Reaching Out (8 page)

"Good morning, young man," he said.

"Good morning, sir."

"I am Robert Easton," he said, shaking my hand. His
wrinkled face and hands were full of brown spots.

"People call me Frankie." I smiled from ear to ear. "I am very happy to meet you!"

"It's a pleasure, son. So you're the lad who cleans for us." He smiled, and his eyes sparkled as he talked. "Are you still in school?"

"I graduated from Santa Maria High School last year..."

"Splendid," he said.

"I just finished my first year in college; I am going back next week,"

"Marvelous. What college?"

"The University of Santa Clara," I responded proudly.

"Oh, yes, I know about Santa Clara. I've been in that neck of the woods. In fact, I was born in Santa Cruz ... many years ago, of course. I spent my childhood there."

"It can't be that long ago."

"Oh, it was, son. I was born in 1875, and if my calculations are correct, I am eighty-seven years old. But I am still standing," he said, chuckling. He switched his cane to his right hand and shifted his weight, "University of Santa Clara ... I remember when it was a football powerhouse back in the thirties. It won the Sugar Bowl in 1936 or '37; I can't recall the exact year."

"It was around that time." I pretended to know something about it. I had no clue, but I felt proud of it once he told me. "Where did you go after you left Santa Cruz?"

"How do you know I lived in Santa Cruz...?" He
frowned, looked up at the ceiling, and exclaimed, "Oh! I told you, didn't I?" He straightened his body, coughed, and added, "Do you really want to know? I don't want to bore you, son..."

Before I had a chance to respond, he continued. "Well, okay then. After Santa Cruz, my parents went to Benicia, then to Berkeley, where I attended school." He paused, shifted his weight to his other leg, and looked at me intently as though to make sure I was listening and really interested in what he was saying. I took a step closer to him. "I then went to Cal, and after I graduated from there I worked for a contracting and field surveying firm for two years."

"So, when did you begin working for the gas company?"

"Oh, that's a long story," he said, taking a deep breath and continuing. "Before I got involved with the gas company, I organized the Home Telephone and Telegraph Company, The year was 1907, and two years later in 1909—February of 1909 to be exact—I was one of the cofounders of the Gas and Power Company, which became the Santa Maria Gas Company."

"So, you have been working here for over fifty years."

"Not exactly. I retired as president of the company when it merged with the Southern Counties Gas Company in 1941." He paused, looked away, and added, "Alas, now I am completely retired, but I keep my office and come in once in a while." His voice trailed off, and he had a sad look on his face.

"I like your office." I wanted to cheer him up. "In fact I was about to tell him that I used his office to study, but I changed my mind. He might not have liked that.

"What were you going to say?"

Pretending to attempt to recall, I touched my chin with my right index finger, looked up, and after a few seconds I said, "I forgot; I forgot what I was going to say!" I laughed nervously.

"Oh, you're too young to be forgetting things." He smiled, but his grin quickly disappeared. "Forgive me for saying so, son, but I notice that your gums are very red. You need to see your dentist."

Instinctively, I covered my mouth with the palm of my hand. "I've never been to a dentist." I was embarrassed.

"Oh, dear! We must take care of this."

I was surprised he did not ask me why I had never seen a dentist. I figured he must have guessed the reason. "Come, I want you to meet Mary, my secretary. I'll have her make an appointment with my dentist to see you. She's in my office waiting for me."

I was completely taken by surprise. Struggling for words, all I could say was "Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Easton," He hobbled back to his office and introduced me to Mary, a friendly elderly lady who was about fifteen years younger than Mr. Easton.

A few days later, Mary left me a message at the gas company indicating that she had made an appointment for me to
see the dentist the following Wednesday and to meet her in front of the main office at three o'clock in the afternoon on that day. She picked me up right on time. On the way to the dentist's office, she told me that she had retired at the same time Mr. Easton stopped working for the gas company. As a favor to him, she took care of his personal business and drove him to his office once in a while since he could no longer drive. She waited for me at the dentist's office while I had a cavity filled and my teeth cleaned. She then charged the bill to Mr. Easton's account and drove me back to the gas company. Before she left, I thanked her for her help and kindness. That evening, after I finished cleaning Mr. Easton's office, I wrote him a thank-you note and left it on top of his desk, hoping to see him again. My note was still there the last day I cleaned the gas company that summer.

At the end of that summer, I returned to Santa Clara with mixed feelings. I was glad to leave behind my tiresome and tedious janitorial work and escape my father's depressing moods and strange behavior. But I was worried about him and I was sad to leave my family. They were still struggling to make ends meet even though I had given them my summer earnings. Trampita's salary from working at my old job while going to school, Torito's take-home pay from picking carrots after school and on weekends, and my mother's earnings from taking care of babies for migrant families and ironing for them were barely enough to pay the monthly rent and buy groceries and other basic necessities.

I too had a financial challenge: financing my second year of college. I managed to pay for tuition and room and board with scholarships I received from the university and the Santa Maria Valley Scholarship Association and by borrowing another thousand dollars from the federal government under the National Defense Student Loan Fund. But this was not enough. I had to find a job. My family needed help and ! had
to buy my books and pay for living expenses such as clothes, toiletries, and laundry.

The first week of September, I moved into room 225 of McLaughlin Hall and registered for classes. Smokey and I agreed to room together that second year, but we hardly spent time together. He was busy with extracurricular activities and classes and I was occupied with studying and work. That fall I took seventeen semester units. The classes and professors I most enjoyed were History of Philosophy with Father Austin Fagothey, who was the chairman of the Department of Philosophy; History of Christianity with Father Bartholomew O'Neill; and Latin American Literature with Dr. Martha James Hardman de Bautista.

The second week of classes I went to see Dr. Hardman de Bautista about being her reader. The door to her sparsely decorated office in the basement of O'Connor Hall was open. I poked my head in and knocked. "Come in, Mr. Jiménez," she said, smiling and placing a book on her desk. As usual, she was wearing sandals, a long one-piece white dress bound at the waist by a wide, colorful woven sash, and a small mantle over her shoulders fastened at the front with a straight silver pin. Her yellowish-brown hair was parted in the middle and pulled back with a headband. "I enjoy having you in my class."

"Thank you, Professor." I was surprised she had already learned my name. "I like outclass. It's small," I added nervously, trying to make casual conversation.

"Yes. And everyone in the class is a native Spanish speaker,
mostly from Central America, except for one student. Please have a seat." She brought her chair from behind the desk and sat facing me. She had a radiant round face and large blue eyes. "So, what can I do for you?"

"I was wondering if you needed a reader." I proceeded to tell her why I needed a job, without mentioning my family. I did not feel comfortable telling her about my home situation. She listened intently, and at the end of my explanation she asked me questions, in Spanish, about my language background. She then switched to English.

"You're Mexican, aren't you?"

I was amazed that she knew this.

"Yes, I am Mexican, but I was born in Colton, California."

She must have noticed my surprise because she said, "I can tell that you're Mexican by your intonation and some of your vocabulary. You see, I am an anthropological linguist, I study languages."

"What languages?" I had never heard of an anthropological linguist before.

"Currently I am doing research on the language of the Aymara Indians of the Andes. I'm studying the phonological and grammatical structure of their language." She became more and more animated, and her face became flushed as she described her work. "The majority of the Bolivian population, the country where I've done most of my research, belongs to Aymara and Quechua Indian groups. Yet education in Bolivia is delivered solely in Spanish without regard for the indigenous
languages, and as a result there is social, economic, and racial discrimination. My hope is that once we create a written language, the Aymara speakers will learn to read and write it so that in the future they will be able to document their own history, in their own language!"

I admired her enthusiasm. "That's very interesting. What you're saying relates to what we're studying in your class about pre-Columbian literature and the Spanish Conquest."

"Exactly! Now, would you be interested in helping me with my research? I need help coding and cataloging the data I collected on the Aymara language, I have it on hundreds of index cards."

I did not respond right away because I was not sure I was capable of doing the work. Noticing my hesitation, she said, "I'll show you how to do it; it isn't difficult. And I have grant money to pay you."

"Thank you, Professor. I'd like to try it." I felt slightly more confident. She then carefully explained to me how she wanted the data coded and cataloged and gave me a key to her office so that I could do the work in the evenings and on weekends. She also hired me as a reader, correcting papers and quizzes for her elementary and intermediate Spanish courses.

My flexible work schedule for Professor Hardman de Bautista made it possible to get two other part-time jobs, I worked in the language lab two hours a day, and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons I tutored students in Spanish at Bellarmine College Preparatory High School in San Jose,
which was a little over a mile from the university. I worked an average of twenty-five hours a week.

I enjoyed working at Bellarmine, but it was time-consuming and frustrating. It took me approximately forty-five minutes to walk to and from campus, and when no students showed up for tutoring, I did not get paid. So I tried to get another job on campus by taking advantage of my experience working as a janitor. I wrote a letter to the president of the university, Father Patrick Donohoe, suggesting that students be hired to do the custodial work in the dormitories in exchange for room and board. I argued that by having students do the cleaning, other students would be less likely to mess tip their rooms and the hallways. I described my extensive janitorial expertise and concluded by offering my services. I never got a response.

I was more successful in marketing my typing skills than my janitorial experience. In high school, I took a typing class and did very well in it because of my typing speed and accuracy. I was so fast that my mother called me a typing machine. "You got fast fingers from picking strawberries and cotton," she told me. I approached a few classmates of mine who were approximately my size and weight and told them that I would happily type their papers in exchange for clothes or money. I ended up with a beautiful light blue alpaca sweater, some nice long-sleeved striped shirts, and some cash.

At the end of the month, after paying living expenses, I sent home any money I had left over. It was not much, but my family appreciated it.

On Friday, November 22, I was excited because in five more days I would be going home for Thanksgiving, which was my favorite holiday. It was not the celebration of it that had the most meaning for me, but the time of the year in which it took place. At school we always celebrated it but not at home. From the time I was six until I was thirteen years old, we spent the winter months in Corcoran, California, picking cotton every day, including Thanksgiving, unless it rained. Usually, a few days before Thanksgiving, I would start school every year for the first time. I would be behind in my studies, but I was always happy to be back in school. For this reason Thanksgiving had a special significance for me.

Thursday night I stayed up late studying for my History of Philosophy course, which met at 9:10 in the morning, three days a week. That Friday, a few of us stayed after class to ask Father Fagothey questions about our readings on Plato's
The Republic.
I was so fascinated by his explanations that I lost track of time and was late for my 10; 10 class, which was U.S.
History. I rushed out of Montgomery Labs and headed for O'Connor Hall. On the way I ran into Smokey, who had tears in his eyes. "What's the matter? Are you okay?"

"Kennedy has been shot."

I could not believe what I heard. "Are you sure?" I asked.

"Sure I am sure," he snapped. "Our class has been canceled. I am going back to our room to listen to the news." He turned around and walked away, toward McLaughlin Hall. I continued on to my class, praying that what Smokey had told me was not true. As I entered the classroom, I noticed the lights were off and all the seats were empty. Professor James Hannah, the instructor, was leaning behind the podium, his head down. He was holding a white handkerchief in his right hand and shaking with emotion. His thick glasses, books, and lecture notes were on his desk. He looked up at me, wiped his eyes, and pointed to the blackboard, where he had written "Class canceled."

I stood there in silence for a few seconds and then went back to my dorm room in a daze. As I climbed the stairs to the second floor of McLaughlin and walked down the hallway, I could hear radios in various rooms tuned in to the news. When I got to my room, Smokey was sitting at his desk, glued to the radio. His eyes were red and watery. I felt a knot in my throat. I sat on the edge of my bed and listened to the news.