MLK, UCLA, and Kay
On Thursday evening April 5 Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot. On the afternoon of Friday, April 6, 1968 I was looking forward to a camping experience organized by my college, UCLA. I saw the buses were there where they should have been as I arrived with my suitcase and then I saw the buses pull away. The camping trip was canceled.
I am sure all of you have had disappointing experiences when you were looking forward to something and it was canceled. I decided to substitute something else. It just so happened that there was an announcement posted in the elevator that a couple was having a dinner party and needed help serving their guests. It paid $2.50 an hour. Wow! I was a little nervous to do this by myself so I talked with my house advisor into doing it with me.
This was my junior year of college and I lived in Sproul Hall, a very large dormitory. On each floor there was a graduate student who took responsibility for the 60 undergrads living on that floor. Our House Advisor was Carol and she was wonderful. I was so glad she was willing to come with me. We would split the $2.50 a cool $1.25 each. When you are a college student any amount of money is good.
Of course, neither of us had a car. The husband of the hostess was going to come and pick us up. So that started our adventure! Instead of the husband, a law student picked us up. His name was Bruce and he was going to be the bartender. Off we went to a lovely home where we served food, cleared dishes and did everything you would do to help out at a dinner party. This law student/bartender was the essence of the Mr. Right I was looking for. He was tall with blond hair and blue eyes. There was only one problem; he spent the whole evening flirting with my friend Carol!
The end of the evening could easily have been the end of any further contact with Bruce except for an interesting connection. Bruce had cousins who lived in Escondido and that was where Carol’s parents lived. Everyone listening to me right now will have no doubt what I did next! I suggested that the next time Bruce was going to visits his cousins; he might take Carol to visit her parents.
On September 14, 1968 Carol and Bruce were married. Yes, that was 51 years ago. They now have three children, nine grandchildren and one great grandchild.
Also when I was at UCLA I found a wonderful roommate named Dian. We had fun adventures while living at UCLA such as taking a ride on the Goodyear Blimp. We continued our adventures even after she moved to northern California to teach in a community college and I returned to San Diego to pursue a career in Social Work.
When I say fun adventures, I really mean fun. The year after I graduated from UCLA, the two of us motorcycled through Europe for 11 weeks. Later, we took a picture-taking Safari in Africa and more recently we enjoyed an Alaskan cruise.
Dian fell in love with another college teacher, married and had two children. They found a beautiful piece of property in Paradise California and let me help them by hammering a few nails in their beautiful dream home they designed. The house was situated above a running stream and nestled under majestic tall trees. The word “Paradise” certainly fit the community they had chosen. I spent many Thanksgivings in their beautiful home. When my daughter Christa came along, she too was included in my friends’ generous hospitality.
The terrible fire of November 2018 burned their house to the ground. Dian and Gary narrowly escaped with their lives and their two little dogs.
Sometimes when someone is trying to select a gift for someone, you hear the expression “How do you buy a gift for someone who has everything?” Well this was the flip side. “How do you give a gift to someone who has absolutely nothing?” Everything was lost.
I took it upon myself to start collecting everything I could think of; kitchen utensils, bedding, clothes, office supplies, just accumulating everything I could and putting things in big boxes to ship to Dian and Gary. Fortunately, due to unusual circumstances and foresight, my friends were able to purchase a house in Chico just two days after their house in Paradise burned down. Their house burned on a Thursday and they made an acceptable offer on that Saturday before the prices of the houses on the market in Chico increased. It became my ambition to help furnish that house.
Now, I am going to take you on just a little side track which will seem like a tangent but does play into this tale. My father’s youngest sister, Aunt Stasha, lived in Rancho Bernardo and loved to go gambling at the Valley View Casino. Periodically, I would drive my aunt to the casino and watch her play a game on the slot machine called “Blazing Sevens.” My aunt would win again and again. I mean seriously, people would gather around to watch in awe. Sometimes, when the payoff was exceptionally large, casino representatives would come and have her sign something promising to pay taxes. You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to but I took pictures of the screen showing all the sevens lined up and I have lots of pictures. Eventually my Aunt Stasha died and sometime later I happened to come across a dollar bill that had five sevens in a row. I said to myself “Five sevens in a row!” Well, I made photocopies of the dollar and sent one to each of her three daughters. I taped the dollar on my computer screen and said to myself “This is a lucky dollar bill.”
So once I was filling boxes to send to Dian, I pulled the dollar bill off the computer screen and zipped it into a special wallet and put it into the box. After all, it seemed like Dian needed good luck. After I did that, I looked at a shelving unit just a couple of feet from where I was packing the box. I looked around at the items in this shelving unit to see if there was anything else I might send up to Chico. I noticed this odd little thing that looked like one small red mitten. I discovered it was actually a change purse. I thought “well why don’t I throw this in too?” I don’t know how it got on that shelf or how long it had been here. Then I thought to myself well, even though it felt empty I had better check and see what is in it. Well, there were two items in this mitten change purse. One item was a small paper about discounts at the San Diego Zoo in 2003. The other folded up item was a Hundred Dollar Bill! Well I was flabbergasted but then I began to think about a friend of my mother.
My mother had died in 1993 but up until her death, she used to host a special Christmas luncheon for a group of women that belonged to a Catholic organization called Theresians. I had continued this tradition of inviting my mother’s friends over for lunch early in December. One of these women, Kay, was always very generous toward my daughter. Kay would enclose a $100.00 bill for Christa in her Christmas card.
I got on the phone and called Kay’s sister Betty. Hearing about the discovery in the mitten of the money with the coupon, Betty had no doubt this was from Kay who had subsequently also passed away. “That’s Kay” Betty quickly asserted.
So I was giving a dollar to my friend Dian and within one minute I got $100.00 back.
I decided to treats some friends to lunch with the money on Martin Luther King’s Birthday. Before the luncheon, I called Bruce and Carol. Bruce said “Helen I was just thinking about you because Carol and I would never have met without that plan through you to help at that party. Bruce then offered to pray for the success of the luncheon and it was a wonderful success. Last year’s Martin Luther King Jr.’s luncheon was a lot of fun. Of course, I called Bruce and Carol in anticipation of this luncheon and they wished us a great time.
So this is how UCLA, MLK and Kay came together in an unusual path leading to us today!