A Wrinkle in Time (Wrinkled By Time?)...Karl joins the family...

4 generations..with Dad, Grampa Gil and Great Grampa Walter

In August of 1968 Dad and I moved to our first home in San Francisco…142 Lake St. This was just off Arguello …the entrance to the Presidio..and around the corner from a big Jewish synagogue…in a little court off Arguello lived Mayor Alioto…but the neighborhood was not so upscale as you headed down Lake St….but still quite charming.

 It was at the beginning of “The Avenues” and one block over was Clement St which was filled with interesting shops…BusVan (used furniture) and many ethnic grocery stores.

We had definitely left Utah and even the suburbia of San Jose. It was here on Lake St that we found the old steamer trunk in the garage where we found the old journal of Pier Ringstrom telling of his journey through the Panama Canal to San Francisco in 1852.

And it was here we expected our first child (soon to be  known as Jochim Karl Christian Nieman)…I was due on December 8 (1969) and taught up until Thanksgiving. On Tuesday, the 2nd, we had gone over to  Grandma Dorothy’s in Montclair for a leftover Thanksgiving dinner…also that weekend we were moving as our building  on Lake Street had been sold and the new owners were raising the rent ! So in the business of the move (and post Thanksgiving leftovers) I think I mistook early labor for indigestion! I remember talking to Marcia Ann Ludlow (her husband was another dental student and they  had a six month old) about 10pm and asking her what labor was like...
We headed to Kaiser about 6 am the next morning.

Dad sat with me in the labor room reading the sports section of the newpaper…as I had an expecially strong contraction (we hadn’t gone to any labor/delivery classes)…he looked over at me and said..It’s going to get a lot worse…and went back to reading the paper! 

I got an epidural about noon but it was pretty pointless as my labor suddenly sped up and I was wheeled into the delivery room where Karl was born about 12:30. The attending OB was Dr. Leach!

After we brought Karl home to our new apartment (a big building on Stanyon Street across from Golden Gate Park) we settled into learning how to be parents. This was really a one bedroom apartment…but it did have a big walk in closet with a window in it that became Karl’s “room.” They didn’t have baby monitors yet but it wouldn’t have mattered…I made a point of closing both my bedroom door and Karl’s closet door to muffle his cries as I tried to get a little sleep. (Does that qualify me for a "poor parenting" award???)

Blessing Day...probably January 1970

A couple of weeks later ladies from church started calling and asking if they could get their dishes back…being new to Relief Society I hadn’t realized that people in the ward would bring me dinners. But I hadn’t gotten any! We finally figured out that they had taken them to our old apartment on Lake Street!

So Dad went over one night to see about the dishes …he found out that the new people who had moved into our apartment were deaf! They couldn’t hear the soft knocks on the door (since no one wanted to wake a sleeping baby) and of course they didn’t ring the doorbell(which would have made a light go on inside)…they just left the food outside the door in the hall. 

The people living there had saved the dishes and gave them to John with a little note that said…We thought the angels had left them!...maybe they had!

Wrinkled by Time...First "Fight" and Football

First Fight and Football

Teaching at Woodrow Wilson also led to the first fight (uhhh…misunderstanding) Dad and I had.  Just for background…By November (1969) I was beginning to learn how to survive in a ghetto school and teach subjects for which I had no training. 

"Teacher" Patti...(I don't have too many pictures from these days)

But more excitement was to come. 

Our generation can remember the strife and dissension common during the late 60’s.  In January of 1968 the USS Pueblo had been seized by the North Koreans. The TET offensive began and anti war rallies were common across the country as so many protested President Johnson’s handling of the war in Viet Nam.

Here in California, Cesar Chavez began his first fast for non violence as college campus’s exploded.  Bombings in Laos, the massacre at My Lai, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy fueled tensions.

In  October 1967 Huey Newton (who had gone to Woodrow Wilson and Oakland Tech a few years earlier) was involved in the shooting death of Oakland Police Officer John Frey.

He was convicted in September of 68 of manslaughter to serve 2-15 years amid cries of conspiracy in the community…feelings were high as I began teaching my first year fresh from BYU.

 July had seen a huge “rally” in front of the Alameda County Courthouse to “free Huey.”  At the summer Olympic Games in Mexico City San Jose State athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in the black power salute during their medal ceremony to protest the treatment of African Americans.  

 

 In October 27 soldiers serving brig time attempt to stage a sit-in protesting prison conditions; all are tried as mutineers. 

On the 5^th of November Richard Nixon was elected as President….this did not go over well in the Bay Area…on November 6 at San Francisco State the Black Student Union and the World Liberation Front led a student strike clashing with police and making national headlines. 

This was the community I came into each day trying to figure out what to do in my art class and how to teach non readers in my English classes.  I don’t quite remember the triggering issue (probably having to do with Huey Newton) and probably instigated by student unrest for various reasons at nearby University of California-Berkeley…the students at Oakland Tech started some sort of demonstration throwing typewriters out of the second floor windows and generally running amuck. This brought the Oakland Police who were also concerned with the trickle down effect on our school just a block away. Nothing had really happened at Woodrow Wilson but just before lunch the entire student body was brought into the auditorium and told we were going to be dismissed early until things settled down. They slowly began to allow students and teachers to leave. I drove back  to San Francisco that afternoon with the other two (white) teachers in my carpool.

We were pretty shattered.

Needless to say I was eagerly waiting for John to get home from dental school so I could fall in his arms and tell him about my horrible day and get a little well deserved comfort!

Now about the fight…About 5:30 John rushed into the house and heedless of my desperate efforts to start sharing the events of my day made a beeline for the TV and told me to wait because he had to see the sports on the news! I burst into tears (which he ignored because he was dialing into the news)…I’m sure he was astounded that watching the news evoked such a dramatic response from me!

What I didn’t know and found out later after I stopped sobbing was that the day before had been a big football game that has gone down in sports history as the “Heidi game”…with only 1 minute left to play the Oakland Raiders were losing to the New York Jets  32-29. NBC cut away from the game for this last minute to start the TV Movie Heidi on time at 7pm Eastern Time.

 

 Little did they know that Oakland would come back in that last minute and score TWO touchdowns to  ultimately win 43-32! 

John was rushing home to watch the replay of that exciting minute….I eventually calmed down and understood  his desperate need to see the sports.(Although, as you well know<  he was always pretty desperate to watch sport!)