Passing Days

Jerry and I met 45 years ago, and with few exceptions, we have seen each other every day since the day we met. We were still young and energetic when we met, and now we are old. Yes, we have grown old together… sometimes gracefully. He has been diagnosed with Frontal Temporal Dementia (FTD) and Alzheimer’s Disease, as if one form of dementia is not enough. He also has chronic leukemia which just kind of lingers around perhaps as a backup in case the dementia doesn’t get him first. Yesterday, out of the blue, he asked, “Why do you love me?” I opened my mouth to answer and nothing came out. Finally, I said, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” and we both laughed out loud. I was rather astounded that I did not have a ready answer. My mind felt like it was racing through the channels of my brain to find a solution to my wordless response to a simple question. How do you say in a few words when I met him I found myself, and I didn’t even know I was missing? Through him, I learned the most about me. I found freedom, although I had never really been unfree. In his usual way and without even knowing, he asked me that question at the perfect time. Why? I had just finished writing about my history before I met him. Hopefully, as I go forward I come up with a better answer to Jerry’s question than silence..

On the day I left Jim in 1974, I moved in with a girlfriend who had recently separated from her husband. My girlfriend had a baby girl, and her sister was also living with her. I immediately began looking for a job. Since I had not worked outside of my home for almost a decade, I thought it would be challenging. I was searching in the local newspaper ads and saw that a social service agency was seeking a secretary for their executive director. I called about the position and spoke to an older woman who told me the position had been filled. I told her I was extremely disappointed to hear that, because my qualifications were perfect for the assignment. I briefly let her know of my private secretarial experience with the county superintendent of schools in Illinois and told her a few of the duties I had successfully experienced in my past positions. I asked her to keep my number and if something opened up in the future to please call me. I was shocked a couple of days later when she called and told me she had decided to interview me, although they had filled the position for private secretary. The name of the agency was Crisis House, and I knew it would be interesting to work there, so I set up an appointment to interview for a non-existent job. On the day for my interview, I dressed as I believed to be appropriate attire for a typical office worker, which included a dress, nylons, heels, a bracelet, watch and a ring. I never wore earrings, because I was allergic to metal. When I arrived at the site, I noticed the employees were dressed in a significantly different manner with the exception of the older woman who was the private secretary planning on leaving her position. I made a mental note that office attire in California was a lot more casual than it was in Illinois. I really liked my interviewer, and she informed me of the agency’s purpose and contributions by way of social services being delivered to the community. They had a 24 hour crisis hot line, a food bank and a new mental health program, which was focused on serving adult clients who lived in community care homes in the surrounding community. Those clients would come to the Work Development Day program at the crisis house 5 days per week for six hours per day. Most had spent several years in state hospitals, and they were being transitioned back into local communities. I was fascinated and told the woman of my enthusiasm for psychology. I also let her know of the courses I had already completed at the local community college. When the interview was over, I left hoping they would have another position open up and call me again.

I didn’t have to wait long to receive a call from the woman who interviewed me for the job at the Crisis House. What she had to say was quite unusual. She told me they would like to hire me now if I was willing to work 20 hours per week instead of 40 hours per week for a month when they had another job opening up. I enthusiastically said yes to the offer. I soon found out that at the same time, they also hired a young 19 year old female from Florida to work the other 20 hours per week. The Executive Director would have two 20 hour per week secretaries for a month. When I met my “other half,” I instantly liked her. We soon became friends, although we shared little in common. She was a teenager, and I was an estranged mother of two. She was a party girl, and I had never experienced her kind of partying. She was tall, tanned and beautiful. I was still almost 5’7”, skinny and never thought of myself as attractive. In fact, I have often wondered how I managed to end up with three good looking husbands.

Nancy looked like a movie star. She could have been a perfect model for a Florida or California girls poster. She blended well with the staff at the Crisis House, which was comprised of paid employees and volunteers. I was thrilled to find out I would be the one transferring into the position opening up in the mental health program. I liked the Executive Director. He was a psychologist, and we later became really good friends. However, I wanted to work with the former state hospital patients in the Work Development Program. I was already getting to know some of them. I found them to be very interesting and wanted to learn more about their experiences in the state hospitals and their daily lives. I was also looking forward to working with the lady who would be my new boss. She was a social worker, very smart and I knew I could learn so much from working with her. Her name was Julie, and I loved the name. Later, she would birth her first child and although so long ago, she was allowed to bring her baby to work where she slept in her little portable bassinet in Julie’s office. The little baby girl was beautiful, and I loved that she could bring her to work and not have to leave her with a stranger for child care. Julie was officially the director of the Work Development Program. She dressed in the same type of conservative clothes I was trained to wear on my jobs prior to working at Crisis House, which made me feel not quite so out of place.

The month went by quickly, and I moved into my new position. I shared an office with Julie. Soon my other half, Nancy, was dating the Executive Director, although he was several years older than me, and she was several years younger than me. With the exception of the Executive Director, Director of the day program and me, the remaining employees were all younger. I was accepted by an estimated 50% of the volunteers and employees, and really didn’t get to know the rest, since they came in and left on different shifts. We also had nothing in common. I am sure there were hundreds of places I could have found a position that would have shared some common ground with my midwestern background which would have helped me to transition from being a Santee Housewife into the California lifestyle. Instead, I ended up in a grass roots liberal social service agency with pot smoking people who didn’t appear to have established any boundaries when it came to living the California lifestyle.

My estranged husband, Jim and I decided to seek counseling from one of the marriage and family counselors working at Crisis House. We each had an independent session with her, and through her recommendation, we agreed that Jim would attend a social event with other Crisis House employees. The social worker thought it would help him understand my work and that he would feel better if he knew the people working with me. The memory of that evening includes the best and probably the most disappointing evening I ever spent with Jim. The best comes from the fact that people were sitting on the floor around a coffee table smoking pot. They were passing the marijuana cigarette from one person to the next. When it was handed to me, I passed it forward. Soon it became Jim’s turn. He was talking and actually flirting with our counselor. When it was handed to him, he thought it was just a cigarette, noticed it was quite small and like a gentleman, he snubbed it out in an ashtray. The group around the coffee table were horrified. Jim and I had never smoked pot and were not about to start. The disappointment came later when Jim decided I must be participating in all of the social activities since I loved my job. That evening kind of sealed our separation, and we cancelled out any further counseling sessions with the marriage and family counselor.

I was batting a thousand on the stress check off list. I had left my husband, moved, had a new job and really didn’t have a clue as to where I was headed. Although we were estranged, Jim helped me get a car, so I could get back and forth to work. We went to a used car lot in the city where I was living. It was one of those like you see in movies, which is a corner lot filled with used cars displayed under hanging lights strung above the lot. I saw one I liked, and I believe we paid $1,800 for it. It was a 1965 fast back Mustang. I wasn’t too worried about it being used, because Jim’s background included being a car mechanic in a Cadillac dealership. In those days, cars shared many common designs under the hood, so I knew he could fix anything. If I had the car today, obviously it would be worth a lot more money than $1,800, but I wasn’t looking for long term value on a car. I just wanted to get back and forth to work, and I thought it was cute. We had been a one car family and had traded his 1957 Pontiac for the station wagon we were driving when we separated. Now we each had a car.

My next task was to save up enough money to find an apartment. In the meantime, I was made to feel so welcome in my girlfriend’s home. She and her sister went out every weekend and always invited me to go along. I joined them a few times, and it was fun but I really needed to get my own place. Jim joined us a couple of times when we were going out dancing. Sometimes they didn’t come directly home after an evening of dancing, so I always took my own car. I wasn’t in to trusting strangers I met in a bar and going out with two beautiful blonds certainly attracted plenty of strange men. Within a month I found a motel rental with a small kitchen, bedroom and living room. It wasn’t very attractive, and I didn’t feel totally safe there. However, it gave me the privacy I wanted, and I had a phone so I could check on my kids.

The mornings before work time were the most depressing to me. It had been the time of day that I had private time with my kids before the neighbor kids invited them to play and before I would start my daily housewife tasks. Often, they would come in to get into bed with us when I was still living there. Sometimes after fixing Jim’s breakfast, I would go back to bed and they would crawl into bed with me. It made sense that I missed them the most in those early morning hours.

My job kept me focused in a forward direction, or I might have returned home after a couple of weeks of living there. I had never stayed anywhere so scary that left me alone after dark, and here I was in a strange community in a unit that anyone could have easily broken into had they tried. Most of my time was spent working, reading, watching television and talking on the phone with friends during that first month of living by myself. Jodi often called me. One day she called and sounded like she was very upset. She said, “Mommy, Henry’s ear came off.” I knew, of course, that Henry was her stuffed toy, so I began to comfort her. Soon I found out she had misdialed and called some poor woman by mistake who thought Henry was a child. I think she was as upset as Jodi before she figured out Jodi was talking about a toy.

Living alone was a brand new experience for me. I had never lived totally alone my entire life. I didn’t like my living situation, so that didn’t help, but I loved my job. When I was with the mentally ill clients at the program, my thoughts never wandered. They had my full attention. I wanted to make their days better by offering them respect and kindness, while encouraging them to see their own self worth. I also wanted to learn all about their lives and the way they had lived in the past including after they entered the state hospital.

With my co-workers at work, I was a bit like the guys in the movie “Interns,” who got an internship at Google, but I loved the kids working there and enjoyed hearing about their activities and their perceptions of life too. I had started to get to know each patient before I officially started my new job assignment in the mental health program, so by the time I was officially assigned to work in there, I was prepared. The Executive Director really didn’t have that much secretarial work. He could probably have gotten by with a part time secretary. One of the employees who worked in the regular Crisis house services section had a boat, and sometimes a group would take off to go boating. People would take off early afternoon on a regular basis just to go to the ocean for swimming and sunbathing. There were a couple of surfers. I received regular invitations to go boating with them, but I would always decline the offers. I wasn’t up for the activities going on during the trips. I enjoyed hanging out at the office with the counselors who used our building for counseling sessions. They would come in and out after the mental health clients had gone home for the day.

One of the psychologists was the woman who had her life story made into a movie. She was a nun who had left the convent and married the man she loved. One day she told me I would miss my natural calling if I didn’t continue on in my pursuit of a degree in psychology. She actually had been sharing some about her previous life with me, when she told me that. I still remember we were sitting on a stairway that day. She was a couple of steps above me, and I was fascinated by her story. She said that it was so easy to talk to me and she had seen the way I interacted with the mental health clients and admired my work. Her words meant so very much to me and went a very long way in motivating me to continue my education. We didn’t know at the time that only a few years later, she and her husband would be my supervisors and sign off on my dissertation. Her husband was a Chinese professor of psychology at one of the universities in San Diego. They were so nice. I loved the way they had furnished their house. They seemed to have only the necessary items. Their mattress was on the floor, which I thought was strange. Today I wish my mattress was on the floor, since it would be easier to access and my dog would not have to be lifted into it. Anyway, their home was very attractive.

Clinical Psychologists, Social Workers and Marriage and Family Counselors were plentiful at the Crisis House. There were also a few attorneys coming and going. A couple were friends of the Executive Director and one was serving on the Board of Directors. One of those attorneys was also a friend of the man who would be my next husband, but the thought of another husband was the farthest thing from my mind at that time.

Soon the young lady from Florida was dating the Executive Director. One of the male counselors told me when we both interviewed, the doctor had been in a dilemma. He wanted to hire me because of my qualifications, but he wanted to hire the teenager so he could date her. Actually, she also was well qualified to handle the office work, but his interest was elsewhere. Much later and due to a most unique circumstance, I would learn that the man had served some time for dating a minor. I asked him why he did that, and was reminded never to ask a male friend why a man in his forties was attracted to teenagers. He told me and answered with more details in two sentences than I was pursuing with my question.

He was soon head over heels in love with Nancy. Only a few months later, her sister arrived from Florida to spend some time in San Diego. Apparently, the girls in Florida can be as wild and beautiful as California girls. The older sister loved the party life too. The poor director who had fallen in love with his secretary was broken hearted when the sisters decided to head back to Florida. Nancy told me that she couldn’t stand to be with him anymore, as she laughed and said “when he takes off his clothes, everything points at the floor.” I have had many moments in life when I anticipated a lot of things which a person might say in given situations, but what she said about dating an older guy, would not have been included in my predictions that day. In the meantime, the poor doctor was so sad about her leaving, and it appeared he was never going to get over her. I asked him, “Why do you let yourself care that much when you surely know it won’t last forever?” His response also surprised me. He said, “Oh, I just love being in love. It feels so good, and I know when it’s over, I will grieve and that hurts, but I can handle it.”

Before the sisters left for Florida, the agency held a premiere of the movie, “The Towering Inferno.” Both sisters and I were responsible for handling a food and drink booth in the lobby of the theater. We served sandwiches, chips, a few finger foods and drinks. The drinks included water, soft drinks, wine and champagne. It was a fun evening, and the people attending the premiere were obviously well heeled professionals from the surrounding geographic area. That is the first evening I saw the man who I would someday marry. Of course, I never had a clue of that during the exciting premiere night. I was focused on the success of the evening, which turned out to be a great success for our agency. I remember noticing Jerry, because he came out of the theater to the lobby a couple of times while the movie was going on. I noticed he was restless. He asked for a soda, and I happened to be the one who took his request and handed him his drink. I noticed he looked like a movie star and was dressed in a beautiful classy looking suit. I also saw that he had come in with one of the attorneys who was a friend of the Director of the agency. He was very polite. As I am writing this, I realize that I served my 2nd husband a hamburger when I first saw him, and I served Jerry a soda when I first saw him. Maybe it is true that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. One would think it would take more than a soda or a hamburger though. Of course, I am kidding. There wasn’t anything noteworthy about either encounter.

I was sad to know my Florida friends would be leaving. Of course, we made promises to stay in touch, but Florida is a long way from San Diego and as could be expected, we never connected up again. Nancy gave a two week notice, and by the time she left, the director had hired another beautiful young lady.

The new woman was not a teenager, but she was very young and was one of the people the doctor was counseling. I liked her instantly. She had a son who was only 4 or 5 years old, and she was divorced. However, she was engaged and actually planning on having her wedding at the center. She was of Hawaiian descent, and it showed in her appearance. She had very long black hair, big brown eyes and was strikingly good looking. Whereas the Florida girls were tall, the new girl was short. It is interesting how first impressions based solely on looks can be so wrong. When I first saw her walk into the office, I thought she would never fit into the social service grassroots agency. I learned because she was a client of the director and was grateful for the outcome of her counseling sessions, she wanted to get married at the center. It was an environment which she felt had contributed to healing the emotional pain of her broken relationship. She was very devoted to her little son, and her fiancee had officially adopted him. He was a good looking kid and very well behaved.

I didn’t really get to know her until soon after her wedding. She had a great sense of humor, and contrary to my first impression of her, she blended into our work environment as if she had been there forever. I recall one day when she said she had an emergency and needed to leave. She asked me to monitor her phone. She told me her son’s eye had popped out at school. I was horrified, and was shocked at how calm she was over it. Later, she told me that he had a glass eye. You would never have known it by looking at him, but that explained her calm attitude when she had to leave her job to go put it back in its proper place.

Unfortunately, within a year, she was filing for divorce. Once again, I was shocked. Apparently, her new husband was jealous and had some other issues. In spite of their problems, he and her son shared a mutual love and respect, so her little boy spent part of his time with her and some of his time with his dad. She and her husband had a rather amicable parting. She saw our psychologist director a few more times during the process. When she physically moved out of her husband’s house which he had owned prior to their marriage, she asked me if I would be interested in sharing an apartment with her. I told her about my living situation and suggested we would have to find a nicer place. I began looking for a two bedroom apartment and found a really nice complex within our budget but unfortunately, it also only had one bedroom units available. She said she would sleep on the couch and didn’t mind doing that at all. She was short and a couch offered her plenty of room, plus it folded out into a bed, so we agreed to take it. It was certainly a step up for me, well managed and I was pleased to make the move. She was a fantastic cook, so she was the designated chef. One evening, she invited our boss to join us for dinner. She worked on the meal the night before and was up early the next morning putting everything into the crockpot. I had never heard of a crockpot, so I was fascinated. Her meal looked delicious. She made a beautiful salad, and filled our plates with spaghetti and large homemade meatballs. When she set the plates before us, we simultaneously picked up our teaspoons and scooped up a little sugar and spread on our sauce. She was horrified and her voice rose a volume as she asked, “WHAT are you two doing?” Thankfully, she continued to make a wide variety of tasty crockpot meals, so we often would have dinner waiting when we came home from work. I enjoyed having someone sharing my apartment. It served as a distraction to loneliness and lifted my spirits. Her little boy would sometimes be there, and my kids would come over too. There was a 7-11 nearby, and the kids liked to go there and buy candy or ice cream. You could see the store from our balcony, and it was a time in our country when it was safe for children to walk to a store, play outside and have the freedom parents cannot give their children today.

Some time during that first year, I received a promotion at work. I was offered a position of Field Placement Coordinator, which I had actually suggested we create. I didn’t know I would be the one doing it, but I wanted to help our clients feel more comfortable going into the community at large. They were limited by their lifestyles of only being at the day program or in their community care homes. I suggested we assign someone to focus on helping them access community activities. We needed to see if we could arrange for some of them to do volunteer work at local businesses or take special classes at the community college. The response was that it was a good idea and I could do it. I received a very small salary increase, which bought my income up $2.50 per hour. It was enough money that I could pay my share of the rent, buy gas to get back and forth to work and get my Winston cigarettes. I could also afford to go out to lunch a few times per month. Life on my own was definitely improving. Little did I know that my roommate and my boss had a couple of shocking things they had not shared with me yet.

When spring arrived the year after I was hired, the workplace provided me a front row seat view of the Southern California liberal lifestyles. I began to realize regardless of one’s education, age or gender, the priority in California was to have fun. Dr. Herb, the executive director and my supervisor, Julie hired a few more people, since the agency was adding services and becoming more of a presence in the local community. One of the people who was hired to work there during the summer was a young student who was of Italian heritage. Her name was Sharon. She could have been picked off of a Hollywood lot to play an Italian girl. She was another short girl who appeared to be a perfect example of good looks and good health. She had an apartment nearby, and would leave at noon to go home, eat a salad, take a swim and return to work while never being late. She was a bundle of energy. I was surprised to learn that her family were ranchers where she grew up in an area somewhere north of Los Angeles. She was a psych student who had just finished her first year of college. Crisis House was a perfect fit for her to gain a little experience before going back to school in the fall. I learned about her parents being ranchers when one day in group she shared her experience of biting the testicles off of sheep. She said she helped carry out that annual assignment and was telling us in detail how she bit off sheep testicles and spit them out of her mouth. She said it was the healthiest, quickest and best way for the sheep. I think some of the guys turned a little pale when she was describing the process. In spite of spending most of my life on a farm, I was shocked. I never knew that people bit off testicles of farm animals, and was even more surprised to hear that one of the biters was Sharon. She also had the most beautiful white teeth, and she carried a toothbrush with her all of the time. She brushed her teeth following any food intake. She claimed that she never got cavities. A final word of advice she shared with us that she had learned from her dentist was that toothpaste was a horrible product to use on your teeth. She brushed her teeth with her saliva.

Sharon was cute as a button, and I told her that when one day she asked me why people did not seem to value her opinion when we were having staff meetings or group sessions. I could see her concern was impacting her self confidence, and I wanted her to be heard when she would someday enter the work field. She was a smart young woman, and her opinions were valuable. I told her that the voice she used in those meetings coupled with her cute appearance was soliciting that kind of response from her co-workers and supervisors. In the workplace, you can’t use a cutesy little voice as you might use when charming your family members. Also, you can’t display body language that confirms the charming and timid approach if you really expect to be taken seriously. She needed to convert her voice into a professional sounding one and leave the little girl manner of speaking and giggling behind her as she developed her career. One could say the same thing to our first female vice president of the United States today when she answers reporters’ questions and follows up her response with laughter. It is annoying to see a mature woman like her display a giggling laughter. Such behavior just doesn’t solicit confidence in one’s opinion. I enjoyed working with Sharon and was sorry to see her leave when she returned to school.

Another interesting employee was a 22 year old guy named Bill. Bill was tall, dark and handsome. He looked like a model. Bill was gay. He was the one who told me about the doctor’s dilemma when he thought he had to choose between hiring me or Nancy. One of the employees found a photo contest in a magazine. If your model won, there was a prize of several thousand dollars. Today I would immediately suspect it was a scam for a creep to collect nude photos. We didn’t even consider that, and most of us felt Bill could win this, and we would all share the prize. One Saturday one of the staff who knew the perfect private place for our model to pose drove the rest of us to a wooded area. Somebody took the photos of our selected model, and we all laughed about the experience later. It takes a lot of self confidence to pose nude in broad daylight in front of your co-workers. Bill was quite openly gay, so there was no apparent attraction to any of the girls. We were all too busy looking forward to sharing our projected fortune. Unfortunately, Bill did not win the prize. There was no internet when this was going on, so the photos had to be developed, packaged and mailed. I am sure Bill kept copies for himself. He was still working at the agency when I left, so I don’t know where he was going after he finished his work there.

All of the young students were seeking psychology, social service, or marriage and family counseling degrees. There were no business majors or law students interested in working there. Personally, I couldn’t have found a better job which would indoctrinate a conservative former midwesterner on California liberalism. I loved it. It was like having a part in a real live soap opera, and I was getting paid to be there. Political correctness was not born yet even in California. Labor laws at that time were sparse, and employers seemed to have the freedom to establish the employee policies and procedures as they saw fit. We didn’t even have written policies to hand out to new employees. Common sense seemed to be the built in guide to how people interacted with fellow employees and supervisors. There was no concern or fear of lawsuits. Sexual discrimination laws were not formally enforced. If the government had developed such governing guidelines, most employers didn’t know about them nor choose to acknowledge them. If someone stepped out of line, counseling seemed to solve most employee problems. If a person didn’t like the atmosphere, they quit their job. It is interesting to note how well people can get along until rules are written and enforced with underlying threats of what could happen if the procedures are not followed. When they exist, it is as if some people seek out issues in the workplace for personal gain. Working at a grassroots agency during that time period was just the opposite of a stressful job. In fact, if any employee was even feeling slightly depressed or had a personal problem, there was always someone willing to sit down and help resolve the issue whether it was work related or something going on outside the workplace.

The Director set the stage, since he was just that kind of leader. He was warm and caring and loaded with common sense. A county licensing worker once told me that he was an amazing counselor, very smart, and an excellent director in his professional life but he was emotionally immature when it came to his personal life. I could see that. The emotional immaturity put him at serious risk due to his attraction to very young girls. Once he had been punished for it, however, he always made sure anyone he was seeing was at least 18. Apparently, his common sense ruled after the experience of being in prison. I never knew he had served time in a California prison during my entire time of working with him. It was only later that I found out about it, and it was brought to my attention for a very specific reason by the actions of a professional enemy of mine.

One day one of the psych interns asked me if he could do some psych testing on my daughter, Jodi. She was 8 years old, and psych testing on a child was a college requirement for him. He was working towards his Ph.D. in one of the most highly regarded universities in San Diego County. Jodi wanted to do it, so I approved. I was glad to have a cost free evaluation of her and especially since she was a child of parents who did not live together. The intern was quite amazed at her response to the testing, and he was telling me her perceptual skills for her age year were excellent. He detailed a few of her responses to me, and then he asked if her father wore cowboy boots. Apparently, Jodi was asked to draw a picture of a man, and she drew one wearing boots. I was puzzled. Jim may have worn cowboy boots once in a while if going out to a a country night club, but they were not a part of his daily attire. The intern was really shocked, because he was sure it was representative of her dad. I then asked him what he was wearing the day he was testing her. He began to laugh. Yes, he was wearing cowboy boots.

That experience with Jodi and the boots is a perfect example of why those of us who have the privilege of having our opinions of others kept in files have to be very careful. It is another reason when I found myself being in charge of counselors later, I tried to train them to describe the behavior of the clients versus recording subjective opinions. If a counselor notes a client is angry, I want to know the behavior that caused the counselor to come up with that opinion. Did the client pick up a chair and throw it across the room? Did he say he was angry? Did he physically attack another person? In our services not only do we record the behavior involved in an incident, we also require the counselor to note the antecedent to the behavior. That is the only way to find the pattern of what triggers a person’s behavior. It also helps to see if the staff member may be unknowingly or even intentionally aggravating a client. Reports include the names involved in the incident to include the counselor and the client(s.).

I felt very lucky to be working at an agency with so many available counselors. I could get feedback while going through a separation from my spouse without it being formalized. The director was always willing to respond to any concerns I expressed. He helped me to recognize passive aggressive behavior used for manipulative purposes. He also assured me that a child’s treatment during the first 6 years of their life would most benefit them throughout the rest of their life. I was worried about the effects that parental separation might have on the kids. The psychologist believed the basic strengths of their personalities were formed early in life and in fact, he said during the first six years. He claimed that has the most long term impact. Today, I would not agree with that opinion, but it sure made me feel better at the time. I had been a Mom who spent 24-7 with the kids during that entire time. They were 7 and 9 when Jim and I separated. He may have been right with that theory then but it would certainly be wrong for today’s kids. Children’s lifestyles were quite different in the 1970’s.

My living situation with my co-worker continued to work out quite well. We got along fine, and we didn’t spend a lot of time together. She was dating a lot. I was an avid reader, so when she was out in the evening, I would read. I loved reading true crime and the biographies of successful people. I also continued to attend college a couple of nights per week, so I had to study. The kids usually came over on the weekend at least for one day. I also did my laundry in the apartment complex laundry mat. She did her laundry at her estranged spouse’s house, and she had activities with him and her son. In other words, we each had the space required to prevent us from getting on each other’s nerves. We both laughed when one evening following my bath, I let her know that Joey was becoming curious, because I had seen him peeking under the door into the bathroom. There after if he was there, I would put a towel in front of the door when I was in the bathroom.

One Friday evening, Dr. Herb invited a few of us to go out for drinks after work at a place called the Diamond Lounge. It was his treat, so 4 of us decided to go. My room-mate and I were two of the four. That turned out to be a night to remember for several reasons and one that changed the course of my life forever.

It was a typical hot summer day when on that Friday afternoon, Dr. Herb offered to take a few of us out after work for a drink. Main Street is a long street, which runs all the way through the city of El Cajon, California. The agency was on West Main and the place chosen to meet was East Main. The bar section of the restaurant was named the Diamond Lounge. We all had left work earlier than usual, so it was mid afternoon. I was driving down Main St and looked over to see a spider crawling down a web over my passenger seat. I have always been terrified of spiders. My sister would tell you when I was living with her in high school and would see a spider in the house, I would scream Jean so loud the neighbors a half mile away could have heard it. She would run to see what on earth had happened, and she said I would be pointing at a tiny little spider up in the corner which she could barely see. However, she would kill it for me and show me the evidence that it was dead. Jean was never afraid of anything. She is 92 years old today and if she fears anything, I haven’t yet heard about it. Our mother was always afraid of snakes, and Jean would take care of the snakes on the farm. There was no way that I was going to continue cruising down the street with a spider as a passenger. I pulled over to the curb and parked. I got out of my car and waited. I approached the first man that I saw coming down the street and told him there was a spider in my car and asked him to remove it. He did. I thanked him, and we both went on our respective ways. I was just a wee bit late because of the spider incident. When I arrived, everyone else was there, and my roommate said she wanted to sit next to me, so she moved over by me. It was common for her to want to sit by me in staff meetings or any situation where a group of us were sitting around. Dr. Herb grumbled and said something about our being a couple of lesbians. We just laughed. He knew better. She still officially saw him for counseling, so he knew everything about her. I don’t have a clue of what we were discussing that day, but we were just having fun. There was a cute guy sitting at the bar, and he turned around and said, “Herb, aren’t you going to introduce me to your harem?” None of the guys from work had joined us, so it was just the doctor and 4 women. Herb introduced us. His name was Jerry. I noticed the lady bartender said, “Would you like another drink, Handsome?,” and her body language and the way she said it caused me to assume they were a couple. I would have predicted the guy had come by on a Friday afternoon to visit with her before she got busy. It is often the things in life that we don’t know, which makes it the most interesting. It was probably five years later when I found out that I actually was right. They had a couple of dates before our arrival that day.

Dr. Herb asked the stranger at the bar how things were going with his court battles and soon I realized he was in the process of getting a final divorce issued, which had obviously been a quite contentious process. It really caught my attention when he said there was a hearing coming up concerning over 50 contempt of court charges. As they chatted back and forth, the rest of us started joining their conversation. He was paying $750 per month child support for one child. My estranged husband was paying $50 per month for two kids living in Illinois, so that caught my attention. Then he got around to complaining about his attorney. He was a guy that our director also knew and apparently, he was not representing his client very well based on some of the things this man was saying. I finally said, “You know everyone thinks they have the best attorney, but I seriously do, and it sounds like you need a good attorney.”

I was definitely naive about a lot of things including the fact that the legal firm I had chosen was one of the most highly respected in San Diego County when I chose it for my estranged husband. They were known as the “legal gurus of East County.” Throughout the years, they have earned impressive honors, demonstrated a wonderful leadership in the local communities, served as city attorneys of several cities in the county and churned out many judges over the years. In fact, when I was attending law school a few years later, one of the judges who was teaching at the university told me he knew that firm was responsible for his being appointed to the Superior Court. I would ask him a pointed question before the class was over. If a person had a matter in your courtroom and was represented by this firm, would you be able to issue a fully unbiased opinion was my question. His answer, of course, was that he could. I’m not totally believing that he would not be influenced.

Anyway, I had chosen them to represent my ex from the yellow pages in a phone book. In those days every home would receive a big fat yellow page book each year. I don’t even know why I made that selection, but I am sure the convenience of their location was one reason. Their offices were less than 10 miles from where I lived when I was helping my husband at that time find an attorney to represent him in a child support matter. I couldn’t have made a better choice. In fact, the attorney who represented my ex did end up becoming a judge too. I certainly have developed a bit more knowledge and a few more techniques for selecting legal representation today.

On that day at the Diamond Lounge so long ago, I really was noticing underneath the conversation and joking, this man appeared to be quite stressed and especially over the fact that it was always a battle for him to be able to see his very young son. Contrary to how I thought he would receive my suggestion of checking out a new attorney, he actually seemed interested. My roommate let me know she thought he was pretty cute. She suggested we all go out together that night, and he could get the information from me. He was sitting on the bar stool next to our booth, and I noticed he was wearing tight jeans, a nice shirt and a pair of boots. I never made the connection at the time that he was the one and same handsome man I had seen at the premiere who was dressed up in a very expensive looking suit. It was Friday night, and we didn’t have any plans. Normally, she would have been going out. I assumed it was safe to go out with him since my boss knew him. My roommate wanted to do the driving, so he gave us his address, we set a time and agreed to get together later. He then left. Before we called it a day and all of us prepared to leave, Dr. Herb said, “don’t get involved with that guy. He is looking for a hit man to take out his mother in law.” Okay …well, if we don’t see you Monday, Boss, be sure and notify the police.

I had a friend who was entertaining at a nightclub in the San Diego area, so we decided to go there. I hadn’t seen my friend for a couple of years. I had actually introduced him to the woman he later married. That loves story and the creation of it would fill a novel, so I will just leave it at that. Good friend and was married to a girlfriend. No-one was more shocked than me they ended up getting married. He was a Mexican, and he was a good singer who could play his Gibson guitar like no other musician. He played hard rock, rock and roll, country or whatever his audience most loved. His parents would open up their home for annual jam sessions, which were amazing, and when they were inviting nobody said no. They barbecued the meat under ground, and it cooked over night. His Mama and her helpers prepared the best side dishes. It was truly Mexican food like you will never find in a Mexican restaurant. Not only were we invited, they included our children. Their jam sessions were always a day of dancing, drinking and having unforgettable fun. I had wanted my roommate to see my musician friend perform, so we decided to take our new found friend there for the evening.

We went to the address given to us by our new friend. He was living up on a hill in the heart of the city. I was surprised to see the view from the deck of the home, which was owned by a building contractor friend of his. The street where he was staying actually went about a quarter of a mile off of a street I traveled often but then it went straight up a hill. I never knew that there was a home sitting so high up in that area of the city. The view off of the deck was beautiful. I noticed our companion for the evening had also changed clothes. He was wearing white slacks, a very attractive shirt and was looking even more handsome than he did earlier. Coincidentally, I had also chosen white slacks for the evening. My roommate was wearing black slacks. One would have thought we all discussed what to wear, since we were dressed so similarly.

I was surprised to see a young woman sitting on the couch. Apparently, she was staying there too. His construction buddy was nowhere to be seen. It was a big house, so I don’t know how many people may have been sharing it. Roommate and I were not interested in that. We were just out having fun. It was our first time going nightclubbing together. I assumed she was interested in him, and never really gave any thought about his being interested in much of anything other than using the evening as a distraction from his pending divorce woes.

When we arrived at the club, my friend seemed happy to see us. On his first break, I introduced him to Roommate and the new found friend. He was welcoming and very entertaining. He had always loved to have friends and family come in when he was on stage. In fact, he was a man who seemed to always appreciate his friends. The people that my estranged husband and I saw at least a couple of times per month had included him as another family member. That night he decided to have a dance contest. I said I didn’t want to dance, so I encouraged my roommate to go ahead and dance with Jerry. Actually, I thought it was a good way to let him know who was interested in him, and I was assuming he was interested in her too. Of course, they won the dance contest, so that was great. I think we all thought the judge might have been a bit biased, but no doubt, they were the best looking couple on the floor. Soon the evening was over and we dropped him off and went home. It had been fun.

I was rather shocked when he called on Sunday. My roommate wasn’t home, so I answered the phone. When I picked up the phone, he said, “How you doin?” I didn’t have a clue that I would be hearing those words thousands of times in the future. If he called me today, he would most likely begin the conversation with how you doin? He then asked if I would like to get together, and I told him I was doing laundry. He said he could come over if that was okay and let me know he didn’t mind if I was doing my laundry. I said, “Sure,” and gave him the address. He knew where the apartment unit was located. Of course, he did. I would find out soon that he was a builder and had built several apartments and duplexes in that city and other ones in San Diego County. He also had been a real estate broker, so he was familiar with many of the streets in the city of San Diego and especially several cities in the east county region. The apartment units where we lived were close to the corner of 2nd and Main in El Cajon, and the street where he was staying connected to that same street on the north side of the city. Our street ran north and south, and on the southern section, it was named 2nd Street but once you crossed Broadway, which ran east and west, the same street changed the name to Wintergardens Boulevard. He was knocking on my door within minutes. It was easy to hang out with him. He carried my laundry basket for me from the laundry room to my apartment. We didn’t have an elevator, and my apartment was on the second story, so my laundry had to be carried up the stairs. Actually, my roommate took most of her clothes to the cleaners and what she didn’t were the ones she washed at her x’s house. Watching her is what caused me to take my work clothes to the cleaners a few years later when normally I would have been washing them. Her clothes always looked so perfect and the time it saved was notable to me. I believe clothes that are professionally cleaned appear to be newer for a longer period of time.

I had thought Jerry was younger than me when we had all gone out together on Friday night, but I decided he was older than I had thought when I saw him in the daylight. I guess the country song with the words “they all get prettier at closing time” is true. Although he definitely looked older than I had thought, I still wasn’t sure that he was not younger than me. I would find out that he was three months older than me. Although he spent the afternoon with me I was still assuming I was just standing in for my roommate. When I asked him what he was doing in life besides getting a divorce, he told me he and his construction buddy were selling dome homes. I knew there was one on Broadway in El Cajon, but I knew nothing about them. From the street when I would pass by, I thought it looked like an oversized igloo with an exterior covered in wood. He invited for me to stop by on my way home from work the next day to see the model and their office.

I have had people ask me if it was love at first sight when I first saw Jerry. I would have to say it was handsome at first sight, because he looked like a movie star the night of the premiere. I definitely noticed him and silently admired his looks. However, I don’t think I ever fell in love with anyone at first sight. In spite of the fact that in love and love are two different matters, how could anyone love someone at first sight? We all know lust at first sight exists. Anyway, it certainly exists for men. If women of my age ever felt lust at first sight, it is something we never talked about when I was a young girl looking for romance. I have never felt lust at first sight no matter how good looking the guy. The first time I heard a young woman say that a guy had a nice butt, I was surprised. Maybe I read too many books when I growing up, but if I was checking out a young man, it was always about eyes, hair and personality. I think all of that means I am not a believer in love at first sight, lust at first sight or even being in love at first sight. I do believe that we fall in love with other people, but even in love isn’t loving in the way a couple who have been together for many years love each other. Sometimes even long term relationships fall apart. Perhaps it is safe to say that love is ever changing and never guaranteed.

I realized before Jerry went home on Sunday that he was interested in me and not my girlfriend. He laughed when he found out I thought he wanted to go out with her. He said, “She is shaped like a tapper keg.” She truly was a beautiful woman and people always noticed her when she walked into a room. She wasn’t overweight, so his tapper keg comment was a surprise to me. If you listen closely to what people are really saying, you will find their personality hidden in just a few sentences. I would learn when Jerry looks at anything including people, he sees the negative. We can look at the same thing or person, and I see what is good, and he sees what is wrong. I am not trying to look like a goody two shoes here, but it is a fact. I don’t have a clue why he chose to go out with me. I am not even on the edge of perfect. Maybe he thought he could fix me. I have no doubt that part of my attraction to him was because I was pretty sure I could fix him. After over 45 years together, he still sees negative. We will be watching television and I literally will be thinking that a person is so cute or a guy is funny, and Jerry will make a comment about a negative feature or personality. I have had to have a few talks with myself throughout the years when starting to pick up the habit of seeing negative in people. It is a lot easier to adopt such ways from other people than it is to hold on to our natural inclinations as we travel through this world. A good example of that is a habit of cursing. It would be great if the positive attributes and behavior of others were just as easy to copy.

I grew up in a home where cursing was never heard. It wasn’t heard sometimes. It just didn’t happen. My parents also never talked negatively about any family, friends or neighbors in front of children. I don’t know what they did when alone. Maybe they talked negatively about everyone they knew, but they sure didn’t do it in front of the children. I am sure that contributed to my ability to see positive in the people I have met and especially during my young years. I never cursed while growing up either. Neither did my friends. That lasted for several years, and I probably didn't pick up the habit of cursing until I went out into the world chasing a career. When I meet new people and see unbecoming traits today, I try to look beyond the behavior and understand what causes it. After I graduated from high school and stepped out into the working world where I began meeting people from all walks of life, my attitude began to change as did my habits. In other words, the floor of my foundation began to crack. I never really was into foul language though, because people around me were not using it either when I lived in Illinois. Venturing out of my circle of Midwestern friends in California when my husband and I separated kind of closed the curtain on the effects of a sheltered life.

When Jerry entered my life, it was like being caught up in a windstorm. If there is such a thing as a whirlwind romance, then we were in it. Nothing would ever be quite the same. Our daughter recently said that a friend asked her what her father did during my high demand career days. She said, “I know what your mother has done, but what about your dad?” Our daughter responded by saying, “He was a psychologist too. He had a history of several different career experiences when they met each other. However, he stepped aside and spent his life promoting her career. When she didn’t want to go to a social event, he insisted. If she didn’t want to approach a person who would be helpful to her career pursuits, he would push her into it.” I told her that she was right and shared with her a time we were attending a political event, and he wanted me to talk to a member of the California assembly. The assemblyman had people gathering around him, and I objected to Jerry’s suggestion. I was wearing an outfit that happened to have suspenders on it. Jerry grabbed the suspenders in the middle of my back and literally shoved me right up in front of the politician. I was astounded and unprepared. I said, “Hi, I’m Dr. Joyce Swineheart, and I am interested in talking to you about mental health services.” I didn’t add that I was also thinking of killing my husband. The assemblyman was probably 6’ 3” tall, and he looked down at me, smiled, warmly greeted me and invited me to set up an appointment at his office, so I could tell him the details of what I wanted to discuss about mental health.

The day I went to his office, I took a woman along with me who was the president of a family mental health association. I made the introduction and she began to talk. After a few minutes, I could see his mind was wandering, so I spoke up and said, “Since this is my nickel, I am going to say why I wanted to talk to you.” Before I left his office, he had asked me to set up a mental health committee and establish the goals I hoped to achieve. He suggested I prepare a list of who should be invited to join the committee and said, “Let’s go to work.” A couple of years later he told me that he thought it was quite funny when I said ‘I paid for this visit,” because I guess had I really done that, it would have been a violation of laws governing public offices. He knew what I meant. I paid to attend his political gathering and “eat the rubber chicken” they serve. In other words, I did my time, so this is MY time.

Our committee was a roaring success and ended with the Chairman of the State of California’s AB3052 Mental Health Committee coming down to San Diego to personally receive my committee’s recommendations for changes in California’s mental health system, which he then presented to the California legislature. I ended up being appointed by the State Director of Mental Health to the AB3052 committee, which reviewed new 24 hours services throughout the state. The Assemblyman later became a California Senator and ultimately ended up being a judge in the Superior Court. A few years later, he called one day and invited me to go to lunch, because he wanted to discuss the need for services for people with substance abuse issues ending up facing the judge in a court of law. Today I think I missed an opportunity that I should not have passed up, but at the time, I had other things going on in my life that prevented me from accepting the offer. All of this would come much later, however, and when I first met Jerry and he came over to carry my laundry basket on a Sunday afternoon, had I known of the challenges ahead, I may have decided to carry my own basket.

Jerry was driving a little white station wagon, and he kept showing up in it daily. We would go out for an ice cream or for a hamburger, and I would listen to him talk incessantly about his pending divorce. He had only been married 4 years, and his estranged wife had separated from him at least a couple of times during that time period. If you put all of the time they actually lived in the same residence, it may have been 2 years together. They had a son who was 3 years old. Jerry was under court ordered supervised visitation due to the fact the mother had convinced the court Jerry was planning on taking him into hiding. I actually had never known anyone or even heard of court ordered supervised visitation. He had to visit him in a psychiatrist’s office and could see him once weekly. At the time, Jerry was paying $750.00 per month child support. He was a real estate broker and builder. His business was suffering. Her attorney had subpoenaed business records and placed liens on his projects, so any money made from the sales would go to her. He was still wearing his military veteran attitude, so he basically just walked away from all of it after deciding he was working a lot of hours only to watch profits going to attorneys and his soon to be ex wife. He has always said he would rather be rested and broke instead of tired and broke. His wife’s attorney had a reputation for capitalizing on women’s wrath. It didn’t help Jerry when he grabbed him outside the courtroom one day and threatened to toss him over the railing to the floor below. When Jerry was ordered to deliver his business receipts and records to her attorney’s office, he loaded them loosely into paper boxes, walked into the attorney’s office and turned the boxes upside down on his desk. He was fighting the battle, unfortunately, like too many men typically do in family court. His emotions were on display all over the place, while his wife was fighting more typically as women do using strategy. More than one judge took Jerry aside and told him he was beating his head against the wall and tried to get him to calm down. I had a front row seat on the best podcast in the county if podcasts had existed then. It looked like soon I would be invited to participate in it.

One day Jerry showed up at work. He had arrived at lunchtime to invite me to lunch, but I had gone early that day, so I wasn’t there. When I returned, Bill, a gay co-worker, said “Joyce, there is a really cute guy out there waiting to see you. Can I have him first?” He wouldn’t be the only gay guy to feel an attraction to Jerry. I had a patient in one of my veteran’s programs come to me once and told me he had been deeply depressed, because he was attracted to my husband. He said he felt like he was being deceitful to me. That was an easy fix for me. I told him I found Jerry attractive too, and that it was ok for him to be attracted to my husband. In other words, I gave him permission to have a crush on Jerry. I learned early on when working in the mental health field not to be shocked by anything. One of my patients who had a physical handicap could only perform sex if his wife wore a mink coat. The coat came up missing once, and he started having multiple seizures. Nothing I ever learned in college or growing up prepared me for how to advise him to handle the problem. I decided to tell him to report the stolen mink coat to the police and was really surprised when it was found. You never know what the homeless have in their compounds unless you look to see what might be there. A few decades later my husband decided it would be fun to tell his best friend and a very well known high level political consultant that I was turned on by wearing a mink coat when making out with my husband. There is no doubt in my mind today that the man still believes that to be true. I am sure he has shared that with a few prominent San Diegans. How do you deny it and not have it look like you are just embarrassed? My husband thinks it is the funniest joke in the world. I don’t. Nothing I learned in college or during my childhood prepared me for Jerry either. Nor would my life experiences have prepared me for an invitation from his estranged wife and her mother to come to their home one evening to hear all about Jerry.

I had known Jerry less than a month when one day I received a call from his friend where he was living. I had never met him. He introduced himself and said, “Jerry wanted me to call and let you know he will be going away for a while. He wanted you to know why he isn’t available, and he said you will know what that means.” I thought about it for a few minutes and then remembered he had a court date that day, so I assumed he went to jail for the contempt of court charges. I actually found that kind of funny for the reason I had never dated anyone who had ever been to jail. A couple of days later I received another call from the same friend. He said, “Jerry wants you to come and visit him.” I asked him where would I go to see him, and he responded “at the county jail.” When I asked the question, I had assumed he had gotten out of jail. He was asking for me to come to the jail to see him. I certainly had never visited anyone in jail, so my new soap opera style life was becoming more interesting. I found out the jail was located down town San Diego on Front Street. I had lived in San Diego County for a decade and had never been to the city. That means I had never driven in the city, so I was concerned about the traffic and finding my way around in a new area. I decided that he might need to see me, because he wanted me to help him with something related to his legal issues, so I gathered up my courage and with Chicago on my mind, I headed downtown San Diego. I was thinking that going inside of a jail would be an experience and probably a shock to me. However, my greatest shock that evening was the traffic in the city. I had expected a Chicago style of driving with pretty much bumper to bumper cars speeding through the big city. I could not believe what I saw. Driving in the city of San Diego was comparable to driving in a laid back midsized city in the Midwest. There were no speeding cars, honking horns or stressed out impatient acting drivers. I found the parking lot across the street from the jail, went inside the jail and found accessing an inmate was a very easy process. I was directed to a seat with a window in front of it, and soon Jerry showed up on the other side of the window. I could see other inmates who were talking to their visitors, and I found it rather humorous that Jerry looked so different from the people I could see on the other side. Today I would best describe it as it looked like Doogie Howser had gone to jail. He definitely did not look like the typical inmate. I found out he just wanted to see me and did not have an assignment for me. He wanted me to know that he would be in there for six to eight weeks. I told him I would set up an appointment with my attorney after he got out of jail to help him with his child visitation rights.

It was only 3 days later when Jerry showed up at my door. I was quickly learning that he was a most unpredictable man. Soon when I wasn’t at work, he was beginning to monopolize my time. I met his construction buddy and housemate. He was in the process of selling his house due to a court order from his divorce. There were more friends in my life during that time period who were either divorced or in the process of divorcing than married friends. Even my best friend who had been married to her husband for many years had left him. It was hard to say whether people were changing mates or houses the most. You could buy a nice house in suburban neighborhoods in San Diego County for $10,000 to $25,000. A couple of my friends who were married and stayed that way were moving from one home to another one just a few streets over. He laughed and said when he went to work, he would call his wife to see if he was still living in the same house before he came home, because she kept moving from one home to another if she saw one she liked better. It was quite easy to get financing. My X and I had been renting a 3 bedroom house for $90 per month when we received financing to buy a brand new home under construction in Santee, which is where we were living when we separated.

Jerry’s roommate sold his house rather quickly, and he rented an apartment in the same complex where I was living. It was in a different section of the building. My roommate decided to get one of the other apartments, and she found one right next to mine. We shared an inner wall, which was great. Since I was uncomfortable living alone, at least I knew if I needed help, she would hear me and call the police. I later would find out she was working as a surrogate for a psychologist who was counseling professional men in San Diego who had various sexual dysfunction issues and that was really what motivated her to get her own place. She certainly couldn’t do her surrogate work in my apartment. I couldn’t imagine that experience, and I never talked to her about it. The psychologist who was referring to her service told me what was happening. There was an even greater shock to be learned later about her secrets never shared with me.

Jerry and his buddy continued to work out of the offices in the dome building, and they asked me to come to work for them. They offered to pay more than what I was making. I would be handling the bookkeeping and managing the files for the construction company. The construction company did not have any employees. Instead, they used licensed subcontractors. I enjoyed learning the construction business, but I was really focused on a goal of starting my own business. I wanted to develop rehab centers, so people would have comparable opportunities within their own residences to those activities and services they were offered in day programs. I was concerned about the inconsistency between the approaches being used when they were in their homes and the methods used in day programs. I missed my clients, and I could see right away that the construction company wasn’t financially healthy. I was concerned that I had made a mistake when I left my job at the social service center.

Jerry told me about a house that was for sale, which had been a community care home. It was perfect for what I wanted to do. The woman who owned it was financing it. I only needed $2500 down. I learned a hard lesson about buying real estate with that transaction. I was so excited and couldn’t wait to fix it up. Preparing homes for people who needed out of home placement was something I enjoyed doing. While I worked, I felt I could see their future and feel their emotions when they saw the pretty bedspreads, lamps, and artwork on the walls. I believed every purchase I made would help improve the self esteem of the person who would be coming to live there A clean attractive environment blended with kindness, encouragement and good food would surely make a difference in the lives of others. My X and I had a small savings account when I left, and I told him if he would give me $10,000 of the money, I would give him the house when we divorced. In other words, I would give up my 50% ownership to which I was entitled by law in exchange for $10,000. I knew that would give me enough money for the down payment on the home and leave enough for me to buy the paint and other items needed to repair and furnish the home in order to get it licensed as a rehab center. By that time, the value on our home had risen considerably, so it was a good deal for my X and a good deal for me, because I could pursue my dream. Jerry was helping me out. He wasn’t interested in ownership. In fact, he didn’t want to give his X wife any more reasons to fight over assets.

Throughout all of this time, we had been having fun dating each other and hanging out with friends. We could talk for hours about anything and everything, and we spent a lot of time talking about his legal issues.

I got off of work early one day and decided to go over to the apartment Jerry and his friend were sharing. The front door was unlocked. I heard the shower running and assumed Jerry was taking a shower. I went into the bathroom and jumped upon the toilet seat to peer over the shower curtain and scare him. I found myself looking at a stranger. I was horrified. I was down and out of that apartment and inside my own in seconds, although I had to go all the way around the complex to reach my own place. I later was told when Jerry came home, the man looked at him and asked, “so who is the redhead?” He told Jerry what happened, and of course, they both thought it hysterically funny. The shower taker said he saw someone come in the bathroom and he thought Jerry was getting ready to dump cold water on him. He was considering reaching out and grabbing him by the ankle when he looked up and saw me peering into his shower. I never met the man ever and still haven’t today. I made sure of that. He lived out of state, so it was fairly easy to avoid his location when he was in California.

Another character in our little soap opera community was a woman who was head over heels in love with Jerry’s roommate. She was constantly showing up out of nowhere and appeared to be stalking Larry (Jerry’s buddy.). I liked her. She was friendly. She was rather simple minded, had a couple of kids, was separated from an abusive substance abusing husband and in love with Larry. She is a person who you would have to say is complicated. She would give you the shirt off her back if you asked her for it and needed it, but she would also steal yours while in the process. I didn’t realize at the time I met her that she would become a permanent fixture in my life, but she did for many years. Most of her story belongs in another chapter in my life. In fact, her kids after they grew up would become yet another indirect chapter in my life. I will just say here the branches don’t fall too far from the tree. She and her two kids are probably the closest I have ever come to knowing gypsies. Jerry often said he thought she lived in the drain pipes in Larry’s residences.

She wanted me to meet her single brother. One evening she asked me to meet her for a drink at the same place where I had first been introduced to Jerry. We were sitting in a booth talking when

who walked in but Jerry. He joined us. We were all having fun when a guy walked through the door and was kind of looking around. The woman with me waved at him, and Jerry asked, “Who’s that fuzzy faced funny bunny looking “Mother F’r”? She giggled and said, “He’s my brother.” Apparently, she was trying to arrange for me to meet him in a casual way, which obviously didn’t work out. It would not have happened under any circumstances, because he was definitely not my type, but Jerry’s description of him that evening while not knowing he was her brother is a funny memory which has lasted forever. She and I laughed about it so many times especially since it was during a phase in our group of friends if someone said something insulting about a person’s appearance, it was common to claim the person was a relative. Jerry thought she was joking when she said it was her brother. It is those kinds of moments in life …those nonsensical insignificant times …shared with friends which seem to take an honored position in the chambers of our brain. They become a part of the experiences which form our character and bind us together forever in the corners of our minds. It is something we talk about again when separated for long periods of time even if a decade or two later.

One of those insignificant experiences to be remembered forever happened at a family gathering. It was a somewhat typical get together when the men were gathered in one area of the home, and the women were in another room. An out of state relative was visiting. The men had been watching sports on television while laughing and talking. Jerry would describe it as “loud talking.” For some reason, we females started discussing family history …those kind of family stories nobody talks about and if you do, you certainly don’t “loud talk.” Among the topics that day were a couple of murder stories. Suddenly we realized the “loud talkers” in the other room were talking less and listening more. Soon, they were not talking at all. They were only listening. Could it be they were so interested, because in both murder stories, it was women who had killed men? Our defense that day was that the women charged and found guilty of murder were not blood relatives. In fact, it was our blood relatives who were the victims. We were at my sister in law’s home that day. When Jerry and I have family parties in our home and it is time for the family stories, he will say, “Okay …It is time to talk about Burnt Prairie, so I am going upstairs to take my nap now.” Burnt Prairie is the very small town located closest to where I was born and raised. He was surprised by many things the first time he visited my hometown.

Too late and after buying some items and repair supplies for the home we were purchasing, Jerry and I started to recognize the woman selling the property was quite emotional. I shared a mutual acquaintance with her at the time. I had met the person who knew both of us when I was working at the social service agency, because she was a community care provider who housed some of the clients who came to the day program. I assume the woman selling her property had met her due to their mutual interest in providing housing for people with special needs. When the seller said she changed her mind about selling the house to me, and she convinced the escrow officer to close the escrow, I actually called the woman who knew both of us and asked her if she had heard from her. I soon found out why she had changed her mind. She had another offer on the house, and I suspect the pot had been sweetened a bit. The money I spent and the labor Jerry had put into fixing up the home only benefitted her and the new buyer. It benefitted me too in that I learned never to assume an escrow will close. I definitely have had the opportunity throughout the years to make those assumptions, but I have always held fast to my belief that you don’t ever assume that everything will go well when you have a property in escrow.

I try very hard in life to look at each person and including those who have wronged me in a charitable way. There is nothing to be gained from wasting energy on what has happened or what can’t be changed. In this particular situation, I am certainly glad I just walked away, because later the buyer of the property and I became good friends. I would learn, however, in my “field of dreams,” there are some people who make it very difficult to keep bitterness out of your heart.

As can happen when we keep looking forward in life, another property fell into my lap. My former boss, the director of the agency, knew I was pursuing setting up a rehabilitation center, and he was operating a 24 hour care home for the elderly population in a nearby town. He didn’t want any money for it. He just wanted to find someone to take it off his hands. I was quickly approved by the licensing department, and it was a perfect way for me to gain some experience in operating 24 hour services. The scheduled day for my takeover I received an early morning phone call from from my former boss who was also the psychologist who owned it. He told me that one of the residents in the home had died during the night. He and I both were horrified and we each hurried on our way to the home where we found 5 calm, cool and collected old ladies having breakfast. One looked at another and said, “Did you know Fred died last night?” The response was, “Really? No, I didn’t.” The two people in the room needing counseling were me and the doctor. Fred’s housemates were obviously more interested in what was for breakfast than in the natural outcome of living a long life. I operated the home for about two years and enjoyed it. I hired a live in couple perfect for the job. They wanted to develop homes for the elderly, so I passed that home on to them. That was a very good decision, and they were highly respected care providers of many years. When I would say they were such good providers, they would always smile, look at me and say, “we had a good teacher.” They were older than me and such good people, so I loved hearing that each time they said it.

In the meantime, Jerry found another possible deal for me in the newspaper. A man who owned a large property was looking for someone with the expertise to turn it into some type of 24 hour service. I was really hesitant to call the man. Jerry kept insisting, so finally to appease him, I made the phone call and found myself with an appointment to meet one of the most successful realtors in North County. While Jerry had been pushing me forward in the pursuit of my dream,

I also had finally arranged for Jerry to meet with my attorney. I warned him my attorneys would not put up with any nonsense, because they had a lot of integrity and would not approve of some of his antics. Jerry invited me to go with him to visit his son in a psychiatrist’s office, so I tagged along. His X wife arrived in her mink coat, high heeled boots and with both of her parents in tow. Jerry’s son was a good looking little tyke with blond hair, and he seemed perfectly content to go into another room with his dad for an hour’s visit. Meanwhile, I sat in the waiting room with the family. The father said that the marriage between Jerry and his X wife should never have happened in the first place. I know we discussed whether children needed both parents in their lives. I was a strong advocate for both parents to be involved in kids’ lives. I remember her father used one of the late night talk show hosts as an example of a man who never had his father in his life and claimed to not miss him. I said it was interesting that he would be talking about him if it didn’t bother him. She was holding some legal documents to serve to Jerry when he was finished. She looked at me and said, “I feel sorry for you riding home with him. He is going to be so mad.” I found that interesting because when I had first met him, he told me that she was afraid of him. I tried to reassure him that she was not afraid of him by telling him people don’t try to agitate those they fear. It was obvious that she liked pushing his emotional buttons. I don’t recall the subject of the document she served him, but it certainly didn’t affect his driving. I don’t think she realized yet that he was finally moving forward in life. Their divorce was finalized, so she probably had a court order in hand regarding disbursement of assets. She was ordered to return his personal items, which included a toy train. She wrote a letter to him asking if he was really going to take the train from Michal, their son. When I read it, I told him I was concerned about why it would have to remain with her in order for Michael to play with it. “Why couldn’t Michael play with it when he visits you? I asked. I asked Jerry if there was a chance she was planning on moving away. Little did I know, my analysis of her words couldn’t have been more accurate.

Before they left the day of Jerry’s visit with their son, they gave me a phone number and asked me to call because they wanted to meet with me. I discussed that with Jerry, and we decided I should go just to see what they wanted to tell me. I called, and we agreed I would come to their home. I noticed there wasn’t much in the house, and assumed that was because the court had ordered that the house be sold. We actually sat on the floor. Her mother served each of us a glass of wine. His X began to talk about her unhappy time spent with Jerry. I noticed she had a derogatory name for each of the women he had dated. There were “ladies of the evening,” and “hamburger slingers.” I wondered what derogatory name they have given to my work at the social service agency. I really think their purpose in meeting with me was to encourage me to get out of his life, because they believed he might be getting it together. It was obvious they wanted to frighten me away and they wanted me to believe they were concerned for me because I was a nice person and they wanted to protect me. Of course, I knew better than that, but I went along with the game. I was told that he would keep me away from my family. I was told that he would lay around on the couch for days never showering. That one was really interesting then and even more so today, because after having lived with him for so many years, I don’t think he ever missed getting up in the morning and taking a shower. He has always faithfully brushed his teeth morning and night, and is quite meticulous about his clothing. I don’t know if that really happened, but if it did, it was certainly out of character when compared to the man I know. Both his mother in law and his X wife told me many reasons why I should not go forward in a relationship with Jerry. They even told me they had thought he would have been killed in a car wreck already. She also told me that he wasn’t working once, and their baby needed shoes. She said her parents bought the baby some shoes. I was considering that statement when she followed up and said she found him a couple of days later at a friend’s house sitting at the top of the stairs by the hamburger slinger. She added that she was so angry she made him take her shopping, and she bought a mink coat. She told me she loved it, because she could see how much it bothered him. Well, that comment negated the baby needing shoes story, because what mother is going to buy a mink coat if her kid needs shoes? A few years later Jerry bought a full length mink coat for me, and I certainly had not asked for it. In fact, he has showered me with many gifts throughout the years far beyond what I would have imagined I would ever own. It was an interesting visit, and I left realizing they had not said one good thing at all about Jerry. Knowing that most people and even less than desirable people usually have a few good traits, I left the meeting feeling their real purpose was just another step in their effort to destroy a man. What they couldn’t have known is that Jerry had already told me of many of his actions and reactions to the situations that arose during their marriage and certainly more than what they seemed to know. They were also wrongly assuming that I was a meek and/or weak minded person. It might have been more appropriate for someone to be warning Jerry about me if he was looking for a pushover.

Before we even had time to have the meeting with my attorney to discuss a more liberal child visitation plan, we found out that his X wife had taken their son and her parents and moved away with no forwarding address. She was the parent planning on going into hiding with the child while she was accusing Jerry of having such a plan. This was evidenced when a few years later we would learn she had been building a new home during the final year of their divorce proceedings. Jerry was devastated when he found out his son was gone.

We began our search for Jerry’s son, Michael. Michael’s mother had a diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis, so he believed that she would not move to any cold weather locations. He didn’t know of any out of state relatives or even out of county family members. He said her grandparents were deceased. He did know of an uncle and aunt who lived in another nearby San Diego County city. She had maintained her post office box mailing address in the same post office where he had one. He used his magic tricks and found out that she was using that address and either picking up her mail or having it picked up.

In the meantime, and since the seller of the house we wanted to get changed her mind before the close of the escrow, Jerry had been combing through newspaper ads looking for another real estate opportunity. We decided to move in together and found an apartment in El Cajon off of Broadway. We were only there for 2 or 3 months when Jerry found an ad from a North County realtor about a place which appeared to be personally designed for me. The owner of a 5,000 square foot 2 story old adobe house in Poway, California had purchased the home for an investment based on his trust in a man who told him he would get it licensed as a drug treatment center for addicts. He soon found out that the man he was relying on could not perform for many reasons, and unfortunately, the guy had moved several former prison inmates into the home. Basically, there were at least 8 or 10 men living on the property. At Jerry’s urging, I called the realtor, and we all met including the realtor’s wife to discuss whether it was something that would work for my plans and what had to be done to make that happen. It was easy to see they were stressed, and the house which was suppose to be a great investment for them was eating into their time and resources in a big way. He had already filed eviction notices. We agreed that day to form a simple partnership. The major requirements of the partnership were that he would own the property and pay for the cost of preparing it to be licensed by the county as a community care home for the purpose of serving mentally ill adults. The partnership would lease the building and acreage for $1,500.00 per month with a 6% annual increase. I was required to do all of the work involved in getting San Diego County licensing approval. I also could choose to live there while seeking the various permits. It was his responsibility to make sure the house was empty of people. I told my new partner to be that I liked to have agreements in writing and would ask my attorney to prepare a partnership agreement. Within the body of the partnership agreement, I had complete control of the operation of the mental health facility. My partner’s role would be to cooperate with getting a conditional use permit on the property and act only as a landlord thereafter. I asked my attorney to also prepare a 5 years lease with an option of another 5 years. The realtor signed the partnership agreement and the lease agreement. I knew he was desperate, so I wanted to get as much as I could for the business in order to make sure it didn’t fail. He was a very successful man and was totally capable of covering his stress level for a luncheon meeting. However, his wife was clearly displaying the look of desperation. I could see the strain and could also tell it was a family not familiar with financial concerns. There is so much more to learn about people by observing facial expressions and behavior over listening to the words they speak.

There are times when a person is entering into a contract that you want to be the one assigned to writing it. There are other times when you want to have the other person prepare it leaving you the right to approve or disapprove. In this case I wanted to have my attorneys prepare it, because I knew they would make sure I was protected and had a suitable enforceable exit plan within it. There are very few times when you want a partner in business, and in my opinion, that is when something the other party has cannot be reasonably obtained in any other way. Jerry use to tell me if I wanted a partner in business just go down to the marine store and buy an anchor. Partners often don’t work out so well. In this situation, the realtor had the property I wanted and needed for my future plans, and I had what he didn’t have which was expertise on serving people in need of out of home placement. We formed that partnership in the early summer of 1976.

I had a new business partner and a new boyfriend. I was quickly learning that expertise can be as important as money when forming partnerships. I was also learning that you did not need money to buy real estate. What I didn’t have for this newly proposed business was permission from the planning group who approved and/or disapproved business operations in Poway. Poway was not a city at that time, but they did have a planning board. That planning board did not want a mental health facility in Poway. Their disapproval meant that we had to appeal their decision to the County Board of Supervisors. The entire process was so unfamiliar to me, and I had to rely on my common sense while going forth much like teaching a kid to swim by tossing him into the river. Jerry would say here “a fast moving river.”

Poway was a community located between North County, East County, the City of San Diego and the coastline. In other words, it just kind of set out in the middle of nowhere. It was north of Santee and Lakeside and South of Ramona but west of Highway 67 which connected Lakeside to Ramona. There were not a lot of businesses in Poway in 1976. There was a bank, a grocery store and a few retail shops. My new project was located only a couple of blocks off of the main street which ran through the town. There was an old train station within a stones throw from the property. The few people who knew what I was doing told me that I would never be able to get clients in a facility in Poway. They said it was too remote of an area. When you are trying to build a business without money, you take more risks. I had to try. It certainly was remote. To get to it from the east county area of San Diego, you had to drive up a treacherous mountain type two lane road several miles and then turn left and travel on an even more risky drive with curves and cliffs until you arrived in Poway. The news media didn’t even know how to pronounce its name in 1976 They would call it Pow-wee. I think the only time it made the news was when someone was killed on the road trying to get to it. Of course, I liked the community. It was a little country looking town in the middle of nowhere, so that made me feel right at home. I would later learn that the home at one time had been an old stage coach stop.

Prioritizing the steps that we had to take was important, because it would be wasting our time to apply for a license to operate a 24 hour center for mentally ill people if we didn’t have a conditional use permit on the property. The planning department had already said no to John before I met him. I had to go down to the building where the county board of supervisors had their offices and held their public meetings to attend the hearing on the day our request was being heard. It was located down by the ocean on Pacific Highway. Little did I know at the time I would be going there weekly for over 5 years someday. I was certainly getting used to being in the big city. I asked Jerry why it was so laid back compared to Chicago, since San Diego was one of the most heavily populated cities in the nation. He pointed out that the official city of San Diego was spread out over a broad area of the county and not congested in a small geographic area. That is true. At the time, there were a lot of areas of the county, which were not cities yet. You could be only a few miles from Santee, for example, and be within the city limits of San Diego. Imagine creeks winding off of the river’s edge, and that would give you a picture of how the city of San Diego developed such a large population of people without taking on most of the features of comparably heavily populated big cities.

The realtor was actually the key person handling the request for a county conditional use permit which would allow a care facility to be developed on the property, since he had already started the process before I met him. However, I was there in case I was needed. I knew my business partner didn’t know anything about the proposed business. I was surprised to see several people there objecting to it. I was naive enough to wonder why neighbors would be upset if the people I knew as my clients at the social service agency where I had worked were moving into their neighborhood. One woman said, “We don’t have chicken farms to employ them.” I was thinking “What?!!!” Why would anyone think my clients could only work on chicken farms? Actually, I still wonder about that particular testimony. What gave her the belief that chicken farm owners hired people with mental health issues or that people with mental illness want to work at a chicken farm. I was just hoping that my new partner’s professional relationships in the San Diego community carried enough influence to get an approval from the county board of supervisors. Apparently, something influenced them to grant our conditional use permit, so now it was my turn to roll up my sleeves and go to work.

John (the property owner) had already installed a very sophisticated Fire Marshall approved central fire alarm system, which also automatically called the fire department. That would be fun later when one of my female patients had a fetish for firemen. The building had 3 huge bedrooms in the main portion of the old adobe home with two of those bedrooms being on one side of an enormous sized living room and dining area, and the other bedroom was located on the other side of the living room. An old fashioned fireplace was located in the middle of that area. When you stepped outside French doors off the living room, you would find yourself inside a very large courtyard with stairs leading up to the second story where there were 3 more bedrooms. The bedroom on the west side of the house had an exit into the front entry hall and an exit into a hallway with a bathroom. The hallway led to a large country kitchen. One of the bedrooms on the other side of the living room had a doorway leading into a hallway and into the living room. It also had French doors opening into the courtyard. The other bedroom only had one door leading through the hallway into the living room. There was a bathroom on the eastern side of the house off of the hallway, and of course, the upstairs bedrooms also had a bathroom on the 2nd floor. There were windows upstairs which could be opened, and people could exit out those windows and take the outside stairway down to the ground from the second floor. That was also future fun for some of my patients. The upstairs had that outside stairway for exiting and also had the stairway coming down into the courtyard. All of this means the house was designed perfectly should there be a fire and people needed to quickly get out of the building. Safety is very important when serving people with special needs of any time that requires them to live in out of home placement.

The main house was entirely adobe, and the 2nd story was built as a typical wood structure. The home was sitting on 5 acres. There was a long cement driveway leading off of a graveled street of about a quarter of a mile off of a main street named Midland in Poway. The name of the street where the home was located was Adrian Way, and there was only one home on the same street just past our location. This, too, was an advantage affording our clients privacy.

I had decided to name the business Arcadia Residential Care. The definition of Arcadia represents a peaceful healing environment to me. My first assignment was to apply for a license from a government office known as the licensing division of the county social services department. At the same time, I had to switch into high gear on preparing the home for a site visit from the licensing analyst. It had to be completely furnished with all the necessary equipment and supplies in order to receive a license on it. The state laws governing 24 hour facilities changed based on the numbers of people being served. 15 beds or less was a good cut off point to avoid more costly building modifications. The next cutoff point was 6 beds. The needs of the people you choose to serve also affects the requirements. For example, fire codes become much more restrictive if you are serving elderly or children. If I had more than 15 beds for mentally ill citizens, I would have had to install a sprinkler system inside the building. If I had served six or less, I could have served them and met fire code with smoke detectors. However, we were proposing over six beds, and it required the central alarm system, which John had already installed. The licensing department required a Fire Marshall approval on the building before they would license it. The county, of course, required a business license. The bank required the publication of the business name for opening a bank account. We certainly had enough assignments and my life was about to change forever. Harry Browne wrote a book entitled “How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World.” Within it, the recommended that if you can live and die and government never know you are here, that would be best. Government would be coming at me from all directions, but I was determined to follow my dream.

I had already met the county licensing worker, who would handle my request. I really liked her. She was an older woman who was going to retire within a couple of years. She was a very smart and objective woman. In other words, she was one of those people who knew the law and didn’t try to manipulate the law or the people needing her services. She had integrity. She was especially helpful to me, because she recognized I knew nothing about the process, and I believe she saw my sincerity in wanting to prepare a place where people would be respected and treated well.

Jerry’s 1973 El Dorado and his only possession coming out of a 3 year marriage became our truck throughout the process of preparing the home for licensing approval. We went to a discount furniture store and ordered 15 twin beds, 15 nightstands, 15 chest of drawers, 2 lamps for every bedroom to add to their overhead lights, 15 mattresses, 15 chairs for the bedrooms, a large couch, loveseat and 3 sofa chairs, a large dining table with 15 chairs, a small kitchen table with four chairs to put in the country kitchen, coffee tables, end tables, and lamps for the general living area. There was also a sun room on the front of the house, and we ordered furniture for that area. All of that would be delivered, and we were beloved by the furniture store thereafter. We then went to merchandise stores and bought mattress pads, 2 changes of sheets for every bed, pillows, pillow cases, dishes, small appliances for the kitchen, cookware, utensils for cooking and serving, drinking glasses, first aid kit, and home decorating items like wall pictures, flower vases, etc. Imagine how many towels and wash rags you need to buy for 15 people living in one home. Of course, we had to buy cleaning supplies and cleaning tools. Everything was new. I had mats for the bathtubs and showers, shower curtains, and bottles of soap for hand washing. We also bought shampoo. We bought a large refrigerator and a washer and dryer. We bought two vacuum cleaners. Oh how nice it would have been to have Amazon then.

We received our license in August, and our first resident arrived September 1st. How did we get a referral for a home in Poway when the experts said it could never be done? It happened because one of the clients I had worked with at the social service agency day program heard someone in a skilled nursing facility say that Joyce Swineheart had a new place for people. That patient requested that they send her to my home. Just like Field of Dreams, she came and others followed. I never had any problems receiving referrals, and I never advertised. My first lesson was finding out that patients share information behind those locked doors of hospitals, and the best way to get referrals was to provide a high quality service.

I was so excited about receiving my first patient, and I invited my mother up to help. I had to get her cleared through fingerprinting and register her name with the licensing department. I had listed Mother as one of my references on my licensing application. My licensing worker smiled and said, “we have never had a mother not give a good recommendation. However, you are the first to list an Ex Husband as a reference and for the record, he gave you an excellent one.” I told Mother she would enjoy my clients and that basically, they were like us, each unique in their own way. I told her to ignore negative behavior and encourage positive behavior by complimenting people for it. My mother said she remembered those words “just like us,” when she looked up and saw the 400 lb woman walking through the courtyard with me. She was wearing slacks, which did not quite meet her shirt, so her tummy was showing a bit. She had also been in the state hospital for many years, and was living with some after effects of Prolixin. Her tongue would roll to the side of her mouth when she was walking and trying to breathe. Mother said, “I saw her, remembered “just like us” and wondered what does Joyce think of us?” Actually, that patient was the best one for me to serve first. She had been in almost every home in the county. Recidivism was a major issue with the old state hospital patients in the 1970’s, and she was a leader in using the revolving doors going in and out of the local mental hospital and 24 hour care facilities. She became my advisor. I would ask her how other providers handled certain matters. She was never re-hospitalized while I was living in the home. The county officials began to notice our success in working with challenging cases.

Within a couple of weeks, I received another referral from the county’s skilled nursing facility. Edgemoor was located in Santee and specialized in serving adults with mental disorders in one of their buildings. The first patient to arrive had chosen one of the main house semi private bedrooms, so I decided to place the new referral in the other client semi-private bedroom in the main house. He was in his early 60’s, and I thought it best if the younger patients who arrived lived in the upstairs section of the house. I was suppose to pick him up on a specific date, but I received a phone call telling me that every time they tried to discharge him, he regressed and could not leave the facility. I set up another date with them and suggested they not make a big deal out of his discharge, since he had already been informed as to where he was going. Instead, I would just show up on that day and pick him up. Hopefully, that wouldn’t give him time to get so anxious. It worked, and soon I was on my way to Poway with a man who we will call Al. When we arrived, I carried his small suitcase into the house and on into the room where he would be living. I noticed he was no longer following me as I entered his room. I came out of his room, and he was sitting on the extra long couch where my mother was sitting, but as close to her as he could possible sit. Mother, who had been instructed by me of the importance of treating everyone in a most respectful manner was staring straight ahead at a television, and the look on her face was expressionless. I could see that she was rather shocked. I literally had to walk back into the bedroom where I bent over with laughter and then I collected myself, so I could go back out into the living room without laughing. Mother said he had looked at her after sitting nearly on top of her lap and nervously said, “I have never been in a place like this before.” She said, “Neither have I,” which was a perfect example of her Irish humor. Al thought she was another patient. We would find out he had a touch of dementia, but really was a very nice man and easy to serve. He liked to walk into town everyday and buy a soda at a local restaurant. Otherwise, he watched TV and enjoyed his meals. When he finished eating, he would always say, “Thank you very much, Mam to my mother who had prepared the meal and as he walked away he would mutter in a very low voice, “damned old bitch.” That is one of the behaviors we chose to simply ignore. Mother was an excellent cook, and they loved her meals. Within another 7 days, I was picking up Al’s friend from the same skilled nursing facility. He became Al’s roommate, of course. They would walk into town together every day. My next patient was a woman who was in her early 40’s. She had 2 children and was married, but her husband was in the process of getting a divorce from her. She was very religious, and had been picked up by law enforcement when found walking along the streets of one of our cities preaching the gospel and trying to get people to let her baptize them. She, of course, was on medication when she came to us from the county’s mental hospital located in the North Park area of San Diego, so she was no longer going up and down the streets preaching, but she was quite neurotic. She became a roommate of my first admission, since they were both mature ladies and were sufficiently compatible to share a room. She was constantly talking to anyone who would listen about her pending divorce and was very concerned about it. When she wasn't doing that, she was reading the Bible. Her estranged spouse would pick her up at least a couple of times per month, so she could visit her children where they had shared a home before her hospitalization. She required a significant amount of daily assurances that she was doing ok. One day she was talking to Jerry and he told her to not take an asinine and insipid position about her life and future. He was intending to encourage her to go forward with confidence. Later, she approached my mother and asked her the definition of asinine and insipid. Mother was an excellent student of the English language and her knowledge went far beyond her 8th grade education. She told Sharon the meaning of the words, and Sharon was horrified. She said, “Jerry said I am asinine and insipid.” Mother was shocked that Jerry had said it to her, and of course, would find out later he did not exactly say that, but it was one of those experiences you have when working in a mental health facility, which you remember. Jerry also learned that he had to be careful of how he spoke with the people we were serving. As time passed, Sharon told me that she chose insanity in order to get out of her marriage. She was very unhappy, but didn’t believe in divorce. She said she thought if she would just let go and end up in a mental hospital, God would excuse her if her husband divorced her. Surprisingly, she would not be the only patient to tell me they made a choice to accept insanity because of feeling that based on their options at the time, it was the best decision. She did well in our services.

My next patient would also come directly from the county’s mental hospital. She was a very pretty young lady who was 18 years old and filled with energy. She loved me, and I loved her. It was a pleasure working with her. She is the one who finally convinced me that she may have been in the hospital with Mick Jagger. Of course, initially, I went down every avenue to give her the space to tell me she was joking, but she held fast and eventually told me she had a picture of him. She asked if I would like to see it. I told her that I would love to see it. She ran up the stairs to her room and hurried back into the room to show me the photo of Mick Jagger. There he was alright… in the photos she had drawn. It was Mick Jagger in stick figure form.

I am going to give this young woman the name Suzie for the purpose of this writing. She had long natural blond hair, which she wore in a pony tail. She was often by my side, which was especially true when she arrived. Jerry was out of town, so I took her grocery shopping with me and often on other errands I had to handle in Poway. When she was admitted, Jerry was up in the mountains of Tehachapi, California working with another builder buddy who was developing homes in the area. Susie had family in San Diego County, and they visited her often. She was doing amazingly well in our services. Suzie and I actually ended up in a newspaper story with pictures of us. She was so excited, although I required the photographer to only take the back of her head as she and I walked up the long driveway with our arms around each other’s waist. In another photo we were sitting at a table with my facing the photographer while supposedly counseling Suzie. That photo was also directed by the photographer after he was informed that we had to protect her privacy. The female reporter was publishing a positive story on our services and program. When Jerry arrived home from Tehachapi, Suzie was sitting at the kitchen table with me. Jerry was walking through the courtyard carrying his suitcase when she looked up and saw him. He said, “Oh a new guy, and he is so cute. Can he be my roommate?” I laughed and said, “Suzie, he is my boyfriend.” She was embarrassed, but I assured her it was perfectly okay and that I saw it as a compliment. He couldn’t have been her roommate anyway, because we didn’t house men and women in the same room. We also had given Suzie the only private room when she was admitted.

A few years later, the news media would be publishing another story on our services, but it was generated by an unpleasant incident. One of my young men had decided to stand in a corner down by the train station and urinate. Unzipping his pants and going to the bathroom in public did not go over so well with a woman who saw him do that. The woman was a highly respected community member, and by that time, Poway had become a city. The city council got involved. She was determined to run us out of town. Coincidentally, my personal attorney was the city’s attorney, so he had to refer me to another attorney outside of his firm. I had total confidence in his making an excellent recommendation. The end result of that was actually positive too, and that was when my attorney said “You are the only person I know who can fall into a pile of crap and come out smelling like a rose.” I can look back and clearly see that my enemies did more for my career and life pursuits than I could have ever done. However, when you are on the battlefield, it certainly doesn’t feel good or that it will ever benefit you in any way. A few people working in government may decide to abuse the authority of their positions for no apparent reason, which can work havoc in the average person’s life.

I quickly was getting a lot of referrals from all over the county including from the private mental hospitals. When Jerry was in town, of course, he helped me with the mental health center, so my mother would go to her home in Santee. My father had passed away almost two years before that, and she lived alone in the mobile home they had purchased when they both retired and moved to California from Illinois. I should say they were supposed to retire, because they both ended up getting jobs because they actually enjoyed working. Mother had gone to work as a cashier in what we called dime stores in the 70’s, and my father had gotten a job at the Santee Water Department. He worked until he had a stroke. We were not as aware of the importance of keeping an eye on blood pressure then. When he was found at work and transported to the hospital, his blood pressure was over 200. He lived another 5 years following his stroke, and Mother continued to work part time up until about the last year or two of his life when they closed the store where she worked. They actually put a skating rink into the building. Anyway, Mother was available to help me out when needed. I think she enjoyed it. Many of the patients called her Grandma.

Our Christmas season in 1976 was very special. Jerry and I were still living in the mental health facility. Our program was filled, and so was my tummy. We were expecting a baby. We had grocery shopping down to a science by the time the holidays arrived. We would go each week to the grocery store and knew exactly how much we needed to feed 15 people. We also filled 2 grocery carts. Eating was very important to our clients. Some would be eating breakfast or lunch while asking me what I was fixing for dinner. We served the food at the big dining room table which seated all 15 people. We always had seconds available for those who would choose to have them. My advisor (my first client) told me that I didn’t have to serve seconds, and she also told me I should only serve people one scoop of ice cream instead of two, because it would save me money. I continued to serve two scoops unless it was someone who only wanted one scoop.

We bought a large Christmas tree and placed it in the glassed in sunroom in the front of the house. I asked each client to give us a wish list of a half dozen things they would like to have for gifts. We shopped for every client using their wish lists and each client received at least 3 gifts. I actually wrapped all of those presents and did for many years even after I hired managers. The time would come when our business grew too large for me to continue to do that, so I then required the managers to continue with the tradition of requesting wish lists and buying from their personal lists. I did not want all of the clients to get the same thing, because I wanted them to know and feel they were unique and special. We shared our Christmas Day with the clients at the home for a few years even after we stopped living there. We had our personal family parties and holiday parties for friends prior to and during Christmas Eve, so Christmas Day we could have Christmas dinner with our patients. Some would go home for Christmas but others did not have family to visit or their families lived out of town.

As the year of 1976 came to an end, I wondered what was in store for 1977. A new business, a new business partner, a new guy and a new baby. What could be next? I didn’t have to wait long to find out. Shortly after the first of the year, my new partner asked if we would check out some property he owned in the city. If we thought it would work, he would like for us to use one of his houses for developing another mental health facility. He said he would give me a lease back to the business as we had done with the Poway house. I would soon find out my new partner’s property was located in the Golden Hills area of San Diego. Golden Hills in 1977 was also referred to as Southeast San Diego, which was mostly populated by minorities and was considered a high crime area of the city. In fact, John owned a huge corner lot, which included a very large apartment unit, a house which he was proposing that our business lease and a smaller house next to it. It bordered two streets and an alley. Soon I would find myself walking through the house assessing in my mind how many people I could serve and whether it would be safe to do so. Jerry encouraged me to do it, while telling me that second business are usually successful and it is the third ones which fail.

There was a big wooden door between the dining room and the kitchen. It had an unusual latch on it. I believe it was probably there when the building was used as a stagecoach stop. When the door would open, the latch clicked. It had its own unusual sound. I always left that door unlocked during the night although Jerry and I were staying on the kitchen side of the house. When we would retire for the evening after dinner, dishes and evening snack had been served, most of the patients would watch TV either in the living room or their respective bedrooms. My very first admission who chose my program because she developed a fondness for me when I worked with her at the social service agency was a very needy person. She had no family, and she had lived in one of California’s state hospitals for many years before Reagan began to release state hospital patients into local communities. Jerry and I could guess when we heard the kitchen door click that it would be her wanting to talk with me. I would get up and sit down at the kitchen table with her in order to give her the time and attention she needed in order for her to go to bed and sleep all night. I often used the little table at the end of the country kitchen as a counseling table. I had 4 chairs for it, but normally only 2 would be used when I was counseling someone. This troubled woman had several ways of harming herself, which she had experienced many times before moving into Arcadia Residential Care. She never made any attempts of self harm while I was living in the home. After I moved out and hired managers, so I could go develop the next location, she called one evening just as I was walking out the door to go to a law school class and said, “I just stuck a pencil in to my stomach.” I asked her how far, and she told me about an inch. I asked her to pull it out while I was on the phone. She did. I asked if it was bleeding, and she said it was not bleeding. I said, “Ok. I have to go to class. I will call you as soon as I get home from school and see how you are doing. I asked if she would be alright until then, and she assured me that she would be fine. I’m getting a way ahead of myself though, because I had a few more roads to travel before that happened.

One morning I asked Jerry to go in and wake up Al’s roommate, who I will call Buddy. It was time for breakfast, and he always came in for breakfast, but he wasn’t there. I knew he had not felt well the night before, because I had heard the door click around 10 PM. I got up to see who was in the kitchen, and it was Buddy. That was unusual, so I asked him if he was ok. He said he wasn’t feeling real well. I asked him if he would like something to eat or maybe a glass of milk. He said that he would like a glass of milk. I got a glass and poured some milk into it for him. We sat down at the table and talked a bit before he thanked me for the milk and had gone to bed. Jerry came back into the kitchen and said, “I think Buddy is dead.” I did my usual and repeated what he said. “You think Buddy is dead?” I went into his bedroom, and Buddy had passed away during the night. I called the paramedics who came and confirmed he was gone. Due to the layout of the home, the professionals that needed to be involved could handle the situation without disturbing the other residents. I was so thankful that I had gotten up the night before and sit with Buddy while he drank his milk.

When you work in the mental health field, you soon learn that the only thing that is the same each day is that nothing is ever the same. I recall one day when my first patient was walking through the home with a thermometer in her mouth. I had gone grocery shopping and my mother was there. When she told me what had happened, I asked her if she had asked the patient why she was walking around with a thermometer in her mouth. She said, “No. You told me to ignore the negative behavior, and I assumed she was just seeking attention.” I’m sure she was seeking attention, but it is ok to ask why someone has a thermometer sticking out of their mouth.

I was so glad to have the opportunity to live in the home, because it put me in the position to know what I could reasonably expect from my future employees. In the 70’s, it was common practice to hire a live in manager or managers to insure that the clients always had supervision. It could be done while still remaining within the boundaries of the labor laws. I was struggling with the decision of expanding the business and hiring managers. I told Jerry I wanted to make sure my clients would have the best service, because I really wanted to positively affect their lives. During one of our conversations, he asked if I would rather offer that special service to a limited few people or develop additional locations so more people could benefit from my creativity. Finally, I agreed to develop the second location in Southeast San Diego. The house was not in very good shape and since we would have to move out of the Poway home, so the managers could live there, it basically would leave us homeless. So now I was pregnant and homeless and going to be working in one of the highest crime areas in the City of San Diego. Remember, it was a city where previously I had never been slightly less than two years before trying to develop a program there. Not only would I be staying somewhere in that city, I would be in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods.

Jerry had a solution for housing. He influenced me into buying a 25 foot Coachman motorhome. What was I thinking? I was listening to a man who had joined the Navy when he was right out of high school, and had spent one year in Viet Nam as an “advisor” before we were supposedly in Viet Nam. It was one of those later we would learn that we had been there. He almost missed that assignment, but he didn’t, and his experiences there had definitely affected him. He also had married a woman 10 or 12 years older than him before he was discharged from service. He then developed a chain of beauty salons with her, and they sold that. She was in and out of mental hospitals during their marriage. I know of one incident of her intentionally crashing into his car with her car in front of one of their beauty salons. Her name was Joyce too. My x husband had been married to a Joyce before me. I guess instead of being 2nd hand Rose, I was 2nd time Joyce. I would become Jerry’s 3rd wife. His second wife was the one who had gone into hiding with his son. He would be my 3rd husband. Neither one of us had children during our first marriages. During his marriage to the second wife, he had been a land developer, building contractor and real estate broker. Now he was promoting my business. There we were buying a motorhome before many people owned motorhomes. 1977 was just on the cusp of the motorhome craze. It was a novelty in most of the places we traveled. The motorhome had a double bed in the back, a bathroom, a kitchen area and another bedroom area in the hallway with bunkbeds. You could also convert the kitchen table into a bed.

We drove it on to the property at 22nd and K and went to work on the house. Fortunately, I had the same county licensing worker, and like most policies and laws in the 70’s, the requirements were not as strict as they are today. I had already cleared fingerprinting and all the background checks. This time it was about the house and bringing it up to standards. Jerry went to work on it. He tore out walls, had dry wall delivered, hung drywall, painted rooms and really went through room by room getting it ready for a licensing inspection. We had new carpet installed and of course, bought the furnishings as we had done in Poway, except this time we were going to have 10 people living there. There was a little house next door, and we rented that to my former roommate. I wondered why she kept hanging around us. She even did relief work for me in Poway and at 22nd and K, so my managers could have their days off each week. The loved her, because of her fabulous cooking and her personality.

I had a lot going on during that time. I also was preparing an unsolicited report about our success with the people we were serving in Poway. When I finished with it, I sent it out to county officials and to members of the California legislature. My ultimate goal was actually one of wanting to improve the mental health system for people who had been discharged from the state hospitals without appropriate community resources. I believed if I could show the decision makers what could be done, they would be interested in funding services for this seemingly forgotten population. Apparently, I was so focused on my goals I left normalized thinking somewhere along the way. I would soon have a baby and was certainly keeping up my prenatal care at Kaiser, but I really wasn’t preparing for a baby. I had no strollers…no bassinets… and no rocking chair. I did buy some diapers, bottles, pacifiers, baby blankets, nightgowns and socks for the baby. We didn’t know if we were going to have a boy or a girl. You didn’t find out until the baby arrived in those days. Jerry wanted a little girl, which he called a split tail. I really didn’t care. I had a boy and a girl, so I was happy to welcome either. On the night of my visit by invitation from his X wife and mother in law, the X wife had told me she cried when she had a boy. She said she wanted a girl when Michael was born. I couldn’t relate to that. I understand when you have a preference before the baby is born but usually, when the baby arrives a Mama is happy.

I was running all around the county during my pregnancy interviewing patients behind locked doors for possible admission to our services and meeting with social workers and other professionals who also served the same clients as I was serving. Our Poway program had become a very popular location. I had no problems lining up clinical psychologists and psychiatrists who would come to our location to see the patients. Poway truly had become the field of dreams. Build it and they will come.

In the meantime, down in Southeast San Diego, I came home from a doctor’s appointment one day to find blood on the front steps. It was people blood. I go into the house to find Jerry hanging drywall. I asked him about the blood at the entrance. He said a “little gang banger came by to tell me who owns this neighborhood. I had a drywall knife in my hand. He was shirtless, so I decided to welcome him to our home.” I asked, “Jerry, you cut him?” He said, “What did you expect me to do …serve him ice tea? Don’t worry about it. He won’t be back and neither will his friends.” He was right. We were never bothered by the youngsters during our entire stay there.

I couldn’t believe it, but by the time our baby arrived in May, we had our license. I had not let any of the hospitals know yet that we were opened, because I wanted to have managers in place before the patients started coming. Baby decided it was time to join us when I went to a doctor’s appointment one evening. Thankfully, Jerry had gone with me to that one, because I had to go directly from the doctor’s office to the hospital. My water broke. The nurses hooked up all of the monitors, and Jerry sat by my bedside all night listening to our baby’s heartbeat. She came the next day. He was so happy he had a baby girl. He was holding his hands over her eyes and telling the nurses the bright lights were bothering her. They laughed and told him to go buy her some sunglasses. She weighed in at almost 10 lbs, and the nurses tagged her with the name Charlie. We named her Dana Gabrielle for my father, whose middle name was Gabriel. We named her Dana, but everybody called her Baby throughout her toddler and early years. My X brought my son and daughter up to the hospital to see her. They peered through the nursery window, and the nurse said, “Oh, you are here to see Charlie.” Jodi wasn’t pleased that she had called her baby sister by a boy’s name.

Jerry picked up an infant seat before he picked us up at the hospital the following day. Within 2 weeks, Dana was in a long term locked facility in Alpine, California in that infant seat swinging under my arm as I walked in to interview a patient. I doubt if I could do that today, but then I walked into a big room filled with many patients. They were thrilled to see the baby and gathered around. Jerry, Baby and I were living in the motorhome in Southeast San Diego. My neighbor who lived in a tiny little house across the alley came over every day to visit and play with the baby. She was a black lady and had a daughter who was about 10 years old. I soon found a couple to manage the newly licensed home. I spent a couple of weeks training them, and Jerry and I moved our motorhome out to a property inLakeside where one of his construction buddies was finishing up a new home. In fact, he had built two homes at the end of a street on two separate lots. He offered to sell them to us. The financing was sweet, because we could take over his construction loan which he had already converted to a 15 year loan. We now had two programs operating and owned two newly constructed but empty homes. We were still living in a motorhome. We decided to move in to one of the homes when finished and license the other one. Our business partner decided to lease the smaller home next door to the one in Southeast San Diego to the business, and I converted it to another level of service. It would serve as an independent living center, so consumers who were ready could graduate into a more independent style of living.

Now that I had managers in the San Diego and Poway programs, Jerry suggested we take a break and go on vacation. We decided to take the motorhome, invited my mother to go along with us, and we also took my two kids. Our baby was only about 6 weeks old. What were we thinking? The air conditioner stopped working when we were half way through the desert and before we got to the Arizona border. I was placing wet wash cloths on our infant and on my mother in an effort to keep them from getting sick. By the time we got to Yuma, Arizona, the lights were out too. We obviously had an electrical problem. We had to drive on to Phoenix before we could find a shop that would know how to fix it. Jerry took it to a mechanic after tucking us away in a motel, and by the next afternoon, we were back on the road headed for Mission, Kansas. We would stop there to visit my brother and sister in law. They insisted we sleep inside the house. After a couple of days and an overnight with them, we left for Ellery, Illinois where we would visit my sister and brother in law on their farm. They, too, insisted we sleep inside their home. The kids loved the farm visit. Jerry was dealing with culture shock. He couldn’t believe the flat landscaping without any mountains or oceans in sight. Our next stop would be in Northern Illinois where we visited my uncle and aunts in the suburbs of Chicago. Jerry was surprised at the aggressiveness of the drivers on the tollways. I did most of the driving in that area. At one point when we needed to change lanes, and no apparent courteous drivers were around, Jerry threw a couple of bananas at a car until he let us in front of him. I made a mental note that we should never consider moving to the Chicago area. After Chicago, we visited my other sister and brother in law in Northern Illinois and then headed to Salt Lake City. Jerry had a couple of little sisters attending Brigham Young University. We came home through Las Vegas and by the time we arrived back in San Diego, I believe all of us vowed to never do that again. Our relationship actually survived.

Our new home was ready to move into in September, 1977. Jodi moved in with us. Marty wanted to stay with his dad. Jerry became Mr. Mom and the primary caregiver to the baby. He insisted on my getting a new car, which he felt was safer than my 1965 Mustang for Baby. He bought a 1978 Mercedes Diesel. We would go to Mexico to fill it up with diesel about once a month. Baby liked Fruit Loops, and Jerry would pick up cereal in Mexico too. Baby called them Footie Loopies. The car got amazing gas mileage. By 1978, we had 3 mental health centers operating plus the one independent living center for 2 people next to the main house in San Diego. We had managers at all locations along with support personnel and professionals. Our reputation for quality services was excellent.

We had begun to spend more time trying to find out where Jerry’s son was living. We hired a private detective, and he agreed to a $5,000 payment IF he found Michael, but no money if he did not succeed in locating Micheal. He found a grave up by Chico, California, which was the grave site of the X wife’s maternal grandmother. There were fresh flowers on the grave, so he believed they might be in that area. We found out that an uncle and aunt living in La Mesa were the ones picking up the mail for Michael’s mother and was forwarding it to her to a post office box in Los Angeles. However, the post office box was one that forwarded mail. In other words, it was not being picked up in Los Angeles. He was on the trail for well over a year, but never actually located him. One day near the end of 1978, our attorney called to see if we would like for him to have a felony charge filed against Jerry’s X wife for child stealing. Jerry did, so we arranged to meet with him. While we were in his office and Jerry and our attorney were discussing the seriousness of being pursued for a felony, I suggested to them they were thinking like men. Men fear felonies. I told them the thought of a felony is not that scary for women because we tend to believe we can talk out way out of it whereas men know they are going to jail. I told them in order to influence her to come out of hiding you would have to hit her where it would most affect her. We all then discussed the fact that we had evidence her uncle and aunt were helping to hide Jerry’s son from him by assisting her since they collected her mail and forwarded it to her. Our attorney picked up on that thought and ran with it. He filed a lawsuit against her, her parents, the aunt and uncle by name and several John Doe’s for interfering with Jerry’s right and Michael’s right to parent and to have a parent. It was mailed to the post office box where her uncle and aunt picked up her mail. The attorney called us two weeks later and said, “I don’t believe it! She popped up.” Mama had come out of hiding with Michael in tow. She had changed his name to Michael Morris. They were living in Paradise and had chosen that town because of the name. Coincidentally, they chose an attorney to represent the mother with the last name of Meanie. We found that quite funny, because the attorney who was a member of the firm which had represented me for many years and was assigned to represent Jerry’s child custody case had a last name of Love. Mr. Love was the firm’s family law attorney. The aunt and uncle had hired their own separate attorney to represent their interest. Suddenly, the family law court kicked into action. Everyone who would be involved with Michael had to be seen by a psychiatrist. The court appointed psychiatrist approved by the X wife diagnosed Jerry with an explosive personality disorder. He diagnosed Michael as being A typical. He actually said that I was normal, intelligent and my defense mechanism was isolation. I couldn’t argue with his findings about me. Isolation is one of my defense mechanisms. The psychiatrist who had seen the family prior to Michael being taken into hiding also testified, and he gave Jerry a very favorable report. He credited me for the positive changes in Jerry’s life, which made me feel good. The judge was very critical of the court appointed psychiatrist and said that what he presented to the court was ridiculous. The psychiatrist was taking the position that Michael should not be allowed to visit Jerry because of his being A typical, because it could be extremely harmful. The judge said if he went along with the doctor’s definition of A Typical, then he knew several people in the court room who would also be considered A typical as well as his own children. He said, “If Dr. XXXX was looking for a dinosaur bone and found a dog bone, he would say he discovered a dinosaur bone. Dr. XXXX is lost in theory.” I knew at that point when I heard the judge saying that Jerry would be seeing his son in the future. The judge also told his deputies to process Michael’s mother through booking. She was not pleased with that and let Jerry know later it violated her dignity. Jerry won just about everything he had requested, but when you have one parent who is focused on alienation of a parent from their child’s life, it is impossible to make it work in a healthy way for the child.

Another mental health career surprise was waiting just around the next corner. On its face, it seemed to be so positive. Yet, it almost devastated my career.

Life was good in 1978. Jerry and I had a darling baby girl, and he was Mr. Mom. He claimed he was not allowed to take care of his son, because Michael’s nanny or grandmother was always in the way. He wanted to fully enjoy being a dad. I had a decade of previous experience taking care of my first two children and sometimes foster children 24 hours a day 7 days per week having been a stay at home mom. His desire to be the primary caretaker of the baby worked for both of us. It allowed me to focus on my career including my education and the business.

Jerry’s sister and her partner decided to come through San Diego and spend some time following her discharge from the Army. Age wise, she was his next in line younger sister in a family of 7 siblings. She had been in the Army, since they were both very young. She served in the CID section, and decided to continue her interest in law enforcement by pursuing a Master’s degree in Criminal Justice. They stayed with us for a while before getting an apartment nearby. I loved getting to know her, and she adored Baby as much as we did. She lengthened Dana’s nickname Baby by calling her Baby Cakes. Jerry’s dad also visited a few times during the same time period. I hired Linda’s girlfriend as an executive assistant, and she was a huge help with our services, which were rapidly growing in locations. We had purchased the house next door to us at the same time we purchased our home, so with Poway, the two programs in the City of San Diego and the one next door in Lakeside, we had 4 locations going. While they were living in San Diego County, we had a lot of fun together seeing each other almost every day. We worked together, and we played together. They helped with the baby, and sometimes she would stay overnight with them. A neighbor down the street also had a day care, and she watched Dana some of the time. We shared many meals and once Jerry’s dad even cooked the evening meal. He made a Yankee’s pot roast. It was delicious and prior to his preparing it, I had never heard of such a pot roast. Charlie and I got along well.

My manager couple in Poway after many years of marriage had decided to get a divorce. She wanted to give me money to keep in a savings account for her, but I did not do that. She was not the first person and wouldn’t be the last who wanted me to keep their money safe. I refused in all situations and advised them to get a safe deposit box at the bank. It is not something I wanted to add to my responsibilities. In the process of separating, the managers' conduct with each other forced me to seek other house managers. I found out my brother was very unhappy on his job. My sister in law told me he was stressing every night and suffering with severe headaches, which she felt were partly caused by the stress of working in a job he hated. I offered for him and his wife to manage Poway, and they accepted. I encouraged my brother to seek a license on his home, since they would be living in Poway, and it would generate more income for him and his family. My brother was a natural at counseling. He had counseled many people through his religion. He was truly someone who could have worn the title gentle giant. He was 6’ 4” tall but always soft spoken and willing to problem solve by the use of discussions when faced with life’s obstacles. He was raising his own five children in the same manner by trying to use each situation in their lives in a way for them to learn from the experience. Patience was one of his virtues. He quickly established productive relationships with the clients living in the Poway center and was highly respected by all of them. My sister in law was a hard working lady who was willing to do whatever the job required. She also knew how to make delicious meals for her own family, so was not intimidated by adding 15 more people at the dinner table. She also was an excellent shopper for supplies including grocery products. They were making a great contribution to our services.

It was early 1979 when I was told by a county social worker that a 10 bed facility was going to be auctioned off in two weeks. The property was located a couple of blocks from my existing program in the City of San Diego. Since it was a foreclosure sale, a buyer would need cash in order to bid on it. I had recently met a man who would have the cash. He owned a 50 bed residential care building in a choice location in San Diego. At one time, it had been used as a hospital. The man had a beautiful mansion in La Jolla on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. He had tried to interest me in leasing his building and operating it as a rehabilitation center for private pay patients. He also owned a chain of motels. His building did not blend with my goals of providing rehabilitation services in non institutional environments, so I had not accepted his offer. However, I did walk through his building with him and gave him some suggestions for improvements. His son was a retired medical doctor in his 50’s, and he had a grandson who was the son of a daughter and the grandson was clearly the prodigy of the family. He was a college student, and they had high hopes for the grandson to manage their motel chain after graduation from college. I called him and told him there was a facility suitable for a rehabilitation center to be auctioned off and let him know if he wanted to buy it, I would lease it from him. He attended the auction, bought it and paid cash for it. Then he called to arrange for a meeting with me to discuss the lease. I really liked this man. He and his wife were in the their 80’s. They were pleasant and seemingly happy people who invited me and my husband to come to their home for the meeting. Their appearances were a bit unusual, and he drove a very old Cadillac around town. When we went to their home, I noticed the lampshades still had price tags hanging on them, and they appeared to be as old as the people. One would have to say they were eccentric people. He seemed fascinated with my ambition and goals, so he freely offered me advice about real estate and other business matters. One of the things he told me was to always seek advice from people who had proven to be successful and to disregard others especially those who would tell me it couldn’t be done. I decided to throw myself at his mercy and told him what I really wanted to do was to get the property for my brother, because I wanted him to be secure and not ever be forced to work in the printing industry again. For some reason and in spite of the fact that he preferred ownership, he told me that he would sell the property to me for my brother. The property was in escrow, of course, while the county insured a secure title. He said he put $30,000 in cash into the escrow, and I could buy it for $60,000. The property appraised at $185,000, so I agreed to let my brother buy it for $120,000 if he could get financing. If he could not, I would lease it to him. Everyone would make money, and my brother stood to make the most, because the property would rise in value even above the $65,000 my brother would gain in equity on the day he bought it. The old man took possession of the property and opened an escrow with me. I then needed $60,000, which I would have when my brother got his financing on the $120,000 purchase. That would give me enough money to pay the old man, make a profit and my brother would own the home.That is what we did, and my brother got the home licensed. His licensing worker was the same as mine and the one who had licensed his other home, so the process went smoothly.

In the meantime, he county contract officer from the local Department of Health Services’ Mental Health division called me on the phone and said she would like to meet with me to discuss something. I arranged for Jerry and I to go to her office, at which time I was told the the Director of Mental Health was interested in contracting for some services. He was looking for a place to transfer patients following discharge from the mental hospital. There was a little hook to the offer and that was the patients would be required to attend the inpatient day treatment program for approximately 4 hours per day. The contract officer told me to prepare a projected annual budget and also include a start up cost section within my projections. Since my program was already licensed, I really didn’t need much in the way of start up funds. Near the end of our meeting, she asked, “You do have a non profit entity, don’t you?” The look on Jerry’s face was priceless. He was basking in the glory of “I told you so,” because he had nagged me into preparing a non profit corporation only a few months before the meeting. I was told the county was responding due to reading the report of my services in Poway, which I had sent to their department and the California legislative bodies. I would be operating the first 24 hour government funded residential treatment center for diagnosed mentally ill adults in the County of San Diego. It was a very exciting step in the right direction of creating government funded 24 hour services in local communities. I prepared a budget, and she said “that’s not enough,” and told me to keep working on it. I added more costs, and once again, she said, “that’s not enough, so do it once more.” I did, and she submitted it to the Director of Mental Health to be included in the county budget for the forthcoming mental health year. The county shared the same fiscal year as the newly formed non profit corporation beginning July 1 and ending June 30 of the following year. The county would submit it as a part of their request for state funding and ultimately, the services would be supported by what was legally identified as Short Doyle funds.

I had no way of knowing that my world would be turned upside down by one woman when my licensing worker retired, and I was assigned a new analyst for my services. You don’t have to be a genius to recognize harassment from a government representative in an authoritative position, so I knew something was askew. It would be several months before I would find out that my new licensing analyst said I stole Mrs. “Smith’s” (name changed) home and Mrs. Smith was a friend of hers. Of course, I didn’t know Mrs. Smith and didn’t even know who owned the home before her son called me a couple of days before the sale saying that he wanted to buy the house at the auction. I told him that was out of my control, because I wasn’t personally buying the house because I didn’t have the cash, so a friend of mine was buying it. It was totally out of my control. It took me a lot of years before I fully realized that the son may have been trying to “steal” the house from the mortgage company by paying less for it than what his mother owed, and the mortgage company would have had to accept the offer. I really don’t know what he was doing or why he had not rescued it before it went into foreclosure since it was his mother’s home, but I knew what I was doing, and I certainly wasn’t stealing a house. It was my intention to lease it, and I was actually shocked when the old man decided to sell it to me. I didn’t know anything about my new licensing worker being good friends with the previous owner of the house. I had just pulled off a Forrest Gump and walked into a hornet’s nest. Before the year was over, I would be sued by the previous owner’s son, and my new contract with the county would be stalled and in jeopardy due to the actions of my licensing worker behind closed doors. My new old man friend congratulated me on the lawsuit and said, “You know you are successful when you find yourself a defendant in a lawsuit.” Somehow I didn’t share that feeling, but he certainly didn’t seem worried about it in spite of his knowing he was a co-defendant. It takes more than one person to form a conspiracy, and he was the other person involved in the purchase.

The county contract officer called and said there had been a snag, which needed resolution before going forward with the mental health contract we had negotiated with the County of San Diego Mental Health Department. I was sure it was related to my new licensing worker, who I felt was harassing me. I went to a member of the County Board of Supervisors and told him of some of the issues happening in the community as a result of how the county licensing department was enforcing regulations. He asked me to return with a couple of people who would support my position. I asked the president of an organization which was known to have political influence in the state of California known as the California Association of Residential Care Homes to go with me to the next meeting. The president was a man who had a couple of large facilities in the city of San Diego within the district of the supervisor. I also invited the older man who had purchased the home out of foreclosure, which I have discussed earlier. I knew he was political and often made large donations to political campaigns. In response to the supervisor’s invitation to return with other people supporting my position, I called and set up a meeting and went back to his office with these two men by my side. It worked, and the county supervisor decided to set up a task force to look into mental health issues in San Diego County. I worked with his staff to identify appropriate people to invite to serve on the Mental Health Task Force and on the day of our first meeting, I was shocked to see on the membership list my name at the top with Chairman following my name. Yes, It did read Chairman and not Chairperson. No-one cared about that in 1979 …especially me. The supervisor never informed me in advance … just …there it was for all to see. It was sort of comparable to the time Jerry grabbed me by the suspenders and shoved me into the face of a California Assemblyman. It happens when you find yourself sort of on the spot to perform. It is always good to be able to “think on your feet” when you find yourself in the business world.

The supervisor conducted that meeting, and we all agreed to meet every Thursday morning at 8 AM each week to carry out our assignment. Thereafter, we met every Thursday morning at 8 AM for five consecutive years until our county supervisor became a United States Congressman. It was during that experience I learned so much about the world of politics including the fact that it is impossible to avoid political enemies who want to see you fail. I also discovered some of the pitfalls in government. At the same time, it helped me to understand the reasons people from differing viewpoints had developed their perceptions of the situations, which were not working so well for the mentally ill clients. In other words, knowing why people felt the way they did gave me an understanding I didn’t have before chairing the task force, and it was exciting to find that we could address the many concerns without sacrificing quality of care. The approach of bringing people with opposing positions together also served us well in our efforts to problem solve. It was easy to direct the focus on to what we could agree upon. Too often when politicians who serve as legislators support new laws and regulations, they are responding to only one group’s viewpoint and are handicapped by not being able to accurately predict the outcome. It is then that government tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and they are notorious for doing just that. They listen to the big donors and although they may sincerely believe them, it is most often the day to day workers who hold a world of knowledge about why a system is failing.

I decided the best way to approach the situation was to invite a representative from the areas needing improvement or at least were perceived as being problem centers within the county mental health system. In the 1970’s, the mentally ill were slowly transitioning into local communities before a mental health system was in place to fully serve them. This meant that some were living on the streets. Others were living in board and care homes. The board and care industry wasn’t really officially a part of the county’s system, although the county employees assigned to work with mental health clients were referring to them. Thankfully, they existed, because it meant mentally ill people who were no longer being housed in institutions could live in a place that offered food and shelter, and they could afford to pay for that either their supplemental security income aka SSI or if they were not receiving SSI, the county’s welfare department would contribute to their care when they were living in a board and care facility. The welfare system did not pay as much per month as the SSI (federal social security with the supplement from the State of California), so some providers would not accept the county’s welfare patients. The county operated day treatment facilities in some of the localities, and patients would go to those centers during the day for therapy and activities while living in the board and care homes. It wasn’t easy for the providers of residential services to motivate the clients to go to the centers. They would often drop out even if they started and/or if they did attend, it was sporadically. The clients coming out of the state hospitals in the 70’s were heavily medicated with drugs like Prolixin, Haldol and Mellaril, which were counteractive to ambition. The clients preferred to sit at home, drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. It wasn’t uncommon to walk into a community care home and find yourself peering through smoke clouds in order to see the people sitting in the room. Psychiatrists would make arrangements with facility owners to see their clients at the board and care homes, which meant the providers did not have to drive clients back and forth to their doctors and the psychiatrists could see a large number of patients at one location. The sizes of facilities housing mentally patients were typically 6 to 50 beds with many 8, 10, 12, and 15 beds. The fire code laws were quite restrictive if serving more than 15 clients, so unless you were operating a 50 bed with sprinkler systems and automatic call systems inside the buildings, owners kept their board and care homes below 16 clients. 50 beds were the next regulatory cutoffs, so you never saw 53 or 60 bed facilities.

As Chairman of the Mental Health Task Force and due to my personal goals of making a positive difference in the lives of our most seriously ill people with mental health problems, I had been focused on 24 hour services. However, within a few meetings, I started receiving calls from people working within the mental health system in other areas. I soon found that day treatment centers had issues. Family members also had their agenda. Families of loved ones who also had legal issues resulting in relatives ending up in jail wanted to make sure the county supervisor knew about those situations. People working in law enforcement had concerns when they had to assist with an out of control mentally ill client, and there was conflict when trying to get the patient admitted into the county operated hospital. The board and care providers had issues with the county licensing department as it related to how they were inconsistently enforcing the regulations. A county day treatment employee called me and said that the county’s maintenance department was planting bushes and coming back a few weeks later to remove the bushes, and the bottom line of his call was that he said they were making work and this was being charged to the day treatment program, and the county was proposing to cut it from the following year’s budget due to the high cost of operation. Really, People, I soon felt like I was an investigator with a never ending 60 Minutes assignments, only I wasn’t being filmed. My phone rang constantly. Soon the private psychiatric hospitals and private skilled nursing facilities serving mentally ill clients wanted to call asking to present to the task force. We began adding members to the task force from the private sector hospitals. The psychiatric and psychological organizations asked to participate.

Somewhere along the way the county licensing worker mailed a letter to the county supervisor telling him that I had former prison inmates on the board of directors of the non profit entity I had founded. I received a phone call from an administrative assistant to the supervisor telling me I needed to come to their office and look at a correspondence they had received. Unfortunately for the person who sent it, when they had “doctored” up my letterhead to prove the names of my board members which I had proudly displayed, they accidentally left the date of a letter they had received from me. In those days, we didn’t have computers, so I kept a copy of all of my correspondence by using carbon paper. When I saw the date, I told the supervisor’s assistant that I would check my files and see who I had written to on that date. I checked and sure enough …I had written to the County of San Diego licensing department analyst. I called and let him know. He asked me to bring it down to their office and line it up with the letterhead. I did. It was obvious. She was nailed for releasing confidential information from their department. It wasn’t about me. It was about the two gentlemen who had a history unknown to me and even unknown to most of San Diego and a past for which they had served time. However, I asked them to resign. They did. The matter was resolved. My attorney asked me if I wanted to go after her for her retirement funds which were plentiful. I said, “No. She is an old woman. In spite of doing such a poor job, she did work the hours. I just don’t want to ever see her in one of my facilities again.” A few weeks later I saw him at a social gathering and he said, “The county licensing worker has been sent to where all of their incompetent employees go, and you will not see her again.” I never did. I remembered one encounter with her when she patted me on the shoulder and said, “Good luck, Mrs. Swineheart,” after I had told her she was “on,” because she had said to me if I would stay off of my typewriter, I would be ok with their department. She was not a nice person. Several weeks later I heard that she had fallen in her house and went through a sliding glass door receiving some serious injuries. I don’t know, but I recall one thing about what she said which was interesting to me. She told me that her son went to law school with my attorney and that my attorney had graduated number one in the class. I am not surprised. I was always confident in his representation. He is retired now and ill. He was a brilliant man who certainly made a positive difference in my life. When you decide to operate a business, you always need to have a good attorney and a good CPA. Those are two professionals you don’t want to try and find when you have a serious problem. They are key people to your success.

The Mental Health Task Force was quickly becoming a “force” in our county. I began to develop a pattern of inviting a speaker each week. I also prepared minutes from each meeting to be handed out at the next one. The meeting would be called to order promptly at 8 AM. The county supervisor who was sponsoring the task force attended the first meeting in its entirety. Thereafter he would sometimes attend, greet everyone, hear the minutes from the previous meeting and be on his way to handle other important county matters. Sometimes he was unable to attend, but he was always fully aware of what was happening with the committee. He assigned a member of his staff to work with me, who usually always attended. When I look back, I spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone during those years and also a tremendous number of hours on my typewriter. It was common for me to be up at 2 AM typing away. I lived and breathed mental health.

Thankfully, Jerry was a great Mr. Mom, and my x husband was equally so with the two children we shared from our previous marriage. As I think about it today, I am flooded with thoughts about all of that. First, I guess I should thank both of their x wives for setting the stage for a couple of men who had missed out on being able to participate in the care of their children from previous marriages. In Jerry’s case, his x literally would be charged with child stealing, and in my x husband’s case, his x had left him with a 3 year old and an infant. She returned in a couple of months and was awarded primary custody of them. It was a different time, place and attitude about child rearing in the 1960’s when that happened in the State of Illinois before I met him and before we moved to California. He and I had a peaceful marriage of ten years. I guess you could say it was good until it wasn’t, but it was never bad. We remained friends all of his life.

It was during those mental health task force and business development years that Jerry would tell the kids …”If you want your mother’s attention, just say mental health.” I kid you not that sometimes the older ones would do just that. It irritated me, but it worked. I regret the time I missed with my kids and never fully realized I was cheating them out of what was rightfully theirs when it was happening. I convinced myself my financial support then and in the future was important too. During most of my highly demanding business years, I was also attending the university. I spent the first 7 and 9 years as a stay at home mom with my first two kids. Although I wasn’t a stay at home Mom with mine and Jerry’s baby, I was working a lot from my home. I try to relieve my guilty conscience with those thoughts.

I remember one evening during a law class, a Superior Court Judge peered out the classroom window and asked, “Who would be dumb enough to put their name on their license plate?” I knew he was looking at my little 380 SL sports car. Jerry had the letters SWN HART placed on them when he bought the car for me. I was always Dr. Joyce Swineheart and never used my last name Moore until after I became semi retired. Nobody said anything in the classroom in response to the Judge’s question, and neither did I. He peered out that window a little longer and said, “Swineheart, don’t you know if I have to send my boys for you, it will help them find you?” I said, “You will not ever have a reason to send your boys for me.” He laughed, and went back to teaching the class. He is also the same professor who held up my paper one evening when returning our assignments to us and told us he had used my paper as an example to his class of 4 graduate law students while telling them it is the way they should be writing. I was shocked, because I was running late, had procrastinated on getting my homework completed and literally had sit down an hour before class time and began taking it from the top and typing it. I had expected a very poor grade on it. A male classmate leaned over and whispered “teacher’s pet” to me. Now THAT was funny. If I was any teacher’s pet in law school, I hope God helped the ones who weren’t pets. I believe if a person is succeeding in life and feeling fairly confident, they should attend a year or two of law school. They will learn to feel humility very quickly.

On the task force, we began to zero in on about a half dozen very important matters, where we believed we could make a positive difference. One of those was how to make sure mental health clients could receive treatment when being held in jail for a criminal act. That was a problem brought to our attention by a presenter from the family association. It was very difficult to reach the person within the law enforcement system who would be able to assure the family, for example, that a person was receiving necessary medications. Our leader (the county supervisor) had such a vast knowledge and understanding of how all of the systems worked within the county and especially those in the downtown area such as the jail unit. His district covered a major part of the city of San Diego, so he and his staff were a great help, One of these things we were able to accomplish was to develop a mental health unit within the jail. A family member could request the mental health unit when their mentally ill loved one was arrested, and normally, that person would be transferred to the floor housing it.

Another area of our work resulted in the county of San Diego developing a mobile mental health outpatient service, which would set up in various locations in the county making it much more convenient for patients in remote areas to access the system for outpatient treatment. One of the county’s social workers who was employed in the outpatient treatment center informed us of the need and purpose. She is a perfect example of why it is important to seek the advice of the people working at differing levels within a system if you want to improve it versus choosing people to advise you who donate the most to your campaign and/or are considered to be important people in the community.

The task force was also operating during a time when government leadership from both major political parties were interested in cost effectiveness. Today we don’t see that so much. Unfortunately, it seems as if many of the decisions made by our leaderships in the local, state and federal systems today are more focused on winning votes in their next election than in budgets. It was definitely different then, and I tipped all of the presenters’ hands by telling them when you appear before the task force, outline what needs to be done and why, but include cost effectiveness within your recommendation. I believe there is a very strong connection between a lack of cost control and inefficiency. It is certainly true in the business private sector. If you lose control of the spending in a business, your quality of service will suffer. That is a glaring issue within the governments’ systems. It also can happen with charitable corporations. Within five years after forming the non profit corporation which Jerry insisted I form, its income had increased from approximately one hundred thousand per year to approximately six million per year. That happened without any formal advertising and without even trying. In other words, we were not trying to grow the business. It was growing itself. We were just trying to survive the demands. I recall one conversation when I was talking with a county social worker about cost effectiveness, and he said, “I know you are right, but if you do that, it would eliminate my job.” I was puzzled as to why he would look at something which would be so good for the people we were dedicated to serving, and be more concerned about his job. I understand worrying over having sufficient income, but what I couldn’t understand is why he didn’t think he would fit into the new way of doing things. He certainly had the education, skills and had been employed by the county a lot of years. Even if he did not have the protection of the government employee union, he could have been a vital member of a new design. Actually, we did make that change and the day treatment he was working in was eliminated. He ultimately was very successful in the area to which he was assigned when his job changed.

After about 36 months of chairing the mental health task force, it seemed so many problems within the mental health community were solved simply by bringing matters before our committee. Sometimes a couple of phone calls could make a difference in how something was being handled. I was complimented many times on my copious minutes of the weekly meetings. I was able to fully participate in the meetings while making notes on my legal pad, which I would transcribe before the following meeting. Perhaps my secretarial experience prepared me for that assignment. I handed copies out at each meeting to all members and visitors in the room. Our routine was introducing ourselves each week, handing out an agenda for the meeting at hand, discussing any matters from the previous minutes or meeting that may have come up, and introducing the presenter of the day. It was well known by the community at large. Our meetings usually lasted about an hour and occasionally we would add another 15 minutes depending on how much time the speaker needed. My home phone number was quickly becoming a public number. It wasn’t uncommon for me to receive phone calls from county employees who asked me not to tell others where I received the information but letting me know of something that needed to be looked into. If we needed information that wasn’t forthcoming, the county supervisor would send a request over to either the Director of the Health Service Department or the Mental Health Director. Of course, he always got a timely response. I laughed one morning when he handed some papers to me and said, “Here. Read this. They like to respond with all of the bureaucratic garble they can muster thinking the more words they use the more apt they are to fool us.” There was a lot of truth in that statement. Government reports and proposed legislation are usually overloaded with dozens of unnecessary and often repetitive information.

Unbeknownst to me, we had picked up another enemy during those first few years of the Mental Health Task Force. A key member of the official Mental Health Advisory Board complained that our task force was bypassing them. Of course, she blamed me for that. They met once monthly, which they had been doing for many years. It appeared that our success in making a difference bothered them or at least it was troubling to her. The supervisor’s solution to that was to send them copies of the minutes. I found that humorous. What was I supposed to do? They certainly had the opportunity to make recommendations for changing within the system.

After a couple of years and although we were continuing the the task force, the county supervisor decided to bring the issues we had discovered before the entire county board of supervisors at one of the public meetings. This would also allow the Mental Health Advisory Board to catch up on what we had been doing and the changes we were proposing to the system. It was time to bring in speakers to address the board. I had an amazing positive response from the people who had been participating and helping with the Task Force. Residential care providers had a half dozen speakers. The Chief of Psychiatry from one of the local general hospitals with a mental health unit spoke that day. Representatives from various associations such as the American Psychiatric Association and the Psychological Association appeared. A Hospital Administrator from a private psychiatric hospital addressed the board. Family members spoke and one actually sang her presentation. She is a beautiful lady with a wonderful singing talent. Her son has a diagnosis of schizophrenia. We all loved her presentation that day. She is also a nurse. A few years later she would come to work for me in one of my veteran’s mental health programs. She stayed with our company until she retired. We even had a representative from law enforcement speak that day. I tried very hard to make sure every area of the system was represented by a speaker. It was a big day for mental health in our county and covered by the media. I was so proud of my brother. It was the first time I had heard him speak publicly, although I knew he was a leader and speaker where he worshipped. His topic was about the problems with the county licensing system. One thing he said that day was related to when he applied for a license of a facility and was accused by the analyst assigned to him that he was serving as a front for his sister. He said that he told the licensing representative that he wasn’t and that he didn’t think I needed a front. His willingness to speak and his compliment meant so much to me. I learned afterwards that the Director of Mental Health referred to the day as the Cecil D. DeSwineheart presentation. I laughed when I heard that and loved it. I had not planned it that way. I just wanted to make sure that everyone who had brought issues before our task force had the opportunity and invite to present, and I wanted to make sure that we didn’t have people being redundant so I assigned topics for the purpose of holding the county supervisors’ interest and making sure we didn’t overlook any area. We had a lot of people supporting our purpose that day who did not speak. One of our speakers just stood up and said, “I will be brief. He said a couple of sentences, and then asked for the people in the room who agreed with him to stand up.” That gesture received applause.

I don’t know how much of what happened in our county was a result of our work, because we never know what goes on behind closed doors. However, I do know the county licensing department which had handled the licensing of residential care facilities was discontinued, and the State of California, Community Care Licensing Division, took over that responsibility the very next budget year. You can imagine how pleased I was with that. I also was awarded the county contract after it was discovered that the county licensing worker had sent the letter to the county supervisor in an anonymous way. Think about that. She was releasing private confidential personal information about two men in the county who were both successful in their respective careers, but she sent it without acknowledging that she was doing so. She lost her position, and ultimately the department was eliminated after so many people told of issues they had with that unit. Losing her position meant that she retired. I had not mentioned it here previously, but she tried to have me arrested. A young lady living in the independent living facility next to our licensed center committed suicide. It was tragic. She had made several attempts in her past, and she appeared to be very stable when it happened. Ironically, her brother was in another program of mine at another location. Her family was extremely supportive of us and my personnel who had provided her service. They were so kind at a time when in life they most needed kindness themselves. That same licensing worker decided that it was my fault, because she was residing in the independent center overseen by us. She turned the matter over to the District Attorney for investigation. I received a letter from the DA’s office asking for me to come in for an interview. I contacted my legal firm, and the attorney who handled criminal law met with me. He later became a judge. Anyway, I remember his words so well. He told me, of course, to ignore the request to come in and chat with the DA, and he called the DA. He said he asked him if he seriously was going to start an investigation on someone for “providing more services than what is required by law.” This is a wonderful example of the different way that an attorney and a social worker interpret words. The licensing worker was asking to have me charged with a crime because she believed that I was providing services in an unlicensed facility, which should have been licensed. The attorney looked at it that I was providing more services than “what is required by law” in an independent living center. I still find that quite interesting. It would have been foolish to think I was avoiding being licensed if it should have been licensed since I had licensed programs in several locations by that time. I can say that now, but it was a painfully emotionally challenging time for me. I cried a bucket of tears at night and stayed awake wondering what would happen to my kids if I had to go to jail. Sometimes I look back at how mean and hateful that woman was to me, and I think I was awfully foolish when I told my attorney I didn’t want to sue her. I certainly had a great case and wonderful representation, but I followed what I believe God would have me do at the time. I also know that same God knows what I am thinking when now sometimes it comes to mind and I think, “I should have done it.” I guess that battle was preparing me for more ahead with people in authority who develop personality conflicts with us for no apparent reason. I still don’t know why that woman thought I stole Mrs. Smith’s house when it was already up for an auction sale when I heard about it.

The 1980’s welcomed us with open arms. We were contracted with the County of San Diego to provide 24 hour residential treatment services at our Southeast San Diego location. The contract required our clients to attend the inpatient day treatment program located within the County Mental Health hospital, which has always been called CMH by patients and professionals. No matter where you lived in San Diego County everyone knew what it meant if someone was being sent to CMH. It was most common for law enforcement to deliver people to CMH for evaluation, and they were usually admitted for a 72 hour hold. In California the regulation which addresses involuntary commitments to a mental hospital is Section 5150. In a somewhat typical California manner of speaking, people seldom used the words involuntary commitment and instead, would simply say 5150. The police also use 5150 to inform colleagues of what is happening. People who are committed involuntarily have to be discharged at the end of the 72 hours or appear before a judge who can order an additional 14 day hold. If the patient needs to be held longer than the 14 days, there will be another hearing at which time the patient will be placed on conservatorship and the court designates whether the conservator will be a public conservator or a private conservator. The majority of the patients who were processed for conservatorship in the 1970’s and 80’s ended up with a public conservator. Most of the patients were former state hospital patients who had been released when California law required the transition of state hospital patients to their local communities.

You may often hear that Reagan let all of the patients out of the state hospitals, but contrary to popular belief, it didn’t happen by executive order. The California legislative bodies in response to their constituency passed laws, which they felt were positive for the families and patients. It was consider more humane to allow people to return to their respective communities and be served locally, so they could see their families and have more freedom of movement. Reagan was the governor, and he signed the legislation when it appeared on his desk for signature since the majority of the legislatures had recommended and supported it.

California’s Developmentally Disabled clients significantly benefited from that legislation. They were patients lingering in state hospitals for many years who at that time were referred to as a mentally retarded population. The advocacy network comprised of families, professionals from several disciplines, community care providers, regional centers and many associates in the community worked together in support of developing local services. The emphasis was placed on food and shelter type services, because logically, it is obvious if moving people out of state hospitals which is a food and shelter service, they would need food and shelter in their local communities. The state representatives all worked together to transfer funds from the budgets into the development of local services. By working together for the same purpose, a very impressive broad array of local services were established for that population. The regional centers assigned personnel to go to the state hospitals and identify those clients who could safely be transferred to local communities. They followed that up with inviting providers of 24 hour group homes and family care homes to accompany individual regional center social workers to the state hospitals, so they could interview clients and select people who they felt would most benefit from being admitted to their 24 hour programs. Each budget year, the State Department of Developmental Services and the regional centers in the various catchment areas scattered across the State of California would work with the advocacy network and campaign the legislative bodies and the governor for more funding for the people in need of services in their local communities. Differing levels of service were developed within individual 24 hour service programs. Based on the level of service, staffing ratios vary. The homes are identified as Level I, Level II, Level III, Level IV, and staffing ratios vary from Basic Care 1 staff per each 6 clients, 1 staff per 3 clients and in some facilities, it works into 1:1 staffing levels. After Level IV, the identification of the level of service becomes Level IV-C, Level IV-D, and and as the scale moves upward, the service becomes more intense requiring more staffing.

On the other hand, the people who had resided in the state hospitals for many years and were diagnosed as having a mental disorder were simply discharged and returned to their local communities. The county governments had developed a few day treatment programs and outpatient programs. The State Department of Social Services Licensing Division began licensing community care homes for mentally ill adults, but the only funding available for them came through a combination of the federal and state government through the federal social security department. Those funds were called SSI dollars, which stood for Supplemental Security Income. The federal government established a small monthly amount of social security funds, and individual states determined how much they would add as a supplement. Of course, California had one of the highest supplements. However, it was never sufficient to pay for anything more than room and board and supervision of their medications and overall well being. Services were limited due to lack of funding. When compared to what was available for the developmentally disabled population, the mentally ill clients were receiving a pittance both in program availability and in the types of services. A lot of mentally ill clients were denied benefits from the social security departments. Those clients could only receive what was noted as general relief funds from the county. That amount was even smaller than SSI funds, so many of the care homes would not choose to serve clients on the welfare’s General Relief Fund monies. This meant that mentally ill adults would roam the streets or if lucky find a hotel room for at least a portion of a month. The advocacy network for the mentally ill population could never seem to unite for a common approach that would most benefit the clients. The various disciplines, associations, family members and care providers had differing priorities. Too often they fought amongst themselves over funding and instead of seeking more dollars from the state, they were complaining about the lack of quality services within facilities and programs. The mentally ill clients suffered greatly much like children of divorcing parents do when parents can’t agree and instead of uniting in the best interest of their children, they fight amongst themselves. Everybody seems to lose in those situations except the attorneys. It was and sadly still is the same way for people who suffer with serious mental health problems. While people disagree over what is best instead of focusing on obvious needs, the mentally ill patients bear the blunt of those foolish actions. The State Department of Development Services and the network of Regional Centers throughout the state built a system by first strengthening and supporting the foundation. The foundation is food and shelter and sufficient daily supervision to keep people in need of out of home placement safe. That has to be in place and well funded, because just as you can’t build a house on a weak foundation, you can’t successfully build a mental health care system if you don’t have sufficient and well funded food and shelter services in place. Once you have that, you can then add a variety of creative and innovative opportunities for patients, so they can reach their individual fullest potential. For some, stopping multiple hospitalizations per year is significant improvement whereas others will go forward with their education and work experience. Unfortunately, accessing the system remains a huge problem today. When families have a loved one who they recognize needs professional help and it isn’t available to them, it all too often leads to tragic circumstances, which we see reported on our evening news.

Our agency was rapidly expanding and developing more services. It was as if we had a marketing director focused on an assignment to help us grow our business. We didn’t. People kept reaching out to us requesting more services. I received a call from a representative of the Veteran’s Administration via their La Jolla Veteran’s Hospital. They asked if we would be interested in developing a 24 hour residential treatment center as a part of a 3 year pilot project to be reported to Congress. They were interested in finding out how cost effectively veterans with serious mental health problems could be served in a 24 hour residential treatment setting.ala They wanted their program to be set up in the 15 bed center in Poway. That meant I needed another location for a mental health program. Coincidentally, I received a call from another provider of mental health services, who said, “Congratulations on your new contract with the county.” I asked, “Really? I never competed for another contract with the county.” He said, “Oops” and hung up the phone. Within 48 hours, I received a call from the county contract officer giving me the news. I still don’t quite know what happened there, but for sure, I needed another location. We had checked out a property in Ramona a year or two before as a potential location for mental health program. Within the month of being awarded another contract from the county and setting up the veteran’s program in Poway, I received a call from the family who owned the property we had looked at in Ramona. He said, “My wife has finally agreed to sell the property, and she says you are the only person she will consider buying it.” They had birthed and raised several children in that home, and she was emotionally attached to their homestead. Her husband said that she felt if we bought it, it would assure that more happy lives would be living there. Talk about fate or angels. It was perfect. 5 acres very close to the heart of a small country town. That small town has grown into a much larger town today, but just like Poway was when we developed our first program there, they both at one time and especially when we had arrived were very small communities. Within a few short weeks, I would have a 10 bed licensed 24 hour treatment center in Ramona serving diagnosed mentally ill clients in a concept identified as Transitional Living. The two programs operating under county contracts were invoiced at the end of each month for a pre-established monthly amount regardless of the number of people being served. In other words, it was a cost contract, which required us to project our annual cost. The county would conduct annual audits. The county would pay each month on the 10th following the month of service. The Veteran’s services were invoiced at the end of each month also, and it was normally paid with 60 days following the month of service. Both programs were usually filled to capacity. By this time, I had my sister in law’s girlfriend working as my assistant. Having just been discharged from the military, she was a wonderful representative in the veteran’s services. She also was very disciplined, loyal, loaded with common sense and a high achiever in life. She hailed from Michigan. I loved working in direct care, but the success of the company I established was leading me into management, which demanded more and more of my time.

I have heard some people say they would like to have a business, so they could be their own boss. I would say to anyone who really believes that and has a 40 hour per week job, keep your job if you really don’t want a boss. Perhaps a business doesn’t really boss you. Instead, it owns you. Willie Nelson recorded a song, “You Were Always On My Mind.” I could honestly dedicate that song to the businesses I have owned especially during the development years. They were always on my mind. You quickly learn to appreciate the years without major complications, but even during those times, you are acutely aware of the fact you could soon be back under fire. Once we got past the challenges of conditional use permits on properties and a county licensing worker with a personal vendetta, we had to handle the lawsuit filed by the son of the woman who lost her house to foreclosure. That lawsuit never got past the deposition stage, but it cost us money that we had not penciled into our projected budget. How could we foresee that we would be sued for recommending that a friend buy a house out of foreclosure when it was at the for sale by auction stage? I have to admit I found humor during one of the depositions, because my attorney had advised me to not use the word “double escrow” during my testimony. I was determined to follow his advice. The opposing attorney kept asking me to explain how I got the money to buy the house from my friend and colleague. I talked around it in a quite creative fashion, or so I thought. He kept hammering away at that part of the issue, because he was wanting to prove I had the money all along but sent my friend down to the auction, so he would purchase it for me. I guess he actually believed that. It wasn’t true. I had full intention of leasing the home from him before I decided to let my brother have that opportunity. All three of us made money off of the deal we created after the older man had purchased the home, but the three of us never even met before he bought it nor had we discussed any kind of deal amongst us. Anyway, as the lawyer kept hanging up on how I got the money, my attorney finally asked for a break. We stepped outside the room, and he asked, “Why are you not explaining you ran a double escrow?” I said, “You told me not to use those words.” He said, “Now you can use them.” We went back inside. I did what he directed, and soon the deposition was over and the son’s hopes for proving a conspiracy went away too. As a business owner, you sigh with relief when a problem is solved, and yet, you know to be prepared when the next challenge arrives. Operating a business in a highly political and heavily regulated environment could be compared to walking through a mine field. You might laugh and ask, “but how could that be true. You are not going to lose your life if you make a wrong move.” When your children ARE your life and you are threatened with prosecution because a woman committed suicide who had made many prior attempts, it certainly isn’t a threat of death, but is a huge threat to your life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Thankfully, we were able to finally march forward leaving behind the challenges which were all created by one angry bureaucrat in an authoritative position during the late 1970’s. She “retired.” I never saw her again. I did hear that she had later fallen through a sliding glass door at her home and received extensive injuries.

There are a couple of disciplines which perhaps will always remain below the line of being able to gain the complete respect of others regardless of your education level and experience. One is operating a business. It doesn’t matter if you have a formal education in business administration nor years of experience. Everyone or anyway, a lot of people believe anyone can operate a business. After all, you are just selling a product or providing a service and that is all there is to it. Right? The other misunderstood fields of study are psychology and psychiatry. A lot of people consider themselves to be therapists. I always think of a wonderful colleague and friend of mine when this topic arises. I sat in a hospital with several interns gathered around and heard his response on a day he had just heard enough about the expertise of his patient’s family who had talked with friends and read about their son’s diagnosis on the internet. Remember the song “You Heard It Through the Grapevine?” Now it is “I Read It On The Internet.” The psychiatrist is world renowned and has had patients with famous names recognizable worldwide. Many of those patients are outstanding sportsmen. It was really insulting to his most impressive background to have someone make a statement in the manner they did. I wish I could have recorded what he said that day in the midst of his frustration, but I will paraphrase it to say he stated he wished he had studied anything but psychiatry. He mentioned the many hours of schooling followed by his internships, and his continuing educational demands and expressed a desire to have become a plumber or mechanic or developed any skill, which might be recognized by his clientele.

I don’t think a lot of people actually hang out their shingle and begin formally counseling people without a reasonable education and/or a lot of training in a given field, but people do start businesses everyday because of the naive belief it is easy to operate a business. This is straight from the internet …”In 2019, the failure rate of startups was around 90%. Research concludes 21.5% of startups fail in the first year, 30% in the second year, 50% in the fifth year, and 70% in their 10th year.” Unfortunately, I think this problem of operating on assumptions significantly contributes to the results of poor leadership we are experiencing in our nation today. Throughout the years we have had teachers teaching teachers, and we have ended up with watered down teachers. I know we all have seen how the message changes when told from one person to another and by the time you get to the last person, it really may not be recognizable. That is what I am talking about. People in leadership positions who have little or no life experience on the subject at hand are just relying on what they have been told by someone who also may not have any experience. When the old man said to me, “take your advice from people who have proven to be successful and ignore the advice of others,” he obviously knew what he was talking about ….based on his own experiences in life. He had been a long time in business.

I have to admit when the licensing worker sent an anonymous letter telling a local elected official that I had 2 men on the board of directors of the non profit entity I had created who were former felons, I was shocked. I didn’t know that. How could I have known that? I knew both of them as men publicly respected by the professional communities in San Diego. She knew that because of the unique position in which she served. She was working in a department, which required an extensive background check on anyone pursuing a license to operate a daycare or residential care facility. Obviously, she decided to use confidential information which came across her desk for personal gain. What would she gain? She would gain the satisfaction of believing she had righted what she decided I had done wrong to her friend who didn’t make her house payments. I immediately asked the two men to resign from my board, which they willingly did. They could have successfully sued the County of San Diego for their employee’s behavior, but they didn’t. Who would want the publicity that lawsuit would have created? It is interesting how one little mistake can turn vengeance around. When she copied the letterhead of the non profit corporation showing the board members and sent it to a local official, she never noticed that the date on the letterhead would lead to the letter written to her on that date. If that had not happened, she would never have been caught for using her county position in such a wrongful way. If there is a lesson to be learned from the lives we lead, it is that doing what is right and good will eventually protect us from harm and doing wrong to others will ricochet.

If you shouldn’t start a business so you can be your own boss, why would you ever start one especially when so many fail? I believe you should always consider wrapping a business around a passion. If you enjoy something so much, you are good at it and you can enjoy giving it the necessary time to make it successful, you should consider developing a business for your product or service. When you so enjoy creating and developing a passion, you really don’t see it as work, it may be time to become a business owner. If you can keep that passion on track by following laws and regulatory requirements which govern your business and you have sufficient capital to get it off the ground and financially support it until it starts supporting itself, then do it. If it is hard to separate in your mind business from pleasure when you are at work, go for it. However, it is very important that you plan ahead. I call it running the numbers. You have to realistically project your income and expenses. When you have finished preparing a projected budget, you have to put a lot of thought into what you might have overlooked.

For example, one surprise to me was caused by two simple words “experience modification.” I projected the cost of workmen’s compensation insurance, but I couldn’t have known that the State of California would soon design a workmen’s compensation system, which encouraged some clinics to assist employees with staying off from work for a lot longer than necessary, because both the employees and the clinics’ owners were making a lot of money due to the way the system was designed. Insurance carriers were not highly motivated to protect employers from fraudulent claims, because they had the privilege of just tacking on a high experience modification percentage. This means that if your policy costs X amount of dollars but they had to expend monies for any of your employees, you could find your company’s rate was 150% of what you thought it would be when you projected your budget. Reader’s Digest published an article entitled “California’s Workers Comp System, A License to Steal.” That’s about it. The insurance companies who paid the money to the clinics and benefits to the employees were not motivated to root out the fraud, because they just added an experience modification rate to the cost of your insurance policy. There were no apparent limits on the experience modification rate. One year, our insurance for workers comp jumped from about $50,000 per year to over $200,000.00. Your policy cost based on your rate for the type of business you are operating is based on your gross wages paid to employees.

We began using video to investigate our own claims. For example, one female employee who was not working due to an “injury,” was on video tape carrying large sheets of drywall into her home. She didn’t have any assignments in the work place that would compare to that type of lifting. She was a direct care staff member who would cook dinner, supervise clients and counsel them. She didn’t even work in an environment that would require her intervention with angry clients. The insurance company was paying her more than she was earning when working if you took into consideration that she wasn’t taxed on her compensation and had several other benefits. Why should she return to work? The “injured” employees were always waiting for a payout at the end of their treatments, but the claims could stay open for years. We assigned one of our executive employees to stay in constant contact with the carrier questioning why claims were open, which should have been closed. One of the biggest contributors to this problem was when an employee would develop and addiction to pain pills. We ended up suing one of our workers comp carriers. I was surprised when my attorney and I went to Sacramento for a hearing before the Workers Comp Insurance Rating Board serving as the decision makers on our appeal. Why was I surprised? The
“hearing officers” were all holders of key positions in the insurance companies. There was only one person out of a dozen who wasn’t a high level owner or director in an insurance company. He was an employee of the Workers Comp Rating Bureau. We were prepared to go forward through the federal courts and appeals, but we won our case. They were trying to put us into a higher category meaning our rate would be based on a higher percentage of our gross payroll. That was another common problem businesses were facing during that time period. There were several little tricks to the trade combined with laws that appeared to be designed to protect everyone except the employers. Many businesses had to file bankruptcy over high workers compensation costs. We were one of the fortunate ones who survived during that challenging time period.

It is also important to recognize the difference between profit and loss and capital. A business can be making a profit and fail due to a lack of operating capital. For our type of state licensed business, the state requires you to prove you have two and one half months of operating capital in order to get your license. In other words, you can meet all other requirements but if you don’t have sufficient operating capital available to you, you may not get your license. Why would the state require that? You are proposing to serve people with special needs in some type of service. If you fail in your efforts, those people with special needs can suffer. It is a step taken to protect the clients who need the services. You can’t borrow the money and stick it in your checking account as a way of proving you have it. You have to prove it is your money and has been tucked away for starting your new business for some time. Why two and one half months? Well, if you have a contract with the government and you invoice at the end of the month of service and then have to wait to get reimbursed, obviously you need a couple of months of “running money.” If you are going to serve a given number of clients and built your budget around the projected income for those people but for some reason, you end up not getting referrals as quickly as you had anticipated, you need sufficient operating capital to pay your fixed expenditures. Fixed expenditures are those you have to pay every month regardless of whether you are serving 2 people or 15 people. Your rent doesn’t go up and down based on the number of people you are serving. If you have a lease payment on a vehicle, that has to be paid every month. Your insurances and your utility bills all have to be paid. There are several reasons to make sure you have capital and recognize the difference between profit and loss income and operating capital. The number of people you serve can definitely make a difference in whether you are successful or become one of the failing businesses. The number of people I was serving in the program located in the city of San Diego became my next issue. My contract with the county prevented me from enrolling patients into our services unless they came from the county mental health hospital. The Chief of Psychiatry at the hospital never wanted me to have the contract. We started off our professional relationship by his withholding referrals. I will always be grateful for the Director of Mental Health who was another very old man getting ready for retirement. He was a politically powerful individual. His contract officer reported to him of the problem I was facing in trying to work with an uncooperative county employee. Soon we were both invited to attend a meeting with the Director of Mental Health of San Diego County. Uh Oh …

It was the day that I was scheduled to meet with San Diego County’s Director of County Mental Health. He was called “the doctor” by most county employees. He had been around a long time and was known to be a no nonsense type of leader. In other words, he didn’t have time for small talk, and he ran a tight “ship.” In his leisure time, he was an avid sailor. I walked into the conference room that morning to find myself looking at several members of the county’s staff. They were all lined up on one side of the table and surrounded the end of it. We waited for what seemed like only a couple of minutes and in the door walked the doctor. He looked around the room sort of in the same way I did when I entered. He said, “I am going to sit over here by Dr. Swineheart, since she seems to be outnumbered.”

It was a brief meeting. He wanted to hear directly from us why we were having difficulty establishing a reasonable working relationship. I said, “I have a 10 bed program. Dr. H has stated that I am prohibited from serving any patients that are not referred by his department and coming directly from the hospital to my program. I only have 2 patients from him at this time, and trying to cover the fixed expenditures with only 1/5 of the beds being filled is impossible. I am willing to give priority to the hospital’s patients, but in order to do that I have to receive the referrals. I am turning people away who need our services because of this policy.” Dr. H told him that if the people I admit will attend his inpatient day treatment program I can accept other referrals. I pointed out that a clear majority of patients have an aversion to inpatient settings, so it isn’t really a good sales point to tell people if they are admitted to our services, they are required to go to county mental health hospital every day for several hours per day. I was serving a vulnerable population, and it was easy for them to imagine at the end of the day they might not be able to leave the hospital. The Doctor … looked at his Chief of Psychiatry and said, “You cannot expect her to hold empty beds available for your patients if you are not using the services. If she has a vacancy and you can’t fill it within 10 days, she is free to accept another patient who does not have to attend the inpatient day treatment.” He then looked at me and asked, “Do you like that plan?” I said, “Yes, Sir. Thank you very much.” He said, “Okay. We are finished,” and he walked out of the room. I later heard that the Chief of Psychiatry at the hospital mumbled something about the county getting a “pig in a poke,” while I was thinking the psychiatrist was an ego maniac who couldn’t make his day treatment attractive enough for patients to choose it, so he wanted to force patients into it. The problem at hand was solved, but our relationship problems were not really ever going to be solved. A few years later I became good friends with one of the county’s administrators who told me that the Director said a few weeks later he didn’t understand why he could bring “H” and Swineheart into his office, sit them down together and shake them up hoping we would both direct our frustration at him and stop bickering, He added, “Instead, after they leave, they are like oil and water. You shake them up together but when you set them down, they separate.”

When the County Mental Health Director retired, and I heard that he had plans to do a lot of sailing, I bought a gift for him. It was a crystal plaque with a sailing ship etched into it along with the Irish blessing, “May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face; the rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.”

After he officially retired, I only saw him one more time. It was a couple of years later, and I was walking up the court house steps with a couple of people, and he was walking down the steps on the other side of the railing, we both waved and that was it. I felt honored that he had acknowledged me.

In the meantime, the Chief of Psychiatry contacted one of the county’s psychologist who was a friend of his and asked him to connect up with me, so he could get an invitation to sit on the County Supervisor’s Mental Health Task Force, which I chaired. He wanted him to keep an eye on me without my knowing it. If you pay close attention, it is fairly easy to figure out when the government has you under the microscope. Neither the psychologist assigned to me nor the Chief of Psychiatry knew that I was aware. It gave me an advantage, because I could present information to the psychologist as if he were a friend of mine while knowing whatever I fed him would go directly to the man who had decided I was a threat to his territory. They wrote about it in a song … “The Games People Play.” I actually enjoyed knowing the psychologist, and we discussed a lot of mental health issues. It gave me a direct line to a lot of the internal happenings within the system which, otherwise, I couldn’t have known. He obviously had to share enough that it would look like I had inside information. It was really helpful in getting things accomplished, because we agreed on identifying many of the mental health problems and on how to solve them. In other words, because we had a middleman, it could never be said we both felt the same way. We could protect our egos and areas of division but focus on what united us instead of what divided us.

My beds in the Southeast San Diego area were soon filled. The business kept growing, as the demand for our services grew. I enjoyed the most the time I could spend interacting with the people receiving our services, but it was becoming more and more difficult for me to do that due to administrative demands. I don’t recall exactly how I ended up becoming a close colleague of the California State Director of Mental Health. The County of San Diego had a new female mental health director, and the State Director of Mental Health’s Assistant Director was introduced to me. Both the state director and his assistant were living and working in Kentucky when the director was recruited for the Sacramento positions. The first time I ever saw him was at a Mental Health Advisory Board meeting. He had flown down from Sacramento to address the board, so I was one of the people in the audience to hear his presentation. When he spoke, his voice sounded like Johnny Cash was talking, so I was immediately a fan. I learned that the Kentucky doctors were hoping to relocate in San Diego when they left their Sacramento offices. The director was a psychiatrist, and his assistant was a psychologist. I really liked the personalities of both of them.

Governor Jerry Brown Jr. was the governor of California during those early career building days. The State Director of Mental Health from Kentucky was appointed by him. I was chairing a Mental Health Task Force for a County Supervisor, who was a Democrat. I was a registered Democrat. During the late 70’s and early 80’s, the Democratic Party was moderate, or anyway, the Democrats who were within my focus were all moderate. Jerry Brown Jr would be elected again in the 2000’s, but just as his party had taken on a liberal progressive agenda, obviously Jerry changed with the party. The Los Angeles County Sheriff was also a Democrat. I recall being in Sacramento and participating in a conference call, which included the LA County Sheriff. Mental Health was a focus, and we were all working together to better the mental health system in the State of California. One of the areas of our focus was to develop links between services which were most often used by persons who were experiencing serious mental health problems. Those services certainly included law enforcement. Politicians were paying attention to mental health, because of the general population’s interest, and the general population were voters. I was quickly becoming more immersed into the political field and was one of those people who would be called when politicians were fund raising. In addition to the task force, I had participated in starting an organization of 24 hour care facilities. The people who were members of that group could always be counted on to support a candidate who was willing to address the need for better mental health services. I received an invitation to attend a similar very large organization of providers in Los Angeles County. A friend and colleague of mine drove us to Los Angeles to one of their meetings. When I walked in the door, the very well known woman serving as president of that organization announced, “Your new President has just arrived.” It was tempting, but I had to turn it down. I had too much on my plate to be in the situation to go to LA on a regular basis. I was never real fond of LA anyway. It was a city I had to drive through if I traveled by car very far north, and nobody likes to drive through LA. I vowed I would leave San Diego if the freeways ever became as crowded as LA’s freeways and especially if smog was hanging over our city as it was there. I guess I haven’t kept that vow.

I was very supportive of our local provider organization in San Diego County. It was needed, and by uniting, care providers finally had a voice in community affairs which affected their services. A Hollywood director filmed a documentary “A System In Shambles” about California’s mental health system. I was honored to be included in the film and was especially pleased that Dr. Linus Pauling was also a participant. The director also addressed the need for more 24 hour care services.

My husband and I and another man with a Ph.D. in psychology would later work with the film director on a documentary in the literary field. The educator was a genius who developed a reading program to teach Vietnamese children English and later used it in the United States to teach people with dyslexia to fluently read. He also wrote a musical piece used by Notre Dam at their half time during sports games, and was very talented in many areas. His wife was also an educator and served as the administrator of one of the local community colleges. Obviously, we were involved in several projects and assignments, but all linked to the mental health needs of people in some way.

Although administrative demands were high, Jerry and I were still having fun. We were so very compatible in many areas. We were best friends, passionate lovers, intense business partners and we both shared the strong belief that we had a responsibility to make sure the people who came to us for service were always treated in a respectful manner. It saddens me today when I learn that he doesn’t remember some of our experiences with our patients and their families. Sometimes I can say something that will trigger a forgotten time. It is interesting to see what he does and does not remember. I am also looking forward to his forgetting some experiences. He expresses one memory, which I wholeheartedly believe is imagined. That is definitely one I want to go away. He states his brother always hits him in the face every time we see him. That began with his telling me that when he joined the Navy, he left his car with his brother in the Bay Area. Jerry married his first wife while he was in service. She was 12 years older than him. I have seen photos of her, and she was very attractive, and did not look a decade older than Jerry in spite of the fact he has always looked younger than his age. Anyway, he claims that after discharge from service, he and his bride went to San Francisco to pick up his car. He tells me that his brother was angry about his taking the car back to San Diego with him, and he hit him through a rolled down window just before he drove away. I wasn’t there. I don’t have a clue as to whether that happened. However, Jerry also claims that his brother has hit him every time we have seen him since we have been together. That is the part which causes me to believe this has become a false memory for him. We have visited his brother and family several times and have had a lot of fun with them. I have never witnessed his brother hitting him.

The first time I personally met his brother and wife, they were living on a sailboat on the San Francisco Bay, and we had a fabulous time. I had to be up in the area on a business trip. Jerry came along, and we met his brother and wife. We went to one of their fabulous restaurants. I was dressed in what I thought was an attractive new suit. A waitress was walking behind me and someone bumped into her and she dumped a tray of sticky drinks into my lap. Liquid flowed through my skirt and into my half slip underneath my skirt. Some of it splashed into my hair as it fell past my head. It was one of those horrible experiences, which we later all laughed about every time it was mentioned. It wasn’t so funny when it happened. Welcome to San Francisco.

On our way back to the sailboat, his brother accidentally stepped off the dock and fell into the ocean. I’m pretty sure if his brother had hit him in the face during any of those times I would have known it. His brother and sister in law visited us in our ski home in Red River, New Mexico. We all went to Molokai, Hawaii together. We hiked down the mountain to Kalaupapa (the Leper’s Colony). We have attended family reunions in remote areas. They have visited in our home, and we have visited them in their home. Never did his brother hit him in front of me. When I point this out to Jerry, he says that he does it when I am not looking. When you know both of their personalities, it could be humorous to imagine one brother hitting the other in the face without anyone ever knowing it happened. I am quite sure the entire big family would be aware it was happening. This belief that he won’t let go of at this time is the result of Frontal Temporal Dementia (FTD), which was diagnosed in late 2006. I believe it will pass.

The fun we had with his brother and sister in law at the high end restaurant drink dumping party was just one of so many fun evenings, Jerry and I shared with each other, family and friends while we were developing businesses in Southern California. I failed to mention that on the very same evening of that first visit to San Francisco, I walked into a restroom enjoying being away from home, only to hear someone say “Hi Dr. Swineheart.” It IS a small world and most often, you find that out when you least expect to be reminded of it.

In the meantime back in San Diego, one day a licensing worker unexpectedly stopped by the Southeast San Diego location. For some reason, I wasn’t there, so Jerry decided to handle the inspection. She said she thought the gas stove was broken. He said it wasn’t broken. She said she would have to write it up as an infraction. His solution was to tell her if it was a problem he would just take it out while she was there and if it wasn’t there, it couldn’t be the problem. She called the fire department and said we had a gas leak under the house. The fire department showed up with sirens blaring and seemingly every fireman in their building. There was no gas leak to be found. The fire department personnel tagged her with a nickname “4 Alarm Phyllis.” Everyone had a good laugh over it. I didn’t find it so funny. My husband who had done a short but intense stint in Vietnam and had been brutalized in the family law court in San Diego was not the man to assign to deal with the personalities of people who represented government. Early on, we tried to limit Jerry’s time with them.

An exception to limiting his time with governmental type representatives was made when we began to develop services for developmentally disabled adults with mental disorders. We were pioneers in developing services for that particular population who brought unique challenges for treatment personnel. The target population was high functioning developmentally disabled adult who suffered with a secondary diagnosis of a mental disorder. Our expertise in serving people with serious depressive disorders, bipolar disorders, schizophrenia and borderline personality disorders caused us to receive a personal invitation from the founder of the local entity charged with developing services for those being discharged from the state hospital into 24 hour services in our local communities. As a part of that process, our company was invited to send a representative to state hospitals to identify people who would be appropriately served in our services. Jerry served as our representative. He loved working with developmentally disabled people, and he had a talent for quickly bonding with them. I recall on one of his trips he was laughing and telling me as he and our San Diego area delegation and State Hospital personnel were walking down hallways with windows on each side and patients behind the windows, he lagged behind and began making faces at them including sticking his tongue out. In response, they were making faces and responding in like kind to whatever he was doing. Of course, they didn’t know they were being followed by a clown, so they started apologizing for the patients’ behavior and saying that it was unusual. It may have been unusual for the state hospital patients, but it wasn’t all that unusual for my husband.

1986 was a good year. Jerry and I were super focused on our business. We were rapidly developing, and we were enjoying the southern California lifestyle. We bought a boat … a Sea Ray. It was docked at the Marriott in Seaport Village. He was the Captain of that ship. I am taller now than I was before we got the boat, because once when I was helping him dock, I was holding on the railing around the boat as he was rolling it in to the dock, and he accidentally hit reverse instead of forward. Like a fool, I held on to it trying to pull it in to the dock. It was all about me against the power of the engine. I wasn’t about to let go of it. I definitely was losing. By the time he realized his mistake and stopped the battle, I think I may have had one big toe still on the dock. I was determined to not fall into the ocean.

We were docked down in the area in front of the restaurant. That was before the Hyatt was built in Seaport. One of my fond memories of the time period was when we attended a scavenger hunt party with our close but very politically involved friends and some of the news media folks in San Diego. We began by meeting at a media woman’s condo, and on we went throughout the city ending up on our boat.

We owned that boat only a short time before Jerry decided we needed a bigger vessel. I recall the details of the sale of the Septembre, but I don’t recall the purchase details. The man who owned and developed the Charter House restaurants in San Diego had previously owned this one, and it was docked on A Dock at the Marriott. Our next door neighbor …side by side …was Jerry Lewis and his wife, Sam. He often stepped out on to the end of his yacht and yelled “Hey Doctor” when he wanted to talk to Jerry. I told Jerry he should respond with “Hey Comedian,” but of course, he never did. Jerry and Sam were very nice neighbors. They had a little adopted daughter who was close to the same age as our granddaughter, Leanne. Jerry Lewis invited Leanne to come over and play with their daughter.

My husband, Jerry, and I had a tradition of hosting big parties during the holiday season at the end of each year. Some were held in our businesses in the beginning of our venture. Thereafter, they were held in our homes in Lakeside and later in Crest, where we live now. Initially we included friends and family on Christmas Eve every year. The time came when we held one huge event in the beginning of December and on Christmas Eve, we entertained and celebrated with family. When we bought the Septembre, we entertained our friends and family on the boat, and we loved competing in the Parade of Lights in San Diego Bay.

There was one very special evening which I will never forget …

So having a boat docked on “A” dock was ideal and a preferred and desirable section by most boat owners at the Marriott in Seaport Village. When you are docked at the Marriott marina, you have access to all of the benefits of the Marriott. We could order room service. We could work out in the hotel gym. We could park in the Marriott parking lot next to the hotel. Of course, we were within walking distance of wonderful restaurants, and all of the entertainment offered within Seaport Village was like having It in our front yard. A variety of shops were located in the village. My favorites were a special clothing shop and a little shop that made fudge. My husband and I also enjoyed going there on Sunday mornings to pick up the newspaper and have coffee at one of the village tables. We often walked over to see the bands who entertained the tourists, although we could hear them from our boat.

The boat needed a captain. We hired the man who also served as Captain of a boat owned by a nightclub in San Diego. Their topless ladies would be on the boat when it went out to greet the navy ships returning to San Diego after the ships had spent at least 6 months at sea. Jeff was a seasoned captain. His personality blended well with our personalities. His girlfriend was an RN who worked in the cardiac unit of one of our local hospitals. Jeff was a salaried employee, so he was paid $30,000 per year by us regardless of whether we were using his services or whether the boat was docked. He oversaw the service which cleaned the bottom of the boat each month. If friends stayed on our boat, he would keep an eye on it. Sometimes we would ask him to take people out to cruise. We had 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms on it. When we held the Moore Family reunion at our home, two of Jerry’s sisters and one brother in law stayed on the boat. We allowed my nephew to use it one evening, so he could take a group of friends out for a cruise. Captain Jeff was always dependable, and an excellent all around captain. We were generous with the boat. We let a friend use it to entertain his corporate investors. We let a neighbor use it to take out over 20 Japanese exchange students. That is when we learned those kids ate the inside out of M & M’s and spit out the shell. That wasn’t good for our carpets. They also would stand in front of Jeff and take photos with a flash blinding the captain of our boat. It was an annoying evening for him.

We always carried a couple of wave runners and a dinghy on the boat. Another nephew who was an executive with Sprint out of Kansas City would come to San Diego every year for business conferences. He enjoyed staying on the Septiembre since it was docked conveniently close to his event filled evenings. The San Diego Convention Center is literally right next door to The Marriott. He always spent some time at our house too, and we really enjoyed his annual visits. Some friends went with us to attend the Parade of Lights winner announcement evening. When the various awards were handed out, we started complaining amongst ourselves with “that sucks” kind of statements. Suddenly, they flashed the Septiembre up on to the screen, and we were crazy happy.ays heard the two happiest days in the lives of boat owners is the day they buy it and the day they sell it. That was pretty much true with us. We were very excited to have another special place to celebrate the Holiday season and would make sure to offer two parties on the boat each December. One of those annual evenings, we always competed in the Parade of Lights. The first year we competed we won 2nd place, and the final year we competed we won 1st place, which is entitled The City Of San Diego Award. That evening was very special, because our entire boat had been designed by a couple of high school kids. During their summer vacation, one of their best friends had been killed in a tragic car accident on the way home from the desert. Their grief was intense, so the boat project was a place for them to relieve some stress, because it required focus. They wired Christmas lights into bells swinging back and forth as if they were ringing. Of course, they outlined the Septiembre in Christmas lights too. The boat was beautiful, but the sound system they added probably put us over the top. The young man who had lost his fiancee in the accident was the announcer for the evening. As we cruised along the shore, he was constantly talking to the crowd and wishing them a Merry Christmas. When we would be approaching the judges stand, they would switch the sound system over to play Silver Bells as we passed by the judges. Our red wave runners were on the top deck of the boat, and our blond daughter and blond daughters of our friends were sitting on the wave runners wearing their red Santa hats and waving at the people on the shore. We thought we looked good, but I was shocked when we won the City of San Diego Award. After several years of fun with the boat, we decided to sell it. One day we received a call from the woman handling the sale, and she asked if we would be interested in trading it for a 9500 square foot home in Red River, New Mexico. Sure … we were willing to check it out. We flew into Albuquerque and was picked up at the airport by a man who owned the house and a bar, restaurant and hotel in Red River. The drive from Red River to Albuquerque is a 3 and 1/2 hour drive, but he did that, met us at the airport and drove us back to Red River. We did a walk through the home and spent the night in a hotel. The next day he took us back to Alburquerque to catch our flight home. It was a quick trip and a quick decision. We were willing to trade the boat for the house. He had a mortgage on the house, which was very comparable to the loan we had on the boat. We ended up doing an across the board trade with our accepting his debt and he accepted our debt. We could foresee problems with his debt, because it was actually a construction loan. We sought new financing and paid off that note. He did much the same with our all due and payable note.

Our very close friends visited us in Red River and helped us get the house ready for nightly rental. It was a fun time. My girlfriend and I would go to Taos every day and literally load up the 500 Mercedes with lamp shades, linens, soap dishes, pots and pans, dishes, and more. The back seat was full. The huge trunk was full, and sometimes we could hardly see each other in the front seat. Every morning we would get up early and start working on the house. Her husband was a licensed contractor of fine homes in San Diego, and he went to work on the interior. The man who made the trade with us was also a building contractor, but he had not finished the house. The man who originally built the home had gone bankrupt during an economic turndown in our country. It was his wife’s dream home. They had ended up buying a store in Red River with living quarters above it, but their love of the home was evident.

We acquainted ourselves with a local realtor and property manager couple. They were shocked when they saw how much we had accomplished in a couple of weeks. We made one trip to Albuquerque and ordered furnishings to be delivered before we returned to San Diego. Since Jerry and Marty had brought several furnishings out from San Diego too, we were ready to hit the nightly rental market quickly. However, we needed to address some zoning issues before we could go forward with unrestricted nightly rentals.

Before filing for a zoning change in Red River, NM, I needed to learn more about the town and the people who lived in it. I was able to arrange my schedule, so Jerry and I could spend a major part of our summer there. The people living in Red River were very friendly and seemed willing to answer all of my questions. You may have noted I was seeking a zoning change versus a conditional use permit. That was quite interesting to me. Seeking a zoning change in San Diego County would have been a monumental assignment. That is why I had to operate with a conditional use permit on any facilities of more than 6 beds that were in California. There was a fairly new federal law which prohibited cities and counties throughout the nation from requiring special zoning approval in residential facilities serving mentally ill or developmentally disabled people. The law was developed to prevent discrimination against people with special needs. Basically, if operating 6 beds or less, it was and still is today considered a family. Some homeowners associations have learned the hard way that the federal courts strictly enforces that law. In fact, the City of El Cajon challenged a residential care provider when one of her facilities was destroyed by fire, and she built 3 new homes side by side on 3 contiguous lots, and each home was occupied by six handicapped residents. Of course, in Red River, my desire was not to pursue a place for people in need of out of home placement. We wanted to operate a nightly rental. Red River is a ski town. The Federal law that protected our interest in developing a nightly rental would fall under the highest and best use of property rights. That particular law was being challenged on a somewhat regular basis. One could say it is a battle between government zoning rights and the people’s constitutional rights.

I learned that the planning board in Red River, which was comprised of about a half dozen members was loaded with conflicts of interest. In fact, it soon became apparent that all members either operated nightly rentals or owned hotels which would make them competitors of our proposed nightly rental. The city geared up for a battle. They had another issue with the man who had sold the house to us, so they questioned me under oath at a city meeting regarding whether we had been told that we could operate a nightly rental. I told them he did just the opposite. Throughout our purchase negotiations, he had told me that we could not operate a nightly rental, and he wanted to make sure we knew that. Soon I learned that our property was surrounded by nightly rentals and most of those properties were owned by people serving on the board designated to make the decision concerning our request.

Fortunately, I learned that the city did not have a very large annual budget, which left not a lot of money for legal matters. I have always felt that strategical approaches to winning can have a major impact on the court’s decision. Having been raised in a small town, I was very much aware of small town politics. Actually, even big cities have a whole lot of political influence in their courtrooms, but sometimes small town politics can be more challenging. I decided I needed to find an attorney who knew a lot about zoning laws and I felt city and county attorneys usually have the most knowledge when it comes to that particular area of the law. As luck would have it, I found a retired former city attorney of Taos, New Mexico, a neighboring city and one within the same county. He was perfect for this assignment. He was conservative as are my attorneys in San Diego, and he was well respected by the judges. One of the first things he did was warn me that the judges were pretty sensitive to small towns being able to control their zoning laws. I immediately kicked in my politics and said, “That’s ok, because I anticipate taking this to Federal court, and our attorneys in San Diego will take over the handling of it when we get to that level.” I knew it was likely there would be some behind closed doors conversations, and I wanted him to believe we were headed to an appeals court if prohibited from a zoning change in Superior Court. I also told him I was surprised to note that our annual budget was higher than the city’s budget, so I doubted if they really had the money on hand to spend a lot of time in federal court.

The property managers we hired were a tremendous help with the investigative part of our pursuit. It was interesting to see the reaction of the people. There was a history on the house which included the fact that a man well respected in the community had built it as his wife’s dream home, and he lost it during a challenging economic time in our country. He had kept his eye on it, and was prepared to buy it if it had gone into foreclosure. He and his wife were disappointed when we bought it, since it never went into foreclosure. We simply traded our boat for the house. I would say anytime you can trade a boat for an approximately 9500 square foot home in a tourist town, do it. It only took us a couple of months, and we were given our zoning change. With the help of friends from San Diego, within a couple of weeks, the house was furnished and ready to be used for nightly rentals.

The majority of the people living in Red River were originally from Texas or Oklahoma. It is a playground for Texas much like the Colorado River in Arizona is San Diego’s playground. People came up to Red River in the summertime for a break from the Texas heat. There is a fishing pond in the middle of the town for children. Summertime entertainment is as attractive to vacationers as the ski season in the winter months. We named the house Villa La Cresta and soon it was a popular choice of many. After a couple of years, our rates had increased and we found it hard to interrupt the income and the people who loved to go there, so we began spending less time in Red River. I have never spent any time in Texas except to pass through it often when traveling, but I would be very comfortable moving there, because I found the people from Texas to be some of the nicest people I have ever met. They even made the crazy California folks feel welcome and loved. We had so much fun when we would spend time in New Mexico both in summer and winter months. Our property managers were the best, and we always hung out with them when in town. As has always been our tradition, we shared the home with friends from San Diego and family from the Midwest. Son Marty loved skiing, so he always went up during ski season. Our daughter, Jodi and her husband went there for their honeymoon. We also gifted it during ski season as a wedding present to our friends’ kids. Our granddaughter, Leanne, learned to ski in Red River, and she and I made snow ice cream when she was still so small she sit up on the counter to help. We made lifetime friends, and the man who traded the house for our boat still has the boat docked at the Marriott in San Diego. He has taken it to Catalina several times. We were all very happy with our trade, and he was surprised but happy for us that we got the nightly rental going. He would have kept the house had he been able to get the zoning change. Sometimes it just takes a different perspective. Timing also has a major impact on the outcomes in life. Strategy and timing are keys to successful pursuits in the business world.

In the meantime, our business locations in California had continued to expand. Some time in the 1980’s, I hired an attorney from a very large law firm downtown. She was a Columbia graduate, and her husband had graduated from Harvard. For the purpose of maintaining her privacy, I am going to call her Maddie. Maddie was a petite and absolutely gorgeous person. She was extremely smart and of course, she was working in the enviable position of being a year away from a partnership in one of the two largest law firms in the City of San Diego. A partnership in the firm would result in her being gifted with a Mercedes sports car plus other overwhelming benefits. After getting the education, graduating amongst the top in her class and landing herself a fantastic job in America’s finest city, she passed the California bar and began building her legal reputation.passing the California bar. Somewhere along the way of actually practicing law, she decided being a lawyer was not what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. She wasn’t feeling the personal satisfaction that people can get when helping others. A mutual friend arranged for us to meet, and I hired her on the spot. She would serve as our Executive Director. We soon met her husband. I believe the first time saw him was when they invited us to join them for dinner at a fine Chinese restaurant. Her husband was Chinese. The meal was absolutely delicious, because when you are having dinner with a Chinese man in a Chinese restaurant you would be a fool to pass up his recommendations. I had duck. Their little son and our Dana also joined us that evening. My husband had been working at “educating” the little boy about a more common lifestyle. His grandparents were very wealthy and highly educated, so he had been exposed only to a privileged lifestyle. Jerry had begun by making sure he knew what “road apples” were at the ranch. Later, we were told by Maddie he shared that information with his grandparents at one of their family meals. She was laughing. The grandparents were shocked and probably did not find it so funny. Our main offices were located on a ranch property where we had several buildings including classrooms, barns, 4 acres of land and a home which we used for our offices. Maddie would sometimes bring her son along with her. Our daughter had a pony there, so one late afternoon after our clients had left for the day and we were hanging out, Jerry put Maddie’s son on the pony and had Dana to lead her pony past Maddie’s office window but bend over so Maddie couldn’t see the pony was being lead. Maddie was very protective of her only child. She screamed when she saw him. She ran out of the office and when she realized what was going on, she loved it. Jerry and I were on the Foundation Board of the East County Boys and Girls Club. They were holding their annual dinner auction at Hotel Del, and we invited Maddie and her husband to go along with us. That was another fun evening. One of the items at the auction was an ugly clock, and Jerry had commented on it. When the holidays arrived, Jerry’s gift from Maddie was that clock. The next year when the holidays arrived, she had already left our company, but Jerry mailed the clock to her. I don’t even know who ended up with the clock. It is probably in my lower garage.

Maddie was learning more about the social service field. The more she experienced serving others in a human care field, the more she liked it. She had the integrity a business owner always wants when hiring for administrative assignments. I let her use my Mercedes sports car as a part of her benefits with our company. She threw her heart and soul into the job. Actually, I think she wore herself out trying to do so much herself instead of delegating what could be safely assigned to other employees. I recall one evening when a man needed hospitalization. He was in our veteran’s services, and instead of sending for a transport, she got up in the middle of the night and picked him up. After a couple of years with us, she had firmly made up her mind she wanted to remain in the social service field, but she wanted to work with children. She had been volunteering and helping out at her son’s pre-school and she loved it. She said when she would show up and the little kids would run towards her with outstretched arms while excitedly calling her name, her heart would just melt. I always felt good that we had given her the opportunity to test out a new field since she was unhappy with being a lawyer. As far as I know, she is still working as a director or in some capacity with kids. I haven’t talked with her in a while. The last time I heard from their family, her husband called. Pete Wilson was governor of California, and he knew I had a friend who was very close to Wilson. He asked me if I would put in a good word for him to serve as a judge. Of course, I did, and he did end up with a judgeship in Superior Court. Dana certainly missed Maddie after she left our company. Maddie’s love for children was appreciated by our own little girl. She would take Dana and one of our credit cards with her and they would go shopping. They both loved Nordstrom’s. She loved shopping, and Dana would come home with a stack of new clothes. She also arranged for her to have a personal shopper. Dana actually had a personal shopper at Nordstrom’s until she grew up and moved away from San Diego.

When working in the mental health and social service fields, it can get quite political. I soon found myself with another problem. A neighbor complained to the county that we were using the home for offices. We had to move our offices. We rented some offices in Lakeside about 4 miles from the ranch. I had already received permits form the County Zoning Department to operate a center serving developmentally disabled adults. The representative from zoning called me on the phone and let me know of the complaint. I told him that I was probably the only zoning legal business on the street where we were located. However, I realized when the county gets a complaint they have to respond. He and I both knew this person was not going to give up if she could find anything to complain about. The neighbor didn’t want us to have a 5th wheel on the property nor to use the house as a “commercial” office building. As Julie Roberts said in one of her movies when she didn’t receive respect in a clothing store, “big mistake.” I assured the county instead of offices, I would convert the house to a 6 bed residential care facility, since that was protected under federal law. We did just that, so now the complaining neighbor had our consumers there 24 hours per day instead of 5 hours per day. The truth was she was using zoning to discriminate against a population with special needs. The zoning director told me to be very specific this time about the number of clients I wanted to serve and exactly what I was planning on doing, and they would take a look at my request. I did that, and we were approved for all. 25 consumers a day plus my personnel. Thankfully, it did not require an appeal to the County Board of Supervisors. Jerry immediately began remodeling a couple of former horse barns into classrooms and offices. He built a beautiful custom made office for me. I could sit at my desk and watch the clients when they were riding in the big arena. We ended up with an accounting office, a reception room with 2 desk areas, a copy room, extra bathroom, and my office. The copy room was large enough to also serve as a file room for personnel and program records. I have always found it interesting when unfairly attacked in life, it seems to always end up being a blessing.

After Maddie left and before we moved our offices back to the remodeled building at the ranch, I hired an Executive Director from within the administration of the regional center. That was probably not the best business decision, because I found out later the Executive Director/Founder of the regional center was angry I had hired away one of his best employees. He probably didn’t realize his case managers had been hiring and trying to hire my best employees many times. I was complimented that our competitors and agencies overseeing our services were impressed with my personnel, but it was aggravating when they would tell my directors to come to work for them, because they could pay more and offer better benefits. However, it was foolish of me to hire a director away from the man who had given me a personal invitation to develop services and who remained in charge of overseeing our services. He ended up working for us only about 3 years and then he took a job closer to his home. He lived in Vista, so he had quite a daily commute.

In the State of California the State Department of Developmental Services contracts with regional center throughout the state while assigning each a catchment area. Those regional centers subcontract with providers to provide the services. We held contracts with the San Diego Regional Center, Inland Regional Center, and Orange County Regional Center. At one point we were the largest provider of what they identified as Level IV services in the state of California. Our services ranged from Level III all the way up to Level 4G which required 1 staff person for each 2 clients being served. That was about the same time I began to pull my hair out realizing we were providers in San Diego County, Imperial County, Riverside County, San Bernardino County and Orange County. While our services were growing, middle management positions were also growing. My responsibilities were growing. The numbers of employees were growing. The regulations and demands from the overseers were growing. The bottom line was not growing. We had services for veterans with mental disorders, veterans with addictions, adults with mental disorders, and of course, several facilities serving developmentally disabled adults. Two of our programs were located at ranches. We had one 24 hour children’s facility, 3 day programs and rest were 24 hour services. When you are operating 24 hours per day 7 days per week, I figure it is the equivalent of running 2 x the actual listed locations. The man I hired from the regional center was a good man and he did well as our executive director. One of the first things he said was he had no idea the demand that was placed on providers. That is when I decided that people who supervise operations should be required to have a couple of years of experience working in the same type of service. I would often hear much the same from the college students who came to work for us. “Wow…this is nothing like what we are learning in our textbooks and from the professors.” One of the reasons was due to the fact we were creating new concepts in California. The leadership in the state seemed to always be open to new and creative ways. I loved that and was excited about being a part of the process. One of those examples was when we developed a service for developmentally disabled adults who suffered with severe behavior problems. We wrote up a proposal including why we believed such a concept would serve to reduce inappropriate behavior. It was immediately funded. A regional center in another county heard about it, came to see it and then asked us to develop the same for them. You haven’t lived until you drive up and down the streets of a big city looking for a horse ranch. “Look Jerry. Turn around. There’s a ranch, and it is within the area assigned to us. Let me go talk to the owner.” That is exactly what I did, and we ended up leasing from her and using her expertise in our services for over a decade. Jerry and I actually came up with the concept because we would take our little daughter to a local ranch where she took lessons. We noticed how we would relax when sitting out at the ranch watching her and waiting for her to finish her lessons. Once we presented our proposal and it was received we had to buy a horse ranch in East San Diego County. What better place to find a horse ranch for sale than in Lakeside.

It was in 1986 that we decided to develop an equestrian center, so we could offer our developmentally disabled consumers an opportunity to ride horses as a component of a day program. Our adult consumers were high functioning meaning they had most of their self help skills, but they were diagnosed with both a developmental disability and a mental disorder. The combination of the two challenges they faced in life was causing them to express their frustration in a violent manner. Most of our consumers had spent a few years in the state hospitals in California. When Jerry and I realized how stress reducing it was for us to hang out at a horse ranch with our little girl, we realized it would probably be a great way for our clients to also reduce stress. We knew stress was contributing to their violent behavior. We also knew if they learned they could control the behavior of a large animal, they would learn they could control their own behavior. The activities going on at a horse ranch were many, and we were very excited to offer new experiences and opportunities to the people who most needed them. We drove through the horse ranch area in Lakeside and quickly found a for sale sign on a four acre ranch. It was the last ranch on a long street, which was lined with individual ranches. The property on the other side of us was vacant with a radio tower on the other side of the vacant land. We would only have 2 close neighbors on the other side of us. Since the ranch bordered two streets with one street at the entrance and front of the ranch and the other street at the back of the ranch, there were two lots with houses on each bordering our ranch on the same side. When seeking locations for the purpose of housing our consumers, we were always conscious of what would be next to us in a neighborhood. We knew that too often people were not pleased when people with disabilities would be moving nearby. We found out the man selling the horse ranch had sold it at least twice before we came along. Since there was no mortgage on it, he would carry the paper and then foreclose when the new owners could not make their payments. He was willing to finance it for us, of course, because he had been doing quite well taking deposits and foreclosing. He had that down to a science, I think. He was probably licking his chops when the two of us showed up especially since we were going to develop a horse ranch without any experience in ranching. It was also common for people to fail who were in the business of boarding horses. Although I was driving a fairly new 1982 Mercedes sports car, and Jerry was driving a diesel Mercedes, we had little cash on hand. We could get start up funds for capital from the regional center, but we needed another $25,000 for the down payment on the property. I came up with the idea to ask my former spouse if he would like to become a partner in the ownership of the property In other words, he would not be a partner in the business, but we would share 50-50 ownership in the property. The ranch had a very nice home on it of approximately 1700 square feet. I offered him a lease on just the house sufficient to cover his half of the monthly mortgage payment, and pointed out he would be buying a future investment since the market value of the property would increase in future years. In exchange, he would borrow $25,000 on the house we both still mutually owned and I would agree that the $25,000 would cover all of my interest in the home we both still mutually owned. It was a great deal for him in that he would end up with 100% ownership in the house he lived in which we had owned together, and he would not ever be required to make any improvements or pay any expenses on the ranch property investment. However, he could deduct 1/2 of the depreciation off the ranch each year on his taxes, since it was a rental for him. In fact, I later learned that his accountant who handled his taxes each year told him on more than one occasion she would buy him out of his investment if he would sell his interest.

It is interesting to me how the impossible becomes a reality if it is in God's plan. It is as if God looks down from the heavens and sees His people struggling, and He knows if he puts them together and influences their thoughts, it will solve the problems of many. I was kind of down and out and on my own when I met Jerry only because my boss invited our office to go out after work for a drink. Jerry was down and out while being a month away from a final court date ending his marriage, and he just happened to know my boss and was in the same lounge that fateful day. Jerry asked my boss if he was out with his harem, since Dr. Herb was there with all of the ladies in the office. My girlfriend and co-worker suggested Jerry join us for an evening of fun, since Jerry was bemoaning his divorce woes. He was paying $750 per month for one child, while my estranged husband was paying $50 per month for 2 children. I assumed from that information that I had a better attorney than Jerry and that Jerry had a higher income. Too many attorneys delight in finding a plaintiff with an estranged spouse with a high income, because at that time, the family law court system was designed in such a way that the attorney could capitalize on a significant amount of assets. It became apparent that our new acquaintance, Jerry, had found himself a victim of the system. Skipping forward now since I earlier wrote about meeting Jerry, soon I would meet the man who would become my business partner because Jerry saw an ad in the paper, knew I wanted to develop 24 hour services for adults with mental disorders and he insisted I respond to the ad. The man from the ad had a big problem on his hands. He had invested in a property in a community called Poway. In 1976 Poway was a foreign location to most of the people living in San Diego County. The news media reporters could not even correctly pronounce its name. The investor had rented the property to a man who ended up bringing in parolees to live on the property. He was not receiving any income. He was in process of evicting his "tenants." He was happy to meet anyone who might be able to rescue him from an investment that was jeopardizing his success and stressing his marriage. Once we received a conditional use permit after appearing before the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, we pursued and received a license to operate a 24 hour 15 bed group home on the property. The realtor who was my new partner sold the property to a minister who became my landlord for approximately 30 years. Everyone came out a winner in the transaction. How did that happen? I believe it was directed from Heaven. Time marches on and now Jerry and I had spent ten years together and were purchasing a horse ranch. We also had a beautiful 9 year old daughter whose love of horses lead us to the need for our own ranch. One might ask when we began developing businesses, did we plan on creating a private Real Estate Investment Trust. We did not. We knew that the populations we chose to serve were very hard no buildings. No landlord would want to respond to the daily demands to try and keep the furnishings and buildings up to standard. We could not risk being evicted. It would make more sense to buy the properties ourselves and become our own corporation's landlords. No place was it more evident than at the ranch where neighbors would have devastated a landlord. Because we purchased the ranch and not rented it, we could go on to the battle field predicting a successful outcome.

We purchased the ranch, and we began the challenge of starting a new and unique program. In fact, it was so unique it had never previously been done through the Developmental Service System in the State of California. At this same time, we were doing this, we were still participating in moving consumers out of state hospitals into our residential service centers. We were constantly focusing on program descriptions and consumer file designs at all locations, while hiring staff at all locations and developing our executive and middle management offices. There are people who can handle chaos, and there are people who cannot handle it. Those who can't should never allow themselves to be hired by a service under development and especially when the services are unique to a system. Needless to say, our staff turnover was huge. I remember one person telling me she was leaving her position, because she thought she would be working with Dr Joyce Swineheart and was disappointed to find herself working with consumers. I found her comment interesting, because I have always felt every person working with our clients is working with all of us. Had she really worked beside me, she would probably have quit in a week instead of a month. Developing and operating a horse ranch and an intensive behavior management day training program at the same location did not allow much time to rest. My employees never knew while they were sleeping, I would still be up at 2 AM doing paperwork and examining in my mind every part of our ever expanding services. We still had a couple of private 24 hour mental health programs operating. Mental health programs are a different type of service and although both of the populations we were serving shared some things in common such as assistance with basic daily living needs, they are distinctly different types of program designs. One would never use the same approach when providing direct care to the populations just as serving veterans with mental disorders requires a different approach than serving non veterans with mental disorders. One of our mental health programs was funded by the Veteran's Administration, and the other was funded by private pay. Private pay means families would pay for the services for their loved ones. I loved working in direct care with clients who suffered from the most serious mental disorders. Perhaps because they knew how much I respected them and tried to make sure all of my personnel treated them accordingly,, they did very well in our services. I had a policy that they could call me at home anytime of the day or night if they wanted to talk to me. Some people might be surprised to hear they never abused that privilege. I recall when I received one early morning call and a client told me he wanted to take two bananas in his lunch, and the staff member on duty was telling him that he could not do that. I directed the counselor to let him have the bananas, and I went back to bed. Shortly, thereafter, the executive director of our services presented me with a T Shirt which had a couple of bananas and leaves on the front with an inscription "Take 2 Bananas & Call Me in the Morning." In the meantime back at the ranch, we hired a person who knew a lot about horses to run the horse ranch and to teach our consumers everything involved in safely taking care of the horses and learning to ride them. I hired counselors who wanted to work with developmentally disabled clients and who also had equestrian skills. I had to make sure t blended skilled consumer counselors in with a couple of equestrian specialists. Our consumers' unique needs had to be addressed properly throughout the process. Thankfully, the consumers were only present approximately 6 hours per day. That gave staff a couple of hours each day to handle the unbelievable amount of paperwork involved in serving developmentally disabled consumers and the equestrian employees to do whatever had to be done with horses. I was fortunate to have a sister and brother in law who were both owners of horses and were in California for a few years before returning to their home and farm in Illinois. They had been living in a small home on another one of our properties where my sister helped out with one of the mental health facilities, but when we bought the ranch, they moved their 5th wheel home down to the ranch. They unofficially supervised the ranch operation and let me know when or if there was a concern. We turned the house on the property into main offices, had our accounting services moved from outsourcing to in house with our own accountant. I hired an attorney as an executive director, and she hired a private secretary for herself. We had at least two other assistants in the main office. We also hired a professional Director with a Ph.D. in Psychology to serve as the director of the day program operation. We hired one counselor for each three consumers. Our direct care counselors were assigned to insure that consumers were being served as described in our program design and in keeping with the state laws which governed our services. In the midst of all of this, another regional center approached us with a request that we develop a horse ranch in their catchment area. It didn't take us long to find ourselves on the political battlefield at the ranch. That is exactly why it was important we own the ranch and could fight to protect our interest and the interests of our consumers.

Passing Days

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Becoming What You Believe Yourself to Be ...

Thursday, April 29, 2021

JERRY AND ME