In Memory of Eileen McDermott

Chapter One

In the summers of 1947 and 1948 I went for two week tours of Naval reserve duty at Point Loma overlooking the San Diego harbor. On one of these trips, I no longer remember which, Eileen McDermott came aboard the train as it was leaving Oakland. Her doctor had felt that her lungs would do better away from the weather in New York. For a couple of years she had spent summers in Yellowstone Park and winters at The Desert Inn in Palm Springs. This summer someone had convinced her that she might like to try Lake Tahoe. As a certified senior accountant she had agreed to handle both the books and the front desk for a lodge. She was unaware that she would be on that small section of the lake that is in Nevada, and that her employer was running a fair-sized gambling casino. Until that summer there had been two partners, but the previous winter one partner had taken the casino's funds to Las Vegas where he had lost them. Eileen's employer had shot and killed him, but since there were no witnesses, or perhaps because shooting a man who had lost a casino's funds is a justifiable homicide in Nevada, he had gone Scot Free.

The casino boasted a chorus line with ten dancers recruited in Hollywood. A couple of well-known movie actors, Robert Mitchum and Dan Dureau had come up to gamble and to work their way through the chorus line, two or three girls a night. No discretion whatever was involved, and by early July, Eileen had had enough. As she remarked, the behavior of the two actors was so outrageous that it was beginning to make a Puritan out of her. She had called a taxi and just as she was leaving, she lighted a string of baby firecrackers left over from the Fourth of July and threw them behind the counter. This brought forth the thugs from the gaming room with drawn guns. Eileen laughed and made her exit.

A few days later Eileen accepted my invitation to come to San Diego. The first night went well, but there was no room available for a second night. Marking time, we went to an al- night movie only to have several San Diego police officers show up to hassle the patrons. Their approach to me was to demand how long I had know Eileen - implying that I must have just picked her up off the street. Immediately after I had put Eileen on a bus back to Los Angeles, I went to the local police station to complain that the police at the theater were way out of line. As I was in uniform I felt more than safe to confront the desk sergeant. He said that they had evidence that there were underage homosexual prostitutes working the audience. That being so, why had they not tried to shut down the all-night theater. Evidently that was not within their power.

Eileen had arrived back in Los Angeles way too early to go to Palm Springs and took the only job she could find. It was to straighten out the books of a Regal Pale Beer Distributor in San Fernando. The books had been kept by the owner's brother. He had not been cheating, he was just incompetent. Eileen seems to have spent much of her life trying to clean up other's sloppy bookkeeping. At The Desert Inn she discovered that the kitchen staff or the guests had eaten a commercial dishwasher. The entry was under incoming food.

San Fernando was the worst possible spot for any single woman. Being a transplanted New Yorker, Eileen must have regarded it as the end of nowhere. A that time the principle businesses were providing hay and grain for the horses, and constructing Jerrybuilt bungalows for married couples. In desperation she soon opted for a very bad marriage. One has to know more about Eileen, and what her previous life had been like, to understand why the marriage was a disaster.

Chapter Two

Eileen was born in rural Ireland, and at about the age thirteen had come to New York with her widowed mother, a sister and two brothers. She was accepted at a high school for gifted children at Hunter College. This was at the bottom of the depression and times were difficult. To add even a little money she started working nights as an usher in a movie theater. The uniforms provided for the ushers were very short, and since Eileen was tall hers covered even less. She held the job only a few days before she told the manager, that if he would let go of the uniform, he could have it and his job back.

Her next job was as a telephone operator working on the A boards. These were the operators who took the numbers the callers wanted, and relayed them to the operators on the B boards at the other exchanges, who completed the calls. Then groups of young men had rented, for very small sums, vacant stores in Brooklyn. After having moved secondhand sofas, they thought that they had crested a social club and invited the local girls to join them on the sofas. They soon ran out of willing girls. Professional men who wanted to marry and create Jewish princesses were scarce in Brooklyn, but even a faint hope was better than wasting time with sure losers.

Lacking company, the men at the social clubs began to try to make time with the operators on the A boards. The phone company had supplied their operators with a set of approved standard answers. These were thought to be suitable for all situations, and indeed they were capable of driving a well-meaning but perplexed caller nearly out of his mind. For Eileen the men calling from the social clubs deserved sharper answers. Even at fifteen she knew wounding words and puts them together tellingly. Quite soon a supervisor decided she was a threat to Bell Tel's image and she was demoted to the B boards. Usually this work was not too demanding, and she had time to finish her homework. One night a sudden rain squall hit Brooklyn and there were endless calls to a local cab company served by her exchange. The cab company had no desire for more business and had taken their phone off the hook. Eileen was racing up and down yards of B Boards and each time she plugged in her headset she heard "Three Nine Three Three." About midnight she took off her headset, jumped on it, and picking up her books, headed home.

In only two years she had to leave her school and seek full time employment. This ended her formal education. Just before leaving school her mother had bought her a set of new middy blouses, and insisted that Eileen wear them until they wore out. As a young woman hoping to make her way in the world of business, she had no intention of showing up in middy blouses. Certainly not until they wore out. Middy blouses were made to last. She and her mother fought the issue out all week, and word of the battle had reached the parish priest. When Eileen went to confession on Saturday, the priest tore into her for parental disrespect and wanton extravagance, and assigned her to do the stations of the cross. Never before had she been required more than to say a few Hail Marys. As children, they used to speculate on what others had done to merit that severe penalty. When she arrived at church on Sunday, the combination of her anger at the priest for meddling in a matter that did not concern religion, and the shaking of her knees, left her completely unable to start the circuit. She turned and left the Catholic church. There is little question that she would soon break with the Catholic church. It happened at sixteen over, of all things, middy blouses.

Eileen told me only a little about her life or jobs during the next years. I knew that, even though she was pregnant, she had immediately left a marriage when she discovered that her husband was borrowing money from her friends. She had lost the child at birth. Of the many jobs she had, I remember only one. She modeled and worked in the office of a lingerie firm. The owner was an unlikely boss. He had been a fullback at Princeton, and been forced to take over the firm on his father's death. He clearly loathed the business. Eileen and another model in the office used to put on the latest and most minimal under-things and treat him to an impromptu fashion show.

I was told one story that occurred during a very emotional period in her life. She was driving into New York by the Queensboro bridge, her eyes had begun to cloud with tears, and her reflexes were slow. Eileen was lagging a bit behind the traffic as the cars were crossing second avenue. The cop directing traffic saw his chance and signaled her to stop. Slow to respond she continued into the intersection. The cop quickly stopped the trucks that had started to roll, and signaled her to continue. By this time she had registered his signal to stop, and jammed on the brakes. The car stopped right in the middle of second avenue. The cop approaching her car, saw tears now flowing copiously down a true map-of-Ireland face. "Lady," he said "Will you please get off my corner."

A few years later Eileen began to suffer from an ever increasing shortage of breath. She had always been extremely active, while walking briskly in the streets of New York, or hiking in the Catskills or the Adirondacks. She went to various doctors and clinics, but none were able to find a reason for her problem. One evening she accompanied a friend who had made an appointment for a complete physical. The doctor had left Germany and set up practice in Queens. His office equipment included a fancy new X Ray machine. After having finished the physical of her friend, the doctor evidently feeling gemutlich said, "Here lets have a look at you. Strip to the waist and stand in front of my new machine." He turned on the machine, moved the scope into position, and exclaimed, "What is this that I am seeing. There is a large lump in your left lung. Have you had any X Rays in the last few years? If we could find such an X-ray, we would learn how rapidly this has developed." Eileen remembered that a chest X. Ray was required when she went to work at the New York Stock Exchange. She went and got the film. On the envelope there was a notation on the lump, and the sentence, "This does not concern us." They had never bothered to alert her. The delay probably did not exacerbate the problem. During that time the technique of open chest surgery was growing about as fast as her cyst.

The surgery at Bellevue went as well as could be expected. Eileen had no sooner regained consciousness when she asked to have the color that indicated a Catholic patient removed from the head of her bed. She had no desire for consolation by a priest. A more welcome visitor was an intern who stopped by to chat whenever he could. After she was released from the hospital the intern came by her house when he had the time. As she regained strength they went occasionally to the inexpensive neighborhood movie house. That came to an abrupt end when he was drafted into the army and sent to the middle west for the training in the emergency surgery required to treat wounded soldiers. When he was about to finish the course, he called to say that he was coming back to await embarkation to Europe. The staging area was across the Hudson over in New Jersey. Eileen went over to see him off, with the thought that she would refuse no reasonable request.

The staging area was a mob scene. Nearly every soldier had either his family or a girl friend over to see him off. No hotel room was vacant and every bench in a small park was taken. After searching and wandering around for some hours it became apparent that Eileen's strength was beginning to be overtaxed. The only option was to put her on the ferry back to New York. One might note that the second night Eileen and I spent in San Diego was all too frustratingly similar.

A couple of years later he wrote that in days he would be leaving France and returning to New York. Eileen's feelings for him were unchanged, and she looked forward to whatever he might propose. It turned out that what he had in mind was a night on the town in New York with all the bells and whistles. First there was a dinner at a fancy restaurant, followed by a Broadway musical. There had been no way to spend the money he had earned while in France, and he regarded it his duty to spend and tip as lavishly as he could. At two in the morning they were in the Blue Angel nightclub and a cigarette girl came by. Her tray had space for a few stuffed animals, and he tried to buy her one. Telling me the story later she said."Do I look like the stuffed animal lover type?" Refusing the proffered gift she got up from the table and walked out of his life. No other suitor ever played his cards as badly.

Chapter Three

It became apparent that Eileen had best choose a sedentary profession to ease the strain on her lungs. The choice was accountancy, and in short order she completed the studies and took the required exam to qualify as a senior accountant - just one long step below an exalted certified public accountant. One audit she worked on was at the Beechnut plant north of New York. There was a continuing problem in that the audit never balanced. The individual accounts always balanced, but the overall total never did. Each evening as the auditors quit they gave Beechnut's treasurer a list of the accounts they wanted to audit on the following day. Every morning he had all those folders pulled, and racked up in order, waiting for them.

One day one of the auditors noted that the credits shown on the accounts had a suspicious pattern. The auditor knew that the FCC rules required that when goods were delivered to dealers by the trucking firms, the money received had to be returned to the shipper within only a few days. The trucking firms were delivering goods almost daily, but the money that showed up under 'received' in the accounts came in large batches. The Beechnut treasurer had spent every night shifting money between the accounts to keep them in balance. As the discrepancies got ever larger the amount of money he had to transfer between the accounts got ever greater, and a pattern at odds with the FCC rules became only too apparent. The amount of money he had embezzled was not large, and he had taken it because of a crisis caused by his wife's hospital bills. Beechnut had to let him go, but decided under the circumstances not to seek his arrest.

When Eileen went west she started to shift between Yellowstone and Palm Springs and was reasonably happy. She had made staunch friends at Yellowstone. Once she asked one of the managers, could he could pick up something at a store outside the park. He took his car keys off a hook and tossed them to her, implying that anytime she needed the car she had only to ask. Palm Springs was a different matter. The winter residents were mostly young wives with small children sent to The Desert Inn by their husbands, to escape at least part of the winters in the East. Since Eileen had access to the personal files, she knew that a significant portion of the staff had been in juvenile detention. The young wives didn't know or care. They were bored and the staff were only too happy to provide any services they desired to help fill their empty days or nights. Sometimes Eileen was also attracted to one or another of the staff, although she realized it was a mistake and hated herself for it.

Charter 4

Marriage to Dick Wells did not auger well for Eileen. She was everything he was not. Having become a total New Yorker, she was more committed to that life style than many born in New York. That is not unusual. Many of the most enthusiastic San Franciscans were not born there. Eileen had become exceptionally well self-educated. She had read extensively from Gide and Proust to the Russians. Visiting us in Berkeley she discovered we had Tolkien's 'Ring Cycle' and was enchanted by it. I have known many very well educated people, many with sterling academic credentials, but by any criterion Eileen was their equal. She had a true Irish gift for the spoken language. The hotel where we had spent that first night was an old one, and the bathroom in our room was added well after the hotel was built. To fit in the drain pipes under the toilet it was elevated on a low platform. Eileen-"I have frequently heard it called the throne, but this is the first one I have seen on a dais."

Dick had come down from rural Montana to work at Douglas aircraft during the war. When Eileen met him he was working in Pacoima near San Fernando building walls of stucco on track bungalows. Everywhere, in the Los Angeles area, developers had gotten hold of tracks of desert land, brought in water and thrown up row after row of nearly identical houses. The type of construction was unique. A slab was poured, and the basic structure was framed in using mostly 2x4 studs. This was then covered with tar paper and chicken wire fastened by nails driven through the tar paper and into the studs. Next the stucco was slapped on, and as soon as the roofers got finished the house was ready for interior work. With the patchwork of municipal entities and the other areas governed only by the Los Angeles County, building codes and inspectors to enforce them, usually did not exist. The Los Angeles area was truly "seven suburbs in search of a city."

Dick had had little formal education in Montana, and had no interest in self improvement. The successful marriages between bright women and duller men are rare. In Eileen and Dick's the gap was almost a light year and the chance of success was small. In her heart Eileen knew she was making a mistake. She was lonely and in somewhat poor health, and she hoped that Dick would take care of her and treat her kindly.

After they were married, they bought a home in Granada Hills a few miles west of San Fernando. It was in a pleasant area not yet completely built up. There was even a riding trail that snaked between the groups of houses. They bought a small Airstream trailer and went on a cross country tour, that came to our house in Bethesda, Maryland. A county bus passed close by, and it connected to the new subway system at Friendship Heights. The subway has stops near The National Gallery, The Smithsonian Museums, The White House and almost anywhere else a tourist might want to go in DC. Using our house as a base, they spent a few days doing the sights.

As one might have of anticipated, the marriage eventually failed. Instead of taking care of Eileen and being considerate of her frail health, Dick insisted that she work as hard as she could so that he would have the money for the things he wanted. Tired of that arrangement, she sought a divorce. By that time, they had built a good sized house in the very small town of Yucca Valley. It is up in the foothills to the north and east of Palm Springs. On their separation Eileen acquired the house. Dick had moved in with a girl friend in Morongo Valley, the next town down the road toward Los Angeles. Yucca Valley had a small independent local phone system, and its own water district. Eileen worked there trying to straighten out yet another set of messed up books. The residents had been billed only sporadically and many owed considerable sums.

It was during this time that we received a long letter, containing a litany of misfortunes. There had been one death and two murders in her family. The natural death was of her mother who had grown senile. In her letter Eileen had written that she was not unhappy about that death since she regarded it both inevitable and merciful. I can remember that Eileen had a favorite nephew, a child of her sister. As his birthday or Christmas approached, she shopped the stores for something like the most elaborate toy tow truck in existence - one with lights, a crane to haul up a car onto the truck's bed, perhaps even a horn or a siren. At the time she went east he was much older. After he had finished his master's degree and had married, they had gone away on a brief honeymoon. That very day they had just returned to a small apartment that they had rented. After dinner he was at the garbage chute off the hall. A man came out with a shotgun and blew him apart. His killer insisted that God had told him to do it.

Eileen's older brother and his wife were divorced and she was living in what had been their home. He had come to do maintenance on the house. This included the replacement of the putty on some windows. As he was finishing up, they got into a screaming argument that so frightened their son that he got a pistol and gave it to his mother. Probably making some particularly wounding remark, he had turned and was walking away from her, when she lethally shot him in the back. At the inquest, she maintained that she had to defend herself since he had a putty knife in his hand. This was nonsense. He was a six foot ten inch motorcycle policeman, and he could have broken nearly every bone in her body with his bare hands, should that have been his intention. Even worse a photographer from the New York Daily News had shown up and photographed the house with his body in the foreground. It ran on the front page of the News. For several days Eileen received torn pages from the newspaper. The wife had the gall to go to the funeral and sit just behind Eileen and the remaining member of the family. I wish I could quote from Eileen's letter directly, but unfortunately I no longer have it. When I had shown it to a friend who had worked as a writer at the National Institute of Health, he was as impressed as I was with the elegance of her prose.

Then living in the East, I sometimes went to the Los Angeles area on defense business. Eileen was still working for the telephone-water company. A jammed flue had covered every wall in the house with a layer of greasy soot. It would have taken at least a day to wash it off using trisodium phosphate (TSP) in hot water. Ironically the remaining brother had left the New York Police Department and was in the paint business in the Los Angeles area. He might well have tackled those blackened walls. As for Eileen, she had just given up trying to do anything about the house. She returned to her sister's home in Queens and died there some years ago.
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