High School Graduate, Charlene moves to San Francisco

Written by Charlene Ann Brague Jackson

 After graduating from high school, I went to San Francisco to live with my grandmother (my dad’s stepmother), Grandma Renee.  I felt it was time for me to get out and to experience the world.  Of course living with Grandma was not complete freedom because she had rules and she was strict with them, but she and her husband, Neil Compton, were good to me.

I spent the first three months with them going to comptometer school.  This was an instrument that was used before the adding machines we have now.  You had rows of numbers from 1 to 10 lined up from top to bottom.  You actually used only the bottom five numbers, and you had to learn to use them without looking to add columns of figures.

After I graduated from this school, I obtained a job in the office of a grocery store chain.  We sat all day long and added the numbers of the produce that went to each store to verify what the merchants had billed.  It was really boring, but new to me and I had some good friends there.  The office was on the Embarcadero and overlooked the San Francisco Bay.  It was on a hill and about half way down the hill was a little grocery that had the most wonderful pastrami sandwiches, which we would go down sometimes to get for lunch, much to grandma’s horror, because she thought that I shouldn’t spend my money that way , I should be taking a lunch from home (she was quite frugal having lived in Europe during the second world war).

 Every Friday night my girlfriends and I would go “bar hopping”.  They had their drinks and I drank Shirley Temples until I got sick of them.  A Shirley Temple is a 7 up with cherry juice in it.  This was in 1956 and San Francisco was quite safe.  So from town I would take the street car to the top of Nob Hill, then a bus to St. Francis Woods area and be dropped of at the bottom of our street and walked three blocks up the hill to our house, and this was at midnight.  Very different now!  When my brother, Carl, went on his mission to Holland I went home (by bus) to his farewell and decided to stay home.