Southern California Job Market : Looking Back : The Bad Old Days : Over Bingo, Remembering Some <i> Really </i> Hard Times

One in 10 Californians is unemployed. Consumer confidence is sour. Real estate is slumping. You call that hard times? Virginia Sotolongo and Betty McInerney will tell you about hard times.

“I remember the Depression, and this is no Depression,” Sotolongo says stoutly, as her sister bobs in assent. “Boy, it was bad back then.”

The Glassell Park sisters are 75 and 69, respectively, native daughters of California with burnished red hair and nails to match. They didn’t have two nickels to rub together after their father lost his job. The time was 1933, and one in four Americans was unemployed. People worked without a social safety net. Betty and Virginia stood on a street corner, selling apple turnovers their mother baked at home.

“We’d use the money to buy things for school, like cloth to make dresses. Dad got a job in the commissary, working downtown. That was before he split.” McInerney sighs and Sotolongo picks up: “Each summer, all the kids would go out to the orchards and pick fruit. I remember peaches, oh my.”

The sisters laugh at the memory. They are among the lucky ones, all gathered at these tables, because they survived. Time has dulled the pain of long-ago evictions, inadequate food and abandonment.

On this recent summer day their stomachs are full, warmed by a $1.50 lunch of beef burgundy with noodles, squash, cookies and milk at the South Pasadena Senior Citizens Center. Soon the weekly bingo game commences. But the hunger to reminisce lingers.

“I remember collecting $7.50 a week, and I was damn glad to get it,” pipes up George Hopfer, 77, a dapper man with cornflower blue eyes and a tan summer suit. “Of course, I lived at home with my parents in Pittsburgh, so there wasn’t any rent. And $7.50 went a long way then.”

Agreement leaps from throat to throat like a refrain from a scratchy phonograph. No, it wasn’t much by today’s standards, but one could live.

“You could make it on $5 a week,” affirms Elizabeth Gordin, taking a break in the lobby of the Spanish-style building from her job preparing lunch for up to 60 people each day. At 80, Gordin styles her snowy hair in a pageboy that shows off bone structure today’s models go under a knife for. She grew up in Canoga Park when the San Fernando Valley was mostly sun-baked fields. A loaf of bread cost 10 cents; a quart bottle of milk was 7 cents.

“The whole neighborhood was poor, but we helped each other. There was a lady, she would cook a pot of beans and go around with a bowl for everyone. A guy next door had a farm, he told Mom, help yourself, take anything you need, I think maybe he wanted to get more than friendly with her. Mom worked in a deluxe restaurant and they gave her leftover food to take home. We weren’t hungry, you understand, but it was poverty. There weren’t any dimes or nickels to look at.”

Gordin’s father worked for the railroads, and the whole family got free passage down to Mexico to visit relatives. Her mother died when Elizabeth was 13. The young girl was shipped to a foster home.

She never had to ride the rails. But “you’d see the trains go by with hobos, whole families would ride for miles, from one state to another. And they would eat off the fields.

“I remember them coming to the back door, asking for something to eat,” Gordin continues. “They would mark a tree in front of your house if you gave them food, then all the other hobos who came would know. My mother always gave it to them; didn’t your mother?” Gordin asks her 80-year-old friend Esther Sinclair, who works the front desk.

“G-54,” the announcer intones from the other room, drowning out her reply. “We have a bingo.”

Irving Iskin, 93, long retired to Palm Springs from New York’s rag trade, sits at a card table plastered with 18 bingo cards. He is spry and fit in his striped shorts, sitting next to Janet, his 83-year-old wife of five years. Love becomes them; neither looks a day over 70. Twice a month, they motor in from the desert to leafy South Pasadena.

“Honey, this is nothing compared to the Great Depression,” Janet says. “People were jumping out of high-story buildings.”

Her comments jog a submerged memory in Irving. “I knew a cloak-and-suit man who jumped in New York,” he says. “In those days, I was only a young kid making $10 or $15 a week. I was a salesman in a ladies’ dress factory. Thank God, I had a fairly decent job.”

He ponders then and now. “There were no drugs and gangs and homeless people. Relatives took them in. I supplied food to two families every Saturday--my brother-in-law and a nephew.”

Growing up across the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma City as the eldest of six children, Sinclair recalls leaner days. One night, the family stayed up late without supper, waiting for Dad to come home with money from an odd job so they could buy something to eat. When her father walked in, though, he carried only a rag rug--payment from someone equally destitute.

“We all went to bed hungry that night,” Sinclair recalls.

She worked at a dime store--that’s right, lots of things cost a dime--54 hours a week for $8.10 with no overtime, and “if you didn’t get your job done, people were lined up to take it.” She was bright, so a rich uncle offered to pay her way through college. But Sinclair turned him down--she was needed at home: “I was the only one with a steady job, see.”

She hopes we’re not headed for another crash, but she’d weather it.

She’s done it before, and with experience comes a measure of sagacity.

Young people today, though, they might find it hard to adjust, she says. They’re used to too much comfort.

“I know people are hurting. It’s a comedown, especially for those who have been drawing the high salaries. You have to feel sorry for them, but you’ve got to keep in mind that the end of the road is going to come.”

She means, of course, that all things pass. That goes for the good times--and fortunately, it also goes for the bad.