Southern California’s Recession Has Turned Many Lives Topsy-Turvy. Some Find Themselves : Down but Not Out

Their jobs are gone. Wiped out with long-familiar store names and the home sellers’ market. Ousted in mergers, deep-frozen by post-Cold War priorities, gobbled up in the gluttony of junk-bond financing and bad loans. Swept away by an economic storm.

And like victims of a hurricane or an earthquake, Southern Californians who have borne the brunt of the recession are having to sort through the rubble of their lives.

Some, bowed by the limitations of training, age or temperament, get mired in the bogs of unemployment. But many others, showing surprising resilience and stalwart energy, are starting over. Unable to wait for a full recovery or the call back that may never come--and often with a big pay cut and genuine grief for their lost vocation--they are weaving themselves back into the shrunken fabric of the Southern California economy.

A legal secretary uses her severance pay to start a free-lance typing business. A movie-set painter takes jobs from residential interior decorators. A food industry executive buys a coffee shop. A garment worker juggles two jobs, night classes and baby-sitting on the way to a career in child care.

The job loss statistics are staggering, sometimes swamping the individuals who are among the numbered. Some industries and businesses have been forever changed. The Buffum’s name won’t likely grace a storefront again, nor will tellers be hired by Security Pacific Bank. Aerospace and defense firms employ 100,000 fewer than just a few years ago.

A national recovery will bring jobs back, says Robert Arnold of the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto. “There’s no shortage of occupations and jobs if the economy is increasing at a fast-enough pace,” he said.

That’s little consolation to those who find themselves scrimping to get by, those risking their savings or pursuing new career paths. Beginning today, The Times will publish an occasional series of articles focusing on eight such individuals. In subsequent stories throughout the year, we will revisit them, tracking their progress and perhaps sharing the hardships while they are starting over.

Frank Chavoya

There are ways to measure what Frank Chavoya has lost in this recession: the family savings, the huge drop in his earnings, the little luxuries they can no longer afford--dinner or a movie out now and then.

But it’s the intangibles that Chavoya misses most. In his heart, he still is a carpenter, though for too long there’s been too little of the work he loves. He’s in his 30s, a time when most folks expect that job security and earnings will be just about even with life’s responsibilities.

Chavoya has the responsibilities, not the security.

“It’s kind of weird,” he says, “not knowing what I’ll be doing six months from now.”

For now at least, Chavoya has put aside his hopes that the long dry spell in the construction industry will end soon. With two children, and another due in October, the Chavoyas needed more than his wife’s modest salary as a secretary and the five months of carpentry pay he collected over two long years.

“Our priority right now is making our mortgage payment” on their Pico Rivera house, Chavoya says. “Nothing else is as important.”

So he works part-time at a nearby high school as a campus aide and security guard. The pay, $8.75 an hour, is a far cry from the $24 an hour and overtime he earned in construction. And last month, Chavoya took a step toward the future--but away from his trade--beginning a course to learn car-alarm installation.

Even when building picks up, Chavoya may not be able to go back. More and more of the jobs are going to non-union laborers or to union members with close ties to contractors. And the part-time job and night classes have cost him flexibility.

“I don’t think I could afford to quit my job . . . for the (promise of) two or three weeks of carpentry work. But I’d consider it if I was offered two or three months,” he says. “It’s really a difficult position to be in.”

Yet his determination is clear. “I just have to get me and my family through this recession,” he says, “and be prepared for the day when things finally pick up again.”

Barry Bernson

The IRS has Barry Bernson’s number this tax season, and it isn’t pretty. Bernson is paying hefty penalties and taxes for cashing out his individual retirement account last year.

“I had to do it. I had to drain my savings, my credit union account and my IRA,” says Bernson, a 42-year-old film prop maker and special-effects man who worked only 10 weeks in 1992.

On union jobs, that is.

There were also some odd jobs--some under the table and some that barely put food on the table. And yes, he even took some non-union work in the industry, he says--a pragmatist in a world of false fronts and breakaway glass.

In the dry months, when he couldn’t stretch the unemployment checks around all the bills, he reached into his credit cards for cash advances to pay the rent on his Woodland Hills apartment.

Bernson has watched the steady exodus of film makers and television producers out of Southern California in favor of cheaper locations and labor. “Only 24% of all work done was in Hollywood last year. That’s total, including television,” he says, as easily as if it were a well-rehearsed movie line.

So he is planning to get out--but not just now, and not all the way. This business is all he knows, so he’s reshaping his career, going to night workshops to learn to be a director. “It will take a long time,” he says. “It won’t be tomorrow.”

In the meantime, he’s trying to get his 20th year in the union--a year measured not by the calendar but in hours worked--so he’ll qualify for a solid pension and lifetime medical benefits.

It has not been easy to find the jobs. The bleakness of 1992 followed him into the new year. He lost his union-paid medical coverage. January and February slid by, and he had worked only six days. The rest of the time, he read Variety and the trades for tips on shoots and went from studio to studio, producer to producer, trying to hustle jobs.

Finally, this month, he went back to work, on a movie set at Universal Studios. It could last two, maybe three months. He might go on location--or one day simply be told not to come back. Even in good times, movie craft work is a day-to-day proposition.

More and more jobs seem to go to younger workers, he says, though Bernson works as if to prove that being over 40 is no handicap: If the job starts at 6 a.m., he’s there by 5:30.

He knows it won’t last. “I’ve got one more year in this,” he says. “Then I may move out of the state for good.”

Jeff Weekes

Five-year-old Brianne Weekes just loves having daddy around as chief lunch-packer, school chauffeur and occasional escort on walks. Her 3-year-old sister, Tara, doesn’t seem quite so reconciled to the arrangement.

“Tara likes to get up and sit on Mom’s lap and snuggle, and she doesn’t do that with me so much,” says Jeff Weekes. “She hides up in her room and says things like, ‘Don’t see me.’ She’s a little more ornery with me.”

They’ve all been making adjustments since November, when Weekes, 32, lost his job as a manufacturing engineer at Rockwell International’s Anaheim plant.

His wife, Anne, used to have more time for snuggling when she worked part time as a registered nurse. Now she has two nursing jobs, and the hours are long for the 29-year-old mother. Some days she’s gone before breakfast and doesn’t get back until after dinner; other times, it’s the late shift, and she gets home long after the girls are tucked in.

Like Tara, Jeff is struggling with the changes in their family life. He frets about his wife’s exhausting schedule and regrets the things they’ve had to put off--like a new patio, deck and swing set they wanted, and payments on the loan from Anne’s parents that helped them buy their Corona house in 1988.

And he’s restless for the rewards he used to find on the job. “I miss being able to work and see something come out of the work that I am doing,” Weekes says. At Rockwell, he often supervised assembly of sophisticated equipment--gyroscopes and navigational instruments for Navy submarines and the F-111 fighter.

Besides child care and housework, Jeff works at finding a job, often with Tara at his side. He takes her along on excursions to Rockwell’s placement center or to the library while he researches potential employers.

Nearly four months--and 100 resumes--into unemployment, Weekes has had but four interviews. Only one possible nibble. He would relocate for a job and believes that his skills could fit in a non-defense setting.

Not everyone agrees.

At one company, Weekes made it to the second round of interviews, only to be told by the plant president that people coming from a defense background “ ‘can’t handle this job in the commercial world.’ Obviously, I didn’t get the job,” he says.

Now, the assembly work he does is decidedly low-tech: packing Brianne’s lunch box with a snack of crackers and chocolate pudding. “I can see,” he muses, “where housewives can go crazy after a while.”

Michael Mack

More than six months had passed between Michael Mack’s layoff from McDonnell Douglas’ Long Beach plant and his first job interview, just this month. The chance came through a friend, not from all the work he has put into job-hunting. No matter, he was glad to have it.

The interview was going well. The owner of a small machine shop in Torrance seemed impressed. The job, supervising about 25 workers making bearings, seemed a good fit. That is, until Mack learned that the pay would be $5.75 an hour.

He was flabbergasted. When he left Douglas after 17 years as an aerospace assembly worker, Mack was making nearly $11 an hour. “I can’t pay my bills with that! I told them I was willing to take a cut in pay, but that was ridiculous,” he says.

Since August, Mack has gone at least once a week to the Verdugo Job Career and Placement Center in Burbank. He uses their computers in his job search. And their phones too; it all adds up when you’re living on unemployment compensation and money borrowed from relatives.

It’s tough, though, looking at job listings for janitors, fast-food workers and termite inspectors when you’ve got a degree in electronic engineering. Discouragement is getting harder to fend off.

He thinks about going to school, but can’t get past the price tag: A one-week course he’d like to take in computer-aided design costs $1,500. It’s already tough enough to make payments on his house in South-Central Los Angeles.

His family has been supportive. But still, Mack feels cut off from people since he lost his job. He’s 38, single and apprehensive. “No one wants to go out with someone who doesn’t have a job,” he says. “People avoid you.”

So he scours the listings for a job. He makes the rounds of job fairs. He hears over and over again that he’s not quite qualified for the engineering jobs he’d like. Too qualified for such non-aerospace jobs as a machinist or electrician.

The last time that happened was at a job fair where Mack talked to a recruiter about a position installing cellular phones in cars. Here he was, a man who had spent years using complex machinery to put together aircraft, now considering a job using simple hand tools--a drill, screwdriver, wire cutters.

He applied anyway. “It’s not exactly what I want to do . . . but at least they’re paying more than $5 an hour.”

The Thurners

They were super agents who just about had their pick of clients. The Southern California housing market was sizzling. Buyers were snatching up property the same day it came on the market, sometimes paying more than the asking price. It was almost routine for Walt and Dolorie Thurner to be the top producers among the crowd at Century 21 A Marketplace in Long Beach.

But in 1990, the real estate market virtually collapsed, the weight of the recession flattening out all those years of double-digit rises in home values.

And now, the Thurners find themselves part of a new working class--the ones working a whole lot harder for way less money.

Now they have to cultivate clients. They spend more of their money on marketing. “Back in the late ‘80s . . . if you couldn’t return a phone call, there would always be another (buyer) later,” Walt says. “We don’t have that luxury today.”

At 52, he’s getting back to basics: “We’re walking through neighborhoods and knocking on doors and we’re doing a lot more cold-calling.”

They’ve also had to branch out. Dolorie, 50, took a job with a company that distributes small gifts and collectibles. Going on sales calls to card shops and boutiques, she says, “introduces me to a whole new group of people who might want to buy or sell a house.”

Besides, it gives her a steady paycheck--something she can no longer count on in real estate, although she’s still putting in about 40 hours a week trying to match sellers and buyers.

Even when the commissions were piling up, working together was a built-in opportunity for tension in the Thurners’ marriage. Now, with harder times, more work and more worries comes more stress.

Still, they make time for weekend getaways. “We have a rule when we go away--no phones, no pagers, no nothing,” Walt says. “If we didn’t get away every now and then, we’d go nuts.”

Linda Ford

When the real estate market was hot, Linda Ford was basking in success. She had her own public relations agency, a six-figure income, a place on the Westside and membership in an exclusive health club.

The Ford Group--four account executives, support staff and Ford--was spread over 2,000 square feet of Beverly Hills office space and billing real estate and art clients at a $300,000 annual clip.

Then the market for houses--and luxuries such as art--went ice cold. Clients slashed their PR budgets. Worse, some went into bankruptcy. Now, Ford has one-quarter of the office space, one-third the billings and a staff of one: a receptionist-secretary. She’s quit the health club.

But at 40, Ford has a burgeoning new career.

A little re-examination was in order after Ford cut back her staff. Running a business wasn’t always satisfying, she realized. The administrative headaches had eaten into “the creative part of my job--the part I like the best,” she says.

Less administrating meant more creating. She and a friend, Beth Goodman, wrote a book together. Publishers were nibbling at “The Owner’s Manual: The Fast, Fun & Easy Way to Knowing and Understanding Your Lover.” But Ford wanted more than their meager offering.

Putting her confidence--and her condominium--on the line, she decided to publish the book herself, using her home equity to stake her new company, WonderChild Press. She found a distributor and supplied the publicity herself.

The result: Sales could hit 250,000 this year. Sequels are in the works. And so is a possible new line of work--representing other fledgling authors.

“I’m working twice as hard as I used to and making half as much, but I’m having a lot of fun,” she says. “It really is better to be happy than rich. But one day, I still hope to be both.”

Bob Loya

Bob Loya has been through this before. Six times before. There’s always been another job, except this time. It’s different, he says. A 48-year-old accountant, he knows it’s “the roughest time in Southern California to lose my job.”

Loya had been the $60,000-a-year controller of Golden State Bank, a small savings and loan in Newport Beach. He was laid off last April and spent the next nine months looking for work.

Things got tight around Loya’s Mission Viejo home. His wife, Emily, a nurse, took on all the overtime she could at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills.

Their oldest son also took on more work. It bothers Loya that 20-year-old Robert may be sacrificing his pre-med studies at Cal State Bakersfield. “I worry about how it’s going to affect his future,” the father says.

Loya finally got a job in January. The Resolution Trust Corp., the cleanup agency for the nation’s S&L; mess, hired him as an accountant at First Newport Bank, a thrift it took over last year.

It pays considerably less than he made at Golden State. And it’s temporary. Loya’s small office says that plainly enough. It’s neat, clean and all but empty of personal effects--no books, no pictures on the desk of Emily or their four children.

The job could last five months, maybe nine. So Loya is still looking for something permanent. What’s tough is that he’d like to stay with financial institutions--an industry beset by tough times, with lots of merging and winnowing out of employees.

There have been grim days this last year. At times, Loya realizes, he was difficult to be around. “Losing a job affects a family like death does,” he says.

When he learned he would be leaving Golden State, Loya called a family conference, just as he has at other times of change. Two years ago, Loya promised that the family wouldn’t move until Robert graduated from high school. This time, he gave the same reassurance to 18-year-old David, a senior and all-league football player at Mission Viejo High School.

Yet Loya must look beyond the worries to new opportunities. He got a real estate license--a help if he tries for work in mortgage banking. “You have to keep the attitude,” he says, “that this is the day it’s going to happen.”

Southern California Job Losses

Job losses in key sectors of the Southland economy have been dramatic since July, 1990, just before the recession began showing in area unemployment statistics. Figures are for a five-county area: Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

July, 1990 Dec., 1992 % Change Finance, insurance, real estate 482,200 437,500 -9.3% Construction 343,700 226,400 -34.1% High-Tech/aerospace 419,800 313,400 -25.3% Total non-agriculture 7,118,200 6,633,300 -6.8%

Note: The December, 1992, figures are based on surveys and projections made in March, 1992, and will be revised in June. In most cases, the job losses are likely to be more severe than shown.

Source: California Economic Development Department