Coping and Still Hoping : A Return Visit With Six Victims of the Recession
Jeff Weekes has a job.
It’s not the sort of job he ever imagined for himself. In fact, if someone had whispered “golf clubs” to the Corona aerospace engineer when he was laid off last year, he’d have been as befuddled as was Dustin Hoffman’s character in “The Graduate” upon being counseled that the future lay in “plastics.”
But when Weekes, 32, was offered a position as a manufacturing engineer at Cleveland Golf Co. in Paramount a few weeks ago, he grabbed it.
“Sports equipment is a lot different than spacecraft,” Weekes admitted, “but it’s real nice to be back to work.”
Across the Southland, the many who lost their jobs in the region’s economic shakedown are fumbling for new places in a still-shifting employment landscape. And, slowly, some are finding them.
It’s not easy. The key, according to both the fortunate and the less fortunate, is flexibility. Being able to patch together part-time work, to keep a finger in as many pies as possible and accept a radical change in professions without looking back are increasingly crucial skills in the topsy-turvy labor market of the 1990s.
*
“Wanted: manufacturing engineer.” The small classified ad didn’t even name the employer, but after months of sending out resumes, Jeff Weekes figured he might as well mail one more.
His 5-year-old daughter, Brianne, may have been the happiest member of the family when Weekes was offered the job several interviews later.
After all, Dad had promised she could start gymnastics class as soon as he found work. The news came as a huge relief, too, to Weekes’ wife, Anne, who had been run ragged working two nursing jobs to bring in extra income while he was unemployed.
With Anne back to a two-days-a-week work schedule and plans to install a back yard jungle gym back on track, Weekes says that inconveniences such as his long commute--which can take nearly two hours on some afternoons--are easily overlooked.
The dental plan isn’t as good as his old one and there’s nothing comparable to the generous retirement-savings plan he had at Rockwell International, but the salary at Cleveland Golf is about the same. And, with thousands of aerospace engineers still on the streets, Weekes isn’t complaining.
Indeed, he likes the sense of urgency that comes with a business that is driven by commercial competition rather than government dollars.
And he likes the sense of having a future. Instead of building two submarine navigation units a month, Weekes is overseeing production of 2,200 golf clubs a day. Instead of living with the constant fear that Rockwell would lose a contract, he is looking forward to the golf manufacturer’s planned expansion to a larger plant in Cypress this summer.
“Aerospace has always been cyclical, and now it’s gotten a lot worse,” Weekes said. “But there’s always a demand for golf clubs. I think I’m a lot more secure in a leisure-type industry, where I am now.”
*
Bob Loya hasn’t had much time for leisure lately. The temporary accounting job he found after nine months of searching last year is almost sure to end in a few months.
The 48-year-old Mission Viejo resident hopes to land a job soon at one of two companies bidding for Resolution Trust Corp. contracts, but that work, too, will last only a year at most.
Meanwhile, he’s not waiting around. Loya has acquired a real estate license and is moonlighting on commission for a Huntington Beach mortgage company. He pitches home refinancings in the evenings and on weekends.
Soon, he plans to post flyers advertising mortgage offers in Mission Viejo and Rancho Santa Margarita neighborhoods.
“I’m looking at any and all options,” Loya said. “Hopefully, one of them will pan out.”
*
Linda Ford’s version of flexibility has a slightly different twist:
With business at her Beverly Hills public-relations firm off by nearly two-thirds, the 40-year-old Ford has transformed herself into a “love expert.”
In just three months, her book--”The Owner’s Manual: The Fast, Fun & Easy Way to Knowing and Understanding Your Lover”--has sold more than 8,000 copies at $7.95 each. That makes it one of its distributor’s hottest titles.
After financing the book’s publication with a home-equity loan, Ford has turned to marketing herself--with considerable success. She has peddled her love advice on radio and TV talk-shows over the past few months, and the book has been reviewed in several newspapers.
To boost sales further, Ford also sponsored a no-frills contest for the book distributor’s salespeople. Whoever sells the most copies will win two round-trip tickets to St. Martin and a week at her mother’s time-share vacation home there.
Ford got the airline tickets for free by cashing in her frequent-flier credits. And, she says, “Mom wasn’t going to use the week anyway.”
Meanwhile, the PR business slowly is starting to pick up, too.
*
There are sellers getting multiple offers on their homes. There are long-time renters who finally want to buy. And, as if that wasn’t enough, it’s spring.
For the first time in a long time, things are looking up for real estate agents Walt and Dolorie Thurner.
They’ve worked hard over the last few months building a rapport with lenders to help their often cash-poor buyers get loans. They’ve done all they could to show renters how soft prices and the lowest mortgage rates in two decades make this a perfect time to purchase a home.
And they say it’s beginning to pay off.
“Sales always pick up in the spring because it’s the prime home-buying season, but I think that’s only a small factor,” Walt Thurner explained. “My gut says that the housing slump is over and the market’s finally turning around.”
*
Things have turned around for Barry Bernson, too--but not the way he had hoped.
On Tuesday, Bernson got a pink slip. After just two months, his work on a movie set at Universal Studios was ended.
Jobs are always day-to-day for Bernson, a prop maker and special effects man, as for others in the television and movies craft. Bernson just thought there would be more days this time.
“That’s just the way this business is,” he said.
Bernson and the dozen or more workers laid off from the movie set this week will find job-hunting tough. Typically, this is a slow period in the industry; work doesn’t pick up until June, when the studios begin shooting their fall TV programs.
With little hope of finding a studio job, Bernson filed an unemployment claim Wednesday. He knows what living on unemployment compensation is like--he did it for eight months before he got the job at Universal.
Only now, he’ll have to stretch that check even further. Last weekend, he bought a new van.
“I’ve got enough (money) for the first payment,” he said. “And then? That’s a good question. . . . And then what?”
