Marshall &Kay Family  Histories

 

 

 Another San Francisco Apt.

4th & 5th grade

 

So back in San Francisco, and I think for a year I went to public school. And I would come home from school every day and take care of myself in the apartment, while my parents were still at work.  They called me and got worried about me at some point in time because I was alone so much in the apartment. By that time I was in fourth and fifth grade. So I can remember walking to school and back, it was no big deal, everybody walked to school. But the thing I remember was that you walked this way and that way, and on the way home, you walked this way and that way. Up and down the hills, down the other direction from our apartment house. I remember there was a store that had comic books. And I used to love to go down to that store, and buy comic books and ice cream after school, and bring it back to the house. And that's what I spent my allowance on. I used to have so many comic books. In those days we read about Sheena the Queen of the Jungle, and we read about Captain Midnight, and the Phantom, and a bunch of good ones. Good comic books, not the comic books they have now. They have junk out now, but those comic books were fun. That's right, they had Batman, and Superman, good Batman and Good Superman, not messed up. But I had this stack of comic books, such a collection. 

 

 

The Convent Decision

I think my parents eventually got worried about me being alone so long after school until they got home. However, they would assign me chores. I was supposed to clean the apartment and do things like that, but that didn't take very long. So after a year or so, that's when Mother took me to the convent, and decided to enroll me as a boarding student in the Catholic Convent in San Francisco. In fact it wasn't too awfully far from where we lived. I must've been in sixth grade by that time, because I spent sixth, seventh, and eighth grade in the Convent. I didn't want to go to the Convent. I did it because Mother told me that's the only choice we have. She told me that she had researched all the other boarding schools around and she didn't feel that any of them would be safer than the Catholic Convent. Because I remember, I kept asking her, why the Catholic school? But she told me that it was the best one they could find. It may have been the least expensive, I really don't know for sure. But I do remember I did not want to go, and I remember when we went there and I was introduced to the nuns, and then the Convent area, and oh, I just did not want to stay. It was just so strange and so cold. As I've said before though, so many times, I think Mother did the very best she could for me, I really do. And I think that was probably the best decision she could have made for my good. I think something bad might have happened to me if I hadn't been in that place as a student. So I think she did the very best she could do. And the option wasn't open to go back to anybody else's, my Aunt's and Uncle's, that sort of thing. 

 

So I used to come home on the weekends from the Convent and visit with my parents. But I spent the next three years in the Convent. And I learned a lot of things there. I think I learned a great deal of sympathy for the Catholic people and I learned why it's difficult for Catholic people to accept any other religion. I feel I learned lots of things there that I might not have learned any other way. And that's also where I had "The Special Dream", when I was there. 

 

 

 

Summer Camp with the Convent

While at the convent I would go to their summer camp. And I spent the first summer a regular camper. But immediately I did not like that. I was not a camper, never have been a camper. I didn't like going on the hikes, doing work, I didn't like anything. I didn't like getting up in the morning. I remember thinking if I have to come back to camp, I'm not going to come back a regular camper, I'm going to come back as a worker. Because they had some students there that they called workers, and you could earn money and you didn't have to do the things campers did. So I remember applying for that the next year I went back to camp. And I got part way through my camp year, and finally they let me be a worker. So I spent part of that summer being a worker and the following summer I was a worker, the whole summer. All those different experiences had their negative and their positive side. My friend, Robert Ray, was a camper and I was a worker, so I didn't do much with her the last year there at camp, we didn't see each other much. 

 

 

Bad summer camp experience

 

I was the youngest worker there and some of the older girls really didn’t accept me. You know how that goes. You know girls at that age are so awful to one another anyway.  And that was where I had my very first experience of having a group of girls set me up for a fall, you might say. And I think it’s probably happened in every young woman’s life at some time or another or in some way. I knew that they didn’t like me because I was too young for them. But I kept trying to fit in the group anyway. And it really bothered them. But they were going to have a party and they did this about once a week, have a party at one of the workers cabins. So one week they asked if I would like to have the party in my cabin and I said oh, yes, because that was a privilege. And I was excited and asked what can I bring, what can I bring? And they said, don’t bring anything. And I thought that was strange because everybody always had to bring something. So they finally talked me out of it, don’t bring anything, so I didn’t. 

 

  So they all came to my cabin right on time for the party. Pretty soon someone said, what did you bring? And I said they told me not to bring anything, I wasn’t supposed to. Then they started teasing me telling me how selfish I was and all the sort of stuff. And I didn’t even catch on at first, I thought what are they talking about, you know. Finally one girl who was chosen to be the spokes person told me that they had set me up because they wanted to prove what kind of person I really was and they wanted me to understand once and for all that I did not belong in their group. In other words it was a pretty devastating thing to have happen. They said I was selfish, that I just didn’t fit in, you know, and I was not to try and be in their group any more, and it just went on like this. And finally she kind of ran out of steam. In the meantime, it really took a long time for me as I sat there and listened for it to finally set in. I thought, this can’t be happening, you know. At that point they all started to leave. And one girl came up to me afterwards just  as they were all leaving, and she was the only one that did, and she came up to me and apologized.  She said that she was really, really sorry, that she didn’t know it was going to happen that way and she didn’t think they’d been nice and she never would’ve come if she’d known. And I think it was so nice of her to do that, because there was at least one.

 

But I was so hurt by that situation afterwards that I really, really internalized it. So that I really did not associate with them ever, ever again. Even when some of them tried to make friendly overtures I had a wall, I put up a wall. And I never ever, ever let anybody in after that. For a long time after camp, they were always there and I wouldn’t let that wall down. I was just going to let them know that I really did not need them.  And in a way it was too bad because I kept that attitude about many people and many things in life after that, I kept that wall. It took a long time for that wall to come down.

 

But like I say, this has happened to many people. Sometime in their life a situation like that has happened. But at the time I didn’t know that, I thought I was the only one. You know how that is. As it turned out, towards the end of that year, that summer, my mother called and told me there was going to be a change again and I was so excited. I said oh boy, I get to go back to school again, I don’t have to go back to the convent. And that’s what she told me, she said we’ve decided you don’t have to go back to the convent, I was so excited. And no, I didn’t have to face these girls, just until the end of the summer.