BOEING BUST AFTERMATH

WHEN I COMPLETED SIX MONTHS IN THE US, I APPLIED AT THE Immigration Department for my work permit. I was fully supported by Tom but he insisted that I should not work without a proper work permit. The rules governing permits for work in the US have kept evolving over the years. Back in 1971-72, they were not as complicated as they are now.

There was no US Citizen & Immigration Services (USCIS) then as all such functions were carried out by the Immigration and Naturalization Services. It was only when the Department of Homeland Security was set up in 2003 that INS got carved into multiple departments, with USCIS being assigned all activities related to immigration.

My sponsor on record was another cousin of mine, John Purcal, who was working as the financial advisor for World Bank for Asian
countries. His term had finished and he went back to Calgary to rejoin academics at the university. I used this as an excuse and told Immigration authorities that my sponsor had left the country so I needed work to cover my expenses.

The Immigration Department granted me the required work permit. Soon, I started hunting for night jobs so that I could go to day school. Most of the night jobs are janitorial or connected to hotel and restaurant-related businesses. I walked all over the town and applied everywhere.
One restaurant offered me a job as a busboy which is essentially a waiter's assistant. But they asked me to find my uniform, white pants and shirt. I did not have this set of dress combinations nor could I spare any money to buy the outfit. Meanwhile, I was still without a job, despite having the necessary work permit.
I prayed really hard for a job. Pastor P.J Titus had told me to go and see Pat Patterson who was the building superintendent of The Bon Marche building. The pastor himself had worked for Mr. Patterson.

A few days later, the night supervisor of The Bon Marche, Rudy Olson left word with my landlord that I should report for work by 6 p.m. I was thrilled. I got there by 5:30 p.m. After all, it was my first job.

On my first day at the job, Rudy asked me whether I had any experience in janitorial work. I admitted I had none. He took me around and explained how janitorial jobs were done by his crew.
Rudy used to wear a suit to work. But once he began his demon-stration, he removed his jacket, and rolled up his sleeves, before grabbing a can of Ajax cleaning powder and sprinkling some in the toilet. He then took a brush and started scrubbing the toilet with furious energy. Once he flushed the toilet, Rudy turned to me and said, "Now you do it".

I followed the routine and turned to him for approval. He said, "Good job. Now you do it in every bathroom on every floor". As most of us from India have grown up never having to do anything like this, always having depended on servants for such menial work, it was a very difficult thing to clean toilets.
About a week later, Rudy told me, "Mr. Patterson wants to see you." I feared I was going to get fired as my performance did not match his expectations. As I knocked on his door, he invited me in and warmly shook my hand. He said many in the office had been complementing my work and said, "Great job."
I saw others struggle yet it never bothered me at all. May be due to my upbringing. My mother was very strict about how we were raised. She insisted that we children should not grow up in luxury. We were asked to sleep on rough mattresses and the comfortable beds were kept only for guests.
Her ready logic was that she wanted us to survive no matter what kind of circumstances we ended up in our lives. Even though I hated all that then, once in the US, I appreciated her strict upbringing which alone gave me the skill to survive any difficulty.

Rudy had about 15 employees. Some of them had been work-ing there for over 20 years. Most of them were not cut out to do anything more demanding. One such long-timer Tom used to dole out advice as if janitorial work was extremely complicated.

One 'wise' advice I will never forget was that electrical wires should not have any knots as otherwise juice (electricity) will not flow. I guess even they felt the need to appear self-important.
It was an interesting mix of people there. Several of the new employees were students from India who were hard-working and hence were in demand. It is at this janitorial hub that I met Jacob Chacko who was from my home town and was a year senior to me in school. Among others were Pastor George Mathew, George Enoch, Abraham Mathai and one person I can remember only as Alex.

I reckon you could say that this phase as a janitor laid the foun-dation for me to face any adversity with equanimity. This training to do a lowly chore like cleaning up toilets while studying to take up a career in aeronautical technology made me a very determined person.
Later in life, there were many difficulties I had to face as a fresh entrepreneur and quite a few setbacks that negatively impacted the airline industry, but I would not allow myself to be unduly flustered by any of it.

The janitorial work that prepared me for hardships in life went beyond merely cleaning toilets. Within six months, an opening came up in cleaning the beauty salon, which I took up. The volume of work was less compared to my earlier schedule.

Between cycles of cleaning the floor, I had a couple of hours to spare for my studies. As long as the work was done without any complaints Rudy had no problem with us studying.
Down the line, my job definition evolved by another layer. I was soon collecting garbage. This job required me to bring garbage next to the freight elevator and have it collected in a dumpster on the lower floor. I liked this job because I could manually ride up and down with the load.
They say the proof of the pudding is in getting to eat it. This became a reality once Jacob started working in the 7th-floor bakery. There were many goodies like doughnuts that were consigned as waste after a certain shelf life and were deemed fit to be thrown away into the garbage bin.
Since I was the elevator operator I was the only one allowed to travel all the floors. I collected many of these items from Jacob and distributed them to all Indians working on various floors at night.

All of us worked on Saturdays but for Rudy it was his day off.
So, we used to gather on different floors for a bit of socializing. We would share our thoughts on balancing difficult school and work hours.
We would also give voice to our dreams about a day in the not too distant future when our lives would become easier. It may not have had anything to do with these Saturday sessions but each one of us did go on to do quite well later on.

One day Jacob Chacko, Abraham Mathai and I started discussing ways to save money and one solution that came up was that we all go for a shared residential accommodation. There is a bit of a back story here as I was having an enjoyable time, staying with the Short family.
As I already mentioned, they were going out of their way to make my stay in the US quite comfortable. Therefore, I had no business to even indulge in a conversation about shifting residence.
Well, there was a reason and a compelling one. It all started one night or should I say in the wee hours of the morning. I had returned home after my night duty by around 1.30 am and was getting ready to go to bed. Suddenly, I heard someone knocking, more like banging on the door.

First I thought it was Everett and was almost about to open the door when prudent thoughts came into my mind and I looked through the peephole. To my utter shock, I saw a man standing there with a gun in his hand. Once he understood I was not going to open the door, he started yelling at me.
I was trembling in fear but made out the gist of his words interspersed with choice swear words. He kept shouting that I had been making noises all night and that I failed to listen to his repeated requests to tone down the volume.

I could see he was an angry American Indian who was also quite drunk. I knew I had to be extremely cautious as there was no way of predicting what he would do next. I hit the panic button. In a few minutes, I had raced from dead-bolting the door to stuffing pillows under a sheet to make it look like I was sleeping there. Like in the movies, I decided to keep awake by pulling a couch for me to go on alert sleep mode.

As I did not have a phone, I could neither call the police nor seek help from my friends in the neighborhood. I was wide awake by 6 am and began getting ready to go to school in a hurry. I was very careful not to make any noise in case he showed up with the gun once again.
My apartment was on the third floor, so I used the fire escape ladder to reach the ground floor. Such was my fear. I could not con-centrate in the classroom. By the time I got back to the apartment in the afternoon, I had made up my mind.

When I told Mr. Short that I was moving out immediately, he was taken aback. Then I narrated the whole story to him. As I told him about the gun-wielding native Indian and the ordeal I had suffered in the dead of the night, he tried his best to assure me that the Indian was never going to hurt me.
Sure, it may only have been a threat which he never meant to carry out, but I did not want to take a chance. My exit as Short's tenant was as abrupt as it was dramatic. Looking back, I could have stayed back to see if the threat I perceived was real. Not quite the best option, considering the downside, it could have been real!
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It was only a year ago that Boeing had laid off about seventy thousand people. Seattle was like a ghost town. This massive downsizing during what was called the 1970s Boeing Bust had led to that classic billboard being placed on the highway outside Seattle which summed up the stark reality that was life in Seattle those days.
What the billboard said and one nobody who has seen it even once can ever forget, was, "Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights!" Of course, Boeing Inc. may have interpreted it as a process for the company to go lean and mean, by cutting the fat, or about 65,000 workers in the 1969-1971 period.
Whichever side you viewed this from, the downside was vividly clear. The Boeing Bust had rendered Seattle a ghost town. Result: there was no shortage of apartments available for rent right across the city.

Most of the apartments were run down and owners were not willing to spend any money because renters were few and far between. We found a four-plex building with three bedrooms, a living room, bathrooms and a kitchen that was available at an unbelievably low rate.

Sure, the place needed a lot of work but the real estate company was willing to give us an astoundingly low monthly rent of $25.00 if we agreed to fix the place. This place was thrice as big as my apartment at Mr. Short's place where I had been paying $55.00. Thus, we three-Jacob Chacko, Abraham Mathai and 1 - became roommates. The address was 214, 1/2 Cedar Street. For us and for many more Indian students who would move in there in the latter
years, it came to be known as the Cedar Street Apartment. It was popular on many counts but the main reason was its low rent.

Decades later, the building was demolished and the space was converted into a parking lot. It was an iconic residence for dozens of students who were attracted by the rent.

We put in a lot of hard work to do up the place. Once we painted the place and fixed a few damaged doors and windows, the place looked different. We also got lucky with some good pieces of furniture which came from Jacob's friend Mr. Anderson.
A member of the Philadelphia Church, he was the manager of an upscale apartment complex near the waterfront. It was so upmarket that President Kennedy had stayed there once.
Usually, when tenants move out of such upmarket apartments they replace all removable fixtures such as furniture and carpets for the new tenants. Mr. Anderson had a basement full of old carpets and furniture. As soon as Jacob mentioned our requirement, it was but a formality for us to go and pick up whatever was required for the Cedar Street Apartment.
Pastor George Mathew who managed an apartment building donated a mattress. We got our janitor buddy Tom to load all this on his station wagon in the middle of the night, and drive across town to our new apartment
.
I still remember Tom holding on to the mattress atop his car with his left hand and steering the car with his right. It was a miracle the mattress did not bounce off the car.
In no time or so it felt, the summer season had set in. This was one season that we all looked forward to. Longer day hours meant more time to do two, even three jobs, earning extra money for tuition and other expenses.

As foreign students, we paid three times more by way of tuition fees compared to what the residents were required to pay. Jacob had joined Seattle University and Abraham, the Seattle Pacific College for undergraduate programs.

It was the same with George who left Seattle Community College and joined Seattle Pacific. Jacob had an American friend named Bill who also became a roommate for a short period. Bill later married his girlfriend and moved out.
Jacob and I found summer jobs at the Seattle Center Food Court where Bob and Helen Paradise owned a few booths serving German and Mexican food. Jacob had worked there the previous year and knew his job. I got trained to clean big dishes and make sandwiches, hamburgers and tacos.
I spent much of my time making hamburgers and tacos at the Mexican food outlet. I was all the more happy as I got to wear a tall hat as worn by chefs in big restaurants. Most people thought that I was Mexican and started speaking to me in Spanish.
First I tried explaining to them in English that I did not speak any Spanish. When that did not help, I started speaking to them in Malayalam. They got the message and we started conversing in our respective versions of the English language.

One day when I was at the food counter, I was taken aback to see my high school headmaster from back home Mr. O. C Ninan in front of me. He quickly assessed the situation and said in an accusing tone, "So, this is what you do in the US." I did not have the presence of mind to say this was what most students from other countries did to make extra money.
The way he said those words was like pronouncing a judgment, because what he said was judgmental. I was quite embarrassed as the upshot of what he said was that back home it was believed that I had come to the US for my higher studies but the reality was something else.

I explained how it was necessary for students like me to earn extra money and that working in a restaurant was not a demeaning thing. Mr. Ninan was a distant relative of mine. He was in Seattle to visit his brother O.C. Koshy and his wife Sara Koshy who were living there. I would get to know their family well in the coming days.

Mr. Koshy was an engineer at Boeing and Mrs. Koshy was a doctor at the Group Health Hospital. Mr. Koshy was quite involved in the local Democratic Party and was well-connected with most of the local and even state leaders.

He was also one of the founding members of the Mar Thoma church in Greater Seattle. Later they both retired and moved to Michigan to be near their daughter Sherry.
When I started working at the Bon Marche, their hourly wages were better than what was on offer from most others. They were paying $3.10 per hour but the place came under the umbrella of the trade union which meant each month $7.00 was taken out of your paycheck as union dues. The minimum wage almost everywhere else was $1.50 an hour. As I worked at the food center, the food was also free. My life, at that juncture, was about making ends meet.

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