The first day on the job, I came to the office all dolled up in a gray suit and wearing a hat and gloves. You would never go downtown without your hat and gloves. I can remember those comfortable shoes we wore-four inch spike heels. In the evenings, I had to stand up all the way home on the street car. It was about an hour's ride. There was no BART or underground Metro We had to stand on a small cement island in the middle of Market Street waiting for the street car with automobiles zooming by on either side of the island. We took our lives in our hands just trying to get home.

The office was at 315 Montgomery Street, where the SLA first opened their office in 1937. In those days, the building had attendants running the elevators. There were also stairs you could use back then. They were not locked and used only in case of an emergency. I was young back then and thought nothing of walking up to the seventh floor for exercise. Our offices were very sparse back then. The three managers shared one large office with old wooden desks ~ like my grade school teachers had. The rest of the office was one large room, with the exception o f the storeroom. In the main office, all of the gray metal desks were in two rows facing the front of the office. The Office Manager's desk was in the very front and faced all the employees. It was like a classroom. Just think of me looking at you all day as you worked-you would have nightmares. The walls were all lined with file cabinets-five drawers high. At that time we kept all the filings in house for ten years. In the back of the office was a gigantic safe. Every morning we had to spin the large dials and open this safe and voile-no money, just drawers of index cards. We typed index cards on every policy we ever handled. We had no pictures on the walls, as there was no room for them above the file cabinets. Our elegant flooring was dark brown and tan linoleum. The lighting was REAL light bulbs, not fluorescent lighting.

There was a long table in the back of the office. It was our all purpose table, we did the daily mail there and it doubled for a lunch room at noon. Our refrigerator was outside-we would place our food on the outside window ledge to keep cool.

We had all the modern day office machines. Computers-what were they? Even electric typewriters or copiers-What were they? We keypunched all our data. The keypunch machines had just a numerical keyboard, so everything had to be put into numerical code before keying in the documents. Our adding machines were just that, they did not multiply or divide. We had one comptometer for the entire office to share. It was a huge machine, with a large carriage and went clung, clung, clung across as it multiplied and divided. Our typewriters were the latest on the market-manual ones, of course. You manually pushed the carriage back to proceed to the next line. Since there were no copiers, we used carbon paper. Sometimes you had to make as many as six carbon copies at once. You prayed you NEVER made a mistake. Each copy would have to be erased individually. We thought we died and went to heaven the day whiteout came on the market.

All my accounting was done by hand. I had large ledgers and entered with pen, fountain pen that is. All the check were hand written-not typed or computerized.

We were lucky when it came to the telephone. We had all of three incoming lines and three phones in the main office. It rang and we ran to answer it. There wasn't one on every desk. There was only once choice of telephones-large black ones that had to be rented from Pacific Bell. not owned.

People seem to remember where they were on certain dates, i.e. the day President Kennedy was shot, the day the U. S. went to the moon and the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst-well I was working at the SLA for all the above mentioned. We used to get a lot of our mail addressed to us-SLA. When Patty Hearst got kidnapped we didn't receive much mail. After checking with the Post Office, we came to find out they were inspecting it as it was addressed to the SLA and they thought there might be some connection to the kidnapping.

In 1961 there was a staff of twenty three people and filings totaled $20 million a year. We do over $100 million a month today. We did not record the security when I first started. Life was simple and antiquated

I have MANY fond memories and I REALLY enjoy my work. To the staff: thank you for being there, without your support I could not do it.

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