9

Early Marriage

NO ONE WOULD give me a job. At Washington University, we seniors were encouraged to start applying for jobs early in the fall semester, and many of my classmates were getting two, three, even four offers as early as November. Swirling around me were the giddy conversations about how tough it was to have to choose between several exciting and well-paid job offers. I had the feeling I was being left behind, and I wasn’t sure why.

Determined to get a job (after all, I was going to be a married man in a few short months), I started visiting small engineering companies to inquire about openings in person.

“Your résumé is impressive,” the man across the desk from me said slowly, his forehead creased in a frown. “But, you see, son, you have zero actual working experience as an engineer. I’m afraid we’re really only interested in hiring engineers with some prior experience.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this. It wasn’t even the second time. No, I thought, of course I don’t have previous experience as an engineer. I have been busy going to college!

Exasperated, I blurted out, “How in the hell am I supposed to get experience if everyone is requiring experience before they’ll give me a chance to get experience?”

His smile was sympathetic. “It’s true,” he said. “Small companies can’t afford to hire and train young engineers. That’s why you should be looking at large companies, like McDonnell Company, which employs something like 45,000 people. That’s the kind of place you should be applying to.”

So, I applied to McDonnell and other large companies but got the same responses. Could my being deaf also be a factor in my not receiving any offers? I was beginning to think so. Maybe they didn’t know how to work with a deaf employee. Maybe when choosing between deaf candidates and hearing ones, they’d always choose the hearing candidates.

One of the advantages of attending RIT/NTID or Gallaudet University is the support deaf and hard of hearing students receive with their job searches, be it a co-op opportunity, an internship, or a permanent job. Not only that, the students are provided with job search courses that cover résumé preparation, mock interviews, briefing and debriefing their co-op placements, and responding to questions related to employment practices. Gallaudet and NTID even offer workshops to area employers that teach employers about environmental/alert systems for employees with hearing loss, communication strategies between deaf employees and hearing coworkers, as well as assistive devices and access services that facilitate group communication in meetings and conferences. But in the 1960s, at Washington University, none of that was available.

May arrived and with it graduation. My friends and I walked across the stage and accepted our diplomas while our families watched from their seats in the bleachers. I was happy and proud, but also still in the limbo of the unemployed, plus I had two more classes to take over the summer.

Two weeks after graduation, I got a summer job as an architectural draftsman for a very small architecture company in St. Louis. Bill Blank, a deaf architect there, was instrumental in getting his boss to hire me. I hoped that working with the company for at least six weeks while I took my final two summer courses would give me the experience that I needed to get my first full-time professional job as an engineer. I assisted other architects on a huge project with the Holiday Inn headquarters by tracing the drawings from the preset designs for the architects to do their final production work. As I sat bent over the large drafting table drawing, I often thought of my Uncle Max. What a coincidence that here I was doing the same sort of drafting work that he had loved to do for forty years at Bailey Meters in Cleveland.

Uncle Max Ellis receiving a gold watch in honor of his retirement and forty-year service with Bailey Meters.

Our wedding was set for August 22. I hoped that I’d have a job offer before the big day. Sure enough, a telegram arrived for me on August 5: White Sands Army Materials was offering me a job as an electrical engineer, with an annual salary of $7,000 (about $57,000 in 2020 dollars) in New Mexico, over 1,000 miles away in the desert.

But when I told Vicki about the offer, she wasn’t too happy. We decided to talk with her father and get his advice. I hadn’t had any conversations with him about my job search so far. When he heard about all the places I’d visited, all the applications I’d submitted, he seemed surprised.

“Have you ever applied to McDonnell?” he asked me.

“Yes, I did,” I told him.

“You know,” he said, “I’d be happy to call my friend in human resources there.”

I’d had no idea that he had a friend well-placed in McDonnell’s HR office. He made the call the next day and told me to meet with his friend the following day in his office. I wore my best suit, brought my résumé with me, and explained to the guy that I had applied to McDonnell several times but either got rejected or received no response at all. He was surprised, too, and looked for my application in his file cabinet. After not finding it, he went to another cabinet that was filled with inactive applications. That’s where he found mine, marked up (with what words, I still don’t know). He read my application and said, “Hey, you should have been invited for an interview!” He immediately called Dr. Dennis Joerger, the head of the plasma physics department of electrical engineers, who told me to come back the next morning for a meeting.

The next day, I suited up again and met with Dr. Joerger. We hit it off very well since he was easy to lipread and could understand me in a one-to-one situation. As both of us were trained electrical engineers, we had a fluent conversation in the technical jargon of our field. He spoke slowly and clearly. Sometimes he wrote down notes to be sure that we understood each other. We talked about his department’s mission, which was to develop a ray-tracing system for the NASA Gemini project that would connect ground antennas with a radio system in a space capsule. He explained that as the space capsule reentered the atmosphere after orbiting the Earth, there would be a substantial heat crash that would burn the insulated cone cover of the space capsule and lose the radio connection.

“Let’s take a little walk,” he told me. “There are some people I want you to meet.” He then introduced me to his team. At the end of our hour together, we shook hands by the elevator. “You’ll hear from me soon,” he said.

I left the McDonnell building exhilarated. For the first time in months, I felt optimistic about my engineering career and calmer about my impending marriage to Vicki.

That very afternoon, I received a call through Vicki’s father from Dr. Joerger with an offer of $7,700 to be an associate electronics engineer. They wanted me to start working the following Monday.

“Could you ask him if I could start September 1 instead?” I asked my father-in-law, thinking of our honeymoon plans. Dr. Joerger said it was not a problem. Everything was right with the world.

Vicki and I got married on August 22, 1965, in the beautiful Temple Shaare Emeth in St. Louis, with its colorful, thirty-foot-tall stained glass Ark where the Torah scrolls were stored. Vicki’s mother had wanted the wedding in a hotel, but Vicki really wanted to get married in a temple. After a much-heated discussion between mother and daughter, Vicki’s father persuaded them to compromise by having the wedding in the temple and the reception at a hotel.

Vicki's father, Jack Bernstein, walked her down the aisle during our wedding at Temple Share Emeth in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 22, 1965.

Wedding party with both families.

Feeding each other wedding cake gently.

Coincidentally, our wedding day was also Uncle Max and Aunt Cranie’s fifteenth wedding anniversary. They were thrilled when they learned of our wedding date and asked what we wanted for a wedding gift. Since they lived in Cleveland and knowing Uncle Max had a fear of flying, I told them to fly and attend the wedding as our gift. Though he was hesitant at first, they did it, and it broke the spell for them and airplanes. Afterward, they flew everywhere, even halfway across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii!

The morning after our wedding, we left for our all-inclusive honeymoon package at French Lick Springs Hotel in Indiana, a sprawling golf resort in the Hoosier National Forest, situated at the foothills of a small mountain range. The waiter who was assigned to serve us at dinner that first night was gracious, fun, communicative, and accommodating. The food and service were perfect. The next morning we had the same waiter, but now, mysteriously, he was very cold toward us, walking by our table several times without serving us. We didn’t understand why and kept trying to get his attention. When he finally served us, he was still cold and unfriendly. Vicki and I were puzzled.

Since the resort’s package didn’t include lunch, we drove around the town for a change of scenery and had a wonderful lunch at a café. As Vicki and I discussed the waiter’s odd behavior, I suddenly realized that maybe he was upset that we hadn’t left a tip for him, which we’d thought was included in the all-inclusive package. “We’ll tip him double tonight,” I said.

The waiter poured wine from a bottle into our glasses, his face sour. We thanked him nicely, and he nodded curtly, still unsmiling. When he brought our food, we smiled and thanked him, but still he was like stone. After dinner, I left enough money on the table to cover a tip for dinner the night before, breakfast that morning, dinner that night, and more. Maybe it would have a thawing effect. Sure enough, when we returned for breakfast the next morning, he beamed at us, truly happy to see his old friends—his charm from our first night completely restored. “That was it!” Vicki said as he walked away to put our order into the kitchen. It was a learning experience for two young honeymooners.

OUR LITTLE APARTMENT IN ST. LOUIS was on the second floor of a two-story building on Eager Street, near a bank branch, a gas station, and an A&P. It had one bedroom, a living room that included a small eating space, and a narrow kitchen with miniature appliances. In the back was a deck that held a lounge chair and a barbecue, and since we moved in at the end of the summer, this soon became a favorite spot to relax or entertain visitors. From the deck, there were steep stairs down to a postage stamp backyard where Vicki hung our clothes to dry after washing them at a laundromat two blocks away.

In the fall, Vicki transferred from William Woods College to Meramec Community College in Kirkwood, Missouri. After taking just a few courses, she decided it wasn’t the right fit for her. She didn’t enjoy going to school because she found it boring not to participate in class discussions, and it was difficult to lipread teachers; again, interpreters were not available back then. Finally, she was driving to school on a snowy day when a car hit her from behind. She suffered whiplash and received medication and a supportive brace for her neck.

“I want to get a job,” she told me one evening while she was still recuperating. She was fed up with school.

She worked as a bookkeeping machine operator at a bank and later at a shoe company before we decided to start a family. A year after we’d started trying, we finally got the good news: we were going to have a baby.

Vicki’s OB-GYN, a man nearing retirement, was also her mother’s doctor. He didn’t offer much advice or conversation at her obstetrics checkups, which was frustrating because, like most first-time mothers, Vicki was bursting with excitement and questions. “He’s taken good care of me for more than twenty years,” Vicki’s mother said.

Her due date was in early October, but in June, on Father’s Day, Vicki went into early labor. She was only five-and-a-half months pregnant. We rushed her to the hospital, where she delivered our daughter, who weighed just one pound and five ounces. She was tiny but beloved, and she died thirty-six hours later. Vicki’s mother’s doctor, who had been away on vacation or for some other reason not on duty during the delivery itself, came into Vicki’s room just once. “The placenta was not attached to the wall of the uterus properly,” he told us, explaining why the baby had come early. “I’m very sorry,” he said, obviously uncomfortable to be speaking with us as Vicki wept in her hospital bed.

Following the Jewish custom of using the first letter of a family member’s name, we named our daughter Bonita Vera after Vicki’s father Bernard and my Uncle Victor. We buried her in Norfolk, Virginia, where Vicki’s maternal grandparents had an extra burial plot. Her death was a profoundly sad experience for us both, and it left Vicki wondering if she could ever risk another attempt.