So I have spent all my adult life learning more about these painters and luxuriating in their work, as one does with a subject one cares about. In college, I soaked up all I could find out about them, even if just individuals or small groups of painters. I had wanted to attend the San Francisco School of Fine Arts for at least one year of my schooling, but my father would have none of it, insisting that I attend a “real” university. I had a really good reason for wanting to go to Fine Arts, and that was the fact that Richard Diebenkorn had been teaching there, himself, in the flesh! And my father would hear none of it. Period. (I had been accepted at Stanford, too, and my father would also hear none of that!)
So, I stayed where I was, in L.A.
Many years later, having been married for a few years and then divorced, I was working for the City of Berkeley in a clerical job. That lasted for some four years, but I was going nuts with the Monday through Friday schedule, while my good friend, Stan, a fire captain, worked days on and then got a string of days off in a row. I couldn’t go hiking in the Sierra with him because of the restrictions of my work schedule. I attended real estate school until I almost had the license, and then quit my perfectly good clerical job to start working in the real estate field. My thinking was that I could finally get more than just a Saturday and Sunday off, and get more mileage on the treads of my hiking boots. (That is another story altogether!)
In the early 1970s, it was quite hard to find properties for sale that we might list, so our broker had us going around to various neighborhoods to go from door to door, asking if they were thinking of selling, or if they had heard of anyone who was. One week I decided to “work” north Oakland, in the flatlands. Realize that there is no room for any new construction in that part of the Bay area. There wasn’t then, either. But lots of really wonderful older houses, each different from the next, were in various areas. North Oakland was one which had good old houses. I parked my old heap of a car and started walking. Doorbell after doorbell. This was one of the hardest things I had ever done!
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