Knight in shining armor

Just when you think it can’t get worse, along comes an irresistible knight in the shining armor of a brand new 1925 Chrysler. It would be almost 10 more years before this particular knight would even meet Lucia, but when he did, he surely planned to save his little damsel in distress.

Bruce W. Barrett — his brothers used to call him B-Dub — had big plans and dreams of becoming an architect, which fizzled out when he refused to not smoke on the job, as was required by the one firm in Oklahoma City that considered hiring him on as an apprentice.

“To hell with that!” was his motto.

So instead of designing homes and remodeling projects for an architectural firm, he went to work as a carpenter. And he was good. Very good. He quickly rose to foreman and eventually worked on a number of huge projects that would become historically significant. During the Great Depression, he was a foreman for the building of Boulder Dam (renamed Hoover Dam by the Republican Hoover Administration) . During World War II — he was too old to enlist at the time — he was again a foreman on the construction of the Al-Can Highway that connects Alaska to the contiguous United States via Canada.  He worked on those mighty projects, but was unable to be there for the christening of either one. He got drunk and told his boss where to go on the Boulder Dam job, and he got pneumonia on the Alaska job.

When he came home from the Boulder Dam job, he worked on local construction projects in West Texas and hired Lucia’s grandpa and brother Joe to work on one of them. That’s how he met Lucia. She once told me that Bruce never brought Grandpa’s pay to the house without also bringing something for the rest of the family — including once an entire bag of oranges, considered a delicacy worth their weight in gold during those terrible Depression years. When Christmas of 1933 rolled around, Lucia recalled, her family had no money for gifts or decorations of any kind. Bruce came over with Christmas stockings stuffed with nuts, fruit, and hard candies. Lucia was 19 — and crazy about that knight in shining armor. He didn’t have much, but what he did have he splurged and shared.

Not long afterward, he came by and took Lucia with him. It was 1934. She was 20. He was 30. The Dust Bowl blew out and they came to California as migrant farm laborers. They moved back and forth from Texas to California in search of work until mid 1950, when they finally came to the San Francisco Bay Area to stay for good.

Against all odds and despite decades of hardship and alcoholic battles, Bruce and Lucia stayed together until the day he died — with 17 years of continuous sobriety — in 1980. They had been together for 46 years.

After Daddy died, when the next Mother’s Day rolled around, I remember telling Lucia how grateful I was that she had endured all of those difficulties and heartaches of life with an alcoholic. I told her I didn’t know how the other kids felt, but it meant a lot to me that my mother was still married to my father when his life ended. I asked her:

“Did you really love him?”

She squirmed a little in her seat. She never did like any mushy talk. Then she looked down at her newspaper, picked up her coffee cup and said in an offhand voice:

“I must have.”

Bathing beauty

That beautiful young woman on the West Texas version of a beach is Lucia as a teenager.

Where her family lived was a lifetime away from a real beach but, like so many Dust Bowl towns, it had a sand problem. When you’re as poor as her family was, you learn to make the best of every situation — and no one was more resourceful than Lucia.   She and her sisters would find a nice sandy patch where there weren’t many rocks sticking up and pretend they were bathing beauties like the pin-up girls in the magazine ads.

They didn’t have bathing suits, but Lucia found a way around that, too. For years she had sewn hand-made slips from muslin flour sacks. All she had to do was shorten them a bit and they turned into tunic-style “bathing suits,” even if there wasn’t a a swimmable body of water for miles.

One day a cousin who had somehow gotten hold of a box camera took pictures of the girls as they pretended to be modeling for a magazine or a postcard. The result was this priceless photo of an unspoiled beauty who had no idea how pretty she was.