A True Story of Kindness and Good Fortune
by Jacques Delacroix
I am a disciplined man. That’s why I make myself listen to National Public Radio just about every week morning. My reward is a litany of stories of unfairness told by various categories of “survivors” under the expert guidance of NPR’s own misery coaches. Some of the injustices are no doubt real, some are imaginary, others are a more or less artful blend of the real and of the imaginary. The NPR summary message is that American society is beastly unfair. Myself, this immigrant, I think that American society is almost absurdly generous. I want to add this small viewpoint to the mix without denying the others, or not necessarily. (In fact, I think the story of the long atrocity that was slavery and that of government enacted racial discrimination that followed are still being whitewashed as I write in 2023.)
But, anyway, it’s 1965, which was a glorious year for me. I was twenty-three and full of beans. The beans had not always been with me. They were sort of new, in fact. Let me explain. Don’t worry, no whining, no complaining. This is a warm and sunny story, like Christmas in June. It will make you feel good, I promise.
The Shunt
I grew up in a different and severe world. In the France of those days, children were separated at age 12. The 10% or 20% ones judged smart – book smart actually – were directed to academic junior high schools where Latin was taught and standards were high. Some of the balance went on in elementary school for two years and then, they were directly apprenticed into the trades. Could be construction, or plumbing, or even retail butchering. More children however attended different kinds of specialized trade schools for an additional six years. (12+6=18.) So, my mother went to sewing high school, for example. I was one of the smart ones and I was sent on the academic path. At the end of that path stood a gilded gate, called the “baccalauréat” (also, “le bac”).
Walking through that gate assured one of admission to university level education and, from there, to a secure place in the middle class, with corresponding income. At the time, the “bac” was a truly meritocratic and a competitive exam: Succeed and walk through that big door in triumph with fanfares playing. If you failed, you got another chance the next year. As far as I knew; as far as I know now, there were no dispositions taken for those who re-failed. Or, perhaps, you were welcome to try as often as you wished but 25-year-old bac candidates were nowhere in evidence.
Things went well for me initially on the academic track; I was a good student. I received good grades. All approved of me. And then, things didn’t go well anymore. Around age fifteen, I gave up, or I lost interest, or I lost my way in math, then in physics and then, in chemistry. My parents did not notice, or they did not notice enough, or they did not assess correctly the weight of my bad grades. It must have been easy because no one in my family, or among my known forbears, or relatives, had been there. I am not trying to make excuses. It’s true that, for once, the old man that I am today does not have a clear idea of what happened during the relevant years. I think I must have been depressed but I don’t know if it was a cause or a consequence. (Digression: I discovered much later that I am susceptible to SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder. Paris is far north, with long winters and short dark winter days. Contrary to the movies, it’s a good place where to be chronically depressed.)
At any rate, the unavoidable was not avoided. I failed at the bac because of a single very bad score in math. I was neither surprised nor, somehow, severely affected. In fact, as soon as the results were out, I proceeded to hitch-hike to Sweden where, I had been told, the girls were hot and easy. (The latter, a damned lie, I can assure you.) I spent the next year trying again for the bac but unaccountably, not very hard. It was in a much less prestigious establishment than the one I had formerly attended. I don’t know why anyone thought the results would be different. I failed again, pretty much along the same lines as before. Yet, one good small thing happened during that second senior year that would eventually change my life for the much better.
A Ray of Sunshine
What I am telling you here should have been pretty much the story of an existential tragedy. As I have said, there was no path forward for people like me in the inflexible French society of those days. It was too late to enroll in a conventional trade high school – which would have been fine for me, I think. My four siblings graduated from such specialized schools and all did well in his/her way. The opportunity was also past of becoming an apprentice to a tradesman. I am thinking of our local charcutier (pork butcher/sausage maker). He had a pretty daughter who perhaps was sweet on me. I might have courted her and possibly married her and then, inherited the shop and become seriously wealthy before I was forty. Besides, I always liked charcuterie; I still do.
Things were very sticky then in an other way, the same for all young Frenchmen. The hard fact of universal compulsory (male) military service erected an unpenetrable barrier to existential inventiveness. No employer was likely to gamble on some half-hidden talent in a young man who was 95% likely to be snatched by the draft within months. Socio-historical digression: The French Republic drafted every male citizen before he reached age 21 except: those who were pursuing advanced studies with flying colors, the lame, the sick, and the insane. Given my experience in the service, I don’t even think the standards were strict in connection with the latter.
The quasi-certitude of being drafted prevented young men from making serious commitments of any kind. No getting married, no starting university level education unless you were reasonably sure of obtaining a stay of incorporation into the armed forces, no trying to make a name for oneself in any field. The nearly universal draft encouraged in young men the irresponsibility that is already natural to the breed. Behavioral irresponsibility promoted a generalized “could care less” attitude that in turn, affected all facets of life.
After my second failure at the bac, I suppose (not sure anymore) that I thought I could always make decent money working as a bellboy in an expensive hotel, as I had done on weekends since I was fifteen. At age eighteen, I had even been told I had a good crack at becoming concierge in time, a sure path to riches. Worst case scenario, I could always enlist in the merchant marine since I liked the sea and travels! Around 1958, travel was expensive and therefore scarce. Before containers, freighters stayed in port for several days loading and unloading, encouraging a sort of casual tourism by the crew. Both facts made the merchant marine seriously more attractive than it is today. I must specify here that I was a decent youth and that the idea of marrying a rich girl never crossed my mind. Plus, I didn’t know any rich girl (except the charcutier’s daughter but she wasn’t really rich and anyway, I like her). At any rate, I didn’t have to make up my mind about any of the above because something slight but important or determinative happened during my second senior year that I try to describe below.
In that other, kind of mediocre high school, I was easily the best of my cohort in English and there was no second and no third. The English teacher was a young woman of about twenty-three. It crossed my mind later – but not then- that she kind of enjoyed being shut up in a classroom with thirty or so lusting 18-year-old guys. It may have been good for her skin, I figured later. Pleasant looking Ms. X called me to her desk, at the end of the fall quarter. She told me something I only vaguely understood.
There were some unknown Americans who were eager to pay for my traveling to the USA to spend one year there in a family, and to go to school. Ms. X said she had done it herself a few years back and it was a great experience. She told me that she would help me with the application and that she would back my request. I spoke about it to my parents. I did not do a good job of it because I did not understand well the endeavor myself. They thought it all sounded suspicious. The French then believed that good things happened only on a meritocratic basis and I had obviously little of that commodity, merit, what with my previous bac failure. Again, it all sounded fishy to them, perhaps a tall tale of my own fabrication. The thought of meeting with the teacher to clarify things did not cross their mind (or mine, actually). It was that kind of compartmentalized world. They also balked at promising to supply the very humble items the program required. My fairy godmother stepped in and agreed to provide four new shirts and a guarantee of about $25 of 2023 monthly for pocket money, should I be selected.
I forgot about it and went back to nursing the broken heart a girl my age had given me the previous year.
In May, I received the news that I had been accepted and assigned to a family in California, near San Francisco. I thanked my English teacher in moderate terms. (I realized much later that such response was utterly inadequate, that I should have at least squeezed her against my strong chest. Regrets! My mature intuition is that she would have enjoyed that quite a bit. More regrets!) In late June, I failed the bac again, as planned. A month later, I took a train to Rotterdam where I boarded a student ship bound for New York. From there, I flew to San Francisco. (It was my first time on a plane.)
USA I
Long story short, I spent a year in a small town 45 minutes north of San Francisco with a very nice, warm family, and attended high school as a senior. My English, that was already good, improved a great deal, of course. I learned to read everything with ease. I learned to really write the language. I found most classes almost absurdly easy. But there were opportunities that did not exist in French schools. I took auto shop, a crafts class that involved metal working. (I made an iron lamp for my mother and a silver brooch for my godmother.) The required civics class was quite useful, I thought, and even the required First Aid class.
All the same I did not have an especially good time that year, for several reasons. Most of the young people in my age range were surprisingly intolerant and not welcoming. It did not help that I made a kind of cultural error in the first few days in town. OK, since you insist, I will tell you what it was. At a school sponsored event, I made the mistake of dancing the same way I had been dancing with French girls for years. I am speaking of close dancing, of course. The French girls had liked me for it. The California girls, some of them, at least, labeled me a pig for the same exact body motions. The rumor spread.
In addition, I was a big city boy air-dropped into what was then a cow town with no place to go. (At least, I learned how to ride a horse there, sort of.) Only one local guy really befriended me. He was the smartest person in the school but also a bit of a hoodlum. Neither helped me. (He was the one who lent me his horse. Thanks again, Rich!) At any rate, I kept my eyes opened and I observed a really different educational system, a smooth one, almost affectionate, that made no attempt to keep you down. I was intrigued and almost dazzled in particular by the wonderful California social innovation of the community college. I was told there that anyone with a (non-competitive) high school diploma could be accepted. I learned further that it was possible – with good grades – to transfer from there to nearly any regular four-year university. It was almost too good to be true, I thought, but I made a note of it.
The Dead-End
Fast forward again. I go back to France; I travel around in Europe with my Cali buddy. We get into trouble in Eastern Europe. Then, I am drafted into the French Navy where they teach me nothing in particular except some typing. All the same, it’s a good place to let my brain mature, with hot showers at will and three squares a day. (And, it was the French Navy after all; the food was almost always good.) The Navy also shows me some of the world at a time when travel is very expensive (as I know I have said before).
At age twenty-one, I am about to be released from the service, in mid-June. I have no training, no recognizable talent, no skill except fluency in English, and also a good command of Spanish. Nevertheless, I am well educated and well read. I have no way to make a living except to continue working in a menial role in a Paris hotel as I had done through my teenage years. I think about the merchant marine again knowing that my service in the Navy would compensate there for my degreelessness. And someone in the Navy is ready to recommend me for a short-time school that further qualifies you to serve on freighters. I also think of working for a big beach hotel on the Riviera, where I will be tanned year around. Finally, I decide to write some California friends and ask them to send me information about their local community college.
Soon, it’s clear to me that I would like to take up up my education again, only there. Unfortunately, my determination is based on a gross linguistic misunderstanding. Another long story short: Though my English is quite good by then, it comprises deep holes. The community college documentation shows an abundance of “Penology” courses. After I quickly eliminate the word “penis,” it becomes obvious that the root of the word is “pen.” Those are dozens of different courses about writing. Exactly what I would like. I will become the best writer of English in all of France. (Incidentally, sixty years later, it still seems like a good plan.) I am getting ahead of myself here, but what happens is that after an embarrassing five or six weeks at the community college, I realize that “penology” concerns penal institutions, that it’s about learning the art of being a good prison guard. The fact is that the California State Prison at San Quentin is about three miles away. Oops, my mistake! Nobody is perfect!
Anyway, after being released by the Navy, I make my way back to Paris, my home town. Incredibly, I start working at the same hotel where I have spent many of my teenage weekends. I stay in my parents’ apartment that happens to be empty because of summer vacations. I work long enough to save enough for a one-way ship ticket to the US, plus about three hundred dollars of today. I need to explain: That is a time when all air travel is expensive. Airlines are not really allowed to compete on price. There are yet no charter flights. This situation feeds at lively industry of cheap “student ships” sailing back and forth across the north Atlantic. I leave France at the end July on a bus bound for Rotterdam and then, for New York by sea.
Meals were included in the transatlantic ticket. There was little to spend on aboard, fortunately. I felt so poor (I was so poor) that I was still wearing some of the pieces of uniform the Navy had made me keep because I was theoretically in the Reserves for years to come. That was no obstacle to dissipation. During the crossing, I met a busty Midwestern blonde with much organic curiosity. I mean that she had an active interest in what organs could achieve, hers and mine. When disembarked in New York City, she waylaid me into flying with her to her city of Saint Louis. After two days there, staying with her and her parents, I realized that the most likely outcomes were that either her boyfriend or her father would kill me. I thanked everyone, kissed the blonde on her teary eyes, promising to come back (I did, incredibly.) I caught a Greyhound bus to San Francisco. Right after we hit the Nevada border, I started losing money. There were slot machines even in the toilets of small diners; what do you expect?
My recollection is that I had no, zero, money when I reached San Francisco in mid-August. My recollection must be wrong; it hardly seems possible. I had at least a dime to call my friends from a pay phone. But, if I had a dime, I had two, or three, etc. Yet, any way I look at it, I had almost nothing. My older friends in Novato, from my earlier, high school stay, had kindly cleared their spare room for me. They were very generous and ready to host me during two years of community college. We had not seen one another for almost three years. They had no way to measure how much I had changed, how enterprising I had become. At any rate, I found a job, an interesting one in a French language newspaper, in San Francisco, within days. The job came with a room in a Basque hotel and restaurant. The hotel catered only to young Basque shepherds on leave who had spent lonely months on end tending herds in Nevada or Utah. The Basque hotel was more exotic to me than the US itself. The modest hotel fee came with breakfast included. You went into the kitchen and fixed it yourself. Mine lasted me almost all day. Every day or so, I hitched-hiked to and from the community college. It took an hour each way. Soon, it was winter and I did the return trip in the dark.
The Golden Age
My round-trip travel often took me through the impossibly pretty small Bayside town of Sausalito. Soon, it struck me that I could try to live there which was closer to the community college anyway. By that time, the interesting initial job in the City had lapsed. I had become instead a houseboy to a finicky rich old lady who thought she was generous because she always gave me her leftover cooked vegetables. She fired me, or I quit, I don’t remember which. Immediately I found through the college bulletin board a job as a gardener, in Sausalito, as luck would have it. That was the result of a common confusion. In those days, most of the gardeners in the Bay Area were French Basques. So, Basque=French=gardener and, for short: French=gardener. I did not find it in my heart to tell the potential employer that I was a Paris boy with little gardening experience – except with vegetables (though I had seen it done with decorative plants!)
Right away, I found a room in Sausalito, in a house two blocks from the water. I and another guy were subleasing from a married hippie couple. The arrangement was for room and board. It was inexpensive. The young woman gave us lunch packed in newspapers every morning. Pretty soon, my roommate, Bill, and I felt the first symptoms of malnutrition. I mentioned this casually to my gardening employer, a rich woman in her forties with a big house on the hillside who may have liked me in a louche sort of way. She offered me, for a song, the tiny apartment that was beneath her own main part of her big house. I was allowed to bring Bill along to share the small rent. As I said, the dwelling was minuscule but lovely with walls made of varnished wood. There were two small bedrooms, a tiny kitchen, and a complete bathroom. The kitchen opened on a large sundeck with a view on downtown Sausalito and on the Golden Gate Bridge. I almost forgot: Bill studied at the San Francisco Arts Institute and he was a gifted cook.
I did well in Sausalito, at my low level of consumption. I earned enough and I was even doing stimulating work. My landlady decided that she wanted a sculptor’s studio. I was hired as a poorly watched apprentice to help build it. I learned the rudiments of carpentry then. I also met a slightly older guy at the No Name Bar who wanted to practice his French as he worked. He hired me too. From him, I advanced pretty far in the rare old art of boat painting and varnishing. I have no recollection of hardship in that period. In fact, I remember it as a Golden Age.
My new location, Sausalito, sat within the catchment basin of my community college. The girls who attended it discovered me there, and Bill. While I was still hitch-hiking many of the girls drove their own cars. They often wanted to study with me. Amazingly, some actual studying was done and I received nothing but good grades. Bill drove to the Art Institute in San Francisco most days; he fixed a good diner almost every night. His weekends were almost all dedicated to Rosalind. This is another story, of course. Rosalind was a Stanford student. Sometimes – around finals, I think – Bill went to Stanford to be with her without distracting her too much. But Rosalind much preferred to come to Sausalito where there was but one distraction, and guaranteed secrecy.
A Flash of Lightning
In those days, universities took their loco parentis status seriously. They replaced parents, in other words. Female students had a curfew. Their spending the night out was not even discussed except, except, with family members. Rosalind and Bill had concocted an old female aunt of Rosalind who happened to live in San Francisco, with a real street address, in a good area of the city. The auntie not only welcomed Rosalind any weekend but, providentially, she needed her niece to help her with small tasks. When an abnormally suspicious Assistant Dean called the San Francisco phone number Rosalind had provided, she got confirmation of the arrangement. I greatly admired Bill and Rosalind’s self-assurance, but especially Rosalind’s who played the system as if she had been doing it for generations. I am now guessing she actually had. She was a slim, pert redhead with an easy manner about her, and quite friendly to all, including to me. Not that I interacted with her often because she spent most of her Sausalito time in bed. (No, she was not lazy, on the contrary as I could hear with my own ears!)
One afternoon that I remember well because it was very hot, I was at the kitchen table filling a college admission application. I was just following the example of other academically oriented community college students aiming to be admitted to a four-year college as juniors. Our group was hoping to be accepted at the well regarded (state) University of California at Berkeley. Most thought that, failing this, we were pretty sure to make it to San Francisco State College because our junior college, situated in prosperous Marin County, had a good reputation. So, some tension accompanied my task but not much. I hate to admit it but I was by then a 3.80 GPA student. Anyway, Rosalind squeezed past my chair and mechanically looked over my shoulders.
“What are you doing, Jacques?” she asked casually.
“Don’t you see? I am applying to San Francisco State.”
“Jacques,” she declared, “What you are doing is very stupid.”
“What do you mean, ‘stupid’?” I inquired sharply.
“Jacques,” she said, “you are too poor to go to a state college.” One unforgettable sentence!
The next weekend, she brought me a Stanford University application. She guided me a little – not much. I got three of my community college instructors to write letters of support – one of whom was a Stanford graduate, it turned out.
Of course, I sent in my other applications to state schools. I soon half-forgot about the whole thing. Early that summer, I did something absorbing: I hitched-hiked to Paris and back to see my parents. (Yes, from the west coast to Paris. And yes, I had to book passage on a student ship to cross the Atlantic. Everything else was thumb transportation though.) In mid-July, when I was in Paris, Bill called me at my parents’ to let me know that I had been admitted at Stanford with a full tuition scholarship.
Denouement
I returned to Sausalito – the same way – to pack up and move away. A friend drove me to Palo Alto with my small belongings two weeks before classes were due to start. There was little joy in my heart. I suspected that my lovely lifestyle would suffer. This, although College of Marin had given me a generous going-away scholarship, a significant cash award to facilitate the transition. I never heard of any such thing before; I still have not. The amount that comes to mind is more than enough to pay for the first and last month rent and for cleaning deposit.
Still, my premonition couldn’t have been more right. Yet, I found both housing and work right away. A strange middle-class man was putting the finishing touches to an apartment house he had had built on the wrong side of the freeway, with the avowed intention of becoming a slumlord. The building was next to an all-black high school. I helped him wrap up the work in return for a serious discount on rent on a one-bedroom apartment. I was the first tenant but the place filled up shortly, as he expected. Every other tenant was black. That was never a problem for me. In a few weeks, the black tenants were treating me as a sort of mascot with many smiles and offers to help any way whatsoever.
The first year at Stanford, I survived through impermanent odd jobs, some of which were downright odd. They included having kindergartners on the Stanford campus put on a play after Gilbert and Sullivan. (It was a disaster but the mostly Stanford faculty parents seemed to love it.) Next, I was teaching babies how to swim in a famous local swim school. (It’s a sham; babies don’t swim but they will drop to the bottom of a warm pool with their eyes open and a smile on their faces.) Then, for a quite a while, I was a puppetry instructor in a Jewish Community Center. This was followed by a stint as a nature exploration instructor for its teenagers. Fortunately, the suburban area of the center was crawling with deer. They made me look good (the deer)! In both roles, I had the strong impression that my goy identity was an asset. I think the decision makers were a little anti-Semitic, actually. Perhaps, they had trouble imagining a Jewish youth leading teenagers into the nearby woods. Myself, my past in the Catholic Boy Scouts served me well (again). All my small jobs were procured by a bighearted faculty wife, married to a star professor who had somehow taken an interest in me. (The wife; the star husband also liked to drink with me when he came home early enough to catch me. I was one of his excuses.) In fact, I was an unusual young man, undoubtedly brave, for one thing, and my mother had brought me up right; I had good manners. But my economic fate suddenly changed, and drastically so.
I declared Latin American Studies as a minor. Perhaps, it was largely because my good Spanish gave me a leg up. The main instructor and minor supervisor liked me because I did not cut corners and did the recommended reading avidly. Before that first year had ended, he had helped me land a Ford Foundation fellowship to do field research on my own in Bolivia – all expenses paid, of course. Two and half months in Bolivia further opened my mind, of course. It was a rare experience because undergraduates seldom did field research and never on their own. I don’t know what objective the Ford Foundation was pursuing. At any rate, the CIA never contacted me.
A Couple of Things I learned at Stanford
On an intellectual plane, Stanford turned out to be everything anyone could expect, and some. The transformation being at Stanford fostered in me is easier to summarize than to understand. First, being surrounded exclusively by intelligent people had a liberating effect on the lower-middle class boy I was still. The ordinary young people around me dreamed big dreams, and nursed big ambitions; some were already engaged in big projects. They are not much different from me, by and large, so, why not me, I mused? Proximity to some professors had the same effect. I took an intro class in biology that was taught by a Nobel Prize winner. He took my questions seriously. That was empowering in a simple, humble way. I believe a man teaching me Economics 101 subsequently won his own Nobel.
That was number one. Number two is a little more difficult to explain. My two years at Stanford, beginning with the welcome speech delivered by an anonymous Associate Dean, motivated me to modify my relationship to facts. The welcoming speaker simply told the newcomers: “If you want to profit by Stanford learning the best thing you can do is to check yourself and not affirm anything unless you are completely sure.” This somewhat hermetic advice was not wasted on me because I sort of knew that I came from a national culture that tends to treat facts in a relaxed manner. French culture easily sacrificed these building stones that are facts to the visual harmony of the whole edifice, to the presentation. Incidentally, I don’t know why I use the past tense. Fifty-five years later, I often watch French television where I frequently hear falsehoods that no one, no one, ever bothers to correct. (For one thing, it might be rude.)
In two years, Stanford provided my first exposure to the methods and to the spirit of science. I acquired both easily as if I had already been hungry for them. My motto as a researcher and latter as a teacher soon became: “Facts Matter.” The slogan was printed in big characters on all my syllabi for thirty years; it’s engraved in the concrete where you step onto my property. U. of California at Santa Cruz undergraduates often come by to take photographs.
I chose sociology as a major. I sensed that I would easily be bored with any degree of specialization and I sensed that sociology was ill defined enough to allow for fairly free intellectual ranging. (I was correct.) Two Stanford sociology professors I met early on had a big influence on me. The organizational theorist R. W. Scott showed me that systematics are not boring. I took St Clair Drake’s class on “Race and Ethnic Relations” because it was convenient to my schedule. The class demonstrated to me that almost anything can be taught through the telling of stories. This charming discovery guided my teaching for thirty-five years while developing a part of my brain I did not even know existed.
I graduated in two years (on top of two years of community college, thus a total of four years as an undergraduate). I graduated “with Distinction,” thank you. By the middle of the last quarter of my senior year, I had three offers of good jobs in France. That was sight unseen and mostly on the basis of the good reputation Stanford University enjoyed even that far away.
Epilogue
I chose a job in a city planning team in Lorraine. The area was beautiful and interesting. The job could have been exciting but I soon discovered my own shortcomings. I realized that I didn’t know the things I should have known to do the job and that everyone else there thought I knew except I. Also, I did not thrive on the “planning” meetings that I was sent to attend too many times.
Soon, I resolved to go to graduate school. I did the obvious and wrote my mentors in the Sociology Department at Stanford expressing my interest. Sure thing, they said, come over; you are in. One year after leaving for France and I was back in California enrolled in a doctoral program.
I did well there, thank you, and learned esoteric skills I did not even know existed as a youth. Subsequently, I taught thousands over a career spanning 35 years. I think I was a productive scholar though not a great one. In fact, I subscribe to a vanity service that helps me keep track of the mentions of my productions in the work of others. It turns out one of the papers I wrote in 1978 is still doing well. Good enough for me, at 45 years longevity. Money well spent!
Oh, yes, the title of this story, “The Life Sentence”? It means that a single sentence changed my life. Yes, I am still a little immature.
Jacques Delacroix is a writer who lives in Santa Cruz, California. He used to be a college professor. Send him mail.
Isonomia Quarterly 