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I often think about the events and changes in the world that my grandmother experienced – no one would have imagined the life she led, beginning in a small town in Bohemia and ending up in San Francisco, with a full life and several years of nightmarish hardship along the way.
I suppose one might say the same when looking back at almost anyone who lived a long life. I’m sure that as a child my mother Eva never imagined the life she would live and the places she would go.
After a childhood in Vienna, several months in Istanbul to obtain a passport, and completing high school in San Francisco, Eva received a nursing degree in 1943 and went to work. As we have seen in letters from her brother Harry in the army, she had dreams of doing her part for the war effort, or at least of traveling the world. After she married, she continued her education and received an MA in Education from San Francisco State College (now University) in the late 1950s. [More than 20 years later I studied in the Counseling program at SF State and had a course with one of the same professors!]
The MA degree made her eligible to work as a public health nurse for the city of San Francisco, which she did for 20 years through the 1960s, 1970s, and into the early 1980s. As with her mother, Eva had a front row seat to the cultural changes, since she was working with city residents who needed health care and assistance. She made home visits, worked in the public health center clinic, was a school nurse, gave health education presentations. In the 1960s, she made home visits in the Haight Ashbury (I don’t know whether there was a disconnect between a nurse with a European accent who had a strict code of conduct and high expectations working with hippies during the summer of love, etc.). She saw huge changes in the social safety net: many of the single room occupancy buildings that provided cheap housing for many of her clients were razed to make way for new high-rises and offices downtown and changes in mental health care. As both a city resident and an employee, she was shocked by the events of November 1978 – the mass murders at Jonestown and the murders of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone (and Dianne Feinstein becoming mayor). By the time she retired in July of 1984, the AIDS epidemic had a name and was in full force.
