Still Best Friends After All These Years

On the one coast was Santa Monica in 1958: picturesque, clean and teeming with single crew-cut men earnestly pursuing aerospace careers. On the other coast was New York City: old, cold and home to four twentysomething women, all secretaries, all looking for men and adventure. So it was that Maureen Caruso, Joan O’Brien, Eileen Campbell and Mary Harris came to California in the summer of ’58 for a six-month visit that lasted 40 years.

“We were having such a good time, we just never went back,” said Eileen (now Roth). They moved into a happening apartment on 9th Street in Santa Monica, home to dozens of other young people from out of state.

“We soon realized everyone we met was a lot like us,” said Maureen (now Gehris). “No one was from California. Every man was an engineer recruited from somewhere else, and every woman was tired of the place she was from and looking for a future.”

Anyone living between 2nd and 26th streets and searching for a social life converged at the now legendary apartments on 9th, where friendships and marriages formed and endured.

On Aug. 15, the group regrouped at a 40-year reunion to celebrate its coming to California.

The four young women had come west with few belongings. They slept in their raincoats until they could afford sheets. Mary, who came a couple months after the others, slept on a chaise lounge borrowed from the apartment’s pool area.

They wore hats and white gloves to job interviews. “That was so New York of us,” they now say, laughing. They got secretarial jobs at prestigious companies: Rand, Litton, American Airlines.

“It was a very innocent time, yet for us it was freedom,” Eileen said. “In those days you stayed home until you got married. Instead, we had the wonderful experience of being on our own.”

“We made no secret of the fact that we weren’t looking for anything but husbands,” said Maureen. While the women’s agenda was marriage and family, the men admitted theirs was beer and girls. But the women held the trump card, noted Maureen: “They couldn’t sleep with us in those days until they married us.”

Within two years, the roommates all married aerospace engineers, and the four couples have 18 children (one of whom became this writer’s husband) and 22 grandchildren to date.

“Those were good times, maybe better times,” said Elmer Zirkel, who with his wife--whom he met at one of the famed apartment parties--hosted the reunion of some 30 friends at their Palos Verdes home. “Of all the people in our group, not one has divorced.”

“Picture Silicon Valley,” said Howie Arnold, a 9th Street veteran. “That’s how Santa Monica was 40 years ago, except the young engineers are in computers, not aerospace, and the women aren’t secretaries anymore, they’re engineers too.”

At the reunion, guests’ voices betrayed their mostly East Coast origins, but the party was pure California, a patio poolside affair with tiki torches, an ocean view and palm trees punctuating the skyline. The group remembered Friday nights, when each of the aerospace firms--Douglas, Litton, Hughes--would post a list of the parties their employees knew about.

And they reminisced about who met whom where and how. “Oh, there’s Barbara’s sister. Remember they lived on 20th and San Vicente together with Ruth, who’s over there. She met her husband, Les, at Jim Gehris’ party.”

Just when you feel a need to diagram the network, you realize it doesn’t matter. What matters is this: They were all out-of-state transplants who in the absence of their own families became each other’s. The core four remain best friends. For the past 25 years, they’ve made a tradition of turning Mother’s Day weekend into a Palm Springs getaway. “It just gets better every year; we have so much history,” said Eileen.

After a lively gabfest, guests sat down at round tables on the lawn and continued their conversations over dinner. They talked into the night. At the end of the party, as with the end of the era on 9th, everyone got what they came for.

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