History of John Smith Griffin
page 73
Berkeley - 1946
On a Saturday afternoon we had been looking at houses in Oakland without much success. It was late in the afternoon and we stopped in a restaurant for dinner. I recall that when they served me I just could not eat the food. I really felt rotten and so we went back to Berkeley and I promptly went to bed. I knew that I had a fever but I did not know how high. I spent a very restless night and the next morning I knew that my fever was really high. Dorothy bought a fever thermometer and I found that I had a temperature of 104. She then started calling friends to try and find a doctor who would come and see me on a Sunday. Finally she found one and about four o'clock Sunday afternoon he came. After giving me all the tests he could think of he said that he did not know what was the matter with me. I had no sore throat, cold, or other symptoms of the flu. He took a urine sample and told me that he would let me know when he got the results My fever stayed high and I really felt miserable. The next day he called and said that the urine had puss in it and that I had either a kidney or urinary infection. For a week I stayed in bed with a high fever while they fought the infection with sulfa and other drugs. I finally began to get better. The doctor told me that my trouble was probably caused by sitting in the same position for so long a time without moving, on my trip out to Utah.
My cousin Kathryn Baer lived in Berkley in a house that they were renting on Cedar street about three or four blocks below Grove. The man that owned it wanted to sell it and had offered them a real good proposition with a low down payment. They had some friends, however, that wanted them to go in with them and buy a duplex in Oakland and so were not interested in buying the house on Cedar.
I asked Leon (Kathryn's husband) if he would see if his landlord would sell the house to me on the same terms. The landlord finally agreed and so we decided that this would be the best solution to our housing problem. We completed the transaction involving a $1500 down payment and reasonable monthly payments. The Baers were'to stay there until the duplex was ready to move into and in the meantime I started work and slept in the basement. When they finally moved out, I refinished the home, painting the inside and sanding and refinishing the floors, before sending for Dorothy and the kids.
The next day I took the car down to the Pontiac agency to see if they could do something to stop it heating. I knew that I would never make it across the desert from Ogden to San Francisco in July unless I found out the trouble and had it fixed. They knew just what to do and put in a new distributor tube that went down through the engine block to distribute the water to the back cylinders so it would cool them. The old tube had almost completely corroded away.
A few days later Dorothy and I left for San Francisco, leaving the kids with my relatives there in Ogden, until I could find housing for the family in the San Francisco area. At this time my uncle Jess lived in Berkeley and he and his wife were visiting in Utah and so offered to let us stay at their place while we were hunting a home. For three or four days we looked all over the San Francisco area for a place to live, with little success. We decided that we would have to buy a house in order to obtain lodging. Our trouble was that we had very little money to use as a down payment and there were very few homes available that could be purchased with a small down payment.
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