My Life With Dot and Jack

By Paula Hassler
October 2000

I lived with Aunt Dot and Uncle Jack Nason at 619 Wilson Avenue in Council Bluffs from May 1945 when I graduated from Denison High School until September 1946 when I went to school at the University of Colorado in Boulder. This was probably one of the most fun and instructive times of my young life. I had just turned 18 and living with my aunt and uncle gave me a graceful transition from girlhood to independence – plus they were like second parents to me. It’s hard to admit but for a short while I had a case of homesickness. However, our first regular visit back to Denison cured that for good.

Working in “Uncle Jack’s office” was my first real job – 5 ½ days a week for $35 per week, which wasn’t bad money in those days for a girl just out of high school. I saved up quite a bit for college in those 15 months. Dot charged me $7 per week for room and three squares a day – plus I got a free ride to and from work with Uncle Jack, as my job was in his office. Riding with Jack in his car was an adventure, by the way, because he would often stop, roll down his window and yell things. “Hey, you kids! Get away from the street! Do you want to get run over?” He would also stop and yell at small animals including squirrels.

My job was operating the office switchboard (it had a genuine golden oak case and plugs on long cords) and doing various secretarial duties. One problem was that my shorthand skills were weak and I flunked the Civil Service exam. Jack secured a retest by stating that I’d failed “because the guy mumbled” – something that hadn’t occurred to me. Fortunately, they gave the exact same shorthand test and I had sort of memorized it by then and I managed to pass the second time around.

WW2 was still on when I started and the office was called The War Manpower Commission, but it was later changed to The U.S. Employment Service when the war ended in August of 1945. The office staff consisted of eight or nine interviewers who sat at desks in a large room and assisted war veterans in their job searches. I was the only female in the office besides one woman interviewer and Rita Quick (“Speedy”), the office manager. Almost everyone had a nickname – I was “Junior” or sometimes “The Bobby Soxer” (at that stage of my life, I considered anklets and saddle shoes to be appropriate office wear). But more on nicknames later.

Uncle Jack was The Manager (the boss) and everyone in the office knew I was his niece. I discovered much later that Uncle Jack had fired the previous switchboard girl in order to hire me, claiming that she missed too much work or something. At the outset, that didn’t make me the most popular person in the office, but as time went on, I apparently won over most everyone without knowing that I had to do so.

One clue that maybe someone had it in for me was when one of the interviewers (I can’t remember his name) sidled up to my desk and handed me a nasty joke and asked me to type him ten copies. Of course, photocopy machines were unknown in those days. I took one look at the piece of paper, handed it right back to him and told him to go find a secretarial service. Word of my snippy reaction got around and apparently raised my stock with most of the others in the office, who (correctly) felt the man was being disrespectful to a young lady. I was never shy about telling or hearing jokes but, in this case, I knew that I was being insulted.

Getting back to nicknames in the office, I soon discovered that they were bestowed on us by one of the interviewers named Ron Thompson. “Tommy” was 35 years old and a veteran who had an Army medical discharge due to injuries suffered early on in the war. He was a bright and articulate man, well educated, with a wonderful sense of humor, who was in my opinion working way below his potential.

However, Tommy and I became good friends. He looked older than his 35 years and maybe I looked younger than my 18 – and we must have made a few heads turn when we went out to bars after work to talk and enjoy a few brews. Tommy’s war injuries had affected his equilibrium and unfortunately the slightest bit of alcohol made that condition worse. It was clear that we had a crush on each other, but he never once took any, er, liberties with me. I believe in those days, men respected women much younger than themselves. At any rate, we each got a lot out of our friendship and we corresponded until his death in the late 1970s.

Dot and Jack had just purchased the house at 619 Wilson just before I came to live with them. When we moved in, I found myself performing household tasks I’d never done or never even heard of before, like helping Dot scrub the dining room hardwood floor on hands and knees and helping her clean the old stove and refrigerator that came with the house. Dot used to say, “I can stand living with my own dirt but not with other people’s.” Actually, she didn’t live with any dirt, as far as I could see.

I learned another new skill which was keeping mum in the morning until everyone had downed several cups of coffee. Dot and Jack were deep sleepers and didn’t really come to until they’d been up and shuffled around (their choice of words) for quite a while. We were all three smokers and the gray fumes would hover above the silent kitchen, where the only words spoken were, “Toast?” “Yes.” “More coffee?” “No.” How different from my home of origin, where all came bouncing down to breakfast, bright and chipper, jabbering throughout the meal.

As an aside, here’s one of the famous Dot and Jack stories that illustrates how deeply they slept. It seems that when they were first married, they had this cheap, old bed with the mattress held in place by wooden slats. Dot said that in her dream that night she heard rifle shots but didn’t waken. Jack heard nothing. The next morning, they both woke up still on the mattress, but with their heads at floor level and their feet in the air. Yes, half the bed slats had broken in the night but they slept right through it.

Something else I learned from Dot, other than how to sharpen my game of Oklahoma Rummy, was that “saved” items in the refrigerator were subsequently used. Since then I’ve always been able to keep an organized refrigerator, somewhat different from my first home, where foil-wrapped organic matter stayed on and on and on in the refrigerator.

One fond memory of Dot and Jack that always stood out in my mind involved the home repair projects they did together. I’ll never forget the Saturday afternoon of the handrail for the cellar stairs. Dot’s anguished voice coming from the basement, “Johnny, just look at this – it’s all wobbly and you built it crooked!” Jack’s voice, equally upset, “Oh hell, Dot, nobody’s going to notice that!” Somehow, the job got done and peace reigned again – until the next home improvement project started, that is.

And the parties! The office parties were held downtown and the liquor flowed freely. Jack was the only driver among the three of us and he usually had more drinks than he could hold (one or two) so the trip home was a series of alarmed cries from Dot, “Johnny, look out – there’s a car!” Jack would mutter fuzzily from behind the wheel, “Don’t worry – I’ll herd this heifer home!” By some miracle, we always made it.

The parties at the house were really something! When the war was over, one by one all my cousins and uncles returned from the service and would either deplane or detrain in Omaha – and go right to Dot and Jack’s for the parties. I drank and smoked right along with everyone else and nobody apparently thought a thing of it.

Jokes abounded, couples danced to the music on the radio, barbershop quartets sprang up from nowhere, Jack would do his Groucho Marx imitation, and Dot presided over the food and drinks. Jack could also do some great lines from the radio show Amos and Andy. At first, they tried to tell dirty jokes out of my hearing but I didn’t let them get away with that and soon they just plain gave up on trying to spare my delicate 18-year-old ears.

The Ouija board was the center of most parties back then and it generated much fun but also some controversy. Jack would have his quota of two drinks and then get out Old Weej (as he called it) and start in. Dot would blindfold Jack and then sit next to him in order to write down what Weej spelled out. The planchette under Jack’s fingers moved with lightning speed to reveal the scariest messages, including gossipy things about family members – and once it even predicted an actual phone call that came in telling of someone’s death. I’m not superstitious or anything but how that thing worked has always been one of the great mysteries of my life. Some family members really didn’t like the idea because of religious issues, and I understand that later on Dot finally got rid of it. But it sure was fun while it lasted.

Rags, or Raggy, was the Skye terrier that Dot and Jack had rescued some years before on a dark road during a bad rainstorm. Raggy was probably one of the cutest and smartest dogs I’d ever heard of. She not only understood what people said, but she apparently read minds. Raggy hated being bathed and Dot and Jack insisted that all they had to do was to think about giving her a bath and she hid out under the bed in the farthest corner possible. She loved going in the car and traveled nearly everywhere with us.

We did a lot of fun things back then, including the three of us going to movies, making periodic cigarette runs to Omaha (where a pack was five cents), and regular trips back to Denison to visit. Jack’s one-liners were always good for a laugh no matter how often we’d hear them. For example, if someone mentioned high school kids getting into trouble, Jack would declare, “When I was that age, I was so innocent of sex that I thought StickItIn was a summer resort.”

I could go on for ten more pages on this subject but don’t want to lose my audience, so that’s all for now, folks! Maybe some day there will be a second edition recounting some of the famous Dot and Jack stories that you already know so well; including panthers in the basement, bad gas attacks in bed, and peeing in Grandma Christiansen’s chest of drawers at Christmas. Plus, maybe I’ll think of some more of Jack’s one-liners by then.

Paula, the Bobby Soxer
September, 2000