L. Jack Davidson Part IV: Breaking Away

We move forward from New York City....

*****
(In 1963 you graduate from high school. And then?)

I went to the American University in Washington.

(What did you study there?)

International business.

(Did you get your—you stayed there for four years?)

I stayed there for four years, but I didn’t the degree. It was the time of the Vietnam war, and I didn’t want to be drafted, so I came back to Salvador. I was a draft-dodger. With pride. (laughs)

(So you came back to Salvador in 19—?)

’67.

(And then what did you start doing at that point?)

I started working with my father, but that was a little over half a year. My father got married in the summer of ’67. I came in May and my father got married in July.

(To a Salvadoran woman?)

No, to a German woman. That’s another long story. My father was a—in the business, we had the representation of Swissair. Every year they would give us $2,000 worth of free tickets. He and his partner would share those tickets. At that time it was about four trips round-trip to Europe. That was the year that my sister and I went, we went with Frankie Rosenberg to Europe. We spent six weeks there. Trying to return, it was that summer of ’66, there was a big airline strike. And of course we were on standby because we had free tickets, so we were stuck in Zurich. We spent ten days going to the airport every day to try to get out, because we didn’t have money—well, my father sent us money, but we weren’t prepared for those extra ten days. Every day that we went to the airport, we went to the Swissair counter and this young woman took care of us. She was very nice. She tried to get us on the planes, unsuccessfully, but every day we would go to see Miss Gossens and so on. The day we actually left, we actually got on the plane, was her day off. So we asked people to please say “thank you” to her that we finally got off and left her a note or something, I don’t remember.

Came back to Salvador, told my father the story, he was going to Europe later on in that year. In October of ’66, or September, he went to Europe. We asked him to buy a bottle of perfume, or we had left her one, but we asked him to stop by the Swissair counter and say hello to her and thank her for having taken care of us, whatever. He must have been very anxious to meet somebody, because he landed that morning in Switzerland and that afternoon went back to the airport to see her and to thank her, ended up going out to dinner with her and eventually marrying her.

(So he ended up marrying her?)

This was in ’66, and in ’67 they got married. At that point I was living here, in Salvador, and I lived with them for the first six months in the house. And in 1968, Lillian (wife) and I went to Chile and got married there, so I got married six months after my father did.

(So you knew Lillian from—?)

Lillian and I—she says we met in a concert where probably her grandparents were, because they used to go to all the concerts. She went with her grandparents and my father would take us to concerts, to the few concerts that happened here. And during—I have to backtrack again.

In 1959 was my bar mitzvah in New York. We were living in New York at the time. If you look at the chronology, we were in New York at the time. And my mother as a bar mitzvah gift gave me a trip to Europe. But my sister came to spend that summer in Salvador. That was a first time that we actually separated. So she was here alone and I went to Europe with my mother and her husband. During that summer, my sister got very bored being alone, she was eleven or twelve years old. Here in Salvador, she got very bored. So my father decided to put her in the American school for the summer, because she was doing nothing at home. These summers, school vacations at that time were June, July, and August, so they were a long time. And my sister was never very happy in New York. She hated Walden School, the school that I liked. She hated it. It was not her thing at all. So she end up staying. So that that point my sister lived with my father and I lived with my mother in New York, from ’59 to ’62.

In ’62 my sister was sent to a boarding school in Massachusetts, and that’s when I came down here, so we didn’t live together. But we were always very close. During that time that my sister was here alone, she went to the American school, and Lillian was her classmate. When I used to come down for vacations, I got together with a lot of Monica’s friend because, you know, we were a year and a half apart, a year and eight months. Her friends were girls that I—she went out with my friends, I went out with her friends, that sort of thing. And we were always very close. So at one party that Monica gave, I remember meeting Lillian there. She says we knew each other from before. But at that time, I think—I don’t know if she was thirteen and I was fourteen or she was twelve and I was thirteen—we started going out then.

(At twelve?)

Thirteen, something like that.

(You would write letters when you were traveling?)

Yeah, on and off, you know. And then when I came back here for the senior year in high school, at the end of that period I remember Monica came for the summer, after I had graduated high school, and said, “Remember Lillian Moncada [?]? She wants to go out with our group.” You know, for a girl it wasn’t so easy to adhere herself to a group if she wasn’t—

(Right.)

And I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time or whatever, so I started going out with her. So actually, that’s when we started quote “going steady.” That was in 1963, when we were sixteen and seventeen.

(Wow.)

And we of course didn’t go steady the whole time until we got married, but we were in contact the whole time. During all the four years of college we wrote letters, we would see each other on vacations and that sort of thing.

(Did you know already you wanted to marry her, or you weren’t even thinking of that at that point yet?)

Yeah, I probably would have married her right away......

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC