In the summer of 1935 my father (32 years old) took his first family and moved to the Washington DC area so that he could accept a position with the Civilian Conservation Corp as a statistician grade 6 at $1,800/yr. Over the next five years he received regular increases in pay and responsibility. These responsibilities included drafting a "Study of German Labor Services," and writing two presentations which he made to the Senate Budget Committee the second one being titled "The Job Placement Program of the Civilian Conservation Corps."In the 18 months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the end of 1941 his income increased 35%, his first wife died of diabetes, he met and married my mom, lost his daughter to pneumonia (she was in the hospital at the time with complications from her own type 1 diabetes), and saw the birth of his first son. It was in June of that same year that he was appointed to the position of shipping analyst in the Office of Exports a division of the Board of Economic Warfare and received another 9+% pay hike.
The Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) was established by the President on December 17, 1941 and was abolished by Executive Order on July 15, 1943, when its functions were consolidated into the Foreign Economic Administration[1]. As a side story to this one I should note that a number of Americans who worked for the BEW were later discovered to have been secretly members of the Communist Party of America and had established covert liaisons with Soviet intelligence in what was known as the Silvermaster network named for Gregory Silvermaster a Russian immigrant and naturalized citizen who acted as their handler and courier. None of the papers that I possess from my fathers employment in the agency contains any of the names I found associated with the spymaster's ring but one of the persistent and unsubstantiated tales from my fathers years in the government are that he was conscripted to look for spies. Silvermaster himself was detailed to the BEW in 1942 where he was able to obtain and provide the Soviet Union with a large amount of data on arms, aircraft, and shipping production[2]. With the dissolution of the BEW in 1943 my father left for work in the private section and took a job with Bethlehem Steel.
As my Mom tells it, Dad was obsessed with the notion that California was were the opportunity was and he was hell bent on getting out of Washington DC and over to the West Coast to be a part of what my history book referred to as the "West's Second Gold Rush." As to whether the job offer came before or after the train trip to California I don't know but very little time elapsed between his leaving the post at the BEW in April 1943 and starting at Bethlehem Steel's plant near the shipyards in San Francisco. At Bethlehem he worked as a design draftsman and his name appears as draftsman for things like reduction gear dehumidifiers and emergency steering room pumps. Not exactly the big guns that others names are next to on the work rosters I found in his old papers but he does seem to be the one that had to sign off on the overall work schedule and certify its on time completion.
The Bay Area had managed to gather into one small geographic corner the operations of Bethlehem Steel, the Bechtel Corporation, Standard Oil, and the Kaiser Ship works. My parents took a flat way out on Geary Blvd. and Dad continued to work at Bechtel until the end of the war when he was terminated. He garnered several letters of recommendation from supervisors but the termination letter simply says "terminated due to the end of the war."
I found no record of another job for six months. Then in February of 1946 he began working as the San Francisco Office Manager for a Los Angeles based PR company that performed customer surveys and market analysis - but that just starts a whole 'nother story because he was about to leverage the business contacts he had made at Bethlehem, Bechtel and Standard Oil.
[1][1]From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[2][2] http://www.answers.com/topic/greg-silvermaster
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