NONFICTION   -
        WITH A THEME OF WORK

You are ordered to disperse. Anyone not leaving will be arrested.
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Authority by Respect
by  Pat Skala

On January 23, 1969, I was arrested along with 400 other students during a rally at San Francisco State College. We all spent the night in jail and the women were fire-hosed. It’s not a stretch to say this single event changed the trajectory of my future work life.

My arrest occurred at the end of the third month of what would turn out to be the longest student strike, six months, of the Vietnam era. The Black Student Union had gone on strike to demand the creation of an ethnic studies department. A week before my arrest, there had been violent interactions between the SF TAC Squad and students, and the campus was shut down. Students were told to stay away. Still, when word of a rally got out, hundreds of students came together in the center of the campus. I’m sure many of them were there for the same reasons I was. I supported the strike: I walked the picket line, I wanted to know where the strike was going and most especially, when it would be over. I thought of myself as an active supporter if not a militant one.

“This is an illegal assembly. You are ordered to disperse. Anyone not leaving immediately will be arrested.”

When the voice came over the loudspeaker, I saw a few people leave, but not many. I wanted to go, but I could not move my feet. I wanted to go, but I was too scared to move. I was immobilized by my own internal conflicts. How can I support the black students if I leave at the first sign of trouble? How can I stay out of jail if I don’t leave? And so I spent that night with 100 plus other women in the dayroom of the county jail.

There may have been a few tables or chairs. Most women sat on the floor or leaned against the wall expecting to be there all night. A large window in one wall faced the hallway. Standing by the window, I could see police personnel dragging a heavy firehose towards us. I knew right away we were going to be hosed, though I didn’t know why. As soon as they entered, everyone ran to the opposite corner. They aimed mostly at our feet and the floor. But I did see one woman knocked over by the force of the water. Later, I heard she’d broken her arm in the fall.

After spending the night on a cold, damp floor, I was released on my own recognizance. I went to my grandmother’s house where I lived while finishing my Master’s Degree. My mother was also there, having driven up from her home in Menlo Park. Both women were very angry at me for potentially “ruining” my life.

“You’re the first person in the family to go to college and the first person to go to jail,” my grandmother said.

My mother kept asking, “What if the college won’t give you a degree? What if you can’t get a teaching credential? What if you can’t get a job?”

I knew what she meant was: “Who will want you?”

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It appeared, at first, her fears were justified. The 400 students and “outside agitators” arrested that day were tried in groups of 10 on three misdemeanor counts: illegal assembly, refusing to disperse and a third charge that sounded like a combination of the first two. Trespassing, perhaps.

Verdicts varied widely. Some groups were acquitted. A friend of mine got two weeks in the county “farm” at Santa Rita prison. My group got a two-year suspended sentence and two years’ probation. Ours was the toughest sentence given. When I met my Parole Officer for the first time, he asked me if I was one of the “ring leaders.” It scared me to think my sentence could potentially brand me as a radical, when I was just a frightened, albeit sympathetic student.

I received my Master’s Degree without issue. As soon as the Black Students had gone on strike, the TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) faculty moved our classes off campus. I was able to continue going to classes offsite. I also continued student teaching, offsite, to foreign students who needed to improve their English before enrolling at State. Between teaching and going to my own classes, I walked the picket line.

My mother was right about one thing: I couldn’t get a teaching job. The State Legislature passed a bill prohibiting persons arrested on State property from getting teaching credentials. So, I found a job doing clerical work in the clinical laboratory of a local hospital. Several months later the California State Supreme Court held that bill to be unconstitutional and my provisional credential, only valid for one year, arrived the day it expired.

I wasn’t entirely disappointed. I had felt very conflicted doing student teaching to foreign students, especially Asian students, knowing that my country was bombing and napalming Southeast Asia. I even had a Chinese student in my class who worked for Dow Chemical. I couldn’t make myself feel okay about that. I didn’t go back to teaching.

Instead, I remained at my job in the Hospital Clinical Laboratory, sometimes working the front desk, sometimes making chemical reagents. When I wasn’t working, I went to anti-war rallies and smoked pot. After a few years, I decided I wanted to have a piece of paper that said I could do something technical. I wanted to be a licensed or certified something or other. I very arbitrarily picked Court Reporting out of an SF City College catalogue. I went to school during the day and worked part-time at night in the Data Processing Department at a different hospital batching charge tickets for the keypunch operators.

That job put me in exactly the right place at the right time, and although I didn’t know it then, altered my future for the better and forever.
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Things were about to change in data processing. Bar codes would soon replace key punch operators. Desk top computers were replacing dumb terminals. Data was being thought of as information and data processing began morphing into information technology.

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Eventually the hospital decided to install an electronic billing system with point-of-service charging—no more charge slips. Nurses would be entering a charge code directly into the computers that would soon be installed on their units. My boss told me he would train me to be a systems analyst if I would come to work for him full-time. I didn’t know what the word “systems” meant exactly, but I wasn’t cutting it in Court Reporting School. One needs to “type” 200 words a minute to pass the State Exam. I could never get above 180. I told my boss, “Yes!”

It turned out I had a knack for the work. I could talk to people who worked in the Billing and later Nursing Departments, the users. I could talk to the vendor reps as well. To get the best results, I learned to lobby for both sides.

One day while I still considered myself an apprentice, my boss sent me to meet with the Assistant Director of Nursing. I knew her, of course, and she was always very nice to me, but correct protocol would have been for my boss, the Data Processing Director, to meet with her. Nevertheless, we had a good discussion about something I was going to be training the nurses to do regarding billing. Even then, I sensed that nurses would have a love/hate relationship with the computers that would be coming to their nursing stations soon.

Anxious that the nurses would not appreciate the additional work, I asked, “Why should the nurses listen to anything I have to say? I don’t have any authority over them.”
 
“You have authority by respect,” she responded.

Authority by respect? It sounded like a good thing, but again I wasn’t sure what it meant.
Eventually, I came to realize that I didn’t actually need a piece of paper to say I could do what I was doing. It was clear to the people around me that I was competent to do the work. Over the next 40 years, I helped install electronic billing, medical records and clinical systems in several hospitals in the City. The last fifteen years of my work life, I spent as an IT Manager for the Department of Public Health where my staff installed and supported desktop computers at SF General, Laguna Honda Hospital, ten Health Centers and the jails.
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While my mother had been right in the short-term decades before, she could not have foreseen how the unexpected events of getting arrested and then being denied a credential, would lead me to a career path neither of us knew existed and could never have predicted.

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​Pat Skala is a native San Franciscan (only 3 generations) and a graduate of San Francisco State College. (Note the "C". Had she waited a year longer to graduate it would be a "U.") A retired City employee, Pat and her husband live in the house that her grandparents built in 1927. She is a gardener, a quilter and an avid jigsaw puzzle person. Although she would love to be a star on Moth Radio, she limits her storytelling to friends and family. Her stories are true and focus on what she thinks of as "angels:" people who come into our lives ever so briefly, but who give us something we need or point us in a better direction.

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