A Personal Story Related to Being Poor and Fat

Anyone who has read my last book, Tennis Talk of a Nobody, will understand that I feel gratitude toward my father, Robert Theron Wilson. His desire that I play tennis accounts for the life I’ve led: a life of mysterious circumstances and connections, all related to the sport of tennis.

But something I did not mention in the book was my father’s decree when I graduated from USC.  I was supposed to be an elementary school teacher and support myself after four years of college.  Instead I wanted to earn a master’s in English and eventually get a Ph.D. and teach in college.

“Fine,” my father said.  “But it’s on your dime, not mine.” So off I went to San Francisco with the money I saved my senior year by taking night classes, living at home, commuting to USC in Los Angeles, and teaching tennis in Fullerton. But that first semester at SF State, I realized I could not support myself through a two to three year program. So in winter 1966, I entered a year-program to earn a secondary credential (8-12 certification). The program made it difficult to earn money the way I had earlier: babysitting, taking inventories, working at night for Joseph Magnin department store.

Then a move had to be made for cheaper rent. I could no longer walk to San Francisco State and took buses from Webster Street in the Marina. I remember bars with free spaghetti and my hope that someone would buy me a drink. My shoes wore out and I couldn’t replace them. No thrift store world then. My family wasn’t rich. Nor were we poor. Which is why I could not get a student loan in those days.

Why do I thank my father for cutting off financial support? Because I began to see the face of poverty in the Fillmore, where my bus stopped and I had to catch another. It shocked me that the Safeway there was more expensive than the Safeway in the Marina. How could that be? The poor spent more for food than the rich? I felt hungry all the time and yet I gained weight. The poorer I was, the fatter I got.  I am only saying this because of Now.  November 2025, and the continuing shut-down of the government. Forty or fifty million in our country, food insecure, as it is said. And now without their benefits.

I keep hearing comments from women who don’t have food for their children. We see them on television being interviewed. Many are overweight and look as if they eat a lot. But personal experience tells me they eat food with sugar, fat, and salt. That’s what I did to assuage hunger. Then in 1966, it was possible to buy a large bag of chips for what an apple would cost.

And buying all the ingredients needed for spaghetti or a pot of homemade soup involved an outlay of cash I did not have. I grew up with a mother who fixed real meals. I had been taught to cook. But I didn’t cook that semester in the Marina, living in a basement.

Yet my luck was to move to another apartment where three of us (all students) fixed dinner each night. And one of them did not need the $500.00 loan she was given that semester and offered it to me. Then in January 1967 I was hired to teach in Los Angeles; and given that I now had a job, my father helped me out and loaned me some money. I needed to pay back my room-mate the $500.00.  I also needed a downpayment on an apartment in Southern California. But I was able to buy a VW ‘bug’ on a loan through the L.A. Schools. I remember my first week of teaching at Dodson Junior High and how I bought a T-bone steak that Friday night, after surviving the first week of teaching. I cooked the steak for myself and no longer felt poor. Yet that experience in San Francisco marked my life in the best of ways, thanks to a father who said to me repeatedly, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

Next week:  A book I could not have written without teaching “bus kids from San Pedro” that year of 1967-68 in Los Angeles.