Childhood
Growing Up
My father Louis met and married my mother, Pauline, while he served in the United States Army during World War II. They met at Lawrence Welk's Hollywood Palladium, on the infamous Sunset Strip. The Palladium hosted dances for GI's featuring Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra and lead singer Frank Sinatra
It wasn't love at first sight; at least it wasn't for my plain, plump but voluptuous mother. My father pestered her and pestered her, until she finally agreed to dance with him. Tall, dark, and handsome with a charming smile, engaging sense of humor, and charismatic personality, it didn't take long for my father to hook my mother. After their third date, she was head-over-heels in love with him. In his arms, she became charming and pretty too. But the marriage started out with secrets and lies that infested the foundation of our family and lead to the collapse of the facade and family.
I was the baby of the family, the last of three kids. Lou was a struggling writer and Pauline worked as an administrative assistant at an aircraft defense plant.
My father could not find a writing job, so he stayed home, wrote most of the day and took care of me, while my mother worked to support the family. My mother was the only working mom in the neighborhood. She was never home. She would pick up the swing shift and the night shift to make extra money. My father was writing dime novels and pornography and earning nothing. He applied for job-after-job but was turned down. Los Angeles at the time was a very anti-Semitic city, forcing my father to legally change the family last name to the Irish sounding, Karney, so he could find work.
My brother and sister were in school. I would fall asleep to the banging of the typewriter keys and the ping of the slamming carriage return, as my father typed 85 words a minute on his cherished old Royal manual typewriter. He would bang and ping for hours at a time. It was when the typing sounds stopped, that the bad thing would happen. Something I never told anyone about, something I eventually forgot happened at all.
In 1958, my family won "Family of the Year." We were the perfect American family. I believed I that I came from the perfect family.
My father finally landed a writing job with the Los Angeles Herald Examiner as a sports writer. My father disliked sports and could barely follow a baseball game. After he got fired from the paper, he landed a solid writing job as the West Coast Editor of a business magazine. It enabled us to move out of our tiny rented house near MGM Studios to the Hollywood Hills of California.
My father traveled for months at a time on business.
I attended Fairfax High School where I was reasonably popular. At graduation, was anointed "Class Clown"--the funniest person in the class with the wicked sense of humor.
When I scored low on my college entrance exams (SAT's) my high school counselor recommended that I go to a trade school. In my Jewish family, medicine and law were the only "trades" that I was expected to pursue. I thought "law" was a trade, so I didn't see why the guidance counselor was so upset. I got into UCLA, despite low SAT's but super high grades, and went on to graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. I took a "gap year" off from school to try and "find myself." I volunteered my time at the Children's Home Society in Los Angeles (a home for abused, abandoned and neglected children) and then got a job working the swing shift, at a private in-patient psychiatric facility. I was placed as a psyche assistant on the teenage girls locked ward. It was like a combo of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest mixed in with Girl Interrupted. Seeing children and teenagers so mistreated and misunderstood inspired me to go to law school.
I applied and got accepted at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where I graduated with Honors. Trying to pass the bar exam proved to be a daunting struggle. I finally was able to pass the bar exam with the help of a wonderful bar review program (Beverly Reuben's' Writing Course) and a gifted hypnotherapist. Even though I had always done well in school, I didn't feel smart enough to pass the California bar exam. I thought, like many of my current bar students, that I only did well in school because I worked twice as hard as everybody else. The hypnotherapist helped me realize that I was smart enough to pass the California bar and I finally did.
Dead broke with a boatload of student loans, I eventually landed a job at an Aviation Law firm handling airplane crashes. It was the only firm that offered me a job. All my clients were dead. I was the only female lawyer in the firm and the only non-pilot attorney. All the guys had flown in the military, or had been commercial airline pilots or civilian cargo pilots.
I began moonlighting at the Women's Rape and Domestic Violence Clinic because I told myself that I cared about women's issues. But today, I realize it was so much more.
A social worker that had heard about my work at the clinic visited me unexpectedly one day, at my office. She asked me to take Katie's case. Katie was a three year-old child who was being sexually abused by her father during weekend visitation. At first I refused, because I didn't want to get involved. Once I met little Katie, I couldn't refuse to help her.
Katie changed my life forever.
