Story by Donald H. Harrison; Photos by Shor M. Masori
FALLBROOK, California – They say there are not many of our fellow Jews in this northern San Diego County town, but my grandson Shor and I recently met two interesting ones who are living alongside the Pala Mesa Resort golf course.
Gordon and Phyllis Molloff have been happily retired in Fallbrook for 20 years. He plays golf three times a week, and she plays almost as often. Very fit octogenarians, they each have their routines, including workouts for Phyllis. Not at all religious—but proud of their Jewish heritage and culture—the Molloffs live in a non-Jewish neighborhood. Reminders of their heritage are the mezuzahs on their doors, and a menorah up on a shelf, but that’s about all.
When they moved to Fallbrook from Los Angeles, relatives and friends questioned whether they’d be safe. Fallbrook then was known as the hometown of Tom Metzger, a white supremacist who once was the local Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan as well as an organizer for the White Aryan Resistance.
The Molloffs said they were unimpressed and unintimidated by Metzger, who was a local television repairman until he moved out of the state. Gordon said he told his relatives, “If he doesn’t bother me, I won’t bother him, but if he bothers me, he will hear from me.”
Said Phyllis: “There was napalm stored here [at Fallbrook Naval Weapons Station] and that was worse than Tom Metzger. Who wants to live near napalm? I remember the time they schlepped it out and took it to Texas, which was fine with me.”
Nowadays, anti-Semitism rarely comes up. There was a time an acquaintance called Phyllis a “Jewish American Princess,” a stereotype which Phyllis thinks might be exactly opposite of her. “Look at my hand,” she said. “Do you see all the diamonds?” In fact, she wore none. At an earlier time in her life, she said, a woman talking about a place to shop, said “You have to Jew them down,” and Phyllis said she asked the woman whether she even realized what a slur that was. The woman didn’t. Phyllis is not religious, but she stands up for herself and her fellow Jews.
Before their retirements, Phyllis had a long career as an English teacher, mostly at Simi Valley High School, while Gordon worked at a variety of jobs, mostly in the meat industry. They met in 1956 in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, when he was driving an ice cream truck and she had a summer job at a Mohawk Gas Station, which featured an all-girl staff of attendants. Because she was dark-skinned and exotic looking, Gordon made it a point to return to the gas station, where Phyllis said that gas was 19.9 cents per gallon and customers received a towel or a pack of cigarettes with every fill-up. The year was 1956 and they got married in 1957.
Reflecting on their marriage more than 60 years later, Phyllis suggests that although the marriage turned out right, her reasons were wrong. Her working mother often left her in charge of two younger siblings, which was a lot of pressure for someone also trying to be a student at UCLA. She figured then that marrying Gordon would get her out from under her responsibilities. Instead, within a few years after marriage, she was the mother of two daughters, and had to drop out of college. She didn’t return to her studies until the girls were older and Gordon, who had gone to work for the Akron chain, was transferred to the San Francisco Bay area. There, Phyllis enrolled at San Francisco State and, influenced by her environment, became very liberal in her political outlook. Don’t even mention President Trump to her, or for that matter, to Gordon either.
The couple didn’t like the weather up north, and eventually returned to the Los Angeles area, where Phyllis taught high school for 30 years. In addition to teaching honors English, “I also taught a class that if you were observing it, looked like a very controlled Jerry Springer show. There were between 30 and 35 kids in the class. They all sat in a circle, and every day, without them knowing it, I tried to teach them strategies to deal with the issues in their lives because most people do not have a plan, and whatever happens, happens. All that they knew was revenge, which is a very unsuccessful strategy. So, they would tell us whatever was on their minds that day, and it was important to get the trust level up in that class very quickly. The class was called ‘Peer Counseling,’ which was an innocuous name so that it didn’t sound politically incorrect.”
Phyllis suggests that all schools should have classes like that one, because if they did, “there would be no Columbines, no way.” Columbine High School in 1999 was the site of a horrific mass shooting in which 12 students and one teacher were murdered, and 24 other persons were injured on and near the school grounds. The two young perpetrators committed suicide.
If all schools had such peer counseling classes, she said, “There would be places for kids to go to reveal, and to vent.” Moreover, teachers in such classes would be trained to note red flags. Phyllis said it seems that after every mass shooting, someone who knew the shooter beforehand, say things like, “Yeah he was crazy,” or “He was mad.” However, she added, “most people ignore that stuff” until it’s too late. She said some school administrators are just as negligent. “I once reported a teacher for incredible sexual harassment of female students, and they didn’t do anything – nothing! I think schools are notorious for turning their heads the other way!”
She said the students who participated in the Peer Counseling were drawn from a pool of students considered to be the least likely to succeed, students who were failing their classes or just getting by with Ds. “We put them together, so that they had the same first, second, and third periods. We (the teachers) constantly used the phrase ‘Follow the directions’ and we would say it 100 times, the three of us. Everyone of those kids graduated.”
Phyllis used to keep up correspondence on Facebook with some of those students, some of whom went on to become doctors or teachers. But not every story was a success story. She recalled one student who was mean, demeaning, and a racist. Phyllis said she even met with the boy’s mother to tell her how worried she was about the boy’s behavior. “And his mother said to me, I will never forget, ‘He always comes home when he is supposed to.’” Be that as it may, that boy grew into a man who currently is serving a prison sentence for murder.
Notwithstanding that outcome, the class otherwise was “the most fabulous class I ever had; it was damn good to see what we had done. It just shows you what happens when with a little money, and a little planning, what good teachers can do.” One feature of the class was field trips; for example, when the class studied The Diary of Anne Frank, Phyllis escorted the students to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
The program in which the students took three classes together lasted one year only. “In woodshop,” she recalled, “they built telephone tables. That was pretty intricate, and they had to follow directions… So, anyway, they had all their telephone tables in a circle and they were magnificent. All the teachers wanted to buy them, and again, it just shows that with this kind of attention, and this kind of morale, anybody can be a success.”
Asked what she thought about President Trump’s suggestion that teachers should be armed with guns, Phyllis was indignant: “I think it is about as stupid as stupid gets,” she declared. “You have to understand education to respond to that. A classroom should be a sanctuary. You don’t have guns in a sanctuary; that is counterproductive and an oxymoron. Teachers did not go into teaching to arm themselves and if you have the mindset of ‘I am a target,’ you can’t teach. The entire concept of teacher-learner, learner-teacher, that ambiance, it’s gone. You just can’t think those thoughts. It is wrong beyond any belief.”
“Also,” she added, “a lot of teachers are stupid, and it is easy to become a bad teacher because there is zero supervision, very little evaluation, and sometimes the authorities who evaluate you are worse than you are. So, it is just not the environment for guns!”
Beaming as his wife told of her career, Gordon said he himself was never much of a student, but was a good amateur athlete—whether the sport be basketball, baseball, or bowling, for which he took a prize in his boyhood home of Chicago.
He said his life was influenced by his mother’s act of kindness when she “brought a boy from the orphanage to live with us. He was a year older than me.” His family lived on the northside of Chicago – “Cubs territory” – and the boy came from the south side, where he had been a devoted fan of the Chicago White Sox. Notwithstanding his neighbors’ baseball preferences, Gordon followed the example of Howie, who today lives in Holland. “When I got to be 8-years-old, I started playing sports and he let me play with all his friends, which is why I got to be a good player.”
Later on in life, “I was a dumb jock,” he reflected. “I had the least self esteem than anyone you ever met. The only time I felt good about myself was when I had a ball in my hand. In high school, I played basketball and baseball.” A friend who was an excellent bowler invited him to join a high school team, and “I bowled my highest score ever, a 575 series, best I had ever done, and we won the city championship.” He was only 14, a freshman, who managed to elude a rule about freshmen not being permitted to play on a varsity team. He received a varsity letter in bowling, although, in truth, he said he would have preferred to earn letters in baseball and basketball.
After marrying Phyllis and deciding college was not for him, he worked for the Akron home decorating department store chain, working his way up to assistant manager, but finding his way blocked to full manager. So, he quit. He went next to Pic n’ Save for about a year and a half, “but I got fired because I opened my mouth to one of my managers. I called him an S.O.B.” Next it was to The Supply Sergeant military surplus store, and there he might have stayed, but for ball games he played with a group of guys, who turned out to have attended a neighboring school back in Chicago One of them suggested he come work for his company, R.C. Provisions in Burbank, which was renown for its chili, corned beef, roast beef, and pastrami. The Tommy’s Restaurant chain was a regular customer.
Starting in the shipping department, Gordon eventually talked himself into a sales position. In total he worked for the company 17 years, but feeling underpaid, he accepted a job from a rival firm. That company, he soon learned, did not have the same high health standards that R.C. Provisions had. After only a week, he went home, crying to Phyllis that he had made a terrible mistake. He quit immediately after that. “From there, I bounced around from job to job, and then I retired. I’ve never been sorry one day in my life.”
Gordon and Phyllis have four grandchildren, with two of them soon to be married. One wedding, said Phyllis, will be an elaborate Jewish affair, up in Los Angeles. The other will be simpler; in fact, the wedding officiant will be none other than Phyllis herself. “For $40 you can get a license from Ministries of America,” she said. That grandson and his fiancée “are completely non-religious as I am. However, you can’t take the Jew out of himself. There is going to be a chuppah, there is going to be the breaking of the glass, and there is going to be a ketuba.”
Phyllis said she has decided not to use the phrase, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” because “I think that is dumb.” Instead, she said, she will say, “Alivia and Andrew, you are now a married couple!”
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Harrison is editor and Masori is a staff photographer of San Diego Jewish World. They may be contacted respectively via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com and shor.masori@sdjewishworld.com