Homeless in San Diego

Having just been through the disaster of the trailer accident, the theft of almost all of their possessions, and the runaround from the Allstate Insurance Company, the family still moved onward to California. But now they were headed  to a strange city with no trailer to live in, and having spent all their savings already, there was great uncertainty of what lay ahead.

Lynda provides our view into the past to those days when the traumatized and exhausted Warriners finally arrived in San Diego as a homeless family:

" When we got to San Diego, we had no place to stay.  Our parents went to the Salvation Army and they provided us with shelter for several days.  The males of the family (Dad, Tim and Skip) had to stay in one area,  and the females (Mom, Patty, Sue, Lynda, and baby Darwin, who was only a few months old and still nursing) stayed in another area.

I later learned that it was The Salvation Army that found us housing in Linda Vista.  We all went in the car with Dad while he applied at Ryan.  He came out very happy, and we knew that if Dad was happy, that meant everything was going to be okay.  I don't believe the story that he cried in the hiring office.  He was a talented, gifted engineer who had previously worked as an engineer at Square D in Detroit and who had designed the box in most elevators.  He had a plan for himself, and he talked about it. That plan was to come to California to work at Ryan in their space program.  He achieved his goal. And I don't think he achieved it by crying; he achieved it with his confidence and his resume.

The Salvation Army helped us find housing in Linda Vista.  While we lived there, Mom and Dad started to look for a home of their own, and sometimes I would get to go with them while they were house hunting."

Thanks to Lynda for filling in this important gap in the story of the move to California!

The Warriner family's brief stay in Linda Vista lasted from December 1952 until sometime in 1954. It was during this time that they acquired their little Sheltie puppy Dachoo.  Their home address, according to the dog tag, was 7254 Wellington. I remember seeing a home video of the children playing on a large grassy area, and Carol told me that was shot at their first home in San Diego.

 Linda Vista did not even exist 10 years before. It was conceived during World War II, for the purpose of providing much needed housing for defense workers.  During the 40s, housing was in such short supply that Mission Valley was packed with trailers, and many other workers were sleeping in their cars and in abandoned streetcars. The wartime project in Linda Vista was the largest housing development in the world at the time, similar to Levittown.  Thousands of houses were hastily built in the area now known as Linda Vista in just a matter of months, and about 13,000 people quickly moved in.  Once the war was over,  these homes became available for others to live in, and thanks to the Salvation Army, the Warriner family did not stay homeless for very long.