When I was a little girl growing up at 501 North Spring Street in La Grange Park, Illinois…I had a beautiful baby doll Santa left me at Christmas. I named my doll Dorothy Miller. Don’t ask me why. This was her name and I took very good care of my baby. I was a good mom and loved her.
Later in my young life, we moved from the Chicagoland area for two years during my high school years. I went to four high schools and the last high school I attended was Sullivan High School in Chicago. I went from suburban schools, rural schools and now a big city school. I always made friends fast. One day at school, I met Dorothy Miller. Dorothy Miller was on the basketball team and was six feet tall and built strong and athletic with sandy brown hair and a plain face. We became best friends fast. Her name was Dorothy Miller for crying-out-loud. It was fate. Dorothy had a daughter out of wedlock by a gangster-type guy that I never met. Dorothy and I lived within walking distance from each other by Lake Michigan, but then she bought an old baby blue Volkswagen beetle and we weren’t walking anymore. We tore up Chicago in that beetle. I was her best friend, so I always sat in front with three or four girls piled in back. Oh Lord, we had fun.
We had a little too much fun, if you want to know the truth. I was 16 when I was a senior and 17 when I completed my senior year. Dorothy Miller would role us up marijuana joints big as a cigar, and we’d all sit on the pier on the lake and smoke em’ up. Looking back, I don’t know how she could smoke that much. Thank heavens we never drank alcohol. At least, I never drank alcohol as a minor. All of us would be high and laughing our asses off, and jump in the lake or just kick it in the sand.
Then we’d get the munchies and pile back in the beetle and run around Chicago going through McDonalds, Burger King or Kentucky Fried eating it all, as we drove down Lake Shore Drive laughing and gazing at the lights in traffic. What I remember about this time in my childhood, that is kinda terrible, but it cracks me up now, is that when we were finished with all the food, we would toss all the food bags out the window, directly onto the street and then Dorothy would speed off blasting music and we’d be singing “Smoke on the Water,” or “Space Oddity,” “Rocket Man,” or whatever came on the radio. We were just kids. What the hell did we know ? We knew all the songs. I sure did. I am a musical freak. Always was. Always will be.
I had been a nurses aide for three years by the time I met Dorothy Miller in Chicago. I was a nurses aide at age 14 in Lafayette, Indiana working in the nursing home next to my high school, a damn good nurses aide too, and no one ever trained me. I would care for an entire wing of oldies but goodies with one R.N. who just passed meds., and then I worked at Home Hospital in the surgical and pediatric wings earning $1.60 an hour which was minimum wage at the time. We were actually required to give back rubs on the surgical unit. This was when I asked to be transferred to the pediactric unit. You know, I didn’t have to work. I wanted to work for some reason, I don’t recall, but it was more than likely to “get the hell away” from my walk-on-eggshells kinda dad.
Anyway, this is about the time, I was being groomed in Chicago, in my virgin innocence after another girl from school, Kathy Frisbee, a ward-of-the-state, living in a group home took me to NuLife Health Food store on Morse Avenue. Another story. Please watch out for your kids people. Children can be very sexually sophisticated young. Know who your children are with always.
So, Dorothy Miller and half of my friends went into nursing school. Not me. I had cleaned up more butts by the time I was 16, I wanted a more glamorous profession. Thank you very much. Dorothy Miller eventually becomes an R.N. after graduating and two years, and then meets Ozzy who had a good job working at Commonwealth Edison. Dorothy then takes her daughter, Jackie and moves to Phoenix or Tempe, Arizona to be exact leaving Ozzy behind who she is smitten with. Of course, one day Ozzy drops by my apartment unexpectedly and we’re sitting watching television. I’m being polite…this is my best friends boyfriend, in my living room, I’m alone with, and he asks me to go out with him on a date. Hell NO ! I’m the most loyal friend a friend could be. This kinda thing happened to me a number of times too. I would never betray a friend, ever.
Time passes and Ozzy moves to Arizona with Dorothy Miller and they eventually get married when she is pregnant, and have a couple of boys thereafter.
So my friends packed a Uhaul and I drove my Toyota Celica Supra with the moon roof to Phoenix. It was May and 115 degrees in Phoenix. All of my clothes were silk to go to work in. It took a little time for me to realize to switch to cotton. Within a week, I obtained a job at the Law Firm of Evans, Kitchel and Jenckes, the oldest law firm in Arizona since Abraham Lincoln. I had worked in medical malpractice and corporate law in Chicago, and now I was working in tradename and patton law. I got into a really nice home on Palm Lane, in the historic Encanto area of Phoenix blocks from the high-rise on Central Avenue where I worked.
Then, and not that long after my arrival, the aged partners of the law firm inform the 40 associate attorneys the law firm was closing for good. About this same time, and since I had left Chicago, I was experiencing clinical depression due to my breakup with the Arab, who by the way, years later I find out from a friend of his in Highland Park, Illinois at a restaurant, that the Arab gambled away his millions and ended up in Federal prison for three years, after importing illegal unlicensed cigarettes and Red Bull out of a warehouse in Chicago. He’s not worth talking about. I knew what I was doing when I left Chicago. I was a Christian too, and I was about to go full force into learning the Bible at this time.
Getting back to Dorothy Miller. Dorothy turned out to be a difficult friend in the long run. Firstly, because I am spiritual-minded and she isn’t at all, or at least she wasn’t then and, I just couldn’t handle how awful she treated her daughter after she had her sons with Ozzy. She and Ozzy had a tumultuous marriage in my opinion, and I was having a hard time listening to, and watching her behavior in front of her kids, and then I would have to hear it all over again and again. It drained me emotionally. Constantly criticizing and nagging Ozzy, and he wouldn’t respond when she was always upset. I started to realize I didn’t like her very much anymore as a married woman with children. Besides, I wasn’t married yet and had no children either. Dorothy ended up very well off though in her career as a nurse obtaining a badass highly paid travel nurse job for the county.
My legal career ended for a good while after Evans, Kitchel and Jenckes closed. I’m adaptable. You have to be adaptable. I’m now putting my head on at home, creating a business to work from home. I had lower back problems and needed to continue to work to pay the bills, so I taught college part time, teaching business law, business English, office procedures, and any class they needed taught that I could do and worked at three colleges all together part time while I got my ducks in order at home.
This was the time I got out of the rat race and started my first business out of my home in Phoenix on Palm Lane. I started Actually, the second business I created. I had my first business when I was 12 years old when I had a daycare in my backyard and took care of half the neighborhood kids during summer and put on plays. All the adults would tell me I was like an adult when I was 12. My company now in Phoenix was AMF Domestic Placement Services. I placed nannies, caregivers, housekeepers, etc. in homes throughout the Phoenixland area, and I landed a contract with the Department of Economic Security. I was even on television several times interviewed by different news stations. The kids from church would see me on Saturdays when they were watching cartoons and get so excited when they saw me at church to tell me. I would do the background checks on the workers and place them in homes. Several very wealthy Phoenicians used my service. I invented it ! It is still mine, and is a subsidiary company of GoFish, Enterprizes, llc. Although I don’t work it now. It is my intellectual property and always will be.
This was just the beginning of my entrepeneurial career for the next 45 years. Stay tuned.