Perjury
In San Francisco, Barbara became a mid-class call girl, taking care of small Union Square hotel business, hoping to work her way up to Nob Hill clientele. World War Two was winding down to a close. Barbara was twenty-two now, a good-looking, stacked young woman who knew how to strut her stuff. In San Francisco she made good money, wore good clothes, and had good times. Once in a while, like everybody else who lived on the edge, she took a fall. In 1944, using the name Barbara Klemmer, she did four months for vagrancy (a catch-all charge used when the law couldn't prove prostitution). But all in all, she did pretty well in the City by the Bay. Until she agreed to do a favor for a couple of guys she knew.
Like everyone who lives the kind of life she led, Barbara's acquaintances were pimps, other prostitutes, petty thieves, con men, and hustlers of every imaginable variety. When two such types she knew, Mark Monroe and Tom Sittler, were about to go on trial for theft, they asked Barbara to testify as an alibi witness for them. Good-time gal that she was, she never said no to a friend. Unfortunately, after swearing in court that she had been with the two men at the time of the crime, the prosecution was able to prove that she had not even been in San Francisco on the date in question.
Under the name of Barbara Klemmer, she was charged with and convicted of perjury. Sentenced to the women's prison at Tehachapi, she later managed to get the sentence suspended on condition that she serve one year in the San Francisco county jail and remain on probation for an additional five years.
It was now May 1, 1948, and Barbara was twenty-four years old.
Desperate
When Barbara was released from jail in the summer of 1949, she was a woman desperate to straighten out her life. Still young at twenty-five, she felt much older, felt once again as if she was beginning to become used up, like so many of the street women she saw around her. Vowing to somehow make a new start, she began in good fashion by getting out of California -- leaving behind all the bad influences in her sordid life.
Barbara traveled to Reno, Nevada, and looked for work. In the newspaper, she saw a Help Wanted ad for nurses' aides in the little town of Tonopah, halfway between Reno and Las Vegas. The ad said no experience necessary, will train. Barbara bought a bus ticket.
Tonopah was a perfect place to stay out of trouble. High desert, low crime rate, crooked roads but straight people. Barbara worked at the Nye County Hospital, lived in a respectable boarding house, and began to make new friends -- the right kind this time. Before long she was dating a clean-cut town bachelor who worked as a salesman for an auto supply store, named Charles Oldman (name fictionalized in the interest of privacy). After several months, Barbara married for the third time.
Soon leaving her job at the hospital, Barbara took a better one managing a small luncheonette. It was hard work: she waited tables when it was busy, and helped out in the kitchen too. And the hours were long. Then she had to take care of the house they were renting, and cook for her husband, and she suddenly had a dread fear that she might get pregnant again --
It just wasn't the kind of life Barbara had hoped it would be. One day she packed her bag and got on a bus for Los Angeles.
And that, as the saying goes, was that.
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