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Emmy Lou Packard   2/5/79 - page 2, section 3

[[marginalia]] people in Hollywood [[/marginalia]] The Homolkas knew the most interesting people in Hollywood, and I was much too immature to know how to arrange my social life. While was eating lunch in my small apartment Cary Grant called and asked it I would have lunchwith him at the studio the next day. Thrilled and terrified at the opportunity, I said "No, I can't possibly. I'm busy." Then he said, "Well, then, Barbara (Hutton) will give a cocktail party for you." This was even worse, and I couldn't avoid it. As a result I missed the party the Homolkas gave for me which included Charles Laughton and others of his rare ability. But I did have the opportunity to meet and talk with Bertold Brecht's wife and with the novelist Leon Feuchtwangler (sp?) at other occasions at the Homolka's house. They were very kind to me.

[[marginalia]] back to San Francisco 
war work Ames Co. [[/marginalia]] As soon as my show was over I packed my paintings and drove to San Francisco, settling down temporarily with my parents in Berkeley. My son Donald had been staying with my sister Clara in Napa, where she and her husband gave him an excellent home. I found an apartment on Twin Peaks in San Francisco and brought Donald to live with me. Since the war was all that anyone was interested in, I immediately took a defense training course at Lick-Wilmerdine School in the Potrero district. I learned engineering drafting and got a job at once in the Ames Sheetmetal Company, who had a war contract to make ammunition boxes. For a year I made details of parts from assembly drawings of ammunition boxes, and then made isometric perspective drawings of a bomb-release mechanism for planes. These were to enable inexperienced workers to visualize the mechanism they were assembling. They were widely used because so many civilians not experienced in reading engineering drawings were trying to put metal parts together. The perspectives helped them, made the picture clear. 

[[marginalia]] my show SF Mus. [[/marginalia]] In January, 1942, my Mexican paintings were shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art on McAllister Street in the Veteran Memorial Building. William Gerstle, head of the San Francisco Art Association (who had been the one to first commission Diego Rivera to paint a fresco in the United States - in the San Francisco School of Fine Arts (now the SF Art Institute) showed his paintings in an adjoining room as a fraternal gesture. Rivera had written to Dr. Grace Morley, head of the museum, asking her to arrange the show. Mrs. Sidney Joseph (Emily) who was an art critic and on the women's board of the museum, made all the arrangements. The show was made up of Mexican landscapes, portraits of child models, and still lifes. At the same time my drawings and watercolors were shown at Raymond and Raymond Gallery on Sutter Street, then run by Mrs. Grete Williams.

[[marginalia]] Talesis war work [[/strikethrough]] During 1942 or 43 the organization known as Talesis (see article in SFChron (Calif Living Feb 26, &*) which my first husband Burton Donald Cairns had helped start (one of the first five organizers) decided to do an exhibition called Women in War Work. The group was made up of 15 or 20 people, architects, landscape architects, designers. I remember a few: Ed Varneo arch Joseph Stein (arch) Garrett Eckbo (landsc. aech) Walter Landor (designer) Fred Langhorst(arch)Mary Cooke (arch des.)... there were others I can't remember. I did a number of large, free brush drawings of women and children (see illustrations) and worked with the rest getting the show together. Its text showed that women in war work actually worked 17 hours per day when childcare, cooking, laundry, were counted, and suggested ways in which these facilities could be made more available. 

[[marginalia]] Russ War Relief [[/marginalia]] Shortly after that I designed and made a ten-foot high series of panels on Russian War Relief to be used at a large meeting in the Civic Auditorium. (see illus).) 

[[marginalia]] Calif Labor School vis hist org labor, Pacific peoples [[/marginalia]] About that time the California Labor School was started on Turk Street, with David Jenkins and then Holland Roberts in charge.[[marginalia]] check [[/marginalia]] For them I designed a set of ten 2x3-foot panels of a visual history of organized labor in the United States. Most of my information was taken from Philip Foner's History of Org Labor in USA It was to send from union to union to help educate the membership about the history of their movement, and what bad conditions prevailed before labor was organized. Unfortunately the exhibition was lost in shipment, and I had no photographic record of it. I also did three six-foot panels showing [[strikethrough]] the Japanese contribution to the anti-fascist forces in the USA [[/strikethrough]] a visual history of Pacific Peoples: Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Island peoples, stressing the need for the US to better relations with these peoples. (There were 10,000 Japanese men in the American army fighting Japan) (see illus.)