When Pual Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after WW2, he made a wager with his crewmats.
They had arrived in San Francisco, where their ship was decommissioned, and Pual bet that he would
find himself a wife within two weeks. He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with
a passing resemblance to James Dean. But it wasn't his looks that got him a date with Clara Hagopian
a sweet-humored daughter of Armenian immigrants. It was the fact that he and his friends had a car,
unlike the group she had originally planned to go out with that evening. Ten days later, in March
1946, Pual got engaged to Clara and won his wager. It would turn out to be a happy marriage, one
that lasted until death parted them more than forty years later.
Pual Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsion. Even though his father
was an alcoholic and sometimes abusive, Pual ended up with a gentle and calm disposition under his
leathery exterior. After dropping out of high school, he wandered through the Midwest picking up
work as a mechanic until, at age nineteen, he joined the Coast Guard, even though he didn't know how
to swim. He was deployed on the USS General M.C. Meigs and spent much of the war ferrying troops
to Italy for General Patton. His talent as a machinist and fireman earned him commendations, but he
occasionally found himslf in minor trouble and never rose above the rank of seaman.
Clara was born in New Jersey, where her parents had landed after fleeing the Turks in Armeni, and
they moved to the Mission district of San Francisco when she was a child. She had a secret that
she rarely mentioned to anyone: She had been married before, but her husband had been killed in the
war. So when she met Pual Jobs on that first date, she was primed to start a new life