While working at Saugus High School in the spring of 1984, I received a letter in my school mailbox simply addressed Jenk Stephenson, "Business Teacher" Saugus High School. Seeing that it was coming from the US Olympic Committee, I simply thought it was some kind of advertisement since we all knew the Olympics were coming to town for the summer. However, after opening the letter I realized it was a chance for summer employment working for the Olympics. Patty and I had discussed leaving town for the summer because we were expecting massive crowds into the Los Angeles area creating extreme traffic problems. I took the letter home to discuss it with Patty.
Actually Patty was a teacher also at Saugus High School, but she had not received the letter and none of my immediate colleagues had received them. I’ll never know why I was singled out for the invite, but we decided to call and check it out and see if Patty could also apply for a job. I made the call and was told they were looking for 6,000 employees in the transportation department, who would be paid and then an additional 80,000 volunteers. I indicated that I was only interested in a paid position and that my wife, who was multilingual (English, French, Spanish, some German) was also interested. He liked her language ability so we set up interview times for both of us. To make a long story short—we both were hired to work for the Olympics. I was to work at the UCLA Village and Patty was to work at the USC Village. She was designated an information agent (interpreter) and worked mostly with the athletes and coaches. I, on the other hand, was designated a loader/dispatcher and worked mostly with the Olympic judges and volunteers.
The UCLA Village was divided into different zones and if you were a volunteer that worked in one zone you were unable to pass to another zone. Not only did I pass through three different metal detectors each morning for work; but, as I passed through the different zones inside the Village, I went through additional detectors. Security was very tight. One must remember the Israeli massacre of 1972. Police were everywhere even with sharp shooters on rooftops of buildings.
One of our early trainings was on something called electronic mail. There was one tent in the Village that housed about 20 computers where we were told we could access all the Olympic events. Since the 1984 Olympics were scattered over a wide area of LA one concern was in getting out the winners of events when the events were many miles apart. The Olympic Committee had announced that the winners would be available within five minutes no matter where the event was located. Paid employees, judges, coaches, etc. could access these computers for results. This is also the way I could communicate with Patty at USC. (Remember there were no cell phones in those days.) This was our first introduction into what we all now know so well as email. This electronic mail is also the way I notified Patty that our adopted daughter would be arriving from Korea soon.
Judges, who came from all over the world, had to be picked up from the airport, driven to their hotel, and picked up from their hotel and driven to whatever event they were judging and returned to their hotel each day. Whatever transportation a judge needed we provided it, even some sightseeing trips. Judges generally stayed in town only for their events and when the event was finished, we took them back to the airport for their transportation home. I’m sure there were thousands of judges, staying at hundreds of hotels and all of this had to be coordinated so that no judge was ever late for an event.
Time was spent on the radio notifying drivers who they were picking up and at which airport and at which terminal and where they should be taking their occupant. Judges were arriving at all hours of the day from all over the world, so the drivers made many trips per day to the airport. There was a large motor pool with cars and vans for shuttling judges. We also had busses that would shuttle volunteers from parking lots to the Olympic Village. I worked from 6 am to 2:30 pm five days a week with Friday and Saturday off.
I might add that we had busses that sat all day just off the side of the freeway that never moved. In case we had an athlete bus that broke down, there would be an available backup buss not more than 15 minutes away to get them to their competitive venue site time. Some of these drivers never had any passengers the entire time they worked for the Olympics.