M. (1) 4 Apr 1946 in Texas
Wife: Bettie Marie Radeke
M. (2) 2 Jul 1949 in Pasadena, California
Wife: Margaret Elizabeth Bolheres
D. 10 Nov 2007 in Winnetka, California
There’s sometimes a moment in a person’s life that changes the fate of others in ways that they can’t possibly know at the time. In the case of Thomas Milton Mitchell, that happened when he took to heart what he was told during a job interview in 1946. Tom was the oldest child of Thomas Michael Mitchell and Hazel Laura Elwood, born in Los Angeles, California on July 1, 1922. A younger sister came along two years later, then the family moved north to the city of Oakland, where a brother was born in 1926. After a fire destroyed their house a couple of years later, they moved back to Los Angeles.
Tom and his sister Patsy in about 1926.
When Tom was 5-years-old, he contracted polio. Despite the seriousness of the disease, his mother decided to treat him at home by wrapping his legs in mud packs, and somehow he recovered. But for the rest of his life, Tom walked with a slight limp. In about 1929, the family moved to the town of Tujunga, tucked into the hills north of the San Fernando Valley. Tom's grandmother and other family members lived on the same block, and they became central figures in his childhood.
In about 1930, marital problems between Tom's parents caused his mother to move out, and from then on, he was more or less raised by his father. The Great Depression brought financial hardship, and his father relied on killing the chickens he raised to make dinner for the kids. Meanwhile, Tom's mother had a daughter born of a relationship with another man, and the baby girl joined the household.
Tom's family moved to the San Gabriel Valley during the mid-1930s, and this is where he spent his formative years. He attended Alhambra High School in the same class as baseball Hall-of-Famer Ralph Kiner, then later graduated from a brand new high school, Mark Keppel. While in school, Tom had a paper route, and later, a job working as a magician’s assistant; the latter brought him into contact with a few Hollywood celebrities, such as Harpo and Chico Marx, who attended a party where the magician performed his act.
Tom was 19 at the time of the invasion of Pearl Harbor, and within months, most of his friends joined the service. He enlisted in the army on September 11, 1942, and was chosen for a special program to train men to be engineers. For nine months, he lived with a group of guys that attended school off-base; after completing each course, only the top students moved on to the next one. Tom passed through three levels, then the army decided they didn’t need more engineers, and he was suddenly thrown into basic training. The intense physical activity after months spent in classrooms was too much for him, and he suffered a nervous breakdown that put him in the hospital.
As a result of his collapse, Tom was never sent overseas to fight in the war. The army wanted to discharge him, but he managed to get a post serving in San Antonio, Texas, and this is where he remained through 1945, guarding German prisoners and repairing electronic equipment. While in Texas, Tom met a single woman named Bettie Radeke who was pregnant by another man. He felt sorry for Bettie, so he agreed to marry her. The wedding took place on April 4, 1946, and when Tom got his discharge from the army, they drove to California to make their home. Bettie’s baby was born a month later, a girl she named Barbara Jeanne, however, the marriage ended in annulment within two years.
Tom during his army days.
After moving back to California, Tom needed to find work, and his father, who was a cabinet maker, quickly gave him a job. But he really wanted to repair radios, so on September 4, 1946, he answered an ad for a position at Hoffman Radio Corporation. Everything seemed to go well in the interview until the man doing the hiring said, “We expect our technicians to repair 30 radios per day.” Although Tom was offered the job, he was terrified to show up because he thought he could never reach that quota. He waited two more days before reporting to work, and with a lot of effort, he managed to repair 25 radios during his first shift. Pushing himself harder, he was able to fix 30 the next day.
But Tom didn't stop there. Soon he was up to 40 radios per day, then 50. He devised a system of grouping the ones with the same problem, lining them up and repairing them like an assembly line. By Christmas, he was repairing 100 radios per day. In late January, Hoffman had a layoff, and 38 of the 40 technicians were let go. One guy who kept his job had the longest tenure, and the other was Tom — because no one else at Hoffman ever repaired 30 radios in one day.
Hoffman's 1948 line of radios.
The fact Tom kept his job set the tone for the rest of his career and life. He was moved into the engineering department, which was developing new products. Early in 1947, Tom built his own TV set at home by sending away for a kit. A couple of months later, he offered the set to Hoffman, and it was studied by his coworkers. By the end of the year, Hoffman was on its way to becoming the largest manufacturer of televisions in Southern California.
In September of 1948, Hoffman promoted its TVs by setting up a booth at the L.A. County Fair. Because they needed to make sure the TV sets didn’t break down, Tom and another technician were assigned to spend the day there. The two guys found they had little to do, and filled their hours by touring the entire fair. When they were sent to the fair again a week later, the coworker declared he was bringing a date. This forced Tom to do the same, but he didn’t have a girlfriend, so he had to find someone quickly.
A few Hoffmann employees came to mind, and Tom gained access to personnel records to get their phone numbers. One who answered the phone was Margaret Bolheres, an assembly worker on the TV production line, and fatefully, she said yes. Tom and Margaret hit it off, so after their day at the fair, they began a relationship. Months later, they decided to get married. The wedding took place on July 2, 1949 in Pasadena.
Leaving the church with Margaret after getting married in 1949.
To set up their household, they rented an apartment for the first year, then moved in with Margaret’s mother in her small Los Angeles house. Unfortunately, Mrs. Bolheres passed away suddenly in July 1950. Margaret was pregnant at the time, but the baby was born with a defect and died right after birth. During the years that followed, Tom and Margaret relocated to the city of Downey, then back to the house her mother had owned. Another child was born who was premature, but survived. Not long after, Tom bought a brand new tract home in Inglewood, paying for it on the GI bill. The family moved in, and by the middle of 1957, two more children were born.
Meanwhile, Tom continued his career at Hoffman, moving up the ladder into management, and he was put in charge of one of the production facilities. Eventually, though, the pressures of the job took a toll on him, and in 1954, he suffered another nervous breakdown. His recovery took almost a year, a period of deep reflection. When Tom was finally ready to return to work, he was hired as a manager at Califone, a company that made reel-to-reel tape recorders. By learning to control his stress level, he was able to stay healthy, and he never again suffered a breakdown.
Besides work, Tom enjoyed bowling once a week in a company league, and this brought him into contact with a young woman on his team named Anita Woolsey. They had a brief affair which resulted in Anita becoming pregnant with his baby. Tom left Margaret for a few weeks, but neither of them wanted to end their marriage, and they got back together. The child was kept a secret from everyone for many years.
During the early 1960s, Tom had a series of mid-level management jobs in various factories; each change in employment involved the relocation of his family, which took them from Inglewood to Garden Grove to Mountain View and finally back to Inglewood again. In 1966, he found himself unemployed, and for the first time, he faced financial problems. This led to his decision to move into the San Fernando Valley house which had belonged to his recently-deceased mother. The house was now owned by his step-father, a Filipino immigrant named Johnny, and he still lived in it. After about a year and a half, the relationship with him turned difficult; Johnny got a lawyer, and Tom's family was forced out of the house.
In December 1968, Tom purchased a 4-bedroom tract home in Canoga Park (later called Winnetka), a place where he would spend the rest of his life. During the 1970s, he worked as a production control manager for an electronics factory in Chatsworth. When that job ended in 1980, he found it hard to get hired for similar work due to his age, and after a series of consulting jobs, Tom was facing retirement. But he still looked to bring in money, and turned to answering want ads. One of the ads was to become a movie extra, and this led to an interesting chapter in his life.
From 1987 to 2002, Tom worked on hundreds of movies, TV shows and commercials. He signed up with an agency and got a head sheet done. After the first year, Margaret became an extra, too, and they often took jobs as a couple. Typically, a phone call would give instructions to show up at a location at an appointed time the next day; it might be a studio, or a public place anywhere in Southern California. Only when Tom arrived would he find out what the job would be. The assignments varied from being part of a large crowd, to walking by in the background of a scene, or to having interaction with the principal actors.
Tom's 1988 head sheet.
Even if Tom got no camera time, he was able to see behind-the-scenes productions of some of the top movies and TV series of that era. The list of movies he worked on included Naked Gun, Wayne’s World, Twins, Jerry McGuire, Kindergarten Cop, Beaches, The Addams Family, Father of the Bride, Wag the Dog, and Oceans Eleven. As for TV, he worked on pretty much anything shot in California that used extras, including Ally McBeal, Baywatch, Beverly Hills 90210, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Chicago Hope, CSI, Dharma and Gregg, Doogie Howser MD, Ellen, ER, Everybody Loves Raymond, Frasier, Friends, Gilmore Girls, Home Improvement, Knots Landing, L.A. Law, Mad About You, Matlock, MacGyver, Moonlighting, Murder She Wrote, Murphy Brown, Night Court, NYPD Blue, Party of Five, Picket Fences, The Practice, Scrubs, Seinfeld, Sex and the City, Thirtysomething, The West Wing, Will and Grace, The Wonder Years and The X-Files.
Tom in the Seinfeld episode "The Subway."
During Tom's final years, he fell into a routine of healthy diet and exercise; each morning, he did a light workout tape followed by a 40-minute walk at the mall. In spite of potential heart problems, he lived to be 85-years-old. Tom died in his sleep on the morning of November 10, 2007. Margaret survived him, passing away in 2016.
Children by Margaret Elizabeth Bolheres:
1. James Michael Mitchell — B. 26 Mar 1951, Los Angeles, California; D. 26 Mar 1951, Los Angeles, California
2. LIVING
3. LIVING
4. LIVING
Child by Anita Jan Woolsey:
1. LIVING
Sources:
My firsthand knowledge
California births and christenings, 1812-1988, FamilySearch.org
California County Marriages, 1850-1952, FamilySearch.org
Social Security Death Index
