Obama left lasting impression on one-day boss

It was just a year ago that Pauline Beck -- a 62-year-old mother and home health-care worker in Alameda, Calif. -- got a memorable and unusually up-close-and-personal look at a then-largely-unknown presidential candidate named Barack Obama.

The Illinois senator, then considered something of a long-shot Democratic presidential hopeful, came to Oakland and wanted to tag along with Beck to learn about her often-backbreaking, $10.50-an-hour job.

Now, Beck says she's more than impressed at how her famous apprentice turned out.

"He was genuine. And you could feel the love and concern he had," said Beck, who was chosen by the Service Employees International Union to give Obama a campaign experience that would focus attention on the duties and problems of everyday working people.

Indefatigable and cheerful, Beck manages a full agenda of cleaning and folding clothes and washing, bathing and dressing a bedridden elderly former cement mason, John Thornton, 82, whom she affectionately calls "Mr. John."

But she says she was far from a pushover -- and not exactly enthusiastic -- when Obama arrived in Alameda last August for his stint at her side.

"I was for Hillary (Clinton)," she recalled. "I was thinking, why do both of them have to be running together?"

Beck recalls that she didn't relish the idea of having a political celebrity tag along on her job -- which is tough enough -- or the plans to have him come to her home with a bunch of reporters.

The mother of three adult children and three foster kids, ages 2 to 17, was a little concerned: How would the kids react? How would she get all the work done?

Obama broke the ice, coming by first for breakfast, coffee and conversation with her and her kids, then heading off to work with her. He put them at ease, telling them stories about his own young daughters and immediately taking to her nephew, Damien, age 2.

But she still didn't want to cut him any breaks on the job.

And he didn't want any, she said.

"He said, 'Explain to me, in detail, what you're doing here,' " she said. "He was concerned about me. And he wanted to know, step-by-step, what I did."

She gave him a mop and showed him how to clean the cobwebs from Mr. John's ceiling. She tutored him in the proper ways to cut up watermelon and make turkey sandwiches for Mr. John's lunch and dinner. She showed him the right way to wash and fold clothes and how to change Mr. John's bed and clothes. That task Obama insisted on performing -- though his campaign staff would have preferred that he had "hands off," she remembered.

The candidate served the shut-in elderly man at bedside and sat at the end of the day at the kitchen table, joking that he hoped his wife, Michelle, wouldn't find out how tough Beck had been. He wasn't, he said sheepishly, exactly that great at home with the very same jobs.

The senator and Mr. John especially hit it off, Beck remembers.

Mr. John, recalling the day, laughs. Beck, he said, "was working the hell out of him."

What Beck says she remembers most is that Obama asked about her salary -- it goes up to $11.50 an hour starting in October -- and wondered how she could make it with no health care.

"He talked about a living wage," she said. "And I felt blessed that I could take part."

Since that day, Obama has repeatedly on the campaign trail noted his hours spent at the side of Pauline Beck as a memorable illustration of why American workers need better health care.

Beck and Mr. John still wonder if the man who back then seemed so far from the White House will actually make it there.

If he does, says Beck, "I just hope I get to see it."

And, she says, she won't even make him mop the floor.

(E-mail Carla Marinucci at cmarinucci(at)sfchronicle.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)