Gold Dust At My Feet
Memoirs by Randy Steven Kraft
Below are sketches of my life and experiences as I grew up in Southern California during the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. At first I wrote very short recollections because my typewriter has only 3.5 k of text coverage, but later I learned to piece 3.5 k segments together to accommodate longer and more detailed memories. What you read here is true, and can be independently verified.
I do not pretend to be a good writer. This is not why I write. I have no illusions about writing the Great American Book or appearing on the best-seller list. No, my only hope is that I can relate to you what it was like for me growing up, what my family was like and what we did. I hope I write well enough to take the truth from my memory and share it with you.
Obviously, as a condemned prisoner, I do not have access to a computer or the Internet, and what you see here has been transcribed for me by generous people posting here. I sincerely thank these people for their help.
The Old Homestead (1949)
Today Beach Boulevard is an extremely busy, commercial, four-lane highway lined with business from North Orange County down to the Pacific Ocean. But when Dad had built our home in the late 1940's,it was just Huntington Beach Boulevard, a slow, uncluttered, two lane road with cheap, open land for sale everywhere.
At the end of World War II the Kraft family lived in a tract home: 4212 Gaviota Street, Long Beach, California, within walking distance of Douglas Aircraft where Mom and Dad both worked during the war. I had just been born, and the house was cramped. Dad looked to nearby Orange County for a promise of open space and growing property values. Gasoline was still rationed, so we could not move very far from Dad's job. Midway City, at about eight miles away, was as far as Dad wanted to move, and he became one of the first commuters when he bought a one-quarter acre lot fronting on Huntington Beach Boulevard.
At our rental home on Harper Street in Midway City while Dad built our house on Huntington Beach Boulevard. Circa 1948.
It was rural. The neighbors, Stewart and Lena Gilbert who lived to the North, raised chickens. A retired couple, Steve and Florence Gulick, lived to the south, and beyond them was a small dilapidated lazy Susan factory and then a blacksmith's works. Across the highway was a small trailer park surrounded by open fields.
Dad bought a surplus army barracks from Fort McArthur, in San Padro, tore it apart and hand built our new home from the salvaged materials. He worked on it every day and on weekends, and we lived in a rented house on Harper Street until it was ready. I was only two or three years old and don't remember the specifics of how all that happened, but I do recall "helping" him with the construction now and then.
One time is etched in memory. Dad was hammering away at something, and as usual, I tried to do just what he did. I pounded a piece of wood into the ground and thought I had done a really good job until Dad gasped, "Randy!" and gave me a swat on the bottom. "That’s my brand new level!" he said, exasperated. I didn't know what a carpenter's level was, but after he dug it out and saw that it was not broken, the moment of anger passed and he showed me the difference between the wooden level and an ordinary two by four. He showed me how it worked, how to center the bubble in the little glass tube filled with liquid, and then let me check the level of everything around while he worked.
I also remember a house-building party hosted by my older sister, Doris (Dad called her "Cookie" or "Cook",) She invited her high school friends over to help Dad build the house. It was a fun day - - a lot of people, popcorn and soft drinks, but according to Dad's recounting of it, many times over the years, there was more partying than building, more eating popcorn than sawing and nailing, and he got very little work done that day. Maybe that was so, and then again, maybe he was just fooling with Doris when he told the story.
The house Dad built was small by current standards - 54 feet by 20 feet or 1080 square feet. It had four bedrooms, a bath (a tub only, no shower), kitchen, dining room, living room and a detached one-car garage. Six of us lived there: Mom, Dad, my three older sisters (Kay, Doris, Jeanette) and me.
Kay and Doris each married and left home in a few years, and Jeanette as well a few years later. Dad took the opportunity to remodel in the mid fifties, expanding the dining and living rooms, and leaving only two bedrooms.I lived there until leaving for college in 1963. Mom and Dad never left. It stayed their home until they passed away in the 1990s. In the last half of the 20th century, a time of often bewildering changes, our family home remained constant. Mom called it "The Homestead". So did Dad.
Kindergarten (1950)
Mom and Dad wanted me to start Kindergarten in 1949. Their reasoning was that I would have my fifth birthday during that school year, in the spring, and I should start in that school year. But it was explained to them that I had to wait until the next year, 1950, because I had to be five-years old when the school year began. I sat through that explanation, and although I did not fully understand it all, I did know that I had to wait another year before I could start school.
During that year’s wait I did not know exactly what school was, but I knew that all three of my sisters were in school and from all appearances it had not harmed them very much. I knew that Kay played the clarinet at her school, because I saw it at home and she let me assemble it. The case was black and had a decal on it; one side said “ORANGE COAST COLLEGE,” and the other side said “PIRATES” under the cartoon-face of a pirate with a dagger clenched between his teeth. It was neat. And Doris played the violin, but it was too fragile for me to handle much, although I could play with the bow and apply rosin to it. I knew that music was somehow related to school, and that I might play the clarinet or violin when I finally started. Until then I enjoyed my last year of freedom playing with friends.
During that year’s wait I did not know exactly what school was, but I knew that all three of my sisters were in school and from all appearances it had not harmed them very much. I knew that Kay played the clarinet at her school, because I saw it at home and she let me assemble it. The case was black and had a decal on it; one side said “ORANGE COAST COLLEGE,” and the other side said “PIRATES” under the cartoon-face of a pirate with a dagger clenched between his teeth. It was neat. And Doris played the violin, but it was too fragile for me to handle much, although I could play with the bow and apply rosin to it. I knew that music was somehow related to school, and that I might play the clarinet or violin when I finally started. Until then I enjoyed my last year of freedom playing with friends.
A year later Mom and Dad took me to school. As they stood just inside the doorway of the Kindergarten room talking to the teacher, I held onto Dad’s pant leg and reluctantly surveyed the scene inside. The room seemed enormous, and the hubbub of kids who were already busy inside echoed unlike anything at home. The far wall had a counter top with paper, crayons, books, and there were drawers and shelves underneath and it ran half the length of the room. Above it windows stretched all the way to a high ceiling, more windows than I had seen all together. Light poured into the room, however, ceiling light fixtures were turned on and provided even more light. The light fixtures looked futuristic to me, several concentric, flat metal bands surrounding a large light bulb, and they resembled so many Saturn-like planets hovering over everything. There were Painting easels, big wooden blocks, a piano, a “store”, a carpeted area, a coat rack, a bathroom, and a number of kids already there whom I had never met before.
“This is Mrs. Cherry, honey,” Mom finally said, bending down to me. “She is your teacher!” She said it in the same tone of voice she used when she wanted me to eat something awful, like peas or liver. I looked at Dad and clutched his slacks a little tighter, but he was no help. He just gave me the stern look and nodded encouragingly. Although I had a year’s notice that this day was coming, the reality of it all stunned me… strange room, strange stuff, strange kids. Dad nudged me forward while Mom took my hands from his pant leg and assured me they would return before long to pick me up.
Then she presented me to Mrs. Cherry. “He’ll be fine,” Mrs. Cherry said, and she put her hand on my shoulder and swept me into the room before I knew what happened. Until then I had not paid her much attention, but now I saw she was easily the biggest woman I had ever seen. She was heavy, but immaculate. She had a full, round face with a turned-up nose, a very fair complexion with ruddy cheeks, and her hair was shiny, dark and curled. She wore a brightly-colored print dress, tightly cinched around an ample waist.
Mrs. Cherry steered me to one of several wooden painting easels that were very sturdy, being made from two-by-fours in an A-frame fashion so that a paper and paints were on either side. It was unlike anything I had seen before. Whereas my paint set at home was a little water color tin with five or six pats of dry color each about the size of a postage stamp, here the paint was liquid in large glass jars, and it sloshed around. And while my brush at home was very small, fitting inside the little tin set, these brushes were huge, easily bigger around than any of my fingers!
A girl stood at the next easel painting a house by a tree and the sun shining down from above. It was a big, BIG picture, and I watched her as Mrs. Cherry stirred a brush in bright red paint and made a mark on the paper in front of me. Turning back to the door, I saw that Mom and Dad were gone.
“Let’s see what you can paint,” Mrs. Cherry said with a big smile. She held out the brush to me. I took it, assessed the blank paper, and thus I began my education.
Soon I discovered other aspects of Kindergarten. There was a “store” of empty food containers, and we could “buy” them and learn how to make change. But many kids, like me, already knew how to make change from going to real stores with our parents, and so did not spend much time with the store. However, now and then I brought an empty box or can from home to add to the store’s assortment.
Much of the time in Kindergarten we were out on a large rectangular carpet that faced a blackboard. A piano and Mrs. Cherry’s desk were alongside. We gathered there for lessons, Show and Tell, to sing songs, for Mrs. Cherry to read to us, and for naptime. Even today I distinctly remember learning how to tie my shoes on that rug. I can see the gray rows of carpet pile behind my Buster Brown shoes, and the brown shoelaces that challenged me. All the kids were trying to follow Mrs. Cherry’s example, and a few already knew how to do it. I could not get it at first. When I let go of the laces my bow just fell apart, and I looked up to Mrs. Cherry for help. She held the shoelaces and guided my fingers, and… I saw how to do it! I practiced it over and again so I could show Mom and Dad. Sometimes today as I lace up my shoes I stop and think about why I hold down one lace with my little finger as I make the bow, and then I recall that is how Mrs. Cherry showed me to do it so many years ago.
For Show and Tell I sometimes brought things from Douglas Aircraft where Dad worked. He got company publications that had pictures of the airplanes they made, and I brought them to school to share. It was neat that my Dad made airplanes! One time I brought Dad’s smallest pocketknife to share, but to my chagrin I learned that a knife was not the best thing to bring to Show and Tell, even if it was really small, and Mrs. Cherry kept it in her desk until class was over and then gave it back to me. As we waited for the bus to take us home some of my friends and I tried to play Mumbly-Peg with the knife, but no one really knew how it was played. All we could do was try to flip the knife so that it stuck in the grass. I never did learn the object of that game, if there was one.
Just before naptime we each got a carton of milk from a crate that had bits of ice melting on the cartons. In those days the cartons were flat on top with a large, round hole cut in one corner and closed up with a stopper that pressed in below the top of the carton. A paper straw was provided by Mrs. Cherry, not individually wrapped as they are today, but from a box full of individual straws, and each of us got to pull our own straw from the box.
Working The Soil (1950)
Dad was an Iowa farm-boy at heart. He came to Southern California (via Wyoming) and found work in Long Beach, at Douglas Aircraft, during World War II.
When I was born in 1945, our small house in Long Beach became cramped, and dad looked for a better place for the family. But more than just an extra room, he longed for a larger piece of land where he could settle in and grow things like his family had in Iowa. He wanted some rows of corn, beans, other vegetables and fruit trees. The temperate California climate promised a wealth of possibilities Iowa never offered. And he wanted some critters, too. Above all, he wanted the freedom and space to have all these things without the neighbors.
Dad seized the opportunity to realize his dreams when he bought a quarter-acre of land along Huntington Beach Boulevard in an unincorporated area of nearby Orange County called Midway City. He moved the family to a nearby rental house while he hand-built our home from a surplus army barracks he purchased from Fort McArthur in San Pedro. That’s where I grew up, and where he and Mom lived until old age.
When Dad bought the land it was barren. The soil was highly alkaline and hardpan. Water ran off it, or stood in pools, but it did not soak in but an inch or so. It was so hard a shovel could barely penetrate it, and when it did, the dirt broke into brittle, dusty clods, which, in turn, had to be broken up again and again into smaller pieces. The only plants able to grow were shallow-rooted weeds.
The neighbors on either side-- the Gilberts to the North, and the Gulicks to the South-- said our land was worthless, poisoned, but anyone could see that their land was fine, and Dad knew he could make ours just as good. His solution was to mix gypsum and sand into the soil, water it well and hope for rain. It was very hard work, taking years of continual labor and attention, and Dad did most of it himself. To begin he rented a roto-tiller and broke up the surface over the entire lot, but after that the rest was intensive, hand labor, using only a shovel: one spade full at a time, turned over, clods broken up with the back of the shovel, gypsum and sand thrown on top, then spaded under, and then repeated again and again until a seventy-five foot row across the property was done. Then he shoveled another row back in the opposite direction, and over a period of months Dad spaded the entire 225-foot deep lot. Then he started over with more gypsum and more sand.
Working the soil began even before he built the house, and it continued on for years after. I was there much of the time, helping him as best I could for a kid of five or six years. There was another shovel, a hoe and a rake. If I stood with both feet on the blade of the shovel and jumped up and down, and wobbled the handle back and forth, I could get the blade about halfway into the dirt, turn it over and break up the clods. Or more often I would go along behind Dad and re-turn the dirt he had already turned, breaking the clods into even smaller pieces. There was nothing alive in the dirt: no bugs, beetles, earthworms, ants, nothing.
Beach Blvd. Circa 1950.
I took this picture from our roof, sent it to Sheriff John for a contest and won third place.
Truth.
Dad worked very hard to make our home as well as it could be. He turned soil on weekends. When he worked swing shift at Douglas Aircraft, he turned soil before going to work. When he worked days, he turned soil after work until it got dark. Except for what little I could do, he worked alone. He bought bags and bags of gypsum and spaded them into the ground. He broke up pieces of cast-off plaster and wallboard with a hammer and shoveled that in too.
Dad found a source of free sand at the Santa Ana River riverbed where it neared the ocean. The spot was six or seven miles away, across a huge expanse pf sparsely populated strawberry and bean fields, an area where eight years later he would teach me how to drive our 1953 Plymouth on the seldom-traveled roads, and which ten years after that would see the new City of Fountain Valley overrun all the fields with tract housing and strip malls.
Dad made several trips a day to the riverbed when he wasn’t working, loading up the trunk of the car with sand, bringing it home and then returning for another load. Sometimes my older sisters’ boyfriends would help with their cars. Sometimes I went along to help, and I did one day when Dad dug up a small willow-tree sapling from the riverbank. He said Mom would like it. We took it home and planted it directly in line with the kitchen window, along the back driveway. It took root, and in a few years it was more than 25 feet tall and supported a tire swing. Dad also brought some Pussy Willow from the riverbed and transplanted them near the kitchen door.
Mother Nature helped, too. During the early 1950’s there were heavy rains, and, combined with the lack of sewers and storm drains in the area, the ground flooded over for days at a time, putting our lot under several inches of rain. It was inconvenient, but at the same time it helped the gypsum and sand penetrate the ground to break up the alkali underneath. Dad took advantage of it, going out in his rain boots to spade dirt and mud, even before the ground was dry.
In time the ground responded, but for years later Dad continued to discover patches that needed to be spaded and conditioned. Even in our garden area that we planted every year, clods of dry dirt would surface now and again. Dad would break them up, by hand if necessary, and work the dry dirt into the rich and moist surrounding soil.
It all worked as Dad knew it would, and after a few years of his hard work our yards exploded with a variety of seasonal vegetables, berry and grape vines, flowers, shrubs and numerous fruit trees. Dad coaxed our “poisoned” ground into dwarfing what the neighbors had, and they complimented him for it. He created an island of lush greenery, his gift to all our family.
The Old Homestead, Circa 1950
The Helms Bakery Man (1951)
A soft, two-pitched tone sounded down the alley in back of our lot and played through the house. “Thweet…thweet-thweet!”I abandoned the Tinker Toy windmill I was building on the living room floor and ran to the kitchen where mom had flour and dough on the breadboard, cutting noodles. Through the window over the sink I could see the Helm’s Bakery truck bouncing as it sought the most level stretch of the dirt alleyway. With a sideways jostle it reached our driveway, passed it a little, then stopped and backed in.
“Thweet-thweet!” the dissonant little horn insisted.
Mom raised her hands and dried them on her apron.
“Can I get something?” I asked excitedly. “Can I?” “I think so,” she said. “You go on out and tell him I’ll be there in a minute.” She took off her apron and turned into the dining room. I bolted out the screen door, letting it slam shut with a wooden “clack,” hopped off the foot-high back porch and ran around the garage to the driveway.
“Thweet-thweet!” the dissonant little horn insisted.
Mom raised her hands and dried them on her apron.
“Can I get something?” I asked excitedly. “Can I?” “I think so,” she said. “You go on out and tell him I’ll be there in a minute.” She took off her apron and turned into the dining room. I bolted out the screen door, letting it slam shut with a wooden “clack,” hopped off the foot-high back porch and ran around the garage to the driveway.
The Helm’s man was just getting out of his truck. It was a standard delivery truck of that era, a cross between a station wagon and a van, one of a fleet that the Helm’s company used to market bakery products directly to homes. The truck was a light yellow, and it had the mostly-blue Helm’s name and logo painted front, rear and on the sides. The double horn that made the distinctive Helm’s sound was on the roof over the windshield.
“Hi there, son,” the Helm’s man said as he reached the rear of the truck.
“Hi,” I replied. “Mom said to tell you she would be out in a minute.”
“Well, we will just wait for her then,” he said in a kindly voice.
He turned to the double doors at the back of the truck and opened them all the way, framing the center area that held the bakery goods. The doors held paper bags, waxed paper and other supplies used to dispense and wrap the merchandise. I watched in awe as he straightened some loaves of bread across the top that had been jostled askew when he drove down the alley.
Mom appeared from around the corner of the garage, straightening her dress. She had her coin purse in hand. “Hello,” she said, a little breathless from rushing. “Good morning, Ma’am,” the Helm’s man said. “What can I get for you today?” Mom briefly surveyed the familiar display, and then began, “A loaf of the sesame seed bread,” and then he took down a loaf of bread…As mom continued her selections, I stood in thrill of the truck and all it contained. A wooden cabinet filled the interior completely. A shelf across the top was stocked with loafs of bread, and under that were a stack of sliding doors, or trays, their perfectly-aligned chrome handles sparkling in the sunshine. There were so many drawers and compartments I could not fathom how he knew where everything was; yet he did. Usually he opened the same drawer or two when he came to our house, and I often wondered what unknown delicacies must have been in the other ones I never saw him open. It must have been something super-fantastic. “…Do you have bear claws today?” Mom asked. “Sure do,” he said, sliding out the bottom tray with a slow flourish. It brushed at my midsection as he slid it out, and I took a step back. Things that grown ups liked came into view one by one: things with nuts on them, raisins, prunes, white stuff, and a gooey-looking colored stuff. Coffee cakes they called them, and Danish. Some of them were okay, but not really kid food. When the tray was about halfway extended, the Helm’s Man gestured to a section stocked with Bear Claws. He slid the Bear Claw tray back inside, and slowly pulled out the tray above it. A dazzling array of doughnuts appeared one-by-one until the tray was extended to its full length, about four feet from the back of the truck, or so it seemed. There were cake doughnuts, iced, buttermilk, sprinkles, candies, sugars, glazes, twists, and I waited until they were all in view.Finally mom said, “What do you think, Randy, honey?” “I want a glazed one,” I said. That was my favorite. The Helm’s man took a fresh paper, plucked up one giant glazed doughnut and handed it to me, making sure I had a good hold on it through the paper.
“And two powdered sugar and two chocolate iced ones,” Mom said. The Helm’s mad added those to our bag as I licked the glaze on my doughnut and watched him at work. Mom paid him with two dollars, and he made change from a machine he wore around his waist. It was shiny metal and held quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies in separate stacks so that depressing a lever at the bottom of each stack could dispense each. He quickly worked each stack as necessary, and then visually verified the change before giving it to mom. Mom said, “What do you say, Randy?” “Thank you,” I said to the man. “You are welcome,” he said, as he held out the loaf of bread to me, and I took it under my arm. When he left, the Helm’s men continued down the alley to another house and then back the way he had come. It was a dead end. I waited for him to pass by, and as he did I waved to him and he waved back, sounding the horn, “Thweet…thweet—thweet!”
Mom appeared from around the corner of the garage, straightening her dress. She had her coin purse in hand. “Hello,” she said, a little breathless from rushing. “Good morning, Ma’am,” the Helm’s man said. “What can I get for you today?” Mom briefly surveyed the familiar display, and then began, “A loaf of the sesame seed bread,” and then he took down a loaf of bread…As mom continued her selections, I stood in thrill of the truck and all it contained. A wooden cabinet filled the interior completely. A shelf across the top was stocked with loafs of bread, and under that were a stack of sliding doors, or trays, their perfectly-aligned chrome handles sparkling in the sunshine. There were so many drawers and compartments I could not fathom how he knew where everything was; yet he did. Usually he opened the same drawer or two when he came to our house, and I often wondered what unknown delicacies must have been in the other ones I never saw him open. It must have been something super-fantastic. “…Do you have bear claws today?” Mom asked. “Sure do,” he said, sliding out the bottom tray with a slow flourish. It brushed at my midsection as he slid it out, and I took a step back. Things that grown ups liked came into view one by one: things with nuts on them, raisins, prunes, white stuff, and a gooey-looking colored stuff. Coffee cakes they called them, and Danish. Some of them were okay, but not really kid food. When the tray was about halfway extended, the Helm’s Man gestured to a section stocked with Bear Claws. He slid the Bear Claw tray back inside, and slowly pulled out the tray above it. A dazzling array of doughnuts appeared one-by-one until the tray was extended to its full length, about four feet from the back of the truck, or so it seemed. There were cake doughnuts, iced, buttermilk, sprinkles, candies, sugars, glazes, twists, and I waited until they were all in view.Finally mom said, “What do you think, Randy, honey?” “I want a glazed one,” I said. That was my favorite. The Helm’s man took a fresh paper, plucked up one giant glazed doughnut and handed it to me, making sure I had a good hold on it through the paper.
“And two powdered sugar and two chocolate iced ones,” Mom said. The Helm’s mad added those to our bag as I licked the glaze on my doughnut and watched him at work. Mom paid him with two dollars, and he made change from a machine he wore around his waist. It was shiny metal and held quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies in separate stacks so that depressing a lever at the bottom of each stack could dispense each. He quickly worked each stack as necessary, and then visually verified the change before giving it to mom. Mom said, “What do you say, Randy?” “Thank you,” I said to the man. “You are welcome,” he said, as he held out the loaf of bread to me, and I took it under my arm. When he left, the Helm’s men continued down the alley to another house and then back the way he had come. It was a dead end. I waited for him to pass by, and as he did I waved to him and he waved back, sounding the horn, “Thweet…thweet—thweet!”
First Grade (1951)
Mrs. White was our teacher in first grade. She was average in height and body type, but was thin and had a pasty complexion. Her shoulder-length, black hair was curled and she often wore a black skirt with a white blouse. She looked tired most of the time. Maybe that’s what First Grade does to a teacher.
Each kid got his own desk. They were the old style and well worn. The top was wood, with a hole in one corner intended for an inkwell, and an open compartment underneath allowed books and things to slide in. Each desk had curved, black ironwork legs that were bolted to long wooden runners that kept the desks in fixed rows. The folding seat of each desk was attached to the front of the desk behind it. During “duck & cover” air-raid drills we had to get down under our desk, between the runners, and put one hand over the back of our neck and the other over our eyes. That was one of the first lessons we learned.
Other regular lessons began this year-- reading writing, arithmetic and all that. A small reading circle of little chairs was in the front-left corner of the room, and we each took turns reading portions of Dick & Jane, and we all saw Spot run. Being shy, I got tense as the reading came around to me. But I read pretty well, and I got through my three or four sentences as quickly as possible and then sighed with relief.
There was graph paper available that was thick, like construction paper, and with a large grid of ¼ inch squares. I used that a lot during drawing time to make symmetrical designs by coloring each square. I did all kinds of them, different color schemes, different designs.
Recess was new. We got to use the same playground as the other kids, but our time was staggered so that we didn’t butt heads trying to use the same limited equipment. The swings were neat-o, and tether-ball was a daily event, but I really liked the Giant Strides-- long ropes knotted at the bottom and suspended from a rotating device atop a tall pole. The object was to grab a rope and spin around like a carousel. If two people paired up and intertwined their ropes, then when the whole thing spun around they could alternately sling each other ahead, like a whiplash. That was the best, and I did that a lot with my friends.
Marbles were popular, too, both collecting them and shooting them out of circles. Most guys had a little drawstring-bag to carry their marbles-- boulders, peewees, agates, steelies, and the newest ones-- the cat’s eye. During one period I shot marbles so much the cuticle of my thumb rubbed raw.
One major project of First Grade was for each kid to make a plaster cast of his handprint. First we made individual clay molds, then filled them with plaster of Paris, and when that hardened we unmolded them and painted them gold. It took weeks to finish, and they looked really good at Open House that spring, and they made a nice keepsake present for our parents. Mom kept mine undamaged through the years, and I last saw it in the early 1980’s. It may still exist today.
We all took the Iowa State Achievement Test to assess our individual abilities. Mine came back showing an I.Q. of 134 or so, and by Second Grade this prompted talk of moving me ahead a grade, as was done with a classmate during this year-- Eric Cox. (Recall, I had been held back a year to start Kindergarten because of my birth date.) I was not supposed to know about this, but I overheard Mrs. Stacey, the Principal, talking with Mom and Dad, and she recommended that it would be better for my social development if I did not skip a grade. Her judgment may have been influenced by Eric Cox who had been moved ahead a grade and was really kind of introverted, not mixing well with his new classmates. But he wasn’t that way because he skipped a grade, that’s just the way he was. At any rate, Mom and Dad assented to Mrs. Stacey’s recommendation, and I did not skip any grades.
Since the school day was now longer-- classes AFTER noon-- we had to bring our lunches from home, as there was no cafeteria. The school still gave a carton of milk to everyone, and a straw, but there was no cafeteria or any food available at the school. Mom made lunches for me, and at first I had only a paper bag to carry, but soon I got a lunch box and Thermos. It had Hopalong Cassidy all over the outside and on the Thermos too. It was during these days that I learned to dislike Velveeta cheese, because Mom made sandwiches from big slabs of it. She probably thought she was being generous to put so much in a sandwich, but it made it nearly inedible. It didn’t make any difference how much mayo or lettuce there was, the thick dry cheese stuck in my throat. I dreaded those sandwiches, and every lunch I pried open the bread apprehensively, hoping for peanut butter or left-overs. I tried to trade the cheese sandwiches to someone else for whatever was available, but it that wasn’t possible, I threw the cheese away and ate a lettuce sandwich. The Thermos was great, though, and Mom put in hot soup, and sometimes cold juice or punch. I wanted coffee, like Dad took to work in his Thermos, but that was taboo.
There was only one class of each grade at Midway City School during this time, and that led to a fairly cohesive group of kids moving from grade to grade (classroom to classroom) together. By Sixth Grade the population increase in the area brought more kids for each grade than one classroom could handle, and we were split into groups. But before then we were like an extended family. We knew each other, and often each other’s parents, and we expected to be together as the years progressed. Many of us graduated high school in the same class at Westminster High School in 1963. From the early years I remember well Jimmy Hulsey, Joyce Weir, Bobby Sample, Sherrill Tiller, Richie Foster, Ed Cutler, Sharon Rogers, Teddy Kosters, David Ganick, Barry Dodd, Susan Berry, Mike Jones, Joyce Deitweiller, Jo Ann Card, Bob Parks, Dennis White, and Christine Spahn.
My First Grade class picture, taken right out of the back door of our classroom on the playground dirt. I'm in the first row not on the ground, fifth from the left. Circa 1951-1952.
PLANTING WITH DAD (1951)
Along with kite flying and Easter Vacation, Spring brought planting season. Our yearly garden was a space about thirty-feet square near the back corner of the lot on the north side. It lay fallow through Winter, and weeds took root after Spring rains. If they were tall and thick Dad used a scythe to chop them off at ground level, but usually a shovel or hoe was enough to clear them away, along with pulling them by hand. I helped, and every year I got blisters on my hands from the sudden, intense use of the tools and weed pulling.
After clearing the surface, Dad spaded the area with a shovel, reaching down now and then to break up any residual clods of dirt that surfaced, but by this time, circa 1951, the soil had improved dramatically. Earthworms wriggled through the overturned soil; “potato bugs” (Jerusalem beetles) scampered out of the way now and then, and there were gophers, moles and other things that lived underground.
“Me and cat Skeezicks” at Harvest Time, 1951
I helped with the spading as much as I could, considering my small size, but Dad did most of the work. I used a second shovel and stood with both feet on top of the blade, wobbling the handle back and forth so to sink the blade into the ground, and then I hopped off and turned it over just like Dad.
At this point Dad envisioned just what he wanted to plant, how many rows of corn and other crops. Then we went to Hefley’s, a nearby nursery, to buy the seed. Dad examined each box and packet to find just what he wanted. If it said “Iowa” on it that got his attention, as Iowa is where he grew up. Dad selected seeds for the garden: corn, carrots, radishes, lettuce, kohl-rabi, beans and pumpkins. I encouraged him to get some flowering plants for Mom: Sweet Pea, Larkspur, Zinnia, and Snapdragon. I took particular interest in that, and spent time looking over the selection of bare-root roses, and occasionally we bought one. Dad evaluated sapling fruit trees, and in those early years he usually got one each year: a nectarine one year, a peach the next, or a plum. On this particular day we bought a half-dozen growing tomato plants from a large flat. Mr. Hefley used a trowel to cut the plants from the flat, as though cutting a piece of sheet cake, and wrapped them in paper to protect the roots and crumbling soil.
When we got home the tomato plants had to go into the ground right away, as already they were starting to droop. Dad dug six shallow holes and showed me how to plant the first one-- fill the hole half up with water; make mud; poke the tomato plant’s roots into the mud, and then fill in the hole with the rest of the dirt, making sure it was all very moist.
Dad let me plant the other five tomatoes while he went to ready the plow for making furrows. It was a one-man push plow with a spoked, iron wheel that was flat around the rim and about two inches across. The wheel was mounted loosely so that would give when pushed over uneven ground, and it wobbled so much it seemed nearly broken. An eight-inch plow blade was loosely attached behind the wheel, and the whole assembly was mounted on two wood handles that rose outward from the wheel’s axle to nearly chest height, spreading to about shoulder width, and then curving down. Half-way up the handles was a cross brace, and that is where I grasped the plow when I used it (or tried to). The handles were painted blue, but the paint was well-worn and chipped, exposing the bare, gray wood underneath that itself was worn smooth from years of use.
When I finished planting the tomatoes I joined Dad who was sitting on the edge of our concrete back porch with the plow blade pulled up between his legs resting on his old, brown work slacks. Apparently he had just oiled the wheel’s bearings, as a new stain spread onto his pant leg. He held a long, flap rasp file at each end and was sharpening the blade with heavy, deliberate strokes of the file, several strokes to one side of the blade, then several to the other, back and forth until he tested it with his thumb and pronounced it ready to use. I tested the edge too, brushing my thumb across it a few times like Dad did. It was cold and coarsely sharp, a bright line of newly filed metal gleaming in contrast to the rest of the dull gray blade.
While Dad put the file away I turned the plow upside down, blade pointed to the sky, and rolled it like a wobbly wheelbarrow out to the garden. Dad was there in a minute with the seeds we bought from Hefley’s and a dried ear of corn from last year. He righted the plow and heaved it into position to start, squared himself to an imagined row, dug the plow blade into the dirt a few times to test its penetration of the soil, and then he was off. The plow lurched ahead with each push, dirt falling dark and moist to the side and leaving a furrow in its wake. But it didn’t move smoothly ahead. With each forward push, Dad also dug the plow blade down into the soil; then he yanked it back toward himself and pushed it ahead a second time through the broken dirt. Then he caught up with a step or two over the uneven ground, straddling the new furrow, and repeated the sequence… push/dig-yank-push-step-step, and over again, and again, occasionally backing up a few feet to re-do a spot where the blade came up too soon.
I watched him for a few feet, noting how he did it, and then I caught up quickly and shadowed him the rest of the day. In a minute he reached the end of the first row, and turned around to repeat the same plowing in the opposite direction. But before he started off, Dad let me get in between the handles at the cross-brace, and we plowed the row together. It was awkward, a lot of jostling from the pushing and yanking, but I was eager to do it, and Dad let me “help” him every few rows.
Dad plowed the furrows very close to each other, so close that the dirt from a new furrow spilled a little into the previous one. As I soon learned, not every furrow would hold seeds; the unused ones would become watering channels, scooped out so to elevate the seeded furrows and give the growing roots oxygen, and also allowing the soil to dry out between watering. Most people would not have thought of that, but Dad knew to do it, and it worked spectacularly.
When the plowing was done we began planting. The first five rows were reserved for sweet corn. Dad used the hose to water the second furrow, walking it down the length of the row and using the hose end and the running water to knock away obstructions and make a continuous, wet seed bed. Then he skipped a few furrows and walked the hose back toward me making another seed bed. He showed me how to sow the seed: drop a couple of kernels onto the wet dirt, skip 10-12 inches and drop a couple more. Dad seeded the first few feet, and then let me do the rest to the end of the row. He watered the other furrows, and I went behind sowing the seeds. Then Dad showed me how to use the plowed dirt to cover the seeds, breaking it in my hand to assure there were no big lumps, and how to use the hoe to clear a waterway between the rows, using the dirt to further build up the seed beds.
We planted all the seeds from Hefley’s and then turned to the dried ear of corn that lay next to empty seed packets. It was popcorn, and rather than buy new seed Dad just saved an ear from last year. He pulled the husks back enough to expose two inches of kernels and let me get them off the cob. It’s not easily done. Popcorn kernels are smooth and hard, and very different to dislodge. My thumbs were red and sore by the time I finished, but we planted a separate row of popcorn, and that was something to look forward to.
While I was doing the popcorn, Dad went to the garage again and returned with an old, dried sunflower head that had been in there all Winter. It still had some seeds clinging in it, and as Dad shook them loose I thought we were going to eat them. Instead, he poked them into the last row of the garden, a few at a time every six inches or so. Last year our sunflowers grew huge heads, twelve inches or more across, and Dad explained that these seeds from the old sunflower head would grow the same type of giant sunflower. That was really neat. I was learning the cycle of planting, growing, harvesting and planting again.
Time flew by, and before long the sun dropped low in the sky and shadows grew long. Everything was planted in the back garden, and the tomato plants had perked up after being transplanted. Dad planted a row of green beans along the side fence, stuck some small poles in the ground along the seed bed, and attached string to them in a criss-cross pattern. Something for the plants to grab hold of and climb on, he explained. Beans needed that.
Dad cleaned our tools and put them away, and at his suggestion I tended the hose watering the seeded rows, moving it from place to place as needed. A small stick of wood served as an imaginary “boat,” and I watched it carried by the running water: propelled ahead, spun around, pushed sideways. Every so often its progress was inhibited by some impediment, or pool of water, and I watched expectantly to see if the momentum of the water eventually would carry it on. If not, I intervened and broke up the barrier with the hoe and let the water rush ahead. This was a little game I played frequently, delighting in the clear water rushing over moist earth, and urging my little boat onward.
Mom appeared with two glasses of lemonade and complimented our work. She said dinner would be ready soon, but we knew that already from the hearty aroma of delicious fried chicken that wafted over the yard. Mom looked over the garden one last time and asked if we planted potatoes? Dad and I looked stupidly at each other and had to admit there were no potatoes. However, Dad assured her, we could make a place for them easily, and the russets in the kitchen drawer, the ones that were starting to sprout, would make fine sets for new potato plants.
The next weekend we planted potatoes.
Catalina Island (1953)
21 Mar 2025 | Randy Steven Kraft
Among our family photographs are one of my sister Doris and her friend Sissy Williamson on the beach at Avalon weaving a sun hat from palm fronds. I think it was taken about 1950, because I remember seeing it before my first trip to Catalina.
The Catalina steamer, later called the Great White Steamship, sailed from San Pedro to Avalon several times a day. It took more than an hour each way for the 26-mile trip. In 1953 my Cub Scout den made the trip one Saturday, and Mom and Dad went, too, as chaperons. My sister Jeanette joined us, anticipating a day of sunbathing. After much discussion with Doris about sea sickness, we brought Lemon Drop candies for our stomachs and some warm clothing for the windy ocean crossing. On the way to San Pedro, Dad pointed out the huge crane in the Naval Shipyard on Terminal Island that came from Germany at the close of World War II. The largest crane in the world, Dad said, and it is still in use there today. Then we caught the automobile ferry to San Pedro, since it was before the Vincent Thomas Bridge was built, and before the time of freeways as well.
The Catalina steamer, later called the Great White Steamship, sailed from San Pedro to Avalon several times a day. It took more than an hour each way for the 26-mile trip. In 1953 my Cub Scout den made the trip one Saturday, and Mom and Dad went, too, as chaperons. My sister Jeanette joined us, anticipating a day of sunbathing. After much discussion with Doris about sea sickness, we brought Lemon Drop candies for our stomachs and some warm clothing for the windy ocean crossing. On the way to San Pedro, Dad pointed out the huge crane in the Naval Shipyard on Terminal Island that came from Germany at the close of World War II. The largest crane in the world, Dad said, and it is still in use there today. Then we caught the automobile ferry to San Pedro, since it was before the Vincent Thomas Bridge was built, and before the time of freeways as well.
.jpg "Class Picture")
My Cub Scout Den waiting for the train to San Diego to visit the Zoo.
From the right: me, Jimmy Hulsey, Bobby Sample, Richie Foster, David Ganick. Circa 1953.
The Catalina Steamer seemed huge to me, probably because I was so small. There were two or three decks, and I spent most of the trip exploring the various levels from bow to stern. And we each ate at least one Lemon Drop, which, no doubt, accounted for none of us being seasick! However, the main thing I remember are the flying fish. They raced alongside the ship, as though drawn by it, and broke the surface of the water with their wing-like fins beating the air. They stayed airborne much longer than seemed possible, and as one fell others sprang into the air. All together they made a sort of chattering noise. Today there are flying fish tours on Catalina. Boats go out at night and shine powerful lights across the water to attract the fish. But back then flying fish escorted the steamship in broad daylight and without any obvious encouragement.
On arriving at Avalon Harbor, Dad noted the return trip schedule and impressed the departure time on everyone, because to miss the last boat of the day meant staying in Catalina overnight! Not that it would have been such a bad thing from my perspective, but no way was Dad going to pay for a pricey hotel. He made sure we were among the first in line for the return trip!
Avalon was a sleepy town with not much to do but enjoy the beach. Jeanette, being fifteen or sixteen at the time, was a pro at that, and Mom and Dad kept a close eye on her. That freed me to explore with my Cub Scout buddies.
To the left, as you face Avalon, the road climbs a hill overlooking the harbor. There was a hotel up there and a lot of birds. A good walk to the right, standing alone, in the casino, a round, landmark building reminiscent of the casino at Monaco or Monte Carlo. At that time it appeared to be abandoned, as every entrance stood wide open, and the interior was bare concrete, looking almost burnt out. A newspaper and gum wrappers swirled through the building on gusts of a healthy sea breeze. It was spooky in a way because of the stark contrast between the fine exterior and the barren inside. It seemed as though it ought to have been whole and in use, but was not. Today the casino is fully restored as a museum. It is a beautiful old building, and every time I see it I recall that first trip and how neglected it was then.
Five or six years later we went to Catalina again, but this time on a flying boat that landed in the water at Avalon Harbor. It was Boss. The plane left from Long Beach Airport, right next to Douglas Aircraft where Dad worked. Maybe that is why he thought of the trip. The flight only took about twenty minutes, and the planes flew much more frequently than the steamship made trips. Consequently, there were more opportunities to return throughout the day, and less pressure to make a final departure time.
By this time Jeanette had married and begun her family, so the trip involved just Mom, Dad and me. We went on the Diving Bell; an elevator like thing that went underwater and you could see the ocean floor, kelp and the fish through portholes. It wasn’t very exciting, but at the end it surfaced like a cork and buckled your knees. That was neat. And we went on the Glass Bottom Boat, too, where you could see similar things through the glass bottom as the boat passed over them. And there was a live person down there feeding the fish, and a phony chest of treasure. It was cool. Afterward Dad rested while Mom and I hiked a little up the road behind Avalon, and we discovered that the beach atmosphere turns into a dry interior once you leave the city.
We didn’t catch the absolutely last plane home, and consequently there were some empty seats. The planes were small aircraft, having only 8-10 passenger seats, and the pilot and co-pilot were right there in the same cabin with only a pull-curtain between them and us. Before we took off the co-pilot turned back and asked me if I wanted to take his place. Wow! After everyone convinced me he was not kidding I hopped into his seat and he secured me with the seat belt. Because it was so low, and because of the angle of the plane as it rested on the water, I could not see anything but the instrument panel and the stick in front of me. There was nothing out the windshield but blue sky. As we gained speed for takeoff the ocean tugged at the plane’s fuselage, holding it back, until the tail broke free and it came level. At least there was no shortage of runway! I was leaning forward and peering out the side window when the pilot jerked the stick back, and it hit me in the stomach. It wasn’t very hard, and as we soared into the air it was very quickly forgotten. As we banked towards the mainland the view of Avalon Harbor was thrilling. I could see every place we had been that day, all at the same time. It was my first time ever in an airplane, and what an inauguration! During the flight back the pilot explained the instruments to me, and he let me have the stick-- fly the plane. But as we neared Long Beach Airport I had to relinquish the seat to the real co-pilot. Nevertheless, it was a fantastic experience and a terrific trip.
On arriving at Avalon Harbor, Dad noted the return trip schedule and impressed the departure time on everyone, because to miss the last boat of the day meant staying in Catalina overnight! Not that it would have been such a bad thing from my perspective, but no way was Dad going to pay for a pricey hotel. He made sure we were among the first in line for the return trip!
Avalon was a sleepy town with not much to do but enjoy the beach. Jeanette, being fifteen or sixteen at the time, was a pro at that, and Mom and Dad kept a close eye on her. That freed me to explore with my Cub Scout buddies.
To the left, as you face Avalon, the road climbs a hill overlooking the harbor. There was a hotel up there and a lot of birds. A good walk to the right, standing alone, in the casino, a round, landmark building reminiscent of the casino at Monaco or Monte Carlo. At that time it appeared to be abandoned, as every entrance stood wide open, and the interior was bare concrete, looking almost burnt out. A newspaper and gum wrappers swirled through the building on gusts of a healthy sea breeze. It was spooky in a way because of the stark contrast between the fine exterior and the barren inside. It seemed as though it ought to have been whole and in use, but was not. Today the casino is fully restored as a museum. It is a beautiful old building, and every time I see it I recall that first trip and how neglected it was then.
Five or six years later we went to Catalina again, but this time on a flying boat that landed in the water at Avalon Harbor. It was Boss. The plane left from Long Beach Airport, right next to Douglas Aircraft where Dad worked. Maybe that is why he thought of the trip. The flight only took about twenty minutes, and the planes flew much more frequently than the steamship made trips. Consequently, there were more opportunities to return throughout the day, and less pressure to make a final departure time.
By this time Jeanette had married and begun her family, so the trip involved just Mom, Dad and me. We went on the Diving Bell; an elevator like thing that went underwater and you could see the ocean floor, kelp and the fish through portholes. It wasn’t very exciting, but at the end it surfaced like a cork and buckled your knees. That was neat. And we went on the Glass Bottom Boat, too, where you could see similar things through the glass bottom as the boat passed over them. And there was a live person down there feeding the fish, and a phony chest of treasure. It was cool. Afterward Dad rested while Mom and I hiked a little up the road behind Avalon, and we discovered that the beach atmosphere turns into a dry interior once you leave the city.
We didn’t catch the absolutely last plane home, and consequently there were some empty seats. The planes were small aircraft, having only 8-10 passenger seats, and the pilot and co-pilot were right there in the same cabin with only a pull-curtain between them and us. Before we took off the co-pilot turned back and asked me if I wanted to take his place. Wow! After everyone convinced me he was not kidding I hopped into his seat and he secured me with the seat belt. Because it was so low, and because of the angle of the plane as it rested on the water, I could not see anything but the instrument panel and the stick in front of me. There was nothing out the windshield but blue sky. As we gained speed for takeoff the ocean tugged at the plane’s fuselage, holding it back, until the tail broke free and it came level. At least there was no shortage of runway! I was leaning forward and peering out the side window when the pilot jerked the stick back, and it hit me in the stomach. It wasn’t very hard, and as we soared into the air it was very quickly forgotten. As we banked towards the mainland the view of Avalon Harbor was thrilling. I could see every place we had been that day, all at the same time. It was my first time ever in an airplane, and what an inauguration! During the flight back the pilot explained the instruments to me, and he let me have the stick-- fly the plane. But as we neared Long Beach Airport I had to relinquish the seat to the real co-pilot. Nevertheless, it was a fantastic experience and a terrific trip.
Sunday Afternoon (1953)
21 Mar 2025 | Randy Steven Kraft
.jpg "Me, Dad & Mom, Aunt Vivian and Uncle \"Fat\" (Virgil)")
Me, Dad & Mom, Aunt Vivian and Uncle "Fat" (Virgil) who were visiting from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Note the many plants in the front yard (background): Berries, Peaches, Nectarines, Apricots, etc,etc (Circa 1953)
Weekends were times we did things together as a family, and Sunday after church was prime time for some joint activity: a picnic, barbeque, County fair, visiting relatives, or maybe just a ride in the family car. "Let's go for a ride, Harold,” Mom said to Dad. We had just returned from services and Sunday school at the Presbyterian Church-- Mom, Jeanette (my sister) and I-- and I had already shed my dress clothes and was ready for the rest of the day.
Dad was finishing work on our push mower. He sat on the edge of the back porch and wiped grease and dirt from his hands with a rag. Dad wore an old, tank-style white undershirt, worn and spotted with old paint and fresh grease. He wore and old pair of baggy, brown dress slacks, similarly stained and spotted, his favorite around-the-house work outfit. While we were at church, Dad had sharpened the mower's blades using a large, heavy, flat hand file, and then cleaned and oiled the whole cutter assembly. He gave the mower a test push on the concrete slab by the porch, and the blades spun around freely making a characteristic steel-on-steel shearing sound ... " chush-chush-chush-chush-chush.
Yeah, pop, let's go for a ride!" I chimed in. "Can we? Huh?" I bounced impatiently on my toes like our dog Bupps when she heard the word "walk."
"This yard is not going to mow itself," Dad said, nodding over to the shaggy grass of the yard. "It's getting real ragged, and you know these old weeds bother your mother really bad." Mom had hay Fever, and recent Spring rains spurred the growth of our grass as well as weeds that blew in from everywhere and took root. Ragweed bothered Mom most of all and it sprouted relentlessly. Dad looked at me with his face canted down and eyebrows raised. It was my turn.
"I'll do it," I blurted out. "I'll do it tomorrow after school. I promise I will!"
"You won't have enough time," Dad sighed. He knew it would take me a lot longer than that. The mower was as big as I was, and I had to wrestle it around the yard. But given enough time I could do it. "I'll come straight home," I said. "I won't stop at Jimmy's house, and I'll get it all done. You have it all fixed up for me, and it'll be easy." Dad gave the mower another push, spinning the blades... "chush-chush-chush."
"I promise," I added again. "Can we go? Huh?"
Jeanette now came out on the porch, also changed to casual clothes. "How about you, Net, want to go for a ride?” Dad asked.
He sat the mower aside.
Jeanette rolled her eyes, sat down on the porch steps and let out a long sigh as though exasperated. At sixteen years she was completely absorbed with being a teenager, and anything contemplated by grown-ups was infinitely B-O-R-I-N-G. "I guess so," she finally deigned to respond. "But I could go over to Robin's house," she added quickly.
"Now, Jeanette, honey," Mom, said. "You've been at Robin's so much lately, and you were just there last night for dinner. They probably think we can't afford to feed you! Come with us today. Maybe we can go into Long Beach,” Mom said, looking to Dad for approval. "I read in the newspaper that they are going to tear down Rainbow Pier. Remember that, Harold? I would like to see it again before it's gone."
Dad brightened at the suggestion. "Hey, that's a good idea," he said, looking from me to Jeanette. "The Spit & Argue Club is right there, too, and Bub hasn't seen that." Dad always called me "Bub."
Mom made a face.
"What's that?' I asked.
"The Pike is right there too!" Jeanette said with new enthusiasm.
"What's that?" I asked again.
"It's a fun zone," Jeanette said. "Rides and things."
"Yay! Neat-0!" I cried.
"That's not a nice place,” Mom said, shaking her head.
"All those sailors and whatnot."
"It is to nice," Jeanette protested. "Can we go, Daddy?"
"We'll see," he answered her, and then to Mom he said.
"It's not bad in daytime."
And so it was decided we would drive to Long Beach for the afternoon. It was only about eighty miles away, but we rarely went that way. Dad worked in Long Beach at Douglas Aircraft, and since he made the drive five or six days a week he usually didn't want to go there on his few days off. But this day he relented.
As we drove through Long Beach the streets and sidewalks were quiet until we approached the foot of America Avenue at Ocean Boulevard. That's where the Municipal Auditorium stood, with the ocean just a little behind it. Next door was Rainbow Pier, and at the far end of that was the Pike. This was my first visit here, and as Mom and Dad pointed everything out I got up on the seat and leaning over Dad as he drove so I could get a good look.
"And there's The Pike!" Jeanette added. "See the roller coaster?" "There was more than that -- a double Ferris wheel towered over an Octopus. A Tilt-A-Whirl, other rides and a whole midway.
"Oh boy!" I gasped, pop-eyed. "It's like the County Fair!" Dad must have known then that we would visit The Pike before the day was done. Dad lived here, downtown Long Beach, when he first arrived in California from Wyoming, about a dozen years previously. He lived at the YMCA just a few blocks up on America Avenue. And when the family lived in Long Beach, the downtown area was a place they came to shop and to bring my sisters for music lessons.
We found parking several blocks from the auditorium, and as we walked back to it I experienced the Long Beach Scramble System for the first time. At the major intersections a third stoplight held all traffic so pedestrians could walk diagonally and in every direction. Long Beach was the only city around with anything like that, so we played with it by walking all over the place just for the fun of it.
The Municipal Auditorium was a narrow building, vertical, and reminiscent of a cathedral in some ways. A concourse fronted it, providing space where people tarry, and the Spit & Argue Club were located there. It wasn't a real club, but a known locale where individuals gave impromptu speeches and others came by to argue with them. Knots of people gathered around the more interesting arguments. One man stood on a box gesturing wildly and speaking in a heated voice. He wore a suit and tie, as did most men in those days, and he presented an average appearance. He spoke against President Eisenhower's policy in Korea. Then a man in the knot of people gathered around shouted back in support of the President, they argued back and forth with the onlookers egging them on. Anyone was welcome to speak up. When people heard enough they moved on, and others took their place, but the speeches and arguing went on and on.
The arguments were mostly over my head, and while the spectacle of grown men shouting at each other was something new, it did not hold my interest for long. In a rare convergence, I found myself agreeing with Jeanette... let's move on! (Sorry, Dad. The Spit & Argue Club was a bust!) Steps led down from the auditorium concourse to beach level where Rainbow Pier spanned a long arc to The Pike. It was a large, semi-circular pier, painted in colors to resemble a rainbow and lit at night with rainbow-colored lights. Hence its name. Its large arc sheltered a semi-circular lagoon between the auditorium and The Pike. Small, wooden motor launches, highly varnished and polished, rented from the shore walkway and plied the calm water filled with Sunday wanderers.
Throngs of people strolled the arc of the pier, but Mom had persuaded Dad to rent a boat so we took the shore walkway and selected a rental company at random. There was a small hassle when Dad balked at leaving his driver's license with the boat company... (“What's the world coming to?? Making a man leave his driver's license!")... But with that soon over, and Dad minus his license, we cruised about the lagoon for half an hour. Dad let me steer and work the throttle while standing in front of him, and I was in heaven! It was a real boat, not on a track or guided in any way, and we could go anywhere, even in reverse! The varnished wood glinted in the sun, and the little inboard motor made a subdued and throaty roar. The boat didn't go very fast, but considering all the other boats we still had to be careful Mom reminisced about how it looked at night, how the rainbow-colored lights shimmered off the water as music from nearby ballrooms floated on the night air. She quietly hummed a tune I didn't recognize. There was some wistful memory here for her and Dad. It was palpable, but whatever its substance, she did not say.
Our half-hour drew to a close, and I lobbied Dad for another stint, but without success. The afternoon was already slipping away, and we had more to do. Jeanette was getting antsy. At the dock a couple of young men extended their hands to help us step up from the boat. One paid a little extra attention to Jeanette, and she smiled back at him. "Mom, Jeanette made Goo-Goo eyes at that man!" I said loudly for all to hear.
“Hush, Randy,” Mom said quietly.
Jeanette lunged at me. “Oooh, Bratinella!” She hissed, her pet name for me when she was angry. But I squirted away to join Dad at the check-in stand, leaving her red-faced and her admirer chuckling.
She was still poking at me, getting even, as we approached the Pike.
It didn’t have any entrance so much as a boundary, and even that had begun to decay by the early 1950’s. A large, worn sigh announced “The Pike” in faded letters over background illustrations of a clown’s face, an ice cream cone, and depictions of games and rides, all similarly, and sadly, well-faded from time. The Pike had seen better days.
To the right a very wide flight of steps led up to a street level and Ocean Boulevard. To the left a walkway led to a maze of carnival rides, the Double Ferris Wheel looming over everything, turning and turning again. Directly ahead stretched the Midway, a rag-tag collection of permanently established games and attractions. We got some refreshments from a corner stand… a snow cone for Jeanette and some cotton candy fro me… and then ventured ahead.
It was not well-kept, litter and dust collecting in corners, paint faded and peeling. No throngs of people here. Just a few couples and families wandered the block-long way. A group of unchaperoned kids breezed past us, voices raised, oblivious to all but themselves. A lady with a whole lot of makeup talked closely with a sailor against a wall, his hand around her waist.
“Mom!” Jeanette rasped in a whisper. “Is that a whore?” Her neck craned around as we walked ahead, staring at the couple.
“Of course not,” Mom whispered back, disapproval in her face.
“Is too,” Jeanette said aloud, confidently.
“What’s a whore?” I asked.
“Shush, Randy,” Mom said, still whispering, moving us along.
“What is it?” I persisted, looking back at the couple. The sailor’s dark blue uniform was immaculate, its square Middie collar lending a playful aspect to the scene.
“Never you mind,” Mom said, and then changed the subject. “Look, this is like the County Fair!”
And it was, actually. Just ahead were games and attractions similar to a fair. Many were closed up, perhaps just waiting for the busier evening hours, maybe closed for good. But the open stalls displayed rows of kewpie dolls and stuffed animals of all sizes, hats, plates, figurines, ribbons, cups-- all prizes to win, and each still had a hawker.
“Just a dime! Try your luck! Win a prize!” They called out, each gesturing us toward his game as we passed by. Dad stopped at one and paid a dime: three lead milk bottles, one balanced atop the other two, with one throw of a baseball to knock them all over. Dad made a good throw, but only knocked two over. No big prize.
“Try one more time,” the hawker said as we moved away. “I’ll give you two throws for one dime. Show the boy how it’s done. Win a bigger prize for the young lady there.”
Dad accepted the offer and tried again. This time the third bottle wobbled, but stayed upright. He gave the second ball to me. It was well- worn and shiny from many, many throws. I gave it a good heave, as hard as I could throw, but it only glanced off the top bottle, knocking it over.
Again no big prize, but the hawker let me choose one of the small consolation prizes, and I picked a little prancing horse on a pedestal. It was cheap plastic, but cool nonetheless. As we moved on down the Midway, Dad explained how the placement of the bottles and the straight-ahead angle of the throw, combined with the lopsided weight distribution of the bottles (most weight toward the bottom) makes it almost impossible to knock over all three with just one throw.
“Then why try?” I asked.
“Well, you never know,” he said. “Sometimes you get lucky.”
We passed a well-lit arcade with pinball machines and other games.
Dings and rings and buzzes spilled out onto the Midway. Sailors and teenagers came, went and milled about. A sign on the wall announced something about “Peep Shows,” whatever those were. Mom didn’t want me to go in there, and we continued on.
Decaying signs trumpeted two dance halls, perhaps named The Starlite Ballroom, or Cloud Nine, or maybe Roseland. One appeared closed, but the doors were open, revealing a stairway that rose into darkness as strains of a fox trot spilled onto the walkway. Dad recalled throngs of people, Big Bands, World War 11, sailors on shore leave, and taxi dancers who would be your partner for a 10¢ ticket purchased at the entry window right in front of us… days long passed.
At the far end of this block-long section, on a corner, was one of several tattoo parlors. It had a window for passerby to view work being done, and we stopped to watch. A tattoo gun droned through the glass, and my eyes went wide in amazement. A sailor sat in a chair, his uniform top off and his T-shirt sleeve pushed up over his shoulder. He winced as a large anchor took shape on his biceps under the intense concentration of a man wearing a form-fitting black T-shirt whose arms were covered with tattoos. The drone stopped abruptly, and the tattoo artist daubed and wiped a tissue over the growing anchor, removing excess ink and a little blood. In the background another artist opened his shirt so another sailor could examine a large eagle tattoo on his chest. I was speechless. This was far, far from Midway City fare. Mom mumbled disapproval, and Jeanette said it was “icky,” so they moved on. I was mesmerized, and Dad had to peal me off the window.
We turned left at the corner and came around to a parallel section of Midway and headed back in the direction we had come, toward Rainbow Pier. More games and food stands lined the left while, to the right, carnival rides spread out over a large area. First was the Cyclone Racer, a wooden roller coaster that was already old in the early 1950s. Its structure was so dense with beams, posts and cross supports that the interior was not visible, and coaster cars disappeared inside even in full daylight. Now and again a car returned to the front, jetting from the mass of wood for a moment only to dive back inside, the clackety-clack of the cars and the screams of the riders quickly fading away. Mom said my older sister, Kay, rode the roller coaster years before and it scared her so badly she was paralyzed from the waist down when the ride ended. Not permanently paralyzed, Mom said, but almost. Dad added his recollection of reading in the newspaper that a man had stood up during the ride and was decapitated by one of the wooden beams. That got attention. It was easy to see how that could happen, and Dad said it happened all the time. I decided then that I didn’t like roller coasters. Decades later that changed.
We didn’t go on all the rides that day, or even most of them, as it was growing late in the day. Nevertheless, there were two first-time experiences for me: the double Ferris wheel, and the Tilt-A-Whirl. Mom and Dad rested while Jeanette went with me on the rides. The double Ferris wheel was impossibly high, and though it thrilled me no end, and even scared me a little, Jeanette ho-hummed it. But the Tilt-A-Whirl lurched and spun so much, and so unpredictably, that Jeanette could not maintain her veneer of cool detachment, and eventually she laughed and squealed along with me. We drove the bumper cars, too, the old kind where each car has a tall pole topped With a metal strip that drags noisily across an electrified metal ceiling, sparks flying. We had a mini –replay of the boat dock when a guy in another bumper car caught Jeanette’s eye. I rammed her car whenever possible, being a little-brother pest. Eventually she gave up, or maybe the guy did, and Jeanette chased me down and rammed my car, pinning it against the side rail with a victorious, “Gotcha, Bratinella!” This time, though, there was a hint of a smile mixed with her satisfaction in getting me. Underneath it all we got along pretty well, never having any serious differences that I recall.
It was a fun day, maybe four hours in Long Beach. On other Sundays we drove to other places, sometimes spending the afternoon, sometimes shopping, and other times just having a bite to eat and returning home by a different route.
On the way home this day I held forth in detail about how to get a tattoo… and Mom emphatically decreed that I would not be getting one. And I never did, not one, not to this day. However, one day in the late 1970s I was at Magic Mountain, California, with friends, and I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, screamed my head off and turned my fear of roller coasters into a passion for them. Sometimes parents don’t know everything.
Dad was finishing work on our push mower. He sat on the edge of the back porch and wiped grease and dirt from his hands with a rag. Dad wore an old, tank-style white undershirt, worn and spotted with old paint and fresh grease. He wore and old pair of baggy, brown dress slacks, similarly stained and spotted, his favorite around-the-house work outfit. While we were at church, Dad had sharpened the mower's blades using a large, heavy, flat hand file, and then cleaned and oiled the whole cutter assembly. He gave the mower a test push on the concrete slab by the porch, and the blades spun around freely making a characteristic steel-on-steel shearing sound ... " chush-chush-chush-chush-chush.
Yeah, pop, let's go for a ride!" I chimed in. "Can we? Huh?" I bounced impatiently on my toes like our dog Bupps when she heard the word "walk."
"This yard is not going to mow itself," Dad said, nodding over to the shaggy grass of the yard. "It's getting real ragged, and you know these old weeds bother your mother really bad." Mom had hay Fever, and recent Spring rains spurred the growth of our grass as well as weeds that blew in from everywhere and took root. Ragweed bothered Mom most of all and it sprouted relentlessly. Dad looked at me with his face canted down and eyebrows raised. It was my turn.
"I'll do it," I blurted out. "I'll do it tomorrow after school. I promise I will!"
"You won't have enough time," Dad sighed. He knew it would take me a lot longer than that. The mower was as big as I was, and I had to wrestle it around the yard. But given enough time I could do it. "I'll come straight home," I said. "I won't stop at Jimmy's house, and I'll get it all done. You have it all fixed up for me, and it'll be easy." Dad gave the mower another push, spinning the blades... "chush-chush-chush."
"I promise," I added again. "Can we go? Huh?"
Jeanette now came out on the porch, also changed to casual clothes. "How about you, Net, want to go for a ride?” Dad asked.
He sat the mower aside.
Jeanette rolled her eyes, sat down on the porch steps and let out a long sigh as though exasperated. At sixteen years she was completely absorbed with being a teenager, and anything contemplated by grown-ups was infinitely B-O-R-I-N-G. "I guess so," she finally deigned to respond. "But I could go over to Robin's house," she added quickly.
"Now, Jeanette, honey," Mom, said. "You've been at Robin's so much lately, and you were just there last night for dinner. They probably think we can't afford to feed you! Come with us today. Maybe we can go into Long Beach,” Mom said, looking to Dad for approval. "I read in the newspaper that they are going to tear down Rainbow Pier. Remember that, Harold? I would like to see it again before it's gone."
Dad brightened at the suggestion. "Hey, that's a good idea," he said, looking from me to Jeanette. "The Spit & Argue Club is right there, too, and Bub hasn't seen that." Dad always called me "Bub."
Mom made a face.
"What's that?' I asked.
"The Pike is right there too!" Jeanette said with new enthusiasm.
"What's that?" I asked again.
"It's a fun zone," Jeanette said. "Rides and things."
"Yay! Neat-0!" I cried.
"That's not a nice place,” Mom said, shaking her head.
"All those sailors and whatnot."
"It is to nice," Jeanette protested. "Can we go, Daddy?"
"We'll see," he answered her, and then to Mom he said.
"It's not bad in daytime."
And so it was decided we would drive to Long Beach for the afternoon. It was only about eighty miles away, but we rarely went that way. Dad worked in Long Beach at Douglas Aircraft, and since he made the drive five or six days a week he usually didn't want to go there on his few days off. But this day he relented.
As we drove through Long Beach the streets and sidewalks were quiet until we approached the foot of America Avenue at Ocean Boulevard. That's where the Municipal Auditorium stood, with the ocean just a little behind it. Next door was Rainbow Pier, and at the far end of that was the Pike. This was my first visit here, and as Mom and Dad pointed everything out I got up on the seat and leaning over Dad as he drove so I could get a good look.
"And there's The Pike!" Jeanette added. "See the roller coaster?" "There was more than that -- a double Ferris wheel towered over an Octopus. A Tilt-A-Whirl, other rides and a whole midway.
"Oh boy!" I gasped, pop-eyed. "It's like the County Fair!" Dad must have known then that we would visit The Pike before the day was done. Dad lived here, downtown Long Beach, when he first arrived in California from Wyoming, about a dozen years previously. He lived at the YMCA just a few blocks up on America Avenue. And when the family lived in Long Beach, the downtown area was a place they came to shop and to bring my sisters for music lessons.
We found parking several blocks from the auditorium, and as we walked back to it I experienced the Long Beach Scramble System for the first time. At the major intersections a third stoplight held all traffic so pedestrians could walk diagonally and in every direction. Long Beach was the only city around with anything like that, so we played with it by walking all over the place just for the fun of it.
The Municipal Auditorium was a narrow building, vertical, and reminiscent of a cathedral in some ways. A concourse fronted it, providing space where people tarry, and the Spit & Argue Club were located there. It wasn't a real club, but a known locale where individuals gave impromptu speeches and others came by to argue with them. Knots of people gathered around the more interesting arguments. One man stood on a box gesturing wildly and speaking in a heated voice. He wore a suit and tie, as did most men in those days, and he presented an average appearance. He spoke against President Eisenhower's policy in Korea. Then a man in the knot of people gathered around shouted back in support of the President, they argued back and forth with the onlookers egging them on. Anyone was welcome to speak up. When people heard enough they moved on, and others took their place, but the speeches and arguing went on and on.
The arguments were mostly over my head, and while the spectacle of grown men shouting at each other was something new, it did not hold my interest for long. In a rare convergence, I found myself agreeing with Jeanette... let's move on! (Sorry, Dad. The Spit & Argue Club was a bust!) Steps led down from the auditorium concourse to beach level where Rainbow Pier spanned a long arc to The Pike. It was a large, semi-circular pier, painted in colors to resemble a rainbow and lit at night with rainbow-colored lights. Hence its name. Its large arc sheltered a semi-circular lagoon between the auditorium and The Pike. Small, wooden motor launches, highly varnished and polished, rented from the shore walkway and plied the calm water filled with Sunday wanderers.
Throngs of people strolled the arc of the pier, but Mom had persuaded Dad to rent a boat so we took the shore walkway and selected a rental company at random. There was a small hassle when Dad balked at leaving his driver's license with the boat company... (“What's the world coming to?? Making a man leave his driver's license!")... But with that soon over, and Dad minus his license, we cruised about the lagoon for half an hour. Dad let me steer and work the throttle while standing in front of him, and I was in heaven! It was a real boat, not on a track or guided in any way, and we could go anywhere, even in reverse! The varnished wood glinted in the sun, and the little inboard motor made a subdued and throaty roar. The boat didn't go very fast, but considering all the other boats we still had to be careful Mom reminisced about how it looked at night, how the rainbow-colored lights shimmered off the water as music from nearby ballrooms floated on the night air. She quietly hummed a tune I didn't recognize. There was some wistful memory here for her and Dad. It was palpable, but whatever its substance, she did not say.
Our half-hour drew to a close, and I lobbied Dad for another stint, but without success. The afternoon was already slipping away, and we had more to do. Jeanette was getting antsy. At the dock a couple of young men extended their hands to help us step up from the boat. One paid a little extra attention to Jeanette, and she smiled back at him. "Mom, Jeanette made Goo-Goo eyes at that man!" I said loudly for all to hear.
“Hush, Randy,” Mom said quietly.
Jeanette lunged at me. “Oooh, Bratinella!” She hissed, her pet name for me when she was angry. But I squirted away to join Dad at the check-in stand, leaving her red-faced and her admirer chuckling.
She was still poking at me, getting even, as we approached the Pike.
It didn’t have any entrance so much as a boundary, and even that had begun to decay by the early 1950’s. A large, worn sigh announced “The Pike” in faded letters over background illustrations of a clown’s face, an ice cream cone, and depictions of games and rides, all similarly, and sadly, well-faded from time. The Pike had seen better days.
To the right a very wide flight of steps led up to a street level and Ocean Boulevard. To the left a walkway led to a maze of carnival rides, the Double Ferris Wheel looming over everything, turning and turning again. Directly ahead stretched the Midway, a rag-tag collection of permanently established games and attractions. We got some refreshments from a corner stand… a snow cone for Jeanette and some cotton candy fro me… and then ventured ahead.
It was not well-kept, litter and dust collecting in corners, paint faded and peeling. No throngs of people here. Just a few couples and families wandered the block-long way. A group of unchaperoned kids breezed past us, voices raised, oblivious to all but themselves. A lady with a whole lot of makeup talked closely with a sailor against a wall, his hand around her waist.
“Mom!” Jeanette rasped in a whisper. “Is that a whore?” Her neck craned around as we walked ahead, staring at the couple.
“Of course not,” Mom whispered back, disapproval in her face.
“Is too,” Jeanette said aloud, confidently.
“What’s a whore?” I asked.
“Shush, Randy,” Mom said, still whispering, moving us along.
“What is it?” I persisted, looking back at the couple. The sailor’s dark blue uniform was immaculate, its square Middie collar lending a playful aspect to the scene.
“Never you mind,” Mom said, and then changed the subject. “Look, this is like the County Fair!”
And it was, actually. Just ahead were games and attractions similar to a fair. Many were closed up, perhaps just waiting for the busier evening hours, maybe closed for good. But the open stalls displayed rows of kewpie dolls and stuffed animals of all sizes, hats, plates, figurines, ribbons, cups-- all prizes to win, and each still had a hawker.
“Just a dime! Try your luck! Win a prize!” They called out, each gesturing us toward his game as we passed by. Dad stopped at one and paid a dime: three lead milk bottles, one balanced atop the other two, with one throw of a baseball to knock them all over. Dad made a good throw, but only knocked two over. No big prize.
“Try one more time,” the hawker said as we moved away. “I’ll give you two throws for one dime. Show the boy how it’s done. Win a bigger prize for the young lady there.”
Dad accepted the offer and tried again. This time the third bottle wobbled, but stayed upright. He gave the second ball to me. It was well- worn and shiny from many, many throws. I gave it a good heave, as hard as I could throw, but it only glanced off the top bottle, knocking it over.
Again no big prize, but the hawker let me choose one of the small consolation prizes, and I picked a little prancing horse on a pedestal. It was cheap plastic, but cool nonetheless. As we moved on down the Midway, Dad explained how the placement of the bottles and the straight-ahead angle of the throw, combined with the lopsided weight distribution of the bottles (most weight toward the bottom) makes it almost impossible to knock over all three with just one throw.
“Then why try?” I asked.
“Well, you never know,” he said. “Sometimes you get lucky.”
We passed a well-lit arcade with pinball machines and other games.
Dings and rings and buzzes spilled out onto the Midway. Sailors and teenagers came, went and milled about. A sign on the wall announced something about “Peep Shows,” whatever those were. Mom didn’t want me to go in there, and we continued on.
Decaying signs trumpeted two dance halls, perhaps named The Starlite Ballroom, or Cloud Nine, or maybe Roseland. One appeared closed, but the doors were open, revealing a stairway that rose into darkness as strains of a fox trot spilled onto the walkway. Dad recalled throngs of people, Big Bands, World War 11, sailors on shore leave, and taxi dancers who would be your partner for a 10¢ ticket purchased at the entry window right in front of us… days long passed.
At the far end of this block-long section, on a corner, was one of several tattoo parlors. It had a window for passerby to view work being done, and we stopped to watch. A tattoo gun droned through the glass, and my eyes went wide in amazement. A sailor sat in a chair, his uniform top off and his T-shirt sleeve pushed up over his shoulder. He winced as a large anchor took shape on his biceps under the intense concentration of a man wearing a form-fitting black T-shirt whose arms were covered with tattoos. The drone stopped abruptly, and the tattoo artist daubed and wiped a tissue over the growing anchor, removing excess ink and a little blood. In the background another artist opened his shirt so another sailor could examine a large eagle tattoo on his chest. I was speechless. This was far, far from Midway City fare. Mom mumbled disapproval, and Jeanette said it was “icky,” so they moved on. I was mesmerized, and Dad had to peal me off the window.
We turned left at the corner and came around to a parallel section of Midway and headed back in the direction we had come, toward Rainbow Pier. More games and food stands lined the left while, to the right, carnival rides spread out over a large area. First was the Cyclone Racer, a wooden roller coaster that was already old in the early 1950s. Its structure was so dense with beams, posts and cross supports that the interior was not visible, and coaster cars disappeared inside even in full daylight. Now and again a car returned to the front, jetting from the mass of wood for a moment only to dive back inside, the clackety-clack of the cars and the screams of the riders quickly fading away. Mom said my older sister, Kay, rode the roller coaster years before and it scared her so badly she was paralyzed from the waist down when the ride ended. Not permanently paralyzed, Mom said, but almost. Dad added his recollection of reading in the newspaper that a man had stood up during the ride and was decapitated by one of the wooden beams. That got attention. It was easy to see how that could happen, and Dad said it happened all the time. I decided then that I didn’t like roller coasters. Decades later that changed.
We didn’t go on all the rides that day, or even most of them, as it was growing late in the day. Nevertheless, there were two first-time experiences for me: the double Ferris wheel, and the Tilt-A-Whirl. Mom and Dad rested while Jeanette went with me on the rides. The double Ferris wheel was impossibly high, and though it thrilled me no end, and even scared me a little, Jeanette ho-hummed it. But the Tilt-A-Whirl lurched and spun so much, and so unpredictably, that Jeanette could not maintain her veneer of cool detachment, and eventually she laughed and squealed along with me. We drove the bumper cars, too, the old kind where each car has a tall pole topped With a metal strip that drags noisily across an electrified metal ceiling, sparks flying. We had a mini –replay of the boat dock when a guy in another bumper car caught Jeanette’s eye. I rammed her car whenever possible, being a little-brother pest. Eventually she gave up, or maybe the guy did, and Jeanette chased me down and rammed my car, pinning it against the side rail with a victorious, “Gotcha, Bratinella!” This time, though, there was a hint of a smile mixed with her satisfaction in getting me. Underneath it all we got along pretty well, never having any serious differences that I recall.
It was a fun day, maybe four hours in Long Beach. On other Sundays we drove to other places, sometimes spending the afternoon, sometimes shopping, and other times just having a bite to eat and returning home by a different route.
On the way home this day I held forth in detail about how to get a tattoo… and Mom emphatically decreed that I would not be getting one. And I never did, not one, not to this day. However, one day in the late 1970s I was at Magic Mountain, California, with friends, and I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, screamed my head off and turned my fear of roller coasters into a passion for them. Sometimes parents don’t know everything.
Mom's Bible (1953)
Jimmy Hulsey (R) and me Circa 1953, During our summer camp years.
Jimmy's new 3-speed bike was the hottest bike around
I was eight-years old, and our church participated in a Summer camp program for kids-- a week at Tahquitz Pines, a camp near Idyllwild in the San Jacinto Mountains of Southern California. Kids came all over, a week at a time, for fellowship, hiking, hobbycraft, swimming, and evening campfires with singing and vespers-- Kum-ba-ya-- good, wholesome fun.
Each kid had to provide his own bedroll, so the week before camp Dad and I bought the family’s first sleeping bag at the Surplus Store on Garden Grove Boulevard. We found one that was moderately priced, water-resistant, and it had a bright-red plaid lining. At home I practiced packing and unpacking it, trying to get it into as small a roll as possible, and, just to make sure it worked, I tried it out in the backyard sleeping under the stars.
It was my first time away from home, and one of my best friends from school, Jimmy Hulsey, came along too. He was a fellow Cub Scout, and his mom was our Den Mother.
(Years later Dora Hulsey was my Master Teacher when I did student training.) On the appointed day Mom and Dad drove us to Tahquitz Pines in the family Hudson, a cavernous, whale of a car. But Mom was reluctant to part, and she made me promise to write letters.
The camp had separate bunkhouses for boys and girls, and each one had a counselor. Ours was a young man in his twenties named Len Lozier who had short, curly-blond hair and wore thick glasses. He was in charge of us for the week.
There was a dining hall, and next to it a small store and Post Office that offered basic supplies for sale along with some religious items and souvenirs. In a display case by the door a selection of tie clips caught my eye. I needed one, because I always used Dad’s when we went to Church. These had the Christian Endeavor logo in the center (a rounded “e” nested in a larger “C”) with a choice of either silver or gold–tone finish. I liked the silver. My camp allowance from Dad was not very big, but I decided the first day that I would reserve enough money to buy a tie clip.
There were several choices of daytime activities. Counselors led nature hikes in the nearby’ areas and during rest periods they taught us about native plants and animals, and how to be careful with campfires, and not to litter, basic stuff that Jimmy and I had already learned in Cub Scouts.
Hobbycraft was popular during the day, but you had to pay for the materials as you used them. There was bead working, leather craft projects (wallets, belts, moccasins), braiding and painting. I picked braiding lanyards from vinyl lacing material, because it was relatively inexpensive, and I wanted to save money for the tie clip. There were spools and spools of different color lacing to choose from and various styles of braiding to learn. Jimmy chose leather craft, but the cost was too much for my budget, and, although the final products were nice, putting them together was not much of a challenge. In contrast, the detail of intricate braiding techniques was challenging, and I really liked it.
Each day after lunch there was a Quiet Hour for reflection, prayer, a nap, or any other quiet activity. Jimmy and I found a log in a small clearing and each day we went there for quiet time and wrote letters home or just lay back and enjoyed the day. The pine trees were huge, and their cones dotted the ground. Brown, fallen pine needles made a thick carpet on the ground. The air was heavy with pine scent, an exhilarating, new experience. Camp was a great place!
Each day when I went to mail my letter home, I stopped by the display case to see the tie clip again, to confirm that I really wanted it, and I did. In the opposite corner of the case were several Bibles. One of them was white and stood out from the rest. I had never seen a white Bible before, and on closer inspection I saw the leatherette cover was closed by a gold zipper. That was unusual.
By mid-week several guys were sporting really nice leather items they made, and I was torn between making a wallet for myself or buying the tie clip. As I stood at the display case I could not make up my mind, so I asked the clerk to let me see the white Bible. I didn’t need a bible, certainly not a white one, but it was something to do while I considered the tie clip. It was a beautiful book, even more so when opened and the gilt-edged pages contrasted richly against the creamy leatherette cover. I thought of Mom’s Bible. It was old, frayed and literally falling apart. The white Bible would be perfect for Mom! Then I checked the price, and, GULP, it cost as much as a leather wallet and a tie clip combined. In fact, it would require most of the money I had for the rest of the week! I gave it back to the clerk and returned to the tie clips.
I could not make up my mind between the tie clip and a leather wallet, so I did not buy anything right away. I checked the display case after meals, and evaluated the leather projects during the day, but I could not decide. I also looked at the Bible again, read some favorite passages and examined its maps of the Holy Land.
At the braiding counter I found that odd lengths of lacing material remained when spools got to the end, and since they could not be sold, the man in charge gave me some for free and I made lanyards for key chains. The price was right!
Friday came and went without any purchases. The Hobby Center was closed for the week, and the money was still in my pocket. My indecision had actually become a decision-- to get Mom the white Bible. By saving all my money, I had a little more than enough for it and the tie clip too.
But on Saturday a final, unannounced temptation appeared. The counselors took groups of us and hiked into the nearby’ town of Idyllwild, maybe a mile down the road, where tourist shops hawked a myriad of items made from pine and other trinkets. Stores offered ice cream and candy that had not been available all week at camp, and that was very popular. Many kids took the opportunity to empty their pockets before their parents picked them up. It was a festive and fun morning. I knew how much I could afford, and I bought an ice cream and a foldout set of postcards depicting Idyllwild and the vicinity.
After everyone got back to camp we all assembled for a group photo, and among my family’s photographs today is that two-foot long picture: all the kids, counselors and staff, including Jimmy and me. After that I went to the store and bought the white Bible for Mom and a silver-tone tie clip for me. No regrets.
So that is how Mom came to have a zippered, white Bible, and if my family still has Dad’s cuff link box, my Christian Endeavor tie clip is probably there. Actually, the two sort of go together.
Postscript:
I learned a lesson here: appearances are deceiving, and you cannot always know the value of something from its appearance. As I grew older I learned that Mom’s old Bible, though frayed and falling apart, was one of her cherished possessions. She had it through the Great Depression of the 1930’s and recorded the births of her children in it. Although she loved the white Bible I gave her that weekend and carried it with her to church, it did not replace her old one. That’s easy to understand.
A Present for Mom (1954)
When Dad and I had lunch at Tom's Drive-in the other day, he said he was going into Santa Ana to get something special for Mom and that I could go with him. Now, on Saturday morning, I woke up in anticipation of the trip town. Dad even said we might stop at the car dealers and look at the new cars!
Mom left for the Presbyterian Church where she was helping to prepare tomorrow’s service for Holy Communion. Last year I helped her toast little cubes of bread, fill the tiny Communion Service glasses with grape juice and set them in the multi-tier silver trays. She asked if I wanted to help again, today, but I chose to go with Dad to Santa Ana. He offered to take her watch to the jeweler's to see about repairing it.
Dad finished his work in the yard, cleaned up and changed clothes, and then we drove to Santa Ana in our 1951 Hudson Commodore. It was a big car with a cavernous interior. When the whole family was along, my spot was the center of the back seat, most times pulling down the wide arm-rest and using it for a seat, nestling into the hollow it left when opened.
Lately, however, it was a tight fit to get my rear-end in that space, as I was getting bigger. But now, with just Dad and me, I got to ride shotgun in the front seat. After finding a good radio station for Dad, and leaning out the window for a while, Dad let me sit on his lap while he drove. I actually got to steer the car a little between stop signs! By myself!
It was neat. There was not much traffic on two-lane Bolsa Avenue, and many stretches on the way to town were undeveloped, free of businesses or residences. But as we neared Santa Ana the traffic increased, the city appeared, and I had to return to being a mere passenger.
In Santa Ana, Bolsa Avenue became First Street, and we turned to the main business district on Fourth Street around Main and Broadway. The parking was diagonal, each car angled forty-five degrees to the curb, and as we drove down Fourth Street a man got into his car, and Dad stopped our car in the street, waiting for him to leave. Other cars backed up behind us until we pulled into the vacated slot.
Dad fed the parking meter with a dime, and, since we had parked right in front of Woolworth's, it was just a few doors down to Lorenz Jewelers. Once there, Dad produced Mom's old watch and asked Mr.Lorenz if it could be repaired. While he the watch to a small repair area to evaluate it, Dad led me to a section of the display case.
Little red velveteen display boxes each held a diamond ring, and they glittered up at us. We looked them over and Dad explained that his and Mom's 25th wedding anniversary was coming up soon. He was going to surprise her with a proper wedding ring, which, for some reason I don't recall now, she did not have.
Before long Mr. Lorenz returned with Mom's old watch and said he could not repair it himself, but he could send it to some place in Texas. Dad declined that offer, and asked to see some of the rings in the case, specifying that it had to be a real diamond, but it had to be affordable, too. As we bent over the display case, Dad asked for my opinion, and, as usual my eyes gravitated to rings that turned out to be on the expensive side. One marquis-cut diamond was stunning, set to hold it free of the ring's circle, and Mr. Lorenz retrieved it for us. When he removed the ring from its box and checked the price tag, Dad let out a soft whistle. Much, much too expensive for us, but it was something to see. So, we looked at other rings and settled on a selection of four, which were arrayed side-by-side on the counter top. Dad said, "What do you think, Bub?" and together we eliminated all but one.
While Dad made the purchase, in cash, I wandered down the display case and looked over the selection of watches, each one in its own snap-top presentation case. There were Longines, Wittnauer, Benrus, Bulova, Hamilton and a new brand, Timex, but there were no Japanese watches, no Casio, no Seiko. There were pocket watches, and I paid these particular attention because Dad had an old one at home that did not work. He kept it in a cigar box (his jewelry case) in the top drawer of a tall chest in his and Mom's bedroom. He came over after paying for Mom's ring, and I pointed out the pocket watches. Dad looked at them longingly and agreed they were handsome, and I noted that for the future.
Dad offered us lunch at Woolworth’s, and I jumped at the chance, being particularly fond of their Turkey Club Sandwich, a double-decker. We found seats at the lunch counter, and while. I ate my sandwich and root beer; Dad had just a piece of pie and coffee.
"Dad and I mugging for the camera. Circa 1956."
As we finished and waited for our change from the waitress, two teen-age girls emerged from a photo booth that was right behind us near the end of the lunch counter. They hurried away gleefully clutching a strip of photos and laughing out loud. I walked over to the machine and scanned the many sample photo strips, the inducement for people to part with a quarter. Happy, smiling faces all. Dad joined me after getting the change, and I asked him if we could make a strip of photo, and he said yes. We both entered the cramped booth, sat closely together and mugged for the camera, each goading the other to SMILE BIG!
It was just after noon, and as we returned to our car I asked Dad again if we could go look at the new cars. Well, it wasn't a new model time of year, as it was Spring, but still they were new cars, and there were always different models on display. Dad caved in, but he reminded me that we were only looking. No car was going to be bought. Period.
We drove past the De Soto dealer, and I gaped at the long, sleek, beautiful convertible in the showcase, but there was no convenient place to park, and Dad wasn’t much of a De Soto man anyway. So we turned over to Main Street and drove down to C. Knickerbocher, the Lincoln-Mercury dealer. Dad had stopped there several times before, and although he never came close to buying a car, I could tell his interest was up.
When we stopped there this day, Dad talked with a salesman while I drooled over a creamy white Lincoln Premiere convertible, one of two cars in their small showcase. I inspected it from all angles, and got in and sat behind the wheel. The other car was a Mercury Sun Valley. It had a tinted glass panel in the first portion of the roof, over the heads of both driver and passenger. That was neat, too.
After a while I noticed Dad was gone, and I found him and the salesman emerging from the dealership’s garage. As they walked down a line of used cars, I noticed one was a shiny black Continental Mark 11, the small squarish one, and I ran to it and peered through the windows. Dad looked over and I motioned to the Mark 11 excitedly, but he just rolled his eyes and kept talking to the salesman as they passed by. Yes, I knew it was way too expensive, and not practical for our family either, but it surely was a beautiful car!
Dad and the salesman stopped near the doorway to the showroom, and they appeared to be talking about one of the cars there, a bright red Mercury. I joined them, and Dad said, “What do you think about this one?” I was stunned, and my mouth dropped open. Dad quickly added, “But we’re not buying it, understand?” Yeah, I understood. Uh-huh. But something was in the wind, so I checked it out: a fire-engine red 1955 Mercury Monterey, with small accents of white here and there. It was a year old, sure, but even so it was nearly new -- only 3,000 miles on it as Dad pointed out. And it still smelled new; that was super neat. The inside was upholstered in red and white leather, and the dashboard gleamed bright shiny red under the windshield. I sat behind the wheel and marveled at the gauges that fanned upward from the steering column in a 90-degree arc. The lettering and numerals of the speedometer were turquoise blue, and so was the radio dial. It was a wonderful car, a mind-- jarring leap from our 1951 Hudson.
But, alas, it was not to be ours. However, the salesman followed us to our car, parked in front of the showroom, and he looked it over, even taking out his little blue book and looking up some numbers. Whether that was good or bad I didn’t know, but Dad and the salesman shook hands in a very friendly way, and as we drove off Dad said it was “interesting…a possibility…a car your mother could drive to work.” When I said it might be snapped up by someone else at any moment, Dad countered with this often-used bit of wisdom: “If we are meant to have this car, it will be there when we come back.” The air went out of me. I knew it was probably being sold right now.
The next Sunday afternoon our family gathered at the Old Homestead for dinner, and later there was cake and home-made ice cream to celebrate my eleventh birthday. Dad used the occasion to give Mom her anniversary present, the ring we bought for her, and it brought tears to her eyes. Everyone ooh-ed and aah-ed as Mom held out her hand to show the ring.
A week later I waited for Dad to pick me up for lunch at Midway City School. I didn’t see the car parked anywhere, but a honking drew my attention…to Dad, waving and grinning from that bright red 1955 Mercury. It was a total surprise!
Tall Grass (1954)
Me (Far Right) And my Cub Scout Den Circa 1952.
There are the guys I played with, went to school with, made forts with.
Jimmy Hulsey is next to me; Johnny behind me
The presidential election of 1952 was my first introduction to politics. Republicans Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon ran against Democrats Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver. Ike was a popular Four-Star General, while the balding Stevenson was aloof, an intellectual, and an egghead. Ike won.
Most kids at school were oblivious to the campaigning, but another boy and I took the opportunity to wear the colors and voice the slogans of the candidate our fathers backed. We wore our campaign buttons every day to school. Mine read, “I like Ike.” Johnny’s read simply, “Stevenson.” This was second grade.
Johnny and I frequently locked horns over which candidate was better. It was good-natured bantering, predictably short on substance, such as, “My dad says this,” countered by “Yeah, well, my dad said that.” All the while our campaign buttons were prominently displayed, squared off against each other just like the candidates.
One day in late October, after the last class of the day, Johnny and I argued so long about the election that I missed the bus. I had to walk home. Well, I didn’t have to walk all the way, because my oldest sister, Kay, lived nearby. She had recently married Duane, and they lived in a duplex on Jefferson Street, near Bolsa Avenue. It was five or six blocks from school, about halfway home, so I started out.
Directly across the street, south of Midway City School, lay an open, untended field overgrown with grasses, bushes and an occasional nicotine tree. It stretched a quarter mile (four blocks) to Bolsa Avenue, a major two-lane road. Beyond Bolsa there was nothing but the bare dirt of empty bean fields and strawberry fields, criss-crossed by little used two-lane roads and dotted with isolated farmhouses. A few dusty, dying towns huddled at minor crossroads.
To the right of the field Newland Street ran down to intersect Bolsa, its far side lined with homes and a sidewalk. To the left a ramshackle fence of weathered, irregular wood posts holding a few strands of rusty barbed wire demarcated several large pastures, fenced off my landlords for a few horses and dairy cows. Beyond the pastures, eucalyptus trees rose along Cannery Street and sheltered the landlords’ farm-style homes.
I could have walked down the sidewalk on Newland Street, but not far into the field I saw some of my friends who lived nearby- Jimmy, Bobby, David and Dennis- playing in a “fort” we often made. It was just a few mounds of dirt among the vegetation, cleared by our playing, but imagination supplied the rest. I joined them for a while at bombarding each other with “grenades,” a handful of grass or weeds yanked out of the ground with a ball of dirt around the roots. They flew pretty well and were easy to aim.
But I had to get home, so before long I dusted myself off and headed down a narrow path worn through the field, down toward Bolsa Avenue. As I left the “fort,” behind the field became an irregular expanse of grasses and plants rising to my waist. It was thick, lush and undisturbed. My fingertips brushed bending, green foxtails as I walked. I plucked one, stripped the stem away, and tossed it through the air. A dusty-green nicotine tree, newly grown, spread its sparse branches holding tubular yellow blossoms. Wild mustard clumped here and there offering more bright yellow flowers, and I stopped for a moment to watch a bee about its work. It was an “H” bee, the marking across its back forming a sideways letter “H,” and that meant it would not sting. So I caught it carefully in my hands. It buzzed angrily as I held my hand to my ear. Its escape efforts tickled my palms, and I let it go.
About halfway to Bolsa I stopped at a sea of flowing green foxtails. Looking back I could not see my friends at the fort. Maybe they had gone home. I waded into the foxtails, got down and rolled an open space to lay in, a private nest of green just for me, and when I looked up, all I could see were foxtails bending under their own weight on sturdy stems and the wide, blue sky.
A wall of green surrounded me, cooling the heat of late afternoon, and the trampled foxtails on which I lay exuded a heady and pungent, green scent. No breeze stirred, and it was quiet. Then, the perfect stillness was pierced by a high-pitched tone; quickly followed by a still higher tone and then a descending throaty yodel. A meadowlark was nearby. I picked a stalk, stripped the closely held leaves, plucked the slinky foxtail, which was the size of a large caterpillar and set it jetting off to the outside world. Then I chewed the stem as I lay there. It was tart, puckering my jaws, and I liked that.
I fiddled with the “I like Ike,” button on my shirt, unpinned it and examined it more closely, removed the circular metal pin and snapped it back into place. “Could Johnny be right?” I asked myself inwardly. “Could dad be wrong?” I thought about that for a while as I chewed the stem, then concluded there was no way dad was wrong. Johnny’s dad must be wrong. Who knew? Our teacher, Mrs. Gill, would not say. Politics was not like math, reading or spelling. Was there a right answer? Hmmm. Still, Ike was better than Stevenson. Had to be. I pinned the button back on my shirt.
Before long the stem was chewed down, and I got up knowing I still had to get home. Leaving my nest of tall grass I angled over to Newland Street and then on to Kay’s house.
Yes, Ike won the election. And the tall grass? A few years later the field was plowed under and covered by housing tracts; all of it. One day I rode in the school bus, returning home from the Sixth grade at a different school, and I looked long at the new houses and streets as the bus bounded down Newland Street. I thought back to the day I lay out there, in the same space, but in my private green nest and serenaded by a meadowlark. I understood that progress required things to change, but I felt in my heart that something special was lost.
Going Home for Christmas (1966)
Not only was 1966 my Senior year at Clarmont Men's College, but I was also President of Green Hall, one of the school's eight fraternity-like on-campus dormitories. The position absorbed as much work as one wanted to give it, and, for better or worse, Green Hall had a tradition of being active on campus. It kept me busy. In October we built a float for Homecoming. We rented a big half-bed truck, built a structure of wood and chicken wire on the back, and stuffed the wire with crepe paper. The opposing football team was nicknamed the Tigers, and our float was a huge black bra with the saying, “We Drempt We Trapped The Tigers In Our Maidenform Bra.” It received a mixed welcome during the parade through downtown Claremont.
The Vietnam War was raging in the print media and on television. Public opinion had not yet turn overwhelmingly against it, but it wasconstantly on the minds of most male students. We each knew we were potential cannon-fodder when our student deferments expired. The war dominated many discussions, and there were demonstrations for and against it. The pro-war faction vastly outnumbered those against it at our school, both in students and faculty here.One avenue of escape, at least for me, was the game of Bridge. I had avoided learning it my first three years at Claremont, but late in my Junior year I caved in and learned how to play. When school resumed for my senior year I formed a partnership with Jim R., and we attempted to play an unusual bidding system known as Schenken, or the Big Club. We entered duplicate bridge tournaments held regularly at neighboring Harvey Mudd College, but with mixed results. We did not have the knowledge or skill to play consistently and well, but it was fun trying. Throughout the entire school year that I partnered with Jim, I amassed .08 Master Points from duplicate play. I was told the points are recognized by the American Contract Bridge Association.There was a foreign-exchange student from Iran, named Javad Khalilzadeh Shirazi, and he lived in Green Hall. He was a few years older than most of us, but smaller in stature. He had black hair, wore thick glasses with black frames, and he spoke in a high-pitched, fluttery voice that is typical of many mid-eastern men. When Thanksgiving arrived almost everyone left campus to join with their families and loved-ones, but Javad did not have anyone in the United States. He was going to remain on campus alone until I invited him to join my family for the weekend. He accepted, and Mom made him a bed on the sofa. My sisters and their families were in and out of my parent's home constantly, and Javad got to meet them one at a time. When we all converged for Thanksgiving dinner he got the full treatment. My nieces and nephews mere all over him, asking questions about Iran and what life there was like. Dad spent time with Javad in the quieter moments, and he asked about the Shah and the government. Mom doted on him, offering food, food and more food.When we returned to Claremont only a month remained before Christmas break. Someone in Green Hall learned of a young, orphaned girl in Los Angeles whom the media had dubbed "Little Miss Smiles" for her relentlessly happy face. At a dorm meeting we decided to help her, and we organized a fund-raising campaign in the spirit of the Christmas Season. To attract public attention we staged a bike-a-thon with the goal of pedaling a bicycle, nonstop, around the school library, 24 hours a day for a full week. The pedaling was split into hour-long shifts, and each of our 50+ guys committed to ride several shifts. A basket on the bike provided a place for people to drop their donations, and there was a table set up outside the library, too. As Dorm President I started it off with the first hour's ride, and over the week we collected several hundred dollars for Little Miss Smiles. After the holidays, in January, 1967, our Dorm Treasurer, Russ C., presented the money to her, and it was reported in the Los Angeles Times.
The last thing we did at Thanksgiving was draw names for Christmas gift exchange. Since there were more than twenty family members, it was not practical for everyone to get a gift for everyone. So we drew names at Thanksgiving and brought a gift for only that person when we assembled for gift-exchange on Christmas Eve. Everyone got a gift from someone, and it was not a burden on anyone. We encouraged Javad to put his name in the draw and return over Christmas, but he begged off. He said he had important work to do over Christmas break, and that may have been true. Important papers were due in January. Or perhaps he did not want to be a burden, or he may have dreaded sleeping on the sofa, or it may have been due to his Muslim religion. Whatever Javad's reason, my family respected it and wished him well.I renewed the offer to Javad when I left campus for home, but he still declined, although he did send his regards to Mom and Dad. I arrived home several days before Christmas Day, but when I entered the house there was something amiss. No pine smell. And when I entered the living room I saw why: no Christmas tree. Fixing that was my first order of business. Dad and I went to a tree lot not far away on Beach Boulevard, and we picked out a bushy Douglas Fir. All the ornaments and light strings needed were already at home, but we bought some extra light bulbs just in case, and we got several packages of icicles and foil garland, too. When we returned home, I helped Dad prune the lower branches and trunk so it would fit our tree stand. Then we set it in the living room, and the three of us decorated it.I untangled the several strings of lights, replaced any burned out bulbs, and arranged them on the tree. Mom brought out several boxes of tree ornaments, some of them fragile glass mementos from the 1930s. Mom said wistfully that the soft, white yarn tied as ornament hangars was tied by the small fingers of my older sisters when they were children. Decades melted away as she handled them lovingly. One was a lemon, but most of its yellow was worn away, one a shiny golden pinecone, another a shiny blue violin. There were newer ornaments acquired when I was a boy, and we remembered them together. When the tree was fully decorated, we turned off the house lights and sat around in the glow of the tree lights. Mom disappeared for a moment and returned with a wrapped present to lay under the tree. It was for me, she said. I retrieved two presents from my room that I brought from school for her and Dad, and I placed them under the tree, too. There we were: three people and three presents. It was a start.Christmas Eve saw the gathering of the family. By tradition, Dad hung a red, vinyl ribbon of sleigh bells on the porch by the door, and when each family (or anyone) reached the door, they announced their arrival by sounding the bells. As the assemblage grew, jingling bells on the porch produced greater Qooohs and Aaaahs inside, and more loved-ones entered the living room to deposit their gifts under the tree: six from the Eastburns, eight from the Lanes, five from the Boswells, three from Mom, Dad and me, and a few others. By the time we had all arrived, it was a bounteous tree indeed. Mounds of presents spilled out from under it. Mom was so happy at these moments.Kay brought a pinata loaded with candy, and Dad hung it from the ceiling. The kids took turns whacking at it with a baseball bat until it broke open and spilled candies on the floor. Since it was indoors, it required closer supervision than usual, but nothing was damaged. Kay had rigged it to break open easily.After the pinata broke, and the kids finished scrambling for the candy, presents were passed out. Doris husband Mark played Santa, calling the name from each gift, and I helped him so it would go faster. Soon the living room was enveloped in a cacophony of ripping paper, exclamations of surprise, expressions of thanks and hugs given. Wrapping paper and ribbon littered the floor, and the younger kids trotted about showing off their present. I received a gag gift: a full length flannel night shirt with a zipper in the front. My nieces and nephews had a good laugh as I held it up for the camera.
In the dining room there was a spread of holiday cakes and cookies. The adults milled about the table, sampling goodies and chatting, while the kids let loose in the living room. Mom was busy making sure everyone wanted for nothing, and someone had to retrieve her from the kitchen,still wiping rids on her apron, and sit her down so she could open her gift.Within a few hours of the first jingling bells, before nine o'clock, everyone had left for their own homes where they had a full night ahead preparing for Christmas morning. Mom and Dad and I cleaned up the house, then watched a little TV before retiring for the night.I did not wake up at the crack of dawn, as kids do. I was still catching up on sleep lost from long college nights, and it was about 7 am when I finally rose. Mom and Dad had been up for hours. Dad was puttering around outside, and Mom called him to come inside to open presents. She gave me a cup of coffee, and, with Christmas carols playing on the stereo, we went to sit by the tree in the living room. It looked barren in comparison to what it had been the night before. Now only a few presents lay scattered on the white sheet under the tree. Dad joined us, and we opened our gifts from one another.Within a few hours of the first jingling bells, before nine o'clock, everyone had left for their own homes where they had a full night ahead preparing for Christmas morning. Mom and Dad and I cleaned up the house, then watched a little TV before retiring for the night.I did not wake up at the crack of dawn, as kids do. I was still catching up on sleep lost from long college nights, and it was about 7 am when I finally rose. Mom and Dad had been up for hours. Dad was puttering around outside, and Mom called him to come inside to open presents. She gave me a cup of coffee, and, with Christmas carols playing on the stereo, we went to sit by the tree in the living room. It looked barren in comparison to what it had been the night before. Now only a few present lay scattered on the white under the tree. Dad joined us, and we opened our gifts from one another.I don't recall what I gave them that year, however, it is likely I gave Mom some form of Shalimar, as I bought it for her every year. Neither do I recall what they gave to me. What I do remember is the contrast between how full the house had been the night before, and how happy Mom had been when presents spilled from under the tree and our family was all together under one roof; and the next morning, when the house was nearly empty and I was the only one there with them, how Mom seemed wistful, almost sad, more frail. Even Dad was a bit subdued. As we sat there in the empty house, by the tree adorned with ornaments from the 1930s, I sensed Mom's sadness and her feeling of loss from a family grown up and gone away. She wanted so much for me to like what she gave me, as though the right gift could roll back time. I know I did like it, truly, regardless of what it was, because she gave it to me. How could I not like it? I remember wishing there was something I (or anyone) could do to restore what used to be, and, of course, I knew at the same time that was impossible. Children grow up, leave home, and parents endure the loss. I made a promise to myself to make every effort to return each year and spend these few moments with Mom and Dad: to sleep overnight in my old room and wake up to open presents with them around the tree. As it turned out, I may not have made every single Christmas (one year I was in Spain), but I was there almost every year. It was such an easy thing to do, and it meant so much to Mom and Dad. It may have been the best present I gave them. By eight o'clock that morning we had begun a circuit of my sisters' homes, stopping by each one to visit, share a cup of coffee and marvel at their gifts. We did this every year, and at each stop plans were made for a casual lunch later in the day. It was always Pot Luck, bring what is easy, and if prior plans called you elsewhere, that was all right, too.
My Friday The 13th (1983)
Friday, May 13, 1983: 3:45 pm
Palos Verdes Peninsula, California
Scott Arntsen got up from his chair and met me at the corner of his desk to accept the
clipboard/notebook I handed him. It was bulky and awkward, business and computerrelated papers tucked in pockets front and back, and folded open to the clipboard with a pad
of paper in the middle. It was the end of the week, time for him to sign-off on the hours I
worked.
"I appreciate the time you're putting in for us," he said, reviewing my hours. "I know you
have other clients."
Although he was young, in his twenties, Scott was the Controller for St. Ives, a growing
company that produced soaps, shampoos, lotions and conditioners. He supervised the
business office and was responsible for developing new computer systems to help the
company grow as its sales increased. I worked at his direction through a sub-contracting
arrangement, using my programming and system design skills to create the business
systems St. Ives needed.
Photo of house 1983
Scott sat on the corner of his desk, dress-shirt sleeves rolled up, collar open and tie well-loosened. He held the folded-open clipboard as he spoke, reviewing the second page of the pad of paper in the clipboard-- my hours for the week. The first page was folded over the top of the notebook and he held it in the back.
"Looks good to me," he said, reaching for the pen in his shirt pocket. As he shifted his grip on the clipboard, the first page sprang back over the top of the notebook. Scott looked down at two columns of writing, not my hours, and swept that page back over the top and held it more firmly in place as he penned his initials by each date I worked, including that day, May 13, 1983. Then he held the notebook out to me, and that first page of paper, with two columns of writing, fell back into place on top of the clipboard pad.
"I'm glad to help," I said, taking the notebook and folding it closed. "We'll get the product-code problems resolved next week."
"Very good," Scott said as we shook hands. "Have a good weekend."
As I left Scott's office that day neither of us could know that in a few weeks an Orange County Sheriff's Homicide Investigator would tear that wayward first page from the pad of paper in my clipboard and proclaim that the two columns of writing on it were a list of murder victims spanning ten years, and that it had been hidden in a clandestine place, thus making it even more reliable as proof. Neither of us could have known that it would be cut up, pasted into a different form, and made into evidence to prove me guilty of sixteen murders and provide reason to put me to death.
I said goodbye to the office staff at St. Ives and wished them a good weekend. My car, a brown Toyota Celica, was parked just outside, and one of the office girls waved to me through a wall of windows as I tossed the binder/clipboard into the trunk. My job as an independent consultant demanded that I go from business to business, often three or four in one day, and the trunk of my car served as an on-the-go office. It held computer manuals, long program printouts, a business appointment calendar and odds and ends. I slammed the trunk closed and waved in reply.
The trunk of my car on the morning of May 14, 1983
Very soon my mobile office would be denounced by Orange County law enforcement as a "clandestine" hiding place, and six years later a judge would cite it as one reason to put me to death.
I was eager to get home that day, because several months previously I had taken out a second mortgage on our home and begun some remodeling which was still in progress. The last phase was underway, installing a spa in a new redwood deck, just outside new doors that had been cut into the bathroom and den. When that was done the rest would be easy. I was hoping it could be completed by the Fourth of July, two days after Jeff's birthday.
The work was being done by an independent contractor, Doug, and his buddy, Sam, both young guys, thirty-ish. Doug had built some cabinets for Grandma's Sugarplums, a candy store in Belmont Shore where Jeff worked, and they turned out very good. So with Jeff's recommendation, I contracted Doug and Sam to work on the house.
Being Friday, I had to talk with Doug about several things: the state of progress, any special problems holding up work, and whatever attention was needed from me before he returned on Monday. Recently I had been helping -- applying redwood stain to patio cover pieces before they were nailed in place. Also, I had run the PVC plumbing for the spa and hooked it up as the deck was built around it. If there was anything Doug needed me to do over the weekend, this was his time to tell me.
As I slid behind the steering wheel the Celica’s interior was very hot from sitting in the sun, so I rolled the window down and opened the sunroof to air it out. I also opened the glove box and fished around for a Marshall Tucker cassette tape I wanted to hear. Instead, I got Cabaret... then Kenny Rogers. There was too much junk in the glove box: souvenir buttons from a Portland oyster bar, a spray-bottle of cologne my niece left when she car-sat for me, political material, pill bottles, papers, a broken belt buckle and much more. I really needed to clean it out.
I should have. Five years later an Orange County prosecutor would be allowed to enter every item from the glove box into my trial as evidence he claimed proved me guilty of murder even though it was not connected or related to any murder victim.
I couldn’t find the Marshall Tucker tape (Was it in the trunk?), but my rummaging around caused two prescription medicine bottles to fall onto the floor. One bounced under the passenger seat, and I contorted myself around to retrieve it. I had transferred several bottles of medicine from the house to the glove box a week before because of an incident that occurred with the house remodeling: new tile on the wall behind the tub and toilet had been horribly mislaid. The tiles were not straight. Grout lines waved and leaned in a dizzying fashion, as though the wall had been struck by an earthquake. I found a professional tile contractor in the Yellow Pages and paid him $25 to stop by and give me his opinion-- the work was laughable, he said, and no customer should have to accept it.
After he left I sat in the bathroom with my wall of wavy tile. It almost made me sea-sick to look at it. A photograph I had seen years earlier came to mind: a spider web spun by a spider given LSD. I knew Doug and Sam both smoked marijuana, but I did not know if either of them used other drugs. That night I collected what medications we had in the house, seven or eight bottles, and transferred them to the car, safely away from the house. The next morning Doug agreed that the tile work was unacceptable and agreed they would redo it.
Little did I know that soon the presence of those medications in the glove box would be labeled a “murder kit” by an Orange County prosecutor and used years later to persuade a jury of my guilt, even though the specific medications had not caused anyone’s death.
I stopped at the corner market a few blocks from home and bought two six-packs of Moosehead beer. That was the brand Doug and Sam liked, and it was Friday, the end of the week.
“Thanks,” Doug said as I handed him a beer. He looked over the construction and commented. “The rest is going to come together pretty fast. You’ll be surprised.”
Sam rushed up. “Can’t stay,” he said, a plaid shirt slung over his shoulder. “Gotta run. Date tonight, but I’ll take a couple of these,” he said, pulling two beers from a six-pack. “Bye!” he said, and took off down the driveway.
“Have a good one,” I called after him.
“I can’t stay long either,” Doug said. We talked for a while about the work underway, and when Doug finished his beer, he left.
I went into the house and walked out onto the new redwood deck through the new French doors in the den wall. Our dog, Max, followed, sniffing all the newness and looking up at me balefully as though he wasn’t sure if he approved.
I got a folding patio chair and sat down to take it all in. It was a nice afternoon, about 4:30 pm, and warm sunlight filtered through the new deck roof that now shielded the back of the house from a two-story apartment next door. (Ahhh, finally some privacy!) Sawdust and pieces of wood littered the deck. The brick-red spa was in place, but it wasn’t hooked up yet.
I had completed the plumbing the day before, but the electrical remained to be done. It lay empty except for some litter from the construction.
Max poked around. He sneezed after sniffing some sawdust, and then lay down next to my chair, sighing deeply and looking up at me with his eyes, not moving his head.
“Oh, Max”, I said. “It won’t be long, now, with a little luck this should all be ready in time for Jeff’s birthday.” Not that the construction was any secret, but I already had begun laying the groundwork for a Deck-Warming/Open House/Birthday Party to properly inaugurate the renovations. I had dropped hints to Jeff that we had spent so much on the construction that we probably couldn’t afford anything until Christmas. That wasn’t true. It was just the beginning of a surprise celebration. I liked surprising him.
I sat there and let my mind wander, imagining what it would be like when it was finally done. I envisioned people all around, eating, drinking, talking and laughing. I envisioned them in the spa, jets of water bubbling and steam rising. I could almost hear the hubbub, nearly feel the closeness of friends and family. Everyone was there. Everything was going very, very well for me, better than ever before in my life. Years of hard work were about to show real results.
And then I realized something. I could not see myself in the scenes I envisioned. I looked again, but I felt somehow estranged, cutoff from what would be, as though I would never enjoy all that was coming together. That was an odd feeling for me, the perennial optimist, and I shook it off. Then I felt something physical, a sort of nearly imperceptible wrinkle passing over me, followed by a small chill. A single, small bark escaped from Max as though it had slipped out unintentionally, surprising him.
“You feel that too?" I asked Max. He was up on his front paws, looking here and there, apparently trying to find where it was, whatever it was. I looked again to what might be, but there was no change so I let it go and got up to leave.
"Come on, Max" I said, bending down to pat his head and rub his ear. "That was weird, wasn't it, buddy?" I went back inside, waiting for Max at the doors. He was giving one last look around, testing the air, alert. Then he snorted at nothing in particular and sauntered by me into the house.
Nothing would ever be the same again.
Nothing.
San Quentin (Circa, 1990)
What is my cell lika, you ask? It is about 7x12 feet. There is a small metal bunk attached to the floor, a sink, a toilet, two built-in lights on the wall over one end of the bunk, and some metal shelves attached tot he wall over the sink (about 2x4 feet). The cell is all concrete, painted an off-white color, and one end is all bars, and that is where the door is. The bars are covered by a screan, so you cannot reach through the bars, but you can still see out and some air can get in and out. My cell is on the 5th floor, the top floor, of a large cellblock. Half of the building faces toward San Francisco Bay, and the other half faces into San Quentin. I'm on the bay side. Immediately cutside my cell is a walkway that fronts all 54 cells on this side of the fifth floor. Beyond that walkway is nothing, it drops away to the ground floor. About twenty feet beyond that is the outer wall of the building, and along that wall is a catwalk where an officer patrols with a gun. He's called the "gunrail." On the wall opposite my cell are three small windows. My cell does not have windows, but I can see out the three windows on the outer wall. Since it is facing aast, I see the sun come up in the morning part of the year; it shines right into my cell as it rises over the East Bay Hills. I can see some of San Francisco Bay, and most times when the moon is full I see it rise in the east and its light shimmers across the water of the Bay.
Several years agc the planet Mars (I hope it is still a planet!) was the closest to earth it will be for a long time, and the television said it could be seen with only one's eyes, no telescope needed. It said to look in the eastern sky in the early evening, and I did, and it took a while but I did find it through the three small windows. (Each window is about 10x2 feet, so they are not that small, but they are 20 feat away.) I was able to follow Mars as it rose in the sky and moved across the windows. It was cool! I watched it for two nights.
Years before that there was a comet, Hale Bopp, I think. And when it was in the sky I applied to go to the Law Library and on the walk over there, at night, I got to see that comet. That is the only comet I ever saw in my life.
Several years agc the planet Mars (I hope it is still a planet!) was the closest to earth it will be for a long time, and the television said it could be seen with only one's eyes, no telescope needed. It said to look in the eastern sky in the early evening, and I did, and it took a while but I did find it through the three small windows. (Each window is about 10x2 feet, so they are not that small, but they are 20 feat away.) I was able to follow Mars as it rose in the sky and moved across the windows. It was cool! I watched it for two nights.
Years before that there was a comet, Hale Bopp, I think. And when it was in the sky I applied to go to the Law Library and on the walk over there, at night, I got to see that comet. That is the only comet I ever saw in my life.