Vogue Theater, Long Beach Blvd., South Gate, CA

In addition to reading comic books, I spent many hours at the Vogue Theater on weekends, just a few short blocks from home. Obviously, it's been renamed quite some time ago. But back in the early to mid-60's, for seventy-five cents, I could watch a double bill, even stay for another showing of each movie that same day if I wanted to. The Pumpkin Eater or In the French Style were probably a bit too mature for my age, but I saw them there nonetheless. I much preferred comedies such as the double bill of What A Way to Go and Honeymoon Hotel, or historical dramas such as The Long Ships.

We also went to either of the two movie theaters in Huntington Park, as well. Mom and I saw a curious double bill: The Ugly American and Flower Drum Song, paired perhaps because each starred Asian or Asian-American actors, about the only thing those two movies had in common. On my own I saw two controversial films with gay content: The Fox and The Sergeant.

It was at one of the Huntington Park theaters that I had the oddest experience I have ever had in a movie theater. Dad was taking Ann and me out for the day, and I wanted to see Muscle Beach Party, which was showing in HP. We were a bit late but got there well before the picture began. However, when we entered the theater to find three empty seats, there were none on the first floor, we were told, so we hiked up to the balcony. When we got there, we were only able to find three seats together on the very back row of the balcony. It's not that the second Beach Party installment ought to have been that popular. But what was strangely curious was that everyone in the theater but the three of us was Black. Every seat but our three was occupied by a young black man or woman or boy or girl--not another empty seat to be found. I was really perplexed. Why would any African American young person in the mid-60's want to see Muscle Beach Party with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello?

There might have been a few chuckles here and there during the presentation, but everyone was generally subdued throughout the film. But, finally, I realized why they had come this far to watch this movie. In the music club in the film, one of the guest artists who came out on stage to perform was Stevie Wonder. The moment he appeared on the screen, the audience erupted, with many of the patrons even dancing in the aisles when the music began. I instantly realized that few of them would likely ever get to see Stevie on television or on stage--even network television was still mostly segregated then--you would be hard pressed to find an African American character (and certainly no gay character). This was one of the few opportunities many of them probably had to actually see Stevie in any medium. They were willing to sit through a lousy teen flick, a very white teen flick at that, to see Stevie Wonder perform for a very few minutes on the screen.

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Christmas 1965 or 1966

Black surf pants. Now there's something you don't see every day. Obviously, I loved wearing surf pants, even at Christmas. The man in the photograph in our kitchen on Cypress was Kenny Morse. He and mom dated for several years throughout the 60's. They both loved playing golf. He owned his own company and installed fire prevention plumbing in the ceilings of Southern California businesses. He never would marry mom because she had us two kids. Several years after they broke up, mom found out that he married another woman, who had two kids. Go figure.

On the table is a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Whether it was this visit or another, Kenny got upset about something. (He had a short fuse, though he never took his anger out on anyone physically or verbally. He just took off out the door.) Anyway, he stormed out the back door and left that day. A few minutes later, he returned through the back door, grabbed the bucket of chicken that he had brought, and left again. We laughed, actually.

Typically, mom would not hear from him for several days or more. Then he'd call or return once more as if nothing had happened. He lived in an apartment in Downey, which was the typical bachelor pad, with large accumulations of dust behind the interior doors that were never closed. He was good friends with a couple from Texas whom mom also knew well. They adopted a young boy whom we met. As he got older, they realized that his biological heritage was part African-American, though they weren't overt racists, just moderately so. I later learned that he was also gay, having landed a role in the Broadway chorus of La Cage Aux Folles. I always wondered if they were more mortified that he was part African-American or totally gay.

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Rambleback Yearbook Photo 1965

Rambleback was the name of our school yearbook. South Gate High School was the Rams. I'm in the third row up from the bottom, fourth student in from the right. South Gate tended to be a mostly white school, with very few Hispanic or Black students, easily counted on one hand for each class. On the other side of the tracks, literally, from South Gate was Watts, just a few short blocks from where we lived.

Besides Mike Mebs and Richard Meyers, whom I met when I started at South Gate High in the fall of 1964, I also became friends with Bill Vogt whose parents owned the Southland Motel, just two blocks from our house. I was able to swim in the motel pool for a few weeks that summer until they realized that their insurance policy did not cover guests other than those actually staying at the motel. Before the Southland Motel, his parents had owned a motel in the desert, not far from where the destruction of the service station took place for It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which Bill watched from afar. When the Watts Riots broke out in August of 1965, a National Guard sand-bag machine gun emplacement was set up just a couple of blocks from the Southland Motel. Bill told me all about seeing it up close; however, I did not have the courage to walk the three or four blocks and have a first-hand look myself. We could easily see the smoke rising from the many fires to the west of South Gate, and that was more than enough--the palpable smoke and the many local and national TV broadcasts.

Between the riots and the Vietnam War footage increasingly on the nightly news, the 1960's easily seemed like a confrontational and especially violent decade. Fortunately, South Gate was peaceful, and South Gate High School was spared any confrontations. I walked the five and a half blocks to school each day without incident. Mike, Richard Meyers, sometimes Leslie Peters or Richard Wright, and I hung out for breaks or lunch. Mike, Richard Meyers and I were in the corrective gym class each day throughout high school. Not only was it an easy "A" on the report card, we didn't have to play competitively with the much more athletic students in our class. At that age, I actually benefited from being overly lanky and relatively unfit. But I could walk fast, not just hunting down comic books but also once every few weeks, I would have to leave school early and walk to Huntington Park to get my braces adjusted.

One of the first things mom did was to work out a financial arrangement with the orthodontist to get both Ann's and my teeth fixed. Dad was sending her $75.00 per month and most, if not all of that, went to the orthodontist to pay for our braces. I believe the total cost was over $1,000.00 for each of us, Ann's being slightly more. I would wear braces throughout high school and even into college before they finally came off.

Our orthodontist was an older, overweight fellow. In his lobby, he had a map of the world. Around all of the communist countries, he had placed push pins and used red yarn to delineate those parts of the world under communist domination. Waiting for my appointment, I got a geography and political lesson while I sat there. The periodic adjustments were often torture, and that evening all I wanted to eat was soup because my whole mouth ached. I'd also have to take aspirin to cut some of the pain so I could try and sleep.

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October & December 1965

I loved that shirt, that did look a lot like a country-style table cloth. We are standing in the alcove, each of us holding that small pumpkin, so it's obviously before Halloween. We are standing behind the organ mom bought for us, though neither Ann nor I figured out how to play it. Mom eventually bought a piano instead, but the organ looked nice in the alcove.

Mom annotated the back of the lower photograph with "Dec 65. Southeast Escrow Xmas Dinner Dance." In the den in the background was our prize possession. One afternoon after work, mom announced that she had bought us an RCA color television set which was delivered that evening. We were stunned and excited. From 1964 until even after I started college in the fall of 1967, I became a TV junky. When the fall TV schedule arrived each year, I would pour over the nightly programming to see what I wanted to watch all week long.

The Beverly Hillbillies, The Munsters, The Addams Family, Honey West, Get Smart, My Mother the Car, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., Bewitched, That Was The Week That Was, Laugh-In, The Defenders, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Hullabaloo, Shindig, The Monkees, Lost In Space, The John Davidson Show summer replacement series, and, beginning in September of 1966, Star Trek. Even when I stopped watching most other TV shows because I had to make time to study, I continued to set aside an hour each week for Star Trek.

Not long after we moved to Cypress, I rediscovered comic books from the neighborhood market on Long Beach Boulevard, just a couple of blocks from our house. The little store had a bin of used comic books for sale at a nickle a piece, when the regular price was 12 cents. There I found copies of Adventure Comics, featuring The Legion of Super Heroes. When we were still living with dad and Willene, I had read an imaginary tale of The Death Of Superman. Three teenage legionnaires had journeyed back in time to pay tribute to the great fallen hero. I was fascinated by them being teenagers. So when I came across used comic books about the Legion, I grabbed them up, hoping to acquire all of them in time, which I eventually did.

Some weeks, I would hike all over South Gate to find the latest haul if the drug store across from the little supermarket was tardy in opening their shipment or had missed some of the titles that I started buying regularly. I found a used magazine and comic book store on Tweedy Boulevard. I also came across another one in Huntington Park when I finally had to buy that last early issue of Adventure Comics that I did not have, #305. I had to pay the princely sum of 50 cents to complete my collection. The owner also casually mentioned that he had a mint copy of Action Comics #1, the first appearance of Superman. He would gladly sell it to me for $75.00. Considering that mint copies of Action Comics #1 have sold for over $1 million dollars in the last year or so, it would have been a steal to have bought the copy he was offering me. However, $75.00 was what mom paid in monthly rent for our little two-bedroom, one-bath house in those days. Even when, as a senior in high school, I started working for $1.25 an hour, he might as well have asked for a chunk of moon rock from me as payment because I was never going to be able to afford that kind of money for a single comic book. Mom would have killed me had I spent that much for a comic book, regardless.

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February 1965

Both photographs bear the date Feb 65 along the margin, so they were obviously developed then. When they were taken is less obvious. I am wearing my black suit with the narrow black tie in the top photograph and inexplicably pretending to play the ukulele--mom and I had gone to a clothing store in Huntington Park to have the suit made for my junior high graduation the year before. Along that wall of the living room mom would place a large piano sometime later. The handle in the foreground is to the front door. I might have been getting ready to go to church or had just returned from church. The Catholic Church in South Gate was on Firestone Blvd., only a few blocks from our house.

The bottom photograph is of mom and me on the couch along the opposite wall in the living room. The magnolia picture on the wall is a pastel that mom had since at least the 1940's and was in the background of several B&W photographs from that era and later. Mom told me that the woman who created it, and from whom she bought it, died of cancer. Given that it was first seen on the wall of the house in Tampa, FL, the woman must have died back then because I doubt if mom kept in touch with her after we kids were born and the family moved on. After mom died, I kept mom's painting of Grandpa Sanchez's sail boat. Ann kept the magnolia pastel, for a few years at least until she moved to Indio, CA, for good.

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Greg, Christmas 1964

There are a whole cluster of color photographs that are dated from 1965 on. This is undated and not marked on the back as so many others have been. Given that this is the last B&W picture I found, I suspect it was before those from 1965. I've also compared the Christmas tree in the background with trees in photographs which I know are later, and this one is different. This one is definitely from 8940 Cypress. The alcove in the front of the house was perfect for setting up a Christmas tree and packing the presents underneath. In fact, from the looks of the other three, later Christmas tree photographs, this was the only place in the house where we ever put up a Christmas tree.

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Greg, Mom and Ann

I cannot quite place when this picture was taken. I suspect, comparing it to others that I know were from 1965 and later, this was taken professionally while we were living on Orchard Place in 1964 or late 1963. I also use myself as a comparison, and this appears to be the last time, for quite some time, that I don't appear to be a total geek. That will become painfully apparent in the next photographs. I probably endured a growth spurt which left me lean, even skinny, and certainly lanky and awkward.

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8940 Cypress Ave. backyard

These are the only photographs I have of the backyard on Cypress. When I have visited the house in recent years, it appears that the entire space between our house and the smaller house in back has been cemented over. The driveway itself was, when we lived there, two cement strips with grass inbetween for a car to drive on, backing out as mom did every morning after she parked in the garage (the old woman and her old son did not have a car and did not drive). As you can see from the current photograph in the last post, the entire driveway has also been paved over. There was even a narrow space along the left side of the house where irises grew. That, too, is cemented over.

So the grapefruit tree in both pictures is gone. The avocado tree, in the right corner above, was just outside my back window. That, too, is gone. The irises along the house are gone. There was also a lemon tree behind the small house in back. I suspect that is gone, as well. All the plants and greenery that gave our little house some cheerfulness and color and character have been eliminated. It's become like Joni Mitchell's song.

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8940 Cypress Avenue, South Gate, CA

I have only a very few photographs from the 60's of the front of our house on Cypress--I managed to find the top one which shows the house next door still there and the magnolia tree recently planted--so this was likely taken after October 1964, but not much later. In the contemporary photo, as you can see, there's a fence/wall surrounding the entire property, a gate for the driveway, and bars on the windows. It looks like a fortress today, not at all as it looked when we lived there.

When we moved in that June of 1964, we had a much different tree out front. It was large and shady with a thick trunk. It kept the front of our house cooler in summer. Unfortunately, though, the large roots had buckled the sidewalk in front. That fall, the city cut that beautiful old tree down, ripped up its offending roots, and replaced it with the magnolia tree that still stands--which took forever to grow and never did provide the kind of shade the old tree did. They also repaved the sidewalk. I applied the date of Oct. 10, 1964, and wrote my name in the wet cement. So did Mike Leonard. And those personal markings remained in the sidewalk until the wall/fence was added, sometime in the 2000's, I believe. when they also ripped up the sidewalk and replaced it.

Over the years, I was pleased to see that our handiwork in the sidewalk managed to survive for at least 30 years, perhaps longer. Then it was all gone as if we never lived there.

The only advantage for me with the shady tree gone out front was that I could watch the planes that flew directly overhead disappear beyond the horizon. Without even going outside, I could tell when the daily National Airlines DC-8 flew overhead. They flew lower, and louder, than any of the other aircraft. We'd already gotten used to tuning out the jets flying overhead at all hours of the day or night on Orchard, and they almost never disturbed our sleep on Cypress either.

After the old woman from Germany died in the small house that used to be on the left, she willed her home to our landlord, who used to mow her lawn every week for her. He sold the house, pocketed the pure profit, and the developers to whom he sold the house tore it down and built the apartment building that is still there. The city only allowed them to build four units, to correspond to the number of on-site parking spaces in back; however, the building was designed so that when the inspection was complete, the builder sent crews back in to seal off sections that were already designed to be separate units. The building then had six units, three per floor, and so not nearly enough places to park, except on the street.

A couple of years later, when I was returning home from church one Sunday, I happened to glance up to the second floor at the small porch that lead into the living room of that front apartment. The door was wide open and an attractive young man was just standing inside the door, in profile, totally naked. He stood there looking at me, and I continued to stare up at him as I walked along. I never saw him again, but I always wondered if I had simply waved at him that something further might have happened.

The house on the other side was also owned by an old woman who also died while we lived there. She was much less friendly than the German woman. Her house was sold to a young woman who's ex-husband or boyfriend would get drunk and sometimes become abusive. He'd chase her outside, often in the middle of the night, and wake us up. Mom yelled out her window one night, to tell them to knock it off. Yet the stupid younger woman told mom to shut up and mind her own business even though the guy was slapping her around and she was crying out.

There is a small house in back of ours on the same lot. An old woman and her older son lived there. They kept to themselves and didn't bother us, though I think they both had an overt pension for drinking at all hours, though they were quiet.

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PSA Lockheed Electra flight, Spring 1964

Aunt Jean drove us to San Francisco International Airport for our return to Southern California. Mom had me make our reservations, and PSA, flying the Lockheed Electra, had the cheapest airfare at $13.50 each, one-way. This would be my first flight after so many years of gazing skyward in Whittier and then finally South Gate, to see all of the many aircraft flying overhead and wondering what it might be like to be aboard. Our flight was smooth and quiet the whole way back to Los Angeles International. The skies were sunny and almost cloudless. Over Southern California especially, I could see all of the aqua-blue swimming pools sparkling in the suburban backyards all over the LA Basin.

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Ann, Greg, Anita, Aunt Jean, Easter Week, 1964

Cousin Doug must have taken the picture. Aunt Jean, when she saw this photograph at New Year's didn't even recognize herself. We are all leaning on their Corvair Monza four-door. Nader made his reputation deriding the Corvair, but it has become a classic. Aunt Jean still owns this car, and it sits in her garage in Fairfield, though it no longer runs.

In the background of that photograph is the apartment complex she and her husband used to own in Napa. Between her income as a nurse, and Uncle Lloyd's as a member of the teamsters, they lived a comfortable life and were able to retire early. As a single mother with two kids, it was never going to be that way for mom; but I don't think she minded. Later, when she was forced to undergo open heart surgery to at least temporarily repair her heart--because of the rheumatic fever damage--she was forced to retire early.

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Easter Week, Bay Area, 1964

While we were still living on Orchard, mom arranged a vacation for us to visit Uncle Lloyd, Aunt Norma Jean and cousin Doug in San Leandro, CA. We had not seen any of them since the Santa Ana visit, Easter of 1953, eleven years earlier, when we all were a lot younger. We took the bus north. Uncle Robert met us in Santa Maria for dinner; unfortunately, we stored our suitcases in the bus depot there, not realizing that the manager would shut the station down for the night before the last bus left, the one we were taking for San Francisco after dinner. Robert was able to reach the manager and he returned in time to unlock the door and let us retrieve our suitcases from the storage lockers just before our bus got there.

Doug would graduate from high school in June since he was three years older than I. He had a 1958 Chevy converted from a stick shift on the steering column to one on the floor. He would still have that car when I visited three years later, so I will provide a picture of it then. It was he who drove over to the San Francisco bus depot to pick us up that morning after we arrived.

The two pictures above were taken on the observation deck at the Oakland International Airport, not too far from San Leandro. The coat I am wearing, I forget to take with us when we left at the end of the week. They still had it in their front closet when I visited again in 1967, but by then it was much too small for me. I am not sure why nobody thought to box it up and mail it to me. You can easily see that Doug's trousers were too short on him then, but guys did tend to wear high-water pants to one degree or another back then.

I spent most of the week hanging out with my older cousin. He and his girlfriend took Ann and me to a drive-in double bill one night: The Pink Panther and Mouse on the Moon. He and his girlfriend Pat sat in the back seat and made out while Ann and I sat a bit uncomfortably in the front, watching the two movies.

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We Met the Beatles

The girl I briefly dated, Nancy, and her older sister, Debbie, lived with their mom and much older brother in an apartment about a block away from us. Whereas Ann and I kept mom's apartment clean and tidy since we weren't forced to do it, Nancy's family was, to say the least, disheveled. Nobody seemed to do dishes or kept house or cleaned. Their mom, like ours, worked many hours. Once in a while Debbie would become frustrated and clean up after the rest of the family, but otherwise their entire apartment looked like an unruly child's bedroom.

Besides the fact that I liked spending time with them, their family loved music and had vinyl 45's all over the place. I gained an appreciation of any number of artists with whom I had no familiarity. But at the beginning of 1964, everyone of us came to know the Beatles. Richard Watson's parents had a huge stereo console, made of beautiful, polished wood. It played remarkable sounds. And, of course, Richard immediately bought MEET THE BEATLES and then THE BEATLES SECOND ALBUM. I watched the Beatles appearances on the Ed Sullivan show, as well.

The youth music scene suddenly exploded, especially for me. My dad may have had Broadway cast recordings (THE MUSIC MAN) or a Frank Sinatra (COME FLY WITH ME) or Gordon MacRae (SEASONS OF LOVE) or Dinah Shore (DINAH! YES, INDEED) album, but he never had anything like the Beatles. Elvis was for the generation before ours, as were so many of the teen idols of the early 60's. We had Bobby Rydell's "Forget Him" on a single. However, the media revolution that the Beatles fostered was rock and roll albums filled with remarkable pop music. Adults might have wanted to own albums by those artists previously mentioned, and mom was more than happy to buy me a copy of my favorite artist's new album at the time, Peggy Lee's LATIN A' LA LEE, because that was their music. But I don't think that any of us at South Gate Junior High felt there was as much going on until the Beatles blew the lid off of everything that had come before.

And not only the Beatles, but we were hearing stuff that was equally as magical from Motown. I was actually thrilled with songs like Mary Wells' "My Guy" which helped bump the Beatles from their lock on the number one spot on the U.S. charts. LA radio stations such as KRLA and KHJ were our radio stations, playing our music. On TV were local dance shows such as Lloyd Thaxton's Hop and KHJ disc jockey Sam Riddle's 9th Street West. I actually went on Sam Riddle's show twice with Nancy.

After we moved to 8940 Cypress, I got invited to parties in the neighborhood where we played spin the bottle and kids actually made out to 45's being played on a portable stereo. The house next to ours, which was torn down and replaced by a two-story apartment house, was owned by a very old woman who had come from Germany many years before. She brought out a LIFE or LOOK magazine one day when I was in the yard, to show me a photo spread of The Beatles. I was surprised when she told me that she thought they were marvelous.

From 1964 forward, music became an even more important part of my life, whereas before it had always been something in the background, something that you might listen to but not with such an abiding passion and commitment.

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Industrialist year book, South Gate Junior High School, S'64

I was not in journalism in the spring of 1964; however, in the fall, I came up with the motto for our graduation class: "Memories of the Past to Dreams of the Future". Nowhere in the yearbook do I find that I was given credit for that little ditty of a graduation motto.

Also, in contrast to the W'64 edition, I have only two signatures in my yearbook, one from a girl I briefly dated, Nancy, whose family lived neared us on Orchard, and the other from my friend Michael Leonard. Both would move away, along with my other friends, Cheri Earl and Richard Watson, before high school. I have no idea now, looking back, why I had so few classmates sign my yearbook. Also, since I was no longer in journalism, and never had been a member of any other school clubs or organizations that entire year, I did not have my picture in our graduation yearbook. I'm not even in our class picture because I failed to return a signed form on time to my homeroom teacher. He decided that adequate punishment was that I could not participate in the class picture. My name is on the roster of our graduating class inside the yearbook but no picture.

It all seems rather unfair, looking back at his decision all these years later. But that paled in comparison to what I experienced when I returned home that afternoon of the last day at school. I arrived at 2875 Orchard to find that all of our possessions had been stacked outside the apartment on the upper landing at the top of the stairs--I felt suddenly homeless. I would later learn from mom that we were paid up through the end of the month, which would have been through that weekend; however, our landlord wanted to get the place ready for a new tenant, so he had moved our things out prematurely, and mom was furious when I reached her on the phone. She already had rented a new, two-bedroom, one-bath house, a few blocks away on Cypress Avenue. And she had already bought used furniture which had already been delivered there. (The apartment on Orchard had been furnished.) Mike Leonard helped us move that evening, just as I would help him and his mom move later that summer. After we finished moving in, mom took us out to dinner that night.

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Industrialist year book, South Gate Junior High, W'64

Mom enrolled us at South Gate Junior High for the fall term of 1963-4. I was in the 9th Grade. For high school and junior high, South Gate did have students who graduated in the Winter term as well as the Summer Term each year. For a few days, mom drove us to school in her 1960 white, four-door Rambler since the junior high school was almost at the entire other end of South Gate and Firestone Blvd. from where we lived. But we did have to walk home and then walk to school fairly quickly.

Unlike at Yorba Junior High School, South Gate Junior High did have a year book published each semester, yearly in high school. (Maybe Yorba had a yearbook and we just could not afford to buy one; I don't remember.) But a year book such as this one reminds you that you did have friends and acquaintances who cared about you and did write silly or serious messages in your book. I knew that I took a journalism class that fall, depicted above; I just did not remember that our class got its picture in the yearbook. (I am in the upper right hand corner of the shot.)

Although there is no mention of it anywhere in either yearbook from 1963-4, that fall was when President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. When we learned of this in our individual classes that awful day in November, we trooped out with our teachers as they lowered the school flag in tribute to the slain president. It was difficult to get away from the news, and the news of the assassination of the assassin, that entire weekend after we were sent home later that day.

Steve Page, who signed my yearbook above, gave me a guided tour around town that fall, to locate all the model kit shops. I ended up going regularly to one in Cudahy, an unincorporated area north of South Gate, not far from our apartment on Orchard. Independent of that, I also discovered the Loop Market magazine store. The market itself was a grocery store with an awning out front along its entire length. The magazine section, with an entrance separate from the grocery store, delineated by the large wooden shelves and the metal racks themselves, carried everything from Time magazine, to aviation magazines, to softcore gay porn, which I soon became drawn to. (When my friend Randy visited before the school term began, he assumed when he saw those mags on the upper shelves, well above the aviation periodicals, that they were Playboy-type magazines for women--even I knew that they weren't primarily for females but never let on.)

The Loop Market was named for The Loop in Cudahy where the street cars made their mandatory railed swing through the station, to pick up passengers before heading back up through Huntington Park and then on into Los Angeles itself. By the time we moved in with mom, the street cars had been taken out of service and the tracks covered in blacktop along the entire route. Buses made the same swing into the same station. But the last couple of times that my friend Mike and I drove through that area, we've had a difficult time figuring out where The Loop was--everything in that area having been significantly altered. The Loop Market is also long gone. That whole block of retail businesses, in fact, is gone.

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Dave Moore, Sept. 1963, backyard Orchard Place

Dave Moore was my best friend throughout the 1960's. Even before we moved from Orange, Dave had the guts to ask Willene one day if I could come over to his house for an afternoon. Willene lied and said I had things to do. But we did get together on weekends. We'd save up our milk money and splurge on some kind of dessert when I spent the day. He and his family lived a couple of miles away, in the direction of our old address on Oak Street. His dad was in the Marines. His was one of those families that looked good on the surface but had many dark secrets (for those days anyway) that they kept hidden.

We corresponded that whole summer before he was able to visit, probably over the Labor Day weekend. To still have a best friend even when we lived so many miles away was terribly important. I would make a couple of friends the next year at South Gate Junior High school, but Richard Watson's family would move away first thing the following summer, before high school, and Mike Leonard's family would move away not long after that. So in high school I would have to make new friends all over again.

The picture above was taken in the small backyard we had behind the apartment over the garage. High wooden steps lead from the back porch laundry room and exited down to the clothes line and a small rectangle of grass. That summer mom even invited a couple of relatives over and we had a little luau back there with a small hibachi to grill burgers on. Our landlord who lived in the front unit of the triplex seemed a nice enough sort. But mom was upset to learn that he had had his wife committed to the Norwalk mental facility where she died of something minor like strep throat after being held there for a few months. Since the triplex was in her name, mom always wondered if he hadn't done it to get her out of the way.

My friend Randy Bancroft also spent a weekend that summer visiting us. He was just as impressed as I had been with all the aircraft flying relatively low overhead, and he would join me out on the landing to catch a glimpse of each one and identify it before it disappeared from view. The only problem for all of us to get together was that there really wasn't even bus service between Orange and South Gate. There was a bus you could take from Downey, several miles away, that dropped you off in downtown Orange. But it was much too far away to walk to. None of us was yet old enough to drive a car, though Dave would have his license by his senior year in high school. But that was still three years away. Corresponding by mail or, very rarely, by phone, would have to do. Eventually, dad would visit us one day a month, and once in awhile he'd drive us back to Orange, for Ann to see one of her friends or for me to see Dave for an afternoon.

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2875 Orchard Place, South Gate, CA

The apartment looks shabby these days, but it wasn't back then. The kitchen was certainly in need of renovation, but the place was clean and well taken care of, both outside and inside. The front steps that lead up to the apartment were also in beautiful shape in those days.

What I enjoyed the most about living here was that South Gate was on the direct flight path into Los Angeles International Airport. The noisy jet aircraft from the 1960's would roar overhead, significantly lower at this stage of their approach than when we lived in Whittier. I would run out onto the second floor landing and look up to catch what airline and what type of aircraft it was. Very quickly I could recognize all of them--the BOAC 707 from London, the Air France 707 from Paris, Scandinavian Airlines DC-8 from Stockholm or Copenhagen, Air New Zealand DC-8, Qantas 707 from Australia, Mexicana Comet from Mexico City, Japan Airlines DC-8 from Tokyo.

During this summer, I would also work on the model aircraft and model ship kits that I had acquired before we moved in with mom. We didn't have any friends in South Gate, although Ann would make a few friends later in the summer. I watched a lot more television than we did before on the black and white set mom had. It was this summer, too, that I fully experienced sexual maturity, requiring a number of long showers.

That summer we often walked over to a small convenience store across the tracks for groceries. At our end of South Gate, there weren't any first rate super markets within walking distance and would not be for a few years until a Lucky Supermarket was built on Firestone Blvd., a few blocks from Orchard.

This summer I came down with an ear infection that lasted for more than a week. I was in agony all the time--mom could not afford to take me to a doctor. I took aspirin until the pain finally went away one night when my eardrum broke and warm fluid drained from my inner ear. Fortunately, I never had any problems resulting from that infection, though during subsequent physicals doctors have noticed a slight scar across the eardrum.

In the contemporary photo above is the maintenance department and back lot of the automobile dealership. When we lived there, the dealership property did not extend all the way to Orchard. Three nice homes were on the same side of the street as our apartment and continued to Long Beach Boulevard. On the corner of Orchard and Long Beach was the nice, older home of a fortune teller with a prominent sign out front. Across Long Beach was also the Hoot Owl Cafe, in the shape of a giant Hoot Owl. Both the fortune teller lady's home and the Hoot Owl Cafe are long gone. When we lived in the apartment, every day of the week we could hear the continuous calls over the intercom from the dealership, announcing that a car was available for pickup or for someone in the shop to answer a call about a repair.

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Greg & Georgann, Easter 1962, Orange, CA

This was the only photograph in mom's collection that I can identify from Lomita Avenue in Orange, CA. I was still in the 7th grade and Ann would have still been in elementary school. Mom would likely have come over after we attended church for Easter of that year since the picture has May of 1962 along the margin.

What we would not know at the time was that 13 months after this picture was developed, Georgann and I would be leaving Orange and Lomita Avenue. What changed? It all started with the day Georgann left the house and walked all the way to dad's paint store in Fullerton, many miles from our home in Orange. I would not have even known the route to walk. To give just one example of what we had had to put up with in recent months, I was walking on the sidewalk beside our two bedrooms and bathroom between. I heard someone crying out inside the house. I ran inside and looked into Pam and Georgann's bedroom where Freddie was helping to hold Georgann down on the bed while Willene beat her. I yelled at them to stop. Willene's response was that this was the only way to keep Georgann from kicking her.

At some point over the next year, during one of my many exiles to the bedroom, Willene came in and noticed that I wasn't sitting on my bed. She demanded that I do so, but I firmly responded that I would not. She came at me, arms upraised. Realizing that I was both taller now, and probably stronger, I grabbed both her wrists as she was about to strike me. She struggled mightily to break free and smack me, but I kept her hands in check. In frustration, she backed away and warned, "Wait until your father gets home." I was not worried about dad. He had become a non-factor in his own home. There had been a night of confrontations in which, at one point, dad tried to get Willene to calm down, to which she then began to kick him in the legs. He had done what I did and held her back from hitting him with her fists. Freddie was weeping openly about how his mother was being manhandled when it was obvious to both the girls and me that Willene was being the aggressor and dad wasn't laying a finger on her.

The final incident occurred in early spring of 1963. I heard a commotion in the front of the house. I stuck my head out to see Freddie standing in the living room and Willene in the dining room. Georgann was out the sliding glass door and walking across the field next door, where the entrance to the alley now is and the small shopping center. Willene, seeing me, demanded, "You go and get your sister and you bring her back." I immediately sized up the situation, realizing that Georgann probably was provoked into leaving, and firmly countered, "Heck no. I'm going with her." So out I went through the open door as Freddie and Willene issued all kinds of threats at my back.

I quickly caught up with her and we began discussing our options. Not many weeks earlier, we had stayed with mom in her new apartment in South Gate, CA, where she had moved after living on La Reina in Downey. We liked her place and we liked South Gate. How we then got a dime, I don't know, but we decided that we were going to call dad at work and give him an ultimatum: he was to contact mom and tell her that we would henceforth be living with her. We were not going to take any more physical or emotional abuse.

In retrospect, I don't think dad believed us. Or perhaps he hoped that we would change our minds in the few months remaining before the school term ended, the date we told him we were leaving. From that point on, we were elated. We were finally going to be out from under Willene's tyrannical, and unfair, rule. Frankly, too, I don't believe Willene minded a bit losing the two of us. Dad took me to the junior high production of Brigadoon the night before we left. After our final day at Yorba Junior High, we packed up our things in the station wagon and left. We would not even see Willene, Pam or Fred for several years after that. We eventually arrived at mom's place that evening.

I clearly remember the moment she opened up the door. She looked at dad and then at us and invited us in. What she never told us until many, many years later was that dad never did call her to say that we were coming to live with her. She had no idea that night. I realize now that that was why she wasn't really prepared for us spending the night, though she never let on. We brought our meager possessions into the one bedroom apartment and that was it. I slept on the Murphy bed that dropped down from a closet in the living room. Georgann shared mom's queen-sized bed. Our lives were about to get much, much better, and we knew it.

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Yorba Junior High School, Orange, CA, 1961-3

Several of the schools we attended back in the early 60's, especially in Orange, looked rather shabby in the mid-90's when I visited them with my mom and took videos. Now, in these contemporary photographs, the schools look much better. Paint and nicer looking fences help them to appear less like prisons and more like schools. When we attended, there was no need of chain-link fences or gates or padlocks. Apparently, in the 1990's, there was.

Ann tells me that she and Freddy no longer attended Handy Elementary but went to another one along the way to Yorba, where Pam and I began attending in the fall of 1961. Perhaps with the overpass and the Costa Mesa Freeway, they felt that kids on our side of the freeway should not cross over. For me, entering Junior High meant Willene had to buy me an athletic supporter and we had to attend gym class, taking showers together for the first time. Years earlier, when we lived in Whittier, dad would take me and Tommy Tipton on Saturdays to the YMCA to swim. One Saturday, dad had to drop us off early, so we got our swim trunks on in the locker room and exited to the large, indoor pool. What we saw shocked us. Every instructor or boy splashing around in the pool or diving off the boards was totally naked. We'd never been aware of a nude swimming class in the mid-50's in conservative Whittier. We did not know what to make of this, and being the only two with swim trunks on, we stayed in the pool and churned water by the side, feeling distinctly the odd ones there.

Dave Moore and I became best friends at Yorba, much more so than at Handy Elementary School. Though I had a best friend, I realized very soon that there was an even greater dichotomy between popular, especially affluent, kids and the rest of us. There was a new boy who attended Yorba during our second year there, and I thought he was attractive. I asked a girl in my class about him one morning, yet she arrogantly responded, "Oh, I wouldn't tell you. I only tell popular kids." I didn't imagine even then that she was particularly popular herself because her family certainly wasn't affluent.

What the rest of us noticed also was that those students whose parents were comfortable financially could afford to indulge their offspring. Clothing fads became an everyday occurrence. Boys wore Pendelton shirts. Girls wore boys' white dress shirts with suspenders and pleated wool skirts. None of the rest of us could ever hope to keep up. It was enough that our clothes were generally new and clean and pressed.

It was at Yorba that I endured my first experience with prejudice for having an Hispanic last name. I was tricked into having to go to detention by this one boy whom I was asked by our teacher to take to the vice principal along with two others who were flinging spit balls in class. When we got there, he whispered, "You better not tell him that you didn't do this because it will only make him mad." Knowing the VP was a mean bastard who used to jump in his jalopy with other staff and head off to catch students fighting after school, I kept my mouth shut but was forced to appear at detention. My first afternoon there, a girl behind me made some remark. I turned around to look at her but said nothing and turned back to face the teacher, a man I did not know. He looked at me and, addressing the class, said, "You better turn around and keep your mouth shut, Sanchez, or we'll send you back to Mexico where you came from." At the time I didn't realize that he was attempting to demean me in front of everyone. All I could wonder was why he thought I was from Mexico when I was not.

Willene did try to demean us all the time. She would make us wear those bright yellow kids' raincoats when it was going to rain. When the weather was chilly, she would make us wear wool hats which nobody wore in Southern California. She would stand at the sliding glass door of the house and watch us all the way to the intersection of East Collins Avenue until we would disappear from sight. If she saw that we had removed any article of outer wear, she would say in her ignorant way when we got home, "I stood there at the door and I seen ya do it." Her bad grammar would grate on my ears every time.

In a music class, my teacher thought that I might have talent when we were listening to a recording and I noticed, when no one else did, that one of the singers in the chorus started to sing the wrong word and the recording engineer obviously did not notice the error. After a few listenings, the other students and the teacher finally detected what I had heard. I told her that we had an old, discolored trumpet that had belonged to my Uncle Leon. I was then transferred to the school band. Unfortunately, Willene wanted to make sure that I showed no promise and discouraged me in any way she could, forcing me to practice every night in the cold garage. When I did not practice every single night, she insisted that I would have to quit the school band. So I had to tearfully explain to the teacher that I would no longer be able to participate and would have to change music classes again, putting me way behind the other students in the previous class. Dad later asked why I was no longer practicing and I told him that Willene had forced me to quit. It surprised me that he was not even aware that she had made me quit.

This was the first time that most of us experienced a dress code. A few of the female teachers would force the girls to get down on their knees to ensure that their skirts touched the concrete sidewalk so that they weren't too short. One of my classmates came to school in a multi-colored pair of trousers, each panel being either red, green, yellow, or blue. He was sent home. Unrelated to the dress code, mom bought me a nice shirt that had 3/4 sleeves. Not short sleeves and not long sleeves. I loved that shirt because it was unique. However, after a few weeks, Willene, probably recognizing that I liked it just the way it was, informed me that she was cutting the sleeves because that shirt was just too hard to iron.

Fred and I used to do chores for a young married couple in the triplex to earn fifty cents each, each week, taking out their trash or washing their car. One Saturday, when we were leaving early and they weren't awake, we wanted to wash their car first. Freddy had the bright idea that he would steer the car while I pushed it out of the garage. He foolishly turned the wheel too sharply and the bumper of the aqua Ford Falcon caught on the garage door spring and bent it. Dad's insurance covered the repair of the damage, but we were forced to repay the deductible, $25.00, a huge sum of money for us to repay. It took us many months, with every penny or nickle or quarter we got from anyone going to repay our debt.

I was also friends with Randy Bancroft from across the street--his parents owned a duplex. He was very much into building plastic airplane model kits, and he was very good at it. I could almost never afford to buy a model kit because they were usually 50 cents or 99 cents, so I lived vicariously through him. His family also had relatives in Arizona. They would almost always fly to Phoenix from Orange County Airport on Bonanza Airlines on one of their Fairchild F-27A Silver Dart twin-engine turboprops. I envied him for that, too, and would always enjoy it when he bought an F-27A model kit to build a Bonanza plane. The model kit builder, Revell, for the F-27A, would have you contact one of the small regional carries flying the F-27 to ask for decals of their paint scheme--West Coast, Pacific, Bonanza, Piedmont, Northeast.

In my final year at Yorba, I really stood out in my English class when we were supposed to rewrite a Shakespeare play to make it more contemporary and then perform the play for the class. One student modified The Taming of the Shrew by making it a hillbilly, Lil' Abner-type, farce. I was asked to play the main character, as well as act in the plays of two other students who picked different Shakespearean plays to modify. We even performed the Shrew in the school cafetorium later in the term for a talent event. I think we came in second to two boys who simply performed a Smothers Brothers comedy skit.

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6th Grade, Handy Elementary School, Orange, CA, 1960-1

In the fall of 1960, we started school at Handy Elementary, only a short distance from our home, before the Costa Mesa Freeway was built. The summer before school, my teacher, another man, came to the house to meet the parents. I was, of course, in my room yet again for perceived misbehavior (Willene almost never confined Freddie, but I was in room detention all the time--let's face it, she was a horrible parent who now had five kids, our half-sister Lorri having been added to the mix in March of 1961).

This new teacher was quite innovative. He brought a TV to school so we could watch the inauguration of John F. Kennedy (with the poet Robert Frost reading a poem for the occasion). We learned algebra--I still never got the concept of letters of the alphabet substituting for numbers. We had 100-word spelling tests every week. I wasn't a star student--too much disruption at home and no encouragement. But I got by. School was again, like the visits from mom, a refuge from all that we had to endure. If I had anything of value, I kept it at school to ensure that Freddie would not steal from me and trade my stuff at school for food.

It was at Handy that I first met my good friend Dave Moore. I also had another friend, Jim Gendron, I believe his name was. He had to have been gay, as well. We could both be flamboyant when we affected English accents--a sure sign right then that we were gay. I did hear from Dave that Jim had emotional issues and that his parents may have had him get help. Perhaps they realized that he was different and they were trying to address that--fortunately for me, Willene just didn't like us kids and we didn't like her. Nothing else was really an issue.

Our teacher had row monitors for each of the rows of desks in our classroom. The row monitors were selected based solely on test scores. So, week after week after week, we had the same row monitors. With almost no exceptions, or very few, they were the pretty, smart, competitive girls in the class. They were also the girls whose families were comfortably off financially. They weren't snobs or stuck up, but we regular kids were starting to get upset about this routine since it began to seem as if the whole thing was rigged against us. We loudly protested--it wasn't the girls themselves but it was the system we were opposed to. The teacher relented and let us vote for row monitors. With only one exception, a very popular boy we all liked, we voted for the exact same girls to be row monitors! Boy, were we really angry then. Unfortunately, with these same girls, I would experience one of the most painful humiliations of my young life.

One of the smart girls, though not particularly one of the cute girls, had a birthday party to which the whole class was invited. There was cake and a huge punch bowl with punch and large sherbet ice cream bergs floating around in the bowl. And there was dancing to pop records. I bravely asked in turn each of the pretty girls in class to which most of us were attracted if she would dance with me. Each told me the same thing: that they would dance with me, but I would first have to dance with Christine.

Christine was the one girl in class who was larger than almost all of us boys--Christine could, in fact, pound any of us boys into the ground had she wanted to. She was not at all attractive though I would soon discover that she was a good dancer. A deal was a deal, I figured, so I danced with her. When it was time to collect from the others, I returned to each of the pretty girls to fulfill the agreement each had made with me. However, they roundly refused. I was crushed. In addition, I felt betrayed. Had they simply suggested to me that I dance with Christine, assuming that I would not do so? Did they really think so little of me that a dance was out of the question?

I should have told them all that they were jerks to treat me that way and walked off with my dignity in tact. Unfortunately, I compounded my humiliation by grabbing one of them by the hand to drag her out to dance with me. The others grabbed her to keep my plan from succeeding. I cannot say how long this tug-of-war went on before I realized how much of a fool I was making of myself and how much they really did not want to dance with me, regardless of their promises. I suddenly stopped, let go of her hand, and sat down on a nearby bench, covered my face with my hands and began to bawl like a baby.

This caused quite a scene. With my hands over my eyes, I could only hear everyone talking. Parents were asking what the matter was. Boys in the class were trying to figure it out. The 3-4 girls who had helped initiate this outburst were confessing to what they had done. Eventually, I removed my hands from my face, stopped crying, and eventually the party resumed. I suppose a couple of those girls did dance with me, but I also made sure that I danced again with Christine. There were the cute, popular kids; and there were the less attractive, less popular kids, of which I suppose I realized I was one.

Unfortunately, to add to my humiliation, after the party broke up and we were being driving home by one of the parents, Willene called to ask where I was. The adult driving let off other students first so that I was one of the last to arrive home. She accosted me in the living room when I came into the house about where I had been. I calmly explained what had happened with the order of dropping us off, but she would have none of my explanation. She accused me of lying and of doing god knows what with the time that had transpired between when she called the house of the girl with the birthday, whose mother incautiously told her the party had ended awhile before, and when I finally walked through the front door. I could not win that night.

Frankly, I believe that she probably anticipated that I had had an enjoyable time at the party and she was going to darn well ensure that whatever fond memories I had would be permanently damaged by her baseless accusations. None of the other kids in the family had often been invited to a birthday party not our own, certainly not Freddie who was not someone other kids liked very much at school. She succeeded even though I never told anyone about how the party had almost been a total disaster for me anyway.

All of us did get to go to Disneyland because one of the kids in our school had a father who worked there. For a dollar per student, we got unlimited rides at the park that day. Unfortunately, for the four of us, dad could not afford four dollars for us to go. My teacher met with me separately and said the admission fee was taken care of. He may have contributed the amount himself for me, the same for the teachers of Georgann, Freddie and Pam. I did not go with Dave Moore, which I don't quite understand. The fellow student I spent the day with insisted that we ride the rockets around and around several times, followed by the Tea Cup ride. I almost puked at the end of that insane marathon of circling.

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Mom, Greg & Georgann, Summer 1961

A year later and we were staying with mom at the same La Reina address in Downey, CA, certainly for a weekend (the back of the picture is stamped by Kodak July 1961). Mom now lived in the unit at the very front of the complex, on the top floor, visible in the background of this shot. Issues at home were not getting any better, but at least these monthly visits provided some respite.

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The Great Kidnapping of Labor Day Weekend, 1960

Willene very quickly laid down the law that we could spend but a day, at most, with mom per month and that was it. We were too difficult once we came back from those monthly visits with her. However, for the Labor Day weekend of 1960, Grandma Breeze was visiting from White Cloud, Kansas, and wanted to spend that weekend with two of her grandkids. Dad was not home, but Willene was and told mom that we could not go with her, regardless of the unique circumstances. I met with them at the front door of the Lomita triplex and desperately wanted to go but knew I would be in terrible trouble if I did. Perhaps they jointly got the idea of kidnapping us, though I was the only one handy enough to drag off to her 1950 Jetback Buick. Each one had a hold on an arm and pulled me toward the street.

Quite a ruckus developed after that. Neighbors came out to watch. Neighbor kid Larry Sundstrom, who lived in one of our rentals, on orders from Willene ran out and got in front of the car to write down mom's license plate number. People were yelling and gesticulating wildly. He got the plate numbers (he was mildly retarded) and fled, and then mom drove off. They took me to a fancy shopping mall in Irvine to get me proper clothes for the weekend (I had only been wearing a T-shirt and shorts when they nabbed me). We spent the weekend at a couple of pools, as the pictures above indicate.

Mom was living in an apartment complex at the time in Downey, CA, on La Reina, in a studio, at the top and to the left of the stairs in the upper photograph. I slept on the floor, on a lamb skin rug. When the weekend finally came to a close and mom dropped me off at the triplex, dad suggested that I apologize to Willene, who was in the kitchen. I did so but without much conviction. They were having a barbecue with people I did not even know.

When we were clearing out mom's things from her apartment in San Pedro, CA, to move her to an assisted living residence several blocks away, I came across a legal document that made me curious. Dad apparently took out a court order against mom for the above incident. The main complaint was that mom did not inform him that she wanted to take us kids that day. She was required to give 24 hours' notice but had not. Mom agreed to the provisions of dad's complaint. She might have swallowed at bit of crow, but she subsequently was able to take us kids for a weekend as long as she notified dad of that in advance. I only recently learned from our Aunt Jean that Grandma Breeze was afraid that whole weekend that the cops would show up and take me away. But looking at the document, dad apparently claims he did not even know where mom lived at the time, so he could not have contacted the police to have me picked up.

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Villa Park Elementary School, Orange, CA

We attended Villa Park Elementary School in the spring of 1960, the 5th Grade (Georgann was in the 4th grade). Handy Elementary School would open for us in the fall of 1960, and was much closer to our home, over the freeway bridge. My classroom was the one of the right end of that section of classrooms. Georgann was in the next classroom down. I again had a female teacher. Not much was memorable that single semester except that they promoted religion in those days by having students attend instruction, perhaps once a week or maybe once a month, at some one's house near the campus. We Catholics were met by a priest at the home of an elderly woman. I suppose that was their way of separating church and state by having these religious classes off campus. The only other memory I have is that several of the moms with acting aspirations put on a production in the cafetorium of Lil' Abner.

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1745 Lomita Avenue, Orange, CA

We moved from Oak St. to Lomita some time before Christmas of that year, but we moved into a duplex that Pam, Freddie and Willene were renting across the street and a couple of houses down from the triplex being built. After New Year's, dad married Willene since his divorce was now final. That's when the real issues began. Tiger was gone. That Christmas, I got a car carrier with three cars on it. It came with three rubber bands to keep the plastic cars on the carrier. My soon-to-be step-brother Freddie stole the rubber bands which he needed for some gift he got for Christmas. When I protested loudly about what he had done, Willene came over and smacked me hard across the face. She then lied and announced that the three rubber bands he now had, while I had none, had been given to him by her. They were not mine, though where mine had gotten to was a mystery. This would become the pattern of our lives with her. Freddie would do something bad, she would cover up or ignore his transgression, and the rest of us would somehow be punished.

I have but one photo that I will put up next from this period; but, again, there are no others, so Lorri might have those. The new house itself when we moved in that spring needed all kinds of exterior work on the grounds. We helped dad build that low brick wall at the sidewalk, as well as the brick planters across the front of the house. We hauled many wheelbarrows filled with dirt in or rocks away, to fill in the front yard. We felt like slaves much of the time. When the lawns matured, Freddie and I had to divide them between us to mow once a week. He would do his, the easier sections that had the least amount of edging, first thing in the morning. I would have to wait until he was done and then take over. Especially with the two segments of lawn in back, in front of the two rental units, I would mow and edge and Willene would stand at the den window and watch me the entire time, thumping on the window with her knuckles and then pointing to where she insisted I had missed some blade of grass or other.

One summer, Freddie was supposed to take summer school. He was forever doing poorly in school anyway. However, he did not attend. He skipped school every single day. I soon realized what he was doing, but I had quickly learned that you could not tell Willene anything that her precious son had done wrong. She would refuse to believe it and would turn the accusation against the informant. Pam may have also figured it out, but Willene remained oblivious. (Georgann was staying with the grandparents that summer because she had had her own confrontations with Willene and this was a cooling off period for both of them.) By term's end, of course, she was presented by the school with the fact that he had not been attending at all. The rest of us were punished for not have squealed on him--we could not win either way.

Mom's monthly visits were the only highlights of our three and a half intolerable years of living with Willene and Freddie (Spring 1960 - June 1963). We'd get to go away for a day and forget about the rest of the month, for a few hours, at least. But then we'd have to return on Sunday evening, and the cycle of physical or emotional abuse would continue all over again.

During one stretch, emotional confrontations between Freddie and me were so intense, they moved him into the spare room even though Lorri was in the crib there. I was in heaven, now having the bedroom all to myself. We didn't fight nearly as much because he and I weren't sharing the same room--and the nights when Willene would come in and smack us with the metal fly swatter hardly happened--Freddie would leap all over the room once she started on him and weep openly even when hardly a single blow landed--I would stoically stand there and take the beatings with the metal handle of the fly swatter and not react in any way. (I think that made her even angrier, and she'd hit me harder, but I would still not be provoked.) Unfortunately, the separation ended after a couple of weeks and he was moved back into the bedroom.

A bit of background is important here. Dad had ulcers--no surprise there--so he would chew gum to deal with them. Freddie would sneak into their bedroom and steal packs of gum to chew at night. The girls also made brownies for our school lunches, but they seemed to disappear faster than they ought to have. Here was Willene, broom in hand, and there at her feet, after Freddie's bed was moved out, were multiple brownie crumbs and a few empty Chicklets boxes, yet she never acted as if she saw any of this obvious evidence. I stood there, amazed, and watched her sweep, marveling at her overt denial that her son was a thief.

His thievery was not confined to food or gum. He would steal my things, take them to school, and trade them for food to other students. If we had identical toys, and Willene had taped our names to the bottom, as she did with our new, red tanker trucks, as soon as he abused his truck, he sneaked out to the garage and switched the name tags. You could see the outline of where the tape had been reapplied since we had run them through a mud puddle in the alley. He did the same thing with my jeans. She would write our names on the leather tags on the back. When his began to wear down, he would take a pen and write over my name with his. You could see the faint outline of "Greg" having been overlaid with "Fred", but telling her would do no good--it was the rubber bands incident all over again.

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Palmyra Elementary School, Orange, CA

In the fall of 1959, we attended school here. I actually enjoyed this term very much, as well as my fellow students. My teacher, whose name I do not remember, though Mr. Baker surfaces in my mind, was the first male teacher I would have until Junior High. The class would listen to radio broadcasts over the intercom about various national parks, many in California. After listening, we would draw a picture of that national park. I guess mine always looked the same and that was often because the broadcasts were about Mt. Shasta or Mt. Lassen or some other snow-peaked mountain somewhere along the Pacific Coast or just inland. Looking through all of the pictures, not one can I identify from this period of time when we lived on Oak St. and walked to Palmyra. If there were any class pictures, dad probably had them. And if any of those survived, our half-sister Lorri likely has them.

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253 Oak St. Orange, CA

We had waited outside under the covered porch for the moving van. We may have even said goodbye to our friends the Tiptons and the Hofeldts. The moving van was large and slow. Dad stopped a couple of times along the freeway from Whittier for them to catch up, complaining that they were probably slow because they were getting paid by the hour. This apartment complex above with a pool was our destination that sunny day.

The aerial photo of that complex today shows that the swimming pool no longer exists, but the place looks very much the same as it did in the summer of 1959 when we moved in. Grandma still lived with us and would until we moved in with the others in another house across the street and a couple houses down the block from the triplex being built for all of us on Lomita Avenue in Orange.

Even this place wasn't particularly a happy one to live. Grandma Sanchez was difficult to live with, as always. She treated my cat Tiger poorly, feeding him leftover oatmeal, which he would not eat, instead of cat food. He wandered the neighborhood, being an outdoor cat much of time. I would also learn another mean trait from Willene, our soon-to-be stepmother. It would be she who would tell dad that I could not keep Tiger after we all moved in together at the beginning of 1960. So dad told me that he would simply dump Tiger somewhere along his route of visiting paint stores. One day, which he said would take him by an ideal locale for Tiger to spend his remaining days, he took Tiger with him in the car and that's the last I saw of my cat. He lied to me about a week later, saying that he again had gone by the place where he had dumped him and saw Tiger carrying a fat mouse in his mouth. Even then, I suspect that I was skeptical about the convenient story.

We didn't have any friends that summer. I did become acquainted with a much older woman who lived in an apartment at the end of the complex. I got into mischief one day, unfortunately, probably from boredom. I stepped into an oil spot on one of the parking spaces and tracked it across several other spaces, finally wiping my feet on the grass. I stepped into mud and tracked those across the sidewalk inside the complex, cleaning off my shoes by dangling them into the pool. I was accused of doing all of this by the older woman and by my Grandma Sanchez; and, of course, I lied, being 10 years old. It wasn't me, I pleaded through my tears. But that one afternoon was the extent of my wild, rebellious ways that summer. Otherwise, we played canasta with Grandma, watched some television, and listened to dad's collection of Broadway cast recordings of such musicals as The Music Man.

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Two More Glamour Shots

One shot on the beach, the other at home. Georgann almost seems an after thought in that picture.

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Mom's Glamour Shots

The top one is annotated on the back: "Back stage scene of our fashion show." The second one is apparently Palm Springs.

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Mom & Dad attending parties, 1945, 1948

The top picture is heavily annotated on the back: "Quite an evening" It's dated 1944, but I am sure that's wrong. Dad could not have been released from the P.O.W. camp in 1944. This must be 1945, after the war in Europe ended. "Grif is poking Jean Brooks 'RKO star' on the nose. Corrine, his daughter, is looking on. The two characters on the left are Lt. Sanchez and I. (Period) California."

The bottom photograph indicates, "[19]48 Mike Patton, Sanchez, Denver. Phyllis Baker"

They were young. They were having fun. He was in uniform or still in the service. It was still the 1940's, after the war. A decade later, the marriage was effectively over and she was on her own again.

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Christmas Party, early 1950's

I saved this photograph and a couple of earlier ones to make a point. Ann and I discussed this recently. Mom often told us that one of the reasons she married dad was that his parents paid for her train ticket down to Florida. She felt obliged to marry him--a very bad justification for getting married. However, he was a military officer. The two of them did travel about the country with assignments in states and at bases she'd never been to before. For her, being born and raised in rural Kansas, even though she had lived in Phoenix and L.A. during and after the war, it was still an exciting life, being a military wife. She did not have to work in a bank anymore. After we were born, they returned to California where dad's parents had that wonderful house on the beach with the sailboat. It all must have seemed pretty glamorous for her.

Unfortunately, after dad was shipped overseas to Japan, and was then about to be sent to Korea, he did not want to run the risk of becoming a P.O.W. again. (His sole story to me of life in the camp was that when the Germans gave them raw potatoes to eat, even if they were covered in mud, he explained, "You rubbed off the mud and you ate it. It was all they gave us to eat sometimes.") When dad resigned his commission, he was a civilian. No longer would they be sent to San Antonio, Texas; or Denver, Colorado; or Biloxi, Mississippi; or Tampa, Florida; or Valdosta, Georgia; or Victorville, California. No longer was mom able to be part of Women's Clubs like the one above. Or attend parties or other functions on base.

Mom was then simply a suburban housewife with two children in the 1950's. She may have gone all out with the birthday parties and Halloween parties and decorations or presents for Christmas. But it wasn't very glamorous. She was no longer meeting and getting her picture taken with the movie stars such as Ginger Rogers or Paul Henried. She was no longer married to a military officer. She was married to a paint salesman who ran a paint store in Whittier, California. By the late 1950's, the grandparents no longer had the house on the water in Newport Beach or the sailboat. They soon would live in Placentia, CA, not very glamorous compared to Newport Beach.

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