These two are also from June 16, 1968. The above is in the living room of Dave's girlfriend's parents house. The lower photograph is of the front of their house. This might have been when I was also invited to a barbecue at their home but had to leave immediately afterwards. I guess I neglected to thank them for the meal, and they mentioned something to Dave. I heard about their comments and sent them a long, apologetic note that rather embarrassed them about making such a fuss regarding my lack of a verbal thank you.
Dave's father, a Marine, was not pleased with Dave's relationship with his girlfriend. Not many months later, he took Dave out of college and had Dave join him in Southeast Asia--Thailand, I believe--where he was stationed, to break up their relationship. That action totally screwed up Dave's life. He was no longer in college, so he became eligible for the draft when he returned. His girlfriend took up with a guy who had been Dave's good friend in high school, and they would soon marry. When Dave returned, he wasn't very successful putting his life back together because of that. He was soon living with his kookie cousin, Mona. One morning I had to take him downtown to the induction center because he'd gotten his draft notice.
We'd stopped by the Wayfarer's Chapel along the coast on Palos Verdes Peninsula the night before. I had tossed a coin in the wishing well there and said to whomever might be listening, "Take care of Dave." Later that day, Dave called me at A.U. Morse to tell me that, because he had attempted suicide a few month's earlier (probably not a very serious attempt) while he and Mona had been living in Torrance, the army rejected him. Unfortunately, though, that rejection didn't make his life any easier. He would eventually move in with his older sister in a trailer park near Oceanside in 1972 or so. And by the time I was dealing with my military service requirements after college, in 1972 and 1973, he would also join the Air Force as an enlisted man. But a couple of years later, while I was in the Air Force, stationed in North Dakota, I would find out that he had been medically discharged and would be at a VA Hospital in Northern California, in the "patient squadron," I was told. I tried to contact him at the hospital, but I never did find out what had happened or where he went after his stay there.
We'd been good friends since elementary school at Handy in 1960. But in 1975, I completely lost track of him. Even Mike had helped Mona out by giving her a ride into downtown L.A., to her job at the Clothing Mart, not far from where he worked. Mona and Dave were dreadfully poor at one point when I visited them in a clean but barely adequate apartment with very little furniture, in a part of L.A. that was not the best. She, her infant son, and Dave were sometimes living on just beans for meals, I learned. I helped by giving him money even though I was making well less than $2.00 per hour. He'd been my best friend when living with Willene had been so terrible, so I had no problem helping him out.
Mona never married the man who had fathered her child--it had become that kind of era. When he died under odd circumstances that I never did quite figure out, and his family disowned both her and the infant, she eventually began seeing a married man in the astronaut program. He helped her out financially, even set up a jewelry outlet in a small shopping center near the much nicer apartment he had moved them to in a far better part of town, but he soon grew tired of Dave being around.
Soon, Dave had to move on; and, not long afterwards, I found out that he was living near Oceanside with his older sister and was working at a Fish and Chips fast food restaurant in a town nearby--this was in 1972. I would drive down there with my new Peugeot bike tucked in the backseat of my Mustang, and we would ride it among the dirt paths near the trailer park. One time I had to push his Rambler back to the trailer park repeatedly with my Mustang because the seal to the radiator had broken, stranding the car several miles from the trailer park. It was a long, arduous effort because the temporary seals Dave used, the tops of plastic milk jugs, would stay in place for only a short distance, requiring that we stop, refill the radiator, put another plug in place, and start the whole pushing process all over again. I drove off that day not in the best of moods when we at long last reached the park.
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