After OCS - June 1972 to August 1973 - Finding my way forward

I no longer remember the order in which the next two events happened, but I either got a job as a security guard for a local company first or I heard back from the Air Force regarding Officer's Training School at Lackland in San Antonio, TX.  

One of the guys I had known while working in the warehouse at A.U. Morse and Company, before I had moved into the office and then been fired, had previously been a security guard.  A part of his sad story was that his father, who was in the military, put both of his sons into foster care.  Perhaps their mother was dead.  That part of the story, I no longer recall.  But while in foster care, one of the families that got money for caring for the two boys fed them dog food--even as an adult he did not seem bitter just surprised and disappointed that they'd been treated that way.  He and his brother were white, so it wasn't racism that caused the two to be treated so inhumanely. 

When I met him, he was married with a child.  Eventually, he left A.U. Morse and went back to being a security guard.  Again, the order of things and how certain events happened, I know longer recall.  But with my unemployment either running out or having just run out, and no other job prospects of any kind on the horizon (I had even for a short period while in the warehouse, but before the Marines, quit and worked at a sock warehouse in downtown L.A. for a company that my best friend Mike worked for), I was in need of some sort of employment, possibly to pay off my '66 Mustang.

(It was at this point that I ought to have gone back to Dominguez Hills, entered a Master's program, and, upon graduation, gotten a job as a community college instructor.  But that was a direction I never considered, but had I done so, there would likely be no Rainbow Arc of Fire.  No husband, Mark.  No military career, even if foreshortened.  So while the safer, perhaps better, path was there, I did not pursue it.)

I don't know how or why he got a hold of me for that job, but the guy who had been a foster kid did get me a job at the same security guard company, run by a husband and wife team, that he worked for.  I had to buy a specific shirt, trousers and badge at a supply store in downtown L.A., and I got my first assignment, working in a tiny guard shack for Yellow Freight in a trucking district somewhere in the Los Angeles Basin, but not too far from South Gate.  That assignment only lasted a short time, but I remember this as my first experience working a swing shift.  I adapted pretty well.  There was a small radio in the shack, so I listened to L.A. Lakers games; and I also remember reading John Knowles's book, A SEPARATE PEACE, as well as his short story collection that included PHINEAS, during those quiet intervals when freight trucks were not entering or exiting the facility.

Actually, I had never been much of sports fan until I met Daylin.  Their household would watch Rams football games and NBA games, as well as college football and basketball, especially with UCLA having their run of championships under John Wooden and USC being a football powerhouse.  His dad would sit in his oversized lounge chair, smoking cigarettes and piling the butts up like logs in the ashtray, Daylin would explain the nuances of football or basketball to me, and pretty soon I started watching on my own at home.  Beginning in 1971, I even drove to the Rams ticket office at the Coliseum, or in the main office in Los Angeles, possibly on Pico Blvd., and bought pairs of tickets to Rams home games. 

I still remember the first night I went with Daylin to my first live game in the Coliseum.   Daylin explained that seats above the end zone allowed you to see the line splits so you could see gaps opening up where the running back could break free and run for yardage.  The running game was far more significant in those days than now.  The Rams starting backfield was two white guys, Les Josephson and Larry Smith.  Their wide receivers, Jack Snow and Lance Rentzel, and tight ends, Bob Klein and Pat Curran, were also white.  It was an entirely different era, but the transitioning was beginning.  Their reserve running back would be Willie Ellison, who would eventually take over for Larry Smith and run for a record number of yards in one game that had never been accomplished before, 236 yards if I am remembering correctly, something quite significant then--this was before OJ entered the league from USC.    

Regarding the end zone seats, of course the end zone seats were also cheaper; and Daylin in those days was especially frugal.  This was 1971, and the Rams had just hired UCLA Football Coach Tommy Prothro with the departure of former Head Coach George Allen to the Redskins. That team had just lost legendary coach Vince Lombardi to cancer and needed to replace him.  (Lombardi had left the Packers after their glorious reign was at an end and spent a single season with Washington before cancer overtook him.)   Prothro might not have been one of the better Rams coaches, but the team drafted two of the best players they ever had that first year that he was coach:  Isiah Robertson and Jack Youngblood.  So while their record did not earn a playoff spot, and was barely winning, their future was being established.  

That first night in the Summer of 1971, we emerged from a tunnel at the West end of the Coliseum into an almost indescribably glorious scene.  The stadium with row upon row of seats seemed massive, the field below an almost endless stretch of bright, almost chartreuse, grass bordered and gridironed in white.  The Rams were in their Hospital white and blue uniforms.  The game was a monumental spectacle of bright lights, intermittent, thrilling action, and crowds roaring their approval of one successful play or another.  The Rams still had Roman Gabriel at quarterback; and Coy Bacon and Merlin Olsen, part of the latest Fearsome Foursome (Lamar Lundy and Roosevelt Grier had retired at the point I started watching the team), with one of the greatest defensive ends of all time, David "Deacon" Jones, who coined the phrase to "sack" the opposing quarterback.  I was hooked from that night onward.  

I bought every pro football preseason magazine on the newsstand after that.  Poured over the impending rosters and looked carefully at all the trades in the league, how they might help or hurt my Rams.  I noted that the Rams had traded for troubled Dallas wide receiver (flanker) Lance Rentzel, to pair with Jack Snow.  I even bought and read Rentzel's book, WHEN ALL THE LAUGHTER DIED IN SORROW, about his horrendous addiction to exposing himself to underaged girls.  He'd married the actress Joey Heatherton, but she divorced him when he was arrested after one of these incidents. 

Once I had pairs of tickets to that season and the next, I always managed to rope someone into using my second ticket to a Rams game, once even taking a UPS driver I was attracted to to a night game, though I doubt he was gay.  It may have been for the 1973 season that I had finally purchased a single season ticket to Rams games, but my mom would have to use it once I was gone during the fall season that year.

As I said, it wasn't just pro football that earned my attention in the early 1970's.  During the 1971-1972 season, when the L.A. Lakers had Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, Gail Goodrich, Keith Erickson, Pat Riley, Jim McMillan, Happy Hairston, Flynn Robinson and others, they went on an unprecedented win streak of 33 games.  I had picked it up during the middle of the run until Kareem and the Milwaukee Bucks ended that streak.  I even watched the final game of the finals in taped delay when Wilt and Jerry won it all while I was awaiting discharge from Marine OCS in that out-processing building one night.  I believe the small set was in black and white, but the thrill West and the team experienced was genuinely apparent after soo many finals appearances when they had lost, most often to the Boston Celtics.

But that next year, I would try to follow the Lakers even on that little radio in the guard shack at Yellow Freight as the Lakers put away the Golden State Warriors and Nate Thurmond, their Hall of Fame center who always gave Wilt memorable games, as the team marched to yet another NBA Finals against the New York Knicks.