Unfortunately, the Ficus tree's extensive roots had buckled the front sidewalk over time. A city crew in early fall cut the tree down, dug up the roots, and planted the Magnolia tree in the photo at the top. That Magnolia tree is still there all these years later. It has grown significantly taller but, as then, still provides very little shade, nothing like the Ficus tree. Sadly, too, the quaint house now looks like a fortress today, so I imagine that the neighborhood is no longer as safe a place to live and grow up in as it was in the 1960's. Here I am in front of the house just a few years ago, bars on the windows and a wrought-iron fence and wall around the front yard. We had grass but now it's artificial turf. There used to be a grass strip between the two cement lines of the driveway, that has been paved over also.
Unfortunately, our landlord almost immediately sold the inherited house to a developer who built that massive apartment building in 1965. When completed, it had four units, corresponding legally to the number of parking spaces in back of the structure. But after the city's inspection was concluded, the builder closed off portions in the middle of the building to create two studio units, one on each floor. There were then six apartments and not enough parking spaces off of the street. (In more recent years, when we have revisited the old neighborhoods, Mike Mebs would have a tough time navigating the drive down narrow Cypress Avenue because of all of the parked cars on either side of the street--the population density of South Gate is far greater now than when we lived there.)
The front apartment upstairs has a very small deck and a door that leads out of the living room to that tiny landing, facing down to the driveway on the other side of the building from our house. One day, a few years after we moved in, I was walking home from church at midday from the direction of Firestone. I looked up to see that the door to the tiny deck was wide open, and a very handsome young man was standing just a couple of feet into the living room beyond. Curiously, he was totally naked, standing almost in profile, his body lithely tanned and muscular. He was probably in his later teens, but not much more than a few years older than I. He was gazing down at me as I walked along just as I was intently looking up at him, amazed at what I was seeing. He made no attempt to move out of my sight into the darkness of the rest of the apartment or to cover his fully exposed genitals. He just stood there, unmoved. The expression on his face was not unfriendly though somewhat passive. He may have glanced back toward what I assumed was the front bedroom, but his gaze quickly returned to me on the sidewalk.
In all of the years we lived on Cypress after that, I never saw him again. I don't recall that I ever saw that door open again. Perhaps he was only a visitor from the night before. To this day, I wish that I had stopped walking as I continued to stare, perhaps even waved up at him. Any gesture to show that I was intrigued. That I wasn't just some disinterested passerby. But in my amazement at what I was seeing, and in my nervousness, I just kept walking, my mind racing. In front of our house, I even looked up on the other side of the apartment building, at the front bedroom window; but the curtains remained firmly closed. He had not walked to the other side of the apartment, to see where I was headed.
I believe that during the entire time we lived on Cypress, Mom paid $75 per month rent. As the years passed, we seemed to each have increasingly independent lives even though we lived under the same roof. Mom worked full time, and Ann and I went to school full time but returned home much earlier than Mom would. For that first year there, Ann still had the long walk to Junior High while I was able to walk a much shorter distance to the High School. We kept a key under the front door mat, not that we really had much of value that anyone would want to steal if they knew where the key was hidden.
Mom was a smoker and had been for years (but so were most adults in that era). Cleaning her dirty ashtrays was a common process for us kids. If we were all sitting at the kitchen table together, the smoke would seem to waft directly toward me. Even if I got up and moved, it would float toward me there. As a consequence of being exposed to cigarette smoke, I never wanted to take up smoking, despite the hot ads on TV or in magazines those days before the bans, with some mountain-man hunk or swimsuit-clad, tanned and muscular man, posing sexily with a cigarette in hand or sultrily puffing away in an ad on TV. The following photograph is the only one I have found of our kitchen. The man in the photo is Kenny Morse, Mom's volatile boyfriend throughout the mid 1960's. I am wearing my favorite black surf pants. The legs in the photo belong to Mom, so Ann likely took the picture.
Kenny lived in a perpetually disheveled apartment in Downey (we once all pitched in and cleaned it for him--the amount of dust behind the bedroom door was remarkable). I believe Mom loved him very much, but he was way too unpredictable emotionally. One afternoon, he bought for me a 45 of Sandy Shaw's, Girl Don't Come, for which I was incredibly grateful. However, when we got home, I realized that I had left the stereo record player on and mentioned that I ought to let it cool down for a few minutes since it was quite warm. He took offense at not being able to immediately listen to the record he had bought for me and bolted out of the door, though I was thankful that he did not take the record.
Before the 1980's were over, Mom told me that she had learned Kenny was dead. Between the smoking and drinking and the emotional roller coaster of his behavior, it did him in, years before Mom passed. I know his death saddened her, and perhaps he was the love of her life, if she ever had one.
(When we lived on Cypress and I was in college, I remember we would get an occasional phone call from a man whom Mom had known from her early years in Kansas. Eventually, I would learn that his name was Ralph Houk, from Lawrence, Kansas, west of White Cloud. Born in 1919, he had been a not-very-successful baseball player in this youth, playing for a well-known professional organization, the New York Yankees. Twice, later, he became manager of those same Yankees, the first time in the early 1960's very successfully when they were world champions, the second time in the later 1960's and early 1970's, not so successfully when they missed the playoffs several times. It was during that second stint when the Yankees would be in Southern California to play the Anaheim Angels that he would call mom. She would get the message and take off to meet him. He was a married man, and I presume they merely met up for dinner before or after a game, as old friends might. If anything further happened between them on those rare nights when he'd call, I was not aware nor did I care. He would later manage the Tigers and Red Sox, but if the two ever met up during those years while I was away in the Air Force, I have no idea. Long after Mom had died, I came across a couple of old photographs that she had in her collection of Ralph Houk on the Missouri River as a much younger man in rural Kansas. Even the extent of their relationship back then when they were young is unclear. Ralph Houk died in July of 2010 at the age of 90. Mom would die eight years before him in June of 2002 at the age of 80.)
Kenny Morse was friends with a comfortably wealthy couple whom we liked (they let me board an American Airlines 707 briefly before it took off for Detroit, Michigan, from LAX). They adopted a young boy since they could not have kids of their own. I remember him being a cute, precocious youngster. Years later, Mom told me that they found out as he matured that not only did he have some African-American heritage in his background that they were not aware of at the time they adopted him, they also found out he was gay. Mom related to me that he was appearing in the chorus of La Cage Aux Folles on Broadway. They were a kind couple; but like so many whites in that era, they had their abiding prejudices. After hearing from Mom about their adopted son now grown up, I always wondered if his being part African-American or all gay that most bothered his extremely conservative parents. Probably both.
Mom and Ann shared a bedroom in the right front of the house, while mine was in the back. Except for the few months before Ann was born, this was the first time in my entire life to that point that I got a bedroom of my own. Ann and I shared a bedroom in Whittier, Dad and I on Oak St, Fred and I on E Lomita, and I slept in the living room on Orchard, not even having a bedroom that year.
The living room on Cypress is on the front left of the house. There was a small dining room that mom actually furnished as a media room with a sectional couch and an end table placed between the two sections. The kitchen was in the back left of the house. We ate our meals at the kitchen table or on the couch while watching TV in the media room. As with every home I have typically lived in before, we had one shared bathroom (the Whittier house had the one additional half bathroom in the rear corner of the house between kitchen and den, but we only rarely used it). Four of us shared the main bathroom in Whittier, four of us shared the bathroom in the apartment on S Oak St, four of us kids shared the bathroom on E Lomita, and three of us shared the one bathroom on Orchard and on Cypress.
Even more than with the apartment on Orchard, the house on Cypress was directly under the flight path of aircraft heading into LAX. So much so that you could not hear the TV, and you would have to stop a conversation, when a jetliner flew directly overhead. Strangely enough, the National Airlines DC-8 flights from Houston or New Orleans passing overhead were lower and louder than any other aircraft or airline. With the Ficus tree gone, whenever I ran out to the front yard to look up, I could identify the aircraft and airline as they headed directly West. I was always right about the noisier National flights.
Mom and I are sitting on the couch in the living room circa 1965. The pastel artwork behind us mom treasured for years. She told me that she had bought it in Florida from a woman artist who later died of cancer. Ann inherited it after mom died but later tossed it out.
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The year 1964, before and after we moved from Orchard, featured a few parties I attended. Sodas and potato chips were all that were offered, not that any of us wanted anything more intoxicating. I went to a party East of Orchard Place where someone played Opportunity by the Jewels. At some point afterwards, I bought the 45. Ann and I held a modestly attended party at our apartment. Richard Watson and Michael Leonard were intending to host a party at Richard's house. But after Richard bought a shopping cart load of sodas at a nearby market, I found myself pushing the cart alone after the two of them disappeared. (I never did learn what they were up to.) When I arrived at Richard's house on Mountain View, a few blocks away from the market, I was confronted by his mom who asked where Richard was when she saw that I was pushing the heavy cart by myself. He and Michael showed up a few minutes later and Richard got scolded, probably for abandoning me with the full shopping cart. That party never took place. That fall, after school started, I was invited to another party, this time on Garden View Avenue, one block over from our house on Cypress. I was able to watch the premiere of Bewitched on TV in the fall of 1964, before the party started. Someone there played Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison, a number one hit that month.
Once in high school, Michael Leonard showed up with a buddy driving a Corvair that he had borrowed, asking if I wanted to take a ride with them. We ended up as far away as Long Beach. It was only then that I learned that Michael's buddy did not even have a driver's license. The whole way back I worried that we might get pulled over by the police and arrested. His buddy also came over with Michael with a couple of bottles of booze. They challenged me to take a swig when they found out that I had never had a drink before. I took a sip of Whisky. It exploded in my throat. They said, "Take a swig of Vodka. That'll help because it's just like water." It, too, exploded in my throat. I had no desire to ever drink again. The stuff was nasty.
Unfortunately, Michael Leonard moved away some time after we wrote our names in the sidewalk out front of the house in October of 1964. I helped him and his mom make the move; but, as with Richard Watson after he moved from South Gate in June of '64, after I helped Michael and his mom move, I never heard from him again.
That summer before high school, I would hike over to the houses of my friends. Rhonda Sewel's house on Liberty Blvd often became a gathering spot for a few of us. Her mom would make tuna fish sandwiches for us at lunch, saving me the long walk back home to have lunch there.
That summer while hiking around town with a new buddy, we stopped at a junkyard that used to be on Tweedy Blvd, possibly where a CVS Pharmacy is now. I had first learned about The Legion of Super-Heroes DC Comic book team from a panel in an imaginary tale about Lex Luthor finally killing Superman from 1961. Freddie had brought the comic home (without a cover). I was immediately intrigued.
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That summer of 1964, I found the following comic at that junkyard, with a cover, that was about the same teenaged super-hero team from the future. (Teenaged groups had always interested me, even when I read the Trixie Beldon teen novels when they formed a 'Bobwhites of the Glen" club in an old gatehouse on the grounds of Honey Wheeler's parents' estate.)
I believe I bought the comic book for five cents. Not long after that, I discovered that a neighborhood market and liquor store on Long Beach Blvd, around the corner from Glenwood Place (that ended at Cypress) had a wooden bin filled with used comic books for a nickel each. Regarding any of these comic books that featured the teenaged Legion of Super-Heroes, I would snatch them up, take them home, and greedily pour through their futuristic tales. Starting with Adventure Comics #300, September 1962, the Legion of Super-Heroes were regularly featured. Beginning with Adventure Comics #311, I would have to buy them brand new that August of 1964 from the pharmacy that carried brand new comics, across the street from that neighborhood grocery store on the Northwest corner of Long Beach Blvd. My love of comic books and superheroes was cemented that summer and fall.
Yucaipa & Ensenada
That first summer on Cypress, Mom sent us off to spend two weeks with Grandma and Grandpa Sanchez in their trailer park in Yucaipa, CA. We spent a lot of time playing Canasta with Grandma Sanchez. I brought some aviation magazines with me and poured through them often. I am not sure why, probably a reflection of Mom's conservatism; but I did watch Barry Goldwater's nomination as the Republican Party's nominee for President on July 15th, 1964, in the Cow Palace near San Francisco, on their B&W TV. I mentioned my support for Goldwater to Grandma and a woman friend as we went for an evening walk in the trailer park. They looked at one another, made brief remarks that I did not overhear, and laughed at me which made me suspect that they both were Roosevelt Democrats.
Goldwater made any number of ridiculous statements during his acceptance speech and during the campaign: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is not virtue." He said something about wishing that the Eastern Seaboard (a liberal bastion) could be sawed off and float out to sea. Surprisingly for me in the 1980's, after I was forced to resign from the Air Force for being gay in 1979, Senator Barry Goldwater would write a forceful editorial, advocating that gays should be able to serve openly in the several branches of the military.
During our stay, Grandpa Sanchez hooked up his Airstream trailer (where I slept each night in the storage area while we stayed with them), and off we four went to the outskirts of Ensenada, Mexico, for a few days. He hooked up the trailer in a park on the beach. I slept in their station wagon while the grandparents and Ann slept in the trailer. At night in the moonlight, I could watch the waves crashing against the shoreline. After our short stay in Mexico, we headed back to Yucaipa before the grandparents returned us to South Gate.
The living room on Cypress is on the front left of the house. There was a small dining room that mom actually furnished as a media room with a sectional couch and an end table placed between the two sections. The kitchen was in the back left of the house. We ate our meals at the kitchen table or on the couch while watching TV in the media room. As with every home I have typically lived in before, we had one shared bathroom (the Whittier house had the one additional half bathroom in the rear corner of the house between kitchen and den, but we only rarely used it). Four of us shared the main bathroom in Whittier, four of us shared the bathroom in the apartment on S Oak St, four of us kids shared the bathroom on E Lomita, and three of us shared the one bathroom on Orchard and on Cypress.
Even more than with the apartment on Orchard, the house on Cypress was directly under the flight path of aircraft heading into LAX. So much so that you could not hear the TV, and you would have to stop a conversation, when a jetliner flew directly overhead. Strangely enough, the National Airlines DC-8 flights from Houston or New Orleans passing overhead were lower and louder than any other aircraft or airline. With the Ficus tree gone, whenever I ran out to the front yard to look up, I could identify the aircraft and airline as they headed directly West. I was always right about the noisier National flights.
Mom and I are sitting on the couch in the living room circa 1965. The pastel artwork behind us mom treasured for years. She told me that she had bought it in Florida from a woman artist who later died of cancer. Ann inherited it after mom died but later tossed it out.
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The year 1964, before and after we moved from Orchard, featured a few parties I attended. Sodas and potato chips were all that were offered, not that any of us wanted anything more intoxicating. I went to a party East of Orchard Place where someone played Opportunity by the Jewels. At some point afterwards, I bought the 45. Ann and I held a modestly attended party at our apartment. Richard Watson and Michael Leonard were intending to host a party at Richard's house. But after Richard bought a shopping cart load of sodas at a nearby market, I found myself pushing the cart alone after the two of them disappeared. (I never did learn what they were up to.) When I arrived at Richard's house on Mountain View, a few blocks away from the market, I was confronted by his mom who asked where Richard was when she saw that I was pushing the heavy cart by myself. He and Michael showed up a few minutes later and Richard got scolded, probably for abandoning me with the full shopping cart. That party never took place. That fall, after school started, I was invited to another party, this time on Garden View Avenue, one block over from our house on Cypress. I was able to watch the premiere of Bewitched on TV in the fall of 1964, before the party started. Someone there played Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison, a number one hit that month.
Once in high school, Michael Leonard showed up with a buddy driving a Corvair that he had borrowed, asking if I wanted to take a ride with them. We ended up as far away as Long Beach. It was only then that I learned that Michael's buddy did not even have a driver's license. The whole way back I worried that we might get pulled over by the police and arrested. His buddy also came over with Michael with a couple of bottles of booze. They challenged me to take a swig when they found out that I had never had a drink before. I took a sip of Whisky. It exploded in my throat. They said, "Take a swig of Vodka. That'll help because it's just like water." It, too, exploded in my throat. I had no desire to ever drink again. The stuff was nasty.
Unfortunately, Michael Leonard moved away some time after we wrote our names in the sidewalk out front of the house in October of 1964. I helped him and his mom make the move; but, as with Richard Watson after he moved from South Gate in June of '64, after I helped Michael and his mom move, I never heard from him again.
That summer before high school, I would hike over to the houses of my friends. Rhonda Sewel's house on Liberty Blvd often became a gathering spot for a few of us. Her mom would make tuna fish sandwiches for us at lunch, saving me the long walk back home to have lunch there.
That summer while hiking around town with a new buddy, we stopped at a junkyard that used to be on Tweedy Blvd, possibly where a CVS Pharmacy is now. I had first learned about The Legion of Super-Heroes DC Comic book team from a panel in an imaginary tale about Lex Luthor finally killing Superman from 1961. Freddie had brought the comic home (without a cover). I was immediately intrigued.
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Yucaipa & Ensenada
That first summer on Cypress, Mom sent us off to spend two weeks with Grandma and Grandpa Sanchez in their trailer park in Yucaipa, CA. We spent a lot of time playing Canasta with Grandma Sanchez. I brought some aviation magazines with me and poured through them often. I am not sure why, probably a reflection of Mom's conservatism; but I did watch Barry Goldwater's nomination as the Republican Party's nominee for President on July 15th, 1964, in the Cow Palace near San Francisco, on their B&W TV. I mentioned my support for Goldwater to Grandma and a woman friend as we went for an evening walk in the trailer park. They looked at one another, made brief remarks that I did not overhear, and laughed at me which made me suspect that they both were Roosevelt Democrats.
Goldwater made any number of ridiculous statements during his acceptance speech and during the campaign: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is not virtue." He said something about wishing that the Eastern Seaboard (a liberal bastion) could be sawed off and float out to sea. Surprisingly for me in the 1980's, after I was forced to resign from the Air Force for being gay in 1979, Senator Barry Goldwater would write a forceful editorial, advocating that gays should be able to serve openly in the several branches of the military.
During our stay, Grandpa Sanchez hooked up his Airstream trailer (where I slept each night in the storage area while we stayed with them), and off we four went to the outskirts of Ensenada, Mexico, for a few days. He hooked up the trailer in a park on the beach. I slept in their station wagon while the grandparents and Ann slept in the trailer. At night in the moonlight, I could watch the waves crashing against the shoreline. After our short stay in Mexico, we headed back to Yucaipa before the grandparents returned us to South Gate.
South Gate High School
I was told that in 1962, a Black family moved onto Cypress Avenue (likely on the other side of Firestone Blvd from where we would live two years later). Twice their home was firebombed by bigots who did not want a Black family living in their neighborhood. Mike Mebs even remembers the principal preparing the Junior High students for a Black girl, to begin attending South Gate JH in the Fall of 1962. Since Mike had previously gone to school in Pennsylvania with Black students, he did not understand why this sort of preparation was even necessary. Regardless, the Black family moved out after the prolonged terror campaign. (Historically, I read that South Gate had been a white bastion, with gangs of white youth that would seek out and beat up any blacks whom they found walking the sidewalks who had made their way over from Watts.)
Now, two years later, in the Fall of 1964, we were made aware, when we were newly arriving students at South Gate High School, that a few Black students from Watts would begin attending our school in our class instead of the all-Black Jordan High School in Watts. What we would learn over the next three years was that these few were highly intelligent and creative students. Pat Summers, Peggy Taylor and the others were exceptional classmates. By graduation, those two specifically were among the Top Five in our class. What was different this time is that I have no recollection of any of this change causing a problem with residents or parents or students.
Having never before attended a school where there were Black students, I had no preconceived notions. While I had loved The Beatles, I was happy to discover that Mary Wells, one of my other music favorites, had unseated The Beatles at #1 on the charts with her sultry My Guy. Eventually, when I would share a class in German in the 1966-7 school year with Pat Summers, we became acquainted because we sat next to one another. I suppose I was surprised to find that she loved Barbra Streisand as much as I did. If I had had any preconceived notions or prejudices, they certainly drifted away after becoming friendly with Pat. The following photograph was taken during graduation in June of 1967. From left to right, Michael Mebs, Jane Morning, Richard Wright, Leslie Peters, Pat Summers, Peggy Taylor. (I took the photo.)
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The school year always began after Labor Day in those days.
At some point that first day of high school, I found myself hanging around outside of the gym building. I am not sure now whether I was uncertain as to where I was supposed to be or I knew where I was supposed to be and did not want to report to gym class right away. But I found myself in the company of Richard Meyers. I had not known of him in junior high. And he would not be found in any of our high school senior year graduation photos. He was one of the smartest students in our class, but he was a strange person in so many ways, as we would learn in the next three years by being his friends. While he graduated from South Gate High School, he refused to show up for the ceremony. Or for Grad Nite at Disneyland. Mike and I took Richard's diploma to him (the one time Mike's Dad let him use the family station wagon). Unlike many of us, he never went on to college, though I am sure he would have gotten a scholarship to many schools had he applied. He was teaching himself to speak Russian. He read advanced books that I would not have even heard about, let alone thought to read. He was always cleaver and frequently very amusing. But he seemed to resent our stopping by his house to give him his diploma, and he barely opened the door to take his diploma from us, seeming to wish us away as quickly as possible.
One afternoon after school after he and I had become friends, I came home to find Richard Meyes sitting on our couch in the living room. (He had known about the key under the front mat.) But rather than say anything to me, he simply got up from the couch and headed out of the front door, never to return. (Richard was a keen reader of Steven Potter books on One-Upmanship, "the technique or practice of gaining a feeling of superiority over another person".) Indeed, Richard had an odd sense of humor.
Richard lived with his single mom, grandmother and German Shepard dog, Ginger, in a Craftsman type home in the unincorporated area of Cudahy, north of South Gate. Mike Mebs, Richard Wright, Richard Meyers and I would soon form an acquaintanceship foursome throughout high school, but Richard Meyers would never do anything with the rest of us after school or on weekends. Someone took a photograph of three or four of us standing together in conversation from the second floor of the main building during lunchtime, though I have lost that B&W photo at some point along the way. Not long after that first day, Richard Meyers got into Mr. Self's "Corrective" Gym Class. This class not only assured its members an "A" Grade each semester, it kept us out of regular PE with the punks and other jerks as well as all of the real athletes in the school. Richard encouraged me to get into Corrective Gym class along with him and Mike. The class aim was to improve one's physical appearance, stamina and athleticism. But when I was examined by Mr. Self, to see if I might qualify, I tried hard to look as skinny and needy of physical improvement as possible. I was thrilled when I got accepted. We three remained in Corrective Gym class for the full three years. We worked out, or tried to appear that we were working out, each day; but we did not want to improve too much so that we would have to graduate back into regular PE.
The only time we were forced to mix with the sweaty others was when rain was falling out of doors (even though we worked out almost exclusively in the weight room). We would all have to gather in the main gymnasium for dreaded dodge ball. (I always thought of dodge ball as a metaphor for life.) We were divided into two teams. A couple of balls were tossed out, one to each side, and the intense pummeling would commence. Waves of boys would scramble this way and that in panic, to avoid being hit and taken out of the game early. But not Richard Meyers. He knew it was all nonsense and refused to participate. He would stand rigidly still toward the middle of the floor so that someone on the other team could take him out as quickly as possible. He would receive the painful hit early, get the inevitable over with, and then retire to the sidelines, watching the rest of us try to survive a brutal game just a bit longer. This was a game that only one of us on one side would win by still standing at the very end while the others--previously taken out--then lined the walls of defeat on either side of the gym. It was a game that did not take much skill to throw the ball hard or avoid being struck. Sometimes, you just got taken out by dumb luck, especially in the beginning when there were so many boys swerving and dodging all over the floor, trying to get out of the way of the on-coming projectile. It was total chaos. You could get hit by a ricochet. Or someone else would duck at the last moment and you got hit with a ball intended for him. Fortunately, as the later song lyric goes, it did not often rain in Southern California, so we could often remain in our safe cocoon of Corrective Gym until graduation.
My first semester at South Gate High was not good academically. I didn't apply myself. I might even have gotten a "D" in German class. (I had taken a French class at South Gate Junior High, but at High school, the French class was filled, so I took German instead. I would also take two years of High School Spanish. Of course, I don't speak any foreign language, even with the one year of German I would later take at East L.A. Junior College.) Richard Meyers took note of my academic deficiencies after the Fall report cards were sent out and directly admonished me, "You aren't going to get into any college with grades like those." After that stern lecture, I did begin applying myself, eventually graduating with a 3.1 GPA even after handicapping myself with poor grades that first semester.
Here is my page from the 1965 Rambleback year book (I am third row up from the bottom, fourth person from the right):
Very few high school classes actually inspired me. Mr. "Bucky" Buchanan taught German in the basement classroom of the auditorium. He was seriously overweight for that era and sat behind a podium upon a high wooden stool. One day, he clamored up, settled himself upon his wooden throne, and then promptly, and soundlessly, disappeared from view. After several moments of the class being thoroughly puzzled as to what had happened, one chubby hand appeared from behind the podium and grasped the edge, then a second pudgy hand did the same. His face immediately followed, bright red and thoroughly embarrassed. The class began to roar in laughter when we realized that his wooden stool had finally collapsed under his weight and taken him down. (Fortunately, he was unhurt--just humiliated.)
On another occasion, a student named Dana was carrying on. Finally, Mr. Buchanan had had enough and ordered Dana to approach him for a whipping. Mr. Buchanan removed his belt to apply the whipping--most of us, myself included, were convinced that Mr. Buchanan's pants would fall with the absence of his belt. He then had Dana bend over his knee. But what he could not notice over his own bulk and Dana's prone body was that another student kept sticking a book up between each blow of the belt and Dana's Levis-clad bottom. Not a single blow struck home. The class was again roaring. When Mr. Buchanan finished administering the corporal punishment, Dana pretended to rub his behind as if recovering from a serious beating, to gingerly take his seat again. (These days, of course, this sort of physical punishment in school is illegal, and rightly so. Having been unfairly and routinely beaten by Willene only made me despise her more. Sadly, whenever I have asked people about the times they were physically disciplined by their parents, they vividly recall each and every time they were beaten, and it's never been in a positive way. If pressed, they almost never acknowledge that it did them any good to have been spanked or hit or beaten.)
I actually liked Mr. Buchanan. When the number of students taking German was seriously reduced by my senior year, Pat Summers, myself and maybe a couple of others were taught on the side as Mr. Buchanan also taught his freshman German class. And, I suspect toward keeping us taking his class, I got a few "A's" from him that I likely did not deserve.
Early on, I did get selected by Miss Fouch for her more advanced history classes. I did well over those three years because I read the newspaper daily as well as Time magazine weekly. I cared about current events as well as U.S. History. What most students found boring and uninteresting, I found fascinating. When Time magazine provided a quiz for students to take, I believe I got the highest score in the class. Lyndon Johnson was overwhelmingly elected in the fall of 1964, and while he would be instrumental in getting historically significant Medicare and Civil Rights legislation passed, his administration would become hogtied by an increasingly dominant Vietnam War.
Miss Fouch would read from outside history books from time to time, and some students probably thought she was droning on and on and did not notice the actions of her students. At one point, however, she looked up from her reading and told one student who had been carrying on, "Lyons, DRY UP!" John Lyons was a cute guy, but he wasn't always the best behaved.
Miss Fouch took our entire class by school bus to the UCLA campus and Pauley Pavilion when Ethiopean Emperor Haile Selassie spoke. On the bus ride back, unfortunately, Dennis Brouard was on the same bus. I was sitting on the aisle while Ken Braun sat by an open window. A couple of girls complained about the wind messing up their hair. When Ken refused to close the window, Dennis moved up the aisle of the bus and hit me in the arm, as if I were at fault.
(I do remember one afternoon that I happened to look out of the third-floor window during history class and saw a girl attempting to parallel park her car on Firestone Blvd. in front of the school. She backed into an open space and bumped into the car parked in back of her. Then she pulled forward and bumped into the car in front. Not close to being done, she put the car in reverse, again bumping the car behind her, and finally pulling forward and bumping that car one last time. She finally stopped playing bumper cars and got out. John Lyons and I did have a subtle laugh at her lack of parking skills that we both abundantly witnessed that afternoon.)
Had it not been for Miss Fouch our senior year, who knows what would have happened to Mike Mebs and me regarding the Vietnam War and our lives? The two of us had made no preparations for college. None. We were not encouraged at home to go to college, and I think that I supposed that, after high school, we just automatically moved on to college. When Miss Fouch discovered that we had done nothing toward attending college after high school, she ordered us down to the counselor's office to do something definitive about our futures. There, we learned from the school counselor Mr. Peterson that it was too late to apply to a state college or university, but junior college was still a viable option. And that is why, after we graduated, we would attend East L.A. Junior College in the fall of 1967. And, unlike some of our fellow students who would soon be caught up in the draft after they turned 18 and did not attend college, we would continue to receive college deferments every semester or quarter until we became eligible for the draft in four years' time after college graduation.
Historically, President Kennedy had sent the first 400 advisors to Vietnam in May of 1961, while I was still in the 6th Grade. In May of 1965, President Johnson sent the first 3,500 Marines ashore at Danang. In July of that year, Johnson told the nation he was sending 50,000 troops to Vietnam. We had two years of High School left to finish at that point, but the fighting war for Americans in Vietnam was just beginning to hit full stride. The Vietnam War under Johnson, Nixon and Ford would dog me and my fellow Baby Boomers for years. The weekly casualty reports in the newspapers and on the TV became increasingly sobering (at some point Life magazine published the photos of all of the men who had died in Vietnam in one week--it was heartbreaking to see all of the young faces). The sights and sounds of the war itself were not kept from us by the media--they were also graphically relayed by TV especially each night. I would watch Walker Chronkite and CBS News most nights, always appreciating the candid and insightful editorials of Eric Sevareid at the end of each broadcast.
Had Mike and I not gone to college, we would have been added to the numbers of those who were forced, or who volunteered, to go Overseas and contribute. Was it fair that we--and millions more like us--were able to legally avoid the draft for a long time while others served, and died? Of course not. However, even if you were not in college, and you had connections, you could get into the National Guard or the Reserves and avoid Vietnam service (think George W. Bush). Or you could pay a doctor to claim that you had a disability and could not serve.
Years later, Mike Mebs encountered Miss Fouch in an elevator at a Broadway Department Store. She was retired from teaching and looked significantly older and frail, and she did not remember him. But he told her how much she had helped him and me by having us see the school counselor that fateful day years before. He believes that his revelation pleased her.
Here is my page from the 1966 Rambleback yearbook (I am in the second row from the top, third person over from the left):
Drivers Training
Mom had no problem with my taking Drivers Training and quickly signed the permission slip. But Mike's dad was stubborn. It took a great deal of effort and days of pleading to get him to finally sign off.
We had experience in a trailer with videos as well as driving around town in a Dodge 4-door sedan with an older, demanding instructor. I did well enough, never having had any experience behind the wheel before.
Most schools dispense with Drivers Training decades ago to save money. On the roads and freeways today, it's obvious to me that the lost experience is sadly missed. Too many drivers have really terrible techniques and instincts behind the wheel.
Other classes
I did take an art class at South Gate High. I remember that I had a modest talent for drawing, and I even painted a lovely travel poster of Japan.
I had one English class with a male teacher. In those days, all male teachers wore suits and ties to class. However, one day, this rather handsome teacher wore a Polo shirt to teach classes that day (perhaps all of his suits were at the cleaners). I never realized that he had a magnificent chest and body. I just stared and stared as he taught the class. (I knew he was married, but that didn't stop me from lusting after him.)
During High School, I sent story ideas into DC Comics in New York. However, they suggested that I would need to move to New York to have a chance to become a DC comic book writer. I also sent letters to the Editor for the columns in Adventure Comics, two of which were printed there and one in a Justice League comic. Obviously, college took precedence in those days because of the war.
Health Class
We were shown a B&W anti-VD film one afternoon in class, probably our senior semester. Two buddies attend a local movie theater and, when they exit the theater, two girls strolling past catch their eyes. Soon the four of them are in a parked car off of a rural road, making whoopee while fogging the car windows. A few days later, the one buddy tells the other that he has a burning sensation "down there", glancing down at his crotch. I don't even remember what happened next, but the entire class--to the teacher's chagrin--were giggling at first and then laughing, full throated. Mrs. Turnbull, mother of a classmate and our teacher, finally shut off the projector because we were not taking the cartoonish effort seriously enough.
Grandma Breeze, June 1965 Visit
When I inherited many of mom's photo albums and a shoebox or two of photographs, I discovered a visit by Grandma Breeze in June of 1965. We took the obligatory couple of photos out front of the house on Cypress and then a couple of photos on top of the theme building restaurant at LAX. She was likely flying back to Kansas. Uncle Robert had obviously also visited.
Me, Ann in the background, Grandma Breeze, and Uncle Robert around the front porch:
Mom and Grandma Breeze atop the theme building. We may once have had just a soda in the theme restaurant at some point. The prices were too high for a lower middle class, single-mom family to afford to actually have a meal there.
Mom took this picture of Grandma Breeze and Ann with my backside and Uncle Robert in his Western togs:
The Watts Riots, August 1965
So close and yet so far.
The intersection of Avalon Blvd. and 116th Street is where the riot/rebellion began, approximately 3.79 miles (directly Southeast) from where we lived in South Gate. As with the rest of the nation, we followed the news on TV. During the 1964-5 school year, I had become friends with Bill Vogt, whose parents owned the Southland Motel on the Southwest corner of Long Beach Blvd and Glenwood Place. While we could step outside our front door on Cypress at any time of the day or night and see the plumes of black smoke arising from burning buildings on the near horizon as the riot/rebellion continued for six days, Bill told me that he saw a National Guard machine gun emplacement further down Glenwood Pl, toward Watts, with stacked sandbags to protect the Guardsmen from attacks out of Watts. But those sentries were never challenged or attacked.
I never believed at the time that we were threatened, even living as close as we did to Watts. However, we could see and hear on TV, and read in the LA Times newspaper, that white people in Bel Air and Brentwood, and in other wealthy areas of the L.A. Basin, miles further away from Watts than we, were stocking up on guns and ammo, to protect themselves and their families from the masses of Black people whom they imagined would rise up out of Watts and attack their privileged neighborhoods. That, too, did not happen.
However, as the late songwriter and activist Phil Ochs would soon write about the riots:
So wrong, so wrong, but we've been down too long,
And we had to make somebody listen.
Sadly, as the years passed, not much improvement was made.
Bill Vogt & the Southland Motel
Prior to owning the Southland, Bill's parents had owned a motel in the California desert. Bill recalled being able to watch the filming down the road of the destruction of the faux gas station in It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
Prior to owning the Southland, Bill's parents had owned a motel in the California desert. Bill recalled being able to watch the filming down the road of the destruction of the faux gas station in It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
The Southland was an aging motel with a less than upscale clientele. But in the summer of 1965, I spent many days hanging out there, sometimes helping out Bill and his parents with the old-fashioned switchboard that linked each room to the outside world, or repainting some of the motel rooms. For a couple of months that summer, Bill and I would swim in the motel's wonderful swimming pool. I would often stop at the neighborhood market, buy a Bubble Up soda and Payday candy bar, and head over to the Southland. When not swimming or helping out, Bill and I would play games of chess. Unfortunately, Bill had been at a friend's pool and chipped a tooth while horsing around. When Bill's dad checked with the motel's insurance policy, he found that I was not covered were I to be injured swimming in their motel pool, sadly my swimming days at the Southland were over. (Decades later, when Mike Mebs and I toured the old neighborhoods, I noticed that the Southland Motel was still there, sadly the swimming pool had been filled in and paved over.)
One of our classmates and his single dad and younger brother were living at the Southland while he attended school. One day I found him sweeping the sidewalk in front of the pharmacy across Glenwood Pl. from the motel where he worked parttime. After we chatted a bit, he asked me if I wanted to have a bite of a chocolate-covered marshmallow candy bar sitting on the edge of the brick planter near the entrance. I assumed it was his and took a bite. As soon as it was in my mouth, he smirked and admitted, "That candy bar has been sitting there for days." I thought that was an incredibly mean thing to do, and I avoided him after that. Not long afterwards, the three of them moved from the Southland and he left South Gate High.
At some point, having bought a couple of Avalon Hill war games such as Afrika Corps and Stalingrad, upon the recommendation of Richard Meyers, who played them regularly by himself, Bill and I decided to create a similar Vietnam War game. During one evening of painting the board, Bill left to get something from the storage room next door to his personal motel room. For several minutes, he did not come back. I finally went looking for him and discovered that when he had opened the storage room door, he caught sight of a man silhouetted in the back window, attempting to steal a flat of sodas that were for the vending machine in front of the motel office. In the field behind the motel, several other items the thief had not had time to spirit fully away were also found after the police arrived to investigate.
One day while I was helping Bill, he had to climb up into a crawl space above one of the motel rooms. He had a flashlight since it was dark where he was crawling. At one point, I heard him let out a laugh. Apparently, years before, someone had printed a cautionary note on one of the wooden beams above Bill's head, "If you are in a position to read this, you're in trouble."
I always associated the Southland Motel with Sam Cooke and his posthumous hit, A Change is Gonna Come. Cooke had been killed at an L.A. motel, and I remember hearing his poignant song while walking to the Southland one day. If I had to choose a single favorite song of all of the thousands I have heard in my entire lifetime, it would be A Change Is Gonna Come.
Bill Vogt's mom told me one day that a young man who lived in the motel and was friends with Bill could not be trusted. I mentioned this to Bill, and he laughed and explained, "That's what she said about you." Although I did not say anything, I realized then that his mom was not all there mentally.
For many months, a kindly older couple lived in the motel. When they finally moved on, they asked if I could take their beautiful green parakeet as they were not allowed to have pets where they were moving. After a few years without any pet after Dad dumped Tiger in 1959, I had a bird to care for. Someone else gave me a blue parakeet they no longer wanted. Another friend, Les Peters, also gave me his blue parakeet. But Les's bird did not like being in a cage and constantly and noisily pulled on the bars with his claws, a cranky behavior Les never told me about. Finally, the bird badly damaged one of its legs and had to hop around on one leg for the remaining year or so of its life before I found it dead on the cage floor. I also found the green parakeet dead on its cage floor even earlier. The third parakeet managed to fly out of the open back door while I was cleaning its cage.
While Bill's dad was a big man, Bill was smaller in stature. His mother always seemed very old and frail the entire time I knew them. A few years later after college and Marine OCS, I visited Bill in Waterville, Maine, where he was living with his older brother and his brother's family after attending college there. Not too many months later after I returned to Southern California, Bill and his brother had to return to the Southland Motel because their mom had died. I picked them up at the airport. Not long after that, I heard that their father had sold the Southland Motel. I lost track of Bill after that.
The Vogue Theater
I spent many weekend hours in the darkened Vogue Theater on Long Beach Blvd., approximately five blocks from our house on Cypress. One weekend in 1964, I sat through a double bill of What a Way to Go with Shiley MacLaine and a host of famous male actors, and Honeymoon Hotel with Robert Goulet, Robert Morse and Jill St. John, twice each on Saturday. I returned on Sunday to watch both movies again, twice more for What a Way to Go and once more for Honeymoon Hotel. I seem to recall that it was 75 cents to get in, no matter how long I stayed. I saw a few foreign films such as In the French Style and imported dramas such as The Pumpkin Eater with Anne Bancroft, as well as what came to be known as Rom Coms and WWII epics that were a staple of 1960's fare.
Randy Bancroft was visiting one weekend, and we took in a film at the Vogue at night. On our way home, we encountered a few of my classmates at the corner of Southern and Long Beach Blvd. As we five or six guys stood there and chatted, I noticed a police cruiser head South down Long Beach but suddenly turn around. I realized that we were probably violating curfew again, and I told Randy to run with me since we were close to my house. We took off, but I did not count upon the jerks we were talking with to point out the direction we had taken so that the cops would not stop and deal with them about why they were out after curfew but pursued the two of us instead.
As Randy and I headed down Glenwood Place, I turned to see the cop car cut across the back parking lot of the corner bowling alley, heading directly for us at a high rate of speed. Knowing we could not make it to the house without them catching up to us, I told Randy to stop and wait for the cops to arrive. The cop car lurched to a stop and one of the officers got out. He asked us why we were running. I said, "I just live around the corner and didn't want any trouble." We were then asked why we were out that late. We explained about seeing a movie and, fortunately, both of us still had our movie ticket stubs to show him. He let us off with a warning not to run next time. (So much for Rick Easter telling me to run a few years before when we saw cops.)
RCA Color TV
Once in a while, Mom would surprise us with a gesture entirely unexpected.
Sometime in very early 1965, she had an RCA Swivel Color TV set delivered from a neighborhood appliance store on Tweedy Blvd., Phil & Jim's, not far from where she worked at the Realty office. (I suspect, as with our used but nice furniture throughout the house, she made payments.) The following is a picture of Ann and me standing on either side of the new TV, from February of that year, providing proof of the approximate time mom bought the TV. Nobody I knew then had a color TV.
The (rather poorly constructed) shadow box on the wall behind us I made in woodshop in Junior High. I'd made a birdfeeder in metal shop at Yorba, though I do not know whatever happened to that. I was glad when I reached high school, so I no longer had to take any shop classes. Mom always kept my nondescript creations for years, even one rather nice glass container that I merely glued a fuzzy bee to the top of while I was at Laural Elementary School. (I suspect she kept the glazed ceramic handprints we also made in elementary school each year.) I have no recollection of why Ann and I were so formally dressed in that photograph above. However, in the only other photo that featured the color TV in the background, Mom is beautifully dressed for a holiday party much later that year.
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More and more color TV shows were coming to, or were already on, the three major networks in 1964-5. We were genuinely thrilled to watch as many as we could in color, especially the first animated Peanuts Christmas special, premiering on December 9th, 1965. Magoo's Christmas Carol had been on, in color, since 1962; but I was finally able to watch it the way it was intended that same December, mesmerized once again with a song I have loved ever since, Winter Was Warm, sung by Jane Kean as Magoo's love interest, Belle. Jane Kean played Trixie Norton on The Jackie Gleason Show.
Each fall, upon receiving the new TV Guide, listing all of the shows and what night and time slot they would be broadcast (there were no personal recording devices in those days--if you missed a broadcast of a favorite show, you generally missed it for good. Reruns were, if they did occur, only occasionally broadcast in summer), so I would block out in the guide what I wanted to watch and when it was on. If there were two favorite shows competing against one another in the same time slot, I had to choose to watch one over the other.
It was Richard Meyers who told me about The Avengers with Diana Rigg (I thought it was about the Marvel Comic book series featuring Captain America) and also about the American version of That Was the Week That Was (TW3 for short). I particularly remember one skit about a post WWIII apocalyptic America, "When there used to be a Texas and a Florida." A map of the U.S. was on the wall in the background with those two states outlined in just dotted lines where they used to exist.
In the Fall of 1966, September 8th, I was glued to the color TV to watch the beginning of a franchise that has been a part of my existence and enjoyment ever since it debuted. The first Star Trek episode aired that night, The Man Trap. I would only miss one Star Trek episode over the next three years (although I no longer recall which one). No matter what night the network chose to stash the series, I would continue to watch, despite the declining ratings.
I watched a lot of delightful television garbage over the next several years: Petticoat Junction, McHale's Navy, Green Acres, The Munsters, The Monkees, The Addams Family, Lost in Space, The Wild Wild West (Bill Vogt turned me on to that series--I liked that Jim West took his shirt off a lot), Bewitched, The Beverly Hillbillies (for the first few seasons), and on and on. But I also would watch special television events such as My Name Is Barbra and Color Me Barbra. However, by the Fall of 1967 when I went to college, my time in front of the RCA swivel color TV in the media room would be seriously curtailed. I didn't have the time. Mom would watch golf and football and other sporting events on the weekends, events that did not interest me until later.
Filling those summer television hours was definitely hit and miss. Handsome John Davidson hosted The Kraft Summer Music Hall in 1966. His two resident comics, who I believe did amount to something really big later, were Richard Pryor and George Carlin. Mike Mebs and I bought Davidson's albums at the time, even as that style of music was becoming far out of step with the era. He was certainly handsome (Mom actually met him, briefly, once when she was living in San Pedro and was out riding her bicycle one day--she took his picture with the Instamatic camera that she always carried in her purse).
One of our classmates and his single dad and younger brother were living at the Southland while he attended school. One day I found him sweeping the sidewalk in front of the pharmacy across Glenwood Pl. from the motel where he worked parttime. After we chatted a bit, he asked me if I wanted to have a bite of a chocolate-covered marshmallow candy bar sitting on the edge of the brick planter near the entrance. I assumed it was his and took a bite. As soon as it was in my mouth, he smirked and admitted, "That candy bar has been sitting there for days." I thought that was an incredibly mean thing to do, and I avoided him after that. Not long afterwards, the three of them moved from the Southland and he left South Gate High.
At some point, having bought a couple of Avalon Hill war games such as Afrika Corps and Stalingrad, upon the recommendation of Richard Meyers, who played them regularly by himself, Bill and I decided to create a similar Vietnam War game. During one evening of painting the board, Bill left to get something from the storage room next door to his personal motel room. For several minutes, he did not come back. I finally went looking for him and discovered that when he had opened the storage room door, he caught sight of a man silhouetted in the back window, attempting to steal a flat of sodas that were for the vending machine in front of the motel office. In the field behind the motel, several other items the thief had not had time to spirit fully away were also found after the police arrived to investigate.
One day while I was helping Bill, he had to climb up into a crawl space above one of the motel rooms. He had a flashlight since it was dark where he was crawling. At one point, I heard him let out a laugh. Apparently, years before, someone had printed a cautionary note on one of the wooden beams above Bill's head, "If you are in a position to read this, you're in trouble."
I always associated the Southland Motel with Sam Cooke and his posthumous hit, A Change is Gonna Come. Cooke had been killed at an L.A. motel, and I remember hearing his poignant song while walking to the Southland one day. If I had to choose a single favorite song of all of the thousands I have heard in my entire lifetime, it would be A Change Is Gonna Come.
Bill Vogt's mom told me one day that a young man who lived in the motel and was friends with Bill could not be trusted. I mentioned this to Bill, and he laughed and explained, "That's what she said about you." Although I did not say anything, I realized then that his mom was not all there mentally.
For many months, a kindly older couple lived in the motel. When they finally moved on, they asked if I could take their beautiful green parakeet as they were not allowed to have pets where they were moving. After a few years without any pet after Dad dumped Tiger in 1959, I had a bird to care for. Someone else gave me a blue parakeet they no longer wanted. Another friend, Les Peters, also gave me his blue parakeet. But Les's bird did not like being in a cage and constantly and noisily pulled on the bars with his claws, a cranky behavior Les never told me about. Finally, the bird badly damaged one of its legs and had to hop around on one leg for the remaining year or so of its life before I found it dead on the cage floor. I also found the green parakeet dead on its cage floor even earlier. The third parakeet managed to fly out of the open back door while I was cleaning its cage.
While Bill's dad was a big man, Bill was smaller in stature. His mother always seemed very old and frail the entire time I knew them. A few years later after college and Marine OCS, I visited Bill in Waterville, Maine, where he was living with his older brother and his brother's family after attending college there. Not too many months later after I returned to Southern California, Bill and his brother had to return to the Southland Motel because their mom had died. I picked them up at the airport. Not long after that, I heard that their father had sold the Southland Motel. I lost track of Bill after that.
The Vogue Theater
I spent many weekend hours in the darkened Vogue Theater on Long Beach Blvd., approximately five blocks from our house on Cypress. One weekend in 1964, I sat through a double bill of What a Way to Go with Shiley MacLaine and a host of famous male actors, and Honeymoon Hotel with Robert Goulet, Robert Morse and Jill St. John, twice each on Saturday. I returned on Sunday to watch both movies again, twice more for What a Way to Go and once more for Honeymoon Hotel. I seem to recall that it was 75 cents to get in, no matter how long I stayed. I saw a few foreign films such as In the French Style and imported dramas such as The Pumpkin Eater with Anne Bancroft, as well as what came to be known as Rom Coms and WWII epics that were a staple of 1960's fare.
Randy Bancroft was visiting one weekend, and we took in a film at the Vogue at night. On our way home, we encountered a few of my classmates at the corner of Southern and Long Beach Blvd. As we five or six guys stood there and chatted, I noticed a police cruiser head South down Long Beach but suddenly turn around. I realized that we were probably violating curfew again, and I told Randy to run with me since we were close to my house. We took off, but I did not count upon the jerks we were talking with to point out the direction we had taken so that the cops would not stop and deal with them about why they were out after curfew but pursued the two of us instead.
As Randy and I headed down Glenwood Place, I turned to see the cop car cut across the back parking lot of the corner bowling alley, heading directly for us at a high rate of speed. Knowing we could not make it to the house without them catching up to us, I told Randy to stop and wait for the cops to arrive. The cop car lurched to a stop and one of the officers got out. He asked us why we were running. I said, "I just live around the corner and didn't want any trouble." We were then asked why we were out that late. We explained about seeing a movie and, fortunately, both of us still had our movie ticket stubs to show him. He let us off with a warning not to run next time. (So much for Rick Easter telling me to run a few years before when we saw cops.)
RCA Color TV
Once in a while, Mom would surprise us with a gesture entirely unexpected.
Sometime in very early 1965, she had an RCA Swivel Color TV set delivered from a neighborhood appliance store on Tweedy Blvd., Phil & Jim's, not far from where she worked at the Realty office. (I suspect, as with our used but nice furniture throughout the house, she made payments.) The following is a picture of Ann and me standing on either side of the new TV, from February of that year, providing proof of the approximate time mom bought the TV. Nobody I knew then had a color TV.
The (rather poorly constructed) shadow box on the wall behind us I made in woodshop in Junior High. I'd made a birdfeeder in metal shop at Yorba, though I do not know whatever happened to that. I was glad when I reached high school, so I no longer had to take any shop classes. Mom always kept my nondescript creations for years, even one rather nice glass container that I merely glued a fuzzy bee to the top of while I was at Laural Elementary School. (I suspect she kept the glazed ceramic handprints we also made in elementary school each year.) I have no recollection of why Ann and I were so formally dressed in that photograph above. However, in the only other photo that featured the color TV in the background, Mom is beautifully dressed for a holiday party much later that year.
.jpg)
Each fall, upon receiving the new TV Guide, listing all of the shows and what night and time slot they would be broadcast (there were no personal recording devices in those days--if you missed a broadcast of a favorite show, you generally missed it for good. Reruns were, if they did occur, only occasionally broadcast in summer), so I would block out in the guide what I wanted to watch and when it was on. If there were two favorite shows competing against one another in the same time slot, I had to choose to watch one over the other.
It was Richard Meyers who told me about The Avengers with Diana Rigg (I thought it was about the Marvel Comic book series featuring Captain America) and also about the American version of That Was the Week That Was (TW3 for short). I particularly remember one skit about a post WWIII apocalyptic America, "When there used to be a Texas and a Florida." A map of the U.S. was on the wall in the background with those two states outlined in just dotted lines where they used to exist.
In the Fall of 1966, September 8th, I was glued to the color TV to watch the beginning of a franchise that has been a part of my existence and enjoyment ever since it debuted. The first Star Trek episode aired that night, The Man Trap. I would only miss one Star Trek episode over the next three years (although I no longer recall which one). No matter what night the network chose to stash the series, I would continue to watch, despite the declining ratings.
I watched a lot of delightful television garbage over the next several years: Petticoat Junction, McHale's Navy, Green Acres, The Munsters, The Monkees, The Addams Family, Lost in Space, The Wild Wild West (Bill Vogt turned me on to that series--I liked that Jim West took his shirt off a lot), Bewitched, The Beverly Hillbillies (for the first few seasons), and on and on. But I also would watch special television events such as My Name Is Barbra and Color Me Barbra. However, by the Fall of 1967 when I went to college, my time in front of the RCA swivel color TV in the media room would be seriously curtailed. I didn't have the time. Mom would watch golf and football and other sporting events on the weekends, events that did not interest me until later.
Filling those summer television hours was definitely hit and miss. Handsome John Davidson hosted The Kraft Summer Music Hall in 1966. His two resident comics, who I believe did amount to something really big later, were Richard Pryor and George Carlin. Mike Mebs and I bought Davidson's albums at the time, even as that style of music was becoming far out of step with the era. He was certainly handsome (Mom actually met him, briefly, once when she was living in San Pedro and was out riding her bicycle one day--she took his picture with the Instamatic camera that she always carried in her purse).
We Five: You Were On My Mind
I don't even recall how I came by the cash, but after the single was #3 in September of 1965, I bought my first rock album, You Were On My Mind by We Five, from Elliot & Craun music store in Huntington Park. Elliot & Craun kept the records, both albums and singles, in the far back extension of the store, past all of the guitars and drum kits and other musical instruments that were the mainstay of the store's business. An older, hawkish woman used to patrol that back area where the records were kept. If you perused the 45s that were kept in a wooden display bin and did not push them back into place after you were done looking, she would follow along immediately behind you and push them back into place with an impatient flourish. As the decade progressed, record stores of all kinds would proliferate. But in 1964-5, they were not at all plentiful. You would have to endure the scornful eye of that judgmental woman when you wanted to buy certain contemporary records (I believe that she told Mike on one occasion, "We don't carry 'kid' records"--she was becoming quite a dinosaur because "kid" records were massively starting to sell.) Among the 45s that I bought there were Dionne Warwick's trio of monster 1964 hits, Walk on By, You'll Never Get to Heaven, and Reach Out for Me at Elliot & Craun. (I texted briefly with the now-late Jerry Burgan in 2017 or so after he wrote an autobiography of himself and his time in the band, WOUNDS TO BIND. He is the cute guy walking with Michael Stewart on the cover of the album. But, alas, all four of the male members of We Five are dead now. Only Beverly Bivens, the female vocalist who retired from the group after their second album was released, is still alive.)
During that 1964-1965 timeframe, Mom had surprised me again when we were shopping at a warehouse/discount store, a retail outlet unique at that time. I saw a nice record player that featured two speakers that could either swing out or even detach from either side of the record player unit, to enhance the stereo sound. The whole thing stood upon four metal legs. The price was not bad, and as our old record player no longer worked after I had nursed it along for many months, Mom agreed to buy us that new record player. I was excited that I could finally buy an occasional record album such as You Were On My Mind and acceptably listen to it on the new stereo record player. Imagine the following unit with speakers attached to its sides that swung out on hinges instead of having a front panel speaker:
Michael Mebs
In Ivan Evan's English class at South Gate Junior High, Michael Mebs sat behind me and somehow believed, from what the teacher implied one day, that I was from Cuba. He and I only became acquainted when I met up with the couple of friends of Richard Meyers of whom Mike was one, along with Richard Wright, after Richard Meyers and I chatted before gym class that first semester.
Sometime in 1965, Mike invited me over to his house on Washington Street, a couple of blocks South of South Gate Park. I suspect I took a city bus from the intersection of Long Beach and Firestone Blvd. that eventually traveled down Tweedy Blvd, with a stop near Washington. Washington Street is a wide neighborhood road, unlike Cypress.
I don't recall what the two of us did that day, perhaps hiked to a store and bought a record album or just hung out together. But that meeting became the start of a beautiful, long-lasting friendship that continues to this day.
In the Fall of 1965, we took the bus into Huntington Park one weekend for Christmas shopping. (I remember buying Candy and the Kisses minor hit that year, The 81, from Elliot & Craun.)
During our '65 Christmas vacation, we even took a city bus all of the way into downtown L.A. to The Broadway Department Store, having lunch at the historic Clifton's Cafeteria. I felt like an adult eating out like that. We would do the same for Christmas in 1966. The two of us became mesmerized by a young woman who worked the perfume and cologne counter at The Broadway who spoke with a lovely French accent. Either in 1965 or 1966, I bought an intriguing, and expensive, set of colognes called Nine Flags for Dad for Christmas, something I would have loved to have been given to me. However, Dad opened his present and was non-plussed as to what to do with nine different men's colognes. While we teenagers were so familiar with, and used, Jade East, or British Sterling or several others that 1960's TV advertisements made us comfortably wanting and using, Dad's generation seemed to have no use for, or inclination toward even to consider applying, colognes of any kind. I doubt if Dad ever used any of those beautifully presented, and distinctly scented, European colognes.
For Christmas 1965, Ann bought me a small kit of personal grooming items. I wasn't much appreciative at the time because the straight blade razor looked positively dangerous to shave with unless your desire was to slit your throat. But all of these decades later, I still have the tweezers and the nail scissors. However, in 1966, both Mom and Ann bought me two record albums for Christmas: Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys and Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful by the Lovin' Spoonful. (I never knew at the time, or for years afterwards, what that group's name actually meant.) I was thrilled at the time with those two presents and remember that Christmas as one of the best ever. The following photo is from Christmas in 1965, again I am wearing my favorite surf pants:
Other Christmas Photos
A few additional photos exist of Christmas's on Cypress Ave. At least one before the photo above and one of a Christmas after. Again, that nook in the living room was the perfect place for a tree. This first is Christmas 1964, our first at Cypress:
This might be 1969 or, possibly, later than that, with Grandma Breeze visiting from Kansas:
This one is marked 1971 (that lamp endured):
School Candy Bars
Sometime in 1966, a decision was made to build additional, metal bleachers on the North side of the football field and running track, to supplement the permanent, cement structure on the South side. No one in our little group of Mike, Richard Meyers or me (or even Les Peters who sometimes joined our lunchtime foursome) went to any sporting events, especially not to football games. (When South Gate High played all-black Jordan High School in football one year and shockingly won, students from Jordan were upset and drove around the school neighborhood, looking for trouble and picking fights.)
We four agreed that we would take no boxes of chocolate candy bars to sell, to help raise money for the new bleachers. I would have had no idea to whom to sell a whole box of candy bars (I believe there were approximately 24 bars to a box). I certainly could not have bought more than one or two myself (they were $1.00 each). Mike, Les and I shared the same history class where each student was to order one or two, or more, boxes of the candy bars. Rather than privately ask each student, the teacher went around the room and individually asked us aloud how many boxes we wanted. When he got to me, I firmly said, "None." Several members of the class seemed to gasp that I was not ordering even a single box. Dee Dominguez, who was a member of the high school cheerleader squad, accusingly suggested aloud, "He doesn't have any school spirit!" When the teacher got to Les Peters, he surprisingly blurted out, "TWO BOXES!" (I believe Mike asked for one box so as not to be publicly shamed by Cheerleader Dee as I had been.) So much for solidarity.
Politicians
In those days, South Gate was thoroughly Republican, and probably had been for years. Our Congressman was Del Clauson, a staunch conservative. And most politicians of all stripes across the nation looked white, usually overweight, and old, from Lyndon Johnson down to the Mayor of South Gate. One afternoon, the entire school was required to gather on the permanent bleachers to hear the Mayor speak. I am not certain why we were there, but he did discuss not littering. He totally bungled the cliched expression used in a TV ad in those days, dropping a few notches with us smirking young people who believed him to be a joke, "Remember, every little bit--I mean litter bit--helps--I mean hurts." Sheesh.
By 1967, the Vietnam War began to increasingly dominate the news, especially as we students got closer and closer to graduation. When Senator George Romney (Mitt Romney's dad) toured Vietnam before he intended to run for the presidency in 1968, he admitted upon his return to the United States that he had been given a "brainwashing" regarding Vietnam. A poor choice of words perhaps, but the nation would find, along with Romney, that we were not being told the truth about the War as victory seemed no closer, no matter how many years would pass, no matter how many lives were lost on all sides, no matter how much treasure was expended. When the Afghan army collapsed in 2022, I had an overwhelming sense of Deja Vu that I was witnessing a similar kind of collapse that I would see in 1975 when the U.S. left Vietnam for good. There seemed never to be an easy way to end a war that had been going on for years when those you were defending did not have sufficient will to maintain their own independence.
If I may be so bold, I have always believed that the 1960's were the golden age of political cartoons in the newspapers: Jules Feiffer, Pat Oliphant, and Paul Conrad graced the pages of the L.A. Times. Their cartoons were some of the best ways to protest the war and defeat the lies being told by politicians to defend a war that seemed to be un-winnable.
It was also the golden age of TV anchors, Walter Cronkite being the most trusted. Eric Severide typically provided solid and especially perceptive political commentary each weekday night. After Johnson fell from grace and announced he was not running again in 1968, Mr. Severide provided serious reasoning for why Johnson had fallen so far. It was during High School that I also read William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A blueprint for how the Nazi's came to power. I would later read Eric Severide's autobiography, Not So Wild A Dream.
Halloween
I only found one photo regarding Halloween while we lived on Cypress. Here are Mom and I holding up a very small pumpkin. Mom also bought us that small organ, to encourage our musical interests. That's in the foreground. (I loved that red & white shirt that looked like a country tablecloth.) The alcove where we are standing was where we could always put the Christmas tree every year. The rest of the year, it was not much use.
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Summer 1966
I needed to take an algebra course, and I didn't have enough class slots in my senior year to fit it in. So, I had to join Ann and Mike in taking summer school. South Gate High was not holding summer school, so we had to take the bus into Huntington Park and walk the three blocks to Huntington Park High School. My algebra instructor was usually one of our gym teachers at South Gate High. A girl sat between me and another guy during class. She always cheated off of our exams, getting slightly better scores than we did, knowing what to steal from each of us. It was a particularly warm summer, and The Lovin' Spoonful had an appropriate hit that year, Summer in the City.
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I never mentioned to either Ann or Mike that when we passed by a swim club on the way to the high school, there was a screened portal through the ivy-covered cinder block wall that afforded a look into the inviting pool area. Every morning I would sneak a peek inside because, inevitably, there was a handsome, muscular young man in a Speedo who obviously worked there that summer and was getting the pool ready. He could have posed for Tomorrow's Man.
Before summer school, Uncle Robert had decided to permanently move back to White Cloud, Kansas. (I think he must have believed that his dreams of becoming a Hollywood star were long over, or that the popularity of a Western-themed The Timbers steak house was wanning and no longer could afford to provide the Wild West show that centered around him, his whip or his rope tricks.) Mom must have decided that this was an inexpensive way for the three of us to accompany him for a visit with the relatives in Kansas because we had not been back to White Cloud since that summer of 1957. We met up with Robert at The Timbers restaurant parking lot north of Santa Barbara (I believe Uncle Hap drove us there). From the restaurant, we piled into Robert's 1961 Ford Woody station wagon for the trip East. The wonderful cook at The Timbers had fixed us several submarine sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil to eat along the way. We stored them in an ice chest in the back of the station wagon along with some sodas.
We eventually stopped in a small Arizona town that evening and had dinner in a motel cafe. Robert asked our waitress about the location of the city park, presumably where he would park and allow us all to sleep in the station wagon until driving on in the morning. Mom was having none of that, and we spent the night in a comfortable room at the motel that she paid for. The following morning, we headed for The Grand Canyon, a first for Ann and me. Ann took the following picture, with Mom and me in the foreground and Robert in a cowboy hat in the background, looking at the impossibly wide canyons beyond.
We also stopped at the Petrified Forest, another first. Here are Mom and I in front of the entrance.
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We stopped in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and then at The Big Well town of Greensburg, Kansas, on our way to stopping longer in Wichita, Kansas, where Great Aunt Lucille lived. (Aunt Jean, before she left for nurse's training for the Army after attending nursing school during WWII, had been farmed out by the family to do housework for Aunt Lucille, which Jean told me years later she deeply resented. Nurses training was a breeze compared to working hard, and thanklessly, for her Aunt Lucille.)
I am not sure how we were able to visit so many tourist destinations in a single day of driving after the stay at the first motel. (The photographs show me wearing the same clothes in all three locations--I am also wearing my favorite short-sleeve sweater on top of my regular shirt, in front of the Petrified Forest.) I simply don't remember us spending the night anywhere else or sleeping in the station wagon the rest of the way to White Cloud. Perhaps Mom and Uncle Robert switched off driving as we pressed on during at least one night of the trip. (Ann believes that we stayed at a motel in the Oklahoma panhandle, remembering that she and Mom went swimming in a motel pool other than at the motel in Arizona.)
Once we got to White Cloud, I bagged groceries for Aunt Doris and Uncle Hap at their new neighborhood market for a couple of days and earned $5.00. I fished on the Missouri River with Uncle Hap. Great Grandma Nuzum was recently deceased, and Grandma Breeze had bought her small house on the main street of White Cloud. Great Grandma Nuzum's large brick house above the town to the left as a viewer looked toward the Missouri River at the foot of the town had slowly been falling apart for a few years. Uncle Robert would later buy it, along with the old telephone building, in addition to Grandma Nuzum's house that Grandma Breeze bought after her mother died. As the years passed, he also bought the hill on the South side of town for primitive camping. (When Robert died, his estranged son inherited everything but immediately put all of the properties up for sale, not that there were many buyers for land or decrepit buildings in a small town that had been dying or dead for decades after the end of WWII.)
Sadly, Aunt Doris and Uncle Hap's grocery store eventually folded. They had extended credit to locals who were slow or negligent in paying them back. Those same neighbors would often head to other stores in other towns to shop rather than shop locally. Aunt Doris would eventually get a job with the post office until she retired. Cousin Jim would graduate from Hiawatha High School in 1967 (he and Cousin Doug were the same age, three years older than I and four years older than Ann). Jim would attend college at the University of Kansas before joining the Army, though I do not believe that he served in Vietnam.
I remember reading an article in the local Hiawatha newspaper, interviewing some old coot who said that young people then were "too soft", in his opinion, as he did handstands on a picnic table. I am certain he did not think of my generation fighting and dying in Vietnam, or those before us who fought so hard for civil rights and voting rights during the early 1960's. Too soft indeed.
While I enjoyed seeing Mom's relations once again, as well as the famous sites on the drive to White Cloud, I was most thrilled to learn that Mom had purchased tickets for the three of us to fly back to Southern California on a TWA 880 from the old downtown Kansas City Airport. Here we are in the concourse, awaiting our departure. From left to right, Mom, Grandma Breeze, Uncle Robert, Aunt Doris, me and Ann.
Here is a picture below that I took of Ann and Mom about to board through the rear stairs. (No jetway at the old Kansas City airport in downtown Kansas City in that era.)
This photo Ann took of Mom and me aboard the flight. We had a few rows to ourselves, just behind the first class cabin:
Below was some of the landscape that we had traveled through on our way to White Cloud, The Grand Canyon specifically:
South Gate Rod & Gun Club, Spring 1967
Les Peters was working for the South Gate Rod & Gun Club on weekends during his senior semester. One Saturday morning he called me and asked if I wanted a job there, too, as a "trap boy". I agreed to give it a shot. I had to take a city bus, getting off at a stop near the L.A. River and walked to Les Peters' house. We two then hiked toward the L.A. River, crossing over on a railroad trestle. The gun club fitted neatly into the triangle of the Rio Hondo River and the L.A. River, at the end of Miller Road. We were paid $1.25 per hour minimum wage. Old Ola Hopewell was the manager. We started in the mornings on Saturday and Sunday at 8:00 AM or 9:00 AM and plugged away until 4:00 PM or 5:00 PM, depending upon how late the remaining club members stayed and used their shotguns to blast clay pigeons out of the sky until dusk.
Once a trap boy learned the basics of placing a clay pigeon on the arm of the throwing machine, the job became boring. Olah allowed us to have a radio in each of the two trap range bunkers. Les Peters must have taken the following photo of me in a trap range bunker. (Years of bored trap boys wrote graffiti on the walls of the bunker. I wrote the aircraft numbers on that wall behind me.)
Once I became experienced, and more experienced trap boys quit, I would graduate to sitting at an old school desk on one of the two ranges, holding the controller that triggered the machine in the bunker. The several shooters were arrayed before me and called out, in order, "Pull it!" I would push the button, the clay pigeon would fly out of the bunker, the shooter would follow the pigeon across the sky and attempt to hit it. I would have to determine if he actually nicked the pigeon, or it was merely the wad from the shotgun shell that I saw. Most of the time, the pigeon was entirely blasted, and I could easily mark the score sheet on a clipboard.
One problem could arise if the shooter thought he hit the pigeon and I was convinced he had not. One old curmudgeon, Chuck Spinella, got so mad at me for not crediting him with a specific hit that he tossed an empty shogun shell at me as he left the range. Another problem could result when an occasional clay pigeon was defective and fall apart as it got tossed aloft. Once in a while, a shooter would become so frustrated with a string of defective "birds", he would actually shoot at the concrete-block-and-corrugated-tin-roof-covered bunker. The trap boy inside would jump in fright. Another problem could happen when not enough trap boys showed up on a specific day for work. We needed four, one in each of the two bunkers and two to push the buttons on each of the two ranges. Otherwise, members of the club would have to take over the button pushing & scoring duties. Most were decent enough at it, but some left their fat, aged fingers on the button too long and the arm on the throwing machine in the bunker would spin around more than once as the trap boy tried to place another clay pigeon on the arm and worried about getting his fingers whacked.
We often have songs that we associate with certain people and certain places in our lives. For me at the trap range it was Groovin' by The Rascals. I would be in one of those two bunkers, listening to one of the crappy radios, to a Top 40 AM station and hear the vocalist sing:
Life would be ecstasy, you and me and Leslie
Groovin' on a Sunday afternoon.
Here were Mike, Leslie and I working at the trap range on a magnificent Sunday afternoon, not exactly "groovin'" but doing OK. Only decades later did I learn that I had the words wrong. This is what the lyric actually says:
Life would be ecstasy, you and me endlessly
Groovin' on a Sunday afternoon.
Most of the time, even pushing the button and keeping score got incredibly boring. The rhythm of the shooting, the bright, sunny days of Southern California, the drone of the traffic on the nearby freeway could become totally mesmerizing. I remember one afternoon I completely zoned out for several moments. When I came to in fright, I looked around me. Nobody was yelling at me. They were all still shooting away. I glanced down at the score sheet and, apparently, I had continued to push the button and continued to accurately keep score.
We also needed to take a break now and then to use the bathroom or take a half-hour break for lunch. Once a month, the members of the club would host a potluck lunch. We trap boys, like needy peasants, were told we could have any food that was left over after the members filled their paper plates. While the food might have been a welcome change to the sandwiches we typically brought from home, we still felt as if we were poor relations invited to partake of the kitchen scraps after the royal family had had their fill. It was a thankless, low-paying job, and we weren't treated all that well.
The money, even if minimum wage, was nice to have during my senior semester. I was able to buy my class ring, as well as more record albums. But we were lied to. Olah said that they paid our taxes above and beyond our minimum wage salary that was given to us in cash at the end of each day.
Unfortunately, the following year, I found that I had to come up with $90, a princely sum in those days while I was attending college, to pay my reported income tax bill.
One morning when we arrived, we saw Oleh hiking up from the L.A. River. He told us that a body of a woman had been found in the river. "She looked strange, nekked," he told us.
One of our concerns happened during rainy days. We would be expected to show up and to hang out at the range just in case the skies cleared and members showed up to shoot. But if it kept raining, we were forced to wait under the corrugated-roof-covered picnic table pergola. If it looked as if no members were going to show up to shoot before noon, we were sent home in the rain, with only an hour or two of pay. And, of course, each walk back and forth across the active railroad trestle was dicey--although only once did we actually have to run. One morning, we could see a police car pull up at the gun club ahead. Olah had to talk us out of trouble. Problem was, there really was no other direct way for us to get to the gun range. None of us had cars. I was still just 17 and did not have my driver's license even though I had taken Driver's Training in high school earlier that year.
Unfortunately, even though Les brought me on, after a couple of months, he quit. I thought of Mike to replace him. I called his house from the trap range and reached his father. Mike relates, even decades later, that his Dad entered his bedroom and woke him up from a sound sleep, to tell him that he now had a job to get to. Mike was not happy about working at any job, let alone at the trap range. While I stayed on until the very end of the school year, Mike quit after a couple of months of work there. He never lets me forget that dark time when I got him that miserable job.
Here is my page from the 1967 Rambleback year book (I kept my mouth closed to hide my braces, second row from the bottom on the right):
Braces
Regarding my braces, I had been wearing them for a couple of years at this point and would for at least my first year of college. In high school, once a month I would leave before my last class of the day and hike to the orthodontist's office in Huntington Park, at the Northeast corner of Seville and Florance on the second floor. Each time they tightened the braces, I would be in such intense pain that I could not eat solid food that evening at home. I would also have to sometimes apply wax to keep the sharp wires from cutting the inside of my mouth. I would typically have soup because my teeth hurt too much. Mom always had Bufferin at home, and I would take a couple to try to mitigate the pain and sleep at night, but the two tablets were only marginally effective. Braces in those days were torture.
St. Helen's Catholic Church
I attended church service every Sunday morning through my first year of college. At some point, the church offered an English mass which I preferred. If I went to confession on Saturday, I never mentioned being homosexual or having homosexual thoughts and longings. The church itself was just 3 1/2 blocks from the house. I don't really recall that Ann and I went together, either to confession or to church on Sunday, but we did go each Sunday. I thought about stopping--Mom was not particularly religious and never attended any church service. When I mentioned not going to Ann, she tried to shame me by saying that God gave us everything and all I was required to do was attend a worship ceremony for one hour a week. It worked, for a time.
1967 Pontiac GTO
Across Firestone, on my walk to high school each weekday morning in the Fall of 1966, I would see a cream-colored '67 Pontiac GTO in the Roc Cutrie Pontiac Dealership lot (at the corner of Garden View and Firestone), often with beads of morning dew on the hood before the staff arrived to wipe the cars clean. (Mike would later mention that his Uncle Milton was a salesman there.) I thought it was the coolest car I had ever seen. No way could I afford one, especially not a brand new car when I began to work for minimum wage as a senior. But I always loved the look of that car.
Graduation
Mom could not attend because of work. But Dad and Grandpa and Grandma Sanchez did come to my graduation ceremony from High School. Here are two photos taken before we left the house.
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I don't remember that much about the ceremony itself. I did have a friend take the following picture of me in my robes with my diploma:
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Once all of this formal ritual was over, we returned to the school in Mike's Dad's station wagon, to board buses to take us to Grad Nite at Disneyland. Mike's date was Ann. My date was a friend of Ann's.
Grad Nite
All of the rides at the park were free that night, and we four had a great time. But, eventually, the night and High School were finally over. Adulthood predatorily beckoned.
Round Trip to San Diego
In the next couple of years, when we had a little extra cash and time, Mike and I would take inexpensive flights to San Diego from LAX. We'd pour over airline flight schedules and attempt to take as many different airlines and airliners back and forth just for the fun of it. The first time was on June 10, after graduation. On that trip we took a National Airlines DC-8 to San Diego to see the zoo. The following two photos were of us boarding at LAX. Notice that we were using a cement ramp and stairs to board. Jetways were not yet in widespread use.
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Mike took the following picture of me sitting in the back row in coach. I am wearing my favorite short-sleeved sweater.
The following two photos are at the San Diego Zoo. We took a bus to LAX (more about that later) and, apparently, a bus from the San Diego airport and the Zoo.
We each had bought SAS (Scandinavian Airlines System) flight bags at LAX. Our return flight to LAX would be on a Delta Airlines DC-8 flight. We got a taste for the Chocolate Sundays that the restaurant in the airport served in a large goblet, with shaved almonds and a cherry on top of the whipped cream. Over those several months, we would fly down to San Diego on a United Airlines 727, United Airlines DC-8-61 that flew into LAX from Hawaii, a Bonanza Airlines F-27 via Orange Country airport, and a PSA DC-9-30. We would fly back to LAX on a Southern Airlines DC-9-10 leased to PSA, and an American Airlines Convair 990, among others. Airline tickets in those days ranged from $5.00 and $6.00 to $9.00 (American). Early on, we would have to take an RTD bus from South Gate to LAX and return to South Gate by the same means.
During the American 990 flight, we got to listen to the wondrous inflight entertainment system, still a bit of a novelty in those days. Previous passengers had left their headsets on the seats. As the 4-engined jet aircraft roared aloft and I could look down and see the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego below, I heard Vince Guaraldi's jazz version of Watch What Happens and, later, his mournful piano version of Eleanor Rigby. Unfortunately, Southern California was experiencing wildfires on several hillsides as the plane barreled North along the coast. However, on this flight aboard the 990, LAX was fogged in. The pilot aborted the initial landing after we got into the low clouds, then soared aloft once more, and circled around over the ocean for another pass. We did land that second time and taxied to the terminal.
After we exited the terminal, we counted ourselves lucky indeed that we were still able to catch one of the last buses to South Gate through Watts that night. The bus ride was uneventful. Passengers got off here and there. Eventually, in addition to Mike on the aisle and me at the window, the only other passengers were two young men. One was seated directly behind the driver. The other was seated on the long bench seat at the very back of the bus. There was never any indication that the two young black men knew one another. At the last bus stop in Watts, the man from the back curiously passed by us for the front exit (the middle exit was closer, just a couple of rows behind us). The man behind the bus driver got up but put his arms around the driver instead of exiting. I first thought to myself as I heard the driver make some odd sounds was, "He's tickling the bus driver." The young man from the back of the bus now stopped next to the driver, and Mike and I soundlessly turned to each other and lowly whispered our sudden realization, "They're robbing the bus!"
One of the young men, brandishing a large, old, rusty kitchen knife approached us, demanding of Mike, "Gimme your watch!" Mike limply raised his arm as the young man pulled the watch off of his wrist and pocketed it. After he turned to walk back toward the front of the bus, Mike suddenly dug into his back pocket, producing his wallet. I though he had gone insane and was going to tell the robber, "You forgot my wallet!" Instead, Mike promptly tossed his wallet to the floor, under the seat in front of me. Without looking down, I slowly moved my foot over and covered his wallet with my shoe. The two men exited the bus. The one young man immediately ran off. The second, still brandishing the rusty knife, pointed it toward the massive bus with the doors now closed and calmly ordered, "Drive on!" I glanced down at him as we passed by, looking directly at his face and at the old knife, thinking how absurd it was that here we were in this big bus with the doors closed, and he was just standing there by the sidewalk with only a dull kitchen knife to defend himself. Some later action hero might have tried to run him down with the bus. All our driver could say in a stunned voice as he hit the accelerator was, "Can you beat that?"
He soon stopped the bus just inside of the South Gate city limits and contacted the police via a nearby phone. The police arrived soon and took our statements, but nobody offered to take us to our anticipated bus stop or home. We were still several blocks from the regular bus stop or from our separate homes. With no one offering to help us, Mike called his Dad. Mr. Mebs picked us up a few minutes later and took me home. He and Mike then drove home. That was the last time we used an RTD bus to or from LAX. We were lucky we had not been stabbed or beaten. Except for Mike saving his wallet, we were too stunned by what was happening to act or move, even to defend ourselves. Once we each got cars, we would return to LAX and resume taking flights to San Diego or San Francisco.
A.U. Morse & Company
I got an unexpected call about a full-time summer job at a company at 2423 Hunter St., near downtown Los Angeles. With the directions mapped out, I took the bus through Huntington Park and up Santa Fe Avenue--the one we used to take to go shopping in downtown L.A. at Christmas--and got off at a corner stop just before the bus route passed under the Santa Monica Freeway. This was an extensive warehouse district around Olympic Blvd where the bridge over the L.A. River--often used in car commercials and Hollywood films--is located. I found the door to 2423 and headed up the wooden stairs to what appeared to be a warehouse office. An older woman who seemed to be in charge said when she saw me, "He looks just like his dad."
What I was soon to learn was that Dad had gotten me this summer job at A.U. Morse & Company where he worked as a wallpaper salesman with three other salesmen. They would stop by the warehouse weekly but typically scoured the paint and wallpaper stores all around the L.A. Basin and Orange County for orders. The company had a male manager at this location, and the older woman I saw right away was the office manager. The owner was deceased, but his wife and adult son ran the comparable warehouse in Burlingame, California, near San Francisco.
One day each week, I would be helping out in the warehouse, unloading a long trailer truck packed with heavy cases of wallpaper from the Borden Chemical Company of Columbus, Ohio. The rest of my hours and days I would be occupied with filling orders for rolls of wallpaper in the warehouse or answering inquiries over the single loudspeaker for availability of specific wallpaper rolls from the secretaries in the office. The regular foreman, Joe, was out for a few more weeks after recovering from kidney stone surgery. Julian, a young Latino family man, was the temporary foreman until Joe returned. The hours were 8 AM until 5 PM each day, with a half-hour break for lunch and two, ten-minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. At the end of the day, we helped the UPS driver load the brown-paper-wrapped wallpaper orders into his truck for delivery to various paint and wallpaper stores around Southern California. I would be given a 10-cent per hour increase in my pay to $1.35 per hour over what I had been making at the trap range, and they did take out for taxes. We were paid weekly.
The only entertainment we had was a radio that was set to KLOS, a very cool FM station that had a hip sensibility for that era. One later guest on an afternoon broadcast, a woman, detailed the sexist elements of certain Rolling Stones lyrics in songs such as Stupid Girl or Under My Thumb.
Julian had started out after High School with dreams of becoming a draftsman but only got this job instead. Most of the two or three other men I would be working with had no education or skills beyond High School, if that, so this was as far as most of them would ever get. They didn't have the prospect of college as I did that fall. Over the next four years, those who worked alongside me were typically poor, white or Hispanic/Latino, with maybe a High School diploma. The women who worked in the office taking phone orders were generally older and white, though most of them only had a High School diploma. That whole summer I took the bus back and forth to work, the better part of an hour's commute each way. Everyone on the bus was, like me at the time, lower middle class. They either could not afford a car or could not afford to park it daily downtown while at work.
I used to chat on the bus with a somewhat attractive young man not much older than I who lived a couple of blocks away in South Gate. I passed by his rental house one afternoon and noted that the two cars in the driveway did not look as if they were operable. He already had a wife and an infant son.
I also caught the eye of a pretty young woman who lived with her sister and brother-in-law in an apartment complex near our house on Cypress. She worked as a secretary downtown. I cannot say we dated. But I did go over to their apartment one evening for conversation.
Early that summer, Mike got a job through Richard Meyers at a sock distribution warehouse in downtown L.A., working for a woman who sublet warehouse space. Sadly, after Lily Butler hired Mike, she realized he was a more efficient worker than Richard Meyers and fired him. We only heard from him once more after that. Over the phone Richard told me about his experience when he had to report for his draft physical in 1968: "I got off the bus in a dirty part of town. All I could see were bums and trash everywhere. The sidewalks were filthy. The sky was smoggy. I took my degrading physical, but I was rejected because of a bad elbow. I left the draft building and stepped outside. The sun was shining brightly. The day was beautiful. I saw lovely Hispanic people along the sidewalk, and I admired their culture."
(I would briefly quit A.U. Morse at one point and work in the sock warehouse for Lily Butler--Mike had moved into the office to work. Lily wasn't really a nice person. I had to take an old elevator to the floor where the warehouse was located. Lily's office, and Mike's desk, were on the floor below. After a couple of months, A.U. Morse called me back with the offer of a modest pay raise. I took it. There I could park on Hunter St. for free. Working for Lily Butler, I had to pay for parking. Mike got his brother my job when I left. Rick Mebs showed up with longish blond hair. After the brief interview, Mike recalls Lily telling him when his brother was out of earshot, "Am I being tested?" Referring to the longish hair. To give you an idea of what kind of person Lily was, one time Mike called her and asked, "How are you?" Her response was suspicious, as usual, "Why? Who wants to know?" "Lily, this is Mike!" "Oh." Twice Mike had to forge a check to spring Lily from the Sybil Brand women's jail. She often skirted the law with her business practices and would get caught. Mike would later be hired by the sock company, Neuville Hosiery, and become a salesman for them after college, making far more money. Lily was furious that Mike would abandon her. Neuville would also move out of its sublet into a warehouse of its own, severely cutting into Lily's income.)
Richard Meyers disappeared back into the rented house in Cudahy, and we never heard from him again. As I said, he was the smartest of all of us four friends, one of the smartest in our entire class; but he had no ambition to do much of anything with his life. His grandmother and then his mother would have died at some point. What did he do after that? We never were to find out.
Action Comics #1
At some point that first year at A.U. Morse, I was told that there was a used magazine and comic bookstore near the corner of Seville and E Florence Ave, on E Florence, in Huntington Park. I was still missing Adventure Comics #305, and my copy of The Justice League #21 someone had marked all over with blue ink before I bought it from that bin at the neighborhood liquor store and market. I stopped into the used bookstore to find out if he might have copies of each comic that I was looking for. He was certain he did, but it would take him a couple of days to go through his warehouse in back to locate them. They would cost me 50 cents each, a princely sum even though I was working. I returned a couple of days later to pay for and pick up the copies I had ordered. They were in mint condition. I was thrilled to have them. But before I would depart with my treasures, the store owner mentioned that he had a very good copy of Action Comics #1 that he would sell to me for $75.00. While I was certainly tempted, $75.00 was out of my financial reach in those days. Of course, had I foreseen the future, when a good copy of that historic comic would sell for a couple of hundred thousand dollars in the 1970's, and even up to $2 million dollars and more in the decades after that, I would have done all I could to have begged or borrowed the necessary cash. But it was not to be. (I have always wondered what happened to that particular copy.)
My mom never understood my desire to buy and read comic books, nor did she comprehend my expanding collection of vinyl LP's. I remember one evening when Mike and I returned from an album buying spree, I had him feed my purchases through my side bedroom window so that Mom, watching TV in the media room, would not know I had bought more records. Decades later in 1997, I would smugly explain to her that between selling my neatly cared for record albums and my remaining comic book collection, I was able to put a tidy downpayment on my condo in Denver in 1997. She finally acknowledged that I might have been on to something all those years before.
Dave Moore after High School
Until I got a car, I would take a bus that made a stop on Firestone Blvd in Downey, CA, and make a final stop in downtown Orange. The fare was 97 cents. Dave not only had his driver's license, his dad helped him get a light green Rambler convertible. We took a trip to visit the L.A. Art Museum (his mom did not allow him to drive that far from home, but we went anyway--he got a parking ticket that alerted his mom to the unauthorized trip). Below is a picture I took of Dave and his car in their driveway.
One time, I actually took the bus to LAX in the morning and boarded a Bonanza Airlines F-27 flight to Orange County Airport. The trip I thought was cleared for Dave to pick me up. I took the following photo of the beach beyond LAX from that F-27 (with the high wing, the view below the aircraft for passengers was unobstructed).
I used to have a great photo (now vanished) from before this picture was taken that featured the landing gear folding up into the engine cowling. I would show it to friends, and they'd always wonder if I had somehow been hanging beneath the plane to have taken that photograph. I would have to explain that it was because it was an F-27, and I was just looking out the window.
After I arrived at the Orange County Airport (with the modest arrival/departure gate in the old tower building) and called Dave's house, nobody answered. Hungry after a few hours of waiting for him, I eventually crossed a street and ate dinner at a nearby restaurant. Still, he never answered when I called numerous times during the day until it was growing late. I finally gave up that he was coming to pick me up and took the last Bonanza flight back to LAX and the RTD bus back home. On a later bus trip from Downey to Orange, Dave, his girlfriend, his sister Debbie and I took a trip to the Mt Palomar Observatory.
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Dave's dad, for reasons unknown, did not like Dave's girlfriend. Or he did not like her influence upon his son. Dave was then attending college at Fullerton State. At some point before 1970, Dave's dad took him out of school and to Malaysia where he was working with the Malaysian military as an advisor. So, Dave spent months in Kuala Lumpur. However, Dave should have remained in college with his student deferment. He would eventually become eligible for the draft. But that was all in the future. While still in college, Dave and his girlfriend had jobs working at a new drag strip off of the San Diego Freeway near the Orange County Airport. Here they are walking to her car when we visited her as her shift ended.
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During that visit, Dave and I spent some time at the Orange County Airport. Air California had begun service from that airport to San Francisco. PSA had been encouraged to expand their California service to include Orange County, but they resisted. As a result, Air California was formed using Lockheed Electras (as PSA had begun their propjet service several years before with Electras). Here are photos of three of their four Electras.
The following photo was taken from an observation platform on the second floor of the new terminal building.
The following photo is Dave in front of the new terminal building, note that they have not yet added the mosaic design. The right face of the terminal is still plain concrete.
Sadly, with the success of Air California at Orange County, the beautiful new airport terminal would eventually prove to be insufficient for growth (more and more major airlines would begin direct service to Orange County in the following decades). The open space you see from me below to the freeway beyond would be filled with a much larger terminal and a large, multi-level parking garage.
At some point later in the decade, Air California, when they converted to Boeing 737-200 jets like the one photo I took below, offered a $25.00 all-weekend-long fare to fly throughout their entire route system of OC, Burbank, San Jose, San Francisco, and Ontario. Richard Wright drove and all three of us took full advantage of the opportunity. We flew from OC to San Francisco on Saturday morning, got off the plane and reboarded the flight back to OC in the same aircraft. One of the routes took us from OC to Ontario and thence to San Francisco. Eventually, some of the stewardesses recognized us as the day progressed. When one of them stopped to chat us up about what was going on, Richard Wright embarrassed the hell out of Mike and me when he said, in his gravelly voice, "We're in a plot to destroy this airline!" The stewardess, with a perplexed look on her face, left us as quickly as humanly possible and escaped down the aisle to the front of the cabin and the galley. We were lucky, even in those days, that we three were not hauled off the flight after landing in San Jose and arrested for that kind of thoughtless remark. We both chided Richard mightily for what he had said.
The following day, a Sunday, we took the morning flight to San Francisco, a bus to the Downtown Airline Terminal in San Francisco, and enjoyed a Greyline Tour of Muir Woods.
Before summer school, Uncle Robert had decided to permanently move back to White Cloud, Kansas. (I think he must have believed that his dreams of becoming a Hollywood star were long over, or that the popularity of a Western-themed The Timbers steak house was wanning and no longer could afford to provide the Wild West show that centered around him, his whip or his rope tricks.) Mom must have decided that this was an inexpensive way for the three of us to accompany him for a visit with the relatives in Kansas because we had not been back to White Cloud since that summer of 1957. We met up with Robert at The Timbers restaurant parking lot north of Santa Barbara (I believe Uncle Hap drove us there). From the restaurant, we piled into Robert's 1961 Ford Woody station wagon for the trip East. The wonderful cook at The Timbers had fixed us several submarine sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil to eat along the way. We stored them in an ice chest in the back of the station wagon along with some sodas.
We eventually stopped in a small Arizona town that evening and had dinner in a motel cafe. Robert asked our waitress about the location of the city park, presumably where he would park and allow us all to sleep in the station wagon until driving on in the morning. Mom was having none of that, and we spent the night in a comfortable room at the motel that she paid for. The following morning, we headed for The Grand Canyon, a first for Ann and me. Ann took the following picture, with Mom and me in the foreground and Robert in a cowboy hat in the background, looking at the impossibly wide canyons beyond.
We also stopped at the Petrified Forest, another first. Here are Mom and I in front of the entrance.
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We stopped in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and then at The Big Well town of Greensburg, Kansas, on our way to stopping longer in Wichita, Kansas, where Great Aunt Lucille lived. (Aunt Jean, before she left for nurse's training for the Army after attending nursing school during WWII, had been farmed out by the family to do housework for Aunt Lucille, which Jean told me years later she deeply resented. Nurses training was a breeze compared to working hard, and thanklessly, for her Aunt Lucille.)
Once we got to White Cloud, I bagged groceries for Aunt Doris and Uncle Hap at their new neighborhood market for a couple of days and earned $5.00. I fished on the Missouri River with Uncle Hap. Great Grandma Nuzum was recently deceased, and Grandma Breeze had bought her small house on the main street of White Cloud. Great Grandma Nuzum's large brick house above the town to the left as a viewer looked toward the Missouri River at the foot of the town had slowly been falling apart for a few years. Uncle Robert would later buy it, along with the old telephone building, in addition to Grandma Nuzum's house that Grandma Breeze bought after her mother died. As the years passed, he also bought the hill on the South side of town for primitive camping. (When Robert died, his estranged son inherited everything but immediately put all of the properties up for sale, not that there were many buyers for land or decrepit buildings in a small town that had been dying or dead for decades after the end of WWII.)
Sadly, Aunt Doris and Uncle Hap's grocery store eventually folded. They had extended credit to locals who were slow or negligent in paying them back. Those same neighbors would often head to other stores in other towns to shop rather than shop locally. Aunt Doris would eventually get a job with the post office until she retired. Cousin Jim would graduate from Hiawatha High School in 1967 (he and Cousin Doug were the same age, three years older than I and four years older than Ann). Jim would attend college at the University of Kansas before joining the Army, though I do not believe that he served in Vietnam.
I remember reading an article in the local Hiawatha newspaper, interviewing some old coot who said that young people then were "too soft", in his opinion, as he did handstands on a picnic table. I am certain he did not think of my generation fighting and dying in Vietnam, or those before us who fought so hard for civil rights and voting rights during the early 1960's. Too soft indeed.
While I enjoyed seeing Mom's relations once again, as well as the famous sites on the drive to White Cloud, I was most thrilled to learn that Mom had purchased tickets for the three of us to fly back to Southern California on a TWA 880 from the old downtown Kansas City Airport. Here we are in the concourse, awaiting our departure. From left to right, Mom, Grandma Breeze, Uncle Robert, Aunt Doris, me and Ann.
Here is a picture below that I took of Ann and Mom about to board through the rear stairs. (No jetway at the old Kansas City airport in downtown Kansas City in that era.)
This photo Ann took of Mom and me aboard the flight. We had a few rows to ourselves, just behind the first class cabin:
South Gate Rod & Gun Club, Spring 1967
Les Peters was working for the South Gate Rod & Gun Club on weekends during his senior semester. One Saturday morning he called me and asked if I wanted a job there, too, as a "trap boy". I agreed to give it a shot. I had to take a city bus, getting off at a stop near the L.A. River and walked to Les Peters' house. We two then hiked toward the L.A. River, crossing over on a railroad trestle. The gun club fitted neatly into the triangle of the Rio Hondo River and the L.A. River, at the end of Miller Road. We were paid $1.25 per hour minimum wage. Old Ola Hopewell was the manager. We started in the mornings on Saturday and Sunday at 8:00 AM or 9:00 AM and plugged away until 4:00 PM or 5:00 PM, depending upon how late the remaining club members stayed and used their shotguns to blast clay pigeons out of the sky until dusk.
Once a trap boy learned the basics of placing a clay pigeon on the arm of the throwing machine, the job became boring. Olah allowed us to have a radio in each of the two trap range bunkers. Les Peters must have taken the following photo of me in a trap range bunker. (Years of bored trap boys wrote graffiti on the walls of the bunker. I wrote the aircraft numbers on that wall behind me.)
Once I became experienced, and more experienced trap boys quit, I would graduate to sitting at an old school desk on one of the two ranges, holding the controller that triggered the machine in the bunker. The several shooters were arrayed before me and called out, in order, "Pull it!" I would push the button, the clay pigeon would fly out of the bunker, the shooter would follow the pigeon across the sky and attempt to hit it. I would have to determine if he actually nicked the pigeon, or it was merely the wad from the shotgun shell that I saw. Most of the time, the pigeon was entirely blasted, and I could easily mark the score sheet on a clipboard.
One problem could arise if the shooter thought he hit the pigeon and I was convinced he had not. One old curmudgeon, Chuck Spinella, got so mad at me for not crediting him with a specific hit that he tossed an empty shogun shell at me as he left the range. Another problem could result when an occasional clay pigeon was defective and fall apart as it got tossed aloft. Once in a while, a shooter would become so frustrated with a string of defective "birds", he would actually shoot at the concrete-block-and-corrugated-tin-roof-covered bunker. The trap boy inside would jump in fright. Another problem could happen when not enough trap boys showed up on a specific day for work. We needed four, one in each of the two bunkers and two to push the buttons on each of the two ranges. Otherwise, members of the club would have to take over the button pushing & scoring duties. Most were decent enough at it, but some left their fat, aged fingers on the button too long and the arm on the throwing machine in the bunker would spin around more than once as the trap boy tried to place another clay pigeon on the arm and worried about getting his fingers whacked.
We often have songs that we associate with certain people and certain places in our lives. For me at the trap range it was Groovin' by The Rascals. I would be in one of those two bunkers, listening to one of the crappy radios, to a Top 40 AM station and hear the vocalist sing:
Life would be ecstasy, you and me and Leslie
Groovin' on a Sunday afternoon.
Here were Mike, Leslie and I working at the trap range on a magnificent Sunday afternoon, not exactly "groovin'" but doing OK. Only decades later did I learn that I had the words wrong. This is what the lyric actually says:
Life would be ecstasy, you and me endlessly
Groovin' on a Sunday afternoon.
Most of the time, even pushing the button and keeping score got incredibly boring. The rhythm of the shooting, the bright, sunny days of Southern California, the drone of the traffic on the nearby freeway could become totally mesmerizing. I remember one afternoon I completely zoned out for several moments. When I came to in fright, I looked around me. Nobody was yelling at me. They were all still shooting away. I glanced down at the score sheet and, apparently, I had continued to push the button and continued to accurately keep score.
We also needed to take a break now and then to use the bathroom or take a half-hour break for lunch. Once a month, the members of the club would host a potluck lunch. We trap boys, like needy peasants, were told we could have any food that was left over after the members filled their paper plates. While the food might have been a welcome change to the sandwiches we typically brought from home, we still felt as if we were poor relations invited to partake of the kitchen scraps after the royal family had had their fill. It was a thankless, low-paying job, and we weren't treated all that well.
The money, even if minimum wage, was nice to have during my senior semester. I was able to buy my class ring, as well as more record albums. But we were lied to. Olah said that they paid our taxes above and beyond our minimum wage salary that was given to us in cash at the end of each day.
Unfortunately, the following year, I found that I had to come up with $90, a princely sum in those days while I was attending college, to pay my reported income tax bill.
One morning when we arrived, we saw Oleh hiking up from the L.A. River. He told us that a body of a woman had been found in the river. "She looked strange, nekked," he told us.
One of our concerns happened during rainy days. We would be expected to show up and to hang out at the range just in case the skies cleared and members showed up to shoot. But if it kept raining, we were forced to wait under the corrugated-roof-covered picnic table pergola. If it looked as if no members were going to show up to shoot before noon, we were sent home in the rain, with only an hour or two of pay. And, of course, each walk back and forth across the active railroad trestle was dicey--although only once did we actually have to run. One morning, we could see a police car pull up at the gun club ahead. Olah had to talk us out of trouble. Problem was, there really was no other direct way for us to get to the gun range. None of us had cars. I was still just 17 and did not have my driver's license even though I had taken Driver's Training in high school earlier that year.
Unfortunately, even though Les brought me on, after a couple of months, he quit. I thought of Mike to replace him. I called his house from the trap range and reached his father. Mike relates, even decades later, that his Dad entered his bedroom and woke him up from a sound sleep, to tell him that he now had a job to get to. Mike was not happy about working at any job, let alone at the trap range. While I stayed on until the very end of the school year, Mike quit after a couple of months of work there. He never lets me forget that dark time when I got him that miserable job.
Here is my page from the 1967 Rambleback year book (I kept my mouth closed to hide my braces, second row from the bottom on the right):
Braces
Regarding my braces, I had been wearing them for a couple of years at this point and would for at least my first year of college. In high school, once a month I would leave before my last class of the day and hike to the orthodontist's office in Huntington Park, at the Northeast corner of Seville and Florance on the second floor. Each time they tightened the braces, I would be in such intense pain that I could not eat solid food that evening at home. I would also have to sometimes apply wax to keep the sharp wires from cutting the inside of my mouth. I would typically have soup because my teeth hurt too much. Mom always had Bufferin at home, and I would take a couple to try to mitigate the pain and sleep at night, but the two tablets were only marginally effective. Braces in those days were torture.
St. Helen's Catholic Church
I attended church service every Sunday morning through my first year of college. At some point, the church offered an English mass which I preferred. If I went to confession on Saturday, I never mentioned being homosexual or having homosexual thoughts and longings. The church itself was just 3 1/2 blocks from the house. I don't really recall that Ann and I went together, either to confession or to church on Sunday, but we did go each Sunday. I thought about stopping--Mom was not particularly religious and never attended any church service. When I mentioned not going to Ann, she tried to shame me by saying that God gave us everything and all I was required to do was attend a worship ceremony for one hour a week. It worked, for a time.
1967 Pontiac GTO
Across Firestone, on my walk to high school each weekday morning in the Fall of 1966, I would see a cream-colored '67 Pontiac GTO in the Roc Cutrie Pontiac Dealership lot (at the corner of Garden View and Firestone), often with beads of morning dew on the hood before the staff arrived to wipe the cars clean. (Mike would later mention that his Uncle Milton was a salesman there.) I thought it was the coolest car I had ever seen. No way could I afford one, especially not a brand new car when I began to work for minimum wage as a senior. But I always loved the look of that car.
Mom could not attend because of work. But Dad and Grandpa and Grandma Sanchez did come to my graduation ceremony from High School. Here are two photos taken before we left the house.
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I don't remember that much about the ceremony itself. I did have a friend take the following picture of me in my robes with my diploma:
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Once all of this formal ritual was over, we returned to the school in Mike's Dad's station wagon, to board buses to take us to Grad Nite at Disneyland. Mike's date was Ann. My date was a friend of Ann's.
Grad Nite
Round Trip to San Diego
In the next couple of years, when we had a little extra cash and time, Mike and I would take inexpensive flights to San Diego from LAX. We'd pour over airline flight schedules and attempt to take as many different airlines and airliners back and forth just for the fun of it. The first time was on June 10, after graduation. On that trip we took a National Airlines DC-8 to San Diego to see the zoo. The following two photos were of us boarding at LAX. Notice that we were using a cement ramp and stairs to board. Jetways were not yet in widespread use.
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Mike took the following picture of me sitting in the back row in coach. I am wearing my favorite short-sleeved sweater.
We each had bought SAS (Scandinavian Airlines System) flight bags at LAX. Our return flight to LAX would be on a Delta Airlines DC-8 flight. We got a taste for the Chocolate Sundays that the restaurant in the airport served in a large goblet, with shaved almonds and a cherry on top of the whipped cream. Over those several months, we would fly down to San Diego on a United Airlines 727, United Airlines DC-8-61 that flew into LAX from Hawaii, a Bonanza Airlines F-27 via Orange Country airport, and a PSA DC-9-30. We would fly back to LAX on a Southern Airlines DC-9-10 leased to PSA, and an American Airlines Convair 990, among others. Airline tickets in those days ranged from $5.00 and $6.00 to $9.00 (American). Early on, we would have to take an RTD bus from South Gate to LAX and return to South Gate by the same means.
During the American 990 flight, we got to listen to the wondrous inflight entertainment system, still a bit of a novelty in those days. Previous passengers had left their headsets on the seats. As the 4-engined jet aircraft roared aloft and I could look down and see the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego below, I heard Vince Guaraldi's jazz version of Watch What Happens and, later, his mournful piano version of Eleanor Rigby. Unfortunately, Southern California was experiencing wildfires on several hillsides as the plane barreled North along the coast. However, on this flight aboard the 990, LAX was fogged in. The pilot aborted the initial landing after we got into the low clouds, then soared aloft once more, and circled around over the ocean for another pass. We did land that second time and taxied to the terminal.
After we exited the terminal, we counted ourselves lucky indeed that we were still able to catch one of the last buses to South Gate through Watts that night. The bus ride was uneventful. Passengers got off here and there. Eventually, in addition to Mike on the aisle and me at the window, the only other passengers were two young men. One was seated directly behind the driver. The other was seated on the long bench seat at the very back of the bus. There was never any indication that the two young black men knew one another. At the last bus stop in Watts, the man from the back curiously passed by us for the front exit (the middle exit was closer, just a couple of rows behind us). The man behind the bus driver got up but put his arms around the driver instead of exiting. I first thought to myself as I heard the driver make some odd sounds was, "He's tickling the bus driver." The young man from the back of the bus now stopped next to the driver, and Mike and I soundlessly turned to each other and lowly whispered our sudden realization, "They're robbing the bus!"
One of the young men, brandishing a large, old, rusty kitchen knife approached us, demanding of Mike, "Gimme your watch!" Mike limply raised his arm as the young man pulled the watch off of his wrist and pocketed it. After he turned to walk back toward the front of the bus, Mike suddenly dug into his back pocket, producing his wallet. I though he had gone insane and was going to tell the robber, "You forgot my wallet!" Instead, Mike promptly tossed his wallet to the floor, under the seat in front of me. Without looking down, I slowly moved my foot over and covered his wallet with my shoe. The two men exited the bus. The one young man immediately ran off. The second, still brandishing the rusty knife, pointed it toward the massive bus with the doors now closed and calmly ordered, "Drive on!" I glanced down at him as we passed by, looking directly at his face and at the old knife, thinking how absurd it was that here we were in this big bus with the doors closed, and he was just standing there by the sidewalk with only a dull kitchen knife to defend himself. Some later action hero might have tried to run him down with the bus. All our driver could say in a stunned voice as he hit the accelerator was, "Can you beat that?"
He soon stopped the bus just inside of the South Gate city limits and contacted the police via a nearby phone. The police arrived soon and took our statements, but nobody offered to take us to our anticipated bus stop or home. We were still several blocks from the regular bus stop or from our separate homes. With no one offering to help us, Mike called his Dad. Mr. Mebs picked us up a few minutes later and took me home. He and Mike then drove home. That was the last time we used an RTD bus to or from LAX. We were lucky we had not been stabbed or beaten. Except for Mike saving his wallet, we were too stunned by what was happening to act or move, even to defend ourselves. Once we each got cars, we would return to LAX and resume taking flights to San Diego or San Francisco.
A.U. Morse & Company
I got an unexpected call about a full-time summer job at a company at 2423 Hunter St., near downtown Los Angeles. With the directions mapped out, I took the bus through Huntington Park and up Santa Fe Avenue--the one we used to take to go shopping in downtown L.A. at Christmas--and got off at a corner stop just before the bus route passed under the Santa Monica Freeway. This was an extensive warehouse district around Olympic Blvd where the bridge over the L.A. River--often used in car commercials and Hollywood films--is located. I found the door to 2423 and headed up the wooden stairs to what appeared to be a warehouse office. An older woman who seemed to be in charge said when she saw me, "He looks just like his dad."
What I was soon to learn was that Dad had gotten me this summer job at A.U. Morse & Company where he worked as a wallpaper salesman with three other salesmen. They would stop by the warehouse weekly but typically scoured the paint and wallpaper stores all around the L.A. Basin and Orange County for orders. The company had a male manager at this location, and the older woman I saw right away was the office manager. The owner was deceased, but his wife and adult son ran the comparable warehouse in Burlingame, California, near San Francisco.
One day each week, I would be helping out in the warehouse, unloading a long trailer truck packed with heavy cases of wallpaper from the Borden Chemical Company of Columbus, Ohio. The rest of my hours and days I would be occupied with filling orders for rolls of wallpaper in the warehouse or answering inquiries over the single loudspeaker for availability of specific wallpaper rolls from the secretaries in the office. The regular foreman, Joe, was out for a few more weeks after recovering from kidney stone surgery. Julian, a young Latino family man, was the temporary foreman until Joe returned. The hours were 8 AM until 5 PM each day, with a half-hour break for lunch and two, ten-minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. At the end of the day, we helped the UPS driver load the brown-paper-wrapped wallpaper orders into his truck for delivery to various paint and wallpaper stores around Southern California. I would be given a 10-cent per hour increase in my pay to $1.35 per hour over what I had been making at the trap range, and they did take out for taxes. We were paid weekly.
The only entertainment we had was a radio that was set to KLOS, a very cool FM station that had a hip sensibility for that era. One later guest on an afternoon broadcast, a woman, detailed the sexist elements of certain Rolling Stones lyrics in songs such as Stupid Girl or Under My Thumb.
Julian had started out after High School with dreams of becoming a draftsman but only got this job instead. Most of the two or three other men I would be working with had no education or skills beyond High School, if that, so this was as far as most of them would ever get. They didn't have the prospect of college as I did that fall. Over the next four years, those who worked alongside me were typically poor, white or Hispanic/Latino, with maybe a High School diploma. The women who worked in the office taking phone orders were generally older and white, though most of them only had a High School diploma. That whole summer I took the bus back and forth to work, the better part of an hour's commute each way. Everyone on the bus was, like me at the time, lower middle class. They either could not afford a car or could not afford to park it daily downtown while at work.
I used to chat on the bus with a somewhat attractive young man not much older than I who lived a couple of blocks away in South Gate. I passed by his rental house one afternoon and noted that the two cars in the driveway did not look as if they were operable. He already had a wife and an infant son.
I also caught the eye of a pretty young woman who lived with her sister and brother-in-law in an apartment complex near our house on Cypress. She worked as a secretary downtown. I cannot say we dated. But I did go over to their apartment one evening for conversation.
Early that summer, Mike got a job through Richard Meyers at a sock distribution warehouse in downtown L.A., working for a woman who sublet warehouse space. Sadly, after Lily Butler hired Mike, she realized he was a more efficient worker than Richard Meyers and fired him. We only heard from him once more after that. Over the phone Richard told me about his experience when he had to report for his draft physical in 1968: "I got off the bus in a dirty part of town. All I could see were bums and trash everywhere. The sidewalks were filthy. The sky was smoggy. I took my degrading physical, but I was rejected because of a bad elbow. I left the draft building and stepped outside. The sun was shining brightly. The day was beautiful. I saw lovely Hispanic people along the sidewalk, and I admired their culture."
(I would briefly quit A.U. Morse at one point and work in the sock warehouse for Lily Butler--Mike had moved into the office to work. Lily wasn't really a nice person. I had to take an old elevator to the floor where the warehouse was located. Lily's office, and Mike's desk, were on the floor below. After a couple of months, A.U. Morse called me back with the offer of a modest pay raise. I took it. There I could park on Hunter St. for free. Working for Lily Butler, I had to pay for parking. Mike got his brother my job when I left. Rick Mebs showed up with longish blond hair. After the brief interview, Mike recalls Lily telling him when his brother was out of earshot, "Am I being tested?" Referring to the longish hair. To give you an idea of what kind of person Lily was, one time Mike called her and asked, "How are you?" Her response was suspicious, as usual, "Why? Who wants to know?" "Lily, this is Mike!" "Oh." Twice Mike had to forge a check to spring Lily from the Sybil Brand women's jail. She often skirted the law with her business practices and would get caught. Mike would later be hired by the sock company, Neuville Hosiery, and become a salesman for them after college, making far more money. Lily was furious that Mike would abandon her. Neuville would also move out of its sublet into a warehouse of its own, severely cutting into Lily's income.)
Richard Meyers disappeared back into the rented house in Cudahy, and we never heard from him again. As I said, he was the smartest of all of us four friends, one of the smartest in our entire class; but he had no ambition to do much of anything with his life. His grandmother and then his mother would have died at some point. What did he do after that? We never were to find out.
Action Comics #1
At some point that first year at A.U. Morse, I was told that there was a used magazine and comic bookstore near the corner of Seville and E Florence Ave, on E Florence, in Huntington Park. I was still missing Adventure Comics #305, and my copy of The Justice League #21 someone had marked all over with blue ink before I bought it from that bin at the neighborhood liquor store and market. I stopped into the used bookstore to find out if he might have copies of each comic that I was looking for. He was certain he did, but it would take him a couple of days to go through his warehouse in back to locate them. They would cost me 50 cents each, a princely sum even though I was working. I returned a couple of days later to pay for and pick up the copies I had ordered. They were in mint condition. I was thrilled to have them. But before I would depart with my treasures, the store owner mentioned that he had a very good copy of Action Comics #1 that he would sell to me for $75.00. While I was certainly tempted, $75.00 was out of my financial reach in those days. Of course, had I foreseen the future, when a good copy of that historic comic would sell for a couple of hundred thousand dollars in the 1970's, and even up to $2 million dollars and more in the decades after that, I would have done all I could to have begged or borrowed the necessary cash. But it was not to be. (I have always wondered what happened to that particular copy.)
My mom never understood my desire to buy and read comic books, nor did she comprehend my expanding collection of vinyl LP's. I remember one evening when Mike and I returned from an album buying spree, I had him feed my purchases through my side bedroom window so that Mom, watching TV in the media room, would not know I had bought more records. Decades later in 1997, I would smugly explain to her that between selling my neatly cared for record albums and my remaining comic book collection, I was able to put a tidy downpayment on my condo in Denver in 1997. She finally acknowledged that I might have been on to something all those years before.
Dave Moore after High School
Until I got a car, I would take a bus that made a stop on Firestone Blvd in Downey, CA, and make a final stop in downtown Orange. The fare was 97 cents. Dave not only had his driver's license, his dad helped him get a light green Rambler convertible. We took a trip to visit the L.A. Art Museum (his mom did not allow him to drive that far from home, but we went anyway--he got a parking ticket that alerted his mom to the unauthorized trip). Below is a picture I took of Dave and his car in their driveway.
After I arrived at the Orange County Airport (with the modest arrival/departure gate in the old tower building) and called Dave's house, nobody answered. Hungry after a few hours of waiting for him, I eventually crossed a street and ate dinner at a nearby restaurant. Still, he never answered when I called numerous times during the day until it was growing late. I finally gave up that he was coming to pick me up and took the last Bonanza flight back to LAX and the RTD bus back home. On a later bus trip from Downey to Orange, Dave, his girlfriend, his sister Debbie and I took a trip to the Mt Palomar Observatory.
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Dave's dad, for reasons unknown, did not like Dave's girlfriend. Or he did not like her influence upon his son. Dave was then attending college at Fullerton State. At some point before 1970, Dave's dad took him out of school and to Malaysia where he was working with the Malaysian military as an advisor. So, Dave spent months in Kuala Lumpur. However, Dave should have remained in college with his student deferment. He would eventually become eligible for the draft. But that was all in the future. While still in college, Dave and his girlfriend had jobs working at a new drag strip off of the San Diego Freeway near the Orange County Airport. Here they are walking to her car when we visited her as her shift ended.
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The following photo was taken from an observation platform on the second floor of the new terminal building.
The following photo is Dave in front of the new terminal building, note that they have not yet added the mosaic design. The right face of the terminal is still plain concrete.
Sadly, with the success of Air California at Orange County, the beautiful new airport terminal would eventually prove to be insufficient for growth (more and more major airlines would begin direct service to Orange County in the following decades). The open space you see from me below to the freeway beyond would be filled with a much larger terminal and a large, multi-level parking garage.
The following day, a Sunday, we took the morning flight to San Francisco, a bus to the Downtown Airline Terminal in San Francisco, and enjoyed a Greyline Tour of Muir Woods.
East L.A. Junior College
I remember our first day at East L.A. as if it were yesterday rather than 56 years ago, in September of 1967. We were bewildered. A board listed the classes available to sign up for. Many had "staff" as the instructor. We had to ask others what that meant (no specific instructor had yet been assigned). Classes were filling up quickly. We were trying to choose classes in the morning so that we could still work in the afternoon now that Michael and I had gotten used to having a steady (if barely above minimum wage) income. I would later discover that both the algebra class and a freshman English class I signed up for would not transfer for credit after we graduated from Junior College and moved onto a four-year state college. I would need to take an extra quarter of classes in the Fall of 1971 to graduate. That additional college time would pose a problem with the still-existent military draft.
Our only expense to attend East L.A. was the $6.50 student fees and books, though the books could be a bit costly if only new books were available. I would enjoy scouring the bookstore several times and bought a few paperback books that were not a part of any class, often collections of world and American poetry. Remember, though, that in this era, very few people had credit cards of any kind. I did not even have a checking account. Anything I bought was paid for by cash. If I did not have the ready cash, I could not buy something.
I took a German class, but I still would not learn enough, or be able to practice sufficiently, to be able to speak a foreign language. But in the German class, I would soon meet James Patrick Mullaney. He lived in an apartment on the other side of W Floral Drive from the campus. Unfortunately, that first semester, we had to take a general gym class (no corrective gym there). We had to play basketball and volleyball. For the Spring, however, we could sign up for the badminton team, a sport I had remembered my parents playing over the low chain-link fence between our driveway and the Hofeldt's driveway. Unfortunately, while Mike loved to play and signed up, they found that he had a hernia during the required physical and needed to drop badminton and have surgery. I continued to play for the team though I was not particularly good in the very beginning.
We played Santa Monica Junior College as our first opponent. They were a badminton powerhouse. With our best player academically ineligible for a few weeks, each of us had to move up and play a better adversary than we would otherwise have. The guy I played against destroyed me, 15-0 and 15-1. I am not even sure how I managed to get a point off of him. He was just toying with me and seemed slightly bored. Our team coach was Miss Quintana. Mike especially never thought of Hispanics or Latinos as anything but white, and I really never gave it any thought. Yet when she introduced herself to us, Miss Quintana pronounced her name as follows: "I am Miss Keentahna. Or Kwintana to our Anglo friends." Mike never forgot being referred to as an "Anglo" friend.
At some point during our two years at East L.A. Community College, we actually experienced a riot among many of the Latino students. We had to pull one of our fellow students into our classroom as other students were angrily running down the hallways outside our classroom and threatening other students.
That Fall I again took, and finally passed this second time around, my driver's test and finally got my driver's license. (Driver's training in High School helped some, but I was usually too nervous to give my best while being scored by a judgmental DMV observer.) That Fall or very late Winter, Mom gave me her 1960 4-door Rambler. I would no longer have to ride with Richard Wright to East L.A. each morning. In the early afternoon, I would have to catch a ride home from Ken Braun, a classmate in High School who drove a maroon Corvair. We would stop at the new Der Wienerschnitzel off of Firestone Blvd, near Cypress, and grab a few Chili dogs to eat. After Ken dropped me off, I would leave my books at home and walk to the corner of Long Beach and Firestone, to catch the bus to work a few afternoon hours most weekdays at A.U. Morse. With the Rambler, I could drive directly from East L.A. College to A.U. Morse. (I thought Mike and I would each quit our summer jobs when we first started college in the Fall of '67, but Mike explained that he would continue working 40 hours per week for Lily Butler while attending college full time. All of these years later, we wonder to each other how we managed to do both. I did not work as many hours as he, but I still worked over 20 hours each week while attending college full time--we could not afford to go part time because of the military draft looming over us.)
The day that I finally got my Driver's license, Ken had dropped me off at home. Mom was waiting to take me to the DMV. As Mom was backing out of the driveway, Ken stopped us and asked if he could use our phone. We were in a hurry and had left the backdoor unlocked anyway. When I returned later that afternoon, I noticed that a 10-dollar bill that I had tossed onto my bed was gone. Mom told me that she had seen the money lying there and had laid an article of my clothing on top of it. But Ken had obviously found the money and taken it. Mike had known Ken for a few years and warned me not to trust him. Ken's Mom used to beat him viciously for almost any reason; but he was often involved in mischief, like putting a hose down a neighbor's mailbox and flooding their living room while they were away on vacation. Ken had been driving me home for weeks that Fall, so I really should have just given him money for driving me all of those afternoons, even though I recall that he refused to be reimbursed since he was not going much out of his way. A few years ago, I read on Facebook that Ken had died at 70. He left behind a wife and two daughters.
Mom gave me her Rambler because she had bought what was her first new car ever, before or since. (She always said she wished she had owned a 1957 T-bird.) She purchased a light blue 1968 4-door Ford Galaxie 500. It was beautiful and rode so smoothly. She kept that car for years until she was rear-ended and the car was totaled in the early 1990's.
Here is Mom in front of a Crocker Bank in Palm Springs with her new car, some time after she bought the Ford in late 1967 or very early 1968. She eventually got a job in the escrow department working for Crocker Bank after leaving the Realty firm on Tweedy. She might have been asked to temporarily work at the Crocker Bank in Palm Springs. Her friends Julie and Bill Fernandez, whose main house was in Downey, owned a condo in a resort complex in Bermuda Dunes that featured a golf course. She would drive to Bermuda Dunes and stay with them and play golf.
San Leandro Visit July 1967
I had heard that Doug, on leave, was visiting his parents in San Leandro. I decided to take a Pacific Airlines 727 (the same aircraft that many musical acts had taken from LA to Monterey, to attend the Monterey Pop Musical Festival, June 16-18, 1967) from LA to Santa Barbara to Monterey and finally to San Francisco. I would take an SFO helicopter to Oakland. Here is the Pacific Airlines 727 at LAX. It wasn't a very efficient way to fly that two-stop route to San Francisco, but I jumped at the chance.
Doug and a buddy took me to a few places around San Francisco. We first stopped at an apartment building in downtown SF to visit a woman he knew in High School. He still had his '58 Chevy, as you can see by the photo below. We did drive through the Haight-Ashbury district where the Summer of Love was supposed to be in full Flower. Well, the traffic was certainly bumper-to-bumper, with tourists staring from behind their closed car windows at the many freaks crowding the sidewalks. One long-haired guy was tugging a long-haired girl, clad only in a T-shirt, behind him. She had her eyes closed and appeared to be totally stoned out of her mind and unaware of what was going on around her. Doug honked his horn at the guy, seemingly to encourage what he was doing. The guy gave a thumbs up gesture in reply. I thought it was all rather disgusting.
Here we are walking along Fisherman's Warf:
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San Francisco trip, New Year's Eve 1967
I had wanted to visit San Francisco since Pam bought me that teen mystery, set in San Francisco, The Green Cat Mystery. Mike and I decided to fly there during Christmas vacation at the end of the year.
Los Angeles under smog:
San Francisco fogged in:
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We actually exited the plane through the tail stairs in San Jose. After the hijacking of a Northwest 727 by D.B. Cooper, who used the tail stairs as his exit with the ransom, the tail stairs were never allowed to be used again on 727's.
By the time we got to the SF Airport, the day was getting on. When we arrived at the Downtown Airline Terminal (where you could catch a bus back and forth to the airport and downtown SF, as well as tour buses to various sites in and around San Francisco), we decided that we would take a bus tour to Muir Woods instead of seeing any of the tourist sites in San Francisco.
Here I am on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge:
After the tour, I called Aunt Jean and Uncle Lloyd in San Leandro and realized that my Cousin Doug was again home on leave from the Air Force. I abandoned Mike at the airport and took an SFO helicopter flight to the Oakland Airport. (Mike never lets me forget that abandonment as he had to take a PSA Electra back to LAX alone, all the while recalling the details of The Electra Story when two separate Electras came apart in midair, killing everyone aboard both aircraft because of a design flaw years before.) I spent the rest of the New Year's weekend at Aunt Jean and Uncle Lloyd's. Cousin Doug and his girlfriend, Sue, were recently engaged. Grandma Breeze was also visiting from White Cloud.
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One of Doug's friend's drove me to the San Francisco Airport. There were no flights out of Oakland, and any of the flights out of SFO to LAX were booked. I could only get a flight into Orange County Airport. I then took a bus to Disneyland. But that's as close as I could get to South Gate. I called Mom to be rescued. Uncle Robert was visiting, and the two of them drove to the Disney Hotel parking lot to pick me up. Mom was not too happy about having to pick me up there, even though I explained that I had done my best to get this close to home.
James Patrick Mullaney
James Patrick Mullaney had light brown, curly hair, a muscular chest and muscular arms. I thought he was quite cute. He was the first of three men, each one three years older than I, who had been in the service in Vietnam and returned to take advantage of the G.I. Bill to enroll in college. Jim had been in the Air Force in Vietnam. While attending college, he worked at a hospital wearing scrubs. His studio apartment featured a convertible sofa that he slept on. Three or four years ago, I came across an obituary online that his family had put up. He died at 70 after retiring from a government job that he never missed a day of in all of the years he'd work there. He'd been married for his entire life after college to one woman and had three children. Here is a photograph that he'd had framed on an end table by his couch in that apartment by East L.A. College. His children posted the photo within his online obit. I felt as if a pleasant part of my past had returned. Perhaps he was the first man I was fully attracted to, both physically and emotionally.
We would spend evenings together in his apartment, chatting or watching TV or listening to his reel-to-reel tape player. A buddy of his had made a professional tape of Johnny Mathis records for him. We would also wrestle on the bed when it was folded out.
While Jim was dating an Asian-American woman doctor at the hospital where he worked, I always wondered about our relationship. Early on, when I had stayed a bit late at his apartment, he offered that I could spend the night rather than drive home that late. We got undressed and climbed under the light covers, only clad in our underwear. I was nervous because I only very rarely shared a bed with another boy or man, maybe less than five times in my entire life before meeting Jim. I was having a tough time falling asleep. All of a sudden, I could see and feel Jim roll over toward me. His right arm was outstretched to fully embrace me. Confused, I thought that perhaps he was asleep and did not realize what he was about to do. I wanted him to embrace me, but I did not know if he was doing this because he did not realize he was sharing his bed with a man and not his girlfriend--though I had no idea the extent of their relationship or if they had ever had sex. I stuck my hand out to stop him and he pulled back. Had he been asleep and not really known what he was doing? Or had he known exactly what he was doing and stopped only because he thought I did not welcome his impending embrace?
In the morning he mentioned by way of explanation that he had only once slept with another man and that they had "not made a move toward one another." Had I prevented yet another early sexual encounter because I was intimidated?
As with the naked young man near the doorway to that apartment building next door, in retrospect this was another time in my life when I wish that I had allowed events to play out instead of hesitating. Jim and I went on wrestling in his bed and sleeping together afterwards. (We were actually stopped in mid wrestle on the night of June 5th, 1968. Jim had had his portable B&W TV on to the primary election news when the broadcast was interrupted by the startling announcement that Robert F. Kennedy had just been shot at the Ambassador Hotel after he'd won the California Democratic Primary. He likely would have won the Democratic nomination in Chicago and beaten Richard Nixon in the presidential election in the Fall of '68. No President Nixon. No prolonged Vietnam War. No Watergate burglary and resignation.)
Only once was there another overt expression of true intimacy between Jim and me that I--again--did not know how to react to, not counting the wrestling on his bed.
The summer of 1968, I was taking a vacation to visit my Cousin Doug and his wife Sue in Anchorage, Alaska, where Doug was still stationed with the Air Force. Jim agreed to ride with me to LAX in my Rambler. He would then drive the Rambler back and park it on the street in front of his apartment building for when I returned. We were standing face-to-face and close in his apartment before we left. He smiled, actually batted his eyes at me sweetly, and then he reached out and hugged me, pulling me close and holding me tightly for several moments. This was not an era when men actually hugged much, if at all. I did not know what his unexpected and prolonged hug meant. I kept my arms at my sides because I was not used to being hugged by anyone, especially not by someone I was attracted to.
The best way I can justify how I acted was that I was only 18 and extremely confused. I knew I was attracted to men. To Jim specifically. I still believed that I was the only homosexual man in the world, at least to a degree that I ever deeply thought about it, as illogical as that sounds today. In Alaska, however, I loved the way Doug and Sue lived their lives together. They were married and slept together. They seemed happy, something I had rarely known before in my life with couples I knew well. When I returned from Alaska, I picked up my Rambler but did not contact Jim. He called a week or so later, but I was cool toward him on the phone. I never saw or heard from him again after that.
I was unspeakably cruel, acting as I did toward Jim in 1968. He had done nothing wrong. Perhaps he was as confused as I was, or perhaps he only felt an innocent affection toward me, a deep friendship when he might not have had any other close male friends. He would have been only 22 years old or so when we met at East L.A. I don't excuse my ending our friendship that way--I was wrong. I might have thought I wanted to live a heterosexual life; but I should have known that was never going to happen, and I did not exactly want that life anyway.
Unfortunately, two men living together, even as sketchily homoerotically as we were, was not acceptable, looking at it from the outside. I remember Jim telling me once after I had moved in with him for a few weeks before preparation for finals, the apartment manager had asked him about our living arrangement--I was not on the lease, obviously. (Perhaps the manager had seen a girlfriend move in with a boyfriend in his building over the years but not two men living together as we were--and he must have known that Jim only had a convertible sofa to sleep on in his studio apartment.) We had splashed around together in the apartment swimming pool for everyone to see, enjoying one another's company and just having fun. Jim told me that he had assured the manager that our cohabitating was just for finals since we were studying together.
The Stonewall riots would not take place for another year. Gay rights and pride parades were all in the distant future. Mike's Aunt Gin and Uncle Milton lived in a cozy single story older apartment building in South Gate. Two of their neighbors were Chuck and Bess, both men. They did not have problems with their gay neighbors, but they were likely in the minority. Even our typing teacher in High School, Mr. Ziven, was arrested, along with some of his male friends, when they were having a men-only party in his apartment building. The cops figured out they were all gay and that recognition probably led to the arrests. I would read about those arrests in the mid 1970's in The Los Angeles Times newspaper while stationed in North Dakota. His arrest likely cost him his teaching job forever.
Mike even told me that his own brother, Rick, a few years after Jim and I met, would accompany his buddies and drive into West Hollywood to seek out and "bust fruits".
Breakfast and Lunch at East L.A. and A.U. Morse
A McDonald's restaurant was built between the college campus and S. Atlantic Blvd. We'd hike down there and grab a burger, fries and a Fresca, a cheap way to satisfy our hunger. This went on for a few weeks until I ordered a Fresca, that turned out to be slightly brown in color, while one of the burger buns had a tiny bit of green mold on the bottom. Enough of fast food.
We then ate more healthily at the lunch counter of a Woolworth's across S. Atlantic from the McDonald's. The waitress was friendly and the food was always tasty. I usually ordered a tuna salad sandwich and fries.
During those days when I worked an entire day at A.U. Morse, I would sometimes buy a breakfast sandwich from a food truck that parked on S Hunter St. to service all of the workers on the block. The owner of the truck was very conservative. (We got along well until my politics began to change.) One woman secretary would go to the famous Sears store across the E Olympic bridge for lunch. I would ask her to pick me up a burger and fries and bring them back for me.
June 9th, 1968, San Francisco
Mike and I decided that we would fly to San Francisco one weekend and finally tour the city. I am not sure that we intended to see so much of the city on foot, but we did. We flew to San Francisco on Saturday, June 8th. We spent the night at the Americania Hotel, not far from Market Street, after a brief walk around the town that night. The Summer of Love the year before was definitely over. Parts of the city had gone to seed. In the crowds that night, we passed a willowy young blond woman quietly asking for money from anyone who might help. I stopped and looked back at her, wondering if I should give her something. Our eyes engaged, but only briefly, her forlorn gaze looking momentarily hopeful. But Mike grabbed me by the arm and kept me moving away from her, and she slowly looked away, to engage someone else.
We ordered Chicken Delight delivered to our hotel room that night. Mike had collapsed on his bed and was asleep when the food arrived, so I had to rouse him to eat. (I must confess that on the long hike the next day, I never recall the two of us getting anything to eat or drink except one time the entire day--nobody carried bottled water in those days. I don't even have any memory of us eating anything that Sunday morning after we checked out of our hotel. For years, I also had a--proven false--memory of my wearing blue, low-top Converse tennis shoes on the hike. But one photo in particular disproved my long-held, faulty memory.)
We were both 18 and reasonably fit. Until we got cars, we were used to long walks around South Gate, though the streets and sidewalks there were quite flat. Not so San Francisco.
Here is the first picture Mike took of me. We are likely heading up Leavenworth St. to California St., to cross the top of Nob Hill. I am carrying a small suitcase. We probably only brought a change of socks and underwear with us.
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Here I am standing along California St. with Grace Cathedral in the background, as well as Huntington Park across the street from me.
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We might have walked up to Coit Tower; but I have no photos of either of us there, so perhaps no photos and no memory of visiting that attraction means that we did not go there. Here is a photo of me, possibly descending California St. to Grant Avenue with Coit Tower in the distance.
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We did take Lombard St. to view the crooked section above as we headed toward Fisherman's Warf.
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Here is Mike at Fisherman's Warf.
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We walked out to the end of the Aquatic Park Pier and took three photos, looking back at the city or toward the Golden Gate Bridge.
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We then headed toward the Palace of Fine Arts on the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. (Again, I am not certain that we originally intended to cross the bridge, but we would, as other pictures reveal.)
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We are finally nearing the bridge.
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When we got very close, we realized that it cost 10 cents to walk across the bridge in those days. (That turnstile has since been removed.) Fiendishly, I wondered how much the city had collected from those who only intended to walk partway across the bridge before jumping. Regardless, I am not fond of heights, so the entire walk was incredibly scary for me. I wanted my feet to keep firmly gripping the sidewalk through my hard shoes.
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Victory:
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On the other side:
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We obviously got someone else to take our picture.
Problem was, once we crossed over the bridge, we had to cross back. And we had to then hike back to what in those days was called the Downtown Airline Terminal, to catch the bus to the airport for our return flight to LAX. We made a really bad mistake when we stopped at an old drug store with a lunch counter. We only intended to have a cold Coke before resuming our hike to the Downtown Airline Terminal. We savored the Coke, but when we got up to exit the drug store, we could barely move our legs. They had cramped up after not only walking as far as we did, but going up and down hills to get where we were going without sufficiently hydrating. And our muscles were not used to walking up and down hills. We could barely move one leg in front of the other. However we did it, we managed to reach the Downtown Terminal, caught the bus to SFO, and changed our socks in the gate area before we boarded our late afternoon TWA 727-200 flight to LAX. A younger woman had the window seat when we sat in the middle and aisle seats. Mike whispered, "Is she praying?" as the jet roared aloft while the sun was just setting. She overheard his comment meant only for me but confirmed, "Why, yes, I am."
Summer 1968, Anchorage, Alaska
Christmas vacation, Spring break and summers I would shift from part time to full time hours at A.U. Morse. I accumulated enough money to take a 1-week vacation that summer to visit my Cousin Doug and his wife Sue in Alaska. I had figured out the cheapest airfares and airlines to make the round trip. If I took night flights each way between Seattle and Anchorage, it was only $75.00 each way. I would fly Northwest to Anchorage and Alaska Airlines back to Seattle. And because I took United Airlines round trip from LAX to Seattle and back, the fare was cheap enough that I was able to pay slightly more for First Class. The entire trip would be around $300. I brought my Mom's Instamatic camera.
While waiting for the Northwest flight in Seattle, I spend some time chatting with an older businessman at the gate. Looking back, I think he was interested in me for more than just conversation though nothing was said. When we boarded the flight, he pointed to the First-Class seat next to his and asked me to have a seat. I wasn't trying to avoid spending the flight with him, but I had only paid for coach and told him so as I headed back to the coach cabin. (In those days, the Northwest 707 had half of the right side of the First-Class cabin area chained off for cargo.) I quickly took my seat in coach, even more convinced that I was being hit on. He was a nice-looking man, but I could see no way for the two of us to spend any time together after we arrived in Anchorage; and I was not sure that Anchorage was his final destination. Doug and Sue would be waiting for me at the airport, regardless.
We actually had at least one male flight attendant in coach. We might have been served a snack on the flight, but what I remember most all of these years later are the peaches he was handing out. I have never before or since had such a sweet, juicy, delicious, and ripe peach. It was perfect.
Having the row to myself, I spent much of the flight looking at the darkened landscape off to the right of our flight. Every once in a while, I could see an isolated light here and there along the lengthy, darkened coastline. When we finally reached the outskirts of Anchorage after midnight, we broke through the clouds. The entire area was bathed in a wondrously deep purple glow.
Doug and Sue were living in a rustic apartment building owned by Nick Begich, a Democratic member of the Alaska State Senate. In 1970, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. In October of 1972, he was aboard a Cessna light-plane flight from Anchorage to Juneau with U.S. House Majority Leader Hale Boggs of Louisiana for a campaign event. However, the aircraft and its four passengers disappeared and were never found after 39 days of intense searching.
During my entire visit, we spent a lot of time washing their two cars, Doug's Green Triumph TR-7 and Sue's yellow 1966 Mustang hardtop.
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We did visit Portage Glacier one afternoon.
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Portage Glacier (I also took some slides on the trip):
I am not really certain what Doug was cleaning when Sue took this surprise picture of the two of us in their bedroom. (The apartment's sole bathroom was only reached through their bedroom. I was always in agony each morning because their bedroom door was always closed while I slept in the living room. I had to go but did not want to walk in on them while they might still be sleeping soundly.)
I did take an Alaska Airlines flight from Anchorage to Fairbanks. The flight to Fairbanks was on a piston engine Convair 240. This is an image of Anchorage from the air after departing from the International airport. The second looks toward the Knik Arm.
I flew an Alaska Airlines 727 back from Fairbanks. We soared by Mt McKinley.
Here is the only photo I have of Doug in his Air Force fatigues.
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At the end of my vacation, I boarded an Alaska Airlines Convair 990 night flight back to Seattle from Anchorage. That next morning, I took a United Airlines DC-8 flight back to LAX. As with the First Class flight to Seattle, as a teenager I was totally ignored by the stewardess except to be given breakfast. It was a poached egg slid into a tomato shell. Almost made me sick. We flew past Mount Rainier.
I was supposed to be met at the gate by Dave Moore and his girlfriend. They weren't there. I claimed my bag and headed to the sidewalk outside. They still did not appear. I finally figured that they were not coming, as promised, so I reluctantly boarded the RTD bus for South Gate. As I hiked to the back, I looked up and saw Dave's familiar light green Rambler turning into the parking lot. I quickly got to the door of the bus and pulled the cord. The driver stopped and let me exit. I ran to find Dave who still had not yet parked in the lot. They drove me back to the house in South Gate. I entered the front door and collapsed on the living room couch, immediately falling asleep. (I was so exhausted that when one of Ann's friends knocked on the front door, I merely let her in, saying nothing. As she stood inside the door for a couple of minutes and soon asked where Ann was, from the couch I told her, "Ann's not here." After I went back to sleep on the couch, her friend left.)
1966 Ford Mustang GT convertible
At some point, likely late summer or early fall, Ann needed a car since she was starting college at Long Beach State. Mom realized that if I gave Ann the Rambler, and I bought a car, that would solve the dilemma. Mom may have asked me what kind of car I might be interested in. I suppose I forgot all about the favorite 1967 Pontiac GT because Mom found the Mustang at a used car lot in Downey, not far from her job at Crocker Bank.
We drove to the lot one afternoon to check it out. We took it to a mechanic whom Mom seemed to know and trust, for him to give us his opinion. (I would not realize that it had been in an accident at some point because the front of the hood had been patched with some kind of resin material and the radiator looked as if the fan had brushed up against it after a moderate front-end collision.) Regardless, this was a car I loved at first sight. Ivy green with a white racing stripe along the lower part of each side, cool foglamps, and cream-colored seats and kick panels. (The photos below were swiped since I only have one photograph of my Mustang, and that is necessary for a later narartive.)
Two issues were concerning that I only discovered living with the Mustang convertible over a few years that I owned it: One of the spark plugs had a propensity to work itself out of its socket, typically when I was on a freeway--each new spark plug needed to work its way out, get tightened in place again, and the problem was solved. (A few of the spark plugs were difficult for any mechanic to reach and replace--a friend's dad who owned a gas station would reluctantly do a major tune up for me, but he told me it was not at all easy to replace a couple of the plugs near the wheel coverings inside the hood on each side.) Second, the back window on a convertible in those days got dirty really easily with the significant California air pollution. Overnight dew would mix with the dirt, making it hard to keep the window clean. The window became easily discolored and too easily scratched. But the '66 Mustang was so much fun to drive, and the 289 engine and smaller size and weight of the car made it nimble and speedy in traffic. (One time, I was on the Harbor Freeway, driving South. Suddenly. a tire rose up behind the Jersey barrier from the Northbound fast lane. I watched it soar high above, but I knew that it would hit me if I did not do something fast. I gunned the engine, the Mustang instantly took off, and the tire with rim sailed harmlessly over the Mustang, bouncing onto the fast lane behind me.)
I had considered buying a brand new VW Beetle when they were under $2,000 back then, but when Rhonda Sewell tried to teach me how to drive a stick, I was unable to get how to do it and quickly gave up. (I would only learn how to drive a stick after I turned 40, the same year I got my tonsils out--I was always a late bloomer. I never wanted to own an automatic again.)
Mom and I drove the Mustang back to the car lot to complete the purchase and get credit (Mom was going to have to co-sign the bank loan). However, she seemed to balk for no reason at completing the purchase. Something inexplicable appeared to have spooked her. It had been OK that I was going to give Ann the Rambler, but I would then not have a car to get to school and work. Mom walked out of the car lot office and headed for her Ford. I was dumbfounded. I called out to her, but she only turned slightly and waved at me, still walking away. I returned to the salesman sitting at his desk and said, "We will be taking the car!" I seem to remember cornering Mom in the front seat of her Ford and wondering what the problem was. It was she who had found the Mustang, and it was she who wanted me to give the Rambler to Ann. What was the problem?
I no longer remember why she relented or how I got her to relent, but I was soon able to drive the Mustang home.
Mike's dad found for him a tan-colored 1964 Dodge 2-door sedan with 18K miles on it. Mike was never fond of the car because, not only was it not a car he would have picked out for himself, it was very plain, even stodgy, looking. But his dad, who had strongly resisted signing the waiver for Mike to take Driver's Training in High School, would not have co-signed for a car loan had Mike chosen one for himself. (His dad later picked out a really nice Ford Fairlane 2-door for his younger sister Debbie when it was her time to need a car; but she hated it because her father had chosen it for her. We both thought the Fairlane was beautiful, and Mike would have swapped it for his plain Dodge in a heartbeat.)
Here is a photo Mike dug out which he says is the only one of his Dodge that he has:
Dennis Madura
I became friends with Dennis Madura, who graduated from Bell High School, at East L.A. Junior College through Lida Meek, a young woman in one of my classes who had been in his class at Bell High. She had tickets, and invited me, to a Zubin Mehta concert with the L.A. Philharmonic at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion downtown. I suspect she was interested in me; but I was not at all attracted, of course. The concert was entertaining, however.
Dennis's dad owned an Atlantic Richfield (later ARCO) service station on Florence in Bell. Dennis lived in the converted garage behind his mom's house in Bell--his parents were either estranged or soon divorced after I met him. He had a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a Roberts 8-Track tape recorder. He had installed an 8-track tape player in his pristine, white, two-door 1967 Chevrolet Impala. The sound system was a revelation.
After listening to his system, especially to Creedence Clearwater Revival's first album with Suzy Q and I Put a Spell on You, I wanted an 8-track player in my Mustang. I sold my entire comic book collection (except for the complete collection of the Legion of Super-Heroes comics) to a used comic and magazine bookstore on Tweedy Blvd in South Gate that I had frequented for several months before. (I had owned several Marvel comics at that point, even Daredevil #1 that I bought used from him.) Unfortunately, he only gave me $50.00 for the entire collection of hundreds of vintage 1960's comic books. He actually really only wanted an early 1950's Superboy comic book that I had been sent by a man in Chula Vista, CA. That fellow had been willed a trunk filled with classic 1940's comic books from a deceased relative who had kept them from childhood. He'd put an ad in the newspaper about the collection, so I wrote to him. The beneficiary had sold the entire contents of the trunk to a comic collector instead of to me for a very tidy sum, except for the one comic with a torn cover that he kindly sent along to me as a kind of consolation prize.
Unfortunately, I was still not able to buy an 8-track player after selling so many comics because the players were approximately $100. I was only halfway there. Eventually, I was able to cobble together the rest of the money and bought a Roberts player. Dennis helped me install it, along with speakers in the kick panels. He also soon found out how to make his own blank 8-track tapes instead of having to buy more expensive professional 8-tracks, whether prerecorded or blank. This allowed him, and later me, to make our own custom music tapes rather than pay for the more expensive professional tapes.
I should have realized that the joy of having my favorite music in my car whenever I wanted was not meant to last. One afternoon, as I walked to the parking lot at East L.A., I saw that my driver's side door was ajar. The lock had been popped open and the 8-track player had been disconnected and stolen. To add insult to injury, a few nights later, while my Mustang was parked in front of our house on Cypress, someone cut open the convertible top to steal the player; but the 8-track had already been taken and now I have to replace the convertible top. At some point not too much later, manufacturers developed a way to attach a connector system inside the car and to the 8-track player itself. I could unlatch and pull my replacement player out after I parked the car and put the 8-track in the trunk, short circuiting potential thieves. With no player visibly hanging under the dashboard, a potential thief could not see anything worth stealing from my car. It was an expensive lesson for someone barely making above minimum wage, perhaps $1.65 an hour at that point.
While Dennis did work at his father's gas station when they still pumped gas for you and there were no self-serve pumps, we still got together to do things, usually related to music and records. There were still Wallach's Music City record stores throughout the LA Basin. Tower Records would open in West Hollywood in 1971. He and I also attended a few Planetarium shows at the Griffith Park Planetarium above Hollywood. Mike and I now believe that when we transferred to Cal State Dominguez Hills, and Richard Wright attended Cal State Fullerton, Lida Meek and Dennis transferred to Cal State L.A. (where Jim Mullaney also transferred).
Driving to San Diego
Mike and I both remember leaving East LA College one late afternoon, taking my car for home. As we walked toward the parking lot, the path of which featured a panoramic view of the Los Angeles Basin beyond, we could see airliners descending toward LAX as the sun was also descending. Neither of us recalls which one began the chant, but quickly both of us were repeating "Airport! Airport!" over and over. That meant that when we got to the car, we dug into our pockets to see how much cash we could pool to buy two, roundtrip tickets to San Diego. We might have taken the United Airlines 727 that evening. But it was one of the very last flights, if not the last flight, we took together to San Diego.
We started driving there instead.
(We would miss sitting in the San Diego Airport restaurant, ordering Hot-fudge Sundays, with shaved almonds and a cherry on top of the extensive mass of whipped cream topping, served in deep goblets with lots of hot fudge and vanilla ice cream. We would order one each whenever we had previously flown into San Diego before.)
On our first drives, we stopped in San Juan Capistrano, near the Misson, at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, to buy a couple of boxes for lunch. Through Oceanside, the traffic slowed to bumper-to-bumper because the crews were still completing the final addition of two extra lanes so that we would soon have a 4-lane freeway all of the way to San Diego itself. On another drive to San Diego, Mike used a check of his to buy us a meal of Chicken Delight ("Don't cook tonight, call Chicken Delight".) Without most Americans having any kind of credit or debit cards, businesses often still took checks in that era.
Daylin Jean Butler
In an English class that Mike and I shared at East L.A., he mentioned that a hot looking, muscular blond in the front row might be the older brother of our classmate at South Gate High, Darryl Butler. I looked more closely and noted that he did have an extremely sexy looking butt. And he actually was Darryl's handsome older brother I would soon learn. That gave me an opportunity to talk to him.
I would also eventually learn that, like Jim Mullaney, Daylin had spent a tour in Vietnam, though with the Marines. He'd had a scholarship to a prestigious college in Southern California, perhaps Pomona, but had embarrassingly flunked out after his first semester. He became eligible for the draft. But when he arrived for his draft physical, assuming he was bound for the Army, his group was funneled to the Marines instead--the first time they required draftees--and not the Army. The War was becoming unpopular even then, so this first batch that the Marines drafted was because they could no longer reach their quotas of volunteers. He was smart enough to not be assigned to a combat unit though he did admit that he was knocked backward one day when shells hit an ammo dump on the base where he was stationed as he stood in a doorway after he first heard the sounds of an attack. At first he had thought he might even be dead from the blast as his head hit the ground.
After Daylin returned home from Vietnam, he was forced to attend community college, to rebuild his academic credentials, given that he'd had terrible grades which forced him out of Pomona College and into the Marines. His father worked for years at the Firestone plant in South Gate. Daylin had no intention of following his father's path into a factory job.
I was attracted, of course. After a few conversations in between classes, he soon invited me to join him in working out in his garage where he had an extensive weight set and weight bench set up to build up his body, the muscular body I admired so much (his mother had bought him the weight set for Christmas his first holiday home from Vietnam, dragging each plate into the house and under the tree because they were so heavy for her).
A few times I even tried to get him a part time job at A.U. Morse though it never worked out long term. Getting to know Daylin allowed me eventually to become friends with Darryl Butler, someone I was not acquainted with in High School.
Daylin, Darryl, Ann and I drove to San Francisco several months later, to stay with Aunt Jean and Uncle Lloyd and tour the city. Here is Daylin with an aircraft carrier arriving in the background.
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Chinatown photo:
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Here were the four of us, departing San Leandro that Thanksgiving weekend. Curiously, this is the only photo that I have of my '66 Mustang convertible.
One of the books I found, and bought as a bargain bin hardback, was A.E. Housman: A Divided Life, by George L. Watson, about the homosexual English poet. I had enjoyed A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems, and this book allowed me to somewhat understand what had inspired his poetry. He had been attracted to, and was likely in love with, a heterosexual classmate, Moses Jackson. (Much as I had been with Jim Mullany, Daylin Butler and, later, Patrick Harlan Byrne.) In college, Housman crashed his exams and was forced to rebuild his academic reputation while working at a menial government job.
Not only did Daylin inspire me academically, but he also got me interested in watching and following sports. I would eventually buy tickets to see the L.A. Rams in the Memorial Coliseum on Sunday afternoons. Tommy Prothro, the former UCLA coach, was the head coach of the Rams for those first two seasons, 1971 & 1972. (Monday Night Football began in 1970, but there were no Thursday night games until much, much later.) Endzone tickets were just $5.50 and then $6.00 each, paltry sums compared to what professional football tickets cost these days.
During the 1971-2 NBA Season, I started following the L.A. Lakers in the midst of their 33-game winning streak.
Unfortunately, much as Daylin would give, he could also cruelly withhold. One evening at his place, he made some cutting remarks about me, quite mean in fact (the details and subject of which I have long forgotten or suppressed). I went home, crushed. I even, briefly, contemplated suicide. But I called Rhonda Sewell, who must have broken every speed limit to reach my house that night. She and a friend drove me around South Gate for the next hour or two, making sure that I was emotionally out of danger. It was not a good thing to have someone you are quite enamored with blithely cut you down to your face. While our friendship remained, a safe distance built up between us. When we graduated from Junior College in June of 1969, Mike and I headed off to California State College, Dominguez Hills, in the fall; but Daylin had gotten a scholarship to USC. He would live off campus in a rather dingy, second-floor apartment but meet a sweet blond coed who moved in with him.
For Rams games, I often parked in front of their apartment building and walked across the USC campus to the Coliseum. Much less traffic existed when I parked there. I would become a Rams season ticket holder for the 1972 season. For the 1973 Superbowl, I was able to buy a ticket to the Dolphins-Redskins game in the Coliseum and watch in the stadium. I think the price was $25.00.
Daylin and his girlfriend would remain together, even marry before Daylin went off to graduate school at the University of Michigan after USC. They stayed married for a few years but eventually divorced. Daylin never remarried.
I do recall a few lines of Housman's poetry that were applicable to my troubled relationship with Daylin:
Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away …
I visited him and his wife in Ann Arbor, on a trip East in early 1973. The magic and the feelings were long gone by then--he had grown his beautiful blond hair long, something I was never attracted to.
Component Stereo System
At some point, our compact stereo unit either broke down or became outdated. Daylin had an Akai receiver and a reel-to-reel tape recorder that he'd purchased in Asia before leaving the Marines. Over several months after we first met, he would borrow many albums from my entire collection and record them onto tapes. A local stereo component store opened on South Atlantic Avenue, Olson Electronics, in Lynwood. Daylin helped me when I shopped for a component system. I could only afford to buy pieces of the system that I picked out and had them keep the rest as layaway--no credit availability or purchases in those days. A Garrard turntable, an Olsen receiver, and a pair of modest bookshelf speakers were my first venture into more advanced stereo systems. That introductory system would definitely not be my last. (It was this system that allowed me to connect the Roberts 8-Track recorder and make my own tapes for the car.)
Several months later, I was listening to my stereo one afternoon when a loud voice came over my modest speakers, scaring the hell out of me and nearly damaging the speakers. I eventually realized that it must be a ham radio operator that my system was picking up. If I were in the middle of recording a tape, I would have to stop. Whoever it was, he was overly chatty, likely lonely, and loud. On a later afternoon, frustrated, I went looking for whoever it was to have it out with him. I scoured Cypress on my side and then crossed Firestone. I came upon a home with an impressive antenna array atop the roof. I knocked on the door. An older man, using a voice box to talk to me, explained that it could not be him since his system was well insulated; but he told me what to look out for. As I walked back to my house, I glanced up at the apartment building next door and there was telltale antenna I had not noticed before.
Wires led to the one studio apartment on the top floor that had been carved out after the initial inspections. I knocked on that door. The younger man who answered admitted that he was the operator. He offered to try using a different microphone to broadcast. That did not work. Over the next few weeks, the interference did not lessen. I was really getting upset because his broadcasts were coming through my speakers much louder than the music I was playing or trying to record. His conversations weren't even interesting. He would just babble on and on about nothing significant. Finally, one day I stormed up to his apartment to have it out with him. When he answered the door, he immediately cut off my complaint, "I'm moving out next week." I was thrilled and never had that problem again.
Acceptance for the draft
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Summer 1969
Only one other summer became worse for me than the Summer of 1969, but that comes later in the narrative of my life. After the incident of Daylin Butler's scathing and personal criticism, I slowly drifted into a months' long depression. While I might have felt that my unrequited affection, even obsession, with Daylin was the main cause, several other factors certainly contributed. On our drives to San Diego, Mike and I would cruise out to Point Loma, to the military cemetery there. The view of the harbor and the city was spectacular. But what was even more significant were the rows of dead veterans buried there. Each visit would find more white headstones than the visit before. These were not just of those aged veterans who had survived one or more of the Nation's several wars and died of old age and natural causes or disease, but the increasing casualties of the seemingly never-ending Vietnam War. We were shielded from the War, for a time at least, in college. But what if the War continued past our safe deferment years?
Mike and I had just graduated from East L.A. Junior College in June of '69. In the fall, we would both be attending California State College at Dominguez Hills, a school that was still slowly under construction (Richard Wright decided to attend Cal State Fullerton because the Dominguez campus was not even close to being finished). The newness of Dominguez intrigued us Those two more years of college would give us two more years of protection from the draft; but by June of 1971, we would be eligible. A sense of dreadful inevitability invaded my soul in those months of 1969. In the depths of that depression, I turned to writing in the journal that Miss Nancy King had recommended to me that I keep. I was reading so many classics (The Brothers Karamazov, for example), and at the same time writing poetry, much of it based upon our visits to Point Loma Military Cemetery.
Death was on the news every single night. Mike and I supported Richard Nixon in the 1968 election even though we could not vote. He told the nation during the campaign that he had a secret plan to end the war. His secret plan was to slowly turn the ground fighting over to the Vietnamese, but that would take several more years and many more American casualties. He was just as dishonest about the War as the Johnson Administration had been before him, in many ways more so.
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"The old stone tabs we keep on our dead."
I wore that old fatigue jacket a lot in those days, but I have no recollection as to where I got it or from whom. But not only did we take time with each San Diego visit to dwell about our futures in the cemetery, I thought a great deal about our war dead. I remember after one Memorial Day weekend that we found flowers and a stick-figure note from a child placed upon a specific grave, expressing his love for his deceased brother, over 50 years dead now, and the older brother was in his late teens when he died. His grieving parents are likely dead now, and the youngster who created the sweet, stick-figure note of two boys holding hands, one taller, one smaller, is likely an old man now, as am I.
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The Naval airfield, just across the channel on North Island, was where several civilian airliners were often parked, waiting to fly soldiers and Marines to Vietnam.
Miss Nancy King
She was an English teacher at East L.A. I am certain now that she was lesbian. But she took an interest in my writing. We had been reading Dante's Inferno, the John Ciardi translation, in paperback. (Miss King did not believe that he would finish the other two books of La Divina Commedia, given the difficulty of translation but he did, eventually.) In the supreme arrogance of my youth, I thought I could duplicate his terza rima rhyme scheme. I turned in my lines, she whittled a bit with the beginning and with the end. I came up with the title, and here was Tourist Trap:
Now only tourists poke
around the ruins just for fun,
taking souvenirs away. No one spoke
of girls throwing wilted lives toward the sun,
while more boys went to war although some returned
in boxes, parts, and pieces.
They explored, exploded, and ignored atrocities
while crawling around on their feet
building weapons, so don't waste your pities
on them. They starved for the food they could not eat.
I came in second in a poetry contest. As Miss Noel in High School had appreciated my creative paragraph in her class, describing a photo from an ad about Alaska, Miss King's appreciation of my developing ability to write helped me to find myself, find an outlet for my frustrations and conflicting feelings. This was not an era when one could easily reveal one's LGBTQ self to those around us. As my mother used to say about her earlier years and difficult subjects such as homosexuality, "Oh, we never discussed such things."
California State College, Dominguez Hills
Obviously, I carried a full course load my first quarter at Cal State Dominguez Hills that Fall of 1969. But the only class I truly remember taking was Dr. Marilyn Garber's history class. ("Call me Marilyn. Dr. Garber was my mother's name," she would firmly tell us.) She was unorthodox in so many ways. The large class sat in a huge circle, facing one another. We would have no traditional rows, all facing forward, to focus the class solely upon her, the professor. She wanted us talking to one another rather than relying only on her input. She had curly hair and looked very much like a female approximation of Bob Dylan. She drove an old, VW station wagon (not the classic VW van but the station wagon) that had seen better days. I never was invited to her house in seedy, canal-infested Venice, CA; but Mike, who was dating Lida Meek, was invited, along with his class. He said that the floors were covered with stacks and stacks of books, with very little furniture to be found throughout the entire house. The mattresses in the bedrooms were on the floor, for she, her husband and their children. They sat around that evening smoking pot and discussing the course material (Mike and especially Lida were appalled and did not partake of the pot.)
Besides that first History class, I would later take a course she taught called Utopias and New Communities. We read Thomas More's Utopia, as well as Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and, perhaps, Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, possibly Erewhon by Samuel Butler, and definitely Walden Two by B.F. Skinner. She made us get out of the classroom and discover previous utopias or new communities that real human beings had actually tried to develop, even if they eventually failed. We would write a paper about what we had discovered. I wrote about how the University of California at Riverside had recently used the Mission Inn to house students (Darryl Butler helped my research). They developed a camaraderie and closeness that was rarely found in a typical college dorm. But that experiment was lost when the college built the Bannockburn dorms on campus for students and the Misson Inn was abandoned.
She also taught a course called Law & Society. Again, we had to get out and experience law in the real world. I decided to attend Courts Martials at El Toro Marine Base in Orange County and write about those experiences. It was at this time that Playboy magazine featured an article by Robert Sherrill, Military Justice is to Justice as Military Music is to Music.
Several years ago, I would learn that Marilyn Garber had died of breast cancer. I am almost certain that Miss King from East L.A. is long gone, too, the same as Miss Fouch from high school. They opened my mind and my heart. They fostered my creativity and search for knowledge. None of this would exist within me without their encouragement.
I would later have Dr. Howard Holter for some history classes, and he also inspired me. His specialty was Russian and Soviet history, though I took 19th Century Europe and 20th Century Europe courses from him. I would read stellar biographies of Lenin and Stalin (Isaac Deutscher) and, especially, Leon Trotsky (possibly Robert Service's book). We would become friends after I was in the Air Force and was working on my Master's Degree in the Humanities through Dominguez Hills. He was the one who believed that I was destined to be a teacher.
Cal State Dominguez Hills, instead of a major and minor, offered a Departmental and Interdepartmental degree program. My Departmental major was History. My Interdepartmental major was 20th Century Thought and Expression, with courses in all kinds of fields such as philosophy and literature, in addition to history and art.
I did take a Modern Art course that was primarily for art majors. The instructor was obviously gay (while I became friends with him, there was zero attraction, and he never expressed any interest in me beyond being my instructor). For the midterm exam, I believe I had the third highest score in the class. I had been mostly silent and sat in the back of the classroom. Several art major eyes looked back at me, mixed with envy or disappointment, when the scores were announced. He would show us slides in class of the great works of art. Our textbook was Mainstreams of Modern Art by the late John Canaday, a book I loaned to a friend in the 1980's and never got back. (I would find a used copy on eBay a few years ago.) His exams were difficult, but I thoroughly enjoyed remembering the works of art we had seen in class, as well as determining whom the artist was who painted a work that we had not seen before.
The campus initially consisted of a large, two-story, square apartment building. It housed a lunchroom on the second floor, many classes on both floors, the bookstore, and the school library. Only the brand-new administration buildings were in operation across the street when we first began taking classes in the fall of 1969. (A not-yet-connected hydrant sat in front of those new buildings. Someone had hung a helpful sign, indicating, "Don't Use. No Water." An English major had playfully written an addendum to that sign, "Double negative.")
Only a handful of professors existed for each department. If a specific professor was not to one's liking, you were often out of luck. Most professors were very young, probably just out of grad school. I took a history course, Asia Since 1600, from a woman who only had her Master's Degree. She would move on to a local community college, to be replaced by her husband who had a PhD, Dr. Donald Hata. Both were Japanese-American. I took a course from him, Modern Japan. His family had been interred at one of the California concentration camps during WWII, probably Manzanar. He referred to his time in the camp as his being an "infant saboteur". He had no recollection of those years. But he did seem to have retained some bitterness from his family, justifiably.
Although I never took a course from him, Howard Holter's colleague had a nickname, "Happy" Jack Kilfoyle. He used heavy drugs, hence his nickname, and he did not survive. He might not have even gotten out of his late 20's alive. Howard used to talk about how smart Jack was, but rarely did one overcome certain excesses in that era.
Mom's racism
When Mike worked for Lily Butler in downtown L.A., two of his coworkers, Elmer and Willie, were African-American. We visited Willie once at his home in Watts where he played Isaac Hayes's Hot Buttered Soul. One evening, with Mike driving, he and Willie stopped by our house on Cypress. Later, I casually mentioned the visit to Mom. Her angry reaction shocked me. "Did any of the neighbors see him?" Before I could reply in the negative, she blurted out, "They're going to say '''Nita's got N*****s!" As if Willie's casual visit was an infestation.
I should have realized that, like Mike's mom, too many members of their generation did not like the increasing numbers of black faces on TV, on shows or in commercials. Mike's mom would enter the living room, and when she saw Diahann Carroll playing Julia, she would demand that Mike change the channel. Fortunately, Mom did not like Science Fiction, so she almost never saw Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhuru on Star Trek, especially the first interracial kiss ever depicted on a TV screen.
I never understood how that generation could enjoy Nat "King" Cole or Ella Fitzgerald or Louis Armstrong in a token appearance on a variety show. But no way did they want to see any African-American actor in a featured or supporting role on TV. Getting so upset over someone else's race seemed like such as waste of time and energy.
Mona and Dave
After his father had pulled him out of college and took him to Malaysia where his dad was a military advisor, Dave Moore's life became unhinged. When he first got back, he lived with his sister and brother-in-law inland from Oceanside on the grounds of a golf course played by President Nixon and Evangelist Billy Graham. Dave's brother-in-law worked as a groundskeeper. I had attended their wedding and given them juice glasses as a wedding present. Dave gave his sister away because their father was out of the country. But his own former girlfriend had married his good friend from Orange High School after Dave had gone to Malaysia. That was an even more crushing blow.
In the aftermath of his sister's wedding, when we returned to Dave's house, his mother came out of her bedroom, confessing that the best man had collapsed on her bed, drunk. Standing in the hallway, I could just see his still formally dressed form splayed upon her bed. I was oblivious, but Dave appeared both angry and uncomfortable, suggesting that we go for a drive. Only later did I learn that his mother was in the process of seducing the drunken best man, many years her junior, a la The Graduate. At some point, I had heard from Dave and his sisters, regarding their many unacknowledged siblings, that their mother's sister was actually their mother's daughter, a la Chinatown. Their Marine dad had fathered offspring in a list of Pacific and Asian countries and Hawaii while married to their mother. After their parents divorced, their dad married a woman from Vietnam by whom he had had another child.
I got a call from Dave at some point after he no longer lived with his older sister. He was then living with his cousin, Mona, in a bare apartment in Inglewood. I arrived to find that the apartment had hardly any furniture. He was helping his cousin care for her infant son, a child that she'd had out of wedlock with her Jewish boyfriend. After the boyfriend suddenly died, his family drove her and her baby away since she was not married to their son. Mona and Dave barely had enough food in the apartment to eat. I gave him $5.00, which was all I had on me that afternoon. I was severely saddened at this turn of fortune.
Fortunately, Mona was eventually able to get a job in the Clothing Mart in downtown L.A. They had moved to a nicer apartment in Torrance, CA. Occasionally, since the Mart was not far from where Mike worked for Lily Butler, he would drive Mona to work when he could. On one of their drives into work, Mona confessed to a skeptical Mike, "I'm a freak." She was weird, for sure, but more self-absorbed than freakish.
Mona was soon dating an astronaut in training. Unfortunately, the potential astronaut was married, complicating their relationship. At some point as I only later learned from Mona, Dave attempted suicide. Not long after, the draft board finally caught up with Dave. He got his notice to report to the downtown L.A. board. I took him for a drive the evening before. We stopped at the historic Wayfarer's Chapel in Palso Verdes. I tossed a nickel into the wishing well out front of the chapel and silently said to no one in particular, "Take care of Dave." The following morning, I drove him to the draft board building up the Harbor Freeway and then dropped him off.
I got a surprising call at work later that day to find that Dave's attempted suicide had caused him to be rejected for the draft. Mona would later tell me that she believed his suicide attempt was a calculated move to get himself out of the draft. Regardless, Dave was free, though his life was just as disconnected as ever.
Mona moved the three of them to an even nicer apartment in Torrence. Her astronaut boyfriend rented her a retail space not far away, where she could sell the jewelry that she made. However, he demanded that Dave move out because Dave didn't have a job. He felt Dave needed to get a job and get out on his own. Mona told me that Dave was hanging out with a buddy when he was forced to take off after the potential astronaut was going to physically remove Dave and his buddy who were sleeping in the Green Dragon shop, to avoid his wrath if he found them in the apartment. I got a call from a payphone in Downey from Dave not long after/ He was at a gas station and needed some place to stay. He really did not have anywhere to go. I did not offer that he could stay with us for a few days because I thought he was still hanging out with this buddy whom I did not even know. We did not have room for two of them.
When I finally heard again from Dave, he was living with his older sister and her infant son in a small, sad, faded green trailer in an even sadder trailer park not far from Oceanside--think of the trailer park in the movie Starman but much plainer. She had gotten divorced from her groundskeeper husband. Dave was working at an Arthur Treacher's Fish & Chips fast food restaurant in a small town, inland from Oceanside. He gave me a free fish & chips lunch after I arrived. I drove him back to their trailer when his shift was over. He showed me a picture of his younger sister, Debbie, sitting atop the hood of my Mustang when the two of them and my sister and I drove to San Leandro, again staying with Uncle Lloyd and Aunt Norma Jean. We toured San Franscisco in the Mustang.
For the next few weekends, after I had bought a Peugeot bike, I would take the top down on the Mustang, load up the bike, and haul it down to the trailer park where Dave and I would take turns riding it in an empty field not far from the trailer park. Dave realized that his life was still adrift, and he was not going anywhere. He would soon decide to join the Air Force as an enlisted man. He took a bus, paid for by the Air Force, to visit me one last time in South Gate. He eventually left for basic training at Lackland, AFB, in San Antonio. I got a couple of letters from him before he finished training there. After that, I did not hear from him again.
When I was stationed in Minot, I used the Air Force's locator service to try and find out what had happened to Dave. I got a number and called it. I thought perhaps he was based at the location where I called--it was a hospital. I was told that the facility I had reached provided a disquieting turn of events, "This is the patient squadron." But Dave was no longer there. I lost track of Paul David Moore for good at that point. The sense I got was that he had been discharged from the Air Force for some physical or psychological reason.
Dave had been a good, close friend for all of those years beginning at Handy Elementary School in 1960, through the end of college. He had stood up to Willene and provided a refuge at his house on weekends when life on Lomita became too oppressive. When I lived on Orchard, he corresponded with me and visited when I was otherwise rather lonely, living in a new community where I had no friends. When his own family accused me in private to him that I was gay, Dave told them that I had never given him any reason to believe that was true. Regardless, he told them, I was his friend and would always be his friend.
"Why was he in a patient squadron?" I wondered. Dave had always had a severe allergic reaction to peanuts and peanut butter, but he had also had that attempted suicide in his recent past. Had he deliberately eaten peanut butter to get out of the Air Force? Or had he attempted suicide once again because he did not fit in with the Air Force and was profoundly unhappy? I have no way of knowing.
Patrick Harlan Byrne
I first saw Pat Byrne in a classroom at Dominguez Hills, probably in the Spring of 1970, after campus protests and "teach-ins" across the U.S., in response to Nixon ordering incursions into Cambodia from Vietnam, to destroy North Vietnamese and Vietcong sanctuaries there. Brown-haired and handsome, I would eventually become friends with yet another Marine Veteran in college using the G.I. Bill. Unlike Daylin who never saw combat, Pat was a combat Marine.
He lived in a modest apartment in Torrance and worked part time for the U.S. Post Office when not attending classes at Dominguez Hills.
I had become friends with Sue Collins. She still lived with her parents across the street from another Dominguez Hills coed, April. It was April who was dating Pat Byrne. I had applied to become an editor of a new campus creative writing publication. A trio of pot-smoking "hippy" types had applied to be editors of a different publication. After we were all chosen, we decided to pool the school's limited financial resources and combine our efforts into one creative publication. I wanted to provide a forum for a few of my Vietnam-era poems that I had been writing in my journals ever since I had left East L.A. for Dominguez Hills. I thought the poetry would be enhanced with photographs of one or more veterans in uniform while they were serving. Hence, I had a reason to contact Pat Byrne, to see if he had photographs I might be able to borrow.
April had given me Pat's address and had told him I might stop by some evening. I arrived in front of his apartment but saw his car pull away. I followed him until he stopped in front of a closed business a few blocks away. As he got out to confirm the business was closed, I stopped and got out as well, introducing myself again. (I believe we had met once before through April.) I followed him back to his apartment building. He rummaged through his collection of photos from the Marines, and I picked ones that I might use for the creative writing publication and my poems.
Over the following weeks and months, we became friends. He came over to my house to listen to music. Mom served us chili dogs. We eventually took a drive to San Diego, to visit the cemetery there. Pat found the grave of a Marine buddy of his who had gone out on one patrol and Pat never heard from him again. He assumed that his buddy had been killed, and now he had confirmation.
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During Easter Week, 1971, we also drove to San Leandro, to stay with Aunt Jean and Uncle Lloyd, for yet another visit to San Francisco.
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I became so attracted to Pat that I finally had to do something about that attraction. I presumed he was straight, but I arrived at his apartment one evening to tell him how I felt. He was only wearing sweat pants as he sat down on his couch after I told him I needed to talk to him. I tried not to stare at his lean, muscular chest and rippled stomach as I confessed my feelings for him. Thankfully, he had no problem with my being gay. He obviously did not share my attraction because he was straight. But his acceptance of me as a person and friend was significantly important to me.
He graduated in June of 1971 while I still had the Fall semester to finish before I could graduate because of those two Junior College courses that did not count toward graduation. Pat had saved enough money to fly to Europe, buy an inexpensive VW bus, and tour the continent that summer. We corresponded periodically. During his tour, he managed to get a job with the Ice Capades, working the lights. He was able to remain in Europe far longer than his initial funds would have allowed him to.
In 1972, not long after he returned from Europe, U.S. airlines were mandated to hire men as flight attendants. At LAX, both Continental Airlines and TWA were hiring. I had applied to both airlines, and so did Pat. With his looks and personality, he was immediately hired by TWA. I was not.
He soon left for flight attendant training in St. Louis. After graduation, he was retained to teach others at the school. Eventually, he was assigned to European routes. He met a beautiful blond, Sandra. I would later visit them in New York City where they both were based. But when winter arrived, they moved to Florida as the European flights were reduced and they reverted to domestic flights. Before that, Sandra had been on the TWA flight to Rome that broke apart upon landing. She had to rush about to get the nervous survivors to put out their cigarettes at the crash site with spilled fuel all around them. I did not get their address in Florida after the move and lost track of them. With the TWA strike in the 1980's, I don't know what might have happened to them.
When Sandra and Pat lived together and were serving on the same flights, she would have to endure pilots' derisive, homophobic comments, assuming that Pat must be gay because he was a flight attendant and good looking. It did not matter that he'd been a combat Marine. He was handsome, personable and in great shape. He must be gay. Such were the early years of men being hired by the airlines as flight attendants. Maybe the woman who interviewed me at TWA assumed I was gay and did not hire me because of that. Who knows?
You meet some people who profoundly influence the direction of your life. Others just pass by, leave a trace and are gone. You get hired or rejected for a key job in your life. By the time I did not get hired by the airlines in the summer of 1972, I had already put my concern, and eligibility, for the draft behind me. But that meant I needed to find a new direction after that airline rejection. Where I would go would make all of the difference.
Summer 1970
The Summer of 1970 was a season of healing for me.
Perhaps Mike's and my drives to San Diego (or that one-time trip to Borrego Springs) and back in the Mustang were our way of escaping from the harsh reality of those times and the War. I would eventually make an 8-track tape of the music we would listen to on those escapist drives: Summer 1970.
Make It With You - Bread
Snowbird - Anne Murray
Mill Valley - Rita Abrams
New World In the Morning - Roger Whittaker
Odds and Ends - Dionne Warwick
I Just Can't Help Believing - BJ Thomas
Suicide Is Painless - M*A*S*H soundtrack
Song from M*A*S*H - Al DeLory
Guinnevere - Crosby, Stills & Nash
One Less Bell to Answer - The 5th Dimension
The Long and Winding Road - The Beatles
Oh Me Oh My (I'm A Fool For You Baby) - Lulu
Apartment 21 - Bobby Gentry
On the Beach (In the Summertime) - The 5th Dimension
Waltz for Tricia - The Mystic Moods Orchestra
Theme From Stormy Weekend - The Mystic Moods Orchestra
Lover's Lullaby - The Mystic Moods Orchestra
Visions - The Mystic Moods Orchestra
(They Long To Be) Close to You - Carpenters
Long Long Time - Linda Ronstadt
Eleanor Rigby - Vince Guaraldi
Watch What Happens - Vince Guaraldi
Big Yellow Taxi - Joni Mitchell
The Circle Game - Joni Mitchell
(It ought to come as no surprise that Long Long Time was my most significant song about the difficult relationship I had with Daylin Butler.)
On the phone once that summer, Mike and I were discussing our perilous futures. We had only one year left of academic deferment remaining. Mike explained, "I don't know. A lot can happen in a year. I could get into a car wreck. I could lose a limb. I'm optimistic." I have rarely laughed so hard.
Even Dave Moore had briefly driven his small Datsun pickup to Vancouver, intending to become a refugee rather than be drafted. But he drove back to California after a day or two. Others, however, stayed in Canada.
Shakespeare in the Park
I did take a Shakespeare class at Dominguez. The English professor required us to spend the day in Balboa Park in San Diego to take in two Shakespearean plays that had been offered for years during their annual Summer Shakespearean Festival. I took a young woman from Norway in our class because she did not have a way to get there otherwise. We actually stopped at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot--they were having an arms show with a Huey helicopter and other weapons on display.
The young woman brought a picnic basket for us to eat in between the two plays we attended. One of them was Antony & Cleopatra. Our professor critiqued the performance of the Cleopatra actress and judged her badly miscast. She was not someone for whom one would give up one's life.
I took the young woman home that night, walking her to their back gate to ensure that she was safe. Unexpectedly at the gate, she suddenly turned to give me a kiss on the cheek after I told her she owed me nothing for taking her with me to San Diego. Her kiss was so unexpected that my hand accidentally brushed against her ass. I was suddenly embarrassed as I walked back to my car, hoping she did not think I was trying to feel her up.
Nixon's Draft Lottery
My number (along with Bruce Springsteen who was also born on September 23, 1949) was 119. Mike's was well over 300. So, he was not going to be called up. This was Nixon's duplicitous means to divide and conquer the anti-war movement. Presumably, those who got high numbers would no longer care about how long the war was going to last.
Mike had already had a nasty tussle with the draft board while we were at East L.A.. The board claimed they did not have his student deferment paperwork in his file. He knew they were lying but he was not allowed to view his own records himself. His mother could do it for him. She easily discovered the proper information in Mike's file. He should not have had his draft qualification changed. When he initially challenged a rather officious young woman at the draft office and told her he would contest the improper ruling, she curtly replied, "You may do so if you wish." Armed with what his mother had discovered, he contacted our Republican Congressman, Del Clauson. He set things right and Mike would not be bothered again. Though he never quite trusted his draft lottery position, he was protected. My much lower number offered me no such protection.
Sue Collins
Sue had a party one evening in their remodeled garage, serving wine coolers. Everyone had to use the bathroom off of the main garage space. The wall did not go all of the way to the ceiling, so we could all hear each attendee peeing in between finishing off a cooler.
At one point, I accompanied Sue into the house. She showed an album cover of James Taylor's debut to her mom, exclaiming about the cover photo, "He's so handsome."
Her mom misunderstood and though Sue was referring to me. I laughed and corrected her as she looked me up and down, "Not me. Sue is talking about James Taylor," as I pointed to the album cover.
At the end of the party, I took Mike home. He was drunk. As we zoomed up the Long Beach freeway, he stuck his head out of the car through the open passenger window. I worried that he might do something stupid, but he responded, "I just need a minute." When we arrived at his house, his mom and dad were on the front porch and collected their son, realizing Mike was three sheets to the wind. Without getting out of the car, I waved and took off for home. The following day Mike told me that his parents thought I did not get out of the car because I was equally drunk and did not want them to know. I was not.
Sue was always an upbeat, positive person. But then she, like all young women ever, did not have to worry about the draft. It wasn't that I was upset about that situation, but one afternoon on the phone I had to confess that I was not always as upbeat as she was because the draft was a constant worry for me. Sue mistook what I was saying and wearily responded, "Well, see you around." That seemed to be the end of our friendship.
The Boys in the Band
I read about The Boys in the Band debuting in a theater in West Hollywood in 1970. I ought to have been more curious at the time as to why Mike Mebs readily agreed to go with me. We had seen several films in Hollywood, West Hollywood, Westwood Village, and vicinity once we bought cars: The Devils, The Graduate (which I had also seen first with Jim Mullany), Oh, What A Lovely War, M*A*S*H, Catch-22 (which Mike hated), The Exorcist (both Mike's mom and his sister, fearful as to what might happen if Mike saw such a perverse film, warned, "Don't Go, Michael. Don't go."), 2001: A Space Odyssey, and several more.
The Boys in the Band was paired with Fortune And Men's Eyes. We entered the theater cautiously, and I for one did not look around at any of the other patrons already seated. We sat in a row by ourselves. I was certain most of the others in the theater were likely gay, but the likely inhabited a world of which I was entirely unaware. I was definitely uneasy until the movie began.
In 1972, when both Ann and Mom were away from home, I would watch That Certain Summer on TV. So, the Mart Crowley vehicle in 1970 was the first fully gay film I saw.
In the 1990's, I would read or overhear several critical remarks about The Boys in the Band from other gay men whom I knew. (Theater On Broadway would mount a production on stage, and I would see the play for the first time.) Yes, the characters were closeted, self-loathing, even destructive. However, I was thrilled finally to see others similar to me represented on the screen. I'd had secret loves to whom I had revealed myself. I'd not had sex with anyone, but I could understand the various possibilities that existed from one man to another or to others. I did not have a small group of gay friends, yet. Most of the characters were relatively "normal" human beings, regardless of their individual hangups or conflicts.
Before we saw the film, Mike told me that he had had a class with Marilyn Garber in which she invited two Lesbians and a gay man to her class, to discuss gay issues. Mike laughed when he informed me that nobody in his class sat in the front two rows of the classroom, as if sitting too close to LGBTQ people might infect them.
Weeks later after seeing the movie, while visiting Darryl Butler in Riverside, it was showing at a local theater. I accompanied Darryl and a college buddy of his to see it once more. I enjoyed it equally the second time. In fact, while we walked back to his residence after the movie, Darryl would later tell me that that was when he first realized that I was gay.
At this point, Pat Byrne knew I was gay because I had told him. Michael had wheedled it out of me at some point. Now Darryl knew. I had told Sue Collins before the breakup of our friendship about seeing the movie and liking it very much. She seemed quite taken aback and might have started to suspect that I was gay.
The Marines
Unlike Pat Byrne, I was not going to be able to graduate from Dominguez Hills in June of 1971. I needed one more quarter of credits during the Fall of 1971. My Dad had a good friend at A.U. Morse, a fellow wallpaper salesman named Bill Barber. I knew him, too. (He was an ex-Navy enlisted man who had survived the Kamikaze attack upon the aircraft carrier Franklin during WWII.) Bill's daughter was engaged to a young man who had already been accepted into the Marine Corps Reserves. I decided to pursue the same tack. The Marines would allow me to graduate in December and attend Boot Camp in San Diego after graduation. For want of a better military occupation, I picked "Clerk Typist".
But before that decision became finalized, I got my notice to report to the new draft facility for my draft physical on Wilshire Blvd. I arrived and entered the building. My group was hustled through quite like cattle. When a doctor listened to my heart, he demanded, "What are you nervous about?" I replied, "The whole thing." I was never asked if I were gay, not that I would have volunteered that fact. After the physical, I was declared draft eligible and would be called up after they had called up the lower numbers first.
I must have gotten this notice after my draft physical, letting me know that I was acceptable to be drafted.
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Very soon, however, I returned to the same facility for my Marine Reserve physical. The attitude was as different as night and day. Instead of being looked down upon as scum and draftees to be processed like cattle, I followed the Marine Corps colored tape path indicated on the floor and was treated kindly and with dignity. The doctors and staff were friendly and considerate. As a draftee, I was nothing. But as a Marine volunteer, I was treated royally. I passed that physical easily. I would be able to graduate and get my degree. Besides, the Marines were beginning to leave Vietnam. Nixon's "secret plan" was to turn the war over to the Vietnamese and then get out as gracefully as possible, and that process had already begun for the Marines.
That fall, however, I met a guy at Dominguez Hills whose family had a nice home in Palos Verdes Estates, Mark Lombardo. When he heard about my Marine Corps Reserves decision, he explained all about Marine OCS in Quantico, VA. He had gone for his three-month training at Quantico the summer of 1971. He was now going to finish his final year at Dominguez Hills before returning to Quantico for The Basic School, an advanced infantry training school, as a 2nd Lieutenant. He convinced me to ditch the Reserves and sign up for OCS. I could still graduate in December and head to OCS in the Spring.
I spent that winter driving up to Mark's house and running the median trails amid the pepper trees to get ready for Marine OCS. The first time I ran with him, I got sick, not having run in a long, long time. I continued to work for A.U. Morse on my spare afternoons and free days after I graduated.
Clothing
Daylin had become friends with a young man who worked in a new clothing store near Abbot Road. He had paid a doctor $350 to say that he had a medical condition that prevented him from serving in Vietnam. I bought a number of colorful dress shirts and pull-over shirts at his boutique shop. For the rest of the decade, any photos of me in civilian clothes, I bought the shirts at his shop.
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The following two photos were on our front lawn. The wool shirt I bought at a different clothing store, this one on Tweedy Blvd.
Sometime in late 1969 or early 1970, Ann let it be known that she wanted to buy a sports car. She sold the Rambler, and Mom found her a light-blue Triumph TR-4. Here is the only photo I could find of a partial look at that sports car. She had never driven a stick shift before and had to learn quickly.
She had mechanical problems with the car from time to time, once pulling into a gas station in Long Beach where she would meet her future boyfriend and, later, husband, Mark Egan.
Marine OCS
The office staff of A.U. Morse bought me a tan Remington electric shaver and presented it to me my last day at work. (Although I had owned Remington shavers before, and never had any problems with them, this one did not last for more than a few weeks, not that much longer than my 10-week residence at Quantico, Virginia, the location of Marine OCS.)
(They Long To Be) Close to You - Carpenters
Long Long Time - Linda Ronstadt
Eleanor Rigby - Vince Guaraldi
Watch What Happens - Vince Guaraldi
Big Yellow Taxi - Joni Mitchell
The Circle Game - Joni Mitchell
(It ought to come as no surprise that Long Long Time was my most significant song about the difficult relationship I had with Daylin Butler.)
On the phone once that summer, Mike and I were discussing our perilous futures. We had only one year left of academic deferment remaining. Mike explained, "I don't know. A lot can happen in a year. I could get into a car wreck. I could lose a limb. I'm optimistic." I have rarely laughed so hard.
Even Dave Moore had briefly driven his small Datsun pickup to Vancouver, intending to become a refugee rather than be drafted. But he drove back to California after a day or two. Others, however, stayed in Canada.
Shakespeare in the Park
I did take a Shakespeare class at Dominguez. The English professor required us to spend the day in Balboa Park in San Diego to take in two Shakespearean plays that had been offered for years during their annual Summer Shakespearean Festival. I took a young woman from Norway in our class because she did not have a way to get there otherwise. We actually stopped at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot--they were having an arms show with a Huey helicopter and other weapons on display.
The young woman brought a picnic basket for us to eat in between the two plays we attended. One of them was Antony & Cleopatra. Our professor critiqued the performance of the Cleopatra actress and judged her badly miscast. She was not someone for whom one would give up one's life.
I took the young woman home that night, walking her to their back gate to ensure that she was safe. Unexpectedly at the gate, she suddenly turned to give me a kiss on the cheek after I told her she owed me nothing for taking her with me to San Diego. Her kiss was so unexpected that my hand accidentally brushed against her ass. I was suddenly embarrassed as I walked back to my car, hoping she did not think I was trying to feel her up.
Nixon's Draft Lottery
My number (along with Bruce Springsteen who was also born on September 23, 1949) was 119. Mike's was well over 300. So, he was not going to be called up. This was Nixon's duplicitous means to divide and conquer the anti-war movement. Presumably, those who got high numbers would no longer care about how long the war was going to last.
Mike had already had a nasty tussle with the draft board while we were at East L.A.. The board claimed they did not have his student deferment paperwork in his file. He knew they were lying but he was not allowed to view his own records himself. His mother could do it for him. She easily discovered the proper information in Mike's file. He should not have had his draft qualification changed. When he initially challenged a rather officious young woman at the draft office and told her he would contest the improper ruling, she curtly replied, "You may do so if you wish." Armed with what his mother had discovered, he contacted our Republican Congressman, Del Clauson. He set things right and Mike would not be bothered again. Though he never quite trusted his draft lottery position, he was protected. My much lower number offered me no such protection.
Sue Collins
Sue had a party one evening in their remodeled garage, serving wine coolers. Everyone had to use the bathroom off of the main garage space. The wall did not go all of the way to the ceiling, so we could all hear each attendee peeing in between finishing off a cooler.
At one point, I accompanied Sue into the house. She showed an album cover of James Taylor's debut to her mom, exclaiming about the cover photo, "He's so handsome."
Her mom misunderstood and though Sue was referring to me. I laughed and corrected her as she looked me up and down, "Not me. Sue is talking about James Taylor," as I pointed to the album cover.
At the end of the party, I took Mike home. He was drunk. As we zoomed up the Long Beach freeway, he stuck his head out of the car through the open passenger window. I worried that he might do something stupid, but he responded, "I just need a minute." When we arrived at his house, his mom and dad were on the front porch and collected their son, realizing Mike was three sheets to the wind. Without getting out of the car, I waved and took off for home. The following day Mike told me that his parents thought I did not get out of the car because I was equally drunk and did not want them to know. I was not.
Sue was always an upbeat, positive person. But then she, like all young women ever, did not have to worry about the draft. It wasn't that I was upset about that situation, but one afternoon on the phone I had to confess that I was not always as upbeat as she was because the draft was a constant worry for me. Sue mistook what I was saying and wearily responded, "Well, see you around." That seemed to be the end of our friendship.
The Boys in the Band
I read about The Boys in the Band debuting in a theater in West Hollywood in 1970. I ought to have been more curious at the time as to why Mike Mebs readily agreed to go with me. We had seen several films in Hollywood, West Hollywood, Westwood Village, and vicinity once we bought cars: The Devils, The Graduate (which I had also seen first with Jim Mullany), Oh, What A Lovely War, M*A*S*H, Catch-22 (which Mike hated), The Exorcist (both Mike's mom and his sister, fearful as to what might happen if Mike saw such a perverse film, warned, "Don't Go, Michael. Don't go."), 2001: A Space Odyssey, and several more.
The Boys in the Band was paired with Fortune And Men's Eyes. We entered the theater cautiously, and I for one did not look around at any of the other patrons already seated. We sat in a row by ourselves. I was certain most of the others in the theater were likely gay, but the likely inhabited a world of which I was entirely unaware. I was definitely uneasy until the movie began.
In 1972, when both Ann and Mom were away from home, I would watch That Certain Summer on TV. So, the Mart Crowley vehicle in 1970 was the first fully gay film I saw.
In the 1990's, I would read or overhear several critical remarks about The Boys in the Band from other gay men whom I knew. (Theater On Broadway would mount a production on stage, and I would see the play for the first time.) Yes, the characters were closeted, self-loathing, even destructive. However, I was thrilled finally to see others similar to me represented on the screen. I'd had secret loves to whom I had revealed myself. I'd not had sex with anyone, but I could understand the various possibilities that existed from one man to another or to others. I did not have a small group of gay friends, yet. Most of the characters were relatively "normal" human beings, regardless of their individual hangups or conflicts.
Before we saw the film, Mike told me that he had had a class with Marilyn Garber in which she invited two Lesbians and a gay man to her class, to discuss gay issues. Mike laughed when he informed me that nobody in his class sat in the front two rows of the classroom, as if sitting too close to LGBTQ people might infect them.
Weeks later after seeing the movie, while visiting Darryl Butler in Riverside, it was showing at a local theater. I accompanied Darryl and a college buddy of his to see it once more. I enjoyed it equally the second time. In fact, while we walked back to his residence after the movie, Darryl would later tell me that that was when he first realized that I was gay.
At this point, Pat Byrne knew I was gay because I had told him. Michael had wheedled it out of me at some point. Now Darryl knew. I had told Sue Collins before the breakup of our friendship about seeing the movie and liking it very much. She seemed quite taken aback and might have started to suspect that I was gay.
The Marines
Unlike Pat Byrne, I was not going to be able to graduate from Dominguez Hills in June of 1971. I needed one more quarter of credits during the Fall of 1971. My Dad had a good friend at A.U. Morse, a fellow wallpaper salesman named Bill Barber. I knew him, too. (He was an ex-Navy enlisted man who had survived the Kamikaze attack upon the aircraft carrier Franklin during WWII.) Bill's daughter was engaged to a young man who had already been accepted into the Marine Corps Reserves. I decided to pursue the same tack. The Marines would allow me to graduate in December and attend Boot Camp in San Diego after graduation. For want of a better military occupation, I picked "Clerk Typist".
But before that decision became finalized, I got my notice to report to the new draft facility for my draft physical on Wilshire Blvd. I arrived and entered the building. My group was hustled through quite like cattle. When a doctor listened to my heart, he demanded, "What are you nervous about?" I replied, "The whole thing." I was never asked if I were gay, not that I would have volunteered that fact. After the physical, I was declared draft eligible and would be called up after they had called up the lower numbers first.
I must have gotten this notice after my draft physical, letting me know that I was acceptable to be drafted.
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Very soon, however, I returned to the same facility for my Marine Reserve physical. The attitude was as different as night and day. Instead of being looked down upon as scum and draftees to be processed like cattle, I followed the Marine Corps colored tape path indicated on the floor and was treated kindly and with dignity. The doctors and staff were friendly and considerate. As a draftee, I was nothing. But as a Marine volunteer, I was treated royally. I passed that physical easily. I would be able to graduate and get my degree. Besides, the Marines were beginning to leave Vietnam. Nixon's "secret plan" was to turn the war over to the Vietnamese and then get out as gracefully as possible, and that process had already begun for the Marines.
That fall, however, I met a guy at Dominguez Hills whose family had a nice home in Palos Verdes Estates, Mark Lombardo. When he heard about my Marine Corps Reserves decision, he explained all about Marine OCS in Quantico, VA. He had gone for his three-month training at Quantico the summer of 1971. He was now going to finish his final year at Dominguez Hills before returning to Quantico for The Basic School, an advanced infantry training school, as a 2nd Lieutenant. He convinced me to ditch the Reserves and sign up for OCS. I could still graduate in December and head to OCS in the Spring.
I spent that winter driving up to Mark's house and running the median trails amid the pepper trees to get ready for Marine OCS. The first time I ran with him, I got sick, not having run in a long, long time. I continued to work for A.U. Morse on my spare afternoons and free days after I graduated.
Clothing
Daylin had become friends with a young man who worked in a new clothing store near Abbot Road. He had paid a doctor $350 to say that he had a medical condition that prevented him from serving in Vietnam. I bought a number of colorful dress shirts and pull-over shirts at his boutique shop. For the rest of the decade, any photos of me in civilian clothes, I bought the shirts at his shop.
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The following two photos were on our front lawn. The wool shirt I bought at a different clothing store, this one on Tweedy Blvd.
Sometime in late 1969 or early 1970, Ann let it be known that she wanted to buy a sports car. She sold the Rambler, and Mom found her a light-blue Triumph TR-4. Here is the only photo I could find of a partial look at that sports car. She had never driven a stick shift before and had to learn quickly.
Marine OCS
The office staff of A.U. Morse bought me a tan Remington electric shaver and presented it to me my last day at work. (Although I had owned Remington shavers before, and never had any problems with them, this one did not last for more than a few weeks, not that much longer than my 10-week residence at Quantico, Virginia, the location of Marine OCS.)
I had already met one of my platoon mates, Bruce Culp, who had been a classmate of Lida's and Dennis's at Bell High School. He was still living with his parents in Bell. The other two Southern California Marine OCS candidates met us at LAX. The Marine Corps got us reservations on an American Airlines 707 night flight to Dulles. The flight was not full and each of us was able to find a row in coach to put up the arm rests and try to sleep. Nothing worked, and none of us slept much.
Upon arrival at Dulles, we discovered there was no means for us to get to Quantico except for the four of us to hire a cab and split the cost. The landscape was gray, the trees barren, the skies overcast. We were tense enough, and none of that tension was reduced when the cab stopped at a main entrance guard shack, where the driver could learn where to drop us off. Our early arrival roused a cranky Marine enlisted man who would become the Sergeant Instructor for another platoon. He stood there in his underwear and was a total jerk as he finally told us where to go.
We arrived at the main building off of the drill pad and checked in at the desk. The clown behind the desk asked me to clean up a glass bottle of shampoo that he had broken in the shower. Two guys sitting on a bench nearby chuckled at the request. I did what I was told but later learned that the guy was only a Marine OCS reject who was on his way out. I wasn't happy that he'd asked me to clean up his mess. The chuckling duo on the bench though would become good friends, Dennis Zito and John Ormbrek.
Soon, a Marine Sargeant collected us and marched us over to get our first haircuts. We were almost shaved bald. But washing our hair was one less concern we would have in the next several weeks when there really would not be enough hours in each day. (A few weeks later, Dennis Zito, who had a long, narrow comb, returned from the latrine--not bathroom or restroom but latrine--sporting a very minimalist part in his still-short hair. He coughed and leaned forward so that we could not help but notice. I realized that my hair was growing back faster than most, so I borrowed his comb. When I returned from using one of the latrine mirrors, my head featured a part even more impressive than Dennis's.)
That first night in our barracks I slept as fitfully as I had on the 707 flight. Adding to my nervousness was the fact that the car trains from Northeast coastal cities like Boston and New York roared past our barracks more than once each night, hauling tourists and their vehicles to their Florida vacations. We would soon come to ignore the racket. But not that first night. Our barracks were of WWII vintage and had seen better days. The whole wooden structure shook and vibrated as the heavily laden and noisy trains flew past. In addition, one candidate from the other platoon that shared our first-floor barracks--who had been given fire watch--decided to smartly march up and down our squad bay and then down the long hallway that connected our squad bay to the other platoon's bay. The creaky wooden floors announced each step when this martinet arrived and departed, in addition to his goosestepping upon the floor of the second story bay directly above us.
At some point I finally did fall asleep. In my brief but blissful unconsciousness I was unaware that just before 5:00 AM, the Sargeant Instructor, Blazer, had taken up station at one end of the squad bay with a metal trash can in his hands, while Platoon Sargeant "Gunny" Williams stood by the light switch. At precisely 5:00, the light was switched on, the trash can tossed down the middle of the bay, and both of them started screaming like lunatics for us to, "Get up! GET UP!" I was on the top bunk. In my befuddlement, I grabbed the edge of the metal frame and tried to swing down to the floor. The bed skidded across the highly polished wooden floor, I lost control of my descent, hitting the front of my left leg against the sharp edge of the lower bunk. I hobbled to attention at the edge of the front of the bunk bed but could barely stand. I looked down to see that my leg was bleeding just as Platoon Sargeant Williams walked past. I got his attention. "What do you want?!?" he demanded, his face lunging forward toward mine as if I were some vermin he wanted no part of. I pointed down to my bleeding wound. "Oh," he softened, seeing the red blood slowly oozing out. "Go use the latrine." Thankful, I hobbled to the latrine, trying to staunch the wound with toilet paper. No use. Finally, I hobbled back to stand by my bunk. Passing by yet again, he told me to see the Corpsman after breakfast for a Band Aid.
The following year, 1973, I was visiting another friend of mine from Marine OCS, John Robertson, and we took a few pictures during the return to OCS. This is what the old barracks looked like. I am standing by the door that lead into our squad bay in the lower photo. Looking at an aerial map today, the old barracks are entirely gone, to be replaced by much newer barracks at the Southern edge and Southwest corner of the large, blacktop parade grounds. (Our squad bay was on the lower left of the photo, in the foreground.)
To reach the chow hall that first morning required a march along Bauer Road, mostly parallel to those cursed railroad tracks, crossing those tracks on Flemming St. The main building where we first checked in also seems to be gone in current aerial views. I can no longer tell where the current chow hall is located, but the chow hall in 1972 was behind the main building where I had cleaned up broken glass in the shower.
The Confidence Course was off to the right side of the chow hall so we could see it three times a day. The following was not something I could ever figure out how to negotiate, nor did most of the other candidates, hence the "Dirty Name" (it was the only piece of equipment that I could not finish in the Confidence Course, a course we had to complete but once during our time at Quantico):
Chow Hall
That first morning as we entered the chow hall, we could see that the food was well prepared. Enlisted personnel were required to spend a month, working in the chow hall. In the three months that we were at OCS, the routine became predictable. As the month progressed, we noticed that the food preparation, appearance and taste declined. When a new shift of enlisted men arrived after a month, everything improved again, dramatically. Another quality about the Chow Hall was important: the staff left us entirely alone when we had to eat. The OCS program often demanded the burning of many calories each day, and the staff did not interfere with any of us eating. We needed as much nourishment as possible nearly every single day.
Uniform Issue
I believe that on the second day, we were loaded into cattle cars. Gunnery Sgt Williams called them "kidney busters" because of their all-metal interiors and benches along each side. From the outside, they looked very much like trucks that carry cattle to slaughter and, without seat belts, we slid around as the trailers we occupied turned corners. We were being taken to get our OCS fatigue uniforms, underwear and boots. Lt. Nickel was our Platoon Commander (after I left at week 10 and returned for graduation, the platoon had come to refer to him as "Nickel Nuts"--he was not well liked at that point). It was he who smartly stood, arms folded, and determined if our uniforms fit properly.
I was wearing my Marine boots (the first boots I had ever worn since those ill-fated ones that I had tripped in while wearing them in the living room in Whittier that required stitches). I then had to climb up and down a three-step, wooden platform so that Lt. Nickel could determine if my uniform trousers and shirt fit properly. I stumbled climbing up the three steps and stumbled coming down, though I did not actually fall. In exasperation, Lt. Nickel finally demanded, "Can't you chew gum and walk at the same time?" I wasn't about to go into the story of my unfortunate first boots, so I said nothing in reply. We were each also issued traditional white boxer shorts and T-shirts. On the right front edge of the shorts, we had to stencil in black a number, where we were in alphabetical order in the platoon. John Robertson was B-24 (Bravo Platoon, #24); I was B-25. (There were around 35 of us in the platoon when we began the program.)
One thing the Marines stressed was working in unison. One morning, Candidate Zebal, I believe, was found to be wearing white briefs instead of his issued white boxers, those same boxers the rest of us were wearing that morning. The staff was not happy. The entire platoon could be wrong as long as they were all wrong the same way. But if one member did not conform, regardless of what that lack of conformity involved such as underwear, that was a problem.
When we returned to the barracks with our newly issued uniforms that second day, the Platoon Sgt Williams and Sgt Instructor Blazer made it clear that their wives were very proficient at sewing on the required white cloth name tags (with black stenciling) to the backs of our fatigue shirts and over the left front pockets of those same shirts. They would charge each of us a modest fee. We each had three uniforms. We could have had someone else do the sewing or we could do it ourselves; but that would not be looked upon favorably by the staff or their wives who appreciated a bit of additional income.
We all wisely used their wives and were very pleased with the results. A couple of weeks into the program, we got to purchase the following photo of our platoon since we were all decked out in our new uniforms. (I bought two copies of the photo and, years later, when Dennis Zito's lone copy was destroyed in a warehouse fire, along with all of their household goods after he got stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, I was able to send him my extra copy.)
I am in the very center of the second row from the top. Bruce Culp, whom I would meet up with again in 1973, is second from the left in the top row. Dennis Zito is the third Candidate from the left in the front row. John Ormbrek is standing next to me, to the viewer's right. John Roberson is third from the left in the same row as John Ormbrek and I. Lt. Nichol is on the far left of the front row; "Gunny" Sgt Williams is to the far right. (Dennis Zito and I were able, years later, to come up with the last names of all of the other Candidates in our platoon save one. I believe this list is in a blog post I wrote several years ago.)
Top Row: Paul Fitzpatrick, Bruce Culp, Clayborne, Dan Hunter, Wright, Booher
Second Row: Kramer, Jim Schloss, John Robertson, Wilson, Greg Sanchez, John Ormbrek, Jerry Moore, Ken Zebal, Olsen
Third Row: Jim Mullen, Walzak, Loviglio, Smith, Stuart, Darwin Newlin, Raese, Kent Nix, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Langdon
Bottom Row: Lt. Nickle, Tourek, Moffatt, Dennis Zito, Campomenosi, Hudnall, unidentified, Delacroce, Sgt. Blazer, Sgt. Williams
Not depicted: Palms, Kelly Stage, Don Richards (the last two were on the plane with Culp and me from California).
Mystery Candidate
We began with one additional candidate who didn't stay around long enough to be in the platoon photo above. Maybe he lasted the first week. He seemed like a nice fellow. But one day he was taken back to Lt. Nickel's office. They must have spoken to him, perhaps having found out something in his background that they had not learned before. We never were told why he was summarily packed up later that morning and exiled from the platoon; but he quickly vanished without explanation.
We had also stenciled our names onto masking tape to identify which footlocker beneath each bunk belonged to each one of us. When the mystery guy departed, he let me have his strip of masking tape because a small plastic case I had in my footlocker had a broken clasp and would not stay closed. I used the tape with his name on it to keep the case shut. During a later footlocker inspection, Lt. Nichol spied the mystery candidate's name tape and angrily demanded to know why I was in possession of that guy's name tape. I got the sense that, whatever the mystery candidate had done in the past, it was not good. I explained why I had the strip of tape, but that explanation only seemed to partially satisfy Lt. Nichol, who moved on to inspect the next locker. Why that other candidate was so summarily removed from the program without explanation remains one of those small unknowns in my life. He was never spoken of again.
Lt. Nickel
Besides acquiring the nickname "Nickel Nuts" after I left at the end of week 10 of the program, he had other quirks that demand mentioning. Whenever we went on long marches with rifles and backpacks and returned to the barracks to shower and change, Lt. Nickel would come through the barracks and inspect our feet. (That seemed reasonable enough because we were his charges and he needed to make sure we had not gotten blisters that could really screw up our feet and, potentially, put one of us in the hospital with a resultant infection.) Guys would be in various stages of undress, usually with a towel hanging loosely about our waists after a quick, refreshing shower, possibly with our dicks prominently hanging out, or at least somewhat visible to Lt. Nickel during the foot inspection as we each casually sat on our footlockers, waiting for him to clear us.
Maybe in porn videos does barracks life ever seem erotic. We all were usually too exhausted all of the time to even think about sex. At least it was true for me. And most of us were so uptight the first few days that almost none of us took a dump for at least two days. We had six toilets in the latrine, three on either side facing its opposite. There was absolutely no privacy or personal space. We were always in a hurry to shower and shave and get ready. We did not have time to concern ourselves with being naked in front of another candidate or in front of any of the staff. But after a foot inspection or two, word came down through Gunny Williams that Lt. Nickel wanted us to cover our genitals during his close inspections of our feet. Most of us quietly or openly hooted at the demand, but we conformed to his request, though thinking it ridiculous. None of us cared if we saw another guy's dick or crotch or butt.
We quickly built camaraderie. So much so that when one of the guys said to me, out of the blue one day as we were all getting ready for a march or chow or class, "We have two of the lightest skinned blacks I have ever seen," referring to two other members of our platoon. I stopped mid-thought. I genuinely did not at first realize what he was referring to. I looked about the squad bay at each of my fellow candidates to determine what he meant. Only then did I recognize that he was pointing out something about the two candidates who were African-American. I don't believe anyone else thought about racial or ethnic distinctions like that. I certainly didn't. We had two guys, Fitzgerald and Fitzpatrick, one from Boston, the other from Louisiana, who became buddies, probably because they were next to one another in the alphabet and, therefore, in the barracks. Each was married. They later told us that when their wives visited one weekend, and the four of them went out to dinner together, neither wife could understand the regional accent of the other. It was almost as if their husbands had to translate. (John Robertson and I were next to one another alphabetically, and Dennis Zito was near enough to the two of us, possibly only separated by Zebal, a prior service Marine, in the program to become an officer.)
During that first week, Lt. Nickel also had each one of us come to his office, sit in an oversized stuffed chair, and just...chat. My turn finally came, and I had already decided that the Marines were not for me. The thing about the chair was that it did not directly face the desk chair that Lt. Nickel was sitting on at his desk. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to look at him when we talked or not. Being intimidated, I didn't look. It was like gazing straight ahead and not at the priest during confession. Although I have never been to one, perhaps it was like chatting with a psychiatrist during a session on the couch where you stare up, or off, into space as you talk. Regardless of my feelings about wanting to leave OCS (I am sure he probably heard that same complaint from more than just me that first week), he firmly reminded me that I could not leave the program voluntarily until after week 9. And it would still take another week of out-processing after that. I left his office depressed.
Parade Ground
During the first several days, we spent considerable time on the parade grounds, the large expanse of blacktop, learning different marching maneuvers and standing positions: right flank, left flank, column left, column right, right oblique, left oblique, about face, right face, left face, at ease. We were taught hand gestures to communicate silently during combat. However, we were also told the story of the newly minted Marine OCS 2nd Lt. who stood up in combat in Vietnam to give those same hand signals and was promptly shot dead, too tempting a target in full view of the enemy.
The silliest thing we did on the parade grounds was to divide into two lines, facing one another several yards apart, and shout at one another as loudly as we could. It was to develop a "command voice" for combat, but the continuous shouting at the tops of our lungs left most of us hoarse for the next few days.
Running
All of that practice I did running up by Mark Lombardo's house in Palos Verdes or on the sidewalks of Cypress Avenue helped. The first time our platoon ran, we would run for a certain distance, walk fast for some more yards, then run again. But that lasted maybe a couple of times. We were quickly up to running 3 miles a day, as a platoon or individually. Eventually we were up to 5 miles a day, and I may be correct in remembering 6 miles a day at some point before I left. I recall John Robertson telling a couple of us that, along a rocky dirt patch by the parade grounds, he kept hoping that a prominent rock poking up through the dirt would catch his foot, forcing him to collapse to the ground, the resulting injury preventing him from running for at least a week or two.
Regardless, we were lucky that the Navy medical staff (the Corpsmen were all Navy personnel, the Marines referring to them derisively as "squids") had gotten the Marines to allow us candidates to run in low-cut canvas Converse tennis shoes instead of the traditional running in boots. (That prior practice had caused far more foot, ankle and leg stress and injuries over the course of 12 weeks.) Of course, those primitive tennis shoes could not compare to the sophisticated running shoes of today. But it was much better than running so many miles in boots. We did not run every day, but typically every other day, and not on the one day each week in which we hiked out into the Virginia wilderness with full pack and rifle.
The Naval medical personnel also taught us how to floss our teeth, a concept new to almost all of us who had never flossed our teeth before.
Obstacle Course
A current aerial photograph still shows four obstacle courses beyond the parade grounds (one pair of side-by-side courses facing the opposite pair). However, circa 1972, if memory serves, those four courses seemed much closer to the parade grounds than they are today; but I may be misremembering. The first obstacle was a high, metal, pull-up bar. Two ways to go over the top of that bar was the "kip" which involved jumping up, grabbing the bar with both hands, and sharply pulling it to your midsection while flipping over the bar, and then jumping down on the other side. Mark taught me how to do the kip, but it was not easy. And after we ran through the obstacle course once, a couple of weeks later we had to run through the course a second time. At that point I did not have the upper body strength to do the kip a second time. I and several others had to resort to what the staff derisively called the "college boy roll". That involved pulling yourself up and rolling your body over the high bar. (One time, I stupidly tried the kip a second time and failed. I hadn't the strength then to use the college boy roll now, no matter how I tried. Lt. Nickel stood nearby, stone faced, watching my struggles but saying nothing. After watching countless, unsuccessful attempts by me, he finally relented and told me to bypass the high bar. I was able to finish the rest of the course without any trouble.
The following is John Robertson and I on a few of the obstacles nearly a year later. The first photo shows a double row of metal bars that we had to climb over. Next, John is pretending to clamber over a low log. I am sitting atop the high wooden wall that we also had to climb over.
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Crystal City Marriott
Our first weekend away from Quantico, four of us stayed in a high-rise Holiday Inn in downtown Washington DC. I know that John Robertson was one of us but not Dennis Zito. He accompanied a couple of other Candidates who also stayed in the same Holiday Inn. Unfortunately for him, the others hired a prostitute for a little amusement. He told me all of this years later. He remained in the hallway, being engaged to Elizabeth with no intention of cheating on her. After that first weekend, John, Dennis and I had heard about how much nicer, and cheaper, the Crystal City Marriott was, so we stayed there every following weekend when we left the base for a weekend.
The second liberty weekend, John Ormbrek let us use his tan VW station wagon and drop him off at the train station where he took the train to New York City for the weekend (I don't believe that he was supposed to travel that far away from Quantico, but he didn't care). The night was rainy as we drove through the capitol. This was when I first heard "A Horse with No Name" by America on the VW radio. During one of our stays at the Marriott, we saw the Robert Redford caper, The Hot Rock. When we left the theater complex, it was chilly outside and the skies were spitting snowflakes. From Ohio (Dennis) and Tennessee (John), they laughed at me for describing the few flakes falling as snowing. One other weekend away from Quantico, we saw Nicholas and Alexandra in a theater with a movie screen so small, many of today's flat-screen TVs would be as large.
I found the first two pages of a letter that I wrote to my Mom on 8 April 1972 on Marriott stationary ( actually drew three pictures of obstacles on the Confidence Course:
As I mention in the letter, we frequently got longer liberty weekends because the base was so close to Washington DC. Dignitaries of varying sorts would trundle down to Quantico for a look at what we were up to there. We would have to put on a spectacle for each one of them. Gunny Williams referred to these periodic events as a "Dog and Pony show". Two platoons might be marching on the parade grounds; others of us were poised to take off down the four obstacle courses as the dignitaries approached (I believe this was when the candidate from the other platoon broke his ankle). While the entire faked extravaganza was rather silly, we would get an extra day or half-day off on our weekends, which was most appreciated. One time, we were even given an afternoon off after we donated blood. As with the cloth name tags sown by the staff wives, it was expected that we donate blood, and we readily complied.
But as the weekends went by, John, Dennis and I decided to forego the Marriott and remain in the barracks to save money. Besides, at the six-week mark, we lost the use of John Ormbrek's VW station wagon. He and another candidate named Palms got themselves bounced from the program. They had no intention of graduating, and their daily actions became increasingly contrary to what was demanded of Marine candidates.
Being deficient, the two met the six-week Marine OCS board and were banished from the program. I also appeared before the same 3-man board, but all I did was anger them and, out of spite, they made me stay longer. I suppose I was stupid to come across as a pacifist as the panel glowered at me. When one of them angrily demanded, "What do you think the Marines at the Chosen Reservoir did?!?" I indelicately responded, "Kill people." That was really stupid and incredibly disrespectful to the hundreds of Marines who died there trying to hold off the masses of Chinese soldiers being shoved into the Korean War by their totalitarian government. (We attended several classes on various Marine historical subjects such as the British invasion in 1812, sparing the Marine barracks at 8th and I while burning every other U.S. government building because of how well the Marines had fought in the battle outside of DC.)
However, some of Marine history got to be so jingoistic and excessive that candidates began to invent preposterous Marine victories: "One Marine with nothing but a pocketknife and three bullets, but no gun, held off thousands of the enemy for seven days before he was rescued." You get the point.
On our weekends at the base, the three of us might occasionally have lunch at the cafe near our barracks that Gunny Williams referred to as a "Slop Shoot". They had good burgers and fries and a juke box where I first heard "Ain't No Sunshine" by (the now late) Bill Withers. Spring had exploded all over Virginia by then, and the trees, at first brown and barren upon our arrival, were now massive and lush with bright green leaves. We would often listen to Casey Kasem's American Top 40 Countdown on Dennis's radio and just relax in our bunks. With most of the platoon gone, the nearly empty barracks became a kind of haven or heaven. Eventually, Dennis observed that barracks life was glorious until the departed candidates started returning on Sunday evening, signaling that the peaceful weekend was almost at an end. The depression of realizing that another week of Marine Corps torture would once again be renewed on Monday morning.
I had bought and devoured a paperback from The Rolling Stone, a compilation of some of their best album reviews since their founding in 1967. For the first time I read about The Masked Marauders, a satiric, but entirely fake, super group, invented by Rolling Stone writer Greil Marcus.
I had also compiled a list of my favorite songs that, when I hear them even today, I am reminded once again of Marine OCS in the Spring of 1972. Specific memories and events and locations and friends invade my thoughts, as if all of the years since then are stripped away and I am once again in the barracks or the Slop Shoot or John Ormbrek's tan VW on a rainy night in DC.
A Horse with No Name - America
Ain't No Sunshine - Bill Withers
Vincent (Starry, Starry Night) - Don McClean
Betcha By Golly, Wow - Stylistics
Look What You Done To Me - Al Green
Alone Again (Naturally) - Gilbert O'Sullivan
Old Man - Neil Young
(Last Night) I Didn't Get to Sleep At All - 5th Dimension
Oh Girl - Chi-lites
Without You - Nilsson
Suavecito - Malo
Day Dreaming - Aretha Franklin
It Doesn't Matter - Manassas
Mother and Child Reunion - Paul Simon
Everything Thing I Own - Bread
I Saw the Light - Todd Rundgren
Morning Has Broken - Cat Stevens
Walk In the Night - Junior Walker and the All Stars
Rocket Man - Elton John
Theme from "Shaft" - Isaac Hayes
Bang a Gong (Get It On) - T-Rex
Sweet Hitchhiker - Creedence Clearwater Revival
Heart of Gold - Neil Young
Immigration Man - Crosby and Nash
The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face - Roberta Flack
Back Off Boogaloo - Ringo Starr
The Family of Man - Three Dog Night
Soon enough, with cheaper prices at the Base Exchange, I bought several albums to add to my collection when I got home to California. Eventually, I had to buy a large suitcase at the BX to store the albums until I was able to get them home.
Marching
The staff rotated which one of us was to march the platoon to chow and back or to classes near the parade grounds. I sometimes got my left confused with my right and called out the wrong direction to perform a turn. The platoon was generally kind enough to pivot in the direction I wanted them to turn rather than in the direction I told them to turn. For example, I wanted them to pivot right though I called out "Column Left!"
All was fine until, one day, I was marching them between a few buildings on a narrow sidewalk. They decided to ignore my command because it was wrong. At least the front half of the platoon did that. They headed off of the sidewalk across a stretch of grass straight ahead when I actually wanted them to turn left. The back half of the platoon broke off from the front and chose not to obey my incorrect order and just turn left. I should have immediately ordered both sections to halt, fall out, and form up on me after the 45-degree turn in the sidewalk. Instead, I ordered the back half of the platoon to halt. (I also had to order the platoon behind us to halt while I sorted out the mess I had made.)
I called out "Column Left and Column Right" repeatedly until I got the front half of the platoon headed in the correct direction. I then halted that half while I got the back half of the platoon formed up behind the front half and we proceeded. But it was a clusterf**k to watch. In fact, when we reached the classroom, one of the guys told me that he had overheard a staff member with the platoon behind us let out a profanity when he turned the corner of a building, only to be presented with a pack of Marine candidates apparently going every which way.
Classes
The worst classes were those after chow. The doors might be open to create a slight breeze. But we were tired, we were full of food, and the lecture on firing a rifle delineating the difference between "hang fires" and "cook offs" might be droning on and on. Candidate Zebal, the prior service guy, once learned over and told me that the "Z" monster was about to get him. Meaning, he was ready to fall sleep. If you did feel the urge to drift off, you were supposed to stand up, to prevent yourself from drifting off, but few ever did. Once in awhile, the instructor would call out some hapless candidate who had noticeably nodded off to sleep.
This is probably as good a place as any to confess that, since I knew I was going to leave, I never studied after our classes even though there would be an exam. I failed most of them, and only passed one because it was history and I remembered enough to get a "C" without studying. My failing test scores were what got me before the six-week board. When they asked why I had repeatedly failed, I told them that I had not studied. "What about this one test that you did pass?" I confirmed that I never tried to fail any exam I took while I was taking the exam. If I failed an exam, it was because I did not remember the answer from the class instruction.
They asked me why I had done so well on the obstacle course. I told them truthfully that I was not always the most athletically inclined person and looked upon that course as a physical challenge.
They ruled that I would have to stay for the required 9 weeks and 1 week of out-processing. We were supposed to stand up, take a step back, do a "Left Face" and depart. However, the room was very small. With the big desk, the chair I was sitting on, the three chairs the board was sitting upon, and the bookcase behind where I was sitting, there was almost no room to take a step back and leave the way we were supposed to. But when I did not do it the right way, they angrily called me back to do it over. I did my best, bumping into the chair that I had been sitting on, bumping into the bookcase directly behind me, and then I departed. They seemed satisfied with that.
As I said, John Ormbrek and Palms, however, were dismissed from the program. It's what they had desperately wanted and really earned. When we were on a Day Compass course, where we were required to utilize a compass to reach specific points in several locations, Ormbrek and Palms could be seen, sitting on a log, each with a flower stuck into the end of each rifle.
Pugil Sticks
Pugil sticks were significantly thicker than a typical broom handle. On either end was a big mass of padding. You could strike your opponent with either end. We wore helmets with metal face protection like a catcher's mask, as well as somewhat protective chest padding that also came down between our crotches to provide some protection for our "family jewels". We had big mitts on our hands, as well. After we were taught how to use the pugil sticks, the platoon held a brief "tournament". Dennis Zito beat three opponents in a row. He was exhausted. John and I ran up to him as he took off his helmet, "Who do I have to fight next?" "You're through!" we exclaimed. "You won." He was too exhausted to revel in the glory of his victory.
Earlier, Lt. Nichol took delight in pairing me up against Candidate Zebal. Zebal was one of the nicest guys you ever wanted to meet. He was good natured. Once, when it was explained that our promotion rank upon graduation would be based on alphabetical order, Zebal exclaimed, to the delight of all of us, "At least I'll be ahead of Zito!"
But Zebal was prior service. He had spent time in Vietnam. Nobody ever asked, but I am sure he had killed enemy soldiers in combat. As we stood facing one another, about to come to blows, I looked at him through his face mask from behind my own face mask that now seemed so much less protective. His eyes were glazed over. He had calculable humanity in him, but I saw none of that in the moment before he would attack me. Did I mention that among all of us in Bravo Platoon, he was likely the strongest and most muscular, pound for pound? I was about to be slaughtered.
"Gunny" Sgt Williams gave the signal. Zebal's pugil stick was smacking me right and left. All I could do was keep my stick elevated, to lessen the hits or prevent as many blows as possible from striking me. I was instantly and continuously on defense though he never did knock me down. And then it was over. Lt. Nickel awarded the victory to Zebal, and rightly so. But Sgt Williams kindly added, "I think Sanchez got in some good hits." Ever since that first morning with my bloody leg, Platoon Sgt Williams always seemed to like me. He was the one who was the most disappointed that I was not going to finish the program when I told him I intended to leave.
One time, Sgt Williams did scream at me. Intensely. We were playing volleyball. He and I were on the same six-man team and I miss-hit the ball into the net. I never before knew how competitive he was until then when he screamed at me for hitting the ball into the net and causing us to lose a point.
Correspondence
We all had these little spiral notebooks. I used mine during any spare moments to write letters to mom or dad or a few others while I was at OCS. Weekends or specific kinds of guard duty gave me a chance to let them know how I was doing or what we were up to. I remember once that I was assigned guard duty late at night at the base armory. Two of us sat inside where it was quite warm so that the hundreds of rifles did not rust. The enlisted man was armed with a pistol; I was not armed. We had been warned that it was a courts martial offense to fall asleep on any kind of guard duty. Not long after I arrived for my shift, he fell asleep. I was not about to risk a courts martial, so I took out my little notebook and wrote another note to mom or dad. I believe that both of them had kept my little letters, and I know mom gave them back to me when I returned home. Over the years, I lost them. I would have enjoyed reading what I had written back then.
As I mentioned, I had had fire watch while at OCS. And I experienced that one night of guard duty at the armory. I was very lucky that I never had had to guard the Candidate parking lot. Especially during those first few weeks because the nights were so very cold in March. The parking lot was a fenced in area with a gravel surface and a locked gate where Candidates who had driven to OCS could safely park their cars. At night, though, two Candidates would have to patrol the fenced parking lot to prevent theft of any items in those cars since the lot was next to the woods. I remember one of the first nights that two Candidates from our platoon returned to the barracks and were trying to warm themselves after their 2-hour shift outside. Darwin Newlin was one of them, and his cheeks were flushed and red with the cold. I would not have been able to write because, like the two of them, I would have had to keep walking during the shift, just to keep from freezing.
I found a large tub in the garage, containing all kinds of paperwork and letters from my years in the service at Marine OCS, Air Force OTS, and the Air Force. Here is a four-page letter I wrote to my Mom on 2 May 1972. I had forgotten that I had gotten a cut on my pinky finger from the Day Movement Course that required medical attention. Also, I had not remembered that Bruce Culp had not participated in most of OCS because he was always injured.
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I've already mentioned the obstacle course, the day compass course, and the confidence course. We also had a circuit interval course out of doors, which I believe involved various exercises on equipment built in place in a large circle. We would move from device to device within a set period of time at each station, with a set amount of time at each type of device. I always liked the reverse sit-up device. This course was located beyond the far end of the parade grounds.
Another course which most of us hated I no longer remember what it was called. We climbed across a two-rope bridge or a three-rope bridge. Crawled through a narrow cement drainpipe. If you reached the end of the pipe and were about to emerge, and one of the staff could pull your rifle away from you, you had to crawl through the narrow pipe again. (The interior of the pipe was extremely claustrophobic.) We had a really big guy in our platoon. We called him "Big Boo". (His last name was Booher.) We heard that he had tried out with the Dallas Cowboys as a defensive lineman. I know he had a really tough time crawling through the cement pipe because he was so big. You had to sort of wiggle your way through, but for him there could not have been much wiggle room.
He later performed a rather miraculous feat on a log, one probably quite accidental but still amazing to watch, as his instinctive athletic agility kicked in, unexpected for a man who was 6'4" and broad shouldered. (Booher was the guy on the right end of the top row in the platoon photo above.)
What I have not mentioned before was that we had had significant rain a couple of days before we had to complete this course. Puddles of water were everywhere throughout the course, the worst being where we had to crawl a significant distance under barbed wire, and through puddle after puddle of now-stagnant water. (Again, if a member of the staff could pull your rifle away from you while you were crawling on your arms and legs and torso, you had to crawl through that part of the barbed wire course again.)
But this was not just muddy, stagnant water. Putridly green, pond-scum water was everywhere. It smelled really bad, and it made some of the individual devices slippery, especially after several candidates had negotiated them. That was especially true of the elevated log. We had to run across the elevated log (maybe a couple of feet off of the ground), holding our rifles out in front of us. Booher started across, but I could see that his boots were starting to slip as he neared the end of the log because it was now thoroughly wet and muddy. But then the miraculous happened. As he started to really slip, his entire body flipped at the end of the log. He did a complete somersault in the air, with his rifle still in both hands. He stuck a perfect landing with both feet and resumed running as if nothing insane had just happened to him. No petite gymnast could have stuck the landing any better. But, again, Booher was 6'4" and probably 250 pounds.
After finishing that course, all of us marched back to the barracks covered in mud. Our boots were scuffed and muddy. Our uniforms were totally smeared with mud. (The formerly white name tags sown upon them were never white again--they were tan, even after several cleanings when we dropped them off at the Base Exchange laundry truck that would pick up our uniforms a couple of times a week and clean and starch them for us.) Our rifles were thoroughly scuffed and covered in mud.
When we got back to the barracks, most of us showered with our rifles, to get most of the mud off, though we were not supposed to. Even with most of the mud washed down the shower drains, we still had to thoroughly clean and dry them. If not, rust would develop. While I cleaned my M-14 as much as I was able, carefully massaging the wooden butt of the rifle, I entirely forgot to clean the inside of the barrel. During a rifle inspection a day or two later, as Lt. Nickel approached me, it suddenly came to me what I had forgotten to do. I was in a panic but could do nothing about it.
As he stood before me, I presented my rifle to him. He completely looked over the exterior. Then he held the barrel up to the light, looking down the interior of the barrel. "There's no reflection at all!" he loudly exclaimed. As he handed my rifle back to me, he curtly remarked, "Attention to detail is as important in civilian life as it is in military life." He knew that I intended to leave the program. But in his rising anger, he forgot to declare that my rifle was totally unsatisfactory. In fact, he gave the next two guys, including Dennis Zito, an "unsat". After the inspection, I was called to his office. He expected that he had given me an unsat, but I corrected him. He then ordered me to tell the other two candidates to whom he had given unsats to report to his office instead. I felt guilty because he might not have failed their rifles had he not been so upset with me and the interior of my rifle's barrel.
Another course involved a squad of Candidates proceeding from station to station in the woods. The course might have been at least three miles long, over rugged terrain. We were in full gear, backpacks, shelter halves, ammo belts, canteens, and M-14 rifles. The squad had to navigate the course as a team, and it was timed. If a member were struggling, another team member could carry the rifle of the struggling candidate as well as his own. No one, however, could discard any of his gear along the route or at any of the few stations that called out the time. At each station a team was told if they were keeping up with the required time to finish or were lagging behind. While a team could not drop off any gear, that team could decide to drop off any straggler who was causing the entire team to fall behind.
At first, we believed that we could march/walk the course very fast. We soon realized that we actually had to run to finish within the set time limit. I was able to keep up, but I was not able to lift another Candidate's burden in any way. Other squads had preceded us along the course by the time we began. At the second station, we saw a Candidate from another platoon standing forlornly beside a member of the staff. We knew of him by reputation. He had obviously shown up to OCS over-weight and not in the best of physical conditioning. We were not surprised that his squad had dropped him off so quickly. Most of us felt sorry for him, but we had our own concerns to deal with. Someone in our squad was really struggling, so one of the others (possibly Zebal) took his rifle from him and he was able to proceed.
We had previously run miles almost daily. We had marched for many miles with all of our gear and rifles. But never before had we had to run in our boots and gear for any distance. I believe we finished barely on time, and I know we finished without having to drop anyone off. But we were all exhausted as we never had been before. I was wiped out and just trying to catch my breath. We were met by a 2nd Lt who was asking each of us our names to compare to his list. When asked, I gave him my name. He glared at me. I didn't have any idea what he was upset about. He angrily said something else to me; I gave another short reply. He continued to glare at me, even more angrily than before. I still was perplexed. Fortunately, one of my squad mates leaned over and whispered "Sir!" In my exhaustion I suddenly realized why he was upset. I had neglected to respond respectfully to each question with a "Sir!" at the end. As in "Gregory Sanchez, sir!" I also realized that since he was African-American, I suspect that he might have imagined I was not showing him proper respect because he was black and not because I was exhausted and still not thinking clearly. Fortunately, my finally stating "Sorry. Sir!" calmed him down.
This was 1972. This was not the Virginia of today. The Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act had only passed seven years previously. Richard Nixon was president, and his racist "Southern Strategy" was in full effect. As with some of the racist political environment today, it was even more acceptable to be a bigot in certain quarters back then.
Unknown Course
I no longer remember what this problem-solving course was called. But when it was my turn to figure out how to get my small team over a chasm with only a ladder and rope, I totally failed. I did not lead. I simply faded into the woodwork (each segment of the course was made of wood), with high wooden walls separating each physical problem of the course). I let someone else take over my team and try to solve this particular problem. Surprisingly, I had seen a photograph of this segment of the course in the over-sized color brochure we each were sent when we signed up for OCS. The team apparently tied the rope to one end of the ladder and, presumably, slowly lowered it toward the other side of the chasm and simply walked across the prone ladder. Intimidated, I locked up. I was definitely and properly chastised by the member of staff who oversaw this particular problem-solving predicament. He rightly pointed out that I had done nothing constructive but help hold the ladder.
Day and Night Compass Course
We had a classroom course on how to use a compass to navigate terrain in the woods. I didn't get it. When we were paired up in teams of two, I got paired with a total slacker. I finally rebelled at one point. He had tried to fake his way--our way--through the entire course. He would walk up to near where the staff member stood at specific stations, pretending that this was where our compass took us. I gave up. He wasn't going to stop cheating his way through the several stations and chided me for not wanting to play along.
The night course was almost the same. The only difference was that our luminous compass had to be recharged by the staff member at each station using a flashlight. When this was being done, we had to look away so as not to impede our night vision. To this day, I have no idea how to navigate in a wilderness using a compass.
It was on the Day Compass Course that I saw Ormbrek and Palms, calmly sitting on a log, flowers stuck into the barrels of their respective rifles. At one of the compass stations, I overheard a member of the staff tell another that he had also seen them sitting on that log.
Day Movement Course
On two occasions, instead of marching into the woods of Virginia, we were flown out to specific training exercise areas in Marine helicopters, once aboard a twin rotor CH-46, and once aboard a larger CH-53 Sea Stallion. We boarded the CH-46 through a front door near the cockpit; we boarded the CH-53 through the back of the helicopter and up a wide ramp. In both cases we were fully, and heavily, decked out in our fatigues, boots, helmets, canteens, shelter halves across our upper backs, entrenching tool, ammo belts around our waists, spare underwear and socks in our backpacks, and a few personal items so we could shave. We carried our M-14 rifles onto the helicopters as if we were going into combat. In a sense we were.
For the Day Movement Course, and its companion Night Movement Course, we would spend three days in the field. We pitched our shelter halves into tents which required a second candidate to provide the other shelter half to produce a fully acceptable tent. I am not sure why or how, but I was paired with a candidate who was about as tall as Candidate Booher though not quite as big overall. He was from North Carolina, sounded every bit like Gomer Pyle, and walked or marched, as Gunny Williams once yelled at him loudly so that we all could hear, "...as if you have corn cob up your ass."
As with all of the rest of us, he was a college graduate; but one night in the field made me question his common sense. I had returned from the Night Movement Course--more about that later--and had collapsed on the canvas floor of our narrow tent and was fast falling asleep. I had not even removed my boots, I was that tired. The North Carolinian noisily crawled into the tent shortly thereafter, stuck his fully lit Marine-issue flashlight in my face and stupidly asked, "Are you asleep?" I grumpily replied, having been fully awakened by his clumsy actions, "I was until you stuck your flashlight in my face!"
The Day Movement Course involved squads of us candidates maneuvering through various sections of the wooded Virginia landscape. Each one of the squad members would eventually be in command of the squad on patrol through one of these several combat scenarios. At some point, the squad would be attacked by an enemy firing at us from behind a tree or log on the ground or from behind us as we warily spread out across each wooded zone. During the first zone our squad passed through an area that was relatively flat. As with our attacker, we were given a number of blanks for our M-14 rifles to return fire. We tried to retain an even line as we climbed over logs or around trees. John Robertson and Dennis Zito were in the same squad with me. The enemy in this first zone was right in front of us. We had to drop to the ground, return fire, and listen to the chosen squad leader tell us what we ought to do. Afterwards, our actions and his commands to us during the brief firefight were critiqued. Then we moved on to the next zone.
I believe I was squad leader in the third zone. The ground fell off into a V-shaped decline. A shot soon rang out as we neared the bottom of the decline. We quickly realized that we were being shot at from behind. We turned around and all of us instinctively fell to the ground and returned fire. Our attacker stood behind a tree at the top of the decline and at the apex of the V. I immediately realized that while most of us were pinned down, John and Dennis were far enough off to my left to send them on a flanking movement to catch our attacker from his right. (We had learned all about flanking movements in class before this course in the field.) The slope of the low rise would cover their movement.
While they were out of sight to all of us, I could hear them firing once they were in position. It was a straight line to the attacker who would have to deal with us firing at him from below while John and Dennis were firing at him from his right. He would be trapped. But the fire from Dennis and John suddenly stopped. "What's the matter?" I yelled up at the two of them. "We ran out of ammo," one of them called back. There was nothing else I could do but initiate a frontal assault. But just as I was about to order the rest of my squad to inch forward up the steep slope before us, the firing from Dennis and John started up again. "What happened?" I yelled up at them. "We found more ammo," was their reply. "OK," I yelled back, "Continue to advance!" It was then that the staff observer ended the exercise.
Regarding the running out of ammo, he told me, "That happens. You just have to deal with it." Dennis especially apologized for their blunder involving thinking they had run out of ammo when they had not. I told them it was all right and not to worry about it. We then moved on to the next zone and another Candidate was chosen to lead the squad. We kept getting better with each zone.
At the end of the first day, after the last zone, we had several brand-new ammo boxes to carry back to our base in the field. Another platoon's Sergeant Instructor was in charge. He did not want to deal with hauling them back, so he ordered us to dig a few holes and bury them. I could not believe the waste. Several brand-new ammo boxes, a bit bigger than a standard lunch box, got buried in the woods. I doubt if that was the first, or last, time that this sort of waste occurred at OCS. (If I remember correctly, this was the same Sargeant who was critical of the four us when we arrived at the main gate that first day when we needed to know where to go.)
The following morning our squad was chosen to maneuver under the Candidate who had previously broken his ankle on the obstacle course a couple of weeks before. He had to remain on the dirt path because his ankle was still in a heavy cast. He tried to tell us what we ought to do, and we did our best to make him look better since we were all now fairly experienced from maneuvering through that same zone the day before. The staff observer pointed out after the exercise that the Candidate wasn't very proficient, especially given the fact that he had not been able to participate at all the previous day. And the observer acknowledged that the squad was doing well because we had gained valuable experience the day before.
Night Movement Course
The staff for all of the three platoons had us lined up, a foot or two apart, along a dirt road. We faced another section of woods bathed in darkness. We were told that we had to slowly make our way through those woods that were filled with trip wires attached to flares. If anyone tripped a wire and set off the attached flare, all of us needed to instantly freeze since the entire course would be illuminated. (Gunny Williams could often be heard, yelling at everyone to freeze and stop advancing when the course was lit up.)
As I slowly made my way through the course, I eventually found myself behind another Candidate who seemed particularly adept at finding each and every trip wire, no matter how skillfully placed. He knew I was right behind him and used his hand in the dark to point out the placement of each wire he encountered. At one location beside a couple of trees, he showed me a triangular wire set up that would have been difficult to avoid had he not warned me about it. We were soon through the course and on a dirt road on the opposite side from the start line. I was startled to realize that the fellow platoon member who had so skillfully helped me navigate the difficult course was Kent Nix.
Kent Nix had been, from the very first weekend off, the platoon "clown". He'd asked Gunny Williams if, after we returned from our first weekend away, we would be subjected to a "short arm inspection," presumably to verify if any one of us might have been exposed to one or another venereal disease. Kent was never taken seriously after that. But here he proved, at least to me, that he was very skillful at making both of our ways through a difficult course at night. (Even after I got back to our camp and tried to sleep, I could hear flares almost rhythmically going off and Gunny Williams yelling for everyone to freeze.)
The next morning after breakfast chow, we packed up our shelter halves and backpacks and lined up in formation to march back to the barracks after three days in the field. It was a beautiful morning, and the hike would eventually cover over 11 miles. We crossed over a broken bridge and sloshed along a shallow stream. At one stage, we crossed a small, but raging, stream in two files. However, the file on the right had a hidden depression under the waters of the fast-flowing stream. One of our short platoon members suddenly dipped below the level of water. The guy behind him instinctively grabbed his backpack and pulled him up as he sputtered muddy water, almost totally disappearing before he was grabbed. Given that we were each fully loaded down with all of our gear and were carrying our rifles, he could have drowned without help.
The first night we were back in the relative comfort of our barracks, I found myself talking down a member of one of the other platoons. He had been designated the company commander for our trip to the field. But after he had personally completed the Night Movement Course, he retired to his own tent, exhausted. The staff sought him out and then angrily criticized him for retiring before everyone in the company had completed the course and were able themselves to sleep. A commander needed to watch out for all of his men before he sought comfort for himself. The poor guy was crushed.
In a low voice so as not to awaken my sleeping platoon mates, I tried to restore his confidence. I told him that the program existed for us to make mistakes. The staff knew we would make mistakes, and they were there to set us on the right path toward leadership. I hoped I had helped him feel better about himself and his situation in the program.
Last March
Somewhere along the way, I developed a deep soreness in my lower back. I would sit in one of the OCS whirlpools to ease a bit of the lingering pain. When we were marching, the pain could become acute. While marching along these woodland trails a phenomenon occurred in which the platoon became an accordion of gear-laden Marines. At the beginning of a hike, the platoon was tightly marching together. One could easily reach out and touch the backpack of the candidate in front of one. However, once the platoon hit the uneven trails, the platoon began to stretch out, especially in the most rear ranks. They would often periodically be forced to run to keep up. But the staff would yell at those running to stop running and just march quicker to catch up, though that was almost impossible.
On what I believe was my final march, John Robertson and I were at the back of the ranks, probably at the very end. We were cranky short-timers at that point, and my lower back was acting up. The ammo belt with two full canteens, two ammo pouches, and embarkation card pouch bounced up and down with each pothole or uneven patch in the winding dirt trail. Dennis Zito was tasked with taking a card from any straggler who fell too far behind and lost sight of the rest of the platoon ahead. Our straggling became so pronounced that Dennis was forced to take a card from each one of us. We could not blame him. However, had we held out a couple of minutes longer, we would have caught up with the front of the platoon that had stopped to rest just around the next bend in the woods, draining their lizards, as Gunny Williams was wont to say when the platoon stopped and some of us needed to pee. John and I kept up after that.
Tooth infection
Again, at some point, I developed a bubble-like infected swelling beside one of my back teeth. I also had an accompanying slight fever. I was sent to the Navy dentist. He proceeded to dig underneath my gums in the infected area and suck out the puss. It hurt like hell, but he managed to clean out the infected area so that the swelling went down and I could return to duty. The dentist wanted me back in a few days to remove the tooth. However, knowing that I was going to leave the program, Sgt Williams curtly informed me that I could see my own dentist at home to remove the tooth.
Several days later, I felt feverish again. I again sought out the Navy Corpsman. Gunny Williams assumed that I would not be able to make the march if the infection had returned. But because the Corpsman took my temperature and found it to be normal, I realized that I had no excuse to miss that march. I got all of my gear on, climbed down the fire escape, and rejoined the platoon that had formed up outside on the road just as Gunny Williams was about to say that I would not be making the hike. I spoke up and raised my hand, "I am here Sgt Williams."
Marine uniform
During the 9th week, we all gathered in a open building to pick a tailor to produce our regulation Marine uniform, the one that Lt. Nickel is wearing in the platoon photo. There were several tailors plying their services, including being able to provide us with our required ceremonial officer's sword.
After each local tailor gave his speech, outlining his skills, guys were picking the tailor they intended to use. I hung back, figuring that it was silly to have a fully tailored uniform that I was never going to wear get made by a tailor for me. However, I was told I had to do it, regardless. As one of the tailors was fitting me, several of the guys, and a couple of the staff, were joking with me that I looked good in the Marine uniform and, perhaps, I was beginning to look as if I might be changing my mind about leaving the program.
I didn't stay, obviously; but it was nice that several of the guys expressed the wish that I not leave the program.
Final Days
I believe I was squad leader in the third zone. The ground fell off into a V-shaped decline. A shot soon rang out as we neared the bottom of the decline. We quickly realized that we were being shot at from behind. We turned around and all of us instinctively fell to the ground and returned fire. Our attacker stood behind a tree at the top of the decline and at the apex of the V. I immediately realized that while most of us were pinned down, John and Dennis were far enough off to my left to send them on a flanking movement to catch our attacker from his right. (We had learned all about flanking movements in class before this course in the field.) The slope of the low rise would cover their movement.
While they were out of sight to all of us, I could hear them firing once they were in position. It was a straight line to the attacker who would have to deal with us firing at him from below while John and Dennis were firing at him from his right. He would be trapped. But the fire from Dennis and John suddenly stopped. "What's the matter?" I yelled up at the two of them. "We ran out of ammo," one of them called back. There was nothing else I could do but initiate a frontal assault. But just as I was about to order the rest of my squad to inch forward up the steep slope before us, the firing from Dennis and John started up again. "What happened?" I yelled up at them. "We found more ammo," was their reply. "OK," I yelled back, "Continue to advance!" It was then that the staff observer ended the exercise.
Regarding the running out of ammo, he told me, "That happens. You just have to deal with it." Dennis especially apologized for their blunder involving thinking they had run out of ammo when they had not. I told them it was all right and not to worry about it. We then moved on to the next zone and another Candidate was chosen to lead the squad. We kept getting better with each zone.
At the end of the first day, after the last zone, we had several brand-new ammo boxes to carry back to our base in the field. Another platoon's Sergeant Instructor was in charge. He did not want to deal with hauling them back, so he ordered us to dig a few holes and bury them. I could not believe the waste. Several brand-new ammo boxes, a bit bigger than a standard lunch box, got buried in the woods. I doubt if that was the first, or last, time that this sort of waste occurred at OCS. (If I remember correctly, this was the same Sargeant who was critical of the four us when we arrived at the main gate that first day when we needed to know where to go.)
The following morning our squad was chosen to maneuver under the Candidate who had previously broken his ankle on the obstacle course a couple of weeks before. He had to remain on the dirt path because his ankle was still in a heavy cast. He tried to tell us what we ought to do, and we did our best to make him look better since we were all now fairly experienced from maneuvering through that same zone the day before. The staff observer pointed out after the exercise that the Candidate wasn't very proficient, especially given the fact that he had not been able to participate at all the previous day. And the observer acknowledged that the squad was doing well because we had gained valuable experience the day before.
Night Movement Course
The staff for all of the three platoons had us lined up, a foot or two apart, along a dirt road. We faced another section of woods bathed in darkness. We were told that we had to slowly make our way through those woods that were filled with trip wires attached to flares. If anyone tripped a wire and set off the attached flare, all of us needed to instantly freeze since the entire course would be illuminated. (Gunny Williams could often be heard, yelling at everyone to freeze and stop advancing when the course was lit up.)
As I slowly made my way through the course, I eventually found myself behind another Candidate who seemed particularly adept at finding each and every trip wire, no matter how skillfully placed. He knew I was right behind him and used his hand in the dark to point out the placement of each wire he encountered. At one location beside a couple of trees, he showed me a triangular wire set up that would have been difficult to avoid had he not warned me about it. We were soon through the course and on a dirt road on the opposite side from the start line. I was startled to realize that the fellow platoon member who had so skillfully helped me navigate the difficult course was Kent Nix.
Kent Nix had been, from the very first weekend off, the platoon "clown". He'd asked Gunny Williams if, after we returned from our first weekend away, we would be subjected to a "short arm inspection," presumably to verify if any one of us might have been exposed to one or another venereal disease. Kent was never taken seriously after that. But here he proved, at least to me, that he was very skillful at making both of our ways through a difficult course at night. (Even after I got back to our camp and tried to sleep, I could hear flares almost rhythmically going off and Gunny Williams yelling for everyone to freeze.)
The next morning after breakfast chow, we packed up our shelter halves and backpacks and lined up in formation to march back to the barracks after three days in the field. It was a beautiful morning, and the hike would eventually cover over 11 miles. We crossed over a broken bridge and sloshed along a shallow stream. At one stage, we crossed a small, but raging, stream in two files. However, the file on the right had a hidden depression under the waters of the fast-flowing stream. One of our short platoon members suddenly dipped below the level of water. The guy behind him instinctively grabbed his backpack and pulled him up as he sputtered muddy water, almost totally disappearing before he was grabbed. Given that we were each fully loaded down with all of our gear and were carrying our rifles, he could have drowned without help.
The first night we were back in the relative comfort of our barracks, I found myself talking down a member of one of the other platoons. He had been designated the company commander for our trip to the field. But after he had personally completed the Night Movement Course, he retired to his own tent, exhausted. The staff sought him out and then angrily criticized him for retiring before everyone in the company had completed the course and were able themselves to sleep. A commander needed to watch out for all of his men before he sought comfort for himself. The poor guy was crushed.
In a low voice so as not to awaken my sleeping platoon mates, I tried to restore his confidence. I told him that the program existed for us to make mistakes. The staff knew we would make mistakes, and they were there to set us on the right path toward leadership. I hoped I had helped him feel better about himself and his situation in the program.
Last March
Somewhere along the way, I developed a deep soreness in my lower back. I would sit in one of the OCS whirlpools to ease a bit of the lingering pain. When we were marching, the pain could become acute. While marching along these woodland trails a phenomenon occurred in which the platoon became an accordion of gear-laden Marines. At the beginning of a hike, the platoon was tightly marching together. One could easily reach out and touch the backpack of the candidate in front of one. However, once the platoon hit the uneven trails, the platoon began to stretch out, especially in the most rear ranks. They would often periodically be forced to run to keep up. But the staff would yell at those running to stop running and just march quicker to catch up, though that was almost impossible.
On what I believe was my final march, John Robertson and I were at the back of the ranks, probably at the very end. We were cranky short-timers at that point, and my lower back was acting up. The ammo belt with two full canteens, two ammo pouches, and embarkation card pouch bounced up and down with each pothole or uneven patch in the winding dirt trail. Dennis Zito was tasked with taking a card from any straggler who fell too far behind and lost sight of the rest of the platoon ahead. Our straggling became so pronounced that Dennis was forced to take a card from each one of us. We could not blame him. However, had we held out a couple of minutes longer, we would have caught up with the front of the platoon that had stopped to rest just around the next bend in the woods, draining their lizards, as Gunny Williams was wont to say when the platoon stopped and some of us needed to pee. John and I kept up after that.
Tooth infection
Again, at some point, I developed a bubble-like infected swelling beside one of my back teeth. I also had an accompanying slight fever. I was sent to the Navy dentist. He proceeded to dig underneath my gums in the infected area and suck out the puss. It hurt like hell, but he managed to clean out the infected area so that the swelling went down and I could return to duty. The dentist wanted me back in a few days to remove the tooth. However, knowing that I was going to leave the program, Sgt Williams curtly informed me that I could see my own dentist at home to remove the tooth.
Several days later, I felt feverish again. I again sought out the Navy Corpsman. Gunny Williams assumed that I would not be able to make the march if the infection had returned. But because the Corpsman took my temperature and found it to be normal, I realized that I had no excuse to miss that march. I got all of my gear on, climbed down the fire escape, and rejoined the platoon that had formed up outside on the road just as Gunny Williams was about to say that I would not be making the hike. I spoke up and raised my hand, "I am here Sgt Williams."
Marine uniform
During the 9th week, we all gathered in a open building to pick a tailor to produce our regulation Marine uniform, the one that Lt. Nickel is wearing in the platoon photo. There were several tailors plying their services, including being able to provide us with our required ceremonial officer's sword.
After each local tailor gave his speech, outlining his skills, guys were picking the tailor they intended to use. I hung back, figuring that it was silly to have a fully tailored uniform that I was never going to wear get made by a tailor for me. However, I was told I had to do it, regardless. As one of the tailors was fitting me, several of the guys, and a couple of the staff, were joking with me that I looked good in the Marine uniform and, perhaps, I was beginning to look as if I might be changing my mind about leaving the program.
I didn't stay, obviously; but it was nice that several of the guys expressed the wish that I not leave the program.
Final Days
I had made a unique blunder late one night in the barracks. I had been designated as platoon sergeant, responsible for everything from getting everyone up in time, to marching us to chow or class. I owned a luminous Timex watch at the time and wore it as often as possible during OCS. One night I woke up and carefully looked at my watch. It looked as if it were after 5:00 AM, a few minutes after we should have been up and getting ready. But I was not entirely certain. From the squad bay directly above, I could hear what sounded like several candidates walking across the floor, getting ready to head off to chow. In a panic, I got up, convinced that it was well after 5 AM after staring at my watch one last time, ran to the light switch, flipped it on and called out, 'Get up! GET UP!" I could see everyone sleepily climbing out of their bunks. But someone, looking at his own watch, responded, "My watch says its only after midnight." In the full electric light, I realized that he was right. I flipped off the switch and ordered, "Go back to sleep!" They were too tired to dispute that order.
The next morning, I'd hoped they had forgotten my mistake, but someone wondered aloud, "Did someone walk us up in the middle of the night?" I was exposed. Later that day, I was standing in line at the laundry truck to pick up a spare uniform. The guy in front of me turned around and asked, "You're in Bravo Platoon?" I nodded. He continued, "I heard that some guy in your platoon woke everyone up in the middle of the night." So, the news had gotten around. I had to sheepishly admit, "That was me." We shared a good laugh.
As the days dwindled down to when those of us not intending to graduate could start to out-process, all platoons were marched to the airfield for a third helicopter flight, this one all of the way to Camp Lajeune, the major Marine base in North Carolina. However, surprisingly, we were told that any of the Candidates who were not going to complete the program were to fall out and not board the helicopters. As the CH-53's took off, those of us soon leaving the program marched back to the barracks instead. Except for noon and evening chow, we spent the entire day in the barracks, doing very little. As evening turned to darkness, we were not even allowed to sleep in our bunks until the rest of the platoons returned. They were running late.
Prior Service Marine and friend John Robertson, with a newborn son and wife, had also decided to discontinue being in the program. He would finish out his commitment to the Marines as an enlisted man and leave the service. I simply no longer recall who else was waiting in the barracks with the two of us and were also leaving the program. Maybe there were five of us total from Bravo Platoon, including Bruce Culp.
Finally, we heard the helicopters above returning to the airfield. Several minutes later, the rest of the platoon marched back to the barracks, and we could all get some sleep (we had sat on our footlockers and tried to sleep sitting up before they got back). I suspect it was near midnight. We all lost at least two hours of sleep that night because those in the helicopters had only fitfully slept aboard the CH-53's on the return flight from North Carolina.
John, Bruce and I finally moved to the same building, and Casual Platoon, that Bruce and I had checked into that first morning. This move occurred at the end of our 9th week at OCS. We would have one week of out-processing before we could actually leave for good. They had us doing odd chores around the base, most of which I no longer remember. (We loaded or unloaded a truck somewhere on the base, I recall.)
I had fire watch one night. Close to midnight, I came upon one of my former Bravo Platoon mates, the other older prior-service member. His face had cuts. He was on the phone. It seems that earlier he was in a phone booth, talking to his wife, when he was attacked by a group of black Marines during a riot in downtown Quantico. I never did learn the reason for the riot, but they had been attacking any white Marines they came across. This Candidate was rescued by Marine police. The cuts on his face were from the glass of the phone booth being broken as the rioters tried to get at him.
I kept only one pair of my OCS boots the day I was leaving. I left the second pair in the hallway, and those quickly disappeared. I did keep my Marine fatigue cap for years though I am not sure I still have it after moving to California from Colorado.
For several weeks, I had been in contact with Bill Vogt, my high school buddy whose parents owned the Southland Motel. He was moving back to Maine to temporarily live with his brother and sister-in-law and their kids after college. By the time I was to leave OCS, he invited me to spend some time in Waterville, Maine, where they lived. I had no more worries about the draft, and I thought perhaps I would find a job and spend some time there since I had no other commitments after OCS.
I boarded a Northeast 727-200 "Yellow Bird" from Washington National Airport to Boston. I had a piece of cheesecake and a glass of milk in the airport restaurant. Unfortunately, I would see that fatal combination later. The Air New England flight in a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air from Boston was bumpy. I got so sick that I completely filled up an airsick bag. We finally landed in Portland, Maine. The pilot kindly took the bag from me and deposited it in a trash can after most of the other passengers departed the aircraft. I did manage to keep it together for the short flight to Waterville. Bill and his brother bundled me into the back seat of their car. I explained how sick I had gotten and was exhausted. At their house, they put me to bed since I looked extremely peaked. I slept for 12 straight hours.
That first morning I walked into the woods with the family dog. We had a wonderful time. It was still in the last throws of winter in Maine. A few patches of snow were still in the shade of trees in the woods. I had noticed that, during the Northeast flight, the woods were turning from bright green to dull gray and brown as we winged north. A week later, though, when the dog and I went for the same walk in the woods, we had to turn back in panic. The bugs were out in full force and were attacking us both. We ran back to the house.
Bill's brother and Sister-In-Law owned a grocery store in Waterville. Bill helped them out by delivering groceries to those customers who were housebound. One day, I was so hungry I bought a cake from their store and ate the whole thing. My metabolism was still elevated from OCS, but I was becoming far too sedentary.
Bill was looking for an accounting job in Waterville, but I really wasn't suited to do much. Besides, Maine was experiencing hard times, and my prospects were non-existent. I realized I would have to head back to California if I wanted to figure out what to do with my future.
OCS Graduation
After two weeks in Maine, I decided that I wanted to fly back to OCS and see the other guys graduate. One of them picked me up at Washington National, and they had a room reserved for me at a small motel just outside the main gate. I later met up with Lt. Nickel in the barracks who asked me, "Do you regret your decision to leave?" I thought about it for a moment, "Not really. But I hope I don't reach a time in my life when I do regret leaving."
Larry D. Wilson was our other Prior Service Marine. Of course, I have mentioned Zebal a few times.
After the impressive ceremony, making them all 2nd Lieutenants, a few of us got a ride to Dulles where we caught a United DC-10 flight to LAX. Darwin Newlin and I sat next to one another on the flight. He had brought a present for his sister. I don't remember how I got from the airport to home. But when I did arrive home after my 12-weeks away, I still had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
After OCS
I quickly returned to A.U. Morse and reverted to working in the warehouse. However, they had a new office manager when the older woman retired. He had hired a young man to answer phones and take orders, the first time that a man had been the office manager or an order taker.
At some point, I tried to enter the Air Force's Officer Training Program but did not pass the test I was required to take at the Air Force recruitment office in Huntington Park. I then shifted to trying to qualify for the Coast Guard's officer program. When the other fellow left the A.U. Morse office, I asked to take his place as I was tired of working in the warehouse. That was likely a mistake. My weight increased until I was 180 pounds whereas I had typically been 165. When I drove to San Pedro to take the Coast Guard's required physical, whether because of nerves or the added weight, my blood pressure was high. They gave me a few tries, but it did not improve.
In my attempt to pass, I contacted the new Office Manager and said I would not be coming in for a couple of days as I tried to get my blood pressure under control. A day or two later, I got a letter, firing me from A.U. Morse. I drove to the state employment office to apply for unemployment benefits. When they called A.U. Morse, the Manager claimed that I had quit and had not been fired. I handed over the incriminating letter I had gotten. The unemployment worker instantly qualified me for insurance.
In 1972, airlines were forced by the courts to hire men to fill flight attendant positions. They were not allowed to keep specific jobs confined to only one sex or the other. At LAX, Continental Airlines and TWA were accepting applications for flight attendant school. Dennis Madura and I drove there one day and submitted applications to both. The woman I spoke with at TWA asked why I had left Marine OCS. I told her that it was simply not for me. She remarked that her husband was a Marine. Neither Dennis nor I was hired. However, Pat Byrne was hired. I was not surprised. He did not have a Hispanic name. He was handsome and in great shape. We kept in touch as he headed off to TWA's flight attendant school in St. Louis. He had done so well that they kept him on as an instructor for several months before he finally got picked to be on TWA's European routes.
I had gotten the following recruitment letter sent on 8 July 1971. This must have kept the Coast Guard in the back of my mind after Marine OCS.
Meanwhile, I was still trying to get into the Coast Guard's officer school. That's why I took that East Coast swing, visiting Daylin in Michigan and John Robertson and his wife and infant in Quantico. While visiting the Robertsons, I called the Coast Guard. Either they had my records wrong or whatever the reason, I was told that I was not chosen because of the results of my physical--though what he specifically mentioned as an ailment did not apply to me. He further explained that, unlike Marine OCS, the Coast Guard only had one officer candidate class each year and also they only accepted 13 candidates into that one class.
That call made me realize that the Coast Guard was not an option for me. I would have to look elsewhere. Here is a letter I received, pretty much closing the Coast Guard OCS door.
My former OCS buddies might have graduated and become officers. However, they had not left Quantico. They moved on to an additional 6-month Marine advanced combat program at The Basic School at Quantico. I was told by Dennis Zito that they referred to the program as "The Big Suck". And while they were no longer OCS candidates, they felt as if they were just "Lieutenadates" rather than full 2nd Lieutenants.
After I had stayed with the Robertsons for a few days, Dennis told me that I was welcome to spend a few days staying with them before I returned to California. I should have taken him up on his kind offer. My relationship with the Robertsons was beginning to sour. First, his wife bluntly told me that I was not allowed to lay on their couch to watch TV with John. "I don't even allow John to do that." Without complaint, I immediately moved to the floor. A few days later as she stopped at the base gas station, and we were waiting for the attendant to fill up the tank, I simply speculated that, with the war in Vietnam slowly winding down, as well as Congress predictably downsizing the military after every war ends, they might even disband the Marines. She immediately took extreme offense, telling her infant son sitting in a car seat between the two of us, "Hit him, Trey!" I was shocked and tried to backtrack. She would have none of that. The break was complete. She never really spoke to me much after that.
That evening, I tried to apologize to John, knowing that his wife's anger was so acute. However, he would have none of that. He falsely told me, "You said that because you couldn't complete the [OCS] program." I was floored at that point. John and I both could have graduated had we decided to stay. The staff tried several times to get me to change my mind and remain. John knew that. Whatever his wife had told him about our conversation, our friendship was also broken for good.
While I stayed with them, I had even attended their Baptist Sunday service even though I no longer went to church at any time. They were good friends with the minister and his wife, having us over for dinner one night. I never even discussed religion with them even if I disagreed with some of their beliefs.
After I returned to California, I mailed them three copies of the following photo of John "Trey" Roberson III's first birthday party (one for them, and one for each set of their respective parents) since they did not own a camera to take any photos that day.
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They did not even have the decency to write back and at least acknowledge receipt of the photos. I never heard from the two of them again.
I had to take a cab to Dulles--it cost $50.00. She was not going to drive me. I tried to apologize on my way out the door as the cab arrived. John had already left for work without saying anything to me, and she did not even look up from reading the morning paper as I thanked her for their hospitality.
A further indignity occurred on the United DC-8-61 flight home. Unemployment in those days paid in large bills. All I had was a $50 bill to pay for the $3 inflight entertainment headphones. The woman flight attendant explained that she would have to repay me later as she did not have enough cash to repay me right away. I had no problem. As we descended into L.A., though, she still had not returned. I mentioned to another flight attendant that I had not seen her to be repaid. "Don't worry, she'll pay you back. She won't take off with your money. You will get off the plane before she does." I felt humiliated. I had not implied or believed that she was a thief. It was a busy flight and I thought that maybe she had forgotten me.
Election 1972
We know now that Nixon's main goal was to knock Edmund Muskie out of the race early on the Democratic side. His campaign did so with the "Canuck letter". The nominee would eventually be liberal Senator George McGovern from South Dakota. Rumblings about a break-in at the Watergate were already on the horizon. The media, however, generally ignored those rumblings and focused instead upon McGovern's choice of Senator Tom Eagleton from Missouri as his VP when it was revealed that he had received shock treatments to deal with depression. The press seemed only concerned with, not if but, when McGovern would abandon Eagleton. The real issues were generally ignored. Nixon claimed in '68 that he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. Here we were in 1972, and the war seemed no closer to conclusion. Agnew was Nixon's attack dog even though his criminal behavior, mainly tax fraud, would be exposed and he would be forced to resign, to be replaced by Gerald Ford in 1973.
Unlike 1968, I was finally going to be able to vote. On election day, I crossed Firestone Blvd. and continued along Cypress Ave. The polling place was in the living room of a private home on Cypress. California used punch cards. I knew McGovern was going to lose, but I voted for him, regardless that most Americans were of the belief that he was too liberal to be president. So, the electorate re-elected a crooked VP and a crooked President. Overwhelmingly.
All of these years later, I kept my ballot stub from that first election:
Mike's December Wedding, 1972
Mike married Lida Meek in December of 1972. Here is a Christmas photo of me in the living room with the Christmas tree and my new Peugeot bike on December 23 (I am dressed to be at Mike's wedding as his Best Man that evening at a church in Bell, CA, so that must have been when they married). And, yes, I tried to grow a mustache and it was really weak and cheesy.
Ann and I before the wedding:
Here is a photo right after the service. Lida looked so cool during the ceremony, but when I looked down at her hand as Mike put the ring on her finger, her hand was shaking badly.
Velobind
Many mornings after Marine OCS in 1972 and 1973, I watched AM Los Angeles with Ralph Story and Stephanie Edwards. Their many segments on just about any topic were entertaining or enlightening. One segment in particular featured the Velobind process for creating a less expensive book. I visited their physical site in Torrence, in hopes of gathering together my existing couple of dozen poems and producing several copies of the collection to give away to family and friends.
I had chosen for the title of my modest assortment of war poems, SONS OF MEN, from a line of an A.E. Housman poem,
For oh the sons we get
Are still the sons of men.
I may have had them create 25 copies for me. I chose the blue cover. with silver lettering embossed on the cover for the title of the book and my name. The last poem in the collection I wrote when Darryl Butler offered that I have never writing a single-lime poem. I took up the challenge and produced the following:
P.O.W.
Seems not enough knowing release.
I felt the poem had a couple of meanings. First, that so many the world over were prisoners of war even if they were not actual combatants--not enough people across the world were free from war. The Vietnam War itself seemed endless for Americans; but so, too, were the wars that others around the world were experiencing. In addition, even when released from being a POW, war veterans would forever be prisoners. They never forget what they endured, as my own father likely never forgot what he experienced as a POW in Germany in WWII, even when he almost never spoke about his capture and captivity. Furthermore, as the Vietnam War POWs were returning from the war, several expressed dismay that the country they were returning to was no longer the country they had left when they went off to war. Being finally released from captivity was not enough for them. They wanted the nation to have stood still while they were in captivity. No progress. No development. No changes. And their memories were likely idealized versions of a nation that actually did not exist. They were younger men then, as yet unscarred by war and just out of high school or college. Many had gotten married, had fathered babies that had become children or teenagers while they were away. Cultural changes had occurred while they were locked up; but they had not participated in, or at least had not observed, those changes in context and over time. They were in shock.
Air Force Redux
At some point in late winter or early Spring of 1973, I got a call from the Air Force recruiter in Huntington Park. The Air Force had changed its standards regarding the test results it used to determine who might be eligible to attend Officer Training School (OTS) at Lackland, Texas, for their pilot training program (Flight Screening Program or FSP). I would spend the first three weeks in the normal officer training program. After that, other FSP trainees and I would leave the regular officer program and focus on showing our aptitude for flying T-41 Cessna trainers at Hondo Field, a few miles away from San Antonio. Hondo Field had been one of several pilot training bases in WWII. The Air Force was now using it for the FSP program, to weed out those who did not have as deep an aptitude for becoming Air Force pilots. The program was far less expensive than to send us to advanced pilot training elsewhere, only to find that we did not have the right stuff.
Marine OCS and Coast Guard OCS were now in the rear-view mirror. So was working for the airlines. A.U. Morse was definitely done with. While I might have felt that I had more of a chance to become an Air Force navigator, my scores did not provide that avenue. Officer and pilot training at Lackland was about my only option remaining. However, had I known what was ahead, my best option would have been to return to Dominguez Hills, get a Master's Degree in history, and apply for a job as a junior college instructor at one of the several JC's throughout the Southland. In the remaining years of the decade and beyond, California would build more Community Colleges as the population grew. However, my heart and soul were still focused on a military career. And I never envisioned myself as a college instructor. At least not in 1973.
My flight physical was to be at March Air Force Base in Riverside, CA. This was the base dad and I visited during a static air show in the 1950's where I walked into a Globemaster cargo aircraft. It was where I was walking through the base exchange with one slipper protecting a sore foot and an Air Force enlisted man kidded me about the slipper. This was also where dad had spent his Air Force Reserve two-week active-duty commitment each summer for as long as I could remember. Besides, Darryl Butler was still attending the University of California at Riverside. We had become good friends. I would be able to stay at the dorm after they had dilated my pupils for the flight physical. I easily passed the physical--any weight gain that I had experienced after Marine OCS was gone after a series of colds I had endured after I got home from Virginia. Unfortunately, my Air Force OTS class did not start until August.
One of the guys with whom I worked at A.U. Morse had quit and went back to his previous job as a security guard. The mom and pop security company was always needing guards as they developed accounts throughout the area around Downey and well beyond. Through my former warehouse colleague, I was hired. I purchased my hat, badge, shirt and trousers and started almost immediately inside a small guard shack on the swing shift at Yellow Truck Lines. I would listen to the Lakers on the tiny radio in the shack; and because traffic in and out was light at that time of night, I could also read. Having seen the movie A SEPARATE PEACE, I bought the paperback of the novel. Soon enough, I was transferred to Accuride, a German-owned company with a factory in Santa Fe Springs. I was again on the swing shift.
The company was likely tight-fisted and was in the middle third of what had been a nasty strike. That is why they hired the security guard firm. I was not thrilled to have to cross the picket line to do my job. Most, if not all, of the factory workers on strike were Latino. Sadly, at this point many had returned to work without their demands having been met. The picket line was thin at this stage and surly. One evening an angry man appeared at the gate. The factory manager had joined me. I was unsure if I was supposed to open the gate to let the man in or not. "Don't let him in," the manager bluntly told me. He was staring daggers at the angry man outside. I soon learned that the angry man was the union organizer.
One evening I found nails covering the entrance driveway, the kind that were lodged through cork so they more likely would puncture the tires of anyone driving over them. I gathered them up and tossed them out. I was told that in the first few weeks of the strike, nails strewn about the entrance were almost a daily occurrence. But just a few weeks after I arrived on site, with the ownership standing firm, the strike was at an end. The workers had failed. Many were hired back with no increase in pay as they treated the metal railings that were used on the sides of drawers to make them easy to slide open or close. They worked with vats of chemicals to treat the metal.
The owner and his son were again able to drive in and out of the relatively small factory parking lot in front and park their large Mercedes near the entrance to the office without fear of reprisals. The gate was then left open during the day.
I would get home, typically at 11 PM or so. Some mornings I would get up and take in a movie at the Del Amo Mall in Torrance, usually at 10 AM or 11 AM. It was only a buck for the first showing. That is where I saw A SEPARATE PEACE and HAROLD & MAUDE, among several others.
One afternoon on my drive along the street leading to the factory, I saw something odd on the center dividing line of the two-lane road. No other car was behind me, so I slowed down. I quickly realized that it was a small, gray kitten. How it had gotten into the center of the street without being injured, I had no idea. But I knew that if I did not rescue it, it would soon be run over if it moved in any direction. I scooped up the little ball of fur and set it on the passenger seat. I had become friends with the secretary at the main desk. I asked to borrow a phone book to call the local shelter. I was going to be heading off to OTS in a few weeks and certainly could not keep the little fellow. The secretary said she would have loved to keep him but knew her husband would not agree to adopting it.
Soon, the shelter truck arrived and took the little fellow away. I had always hoped he had gotten a good home, but almost anything was better than being killed on that often-busy street.
Across the street from the plant were private homes. A woman directly across had two dogs that she left in the fenced-in front yard. One evening, the larger dog showed up at the closed front gate of the plant. I lead him safely back across the street and knocked on her front door. She was grateful that I had rescued him. However, when it happened twice more, she accused me of luring her dog out of the yard. The accusation was absurd. Eventually, she discovered that he had dug a hole under the fence amidst several thick plants and that was how he was repeatedly getting out. One night I saw the smaller dog in the street, and it was hit by a car before I could rescue him. I thought it was dead. A few moments later, it sat up, rose to its feet and then walked back to its yard.
Eventually, the owners of the factory provided us with a truck to drive around the periphery of the plant site. I would listen to the Lakers finals games on the radio. This was the third time in three years that they were in the NBA finals but lost for a second time to the Knicks, having beaten them in 1972.
Dennis Zito
After The Basic School, Dennis Zito was transferred to the Marine base at 29 Palms. I drove out there one afternoon and waited in my '66 Mustang that night with the top down for him to return from the base to his rented trailer outside of the base itself. He had stopped at our house on Cypress in his new compact Fiat before reporting. He'd hit a coyote on the drive through the desert and dented the bumper.
Later, Dennis, a Marine buddy, and Dennis's twin brother, David, drove down to our house in the Fiat. We took my Mustang on the now-familiar drive to San Diego. We stopped at the Marine Recruit Depot, the same depot that had so fascinated and terrified Mike and me that we braved everything, drove up to the main gate one Saturday afternoon, and were allowed inside to see the fearful place up close. With the Marine IDs of two of them, and David's Air Force ID, we had no trouble entering the depot. (David was soon to be training at George AFB as a backseat navigator and weapon's officer in an F-4 Phantom. As I said, being set down in the Day Care center at George AFB when my dad was stationed there is one of my earliest memories.)
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David is on the left, Den in the center, and his Marine buddy is on the right. We later had lunch at the El Cortez dining room, on the top floor overlooking the downtown.
Dennis Madura and I had decided to buy new cars that early summer of '73. We were both focused on 1973 Cameros. The only problem was that the GM factory manufacturing the Cameros was on strike. We had to wait. Finally, with the strike ended, the Cameros started to roll into Cormier Chevrolet, off of the San Diego freeway, a few short weeks before I was to head off to Air Force OTS. I could not afford the extra $400.00 for air conditioning, though Dennis could. My maroon Camero was $4,000.00. Mom had to again cosign. Grandpa Sanchez had given Ann and me each 2nd mortgages to two different properties. I was able to have the homeowner buy out what remained of the mortgage I had with him for $400.00, which was my down payment for the Camero. A short time later, Dennis Zito visited one last time--he was soon off to marry Elizabeth back in Ohio. Here he is in front of our house on Cypress, standing beside the brand new Camero, pretending to be serious.
Before I left for Texas, I had boxed up my record collection and all of the rest of my possessions for mom to take to San Pedro. She was finally moving from South Gate now that we two kids were out of the house. Ann had already moved out a couple of years before. (I believe she was living with her boyfriend, Mark, at this point, in Long Beach.) Mom had always wanted to live near the ocean, and now was her chance with me likely gone for good. She'd found a duplex in San Pedro where the owner and his wife lived in the other half.
I had planned my drive to San Antonio in three stages. I would drive from Soth Gate to Phoenix that first day, staying at a motel near the airport the first night. The second day I would drive from Phoenix to El Paso. There, I would meet up with the other three OTS guys who were also driving their own cars to San Antonio. The final day, we four would drive across Texas and stay at a motel the night before we reported to OTS. Bruce Culp, with whom I had gone through OCS with the year before, was also going to be in my OTS class, though I do not believe he was one of the other three.
I had packed up the Camero the night before with my stereo and my many 8-track tapes, along with some clothes and shoes. The early morning was cool and beautiful. I remember getting in the Camero and leaving 8940 Cypress for the last time. I had lived there longer than any previous residence. The Air Force was about to become my home; indefinitely, I hoped, though eventually that was not to be.
Election 1972
We know now that Nixon's main goal was to knock Edmund Muskie out of the race early on the Democratic side. His campaign did so with the "Canuck letter". The nominee would eventually be liberal Senator George McGovern from South Dakota. Rumblings about a break-in at the Watergate were already on the horizon. The media, however, generally ignored those rumblings and focused instead upon McGovern's choice of Senator Tom Eagleton from Missouri as his VP when it was revealed that he had received shock treatments to deal with depression. The press seemed only concerned with, not if but, when McGovern would abandon Eagleton. The real issues were generally ignored. Nixon claimed in '68 that he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. Here we were in 1972, and the war seemed no closer to conclusion. Agnew was Nixon's attack dog even though his criminal behavior, mainly tax fraud, would be exposed and he would be forced to resign, to be replaced by Gerald Ford in 1973.
Unlike 1968, I was finally going to be able to vote. On election day, I crossed Firestone Blvd. and continued along Cypress Ave. The polling place was in the living room of a private home on Cypress. California used punch cards. I knew McGovern was going to lose, but I voted for him, regardless that most Americans were of the belief that he was too liberal to be president. So, the electorate re-elected a crooked VP and a crooked President. Overwhelmingly.
All of these years later, I kept my ballot stub from that first election:
Mike married Lida Meek in December of 1972. Here is a Christmas photo of me in the living room with the Christmas tree and my new Peugeot bike on December 23 (I am dressed to be at Mike's wedding as his Best Man that evening at a church in Bell, CA, so that must have been when they married). And, yes, I tried to grow a mustache and it was really weak and cheesy.
Ann and I before the wedding:
Velobind
Many mornings after Marine OCS in 1972 and 1973, I watched AM Los Angeles with Ralph Story and Stephanie Edwards. Their many segments on just about any topic were entertaining or enlightening. One segment in particular featured the Velobind process for creating a less expensive book. I visited their physical site in Torrence, in hopes of gathering together my existing couple of dozen poems and producing several copies of the collection to give away to family and friends.
I had chosen for the title of my modest assortment of war poems, SONS OF MEN, from a line of an A.E. Housman poem,
For oh the sons we get
Are still the sons of men.
I may have had them create 25 copies for me. I chose the blue cover. with silver lettering embossed on the cover for the title of the book and my name. The last poem in the collection I wrote when Darryl Butler offered that I have never writing a single-lime poem. I took up the challenge and produced the following:
P.O.W.
Seems not enough knowing release.
I felt the poem had a couple of meanings. First, that so many the world over were prisoners of war even if they were not actual combatants--not enough people across the world were free from war. The Vietnam War itself seemed endless for Americans; but so, too, were the wars that others around the world were experiencing. In addition, even when released from being a POW, war veterans would forever be prisoners. They never forget what they endured, as my own father likely never forgot what he experienced as a POW in Germany in WWII, even when he almost never spoke about his capture and captivity. Furthermore, as the Vietnam War POWs were returning from the war, several expressed dismay that the country they were returning to was no longer the country they had left when they went off to war. Being finally released from captivity was not enough for them. They wanted the nation to have stood still while they were in captivity. No progress. No development. No changes. And their memories were likely idealized versions of a nation that actually did not exist. They were younger men then, as yet unscarred by war and just out of high school or college. Many had gotten married, had fathered babies that had become children or teenagers while they were away. Cultural changes had occurred while they were locked up; but they had not participated in, or at least had not observed, those changes in context and over time. They were in shock.
Air Force Redux
At some point in late winter or early Spring of 1973, I got a call from the Air Force recruiter in Huntington Park. The Air Force had changed its standards regarding the test results it used to determine who might be eligible to attend Officer Training School (OTS) at Lackland, Texas, for their pilot training program (Flight Screening Program or FSP). I would spend the first three weeks in the normal officer training program. After that, other FSP trainees and I would leave the regular officer program and focus on showing our aptitude for flying T-41 Cessna trainers at Hondo Field, a few miles away from San Antonio. Hondo Field had been one of several pilot training bases in WWII. The Air Force was now using it for the FSP program, to weed out those who did not have as deep an aptitude for becoming Air Force pilots. The program was far less expensive than to send us to advanced pilot training elsewhere, only to find that we did not have the right stuff.
Marine OCS and Coast Guard OCS were now in the rear-view mirror. So was working for the airlines. A.U. Morse was definitely done with. While I might have felt that I had more of a chance to become an Air Force navigator, my scores did not provide that avenue. Officer and pilot training at Lackland was about my only option remaining. However, had I known what was ahead, my best option would have been to return to Dominguez Hills, get a Master's Degree in history, and apply for a job as a junior college instructor at one of the several JC's throughout the Southland. In the remaining years of the decade and beyond, California would build more Community Colleges as the population grew. However, my heart and soul were still focused on a military career. And I never envisioned myself as a college instructor. At least not in 1973.
My flight physical was to be at March Air Force Base in Riverside, CA. This was the base dad and I visited during a static air show in the 1950's where I walked into a Globemaster cargo aircraft. It was where I was walking through the base exchange with one slipper protecting a sore foot and an Air Force enlisted man kidded me about the slipper. This was also where dad had spent his Air Force Reserve two-week active-duty commitment each summer for as long as I could remember. Besides, Darryl Butler was still attending the University of California at Riverside. We had become good friends. I would be able to stay at the dorm after they had dilated my pupils for the flight physical. I easily passed the physical--any weight gain that I had experienced after Marine OCS was gone after a series of colds I had endured after I got home from Virginia. Unfortunately, my Air Force OTS class did not start until August.
One of the guys with whom I worked at A.U. Morse had quit and went back to his previous job as a security guard. The mom and pop security company was always needing guards as they developed accounts throughout the area around Downey and well beyond. Through my former warehouse colleague, I was hired. I purchased my hat, badge, shirt and trousers and started almost immediately inside a small guard shack on the swing shift at Yellow Truck Lines. I would listen to the Lakers on the tiny radio in the shack; and because traffic in and out was light at that time of night, I could also read. Having seen the movie A SEPARATE PEACE, I bought the paperback of the novel. Soon enough, I was transferred to Accuride, a German-owned company with a factory in Santa Fe Springs. I was again on the swing shift.
The company was likely tight-fisted and was in the middle third of what had been a nasty strike. That is why they hired the security guard firm. I was not thrilled to have to cross the picket line to do my job. Most, if not all, of the factory workers on strike were Latino. Sadly, at this point many had returned to work without their demands having been met. The picket line was thin at this stage and surly. One evening an angry man appeared at the gate. The factory manager had joined me. I was unsure if I was supposed to open the gate to let the man in or not. "Don't let him in," the manager bluntly told me. He was staring daggers at the angry man outside. I soon learned that the angry man was the union organizer.
One evening I found nails covering the entrance driveway, the kind that were lodged through cork so they more likely would puncture the tires of anyone driving over them. I gathered them up and tossed them out. I was told that in the first few weeks of the strike, nails strewn about the entrance were almost a daily occurrence. But just a few weeks after I arrived on site, with the ownership standing firm, the strike was at an end. The workers had failed. Many were hired back with no increase in pay as they treated the metal railings that were used on the sides of drawers to make them easy to slide open or close. They worked with vats of chemicals to treat the metal.
The owner and his son were again able to drive in and out of the relatively small factory parking lot in front and park their large Mercedes near the entrance to the office without fear of reprisals. The gate was then left open during the day.
I would get home, typically at 11 PM or so. Some mornings I would get up and take in a movie at the Del Amo Mall in Torrance, usually at 10 AM or 11 AM. It was only a buck for the first showing. That is where I saw A SEPARATE PEACE and HAROLD & MAUDE, among several others.
One afternoon on my drive along the street leading to the factory, I saw something odd on the center dividing line of the two-lane road. No other car was behind me, so I slowed down. I quickly realized that it was a small, gray kitten. How it had gotten into the center of the street without being injured, I had no idea. But I knew that if I did not rescue it, it would soon be run over if it moved in any direction. I scooped up the little ball of fur and set it on the passenger seat. I had become friends with the secretary at the main desk. I asked to borrow a phone book to call the local shelter. I was going to be heading off to OTS in a few weeks and certainly could not keep the little fellow. The secretary said she would have loved to keep him but knew her husband would not agree to adopting it.
Soon, the shelter truck arrived and took the little fellow away. I had always hoped he had gotten a good home, but almost anything was better than being killed on that often-busy street.
Across the street from the plant were private homes. A woman directly across had two dogs that she left in the fenced-in front yard. One evening, the larger dog showed up at the closed front gate of the plant. I lead him safely back across the street and knocked on her front door. She was grateful that I had rescued him. However, when it happened twice more, she accused me of luring her dog out of the yard. The accusation was absurd. Eventually, she discovered that he had dug a hole under the fence amidst several thick plants and that was how he was repeatedly getting out. One night I saw the smaller dog in the street, and it was hit by a car before I could rescue him. I thought it was dead. A few moments later, it sat up, rose to its feet and then walked back to its yard.
Eventually, the owners of the factory provided us with a truck to drive around the periphery of the plant site. I would listen to the Lakers finals games on the radio. This was the third time in three years that they were in the NBA finals but lost for a second time to the Knicks, having beaten them in 1972.
Dennis Zito
After The Basic School, Dennis Zito was transferred to the Marine base at 29 Palms. I drove out there one afternoon and waited in my '66 Mustang that night with the top down for him to return from the base to his rented trailer outside of the base itself. He had stopped at our house on Cypress in his new compact Fiat before reporting. He'd hit a coyote on the drive through the desert and dented the bumper.
.jpg)
Dennis Madura and I had decided to buy new cars that early summer of '73. We were both focused on 1973 Cameros. The only problem was that the GM factory manufacturing the Cameros was on strike. We had to wait. Finally, with the strike ended, the Cameros started to roll into Cormier Chevrolet, off of the San Diego freeway, a few short weeks before I was to head off to Air Force OTS. I could not afford the extra $400.00 for air conditioning, though Dennis could. My maroon Camero was $4,000.00. Mom had to again cosign. Grandpa Sanchez had given Ann and me each 2nd mortgages to two different properties. I was able to have the homeowner buy out what remained of the mortgage I had with him for $400.00, which was my down payment for the Camero. A short time later, Dennis Zito visited one last time--he was soon off to marry Elizabeth back in Ohio. Here he is in front of our house on Cypress, standing beside the brand new Camero, pretending to be serious.
I had planned my drive to San Antonio in three stages. I would drive from Soth Gate to Phoenix that first day, staying at a motel near the airport the first night. The second day I would drive from Phoenix to El Paso. There, I would meet up with the other three OTS guys who were also driving their own cars to San Antonio. The final day, we four would drive across Texas and stay at a motel the night before we reported to OTS. Bruce Culp, with whom I had gone through OCS with the year before, was also going to be in my OTS class, though I do not believe he was one of the other three.
I had packed up the Camero the night before with my stereo and my many 8-track tapes, along with some clothes and shoes. The early morning was cool and beautiful. I remember getting in the Camero and leaving 8940 Cypress for the last time. I had lived there longer than any previous residence. The Air Force was about to become my home; indefinitely, I hoped, though eventually that was not to be.
