I'm only now starting to realize the importance of the two symbols above. They're the medals that just about every serviceman and woman received when they served in what was South Vietnam during the 1960s and early '70s. It's now been 30 years since I first arrived in Vietnam as a wide-eyed 19-year-old who believed he was somehow carrying on the noble tradition of keeping America (the United States of America that is) free.
After a year of duty there as a military police sentry dog handler -- a year of mortars, snipers, claymore mines, mosquitoes the size of forklifts, outdoor latrines, powdered milk, major league skin rashes, Agent Orange and some of the stupidest people you can imagine (I'm talking about some of the people on our side), I came home to a world that was nearly unrecognizable. I learned to remain low-keyed about being a Vietnam veteran. Like most others, I put many of the memories of that year in the back of my mind and got back to the business of life.
It took nearly 30 years for me to begin seeing the connections between that year of my youth and the person I am today. There is no blame nor are there any excuses -- just connections. While many people seem to have great respect for me, there is a certain isolation I still experience. I've heard other Vietnam veterans speak of it -- veterans with successful careers and wonderful, loving families. There are other veterans out there who blame the war for their misfortunes and failures. I try not to judge them, but at times I want to shake them and shout, "Get off your ass and start living." But I probably don't know all that they're feeling and I probably didn't experience their Vietnam War. So I remain quiet.
But there is a lot I finally want to talk about -- to somebody. But I'm not sure to whom. So I am putting this open conversation (albeit one-sided) on the Internet with the thought that someone out there is quietly reading this and listening. I seek no advice, no approval, no critiques, no money, no sympathy. Nothing. It's time to talk about some stuff. I'm sure this won't be terribly exciting to anyone expecting detailed descriptions of fire fights and booby traps and napalm-charred bodies. In fact, what I'll talk about will probably be quite boring. That's the wonderful thing about the Internet -- there's no editor out there leaning back in his chair, holding a lit pipe in his hand saying, "I'm not so sure your approach is right." I don't have to worry about any deadlines and I certainly don't have to wonder when my payment check will arrive. I'm the writer, editor, fact checker, publisher, photographer (sure, I'll throw in some pictures) and critic. I'm new at building websites, but maybe I'll even set this up in installments or have certain key words linked to other stories. If anyone wants to use any of this for anything, please let me know first. After all, it is my life I'm talking about.
After writing five installments, I still haven't gotten anywhere near Vietnam. But that's okay with me. I'm finding it quite satisfying going back in time and re-evaluating the person I once was and, in some cases, still am. And recently, after talking with a few very wonderful men I never met -- men who were also stationed the the remote airstrip, deep in the Mekong Delta, called the Soc Trang Army Airfield -- I'm learning that there are even more connections than I was aware of when I started writing this. What's interesting is that I'm beginning to see how characteristics and idiosyncrasies of my high school years, about which I've already written below, pop up again while I'm in Vietnam. I tell you this in case you're considering clicking directly to my Vietnam era. You might not see some of the things I believe will foreshadow things that happen in Vietnam and later.
Even though you should read it in order, here's a sort-of table of contents.
Just your average 18-year-old -- at least that's what I thought.
My first successful muckraking
The best way to paint you a picture of who I was in high school would be to have you read the wonderful book The Quartzsite Trip by William Hogan (Athenium, 1980). It's one of those out-of-print books you look for in every used bookstore because you're always giving away copies of it to people you care about. I was a high school senior in 1966 and 1967. The book is about high school seniors in 1962. But in so many ways I can relate to both of the main characters -- one, Deeter Moss, when I was young, and the other, P.J. Cooper, when I got older (I must admit I wish I could be more like the character P.J. Cooper). In 1962, I was in John Muir Junior High School. Here are a few excerpts from the beginning of the book so that you can get a feel for the kind of place I left behind when I joined the Army and so you can maybe get charged up about finding your own copy of The Quartzsite Trip.
(From The Quartzsite Trip)
John Muir High School is an imaginary institution in an imaginary neighborhood, in the imaginary County of Los Angeles.
There is, of course a real Los Angeles County. And a real John Muir High School. And a real neighborhood.
And the events of this story, which takes place there, did in fact happen.
But they happened at other places and to other people than those named here.
They happened in the spring of 1962.In the spring of 1962, Deeter Moss was a senior at John Muir High School. And 1962 was the year that Deeter Moss went on the Quartzsite Trip.
In 1962 John Glenn became the first man to orbit the earth in a spacecraft.
Tricia Nixon celebrated her sixteenth birthday.
The Dow-Jones industrials hit a record high of 735, then plunged below 600.
Arnold Palmer won the Masters.
Goodyear introduced a tire with "Turnpike-Proven Tufsyn."
Nelson Rockefeller divorced his wife.
Jack Paar left The Tonight Show.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was President of the United States. In 1962 his administration was called "Camelot."In the spring of 1962 these books were published: Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories by John Updike; One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey; and Six Crises by Richard Nixon.
In 1962 in Los Angeles, a pound of coffee cost 59 cents. Gasoline was 21 cents a gallon. At Bob's Big Boy, a cheeseburger with fries cost 55 cents.
In 1962 the television shows were Mister Ed and Maverick and Lassie and Password. What's My Line was on, and Bullwinkle and Ozzie and Harriet and Candid Camera. And the stars were Red Skelton and Dick Powell and Alfred Hitchcock and Andy Griffith and Dick Van Dyke and Donna Reed and Groucho Marx and Soupy Sales and Bugs Bunny and Howard K. Smith.
But Ben Casey was the hit of the TV season in 1962. At some colleges, student nurses were granted an extension of the "lights out" curfew to stay up after 10:00 PM to watch it.Byron "Whizzer" White was President Kennedy's first Supreme Court appointee.
Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fischer separated.
In 1962, in an article on the four thousand American advisers in Southeast Asia, Life magazine reported that "U.S. troops are not in Viet Nam as combat units, and no such action is contemplated."
In the spring of 1962 there were coffee houses and hootenannies, and a new singing group called Peter, Paul and Mary.
Pontiac introduced the four-cylinder Tempest.
An Life Magazine offered for a dollar a paper bound book titled Communism: The Nature of Your Enemy.In the spring of 1962, West Side Story won the Oscar for best picture.
Sonny Liston signed to meet Heavyweight Champ Floyd Patterson in a title bout.
Richard Nixon ran for governor of California. In 1962 he lost, and retired from politics.
The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company introduced Brandon cigarettes. And Harry F. Waters, inventor of the tea bag, died of a heart attack aboard the 20th Century Limited outside Albany, New York.
Katherine Anne Porter published Ship of Fools.
And Deeter Moss went on the Quartzsite Trip..............By 1962, at John Muir High School, Deeter Moss had learned to live by his wits. He had learned by necessity.
Deeter Moss had neither the size, the strength, the coordination, the wardrobe, nor the beauty that made for popularity at John Muir High School. It did not matter that he had intelligence. In 1962, intelligence counted for nothing at John Muir High School.
Deeter Moss managed for them never to discover how smart he really was. He did not care about status. He kept himself from being hurt...........In 1962, P.J. Cooper's salary was $646.00 a month, paid ten months of the year. He had been teaching at John Muir High School, an employee of the Los Angeles Unified School District, for eight years.
P.J. Cooper had a bachelor or arts degree from Occidental College, and twelve units toward an M.A. at Los Angeles State. These latter he had obtained during the summers sessions, sx units at a time. If he completed the additional twelve units required for the M.A., P.J. Cooper would jump a grade in the salary scale, to $670.00 a month, and be pad an additional $10.00 a month for his earned master's degree.
One night, during his second year of teaching, in a rare mathematical mood, P.J. Cooper figured out that if he got his M.A., the total salary increase of $34.00 each month, when compared to the expense of tuition, fees, books, supplies, mileage and meals, it would result, after twenty years of teaching, in a net profit of $1,160.00.
P.J. Cooper hated education. He was a teacher. He knew the educational system did not teach. He hated to have to submit to it himself, just for the degree, just for the money. The night he discovered that an M.A. would yield him only $1,160 over twenty years, he decided never to attend another class as a student. And in that year, P.J. Cooper started the Quartzsite Trip. In 1962, he continued it............In 1962, P.J. Cooper was a beginner of novels. He had a file folder of pages he had typed or scrawled over the years, each page a first page for a novel. After school on April 2d, the day of the invitations to the Quartzsite Trip, P.J. Cooper sat at the long oak table in the Teachers' Room at John Muir High School, "The meaning of life," he wrote,
"was discovered in 1987 in Telluride, Colorado. It was discovered on a Wednesday morning in winter, in a kitchen. A woman discovered it. She was not wearing clothes at the time."
In 1962, P.J. Cooper was a beginner of novels. He did not end them.
By 1967, things hadn't changed much around Los Angeles. John F. Kennedy, of course, was dead. Lyndon B. Johnson was now President and the situation in Vietnam had escalated -- American soldiers were dying and the officials in Washington were saying, "Everything's under control. We should be wrapping this up fairly soon."
During my senior year at Burbank High School my biggest scholastic concern was passing all of my classes so I could graduate. Like Deeter Moss, I was not someone many would remember. There were several clearly defined groups at the time -- the surfers, jocks, the soshes (as in "social" or "high society"), the brainers (who often doubled as soshes) and the beaners, a horrible name many of the whites gave to some of the Mexican-American students -- the only minority of any numbers in Burbank at the time.
The biggest threat to graduating was a report called the "indebtedness list". It was a summary of all the textbooks or library books one was assigned but never returned. If you didn't clear the indebtedness list, you didn't graduate. As I recall, my indebtedness total was somewhere around $175. If you remember the part about gasoline costing less than 30 cents a gallon and a burger and fries going for 55 cents, you can see how stratospheric that amount was to me.
Throughout my three years there, I shared a locker with a popular basketball player who hung around with other jocks -- jocks who didn't keep good track of their own books. Call it coincidence, but when they'd lose their books, mine would soon be gone. With the exception of one large library book I knew was somewhere at home, all of my indebtedness came in the form of missing textbooks. The list itemized the books, the cost to replace them and each book's serial number. I didn't think it was fair to have to pay for books I didn't lose (aside from the fact I didn't have the money), so I tried to come up with an alternate plan -- find the books. I was in no position to approach every basketball or football player who had lettered over the past three years and ask them if they might have accidentally left the books they'd stolen from me under their beds. And who's to say they didn't turn in my book to avoid the indebtedness list? Wait a minute, I thought. If they turned the books in, wouldn't the people in the book room know about it?
"If your books were turned in, they wouldn't be listed on your indebtedness list," the book room woman said curtly as she turned to the desk behind her to get the keys from her purse. "We're going to be closed for an hour for lunch," she said with her back to me. "If you have any more questions, feel free to come back later."
I don't know what got into me, but her answer didn't satisfy me. I quickly ducked behind the first row of books and waited until she left the room. I listened for her to lock the double deadbolt. I was now locked in the book room. For the next hour I went down the list of books on my indebtedness list and categorically went in search of each, long-lost book. I had no trouble finding the right book sections and then I checked the numbers on the spines of the books. One-by-one I found my each of my missing books, all except one.
When I heard the book room woman fumbling for
her keys outside, I got behind the bookcase again and held my breath. I waited
until I heard her open her desk drawer before I snuck back to the counter -- as
if I had just walked in. This time, I was carrying seven or eight books. "This
is my lucky day," I told her. "I found almost all of my books." She looked a
little bit surprised, but she took the books and signed off the form. As I
walked away I wished I could write an expose for the school paper, but I really
didn't want to risk what could happen if they knew I had stayed in the room. I
couldn't lie, so I figured it was best to remain silent. The secret has been
safe for 31 years. I think the statute of limitations has expired by now. Ya
wanna come after me, book police? Take your best shot.
It wasn't until many, many years later I would learn that I'm not as much of a lazy bum as I thought I was. Certainly one of the reasons I lost track of so many books is that I didn't read well. It had always been a problem. In third grade the teacher sent a note home to my folks telling them that I was holding the reading books sideways and upside down to read them. That was the earliest clue I can remember. By junior high school I couldn't read more than about 15 or 20 minutes without my eyes watering over, the words on the page becoming blurry, the letters pulsated and I'd fall asleep. Even when I'd struggle to stay awake, I'd get to the end of one line of print and then re-read the same line -- over and over. It was like that never-ending song my mother would sing:
The result of this reading problem is that I didn't read much. I was very angry at myself for not reading as much as the other kids and angry at myself for not trying harder. Instead, I unconsciously learned other ways of learning. First, I learned to listen differently. Then I think I learned to figure out systems better than the other kids. I looked for patterns. I used logic. I think I learned how to learn in a more effective way -- at least for learning's sake. Maybe P.J. Cooper was right about education. Did I get better grades? Not on your life. It's pretty hard to listen to a book. So if the teacher didn't say aloud the materials in class, I stood a pretty good chance of not knowing it come test time.
It wouldn't be until the late 1980s that I would learn that maybe I was suffering from a reading disorder called Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome. The woman who allegedly discovered the alleged disorder, Helen Irlen, developed an alleged way of treating the alleged disorder by putting colored overlays over pages of a book while alleged patients were reading. Eventually, she would make up special colored lenses that were supposed to improve reading for people who allegedly suffered from the alleged disorder. Even though there are a zillion critics out there who claim her theories stink, there are scores of thousands of people out there wearing her lenses and believing they're reading better. I'm one of them.
But back in the mid-'60s I wasn't reading and I knew it. I must point out that, aside from a problem reading, I was never the most organized person on earth. The two problems exacerbated each other quite often and I'd find myself shocked and surprised to find out that a term paper or other assignment was due the following morning and I hadn't even remembered learning about the assignment. Maybe I didn't listen that much better. But I found a remedy that worked. I learned to fake it.
Now please don't start reading things into this story -- it's a story about the past -- about a life I no longer lead -- about sins and errors and mistakes I made and deceptions I used when I was a kid. I stopped doing these things more than 30 years ago. I still remember the first time I had to resort to deception to survive. It was tenth grade European History. Mr. Holmes was the instructor. It was probably appropriate that he taught the class in the "annex" across the street from Burbank High School. The building was ancient -- and Mr. Holmes seemed to be living in an ancient world. Many years earlier, it had been John Muir Junior High School. But in 1964 the ancient building was used mainly for adult classes -- Mr. Holmes's class was an exception.
Mr. Holmes is one of those instructors I'd pay to go back and listen to again today, if I could -- I certainly didn't appreciate him then. He was colorful. He was immersed in his topic. He acted out many of the famous lines from the history of Europe. I can still see and hear him as he would extend his arm out in front of him and then sweep it to his right as he flipped his wrist in a backhand manner and quoted Louis the someteenth say, "Après moi, le deluge!" He was really into it in a way I couldn't appreciate back then.
It might have been his toupee -- I'd never known anyone with a toupee before -- or just the fact that I had no possible way of relating to a place I'd never visited in times I never knew. But don't get me started on the way they taught history back then. Regardless, I didn't take him seriously -- until the night I realized there was a term paper due the next morning. I had never done a high school term paper before, so when I read the instructions I was in a major panic. He had assigned every student a different topic. Mine was "The French Revolution." About all I could do at 9 p.m. on a week night was to struggle through the textbook and hope I could make that single source work.
Here's where I used the part of my brain that didn't rely on remembering what I'd read before -- because I had read nothing. The kind of deception I'm going to describe here is incredibly wrong and stupid and unethical and everything else evil. Again, I shed that clothing a long time ago. I was only thinking of survival.
Bach then I called it "de-writing". But today I know it was plagiarism. I pretty much just copied the chapter in the textbook about the French Revolution except I replaced all big words with small words, made the sentences shorter, changed the order of things when I could and made a lot of simple spelling and grammar errors. Looking back, I was actually writing for broadcast and didn't know it. I was writing more the way a person speaks than the way an academian writes. Little did I know I'd one day be paid a lot of money to write things in a simple manner. I still haven't learned to spell, by the way.
I always typed my term papers very neatly (albeit with spelling and grammatical errors) and I never used fancy notebook covers, plastic sheet protectors or other "padding" tools. I wanted the teacher to see no evidence that I was trying to pull the wool over his eyes. After I had completed typing the 20 or 30 pages (maybe less, but it seems that way now), I re-read the instructions one more time and discovered that Mr. Holmes was demanding a bibliography of at least 12 entries. Holy Jeeminy! This was going to be tough. The only other book in the entire household that I could find that would in any way relate to the French Revolution was Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopedia. We didn't have an entire set -- in fact, it didn't even go as far as the letter "F". You see, they used to give shoppers a free volume each week if the grocery bill was enormously high -- like more than $10 or so. So far, we only had A through E. But the title, authors and publisher were named, so I used it. I also used the textbook -- that seemed reasonable. But as for the other 10 titles, I was up a creek.
So I had to invent the titles -- and the authors. I could lift the names of publishers from other books laying around the house, but I had to invent the rest. And, you know, it was actually kind of fun. I don't think that particular paper still exists, but I can still remember the factors I used in inventing the titles. And, unfortunately, I would do it again a few more times before I would be out of school (all in the past, though, I remind you).
I used first names that sounded old at the time:
Herbert, Ralph, Jonathan, Clarence, etc.
I used last names that were both
common and uncommon: Smythe, Braxton, Cleland, Thompson, etc.
I made good use
of initials: G. Broderick Hampton, T.R. Beckman, etc.
I used women's names
and titles: Dr. Louise Werner, Dr. Elloise Chun, Barbara Fulsom, PhD,
etc.
And I decided I needed one name that sounded like a name someone would use as a pen name: Stuart Hunter. I would end up using Stuart Hunter many times in my high school and college career. Stuart actually wrote a magazine article years later after I found out that "Paraphernalia Magazine" was about drug paraphernalia -- not stuff you'd sell at a garage sale. At the last minute I had demanded the editor change the byline.
Anyway, I made up reasonable titles -- "Background of the French Revolution", "The Road to Bastille" (I did remember some things from class), etc. When I got the paper back I breathed a sigh of relief that I had passed with a score of 18. Then I was elated when I found out I had the second highest grade in the class -- there were only 20 possible points. Then I laughed when I read the only two comments Mr. Holmes had written in the term paper:
Midway through the paper he wrote: "Tends to follow the style of the textbook." Very observant! Then, in the bibliography section, he wrote, "Good choice of books."
Okay! Thanks Mr. Holmes. I can honestly say you've taught me something I'll keep the rest of my life -- you've taught me that teachers don't check the bibliography. It was a rule that would hold true throughout the rest of my education.
You'd think it would be a in a journalism class that I'd submit my first investigative report. No, it was in my tenth-grade Health and Safety class. The teacher was Dr. Charles Campbell -- probably one of the most daring and progressive teachers I've ever had. His father was a math teacher at John Muir Junior High School at the time, but I hadn't had him for a teacher. Dr. Campbell was an expert on venereal diseases. In 1964, I had never heard the term "venereal disease" or "syphilis" or "gonorrhea" or "crabs" or "herpes" or any other such STDs (sexually transmitted diseases, as they're called today). On the first day of class, he handed out a multiple-choice exam mimeographed on legal-sized paper. It consisted of 50 questions, each worth two points.. Every question was related to either syphilis or gonorrhea. The last multiple-choice answer for each question was "I don't know." Since I had neither seen, read nor heard the two words, I figured this had to be an honesty test.
I recalled how, three years earlier, I had filled out a questionnaire in my seventh-grade music class that asked if I played any musical instruments. I had written down that I played the piano, the clarinet, trombone, accordion and violin. My answer would have been more accurate if the question was, "What musical instruments have you ever touched." When he invited everyone who played musical instruments to perform a short recital, I thought for sure I was in for some major league humiliation. Fortunately the teacher back then, Graham Young, was apparently able to figure out that I was slightly exaggerating and he never said called my bluff. After that experience, I made it a point to not pretend I knew something -- at least as long as there was no penalty for that honesty.
So I read each question about syphilis and gonorrhea and dutifully and honestly marked "I don't know" to every question except one. It asked which disease killed more people in the United States over the last 20 years -- 1. Syphilis, 2. Gonorrhea, 3. Smallpox, 4. Polio or 5. I don't know. In this case, since I believed 1 and 2 didn't really exist, I chose polio over smallpox. When the tests came back the next day, I score a disturbing two points. I tell you this because by the end of the school year, everyone in the class knew more about venereal diseases than most teachers know today. That's how good Dr. Campbell was. He gave us the same test at the end of the year. I scored a 96 on that one, which put me down in some record book somewhere as the student with the most improvement on a venereal disease test.
That was the "health" part of Health and Safety. The "safety" part was partly driver education. Here's how good Dr. Campbell was -- I can still remember the five rules of defensive driving. Just for the fun of it I tried to remember them a year or so ago. Here they are:
1. Get the big picture.
2. Aim high in steering.
3. Keep your eyes moving.
4. Leave yourself an out.
5. Look out for the other guy.
I may have them wrong, but they seem right. The strange thing is that after I got to thinking about them, they make a pretty good list of tips for life. Read them again and I think you'll agree. I wish I had realized this 30 years ago.
In 1964, the modern environmental movement was in its infancy. Dr. Campbell assigned everyone in his class to read The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. I read the first chapter and knew it would be impossible for me to read the entire book -- much less understand it. I needed to come up with a plan. For several weeks I though about it. One evening, I went with my mother to Hughes Market. That day in class, Dr. Campbell had spent the entire hour talking about medical quacks. It was still on my mind when I glanced at the want-ad bulletin board at the rear entrance to the store and saw a glossy business card with the words "Arthur J. Beeley, Hypno-Consultant" (I changed the name here, even though I checked and he died almost 20 years ago). He had written on it, "Quit smoking! Lose weight!" There were two cards on the board, so I took one.
The next day I showed Dr. Campbell and offered him a proposal -- instead of a Silent Spring book report, let me investigate the hypno-consultant. He agreed to it. I didn't realize it at the time, but I had discovered a key rule of classroom survival -- always try to get an assignment nobody else in the class has. That way, everybody else's work is compared to the work of the best student -- the one with more brains, more time or more money to pay someone to do a winning report or paper. When you are assigned a unique assignment, I learned, you're judged only on your work -- even though there's no chance of someone doing worse than you, there's no chance of anyone doing better than you.
There were no guidelines relating to checking out a possible medical quack -- at least none that I knew of. So I simply put on my deepest grown-up voice and gave the hypno-consultant a call. I told him I was interested in losing weight and wanted to know what he could do. He was confident he could help me. After asking a lot of encouraging questions, I asked him what degrees he held. He said, "None." He told me there was no license required to be a hypno-consultant, but he had years of experience. Then I had my mother call and ask some more questions under the guise of wanting to quit smoking.
I was ready to write the paper, but I remembered how so many essay questions in other classes asked us to "compare and contrast. . ." two things. I decided to compare and contrast him to a "qualified" hypnotist. I looked in the yellow pages under "hypnotists" and found several physicians and dentists whose listings included a line that indicated they were certified by some national association of hypnotists -- I don't remember the name. So I picked one of them, a dentist, and had my mother call. She told him she needed some teeth filled and didn't like Novocain. She asked him about any special training and he told her he was certified by that national organization. I got a number for the organization and called them. The woman I reached there explained they only certify licensed physicians and dentists to use hypnosis. I asked about the training and was shocked to hear that the training consisted of a weekend seminar -- in Las Vegas.
The paper I turned in (neatly typed -- no report covers) concluded that there didn't appear to be anyone keeping tabs on hypnotists and that there should be more regulation. Since nobody else in the class could write what Dr. Campbell wanted to read about The Silent Spring, I got the only "A" in the class. I should point out that, although I didn't do the book report, I got a lot out of the class. In fact, years later I would track down Dr. Campbell. Today we're friends.
The following year, eleventh grade, I was facing an English class that would require much more reading than I had ever done. I searched for an option and found one that would have a major impact on my life a decade later. It was a class called English/Journalism. It was the prerequisite-requisite class for being on the school paper staff in the senior year. It required a lot more writing, but practically no reading. That was the class for me. What a dream -- a class that would only require one book report. I could handle that!
But could I? I remember the teacher, Larry Lloyd, giving the book report assignment. I think I even remember checking out a biography of Abraham Lincoln from the library. I also remember that I never read the book. I also didn't keep track of the date the book report was due. When the day arrived, I hadn't remembered that we would actually write the book report in class -- in the form of an essay exam. When that day arrived, I hadn't read the book -- in fact, I didn't even have the book with me. I would have to fake it again.
Mr. Lloyd wrote the first question on the board. "Discuss your book's 'voice'." I didn't know what the voice was on the book I hadn't read, so I decided I'd better not use that book. I decided to create my own book. I remembered having enjoyed hearing lectures about the Lewis and Clark expedition. I had even read part of a book about Meriwether Lewis when I was in elementary school. I decided to answer Question #1 using the non-existent book, Travels with Lewis and Clark, by (you wanna guess?) Stuart Hunter. I decided that the book I didn't read would probably have been written in the "third person, omniscient" voice. I had no trouble explaining how it all worked -- after all, I did listen to all the lectures. I finished writing my essay answer in only about five minutes.
Question #2 would prove too much for me to fake. "Write out one paragraph from the book you read and discuss the author's use of tone." No way could I possibly write a paragraph that could fool Mr. Lloyd. I needed a book -- any book. Lynda Foreman sat beside me. She was an artist and had the most beautiful penmanship. And, thank goodness, she wrote very, very slowly. She was still on Question #1. I whispered to her that I needed her book "for only a minute." She gave me a strange look as she handed me her book.
Her book was about as far from the Lewis and Clark expedition as it could be. It was a contemporary novel set in modern-day France. The only good news was that the author had written it in the first person, omniscient voice. I opened the book to somewhere in the middle and scanned page after page looking for something I could alter enough to fit in a book about 19th Century explorers. Finally I found a scene where a school teacher and the school's principal were interrogating her about stealing something -- an eraser maybe. That was good enough for me. I copied down the entire paragraph, but turned the classroom in her book into a cabin on a riverboat the Lewis and Clark expedition was using to navigate up the Platte River. The teacher became Meriwether Lewis -- the principal became William Clark (was that his first name?). The girl became a cabin boy and the eraser became a flintlock gun. I wrote out the revised paragraph in about five minutes and gave the book back to Linda Foreman. Then I wrote a pretty good description of the use of tone in the book. Stuart Hunter turned out to be a pretty good writer after all. I don't recall the third question, but whatever it was, I answered it satisfactorily enough to score a B+ on the book report exam.
You'd think I would learn to keep track of assignments, but I didn't. I can't even blame my reading problem for the next near disaster -- I just forgot to do the work. The assignment was to research all aspects of an issue we would use in class to write an editorial. I remember taking notes during the lecture on how to write an editorial -- I just don't remember hearing the teacher tell us what day we had to bring in our research materials. Turns out it was on a Monday and I was less than prepared -- in fact, I hadn't even decided what the topic of my editorial would be. So on that Monday I arrived at the post-lunch class with nothing. "By now, you should have your materials organized and you should be prepared to write your editorial in class," Mr. Lloyd said. "If it's good enough, the best editorial run in this Friday's edition of Burbank Hi-Life (the school paper)." That was the least of my concerns -- I didn't have a danged topic.
Stuart Hunter couldn't help me with this one -- I had to do it on my own. I stared first at the clock -- moving much too slowly but yet much too quickly. Then I looked at the American flag to the left of the clock -- the same as every other American flag next to every other clock in every other classroom I'd ever attended in Burbank. Thirteen red and white stripes and 48 white stars on a blue backgro . . . Wait a minute! Only 48 stars! I remembered that every flag I'd ever seen in Burbank schools had only 48 stars -- two shy of enough to represent the 50 states. Heck, we'd had 50 states for at least seven years. It was now 1966. Wasn't Hawaii admitted to the Union in about 1959 or 1960? I was now ready to write my editorial. The requirements were that it had to present a problem, take a position on the controversy and then present at least one possible solution. Here's what I wrote:
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America...." Yes, students all across the country repeat these famous words every day. The students of BHS also pledge their allegiance to the flag of the United States of America -- that is, excluding Alaska and Hawaii. For some strange reason, only 48 of our 50 states are represented on the Stars and Stripes scattered in and out of the BHS campus.
But what do you expect? This is only the seventh year we've had these new states! Of course there are some financial problems involved in keeping up with our nation's growth If a set of new flags was bought, then where would we ever gather up enough money for things like full sized mirrors at the end of our hallways; or 2,000 weekly copes of "Bulldog Barks" that end up wrapping gum, in the wastebasket, on in the form of paper airplanes.
I feel that there are ample ways to budget the money for out Schools so that we could have some 'real' American Flags. It's about time the average student learned that there is more to worship and defend than a PRIDE sign.
The next day, Mr. Lloyd asked me if I was sure about the flags being outdated in other classrooms. I told him that every classroom I checked at the elementary school level, junior high school level and high school level had an outdated flag. I didn't tell him that I checked them during the course of the last six or seven years -- when I should have been reading books in class. He ran the editorial under the headline:
What a thrill -- my first published piece. Little did I know the stir it would cause. The paper came out on Friday afternoon. By about 3 p.m., kids were arriving home with their copies. By about 3:30 p.m., some of the parents had read the editorial and were already angrily calling the Board of Education. Of course, I knew nothing about this. To me, the editorial was just another scrape with failure I had survived.
After lunch on Monday I walked up the outdoor, steel staircase that led up to the Journalism/English classroom in the Industrial Arts Building. When I walked in the door, Mr. Lloyd saw me and motioned me into his office and asked me to sit down.
"You're lucky," he told me. I shrugged a "why" shrug.
"This morning the principal ordered me to come to his office. The Superintendent of Schools had chewed him out for the 'false' editorial and told him to punish me. All I could do is tell him I stand by my reporter. So they sent a delegation to every school in Burbank to prove us wrong. But they couldn't find a single 50-star flag. Good job," he said as he pointed through the glass wall of his office to the new, 50-star flag on the wall next to the clock.
"They've already replaced them all."
By the time I was a senior in high school I had been working as a burger boy at Foster's Old Fashioned Freeze for a couple of years. It was my first real, hourly job. I had, of course, mowed lawns, washed neighbors' cars and even spent a summer shining shoes at Johnny's Barber Shop where the upbeat Market City Café is now. The first serious money I made, however, was keeping score at Marlindo Lanes. It must have been when I was 15 or 16 that I and my pals, Kevin Kelly and Joe Veraldi broke into what we thought was a lucrative endeavor
There were two leagues each weeknight -- one started at six and the other started at nine. There were five bowlers on each team and each bowler on the two teams competing paid the scorekeeper $.50 for the three games. That meant ten bowlers on each league paying a total of $10 for six hours of work. And if you were good, as we were, they'd usually thrown in a tip and one or two Cokes. We really were good. Back then, we wrote with yellow, crayon-like pencils on the transparent score sheets that was clamped to a thick piece of glass. Beneath the glass was a bright and hot projection lamp that sent the image up through a couple of mirror and projected it on screens above the bowlers' approaches. We learned early that if we looked into the light for an entire evening, the eye strain was severe. So we learned to look up at the projected images as we wrote. We'd see the shadow of our hand and the pencil and then write in the scores in the appropriate squares.
Forget the lousy grades we all got in math, you had to be alert, organized, neat and quick to be a scorekeeper. And unless we wanted to completely fail in school, we had to do much of our homework while we were keeping score. Since we had all been bowling together on junior and traveling leagues for years, we knew the routine so well we rarely had to look up from our work -- save a the moment we'd hear the ball approaching the pins on either of our lanes. We knew which bowler was supposed to be up and we knew where each new entry would go. And we even knew without looking sometimes how may pins remained after the first ball. If the ball hit in a certain spot, we knew it would leave three standing. On the second shots, we didn't have to look at all usually, because we could distinguish between the sound of a ball hitting one, two or three pins.
We would instantly calculate the score at the moment of impact and have it written before the machine reset the pins. There were superstitious bowlers who would blame us for their bad bowling if we violated a few of the unwritten rules of keeping score -- such as adding 20 or 30 pins to the box of the prior frame when someone got a strike followed by a spare, a spare following a strike or three strikes in a row. They felt that it was bad luck to write down the scores. Similar to the way a caddy anticipates the needs of the golfer, we would know when to draw a big verticle line, a "fence" following a succession of bad frames. The fence was a psychological way of separating the bad bowling from the anticipated good bowling on the other side of the fence.
Sometime after I turned 16 I heard that one of guys from school was going to quit his job at the Foster's Freeze. He wasn't a good enough friend to ask him to put in a good word for me, but I was somehow able to learn the exact day he was going to give notice. Late that afternoon, I walked up to the window and asked if they needed any help. They did. The "they" was an elderly couple, Bud and Claire Hartzell. I must put some 1998 perspective on my 1965 perceptions. Bud was in his mid-to-late 50s while his Claire, his bride of less than a year, was in her mid-to-late 40s. If anyone dares call me an elderly man today, I'm going to hurl a bottle Geritol at them. Amazing how we see things when we're young.
Anyway, they hired me that day and I started the next afternoon. Minimum wage at the time was $1.30, but they told me I'd get only $1.05 for the first two weeks. It was all legal, they told me. The law allowed them to pay "trainees" at a lesser rate. I would be working on the "burger side", as opposed to the "ice cream side" where only girls and women worked. Apparently, they couldn't imagine a teenage boy being able to dispense soft-serve ice cream to match the perfectly shaped cones displayed on their large menu posters. To the male employees, the ice cream side was akin to the key on a basketball court. Guys could pass through it on their way to the walk-in refrigerator box (only if the other route was somehow blocked) or could come across for "official business" but could not stand there for more than about five seconds. To keep us from having to go there, Bud and Claire required the customers to stand in two separate lines and pay twice -- once for drinks or ice cream products and the other for prepared food. They stood in line on the burger side for hamburgers, hot dogs, formerly frozen tacos, formerly frozen taquitos, barbecued beef sandwiches, BLTs, egg salad sandwiches, tuna salad sandwiches, grilled cheese sandwiches, sandwiches made from formerly frozen pastrami disks (they were about the size, shape and weight of hockey pucks -- but quite tasty), sandwiches made from formerly frozen fish cakes, formerly frozen fries, formerly frozen onion rings and an actual dinner comprised of formerly frozen fried chicken, formerly frozen fries, fresh lettuce and a slice of tomato topped with the 1,000-island dressing we would put on the hamburgers and other selected sandwiches.
It was a lot to learn in a short time. We kids on the burger side had to learn to take orders, work the grill, the fryer and the hot dog steamer. We had to learn to dress the buns or bread, We also had to total the bill, ring the total on the register, take the money and, of course count back change. For anyone under about age 30, "counting back the change" is something you've probably never encountered -- a lot like 10-cent calls on dial phones, 8-track stereos, LP records and the "little store" around the corner from your house. It was a foolproof way of calculating the change. It was extremely easy to learn -- and you never forget how to do it. Anyway, we also had to learn how to slice tomatoes, lettuce and onions, mix up 40 gallons of 1,000-island dressing in a large, plastic trash container (one part ketchup, one part mayonnaise and one part relish). Females were never required to to the "lot checks" to pick up trash just about every customer threw on the pavement, never required to clean the grill, filter or replace the fryer oil or mop the floor.
I took to it easily. It was actually fun. After only two or three days, one of the other burger boys quit and I had to work a shift alone. Then, after I was there only a week, another guy quit, without notice, and so Bud and Claire were in trouble. They quickly hired a new guy, but there was no one available to train him on his first night. I told them I could do it. "I already know how to do everything. I know I can do it."
They talked about it a bit and then decided to give me a chance. Then I said to them, "If I'm training someone else, doesn't that mean that I'm no longer a trainee?" They agreed. "Then I should be getting full pay, shouldn't I?"
The both smiled. Bud said, "You're the first." Before I would leave a couple of years later, I would end up training some 40 burger boys. I don't remember not having fun working there -- until new owners would take over the place and then leave the day-to-day operation of it in the hands of people who were their friends first and good managers second. But for about two years I had a great time. There was something thrilling, almost sports like in working the grill and the fryer during a heavy dinner rush. There was a rhythm I would get into. I would focus. I was on. I was in control.
That might have been one of the first times in my life I felt in control. During occasional rush periods, Bud would come in wearing his white, short-sleeved shirt, black bow tie and light-colored pants. On two-man shifts, the second worker usually took orders, clipped them to a wire cable and then slide them down to where the grill man was working. Bud would start looking at one order after another, then down at the grill to see if it was there and then back up to other orders. Claire would say, in a most loving and patient voice, "Mr. Hartzell, the kids are doing just fine. Let them do their work."
The first time I remember really putting my foot in my mouth was the day I was working with an older girl, Bobbie Grumley. She was a cheerleader, beautiful, popular, poised, kind, considerate. She scared the poop out of me. One day Bud caught her nibbling on a formerly frozen French fry and cautioned her kiddingly that she could lose her nice figure." You look like you've put on weight recently," he said with a smile.
"You're wrong," she told him firmly. "I'm at my perfect weight."
"How much is that?" Bud asked.
"Go ahead," she challenged him, "guess my weight."
I was watching with fascination. I was wishing I had the confidence to kid around with such a beautiful woman. When Bud looked her over to assess her weight, it reminded me of a carnival I'd been to recently where one man's shtick was to guess anyone's weight. If he failed, the person he was assessing received a prize, a cheap imitation of a Hawaiian lei.
With that in mind, I blurted out to Bud, "Hey Bud. If you guess it right you get a free lei!"
His ears and her ears, as you'd imagine, spelled it l-a-y. They both turned to me at the exact moment -- her with a look of shock and him with a big smile that was quickly shrinking to a scowl. I tried to explain it, but the damage was done. An anyone will tell you it's impossible to get oneself out of such a situation. But for a millisecond, Bud was in fantasy heaven.
It's been four years since I've updated this. Once I figure out again how to put things up on the website, I'll add more.
Now it's November of 2004. I've learned how to put files on the website, so I'm going to try to put this corrected version up there. If you can read this, I was successul.
Copyright 2004 Don Ray