Projects That Interest Me

Nineteen seventy-six was a watershed year. As a nation we had come out of the dark times of Vietnam and Watergate. The turbulence of the sixties was still fresh in our collective memories. Yet there was a sense of resilience, and a mood of general optimism. There were new leaders emerging bringing fresh energy to move the country forward. Expanding freedoms for women, gays and minorities. The promise of new technologies at the dawn of the computer age. The country coming together and putting our differences aside to celebrate our shared heritage. There was the feeling that this year was special and that a new era was ahead. As the Bicentennial approached the country was ready to party. Massive festivities were planned across the country and anticipation was building as the Fourth drew near.

I was twenty two and living in the city. The season at ACT had ended and I was picking up the odd gigs doing street fairs and the occasional load in at the Marines Memorial. Between those and my unemployment I was doing well enough. The rent at the flat in North Beach was split between a half dozen roommates, give or take, so there was money left over for the essentials, namely beer and Friday nights cruising the bars on Union Street.

The Fourth arrived as a bright sunny day in the city. Ellenwood and Red and I piled into the Olds and headed out to Golden Gate Park with the super 8 camera to catch the parade. The patriotic spirit was high in the park as the marching bands and drill teams passed by. Then we went back to the flat to get high and wait for crescendo to the festivities. There was a spectacular fireworks show planned for that night on Alcatraz Island that would light up the entire bay. They had been hyping it on TV and in the Chronicle for weeks, saying it would be larger than any that had happened before. So as the sun set we made our way up to the roof to catch the show that was scheduled to begin at 9:30. As we settled in we had a perfect view of the Rock. At 9:15 as we sat waiting we could see the fog rolling through the Golden Gate and by 9:30 the bay was blanketed in a impenetrable murk. This being the government the show went on as planned and while we couldn’t see a thing I must say it sounded most impressive.

As I look back that year stands out as a turning point. It was only a couple of years until the dark times returned. The ensuing decades have seen successive waves of boom and bust, of war and peace, but somehow the highs never equaled the lows. As we approach the two fiftieth I don’t sense any of that feeling of resilience, of optimism, that celebratory mood in the country. The attempts to recreate it seem forced and unsatisfactory. Much has changed in the country in fifty years. Leaders trying to take the country backwards. Freedoms under assault. Technology that triggers anxiety about the future. A country that seems hopelessly divided. The malaise which envelopes the country seems as thick as the fog on that night fifty years ago.

Looking forward toward the next fifty years the question facing we the people is which America are we. Do we continue downward into darkness and division or do we recapture the spirit of seventy-six, of hope, of optimism, of trying to make the world a better place. One nation with liberty and justice for all.

We spend the first year of our child’s life teaching them to walk and talk, and the next seventeen telling them to sit down and be quiet.

Do whales carry brain worms?

What is the clinical term for the fear of sneezing while brushing your teeth?

The appeal of Body Piercing I’ve never understood. I’ve done it countless times…just never intentionally.

Some helpful tips for assimilating to seniorhood.

1. Hawaiian shirt. The louder the better. Helps identify you, especially in crosswalks.
2. Cargo shorts. Because carrying your wallet in your back power is agony on your sciatica.
3. Sandals. Socks optional but recommended because even you don’t want to see your toenails.
4. Ponytail. Optional depending on whether you have enough hair left to rock it.
5. Beard. Because who wants to walk around with bits of toilet paper stuck to your face.

In the summer of 1959 our family faced a life changing crisis. A few months after the birth of my younger brother, Michael, my mom…who had developed Chronic Heart Failure following a bout of rheumatic fever as a child…suffered an episode which resulted in a lengthy hospital stay. My dad, faced with the daunting task of raising four young children while working full time, moved us in to live with his parents. My dad felt that my mom’s collapse was caused by her strained relationship with her mother, who was prone to be stern and judgemental toward my mom, so the decision was made to sell the house on Vine Street in order to create some distance in the hope that it would aid in her recovery.

My maternal grandparents lived on Rose Street, just north of the center of town. It was in the older part of town, a mix of Victorian and Georgian era houses on a quiet, tree lined street. My grandparents’ house, where my family would live for the summer of 1959, was a two story Victorian set on a narrow city lot. The faded white paint gave the exterior an understated appearance but it was a well built house, though the plumbing and electrical could have used an upgrade. On the first floor was the living room, dining room, and kitchen while the bedrooms and bathroom were upstairs. It had a full basement where they stored relics of bygone years. A classic Victorian down to the floral wallpaper. There was a somber feeling to the house and a cool, almost unnatural, stillness. My grandparents had bought the house soon after moving west and settling in Stockton in the late 1920’s. They had raised six children there but now it was just the two of them. It was a clean, quiet house except on Christmas Day, when my family along with my aunts and uncles and dozen or so cousins descended on the house, creating chaos and cacophony.

Most of my memories from that time have since faded. Mostly I remember my feelings from that time.. confused, lonely, and a bit afraid. I was too young to understand why my mom was in the hospital, I only knew she was there. Between working full time and getting the house on Vine Street ready for sale I didn’t see much of my dad that summer. My brother Bill who was five years older was rarely around and Michael was an infant so my sister Mary, who was a couple of years younger, and I were pretty much left on our own. Most of our days were spent parked in front of the television watching cartoons. Grandma would bring us chocolate milk and cookies while she went about her daily chores. I remember one day Mary and I gorged ourselves on green figs from the tree in the back yard and I got so sick that I can’t eat raw figs to this day. At night my sister and I shared a bed in one the rear bedrooms upstairs. It was then that an uneasy dread would well up. It felt like there was a presence in the room watching over us. There wasn’t a feeling of good or evil, just a cold melancholy. Hanging from one side of the dresser mirror hung a wooden cutout of a football player illuminated by a shaft of light coming through the window and in my child’s mind it became a personification of the dread I sensed. A talisman of an unseen sadness.

My grandfather, Orson P Bird, was a quiet man. A man of a stoic demeanor and simple habits. He was small in stature but chiseled from a lifetime of hard work. Born and raised in Kansas, he met my grandma while at college in Missouri. After the wedding they had moved to southern Colorado where my dad was born, the fifth of six children. They homesteaded a small piece of land and he found work in the mines. His time in the mines left him with a grip that would leave a mark. After a few years the mines closed and the family moved to Stockton on the eve of the Great Depression. Times were hard and struggling to find work he signed on as a pro wrestler with the carnival traveling up and down the state taking on all comers. When World War Two began he found work as a welder in the shipyards. After the war he had built a small amusement park on a piece of land leased at Oak Park which he was running at the time. It had been a hard life and you could see the scars on his face and his hands, but the scars inside he kept to himself.

My grandmother, Aileen, was a kind and gentle woman, petite in stature and soft spoken when she spoke at all. She was a humble and pious woman but beneath her modest demeanor had a steely toughness that spoke to her Missouri roots. Hers had not been an easy life, raising six children in the wilds of Colorado, managing a household during the depression, watching her sons go off too war. A Gold Star decal displayed on the front door spoke of the one who didn’t return.

My uncle Raymond was their second child and the eldest of five sons. To his sister and his brothers he was not just a sibling, but their protector and their leader. When their father was away with the carnival during the winter months Raymond was left to take on duties far beyond his years. With war coming Raymond had joined the army and had been assigned to the Army Air Corps. While stationed in Ohio he fell in love and was married, but soon after his squadron was deployed to the South Pacific.

Raymond was a top turret gunner on a B-24. Five days before Christmas of 1943 during a mission over Maloelap Atoll near the Marshall Islands his plane was hit and forced to ditch in the ocean. As the crew was abandoning the aircraft the Japanese fighters that had been pursuing them began strafing the life rafts. It was reported that Uncle Raymond stayed at his post, proving cover fire for the rafts until the plane went underwater. For his bravery in combat he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal with Oak leaf Cluster, and the Purple Heart posthumously. There was a bookcase in the living room of the house where family pictures were displayed. There, prominently placed was a photo of Uncle Raymond in uniform with his medals displayed below. He is memorialized at the Tablets of the Missing monument at the National Cemetery at Pearl Harbor and in the Honor Roll of the Dead at the National Archives.

Honors and medals, however, do not make up for the loss of a loved one. They cannot replace the smile, the embrace, the heartfelt conversation now left unsaid. The family was devastated by the loss. It was as if a piece of themselves had been ripped away. I know my dad never got over it. A sadness so deep that it seemed to seep into the very walls of the house. Time doesn’t stop and lives move on, but the scars never go away. When I think about that house I can’t help thinking about that gold star and the sadness it had brought to that house.

By the end of that summer my mom had recovered and the new house was ready to move in, so we left the house on Rose Street. We would return to live there many years later after my grandparents had moved out. I found that the sense of unease had diminished, but still lingered. At some point years later I shared my feelings about the house with Michael and Mary and found that they had also felt it. That same unnatural chill to the house, the same unseen melancholy that haunted the house on Rose Street.

We lived in a house on Vine Street until I was five. It was a two bedroom wooden house my dad and my uncle Sam had built. It was on a plot of land adjacent to my maternal grandparents house that they had given my folks as a wedding present. It was a small house set toward the front of a long narrow property with a small front yard and an open field in the back. It was located on a quiet street with ditches rather than sidewalks toward the eastern edge of town.

What few memories I have are somewhat random. I remember my dad’s old wooden fishing boat rotting in the tall grass behind the house. I remember we had a dog, a collie who’s name escapes me, who one day disappeared. We were told at the time that he had gone to live on a farm. I only learned later that his removal was caused by him trying to eat my then infant brother Michael. And there was no farm. I remember watching the French explode an atom bomb in the South Pacific on a grainy black and white television in the living room and even at my young age I sensed that this wasn’t a good thing. I remember twice having my stomach pumped after trying to expand my culinary palate…once with a bottle of aspirin and once with a pack of Lucky Strikes, thankfully unfiltered. I remember that one time my mom sent me to the corner store to buy some “snails”. I didn’t know that she meant the spiral shaped pastry and I was pretty sure the didn’t sell molluscs at the corner store so I came home with a can of beans.

I never knew my maternal grandfather, Frank Brown, who died a few months before I was born. What I know of him comes from stories my mother told me. He had been born in Kansas and had come out to California as a young man. He settled in Los Angeles where he married and had three daughters. But when the marriage didn’t work out he headed north and took a job as field supervisor for Holly Sugar, working the sugar beet fields in the delta. Soon he met my grandmother and they settled in the obscure hamlet of Clyde, just north of Concord in the East Bay, where he sired two more daughters before moving to Stockton. He was a kind man, by all accounts, with an intellectual frame of mind. He was an avid reader who liked his drink and could often be found in one of the Skid Row bars until late in the evening. One Sunday in the spring of 1953 he lay down for a nap that is still on going.

As for my grandmother, who we called “Nanna”, my memories are few. We saw little of her after we moved from Vine Street until she passed when I was eleven after a lengthy stay in a nursing home following a massive stroke. She was the daughter of an English doctor who had emigrated to California when she was ten to work for the railroad. The family had come from British aristocracy and were used to servants and the finer things. My memories of Vine Street were that her brother Charley lived with her, doing chores around the place. Charley was the only grownup I knew who rode a bicycle. I remember that she kept chickens. Mean, vicious chickens. My later memories were of visiting her in the nursing home, with it’s pale green walls, and of her open casket funeral which made quite an impression on me being my first encounter with a dead person. By all accounts she was a formidable woman who loved a good argument…or a bad argument or any excuse for an argument…and would take on all comers. My mom often said that Nanna went through life looking for a worthy opponent.

Shortly after my brother Michael was born my mom, who had contracted rheumatic fever as a child, suffered a bout of chronic heart failure and went into the hospital for an extended stay. Our family had outgrown our small two bedroom house…Michael was sleeping in a crib in the living room which he would soon outgrow…the decision was made to sell the house and move. So with my dad needing help raising four kids while working a full time job we moved in with his parents across town on Rose Street while the house was readied for sale.

As the old saying goes, Stockton is a great place to be from…far from. I knew that I wanted to be somewhere else as soon as I knew there was somewhere else. It’s not that it was a horrible place…there are far worse places on the planet…it was just godawful boring with a tinge of bleak. Mind numbingly average and they liked it that way. A Norman Rockwell veneer painted over a canvas of relentless tedium.

The Stockton of my youth was in the latter stages of transition from a quiet farming town to a small industrial city, struggling with the challenges of urbanization while still clinging to it’s rural culture. Stockton, which in the early days was known as Mudville…some claim it to be the locale of the famous poem “Casey at the Bat”…and later Tuleburg, had experienced four distinct migrations in the 19th and 20th centuries which had shaped it’s identity. And each of the latter three being vehemently opposed by the previous immigrants. It had it’s roots as a trading post and transit point for miners heading for the Sierra Nevada gold fields in the 1850’s. When the gold petered out a wave of settlers began farming the land around the young town, which proved exceptionally fertile. Italian immigrants in particular found the valley ideal for growing tomatoes, grapes, and almonds while Asian immigrants found the delta region favored rice and root crops like sugar beets and onions, at least until several racist laws…such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882…banned them from owning property. In the 1930’s the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression drove a wave of migrants, mostly from the South and the Midwest, west seeking better opportunities. This sudden influx created friction between the mostly white immigrants and the more diverse local population. The new arrivals were derisively called “oakies”, causing a resentment that lingered for decades. Soon after the onset of WWII resulted in a manufacturing boom to meet the war effort. Factories and shipyards drew a new wave of migrants, including a large African-American contingent, looking for work. This created racial tensions, both among the recently arrived southern whites and many of the locals as the city dealt with the issues of segregation and discrimination that would culminate in the Civil Rights era. In addition the pall cast by the Cold War and the rise of communism, along with the growing threat of nuclear war, led to a national sense of unease and helped inflame divisions between New Deal progressives looking to move the country forward and those that saw that the changes being advocated as a threat to their way of life. Stockton also suffered, as almost all cities do, with the stench of corruption among it’s civic leaders which tended to widen the gap between the haves and the have nots. Community and business leaders along with the local media, which they controlled, tried to gloss over these issues and present the image of Stockton as a model modern All American city. This did little to dispel the underlying atmosphere of dissatisfaction that pervaded the city.

The city was generally divided along racial and economic lines. The upper class, mostly white, lived on the north side of town around a neighborhood called Lincoln Village. An area of newer, larger homes and even their own school district. It wasn’t gated but it might as well have been, as any outsiders were closely watched and viewed with suspicion. The south side was the poor side of town where most of the black population lived. It was a mix of older houses and light industrial, which lent the atmosphere of chain link and dirty air. To many of the white residents of the town it was an area where you didn’t go after dark, if at all. The east side of town, where I mostly lived through high school, was a collection of blue collar neighborhoods with a mix of Hispanic and poor whites. It had a more semi-rural feel to the area. Being near the farmlands east of town it was home to much of the agricultural processing, as we were reminded every fall when the wind shifted us downwind of the tomato cannery. The west side of town was the old part of town. Lots of Victorian and Georgian architecture and tree lined streets. Solidly middle class and mostly white. Downtown was the commercial hub as well as the seat of local government in area just north of the area known as “Skid Row”, blocks of run down hotels frequented by men referred to in those days as “whinos”.

The landscape could best described as flat. The elevation was listed at fifteen feet above sea level and didn’t vary much from one end of town to the other. Standing on top of any tall building in town…there weren’t many to choose from…you could see east to the Sierras, west to the Coast Range, and north and south into oblivion. The one positive from my perspective was the juxtaposition of several highways making it easy to get out of town. Both Highway 99 and later I5 led south to LA and north to Sacramento and beyond. To the west 580 led to the Bay Area while Highway 4 went east into the Sierra foothills. Much of my young life I wondered often why more people didn’t take advantage of the exit ramp to somewhere else. It took me a while but when I was ready I got out and I pretty much never looked back. Except for now, it would seem.

Introduction

I was born in the middle of the 20th century in the middle of the night in the middle of a town the middle of nowhere, the middle son of a lower middle class family. An inauspicious beginning to what go on to be what to the casual observer would seem a rather pedestrian life. I was an average child, though judged a bit odd by my peers. In truth, even I found myself a bit strange. I was a frail child and obsessively shy, I found the outside world cold and menacing…which it often was…and tended to withdraw into my own world. An uninspired student and a mediocre athlete, I drifted through my school years without much promise. I mostly coasted along, drawing as little notice as possible. Girls, in particular, paid me little attention in my early dating years. Whether it was my less than dynamic personality or my J.C. Penny wardrobe I was never really sure. In my 20’s I drifted a bit…town to town, job to job…eventually settling down to raise a family while shuffling through a series of jobs before settling into a rather sedate retirement. No great accomplishments or heroic acts of valor to relate. Never achieved fame or fortune…though the latter I continue to blame on the lottery. All in all it would seem a very ordinary life.

Yet woven into the fabric of that life are a pattern of places, events, and most especially people that have led to an extraordinary journey through this humble lifetime. It is those elements that have shaped who I am today. They have given me the strength and the confidence to take on a world that I once feared, to trust in others and to trust in myself. It is said that a life well lived is good friends, great stories, and grand adventures and in those respects I feel fortunate indeed. With that I embark on this admittedly narcissistic chronicle of a life lived under the radar. I hope you will join me.

Disclaimer: While the places and events in the story are real, some of the names have been changed in order to respect the privacy of the persons involved.