My First Memory

I would like to tell about my first memory in this life. It was one month before I turned three years old, and it was a Sunday morning and we had gotten up and gone to Sunday school at 9:30 in the morning and then to the church service at 11:00. Our church service was divided into three parts. The first part was made up of prayers, songs and the reading of scripture. This was the part that the members of the church participated in. The second part was the sermon, which went on from a half hour to an hour, depending on the minister (some loved to hear themselves talk), and the last part was the altar call. Some ministers could not end the service until at least one person had come to the altar to ask God’s forgiveness for their sins, so this could last quite a long time. I remember it being over an hour long many times.

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As I remember on this particular Sunday it was about quarter to twelve (I know the minister was preaching) when a man came rushing through the Sanctuary doors shouting something very bad and very important because I could feel the fear in all of the adults around me. I didn’t know what was going on, but it was important. The next thing I remember was that my parents and I were going to my aunt and uncle’s apartment. We were going to listen to the radio and hear someone tell us what had happened and what we should do about it. You see the date was December 7, 1941 and we were going to hear that the Japanese had bombed a place called Pearl Harbor on an island called Hawaii.

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My parents and their friends got out an atlas and looked for this island called Hawaii and found it and that made it even worse. Their greatest fear was that the Japanese navy was steaming toward the west coast of America and we had no way of defending ourselves against a Japanese invasion. I can still remember the fear that totally controlled our lives that day and for the weeks to come. While the church dominated our lives, it was in no way a comfort to its members. There was no way to turn to a loving God and ask for help.

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Because of the total domination the church had in my early years I will come back to it quite often when recalling the stories I tell of my early life.

 

Foothill Blvd.

The first house I remember living in was at 10320 Foothill Blvd. in East Oakland during the Second World War. The stretch of Foothill Blvd. I lived on was made up of about a dozen new houses all on one side of the street. There was a huge empty lot across the street from us that we kids would build forts in from anything we could find around and have grass clump fights. We would wait until the grass was about a foot high and then we'd pull up a small clump that had a ball of dirt about two inches in diameter. We would pack the dirt until it was a bout an inch in diameter and then throw the clump with its grass sail at the other fort.

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Of the dozen houses about eight of them had young kids. There were ten maybe twelve of us three to four years apart from youngest to oldest. I was in the younger group. I remember when I was four years old the older kids were all going back to school and I was the only one left out on the street. The other younger kids were girls who played inside. It was terrible to be all alone. I still remember the feeling of abandonment.

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We lived in the Foothill Blvd. house during the entire Second World War. My dad was a salesman for Western Auto but as soon as the draft was called he went to work for Kaiser Shipyards as a ship fitter. He operated an automated welding machine that made the long welds that held the large sheets of metal together to form the troop transports he was building.

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In WWII if a man was of a certain age, had a family and got a job in the war industry he had an exemption from being drafted. All of the family men on the street changed their jobs to war industry companies except two.

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One joined the Army Air Corp and became a bomber pilot. We worried about him during the entire war but he came back with not a scratch. The man who was our next day neighbor was a banker and was not about to move down in the job ranks just because of the war. In those days bankers were thought of as powerful men. Well, he became another type of powerful man – a drafted marine. Because of his ego he lost his life storming a beach in the South Pacific. We were all shocked when the news arrived. All the women on the block went to the home of the widow to help her through the trying days. This event brought the people on our street very close together.

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One other thing I remember was the outbreaks of childhood diseases – whooping cough, measles, mumps, etc. When the first kid showed signs it wasn't long before the whole street had the same illness. The health department would come out and place a quarantine sign on your front door when you got one of these diseases. We were ordered not to go outside for two weeks. But as soon as a kid was feeling okay he begged his mother to go to one of the other kid's houses until he wore her down and we all converged on one house. It was a great time. I have only great memories of those very contagious, very deadly diseases.

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One day a paperboy came walking down our street yelling and holding up a paper. We all went outside and saw the headlines about VE (victory in Europe) Day. Three months later he came back with headlines about VJ (victory in Japan) Day.  Soon after the war was over my parents moved us to San Leandro, which is south of Oakland.

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Some of My War Memories

I remember the fear that the adults had that the Japanese navy was storming toward the west coast of the U.S. But to the contrary, the Japanese fleet had turned around and headed back toward Japan. But we were at war and the war was very much a part of my life. One of the things I remember was that people and stores had small models of U.S. and Japanese airplanes hanging from the ceiling by strings. These models were painted black and were on the same scale as a real plane would be if you saw it flying.

The idea was that we were supposed to be able to identify the plane immediately and know if it was friendly or enemy. Even as a very young child I became very good at looking up at planes in stores and being able to call out what model of aircraft it was.

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The other thing I remember about those war years were the blackouts. This meant that you had to pull all of the drapes or blinds and shut out all light from getting out of your house. It was a very serious breach to open a drape or blind and let the light be seen from the outside. There were Block Wardens who would patrol the streets to make sure no one did let light out. Blackouts were signaled by sounding air raid warning sirens. These would sound until an all clear sequence was sounded. The all clear was three fast blasts of the sirens as I remember.

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If you were unable to keep the light from getting out using drapes and/or blinds you had to shut off all the lights in your house. My parents' house did not have the ability to shut out light using blinds or drapes so every time the air raid sirens sounded we had to shut off all the lights and wait in the darkness.

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As a kid I liked these air raid blackouts because I could look out at the very dark night and see the bright searchlights scanning the sky. This was very exciting to me. I never had a sense of fear. I pretty much knew that there were not going to be any Japanese planes attacking us.

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The P51 Mustang was my favorite plane and I remember that I used to paint them during our art time in the 1st and 2nd grade. I painted them with the famous "shark mouth" painted on the engine cowling.

I believe that the war, and living through it and all the hassles and heartbreaks, gave those of us who lived then a different sense of identity with the country than the generations to follow.

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Our Entertainment

When I was a kid we had to make our own entertainment far more than the kid's of today's world.  Today kids have movies, television, social media, video games and music.

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In my early days we had movies (although I wasn't allowed to go because the church I attended considered them sinful. I talk about that in another chapter.) - and we had radio. You could listen to music on the radio and you could listen to the radio shows, both drama and comedy.

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As a kid my favorite shows were; Jack Armstrong, All American boy, Captain Midnight, The Green Hornet, Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid and Roy Rogers. As I grew into my teens I listened to adult shows. There were two types of show.

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First there were the half-hour comedies that had skits that ran five to ten minutes each. The Burns and Allen Show, that featured George Burns and his wife Gracie Allen was very funny. George Burns lived to be 100 years old and was performing at 99.

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Then there was Jack Benny. Benny was one of the greatest comedy minds of the century in my opinion. He is still copied today by serious comedians. There were two themes that ran through every show. Jack was always 39 years old and Jack was very tight with his money. One of the great lines from the show was when Jack was mugged. That was when a guy stuck a guy in his face, and the guy said, "Your money or your life." There was a long pause and finally the guy says, "well, what you waiting for?" Jack replies, "I'm thinking." The way he said it made it one of comedies greatest lines.

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One of my favorites was The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet Show. Ozzie Nelson was the husband and Harriett was the wife. In real life they had two boys, David and Ricky. In 1949 the boys finally prevailed on their father to allow them to appear and I immediately connected with Ricky who was five at the time. Ricky went on to become a pop singer and did very well. He was killed when his plane crashed on takeoff during a concert tour. It was a very sad day.

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One of my other favorites was Bob Hope. During WWII Hope's Pepsodent (Toothpaste) Show was the highest rated show on the radio. He too lived to be 100 although he did do much during the last five years of his life. He went on to TV and made many very funny movies.

Another great comic was Red Skelton. Red had a number of characters he would perform skits as. Among them were: Junior, the mean widdle kid, Deadeye, the fast gun in the west, and Clem Kadiddelhopper. I loved his show and continued to love him when he went to TV. He was even a stronger performer on TV because one of his greatest talents was as a pantomimist.

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Then there were the great action and drama shows.

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My two favorites were Inner Sanctum Mysteries that always opened with a squeaking door and a sinister host who welcomed the listeners with, "through the squeaking door to another night of horror." The other favorite was what I believe to be the best "western" show ever on radio – Gunsmoke. I still remember the night William Conrad, the star, ended the show with the announcement that this was going to be the last Gunsmoke on radio and next week the show would move to TV – without him. While Conrad had one of the best voices on radio he was short and stout – not the right image for Matt Dillion the show's leading character. I was devastated. But Gunsmoke became a big hit on TV and lasted over ten years.

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There were many other action and drama shows I listened to. I'll just give the titles and a line about the show if I think it's necessary. Dragnet was a show about two LA detectives. The great line from the show was, "just want to get the fact ma’am." This Is Your FBI told actual FBI cases but changed the names and locations. Yours Truly Johnny Dollar had a unique way of presenting the insurance investigator's cases. The storyline was a narrative by the investigator of his expense account items. Boston Blackie was one of my favorites and was about a private detective that was always just one step ahead of the police in solving crimes. Dangerous Assignment was another great show. It opened with the main character saying, “Yeah, danger is my assignment – I get sent to a lot of places I can't even pronounce. They all spell the same thing, though – trouble.” I was a Communist for the FBI was another show I listened to. This series told the real-life story of FBI undercover agent Matt Cvetic. Sergeant Preston of the Yukon was the story of Canadian Northwest Mounted Policeman.

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There were two shows I never missed that don't fit into either of the two categories above. These were 20 Questions and The Quiz Kids. In 20 Questions the panelist had twenty questions they could ask to figure out what the mystery object was. They always started by asking, "Is it bigger than a breadbox." The Quiz Kids were all under 12 years old and were asked questions that were well beyond their young lives. Most of the time the kids answered the questions.

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I wish radio comedy and drama had survived. It was more personal to the listener than TV. You could picture the action in your mind and live out the shows in a much more intimate way. I miss radio.

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The Lafayette House

When I was 7 years old my parents moved from Foothill Blvd. in Oakland to Pearson Street in San Leandro. It was a nice neighborhood, but as I remember the house didn't seem as nice as the house on Foothill Blvd. My parents were always buying fixer-upper houses and painting and redecorating them and selling them. We moved a lot as you will find out. They were the first of the “house flippers” and they always made money.

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The Pearson Street house was nice, but it was only one thing to my folks, a fixer-upper to be sold as soon as possible. They must have made a good amount off the sale of the Foothill Blvd. house and probably thought they could make good money on the Pearson house because within a year they had started building a large house in Lafayette, California which was then, and is now, an upscale neighborhood.

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The contractor who was building our house lived just a short drive from the house. My folks would go out to the house on Saturday to see how things were coming. I remember we went out there every Saturday.

But one Saturday was different from any other day I have every known.

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Lafayette is a very hilly/mountainous terrain. Our house was on a hill that looked out over what is now the Concord Valley. The contractor's home was built on a point of land that was fifty feet or more above the land below it. The living room was in the back of the house and faced the north toward the Concord Valley, at that time completely undeveloped. It had a north-facing wall that was twenty to twenty-five feet across and ten to twelve feet high and it was solid glass. The view was amazing. But one night the view was the most spectacular that I have ever seen. It was a lightning storm and we could see all the lightning strikes from our vantage point. It lasted for over an hour and it was stunning!!!

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Asthma

When I was five years old I started having asthma attaches. They lasted until I was sixteen. I had a very serious case of asthma and I was out of school many days out of the school year. I had two cases of phenomena develop from my asthma.  The only relief I could get was from breathing the smoke from a product called Asthmadore. This was a gray powder that my mother would form in a mound as best possible and then light it with a match and I would get as close as possible to the mound and breath in the smoke. This would bring some relief.

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I also had to have two shots of adrenalin when I was six and eight. I have never used any illegal drugs but I don’t understand why adrenalin isn’t one of the top on the list. What a rush! One moment I was about to die because I couldn’t breath and the next I felt like I could do anything I want to do. It was a great rush and the feeling is indescribable.

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When I was six my mother took me to the doctor and he drew a matrix on my back and stuck needles in the squares on my back and put in a small amount of liquid in each.  This was a test to see what I was allergic to. It turned out to be mold and dust. Two things that are everywhere. I have the same allergy today but the symptoms are various sinus problems.

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I then started to get shots three times a week. At first there was a small amount in the syringe and little by little the amount grew and my asthma became worse. Finally the doctor stopped the shots for a week and when I went back we stated with the small amount and added a little each time again. This lasted for two years.

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Dad’s Heart Attaches

My parents never moved into that house because one day my dad was working on the side of the Pearson Street house and trying to dig out a bush. He was pulling the bush out when he had his first heart attack. They had to sell the Lafayette house before it was completed.

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My dad recovered from the hear attack. After a thorough examination he found out that he had a bad heart valve. When he was 16 he had rheumatic fever. As bad as he felt he did not go to bed and he pedaled his bike over his twenty square mile paper route every day. The doctor said that this is what caused the bad heart valve. It is a condition called a rheumatic heart.

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When my father had his heart attack my mother sold the house on Pearson Street in San Leandro and we moved in with her mother on 62nd Avenue in East Oakland. It was then that I developed one of my worst attacks of asthma. So my mother had my father recovering from a heart attack in one bedroom and me struggling to get a breathe in another bedroom.

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We made it through that horrific time and my father recovered and my asthma released its grip on me and my parents decided to take a big leap. They bought a corner neighborhood grocery store in Portland, Oregon. I guess my father had gone up to Portland to investigate and make the deal but I didn’t know anything about it until my folks told me we were going to pack the car, an old Oldsmobile, and go to Portland. We were going to be the grocers. It was called “Bancroft’s Cash and Carry.”

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The good thing for me about going to Portland was that the immunization shots stopped.

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 I was in the low third grade in California when we moved. That means that we moved sometime between February and June. I had started the 3rd grade in February of 1947 and now it was the second half of the 3rd grade in the Portland schools that did not use the low-high system. They put me in the 3rd grade and I progressed fine and went on to the 4th grade that fall.

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Being the kid from the neighborhood grocery store I knew all the other kids from a wide area, and I had lots of friends – both kids and adults. I got to know the adults because my dad taught me how to make change and I would wait on customers from time to time. That was fun. I also started a collection. The Coca Cola bottles of that era had the name of the city and state where they were made cast on the bottom of the bottle. We sold Coke and had empty coke bottles coming back by the caseload. I decided I would try to collect a Coke bottle from each state and see how far I could get.

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I don’t remember how many I got because as I was into my collecting my dad had his second heart attack and everything came to a halt. I don’t remember those days. I know that I was handed off from family to family in the neighborhood because my Mom had no one to take care of me while she took care of my Dad. Things were not like they are today. Dad did not go to the hospital, but the doctor would come to our apartment and dad was in bed for quite a long time.

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One instance I remember was while I was over at a friend’s house to play I hit my craze bone very hard. It hurt worse than anything that I can remember. My friend’s mother brought me into her house and tried to calm me down. I said I needed to go home, and I remember her saying that she could not send me home. That she would have to help me recover.

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When my dad finally recovered, the folks sold the store and we moved back to Oakland and lived with my Grandma Mouser until dad could find a job and the folks could find a house. I remember those days as being very chaotic. My dad got a job at an airline in the parts department of the repair section. The folks also bought a small paint store on the corner of 82nd and MacArthur Blvd in Oakland.

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My Most Prized Toy

When I was ten years old I wanted two things for Christmas. A bicycle and an Erector set. But I knew my parents could only afford to buy me one of them and I was tied in knots trying to figure which one.

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My mother knew that I was very excited about my Christmas gift so instead of making me wait she allowed me to get my gift on Christmas Eve so I could sleep that night. My gift was a new bike and I was really excited. I wanted to go out and ride it but it was dark outside and my mom said I'd have to wait. But my dad said he would take me outside and turn on the porch light and I could ride the bike in the driveway. It was great to have a new bike.

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The next morning I jumped out of bed ready to go out and ride my bike but as I got to the front room there was a Christmas package sitting under the tree with my name on it. I opened it up and to my great delight there was a shiny red metal box with the name Erector Set across the top.

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I opened the top and looked inside and there were all of the small metal beams with regular holes for nuts, bolts, screws, and mechanical parts such as pulleys, gears, and an electric motor. I opened the small book that came with the set and paged through it looking at all the things you could build with an Erector set.

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The Erector Set became my most valued toy for the next three or four years. I built every object shown in the booklet that started in the front with small easy to build things like a wagon with four wheel and a tong to pull it. I built a suspension bridge, a Ferris wheel and finally I built a robot. The last picture in the instruction book was a robot called the "Mysterious Walking Giant." I built it and it did indeed walk. Not very far before falling, but it did walk.

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I spent many days, I mean entire days, building things with my Erector Set. I had asthma from age five to sixteen so I was confined to my house for many days and my Erector Set was my best friend.

I still have the original set plus a smaller set I bought later and added it to original set.

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Mills College Lock Down

I was a city kid. As I’ve said, I was born in Berkeley, California and I was raised in the cities of the San Francisco east bay. We moved around quite a bit when I was young. I attended nine schools before high school. I still have the report cards that show where I lived at any given time. While I was born in Berkeley, my parents lived in Oakland on Church Street in the Havenscourt district. This area was called East Oakland.

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While I lived in Oakland, San Leandro, Hayward and San Lorenzo, during my first 14 years, my center of activity was my grandmother’s house on 62nd Avenue across from Frick Junior High School in Oakland. I had many good friends in this general area and would ride my bike, or get someone to take me to grandma’s house if we lived too far to go by bike.

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About a half a mile to the north of Grandma’s house was Mills College. It is a very prestigious girl’s college that was the Vassar of the west coast. Before writing this story I went to the Mills College Website and it says that the college has been in existence at that location for over 150 years. So it had been around for a little less than 100 years when the events of this story took place.

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Mills College had a great campus in those days. As I look at it on the map today it seems that it has the same amount of land (135 acres) today as it had in 1949. It had a great deal of open, undeveloped land and a lake on campus in those days. This was a fantastic place for young boys to play. We went on campus and played all sorts of games. We loved to play “guns” in the woods of the campus and we played with vigor and noise. Many times students would tell us to be quiet, but we just kept up our games.

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One day we approached the campus and found the entrance gates were manned by security guards. To get on campus you had to show your credentials. We found out from a teacher we knew at Frick Jr. High that the college administration had had so many complaints from faculty and students about a group of boys playing on campus that they decided to secure the campus. At this point I would like to say that at no time had anyone in authority from the college confronted us and told us that we couldn’t play on the campus.

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Well, having one of our favorite play areas cordoned off didn’t sit well with us so we decided to find a way back onto the campus. The campus had a cement wall all the way around it and there were few gates in the wall. Almost all traffic going into the campus went through the main gates that were at the intersection of Seminary Avenue and MacArthur Blvd; the main intersection in the area. We walked around the campus perimeter and looked at the wall and decided that it would take too much effort and paraphernalia (such as ladders or boxes) to climb the wall. It was about eight feet high. So we decided to go in another way.

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At the north end of my Grandma’s block was an open, undeveloped plot of land that ran north about a half mile up to the corner of Seminary Avenue and MacArthur Blvd. We called this undeveloped land “the creek” because it had a creek bed that was used for rain runoff during the rainy season. The creek ran in a north-south direction.

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At the south end of the creek area there was a large storm sewer. It looked exactly like any storm sewer entrance you have seen many times on TV and in the movies. It was about eight to ten feet high and had an arched top. It was about eight feet across and ran for miles under the streets and buildings of the area. At the north end of the creek area there was a storm sewer that was exactly like the one on the south corner. It ran under the Seminary/MacArthur intersection and under Mills College, and under the hills to the north of the college.

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One of our big adventures was to walk the storm sewers and try to figure out where they went. We had walked the entire sewer system to the south and knew where it came out but we had never managed to do this to the northern sewer. The sewers were easy walking. Just flat dirt floors and interesting piles of junk that had been swept in to them by the rains. It was these piles of junk that we went into the sewers to find after each major rain. We would pack a lunch before leaving home and started our trek to find the treasures.

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The sewers were fed by street storm drains from above that came down through round or oval channels. These channels would be as big as three feet across for major runoff drains such as the ones at Seminary and MacArthur and as small as a foot across for minor street storm drains. I was a small, skinny kid and I was able to climb up to the top of the channel and look out on to the street and determine where the storm drain was. I knew this drain system very well.

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We had walked the north section and I identified the south-side channel and the north-side channel for the Seminary/MacArthur intersection and I had climbed up and identified streets and intersections to the north and east of the college. However, there was one channel that we knew came down from the Mills College campus, but we had never been up into it because it was too long. I had climbed up into the channel but I could not see the light at the end of the tunnel so I backed out. The channel was about eighteen to twenty-four inched across and was an oval and it wasn’t any higher than sixteen to eighteen inches.

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Since we knew this channel went onto the Mills College campus we decided that we would crawl up until we came to the end and that way we could get back on to the campus. We went up, I was leading, and laid flat on our stomachs and used our forearms to inch our way up the incline. As I remember the channel came out of a sewer wall about three to four feet above the ground so the incline was not too steep because it was so long, probably about 75 to 100 feet in length. But it was steep enough that you could not see the end as I said before. You could see light, but not the opening at the end.

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We inched along and finally I saw what looked like daylight about twenty-five or thirty feet ahead. But it was just spots of daylight and I didn’t know what was ahead. I stopped and told the others what I saw and asked if they wanted to go on. They all said yes because we would have had to back out of the channel because we were literally wedged in the surrounding concrete channel and couldn’t turn our bodies around and go back headfirst. Some of us were wedged tighter than others because most of the other boys were bigger than me. My best friend, Bob Ambro, was at least one and half times as big as I was and to this day I can’t see how he made it through some of the very tight spots we had to go through in that channel. I remember wondering about it at the time.

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Well, we finally made it to the opening and I saw why I had only seen patches of sunlight. The opening to the storm drain was in an unmanaged section of woods that was completely overgrown with brushes and weeds. The opening to the channel was completely covered with weeds. This was the natural runoff channel that serviced the southern part of the campus. During the rain it had its own little creek that would fill up and run down to the channel and into the storm sewer.

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Well, we had made it. We were on the campus and we were going to make our way with stealth to the northeast part of the campus and the woods and the lake. One problem we had was that we had to go past the administration area and as we quietly crept along we were seen by a couple of college girls who started yelling at us to stop, and then more girls started yelling. We were just kids and we panicked and stopped. Well, that was the end of our adventure and we were detained by some of the gate guards and taken to an administrator’s office. I don’t know who the person was, but I do remember that he was very mad. He asked us how we got on to the campus and we told him.

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He made a telephone call and another man came into the room and the administrator told us to repeat our story of how we got in to the campus. We did and the two looked at each other and the man who had come in said he didn’t know anything about that runoff channel. We told them that we would take them to the place and show them. When we got to the runoff channel I pulled back the weeds and showed the two men the grate that set over the  small cement channel opening. The man who I now believe was the head of maintenance for the college just shrugged and shook his head at the administrator. He didn’t know about this channel.

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The administrator then read us the riot act and told us if we were ever caught on the campus again he would tell our parents. We were marched to the main entrance gates and told to leave and never come back.

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Why he didn’t call our parent then I can only guess. My guess would be that the Mills College administration did not want the word to get around that four young boys had caused the campus to go into lock down mode. In those days news was not on TV 24 hours a day and the administration could easily stop the spread of the story. However, if that were to happen today, I believe the boys would make national, perhaps international news coverage.

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I was lucky that I never saw that administrator again because eight years later I dated a girl from Mills College and I drove onto the campus in my 1955 Buick Century with no one giving me a second thought.

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Dad’s Third Heart Attack

The summer of 1951 and 1952 I spent at my great aunt and great uncle’s ranch in Beavercreek, Oregon. My first trip up there from Oakland was with my mother’s cousin, Roy Speckles. We left on Friday morning. I kissed my mom goodbye and said bye to my dad. I still remember him sitting in his chair in our living room.

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Roy was in his early twenties and I was twelve and we got along well and had a good trip. He took me to my uncle Eldon’s house in Portland and Eldon drove me down to Beavercreek the following Monday. Eldon was a pastor, so of course I had to stay in Portland for the weekend to attend church.

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Marie and Ross were retired wheat farmers. They had farmed over a 1000 acres of wheat east of The Dalles, Oregon for over fifty years and then retired to a 90 acre ranch with mostly timber and pasture land. It was a beautiful place – and a wonderful place for a twelve-year-old to explore. They had one dog, Moackie, who became my best friend.

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It was two weeks after I got to Beavercreek that Eldon came down to the ranch to get me and bring me back to Portland to stay the weekend with him and his family. After we got to his house he sat me down in the living room and said he had some news for me. He then told me that my dad had had another heart attack and that he has died. We were going to drive down to Oakland that night.

I remember sitting there stunned. I asked how mom and I we’re going to live. Who would pay the bills? It’s strange what comes into the mind of a kid who’s life has just changed more radically than he could ever imagine. Yes, there would be changes in the next few years and most of them would not be for the good.

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One of the things that I remember is that I had to learn to tie a double Windsor knot for my suit tie. I had never tied my own tie before.  Dad had tied it and then put it on me. A family friend name Kibby Olson slowly and carefully showed me how to tie the knot and then I stood in front of a mirror for hours practicing.

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One of the other things that I remember about those days was that I had decided that I was now the man of the family and as such I was to be a man. And that meant I could not show my emotions.

I would not allow myself to cry or in any way show my grief over the loss of my father. This lack of showing emotions stuck with me for the next forty years. It has only been in the last few years that I have been able to feel things deeply. I look back in enormous sadness at the immense burden I put on that twelve-year-old boy. It has taken a great deal of work to free myself from that knot. I still have hang-ups connected to that mindset.

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As an adult I thought a lot about my dad. I found an old picture of him in his early twenties and scanned it and printed and framed it. It’s in my hallway and I look at it every day.

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​