Wash & Wax the Olds

The summer before I went to high school my mother moved us into a new school district. I had been planning to go to Fremont High School for the three years I had been at Frick Junior High. All my friends lived in the Fremont High area and I was really looking forward to my new school. Then one day, out of the blue, my mom told me she had bought another house and that I would be going to Castlemont High, the other guys – my rivals.

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We moved into the new (not really new but new to us) house and I couldn’t see why we had moved. The house was smaller and the yard was a lot smaller. There was one other problem with the house. The garage and the driveway that led to it.

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The garage was for a single car but it was about two cars wide. The space to the right of the garage door was empty and I converted it to a shop for myself during the next year. The problem was not the garage, it was the driveway. The driveway was very narrow and had the house on one side and a chain link fence on the other side. The fence belonged to the neighbors.

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At the front of the house was a chimney for the fireplace in the living room. The chimney jutted out about eighteen inches into the driveway and was very hard to get around. My mother started to back the car out the first time she parked it in the garage, but found she could not manage to get around the chimney. I told her that I could back the car out if she would watch the chimney and tell me how far away I was when I got to it. I made it out and from that point on I always backed the car out of the garage. I didn’t need her help from that point on (I was only 14) .

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One day in the summer I decided that I would wash and wax the car. Mom had taken the bus to work. She did that from time to time. She really didn’t like to drive and had not even had a driver’s license until my father had passed away two years before. So I backed the car out and spent a few hours washing and waxing the Olds 98 coupe – loving every minute of it. I loved working on cars, even if it was just washing and waxing them.

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When I finished waxing the car I started the engine and put the transmission lever in Drive and started to creep forward to put the car back into the garage. That way I would be able to surprise Mom. As I slowly moved passed the chimney I heard a dreadful scraping sound and immediately stopped the car. I got out and went around to see where the car had scraped against the chimney and dented the front of the rear fender.

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The car was a 1949 model and in those days car fenders extended out from the body of the car. I had just wretched my mother’s car and I was sick. You see while I always backed the car out of the garage, I had never driven the car forward before that moment.

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I slowly backed the car to the open space by our front lawn. This is where I had washed and waxed it and now I was looking at the badly mashed front of the passenger-side rear fender and I was really sick. I was going to be in so much trouble when Mom got home I just couldn’t believe it.

When Mom got home I was sitting on the front porch waiting for her. She was coming up the street from the driver’s side of the car so she couldn’t see the mashed fender. Before she could get to the car I jumped down and was standing at the back of the car. She stopped and asked me why the car was out. I said I backed it out to wash and wax it for her. And I told her I had a problem. She asked what it was and I showed her the fender.

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She looked at the fender and then at me, I was almost in tears, and then she held out her arms for me and said, “I know you were trying to do something nice for me. We’ll get the fender fixed. Thanks you,” and she kissed me on the cheek.

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Olds Hydraulic Window

Many people are born with natural gifts. For some it’s good looks, for others a great singing voice, but for me it was the natural ability to understand how a piece of mechanical equipment functioned and how to fix it, if it was broken. I don’t know how I knew it but I just understood the equipment and how it was supposed to work. My mother told me that I took an alarm clock apart when I was four and put it back together. I don’t remember it but I do believe her.

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My favorite toy as a young boy was the Erector Set my parents bought me for Christmas when I was eight. I spent hours, sometimes all day building all kinds of structures with that great set. When I was ten I got good enough with the set that I built a robot that would walk. I still have the set today.

My natural gift for fixing things mechanical became a fixation on cars when I entered my teens and I could fix anything that broke on my mother’s car. Mom had a 1949 Oldsmobile 98 two-door hard top with automatic windows.  The windows were powered up and down by the use of hydraulic cylinders. This was a few years before the electric window would become the norm.

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The hydraulic cylinder for the rear passenger-side window broke and started to leak hydraulic fluid until it was all gone and the windows would not go up or down. I was fourteen and I told my Mom that I would fix it for her. I had fixed so many things for her over the years she agreed to give me the opportunity to give it a try - even though I had never seen the window mechanism and didn’t know how it worked.

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I removed the back seat cushions and then I had to figure out how to remove the inside panel so I could get at the windows mechanism. Without going into a lot of uninteresting details I’ll just say if you have never taken an inside door panel off it’s not an intuitive procedure. But I studied it and finally figured out how to get it off. It was only then that I realized that the windows were powered by hydraulic cylinders and not electric motors.

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This was going to be a much bigger job than I had anticipated. But I didn’t let Mom know I was facing a job that I had no way of knowing how to fix. The cylinder looked just like a shock absorber, but had a metal hose that connected to it for the hydraulic fluid to push the push rod up and allow it to come down, thus, opening and closing the window.

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The cylinder was up between the window and the outside back fender. It was almost impossible to reach. It was engineered so that only a trained Oldsmobile mechanic could replace it. But I had a special wrench that allowed me to reach the bolts holding the cylinder. My dad had brought the wrench home from the airline where he was the manager of the parts department. It was specially designed for a bolt on an airplane engine that the airline was going to throw away. It was a 1/2-inch at one end and 9/16th-inch at the other. The ½-inch end had been made with a special slant and twist to it. Using this wrench I did manage to reach the ½-inch bolts and to take the cylinder out of the car.  It’s interesting to note that I used that special ½-inch wrench many time over the years to reach nuts and bolts that were otherwise impossible to get a hold of.

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I took the hydraulic cylinder to the local Olds dealer and asked for a replacement part. The parts man asked me where I got the cylinder and I explained that I had removed it from my Mom’s car and was going to replace it with a new one. I became an instant celebrity in the service center when the parts man told the mechanics what I had done.

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Some didn’t believe me so they asked me how I had done it. I told them and I must have been convincing because they seemed to believe me. I got the new part and brought it home and put it into the car and tightened everything up. I filled the hydraulic fluid and then started the car and crossed my figures and pushed on the window switch. The window went down and there were no leaks. I put the side panel back on and the seats in place and Mom’s car was as good as new.

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The Symposium

In the Spring of 1954 my high school auto shop teacher taught me a new word and the concept behind the word. This word was symposium. In the spring of each year Mr. Kirke Powell, the teacher, would take a week and have a symposium and the class would discuss how we could make the auto shop program work better.

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The shop was run by a set of elected student supervisors that each ran a certain part of the shop operation. In 1955, during my second symposium, after being part of the open discussion about how the shop could be run in a more efficient manner I went home and started writing down the way I thought the shop should be operated. I didn’t think our shop ran smoothly at all and I thought I could come up with a better way to organize and run the class.

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I understood that every successful organization had one person who made the final decision and was “the boss” of the business. So, I created the position of superintendent. This person would have the overall responsibility to see that each of the departments under him ran smoothly and efficiently.

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I then broke the operating of the shop into four departments. These were organization, work, bookkeeping, and safety. Each of these departments had a foreman. Under the safety foreman I had a traffic manager that was responsible for moving the cars in and out of the shop and the scheduling of these cars. Under the traffic manager I had a traffic director and a fire marshal. The traffic director handled the moving of the cars and the fire marshal was responsible for finding fire hazards and making sure they were dealt with immediately.

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I presented my new organization to the symposium the next day and it was greeted with overwhelming enthusiasm. Mr. Powell asked the students if they would like to vote on accepting this organization for running the shop and they said yes. They voted and the organization was accepted and from that point on the shop was run under “The Bancroft Plan” a name that Mr. Powell gave it in two articles he got published in educational magazines the following summer.

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I have an Oakland Tribune newspaper article about the Castlemont High auto shop program and its operational organization. It gives information about the auto shop program that was “created by a student named George Bancroft.”

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Thirteen years after the plan was implemented at Castlemont I was working for IBM and I was an adult advisor to a Junior Achievement group. One afternoon after our normal weekly session one of the students came up to me and asked me if I knew Kirke Powell. I said I did and that he was my auto shop teacher in high school. This just blow the kid’s mind. He said, “You’re THE George Bancroft, the guy that developed, “The Bancroft Plan." I was taken back, but said that, yes, I had developed it. It seemed that Mr. Powell had left Castlemont High and had gone to another high school in Oakland and he had taken the plan and implemented it there also, name and all.

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I was really taken back by this news and wanted to see and talk to Mr. Powell, who had been one of my favorite teachers. The student coordinated my visit to his high school and to the auto shop. I learned on the day of my visit what it meant to be a celebrity. It overwhelmed me to have the kids in the shop classes see me as some kind of special person. It had never happened to me before, and it only happened to me once after that.

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A Possible Job

My aunt Mamie and Uncle Eddie Futrell were two of the really good people in this world and in my life. Mamie was my father’s sister. Mamie and Eddie were the only members of my father’s siblings that I knew. I had met his other four siblings at one time or another but I didn’t really know them. But Eddie and Mamie were some of my favorite people. I always enjoyed going to their house, especially at holiday time because we had many of our holiday meals at their house. Mamie was a wonderful cook.

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When I was sixteen years old I was a senior at Castlemont. I was an auto shop major and was on my way to getting the Bank of America Industrial Arts Award for auto shop which meant I would get an apprenticeship at a large Oakland Ford dealership. This is what I wanted. Cars were my life and fixing them was something I was born knowing how to do. My long-term goal was to become a racing mechanic, but I knew I first had to make a name for myself by building some outstanding racing cars for myself.

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It was at this moment that my life took a turn into another direction. One Saturday my mother told me we were going to see Mamie and Eddie. When we got to Mamie and Eddie’s house it turned out that Eddie had some information for me and he had evidently talked it over with my mother and she had agreed to let him ask me if I would be interested in going to work at the Naval Air Station in Alameda where there were some job openings coming up. Eddie was the manager of the Electronics department at NAS Alameda.

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My father had died when I was twelve so it was just Mom and me. My mother only had training as a typist and she was a billing clerk who typed invoices all day. It wasn’t much, but it paid the bills. I believe that Eddie saw the job opening on the base as a way to help Mom and me with our finances.

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There was one hitch to this whole plan and that was that I would have to take and pass a Federal civil service examine. He told me that the exam to get the position would be in June about a month from then. I didn’t even have to think about it. I said that I would like to take the test and try to get into the program. This would get me out of school early and the job that I would get paid much better than the car dealership apprenticeship program so I would have money to build my cars.

The day of the test I was very nervous. I had learned that veterans automatically got five extra points added to their score on the exam and disabled vets got ten extra points. And, the room I was taking the test in was filled with men, not high school kids. They knew so much more than I did. But the thing I had going for me was I liked taking these types of tests. I saw it as a challenge and found them exciting. When I finally got the tests and looked them over I realized that they were almost the same as the tests the school had been giving me since I was in the tenth grade.

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I finished the test which took six hours and went home to wait for the results. I expected them to be sent to me in about a month. But the month came and went and I didn’t hear. Four months came and went and I hadn’t heard and we all thought that I had not made the list for the job. During the first week in October I received a letter from the Navy telling me that I had passed the Civil Service exam for their job opening and that I was to respond telling them if I wanted the job starting October 16th. I didn’t have the slightest Idea what the job was or what it did but I said I wanted to take it. I started on October 16, 1955 and I said to myself 49 years and I can retire. As it turned out I work one month, to the day, short of 50 years before I retired.

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The day I started work was a day of processing me through the personnel department. That day I finally found out why it had taken them so long to send my response. The job required a top-secret security clearance and the FBI had been busily checking my background. I found that they had talked to most of my adult friends and most of the neighbors on my block and that all these people were told that they could not tell anyone about the clearance check. Looking back I do remember that the adults I knew did treat me differently after I had taken the test. I had even seen the FBI agents in our neighborhood from time to time but just thought they were door-to-door salesmen.

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Now I was ready to take on a totally new way of life and I was one of the youngest people in the United States to hold a top-secret security clearance. Oh, why was a top-secret security clearance required. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.  ; - )

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The thing that I can tell you is that I didn't sit behind a desk. I was out working all around the base. Working on projects and solving problems.

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My First Cars

One of the first things I needed to do when I started my new job at NAS Alameda was to buy a car.  Because without a car I had to get up at 5:00 AM so I could shower and shave and eat breakfast and then walk to the bus stop where I would catch the 5:45 bus that would start my four-bus trip to NAS so I could punch in by 7:15.

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I started shopping almost immediately and by Friday I had found my first car. It was a 1950 Ford convertible that was in showroom condition. It had a flawless black paint job and a white naugihide top and brown leather upholstery. I loved that car. I felt like a different person when I drove it. I drove it mostly with the top down unless it was raining. I started by tuning the car to run at its very highest performance and then went out looking for drag races. I did okay, but this was not a muscle car, it was a show car. So, after six months I looked around for another car that would do better at drag racing.

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After a couple of weeks of looking I found the car I wanted. It was a 1950 Oldsmobile two-door coupe. One thing I knew about this car was although it had a Hydromantic transmission (automatic transmissions were looked down on by dragsters), it was a four-speed transmission that meant that it was very fast off the line. First gear had such a high gear ratio from engine speed to rear wheels that the car literally jumped when the accelerator was pushed to the floorboard. I had done a special project on automatic transmissions during the first symposium I had attended in auto shop at Castlemont High. I knew that the transmission could be tightened far more than the company specification indicated, and this would give a much firmer action to the automatic transmission. This put it on par with a car with a manual transmission and a clutch. I could peel rubber every time the transmission shifted gears, even going from third to fourth gear. This was unheard of because the gear ratio was very low in fourth gear.

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I also was a very good tune-up mechanic and I tuned the car especially for drag racing. This meant bad gas mileage and poor idling, but gas was only 25 cents a gallon and I raised the RPMs (revolutions per minute) at idle which took away the roughness when idling.

I replaced my coil with a 50,00 watt one. I upgraded the distributor and tuned the carburetor for ultimate speed. Now it was time to go looking for my prey. 

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But before I talk about that let me go back to the last week I had owned the Ford. I was coming home from drag racing with a friend of my who had a 1949 Ford coupe that he had been modified for racing. We had gone from stop signal to stop signal and we were pretty well matched. His car had all the “goodies” on it, but my car was tuned much better and it was about 50-50. I was going home and just about a block from my house when a siren sounded and red lights went on and a cop pulled me over to the side of the street. It seems that I had run a blind intersection just a block back (I believe the cop sat and waited for cars to do this so he could easily raise his ticket count). I was going 25 miles an hour which was the speed limit in the neighborhood but he got me for going 10 miles over the speed limit (15 miles and hour) through the intersection. To this day I believe it was a bad ticket.

In those days anyone under 18 (I was 17) had to go to juvenile traffic court for any ticket. You couldn’t just mail in the traffic fine, you had to go before a judge in a one-on-one meeting. Since this was my first ticket the judge let me go with a warning. This meeting with the judge was after I had sold the Ford and was driving the Olds.

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I tried my luck with the Olds first with my friend with the 1949 Ford. I blew him off every time. It wasn’t even a race. I raced for about a month in Oakland and did well. I didn’t lose a race.

On the weekends I would go up to Vallejo to get away from home. Vallejo is about 40 miles north of Oakland.  My grandmother and aunt and uncle lived there and I had many friends from my uncle’s church that I hung out with. About a couple of months after getting the Olds I heard about a guy in Vallejo who was blowing everybody away. His father had paid to have a 1954 Cadillac engine put in his 1953 Ford.  Well, to make a long story short I found the guy and we went off against each other about four times (four street signals) and I won every one. But as we were in the middle of the fifth race a cop siren and lights came on. I turned left at the next signal and the other guy turned right. The cop followed the other guy. Probably knew of his car.

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Now I was seventeen and on an adrenaline high so I wasn’t thinking at all. Well, I was thinking but it was emotion-based, bad thinking. I should have headed to my friend Harvey’s house. Harvey was my best friend and was riding with me during the races. But I was feeling so smug that I decided to drive by the other car that had been pulled over and laugh at the driver. Well, to my surprise the cop wasn’t blind and he had a memory. As soon as I was within sight he motioned for me to pull over. I did and I sat in my car while the other guy got his ticket and then I got a good lecture and a ticket for drag racing.

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I believe it was the next week that I had to go to court for my first ticket and I didn’t say anything about the one I had just gotten. I honestly didn’t see any reason to.

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When It came time for me to appear before the judge for my second ticket luck was in some far corner of the world and I got the same judge I had for the first ticket. When he saw me he recognized me and he was very upset (I have toned down his reaction) and lectured me on drag racing and ask me in a very loud voice why I had not told him of this ticket three weeks ago (or whenever it had been I don’t remember the exact timing) when I saw him for my first ticket.

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He was so mad he suspended my driver’s license for six months. This meant I had to get up at 5:00 AM so I could shower and shave and eat breakfast and then walk to the bus stop where I would catch the 5:45 bus that would start my four-bus trip to NAS so I could punch in by 7:15.

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The only thing that saved me from spending a miserable six months was Joe Bartello. When Joe heard about my plight he said that he could stop by and pick me up. He drove to work on San Leandro Blvd, which was just two blocks from my house and it was only a five minute side trip. It was during those morning drives for six months that Joe and I became friends and it was at that time that he had me assigned to him as his apprentice. Thanks, Joe, for saving me - again.

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It would be 49 years and six months before I got my next ticket. I was going for 50 years when I did a stupid thing. I made a right turn on to the 78 freeway at Rancho Santa Fe Rd in San Marcos from the lane inside the normal left turn lane. There is a heavy white line between the two lanes that means (remember this if you have to take the written driver test) “Don’t cross over me.” Especially if there’s a cop in back of you. Oh well, now I have to wait another 50 years to make that record.

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Please Don't Sell to a Black

In the summer of 1957 I decided that I would go to college in the Fall. My mother decided that she would sell her house and move into an apartment. When she put the house up for sale there was an immediate procession to our house by the neighbors. Each made the same request. Please don't sell your house to Blacks. This period in the life of Oakland, California was one of its transitions. For many years West Oakland had been the place where black people lived and North Oakland and East Oakland were where white people lived.

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About three years prior to my mother's home sale a group of Whites had bought some houses in a nice, up-scale neighborhood in East Oakland. They immediately sold those houses to black families. The black families had never had the responsibility of keeping up a yard and most of the homes bought by black families deteriorated and within a year the home values in the subdivision had deteriorated by 50%. The white families were selling as fast as they could to keep some of their equities. Finally many white families just packed up and moved out. The subdivision became a black ghetto surrounded by white neighborhoods. The white families in East Oakland became very possessive of their "white only" neighborhoods and selling to a black family was a "sin."

My mother was on the threshold of being a racist so it was not hard for her to not sell to blacks. She would not have sold without requests from the neighbors. She finally sold to an Italian man who was a well known barber in downtown Oakland. A very safe sell for Mom.

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About a year later there was a headline in the newspaper about the arrest of a prominent Oakland resident. Well, I read the article and it turned out that a well known Oakland barber was arrested for selling drugs out of his house. And his daughter was running a prostitution ring out of the same house. Yes, you guess it. Our former house was now a drug house and the center of a prostitution ring. But, they weren't black – so I guess it was okay with our former neighbors.

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