It’s 2009 and I have been involved in a life story writing group for about four years. I am writing this for you – whoever you may be. I hope that you are living a couple of hundred years from now and you will be able to get a feeling about how life was lived in the 20th and 21st centuries.

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As I said, these are stories of my life written to be read to the life story writing group. Because of this you will find me referring to certain times or events in many stories. Each story was read to a group of individuals who may have been in all or none of the other events. Thus the repetition.

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I am going to give these stories to my grandchildren Jacob and Elyse. I’ll ask them to keep this book and pass it on to their children who I ask to pass it on to their children, etc.

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In Section One of this book I will tell you about some experiences that I have had during my life. In Section Two I will tell you what I believe about this life and why I believe it.

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Writing My Life Story

It occurred to me that I needed to write an introduction to this series of articles and to also go back in my life and tell some of the stories from my childhood. So I am going to write some stories about my childhood. But before I write individual stories I am going to give you an overview of my first five years.

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I have all of my report cards from all of the schools I attended, with the exception of the school I attended in the fifth and sixth grade. This was Grant Elementary in San Lorenzo, California. I am going to use these report cards as the basis for telling you where I lived at what time in my childhood.

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First, I was born at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley on January 4, 1939 at 7:58 PM. My parents lived in Oakland, but my mother's doctor used Alta Bates so I was born in Berkeley but never lived there. My first home was on Church Street just north of Flora in East Oakland.

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When I was two we moved to a newly built house at 10320 Foothill Blvd, which in those days was considered out in the "sticks." My parents were asked why they would move so far out – almost to San Leandro.

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We lived in this house when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and brought the U.S. into World War II. My father worked for Western Auto as a salesman until the war started and then he worked at the Kaiser Shipyards as a ship fitter until the end of the war.

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The house was on an isolated street with about a dozen houses on one side of the street.  Most of these houses were owned by young couples with small children so I had loads of kids to play with. There were probably ten or twelve kids from ages 2 to 9 or 10 on the street when we moved there.

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Because I was born in January I started school in February. The California school system had what was known as a High-Low system. That's what it was always called and I don't know why it wasn't called the Low-High system. The school year was divided into two terms. The first was from the first of September to the end of January. The second term was February to end of June.

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If you were born after Thanksgiving you could not started school in September, but had to wait until the second term that started in February. This system went all the way through high school. So I started Kindergarten at Toler Heights School in February of 1944.

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