Toughy

Growing up, I was about average height, but physically strong, the result of miles of daily paper routes. Much to my father’s chagrin, and at my own expense, I had two parakeets, two hamsters, and three aquariums. One of the aquariums was a breeding tank for Siamese fighting fish. Before I was nine years old, I had an outside cat named Mittens, and an outside dog. Not just any dog either. I had Toughie. He was probably the best-known dog in our part of the city. And he was the best friend any boy ever had.

 

Toughy was a shorthaired, medium-sized, good-looking mongrel. He ran beside me every day, over all those miles of paper routes. When I threw a paper and missed a porch, Toughie retrieved the newspaper, and dropped it on the porch where it belonged. Everyone on my paper routes knew Toughie. He was legend. Most folks simply knew me as the paperboy with the amazing dog. Toughie was never tied up. He was never confined in any way. He simply ran loose. His only restriction, he was NEVER, under any circumstance, allowed in the house.

 

A favorite game in our neighborhood was, “ditch Toughie.” A pack of kids would scatter in all directions while one held Toughie with his eyes covered, sorta like hide n’ seek. We would jump fences, run across people’s backyards, climb onto garage roofs, into trees, whatever, but no matter where we would go, Toughie would find each and every one of us. Toughie could climb a fence as fast as any of us, but he could not get up the trees, or onto roofs. If someone were in a tree, he’d run around the base looking straight up barking his find.

 

In a day before tape recorders, when records were “78’s” (those mysterious black plastic platters with a single small hole in the middle), new neighbors moved in behind us. We shared a substantial six-foot wooden fence that separated our backyard from the folks that now lived behind us. I was warned several times not to climb the back fence. Our new neighbors had been firm about this issue in discussions with my parents. Well, as it turned out, the new back neighbors had brought with them a talking Mina bird. It lived outside in a large cage surrounded by plants. Even if we had known they had a Mina bird, it would have meant nothing to us kids. The only talking bird we had ever heard of was a parrot, and none of the local kids had ever seen such a rare thing. And, of course, in our worldview, talking parrots were pretty much associated with pirates, and we really weren’t even sure they were real.

 

Every day, morning, and night, when I went out to feed my dog, I would simply call out “here Toughie, here Toughie” and lo and behold he would come racing around to greet me from wherever he had been hanging out. If he didn’t show in the first couple of minutes, I would climb the backyard Elm tree, and yell the same refrain at the top of my lungs. Tuned to my voice, and because we lived in a quiet residential neighborhood, he could hear me from blocks around. One day while playing “ditch Toughie” I was high up in the Elm tree when I heard myself calling the dog. Toughie raced around the house and began jumping at the backyard fence, thinking I was on the other side. That was weird! For the life of me I could not figure out what was going on. It was surely my voice that had called the dog. But I was in the tree. Who was playing this trick?

 

Toughie finally managed to scramble over the fence and got trapped in the neighbor’s backyard. Now this was not a yard I felt comfortable in. The mysterious people that had bought the house didn’t have kids and were rarely seen by anyone on my block because the front of their house faced out on the next street to the north. My paper routes began on my block and covered areas south and west, so as strange as it seemed, I was unfamiliar with the place right behind me. At least, since the new folks had moved in and started changing everything. There had been a time when the kid who lived behind me was also a paper-boy, and we knew each other and did some things together, but the new owners had really changed the place. They built this over-sized fence, and built on to their house, then planted their backyard so it looked more like a jungle than a normal yard. It was spooky. Yes, of course, that hadn't kept me from climbing the back fence a few times, but I was afraid to drop down into their weird-looking yard for fear I could not get out quickly if I needed to. I had just walked around the top of the fence, endeavoring to keep my balance while snooping around.

 

There were dark places in the neighbor's backyard; places I could not see clearly. More than once, I heard strange sounds, and thought someone was hiding there lurking in the shadows. Toughie was yelping, and making a racket, trying unsuccessfully to climb back over the fence. He was scratching the dark, stained wood, and I knew that either way I was going to be in trouble. With some trepidation I re-climbed the fence, jumped down, and looked around nervously. A rustle in the shadows caught my immediate attention.

 

Yellow eyes were staring out at me. Black wings flapped with agitation. It was creepy. The bird was deep in the shadows. It looked demonic. I grabbed Toughie and launched him over the fence. Then I scrambled up to straddle the top and look back. The bird began screeching out, “here Toughie, here Toughie.” What a shock. I simply could not believe it. A bird was calling my dog. And, Toughie, who was hard to fake-out, was buying into it completely. This was a true wonder, and nothing I had ever supposed was possible. This single event kept coming up in my thinking. I puzzled over this newfound knowledge. It stretched my worldview. It made me question everything I thought I knew.

 

For several years, it took much of my paper route money to keep Toughie alive. He was run over by cars, four times in as many years. Each time, it was while I was delivering papers. At one point, he was dragged under a car, until the driver stopped. The man driving was nice enough to help me pull him out. It wasn’t the driver’s fault. It never was. Toughie just ran and ran. He would dart between cars, running back and forth, apparently with no thought of danger. This time, I was sure he would not survive, but I collected him in my arms and carried his limp bleeding body home on my bike. I begged my mother to take him to a Vet. My father said no. My mother gave in eventually, but not without price. My father was furious. He flatly declared he would not pay a cent to help. Toughie was on life support for several days…it was incredibly hard. It cost me over $400, an unbelievable sum at the time. It was as much as many families made in two months. Toughie turned out to be true to his name. He bounced back. His life was all about being the paper dog.

A Kid’s Life

 

From perhaps age 7 though 12, I was frequently restricted to my room to study. It was here that I discovered the joys of having a book open in the desk drawer, my back to my bedroom door, whilst appearing to study a boring text of some kind on the top of my desk. My memory of these years swirl around classroom incidents, long warm summers, delivering papers, the slingshot and BB gun wars, archery, NRA rifle competition, dance lessons with some kids who would become famous as the Mickey Mouse Club. I also have powerful memories of sneaking out of church on Sundays to roam downtown Long Beach, while my mother sat in the choir with her glasses off, unable to see to the back of the church. Deep-sea fishing taught me much, as did a couple of family reunions in Oklahoma and Texas. I remember running away from home several times, each time eventually caught. Sneaking out through my bedroom window to explore the world late at night was a favorite activity. My desire to learn and explore seemed to underlie most of what I endeavored to do.

 

Shirley Nored Neal was my mother. Her middle name was formerly her last name. She was a second-grade schoolteacher. She taught in the Norwalk-LaMirada school district. It might as well have been in another State as far as I was concerned. It was a long way for mom to get to work as there was no public transportation in that direction. She had to drive. Once when I asked my mom why she didn’t teach in Long Beach, considerably closer to home, she told me it had something to do with my father being a teacher in our area. Apparently, during that era, husbands and wives were not allowed to teach in the same district.

 

At the close of World War II, both my parents were officers in the military. Neither had ever even been through boot camp. It seems that because they were both college-educated, and because the military needed educators to train pilots who were already second lieutenants, they were inducted as officers of higher rank. This allowed them to be appropriately respected in the classroom. Both my parents taught meteorology and aeronautics to new pilot trainees. Curiously, neither of them had ever been in the air.

 

I suppose it was partially caused by the war, but for whatever reason, my mother was unusually independent for a woman of the late nineteen-forties and early fifties, and she had her own car. Both played a critical part in my upbringing.

 

My mother, father, older sister, and I, lived in a middle-class neighborhood of block homes that sprang up just prior to the close of World War II. These housing developments were launched all around the Long Beach airport, which at that time was the home of Douglas Aircraft. Douglas Aircraft would later become McDonald Douglas. My folks paid less than $4,000 for their brand-new home the year before I was born. By the time I was in my forties, the same house would be appraised for over 100 times the amount originally paid. Later, it would be valued at 200 times its original purchase price. An interesting commentary on appreciation and inflation.

 It was in these neighborhoods around the Long Beach airport that my paper routes were laid out. I learned a lot about business, personal organization, and hard work from operating paper routes, but probably more significant to my future, I acquired a level of self-determination not often found in young men my age raised in a middle-class neighborhood in the suburbs.

Dad

My father and I did not get along. When I was around the house, and my dad was home, things were stressful or worse. Having been raised on a farm in the Great Depression he did not believe it was good for a young man to have free time. He was convinced that if I was not gainfully employed that I must be studying or doing jobs around the house. At an early age my father restricted my time with friends from playing games like kick ball, capture the flag, baseball, and other boyhood pastimes, and began to assign me home study work so that, in his words, “you can amount to something someday.” When crossed, he could become quite angry. I lived in terror of his presence most of my youthful years.

Sick

 

My father was eight years older than my mother. He never appeared to be happy, and probably wasn’t much of the time. In retrospect, that must not be altogether true, but I was to discover in my late teens that he had had cancer for many years, so I assume he rarely felt well. My family did not discuss such things. When my mother lost both her breasts to cancer, I was not told. She just left the house and was gone for ten days. She returned looking weak and sick. There were no discussions. Nothing was said.

 

Eventually, I discovered something was seriously wrong with my mom quite by accident. My parent’s slept in separate rooms. Mom's bedroom was also the passage to our den. Not knowing she was there, I walked into her bedroom unannounced, to discover her undressed from the waist up, standing in front of a mirror. The scars were horrible. Her body looked like something right out of a monster movie. Mom pulled some kind of corset-looking affair in front of her. I left the room shocked and embarrassed. We never spoke of it. We both acted as if it had never happened. Sometime later, I got up the nerve to ask my older sister what happened to mom. Sis told me in hushed tones that mom's breasts had been removed because of cancer. That was it…a new word…cancer. Cancer was an embarrassing illness in those days. People did not speak of it.

Oklahoma

 

Of one thing I am fairly sure; my father did not want another child when I was born. It was obvious that I was more than just a nuisance to him. Of course, my father did not like kids in general, a sad state of affairs for a eighth grade school teacher. It’s rather odd, but I knew nothing about my father until I spent the summer between the 10th and 11th grades in the Oklahoma panhandle. I was sent there ostensibly to help my father’s mother, my grandmother, after a tornado struck and damaged the family barn and other outbuildings. But why I was really there was because my parents wanted to get me away from my girl friend, Maureen. Now, admittedly, it was probably a wise decision on the part of my parents, or at least a rational one. However, the separation simply served to make my feelings for her more intense. We were married two years later in any event. So, I would turn sixteen in Oklahoma, whilst learning to buck hay, chop cotton, brand cattle, and drain irrigation ponds. The latter, we did to kill snakes. The snakes we were after were called Water Moccasins; a variety of swimming rattlesnake sometimes called a Cotton Mouth.

 

My father's father, my grandfather, had been blinded in one eye, and almost blinded in the other. Some coffee grounds had exploded into his face from a pot on a wood-burning stove. I thought it interesting that grandfather was born in a sod house in Kansas Territory before statehood. He never had a birth certificate. He died a few years before my being shipped off to Oklahoma.

 

As my grandmother told the story, my father had earned a scholarship to MIT as a young man, but the depression was then in full force, and dad was needed on the family farm. She observed sadly that it seemed he never got over it. Perhaps this explained his unhappy disposition, but I still couldn’t understand why he disliked me so much.

 

I learned that my father attended Oklahoma A & M for a year, then worked on the farm for two, then back to college for a year, then two on the farm until he finally graduated. His Master’s thesis was on the fallacy of the IQ test. I remember how surprised I was to find a tattered old black and white photo of my father in a wrestling singleton. My grandmother told me he was the four-state college champion in his weight class, which probably explained the “nature” of my skills at the same sport as well as those of my sons. It certainly wasn’t a “nurtured,” condition, as my father did not encourage athletics, which is why it came as such a surprise to discover he had been good at it. In retrospect it must be a gene-pool proclivity thing, as my oldest son Michael was also a wrestling champion and my son David was a natural wrestler but wasn’t interested in pursuing it.

 

My parents evidently met sometime after my mom had graduated from the University of Texas. She was posted to a teaching assignment in a school district where my father was then the superintendent. I’d heard a couple of different versions of how they met from relatives, so I sent an email to my sister asking her what else she knew about our parents’ early childhood. She responded, “I know as little as you, because I really never thought that adults had a childhood.”

Sis

 

When I was about ten or eleven, I noticed that my sister Sherry, who would then have been sixteen to seventeen, was actually very attractive. It was normal to hear that she was close to perfection, but that was because she was a good student, always the head of her class, talented in so many ways, and because unlike me, she didn’t seem to cause my folks any grief. The comment, “why can’t you be more like your sister,” was never far from my parent’s lips.

Now, Sherry was okay, more than okay, but I never thought of her as a friend until she started having girls over to visit. Wow! All of sudden I realized my sister was very cool. She had a memorable slumber party once, but only once. It was incredible. All these beautiful girls romping around in their underwear, laughing, throwing stuff at each other, constant chatter, all the while practicing their flirting skills on Sherry’s little brother. (That would be me.) Sis tried to run me off several times, but a couple of her friends kept saying I was “soooo cute,” so she ended up letting me hang around. I fell totally in love with the whole bunch of them.

 

Sherry's slumber party turned out to be quite a physical evening. I got dog piled on after a wicked pillow fight, rolled off the edge of the bed where I got stuck between the wall and the bed with one girl under me and one on top. It was exciting, but I couldn’t breathe for a while, and almost passed out.

 

By the time Sherry was in college, a year ahead of her peers, she had a constant stream of would-be suitors. They were not allowed in the house. She would visit with them at the curb in front of our quiet residential home. One day, a young man in the military was hanging around outside hoping to see Sherry. She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, come out. I remember my parent’s giving her the third-degree about where she had met this guy, and why he was at our house to see her?

 

It was rather refreshing to have my sister be the center of negative attention for a change. All of eleven years old, I was way impressed with the guy in the front yard; especially his uniform. I headed out to the curb to find out what the big deal was with an army guy coming to our house. Frankly, I thought it was cool. The army guy seemed to have nothing better to do than wait to see if Sherry would come out. While he waited, he began to teach me some things about cars. The most amazing thing I learned was you could hotwire a car with a piece of tin foil. He told me a lot of things, but this one thing stuck in my mind. To begin with, I didn’t believe he could do it. Then he took the foil wrapper off the top of his pack of cigarettes and started my sister’s car with it. Now that was impressive!

Rape

When I turned eleven years old, I joined the Boy Scouts. Most of the scout troops at that time seemed to be associated with a church organization. Many of my friends were scouts, and I felt as though I was missing something. The Baptist church I attended with my mother did not sponsor a scout troop. I joined one at a Lutheran church. A month, or more into my initial scout activities, the assistant scout master, an Army recruiter, offered to take a couple of friends and me, to the Saturday late afternoon matinee, at the Lakewood Theatre.

 

The theatre was located on the northeast corner of Lakewood Blvd and Bellflower Blvd. Although it was not more than a mile and a half from my home, to get there required crossing through a tree farm and archery area (a large park today), then skirting the Long Beach City College campus, and crossing a major highway. I went to the Lakewood Theatre whenever I could, after all, it only cost ten cents, but my folks wisely insisted that I go with my older sister, or a group of friends, and only if we were taken and picked up, by their parents.

 

It was dark by the time we finished two cartoons, and both movies. My friend's parents picked them up from the theatre. The assistant scout master said he would walk me home. When we cut through the nursery, I was suddenly dragged down between rows of plants. A knife came out and was held tightly against my throat. I cried out. His hand went over my mouth, and I thought I would die of suffocation. I was raped. I bled. I was threatened to never tell. I became physically sick. I was afraid, disgusted, and deeply ashamed. When I refused to attend the next scout meeting, my father got angry, yelling that I never finished what I started, and things to that affect. I refused to go. I was placed on restriction.

 

Eventually my shame and fear were forced to the background. One day, as I was returning from delivering papers, the offending scout leader was standing at my front door talking with my father. All the fear came crashing back. I refused to come in the house, even when my father yelled for me. When he came out to find out why I was not responding, I told him I still had my trash chores to do. It mollified him, but he insisted I come with him to talk with my scout leader.

 

My father didn't have a clue. He mistook my reluctance as embarrassment because I was not attending scouts as promised. I stood beside them while the scout leader told my father all the reasons I should be attending regularly. Then, the most amazing thing happened. The scout leader materialized a 22-caliber rifle from a gun case. He told my father it was time I learned proper gun handling, and that he would get me enrolled in the NRA. And, if I would return to scouts, the rifle was mine.

 

Predators are a very dangerous lot. Somehow, they know how to put their victims in such a bind that they can't find a way to extract themselves without going public. Going public was an impossibility in the mid 1950's. I was certain no one would believe me. Worse, I was afraid for anyone to know.

 

I attended scouts off and on for another month or so. I hated it and lived in constant fear. I was careful to never be alone, and hyper-alert to dangerous situations. I felt entirely boxed in. My dad would not let me quit scouts. I did join the NRA. Thankfully, the men teaching these classes were cut from different cloth.

 

A few weeks later I went on a scout camp-out. Three men went with the boys. I assumed I would be safe because there would be other leaders present. During the night, I heard two other scouts being abused. It was the other men. They were friends of the assistant scout leader. I felt helpless, and miserably ashamed, especially for the whimpering scouts. I moved off into the trees and hid. I shook in my sleeping bag all night, terrified I would be next. I had the crazy belief they would kill us all. I was passed over that night. Either that or they simply couldn't find me. At daylight, none of the scouts would look each other in the eye. I never went to another scout meeting.

 

NRA rifle competition was my escape for a time. I could ride my bicycle to the shooting range. I was so busy winning medals and patches my father didn't seem to notice I wasn't going to scouts any longer.

 

It took me many years to recognize why I so distrust powerful authority figures. Allowing these experiences to resurface, and facing them as an adult, has been a revelation to me.

Borrowing the Car

 

By age twelve I was “borrowing” my sister’s car. I would leave late at night, crawling out my bedroom window then pushing Sherry's car down the street and around the corner before hotwiring it. I drove all over, exploring the world outside the local neighborhoods. One night I drove to the point I got thoroughly lost and then ran out of gas. I managed to get some gas but didn't make it back until after Sherry was trying to leave for her college classes in the morning. As I drove down our cul-de-sac, to turn around and park at the curb in front of our house, both my parents, and my sister, were standing on the lawn waiting for the police to arrive. Wow, did I catch hell! Looking back on this event, it was a turning point in my life. It marked the transition from youth to teen, a tumultuous change at best.

 

Sherry went on to become a teacher, like both of our parents. She suffered through two masters’ programs and two doctoral programs. She was the perfect child for parents like ours. By the time I was in high school, Sherry had become the best sister a little brother could hope for. She was then, and still is, thoughtful, kind, smart, and has always been there for me. In the world outside of family, Sherry is known for many accomplishments. In addition to being a former first-rate schoolteacher, she is known for her sell-out classes on various college campuses. She is an accomplished public speaker; she has authored numerous books, and for a time, she was a regular guest on talk radio and some television programs.

Fishing

Life was simply more pleasant growing up when I was away from home. It was hard to get away for anything other than gainful employment, so I sold greeting cards, then graduated to mowing neighbor’s lawns with a push mower, then to delivering papers. Finally, by thirteen, I was working summers at Pierpoint Landing on the “all day boats,” which left at either 12am or 2am for Catalina Island, and beyond. Local fisherman would buy a ticket on one these offshore fishing boats, hoping to catch larger fish not available by fishing from the beach, or off the piers. Depending on the size of the boat I was working, and the way the fish were supposed to be hitting, there would be from 30 to 60 paying customers on board.

 

The boats went out for twelve to fourteen hours a day, getting back between 2pm to 4pm. It was important for me to get on the 12am boat - returning at 2pm. At this point, I still had two afternoon Press-Telegram paper routes to handle. These were the premier routes for a newspaper boy living in Long Beach, CA. I did not want to lose these two routes; they were very valuable. So, I continued to deliver papers daily after riding my bike 11 miles home from Pierpoint Landing, on top of having been up much of the night before and fishing all day. Thankfully, the Press routes were only a few blocks long. Notwithstanding, they still had up to a hundred paying customers each.

 

When the fish boat pulled away from the docks at midnight, the first job was to motor out to the “bait boat” to fill the seawater circulating bait tanks with Anchovies. After "baiting up," it was a five-to-six-hour trip to the first fishing area at Catalina. This is when I could get some sleep, provided the sea wasn’t too rough, or the night too cold. Out on the ocean in the middle of the night, it is almost always cold, even off the coast of sunny Southern California.

 

Some nights it was excruciatingly cold, or the water was splashing over the sides such that I could not lie on the decks to sleep. At these times, I would try to crowd into where the fishermen drank coffee or beer, smoked, and told stories, while trying to keep their minds off getting seasick. There was rarely room for me to sit on a seat inside the boat, and usually most of the floor space inside was packed with gear and guys propped against the bulkheads. Finding a place to camp out while we crossed the channel was always a chore. Many times, I was jarred awake by someone pounding on the toilet room door where I had gone to be warm, and accidentally fallen asleep.

 

For a young man there was money to be made in fishing, if you did it right. I almost always had a large catch, and most times, I was able to sell my fish. But, in truth, the reason I was fishing had little to do with money. I was out there, doing exciting things, being independent, walking with a swagger.

 

Personally, I rarely fished with bait. My specialty was lures of all kinds. I learned to make my own “candy-bars” in sand molds with poured lead, but mostly, I preferred flashers, spoons, feathers, and the like. I had a talent for picking the right lures for the right fish, and I was careful to keep my gear set-up so I could quickly switch lures as needed.

 

There was always a “jackpot” on the boat, which went to the fisherman lucky enough to catch the heaviest fish --- and for which I had earned a reputation for wining. One day, I hit a double jack, which gave me enough money for another rod, reel, 9 to 1 ratio, and a bunch of specialty gear I had been coveting. Eventually, my deal with the crew was that three-fourths of the kitty went to them when I won, which bought me a promise of never again paying to fish from the offshore boats.

Selling Fish

 

Throughout two summers I was out on the ocean fishing four to five days a week. Overall, I was insanely lucky. Much of the fish I was able to quietly sell to others while still on the boat, during the return ride to Long Beach. I would size up the men who had not caught much, primarily because they were drinking beer, seasick, or just didn't know what they were doing. There was rarely a woman on board. These men frequently wanted something to take home to show for their having spent the money for an offshore fishing adventure. I would offer them the pick of my catch for pennies on the dollar of what it would cost to buy fish at the market.

 

The saleable fish were Yellow-tailed tuna, Albacore tuna, Barracuda 30” or longer, large Bonita, Halibut, Rock Cod, White and Black Sea Bass, (Grouper) and the larger variety of Calico Bass. Tommy cod, Herring, Sheephead, Sculpin, Mackerel, Shark, and various forms of white fish, were all considered trash fish, in those days. Most of my saleable catch was comprised of 2 feet or longer, Bonita, good-sized Bass, 3 foot and over logger-Cudas, also called Scooters, which are larger Barracuda, (smaller Cudas were referred to as Pencils). No one would buy small bass, even though they are quite tasty, simply because they could catch them all day long off the fishing piers.

 

When the fishing was good and there were no buyers on board, I would sell fish through the backdoor of one of the three Pierpoint Landing restaurants. But they didn’t want Scooters or Bonita. When this didn’t work, or I still had fish to sell, I would haul my catch in one, or more, large potato sacks to my bike. Whilst balancing my surplus catch on my bike rack, I would cycle across the landing to where guys were fishing off the shipping docks. Most of the time, I could unload the rest of my catch to the dock fishers. My strategy was simple. I just kept reducing the price per fish until they couldn’t resist. Twice I got busted for selling fish without a commercial fishing license. The Fish and Game warden threatened to take my bike, rods, reels, and tackle if I didn’t quit selling fish.

 

A few times I found myself with a lot of fish and no buyers. I was pretty certain I could unload the fish at Belmont Pier; about five miles away, where dozens of guys were always trying to catch something. The problem was how to haul all my gear, plus bags of fish, on a bicycle. Even a large heavy paper-bike like mine, with a large front-mounted basket and a rear-mounted rack, could not easily handle large bags of fish.

To get my gear from home to Pierpont Landing and back was a struggle. I carried three long, heavy-duty rods, strapped along the right side of the frame of my bike with the butts over the rear wheel and the tips projecting beyond the front wheel. My paper bags were mounted over the rear rack. In the left bag was my tackle box; in the right, I carried three heavy-duty Penn fishing reels. It was awkward pedaling without scrapping the rods strapped along the center support that passed right under the seat. The paper-bags did a good job of holding tackle and reels provided the weight was balanced, but when you added a large bag, or bags, of fish to the equation, and a tired young fisherman doing the pedaling; it became an extremely difficult problem.

 

The times I went to Belmont Pier to sell fish, still stand out in my mind. My arms were killing me from balancing bags on the front basket and the top of the rear rack. Thankfully, I could ride a bike easily without using my hands to steer, but the constantly shifting weight of large fish in sacks just about did me in. I don’t think I ever made it there without having to stop several times, prop my bike against a telephone pole, or some such, put the fish sacks on the ground, and let the blood return to my arms. Each time I got to Belmont Pier it was a sell-out. The money I got was at least twice as much as I was getting at the Pierpoint docks, but the trip was killing me. And it made me late getting home to deliver papers.

Running Away

From my earliest childhood there was stress between my father and me. In the 8th grade, in the second half of the school year, I left home again. The breaking point this time was an embarrassing incident at school. When suiting up for gym class, someone reported the angry bruises that covered my back and legs, earned from a belt whipping from my father. I was called in to see a school counselor who probed me repeatedly on what had happened. I acted dumb and said I didn’t know what she was talking about.

 

Child abuse was not an open subject in those days, and I was deeply embarrassed when the subject was raised. I did not know how bad my back looked when uncovered. The pain was gone, and I had largely suppressed the event, but now, called into the administration building to see a counselor, I was riddled with shame and embarrassment. To have someone from school questioning my behavior at home was very unnerving. Eventually the counselor had me take off my shirt and look into reversed mirrors to see my back. It was bad. I had no idea how awful it must have looked to others. I admitted that my father had used a belt and buckle on me. That’s when everything got worse.

 

I thought the incident was over when I left school, but when I got home my father was there ahead of me. The school counselor had called the district superintendent’s office because my father was a teacher at another junior high school in the same district. They had called him about my condition. He was fuming mad. I was terrified.

 

Seeing no way out of a miserable situation, I determined to leave. Over the next week, I carefully planted disinformation at school when talking with friends about where I would go and how I would get there. I knew that if I were successful at getting away, and stayed gone for a time, that my friends would eventually give-in and tell all. I quit the last of my paper routes, easily finding someone who wanted my cash cow. This angered my father no end. But I was determined that my planned leaving was not going to hang out my paper customers, many of which had been particularly good to me over the years. The obvious place for me to go was Pierpoint Landing. There I could sleep on the beach and be gone on a midnight boat and off on a new fishing adventure every day.

 

Now, my dad really did not know me very well, but he certainly wasn’t dumb, and it would not take a genius to figure out where I felt appreciated. So, I told my friends, I was headed another direction, I can’t remember the story I made up, but it seemed logical at the time, and it worked…at least it worked for three full weeks.

 

I had my own sleeping bag, won from a “new starts” paper contest. However, I was to discover that sleeping on the beach, which earlier had seemed so glamorous, was dangerous. There are some real weirdoes out there. A young kid is asking for trouble sleeping on an empty beach. So, I figured out how to wedge myself in the jetty rocks, right close to where the boat landings were, and sleep in a sometimes-damp bag with crabs crawling across me. No one, not even the weirdoes, ventured down on the jetty rocks at night. It was really a hazardous place to be in the dark.

 

One of the restaurants at the dock allowed me to store my bike and leave my rods in their supply closet. Everyone at the landing knew I had run away. Most were helpful in small ways. It probably helped that I was ultra polite and careful to be helpful at every turn. The only thing I had to make sure of was to wake up by 11:00 PM each evening to catch the midnight boat. I missed once. That was so traumatizing I did not miss again.

 

Then one night it rained. This is not a common event in Long Beach, California, and it never occurred to me previously what I would do in this situation. It was too wet to stay outside, so I finally went into the “Mermen’s.” Mermen, was Pierpoint Landing’s public men’s restroom. I spread my bag on the floor near a row of sinks. I woke up sometime later knowing I was being watched. I opened my eyes to discover my father staring down at me. He simply motioned that I come. I got up and followed him to his car. The ride home was in silence. We never discussed my being gone three weeks during the school year. We simply never spoke. School was always numbingly easy. My having been gone hardly affected my grades. It was like it never happened…but it did.

The Fight

Sometime later, the worst event of my life, to that point, took place. It was a pleasant Saturday morning. My father told me to cut the grass, edge the sidewalk, and clean the front yard. I did. An hour or so later he was backing down the driveway when he saw two newspapers on our front yard. Someone had come by after I had cleaned the yard up and thrown a couple of the ubiquitous free weekly advertisements on the grass. This was a normal occurrence on Saturdays where we lived. Dad was furious that I had not picked them up earlier. Of course, they weren’t there earlier, or I could not have cut the grass in the first place. Nevertheless, he was so angry at my “slovenly” attitude that he raced the car back into the driveway, stormed into the house red-faced, flung open my bedroom door and marched right up to me shouting insults with clenched fists.

 

I remember wondering if I had the guts to hit him before he hit me. The next thing I knew my father was lying on the floor. I realized he didn’t get there by himself. Panic struck. I was terrified he’d get up and beat me. Something snapped inside. I jumped on him with no other thought than to keep him from getting up and hurting me. Evidently, I lost all control and began to scream obscenities. My mother came in and tried to pull me off. Much, much later, my mother was to tell me she could not stop me from hitting him again and again. I guess it was bad. I broke his jaw and cracked several of his ribs. He was in the hospital for days. As strange as it sounds, I did not then, nor do I now, remember ever hitting my father. I only remember wondering if I had the guts to do it. Most of what I know about this event is what my mother would eventually tell me.

High School

The summer of my fourteenth year, when I turned fifteen, was the last I fished for money. When sixteen, I bought a truck, a power mower, and a power edger. I started a landscaping business, Neal's Lawn Service. As I look back on this period of my life, I seemed to do just about anything I could to be out of the house and involved in the world --- and it showed.

 

Eventually, and true or not, I thought myself wise, and was bored silly with most normal teenage activities by the time I could drive. In my mind I was simply to mature to get my head into the normal high school stuff that seemed to obsess most of the kids my age. My father had denied me much of childhood, and programmed as I was, I continued and denied myself of a lot of the social experiences swirling around school activities and the like. On the other hand, I had a lot of confidence, and held myself aloof from many of the things that seemed to get others hurt. Typical high school stuff was all just too silly and unimportant. I knew how to make money, and I thought I knew how to make my way in the world.

 

Not really a loner, but generally comfortable by myself, or in doing things that other teenager’s thought were way beyond the pale, I somehow garnered a following of mesmerized teens seeking a defacto leader. I became a spokesperson of sorts. Ultimately, however, I allowed their opinions to carry too much weight. I found myself doing increasingly unusual things to maintain a reputation for being confident, independent, and unpredictable.

 

I was elected president of Zeta Phi, a High School feeder fraternity to the local college while still in the tenth grade. Presidents of frats were usually seniors. Years later, the State of California would outlaw High School fraternities due to a multiple hazing incidents. In my day, they were all the rage, and a big deal.

Bomb Scare

My sister and I grew up during the insecure time of monthly air raid drills, and long lectures about the devastation that would be experienced during the coming atomic war with the Russians. We were all made painfully aware that Douglas Aircraft was the number one target for an A-bomb on the West Coast of the United States. We were taught to be on the constant look-out for a blinding flash in the sky and trained on how we were to respond. This carefully instilled paranoia eventually gave rise to the bomb shelter craze of a few years later. This phenomenon came on the heels of the Soviets detonating their first Hydrogen Bomb. One we were told that was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. These two bombs brought a speedy end to World War II in the Pacifica.

 

In looking back at the wide held believe that many of us would never make it to adulthood, or at best not live much longer than that, it's no wonder the sixties erupted with such self-possessed fury. I grew up while we were fighting a war in Korea, and alternatively afraid of the Chinese and the Russians. In our high school years, our country was providing advisors to Vietnam and by the time I was seventeen, friends were dying there. Most of us didn’t believe we had much time. So, as in other periods leading up to and during wars, many thought they needed to grab as much living as they could, right up front.

Risky Business

Height seemed to escape me until about sixteen when I jumped up to 5’11”, never to grow taller. In 11th grade I discovered weightlifting. I bulked up and felt manly. I broke my high school, timed record, in both sit-ups and push-ups. My gift, however, was gab. Quick, talkative, and ego-driven, I could move friends and foe alike, to do almost anything. It drove my teachers nuts, but it earned me a certain popularity with the less self-possessed, who were all to frequently looking for a star to hitch themselves to. Besides, I had a car. In fact, by sixteen, I had three cars and a pick-up. I had graduated from paper routes to my own lawn service by this time, and my old International pick-up held the latest and greatest in lawn equipment. And, I still had Toughie.

 

Toughie no longer had paper routes to run. He seemed confused and somewhat lost, until a female dog anywhere within a couple of miles came into heat. Then he was off and running, doing his doggie best to act out his part in producing little mongrels from pure bred pampered females. I could never figure out how he did it, but I cannot count how many times an angry dog owner was ready to kill him for coupling with their pure-bred dainties. Because everyone in our side of town seemed to know Toughie, and the kid who used to deliver all those newspapers, this became increasingly problematic.

 

When I was about ten, a grown man, who lived four blocks away, just across from the archery range, which is now a park, rammed my bicycle with his car because he was so angry that somehow my dog had managed to climb his concrete block fence and score his little Lady. He knocked me right over a curb and bent the front wheel so bad I had to carry my bike home. He was angry, and shouted and cursed a lot, but I was just a kid when this happened, and I couldn’t really figure out what it was all about. Sex education was just then coming in vogue. I hadn’t got it all put together yet. In a few cases Toughie was shot at by angry dog owners.

Shot At

I had a similar experience once, but it wasn’t because of a dog in heat. It was about a vamp of a girl that lived five blocks away. I really didn’t know her well, and then only by her nickname, which wasn’t very nice, but on a dare from some friends I knocked on her window one night and woke her up. I guess “daddy” heard us talking through the window at about 2 AM, and right when he opened her bedroom door to check things out, she was helping pull me over the sill and into her room. He yelled and reached for the light switch. I immediately fell back into the bushes and ran down the street the opposite direction from my home. He ran out the front door and around the house. He had a gun. I never knew whether he meant to shoot me, but fire the gun he did, which scared me badly and woke up the whole neighborhood. Sometime later, after I had managed to circumnavigate my way home and sneak back through my own window, the police showed up and had my mom get me out of bed for questioning.

 

I stuck to my story of being asleep until the police asked my mother to leave the room. Without showing any mercy at all, they told me I was busted big-time as they got the whole scoop from the young lady who crumbled under their interrogation. The police told me they would let me off if I would simply admit I had been the guy in the window otherwise the father would not be released from his temporary custody for discharging a firearm inside the city limits. I confessed, my mom was crushed, and my older sister finally decided I was cool. In one week, everyone in our end of town was calling me Casanova, or some just derivative, a reputation I was not to lose for some time.

 

About the same time Toughie was off on what I presume was another of his romantic forays, he never returned. I suppose that someone finally did him in. This probably should have had a sobering effect on me, but somehow the point was lost. I was, by now, held captive by my own hormones. Which brings to mind, what Maureen has been saying for years: "Men are handicapped by their hormones, and there design system is faulty. There’s not enough blood in a man to operate his brain, and his groin, at the same time." She makes a point.

First Cars

I got my first car, a 1950 Ford flathead with a column stick shift, from a deal made with my mom. She owned the car but was trying to buy an almost new Buick Roadmaster. I wasn’t yet sixteen, but would be soon, and I was doing well selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. The car was a gutless wonder. I managed early on to throw a rod trying to make it go faster than it should. The problem was exacerbated by the fact I was a new driver with limited knowledge about cars and had not kept track of the oil level. Before I even got my driver’s license, I bought a 1955 Ford Fairlane. It was a lot better looking, but it had a bad oil leak and a host of other maladies. These problems caused me to buy another 1955 Ford as a source of parts for the first. The International pick-up, with an on-the-floor stick shift with grandma low came next. I bought this to haul my law equipment. I paid for the old used truck with just one complete lawn renovation.

 

A couple of years later I was to get, and sorta-kinda build, the hottest car on the road. At least that was my opinion. It was a two-seater, 1955 Thunderbird roadster. It was a very cool car indeed. By this time, I was into building racing engines and dropped a 312-cc engine. which I bored-out one hundred thousandths, raising the cubic centimeters to 352. I installed a ¾ race cam, with three two-barrel carburetors, into my little two-seater wonder. Later I would replace the three duals with dual quads, AFB series E, with throats the size of beer cans. (Soda pop wasn’t sold in cans in those days. And for the record, I did not drink beer, or any kind of alcohol and in fact couldn’t stand the stuff.) My T-bird was a very fast car that managed to get me into trouble more than once, but that is another story, and I’m getting ahead of myself.

Fate

Generally, not more than one or two of my vehicles were operating at the same time, but they, coupled with “clever” sarcasm and my greased-back duck tail, earned me more popularity than was healthy. But, prior to cars and bulk, I met the lovely red headed Irish colleen, Maureen Gail Donnelly. Much later I was to discover that her hair was not red, it was brown, which I came to prefer, although much of our later life she presented herself as a blond. Blonds were in vogue in the early sixties, after a voluptuous Marylin Monroe gyrated her way to stardom in the movie “Gentlemen Prefer Blonds.” Personally, I was smitten with Marylin’s busty rival, Jane Mansfield, who played opposite John Wayne in the movie “Charge at Feather River.” This was one of the first-ever movies in 3-D.

It was just a couple of months after the tormenting summer of mysterious dreams that on November 10, 1961, I went to a high school football game that changed my life forever. Now California was very aware of itself in those days. Everything we did eventually became the trend for the rest of the country, or so we believed. In Long Beach we had large high schools with fraternities and sororities that served as feeder clubs to their college affiliates. My high school was solid middle to upper-middle class. Ours was a high school where authority was respected and obeyed. There was no observable segregation; we just lived in a vanilla environment that lacked cultural diversity and color.

 

In 1961 we were told that Lakewood High had the largest enrollment of any three-year high school in the nation. There were about 5,200 students in our school, while our sister high school, build from the same exact construction plans but a few years earlier, and just a couple of miles away, was our main rival boasting about 4,600 students. As a lowly high school sophomore, I was already in Zeta Phi, one of four fraternities on campus. And I knew I was cool.

 

In early October of 1961, I found myself camped out with about twenty frat brothers on a long bench in the high school football stadium when I spotted two young ladies with Tom Steward, a Zeta Phi pledge, sitting on the bench directly below. Strengthen by pack mentality, I quietly asked the pledge what the deal was with him having two girls. He replied they were school friends from his Junior High. (At least four, and perhaps five, Junior Highs, what many refer to as Middle Schools today, fed the large student body of Lakewood High School.) Tom was either to embarrassed, or to concerned about pledging our fraternity, to admit that he had an interest in one of them.

 

Daring the frat brother beside me, we leaned down and each took hold of the opposite elbow and wrist of what I thought was the cuter of the two girls sitting below us. We lifted her up from where she was seated and deposited her between us. To say she was shocked would be something of a huge understatement. She slapped my frat brother full across the face and angrily climbed back down to where she formerly had been seated. Wow, I was smitten! And darned, if she didn’t look just like the girl in my dreams. From that day till this, when asked how I met my wife, I simply tell people I picked her up, which of course is literally true. I suppose I needn’t say how this makes my wife respond if she is anywhere within hearing range. It is an old joke with predictable reactions, but for some reason I can’t seem to resist pushing these buttons.

 

In my limited experience, guys, especially younger guys, can’t remember what girls were wearing ten minutes after they are gone, unless of course it was terribly revealing, and even then, they would rarely be able to tell you things about color coordination, shoes, or notice things like hair style changes, and the like. And frankly I may be even worse at this than the average male. But the funny thing is, I can still remember clearly what Maureen was wearing the night I met her. A sheer crème colored blouse with lacy lapels, yellow slacks, and a silver metal belt, with shoes to match her blouse, and a small clutch purse. The only thing missing was a rakish hat. I must confess, that women who wear hats well, are unusually attractive to me. Guess that came from watching all those flapper movies when I was young.

Maureen

Maureen Gail Donnelly was born on 31 March 1946 to Joseph Philip Donnelly, and Jane Ellen Dowling. She is the oldest of five children. Their names in order of age are Maureen, Michael, Marsha, Margaret (nicknamed Peggy at birth), and Laura.

 

Maureen was model slim, attractive, intelligent, and was the kind of girl that would look great in just about anything. She was quiet and demure but spoke volumes with her eyes. Her hair was red, set off by bright blue eyes. When she smiled the whole world seemed to light up. She was one of those rare young women who was genuinely lovely and simply did not seem to know it. Yet she was confident enough not to flirt overly much to garner validation. In retrospect, there is probably nothing more immature in life than a jealous teenager trying to stake his or her claim on another. Riddled with insecurities, most teenagers are overcome with jealousy at the drop of a hat, and many young ladies, once they realize the effect they have on men, become something akin to drunk on their own sensuality. This makes for dangerous circumstances.

 

The day after I met Maureen, I got her phone number though operator information and proceeded to turn on my charm. It was going well, and the following weekend I conned my sister, then 22, who was now out of college and teaching school, into picking her up so we could go swimming. We met at my sister’s apartment. It did not go well. In fact, it did not go well at all! Maureen was traumatized when my sister left (according to my unmentioned plan), leaving the two of us in an apartment in swimsuits, and alone. Maureen would literally not let me within ten feet of her. She was frightened. I was ashamed. My sister returned and took her home. I sat in the front seat. Maureen sat in the back. Our first date at fifteen was a total disaster.

 

The next Monday when I approached her in the hall of the 400 building at school, a friend of hers blocked my path and told me to get lost. Sue South was tough and outspoken. A few years later she was to become a manager for the musical team of Sonny & Cher, or at least that is what I recall. Maureen’s younger sister Peggy is quite certain that Sue was involved with the singer Roy Orbison. Who knows? But at this moment, we were all just fifteen and these soon-to-be-hot singers had not yet achieved stardom. Maureen was huddled in the middle of a group of girls refusing to look at me. None of this made any sense to me, and besides I was not used to being told off, especially by some outspoken chick, so I was probably flippant with Sue. I couldn’t understand why this loud-mouth bossy female was telling me that Maureen did not want to see me. What happened next, I’ve never forgotten.

Weird and Weirder

Sue demanded my name so she could report me to the principal’s office. I told her my name. She paused, then had a horrified look, then gasped, then ran back into the huddle of girls. I wasn’t sure what to think. Her reaction was so bizarre I was afraid she would tell somebody I’d hit her or something. It was a very odd at best.

 

Sue marched back and practically screamed at me. "Where did you hear that name?

 

Unnerved, and completely confused, I blurted out: "I don't know what you're talking about."

 

Again, she incredulously demanded where I’d heard the name before.

 “What name?” I demanded.

 “Terry Neal,” she shouted.

  “What do you mean where did I hear it, it’s my name.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she stated flatly.

 

Now this was a weird development. I can still remember the odd sensations I was going through. Why wouldn’t she believe me? What had she heard about me that caused her so much anxiety? Swamped in my own insecurity, I wondered if she thought I was some kind of a pervert or something. Several girls buzzed in a group protected by the pushy Sue South standing between us, with hands on her hips. She called out to a couple of guys I didn’t know and told them I was causing trouble. (Now, it may help to realize that this is just two months into my first year in high school, and the incoming freshman had come from a number of middle schools, so most of us did not know one another.)

 

Things started to get crazy. It looked like a fight was ready to break out. I simply did not know what was going on and was very upset. It was clear to everyone in that end of the building. I lost my cool, slugged a couple of lockers, and darn near broke by hand. Trying to redeem some face, I promised to leave Maureen to her group of protective girlfriends, but only if this wacko female would tell me what the problem with my name was. Sue responded, not believing I did not already know, and proceeded to tell me why it was so incredibly unfair of me to use the Terry Neal name. I was even more confused and still upset, but nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to hear.

 

Sue South, Dedrie Whitehurst, and Sue Schlinz were hovering around Maureen, at the end of the 400 Hall. At this point, I had not met any of Maureen’s friends. But I was to learn, that these four girls had all attended a late summer slumber party just before the school year began. Sworn to absolute secrecy, someone had introduced a Quija board, and the late-night question of the hour for the Quija board spirit was: “What is the name of the man Maureen will marry.”

 

Apparently, there were frightening overtones to the evening. The girls were all convinced that some kind of spirit had indeed attended their slumber party. They were also deeply concerned that their parents might find out what they had been doing. Ouija boards were considered somewhat demonic, so they took an oath to never tell, and proceeded to call on the Quigee spirit anyway. With all their fingers on the moving spelling device, it had spelled out my name. Or at least that’s the way it was reported to me. Frankly, I would have accused them of all smoking dope, except that stuff didn’t yet exist, or at least none of us had heard of such things in those days.

 

Sue seemed to think I’d already heard the story, and that it was not really my name, and that I was simply using it to put a girl off balance and take advantage of her. She also demanded I tell her who the ratfink was that had told me about their séance. This was all too incredible to believe. I gave it no credence whatsoever. But, then again, maybe I subconsciously did, and simply couldn’t bring myself to admit it. Clearly, I’ve not forgotten the incident. Well anyway, at that particular moment, I was too riddled with raging emotion to process this strange piece of input, having just barely escaped an all-out fist fight with some guys I didn’t even know. Further, I was worried my hand was broken from slugging steel lockers in frustration. So, what came immediately to mind was how to exit gracefully and get away from Sue South and her cronies. Obviously, they were raving lunatics. I was thoroughly mortified by the entire event.

Second Attempt

 

I did not see Maureen until the next Friday night’s football game. It was held at a rival High School where I saw her quite by accident. My first reaction was a flood of emotions spawned by the conflict with her friends. It was still a source of considerable embarrassment, so I was not in a rush to speak with her. Unfortunately, a couple of my buddies saw her too. They wondered out loud why I wasn’t down there doing my Cassanova thing. That’s the problem with reputations. For some reason, we feel inclined to live up to them. My frats believed the Casanova story, and it had been buttressed by my approach to Maureen in the bleachers the week before. They had seen the whole thing go down. When I did not immediately respond to my frat brothers, my status began to suffer. Their not-very-subtle harassment continued until I finally told them I was simply waiting for the right moment. They should be quiet and learn something.

 

Seeing no way out without losing face, I eventually tried to claim I wasn’t feeling well. That really wasn't a lie given the condition of my stomach’s reaction to the stress of the moment. I made the case to leave, but my ride wasn’t going anywhere. After spending a while watching Maureen from a few bleacher rows back, I noted she was in company with a couple of girls I had not yet met. These gals would not have seen me act like an idiot and probably wouldn’t be in the “run-interference mode,” so she was essentially vulnerable, and might not make a scene.

 

A combination of saving face, and the thrill of the hunt, eventually overcame timidity, and my queasy stomach. I determined to walk right up and act like everything was fine.

 

Maureen saw me coming from perhaps twenty feet away. She turned a crimson red. She was as embarrassed to see me, as I had been to see her. I came on strong. She looked everywhere but at me and kept mumbling she didn’t think it was a good idea that we see one another. Sensing an opening, I pressed on at a furious pace. She shrunk back like a frightened child. It finally dawned on me that she was afraid of me, not just put off, seriously afraid. I changed course mid-stream. I tried to make the leap to being the sensitive type. Maureen's courage returned. She told me to get lost and turned away. Oops…crash and burn.

 

Thankfully none of my fraternity brothers were near enough to hear what was going on. Nevertheless, her body language was clear. I swaggered back to my friends, trying to maintain the appearance of the guy in charge, but my gut was doing loop-the-loops. After giving the situation a little more thought, it occurred to me that the ice had been broken. After all, she had spoken with me, so I determined to accidentally run into her when she got up and left the bleachers to buy popcorn. I suppose one might call that stalking these days. I stomped down the bleachers, hoping she’d notice me. I tried a number of other, all-too-obvious moves. Each time I’d catch her eye I’d wave and act like we were on great terms. Finally, her natural tendency to be nice overcame her sense of threat, and she spoke to me.

 

Maureen and I did not address the building 400 fiasco. It was as embarrassing to her as it was to me. From my perspective (admittedly that of an immature young male), I didn’t know whether to be more humiliated about her girlfriends making me look stupid, or whether Maureen might think that the only reason I gave in to Sue South was because she had called on some other guys to threaten me. (A situation probably closer to the truth) Either way, it was not a scenario I wanted to replay. Besides, the Quigee board story was so far out of touch with anything in my reality, I couldn’t give it any credence whatsoever. It was dumb, it was weird, and it seemed a bit satanic. Thinking about it was just too unsettling. We avoided the subject, but we did become an item. And it wasn’t long before everyone knew we belonged to each other.

Fifteen

     

Things developed between us, and at just fifteen and before I could get a driver’s license, I would hitchhike to Maureen’s house and take long walks with her. And as corny as it sounds, I had a good singing voice and sang show tunes to her, when no one else was around. My favorite was Maria, from Westside Story. I replaced the name with Maureen.

Seventeen

 

Two years later, when seventeen, I was attending Long Beach City College full-time, except for a required physical education class I was forced to take at the high school. In those days, the citizens of the great State of California were insistent upon making certain its students were physically fit, having been embarrassed by the Army naming California’s young men as the least in shape persons entering the service. The state legislature passed a law that one could not graduate high school without having passed 6 years of physical education. Grades 7 through 12 required a mandatory gym class five days a week. The legal exceptions were if one was married, or over eighteen, and had been out of school for a minimum of one year. So, there I was, out of high school a year early and attending college but forced to go back every day to attend a gym class before I could get my high school diploma. Now this was to cause a lot more problems than one might imagine.

 

Harry Thompson, a fraternity brother of mine in Zeta Phi, got married halfway through his senior year to a gal named Peggy. It was on very short notice. At the time, I was still the president of our fraternity, and Harry asked me to be his best man. I accepted, having never been to a wedding in my life, and having no idea what to expect. Maureen went with me to the Polynesian hotel where a small service had been arranged. At the impromptu wedding, Peggy asked Maureen to be her Maid of Honor. I always assumed it was because Maureen looked so good dressed up, which at least she had had the foresight to do.

 

For Maureen and I, getting away together was problematic. Eighteen months earlier Maureen’s parents, and mine, had forbid us to see each other again. Both sets of parents were convinced, and rightfully so, that Maureen and I were getting way to involved with one another. Maureen’s mother was particularly vehement. She told me she carried a handgun in her purse and would shoot me in the groin if I ever contacted her daughter again. (In reality, her words were a lot more expressive.)

 

As noted earlier, my parents sent me off to Grandma Neal’s farm in the Oklahoma panhandle in late May of 1962. That was just two weeks before school was out. Considering my parents were both teachers, and I was being exported before year-end finals, it shouldn’t take great intuitive skills to realize how serious our parents viewed Maureen’s, and my, relationship. At the time, the plan was I would spend the summer on the farm and learn the value of real work --- something my father was convinced could never happened in a suburban neighborhood. Reluctantly, and for the most part, I admit he was right. Anyway, I was gone for over three months, during which time Maureen’s family purchased a new home, and moved to a different city and school district. A great deal more happened during my absence, but I was not to learn of this until much later.

 

Although Maureen was now living only about ten miles north of my parent’s home, about a hundred thousand people and considerably different cultural pathways, now separated us. There is much about the drama of the next few months I will save for another time but suffice it to say it is a book by itself. Nevertheless, I shall dare to sketch out a few broad strokes.

Lost Love

 

While I had been off to Oklahoma working, and then on to Texas for a family reunion, Maureen and I were able to exchange a couple of letters through Suzie Appleton, my attractive next-door neighbor, who thought our love affair was right out of a Shakespearian play. Once I returned from my tour of chopping cotton, bucking hay, and branding cattle (manly Oklahoma stuff), we re-established contact through third parties. We met once briefly, perhaps twice, but Maureen did not tell me where she was then living, and after our three-month summer hiatus, she was clearly rethinking her connection with me. There was a lot more going on, but I was barely sixteen, and too young and stupid to get it.

 

Due mostly (I thought) to the male hormones charging around in my system, and my tendency to flirt with every attractive gal within line of sight, Maureen dumped me in September of 1962, right after my return from Oklahoma. I assumed she simply did not believe it was possible for me to remain faithful to her, and she in effect said good riddance. I did not know her new address, or even her phone number, although frankly I would not have dared call her home. (No cell phones in those days.) We didn’t see each other for about eight months during which time I was nothing short of devastated.

 

Within a very short time, I realized how much I wanted us to be back together. I tried to track Maureen down, but the rumor floating around was that her parents had sent her to live with relatives in Texas. This left me with nothing to go on, and no way to try and make things right. Having spent grueling hours driving through Texas just months earlier, I had some feel as to its incredible size. In more ways than one, Texas is a nation masquerading as a State. So, in the end, I did not know where her family had relocated, (they had moved to the City of Bellflower where I knew not a soul), and I was not about to try and track her down though the LAPD. Maureen’s dad was not just a cop, he was a big guy, and attempting to track him down through the police department did not seem like a particularly wise move.

 

Given this ugly turn of events, I endeavored to make up for my disappointment by expanding horizons with other ladies. This did nothing to alleviate my dreams of Maureen. She became a routine nighttime event. I was increasingly focused on her, and no one else. I often dreamt of meeting her again. I was sure that if I ever had the chance, I would be faithful, honorable, chaste, etc. In time, I did, and I was.

 

In the spring of 1963, two of my fraternity brothers screeched up to the house of my present attraction, a girl named Susan Miller. They insisted I come outside and speak with them. This was a surprising request. I immediately agreed. Something deep down in my gut screamed that it had to do with Maureen, and something equally as loud was shouting the same thought to Susan. How do females intuit this kind of stuff? Sue hadn't even known Maureen. She knew of her, of course, but she didn't actually know her. Safely outside, the guys told me that they had come across Maureen at a shopping mall a few miles away. She looked terrific, and was now blond, very tanned, and that she asked about me. Halleluiah!

 

After meeting Maureen, my frat brothers had hidden out in the mall watching her from a distance. They followed her home without her knowledge. Not sure which house she lived in, they were certain of the street. They offered to lead me there while they could still remember the location. Now, these fraternity brothers were also brothers in real life, and the two of them were notoriously heavy drinkers. They simply could not be trusted to remember anything for very long. I said my goodbyes to Susan, which she took to mean permanently, jumped in my car, and followed them to the street where she lived. Sorta sounds like a theme from “My Fair Lady.”

 

This quiet residential street turned out to be a long series of several blocks that ran parallel to a city park. I had never been there before. The guys parked their car and piled into mine. We drove down the street slowly looking at all the houses. Immediately they began to argue with each other as to which block it was, where they had lost sight of her, assuming that she must have gone into one of the houses. We struck out. I didn’t find any trace of her, and for this wild goose chase I had just screwed up my current relationship with a girl that had claimed I was her only true love. All things considered, it seemed a disaster. I drove home to sulk and feel sorry for myself.

Reunited

 

A few days later, a neighbor and fishing friend, a young man in his third year of college, came across Maureen. He fell madly in lust. But, friendship, and all that, required him to ask me for permission to see her. I told him that I ought to see her first, to plumb the depths of my feelings, and so he reluctantly set up a rendezvous at the Shell gas station, on the corner of Del Amo and Bellflower Blvd. The extreme northern end of my territory. Getting there early the next day, I had my new car (not new, but new to me), up on the rack, trying to look cool. She never showed up. On the other hand, there was one very attractive girl standing on the corner waiting for someone, and after a while I forgot about Maureen, and went for the platinum blond. Yikes, I was surprised. It was Maureen. Boy, had she changed. I was thunderstruck! We had been apart for less than a year, and she looked like a whole different person. She was still Maureen, but a new and revised model, and we had history together.

 

Maureen was frosty. She had already figured out that I had hit on her thinking she was someone else. But eventually she agreed to take a ride in my new wheels, and I headed to the ocean where a romantic marina I had discovered with another girl had never failed to sweep the ladies off their feet. Wrong again! Maureen wasn’t moved. She knew immediately that I had been there before with other gals. This didn’t play well with her. She got downright prissy, and nothing I could say or do seemed to work. I drove her home, or that is to say, I drove her to the end of her very long street, as she could not afford to be seen with me.

 

It was clear that I was NOT off the hit list with her parents. Although at the time, I did not know all the reasons why. However, it was clear to both of us that were our folks to know we had seen one another, it would not bode well. Nevertheless, I tried every charismatic trick I knew to turn her heart around. Nothing seemed to work. She got out of the car and started to walk away. I jumped out of the car and yelled after her that I was crazy in love with her, and I did not want her to go. She broke down and started to cry. That was my cue. I threw my arms around her, and brought her back to the car, and Presto, we were a couple again.

Nominee Boyfriends

 

For the next year, various of my fraternity brothers showed up at the front door to meet Maureen’s parents. Each played the part of her date for the evening to whatever school program might be in vogue. This included Harry Thompson, the guy who got married the next year when Maureen and I stood in as Maid of Honor, and Best Man. As funny as it sounds, Harry had become Maureen’s mother’s favorite. It caused delays in picking up Maureen from time to time as her mom wanted to talk with him. I would frequently collect my friend’s girlfriends, as they were dealing with similar situations. Several parents had rather wisely warned their daughters away from my fraternity buddies.

 

So, a year prior to Harry and Peggy's wedding, I was acting as Peggy's escort for various evenings, while Harry was getting Maureen from her home on the same nights. We would meet at a pre-destined spot to switch girls. This plan had its own series of glitches, due to memory issues, etc., and there being no such thing as cell phones. Maureen’s folks never tumbled to the fact we were seeing each other. To them, I was a nightmare that was well behind them. Of course, there were a few close calls.

 

One night I picked Maureen up in her pajamas sometime after 1 AM on a school night. I drove several miles to my house, and we sneaked into the family den. It had direct access from the backyard through a sliding glass door. We accidentally fell asleep and awoke about the same time her father usually got up to go to the police station. In a complete panic I drove like a crazy man through town, dropped her off in front of the house next door. She was still in her pajamas, much to the surprise and amusement of the neighbors. Right when she got to the front door, her dad opened it to collect the morning newspaper. I thought she was caught cold. I ducked down in my front seat. I was so many shades of red I felt like the car was a flashing neon sign. Of course, her dad did not know the car, and he was sleepy and surprised to find Maureen on the front porch.

 

Maureen had more presence of mind that I had given her credit. She told her dad something to the effect that she had stepped out to get a bottle of milk that the early morning milkman had delivered and inadvertently locked herself out of the house. She breezed on past her dad, went straight to the bedroom that she shared with her three sisters on bunk beds and climbed into bed saying she didn’t feel well. Joe, Maureen's father, just shrugged his shoulders. After about a thousand years of worry crammed into the next couple of days, we resolved to be more careful.

 

Getting married in high school had never occurred to me, but after Harry and Peggy, I became a bit taken with the idea. Besides, I was now a grown-up college guy of seventeen, with friends about my age, already dying in Vietnam. Why couldn’t I get married?

School Fight

One week after Harry and Peggy’s wedding, I rode to school in Harry’s 1956 Chevy known as “half fast.” Everyone knew the name of his car because it was written on the doors, and because Harry was given to impromptu drag racing. Harry had beefed up the engine, raised the front end, and put a Hearst stainless shifter on the floor. It was very cool.

 

My car was then in pieces at the college tech campus where, much to the chagrin of my parents, I was taking a 3-hour lab class, 5 days a week, in auto mechanics. I was now into building racing engines. It made me very popular with the kids my age. It made me an utter failure in my father’s eyes.

 

On this particularly fateful day, Harry gave me a lift to my required gym class. Because we were late, he pulled into an empty space in the teacher’s parking lot. Bad choice. Lakewood’s two nasty-mouthed truant officers --- who bragged about being ex-marines, stopped us as we got out of the car. With less class than even a classless teenager, they started making fun of Harry’s recent marriage. A story that by then, was all over campus. In those days, at least in our middle-class WASP world, getting married in high school had never happened in anyone’s experience.

 

Now, Harry may have been a lover, and a racer of cars, he was not much of a fighter. And these two-truant officer-idiots were doing everything they could to push him into a fight. One even flicked his lit cigarette against Harry’s chest. They were unmerciful about calling his wife vulgar names, although they did not know her, as she went to a different school entirely and in a different district. Okay, so she was pregnant, and Harry was the father, but it was not their place to insult her. So, by now, and even though Harry knew he would lose badly, he was about to take a swing at the more outspoken of these two loud mouths.

 

Having more brass than brains, I stepped between them and told the truant officers to go pick on some girls their size. I wanted to calm things down, as neither Harry, nor I, could afford to be late for class one more time. Unfortunately, that reputation makes you do things that you otherwise would have intelligently avoided. You can just about imagine how the machismo truant officers reacted to my little insult.

 

The leader of the two officers got red in the face. His voice became loud and threatening. He began to yell that I did not have the guts to take a swing at him. I had already had conflicts with this truant officer. He had complained several times to the school administration about my ability to come and go on our “closed campus.” He thought there was something horribly wrong with me attending college during my senior year. Due to his complaints, I was no longer allowed to park my car in a school parking lot. This was because I would be driving off campus during school hours, which apparently made their enforcement work more difficult. Well, anyway, Mister ex-marine, senior truant officer was so angry he drooled while pointing at his chin screaming to everyone within earshot, that I was just a show-off coward, and I didn’t have the nerve to hit him. He was so upset he was literally frothing. He spit on me as he screamed that I was a panty-waste, etc., etc.

 

Not being overly brave but realizing there was no way out of this situation without thoroughly destroying my carefully constructed reputation (I was still the president of Zeta Phi), I feigned to turn away to my right and swung back around with a right-fisted haymaker. I was lucky enough to hit him square on the chin and not break my wrist. During the split second this took, which seemed like an eternity, I was terrified I might miss a direct hit, which had happened before in another little skirmish with a college guy at a carnival. I also remember worrying I might connect, and he wouldn’t go down.

 

I have a vivid recollection of the whole event in slow motion. The truant officer lifted into the air, fell backwards, and hit the ground with a thud. He stayed there. The guy must have had a glass jaw. He was out cold. The circle of students that had formed around us went dead quiet. No one, but no one, had ever dared hit an authority figure, much less, an ex-marine. Everyone was spooked. The way of things had shifted. Our little universe swayed precariously.

 

All of us there, even me in my adrenaline-shocked state of mind, knew this was a significant event in the history of Lakewood High School. It was both frightening and exhilarating. Authority had been shaken to the core. Somewhat later, this was to scare me badly as I intrinsically knew that the example I had set was not a good one.

 

Truant officer number two, feeling threaten by the large group that had gathered, looked furtively around, stepped back, said nothing, and stared at his partner lying still on the ground. In retrospect, I realize he was downright scared, something not so unusual in many schools these days. It was certainly a new experience back then.

 

Not knowing what else to do, I turned and walked briskly away, mainly to keep my shaking legs from being too obvious to the growing mob. I dared not say a word for fear my voice would crack. I knew it would leave me looking like the terrified boy I really was.

 

My newly enhanced image of downing the idiot-truant officer, then simply walking on to class, spread quickly. Teachers couldn’t seem to get their students into classrooms after the bell rang. Everyone wanted to mill around talking about my insanity. The students were every bit as shocked as the teachers, even though virtually everyone disliked the truant officers.

 

Before my one-hour gym class was over I had been called to the principal’s office where I got lecture #101 on respect, yak, yak. Of course, the school must make an example of me, notwithstanding at least two-dozen students had stormed the administrative office to give the equivalent of their personal testimony of the events that had transpired. The principal openly admitted to me that everyone with whom he had spoken was firmly on my side of the incident. And, curiously, he was incredibly nice, all things considered. He even told me that they were planning on sacking both truant officers because of their surly attitude. Nevertheless, he made it clear that I must be kicked out of school, or this kind of problem would not end with me, etc. Funny thing, for years thereafter I worried that one, or both of these guys, were going to track me down and make me pay for their humiliation and lost jobs.

 

As it turned out, I would not be able to graduate from high school that year, even though I was then attending college full-time and had all my high school requirements completed a full year earlier, except for the compulsory requirement that I run around a track and play ball for an hour a day. By this time, I was also working at a gas station and always had at least some money. It was then that I launched my campaign to convince Maureen that I could graduate on time, and get my diploma, if I was married. According to State law, being married cancelled the gym requirement. I argued that we were surely a couple, and it wasn’t like we weren’t planning to get married someday anyway, so why not now? My false bravado and surly arrogance seemed to play well, but in truth, both of us were terrified.

 

It seems that timing is as important as anything else. Things were not good at home for Maureen. Her parents were heading for another divorce. It was obvious to everyone. Jane and Joe were married and divorced, from each other, at least a couple of times during their shaky years together. I am pretty sure it was three times. Maureen was the oldest. She had twice previously played mom to her younger siblings, while her attractive mother was off doing other things. Her father, a 6’4” Los Angeles cop, worked the San Pedro harbor. Jane was involved with a mafioso from New York.

Mexico

 

On February 14, 1964, yep that’s right --- Valentine’s Day, Maureen told her parents she was going to a slumber party. I told my folks I was going camping with a bunch of guys. Both my parents were suffering from cancer. They weren't paying much attention to me.

 

Maureen and I jumped in my car and headed for Mexico. Earlier that day, I had splurged for a huge box of candy in a giant pink satin heart shaped box. I also bought myself some new Levis for the occasion. It was then about a two-and-a-half-hour drive to the border. All the way there we planned what we would say if the border guards stopped and questioned us. The law required we each had to be eighteen before we could cross the border unless we were with our parents. Maureen was frightened and didn’t think she could tell a lie to someone in a uniform. As for me, I was acting all positive about how I knew we could pull it off. I determined that if they did not let us through, and discovered our real age, we should adapt the Harry & Peggy wedding story to explain that we had just been married earlier that day and were now headed to Mexico for our honeymoon.

 Since the year before I met Maureen, I had been sneaking into Mexico to fish. I was a deep-sea fisherman. I was proud of it, and the first few times to Mexico, I crossed the border in the trunk of Phil Nichols’ car. Phil was a fisherman too; he lived three houses down and across the street, right on the corner of Stearnlee Blvd, and Harco Street. Harco was the cul-de-sac where we lived. Phil was about four years older than me. He went fishing in Mexico every chance he got.

 

Ensenada was a renowned fishing hot spot throughout the fifties, sixties, and on into the seventies. It is located ninety clicks south of Tijuana, the infamous border town that separates San Diego, California, from the Baja. By the 1980's, Ensenada would be replaced by Cabo San Lucas, another 900 miles south on the Baja, as THE fisherman’s paradise. Cabo would become the Sport’s Fishing Capital of the world. But, when I was young, Cabo was simply a lonely mission at the end of a 1,000-mile dirt road, and no one with a brain would dare drive it, although I was subsequently to do just that several times. Anyway, Ensenada was then about a two-hour drive south of San Diego, and a great place to fish. Today it’s less than an hour from Tijuana to Ensenada using the toll-highway cut into the cliffs that wind along the stunning seashore, but back then, it was a very different story.

 

On two occasions Phil and I had caught so many yellow tail tuna, and large barracuda, out of Ensenada, that we filled the entire trunk of his car with layers of chopped ice, and fish fillets, and drove them to Deardon’s Fish Market in Seal Beach, California. There we sold our fish for considerably more than the cost of our entire Mexico trip. Coming back into the States was always easy. I sat right up front with Phil, our fishing gear in obvious sight, and when the border guard asked where we were born, we simply said Long Beach, California. Inasmuch as we looked and sounded like we were what we claimed to be, there were no further questions, and we would be waived through.

 

When Phil drove his 1953 Chevy from Tijuana to Ensenada, it was a real challenge. It was always late at night, and the road was extremely poor. Compounding the problem of bad roads, there were no reflectors, lights, nor signs to any extent, and the inside Peninsula Road was littered with huge chuck holes, hair pin curves, and was bordered by steep ravines. To add excitement to the late-night drive, we always managed to stop in Tijuana to spend a few hours learning the mysteries in the border town bars, even though I personally did not drink alcohol. Frankly, it’s amazing we ever made it to the fishing boats by 5 am when they were scheduled to depart. In fact, one summer morning, the boat we were supposed to be on had to return to the dock to pick us up. An alert deck hand had spotted two animated gringos running madly along a floating dock, loaded down with fishing gear.

 

The point to all this fishing story was that I had made the trip to Mexico many times before. I pretty much knew my way around. But this time I was doing the driving to Mexico rather than Phil, and I wasn’t going to cross in the trunk. This time, I was in company with a beautiful girl, but admittedly one who looked too young and innocent, to be out with a rough-looking character like me. So, I kept rehearsing out loud how I planned to get Maureen across the border, testing her on our story as we drove. She was getting more and more nervous as each moment passed.

 

I timed our arrival just minutes before the duty shift change at 10 PM hoping that the guards would be anxious to go home and pay little attention us. This was a trick learned from Phil. The theory was, to keep the border guards from looking into his trunk and finding a young fisherman hiding in there. As neither Maureen, nor I, were yet eighteen, crossing was problematic. I looked old enough to probably pass a cursory inspection, but Maureen was another matter entirely.

 

Acting a good deal more confident than I felt, I continued to coach Maureen on our story as we closed on the border. We would tell the guards that we were already married. Realizing that being married, regardless of what age you were, seemed to make a difference in school requirements, I reasoned that it should also put us into an entirely different category when crossing the border. For two hours I tried Maureen with questions about our supposed wedding earlier in the day. She was a mental wreck by the time we got there, and she was seriously frightened about doing something wrong. If we were caught, both of us would have to face her policeman father. Admittedly, I was afraid of her father, but not just because he was a policeman, mainly because he was such a big guy.

 

Predictably, the border guards, seeing the youthful-looking Maureen in the front seat, shunted us off to an area for questioning. Maureen was nervous, which surely increased their suspicions. They had us leave the car and wait in an office on the U.S. side. Border personnel began to grill us with questions, which we handled due to our extensive preparation. But they got wise to my jumping in and answering questions, so they separated us into different interrogation rooms, and began to probe us with greater intensity. They asked each of us separately, questions we hadn’t thought to prepare for, i.e.: the colors we used in the wedding and stuff like that. In the end, they asked for our parents’ phone numbers. They tried to call both of our homes.

 

Amazingly, no one answered at either of our houses, and in the end, we had both stuck close to our stories, which were evidently so audacious that they finally just let us cross. I suppose they concluded that no one would be so well prepared with complex stories like the ones we told, just to go to Mexico. Normally, border jumping came from the other direction. We got back in our car, crossed into Mexico, and our entire world changed once more.

Married

Cruising through Tijuana, we discovered a lawyer’s office with a sign hung out front saying, “One Hour Marriages and Divorces.” It was open until midnight. It was here that we got married. In truth, it was a terrible let-down. All we did was sign documents across a desk in front of a lawyer who told us that someone else would be married as proxy for us standing in and using our names in front of a judge the next morning. He explained that it was normal, and done all the time, which I wanted Maureen to believe, but didn’t believe myself. After about two hours he issued us a marriage license, we paid for it and that was that.

 

Believe it or not, our Mexico marriage license has handwritten on the back in English “Marriage valid for fourteen days unless affidavits are sent from both parents.”

 

Some years later I was to learn that what the Mexican lawyer had told us, was true. People are married by proxy. Servicemen, in remote locations, are routinely married by proxy, and during wartime it was done all the time.

 

Once married, we stopped in one of those bars where a roving female, wearing only a camera, offered to take our picture, a photo we still have. It was very clear that Maureen did not belong there, and I felt bad for having brought her to such an inappropriate place. Not knowing exactly what to do next, I decided to take her on to Ensenada, the legendary place of so many fishing stories.

Crash

 

As Maureen and I left Tijuana late that night, now actually married, we discovered that the coastal route down the Baja peninsula to Ensenada was closed for reconstruction. About 1 AM, driving way to fast, we headed down an alternate inland route. It was mountainous, and it was dangerous. There was no such thing as guard rails to keep you from driving off the ubiquitous cliffs, and still I was driving too fast. About an hour later we blew a tire right off the rim, right in the middle of nowhere. The tireless rim dropped into a chuck hole and jerked us sideways. We skidded off a cliff in pitch darkness. The car seemed to hesitate in the air, like a road-runner cartoon. We had time to cling to each other before we dropped to what we thought, was our certain death. The car struck the side of the ravine, and we slid about forty feet down coming to rest on a ledge of boulders. Seriously surprised to be alive, we scrambled out of the car and tried to climb the steep side of the drop-off, back up to the road.

 

After several attempts, we climbed up the ridge and up on to the road from which we had spun out. Other than a few bruises, and a bloody hand, we were physically okay. Maureen lost a shoe, and both of us got repeatedly stuck by prickly things not visible at night, but which we were to discover the next day was cactus.

 

After we stopped panting, a result of hyper-ventilating from the danger and the climb up the cliff face, it dawned on us that we were in another country, we didn’t speak the language, we were underage, we had very little money, our car was damaged and down in a ravine, and it was after 2 AM. We didn't even know where we were or even have a map. And I was hungry. How weird, I was absolutely famished.

 

Over the years since, I’ve discovered that whenever I am in a stressful situation, I get ravenously hungry, the opposite of most people. There was the Valentine’s candy, left down in the car, but I couldn’t muster the courage to climb back down. So, I suffered on, more concerned about finding something to eat than almost anything else. This didn't play well with my new bride.

 

There was no moon out, but the stars were brilliant. So, we lay on our backs, at the side of the road hoping someone would come by and give us a ride. For my part, I fantasized about cheeseburgers and fries.

 

About an hour passed before we saw anyone. The first car kept on going without stopping. Later, an old Buick came rumbling by. It almost hit me as I stood in the road waving my arms. No luck again. Time passed, and a beater of a pickup, which looked too old to run, stopped and picked us up. The driver was a wizened old man who looked to be incredibly ancient. He turned out to be an American prospector who lived in Baja. He seemed to have forgotten a lot of English, but no matter, he was the original Good Samaritan, as far as we were concerned. We threw ourselves on his mercy, to which he seemed to respond.

 

Completely squished into his antique we eventually got on to the coast road beyond where the construction had ended. Our driver tried to get us into a motel, which turned out to be a really big deal. We did not see the ocean that night, and were completely turned around and lost, but the noise of water on rocks told us that the ocean was close by. After several attempts, our newfound savior woke up the proprietor of a little motel who kept arguing with him to go away by saying there was no vacancy. Finally, the motel guy relented, all the while making it clear that he was not pleased to be giving us a room. The motel manager kept asking us questions in Spanish which we couldn't answer. "No hablar Espanol", was almost the extent of my Spanish. Each time I failed to answer, he would repeat his questions louder, as if somehow that would help. There was a lot of arm waving going on. After what seemed like an eternity, he took us to a room, let us in and left, muttering to himself the whole time.

 

We were too nervous and scared to sleep or even appreciate our second night ever in a motel together. The first being at Harry & Peggy’s wedding where we had ended up staying in their hotel room with them on their wedding night --- pretty darn strange as I think back on it, and completely anti-climactic. All we did was talk.

 

Suddenly somebody started yelling outside our room followed by a loud pounding on the door. We were just too frightened to answer the door. The yelling increased in intensity. The pounding became more severe. It was one scary night. It sounded like a bunch of drunken guys shouting and alternatively beating on the door of our motel room. We could hear motorcycle engines revving. I was seriously concerned they would break the door down.

 

We decided to attempt an escape through the windows. It was so dark we couldn’t see where that might take us, so we abandoned the idea. We huddled together, not knowing what to do, or where to go. In desperation, we said a prayer out loud, asking God to help us. Here we were, trapped in a room with only one way out, and that was blocked by alcohol-fueled desperadoes, probably Hell’s Angel types, we were sure.

 

Still frightened, and holding on to each other for dear life, the day dawned. Looking out the windows that we had considered escaping through during the night, we discovered we were on the side of a cliff, above a bay with waves crashing on a pebbled beach below. It was a good thing we didn’t go out through the windows. As it turned out, our Good Samaritan driver had thoughtfully arranged for the motel proprietor to have a tow-truck meet in the morning. The truck driver was kind, and he spoke a little English, but mostly we communicated by hand gestures.

 

We were to discover that the guys who were beating on the doors during the night had rented our room the prior afternoon. They had then gone out drinking and carousing at some beach bars a few miles away. When they returned, they were unable to get into their room because we had dead bolted it from the inside. They assumed one of their other drinking buddies, who had left the bar with a girl, had taken the room and locked them out. Thankfully, as we left in the tow truck that morning, the whole group was scattered about, dead asleep on the ground.

 

The tow truck drove us back into the hills for a good 30 to 45 minutes. Of a sudden he stopped, got out of his truck and looked over the side. How he knew where to look is beyond me. We did not recognize anything in sight, but there, sure enough, straight down about forty feet, was our car sitting on a ledge right next to another drop-off that would have sent us a hundred feet down to our deaths. This was a sobering revelation. Yet, there was possibly some good news. Other than a broken hub, wheel, and missing tire, along with a whole collection of new dents and scratches, the car looked like it might run if we could just get it back up to the road. The radiator and oil pan were intact. No vital fluids seemed to be leaking.

 

A few hours’ effort and it became obvious one tow truck was not enough. Our driver called a second tow truck, and together they got our 1955 Ford Fairlane back on the road. Amazing! Then we waited, and we waited, and we waited some more. We finally got enough communication working to understand that the police must come and arrest us for drunken driving, an appalling thought. The fact was we were not drunk. And as odd as it might seem, especially in light of my fraternity’s reputation --- I was not a drinker. At all. Ever. It was probably the reason I had been elected president of Zeta Phi to begin with --- I had a car, I was always sober, and I could get my frat brothers home safely after a drinking binge.

We tried to explain to the tow truck drivers that we had not been drunk. It didn’t seem to matter whether it was true. It was just what the police did when a foreigner wrecked a car in Mexico. After all, fines, which are actually police pay-offs, were the way the police made their living.

 

El Capitan finally arrived. He came with a custom-tailored, suede lapelled jacket, knee high polished boots, and a rider’s crop. He strutted about waving the rider’s crop, making dire pronouncements in broken English about our litany of crimes. He fined us considerably more money than we had, and impatiently demanded we pay now, or go to jail. The first tow truck driver, which we had befriended by now, interceded on our behalf, and calmed the police guy somewhat. He finally convinced him that neither of us drank, so instead, he decided to fine me for reckless driving, which was probably closer to the truth.

When it was obvious that we were unable to pay, our car was impounded and towed into town by the 2nd tow truck. We caught a ride into Ensenada in the first tow truck, got a cheap, fleabag hotel room, and called on the U.S. consulate, and told them our sad tale. The next day a woman lawyer, who seemed to be based there to protect U.S. citizens from being taken advantage of by the police, helped us negotiate the release of our car, and got someone to fix the wheel. It left us with enough money for gas to make the border. We did not have enough to get home. We had stuck to our wedding story, and once the police officer understood the story, he made a big issue of waiving our fines as a wedding present. Whew!

Heading Home

Frighten, shaken, and exhausted, we limped back towards Tijuana on the ocean side road that was then under construction. It was dirt and gravel, the entire way. The car shook from the damage done to the undercarriage, and we expected it to break down permanently at any moment. We struggled along, hardly daring to take a deep breath for fear it would somehow negatively impact our situation. Tired and stressed to the max, we argued with each other incessantly all the way back to Tijuana. An inauspicious beginning to what would mature into a healthy solid marriage. It helped, that we were madly in love with one another.

 

Arriving at the road leading to the border crossing, there were long lines of cars for what seemed like miles. That has not changed. Vacationers, fisherman, sailors on weekend pass from the San Diego shipyards, revelers, and partygoers, were all trying to get across the border on Sunday afternoon. I still remember my surprise that the car did not run out of gas while idling in line as we ever so slowly lurched to the border crossing. I also remember how bad I had to pee while stuck in the grindingly slow traffic snarl. Amazingly, we got through the border without so much as a question, then hobbled to the first highway off ramp and into a gas station with a bathroom and hydraulic lift. Borrowing some tools from the station, I was able to make some temporary adjustments sufficient to get us home to Long Beach.

 

Circumstances required I pull off the road at a junkyard (they used to be all over the place) and use what we coincidentally referred to as a “Tijuana credit card.” Nothing more than a siphon hose, it was about 3/8th” in diameter, and about 6 feet long. I kept one coiled up in my trunk along with a gas can. With practice, you can get a siphon going without filling your mouth with gas, but not always. If you're good at it, you can often get a siphon going without ever sucking on the hose. The key to starting a successful siphon is that the end of the hose placed in the gas tank must be higher than the opposite end so that the gas will flow out of the tank from which its being “borrowed” and into the gas can. In my era, every self-motivated high school boy with a car, kept a Tijuana credit card safely ensconced in the trunk of his car. Not really stealing, we were forever borrowing gas from one another until we got paid from whatever job we might have.

 

When we got back to Long Beach, we still had gas in the car and 25 cents. This was the price of a gallon of gas in those days. Having successfully gassed up via our Tijuana credit card, we stopped in at a Jack in the Box drive through and spent the $.25 on a taco. I still remember my abject terror when I looked in my rear-view mirror to discover that the truant officer, I had decked a few weeks earlier, was in the car right behind me. It really spooked me. This latest development, on top of everything else we had experienced was so over the top that my legs began to shake uncontrollably. The truant officer did not seem to recognize the car, especially in the shape it was now in, and we drove the remaining mile where I dropped Maureen off at the end of her block. I drove home, took a bath, crawled into bed, and passed out for about twelve hours. It was two more days before Maureen, and I could meet again and try to sort out the implications of what we had done.

Telling Our Parents

     

Getting up the nerve to tell our parents that we had eloped, and were now officially married, at least temporarily, turned out to be our biggest problem. Perhaps the hardest thing I’ve ever done is knock on Maureen’s front door and tell her 6’4” policeman-dad that I ran off with his daughter and married her in Mexico at seventeen. I was scared! However, I saw no other way through the situation, so I resolved to take the beating I was certain would come, and just get it over with! When Joe answered the front door, it took him a minute to recognize me. It had been well over eighteen months since he had seen me. He pointed towards the street and simply said, “GO!” I stood my ground and choked out my story. He stared at me in amazement. His shoulders slumped. He mumbled something about how he would talk with Maureen. That was that --- I was free to go, and I wasn’t bleeding.

     

As it happened, Maureen’s mother had gone to the hospital for a hysterectomy the day before. I got a call from one of Maureen’s sisters, a few hours after my confessing to her dad. She told me to meet Maureen at the park. From there, we went on to the hospital to see her mother. Jane was heavily sedated, which spared me what I expected would be her renewed threats of bodily harm. I vividly remembered her statement of eighteen months earlier when she would shoot me in the groin if I ever saw her daughter again.

     

On the way to the hospital, Maureen had gone into the May Company and bought her mother a nightgown. She wrapped it and brought as a gift. This was a bizarre thing to do in my experience, but Maureen was more cultured than I. When we got to the hospital, and into her mother’s private room, Jane simply starred at me through her drugged state. She opened her present and became completely sidetracked with complaining that Maureen had bought her a granny nightgown that was certainly not fit for someone like herself.

   

Jane was quite a beautiful woman, whom even a seventeen-year-old boy could see, but she was way too obsessed with her looks. Funny thing about the granny issue, Jane was to become a grandmother later that same year thanks to us, a situation for which she was not to forgive me for perhaps another ten years. However, as the years passed, Jane and I would become friends, uneasy friends at first, but reasonable friends over time. Jane would eventually die in the Living Room of our home in Beaverton, OR, thirty-some years later. I gave her CPR until an ambulance arrived.

The Judge

     

The State of California would not recognize our Mexican marriage license. We ultimately had to secure our parents written permission to be married within the State. We couldn’t simply run off and live together. In those days, an act of that magnitude was seriously against the law, and in fact, because Maureen was under the age of eighteen, I would likely be thrown in jail for statutory rape, notwithstanding she was 3 months and 10 days older than me. Just a few years later, Vietnam War protestors, in concert with San Francisco's flower children, turned all the rules upside down. The laws were changed. It was impossible to enforce them anymore.

     

But that was then, and the laws of our time said that Maureen could get married with her parents’ written permission, but I was required to appear before a judge, in addition to having my parent’s written permission. Girls could get married younger than boys. That was the way of things.

     

I met Judge Sanford Beach in chambers at the Long Beach courthouse. It was a very serious affair. Our dialogue suggested he would deny me the right to be married. About then, a guy stuck his head in the door and yelled “Hey Sandy, are we going golfing?” It took me a couple of seconds to get it… his nick name was Sandy, and his last name was Beach, and irreverent me started to snicker, which broke down the facade of the Judge’s thoroughly practiced demeanor. He finally grimaced, and told me to get out, and if I was crazy enough to want to be married at seventeen, he wouldn’t stand in my way. Like everyone else, he was sure we would be divorced in a year. They were wrong. They were all wrong.

Married Again

     

Three weeks after our Mexico adventure, the gas station where I worked put me on full-time and gave me four hours off so that Maureen and I could get married again. We were re-married on March 7, 1964, at the First Baptist Church at tenth and Pine in Long Beach, California. Only my mother and sister attended. It was a short ceremony in a small room, and that was that. The next day I worked a twelve-hour shift to make up for the four hours missed the day before. The gas station where I worked gave me a raise because I was now married, and I had a wife to support. I went from earning $1.10 per hour to a whopping $1.25 per hour. Plus, I got extra hours, and a better schedule.

     

Maybe it was just dumb luck, or maybe we programmed ourselves, or just maybe there’s a whole lot more to what’s going on around us that we cannot seem to fathom. It sounds terribly wacky, but:

Maureen did marry the guy she met through the Ouija board,

and Terry did marry the girl of his dreams.

Pregnant

     

We were married. Maureen was pregnant with Natalie. I suspected she might be. Maureen insisted she was not. No one could really tell by looking at Maureen because she was so thin. We had no tests available to make that determination short of a hospital visit. As slender as Maureen was, it was normal for her to miss monthly menstrual cycles. So, early on, we were not sure of much of anything. Although I really did not understand it then, Maureen was severely traumatized by the loss of Lynda. It was hard to even discuss the possibility with Maureen that she might be pregnant. She was not ready to deal with another pregnancy, and she refused to discuss the possibility.

     

I worked during the day at a gas station, and the two of us “packed wheels” at night. What the heck is that you might ask? Well, as it happened, a childhood friend of Maureen’s, a redheaded gal named Gail, who was a few years older than Maureen and me, had also married young. Previously, Gail had been the babysitter for the Donnelly kids when they were small. Maureen was the oldest of the Donnelly children, and she and Gail had become friends and managed to stay in touch over the years.

     

Gail and her husband then had two children. He was the midnight shift manager at a plastic extrusion company that made all kinds of items. For example, they made wheels and parts for children’s toy cars and trucks. Someone had to take all the various extruded parts, break them up, count them out, and seal them in plastic bags to be stuffed into the cardboard cartons in which the toys were boxed. Gail and her husband packed wheels at night up until he left for work. This gave them some extra income. They invited us to help. This became our night job for a time. We talked and talked, and packed wheels, and made a little money. More importantly, Maureen was able to get out of our apartment and socialize with someone she trusted.

     

One evening, Gail announced she was pregnant for the third time. Curious, I asked her how she knew. Gail said she got the results from her doctor, a man she did not hesitate to recommend. He had been her doctor through the delivery of her two children and would be her doctor to deliver this child. Gail had asked Maureen several times before if she thought she might be pregnant. This was so incredibly embarrassing to Maureen, she would just shake her head no and look to the floor. On the other hand, I was ready to openly discuss the subject. It all came out over packing wheels. Maureen was terrified to discuss even the possibility. The incredible trauma she had endured previously is something I really did not understand. I pushed the issue.

     

Thankfully, Gail seemed to grasp how difficult this was for Maureen. She made her husband get out of the house. We went out back and stood around talking on their dirt driveway. Gail spoke with Maureen for a very long time. When we were allowed to return, Maureen was sobbing and refused to even look at me. Gail had convinced her of the wisdom in seeing a doctor. Maureen’s immense embarrassment of the situation, (it was very different era), combined with her deep distrust of doctors after the experience of Lynda being taken away from her, combined to be more than she could cope with emotionally.

     

A year earlier, sometime after Maureen and I had reunited, she told me of Lynda’s birth. At first, I simply did not believe it. It was hard to process and beyond shocking. She recognized my struggle with belief, which made things worse. Once I realized it must be true, I got caught up trying to find Lynda. Maureen insisted that I not do so. She was completely traumatized by it all. In the end, I suppose I just saw it as a happening and did not realize the depth of her pain. In retrospect, I made things worse, multiple times due to my ignorance and emotional immaturity.

     

Maureen and I drove to our apartment in silence that night. She was extremely upset. I simply did not understand the trauma she had been through previously, and how deeply it had impacted her. But occasionally, admittedly not often, I knew when to quit talking. It hardly mattered, Maureen refused to talk anyway. It would be many years before she would discuss the details of the months that she spent essentially locked up during her pregnancy, and then the trauma of having Lynda taken from her while she slept was just too much. This had all taken place when we were out of touch. Maureen’s family had moved to another city, right after I was sent to Oklahoma, and eventually we lost touch until my neighbor Phil, who was four years older than me, ran into her.

     

Overtime, I learned to tread very softly around the Lynda topic. Just bringing it up could cause Maureen an emotional meltdown that lasted for days. She was angry, embarrassed, ashamed, and completely traumatized by it all. Then there was the extreme pain of loss and the betrayal of the doctor, an adoption lawyer, her parents, and me, although I knew nothing of what had happened until much later. Nevertheless, I created the situation, and she felt entirely abandoned for many months. It was all too much for her. This utter abandonment by literally everyone she had trusted, at such a crucial time, would come back to haunt her again and again, throughout her entire life. And, unfortunately, I was the one that was usually responsible for bringing it up. There is no way to describe the depth of the emotional damage she suffered.

     

Gail gave us the name and phone number of her doctor. Within a few days, we were in a meeting with him. I do not recall his name, but he was understanding and helpful. His primary nurse did not like me. All she could see was that I got a young girl pregnant. Now, Maureen was three months older than me, but I looked and acted much older than she did. I was strong, and strong-willed, and came across sure of myself. Maureen was a slip of a girl, beautiful, to be sure, but quiet and demur. Since the first day I had met her, I had been smitten.

Maureen seemed timid to most. But we had a connection, and both of us were dealing with childhood trauma. We had come together like magnets. We often clung to each other for support. She was very smart, and read constantly, but was slow to share her thoughts with anyone beyond me. It would be years before Maureen evolved into the incredibly capable, stand-up woman she would become. But back then, she was only a quiet girl, downright skinny. Around others, she was respectful, and pleasant. Always preferring others to talk. We used to laugh and say she couldn’t lead a group of nuns in silent prayer. Not very nice, but it was a different time. Her soft childlike demeanor would change, and beautifully so, but at that time she was simply a shy, pretty, young girl to most.

     

The doctor was an osteopath and did not believe in drugs, so this would be a natural childbirth. They killed the rabbit. (An old expression meaning they tested her for pregnancy.) A few days later it was confirmed. Maureen was indeed pregnant. She was encouraged strongly to gain weight. The doctor was convinced she was intentionally not eating. Both of us were lectured on that point. Personally, I did not believe she was intentionally not eating. Mainly because I could not understand it. She had never really eaten much. Maureen had always been very thin. However, over time, I came to realize that women are a good deal more complex than men. They seem to experience things at a different intensity level than the average guy.

     

Looking back, I realize that no matter how smart I thought I was, I was basically dumb about almost everything going on. I knew how to work, and I knew I was committed to Maureen, beyond that…basically dumb. Could she have been intentionally under eating? Yes. Possibly. But the very thought that this could be true, never really penetrated by brain at the time. Her doctor was painfully clear. She needed to gain weight and stay in bed. I needed to stay out of it. Period. There was a significant risk of losing our child and Maureen’s health was of great concern. The doctor seemed legitimately worried. Maureen intermittently passed blood and she had a fainting problem. It was touch and go for several months. Every time Maureen would faint, or spot blood, I was called from work to take her to the doctor or the hospital. When she eventually gave birth to a strong and healthy Natalie Suzanne at full term, Maureen weighed just 95 pounds.

Natalie’s Birth

     

During Maureen’s pregnancy with Natalie, we were in and out of the hospital several times. It was a confusing period. At one point, Jane, Maureen’s mother, returned from the family cabin at Randsburg, in the California desert, formerly a gold mining ghost town where police officers from the LAPD had purchased all the old houses. Randsburg, along with Johannesburg and Red Mountain, were very small ghost towns close to one another. They were all once mining operations along U.S. Highway 395 between Ridgecrest and Boron, in California. Oddly, they were all, named after mining towns in South Africa. Sometime earlier, Maureen and I had been shooting 22 rifles at targets we placed on the slag pile of the deserted gold mine known as the Yellow Aster. Formerly, it was the number one producing gold mine in California from 1910 through 1919, but then it was just a huge pile of dirt and rock.

     

Jane moved to the desert with all four of Maureen’s teenaged siblings after her last divorce from Joe. She came back to Long Beach one day and left all the kids at our apartment while she went to buy cigarettes. She did not come back. No one would see her for a couple of months. Jane just vanished. We would eventually discover that she was in Mexicali. It was just one of several incredibly stressful events surrounding this situation. At the time, we did not know where Jane had gone. Maureen and I were only seventeen. We could not figure out how to pay for all the extra mouths to feed.

     

Our apartment was a simple one-bedroom unit with only one twin bed for the two of us. Maureen’s brother and sisters slept on the floor. A week or more later, we took the kids to their father, Joe Donnelly. Jane and Joe had divorced for the third time from each other, at almost the exact same time that Maureen and I were married. California law automatically gave the children to the mother, notwithstanding that Joe was considerably more responsible than Jane.

     

When Maureen and I tracked down Joe, he had just remarried. He married Audrey, a single mom with five kids still at home whom he had met at a Parent Teachers Association meeting. In those early days, Audrey and Joe were the only people that treated Maureen and I as adults. We liked them both very much. However, Audrey was obviously upset that Joe’s four children were now shoved in to her three-bedroom home without any prior notice. Maureen felt as though her siblings were her personal responsibility. She begged me to help her brother and her sisters. I did what I could, but we were very pressed for money, and taking time off to keep helping the kids eventually caused me to lose my job.

     

I began looking for another job. After three weeks I began working at a Chevron station on 7th avenue in Long Beach, and even though I was young, I was put in charge within six weeks. (Nobody checked IDs in those days, and the owner thought I was in my 20’s) Almost immediately, I found myself doing mechanical things that I had not done before. Complete brake jobs, front end alignments, I even rebuilt a rear end. When at sixteen, I was supposed to be a senior in high school, I had the credits for early graduation and went to Long Beach City College instead, that is, until Maureen and I got married. The only class I remember, besides creative writing, was that I took a 3-hour a day lab class on auto mechanics, much to the chagrin of my father. Why had I done this instead of more academic studies? Because like every young man I knew, I was obsessed with muscle cars. I learned to rebuild engines from the ground up, and that training followed me for the rest of life.

     

With a new job, and responsibility to open and close the station, I was gone about twelve hours or more, each day. When I would get home, Maureen and I would play checkers, chess, or card games, and eat whatever she was able to prepare. We did not have a TV. During the days, Maureen would read. By this time in the pregnancy, she had grown a round little belly, looking very much like she had stuck a basketball under her smock. On the night prior to Natalie’s arrival, Maureen was frustrated and uncomfortable. She could not control her pee and kept wetting herself. How stupid of us, we did not know her water bag was in the process of breaking. I did not even know what that was. But anyway, at that point, it was simply leaking. We were playing chess. She finally had to stand in the bathtub with what we thought was urine running down her legs. I was so hot and tired I could not think, and even in her crazy condition she beat me at chess, while standing in a bathtub with the chess board perched on the sink.

     

A fascinating thing about Maureen, which remained true throughout her life, was that she was way smarter than anyone knew. Although, for a long time, it was hard to admit, she was also a better shot with a 22 rifle than I was. Now, consider that I had gone through the entire NRA training program at ages 12 and 13. I earned all the metals and patches graduating as Sharpshooter, one step beyond Expert. Very few of the guys in my classes ever made it that far. So, here it was, that without any training, Maureen was dead on target over and over again. I quit shooting with her. It’s quite humorous as I look back on it. Stupid boy ego.

     

This particular night when Maureen had just beat me at chess while standing in the bathtub, I took the mattress off the box spring of our twin bed and set it on the floor. The two of us, had gone through the entire pregnancy sleeping on a single twin bed together. But that night, I slept on the mattress on the floor. She was right beside me on the box spring, uncomfortable and leaking. She needed the extra height of the bed frame to get up and go to the bathroom. Once at floor level she had real trouble getting up. It was late when we went to bed, about midnight.

     

Because I was closing the station at night, I did not get home until about 10 PM. She had been having contractions for days, but we had already been to hospital on one false go, and neither of us wanted to do that again. But, a few hours later she woke me with the quiet words: “Terry, it’s time.” I jumped up trying to figure out where I was and ran into the wall. I staggered around, got her bundled up in a blanket, and took her down to our car. She was still in her night gown. She was having hard contractions. I was so out of it I forgot my shoes and was afraid to take the time to run back upstairs to the apartment and look for them. I would spend the entire day in the hospital barefoot.

The Hospital

     

It was dark as we drove to the hospital. The world seemed somehow surreal at 4 AM. Maureen was admitted quickly. I would not see her again until about 8 PM that night. We had no smartphones, no cell service, no internet, and there was no TV in the sterile waiting room. I did not know what to expect, a girl or boy. I was afraid to drive home, for fear I would not be there when baby was born. In retrospect, it would have been the right thing to do, considering I looked like something the cat drug in. I was completely disheveled and had no shoes. Some father to be I was. No wonder, literally no one took me seriously at the hospital.

     

It seems that when asked during her check-in, Maureen said she wanted to tell me personally the details of Natalie’s birth. In those days, men were the enemy. We were not allowed in the birthing area and basically treated very poorly. At least I was. There were a lot of ladies giving birth that day. It was crowded and noisy. I could hear women screaming. Basically, it was frightening, and I felt awful. The nurses were firm. They could not be bothered with a young man wanting to know what was going on. I was told to stay where I was, that I would know something soon enough. After hours of waiting, and listening to the screams of women, who were all apparently having natural childbirth at this particular facility, I got super worried. I would discover later that Natalie was born early in the day, and Maureen was doing fine, but there were so many women arriving, the rooms were all filled and there were women in beds up and down the halls waiting to deliver. Some were being delivered in the hallway, right behind the door I was sitting next to. Hence, the groans, and screaming women.

     

By nightfall, and still not knowing anything, I drove home to shower, eat, and get my shoes. When I got home, the phone was ringing. My boss. I had not opened the gas station. I didn’t have access to a phone at the hospital, and I had no way to contact anyone. Although I did not drink, my boss was convinced I was drunk. Basically, I was exhausted and emotionally drained. And, by this time, I was sure there was something seriously wrong with Maureen. I tried to explain to the owner of the gas station, but he was not happy. He had given me the only set of keys and he had to get a locksmith to help him reopen when I did not show up.

     

The phone rang again. It was one of the Donnelly kids. Peggy. She was asking me questions about how the birth had gone and how Maureen looked, etc. I was completely confused. I told her the situation. She was shocked, and more than a little suspicious to hear I was uninformed. I tried to explain. She told me that Maureen had a girl, that she heard Maureen was fine. I could not process this at all. How could she know anything when I had been there all day and couldn’t even get a message into Maureen? Turns out Peggy had heard from her father Joe, who called the kids from a phone in the Randsburg tavern. That also made no sense to me. Joe was not a drinker. And how could Joe, all the way out in Randsburg, a ghost town in the middle of nowhere, know anything? I wanted to believe it, but it made no sense to me.

     

Cleaned up and dressed more reasonably, and with shoes on, I drove back to the hospital. It was two cities away. At around 8 that evening, I was allowed in to see Maureen where she was in recovery. It was all true. Natalie had been born, was simply beautiful, mama was drained, but in good spirits. It seems that everyone knew what was going on. I was the guy in the dark, even though I had been there the entire time.

     

The story began to unfold. It seems that once Maureen was in a recovery room, she was allowed to make a telephone call. She couldn’t reach me at our home phone because I was in the hospital. She couldn’t reach the gas station as I forgot to open it. So, she called the Sheriff’s department in Kern County. Her father was a police officer, so this was familiar territory for her. The sheriff closed his office and crossed the street to the courthouse and told the judge who was friends with Joe. The judge took a break from a court proceeding to call the bartender in Randsburg, which may have been the only phone in town. The bartender left the bar and tracked Joe down at his cabin. What Joe called the cabin was basically a small house, just a couple of blocks away from the re-opened bar.

     

The bartender told Joe he was a grandfather. Now, Joe was not a drinker, he had jailed too many drunks in his life, but this day he made an exception and went back to the bar and bought a round for everyone. His first grandchild. He tracked down the hospital and reached Maureen. They talked. No one could find me. All of this had taken place while I was sitting in the waiting room right outside the door to maternity deciding there was something super wrong because I could not see Maureen.

The Intercity

Natalie Suzanne Neal was a beautiful baby. She smiled and cooed and brought a great deal of love into our fledging little home. Maureen turned out to be a natural mother. She was immediately able to do all the things a new mother needs to do. Baby Natalie came home way before pamper-style diapers existed. Diapers were cloth, they required safety pins, and constant washing. We had no washer or dryer, so everything was done at laundry mats. Although timid at first, I became very involved in taking care of Natalie.

     

We lived in an apartment building, a short walk to a bowling alley. Maureen and I bowled together often. It was basically our only form of recreation, other than driving along the beaches. Natalie became a favorite at the bowling alley. She hardly ever fussed and would go right to sleep, even in all the racket of balls going down the alleys and pins getting knocked over. In so many ways, Natalie was the perfect baby. She grew into the perfect child. Smart, fun, and super cute.

     

The owner of the gas station where I worked, never treated me the same after my taking the day off to be at the hospital. What’s worse, I had to take another day when bringing Maureen and baby Natalie home from the hospital. Within a month he would hire a new manager and demote me to pumping gas and doing oil changes and lube jobs. Another month and I was out looking for a job again. The new manager was polite enough, but much older. He told me he did not want me to be around for the owner to compare with him. I was just too hustle.

     

Over the next few months, I managed to find odd jobs, nothing that would last long, until I landed work with a company called Coastal Contractors. It paid much better, but it was very dirty work. I was doing oil spill clean-ups around the Long Beach and Los Angles harbors where there were hundreds of old-style pumping units. A few months later, and Maureen got a nighttime job with Bob’s Big Boy restaurants. The remainders of this chain are called VIPS. Similar in operation and style to today’s Red Robins.

     

We moved again, that made three times in about seven months. This time into something closer to the harbor and much less expensive. After all, there were now three of us to care for and the costs of even a small child are significant. This apartment was an older, one bedroom, ground level with nothing above us. We were backed up on to an alley in downtown Long Beach. An area referred to as the intercity. It was primarily a black neighborhood, and our only babysitter was an older black woman one street over. She was simply wonderful. We had cut our expenses, both of us were working, and things were looking up. It never really occurred to me we might be in danger. Neither Maureen, nor I had any racial concerns.

     

We were nice to people, people were nice to us, and when not working, we spent all our time together and were not out and about. However, where we chose to live was of considerable concern to Maureen’s father, the cop. He saw things very differently. Admittedly, my car was robbed a couple of times, parked as it was in the alley behind the apartment. One night I chased four guys down the alley. Rather stupid of me. I was wearing only a T shirt and underwear barely asleep when I could hear some guys trying to break into our car. I went running out dressed as I was. They took off down the alley and there I was running after them barefooted in my underwear. About a block down, I realized there were four of them, all about my age. When I got back home, my feet were bleeding from running on broken glass. Dumb, but sobering.

     

For us, the apartment was a blessing. It was affordable and about halfway between Maureen’s job and my work, and we had a washing machine and a clothesline. I would head out to work early and be back by 4 PM. I would shower drive Maureen to the restaurant. Natalie and I would return together, then I would go back and pick Maureen up at 11 each evening. Natalie went with me in a baby seat each way. She seemed to like getting out and seeing the world, and many times, after dropping Maureen off, we would drive back a slightly longer way along the ocean front. Sometimes Natalie would sit on my shoulders, and we would walk onto the beach. She loved to play in the sand.

     

During the time we spent at 861 Washington Place, the address of our apartment back then, our lives began to sort out in many different ways. I had sold my 55 T-bird with the 57-porthole top. It was a very fast car, but not practical for a family. I also sold our 1964 Ford Thunderbolt with Hearst floor shifter. I had bought it new but now I needed to pay off the hospital bills. With those finally out of the way, we now drove an older 1961 Ford Galaxy. We now had two streams of income, which helped us get our lives better organized. Maureen was good at earning tips. She was a super woman. She worked hard, and she was learning to be more open and friendly with others. She ultimately earned a reward for being the top-rated waitress in a chain of a couple dozen restaurants in Southern California. That’s an interesting story all by itself as one of the gifts they presented her at a ball in Burbank, was a case of high-end champagne, which we were not legal to drink. They were surprised we really did not want it. But we didn’t drink so we gave it back.

     

This job was very important to Maureen; she gained a lot of self-confidence but eventually quit due to male harassment. Maureen was an attractive girl. She was constantly hit on my men of all ages. One night she had grown tired of it. She was so incredibly tired of fighting guys off. She poured an entire glass of milk on a guy’s head who had grabbed her bottom as she went by his table. That was the end of Bob’s Big Boy.

     

Maureen was able to get work at a more upscale restaurant within a few weeks of leaving Bob’s. The hours were the issue. It was not as easy for us thereafter. Now she would go to work earlier and not get off until midnight. Michael Donnelly would come to live with us for a while. Later it would be Marsha Donnelly. Then late one night, after Marsha had moved out, Joe and Audrey showed up with Peggy. Maureen was still at work. Peggy would stay with us for a time, as well. Obviously, there are significant stories around each of them coming to stay with us, but those stories are for others to tell.

     

The night Joe and Audrey brought Peggy to our apartment, they just showed up at the door. No advance notice. Joe was very distraught. That’s when he told me that he was not Maureen’s biological father. He did not have the nerve to tell Maureen himself. According to Joe, Jane had got pregnant while Joe was in the Navy, stationed in Guam. He wanted me to know, and he wanted Maureen to know. The thing is, Maureen just tolerated her mother, but truly and deeply loved her father. This was an awful thing to put on me. I ended up telling Maureen what her father told me. She refused to believe it and got angry with me for telling her.

     

About three years later, we would meet her half-sister and half-brother by her real biological father. They lived in Whittier, California. They were very nice and really wanted a relationship, but Maureen could not deal with it emotionally and cut them off. I liked them. Maureen did too actually, but she was burdened by the thought that Joe was not really her father, and being with them was a constant reminder of that reality. She just could not handle it. So, she refused to see them further.

The Watts Riots

     

Our world went crazy one night. This period is known as the Watts Riots. In Los Angles, Watts was a large intercity area, much larger than the one in Long Beach, but similar in many ways. We lived on the very block where the intercity boundary was drawn by the police and National Guard. I was home with Natalie when the fires were set in Watts. When firemen arrived to fight the fire, they were picked off with rifles. The race riot was on. By now, we had a small TV, and we stayed glued to it, when we were home. Although, we still went to work each day. Joe came by an insisted we vacate our apartment. We felt comfortable where we were and did not want to leave. Anyway, we had nowhere to go.

     

A few days later, the fires, gunshots, and helicopters had hit our neighborhood. Every streetlight was shot out. The entire neighborhood was locked down one night while I had gone to pick Maureen up from work. Natalie was with our babysitter, the neighbor lady on the next block over. When I left the apartment, there were no roadblocks, when I got back with Maureen not an hour later, all hell had broken loose. The National Guard would not allow us into the area. It was very dark. I told them my baby daughter was there and that is where we lived. They did not budge and said they would shoot me if I drove on. They had not even seen Maureen in the front seat. It was quite dark. I told them I was going in. It became very tense, very fast. Two police officers came over and made me get out of the car. In a flash one hit me behind the knees with a rifle butt, another hit me in the neck causing me to fall over the hood of my car. Maureen jumped out screaming at them. One of the policemen turned around and recognized her. She served him at Bob’s Big Boy. In those days, cops always got free coffee and donuts wherever they stopped. He stopped at Bob’s daily. The cop explained to the trigger-happy National Guardsmen that he knew Maureen, and by extension he knew us. Maureen was emphatic we were going in to rescue our baby girl. I was dizzy from being hit in the back of the neck, but I managed to get in the car and sat their stunned. A guardsman called his superior. Finally, they said we were crazy to go but they would not shoot us, but no way they would let us come back out. They kept saying we would be stuck there for days with no one to protect us.

     

I drove slowly, still spinning from the hit to my neck and head. The drive in was surreal….no lights. Even Taco Bell, just two blocks away, was closed. Very spooky. Very dark. And foggy. I parked in the alley and got Maureen into our apartment. She wanted to come with me to get Natalie, but that did not seem wise. I knew I had to walk back down the alley, around the corner and down one block to the babysitters. A bit sketchy at night under normal times. It was very dark, and I admit to being scared. On the corner was a group of black men, at least a dozen, standing under a shot-out streetlight. I did not know any of them. I walked towards them feeling very exposed. They stared at me, murmuring to one another about what I was doing there. I half-waived and said something like, “Hi Guys,” as I walked right around them and turned the corner. I could feel a couple dozen eyes burning holes in my back.

     

Once I collected Natalie and was walking back around the corner. This time the group treated me differently. They could see I was holding a baby. A couple of them even wanted to see her. Whew. It was okay. So, as it turned out walking back was not nearly as scary as going there, but still very weird. In the distance one could hear gunshots. It was hard to grasp. Maureen and I stayed locked up for a week before we were allowed to leave the area. Phone lines were cut, but the power stayed on. It was frightening because we did not really know what to expect. We had enough food, and Joe dropped by with a care package. He was cop, so he could come and go. Looking back, it was the media, more than anything else, that fanned the flames of the uprisings. And as it turned out, it was the police that shot out all the streetlights. Why? They never gave a reasonable answer, but it did eventually become public knowledge. It took more than a year to get the streetlights replaced.

The Snake

     

I was working at Coastal Contractors when the Watts riots took place. No one could get to work, so I did not get fired for being absent. Coastal Contractors was by far the best paying job I had experienced to date. They had the contract for cleaning up oil spills on terminal island where there were Pumpjacks literally everywhere. There were hundreds of them. These are the old nodding-donkeys or rocking horse style pumping units. Each day I rode around with a much older guy who drove the A-frame truck with a list of pumpjacks to clean up. We scooped oil with flat shovels into barrels and covered with sand the remaining stains. Most of these units were old and many leaked. Usually not large amounts, but enough to require daily oil clean-ups around the Long Beach and Los Angeles harbor areas, and all-over terminal island.

     

Finally, Maureen and I were making enough money to consider moving into a nicer place. We moved out to the Bellflower area about the time Coastal Contractors relocated me to work on a Chevron Oil site in the Whittier Hills. Here I joined up with a crew of five other guys who all knew each other. I was the new guy on the block. They did not accept me right away. Basically, I had to earn their respect, and that did not come easy. We would be doing much more extensive types of oil field work, including laying pipe, welding flanges, doing upgrades on holding tanks, laying concrete foundations for tanks and scrubber units, etc. Driving up into these hills on dirt roads was like being on another planet compared to where I lived. There were lots of wild animals and numberless snakes.

     

The guys I was working with were forever catching snakes and bringing them back to the Snake Pit, where there were some large empty barrels pulled together. This was our home base called the Yard. From there we had 3 different A-frame trucks, each with its own operating crane. We drove the roads up and down the dirt roads in these otherwise deserted hills, finding things to repair or replace, clean-up or tear down. Sometimes we worked together building new tank set-ups, or pipe-bridges, but mostly we saw one another each morning at the Snake Pit, and again at noon for lunch, and once more before we left for the day.

     

Wanting to be accepted by these rough and tumble guys, I learned to catch snakes by stepping on their heads from behind, grasping them right behind the head and carrying them about. The rattle snakes were dangerous, but the bigger bull snakes were just scary looking but not poisonous. A bull snake could kill a rattle snake in a fight, hence the Snake Pit. We caught them, brought them back to the Yard, and threw them into empty barrels. One day I caught a huge bull snake. He was a good 6 feet long and large around. These are constrictor snakes so holding on to him from behind the head, meant the rest of him wrapped around my arm and tried to squeeze it off. We had big plastic gray lunch buckets; each held a heavy thermos inside. I took my thermos out and put the snake tail first into my over-sized lunch box and slammed the top down. The weight of the lunch box was not much different with the snake in it than with a heavy stainless thermos. It was a hot day. I tossed my lunch box on to the back of the A frame truck.

     

Something dramatic happened that afternoon which took my attention completely off the snake in my lunch bucket. We had an oil fire at one of the tanks we maintained, and it was all hands-on deck. All of us were filthy and exhausted by day’s end and covered in smoke and oil. I tiredly tossed my lunch box from the A-frame truck into the back of my pickup. I do not recall where I left my thermos. I drove home in a tired stupor. I got home late, due to the fire. I brought my lunch bucket into the kitchen and left it on the counter and started stripping off my clothes in the living room of our new street-level apartment.

     

Down to nothing but my underwear and bare feet, Maureen suddenly screamed. She was understandably terrified. She had opened the lunch bucket. A raging snake came out like a jack-in-the-box. It was hissing and striking in every direction. It hit the kitchen floor with Maureen screaming her head off. It was totally my fault. But it was not intentional. Although Maureen thought otherwise for several hours. Our new apartment had all hardwood polished floors. The snake was moving fast across the floor and when I ran towards it barefooted and basically naked, it scared me too. I jumped around it, got a dish towel from the kitchen and threw it over its head. It came out from under the towel striking at things and got its fangs caught in the towel for a while. I pressed it to the floor with a mop, but it slithered out from underneath it. I ran for my pants and shoes, and the snake took off across the living room floor. Just like he knew where he was going, the snake made a beeline for the door into baby Natalie’s room. She was only a few months old and awake in her crib by this point.

     

Maureen was screaming anew about the snake in Natalie’s room, while I tried to get my shoes on. Failing that as we had a new emergency, I grabbed a bath towel and went into Natalie’s room. The snake had positioned itself under the crib and was curled for striking. Maureen was still shrieking, which was rather unnerving, and I now had pants on but no shoes. I felt horribly vulnerable but knew this was my problem to fix. I pulled the crib away from the wall and the snake took off again. I managed to get the larger towel over it until I could figure out how to grab the spot just back of his head where he could not rotate and bite me.

     

I lifted him off the floor as he wrapped around my arm and upper shoulder. He could really constrict. The next day I had bruises down my arm. I just held on to him for the longest time, not knowing what to do. Eventually, I ended up putting him back in my lunch box and set it on the porch with an absolute promise to take it back to the hills in the morning. That night, my lunch bucket was stolen right off our front porch. I’ve often wondered just how whomever stole my lunch box reacted when he or she opened it somewhere in private.