My name is Grant Covington and this story is true. Well, my name isn’t actually Grant Covington, and this story is not exactly true. But, this tale is about as true as anyone’s memory can be, so the bottom line here is I believe this story is a pretty fair representation of what actually happened. Of course, there are places where I’ve found it necessary to change people’s names to protect the innocent; well perhaps they’re not really innocent I mean who really knows? Anyway, under the circumstances I can’t really identify some of the folks that have helped me along the way for fear of governmental retribution, so it seemed appropriate to change their names. But here’s the key, those name changes are not so sly, and with a little thought you can figure them out --- because after all, this story is true. Okay, so I’ve already said that and here I am at the very beginning and already side-tracked … so on to the story.
Where to begin? I suppose way back at the beginning. The year is 1945; World War II is at a close. Enlisted men, and some women, are streaming back to their respective homelands. Good had finally prevailed over evil and civilized people everywhere wanted to be with their families, to rebuild, to make a better and brighter future, to enjoy peace and seek prosperity. In 1946 the baby boom began, I was one of those millions born in the first wave of procreation that marked the end of the world at war. Now I am in my fifties with many stories to tell, and with many more that probably ought not be told.
Sunday, 16 November 1997
It’s 5:55 AM and still dark. The morning sun struggles to light the far horizon but barely manages to make a dull red line. Standing in the warm salted air on our darken terrace I observe Jacque Cramer, dressed in running shorts and a tee shirt, walk purposefully to the beach gazebo and stand just outside to watch the sunrise. Within minutes dark red gives way to gold and reflections of colored light against clouds far to the east promise a new day.
Sorting mixed feelings I sit down to write and await Maureen’s morning company. Dull, and unable to think enough to capture the flood of feelings that wash over me, I wander into the guestroom where Maureen sleeps quietly and stand and stare at the woman I’ve loved for as long as I can remember. The last two nights we’ve talked until very late. Maureen is dealing with some depression that she’s convinced is chemical and she wants to return to Portland, Oregon immediately, see her doctor, and change her medication. I want her to wait three more weeks when I’m scheduled to leave island and return to the States. She would like me to cancel my incoming business guests and go home with her. I’ve spent a good deal of time convincing these folks to come, and they’ve bought their tickets and organized their schedules, so my sweetheart and I are at something of an impasse.
We’re not really in serious conflict and there have been no arguments with strained voices or anything like that. But, I don’t want her to leave because I’m lonely when she’s gone. I think that the underlying problem is that she’s not doing much of anything here in the islands and she has way too much time on her hands to dwell on the depression thing. She believes she’s better off to go and deal with the problem in her own way. We’ve agreed. She’ll leave tomorrow and I’ll follow according to plan. I will miss her. My mind wanders back to when Maureen and I first met…
My birthday is in the middle of summer, July 10th to be exact. When I was fourteen, just prior to my fifteenth birthday, I had an uneasy series of summer nights. Although it is not uncommon for a young man to dream of love, young women, and all things connected, particularly at this age, in retrospect it does seem unusual that my recurring dreams were of a specific person whom I did not then know.
Since about age eleven, perhaps even younger, my maturing biology had pressured me with greater urgency to dwell on forbidden thoughts. Dreams with sexual overtones were not new. What was different now was that the vision of a certain young woman, unvoluptuous, overly slender, a wisp of a girl actually, and shy, returned to haunt me night after night. Beautiful yes, overtly sexual, no. By my fifteenth birthday I had taken to thinking of her in the daytime.
In Long Beach, California, where I grew up, the new school year started the day after Labor Day, September 6th. It was an important time, the shift from Junior High, what some call middle school, to the life shaping experiences forced upon us when we’re all grown up and in High School. Of course no one is “grown up” in High School, but to many, or even most teenagers, this is their coming out period, the time when they’ve arrived and they’re infused with self knowledge and they begin to gain a false certainty of the way things really are. I was no different from my peers.
During the summer of my fourteenth year I had worked on a commercial fishing boat known as “the Hurricane.” The considerably famous “Cookie,” a local icon of deep-sea fishing enthusiasts, skippered this particular fishing boat. Cookie was a man whose knowledge about southern California offshore fishing spots was the stuff mythology is made of. He and his tough talking deck hands introduced me to mysterious and far off places like the Channel Islands and the backside of Catalina Island. This was a place so different from my local environment as to be almost dream-like, a place of fantasy. These were places where a fourteen-year-old boy could find himself and imagine doing amazing man-like things.
Catalina was only 26 miles offshore, a fact well known across America when a few years later a relatively unknown singer, with the stage name of Frankie Avalon, sang his way into fame with the song Santa Catalina. One of the best fishing spots in the world, at least from my perspective, was instantly changed into “the island of romance.” I had actually been fishing this island for the two prior summers and on various weekends, whenever I could get enough money to buy an “all-day” fishing ticket. From a relatively young age I earned money. After greeting cards, most of my money came from selling newspapers.
An aggressive paperboy, I was operating six paper-routes at the pinnacle of my newspaper delivery career. Of course, it wasn’t particularly legal, or at least it wasn’t officially allowed by the newspapers, for a boy to have more than two routes at a time, so I had two afternoon Mirror News routes, a morning LA Times route, a morning Herald Examiner route, and two afternoon Independent Press-Telegram routes. The various newspaper publishers were unaware that I was delivering their competitor’s papers.
I got my first route at age eight. The Mirror News was independent and a large Los Angles newspaper, later it would become part of the world famous LA Times. The Mirror did not have many customers in Long Beach, and their subscribers were fairly spread-out. Their requirement was that a boy must be a minimum of nine years old before he could fold and throw neighborhood papers. I lied about my age. They couldn’t find anyone who’d ride the daily long route necessary to make the few dollars a month their routes then paid, so no one checked my age, no one wanted to know. The main thing was I had a bike, earned from selling greetings cards, and that was recommendation enough.
After much begging, Mirror News gave me a second route. The total distance of these two paper routes combined was 10.2 miles as determined by the odometer on my mother’s car. She was in shock; my father thought it was child’s play compared to being raised on a farm. Even when I was eight, the fact that my mother was independent enough to drive was not lost on me. My mom was the only woman on our block, and maybe for blocks around, that owned her own car. In my eyes that made her famous.
Growing up I was about average sized, 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 was a breeding tank for Siamese fighting fish. I also had an outside cat named Mittens and an outside dog. Not just any dog either. I had Toughie, probably the best-known dog in our part of the city and the best friend any boy ever had.
Toughie was a shorthaired medium sized mongrel that ran beside me every day, over all those miles of paper routes. When I missed a porch, Toughie retrieved the paper and put it 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. It took a lot of my money for several years to keep Toughie alive. He was run over four times in as many years, each time while I was delivering papers. There was no way to keep him home. His life was all about being the paper dog.
Shirley Nored was my mother, her middle name was formerly her last name. She was a second grade schoolteacher that taught in the Norwalk-LaMirada school district, which might as well have been another State as far as I was concerned. It was a long way for her to get to work and there was no public transportation in that direction, hence she had to drive. Once when I asked why she didn’t teach in Long Beach, closer to home, she told me it had something to do with my father being a teacher in our area and that husbands and wives were not allowed to teach in the same districts.
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 with advanced degrees, and because the military needed educators to train pilots who were already second lieutenants, they were inducted as officers of higher rank in order to be appropriately respected in the classroom. Both my parents taught meteorology and aeronautics to these pilot wannabes. 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, 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 a whopping $4,000 for their brand new home just prior to my being born. By the time I was in my forties, after both my parents were gone, the house would be appraised for $300,000, 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.
My father and I did not get along, and when I was around the house things were stressful or worse. Having been raised on a farm in the Great Depression Leonard L Neal 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 a fairly 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 abusive, and I lived in terror of his presence most of my youthful years.
From perhaps age 7 though 12, I was frequently restricted to my room to study something of value. It was there that I discovered the joys of having a novel open in my desk drawer with my back to the door whilst appearing to study a text of some kind. My memory of these years are pretty much restricted to a few classroom incidents, delivering papers, deep-sea fishing excursions, a couple of family reunions in Oklahoma and Texas, running away from home, (several times), and sneaking out through my bedroom window to explore the world at night.
At age twelve I hotwired my sister’s car one night and drove all over town to the point I got thoroughly lost and at one point ran out of gas and did not return until after she was trying to leave for her college classes in the morning. As I drove down my cul-de-sac, to turn around and park at the curb in front of our house, both parents and my sister were standing on the lawn waiting for the police to arrive due to her stolen car ---- wow did I catch hell! But, looking back on this event it was clearly a turning point in my life --- it marked the transition from youth to teen, a tumultuous change at best.
Life was simply more pleasant growing up when I was away from home, but it was hard to get away for anything other than gainful employment so to begin with I sold greeting cards, then graduated to mowing neighbor’s lawns with a push mower, then to delivering papers and working summers on offshore fishing boats, and finally when sixteen I bought a truck and a power mower and edger and started a landscaping business. Basically I did 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 of much of childhood, and programmed as I was, I continued on 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, particularly in the social world of gossip and the game of whose up and whose down on the fluctuating scale of the in-crowd. It was all just too silly and unimportant.
Not really a loner, but generally comfortable by myself or in doing things that other teenagers thought were way beyond the pale, I somehow garnered a following of mesmerized others seeking a defacto leader and spokesperson of sorts. Ultimately their opinions carried entirely to much weight and I found myself needful of doing increasingly unusual things in order to maintain a reputation for being independent and unpredictable.
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 and that we should be on the constant look-out for a blinding flash in the sky. This carefully instilled paranoia eventually gave rise to the bomb shelter craze of a few years later, directly after the Soviets detonated their first Hydrogen Bomb, one we were to learn was 1,000 times more powerful than that dropped on Hiroshima which had ended the War with Japan.
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, its no wonder the sixties erupted with such self-possessed fury. I grew up while we were fighting a war in North Korea and alternatively afraid of the Chinese and the Russians. In our high school years our country was providing advisors to Vietnam and before I was seventeen friends were dying there. Most of us didn’t believe we had much time and many thought they needed to grab as much living as they could, right up front.
Height seemed to escape me until about sixteen when I jumped up to 5’11” never to grow higher. In 11th grade I discovered weight lifting, which bulked me up and made me feel manly. 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 and 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. As a matter of fact, by sixteen I had three cars and a pick-up. I had graduated from paper routes to my own lawn service and the old International pick-up held the latest and greatest in lawn equipment. And, I still had Toughie, ala Tramp, from the Walt Disney classic, “Lady and the Tramp.”
Toughie no longer had paper routes to run and seemed confused and somewhat lost until a female dog anywhere within about a ten square mile radius 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 bitches closely controlled by their proud owners. I could never figure out how he did it but I cannot count how many times an angry la-de-da dog owner was ready to kill him for coupling with their pure bred dainties. Because everyone in town seemed to know Toughie and the kid who used to deliver all those newspapers, this became increasingly problematic. When I was about ten I actually had one guy, who lived four blocks away, just across from the archery range (now it’s a lovely park) ram my bicycle with his car because he was so angry that somehow my dog had managed to climb his cinder 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 really angry, but I was just a kid when this happened and I couldn’t really figure out what it was all about, after all sex education was just coming in vogue and I hadn’t got this all put together. In a few cases Toughie was actually shot at by angry pseudo fathers of these little girl dogs.
I had the same experience once, but it wasn’t because of a dog. Early one summer while I was yet fifteen Daddy caught me crawling into his little darling’s window about 2 am, and ran out the front door and around the house with a gun. I never knew whether he meant to actually shoot me but fire in my direction he actually did, which scared the be-Jesus out of me and woke up the whole neighborhood. Two hours 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 and then without showing any mercy at all, 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 really okay. In one week everyone in our end of town was calling me Casanova, or some just derivative, a reputation I was not to loose for some time.
About the same time Toughie was off on what I presume was another of his romantic forays, he never returned and I suppose that someone finally did him in. This probably should have had a sobering effect on me but somehow the point was lost, as I was evidently held captive by my hormones by this time. Which brings to mind what my wife has been saying for years, that men are all basically handicapped by testerone and their basic design system is faulty because there’s not enough blood in a man’s system to operate his brain when the other head is coming to attention. She actually has a point, no pun intended, and there may be something to this. Come to think of it, this study is probably worth millions in government grants.
Generally not more than one or two of my vehicles were actually 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 Maureen Gail Donnelly. Much later I was to discover that her hair was not really red, it was dark brown which I much prefer, although much of our later life she presented herself as a blond. Blonds were all the vogue in the early sixties after a voluptuous Marylyn gyrated her way to stardom in the movie “Gentlemen Prefer Blonds.”
It was just a couple of months after the tormenting summer of mysterious dreams, that on November 10, 1962, I went to 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, it was an all white 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 1962 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 construction plans 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 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 of several years. He was either to embarrassed, or to concerned about pledging our club, to admit that he actually had an interest in one of them.
Daring the fraternity brother beside me, we leaned down and each took hold of the opposite elbow and wrist of the cuter of the two girls and lifted her up from where she was seated and deposited her between us. To say she was shocked would be something of an understatement. She slapped my frat full across the face and angrily climbed back down to where she formerly had been seated. Wow, what passion! 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.
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 grown up sister of 22, who was already 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. She was traumatized when my sister left, (according to my unmentioned plan), leaving Maureen and I in an apartment in swim suits, all alone. She would literally not let me within ten feet of her. She was truly frightened and I was ashamed. Eventually my sister returned and took her home. I sat in the front seat, Maureen sat in the back; our first date was a total disaster.
The next Monday when I approached her in the hall of the 400 building 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, but admittedly Maureen’s younger sister Peggy is quite certain that Sue became involved with the singer Roy Orbison. But at this particular 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 sense to me and besides I was not used to being told off, especially by some outspoken chick, so I was probably pretty flippant with Sue. I couldn’t understand why this loud-mouth bossy female kept telling me that Maureen did not want to see me and that I should go get a life somewhere else. What happened next I’ve never forgotten.
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 and I was afraid she would tell somebody I’d hit her or something to that effect. It was a pretty odd at best. Sue marched back and practically screamed at me wanting to know where I’d heard that name before. Unnerved and confused I blurted out that I didn’t know what she was talking about. She again incredulously demanded where I’d heard the name before. “What name?” I demanded. “Terry Neil” 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, and what had she heard about me that caused her so much anxiety. Did she think I was some kind of a pervert, or something? Several girls all buzzed in a group protected by the pushy Sue South standing between us with her hands on her hips. She called out to a couple of guys I didn’t know and told them I was causing them trouble. Things started to get crazy and it looked like a fight was ready to break out. I was pretty upset by then and it was clear to everyone in that end of the building. I definitely lost my cool.
Trying to redeem some face, I promised to leave Maureen to her group of protective girlfriends, but only if this wacko female named Sue would tell me what the problem with my name was. She angrily agreed, obviously not believing I did not already know, and proceeded to tell me why it was so incredibly unfair of me to use the Terry Neil name. I was confused and upset, but nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to hear.
Maureen Donnelly, Sue South, Dedrie Whitehurst, and Sue Schlinz, all of who were hovering around Maureen at the end of the 400 hall, and none of which I had yet met, had all attended a late summer slumber party just before school started about two months earlier. Sworn to absolute secrecy, someone had introduced a quigee board and the late night question of the hour for the quigee board spirit was: “What is the name of the man Maureen will marry.”
There were frightening overtones to the evening and 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 that they were doing something 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 spelled out the name Terry Neil. Neil and Neal are of course the same name, in fact Neil may be the more common spelling, but in our family it’s spelled Neal. Funny thing, years later when doing some family genealogy I was to discover that our name had indeed been spelled Neil at one time.
Sue told me the story, assuming that somehow I’d already heard it from somewhere 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. Her story was simply too unbelievable to give any credence. Further, I was too riddled with emotion having just barely escaped an all out fight with some guys I didn’t even know. I was convinced Sue South, and her cronies were all raving lunatics and I was thoroughly mortified by the entire event.
I did not call or see Maureen until the next Friday night’s football game at a rival school where I saw her quite by accident. My first reaction was a flood of emotions spawned by the prior conflict and which consisted primarily of immense embarrassment, so I was not in a rush to speak with her. But, a couple of my buddies saw her and wondered why I wasn’t down there doing my thing, they having believed the Casanova stories an all, which had been buttressed by my prior approach to Maureen in the bleachers right in front of them. When I did not immediately respond my reputation began to suffer and the harassment continued until I finally told them I was simply waiting for the right moment and that they should be quiet and learn something.
Having no way out without loosing face I tried to claim I didn’t feel well, which was not a lie given the condition of my stomach’s reaction to the stress of the moment, and I made a case to leave but my ride wasn’t going anywhere. After spending a while watching Maureen from a few bleachers back it was clear that she was in company with a couple of girls I had not 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, so I determined to walk right up and act like everything was fine.
Maureen saw me coming from perhaps twenty feet away and turned a crimson red. She was clearly as embarrassed to see me as I had been to see her. I came on strong and she looked everywhere but at me and kept mumbling she really didn’t think it was a good idea that she see me. Sensing an opening I pressed on at a furious pace which made her shrink back like a frighten child. It finally dawned on me that she was really terrified and not just put off so changing course mid stream I tried to make the leap to being the sensitive type. Crash and burn --- her own courage returning she told me to get lost and turned away.
Thankfully none of my fraternity brothers were near enough to hear what was going on but her body language was pretty 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. The ice having been broken I determined to accidentally run into her in various places, when she was buying popcorn outside the restrooms, stomping down the bleachers with my friends and other all to obvious moves. Each time I’d catch her eye I’d wave and act like we were on great terms and finally her natural tendency to be nice overcame her sense of threat and she spoke to me a bit more kindly.
We did not address the building 400 conflict, as it was more embarrassing for me than it evidently was for her. From my perspective, that of an immature young male, I didn’t know whether to be more embarrassed about her girlfriend making me look stupid or whether or not 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 my reality that I couldn’t give it any credence whatsoever. It was dumb, it was weird, and it seemed a bit satanic; and thinking about it was scary. We avoided the subject for along time thereafter.
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 actually passed a law that one could not graduate high school without having passed 6 years of physical education, for grades 7 through 12. 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 and attending college but forced to go back every day to attend a stupid gym class. Now this caused a lot more problems than one might imagine.
Harry Thompson, a fraternity brother of mine in Zeta Phi, got married half way through his senior year to a gal named Peggy on very short notice. At the time I was 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 and on the spur of the moment Maureen was asked to be Peggy’s bridesmaid, probably because Maureen looked so darn good dressed up, which she had had the foresight to do.
For Maureen and I, getting away together was actually rather problematic because eighteen months earlier Maureen’s parents, and mine, had forbade us to ever date or 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, after all we then just fifteen. To counter our obvious obsession with one another my parents sent me off to grandma’s farm in the Oklahoma panhandle in June of 1962 two weeks before school was out. The plan was I would work the summer on the farm and learn the value of real work --- a possibility my father was convinced could never happened in a suburban neighborhood. While I was away, Maureen’s family bought a new home and moved to a different school district and she was now enrolled at Bellflower High some ten miles north.
While I was gone we were able to exchange a couple of letters through Suzie Appleton, my drop dead gorgeous next door neighbor, who thought our love affair was right out of a Shakespearian play. Once I returned from my three-month tour of chopping cotton, bucking hay and branding cattle, we established contact through third parties and met, but Maureen did not tell me where she had moved and after the three-month hiatus Maureen was clearly rethinking the Terry Neal connection.
Due mostly to the male hormones charging around in my system and my tendency to hit on every attractive gal within line of sight, Maureen dumped me in September of 1962 based on my apparent inability to be faithful, and in effect said good riddance. We didn’t see each other for several months during which time I was nothing short of devastated.
The rumor was that Maureen had moved to Texas, which left me with nothing to go on and no way to try and make things right. Now this ugly turn of events I tried to make up for by expanding my horizons, which basically meant increasing my success rate with members of the opposite sex. Sex being the operative term. This did nothing to alleviate my dreams of Maureen however, which became a routine nighttime event. I was increasingly obsessed with her and often dreamt of meeting her again and how, if I ever had the chance, I would be absolutely faithful, honorable, chaste and all that kind of stuff.
In the spring of 1963 two of my fraternity brothers screeched up to the house of my present attraction, a girl named Susan something-or-other, and begged me to come outside and speak with them, a surprising request to which I immediately agreed. Something deep down in my gut screamed it had to do with Maureen and something equally as loud was shouting the same thought to Susan. How do woman intuit this kind of stuff? Safely outside they told me that they had in fact come across Maureen at a shopping mall a few miles away, that she looked terrific, was now blond and very tanned, and that she asked after me.
After meeting Maureen my frats brothers hid out in the mall watching her from a distance and then followed her home somewhat surreptiously. They weren’t exactly sure which house she lived in but they were certain of the street and they offered to lead me there while they could still remember the location. These particular fraternity brothers were pretty heavy drinkers and could not be trusted to remember anything for very long, so I said my good byes 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. They parked their car and piled into mine and 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, and didn’t find any trace of her, and for this wild goose chase I had just screwed up my current relationship with a hot looking chick that had claimed I was her only true love, etc, etc. All things considered it seemed a disaster and I drove home to sulk and feel sorry for myself.
A few days later, another frat brother came across Maureen and fell madly in lust, but brotherhood and all that required he ask me for permission to see her. I told him that I ought to see her first in order 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. Getting there early the next day I had my new car (not really new but new to me) up on the rack trying to look cool, but she never came. 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, was I surprised. It was Maureen and had she changed. I was thunderstruck! We had been apart less than a year and she looked like a whole new person. She was still Maureen, but a new and improved model and we had history.
She was pretty frosty, but agreed to take a ride in my new wheels and I headed to the ocean where a thoroughly romantic marina I had discovered with another girl sometime back had never failed since to sweep the ladies right off their feet. Wrong. Maureen wasn’t moved and knew immediately that I had been there before with other gals and this didn’t play all that well with her. In fact, she got downright pissy and nothing I could say or do seemed to work so I drove her home, or that is to say I drove her to the end of her street, as she could not afford to be seen with me.
It was clear that I was not off the shit list with her parents and if they knew she had met with me it would be curtains for her new found social life. I tried every charismatic trick I knew to no avail, and then as she walked away I 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 and that was my cue so I jumped out of my car, threw my arms around her, and brought her back and presto we were a couple once again.
For the next year or so, various of my fraternity brothers, including Harry, had been the guys that showed up at the front door to meet Maureen’s parents and take her out for the evening. As funny as it sounds, Harry had become her mom’s favorite, which caused him some delays in picking Maureen up from time to time. I would usually collect my fraternity brother’s girl friends as needed as several parents had warned their daughters off various guys and we would meet at a pre-destined spot to switch females. Maureen’s folks never tumbled to the fact we were seeing each other. To them I was a bad nightmare that was behind them all. Of course there were a few close calls.
One particular night I picked her up in her pajamas sometime after 1 AM on a school night. I drove the ten miles to my house and we sneaked into the family den because it had direct access from outside. We accidentally fell asleep and awoke about the same time her dad usually got up to go to the police station. In a complete panic I drove like a crazy man through town, dropped her off at the house next door still in her pajamas, to the surprise and amusement of the neighbors, and right when she got to the front door her dad opened it to collect the morning newspaper. I thought she was caught cold as I ducked down in my front seat glowing 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.
She had more presence of mind that I had ever given her credit for as she simply 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 she shared with her three sisters, and climbed into bed. He never brought it up and 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 having seen it happen with Harry and Peggy, I became somewhat obsessed with the idea. After all it seemed to me that I was a grown-up college guy of seventeen with friends my age dying in Vietnam, so why couldn’t I get married?
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 was constantly seen, and surely heard, all over town as Harry was given to impromptu drag races. He had beefed up the engine, raised the front end, and put a Hearst shifter on the floor. It was very cool.
My drivable 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 building racing engines. This made me an utter failure in my parent’s eyes, their being educators and all, and very popular with my friends. Harry gave me a lift to my required gym class and 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 --- both who bragged about being ex-marines, stopped us as we got out of the car and started making fun of Harry’s having recently got married. 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, but he was not really much of a fighter, and these two truant officer-idiots did 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 and slamming her virtue. Having more brass than brains, I stepped between them and told these guys to go pick on some girls their size and leave Harry alone as we could not afford to be late for class. Well, you can just about imagine how they reacted.
The leader of the two officers got red in the face and started yelling at me that I did not have the guts to take a swing at him. He kept pointing at his chin screaming to everyone within earshot, that I did not have the nerve to hit him. He was so upset he was literally frothing at the mouth spitting as he screamed that I was a total 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 of being unintimidatible, not to mention being the president of a fraternity with whom one did not mess, I feigned to turn away to my right and then swung back with a right fisted haymaker and was lucky enough to actually hit him square on the chin and not break my wrist or hand. During the split second that this took, which seemed like an eternity, I was terrified I might miss a direct hit, or worse, that he wouldn’t go down, and I would get my butt royally kicked.
I still remember seeing the whole event in slow motion as he physically lifted off the ground, fell backwards, hit the ground with a thud and stayed there. He must have had a glass jaw because he was absolutely 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 just shifted.
All of us there, even me in my adrenalined state of mind, knew this was a significant event in the history of Lakewood High and it was both frightening and exhilarating at the same time. Authority had been shaken to the core; somewhat later this was to scare me pretty badly as I intrinsically knew that the example I had set was not a good one. Truant officer number two, feeling threaten by the huge group that had gathered, looked furtively around, stepped back, said nothing and starred at his partner lying very still on the ground.
Not knowing what else to do I turned and walked briskly away to class in order to keep my shaking legs from being obvious to the growing mob. I did not dare say a word for fear my voice would crack and leave me looking like the terrified boy I really was. My newly enhanced image of being quick to dispatch the idiot-truant officer and overly cool in simply walking on to class, spread quickly and teachers couldn’t seem to get their students into classrooms after the bell rang. Everyone wanted to mill around talking about my insanity, kind of like what happened when we had heard that president Kennedy had been shot. People weren’t sure what to make of this event; the students were every bit as shocked as the teachers, although virtually everyone disliked the truant officers.
Well, 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, yak. Of course, the school must make an example of me notwithstanding at least two-dozen students had stormed the office to give the equivalent of their personal testimony of the events that had transpired. The principal was incredibly nice all things considered, and even told me that they were planning on sacking the truant officers because of their surly attitude. Nevertheless I would be kicked out of school or this kind of problem would not end with me, etc., etc, etc. Funny thing, for years thereafter I worried one or both of these guys were going to track me down and make me pay for their humiliation and lost jobs.
So as it turned out I would not be able to graduate from high school even though I was then attending college and had all of my high school requirements complete except for the compulsory requirement that I run around a track and play ball for an hour a day. I was working part-time at a gas station by then and was never entirely broke and it was then that I launched my campaign to convince Maureen that I could graduate on time and get my diploma if I was actually married. We were a couple after all 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.
Things were not good at home for Maureen. Her parents were heading for another divorce. Jane and Joe were actually married and divorced from each other three times during their shaky years together. Maureen was the oldest and had twice previously played mom to her younger siblings while her attractive mother was off drinking and her father, a 6’4” policeman was working the San Pedro harbor.
Maureen was then, and even more so now, a wonderful woman (I suppose she was only a 17-year old girl at that time), but then as now it seems it would be an almost unholy task to try and list her attributes because I would undoubtedly fail to make mention of many important virtues and fall short of describing the most important person in my life. 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.
On February 14th 1964 …. yep that’s right --- Valentine’s Day, Maureen told her parents she was going to a slumber party and I told my folks I was going camping with a bunch of guys, and the two of us jumped in my car and headed for Mexico. I had splurched for a huge box of candy in a giant pink satin heart shaped box and had bought myself some new Levis for the occasion. It was a two-hour drive to the border; today it would likely be less on the freeways. All the way there we planned what we would say if the border guards stopped and questioned us as the law required we each had to be eighteen before we could cross the border without our parents present. Maureen was frightened and didn’t think she could tell a lie to someone in a uniform. On the other hand 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 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 summer before I had met Maureen, when I was yet but fourteen, I had been sneaking into Mexico. I was a deep-sea fisherman and 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 the cul-de-sac where we lived. Phil was four years older than me and went to Mexico every chance he got.
There was no such thing as strip bars or nude dancers in California in the late fifties and early sixties, all though things changed pretty fast in the later sixties, but right across the border the glamour of evil glittered bright. And if you could get there, it didn’t matter if you were only six years old, if you had U.S. dollars you could go anywhere in Tijuana and do just about anything you could imagine. So, being a young man of some experience, I had already been crossing the border for better that three years, to go fishing out of Ensenada which was a couple of hour’s drive south of Tijuana. Of course, on the way to the fishing vessels, Phil and I had always managed to stop in Tijuana to spend a few hours learning the mysteries explicitly taught in the famous border town strip bars.
This time I was doing the driving to Mexico rather than Phil, all the time rehearsing how I planned to get Maureen across the border. 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 to keep the border guards from looking into his trunk and finding a young man hiding in there. Neither Maureen nor I were yet eighteen, which as I have already mentioned was the required age for you to cross the border without your parents, but whereas I looked old enough to probably past a cursory inspection, especially with a cigarette dangling from my lips, Maureen was another matter entirely.
Acting a good deal more confident than I felt I coached Maureen again and again 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 her with questions about our supposed wedding earlier in the day. She was a mental wreck and was very frightened about breaking the law, getting caught, and facing her father the policeman. Admittedly, I was also afraid of her father, not just because he was a policeman, but also because he was such a big guy.
Predictably, the border guards seeing the youthful looking Maureen shunted us off to an area for questioning. Maureen was obviously upset which increased their suspicions whereupon they had us leave the car and wait in an office on the U.S. side. The border guards began to drill us with questions, which we handled somewhat better due to our extensive preparation, but they finally got wise to my jumping in and answering questions for Maureen so they separated us into different interrogation rooms and began to probe us with greater intensity. They asked each of us separately some questions we hadn’t thought to prepare for, (colors used in the wedding and stuff like that) and finally they asked us for our parent’s phone numbers and tried to call both of our homes.
Amazingly no one was home at either of our houses and in the end we had both stuck to our stories which were evidently so audacious that they finally just let us cross so we could be on the way to our “honeymoon” assuming no one would be so well prepared with complex stories like the ones we told just to go to Mexico. Besides, normally border jumping came from the other direction. We got back in our car, crossed into Mexico and our entire world changed once more.
We visited a lawyer’s office with a sign hung out front saying 1-hour marriages and divorces. It was open until midnight and 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 actually be married as proxy for us standing in and using our names. He explained that 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 and that was that. Believe it or not, our Mexico marriage license has hand written 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 actually true. People can be and are married by proxy and service men in remote locations are routinely married by proxy and during wartime it was done all the time.
We stopped in one of those bars where a roving female, less than scantily clad, offered to take our picture, a photo we still have, but within minutes it was very clear that Maureen was out of place here and I decided to take her to the town where Phil and I had had some very successful expeditions. Twice Phil and I had caught so many yellow tail and barracuda that we filled the entire trunk with layers of chopped ice and fish fillets and drove them to Deardon’s Fish Market in Seal Beach, California and sold them for considerably more money than the cost of our entire Mexico trip. Coming back into the States was always easy as I sat right up front with Phil with our fishing gear in obvious sight and when the border guard asked where we were born we simply said Long Beach, California and in as much as we were not of Mexican descent there was no further questions and we would be waived straight through.
As Maureen and I left Tijuana late that night, now actually married, or at least sorta kinda married, we were to discover that the coastal route down the Baja peninsula to Ensinada was closed for repairs. About 1AM and driving way to fast, we headed down an alternate inland route, blew a tire right off the rim in the middle of nowhere, the tireless rim dropped into a chuck-hole and jerked us sideways and we skidded off a cliff in pitch darkness. The car seemed to hesitate in the air like some kind of cartoon situation, we actually had time to cling to each other while we dropped to what we thought was our probable death. Forty feet down we came to rest on a ledge of boulders. Seriously surprised to be alive we scrambled out of the car and tried to climb the vertical side of the drop-off from the road above.
Eventually, after several different attempts, we got up the ridge and on to the road from which we had spun. Other than a few bruises and a bloody hand we were physically all right. Maureen lost her 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 actually cactus.
After we stopped panting for air, a result of hyper-ventilating from the danger and the climb up the cliff face, it dawned on us that we were actually in another country, we didn’t speak the language, we were under age, we had very little money, our car was damaged and down in a ravine, it was after 2AM and we didn’t know where we were or even have a map. And, I was hungry. ---- Over the years since then I’ve discovered that whenever I am in a stressful situation I get ravenously hungry, right the opposite of most people’s reaction. Anyway there was only the candy, left down in the car, and there was no way I was headed back down there. So I suffered on, more concerned about finding something to eat than almost anything else, a situation that did not play well with my new bride. There was no moon out but the stars were brilliant. We lay on our backs at the side of the road hoping someone would come by and give us a ride. I fantasized about cheeseburgers and fries.
About an hour passed before we saw anyone and this car kept on going without stopping. Later an old Buick came rumbling by and almost hit me standing in the road waving my arms – no luck again. Time passed and a beater of a pickup that looked to old to actually run, stopped and picked us up. The driver was a wizened old man who looked to be even older than his truck. 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 and we threw ourselves on his mercy to which he seemed to respond.
Completely squished into this antique probably build for one person, certainly not three plus a tool box and other things I did not want to even look at, we eventually got on to the main 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 actually did not see the ocean that night and were completely turned around and lost but the noise of water on rounded rocks told us that water was close by. After several attempts our savior woke up the proprietor of a little motel who kept arguing with him to go away that there was no vacancy, finally he relented all the while making it clear that he was not pleased to be giving us a room. He kept asking us questions in Spanish and when we replied No hablar Espanol he would repeat them louder as if somehow that would help. There was a lot of arm waving going on and finally after what seemed an eternity he took us to a room, let us in and left, muttering to himself the whole time.
We were to nervous and scared to sleep, or even take advantage of our second night ever in a motel together. (The first being at Harry & Peggy’s wedding where we stayed in their hotel room with them on their wedding night --- pretty darn weird as I think back on it.) Suddenly somebody started yelling outside our room followed by a loud knocking. We were to frightened to answer the door and the yelling increased in intensity and the pounding became severe. It was one scary night with what sounded like a bunch of drunken guys shouting and alternatively beating on the door and walls of our motel room. They had at least one motorcycle out there, the engine of which they were gunning again and again and I was seriously concerned they would break the door down. We decided to attempt an escape through the windows but it was so dark we couldn’t see where that might take us so we huddled together not knowing what to do or where to go and finally said a prayer out loud and asked God to help us. We were trapped in a room with only one way out and that blocked by alcohol-fueled desperadoes, probably Hell’s Angel types.
Needless to say we didn’t get much sleep that night but with morning we looked out the windows to an incredibly bright and beautiful bay with the waves crashing on a rounded pebble beach some fifty feet below. It was a good thing we didn’t try to escape through the windows during the night or we would have been in evener bigger trouble. Our driver had thoughtfully arranged for the motel proprietor to have a tow-truck meet us in the morning. He was very nice and spoke a little broken English but mostly we communicated by hand gestures. As it turned out the guys who were beating on the doors had rented our room earlier the prior evening and then gone out drinking and carousing at some beach bars a few miles a way. 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 and not returned, had come to their room and locked them out. Thankfully when we left these guys were asleep in and around their pickup and motorcycles.
The tow truck guy drove us back into the hills for a good 30 to 45 minutes when of a sudden he stopped, got out of his truck and looked over the side. How he knew where to look is beyond me as we did not recognize anything in sight, but there, sure enough, was our car sitting in the most precarious of positions on a ledge not thirty feet from a drop-off that would have sent us a good two hundred feet further down to our death. Very scary this, but 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 amazingly looked like it might run if we could just get it out. The radiator and oil pan were intact, and no vital fluids seemed to be leaking out.
A few hours effort and a second tow truck later, and together they managed to get the car back on to the road. 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, which of course was an appalling thought. The fact was we were not drunk, and as odd as it probably seems, especially in light of my fraternities’ reputation --- I was not a drinker. 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 could get my frats home safely after a drinking binge.
We tried to explain to the tow truck drivers we had not been drunk. It didn’t seem to matter whether or not it was true it was just what the police always did when a foreigner wrecked a car in Mexico. After all, fines or perhaps pay-offs, were the way the police made their living.
Eventually El Capitan arrived, complete with a custom-tailored, suede lapelled jacket, knee high polished boots and a rider’s crop. He strutted about waving the rider’s crop and made 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 guy, which we had by now befriended, interceded on our behalf and calmed our prosecutor down somewhat. He finally convinced the policeman that neither of us drank so instead he fined us for reckless driving which was probably closer to the truth. Eventually 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 to Ensenada in the first tow truck, got a cheap, fleabag hotel room, and called on the U.S. consulate and told them our sad tail.
A day later a woman lawyer who seemed to be based there to protect U.S. citizens from being ripped off by the police, helped us negotiate the release of our car, got someone to fix the wheel which left us with just enough money for gas to possibly make the border, but certainly not enough to get us home. The police officer made a big issue of waiving our fines as a wedding present.
Frighten, shaken, and exhausted, we limped back towards Tijuana on the ocean side road that was then under construction, it was basically dirt and sometimes gravel, most of the way. The car shook violently 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 exhausted and stressed to the max we argued with each other incessantly all the way back to Tijuana.
Arriving at the road leading to the border crossing there were long lines of cars for what seemed like miles. Vacationers, fisherman, sailors on weekend pass from the San Diego shipyards, and other revelers and partygoers, were all trying to get across the border on Sunday night. I still remember clearly my almost disbelief that the car did not run out of gas while idling in line as we ever so slowly lurched to the guard stations. I also remember how bad I had to take a pee while stuck in the grindingly slow traffic snarl. Amazingly we got through the border without so much as a question and 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.
At one point enroute I was forced to pull off the road and use what we coincidentally referred to as a “Tijuana credit card” to get enough gas to make it home. This consisted of a ¼” diameter length of rubber hose about 5’ long which I kept 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. In fact, you can often get a siphon going without ever sucking on the hose, but the key 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. We were forever borrowing gas from one another until we got paid from whatever job we pursued.
When we got back to Long Beach we still had gas in the car and one quarter, which everyone then called a two-bit piece. This was the price of one gallon of gas. But having successfully gassed up via our Tijuana credit card, we stopped in a Jack in the Box drive through and spent the $.25 on a burger. I still remember my abject terror when I looked in my rear-view mirror to discover that the truant officer I had decked a couple of weeks earlier was in the car right behind me. It spooked me big-time. This latest development heaped on top of everything else we had experienced on the weekend from hell, 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 and went ever so carefully home, took a bath, crawled into bed and died for about twelve hours. It was two more days before we could meet again and try to sort out the implications of what we had done.
Trying to get up enough nerve to tell our parents that we had eloped and were now 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. I was incredibly scared but saw no other way through the situation so I resolved that the manly thing to do was simply take the punch I was certain would come and get it over with! When Joe answered the door and recognized me he pointed towards the street and said go. I stood my ground and choked out my story. His shoulders slumped, he mumbled something about how he would talk with Maureen and that was that --- I was free to go and not bleeding.
As it turned out Maureen’s mother had gone to the hospital for a hysterectomy the day before and so we went to the hospital to tell her, she was heavily sedated which spared me what I expected would be her threats of bodily harm. Two years earlier when last we had seen one another, she told me in absolute seriousness that she carried a gun in her purse and that if I ever saw her daughter again she would shoot me in the crouch. (Actually she used a more graphic term) Now this makes a pretty wicked visual for a young man obsessed with his manhood and I was truly reluctant to see her --- and for good reason.
On the way to the hospital Maureen went to the May Company and bought her mother a nightgown which she had wrapped as a gift. This was a pretty bizarre thing to do in my experience, but Maureen was convinced it was what needed to be done. When we got to the hospital and into her mother’s private room she simply stared at me through her drugged state and opened her present. She became completely sidetracked with complaining to her daughter that the nightgown was barely fit for a grandmother and certainly not someone like herself. Funny thing that --- she was to become a grandmother later that year, a situation for which she was not to forgive me for perhaps another twenty years into the future.
As it turned out the State of California would not recognize our Mexican marriage license and we ultimately had to secure our parents written permission to be married within the State. We couldn’t simply run off and live together because in those days an act of that magnitude was seriously against the law and in fact because Maureen was under the age of eighteen chances were pretty good that I would be thrown in jail for statutory rape. Just a few years later Vietnam war protestors and the San Francisco flower children turned all the rules upside down and the laws were changed as it was simply impossible to enforcement them anymore.
Maureen could get married with her parents’ written permission but I was required to appear before a judge in addition to having both my parent’s written permission. Girls could get married younger than boys and that was the way of things. I met with Judge Sanford Beach in chambers at the Long Beach courthouse. It was a very serious affair, and I was afraid he would deny me the right to be married when a guy stuck his head in the door and yelled “hey Sandy, 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 snigger which broke down the facade of the Judge’s thoroughly practiced demeanor. He finally grinned 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.
Three weeks after our Mexico adventure the gas station where I worked gave me four hours off and Maureen and I got married again 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 station gave me a raise because I was now married and had a wife to support. I went from earning $1.10 per hour to a whopping $1.25 per hour plus 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. And of course it sounds terribly cornball, but Maureen did marry the guy she met through the quigee board, and Terry did marry the girl of his dreams.