We spend the first year of our child’s life teaching them to walk and talk, and the next seventeen telling them to sit down and be quiet.

Do whales carry brain worms?

What is the clinical term for the fear of sneezing while brushing your teeth?

The appeal of Body Piercing I’ve never understood. I’ve done it countless times…just never intentionally.

Some helpful tips for assimilating to seniorhood.

1. Hawaiian shirt. The louder the better. Helps identify you, especially in crosswalks.
2. Cargo shorts. Because carrying your wallet in your back power is agony on your sciatica.
3. Sandals. Socks optional but recommended because even you don’t want to see your toenails.
4. Ponytail. Optional depending on whether you have enough hair left to rock it.
5. Beard. Because who wants to walk around with bits of toilet paper stuck to your face.

In the summer of 1959 our family faced a life changing crisis. A few months after the birth of my younger brother, Michael, my mom…who had developed Chronic Heart Failure following a bout of rheumatic fever as a child…suffered an episode which resulted in a lengthy hospital stay. My dad, faced with the daunting task of raising four young children while working full time, moved us in to live with his parents. My dad felt that my mom’s collapse was caused by her strained relationship with her mother, who was prone to be stern and judgemental toward my mom, so the decision was made to sell the house on Vine Street in order to create some distance in the hope that it would aid in her recovery.

My maternal grandparents lived on Rose Street, just north of the center of town. It was in the older part of town, a mix of Victorian and Georgian era houses on a quiet, tree lined street. My grandparents’ house, where my family would live for the summer of 1959, was a two story Victorian set on a narrow city lot. The faded white paint gave the exterior an understated appearance but it was a well built house, though the plumbing and electrical could have used an upgrade. On the first floor was the living room, dining room, and kitchen while the bedrooms and bathroom were upstairs. It had a full basement where they stored relics of bygone years. A classic Victorian down to the floral wallpaper. There was a somber feeling to the house and a cool, almost unnatural, stillness. My grandparents had bought the house soon after moving west and settling in Stockton in the late 1920’s. They had raised six children there but now it was just the two of them. It was a clean, quiet house except on Christmas Day, when my family along with my aunts and uncles and dozen or so cousins descended on the house, creating chaos and cacophony.

Most of my memories from that time have since faded. Mostly I remember my feelings from that time.. confused, lonely, and a bit afraid. I was too young to understand why my mom was in the hospital, I only knew she was there. Between working full time and getting the house on Vine Street ready for sale I didn’t see much of my dad that summer. My brother Bill who was five years older was rarely around and Michael was an infant so my sister Mary, who was a couple of years younger, and I were pretty much left on our own. Most of our days were spent parked in front of the television watching cartoons. Grandma would bring us chocolate milk and cookies while she went about her daily chores. I remember one day Mary and I gorged ourselves on green figs from the tree in the back yard and I got so sick that I can’t eat raw figs to this day. At night my sister and I shared a bed in one the rear bedrooms upstairs. It was then that an uneasy dread would well up. It felt like there was a presence in the room watching over us. There wasn’t a feeling of good or evil, just a cold melancholy. Hanging from one side of the dresser mirror hung a wooden cutout of a football player illuminated by a shaft of light coming through the window and in my child’s mind it became a personification of the dread I sensed. A talisman of an unseen sadness.

My grandfather, Orson P Bird, was a quiet man. A man of a stoic demeanor and simple habits. He was small in stature but chiseled from a lifetime of hard work. Born and raised in Kansas, he met my grandma while at college in Missouri. After the wedding they had moved to southern Colorado where my dad was born, the fifth of six children. They homesteaded a small piece of land and he found work in the mines. His time in the mines left him with a grip that would leave a mark. After a few years the mines closed and the family moved to Stockton on the eve of the Great Depression. Times were hard and struggling to find work he signed on as a pro wrestler with the carnival traveling up and down the state taking on all comers. When World War Two began he found work as a welder in the shipyards. After the war he had built a small amusement park on a piece of land leased at Oak Park which he was running at the time. It had been a hard life and you could see the scars on his face and his hands, but the scars inside he kept to himself.

My grandmother, Aileen, was a kind and gentle woman, petite in stature and soft spoken when she spoke at all. She was a humble and pious woman but beneath her modest demeanor had a steely toughness that spoke to her Missouri roots. Hers had not been an easy life, raising six children in the wilds of Colorado, managing a household during the depression, watching her sons go off too war. A Gold Star decal displayed on the front door spoke of the one who didn’t return.

My uncle Raymond was their second child and the eldest of five sons. To his sister and his brothers he was not just a sibling, but their protector and their leader. When their father was away with the carnival during the winter months Raymond was left to take on duties far beyond his years. With war coming Raymond had joined the army and had been assigned to the Army Air Corps. While stationed in Ohio he fell in love and was married, but soon after his squadron was deployed to the South Pacific.

Raymond was a top turret gunner on a B-24. Five days before Christmas of 1943 during a mission over Maloelap Atoll near the Marshall Islands his plane was hit and forced to ditch in the ocean. As the crew was abandoning the aircraft the Japanese fighters that had been pursuing them began strafing the life rafts. It was reported that Uncle Raymond stayed at his post, proving cover fire for the rafts until the plane went underwater. For his bravery in combat he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal with Oak leaf Cluster, and the Purple Heart posthumously. There was a bookcase in the living room of the house where family pictures were displayed. There, prominently placed was a photo of Uncle Raymond in uniform with his medals displayed below. He is memorialized at the Tablets of the Missing monument at the National Cemetery at Pearl Harbor and in the Honor Roll of the Dead at the National Archives.

Honors and medals, however, do not make up for the loss of a loved one. They cannot replace the smile, the embrace, the heartfelt conversation now left unsaid. The family was devastated by the loss. It was as if a piece of themselves had been ripped away. I know my dad never got over it. A sadness so deep that it seemed to seep into the very walls of the house. Time doesn’t stop and lives move on, but the scars never go away. When I think about that house I can’t help thinking about that gold star and the sadness it had brought to that house.

By the end of that summer my mom had recovered and the new house was ready to move in, so we left the house on Rose Street. We would return to live there many years later after my grandparents had moved out. I found that the sense of unease had diminished, but still lingered. At some point years later I shared my feelings about the house with Michael and Mary and found that they had also felt it. That same unnatural chill to the house, the same unseen melancholy that haunted the house on Rose Street.

We lived in a house on Vine Street until I was five. It was a two bedroom wooden house my dad and my uncle Sam had built. It was on a plot of land adjacent to my maternal grandparents house that they had given my folks as a wedding present. It was a small house set toward the front of a long narrow property with a small front yard and an open field in the back. It was located on a quiet street with ditches rather than sidewalks toward the eastern edge of town.

What few memories I have are somewhat random. I remember my dad’s old wooden fishing boat rotting in the tall grass behind the house. I remember we had a dog, a collie who’s name escapes me, who one day disappeared. We were told at the time that he had gone to live on a farm. I only learned later that his removal was caused by him trying to eat my then infant brother Michael. And there was no farm. I remember watching the French explode an atom bomb in the South Pacific on a grainy black and white television in the living room and even at my young age I sensed that this wasn’t a good thing. I remember twice having my stomach pumped after trying to expand my culinary palate…once with a bottle of aspirin and once with a pack of Lucky Strikes, thankfully unfiltered. I remember that one time my mom sent me to the corner store to buy some “snails”. I didn’t know that she meant the spiral shaped pastry and I was pretty sure the didn’t sell molluscs at the corner store so I came home with a can of beans.

I never knew my maternal grandfather, Frank Brown, who died a few months before I was born. What I know of him comes from stories my mother told me. He had been born in Kansas and had come out to California as a young man. He settled in Los Angeles where he married and had three daughters. But when the marriage didn’t work out he headed north and took a job as field supervisor for Holly Sugar, working the sugar beet fields in the delta. Soon he met my grandmother and they settled in the obscure hamlet of Clyde, just north of Concord in the East Bay, where he sired two more daughters before moving to Stockton. He was a kind man, by all accounts, with an intellectual frame of mind. He was an avid reader who liked his drink and could often be found in one of the Skid Row bars until late in the evening. One Sunday in the spring of 1953 he lay down for a nap that is still on going.

As for my grandmother, who we called “Nanna”, my memories are few. We saw little of her after we moved from Vine Street until she passed when I was eleven after a lengthy stay in a nursing home following a massive stroke. She was the daughter of an English doctor who had emigrated to California when she was ten to work for the railroad. The family had come from British aristocracy and were used to servants and the finer things. My memories of Vine Street were that her brother Charley lived with her, doing chores around the place. Charley was the only grownup I knew who rode a bicycle. I remember that she kept chickens. Mean, vicious chickens. My later memories were of visiting her in the nursing home, with it’s pale green walls, and of her open casket funeral which made quite an impression on me being my first encounter with a dead person. By all accounts she was a formidable woman who loved a good argument…or a bad argument or any excuse for an argument…and would take on all comers. My mom often said that Nanna went through life looking for a worthy opponent.

Shortly after my brother Michael was born my mom, who had contracted rheumatic fever as a child, suffered a bout of chronic heart failure and went into the hospital for an extended stay. Our family had outgrown our small two bedroom house…Michael was sleeping in a crib in the living room which he would soon outgrow…the decision was made to sell the house and move. So with my dad needing help raising four kids while working a full time job we moved in with his parents across town on Rose Street while the house was readied for sale.

As the old saying goes, Stockton is a great place to be from…far from. I knew that I wanted to be somewhere else as soon as I knew there was somewhere else. It’s not that it was a horrible place…there are far worse places on the planet…it was just godawful boring with a tinge of bleak. Mind numbingly average and they liked it that way. A Norman Rockwell veneer painted over a canvas of relentless tedium.

The Stockton of my youth was in the latter stages of transition from a quiet farming town to a small industrial city, struggling with the challenges of urbanization while still clinging to it’s rural culture. Stockton, which in the early days was known as Mudville…some claim it to be the locale of the famous poem “Casey at the Bat”…and later Tuleburg, had experienced four distinct migrations in the 19th and 20th centuries which had shaped it’s identity. And each of the latter three being vehemently opposed by the previous immigrants. It had it’s roots as a trading post and transit point for miners heading for the Sierra Nevada gold fields in the 1850’s. When the gold petered out a wave of settlers began farming the land around the young town, which proved exceptionally fertile. Italian immigrants in particular found the valley ideal for growing tomatoes, grapes, and almonds while Asian immigrants found the delta region favored rice and root crops like sugar beets and onions, at least until several racist laws…such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882…banned them from owning property. In the 1930’s the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression drove a wave of migrants, mostly from the South and the Midwest, west seeking better opportunities. This sudden influx created friction between the mostly white immigrants and the more diverse local population. The new arrivals were derisively called “oakies”, causing a resentment that lingered for decades. Soon after the onset of WWII resulted in a manufacturing boom to meet the war effort. Factories and shipyards drew a new wave of migrants, including a large African-American contingent, looking for work. This created racial tensions, both among the recently arrived southern whites and many of the locals as the city dealt with the issues of segregation and discrimination that would culminate in the Civil Rights era. In addition the pall cast by the Cold War and the rise of communism, along with the growing threat of nuclear war, led to a national sense of unease and helped inflame divisions between New Deal progressives looking to move the country forward and those that saw that the changes being advocated as a threat to their way of life. Stockton also suffered, as almost all cities do, with the stench of corruption among it’s civic leaders which tended to widen the gap between the haves and the have nots. Community and business leaders along with the local media, which they controlled, tried to gloss over these issues and present the image of Stockton as a model modern All American city. This did little to dispel the underlying atmosphere of dissatisfaction that pervaded the city.

The city was generally divided along racial and economic lines. The upper class, mostly white, lived on the north side of town around a neighborhood called Lincoln Village. An area of newer, larger homes and even their own school district. It wasn’t gated but it might as well have been, as any outsiders were closely watched and viewed with suspicion. The south side was the poor side of town where most of the black population lived. It was a mix of older houses and light industrial, which lent the atmosphere of chain link and dirty air. To many of the white residents of the town it was an area where you didn’t go after dark, if at all. The east side of town, where I mostly lived through high school, was a collection of blue collar neighborhoods with a mix of Hispanic and poor whites. It had a more semi-rural feel to the area. Being near the farmlands east of town it was home to much of the agricultural processing, as we were reminded every fall when the wind shifted us downwind of the tomato cannery. The west side of town was the old part of town. Lots of Victorian and Georgian architecture and tree lined streets. Solidly middle class and mostly white. Downtown was the commercial hub as well as the seat of local government in area just north of the area known as “Skid Row”, blocks of run down hotels frequented by men referred to in those days as “whinos”.

The landscape could best described as flat. The elevation was listed at fifteen feet above sea level and didn’t vary much from one end of town to the other. Standing on top of any tall building in town…there weren’t many to choose from…you could see east to the Sierras, west to the Coast Range, and north and south into oblivion. The one positive from my perspective was the juxtaposition of several highways making it easy to get out of town. Both Highway 99 and later I5 led south to LA and north to Sacramento and beyond. To the west 580 led to the Bay Area while Highway 4 went east into the Sierra foothills. Much of my young life I wondered often why more people didn’t take advantage of the exit ramp to somewhere else. It took me a while but when I was ready I got out and I pretty much never looked back. Except for now, it would seem.

Introduction

I was born in the middle of the 20th century in the middle of the night in the middle of a town the middle of nowhere, the middle son of a lower middle class family. An inauspicious beginning to what go on to be what to the casual observer would seem a rather pedestrian life. I was an average child, though judged a bit odd by my peers. In truth, even I found myself a bit strange. I was a frail child and obsessively shy, I found the outside world cold and menacing…which it often was…and tended to withdraw into my own world. An uninspired student and a mediocre athlete, I drifted through my school years without much promise. I mostly coasted along, drawing as little notice as possible. Girls, in particular, paid me little attention in my early dating years. Whether it was my less than dynamic personality or my J.C. Penny wardrobe I was never really sure. In my 20’s I drifted a bit…town to town, job to job…eventually settling down to raise a family while shuffling through a series of jobs before settling into a rather sedate retirement. No great accomplishments or heroic acts of valor to relate. Never achieved fame or fortune…though the latter I continue to blame on the lottery. All in all it would seem a very ordinary life.

Yet woven into the fabric of that life are a pattern of places, events, and most especially people that have led to an extraordinary journey through this humble lifetime. It is those elements that have shaped who I am today. They have given me the strength and the confidence to take on a world that I once feared, to trust in others and to trust in myself. It is said that a life well lived is good friends, great stories, and grand adventures and in those respects I feel fortunate indeed. With that I embark on this admittedly narcissistic chronicle of a life lived under the radar. I hope you will join me.

Disclaimer: While the places and events in the story are real, some of the names have been changed in order to respect the privacy of the persons involved.

This is a story about my friend Jim who left us a few years back. Jim was a special breed of man. I told him when we last spoke that few people in my life had influenced me as much as him. Jim was older by a few years. He had joined the army as young man and had served in Korea. His military service became an significant factor in shaping his identity. After he got out he hung around L.A., doing studio work and frequenting the bars around Venice Beach. Jim had a bit of a wild streak back then and he had seen his share of trouble but by the time I met him he had mellowed into the calm demeanor of a grizzled veteran.

I met Jim when we were both working the southern Renaissance Faire in Agoura back in the early ’80’s. He was working security and I was working carpentry. We became friends instantly. Jim was a very easy guy to be around, easy going and quick with a smile. There was a feeling of kindness and humility, but also the quiet strength of someone you could trust with you life. An “old soul” as they say. By the fall of ’84 Jim had risen to captain of the Walking Guards, a security detail that patrolled the faire with radios ready to respond to any emergencies. I had known him for a few years and had grown to respect him so I was honored when he asked me to be his walking partner for the upcoming northern Faire.

It was a Saturday afternoon when we got a call over the radio from the parking lot alerting us that some Hells Angels were on site. The Angels had visited before without incident and so while alert we were not overly concerned. We were up toward the middle of the Faire when the radio blew up with the hysterical voice of an Area Guard who was shouting that the Hells Angels were trashing a jewelry booth in the front area and calling for the Goon Squad. Jim keyed his mike and directing everyone to stay off the radio and stand down and that he would handle it.

When we arrived at the booth we discovered that this was a contingent from the legendary Oakland chapter, including Sonny Barger and Irish, who was chapter president at the time, and a few of his lieutenants. The Angels were engaged in a heated conversation with the people in the booth and a crowd was gathering. The issue it turned out was that the jewelers were making a selling a silver ring that featured a winged skull. The Angels were claiming the winged skull image was theirs and demanding the jewelers stop selling them. The jewelers were understandably frightened by the confrontation and there was a sense of rising hysteria that could have led to a bad outcome. Jim and I quickly stepped in between the parties, Jim drawing the Angels away from the booth to talk while I took in the jewelers’ side of the story.

Soon Jim came back to the booth and said that he had smoothed the situation with the Angels and that there wouldn’t be any trouble. He asked the jewelers to pull the rings off the counter and they swiftly complied. As the crowd began to disperse and the jewelers went back to their business Jim confided in me that he and Irish had a mutual cellmate back in the day and that he had been able to establish a bond with Irish. In order to guard against any further incidents Jim agreed to personally escort the Angels for the day and that I would take over the walking teams. About then a call came in from Ale 1 about some drunk causing a problem and I was off to deal with that. Meanwhile Jim took the Angels on a tour of the faire, including some backstage access, until they happily rode off into the sunset.

The next afternoon we again got a call form the parking lot the the Angels had arrived. Area guards in the front area confirmed that they were headed for the jewelers booth so Jim and I headed over to meet them. The Angels brought a manila envelope with a cease and desist letter from their lawyer alleging copyright infringement. While Jim took on the role of mediator I organized the walking teams into a security perimeter, rotating in a clockwise direction. I soon realized that Irish’s men were working the same perimeter in a counter clockwise direction. It was all quite cordial as we passed each other with nod that said “just doing my job”.

Meanwhile at the booth it turned out the Irish really liked the rings and an agreement was reached with Jim’s help that the jewelers could make all the rings they wanted but they could only sell them to the Angels. Thus could have been a tragic incident turned into a favorable situation for both sides and much of the credit for that goes to Jim. The bond that developed that day between Jim and Irish turned into a friendship that lasted until Irish was murdered in his own bar. I remember the deep sadness in Jim’s voice when he told me of Irish’s passing. The world saw Irish as a violent gangster, which he was, but Jim saw something more. That’s the kind of guy Jim was.