California Here We Come

California Here We Come!

We weren’t out of Maryland when it began.

“Are we there yet?” Suzie called plaintively from the back seat.

That would be repeated an aggravating number of times by the poor bored souls enduring the torturous ordeal of the back seat. If you were in the front you knew better not say it because you were in arms reach of a hard WAP on the back of your head. I don’t know how we all fit into that car. It was a black and white finned 1960 Plymouth station wagon. Each of us took turns sitting in the front seat between my mom and dad. My mom held little baby John occasionally on her lap or we wedged him between us when he slept, which was most of the time. We were crammed five across in the back seat. Luckily we were all skinny. It wasn’t easy to sit there with nothing to do. You could read a passed around comic only so many times. We learned to control your body functions for excruciating lengths of time or until you threatened to crap your pants, and that was ignored after a while. Looking at the passing scenery didn’t offer much relief until you passed through a few states and the landscape changed noticeably or we passed by an interesting city or a landmark like the Mississippi or spotted something worth seeing like an armadillo. We’d tally the state license plates on passing cars and get excited to no end to spot a car from Alaska, Florida, Maine, or pretend we saw the Holy Grail—Hawaii.

“No you didn’t.”

“Yeah I did! It was that blue car we just passed. The guy looks like Don Ho.”

“Dad, could you slow down, that last car….”

No answer.

There was lively chatter the first hour or two of each day. But the babble would be strangled in the grip of monotony as we faded into a zombie-like stupor. My dad did all the driving and kept one elbow out the window, consequently that arm was about ten shades darker than the rest of him. He was truly an endurance driver and we’d do at least 600 miles a day. This wasn’t a leisurely sightseeing cruise it; was a test of endurance, both of distance and company. We’d drive from morning to night, stopping only to eat, do our business or to get gas, usually in the same stop. The tedium would occasionally be broken when my dad blew his top or the horn and curse out a driver who was going too slow, too fast or cut us off. At least that was entertaining. He was in control of the radio and we’d be forced to listen to a hellish string of songs such as Roger Miller’s hit “Dang Me” followed by “Walk like a Man” sung by Frankie Valli, “… talk like a man?” in that ironic un-manly falsetto? It was never ending… Perry Como, Streisand, Al Hurt or Bobby Goldsboro singing that sappy ditty, “See The Funny Little Clown.” If I had it handy, I’d have pulled out a rosary and prayed for deafness. I thanked God when a Beatles song came on. We knew the lyrics by heart and sung together like merry munchkins in the back seat.

“Are we there yet?”

It was dangerous in the back seat as territorial disputes, shoving matches and random senseless violence broke out. There was a lot of crying. My sister Karen was tough and didn’t take crap from anyone. She’d pummeled you with her elbow or pulled your hair if you happened to annoy her or get on her nerves. I was relentlessly good at that and made teasing her one of my specialties for many years to come.

“Look, a reindeer!”

“There’s no reindeer in Oklahoma.”

“Uh huh, I just saw one, next to an Armadillo.”

“No you didn’t—“

“—Yes I did! OW!”

“Don’t make me pull over.”

“Are we there yet?”

San Carlos

San Diego was beautiful in its own way. Not anything like North East but just as interesting for a young explorer. We lived in temporary housing briefly before we moved into our first real home. Our house on Lake Badin Avenue was the only house my dad was able to purchase along the way. It was a joy to have our own home instead of living in government housing. It was on the lower end of a sloping hill of terraced houses in a brand new development called San Carlos. Our house was a soft green split-level with four bedrooms, a garage and a cement patio out back, covered by a rippled orange fiberglass roof. A tall wood fence enclosed the tiered backyard with two small slopes covered in patches of yellow marigolds.

Across the street was a large scrubby open area of undeveloped land, overrun with sagebrush and ground squirrels. Above that was a baseball field where I would soon play left field three times a week. On the other side of the field, you could see the elementary school we would attend. We could walk to school, that meant an extra half an hour of sleep each morning. Looming above us was a large mountain I couldn’t wait to climb.

For desert country, it wasn’t that hot in San Carlos. Because we were ten miles from the ocean, it was relatively pleasant year round. It could get hot in the summer months when the Santa Ana winds blew in some heat from the deserts to the east but it was in the mid 70’s on average and dipped into the upper 50’s in the winter months. We quickly became acclimated to the drastic consistency of climate. No winter, no spring or the vibrant colors of fall; it felt like summer time all year round.

The contrast of environment was startling. Not a tall tree anywhere, at least not around us. In San Diego proper I saw tall palm trees but in the new suburbs the indigenous oaks were puny. The big trees were maybe twenty feet high but that was the exception. Occasional clusters grew here and there but the land was barren of forest. That’s not to say the desert was barren of life because it was absolutely crawling with it. Bugs, lizards, roadrunners, spiders and snakes were everywhere and quite at home there. Unfortunately for them so were the new suburbs.

San Carlos is a typical middle-class tract-home subdivision cut into the hilly countryside below Cowles Mountain. Cowles Mountain anchors one part of Mission Trails Park and is the largest urban park in the U.S. at over 6,000 acres… seven times larger than Central Park in New York City. It was the only mountain and the biggest natural feature within the city limits of San Diego, if you don’t include the beaches. From its summit of 1,591 feet you can see the vast panorama of the Pacific Ocean to the west. Looking south you can see Lake Murray and all of San Diego County and into Mexico.

We settled into the lifestyle of the mid sixties and suburban living. Joe and I played on the local baseball league and joined the Cub Scouts. Paula and Suzie were in the Brownies and Karen in the Camp Fire Girls. We attended the local Catholic Church faithfully every Sunday and attended Catechism lessons. Everything seemed hunky-dory in San Carlos, but behind closed doors, burning whispers scorched like the Santa Ana winds.

California was much more stylish than the East coast. The Beach Boys and the surfer mentality made a big wave of its own; not like a tsunami, but a big splash nonetheless up and down the coast. Throughout the early sixties Woodies had been back in style, this time sporting a surfboard hanging out the back or tied to the roof. Hot rods soon left them in their dust. Surfing the waves became a phenomena but that was for teenagers with cars and a lot of free time. Kids our age were the first generation of skateboarders. We surfed the sidewalks and streets.

Bainbridge

We moved out of that big blue house on Mechanics Valley Road to a drab cramped officer’s quarters at the Bainbridge Naval Training Station. I don’t think we lived there very long because I really have to rack my brains to think of anything half memorable there. I’ll tell you a little bit about the base. It was like a college campus. There were many schools there; for Marines (NAPSters), Waves (Women Available for Volunteer Emergency Services), Navy Training Centers, where my dad was the Superintendent of Schools, and a Naval Academy Prep School at the top of the hill in the Tome section. Elite military students prepped there before assignment to the Officer’s Naval Academy in Annapolis. The base was at the top of a hill and you had to come and go through a guarded gate. Inside the fenced in facility was a maze of roads, large training buildings, dormitories and officer’s housing that surrounded a sprawling treed mall on a rolling landscape. It included a football stadium, tennis courts, a lacrosse field, a huge amphitheater and three churches. On the far side of the base was a fence above a steep cliff that overlooked the Susquehanna and the tiny town of Port Deposit below. Sailors, Jarheads (Marines) and Waves were constantly on the move marching back and forth in their whites, khakis and blues between the schools, mess halls and the enlisted club, Fiddler’s Green. We ignored them for the most part and were kept segregated in our quarter of the base. Being fenced in restricted us from the free roaming we enjoyed in North East but we made the best of it. A little league baseball field was a block away but I never got to play in because it was winter. We took the bus to and from school and Blackie would meet us at the bus stop everyday.

We had a big snowstorm that year and woke to find out school was closed and there was a foot of snow on the ground with more on the way. As had been the tradition at the base, just about the all the kids assembled into a collective force at the park area. Like worker ants we prepped the hillsides, taking turns pulling kid-laden snow saucers that flattened down the snow and others stomped and packed the snow and smoothed out embankments along the tight curves. After a couple hours the serpentine sled path snaked to the bottom on the park and shot out into an open area. The sledding was fantastic. It was fast and dangerous. Most of us had the dependable runner sleds called the “Flexible Flyer,” they were steerable and you could slow them down by dragging your feet along the curves. We’d start off in a sprint and flopped down on them to get a faster start. The brave or reckless kids had snow discs, or flying saucers. They were metal discs with hand straps and always an adventure to ride. It was only luck if you made it all the way down on one of them. Usually, you’d end up riding sideways or backwards totally out of control and end up shooting off the path and face down in the snow. It was a blast. We returned home frozen, wind-chaffed and wobbly-legged and would thaw out with a hot cocoa.

Another transfer came around and we packed up for a trip back to California. With my parents and five siblings, suitcases and bags, our station wagon was packed tight as sardines in a tin. There was no room for Blackie.

“There’s no way we’re taking that dog!” my dad announced.

We never expected that, it was too cruel. That dog was like a brother to me, I saved its life for Christ’s sake! He ignored our shocked and desperate pleas and pulled out of the driveway, all of us crying. Blackie stood in front of our house wagging his tail, expecting we’d be back later. That was really heart breaking!

Months later, in California, I saw a kid who had lived in Bainbridge at the same time we had. He told me Blackie was still roaming the base looking for us. I was glad, incredibly glad, to hear that and wondered if there was a kind soul who fed him or he survived on rabbits or overturned trashcans to survive. Better yet, maybe he escaped the guards and fences and re-joined his wolf pack in the deep wild woods of North East.

Other Stuff

Down in our basement we’d mimic the Beatles just like they were on Sullivan. I made replica guitars out of cutout cardboard accurate in every detail complete with knobs, frets and strings, coloring them in with pastels from my Jon Gnagy art set. I used my mom’s hairspray to fix the pastels to keep them from smearing and give the guitars a cool lacquered surface. I was always John, “the artistic one,” Wayne alternated between Paul and George and my brother Joe and one of Taylor twins would fill out the band. The twins would smuggle over one of their mother’s wigs, a Elizabeth Taylor kind of mop and press a wad of silly putty on their nose and took turns being Ringo. It was hilarious.

My parents never had much money to dole out but every now and then you’d manage get a quarter or fifty cents for something or another. I was a resourceful scrounger and kept a keen eye out for a glint of coinage lying about. I collected coke bottles I found along the road, you could get good money for the bottles if you had a box of them. I sold my duplicate Beatles cards at an inflated 5 cents a pop and made outrageous bets like I could walk across the room on my hands or drink a tablespoon of Tabasco sauce for a quarter. I could do it. When no one was looking, at my house or at neighbor’s, I’d take the liberty to search sofas for loose change in the deep crevasse back behind the cushions. It’s probably added up to hundreds of dollars over my lifetime.

When we had money, we headed to the railroad. There was a track not too far from Mechanics Valley Road. With Joe and my sisters in tow we’d follow it up about a mile (it was probably a half a mile, if that) until it came to one of our favorite places, the local candy store. You could buy plenty of candy for a quarter then because single candies were a penny and candy bars were a nickel or a dime. For 50 cents you could eat yourself sick. Inside a large glass counter there were three shelves of candy, on the top of the counter was an array of open boxes of gum, trading cards, candy bars and suckers. It was a treasure trove of candy. Overwhelming to behold, it was enough to drive you nuts as well as the proprietor who stood waiting impatiently behind the counter as your eyes darted back and forth while you hemmed and hawed and finally slobbered: “I’ll take one of them, two of those, —no three, a pack of this, a box of that, and so on. Your little brown bag would soon be filled to the brim with red hot dollars, Bazooka Gum, wax lips and candy necklaces for my sisters, Mallow Cups, Neccos, candy cigarettes, Pixy Sticks, black licorice twists, caramels and jawbreakers. Oh yeah ... and two five-cent packs of Beatles cards with a powdery wedge of bubble gum in them. (I have to stop now—my teeth hurt thinking about it.) All that candy, all those cavities.

Later that year, I found out why people hate dentists.
I was paralyzed as I gripped the arms of the dentist chair. Pinned down by the dentist’s elbow, he held my jaw open with his thumb. My eyes closed at the sight of a frighteningly long needle headed into my mouth, straight into my gums and excruciatingly sensitive nerves. It killed me! He left the room while I laid there in rigor mortis recline. I blinked as tears streamed down my face and licked the inside of my mouth and wiped my tongue to see if there was blood. There wasn’t. The side of my face went totally numb, including my right eye. I grabbed a tiny dental mirror from his tray of torturous tools beside me and peered at my self through it. I looked like a very young Quasimodo.

The dentist returned and I watched nervously as he arranged the drilling bits, various pointy dental tools and cotton swabs on the tray beside me. He smelled of cigarettes and his nostrils were so hairy it looked like he had squirrels lodged up his nose. He held up the drill bit and revved it before going in. It buzzed in a high-pitched whine as he drilled out my cavities and packed them with silver fillings. After surviving that torture, like that wasn’t enough, I was lectured on my poor hygiene and excessive candy consumption.
“I better not see you back here any time soon!” the doctor warned.
I took that to heart and started brushing on a daily basis, sometimes twice. I still, miraculously, have that sweet tooth, re-filled a couple times since then.

We had been in North East for almost two years and our time was up. We would be moving down to Bainbridge Naval Base, six miles away in another month. Over the last few weeks I stayed over night at Wayne’s and the Taylor twin’s house as often as possible. We watched some our favorite shows— The Outer Limits, The Munsters and The Addams Family; the latter, two brand new shows that year. They’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and spooky…. You wouldn’t believe how many wise-ass kids sang that song at me through the years.
“That Addams Family has two d’s!” I’d come back with.

My friends and I were into monsters — big time. We loved to watch the horror classics— Frankenstein, The Wolfman, Dracula and The Creature from the Black Lagoon to name a few. We paged through copies of Famous Monsters Magazine and marveled at the behind the scenes photos of monster movie making magic. It was terror-ific. We stared in awe at pictures of Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi and the great Boris Karloff enduring hours in the make up chair or clowning around the set. As an artist, I had a deep appreciation for the artistry of special effects.
For Halloween that year I was the Wolfman, well technically, Wolfboy. I saved hair clippings from recent haircuts and pasted it to my face. I painted my eyes and tip of my nose black with my watercolor set and slipped on a set of wax candy fangs. My face itched something terrible and the teeth kind of melted, but I was convinced I looked just as scary as Lon Chaney Jr. ever did.

One of my last memories of North East was Wayne Dean’s ninth birthday party. It was a big shindig. Every Dean from miles around was there for the celebration. His parents, his cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents were all in attendance. It was outside on a warm fall afternoon as we stood around a cloth covered picnic table filled with plates, cups, party hats and a big punch bowl with scoops of sherbet floating in a sea of foamy cream. In the center of the table was a large chocolate cake with Wayne’s name decorating the top of it in yellow and blue confectionary script surrounded by barber-striped candles. On a fold out table next to the picnic table was a pile of presents so big I thought the table would collapse at any second. Wayne sat at the big table in front of the cake grinning as he eyed the presents, by the looks of it, equal to a good Christmas haul. The candles were lit then re-lit in the uncooperative wind. With a nod of her head Mrs. Dean gave the official go ahead as the crowd sang a rousing and enthusiastic “Happy Birthday To You.” I joined the chorus and waited patiently for the last refrain.
“Happy Birthday to you…” I continued singing: “You look like a monkey and yah act like one too!”

That…I have to say… did not go over too well. It was met with scornful glares and total silence. If a cricket had been chirping in a nearby field you’d have heard it. It was one of those uncomfortable moments when you try to laugh it off, force a feeble laugh, clear your throat and feel the twitching smirk melt off your face as you stand there in your pointy birthday hat feeling like a jerk.

Wayne smiled, rolled his eyes back and shook his head before blowing out the candles. I stared down, not daring to look up as I took my seat at the table. I was handed a plate with an extremely small slice of cake. It wasn’t a total disaster because the cake was really good and Wayne loved his present. I gave him an Aurora Monster model kit of The Wolf Man with a human skull at his feet. He told me it was his favorite but I knew he was being polite. The best one, hands down, was the Beatles second album, A Hard Days Night. We waited until the crowd broke up and slipped by them as they settled in front of the TV inside to watch a college football game. Wayne and I ran up stairs to listen to the album.

Although we didn’t make it down this year, my son Jude and I stop in North East occasionally on our way to the Susquehanna Flats to fish for Striper. We go by Harry’s Bait and Barber Shop … really, and get bloodworms and shiners before we head out, still hoping to catch a big one. On the wall above the bubbling minnow and eel troughs is a bulletin board pinned with photos of fishermen with their BIG fish. I study the faces to see if any of them resemble a Wayne Dean of my own age.

There’s a stop and go place in Perryville, right before you cross the bridge to Havre de Grace, where we put in at the public boat ramp. On one of our visits there I was talking to the cashier all friendly-like and casually mentioned I’d lived in North East as a kid - and did she happen to know Wayne Dean! She smiled and said, “Yeah, he’s still around. Wayne sometimes stops in for a coffee on his way to work. He works for the railroad.”

“Hey Wayne!”

We promised to write and stay in touch but never did. I figured I’d never see him or the Taylor twins again. That’s the way it was when you were a Navy brat. I’ve had a lot of great friends over the years but out of habit I’d lose touch and let the time lapse as well as the friendship.

Deja Vu

It’s weird how things seem to reoccur in families a generation later. We repeat the same mistakes of our parents or we inherit habits, ticks and physical traits not apparent until we get older. I didn’t think of it until I wrote about the memory but my son Ian had with the same type of lump on his neck my brother John was born with. Ian also had an accident strangely similar to something that happened to my brother Joe when we lived in North East.

I have to admit I was not always the most reliant babysitter as a dad. I let my boys play and have a good time. I was too dense to anticipate the potential injurious consequences that would inevitably occur. While I lay on the bed with baby Nick nestled in a pillow next to me, I watched as Jude and Ian laughed and bounced up and down on the mattress while they held onto the tall bedposts at the bottom of the bed. Ian went down while Jude was in mid-air. Jude landed hard on Ian. Ian cried and wanted to go lay down right away. He stayed in his room for another hour until my wife Cathy got home. She found Ian in his bed, holding his now swollen arm. It was broken.

Two weeks before, Ian had to get stitches on the bridge of his nose for another incident on my watch. I’ll get into that in a second. Concerned there would be suspicions of child abuse or at least negligence, I was convinced we better be safe and not take him to the same hospital he went to for the stitches. Cathy agreed, thinking it definitely was child abuse the way I babysat the kids. I thought it was simply a matter of bad luck. Two weeks earlier, with Nick safely asleep in his room, I watched TV from the big chair in the living room as the boys laid out the cushions of the couches across the floor. They took turns vaulting off the far couch and leapfrogged across the cushions. Ian’s momentum carried him past the last cushion, slamming him into our (what was huge then) and very heavy 32” TV —that promptly crushed him when it toppled over on him. Did you ever see a Roadrunner cartoon where Wiley Coyote is crushed by a boulder? All you saw was his splayed legs and paws sticking out. Uh, huh…lots of blood and six stitches.
We did the same thing when I was a kid. Something exciting or unexpected seemed to happen on a regular basis when we lived on Mechanics Valley Road. This time it happened on a bright summer morning. We were messing around, nothing out of the ordinary, just entertaining ourselves in the family room. We too lined cushions from one end of the room to the other. We bounded from the couch and pogoed across numerous times. And if we fell, we landed safely on one of the cushions. Except for the one time.

CRASH!

My brother Joe kept going and smashed through the glass door. When he pulled himself free there was a huge jagged shard of glass embedded in his left arm. He stood there in shock looking at the horrible sight before he pulled out the hunk of glass. When he did, blood shot a foot into the air as it pumped out of his severed artery. There was blood everywhere! I never saw so much of it. We didn’t know what to do; it was pretty frightening. My mom was upstairs in the tub at the time, and heard us screaming. She ran down the steps to see what happened and was horrified when she saw Joe and pulled off her towel and wrapped it around his arm. She stood naked in the kitchen, crying as she called for an ambulance.
Joe would have been dead before it got there if it wasn’t for our next-door neighbor. My mom spotted him in his yard as we waited for the ambulance and called frantically for his help. Fortunately he knew exactly what to do and took off his belt and tied a tourniquet above Joe’s elbow. He saved my brother’s life.

Joe got twenty-some stitches and was left with a ghastly scar.