Meet the Outlaw

Here is a certain young lass as she appeared 55 years ago:

Would you ever guess she would grow up to be a rebel? Look at that starched organza dress! That sweetly upturned fringe! Perhaps I am using that ball as a memo recorder, reminding myself to inflict damage on the person or persons responsible for the stiff dress and stupid hairdo.

This sweet child, in the next 21 years, would grow up to:
~ run away from home at the ages of three and sixteen.
~ write a letter at the age of nine to Jack Ruby protesting the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.
~ have her first run-in with the law at age eleven for throwing rocks over a freeway bridge.
~ smoke, drink, and take drugs from the age of fourteen through adulthood and become a member in good standing of Alcoholics Anonymous.
~ organize a sit-in on the high-school administration steps to protest the Vietnam War.
~ threaten “legal action” against a high-school teacher for throwing me out of geometry because I talked in class. That one got me to the principal’s office, where I lost the battle and was sentenced to the library with a geometry book for the semester. I failed geometry and never enjoyed math again.
~ engage in a heated argument with my senior-year history teacher about the efficacy of war and was ejected from class. That one also got me to the principal’s office, where I won the battle for free speech and was sent back to class.
~ stage a walk-out during an Explorer Scout meeting when the local police chief came to address the scouts about the field of law enforcement (it was that kind of era).
~ threaten PG&E with a formal complaint to the state utilities commission for wanting to charge me a new-account fee when I was simply changing addresses in college. (They rescinded the charge.)
~ threaten J.C. Penney with a complaint to the Better Business Bureau for their shoddy vacuum cleaner (I was just out of college and it was my first vacuum cleaner; the store gave me a refund).

That sweet little girl has grown up to believe in her right to free speech, to protest infringement of her rights, and to be heard by the powers that be.

My legal projects and research on behalf of my infirm mother, concerning the violation of her civil rights and state laws perpetrated by a local hospital recently (here’s a brief of the gory story), have taken away my blogging time. I’m sorry, my blogging friends.

I’ve written protest letters to the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary, the California Attorney General, the California Department of Public Health, the county district attorney, the county ombudsman’s office, and many patients’ rights organizations and attorneys. The wheels of justice turn slowly, and so far no one has emerged to champion my mother, except me.

Now I’ve written a lengthy letter to the American Civil Liberties Union, asking them to take on my mother’s case on behalf of elderly people across America whose Advance Directives are routinely ignored by medical institutions.

Over my lifetime, my protests have about a 50/50 success rate. That’s not too shabby. Ballplayers who bat .500 get beaucoup bucks.

Wish me luck?

*****

This is a Sepia Saturday post. For more personal glimpses of history, visit the Sepia Saturday blog here.

"Fat Boy" Gets His Wish

They called him “Fat Boy” with affection even though he wasn’t fat. It was an honorable title bestowed on him by the football team, in recognition of work well done as a fullback. He lettered in football two years running and he wore his letterman’s sweater for the senior photos with pride, because it was the only thing he was really good at in high school.

He almost didn’t graduate, thanks to failing grades. He wasn’t a good student. In the first place, he was a wiseacre who didn’t hesitate to mouth off to teachers, and in the second place, he had no use for school. He got kicked out of Driver’s Ed. when he got smart with one of the teacher’s questions, “What’s the first thing you do when you’re ready to drive a car?” she asked.

“Turn the key on!” he hollered from the back row. He knew more about driving a car, he said, than any teacher sitting at a desk. That was the end of his driver’s ed. career.

When it was clear he couldn’t graduate with his grades, he got a good tutor, the May Queen (whom he had known since first grade), and she undertook his education with dead-on seriousness. She quizzed him on math and American history in long sessions at the gas station where he worked after school every day. He barely squeaked by.

Where he was headed in life, he said, he didn’t need no stinking diploma. He was a wheeler dealer, and he was going to be in charge someday.
So he married the May Queen, learned a trade, raised a family and ran his own business. He was finally in charge.

I love this photo of my pop, the light in his eyes and that gallant hair.


This is a Sepia Saturday post. For more personal glimpses of history, visit the Sepia Saturday blog here.

Lost Youth

This is me 30 years ago.

At the time, I worked for Hugh Hefner in West Hollywood, with a wonderful group of talented people who produced a secondary men’s magazine for Heff. I lived in Santa Monica, California, a beach city in west Los Angeles.

On the weekends and evenings, I wrote my own material: vignettes, poetry, random essays and rants. When I wasn’t partying, I was writing. Sometimes I partied and wrote at the same time. I’ve saved a lot of that material, and occasionally I look back at it and marvel at the free spirit, the free-wheeling writing, the youthful style.

Writers like Tom Wolf, Hunter Thompson, and Joan Didion had impressed me in the mid- to late 1970s with their radical, new approach to nonfiction, which was personal, gritty, and clever. I was a hippie from the ‘60s who was attracted to anything revolutionary. Instead of writing as a detached, invisible narrator, the new journalists injected themselves into their work, becoming part of the story, and they focused on revealing the humanity of their subjects. Those writers have influenced my writing style for decades.

I was deeply into drinking and drugging too. At the time, it seemed to be the gateway into uninhibited thought, into free association, into creativity itself. I think now that might have been true.

Looking at these photos now, I’m struck by how resilient I was, how eager I was to explore, experience, and invent. It would be another 10 years before the drugs and alcohol beat me down and destroyed that sense of power and possibility.

Today, I’m glad I was what I was. I like this young woman. I’m thankful for everything that brought me to this day, this life I now lead. I’m thankful that Something was there, 10 years later when the addiction shattered me, to save me from self-destruction and renew my life.

~~~~~

This is a Sepia Saturday post. For more personal glimpses of history, visit the Sepia Saturday blog here.

~~~~~

My Father

This is my father, in about 1950 before he married, looking more dapper than I ever saw him, complete with flower on the lapel of his double-breasted suit. I don't know the story behind the photo, and there's no one left to ask. He was an only child, of strong Oklahoma stock transplanted to California in the Depression. Does anyone have a clue about the make/model of the car?

Christmas 1954: I am but a wee thing lying on my mother's knee. I like the way I'm watching my dad with my older brother, wanting to be in his arms.

For the first two years of wedded bliss, my dad was a "sheet metal man" by trade and a member of the National Guard on weekends. Always the class clown, he met some kindred souls and made lifelong friends. From his poor beginnings, he later went into business for himself as a heating and cooling contractor.

Dad's roots were clear in his pronunciation of "crick" for "creek" and "jurnly" instead of "generally." Poorly educated, he was a whiz at mathmatics, and he could visualize and construct complicated air-duct systems. He liked to write songs although he couldn't play a musical instrument, and he could spin a good yarn.

He whipped me for the last time when I was 16. He wasn't always a great dad. But he grew more loving as the years went by. When I was 28, he was diagnosed with brain cancer. In six months, he was gone. He left me with a mean game of dominoes, a killer instinct in gin rummy, and a knack for telling stories.
Here's one of the last poems I wrote for him:

Chemo Strikes the Child’s Colossus

Black hair streaked with silver
slithered down the drain.
As far as he could see
down the long white length of him
down the slick white walls,
his black hair swept.

Did he clutch at straws.
Did he lift rough hands in disbelief
before he laid his face in them.
Not moving, making no sound,
who was he then:
the bald man bowing
head to the water
to the unknown

This is a Sepia Saturday post. For more personal glimpses of history, visit the Sepia Saturday blog here.