Memphis and Little Rock

We left Henderson at close to three in the afternoon yesterday, and drove mostly in the dark to Memphis. We were both feeling a little punk, so we had a bowl of soup in the hotel restaurant and stayed in for the night. Today we spent a few hours along the main drags of Memphis, saw the clubs on Beale Street, visited the Peabody Hotel and saw the ducks, and had lunch at the Rendezvous, a very good rib joint. Then we hit the road and drove here, to Little Rock. It's now about five-thirty, and we're going to stroll the avenues and boulevards here, hoping to find an appealing place to have dinner. Tomorrow we will go to the Clinton Library, and then back on the road, heading to Oklahoma City.

Best to all,

Dan

End of December - Heading Home

I've been here in Henderson, KY, for eight days now. I came in last Sunday to attend the funeral of Lynette's mom, Helen Mathews. The funeral was very moving; we loved Helen very much and we are all sorry that she is gone. It was nice to see flowers and notes from many of Helen's California friends.

Lynette has been busy, along with her sister Amy and brother Gary, tying up some of the loose ends from her mom's affairs. Now, we are ready to head home. Our plan is to drive the car we bought for Helen back to California.

We plan quick visits to Memphis and Little Rock (the Clinton Library), then a straight shot across Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle to New Mexico, where we'll stop for a night in Santa Fe. We were there many years ago and would like to see it again. Then on through Arizona to Glendale, CA. If we are able to leave today I expect to be home on Saturday or Sunday.

But there is a hitch - Lynette came down with serious stomach flu, or something like it, in the middle of the night last night. Her sister and brother-in-law Alan are also suffering from this bug. I hope it leaves me alone! The question is, when will we be able to hit the road?

I hate to see Lynette feeling so ill. She is almost never sick, and has seen me through so many colds and flus and injuries. As I write this, at almost one o'clock in the afternoon, it looks like we won't be getting to Memphis any time too soon.

When I got here on Sunday, the temperature was nine degrees Farenheit, and it held at that level through the funeral the next day. But then it warmed up a lot the day after that, reaching a toasty 56 degrees, one degree short of the record for that day. It has been about the same for the last five or six days - shirtsleeve weather for the folks here. It was actually warmer here than in Southern California for a couple of days.

I'm looking forward to the trip home. The little car - a spiffy 2008 Toyota Corolla - is fun to drive, and it gets about 33 miles to a gallon of gas. I have made a few music discs for the journey - some Mozart, some Stones/Beatles/Kinks, and a couple of mixes of old stuff. Between that and NPR, when I can find it, we should be in good shape.

I went to Wal-Mart yesterday, at Lynette's behest, and bought snacks - crackers, cookies, chips (low-cal, low fat for all of these, of course) for the road. The last time Lynette and I drove across the US was in 1977. We had fun then and hope to enjoy this one, too.

It's been a nice visit, not withstanding the reason for my coming here. It was nice to see Clay and LeighAnne (Lynette's nephew and neice) and their families, and it was also nice to spend a little time with Gary and his partner, Eika. Eika and I had a day to ourselves last week when Lynette, Amy and Gary were busy at their mother's house, and we drove to Evansville to look around and have lunch. We walked around the downtown area and found some interesting buildings to look at, and dined at a Chinese restaurant. We also visited the casino and walked along the riverbank. It was a breezy, cool but comfortable day, and we had a good time.

That night, Amy and Alan, Gary, and Lynette and I went to dinner in Evansville at a very nice place called BoneFish. A good time was had by all.

I've been reading a novel titled "The Yiddish Policeman's Union," a very funny book by Michael Chabon. I haven't read anything else of his. I may check out his "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," which won a Pulitzer prize recently. The one I'm reading now is an inventive, satirical imagining of a Jewish settlement in Alaska. Suffice it to say that it cracks me up. I recommend it.

I'll try to post reports from the road. Meanwhile, I wish everyone who reads this a happy new year!

End of November Notes

This has been a very busy, often crazy month. Lynette has been in Kentucky since early October, helping her sister Amy in looking after their mother, who is very sick and has been in the hospital most of the time. Lynette and Amy, and Amy's daughter Leigh Ann, take turns spending the night with their mother, either in the hospital or at her house on the few days when she is at home. It is a grueling routine that has nearly exhausted all of them. Claire went back a few weeks ago to help out, which they all appreciated.

I travelled to Kentucky in the middle of the month to spend a week with Lynette...we had a few nice times together, and I was able to run a few errands and help them out a little. It was very cold there - in the mid-twenties at night.

Emily was in Kentucky for a few days, too, and our visits overlapped, so I got to spend some time with her, which was very nice. She and her friend Abigail will be visiting us in California in mid-December. Lynette is coming home next week, which I am looking forward to very much.

Jackie and Martin are in London, on their annual visit, seeing Martin's family and friends and doing some touring. I hope they are having a good time.

Jayne and Bernie went to see their son Kirk and his family in Tucson for Thanksgiving.

I came home from Kentucky a week ago today, and then flew to Reno the next day to spend some time with my brother Alan and his family. They live nearby, in rural Walker, California, and like to spend a few days in Reno each year. Their daughter Sally is a student at the University of Nevada at Reno; she took us on a tour of the campus, which is quite impressive. Their other daughter, Molly, is taking college classes online from their home in Walker. I enjoyed my time with all of them, including Al and Priscilla and Al's daughter Romi, who came to Reno with her husband John for a couple of days while we were there. Romi is expecting her first child in February.

My brother Mike and his wife Kim, and their sons David and Aaron, spent the holiday with Kim's parents at Avila Beach, at a time share her parents have there. Mike said they had a very nice time.

Last night Joe and Marsha Grieco called and invited me to go to dinner with them, which I did. We went to El Portal, a very nice Mexican restaurant in Pasadena. It was nice to spend time with them, as always. They told me that their friend Brian Doyle Murray reported that his father-in-law came across this blog and read about the lunch I had with them a few weeks ago; I was delighted to see that I have a real reader out there. Brian's wife Tina is a lovely, charming lady, and I hope her dad checks in here now and then.

I am half-way through John Updike's latest, the Widows of Eastwick. It is fun to read, as Updike usually is. I just finished a book about William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the time they spent together in the English Lake District before Wordsworth got married to Mary Hutchinson. Coleridge was very unhappy in his marriage, had a crush on Wordsworth's sister-in-law-to-be, Sara Hutchinson, and spent as much time as he could away from his family and with the Wordsworths and Hutchinsons. William's sister Dorothy kept a very comprehensive journal during this time, and it was the source of much of the material in the book. I found it very interesting.

I am excited about Lynette coming home, and Emily's visit, and Jackie and Jayne's return from their holiday trips.

Yesterday was my birthday

I had a great day. I drove down to Laguna Niguel, to the Ritz-Carlton hotel there, where Charlie and Nancy Walker had a nice birthday lunch for me. We sat at a lovely table overlooking the ocean. Charlie ordered a bottle of champaigne and they toasted by birthday. It was a delightful couple of hours.

Then I drove to my sister Jackie's house, where she and her husband Martin hosted a birthday party for me. It was also an early Thanksgiving dinner; they will be in England on the actual day, and my sister Jayne and her husband will also be away, so Jackie made turkey and dressing and had all the usual Thanksgiving stuff.

The guests included Jayne and her husband Bernie, my daughter Claire and her friend Tami, my niece Jill and her son Dane, our friend Jean, my nephew Kenn and his family, my niece Tiffany, her partner Caroline and their two-year-old son Elijah.

After dinner they put some candles on a pumkin pie for me to blow out (with help from Elijah), and then they all gave me birthday presents. There was much good cheer and family affection. My brother Mike called from his home near San Luis Obispo to wish me a happy birthday. On the way home I returned a call to my other brother, Alan, who had called from his home in the eastern Sierras with birthday wishes. All together a very good day.

The day before, Saturday, my friends Joe and Marsha took me to a museum in Santa Monica to see an exhibit of paintings by the watercolorist Milfred Zornes. It was an impressive and most enjoyable show. We were joined by the Grieco's friends Brian Doyle Murray and his wife Tina (I have also known Brian for many years, through the Griecos); it was good to see them. We had a nice lunch on the patio of a comfortable restaurant adjacent to the museum. It was a beautiful, clear, balmy day, and lunch on the patio was a treat.

And today I had another birthday lunch, with my friends Richard Del Belso and Erika Callahan. I had worked with them both for many years when I was at Warner Bros., and have enjoyed seeing them frequently since then. Our lunch was at Nippon, a Japanese restaurant near WB that we had been to many times over the years. We were all very happy that Barak Obama won the election last week, and had a good time catching up with each other and sharing our opinions about lots of stuff - movies, tv shows, et cetera. Both Richard and Erika had been to London recently and agreed that it was fun if also very expensive.

I am excited today because my daughter Emily will be coming to town early in December, and her friend Abigail will be coming with her. I will also be seeing Emily later this week, as I am going to Kentucky on Saturday, to join Lynette, who is there to help care for her ailing mother. Emily is also going to Kentucky, this Friday. Lynette's mom's chemotherapy seems to be having some good effect, as she is feeling a little stronger. We are all glad about that. I will be there for a week. Lynette has been there for about a month now, and plans to be there for at least a few more weeks, depending on how things go with her mom.

That's about it for today.

Dan

End of September Update

It was a busy month. The highlight was the ten days we spent in Aruba, where we have a timeshare. Lynette's sister Amy and her husband Alan have the week before ours, which allows each couple to overlap with the other and have a few extra days beyond our individual weeks.

We flew out on Tuesday, September 10th, on a redeye to Miami, then caught a morning flight to Aruba that got us there at around 1:30 pm. Amy and Alan picked us up, and we headed to our usual first stop, an open-air beer-garden-like place called the Paddock, where we had lunch and a drink or two. Then it was on to Costa Linda, the resort where we have the timeshares.

It's a great place, right on the ocean, where we would spend mornings under a thatched shelter - I read three Phillip Roth novels while we were there - with frequent dips in the clear, crisp ocean water to cool off. Then we'd go up to the pool, have lunch at the Turtle's Nest Cafe there (the grilled grouper was fabulous), and spend the afternoon alternating between reading in the shade and cooling down in the pool. At four o'clock the cafe would ring the happy hour bell, and the waitress would come around and take drink orders.

At around five-thirty or six we'd go up and get dressed for dinner, then head out to some perfect place, often either on the water's edge or actually over it, on a dock suspended above the ocean. Our favorite was a place called Pincho's, where we would have a rum punch or pino colada and watch the sunset. Then, at the end of the night, we'd take a walk along the water's edge and look at the moon and stars.

On the home front, we had the wood floor in the "great room" (what we now like to call the kitchen and family room) refinished, my office and some of the upstairs bedrooms painted, and new carpet installed. It all came out very well, and we are happy with it. In the process we are getting rid of lots of stuff we have collected over the years - things we thought we had to hold onto but now don't. I've sold or given away hundreds of books and some old memorabilia that I thought I'd never part with, but now that it's gone I'm okay with it. It's nice to have less clutter and some extra space.

Now that October is looming, Lynette will be going to Kentucky on Saturday, to be there to help out with her mother's treatment for her various health problems. She will be there for three weeks; I will join her there for the third week. We will look at some houses in Indiana, just north of the Kentucky border, where we are thinking about moving to pretty soon.

We watched the debate between Barak Obama and John McCain last Friday; I thought it was either a draw or at best a very slight edge for Obama. Can't wait for the veeps debate this week.

Meanwhile, I was fairly busy with work, writing screening reports for new movies. I brought my laptop with me to Aruba and was able to write a couple of reports there - it wasn't bad, working in the timeshare unit for a few hours in the morning with the ocean breeze in the background. Since we've been back I've had three or four other pieces of work, including a screening I put together myself for a new client. It was fun, and a little exciting, and in the end the client was happy.

The Beginning and After

I know very little about my parents’ lives before I was born, and much less about their parents’ lives.

I wish I knew what it had been like for them to be young in New England in the early years of the twentieth century: what their feelings were about the world they lived in, how they spent their days and nights, what their family life was like, what they hoped for and dreamed about.

They were young when America changed from a nation of horses and wagons to one of cars and trucks; they saw the earliest telephones and movies; radio became the national medium when they were young. Airplanes were invented and air travel grew from a stunt pilot’s ride to an essential form of transportation during their lives before I was born.

They lived through two World Wars and the great depression before they had me. The nation and the world went through enormous growth and change, as well as tremendous turmoil, early in their lives.

I know that my mother danced the Charleston, and that she had a 1932 Ford coupe at one point in her early life. I know that my father was a body builder, that he piloted a private plane that he owned with another man, and that he was a ham radio operator.

I know that their lives were difficult, that they faced hardships far more severe than anything we have ever had to endure. The scarcities and shortages of the great depression had a lasting impact on both of them, before and after they were married – an effect that was evident during much of my own younger life.

Inspired in part by my wish that my parents had shared more of this part of their lives with me, I have set out to describe some of the events of my own life, so that my daughters will have a notion of what I experienced before they were born and while they were still young.

In addition, I want to set these things down for my own benefit – I’ve forgotten an awful lot, and will surely forget more as I get even older than I am now. What I can recall in these pages will at least be safe from further forgetting.

I also hope that my brothers and sisters will enjoy re-visiting some of these times with me.

Much of what follows will be of little of no interest to most readers, but I hope that some will recognize the people, or the events, or the way things were from the middle of the last century to near its end.

As I go through my memories and set them down, my focus will be on the people who have been important in my life, the places where I have lived or visited and the events that I was part of, and the songs that were in the air as the time flowed on.

I won’t have much to say about world events or changes in technology, the arts or politics, but these aspects of the times I lived in will be in the background as the years roll by.

I’m sure I’ll overlook a lot, but I’ll be as thorough as I can.

I have lived through more than a few major transformations and powerful events myself. Television came along when I was four or five years old; jet aircraft entered the commercial aviation industry when I was ten or eleven.

The first person in space, the first person on the moon, the arrival of the big bang theory, of DNA, of medical miracles such as heart, kidney and liver transplants, all occurred early in my life.

The enactment of the civil rights act, of Roe vs. Wade, the women’s movement, gay liberation, and a host of other progressive actions took place before I had children of my own.

The world shook early in my life, as the race for the hydrogen bomb, the Korean War, the McCarthy hearings and the red scare, the Rosenbergs (with a name a lot like ours), the cold war, the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, the assassinations of famous men all happened while I was still a boy or a very young man.

I note these events here, before I begin my story, to provide some context for what follows. I won’t dredge them up often as I describe the personal events and experiences I can remember, but they will be there in the background.

I do remember that my friend Dennis and I, playing on the corner of our street at age five or six, knew that there was a new bomb, a hydrogen bomb, that was bigger and more powerful than the plain old atomic bomb. Somehow, we knew that an atomic bomb had been exploded in Japan and that unimaginable numbers of people had been killed.

Of course we didn’t really know what any of this meant, but we would imagine that we – we two children - had such a really big bomb and could blow up anything we wanted. This at six years old. What must we have heard or seen to be able to play at this?

When I was a freshman in high school I discovered Richard Lederer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in the school library. I hadn’t had any inkling of what had happened in the holocaust before that; at the time I wasn’t especially conscious of my Jewish heritage, and the impact of those events was nondenominational to me. It was my first exposure to the possible scope of man’s inhumanity to man.

Subsequent events piled up as I finished high school and went to college – John Kennedy was assassinated; the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement raged.
My awareness of how things were and my feelings of how they should be took shape during these times. Some of this will seep into the story that follows in these pages.

So, here it is – my life as I remember it, from the very beginning in the aftermath of the Second World War, up to the middle of the nineteen eighties or so, when Claire and Emily were old enough to make their own memories.



I was born on the ninth of November, 1946, in Medford, Massachusetts, at Lawrence Memorial Hospital.

My parents had been living with my father’s mother, in her house at 4 Valley Street in Medford. They had recently returned from Selma, Alabama, where my father had been stationed during the Second World War as a sergeant in the Army Air Force.

The family didn’t stay in Medford very long after I was born. There were far more returning servicemen in the Northeast than there were jobs, and my parents soon decided to go to California to find their future.

My father, Edwin Rosen, was born in Medford on February 19th, 1911, also at Lawrence Memorial. He was the third of three sons, and had a younger sister as well.

His father, Jacob Rosen, worked at and was possibly the manager of a department store in Medford. Jacob had come by himself to Massachusetts, from either Russia or Poland, as a young man sometime around the turn of the century.

My father’s mother, Annie Rosen, nee Herman, had come from Kiev, in Ukraine, as a young child, with her parents and their other children – refugees from persecution of Jews by Russian Cossacks – sometime late in the nineteenth century.

Jacob died, I was told by my father’s cousin, Dudley Weiss, in 1929, of a heart attack. The department store went out of business in the stock market crash of October of that year. Dudley suggested that there was a connection between this and his heart attack. Who knows? My father said virtually nothing at all about his father to me, ever.

Edwin’s two older brothers, Albert and Norman, had both gone to college in New England, but – probably for financial reasons connected to Jacob's death - Edwin was not able to attend college as he had planned.

He worked with his brothers in various business ventures – somehow I heard about a diner they ran, where bootleg gin was stored under the floorboards, as well as a refrigeration repair business and something to do with radios.

He married my mother, Dorothy, when they were both in their early twenties. My mother's friend Dot McCormack told me that they met at a dance, a detail that I like.

Dorothy was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on June 24th, 1911. Her father, Daniel Sullivan, was, I believe, born in County Cork, Ireland, and came to the US at a young age. Her mother, Mary (nee Ford), was possibly of French background. I don’t know when either of them was born.

Daniel died when my mother was around twelve years old, possibly from an injury sustained while he was working in a railroad yard. This threw the family into very hard economic times, and my mother had to leave school and go to work to help support her mother and sister. She often told me and my brothers and sisters that she worked in a sausage factory, and that it was a horrible experience.

Her sister, Florence – our Aunt Flo – stayed in school, and helped her mother with the housework. I believe that Flo was a bit older than my mother. They – my mother’s family - lived in Medford (I imagine they moved from Cambridge after Daniel Sullivan’s death) in a three-family house on Salem Street.

I remember visiting this house when I was around five years old, when my mother took my two sisters and me across the country by train to visit her mother. I have a few dim memories of that trip – the train stopping in New Mexico, where Indians sold blankets and trinkets near the station, and our time in Medford, with lots of family members celebrating our being there.

This would have been my mother’s first visit to her family since leaving Massachusetts almost five years earlier, and everyone there was glad to see her again. I was made much of by aunts, uncles and cousins, who made me feel very special.

The Sullivan family included a foster child, George Healy or Haley (they called him Georgie), of whom my mother was very fond. (I met him when, at age 19, I spent the summer in Medford with Aunt Flo and got to see, for the first time since age five, where I had come from and what it was like in that part of the world.)

My sister Jayne was born on January 8th, 1934, in Medford – also at Lawrence Memorial, I would think. She was an only child for almost thirteen years before I came along. When she was seven years old she was crowned “little miss Medford.” I’m not sure where the young Rosen family lived at the time Jayne was born.

I do know that my father spent some time as a travelling salesman, selling I know not what. I have a letter that he wrote from a hotel in Montpellier, Vermont to my mother in early 1934, telling her that it was a slow day and that he loved her and reassured her that all would be well. It was the depression; I’m sure that they struggled along with the rest of the country while President Roosevelt worked to get America back on track.

For some time during her early years our parents were separated; for how long, I don’t know. Jayne says it was for several years, and that they were divorced; my mother’s friend Dorothy McCormack told me that it was a matter of months, and did not speak of a divorce. I don’t know what the cause of this separation was.

This is all now shrouded in the mists of the distant past; I don’t think it matters much how long it was (it doesn't matter to me), as they got back together some time around the outbreak of the Second World War and lived most happily together for thirty or so years, until my father died.

They spent most of the war years in Selma, Alabama, where Edwin taught radio to French resistance fighters; in the process, he and Dorothy both learned to speak some French. I don’t know much about how they spent their time in Selma; I’d guess that it was much like life in many parts of the country during the war, with the rationing of basic commodities and other hardships, and music from the swing bands and crooners on the radio. Jayne says she was happy there, glad that her parents were back together.

When the war ended they returned to Medford. My father’s cousin, Dudley Weiss – who by then was a practicing attorney with a Harvard Law School pedigree - told me that he advised Edwin to go to California to find his future, as his prospects in New England were not promising.

They were still in Medford 18 months after the war ended, when I was born, but sometime in the summer of the following year, 1947, they hitched a “house trailer” to their car (like Lucy and Desi in "The Long Trailer") and headed west.

I wonder what it must have been like for them to leave their families for a new life three thousand miles away. They both had widowed mothers, and they were both leaving close siblings behind. There must have been tears as well as best wishes.

Nevertheless, they loaded their adolescent daughter and their almost-toddler son into the car and drove to California. I’m sure they were excited. My father was an optimistic man, and I’d guess that he saw this as an adventure that would lead them to a rewarding new life in the rapidly growing west.

Their destination was Palm Springs. My father’s sister, our aunt Ruth, and her family had come to California sometime before, and were living in the San Fernando Valley. My mother’s friend Kay Miskella, formerly Catherine (“Toots”) Cavanaugh, and her husband Jim were also living in the Valley. So was another couple they knew from Medford, Betty and Dick Hall.

I don’t know why they headed for Palm Springs, but they spent some months there, living in the trailer they had pulled across the country.

There are a couple of stories that I remember hearing from this time. One is that they almost had a serious accident with the trailer somewhere in the middle of the country, and the other is that my mother lent a large part of their traveling money to someone who left town without repaying it and was never seen again.

A few pictures from that time, including one of me as a toddler in front of the trailer in a park in Palm Springs, make their situation there look relatively pleasant. I have some very faint memories of us going to the Springs a few years later and visiting friends that my parents made there, including someone who worked at, or perhaps owned, a restaurant called The Doll House.

I also have a copy of an eight-millimeter movie my mother shot of a parade on the main street in the Springs, in which the comic ventriloquist and movie star Edgar Bergen is showing off his new daughter, Candice. (I met Candice Bergen many years later and mentioned this to her, but she wasn’t very interested.)

I don’t know just how they made their living in Palm Springs, except that there is a story that my father installed music systems in the homes of some celebrities; Frank Sinatra’s name was mentioned in this context.

Both Dot and Ed became masseurs at some point during this time, and apparently worked in this field in Palm Springs. I have a business card of my father’s that refers to him as a masseur with a Palm Springs phone number.

Whatever it was it didn’t last long, because soon they left for Baldwin Park, a new town near the eastern edge of Los Angeles County.

At least part of the reason for choosing this location was that it was not far from the town of Covina, which had a high school that Jayne knew about and wanted to attend. They moved first to a trailer park in Baldwin Park. But soon they were moving into their own home, a brand new house they bought on a brand new street, Emery Avenue.

This is the first place I remember living. We moved into it sometime before my sister Jacqueline was born, on December 23rd, 1948.

Also part of the reason for the move to Baldwin Park, I think, was that my father had enrolled at the Glendale College of Chiropractic, not too far away. The G.I. bill that was passed after the war provided some of the funding for this, and probably made it possible for them to buy the house, too.

Baldwin Park was not exactly a suburb in the classic sense – I don’t think many of its residents commuted to jobs in LA; it was a small town of its own, in a cluster of other small towns (El Monte and La Puente flanked it on the west and east, respectively), lived in mostly by people who worked in nearby factories, offices, retail establishments or other relatively local jobs.

Our neighborhood in Baldwin Park was nice, with new, modest houses that had good-sized front yards and big back yards.

Many of the neighbors had vegetable gardens, and some raised chickens as well. Many of them had come to California during or right after the war, often from rural areas; the vegetable gardens and the chickens must have been their way of continuing life as it was before they moved west.

I think that we were, if not unique, at least unusual in the neighborhood for having come from the East Coast.

Our house was at the corner of Emery Avenue (13143 was the house number) and Mangum Street. It originally had two bedrooms and one bathroom, a small living room and a good-sized kitchen. I’d guess that it was around a thousand or twelve hundred square feet overall. The front was on Emery, and the side of the house and the back yard ran along Mangum. The yard was about twice as deep as it was wide.

When I was around five or six years old (it could have been later – it’s hard to remember), my father added a large living room, on the west side of the house along Mangum street. This nearly doubled the overall size of the house.

The new room was thirty feet long and had a stone fireplace in the middle of the west wall. There was a big picture window in the south wall, divided into nine square panes – three up and three across. (At Christmas time my mother would use Glass Wax window cleaner to simulate snow on these window panes, creating a winterish look.)

My father bought my mother a small piano, which occupied the space under a window to the right of the fireplace. My mother would play songs from her younger days on that piano and sing to me when I was very young.

I especially remember her playing the songs “Long, Long Ago” (“Tell me the tales that to me were so dear, long, long ago, long, long ago….”) and “You’ll Never Know (How Much I Love You).” She also sang “Side by Side,” which she said she used to sing with her childhood or teenaged pal Alice Cooper Coldwell, who was by then married to the proprietor of a rustic resort in New Hampshire.

Dot and Ed built a wall all around the back yard, out of gray cinder blocks topped with flat pink cement slabs. It was five or six feet high. There was a big brick fireplace and barbecue built into the wall.

We – the neighborhood kids - used to love climbing on this fireplace. It was used for a fire or a barbecue only a few times while we lived there. We used to like to walk along the top of the wall and jump off onto the side lawn next to the street.

Edwin also built a service porch onto the back of the house. It was mainly a laundry room – I remember a wringer-type washing machine next to a big metal sink. There was also a small bathroom, which we were supposed to use instead of the main one when we were outside playing.

Ed didn’t stop there – he (with the help of various friends and patients) laid down a cement patio in the back, and added a wooden trellised enclosure with a slanted wooden roof. He finished the patio with a low flagstone planter along the edge. There was a nice lawn with a cement walk in the middle, going from the back door, along the edge of the patio (the patio was on the west side of the walk), and out to the driveway. There was a clothesline on the eastern side of the yard.

It was nice. Ed did lots of this kind of work himself. I have memories – and a picture or two – of him working a trough of cement, mixing it with a hoe, getting it ready for whatever he was making. He also did lots of hammering and sawing on various projects. That house was, in many ways, his creation.

Across Mangum lived another young boy, Dennis Hugie. Dennis was about a year and a half younger than I was. I don’t remember any time before I knew him. We were together almost all of the time in those early days. His family was from Provo, Utah.

Dennis and I played together constantly in my preschool days, up to about age five, and went through all the usual young boy phases together. We played in the dirt; we built forts. We loved to spend time in the shed in the Hugies’ back yard and use it as a clubhouse. We climbed the trees in my front yard and looked out at the mountains to the north, about 25 miles away.

The Hugies had a vegetable garden; I remember pulling carrots out of the ground, brushing off the dirt with my fingers, and eating them right there. (Maybe we rinsed them with a garden hose.) They also grew squashes and watermelons.

In the summer Dennis’s mother, Verda, would choose a ripe watermelon from the backyard patch, bring it into the house, and cut slices for him and me. We would sit on the curb in front of his house eating the fresh melon, spitting the seeds into the gutter.

The Hugies had a pine tree in their front yard. It seemed incredibly tall to us, but we were only a couple of feet tall ourselves, so the tree may not have been as tall as I remember. We used the circle of ground around the tree as a place to create (or at least imagine) little villages and roads with our toy cars, Indians and pirates.

I usually got pretty dirty, but Dennis had an almost magical ability to stay clean; his tee shirts were always bright white at the end of the day, while mine were usually a mess.

Dennis’s father, Clarence, was the foreman of a metal-treating plant in a nearby industrial area, Santa Fe Springs. He went by the nickname Kink. I never heard anyone call him anything else.

He was short, probably about five feet four. He was gruff but good-natured; when we were pestering him he would threaten to cut our god-damned ears off if we didn’t stop it. He had a gravelly voice; I remember him smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes.

I remember him working on cars. I have a mental picture of him actually inside the engine compartment of his car, working on the motor (he was a small, wiry man). He bought a new Pontiac every two years in those days. He almost always wore the khaki pants and shirts that were his work clothes.

I also remember him in their back yard, grabbing a chicken by its neck and whacking its head off with a hatchet; the chicken would then run around the yard for a moment or two, blood shooting straight up in the air out of its now headless neck.

Dennis’s mom, Verda, was also short. She was always cleaning and ironing, and everything in their house was spotless and shiny. I remember doilies on the back and arms of the sofa and upholstered chairs, and hooked rugs on hardwood floors. In the kitchen were the chrome and vinyl table and chairs of the era. The houses in our neighborhood had kitchen cabinets that were made of metal, painted white.

Dennis’s sister, Tamara, was four or five years older than I. She was very pretty and talented; she took dancing lessons and would occasionally perform in recitals. Her recycled dance outfits often got made into our Halloween costumes. Sometimes she would practice tricks with her baton in their front yard, throwing it high into the air and catching it.

Later on she would be the first person I knew to have records by Little Richard and other early rockers. Sometimes she would baby sit me and my sister and brothers when our parents would go out at night. At one point she had a really nice red and white 1955 Chevy.

Dennis had a brother, Gary, a couple of years older than Tamara. He worked at the grocery store a few blocks away from our house, the Parkway Market, while he was in high school, and eventually became the manager of the store.

Next door to Dennis (on the right, looking from our house) lived Mr. and Mrs. Szabo, an elderly couple – they were probably in their seventies – from Hungary. They must have been refugees from the Nazis or the Communists, although we didn’t hear anything about that at the time.

Mrs. Szabo sold eggs from her hens to the families in the neighborhood. On Sundays she would show up at our door with a plate of fresh, still-hot donuts she had just made. But if the ball Dennis and I were playing with went into her yard, she would keep it, telling us that she was going to make rubber soup with it.

Mr. Szabo stayed in the house almost all of the time; the few times that we did see him, he wore overalls and a hat like a railroad engineer’s. He had a walrus mustache.

The Szabos had a son, Johnny, who was in his late teens when I was four or five; he was about the same age as Dennis’s brother Gary. We would often see Gary and Johnny throwing a baseball back and forth out in the street.

Other neighbors included two Bryant families – Wiley and Jessie Bryant were brothers, who lived with their families about five houses apart on Mangum Street.

Wiley’s wife was June, a Mormon woman from Utah. Wiley was from eastern Kentucky. He was a bus driver. He liked to drink. He would go back to Kentucky once a year and return with the trunk of his car packed with mason jars filled with moonshine whiskey. June liked to play the horses and had a bookie at a little store nearby.

June and Wiley had a son, Ricky, a few years younger than I. When he was around eight years old he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanitarium. He was gone for about a year, maybe longer. It was a strange thing to have someone removed from our world like that. June and Wiley also had two daughters, Theresa and Cheryl, younger than Ricky.

Wiley and June lived three houses to the North of Dennis on Mangum Street. Jesse Bryant, Wiley’s brother, lived two or three houses on the other side of Dennis’s house. Jesse was a Fuller Brush salesman, and he had a mustache that looked like a big brush under his nose. He was a jovial man.

Jesse’s wife, Elizabeth, whom we knew as Litzie, would invite Dennis and me and other neighborhood kids into her kitchen to have a snack of white bread spread with butter and then sprinkled with sugar. We thought that this was great, but my parents disapproved of this treat. We weren’t supposed to accept it when Litzie offered, but most of the time we couldn’t help ourselves.

Jesse and Litzie had a son, Jesse Junior. He was close in age to Gary and Johnnie, but I don’t recall that they were pals. I do recall that Jesse Junior eventually went into the Navy, and when I was a Cub Scout, at around eight years old, he helped me learn to tie some of the knots that scouts were supposed to know.

One of the kids in the neighborhood was Bill Phelps, a strong, curly haired boy about our age, who lived across from us on Emery Avenue. He was a rough-and-tumble kid. Dennis and I liked him and included him in some of our schemes.

His family was quiet and did not come out much. I think his family was probably from someplace very rural and was uncomfortable in our relatively urbanized neighborhood – or maybe they just weren't interested in us.

I have a memory of Bill at about age six or so. It was a very rainy day in the middle of winter. We used to like the rain, and would put on our raincoats and be out in it, in the street or in someone’s yard. On this particular day, I remember seeing Bill in swimming trunks, up to his waist in a puddle that had collected at our intersection. Dennis and I thought this was strange but somehow just like Bill to be doing it.

Bill’s father’s work, whatever it was, sometimes led them to have large empty barrels in their yard, made from very sturdy, thick cardboard. They must have originally held some industrial product. They were more than big enough for a kid of six or seven to get inside of. We liked to take turns getting in one of these barrels and having someone roll us across the lawns of the houses on Bill’s side of the street. It was fun.

To the east of us on Emery Avenue, in the very early years, lived a young family I remember knowing and liking, but no more than that. They moved away when I was about five, to be replaced by a brother and sister, Gammie and Skiddy, both retired people who must have been in their seventies.

Next to them lived Lee and George Nicholas. I remember that Lee was fond of me and would give me treats when I would walk down to their house, from as early as age two or three.

Lee was impressed with my vocabulary, which was pretty good for a kid. Lee and George were nice. They had a front porch with a swing where I would sit and chat with them. They had a son, Russell, in his late teens or early twenties, who was in a car accident when I was still very young. I remember that he had hit a “soft shoulder” that caused him to lose control of the car.

He was okay, but it was the first car accident I had ever actually known about, and that “soft shoulder” story, which had to be explained to me, has stayed in my head all these years.

Gammie and Skiddy, as mentioned, were elderly retired siblings who lived just east of us on Emery Avenue. There last name was Skidmore (hence, Skiddy).

Gammie was tall and pretty broad and kind of grumpy, although she was a good neighbor to our parents and was probably a nice person. She had very long brownish grey hair and an owlish face. I don’t know where they were from but I would suppose that they were Midwestern. Gammie had a daughter who lived with her husband in another part of Baldwin Park.

Skiddy was thin, with short grey hair. He had a vast array of tools, and an arsenal of nuts, bolts, nails and other hardware that he kept in coffee cans and cigar boxes in the service porch in the back of their house. I could sometimes make ten cents by getting an empty cigar box from the counterman at the Parkway Market and giving it to Skiddy in exchange for a dime.

Trouble arose if one of our balls went over the fence into their yard; like Mrs. Szabo, Gammie would keep the balls (maybe she made rubber soup, too).

We were always outside in those days, from early in the morning till it got dark. My mother would tell me to “go out and play” and not to come back till suppertime. We knew where our boundaries were – the big streets that were several blocks away in any direction.

We basically had the run of all the streets inside of those borders. There was never any concern about the dangers that parents worry about now. We felt safe in our neighborhood. Most of the neighbors knew the local kids. Most people left their doors unlocked. Most of the mothers were home during the day while their husbands worked.

My sister Jackie would sometimes play with Dennis and me. There were lots of boys but only a couple of girls in the neighborhood, so she was often stuck with us. I remember her with her blonde hair in tight pigtails, parted down the middle. We were always running in the street, either in a ball game of some type, or tag, or hide-and-seek, or just chasing each other.

As early as age four or five, and maybe even younger than that, my mother would have me walk the four or five blocks to the Parkway Market to pick up items she needed, which often were cigarettes. She would write a note – “please give my son Daniel a package of Salems” – and give me the 20 cents that a pack of smokes cost in those days. There was never any problem with this.

The Parkway Market was a favorite place of ours. The four blocks seemed like a pretty long way, but we walked there at least once almost every day, and more than once on many days. It occupied a building in the middle of a big parking lot on Francisquito Avenue, which was the northern boundary of our little neighborhood.

Francisquito was a wide avenue with two lanes of traffic in each direction, and seemed very formidable. The area north of Francisquito was in these years mostly unexplored territory for us.

The Parkway Market had an entrance on the parking lot side that opened up to a magazine rack on the right, which featured lots of comic books along with Life, Look, the Saturday Evening Post and all the other big magazines from that era. I remember spending what seems like hours on end at this rack, reading comics from cover to cover, often sitting on the coin-operated pony ride that stood next to it.

I never bought a comic book – I almost never had any money. But I read Batman, Superman, Archie and Jughead, the Phantom, Mickey Mouse and the other Disney characters, and Classics Illustrated. I spent many hours in that little entryway into the market.

More than once, Little Oscar, the character who promoted Oscar Meyer hot dogs, showed up in the Parkway Market parking lot in his Weinermobile, a vehicle that was shaped like an enormous hot dog, with the Oscar Meyer logo emblazoned on the side.

He would give away trinkets – I vaguely remember little whistles shaped like the Weinermobile - and probably hot dogs, too; kids got to go into the Weinermobile and feel somehow connected to the shows that the company sponsored on television. He wore a big white chef’s toque and a white jacket. He was an elfin little man who smiled all the time.

There was an open area in front of the magazine rack, and across it was a refrigerator case with beer and soft drinks in six-packs and quart bottles. There was also a big cooler with individual bottles of sodas, with the bottles submerged in cold water, in tracks with only their bottle caps showing to identify them. You would slide the bottle you wanted to the end of the track and lift it out and take it to the counter to pay for it.

The counter was opposite the entrance. Behind the counter were shelves with bottles of gin, whiskey and other distilled spirits, pipe tobacco and cigars, and other things that were for adults only. To the right of this counter was an aisle that led into the main section of the market, where the produce, canned goods and packaged items were lined up on the shelves.

When we were a little older, the store was expanded; a variety or “dime store” was added on to the market, and was connected by an open passageway; later, a drug store was added on the other side of the variety store, also reachable via an open passageway. This was quite a big deal. We would spend a lot of time at the variety store.

There was a shooting gallery game there, where you put a nickel into a slot and you could shoot at targets with a simulated rifle. We liked that a lot. Since we didn’t have many nickels, we usually just pretended to shoot at the targets. The people who worked in the stores were very tolerant of a bunch of kids hanging around, reading the comics and playing with the equipment, rarely buying anything.

Later on, when I was around ten or eleven, Dennis and I worked at the Parkway Market, for fifty cents an hour, sorting out redeemed pop bottles and putting them in their brand-appropriate wooden crates for return to the bottlers. We would sit on the ground, out in the sun in a fenced-in area at the side of the building.

It was a good job, we thought. We would work for maybe two hours on any given day. Of course today it would be considered child labor, but at the time it seemed just fine. It was great to have a little money in my pocket.

When I was five, my mother discovered that she was going to have another child. This was a bit of a surprise, as she was more than 40 years old at the time, and having a child at that age was unusual then. This was before my father built the new living room onto the house.

I can recall various people – Kay Miskella? Betty Hall? - commenting to the effect that my mom must be crazy to be having a child at her age, but, then again, these were good Catholics, so I don’t know what they thought would have been her alternative.

The new child turned out to be twins, my brothers Michael and Alan. I remember them in cribs in my parents’ bedroom. I can’t remember how the seven of us – Jayne, Jackie and me, and now the two infants, plus our parents – all fit into that small house. I remember a time when I shared a room with Jackie, but I don’t remember where Jayne was in this set-up.

At some point, the new living room was added, and our parents turned the prior living room into their bedroom. Jackie and I moved into what had been their bedroom, and Jayne got a room of her own – I remember that she got to decorate it, with yellow walls and a chair with green and white stripes. (I had that chair many years later, and eventually gave it to one of her kids. I wonder if it is still around.)

Jayne got married pretty soon after the twins were born, and her room became theirs. Much later, our parents moved back into their original bedroom, the three boys shared the big bedroom – bunk beds and another single bed – and Jackie, being a girl, got her own room.

There were other kids in the neighborhood we played with when we were a little older and going to school.

There was Bobby Turnbull, about my age, who lived three houses up from us on our side of Mangum Street. His father must have been some kind of carpenter. He had a full workshop in his garage – power saws, benches, lots of wood. Sadly, his father was hit by a car and killed when we were about ten or twelve.

There were also the Coe kids, Butch and Barbara, who lived next to the Turnbulls. Butch was a tough kid who pushed us around, so we didn’t want to have much to do with him. Barbara was tough, too…Jackie says that Barbara used to threaten her and chase her home if she saw her in the neighborhood.

And there were the Maronachs (or something like that), who lived next to us on Mangum Street, between us and the Coes: the husband, Matt; the mother, whose name I don’t remember, their daughter Ruth Ann, and son, Matt Jr., who was called Brother.

Jackie and the twins may have played with them; I just remember them being around but not actually having much to do with them. Rumor has it that, years after we left the neighborhood, Wiley Bryant had a fling with Mrs. Maronach. Who knows? Jackie knows more about them than I do.

Dennis and I played at being pirates, space travelers and other fantasy things. My father, who became a chiropractor when I was five, had some “ultrasound” equipment and other things with dials and oscilloscopes stored in the garage, and we would pretend that these devices were the controls of our space ship.

Our garage was always a complete mess. There were piles of scrap wood and other materials in the middle of the floor, lots of old stuff that the folks didn’t want in the house but didn’t want to throw away. I don't remember their ever being a car in that garage. It was at the back of the back yard, across the yard from Mangum Street, with a driveway that connected it to Mangum. The family car was always parked in the driveway. The first car I can remember was a blue and white 1953 Buick.

My father loved radios and TVs and all technical things. As I said, he taught radio during the war, and he had been a ham radio operator when he was a teenager. At some point before I was born, he had a pilot’s license and owned a share of a small plane.

We were among the first ones in the neighborhood to have a television. Ed was good at fixing it when anything went wrong. I remember going with him to buy tubes for the TV. Groceries and drugstores at the time had kiosk-like set-ups with various types of TV tubes; you would bring the ones from your TV to the store and test them at the kiosk, and you could buy replacements for the ones that didn’t test well. My dad was often on the floor behind the television, replacing tubes or jiggling wires to make the thing work the way it was supposed to.

My sister Jayne would have her friends over to our house; I remember teenaged guys and girls in jeans, hanging out in the back yard, smoking cigarettes and flicking the ashes into their rolled-up cuffs. That was, I guess, the cool thing to do in those days.

Jayne and her friend Mickey Tackett would take me to the beach when I was very young usually to Huntington Cliffs in Orange County. At that time the road to the beach went through fields with lots of oil wells. I have pleasant memories of being at the beach with Jayne and Mickey. I always loved the beach. My mother taught me to swim in the ocean when I was only three or four.

When she was around eighteen, Jayne had a boyfriend who was apparently very serious about her. His name was Verne. Two things about him have stayed with me: one, my dad got him to mow our lawn once or twice; and two, Dad successfully encouraged him to enlist in the Air Force, apparently to keep him from getting any more involved with Jayne.

On most Sundays we would be visited by the Miskellas and the Halls, my parents' friends from Massachusetts who now lived in the San Fernando Valley.

Jim Miskella liked to play with us kids. He was a very jovial man. He smoked a pipe and wore a fedora hat. He didn’t have much hair, and reminded me of the actor who played the trainer Knobby Walsh on the Joe Palooka TV show. He would usually be wearing a jacket and tie when they visited. He worked for the Chevrolet dealer in Sherman Oaks.

I remember thinking that it was odd that his wife, Kay, always drove when they would come to see us. (It occurs to me now that Jim might have had a drinking problem – maybe he had lost his license – but this is pure speculation.) Jim would play “rough-house” games with us – swing us around, wrestle, that kind of thing. We loved to see him. He was funny and nice.

Kay was somewhat reserved. She was a pious Catholic, which is one of the things I remember most about her. She was always well dressed, in long skirts or slacks and pretty blouses. She was tall, with brown hair, which I remember as usually being worn up. She was pretty.

She and my mother had worked together as switchboard operators at the telephone company in Boston when they were young, Along with my mom’s very dear friend, Dot McCormack, before the war. She didn’t like noise and would tell Jim not to get us kids so excited. She was my sister Jackie’s godmother, and I think Jim was her godfather

Betty and Dick were quite different from Kay and Jim. Dick played golf. He also looked like a character on one of the early TV shows from the fifties. I don’t know what he did for a living. He was thin with short, dark hair. I remember him wearing sport jackets and slacks. No grown men we knew wore jeans in those days. He and Betty liked to have a drink with my parents when they came over; I don’t think Kay or Jim did.

My memory isn’t that clear, but I don’t remember that they had dinner with us when they would all visit. Maybe they would have had an early dinner on Sundays and then come to our house, although it must have taken quite a while to get from Sherman Oaks, where they lived, to Baldwin Park, in those days before there were freeways.

I do remember that when I was too young to stay up past eight o’clock or so, they would all watch Ed Sullivan and Perry Mason on Sunday nights, and I would sneak out of my room and sit quietly in the hall in my pajamas, next to the wall heater, and watch the TV across the living room. I have a faint remembered feeling of getting away with something and thinking that I was watching something special.

I recall being five or six and riding in the car with the folks, going to see Kay and Jim at their house in Sherman Oaks. This was before there were freeways between Baldwin Park and the Valley. We would take Garvey Avenue or Valley Boulevard from nearby El Monte all the way into Los Angeles, then take Sunset Blvd., probably to the Cahuenga Pass into the Valley and along Ventura Blvd. to Sherman Oaks.

I have a couple of memories from these rides: one, of passing a drive-in movie theater on Garvey that had an animated waterfall on the back of its screen, perhaps in neon light; and another one of the Currie’s Ice Cream store, also on Garvey, which had a neon sign in the shape of a huge ice cream cone next to the building.

Currie’s had several stores around the L.A. area at the time, and they had a jingle on the radio that I still remember (“mile high Currie’s stores; mile high ice cream cones; mile high malts, double thick; hurry to Curries’, double quick!”). I imagine that we must have stopped in for a cone once or twice; I could even persuade myself that I remember someone taking me there for a birthday treat.

Also on those drives to see Kay and Jim, I remember that we would see the big illuminated cross on top of a hill in the Cahuenga Pass, and it made me think of Kay, she being so religious (just about everything religious made me think of her in those days). Even now, when I see that cross on my frequent drives through the pass, I think of her and of those days all those years ago.

There was an interesting store not far from our house, in El Monte, at an intersection called Five Points, that we would visit now and then. It was called Crawford’s, and it was not only a store; it also had a kids’ amusement area outside, with little rides that, as a very young boy, I liked a lot.

On your birthday they would send you coupons that entitled you to ride on the little train and the merry-go-round and the boats in a little stream and other rides for free. There were also stands that sold various treats. My mother would take me there a few times during the year. I have a fond memory of Crawford’s; I have a sense that there were colored lights and decorations that would make a young boy feel that he was in an exciting place.

When I was five I attended kindergarten at the Elwin Elementary School, a couple of blocks from our house. I remember my mother taking me the first day. After that I went on a school bus. I remember that my teacher was Mrs. Anderson, and that she was slim and pretty and nice.

After kindergarten I left public school and started at St. John the Baptist Parish School, connected to the church we attended. This would be in September of 1952. We wore uniforms of brown corduroy pants, white shirts and brown cardigan sweaters. The teachers were all nuns – sisters of the order of St. Benedict. They wore black habits with white wimples. Some were nice, some were stern.

I did well in the early grades. I almost always won the spelling bees. There were lots of kids in every class – I would guess 35 or 40, maybe more. The nuns were good at maintaining order in the classrooms. There was almost no trouble beyond kids talking when they weren’t supposed to – hardly ever any fighting or other misbehaving.

We started the day with the pledge of allegiance and a prayer. In the second grade we all prepared for our first holy communion, with lots of catechism study. We had to memorize the answers to the questions in the catechism – a question-and-answer book that covered everything we were supposed to know in order to qualify for this sacrament. The kids who did best at this and other things were rewarded with holy cards – like baseball cards, with pictures of saints on the front and the saints’ stories on the back. I won lots of these.

The ceremony for first communion required much preparation, as the child had to understand the seriousness of what was about to take place – the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus, and the taking of that bread into the student’s own self, an action that would purify him and make him one with the Lord Jesus.

I remember the day of the first communion ritual. It was such a big deal that my father came to the church – something he almost never did. Each student had to have a sponsor for this event, preferably some one of real devotion to Jesus and the Church. I asked Jim Miskella to be my sponsor, which he did.

Jim and Kay gave me a new silver dollar as a communion gift. When the collection basket came around, and I saw the other kids dropping small change into it, I put the only money I had – the new silver dollar - into the basket. (This was not greeted with approval when I told my mother what I had done – a dollar was way too much for me to have given.)

From then on I was a full member of the church, having reached the age of reason, seven years old, at which point it was held that I knew the difference between good and evil and could choose between them for myself.

We went to Mass every Sunday with our mother, who at the time was still quite devout. I remember her in her coats and hats, driving us to Sunday Mass. Mass was conducted once every hour from six to twelve on Sunday morning. We usually went to one of the later services.

We would wear our best clothes, and follow the Mass as the priest went through the liturgy. At first communion each child received a new missal, the book that covered and described the liturgical year, the gospels, and the liturgy of the Mass, which you would follow as the priest conducted the individual segments.

The parish sold donuts and coffee after Mass, to raise some money for the church’s many unmet needs. It was all set up on folding tables in the church yard. Donuts went for a nickel.

We didn’t get treats like this very often – our father was very health conscious, and didn’t want to have sweets in the house – so we were glad to get a donut on Sunday. On many Sundays, we would stop on the way home at a supermarket near the church and follow our mother up and down the aisles as she did the week’s shopping.

I liked the liturgy of the Latin Mass. Later on, at about age ten, I became an altar boy. From the fifth grade on, I would serve at morning Mass a couple of times a week, at either six-thirty or eight o’clock, and once on Sunday. There was a lot of pomp and ceremony.

I liked all of it. As an altar boy you were very close to the priest in his service to the Lord, which meant that you were pious and devout. You were playing an important part in the ritual of the Mass, thereby serving God and helping the congregation in its devotion.

As altar boys we moved the large missal on a stand that the priest read from so that it would be where he needed it at each part of the liturgy; we rang the bells at the appropriate places during the mass; we recited, in Latin, the parts of the mass that represented the congregation’s responses.

Most importantly, we assisted in the communion service, holding a golden plate, called a paten, under the chins of the recipients of the Eucharist as they knelt at the altar rail and opened their mouths to receive the consecrated hosts. We poured water and wine into crystal cruets for the priest to use in the sacred transubstantiation. All in all, it was quite a thing for a boy to be part of at age ten.

I kept at it through eighth grade; by the time I was finished I was the head of the alter boys’ group. I got to carry the big wooden cross on a pole in ceremonies that used it, ahead of all the others, next to the priest.

Now, nearly fifty years later, I still have a belt buckle that I was given back then, with a little heraldic crest and the words “altar boy” emblazoned across it. It’s in the drawer of the desk in my den. I come across it every now and then and have a brief little nostalgic moment, remembering all of this.

We wore black cassocks and white surpluses during the services, which were kept in the sacristy, a suite of rooms next to the sanctuary, where only the priest and the altar boys were allowed. We would meet ten minutes before each service to put on our cassocks and make sure everything was ready.

The presiding priest would fill us in on any special aspects of the morning’s Mass. It was especially exciting if it was a High Mass, in which everything was done at a higher level of intensity and ceremony: more ornate vestments, more music, incense, sometimes another priest and extra altar boys.

From the earliest grades at St. John we would celebrate feast days and other significant points in the liturgical year with special school activities. The church itself was across the playgrounds from the school, and we would often be marched over to the church for a lesson or an address by the pastor, Father John Flack.

To celebrate All Saints Day, the holy day that falls on the day after Halloween, we would dress as saints and have a pageant, marching around the schoolyard, carrying banners and singing religious songs, with the nuns walking along side of us like drill sergeants in the army.

The nuns were, for the most part, pleasant, but strict. They wore the black habits and white wimples of the Benedictine order. They wore beads around their waists – were they rosaries? I don’t know, but they looked like rosaries. Maybe they were chains with bunches of keys. Some of the nuns would twirl them around as they patrolled the schoolyard.

There wasn’t much grass at St. John’s – most of the grounds were blacktop, for church parking on Sunday. There was a big dirt field on the north side of the campus where we would play touch football.

Students were encouraged to attend Mass on the first Friday of every month. We were told that if we received Holy Communion on nine consecutive first Fridays, God would make sure that there would be a priest at our sides when we were on our deathbeds, to give us the last rites, thereby assuring that we would go to heaven.

Another guarantee of having a priest there when you were dying was the scapular, a medal you wore around your neck, honoring Jesus’s mother Mary. If you had it on when you were dying, you could be sure that a priest would give you the last rites and thus assure you of salvation.

In those days, you couldn’t eat anything before receiving communion, because it was felt that the host, which would be transformed by the priest into the body of Christ, should not be consumed when there was other food in our stomachs. For this reason, on the first Fridays when we had communion, we brought a dime to school and exchanged it for a small carton of milk and some coffee cake, which we were allowed to eat in class.

This was a really special treat. If you didn’t receive communion, and therefore didn’t get to have milk and coffee cake that morning, there was a faint sense that you weren’t fulfilling your duty as a good catholic.

If you forgot about it and had breakfast before heading to school or just ate some little thing without thinking, you couldn’t receive communion, and then you couldn’t have the milk and coffee cake, and so you felt pretty bad when everyone else got some and you didn’t.

You felt bad because everyone would know that you didn’t receive communion, but more so because it made you hungry to see all the other kids eating their First Friday special breakfast.

I was at St. John’s for eight years, from the first through the eighth grade. There was a school bus in the first couple of years, but from about the third grade on I walked to school. It was about two miles, and took thirty minutes or so at kid speed.

Jackie joined me at the school when I reached third grade, and we would walk together most of the time. There was a “lay teacher” at the school, Mrs. Knopp, who lived a few blocks away from our house, and sometimes we would get a ride home from her.

Our father would sometimes drive us to school on his way to work, but most of the time we had to walk. It was a long way to go for a young kid.

We never had any money in those days – most of the time, not a nickel or a dime. If we found a soda bottle along the way, we would pick it up and take it to a little store along the way that sold candy and “notions,” and cash the bottle in for the two cents redemption value. The rare quart bottles were worth a nickel – a windfall if you found one. At that time there were lots of penny candies, so the bottles had substantial value.

If you found two or three you could do pretty well. A candy bar or pack of gum cost a nickel. There was a small Popsicle that sold for four cents, the value of two pop bottles. We kept our eyes open for bottles all the way home.

The route from the school to our house included a long stretch of Ramona Blvd., a busy road with two lanes of traffic in each direction. It was lined with a wide variety of stores, small offices, churches, gas stations and some houses. It was not a very upscale stretch.

There was a sidewalk for much of the distance, but not all the way – for several blocks, we had to walk on the edge of the road or in the weeds and dirt next to the road. The good news about this was that there were often a couple of two-cent pop bottles in this stretch of grass.

I recall a Foursquare Gospel church, which was very small and shabby. Some kids said that the people in this church were “holy rollers” who would roll around on the ground in rapture during the services.

I also remember a kind of amusement center, with pinball machines, skiball and other games. I stuck my head in the door once to get a quick look at the place, but we never went in because, of course, we had no money to spend on such things. This establishment was very near the start of our walk, on Ramona just after the turn off of Stewart Street, where the church and school were (and still are) situated.

I recall walking by and hearing rock and roll music coming out of that place. I still remember specific songs – “You’re So Fine,” by the Falcons and “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters stick in my mind as associated with that place I was never able to patronize.

There was a stand along Ramona Blvd. that sold pastrami sandwiches for fifty cents. We never had one of those, either. Once one of the kids I was walking home with went up to the counter and ordered two of them, then ran off, thinking that this was a very funny stunt.

Also on Ramona, not far below Stewart Street, was a trailer park. I can still picture it, with a chain link fence around it, some flowers in planters, and most of the trailers a kind of faded green that was used on a lot of things in those days. There was a girl in one of my grades – probably fifth or sixth, when I was ten or eleven – who lived there with her parents.

I remember walking home a little bit behind her, watching her ponytail swaying above the brown bolero of her school uniform. Her name was Linda Lemon. I did have a little crush on her. I don’t think I ever said a word to her. She was only at the school for one year, as I recall – I would guess that her folks managed to move out of the trailer park at some point, and away from St. John’s. Too bad.

On Ramona Blvd. not too far from our house was the barbershop where my father and I got our hair cut. There were two barbers, Verne and Russ. Verne looked like Bud Abbot; Russ was shorter and stockier (but he did not look like Lou Costello). Haircuts were a dollar for men and fifty cents for kids.

When I was around eight years old Verne asked me if I wanted to sweep the floor of the shop for a dime, which I gladly did. From then on I would walk over to the shop most afternoons and ask him if he needed a sweep. He said yes about half the time. I was always disappointed when he didn’t.

A dime was a lot for me at that time. A dime would by a soda, or a comic book, although I don’t think I ever actually bought a comic book. It was a matter of priorities – I usually chose things to eat when I had a dime to spend. As I said, I did my comic-book reading while sitting on the pony ride at the Parkway Market, at no cost. But I did appreciate the opportunity to earn that dime at the barbershop.

There was also a tiny little store next to the barber shop – the one that sold the four-cent popsicles and lots of other things you could get if you had a dime, including little wax bottles with an ounce or two of some kind of soda in them that you got to by chewing the wax, and little candy dots that were stuck onto a strip of paper.

This little store – “Joe’s” – was dark and dank. It was one of the stops we would make along the way home from school or on weekends when we were out wandering around.

Close by was the Elwin Market and Liquor store, where June Bryant’s bookie worked. It sold produce and the usual packaged stuff. It was only a block from the Parkway Market and carried much less variety; I never knew why people shopped there – maybe it was the bookie.

At different times there were different kids to play with and, later, when we got older and were too cool to “play,” to hang out with, but Dennis was always my closest friend for all those years. We lived in that house on Emery Avenue for fourteen years, until just before I turned 16. Dennis moved away at about the same time.

We spent a lot of time in the street – literally, in the middle of Mangum Street. We played ball games – mostly three flies up. Usually it would be Dennis, Bill Phelps, a couple of the other kids from up the street, sometimes Jackie, and me.

We also played “work-up” if we had enough kids. That was a great game. You started in the outfield, then moved up into the infield and eventually to catcher and pitcher as the kids who were “up” were put out and had to take their places in the outfield. The object was to stay up as long as you could, by not being put “out.” What fun. We would play until it was too dark to see the ball. The worst thing would be if your mom called you in to supper when you were still up.

We loved to fly kites. Every spring we would each get a new paper kite and a ball of kite string at the Parkway market. The kite and the string each cost a dime. (I also remember my father trying to make a kite from newspapers, as he said was done when he was a kid, but it didn’t work.)

Dennis and I would launch our kites from the middle of Mangum Street, up over our house and high into the sky. The wind always blew that way, to the northeast. We would stand in the street, or at its edge when cars came by, which in those days wasn’t very often, for hours.

I had another close friend for a few years, from around age six through nine or ten. Richard Murphy lived across the street from us, on Mangum, a couple of houses south of where Dennis lived. It must have been just south of Jessie and Litzie Bryant’s house. We were pals until he and his mom, whose name was Virginia, moved away – far away, to Oroville, in the northern part of California, on the Feather River.

Richard and I liked a lot of silly stuff. We would sit in his room and read Mad Magazine. We laughed a lot. It’s so long ago that I don’t remember much more than that. His mom was single and was a school teacher. He had an aunt named Sylvia – I remember this only because at the time my mother had sheet music for the song, “Who is Sylvia?” and I thought to myself, well, she is Richard Murphy’s aunt.

Two things I recall about the time with Richard Murphy: one, we loved the song “Hernando’s Hideaway,” which was on the radio at the time; and, two, we liked Rocket 88 Oldsmobiles. We must have seen commercials and thought they looked cool; I don’t know if we ever actually saw one in the neighborhood.

I don’t recall whether he and Dennis and I were all friends together, or if I would alternate between them, or what, but I do recall that I was very upset when he moved away. I visited him in Oroville when I was fourteen, in the summer between freshman and sophomore years in high school, when I took a road trip with a friend of my dad’s. I spent a couple of weeks with Richard and his mom, at their mini-ranch where she raised appaloosa horses.

I also have a memory so faint that I’m almost not sure it’s true, of a visit about ten years later, when I was driving up the coast to Canada, of stopping off and seeing them again. I do know that at some point I was there when one of the horses gave birth in the middle of the night, and Virginia woke me up and had me come out to the stable to see it happen. Otherwise Richard Murphy has been completely gone from my life for over forty years. I hope he is well!

When I was around five years old, a family named Meier moved into a house on Mangum Street – a couple of doors south of Dennis. Mazie and Charles were the parents. They had two sons – Barry, about my age, and Gary, about Jackie’s.

My parents became good friends with Mazie and Charles, and Jackie and I became good friends with Barry and Gary. Mazie was from England; she had met Charles when he was a soldier stationed there during the war. Charles drove a big-rig truck for the Garrett Trucking Line.

The story was that our doorbell rang, and our mother opened the door to see a tall young woman wearing very short shorts and high heels, asking to borrow…a cup of sugar or some such thing. That was her first look at Mazie. My mother was in her early forties and Mazie must have been around thirty.

They were our neighbors for only a few months. Soon they moved to Covina, into a house they bought somewhere else and had moved to their new location on a truck. It was a big, two-story house. They plopped it onto a big lot – I would guess a couple of acres – that was mostly covered with orange trees. They built a swimming pool in back.

We spent a lot of time there from when I was about seven or eight up to about thirteen or fourteen. Jackie and I would sometimes spend a few days in the summer at their house. We liked to play in the “forest” of orange trees behind their house.

Mazie’s father lived with them. He was a quiet Englishman who had something to do with the soft drink business. There was a cooler filled with sodas, much like the one at the Parkway market, at the side of the house, from which we were always free to take a bottle.

Once or twice the four of us would collect the empty bottles from around the cooler and take them in a wagon to the market at the corner of Covina Avenue, their street, and Citrus Avenue, a principal thoroughfare in Covina, and exchange them for their two- and five-cent redemption values. We bought Hostess cupcakes and Twinkies, candy bars – lots of what we didn’t get at home – with the proceeds.

Mazie was very pretty, and had a low, sonorous voice. She had strawberry blonde hair that she wore in big curls. I remember her as always wearing make-up and jewelry, even just around the house. She was nice and liked to laugh. She liked to watch movies on TV, and would get excited when an English movie would be on.

Charles was tall and slim, and didn’t say much, at least not when I was around. I don’t remember much about him, but I do recall that he had dark hair that he wore like the singer Jack Scott, complete with long sideburns. This was probably the preferred look for truck drivers in the nineteen fifties.

The Meiers would frequently come to visit our family in Baldwin Park. That is, Mazie and the boys did, as Charles was usually out on the road. The families became good friends. Jackie and I didn’t see much of Barrie and Gary after I started at high school and she went off on a long visit to Medford (more about that later); in fact, I saw next to nothing of them from about my freshman year.

The last memory I have of their house is standing in the driveway, listening to a transistor radio. I can remember the songs that were played: “Take Good Care of My Baby,” by Bobby Vee, “Only the Lonely” by Roy Orbison, and “(The Name of the Place is) I Like it Like That,” by­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ Chris Kenner.

My very last memory of seeing either one of them is when I was a student at Mount San Antonio Junior College (“Mt. Sac”), around 1965. I ran into Barry while walking across the campus; we spoke for a moment or two, and that was that. I believe that Barry became a high school teacher and football coach. Gary was a fireman and eventually became the fire chief for the city of San Clemente.

I haven’t seen either one of them for decades. Mazie and my mother were friends until my mom died, and we – Jackie, Jayne and I – kept up with her until she died, which was in nineteen ninety-five. Charles had died many years before.

Mazie was a good friend of another early Baldwin Park neighbor who also became extremely close to our family, Elsa Lowers. Elsa and her husband, Edward, and their son Victor and daughter Hilda, moved into yet another house on Mangum when I was around six years old.

They had come from Belgium, where they had gone through extremely hard times during the war. Edward had been a prisoner of the Nazis, and escaped from them more than once.

They soon moved into another nearby house, on Emery Avenue, three doors east of us. My parents welcomed the Lowers to the neighborhood and helped them settle in – to life in America as well as in Baldwin Park.

As I said, they became great friends and remained so for all of their lives. My mother and Elsa – whom we always called Elska – took a class in conversational Spanish at a local school together.

For a while Victor and I played together – he was two or three years older than I. The house they moved into was next to a very large vacant lot, and Victor and I transformed part of it into a Navajo Indian village by digging a deep hole in the ground and cutting little pueblo dwellings into the side of it, and populating them with little plastic Indian figures.

That vacant lot was, a few years later, the scene of a historic dirt-clod battle between Dennis, me and a few others in the lot and Butch Coe and some friends of his in his back yard, which was next to the vacant lot. A low chain- link fence was all that divided the yard and the lot.

I remember that I was still wearing my white school uniform shirt. This was probably around the fifth or sixth grade. I managed not to get hit the whole time. We used trash can lids for shields, and pulled weeds out of the ground with nice, tightly packed clods of earth around their roots – perfect for throwing over the fence at Butch and his troops.

This event has stayed in my memory, albeit somewhat foggily, as a really great, fun time. I think the battle went on from right after school until it got pretty dark. Of course, as I remember, we won.

After a short time in the house on Emery Avenue, the Lowers moved to the north side of Baldwin Park, into a small house that was set way back from the street on a big lot. Edward fixed it up himself, and added a beautiful mural of a scene from Belgium on one of the walls.

Edward was exceptionally talented as an artist. He built a creek and fish pond, and had extensive gardens and a hot house. He grew a myriad of plants, trees, bushes and flowers. There was a chicken coop, with hens and a rooster. Edward liked to watch the rooster go after the hens.

Edward made his living as a house painter, but he also bought rundown houses in Baldwin Park and restored them, then sold them at a profit.

Our family would visit the Lowers on special occasions – Easter, Christmas Eve, birthdays. Christmas Eve was always very special. I remember our going there from a very young age. Elsa would prepare a fabulous dinner, and Hilda would set a beautiful table, complete with hand-written and illustrated menus.

Hilda was a special friend to me in those days, when she and I were eleven or twelve years old. She was pretty and funny, and we would spend time together at the Easter and Christmas gatherings, laughing at the adults or at the world in general.

Usually there would be asparagus soup, a light, round pastry with chicken and mushrooms inside, and other delicious things. After dinner we would watch the Lowers open their Christmas presents to each other. These evenings were very happy events.

My parents seemed to be at their most relaxed and to have an especially good time with Elsa and Ed. For many years, these visits were central to our holidays. The Lowers were often at our house, too. At either home, there was always much laughter, often some wine, and lots of affection.

Edward and my father would discuss world events, each with his own perspective, and each one appreciated the other’s take on this or that issue. My mother and Elsa, likewise, enjoyed each other’s company immensely. Ed Lower liked to tell racy jokes and was flirty with all the women.

We got to know some of the Lowers’ relatives who had also come to the US from Belgium. Elsa’s sister, Jo Van den Brooke, and her husband, John, had two daughters, Linda and Heidi, and a son, Bennie. They would often be at the Lowers’ house when we were there.

Linda and Heidi were relatively close in age to us – Jackie, Mike, Alan and me. The various parts of the Lowers’ yard, the greenhouse, gardens, a big building that was a cross between a barn and a workshop, and a grove of trees, all provided fun places for kids to explore and hide and play in.

There was a big oak tree in a clearing in front of the house, and a couple of tables around the tree. I recall piñatas hung from that tree, and kids whacking away with a baseball bat, and candy spilling out all over the ground and kids scampering to pick it up. The kids were mostly us and the Van den Brookes.

In the late fifties or early sixties, Jayne and her husband John had a motor boat, a sleek outboard that they used for water skiing. Once or twice they took me along with them when they went to ski at Salton Sea, which at the time was in pretty good shape and had a lot of recreational facilities – boat launches, camping sites, and such.

It was a lot of fun. John would drive the boat while one of us – Jayne, Kevin or me – would ski behind it. It was incredibly hot there, and we would ski mostly in the morning before the sun got too high. Now the Salton Sea is mostly a dead, fetid lake with nothing happening on or around it, but it had a brief heyday that I still remember fondly.

When Dennis Hugie and I got to be a little older – eight or nine, I would say – we would venture on foot past the tacit limits of Francisquito, and head up Ramona Blvd. Railroad tracks ran along the northwest side of Ramona, and there were usually some cars – boxcars, tank cars, and cars that funneled down at the bottom for grain or other commodities – parked along these tracks. Dennis and I liked to walk along the tracks.

We had contests – who could walk along one rail the longest without falling off. We would often climb around on the cars. We would get inside the boxcars and pretend that we were going to hitch a ride and leave home; unbelievably, we would walk along the rail at the top of a grain car, balancing along the edge. We would surely have been badly injured, if not killed, if we had fallen in.

In the kitchen of our house there was a brown plastic (or Bakelite) radio on the counter, and I remember specific songs that were played back then, around the time I started Kindergarten. “Slip Around,” by Jimmy Wakely and Margaret Whiting and “You, You, You,” by the Ames Brothers come quickly to mind. My mom liked the station KLAC – “570 on your a.m. dial” - which at the time was the leading music station in L.A. I can easily conjure up a memory of her singing along with the radio as she did housework in those days.

I loved to watch the variety shows that were on TV at that time or a little later – Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante (my very favorite), Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle – and Spade Cooley, a country musician who was a big star in L.A.

There were also comedies that I liked a lot: “Make Room for Daddy” with Danny Thomas; “Father Knows Best”; a couple of shows with Ann Southern; “December Bride,” with Spring Byington; “the Betty White Show”; “My Little Margie,” with Gayle Storm and John Forsyth.

I also liked Roy Rogers and Hoppalong Cassidy very much. There was a time when playing cowboys was a major part of what Dennis and I did, and we both had toy guns that we would wear in holsters and pretend to shoot each other. Sometimes we would have caps that contained a small amount of gunpowder and would make the toy guns seem like real guns when you pulled the trigger and the gun’s hammer hit the cap.

I dimly recall a show called “Boston Blacky,” and another one about a boxer named Palooka Joe (with the trainer who reminded me of Jim Miskella). Later on there were Burns and Allen and Ozzie and Harriet.

As a young kid in the very early fifties I watched the local children’s programs: Engineer Bill, Sheriff John, Popeye, Crusader Rabbit, Beanie and Cecil (the seasick sea serpent), Howdy Doodie; I also have a vague memory of a show with Andy Devine and a Frog; I can’t remember anything much about it now, except that I liked it a lot. This must have been around 1954 or so. I also remember liking a show called “Thunderbolt the Wonder Colt.” And Rin Tin Tin.

At some point in the fifties, when I was around seven or eight, my mother went back east to visit her mother and sister. While she was gone, my father, with the help of Ed Lowers, enlarged the kitchen in our house, nearly doubling its size. Now there was room for a big dining table. My dad made one out of a door! It was big enough for about eight people.

Most memorable is the way Ed Lowers painted the new kitchen, with a bold brown horizontal stripe all around the room at about waist level, with different shades of beige or coffee colored paint above and below it. This was quite adventurous at this time. My mom was quite surprised when she returned from Medford.

When I was ten years old, my mom’s mother came out to see us over the Christmas holiday on one of her rare visits. She stayed for a few weeks or maybe even longer. She took my place in the bedroom I shared with Jackie, and I slept on the sofa in the big living room. The sofa was a long, curved Chinese-style divan, with jade-green upholstery.

I mention it because I have a lasting, still-clear memory about this. This was at the time when the transistor radio had just been developed, and I had been given a very, very primitive one for my birthday a few weeks earlier. It was a little red one, about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

You had to use an earphone, as there was no speaker, and you had to fasten a little alligator clip onto something big and metal in order to get a signal, but I thought it was wonderful. I would go to bed on the sofa with the earphone in my ear, and listen to KFWB, the local pop music station. This was really my first immersion in the pop world.

I remember the disc jockeys from those days – Ted Quillin, Bill Balance, B. Mitchell Reed (who later became a star of the FM revolution of the sixties), Gene Weed, Elliot Fields – I loved to listen to those guys.

I also discovered that late at night you could find stations from as far away as Chicago and other places in the Midwest. It was all AM radio in those days, and the signals traveled really far at night. It was thrilling, as a ten year old, to hear programs from so far away and to get a sense of the larger world beyond my own.

I had discovered KFWB earlier that year, in the summer, sitting by the pool at the country club we belonged to. (More about that later.) I had brought a big portable radio with me (maybe it was Jayne’s) to the pool, and had tuned it to KLAC.

I was sitting in a row with some other kids, when a slightly older boy said, why don’t you turn to KFWB? I did, and instead of Eddie Fisher, there were Chuck Berry and Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard and Buddy Holly. What a discovery! From then on it was KFWB for me.

The Christmas of the year when I had turned twelve or thirteen – nineteen fifty-eight or fifty-nine – Dennis, Jackie and I all found new bicycles under our Christmas trees. We were thrilled beyond belief. Dennis’s was a blue and white cruiser with whitewall tires. Jackie and I had matching all-chrome bikes. They were great.

I imagine that our dad had stayed up much of the night putting Jackie’s and my bike together. At some point in the morning – It couldn’t have been too early; we must have gone to Mass before going out to play – the three of us took off for a ride on our new bikes. I can still remember the feeling of heading out of Dennis’s driveway and into Mangum Street. Dennis turned right onto Mangum. Jackie turned right onto Mangum.

I turned my handlebars to make a right turn, too, but the bike didn’t turn – the handlebars had no effect on the front wheel. Bang! I went into a car that was parked in front of the house on the corner, across from ours. I now had a dent in the fender of my new bike that wasn’t fifteen minutes old.

It got fixed, and all was well, but that was a beginning that has stayed in my memory. We had great times on those bikes. Now we could ride up to Via’s Turkey Farm and McMullen’s Dairy (see below); we could ride to the wash that was at the far reaches of our territory. The relatively new San Bernardino Freeway effectively defined the southern border of our available world.

The wash that ran next to the freeway, overgrown with bamboo and assorted bushes, was, to us, a wild place where we could hide, pretend to be on an island or in a forest, and sit and talk and wonder what life would be like when we got to it.

After a while Dennis and I wanted to make some changes on our bikes; specifically, we wanted to replace the stock handlebars with “ape hangers and goose necks,” and to add a rack on the back that would serve as a seat if you wanted to have someone ride with you. The rack could also hold a canvas carrier for newspapers if you were a paperboy, which I became later on.

I got the rack, and the goose neck and ape hangers – handlebars that had the shape suggested by their name, on an extended neck that raised them up high, like some motorcycle drivers used, with money from Christmas and birthday gifts, and from sorting pop bottles at the Parkway Market.

When I was twelve years old I got a paper route with the San Gabriel Valley Daily Tribune. I had 72 customers on a route that went around our neighborhood in a big loop. It was a larger than usual route that I got when the previous paperboy decided it was too much.

The Tribune was an afternoon paper every day except Sunday, when there was a big morning edition. I would come home from school at around three o’clock; the papers would be dropped off at the end of our driveway shortly after that. I had to fold and rubber-band the papers and put them into canvas saddle bags that would go over the rack on the back of my bike. Then I would ride around the route, throwing the papers onto customers’ porches.

It took some skill to hit a porch that was thirty of forty feet away, from a moving bike. If the paper got away from you and went onto a roof, you had to use one of the two extras you carried with you, which you paid for yourself.

You paid for everything, in fact; the paper sold the papers, the rubber bands and the canvas bags to the boys, who made a modest profit from each customer on the route. At this time, nineteen fifty-eight or so, the monthly subscription price was a dollar and sixty-five cents.

The wholesale price, to the paperboys, was a dollar thirty. That meant that you made thirty-five cents per month per customer. With seventy-two customers, I made $25.20 per month. Some customers – but not many - would pay with two dollar bills and give me the change as a tip, so my total per month was probably around twenty-seven or twenty-eight dollars.

However, there was a catch in this. For two or three days at the end of each month I would knock on customers’ doors and collect the money while delivering the papers. Inevitably, some people wouldn’t be home, and some would ask me to come back the next day. But everyone on my route eventually paid their bills.

The problem was that I would spend more than a little of the money as soon as I got it. My route passed near McMullen’s Dairy, which had a little retail store in front that sold ice cream, soft drinks and snacks. I liked to park the bike next to the dairy's fence and watch the cows while I enjoyed a soda and some Hostess cupcakes or an ice cream bar.

Two or three stops like this could cut pretty deeply into my monthly take, of which I usually owed quite a bit to my mother for various outlays she had made, and to other creditors such as the paper, for rubber bands or extra copies. Mom was not happy when, a couple of times, we tallied up and there wasn’t enough left to pay everything I owed.

Now and then I would be late getting home from school, and my mother would decide that she had better fold the papers for me, and a couple of times she would feel it necessary to put the canvas bag over her shoulder and deliver the papers herself. Suffice it to say that this was not done cheerfully, and that I did not enjoy the aftermath of this.

Having a bike at that time gave me a sense that I could go places I couldn’t get to before, and I really valued it. I took good care of it – I remember having it upside down on the patio in the back yard, repairing the inner tubes of the tires, adjusting the chain, tightening spokes.

One day in particular I recall, working on the bike, listening to a transistor radio I had received for a birthday present (it was lime green with a silver screen over the speaker – I loved it) with Dion and the Belmonts singing “Where or When.” It’s funny how certain songs are connected to very specific moments in my memory.

I gave up the paper route after a couple of years, about the time that I started high school. It was, all in all, a fun experience that taught me some things about work, dealing with people, money, and bicycle maintenance.

We had a few places we liked to walk ride our bikes to. One was Via’s Turkey Ranch, a few blocks northeast of our corner. It was the kind of place you would almost never see now. On probably two or three acres, it was at the end of a residential street a couple of blocks south of Emery Avenue, Waco Street. Their main business was turkeys – they raised them and sold them either live or “freshly dressed.”

We would go and look at the big birds in their pens, with their pink wattles and funny shapes. They also sold parakeets and canaries, which we could look at in their aviaries, which were basically big cages made of chicken wire. There were also a few goats and other farm animals. Via’s was a regular stop on our circuit around the neighborhood. It was a chance for us to see something beyond the new suburbia of paved streets, curbs and lawns and local stores. Real, live animals!

There was also the McMullen Dairy, mentioned above, not far from the Turkey Ranch. It was a working dairy, with the store in front and milking sheds and pastures in the back. Sometimes we would climb the fence and walk up to the cows and pet them or just look at them closely.

We may have actually gotten up onto the backs of one or two of these cows, but I’m not sure. We were small kids, Dennis and I, and it wouldn’t have been such a big deal to the cow if one of us sat on its back. Maybe we did. We liked the smell of the hay and the manure, and sitting on the fence of wooden rails and watching the cows graze.

Another destination, as mentioned, was the wash near the San Bernardino Freeway, probably a mile from our house. The wash was usually dry, or had only a little trickle of water, but stands of bamboo grew along it, which we would cut or break off, just to have – a long, light pole was a cool thing to have if you were ten or eleven. As noted, that wash was a little bit of wilderness for Dennis and me, in our mostly blacktop and suburban world.

When I went to St. John’s and Dennis went to Elwin School, we still spent most of our after-school time together, but my world expanded a little as I developed acquaintances and the occasional friendship with classmates. One of these was a boy my age named Henry Van Horn. He lived a few blocks away – north of Francisquito. We would walk home from school together.

I remember him as kind of a sad kid. I don’t remember very much about him, but I want to include him here because I do remember that we were good friends if only for a little while. I can remember being at his house and playing in his back yard. I think his family moved away at some time in our later years at St. John’s.

My father had a classmate at the Chiropractic College named Hal Ross. Hal became a chiropractor at the same time my dad did. Hal and his wife, Evie, lived in El Monte, not far from Baldwin Park. They had a son named Lenny who was about my age.

For a while the Rosens and the Rosses would spend time together, visiting at each other’s houses, probably having dinner together now and then. Hal was tall, with a mustache and a receding hairline. Evie was short and perky, with dark hair and a little pixie face, kind of like Suzanne Pleshette on the Bob Newhart Show.

At some point in the middle fifties, my dad and Hal Ross went to Maryland together, to take the state Medical boards. That state apparently recognized practitioners of homeopathic medicine, which they were, as medical doctors, and their certification there entitled them to use the designation “M.D.”

I remember a period of time when we would occasionally drive over to their house for a visit and they would come to ours. (I recall that they had a pink Mercury sedan.) This all came to an end when Hal Ross decided to move his family to Bakersfield and open a practice there.

I have a dim memory of a sojourn to stay with them in Bakersfield at around age ten or so, a hot summer’s visit of a few days. I remember an old house with a vine-covered arbor in the back. We had watermelon at a table in the back yard. Lenny and I actually did go by the bakery near their house to smell the freshly baked bread. No lie. That's how exciting it was in Bakersfield.

I saw Lenny Ross once as an adult. I was passing through Bakersfield on the way to somewhere in the seventies and looked him up. He had become a chiropractor, following in his father’s footsteps. Lenny looked a little like the actor Robert Cummings from the forties and fifties.

He was virtually evangelical in the way he talked about his new profession, referring to his hands as instruments that could cure illness and bring new health to his patients. I think I left after about five minutes. I hope he is well and happy.

The back yard of Dennis Hugie’s house on Mangum Street abutted the back yard of a house one block over, on Athol Street. Dennis’s dad would often complain about the kids who lived there, referring to them as “the kids down the back.” There were three brothers – Bill, Tim and Pat Keely.

They lived with their mother, Helen, who taught typing at Mission High School in El Monte. She was a divorcee – a rarity in my world at the time; in fact, the only divorced person I remember ever meeting till then (I don’t think I actually realized that Richard Murphy’s mom was divorced, although I obviously knew that there wasn’t a dad at their house).

The three boys were all pretty wild. I became friends with Pat, the youngest, when we were in the fourth or fifth grade together. Pat’s mom liked him to spend time with me because I was a good kid who didn’t get in trouble, unlike Pat and his brothers. I believe that Bill had spent some time in the local juvenile detention facility, probably for theft or breaking and entering.

The older two, Bill and Tim, swore and smoked, and generally acted like the juvenile delinquents that were in the TV shows and magazine articles of the day. They combed their hair like Eddie Cochran, in big swirling pompadours with Elvis-style sideburns. Bill had a set of brass knuckles and a switchblade knife. They talked about fights they were going to be in, although I don’t remember there ever actually being one.

Their mother was almost always at work, so it was great to hang around at their house after school. At about age ten or eleven the Keely boys taught me to smoke. Their mother kept a carton of Chesterfields in a drawer in the kitchen, which we would access whenever we wanted.

Their house had a garage in the back yard with a deck on the back, over an area where Bill and Tim would allegedly work on cars. Pat and I would climb up to the roof of the deck and sit there, smoking cigarettes and looking out over Dennis Hugie’s father’s vegetable garden.

The Keely boys always had lots of car magazines around the house – stacks of Hot Rod and Car Craft. Much of the time I spent there was devoted to perusing these mags. The photos of customized cars were really fabulous, and provided lots of material for a young boy’s fantasies.

Pat and I would find cars we especially liked and show them to each other. Pat preferred the cars that looked ominous, with their windshields chopped down and the whole car lowered close to the ground. I liked the racier ones, the coupes and roadsters with lots of chrome, exposed engines and custom interiors.

Pat and I had a few favorite songs; when I hear them now I am reminded of him. “Suzy Darlin’,” by Robin Luke (which Bill used to play over and over, driving Tim crazy) and Elvis's “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again” and “A Big Hunk of Love" are the ones I associate most with him.

Pat’s brother Bill, who was probably 16 or 17 at the time, and as far as I know not going to school, or maybe going to some kind of trade school, got a horse that he kept in the back yard of their house, behind the garage. How or why I don’t know. At that time – the late fifties – people in the area did have a few animals besides cats and dogs. Some of the properties not far from us were good-sized – half an acre, maybe an acre here and there - and some of them had a mule or a goat or a pony.

So Bill had this horse – but not for long. One day soon after he got it, he took it out for a ride. On a bridge on Ramona Boulevard over the San Gabriel River, he was hit by a very large truck. The horse was killed and Bill ended up having one of his legs amputated.

It was a horrible thing. He was not supposed to have taken the horse out at all on that day, so the event became something of a morality lesson for those of us who might have been thinking about disobeying our parents.

Not long after Bill’s accident, his mother went on a popular TV show of the time, “Queen for a Day,” in which women with sad tales to tell would compete to win big prizes. She won, and soon had new appliances in her kitchen, and the boys had a new hi-fi and a bunch of new record albums.

Pat and I tried to sell some of the albums around the neighborhood, but didn’t have much luck. There was a lot of Montovani and Eddie Fisher, as I recall.

Pat and I hung around together through seventh and eighth grades at St. John’s. I recall going to Wednesday night novenas at the church with his mother – for me, it was mostly an excuse to get out of the house on a school night. Pat and I would slip out the back of the church while his mother followed the service, and walk around the neighborhood and smoke. We thought we were very cool.

I also remember a moment or two from school lunch periods when Pat and I were pals. At the time there was a row of tables and benches under a roof along the edge of the playground where the kids ate their lunches. There must have been fifteen or twenty picnic-style tables in two long rows.

I recall three things: one, someone had a radio that was playing “Every Day” by Buddy Holly, and I recall really liking that song; two, Pat had bought a ring, a flat, silvery rectangle that was probably supposed to be engraved, but was just really shiny and cool; and three, we started drawing a certain stylized kind of cross with a snake curled around it, which we thought would be our emblem if we ever had a use for one.

Walking around smoking, now that I look back, is how Pat and I spent an awful lot of our time. There was no malt shop with a juke box for us to go to. We went to the Parkway Market and read comic books, and otherwise just hung out.

There was a tough kid at St. John’s named Leroy Marcus. He was recognized as the toughest kid at the school, although I don’t recall that there was ever any real fighting or much trouble at all. However, I did have a run-in with Leroy that I still remember.

I was one of the smallest boys in my class, if not the smallest, all the way from first to eighth grade, and just about any other boy could have pushed me around at will. One day we were playing a game called foursquare, in which you bounced a big round ball around in a grid on the ground.

Leroy came up and basically told me he wanted to play and I would have to give up my place in the game. I think this was in the fifth grade. I refused, and Leroy gave me a push.

What got into me I don’t know, but I gave Leroy a push back. Somehow this surprised him so much – I guess nobody ever had pushed Leroy back before – that he just shrugged and walked away.

I had was a cub scout from age eight to age ten, and then became a boy scout. My father had been a boy scout, and was happy that I was one, too. He was the “Den Master” of my cub scout troop for a while. That was very funny. He would march us around the backyard like privates in the army. The troop I belonged to (troop 695) was sponsored by the St. John’s parish, and held its meetings in the church hall.

Pat Keely joined me in the troop at some point, and we would go to the weekly troop meetings together, usually dropped off and later picked up by my father. We had a troop leader named Mr. Welch. He must have been in his twenties or thirties. He was a bit creepy, and took what I now realize was perhaps an unhealthy interest in some of us.

He took Pat and me to the movies once, in his very cool red fifty-nine Chevy Impala coupe. The movie was called “Party Girls.” Pat and I were pretty excited about this. I have no idea what we might have told our parents we were going to see; I suppose the fact that we were with the scout leader was enough for them to know.

I don’t remember anything about the movie except that we were disappointed that there wasn’t anything forbidden in it. We were twelve or thirteen at the time and were very interested in seeing something we hadn’t seen before.

I went on a few hikes and camping trips with the troop. One was a twenty mile hike, over two days, in the San Gabriel Mountains. It was a lot of fun. We slept under the stars in our sleeping bags, lying awake telling stupid jokes, making crude noises and shining our flashlights around at the trees.

I had two girlfriends at St. John’s. This meant that we walked home from school together and occasionally held hands. A very sweet girl named Patricia, with blue eyes and medium blonde hair, asked me to be her boyfriend one day in sixth or seventh grade while I was hanging around the schoolyard at recess. It seemed like a nice idea to me. We would talk and visit and sit together at lunch for a while until it eventually faded away.

In the eighth grade, another nice girl whose name was JoAnne, became my girlfriend – I don’t remember how it happened, but I do recall that it was very pleasant. Again, we would walk home together and, once in a while, hold hands. That was it. I recall that our mothers thought it was very sweet.

That winter I sold Christmas cards door-to-door to make a little money, and JoAnne’s mother bought a couple of boxes from me. That romance faded away pretty quickly, too, although we remained friends until we went to high school, where I saw next to nothing of her or of Patricia Weitkempf, although we all went to the same school.

Many years later, at our twentieth high school reunion, JoAnne, Patricia and another girl who had been a friend at St. John’s named Mary, who was a lot of fun in elementary school (I remember her from first grade all the way to the eighth, with her pigtails and pretty features), came up to me and said that they all had hoped I would be there. I spent just a little while with them, but was glad to have seen them.

Then, twenty years after that, I saw JoAnne at our fortieth reunion. I was disappointed that she was not interested in more than a quick hello…I was hoping to have a little walk down memory lane with her. It was nice to find out that she was happy and having a very nice life with a lovely family, but I would like to have had a little chat.

One day when I was in the eighth grade I went to a birthday party at the home of one of my classmates, a boy named Edward. It was at the swimming pool in the back yard of his family’s house in what must have been a nicer part of Baldwin Park. Edward had a portable record player and a stack of new 45 RPM records. I was very impressed. It was from Edward that I learned about the record store in downtown Baldwin Park – Polly’s Platters.

From then on, Dennis and I would regularly ride our new bikes all the way up Ramona Blvd. to the downtown shopping district – about three miles from our street – to buy one or two records a month. The first two records I bought were “That’s All You Gotta Do” by Brenda Lee and “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” by Freddy Cannon.

I got a little case to keep the records in, and eventually amassed a pretty good collection. I still have that case and those records. This was the beginning of my record collecting, which lasted until very recently. Only with the arrival of the digital age, which made almost every song I could want instantly obtainable, have I stopped hunting for old 45s in used record bins and antique shops.

I graduated from St. John’s in the summer of nineteen sixty. The school had an organization for recent graduates called the Chiro club (Chiro is a Greek term that refers to Jesus). It was, I guess, supposed to keep us off the streets and out of trouble. I went to one of their dances shortly after graduating. I danced with a sweet, pretty girl from our class (whose name I can’t remember), to Little Anthony and the Imperials’ song “Tears on My Pillow.”

I still remember feeling, for the first time in my young life, how wonderful it was to be that close to a girl, to hold her in my arms and feel her next to me, moving with the music. It only lasted as long as the song, but the memory is still there..

After eighth grade, Pat Keely and I went to Bishop Amat High School, which was (and still is) run by the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. It is in La Puente, the town where my father had his chiropractor’s office. La Puente was a mostly working-class town next to Baldwin Park. The school was one of the first Catholic High Schools in the area, and the one that our parish, along with several others, fed students into when they graduated from the eighth grade.

There was never a question about whether I would be going there. The truth was that we were all a little scared of public school kids. They got into fights and were generally out to get Catholic School kids.

There was a tradition in our neighborhood in which, when a public school kid graduated from the elementary grades into junior high (now they call it middle school), the kids already in junior high would grab the new grad and smear his face with red lipstick. I remember seeing public school kids walking home after this happened to them.

I suppose it wasn’t so awful, but I recall being very afraid of this happening to me. I think we were spared because the public school kids didn’t know us and so they weren’t aware of just when we transitioned from the elementary to the junior high level of our school (it went straight from first to eighth grade, but seventh and eighth were the equivalent of junior high).

On the first day of school at Bishop Amat, the kids from St. John’s were milling around the schoolyard, waiting for things to get started. We were all supposed to gather in an open area behind the classrooms. At some point early on, Pat came up to me and said, come with me; I met these two really cool guys. Let’s go hang out with them.

The two really cool guys were Mike Gatey and Steve Linowski. Very soon the four of us were spending most of our out-of-class time together. However, at some point during that year, Pat was discovered to have a bottle of gin in his locker and was expelled. That was pretty much the end of it as far as our friendship was concerned. He was just suddenly gone. I don’t know where he went – probably to Baldwin Park High School. I saw almost nothing of him after that, as I was caught up in school work and school-related activities almost all the time.

Years later, when I was in college and working at a Stop ‘n’ Go convenience store on Ramona Blvd., Pat walked in with a couple of scary looking guys. We recognized each other and exchanged about a minute’s worth of pleasantries. Pat said he had been in jail for some small theft. He asked me if I could give them some beer. I couldn’t, and they left. That’s the last time I saw him.

When I was thirteen or fourteen and had become interested in cars, mostly from reading Hot Rod and Car Craft at the Keely's, I persuaded my dad to buy Jim Miskella's 1943 Chevy sedan for me. The idea was that I would work on the engine and learn all about maintaining it, and would have it to drive in a couple of years when I turned 16 and could get me driver's license.

We parked it on Mangum Street at the side of our house. Dennis and I liked to sit in it and pretend that we were driving around town. After a few months my dad figured that we were never going to get involved with that car and sold it to someone. I liked having it and was sad to see it go.

I would usually stay at Bishop Amat after school, throwing a baseball around with Steve or just hanging around with other kids. By this time my sister Jayne had been married for five or six years and lived with her husband and kids a few blocks from the school, so I would often walk to her house and stay there until my parents could pick me up on their way home from work. It was a good arrangement. I always liked playing with her kids and they liked having me around. We had a lot of fun.

Steve lived fairly close to Jayne, and he would sometimes come to her house with me. Steve and I became best friends, and spent almost all of our time together outside of school. Mike Gatey left Amat after freshman year, and I don’t remember seeing him after that. (However, he did have a cute younger sister who stayed at Amat and caught the attention of many of us).

I remember going up to Mike’s house in Turnbull Canyon, in the Puente hills south of the school, a couple of times. It was a big Spanish-style house with a central courtyard. His father was an executive with a paper products company. Mike was the first kid I knew who had an electric guitar. I was knocked out by it.

It was a big white one. We fiddled around on it and tried to play some simple chords, but didn’t get very far before he left the school. I have no idea what happened to him. Many years later a coincidence brought me back to that house. I’ll tell you about that when it comes around in this story.

All in all, I loved going to Bishop Amat. During the first couple of years I would sometimes get a ride to school from my dad, whose office was not far from the school, but school started a lot earlier than he opened his office, so much of the time it was up to me to get to school on my own. It was about two and a half miles from our house.

I would trek up to Francisquito and start walking in the direction of the school – east – and when a car came by I would stick my thumb out and hope to get a ride. I often did. Many times I would manage to catch a ride with a fellow Amat student named Larry Stein, another St. John’s alumnus, who lived along the way and was driven to school by his mother.

But sometimes I ended up walking all the way, and when this happened I would occasionally be late to school and would have to go to the dean’s office for a note admitting me to class. The dean was Father Cyril, a very large, very strict man who didn’t let me off easy.

I recall one time getting to school late and reporting to the dean, who gave me a hard time and said, “this isn’t a country club, you know,” which made me think, well, at least I belong to a country club and I know what you’re talking about! (I’ll explain this later.)

Bishop Amat was an academically strong school, and the classes were tough. I was in the college track classes, which meant that as a freshman I took Latin and Algebra and a serious science class. This put me in with all the really smart, dedicated students.

I hung out with Steve almost all of the time when we weren’t in class. He was very popular with the cool kids, and being his friend made it possible for me at least to stand on the fringes of the group and try to get into their better graces. I didn’t do too well with this, but at least I was there and they knew who I was.

This group, made up largely of kids from St. Louis of France parish, where Steve had gone to grade school, included all the most popular boys and girls in the freshman class, and stayed that way all through the four years we were at Amat. There were some from schools in West Covina who were also in this group, and just a few from St. John's. I was glad to be able to get close. The girls were very pretty, and most of the cheerleaders and flag twirlers came from this bunch.

Now and then the school would have a dance. In the first year or two, before the school’s gym was built, the dances would be held at the VFW hall in West Covina. Steve and I would usually get a ride from my dad. We would stand at the edge of the floor and watch the dancers and listen to the records.

I was desperate to dance with certain girls in the school, but I had no nerve, and didn’t know much about dancing. I often spent the entire evening trying to get the courage to ask this or that one to dance; now and then I actually did. Steve, on the other hand, was often asked to dance by the girls – often the girls I had been dreaming of asking myself.

Our classes were segregated by sex – boys on one side of the campus, girls on the other. The boys were taught by priests of the order of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, the girls by the Sisters of St. Benedict. We would meet in the central area of the campus at lunch and recess and stand around talking about lots of stuff that seemed to matter at the time. I mostly listened; I was shy.

The school didn’t have a cafeteria. At lunch time every day, a catering truck would pull into the center of the campus and set up for business. Students would buy burritos and sandwiches and chips and snacks and soft drinks and eat it all while sitting on benches around the lunch area.

I usually brought my lunch from home, as my parents felt that the food sold from the truck would not be healthy. My mom made tuna sandwiches a lot of the time. There would always be an orange or an apple and some carrot and celery sticks in my lunch bag.

Steve and I spent a lot of time at the school when classes were over for the day, visiting with other kids and playing catch. We had become fans of the new Los Angeles Angels baseball team, with its brash young stars Bo Belinsky and Dean Chance, and this made me more interested in baseball in general.

Steve was a good infielder and could throw the ball really well. I wasn’t so good but I tried and had some fun. We never played in actual games, but we liked to hit grounders to each other and then throw the ball back to “the plate.”

Steve and I had another friend, Richard Lawrence, who lived a few blocks from the school. Richard was stocky and was on the bowling team at the school. We liked him. He got a brand new Chevy Corvair Monza for his sixteenth birthday, which especially endeared him to us.

One spring weekend the three of us drove out to Palm Springs in Richard’s new car to watch the Angels in spring training. I got Bo Belinsky’s autograph. Wow.

Bishop Amat always had a topnotch football team and was very competitive with the other high schools it the area. Going to the games on Friday night was lots of fun.

It was romantic and exciting to be out at night, walking around with your pals, chatting with the girls, and getting a big thrill when the Bishop Amat Lancers would win, which was much of the time.

Steve and I were friends with many of the varsity players. I especially liked going to Bob’s Big Boy after the games for hamburgers and cokes and sitting in a big booth with a bunch of other kids. When I recall those times I think of one member of the football team who was a very nice fellow and would joke around with me at Bob’s, David Lallich. David’s name is on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

My father’s chiropractor’s office, as I said, was not far from Bishop Amat. I went to the office pretty often during my school years. I liked seeing him there. It was a small, narrow office in a little row of shops, between a grocery store and an optometrist’s office.

There was a reception area in the front, where my mother had her desk, leading to a hallway with two treatment rooms on each side, and an office and a couple of other rooms in the back. I recall brown tile on the floor and white walls.

My father was a well-liked member of the community there. He had a regular clientele who all liked him a lot. In those days, chiropractic was new and constantly assaulted by the medical establishment, which, I understood, was intent on driving chiropractors out of business so that it could maintain its hold on the health industry. My dad struggled to build his business, and I don’t think he ever made much money.

Regardless he was always cheerful and optimistic. He loved to talk about lots of things, and a group of his regular patients seemed to come to him as much for the conversation as for the treatment. He had two or three who were there very often, and he had a regular lunch with some of them at a local steak place.

Somehow, when I was in the third of fourth grade, despite the fact that they had very little money, and we lived very frugally – we never, ever ate at a restaurant; we bought new clothes or shoes only when we had too, and always at the lowest possible prices; our home was furnished very sparsely; we had one car that we kept for a very long time – somehow, Dot and Ed joined a country club.

It was brand new, and I think that one of my dad’s better-off patients must have helped him get in on the ground floor at some nominal cost. It was the California Country Club in Whittier, several miles from our house. So, from my age eight or so on, we spent a lot of our time, especially in the summer, at the pool at the club.

My father’s office hours were from ten to seven on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and ten till noon on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays – a schedule that left a lot of time for my mother and father to play golf. They loved this part of their life. They were very popular with the other members, well liked for their charm and grace. The folks never became good golfers, but they participated in the events and tournaments and had a good time.

Not long after we joined the club, Jayne got married, and my father was, I’m sure, very proud to host his daughter’s wedding reception at his club. Jackie was the flower girl and I was the ring bearer. The ceremony was at St. John’s, and the reception followed at the club. I don’t remember much of it, but we have pictures that show a very happy Dot and Ed.

I loved to hang out at the club pool. (This was where I had discovered KFWB.) It was large, kind of L-shaped, but with rounded corners. It had a diving board at the deep end. In the summer we would spend long days at the pool, swimming and hanging around with the other kids.

There were Thursday night barbecues on summer evenings, which were about the only time we ever dined there (the barbecue was a good deal). The parents would sit and talk in the clubhouse while the kids stayed out after dinner by the pool.

There was a little stone-lined creek at one side of the pool area, with tropical plants and a short little walkway, with colored lights strung across trellises and an arbor. At night, for a young boy, it was all very special.

We would sometimes bring my friend Dennis to the pool to swim with us. Dennis and I would each lift one of my twin brothers on our shoulders and have splash fights in the pool. This would have been when I was around nine or ten and the twins were four or five. Later, we would do the same thing with Jayne’s kids (she had six).

There was a men’s and a lady’s locker room across the pool area from the main clubhouse. In the men’s locker room there was a man who shined shoes and generally kept things tidy. His name was Don, and he was perhaps the only black person I had ever known up to that time.

Unlike most of the other members, my dad didn’t have a locker or ever have his shoes shined (guess why), but we did take showers and use the towels in the locker room, and got to know Don a little bit.

The club had junior golf clinics, teaching the rudiments of the game. I signed up for the clinic in the summer when I was old enough (probably at eleven or twelve), and tried to play the game. I stayed at it for a few years, and was actually on the club’s junior team and played against the juniors at other clubs, but I was never better than pretty terrible.

Nevertheless, it was fun to go to the other clubs, where we got to swim in their pools and usually got lunch. It was a nice thing to be able to do. I kept at it through high school, and actually got a varsity letter as a member of the Bishop Amat golf team.

When I was in the fifth or sixth grade, the pastor of St. John the Baptist Parish announced that the archdiocese had approved a plan for a new church to be built, replacing the small, very modest original church. The new building would be much grander, with a tall steeple, lots of marble, stained glass windows and all the other elements that a Catholic church should have.

Such a building would be expensive, and St. John’s was a relatively poor parish. A building drive was launched, and a few years later the building went up. When it was finally finished there was a great celebration. It was in this church that I did most of my service as an altar boy.

My class at the parish school, that of nineteen sixty, raised a little money for the church by selling candy and cookies and subscriptions to the Tidings, the Archdiocesan weekly newspaper, and we were thrilled to hear that a tablet with all of our names on it was laid into the altar stone.

I spent enough time in that church that I can remember it well, even now, more than forty years since I last attended a service there. The pews were of blonde wood, and there was a choir loft of the same wood at the back. I recall being in the school choir and singing songs in Gregorian chant in that choir loft. And I served at many masses, weddings, funerals and other ceremonies there. A catholic school student of the nineteen fifties spent lots of time in church.

I can visualize the fourteen Stations of the Cross, seven each on opposing walls, paralleling the central aisle up to the altar, and the stained glass windows above them. There was a statue of Jesus on one side of the altar and one of the Blessed Mother on the other. In a niche on one side there was a statue of St. Joseph. And of course there was a statue of St. John the Baptist.

I can remember being at the church with my mother when her sister back in Medford was sick, and our mom would go to the church to pray for her sister’s recovery. She went to Wednesday night novenas – special services honoring the Blessed Mother – and prayed for her sister for nine consecutive weeks.
She also had the four of us kneel around the bed with her in her and my dad’s room and say the rosary for aunt Flo. Miraculously or not, Aunt Flo got better.

Sometime during those years – middle to late fifties – our mother went through some trying times emotionally. I’m sure that raising four kids, working in my father’s office, trying to keep the family’s finances out of the red, far from her mother and sister, was a strain.

We were not the best behaved kids around. Mike and I, especially, fought a lot. Sometimes our parents would come home to find that we had been fighting, messed up the house, didn’t do what we had been told to do, and generally made her life difficult.

I don’t remember much about it, only that there was a time when I was around ten or eleven or twelve when mother was not in great shape emotionally. She would sometimes have migraine headaches and would seem depressed. This lasted, to the best of my very foggy memory, until around the time that Mike went to spend some time with Aunt Flo in Medford.

This was quite a development. Aunt Flo had come to visit us. She probably spent a few weeks with us. I must have been around eleven or twelve, or maybe a little older. It was time for her to go home, and we all went to the airport to see her off.

I loved going to the airport. I wanted to fly on a plane more than just about anything. Every time we took someone to the airport I was filled with excitement and an incredible desire to get on a plane and get up in the air. I often dreamed that I could fly.

In the late fifties, what is now LAX was a much more modest airport. I remember that we would stand on a deck in the open air and watch the planes arrive and depart. In earlier years we had seen my mother’s mother arrive and depart on TWA DC-7 aircraft, with their triple tails. The appeal of air travel called to me very strongly.

So here we were now, at the airport seeing Aunt Flo off. Suddenly, my little brother Michael comes out from behind my parents with, what, a suitcase in his hand, and starts to walk up to the gate and out to the plane. I was shocked, stunned, and confused. What’s going on here? Why is this happening? Mike and aunt Flo boarded the plane and flew off to Massachusetts.

It turned out that Mike had been having some problems, and my mother was having some trouble dealing with him. Aunt Flo had offered to take him home with her for a while, and mom had said okay. Mike ended up spending an entire school year in Medford. I was incredibly envious. I was the one who wanted to fly, to travel, to see new places. Yet, Mike was going back east, not me.

The good news was that mom seemed to get over her emotional problems, at least to some degree. There were still issues to deal with, including problems Jayne was having, that I was only dimly aware of at the time.

I would guess that financial concerns were also weighing on Dot and Ed; I don’t think the chiropractic office ever generated enough income for them to be able to relax. Yet, they played golf at the club, entertained the Miskellas and Halls and Lowers pretty regularly, and enjoyed much in their lives.

Mother had an aunt of her own, Aunt Sal, her mother’s sister. Her name was actually Mabel Dunnett, but we always knew her as Aunt Sal. Sal was a pretty unusual, kind of nutty woman. She would come out to visit us every couple of years and stay for a few weeks each time. I guess she was twenty or so years older than my mother.

She had been a widow for as long as I knew that she existed. She was very, very funny. She liked to have a little nip now and then. She often wore a shapeless white hat, like a sailor’s hat with the brim turned down. She was slim and wiry, and had a little, round face and wispy grey-brown hair. She was fun to have around, and made us laugh a lot. She would say things like “meet me at the roundhouse, boys – they’ll never corner us there!”

She was a diehard old Boston Irish Democrat. Some years later I visited her in her apartment in Cambridge, a small, sweet little place where she lived by herself; she had created a shrine to the late President Kennedy, whom she referred to as “my president.” She was a sweetheart, a very bright spot in our family saga. We kids always liked it when she was there.

She had a son, a man in at least his fifties when we heard her talk about him; we thought it was funny that she referred to him as "my boy Bill." (We weren't familiar with the song from "Carousel.") I don't recall just when she passed away, but we were all saddened and hated to see her go.

When Mike came back from his stay in Medford, my parents decided to send Jackie to stay with Aunt Flo. She stayed there for a school year, too, her eighth grade year – the fall of 1962 through the spring of 1963, I think. She got to know many of our relatives and people our parents had known before we were born. She had a nice relationship with our father’s mother, whom she would visit sometimes after school.

She made friends with the friends of our cousin Danny Sullivan, who lived, as did his mother, in Aunt Flo’s house with her and Flo’s husband, uncle George. Danny wasn’t really our cousin, but he and his mother always lived with Flo and George. I don’t know what the actual relationship was. My mother and his were pregnant with us at the same time; his birthday is a month before mine.

And then, after Jackie came back, Alan went east. Someone our parents knew was driving across the country, and somehow Alan was inserted into their trip. There was a stop somewhere in Kentucky, and then on to Massachusetts. I don’t think Al had as good a time as Mike or Jackie. I believe he came home after a fairly short while there.

At some point when I was around fifteen, my father and his patient Linder Nielsen decided to build a house and sell it in the hopes of making a profit. There was a home site available near the golf club, and a few dozen very nice houses had been built nearby. My dad and Linder must have thought that it was a safe bet to build one there.

My dad’s brother-in-law, my uncle Dave – Aunt Ruth’s husband - was a successful builder on the west side of L.A.; he had built a couple of well-known buildings in Hollywood, and was doing very well. My father asked Dave to refer an architect for their project. The best thing about it for me was that Dad would have to go to see the architect about once a week for a couple of months, and he would bring me with him.

He would pick me up at around twelve-thirty at the school (I must have had some kind of okay from the dean to leave with him) and we would first go to Canter’s delicatessen on Fairfax Avenue in Hollywood for lunch. He would always have a chopped chicken-liver plate, and I would have a corned-beef sandwich on rye bread. I would also get to have a chocolate shake for dessert. It was a wonderful thing to do. We would sit in the red leatherette booths and have a great time. Then we would go to meet his architect in an office building in Hollywood.

After that we would go see my dad’s sister, my Aunt Ruth, and my cousin Julie, who was close to my age. They lived in a very nice apartment on Laurel Avenue, just south of Sunset Blvd. Julie said that Ricky Nelson lived just across the street.

Except for these excursions with my dad, I virtually never left the area between our house in Baldwin Park and Bishop Amat to the East or El Monte to the west. Los Angeles and Hollywood were distant, remote places to me. To visit Julie in their apartment in Hollywood was a treat. Dad would visit with his sister and I would talk to Julie. These visits were part of what made me feel that I would live in Hollywood and be somehow involved in entertainment and media when I grew up.

The house dad and Linder Nielsen built turned out well. I see it now and then when I’m in the area and remember those trips to town with my dad, and smile.
In nineteen sixty-two, when I was fifteen, Dot and Ed learned that some new homes would soon be built adjacent to the California Country Club, along the ninth fairway of the golf course, and they decided that we would buy one. (I can’t remember whether this was before or after Dad and Linder built their “spec” house.)

We were going to move from Baldwin Park, which over the years had become a little rough around the edges, to Whittier, which at the time was relatively swanky, at least in its nicer sections. We were all delighted. Dennis’s family had moved away early that year, and there was no one I would miss very much from the old neighborhood.

I remember going with the folks to look at some houses in another part of Whittier that were built by the same company that would be building ours, and how excited mom was to see the nice kitchens and bathrooms and generally much nicer everything than we had in Baldwin Park. They were both fifty years old at the time, and it must have been a great thrill for them.

The house they chose was in absolutely the best possible location. It backed onto the ninth fairway of the golf course, near the green. There was a gate in the back fence that allowed us to walk to the clubhouse and the pool. It was great.

Our new house was a one-story ranch-style home. It had decorative touches that gave it a Chinese effect, including eaves that curved up at the corners and a few other sort of generic Asian touches. It was cute. It had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, a nice living room and dining room, and an up-to-date kitchen with built-in appliances. What a change from the Baldwin Park house. We really did feel as if we had moved to Beverly Hills.

One day while the house was still being built, my mother took me to look at it. She showed me the three bedrooms and said that one of them would be mine. It would be the first time in my life that I would have a room of my own. But it turned out that she hadn’t thought things all the way through, because after all there was Jackie, who would have to have her own room, and the twins, and then the folks themselves.

The upshot was that I didn’t get a room at all. There was a den near the kitchen, at the other end of the house from the bedrooms. They put a sofa with a fold-away bed in the den, along with a little desk and small chest of drawers. It would be a den during the day and my room at night. What a letdown! But I got used to it and ended up liking it.

Soon after we moved in, Ed decided to convert the garage, which was attached to the house and could be accessed via a door in the den – “my room.” He covered the walls with wood-like panels and put tile on the floor. He sealed the garage door shut, and, voila, we had a huge family room.

A big brown leather arm chair and a couple of round ones that spun around on platforms (from the big living room in Baldwin Park) faced a television across the room. Dad finished it off with a bookcase that opened into a hidden little storage room – a nice touch, I thought.

There was also our old “hi-fi” – a blonde wood cabinet about four feet high and five feet wide that housed a turntable and an FM receiver – a Capeheart. I would listen to it late at night as I did homework at the little desk in “my room” or lie in bed drifting off to sleep.

That big room became the place where the folks would entertain their guests – the Miskellas, the Halls and the Lowers, among others. Elsa and Ed would come over and watch the Saturday night TV shows in that room; I can still remember Ed Lowers laughing at “Laugh-In” and the Jackie Gleason show there.

Three houses down the street lived a couple about the same age as my parents were at the time – their early fifties – also friends and club members, who painted. On one occasion when my mother went to visit her sister in Medford for a week or two, Dad asked these people (I think their name was Soderman) to paint a pretty Chinese scene on the wall in the living room over the sofa.

It was actually a stencil that needed to be painted and filled in, but it did require skill and a steady hand. They did it beautifully, in glossy gold paint, and it was a real keynote to the décor of the house. The room had a couple of other oriental touches, including a round coffee table in black with a gold-leaf top under glass. The painting finished the effect beautifully.

When Mom came home, Dad let her believe that he had painted the scene on the wall himself. I always thought that she believed this all her life, although I’m not sure that he didn’t tell her the real story at some point. It wouldn’t have been like him to continue the deception, except that it was such a good one that I could see him making an exception.

It was a great new neighborhood and I had a very good time during the four or five years I lived there. I made new friends, and for a while I spent as much time with kids from the new neighborhood as I did with friends from school. Steve and I continued to spend much of our time together, but not all of it.

Many of the kids in our new neighborhood belonged to the country club, and those who didn’t managed to get into many of the club functions anyway. Summers were especially great. This was also the time when I would go to the beach with school friends and would have a lot of fun. These were very good years.

Our new house was at 1271 South Belgreen Drive, Whittier. Belgreen was a quiet street that ran parallel to the ninth fairway of the golf course. Just south of our house it curved around to the east and became Fairplain Drive. I became good friends with a fellow named Dennis Manley, who lived on Fairplain, just down the street from us.

There were kids about my age all up and down Belgreen and Fairplain, and we quickly found each other. Since the houses were all brand new, the families all moved in at similar times, so everyone was starting a new life of sorts and we were all open to making new friends.

In addition to Dennis Manley there was Jim Zito, a tall, kind of tough guy, and Danny Ginther, who seemed to hang around together. They both lived on Fairplain. Across the street from us lived the Garbutt family, with two sons close to my age. Next door to us, to the west, were the Canzoneri family, with two sons – Tony, my age, and Ricky, about the age of Mike and Alan.

Four or five houses up Bellgreen Drive lived Kathy Watson, a very pretty, tall blonde girl who went to one of the Catholic High Schools near Whittier – an all girls’ school, I think. Next door to her was another girl whose name I forget – a kind of sour girl who seemed to need Kathy to be her friend and didn’t want her to spend much time with me and my friends, but she didn’t get her way too often. Across the street was another pretty girl, with short, dark hair, named Jackie Bedard. I liked her. She was nice, and easy to talk to.

From the time we moved to the new house, in the autumn of 1962, at the beginning of my junior year in high school, through all of 1963 and into early 1964, all of the kids named above, and including Jackie, who had just returned from her year in Medford, had a nice time together, doing things at the country club, getting our first licenses and driving cars, doing the normal things that high school kids did in those days.

My sophomore year at Bishop Amat was an especially good time. I was doing well in school, and there was a lot of fun to be had. Surfing and surf music had just come along, and many of the kids at Amat headed for the beach and took on the surf culture to whatever extent they were able.

For me, with only limited ability to get anywhere, and not able to get a board, it was more about the music and the clothes than anything else (white Levis and Pendleton shirts). From my present perspective I would have to say that I was more of a ho-dad – someone who wants to be a surfer and adopts the style but doesn’t do much surfing – than a real member of the tribe.

I always thought I would get into the water and onto the waves when the time was right, but the chance never really happened. Later on, Dennis Hugie and I borrowed a board from a friend of his once or twice and drove down to Bolsa Chica beach, and we each took the board out a couple of times, but that was about it.

But there were the Beach Boys, and the Challengers, and Jan and Dean, and especially Dick Dale, who all made great surf music records that were wonderful to hear in the car or on the little transistor radio I still had.

There were also great songs by Dion, Bobbi Sox and the Blue Jeans, Martha and the Vandellas, the Capris, Roy Orbison and lots of others. I think that Peter, Paul and Mary had their first hits that year, with Bob Dylan songs, and the Crystals had “Uptown” and “He’s a Rebel.”

Steve and I did go to the beach with some of the other kids from school a few times; I especially remember us going to Newport, at sixteenth or seventeenth street, where there was a hamburger joint we all liked.

On one occasion in the spring of 1962 the sophomore class had a beach day at this spot at Newport, which I remember being a very fun day. I spent most of it hanging around with Steve, which was good because he was far more popular than I was. We rode waves, ate junk food and stayed late enough to have a fire on the beach after the sun went down.

I turned 16 in November of 1962, and got my drivers’ license that very day. My mother and Elsa Lowers drove me to the DMV for the test, which I took in Elsa’s car, because it was small (a Studebaker Lark) and had a manual transmission, which was needed for the test if you wanted to be able to drive a stick shift car.

I had taken drivers’ training that summer at Baldwin Park High School (Bishop Amat didn’t offer it). That was fun. The teacher would take three or four of us out in a stick-shift Ford Falcon and show us how to do it. I remember driving up to Crystal Lake in the San Gabriel Mountains on one of my first days behind the wheel. I loved it. I had wanted to drive, of course, from about age eight, and was really glad when I finally got to do it.

Just down Fairplain Drive from our house lived a family named Toller. Their daughter, Teri, was in Jackie’s class at Whittier High School. I thought she was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. Everyone in the neighborhood liked her, and her house became the place where many of us would gather in the afternoon after school or on weekends. She was bubbly and fun and enthusiastic about everything she did.

After more than a year of hanging around with all the other kids at Teri’s house, she and I had become good friends. I liked her a lot. Why had I not been a little bolder, asked her to go out with me…anything to start a little romance? I can’t say now. Basically, I was terribly shy with girls and lacked any confidence that she would say yes. Maybe I was afraid to risk losing her as a friend. Maybe I was just afraid, period.

Teri had a boyfriend (along with lots of friends who were boys) – a guy from another, nearby neighborhood, with the name of Willard. He wasn’t around all that much, and Teri spent a lot of time with me and the other kids from our neighborhood. I was glad that he wasn’t around very much.

The year was 1964. Teri’s birthday was on February 6th. She would be sixteen. Her parents had a party for her, a very nice one. There were presents, cake and ice cream, balloons, decorations, games, all the kids - but no Willard. He was late. None of the kids except Teri cared, since he wasn’t one of our group and we didn’t know him much at all. Teri did care, though, and as the party went on she became obviously upset.

Towards the end of the party, when some of the kids had gone home, I saw Teri sitting at a table in the back yard by herself, apparently not happy. I strolled out and sat down next to her. We must have talked about Willard’s not being there.

It happened that he was supposed to take her to an event at her old high school the next night, and somehow the fact that he didn’t show up at her party made her think that he wasn’t going to take her to that event, either.

I remember looking into her face, seeing tears in those blue eyes. I told her that I thought Willard must be an idiot and that I would like to take her to the event at her old school. She smiled at me and said that that would be great. She’d be happy to go with me. I was thrilled!

The event at her old high school was a pretty big deal, a dance party hosted by a well-known local disc jockey, Bob Eubanks, with music by two recording acts – the Pastel Six, who were currently on the radio with a song called “Cinnamon Cinder,” and Dick and DeeDee, a duo who had had two or three hits. I was even more excited. I had never been to such a show, had never seen a live performance by real stars.

It turned out to be a perfect evening. I loved the show, I loved being there with Teri. By the time the show was over we were holding hands, laughing and having loads of fun.

In the weeks that followed we spent just about every minute we could together. We went bowling, we went to movies, we sat in her living room and held hands. We went on double dates with Jackie and boys that she dated. I had dinner at her house and discussed world affairs with her father. We first heard Beatles songs together.

There are a handful of songs that remind me of her whenever I hear them even now. I had given the soundtrack to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” to her for her birthday, and she liked it a lot. I can’t hear any of those songs without being brought back to the living room of her house on Fairplain Drive.

It all lasted for about eight weeks and then it was over.

My high school prom was coming up in April, and I was naturally excited that Teri would be going to it with me. Her mom made the most incredible dress – all purple satin and gauze, with dozens, maybe hundreds of little pearls sewn into little folds. It was beautiful.

We went to the prom. I borrowed my sister Jayne’s nice blue Ford station wagon. I bought an orchid at the flower shop down the road from our house. I went to Teri’s house in my rented tux. Teri was stunning in her purple dress, glittering with pearls. When I picked her up she said she felt a little queasy but thought she would be okay.

We went to dinner at a restaurant in Beverly Hills, the Captain’s Table, which specialized in Lobster. I had about twenty dollars in my pocket. Teri ordered Lobster – why wouldn’t she? I must have found something cheap enough for myself, because we got out of the restaurant feeling pretty good and went to the big event.

The prom was at the Ambassador Hotel, in the Embassy Room. I remember walking in, signing the book and going to have our picture taken. We found a table and sat down. The band was playing. We started to dance. Teri said she didn’t feel very good. We sat down for a moment. She still didn’t feel very good. She needed to go home. We had been there, at most, for ten minutes.

We got the car from the valet. Teri started to get into the front passenger’s seat but then said that she wanted to lie down in the back seat while I drove home. Somewhere she found a paper bag. I can still hear the sound of her throwing up in the back of Jayne’s station wagon as I drove her home after ten minutes at my one and only high school prom.

It couldn’t have been later than nine o’clock when we got home. I helped her to her door, she went in and I went home. I have the prom photo. Teri looks wonderful – you’d never guess that in a few minutes she’d be coughing up lobster chunks.

After that night, my romance with Teri wound down pretty quickly. It wasn’t my idea – she, as they say, dumped me - and I was heartbroken for a long time afterwards. At some point I got over it, but I have always felt that the time we were together was one of the best times of my life. I’m grateful to Teri (as Ray Davies would say, “Thank you for the Days…those precious days you gave me”) and I will always be fond of her.

In my senior year at Bishop Amat, the school organized a debating team, which I joined. We would enter competitions with other schools in the area. One of the highlights was the Model United Nations, in which each school represented the delegation from a member country of that body.

We were Chad, which no one on the team had ever heard of. This was in the height of the cold war, the Cuban missile crisis, et al. Our issue was, should China be admitted to the U.N. We did research and represented the Chadian point of view.

The event was at what was then called L.A. State College, now Cal State University at Los Angeles. I hadn’t been on a college campus before that, and it was an exciting day. It was on this campus that I saw a sign advertising an upcoming appearance by Joan Baez. I had never heard of her, but a couple of evidently hipper kids on the team had and were very excited about it. I don’t know if they managed to see her.

One of my team mates was a girl named France Cordova, who went on to great success, first as a physicist, at the University of Pennsylvania and later at NASA, and recently as the chancellor of the University of California at Riverside. She is mentioned in articles in the newspaper now and then.

One day in 1963, early in my senior year, there was a debate event at Bishop Amat. As it happened, it was the day that Victor Lowers was going to be married. I had to be at the debate and therefore couldn’t go to the wedding with my family. I arranged for someone from the school to give me a ride to the Lowers’ house in Baldwin Park; I would then ride with one of the Lowers to the wedding.

This turned out to be November 22nd, 1963, the day that John Kennedy was shot. We heard about the assassination over the PA system at the school late in the morning. Classes were suspended and, of course, the debate event was cancelled. Somehow I ended up at the Lowers, but only late in the afternoon, when everyone had left. I never made it to Victor’s wedding. The house was all locked up; the best I could do was to sit in one of the cars that were parked in the driveway and wait. It gets dark early in November, and I recall that it was chilly.

The afternoon newspaper – the San Gabriel Valley Daily Tribune, my old employer – eventually arrived. The Kennedy assassination was all over the front page. I turned the page to see what was inside, and saw that Aldous Huxley had also died that day.

I liked Huxley, and had read him at the behest of my father, who was a fan of his “Point Counterpoint.” His passing got very little attention, overshadowed by the Kennedy murder. But I always remember that day for the passing of both of these men, and for the wedding I missed.

Earlier in 1964, Steve Linowski got hit by a car while riding his bicycle and was laid up with a broken leg. I would visit him at his parents' house near Bishop Amat, stopping by on the way to Jayne's house. I asked him if I could get him anything, and he said yes, he'd like to have that new record by the Beatles, who had just been on Ed Sullivan and were now taking over the music world. So I got him a copy of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," which was at the top of the charts and would be there for many weeks, the first of about a dozen Beatles records that would be number one that year.

That summer, after graduation, I got a job at a place called Thomas Industries, a lighting fixture company in the City of Commerce. I got the job with the help of a nice lady who lived a couple of blocks down Belgreen Drive from us, whose kids I sometimes baby sat. She was a very cool lady about thirty years old. She liked me and set me up for the job at Thomas, where she was a secretary. It was a horrible job in the warehouse, unloading trucks, and was very hard.

I remember coming home the first day and collapsing on the floor in the entryway to our house. I worked there the whole summer. There was another young guy who worked with me; we would sit in the car of the lady who got me the job (it was a white 1960 Thunderbird) while having our lunch and listening to KRLA on the radio. I remember hearing the Supremes for the first time during one of those lunch times – the song was "Baby Love." I didn't like it.

This was the summer when Steve and I and a few other kids from Bishop Amat would drive to Hollywood in someone's car – not mine – and cruise Sunset Blvd. and absorb the atmosphere of all the other teens out looking for some action. We never found any action, but we did go a few times to a very cool club called Pandora's Box, which was situated on a traffic island, a triangle at the intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights.

It was a kind of beatnik coffee house with little round tables and a small stage. It probably started out with jazz artists and folk singers, but now it was getting a rock and roll vibe. I remember that we saw the Kingsmen, who had the iconic hit "Louis Louis," at Pandora's. The club later became a rallying point for the street hippies and anti-war demonstrators, and was demolished by the police during the so-called "riots" on Sunset Strip in 1966.

In the fall I started school at Mt. San Antonio Junior College - Mt. Sac. I had been accepted at two universities in the San Francisco Bay area, UC Berkeley, and St. Mary's in Moraga, but there were major obstacles that kept me from attending either of these: St. Mary's was expensive, and Berkeley was aflame with student revolution, which led my father to nix that choice. The year before, a nice kid from down the block from us had gone up to Berkeley and come back, in his father's view, a crazed radical hippie, which my father did not want to happen with me. I was dismayed but had little choice in the matter.

Freshman year at Mt. Sac was tough, although I did have one good thing going for me – I had a great car. My dad had bought my mom a very sharp 1956 Thunderbird – how, I can’t imagine – and I had bought it from her, paying over time with money from the various jobs I had. I loved driving that car. It was the perfect vehicle to drive around in, listen to songs on the radio and enjoy life in Southern California.

By this time, KFWB had been supplanted by a new station, the aforementioned KRLA, which was really great and played all the best songs of the day, led by the English bands – Beatles, Stones, Kinks, et al – and Bob Dylan…all the ones I liked most. I would usually give a ride to a guy I had known from Bishop Amat, whose name was Manuel Valencia. He was a good guy, but he left the school at some point early on and I never saw him again.

I had a number of jobs while going to Mt. Sac. The first one was at a gas station near our house, on Valley Blvd. at the corner of Puente Ave. It was an independent station; I think it was called Chief or some other reference to Indians. It was hard work, but it was fun. I made minimum wage – a dollar and a quarter an hour – and worked about 30 hours a week.

It was a full-service station: when a car pulled in, I would step quickly up to the driver, take his order for gas, fill his tank, check his oil and coolant, wash his windshield and put air in his tires if needed. Quite different from gas stations these days. It was fun to spend time with the other guys who worked there.

Virtually all of the money I made went for gas and oil for the T-bird. It burned about two quarts of oil a week – it needed a ring job but that was something I would never be able to afford.

I also worked at the May Company in Covina for a while. I had started doing this in my senior year in high school, working first over the Christmas holiday and then part time whenever they needed me. I worked in the men’s furnishings department – shirts, sox, ties, underwear, accessories.

Steve Linowski, who had left Bishop Amat after our junior year, also went to Mt. Sac for a while, but had a bad problem with his back and couldn’t stand to sit in the desk chairs in the classrooms, and left the school. He got a job as a stockman at the May Company, working in the women’s shoes department. He liked this because, he said, there were often pretty girls there and it was fun to watch them try on shoes. He had that job until he got drafted and went into the Army.

During the first year at Mt. Sac I was pretty much a loner. There were a couple of people in my classes that I might chat with or go to the student café with, but I didn’t spend much time with anyone. I liked to wander the campus, to spend time in the library, and to sit and read in various shady spots around the school. I started taking a schedule of general education classes, not having a strong feeling for anything to major in.

One of my classes that year was English 101, which was an introduction to college level English literature. The teacher was a nice Chinese woman named Coleen Tan. She was vivacious and enthusiastic, and it was in large part because of her that I decided to major in English.

I don’t remember much of it now, except that she lit a fire in me that made me want to read poetry and fiction and Shakespeare and to know more deeply what the great novels and plays and poems were about and how they achieved their places in our cultural firmament.

I developed a nice relationship with Mrs. Tan. I was still living at home in Whittier, and she lived in Whittier, too. Sometimes I would give her a ride home in my little T-Bird and we would talk about the material we were studying, which I enjoyed.

In my sophomore year I took a survey of literature course. In the class I met another student named Jim Sharp. Jim came up to me one day to say something about a comment I had made in the class. We talked for a little bit and eventually got to be good friends.

I spent much of my time that year with Jim and his girlfriend JoAnne. We became a trio and went lots of places together. Jim was really, really bright. He and I liked the same music – Rolling Stones and Beatles, and all the other English bands, and Bob Dylan. It was Jim who led me to pay closer attention to the Kinks.

We had classes together, and would discuss books and music and world events. The anti-war movement was gaining momentum then, and we would talk about it and discuss what was said in the papers and on the radio. I bought my first Bob Dylan album at the Mt. Sac student store after Jim and I had talked about his music and what it meant.

I have to say that before this, Steve Linowski had been listening to Bob Dylan – this was way before Dylan was on the radio – and had recommended him to me, but it was Jim who actually got me to listen to him. Steve had been drafted by this time and wasn’t around (poor boy, he was in France, in Fontainebleau, just outside of Paris). We wrote to each other now and then, but he was essentially out of the picture at this time.

Jim and I got along very well for a while. We liked to go to a Mexican restaurant near the school called Carmen’s, where they had great burritos. We would ride in my little T-bird and listen to KRLA and sing along with the Beatles and Stones and even the Monkees, who we of course ridiculed but at the same time liked some of their songs. We also liked songs by Johnny Rivers ("Mountain of Love"), The Byrds ("Mr. Tambourine Man") and the Hollies ("Look Through Any Window").

That year was great for me. I really enjoyed spending time with Jim and JoAnne. We were quite a trio for a while. Of course I would like for us to have been a foursome, but that opportunity did not come along.

Jim had problems; his family was somewhat dysfunctional; his relationship with JoAnne, who I thought was a lovely girl, was crazy; I thought he should have been much nicer to her. They competed in things and he would make fun of her ideas and comments about things. I was amazed that he could be unkind to a lovely girl who cared about him.

But he was a good friend and we had a lot of good times. He was tall and had shaggy blond hair and blue eyes and lots of teeth. My mother liked him. He looked kind of like Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits.

We got through the year. We had a teacher who was well known beyond the college for his writing and his wit. I think his name was Jim Moore. He taught creative writing. He would invite prominent writers to address the class.

One was A. L. Rowse, the famous Shakespeare scholar, who was pretty old at the time. He gave a great talk about the bard; it would be nice to say that I could remember what he said; suffice it to say that I remember how he looked: thin, with a big head of white hair. He was dapper, in a dark suit with a vest, and a bow tie. He made us think about his subject and want to study him more diligently.

The author who addressed Jim Moore’s class that I remember best was Ray Bradbury. I remember what he said: he said that a writer should expose himself to everything. He should see every play, read every novel and poem; study every painting and hear every symphony and opera.

His point was that we should absorb what the creators of these works are saying and presenting. We shouldn’t judge their work, but we should have our own sense of what is especially good or meaningful or valuable, and let the best of what we saw and heard seep into us and influence what we did.

He also said that artists don’t compete; his phrase was “where excellence begins, competition ends.” I took this to mean that a true artist creates his own work without caring about how it stands in relation to the work of others. Excellent works stand side by side in their quality. It is not a “zero sum game”; there is room for all works of true quality.

I was fortunate enough to walk with Ray Bradbury across the campus and chat briefly with him as he left the school. I don’t recall much of what we said; I had read “The Martian Chronicles” in anticipation of his addressing our class, and said something about how much I liked it, and he was pleased. He is still around, after all these years, and when I hear him on the radio or see him on TV I of course remember our moment together and think of how exciting it was.

At the end of our sophomore year, after our finals, we decided to have some fun. We went to Hollywood, to the Whiskey au go-go, which we had heard about but had never been near. Hollywood was a distant place for us at that time. I had spent those times there with my dad when I was much younger, and Steve and I had cruised along Sunset Strip with some other Bishop Amat students a few times, going to Pandora’s Box and drinking coffee drinks, but that was it.

We wanted to see the band Them, who had a bunch of hits – “Gloria,” “Baby Please Don’t Go,” “Mystic Eyes,” “Here Comes the Night.” We liked them a lot and were excited about seeing them. Their lead singer was Van Morrison, who of course went on to a great solo career and is still going strong.

We drove to Hollywood in the T-Bird and parked behind the Whiskey. We bought tickets and went in. It was a strange place – dark, smoky, smelly. There was an opening act on stage, a weird singer with long brown hair. What do you know, it was Jim Morrison and the band was the Doors. They did “Light My Fire” and “Break on Through” and lots of their hits-to-be. We thought they were pretty far out but really interesting. Later on we felt very cool for having seen them before they were famous.

Eventually we saw the headliners, Them, and they were great, too. This was the first time I saw a really big time rock bands play (not forgetting Dick and DeeDee or the Pastel Six), and I was pretty much hooked. What a thrill it was!

All during this sophomore year I had been working at a hamburger stand near the school. It was called C&E Burgers, for Chet and Elaine, the husband and wife who owned the stand. They were patients of my father. He had sent me to them, looking for a job, and they hired me at the beginning of the school year in September of nineteen sixty-five.

It was a good job. I usually worked from about six in the evening till midnight, and till one a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. It was a fast-paced, busy job. The stand was a drive-through. There were two driveways. Cars would pull up to the speakers and order their burgers and we would fill them in a very organized way.

I started as the drinks guy and worked my way through hot dogs, fries and cook’s helper. I wasn’t full time, so I could never get to be cook, the most important job on the line. The cook’s helper made sure that the cook had all the buns and tomatoes and lettuce and onions and beef patties he needed, because when things got busy he had to focus all of his attention on the grill.

We had a good esprit de corps at C&E. Chet, the husband, was a big man who was pretty nice. Elaine, his wife, was not as nice, but she was okay. In those days, before computers, we did everything by hand. You took orders on little pads of paper. Every order had to match what was on the order sheet.

At the end of each night, the cash register had to be reconciled with the tallied order sheets. The order takers had to do the math by hand, and if you made a mistake it came out of your pay. They calculated the number of burgers sold by how many buns were used. It was all figured out down to the penny.

After closing each night, we had to clean all the equipment – the grill and the fry cooker were the biggest jobs. There was a guy on KRLA name Dick Biondi, who billed himself as the world’s ugliest and skinniest disc jockey.

He was funny. He came on at midnight during the week, which was our closing time, and he would start his show by playing “Going Home,” the six-and-a-half-minute opus at the end of the Rolling Stones’ “Aftermath” album. I would drive my car around to the back of the stand, open the door and crank up the radio, and we would clean the grill and the fry cooker to the tune of “Going Home.” It was great.

Often afterwards I would go out for coffee and something good to eat with the chief burger chef, a nice guy named John Ziesser. He was a stocky fellow a year or so older than I was. The job at C&E was his principal occupation and he hoped to take over from Chet one day. We had a nice relationship. I was going through a brief period where I was listening to “adult” music – Jack Jones, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughn – and we would talk about these singers and the songs we liked.

John and I would go to a local coffee shop where we both had a crush on the late-night waitress. Her name was Linda and, of course, she was very pretty. She was probably just enough older than we were to think of us as goofy kids, but we went there mainly to see her. We would leave her enormous tips. I recall that John had a late-fifties Buick, which I liked a lot, having driven my dad’s fifty-seven for a couple of years.

At the end of my sophomore year, in early June of 1966, my dad’s mother passed away. I guess that she would have been around eighty years old. She had been sick for a while, and dad had gone to see her a little while before. I think that was one of only a couple of trips back to Massachusetts he made in the entire time after leaving in nineteen forty-seven. Maybe the only one.

He and his brothers went many years, often decades, without seeing each other. I don’t think I ever met his brother Albert during my dad’s life. His brother Norman visited us once or twice. Dad and Norman played a round of golf at the California Country Club. Norman drove the golf cart. Having had a drink or two, Norman rolled the cart off the path going down a hill and landed on my dad, breaking a couple of dad’s ribs.

Since he had been to see his mother recently, and not feeling that he could leave his business again so soon, dad decided that I should go to Medford to represent the family at his mother’s funeral. I was excited to be going; I would finally get to fly on a plane and to see Medford and Boston.

It was arranged that I would stay with my mother’s sister, our Aunt Flo.

I flew to Boston on TWA, our airline of choice, as that was where Dot McCormack (whom we always called Aunt Dot) worked, which allowed her and George and their son Bill to visit us in California fairly often. I was picked up at Boston’s Logan Airport by Helen Sullivan, Danny Sullivan’s mother.

Danny had been out to visit us the previous summer, and had a good time; I remember driving around with him, Steve Linowski and our friend Robert Estanislau and laughing at everything. "Satisfaction" was on the radio and we all loved it.

Danny was a good guy. He made me feel at home in Medford. He had a new car, a white convertible Ford Falcon, and a job at Stop and Shop, the local supermarket. He was attending junior college and, all in all, having a good life. He had a girlfriend, Mary Jane Belushi, who lived in Wakefield, an old New England town a few miles away.

I went to my grandmother’s funeral with Dot and George; I don’t recall that any of my mother’s family attended. It must have been a pretty normal funeral; all I remember is the graveside service. I’m sure that I went to a synagogue for the funeral itself, but I have no memory of this. I have a vague memory of Dot and George helping me find the graves of my mother's parents, who had been buried in the same cemetery as Grandma Rosen. After that I went back to Aunt Flo’s.

The household at Aunt Flo’s, at 36 Saunders Street, was a peculiar one. There was Aunt Flo, who couldn’t have been older than mid to late fifties, probably younger than I am now, but who looked and acted like a very old woman. At the time I probably thought she was in her seventies.

She seemed as old as Aunt Sal, who was in her seventies at that time, maybe older. Aunt Flo had some ailment – what, I can’t tell you – that needed lots of medicine, and that required her to sleep on the sofa in the living room, downstairs from the bedroom that was nominally hers and uncle George’s.

She and George, who looked like Fred Mertz and dressed like Archie Bunker, were always at odds. She would say terrible things to him, and he drank a lot (at least that was the impression I had). I can picture him in his black pants and white dress shirt, going out every morning to take the bus to his job at the Ford plant in some nearby town.

Helen and Danny Sullivan had, I believe, lived with Flo and George since Danny was born. I don’t know what the connection was between Helen and Aunt Flo. Helen did most of the work at the house – laundry every Wednesday night, at a Laundromat, as there was no washer or dryer at 36 Saunders Street; cooking supper every night – and you knew what it would be by the day of the week…beans and frankfurters and brown bread on Saturday, fish on Friday, something else each other day.

Helen cleaned the house and Danny did the yard work. Aunt Flo had a good thing going. Helen also had a full-time day job at a Sylvania factory not far away. She frequently won prizes for coming up with new, more efficient ways of doing things. She was a funny, spry little woman, kind of like Carla on "Cheers."

The house was small, built up against a huge rock. The rock formed the north wall of the basement and covered much of the back yard. There was a small living room and a dining room, and a kitchen, where I remember spending most of my time in the house. There was a staircase that ran from the side of the living room to the bedrooms on the second floor. I think there were three bedrooms. I was put up in the largest of the three, which I shared with Danny. Helen and George slept in the other two.

Aunt Flo had a coterie of attendants, elderly women who seemed to be at her house all day long. Flo smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, and always seemed to have one going. I thought she looked a little like Bette Davis, and she held her cigarettes just as Bette did in her movies. She would hold court on the living room sofa, with a coffee table covered with her needs – iced tea, ash trays and cigarettes, and bowls of grapes.

Whatever her ailment was, it required that she always had a good supply of green grapes to munch on. She was thin; I’m not sure that she ate much of anything besides these grapes. She professed to be a devout Catholic, but her ailment, whatever it was, kept her from attending church. I seem to remember rosaries on her coffee table along with the grapes and ashtrays.

Danny introduced me to his group of friends, all of whom I had heard about from Jackie and Mike. There was Bobby Spindler, who was a big, rough guy, blond and blue eyed, lots of fun but also kind of a bull in a china shop; Dotsy Callahan, who looked like Olive Oyl, and had just married her Joey, an older guy; they had just been blessed by the arrival of Joey Junior; Sheila Maye Morse and her boyfriend Charlie, and Margaret Harrington. Margaret had been pals with Jackie when she had visited a few years before.

They all lived in the same neighborhood, some of them had gone to school together for most of their lives, and spent a lot of time together. They were all very friendly with me, for which I was glad. I liked them all, even though they were very different from me in a lot of ways.

I met Margaret a few days after my grandmother’s funeral. She was out in the back yard of Aunt Flo’s house, leaning on the rock, smoking a cigarette. We were introduced and I said that Jackie had talked about her and told me that I would like her. I did. She was pretty and smart and funny. We hit it off immediately.

It happened that the gang was going to Cape Cod the next weekend, and I was invited to go along. Everyone was in a couple except for me and Margaret, which worked out great because we naturally got together over the Cape Cod weekend. The arrangements were all very proper; the girls all shared rooms with each other and so did the boys.

I remember spending time out on the porch of the rented house with Margaret and getting to know her a little, laughing and talking about California. The boys had a poker game that night, and each guy’s girl sat or stood near him, cheering him on when he won a hand. I recall feeling very pleased that Margaret sat by me and cheered when I won. At some point over that weekend we had a kiss, and by the time we returned to Medford we were very smitten with each other.

I was very happy to have a girl friend. I asked Aunt Flo if I could stay with her a little longer – I was originally planning to stay for only a week or two – so that I could spend time with Margaret. She said sure, and her son, Buddy, my cousin, got me a job at the warehouse where he was a foreman. I ended up spending the whole summer in Massachusetts, working for the Converse Shoe Company during the day and going into Boston almost every night with Margaret. It was a wonderful time for me.

Margaret worked at the State Street Bank in Boston, operating a machine that recorded checks that were deposited by customers each day. How archaic it all seems now! She had recently moved from Medford with her mother and sister to a house in Peabody, a town about 20 miles north of Boston. She took the train to and from work each day.

I would ride to work with Buddy; he would pick me up at a point on the way from his house, in Malden, the town next to Medford. I would walk to this spot, a mile or so from Aunt Flo’s, where he would pick me up at 7:15 each morning. It was in front of the Friendly’s Ice Cream parlor on Highland Avenue on the Medford-Malden line. Work started at 8:00. We would arrive a few minutes before 8:00 and get refreshments from the catering truck that was there each morning. My regular breakfast was a coke and a buttermilk donut.

I was part of Buddy’s crew of guys who would put boxes of shoes away when they came in from the factory, and load other boxes of shoes onto freight cars for shipment to stores around the country. I worked with two other guys. One, Frankie Weifers, I think his name was, was a short little Irish guy who worked out and had a great physique. The other guy, an Italian whose name I forget – Bobby something - was tall and strong. They were both very nice to me.

They talked in a way I had never heard before, with so much crude language that I was truly shocked. Everyone at the job talked that way, including the women, which shocked me all the more. Part of the daily routine was to insult, in a joking way, anyone you encountered as you did your job. I got good at it and made people laugh a lot. It consisted mostly of homophobic remarks about the other person.

I would ride back to Medford with Buddy each evening, shower and shave and put on some clean clothes, and take the bus and subway train into Boston to meet Margaret. I would meet her at the bank on State Street, in the heart of old historic Boston. We would get something to eat and then spend the rest of the night exploring the city.

We would go to the Pewter Pot Muffin House, or to Howard Johnson’s, or sub shops or other inexpensive places, and sit and talk and enjoy each other’s company. As this was the late sixties, and Boston, the atmosphere was full of the new ideas of the times, and the bookstores and record shops and cafes and the streets were exciting places to be.

Rock and roll was in the air, and the "underground" publications were full of music and revolution. I was very interested in all of that, and Margaret and I would wander all over town, up Boylston Street and down Newberry, across the Public Garden and the Common, and through the narrow streets around Faneuil Hall and Government Center, formerly known as Scully Square.

I loved this. We would take a late train back to Medford, and Margaret would often spend the night, sleeping on the second bed in Helen’s room. The next morning she would go back to the city and I would head off to meet Buddy for the ride to Converse.

As I think about this, I realize that it wasn’t every evening; it was probably two or three times a week (it was forty years ago). Sometimes Margaret would come to Medford after work and we would do things with Danny and the other kids, or, if Danny was working – he often had the night shift at Stop ‘n Shop – I would borrow his car and Margaret and I would drive up to Gloucester or Salem and walk around or sit on the beach. We were soon very wrapped up in each other.

I had finished my first two years of college at Mt. Sac and was set to transfer to San Diego State College in September. I returned to California at the end of the summer. Margaret and I promised to write to each other every day. I went to San Diego and moved into a dormitory a couple of blocks from the campus.

I shared a room in the dorm with a fellow who was planning on going into the army or the marines after graduating; we didn’t have much in common. But he did have a phone in the room – a rarity at that time – and I would occasionally use it to call Margaret in Massachusetts. I ran up a pretty big bill and wasn’t able to pay him back as quickly as he would have liked, which did not make for a good relationship between us.

After a short while I switched rooms and got a much better roommate – a young guy from Bakersfield who had an old VW bug and an acoustic guitar. We got along well. He taught me some guitar chords, and when he went home to Bakersfield for the weekend I would ride with him and he would drop me off in Whittier and pick me up on the way back down. This was before there was a San Diego Freeway. We would take the old highway 101 through all the little beach towns north of San Diego.

It was a good arrangement. His name was Steve Warren. I remember that he and I would go out late at night to buy fifteen-cent hot dogs at der Weinerschnitzel, which had just opened near our dorm. I also recall that he and I were dazzled by the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” which was on the radio that spring. It was fun to have someone to share music and other things with.

I liked it at San Diego State. I took mostly all English classes. At the time the campus was fairly compact, with buildings in a Spanish style that were quaint and charming. (Now it's many times larger and filled with modern buildings that obscure the ones I had classes in.)

I had almost no money at all (the story of my early life), but I got by. My meals were included in the room and board at the dorm, and my mother would occasionally send me a dollar or two in the mail. Now and then I would take the train back up to Whittier for a weekend with the folks.

Margaret and I did write to each other virtually every day. She came to spend a few days at our house in Whittier that Christmas. It was her first trip west and we had a great time.

The next semester started in January of 1967. Jim Sharp had enrolled at San Diego State, and he and I got an apartment to share, just a block from the college, on Carillon Drive. I remember my dad driving Jim and me down in his white Buick Skylark Wildcat – a very hot car that I really liked.

We had a nice, airy upstairs apartment with two bedrooms, a living room and kitchen. The lady who owned the apartment was the wife of an award-winning children's book writer, Scott O'Dell. We would send our rent checks to them in the little town of Julian, California – their address there was simply "Stoneapple Farm, Julian, CA." I remember thinking that this was very sweet.

We were comfortable in that little apartment. I had missed Jim while in Medford and was glad to re-connect with him. His girlfriend Jo-Anne also enrolled at the school. She lived with a couple of other girls a few blocks away, but spent much of her time at our place, including many nights.

Jo-Anne was pretty and nice and charming. She and Jim, as I have said, had a contentious relationship even though they were supposedly deeply in love and committed to each other. They would frequently get into uncomfortable situations – not fights, per se, but feelings would be hurt and words said that often led to tears.

They were very sensitive (you might say touchy) people. I can recall Scrabble games; if Jim did great, Jo-Anne would get upset and accuse him of bullying her with his erudition; if he didn't do so well she would claim that he was condescending to her. It was not a nice situation.

They were both arty and intellectual and easily offended. I was very fond of both of them and thought they were very smart and very cool. Jim had been a painter and knew a lot about artists and their work, and he also knew lots of writers and musicians that I had never heard of.

But those days in San Diego had their problems, especially when he and Jo-Anne would get into their bouts. I can recall her running out the door and down the stairs, tears flowing and her long blonde hair flying behind her.

Nevertheless, Jim and I had a lot of good times. He had a portable record player and some very good albums, and we would listen to the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Bob Dylan, Donovan, the Doors, and especially the Kinks; Jim was a big fan of theirs. Although I had next to no money, I did buy my first album by the Who during that time; it was "Happy Jack."

I had to choose between that album and something else that I also wanted very badly; I think it was Simon and Garfunkel's "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme," and I chose the Who. I loved that album. I also stood in line for a long time on the morning when "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" went on sale, at a record shop on the main avenue near the campus.

Jim and I would go shopping for groceries at the nearest supermarket, which was quite a long walk from our apartment. Our budget limited us to things like peanut butter, liverwurst, frozen fish, canned soup, and other very cheap things.

Contrary to the standard image of college students, we did not drink beer or any other alcoholic beverage. We weren't actually interested in drinking, but it was also the case that we couldn't afford it. We also didn't smoke pot or do other drugs, even though we read that everyone was doing so. We didn't know anyone who did, and the occasion never presented itself.

Mostly we walked around the neighborhood or stayed home and listened to music and studied. One night a week we would go to the TV room of my former dorm and watch "I Spy," which we liked a lot.

At one point in the semester I got tired of spending time with Jim and Jo-Anne and changed my schedule so that I saw fairly little of them. My classes were all early in the day, from around nine a.m. to mid-afternoon. I always stayed up pretty late, and gradually I got in the habit of staying up all night.

I would come home from classes in the early evening and sleep till ten or eleven; then I would get something to eat, study, do my written assignments, write my letter to Margaret, and sometimes go out at two in the morning and wander around the school and the neighborhood.

I liked to find a spot under a street lamp and read the material that had been assigned in my classes. It was always very peaceful; it never occurred to me to be concerned about my safety or anything else. I liked the night.

I would come back to the apartment in time to have some breakfast and get ready for class, and then head back to the campus. I might run into Jim and Jo-Anne now and then, but towards the end of the semester I wasn't seeing much of them.

This was the spring of 1967, and there was a lot going on in the world. The Vietnam War was raging, and young people were demonstrating against the war all over the country.

The "cultural revolution" of the sixties was in full swing, and the "counterculture," as it was called in the press, was a convergence of the anti-war movement and a lot of other things having to do with trying to find new ways to live and a re-examination of old values and points of view. It was a very exciting time. And the music on the radio was a big part of this.

The bands from San Francisco were at this time rising to the top of radio playlists and were getting as much attention as the English bands – Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish, Spirit, Moby Grape and others, and they sang songs of revolution and new ideas.

Jim and I would spend hours on the floor in our living room, playing records on his little hi-fi, and talking about the lyrics and the guitar lines and so on. We were sure that the revolution was a good thing, that the war would be stopped, and that a new way was coming to America and the world.

I went back to Medford for the summer of '67 (thereby missing the Monterey Pop Festival, which I had hopes of attending) to work at Converse and spend time with Margaret. We had written and talked on the phone and stayed very close. It's funny, now that I look back on it, how innocent we were.

As we had in the previous summer, we would go into town several times a week, and use Danny Sullivan's car at other times, going up to Gloucester to sit on the beach. When the summer ended I went back to California for my senior year in college.

I had decided to transfer from San Diego State to Los Angeles State College, mainly because I could live at home with the family and not have to pay any rent. I would drive the little T-bird to school each day. L.A. State was and is primarily a commuter college, where most of the students live and work nearby – not many people came from somewhere else to attend L.A. State.

To avoid having to pay for parking, I would find a spot up on a hill above the campus and then climb down a slope to get to my classes. I had a string of jobs during this semester, including one at the Stop 'n' Go chain of mini markets, which Jayne got for me via a friend of hers. (It was at one of these stores that I last saw Pat Keely.)

I met Joe Grieco at L.A. State on one of my first days in class. It was a class about the Romantic Poets. I was sitting in a seat near the front of the classroom, waiting for things to start, and Joe came in and took the empty seat next to me.

He wore a vest with multi-colored vertical stripes over a bright-colored shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, and a floppy hat. He had a full beard, except that he had shaved one vertical razor's width down his chin, so that the beard was effectively cut into two congruent halves. I think that he also wore some necklaces or beads.

"Hey, man…got a cigarette?" Those were the first words I heard him say. I gave him one, and we became fast friends. We spent lots of time together on the campus between classes, in the cafeteria, and after school. He was already married to Marsha by then. He had just turned twenty-one the previous June.

We would read the L.A. Free Press, filled with anti-war articles and music reviews, and Paul Krassner's the Realist, which became notorious for a center spread cartoon depicting all the famous Disney animated characters in explicit sexual positions.

During that year our school hosted performances by the Buffalo Springfield and Phil Ochs. Joe and I had a brief chat with Phil; I remember him asking us who the campus radicals were, and we told him that we didn't think there were any. He laughed and wished us well.

Later that year the Dow Chemical people came to recruit students and were driven out by angry protesters because Dow was the maker of Napalm. So I guess there were some radicals after all.

Sometime during that year I got a job working for one of our neighbors, Earl Daken, who owned a company that built swimming pools for schools and other institutions. Earl and his wife Erline lived a couple of houses down Belgreen Drive from us, and were favorite local friends of my parents. Earl was a big, jolly guy with a walrus mustache who sometimes played golf with my dad.

Earl and Erline would often come by our house in the late afternoon or early evening to sit with the folks out on the patio and watch the last golfers go by as the sun went down and the lights would come on in the valley below the golf course, looking out across the San Gabriel Valley towards Pasadena.

My mother especially enjoyed this view; she would now and then observe how wonderful it was that a girl from a poor Irish family in Medford could live in such a place. Visitors to the Whittier house were invited to enjoy their beverages out on the patio whenever the weather was nice, which was the case much of the time.

Earl offered me a job as general helper around his office-cum-shop in La Puente, not far from my dad's office, and at his work sites. I would do all kinds of chores at the shop, from sweeping the floor to drilling holes in PVC pipe that would be used in the filters for the swimming pools. And I drove a big truck to and from the sites, carrying supplies and materials to the job and then hauling trash from the job to the local dump in the Puente hills.

It was actually very grueling work, for which Earl paid me the prevailing minimum wage of $1.30 per hour. I recently came across an old pay stub from Earl and that was the amount shown. I made around 30 or 40 dollars a week after taxes, most of which went for gas in the T-bird.

I remember that we built the Olympic training pool in Long Beach, and another one at Norco High School out in the Inland Empire. One of the jobs I had was to wiggle my way into the fiberglass shell of the pool's filter system before it was installed – I was skinny and could go where bigger guys couldn't – and attach pipes and fittings. It's a wonder I didn't get stuck inside.

At around this time – late nineteen sixty-seven - Steve Linowski came home from the Army. He had spent his two-year hitch in France and Germany, and had had a pretty interesting time. He had been an MP. I remember lots of letters with stories about the local girls in Fontainebleau, near Paris where he had been posted. It hadn't been so bad for him. Now he was back and we could hang out together again.

I would see Joe a lot at school, and then drive to Steve's house after my classes. He was living with his parents in their house just east of La Puente. We would play pool in his garage and listen to the new underground FM radio station, KPPC, which was one of the very first new stations that played long album cuts and had disc jockeys with real personalities who were into all the new music and the revolution and its attendant notions.

They played the very long piece by the Chambers Brothers, "Time Has Come Today," which became something of an anthem for the cultural revolution. Judy Collins' version of Joni Mitchell's "Clouds" was also a favorite of that time, as were a bunch of Leonard Cohen songs and, of course, lots of Bob Dylan.

Jim Sharp has stayed at San Diego State, and I didn't see much of him during that year. He would come up for the holidays and we would connect and catch up; we were still friends and enjoyed each other's company when we could.

I went to Massachusetts at Christmas in 1967 and spent the holiday at Aunt Flo's, seeing as much of Margaret as I could. I remember lots of snow, sledding with Danny Sullivan's friends, walking around Boston with Margaret and seeing all the holiday lights and decorations. It was nice.

It was on this trip that Margaret's mother took us to Blinstrub's nightclub, where she had been a waitress for many years. Blinstrub's was a very popular place for several decades, dating probably from the forties, so it was kind of a big deal to go there. As I had just turned 21, I was able to have a real drink. I had a couple of Harvey Wallbangers, which I had heard about from someone. They were good. Then it was back to California for the new school term.

Jackie got married to Jim Miller in 1967, and I spent a fair amount of time with them. I really liked Jim. His band was still together and I liked to go to the parties and shows that they played. Jim worked at the Douglas Airplane factory as a riveter.

Their son Eddie was born in December of that year. I would often drive to their apartment in Bellflower to visit them and play with Eddie. Jim's brother Chuck and his wife Sandee lived in the same apartment complex as Jackie and Jim, and it was there that I first met them.

I remember meeting Sandee for the first time one afternoon; she was amusing herself by doing palm readings. She was very sweet, and she and I developed a special friendship that has lasted now for over 40 years. Of course she and Jackie also became very close, and their friendship has survived much, including Jackie's divorce from Jim.

It was also around this time that Jayne's marriage to John McFarland was coming seriously undone. They had had a rough time for several years. Jayne had started to divorce him once or twice before but had changed her mind at the last minute; now it was becoming clear that things were not going to work out.

I remember during my year at L.A. State that on several occasions Jayne would call and ask me to help her find John late at night. I would pick her up at her house and we would drive around to the seedier bars in Santa Fe Springs and South Whittier, which was apparently his stamping ground when he was on a crawl.

We would go into one joint after another looking for John. I don't think we ever found him, but he would eventually show up at their house in the very late hours. She did divorce him soon after, and started a life as a single mom that was very difficult for a long time.

The new academic semester was marked by two terrible events: the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. King was killed while we were in class one morning; I recall an announcement over the PA system at L.A. State, relating the news and then cancelling classes for the rest of the day.

Kennedy was shot in the very room at the Ambassador Hotel where my high school prom had taken place four years before. I was watching the returns from the California Democratic Primary on TV at our house in Whittier that night, while my parents were on vacation in Hawaii. I saw Bobby Kennedy give his victory speech and then walk away from the podium; a few seconds later shots rang out. It was such a shock, to see such a thing happen almost live on television.

I hadn't been a supporter of Kennedy's – I voted for Gene McCarthy in that election – but I liked him and was terribly saddened by his death.

I had planned to go to Europe with Steve that summer after graduating, but I didn't graduate – I was a couple of units short. Steve went without me. I was incredibly disappointed. He had a great time wandering around England and France and Switzerland with another friend of his.

I went to school during the summer to make up the needed units. It turned out that Joe needed another class or two as well. We took a poetry class together. The teacher – Henri Collette, a man we liked a lot – assigned a project to teams of two students each, and Joe and I wrote a paper on Wallace Stevens together.

I don't know whatever happened to it, but we had a lot of fun with it and got an A. We did most of it in one frantic night at his apartment, finishing it as the sun was coming up and then taking it into class that morning.

At some point that summer Margaret started talking about us getting married. She and her mother started making plans for a September wedding and booked the church in Lynnfield, a pretty town north of Boston.

I didn't get around to saying anything about this to anyone in California until some time in August. When I did tell my parents they were taken aback, but they liked Margaret a lot and, while they thought we were really too young and should at least have real jobs, they gave us their blessing.

My mother had rented a house in Laguna Beach for a week at the end of the summer for a family holiday – something we had never had before. We had never had a real vacation during all the years that I lived at home; my dad was always tied up with his practice and there was never either the time or the resources. We had the pool and the golf course at the country club, and the folks would say that because of this we had vacations all the time.

Nevertheless, at the end of the summer of 1968, over the Labor Day weekend in early September, we were having a ball at the beach. Everyone was there – mom and dad, the twins, Jackie and Jim and Eddie, maybe even Jayne and her brood. It must have been a pretty big place, as I even invited Joe and Marsha and a couple of their friends down for a few days.

I was scheduled to fly to Boston to get ready to get married - the wedding was set for September 14th - but I was having such a good time at the beach that I postponed my departure a couple of times (airlines were much more flexible in those days). I remember my mother, in her uniquely wry way, wondering how much I really wanted to get married, since I didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get back to my bride-to-be.

The plan was that Margaret and I would get jobs and find an apartment in Massachusetts and start our new lives. I flew East about a week before the wedding.

I conducted a high-speed job search that included an interview at Little, Brown and Company, the book publishers, which had been my dream destination, but ended with employment at Krey's Discs, a record shop in the new North Shore Mall in Peabody, near Margaret's mother's house. Margaret got a job at a shoe store in the mall.

We found an apartment in a very old building in Beverly, a quaint town near the coast with lots of history. Now we were all set for the wedding.

I hadn't expected my parents to be there for the event, but they surprised me and did come east. I was very happy to see them. I remember a lobster bake at Aunt Flo's a night or so before the wedding, sitting next to my father at her dining room table; I recall him urging me not to worry about the future but to enjoy the lobster, which was really good.

Dotsy Callahan's husband Joey had a bachelor party for me at their tiny apartment in Malden. The guest list included Danny Sullivan, Bobby Spindler and one or two other guys.

I remember two things about this evening: Joey dragged out his old army trunk and showed us some souvenirs he had from his days in the service – a knife, a flag, stuff like that – and that we watched an old black and white movie on their little television. Then I went back to Aunt Flo's and went to bed. I may have had a beer, but I don't recall it if I did.

The wedding was at St. Genevieve's church in Lynnfield, followed by a reception on the lawn at Margaret's mother's house. There was a band and tables with lots of food. Danny Sullivan was my best man. It was very nice. After a few hours Margaret and I were driven to our honeymoon at the Elms, the resort in New Hampshire owned by my mother's friend Alice Coldwell. We spent three very nice days there. Alice let us use her car for a Drive up Mt. Washington.

We stayed in our new home and new jobs for about six weeks. I liked the job at the record store – I knew more about the music and the artists than anyone else in the store – and we had fun, living on our own for the first time, but I could not get used to the New England winter, which came on early and strong that year.

Our apartment had very little heat, and it was old and creaky, and cold wind blew through the cracks in the floor and around the windows. We rode the bus to our jobs each day, and the icy wind would cut right through me as we waited at the bus stop.

I did like the people I worked with at the record store. The manager was a young woman who was obsessed with Janis Joplin. There was a fellow who Margaret and I liked, who came to our apartment a few times. I’m glad I had the experience of working at that store. I learned a little about the record business, and about the world of retail, that came in handy later on.

We decided to move back to California. Our timing was influenced by the fact that I could get a cheap "youth fare" on TWA only up to my 22nd birthday, which was coming soon. This meant a lot to our puny little budget. So we gave up the apartment, quite our jobs and returned to my parents' house.

My parents helped us get an apartment in Hollywood (i.e., they provided some money for deposit, first and last month's rent, et al), near the bank where Margaret quickly found a job.

It took me a little longer. I would knock on every door and call on every possibility that turned up, but there weren’t many jobs for English majors at that time. I read William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner during that job search.

It was a very powerful story – one that I felt conveyed serious truth. It was far more compelling than the job search I was on. I found it hard to focus on my comparatively inconsequential needs while Turner and his crew were wreaking havoc on the power structure that had stomped on their humanity.

I I eventually found a position at the Pickwick Bookstore, a venerable old shop on Hollywood Boulevard that was frequented by the literati of the area, including many in the film and TV worlds. I liked it a lot. I started working there in February of 1969. I was put in charge of the "essays and belles lettres" department of the store.

The pay was terrible – minimum wage – but English majors were not in great demand, and I thought that I might do well at Pickwick, maybe move up in the company. There was an interesting group of people working there, including a fellow named Brian Baxter, who became a good friend.

He had a sister, Meredith, who went on to become a famous television actress. At this time she was married to a guy names Bob Bush, who also worked at the store and was a very funny fellow. We had a lot of laughs together.

The boulevard itself was a mess, much worse than it is even now, in 2008. When I was younger, in the late fifties, my parents would bring us into Hollywood now and then, when a new "Cinerama" movie would come to the old Warner Theater.

In those days Hollywood Boulevard, like Hollywood in general, still had the aura of glamour and sophistication that typified it in the movies of the 1940s – the streets and sidewalks were well kept and populated with well-dressed shoppers and tourists, and the stores were glamorous and exciting. The restaurants such as Musso and Frank and the Brown Derby were still in their prime.

Things changed in the later sixties, when swarms of kids headed for Hollywood to be part of the new hippie and rock and roll cultures – many of them became homeless and drug-addled.

Many of the old stores closed and were replaced by tawdry head shops and tattoo parlors; and the upscale shoppers migrated to Century City and Sunset Plaza while Hollywood Boulevard became a trash-strewn, homeless- and hippie-infested wasteland.

Pickwick survived in this environment for a while, but while I was there it was nearly impossible to find any of the old charm on the Boulevard.

But we had fun. Everyone in the store had to know all about the book world, what was new, what was hot, what authors were getting attention. The store gave us reprints from the L.A. Times Sunday book review section each week so that we would know what had been critiqued and could speak knowledgably when customers asked for recommendations, and we were encouraged to borrow books and read them for the same reason.

Employees got a nice discount on books at the store – I think it was fifteen percent. I still have many books that I bought during that time – many that I still look forward to reading.

Sometime in the middle of 1969 there was a major publishing event – a very limited edition of "Alice in Wonderland," printed on very special, oversized paper, and illustrated by Salvador Dali. Each copy came in a big box and included quite a few Dali prints as well as at least one original drawing by the artist.

It was a very big deal. The cost per copy was about $400.00. Joe and Marsha bought one, which they still have. It is now exceptionally valuable – I see copies advertised in the Bauman's rare book catalogues for more than ten thousand dollars.

I met some well-known people at Pickwick. Alfred Hitchcock came in to the store. I sold books to Harriet Nelson, Diana Ross, Brian Wilson, Alan Sherman, and Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell. I was still young and starry-eyed enough to be dazzled by some of these people.

I also met John Fowles and Charles Webb (he had written "the Graduate"), who had come in to sign copies of their new books – "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and "Love, Roger," respectively.

Jacqueline Suzanne came by for a book signing and caused quite a stir. She gave little silver Egyptian ankhs, which played a key part in her book, to the managers of the store, who were very excited about it all.

Now and then the owner of the store, a legendary book-seller named Louis Epstein, would come to the store and work behind the counter along with the rest of us. It was a treat to work next to him. He had founded the store in the twenties; the legend was that he put some used books on a board that he had propped up on a few bricks and started selling them to passersby on the Boulevard.

From that humble beginning, Pickwick became the celebrated haven for book lovers that it was from the war years on, until the nineteen seventies when chains came along and altered the bookselling world forever. Now Pickwick is long gone, but in its day it was very special. I'm glad that I had the opportunity to work there, even though the conditions were harsh and the pay was embarrassingly low.

That year, 1969, was an exciting one. It was still a time of cultural change and conflict, and we lived in the heart of Hollywood, where things were always happening. We lived just off the Sunset Strip, and I loved to walk up to the record shops and book stores and watch people and feel that I was part of the larger events taking place.

Joe and Marsha Grieco also lived in Hollywood, and we saw them often. Joe had started a career as a social worker but quickly decided that it wasn't for him. He worked as a photographer for a while, and also drove a taxi for a time. Margaret and I would visit their house and they would visit ours, and we would eat cheap food and listen to music and discuss all that was happening in the world.

We also saw a lot of Jackie and Jim. They had moved to Alhambra, to a little old house on one of the main streets in the town. We would go over there and play Yahtzee or Hearts with them. B y this time Jim had left his job at Douglas and started working at Security Pacific Bank.

I especially enjoyed those visits with Jim. He and I would sometimes drink a little wine and stay up till the early hours of the morning, discussing philosophical issues, war and peace, truth and beauty, and sometimes actually felt that we had solved some of the world's problems, at least in our own minds.

I had a nice, pleasant relationship with my parents. We shared our opinions and feelings about things. We were on different sides of many issues, but for the most part we could talk about them and respect each other's views.

They both disliked the demonstrations on the college campuses and the hippies and the war protesters, but they were on the same side of the civil rights and anti-war issues as I was. I think they were as conflicted as anyone at the time.

We would visit Dot and Ed in Whittier at least a couple of times a month and had nice times with them. I was driving an old Ford Falcon that I had got from them somehow, and I remember driving over the Pomona Freeway in that car, hoping that it would make it all the way there.

(At some point in this period my mother sold the little T-bird while I was away somewhere, I don't know just when or where. She claimed that I owed her money for it, but I know I didn't. I loved that car and missed it for a very long time. I still miss it.)

The Pomona Freeway was new then. We would visit the folks on weekends and have dinner and sit out on the patio and watch the sunset.

For much of the year we didn't have a car at all, and I took the bus to work. Sometime late in the year, Jackie and Jim bought a new Datsun two-door sedan, and Margaret and I decided that we would get one, too.

I remember buying it in Alhambra, with Jackie along to help negotiate. It was my first car purchase. The total cost, out the door, was $1946.00. We put a few dollars down and paid about sixty dollars a month on the balance. It was a great little car.

All of a sudden we had freedom and mobility. I had to buy a parking space off Hollywood Blvd. near Pickwick; it cost ten dollars a month.

During that year, we saw four rock bands that we – at least Jim and I – had only dreamed of seeing: the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Beach Boys and, last but perhaps best, the Kinks. We also saw one of the few performances of Eric Clapton's superstar band, Blind Faith.

The Stones were on the tour that eventually took them to Altamont and the tragic events of that show, but when we saw them it was nothing but fun and excitement. They played two shows at the Forum in Inglewood on the same night.

The first was scheduled for eight o'clock and the second for eleven. Alan and Josie had tickets for the first show, and Jackie, Jim, Margaret and I, and Jim Sharp and Jo-Anne, too, had tickets for the late show.

There was a problem. There had been a hockey game at the Forum earlier in the day, and the ice did not melt as it was supposed to. Thus, the eight o'clock show did not start till very late – ten or eleven. When we arrived for the midnight show, the audience for the first show was still waiting to get in.

We had to wait in the parking lot for the entire length of that show and then wait more as they got the place ready for ours. I remember finally seeing Alan and Josie coming out of the earlier show at around two a.m., beaming and all aglow from seeing the Rolling Stones at the peak of their ability to enthrall an audience.

When we finally got to see them they were awesome, even from our seats at the opposite end of the arena, where we had to squint to see the band very well. It was the show where Mick wore a Mad Hatter hat and a long scarf, and bounded around on the stage in his unique way.

It was an amazing night. It was notable for many reasons, one of which was that Mick Taylor had recently joined the band, replacing Brian Jones, who had died earlier that year. I had been very upset when I heard about Brian's death, and didn't think the Stones would be the same without him.

They weren't, but it was still great to see them. Our show didn't start until around two in the morning, and I recall that we saw the sun coming up as we left the Forum.

We saw the Beach Boys at the Whiskey au go-go on my 23rd birthday. They hadn't played in public for a few years, owing to Brian Wilson's mental health problems, and the Whiskey show was a major event.

We – again, Jackie and Jim, Jim Sharp and JoAnne, and Margaret and I, and I think Alan and Josie, too – we were very excited about seeing them. It was a great show and, since the Whiskey is such a small, intimate venue, we got to see them up close and personal.

They did all the songs we wanted to hear and it was a great night. Brian didn't play with them, but we thought we saw him prowling around the stage behind a big bank of speakers and what seemed to be a Moog synthesizer.

The Kinks had been prohibited from touring in the US for several years, for reasons that are still unclear even at this late date. We – the same group that went to the other shows – stood up in front of the stage the whole time and sang along with the band, thrilled to see Ray and Dave and Mick Avory (Peter Quaiff had been kicked out of the band a few months earlier).

That show was the thrill of thrills, as we were all in the early, most fanatical stages of our Kinks infatuation, and were absolutely delighted to see them live.

Also in 1969, we went to a really incredible show at the Hollywood Palladium. The Who were debuting their rock opera, "Tommy." It was a very big deal. I think we went with Jim Sharp and Jo-Anne; Jackie and Jim may have gone, too.

A very big bonus – in retrospect, the best thing about the show – was that the Bonzo Dog Band was also on the bill. I had just discovered them a few months earlier, thanks to Jim Sharp, and thought they were really clever and witty and, on top of that, a great band.

The Who were awesome – it was the first time we saw Townsend do his windmill guitar slashes, and Daltry throw the mike high into the air and catch it just in time for the next line of the song – and "Tommy" live was quite an amazing thing to see and hear.

Sometime during that year I had the opportunity to write record reviews for a new publication, a free paper called the L.A. Image. It was an "alternative" paper that covered the local arts scene, restaurants, et al, as well as social issues and politics.

I wrote a handful of reviews for them that actually got published. The Rolling Stones' "Through the Past Darkly" and the Kinks' "Arthur" were my favorites.

A real advantage was that this enabled me to get promotional copies of new albums from some of the record companies. I still have a few of these "white label" pressings. Sometimes it took some legwork; I remember going to the Decca offices on Sunset and persuading them to give me an early copy of the Who's "Tommy" album. That was quite a coup.

I was put on the regular reviewers list at Warner Bros. records, and for a while I would find new releases on my doorstep when I got home from work. How great was that!

I managed to score tickets to the Blind Faith concert at the Forum. I was watching the crew set up the stage for the concert, and there was the "chips and gravy" guy, carrying guitars and amps and laying electrical cord.

I worked at Pickwick for almost exactly one year. One day early in 1970 I was at the store when the phone rang and I answered it. The woman caller identified herself with a name I recognized as that of a singer in a trendy rock band that had gotten some airplay on KPPC.

When she said "my name is Dorothy Moskowitz," I said, "Oh, the singer in the United States of America?" (That was the name of her band.) I heard her say to someone there with her, "Oh my god, he's heard of me," or something like that.

She had accidentally left some papers on the counter at the store and asked me to hold them until someone could pick them up. When her associate arrived to retrieve them, she (the associate) told me that the company where they worked might have a job for me, as an editor of the reports they issued to their clients. I was ready to move on, so I took her up on it and applied for a job at her firm.

The company was called Audience Studies, Incorporated. It was a market research company with a specialty – a theater on Sunset Blvd. where they showed TV shows and commercials to specially invited audiences and then asked them questions about the material they saw.

They hired me as a proof reader with the idea that I would become an editor in a short time. I was thrilled. It was a real job, in an office, with a desk and a phone. Wow. My English degree would finally mean something in the world.

I was hired by an Englishwoman named Marie Boyd. She was in charge of the editing department and was the wife of the president of the company, Mike Boyd. Her department was responsible for the accuracy and correctness of every word, sentence, conclusion, implication and arithmetic process in the reports sent to the company's clients, so the job was very demanding.

We had to check spelling, math, grammar and everything else in the reports and fix all errors or bring them to the attention of the reports' authors, the project directors. It was both fun and grueling.

Not long after I started working at ASI, Joe Grieco decided that he needed a job and asked me if I could help him get one. I wrote a note to the personnel director extolling his many virtues, and he was soon hired in the phone room – the department that invited people to come to the theater for screenings.

It was a fairly sophisticated operation, with quotas for specific demographic segments for each night's audience, and it took a lot of planning and quick maneuvering when quotas weren't met or fell short. Joe quickly became a star in that department.

In May of that year, after getting a few hundred dollars back on our income tax return, I bought myself a Martin D-18 guitar at the Guitar Center, which at that time was new and much smaller than the big store they now have on Sunset. Back then it was on the south side of the street a few blocks east of the Preview House.

I remember walking down to the store and choosing it and getting quite a thrill when I got it home and opened the case. I couldn't play much on it, but I loved having it. Joe had an old guitar of his own, and he and I spent many an evening playing together – mostly stuff that required only a few chords, but we had fun. I also played a lot with Jim Miller, who is a very good guitar player and taught me the chords for lots of songs.

Working at ASI, on Sunset Blvd. in the middle of Hollywood, was often exciting. We would screen TV commercials for our audiences and prepare reports on the test results, and soon after we would see many of these spots on television. That seemed pretty cool – we were doing work that would actually show up out in the real world, and the world of television at that.

I would see a spot while watching TV at home with Margaret, or at my parents' house on a weekend visit, and get very excited when a spot that we had tested came on. We tested more spots for pain relievers and personal care products than anything else, but nevertheless it was a kick to see them on the air. Alka-Seltzer, Dristan, Excedrin, Right Guard, TWA, Dry Control by Vitalis – lots of exciting brands and products!

My dad was especially pleased that I had a job in an office with what seemed like a promising future. He liked that I worked with people with Jewish names, I could tell. The human resources director, whose name was Simone Weiss, had spoken to him about something, and I remember him asking me about her a couple of times. He and mom came by the office once to see me when they were doing something in Hollywood, and I could tell that they liked my situation there.

In the summer of this year, 1970, Margaret and I took a short holiday to see her mother and sister in Massachusetts. It was a nice trip. We decided on a whim to fly to Montreal over the Fourth of July weekend. It was bright and sunny when we left Boston, but we were met by a torrential rainstorm when we reached Montreal.

I had been excited about seeing the city, which I expected to be very European and charming, but we ended up spending the entire day underground in the city's extensive subterranean shopping area. We didn't see much of the city at all – I still don't feel that I've actually been there.

We flew home in the most frightening weather I have ever experienced. I remember thunder and lightning flashing and crashing around the plane, and the plane seemingly flopping around in the clouds. I was sure that we were doomed, but we got back to Boston in one piece and all was again well.

The year 1970 ended very badly for me and my family, with the sudden death of my father. I came home from work one evening and had a phone call from Jim Miller. He said that my father seemed to be okay but that he had had "an attack" and was in the hospital in West Covina.

Margaret and I drove over to Jackie and Jim's house. They didn't have a telephone at the time so we walked to a nearby phone booth and called the hospital. We got Jayne on the phone. She said that Dad was in very bad shape and that we had better get over there as quickly as we could.

We went to the hospital and arrived to see my mother sitting in the waiting area, holding the black socks from dad's feet in her hands. She said, "I think we’ve lost our dad." Just as I was about to respond, the doctor came out and told us that he had died.

We were all stunned. He was only 59 years old and had never been sick in his life as far as I knew. He was a healthy and vigorous man. But he had phlebitis – veins in his leg that had some clotted blood in them; apparently, a clot had moved up to his heart and blocked a valve, causing a heart attack.

We were all holding each other and crying and trying to absorb what had happened when a person from the hospital took me aside and told me that I had to make arrangements for Dad's body right away. I remember being angry at this – I had hardly had time to realize that Dad was dead, and now they were insisting that I make important choices and decisions.

Mom said that he should go to a Jewish funeral home, which I conveyed to the hospital person. Then we all went back to the house in Whittier, where Mike and Alan, who were 18 years old at this time, were still unaware that their Dad had died.

I remember us arriving and telling the twins, and everybody crying. We sat around in the living room and expressed our shock to each other, saying that we couldn't believe it. It seemed impossible that he wasn’t there.

We sat up through much of the night. I remember Margaret telling me that she had come to think of my Dad as her father as well. It was an incredibly tearful night. We talked about how smart and funny and generous Dad was and how much we loved him and couldn't imagine not seeing him anymore.

I had last seen Dad on Christmas, a few days earlier, at Jackie and Jim's house in Alhambra. We had gone there for Christmas Dinner, which was very nice. I remember that Jim had given me Paul McCartney's new album as a Christmas present.

I distinctly remember that, as we were about to leave for home, Dad was sitting in a big green chair, holding Tiffany, who had been born in April of that year. I remember kissing him goodbye and leaving, and glancing back and seeing him and the green chair and Tiff in her yellow baby outfit. It is a good last image to have of him.

Mom and Dad had come to visit Margaret and me a few days before Christmas at our apartment in West Hollywood. They were on their way to a party hosted by some friends – after all this time I can't remember just who – and were all dressed up.

Dad wore a nice suit, but an undeniably terrible tie. I had one that I thought would be just right and I gave it to him to wear to the party. I have a photo of them from that visit, and they both look very sharp. Who knew that a few days later we would be mourning his passing.

Dad died on a Saturday, and the next day was New Year's Eve. Jewish custom calls for the funeral to be held as quickly as possible, but I have a dim recollection that several days went by before we managed to get Dad buried.

I remember being at a visitation at the funeral home, which was on Beverly Blvd. in Hollywood (there weren't any Jewish funeral homes close to Whittier), and hearing Dad's friends and especially his patients tell stories of how much he meant to them and how he had gone far beyond the call of his profession to help them. For hours, it seemed, they stood up and told stories about him.

I felt very comforted by this. I knew that he was generous and caring. I remember a night when I lived at home while going to college; it was two or three in the morning, and Dad got a call from a patient complaining of terrible back pain and asking him to come to his house despite the late hour. Dad said sure.

I went with him and waited while Dad gave the guy an adjustment that relieved his pain almost entirely. The man held a twenty dollar bill out to Dad but he wouldn’t take it. I think he felt that it was undignified for a doctor to take a tip; Dad said he would send him his regular bill.

Things were very different in the family from then on. Mom never recovered from Dad's untimely death. She was despondent much of the time, although there were times when she was reasonably okay. Dad had left very little money – he didn't have any insurance, there was little savings or investments, and some debt.

Mom struggled to take care of these obligations. She had a couple of jobs – one as a bookkeeper at an outfit that made machine parts, the Pacific Coast Jig Grinding Company, and then as an assistant of some kind at the local branch of Great Western Savings and Loan.

She hadn't been employed since she worked at the phone company during the depression, almost 40 years before, and I think she felt some pleasure at being able to get and perform these jobs. Somehow she managed to stay above water and to get Mike and Al into college.

Margaret and I visited regularly and spent a good amount of time with mom. We also spent a lot of time with Jackie and Jim. Not too long after Dad died, they moved into our old house in Baldwin Park, which Mom and Dad had kept and had been renting since moving to Whittier. Now Jackie and Jim and Ed and Tiff would live there for a while.

Jim and I liked to play guitar together and generally enjoyed each other's company, and we all had fun together. Meanwhile, Mom continued to decline; both her emotional and her physical health got slowly worse.

I continued working at ASI. Soon I was made head of the editing department, and was in charge of the whole team. After a while I was promoted to project director, which was the job that was responsible for projects from the time they leave the theater on the night of testing until they were sent to the mailroom for printing and distribution to the client.

In 1972, Margaret and I decided to go on a vacation to Europe. I had been itching to travel ever since I had missed out on the trip with Steve four years earlier, and now it seemed that we could afford to take a European holiday.

At first we were going to take two weeks, then a month, then six weeks, which Marilyn Beaudry, who had taken Mike Boyd's place as head of the company, had agreed to let me do. But as we planned and investigated the places we wanted to visit and the arrangements for travel that were available to us, we decided to quit our jobs, buy a European car abroad (this could be done at a great savings), and drive around the continent for as long as we could.

So we quit our jobs, sold the Datsun, gave up the apartment, and got cheap tickets to London. Our friends at ASI gave us a very nice bon voyage party.

We spent about a week in London, seeing the sites. Frommer (“Europe on $15 a Day”) was our primary guide, and we took his advice and stayed in a bed and breakfast in Cartwright Gardens, near the British Museum. I remember not being able to sleep that first night because of jet lag, and waking up before dawn to the sound of milk wagons making their rounds.

We ate cheap food – awful fish and chips ("fried plaice") and shepherd's pie and ersatz Italian. We saw the Elgin Marbles and visited Westminster Abby and wandered around the city, seeing as much of it as we could. Then we picked up our new car – a red Volkswagen Beetle – at a location outside of town, and headed north to Oxford.

We spent about two weeks driving in England and Scotland. We got as far north as Loch Ness, and as far south as Bath. In between we spent time in Edinburgh, Stratford, Northern Wales, and other quaint and lovely places.

Still fairly fresh from the curriculum in English at college, I allowed myself to feel that I was absorbing the spirit of Chaucer, Milton, Shelley and Jane Austen. Then we caught a ferry to Holland. We drove that little car all over Western Europe.

We spent a few days in Amsterdam, then drove through Belgium to Paris. Margaret and I had taken a short course in conversational French at Hollywood High during the summer before we left (which was in September of 1972), and it was fun to use it when we could.

We parked the car in a garage and stayed at a little one-star pensione on the left bank. We wandered the city, eating at cheap cafes. After more than thirty years it is hard to remember much detail, but I do recall that we had a wonderful time.

I know we visited the principal tourist sites – the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Madeline, Sacre Couer (which had been a favorite of my mother’s when she and Dad were there), and the Eiffel Tower. We wandered the streets of the Rive Gauche and felt very continental.

It was cold – it must have been late October by then. I had been reading Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London,” and now and then thought that I had seen or felt some of what he described in that book – in particular, one evening when we were in a cozy café and a poor street person put his face up to the window and obviously wished he could trade places with us.

After a week or so we got the car out of the garage and headed south. I recall that, as hard as I tried to avoid the traffic circle around the Arc de Triomph, I somehow got caught up in it and couldn't get out of it until I had driven around it five or six times. It was frightening but, in retrospect, pretty funny. We eventually found the road out of town and headed for Fontainebleau.

We drove through Chartres, Orleans, Tour, Poitier, and Bordeaux, spending a little time in each of these places. Then it was on to Biarritz and around the corner of the Pyrenees and into Spain. We spent a night in Bilbao, at a big old-fashioned hotel where young boys in uniforms with lots of buttons and epaulets carried the bags and showed us to our room.

We drove from Bilbao south to Madrid, where we arrived late one night. We stopped for gas and filled the tank. When it came time to pay, I discovered that I was short of Pesetas, and the station wouldn't take a traveler's check. I offered to go out and find a place where I could cash one; the proprietor said okay, but he insisted that I leave Margaret there as security. She wasn't too happy about this, but I was able to get some Spanish money and ransom her fairly quickly.

We spent a few days in Madrid, saw the Prado and the royal palace and the Plaza del Sol. Next was Barcelona, which I remember thinking was one of the most beautiful cities I had ever seen. I was taken by the young people on promenade around the city's broad streets and circular plazas.

We drove across France, stopping in Avignon and Nimes before reaching the cote d'azure. We poked around in Cannes, Nice and Monte Carlo. We spent a night in Genoa and then drove to Florence. After being repeatedly dazzled by all that we saw there we headed north into Austria, stopping at Innsbruck. We loafed around that pretty town for a few days, enjoying sunny, crisp winter days and seeing the sights.

After a couple of days in Innsbruck, we decided to head west, to Zurich. We could either put the car on a train that would take it and us over the high mountains we would have to cross, or we could get some chains for the tires and drive. There was a storm expected in the next day or so and we were advised not to drive in the mountains without chains.

I was torn – the train was expensive and the chains were also a problem, why I don't remember. At any rate, I foolishly chose to drive across without the chains, thinking that I could beat the storm.

It was a harrowing experience. We were doing fine until traffic slowed and then stopped a few miles below the summit, where two big trucks had collided. The delay gave the storm more time to get to us, and soon snow began to fall.

We eventually crossed the summit and headed down to the Austrian town of Feldkirch, which we reached only after many harrowing turns and patches of icy snow. Along the way we passed quaint villages and kids on skis and snow shoes having fun as they mushed along. It was very charming and fun to see, despite the slipping and sliding on the icy roads.

When we got to Feldkirch it was late and the shops and inns and cafes were all closed, but we found a place that welcomed us and prepared a late supper even though the kitchen had been shut down for hours. We were grateful that we had made it safely, and that we had found such warm hospitality.

The next day we drove across the little principality of Lichtenstein and into Switzerland. By the time we reached Zurich we had decided that we were tired and wanted to go home. I think that the ordeal of crossing the mountain under those conditions wore us out. It really was stressful.

At any rate, we turned the car over to a shipping firm and booked a flight to London. From there we flew to Boston and went to stay with Margaret's mother and sister. Our European trip was over.

We arrived a little before Christmas, and had a nice holiday with Margaret's family. I remember making a snowman in their front yard – the one and only time I did this.

I also remember a party with the Medford kids, where we danced and drank beer and had a lot of fun. Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" was just out and I heard it for the first time at this party. I thought it was a great record. It was good to see everyone…as it happened, this was the last time I would ever see them.

We flew back to L.A. and went to my mother's house. I don't remember much about how mom was doing at that time, but I don't suppose that she was doing especially well. After a day or so, Jim Miller showed up and insisted that we stay with him and Jackie at their apartment in Bellflower, which we did, and had a week or so of rest with them before getting back into our regular lives.

I got my job back at ASI and Margaret went back to her job at the bank. We found an apartment on La Jolla Drive – half of a duplex, actually – just south of Santa Monica Blvd. It was very nice. My mother bought us a bed and a dresser from someone she knew – a lovely early American set that was just right for us. We bought some new furniture from a store in Whittier and settled in, feeling very good about things in general.

This was early 1973. I worked hard at ASI; we saw Joe and Marsha and Jackie and Jim; I remember that we would watch our new Sony television, which we bought at the Robinson's in Beverly Hills. Life was good. Margaret took lessons and learned to drive the little red VW.

Sometime in this period a fellow at ASI gave me a copy of David Bowie’s album, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and told me that it was great and that I would really like it. I have to admit that I didn’t get it when I played it that first time, and I didn’t become a fan of Bowie’s until the next year, when the Diamond Dogs album came out.

I was listening to ELO, Jethro Tull, Mott the Hoople and a few other newer English bands, along with the old standbys, the Stones, Kinks and the Who. There were lots of other things I liked, too, but those were the mainstays. The same fellow who gave me the Bowie album also tried to get me interested in Blue Oyster Cult, but that didn’t work either.

A big act at the time was Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, one of the “country rock” groups that were developing in LA. I didn’t like this development…I was a diehard fan of what I thought of as stylish English rock, and had no interest in the twangy sounds that CSNY and other LA groups were making at the time.

We went to concerts and once in a while we would drive up to San Francisco. Joe and I started playing tennis at Poinsettia Park in Hollywood – we would meet at six in the morning and play a set, then go home and get ready for work. I liked it. We never got to be very good, but we learned a little about the game and at least knew what to watch for in matches on television.

Work at ASI during that period was interesting, as I became more familiar with various clients and their issues, and got increasingly better at the job. It was exciting, and I remember thinking that I might enjoy moving into the advertising agency world.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that Margarat and I were very happily married, I found myself becoming infatuated with a woman who worked with me at ASI. Lynette Baily was one of the project directors at the company. She was very pretty and very charming, and - to make a long story short - I found myself falling in love with her. At first it was just something I kept to myself, but eventually I let her know how I felt, and she, much to my surprise, felt the same way about me.

What followed was very difficult and painful for everyone concerned. Eventually I ended my marriage to Margaret, and Lynette and I began a new life together.

After a terribly hard ordeal that lasted many months, Margaret moved back to Massachusetts to live with her mother, and eventually re-married.

My mother was very upset by this and for a while would not accept Lynette at all. Jackie and Jim were more accepting of us, as was Jayne. Gradually they saw what a wonderful person Lynette was, and how happy she made me, which seemed to be their main concern.

Then, as my mother told me, her friend Alice Coldwell, who had had issues with her son Peter, told her that she would either have to accept her son despite how she felt about what he had done, or risk losing him. This led her to take a small step or two towards accepting Lynette, at least in a tentative way.

At this time Lynette and I had been driving the little Volkswagen that Trish had left behind when she went to England with Dave Mattocks. It was a really beat up beetle that Trish had named the Turkey. One day Lynette impulsively bought a ten-year-old Porsche. It was pretty cool, but it had loads of problems, including a basically non-functioning electrical system. She had paid $2000.00 for it.

I realized that we had to unload it, and placed an ad in the L.A. Times. Fortunately, a young Asian guy came over to see it, and liked it enough to buy it. He gave us twenty one-hundred dollar bills and drove away with it. I hope he got the lights to work.

At one point during this time – it was in the spring of 1974 – a young man named Larry Heller came to ASI and convinced the management that he could develop a new service for the pop music business to do what ASI had been doing for the advertising and filmed entertainment industries – provide consumer responses to their product. I was asked to help Larry develop his system.

I was moved out of the TV testing part of the company, and Larry and I created the “record testing” program. We would have teenagers and young adults come to the Preview House on Saturday mornings to listen to records and turn the dials and fill out questionnaires. It turned into a viable operation and became pretty well established in the record business, which in the middle seventies was a pretty exciting industry.

We had a big office on the second floor of the Preview House, and a team that, in addition to Larry and me, included Barbara Heller (who was then Larry’s girl friend and soon became his wife), a fellow named Bob Wayne, who was our technical resource and helped with taping and other electronic needs, and, later on, a statistician who was supposed to help us plug some of the holes that developed in our ability to predict the hits.

For a couple of years we had a good time in that office. We were relatively autonomous from the other parts of ASI, and Larry and I would often go out to call on prospective clients.

We had good relationships with a handful of producers and record company executives. It gave me a chance to have a close look at how things worked in that world, which I had been interested in since well before I had come to ASI.

Clive Davis, who was already a legend and subsequently went on to be a mythical god in the music business, was a regular customer. Executives at Warner Bros. Records, Bearsville, A&M and many others would spend their Saturday mornings in the client booth at the Preview House, watching as the teens turned their dials while their records played.

Larry and I went up to San Francisco, for the NARM (National Association of Record Marketers) convention, and another time we went to Las Vegas for the Billboard Magazine get-together.

At the Billboard show we met the guy who produced the two-girl band Heart, which had just had their first hit; we also saw Andrew Loog Oldham, who had produced the Rolling Stones and was now pushing some new product or service.

I was still just in my mid twenties and found the whole situation very exciting. I worked at this with Larry for a couple of years and then went back to the advertising side of ASI as what they called a unit director, supervising a small number of project directors.

Sometime around the middle of 1975, my mother got very sick. For a while she was able to stay at home, but it was clear that she was getting worse very fast. For many months, Lynette and I would spend every weekend with her; on Sunday mornings we would take her bowling, which she had taken up a little while before, and then we would pick Jayne up at the store where she worked and go to lunch.

Mother had an acid tongue and would make sarcastic comments about everyone and everything. God help you if you said something that didn't hit her right. But I think she actually enjoyed these outings and looked forward to them. Poor Lynette…she endured much in order to be with me.

Through the fall of 1975 and well into 1976 Mother got worse and eventually had to be hospitalized. We would visit her every evening after work, and her condition seemed to be worse every time we saw her. She became very thin and grey, and the light went out of her.

My brother Michael got married to a lovely young girl, Kim Greene, in 1975. Mom was too sick to attend the wedding. I don't know where Al was, and I don't think Jayne or Jackie attended. I went to the wedding by myself. It was held at Kim's parents' home in Whittier, and was very nice. Mike and Kim went to live in Atascadero, near San Luis Obispo; they have lived in that area ever since.

In June of 1976, Lynette's brother Gary was set to graduate summa cum laude from Harvard University. This was obviously a very important event in her family, and she dearly wanted us to be there with her mother and father, who were planning on driving up to Boston from their home in western Kentucky.

I talked to my mother's doctor, and was given assurances that, while she was clearly in bad shape, she was stable and not in imminent danger. He said that I could go to the graduation without concern.

Lynette and I flew to Kentucky several days before the graduation, planning to spend a few days there and then drive along with her parents to the graduation. I got to know her parents, and met her sister Amy and Amy's husband Alan and their daughter Leigh-Ann, who was just a couple of years old at that time.

One day we went on an outing with Amy and Alan, to water ski on the Rough River. When we got home there was a message that Jackie had called. When I returned the call Jackie told me that our mother had died at the hospital that afternoon.

Naturally I was devastated. My mother had been the world to me and loved her deeply. I was always more concerned about her feelings than anything else, from my earliest childhood right up to that time. That she had died while I was away was very troubling to me.

When Jackie gave me the news I cried and was terribly upset. Lynette's mother was a great comfort to me at this time; I very well remember her efforts to make me feel better, and I am very grateful to her for this.

Jayne and Jackie had made the funeral arrangements by the time Lynette and I got back to California. The funeral was held at Rose Hills in Whittier and our mother was buried next to our father in the grave she had purchased along with his when he died.

Lynette and I decided to catch up with her parents and go to Gary's graduation with them. We flew to Buffalo, New York, where they had arrived the day before, and went with them to see Niagara Falls, which was really spectacular.

Then we drove across New York and down the Hudson River Valley to Hyde Park, the historic home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. After a couple of hours there we headed east into Massachusetts, and on to Cambridge.

The graduation was impressive and moving. We sat with Tola, Gary's wife-to-be and watched Gary receive his diploma and other honors, including his Phi Beta Kappa key.

Back at home, we returned to work and to tasks associated with Mother's estate, such as it was. I was the executor and handled the legal and financial aspects, including selling the house, which took a very long time, as there was a slump in the housing market just then. But we eventually sold it, and each of us wound up with a small but welcomed amount of cash.

It was at this time, between mom's death and selling the house, that Jackie and Jim split up. Soon after, Jackie decided to become a nurse and started preparing for that. She had quite a full plate; Eddie was around ten and Tiff, about seven.

Shortly before mom died, Jayne had become involved with a very nice man named Bernie Ubinger. I remember that we met him in our apartment on Hilldale avenue (we had moved into a nicer place a couple of blocks up the hill).

We all liked Bernie very much and were happy for Jayne. They got married not too long afterwards and Jayne – along with two or three of her kids - moved into Bernie’s lovely home in Hacienda Heights.

In the spring of 1977, Lynette and her mother went to Greece, to visit Gary and Tola. Gary had been given a grant to study at the American school in Athens and was involved in an archeological dig there. The four of them had a wonderful tour of the Greek mainland and several of the islands.

Early in that year I got fed up with working at ASI and decided to take my very modest inheritance and travel in Europe for a while. I was feeling uncertain about many things, especially my "career," and thought wandering in the old world would give me a chance to sort things out.

I told Lynette what I wanted to do and that I wanted her to go with me. She wasn't quite sure that quitting her job was such a good idea, but she eventually did, and we started making travel plans.

While we were working out the details of our trip, Lynette got a call from Marilyn Beaudry. Marilyn and been called by Olen Earnest, a fellow who had worked at ASI on the entertainment side of the business, handling clients from movie studios and television networks. He had recently left ASI to become the market research director at 20th Century-Fox Films, and was looking for someone to help him get through an especially busy period.

Lynette and I ended up free-lancing for him for a couple of weeks prior to leaving on our trip, analyzing the results and writing reports on a batch of research projects. This was a great boon because it put some extra money in our pockets and, potentially even more valuable, it gave us a taste of the movie business and a connection at one of the major studios.

It was while we worked at Fox that summer that Elvis Presley died; I can still remember the moment when Olen gave me the news in the hallway outside our offices. What a shock.

Near the end of the summer of 1977, my brother Alan stayed with Lynette and me for a couple of weeks. I think this was when he had split up with Josie and wasn't sure about where he was going to go next. Al and I had a great time, playing a lot of tennis and hanging out in West Hollywood. It was nice to be out of work and have so much free time.

This took us to near the end of August of 1977. We decided that we would drive to Kentucky so that Lynette could see her parents and sister and her sister's new son before going abroad. I had bought a new VW beetle a few years earlier – soon after we sold the Porsche - which we used for the trip. It took us about four days to reach Owensboro, where we stayed for three weeks or so in order to be there for a couple of family birthdays in the middle of September.

We did eventually leave, flying to New York City, where we had booked flights to London. We stayed a night in New York, visiting some friends from L.A. who had recently moved east (Steve Hunter, from ASI, and a couple of women we knew from I know not where), and then flew to England. We had made arrangements to stay with Trish McGill, who was now Mrs. Dave Mattocks, having married the Fairport Convention drummer.

We landed at Gatwick Airport and were surprised to see a man holding a sign with our names on it. Trish had arranged for a car to meet us and drive us to their flat, in a town about 30 miles south of London, Hayward's Heath. It was a nice touch. We later learned that Dave didn't drive and they either took trains and cabs or hired cars when they went anywhere.

We spent a few weeks with Trish and Dave and had a really good time with them, getting a taste of life in a small English village. We used their home as a base for travels all around England, which worked out really well.

We had bought a three-week Britrail Pass and traveled all over the country, and into Scotland as well. Highlights included Oxford, Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Bath, Stonehenge, Penzance and Canterbury. Then we flew to France on a tiny plane operated by a company called Dan-Air (what a great name!) and landed just across the channel. From there we took the train to Paris and had a fabulous week in the City of Light.

Thus began our leisurely tour of the continent. From Paris we went north to Holland (had a great week in Amsterdam and visited the flower markets in Aalsmeer) and then on to Denmark, Sweden and Norway, including a trip to a town well north of the Arctic Circle (Narvik), and another to the fjord towns of Flan and Myrdal. After Scandinavia we traveled across Germany, with stops in Heidelberg, Munich, Rotenberg, Wurzburg and Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

Munich was our base for a few days, where we stayed with a lovely old German woman, Frau Liebhart, which, she told us sweetly, and with obvious pleasure, was German for "love heart." She put us up in a room of her flat in a very modern high-rise apartment building that had its own commuter train stop.
She went out of her way to take care of us, and when we told her that we had been provided with an especially nice breakfast at our B&B in Heidelberg, she made sure that she outdid them with her lavish spread.

When we told her that we would be setting out especially early one morning to visit Rotenberg and Wurzburg (to see Charlemagne’s throne), she got up even earlier to prepare breakfast for us. She was a great hostess and made our visit to Munich especially memorable.

Highlights of the Munich visit included the Hofbrau House, an enormous beer garden, the BMW factory tour, and the Marianplatz, a square in the center of the town with much medieval character.

It was cold and snowy when we were there, and the Christmas festival, which I believe was called the Kris Kringle Mart, or something like that, was in full swing. There were lots of booths in the square that sold holiday-themed crafts as well as good things to eat and drink; we especially enjoyed the gleuwine, a nice, hot brew of wine and spices that took the chill off the cold day.

From Munich we traveled to Austria. We were initially headed for Salzburg, but on a whim we got off the train at a quaint Alpine town called Zell-am-See, where we stayed for a night in a nice inn with cozy down comforters on the bed, and enjoyed a nice walk around the town and up the mountain.

Then it was on to Vienna, where it was so cold that we couldn't bear it; after a peek at the cathedral, a pastry and a tour of the Schonbrunn palace (where they gave you slippers to wear that polished the marble floors while you walked through the place), we headed for the station and caught the midnight train to Venice. We arrived to see the sun coming up over St. Mark's Basilica, an awe-inspiring sight.

After a wonderful week or so in Venice, our next stop was Florence, where I was laid low by some kind of flu. We stayed in a pensione operated by the Azzi sisters, two elderly ladies who ran a comfortable but very Spartan inn.

We managed to see the most important art and historical buildings, but missed a lot, too. Lynette did go out by herself once or twice and saw some of the city that I missed. We must get back there soon! We had a day trip to Pisa, where I climbed the tower while Lynette waited below. Then it was on to Rome.

Rome was overwhelming. We stayed there for a couple of weeks, in a pensione on the Via Sistina, which had been recommended to us by the Azzi sisters - I still have their card somewhere. At breakfast there one morning we met another young American couple, an aspiring architect from New Bedford, Mass. and his wife.

The four of us spent some time together in Rome and got along well. We had Christmas dinner together, at a restaurant near the American Embassy, which was the only place we could find that was serving turkey (it was a la Tetrazzini).

We went down to Naples for a couple of days, and visited the amazing ruins of Pompeii. Then it was back to Rome for another week.

From Rome we took a train to Geneva. In our compartment were two young Japanese men, both named Hirosh, which Lynette and I thought was very funny because years earlier we had made up a character with that name, whom we would blame when anything was missing or broken and neither of us would admit to being responsible for it. Somewhere we have a photo of these two gentlemen, who were pleasant travel companions.

I think it was in Geneva that we visited an English-language bookstore and bought a few volumes; I recall purchasing – and reading – "Gulliver's Travels" and also the "Confessions" of St. Augustine (I didn't get all the way through that one). Lynette bought and read a very interesting book on the oil industry, "The Seven Sisters," which we both read. It was a fascinating overview of the newly emerging oil states in the Persian Gulf, with much foreshadowing of later events.

Geneva was beautiful and expensive. We had been in the habit of buying a little bit of chocolate for a treat in our room or on the train; in Switzerland, the chocolate was much more costly than in other countries.

When I mentioned this to the man behind the counter in Geneva, he shrugged and said, "mais oui, chocolate Swiss est tres cher!" Lynette and I still remember his pithy comment when we happen to have any Tobler or other Swiss chocolate.

After a few days in Geneva we took the Talga Catalan Express, a very fast train that made only a few stops, to Barcelona. We loved that city. We took Frommer's advice and had paella at Jose's, a cheap restaurant that served excellent food. We went to a concert at the city's famed opera house, and saw a lot of the work of Antonio Gaudi.

We visited the Picasso Museum in the city's gothic quarter, where we saw his interpretation of Velasquez's Las Meninas, which we would soon see in the original at the Prado in Madrid.

We loved walking around at night in Barcelona, when much of the city was strung with colorful lights that gave it a very festive atmosphere. It was early January, and the Spaniards were in their Christmas mood.

After four or five days in Barcelona we took the train to Madrid. We happened to take a second-class train, probably for schedule-related reasons, and I remember that our fellow passengers included chickens and goats as well as men, women and children. It was an interesting experience. A woman seated nearby in the train compartment saw us cutting an apple with a pocket knife and tried to persuade us to give the knife to her, but we didn’t.

In Madrid we visited the Prado (incredible – enormous rooms filled with paintings by Goya, Velasquez, Hieronymus Bosch and many others) and saw lots of the city. Lynette had the most wonderful flan ever at a little restaurant we went to with another couple we met.

She also went to see a Zarzuela – a Spanish musical production – but I stayed in with another cold. We took a day trip to Toledo and saw El Greco's house and wandered the medieval streets of that amazing town.

After Toledo it was back to Madrid and Barcelona and then back to France on a fast train to Nice via Avignon. Nice was nice…warm and easy. We took a local train for a day trip to Cannes and another to Monte Carlo. All great places to see – I could easily imagine living on the Cote d’or.

After a couple of days we took the Mistral – another fast train – direct to Paris. This was our last train voyage, as our Eurail pass ran out that day. We met our friends from New Bedford as we had arranged when we left Rome. We spent a week or so in Paris and then rode with them in their little Volkswagen to London via a channel ferry.

We spent week or so with Trish and David in Hayward’s Heath, and then returned to the USA – specifically, Owensboro, KY. Lynette stayed with her folks for a couple of weeks; after a few days I dug our Volkswagen out of the snow and headed west, accompanied by a tape cassette of the brand new ELO album, "Out of the Blue."

I drove home in three days. I stayed with Jackie for a short time, and got work with Olen Earnest at Fox almost immediately. I found an apartment in West Hollywood, on West Knoll Drive. Lynette came in after a few weeks and we started the next phase of our lives.

Lynette had received a phone call from the man who owned ASI while she was visiting her friend Yvonne in Atlanta (he had tracked her down somehow), asking her to return to the company, which she did.

But soon after her return she got a call from Willette Klausner, who was now working at Universal Studios, and wanted to introduce her to a man who was starting a new research company and might have a really exciting job for her.

The man was Joe Farrell, who had come to California from the New York to open a branch of the Harris Poll, which conducted national political and social-issues surveys. When he got to Hollywood he realized that there was much opportunity for research in the movie business, and left Harris to start his own company, the National Center for Survey Research, which he later changed to the National Research Group. Lynette left ASI and went to work for NRG; she was actually the first person that Joe and his partner, Catherine Paura, hired at NRG.

I went to work with Olen, first as a free-lance analyst and soon as a regular employee. It was really exciting to have landed a job at a movie studio, and particularly at Fox at that time.

They had just had an enormous success with the first Star Wars movie, and were the talk of the town. Articles were appearing about their young studio president, Alan Ladd, Jr. (known throughout the industry as "Laddie"), who was making quality films and creating a very film-maker-friendly environment.

Our offices were on the second floor in the main executive office building on the Fox lot, on Pico Blvd. in Beverly Hills. The lot was now much smaller than it had been a few years earlier, when the studio sold much of their back lot to the people who turned it into Century City in the early seventies, but there were still quite a few sound stages and other production settings to wander around in. I loved to take a break in the afternoon and stroll around the lot, walking into the stages and watching TV shows and movies being filmed.

I liked the job, although Olen could be difficult to work for. He tended to get a little hysterical at times, and he reacted to every problem, whether very small or very large, or anywhere in between, as if it were the end of the world, and would shout and get very worked up, when most of the time the situation could be resolved pretty easily. After a while this got very tiresome. But for much of the time it was exciting.

One day that Spring, Lynette and I were enjoying a quiet Saturday morning with the L.A. Times. Lynette saw a classified ad that said we could get married that day if we wanted to, no blood test required. We decided to do it. We called Jackie and Jayne, and they, along with Bernie, witnessed our marriage on April 29th, 1978, in a little apartment in Santa Monica. We went to a Mexican restaurant afterwards to celebrate.

Also that year, with Lynette working at NRG, we realized that we needed a second car. We bought a Toyota Celica, a sporty white coupe. It was peppy and good looking and fun to drive. We had a lot of fun in that car. I drove the VW to Fox, and liked it, but I was a little jealous of Lynette in her sporty coupe.

It was around this time that I re-connected with my friend Steve Linowski. I had not been in touch with him for a couple of years, since before my mom died and Lynette and I went to Europe. Neither of us meant for it to be that way, but we were both doing other things and just kind of drifted apart.

The last I remembered at the time, he was living in a boarding house in Pasadena and attending Pasadena City College. But one day in 1978 the phone rang, and it was a woman who said she was Mrs. Steve Linowski, and that they would like us to come to a gathering at their apartment in La Crecenta, north of Glendale.

We went, met Steve’s wife Kathy, and caught up with him and he with us. A couple of Steve’s brothers, who I hadn’t seen since high school, were there with their wives. We had a nice time, and after that we saw Steve and Kathy pretty regularly.

Steve and I also initiated a semi-regular date to play pool on Wednesday evenings. We found a billiard parlor on Ventura Blvd. in Van Nuys that we liked, where the beer was cheap and the tables were usually free. We did that for a couple of years until we got tired of it. It was fun while it lasted.

I met Mel Brooks while working at Fox. He had an office in the same building as ours. That was a treat, as I had been a big fan ever since John McFarland had played the "2000 Year Old Man" comedy album that Mel and Carl Reiner had made in 1960, for me when I was only 13 years old. That was long before Mel made any of his movies and became well known. Not surprisingly, Mel would always have a funny bit whenever I would see him.

The one we all remember was the day that I hosted a number of people from the family – Jackie and Jayne, her daughter Jill, and her son Kris’s wife, Diana – to lunch at the studio commissary.

Jill and Diana were both expecting their sons to be born pretty soon. We were at a table with Jill and Diana seated next to each other, facing the entrance to the commissary. I saw Jill poking Diana in the ribs with her elbow, urging her to look up and see who has just come in. But Diana is focused intently on what she is eating and doesn't look up.

Jill pokes her again, but still Diana doesn’t look up. Then suddenly Mel appears at the table, takes Diana's chin in his hand to lift her face up to his, and says, "She's telling you to look up and see that it's me, Mel Brooks, coming into the dining room!" Everyone laughed as Mel walked on to the back room where the celebrities and high-level executives had their lunch.

I enjoyed much about the Fox job. I liked the drive, down Robertson Blvd and across Pico through Beverly Hills, and pulling into the studio, where the set from “Hello, Dolly” was still in place and created a feeling of entering another world each morning. I had a parking place with my name on it, where I’d park the beige Volkswagen. It was good.

One of the more exciting experiences at Fox was working on the marketing for the movie “Alien.” It was the first big sci-fi picture for the Ladd group since their huge success with “Star Wars,” and everyone was very anxious to get it all right.

Early on in the development of the campaign, we were asked to help choose a copy platform for the movie’s print advertising. Olen decided that we would have some focus groups conducted, by a small company in San Francisco that had called on him shortly before I joined the department.

Olen had other things to do on the day that the groups were scheduled, so I flew up to San Francisco on a nice afternoon to meet the group moderator and review the discussion guide before the groups.

The plan was that the moderator would meet me at the airport and drive me into the city, but he didn’t show up and, after waiting for a while, I took a taxi to their office. I remember thinking that this wasn’t a good sign, and my expectations for the groups and the overall experience with this company turned a little dark.

When I got to their address I found a pay phone and called the office. The moderator, whose name was Jim McCullough, apologized for not picking me up, with a good reason that I don’t remember now.

It all went very well. We ended up with copy for the campaign – “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream” – that worked perfectly for the movie and has become somewhat iconic in movie culture.

Jim and his wife, Meli, have been dear friends of ours ever since. Jim became a great resource for me over the course of my research career, working on projects at Fox and, later, at Warner Bros. We had a lot of fun together.

Lynette and I had our first wedding anniversary in April of 1979, and we decided to celebrate it with a week in Paris. How exciting that was.

We had recently seen a movie titled “Once in Paris,” in which much of the story took place in the Regina hotel near the Louvre. It was very romantic and charming in the movie, and we thought it would be that way for an anniversary, too, and arranged to stay at the Regina for the week.

We envisioned sunny days, blue skies, soft breezes…everything perfect. We found cold, drizzle, sleet, and after the third or fourth day, snow.

Lynette came down with some flu-ish symptoms and spent almost the whole week in bed in the hotel. The hotel staff was very sweet, bringing her tea and whatever else she wanted. I would go out each day and wander around by myself, bringing back a croissant or cream puff or some other treat. I visited Balzac’s house on one of these rambles.

Since we hadn’t expected cold weather, we hadn’t brought any coats or sweaters or scarves. I remember walking across the bridge from Notre Dame to the Left Bank in my little white linen jacket – the warmest thing I had brought – and standing in the middle of the bridge with snow falling on me.

It was scenic, it was picturesque, but it was very chilly.Nevertheless, it was fun to be in Paris…as the song says, “I love Paris in the winter, when it drizzles….”

Then, back in town…

After a while, Olen got fed up with his secretary, Susan, and let her go. I thought this was pretty cruel. She was in her fifties, long divorced, and didn’t seem to have much going for her. To replace her, he went through a series of temporary workers, the last of whom was a lively, funny and very sweet young woman named Lola.

She was a good secretary and eventually got the job permanently, and she and I quickly became good friends. We would often have lunch together at the commissary or at nearby restaurants and have lots of laughs. She is still a good friend of mine and Lynette’s. We see her and her family once or twice a year.

After I had worked with Olen for a couple of years, the apple cart was upset when Laddie and his team of executives resigned from the studio en masse one day early in 1980. Laddie was upset because corporate management would not let him give bonuses to various employees as he wished to – he wanted to share the vast profits from “Star Wars” with some number of key employees but was not allowed to do so.

As a result, Laddie and his senior marketing team and the production executives all walked out. This eventually led to my leaving Fox and going to Warner Bros. Ironically, most of the Ladd team ended up at Warner Bros. not long after I got there.

When the Ladd team left, the head of the Fox Film Corporation, Dennis Stanfill, a highly regarded, very sophisticated and polished businessman, lured most of the management of Columbia pictures away from that studio and ensconced them at Fox. Among them was the young marketing wiz, Robert Cort, who had recently made a big name for himself in the industry with some flashy campaigns that turned out to be very successful.

Olen realized that it was time for him to leave, and followed David Weitzner to Universal, where David had been hired as head of that studio’s marketing department. Cort made me the guy in charge of research at Fox. He also got rid of the rest of the department, so I was suddenly the boss of no one but myself. (Lola had found a better job in the television division of the company.)

I remember sitting in what had been Olen’s big office, with its big desk and leather chair, and feeling both nervous and excited. Then the first actual piece of work came down from Cort’s office and I suddenly had to put a study together without any of the team I had been working with.

What to do? I didn’t want to go to NRG – I had already developed an antipathy towards that company that would only become stronger over the ensuing decades – so I called Joe Grieco, who was now the research director at the McCann-Ericson advertising agency, and asked him to recommend a supplier. He suggested that I call a fellow named Charlie Walker, who had a research company that Joe said was very good and had some experience in the film business.

It turned out that Charlie’s company had, in fact, done some work for Bob Cort at Columbia. With the help of Charlie’s staff I put the job together and it worked out well. Charlie and I got to know each other over the course of the next few months as they handled almost all of the work that I supervised. He and his wife, Nancy, became good friends with Lynette and me, and they have remained among our very dearest friends ever since.

I liked Bob Cort. He was funny and bright and cocky. One of the first things he did was to establish a regular Monday review meeting that I attended along with the other key marketing team members. It would begin at nine in the morning, and there would be bagels and lox, Danishes, lots of fruits and juices – it was like a party.

We would go through every detail of the campaign for every one of our upcoming films, and I would provide whatever recent research findings I had to report. The meeting would go well into the afternoon – Cort was a micro manager to the max, and our review of the campaigns would be extremely detailed – and at around 12:30 lunch would arrive, including a big tub of ice with lots of bottles of beer. Was show business great, or what?

But it didn’t last. Bob Cort decided to bring a friend and former Wharton School classmate of his, by the name of Doug Stern, out to California from New York to be the head of the research department.

I was, to say the least, dismayed. Stern was supposedly an academically-oriented researcher who would bring new techniques and methodologies to our work and help Fox compete more effectively in the rapidly expanding world of movie marketing.

He was not my kind of guy and I was not happy working with him, but I was still fond of the overall situation at Fox and wanted to stay. I worked hard and tried to maintain a harmonious relationship with both Cort and Stern, but it was a struggle.

Then, near the end of that summer, I got a call from Richard Del Bels at Warner Bros. Richard said that I didn’t belong at Fox with those guys and asked me to join him at WB.

I was conflicted - I really wanted to make it work at Fox, which I had always thought of as sort of the Tiffany of the studios, versus the Sears-Roebuck that we thought Warner Bros. to be. Fox made classy pictures; Warners made lowbrow genre movies. But things clearly did not bode well for me at Fox.

I asked Cort and Stern for a meeting and told them that I really liked it there and hoped that their plans included a role for me. They didn’t say yes, they didn’t say no; they didn’t say anything, but I got the message.

I had two weeks of vacation coming, so I took it. Lynette and I took a slow, restful drive up the west coast in our new Toyota Celica.

We visited our friends Jim and Meli in San Francisco, camped on the beach in Oregon and in the Olympic Rain Forest in Washington (where Lynette cooked a sensational salmon dinner over an open fire), and stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel in Vancouver, Canada. We spend a few days on Vancouver Island and then headed down the I-5 and back home.

I went to see Richard, who was in the hospital, recovering from back surgery, and told him that I accepted his offer. He sent me to an interview with Sandy Reisenbach, the head of marketing at WB, who liked me well enough to give Richard the go-ahead to hire me. Then I gave notice at Fox, and started my new job on Monday, December 1st, 1980.

Meanwhile, Lynette and I had bought a house in Whittier, near my brother Alan and his wife Josie (they had gotten back together by then). Their daughter Romi had been born just a year before, and they were living in a little house near the intersection of East Orange Drive and Pickering Street in the old, cozy section of the city. Before it became clear that I would leave Fox, Lynette and I had been looking for a house near the studio.

The apartment complex we were living in was being converted to condominiums, for a price that was too much for us, and we thought we could find something more affordable in the area north of Pico Blvd. west of Fox, near where the Westside Pavilion is located. We were wrong – the best we could find there was a house of about 900 square feet for nearly $200,000 – a lot of money at the time.

Then Alan called to say that there was a nice house up the street from him that he thought we should look at. We did, we liked it a lot, and we bought it. The sellers wanted $125,000, but we managed to get it for $117,000. It took everything we could scrape up to make the down payment, but we did it and we moved in just before Thanksgiving.

It was a great little house, with a big yard, three small bedrooms downstairs and two upstairs, lots of trees, a fish pond and a fireplace. It was on a quiet street with quiet neighbors. Perfect. Lynette and I could each have an office of our own, and there was even a room for her mother downstairs. The “master” bedroom, such as it was, was upstairs, along with a good-sized bedroom.

We had a man come out and re-surface the hardwood floors; we painted and wallpapered and did other things to get the house ready for us to move in.

We had the family to our house for Thanksgiving, which was very nice. Then, as I said, I started my new job at Warner Bros. on December 1st. I remember driving to Burbank that first day, taking the Pomona Freeway to the Golden State to the 134 and entering the studio gate, giving the guard my name and finding my way to the little building in the back of the lot where the “ad/pub” department was located.

I arrived at a little before nine that morning, and found no one in Richard’s office. Someone else (Gayle Rubin, who much later would become Mrs. Sandy Reisenbach) helped me find my office. I settled in, waiting for Richard to arrive.

In a half hour or so his assistant, Phyllis Mortimer, showed up and, in what I was to discover was her normal manner, gushed and chattered and made a big fuss over me, giving me a philodendron in a pot for my desk. (I kept that little plant going for my entire career at Warner Bros. – 24 years!)

Richard eventually showed up and, without much fanfare, asked me to write an analysis of a trailer test for the new Superman movie (Superman 2). That day I met some of the people I would work with for most of the next twenty years or more, including Joel Wayne, Joe Hyams, Rob Friedman, Mardi Marans, John Dartigue and many others.

I had a good first week at Warner Bros. and felt that I had made the right decision about leaving Fox. Richard was great – it was apparent right away that he was an exceptional market researcher and that I would learn a lot from him. I liked everyone there and they seemed to like me. It was a propitious beginning.

The next week went by quickly. Lynette and I were still settling into our new house, meeting some of the neighbors and discovering things about our neighborhood. The weekend came and went, and then Monday rolled around again. After work that day I went over to Alan’s house to watch Monday night football. The Miami Dolphins were playing the New England Patriots, and we were cheering for the Pats.

Sometime during the game, while Al and I were having a nice time together, Howard Cosell announced that John Lennon had been shot dead in front of the Dakota, his apartment building in New York City. Of course we were shocked, and devastated.

We were fans and admirers of John; we supported him as an artist and as a worker for peace in the world. That he had been assassinated was one of those events that evoke the classic sequence of responses - disbelief, denial, anger, et cetera. We were stunned and deeply saddened.

After moments of shock and disbelief, we turned off the television and drove to a nearby Mexican restaurant where we had a couple of drinks together. I don’t recall that we had much to say to each other, but it was good to be there with my brother during those couple of hours after hearing what had happened. That terrible event was an awful punctuation in what was a real turning point in my life.

Lynette and I found a few days around Christmas for a quick visit to Kentucky to see her family. We stayed with Amy and Alan in the house we had helped them move into when we were there in 1977 at the beginning of our European trip. It was all very nice and restful.

One afternoon Lynette decided to take a nap. I was reading in the living room when Amy came in and asked me if I thought Lynette might be pregnant. I was taken aback by this, but Amy noted that Lynette had been tired and sleepy since we had arrived a few days earlier, and that this was sometimes an early indicator of pregnancy.

Amy and I went to a drugstore and bought a couple of home pregnancy tests, and when Lynette woke up Amy told her what she thought. Lynette took the tests and, sure enough, they turned out positive. Yikes. The hat trick was now complete – new job, new house, and now, new roles as mother and father. The last part of 1980 was certainly a time of change for us!

Of course everyone was very excited for us…in Kentucky and, soon, back home as well. Lynette found a pediatrician and we learned that the baby would arrive in July. We soon found ourselves in natural childbirth training classes at the Presbyterian Hospital in Whittier.

When the time was right Lynette had an ultrasound scan; it showed that the baby was healthy and also revealed its sex. I didn’t want to know whether it was a boy or a girl, and Lynette said she felt the same way. I enjoyed the mystery of it, and thought about both possibilities. We had a list of names for both.

Meanwhile, things were going along well at Warner Bros. The ad/pub department, including Market Research, moved from the little old building at the back of the lot to a brand new, modern edifice referred to as “the Glass Building,” in the middle of January, 1981. We had offices on the second floor.

Lynette and I attended our natural childbirth classes, purchased all the things we would need for the baby, and made sure that we would be ready when he or she arrived. It was hot that year, and when summer came around Lynette was pretty large with child. She liked to lie on a raft in the pool at Jayne and Bernie’s house and let the water take some of the weight off of her.

Finally the time came when Lynette began to think that the baby was coming – about three weeks later than had been predicted. We packed up, went to the hospital and checked into the natural child birth suite, feeling pleased that we had chosen to have our child born the way nature had intended, with no drugs or other artificial elements. We had practiced and we were prepared.

But sometimes the best laid plans don’t work out. Lynette had a hard labor, nineteen hours of it, and despite our breathing in and out as instructed in class, the baby wouldn’t come. The doctors decided that the baby was in danger and that a Caesarian delivery was necessary.

They took Lynette into the operating room and, not long after, they came out with our little girl. What a thrill. Lynette would need some time to recover from anesthesia, and Jayne and I went across the street to a coffee shop for something to eat. We had a nice visit and I was glad that she was there.

We named our little girl Claire, after much debate and inability to choose a name. We finally had to agree on one on our fifth day in the hospital, as they wouldn’t let us out without a name to put on the birth certificate. On that last day I went to the hospital with a new list of names, including Claire, as I had been reading a book about the poet Shelley that mentioned Mary Shelley’s cousin Claire Claremont, and that name seemed just right to me. It has turned out to be just right for our girl, too.

The next few years were as busy as could be. Our second daughter, Emily, was born just seventeen months after Claire, and now we were a well-rounded family of four. The house that we had expected to be for the two of us was soon a full house.

Lynette’s mother came for lengthy stays after each girl was born, to help Lynette while she recovered from the C-sections, which was very good in many ways. The girls got to know their grandmother from the very start, and Lynette had needed help in getting back on her feet. And I enjoyed the great meals she prepared and the spirit of care that she brought to our home.

My career at WB was moving along well. I worked on many exciting movies (and many that were far from exciting), travelled to lots of different places for test screenings and research conferences, and felt that I was an integral part of the marketing process at the studio.

The next ten years flew by.