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June 16, 2008

Earl Church

    Earl Church was born in 1900 and died in 1965.  He and his wife Chloris lived next door to us when I was born.  They had no children, and they were always Uncle Earl and Aunt Chloris to me.  When he'd come over my brother and I would run and hug him and he'd always have a piece of candy for us in his shirt pocket...right next to the Chesterfields.

    Earl owned a company called "Fresno Concrete Pipe."

    It seemed like he always had time for us.  He talked to us.  He had a cabin near the beach at Cayucas and we spent some glorious time there.

    The things that remind me of Uncle Earl are wrapped candy, highball glasses etched with flying ducks, polished rocks, fuchsias, roses, camping, skeet shooting, fishing, and lung cancer.

    We were living in Sacramento in 1964.  The phone rang and my dad talked for a long time.  He told us that Uncle Earl had lung cancer and he was going to die.  This was my first taste of mortality, and it hurt.  I wanted to do something, but there was nothing to do.  For some reason it was agreed upon by the powers that be that Earl would be lied to about the outcome of his cancer.  He was told that the surgery and the cobalt radiation would save him.

    We went to Fresno to visit him.  It was wonderful and horrible driving up to their house on Maroa Avenue.  I just didn't know what to expect.  But he seemed fine.  He still smiled, his balding head looked the same and his voice sounded the same.  But there was an oxygen bottle in the bedroom. And there was the cough.  The hacking cough that brought up blood into an endless chain of kleenex tissues.

    The adults all talked about what we were going to do when Earl got better:  the fishing trips, the camping, the coast.  Earl went along with the joke.

    Later that day he took me aside and asked me if I ever thought about smoking.  I said in my smug 13-year-old voice "I don't know."  He started unbuttoning his shirt and said:  "If you ever decide to smoke, remember this."  He showed me the scars and the stitches that went all the way around him.  He showed me the purple "x's" on his body in indelible ink that marked where the searing radiation had penetrated his body.

    He then said:  "I know the truth.  I know this is going to get me in the end, but please don't tell anyone I know...I don't want to upset them."  I can't even begin to describe how I felt.  I may as well have been on Mars.

    We went back to visit him two more times.  The last time he was in a hospital bed and wore an oxygen mask and his skin was yellow. His sense of humor and his love was still there...but he was so helpless.

    A while later I was watching TV.  The phone rang and my mom answered it.  I knew as soon as it rang that he was dead.

    My mom bought me my first suit to go to his funeral.  Ed Dodd walked me in to the funeral home and asked if I wanted to go up and look at him.  I couldn't do it.  I sat in the very last pew.  I kept looking at his profile above the edge of the casket.  I finally had to leave the room and went out into the parking lot and cried.

    He was put in a crypt on Belmont Avenue in the Chapel of the Light Mausoleum.  Very strange.  I remember so well walking with him past that very crypt when I had a piano recital in the chapel there.  I remember him looking up and saying "I've got too many friends in this place."

    I had written him a letter every single day since his diagnosis.  After his death I saw that Aunt Chloris had tucked the last six unopened letters behind the mantle clock.

September  23, 2007

    About seven years ago I made the decision to get out of food and into education.  After 25 years in food I went back to school.  Since I always hated school it was a real challenge...mostly to stay awake.  Education for teachers is mostly indoctrination into Doublespeak and Newspeak.  Educators take themselves very seriously, and believe me, they are not worth the effort it takes to seriously consider them.

    Education for teachers is about admitting to yourself and to the world that you are very sorry that you are white, and that you promise no spend your life groveling and apologizing for being white.  The technical term for this is "bullshit."

    Education is an industry...make no mistake about that.  It is the most poorly run industry in the nation.  I was very surprised to find that it is not the fault of the teachers (I really believe that.).  The vast majority of school administrators are incredible fools who find themselves in a playground constructed of money.  They are very highly paid, have incredible retirement and benefit plans, and treat teachers, students and parents with contempt.  The unwritten motto of school administrators is:  "This is a great racket...if only we could figure out a way to get rid of these damned kids."

    The magic of education for administrators is in ADA.  Average Daily Attendance.  The feds (that's YOU) pay for a warm body in a seat on a daily basis.  The total money involved is enormous.  The reason principals don't suspend or expel more problem students is that they lose ADA.  It's all about money, not about education.

    I have learned NEVER to vote for a school bond.  Never.  School districts have plenty of money...they just waste it.  I believe that if an independent auditor checked the books of most individual schools in large districts they would uncover criminal misuse of funds on a massive scale.

    Like most teachers, I started out as a high-minded idealist intent on making a difference in the world.  It took about six months of reality for that to be beaten out of me.

    Right now I work in Sacramento for one of the largest districts...it's run by an Old Girls Network that specializes in lining their own pockets.

    For all this, I love teaching, because in between those times when you are forced to tow the company line (to the detriment of the future of our nation), there are those moments when you just know you are making a positive difference in a kid's life.  For most teachers, it's still all about the kids.

April 12, 2007

Imus at the Beginning

    I guess it was back in the 70's when Don Imus was just starting out in radio in Sacramento.  I worked at some menial job at the Sacramento Union newspaper at the time.  I was in the Service Department.  We put the ads together and got the art and copy and did the layouts back in the early days of "cold type."  We had an interesting character working with us back then:  Mike Dante.  Mike was an independent contractor who sold advertising for a tab section that was devoted to local restaurants.  He spent a lot of time in Service because he put together his own layout and ads.

    Mike would make the rounds of restaurants (as long as they had a bar) and sponge drinks and food and then hit them up for advertising.  For the price of an ad Mike would also provide them with syrupy prose posing as restaurant "reviews."  Physically, Mike bore an incredible likeness to The Penguin on Batman.

    Imus was apparently getting desperate to find new ways to promote himself and his radio show, so he got together with Mike and set up a stunt where a "villain" (Imus) in a cape would attack the Penguin Dante in a restaurant and somehow they would start a media rivalry.

    The stunt went off fine, but one or two self-important local drunks (a.k.a. Fans of Mike) decided that it simply wasn't fitting that someone of Mike Dante's otherwise sterling character should stoop to such an undignified level.  Now here's Dante, a dandruff-encrusted heavy-smoking hard-drinking hack who put the squeeze on restaurant owners for free food and booze and money for advertising...and he struck a post sadly reminiscent of Imus today:  repentant.

    Mike put out a special statement in his tabloid section "apologizing" for his undignified performance.  Mike faded away in later years, and Imus...well, you know that part of the story.

March 12, 2007

Reno and Amtrak

    Last weekend we (my wife and myself) and five friends took the train from Sacramento to Reno.  The train ride was great.  The train was clean and the ride was smooth.  What a way to see the Sierras!  Of course it took 3 times as long as in a car, but time was definitely not of the essence.  The last time I had taken a scheduled train ride was when I used to ride the Daylight from Fresno to Sacramento...and to show you just how long ago that was, it was pulled by a steam engine.

    The Amtrak depot in Reno is right in the heart of things on Virginia Street, and all the clubs are just a few steps away.  Unless, of course, you choose to stay at the old MGM Grand, now being called the "Grand Sierra Resort and Casino."  No problem, since it's a casino and hotel, they'll pick us up.  Nope.  No service to Amtrak.  Catch a cab or a city bus.

    The GSR has lost its luster.  As it awaits conversion to a time share the old MGM is looking a bit shabby.  The restaurants, aside from the Chevy's, are truly second rate.  A glorified group of strip mall restaurants came to mind.  And now the really great part:  the time-share conversion.  Question:  What kind of an idiot would but a hotel room in Reno?  Reno is a dirty, windy town with no real reason to exist now that California gaming is big time.  The empty buildings on Virginia Street stand like broken teeth in a long-dead skull.  Aside from cheap labor (no unions) and favorable taxes, why would anyone choose to live in that town?

    Then there's the GSR casino itself.  First, there's something inherently wrong with a casino where there aren't smokers everywhere.  I don't smoke, but smoking, casinos and bars need smokers.  Next, there's this business of not having slot machines that accept coins.  When the Indian casinos first opened in California that was the thing I didn't like about them...and now Nevada joins the "no coin" crowd.  There isn't the noise of jackpots and dropping coins...it just isn't a real casino.

    We didn't have time to make it to Louis' place on 4th...that's the real old Reno.  But then again, I always favored them for lunch over dinner.  When drinking there with Jim Hardy and Louis the rule was you had to leave when even in that dark bar Louis' nose looked bright red.  Picon Punch.  The old days.

January 16, 2007

Juanita M.

Greetings.
    I read your blog from October 2006 mentioning Juanita Musson, the restaurateur. BTW, she had restaurants in the Sonoma Valley, not the Napa Valley. Unless you count the ones in Vallejo and Benicia.
    I am writing to ask you if she really did die as you say in your blog. I can't find out anything from the newspapers online yet, I am still searching. I worked for Juanita when I was 18, and boy, was that an experience!
    Any info you can give me about Juanita is greatly appreciated.
Kathryn

    You know what?  I just assumed she must be dead by now...and apparently I was wrong.  I have since read that Juanita Musson is alive and not particularly well and living in a motel somewhere in the Sonoma Valley.  From what I have discovered a long-time fan put her up in a long-term room.

    You're right (of course) about the valley being the Sonoma.  To someone as ignorant as I am it's all the Napa Valley once you turn right off I-80 and cross the hill.  Hell, it's all vineyards and wineries, right?  But then I'm the guy that considers that anything south of Bakersfield is Los Angeles.

    How old is Juanita, anyway?  I'm guessing she must be in her 80's at least!  Oh, well, she has achieved a degree of immortality.

    What is it about the restaurant business that attracts outlandish personalities?  I notice a lot of similarities between people in the food business and people in the newspaper business.  Newsmen want to see their name in print over a hundred thousand times a day, and restaurant people want their name in the paper, on menus on neon signs, and on the lips of the public.  Hell, they're both a lot of fun!

    Too many of today's restaurant people are just corporate paper-pushers who don't know a customer from a crouton.  That's the biggest danger in the cancerous spread of chain restaurants across the country.  Along with regional cuisine we are losing character and characters.  Every once in a while an independent sees success, and I heartily support those people whenever I can.

    Bring back the independent house, the outlandish character, the bigger than life hard-drinking personalities...bring back Juanita!

January 4, 2007

Saddam's Execution

    I have to admit to being amused at the objections to either Saddam's execution or the televising of the execution.  The man got what he deserved, and the public...including US...deserved to be able to opt to see it.  It amazes me to watch touchy-feely types disdain reality.  It must be nice to live in a world where you can pretend that people don't get blown up, where children don't suffer and Muslims fit nicely into our polite society.

    Saddam was held accountable for his actions.  Accountable.  Accountability is a concept that is lost on modern America.  Nothing is anyone's own fault.  If I slip in Safeway it's the fault of the guy that sold the refrigeration system to them, and certainly not mine for just slipping.  We're now so far down the slope of unreality that I don't think we'll ever recover.

    Saddam and Tojo and a handful of history's murderers have met a just end.  Stalin and Mao died in bed.  We even let Hirohito go to Disneyland before he died.  I don't care if capital punishment is a deterrent...it is what Saddam deserved, and I'm glad I got to watch it.

December 12, 2006

Resnick

    So Michael Resnick finally met his fate...sort of.  Resnick got off pretty light in view of the charges; however, since he had turned "state's evidence" his sentence seems appropriate, if not stiff.  Looking at his personal life of late, including the tragic suicide of his mother, I'd say this man has suffered enough.

    The cry for Miller's blood continues, and for the life of me, given what I have heard, I can't figure out how this man continues to be bullet proof.  I am willing to consider the possibility that Jim Miller is innocent and was merely a trusting executive a la Warren Harding.  Miller hasn't been charged with anything, and many who email this site have a serious ax to grind...so maybe it's time to leave the man alone.

December 6, 2006

Practical Jokes

    Playing a practical joke is another term for being an asshole.  Some people just have no idea where to draw the line, and Dave Ramsey was one of those guys.  Don't get me wrong:  Dave Ramsey was in most respects a prince among men.  Dave was part of a small group of people who went to Grant High in Sacramento and got into plenty of trouble while doing it.  The others in the group were Ron Howard (went on to foodservice greatness),  Duane Pettibone (went on to run the Reno Convention and Visitor's Bureau and the Livestock Events Center), and another guy who was a professional rodeo rider and I can't remember his name.  Ron Howard and the guy I can't remember are still alive, Dave and Duane are dead.

    Dave was a cowboy at heart, and ran a tack store in Sacramento.  Dave Ramsey is the only guy I know who has been thrown off a passenger train.  Turns out Conductors are like Gods.  Gods who don't like people having sex on their trains.  Funny thing is that it happened to Ramsey TWICE.  Once he and the woman were thrown out in the middle of the night somewhere near Mt. Shasta and damned near froze to death.

    Dave finished off his life in the kind of horrible pain that only arthritis can muster up.  He was in severe pain every minute of his life for years, and through it all he did his best to be friendly, courteous and just a plain nice guy.

    Before arthritis claimed him he and Rodeo decided they would play a very funny trick on a mutual friend of theirs who was getting married.  The groom had built a brand new house in the country somewhere near Merle Haggard's place with plenty of land around it.  As the story goes the bride had never seen the new digs.  While they were on their honeymoon Duane and Dave and their buddies got three or four (does it matter?) pigs (full grown), and did what any friend would do:  they turned them lose in the new house.

    Apparently the boys completely forgot about what they'd done, but when the groom returned it all came back.  The honeymoon lasted almost a month.  A month in July.  July in the northern Sacramento Valley frequently turns in temps of around 115 and above.  Apparently the aroma in the home was a bit off.  The pigs had torn the house to pieces.  They ate the furniture, broke the toilets off looking for water, and I'll just pretend that they escaped, but I'm pretty sure they died there.

    It's good to have friends.

December 5, 2006

A Christmas Gift

    This year I thought I'd give myself a very special Christmas present.  I thought and thought and finally decided that "oral surgery" would be great.  Yesterday my wife hauled me over to an outpatient surgery center and I filled out the paper work (and I always love the part when they come to "other diseases" and I list Malaria) and was escorted to a nice contoured leather chair where I entertained myself by counting ceiling tiles.

    At last!  The big moment was here.  Two people came into the room carrying clipboards and paperwork.  Now since I'd already filled out the paperwork I couldn't figure out what this was going to be about.  Maybe they were going to sell me aluminum siding or a nice sunroom.  Nope.  They wanted me to sign a release that let them off of the hook if I croaked during the general anesthesia and a credit card form for the $500 not covered by insurance.  Like I had a choice at this point.  I did finally get to meet the surgeon.  She was about 28 and an absolute drop-dead beauty.  Her two assistants were moderately skanky blondes, around 23.

    Next I got escorted (I get to use that word twice today) to the actual surgery room where the two skanks strapped me to the table and hooked up lots of tubes and wires.  I made a comment about this being what lethal injection must be like and was promptly told that they hear that all the time.

    Just as I was making plans about how I was going to try as hard as I could to stay awake and see how long I could hold out I woke up and it was all over.  Man, did I feel good.  If feeling good means you could sleep the rest of the day next to a pile driver or a dripping faucet.

    Today is day number two and I must say I have felt better.  Recently.  Before I went under I told her (the doctor) that I wanted the strongest pain killer she could muster.  I told her Vicoden didn't work for me.  Well, I'm not sure what she gave me, but I'm here (sort of) today to tell you that it WORKS.

November 27, 2006

The Auction Yard Cafe

    Dave Pennington and his wife and his mother ran a restaurant in Williams, California, called "The Auction Yard Cafe."  Dave was a good man.  A church-going man.  A man who knew he was right with God and that everybody else was going to hell.  To say Dave was preachy would be like saying World War I was "bad."

    The Auction Yard sat next to an offramp from I-5 so it got lots of business.  Truckers loved it because it had a huge dirt area around it so it was easy to park and turn doubles around.  The parking lot had holes the size of man holes that were about 2 feet deep.  The mud in the rainy season was unbelievable.  Oh, and it's important to know that it sat with the town limits running through the parking lot.  The actual restaurant was outside of Williams.

    A side note would be that Dave had a chef named Guy Ramey, (whose dad had been a professional pool player) that eventually went to work for Carrows on Bradshaw in Sacramento and used so many drugs he got paranoid, became convinced that the waitresses were talking about him, planted listening devices in the women's locker room, and eventually skipped town with a few days receipts...and some money he borrowed from me.

    Dave ran his business so efficiently that he had time left over to run other people's businesses.  Williams is a small farming community that features rice, sugar beets, tomatoes, illegal aliens, Granzella's Deli (a real restaurant that makes great olives), a weird antique store run by a shirt-tail relative, and a volunteer fire department.

    Every year the fire department had a big barbeque fundraiser.  After umpteen years of fundraising the affair caught the attention of Dave and his church.  They served BEER at the bbq.  Dave talked to God and they agreed that the beer had to go.  For some reason this pissed the fire department off and ruined the bbq.

    A short while later Dave's restaurant caught fire.  He called the fire department.  They quickly responded.  They stopped at the city limits, which, as you may remember, ran through his parking lot.  After ruining the fire department fun and funding they didn't want to rain on Dave's parade or his fire by stepping across the town line.

    There's a Denny's where the Auction Yard used to be.

November 24, 2006

Thanksgiving

    Most Thanksgivings we went "up north" from Fresno to the metropolis of Grimes.  At least we went to Grimes and the Kilgore Ranch after Frances finally croaked.  Before that we went to Nevada and Gerald's ranch just outside of Dunnigan.  It was always very cold and very foggy.  If the fog broke the sky was darkened by millions of geese heading to and from the Graylodge Wildlife Refuge.  The countryside was intensely green, the rains having given new life to the brown California summer grasses.

    It was pheasant hunting season so a lot of time was spent plodding across the muddy fields in search of ringnecks.  Pheasant and dumplings was pretty good except for all the shot you had to pick out of your teeth.

    In 1963 we were at Grimes.  Grandpa Kilgore had gone and married the bitch Vivian which absolutely ensured that the kids would find something to do on our own.  There was one tv in the big two-story house, but cable didn't exist, and even though the antenna was mounted on a 50' mast the reception way out here in the country was really bad.

    A weird thing had happened just a day or so ago:  the President of the United States was murdered.  The tv was on all the time and the kids kept trying to sneak a peek at what was going on.  What I really remember about that particular day was that somehow a few of us grandkids had gotten into the huge kitchen/living room and my grandfather and dad and a few others were watching the snowy picture.  All of a sudden my dad jumped up and said:  "They just shot the son of a bitch!"  It was the famous first murder on live tv.  Pretty tame now, but seeing Lee Harvey Oswald take a slug in the gut from Jack Ruby was big stuff back then.

    Since that time, little by little, the world seems to have gone and got itself a lot nastier.

November 17, 2006

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane

    My grandpa Kilgore was married three times.  The first was my mother's mother.  Marion (yep, spelled wrong) died of what might have been a brain aneurism before she was 40. By all accounts my real grandma was a wonderful woman with a great sense of humor.   His second wife, Frances, hated people.  Specifically she hated my grandpa's three kids and anyone associated with them.  Frances was so vicious that all three kids wound up being raised by my Great Aunt Nevada, who was my grandma's sister.  The last wife was Vivian Dalton.  Vivian was a curious woman.  She hated us grandkids, to say the least.  She was mean and spiteful in all her dealings.  My grandpa could sure pick them.  I suppose it would have been a real good story to tell a psychiatrist.

    Vivian was very active in the Eastern Star, and went through the California "chairs" to become the head Poobah called the "Worthy Grand Matron" of the state.  Mostly she was just a mega bitch.  A mega bitch with a pasted on phony smile and huge formal dresses for Eastern Star.

    Vivian was curious in other ways.  She was a pilot way back in the 1940's and 1950's.  She played the violin and piano.  She owned a gift shop in the little town of Williams.  She invented a waterless hand cleaner and marketed it.  She was from Oklahoma and I think she owned an oil well too.  When we first met her she owned the airport in Williams.  It was mostly a place for ag pilots...cowboys in the air, covered with scars from crashes and chemical burns.

    The airport was surrounded by rice fields and when the fields were flooded it was like being on an island.  Her huge ranch style house was in the center of the island.  Northern California + Summer + Water = billions of mosquitoes.

    We, the grandkids and our parents, my mom Bonnie, my aunt Angenette, and my uncle Mick and their respective spouses were all formally introduced to Vivian in the 1950's at a bbq at her house.  The adults were doing field research in intensive alcohol consumption so they told us to play outside.  First, there was nothing to do.  They wouldn't let us near the planes.  There were no toys.  We were dressed up to show Vivian that we could be presentable in public.  And there were the mosquitoes.  A truly unbelievable number of mosquitoes enjoying the fine humid 100 degree weather.  The mosquitoes would rise in dark brown clouds from the rice and attack the poor horses...and us.  We couldn't even jump in the irrigation ditch to cool off and escape the blood suckers.  Just sit and watch people drink and laugh through the glass door.

    I guess that one by one we must have asked to come inside, because Viv got sick of us bugging people.  Vivian was one of those people that was mean to kids when no one was looking.  A quick slap, an unkind word under her breath, then a phony smile when another adult turned our way.  Vivian announced that she was sick of our whining and that she would take care of the problem.  She made a call over to one of the hangars and a pilot fired up an old biplane and took to the air.  We were told to stay outside.

    The plane made a low swoop across the house and we felt it raining.  It was raining small sticky droplets of fly-spray smelling stuff.  It was raining DDT.  We got covered with the stuff, the barbeque, sitting there smoking away (but covered) got covered with poison, the cars got messed up.  It didn't even taste good.

    With a roar the pilot made a second pass about 50 feet over us and positively drenched us in the stuff.  All the while the adults were working on their gins and whiskeys and ignoring us...except Viv.  She kept giving us wicked smiles out of the corner of her mouth as she kept turning to enjoy our misery.

    After a third pass the plane landed and we got to enjoy some barbequed crap a la DDT.

November 14, 2006

Cooling Off

    A few times we got to spend part of the summer at my grandmother's house in Iowa.  She lived in a big white house on half a block in a little town tucked away near the corner of South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska:  Akron.  Akron was the epitome of a sleepy little town.  Farming was the only industry I could see or hear.

    The town had two cemeteries, the Catholic one and the "other" one.  My family was buried in the Catholic one.  Down Main Street there were a small handful of businesses, and they included a bar and a bowling alley.  My grandfather used to own the bar, but, of course, he died a long time ago.

    There was (and still is) an American Legion hall named after a relative.  The Albert E. Hoschler Post of The American Legion was named after the first man in the state of Iowa to die during WWI.  The poor kid got blown up almost as soon as he set foot in Europe.

    Being from California I was amazed by humidity.  By late afternoon the air was so thick you could hardly breathe.  Nothing you did would keep you cool.  There was no air conditioning in the house, so we did one of two things:  we sat in the backyard or on the porch and tried to stay motionless; however, the incredible number of bugs made that pretty difficult.

    The other thing you could do was to wander down the wide street and find one of the two air conditioned places in town.  The bowling alley.  The other one was the bar, and that was forbidden to us.

    We'd get a few bucks from the folks and go bowling.  We had absolutely no idea how to score.  No matter.  The pinsetters would frequently jam up and, quite amazingly, they let us kids go back and crawl around the exposed moving machinery and slam things around until it started moving again.   In retrospect I still can't believe we didn't lose an arm or a leg in that stuff.  The noise was phenomenal.  Ah, the days before lawsuits, back when it was still fun and adventurous to be a kid.

    Back to the other cool place in town.  The bar.  We'd walk by the door when an adult would push it open and feel the forbidden cold, smoky air roll out, and hear the siren call of leather dice cups slamming onto the bar and the sound of glasses and bottles banging on the wood.  I knew that behind that closed door my people were waiting, and when I got old enough I would join them.  And I did.

November 12, 2006

Swamp Coolers

    Swamp coolers made the house smell good.  Sure, they cooled things off in the dry Fresno heat, but they also smelled good.  Every Spring dad would climb up on the roof and Mark and I would follow.  Grabbing onto the gutter and putting your first knee on the shingles and then the wonder of being on the roof.  The top of the world!  The view!  You could spy on the whole neighborhood from up there.  Those weird vents.  Try to look down them.  Listen to the echo down them.  Yell down them.  Twang the guy wires on the TV antenna.  Dad pulled the panels off the cooler and took out the old excelsior pads and put the new ones in.  You got to see the secret workings of the cooler.  The pump, the water and probably some magic.

    Back down.  Getting off a roof was always trickier than getting up.  You had to trust that the top of the ladder, which you couldn't see, was there, and that the ladder wouldn't tip over.  You always wound up getting splinters in your knees from the shingles.  Looking up again at the roof it didn't look as high.

    The day would be hot.  Fresno hot.  You get home.  You go into the bathroom and twist the little tiny valve behind the toilet to start the water running into the cooler.  Then you turned on the switch in the hall that was way up higher than the light switches.  The first bit of air was hot.  Then it got moist and cool.  And good smelling.  Somehow it was a mellow cool...not the artic blast of refrigeration.  The air was always fresh inside the house.

    I suppose that swamp coolers wouldn't work in the more humid clime of Sacramento...but then again, maybe I'm just spoiled now.

November 11, 2006

Shoes

     Kids' shoes could have been made of metal.  They were hard, hard, hard.  If you kicked another kid with your shoes on he really got kicked.  There weren't any soft or canvas shoes, at least not in our neighborhood.

     Buster Brown and his dog Tige.  There weren't any malls so we my mom took us downtown.  Shoe shopping involved getting your feet measured sideways and lengthwise and then the guy pushing down with his thump on your toes through the hard shoe for some reason.  Then you'd walk a few steps and always slip because the leather soles were slippery as ice.

     The main reason shopping for shoes was fun was the X-Ray machine.  Yep.  A real live x-ray machine, unshielded and unregulated and pretty much left on all the time.  The customers and the poor salesmen were being x-rayed all day long.  I understand that many shoe salesmen developed various cancers related to these wonderful devices.  Believe it or not the same guy that invented the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile invented the shoe x-ray pictured here.

     There were three view-ports.  You could look through one, your mother through one, and the salesman through the other, and see your toes wiggling around...actually you saw your toe bones and the shoe nails moving around.  Pretty cool.  The problem was that we were little kids and couldn't stick our feet in the machine and see through the top at the same time.  No problem.  My brother would stick his hands and feet in the bottom and I'd look at his skeleton through the top while my mom bought shoes.  Then I'd play in the x-ray field.

      It's hard to imagine childhood without the joys of ionizing radiation.

November 10, 2006

Veteran's Day

    Here's a tribute to Veterans everywhere.  I was named after my uncle, Stephen Vincent Hoschler.  He was named after his grandfather, Indian interpreter Stephen Burke.  I don't remember my uncle Steve.  I know that he was my dad's favorite brother.  My dad served in the Marine's during WWII, but Steve was too young.  Korea was his war.  Steve joined the Navy and served aboard the U.S.S. Partridge, a minesweeper off the Korean coast.  One day short of my second birthday we got a phone call.  Uncle Steve was killed in action.  We were going to have spaghetti that night.  My mom dropped the colander and it slid down the drain.

    My grandmother framed his Purple Heart and kept it in her living room in Akron.  He was buried in the Catholic cemetery there in the frozen Iowa ground.  Nobody ever found out how he died.  Until my cousin Kim in South Dakota posted a message on a Korean War internet site.  Did anybody know anything about Steve "Shorty" Hoschler aboard aboard the Partridge?

    Within 20 minutes he received an email from someone who served on the Partridge with Steve.  He grabbed onto the same piece of debris that Steve was holding onto in the cold water after the ship was blown up.  Both he and Steve were put on a hospital ship.  He said he wasn't expected to live but Steve was.  That night he watched my uncle Steve die.

    Isn't the internet amazing?  Aren't war veterans amazing?

November 9, 2006

World War II

    My dad never talked about the war. He didn't have to go because he was too old when it started. He enlisted in the Marines, was trained to be a Navigator on a bomber. I think it was a B17. He fought his way across the Pacific.  He kept an old trunk in the garage and my brother and I would play with the stuff inside. There were a couple of silk Japanese flags that he said you were supposed to wave if you got shot down in enemy territory. There was lots and lots of Japanese occupation money. There was a pair of binoculars he used, and some pretty cool but arcane navigation equipment.

    When I was very young my dad used to like to watch "Victory at Sea" and other war documentaries. As he grew older he stopped enjoying watching war movies. The older he got the more bitter he became about the waste of war. To him, using young men for "cannon fodder" was a sin. During the war he found out his wife (before my mother) was screwing her way around Sacramento. He divorced her when he got back after the war. He never spoke ill of her. She died a very wealthy woman, and my dad was saddened by her death. I went to the funeral home and looked at her for the only time in my life. I wondered what they were like together.

    He called her a "crazy Russian red-head." The times they must have had! I really wish I knew my father better.

    The war scarred my father in some way I can never know. He saw and did things that affected the balance of his life. He carried the burden in secret, and it was his choice to do so. My dad was a very private man, and I think the horrors of war, coupled with his abusive Prussian father made him that way.

    After he died my mother discovered a stack of papers in a box. Apparently during the entire war he did something that soldiers were not supposed to do: he kept a diary. My mother made a copy of it and gave one to me and one to my brother. I haven't read it yet. I just wasn't ready...I think I'm ready now. When I dig out the papers I'll post them on this site. You can read them for the first time along with me, as my dad fights his way across the Pacific.

November 8, 2006

Grandpa's Road Trip

    My maternal grandfather, Grandpa Kilgore, went to a military boarding school in Marin County, the Hitchcock Military Academy.  I've got the old yearbooks and it looks like it was a pretty classy place.  For a while his roommate was William Randolph Hearst, Jr.  Apparently George Hearst (the party animal) also was there.  Grandpa said Bill was real straight-laced, but that George was fat and funny and drunk most of the time.  Wow, a fat drunk billionaire...if only I had been there.

    My grandfather told me a story about the time he took an Easter Vacation trip with the Hearst boys and another kid.  Apparently they had a brand new car for the four of them.  The idea was to start in British Columbia and drive south winding up in Mazatlan, Mexico, stopping at Hearst properties along the way.

    They left the Hearst house in B.C. and made it to Wyntoon.  Wyntoon is still owned by the Hearst family.  It's on about 50,000 acres on the McCloud River in Northern California, and the houses are in a cluster.  It's designed to look like a fairytale Bavarian village.  Gingerbread house (3 stories) and all.

    After leaving Wyntoon they were headed south with the intention of stopping in San Francisco and then San Simeon.  Around Eureka the car broke down.  So what does a normal person do when a car breaks down?  I would guess you'd either try to fix it or you'd get someone to fix it for you.  They used shank's pony to make it into town.  Did they go to a car repair shop?  Nope.  They went to a bank.  One of the Hearst boys went up to the teller, who was behind a grill and wore a green visor, and told him he was George Hearst and he wanted money.  The teller looked incredulous and laughed.  Then he said:  "How much money do you want?"  Hearst replied:  "How the hell do I know?  How much does a car cost?"  After getting some sort of identification the teller called the manager who looked things over and said they'd telegraph San Francisco for instructions.

    After a long wait the manager came around front and my grandpa said his face was pale white, and he had banded stacks of hundred dollar bills.  Hell, that must have been like thousand dollar bills now.  "Mr. Hearst, I'm going to start counting and you tell me when to stop."  All the boys collapsed into laughter...but they got enough money to buy a brand new car.  They just abandoned the old one by the side of the road.

    They spent the night in San Francisco at the Hearst digs, and made it to San Simeon.  I don't know what state the emerging Hearst Castle was in at the time, but they spent the night there.  They were going to continue the trip, but they got a telegram that said the other kid's mother had died, so they trip was abandoned.

November 7, 2006

Coke

    We lived on Coca Cola.  There just wasn't any Pepsi.  There was the occasional Nehi Orange, but mostly it was six-ounce green glass bottles of Coke.  Another factor was that Ed Dodd was the manager of the Coca Cola bottling plant in Merced...we had to be loyal.

    At the Builder's Exchange the coke machine looked like a fat refrigerator that you opened in the front and the bottles would slide down to the right.  In front of the gas station down the street from our house was a better one:  the bottles sat in ice cold water.  It looked like a freezer chest and when you opened the top you saw about a hundred bottles of pop all lined up in a metal collar affair that held them by the neck.  And up to that neck they were swimming in the coldest water you can imagine.

    On a hot summer day in Fresno when the temperature was well over 100 nothing in the world was better than that heavy bottle of Coke.  Sugar?  Caffeine?  Nobody really thought much about it back then, and besides, this was before "super-sizing."  The bottles look like miniatures today, but they were the perfect size back then.

    Next to every coke machine was a stack of wooden coke cases that held the returned bottles.  A bottle of Coke cost a nickel. A nickel wasn't an amazing bargain, because a penny would still buy stuff back then.  A penny dropped in the gutter didn't stay there long.  Gum cost a penny.  Real "Ford" gum, whatever the hell that meant.  If you were rich you could also get a small handful of pistachio nuts painted...some painted red and some painted white.  Real heavy paint.  It probably had lead in it.  I don't know what's in "red dye #40" but we must have had "red dye #1" back then.

    One hundred-ten in the shade, finding a shady place to stand in bare feet, holding your bike up with one hand and playing with the bell, making it go real slow with your thumb, "ding, ding ding, ding".  Watching the cars zoom down Cedar Avenue past the Boysenberry field.  Cars turning into wavy heat mirages in the distance.  The Coke tasted good.

November 6, 2006

Skate Keys

    Come summer every kid wore a skate key around his neck.  All summer long.  Skate keys were properly hung on a shoestring.  Sure, you could use a piece of string or a chain, but real kids used shoestrings.

    For the people who might not be familiar with skate keys, they were basically a small wrench.  Metal, unpainted, about two inches long, had a stop sign-shaped hole in the middle for the bottom of the skate and the end was for clamping the skate to your shoes.

    Every kid skated in Fresno.  Nobody stayed inside.  Not everyone had a TV.  There were only 3 channels (!).  There was nothing on during the day for kids.  You played outside.  And by the way, there were NO fat kids.

    The skates we had were made of metal and were designed to clamp onto hard shoes.  You wore your oldest pair of shoes because they were going to get really beat up.  And every kid had hard shoes.  Buster Browns. First you adjusted the length of the skate to your shoe (you really only did this once, unless you had a brother or sister who stole your skates), and that's when you used that hole on the side of the skate key.  Then you strapped the skate around the top of your foot and closed two clamps around your toes with the end of the skate key.  The skates would frequently come loose so you needed to keep that key with you for when your toe clamps came loose.

    Then you flew.  Faster.  Faster.  Faster!  Corner!!  Click-click.  Click-click.  Down the sidewalk.  Driveways were great because they didn't have lines in them and you could get going real fast.  The best place, the very very best place, was Fresno State.  Fresno State was a COLLEGE.  It was WAY down Cedar Avenue, and you had to be really determined to get there.  You couldn't do it on skates because most of the way was dirt and sand.  Sand because when you took away the canals, Fresno was a desert.

    So we rode our bikes.  Fat tired bikes that we could just about change the tires on in the dark because we did it so many times.  There were these things called "puncture vines" that could put a hole in your hard shoe or your bike tire growing everywhere.  We put this goop in the tubes to plug up the holes but we patched those tubes frequently.

    Past the Episcopalian Cathedral that was being built.  Past Harpain's Dairy.  Finally...the biggest expanse of wide, super-smooth, seldom seamed, concrete in the world:  Fresno State College.  Pretty much deserted in the summer.  We skated like hell.  Sometimes you would get going so fast you couldn't stop and you smashed into a chain link fence the wrong way and a skate wheel would get stuck in the fence.  Sometimes you'd hit the ground and get a pretty bad scrape.  War wounds.

    When the day was winding down and the sky was turning red we'd  sit down on the cool grass at the corner of Cedar and Princeton and take off our skates.  We sat when we did it, and we stayed sitting down for a while after we took them off.  We didn't want to start walking because your legs felt like they were made of lead when deprived of your metal wings.  We laughed and threw grass at each other, and then went to Bruce's house for some of Elaine's Kool-Aid.  But first we put our skate keys back around our necks.

November 5, 2006

Studebaker

    Our first car was a Studebaker Champion.  It had a bullet nose and it was the color of lima beans. My folks bought it brand new at the factory in South Bend, Indiana, in 1948 and drove it back to California.  That car made cross-country trips umpteen times in its long life.

    The car had some interesting features, as I remember.  The driver and the passenger could open these little scoops on their side of the car that would blast fresh air around your feet.  They had screens on them so bugs didn't get in.  The starter was activated by flooring the clutch.  That seemed like a pretty good idea since you had to put disengage the clutch to start it anyway.  In the back seat each passenger had a compartment on the side that served as a large arm rest and opened to dump boxes of kleenex and other junk into.

    This was definitely the economy model, so a few things were left off.  The car didn't have an automatic transmission.  It didn't have an FM radio.  It didn't have an AM radio.  It didn't have an air conditioner.  It didn't have a defroster.  It didn't have a heater. No turn signal...signaling when it was cold or raining was a real treat.

    Winters without a heater or defroster were pretty uncomfortable.  Especially on those few trips we made to the midwest.  Summers without air conditioning were pretty uncomfortable.  Especially on trips across the Mojave Desert.  Driving across the desert back "in the day" was very daunting.  There were signs that said:  "NO WATER FOR 125 MILES"  That would seem like a joke now, but it was a serious warning back then.  Cars frequently boiled over and stalled.  To start across the desert you got a canvas water bag.  It looked like a purse that Popeye might give to Olive Oyl.  It had a metal cap sort of like a radiator cap.  You filled it with water and the outside of the bag would slowly get wet.  The bag was tied on the front bumper, and the evaporating water cooled the water inside.  We always had an enamel pan on the floor and we would buy a block of ice and put wash rags on it and pass them around to combat the 120 plus degree blast furnace.  When the signs said "NO WATER" it also meant NO ANYTHING.  Watch the Joshua Trees and cacti move by.  See the bleached Burma Shave signs.  Watch out the side window the telephone lines rising and falling and rising and falling in hypnotic symphony.  Slowly going to sleep with the sweat pouring over your face.  Waking up and asking "Where are we?"  Hoping the answer would be some exotic foreign-sounding place.

    The Studebaker brought out family into prolonged close confinement and all the related tensions were amplified.  Try to keep quiet and avoid being beaten with a belt.  Watch the lines attached to glass jewels on the telephone poles.  Up and down.  Up and down.  Sleep.

November 4, 2006

Why I'm Writing This

    First of all I have to say that I'm amazed that anyone looks at this stuff at all.  Second I have to say that I really don't care if anyone sees this or not.  There are a lot of "I" and "me" on this page.  That's because this page is me thinking out loud.  Remembering out loud.

    I'm so far from a perfect human being that even saying it is a joke.  I think it will be good for me to be honest to the best of my ability on these pages.  I guess there's a possibility that someone might be in sync with something I remember.  Good, I guess.

    I have been blessed with a very good memory for my childhood.  Please don't ask me what shirt I put on this morning.  I want to look at my past and force myself to confront it.  Hell, this isn't high drama.  I'm a guy from Fresno.  I've lived my life the best I could, and that's all there is.

November 3, 2006

Corsages

    I didn't date all that much back then.  I was busy and in college and working.  But when I did I thought that giving a girl a corsage might be a nice touch.

    Now the nice thing about living in a funeral home is 24/7 access to flowers.  Mostly it's wilted stocks, dyed carnations and potted chrysanthemums...but now and again there would be an elderly woman with a lovely orchid corsage pinned to her forever dress.

    A couple of times I borrowed a corsage and gave it to my date.  She was always duly impressed.  I don't think it helped me get laid.  Especially when at the end of the evening I would always have to start squirming as I figured out a way to ask for the corsage back.  "You want it BACK? You cheap bastard!"  I would always try to explain (gently) that it was being buried tomorrow.  The few that thought it was funny were keepers.

November 2, 2006

My First Dead Body

    I was 18 years old, just out of high school, sitting at my parents' dinner table in Sacramento.  I had accepted a job at Harry A. Nauman & Son in Sacramento and would be leaving home within the next day or two.  The phone rang.  It was Don Perry from Nauman's.  I had a removal to assist with.  Dinner would have to wait.

    I got into my VW with some apprehension.  Except for going to one funeral I had never seen a dead body before.  I certainly had never before seen one in a hospital bed.  I drove the couple of miles to Naumans, parked in the alley, and went in the back door.  Going in the back door was new to me.  The door said "FLOWERS."  It was a small white room with a gas-fired incinerator (I later learned it was for "bloody messes.") and walls with nails on them for sticking styrofoam backed floral displays pending their being set up in the various "slumber rooms."  The room smelled like stocks and chrysanthemums.

    The room opened on the right to the garage and on the left to a dark room that was full of caskets in plastic wraps.  I walked through that room and into the carpeted hall in the semi-public part of the mortuary.  Don met me there.  We walked down towards the room that said PRIVATE.  The dressing room that led to the embalming room.  We went into the dressing room.  There was a lift on the ceiling with straps hanging down.  I hadn't seen it used before.  Lots of cupboards and cabinets.  What could be in them?  Don grabbed a mortuary stretcher which is a clever gurney that can be adjusted by the operator to hospital bed level, embalming table level, hearse level or floor level, via two levers, one on either side of the operator's end.  That was also the "head" end.

    He opened the back of the oldest hearse and shoved it in the back.  Don got in the driver's side and I got in the other.  No radio.  Still, it was pretty cool.  Don took the corners too fast and we slid around the front seat and the next thing I knew we were back near my folk's house at a convalescent hospital.

    It was around 8 p.m. and we drove around back.  Lots of people were peeking out the windows to see who was being taken out.  An orderly escorted us to a closed door.  I was scared.  How would I react?  Would I faint?  I'd never fainted before...what would that be like?  Would it be horrible?  I was about to go face to face with death.  Don opened the door.

There on the bed was an old yellow lady.  Under the florescent lights she looked yellowish.  Her eyes were halfway open.  Kind of glazed over.  I had no reaction.  I wasn't bothered or upset...or anything.  I had never seen this woman before.  I knew I wanted her treated with respect because she was important to SOMEONE.  I then learned an important lesson.  Always go for the feet.  The first person to get to the body gets the feet.

    The feet are light.  The head end is heavy and when you pick it up, unless you put a towel on the face, it exhales right in your face.  Horrible air out of the lungs of someone who was so sick they died.  We picked her up.  She was warm.  She was brittle feeling.  The feeling of arthritic joints and emaciated muscles.  She moaned when we slid her over to the cot.  We covered her with a sheet and out the back door and back to Nauman's.

    It was very anti-climatic.  There was a solid line between life and death.  I never understood it before.  From that moment on being around dead people never bothered me.

November 1, 2006

Introduction to Funeral Service 1A

    Going through high school I had no idea what I wanted to do.  I knew what I didn't want to do, which was go to Vietnam.  My graduating year was 1967.  Out of almost 1,000 kids in my graduating class only about 3 of them dropped out.  Drop out and go to Saigon.

    Somewhere along the route I thought I might want to get into the funeral business.  This decision was based upon my extreme immaturity and my brief encounter with the funeral business via my uncle Cheney.  It wasn't until I was an adult that I found out that "Cheney" (and he pronounced it Chee-ny) had a first name.  It was Julius.  Everybody called him Cheney.  Cheney married my delightfully crazy aunt Rose.  They had one daughter, Jan.  Jan lives somewhere near Boulder, Colorado now and has a couple of daughters.

    Aunt Rose was married to some guy before I was born but he died.  She had him cremated and kept him in a closet.  Later when she finally decided to part with him she stuck him in some other guy's casket (by his feet) and buried him.  She was like that.  Rose and Cheney lived in a very small house in Sioux City, Iowa.  Cheney was retired when I knew him.  He used to be a sales rep for Dacus Casket Company in the Midwest, and before that he sold Porta-Boy Embalming machines way back when.  He also owned a few funeral homes in that part of Iowa and I think South Dakota.  Rose and Cheney were very, very rich.

    I thought they made their money in the funeral business.  In reality his family made a fortune during the Depression by buying up foreclosed farms.  They owned farms all over the area.  I guess Jan still owns them.  Rose was a smoking, drinking, sarcastic wonder of a woman.  Cheney was quiet and reserved and very hard of hearing (which served him well when my grandmother bitched about the world every Sunday at dinner...he could just turn the hearing aid down and periodically nod while he read the paper in blissful silence).

    With Rose and Cheney as my misplaced guiding light I aimed to get into the funeral biz.  I decided to go to Sacramento City College which was lovingly referred to as "High School With Ash Trays."  Right across the street from Sac City was the busiest funeral home in Sacramento (at the time):  Harry A. Nauman & Son (350-400 cases per year).  This was back in the day when funeral homes thrived on personal service.  There was an apartment in every mortuary and the apartment was inhabited by either an apprentice embalmer or a college student.  I was the college student.

    It was great.  From my bed to my first period Biology class was under two minutes at a slow run.  The pay was $96 per month plus an apartment and $6.00 for every body you picked up locally and $10 for an "out of town" removal.  And free dry cleaning.  And free haircuts.  As Harry, Jr. (around 80 at the time) used to say:  "Your hair grows on company time."  Two of us shared the apartment and worked every other night and every other weekend.  I swear I could make people die by getting wasted on my work night.

    All I had to do was answer the phone "Nauman & Son, can I help you?" and get the vitals and then go pick up the body.  I got to drive a hearse.  It was pretty cool, and there was no better place for a college party than a place with 7 or 8 dead bodies.

October 31, 2006

Kids, Guns, Dynamite and Apple Pie

    Take a few kids, the oldest being around 8 or so, give them a bolt action .22 rifle, and they do the darndest things.

    At my grandfather's ranch near Grimes, California, we grandkids pretty much had the run of the fields and barns and outbuildings.  There was an old slough that used to be connected to the Sacramento River that we played in, and it seemed like a good place for target practice with a bolt action .22.  A tree stump with cans on it.  BING!  It was great when the can flew off of the stump, but sometimes the bullet went right through it and left the can sitting there.

    I was the oldest of 5 or so grandkids on this expedition.  We found a few old bottles (geez, I wish I had them now) and they worked great, but bottles were in short supply.  Let's find something else to use for a target.

    A little trip to one of the barns provided just what we needed.  We walked barefooted into the dark barn, the only noises being our bare feet padding on the micro-fine dust and the buzz of mud daubers at work on their nests.  The place smelled of oil and old leather.  Light made its way in in shafts through gently moving motes of dust. There was plenty of tack on every wall, including harnesses that harkened back to an earlier day of farming.  And there it was on the floor.

    The box was about a foot and a half long and maybe a foot wide.  It was made out of a light colored wood.  The pieces of the box were dovetailed together.  I'm pretty sure the label said "DuPont Forcite" and I'm sure it had a great picture of the devil, in red, standing up, holding two lightning bolts.  An open case of dynamite.

    I think they used dynamite for blowing out stumps and for breaking into pieces to blow rice checks out of the ground after the harvest when they were cemented into the dried mud.  Anyway, we took one waxy dark red stick and went back to the stump.

    We had heard or read or whatever that you could break dynamite sticks up without killing yourself because you needed a blasting cap to make it work right.  Blasting caps...hmmm....make a note of that for later, guys.  Anyway, we broke the stick into four pieces and set each one up a couple of inches apart on the stump.

    What a fantastic idea!  When a shot hit one piece it would blow up and we'd know we hit it!  It actually never occurred to us that when one piece blew up it would make the others explode.

    I have no idea who hit the first piece of dynamite.  I do know that all of us were literally lifted off our feet and our feet went over our heads and we landed back a ways.  We couldn't hear a damned thing.  We weren't hurt, but we were pretty much deaf, and we were certain that we were going to get the hell beat out of us with a belt when they caught us.  "They" were my grandfather, my parents, my uncle and his wife and my aunt and her husband.  They were back at the house.  Fortunately they were involved in serious drinking.  They (I'm guessing here) put the noise off to some regular farm-related noise here or at a neighbors.  Sound travels in the country, you know.

    That night at dinner we all sat at the table.  We were scared as hell.  Then my brother or someone else finally spoke:  "PASS THE SALT, PLEASE!"   He said.  Trouble was he didn't say it...he literally screamed it.  The adults rather quickly discovered that we were all deaf.  They assumed we had "come down with something" and they put us to bed early.  That ringing in our ears made it hard to get to sleep...that and missing the pie for dessert.

October 30, 2006

The Long Procession

    OK, so I'm 18 years old and in the funeral business in Sacramento.  There are two big funerals back to back and I'm standing there as they load up the hearse and about a hundred cars (literally) start to line up behind it.  Somebody looks at me, throws me the keys to the hearse and says:  "Hey, Steve, you know the way to Mt. Vernon, don't you?"  Hell, how hard can it be?  You just follow the motorcycle cop, right?

    So here I go in my $40 suit driving a car that is worth more than I make in about twenty years following a cop and going through red lights.  I am really styling.  Oh, and what could be cooler than to have a real live dead body in the back seat?

    We head down the freeway and get off on Greenback Lane.  Now Greenback Lane today (in Sac) is a 6-lane traffic nightmare, but back in the 1960's it was a 2-lane country road.  No problem, I just follow the cop.  Then it turned into a real nightmare.  The cop drops back next to my window and taps on it.  I roll it down.  "Hey, kid, here's the county line and I only get paid to go this far...you know where the cemetery is, right?"  And he takes off.

    Shit!  I GUESS I know where Mt. Vernon cemetery is.  I'm PRETTY SURE it's on this road.  I keep going.  And going.  And going.  I am in the middle of nowhere with a dead guy in the back seat and a hundred cars following me.  It can't be this far out.

    I do the only thing I can think of.  I pull into the first gas station I see on the right.  A hundred cars are following me.  I ask the guy where Mt. Vernon is.  It's right down the road about two more miles on the left.  You can't miss it.  What a relief.

    Uh oh.  I now have to cut through my own procession to get back out on the road again.  The looks on the people's faces as I passed through the procession ranged from hysterical laughing to shocked silence.  All I could hear was "ding ding....ding ding....ding ding" as car after car passed through the gas station.  For some incredibly crazy reason instead of just re-arranging themselves in line every damned car went through the gas station.

    I probably learned an important lesson that day, but I'll be damned if I know what it was.

October 29, 2006

Toxic Waste

    I realize that our society has devolved into a bunch of wimps but it still bothers me when it is thrown in my face.  The other day I read about a school being shut down because a small amount of mercury was spilled in a chemistry lab.

    When I was in Jr. High every kid in the school used to play with mercury.  It was cool to put it on your desk and watch it run around.  Having liquid metal in your pocket was amazing.  And since there were lots of real dimes (aka silver) around back then it was great to rub mercury on them and make them shine like...like...well, polished silver!

    And how about lead?  Lead paint?  Give me a break.  We took print shop in Jr. High and we melted lead, set lead type, held lead spacers in our mouths and somehow we all survived.

    If you wanted to light your pilot light on a natural gas furnace, just remove the cover and look on the inside of the cover:  asbestos!  Cool!  It came off in little slivers.

    Want to kill some weeds?  Get some diesel and dump it on.

    Want to start that barbeque?  Dump an empty soup can full of good old leaded gas on it and toss in a match.

    Got gum in your hair?  Let your smoking mother apply leaded gasoline.

    So everybody just shut up.

October 27, 2006

Moving to Sacramento

    On my 13th birthday in 1962 we moved to Sacramento.  My dad was rapidly rising through the ranks in the Contractor's Board, and Governor Brown (Pat, not Jerry) appointed a friend of my dad's, John Chadwick, as the new Registrar of Contractors for the state.  We rented his house.

    The house was in a brand new subdivision called "Rosemont."  It was way out in the sticks on the highway to Tahoe from Sacramento.  It's practically in the middle of town now.  The area around Watt avenue that is solid houses was hop fields back then.  I think they were in the process of abandoning the harvesting of the hops on their huge trellises, but the fields were still there.

    Before we moved  into Chadwick's house something rather terrible happened.  Right after the governor appointed John to his new job he had a stroke and become totally disabled.  Couldn't walk, could barely talk, couldn't feed himself and so forth.  He was pretty much condemned to sit on the couch and let his wife Rita take care of him.

    Rita was Polynesian.  Really Polynesian.  She was born on Pitcairn Island, of Mutiny on the Bounty fame.  John had met her in the war and brought her back to the USA.  She never made the adjustment to life in America.  She never, ever, wore shoes.  She would not shut doors.  She never cleaned the house.  They had a bunch of kids who never took baths or showers.  It was filthy chaos.  Poor John stuck on the couch with the kids running wild and filth everywhere and all he could do was watch it.

    Rita's maiden name was Nordhoff.  Her father was the co-author of "Mutiny on the Bounty."  The movie should have made them rich, but her dad had re-married before his death and his new widow got everything.  They were off and on engaged in a series of lawsuits, but they never came to anything.

    One time John whispered to my dad that mice or rats were eating his feet.  They were.

    John finally, mercifully, died.  I don't know for sure what happened to the kids, but I heard that Rita moved back to the Islands.

    Governor Brown appointed my dad to the head job...and we moved north...and here I remain.

October 26, 2006

Howard and Sophie

    Howard Conklin was completely nuts.  Howard Conklin was a genius.  Howard Conklin worked for my dad.  Howard was our family friend.

    When I met Howard Conklin he was a very skinny old man who was married to a happy heavily Hungarian-accented woman named Sophie.  Howard and Sophie came over to dinner at our house in Sacramento just about every weekend, and for sure every holiday.

    Howard did strange things.  When he and Sophie got married he found out how expensive rings were so he learned how to cut diamonds and bought a 2 carat uncut diamond and cut it himself...and then he made the ring and set the stone.  When Howard bought a brand new Zenith TV in the 1960's the very first thing he did was take the damned thing completely apart in the living room and made a few improvements and put it back together.  He mailed a letter to Zenith, who mailed him back thanking him very much and saying that they had incorporated the changes into their new sets (no money).

    Howard made his own false teeth.

    When Howard married Sophie he was 24 and she was 16.  Wait...it gets better.  He got her from a Hungarian convent (for a price) and she didn't speak a word of English.  Howard didn't speak a word of Hungarian.  There was a method to his madness.  You see, at that time Howard was running booze across the Canadian border into the U.S. (it was during Prohibition) and he wanted a driver who couldn't be questioned.  He put his 16-year-old bride to work running rum across the border into New York.  They were married for almost 60 years.

    Howard later moved back to his hometown of Los Angeles and was one of the biggest "bootleggers to the stars" around.  Howard liked to go to Las Vegas (he lived in Sacramento).  One time his big hulking Buick ran out of gas on the way back from Vegas.  Howard got real pissed and went and bought three gas tanks and fitted them into his trunk, giving him enough gas to drive that gas hog from Sacramento to Vegas and back on one "tank" of gas.  The great thing was he never had to pay full price to fill it up because the pump would show a hundred gallons or so and he'd start an argument that his car couldn't possibly take that much gas and they'd settle for 20 gallons or so.

    Howard was high strung, a chain smoker with a bad ulcer and a taste for whiskey and gambling.  Howard was a great man and I'm glad I got to know him.

October 25, 2006

Going to Work with Dad

    We joined the middle class when my dad got out of construction and painting and got a job with the State of California as an investigator for the Contractor's State License Board.

    He had an office.  He also had a state car.  A car with this cool State of California seal on the doors.  "For Official Use Only."  My dad took the conditions of the state car very seriously.  It was never used for anything except his state business.  His job was to follow up on complaints about unlicensed or crooked contractors...what he called the "suede shoe boys."  These were the guys that sold a "shingle treatment" to some old lady and then dumped used motor oil on her roof and skipping town.

    On very rare occasions my dad would take me to work with him (it was always on a weekend).

    The Contractors Board office was in the Builder's Exchange building in Fresno.  It was an old building.  His office was a desk on the ground floor, surrounded by other desks for people in construction-related businesses.  The room was two-stories high and had a mezzanine around the top.  I wondered if people ever fell over that railing?  What if that mezzanine collapsed.  Mezzanine was a cool word.  JCPenney's had a mezzanine, and so did Roos Brothers Men's Clothing in Sacramento.  Lots of stores back then had mezzanines.  I still like the word.

    There was a Coke machine on the wall.  Cokes (in glass bottles, of course) were five cents.  There was a slot machine on the wall.  A real slot machine.  They took it out later and moved it to either Bill Bray's house (he was a contractor) or John Bonadelli's house (another house builder).  But it was there then.  The floors were very dark wood planks.  There were ceiling fans with white school-type light fixtures on them suspended from the high ceiling.  Some of the desks had adding machines on them.  The old mechanical adding machines.  They made lots of satisfying noise:  precision brass against brass, gears moving, metal numbers popping up in little holes, and a big lever on the right that you had to pull to make it work.  Pulling the lever slowly gave very nice incremental clicks and dropping noises as the ever-accurate machine dropped the right number into the right place.

    On one desk was a comptometer.  What the hell!  Look at all those buttons.  And you could push lots of them at the same time and not make them jam.  Every desk had a big typewriter on it.  Mechanical typewriters and carbon paper.  Each desk had a jar of ink on it, and next to it was an ink pen.  Not a cartridge pen, but the kind you had to dip into the ink well every few sentences.

    The office was echoey because it was the weekend and no one was there.  It smelled good.  The smell was of old cigars and sweeping compound.  Sweeping compound.  That magic stuff that could grab all the dirt.

    The front doors were glass and from the inside the words in gold letters were backwards.

    Staplers were fun to mess with, and those huge heavy rotary metal phones made good noises when you dialed them.

    The smells and sounds of long ago are dead now...except in my memory.

October 22, 2006

The Moler Barber College

    Kids today!  God, I love this part about being old...the part where you get to say stuff like "kids today!"  The very idea of kids getting expensive haircuts and wearing high priced shoes and drinking imported beer (ok, maybe not the beer part) really galls me.

    Part of being a poor kid in the 50's was getting your hair cut at the Moler Barber College.  Open on Saturday.  Big square tiles of alternating black and white on the floor.  Some ceiling fans.  Magic mirrors that would disappear into infinity if you stared the right way.  Every haircut ended with a head massage with a big vibrator that attached to the barber's hands with springs.  Now days you can't even say the word "vibrator" with a straight face.

    And Bay Rum.  I have no idea in the world what the hell Bay Rum is but they splashed it all over us at the end of the haircut.

    There were two sections at Moler.  The ten cent section...and our section...the FREE HAIRCUT section.  Our section was the people who, judging by the way their hands were shaking, were in the early stages of detox.  In retrospect this sort of made sense since the Barber College in Fresno was near the Greyhound Depot and the "We Buy Blood" store.  Imagine how bad a guy's hands had to be shaking to look scary to an 8 year-old.

    But what the hell, the haircuts were all the same.  Jail buzz cuts.  How could you possibly do it wrong?  Your hair was about 1/8" all over.  You looked like a cancer patient or that stupid Irish woman who shaved her head.  But it meant summer was starting!

October 20, 2006

The Death of My Father

    My father died alone.  I could have been with him and I wasn't.

    My father was a strong man.  A Marine in WWII in the Pacific.  A laborer.  An iron worker.  A kid who was beaten by his father.  A man who tried his best to be a good father.  I hated my father.  I loved my father.  I feared my father.  I needed my father.  He paid for his "sins" during the last few horrible years of his life.

    My dad was born on January 20, 1912, and lived into this early 80's.  During those last few years he slipped physically and mentally.  My mother would not even think about putting him in a convalescent hospital, although that commitment nearly killed her.  For at least 3 years my mother never got a night's sleep.  As my father slipped into dementia he became incontinent.  He lost his dignity.

    He finally fell and my mother called 911 and he was put in Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento.  After a week my mother and I went "convalescent hospital shopping."  We made arrangements to "temporarily" put my dad in their care.

    That night I stayed with my father at the hospital.  He was positively skeletal.  I could see every bone in his body.  The nurses ignored him.  What can you do for a dying man?  The day before I was standing with my mother in the hall outside his room and a nurse explained that he was receiving intravenous liquids to make him more comfortable.  I knew that he had a "no resuscitation" order.  I saw that one of the bags contained an antibiotic.  I asked about this.  They explained that my dad had pneumonia and that he needed the antibiotic to get "better."  I asked the nurse:  "If my dad gets over the pneumonia, will he be any better?  Will he be out of pain?  Will he be coherent?"  The nurse said:  "No, he'll probably be worse."

    Worse?  How could you get worse than this?  A skeletal man rambling in his speech.  A dying man talking to his brother who died in Korea on a mine sweeper.  A man who had to be restrained because he kept trying to climb over the rails out of his bed.

    I told the nurse:  "Please do NOTHING to prolong my father's life."  The nurse, in front of my shell-shocked mother, said:  "If you take your father off the antibiotics you will kill him."  I could have killed that nurse for saying that in front of my mother.  I took her aside and asked her to call the doctor.  Soon, he was on liquids and pain killers only.

    I stayed until around midnight.  The gasps were long and labored.  I held his still strong and too cold hand.  I talked to him.  "Daddy, please...relax...it's ok to go."  I felt I couldn't do anything and couldn't stay up any longer.  I went home.

    At 5 a.m. the next morning the phone rang.  I knew what it was.  My mother was crying and said:  "Your father is gone."

    My wife and I drove from Rocklin to the hospital in Sacramento.  All the way I kept saying:  "I knew I should have stayed." Linda waited outside in the car.  I took the elevator up.  The nurses looked embarrassed to see me.  I walked into my dad's room.  The door was open.  A nurse followed me.  She was nervous and constantly chatting.  I have no idea what she was talking about. The room was quiet and bright and sterile.  Plastic and tile and fluorescent lights.

    There was my father.  His eyes were open, his mouth was open, and there was dried blood on his mouth.  I went to his bedside.  I held his hand.  With my right hand I closed his eyes.  I wiped the blood from his mouth with the edge of the sheet.  I was a child again.  I kissed his forehead and said:  "I love you, daddy."  And I left.

October 19, 2006

Goodbye to the Tee

    Restaurants close all the time.  No big deal (unless you owned it or they owed you money).  The other day I was driving by The Golden Tee in Sacramento and saw a fence around it with a sign that said:  "Future Home of Braley-Graham Buick."  That seemed to be a big deal to me.  Kind of the end of an era.

    Back in the days when deals were made over a multi-drink "lunch" the Tee was THE place for FS reps in the Sacramento area.  Ron Yates inherited the place from his dad who started it, and Yates made it a point to become active in the Restaurant Association.  His account was a big one back in the day, and Monarch, ESCO, Rykoff and Sysco all vied for the business.  Many careers were made there, and many livers ruined.

    Ron Howard, Bill Blair, Kerwick, Barney the beer man (Saccani), were all regulars there.  Many distributor sales meetings were held there (remember the time when the meat sales rep from Merced...who was he?...backed his new Mercedes sports car into the telephone pole so hard it bounced back and forth like a toy?...remember Bruce Clendenning being carried out stiff as a board?...the time the bar receipts went up 15% when a ten-year bartender took his first day off?...Deacon Freestone and Claudio Guzman holding court?).  Lots of old memories there.

    The food wasn't that good, but the drinks were 2-3 ounces...free-poured.  One by one the regulars died off.  I took Bill Blair's box of ashes from the crematory to sit on a stool at the Tee for one last drink.  The business changed and the Tee didn't.  I hope Ron made a couple million off the sale and that he enjoys his young retirement.  He deserves it.

comments:

Greetings Steve your blog about the Goldden Tee sparks alot of memories some you will never forget and some you wished that didin't happen. I was there that night and always remembered it as a red corvett but as you know the memory is the first to go...Once again thanks for the trips down memory lane."

GS

October 18, 2006

Exhaustion

    I don't know whether I'll update the site or not.  I'm just plain tired.  Or maybe I've forgotten what it is like to have a real job.  Teaching is strange.  I put in six hours today!  Six whole hours and I'm wiped out.  It's probably my current assignment that's doing it.

    For the past two weeks I've been teaching "severely handicapped children."  These "students" are 18-22 years old.  They wear diapers.  For the most part they can't talk.  They have to be fed.  They have to be watched every single minute.  You have to listen to the same word or phrase repeated ad nauseum. You have to wipe their noses.  And you fall in love with them.

    When I try to imagine what it must be like for the families of these people my heart just breaks.  I really hope they know the love and respect their dear children get when they are in our care.  We thrive on the incremental progress.  A girl is learning to use a spoon to eat.  Someone stood up straight and shook my hand. To the word "kite" a wonderful girl with cerebral palsy said:  "In the sky."  It brought tears to my eyes.

    All day long I lift them, I pull them, I feed them, I change their diapers, I strap them into wheel chairs, I talk to them and I try to keep them from harm.  Maybe it's the little things we do away from the spotlight that makes the world bearable.

October 17, 2006

Restaurant Success

    Is there a secret recipe for success in the restaurant business?  If so what is it?  Is it a passion for food, a secret recipe, or family labor?  Is adequate funding the key?  How about a friend or relative that's a CPA?  What about a friend who's a DSR or better yet a driver that can stop by and drop off the mispicks instead of going through the trouble of putting them back into inventory?

    We've all known people that have failed miserably despite working hard, finding the right location, getting good funding, having great food, having a great concept.  We've all known people that have been wildly successful that serve crap to people who line up at their filthy doors to get in.

    So what's the magic ingredient for success?  I am absolutely convinced that I have found it:  it's pure dumb luck.  Wanna open a restaurant, you're better off heading to Vegas or an Indian casino.  Have some fun losing your money.

comments:

100 years ago (foodservice years are alot like dog years) I had a customer in Pacheco California, Pegg's Western Grill and Bakery, open for breakfast and lunch. Ken and Peggy Price were the owners. The location was at the edge of a "refinery" town, and was a converted biker bar. Ken was an ex-chemical engineer who had worked in restaurants growing up and through school. When I picked up the account they had been in business for about 7 years and did a fantastic business, in spite of their location and size (I think they only had 7 parking spaces).

Ken's menu reflected his clientele. They made the best biscuits and gravy, with plenty of pepper. His burgers all had names like "the pipefitter" and the "longshoreman". I asked Ken one day "what is the secret to your success?" He got a far away look in his eyes and relplied that " I was blessed with the taste buds of the average man."

I had another customer called Clawdaddy's on Cannery Row who came in with a great concept, good food, and was as hands on as the Price family from Pegg's. Clawdaddy was open about 2 years and that was probably about 13 months too long. Towards the end I caught Bob the owner one morning as he opened the front door and asked him what it cost him to turn the lock in the door every morning and he estimated it was $3000.00 just to unlock the place every day.

Pegg's is still open, although I heard it has different owners. Bob closed Clawdaddy's and sold his second restaurant but still runs his first place, the Cafe Sparrow with his wife Julie in Aptos.
PFN

October 16, 2006

Crazy Dorf

    Any company worth its salt has a Crazy Dorf working for it.  Dorothy Coffelt worked for The Sacramento Union for many years.  She was involved in classified advertising, but for some reason wandered all three floors of the building.  Dorothy was about 5'2", bleach blonde, weighed around 250 and always wore Mumus.  Dorothy wore too much eye makeup, held onto your arm when she talked to you, stared directly into your eyes in a disturbing manner, and barked like a small dog at everyone. She didn't walk, she glided.

    When you were around Dorf you got the feeling that you were in the presence of a woman who had been greatly harmed and wronged in the past and that she wore her wounds to protect her from further hurt.  She was good at her job, but not at all socially acceptable.  She was, all in all, a strange but gentle person.

    There was a bar in downtown Sacramento called the Torch Club.  The Torch Club was a dark and dirty place that was inhabited by hookers, druggies, bikers, the governor and most of the other California constitutional officers including Jerry Moonbeam Brown.  On the wall were nicotine-stained caricatures of the most famous denizens of that hallowed ground.  Crazy Dorf was up there on the wall.

    Dorf was the nutty aunt you hid when friends came over.  In the newspaper business friends were always dropping by.  Politicos and Hollywood stars all found it expeditious to court the favors of the press, so they crossed our threshold with great regularity.  Crazy Dorf was not someone we wanted Governor Reagan to bump into and be barked at, nor was Vincent Price.  We kept her from Reagan but didn't have that kind of luck with Price.

    Vincent Price was making the rounds hawking a new art or cookbook or something just as good so he stopped by the Union.  By then editorial had been moved down to the first floor and to get in you had to pass muster at the gate before you could be buzzed in.  For some strange reason our barking employee was at the gate the day Vincent Price walked in.

    Dorf was unusually polite to Price, never barking at him at all.  They talked a bit one-on-one then he shook her hand and went in for the interview.  When he came out of editorial he immediately went up to Crazy Dorf and sat down next to her.  The two of them were engaged in some kind of private conversation for about 45 minutes (longer than the interview).  Because of the Union's inferiority complex everyone was really worried that Dorf had somehow offended Price and that we would look bad because of it.

    From that day on Crazy Dorf and Vincent Price wrote each other post cards and letters and each called the other with regularity.  As far as I know not a month went by in the ensuing years that Vincent Price didn't make contact with Crazy Dorf or vice versa.  Vincent Price, the sensitive chef, art collector and author, saw through the cheap veneer and treasured the jewel we called Crazy Dorf.

October 15, 2006

Oktoberfest

    There used to be quite a population of Germans in Sacramento...or at least a population of people who liked to drink a lot of beer.  During the late 1960's and 70's the annual Oktoberfest celebration was getting bigger and bigger in our cowtown.  One year (coincidentally, it was the last year they had the big formal affair) they moved it to CalExpo, which was the new site of the California State Fair.  There was a huge building and plenty of parking.  Plenty of parking for people who were going to show up to get a wrist band that would let you drink as much as you could (or thought you could).

    This was the days before drunk driving was taken seriously by anyone except the families that were destroyed by drunk driving, so let's put that stark reality aside and pretend that it was fun.

    Sacramento today is run by a bunch of developers who pal around with each other and trot out their trained politicians and make them jump through hoops, but back then it was run by a handfull of smalltown drunks and political insiders (maybe things haven't changed that much).  The sheriff was a guy named John Misterly.  Like any smalltown sheriff who has been in office more than one term he was a crook, and he hung around with his buddies Kirt MacBride and Tom Horton and Bill Conlin and sometimes Bob Wilkins.  MacBride was the dim bulb brother of a very successful realtor and a respected federal judge, and Kirtly was a drunken newspaper columnist (three-dot style, in sad imitation of Herb Caen) at the Sacramento Union.  Tom Horton was a dashing man-about-town and reporter for the Sacramento Union and fancied himself to be the replacement for SF-based Caen when he retired or died.  Bob Wilkins was an advertising man and host of the UHF late night show "Creature Features."  They all hung around together at the Union.  Bill Conlin was the sports editor, and a competent reporter.

    The Sacramento Union was the "Oldest Daily West of the Mississippi," or, as those of us who loved it and worked there called it, "the number 3 newspaper in a 2-newspaper town.  Mark Twain once did a series of columns for the Union and that was our last claim to fame. A real treat was to step into an elevator around 3 p.m. and be jammed in there with MacBride, Conlin, Horton, Misterly and Wilkins returning from lunch.  Each smoking a huge Churchill and each exhaling pure bourbon.

    Misterly's claim to fame was that he ran the Hell's Angels out of Sacramento.  Whenever Sonny Barger would cross the city line on the Tower Bridge his goons would physically turn them around and throw them out of town.

    During the last Oktoberfest a large contingent of derelicts (I was there) from the Union had gotten what all good newspaper people get:  free entry to everything.  We had these orange wrist bands that meant you could eat as much sausage and drink as much beer, including imports, that you wanted.  We did what everyone else did.  We drank like our very lives depended upon how much we could consume in the very shortest period of time possible.

    Pretty soon there were THOUSANDS of drunks singing incomprehensible German songs and sort of hearing polka bands in the far corners and sliding around the flood on spilled beer and mashed sauerkraut.  Well, pretty soon all that good beer had to come out, and that's when we discovered what pretty much everyone was discovering:  there just weren't anything even close to the number of toilets you would need for 20,000 people drinking absolutely enormous quantities of beer.

    The lines going into the rest room were incredibly long.  No one was paying any attention to the "Men's" and "Women's" signs.  For some strange reason if you went outside the CalExpo rent-a-cops would bother you and keep you from peeing in the bushes.  Very soon people were pissing in the sinks, and the garbage cans, and each other's legs, and feet, and much pushing and shoving and screaming ensued.

    Outside the restrooms it was elbow to asshole crowded and for some reason the music had stopped.  Some idiot was going to make a speech.  Incredbidable! Two uniformed sheriff's deputies were hauling the sheriff, John Misterly, out to center stage.  You must know that on a good day Misterly looked like he was scrunching his fat face up to look like a bad imitation of J. Edgar Hoover, but tonight he hardly looked human.  There was a cop on each arm and his legs weren't moving.  He was literally being dragged to the microphone.

    The microphone squealed and got everyone's attention.  Here, in its' entirety, I swear to God, is Sheriff John Misterly's stirring speech to the citizenry:  "There ain't gonna be no fuckin' drunk driving tickets in this town tonight."  Then his head slammed down, chin to chest,  and they dragged him off the stage to thunderous applause. 

    By now the party was pretty much a series of fist fights contained inside the sparkling new Cal Expo building.  With the assurance of no problem getting home, we staggered out to our cars, and after manipulating the key for a few minutes were able to get into the car and with one eye closed drive home.

    I think we even carried plastic cups of beer home.  It was free.

October 14, 2006

Food Show Fever

    It's hard to figure out what the absolutely worst food show I ever attended was.  First you have to put them into categories:  longest show, worst treatment by a distribu