As to the subject of donations, for those who may be so interested as it applies to the gratefulness of my works, I invariably suggest any funds be directed toward THE WOUNDED WARRIOR PROJECT and/or THE AMERICAN RED CROSS.

REDONDO, THE LOST YEARS:

"No sooner had I walked out of high school with my degree in my hands than I started a dream job with a major Hollywood studio, a stint that a few months over a year ended-up not working out. I returned to Redondo this time not with my degree in my hand but my hat in my hand and found that all my buddies, who I totally ignored while I was gone being a Hollywood big shot, were either well established, married, or off to college."

TERMITE TERRACE
(please click image)

REDONDO THE LOST YEARS, AND WHILE LOST, ENTERS SOON, THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD

When I first graduated from Redondo Union High School, the job I had lined up as mentioned in the above quote, I thought was going to be a life long dream job --- a job I considered would be my career forever. It didn't quite work out that way. Without me even breaking 18 months, the company, in a preemptive strike to ward off a potential or rumored corporate restructuring or take over, started reducing the level of their work force hoping to show powers that be that they could turn a profit without being taken over. Across the board upwards of around 90 people were canned, and in a classic last hired, first fired scenario, I was caught up in it.

With so many of us suddenly laid off, roughly 90 or more, and all in the exact same work related area, with many of the last hired having degrees or training from heavyweight places like Chouinard and the Otis Institute of Art, there just wasn't enough positions available in the industry to soak all of us up, especially for a bottom of the rung in-house on-the-job trainee like me who had jumped from high school to the position through innate raw talent and naive perseverance. Even though I received strong recommendations, good word of mouth, and a pile of favorable referrals, after nearly wearing holes clear through the soles of two pairs of shoes and discovering I wasn't quite the hot shit I thought I was, after receiving only one favorable nod, that in the end didn't pan out, I was soon back in good old Redondo Beach searching for other kinds of work, or any work, and staying in a spare bedroom at the home of my ancient and decrepit and over-the-hill grandmother --- who loved me nonetheless.

Through a series of connections of my former babysitter, who I mentioned in conjunction with me as a kid being a Junior Air Raid Warden during World War II in Redondo as found in the main text above, and who as well, used to play with a life-size interactive toy Airplane Pilot Training Cockpit when she was a kid, then moved from there into the aerospace industry, worked with and knew a number of high up people in certain segments of that same industry. Through those connections I was eventually able to land a halfway decent --- as well as high paying job --- related to the then super-secret U2 spy plane, and suddenly right before my eyes a previously unforeseen opening on my path of life revealed itself, providing the chance of an alternate unanticipated future.

At first, although I never ranked my new job right up there with my so called previously mentioned dream job, I did rank it right up there as being "exciting," encompassing in its own way a series of weird, covert, and mysterious overtones, even requiring me to get a security clearance in the process. Besides going to Area 51 I also ended up at a secret military base called Camp Hale high in the Colorado Rockies where Tibetans were being trained by the CIA for covert operations back in there homeland of the Himalayas. It all had to do with need for a high altitude monitoring station and the equipment being able to function continually under extremely cold and rarefied conditions.(see) However, after a short time working on the job, then a move within the company to an area that truly required having the so said security clearance, my new direct one-on-one boss, who I worked with regularly at first, began disappearing over-and-over for continuing longer periods of time doing ever more weird and secret stuff and never telling me anything about it nor including me or anything else.

By clicking the image below left, it will take you to some quick information on my boss and the innocuous little aerospace firm in El Segundo I was hired by. Most people who do so come back, after following the links through to completion, complaining about the weird nature of the end results. Others find what my boss got mixed up in, although a little on the way-out side, fascinating. Clicking the image on the right will take you to some just as quick info regarding my early Redondo Beach being-babysat-days and my babysitter Mary Lou who in later years was instrumental in me be hired by the aerospace firm:

(please click image)-------------------------------------------------------(please click image)
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AS TO MY BOSS------------------------------------------------------AS TO MY BABYSITTER

With me not receiving any amount of direct supervision on the job and being left out of the loop by other company officials, I was spending increasingly amounts of time with really not much to do --- nor did I have the knowledge, ability, or expertise at the level needed to accomplish projects specifically directed toward my boss. In the meantime, the basically non-essential fill-in tasks I was finding to do started to get repetitive or stale and I began sleepwalking through my job.(see)

With everybody near to my boss seemingly having gone nuts over some discovery, along with him disappearing for days and sometimes weeks at a time, and with the two of us no longer heading out to the Area 51 Groom Lake facility doing U-2 stuff, and especially since nobody seemed to care one way or the other, I found myself screwing off more and more waiting for my draft notice to show up. As it was I continued to receive a paycheck, but, since nobody was allowed to get into the clean-room without the proper clearance and keeping tabs on me wasn't easy since most people just thought I was with my boss --- even though I wasn't --- during the interim I began spending more and more time doing other things, i.e., like working on-and-off on a marlin boat, going to Vegas, and even traipsing around Mexico for a whole summer with an old high school buddy from Redondo who at the time, basically viewed himself as being in the same boat I was, re the following:

"A couple of years out of high school a buddy and I, tired of our jobs and the directions our lives were going at the time, decided to spend a few months one summer on an extended road trip travelling throughout Mexico. We shopped around and bought a used six-cylinder 1951 Chevy panel truck just for the trip and over a period of a few months the two of us outfitted it like a camper with fold down bunks, table, sink, stove, and portable toilet. We got a bunch of new fan-belts, radiator hoses, inner tubes and tools, then, early one Saturday morning we crossed into Mexico at the Tijuana border with no idea how long we were going to be gone or where we would end up."

TOMB RAIDER: THE LADY AND THE STOLEN SKULLS

ENTERS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD

Those same years could have been much more productive for me when it came to women too I suppose, but I was finding a good portion of what few old lower level reciprocal wing-man type buddies I had were jumping from the girlfriend stage to the married stage, having met I guess, someone that they wanted to marry or vice versa. However, at that point in my life it wasn't something that was happening for me. For some reason, marriage was something I just didn't want to get into at the time, even if, like for some of my buddies, it meant getting out of the draft.

My decision wasn't made because of a lack of women either. Using the vernacular of the era, the South Bay was crawling with stews (flight attendants) and bikini clad beach bunnies, and now, since I was a few years older --- and with no offense directed toward any of the Redondo Union High School girls of that era --- all seemingly much better than they were during my high school years.

As I was soon to learn, my low-slung British sports car with two rows of louvers and a belt on the hood appealed to one class while my fully restored 40s wooden station wagon appealed to the other class. Where I had been basically invisible to girls while I was in high school, during my post high school years, and a being a little more confident, plus plush with cash and cars, things had a tendency to lean slightly toward being a tiny bit better. It was just that my interests didn't match with most of the girls I met.

That is, until one day when an event of major proportions occurred ---

-------

That exception started out on an everyday regular day when all of a sudden one of those mysterious unexplained flukes that just happen to happen, happened. A friend of my stepmother's who was going through a divorce needed some sort of unnamed help that apparently she thought I could provide. She requested I meet her at a certain time and place in Long Beach. Agreeing that I would, I showed up, but after waiting over two hours beyond our agreed upon time, she never did. Thinking I would come back and check on later, since our designated meeting spot was close to the Long Beach Museum of Art, I wended my way over to the museum when, once inside, the following happened:

"(A)s I was walking around the gallery in the museum --- and totally unprepared for such an event --- I saw a woman that up to that point in time I think was absolutely the most beautiful woman I had ever personally seen in my life. Unwittingly staring at her almost as though I was frozen in a trance, she turned from the exhibit painting on the wall toward my direction and when she did the two of us made eye contact. The exact moment our gaze connected it was a though my life force had been sucked out of me, my knees even buckling from the weight of me standing. Having lost a total sense of dignity and somehow feeling a need for air I immediately went outside, crossing the short distance across a park adjacent to the museum overlooking the ocean. Within minutes if not seconds, for reasons I am yet to fathom to this day, the woman was suddenly standing next to me saying something like, 'Didn't you like the exhibit, you left so abruptly.' I don't recall what my answer was or how one thing led to the next, but soon the two of us were agreeing to have lunch together, although instead I ate breakfast, at a little restaurant she knew just a couple of blocks away called The Park Pantry.

"She said she may have been to the museum before but couldn't remember a specific instance, only stopping in for no other reason except to do so, then she saw me. She said when I left so abruptly she was overwhelmed with the strangest inner feeling, as though she had found something valuable I had lost and she had to return it --- yet she had nothing except for a strange feeling that felt so real."

FIREHAIR: Queen of the Sagebrush Frontier

HOW I REMEMBER HER AT THE MUSEUM
(please click image)

She was unlike anybody I had ever met, most certainly not like anything that inhabited the two South Bay coffee houses, the Iconoclast or the Insomniac I hung out in, and totally unlike any of the other females and flight attendants hanging around the infamous Flying Jib in Redondo at the time. I was in heaven. Primarily because of that the rest of the year slipped by, seeing each other as much as possible. Then, sometime around the middle of the following year I received a confirmation letter from the Selective Service informing me I would be inducted two or three months before the end of the calendar year and would have to report on a given date at a given time and place. The second I showed her the letter, except for one rare occasion years and years later, I never saw her again. Less than three weeks before I was inducted she met some rich-ass USC dude who in the following year while I was still in the army, having barely a year of service behind me and being nothing but a lowly PFC, she married --- a play on the old gone off to college (him) while I remained nothing but a dunce working stiff (in the Army) trick. It has been said they eventually had twin daughters and from what I can tell she and her husband remain married to this day.

Truth be told, it was quite clear I wasn't going anywhere and she was, if she hadn't already. Because of her out of nowhere unexplained rebuff, i.e., if not being dumped, at least being forgotten to death, I instead spent some of the summer of 1962 throwing myself into some rather intense Zen meditation sessions that nearly broke me mentally and almost killed me physically. So too, I know that on July 9, 1962 I went to the opening of Andy Warhol's first one man show ever, held in Los Angeles at the Ferus Gallery, although at the time Warhol was not well known nor had I really heard of him. After that I went crawling back on the marlin boat owned by David J. Halliburton to recoup. I spent the rest of the summer forgetting by hooking up with old friends in Cabo, many whom, at least the female variety, worked the hotels at night and sunbathed on the yacht during the day. In the meantime I played the bereaved lover, licked my wounds and wondered why the sunbathing women always seemed to be able to find the bottoms of their bathing suits but never the tops.

(please click image)

Six years after attending Andy Warhol's 1962 exhibit, in June of 1968 he was shot and pronounced clinically dead and remained dead for well over a minute pushing into two before the medical team was finally able to revive him. Betwen those two times, 1962 and 1968, Warhol and I got to know of each other through a mutual acquaintance because both Warhol and I had similar near death experiences. Upon the death of our acquaintance, he sent an unusual sized package, about three feet by three feet square and around three or four inches thick in care of me to the studio of an up and coming artist he knew in the Santa Monica/Venice area of California. Inside that carefully wrapped package from Warhol's studio in New York, was a three foot by three foot signed by Warhol artist's proof print of Marilyn Monroe, which I still have.(see)

When people see photographs of the person I met in the museum, especially so the headshot a few paragraphs back, people that know the gorgeous raven-haired beauty I met in college and took to see my Mentor, swear she is the exact same person. Although she is a near exact duplicate, I can assure you such was not the case, any doppelganger aspects being pure coincidence. As it was I didn't start college until after the Army. As found at the source so cited, speaking about my mentor after my discharge from the military I write:

"(He) really didn't want anything to do with me, saying the military 'had brought out the beast in me.' He mellowed over time, especially so after he reneged enough to allow me to introduce him to a gorgeous raven-haired beauty I had met in college. She had just turned 21 by a few months when we met and I was a little beyond my mid 20s although well shy of 30. He liked her immediately and thinking of the Samsara world that a woman of such enormous beauty could see something in me, I might still have after all, some inkling of redemption left."(see)

The purposely left unnamed fellow-student I met in college that I give title to as being a gorgeous raven-haired beauty, a direct quote I use from a friend of mine used to describe her, had only turned age 21 by two months when we first crossed paths, she having just finished community college after earning an AA degree at the end of the fall semester. She had applied to Otis Art Institute and Chouinard's, now known as California Institute of the Arts, and been accepted by both, planning to start one or the other in the upcoming fall semester. Because of having met me, at the end of summer and before school started she appeared in a brief dancing scene in one of the beach party movies, most specifically the last in the series called The Ghost In the Invisible Bikini..

THE GHOST IN INVISIBLE BIKINI WITH NANCY SINATRA
BY POOL AND RAVEN HAIRED BEAUTY IN BLUE JEANS
(please click image)

To this day, except for the above so mentioned raven-haired beauty and not counting of course, Hope Savage, who falls into a can't be ranked independently special category all her own and possibly the female pharmacist at the since closed Laguna Drugs in Laguna Beach, California, Doris by name who looks at you over the top of her glasses low on her nose through the height of her pharmacy window --- the museum lady, albeit having since those heady 1960's days become a little wobbly in stature, still stands as absolutely the most beautiful woman I have ever personally met in my life. Well, maybe second, or maybe --- naw, I can't do that to her, but who's counting anyway? It all stems from a young man's past perceptions from a bygone day. Although I have to admit, when that which is, got around to entering into the early 1980's, a person I met in 1964, Madame Nguyen Cao Ky, arguably found floating precariously close to the top spot.

MADAME NGUYEN CAO KY
(please click image)

For those who may be so interested, the gorgeous raven-haired beauty I met in college and introduced to my mentor passed away in 2017. Madame Ky died in 2016 at age 75. The most beautiful woman in the world passed away in May of 2021.

THE CURIOUSLY FAMOUS NUT-JOB ... OR NOT

While in high school, at least for the first two years, I had a job running errands a couple of days a week and sometimes on the weekends for a badly burned, heavily scarred, barely able to move ex-merchant marine who in most of my writings I call my Merchant Marine Friend. During World War II the merchant ship he was serving on was forming up into a convoy and was positioned amongst the other ships in the rear corner on the starboard side that he called "coffin corner," said by experienced hands to be the most easy picking location for submarines in a convoy. Even before his ship finished its final positioning and the convoy got underway members of a U-boat wolfpack began striking at the edges of the convoy and my friend's ship torpedoed. In order to save himself he had no choice but to jump overboard, landing in an area with oil burning along the surface of the water, the fire scorching his skin as he plunged through and returned for air. He spent months in recovery and rehabilitation.

In those days both my Merchant Marine Friend and I lived in homes on the 200 block south in Redondo Beach. He had a friend named Truman Bethurum who lived just a few short blocks away, with an address somewhere just north of the high school not far from my go to Mexico buddy's home, along the 400 or 500 block of north Gertruda. He would come by the merchant marine's house on occasion and the two of them would get into heated discussions. Several times when Bethurum was there I was there. The last time I remember seeing him at the merchant marine's house was in February 1954.

Unknown to me at the time, all the while Bethurum had been coming by to visit my merchant marine friend he was rising up the ranks just to the cusp of being famous --- famous for what was was being called a "contactee." I was told a contactee was a person who had been contacted by aliens from another world. All the while he was having books published, appearing on TV, interviewed in magazines and the press. Even the Daily Breeze did a huge article on him. Bethurum said his experience began after his shift working as a maintenance mechanic for the Wells Cargo Construction Company, an asphalt mixing plant in Nevada. Tired, he took a little time to take a snooze at a nearby place called Morman Mesa where he had been hunting for ancient seashells. In the process he encountered a UFO and its occupants . Bethurum claimed his first contact took place on July 7, 1952 (later corrected to Saturday or Sunday of July 26 or 27) and since then to have had several similar encounters. My Merchant Marine Friend died during the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school, Bethurum died in 1969 after reaching his pinnacle some years before.

When I first heard about Bethurum I sent a letter to my Uncle outlining his story. My uncle wrote back saying to take the guy for what he is worth, but he sounded like a nut case. My uncle said he had three personal experiences with flying objects of an unknown nature or origin, the San Antonio crash (1945), the Roswell crash (1947) and the Kingman UFO (1953), and not once, under any circumstances involving the objects, had he run into any sort of alien life forms, dead or alive --- although he did admit by inference the strong possibility of such, primarily based on the object he found at the Roswell debris field he reluctantly called the The Roswell Ray Gun because it had all outward appearances of being a hand held weapon.

My uncle's advice, possibly tinged with a tiny bit of jealousy, asked what I thought my dad would think if he found out I was listening to Bethurum. After all, he said, when he asked me join him in Kingman, Arizona in May of 1953 my father said that he, my uncle, "was filling my mind with all kinds of 'weird and useless shit' and to and keep his 'cock-and-bull stories' to himself."

THE KINGMAN UFO: 1953

AND NOW THIS

As found in the opening paragraphs at the top of this footnote:

"When I first graduated from high school the job I had lined up as mentioned in the above quote I thought was going to be a life long dream job --- a job I considered would be my career forever. It didn't quite work out that way. Without even breaking 18 months with the company, in a preemptive strike to ward off a potential or rumored corporate restructuring or take over, they started reducing the level of their work force. The area I worked for laid off upwards of around 90 people, and in a classic last hired, first fired scenario, I was caught up in it."

During the roughly 18 month period that I lived in Hollywood following my graduation from high school I stayed at a place owned by a man named Don, a long time acquaintance of my Stepmother. His house, the living area of which was built on top of a two-car garage had no front yard, back yard, or side yards, and was so tightly crammed in between neighbor's houses you could hardly slip a playing card between them. The whole garage door front of the house was only inches off a narrow twisty car-parked congested street a short distance after entering the Hollywood Hills just as the hills began to rise up off the basin floor from Sunset Boulevard, and for me, only a short walk to catch a bus to work if I so chose, having left my woody with my brother in the South Bay.

The living arrangements, with no charge to me, had been set up by my stepmother the summer before when I was working for no pay as an intern or "gopher" or a "runner" as they are sometime called. Don was a single unattached gay guy about 45-50 years old whose primary claim to fame was that he knew the movie actress Elizabeth Taylor, and according to him, when she was in town they would have private little out of the way luncheons together regularly. Every time I asked if he would take me along sometime he would always tell me she wasn't comfortable with new people or people she didn't know.

ELIZABETH TAYLOR, SAME ERA, CIRCA 1961
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Typically like I did almost every day after work in those days I walked down to the bus stop near the corner of Sunset and Van Ness to catch a ride home when on a certain particular day a pristine mint condition Mercedes Benz 300 SL gullwing coupe stopped in traffic directly across from where I was sitting waiting for the light. Of all things, and one of the last things I would have ever expected, I recognized the driver as someone I knew. Stepping off the curb toward the car, and not totally sure if I might scare the crap out of the driver, I tapped on the window. Almost immediately after a quick glance the driver recognized me. In an open hand pointing motion he signaled as though he would pull over when he got a chance. When the light changed he crossed the intersection pulling into a red zone along the curb while I ran to catch up with him.

Now, I don't know how many of you have ever tried to get into a Mercedes Benz 300 SL gullwing coupe, but if you don't know how or have never done it before, it can be a little tricky, especially in the middle of rush hour traffic with horns honking and all kinds of people yelling. But got in I did and off we went in a huge big rush of acceleration. The driver was none other than the multi-million dollar heir to the Woolworth fortune and soon to be famous builder of the highly national and internationally competitive Scarab sports race cars, Lance Reventlow.

The two of us had been crossing paths on and off ever since I was around 12 and he was 14. The first thing he asked was what was I doing on a bus bench on Sunset in Hollywood, implying softly if I was homeless or something. I filled him in that I was staying at the home of a friend of my stepmother who owned a place in the Hollywood Hills while I was working as an Inbetweener in the animation department of a major film studio just down the street from where he picked me up. He told me he lived off Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills and on his way home and could easily drop me off. Remembering back when we were both kids drawing race cars together and what I was doing now, he practically shit. Here was Reventlow, a guy that didn't have to work a day in his life and me thinking nothing I could of or ever do or say would impress him one way or the other, he was drop jawed amazed that I was working, being paid, and doing a job creating cartoons for a major Hollywood studio, and I was still just a kid. It seemed like it was almost as though he wished it was him doing it instead.

A number of people have come forward claiming to have known Lance Reventlow saying what I've written about him doesn't sound like the Reventlow they knew, i.e., spontaneously picking someone up from some bus bench in Hollywood for example and taking him home. What most of the people seem to have in common is that their coming to know Reventlow came into being after he had inherited his wealth and became a Hollywood playboy sports car builder and driver. When I first came across Reventlow he was a 14 year old product of a falling apart family situation having been dumped off in some school out in the middle of the Arizona desert for asthmatics. The day I sat down next to him and began drawing single seat open wheel race cars with him I had never seen anything like it. His incredible attention to detail without the object in front of him showed an extraordinary observant mind to small details combined with an ability to transfer what was in that mind onto paper, showing an extraordinary mental hand-brain hand-eye small motor skill coordination that I hadn't really experienced before even after all those years with my artist uncle. Immediately I began upgrading, incorporating, and refining my ability into the same set of skills. As to others and how they knew him I have to admit the most time I ever spent with Reventlow together alone was the day he took me home in his 300 SL and then he was only just then entering the era where most of the writers were telling me how he "really" was.

I did get a small sniff of that potentiality when one day I submitted a satire article I had written on Reventlow to James T. Crow the editor of Road and Track magazine at the time. I had known Crow personally from the time he was the editor of the California Sports Car Club monthly magazine and through that relationship thought he might publish the satire in Road and Track, a satire I had titled "LUNCH REVS-LOW: Or Lunch Bucks It." Crow got back to me saying even though he found the article extremely funny, falling into the same vein of Mad Comics, he was reluctant to publish it, even if was written by someone Reventlow knew because of his notorious lack of a sense of humor --- which was news to me.

As to the job, weekdays were always filled with work for me, while the weekends went pretty much nonstop around the clock, that is until Sunday evening. By then everything sort of wound down or stopped. Invariably on the weekends, and well before those winding down Sunday evenings rolled around, Don would drag himself home with one or two, or by the end of the weekend several often underage, always broke, runaway Midnight Cowboy types under his wing --- mostly off Sunset or Hollywood Boulevards or some other equally slug infested environ. Finding me there, although I had my own room, they thought I was one of them ending up with me usually spending an inordinate amount of time fending off diametrically opposed lifestyle approaches.

After a basically sunrise to sunrise to sunrise weekend and the weeding out of some of the more undesirables Don would quiet down and sit back and watch TV and always at the top of his list was, after the series started, Maverick. Since the next day was Monday and the start of the workweek for me, after the weekend I would typically join him kicking back, in the process I saw most if not all of the early part of the first season of Maverick, all in order and when they were first released.

In the Fall of 1957, after nearly a year and a half living at Don's house, I spent Thanksgiving and the end of the year holidays with family members back in Redondo. The month prior to Thanksgiving, on what was one of my very last weekends at Don's before moving back to Redondo after being laid off, I watched an episode of Maverick with him titled "Stage West" based on a Louis L'Amour short story called That Packsaddle Affair. One year later, although I hadn't gone back to see Don nor been in contact with him since I left, on the anniversary of that last weekend with him, he sent me a brand new unfolded crisp copy of a just out Maverick comic book that had an illustrated version of that exact same episode of Stage West the two of us had watched together that last weekend, and of which, below I have linked a full online copy of for those readers who may be so interested.

Typically such an offer of goodwill and friendship wouldn't carry much weight beyond what it meant between say Don and I at the time. However, neither of us had a clue as to the downstream outflow that was to follow, nor did Don ever learn of it in later years that I know of.

Although neither of us knew it at the time, it just so happened that the woman who co-starred and received equal billing with James Garner in Garner's own series as found in the Stage West episode of Maverick and who showed up as well in the comic book version, albeit drawn more-or-less ambiguously, turned out to be the exact same woman I met several years later in the museum. Re the following:

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JAMES GARNER IN 1957'S MAVERICK EPISODE: STAGE WEST. THE ACTRESS WAS THE WOMAN IN THE MUSEUM
HOW I REMEMBER HER, THAT DAY AT THE MUSEUM

THE BLONDE

Because of my rather low profile mundane existence and lifestyle amongst the masses I never expected again to be in a position to be granted or become a second time recipient for an event of such significance or magnitude to repeat itself. However, such was not the case, although it took 50 years or so before any type of a remotely similar occurrence was to transpire. That remote occurrence involved an unusual convergence of the supernormal perceptual state known in Sanskrit as Siddhis, myself, and a woman of exceptional beauty, spiritual acumen, intellect, and natural talent by the name of Phyllis Davis. Why she was able to carve out time for me or did so is on it's own is a itself a miracle and a little bit beyond comprehension. In Footnote [3] I mention the Mahasi Meditation Center in Rangoon, Burma --- of which staying there for the full 12 weeks for meditators to this day is still free, including room and board. Phyllis Davis and I were tied together under rather unusual circumstances involving the Mahasi Meditation Center. See:

PHYLLIS DAVIS CIRCA 1980
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THE COMIC BOOK

"On what was one of my very last weekends at Don's before moving back to Redondo after being laid off I watched an episode of Maverick with him titled 'Stage West' based on a Louis L'Amour short story called 'That Packsaddle Affair.' One year later, although I hadn't gone back to see Don nor been in contact with him since I left, on the anniversary of that last weekend with him, he sent me a brand new unfolded crisp copy of a just out Maverick comic book that had an illustrated version of that exact same episode of Stage West the two of us had watched together that last weekend."

BY MOUSE CLICKING THE BELOW GRAPHIC THE ENTIRE MAVERICK COMIC BOOK
STORY OF STAGE WEST PRESENTED BY DELL FROM START TO FINISH COMES UP
(please click image)

MAVERICK TRAILS: THE DELL ADAPTION OF STAGE WEST

LOUIS L'AMOUR: THE PACKSADDLE AFFAIR, STAGE WEST

IF YOU HAVEN'T DONE SO PLEASE RETURN TO:
REDONDO: THE EARLY YEARS

TERMITE TERRACE
JPG ATTRIBUTION

MORE

Footnote [2]

Redondo Beach is where I really remember the last time my immediate family was together, that is, intact and healthy with my mother, father, two brothers and myself fully together as a functioning family unit. That remembrance circulates around all of us living in our original family home on Lucia Avenue. A happy loving childhood with a mother and father and playing with my brothers and kids in the neighborhood. A house full of toys and my older brother learning to ride a bicycle. But, most specifically for me, remembering one of my brother's birthdays, one of the last ones we had together for many, many years to come, if at all.

My brother's birthday is in October and in 1942 it fell on a weekend. My parents --- the key words here being "my parents" in the plural, that is, both of them --- decided to make it more special than usual. More than special because the future was so unsure in those days, and scary besides, they decided to throw him the best surprise party they could while time and circumstances still allowed it. How do I know it was 1942? Because to pull off the surprise required my brothers and me to be out of the house while it was being decorated and guests, friends and kids secretly arrived --- so my dad took us down to the ocean to walk along the sand. It was not unusual to wander along the beach with one or the other or both of our parents, or even grandparents, so it was no big thing. However, we invariably hunted moonstones on what was called Moonstone Beach in front of the Strand that ran north of the pier in those days. Instead, no sooner had we reached the beach than we worked our way south of the pier to see a highly-muted town event, a two-man Japanese Midget Submarine that had washed up on shore. Even though the sub was roped off blocking any formal access from the front, to get to it my dad took us along a narrow strip between the Horseshoe Pier and the rocks, crossing under the pilings of the straight pier along the water line and onto the beach. When we reached the sub he lifted me up and I was able to look inside through an open hatch.

A few days before, within minutes of the midget submarine being spotted 500 yards off the Redondo Beach pier, a half a dozen airplanes dropped bombs from her last known position to all along her suspected path of travel. Two days later the sub, although virtually undamaged, washed up on shore. The date of the event has been reported as being October 4, 1942 although it doesn't really matter much as the bombing occurred in October, 1942 and I personally saw the midget submarine within days of it washing up on the beach --- and I remember seeing it quite clearly with my dad --- and we were there that day because we had to be out of the house for my brother's birthday.

A then Redondo Beach resident named Max Harris and an avowed eyewitness to the midget sub washing up on the beach, who would be well into his 90s now if still alive, was age 26 at the time and, extrapolated from his own words, describes how he recalls the event:

"It was a quiet morning around 10:00 AM and me and my girlfriend were walking along the beach. All of a sudden out of nowhere, six American bombers flew right over us and started dropping bombs about 500 yards from the shoreline. They then circled back and did it again, dropping at least 50 bombs and then flew away. The next thing I knew about 200 soldiers appeared and they quickly closed the beach.

"Later that day radio news broadcasts said that a Japanese two-man submarine had been sighted off the coast of Redondo and it was destroyed. Two days later the submarine washed up on shore and inside they found the bodies of two Japanese Naval officers." (source)

In the above main text I write that a couple who had been visiting neighbors during Thanksgiving offered to take one of us boys in an effort to ease the childcare burden facing my father. My father agreed and the couple selected me, in turn taking me to India first without his knowledge then without his approval. What I am not privy to in such a scenario is what year Thanksgiving we are talking about, 1942 or 1943. If it was the Thanksgiving of 1943, which I have a tendency to lean towards, I would have been with the couple only a month before going to India. If it was Thanksgiving of 1942 I could have been with them for as much to a year IF I went to live with them right away following Thanksgiving.

No sooner had I moved in with the couple following Thanksgiving and started a new school than the two-week Christmas vacation, or winter recess as they call it now, rolled around and they took me to India, not returning until sometime around the start of summer, in the interim me missing the rest of the school year. They chose the end of the year in order to attend a religious convention held December 26-31, 1943, in Adyar, located on the coast of the Indian Ocean near Madras, about 95 miles northeast of Tiruvannamalai. Tiruvannamalai is where they eventually ended up, residing at or near the ashram of the venerated Indian holy man the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi for maybe five months. Through information told to me by a one time childhood friend, Adam Osborne, now deceased, whose family lived at the ashram at the time, he and I were together during the full moon of April 1944. That would put me still at the ashram proper in early April as the full moon fell on the 8th that month, but, as found out through letters from the woman of the couple to my father, on my way home onboard a ship in the Indian Ocean, by previous reckoning as figured out in British Ship MV Tulagi, toward the end of May, 1944 and most likely back in the states sometime in June, 1944.

On near the very last day of June or so 1944, I was put on a passenger train somewhere in Pennsylvania headed toward Chicago, traveling with who I do not know. If it was or was not the couple who took me to India has never been confirmed. In Chicago I boarded the Number 19 Santa Fe Chief westbound to Los Angeles. After two days of travel from Pennsylvania, sometime around midnight of July 3, 1944, between Flagstaff, Arizona and Williams, on a high speed downhill run and behind schedule, the Chief's locomotive, a powerful Baldwin built 4-8-4 Northern with 80 inch drive wheels and clocking out at over 90 miles per hour, hit a marked 55 mph speed limit curve, with the locomotive derailing and sliding in the dirt on it's side off the tracks for well over the length of two football fields before coming to a stop. The rest of the 14 car train ended up in various stages of derailment and wreckage on and off the track, some cars remaining upright with two actually staying on the tracks undamaged. The fireman and three passengers were killed. 113 passengers along with 13 train employees injured, among them the severely injured engineer.

WRECK OF THE NUMBER 19 SANTA FE CHIEF JULY 3, 1944.
(photo from Chris Baird Collection)

While in India or in transit I ended up missing my mother's death and her funeral. No sooner had she been laid to rest than my father, who had been on a non-stop binge since she died, possibly before, hastily left the care of my two brothers, like he had with me, in the hands of others, with each being sent their separate ways to relatives or guardians. Then, without even waiting to see if his haze-fueled plans would be remotely successful he basically disappeared into the hinterlands for several years heavy into alcohol. My older brother went to live with my grandmother's brother and his family in some small town in the lower reaches of the mountains near Fresno, California. My younger brother was sent to live with a couple I was told were, but of which I am still unsure of their status of who they were really, my father's father's brother's son and his wife down along the California-Mexican border.

After my return to the states, between the time I left the train station in Williams, Arizona but before I went to live with the flower shop people, I stayed with my grandmother on my mother's side on and off for an unknown period of time. During that time two very high impact occurrences transpired in my life. First, following my return my grandmother became increasingly concerned about my seemingly askew perspective on things. In turn, because of her concerns, she contacted my Uncle, who lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to see if he had any idea where my father was. Almost immediately, after being totally unsuccessful in locating my father in any of his old haunts, my uncle came out to assist, one of the first of several trips before he actually remained on a permanent basis.

Secondly, I had only been with my grandmother a short time when I went shopping all day long in town along her daughter (my mother's sister, otherwise known as an aunt) and her daughter's two children (otherwise known as first cousins). Returning at the end of the day we pulled up in front of the garage and I got out of the car opening the two side-by-side wooden garage doors. There, only a few steps from where I stood, right in front of me on the garage floor in the glare of the headlights, in a slowly expanding pool of blood, was what was left of the husband of my mother's sister. The whole back of his head blown out from the blast of a double barrel shotgun he had stuck in his mouth.

With everything in a major turmoil with adults screaming. kids crying, and cops and ambulances all over the place, not knowing how it was done or by who, I ended up somehow in bed that night. The next morning, although I personally wasn't very high up on anyone's priority list considering the circumstances, it was eventually discovered I was not only not with any of the cousins, I was nowhere to be found. Weeks, possibly months went by when my grandmother was contacted by a sheriff from a department in a distant desert community saying they had found me, that I was OK, and basically all she had to do except for some minor paperwork, was to come and get me.

Apparently the night of the shooting a neighbor who was trying to help found me walking around my aunt's property in some kind of a semi-dazed state and without consulting anybody, under her own initiative, carried me into one of my cousin's bedrooms and covered me on the bed fully clothed and in the confusion all but forgotten. The next morning, miles, and miles away from where I had been the night before, I was found wandering out in the middle of the desert by an old desert prospector, with no idea who I was or how I got there. Eventually the prospector, the honorable man that he was, albeit living on his own prospector-like desert time, took me to the authorities who contacted my grandmother, re the following:

"The sheriff told my grandmother that the old man informed him he was driving along Old Woman Springs Road located down and behind the mountains from Big Bear Lake on the high desert floor when he noticed an unusual group of vultures circling in the thermals. They didn't seem to be zeroing in on an unmoving carcass of some kind, but moving their circle as though following something possibly injured but still alive. Reading the signs of the desert like a book and using his intuition as much as his curiosity, the old man turned north on a dirt road that led toward the old Bessemer iron mine thinking he might be able to get closer and get a better look. When he reached a point about even with the general eastward movement of the vultures he pulled over to the side of the road and standing up on the seat of his open top jeep peered out over the desert with binoculars to see if he could see anything. Sure enough, visually sweeping the area under the vulture's circle through his binoculars he saw some distance off the road what looked like and turned out to be, a young boy all by himself out in the middle of nowhere walking along almost if he had no clue as to where he was or what he was doing. However, the old man said, such it would seem, was not the case. It was as though the boy knew exactly what he was doing, but why he was doing it was a mystery.

"If the boy was following the vultures with them acting as guides or they were following his lead it didn't seem to matter as the young boy walked straight to and into, only to then sit down in the middle of, one of the most unusual features in all of the Mojave Desert, a creosote ring. But not any creosote ring the old man said, but a specific one, with a huge diameter the likes of which he had never seen. By all description and location, without knowing it, the young boy had walked to, selected out, and sat down in the middle of what, after it's discovery 30 or 40 years later, turned out to be, and has since been given the name King Clone, the oldest known living thing on Earth, dated as being over 11,700 years old."(source)

Sometime in mid August of 1945 my uncle, as nothing more than an innocent bystander --- and officially proven to be such at a later date -- got caught up in some kind of situation that attracted the attention of the atomic energy folk at Los Alamos. Two men flashing badges and dressed in civilian clothes showed up at his home early one morning and took him without explanation to a secured area inside the Los Alamos facility. After two days of questioning about what he saw he was released primarily through the efforts of famed astronomer and mathematician Dr Lincoln La Paz. In a footnote on the La Paz page so linked the following is found:

"(A) serious radiation mishap occurred at Los Alamos that killed one of the scientists working there. His death did not actually happen until several weeks after the accident, and it wasn't until his death that it was reported --- and then, at the time, the real cause of his death was not released. In any case the accident happened on August 21, 1945. During my uncle's conversation with La Paz over coffee and the fact that it circulated around radiation and it's effect on living things --- such as my uncle's interest on radiation impact on plants --- La Paz let slip that a fellow scientist was severely burned by an overdose of radiation the day before."

One way or the other, however the events involving my uncle unfolded, it must have been just at the close of summer, sometime between that August 21, 1945 date and the start of school in September of 1945 that I found myself getting out of a car clutching a tiny suitcase with nothing but a handful of crummy belongings and sack full of dirty underwear and not knowing how I got there. Standing on the sidewalk not much more than a simple beleaguered young boy with no mother and a father long gone, being taken by a stranger to live with a couple that owned a flower shop in Redondo Beach, a couple I was sure I had never seen or heard of in my life.

THE SPIRITUAL ELDER AND THE SANTA FE CHIEF

SANTA FE LOCOMOTIVE #3774

RIDING THE CAB FORWARDS

Footnote [3]

"Living on the ranch in the high desert of the Mojave in those days were heady times. With the war finally over almost everything was doing nothing but going upward. All kinds of things were happening, especially in the aircraft and automotive fields and happening in the desert besides. The ranch was located not far from Muroc Dry Lake the same place Edwards Air Force Base was located. So too, the ranch wasn't far from Mirage Dry Lake either. On the ground at Mirage were nothing but numberless hot rods and belly tank lakesters. My uncle would take us out there to watch some of the hopped-up Ford flatheads hitting 150 mph. In the air, flying right over the ranch, were B-36s and flying wings. Higher up they were testing the Bell X-1 and breaking the sound barrier."

A BOY AND HIS JEEP: ADVENTURES IN THE DESERT

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Not everybody who reads my works catches on or gets the idea that when I write about the combination of me and my stepmother in conjunction with a ranch she owned, that there were actually two very separate and distinct ranch experiences as well as ranches. Some readers, not realizing it, have a tendency run of blend the two times and ranches together, which is easy enough to do.

The first ranch experience revolved or centered around me as a young basically grade school kid along with my older and younger brothers and several other kids my stepmother more-or-less supported or took care of in some fashion, all living on a ranch she bought just for that purpose --- which the above quote on sonic booms and flying wings alludes to.

The second ranch experience found me just entering my teen years and starting my freshman year at Redondo Union High School. I didn't live on that second ranch, only spending the summers there during those high school years. My stepmother, after having just returned from a two year absence living and traveling in Mexico and South America, then divorcing my dad after she got back, bought what was a deserted, pretty much failed run down former attempt at a dude ranch. One year later, during my first full summer there, the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, what she called a 'ranch' --- even though as a ranch it was a little on the sparse side in what I would call standard ranch fare --- had been completely rebuilt and refurbished with a rather long fully stocked bar, food service facilities, swimming pool, a dance hall with a stage and live entertainment, along with rodeos and boxing matches on rotating weekends. It also had at least two dozen one-armed-bandit slot machines in a secret hidden room, plus like I always love to say, an ever present flock of Hostesses.

Even though I was on the ranch during the summers during my high school years as the son of the owner --- and at the time she being quite wealthy --- it wasn't like I was a prince. My stepmother, or ex-stepmother as the case may have been by then, had a whole series of jobs or work for me to do around the place to "earn my keep" as she would often tell me. One of those jobs, besides shoveling horse manure and cow dung after the once-a-month weekend rodeos, was to help the swamper that cleaned up the place following the Saturday night bashes by gathering up and rinsing tons of old beer bottles (usually stuffed with cigarette butts put out in stale beer), emptying and washing ashtrays, wiping down tables and chairs, hoeing out the restrooms and barf and sweeping the dance hall floor and stage with oiled sawdust.

But, it was not all work and no play as the previous mention of me going to the El Rey Club. At the end of one of the boxing days, some Runyonesque types, knowing I was the "son" of the owner and having been ferrying bet money between them on some of the matches invited me to sit down and have dinner with them. My stepmother, circulating through the crowd, after noticing me at the table with some fairly risky types, came over to see if all was well. In small talk one of them said they had come up for the day from Del Mar and would soon be heading back to continue their gambling on the thoroughbreds, then asked if I could go back with them and learn about the horses. My stepmother, having a complementary bottle of wine sent to their table, asked to let her think on it.

Later, when she and I were alone she told me I was welcome to go if I liked but to be aware, despite their appearance and demeanor they were pretty rough types, possibly some even packing heat. That night five of us left together counting me, with me riding in the middle of the back seat of a brand new 1953 Cadillac convertible with the top down, the whole of the trip to Del Mar done mostly at flat out high speed. Cigars, booze, and sometimes shooting at stop signs with .45 semi-automatics. Not me of course, I was just a boy. In the afternoon of the second day, and nearly $500 bucks ahead thanks to their suggestions, I was put on a train to L.A. where I was met at Union Station and taken back to the ranch. Little did I know at the time that for the whole trip I was being watched closely, albeit from a distance, by one of my stepmother's employees.

For more of those summer ranch adventures, the summers between my 9th through 12th grades while attending Redondo Union High School, and some even before when I was much younger during the years between the time I left Redondo and returned, please click the link below:

"One of the sailors said he had seen where a jeep could be adapted to run on railroad tracks so we should take the ranch jeep down there, fix it to ride on the rails, and drive it into Mexico and the U.S. One of the other guys piped in saying that during the war, at least during the early part of the war, 1942 or so, the Army had regular patrols along the railway looking for saboteurs and that he had met a soldier that said that's exactly what they did, fixed up jeeps so they could run on the rails. Everybody figured, what the heck, if the Army could do, so could the Navy and most likely, even better."

(please click image)

THE BOY AND HIS JEEP: ADVENTURES IN THE DESERT

ALSO PLEASE SEE:

HEAR NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL, SEE NO EVIL

Footnote [4]

IN MEMORIAM:

"After we returned from our trip to Mexico my buddy and I basically went our separate ways. He got married and bought a hardware store and I returned to work sanding brightwork on a yacht come marlin boat owned by multi-millionaire David Halliburton Sr."

The above quote is found at the Carlos Castaneda and the Nogales Bus Station Meeting site. My buddy and my "separate ways" didn't happen instantly in the matter of seconds overnight, but more of a slow drip, drip, drip widening of interests --- i.e., girls --- as we each began concentrating and narrowing more and more of our efforts on single specific members of the opposite sex over a several months to year or so period. Then, with one of those specific girls, in the January of the following year after our trip he got married. The year after that I was drafted. By the time I returned from the military he was expanding his family with newborns and my focus had diverged to such a place we just never reconnected.

I write the above because it has been brought to my attention that my travel in Mexico buddy, who I was so close to in those days but lost contact with upon our return and never reconnected, out of nowhere several years ago suddenly and unexpectedly died of a massive heart attack. I never met his wife, at least after they were married, or any of his kids. Nor do I know if he ever related to them of our travels together or if he ever knew himself how important those travels were to me and my life. In later years I saw him dining with friends or family across the room in a restaurant one night, but never went over to talk with him. If he saw me or not I don't know.

The following quote has been readjusted into the first person by me for our purposes here. So said, at a gathering in honor of his memory, his wife was cited as saying:

"(He) was so interested in others that I knew all about the people who crossed paths with him, even if I never met them.

"I would know all their names. I would know all their stories. I'd know their sorrows and their triumphs," she said.

I wonder? It is my belief that up until the time of his death (November, 2011) and unknown to his wife and family and almost everybody else who knew him even up to this day --- my buddy was one of only two people in the world that had within themselves the ability to answer a perplexing question considered by many to carry a certain amount of great significance. Other than me, but especially so thanks to my specific identification of such, he was one of the few people in the world who would have seen Carlos Castaneda and his Road Trip friend Bill in the Nogales bus station at the same time and on the same day he met Don Juan Matus. If he knew or ever put the two events together he never related it to me.

My high school travel to Mexico buddy was a red-blooded, honest, true, upstanding, honorable young man. As a singular unattached red-blooded youth in his late teenage to early twenties he conducted himself in a like manner, always done so in an honorable fashion. He wasn't dead however. For example, at roughly 18, maybe 17, on our trip to Nevada we stopped at my ex-stepmother's ranch, or at least what she called a ranch --- even though as a ranch it was a little on the sparse side in what I would call standard ranch fare --- cattle and horses for example. Instead it had a huge dance hall, a rather long fully stocked bar, food service facilities, swimming pool, live entertainment, along with rodeos and boxing matches on the weekends. It also had at least two dozen one-armed-bandit slot machines in a secret hidden room, plus like I like to say, a flock of ever present hostesses. On the way to Nevada we stopped at her place to pick up the ranch jeep, re the following from the source so cited:

"After playing a few of the two dozen slot machines my stepmother had stashed away in a secret hidden room, having lunch, and talking with some of the hostesses, we removed the front driveshaft from the jeep for easier towing per the ranch foreman's suggestion and hooked the jeep to the back of the truck. Then, without staying overnight or availing ourselves with any or all of the ranch amenities offered by my stepmother, and as much as my buddy would have liked to have done otherwise, i.e., hostess availing, we took off, my buddy sporting a bump in his pants for the first hundred miles of our drive northbound upwards through the state of California along the east side of the Sierras."

THE JEEP, NEVADA, AND THE RED-HAIRED GIANTS

In my own opinion I think his silence was a sort of selected memory loss revolving around himself and the long dark-haired beauty he got hooked up with in Magdalena in the summer of 1960 --- then getting married a mere six months later in January of 1961, most likely to someone he knew before hand. Any forthcoming facts or details regarding our trip, no matter how momentous or earth shaking could have opened a whole can of worms he wasn't prepared to deal with or wanted to discuss.

For info on Carlos Castaneda and Don Juan Matus and how they fit in with me, Redondo Union High School, and my job after graduation, please click HERE. See below as well.

THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS

In a recent email, a reader of my works identifying himself as a former Redondo Union High School student and without citing a specific year, said he graduated in and around the same time I did. Although I didn't recognize his name, most of what he wrote seemed accurate enough, albeit leaning toward the mundane, that is until he reached a point where he began writing about the high school buddy I traveled throughout Mexico with shortly after graduation, and of which who, as a person I had left unnamed and anonymous. The writer connected my travel in Mexico buddy with two other Redondo High alumni that just happened to be attending Redondo High at the exact same time my buddy and I were. The writer revealed a little known fact, or at least that I've never seen mentioned before, that I knew about peripherally. That is that my travel in Mexico buddy was the first person to give the famed Smothers Brothers comedy team, both of who were Redondo Union High graduates and still at the time both Redondo students, their very first opportunity to perform their act in front of a live audience of an auditorium size. Anybody who would have been there that day for the performance would have remembered the "Hearts of Stone" number and the email writer did.

Although I was aware of who the Smothers Brothers were, and even though both graduated on either side of me during my four year stint at Redondo High, I was never afforded the opportunity or privilege to meet or know either of them on a personal level. Interestingly enough however, both of them and my really good travel in Mexico buddy were friends, even at a family level ever since they and their mother first moved to Redondo. How all of that came about, continued, or ended, if it ended, is something I never learned.

In general conversation, just as the letter writer was winding up his email, out of the blue in a speculation sort of a way he offered a name to my travel in Mexico buddy who I had always kept anonymous, He nailed him spot on. As for me and my buddy' and our travels in Mexico please see the following and related links:

"I had ended up in Nogales because a few years out of high school and tired of working as a technical illustrator --- all the while being faced by the draft in the next few years or so --- I decided to take a leave of absence and head into Mexico with a buddy of mine.

"He and I had shopped around and bought a used six-cylinder 1951 Chevy panel truck that was in pretty good shape. Over a period of a few months we outfitted it like a camper with fold down bunks, table, sink, stove, and portable toilet. Early one Saturday morning we crossed into Mexico at the Tijuana border with no idea how long we were going to be gone."

CASTANEDA AND DON JUAN MATUS
THE NOGALES BUS STATION MEETING

MAYA SHAMAN AND CHICXULUB

(please click image)

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The father of the Smothers Brothers actually survived the Bataan Death March only to die later while being transferred between Japanese POW camps. Re the following from his obituary:

Major Smothers served in the 45th Infantry Regiment and died during World War II, while being transported from a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Fukuoka, Japan to a POW camp in Mukden, Manchukuo. He is the father of Thomas and Dick Smothers -- The Smothers Brothers.

Survived the sinking of the Oryoku Maru at Subic Bay, Philippine Islands, and the bombing of the Enoura Maru at Takao, Formosa. He was held in Japan at Fukuoka #3 and #22. Since he had been scheduled to be sent to Manchuria, the Japanese boarded him onto a transport, on which he died, to Korea.

Graduated from West Point, Class of 1929. Became member of the 45th Infantry Regiment, Philippine Scouts. Report date: 7 May 1942, he was held at Hoten POW Camp (Mukden) Manchuria 42-123. He survived the Bataan Death March only to die on a Japanese Hellship, they were en route to Korea, when a Allied pilot mistakenly bombed the ship, he was a victim of friendly fire. He was buried at sea. There is a monument at Fort William Mckinley, Manila, The Philippines. His family was awarded the Purple Heart Medal & Bronze Star Medal. He left three children: Tom, Dick & Sherry and wife, Ruth Remick Smothers.

PLEASE CLICK IMAGE

Footnote [5]

Bobbie Brown, her first name written by her with an annoying little circle over the "I" rather than a dot when she penned her name, and I made a promise to catch up with each other ten years after graduation, which of course, we never did.

For the record, the highest the two of us ever got was she being an "on a first name basis" friend girl, but never a girlfriend. Even if it could have been something it never got off the ground. My father was a general contractor, the school whoop-de-doos saw him as a carpenter, so they put me in woodshop classes. Her father was a doctor, so they put her in college prep classes. She went to college after high school. I was drafted into the Army. She did however, play a huge role in my life because of what relationship we did have and her first name.

Starting around the end of my sophomore into my junior year, up until but mostly after graduation, and not really knowing a whole lot about it, I became more and more attracted to the small pockets of the Beat Generation movement bleeding down from the national level that began to grow up around the South Bay. I started hanging out at the Iconoclast Coffee House just a few steps east up the hill from El Paseo and the Horseshoe Pier on Wall Street in Redondo Beach and/or the Insomniac on Pier Avenue just across the street from Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach hoping to be, or at least think I was "cool" and possibly even absorb or learn some of the movement trends.

Although I attempted to write a few Beat poems while still in high school, only one has proved the test of time. It was written as an ode to my aforementioned fellow classmate Barbara Lynn "Bobbi" Brown and based on a poem Beat poet Allen Ginsberg wrote circa 1953 titled Green Valentine Blues. As it's turned out, at least how I've dredged it up elsewhere for use in my present online works, the poem has become more of an ode to the author W. Somerset Maugham's closest female friend and confidant, Barbara Back than any Barbara I ever knew in high school.

Not long after composing the poem, and unrelated in any fashion to it, I was visiting a friend when I noticed he had two nearly identical same size flat-surface small granite slabs sitting on a shelf in his garage doing no more than collecting dust. He said he found them when he hiked to the top of Half Dome in Yosemite a few years before. Other than the fact that he just liked them, with no real reason of what he was going to do with either of the slabs, he brought them home. Since then, other than what they had been doing, sitting on the shelf in the garage gathering dust, that was about it.

I told him I had written a poem recently and thought it should be carved into stone. So that's what we did. After promising to fix up the older brother of a friend of mine who worked for an outfit that finished tombstones and such with the sister of another friend of mine, he ground and polished one surface of both slabs. Then, over a period of several nights, using a hand held high speed Dremel grinding tool and both stone slabs because of the poem's 18 lines, we engraved or etched as the case may be, the poem onto the slabs. Then he and I drove up to Yosemite and retracing his steps, climbed to the top of Half Dome. When we reached a point along the top where we could, after practicing for weeks as a discus thrower, we threw the slabs out over the edge with the two poem etched slabs falling straight down onto the Dome's talus slope on the valley floor some 4,700 feet below. As far as I know both of the engraved slabs are still there. See:

BARBARA BACK

NOTE THE LINE OF CLIMBERS CENTER LEFT USING CABLE STAIRS TO REACH SUMMIT

During the period of time I was crawling my way through eight weeks of basic training at Fort Ord a few years after high school rather than climbing Half Dome I was doing KP, dodging blanks along with a few live ones and cleaning muck and mud off my boots, she was teaching in a small community called Campbell, adjacent to the city of San Jose --- about 50 miles north of where I was taking my basic training. We were never able to work out any sort of a convenient get together during the short amount of time I had before being reassigned, but she did say in a note or letter she thought it was kind of "neat" (or some such thing) that she was educating the country while I was defending the country.

However, the big shot she was and still is (Newport Beach and all) and the lowly G.I. I was, if one read the early part of the text above, it might be recalled the following about me:

"I settled in using Redondo as a central base of operations while commuting back and forth to college attempting to grab off an undergraduate degree on the G.I. Bill, and of which I was eventually able to do.

"After receiving a B.A. along with a California Secondary Teaching Credential, which required an additional fifth year beyond a bachelors as well as student teaching, I matriculated into graduate school."

There also appears in a lost sentence in a lost paragraph in a lost page written by someone else called Critical Concerns With Awakening 101 wherein the following reference to me teaching not just on a high school teaching credential, but at the university level, a professorship that started out to be a semester, two at the most, ending up instead 4 1/2 years in duration:

"I know for a fact, although I don't know where, he had, at least for a time, taken a professorship incognito 'just for the heck of it' at a rather large west coast university (30,000 student body) in a totally unrelated area and without anybody knowing who he is,"

Although I'm not always recognizable out of context and former students are hesitant for being unsure, I'm not always approached, although it does happen on occasion. One of the most memorable happened in Belize as found in the quote below from Travels In The Yucatan. The rattletrap bus I was on from Guatemala to Belize was late causing me to stay overnight for the next day bus. In the meantime the following happened:

"That evening having a beer along the sidewalk of an open air cantina a young woman sitting with a group of people across the room approached me saying she thought she may have taken a college class from me a few years before. After a little back and forth chit-chat such seemed to be the case. When I asked her to join me she asked if I would like to join her and her friends instead, which I did."

Who would have ever guessed? Nobody but Helen Sinsabaugh, Caesar Hernandez, Al Brown, and George Demos, with Demos, now Dr. George Demos, being probably at the top of the heap being the most Influential having personally interceded positively on my behalf in my life at least three times starting as far back as high school, then on to college, the Peace Corps and fighting hurricanes with the Red Cross.

DR. GEORGE DEMOS

(please click image)

When I was a kid one of my favorite hard cover books, and still is in it's own special way, was on the American Volunteer Group, the A.V.G., or as they were better known, the Flying Tigers. The book was written by a woman by the name of Olga Greenlaw, the wife of the second in command of the A.V.G. Published in 1943, well before the war was decided, the title of the book, The Lady and the Tigers, was actually a semi-clever play on the title of a onetime famous short story called The Lady or the Tiger? written in 1884 by Frank R. Stockton. The connection being, is that in the Stockton story there is no given ending. As to Greenlaw's book, although we know the ending or outcome now, that is of World War II, at the time her book was written and published in 1943, like the no known outcome of Stockton's story, there was at the time no known outcome to the war. The book came into my hands as found in the following quote:

"Just as I was leaving following a several day period in which for the very first time I met the woman who would become my stepmother, she, having observed earlier my avid interest in a book that I had removed from the shelves in her library on Flying Tigers titled 'The Lady and the Tigers,' handed me her personal signed copy to take with me. I read it over-and-over, almost to the point of it becoming a bible or handbook on the Flying Tigers for most of my formative years."(see)

It was only a couple of years after the war that my stepmother gave me her copy of Olga Greenlaw's book. Inside was something Greenlaw wrote that I, as a not yet 10 year old boy, never forgot. Recounting the fate of several pilots she wrote:

"I wonder what happened to him --- probably a prisoner. But the Chinese scouts found a body in the same location or thereabouts where Black Mac bailed out when Jack Newkirk got killed --- in March.

"The body was unrecognizable, as there was nothing left, the ants had eaten all the flesh, but the uniform the bones were covered with was an A.V.G. flying suit with the insignia still on it."

You might imagine what I, as a young boy thought of when I first read about the jungle ants gnawing the flesh completely clean right off the pilot's skeleton leaving nothing but bare bones laying inside the flight suit, all the internal organs gone.

TANGO SQUADRON AIR MUSEUM, CHIANG MAI

So said, when I was in high school, except possibly for a little extra effort on my part in Miss Sinsabaugh's journalism class and maybe art, I probably wasn't the best student Redondo Union High School ever had. However, I still remember in one of my English classes, although I don't remember which grade, we were assigned to read Carl Stephenson's short story "Leiningen Versus the Ants." The story revolves around an owner of a plantation of some kind out in the middle of the Brazilian jungle who had to do battle with a mile wide hoard of army ants devouring everything in their path, with the hoard headed straight toward his plantation. After reading the story we were to write then give an oral report. I combined what I read in Leiningen with Greenlaw's description of the downed A.V.G. pilot and for the first time ever --- and most likely my last for a high school English assignment --- I got an A.

The odd part of it all was the fact that there was this girl named Ann Lopin who showed up in a majority of my English classes that always got A's. Although I disliked that, her getting A's and all, I loved her legs which were without a doubt the best in the high school, and invariably chose to sit right behind her whenever I could, which was most of the time. What I was never able to figure out was why, when I copied everything she wrote, did, or turned in word-for-word, she always got A's and I never received anything higher than a C. I don't think it could have been because of my legs.

NAVY VETERAN MISS HELEN SINSABAUGH (1908 - 2000)
GREATEST HIGH SCHOOL JOURNALISM TEACHER EVER
(please click image)

When it comes to Leiningen Versus the Ants and my high school report and verbal presentation thereof, after I got my one and only A, it didn't end there. Thirty-five years later, in August 1990, science-fiction and horror genre' author Stephen King put together a collection of short stories published in a single volume titled "Four Past Midnight." One of the stories is The Langoliers. In the text of the story King brings up Leiningen Versus the Ants in a round about way by mentioning a movie based on the Leiningen story. As King lays it out in The Langoliers, Brian Engle, who was the pilot of the American Pride L1011 and of which both pilot and plane were major players as the plot unfolded, brings up for some reason a movie he had seen on late night TV a long time ago that starred Charlton Heston. In the text, speaking of the movie, Engle says:

"In it, Charlton Heston had owned a big plantation in South America. The plantation had been attacked by a vast moving carpet of soldier ants, ants which ate everything in their path --- trees, grass, buildings, cows, men. What had that movie been called? Brian couldn't remember. He only remembered that Charlton had kept trying increasingly desperate tricks to stop the ants, or at least delay them. Had he beaten them in the end? Brian couldn't remember."

The movie was The Naked Jungle, released March 3, 1954 with all acknowledgment to Leiningen Versus the Ants. If you would like to see the movie click HERE.

SHAMBHALA, TIME, AND THE LANGOLIERS

KUAN YIN, SHAMBHALA, AND OM MANI PADME HUM

After somehow having been able to successfully finagle my way through the system enough during my first two years of high school that I passed all my classes allowing me to advance to each successive higher grade without hindrance, then spending the months in-between on my stepmother's ranch in a totally un-academic fashion, I returned for the start of my junior year just as the final days of that second summer were closing in. Within a few days of that return I met for the first time a highly unusual man who had moved into the house next door while I was gone.

The day I met my neighbor for the first time, a man who would eventually become my Mentor in things spiritual, I was set aback by the calm serenity he seemed to abide in. Over time he revealed he had studied under the venerated Indian holy man the Baghavan Sri Ramana Maharshi at his ashram in Tiruvannamalai, South India between the wars. As the years passed and I got to know him I began asking him then nearly begging him to "make me like him." Time after time he brushed me off.

Years after that meeting my younger brother, who had lived in Redondo Beach steadily since the summer before he started the sixth grade through to his ultimate retirement in his mid sixties, decided to sell his house and move out of state. While cleaning out his attic he came across a long forgotten cardboard box stashed away that at one time belonged to me. Among the contents of the box was a beat up copy of a book titled ZEN BUDDHISM: Selected Writings of D.T Suzuki (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), a book that had not seen the light of day in decades. The pages were faded and worn. Corner after corner of pages folded down. Pencil notes were all over the margins and inside the covers. Sentences were underlined in ink. Whole paragraphs were highlighted in a now barely discernible yellow.

The reason the book ended up in such a weather beaten and worn state was because the last year of high school and several years afterward I barely let it out of my hands. I carried it around with me like an old time western preacher might have carried his bible. Anytime anybody said anything about anything, and much to the chagrin and distress of almost everybody around, out would come my book...always ready with a Zen answer. Then one day, like the ancient classic Zen master Te Shan who out of the blue threw ALL of his commentaries and books on Zen into a pile and set them afire, reducing them to nothing but ashes, something was different. Somehow I just didn't need Zen books much any more.(see)

As I turned those crumbling pages for the first time in over 20 or 30 years or more, the notes, the underlining, the highlights, all at one time seemingly so important, all seemed so odd. Going back I remembered how no longer needing the books that were at onetime so important slowly all came about:

The man next door, apparently thinking I guess, that he would never get rid of me, began making a few suggestions. In an attempt to strengthen my interest through familiarities by tying together something I knew with something foreign to me he brought in Da Vinci from my childhood and connected it with what was called Vihangam Marg, The Bird's Way, gently coaching me through its finer subtleties. It was he who gave me and urged me to read the aforementioned Suzuki book originally. Then one day he came to me and said he would be leaving soon and that I would be on my own. It seemed the pressure of the multitudes were crunching down on him and he sought a more solitary lifestyle. Prior to his departure he informed me that a highly honored Japanese Zen master named Yasutani Hakuun Roshi was visiting the United States for a short time and since what I seemed to be seeking and what Zen is paralleled, suggested I see him. He had taken it upon himself to make the arrangements for me to attend a special week long sesshin under the master, re the following:

"The sesshins ran from four in the morning to eight at night. About thirty people attended and we sat in two rows of fifteen facing one another across the room with our backs toward the wall.

"By the final day our numbers had diminished greatly and though the master spoke in private with the others, he refused to have private consultation with me. When the last day finally ended and we were leaving, thanking heavens we even survived, the interpreter came to me and said the master wished to speak with me. The master told me three of the our group had realized Kensho and berated me for not being among them. He said I had vast opportunities in my daily existence far beyond most and had not fulfilled the expectations of either him or my mentor. I thanked him, bowed, and left."

ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT: The Path Unfolds

In Footnote [1] I mention that I spent a good part of the summer of 1962 by first, throwing myself into some rather intense Zen meditation sessions that nearly broke me mentally and almost killed me physically. So too, I know that on July 9, 1962 I went to the opening of Andy Warhol's first one man show ever, held in Los Angeles at the Ferus Gallery, although at the time Warhol was not well known nor had I really heard of him. After that I went crawling back on the marlin boat owned by David J. Halliburton to recoup. I spent the rest of the summer forgetting by hooking up with old friends in Cabo, many whom, at least the female variety, worked the hotels at night and sunbathed on the yacht during the day. In the meantime I played the bereaved lover, licked my wounds and wondered why the sunbathing women always seemed to be able to find the bottoms of their bathing suits but never the tops.

What do I mean when I say the Zen meditation sessions "nearly broke me mentally and almost killed me physically?" The quote below follows-up almost immediately after the previous quote above regarding my participation in the meditation sessions in the first place and is found at the same source. Although maybe a little out of context it still provides a good explanation of what I mean:

"Going home my mind was in a whirl. I was sore, I ached, I had welts all over my back and some shrimpie little jerk was telling me to realize my growth. Three people had Kensho. Big deal! Nobody's mind exploded. It wasn't India. For seven agonizing pain filled days I had sat inhumanly contorted under the aegis of a certified Bodhidharma successor, beat with a stick like a dog, nearly starved to death on nothing but turtle food, and probed ceaselessly day after day to practice into the wee hours of the morning...and nothing."

Not long after the end of the above named summer than I was drafted into the military. When I returned I sought out my now ex-neighbor come mentor once again with the intention of at least a semi-return to practice. What he saw he didn't like, saying the military brought out a beast in me, plus all I really wanted to do was use my college time to party and chase girls. He agreed that my unsuccessful foray under Yasutani should have ended somewhat differently and was unsure why it didn't. By spring he had pretty much mellowed and so had I. Thinking I needed something in between Yasutani and his own teaching he arranged for me to go to Connecticut and visit a nearly invisible man of great spiritual prowess by the name of Alfred Pulyan. Just as spring was reaching its final count down I showed up at Pulyan's wooded rural compound and began a most unsual almost non-study study --- the visit growing through to well past the middle of summer because, I'm sure, of my mentor as well as Pulyan's own graciousness. Inturn I was introduced to Pulyan's Teacher, a woman of extreme attainment who lived close by and the person fully responsible for Pulyan's transformation. Before I could return the following year Pulyan died. I never learned if my mentor knew him personally, however he was visibly set back on news of his death.

As I gained insight into some of the teachings afforded me by my mentor, in addition to his recommendations, and not always with his blessings, I began to widen my search for answers on my own. Sometimes the search came to pass by my own volition, other times by powers beyond my control. I had spent months and months half a world away nearly on the roof of the world Doing Hard Time in a Zen monastery as well as the Mahasi Meditation Center in Rangoon, Burma --- of which staying there for the full 12 weeks for meditators to this day is still free, including room and board.

SO HOW DOES IT ALL PLAY OUT?

DARK LUMINOSITY

ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT: THE PATH UNFOLDS

RESTITCHING THE HOLE IN THE FABRIC OF SPACE-TIME

HOW ONE BOY'S FASCINATION WITH A TOY LED TO SHAMBHALA

"People go to The Code Maker, The Zen Maker, as found linked elsewhere, hoping to cull out some insight into the mysterious hermitage said to exist somewhere beyond time in a remote area of the Himalayas known under a variety of names such as Gyanganj, Shambhala or Shangri-la. They are seeking answers. They want to know does Shangri-la exist? Is Shangri-la real? Where is Shangri-la located? What of Shambhala and Gyanganj? And what do they get when they go to Code Maker, Zen Maker? Actually, the answer is there, but all they see in the beginning is something about a boy and something else called a Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph. Without delving into the contents of the text or going deeper into the subject matter they end up befuddled and perplexed. However, the answer is there, not hidden or written in some kind of subliminal manner, but there for all to see. However, for those who demand or would like further clarification as to how something seemingly as insignificant as a small handheld toy could rise to such majestical and spiritual proportions in the overall scheme of the universe that it could unlock the doors to Gyanganj."

RESTITCHING THE HOLE IN THE FABRIC OF SPACE-TIME

TOMB RAIDER: THE LADY AND THE STOLEN SKULLS

The buddy I went to Mexico with was born in the midwest the same year I was born. Around the start of World War II, just like Tike's family, he and his family moved to California settling in Redondo Beach as well. And again, as with Tike, the two of us attending kindergarten and possibly elementary school together. After the death of my mother followed by the break up of my family, and with me moving away, the two of us never really got to know each other. Nine years later or so when I moved back to Redondo after having lived with a number of foster couples during the intervening years, we both graduated from Redondo High the same year. Around our junior year he discovered I was restoring a woody wagon after he found one being used as a chicken coop in a barn out near Riverside he decided to restore. In doing so someone sent him to me. The wagon was a basket case, but offering him advice and working on it and the wood for hours on end we learned we had a lot in common, especially jazz. Eventually we started hanging out together, especially during our senior year.

THE WOODIE PARKED OUTSIDE HOWARD RUMSEY'S LIGHTHOUSE
(please click)

During high school, and more so the last two years after I got my drivers licence and car, I would go to my stepmother's ranch just for the heck of it. Sometimes I might stay for the weekend, other times, say like spring vacation or something, maybe longer. One day I asked my high school buddy to join me in what turned into being a precursor to our several years later trip to Mexico. Instead of going to the ranch using my woody, which in those days was in a constant state of refurbishing, renewal, and restoration, we borrowed his dad's pick-up truck that had a camper installed on the back called a Telescopic Tuk-A-Way, a pretty much fully equipped camper with a stove, sink, table, lights, bunks, and fridge. It was built in such a way that the height could be adjusted up or down using a crank. While driving the top could be kept in the lower position, the same height at the truck cab. When in use as a camper it could be cranked up making all kinds of head room and interior space. After borrowing the pick-up camper the two of us headed out to my stepmother's place in the high desert, borrowing the ranch jeep. Without even staying overnight, we took off toward Nevada and a little town called Lovelock, about 350 miles north of the ranch towing the jeep behind us. Why Lovelock? Because of something really quirky I overheard my dad say:

"(My dad) was always reading pulp western and science fiction magazines and in the process came across a story one day that said located way out in the middle of the desert wasteland near Lovelock, Nevada, there existed an ancient cave that had at onetime within it's cavern depths the skeletal remains of giant humans, red haired humans of a huge size, eight or ten foot tall or more. He said the women would have been twice as tall as my mother at 4 foot 11 inches who also had red hair. We, the near to graduating and deeply educated super-bright intellectual powerhouses that my buddy and I were, after hearing the story, like someone driven to see the world's largest ball of yarn, decided we couldn't live quietly the rest of our lives if we didn't go see the caves and its contents ourselves. So, with no real clue as to what we were doing, off we went, using the camper for comfort and the jeep to traverse the wasteland to find red haired skeletons twice the height of my red haired mother."

The next day after arriving in Carson City we were having breakfast in a local Denny's type restaurant when a woman sat down at our booth saying she had overheard why we were in Nevada. She told us she worked for a local brothel and in her line of work she met all kinds of people. In the process of that work she knew a man who could show us the artifacts we were interested in, artifacts that nobody else would ever get to see. In the middle of the night, driven by an incredible naivete as much as an overwhelming sense of a young mind seeking pure adventure, after meeting in some noisy cowboy-hat infested honky tonk bar outside of town, using the jeep we traversed across some rather rough terrain to an abandoned miner's shack on the side of a remote desert mountain.

THE BROTHEL LADY, LOOKING ALL THE SAME AS LARA CROFT, TOMB RAIDER

There, while being shown the artifacts, the woman grabbed what I would consider one of the more important ones and took off in the jeep with me right behind her. While being pursued we suddenly screeched to a stop and she switched to a dirt bike, escaping out across the desert leaving me sitting there like I was an accomplice. Before I had a chance to do anything somebody took a shot over my head telling me to lay face down on the ground. As soon as I did I had dirt and rocks kicked in my face, with the kicker's heavy boot making hard contact against the side of my head as I turned away as best I could. Re the following from the source so cited, with me remember, still being in high school and only 17 or 18:

"Sometime later, after being out, I groggily came to, sitting up with the blazing hot sun burning down on me, all my clothes gone, dried blood matted in my hair on the side of my head. After a quick search there was no sign of my clothes. I figured he must have gone through every stitch of them searching for the keys, but why he didn't just discard them somewhere close by I have no clue. Bloodied head or not I was glad he didn't just up and shoot me, or worse yet as I viewed it, in that I was still alive, find me amorously attractive in my unconscious and nude state. I dug around for the keys, started the jeep and headed in the direction I thought the main road should be, sitting all the while on a super hot sun heated drivers seat with my bare butt."

All because my dad was always reading pulp western and science fiction magazines.(see)

For the record, the link to the quote that brought you here about me and my high school buddy, a couple of years out of high school and being tired of our jobs and the way our lives were going, deciding to go on an extended road trip throughout Mexico, well that quote, albeit implied, isn't actually intact in full per se' at the Red Giants site. Although accurate in its context I have sort of inferred it from a quasi-conglomerate of sources, most notably as found in the Nogales Bus Station link and the Chicxullb link above. The synopsis above regarding the Red Haired Giants story is actually a prelude to the the Mexico trip, and happened while we were both in high school as opposed to the Mexico trip which happened post-high school. See also on this page "IN MEMORIAM" Footnote [4]

THE JEEP, NEVADA, AND THE RED-HAIRED GIANTS

TRAVELS IN THE YUCATAN
ASTEROIDS, SHAMANS, AND THE HIDDEN MAGIC OF MAYA TEMPLES

WASHOE ZEPHYR

In the latter part of February 1942, during the early morning hours just a few months into the war --- and with me still a very young boy --- a giant airborne object of an unknown origin came in off the Pacific flying over the Los Angeles area for several hours causing a basin-wide blackout. After paralleling the coast southbound from El Segundo it turned diagonally inland over Redondo Beach, and when it did I clearly saw it, together with my whole family and neighbors, as it cruised at a very low altitude directly over the house I lived in on South Lucia.

My uncle often stated he felt the reason for my fascination with flying and flying things in later life, the venerable P-40 Warhawk notwithstanding, went clear back to that incident involving the fly over of the giant airborne object I saw as a child. The object, said to have been as large as a Zeppelin at over 800 feet in length, was seen in one form or the other by literally thousands and thousands of people besides myself in the L.A. basin and along the Southern California coast.

Known variously as the UFO Over L.A., The Battle of Los Angeles, etc., etc., or as I call it The Battle of Los Angeles: 1942 UFO. Even though the object was able to withstand over 1440 direct anti-aircraft rounds and still escape unscathed, the incident is mostly forgotten now except by maybe myself and a few others. Actually, with no disrespect toward my uncle, although the L.A. UFO no doubt had a major impact on me, I personally think what really opened up my fascination regarding the ability to fly, flying machines, giant flying creatures, giant feathers, et al, that seemed to dominate in later life, was born from a germ initiated from me building, flying, and watching a comic book superhero toy called the Flying Captain Marvel. It wasn't a plane construed as flying, but a man.

(please click image)

1942: THE GREAT LOS ANGELES AIR RAID

THE BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES: The Radar Dilemma

WORLD WAR II HAND CRANK PORTABLE AIR RAID SIREN

JUNIOR AIR RAID WARDENS
(please click image>

Living in the house next to the house I lived in on South Lucia was a girl named Mary Lou who used to babysit my brothers and me. While at the time I wasn't sure of her age, that is, if she was into her teens or not, old or young, as my mother saw it she was old enough to babysit us. She lived with her parents along with her curmudgeon old grandfather. He was a sort of Rube Goldberg inventor type guy that seemed like he could fix or build anything. He had set up a junk filled workshop in the detached dirt floor single-car garage on the back of their property collecting, working on, and making stuff he said was to thwart the "impending invasion," meaning of course, by the Japanese.

Amongst the junk in his shop was a portable hand held, hand-crank air raid siren similar to the one pictured above in conjunction with this footnote. It wasn't unusual to find Mary Lou's grandfather out in his shop at all hours of the day and night for one reason or the other. On the night the giant object flew over our house he was awake during the early morning hours working in the garage while at the same time monitoring emergency-band radio frequencies like he often did when he became aware something big was going on. After hearing gunshots or anti-aircraft guns in the distance he grabbed his air raid siren and went out on the street. It was his siren that woke my father and it was he that gave an early warning to the rest of my family and other residents on our street.

THE OLD MAN AND THE BABYSITTER

The old man and the babysitter figured prominently in my early life, several times as a matter of fact, some major, some minor. In a way the old man was sort of a progenitor or prototype of things to come, my uncle not coming along until about four years later, just about the time I was entering the fourth grade. The person who I call my Merchant Marine Friend, entered my life after my uncle, just at the start of my first two years of high school. Both the grandfather and the merchant marine picking up the slack beyond and before the formal educational system, teaching and showing me things and laying the groundwork in my young life long before my mentor came on the scene or I was even old enough to start school. The sun, stars, electricity, pneumatics, the speed of light, time. They were all there in an embryo way.

Later in life I discovered that the two men had mutual acquaintances, but neither had ever met personally, with one picking up as the other left. A similar overall philosophy did however, blanket the two at a higher level, and of which then, filtered down to me. Although both, at a much different place and degrees apart, in the end, through me or because of me, or at least as I saw it, their philosophies blended together in a full circle.

The seed for that smooth blending came about almost as if karma, destiny, fate, or a something just like it but with no name at all stepped in at very important stage or time of my life. In the very beginning it was the grandfather of the girl next door who used to babysit me and of which he is fully discussed in Western Union Telegraph Set. Later during my first two years of high school, aptly bridging the gap between my uncle and mentor, was my Merchant Marine Friend. In an embryo sort of way the grandfather was a kind of a progenitor or prototype of things to come, being there teaching and showing me things and laying the groundwork in my young life long before my uncle or mentor came on the scene or I was even old enough to start school. The sun, stars, electricity, pneumatics, the speed of light, time. They were all there very early on, offered without hinderance and easily absorbed at my level of understanding.

One of the interactions with the grandfather, and ranked right up there as one of the ones I was most fond of, and of all things, believe it or not, turned out to be nothing less than a radio premium offer, albeit one from an era long before I was ever aware of them.

If by pure happenstance you were an unknowing person who just stumbled into the old man's seemingly ramshackle shop, taking no more than a quick glance around, the junk pile dump of a place it appeared to be, you would think he would never be able to find or keep track of anything. However, he had his own way of doing things and in that own way had some things he considered to be of a high personal value and because of that they were treated and kept in a special way.

One of those valuable things --- at least to him --- was an item I was absolutely fascinated and intrigued by, except he would rarely let me touch it. The item was a 1922 antique called an Ansonia Sunwatch, designed to fit in a pocket with a folding lid that covered a sundial and compass. On a sunny day, following the instructions and placing the Sunwatch in the right direction, a person could discern what time it was.

As an alternative to his prized Ansonia he let me use an item of similar intent anytime I wanted, an item that he didn't hold in nearly as high esteem, but for me I loved it. As I viewed it, it just as good if not better. Actually, it was a radio premium offer from Ovaltine like the later-to-come Captain Midnight Code-O-Graphs, only from the year 1938 called a Little Orphan Annie Miracle Compass Sun-Watch:

Another around her house toy, although really belonging to her grandfather and out in the garage, that I loved and when given the chance I played with practically incessantly, was a just before the war nearly all paper box top offer, only through the Ralston Cereal Company called a Tom Mix Straight Shooter Telegraph Set.

(for larger size click image then click again)

DOT 'N DASH ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH SET

THE BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES: The Radar Dilemma

WESTERN UNION STANDARD RADIO TELEGRAPH SIGNAL SET

To my dad my older brother, the first born, was like a prince. In my young mind as I saw things or how I felt it in my bones, my dad lavished, if not all, an inordinate amount of his affections and care towards him, leaving me feeling shortchanged in the bargain. In order to counteract that lavishness and have my dad aim some of that affection in my direction, I did everything I could to gain or establish an equal level of worthiness. The difference was that my older brother received his worthiness, at least as I saw it, with no effort on his part, but I had to continuously prop up mine diligently, making any outcome dubious or short term without my constant input. Thus entered into my young childhood me being a Junior Air Raid Warden.

During World War II, on our block and for several around, my dad was an air raid warden, a position he not only relished, but a fine one at that. My older brother didn't care about it one way or the other, but I saw it as a window of opportunity to upgrade my status in my father's eyes. If my solution did or didn't work relative to my dad is nothing I have any real recollection of, however I liked it. On my own initiative and a little help from my mother, I became a Junior Air Raid Warden primarily on the basis of responding to an ad similar to the one below and reading comic book stories such as Edison Bell. In the process of doing so, even though by age 10, I built and flew a Flying Machine, I was still trying to impress my dad for the same reason as being a Junior Air Raid Warden should have. I did however, in both cases, among my peers and other adults on the block, raise my importance and recognition beyond any simply just from my dad, making me understand for the first time, sadly enough, that there was a much wider world of significance out there.

On the third page of ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT: The Path Unfolds, relating living with my artist Uncle some years following the death of my mother, I write that it was under his auspices somewhere approaching or near age ten that I first heard of Leonardo Da Vinci. Actually, more clearly what happened was, after reading the Da Vinci story as found in True Comics, No. 58, March 1947 titled 500 Years Too Soon, around that same time, and because of my interest in it, my Uncle began showing me pictures of Da Vinci's flying machines in earnest. So saying, I recognized them from my past as a preschool three or four-year old, I just didn't know (or remember) who Leonardo was specifically or how the drawings related to either him or me.

In Codex Atlanticus, that relates to Leonardo Da Vinci's notes on the flight of birds, I write that my older brother who was born three years before me, and because of being older, started school several years before I did. As he went from kindergarten through to the third grade my mother helped him with his reading. Even though I hadn't started school because of being too young, vying to garner as much if not more attention than he seemed to be receiving, I learned to read right along with him. By the time he reached third grade and I started kindergarten, I was reading third grade books probably as well or better than he was and was being shown off by my mother for being able to do so to anybody who would listen.

Two books I remember fondly right up to this day, both hardcover, that my mother and brother read over and over or I chose to read myself was one about Hoover Dam showing how it was constructed, it's inner workings with row after row of power generators and one with pages of black and white line drawings of Da Vinci's flying machines. Why either of those two books or the contents therein would standout so much in my memory relative to any other books we may have read is not known.

To my knowledge I have never seen a copy of the Leonardo Da Vinci book with the black and white line drawings of his flying machines that so impressed me as the young boy that I was reading with my mother and older brother, at least not so that it jogged my memory, and I have searched book after book for years hoping for just that experience. However, such is not the case regarding a comic book I somehow must have read, saw, or came into contact with when I was a very young boy.That comic book was WAR HEROES, No. 4, April-June 1943 which carried within it's contents the following related to Da Vinci:

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WAR HEROES, DELL PUBLISHING CO., NO. 4, APRIL-JUNE, 1943

Although at the time I may not have related the above to Leonardo Da Vinci I did relate it back to something else. One day, several years before, having not yet even reached school age, I was in the junk laden backyard workshop garage of the grandfather of the girl next door who used to babysit me like I often was. While there, I came across the following picture, below, in a publication of some kind the old man had been making a fuss over with a neighbor. The grandfather was big on Japanese invasion stuff, even to the point of monitoring shortwave radio stations all night long to having his own hand-cranked air raid siren. My dad was the air raid warden for our block while right along with him I was, albeit self ordained, a Junior Air Raid Warden, and even though I never quite got it, my dad and the old man didn't always see eye-to-eye regarding his constant false air raid warnings. In any case, I remember well the fuss between the neighbor and the grandfather involving the photograph. It was all about potential invasion, with the grandfather being adamant that "we should go to no ends to protect against invasion" and the neighbor not being in full agreement, even to the point of reaching a huge yelling match and the neighbor being thrown out of the shop because of being in league with the enemy.

Hearing all the commotion my my mother or grandmother came over and took me home and when I left, without realizing it, I still had the publication that had the photograph in it. At home all I did was look at it. Over and over I continued to look at the photo and all I could think about was a man with some kind of wing device designed to help make him fly.

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It was primarily because of the above that from a very young age I started to jump off one-story porches, garages, and roof tops with a bed sheet made into a parachute or flaring behind my back tied to my wrists and ankles a la the glider chute of Captain Midnight on more than one occasion, So too, without any knowledge of same thereof or parental approval either, I designed and built bat-like wings with cloth and sticks and attempted to fly, all before my uncle, who helped me in later years, showed up on the scene.

photo source David Heger

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JUNIOR AIR RAID WARDENS

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The aerospace firm that hired me as a trainee technical illustrator not long after high school did so with me having only two years of high school drafting experience. It basically meant in an off-hand way, if you skewed it enough, I was being paid for my drawing abilities.

Not long after I was hired I met a few other employees in the same department doing technical drawings who, like me, fancied themselves as 'real' artists. Soon some of us began hanging out on Friday nights after work, usually at some little out of the way place like the Iconoclast Coffee House just east of the Horseshoe Pier on Wall Street in Redondo Beach or the Insomniac on Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach, and depending where we were, order some wine, beer or coffee talking way late into the night. In general, at work, it seemed all we ever talked about was girls, cars, and sports. As artists of course, even though most of us didn't know what we were talking about, in either case, our conversations always seemed to lean toward the heavier side of things. Philosophy, religion, existentialism.

A couple of miles from my job was the Mattel Toy Company. Some of the people in the group knew some people at Mattel who also fancied themselves as artists and some of them joined us as well. One of the people that used to show up at those get togethers was Carlos Castaneda, who just happened to be working at Mattel at the time. Now, most people, especially those who know little or nothing about Castaneda's pre-Don Juan background, find themselves at a total loss as to why Castaneda would even bother to show up at our small, unprestigious, under-the-radar, and unheralded group of so-called artists. Over and over it comes up: Why would a person in their right mind, of such stature as Castaneda, entertain the possibility of participating in such a group of nobodies? The answer is quite simple. First, at the time of the meetings Carlos Castaneda was NOT the Carlos Castaneda he came to be AFTER he met the mysterious and powerful Yaqui Indian shaman-sorcerer he came to call Don Juan Matus. Secondly and most importantly, in those pre-Don Juan days, Castaneda likened himself as an artist --- and truth be told, our group was openly receptive to artists that had not made it simply because none of us had.

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As for Castaneda being an artist, it is weaved throughout his early personal history and background. According to his own words, on Monday, July 24, 1961 in a conversation with Don Juan and published in Castaneda's third book Journey to Ixtlan (1972), Don Juan admonishes him for never assuming responsibility for his acts and Castaneda writes:

"He (Don Juan) dared me to name an issue, an item in my life that had engaged all my thoughts. I said art. I had always wanted to be an artist and for years I had tried my hand at that. I still had the painful memory of my failure."

THE INFORMANT AND CARLOS CASTANEDA

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MY BOSS, HARRY THE MAN:

After returning to Redondo the job I eventually landed with the aerospace firm in El Segundo certainly didn't approach the equivalent of my dream job.

It did however, require a certain level of technical drawing expertise and understanding, of which I had, but really nothing truly spectacular or beyond the norm considering what we were doing. In an extra added plus, as far as I was concerned, for whatever reason, in those days relative to what I was used to receiving as just compensation for work or services rendered, they handed out, at least as I viewed it, buckets full of money, some of course because of certain set of job skills, but just as much if not more so, to ensure they had and could hold people who could keep their mouth shut because of the secrecy that surrounded so much of what was being done.

The thing is, after a short time with the firm, for reasons unknown to me, I was moved within the company from working as a technical illustrator which I was good at and knew how to do to working directly under the auspices of a person everybody called "Harry the Man," a job that encompassed no drawing or drafting skills or anything else that I had in my youthful repertoire of skills. Harry the Man was the top-rated high altitude breathing equipment specialist in the world and worked exclusively on the high altitude oxygen breathing systems for the then at the time super-secret U-2 spy plane. The first time I ever saw him he reminded me a great deal of Captain Marvel's arch rival and foe the evil scientist Dr. Sivana --- albeit not his personality or demeanor necessarily --- but his looks, bald head, glasses, lab coat and all.

I wasn't the first or only one to have ever drawn an analogy or noticed a similarity between the appearance of Harry the Man and that of Captain Marvel's rival Dr. Sivana. I say so because hanging on the wall next to Harry the Man's primary oxygen chamber was a very well done and beautifully matted and glass covered framed page from a Captain Marvel, Marvel Family story published in 1949 (The Marvel Family #41, Fawcett Publications, November 1949).

Years before, at another job site and long before I ever heard of Harry the Man or started working for him, some anonymous person, apparently as a joke or possible snide remark, taped the page to the wall of his work area. Instead of being upset or throwing it away he framed it and mounted it on the wall in a highly visible spot for all to see, and has since then taken it with him every time he moved from one job to the next. Below is a copy of that page:

(The Marvel Family #41, Fawcett Publications, November 1949)

High ranking generals and pilots from all over the world would come by and pay him homage. Kelly Johnson of the Lockheed Skunk works was his friend as well as Howard Hughes.

So too, was Lt. Col. William Randolph 'Randy' Lovelace II, who, in World War II at age 36 and never having parachuted from a plane before, Hit The Silk At 40,000 Feet in an unauthorized and unsanctioned parachute jump testing a small portable oxygen bottle he and Harry the Man developed so aviators could survive jumping out of planes at high altitudes. Prior to his jump it had never been done before.(see)

After I worked for Harry several months and gone to Area 51 with him several times, always traveling together, I suddenly found myself being left out of the equation. He started disappearing over-and-over for continuing longer periods of time doing ever more weird secret stuff, with everybody near to him and upper echelon people seemingly having gone nuts over some discovery or some such thing. You can get a pretty good hint if you read the following comic page --- then if you like, for more, clicking the image:

TO SEE A COMPLETE VERSION OF THE COMIC BOOK CLICK HERE

FOR A FREE NO SIGN-UP INDIVIDUAL ONLINE COPY OF ANY OF THE THREE COMICS PLEASE CLICK IMAGE

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THE TIME PILL PARADOX
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CAPTAIN MARVEL: HIS ORIGIN

MY BABYSITTER, MARY LOU:

One of my fondness memories of growing up during those early Redondo Beach being-babysat-days was that my babysitter Mary Lou, who lived on South Lucia Avenue right next door to my house, had a life size cardboard toy fighter plane-type cockpit --- colored on one side with dials and printed only in black and white on the backside --- with a movable square cardboard joystick. It was a Quaker Oats mail-in offer called a Capt. Sparks Airplane Pilot Training Cockpit, and although I didn't have one myself, I played with hers so much it might as well have been mine. Of course, like many of the toys of the era, because of the war, it was made out of cardboard and paper, something kids in those day got used to quickly.

Because I enjoyed the Capt. Sparks Airplane Pilot Cockpit toy so much, and played with it so often Mary Lou decided to downsize it from our or her use to my use exclusively. She did so by upgrading to a different much more sophisticated model. Where the Capt. Sparks Pilot Cockpit was a cereal box top offer, and a good one at that, the new one was a big bucks go to the store and buy it model called an Einson-Freeman Pre-Flight Trainer. She didn't actually give me the old Capt. Sparks one per se' after she got the new one, but for all practical purposes it became mine --- although she never allowed me to take it home. I remember specifically the new one because it didn't have a square joystick like the one I played with, but a circular steering wheel. I also remember she didn't allow me to use it much, leaving me relegated to the use of the old one, which I recall was fine by me.

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My babysitter lived with her parents along with her curmudgeon old grandfather. He was a sort of Rube Goldberg inventor type guy that seemed like he could fix or build anything. He had set up a junk filled workshop in the detached dirt floor single-car garage on the back of their property collecting, working on, and making stuff he said was to thwart the "impending invasion," meaning of course, by the Japanese:

THE OLD MAN AND THE BABYSITTER

HOW JAPAN COULD HAVE ATTACKED THE U.S. IN 1937

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TAKING OUT THE FIRST MEATBALL
KENNETH M. TAYLOR, PEARL HARBOR, AND THE P-40

Te-shan burning the Sutras in a rant of liberated ecstasy is the image of Te-shan in the moment of having appropriated and internalized the Sutras. Once internalized the physical properties on which the words were exhibited were no longer necessary.

His destroying of his Buddhist texts and Zen commentaries, in essence subverting their authority, was not because his Realization was in conflict with what was projected by them, but because in an instantaneous flash it became clear that HIS Realization was an actualization of the same 'way' that gave rise to the Buddha's Realization --- an attempt of which toward understanding and coming to internalize the Way for all, at least the reasoning behind it, had been put down by the followers of the Buddha in Sutra after Sutra after Sutra in hope of that someone, somewhere at sometime, their mind would become ripe and for them, the veil of the Samsara world would dissipate.

When it comes to reading, my page Zen Enlightenment in a Nutshell offers several suggestions, otherwise most if not all of the books that had been found in the box, including a few others, can be found graphically presented on the following list:

BOOK LIST: ZEN BUDDISM

ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT IN A NUTSHELL

There is a continuing discrepancy lodged against me on a seemingly regular basis by what I call the number crunching nay saying sect when it comes to the timeline regarding my use (or possible not being able to use) Suzuki's book while in high school. The implication being my senior year and the book's publication date don't coincide, Suzuki's book not being published until the same month I graduated.

It becomes grist for the mill because of having written that my brother reminded me of how I used to carry the book around with me like a bible my last year of high school and several years afterward. Anytime anybody said anything about anything out would come my book...always ready with a 'Zen answer.' Of course, in writing what I did I am repeating what my brother said, how accurate or how well he was able to remember or recall what actually transpired relative to the time period we are talking about here, that is, me being in high school, is another question.

Many people cite that the book was not published until June 1, 1956 giving me absolutely no time to carry the book around like a bible in high school, thus me doing so just couldn't be so. Disregarding any possible error in my younger brother's ability to remember accurately what I did or didn't do in high school, an edition of the book WAS published and made available January 1, 1956 (see) to the general public --- giving me at least half a school year to carry the book around with me 'to always be ready with a Zen answer.'

I wrote what I did about my brother saying what he did because, in the fact that I had a copy of the book, there was no need to question his accuracy. However, for the number crunching nay saying sect, even though copies were available from January 1, 1956 onward, my mentor received a complimentary copy from the publisher well in advance of any official publication date, be it either January or June of '56. It was his advanced copy, of which he gave me, that I carried around with me all those months prior to graduation from high school and for so many years afterwards.

TE SHAN

NOW RISES THE BEAT GENERATION

"For me however, by the time I reached my junior year on into my senior year I had long since morphed outside the fringes of high school haute cultures into more of a Maynard G. Krebs bohemian type, hanging out, at least after graduation, in places like the Iconoclast Coffee House on Wall Street in Redondo Beach or the Insomniac on Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach."

HOPE SAVAGE: Footnote [7]

A year or so before I started high school and unknown to most of my peers and me, a semi-bohemian literary movement began taking root in various parts of the U.S. that eventually grew to such a point that by my second year in high school I had become more than peripherally aware of it. The movement, given the name The Beat Generation, was mainly centered in and around San Francisco's North Beach, Venice West in Los Angeles, and Greenwich Village in New York City. Two of the top movers, both of whom would become renowned poets in their own right, were Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.

In the South Bay just around that same time, but mostly after graduation, and even though Ginsberg read "Howl" there, and although never reaching anywhere near the level as the other aforementioned Beat places --- and me not really knowing a whole lot about it in those days --- I started hanging out at the Iconoclast Coffee House just a few steps east up the hill from El Paseo and the Horseshoe Pier on Wall Street in Redondo Beach and/or the Insomniac, a European coffee house that opened November 28, 1958 on Pier Avenue just across the street from Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach hoping to be or at least think I was "cool" and possibly even absorb or learn some of the movement trends. Betty Jean at the Iconoclast was cool, but of the two places, the best part for me was taking home to my place an extraordinarily fabulously beautiful young redhead, an Insomniac regular, regularly. Or at least once in a while, or on occasion. Or maybe just once or twice, by the name of Jolene. Unfortunately Jolene, who was highly polyamorous, loved speed even more, and sadly dead from bennies before having even reached the end of the 1960s. By the time I was out of the Army everything had changed. When I went in it was Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. When I got out only a few short years later it was the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, and Bob Dylan.

Before that though, in a letter from Corso, then in New York to Ginsberg in San Francisco, dated August 23, 1956 (two months after I graduated from high school) and published sometime later in An Accidental Autobiography: The Selected Letters of Gregory Corso (2003), Corso tells Ginsberg in so many words that after leaving Harvard in June 1955 he met a girl-come-woman he called a beautiful female Shelley --- Shelley being Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of England's major Romantic poets (1792 - 1822). At the time of Corso's letter to Ginsberg he would have been around age 25. Corso writes:

"(She) dug me and gave me a place to live and has been with me up till a month ago when I decided that I wanted to go to California. She went back home and expects to join me soon. She sends me money and delightful letters and I love her very much. Was she, who taught me. She has fantastic memory, only nineteen, can recite and feel all of Shelley, yes all, Prometheus [Unbound], Alastor, [The] Revolt of Islam, and also fifty stanzas of Swinburne's The Triumph of Time --- but more! She is going to kill herself on her twentieth year. She planned her death two years ago. The year that I lived with her was all her ... she'd lock herself in a room and would walk up and down up and down ... spoke to no one but her Gregory ... weep, she'd weep and weep ... I can't really inform you about her, but I tell you she is the greatest person I've ever met, and if ever you meet her, I doubt if you'd disagree. Her name is Hope Savage."

Her name is Hope Savage! The following, regarding Hope Savage and yours truly, that is, me, as found on the Hope Savage link below, I write:

(On) a couple of occasions I had gone into the village some distance down and below the monastery with several of the monks. On one of those occasions a man in the village who had a rudimentary use of English had tried to tell me something I wasn't getting the full grasp of. He signed me to wait while he went to get something, returning with a well worn magazine, possibly German or Dutch, and pointed to pictures of the women in the advertisements. What he was trying to say, showing his hands with his fingers up and counting, that 10 to 15 --- what I determined to be months before --- a western woman had come to the village. When I asked what happened to her he pointed toward the mountains. At the time I didn't quite know what to make of it and for the most part quickly forgot it --- that is until that night sitting there and I began wondering if there wasn't an element of truth to it.

Some months after the above village incident found me first searching for then finding a certain man of Zen that lived well beyond the walls of the monastery, high in a remote section of the mountains. Part way into my return trip on that journey I took glance of what appeared to be of all things, a western woman along a stream some distance below the trail. When I called out to her she disappeared into the woods and totally gone by the time I reached the stream.

The next morning just as I was waking and trying to shake off the morning chill as well as get the kinks out after a night of sleeping on rocks and hard ground, I looked down toward the trail and saw the woman standing there looking at me. This time rather than disappearing she gestured for me to join her. She had made a small fire and was in the process of making hot tea, a truly welcome delight. She apologized for her behavior the day before saying she was so shocked to see anyone, especially so a person of Caucasian descent, she sort of lost it.

She said her name was Hope Savage, and after learning I was an American, told me that she was from South Carolina and had been travelling alone in Europe and Asia since she was 21, or as she put it, roughly five years or a little more. She also said she had stayed at a village for a few days months back many miles down the mountain trail but wasn't aware of any monastery. She had seen what looked like ruins of what may have been a monastery at one time but didn't seem habited from the distance she saw it. Wanting to stay away from any religious context or involvement she said she kept her distance. So too, she had not seen the Zen man, although she said she had been left stuff on occasion, but didn't know from who.

CAFE FRANKENSTEIN, LAGUNA BEACH

EUROPEAN COFFE HOUSE, CIRCA 1959

During the time I was in high school I was one of the few who gravitated toward the early stages of the Beat Movement, at least at the extent or level I did. After graduation it was a little different because the "movement," before it withered and died, or morphed into something unrecognizable, expanded on it's own in an underground sort of way taking in and absorbing it's own truly cool types. Once it mainstreamed the Beat Generation was done and it's true adherents scattered to the four winds.

One Saturday morning a couple of the extra curricular on-campus type science clubs got together and sponsored an all day field trlp to the Griffith Park Observatory, AKA the Los Angeles Planetarium, of which, having fond memories of as a young boy, I decided to attend.

Everybody either traveled in groups or in pairs and sat on the bus accordingly. Me, not being one of the science types I arrived alone and sat in a seat alone. Just as the bus began pulling out one last student got on. As he walked down the aisle all the single open empty seats began to mysteriously fill up with backpacks, people suddenly laying over sleeping, etc., so with the only real open seat available being next to me, making himself stiffly comfortable he sat in it, with neither of us making eye contact or talking.

The year before I had semi-established myself with the science major types from a project me and my connected at the hip female artist companion and I made and submitted to the science fair. It was a good size black and white 3-D working model replica of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory with all the whys and wherefores his experiments would or wouldn't work. The project, although built as a fluke, won awards clear up to almost going to state level, and brought accolades to the school, science department, teachers and students. Just as the bus was pulling out of the parking lot one of the science students, noticing I wasn't traveling with my artist friend, came up to my seat and clearly in jest asked where the Bride of Frankenstein was, meaning of course my female companion.

The Bride of Frankenstein comment must have jogged something in the guy next to me because after the bus started going and several minutes of silence out of nowhere he told me how much he liked my science project saying it broke all kinds of molds and such. From there he moved on to how much he, and thus then by inference me, liked Frankenstein movies, quickly expanding it to the Wolfman, Dracula, and the Mummy. Soon the conversation turned to all the drive-in horror movies we had seen. Spending the rest of the day together two things happened. One, without really knowing each other we made arrangements to see two of the movies in question together at our local drive in theater the following weekend, and two, some of the other students, when they had a chance pulled me aside and told me or asked me if I knew he was gay, albeit using much more derogatory euphemisms of the day.

We never really ran around together or saw each other socially, he having his own circle of friends and me, as sparse as they were, mine. As it was he was one year ahead of me in high school and started community college when I started my senior year, with him moving on to Cal State Long Beach. We continued with the horror and monster movies, meeting once a month or so, making big bags of butter and salted popcorn and taking our own drinks, and as we always had, doing so at one of the local drive-ins, which to us meant the Torrance, the Vermont, or the San Pedro drive-ins. One day he showed me a photograph he took in Laguna Beach of a coffee house called Cafe Frankenstein and insisted the two of us go there in that I hung out at the Iconoclast and Insomniac on a regular basis. So we did, going down to Cafe Frankenstein, although he wouldn't join going with me to either of the south bay coffee houses.

It was because of my loose association with Cafe Frankenstein, thanks to my above mentioned friend, that in my early twenties I was inadvertently put into a position to meet Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian holy man that eventually became the Beatles spiritual guru

In regards to Cafe Frankenstein and Wikipedia's comments in several of their otherwise pretty good critiques on the Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon series of beach movies such as Beach Blanket Bingo. Wiki editors are of the opinion that the after beach establishments the gang usually hung out in such as Big Daddy's club in Beach Party and Cappy's Place in Muscle Beach Party are a reference to Southern California beach coffeehouses in general and Cafe Frankenstein in particular. Beach coffeehouses in general perhaps, but the three beach coffeehouses I mention, the Iconoclast, Insomniac, and Cafe Frankenstein being like Big Daddy's or Cappy's Place with other than a very broad brush is questionable.

THE FOX THEATER, REDONDO BEACH

OLD DOWNTOWN REDONDO, CIRCA 1956

A reader of my works, although not claiming to be a Redondo High graduate, but for sure seemingly an aficionado of things Redondo, wrote about having read somewhere my dad and my mother to-be met on the beach next to the pier and later my dad met my stepmother to-be on El Paseo near the Fox Theater, citing those times as the heyday for Redondo. Of which heyday's notwithstanding, I offer the following for levity albeit true nonetheless:

"On the evening of Monday July 19, 1937 long after my dad married my mother but before I was born. a mob affiliated gambler named George Lester 'Les' Bruneman was walking arm and arm with two young women along the waterfront business district in Redondo Beach just past the north entrance to the Horseshoe Pier when at least one bullet ripped through his back from several shots fired by two contract hit men."

The Stepmother

The writer jumps then to my comments of how a high school friend of mine and I used to make big bags of popcorn and go see sci-fi and horror movies at the local drive-in theaters, most specifically the Torrance drive-in. But, instead of citing heydays he cited declines with the writer going on to say the Torrance drive-in opened June 29, 1955, in turn escalating the demise of the once grand Fox Theater. I have heard similar arguments for years and there is an incredible coincidence looking at it as he does, but if there is a direct one-on-one cause between the two it is covered by a much wider umbrella of overall decline than a narrowly specific one.

The writer did send me a URL to check out related to the Fox Theater, but since I never access URL's sent me I searched it down on the net. The site was that of a discussion group that talked about the Fox Theater and old Redondo, of which one comment caught my eye because the writer I once knew years back. He writes:

My father, Bill Mauck was manager at the Fox Redondo from 1956 to ‘65 or '66. Bill worked theatres from a very young age. As a usher in the Fox network in San Diego before the war and as a manager after the war. I think his first manager job was at the Fox Theatre in Pacific Beach (San Diego area) in about '46. He was transferred to Calexico California in '48 and stayed there until '56. I remember him telling me that he told the big bosses that the wanted a “Beach” town again. So, there we were at the waters edge in (I think about September) l956.

I have many, many fond memories of life around the Fox and the other waterfront entertainment places. The bowling alley, the skating rink, the penny arcade and the pier with all the activities you could possibly want as a youngster. I came across some photos of candid shots of the outside of the theatre (some with me, and some without) not too long ago and was instantly beamed back to that time in history. Man those were the days.

I still have many friends in the South Bay area that remember the fun times at the Fox and Strand theatres. Catching the movies or just hanging out at the “downtown” area of Old Redondo.

Bill Mauck passed away in Nov 1999 and my brother Bill (who also was a theatre manager for about 15 years) passed away in June 2003. Through the years I have lived in the South Bay, San Diego and the Long Beach area. My soul will always be attached to the part of me that spent my youth in and around the Fox Redondo theatre. My name is Robert (Bob) Mauck and I now live in Torrance, CA.

There was at onetime in the South Bay a traveling Thursday night poker game held variously at moving locations of which I participated in on a regular basis. The writer of the above, Bob Mauck, used to show up on a regular basis as well and through those poker games I got to know him. Years before with me still a teenager his dad or brother, as manager of the Fox, threw myself and two buddies out of the theater one night after being caught up in some sort of ruckus in the balcony. The three of us were walking along really doing nothing because of being out of the show early when the police stopped us. Seems three individuals matching our description had been breaking into those street side round topped blue U.S. Mail drop boxes and stealing mail. After convincing the cops it wasn't us they made us walk up Diamond Street turning right on Irena to my house all the while directly in front of the cop car in the middle of the street under the glare of the headlights, the juvinile delinquents that we were.

HOPE SAVAGE

CAFE FRANKENSTEIN

HARD TIME IN A ZEN MONASTERY

ALLEN GINSBERG: WICHITA VORTEX SUTRA

SEE ALSO:

FOOTNOTE [5]

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DR. MARGARET "MOM" CHUNG: FLYING TIGER RECRUITER

"After she noticed my interest in 'The Lady and the Tigers' my stepmother told me that she had been on vacation in Mexico and while there had gone down to Mexico City. In Mexico City she had dinner with a 'former physician to Chennault's Flying Tigers named Dr. Margaret Chung.'"

Below is a page from an illustrated article, read comic book, published in the early days of World War II when things for the U.S. and her allies in the war against the Axis Powers were pretty gloomy. The whole of the article, which can be found by clicking the page or going to the link below and where the quote above comes from, is about a woman named Dr. Margaret "Mom" Chung, who throughout the war "adopted" and supported at least 509 pilots in her effort to contribute to the war effort. The fourth panel in the article shows Dr. Chung with two pilots, one of which is going to the Flying Tigers. The fifth panel, the one that runs clear across the bottom of the page, implies but doesn't state anything about the Flying Tigers specifically. However, the caption has within its context that "Moms" boys got their wish and joined the Chinese Air Force flying over all parts of the world, even the Burma Road, the implication being that Dr. Chung recruited them into the Chinese Air Force, i.e., the Flying Tigers,

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DR. MARGARET CHUNG

COLLEGE BRINGS THE RAVEN-HAIRED BEAUTY:

For those who may be so interested my initial attraction toward the raven haired beauty I had introduced my mentor to wasn't fostered by nor a direct result of having met the woman in the museum even though as some claimed who met them both, they were "exact duplicates." Neither of them were based on some early infatuation of Olga Greenlaw, the author of Lady and the Tigers, either. If "responsible" can be used in such matters the person more closely or most directly responsible would fall to the person so pictured below whose husband owned an art gallery in La Jolla, California.

She entered into things during my last year or so of high school. The owner of the gallery, who had an avid interest in pre- Columbian art, mounted an invitational only exhibit to show off and possibly sell some of his collection. Since most of his artifacts were three dimensional or sculptures he wanted to fill the rest of the gallery space, i.e., the walls, with compatible works. In doing so he approached his friend Diego Rivera for names of artists whose subject matter in drawing and painting of the desert southwest and Mexico would meet the criteria. Among Rivera's suggestions was my uncle, the two having known each other having worked together for The Federal Arts Program under the Depression era WPA. My uncle was unable to attend the invitation only opening nor too was my dad who my uncle asked to serve in his place. Instead I was tapped and most happily so.

A number of dignitaries were supposed to be there that night of which movie director John Houston, a collector of pre-Columbian works, was one. Among those there it was quite apparent neither I nor my high school same-age girlfriend were collectors or one of the artists. The lady in question, Queta Cabanillas, as seen in the photo below, came to my rescue, discovering quickly I was the nephew of one of the exhibiting artists. She took me right to the painting and I must admit I was a somewhat disappointed. The painting was not one of his better works and it looked small and lost among some of the other works. She had a different take on it however, saying they already had several offers and wished she had a few more of his paintings.

PROTOTYPE FOR THE REST TO COME

QUETA CABANILLAS
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If you go to the Bhagavan Das page titled Kermit Michael Riggs, about his early Laguna Beach connections, you can just catch a glimpse of the raven harried beauty standing to the left in the opening photo at the top of the page and see the comparison between she and Queta. By clicking the photo then clicking it a second time it enlarges to more than full screen size. By doing so you can see her designer sunglasses and handmade leather sandals from the sandal shop in the back of Cafe Frankenstein, with a pair of heel straps added afterwards.

• BATMAN AND LEONARDO DA VINCI

• WANDERING AND THE PIRATES

• DA VINCI: 500 YEARS TO SOON

• SGT. PRESTON OF THE YUKON

• COWBOY CODE OF THE WEST

• TARZAN AND THE HUNTRESS

• FLYING TIGERS AND MORE

• TERRY AND THE PIRATES

• THE BLACK CONDOR

• CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT

• P-40 WARHAWK

• BUCK ROGERS

• FIREHAIR

• PROFILE

JANE MARTIN: WAR NURSE
MEETS THE FLYING TIGERS

CAPTAIN MARVEL HIS ORIGINS

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BATMAN: HIS REAL ORIGIN

TONY POE

The following quotes, found in context in full at the link below, make reference to me meeting a man named Tony Poe several years later that I had met in conjunction with the two of us being at Camp Hale a couple of years earlier:

"Almost the very second Poe and I made eye contact we recognized each other, Poe asking, 'What the hell are you doing here?,' with my response at nearly the exact same instant being, 'I thought you were in Tibet.'

"The last I saw Poe was in 1959 or 1960. He was in Colorado at an old onetime World War II U.S. Army facility called Camp Hale, training covertly off the books, a bunch of Tibetans to fight the Chinese. At the time I was a real civilian yet to be drafted, working instead for a small offshoot of a a major aerospace company involved with the then super-secret U-2 project. The person I worked for directly, called Harry the Man, was the top high altitude breathing equipment person in the world.

"Apparently in October of 1959 it was confirmed that China, with Soviet assistance, had established a nuclear test base at Lop Nor with all intentions of testing a nuclear device. U-2 flights over China were becoming extremely dangerous, so powers that be thought if they could put a monitoring station on top of some Himalayan mountain with a clear shot towards Lop Nor they could gather all the information they needed. Before a decision was made as to what mountain would be selected, it was a given it would be at a very high altitude. The same powers wanted to ensure that already existent equipment necessary to accomplish the mission could be modified, if need be, to operate in the rarified atmosphere OR if equipment could be designed to allow it to do so without modification. Enter Harry the Man. We were both at Area 51 at Groom Lake when the call came through for Harry to meet with some people at Camp Hale. I went along and while there met Tony Poe."

Sometime around I think, June of 2000 or so, and with me not knowing he was edging towards the end of his days, I drove to Northern California to see Tony Poe --- for no other reason than to just offer him my overall well wishes and thank him for some advice he had given me once many, many years before. To say the least I was a tad set aback from the robust young man he had been when I saw him last and how he was. How he was, was in bad shape, although holding on. A compound of aggregate conditions caused by heavy drinking and diabetes began to add up and to take their toll, even to the point he had to have a leg amputated. Toward the end it got to the point he was scheduled to have his remaining leg amputated as well, but died just prior. Even though we talked and he was cordial I know he didn't remember me, just another faceless G.I. that had passed through his life at one time or the other and I felt a sort of emptiness about it because I listened to the advice he gave me and always felt a great sense of gratitude. Yet, when I sat there across from the old warrior looking into his eyes, talking to him and expressing my appreciation for what he had done, I knew he had no idea who I was or how once upon a time, however briefly, I fit into his life. It was a long drive home.

Poe had dropped out of high school to join the Marines when World War II started. He finished high school via a correspondence course and after the war graduated from San Jose State in 1950 with a degree in history and English, although in how he presented himself you would never know it. We crossed paths at Camp Hale, but it was later in Long Tieng --- and I have been told Poe never offered sage advice to anybody --- he told me to get out of this shit while I still had a chance and never look back. Go to college, make something of yourself, don't fuck up your life like I have. Your'e a cartoonist. Draw pictures. Make people laugh. Within four months of my discharge I started college and the following happened, of which I have always attributed to Tony:

"I settled in using Redondo as a central base of operations while commuting back and forth to college attempting to grab off an undergraduate degree on the G.I. Bill, and of which I was eventually able to do.

"After receiving a B.A. along with a California Secondary Teaching Credential, which required an additional fifth year beyond a bachelors as well as student teaching, I matriculated into graduate school."

FROM THE MAIN TEXT ABOVE

LONG TIENG (LONG CHENG), LAOS. ALSO KNOWN AS LS-20A (LIMA SITE 20 ALTERNATE)
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THE CIAs SECRET WAR IN TIBET
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OPERATION HAT
THE CIA IN TIBET AND THE HIMALAYAS

NAM YU: CIA LIMA SITE 118-A

AMAZING STORIES, FATE, THE TEXAS RANGERS,
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION

"(My father) seemed to spend an extraordinary amount of free time or late into the night reading pulp science fiction books like Amazing Stories or paperback novels of the old west, of which the ones about the old west were almost exclusively by L'Amour or Luke Short. I had perused lightly through books by both authors from time to time out of piles of books my dad had strewn around his place, and because he had insisted --- saying it related to my own experiences lost in the Mojave desert as a young boy --- I even read 'Mojave Crossing.'"

LOUIS L'AMOUR

LOUIS L'AMOUR
THE PACKSADDLE AFFAIR TEXAS RANGERS, JUNE 1952, VOL. 47 NO. 1 (please click image)

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THE DESERT SHIP: A LEGEND, OR TWO

1942 UFO OVER LOS ANGELES------------------------BUCK ROGERS: HIS ORIGIN
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THE BOOTSTRAP PARADOX

The Bootstrap Paradox is a time-travel paradox wherein an object or information can exist without ever seeming to have been created. The object or piece of information in the future is taken back in time where, through the normal passage of time from the past to the future, it is retrieved to become the very object or piece of information that was brought back in the beginning.

The term originates from the expression "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" and was used to describe the time-travel paradox in Robert A. Heinlein's short story, written under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald, titled "By His Bootstraps" that was originally published in the October 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction as shown above.

TWENTY PARTIALS OF WARHOL'S 60 DA VINCI LAST SUPPERS

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COUNTRY WESTERN SINGER CINDY WALKER CIRCA 1946

As I remember the singer, she looked an awful lot like a cowgirl version of a popular movie star of the time named Veronica Lake. Long platinum blonde hair, ruby-red lips, and dressed in the finest female western singer regalia. For the record, although many think it might be a stretch, I have a tendency to lean toward Cindy Walker, a country-western singer and song writer of some repute as being the blonde country singer I was so smitten with. She came to Los Angeles with her parents from Texas in 1940 at the age of 22 not returning until 1954. I ran away from home of the flower shop people staying with an ex-Marine taxi driver. It was through him I met Cindy in that they were an item at the time. Interestingly enough, it has often reported she never married. However, in an interview with the New York Times shortly before her death, without giving any details, Walker stated she did at onetime have what turned out to be "a very short-lived marriage." Love is a funny thing and not every minute of Cindy Walker's life was etched in stone. If she was in love with the ex-Marine, no telling how she may have conducted herself. In 1941 Walker signed a five year recording contract with Decca based on the strength of a demo she sang titled "Lone Star Trail." The Decca contract led to her recording several songs and working with Texas Jim Lewis and His Lone Star Cowboys. For a few years Texas Jim's Redondo Barn would have been a perfect forum.

The singer always told me she would take me away with her someday and my dream was that she and the Marine would get married and we would live happily ever after. Of course, such was not the case. I never saw either of them again after my grandmother took me back with her the day she found me.

CINDY, A BOY'S LOVE AS I REMEMBER HER

Although I lean heavily toward Cindy Walker as the the female vocalist in my early life, I have never been able to pinpoint the vocalist with any amount of certainty. There was, however, a tall blond buxom young woman i did meet at around the same time through the ex-Marine taxi driver that I do know and remember the name of right up to this day, primarily because we remained in contact on and off over the years, at least through the the late 1970's anyway. Her name was Mary Davis who became a major Redondo Beach entrepreneur and top west coast if not the nation's foremost female road race driver. She and her husband Bob Drake, also a race driver, opened a sports car themed restaurant and pub in West Hollywood. Following their divorce (1961) she moved on sans Drake leaving her imprint on Redondo Beach, more specifically from her vision and insight designing, building, and running the highly successful Portofino Inn.

When I first met Mary Davis I was just a toddler. After that, with some time flowing by, I was 8 years old and she was 18 just out of the Marines. In 1943 at the tender age of 15 Davis left high school and using her at 5 foot 7 inches tall stature along with fudging about her age, joined the United States Marines. With completion of her basic training she was soon assigned to a base near San Francisco repairing fuel injections for M-4 tanks waiting to be shipped out to the the South Pacific. It was then her true age was discovered and just short of fulfilling her enlistment assignment and much to her chagrin, discharged. It wasn't long after that the war ended and thousands and thousands were discharged anyway.

Just around that same time and among those thousands discharged G.I.s was the ex-Marine now taxi driver that I crossed paths with when I ran away from home after my mother died.. Although Davis was from San Diego, she ended up attending then dropping out of high school in Los Angeles to join the Marines. For whatever reason, even in those pre-teen years before the Marines and high school she began putting her toe into the water regarding Redondo by riding the Pacific Electric Red Car from L.A. with her older sister starting in 1940 or 1941, but for sure, before the war. Her older sister fit in fairly well with the teenage boys and fledgling G.I.s that showed up and hung around the beach, pier and the front, but she at age 12 at the most, Mary found herself just missing out.

One day, as Davis told it and collaborated by my grandmother in separate instances, my family and I had gone to the beach next to the pier like we often did. Unknown to anybody I had wandered off like I often did when Davis came across me. Thinking I was lost, she took me up to the pier, bought me an ice cream cone, then took me to the life guard shack. Right away the life guards knew who I was and right away we were all reunited, with Davis being asked to join us. After that every time she came to Redondo she sought us out. Then one day without her knowing about it or why we stopped showing up and one day without us knowing about it she was in the Marines

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MARY DAVIS--------------------BOB DRAKE

VERONICA LAKE,- PROBABLY AROUND 1948
CLICK FOR HOW I WISH I REMEMBERED HER

"Any mention by me of Terry and the Pirates is typically made to draw an analogy to whatever I am writing about and the exotic-like underbelly-type milieu, real or not, that exemplified the Asian atmosphere Terry and his companions, pirates or otherwise, operated in. I have always carried a certain fondness for that type of milieu and because of that fondness have been drawn to such odd-ball fictional characters and stories like Dan Duryea in China Smith and of course Terry and the Pirates as well as real life places such as Rangoon, Burma; Bangkok, Thailand; and Chiang Mai."

SCENE FROM THE ORIGINAL TERRY AND THE PIRATES AS DRAWN BY MILTON CANIFF DATED JANUARY 27, 1935.

At the end of the summer of 1953, just as I was about to start the 10th grade or so and the same time the El Rey incidents were going down, the August - September #6 issue of the comic book Mad came out. Inside #6 was a story, drawn by my all time favorite non-animator cartoonist Wallace Wood, that spoofed or satired big-time the long running comic strip Terry and the Pirates, with Wood in his spoofing, calling it Teddy and the Pirates.

Although I had followed Terry and the Pirates a good portion of my life, and knew how Milton Caniff, the artist-cartoonist of the strip, presented Terry's world that he and his so-called Pirates lived in, Wood's drawing below showing his version of an underbelly far east like milieu, real or not, that exemplified the Asian atmosphere along with the rest of the story hit me like a hammer, with me, the teenager that I was, sucking up his version as my version and as my version, the real version. Ten years later, thanks to Uncle Sam and his friendly Selective Service, found me in Rangoon, Saigon, and Chiang Mai, as well as other such places, even meeting warlords. Those ten years after high school, especially in and where I traveled, having gone from a teenager to an almost mid-twenties GI, my vision not only didn't wane, but was bolstered and grew. Notice the tommy guns, stabbings, hand grenades and exotic women.

WANDERLING AND THE PIRATES

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HAVING ICED TEAS

"Sometime in the spring of 1982 and a year or so after being gone two years in the Peace Corps, a very good friend of mine, a onetime philosophy major that I had known in college, but somehow now having morphed into a big time computer geek, contacted me.

"She told me the man she loved was on the waiting list for a heart transplant at Stanford University and that she had moved to a small studio apartment in Campbell, California to work in Silicon Valley and be within driving distance to see him. She wanted to know if there was some way I might be able to console him as he was wrought with anxiety almost to the point of a total breakdown --- in turn adversely impacting his health and preparedness for the transplant. Before a new heart with his match was available he died."

The above quote opens an article about Adam Osborne, who was not only a friend of mine and major foe and adversary to Steve Jobs of Apple Computer fame in their early years, he also grew up as a young boy in the ashram of the venerated Indian holy man the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, and where I met him. Osborne is, however not the person so mentioned on the waiting list. He came into the picture because of the person on the waiting list.

In the main text of the Osborne article I write that my initial stay of several days after going to Silicon Valley turned into several weeks, then several months, eventually extending into a period pushing nine months. However, I wasn't there totally from day one day-after-day around the clock through to my departure. During that period I was sort of using the area as a base of operations just like I would almost anywhere, coming and going as needed doing any number of things. Plus, for most of that period my friend had a regular day job and mostly unavailable during working hours and just as well, often not able to put together several days back-to-back over any extended span on a regular basis either.

It was under the above circumstances that during a trip to Southern California I ran into Madame Ky, the former Dang Tuyet Mai, at her boutique. The two of us knew each other through her husband, I just didn't know she had opened a boutique. As it was, typically I would have no call to be at the particular mall her business was located, but on the day we ran into each other I had gone there specifically looking for someone. The daughter of a couple I knew who lived on the east coast had only just graduated from college and moved to Southern California and started the very first year of her very first job as a special needs teacher. The school, Gill Special Education Center, an Orange County Department of Education school site, was located in a residential area in a former elementary school about three blocks south of the mall. I had told the parents, given a chance, that when I was in Orange County I would go by to see how she was doing. The day I went by the school she had taken her class on a community outing to have lunch at the mall. While at the mall I just happened to come across Madame Ky. We made arrangements to see each other again and after that I saw Madame Ky several times, usually for tea and chat.

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During one of those meetings I told her that on that particular afternoon, as soon as we were done with our tea, I would be heading out to Cabo San Lucas for a few days to stay at a hotel resort located basically right on the tip of Baja California called the Twin Dolphin owned by a friend of mine, David J. Halliburton, Sr. Embellishing the story a bit, although still true, I told her that one of Halliburton's first loves was a niece of my Stepmother who was babysitting me for the summer, a girl he always held in high regard. In turn Halliburton made it a point to ensure my stay at the Twin Dolphin was always special. With that Madame Ky said she wanted to go too. So she did, the two of us spending several days or more together at the Twin Dolphin. General Ky, thinking of me more as a monk and apparently slipping his mind that I was a onetime G.I., it presented no problem. Hah!

MEETING WARLORDS ET AL

PANORAMIC VIEW OF HALLIBURTON'S HOTEL TWIN DOLPHIN AS IT LOOKED 1980s-1990s

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The Naked Jungle was released March 3, 1954 with all acknowledgments and credit given to Leiningen Versus the Ants. If you would like to watch the Naked Jungle movie, free and complete with no sign-ups or advertisements please click the image below:

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LANCE REVENTLOW

I had known Lance Reventlow since we were both kids. He was probably around 14 years old and I was around 12 when we first met. My dad and Stepmother had gone off to Mexico and on to South America for a couple of years and parsed out my brothers and I to others to look after us. My older brother went to live with my grandmother and my younger brother went to live with a couple of which the woman of the couple was somehow known to my stepmother. My Uncle, who had basically had charge of me since I was eight years old was going back to Santa Fe and after some negotiating was able to convince the couple that took my younger brother to take me as well. It didn't work out with me running away on more than one occasion. My uncle contacted my stepmother who told him to stick me into some kind of boys home or some such thing until she got back, but not a disciplinary one like they had put my older brother in at one time, but an educational one. In the process my uncle checked out the Southern Arizona School for Boys in Tucson and took me with him. The school for boys idea didn't take hold because of money I think --- mostly the lack of it --- and I ended up back with the couple after promising my uncle I would behave until other solutions were found or my stepmother returned.(see)

The thing is, during my visit to the school, while my uncle was in discussion and being shown around I saw a boy sitting by himself at a table and, although later he claimed to be no kind of an artist, he was making the most fabulous pencil drawing of an open wheeled race car by a kid I had ever seen. I was always drawing pictures, mostly of planes and rocket ships, but never of race cars. I sat down next to the boy and began drawing the only race car I knew anything about, the Boyle Special that had won the 1939 and 1940 Indianapolis 500. The next thing I knew the two of us were talking on and on with the boy telling me of seeing race cars in Europe, not like the ones in the U.S. that drove around only in circles, but that raced on real roads. The boy turned out to be Lance Reventlow.

SCARAB MK I BY LANCE REVENTLOW, 14th SCCA RACES PALM SPRINGS APRIL 13, 1958
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DR. GEORGE DEMOS

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EARLY YEARS-----------------------LATER YEARS
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1928 - 2020
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I was drawing in class one day like I always did instead of doing anything that vaguely resembled anything close to a class assignment or schoolwork, only this time I was drawing a P-40 Flying Tiger. Kent, spending time throwing rolled up balls of notebook paper out of a small gap in the open window across the room and never missing, thinking, after he ran out, he would just take some of mine. He stopped short after he noticed my drawing. Seems that ever since seeing the black and white 1942 John Wayne movie Flying Tigers, P-40s became, like with me, his favorite airplane. It was odd that this guy who was a hero or legend because of his 32' roadster would even talk to me let alone have an interest in P-40s, but he did, enough so that we became close enough to call each other by our first names when we passed each other in the halls. At the time a real feather in my cap and after that things were cool between us.

Throughout my growing up school years, Dr. George Demos, as a teacher in that cumulative educational process, probably made the greatest, most singular impact on me personally. By high school, education-wise, I was in a downhill trajectory, circulating around the wrong crowd which at the time was the much older than me out of high school "beats" in the then up and coming Beat Generation, along with a lack of initiative and no help at home, when Demos stepped in and turned it around by bypassing all the bullshit. He wasn't against the Beats, he just didn't like the way my high school education was being adversely impacted or shunted aside by outside forces.

Seeing I was doing well if not outstanding in all the creative aspects of art but not doing so hot otherwise, especially so English of which he taught and I was one of his students, he formed a "team" with himself, me, the journalism teacher, who was in charge of the school newspaper, and my number one art teacher. Once combined into one package I used my creativity to write for the school paper escalating me into a higher realm of "ingroup status" and without me even realizing it, the constant need for editing and re-editing of my articles and columns forced me to fall into a correct English mode if I expected to be published.

Although as a sophomore I wasn't a fully vetted member of the journalism staff, by the end of the school year I had been recommended by the journalism teacher, Miss Sinsabaugh, to become a member of the Quill and Scroll International Honorary Society for High School Journalists to begin at the start of my junior year. By the time I had reached my senior year I'd received the Society's highest honor, the Gold Key Award, me, the looser that I was.

To write what I am writing now I went back and researched the criteria to be eligible for induction into the Quill and Scroll. Students are required to meet the following five requirements to be accepted:

• They must be of junior or senior classification. Second semester sophomores may be initiated during the last grading period of their sophomore year. Their membership will become effective at the beginning of their junior year.

• They must be in the upper third of their class in general scholastic standing, either for the year of their election or for the cumulative total of all high school work.

• They must have done superior work in some phase of journalism or school publications work. They may be staffers of a magazine, newspaper, yearbook, news bureau or radio/television station.

• They must be recommended by the supervisor or by the committee governing publications.

• They must be approved by the Society's Executive Director.

ADDITIONAL INSIGHTS REGARDING GEORGE DEMOS:

Demos enlisted into the U.S. Army at age 17 just as WWII was winding down and assigned to the 187th Regimental Combat Team 11th Airborne Division. The division was preparing to parachute into Japan when the war ended. He spent 2 years in the occupation forces in Sapporo, Hakkaido, Japan.

He continued to serve in the active reserve for 30 years retiring as a Colonel and Commander of a Medical Brigade. He holds the earned rank of Major General in the US Service Command, a disaster relief organization that helps in disasters worldwide, having gone into Thailand to help with the aftereffects of the tsunami as well as to Houston Texas to assist with Hurricane Katrina. Demos is also President and CEO of the PTSD clinics that help US veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

For the record, the soldiers of the 187th Regimental Combat Team 11th Airborne Division, of which Demos was a part, were the first foreign troops to enter Japan in 2,000 years.

THE 187th (AIRBORNE)

DR GEORGE DEMOS: IN MEMORIAM

MAYA RUINS AND THE SPRING EQUINOX