THE WANDERLING AND HIS UNCLE




THEIR LIFE AND TIMES TOGETHER


the Wanderling



"I have read quite a bit of The Wanderling's writings and found it very intriguing. Much of what he has to say about Zen and Buddhism was helpful, but at the sametime I was skeptical about his apparent fascination with esoteric, 'new age' type topics like Carlos Castaneda, shamanism, UFOs, etc."

Above quote from Zen related Flapping Mouths blog linked down page


"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."

The Wanderling and His High School Friends


Over and over people who read my works seem confused as to the timeline of events as they unfolded during the period I was with my Uncle. They say since so much of what I write about circulates around Zen, Enlightenment, and Buddhism, how does Castaneda, shamanism, UFOs and all the other stuff like Captain Midnight Code-O-Graphs, P-40 Flying Tigers, Buck Rogers Ray Guns and German submarines filled with gold fit in? In a simple clarification of events the following generalized breakdown is a good rule of thumb, however, here on this site, the emphasis is on Stage Three, my uncle and me, with the concentration of the other stages, although with varying degrees of overlap, found elsewhere.

In a more of less the First Stage I was basically a young boy with my family all together and still intact. There is the beach, the war, P-40s and submarines. When the Second Stage shows up I'm still a young boy. During that time I was taken to India, met the Maharshi, and my mother died. When the Third Stage comes around it is dominated by my uncle and Stepmother, the Desert Southwest, Native Americans, ranches, jeeps, and UFOs. Stage Four encompasses my lost years between high school, the draft, the military, with Castaneda showing up. In the last stage, my works and what I write return to or focus more exclusively on the Dharma, Zen, and Enlightenment and how you as a reader can use or tie it all together in some fashion to help you in your own quest, be it knowledge, freedom, or Enlightenment.

Most of the same people as alluded to above in the opening paragraph seem to think that so much happened during such a short period of time it is questionable that it happened at all --- especially since, just like the use of "Once Upon a Time," in fairy tales I am always interjecting "When I was around ten years old..." I do so because I WAS around ten years old, around, of course, being the key word. The thing is, in narrowing down any specifics in the around in "I WAS around ten years old" there are events that fall on known or historic dates. Those known dates can be researched or used to fall back on to coordinate with some of the events I was involved in. Other times some dates are iffy in that they fall within a more-or-less wider time-frame reference rather than a specific, given date. A big problem and one a good portion of you may identify with is, as life unfolded and went along at it's usual and natural pace, at least for me, I never thought about it one way or the other OR that any of it would ever amount to anything or need to be recorded for posterity. Inturn, backtracking here for what I present now, I have had to rely on such known events as personal birthdays, holidays, or even more wayout things such as phases of the moon during a given month to align events. Throughout it all there are however, two hardcore specific dates that I do know for sure, but for personal reasons, I do not quote anywhere in my works. They are the specific day, date, month and year that my mother died, of which a short time later was followed by the specific day, date, month and year that the man who married my mother's younger sister commited suicide. From those two specific dates I am able to backtrack, bracket, or pivot everything on.

However, before we move on, a quick word of explanation. First, when I write about my mother's younger sister I am of course, as it relates to me, writing in the classical sense about an aunt. So too, when I write about the man who married her, the man who committed suicide, I am also writing about an uncle. However, the uncle that committed suicide is NOT the uncle I write about in all my presentations. The reason I do not call my mother's younger sister's husband "uncle" nor her "aunt" is because I do not want to confuse him with the uncle or his sometime wife the powerful Ojibwa Midewiwin I write about over and over in all my works. The uncle I write about all the time was my father's brother, the uncle that committed suicide was married to my mother's younger sister.

Secondly, even though my mother died on a specific day, date, month and year that could be quoted if I so desired, it was not so much the fact that she died on a specific day than it was the months and months she was ill that led up to that specific date. As she became more and more immobilized my father began to farm my two brothers and myself out to others on a more-or-less regular basis. We went from conventional short term babysitting during the day to being with our grandparents overnight or to others several days a week, as my father continued --- because of mounting medical expenses --- to put more and more working hours in to make ends meet. As for myself, sometimes I stayed at one place for awhile, other times I was transfered back and forth, going beween foster parents, guardians, relatives and shirttale relatives, more often than not during most of those periods losing track of my siblings and there whereabouts. So too, the moves and transfers were never always done on even blocks of years or on even-times starting or finishing school. In my writings I have a tendency to break the changes down in much smoother blocks of time than what actually happened inorder to make it easier for the reader to make sense of it all.

The last time I remember my immediate family together intact and healthy, that is, with my mother, father, two brothers and myself fully together as a functioning family unit, circulated around one of my brother's birthdays. My brother's birthday fell on a weekend in October of 1942 and my parents --- the key words being here, "my parents" in the plural, that is, both of them --- decided to give him a surprise party. How do I know it was 1942? Because, to pull off the surprise party 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 to the beach for a walk. It was not unusual to wander along the sand 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. Instead, this time, our dad took us a short distance south of the pier to see a highly-muted town event, a two-man Japanese Midget Submarine that had washed up on shore a few days before. He even lifted me up to look into the inside through the open hatch. What happened to that sub is not really known as hardly anybody except me, as found in World War II Comes to Redondo, ever seems to talk about it. How it got there is another thing. One of the few people who has talked about it is a then 26 year old Redondo Beach resident named Max Harris. Harris, an avowed eyewitness to the event is on record as saying that within minutes of the submarine being spotted six American bombers flew right over the top of it and dropped 50 bombs about 500 yards from the shoreline and two days later it washed up on the beach. Harris cites the date of the above event as being October 4, 1942. It is not clear exactly what the date Harris gives signifies. Since the sub took two days following the bombing to actually show up on the beach, when Harris says the 4th I am not sure he means the day of the bombing was the 4th thus indicating the day the sub washed up on shore was the 6th? Or does he mean the day the sub washed up was the 4th meaning the sub was bombed the 2nd? In either case it doesn't 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 quite clearly seeing it with my dad --- and we were there that day because we had to be out of the house for my brother's birthday.



TWO-MAN JAPANESE- MIDGET SUBMARINE MOUNTED
ADJACENT TO THE MOTHER SHIP'S CONNING TOWER

(please click image)

Although the pace of change in my family may have been slowly increasing all along without me particularly noticing it on a conscious level, it seems to have accelerated quite rapidly shortly after the birthday of my brother in October 1942. So said, because it was becoming increasingly more difficult for my father to care for my mother as well as take care of three young boys he decided to investigate the possibility of a full time care facility for her. One of the facilities he looked into was an around the clock full-care sanatorium-like hospital in Santa Barbara, California. The day he went to see it he took me and my mother along. While we were there the three of us went down to the Santa Barbara pier, known as Stearns Wharf in those days. Somewhere along one edge of the pier was a crane-like boom that was in the process of pulling an airplane out of the water and placing it on a flatbed trailer. To me the plane was what I would call a seaplane. On its wings and behind the wings on both sides of the fuselage were clearly distinguishable bright red circular Japanese insignias. The plane was intact and showed no signs of visible damage that at the time I was aware of. Years later I would identify the plane being lifted onto the dock as a Yokosuka E14Y Floatplane, especially so in that the aircraft was fairly typical of the type plane carried by the long range Imperial Japanese Navy I-Class Type B-1 submarines.

Even though I was the young boy that I was and may not have been able at the time to identify the plane per se', I still knew what the red meatball insignia meant. The enemy. I remember asking my dad how such a plane, that is, one that belonged to the bad guys, ended up being put onto a waiting flatbed trailer on the dock in Santa Barbara. With no verbal response he just quietly shook his head and shrugged his shoulders as having no clue, something that later on prooved to be somewhat less than 100% factually accurate.(see)

Most of the year 1943 is somewhat elusive for me. However, taking into consideration other dates I know, me being in Santa Barbara and seeing the plane for example, it must have been sometime early in the year 1943 because by Christmas I was in India with the foster couple I was living with, staying at or near the ashram of the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi for six months.




Thirteen years later, on a weekend in the middle of March of 1956, a few years into being old enough to have a drivers license but still grinding away in high school, I drove my then in the process of being restored early 1940's Ford Woody Wagon up to Santa Barbara to see the sports car road races being held at the airport in nearby Goleta. That same weekend, before, between, and after the races I sought out and talked to any number of oldtimers who were longtime fishermen on the pier --- without realizing how helpful the woody wagon was as an icebreaker with the oldtimers I approached. A couple of them clearly remembered seeing the same plane that I saw as a kid, telling me that during the war it was found somehow floating around abandoned and inoperable out in the ocean near one of the Channel Islands. It was towed in and lifted out of the water and put on a truck or trailer, but whatever happened to it they didn't know. So too, if the Coast Guard or the Navy was involved in its retrieval was debatable as both seemed to remember civilians doing all the work. Both of the fishermen seemed to recall that the plane appeared to have no visible damage even though some minor disagreement arose between the two as our discussion wore on as one of the men seemed to recall a shattered or broken wooden prop. The other fisherman was sure that wasn't the case. Most of the same fishermen also clearly remembered the night the Imperial Japanese Navy submarine the I-17 shelled the Ellwood oil fields near Goleta as well.(see)

One of the fishermen in the group I talked with told me that sometime around the Ellwood shelling, maybe a little later, an old man that lived on San Miguel Island, about 40 miles off Santa Barbara, although he hadn't seen any sign of a submarine, did in fact however, observe a Japanese landing party come ashore in one of the coves --- looking all the same as though they were scouting the area for a safe place to moor or land a boat or vessel of some type. The fisherman told me, although the old man had lived on the island for years, not long after he observed the landing party, or so the story went, he shot himself. Later research would reveal the old man on the island, who was actually only age 54 at the time of his death, was named Herbert Lester.(see)



E14Y FLOATPLANE LEAVING A JAPANESE I-TYPE SUB OFF THE U.S. PACIFIC COAST CIRCA 1940'S


Prior to my mother's placement at the sanatorium-hospital and up to her eventual death, both of my brothers initially, but not me as far as I can tell, stayed under the care of my father in some fashion. For me however, even before my mother's placement, I was sent to live with a couple who almost immediately took me to India.

Although for many years I was unable to clearly recall all of the events surrounding the couple and India because of mitigating circumstances, my father, during that period of my life, wrote a handful of letters to my uncle which years later I read. In the letters my father said that the couple decided to go to India asking him if it was OK for me to go with them. In one of the letters he said initially I refused to go to India with the couple, making a big fuss, putting up a big battle, and throwing huge fits, saying I did not want to be with them I only wanted to be with my "real" mother and father. I just wanted to go home. I waited and waited for a family member or anybody to come and get me, but nobody ever did. By that time and unknown to me, my mother was no longer at home anyway, having become totally unable to care for herself, so much so my dad went ahead and placed her into the full-care facility we had investigated in Santa Barbara. Before my dad had a chance to respond to the couple, the couple, knowing full well that my mother was in a sanatorium, without my father's grace, took me to India, simply sending him a note saying that in the end I had changed my mind about going. Many of the events that transpired at the ashram while I was there were clarified years later by a long ago childhood friend of mine, Adam Osborne. Adam Osborne, the son of one of the foremost Ramana biographers Arthur Osborne, was raised at the ashram. According to what he told me when we met many years later as adults, as the only two anglo boys at the ashram at the time, and within months of the same age, we spent a lot of time together.

The foremost chronicler of the events surrounding me at the ashram however, was not Osborne's father, who was being held prisoner in a Japanese internment camp in Thailand at the time, but a visiting Ramana adherent and devotee C.R. Rajamani. The way Rajamani presents it he was at the Ramana ashram in the 1940s, albeit as he writes, uncertain about the date or the month of his visit. He says it may have been December or January because he remembers the season was quite cool and that the summit of the holy mountain Arunachala was shrouded in dense mist and clouds. While there he saw the white couple with a young boy and writing of the young boy reported the following:


"Within an hour of his face-to-face meeting with Sri Bhagavan, his mental barriers were reduced to nothingness."


Rajamani was correct in saying he was at the ashram in December or January because the couple, followers of a religious sect called Theosophists, were in India to attend the Theosophical Society's world convention --- the 67th International Convention held December 26 to 31, 1943 at the Society's International Headquarters, Adyar, Madras, India. It was after the convention, in January 1944, they went to the ashram.

The woman of the couple sent three letters to my father, two about taking me to India and the third about returning me home. The last of the three letters, the one I call the Liverpool Letter, was postmarked from England and, except for several long incoherent paragraphs about picking up a live survivor or two or none at all amongst several dead in a life raft sometime before arriving or after leaving Cape Town, South Africa, circulated mostly around the logistics of bringing me home. There was also a brief mention regarding the possibility of me somehow being sick, all the while avoiding any previous mention of how great it would be for me to be in India.

The life raft encountered on her return trip was from the British ship MV Tulagi. At about ten minutes past midnight Tuesday March 28, 1944 in the Indian Ocean the Tulagi was hit by two torpedoes launched from the German submarine U-532. The Tulagi sank in 20 seconds, stern first then rolling to starboard. Only 15 crew members survived, taking to two rafts. Approximately two months later, during which time the rafts became separated, members of one of the rafts sighted several small islands. They decided to make for the closest and around 11:00 PM that night they landed on Bijoutier, a tiny island of the Alphonse Group belonging to the Outer Islands of the Seychelles. The second raft has never been accounted for and it is the second raft that is thought to be the one the woman of the couple wrote about. If such is the case that would put the couple in the Indian Ocean on their return trip sometime toward the end of May, 1944 and most likely back in the states sometime in June, 1944 --- and in the process me having missed a whole half of year of formal schooling.

In a short series of follow-up conversations that came about over a period of time after the intitial meeting between Osborne and myself in the early-to-mid 1980s, he brought up an interesting tid-bit of information that, if accurate and without knowing it, inadvertently pinpointed one of the first specific dates in my timeline of events. Apparently a man of high spiritual attainment by the name of William Samuel, sometime prior to the death of Osborne's father in 1970, contacted Osborne in an attempt to arrange, for reasons not given me, a meeting between himself and Osborne's father. Samuel, so it is said, attained his exalted state during the throes of war as so described by him personally in A Soldier's Story. Osborne's father was Arthur Osborne, who at the time of Samuel's request, and for years previously, lived in India maintaining a close relationship with the goings on of the Ramana ashram as well as being an author of several highly regarded books on Ramana. In the process of their conversation, which Osborne related to me many years after the fact, Samuel mentioned to Osborne that he had met him when he was a young boy at the ashram of Sri Ramana and that the two of them along with another young boy and a few other people including his mother Lucia Osborne participated in Giri Valam, that is, circumabulation of the holy mountain Arunachala. Osborne emphasized to me specifically the other younger boy aspect because Osborne surmised through the gist of the conversation that Samuel thought the other boy (me) was his brother --- a twin brother --- because of our age, size, body build and look-alike curly haired mop tops. In the conversation with Samuel as it was passed on to me, Samuel stated the circumabulation occurred on the full moon of April 1944.(see) In April of 1944 the moon was full on Saturday April 8th. That would put me still at the ashram proper in early April, but on my way home onboard a ship in the Indian Ocean, by previous reckoning, toward the end of May, 1944. Interestingly enough, ten years following the serenity of his visit to the Ramana ashram, immersed in the carnage of war in Korea, William Samuel was said to have had a major spiritual breakthrough, reaching Full Attainment.

No sooner had my mother been laid to rest, of which both her death and funeral I missed, than my father, who had been on a non-stop binge since she died, possibly before, hastily left the care of my older and younger brothers 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.

During the return trip to my grandmother's in California another interesting aspect in my young life unfolded. Sometime around the very last day of June or so 1944, I was put on a passenger train in Pennsylvania headed west toward Chicago. Who I was traveling with is not known. 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. Toward midnight of July 3, 1944, not long after leaving Flagstaff, Arizona towards 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 on it's side off the tracks in the dirt for close to 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.



(please click)


Although I was unhurt, the person or people I was traveling with was among the injured and taken, with me along with them, to either Williams or Flagstaff. Because of the nature of their injuries, whoever I was traveling with was held-up under doctors care for several days, leaving me without direct adult supervision. My grandmother, who had been contacted by the railroad, called my uncle in Santa Fe. He inturn contacted a nearby tribal spiritual elder to oversee me until someone was with was able to get me to my grandmother's.[1]


THE GAP


If you remember, my mental barriers being "reduced to nothingness" occurred during my early childhood years when I was around six years of age, and done so under the personal grace and light of Sri Ramana himself. The so-called "Mara induced impediments," described below, did not occur until some months later --- albeit during a period I was struggling with the death of my mother and the dissolving of my family as well as being separated by growing time and distance from the spiritual penumbra of Ramana's umbrella of grace --- between the two there existed in time a narrow gap where an unimpeded wide-open window of Awakening existed. In the following paragraphs I discuss that gap:


START OF THE GAP:


After my return, that is, between the time I left the train station in Williams, Arizona following the crash but before I went to live with the flower shop people to be discussed later, I stayed with my grandmother on my mother's side for awhile. She took me to see her only remaining child, my mother's younger sister. At the end of one of those days together, as recounted in the Last American Darshan, the following happened:


"One day, after going shopping all day long in town with my grandmother and her daughter and her two children, we returned and pulled up in front of the garage. I got out of the car and opened the two side-by-side wooden garage doors. There right in front of me on the floor of the garage only a few feet away 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 stuck in his mouth. His body laying there apparently falling off a still upright straight-back wooden chair with his once onetime skull full of brain now empty. Gone were all the synapses and neurons and everything that went with them, turned now into nothing but bloody silver-gray yellowish meat splattered all over the upper reaches of the nearby open-studded walls and exposed rafters."


A couple of paragraphs back I wrote that for many years I was unable to clearly recall all of the events surrounding the couple and India because of mitigating circumstances --- my stumbling across the suicide as described above constitutes the bottomline of nearly all of those mitigating circumstances. There I was, a young boy not long returned from India, without a mother, having missed both her final days and her funeral as well, standing with my mouth open, staring down on what only minutes before was someone else dear to me, not just gone, but excruciatingly gone. My aunt, stunned into disbelief at what she saw, with the car still in gear and engine running let her foot slip from the clutch as she apparently tried to step out of the car and run toward her husband. The vehicle lurched forward in one huge leap, crashing into the swung open garage door knocking it and me down and rendering me unconscious. It took months and months and reasons unknown before I suddenly came out of a nearly amnesia-like walking coma --- and even then, not fully so until years later. Everything that I knew and should have remembered about my mother's sickness, India, the time leading up to that moment in the garage, and being with my grandmother, either evaporated or was deeply covered over. I remember everything clearly while my mother was alive and our family was still a unit, but from the first being with the foster couple, both before and for sometime afterwards, days, weeks, months, were all gone. Matter of fact, for all practical purposes, except from outside sources and day, dates, and times provided by those outside sources, all of the Ramana stuff through the year 1944 and 1945 no longer existed in my conscious everyday thoughts.

It was during that exact same chronological passage of time, that is, bracketed between the months following my arrival at the Ramana ashram after showing up in India with the foster couple late in December 1943, but before my departure to the U.S. sometime in June of 1944 and being placed with the flower shop people --- an overlapping period of time that encompassed everything that that had either evaporated or was deeply covered over and no longer existed in my conscious everyday thoughts --- that played a prominent role in the near time-travel-like events that unfolded between the curly-haired dusty young anglo boy that I was and the boy sitting on a wall at the ashram and encountering a mysterious American man as elaborated in The Code Maker, The Zen Maker, an encounter that didn't come to light as even having happened until well into my adult years.

Embedded in that same period, that is, following the death of my mother but before I returned from India, my father dissolved the family and disappeared into the hinterlands heavy into alcohol. After returning from my trip to India I ended up staying with my grandmother on and off for an unknown period of time. It was she who was initially concerned about my seemingly askew perspective on things. In turn, because of her concerns, she contacted my uncle to see if he had any idea where my father was. Almost immediately my uncle came out to assist, one of the first of several trips before he actually remained on a permanent basis.

Even though my uncle was not worried about my behavior at the level my grandmother seemed to be, he agreed her concerns carried a certain high amount of validity. My uncle was aware I had been to India, but at the time he didn't know I had been in the presence of a prominent Indian holy man and, although he had at one time met and knew both Rabindranath Tagore and the Zen master Sokei-an, he was not really versed in things spiritual as they flowed from the Eastern side of things. Even so, my uncle, through pure gut intuition and a long time running association with Native American spiritual elders of the desert southwest and possibly even in consultation with them, felt my behavior was quite possibly spiritual in nature.

He searched around for someone who might have answers and in the process came across Swami Prabhavananda of the Southern California Vedanta Society and then Paramahansa Yogananda of the Self-Realization Fellowship. He took me to see both not because he knew them or was familiar with their works, but for no other reason than both were of the highest profile in the Eastern spiritual movement that had taken root on the west coast during and following World War II.

For my uncle, as far as he was concerned, the meetings with the highly regarded yogis bore no fruit. However, 40 years later I crossed paths with a man of deep spritual attainment by the name of Robert Adams. A few years after my stay at the Ramana ashram as a young boy, Adams, then in his late teens, spent three years under the grace and light of Sri Ramana there --- or at least in the caves above the ashram. Adams told me he recognized me because he had seen me many years previously. He said our meeting came about because he himself had a self Enlightenment experience at age 14 without any idea of what any of it meant. Seeking answers, Adams, at age 17, one year before going to India, went to the temple of Paramahansa Yogananda's Self-Realization Fellowship near San Diego in the process of possibly becoming a monk with the order. He had been there a few months when I was brought in by a man with a beard to see Yogananda. He said he heard I had been to India a year or so earlier and returned with what the man with the beard said was an odd perception of the world. Adams was born in 1928 making the year of my visit during his stay at Yogananda's center at the age of 17, being 1945.

Although it all seemed innocent enough at the time, there has been since, a number of controversies surrounding Robert Adams and any association he may or may not have had in regards to Sri Ramana and any stay he may or may not have had at the Ramana ashram or the caves above it. Katya Osborne Douglas, the daughter of the highly acclaimed author of many Sri Ramana books Arthur Osborne and older sister to Adam Osborne, questions if not refutes much of what has come to us regarding Robert Adams. I have great faith in anything Katya would have to say when it comes to Sri Ramana, the ashram and any goings on there during her tenure growing up there and would again, advise anybody who has read this far and interested in anything pertaining to Robert Adams, Sri Ramana, et al, I encourage you to visit the Adam Osborne site.

In that I have been unable to find a certifiable or reliable source where Adams himself specifically pinpointed the day, date, time or length of his stay at the fellowship --- so I could use it myself to determine the specifics of when I was there --- I have had to backtrack in time using what I have at hand, figuring my visit to the Fellowship had to either be during what would have been the spring semester of school 1945 or early into the beginning of the summer of 1945 --- otherwise it would have to had been toward the end of summer because I know where my uncle was during the middle of that summer.

On Monday, July 16, 1945 at 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time, my uncle, who lived in New Mexico, was startled, along with many others no doubt, by a huge flash of light that filled the whole of the pre-dawn night sky in a giant half bubble arc across the desert toward White Sands. Unknown to him at the time, that flash was associated with the first atomic device ever set off on the face of the earth.(see) One month later, August 15-16, 1945 found him well into the rugged terrain on BLM land some 25 miles or so from ground zero, which had come to be, by then, called Trinity Site, in location not far from the small New Mexico community of San Antonio doing some research into plants of interest to local Native Americans that may have been impacted adversely by radioactive fallout.

As the day was edging toward dusk my uncle was jarred from his concentration first by the feeling of an intense blast of heat followed by a deep chest shuddering air-vibration caused by a huge, weird-shaped flying object, seemingly made of metal and whining like a sick vacuum cleaner that streaked in out of the sky almost directly overhead on a slightly down-angle from parallel to the ground. The object, as it crossed out of sight barely maintaining its height advantage above the undulating canyons and rock strewn hills, all the while traveling at an ultra high speed, by the sound of it, slammed hard, and somewhat explosively so, possibly before it even hit, into the rocks and soil some distance away.

What the object was he never learned officially, but the next day two men flashing badges and dressed in civilian clothes showed up at his home and took him to a secured area in Los Alamos. After two days of questioning what he saw he was released primarily through the efforts of famed astronomer and mathematician Dr Lincoln La Paz.

END OF THE GAP:


One way or the other, however the events involving my uncle unfolded, it must have been just at the close of summer 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 above photo shows the main Redondo Beach business district sometime in the 1940s, looking all the same as it did when I was sent to live with the flower shop people. Shown is the era's downtown main street, Pacific Avenue, looking downhill slightly toward the northwest. Benita Avenue crests up the hill toward the old city hall. The flower shop was located ground level on Pacific Avenue about where the first awning is, just past the telephone pole, center left. As you can see the multi-story building is wedged shaped. The front of the shop faced Pacific Avenue but went clear through the building with a working entrance on Benita. The flower shop couple I was sent to live with didn't live in Redondo however, but in a house not far away that opened directly onto Pacific Coast Highway in Hermosa Beach. I attended Pier Avenue school in Hermosa Beach, also on PCH, but almost all of my non-school free time was spent in and around downtown Redondo and the front.[2]

With the coming of the flower shop people into my life I can now once again start picking up a few more specific dates. In April of 1946 a fairly well established western bandleader by the name of Texas Jim Lewis approached the Redondo Beach City Council to run a newly renovated ballroom on the waterfront near the pier under a new name: Texas Jim's Redondo Barn --- which they approved. Lewis turned it into a western swing venue with himself and his Lone Star Cowboys playing at the top of the card, sometimes with as many as 10,000 people showing up on the weekends.

It wasn't long before the flower shop couple discovered it could be quite lucrative to sell corsages and boutonnieres to couples attending the dances. They also discovered that by putting a tray full of gardenias on a strap around my neck like a cigarette girl and have me walk through the crowds in the dance hall, the cute little kid I was, sold lots of flowers.

For reasons I am unable to recall, but for sure after I began selling gardenias a good part of the night at the dancehall, I ran away from home and somehow ended up staying with a recently discharged World War II ex-Marine taxi driver that had fought his way up through all the islands in all the major battles in the Pacific from Guadalcanal northward.

During the time the marine was battling his way from one island to the next throughout the South Pacific, billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes, as part of his contribution to the war effort, was designing and constructing a massive flying boat that would eventually come to be known, much to his disdain, as the Spruce Goose. The plane wasn't completed by the time the war ended, but Hughes took it upon himself to finish the project. Although the plane was designed and constructed at Hughes Airport just southwest of Culver City, for final assembly and testing it was moved --- in several giant pieces --- to the southeast end of Terminal Island in the Port of Long Beach.

Over a period of six days, starting on June 11, 1946, an outfit called Star House Movers began trucking the two 160-foot-long wing sections over the 28-mile journey to Terminal Island. Their job was completed when the huge hull was successfully transported over the 15th and 16th to the same location after cutting or raising 2,300 power and phone lines along the way.

Early one morning in June of 1946 I was outside the old High Spot restaurant in Hermosa Beach at the top of the hill where Gould Avenue rises up from the beach and intersects with Pacific Coast Highway hanging with the ex-marine taxi driver I was staying with at the time. The two of us were planning to spend the day, or week if we had to, catching up with, watching, and following the giant flying boat. While I was drawing circles in the dirt parking lot with a stick and the ex-marine was sitting on the front fender of his taxi finishing a coffee-to-go, a black sedan pulled off PCH into the parking lot. A tall lanky man wearing a hat and a brown leather jacket got out looking around for a while and in the process making eye-contact with the ex-marine, followed by a slight head-tip toward each other. The taxi driver told me the man was Howard Hughes, the owner of the flying boat we were about to see and that I should go to talk to him, but I didn't.

So, it seems fairly clear that between the time Texas Jim Lewis approached the Redondo Beach City Council in April, 1946 and the Hughes flying boat was being moved June 11-16, 1946 I had left the flower shop people and taken up with the ex-marine taxi driver, at least on a part time basis if nothing else. My grandmother, who had learned much earlier that I was missing and had been looking for me on and off over a period of time, eventually caught up with me sometime during the summer staying by then, full-time with the ex-marine.[3]

My grandmother, except possibly for the taxi driver and I having breakfast almost every morning at the Happy Hour Cafe owned by the South Bay's infamous Fifie Malouf, usually after having picked up non gratis one or two female stragglers wending their way back after a long night of plying their trade, and maybe him visiting a "friend" once in awhile in the afternoon in one of Fifie's apartments while I waited in the cafe, quickly assessed him as being an otherwise honorable man, thanked him for overseeing my well-being, then took me back with her. I stayed with my grandmother, bouncing back and forth between her and my uncle for awhile when for unknown reasons, I was taken to live with my younger brother in a no sidewalk mostly dirt-street town somewhere east of San Diego near the Mexican border, most likely the last couple of months before the end of the summer of 1946. After a passage of time, of which I don't remember how long, but looking back probably not much more than a month or two, several at the most, out of the blue and totally unannounced, my father showed up all dapper looking and handsome driving probably one of the very first brand-new post-war Pontiac Streamliner fastback sedans off the assembly line, telling my brother and me he wanted to take us to Los Angeles for a few days to meet someone. That someone turned out to be the person that would eventually become my Stepmother.

With the time apparently being over for my younger brother and me being with and getting to know my soon-to-be stepmother, he and I along with a nanny were put on a train and sent back to the couple near San Diego. Months passed. Then one day my younger brother and I were returned to the train station, my younger brother brought to the station by the living near San Diego couple, me by my grandmother. Under protest I had been removed from living with my younger brother to live in the mountain resort of Big Bear Lake east of Los Angeles with my grandmother because a mysterious man of spells, a root doctor, called a Curandero who lived next door and the man of the couple I was living with thought I was spending too much time there, accusing the curandero of practicing things occult and drawing me into it, re the following:


"He called my dad, yelling at the top of his lungs telling my dad how screwed up I was, as though I had fallen under some spell of the curandero. My dad told him he would send my godfather down to take me to my grandmother's in the mountains for a few days or forever if need be."


At the L.A. Union Station we were met by the same nanny we traveled with before. The three of us boarded a train, ending up in Reno, Nevada where we were met by my dad and older brother. My dad and stepmother married in Reno that weekend and shortly thereafter we moved into her behind-the-walls compound in Los Angeles. Initially, for the first few months anyway, albeit extended, living like one happy family.

As my stepmother quickly established herself as a major force in the picture she just as quickly noticed a propensity toward art on my part. She encouraged my Uncle, himself a fairly well established artist in Santa Fe --- and who had been traveling back and forth again and again over several years at the request of my grandmother all the time anyway --- to move to the west coast full time to oversee me. She set him up in a fully equipped artist's studio and covered all expenses, including models. All he had to do was have me as a protege', develop my budding talents, and arrange for me to have as many art and educational experiences as possible.

I had been living at my stepmother's compound only a short time when one day I noticed the boy that delivered the afternoon newspaper was hand-pushing his heavily laden bike back in the opposite direction he usually went. Seems he had been several blocks into the route when he ran over some object that punctured the rear tire. Since he had something like a 100 papers in dual bags over the handlebars and rear wheel, plus the bike was a motorized Whizzer, he was reluctant to just leave it sitting, so he was pushing it home to repair the puncture. I told him I could wait with the bike if he liked and he could just run home and get the repair stuff. Thinking it wasn't a bad idea he did just that. After that, every afternoon that my uncle allowed it I would go to the boy's house and help fold papers and just hang out until he left on his route.

During the summer of that year, well before I had moved to my stepmother's, the newspaper had a contest that offered a free one week trip to Catalina Island, all expenses paid, for selling the most subscriptions. The boy won and during the first part of September 1946, a few weeks before school started, he went, taking me along with him after convincing his boss how much work I had done.

Early one morning we were dropped off at the Wilmington boat terminal south of Los Angeles, sailing the twenty-six miles to Catalina on the Great White Steamer, newly refurbished in July from war duty. They put us up in a sort of tent-like village about two blocks behind the main street and straight up from the pier in the little town of Avalon.

It was there on the island during the closing weeks of the summer of 1946 at a then isolated onetime stage-stop high in the mountains of Catalina called Eagle's Nest that I had what I came to discover was a mystical experience. That experience involved not only the venerated Indian holy man the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi that I had met in India several years earlier, and who, to have made what happened, happen, must have invoked, for him, the seldom used supernormal perceptual states called Siddhis, but also the man who I would meet several years later that would become my mentor in things spiritual.

Several years after the man who was to become my Mentor became my mentor I learned he had, prior to moving into the house next door to me while I was still in high school, been living a semi-ascetic lifestyle on one of the Channel Islands off the California coast for seven years, having gone to the island in September 1946 on the occasion of his holy man's Golden Anniversary. Later research revealed that devotees of his holy man, Sri Ramana, gathered at the Ramana ashram on September 1,1946 for a great celebration honoring the fiftieth anniversary of his arrival at Tiruvannamali, the same time as the experience I had that night at the stage stop.

It is easy to extrapolate from the above time-date sequences that sometime during the summer of 1946 --- between the Hughes flying boat being moved June 11-16, 1946 and me ending up on Catalina Island September 1, 1946 --- that I had been found by my grandmother and removed from the care of the ex-marine in Redondo Beach only to end up under my uncle's guardianship at my stepmother's compound in Los Angeles. That move was the start of my full time stay under his auspices for at least the next four years.

Nearly as quickly as I had moved into my stepmother's compound than my brothers and I discovered there were three easily accessible movie theaters close by, two a few blocks up the street near Washington and Arlington, one near Western and Adams. In those for-the-most-part pre-TV days, we continually went to the theaters to see such films as Flying Tigers, Back to Bataan, Cry Havoc, They Were Expendable, and Sands of Iwo Jima, along with a whole host of westerns, Frankenstein and Mummy movies and a never ending supply of Tarzan movies, cartoons and serials, especially so, because he had been one of my heroes throughout the war years, my favorite, Captain Midnight. Probably my most favorite, favorite movie in those days, at least of the wartime themed variety, that is up until I saw Flying Tigers, was The Fighting Sullivans. The Fighting Sullivans was about five brothers from Iowa that all joined the Navy together at the same time only a few months after Pearl Harbor. Released in 1944, but not seen by me until much later, the movie most likely resonated so deeply with me because my brothers and I had been reunited, and at the time unknown to me that such would not be the case, I thought this time it would last.(see)


Although I went to matinees on a regular basis my uncle wasn't big on going to the movies himself. I remember four HE did take me to see personally after he began overseeing me on a regular basis along with one movie I remember well that my dad promised to take me and my older brother to but in the end never did. As for my uncle, no sooner had I fallen under his aegis than we went to see the Howard Hughes production of The Outlaw and sometime around the same time The Razor's Edge, the movie based on the 1944 best selling novel by the British playwright and author William Somerset Maugham with a film release date of December 1946. Then a short time later a screening of Stagecoach and a year or two after that the western Red River, released in September of 1948. For all four movies, except Stagecoach that was a private screening, we went to the big movie houses along Hollywood Boulevard that my stepmother always went to such as the Egyptian and Grauman's Chinese. Why he wanted me to see either Stagecoach or Red River I am not sure, but I think it was a combination of two things. One, for himself, he wanted me to see the lavish background scenes of Monument Valley in Stagecoach and secondly, although he agreed with the precepts as found in the Cowboy Code of the West as advocated by the matinee western stars and how they applied to me specifically, he wanted me to see more upscale realistic and accurate westerns than the usual Roy Rogers and Gene Autry fare I always went to.[4]

The movie my father said he would take my older brother and me to see, important in one respect because it would have been the only movie that I would have ever gone to the show with my dad to see, was titled Lust For Gold about the legendary Lost Dutchman Mine in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona. Although my father and I never seemed to have much in common, Lust For Gold was based on one of his and my favorite books Thunder Gods Gold by Barry Storm. The movie's scheduled release date was set for June 10, 1949, but for reasons unrecalled, and even though I have seen the movie many times, for whatever reason my dad never took me to see it.


LOST GOLD OF THE SIERRA PROSPECTOR


As for The Razor's Edge, that is another story. I do not know if my uncle read the book before seeing the movie, but he went to see it one evening without me and came back all hopped up for me to see it, mainly because I guess, the story line. The release of the movie followed right on the heels of my September 1st experience on Catalina Island, and that, in conjunction with my experiences in India, my uncle was hoping I could put it all together in some fashion. However, in those days the time I was in India was just not reachable in my everyday surface thoughts, so the whole idea was all for naught because any connection was lost and way over my head. The unusual part of it all, although my uncle was highly disappointed with the outcome of his efforts, unbeknownst to him at the time he was right on target with his intuition because the real life person Maugham wrote his main character around in the novel, Larry Darrell, turned out to be the exact same person who a few years later became the person in my life I call my mentor --- and who turned out to be the same person dressed in dark clothes on Catalina Island.

I know by very, very early in the year of 1947, more specifically as soon as January 15, 1947, I was fully entrenched with the going-ons of my uncle and the quasi-family lifestyle with my brothers as set up by my stepmother. Why January 15th? That was the day one Elizabeth Short, otherwise quickly to become known as the Black Dahlia, was found murdered. The Black Dahlia murder was a notorious Los Angeles case wherein the 22 year old Short was found dead, her naked body mutilated and surgically cut in half, carefully drained of blood, then laid out in pieces in a field. Although I had to research the date, I remember the incident clearly because of my godfather. He had been called in by my stepmother to oversee my older brother at the same time my uncle was called in to oversee me. Ten years or so before he had some rather unscrupulous connections with a few even more unscrupulous members of the Los Angeles police department and still maintained a few of those connections. Through those connections, for whatever reason, he was able to obtain a whole bunch of official, albeit unreleased and classified, 8x10 glossy print photographs of Short's naked and severed body taken at the crime scene. While it is true that the crime scene photos of Elizabeth Short are readily available nowdays on the net for anybody to see in all their gruesome details, back then such was not the case --- and for me especially there was no intent on anybody's part for me to see them. However, as soon as I saw the bruhaha being made over the photos I had to see them. The first chance I got, not knowing what they were, I slipped them out of the manila envelope and took a look. Not once, but over and over several times until I was caught.(see)

All along, even from the earliest days, my uncle took a liking to me. However, I don't think he was too excessively concerned with me one way or the other to start with. To me, except to satisfy an ever growing creative side and fill a continous thirst for knowledge, he always seemed satisfied with me and my actions just the way I was --- that is until I came back from my trip to Catalina Island sort of rattled and he got out of me what happened. After hearing my story, which I sum up in THE MEETING: An Untold Story of Sri Ramana, right away he started figuring out ways to get back to the desert and take me with him. He told me there were people and places all over the desert, secret and sacred places that had people that would identify with my experience and me.

The earliest opportunity for the two of us to head out of L.A. toward the desert southwest and spend any amount of time arose during the 1946-1947 school year Easter vacation --- now called spring recess or spring break. In those days, spring vacation typically fell one week before Easter Sunday which that school year ran from Saturday March 29, 1947 through Sunday, April 6, 1947. My uncle had some sort of important business he needed to clear up in Santa Fe so he waited for my spring break so we could travel together. That trip was the first of several where we camped out along Meteor Crater rim close to the 1000 year old pit houses. The temperature dropped so cold one of the nights toward the end of the week we finally had to get in the truck and turn the heater on, eventually moving inside the nearby building being renovated at the time into a meteorite museum by a friend of my uncle, the famed meteor hunter H.H. Nininger.

In 1947, on the day before Easter, Saturday April 5, the Johnny Weissmuller movie Tarzan and the Huntress was released, a movie that, although inconsequential in the lives of almost everybody else in the world, played a huge role in my life. The timing of my return trip from the desert with my uncle did not coincide with me seeing the movie on opening weekend. However, because I was such an ardent fan of the Weissmuller Tarzan series, it wasn't very many days before I caught up with it --- and then over and over. Most of the movie, typical of the Tarzan movies of the day, was pure corn. What impacted me so deeply though, was when Tarzan's son Boy builds a glider-type plane out of cloth and sticks that could not only fly but carry him in flight at the sametime. Before he has a chance to test it, their chimp Cheetah, apparently seeing the glider's potential, steals it. Hanging on for dear life Cheetah jumps off some rocks covering quite some distance through the air before eventually crashing into the trees and falling to the ground.

After seeing that scene I HAD to build and fly my own glider. Under my uncle's guidence and a seemingly unlimited supply of money provided through the graciousness of my stepmother, I researched and studied everything I could find on manned flight, starting with Leonardo Da Vinci and His Flying Machines. Then, gathering all the info we put about building our own machine by combining our 1948 ideas with Leonardo's fifteenth century ideas and the 1895 ideas of some four-hundred years later of Otto Lilienthal.

My uncle drew a lifesize outline of the craft on the floor of the studio and from that the machine grew into an over fifteen-foot wingspan glider capable of supporting a man like Lilienthal's, or a ten year old boy like myself, in flight. I am not sure what his exact plan for the machine was, but one day without my uncle's knowledge a friend of mine and I hauled it out of the studio and up to the top of the second story apartments across the compound, and hanging on for dear life, launched it. The following paragraph, from the source so cited, describes the results of that attempt:


"Initially the flight played out fairly well, picking up wind under the wings and maintaining the same two-story height advantage for some distance. Halfway across busy Arlington Street though, the craft began slowing and losing forward momentum. It began dropping altitude rapidly, eventually crashing into the porch and partway through the front windows of the house across the way. Other than a few bruises and a wrecked machine, nothing was broken, although as it turned out, my dad wasn't nearly as proud of me as intended. I never forgot the thrill of that flight and carried that thrill and Leonardo's dreams into my adulthood."(source)


Two nights later my uncle and I were in the garage contemplating repairs of the flying machine, now hanging securely from the rafters when Howard Hughes walked in. The flight made the local press and apparently in the process attracted the attention of Hughes. As quirky as he was and as much as he loved flying I guess he just couldn't control himself. At first he stayed in the alley out of the light, but after talking with my uncle for a few minutes he came into the garage, all the while the two of them looking up and walking around under the machine while my uncle pointed out some of the craft's finer attributes. After a short time my uncle motioned me over and introduced me.



The next day my stepmother came into the garage, something she never did. She seldom ventured into my uncle's studio for any reason, and for sure, in all the time I knew her, I know she never stepped past the studio into the garage. She told my uncle she thought what we were doing was a highly admirable endeavor, but that he should watch over me a little more carefully as I could have killed myself. As she was walking out she turned toward my uncle and said she had heard "Howard" was there, then said he, Hughes, should be looking out after his own boys a little more carefully too.

That bit of cryptic chit-chat meant nothing to me at the time. It was only years later when my uncle explained the meaning behind what she said that it took on any semblance of understanding. I went to New Mexico to see my uncle sometime around the 20th anniversary of my 1948 manned glider flight in an attempt to narrow down the specific date when it occurred. After prompting him about Hughes' visit that night and a few days later my stepmother coming into the garage he began to recall the events and how they fit into the chronological flow of things. However, I am getting a little ahead of myself here because between the time I started research on making the glider, the construction began, the actual flight took place followed by Hughes stopping by a few days later, over a year transpired --- time having moved from April 1947 when Tarzan and the Huntress was released through to the end of summer of 1948 when the bird took wing.[5] During that period a number of things I report elsewhere happened. That number of things, although spread semi-thinly here-and-there throughout a number of my works on the internet is quickly summed up in the following two paragraphs found in a paper about early UFO pioneer Frank Edwards:


"(My uncle) was given complete authority to oversee me as he so chose, as long as I received extensive education in the sciences, hard academics, philosophy, and the arts. So, as he saw it, travel was a part of the mix. Somewhere along the way he had caught wind of a potential new fossil find in the Arizona Strip related to the teratorn, a giant bird with over a twenty-foot wingspan thought to be the inspiration of Native American Thunderbird legends. When school let out sometime just before or around the middle of June, 1947, off he went, taking me with him.

"Done with teratorn stuff, a few days before the 4th of July weekend found us working our way across the desert after having holed up for some minor exploration at the Elden Pueblo where prehistoric Native Americans had buried in a ritual fashion an extremely rare type meteorite, thought possibly to have come from the surface of Mars or the far side of the Moon. From there we camped near the pit houses along the rim of Meteor Crater. One night, after a rather long discussion around the campfire about Albert Franklin Banta, the man who reportedly discovered the crater and the fact that he was involved in The Long Walk endured by the Navajos and Apaches, my uncle decided I should learn about what they went through first hand --- and while we were at it, visit the gravesite of Billy the Kid. Combining both endeavors put us near Fort Sumner, New Mexico."


As the above two paragraphs attest to, for the first few weeks of the summer of 1947 my uncle and I were basically traveling and living in some very remote sections of the Arizona Strip, moving from site to site and camping along the way with very little contact with the outside world. By the time we moved into New Mexico I had really lost track of day and date. I was, however, fast asleep in my sleeping bag somewhere in the desert not too far from the gravesite of Billy the Kid near Fort Sumner on the night of, it is thought, Friday, July 4, 1947, when around midnight my uncle, who had been sitting up pondering the stars and possibly his insignificance in the overall scheme of things, through a smattering of clouds, saw a brilliant meteor-like object streak across the night sky arcing downward to the Earth toward a fast moving lightning infested stormy horizon, all the while dissipating a string of quickly extinguishing small glowing hunks or particles dropping in it's wake. Thinking it was a meteor and thinking his friend La Paz might be interested in a fresh strike, my uncle began an effort to contact him. In that it was long before the days of cell phones it took a couple of days for the two of them to connect. La Paz informed my uncle that from all indications whatever he saw streak across the sky that night it was NOT a meteor nor a known aircraft of some type --- but whatever it was, after talking with La Paz my uncle was chaffing at the bit to go to the suspected impact site and see for himself if there was any truth behind the so called Hieroglyphic Writing La Paz heard rumors of as being on some of the metal scraps. The following two quoted paragraphs as well as the canteen graphic can be found at the Frank Edwards link previously cited above:


"When they did meet up it was along some deep-rutted dirt road out in the middle of nowhere. La Paz was traveling with his wife and two daughters, the three of which stayed in the car while La Paz got out. He and my uncle walked around a few yards off the road and into the scrub brush and talked while I tried to show-off and make as much eye contact with the two girls that I could, both of whom were quite a bit older than me and neither of which showed even the slightest interest.

"Maybe twenty minutes into their conversation a dust encrusted olive drab military jeep without any numbers, markings or insignias that I was able to see or make out came bouncing across the desert toward us with two men, one a GI, who was driving, the other dressed in civilian garb sitting on the passenger side. Both joined La Paz and my uncle. Without me having a clue as to what was going on my uncle walked over to our truck followed by the civilian and pulled a canvas shoulder bag from a box in the pick-up bed along with a pair of binoculars and a couple of canteens, one on a WW II pistol belt I always wore when we were in the field. As he motioned me toward him, the civilian got into our truck, started the engine, turned the vehicle around and drove away on the same road we came in on. La Paz got in his car and drove off as well."



(please click image)


Although what happened that summer in and around Roswell relative to me is explained much more thoroughly in Tommy Tyree and most especially so in The Roswell Ray Gun, briefly for our purposes here I went into the area within days of the July 1947 incident with my uncle because he was interested in looking into what he heard were hieroglyphs on some pieces of the debris. It was at least two months after the object was said to have crashed that he was officially called back by La Paz with me Meeting Dr.La Paz for a second time.

During the first visit, even though I was around, sat in on, or overhead many interviews between my uncle and various people, I never took any notes or retained anything specifically for posterity. At the time I just didn't know any of it would ever mean anything. I was raised on Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers and as that same young boy had personally observed the giant 1942 Los Angeles UFO fly directly over my house, so rocketships or objects from outer space or other planets just didn't seem all that unusual to me. I spent a good part of my time out in the cab of the truck reading comic books, sitting around in waiting rooms or narrow halls of places that looked like doctors offices or hospitals. Even more time was spent hanging out in dirty little rooms stuck back in the corners of hot, dusty hanger type buildings stacked to the ceiling with falling over old newspapers, out of date World War II Mil-Spec operator handbooks and training manuals, as well as grungy old coffee cups all over the place with spoons and dead bugs stuck in the bottom of thin layer of some sort of a dried-up brown, tar-like residue --- presumably it is guessed, being at onetime, coffee. It was only during that second visit that I joined my uncle along with Dr. La Paz and another archaeologist named --- I've been told --- William Lawrence Campbell, and actually went to every one of the then known or newly discovered debris fields together.

After leaving the desert southwest toward the end of summer 1947, except for going to Santa Barbara with my stepmother to meet a friend of hers sometime in September or October, the rest of the year passed rather uneventful.[6] If it was that first summer of travels with my uncle in 1947 or summers later, my traveling around the desert southwest with him began my interaction with Native Americans on a more indepth level. It was during those same early travels that I first heard about and actually met Navajo Code Talkers. As the nearly ten year old boy I was I thought it was the coolest thing, Native Americans, the Navajo, being placed on the war front and speaking their own language back and forth between themselves and the whole of the Japanese war machine from Hirohito and Tojo to the lowest private not being able to decode or make heads or tails out of what was being said.

No sooner had the year 1948 come upon us, and before January even waned, my uncle had returned to the desert, only this time on his own and without me --- because of school --- leaving me to my own vices. He had gone to the desert to biosearch a plant called Sacred Datura, a plant that was of major importance to many members of the Native American population for ritual and medicinal purposes. The plant bloomed and was the strongest during the phases of the full moon and on January 26, 1948, one month after the winter equinox, the moon, at the full phase went through one of the closest passes to Earth in known history, a closeness in distance that won't be surpassed until November 2034 --- then by only 12 miles. So said, my uncle wanted to be in the field when it happened.

I recall the full moon date and my uncle being gone specifically because the day before the full moon, on January 25, 1948, with my uncle being gone my stepmother took me by the Los Angeles Union station to see a most unusual sight. The locomotive of the Santa Fe Super Chief, after arrival and being unhooked from the main body of the train, went through the track end-barrier, crashing through the upper-wall that bordered the end of the train yard with the front portion of the engine ending up dangling in mid-air 20 feet above street level.




The thing is, however uneventful the year 1947 ended for me, unknown to me at the time, 1948 was being set up to be much different. Behind the scenes the winds of change were beginning to stir from a slight breeze into a fullblown gale. That slight breeze started gaining strength toward the gale it would eventually become when, on May 19, 1948, a woman by the name of Brenda Allen was arrested. A few years later, sometime in early 1950, because of Allen's arrest, my dad and stepmother went on an extended trip to Mexico and South America for a couple of years because of what my stepmother viewed as an increasingly unfriendly business environment --- and it was their departure and the length of their stay away that brought about the demise of MY times with my uncle. However, once again, I am getting ahead of myself by a few years and will backtrack to the start of the summer of 1948, one year after Roswell.

Although I didn't always start and stop school years at even intervals, during the broader time period that I was living at my stepmother's I was in the fourth or fifth grade or so. Two of my grade-school buddies and I used to pull a Radio Flyer through the alleys around the neighborhood collecting pop and beer bottles for the deposit. After we collected a wagon load we would turn them in various places around of which one was a bar. In the process of pounding on the back door I got to know the dishwasher there, an elderly (to me) Chinese man.

Sitting in the shade on the back steps amongst the garbage cans and flies in the back alley behind the bar one afternoon, while drinking hot tea out of tiny little cups with no handles in a near ritual-like tea ceremony he insisted on, the elderly Chinese man told me a story about the bombing of Japanese occupied Taiwan by B-29 Superfortresses of the United States Army Air Force during World War II. He said from ancient times there was a "girl Buddha" whose followers believed that reciting the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum would, because of the "girl Buddha's" compassion, deliver them from harm. He said even though he himself had not practiced or invoked the mantra, while seeking refuge in the midst of the attack he inadvertently ended up amongst a group of believers who were also running to find shelter from the explosions. Then, while within the group, most of whom were verbally repeating the mantra, overhead, pure white and almost cloud-like the "girl Buddha" appeared in the sky above them actually deflecting the trajectory of the bombs away from their exposed path until they reached safety and out of harms way.

The mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum, came up because of a 1940s comic book superhero called The Green Lama that used the mantra much like Billy Batson used Shazam to become Captain Marvel --- to invoke superpowers --- and, in the Green Lama's case, like Captain Marvel, gaining super strength, invulnerability, the ability to fly, and even being impervious to bullets to the point of being bulletproof. The old dishwasher had a six or eight copies of the Green Lama all in like-new mint condition, of which, for whatever reason, he gave to me. It was many years later, as an adult, before I heard of the same events from an outside source as had been related to me by the dishwasher, a confirmation of sorts, as well as the name of the "girl Buddha," or more appropriately, female Buddha, Kuan Yin.

The summer of 1948 started for me when school let out in June, which was a week or so before the official start of the summer --- that is, when the Sun reaches its farthest point north of the equator known as the summer solstice. In 1948 that day was Monday, June 21. It was a very special date for another reason as well. On that date there occurred a very rare astronomical phenomenon of the moon being full at the EXACT same time as the summer solstice. That time of my life found me out in the middle of the desert far from any school traveling with my uncle in New Mexico's remote Chaco Canyon --- eventually ending up high on the cliffsides of Fajada Butte, an imposing natural structure that rises 380 feet above the valley floor in an almost perfect north-south, east-west axis and not topping out until the butte's straight up and down sandstone walls reach an elevation of 6623 feet. We had gone to the butte for two reasons. One, because it is so huge it has its own micro-climate which creates an environment that grows a variety of plants used by the indigenous population for traditional and ritual purposes, plants that are not generally found on the surrounding plain. Special plants also grow on the mounds thought to be the one-time homes of the ancient astronomers. Although others felt that the plants were equally powerful wherever they grew my uncle thought that the power of the plants was increased by being on the butte, hence his desire to be there.

Secondly, high up on side of the butte and unknown to anybody at the time except for a small, highly select group on Native American tribal elders, was an ancient three-stone megalith of deep spritual and ritual significance. The human-modified natural structure that ultimately would become known as the Sun Dagger, had been made into a celestial calendar by the ancient peoples of Chaco Canyon. On the summer solstice the sun threw a beam of light through a separation in the stones toward a sprial image carved into the butte wall, the beam casting a visual image against the surface similar to a dagger. I never got to see the sun dagger in real life. The closest I got was on the ledge just below it that summer with my uncle. At the time I had never heard of such things, summer solstices and all that, nor did my uncle explain what he was doing, although many years later, when the sun dagger became well known he confirmed that was what he and his friend had gone to observe.

It was only a short time after returning from the desert during the summer of 1948 and just before school started at around age 10 or so, that I removed the flying machine my uncle and I built from the hanging position of it's construction lair and hauled it up to the rooftop of the second story building across the street. Then, holding onto the machine for dear life, I jumped off.

The craft maintained the same two-story height advantage for quite some distance, but partway into the flight, instead of continuing in the direction I wanted, it began tipping lower on the right and turning. Without ailerons or maneuverable rudder controls and with inexperienced over-correcting on my part creating an adverse yaw followed by a sudden stall, the ensuing results ended with a somewhat dramatic drop, crashing into the porch and partway through the front windows of the house diagonally across the way. I figure the date of the flight was the weekend of either August 21-22 or 28-29, 1948, having arrived at those dates following talks with my uncle some 20 years later. My uncle was a strong promoter of me building an actual flying machine based on a Da Vinci design for a number of reasons, but most prominently so --- cutting to the quick --- because of how it is explained in the following as found in ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT: The Path Unfolds, linked above and LEONARDO DA VINCI: 500 Years To Soon, so sourced:


"At the time my older brother loved to build model airplanes and continued to build bigger and better models until eventually he was constructing huge gas engine powered remote control six-foot wingspan B-24 Liberators. He was also the apple of my father's eye. My uncle, noticing the situation, decided I too could impress my dad, only through art."(source)


Hence, the building of the machine. The obvious fact that both of the August weekend dates for the flight fall perfectly into the necessary timeframe, although helpful, is overshadowed because of two other prevailing reasons. However, neither of the reasons are specifically able to be narrowed down one over-the-other because both reasons are viable in their own way. The first weekend date shows promise because of my uncle wanting me to 'impress my dad through art.' It just so happens that my father's birthday fell almost on the first weekend date if not the actual date of the flight. My uncle felt I may have selected that weekend to conicide with my father's birthday as a sort of birthday present. The strength in the second weekend involves the night my stepmother came into the garage where the wrecked flying machine was hanging from the rafters. If you remember, she told my uncle she thought what we were doing was a highly admirable endeavor, but that he should watch over me a little more carefully as I could have killed myself. As she was walking out she turned toward my uncle and said she had heard 'Howard' was there, then said he, Hughes, should be looking out after his own boys a little more carefully too. That bit of cryptic chit-chat meant nothing to me at the time. It was only years later when my uncle explained the meaning behind what she said that it took on any semblance of understanding.

Although it doesn't matter much in the overall scheme of things which of the two weekends are selected because both pretty much narrow down the time frame of the flight within a few days, I personally opt for the second weekend, August 28-29, 1948, as being the most accurate. I do so because one, I don't think my father's birthday meant anything to me one way or the other in those days because as long as I can remember it never has, even up to this day. Secondly, the comments of my stepmother as explained by my uncle. When she said something about Hughes looking out after his own boys she was making reference to film actor Robert Mitchum. Hughes owned RKO studios and Mitchum was Hughes' top actor. On Wednesday September 1, 1948 Mitchum was arrested in a highly publicized marijuana bust that most people thought would end his career, which was far from the case. It must have been a day or so after Mitchum's arrest that my stepmother came into the garage and passed on her cryptic remark about Hughes' looking out after his own boys a little more carefully.

No sooner had school let out for the summer of 1948 than my uncle and I took off resuming our travels in the desert southwest, not really returning for any length of time on a permanent basis until towards the end of summer. Suggestions of birthdays and such being potential motivators for the previously mentioned probable August 21-22 or 28-29, 1948 selected dates for the flight don't carry as much weight for me in real life as me having a chance to slip past my uncle and without asking, override any possible outright no's or potential misgivings my uncle may have have carried within himself about me actually attempting a flight in the machine after I got back. The truth is I was tired of waiting and was spurred on to fly the machine primarily because of a story I read that summer in a Batman comic.

The story, titled "The Batman History Forgot," circulated around Batman and Robin traveling into the past where they meet up with Leonardo Da Vinci and together the three of them use Da Vinci's flying machine to battle corruption in 1499 .AD. Milan, Italy. The story was published in the #46 April-May 1948 issue of Batman, meaning it was available for purchase just weeks before school let out for the summer of 1948. In so saying, I picked up a copy and carried it with me throughout the whole summer reading it over and over every chance I got. By the time I returned home near the end summer just before school started, the story had become so ingrained in me about Da Vinci actually successfully flying his machine as opposed to the results found in "500 Years Too Soon" that I figured the first chance I got nothing was going to stop me from launching the machine and doing the same.


THE BATMAN AND LEONARDO DA VINCI, BATMAN COMICS, APRIL-MAY 1948 ISSUE #46
--
(please click any image)


The next date I can pinpoint involves an object with a little bit if not a lot of questionable history behind it, the Kensington Stone. It seems that during the time I was being overseen by my uncle under the ever watchful eye of my stepmother and her then never ending supply of money, there wasn't anything we didn't do or anyplace we didn't go as long as she deemed it in some respects, educational --- and I didn't miss any school. The only time I did miss any amount of school involved the Kensington Stone. When it first came up late in the year of 1948 that I (we, my uncle and I) had to see the Stone it was on exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, having been on display there since February 17, 1948. It was scheduled to leave February 25, 1949, after which it was going to be returned to its owners in Alexandria, Minnesota and replaced at the Smithsonian by a plaster cast. Concerned that the stone might not be put back on public display where I could see it in real life when it was returned to Minnesota my uncle convinced my stepmother he and I should go to DC and see it. Which we did.

No sooner had we left for D.C. than the whole upper tier of the U.S., and especially so the upper midwest, was covered in the worst snow anybody had ever seen, some places so deep locomotives and whole trains were completely buried with tracks covered for hundreds of miles with so much snow they couldn't even be plowed. A good part of the remaining rail service was shifted toward the southern part of the country and since we were traveling the southern route I remember we were caught up in it all both coming and going.

After I returned to L.A. and finished what was left of my Christmas vacation and started school, on January 8-11, 1949, all of downtown Los Angeles was hit with snow. The hills all around the civic center, the Hollywood Hills where the sign is, even Griffith Observatory. The storm was so bad that on January 11 the Los Angeles Unified School District shut down and declared its one and only district-wide Snow Day. It was bad enough the rest of the country was zapped by snow, but Los Angeles? I remember being totally amazed by it all as well as my uncle saying the last time it snowed like that in L.A. he had just met Albert Einstein.

The same way the Black Dahlia murder of January 15, 1947 was notorious in Los Angeles so too was the date April 8, 1949. It was on that date a three year old little girl named Kathy Fiscus fell nearly 100 feet down the open pipe-shaft of an abandoned water well. The rescue attempt to save her and eventually finding her dead after a three day ordeal drew national attention with the local television station, KTLA, covering the event for 27 straight hours, preempting its regular programming to report live from the scene. I remember well being glued to our black and white ten-inch screen TV throughout a good part of it.(see)

The next date I can nail down my whereabouts specifically happened a few weeks later and circulates around a major western movie star of the period by the name of Roy Rogers. Rogers was the number one box office draw for kids my age and I collected all of the memorabilia on him I could get my hands on. Lunch boxes, cap guns, comic books. My two same age as me cousins, who lived in the mountain resorts a 100 miles east of L.A., had met Rogers several times because he was always filming movies right around where they lived, often using their horse corrals. The fact that they had met him many times --- and me not having met him even once was something they never let me forget. My stepmother decided to remedy the situation by making arrangements for me to meet Rogers. That meeting, which was actually the first of three, occurred on the occasion of he and his horse Trigger having their footprints set into cement at Grauman's Chinese Theater in April of 1949. A date still set in concrete in front of the theater for anybody to see.



(please click image)

I can remember a number of things regarding my uncle after the above event in 1949, however only one thing of any major significance occurred during the years of 1949 and 1950, and even then I am unable to recall any specific dates when it happened or if it was before or after the Roy Rogers meeting --- albeit, Rogers in a roundabout way is tied in with it.

My stepmother, who you may recall was quite wealthy, in her new found motherhood role, noticed my younger brother and myself, along with a bunch of other neighborhood kids, spent an inordinate amount of time "playing cowboys" --- with cowboy hats, capguns, holsters, boots, etc., and in doing so we often ended up in the street. Using her logic, she thought, what could be better than having their own real ranch to play on, especially so, not in the street. So that's what she did, the city lady she was, not knowing one thing about a ranch or ranches one way or the other, she went out and bought one. And a fabulous ranch it was, at least for us kids.(see)

One end of the ranch ran right along the Southern Pacific Railroad mainline and not far up the tracks was a siding that freight trains would pull onto to allow the high priority passenger limiteds to pass. It wasn't long before my older brother and cousin were hopping trains and on one occasion I followed them, ending with me riding in the cab of a giant 6000 horsepower 4-8-8-2 steam locomotive, not once, but two times as chronicled in Riding The Cab Forwards.

Even though I had stopped catching trains north after my first attempt my older brother and cousin continued doing so, never going so far the couldn't return the same day. However, one day they didn't return, a trip that ended up involving a mysteriously veiled movie star, mobsters, being over 500 miles away from home, and barely escaping a beating from a railroad bull.[7]

I am unable to recall any specific dates for those events, nor am I able to separate events from one summer to the next. I do recall several things that happened during the summers after the train adventure --- after that it is pretty much downhill. Both summers we camped in the same place, on the eastside of the Sierras along a fairly large creek that flowed from a year around glacier that inturn fed a number of nearby lakes both above and below our campground. We lived off the land as much as we were able, and, except for a number of journeys to places of interest, we only went into town once a month. The places of interest included the ghost town of Bodie, Mono Lake, the Mammoth Lakes caldera, Manzanar, and a couple of mountain peaks of which Mount Whitney was one. One of the most memorable events was my uncle taking me to meet a man of great spritual attainment named Franklin Merrell-Wolff. During the trip to see Merrell-Wolff we drove up to Whitney Portal then hiked to the top of the summit. My uncle had taken me to Badwater in Death Valley, the lowest spot in North America at 282 feet below sea level a few days before and since it was only 85 miles (as the crow flies) from Mount Whitney, which was at the time the highest point in the United States with an elevation of 14,505 feet, we had to go there as well. While on Mount Whitney I signed a guest book for visitors that make it to the top and I have often thought if those old visitor books were still around I could find out the exact date I was there.[8]

Since we were camping for the whole summer like a bunch of feral kids running around the woods all day and night loosly overseen by a couple of scruffy old men (my uncle and godfather) Game Wardens and U.S. Forest Rangers were always coming in and out of our campground. At first, because they suspected there was a possibility we were poaching small game, they would quasi-snoop around to see if we had any pelts or other such evidence as well as checking the trout or fishing limits and licenses and permits. Later, as the summer wore on, they just stopped by to have hotcakes made from scratch over an open fire for breakfast or coffee and chat.

During one of the summers of 1949 or 1950 a ranger who operated south of us in Inyo county came into our camp in Mono county --- on unofficial business --- looking for my uncle, having heard he had a strong reputation for being a rather successful biosearcher. The ranger, whose name I actually re-learned years later, was Al Noren. Noren lived in Bishop some distance from our campground, but still well within in our sphere of operation and exploration. In the process of fixing up his place in Bishop he brought home rather large pieces of gnarled old wood he found in a wilderness area north of where he lived called the White Mountains. While working the wood he noticed that the tree rings were so tightly close together that inorder to count them required the use of a microscope. My uncle, upon seeing the wood knew it had to be of a great age. He convinced Noren take us to the area where he found the wood, which proved to be a grove of ancient trees called Bristlecone Pines growing around the 10,000 foot level of the White Mountains, many trees over 4000 years old. Noren took us to a huge bristlecone he called or named the Patriarch Tree, which eventually turned out to be largest bristlecone pine known. The same strand of trees or a similar one nearby was eventually named the Methuselah Grove because of the ancient age of the bristlecone pines that make up the grove. We returned to camp and went back to swimming in the creek, collecting arrowheads, and living off the land for the rest of the summer. A couple of years later, in 1953, Noren contacted Edmund Schulman, a bigtime dendrochronologist at the University of Arizona and showed him the same stuff he showed my uncle. Schulman, who died in 1958, has gone on to be given credit as the one who discovered that bristlecone pines are the oldest trees in the world.

Sometime in 1950, and most certainly so by the time or during the summer I was camping in the High Sierras, my dad and stepmother went on an extended trip to Mexico and South America for a couple of years because of what my stepmother viewed as an increasingly unfriendly business environment --- and it was their departure and the length of their stay away that brought about the demise of MY times with my uncle.

During the two years they were gone things really changed, and not all of the change transpired quickly or smoothly in one year blocks --- nor to my benefit. A good part of it had to do with financing, which either began to erode, became sporadic at best, or just plain stopped while the two of them were gone. My stepmother's longtime trusted bookkeeper began to renege on payments for our upkeep such as mortgages, rent, utility bills, and day to day expenditures, then began siphoning off the money --- if not more --- for himself. My older brother came back from Idaho to live with our grandmother in the mountains east of L.A. before she moved back to Redondo Beach. My uncle, who I had been with almost exclusively for four years straight, found himself in such a position that he eventually had to return to his old stomping grounds in Santa Fe.

Just as my dad and stepmother were leaving for South America, with no one specifically in the picture to oversee my younger brother, a woman by the name of Pauline who had at onetime worked for my stepmother came forward and requested --- or at least consented in some fashion --- to have him come live with her. Shortly after the war ended she married a former army sergeant she met while touring with the USO that had never stopped pursuing her. They bought one of those look-alike every other house had a reverse floor plan tract homes that sprang up all over in former agricultural areas south of Los Angeles while he went to work for one of the aircraft factories and she stayed home. Their plans to start a family showed no promise as four years into their marriage they still had no children --- hence her interest in my younger brother.

With my father, stepmother, brothers and grandmother all elsewhere with lives of their own and my uncle just on the cusp of returning to Santa Fe, I was left basically hanging. Without many options, after some heavy negotiating that bordered on pure begging by my uncle with Aunt Pauline, as we were told to call her, she halfheartedly agreed to take me in as well. I don't recall if I started an even school year or not when I moved to Pauline's to be with my younger brother, but I do know by April 1951 I was fully ensconced, however good or bad, and my uncle was long gone. I can pinpoint April of 1951 for sure because on Friday, April 6th the science fiction movie The Thing was released and the next day I rode my bike for miles from our neat and prim tract home, clear up to the suspect area corner of Imperial Highway and Vermont Avenue, the closest place the movie was playing. Pauline had told me not to go and not to take my brother, of which I did both and she was livid. I remember that date specifically because I got in a lot of trouble that weekend --- although, if I remember correctly, in my estimation the movie was worth it.

Even if I have the release date of the film a bit off or how soon or when I saw the movie following it's release, one thing that does have a fixed date that I remember quite vividly --- a date easily researched --- is a photo published about one month so after the movie release that appeared in daily newspapers around the country chronicling an event of May 7, 1951, an event that for whatever reason I have never forgot. It showed, as depicted below, three American G.I.'s during the Korean War lighting up their smokes from the red hot barrel of a machine gun that got that way after nearly nonstop firing all night long warding off Red troops somewhere in central Korea.




Aunt Pauline was decidedly different than most if not all of the women of the couples I lived with following the death of my mother. For one thing, during World War II she had traveled for the USO under the name Pauline Page with her own all girl band, so there was a sort of showbiz flamboyancy about her. Plus she reeked with a certain postwar 40'ish sensuality about her that went way beyond the traditional tract home housewife. The other thing about her was she was very heavy into one of the early health gurus, Gaylord Howser. My younger brother and I had a lot of meals in those days that circulated around skim milk, brewer's yeast, wheat germ, yogurt, potassium broth, and blackstrap molasses. She was also into what was called The Law, which eventually morphed into New Thought, promulgated by a man named Neville Goddard. Even though when I was living with her I was not yet into my teens or just barely, she was always taking me into Los Angeles, mostly to the Wilshire Ebell Theater, to hear Goddard lectures. For my first couple of years of high school, long after I was no longer staying with her, but instead living with my grandmother, and even though it was clear she hated me, she used to come by and take me to the lectures. Then one day she just disappeared. Unbeknown to me at the time, during the same period that I was attending the lectures with Aunt Pauline, she befriended a woman by the name of Margaret Runyan, who would eventually become the wife of Carlos Castaneda, and was also attending the lectures. Years later I would interview Runyan in connection with some Castaneda lore I was working on and Goddard came up.

It was when the arrangements with Aunt Pauline didn't work out (i.e., I kept running away, sometimes taking my little brother with me, sometimes not) that after my stepmother returned from South America --- and having divorced my father --- I ended up spending the first of several summers on her ranch while living the rest of the year, the school portions, with my grandmother.[9] However, the very first summer, the one just before I started high school, I did have one last swan song with my uncle before I moved into my adult years.

A few paragraphs back I mentioned my stepmother putting together a plan for me to meet one of my childhood heroes, cowboy-western movie star Roy Rogers. At the time, April of 1949, I was still under the auspices of my uncle. He, after catching wind of my stepmother's intentions, thought the whole thing somewhat frivolous. So said, he came up with a much bigger plan, a plan that took a couple of years to bare fruit --- not coming about until well after the two of us were no longer together. His intention was for me to meet the smartest man in the world, the greatest artist in America, then the greatest artist in the world. In those days the three were, at least as far a my uncle was concerned, none other than Albert Einstein, Jackson Pollock, and Pablo Picasso. My uncle knew the first two himself so he was able to set those meetings somewhat easily. Jackson Pollock coming down from his studio on Long Island to the city after a one man show in Paris and the finishing of his last action painting ever. The meeting with Albert Einstein took place near a dock that was close to what I was told was a boat house, along some lake near, I guess, Princeton, on the day of a new moon night of August, 1952, that day and date being Wednesday, August 20, 1952. The meeting with Picasso never happened, my dad ending the planned trip to France by contacting my uncle somehow before we got a chance to leave. My father said he wanted me to return to California immediately because I would be attending a new school in the fall and needed to register. I was also informed that I would no longer be staying with the foster family I had been living with, but instead, living with my grandmother.

In the middle of the night July 21, 1952, during the new moon phase exactly one month before the August 20, 1952 new moon meeting with Einstein described above, I was with two Native Americans on top of the crest of a lonely rock outcropping that rose up out of the flat Mojave Desert floor to 3,163 feet above sea level and known to be a sacred and spiritual place called Piute Butte. After hearing that my stepmother had returned from South America and was in the process of finalizing some sort of a business arrangement with Pancho Barnes I decided to run away from Aunt Pauline's to find her. Reaching the high desert got a ride in a truck pulling a horse trailer after the driver promised to take me to Barnes. Late in the night the truck began weaving and overturned along some dirt road and I was picked up by the Indians. They in turn, trying to locate the horses took me to the top of Piute Butte. After locating the horses the Indians said it was too dark to lead them safely back to the road. They suggested since it was so late we should just hole up and wait for sunrise. We sought shelter from the wind in the rocks and made a small fire. The Indians told me the butte was both a sacred place and haunted and we shouldn't be there, but both felt in that we were only trying to assist to the overall well being of the horses and not violating the butte for personal gain that the spirits would not be mad or upset. That morning, at 4:52 AM, with the epicenter not far due west from the butte in the Tehachapi foothills of the Sierras, the most powerful earthquake to hit Southern California in the 20th century and the largest in the nation since San Francisco's in 1906, hit, knocking us to the ground and sounding all the same as a huge explosion.(see)


Following the trip with my uncle to see Jackson Pollock and Albert Einstein in 1952, although we talked on the phone a couple of times and wrote letters to each other once in awhile, it wasn't until the year 1968 before I actually saw him again. However, at the end of May 1953, just a week or so prior the end of my freshman year in high school, my uncle contacted me from New Mexico with several quick in succession back-to-back phone calls. He was all excited and without even thinking about me being in school wanted to know if I thought my dad would let me catch a Greyhound bus as soon as I could and meet him in Kingman, Arizona. He said it would be an adventure of a lifetime and that he expected all hell to break loose in a few weeks because the samething that had happened out in the flatlands near Roswell had happened in the desert near Kingman. He told me the news had filtered down to him through some Native Americans who had scouted the area that some sort of a flying disc, later to be known as the Kingman UFO, had come down in one of the canyons there. He said a couple of the Hualapai trackers who were part of the group could get us in through the back door. When I asked my dad if I could go he blew his stack. He got on the phone and started yelling at my uncle that he was filling my mind with all kinds of "weird and useless shit" and to stay away from me and keep his "cock-and-bull stories" to himself. Needless to say that was the end of it and I didn't get to go. Instead, my dad sent me to my ex-stepmother's ranch for the summer and told the hard drinking every other word was a cuss word ranch foreman Leo, who had been at one time, a World War II Pacific Fleet Navy boxing champion, to not let me "wander off."[10]


When my childhood into early teens with my uncle ended and he went back to Santa Fe, the next link in the chain began with a two year period starting in the fall of 1952 when I returned to live in Redondo Beach and just starting my freshman year in Redondo Union High School. It was then that I met the person I call my Merchant Marine Friend. Two years later, during the summer between my sophomore and junior year in high school, he died from complications of wounds he received during the war. His death opened the door for me to meet my spiritual mentor in things Zen, the real-life person British author and playwright W. Somerset Maugham used as a role model for the main character in his novel The Razor's Edge. See:


THE RAZOR'S EDGE
LARRY DARRELL:- HIS LIFE AFTER THE NOVEL


THE REDONDO BEACH HISTORICAL MUSEUM

The Redondo Beach Historical Museum mission statement is to bring together those persons interested in history, especially the history of the City of Redondo Beach, to promote, preserve and protect the historical and cultural resources of the City. For me I use it to tie together most of the Stage Four stuff mentioned on the list at the top of the page, i.e., my lost years between high school, the draft, the military and Castaneda showing up, re the following:

Fifie Malouf, the overflight of the city by a giant unknown object in the middle of the night that had taken 1400 rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition without incident, Japanese midget submarines washing up on shore next to the pier. Every now and then I get an email from someone who tells me, after having visited the Redondo Beach Historical Museum and carrying on a casual conversation with museum staff mentioning something they recalled from material of mine regarding some aspect of Redondo Beach they came across, it is not always received with full 100% substantiating results --- in other words, it gets pooh-poohed. See:


TIKE KARAVAS


"(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 [5]


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 Allen 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 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. The best part for me was taking home to my place an extraordinarily fabulously beautiful young redhead, an Iconoclast 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 loved speed 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.


"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."


Who would have guessed? Nobody but Helen Sinsabaugh, Caesar Hernandez, Al Brown, and George Demos, to a number, all high school teachers during my years at Redondo Union High School. Conservative as they appeared on the surface and may have been in real life, each in their own way independently and together pretty much figured rather than let me slip through the cracks, agreed if I couldn't learn traditionally, then I would learn non-traditionally. Between the four and unknown to me, after meeting with my previously mentioned Merchant Marine friend and learning of his close association with several of the up-and-coming Beat poets, and with me thinking I was doing it all on my own, is how "Howl" and Allen Ginsburg were greased and slipped into the picture.[11]


OF COBRAS, SCARABS, MASERATIS, AND ZEN



Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where
we differ is that we place a fog, a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience
and then make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself.


(PLEASE CLICK)



ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT IN A NUTSHELL


30 MINUTES TO ENLIGHTENMENT


RIDING THE CAB FORWARDS


CODE OF ETHICS FOR SPIRITUAL GUIDES


SPIRITUAL GUIDES: PASS OR FAIL?


FALSE GURU TEST



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HERE FOR
ENLIGHTENMENT

ON THE RAZOR'S
EDGE



E-MAIL
THE WANDERLING

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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.



FLAPPING MOUTH BLOG





















FOOTNOTE [1]



PULLMAN CAR 194 ON THE LEFT, CAR 199 ON THE RIGHT, 196 CENTER
(photo from Chris Baird Collection)

The events found in the paragraph this footnote is referenced to has also been presented by me in the same manner and same form in a number of my works. What I have not included in the above account or have not revealed previously is a part of the crash event that circulates around the somewhat mysterious tribal spiritual elder my uncle arranged for me to be watched by until he, my uncle, could catch up with me. As you may recall, after the wreck, because the adult or adults I was traveling with had been hospitalized, I was left without adult supervision. I write about sitting in the waiting room late at night in some train station out in the middle of Arizona with the tribal spiritual elder waiting for my uncle to come get me.

What I don't write about is that I recognized the spiritual elder the moment he walked into the hospital waiting area looking for me as found in the following quote:


"Mid-evening on the night of the-unknown-to-anybody at the time up-coming crash I had gone to bed in the bunk in my compartment and as far as I knew had fallen fast asleep. Sometime during that period between the time I fell asleep and the crash occurred I found myself neither asleep nor in my bunk but outside of the train standing barefoot on the desert floor in the middle of the night in my PJs some distance off from a set of railroad tracks, my hand being held by an elderly Native American man."


THE SPIRITUAL ELDER AND THE SANTA FE CHIEF


Years later my uncle told me about me sitting in the train station in Arizona the night before the above events, on my very first night with the tribal spiritual elder waiting for my uncle to arrive. A lot of people seemed concerned with me traveling with an Indian, that is, except for an older man who seemed concerned that I might be bored.

He came over and sat next to me and asked if my dad was in the war. I told him no that he worked in the shipyards. Opening his suitcase he asked if I liked comic books and as I nodded yes he pulled out a comic called Blue Bolt. Before he handed it to me he began thumbing through the pages as though he was looking for something all the while telling me he had a son in the war and that his son was a highly decorated fighter pilot. He folded open the comic book to one of the pages and pointed to a story about a group of American pilots that shot down 77 German planes in one outing. Then he told me, going over the story page by page and reading certain things and pointing to others, that his son was one of the pilots. With that, my uncle told me I took the book from the man's hands completely fascinated, so much so I read the story over and over without stopping or setting it down. The man, seeing how much I appreciated the comic and the story, said I could have it. After that my uncle said I continued to read it again and again all the way back to California and months afterwards. The story that so fascinated me in the Blue Bolt comic was true, of which the following is found about the story in the source so cited:


"On Sunday, April 18, 1943 the U.S. Army Air Force's 57th Fighter Group stationed at El Djem, Tunisia in North Africa, on a routine mission over Cape Bon had 46 P-40 Warhawks in the air along with 18 British Spitfires flying top cover. Low on fuel and basically returning to base they came across a 100 plane flotilla of German JU-52 troop transport planes flying just above sea level over the Mediterranean, escorted by 50 Messerschmitt fighters. Catching the Germans completely off guard, while the Spitfires drew off the Messerschmitts and kept them busy, the P-40s split into pairs diving on the enemy planes tearing the transports to shreds, with an overall kill count of 77 enemy aircraft destroyed."(source)



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FOOTNOTE [2]


Interestingly enough, at the exact same time I was attending Pier Avenue School a young boy a grade or two above me by the name of C. Scott Littleton was attending the school as well. Although I have no reason to believe we met or new each other in those days, in our adult years he became sort of an internet nemesis of mine, albeit a friendly one, because of what he considered differing views on a subject close to his heart, namely what has become known as the "Battle of Los Angeles," or what I sometimes call "The UFO Over L.A." The following is from the C. Scott Littleton link above:


"Littleton and I lived in the same general area on and off at the sametime, with both having gone to Pier Avenue School in Hermosa Beach as well as attending the same high school and community college and being in the Army, albeit with me following several footsteps behind most of the way because of our age differences. We are the only two 'eyewitnesses' of any note that have come forward with strong narratives of the event. His reports come from his fully unobstructed broadside view along the coast from his perch along the Strand in Hermosa Beach and my underside and end view of the object as it turned inland and crossed directly above my house in Redondo Beach at a nearly dirt-dragging low altitude."


Littleton and I are the only two eyewitnesses of any note that have come forward with strong narratives of 1942 UFO Over Los Angeles event. His reports come from his fully unobstructed broadside view along the coast from his perch along the Strand in Hermosa Beach and my underside and end view of the object as it turned inland and crossed directly above my house in Redondo Beach at a nearly dirt-dragging low altitude.

Even though nearly all of his works on the subject incorporate comments of my eyewitness experience of the event and vice versa such as the Thursday, December 07, 2006 in UFO CHRONICLES under the title "EXCLUSIVE: THE BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES - Part II" and appearing on and off since then basically in the same format, the last being, again in UFO CHRONICLES, dated March 01, 2015 under the title "Eyewitness Account of The Battle of Los Angeles (Pt 2) 73nd Anniversary." he seldom cites me, the Wanderling, personally as the source.



I do bend somewhat and give Littleton credit in one major case however, because in his officially published hardback book 2500 STRAND, in the footnote section "Notes to Chapter Four #42" used to substantiate what he has presented relative to the footnote, he writes the following, referring to me as an "eyewitness, who lived in Redondo Beach" saying, and I quote, that I:


"(R)ecall that it descended as it passed slowly over his family home. His father at first thought it was coming in for a landing, perhaps at the nearby Lomita airstrip, and he and several neighbors jumped into a car and tried to follow the object. But it soon regained altitude and passed over the hills to the south. He also claims that the 'stern' of the craft was rectangular, with rounded edges, and very thick."


Of course, it is relatively easy to go to my page THE BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES: 1942 UFO and cull out almost word by word what I have written and what shows up in his quote. In the same footnote section in his book a few footnotes down he also brings up San Clemente Island, repeating what is an exclusive with me, again without reference to me or mentioning me by name.


It sould be brought to the attention of the reader that Littleton was, as well, a prime mover in the advancement of Carlos Castaneda in his series of books on the shaman-sorcerer Don Juan Matus --- as was my uncle that I write about in this paper --- my uncle being the Informant mentioned in most of the Castaneda books. Littleton was a graduate student in anthropology at UCLA in the 1960s when Castaneda transfered into the same department as an undergraduate from Los Angeles City College. The two of them met through an introduction by one of Littletons's professors who was impressed with some of the work Castaneda was doing.



WORLD WAR II UFO SCARE ON L.A.
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Footnote [3]

Some people have asked just who was the marine? After all I was just a kid and he was a grown man. Was he a friend of the family, a relative, somebody I knew from the past? The answer is he was none of those things. I basically just met him out of nowhere --- fate as some might say. The eventual meeting between the two of us started after Texas Jim Lewis and his Lone Star Cowboys began their stint at the ballroom in Redondo.

Like I've said, it wasn't long before the flower shop couple discovered it could be quite lucrative to sell corsages and boutonnieres to couples attending the dances, so they put me to work circulating through the crowd selling flowers --- sometimes being on the floor as late as midnight. During that period of my life there was a female vocalist that sang with a couple of the headliners that, even though I was a kid, I had become deeply smitten with. I don't recall her name, however, as I remember her she looked a lot like a cowgirl version of a popular movie star of the time named Veronica Lake, with long platinum blonde hair, ruby-red lips, and dressed in the finest female western singer regalia --- white cowboy boots, above the knee white satin skirts, fringed all the way around with hundreds of little strings, topped with white satin western-style blouses with snap buttons, big embroidered red roses and arrow-ended pockets.

Whenever she came on stage to do one of her numbers and I was selling flowers I would go sit on the edge of the stage and just stare at her. Somehow, and I do not remember how, we began talking to each other and over time I told her my tale of woe. In any case, her friend was the marine. Between sets and after the show the three of us would go down to the Wagon Wheel Cafe, basically just below the dancehall, sit in one of the booths, get something to eat, drink coffee or cokes, and talk until they closed the place.

One day I decided to run away. I gathered up what few things I had and went down to the waterfront and got in the shotgun side of the marine's taxi and never left his side to speak of until my grandmother came and got me.

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 or heard from either of them again after my grandmother took me back with her the day she found me. Not having gone away with the singer and the marine still tugs at my heart even to this day and is still one of the biggest disappointments of my life. How it would have turned out is a question that remains unanswered.


ENTER PBYs AND THE BLACK CATS

One night I was in the Wagon Wheel Cafe with the ex-marine and the singer when a man stepped up to our booth telling the ex-marine that some months before he had been a fare of his, having been taken to Torrance Memorial Hospital to visit a former Navy friend who had been seriously hurt in an auto accident. He said since then he had been contacted by an anonymous source saying the taxi driver had found something he had left in the cab that may have been of some value to him.

The man, apparently without realizing it, had left an envelope in the ex-marines taxi, an envelope that contained a large number of photographs of the man and a bunch of Navy guys in the South Pacific during World War II. By the time the ex-marine discovered the envelope then tried to locate the man's friend in the hospital, the friend had already been released. Over a period of weeks, since the man never came back for the envelope, using his connections and information about unit numbers and such on the photos the ex-marine was able to track him down, leaving a message that he had the photographs. The man, thinking he had left them with his buddy in the hospital, showed up at the Wagon Wheel Cafe to pick them up.




The man sat down at the table and went through the photos one by one, reminiscing about every one, something I found absolutely fascinating. It seems during the war he was a Navy pilot flying PBYs for a then clandestine outfit called the Black Cats. I practically fell off the booth seats, having my breath taken away as he told story-after-story how he flew stealth-like PBYs against Japanese ships and Zeros in the dead of night in almost invisible, all-painted-flatblack planes. They would swoop in quietly, flying just above the surface of the water at no more than mast height, and before the Japanese even knew what hit them, leaving nothing but a path of destruction and sinking ships behind. Japanese fighter pilots couldn't see them from above nor could they get underneath them. So too, they could fly so slow and low if need be that the Japanese fighters would overshoot them trying to come in from behind. Plus the fighter pilots didn't like having to be so low to the water during a night time attack. Most of the time the Black Cats, having nine lives, got away.



THE LADY ON THE DOCK
(please click image)

THE LADY ON THE DOCK, THE PBY, BLACK CATS AND HIGH BARBAREE


AND NOW THIS:

A few people have emailed asking me if the female vocalist could have been Betsy Gay. What I have been able to determine from the information and background material I have seen so far, including photographs and various biographies, it does not seem so. For some reason, from what I remember about the female vocalist, Betsy Gay just doesn't fit the bill --- plus the timing isn't right. It has been reported that sometime in 1946 Besty Gay left the Los Angeles music scene to tour the east coast. Texas Jim ran a contest to find a female vocalist to replace her. Who that replacement was I have not been able to find out. When Betsy was asked who replaced her she wasn't quite sure, but thought it might have been Becky Barfield. As for the information I have been able to garner on Barfield, like that of Betsy Gay, she does not seem to fit the bill either.



COUNTRY SINGER CINDY WALKER CIRCA 1946

Personally, for the record, although many say it would be a stretch, I still have a tendency to lean toward Cindy Walker, a country-western singer and song writer of some repute. She came to Los Angeles with her parents from Texas in 1940 at the age of 22 not returning until 1954. 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.(see)



CINDY, A BOY'S LOVE AS I REMEMBER HER

AND NOW THIS, THIS:

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.

Redondo Beach was big to my family, especially in the early years as it was there my mother and father met, where my brothers and I were raised initially, and where I started school. Going to the beach was a big part of what we did. One day, as Davis told it and collaborated by my grandmother in separate instances, I had wandered off and Davis, doing one of her lesser things, found 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 we stopped showing up.

With the start of World War II it was into the Marines then picking up where she left off with Redondo not long after her discharge. It was then she rediscovered me, bumping into me as a little boy selling corsages and boutonnieres to couples attending the dances thrown by Texas Jim Lewis and his Lone Star Cowboys late into the night.


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


BOB DRAKE AT THE WHEEL OF MAX BALCHOWSKY'S #70 OLD YELLER II
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Footnote [4]



The reason I think there is a possibility Stagecoach was a private screening is because it had been released originally in 1939 and to my knowledge no rerelease had occurred since it originally came out. Another reason I think it may have been a private screening is because my stepmother, who had high up connections in any number of areas, and most certainly so the movie industry, had arranged, and of which I remember well as being so, a private screening just for me to see the Howard Hughes 1930 black-and-white Zeppelin movie titled Hells Angels.(see)

Returning back to the the main text above, in a couple of paragraphs you will come to a paragraph mentioning that on the Fourth of July weekend of 1947 my uncle and I were camping out over night on the desert floor near Fort Sumner, New Mexico, on our way to see Billy the Kid's gravesite. Us going to the Kid's gravesite came up through a series of conversations over a period of time during a road trip that summer, primarily connected through discussions surrounding the 1862 forced relocation of the Navajo and Apaches called The Long Walk that ended at a place called Bosque Redondo. As serious as the subject matter for those discussions may have been, the existence of Billy the Kid came into my life in a much more frivolous fashion --- by seeing the previously mentioned 1946 release of the Howard Hughes production of the movie The Outlaw. After seeing the movie and my uncle believing it was a travesty of history he obtained and gave me with instructions to read, which I did, a small book with the cover title of Billy the Kid, The Outlaw (Atomic Books, 1946) that was actually garnered from a much larger book titled Authentic Story of Billy the Kid by sheriff Pat Garrett, the man credited with shooting Billy.



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FULL LENGTH MOVIE: THE OUTLAW (1943)

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FOOTNOTE [5]



photo source David Heger

"Although I had been known from very early age 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 Captain Midnight's glider chute on more than one occasion, my very, very first serious attempt to build a functional airplane-like craft that would carry me in flight was based almost exclusively on a glider I saw as a young boy in the 1947 black and white movie Tarzan and the Huntress."(source)


The idea of manned-flight didn't end for me the day I crashed my glider into the neighbor's house across the street. Matter of fact, as a grown man, after hearing of a powerful 'devil wind' that blows downslope in the High Sierras given the name 'Washoe Zephyr' by Mark Twain and others, wherein the wind was able to lift a full grown mule off of 7900 foot high Mount Davidson --- up and behind Virginia City, Nevada --- and carry it 5 miles across the valley setting it down unhurt, I had to see it. Experiencing the might of the 'devil wind' at it's full force was the inspiration my second attempt at manned-flight. See:


WASHOE ZEPHYR






















FOOTNOTE [6]


I didn't get to spend as much one-on-one time with my stepmother as I would have liked, but every once in awhile just the two of us would go on errands together where she would pick up little bags of money here and there and sometimes drop off little bags of money here and there. One day she did come to me and ask if I would like to ride up to Santa Barbara with her. I jumped at the chance. Not only could we spend the day together but Santa Barbara was the last place I had seen my mother alive before she died and I always wanted to go back.

When we arrived in Santa Barbara we went to visit a man she knew in a hospital. She said he was a longtime friend and was recuperating after having been in the army. I am not sure what the nature of the business with the man was, but I remember he was introduced as Johnny. Years later I found out "Johnny" was Johnny Roselli, and while it is true he had been in the army, having gone in on December 4, 1942 at age 37, he only served until he was arrested on federal charges March 19, 1943. On December 30, 1943 he was found guilty and sentenced to ten years in federal prison. On Aug. 13, 1947, after serving roughly three and a half years Roselli was paroled. When my stepmother and I saw him in the hospital he may have been recuperating, but not from the army, but prison. More on Johnny Roselli and how he eventually came to play a much bigger role in my life, more than once, shows up in Footnote [7].


When my stepmother decided to take a two-year sojourn to Mexico and South America, unbeknownst to the foster couple I was sent to live with, she arranged for me to get a part-time job after school and on the weekends working in the kitchen and food service area of a card club in Gardena, the same town I lived in with the foster couple. Not knowing how receptive the couple would be with me working at a card club I told them I was doing stage crew at school and it would require a lot of odd hours for plays, rehearses, and building and taking down sets. To prove it I brought home a whole lot of paperwork that needed to be signed and they let it go at that.

One Saturday late in the afternoon or early evening several months after I started working there I was in the back of the club when four or five rough looking suit types, rather than coming in the front, came through the back entrance headed toward the casino offices. As I looked up one of the men said, "What are you lookin' at fuckface?" I diverted my eyes downward, but as soon as I did he stopped the group and came over to me tipping my head up to get a closer look, all the while squeezing my jaw and chin really tight. Another of the men, seeing how tight I was being squeezed, put his arm between the two of us, stretching the distance between the man and me causing the man to loosen his grip. In a much nicer, softer tone the other man said, "Hey kid, remember me?" And sure enough I did. Matter of fact, after looking at the men more closely I recognized two or three of them. By then the owner was there with a couple of other guys wanting to know what was going on.

It seems the heavyweights were coming in the backdoor to catch the owner off guard, possibly even planning on using the art of friendly persuasion inflicted through some sort of bodily harm. The interlude with me stopped them just long enough for the owner to confront them with witnesses. Whatever the problem was it was all diffused and before anything could happen, nothing happened --- or at least delayed to another day. Nobody was shot anyway.

It was either during one of the aforementioned times my stepmother was picking up little bags of money here and there or dropping off little bags of money here and there that I saw or came across two or three of the men in the group that came into the Normandie Club that evening --- and why or how a couple of the men recognized me. I was a great deal younger than 12 years old when the above events happened, so for my stepmother to have a young boy with her under such circumstances was so atypical that I was easily remembered. Those types of dealings were done in an all adult world, kids just didn't exist. If a kid did exist at that level it had to be for a special reason. In my case if it was to diffuse the eventuality of a potential toxic situation or being groomed for later participation in similar type activities I didn't know nor never learned. In later years, now for example, I do have a tendency to lean toward the groomed for later participation in similar type activities aspect of it all. Below is a quote from interactions I participated in in later years as found at the source so cited, that pretty much substantiates that view:


"My stepmother and I had a long and special relationship from the very beginning, she having from very early on having taken me under her wing and into her confidence. Until everything she had came crashing down and she lost everything, I think she was grooming me for a very special high position in whatever she did, as she always made it a point for people to know me and who I was, and that I was a person, even though a kid, was someone that could be trusted. When she said that the slot machines should be dealt with on the sly I knew exactly what she meant --- and she knew I knew."

JOHNNY ROSELLI: SLOT MACHINES, AND THE FBI


THE NORMANDIE CLUB


JOHNNY ROSELLI: SLOT MACHINES, AND THE FBI

















FOOTNOTE [7]


On the day my older brother and cousin didn't return, and by the time my uncle discovered they were actually gone and not off on the ranch somewhere, he received a reverse-charge phone call from my cousin. He told my uncle he and my brother were 500 miles away being held by a railroad bull in a switch-tower in the Sacramento yards.

In that there were threats by the bull of potential bodily harm befalling the boys plus a wisp of extortion in the air, almost immediately my stepmother made arrangements to fly my uncle to Sacramento in a private plane to ensure their overall well being and get them home as quick as possible. In the process I went along. At the sametime, concerned with the level of the threats, she called Johnny Roselli, the friend she knew that we went to see in Santa Barbara, who had a reputation for being versed in the art of persuasion, to see if he could work his magic with local Sacramento associates to ensure the boys would be safe. Apparently in exchange for his assist he requested a person of some importance to him be flown from Reno, just over the mountains from Sacramento, to Las Vegas with a minimum amount knowledge to outsiders on our return trip. A request my stepmother was more than happy to agree to.

There has been some speculation as to who the mysterious woman was that had the need to be transported covertly and without fanfare under the cover of darkness from Reno to Vegas. To me, even though I was personally never able to see her clearly she carried a certain ambience about her that reeked of being a movie star. In those days, since I was still a kid, except for possibly western movie star Dale Evans --- and maybe Veronica Lake for reasons unknown --- my knowledge of female movie stars ran kind of thin. However, while I may not have known female movie stars per se' I did know comic book characters, and one of the ones I remembered was Lana Lang, the female lead in Superboy comics and the protagonist to Lois Lane in Superman comics.(see)

Why is it important? Because I can still remember overhearing the response my uncle gave the pilot when the pilot asked him who the mysterious all wrapped up in dark clothes and sunglasses in the middle of the night woman was. He told the pilot she looked like a Hollywood movie star of the era by the name of June Lang. Now I didn't know who June Lang was, but I knew who Lana Lang was, so putting the two together was enough for me to remember his answer right into adulthood.

First of all, the whole June Lang thing rests on the accuracy of my uncle's perception regarding any resemblances he may garnererd between the woman being transported and June Lang herself. Neither I nor the pilot ever saw the woman other than being basically covered tip to toe, and then only in the middle of the night out in the darkend windswept desert or possibly a little more from the glow of the muted lights of the cockpit dials. My uncle though, was the one that arranged for the actual transportation to occur, so somewhere in Reno when all of that was being set up he may have seen the woman up close and more clearly, maybe even introduced.

The thing is, looking like June Lang and being June Lang are two different things. So said, I have no proof one way or the other who the mysterious woman was except overhearing my uncle's response. He may have been under a gag order not to reveal who she was, so he could have just shrugged his shoulders when asked. Instead, out of respect to the pilot he gave a verbal answer, albeit ambiguous, saying she 'looked like' June Lang --- although he could have easily said Rochelle Hudson --- a movie actress and spy against the Japanese during World War II he DID know. By putting together the dots since then there is some circumstantial evidence that leans in the direction of his reply possibly being on target, however weak in solid proof it may seem.

Years later in my initial research I thought if the woman was Lang she may have been in Reno for a quickie divorce. In 1944 she married an Army lieutenant using her real name Winifred June Vlasek and it was weeks before it was discovered by the press. So I thought there was a chance she may have been in Reno incognito. However, although she did divorce the lieutenant eventually, it wasn't until several years after the events we are talking about here.

Then there is the Johnny Roselli connection. If you remember my stepmother contacted Roselli to put muscle on the railroad bull to ensure neither my brother or cousin was harmed in any way. As it happened Roselli had been married to Lang. They were married in April 1939 and divorced in March 1943. On December 4, 1942, just three days short of one full year following the attack on Pearl Harbor --- and while still married to Lang --- at age 37, for reasons not clear, Roselli either joined or was inducted into the U.S. Army. On March 18, 1943, while still serving in the Army, he was arrested on federal labor racketeering charges. The trial began on October 5, 1943 and on December 22, 1943 he was found guilty of conspiracy of extortion against the motion picture industry. Roselli received a prison term of 10 years and a $10,000 fine. After serving roughly three and a half years he was paroled.

Almost down to the day of his arrest he was divorced from Lang and almost down to the day of the start of his sentencing Lang remarried. It was not long after Roselli's release from prison than all this Reno stuff went down. It could be on my stepmother's request Roselli decided to intervene personally, so he may have gone to Sacramento OR he may just happened to have been in Reno in some sort of secret post divorce rendezvous with Lang. In that the mob often had ties to unions in those days Roselli may have requested the cab forward engineer to come forward and ask my uncle for the person to be flown to Las Vegas on the QT, totally leaving Roselli out of the picture or any with connection to the mysterious traveler.



















FOOTNOTE [8]


-------
1949 KEY-O-MATIC CODE-O-GRAPH


I have really not been able to pinpoint which of the two summers, 1949 or 1950, that I met Franklin Merrell-Wolff at his compound in the Sierras. I can easily remember two important things that happened during those summers, however I am not able to tie one or the other or both of those events back to the specific summer he and I met.

The first of those events circulates around the Captain Midnight radio show. Even though the radio broadcasts didn't come in clearly or not at all in the part of the Sierras we camped, I still had my 1949 Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph with me, the one that to operate required a little key. Of course, almost immediately upon arrival and setting up the camp the key was lost, in turn requiring me to sift through tons of dirt to find. My uncle made a sifter-box using one of those net-type bags oranges or onions sometimes come in, then marked off a bunch of four-foot square plots like some archaeology site. After several days, while the other kids and my brothers were off playing, swimming, fishing or hiking, sifting in the hot sun I collected quite a number of arrowheads, a couple of which were made from obsidian, their edges still just as sharp as the day they were hewn out of the volcanic glass they came from.


Next thing I knew everybody had a sifter box searching for arrowheads and in the process the Code-O-Graph key was eventually found. As for Code-O-Graphs themselves, let alone in having initially lost the key to the 1949 version wasn't bad enough --- of which without, virtually rendered it useless --- I had long been upset over having lost my most important childhood decoder, the Photo-Matic that I had carried with me faithfully throughout most of my life. Little did I know the 1949 version as well as all the other Code-O-Graphs in the series would fade away while the lost Photo-Matic would return in an earthshaking role of it's own in my future.(see)

As it was, at the end of the year 1949 the Captain Midnight radio program ended their decades long run and went off the air rendering Code-O-Graphs basically useless. But, in that I wasn't able to receive the program anyway and it wasn't on the next summer, being on or not really didn't help narrowing down either summer relative to Merrell-Wolff. I must say though, looking back on it now, it must have been the first summer that I had the Code-O-Graph with me and lost the key because having it the second summer after the program was cancelled doesn't make a whole lot of sense in that there would not have been any Secret Squadron messages to decipher no matter where I was.


CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT: THE CODE-O-GRAPHS


The second event that may help determining which of the two summers was the summer I met Merrell-Wolff is that during one of the summers my uncle made it possible for me to see the planet Venus in the sky well into daylight hours. Apparently he had tracked it since sunrise and knew where to look. He had me lay down on the ground in a tall strand of pine trees that blocked everything in a 360 degree circle around me except the open blue sky directly above. There in the sky right above me in the middle of the day was Venus.(see)


At the time all of the above was going on I was around 11 or 12 years old. Twenty years later my uncle and I were on one of our infamous road trips, albeit one much later in life than the ones I typically write about when he and I were together and I was a kid. This road trip came about because my 65 year-old-plus father had been caught in a fire while on the job sometime around 1970 or so. He ended up with a collapsed lung and a good portion of his skin burned and most of his hair gone. Because his outlook was grim, I contacted my uncle who lived in Santa Fe. He inturn came to see him. As it was, my dad held on, although never fully recovering, dying of complications from the fire two years later.

After learning my father's health was OK considering his age and what had happened to him --- as well as spending several days together talking over old times --- my uncle decided to head back home. In that he had not been on the west coast for many, many years, he decided to first visit a long time friend who lived in the Los Angeles area, the cowboy-western author Louis L'Amour then go north along the eastern slopes of the High Sierras and try to make contact with another old friend Franklin Merrell-Wolff --- and, like I write in a couple of places in my stuff on the internet (of which you can click through to using the links provided below) I went along. By accessing the second of the two links the following can be found:


"Prior to the trip the last time I had seen my uncle was in Taos a couple of years before. Since that time the events I describe in Dark Luminosity had transpired and because of that he wanted to see what I called my High Mountain Zendo plus catch up, if possible, with an old friend he had introduced me to when I was a young boy, Frankling Merrell-Wolff --- as told in The Tree --- hence our trip to the High Sierras. I continued to tag along on his return trip home to Santa Fe."


There is sort of an implication by inference that, since I was traveling with my uncle I joined him during his visit to see Merrell-Wolff, --- meaning I would have crossed paths with Merrill-Wolff in 1970 as well. However, such was not the case. Even though I was traveling with my uncle I had opted out going to Merrill-Wolff's. Instead I requested he leave me off near Big Pine and from there I went to the White Mountains somewhat east of Merrell-Wolff's to seek solitude at the 10,000 foot level among the ancient bristlecone pines and meditate at the base of the 48 century old Methuselah Tree just for the heck of it.


During the same 1970 road trip my uncle revealed something that happened to him that he never told me before.

In 1943, less than a year into World War II, my uncle, who you know by now was so predominant in my early childhood and upbringing --- but, unlike most of the above, before I came on the scene --- inadvertently stumbled across some rather alarming Axis-induced fifth column like activities in the desert southwest, more specifically that German U-boats were in the Sea of Cortez, and was shot point blank by foreign operatives and left to die because of it.

He was biosearching by himself as he usually did only this time in the then largely uninhabited mountainous and desert-like terrain in the central section of New Mexico between the New Mexico and Arizona border on the west and the north-to-south flowing Rio Grande on the east.

In the process of his biosearching he came across two men, and unusually so, both Asian. One of men was flat on his back all but unconscious and visibly quite ill after apparently having been bitten by a rattlesnake with the bite being left untreated. My uncle, after using the healing properties of indigenous plants he gathered up, soon found the man up and around. One of the men who had a rudimentary use of English told my uncle they were Japanese, were testing soil samples for radioactivity, and had been left off in Mexico by a submarine. By then my uncle was wanting to beat a hasty retreat but before he could one of the men shot him. They took his truck and although they left him to bleed out he survived. In 1985 a book titled The Japanese Secret War authored by Robert K. Wilcox was published. In the book, completely independent of anything my uncle told me, Wilcox, in his own research, writes about the two Japanese spies doing soil testing in Arizona and New Mexico and the U-boat they arrived in, of which I in turn write about as found in the source so cited:


"Wilcox's book, that for the first time brought to the public's attention Japanese agents having been in the desert southwest during World War II specifically tasked with testing soil samples for radiation, was published in 1985. It was in 1970, fifteen years before Wilcox's book was published that my uncle told me about his 1943 encounter with Japanese spies soil testing deep into state of New Mexico and the fact that according to their own testimony, they had initially been brought to Mexico via German U-boat from Europe."


THE JAPANESE SECRET WAR



For more of uncle's adventures and he and my trips together see:

  1. VIKINGS OF THE DESERT SOUTHWEST

  2. FATE OF THE SANTA FE #3774

  3. KINGMAN UFO 1953

    SEE ALSO:

  4. BUDDHISM IN AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS

  5. SKIPPING ROCKS WITH EINSTEIN

  6. THE ROSWELL RAY GUN


















Footnote [9]


In the above main text, speaking of the woman of the foster couple, Aunt Pauline, I have presented the following:


"Even though when I was living with her I was not yet into my teens or just barely, she was always taking me into Los Angeles, mostly to the Wilshire Ebell Theater, to hear Goddard lectures. For my first couple of years of high school, long after I was no longer staying with her, but instead living with my grandmother, and even though it was clear she hated me, she used to come by and take me to the lectures."


During the summer before high school, right after I heard my stepmother had returned from South America, I ran away from the home of Aunt Pauline ending up at my stepmother's ranch totally unannounced. In that she and my father had only just divorced, she wasn't sure if he would be totally receptive to the idea of me being there. Unable to reach him she contacted my dad's brother, my uncle, who said he was willing to take me until things could be worked out. In that my uncle lived in New Mexico and I was on my stepmother's ranch in the high desert of California and she felt time was at an essence, she arranged for me to be flown to Santa Fe. She had a pilot she knew fly into a close-by one-time, albeit long abandoned military airfield called Victory Field and pick me up. The pilot, a former P-47 Thunderbolt jockey was flying a two seat North American AT-6. It was the first time I had ever been off the ground and into the air in any kind of a World War II aircraft, so for me the trip to my uncle's was not only highly memorable, it was as well white-knuckle exciting.

In the quote above the last paragraph I write that it was clear that she, Aunt Pauline, hated me. That opinion was arrived at quite expeditiously through her own words and actions during an earlier time in my life. The following, as found in The Code Maker, The Zen Maker, wherein I had ran away from home hoping to stay with my stepmother and she, not sure if that was a viable option, began to seek out possible solutions:


"Although impressed that I ran away just to be with her she thought it best to get in touch with my dad and see what she should do next. Unwilling to talk with my grandmother she called the woman of the foster couple I ran away from, who she knew and was friends with, hoping to find out if I should be returned to them or to locate my father, telling the woman that I was in good care and everything was OK. The woman of the couple, Aunt Pauline, told my stepmother to 'keep the fucking little asshole, I don't give a shit what happens to him.' Then she added, 'Don't forget his prick of a little brother, either.'" (source)


Ironically enough, the whole running away thing pulled off semi-successful because of a part time job I did after school that my stepmother put into place before going to Mexico and South America. The job was at a place not far from Pauline's called the Normandie Club, a nearly 24 hour a day around the clock card-room poker club. My stepmother knew the owner and through that connection I got the job. Money earned there helped finance my bus ticket, et al, needed for my escape.

People who read my works, especially so those who go through the effort to compare what I have written between articles, sometimes question, most notably Castaneda-ophiles, IF Aunt Pauline felt the way she did, most prominently so as found in the second quote, why would she take me with her to the lectures? The lectures, since they are as seen by me as being Margaret Runyan related, the Castaneda folk, always looking for ways to discredit what I have written about Carlos Castaneda, don't like the way I actually interviewed Margaret Runyan and in the process, along with my personal interview with Clement Meighan, and between the two, able to garner support for what I have presented related to Castaneda, think it is odd that she, Aunt Pauline, would take me to the lectures --- hating me as she did.

The Castaneda folk, tasting the potential blood of inconsistencies in my work because of the two seemingly opposing views jump on it, hoping in an effort to undermine what I have presented re Castaneda. The thing is, and I have written it several times in relation to Pauline, she was in love with my father.

During the years my dad and stepmother were married he hadn't worked. When he returned from South America and he and my stepmother divorced he had to get his business restarted and off the ground. In doing so he set aside a small office space in the house where I lived with my grandmother. Pauline knew that, so she used the excuse of taking me to lectures to make or keep a continued contact going with my father. It worked out all well and good for her for a short time, that is until she came over one day and caught a long legged, scantily clad 20 year old college girl named Peggy, who lived not far up the street, scurrying out of the back window of the little room in the rear of the house my dad used for an office, leaving a number of important pieces of clothing left behind and scattered around.



THE BEST OF
CARLOS CASTANEDA

<<< PREV ---- LIST ---- NEXT >>>

















Footnote [10]


The quote below from the main text was in regards to a 1953 meeting my uncle wanted me to participate in.

"When I asked my dad if I could go he blew his stack. He got on the phone and started yelling at my uncle that he was filling my mind with all kinds of 'weird and useless shit' and to stay away from me and keep his 'cock-and-bull stories' to himself. Needless to say that was the end of it and I didn't get to go. Instead, my dad sent me to my ex-stepmother's ranch for the summer and told the hard drinking every other word was a cuss word ranch foreman Leo, who had been at one time, a World War II Pacific Fleet Navy boxing champion, to not let me 'wander off.'"


I was not yet in my mid teens in those days and not only did my dad end the two of us getting together then, it was not until I reached young adulthood that my uncle and I met again in the flesh.

That meeting occurred in 1968 and revolved around a request by my uncle to meet him half way between where he lived in Santa Fe and I lived in California. After catching up for most of the day, before we parted he gave me a small taped up cardboard box and told me to deliver it to a man in Laguna Beach. Which I did. That man turned out to be Dr. Timothy Leary, major guru of LSD and psychedelic fame. That 1968 meeting between my uncle and I reopened the doors for the two of us to see each other on a regular basis as adults after years of not seeing each other. For more on that specific meeting, Timothy Leary, and its outcome please see:


BHAGAVAN DAS


KERMIT MICHAEL RIGGS


Although the 1968 meeting was the turning point for my uncle and I to reunite after years of not seeing each other, and the previously mentioned 1970s meeting renewed and cemented our bonds as two equal adults, it was really a meeting that occurred in the summer of 1971 that changed the course between us, redirecting us as adults back into the same type of adventures as when I was in my youth. Please see:


BUDDHISM IN AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS





















FOOTNOTE [11]


Long before high school, while I was still in grade school, probably the fourth grade or so, I read an adult-level book called The Lady and the Tigers written by a woman by the name of Olga Greenlaw who had been with the Flying Tigers from day one. In the book she wrote something about one of the pilots that I as a not yet 10 year old boy never forgot


"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. Some image.




So said, when I was in high school, except possibly for a little extra effort on my part in both art and journalism, 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 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.



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, 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 a story that plays heavily as an analogy about time in what I've written regarding time and the mysterious hermitage known as Shambhala, AKA Gyanganj, and Shangri-la, that is said to exist beyond time deep in the Himalayas following my own travels in the Himalayas. See:


SHAMBHALA, TIME, AND THE LANGOLIERS


In the text of The Langoliers King brings up Leiningen Versus the Ants, primarily 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 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 and see for yourself a mile wide swath of ants devouring everything in their path, and all before CGI, please click the image below:



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OLGA GREENLAW, AGE 31, HIAPHONG HARBOR

THE FLYING TIGERS
THE BOY IN THE MAN REMEMBERS THE LEGEND




















---------------


As a young boy, before I left for India, or taken to India as the case may be, one of my most prized personal possessions was a decoder badge called a Captain Midnight Photo-Matic Code-O-Graph as shown above, left. If it wasn't in one of my pockets it was in one of my hands, taking it with me everywhere I went. When I was leaving my in-those-days slowly disintegrating family to live with the couple, amongst the few things I gathered up, all of which had to be small, looking back in time from what I know now, it is without a doubt that I took the decoder badge with me to India. After returning from India and leaving the east coast to be with my grandmother in California the badge was blatantly missing.

One day, after being fostered out to the flower shop people, while sitting in the Wagon Wheel Cafe with the singer and the ex-marine I was making a few sketches like I often did. Amongst the sketches was a drawing I made earlier of my 1945 Magni-Matic Code-O-Graph decoder badge as shown above, right. When the singer saw the drawing she recognized the badge, saying her young nephew had one that he never used. Several days later when she brought it in it turned out not to be a Magni-Matic but the older Photo-Matic Code-O-Graph. After I showed her how it worked, making codes and all, she thought it would be fun if we, the two of us, using the badge, wrote secret messages to each other that only she and I knew how to decipher and what they said. We only had the one badge so when she wrote the message for me she had the badge. Then she would give both the badge and coded message to me, I would decode the message, write a response in code, then return both to her. The day I was taken by my grandmother she was in possession of the decoder and since I never saw her again I never had a chance to finish or read any secret messages we may have been working on.




Photo-Matic Code-O-Graphs played an ever larger continuing role throughout my life, from childhood right on into adulthood. That role grew exponentially after the decoder I say above that was 'blatantly missing' was found in a box at my grandmother on my father's side in Pennsylvania and returned to me and then in turn followed by my brother inadvertently sending it to me while I was in the Army. See:


RESTITCHING THE HOLE IN THE FABRIC OF SPACE-TIME

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


THE CODE MAKER, THE ZEN MAKER

SHANGRI-LA, SHAMBHALA, GYANGANJ, BUDDHISM AND ZEN


TIME TRAVEL: MEETING YOURSELF




































VIEW OF MID-AFTERNOON VENUS AS SEEN FROM CALIFORNIA

In an article by P.S. Watson titled Planets for 1949 found in "Popular Astronomy" Volume 57, Page 23, Watson wrote, referring to the northern hemisphere and more specifically the U.S. at 40 degrees latitude, that at the beginning the year 1949 Venus would be a morning star rising shortly before dawn, but would soon move towards the Sun to reappear as an evening star during the latter part of April and would remain an evening star for the rest of the year --- pretty much eliminating Venus being seen during the daylight hours during the summer of 1949. However, a year later in Volume 58 of "Popular Astronomy," Page 22, Planets for 1950, again by P.S. Watson, it is a different story. For Venus during the year 1950 Watson wrote:


"Venus will be an evening star for the first months of the year but will move towards the Sun to pass inferior conjunction on January 30. After this date it becomes a morning star remaining until the middle of November. Greatest brilliancy occurs on March 7 and greatest elongation on April 11. This will not be a favorable elongation, however, as the planet will not rise during most of this time until the beginning of morning twilight."


What can be extrapolated from the above quote is that after April 11th, going into the summer months of the year 1950 Venus would have been absolutely perfect for viewing during daylight hours if you knew where to look. However, it doesn't bring me any closer to which of the two summers I met Merrell-Wolff.

If I had to guess I would tend to suspect the first summer for having met Merrell-Wolff with the second summer being the summer my uncle and I went to see the bristlecone pines. I say so for two reasons. The first summer was probably the time for exploration being there for the first time. So too, the summer of 1949 we had the full backing of my father and stepmother, both financially and otherwise, with both of them even visiting our camp. By the next summer, the summer of 1950, they were gone to South America and our defacto family unit began to deteriorate as did the funding. I'm not even sure if we were in the Sierras the full summer even. I know both my younger brother and I were with a new foster couple by the end of 1950, most likely, but not necessarily so, being with the couple by the start of the school year in September as covered more thoroughly near the end of the main part of the text above.



When I was just a kid, and I mean just a kid as my mother was still alive, the grandfather of the girl next door who used to babysit me and my two brothers, gave me to use, of which I apparently kept, a radio premium offer he had obtained several years before called a Little Orphan Annie Miracle Compass Sun-Watch. I say I must of kept it as I specifically remember having it several years later. I even write having it when I was traveling with my uncle in the desert as a young boy saying that in a small side pouch I used to carry, I had all kinds of stuff like a stainless steel pocket knife with a fold-out fork and spoon, compass, and waterproof matches. Then I go on to say:


"Always in the pouch as well was one of my most prized possessions, a pocket-sized sun dial gizmo called a Little Orphan Annie Miracle Compass Sun-Watch."

Klondike Big Inch Land Company


When the time came around for me to spend the summers in the High Sierras, for as young as I was, I had become a fairly seasoned back country traveler be it in the desert or the mountains. Although a lot of the skills were cross-transferable no matter where you were in the back country, there is a huge geographical and weather related environmental differences. In the desert water is the upmost priority. The mountains, especially the High Sierras, not so much. Meaning of course, that my canteen pistol belt I wore or had close at hand wherever I went in the desert, sometimes with two canteens attached, wasn't so much of a priority. Plus we were foraging out from the main camp no more that two days and returning, so again what we carried with us was much less and with several of us we didn't have to duplicate things such as our own coffee pot for example. I was in the High Sierras that I had switched from an army surplus pistol belt to a more-or-less Indiana Jones shoulder bag, thus changing what I did or didn't carry with me.

By the time the summers in the High Sierras came about I no longer had or carried with me the Little Orphan Annie Miracle Compass Sun-Watch, but instead, carried an item of similar use, but overall not as good, called a Frank Buck Explorer's Sun Watch Compass, without ever really knowing what happened to the Orphan Annie one. I remember the Frank Buck one specifically because I used it the morning of the Venus sighting. Notice at the bottom of the advertisement, below right, there is a mail in form that says orders must be postmarked by September 1, 1948. That ad first appeared in the No. 83 issue of Captain Marvel in April 1948, and very few if any comic books before then. The dates indicating I most likely would not have had the Sun Watch by the summer of 1948, but 1949 most likely and 1950 for sure.



FRANK BUCK EXPLORER'S SUN WATCH

-----



ORPHAN ANNIE'S MIRACLE SUN WATCH
FOR INSTRUCTIONS SEE ABOVE LEFT


For those who may be so interested, the following, from Space.com, so sourced, provides several simple steps locating Venus during the day, basically saying as long as you know where to look, you can theoretically find Venus until it sets in the late afternoon. During prime viewing time, that is, when Venus is in position as the morning star:


  • Head out about 15 to 20 minutes before sunrise and find Venus. It'll be easy to spot.

  • Put a house, fence, tree or other object between you and the sunrise, and sight Venus next to, under or over the object, so that you know exactly where it is.

  • Go out again 5 to 10 minutes before sunrise and stand in the same spot, check your sighting. You might be surprised how far Venus has moved. Imagine where this movement will put Venus at sunrise.

  • Wait for sunrise, and keep your eye on Venus. As the sun rises, you'll still have Venus in your sights.(source)


VIEWING VENUS IN BROAD DAYLIGHT



















(please click image)

Although the long range aircraft equipped Imperial Japanese Navy submarine the I-17 had shelled the Ellwood oil fields near Goleta, 12 miles north of Santa Barbara in February 1942, one year later all of the I-type submarines that had been deployed to the Pacific west coast, including the I-17, had been, according to U.S. Naval Intelligence, recalled to contribute toward the increase in the Japanese naval efforts in the south Pacific and northern Pacific.

During the first two years or so of the war Stearns Wharf was closed to the public, falling under the control of the U.S. Navy. Near the end of those two years, with any apparent imminent threat or danger having seemingly dissipated, control was given over to the Coast Guard. Initially area fishing boats were curtailed due to concerns over sabotage and potential fifth column activity. When the boats did go out they were not allowed to stay overnight. By 1943 that restriction had been lifted and boats were able to stay out up to as long as five nights.

The wharf itself was not technically reopened to the general public until 1944. However, after control was relegated by the Navy to the Coast Guard, by 1943 the downgrading of importance for security slowly relaxed, with fishing boats, fishermen, locals and others accessing the pier on a regular basis basically without hindrance.

Naval Intelligence notwithstanding, and maybe acting too soon, it should be noted that at first unbeknownst to anyone, late in 1944 and out of nowhere, a lone I-type long range aircraft equipped Japanese submarine began operating in the western Pacific, sinking ships in an area 1000 miles west of Hawaii. To wit the following:


"October 29, 1944 on a parallel farther south in the eastern Pacific than San Diego and 1000 miles east of Hawaii the American Liberty ship John A. Johnson, on route from San Francisco and unescorted, was hit with two torpedoes launched from what was unknown to U.S. Naval authorities at the time, a Japanese submarine operating in eastern waters that late into the war. The Johnson broke into two pieces and the submarine responsible for the hits, identified by survivors as the I-12, surfaced, lacing the two sections with shells until both sank below the surface."


According to reports, two weeks later she showed up again, this time off Baja 100 miles WSW of Los Angeles. Two U.S. Navy vessels claim to have sunk her --- as have others since. Several times the I-12 was reported sunk only to show up again. Nobody knows for sure what happened to her. See:

THE I-12: JAPANESE GHOST SUBMARINE



















THE BEST OF THE MAUGHAM BIOGRAPHIES:


SPIRITUAL GUIDES, GURUS, AND TEACHERS INFLUENTIAL IN DARRELL'S LIFE OTHER THAN THE MAHARSHI:

















THE FIGHTING SULLIVANS




The following is a summary of the aftermath of the submarine attack on the Sullivan Brother's ship the USS Juneau (CL-52), as found at the source so cited:


On November 13, 1942, during The battle of Guadalcanal, the Juneau was struck by a Japanese torpedo and had to withdraw. Leaving the Solomon Island later that day, the Juneau was struck again. A torpedo from a Japanese submarine I-26 hit the ship which caused it to explode and sink.

Not thinking there could be any survivors from the Juneau, Captain Gilbert C. Hoover continued on with his wounded ships and signaled a US B-17 bomber on patrol to send notification to Allied headquarters for a search patrol. The B-17 bomber crew did not pass along this information until they landed later as to not break radio silence.

The B-17 Bombers report of possible surviviors and exact location was lost in other paperwork and did not get noticed for a few days.

A PBY Catalina search aircraft found ten survivors. According to the survivors, Francis, Joseph and Madison died instantly. Albert drowned the next day. George survived for a few days.The grief of losing his brothers was too much, he was calling for them trying to find them. Delirious he jumped in the water thinking he was going to swim to shore. Thoughts are that a shark probably got him.

REMEMBERING THE SULLIVAN BROTHERS


It should be noted, as mentioned above, that it was a torpedo from the Japanese submarine the I-26 that took out the Juneau. The I-26 was one of nine long range aircraft equipped Japanese submarines that had been dispatched to the Pacific West Coast at the very start of the war. Among those nine the I-17 shelled Santa Barbara, the I-19 torpedoed the SS Absaroka in the Catalina Channel off Point Fermin only to escape in the deep water trench off Redondo, while the I-25 carries all credibility of having been the mother ship that delivered the two-man midget sub that ended up bombed off Redondo.


USS JUNEAU (CL-52)


I-19 ATTACK ON THE SS ABSAROKA



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I hadn't even entered kindergarten before my mother began exhibiting signs of a developing a serious illness, eventually dying a year or so later from that illness. Leading up to her death my father began investigating the possibility of a full time care facility for her. One of the places he looked at was in Santa Barbara, California. The day he went he took me. While there we went down to pier and while at the pier I saw an airplane being lifted out of the water and placed on a flatbed trailer. To me the plane looked like what I would call a seaplane. On its wings and behind the wings on both sides of the fuselage were bright red circular Japanese insignias. Apparently the plane had been found floating upright and undamaged abandoned in the waters in and around the Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara by a couple of fishermen. How such a thing could happen wasn't clear.

The Office of the State Historian, State Records Center & Archives, under the banner of New Mexico History.org can possibly shed a light on it. In their records they have an article on the Japanese Internment Camp that existed during World War II in of all places, Lordsburg. On their internment camp page can be found the following:


"Perhaps the most remarkable incident during the stay of the Japanese came about through the Army's mistake of sending some prisoners of war captured overseas to the camp. Rumors went around that these were the men who had shelled Santa Barbara, California. They had their heads shaved in Japanese military fashion, and the internees hailed them as heroes, going so far as to run a Japanese flag over their barracks. It was a tense time at the camp."

Lordsburg Internment POW Camp


Lordsburg was an internment camp whose primary purpose, right or wrong, was to house Japanese American citizens or inhabitants during the war. It was never designed nor intended initially to house battle hardened military POWs, that's why I find it so interesting that two, and only two, actual war-duty veteran fighters were confined there.

It is my opinion that the captured Japanese POW's, who were not U.S. internees, but actual prisoners of war combatants spawned from overseas, were either from the midget sub that washed ashore after being bombed off Redondo Beach or instead, if not from the midget sub, the pilot and crew member of the Yokosuka E14Y Floatplane that was found floating abandoned in the channel islands off Santa Barbara. After all, after she was abandoned by her mothership, the floatplane was in the air rapidly gaining altitude headed due west putting as much distancing between herself the cutter as quickly as possible, then was seen turning north disappearing from sight. Turning north would put the plane right on top of the Channel Islands in short order. It was said to have a damaged or broken propeller (i.e., couldn't fly, possibly done so by the crew after running out of fuel) and since the plane was found abandoned, who abandoned it and what happened to those that did abandon it? See:


I-9 SINKING OF THE SS LEWIS CASS
WW II PLOT TO UNLEASH BUBONIC PLAGUE AGAINST LOS ANGELES

JAPANESE MIDGET SUBMARINES
A-BOMBS, MIDGET SUBS, AND THE CALIFORNIA CHANNEL ISLANDS
















TRINITY SITE

Below, for your own edification, is a list of the websites wherein I mention the 1945 U.S. New Mexico nuclear test at Trinity Site in some fashion, most commonly related back to my uncle and thus then, how atomic bombs and atomic bomb tests, German or American, circle back to what I have presented elsewhere in my works:



















Not long after my uncle started overseeing me under the auspices of my stepmother than he and I, often with my dad and brothers along, at least in the early days, began to go down to the giant Palley's Surplus Store off Alameda Street and Vernon in Los Angeles. For my brothers and me the place was like Disneyland, sometimes we would spend the whole day there because the place had everything --- big things like half tracks and bomber machinegun turrets to little things like GI issued lensatic compasses and packets of fluorescent green sea dye markers. My brothers and I, in what was one of the few things we ever did together, were always cooking up some kind of an excuse go there with me always returning with a ton of World War II army surplus stuff --- canteens, pistol belts, parkas, infantry backpacks, army M43 folding shovels, and two of my very favorites, an Army Signal Corps J-38 Handkey, one in its own little case, the other with a leg-band tagged as a KY116/U, both for sending Morse code and an ESM/1 Emergency Signaling Mirror.

Take a look at the beautiful machine work that went into making the KY-116/U, an item, like the formidable four wheel drive jeep, that was made in the time of war for war. Both in their own ways masterpieces each built for a different function but to serve the same purpose --- defeat the enemy. Wartime jeeps and telegraph hand keys like the KY116/U were turned out by the thousands and thrown into extremes as far ranging as the Arctic, the sweltering wind blown desert sands of North Africa and the steaming jungles of the the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, and expected to win the the war with all possibilities of being destroyed any second doing it --- along with their human operators and caregivers. Even so, made for war or not, or to last seconds or forever, there probably isn't a more beautiful piece of machined metal than the KY116/U below. Well there may be one thing: SEE


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In the above main text my uncle asked me to get a couple of canteens, one of which I say was on a WW II pistol belt I always wore when we were in the field. Along with the canteen I had a couple of "Carlisle" first aid pouches hooked to the pistol belt as well. Considering the timing of the event, July of 1947, more than likely the pistol belt, canteens and the first aid pouches all came from Palley's.


"Traveling in the desert I carried a World War II pistol belt with a G.I. canteen always filled with water, and along with the canteen, a pouch hooked to the pistol belt. I had a couple of those 'Carlisle' first aid pouches and I used to carry all kinds of stuff in them. Stainless steel pocket knife with a fold-out fork and spoon. Compass. Waterproof matches. Always in the pouch as well was one of my most prized possessions, a pocket-sized sun dial gizmo called a Little Orphan Annie Miracle Compass Sun-Watch, a one-time radio-premium offer given me by the grandfather of the girl who used to babysit me when I was even a littler kid."(see)


When my dad and stepmother went to South America for a couple of years and our de facto family broke up, with my uncle going back to Santa Fe and my younger brother and I going to a foster couple most of my army gear got lost in the shuffle and going to Palley's, for the couple, at least as far as me and my little brother was concerned, was out of the picture.

As a kid it seems like a large portion of almost everything I learned came from reading comic books. Over and over, even today in the stuff I write I often refer back to something I read at one time or the other in a comic book, that is, except maybe for one major time when there was not just comic books involved, but the coming together of both comic books and Saturday afternoon matinee movies of the day. That time I flew well over two-stories high in a Da Vinci-like flying machine I built myself as described in Tarzan and the Huntress.

Below you will find an ad from a comic book that just happened to start showing up for the first time around August 1949, about a year after the above aforementioned flight and the exact time my family was breaking up or on the verge of breaking up. On top of that, with the prospect of me not having the unfettered cash resources that had been provided me so freely in the past, before I moved in with the new foster couple my stepmother arranged for me to get a job at a place not far from where the couple lived where she knew the owner, a place called the Normandie Club --- so I could pick up some extra money. With that money and the comic book ads like the one below I was never without all the Army surplus stuff I wanted.

Besides comic books I was also big on box top and the like offers such as Ovaltine's Captain Midnight's Radio Premiums, especially Captain Midnight's Code-O-Graphs, and more specifically so the 1942-1945 Photo-Matic version that figured so prominently throughout my childhood into adulthood. So, for me as I viewed it, comic book ads were a quick jump, falling into a similar or like category. Matter of fact the first comic book ad I ever answered was for me to become a Junior Air Raid Warden, of which the ad appears just below the Army surplus ad. I don't think I was even in kindergarten when I sent for the Air Raid Warden kit. Please notice the two smaller versions of the surplus ad below the Air Raid Warden ad, although similar to the color ad above, both offer signaling mirrors for 35 cents. Signaling mirrors played a prominent role between Dr. Lincoln La Paz and my uncle, as found in the La Paz link in the above main text, regarding a pre-Roswell UFO encounter. Remember too, from the main text, every time I went to Palley's I always came back with a bunch of World War II army surplus stuff like canteens, pistol belts, parkas, infantry backpacks and Army M43 folding shovels.

The comic book mail order made it a lot easier. Notice in the larger ad below the two smaller ads that in those days a kid could order knives, machetes, and axes if one was so predisposed. As I've reported elsewhere on this page, even my dad was enticed into buying a brand new World War II Army surplus four wheel drive jeep off the docks in San Francisco after being motivated to do so by similar ads. See:


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"My stepmother, who you may recall was quite wealthy, in her new found motherhood role, noticed my younger brother and myself, along with a bunch of other neighborhood kids, spent an inordinate amount of time 'playing cowboys' --- with cowboy hats, capguns, holsters, boots, etc., and in doing so we often ended up in the street. Using her logic, she thought, what could be better than having their own real ranch to play on, especially so, not in the street."

AS FOUND IN THE MAIN TEXT ABOVE


The ranch was located in the high desert of the Mojave, encompassing a whole section of land in size, that is, one square mile, with ten or twenty acres set aside on one corner for the ranch house, barn, and horse corrals. No sooner had my stepmother bought the ranch than my brothers and I moved there, doing all kinds of ranch stuff like ride horses and shoot guns, of which the ranch house had a number of --- some on the wall and above the doors such as a lever action 30-30 Winchester, a shotgun or two, a couple of .22 rifles, and a very rare antique 1847 black powder percussion revolver called a Colt Walker which was usually kept in a case. Every once in a while I would take the 4.5 pound Colt out of the case and run around playing cowboys with it, sometimes even mixing genres by wielding the colt in one hand and a Buck Rogers Disintegrator in the other. In that the Colt was a black powder revolver and since nobody knew how to load it and everybody was afraid to, it was never loaded. In my later teenage years the Colt was sent to a gunsmith for some reason or the other and while there the gunsmith let me fire three rounds through it.

No sooner had we moved onto the ranch than my dad, who along with my stepmother remained living in the city, started to look around at tractors and such. Instead he decided on a four wheel drive World War II jeep to tool around in. Even though none of us kids were old enough to drive legitimately on any of the paved roads around or near the ranch, on the dirt roads and the scrub brush desert lands surrounding the ranch, as well as on the ranch itself, we drove all over the place.




My dad actually bought the Jeep after answering an ad similar to the one below. The ad offered surplus Jeeps for $278.00. After looking into it he discovered he could actually purchase a brand new, or at least never used, World War II Jeep for $225.00 cash right off the docks in San Francisco, which in reality turned out to be not docks in San Francisco, but across the bay in the naval ship yards at Vallejo or Alameda.

I still remember as a boy showing up with my dad and brothers. The whole place turned out to be a huge labyrinth of buildings, cranes, railroad tracks, and narrow between the structures roadways. On the docks were literally hundreds and hundreds of jeeps lined up row after row along with all kinds of other military hardware and equipment. The jeeps themselves had been taken right off the factory assembly line to the docks months before for transshipment to the South Pacific just as the war ended and when I was there with my dad as a kid, all of them were still just sitting there gathering dust and getting flat tires.

Other than learning a new word and having it added to my vocabulary, i.e., cosmoline, except for one thing, I don't recall anything specifically about the logistics of how or what my dad had to do to get the jeep, how long it took, how much paperwork he had to shuffle, or how the jeep was prepared so we could drive it home, only that it was and we did --- drive it home, that is. The one thing I remember is that the man who sold my dad the jeep told him he couldn't pick it up until the next day because of some longshoreman rule. The thing is, my dad brought two longshoremen with him and the man who sold my dad the jeep gave it to him. The two longshoremen were provided by a longtime old friend of my stepmother named Johnny Roselli.

During the heat of the summer my dad didn't want to drive down California's central valley on Highway 99 or cross over the Sierras to use the 395, although once to either highway it would have been the most direct to the ranch. Instead he chose to drive down the California coastline on Highway 1 --- and what a trip it was no matter what highway we would have used. A jeep, no top, my dad and three kids, no real back seats and all before seat belt days. At first the jeep wouldn't go over 45 miles an hour. When we stopped for gas for the first time and with my dad complaining, the attendant, who had been in the Army and knew about jeeps said it was because of a "governor," a device or some such thing the Army put on vehicles to ensure they weren't driven too fast. The attendant took a screwdriver, fiddled with a few things, and the next thing we knew the jeep could do over 60! A couple of days later after camping along the way we were back at the ranch.

For the skeptics, and they are legions, who say regardless of what I say or personally experienced, my dad nor anybody else ever bought a jeep at a ridiculously low price off the docks right after the war. Say what you want or think what you will, however for those same skeptics witness a paragraph from article that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle dated June 26, 1946 regarding one Peter Bosko. According to the article the 24 year old former corporal bought his jeep for $250.00 dollars from the Benicia Arsenal, a large government shipment area directly part of San Francisco Bay. Click the paragraph outtake below to see the article and learn more on Bosko:



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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.

For us, we went from a bunch of kids tooling around the ranch to chasing locomotives out across the raw desert land at 90 miles per hour all the while watching B-36s and flying wings and hearing and sometimes feeling the sonic booms from the X-1.


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WORLD WAR II SURPLUS JEEPS
NEW, STILL IN A BOX FOR $50.00

JEEP IN A BOX


"The ad offered surplus jeeps for $278.00. There were literally hundreds of scams around right after the war saying you could buy surplus jeeps from $50.00 and up and that's what most of them were, scams. After looking into it my dad discovered he could actually purchase a brand new, or at least never used, World War II Jeep for $225.00 cash right off the docks in San Francisco, which in reality turned out to be not docks in San Francisco, but across the bay in the naval ship yards at Vallejo or Alameda."


THE BOY AND HIS JEEP: ADVENTURES IN THE DESERT

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HOSTESSES, SOUND BARRIERS AND BIG BA-BOOMS

THE HOSTESSES




















LUST FOR GOLD

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TRY ALSO

LUST FOR GOLD (YouTube)





















I'M IN LOVE!

MARIA, THE FEMBOT FROM FRITZ LANGS 1927 MOVIE METROPOLIS

IN LOVE? BEWARE OF WHAT YOU WISH FOR
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ROBOT WOMAN