May 12, 2025:

Tomorrow is my big brother Bruce’s birthday. He has many distinctions and we have more than a few similarities.

Distinctions:

1. He was the only one of the four Gregory kids to inherit Mom’s brown hair and eyes. His middle name is “Keefe,” Mom’s maiden name, and traceable back to her ancestors in County Wicklow, on the Irish Sea. The first photo shows him with our beautiful Mom.

2. Family legend has it that he was so reluctant to start school at Margaret Harloe Elementary that he climbed the school flagpole and hung there awhile. They were sensible. He got hungry.

3. We both later attended Branch, but because he was four years older, he got to hear aged, aged Fred Jones speak about the 1886 double lynching from the PCRR trestle at the base of Crown Hill. Fred saw it happen.

4. His AG(U)HS teachers adored him. Room 301 (I taught in 306) had glass soundproof booths for Sara Steigerwalt’s speech class (we both loved Sara, who was scary). Six years after he’d explained the Battle of Gettysburg to his classmates, his battlefield map of July 2 was still in one of those booths.

Our other scary/much adored teacher was English and Journalism teacher Carol Hirons. I was teaching at AGHS the year of Carol’s retirement, and on her last day, she walked up to me with an 11th Grade American Lit anthology that I recognized immediately.

She had tears in her eyes. “Jim, I wanted you to have this.” I got tears in my eyes as Carol walked away toward the parking lot, and then I opened the book. 

It was Bruce’s.

5. Learning to drive a stick eluded me, until Bruce taught me on his little MG sedan. I hope we didn’t run over too many of Mr. Shannon’s Brussels Sprouts.

6. He is gifted mechanically. I have a hard time clearing out the vacuum cleaner of debris. His airplane and car and ship models were meticulous. Mine looked like the mashed potatoes in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Bruce was a finish carpenter.

7, He is meticulous. We had a drawer full of “Mad” magazines, his, and they were arranged in some fashion I did not understand–either by date, theme or the redness of Alfred E. Neuman’s hair.

It never failed. “Been in my ‘Mads’ again, haven’t you?”

He was a pain in the ass until he turned nineteen. He took great joy in picking on me.

More on this at the end.

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Similarities:

1. It is almost impossible to tell us apart on the telephone.

2. We are both TV Boomer Generation types. Here are Roberta, Bruce and I watching the TV when we lived on Sunset Drive. Yes, that is a TV.

3. We are both Branch School products, including several grades spent in the 1888 schoolhouse that still stands in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley. (Photo above, although we lacked the belltower. Termites.)

4. Bruce was the emcee for the 1966 Senior Class play at AGUHS. I was the emcee for the 1970 AGHS Senior Class play.

5. We both enjoyed setting up toy soldiers and them utterly destroying them with industrial-strength rubber bands that our Dad brought home from the Madonna Construction Co. offices, where he was comptroller.

6, Both of us took our first airplane ride, to Marysville, where Dad was bidding a job, in Madonna Construction’s Aerocommander, piloted by Earl Thomson, one of the founders, in 1939, of today’s airport. In the photo, that’s Madonna and the first Gov. Brown in front of that airplane. (That trip led to me writing a book about local World War II combat fliers sixty-two years later.)

Bruce was later a busboy at the Madonna Inn, where I took Jeri Tomson, my 1969 AGHS Christmas Formal date, for two prime rib dinners which set me back $13.84.

7. Bruce was the editor of the Cuesta College newspaper, “The Cuestonian.” Four years later, so was I.

When he turned nineteen, (I was ADHD and so a much BIGGER pain in the ass than he ever was), I’d become slightly less annoying, at fifteen. That’s when he turned into the best big brother anyone could hope for. 

Tomorrow he turns 77. I am 73. 

He’s still the best big brother anyone could hope for.