A story—maybe a kind of Thanksgiving story— I learned while writing a book:
Henry Hall of Cayucos was a B-17 gunner in the 91st Bomb Group when, in March 1944 over Holland, his squadron was “bounced” by a dozen German fighters, Messerschmitt 109s.
It had been a hard day already; Hall had seen the landing gear of a bomber ahead lazily drop, the hydraulics destroyed by another fighter’s cannon fire, and then the plane began to tumble. While it was going in, it clipped two more B-17s and they went in, too. This combat footage gives the faintest sense of what young men like Hall endured.
Suddenly, a fighter like the one above—a P-47 Thunderbolt—appeared. Hall and his crew looked on, amazed, as the American fighter pilot flew into the swarm of German attackers.
This moment allowed the teenaged Henry Hall to live into great old age, to survive what the veterans of the 91st Bomb Group called “Black Monday.”
It was only later that he learned that the P-47 pilot had survived his mission, too. He shot down four of the fighters that had come after Henry Hall and his friends.
“Duty” must seem such a quaint word to the self-absorbed generations that have followed Hall’s. That generation fought for freedom, while modern Americans seem to fight for freedom from accountability. But the man who saved the young B-17 gunner’s life that day understood accountability. He understood his duty exactly.
The fighter pilot was the Good Shepherd, and on Monday, March 6, 1944, the 91st was his flock.
I’m a sucker for movies where the central character takes a moral stand and is pretty much destroyed by it (ask my former students about Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons). I was taken by James McAvoy’s portrayal of accused Lincoln conspirator Mary Surratt’s defense lawyer in The Conspirator, directed by Robert Redford, which was on this morning.
I don’t know much about McAvoy except you need to go immediately to the YouTube video where he plays a Scots air traffic controller on “Saturday Night Live.” It is a gem.
The lead actors, except for Robin Wright, were Scots, English and Irish. My hero among Lincoln actors is Daniel Day-Lewis, who now lives in County Wicklow, where my mother’s ancestors came from.
And they all have splendid American accents. You need to go immediately to the YouTube video where Irish young people try to speak in American accents. That’s a gem, too.
But the film reminded me of all the Lincoln assassination oddities. Here are a few:
–Booth shot Lincoln with a single-shot 44-cal. Deringer pistol. The pistol ball entered behind his left ear and lodged behind his right eye (sorry). It should have killed him instantly, but he lived for eight more hours. When doctors stripped him after laying him diagonally in a bed (he was too long for it) in a boarding house across from Ford’s Theater, they marveled at his musculature–he looked like a Greek statue. The year before, at City Point, Virginia, where an Arroyo Grande soldier served, Lincoln smilingly held an axe straight out from his body at arm’s length. None of the young sailors who served on the presidential steamer could duplicate the feat.
An 1841 Deringer like the one Booth used.
–Booth, from a family of acclaimed actors, was an exuberant sword-fighter in his Shakespeare plays who sometimes wounded his fellow actors. He leaped athletically from the Presidential booth at Ford’s, caught his boot-spur in a furled flag, and broke his leg when he landed on the stage. He exited like a crab. Good, because Booth remains in my top five for the biggest sonofabitches in American history. The actor, by the way, had fortified himself before the assassination with a few stiff drinks at The Star, a bar next to Ford’s. It probably didn’t register to him that the guy a few pairs of elbows down the same bar was Abraham Lincoln’s bodyguard.
–The Lincolns’ partners in the booth that night were a young army officer, Henry Rathbone, and his bride. Rathbone grabbed for Booth but the assassin laid his arm open with a dagger before that leap to the stage. Eighteen years after the assassination, Rathbone fatally shot his wife, Clara, and attempted to kill himself with a knife. He failed. In 1910, Rathbone’s son burned the dress his mother had worn the night of the assassination, thinking it had cursed the family.
The doomed Rathbones.
–Booth timed his pistol shot for a moment in the play Our American Cousin, a comedy, when laughter would be at its peak. The last words the president heard were likely delivered to lead actress Laura Keene: “You sockodologizing old man-trap!” Keene made her way to the presidential box and cradled Lincoln’s head in her lap as he lay dying.
Laura Keene
–Booth’s final words, after being shot in a tobacco barn lit afire by Union troops, were “Useless, useless.” He’d been paralyzed by the fatal shot, and asked a soldier to raise his arms so he could see his hands one more time. Booth was shot by a soldier named Boston Corbett, a hatter in civilian life. Corbett returned to the business after the war and became increasingly paranoid (mercury was the agent that made for Mad Hatters). He was involved in at least two pistol-brandishing incidents, including one when he was the doorkeeper for the Kansas House of Representatives. Corbett was eventually confined to an insane asylum. In 1888, he escaped on horseback. We’re not exactly sure what happened to him–he either lived out his life in Mexico or Minnesota.
Boston Corbett
–At the same time Lincoln was shot, Lewis Powell (also known as Lewis Paine), entered the home of Secretary of State William Seward, who was swathed in bandages and casts and helpless in his bed, the victim of a carriage accident. Powell, claiming to be a pharmacist’s errand-runner with a prescription for Seward, bolted upstairs and stabbed the helpless man repeatedly in the face and throat. Since Seward had fractured his jaw, a metal and canvas splint deflected most of the knife thrusts. Powell, thinking Seward dead, burst out of the home, shrieking “I’m mad!”
Lewis Powell, April 1865
–Powell was hanged along with accused co-conspirators George Atzerodt, David Herold, and, despite James McAvoy’s best efforts, Mary Surratt. The photograph shows an umbrella shielding Mrs. Surratt from the hot sun just before the trap was sprung.
–The film suggests that Mary Surratt was bait, intended to lure her son, John, one of the conspirators, in to surrendering herself–a situation eerily similar to the execution of accused nuclear spy Ethel Rosenberg. She was indicted in what was an attempt to force her to testify against her husband Julius. Julius was almost certainly guilty of passing atomic bomb secrets on to the Soviets. Ethel wasn’t, and she was as strong as Lincoln–it took repeated jolts in the electric chair to kill her. John Surratt was almost certainly guilty. Mary probably wasn’t. The film depicts a military tribunal that doomed her from the start.
McAvoy in a trial scene from The Conspirator.
–The Surratts were devout Catholics. In the years after the assassination, John emerged as a member of the Pontifical Zouaves, soldiers charged with defending the Papal States, then the target of Italian nationalists who would annex that territory to complete the unification of Italy in 1870.
–Mary Surratt’s boarding house, where the conspirators planned the assassination, is today an Asian restaurant/karaoke bar called Wok and Roll.
Okay, this was a big deal. The Rotary Club of Arroyo Grande, in gifting our library with this book, has divined my subversive message in teaching U.S. History for almost thirty years: We are all Americans and we all belong to each other. I spoke to the Rotary Club about Arroyo Grande’s Civil War veterans. What else could they have fought for except for the idea that we are all Americans?
No one taught me this concept better than Mr. Ryan Huss, my colleague at AGHS. He came up with one of the junior U.S. History assessments for Arroyo Grande High School, a 1920s newspaper the students created.
Here’s just one example of what that assessment taught them.
When White 17-year-olds from Arroyo Grande, California, learned about the life of Louis Armstrong, a Black prostitute’s son from New Orleans, Louisiana, nearly every single newspaper at unit’s end had an article about Louis Armstrong.
They caught what a masterful trumpet player Bix Beiderbecke, the son of German immigrants—“Bix” is short for “Bismarck,” the Iron Chancellor— to Davenport, Iowa, caught one night when a Mississippi riverboat approached out of the fog on the great river’s surface. There was a jazz band aboard, and Beiderbecke heard the sweet—and saucy—notes of Armstrong’s cornet floating above the steamer’s superstructure. He was enchanted.
Bix Beiderbecke
His story, from Ken Burns’s Jazz, and the archival footage of Armstrong talking so gently to his audience between numbers likewise enchanted my students. Armstrong made them proud to be Americans, too.
Dan Inouye, Medal of Honorrecipient, 442nd Regimental Combat Team
This is what I taught and what my teenagers learned.
When students learn that the hymn “Steal Away to Jesus” was the signal for carrying out a group escape from a slave plantation, when they learn about Crazy Horse’s generosity, after a big hunt, to Lakota widows and orphans; when they learn that one of the greatest frontier lawmen was a Mexican-American named Elfego Baca, or, in San Luis Obispo County, a sheriff named Francisco Castro; when they learn about the 54th Massachusetts driving up the beach toward Fort Wagner or the 442nd Regimental Combat Team advancing fearlessly under shellfire through the Vosges Forest in France; when they learn about Rosa Parks quietly refusing to give up her seat, they don’t feel ashamed to be Americans.
Rosa Parks
The word, again, is proud.
They don’t feel ashamed because all of the people who perpetrated all of the cruelty that marks much of our history pass their knowing only briefly; these people are dead. But Louis Armstrong is alive to our children. He touches them.
There is nothing to be afraid of in teaching all of our past to all of our kids. It’s actually very hard to indoctrinate schoolchildren. What comes easy to children is recognizing needless cruelty—would you have us teach them to admire cruelty?– and, even more, kindred hearts. If we teach them to listen, then quiet ourselves, they’ll hear the cornet notes, sweet and saucy, clear and sharp, high and weightless above the river’s current.
Harry Chapek was a young Arroyo Grande man killed in action on the Belgian-German border, near the Siegfried Line, in September 1944.
He was a member of the 81st Tank Battalion, 5th Armored Division and is buried at the American Cemetery at Henri-Chapelle, near Liege, Belgium.
Those are 81st Sherman tanks in the photo.
He was almost killed once before, in 1938. He was a driver for the Arroyo Grande Trucking Company, which stood at the site of today’s Bank of America–the photo of the site is courtesy of the Martin family. (That’s the old St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in the left background, built in the 1880s.) It was a vital part of the economy of our little farm town on California’s central coast, population 1,090 in the 1940 census.
He was driving near Elwood, just south of the Gaviota Pass, and less than an hour north of another beautiful California place, Santa Barbara, when a horse threw three little girls and galloped out into the highway in front of Chapek’s truck.
The impact killed the horse and the truck veered into a tree, where it caught on fire. Chapek was stuck in the cab, which in turn was buried by vegetable crates.
The California coast near the Gaviota Pass.
But that night there was a PTA meeting at the Elwood School, which is still there today, and a parent and a janitor ran out to the truck, dragged Chapek out–he was waving his arm out the cab window–and knocked the fire down with two of the school’s fire extinguishers. Four years later, a Japanese submarine shelled Ellwood.
The Elwood School today; a contemporary painting shows the submarine I-17 shelling the area in 1942. (from Goleta History)
Six years later, a German artillery battery, covered by dense fog, fired a barrage that landed on the 81st’s “A” Company; it was probably the devastating explosion of .88 shells that killed Chapek, awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.
Growing up, he was a close friend of our friend George Shannon, who farmed near us in fields along Huasna and Branch Mill Roads, peppers and string beans and I think Brussels sprouts, among other crops. Mr. Shannon was an admirable man.
Farmer and neighbor George Shannon, with his son, Jerry, in the hallway between the two classrooms of Branch Elementary School, built in the 1880s. Shannon served as head of the school board.
That’s my Mom serving dinner to us Gregory kids and to the three Shannon boys. You can tell how much she thought of them because dinner’s being served on the Irish lace tablecloth.
Chapek was an admirable man, too. As was his father, Matthias, or Mat. That’s Mat with the Arroyo Grande Boys’ Band about 1909. He probably lured potential juvenile delinquents away from a life of crime with a tuba or two.
He taught two generations of kids how to play musical instruments. Longtime teacher Ruth Paulding was one of them. The middle school’s named for her. Wayne Morgan, also an Eagle Scout, took up the violin thanks to Mr. Chapek. He was killed on December 7 on USS Arizona, along with another Arroyo Grande musician, Jack Scruggs, a trombonist in the battleship’s band.
I know something about the waves of immigration to Arroyo Grande, for example, from the Azores, Japan and the Philippines. Mat Chapek was from Bohemia– today’s Czech Republic.
It turns out that on upper Cherry Avenue–then called Leedham Lane–Arroyo Grande had a “Little Bohemia.” The Chapeks lived there, as did the Huebners, as did the Marsaleks.
That struck because one of my favorite books as a sophomore in Mrs. Flatt’s sophomore English class at AGHS, was Willa Cather’s My Antonia, about a girl from a family of Bohemian immigrants to Nebraska, to the Great Plains. It’s not more than six pages in before an inordinately large rattlesnake makes its appearance. That snake, and what I read later about the toll laundry and ironing took on frontier farm wives, bending their spines and hunching their shoulders—effectively and mercilessly transforming them into human question marks—remained with me always.
Arroyo Grande’s not much like Nebraska. The climate here is mild and the growing seasons overlap. But both places produce incredible wildflowers. This is field mustard near the foothills east of Arroyo Grande.
So Antonia and Chapek, the children of Bohemian immigrants, are linked in my mind now, even though Nebraska and California are so distant. The cemetery at Henri-Chapelle is more distant still—over 5,000 miles away from the foothills and the farm fields and the wild mustard that both Chapek and I grew up with. The distance, as the poet Whitman wrote, avails not. Sgt. Chapek’s life is now connected to mine. Time, Whitman also wrote, avails not. Arroyo Grande is my home town. Nearly eighty years after George Shannon lost his friend, our town survives both of them. It does so because of them.
It’s their gift to us, you see.
I a now a friend of the American Overseas Memorial Day Association Foundationin Belgium, which is a small honor. But that means I can now pay tribute to Sgt. Chapek on their website, and so draw recognition to the man with far greater honors.
P-38 Lightning fighters would’ve been a common sight over my home town, Arroyo Grande, California, during World War II. That’s because today’s Santa Maria Airport was then an Army Air Forces training base for advanced pilots about to ship out overseas.
The beginners were farther north, at the site of today’s Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria. 8,000 cadets went through primary flight training here.
Still farther north, Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo was devoted to preflight training for prospective Navy pilots. 3,000 young men went through Poly’s program while the civilian student population fell to about eighty students.
Learning to fly–or military flying, period–was hazardous, even for advanced pilots. Three of them were killed in accidents in January 1945 alone: two P-38s collided over Corbett Canyon; one crashed in the dunes; another fell into the Rusconi Cafe in Santa Maria, killing the pilot and two people inside the cafe.
The video also commemorates some of the young fliers from San Luis Obispo County who were killed in flying accidents. Eighteen local aviators were killed in all; half in combat and half in accidents.
Doesn’t matter what uniform this guy wears. There are some people whose integrity is so transparent that you can’t help but admire them. Dusty Baker’s like that.
I just read an article that asserted that the high five was invented when Dusty, as a Dodger, homered off the Astros’ J.R. Richard. But Dusty didn’t exactly invent it–he responded to the raised hand of his teammate and friend, Glenn Burke.
Burke was to be the Dodgers’ next big star. He was compared to Willie Mays.
In 1978, he was traded to the Oakland A’s.
Baker later said that “we knew the reason he was traded was because he was gay. You couldn’t be more blunt than that.”
Glenn Burke
Burke had come out to his teammates and, in part because Baker was so open to Burke’s announcement—he was a leader even then; he set the tone— the rest of the team accepted Burke for who he was.
That’s the other reason they accepted him: because of who he was. Former Dodger outfielder Rick Monday said that Burke “could take any moment in time and make it fun. There was no better guy in the clubhouse, I’ll tell you that. There was no one who didn’t love having Glenn around.”
Some of his teammates cried when the trade was announced.
Burke’s trade was tied to the fact that manager Tommy Lasorda’s son was gay. Lasorda essentially disowned Tommy Jr., whose circle of friends included Burke.
And A’s manager Billy Martin loathed Glenn Burke, openly called him a “faggot.”
Burke’s career languished and he left baseball. He died of complications from AIDS in 1995.
Tommy Lasorda Jr. had died from the same complications in 1991. His father, one of the most famous Dodger managers, insisted then and for the rest of his life that his son had died of cancer.
Burke near the end of his life.
So now Dusty Baker is a manager, too. After stints with the Giants, the Cubs, the the Reds and the Nationals, he was hired, at age seventy, by the Astros. He took over a team justifiably ostracized for cheating. The Houston franchise was at its nadir. There was no tougher job in baseball. Now Baker is taking the Astros to the World Series.
“He’s a leader and he’s a friend, so we can go into his office whenever we feel like it and talk about it,” shortstop Carlos Correa [told the New York Times]. “He’s such a wise man and he’s been through it all in baseball.”
“He’s such a wise man.” That resonates. That makes sense.
Okay, the big pumpkin eating the little pumpkin is brilliant.
I might try to make a pumpkin pie from scratch this year for Thanksgiving, by the way. I’ve already done it once.
I was in college and visiting my second cousin Frances Sally, a powerful figure in Missouri politics. She was the head of the Missouri State Cosmetologists’ Association.
My college friend Wayne from Oklahoma happened to be in the area and his car broke down, so he stayed with us for a few days. He was dead broke, estranged from his Dad, and needed the comfort of a Cousin Frances Sally bed.
She was a sweet lady, but she cut my hair once. Many years later, I realized that the same style had been adopted by Princess Diana. I don’t think Frances Sally had much experience with cutting men’s hair.
This was in Licking, Missouri. There hasn’t been a lot to do in Licking, Missouri, since they closed down the Rawlings baseball factory. Licking used to make all the baseballs for the MLB.
By the way, I had a grand Thanksgiving there once. We were watching Notre Dame slaughter USC and the gang was making fun of me, the California boy. Then, some of you may recall, Anthony Davis scored six touchdowns and SC won going away, 45-23.
Many years later, my Dad called me to the phone. “Somebody wants to talk to you,” he said.
It was Anthony Davis. I pretty much melted into the floor.
Anyway, back to Wayne and me. Since there’s not a lot to do in Licking, Missouri, we bought some pumpkins. And we made a pumpkin pie.
Ladies and gentlemen, there has not been a process this labor-intensive since the construction of The Great Pyramid of Giza. It took us ALL DAY. Scraping and rendering and mixing and beating and spicing and crusting and then, finally, actually baking the damn thing.
Wayne from Oklahoma and I gained a whole new appreciation for what frontier wives had to go through when they baked. And we had an electric oven.
The pie was incredible. Other than getting the Sor Juana de la Cruz Award for being the top student in my Mexican History class, that was the crowning achievement of my time at the University of Missouri.
So I think it’s time to recapture the glory. I sure wish Wayne from Oklahoma was nearby to help. He was a good guy.
This is a science classroom at AGHS, about 1956, courtesy of Mr. Spin, who donated some vintage photos to me.
No STEM yet. Notice the overwhelming number of males. My sister, Roberta, a proud graduate of Arroyo Grande (Union) High School, was a math major at Poly, and sometimes she was the only female in her class section. Maybe two more, but not more than that. And Poly hadn’t caught up with coeducation, even in 1960. It was about a three-day horseback ride to the nearest women’s restroom.
And in 1960, math was a serious business. All those fellows with the flattops and Madras shirts were someday going to be rapidly but noiselessly sliding their slide rules, calculating exactly how long it would take an Atlas missile with a 1.44 megaton nuclear warhead to land in the swimming pool of Nikita Khrushchev’s dacha on the Black Sea.
(Khrushchev was the Russian leader who said ”We will bury you!” Vice President Nixon countered by informing Khrushchev that we made better color TVs than the Soviets did. Touché!)
So I don’t think women were particularly welcome in Cal Poly math classes in 1960. Especially really bright ones. Roberta’s the fat puppy in the litter when it comes to smarts, and maybe that was resented by her classmates.
Roberta as a senior at AG(U)HS. Yeah, she’s kinda stunning.
Roberta decided that she wanted to be a teacher anyway. So she became an education major, then a third-grade teacher, and a no-nonsense one. You can ask Miss Sandy. Her classes at Poly made for over thirty years of very lucky third-graders, busy little sailors on the ship my sister sailed.
I love my big sister.
The other, less serious observation: See those lights? Those light bulbs are BIG, somewhere between a grapefruit and a basketball. I had lights just like those in my Mission Prep classroom–the one with only one electrical outlet, because the Immaculate Heart Sisters thought electricity was a modern convenience, a crutch for softies, like socialists or Presbyterians.
And of course, at least one of the deceased Sisters is supposed to un-decease herself upstairs, where my classroom was, and where my former and much-admired and beloved student Julie Newton now teaches English (that makes me feel real happy, that she’s in that classroom). The late sister is, of course, a ghost. Or one of them.
I told the Mission kids that an I-beam fell on her while they were building their school and flattened her like a tortilla. That was both irreverent and made up.
(I’ll bet she’s looking for knuckles to rap with her steel protractor ruler. The sister, not Julie. English teachers don’t have much use for protractor rulers.)
But Elizabeth, my wife, did hear loud construction noises as she came back from coaching a basketball game late one night. Bang bang. Drill drill. As soon as she opened the double doors that lead to the school’s main hallway, there was complete silence. Complete and dark dark silence, all the lights being turned off. She did a u-turn and went home.
The next day, She asked Mike, the maintenance man, if he’d been working that night. Nope.
An Immaculate Heart Sister on the hunt for knuckles, early 1900s. SLO County Photograph Collection.
Anyway, there have been repeated Sister Sightings–some of ’em in flocks, if not quite whole convents–up there on the second floor over the years. A SLOHS girl, a guest at a school dance in the 1950s, took a look around between songs up on the second floor and came back to her friend, downstairs in the gym. She was thrilled, charmed by the cozy gathering around a warm stove that she’d seen upstairs.
“I didn’t know that the nuns lived here!” she told her friend.
They didn’t.
At another dance in the 1980s a teacher saw a shadowy figure dart around a corner, headed toward my classroom. He thought it might be a student up there messing around. When the teacher turned the corner, there was nothing but empty hallway..
In the 1990s, a French couple, tourists, were traveling through San Luis Obispo and they did what the French will do. They spread their sleeping bags on the Mission Prep front lawn, broke out a bottle of Bordeaux and some Camembert, and began talking about Proust. They were sleeping when the temperature suddenly dropped about thirty degrees. They woke up and it was pitch-black. Black black, and whatever the black was, it was hovering just above them. Then the black lifted, and then the black drifted, into the gym behind the lawn.
They found another place to sleep.
The school was built in 1926–it was sixty years old when I started, just as AGHS was sixty years old when I retired– over the site of the of Immaculate Heart of Mary Academy.
That earlier school was built in 1876. The sisters lived in a convent house behind the present Mission Prep, in what is now a parking lot.
There was a fire at Mission in the 1980s and it burned through the gym floor. There, underneath, was the foundation for the Academy. And a dead cat.
The Immaculate Heart Academy, Palm Street, San Luis Obispo, soon after it was built.
That was downstairs. I was upstairs.
So I was up there painting my room. At night. The biology teacher was around the corner and down the hall just a little ways, happy amid his labware and a year’s supply of dissectable frogs.
I finished up and decided my room looked pretty good. As I prepared to lock up, I called down to the biology teacher: “Barry, I don’t think this place is haunted at all.”
When I closed the door, one of those light bulbs exploded.
*BOOM!*
It was a good one. It was a detonation. It was a good emphatic detonation. My heart wasn’t the only thing that jumped.
I peeked back inside and decided it would wiser to sweep up all that broken glass the next day, in broad daylight. I bid the biology teacher farewell. It was a quick one.
I taught at Mission for eleven years. I never went upstairs at night by myself again.
Me, looking confident in that classroom. That’s because it was daytime.
So I just rowed for 40 minutes on this thing thanks to a 60s playlist on my iPod Nano (yes, I still have a Nano. I once had a FOUR-track tape player, too). Now that I’ve crawled back to the computer–I don’t look quite as pleasant as this young woman– I was connecting old groups/songs with old friends.
Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Joe Loomis (Joe and I also loved “Tusk,” Joe because of the song “Sara,” and that’s because of his little sister.) Oh, and “Crosby, Stills and Nash,” with them on the porch. I later took a photo of Crosby with his arm around Elizabeth’s shoulders only to find out later that I’d run out of film.
Joe Cocker: David Cherry. We listened to “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” with Leon Russell (and Rita Coolidge) until you could see through it. I also owe David thanks for another album we played without mercy: Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Cheap Thrills.” Janis’s “Ball and Chain” is a kind of musical Chrysler Building or maybe Half Dome at Yosemite. Or, since she drove one, a Porsche 911.
The Beatles: “She Loves You.” Melvin Milton (I think I have the name right). He was an eighth-grade transfer to Branch and it took us awhile to get over the culture shock: He wore all black: Beatle boots, tight slacks, turtleneck under and a striped oxford shirt over. He took a lot of flak for that, but he was a kind and thoughtful young man.Totally Committed to the Fab Four. But you can’t run base-paths very well in Beatle boots.
Joni Mitchell: Oh, a girl I once knew.
Blood, Sweat and Tears: Robert Garza. He was crazy about “Spinning Wheel.” Robert was one of my best friends–still is–and we were fellow veterans of Kinney’s Shoes and the somewhat addled lady who was the store manager. Elbows flew when a girl in a miniskirt came in shoe-shopping. It could get ugly.
Cream (“Crossroads”) and Jon Mayall (“Room to Move”). No contest here. My old Sambo’s endless cuppa coffee buddy, Paul Hibbard.
Neil Diamond (Yes, I have Neil Diamond songs on my playlist–“Cherry, Cherry” is awesome): Linda DeVaurs. She was very bright, very funny and a total Neil Diamond freak. We dated, but just for a short time because there was no way I could measure up to Neil Diamond.
Simon and Garfunkel: Didn’t play any today, but Debbie Wizemann and Bonnie Silva (she’s no longer with us and I thought the world of Bonnie. I always will.) did a stellar speech presentation on The Poetry of Simon and Garfunkel for Miss Steigerwalt’s speech class. And we were all fans, of course, of “The Graduate.”
Eric Burdon and the Animals: Nobody in particular, but because EVERY LAST SCHOOL DANCE BETWEEN 1969 AND 1970 ended with “San Franciscan Nights.” Also, my ninth-grade art class collage (see below) was “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” I still like The Animals. YouTube “House of the Rising Sun.”
The Beach Boys: Patsy Silva, Marilyn Machado and Carolyn Coehlo. These three were a year ahead of me at Branch and they’d have little dance parties at lunch in Mr. Lane’s room. And they KNEW HOW TO DANCE. They were so cool, and I think they are still cool. We were a little in awe of them–they were eighth-graders, after all. Okay, okay. Also, all us seventh-grade boys–all ten of us– had crushes on them.
The Rolling Stones: My big brother.
Linda Ronstadt: My big brother.
The Turtles: Liz Miller. Our ninth-grade art teacher asked us to make a collage representing a current popular song, and Liz’s was of two pairs of feet close together–a boy and girl sitting on a park bench–representing the Turtles’ “Happy Together.” Both the collage and the song were utterly charming.
I have pretty much decided that I have ADHD—my psychology doctorate is speeding its way here from Trump University– so I offer this as a public service for other folks who might be, too. It’s a condition that can get you into all sorts of trouble. It’s sometimes great fun.
Here are some of my symptoms.
Telephone phobia: An incoming telephone call makes me panic. I’m sure that when I pick it up, the voice on the other line will say something like: “I’m so sorry. Everyone you love has died.” And calling someone on the phone is extremely difficult. It can take me several hours to work up the courage to use the telephone, and my hands are shaking when I hit the buttons on the phone’s keyboard. This was not a helpful trait when I was a newspaper reporter. I have mentally consigned Alexander Graham Bell to the Nether Regions.
Hyperfocus: Working on a task—like writing a book—means that I can stay in the same position for hours, oblivious to everything around me. I think I’m in trouble with Elizabeth because I was working on History Society stuff this morning when I realized I hadn’t heard her for awhile. I looked out the window and her car was gone. Without me saying goodbye. Uh-oh. It’s also extremely difficult to switch from one task—working on something for the Historical Society—to another, like making the bed.
Time Blindness: Due to problems with “executive function,” ADHD individuals sometimes forget anniversaries and birthdays, have trouble placing events in their past on a rough timeline, are habitually late and have trouble with placing upcoming dates or days of the week correctly.
Organizational chaos: Oddly, I could plan a classroom unit easily, almost down to the minute of a daily lesson plan, because it’s creative and oddly fun. But my teacher desk was a disaster except when Matt Stamey was my TA. I actually needed Matt to follow me around the rest of my life. The photo shows my filing system today. And I lose things. A lot. Once I get started, I’m easily distracted, so instead of getting two jobs done efficiently, I o for twelve done half-assedly. Mornings are agony, because I look around and there’s so much to do that I don’t know where to start. So I just go back to bed.
Lateral thinking: I have never gone from “A” to “B.” If you’ve ever read anything on my blog, you can see that. I recently wrote about two friends on a road trip. It started with the two friends, went to my first cigarette, moseyed on over to Kerouac and “On the Road,” made a beeline for my friend Erin who works at the City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco, then flew across the Atlantic to Les Deux Magots café, opposite Notre Dame, and finally wound up with a delicacy of hamburger stands in rural Missouri, French-fried mushrooms.
Elvis has left the building: Sometimes when people are speaking to me, it seems to them as if I’m not listening. That’s because I’m not. I am more or less a thousand miles away. Maybe at Les Deux Magots, and that’s five thousand miles away. A related problem, seemingly one of inattention, is that I can’t remember names. Our neighbors across the street are the nicest people. Her name is Mary. I can’t remember his name, even though I’ve been reminded a hundred times. I do know that it’s a latino name, so I just call him “Fidel.”
Talkative or Interrupts Frequently: Got me in trouble from first through twelfth grades. “Jimmy talks excessively in class” was a constant on my report cards. And when someone else is the important announcer, doing the play-by-play of a baseball game, I’m the color guy who interrupts with pithy remarks about Yogi Berra’s socks. If you’re old enough to remember the Smothers Brothers, I’m Tommy.
Creativity. “Many people with ADHD tend to be enthusiastic, inquisitive, witty, lively and spontaneous – and each of these characteristics can contribute to being more creative than others who don’t deal with ADHD.
“Generally speaking, creativity is the ability to create something that is both unprecedented and original. Creative ideas must be relevant, new, useful and surprising. Creativity often comes through intense knowledge and significant motivation for innovation in a certain field. These fields can vary, ranging from mathematics to painting, science, or music.” (https://neurogrow.com/creativity-as-a-positive-feature-of-adhd/)
It’s pretty obvious that I love writing. I have this blog. I’m a Facebook addict. I’ve written five books and I write for small magazines, the occasional newspaper and the local historical society.. I even loved writing lesson plans. How do I get their attention? What steps do I need to take to lead them to what they need to learn? How do I make transitions so that it’s not me going blah blah blah for 52 minutes? How do I engage them emotionally? I’d spend hours at it but find it oddly enjoyable.
But if I’d been teaching me, I would’ve been the kid surreptitiously reading Cannery Row hidden just under my student desk.
So, at least in some ways, I’m Calvin.
Time, boredom on your part and self-absorption on my part means I need to finish this. So we’ll just go with a laundry list of symptoms–some of them discussed in more detail above. (Deep breath) Here we go:
A Work in Progress 