Car Clubs were very important well at least when you are 18 they are. I was in the Channels, the Ladds, and the Paragons. I think that I actually owned a car when I joined the Ladds. Well my "car" was cited for 32 violations when the cops finally caught up with me on a dead end street. There were so many things wrong that by todays standards it would have been impounded. Tuck Pierce helped me lower the 29 body so that it met the regulators. It had to clear the ground when the tires were flat. I actually skipped school the day that he welded the shell back onto the frame.

It had a three speed transmission and three two barrels carburetors, which when you let off of the gas and then punched it and let off the gas again would blow flames out the air intakes. At night running with no lights it was like a mythological reptile when the fire blew out the air intake against the front window and lit up the road. Connie rode in it and praise be, she pushed it to get it started--she couldn't get the pop the clutch sequence down.

Altic got swats from the Sargent of the Guard ( Chuck Turney) because he was stealing gasoline and wearing his Channels jacket at the same time.

Chuck Turney fought Skip Stroud three times to defend the honor of the Channels. Where are you today Chuck?

The LADDS met in Cave Junction for a reunion.

The LADDS met in Seattle in 2001 for another reunion.

My membership in the Paragons was short. There were some Paragons from a Long Beach City College art class that did striping and car painting & several of those guys had bikes and I was riding the infamous "crazy man's" Triumph. I got a call one night that there had been a shooting at a party in Long Beach and since our president was part of that club that we would not meet until further notice. Most of the Long Beach clubs had dual club memberships which made it hard to understand who was your friend and who wasn't.

The bikes at my big dance were guys from the Paragons.

I actually got a blue ribbon for a wood carving! My senior year of high school I wanted to go to a vocational school. I had even gone down and toured the facility but my parents were totally against it. So that could only mean that my co-operation my last year would be barely observable. So I ended up with two art classes, swimming, senior problems, and study hall. The one art class was a poster and design class where we did silk screening and made posters and the other was crafts where we could pick a craft and pursue it. I did a couple of drinking vessels out of clay which I carved with strange creatures and then I did a wood carving out of ebony. Not knowing that ebony was one of the hardest carving woods after it has been cut and sat for a little while. The wood carving really almost appeared by itself out of the wood. A magic old man with a humped back.

In reality it was my intro to Capitalism. I "bought" a job delivering papers for the Council Grove Republican. The money game was quite interesting. One paper cost 3¢. The Republican was a daily so it cost a total of 15¢ per week per customer. You always collected for the previous week on Saturday morning and then you took the money to Don McNeal the guy who ran the paper and you paid him for the papers you would deliver the next week. The route I carried had between 96 and 100 customers. It was a small route. Kalley and Grimmett carried over two hundred. Kalley had the east side north of Main and Grimmett had everywhere else on the east side. I think those guys delivered in the dark in the winter time. Don McNeal got a nickel per customer so that meant that I had to give him $9.60 in order to get papers for five days. It was a pretty good deal because that meant that I got $4.80 every week if all of the customers paid. Don tried to get kids to deliver to the area of town they lived in so that there would be less problems. Like when you would miss a house and they would call the Republican and complain, he would call and you would get up from the dinner table and walk out into the night to the customers house and knock on the door and apologize and hand them a paper.

Now in any system that really works there is some slack. Part of the paper route slack was that you got 3 or 4 free papers per hundred customers so you had no gripes if some one was too lazy to walk out to the end of the porch and see if it was laying on the first step instead of right on the porch, right outside the door. I always threw my extra papers on the porch of non customers to try to get them to start taking the paper. Of course on the night when there was a customer who couldn't find his paper, my father would get rather upset when I took his paper (used) and rolled it up and delivered it to some one else. He couldn't gripe too much because he took credit for getting the job for me and thus thought that his employment fee or finders fee should be a free paper FOREVER. So one of my free papers always went to my parents house. I was told that the little kids that weave carpets in the sweat shops of Asia have to give their parents all of their wages not just a three cent paper!

So when I was told that the regular guy who delivered the paper in my parents side of town (north of Main and west of the Republican), wanted to quit his route, it meant that I had to go with him for a week to learn the houses and then carry the papers for a week and deliver while he walked along and joked to make sure that I knew every house that got a paper by heart and then on two Saturdays I went along on his collection route. Then the big moment came when he would hand over his "cards" like the one above and I would give him $9.60 and he would give it to Mr. McNeal and I was officially in charge of the 96 customers.

The problem came with the idea that he had customers who owed him money for a couple of weeks and he wanted me to pay him so that I could collect those past debts. My father told me to think that over when I talked about it and I came to the conclusion that I had no proof that any money was owed. No one would give a new guy any money for anything except for the immediate service that had been rendered last week. Now my route had mostly people who had good jobs and paid their debts, some of the other guys had some well known dead beats on their routes. I said No to the guy I was buying the route from. He brought it up to Mr. McNeal when I handed over the $9.60. Mr. McNeal said, "Remember, all I do is sell you papers, what you do with them is up to you. If you don't collect in a timely manner that is part of your business, not mine." "Do you want to take the route back and not sell it to Mark?" I was instantly hot all over and embarrassed. I was going to screw myself out of a good deal over some money. But the old paper boy was tired of the paper route business, he had a guy trained and he decided to quit trying to get me to ante up any more money. I was in business. My business associate was Don McNeal, an honest, straight, businessman, a good guy to learn from.

It only took a couple of months to find out about customer relations, customers expectations, and to meet the guys who were never home on Saturday. Several "customers" made it hard for me to collect but only one was impossible. He was into me for a fortune. I knew it would do no good to talk to Mr. McNeal, it was my problem. So I tried mornings before school to catch the man who would not pay. When I mentioned that I was going to this guys house right after Sunday School my father became interested. He asked who it was and I told him. My father said that I was never to think of working on the Lords day again. No more conversation.

Next Saturday my father said he wanted to drive me on my collection route to see what it was like. It went fast being in a car and then we came to the place were the man who would not pay lived. When we got to the compound, (and it was a compound) it had a wooden gate six feet high that a truck could drive through and there were typical junk yard dogs snarling and jumping at the gate when ever I knocked. My father pulled right up to the gate and honked his horn a couple of times and almost immediately the gate opened. This guy in a padded welders cap with about two weeks growth of beard opened the gate and looked out. He smiled. yelled at the dogs and came out to the car, He greeted my father by name and asked him to come in. I followed past the dogs who were waiting for the command to tear me to pieces. He drug a backless chair out of his house and offered it to my father, I sat down on the steps where I could watch for the dogs when they started their charge. The man who would not pay, yelled at the dog --Bongo come over here and make friends. He told me to put my hand out palm upward and let the dog smell it. As the dog smelled me, the man who would not pay said to the dog, harshly "He OK, good man". The dog moved up under my hand and the man who would not pay told me to scratch his ears real slow. The dog licked my hand and lay down. The man who would not pay and my father " had a little drink" and my father talked about an upcoming job that the school district needed done to satisfy some rule about handrails. My dad wanted to know if the man who would not pay could get it done in two weeks and how much would something like that cost. After some more talk my father said that we had to go as I was trying to collect for the Republican. The guy looked at me, He knew what had just happened, I knew what had just happened and he said "How much I owe you? I pulled out my record book and asked for his card, he stepped into the door of his house, pulled it off the wall and handed it to me. Our totals matched, it was $3.30, three dollars and thirty cents, which translated into 22 weeks or 110 papers. The equivalent of 33 comic books, or two sport shirts, or 110 of Kirchoff's giant cinnamon rolls. He went back into the house and came out with a hand full of change that paid the full amount. I thanked him, pocketed the money and petted Bongo's ears.

As we passed through the gate my father turned to him asked if the job could be done faster. The guy smiled and answered "yep sur can".

My father did not charge me a collection fee.As we finished my collection route my father wanted to talk about the man and what I thought about the meeting. I don't remember what I said then but now I realize that I learned that day about the concept of one definition of the word purchase, of leverage. I learned that it is many time who you know, some times it is what you know, and a lot of the time it is what you don't know that builds up bogey men in your mind bogey men who become "the man who will not pay". Oh yea I learned that Capitalism has fixers.

I actually spent a lot of time attending sporting events. My father seemed to enjoy the contest of wills.
Athletics was exciting, but after I graduated from High School I probably attended no more than a dozen athletic contests all total.
As can be seen from the activity pass for Long Beach City College, not one number is punched.
Once I got to college, athletics just had no attraction. Watch sports on T.V.? You got to be kidding.
Who wants to watch some little dolls run around on a T. V. screen?

So there were also tickets for travel. Bus tickets when I was hitchhiking and couldn't get a ride through a city. $48.35 pesos to go from the Mexican border to Tampico one Easter vacation. I hitched to the border and met two other adventurous Bethany College students in Matamores where we stayed in a motel with a pool and met a couple of young girls who invited us to attend the movie with them that night. The chaperone was knock dead gorgeous and more our age. She hated Gringos and sat between the girls and the boys.

In Tampico we got off of the bus and went into a very small bar which had a pee trough running around the bar. I ordered wine which was warm , Fred ordered Tequila and McKean ordered a beer. The door was open and a Federale walked in, looked at us smiled and ordered without a word just by holding up two fingers. The bartender brought Tequila - a double. The Police officer went through the ritual and downed the Tequila with one gulp. He brought the glass down rather hard on to the top of the bar. Looked at us as if to say I like trouble makers and I hope you are some. I raised my wine in salute. He smiled and walked out of the bar.

The Washington D.C. ticket was for the night that Muhammad Ali fought in Madison Square Gardens. A guy talked all night on the bus about how he just got to his seat in the Gardens and the fight was over! I hitched to NY, bus to Washington D.C. Hitched to K.C. tried to hitch to Chanute, KS. to see my relatives while Jerry Stec visited with his aunt & uncle in K.C.

I got stuck in Dallas on the way to Mexico and took a bus through. I walked to the back of the bus and sat down. After riding for a couple of minutes it dawned on me that I was the only white face in the back. The bus driver had his eyes glued to the rear view mirror as he drove. People got on and off and I got a lot of stares of incredulity. I finally asked a guy across the aisle "Am I in the wrong place?" He smiled and said " Not as far as I'm concerned. "

A few minutes later I told the same black guy that I could feel the weight of the people staring and he said Oh that aint you that's JFK We went right through Daley Plaza and it was very eerie.The hair on the back of my neck was standing up and all I wanted was to get out of Big D.

Reel Education It was only a matter of time before I was in a "Coffee House" and found a flyer for one of the small movie houses in the Hollywood area. The Cinema, the Rivera-Capri and the Coronet. The Coronet was listed as the Coronet Film Museum. I was told that a Jewish couple had escaped from Europe with a lot of film and that was the basis of the Coronets collection. I know that I saw some incredible images of Hitler giving speeches where he would end up screaming "Seig Heiling" while the drums reverberated off the walls of the stadium. The drummers were in sync at maximum speed. The people in the audience appeared totally enthralled and yes that is the correct word. ENTHRALLED.

There was an evening of WWII cartoons, there were both German and U.S. cartoons. They let one see the total propaganda of countries at war, even the film industry and the old axiom "That the first casualty is always truth," is driven home forever. Years later while attending Bethany Lutheran College I got to listen to a Mrs. Sergio who was in the Italian Information Service serving Mussolini's regime. She told about leaving Italy because she saw what the Black Shirts were actually doing and she said that with in three weeks of arriving in the United States as a former enemy of ours she was hard at work in the United States Information Service. It was these movies and her speech that brought home the fact that Education and Propaganda should be approached in the same manner, Cautiously!

I took my oldest sister Marcia with me to see a lot of the movies, as I thought she would benefit and to be brutally honest, most of the girls I dated from DSHS were intellectually shallow. Those Downey girls with the intellectual ability to benefit from an evening of questioning consensus opinion, did not have the critical thinking skills to keep their mind in abeyance long enough to allow expansion. The drive home was a real treat because, my sister had many different perspectives from mine and many times noticed things that I had glossed over in the movie. We saw "Animal Farm" "La Strada""Battleship Potemkin" Mifuni in "Magnificent Seven" "Strike" by Eisenstein, Fritz Lang's "M" with Peter Lorre. The entrance fee was $1.00 and the theater was never full. There was free popcorn, and a lot of very interesting people in the audience to watch and eavesdrop on.

This was from the Cinema Threatre which had Midnight movies. Which meant that one could go to one of the other Art houses and then catch the Midnight movie at the Cinema.

Looking back at that experience brings up some interesting thoughts. All of these movies are available on DVD's now, so, why don't I check out some of the ones I have not seen and watch them? Was it the fact that it took extra will to borrow the car, drive 15 miles, dress so that I looked old enough to get in, and then there was the scarcity of the material at that time. No more than dozen "art" houses in L. A. and most were into "The Green Door" and other sexual movies rather than those pushing thought processes and visual forms of protest. Is it scarcity that piques the interest. Is it only that which exists out of the mainstream that attracts my attention?

This has a multitude of disparate thoughts attached to it. These are the tags from the "Hope Chest". Among my friends the "Hope Chest" was something they only talked about when they wanted to see me get real mad, real fast. It was maple and bought from Wallers one of the better furniture stores in Downey. I do not remember the actually beginning of the concept of buying the "Hope Chest". It is still rather embarrassing to contemplate the fact that I actually spent one weeks work at Ford Motor Company on a piece of furniture that I gave to a 16 year old girl. With all of my personal opinion that I have always been rather grown up and adult like, this is direct proof that I was a dumb ass kid at 18. The "Hope Chest" was a gift to my first love. I do not know what that statement actually means. The love affair was never consummated. We fought all of the time. Our personal ideas were actually oil and water, not like oil and water, but actually oil and water. I really liked her mother and her oldest brother. Why out of all of the hundreds of girls I had dates with, I fixated on this one draws into conflict any ideas of logical, educated, behavior. I can make a good argument for the configuration of the planets, or the intoxification of inhaling to much of the scent of night blooming Cereus being the impetus. One close friend said that he thought this laison showed irrevokablly, that I actually have a very well hidden streak of masochism. A self flagellation, need to be tortured, and demeaned.

"KALI -Keep Alive and Listen In, beamed on the airways from the front window of FLASH's RECORD SHOP at Vernon and Central". It was Huggy Boy calling us down to one of the best collections of Jazz and Blues Vinyl in Los Angeles. In all of the trips to Flash's I never got killed, stabbed or even mugged by the so called Negros.

Radio was important when you spent five to six hours cruising around every night of the week. Art Labboe, Hunter Hancock, Dick Hugg, Montigue, they all sold records or pushed the "Reeaally Big Dance and Show this Saturday" night. I never went to the 54 Ball Room as it was just too much of a chance to find trouble. The stairs from street level was always filled with guys hanging out.

 The Wolf Man from Via Cuna Qualo Mexico could be picked up at Harveys Char Broiler on Lakewood in Downey and all the way across New Mexico and Arizona.

Humphrys Harmony House sold "oldies" on Lakewood across from the cemetery where the Highway Hobos had a wake for one of their members.

At Auction City there was the most well built blond woman ever --who sold B.B.King and Little Willie John records. Next door was where I bought my Sir Guy shirts. The owner and his wife showed me the tattoos on their wrists from the German concentration camp were they were held.

I had a poster and design class my last year of high school. These are two cards that I did for that class.It was years later that the perfect title for the card on the right showed up. I attended a presentation by various college professors who each read a famous protest speech to investigate the over all totality of the concept of Protest, there was Portia's speech, John Browns last words before being hung, but the one that real got to me was the E.E.Cummings poem "Ode to Ole" and the phrase "there is just some shit I won't eat"

The Wild New Year card of course shows some of the beatnik influence from hanging out at coffee houses in Hollywood. Both of these were linoleum cuts, We also did some silk screening.

This class was the one that my old partner RJ was in and so was Suzy. She had this thing about coming back to the desk where RJ was sitting and stepping in between his legs and smiling which caused the blood pressure of every other male in the room to jump through the roof. She would flounce her breasts, and fluff her hair, and RJ would just sit their and try to look unaffected by this pure mating ritual. The teacher was livid but as long as none of the "rules" were broken there was nothing she would do. No contact, I mean that was what made the ritual so HOT - was NO Contact.

Fishing was one of the relaxing things that my father liked to do. We went to Rosarita Beach , Mexico, and we went deep sea fishing, usually on the other side of Catalina. We hit an Albacore run twice. W e also bottom fished on a half day boat north of Catalina. The best trip was when my mother's Aunt Amy came to California to visit. She stayed up all night watching the Bullfights on UHF television. When my dad asked if she wanted to go Ocean fishing she never hesitated. It was well known that she like to pond fish in Kansas so for her to try the Pacific Ocean pond was a real deal. She really pulled in a lot of fish and ended up winning the money pot for the biggest fish caught all day. She was nearly eighty years old and was so tired she slept on the drive home. Hell she shingled her barn by herself when she was 86.

Another place we went fishing was at Panguitch Lake in Utah. We caught so many fish there, that my father got blisters on his hands from cleaning them. It was north of the area the polygamist Mormon sects call home. I knew about them but had no desire to

go see them. We went to the movies in the town of Panguitch Lake it was a typical small town with a very small walk in movie. Saw some cowboy movie I think. The next time we went fishing, we went into town to go to the movie, but it was closed because some cowboy had thrown a boot through the movie screen. Probably didn't like Gene Autry.

 As you can see from where the money was spent my chickens ate real well. 58 chickens cost $5.50 . The reality was that they charged $1.10 per dozen for newly hatched chicks and they either screwed me or miss counted so I ended up two short. We built a cage with a cover and put a light on all night to keep them a little warm. The cage was in the garage which had a dirt floor. I still wonder why the rats didn't get any. I fed and watered them everyday, until the day came to turn them into a product. My sisters were out in the back yard, which turned into a massacre in their eyes.

My father started me off showing me how to "whip" their heads off which didn't work to well for me or the chickens. So it was the hatchet and a block of wood. They kept moving their heads but finally I got on to it how to kill a chicken and without cutting any of my own fingers off. Soon there were a half dozen chickens running around with their heads cut off, and blood spurting out of the neck where the head used to be attached. My sisters were screaming about their "favorite" chicken and the headless chickens seemed to run right into the area where my sisters were jumping up and down screaming. I tried to concentrate on making each swing of the hatchet count. My father was standing holding six or eight chickens and trying to hand me one at a time. I would miss one and it would run off flapping its wings terrified by the death and shounting surrounding it.

A very similar scene was repeated in one of John Nichols novels.

I also had to pluck the feathers and cut the chicken into frying parts, memorize the names of the different types of chickens. I even washed the feathers and made a feather pillow. Used the manure for the garden. For all the work I got a merit badge, a piece of cloth about one and one half inch in diameter to wear as part of my uniform.

Ten years later I met a guy who killed chickens for a living.

Marv and I decided to go see the beatniks in San Francisco. He borrowed the Ladds treasury (which he publically admitted to forty years later at a reunion of the club). We hitched to Yosemite where we lived by stealing food from campers at night. We lived on an island in the middle of the "river". Saw a Japanese guy get mauled by a bear. It happened so fast that it was over in less time than it takes to read these two sentences.
Ater a week we left the mountains for the Bay. Slept the first night in a park. Then we stayed in a hotel that the Chinese owned. The next door residents argued all night in Chinese. It is funny how I laid their almost all night long tryng to understand something that was said by the loud irrate voices. Most of the places where anything was happening served liquor and we were under 21. We got in to a couple of places for a little while. Heard some poetry and some jazz. Listened to a lot of talk on the streets too. The North Beach area was totally taken over by the beatniks. They were a Tour Bus attraction. We found the City Lights Bookstore where I bought Howl and something by Ferlingetti. I spent almost one whole day at City Lights, just trying to get the whole melew of books on subjects foreign to my mind to stick a little bit.

We ate very little, mostly Chinese as I remember. Got some free soup from some people who fed the street people every night.
One memorable event happened on the way to San Francisco. We were standing in the hot sun by the side of the road and an old Mexican guy and his wife gave us a ride in an old car that only ran about 40 miles an hour. They were moving from one fruit picking job, I think it was grapes, to the apple orchards in Sacramento. Absolutely dirt poor Mexican stoop labor and they insisted on sharing their meger meal as we drove along. We offered a couple of dollars for gas money, but they refused.

After a week of seeing San Francisco we hitched back to L.A. My father treated me differently when I got home. He had said some harsh words when I left. Like never come back! But, I had to go and it was the first good decision I made. Marv was a dependable guy to hitch with and it was a very easy first attempt at being on my own.

It helped to set the idea of Europe, which took place 2 1/2 years later.

P.S. I just sold an eight page poetry book I bought in S.F. on that trip. I got almost $100.00 a page for a $1.75 investment. It will only happen once as I wasn't smart enough to buy two of them.