Garvanza Elementary School was white except for a handful of kids of Californio descent. No blacks could live anywhere in the Highland Park district of Los Angeles and, come to think of it, I don’t remember ever seeing any Chinese, Japanese or Pilipino kids, either, which were about the only kinds of “Asians” you’d see [...]
Garvanza: Okie slang for the chickpea Mexicans call a garbanzo. About all I remember about kindergarten — this probably happened during the first week — is getting into a “fight” with a custard-colored Okie kid named Paul Custer who also wore a Davy Crockett coonskin cap. Turned out the storage shed was filled with giant [...]
You’re hiking alone and without a rifle in the East African savanna. The wind is at your back and, 100 yards ahead, you spot a bull rhinoceros. His beady eyes are locked in on you and, using his two nose horns as a gunsight, he breaks into a charge. At max you’ve got seven seconds before he reaches you: what do you do? Do you run away in panic, wait until the last instant and then sidestep him like a brave matador, or drop to your knees and beg for divine intervention?
When I first laid eyes on the monstrous new super-duper prefab erector set federale fort rising from the scalped, stripped and staked hillside south of Boonville, it struck me: that’s what’s wrong with the poor kids growing up in Anderson Valley today: they should have been born shiny new fire trucks.
When, in the summer of 1953, my family tipped our hats to our Chicago home, piled into our Kaiser four-door and drove the 2,400 mile stretch of US Route 66 to our new home in the City of Angels, the little boy living next door was exactly my age. Happy for the companionship, we became [...]
My dad was born with what you’d call the gift of gab, I suppose. No doubt he loved telling stories and was what used to be called a natural-born teacher. After we moved from Chicago to the City of Angels in 1953, my dad got a job busting tires for Firestone and, since he was [...]
“Give to every other human being every right you claim for yourself — that is my doctrine.” — Thomas Paine “What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not. . .our army and navy. . .Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has implanted in us. Our defense [...]
Did you hear that the blond oil cartel lady that’s always on TV — “the deeper you go,” says she, “the more good things you learn” — isn’t a real human being? Yup, that’s true. The news is all over the internet and, I don’t mind saying, I’d already suspected as much in my own [...]
About a month before my second book came out, I received a form email from my publisher’s Manager of Marketing and Publicity. At the ripe old age of 29, I was informed, worn down by the workaday grind and determined to follow her heart, she was quitting her job so she could devote herself to [...]
A while back in the nearby woods a large gaggle of wild turkeys started raising a ruckus to the high heavens. A veritable convention of agitated gobblers, it was, them being in their tribal mood. By and by a bunch of the turkeys came running out the tree line, hopped the pasture fence and started [...]
