Rednecks, Hippies & Me

I don’t like it when sniveling little punks from the suburbs make snide and condescending comments about rednecks. “Oh yeah, those rednecks, those scary hillbilly goat-sodomizers in their overalls and Nascar jackets.” It’s a bunch of crap, and the most boring, ignorant cliché.

Nor do I approve when the same über-trendy, pseudo-yuppie scum complain about hippies, as if green living, farmer’s markets and organic produce aren’t direct descendants of America’s countercultural, back-to-the-land movement. “Oh, aren’t they disgusting in their incense and VW buses and peace signs?” Not from here, they’re not.

You see, I grew up with those rednecks. I grew up with those hippies. And my life has been a fragrant stew of the two meats.

Boonville was different in the 1970s. For starters, there were still a lot of redwoods and communes. Trees meant a robust logging industry, Levi’s jeans bought at Rossi Hardware, and a strong work ethic. Communes meant Birkenstocks, not-so-free love, and mystery lentils. There were rifles in the back windows of pick-up trucks and solstice parties at Pomo Tierra where some of the adults smoked dope and got naked. But many of my classmates’ fathers and brothers were loggers or truck drivers or cut skid trails with their caterpillars. So my upbringing was a little of each.

While my father and uncle were distinctly more San Francisco liberal than their more traditional acquaintances, they did have one thing in common: sports. Both played basketball and softball on Charlie Hiatt’s powerhouse teams, sponsored by Hiatt Logging. Charlie, like Ukiah’s legendary Brad ‘Super Jock’ Shear, was known for putting together juggernaut teams from local all-stars. Their motto seemed to be: “Who gives a shit if you’re a commie when you can hit a softball 300 feet? You’re on the team!”

And when my dad and uncle weren’t playing for Charlie, they were recruited to help Shear win another Elks Club tournament beneath the Friday night lights. Either way, it was a lot of playing and a lot of watching games being played. I spent my formative years crammed into the backseats of crappy cars rocketing around Mendocino County from gym to baseball field.

Some of the stars, my first idols, were local boys: Gene Waggoner, Gary Waggoner, Gayle Waggoner, Ted Waggoner (see a trend developing?), Leroy Perry, Rick Cupples, Jed Steele. There was Steve ‘Turbo’ Blackstone from Ukiah, the brilliant shooting guard Steve Tiedeman who starred at Santa Rosa JC, and even Jim Mastin, the fiery coach at Mendocino High, whose eldest son and Mendo grad played in the NFL. (A few years later, another Mastin prodigy, Dan Doubiago, also got some snaps as a pro lineman for the Kansas City Chiefs.)

As for the Arkansas-bred Waggoners, how many of them were there? I’m still not entirely sure, but here goes: Gayle, Peter, Gene, Gary, Ted, Judy, Mickey, Joe, and Steve. Gayle was a phenomenal athlete. Strong as an ox and with cat-like reflexes. He was a big ringer at the time, occasionally dropping in from somewhere like Sonora to fortify a squad. My fondest memory of Gayle is one night at a fast-pitch softball game in Cloverdale. Also on that team was the right reverend Ron Penrose (who wouldn’t play on Sunday, the lord’s Sabbath), a highly regarded pitcher. Anyway, this game, the opposing bozo at third base came about half-way up the line and taunted Gayle, who was in the batter’s box. A man of few words, Gayle looked surprised at being insulted by this cleated clown. Then the wind-up and the pitch: BLAM! Gayle blasted a screaming line drive off of the third baseman’s chest, and was on second base with a double by the time the ball was retrieved. Time out. The victim was laying in the red dirt, sobbing. He couldn’t get up. An ambulance was called. Gayle’s shrug said it all: “He should have kept his mouth shut.”

Gayle’s younger but not smaller brother Ted was a muscular wild man and genial pugilist who my father employed as a sort of maniac sergeant-at-arms. One of Ted’s favorite things was to take G.P. and me down to the swimming hole at Indian Creek and pretend to drown us. He called the game, “Scream For Help,” and promised us sodas if we lived. Ted also figures into my fear of scary movies, as he took G.P., Bobby Owens and me to see “The Exorcist” in Ukiah when it came out. Or, rather, Ted, Bryan Wyant and Charles Davis drank blackberry brandy while G.P., Bobby and I were thrown all the way in back of an old Ford station wagon. At one point during the show, no longer able to endure Linda Blair’s satanic gaspings, G.P. and I ran out into the lobby, only to find it creepily deserted. Figuring that it was a trap by goblins to lure us away from Ted and to our certain deaths, we ran back into the theater, and spent the rest of the movie plugging our ears and covering our eyes. The ride back to Boonville was a lot of fun. Ted stopped several times to drag G.P. and me, screaming, into the pitch darkness by the side of the road and drive off — leaving us to, yes, satan. Thirty years later, I’m still recovering from the trauma. Now that’s child care.

Another Waggoner-induced traumatic experience was when Ted’s younger brother Steve (a great high school football and baseball player) and his cousin Don Summit (a three-sport Panther star in his own right, who played hoops in college) fired BB guns at G.P. and me as we ran barefoot through Eva and Floyd Johnson’s field. We finally made it to Gene and Sue’s house a little ways up the Ukiah Road, and locked ourselves in the bathroom. Steve, never one to quit, proceeded to fire BBs beneath the crack in the door, hoping a ricochet would sting us as we cowered behind the shower curtain. There was no motivation for this; or, rather, we hadn’t coaxed this from Steve: it was that he and Don saw G.P. and I without our shoes on, they had BB guns, and so naturally they thought it would be a hoot to make us run across a thorny field while we tried to dodge their shots.

Gene Waggoner, of course, is more myth than man. He starred along with Charlie Hiatt and Leroy Perry at Boonville in the late Sixties. Gene went on to play basketball in the S.E.C. at Ole Mississippi — the big time — and there was nothing Gene couldn’t do with a ball. I spent entire summers with Gene playing basketball, traveling to tournaments with him and his brother Gary (another superb athlete), shagging flies, throwing rocks, playing steal-the-flag in the dark, juggling. Maybe it doesn’t seem like a lot to do, but it was all a lot of us had, and I’m thankful for every second.

Gary, of course, was taken from this sorry earth too soon. I miss him. Just like I miss Leroy Perry’s dad, Harold, another fine Southern working man, who spent hundreds of hours with all of us redneck/hippie Valley kids. A stately figure with his ballcap and twinkling eye, Harold umped our games, ran the clock in the gym, coached our teams, moved the chains at football games, and even traveled to away games. Harold was kind, patient, encouraging and always there. His quiet strength was a comforting presence. Harold and Gary, wherever you are, if you were rednecks, then maybe some day I can be one, too.