In 1967, when I was a senior in high school and intending to grow up to be a star of stage and screen, I landed one of the leads in the Woodside High production of the not-so-great musical Take Me Along, based on Eugene O’Neil’s play Ah, Wilderness.
Posts published in “Essays”
Today we go to a ballgame at old Tiger Stadium, in Detroit. Life is good, real, real good. And, MOTOWN, baby, Barry Gordy’s home — Hitsville, USA.
The location of my experiment with tree crops and the forces of nature are right here on a raw, steep 20-acre homestead. The land is on the margin of foothills and valley, the margin of…
We arrived in Stockton in my car of the moment, a '58 Plymouth Fury, a cool car in its day, a sporty two-door hardtop with outsized Cadillac-style rear fins. It had two big 4-barrel carburetors sitting opposite each other on a ram-induction fuel system feeding a huge “hemi” V-8 engine and a speedometer that registered up to 160 miles per hour.
Exactly one week before Christmas I received a bill in the mail from the Mendocino Coast District Hospital for $2,635.47. Immediately after arriving home from the post office, I called the hospital’s billing department. I spoke at some length to two women who worked there.
To me the most boring part of any biography is the beginning. You know, all that stuff about the subject’s childhood and schooling and who his parents were and what they were like and even…
I’m going to meet my friend Tim in Nashville, Tennessee. He’s there on business. It’s as close as he may ever get to Detroit again. We can do geography and history between Nashville and Detroit in a day of driving — about 600 miles.
High school hit me right between the eyes. Where does a freshman fit in? At the bottom of the ladder, of course. Within a student body of well over a thousand individuals, I ran smack into a social class mentality that seemed to pervade the entire experience, the elite spending their time looking down their noses at those beneath them, each class assuming a position of authority over the underclasses.
AMTRAK has handled the black-porter/white-porter issue very deftly. Their logo — or at least the one that appears on the tissue covering the head rest — depicts a porter standing erect in his sharp uniform,…