Controversy erupted around Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul when the New Republik magazine criticized his campaign for publishing campaign signs that end a sentence with a preposition, and for implicitly comparing America to a Christmas gift that can be exchanged where it was purchased.
Magnificence, originally uploaded by jimhankey.
Christmas was not the same without this angel walking the planet. Bowbow, you are sorely missed!
My family and friends threw a going-away party for me on December 14, 1975, and I reported for Air Force duty two days later. My pre-enlistment in August had not legally obligated me, and I was entitled to change my mind even up to the last moment before the swearing-in ceremony on December 16. All through the fall and early winter, as my enlistment date drew closer, I found some comfort from the fact that my enlistment was not yet "a done deal." But I also found agony in the same fact, as I tortured myself, all that same while, with nearly ceaseless second-thoughts and last-minute qualms. Oddly enough, very little of my angst involved the issue of whether enlistment would be the right choice for my future. No, the dilemma was whether the benefits I expected to gain could outweigh the horrors that I feared awaited me at basic training. All summer I wrestled with my fear and wondered whether I should back out of the whole deal.
In "Pre-Enlistment,"" I described how very unlike me it was to join the Air Force, and I tried to describe some of the factors that led me to ignore my scruples enough to do so. One thing I haven’t yet mentioned, that also made it easier to ignore the many warning signs I had noticed up to then, was the pre-enlistment system itself. If the deal offered me had been that as soon as I signed up I would be required to report to basic training, I would have delayed signing the paperwork – probably indefinitely. But, as it was, I all-but signed up in August, with only a moral obligation to report for duty in December. In August, when I signed the pre-enlistment forms, it seemed like December was a long, long way off. No need to worry about tomorrow today, I somehow convinced myself. Plus, I told myself, I always had the option of deciding at the last minute not to go. So, I signed.
At first it was easy to ignore any thought of my impending enlistment. At the end of August, my parents took me on a trip to Florida, where we visited my father’s parents in Orlando. It was the first road trip I’d ever taken with my parents alone, without at least Diane, if not Dave and/or Mike along too.
Some of the fun I might have derived from that novel situation, though, was ameliorated somewhat by the main objective of our trip. I disliked my paternal grandparents intensely, and the two or three days we spent in their house was agony for me. For as long as I knew them, and, judging from pictures, even from an early age, they both had faces that had frozen into permanent scowls – I never in life saw either of them smile. My grandfather never talked about anything, but only answered questions put to him -- with a grunt that meant yes or another that meant no. My grandmother rarely talked about anything but the Bible. The first time I met these grandparents was when I was eight years old. My parents had driven us from Phoenix to Fort Wayne, where I met my maternal grandparents, and after they, and several other of my mother’s relatives, had doted on us for a few days, my parents drove us to Detroit, where my dad’s parents were then living.
What a difference from my mother’s folks. Whereas my Grandma and Grandpa Sundsmo tried to spoil me and my siblings in a matter of less than a week, my grandparents Hankey rejected us immediately and out of hand. I remember it was chilly and drizzling rain when we arrived, and we were cold when we arrived at the house. My grandparents were at their kitchen table when we made our entrance. We all huddled around the kitchen table while my mother made introductions, and my grandfather, without so much as greeting any of us, immediately insisted that all four children wait in the basement while the grown-ups talked. We were escorted to a short, steep, dark wooden stair, which we descended only to find that the basement, though carpeted, was completely devoid of all furniture, toys, books – anything at all. We sat on the floor down there for four hours or more, and because we had all been cooped up in the car for days and days over the past week or so, we didn’t even talk with each other to make the time pass easier.
So, I never had any great love for the grandparents Hankey from the start, and nothing I learned about them over the years had ever inspired me to feel any differently about them. Fortunately, I rarely saw them. But now, in this last summer of my dependency on my mom and dad, I was going to have to live with my paternal grandparents for three whole days. The only thing that allowed me to keep some sanity while I endured it was that the drinking age in Florida was eighteen. I was able to slip away by myself, sometimes, to bars, where I could drink and forget about my grandparents. I even bought a bottle of wine at a grocery and kept it hidden in my grandparent’s house and drank from it every night after they went to bed. (Even though their bedtime was mid-evening, the early evening hours seemed to drag on at quarter-speed.)
We arrived at their home in Tampa on the Tuesday following Labor Day, and I immediately discovered that my grandparents had a public swimming pool for a neighbor -- it was immediately across the street. Maybe this visit won’t be so bad, if only the pool is open, I thought as I sauntered over to see. Alas, a flock of lifeguards were working on various season-end projects around the pool, but swimmers, there were none. Apparently the previous day had been the last swimming day for the season. I had hoped that in Florida the pools would stay open as long as it was warm, but this one, at least was not doing so. After a while, the guard who seemed to be in charge walked within a few feet of me, though on the other side of the chain link fence. I asked him, since so many guards were around, and since the pool hadn’t been drained yet, whether I could be allowed to come in for a short dip. He told me that I was welcome to try, but that the heater had been shut off and the water was only 68 degrees. I wasn’t deaf to his having said "only," but I ignored this important clue because I figured that, being a life guard, he was thinking in a habitually over-cautious manner. I doubted that 68 degrees was really all that cold. After all, I thought, that’s only four degrees below room temperature. I ran to my grandparents’s house, changed into my trunks, grabbed a towel and ran back to the pool. I climbed to the top of the high board and threw myself into the air in a wild, uncontrolled head-first dive that was as close to flight as my body has ever propelled itself. I sailed far up and far away from the board. It seemed to take minutes to drop to the surface.
And then, in an instant, I had shot to the bottom of the pool, and I felt as though I had somehow gotten to the center of a giant ice cube. It turns out that, unlike air, water that is 68 degrees is incredibly cold. I couldn’t even move, at first, because every muscle was paralyzed with cold. Once I got moving, though, I moved at high speed. Within just a few strokes, I was at the ladder and a second later I was on the deck and running for my towel. I grabbed the towel without stopping, and wrapped it around myself as I sped across the street. I didn’t stop sprinting, in fact, until I was inside my grandparents’ shower, with the hot water running fast and hard. I never even saw any of the guards as I fled out the gate, but I didn’t need to see them to well imagine how they must have laughed at me.
Looking back on this incident, I’m struck by what great foreshadowing it provided for the Air Force experiences that were to follow. I somehow remembered this little incident for many years before understanding its symbolism. Of course, there’s the obvious symbolism in which my trying to "fly" off the high board can be taken to stand for my joining the Air Force and trying, through that venue, to rise to a higher station in life. But leaving that aside as too superficial to make much of, there remains a deeper symbolism for me, in that, in both situations, I was without the knowledge or experience I really needed in order to make a rational decision. And in both cases I rashly, impulsively plunged into decisions that I later learned were not the best choices.
There were no decisions of import to make that summer, though, and especially on that Florida vacation. My parents were as kind to me as they’ve ever been, and they took good care of me on our road trip. You might have thought that I wasn’t enlisting, but was about to be executed instead. My favorite time was at a place called Wichie-Wachie Springs. It was an amphitheater cut into the side of a natural spring, with a glass wall facing the water, through which audiences could watch as variously-costumed men and women sported about under water as though they were of the mer-race. The performers stayed under almost continuously, by snatching surreptitious gulps of air from what looked like gently wafting vines, planted here and there in the spring, but which actually were air hoses. The kinds of movements the performers were making: spinning and writhing as sinuously as eels, were exactly the kinds of moves I like to make myself, when I swim, and I gave more than one idle thought, in the years since I visited the spring, of seeking work there as an entertainer.
We visited Disneyworld as well, and we went to a dog track, which surprised me since my folks were hardly the gambling type. It was a pretty leisurely vacation, but a bit of sorrow permeated the whole thing. I’d been having more and more conflicts with my parents as I had grown older and more impatient to test my wings, and now the day was quickly approaching when I would fly the coop once and for all, and we all knew it. I wished that I had been getting along with them better, but I blamed the problem pretty much entirely on them, which probably made my attitude nearly insufferable to them.
Seeing that my parents were sorry to see me leaving home made me feel at least a little sorry for them, so during this run-up to my enlistment I tried to make up for past sins by getting along with them as well as I could. And they tried too. It was largely an act on both sides, though, and I think each of us sensed it. I couldn’t really hide that I wasn’t dreading leaving home. I couldn’t wait to get away.
What I did dread, though, was the thought of basic training, and every night that summer and fall that I was home, I sat at my desk chain-smoking cigarettes and staring at the ashtray on my desk, a green glass ball with an oval cavity, and tried to imagine what basic training would be like. I couldn’t get any kind of notion, really, except that it would probably involve a lot of humiliation and shouting and hard physical labor. I kept looking inside myself to see whether I could somehow sense the presence of enough strength there to see me through what was to come. I couldn’t find any indication, and so I just had to hope that whatever inner resources I had would manifest themselves when they were needed.
If I had known then what I know now, or even if I’d known only as much as I did by the end of basic training, I would have realized that it was going to be far less an ordeal than it was merely a silly game with rules that are relatively easy to learn. Once the rules are learned by everybody in your group, called a "flight," the quicker the sergeants stop the screaming, the humiliation, the brainwashing techniques and the physical torture.
Before I finally departed for basic training, though, I had one more ordeal to endure as a civilian: saying good-bye to Russ R____. Of course, it was kind of an ordeal to say good-bye each time I had a last meeting with one friend or another in those final days. As December 16, 1975, loomed closer, I began scheduling "one-last" tete-a-tete’s with all my friends. About a week before I left town, I had a call from Russ, and it kind of surprised me because although I liked Russ a lot, he and I had never been very close. We had worked together on our high school newspaper, but our respective duties rarely brought us into contact with each other. Probably a closer link was that he had dated Barb Bristol, and Barb had also dated my best friend, Zook. And Barb, through Zook, had gone, from being someone who rarely spoke of or to me without mocking me, to someone I counted (and still do) as a great friend.
By the time I was ready to leave town, Russ’s parents had moved to a small town northeast of Fort Wayne, where, the last I had heard, he was going to attend a nearby private college. In fact, he had already started classes, by the time I met with him in early December, and had already managed to get permanently expelled from that school -- for detonating a home-made firecracker, constructed of aluminum tubing, in a school men’s room during a football game. The authorities apparently took a dim view of the hazard to others and kicked him out forever. This I only learned after Russ had picked me up and we had already driven off to have one final adventure together. Russ’s news of expulsion foreshadowed a mystifying change of character in him, and my last adventure with Russ proved to be a distastefully memorable one.
Our plan was to go to Hicksville, Ohio, to a bar just over the state line -- a bar well known to Fort Wayne’s teenagers, called "Charlie’s." The drinking age in Indiana was 21, but in Ohio, an 18-year-old could get .32 beer, and many is the time I and my friends took state road 24 up to "the line." Charlie’s was one of the dingiest bars in which I ever took a drop, with dirty, sticky concrete floors, cheap metal tables and chairs, and air ducts hanging down in plain sight and even within reach. These, along with every surface on the walls and ceilings, were plastered with business cards, photographs and signed paper plates and napkins -- hundreds, thousands even, of these "Kilroy-was-here" mementoes marked the prior passing of uncounted teenagers.
Once we were on the road, Russ asked if I’d mind if we took along a friend of his from his new town. I was a bit disappointed because I figured a stranger would inhibit the reminiscence I’d hoped we’d be able to engage in at the bar. At the time, though, I had no idea what a bad idea this was. I was soon to get an inkling, though, as I watched this guy vault one-handed over the passenger’s door and into the back seat of Russ’s convertible, and then heard his unforgettable first words: "I brought my brass knuckles." He took his right hand from his coat pocket, where he’d been keeping it, and displayed the brass knuckles for us to see.
"That’s nothing," Russ said, and he reached under his seat and pulled out a solid steel baton about a half-inch in diameter and about a foot-and-half in length. He gently patted the upholstery next to his leg with it, and it thumped authoritatively. Russ’s friend made a black-power fist and crooned: "Oh, yeaaah!" What kind of lunacy is this? I wondered.
I was afraid that maybe once they got loaded at Charlie’s they’d try to pick a fight with someone, but they behaved themselves at the bar and I put aside my worry and concentrated on getting a big buzz going. I should have realized that it was too soon to relax. We finally left at about 1 a.m., and when we got outside, we saw a beautiful new Sting Ray parked near Russ’s car. We all spent a moment or two admiring it, and then Russ’s friend changed the subject by confiding in us that he’d stolen three glasses from the bar. He lingered for a moment by the Sting Ray while Russ opened his door and let me into the back seat. Russ got in and started the engine, then hollered over to his friend to hurry. His friend whipped his hand in a throwing motion and I heard two kinds of glass breaking as I saw the glass smash into one of the headlights of the Sting Ray. Russ’s friend ran to the car and hopped in, while Russ simultaneously tore out in a long, squealing tire-tear.
That was just the beginning of the lunacy. On the way back to Fort Wayne, Russ’s insane friend disposed of the other two stolen glasses by throwing them into the windshields of oncoming cars on the narrow two-lane highway. I couldn’t imagine how frightening it had to have been for each of those two people, to be cruising along and suddenly have a crystalline explosion erupt right before their face. Even if their windshields didn’t crack or break, it would certainly look as though the windshield was breaking apart in the first few moments of impact.
After the first glass was thrown, I demanded to be taken home at once, and after the second and third were thrown, I was frantic to be back in the safety of my parents’ house. But my ordeal was not finished yet. Up to now, Russ had praised his friend’s insane, criminal acts, but had committed none himself, and I had been hoping that Russ had not fallen too far under this evil genius’s spell. But on the way back to Fort Wayne, Russ started ruminating about all the grudges he was keeping against a particular girl from college – a girl who had the misfortune to live in a house right on the road we were taking, and who also had the misfortune of having a car-for-sale parked on the side of that road. The car was positioned to be seen by prospective buyers -- right at the edge of the highway. But since the house was set far back from the road, behind a dense stand of trees, the car’s owners wouldn’t be able to see the execution of Russ’s plan. When we arrived at the doomed automobile, Russ stopped his car and, ignoring my insistent demands that he start the engine again and drive away, he took his metal club and proceeded to demolish the windshield of the girl’s car. His friend, meanwhile got busy exercising his brass knuckles on all the quarter-panels, while I watched from the backseat with alarm and shock growing within me.
Finally, a dog began barking, which scared the two lunatics back into the car and back onto the road. But, amazingly, they were not yet ready to end their rampage. We managed to make it as far as two or three miles from my home without incident, but then our path took us past a shopping plaza at which there was a coin-operated car wash. It was about two in the morning and no one was around, and Russ decided to pull in "to get a car wash." Again I protested long and hard, and again I was ignored, while these two hooligans proceeded to knock over a coin-vacuum and break open its coin box. Then Russ drove the car through a fiber-glass garage door that had been installed on one end of the bay.
Finally we made it to my parents’s house – I’m still amazed we weren’t caught and arrested. I never saw Russ R____ again, but many years later I heard that he had become a sheriff’s deputy in one of Indiana’s many tiny towns.
(I enlisted in the Air Force the winter after I graduated from high school - December 16, 1975, to be exact. Actually I "pre-enlisted" in August of that year, but didn't report for duty until December.)
Sometime before I left to begin basic training, my recruiter gave me a key chain that I carried for several years. It said: "Find yourself in the Air Force," and I used to joke that I had gotten drunk one night and the next morning "found myself in the Air Force." In truth, I joined with a bit more deliberation than that, but there was also some truth behind my jest, and my experiences during all four years of service continuously made me wonder: What the hell am I doing here?" I find it supremely ironic that I ever enlisted at all. I didn't particularly hold a grudge against the military per se -- after all, I had enjoyed my share of war movies and had, with friends, played war all through childhood. But throughout most of my childhood, too, the Vietnam War had been raging. I was firmly opposed to the war and the draft, and because of them I had grown up intending never to wear a uniform. Of course, through many years of my childhood I was oblivious to Vietnam, as to just about all current events, but when I was eleven, my oldest brother, Mike, joined the Marines. He was shipped to Vietnam right after boot camp and technical training, and suddenly the war loomed large in my consciousness. He served there for a year and then was shipped to California. But he hated this stateside assignment so much he soon volunteered to go back to Vietnam and he served another year there. Not a day of either of his tours in 'Nam went by that I didn't wonder whether he was going to be killed, and I daily dreaded coming home from school because I kept expecting to walk in the front door to find my mother weeping and a black-bordered telegram lying nearby. My father became obsessed with the war, and from the time Mike enlisted until the war ended, he insisted that we watch the TV news at dinner every night. After years of trying to eat while being inundated with pictures of blood and gore, fresh from the front, I came to despise war. Meanwhile, my brother Dave had become a full-fledged "hippy," and my natural tendency to emulate him increased my hate for that war and for the government responsible for prosecuting it. I was much more socially aware than most kids my age because not many of my peers had any siblings as old as my brother. (Dave enlisted in the Navy two years after Mike joined the Corps, but was discharged for medical reasons a week after joining. At the time I missed the irony of a "hippy" like Dave going into the Navy. The draft still was operating, and a lot of people at that time bowed to the inevitable while reserving the right to pick their branch of service. My father had done it toward the end of World War II). Because of Dave's influence and example in rebellion, I was the only kid at my school to wear a black arm band on Moratorium Day. I was in the eighth grade at the time, and I remember that about that time I swore that if the war still was raging when I came of draft age, I would move to Canada. I have no doubt whatever that I would have kept that promise because I love life, and there was no way I was going to allow myself to be enslaved by the government or have any generals or politicians risking my future in a cause I despised. But by some fluke, this war that seemed to have no-way-to-end ended just before my eighteenth birthday, and the government switched to a volunteer military - an experiment that not many people at the time believed would work. My best friend in high school, Scott Zook, was born the day after I was, in the same year I was, and we went together to submit our paperwork for the soon-to-be-defunct draft. Even though the government had stopped calling up draftees, all males still were required to register near their eighteenth birthday. I received a draft card in due course, but Scott received a letter that said that he was not receiving a draft card because the draft no longer existed -- that, in fact, he needn't have registered. (Draft registration was reinstated some time later, but for a short while, at least, the ideal existed in this country and young men were not compelled even to lift a finger for the government.) Meanwhile my father had been telling me all through high school that he intended to send me to the nearby community college when I graduated - that he had selected the house we were living in expressly because it was near the college. But about a month before I actually graduated, he informed me rather abruptly at dinner one night that there was no money with which to send me to school. I would have to figure out some way to do it on my own. I guess he had assumed what I had always assumed - that there would never actually be a need for college money because I was either going to be drafted or go to Canada. I had worked as a bell-hop all through high school, but I had never saved a dime toward college. This was not entirely because my father had promised to pay for it, but also because I never thought I would be able to remain in America when I came to be of college age. (I didn't know about college deferments.) Nor could I see myself continuing to bellhop past high school -- I would never be able to support myself with that low-paying job. At the same time, too, I couldn't decide what I really wanted to do in life. I had decided in the fourth grade that I wanted to be a writer, but somewhere along the way I also had decided that an actor's life was the life for me. As a consequence of all these factors, and as a consequence of the fact that I was too dense to think of asking a counselor at school if there were any grants for college, I began to consider enlisting. All through my childhood, various men I knew had told me that they were veterans and that their biggest regret in life was that they had mustered out at the end of their first hitch. Many's the time I heard a teacher or family friend in their late thirties or early forties comment: "I could be retired by now if only I had stayed in." I decided, before I even decided to join, that if I did join, I would stay in for at least twenty years and get that great retirement deal. The way I finally talked myself into enlisting - a step that would have been anathema to me just a short time earlier - was to consider that while I was in the military I could decide whether to become a writer or an actor. I reasoned that if I earned that early retirement I would be able to try my hand at either writing or acting, and if neither worked out, still, at least I wouldn't starve. I also reasoned that if war broke out before twenty years was up, I could find some way to get out, and at least the GI Bill would give me money for college and a guaranteed house loan upon my return to civilian life. Ideally, I thought, I would put in twenty years, retire, go to college, move to New York and either pursue acting or writing. (As it turned out, the GI Bill was substantially changed two years after I enlisted and I suddenly was given a deadline of ten years by which time I would lose any unused educational benefits. I decided to get out as soon as possible). With these and other rationalizations, I somehow convinced myself to do the unthinkable and enlist. My first step in that direction was to contact a Navy recruiter. My father had served two years in the Navy and I thought he would want me to follow his example, especially since I had followed his lead in precious little else in life. But I was willing to follow his example in selecting my branch of service because I already felt like my fortunes had practically followed his own -- he too had enjoyed good luck in avoiding war. He'd enlisted in the Navy just before turning nineteen so he could avoid being drafted into the Army. The war with Japan was at such a crises point, when he joined, that part-way through boot camp he was told that boot camp would be shortened by two weeks so that he and his fellow recruits could be shipped to the front line that much sooner. In spite of this accelerated schedule, though, my father never made it to the front because the front disappeared with Japan's surrender, two weeks before his graduation from boot camp. To my surprise and consternation, my father seemed unhappy when I told him my intentions of following him into the Navy. He spent two hours convincing me that the Navy was horrible, and his arguments were convincing: life in the Navy apparently is nasty and brutish and often short. With logic apparently closing off what had formerly seemed my only logical choice for a first-step after high school, I angrily declared my intention to simply not do anything after school until I starved, and then I stormed off to my room and slammed the door. About ten minutes later, my father knocked on the door to my room and when I let him in, the first words he said were: "You know, you might like the Air Force. It's a lot different than the Navy." He told me that the Air Force was much less stuck on spit-and-polish and military honors, and was much like any other job in any other workplace. (None of which turned out to be true.) Well, I didn't care. I just wanted to join up, and I didn't want to have to fight him about it, so off I went to talk with the Air Force recruiters. I had decided long before that if I ever did enlist, I would only be willing to do so as a cryptographer. Codes and ciphers had fascinated me as a boy, and I thought that only the sheer joy of getting to play with such things could induce me to this step that was so contrary to what I had wanted for myself just months earlier. As an inducement meant to lure young people into the military, the volunteer forces had started offering guaranteed jobs, so that you could know what you'd be doing before you signed away four years of your life. I figured this new policy would guarantee me a cryptographer's berth, but the Air Force had cleverly designed a system adept at psyching out unsophisticated kids like me. The recruiter in my home town said that I couldn't be placed in a guaranteed job until after my physical, for which I would have to travel, at government expense, to Indianapolis. So, off I went to the Armed Forces Examination and Enlistment Station (AFEES), in the state capitol, all alone and feeling fully in the grip of destiny. The recruiter had given me a bus ticket and a chit for housing at a Holiday Inn about four blocks from the AFEES station. (The fact that the Air Force sent me by bus instead of plane should have told me something about how the Air Force intended to treat me for the next four years, but I dismissed this clue as more an indication of Hoosier provincialism than as a mark of the government's global stinginess.) When I got to my room at the hotel, I discovered that there already were three high-strung, pimply kids occupying it. Luggage was strewn everywhere and the trio was lounging on the beds, telling jokes and laughing uproariously. I observed them for a few moments, feeling very much betrayed - the recruiter back home certainly had said nothing about sharing that free hotel room with roommates - especially not three of them. I backed out of the room without saying a word and walked back to the hotel lobby and asked if there was any way I could add a little of my own money to the value of the chit and get a room to myself. I paid ten dollars and soon was ensconced in a private room on a floor away from all the other AFEES guests. Looking through the local paper at dinner that evening, I noticed that a local theater was showing Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in "Hound of the Baskervilles." I had recently read all of the Sherlock Holmes novels, one after the other, so I felt obligated to go. The theater was too far to walk, so I took my first cab ride ever, and felt quite the grandee, spending what seemed an exorbitant amount on one little round-trip. It was late when I got back to the room, but I turned on the TV anyway, and I was just in time to catch the second half of Steve Allen and Donna Reed in "The Benny Goodman Story." The movie was soothing to me, and I dreamed of the day -- a day that I envisioned, with some chagrin, to be more than twenty-years away -- when I would finally take the stage and wow the audiences, like Benny Goodman did. What he accomplished with his clarinet and leadership skills, I would one day do with my singing voice or acting ability (both of which existed more in my head than in reality). But first I would have to get this twenty-year gig with the Air Force out of the way. I reported to the AFEES station in the morning, walking there amid a large pack of teenage boys all headed to the same place. The pack was dispersed along most of the four blocks between the hotel and AFEES, and most of the fellows were walking in groups of four - apparently most of those who had roomed together were reporting in together as well. I walked alone. Uniformed guards stood at the doors, holding them open and directing us to the elevators that would take us to the beginning of the examination-labyrinth. It was a day of lines, and too many details bombarded me for me to remember much of what happened. I do recall, though, that the infamous hernia and hemorrhoid examinations were performed in a long room with a window that ran clear along its length, and I remember wondering if anyone in the office building opposite might be training binoculars at us as the doctor walked down the line holding each of us, in turn, by the balls, saying: "Turn your head and cough;" or when we were ordered as a group to "bend over and spread 'em," while the doctor strode rapidly down the long line of exposed assholes confronting him, looking for who-knows-what deformity, disease or hygiene problem. At one of the last stops for the day, a foot doctor examined me and then "3-T'd" me. That means he temporarily disqualified me from joining, on the ground that I had developed a plantar wart on my right foot, where I earlier had suffered a severe infection. He told me that I would have to go back home and have the family doctor remove the wart. Then I could join, he said. I asked about seeing a recruiter about a guaranteed job before I left, since it sounded like getting past this medical hurdle would be nothing but a formality. But, of course, regulations forbade execution of such a logical idea. So back to Fort Wayne I went, but not before having another experience that should have led me to reconsider my enlistment plans -- by showing me the caliber of morons I would have to endure for the following four years. My recruiter back in Fort Wayne had given me a voucher for only a one-way ticket from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis, and he explained that when I finished my entry exam, I would be given a ticket for the return trip. But somehow things had gotten behind schedule, and I was told that I probably would have to miss the next bus, as there was a tedious piece of red tape involved in getting my return ticket. I was supposed to have a recruiter at AFEES fill out a travel voucher, which I then was supposed to hand in at a particular office on another floor of the building to get the actual ticket. I would never have time for all the steps, I was told by a staff sergeant who had a Kentucky accent, a neanderthal brow and the squarest jaw I have ever seen. Then his eyes lit with inspiration. "Hold on," he said. "I think I have a ticket here no one ever used." He reached into his desk, pulled out a ticket and told me to hurry to the station or I still could miss my bus. I ran all the way, but when I got there a surly ticket-agent pointed out that the ticket was from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis, and she refused to change it for the ticket I needed. So, back I went to AFEES, went through all the requisite red tape (now that I had plenty of time until the next bus), and finally got a proper ticket. The wart was duly burnt off by our family's doctor, and I made plans to return to Indianapolis. This time, though, I decided there would be none of this Holiday Inn crap. I worked at the Marriott Inn in Fort Wayne, and that chain allows its employees to stay, while traveling, at any member of the chain for free. My friend Zook also worked at the Marriott and, drawn by the prospect of a night of revelry at the Indianapolis Marriott, he agreed to go along with me and keep me company. The Marriott was clear across Indianapolis from the AFEES, though, so it was an expensive cab ride there. (Only my second cab ride, but I felt like an old pro. I didn't even feel out of my element when the driver suddenly offered to smoke a joint with us. Acting like this kind of thing happened to me all the time, I nonchalantly accepted on behalf of Zook and me.) Once at the hotel, Zook and I had an unforgettable night. Although we were only eighteen and the drinking age was 21, we passed for adults at the bar, and we put away about six bottles of burgundy and smoked several joints in our room. We also tried to play a pointless con game on a kid not much younger than us whom we had met in the bar. For some obscure reason that we couldn't even fathom at the time, we tried to convince this kid that I was a singer/songwriter named Shawn Phillips -- an actual artist, of whose work I'm very fond. We also spent some time in the afternoon watching TV in the room, and "The Benny Goodman Story" was playing again. (This Goodman coincidence got weirder all the time. The day I flew to Lackland for my first day of basic training, "The Benny Goodman Story" was playing on a TV in the lobby of the airport in San Antonio when I arrived, and the movie also played again on a local TV station the day I mustered out of the Air Force, in Spokane, Washington). I got as drunk that night at the Indianapolis Marriott as I had probably ever been before, and that's saying a lot. Probably I even got a mild case of alcohol poisoning that night -- certainly I have rarely been as drunk again -- even during the next ten years, when I was hitting the bottle particularly hard. It was almost impossible to wake up on time the next morning. Before we finally passed out, Zook and I realized that we had spent our last dollar at the bar, and so we would not be able to take a cab back to AFEES in the morning - we would have to hitchhike. That meant that we had to request a wake-up call for much earlier than we had intended or wanted. Somehow I opened my eyes the next morning, climbed into a bathing suit and plunged into the ice-cold pool outside our room. That revived me a little, but I suffered all day from a vicious hang-over, and because we couldn't afford breakfast, I also was inflicted with great hunger pains all day as well. Thank goodness we got a ride almost right away. We were toting a lot of luggage that we probably should have left at home - even a stereo, and even a cane that I carried as an affectation at the time. We were afraid that the mound of luggage would scare away potential rides even if our bedraggled condition did not. And for about five or ten minutes it seemed like our fears were to be realized, but finally a friendly old man in a beat-up Chevy sedan of some type picked us up and, when he heard that I was going to enlist, insisted on driving us right to the AFEES door. Having my foot re-examined turned out to be a mere formality after all, and shortly after getting that detail out of the way, I at last faced a recruiter authorized to do the paperwork to make a cryptographer out of me. The sergeant explained that he was not actually the one who handed out the jobs. He said that after I told him what job I wanted, he would call Lackland Air Force Base, in San Antonio, Texas, and someone there would tell him when an opening was expected in that field. He would then set up my enlistment to begin when the job came open. I told the sergeant what I had in mind and he picked up the phone. His side of the conversation went like this: "I have a young man here who wants to be a cryptographer. Oh, really? Oh, I see. Huh." He hung up the phone, turned to me and said: "That's strange. They said there are no more openings for that job for anyone. They're doing away with the career field." I feel sure, or at least I want to feel sure, that if only I hadn't been so hung-over, if I hadn't been so weak from hunger and if I hadn't already invested so much time and energy in this process, I would have stood up right then and said: "Okay. Thanks anyway. See ya'." But instead, I sat there silently until finally the recruiter said: "Tell you what I can do. I've got a job here that does involve some work with codes. It's called Aerospace Control and Warning Systems Operator." Like a big dummy, I asked: "What is it?" After basic training, I finally discovered that the job was absolutely nothing like the description he gave me in answer to this question, and the so-called code work was so incredibly insipid and routine, it really couldn't be called code work at all. But that was later. On that day in the AFEES recruiter's office, I suddenly heard myself agreeing to spend four years of my life doing a job about which I knew practically nothing, and to come back on December 16th to start. I gained some benefits from joining the Air Force, but all in all I consider it to have been a mistake, so I often wonder, when I look back on this pre-enlistment stage, how I could have been so blind to all the signs that should have warned me away. Giving myself a hang-over on decision-day was only the last in a series of mistakes. The first of my mistakes might have been my getting a room to myself that first time I went to Indianapolis. I did that because within just a couple moments I could see that the other boys in that room were obnoxious creeps, and I simply didn't want to have to put up with them. But if I hadn't insulated myself from that experience, I might have been so fed up by morning that when the doctor 3-T'd me, I might have simply never reported back to be re-checked. I guess sometimes a little pain early on can save a great deal of suffering later. But then again, when I think of all the other signs I somehow missed, I have to admit it's likely that nothing short of a fresh outbreak of war could have, by then, deterred me from my plans to enlist. (I wonder what would have happened if a war had erupted and spoiled my enlistment plans. How differently my life might have turned out in Canada!) In the process of writing this account, I have realized what it was that really drove me to enlist. Perhaps I was even aware of it at the time, but over the years I somehow forgot. Now, though, I remember. The early retirement, the GI Bill benefits, the fact that the war had ended and that it appeared that the military would be safe enough for the foreseeable future, the fact that I had devised no alternative plan - these all were rationalizations I used to persuade myself to enlist. But the actual driving force behind my decision was my deep-seated desire to get as far away from home as possible, as quickly as I could. When I was eighteen, I still had not forgiven my parents for moving us to Fort Wayne four years earlier, and now I also felt bitter resentment against them for breaking their promise to help me with college. On top of that, I had started smoking cigarettes and marijuana in high school, and had mostly kept that hidden from them (at least, they accepted my denial when they told me they suspected me of doing both), and I felt that I would be better able to hide my vices if I was at a far remove from them. And on top of all this, I had the example of both my brothers to influence me. They had each enlisted immediately after fighting horrendously with my father, and it was obvious to me, even at age ten, when Mike enlisted, and at age thirteen, when Dave briefly joined up, that their enlistments had less to do with the draft than with wanting to get away from home. The draft didn't take young men until they were nineteen, but Mike and Dave both had enlisted at age eighteen, as soon as they could legally do so. I also signed up at age eighteen, but my conflicts with my father were less openly hostile than theirs had been, so gaining my independence seemed, at times, like less a factor in my decision than it really was. Like I said, perhaps I was aware of this motivation at the time - I don't see how I could have maintained such strong negative feelings about my parents and not have been aware of the influence those feelings exerted on my decision. But almost as soon as I got to basic training, I found that I missed my parents very much and over the next few years I began trying to mend my relationship with them. Eventually, I forgot some of my resentment against them, and somehow in the process of forgiving, I began to forget that leaving home was my primary reason for enlisting. Once I did that, all I had left as "reasons" were the rationalizations I had told myself at the time. And since the rationalizations simply had to do with fringe benefits, I eventually began to feel that the decision was a stupid mistake, and before long, I began to see some truth in the quip that I had simply gotten drunk one day and awoke later only to "find myself in the Air Force." But the truth is, I wasn't shanghaied, tricked or cudgeled into enlisting. Joining the Air Force was the only ticket I knew of for a flight to somewhere far away. How could I not have grabbed at the chance to go?
I was six years old the first time I fell in love, and seven when I lost my soul-mate forever. I can’t remember whether she moved away or we both did. But I’ll never forget how we met. In a sense, this story starts long before I met April, because if not for the way my parents and my older brother had early-on sparked my interest in reading, I would probably never have experienced the delight of holding April’s hand or of sharing confidences with her at every recess.
My mother tells me that I postponed learning to speak until well past the usual age. I would point and grunt at things until I was three or almost four, she tells me. I was about thirty when my mother happened to mention this tidbit for the first time, and it struck me then as a fact quite inconsistent with what I know about myself and my love for the English language. But knowing myself a bit better now, I can form a guess about this that at least seems plausible. First, I am lazy, and no doubt it seemed to me to be more work to speak than to grunt. Second, I have always resented authority of nearly every kind, especially the unstated authority of social convention, and I have always tried to get out of having to do all the cattle-like things that others allow themselves to be herded into doing, like waiting for the “walk” light at street corners, or having good attendance at school. To rebel against the convention of communication by speech is just like something I might have done. And third, I might have been trying to invent my own language just to prove I needn’t necessarily learn everyone else’s. There might well have been nuances to my grunts. I like to believe there were.
Well, there are some things that everyone gets herded into doing that not even I can wriggle out of, and speaking turned out to be one of those. Once I was forced to it, though, I had little difficulty learning -- not that I was particularly accomplished or put much effort into learning. But I was treated like a minor prodigy at school, nonetheless, apparently because most other kids there had a tough time catching on to language and I didn’t.
My brother Dave was also an avid reader, and, because he was five years older than I, he was my most influential role model -- he was an “old person,” to me, but of all the oldsters I knew, he was closest to me in age and personality. All through my childhood, my parents would berate him constantly for staying up too late -- often until two or three in the morning -- reading in his bed. I thought that was a harmless, and even a tremendously brilliant, thing to get in trouble over, and I vowed to get into the habit of late-night reading as soon as I had the ability
Dave knew about my interest in following his various bad examples, and whether that was the reason I can’t say, but the fact is he took it upon himself to teach me some of the rudiments of reading before I went to Kindergarten. He never sat me down with a book or went out of his way in any formal sense, but, using street signs and billboards, Dave provided me some of my first lessons in alphabet recognition and phonetics. He also handed down to me some of his reading primaries from kindergarten and first grade.
So, by the time I was four or five, I could read any sign I saw. I read my first real novel before I was six and it took me less than a day. This turned out to be good preparation – almost too much, really – for first grade.
On the first day of first grade, the day I met April, our teacher began school by seeing who did and did not know the alphabet. One chair was placed alone in a corner of the room, and the other chairs all were grouped in the opposite corner. The teacher sat in front of the students, near the
center of the room and facing the lone chair opposite the class. One at a time, we each sat in that hot seat and called out the names of letters as she raised one flash card at a time. The letters were out of order so no one could fake it, and each of us was given one shot at each letter.
Almost all were humiliated by failing in front of their peers. April and I were the only two who knew every letter, and in subsequent days we both were placed in a group of good readers who stayed after school several days a week for extra instruction in language. I don’t remember now, but I doubt I got much out of those extra lessons, because for me the whole point of them very quickly became nothing more nor less than a circumstance that allowed me to walk April home from school each day.
But that’s skipping ahead. At age six, the convention is for little boys to find little girls to be icky, and to find revolting all mushy things like kissing and holding hands. And I was a conventional boy. Until I met April, that is.
I’m not sure what, on that first day of school, made me forget that girls were icky, but April was a beautiful girl and I was affected by her beauty. I wanted to get to know her as soon as I saw her, before class even started. Then, when I saw that she and I could do what no one else could do, I felt a pull toward her that I could not suppress. I also couldn’t express it very well to her, the first time we spoke.
But before describing that first meeting, I must mention that the boys at Navajo Elementary School, even from the first day, organized their play to a degree that is unusual in unsupervised boys, I think. The big thing in those days was to play war, and I’ll never forget that almost every day for the first month or two of school, almost every boy would join in one massive battle, dividing themselves equally into two teams. Unlike with traditional team sports we later played, the team selection was far more democratic and spontaneous than allowing the captains to draft individuals by name in turns -- the agony of every uncoordinated kid who inevitably gets picked only at or near the end of the process.
By contrast, in our wars, much like in real war, two boys were picked by acclaim as the leaders, and whoever wanted to join one could do so -- one simply chose sides and headed off to his captain’s corner of the field and there prepared for battle.
After separating into the corners of the large, square play yard, the two gangs would rush toward each other, holding pantomime machine guns, each boy shouting his weapon into action: ack ack ack ack ack ack, or ratt-a-tat-tat, or eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh. The simulated noise of battle was raucous, but since the guns were invisible, many squabbles broke out at each recess when one boy would refuse to believe it when another boy would tell him that he had just been shot and now was dead.
I was party to one of the first such arguments, that first recess of the year, when someone refused to fall in the hail of invisible bullets I had sprayed in his direction and then had the nerve to advance to within two feet of me and tell me that it was I who actually was dead.
I argued the point for awhile but he was stupidly adamant. That alone would never have stopped me from arguing until I prevailed, but just then I noticed that April was sitting alone on one side of a teeter-totter. I decided that being dead wouldn’t be so bad, at least for the rest of that recess, and I walked over to April. Just as was to happen all my life afterward whenever I approached a beautiful female, I became nervous and self-conscious. I knew that our common link was the alphabet, and it seemed like a decent place to start a conversation.
But even at six years old, I was already smart enough to realize how stupid I had just sounded when I heard myself blurt out: “I made it all the way through the flash cards.”
April, bless her, didn’t take that as the egocentric statement it probably was, but took it, instead, as her cue. She looked up at me and said quite matter-of-factly: “So did I.”
I never played war again. I sat out the battle each morning and afternoon, and April and I would sit on the playground, holding hands and talking. We talked about everything: books, teachers, parents, other kids. We always agreed, and we each said “I love you” to the other just about every day. We walked to school together in the mornings and back home together in the afternoon. We were inseparable. Until our parents separated us at the end of the school year. I immediately became, once again, a conventional boy who found girls “icky” -- until junior high, when enough hormones kicked in to change my mind about girls once and for all.
That was thirty-five years ago as I write this, and yet over all these years, I have probably thought about April and wondered what she’s doing three or four times a week, at least. When I hear the phrase “soul-mate,” April is the archetype that springs to mind.
I still have the class picture taken of us that year, and I pull it out now and then and commune silently with April while looking at her image. Sometimes I think about hiring a private detective to burrow into old school records and try to find out what ever happened to her. Such a hunt would have to start at the school because, although there is much I still recall about April, I can’t remember her last name. But above all things that I do know about April, I know that I will always think about finding her and I never will try to do so.
I’ve changed so much in fourty-four years, the chances of her changing in comparable ways – ways that might allow us to still be compatible – seem negligible to me. And if she’s married now and has tons of children or has grown wrinkled or fat, or if she stopped learning along the way, or became intolerant or became a socialist, I would prefer never to know it. April’s love was a perfect love and she will always be perfect to me. I need to keep her that way.
In addition to posting photos and topical essays in this space, I plan to present some autobiographical essays. The following is an introduction that explains my plan for the series and sets out the broad contours of my life story:
One of the biggest problems for anyone trying to write his life story, I suppose, is how to organize all the material. It would be handy to be able to sit down and remember everything in just the order it happened, just the way it happened. But nothing I know about the human race leads me to believe that’s possible for anyone, and I know I certainly am incapable of any such mentation process.
My mind tends to skip around a lot -- with a memory from one era frequently triggering, in some mysterious way, a memory from another time and place completely. And yet, this process is not entirely random or pell-mell. All my life, I’ve experienced a sort of choppiness in the way time seems to flow. That is to say that even though each day comes one at a time, for me it seems like each day also belongs to a set of related days. I go through periods, lasting anywhere from two or three days to perhaps six or seven days running, in which a particular mood or ambience has me in its spell, to be replaced at its end by another run of days with its own particular set of thoughts, moods and memories.
The tone of each day is set, usually, when I wake up in the morning. I am not a particularly easy riser -- I’m not ordinarily grumpy, but I don’t come fully awake until an hour or two after I leave my bed. So I tend to go through the mornings in a bit of a fog, and that fog is particularly dense for the first fifteen minutes after I get up. It is usually then that some type of mood will establish itself for the rest of the day.
Many times that mood is set intentionally by me with music that I pick out before going to sleep and that I then play as soon as I awake. Sometimes a particular song or set of songs will hold me in thrall for days, and so I’ll start the day listening to that music and then go through the rest of my day singing or humming the same tune.
Other times the mood-of-the-day is set by a color that inexplicably takes on a more vibrant tone for me that day than is usual. Sometimes I’ve gone through several days suddenly noticing all the blue things around me -- and not just noticing blue wherever it was to be found, but also really seeing that particular color -- every nuance of shade or tone or intensity eliciting a peculiarly unique emotion. Then for the next few days I might be cued into red or green or some other color in just the same manner.
Sometimes color and music combine to establish a mood across a span of days. But probably more often than not, these multi-day moods are set off quite randomly by some memory that grabs me just before I open my eyes and gets me thinking about other related memories. Before I know it, I’ve spent three days filling in my odd moments with memories of college in Kentucky. Then after a few days, I invariably wake up with a memory from some other part of my life, and suddenly I’m captivated for a few days by memories of my radio days in Iowa, or my time on a newspaper in Virginia, or of being a bellhop through high school in Indiana, or of law school in Virginia, or whatever. It’s as though my mind sometimes finds it necessary to pull up old memories together in a block, perhaps to do some more processing on them.
The last time I went through a period of intense memories, I also was seized by the urge to begin writing down what I recall of my past. I’m not sure where this compulsion comes from -- perhaps some subconscious part of my mind is noticing a failure of memory that I haven’t consciously noticed, and is driving me to do this before old age robs me of what I know of my life. Or maybe whatever drives me to process my memories so unrelentingly in the first place is behind this. I don’t know. I like to read about psychology and to speculate like this about myself, but I really have no idea. I just know that I have to start writing down what I can remember.
But that brings me back to the original problem. If I tried to write down everything in order, I’d either forget some things altogether or else be constantly skipping from whatever chapter I’m working on in order to add some just-remembered coda to a previous chapter. That would drive me crazy and I refuse to even attempt it.
But I’m not so flighty that I can’t at least stick to one story and finish it before worrying about the next. I often tell anecdotes from my experiences, and that’s what I’ve decided to do here, and so I am organizing this chronology in non-chronological order. This allows me to write in whatever order things occur to me. I can write in random order, taking advantage of my mind’s propensity to dwell on one era at a time. But before I begin with my intended autobiographical essays, I had better at least set out some kind of brief outline of what shape my life has taken up to now so that the lack of chronology won’t be too confusing. This, in brief, is what my life has been:
I was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where my family moved when I was one-and-a-half years old. I have only a few hazy memories of my infancy in Indiana, but many vivid ones from my childhood in Arizona. My parents met in Fort Wayne, where my father was working in a factory and my mother was working as a waitress. I believe we ended up in Phoenix because my father had lived in California and loved the weather but wasn’t thrilled with the culture. Someone he had met there and whose opinion he respected had told him that Phoenix had the same or even better weather and a less toxic pace of living. My father filed that advice away for the future, moved back to the Midwest where his destiny required him to go in order to meet my mother. A couple years after they were married, my dad decided it was time to give Phoenix a try.
When my parents met, my mother had been divorced (I’m not sure how much earlier), and had two children by that marriage, my brothers, Mike (eight years older than me) and Dave (five years older), and my father adopted them when he married my mom. (My brother Dave experienced a variety of medical problems starting in his forties and, sadly, he passed away in his sleep in January 2005 at the age of 53.)
When I was fourteen, my father became unemployed and could not find another job anywhere in Phoenix. He was a tool-and-die maker and had worked in the aerospace industry ever since we arrived in Phoenix. He had worked in several different places because his skills were in demand during the Apollo program and one place would lure him away from another. As long as NASA kept going to the moon, jobs were plentiful and easy to find. But then NASA shut down the moon program and my father was thrown out of work.
My mother took this opportunity to insisit that we move to her hometown, Fort Wayne. She had never liked Arizona’s heat, and missed her mother, father, sister, and various other Hoosier relatives. Once back in Fort Wayne, my father quickly found work at Magnavox – same kind of work, different kind of government contracts – defense, this time.
We spent a year in an apartment in a lower middle-class neighborhood on the south side, then moved to a house in a nicer neighborhood on the north side. The same year that we moved to the north side, I entered high school and it was so much less unpleasant and threatening than the junior high, I almost enjoyed myself there. Up until I started high school, I had cried myself to sleep every night since we had moved. I never walked with my head up, but slouched everywhere and hardly looked anywhere but at the ground.
But in high school, I lost myself in performing arts. I was in choir, swing choir, all of the plays, musicals and talent shows; plus I was on the school paper as a reporter my sophomore year and as an editor my junior and senior years; I also had many, many friends in the school’s drug culture and considered myself to be, in the parlance of the day, a "head." So far as I know, I was the only kid at the school that belonged to the drama/choir, newspaper/yearbook and drug cliques all at the same time. I made good friends with several people in each group and began to adjust to my surroundings better than I had done up to then. (I can hear the straight people saying: You call doing drugs adjusting better?" Well, my adjustment wasn’t perfect, but still, I’d have to answer that question: Yes. You would have had to have seen what a mope I had been before I started doing drugs to understand.)
Throughout high school, too, I bellhopped at a Marriott Inn that was about three miles from my home -- an uncompromising introduction to some of life’s more sordid realities. After high school, I joined the Air Force and became a radar operator. I will save most of the details from this period for various future entries (See "Pre-Enlistment" and "Pre-Enlistment Interlude"), but I should mention here that for my last seven months in the Air Force, I worked a shift of twenty-four hours on duty, and seventy-two hours off. After about three months, I began looking for part-time work with which to fill my off-duty hours and I landed a job as a singing messenger for a Spokane, Washington, company called "Western Onion."
For reasons I still cannot explain to myself, I returned to Fort Wayne, instead of returning to Arizona, when I mustered out of the Air Force at the end of my four-year hitch. Even more inexplicably, I wasted seven or eight months, upon my return, working at Magnavox as an electronics assembler -- one of the world’s dullest jobs. I didn’t stand much of that before quitting in order to start college. I made it through one full-time semester, then realized that, GI Bill notwithstanding, I was going to have to work to make it through college.
My second semester was only a half semester of credit hours – in other words, two classes. One met at ten in the morning and the other met at three in the afternoon, and meanwhile, the only work I could find was a nasty, brutal job in a plastics factory on the midnight shift. I never had a good block of time in which to sleep and I barely survived the semester.
In addition to the fatigue that wore away at me all through each week, I suffered greatly from a bad deal I had gotten myself into shortly after leaving Magnavox. I had joined the Army National Guard to try to help pay some of my college expenses, and I was often deprived of sleep in the one time-block I could usually use for catching up on sleep – the weekends. Those Guard weekends always seemed to roll around every weekend, not just once a month. This was too much work and not enough sleep for me. I dropped out of college at the end of my second semester, and when my one-year contract with the Guard ran out, I declined to re-enlist.
I then turned my hand to waiting tables, and started out at a restaurant near my house, but I lasted there only about seven months. Then I found a job at one of Fort Wayne’s nicest restaurants (The Olympia, which, alas, no longer exists), and I spent a couple years there, and then scaled back to part-time to open my own singing messenger service. The service, which I called "Funny Bunnies," was enough of a success to pay for food but not for shelter. Before long I had fallen far behind on rent and found that I desperately needed to change my situation.
I consulted my oldest brother, Mike, who had moved to his wife’s hometown, Murray, Kentucky, and he told me that if I came down and went to Murray State University, I could no doubt get a grant that, combined with the GI Bill, probably would let me finish my education. I took his advice and moved to Murray, enrolled in school, and got a grant. I found that I still needed income from work, though, so I managed to get a job as a reporter at the school’s public radio station.
The money wasn’t great. In fact, it really wasn’t enough, but the work was engaging, and it fit well with the communications degree toward which I was working. I had come to college hoping to get the training and credentials I would need to become a playwright or scriptwriter, but I left there wanting a full-time reporter job, preferably in public radio.
When I graduated, I again returned to Fort Wayne, not because I wanted to find a job there, but because I wanted to use the place as a base from which to launch a nationwide job search, and felt I could count on the help of family and friends while I looked. My good friend from high school, Barb Umber, and her husband, Dave, opened their home to me for the six long months it took me to find work.
Finally, a job came through, but it was in the last place I ever thought I would live or would ever want to live: Fort Dodge, Iowa. For me, cold is hell, and so, to me, Iowa was hell. But it was a job, and by the time the Iowa offer came through, I was desperate for work.
The only thing that kept me from losing my mind in Iowa was my relationship with Brenda Pennell, who, when I came on board as news director, was the music director at Fort Dodge’s public radio station, KTPR. A romance quickly developed between Brenda and me and after I had been there about a year, we were married. It was Halloween of 1987.
About eight months after that, our manager quit to take over the manager’s position at the public radio station in his wife’s home town, Grand Forks, North Dakota. (If there’s one thing I’ve learned from other people’s experiences, it’s never to marry a woman who is from a place you never want to end up living). When our manager departed Iowa, Brenda became manager of KTPR and proved herself to be brilliant at managing.
When I had been at Fort Dodge for three years, and Brenda for four, we both began shooting out resumes to try to get out of Fort Dodge. She was hired instantly by WMRA, the public radio station in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley. I followed her there without knowing for sure what I would end up doing. I thought maybe I would go back to school – get a master’s in history or something like that.
On a whim, I stopped by the offices of the local newspaper and applied and was hired on the spot as a part-timer. After a month, I was made a full-time employee, and stayed there three years. But I began to be dismayed by the lack of money and the dearth of opportunities for advancement. Through a complicated chain of circumstances, I decided to go to law school. I was admitted by Washington & Lee University School of Law, in Lexington, Virginia, about sixty miles south of Harrisonburg. To keep my commute to a reasonable length, Brenda and I moved to Staunton, a small town about halfway between Lexington and Harrisonburg.
The trip was forty-two miles each way, each day, for my first year. By studying every night from the time I got home until bedtime, and by having no other life at all, I managed to end the year in the top ten percent of my class. But I knew that I could never do a second or third year as a daily commuter, so, at the beginning of my second year I got a small, cheap apartment in Lexington, and I stayed there throughout the week, and only returned to Staunton on the weekends.
One of the reasons I decided to go to law school was so that I would be able to make enough money to be able to move back to Arizona -- finally. (I haven’t mentioned this much up to now, but I never got over my heartache at being forced to leave Phoenix, but up until graduation from law school, I never felt financially independent enough to move back on my own. I wasn’t about to come back only to be driven out again by financial ruin).
The summer before I started law school, Brenda and I took a vacation to Arizona. It was the first time I had been back in more than twenty years, and it was wonderful. Although Brenda hates hot weather, she liked Arizona too (or said she did), and she promised that when I graduated she would move to Phoenix with me. During my second year in law school, I interviewed for summer clerk positions at several Phoenix law firms, and was accepted by a one-hundred-lawyer firm called Jennings, Strouss and Salmon.
I got the news about Jennings, Strauss in November or December of my second year, . Shortly afterward, on January 17, Brenda informed me that she wanted a divorce. The reasons were complicated – too complicated for this short summary, but the problems were intractable. It was time for both of us to move on to other lives, and although that was very sad, we were able to go our ways and remain friends.
The second half of law school was nearly unendurable and I could hardly wait to finish and get out of Virginia. I was so morose during my summer in Phoenix that I alienated several people at Jennings, Strauss, and the firm informed me in the winter of my last year in law school that they would not be offering me a full-time position upon my graduation.
It was probably the best thing that could have happened, but it stung at the time because the firm would certainly have eased my move to Phoenix following graduation. They would have paid for a bar-review course, commonly considered to be a necessity for anyone who actually wants to pass the bar exam; they would have given me money with which to move; and they would have paid me a salary while requiring no work of me until after the bar exam.
Instead, I had to pay for my own move, had to borrow money to pay for the bar review course, and, in order to pay for food and shelter, worked a variety of odd jobs and mooched off my parents.
At the same time I was seeking work, and after my experiences at Jennings, Strauss (writing memos on obscure aspects of business law or on the rules of evidence), I had decided that I was only interested in practicing criminal law. That decision greatly restricted my opportunities for work because most criminal law shops are one-man firms, and there are few associate jobs in the field. While I was waiting for my bar exam results, though, I was given temporary, part-time work by a Mesa attorney named Victor Ortiz, who set me to writing motions on a death-penalty case he was handling, in which a woman was accused of beating to death the three-year-old girl she had been in the process of adopting.
That case ended successfully in that one of the motions Victor had hired me to write was granted by the court and prompted the state to reduce its plea offer from a 25-year sentence to an offer of seven years. Just as the case was ending, I was admitted to the bar and at the same time started clerking for a Phoenix attorney named Joe Chornenky. Joe only paid ten dollars an hour, which is not the kind of pay I went to law school to be able to earn, but he also offered to let me hang my own shingle from his shop and keep anything I made off my own clients to myself, with him paying for the secretarial help I’d need. He even threw me my first client, a DUI defendant who was among the craziest of clients with whom I’ve had to deal.
Fortunately, before this low-paying job lasted for more than a couple months, I was offered an actual associate’s job in a three-lawyer firm known as Henry J. Florence, Ltd., and started work there on January 2, 1996. I’m still there, more than eleven years later, though the firm many years ago changed it’s name to Florence & Bell, Ltd. Sherry Bell, the best attorney I’ve ever met, has been with Henry for something like twenty-five years. A fourth lawyer, Zachary Mushkatel, joined the firm at the beginning of 2007.
Like my parents, I like to stay busy and so over the years I’ve indulged many hobbies when time permitted. My current passion is photography, and this is a hobby I don’t believe I ever will outgrow.
I tried photography in my 20s and loved it, but it cost too much money, and I could afford to shoot so little film that I learned very little, and after about a year I had to give up the hobby as too expensive. In that year or so, I probably didn't take more than a dozen rolls of film -- if that. I ended up selling the camera to be able to afford a car I needed.
But in May of 2006, I bought a Canon Powershot S3 IS, over the next five months I shot well over 20,000 pix! Since improving any skill requires practice, digital has allowed me to learn much more quickly than I did in my previous foray into photography. I certainly wish digital had been developed 30 years ago!! I've never had a more fulfilling hobby.
A few days before 2007 began, I upgraded from my Powershot to a Nikon D200 and have been enjoying photography more than ever before. But this hobby certainly does consume vast amounts of time
I couldn’’t wait to be able to shoot in RAW format, and although it does, as advertised, allow more effective post-processing, it also requires that every single shot get at least a bit of a levels tweak. It sometimes seems to me that my life is divided these days into only three activities: my day job as a lawyer, taking photographs, and sitting at the computer either editing pix or posting them on Flickr. Food and sleep have almost become distant memories from the past!
Recent Comments
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Geology Byotch said:
I really enjoyed the part about your grandparents---I had a grumpy grandmother who was always scowling. She is dead now... read more
on Pre-Enlistment Interlude
Stunning! read more
on Anatomy Of A Sunset