A Childhood

It was 1968, I was five, and I was soaking wet from the rain. The man in the red 1950’s pickup truck had the passenger door open, and said, “hey, get in, I’ll drive you home.” I was walking alone after school from Kindergarten, and home was a half-mile away. I knew who the man was, but shook my head, and kept walking. He asked once or twice more, then drove off.

The man – who was actually a nice guy who was a neighbor – then stopped at my house to tell my mom of our encounter. When I got home, she hugged me and told me how proud she was of me. I’d been told not to go with strangers, and I didn’t.

When people hear this now they always say, “but back then it was safer.” In some ways it was, but I bet you there were more serial killers driving around my city in the 1960’s and 1970’s than there are today. Fortunately, I never ran into one.

I had to walk by myself because my dad, a teacher, was at work, and my mom, a former teacher who didn’t drive, had other kids to care for. It was a perfectly normal thing. We didn’t have any relatives within 3,000 miles, so I grew up with friends instead of cousins.

By first grade, my mom arranged for me to walk with a group of kids to elementary school. The first day of school my dad drove me a couple blocks away to drop me off at the house with the older kids, a grade ahead. He pulled up and said, “Here you go.”

I said, “Dad, this isn’t the house.”

“Sure it is,” he replied as I got out.

He drove off, and I knocked on the door. Is this the Smith house? A woman looked at me with a smile. No, that’s two doors down. So off we went.

It was almost a mile to the school, and we always took the alleys when possible. Alleys were more interesting. There were dangerous dogs and odd things to see.

Dirt clod fights were a thing for some reason. Find a construction site or vacant lot, grab a good-sized dirt clod – rocks were frowned upon – and chuck it at your friends. Good clean fun, but the pomegranate bush halfway home was next-level. Pomegranate juice stained your clothes, so they were considered the nuclear weapons of grade school, and rarely used. We learned the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction earlier than most.

This was the height of the Cold War. The Russians were the omnipresent bogeyman. We had “duck and cover” drills in school, as if that’d save us. When I came home from school, the black and white TV with three channels would have the Vietnam War constantly on the news, completely unlike today. As a kid I soaked it all up, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, body bags, burning babies. War wasn’t a video game then, like it is today.

I watched more news than most kids because when my dad came home in the late afternoon, he’d change whatever episode of “Gilligan’s Island” or “Bewitched” I was watching over to the news, which back then was actually news, not partisan op-ed.

Dad was a history major - a first-generation American citizen - and my grandfather, during in his sole visit to the west coast, built a shed behind our garage to house my father’s books. Hundreds and hundreds of books, mostly non-fiction. I spent many hours in that shed, trying to avoid black widows while randomly perusing college history books, or something by Ayn Rand (who I later outgrew), a silverfish-eaten newspaper from World War II, or the transcript from some House Un-American Activities Committee hearing. Reading a lot taught me how to write and spell.

I tried to use some of what I’d learned once in second grade. We had some sort of school lunch program. I vaguely remember a punch card we had for cartons of milk or, well, punch. One day the punch was bad. It had turned. My other best friend and I decided to act. We wrote up a petition stating that we had been served rotten punch, and we demanded justice, meaning “normal punch.”

Our friends signed the petition, and, after school, some of the parents that we knew who were there also signed it. It turns out that one or more of the parents even called the Principal to ask what was going on. Bad move for us.

The next morning my friend and I were summoned to the Principal’s office, two scared 7-year olds. She proceeded to scream at us about the ruckus we had caused. All I really remember is her yelling, “Who do you think you are?? Eighth-graders??!!”

We thought we were patriots, little Thomas Jefferson’s doing our civic duty with our petition. The Administration felt otherwise. Both of us were by now crying, and ordered to go back to class and apologize to our teacher for…I’m not sure what, but we did. Our teacher smiled and hugged us, and said “it was going to be ok,” and it eventually was, but not that day. It wasn’t the last time I was screamed at by a Principal or teacher. I learned early on just to accept it. The couple of times I told my parents they sided with the school, so there was that.

We lived in a city where a church, a liquor store, and a bar were all within a few blocks in any direction. There was some crime, but not too much that I remember. I was told that as a toddler I was in our back yard, sitting in a sandbox, when a man with a rifle ran by, dropped the rifle in our yard, and jumped over our back fence. Apparently he’d just robbed a liquor store.

Another time my mom and dad were on our block, walking at night, when a man robbed them at gunpoint. My mom refused to surrender her wedding ring, and was likely about to be shot, when a passerby across the street yelled at the gunman, who ran off with what loot he had. There was the occasional drunken sailor, schizophrenic or vagrant, but I never really felt unsafe.

My best friend lived two blocks away. I walked over there often. He was from a family of 13, one of the youngest, so through his older siblings I was exposed to the 1960’s – good and bad - in a way most my age were not. I had an early appreciation for the Beatles, Creedence, Bob Dylan, and all the other wonderful music of the era. In second grade it was just me and another boy against the entire class in a debate over whether the Beatles or the Partridge Family were better. I still think music peaked in the late-1960’s and 1970’s.

We lived on our bikes, and they weren’t the e-bikes the kids have now. They were real bikes, with no “speeds” – you just had to pedal harder. We’d ride three miles to the bowling alley, or four miles to the movie theater, without a second thought. We rode everywhere. Nobody ever gave us a ride.

I was never home after fifth grade or so. Our moms didn’t know where we were – just that we were with friends, on our bikes, somewhere. No cell phones (or helmets), no internet, no video games, and no Google maps. The maps were in our heads.

I never took a penny from my parents after fifth or sixth grade. I had a job delivering “throw-away” papers – the ones with just ads – on my bike. I think at one point I made nearly $90 a month, which was a fortune for a 10-year old. A twenty-dollar bill then felt like a five hundred dollars today. We always had jobs after a certain age (and later no one we knew got into big debt to go to college – if necessary, you simply got a job, and paid your own way. Tuition was cheap.)

My dad was a teacher, pre-teacher unions, but we had a house near the beach (3BR, 1BA), one car, one black and white TV, and a nice back yard to explore. We dried our clothes on the line. The house Dad bought in the early 1960’s was just over 3x his pay at the time. Today the same house would cost 80 times as much, or more. I have a particular disdain for inflation and those who promote it.

We ate a lot of hamburger helper, and my dad was a whiz at using coupons. We didn’t have much, but we weren’t poor and never went hungry. My school brown bag lunch was almost always tuna or peanut butter sandwiches, and maybe a banana. I never knew anyone growing up with a peanut allergy.

For fun, we’d sometimes pay for one movie, and then when that was over sneak into the next one (“Logan’s Run” was memorable.) Everyone remembers now some parental “be home by dark” rule, but we’d often return from whatever adventure we’d been on in the dark, on our bikes.

There was an incident at the bowling alley once, when I was probably around 11. One of our guys had gone to the restroom, and returned to frantically tell us that a man had tried to crawl under his stall’s door. Our first thought was “let’s go get him!” We ran to the bathroom, but no suspect was to be found. He must’ve known not to mess with us. We did not involve the police, who we generally tried to avoid.

Another time a buddy and I were walking to Cub Scouts, and thought a man was following us. We whispered to each other our plans if he were to make a move. We’d swing our heavy backpacks at him and run. Fortunately, after a few blocks, we turned one way and he went the other, no doubt terrified of our wrath.

We were utterly unsupervised. Even at school, during recess there were almost no adults around. Our school was entirely asphalt – no grass. There was a big metal merry-go-round that we would spin ridiculously until children were hanging on for their lives, horizontally. It was the type of thing that just doesn’t exist today, done in by the lawyers. We LOVED that merry-go-round.

Yes, we all at some point had multiple undiagnosed concussions. It wasn’t unusual to go hope with an egg-sized lump on the back of your head. I don’t remember if we had a school nurse, but I never went. Suck it up.

We’d ride our bikes to practices. For after-school games, we’d all jump in our coach’s van. Our football coach in 7^th grade was a 19-year old fraternity president. We’d practice on the bluffs, and then afterwards ride down to swim or somersault in the waves. I nearly paralyzed myself once doing this.

We had bullies, but generally they’d change their targets often enough that it wasn’t a big problem. I still remember an incident when I was five at Kindergarten that I regret to this day.

There was a little punk in the class, Kevin.  One day I had brought some contraband Hot Wheels cars to school, and was sharing them with a sad kid named Colin, who was sort of the outcast of the class, even at age 5. As we were playing, Kevin walked up and said, “I want to play.” I only had two cars, so I told Kevin that Colin and I already had it covered, sorry.

Kevin then said that if I didn’t let him play instead of Colin, he’d rat on me to the teacher and I’d lose my cars. I looked at Colin and shrugged – sorry, Colin. To this day I wish I’d used some curse words I hadn’t learned yet and told Kevin to take a hike, but I didn’t. I regret that.

By elementary school, just about every boy carried a small pocket knife (I still do. I use it every day.) We’d even sometimes whittle sticks during recess. Today we’d be sent to Gitmo. We had real fist-fights, but never a knife fight. Ever. It would’ve been unheard of, a grotesque breach of etiquette. Same thing with multiple people fighting one guy. Never. It would’ve been considered cowardly. Nobody had a gun either.

I got into a few fights over the years, but generally they’d end with a bloody lip and not much more. As boys we didn’t hold grudges. More than once I was in a fight, and then walked home with my opponent a half hour later, friends again.

My elementary school was middle-class and poor, white and Mexican mostly, with a few Asians and a few black kids.  The Vietnamese and Cambodian population would skyrocket after the fall of Saigon in 1975. I don’t remember any racial incidents. Identify-politics wasn’t a thing. People were treated or mistreated regardless of their skin tone.

We had around forty kids in a class. No aide. My first grade teacher was tiny but tough. You didn’t act up more than once. If you chewed on your pencil you’d get a ruler rap on the knuckles. She taught us to read and do math.

We did have a lot of games then that would appall most parents and principals now. Bombardier, for example, where we’d split a basketball court length-wise, with a team and a bunch of balls on either side (not necessarily just dodge balls, either. Basketballs, footballs etc. were all fair game). Then we’d throw balls at each other from 10 or 15 feet away, hard. If you got hit, you were out. If you caught the ball, the thrower was out. Tons of fun. We had another basketball-adjacent game called “Butts Up” which is probably illegal now.

Kickball was the game of the day (probably because all we had was asphalt). From 2^nd grade on we would play, and we were organized. We’d pick captains and teams in no time. Because of our limited play time, we would continue games throughout the week – e.g., on Wednesday we’d run out, everyone would know their spots – it was bottom of 5^th inning, two out, Joe is on second base…we wasted no time.

Forty years later I’d be at school, as one of the “yard duty” parents, watching over a large grass field. I’d watch kids with a 15-minute recess spend 14-minutes deciding who the captains would be. It was embarrassing. Where did we go wrong?

Back in the day (to continue to sound like an old man), there were NO parents at our practices, ever. There were also almost no parents at any of our games. Why? They were working. None of my friends was ever at a basketball game or football game staring sadly into the crowd looking for mom or dad. We understood.

Today there are often more parents than kids at practices and games. I myself went to almost all of my kid’s games - I get it, I watched my kids like a hawk - but I think many children have lost the ability to solve problems, organize themselves, and resolve conflicts. From their earliest age there were always parents around, organizing things and breaking up arguments, so the kids didn’t have to.

We had to learn all this on our own, without mom or dad (or a teacher). These life skills seem to be lacking in many (but not all) younger people today. Parents need to realize that it’s not always best to rescue kids from uncomfortable situations.

One of the most formative experiences of my life was when I was twelve. A 14-year-old friend and I were hiking in the mountains of Southern California with our Scout troop. We’d started out before dawn, with heavy backpacks for a long day hike. We were the oldest, and kept getting ahead of the group, waiting for the rest to catch up, along with the few adults. The third or fourth time, we waited, and they never caught up, so we kept going up.

Somehow we lost the trail, and the day went south. We climbed up and down ridge after ridge, trying to find the trail. Both of us at one point or another over the hours felt like giving up, but we soldiered on, encouraged by each other. We had little water, but there were still patches of snow on the ground. We were tired, but ended up eventually tumbling down the side of the mountain to find a lake that re-oriented us towards the trail. We had a map, and compass, and found the trail, so were never really scared, just exhausted, and very thirsty.

We reached the summit after dusk, and began a long trek down switchback trails at night via flashlight. As we descended, we saw a campfire in the distance, and headed toward it. Around 2AM we came across two men who looked like they we in the Manson family, and asked them for water. They gave us some, and then one asked if we wanted to smoke some weed. My buddy immediately said, “Yes,” but – not wanting to end up in a shallow grave – I nudged him and said, “No, thank you. Let’s keep going.”

Probably realizing I was right, my friend didn’t argue. We walked on for a couple more miles, exhausted and very thirsty. We eventually found a suitable area to lay our tarps and sleeping bags, and fell asleep. That night, I still remember dreaming of a man on horseback (like Ed Tom Bell in “No Country for Old Men”) riding up and handing me a canteen of water to drink.

We woke up, still thirsty, packed up and walked on. Soon I saw a stream, which was a Godsend since we could boil water to drink. Before doing that though, we trudged on, and another mile down came across the campsite where our troop had spent the night. Dumb luck.

Coincidentally both my dad and my friend’s dad were on this trip, and they walked up to us, “Hey, what happened?”

We said, “Didn’t you look for us?”

My friend’s dad said that the younger boys had altitude sickness, so they’d turned back the day before. “We figured you two were ok,” he said.

No helicopters, no search crews, no rescue dogs, no KTLA camera crew. Can you imagine if this happened today? We were proud.

While my mother was a little upset later at my dad, my friend and I had such a huge boost to our self-confidence it was all worth it. We’d learned a lot about ourselves during our adventure, and I think much of who I am today is because of incidents like this, and how I grew up generally – we learned to be independent, to think on our feet, to adapt. We had to.

Looking back, I think I had a great childhood, but I fear that much of what was best about my childhood would be considered parental negligence today.

I’m not suggesting pushing little Jimmy out the door at age five to fend for himself as a lamb amongst wolves, but little Jimmy still needs to learn about wolves, and coyotes, and raccoons, and how to deal with them.

Now get off my lawn.