I learned to read in first grade from a Dick and Jane book. "See Spot run. Run Spot run." Spot was Dick and Jane's pet dog. Miss Latimore was my teacher. Mom was occasionally a volunteer room helper. I had a single shot pirate style flintlock toy cap pistol that was my pride and joy. Cap guns were not allowed in school, and would be confiscated if found. One day I brought it with me by mistake. It must have been in my belt under my jacket, and when, on the playground before school, I realized I had it with me, I panicked. I didn't know what to do, so I hid it behind an open door. After school I went to retrieve it and it was gone and I never saw it again.
I was seven years old and I got my first sense of history when I realized what the year "1957" meant. It was our place in time and would never come again.
A new subdivision to the south was going in and after school we would go look at the enormous trenches for the storm drain system with the concrete pipes installed before backfilling. We rolled some large dirt clods down into the trenches and watched them burst when they fell on the pipes. I rolled an exceptionally large one and it made a noise that sounded like the pipe cracked. One of the kids we were with said I broke it and we all fled on our bicycles. I was sure the police were looking for me. Each room in the school at that time had a telephone, and for weeks afterward, every time the phone rang in class (usually the principal wanting something) I was sure it was the police asking for me.
The school year seemed to go on forever and at last summer came.
Dad built a tree house for us boys at Granddad's ranch in a large oak tree. There was a row of tall pine trees and dad wanted to remove one of them for some reason. To keep it from falling on the chicken coops he tied a rope from the top of the tree to the bumper of his car and then used a chain saw to fell it. John and walter and I used axes and hatchets to cut the branches off the tree. At some point the rope that was used on the tree got chopped into many small pieces. It was just a really cool feeling, for a kid, to sever a strong rope with a single blow of a hatchet. When dad discovered the finely divided rope he was furious. I kept my mouth shut, but somehow John got the blame. He got a bare skin whipping with Dad's belt. Walter and I walked down by the creek and we could hear him holler and cry. I felt guilty that John was being unjustly punished but I was terrified of Dad's belt.
Dad bought a .22 rimfire single shot bolt action rifle for John and taught us three boys to shoot. Dad also had a magazine-loading bolt action .22 with 5- and 10-shot clips and a target style peepsight, a semiautomatic .22 with telescopic sight, a 30-06 bolt action hunting rifle with telescopic sight, and 20 and 12 guage pump action shotguns. Dad told me that when I was eight I could have my own rifle too, but (probably wisely) that never happened. We were dangerous enough with BB guns.
Grandfather let us shoot sparrows. We killed many with BB guns. Sometimes Grandfather would let me take his bolt-action .22 and give me one .22 birdshot cartridge and tell me he wanted me to kill one sparrow and bring it to him. I would sit patiently under an oak tree that was full of sparrows, take careful aim, and bang, nothing. All the sparrows would fly away. That .22 birdshot was ineffective at more than about four feet. I would go back to Grandfather and ask him for another cartridge. He would go on about how he expected me not to miss and grudgingly give me another shell.
Grandfather had the best apples. I have never again tasted anything as good as his Watsonville Delicious apples. My brother Walter now has an apple tree with grafted scions from some of Grandfather's trees. One day Grandfather showed me how to graft apple scions. He sawed off the middle of a branch of the host tree, split it, and inserted two scions with their bases whittled to a wedge shape, matching up the outer cambiam with the host. He then covered the whole area with melted grafting wax.
One day our teacher told the class that gravity was due to the "spinning" of the Earth. First, I knew the Earth didn't "spin" but that it took a whole day to revolve once. In a view from space the Earth would appear motionless. Second, centripital force at the surface of a revolving sphere is not normal to the surface, but radial to the axis of rotation, and at the equator would be pointing outward, not into the Earth like gravity does. I wanted to know how gravity worked and I was getting spurious tripe.
Sputnik was launched and hula hoops were a fad. Dad had built us a small "telephone pole" in the back yard to play on. It had a smooth 4 x 4 redwood upright and a 2 x 4 cross piece at the top with 1 x 2 recessed braces. Dad had put authentic utility pole climbing lags into it. John and I were at the top of it one day talking about the apparent contradiction of the Russian economic backwardness and their ability to launch an artificial satellite before the USA was able to perform such a feat.
Dad went on a safari to Kenya with his friend Red Middaugh. Red was a Buick dealer and our family would sometimes go to his house for a barbecue and vice versa. Dad bought a high powered rifle, a Weatherbee .300, that he used to shoot a cape buffalo. Dad would take us boys to the rifle range when he sighted it in. A bullet from that gun would go through about two feet of stacked glossy paper magazines. He dug a bullet out from the stack once and we saw its expanded mushroom shape. Dad and Red made a movie of their safari and brought home lots of trophies: various animal heads and skins.
A cape buffalo is one of the "big 5" dangerous game of Africa. The buffalo charged their truck and was raising the back of it off the ground when Dad shot it from above right between the horns. The buffalo's head was mounted on the wall of the play hall of our house, along with many more heads. Dad also had a lion skin rug with head and a leopard skin rug with its head. One leopard had jumped out of a tree onto their guide and was mauling him when Dad shot it five times. It was too shot up to use as a trophy, but shooting it saved their guide's life. The guide's scalp was torn nearly off his head. Dad sewed him back together.
I had obtained a science book for children called "All About the Human Body" which I devoured. The children's library in Salinas had more "All About" books and I quickly read all of them on archaeology, chemistry, and physics, etc. I remember taking a book with me outdoors at school recess and reading while the other children played.
Dad and Mom had bought me a chemistry set and Dad helped to conduct some experiments. They also bought me a microscope.
John was a bit of a philosopher too. One day he remarked on the impossibility of imagining that there could be nothing, not even space. I had to agree with him, but the question didn't bother me, because if there actually were nothing, it wouldn't be possible to worry about it.
That summer Dad took us boys on a horse and mule pack trip to the Big Five Lakes in the Sierra mountains out of Mineral King and over Black Rock Pass. It was a two day ride up there. We brought tackle for fishing for golden trout. Dad offered cash prizes for the first fish caught, the most fish, the biggest fish, etc. I won them all and Dad seemed happy when he paid me when I went to collect it in his office after the trip.
My friend and classmate, John Wayne Humphries, who lived a few doors away on San Miguel Avenue, was also interested in science and we used to fly kites and model airplanes. Walter would help us launch them.
That year I finished reading Grandmother's collection of L. Frank Baum's Oz books. I was beginning to understand the distinction between magic and science. Science excludes any supernatural agency. Phenomena are part of nature.
I started hanging out at the medical lab at Dad's office. The lab technician there tolerated me I suppose because I was her employer's son. She taught me how to use the real binocular microscope and to examine blood and urine samples. How to use coverslips, to stain, and to use the oil drop for the really high magnification for red cell counts. I used to spend hours looking at pond water, chasing paramecia, etc. Single celled protozoa can have complex behavior, so the simple Pitts-McCulloch view of neurons (two states) was never convincing to me. If a single cell can command the complex motions of thousands of body steering cilia, then a neuron, designed (in a manner of speaking) for thought might be much more complex.
In the summer there was a small carnival in the parking lot in back of the stores on the west side of south Main Street, the block with the Lucky's grocery store and Woolworth's five and dime. Walter and I were there and some kid stole a dime from Walter. A dime in those days was made out of silver and could actually buy something. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was the principle. I demanded that the kid give it back to him, and when he wouldn't I started struggling with him. The police came at the disturbance, and somehow Walter and the kid ended up locked in the back seat of the police car talking to the officers while I looked on from outside. My parents were informed of the incident, and I thought Dad would be angry with me for fighting, but he said he was proud of me for sticking up for Walter.
This page created April 9, 2002.
Updated April 19, 2002.
Last updated May 10, 2004.