After three years at Washington Junior High School, I started sophomore year at Salinas High School on Main Street, a bit closer to home. Foster's Freeze ice cream and hamburger stand, a popular student hangout, was (and still is) across the street. Teenagers cruised (and still do) up and down the street in the evenings in their cars.
The conventional (naive) view is that technolgical capability is boundless. I had observed that there is a sigmoidal (s-curve) function that describes technolgical advances: things go slowly at first, then there are rapid advances until the limits of the technology are encountered and then there are diminishing returns. Take for example railroad transportation: in the 19th century, the miles of installed railroad track were growing exponentially. This trend could not continue indefinitely, of course, or the entire planet would be coverd several layers deep in track.
The rate of railroad track increase went to zero after the War. If you graph the installed miles of track versus time you will get a sigmoidal curve. Another example is transportation speed in general. You know the progression: ox cart, railroad, airplane. Transportation speeds leveled off after the Boeing 707 was introduced in the early '60s. If you graph transportation speed as a function of time you get a sigmoidal function.
The same sigmoidal trend is happening right now with computational power: the processing power per unit cost has been growing exponentially for the last 20 years. This process will hit the wall in about 10 to 20 more years, and when graphed at that time will also show a sigmoidal shape. But what about quantum computers? I don't think they'll pan out. There's no free lunch. If they do become reality, it will be the first case of a technology breaking out of physical constraints.
One day I was in Walter's room and the back cover of a magazine had photos of the Indy winning cars and their speeds (race average). That year's winner was a Lotus with a Ford V8 and the winning speed was about 170 MPH. The speeds were exponentially increasing and walter suggested that by the year 2000 the speed would be well over 200 MPH. Knowing about the limits of technology, and particularly how they applied to the Indianapolis motor speedway, I disagreed and we made a bet of $50. I asserted that the average winning speed at the Indianapolis 500 would not reach 200 MPH by the year 2000. Thirty-five years later I have been proved correct.
Mr. Koch from San Francisco and his wife bought Toys Galore from the Millers. On their recommendation I worked for Mr. Koch after school and on weekends. I was a good employee. I was (and still am) scrupulously honest. I never stole a dime from anyone.
Mom and Dad took a driving trip in Europe, picking up a '66 VW bug in Germany and touring Italy. They flew home, sending the medium blue beetle via ship. When it arrived in San Francisco, Mom drove me up there and I drove it home.
I started working at Don's Douglas gas station. Don loved sports cars and had some friends in the Laguna Seca racing scene. He had an Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce with a 2-liter inline wet-sleeve engine with dual overhead cams and dual two-barrel Weber carburetors. It also had tuned exhaust and a four speed transmission. It didn't run when I started working there, but he overhauled it and was driving it around soon.
I started hanging around with Mark Humphries and his friends Steve Clasmeyer, Richard Gray, and Bobby Katner. Mark had an MG mini that he wrecked and spent a long time repairing without much luck. He was always kind of down on account of not having wheels. He got it running once and then the engine seized up a few days later. Mark and I used to have long philosophical talks. Mark's mother had died when he was quite young. He once told me to beware of thinking something is true just because you think it. That's good advice.
One evening Mark and I were hanging around against the wall outside Mel's Drive-in, AKA "The Valley in the Sky" because it had an inverted roof. A bunch of bikers, the Losers of Monterey, were hanging out there too. One of them was trying to start his bike, a Harley chopper and it would pop a bit but he couldn't get it started. Mark and I, being mechanically inclined, were speculating as to the cause. Perhaps it was bad points or plugs. Another biker overheard our conversation and went and told the bike's owner that "we were talking bad about his bike." He came over to us and challenged us. I said we meant no harm and didn't want any trouble. I hate to fight, but our backs were against the brick wall and he started swinging at me, landing a few. I wrestled with him and got him into a lethal headlock and held him at about 50% max pressure. If he struggled I increased pressure. After about 30 seconds he realized I could kill him if I wanted to. I read his body language and wanting a good way out of this said "let's call it even." He grunted OK and I let him go. I then stepped up to him and offered him my hand. He turned his back on me. The gang's leader looked at him in disgust and said to him "you asshole." I said "Come on Mark, let's go" and we walked away with dignity.
The Vietnam war was occurring. Young men were being drafted and killed. I would be draft age in two years, but I didn't worry about it because I thought the war would be over by then. After all, how hard could it be to defeat a backward nation like North Vietnam? What I didn't know is that our leaders didn't have the guts to execute the war as it should have been. Why weren't we sinking the Russian ships delivering weapons to the enemy? Because we were afraid of the Russians. Why weren't we declaring war on China which was also supplying our enemy? Because we were afraid of the Chinese. We had no business being in Vietnam if were didn't have the stomach for war. It was an incredibly absurd American folly.
Music at the time included the Mamas and the Papas and the Rolling Stones Between the Buttons.
I called Candi the next week and we went to visit her friend Christine Honan, who later died in a traffic accident. I would later rent a room on Main Street from her mother, Mrs. Honan, when I got kicked out of the house when I turned 18 that summer of '67.
I started working at the 7-11 convenience store on San Miguel avenue. The owner gave up the franchise and it was taken over by Monte Carpenter and his wife Connie. They had just had a baby boy Scott. Monte drove a white Datsun pickup and Connie had a new green MGB sports car coupe.
One evening I was robbed at gunpoint by a short man in a stocking (nylon hose) mask holding a 22 caliber revolver. He said "Give me all the money in both registers or I'll blow your funcking head off." The pistol was pointed at my belly at the time. I did as I was told and nobody got hurt. The police never solved the crime. During the robbery the perpetrator ordered everyone in the store to the floor with their hands behind their heads. Then he took their wallets and ordered me to the floor too. He said not to move or he would kill us and then left silently. It was about 20 seconds before we had the nerve to look up and by then there was no sign of him. A similar robbery was committed about an hour later in Santa Cruz.
In the store at the time were my friend Mark Humphries and a top-40 AM radio DJ who went by the name of Mark Sherry. While waiting for the police to come, Mark Humphries and I got to know him. Mark Sherry lived down the street in an apartment building. Once he took me to a "battle of the bands" in Monterey where he was a judge and another time we went to a beach concert near Santa Cruz where we saw the Youngbloods. About half way through their set the Jokers, a motorcycle gang, rode in. Some of them got up on the stage and started harrassing the band members while they were playing. The scene had the potential to turn ugly so Mark and I left. As we walked down the beach toward Mark's car we heard the Youngbloods singing their signature hit song that went "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now."
Mark Sherry played a Canned Heat single ("On the Road Again") on the Salinas top-40 radio station after Mark Humphries and I played the cut for him off their Boogie with Canned Heat album. Canned Heat later became a very successful music group, and played in Salinas on tour. Their song "Going up Country" was featured in the opening sequence of the music film of the Woodstock festival.
Monte was a really nice guy who helped me in many ways. I am sorry I have never been able to repay him, but Monte, if you're out there reading this, I've been paying it forward. I wrecked his store's front plate glass window by doing reckless stunts on my Honda on his sidewalk in front of the store. I could have killed myself in that falling glass but I escaped unscathed. Monte got the window replaced and never told my parents that I did it. Monte taught me the grocery business, at least as much as I could learn at a convenience store.
I wrecked my bike going about 40 MPH on San Juan Drive. A woman in a red Datsun 4-door crossed an intersection when she had the right of way and then slammed on her brakes when she saw me coming. She stopped right in front of me and I was unable to avoid slamming directly into the side of her car. Luckily I was able to jump over her car, did an aerial summersalt with a half twist, and landed on my butt going backward, rolled and hit my head on the pavement. I sprang to my feet, but the forks of the bike were ruined. I had a headache for several days due to the concussion. I hadn't been wearing a helmet and didn't have one.
I eventually got the bike fixed, but it was never quite the same again. I think I sold it to a friend for almost nothing. I purchased a 1958 green Chevrolet Del Rey for $200. It had a six cylinder engine and three-speed transmission and would go to Monterey and back on a dollar's worth of gas. That was a great old car (but not fast).
I had flunked the fall semester of my senior year high school English so I was able to make it up and graduate with my class by taking a correspondence course in English literature. I actually enjoyed it and learned more in that one course than in all of my high school English classes. I played chess with Connie Carpenter and wrote poetry in iambic pentameter at their apartment. Music at the time included the Beatles Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Moody Blues Days of Future Passed.
That summer Mom and Dad took John and me to Europe for a month. We spent three weeks in Britain and a week seeing the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. On the tour bus in Britain I met a South African girl who was 20 (three years older than I was) named Jennifer Margaret Northcote Reid from Pinetown, Natal. She worked in a record shop. At the first morning stop on the tour she put a shilling in the jukebox and played "Monday, Monday" by the Mamas and Papas. She had never heard of the Jefferson Airplane, a San Francisco group whoose second album Surrealistic Pillow was popular in California at the time. In the town of Bath we went to a pub and had red vermouth. I wrote to her once after the trip but never heard from her. Getting back to California I had a whole new perspective on life in America.
A few days later, after my 18th birthday, I was evicted without warning from nine San Juan Drive. I took a bed, a table, and a chair. Mark Humphries borrowed his father's pickup truck and helped me move into a room in a house on Main Street across from the High School. I registered for classes at Hartnell College in the fall.
This page created April 9, 2002.
Updated April 19, 2002.
Last updated May 7, 2004.