Stockton, California – 1954 – 1959

Moving to Stockton at age 13 was somewhat traumatic. It was quite a culture shock going from a small town of 1500 to a city of 75000 people. I don’t remember ever seeing a non-white person in Royalton. Stockton had so many different ethnic groups (Black, Latino, Oriental, etc.). Shortly after arriving I was enrolled at Edison High School. For a poor white kid, it was a major cultural shock. I didn’t really know anyone and no friends to speak of. That changed and I got to be friends with neighbors in the Sierra Vista Housing Project where we lived.

Unlike Royalton, there were several gangs at Edison and you soon learned to avoid them. Luckily, I never had a major problem with them. I’m not sure just exactly why that was. I’m sure that fear played a large part in keeping a low profile. I remember that there was an area called Dogpatch where the Latino gangs roamed. The advice I was given was to never go there which I gladly followed.

I remember witnessing a fight between two Black girls. I have no clue why they were fighting. I can vividly remember one of the girls was rather well endowed. The other girl had the longest red finger nails I had ever seen. I can still see that girl curl her fingers like claws and sink them into the other girls breasts and fling her around. That was the worst fight, male or female, I’ve ever witnessed. I didn’t stick around to find out the final outcome.

We had to walk to school and took a short cut through train yards. Trains were moving fairly slow and we had a habit of jumping on the car ladders and riding for a bit. It was stupid to do that but since when do teenagers have any common sense. We quit hopping trains the day we found out that a boy, not someone we knew, slipped while trying to grab the ladder and lost both of his legs. I remember him showing up to school in a wheelchair afterwards.

There were a lot of poor families, us included, living in Sierra Vista. It wasn’t the worst place and definitely a step up from Royalton. The project had a Community Center and gym that I went to occasionally. I was a tall, gangly kid and not very coordinated. There was a basketball coach that tried to work with me to turn me into a player. He would have to do drills practicing hook shots with both hands. I gave up on it because, being a know-it-all teenager, I couldn’t see any benefit to it. I wish I had listened and worked at it because it probably would have gotten me into high school ball. Maybe even college. I did eventually wind up playing intramural and noontime ball in the Air Force which I enjoyed.

My first job was working for a crop duster named Anderson who was a neighbor. I think I made 50 cents an hour. My job was strictly manual labor. The plane was a Stearman biplane. It originally had two cockpits and Andy had converted the front one into a fiberglass lined hopper for the chemicals he used. The hopper had a metal folding lid to keep the stuff from blowing away when dusting a field. It was also where I sat while we flew to whatever job we were doing that day. The drill was that the day before or that morning we would transport bags of dust or barrels of spray chemicals by truck to the field being treated. We would go back to the airfield and then fly back to do the job. Looking back, I realize that it was fairly dangerous. I was sitting inside the hopper, no seat belt, with the lid pulled almost closed. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. It was kind of fun flying along at 1,000 feet or so looking at the countryside. We would usually peel off and strafe whatever field was being treated. That included occasionally going under telephone wires or going up and over trees at the end of the fields. At the time, I thought that was fun. I lost my enthusiasm for it after one incident. We returned from a job and was pushing the plane into the hanger. It jumped the blocks and one of the wings had a strut damaged. Over the next week, I helped Andy repair it and he gave it a test flight. We were flying to a job after that and was zipping along at about 1,500 feet. All of a sudden, the right wing and nose of the plane tilted down. I didn’t think much of it since we usually did that to check out a field. The next think I knew we were standing on our tail, the nose pointing skyward, and the left wing tilted down. I almost crapped my pants. I had visions of the wing falling off and me dying. Shortly, we landed and I shakily got down. I wasn’t very calm and asked Andy, “What the f**k was that”? He said, “I just thought you’d like to see what a wingover felt like.” Andy was an old barnstorming pilot and got a kick out of my reaction. Sometime after that I saw a newspaper clipping of a crash he had before I worked for him. The article had a picture of the totally destroyed plane. Andy didn’t have a scratch on him and walked away from it. He told a reporter that the only thing hurt was his pride.

One of my least prideful memory of high school was my sojourn into crime. We used to visit a local supermarket to ‘buy’ something for lunch. I had a coat with a tear in an inside pocket. As we went around the store, I would pick something up (usually cupcakes, twinkies, cherry pies) and slip them into the pocket and from there into the lining of the coat. We bought something to cover our tracks and then escaped to enjoy our goodies. To this day, I’m surprised we never got busted. I wonder if there’s a statue of limitations for shoplifting.

I don’t remember why but I quit going to Edison in my junior year and went to a vocational school. The only class I really remember was typing. It’s one skill that I’ve always been glad I learned. It kept me out of doing other work at times in the Air Force. I was usually the only one in the office that knew how to type so I got “stuck” with typing reports, etc. Little did they know that it wasn’t a punishment to me. It really came in handy when I got into computers 20 years later.

I remember spending some time just riding buses. Got to know one of the drivers and would ride from one end of the line to the other just bsing. It was also the only way to get around town. I would ride down to the YMCA just to hang around shooting pool or watching TV. I had one of the most embarrasing times of my life there when I enrolled in a talent show doing an Elvis impersonation. I was horrible! That cured me of performing on a stage. You could me all kinds of people at the Y. I met some of the musicians performing with Richie Valens. The Civic Auditorium was just down the street and they hit the Y to shoot pool. They also liked to bullshit people. They almost had me believing that the song ‘Donna’ was written for a girl from Royalton (LaDonna Carpenter). I’ve often wondered in how many towns they told that story to unsuspecting teens.

Somehow I ended up at a bowling alley near to the YMCA keeping score for pot game bowlers. There would be five or six or more bowling on a pair of alleys and I got a reputation for being quick and accurate. Most of the winners were fairly generous in tipping the score keeper and kept me in running around money.

I decided to join the Air Force shortly before my 18th birthday. I waited until I was 18 because then I wouldn’t need my parents permission to join. I considered joining one of the other services. Didn’t like the idea of being on a ship so the Navy was out. Discounted the Army because at 6’4″ I made too big of a target since ground pounders tend to get shot at. A friend of mine had joined the Marines and I was seriously thinking about it until he was involved in an incident. He was assigned guard duty on one of the towers at the prison at Camp Pendleton. They had to climb up a ladder on the outside of the tower to get to their post. Pat was coming down the ladder after a shift when he fell landing on a car and broke his leg. While in the hospital, he received an Article 15 (administrative punishment). His offense was “damaging government property”. Himself not the car! Joining the Marines lost some of it attractiveness after that so the Air Force won by default. I was signed by my recruiter supposedly to go into Weather Observing. Proof that recruiter aren’t always truthful, I ended up in the Medical field. I was processed through the center in Oakland and was sworn in on February 4, 1959. The Air Force pays for your travel and I had fun filling out my travel voucher which includes specifying your mode of travel (mileage by car, bus, train, etc.) I asked the clerk what I should put down since I went from Stockton to Oakland by private plane. He looked at me like I was crazy and I had to explain that the crop duster I worked for flew me in his Cessna. I think we finally settled on car mileage.