The heart of Saturday night; the entire town in attendance in the days before the future happened. As the varsity football team trotted off the field at halftime they were passed by the marching band, the high stepping big redhead pumping his baton, leading the group at double time, the sax players hacking with that unmistakable honk, backed up by the sweet sugary notes of cornets and trumpets, soaring over it all like syrup. Big Jim Maggini holding the bottom steady with his baritone Saxophone, Doyle Douglas matching him beat for beat on the bass drum. Twittering and fluttering over the top like a flock of giddy birds, the flutes. Oh Madeline, Madeline, Bruce Heir and Masaki working those ‘bones, wonderful, wonderful, pounding out James Brown’s “Night Train.” The entire crowd on it’s feet whistling and applauding in time to the insistent tempo of the drum section. The booming heavy base drum and the pick-up sticks of the snare drums rattling their dry bones in the cool night air.  Coda

Richie packed his Blacktop Fender Strat, slid the case into the baggage compartment and flew off to immortality. The eighth grade girls at Branch Elementary stood quietly in their poodle skirts; devastated, they cried for the boys they didn’t know. The music died.  Coda

Hillary wore a yellow dress. She put her wild auburn hair up; I wore my one dollar Silky shirt. I picked her up in my old blue Dodge Dart surf car and we drove to the valley where the Hawaiian Kings once lived. We sat on the grassy slope of the Honolulu bowl an waited for the show to start. The band who opened the show looked like nothing we had ever seen before, long, thick hanks of hair flying off in all the directions of the compass just like Medusa, they wore bright vibrant clothes on a stage hung with Jamaican flags. Potted palms littered the floor. They shuffled around on stage picking up their instruments, adjusting mics, plugging in. Finally they gathered, stood with their backs to the audience and turning, the lead suddenly counted out, one, two, three…and “Dread, Natty Dread now. (Natty Dread)” Instantly the entire audience was on their feet dancing and swaying. Bob Marley and the Wailers. What a night. It was perfect, Hillary was perfect. I’ve long forgotten who the headliners were but the Wailers I will never forget. Today, I was grocery shopping and I heard the same song, put to a thirty piece orchestra and played as Muzak over the PA system at Von’s Market. “Pick up on aisle 6.” Oh man, too sad.  Coda

Ernie slid onto the little bentwood cafe chair, sitting under the dark green awning of the Deux Magots, he turned to the hovering waiter and asked for espresso, it being too early for a man who took great pride in the ability to put away drink. Maybe a little later a gin and tonic with Angostura Bitters. As the day warmed, other dwellers of the Paris Demimond began to stroll the Boulevard Saint-Germain, Studiously ignoring the big man at the wrought iron table in the way that the French so perfectly do, a little lift of the chin, a turn of the shoulder an inward look. A brilliantly dressed man, still in a tailored tuxedo, boiled shirt with an Arrow color, a perfectly tied bow tie, the white carnation still fresh after a long night gave the slightest of nods to the man at the table and slid sinuously onto a chair and resting his chin on his manicured right hand, with a sly look and a twinkle in his large, liquid brown eyes, said, “Hemingway,

Birds do it, bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let’s do it, let’s fall in love”

Ernie smiled his wicked smile under the caterpillar mustache.  “Cole, he said.”  Coda

“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”  Coda

Thank you: Stephan Grapelli, Jean “Django” Reinhardt, The 1962 Arroyo Grande Marching Band with drum major Robert Morefield, Ricardo Valenzuela, Robert Nesta Marley and the Wailers, Hillary Weireter, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Cole Albert Porter, and James Paul McCartney.

There is an island in Pacific Ocean. It is the Mecca for surfers from around the world. In the days before professional surfing transformed this place, it was peopled by young surfers from all over the world.  Many lived on a shoestring, putting up with the privations this caused in order to surf the most incredible waves on the face of the earth.

We will not say there aren’t good waves elsewhere, because there are. The difference is that there are so many high quality surf breaks in such a small place. In an eight mile stretch; a drive of just 20 minutes, are the most famous surf spots on earth. Even non-surfers know the names of the Banzai Pipeline, Sunset Beach and Wiamea Bay, just three of the many.

In the 1960’s and ’70’s the houses that dotted this coastline were occupied by a disparate band of surfer pirate types. Boys, men and girls from California, Texas and Florida; Peru and Brazil, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, all lived together in rental houses along Ke-Nui Road, just off the Kamehameha Highway that circles the island. Ke Nui isn’t really a street, its a little dirt road paralleling the highway, providing entrance to the properties fronting it so they don’t have to enter directly onto the main road. Hawaiian names and phrases are difficult to the translate directly to english but the two words can be explained as Ke, the, and Nui, large or big, Ke-Nui. It is an appropriate name as the little lane fronts some of the biggest rideable surf on earth.

If you drive up the highway from Haleiwa town, (house of the Frigate bird) towards Sunset Beach, passing Wiamea Bay and Pupukea road, look for the turnoff by John Steele and “Fat Pauls” house, take that onto Ke-Nui and go past Ehukai Beach Park and just beyond it, just on your left, is the setting for this little story.

It was a simple two bedroom, one bath home built in the late fifties. Like many Hawaiian homes of the era it was built for comfort not speed. The climate is mild on the north shore of Oahu and much of the living is outdoors. A big deck facing the ocean, a large grassy area on the street side. No garage and no fences, just a hedge of Oleander that defined property boundaries but allowed easy passage in the spirit of Aloha.

You could literally walk down the street, knocking on doors, asking if there was any room to rent and you could find them. During the peak surf season, houses might have more than a dozen people living in them with only the leaseholder actually having a job. People slept on couches, on the floor and in bunk beds on the sleeping porches. A little girl I knew lived in a closet. Most contributed in some way. You might own a car for transportation, or, supply food for all to eat. Some houses had banks of refrigerators owned by different people or groups. One house I knew had padlocks on their refrigerators, for the spirit of RF prevailed. Stolen food, eaten, left no evidenciary trail.

Most of the itinerant surfers had limited budgets. Money saved from a job on the mainland or perhaps unemployment insurance. Carefully parceled out you could live for months without working. Occasionally someone might have no money and grifted around, eating for free. Those that have the least are the most generous to others that have less. Some work the hotels as gardeners or maids, girls waited table, some kids worked construction and the most successful at this might make a permanent life there.

Our hero lived on unemployment, arranged with a co-operative mainland boss who would lay him off for a few months in the winter so he could journey to Hawaii. He moved into this particular house in the fall, anxious to help himself to the amazing winter waves.

The Wide World of Sports would lead you to believe that the huge waves are an almost daily occurrence. They are not. Weeks may pass between swells that produce big, rideable surf. Winters have passed in which almost no surf of that size has appeared. Conditions can change in just minutes. Wind changes velocity and direction, a new swell pushes onshore and waves can grow dramatically in size. Big wave surfers must be prepared. Depending on your experience you might not want to try big surf right out of the gate. Perhaps spend a few weeks, months or even a season or two before you try the really dangerous stuff. Up to you.

Mike arrived in midwinter. For those that don’t know him, we can say that he is not lacking in bravado. Looking like a fire plug, broad shoulders, strong legs and a forward leaning personality, he can fill a room or house with bluster and testosterone. In all the years I’ve known him I’ve never seen him show fear or trepidation. Confidence just oozes from him.

From the front deck of the house the view is from Sunset Beach on your right to the Banzai Pipeline on your left. There are many surf spots in between, Pupukea, Sandbar, Gas chambers and Rocky Point. Names that are descriptive of their nature, rocky coral and shallow bottoms, two feet of water over hard sand or in the case of gas chambers, a wave ending at a the apply named, protruding “Death Rock” which, if you surf there you must take in the possibility you may not come out at the end. These though, are essentially smaller wave spots, easily ridden with a little experience and practice. It’s the bookends of your view that really count. Sunset Beach, a world renowned very big wave and “The Pipe”, arguably the most famous surf spot on earth. Numbers of surfers have died there and many dozens more seriously injured. I suffered a serious concussion there on a relatively small day that required hospitalization. The veteran surfer carries the scars from coral head slices, the marks made are akin to being dragged across a giant cheese grater. Riding there on a perfect, big day can be the adrenaline injection of a lifetime. Of course, that’s exactly the point, isn’t it?

Never to be taken lightly, Pipe consists of both an inner and an outer reef. If you’ve seen it on TV you’ve most likely seen the inner reef, a perfect, left breaking tube that gets big enough to fit a good sized car in.  The surfers who have dominated the place are world famous. They can make it look easy as all great athletes do. They have all taken their lumps though and photos of broken bleeding surfers being helped out of the water are legion.

Outside, or second reef is another story. Basically the same hollow wave shape as the inner reef except its immeasurably larger. A moving behemoth of dark blue ocean that moves in a grand and stately manner toward its ultimate demise.  No one who does not surf big waves can have any conception of the fear engendered by the approach of this beautiful blue mountain with the pure white feathered crown of spume blown off the top by the trade winds sliding down the slopes of the Ko’olau Range to the east. Not many surfers brave this.

In the house, the resident surfers had watched the surf building for an entire day. Sitting on the chairs and handrail, insulting each other as young men do to show affection. Frank and Clown Boy, Steven and his wife, Spider Wills, a neighbor and filmmaker; Jim “Cat Daddy” Craig, who was studying marine geology at the University of Hawaii, Stefan Schweitzer, architect and big Norman Ratzlaff, an impossibly tall, red haired teaser. Norman’s stock phrase was “Don’t be afraid,” delivered in a sepulchral voice and applied to anyone showing the least bit of caution about anything that might be going on. Our boy had arrived in this menagerie just two days before and hadn’t yet ridden a single big wave. He had opinions though and was eager to go after the biggest and baddest waves when he got the chance.

In the very early morning, before the dawn, he awoke to an ominous rumbling and a rolling, shaking of the house. He crawled out of his sleeping bag, stumbling over the other forms lying about, carefully going up the stairs from the back porch to the kitchen. Through the kitchen to the living room, carefully avoiding the sleepers, trying to avoid scattered clothes and discarded sandals until he found the screen door. A matter of just a moment led him out onto the night damp deck where the rumbling sound became the distinct crashing of line after line of perfect waves breaking on the coral reef. Black and dimly seen in the dim light of the predawn, maximum, first reef pipeline was attacking the shore. With no morning trade winds blowing, the glass smooth waves marched one after another to their doom, cracking and spitting as tons of water pounded down upon itself in an orgy of destruction. The waves broke and the earth moved.

At first light, sleepy eyed surfers stumbled from their houses, breakfast bowls in hand, surveying the waves. How big was it, would it get bigger, could a good paddler even get out through the rip. The tidal rip was a river of water flowing east inside the breaking waves, seeking a way back out to the ocean. You had to think, am I strong enough, can I hold my breath long enough, do I want to go? At first all thoughts are kept quiet, no one talks while minds are made up, courage is screwed up, or not. Thoughtful courage in which risks are weighted against thrills or testosterone courage where no risk is considered too much to attain the end result; both carefully considered. Decisions can be made on factors other than skill level or experience. Does a dark and ominous lowering sky nuance your decision? A bright and sunny day might make a difference too, a little less trepidation on a warm and bright sunny day.

Norman; “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid,” begins his chant. He’s not going himself so he’s willing to test others. Boys, in particular know this device, most have listened to it since their earliest days. “C’mon man, you go first, I’ll be right behind you,” or “Whatsa matter, you scared?” The only one who spoke against the rising, vocal tide was our man. In truth he didn’t need to be shamed, he was going, it’s what he had come for. The teasing drove him forward even harder.

Every part of surfing is timing. I don’t mean just the riding either, Paddling to the correct spot, timing the take-off, staying in the right spot, which in Hawaii generally means constant paddling because contrary to what the tourist from Idaho sees from shore, massive amounts of water are in constant motion. In fact, the sea is alive, it moves in all dimensions. Just as the atmosphere moves in the form of wind, does the sea move by current.

Paddling like mad, you thrust your arms shoulder deep in the roiling water of the rip current,  sliding sideways faster than you can propel yourself outward, aiming for the small area where it was just possible to get out past the heavy breaking waves of the inside section. By a miracle of effort and shear luck our hero punched through the top of a breaking wave and made it to the outside. Clearing  the inside breaking waves,  it was an easy paddle to the second reef wave that only broke on very big days. The water that far from shore being much deeper, The initial wave tended to be a little less critical on the take-off. Bigger but slower than the inside wave, the outside is easier to catch but once caught, it becomes ever more critical, faster; in effect, cranking up the volume pass the ten mark in very short order. Imagine coming to the top of the roller coaster where the drop begins slowly and accelerates so fast that it takes your breath away and you’ve got it.

The surfers problem though, was that as the massive energy surge that created the waves moved closer to shore where the water is much shallower both the velocity of, and the power increased exponentially which meant that you must be far enough down the face with your surfboard flying at maximum velocity or the wave would simply rise up faster than you could go. The result is to be pulled to the very top of the breaking wave and then be pitched outward and downward with the crest. You are, for about two seconds that seems, like an eternity, as weightless as an astronaut. The space man is fortunate in the sense that he isn’t about to have hundreds of tons of angry ocean fall on his head and try and drive your soft little body headlong onto the absolutely unforgiving coral reef just a few short feet under water. Pipeline can, and will kill. Every surfer that tries his luck  there knows this.

As you fall, the mind is hyperactive, Thoughts moving at the speed of light flash through the brain which knows that any outcome other than the inevitable is hopeless. Relax and enjoy, the old saying goes.

All of this takes place in silence. All of the whirling spinning motion takes place without the ear being conscious of sound. It’s one of the quirks of surfing, its nearly always quiet out there, the booming and crashing the bystander hears barely registers to the man of the moment. We’ve all had that dream of falling silently through infinite space, not able to take a breath, the dream seeming never to end.

The crowd on the front deck watched all this with, at first amusement and then not a little horror as he free fell, was crushed and disappeared for long moments, that to the surfer held down by all that immense weight seems to last forever. Finally a small dot appeared in the churning spinning white foam that was all that was left of the spent wave. Time seemed to drag as Mike slowly swam himself to the shore and crawled on all fours onto the steep sand shingle of the beach. He paused for a long time, head down, still on his hands and knees, sagging slightly and gasping for a clean breath of air, then he slowly rose, stumbled to his surfboard and slowly walked up the beach towards home.

Then a strange metamorphosis occurred. As the butterfly slowly emerges from its chrysalis so did Mike emerge from his beating. By the time he got to use he was talking a mile a minute, his right eye in the twitch we all knew to be a sign of hyperactive excitement. “Did you guys see that?” “Oh man, what a wave” In just a moment he went from being dead Mike to “Iron Mike,” someone who could survive giant waves and laugh about it.

“Iron Mike.” As the days passed the experience went from black and white to technicolor. From near death to pure life, the biggest wave, the best ride, and the longest hold down. “Why, those coral head were covered with razor blades boys, cut me like glass, pounded me like hammers, held me down for 5 minutes at least.”

In a world of young single men where the art of BS, the  “Jive ” is sublime, this story was over the top. Funny at first, then the inevitable “Not again,” Reality become fantasy become yesterdays news. We’ve all surfed in those conditions, we knew the risk and the experience. Embellished and polished, the story got better but at the same time more fantastic until it entered the realm of “Jiveness.”

“Iron Mike, Iron Mike, Iron Jive,” Perfect. It was done. Forty some years later whenever the story is told, he is still the “Iron Jive.” And you know what, we love him for it.

Farm families live in the mud. It’s a constant. The roads are dirt, the fields are dirt, there is always dirt. It’s in the house, particularly with three rambunctious boys flying in and out the door at all hours of the day. The farmer and his friends have it on their boots, it’s on the floorboards of the car and trucks, the tractors too. When the wind blows there are clouds of it. Even the dogs trail little dust clouds after themselves.

Grandma Hall, not a mudder.

Our farm was located in a small fertile valley in Coastal California. It spanned the narrow valley from side to side. From the cutbank on the east side to the creek on the west. The ground we lived on had been laid down by thousands of years of rain and drifting soil, deposited in the winter floods in a random fashion dictated by the amount and time of the annual rainfall. Before cultivation the little valley stream meandered from side to side in a vast Monte that stretched from the Santa Lucia mountains to the Pacific Ocean 21 miles away. Thousands of years of undisturbed growth had created a tangle of oak and sycamore trees, bound by willows, poison oak and wild blackberry vines that were nearly impenetrable. Only the Grizzly bear passed from side to side on narrow trails they had bulldozed over the centuries. When the first Spanish explorers passed through the area in September 1769 they had to pass along the beach, being unable to penetrate the swampy valley with their 100 mule pack train. The Arroyo Grande remained the same until, in the late 1830’s, the first ranchero, Don Francisco Branch arrived and began the laborious task of hacking a life out of what was still a wilderness. Cattle were grazed on the hills and the monte was attacked to create enough space in which to grow crops. Over the decades the Grizzly was eliminated, marauding Tulare indians were discouraged from stealing cattle and fields of grain and corn were planted. A noble adobe house was built on the Santa Manuela Rancho. A small school was established for the children of the ranchero and his employees. Branch’s school was eventually formalized and officially named after the ranchero. A grist mill was constructed on the upper reaches of the creek and the road leading to it was named Branch Mill because, simply enough, thats where it went.

When the old pioneer died, his properties were divided among his children and their spouses. Slowly the valley began to grow in population. The old Arroyo Grande, Santa Manuela, Corral De Piedra and Bolsa de Chamisal land grants were divided in smaller plots and sold to farmers and ranchers. The sections were subdivided over the years until most of the farm land was broken up into roughly forty acre plots. When I was a boy, nearly every farm supported a farm family, most of whom lived on the land.  Our farm was located on branch Mill road just about three quarters of a mile from the old adobe ranch house. Just across the road, about two hundred yards away was the old bear pit where Grizzly bears were captured in the early days.

Because, over time, the creek had meandered all over the valley, the type of soil on the  farm was varied. Near the road ours was a mix of adobe, sand and gravel. Near the center of the property it was adobe mixed with lighter soils to give it an almost perfect composition for row crops. Near the rear of the property, along the creek it had a very sandy texture.  In the rainy season each type of dirt became mud except for the sand. The sand just grew firm when wet. In summertime though it was just the opposite of the muddy winter, it grew soft and you could easily get stuck in it.

In winter we lived in a sea of mud. Slippery mud, sticky, slimy mud. Mud everywhere. When it was really wet the furrows of the fields were filled to the brim with water, looking, for all the world like enormous piano keys. Parts of our roads were lakes and our driveway was a trap for the unwary driver.

Mom could not keep the house clean. Mud was tracked in on muddy shoes and boots no matter how many rules about ” Take your shoes off! ” she had. We cleaned the soles of our shoes with kitchen knives and then baked them in the oven to dry them out for the next day. Slipping on a pair of high top shoes, curled and dried by oven heat was not a job for the faint of heart. Feet are not curled upward naturally and it took hours for the shoe to soften enough to be comfortable and by that time you had to do it all over again. Hopping from place to place, trying to stay out of the ruts in the driveway on the way out to the school bus was terrific exercise. We three boys must have looked like the Russian ballet, leaping about like farts in a skillet. There were rubber boots for the fields but they were all man size. Boys risked having them sucked right off their feet if they tried to take shortcuts across cultivated ground. Once I got myself in so deep doing that, that I lost both boots and had to crawl on my stomach across the mud to keep from being entombed, I’d have merely been a fossil when the ground dried in the spring. The rubber boots were never found.

Almost all the driving in the fields was by tractor. Two wheel drive pickups could get stuck and they tore the muddy roads up which, when they dried made for a bone rattling rough ride. One winter it rained so much and continually that the fields were too soaked to get even tractors in. The celery and brocolli crops around the valley had abandoned tractors and trailers in them that had gotten so stuck they couldn’t be driven out. No other tractor could possibly get in to do the towing either. The crops rotted in the fields. At the end of every winter, there would be the occasional truck or tractor so deep in the mud that they would have to be dug out.

Farmers knew where they could go. Some types of ground dried rapidly, some didn’t. There were places that looked dry but weren’t and were traps for the unwary. Sometimes wet pasture combined with a steep hill isn’t drivable. You get stuck in a swale and you simply cannot get out. Rubber tires just spin and smoke on wet grass, and try as you might, your pickup won’t go uphill.  A walk to the house to ask for help from your dad or uncle is embarrassing because you are supposed to know about those things.

We were third generation drivers. My grandfather began driving in his mid-twenties and never really got the hang of it. He grew up with horses and was a grown man before he learned to drive. When my grandparents married in 1908, they had their wedding picture taken in a photo studio, proudly sitting in an old high wheel car that still looked like a  buggy. Autos were still a novelty then. Dad said you could spit on the ground and my grandfather would get stuck in it. Believe me, you can’t make things like that up. My dad, of course began to drive as soon as his legs were long enough to reach the pedals of a Model T Ford. He and his brother ran the milk wagons for my grandparents dairy. They did this before school starting when my uncle Jackie was 14 and my dad was 12. It wasn’t unusual in those days to see boys driving at very young ages. If your kid could work that was one more employee you didn’t have to hire. I don’t know how old I was when I first got behind the wheel. I do remember just barely being able to touch the pedals of the old ’38 Chevrolet my dad used for a field car. I do recall how it lurched because I couldn’t keep my foot steady on the gas. I could steer just fine though, I had lots of experience with that from driving wheel tractors, but if you had been in that old Chevy with me you might have broken your neck.

I’ve heard people say, ” Why did people build those old farmhouses so close to the road? ” Mud was the answer. Our house though, wasn’t right on the road. We had to navigate a quarter mile of muddy sloppy road to get in or out and that was no mean feat. My father had one strict rule, “stay in the ruts” he would tell people. The reason for this was simple, the ruts were packed down even though they were often underwater. The mud that looked dry had the consistency of toothpaste and was treacherous for the unwary. Get off in it and you were lost, your car sliding inexorably off the road and into the fields where you sank and stuck fast. If you got out of the car, you’d sink over the tops of your shoes and you’d be stuck too. I don’t know how many times dad cautioned my grandma Hall or my aunt Mariel to do just that, but they would get stuck “just a sure as shootin’.” Now my dad was not given to swearing much, he wouldn’t say shit if he stepped in it, but he would stand at the kitchen sink, glaring out the window, watching them trying to navigate the mud just knowing they’d slide off the road before they got to the house. He’d be grinding his teeth and mumbling under his breath the words he wouldn’t say out loud, knowing he’d soon be out in the cold with the tractor, crawling under a car, his clothes covered in frigid, slippery mud, dragging the chain to hook them up and pull them out. To add insult to injury, people would simply sit in the car and blow the horn to get his attention. He was a man who was born to help others but these events really stretched his patience to the breaking point. Putting one of his boys behind the wheel of grandma’s big, old blue tank of a Buick, he’d skid the car into the yard then help her into the house just as nice and polite as you please and then he’d say, he always called his mother-in-law Missus, ” Missus, you gotta stay in the ruts.”

There was once a little terrier named Benny. You might say he was mine but it was just for a moment. I was visiting at a friends house in Santa Maria and the back yard neighbor, Jeffrey Fitzgerald was trying to pawn off a litter of pups. He browbeat me until I took one. I named him Ben, but he soon became Benny because of his size, I think. He seemed to be the kind of dog who would have a less than serious name. He was all black; a sleek fuzzy mutt about the size of a ten pound sack of flour. He was a good little boy, quickly housebroken and spent most of his time eating and sleeping in my house on Muir street in Ocean Beach. He was friendly and a popular little guy.

Not too long after I got him, I had to catch a ship and  was forced to leave the dog behind with my parents at their farm. They always had dogs but for the most part they were outside dogs. They didn’t come in the house. The back porch was about the best they could do. They mostly slept in the packing sheds or the cabs of the trucks,  or wherever  looked comfy to them. We even had a dog named Paco a medium sized brown mutt who never had much to say who just slept wherever he pleased. He was known to sleep in the mud when it rained. My dad was against another dog but mom turned the trick as usual. I had promised to come and get him when I returned but, as it turned out, he wormed his way into her heart and that was that. He had found a soulmate in my mother and he wasn’t going to leave her.

Benny won my dad over too, he was out the door with him in the morning and at his heels wherever he went. The farm was like heaven for a dog. There were pickups to ride in, fields of celery and lettuce where he could run up and down the rows, sniffing and looking for something to chase, tractors he could bark at and acres and acres of ground, perfect for digging, with all kinds of good smelly stuff to roll in. Irrigation ditches always had an ample supply of sticky mud. Even the hired hands got into the act and would give him parts of the their lunches and perhaps a little pat to boot. He had a yen for tamales. He was happy to get a bit of a white bread and baloney sandwich too. Remember, this was in the days when dogs never saw a vet or ate Pedigree dog food. It was cheap dog food from the Loomis Mill, table scraps and the occasional gopher. Benny didn’t have the speed to catch a Jack Rabbit, though it didn’t stop him from trying.

My mother adored him. She would hold him in her lap like a baby and feed him from a spoon. He liked to curl up with her on the couch at night while she knitted and watched TV, as contented as a little dog could be.

His mostest favorite thing though, was to hop in the pickup truck with my dad and go for a ride. If dad only went ten feet he was there.He went to the loading dock at the Arroyo Grande Trucking company every day to supervise the unloading of my dads vegetables being shipped to market. If Tim Spears or Dick dock got too close to the truck they would get a bark and a growl. He sometimes ran into the office to give Juandel a quick doggie kiss too. He went to the box company in Oceano to inspect the new pine boxes as they were loaded and he rode shotgun every morning as my dad drove into town to get the morning paper and a candy bar at Kirk’s liquor store on Branch street. The best part of the trip though, was sticking his head out the passenger side window and barking at the willow branches along Tar Springs Crick where Branch Mill Road makes the right turn after crossing the bridge between Hiyashi’s and DeLeons farms. You know the place, it’s where people used to dump their old mattresses and washing machines because they were too cheap to go to the dump. It is an old county road with no shoulders and the willows reach out with their branches just to torment a little black dog. No one trims the trees and the brush there. Just the passage of farm trucks and tractors keeps it back, so if you drive close enough they slap against the side of the pickup as you go by. This tormented little Benny and he would bark furiously, enraged by the willows trying to get in the windows. Jumping and lunging, making a terrible racket, he tried every day to drive those pesky trees away. Now, my dad, being a man of great fun, aided and abetted this activity by driving as close as he could get without going off into the creek. He enjoyed the hilarious little dog and his incandescent fuming: little dog loved it too.

Of course, one fine day the inevitable happened, one second Benny was putting on his act, growling and snapping at the branches like a miniature chainsaw and just like that, in a snap of the fingers he was gone, snatched out the window by a willow branch he managed to sink his teeth into. It took a few feet to bring the truck to a screeching, sliding stop, dad leaping out the door into the dust cloud made by the locked up tires. Thinking to see the broken pieces of the his dog, he saw instead, Benny standing, dazed and dusty dirty on the roadside, fur full of dirt and foxtails. He had some willow leaves sticking out of his mouth, not quite sure what he should do now that he had fulfilled his quest of killing a willow branch. Dad bundled him up, drove him home where mom  brushed out his fur, fed him some warm milk and cuddled him while he calmed down. The Holy Grail quest was  fulfilled. A pretty good day for a little dog, don’t you think?

When the neighbor farmers came in for coffee the next morning and heard my dad tell the story they laughed so hard that coffee came out of Manuel Silvas nose. I kid you not.

Benny soon recovered his aplomb. He still hated the willows but dad was careful to drive just a little farther away from them. Gotta be careful with a good dog. He was a tough little bugger, but why take a chance.

Red Shoendienst died today. He was 95 years old. A professional ballplayer, 19 years with the old Saint Louis Cardinals. Though I never knew him personally he was one of the threads that connected me to my dad.

When you are a kid there is always teaching going on in the home. Mom and Dad are at it constantly. Now, when you are little you don’t really notice it but it’s always there. They are sculpting the clay while it’s still soft, building the adult you will be.

We had a kitchen table then that was shiny chrome in it’s legs and trim with a grey laminate top printed in a marble pattern. Nearly every family I knew had a similar one. They were modern and I believe mothers were tired of wood. You didn’t have to polish these, they didn’t dent or stain and in the 1950’s, if it didn’t have chrome it wasn’t “it.”

That shiny stuff was everywhere. Our Buick carried about a ton of it. The Sunbeam toaster, the mixer, saucepans, even the the salt and pepper sellars. The Art Deco shakers were put away in the back of a cupboard, not to see the light of day for fifty years.

Holding pride of place on the table was my dad’s radio. There were different kinds over the years, the last being a little transistor you could hold in your hand. The one most remembered was a small Philco. It was the size of a shoebox and was kind of a maple-ly color, lighter than a maple donut and darker than chamois. The dial was round and placed in the middle with little speakers, one on each side. The speakers were covered with a sparkling fabric and the circular dial had three, yes, three concentric rings. Each ring was a different radio band but the AM band was the one we used. AM radio, or Amplitude Modulated, travels much farther than FM and UHF. It is possible to actually bounce radio waves of the ionosphere and send signals around the world. It seemed magical to me as a child because I didn’t understand it. Neither did my father but, as an adult, he was content to listen and not worry about how it worked, it just did.

The great feature of this modulation was that radio stations, known in those days before cable as clear channel, could broadcast great distances if they were powerful enough. Few of these big boys are left now but at one time their signals could be heard in every corner of America. KNX and KFI in Los Angeles, KGO San Francisco, KSL Salt Lake City, KMOX in Saint Louis and XERB which operated out of Tijuana, Baja Norte, Mexico DF. when I was in high school it broadcast Wolf Man Jack into homes all over the west. Well, maybe not all homes, but millions of teenager’s old cars.

In a way little remembered today, radio connected peoples around the world. Not always positively either, The Imperial Japanese Navy used the radio signal from Honolulu’s KGU to home in on the island for the attack on pearl Harbor. If you lived in Arroyo Grande then and been tuned to KGU you may have heard the original broadcast. Three thousand three hundred twenty five miles as the crow flies, a long distance.

I don’t recall dad listening to music though he did love it, the radio was more of a tool than a source of entertainment. In the fifties a farmer needed radio for many reasons. Dad would stay up very late on winter nights to listen to the weather reports, hoping to hear good news, not bad. Farmers lived by frost reports, dew point, clouds, wind, worried about calamity that they had no way prevent. Adverse combinations of these can produce killing frosts which wipe out entire crops, in effect flushing your entire investment down the drain. The daily market reports out of San Francisco and Los Angeles kept him informed on vegetable prices and quantities. We didn’t use it for news much, life for the family was outside and time at the table was limited. News came from newspapers, local and big city.

Television didn’t arrive in our county until 1954 and it was awhile before we had one. Radio was how we connected with the world outside.

Dad played several sports in high school and college and followed his favorites. Basketball and baseball were his sports and the only way to follow it was by radio. The basketball team, the Lakers didn’t move to Los Angeles until 1960, two years after the baseball Dodgers. He followed the Boston Celtics, Shannon is our name you know. For baseball it was the Cards, the Redbirds, the Saint Louis Cardinals.

I sat at that table for years listening to baseball on the radio. The Cardinals came via KMOX in Saint Louis, Missouri and sometimes KSL in Salt Lake City. Dad loved the Cardinals, not because he was a rabid baseball fan but because when he was a young man they fielded a team fondly known as the Gashouse Gang, which seemed to be the epitome of the baseball teams that were primarily working class men. Not the “Boys of Summer,” as Roger Kahn wrote but the sort of men that came from hardscrabble farms and down and out southern towns where opportunity was scarce and a boy that could throw, hit and field might find a way out. No more picking cotton, no more steel mills or lead mines, no more endless drudge in a job you had to hate or even die for.

Take the “Ol Diz,” Dizzy Dean who hailed from Arkansas, a hillbilly by geography if not by choice, he won 30 games in 1934, a feat only equaled once in the past 84 years. The Cards won the world series that year, the same year my dad graduated from college. It was a national event when baseball was still the only real national pastime. The Tigers were an classy club from Detroit and they were beaten in seven games by a team of scruffy, tobacco chewing, fist fighting characters with dirty uniforms and a very, very bad attitude. Thats how the old boys played, spikes up, bean balls and real, on the field fights. Dizzy and Daffy Dean, Dazzy Vance, Pepper Martin, Leo “The Lip” Durocher, Ripper Collins, Pop Haines, and Frankie “The Fordham Flash, They scuffled, fought each other in the dugout and won a world series. How could you not love “em. Maybe, just from my dads point of view, their chief attraction was they didn’t really play for money ’cause they didn’t make much in those days and the fact that a baseball career in almost all cases were very short, perhaps just three or four years, they eventually went back to working lead mines, painting houses and tilling the soil. This resonated with people in the depression, ballplayers might be famous, there were seven hall of famers on that team, but nevertheless, they likely were just like you. Might even be your neighbor too.

As we listened to the games, and I did my homework and dad spoke to the character of ballplayers the way he spoke of all men. He admired the work ethic of “Stan the Man” who worked in the steel mills of U S Steel as a youth and saw his own father die from the poisonous smog of 1948 that killed almost a hundred people in his hometown. The sulfuric acid, nitrogen dioxide, fluorine, and other poisonous gases that usually dispersed into the atmosphere were caught in a temperature  inversion sending hundreds to the hospital including his father. Enos “Country” Slaughter typified the determined spirit and hustle of the game. “Baseball was the mirror of America,” dad said and in this sense Enos Slaughter was more than a consistent hitter with an accurate arm. He was also a reflection of the times in which he lived and played the game. He was raised on a hardscrabble farm in North Carolina and often said he developed his throwing arm by killing rabbits with rocks, for dinner. Red Schoendienst was the son of a coal miner and grew up in a house without electricity or running water. A high school dropout, he joined the CCC in 1939, played sandlot ball and was signed by the Cards in 1942 for $75.00 dollars. For the next 72 years he played and worked in baseball.

What was passed down here were lessons on hard work, perseverance, honesty and, most of all the transitory nature of things. Ballplayers are one swing of the bat away from the end of their careers each and every day. “It’s why those other values count,” he said.

So, we would sit there at the table with the little radio talking to use while he doodled figures on the back of an old envelope and drank coffee. I did my homework. We spoke of baseball and he picked up hints from the game to illustrate what he wanted me to know. A quiet word here and there was all you might hear.

When I was older and wiser I came to understand that the characters he used for illustration were as flawed as any other men. Somehow knowing that made the qualities my dad pointed out stronger than ever. You could be both good and not so good, weak but still strong. Knowing that helped me sort out problems and relationships that I was going to encounter for the rest of my life.

To use a baseball term, “Dad snuck one in over the outside corner for a called strike.”