Chapter 2 This is not a story of an impoverished child. My roots are struggling Irish-German immigrants who, because of one man’s dream, and his love for his family, left the easy life on the crime-ridden streets of Cicero and succeeded in this Promised Land. Like Huckleberry Fin, I didn’t live the others’ lives. I lived mine, sometimes in my own solitary world. Unlike Huckleberry Fin, there was no Tom Sawyer. I sought out my adventures alone, and although at times I was lonely, I was never bored. Huckleberry Finn’s adventures were concentrated along the Banks of the Mississippi among the ethnic pockets of humanity immersed in poverty eking out a living along its shores. Mine encompassed an aspiring, prosperous group of peers, the west coast of America from the southern tip of Baja to Kodiak, Alaska, with side trips to Yellowstone, Prince Edward Island, Europe, the Red Sea, and Zimbabwe, Africa. It took money to live the life I did as a boy, more when I became a man. My first raft was a row of docks on a lake in an affluent resort. It was expensive even back then, more so today. When you count the cost of a boat, fuel, gear, bait, and travel the average cost of a pound of game fish is over three hundred dollars. Dad and Mother were extravagant when it came to all six of us kids. Later there were three more not of their flesh, but embedded in their hearts. By the time I was ten, I was on a body of water in my own boat every chance I got. We all had cars when we were old enough to drive. Gas was only a quarter a gallon, but back then a thousand dollars a month was a generous living wage. Lake Arrowhead was an endless holiday of boats and barbeques that carried over to the water ski races in the fall at Lake Mead, or Monterey Bay, and the ski slopes at Snow Valley in the winter. Holiday ski races were a family affair. Dad was quick to discipline when one of us got out of line, sometimes too much so. However, for the times I felt I may not have deserved it, there were dozens more I know he let slide. Through it all, I never once heard him complain about the cost of our toys, or of our many expensive mistakes. Dad paid the bills when it involved family or his inner circle of friends and never flinched. Side money for me to explore, and to play outside the family setting was another matter. I started by selling avocados door-to-door out of a paper bag that I picked from a tree in our backyard. Mom and Dad gave me a red wagon for Christmas, which expanded my horizon. In my wanderings, I gathered gallon glass jars from the trash in the alleys that I sold to the paint store for a nickel each. We moved to San Bernardino Road. I lost one avocado tree, but gained two more. I expanded my route when I met the Chinese family that had a garden and vegetable stand on the corner of San Bernardino Road and Azusa Avenue. In those days a family’s life was structured. There was little take-out. Fathers worked, Mothers stayed home and cooked dinner for us all. I would fill my wagon for a dollar, and then sell the fresh produce door to door and make five. Mother was one of my best customers, many times for avocados that came off the trees in our own backyard. The Chinese family sold the garden; someone built a Texaco gas station on the corner. Dad bought me four rabbit hutches. After Grandpa Roelle helped me set them up Dad took me to a rabbitry in San Fernando Valley where he bought seed stock, a buck and three pregnant does. On the way home, we opened an account at the local farm and feed. I expanded the rabbitry after going to the county fair. I joined 4-H and then sold or butchered what I had and bought purebred New Zealand Whites. I carefully chose the stock myself. I kept what I thought an exceptional buck and a few does from a litter. Grandpa and I built more cages. New Zealand Whites average eleven to twelve pounds. The thirteen-pound buck won a grand championship at the county fair; I sold him for ten-dollars a pound at the 4-H auction. The buyer came to the house and bought three young does that were bigger than their cousin. Mom and Dad were proud of me. After the fair, I sold breeding stock to 4-H members in surrounding clubs, and fryers to relatives and friends. With selective breeding, and after culling litters for brood stock, a dozen does still meant a hundred or more fryers every couple of months. Dad taught me to butcher, package the meat, and stretch the hides on wire racks. New Zealand White Fryers dress out between three and four pounds at eight weeks. I got a nickel each for the skins. At fifty cents a pound, I was making a couple of hundred dollars a month. That was a lot of money in 1954. My Aunt Betty Jane and Uncle Fred had five acres on San Bernardino road. She thought rabbits would be a good project for Eddy, my cousin. His Mother took care of them and Eddy didn’t have the stomach to slaughter his pets. You need to do something with them; you can’t just turn them loose. Aunt Betty Jane and other parents whose kids raised rabbits as 4-H projects paid me a quarter each to butcher them. It began to take up every Saturday and Sunday. I grew tired of killing rabbits. One day I opened the hutches and turned them all loose. Two hundred rabbits scattered in our suburban neighborhood. Neighbors, some of them friends of my parents, and their dogs went nuts for a week. It was one of those, spur of the moment, “What the hell were you thinking?” stunts adolescents pull now and then. I thought Dad would to kill me, but Mother gave it away when she turned to keep from laughing when Whitey, one of our neighbors and a mountain of a man, showed up carrying rabbits by their ears. Dad had time to collect himself before he got home. He made me spend the next week collecting what I could. He sold what we caught and gave the hutches to Aunt Betty Jane. Grandpa Roelle built what I thought a tool shed where the rabbit hutches had been. I accepted what I thought a punishment, but Purdy, a sixty-pound Suffolk ram-lamb sporting a shiny black neck, wrapped with a wide red ribbon and a bow arrived on Christmas day. I showed Purdy in the 4-H circuit for a while, but I played with him too much. It started pushing against his head with my hands. It was a close match when he weighed sixty-pounds. However, Purdy grew fast and liked butting anyone in range when they turned their back to him. By the time he was two, it was no longer a game, even with me. I quit showing him when he clobbered a judge and stood him at stud to the surrounding 4-H clubs. I warned people to stay out of his pen, but his head was harder than wood rails Grandpa kept fixing on his pen. Purdy weighed close to three-hundred-sixty pounds when he broke out and nailed Grandpa while Grandpa was tending Mother’s roses. Grandpa was still limping when Purdy broke out again a few weeks later and ate most of Mother’s flowers, and then Purdy disappeared. Dad told me he sold him to a rancher in Cucamonga; I was at school, I think Mother put him in the stew. The farm animals were gone. Lake Arrowhead, California is a flash back in the next chapter. It’s where I spent my summers and then, between middle school and high school cleaning toilets in the Public Park, and boats on the rental docks at Lake Arrowhead. Dad still had cowboy in his blood. We moved from Covina to Palm Desert in the fall before high school started. Dad bought a forty-acre ranch, Ferdinand, a 2200-pound Polled Hereford bull you could set a child on and lead around the pasture, a dozen registered cows, and my first quarter horse, a mare I named Desi, which was short for Desert Queen. Dad also bought Haggerty, a two-year-old liver chestnut stallion he expected me to break and to exercise. Haggerty was the half-brother to the fastest quarter horse on record, Go-Man-Go. Dad had illusions of racing him someday, but it turned out my mare could outrun him at any distance. Dad though Haggerty would get faster as he matured. He was a gorgeous animal that hated a western saddle. I told Dad Haggerty was never going to be a saddle horse unless we gelded him. He wouldn’t hear of it. Dad liked to show him off and always took Haggerty a carrot when he came home on weekends. One day Haggerty was not in his corral. I was in the barn nursing a bruised thigh, a sprained leg, and a knot on my head. Dad asked me where Haggerty was. It took a minute to explain. There were lots of horses in the area. We would be trotting along when Haggerty would get a whiff of a mare in heat and suddenly rear up and over backwards to dislodge me from the saddle. Usually I stepped off; it’s about balance. A twelve hundred horse can’t get up with a hundred-eighty pounds sitting on its neck. I would keep him pinned to the hot sand for a while to teach him a lesson. The lesson usually only lasted a week or two. I thought it worked that day, but it didn’t. Five minutes after I was back in the saddle, Haggerty caught me off guard when he reared up and over before I could get out of the way. Twelve hundred pounds of horse with steel shoes stepped on my inner thigh and kicked me in the head while I was on the ground, and then he just stood there. Jackrabbits and coyotes were a nuisance to surrounding hobby farms. When I rode Desi, I carried a rifle. It was a good thing I left it home because I would have shot him where he stood. Instead, before I got back on I unhooked one rein from the bridle. When he reared, as I knew he would, I stepped off into the sand and pulled him down on his side. He settled with me lying across his neck. I cinched one end of the rein around his back hooves and tied it to a front ankle, and then untied the cinch and dragged the saddle out from under him. There was no way he was going to get up. I walked home dragging the saddle and left him thrashing under the desert sun. “Let’s go get him before he dies out there.” “He’s a mile out on the sand. I can hardly walk; leave him to the buzzards.” I was over six-foot and weighed 175. Dad had thrown away the leather strap and it had been many years since he physically disciplined me. Still, it was the first time I ever questioned an order from my Father. He stood there for a minute looking at the bruise on my leg and then caressed the knot on the back of my head. “Put your pants on, I’ll Saddle Desi, let’s go get him.” It was the desert; buzzards were circling overhead. Haggerty had worked his sweat into a foamy lather; his ankles were bloody and raw from the leather rein biting into his flesh. Dad cut him loose. I wasn’t sure he could stand, but a little prodding got him to his feet. Dad handed me the bridal lead, and then lifted himself to the back of the mare. Dad wasn’t mad, he understood. He damn near killed Desi the day I picked her out of a heard of two year olds roaming a thousand acre spread. It took us six hours to get her in a trailer and then we had to attach her halter to a winch and drag her in. “Get him home; dress those cuts and leave him in a stall. When he heals put him back in the coral. You decide, if you aren’t good enough to train him without killing him, tell me. I’ll get someone who can.” My pride hurt more than my leg. “I’ll find a way.” I was fourteen. There was a polo field a mile from the ranch. I got paid for boarding a half dozen polo ponies at the ranch and exercising them every morning. I sat an English saddle riding one rangy, hot-blooded thoroughbred and leading four more without ever being pulled off. Haggerty and I both healed. The next time I saddled him with the English saddle high on his withers. It gave me more balance and put more weigh on his front shoulders. I don’t know if it was the saddle but he never reared on me again. There were twenty acres of date palms with an aging and untended grapefruit orchard growing below the canopy. Dad thought it a good place to graze Ferdinand and the cows. We had been on the ranch a few months when the grapefruit started to ripen. Ferdinand plucked a big one and tried to swallow it whole. I found him under the tree the next day. A vet cut the grapefruit from his windpipe. Dad was disappointed, but he took it in stride. He surveyed an orchard laden with fruit, told me to move the cows to the open pasture, gave me the keys to an old jeep pickup, and fixed the irrigation well. As the fruit ripened, I harvested the crop and sold it in twenty-pound, dollar bags to the roadside fruit stands common to the area. I spent my first year in high school wooing a girl I met at Lake Arrowhead with money I made tending the orchard. Dad was still living in Covina running his real estate business; we were living in Palm Desert. That lasted a year; Mom put the kibosh to it and we moved back to Covina that summer.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 23:42:45 +0000
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