Its Strange Inside the Reunion

We are faced with an interesting situation. Should the committee release the names of the deceased classmates on the web. The committee is split.

But.. being on the inside and knowing the names... I take a little uncredited solice in knowing that one of my freshman class bullies is not around. He threatened me out of using by locker. So every day I had to haul my books.. all of them up the 12 flights of steps to the pe department. Then home 2 and half miles.. up hill. Some of you know this hill.

Our class was a bubble class. Classrooms were not built to house our numbers. We were in split sessions. And this followed all the way up to high school. Suddenly this boomer class arrived with huge numbers. When capacity was reached and the numbers started to shrink back again, there were too many classrooms constructed. The school board was faced with selling off old elementary schools to day care companies and often to their private competition.

Merced is still building schools and classroom capacity. Will we be in that spot down the road? Its seems like our yearly growth in a county with over 11 percent unemployment cannot be good. But we continue to grow. And even this year at the high school we are looking at growth rather than reductions.

Have a great day

Pat

6K and still running

Thanks to all those readers out there that have moved my blog up to over 6thousand hits. Its one thing to set down a diary and its another to have an audience for it. Thanks for tuning in!

I continue to enjoy comments along the way so don't be afraid to send me a comment. If I don't like it, I will screen it out and not publish it.

Which reminds me of one of Dad's most revered programs. When the Apple 2E was the rage, there was a "cool" by those days standard called, Publish It. My sister Kelly and I always changed the proxemics on the phrase and we had something that you wouldn't repeat to your mother.. Publi sh it..

Just a funny for your late night or to start your day..

Thanks again for tuning in..

: ) : ) Pat

Drama in the Junior High

Alta Loma Jr. high had some of the most distinctive band uniforms of any jr. high. They were these marvelous capes. They were red on the top and satin lined yellow gold under. They were heavy but magnificent at the same time. They were purchased from the proceeds of the annual spaghetti feed.

Drama was performed on a a series of platform tables set up in the all purpose room. Percy our speech and drama teacher put on two plays that I remember. Both were well attended. I was in the Christmas Carol. An adaptation of the the Charles Dickens number. I played the ghost from Christmas past. Touch my robe and ... etc. We had a great time with that. We also put on a melodrama play. Dad had put one on in the junior high for years as part of the fund raising carnival that occurred every fall. It was a wondrous thing with students coming in and playing different roles. Percy's was a different thing. It may have been billed as a fund raiser but I am not sure. It was in the multipurpose room. I was played the villain. It was wonderful. We had a trombone player chase me around the auditorium playing the William Tell overture. Our melodrama rented costumes from a costume rental agency in downtown San Francisco. It was big time fun.

Doing Web Work

This week I have been working on the website for my class reunion. We are having our 40th reunion in October.

I am doing the website as usual. http://wwww.elcamino68.com . Its been a little hard to remember all of the moves I used to do so easily with golive. I had to join up to Lynda.com and go through their tutorial to re remember the pieces that I had forgotten. I have also been working updating a artist's friend's website. She had won several award and had 11 new painting that needed some web exposure.

This is the weekend that Acacia heads back to UCSD. What a trip! I talked to mam and dad this Am on my walk and they said that the Brownkorbels were headed down the coast and planned to stay overnight in Tustin.

I have been really enjoying the audiobook that Kelly sent me. I listen to it on my quite parts of my morning walk. Its "How Starbucks Saved my Life" Its written by a son of a very famous New Yorker columnist who met all the old time literary celebrities and was a big time advertising exec. who was fired by younger people he had hired. He saved his life by working at Starbucks which gave him his insurance coverage that helped him through a brain tumor. Its a pretty interesting listen.

I did my Starbucks walk today.. and it was pretty full for a Saturday morning. The UC students are back.

Have a great weekend
Pat

Building the Boy, Building the Addition

In 1962 the world seemed much different than it does now.
I was in Jr. High and was always hungry as mom would attest. After getting home from school I could easily put down a half a gallon of milk and a half a dozen oranges.

During the Summer I grew over 6 inches in height. Nothing fit and my joints were always experiencing the pull from my muscles that where not growing as fast.
My parents decided to "grow" our house and add a dinning room and a bedroom for me in the back of our track split level three bedroom home. My family hired an architect to draw up the plans. His name was Donald Sandy. He was an architect of great reputation. He had even won an award for his designed from Sunset Magazine.

Our first job was to move the dirt in the backyard. From the disaster,arose new hope.
The year before we started construction, a serious landslide occurred in our backyard. An underground spring had opened up and dumped a ton of water against a slope that could not take it any more. When I came home one afternoon I heard this enormous thud. and the sound of at least 28 cubic yards of dirt came careening down the hill and took out the backyard fence and smashed up against our house.

Dad looked around and found Mr. Cushing that needed all of the clean fill he could get. He even had a "loaner" pickup truck that had a dump attachment to it. He was trying to get enough fill dirt to build a tennis court in his backyard. The round trip was about 4 miles. Dad decided that I needed to learn how to run a shovel. So ever night before dinner, dad and I were filling up wheel barrows of dirt and loading them onto the pickup truck and driving over to Mr. Cushing's backyard. He drove the truck to where the dirk needed to be and dumped it. It was always available the next time we took a load out. It seems like we had about a hundred loads of dirt. This fact will have to be verified since 7th grade eyes are not reliable.

We took out the dirt and dug a footer for a retaining wall. In the mean time,small pine trees and pampas grass were planted to keep the surface erosion down. When the form passed inspection, a group of neighbors and dad's friends came over and spent a Saturday morning rolling wheel barrows of cement from the street to the retaining wall that would form the end to the addition. They were paid by a beer here and there and a chance to help out a friend in need.

The idea of a contractor was simply out of the budget for a single wage earner family. So dad asked the architect to design the addition so that we could put it together ourselves with a a carpenter doing some of the work but basically overseeing us. Phil, our carpenter supervisor lived up the hill. He "moonlighted" at our job. During some of the phases of construction we were just clean up. In others we were wiring and paining creosote for the foundation or stuccoing.. more on that later.

And so it happened. One of Percy's friends was almost 7 feet tall. He came by and helped us set the beams. I remember spending some nights up on the roof pounding in big headed nails to keep the roof insulated and sound. The biggest job that dad and I took on together was the stucco. We got the chicken wire up. Dad rented a cement mixer for a week. I was the mixer and the hod carrier. The first batches of stucco were too loose. When dad tried to push it through the wire, the cement came tumbling onto the ground. We then tried to learn the perfect combination of water, sand and cement.

And so I learned to work... Pat

Finding Cash for the Movie

Percy, see my last blog entry, was poor most of his life. He came from a family that really didn't have the money to send him to college. We enlisted in the army and the army covered his college costs.

When he started work as a teacher he always felt that he should marry a rich woman. Her family would take care of all of his needs. As life would have it, he fell in love with a girl from a family that had the biggest house in Atherton California.

Atherton is a small very upscale town on the San Francisco Peninsula between Belmont(San Carlos) and Mountain View (Palo Alto). Her family home had massive greek columns 25 feet high on the front steps leading up to the house. In front of the house was a huge reflecting pool that doubled as an unheated swimming pool. It was an enormous house with two basement floors underground with row upon row of rare books. The family's hobby business was rare book stores. They owned three. None of them made any significant money. Their operating capital came from land they owned in San Luis Obispo. They had wheat growing in fields between San Luis Obispo and Atascadero.

Percy's friend had a brother almost exactly my age. I was invited down for a day to meet him and be a part. We decided to go to the movie. No one had the two dollars required to go to the movie. The irony was we were in a multi million dollar house and no one had two bucks.

Finally we asked the domestic helper and cook who lived there if she had two bucks we could borrow. She happily gave it up for us to go. I guess we could have asked the gardener.

When we got back the family was having a dinner party. We were invited. It was the first time I had had a canape. I was asked about my family and we had a good time at the dinner table.

I left late at night with Percy driving us home to South City with a little bit of chagrin.

Love Pat

Arguing With A Post

When I was in the 7th grade, a distant second uncle came to stay with us. His name was Percy. He was a wiry young man who had graduated from Western State College in Gunnison too. (Mom and Dad had as well) Dad hired him on to teach in the same Junior High that he was the vice principal and I attended. He became a junior high speech and drama teacher. He also lived at our house.

He was an arch conservative. He was the president of the young republicans from the colleges and universities of Colorado. He was as far right as we were left in political orientation. It was the political year of Barry Goldwater. He was sure that AuH20 was surely going to win the presidency.

He loved going to televised pay for view boxing matches. At that time people assembled and paid good money to watch a black and white television projected broadcast in a huge auditorium like the Cow Palace.

He was anxious to see the Patterson vs Johanson fight. He paid 35 dollars, bought himself a beer, a cigar and three punches later it was over. He felt completely ripped off. Yet he had witnessed history.

Percy was the arch conservative. He was very disappointed when Goldwater, the senator from Arizona did not win. Mom teased him one night. She said to him," I hear Barry is the man of the century."

Percy bightened up and said. "so you can see the value of the candidacy."

Mom replied,"Yes Goldwater is the man of the 18th century"

With conservatives at that time always wanting to return to simpler times it was not all that untrue. It did sort of deflate Percy.

More Percy stories later..

Love, Pat