Dad found a new job in California, and so we pulled up stakes and moved again. 18 months or so in Alabama, and then back on the road. We traveled in a sort of caravan to northern California and alighted in a small town a few dozen miles from dad’s new job at Aerojet General. My folks purchased a partially-wooded parcel some 4.5 acres in size outside this small town, acquired a mobile home to set up upon it and house us, and we began our tenure in California. We still had the Willys, and the old codger (Sig) up the hill from us sold us a 1929 Ford Model A pickup (boy, was THAT thing an adventure to keep running, and to ride in!) and eventually we seem to have come by a Corvair Van. We obtained our household water from a broad irrigation ditch halfway up the hill, which we passed into a settling tank and then pumped to the “house.” The same old codger up the hill grew concord grapes and olives, and taught my mom the art of curing olives. She cured two or three huge (I mean huge – probably 30 gallons apiece) porcelain vats of olives in solutions of lye and brine by turns, and I think she must have given a good amount of them away to acquaintances.
A fair portion of our acreage was covered by an old orchard of apples and pears, but a pear blight had been through the region in recent years and the trees had been “girdled” (a belt of bark cut away near the base of the tree) specifically to kill them, and not spread the blight. Still, a number of them had survived, and we had a sort of minimalist orchard. My folks got bantam chickens and raised a flock in a fenced area under the huge live oak out back. Rather than confine them to a coop, their wings were clipped so they could not fly away, and they didn’t. Despite very poor soil, we gardened in the front yard. Somehow, we wound up with a large colony of cats under our trailer, and we adopted some of them. Eventually, we adopted a German shepherd who had flunked out of police training. Too timid.
Within days or weeks of our arrival, my mom had tried to enroll me in first grade at the local elementary school, because she had already taught me reading/phonics and writing, at least to some degree, but they declared me too young, and so she had to keep me out until the next school year. They offered kindergarten, but she considered me too advanced for that, and so continued to home school me until I could enter first grade. I was there, and actually recall the conversations that went on while she tried to enroll me.
I’ve not mentioned my older sister up to now, as somehow she essentially escaped my durable recollections until about this stage of my life She was five years older than me, two years older than my older brother (who was 2.5 years older than me) and tended to keep very much to herself. We 3 boys roamed all over the nearby landscape, played army and cowboys and Indians and cops and robbers in the woods, harvested salamanders from the irrigation canal, found an old disused garbage dump a mile or so away in the sticks and broke every bottle in it with well-aimed rocks, and all the Calvin-esque adventures boys are wont to pursue. Our folks bought us used bikes one Christmas, and we learned to ride. Mine was a girls’ J.C. Whitney. So we were a family of six out in the boondocks (I made friends with neighbors, each at least a half-mile walk from our place) in (I think) about a 10X50 trailer with wooden sides. Things were a bit snug. We had been there perhaps two years, perhaps less, when a local pyromaniac recently released from a mental institution, burned the place down. We lost everything. Even the old Model A had its paint blistered and its wooden stake sides scorched. I recall learning we had no homeowners insurance, bunking with friends until we got a new trailer, and receiving a fairly good supply of cast-off clothing from friends and neighbors so that we’d have something to wear.
After a couple of weeks or so, my folks managed to secure a used trailer somewhat larger than the old one, and life began to return to normal. The old trailer had been cleared up by the simple expedient of having a D8 Caterpillar bulldozer come to our place and push the charred hulk over the side of the hill to make room for the new digs.
It was not long before my folks built on a covered and ultimately-enclosed porch, which even had a fireplace fashioned from a 55-gallon drum on its side, with a hole in the front to insert wood, and a hole in the “top” side for a chimney. This became a sort of family room where, in the evenings, we would listen to music like the Everly Brothers and “An Evening (wasted) with Tom Lehrer” and have dad (every night) read Dickens, Jules Verne, etc. to us. Then mom & Dad bought an airstream trailer for their “master suite,” attached it to the far side of the family room, and our home got even larger.
For all that we largely wore hand-me-downs and had hardly any money, it seems now like a kind of idyllic existence. It was around this time that my mom began to teach herself guitar. She and Dad had met in a church choir, and actually loved to sing, especially together. Eventually, Mom taught herself ukulele, guitar, banjo, autoharp and dulcimer. We used to say she could play anything with strings. And speaking of Mom & Dad making music together, I recall them always being demonstrative and physically affectionate, for all that dad was kind of rigid and distant toward us kids. Anyway, when we’d been there for five years, Mom had a surprise pregnancy and we gained a little sister. Our family was now seven. We lived in that place (our lane branched off of a dirt road that literally had “poverty” in the name) for seven years. It was the longest I ever lived in one place until I was grown and married and we bought our first home. Two to three years in one spot was our norm.
In school I learned that getting ahead of the class was a liability, that having a “funny” first name was a liability, as was wearing worn, semi-fitting and out-of-fashion clothes, and I learned what bullying was, both physical and emotional, in earnest. I began to become pretty introverted. I knew I was small, skinny and unprepossessing, and that I could be beat up by mean and stupid people who were, nonetheless, popular. I didn’t think of us as poor but, looking back, we most definitely were. Mom baked our bread, and we bought things in bulk like huge chunks of bologna that we had to slice ourselves, and there were two choices for breakfast on any given day. Oatmeal, or eggs from our chickens. I learned to hate oatmeal, and to fry a mean egg. We did chores, took turns washing the dishes, and made our own breakfasts, and lunches to put in brown bags for school. In fifth grade, I joined the school glee club to be a member of something, and to practice an activity that I loved.
