I feel blessed that not only did I grow up in a great location but I also grew up at a great time. Starting first grade in 1960 I experienced President Kennedy's Challenge of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. We were trained in school to become astronauts or rocket scientists. NASA and Lockheed. Eventually I did end up designing computers that were flew on USAF jets. So my early dreams were fulfilled. I always wanted to design Spaceships but USAF Jets is close enough...
and then during the late part of the 1960's I got to participate in Anti Vietnam War protests. We were successful as eventually the vast majority of the American People grasped the concept that the war was Pure Evil. Nixon ended the war AND ended the draft. Saving countless American lives, including Mine. The draft ended just as I turned 18 and I was not asked to go to Vietnam. Thank You, Richard Nixon...
and then I had the opportunity to go to Grateful Dead Concerts High on LSD. Including the concert at Winterland where they filmed "The Grateful Dead Movie"... THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT!
Ecology became popular when I was growing up. I participated in the "Youth Walk for Survival" at UC Berkeley. It was a fundraising benefit for Ecology groups. We asked people to sponsor us for a few cents per mile walked. We started at the Football field on campus, walked around Lake Merritt in Oakland and then back to the football field. Then there was a concert and Malvina Reynolds sand "Boxes, little Boxes". I also worked for the Sierra Club in the Action Clean Up project at the Little Kern River... We camped out for two months and picked up garbage, burnt it in a campfire and packed out the remaining waste to a big dumpster at the trailhead.
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I'm glad that I never played football in High School. Many of my friends and co-workers have developed severe spinal pain due to old football injuries. I was on the team for one week in 7th grade but quit because David Morera and Brett Mannon hurt me every day. Not Fun.
I was a swimmer. We had an AAU team at Pete Denevi's Swim and Racquet Club on Oka Road and then there was a team at LGHS. I won sixth place in breaststroke at the "Far Westerns" held at Foothill Junior College. Anyone from West of the Mississippi could enter. My swimming career peaked at 12 years old and went down from there... sigh...
I also played basketball but was bad at it. Always sitting on the bench while the skilled players took the court. My Coach was Isidro Maytorena. My Idol in 8th grade.
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I went to Isla Vista, CA to visit my brother at UC Santa Barbara. I remember that there was tar on the beach and when we came back to the apartment there was a can of gasoline to be used to clean the bottom of our feet so we wouldn't track the oil into the home and ruin the rug. Companies were drilling for oil offshore and it was leaking onto the beach. California outlawed offshore oil drilling to fix this problem. Now, in 2018 our President Trump wants to start drilling again off ALL the coasts of the USA... That would increase the chances of an ecological disaster like BP had in the Gulf of Mexico. Trump's Policy often benefits the super rich at the expense of the American people...
We also went to a nightclub that had a color organ attached to the record player. The lights would flash in time to the music. Bass notes would trigger red lights, mid-range was green and high frequency sound was blue. By combining Red, Green and Blue equally you can create white light.
This machine blew my mind. Visual Music... Synesthesia... Seeing Sound...
During the years my brother was at UC Santa Barbara, the students burned down the Bank of America to protest the Vietnam War. My brother says he was not involved with this arson as being outdoors on the streets was dangerous. Too much possibility of having your head bashed in by a cop.
One time when we were hiking in the mountains behind Santa Barbara I saw a Condor. They are amazingly large birds... It impressed me.
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I really enjoyed riding a skateboard at Daves Ave School. They had concrete hallways that formed a circle and we kids would race. I was also really interested in baseball and marbles. The school was within walking distance of home so I always walked to school.
All my friends really enjoyed riding bicycles around town. Los Gatos is small enough that we could go anywhere on a bike. Barry Hill and I raced down the hill from the Novitiate and I had a bicycle accident. I ran off the road at a sharp curve, plowed into a short stone wall, flipped over my handlebars and landed on my back in a bush. No real injury except for cuts and scrapes. Had to replace the front wheel but we were able to bend the forks back into shape. One time a bunch of us decided to ride all the way to Big Sur but I got tired and quit before I got to Summit Road. Going uphill all that way didn't seem like a real fun trip after all. Years later I lived in Chico, CA and enjoyed bicycling everywhere for years... Especially in Bidwell Park.
One time I rode my bike all the way to the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose. I always loved that museum with it's Egyptian Pyramid displays. We could go down in a tunnel into King Tut's Tomb... Across the street was a magical bookstore that also sold paintings by Joe Parker, a surrealist/psychedelic painter. He did mandala sunsets in magical landscapes. His paintings were also sold in a record store on North Santa Cruz ave.
My whole family rode bicycles on Highway 280 before it was opened for cars. Thousands of people rode in a one day celebration. We started near the Winchester Mystery House and rode towards downtown San Jose. I've always loved 280 as it was a fast and beautiful way to go visit San Francisco. We had friends that lived in "The City" and would go visit them often. One took me to the Fillmore West in 1969 to go see a band called The Youngbloods. The big song of the night was "Get Together" a classic Hippie Anthem. There were light-shows on the walls of the concert hall. Squishy Water (like the album cover of Iron Butterfly's In a Gadda da Vida Album) and many movie loops. There were blacklights and people were painting each other's bodies with fluorescent paint. Big Fun. We also went to The Exploratorium. That museum allowed the visitors to play with the exhibits. My favorite was the custom built musical jam session where a half a dozen people plated synthesizers that were designed to never play a wrong note... that way visitors that had no musical training could experience the joy of playing without the pain of making noise that was not pleasant. They also had a virtual reality experience where I was flying thru a tunnel and my spaceship traveled in the direction that I looked. It was a game where the goal was to crash into floating cubes that moved randomly. The cubes had people's faces on them and one was Jerry Garcia. This was long before VR games became available to the general public.
We visited the Winchester Mystery House when I was a child. I was not impressed as I was expecting something more like Disneyland. In retrospect, I am admire the giant house and appreciate the story of Sarah Winchester being haunted by the ghosts of all the men that died from gunshot wounds caused by her husbands rifle. She employed carpenters to work around the clock so that their sounds would keep the ghosts away. And if she did have any nightmares she had strong men to protect her.
As a child I loved the Books by Jules Verne and H G Wells. Later my favorite author was Asimov. I'm surprized that Hollywood has never made a movie out of the Foundation Trilogy. It would be as epic as Lord of the Rings... An invention foretold in Foundation was the Encyclopedia Galactica. It now exists as Wikipedia... I still believe there is a possibility of predicting the future using computer modeling... (PsychoHisory)... Be sure to see the movie "Journey to the Center of the Earth" by Rick Wakeman and an Orchestra... They have a narrator reading Jules Verne and then the band plays a song about that chapter. Quite Remarkable. Yes, Rick plays two Moog synthesizers at the same time. Got two hands? Play two Moogs.
MAD Magazine was my favorite. They did satire including a silly poem called Jabberwacky... (On Dreaming, After Falling Asleep Watching TV) based on Lewis Carrol's Book Alice in Wonderland and Thru the Looking Glass. "Twas Brillo and the GE Stoves did Proctor Gamble in the Glade. All Pillsbury were the Tastee Loaves and in a Minute Maid. Beware the Station Break My son..." etc. etc. etc.
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/03/things-i-remember-growing-up-in-los.html
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/02/things-i-remember-growing-up-in-los.html
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