Southern California

Los Angeles

The journey across the United States by car involved stopping in the many states along the way, with my brother and sister in the back seat the plains of Texas passed and passed.  Lightning splintered the sky like tree roots and rain washed dry clay and sage.  Green trees and lakes and finally mountains made the family in the car cry without any words to explain it.

We arrived in Pasadena and moved into a house located by my Mother’s sister near the Arroyo, a water course coming from the San Gabriel Mountains passing close by our neighborhood.  It was a natural area and I immediately developed the habit of getting up at dawn and walking a familiar course into the canyon, the small forests and grasses made a complete world to be in for daydreaming and playing with the kids that magically appeared from the subdivisions of the City. 

My father developed an interest in surfing so we would spend the weekends traveling the freeways (the Pasadena Freeway was one of the first roads to carry the name “Freeway”) to the beach areas of Newport, Coronado, Laguna Beach, San Clemente, Santa Barbara and San Diego.  The hillsides above the Pacific Ocean were natural, Oak Trees, sage grasses and native flowers abounded.  On the plains connecting to the shores with breaking waves were lettuce ranches and passed the hills of the coast inland were miles and miles of orange groves.  Before politics was invented in its current styles, Orange County was about oranges.

During the fifth grade I remember spending a lot of time in the Pasadena Library reading most of the books on the shelves.  It was just so much fun to be able to take any book home and have it to read.  I read the “Lensmen” series by Doc Smith, the time and space adventures of Heinlein, Asimov, Brown, The Hardy Boys, Freddy the Pig books.  One time I had a cold (being ill let me read 16 hours a day with no interruptions) and read a book about flying saucers and sightings of UFO’s (George Adamski)  This led to reading the Vedas and Upanishads which have many references to flying ships and what I took to be tractor beams, laser weapons and beings from other Planets, Solar Systems and Dimensions.  I was struck by the tiny spectrum of the Human Senses, a small band of vibration in an infinite cosmos of Time and Space.  I wrote a term paper with footnotes citing Journals of Science and Literature describing the atmospheres of the 9 known planets, and possibilities of advanced technology and beings existing in our Solar System, the types of Magnetic Propulsion possible by a ship with a powerful magnetic Pole (schematically depicted in Adamski’s recounting) at its center to ride the waves of gravity present in the Universe. 

My school years in Pasadena were too idle seeming to my parents, though my grades were

B+ ish, they chose to enroll me in a prep school with very unusual features.  Verde Valley School in Sedona Arizona was located in the red rock plains of the birth ground of the Hopi People who are reputed to have originated from a chasm in Cathedral Rock,  an amazing red rock formation several hundred feet in diameter featured in countless Western Movies of the John Wayne era.  When I was a student there, the school was made up of a cluster of bucolic white plaster buildings facing some of the most picturesque scenery in the world.  The Indians of what became Arizona and New Mexico held the area to be Sacred because of its beauty and abundance, no homes were established there.  Navajoes were accustomed to running 20 or 30 miles from their dwellings to tend small plots of beans or corn hidden in the canyons or on ridges.  Many natural water courses crossed through the bluffs, mesas and rocks carrying fish and attracting wildlife.  A place to visit, hunt and fish and leave as found.

Verde Valley School was founded and directed by an idealistic intellectual man named Hamilton Warren grounded in Anthropology and dedicated to passing on the lesson of a common heritage to all races and peoples, not doctrinaire, but practiced.  The absolute majesty of the experience was left in me as an indelible component, but my experience was influenced by a resistance that was somehow stamped on my being.  A feeling that the world is not just, the rich exploit the poor, the strong the meek and so on, and somehow missing that I was rebelling against being born into privilege. 

The entire School took trips to Mexico where the students were placed in the houses of Mexican families to experience life in Taxco, or Juarez, Oahaca or Patzcuaro.  Large Ford trucks were outfitted with box-beds to ride in and slots and crannies for camping gear to set up for nights on the road. I remember the teachers having to make hour long phone calls trying to borrow money to complete the trip as the school, populated by scantly paid idealists, operated on a wish and a prayer.

Another annual sojourn was in the homes of Navahos and Hopis where we stayed and were student-teachers in the Reservation schools. The habit of taking long walks at dawn resulted in hiking over some mesas where I found a human skull.  I took it back to my room not realizing that I had been crossing a sacred burial ground.  When a 6 year old child from the school came to my room I showed it to him and he went white with fear. Such was my ignorance. 

The students at Verde Valley, generally between 15 and18, were allowed to smoke cigarettes in prescribed areas (no one had heard of marijuana in those days, the 1950’s), and went to a multi-cultural church on the hill. 

Upon returning to Pasadena I had bitter arguments with my father about Oil Companies

being tainted with profit motive and entirely material concerns.  Mining a natural resource, owned by each human as a birth-right, and sold in a market place populated by lobbyists and speculators.  Needless to say my attitude has tempered since then, current trends are interesting on this note.