Police Academy

B.V.S.T. 28 was known as the special needs class.  Basic Visitor Services Training, as they called the police academy classes in Parks were held at the William Penn Mott Training Center at Asilomar State Beach.  The facilities were part of the conference center run by a concessionaire.  We lived in hotel rooms with maid service and a fireplace in a downstairs day room. 

It was hard to say how we became the special needs class.  We were the last class for the testing done in February, 2003.  That meant, as someone in the class before us indelicately put it, we were the bottom of the barrel.  The classes were put together based on overall scores.  I had originally been scheduled for BVST 27 but the delay from my psych test knocked me back to 28.  We were all in the situation of either being at the bottom of the scoring or having something that delayed our starting.  One cadet had diabetes and had fought the bureaucracy to have his application accepted. 

There were 29 of us.  We were bright, almost all college graduates, a few had AA degrees which they had worked hard to get.  We were teachers, park aides, State clerks, and people who had held one job or another but still hadn’t found the job they wanted.  Our class also had four Fish and Game Warden cadets.  We ranged in age from 21 to three of us in our 50s.  The majority of the cadets were around 30 years old.   One of the older guys was a former banker like myself and the other had worked for an airline. 

The thorough background check done on all of us assured that we were honest and people of outstanding integrity.  The Academy is the only place I’ve ever been where I could leave a pen on my desk in the afternoon and come back the next morning and get it.  Even cash lost was recovered and an attempt made to return it to the owner.  There were no thieves and no liars amongst us.  If we were the bottom of the barrel, it was an outstanding barrel.    

State Parks runs a very good Academy.  It is the same P.O.S.T., Peace Officers Standard Training, that all police officers in California, LAPD, Highway Patrol, sheriffs, municipalities, counties, state and special agencies go through.  It was a 21 week course and had an academic component along with physical training, arms training and police procedures.  The material wasn’t that hard by itself but the sheer volume of it packed into a short period and the intentional stress put on the cadets by the system and the trainers, made it a very grueling five months.  The academic part was geared to a high school graduate and the physical training to someone in reasonably good shape.  The physical training was the easiest part of all.  I think most of us welcomed it as an enjoyable challenge and a stress relief from the rest of the program.      

In spite of all the potential it had, BVST 28 turned out to be one of the worst group experiences I’ve ever had.  My expectations were that it would be like basic training or mountaineering where a disparate group of people came together and accomplished a difficult task by helping each other and developing a team spirit.  It turned out to be an ordeal where each of us survived in our own way.  We never came together as a group and in fact, the 20 of us who graduated six months later, all of us seemed to be relieved to be done with it and fled the scene as soon as it was over.  Parks added an extra month to the academy for interpretive training, At the end there seemed to be a general feeling of embarrassment of what we had become, like the survivors in William Goldings novel, the Lord of the Flies, we didn’t want to be reminded of it.  It was something to be put behind us.  As a group we’ve never made any attempt to get together or even connect on the internet.  We were fragmented into various cliques and while everyone tried to belong one way or another most of us were on the outs.  Instead of being a bonding experience, it was more like a junior high experience, something we were all relieved to be done with.    

It was hard to say what went wrong.  It was basically a very good group of people  We were honest, we had character, we were a specially selected group of people with really superior talents and motivation.  In my opinion, there was one bad apple among us, not bad for a group of 30, and a few weak links also not a bad number for any group.  It was certainly a group that given the right circumstances should have been a good experience for everyone who could survive the challenge. 

I recently had lunch with a superintendent and we talked about my class and his experience in the academy.  He attributed the lack of cohesion to a failure in leadership and I think there’s something to that.  There were two Cadet Training Officers, one of whom was very well liked and supportive, but the other was distant and hard on us and himself.  Our first crisis as a class was an alcohol incident.  Alcohol was banned in the Park for cadets.  We could walk a 150 yards to a local pub outside the Park.  Behind the pub was a picnic area that they didn’t mind if cadets brought their own and consumed it there.  Six weeks into the program it was discovered that some of the cadets were openly consuming alcohol in the dorms.  The Training Officer called each of us in and reminded us we were bound by an honor code to reveal what we knew. 

The so called honor code we were held to was based on a few minutes of paperwork that had been part of the blizzard of paperwork in the first week.  It had never been explained and there had never been a real commitment to it by the group, so no one was protected by any group agreement of transparency, a minimum requirement for any honor code to work. 

In my uncomfortable interview I admitted I had seen a particular cadet take a six pack of beer to his room, but I had never seen him consume it. At the end of the so called investigation we seemed to fall into two groups, conspirators and snitches, but no one could be sure who was which, just suspicions.  Somehow a squabble between two roommates got mixed into it and one of the roommates, one of the alleged snitches, was a lesbian and some of the offended cadets grumbled she shouldn’t even be in the class.  One of the Training Officers, a female, was very apparently a lesbian.  In law enforcement in general and in Parks as well more than the usual number of women among the Rangers were openly lesbian.  On the other hand in law enforcement gay men are almost never out.  Our class probably had one or two gay men in the closet and that added to the tension and one of the leading homophobes against the woman as to be expected had his own issues. 

So we divided into the drinking crowd and the non-drinkers, the cool people and the uncool people, snitches and conspirators.  Some of the younger cadets had problems with those of us who were older, especially me, it seemed.  Maybe I had a problem being older.  I don’t know. 

In my experience even all of this shouldn’t have derailed us.  Differences and problems to be overcome are not unusual in group dynamics and often are part of the challenge the group overcomes.  I guess in our case there were just too many differences, character, age, geography, education, orientation, basic attitudes, even departments, and in my opinion it was exacerbated by bad leadership.  We fractured and then we fractured again and again.  We never came together as a group. 

I started the classes excited about the subject material and threw myself into it.  Our first real classes we had two deputy district attorneys teaching it.  I was excited to have them in the classroom to learn from and grill.  While everyone in the academy did well academically, it quickly became apparent that a number of cadets thought any enthusiasm for the classes was an attempt to show them up and the tone of the classes became competitive with penalties for being enthusiastic about it.  A clique of young people studied together but they seemed to exclude everyone else in a paranoid attempt to look better themselves.   

We studied 40 domains as they were called.  There were sections on traffic enforcement, sex crimes, constitutional guarantees, search methods, everything a rookie police officer needed to know before going in the field.  The classes in law were taught by the deputy district attorneys for Monterey County.  Other classes were taught by Rangers who had become experts in the field and police officers from other agencies like the Highway Patrol, Carmel Police Department and Gilroy.  The material and the classes were not too easy but also not very hard.  What made it hard was the relentlessness of it, week after week, we sat in the classroom for eight hours with short breaks and a lunch break and learned one unit after another. 

When we completed a unit there was a test.  POST requires that the test be passed with a 70% score.  Parks required 80%.  The additional stress of physical training, and the minutia of barracks life, and the academic part which wasn’t in itself hard became stressful.  We had done the same thing for Juvenile POST class, but that extra 10% and the other stresses hadn’t been there.  If you failed a test, you had to retest and if you failed that, you were out of the class.  Our diabetes cadet, a teacher, failed out on a test four of us had to retake. 

It was a week where everything seemed to go wrong.  The section was on Sex Crimes against Minors and it was all about relationships and ages.  The test was loaded with detail and four of us got less than the 80% required.  As a group we decided to retake the test that Friday instead of waiting over the weekend and taking it Monday.  Everything happened that week and there wasn’t enough time to study enough.  At the retesting I still didn’t know the material.  We had a very difficult hour waiting for the results.  No one was confident of passing and Lars, our teacher and diabetic, didn’t.  He was a big loss.  Everyone liked him, he had been one of the cadets who pulled us together. 

In those first few weeks, we lost a Warden cadet who had been too far away from school for too long.  We lost Lars and another cadet who was trying to split his attention between a new wife and the academy.  Alvin chose the wife.  At the end of a couple of months one of the older cadets was let go.  Red was strong but his joints were stiff and he didn’t have flexibility in his hands and wrists.  The defensive tactics training, police judo, was hard for him.  His attitude was they had to pass him and they didn’t. 

I did finish the course, I got a lot of support from Al Pepito and other people in the program but Bill Delasin was my training officer and his write-ups and manner were always very negative. 

Later in the course we had anonymous evaluations by our peers, another ill conceived and executed move that fractured us further.  Many of the evaluations were poison pen notes.   One critique of me particularly criticized my anti-abortion stance, I happen to be pro-choice, based on a question I had once asked.  Another classmate had her weight criticized and denigrated

We never worked together as a class and a cool people clique formed and they helped each other but seemed to think the rest of us should not be there.  It all had a junior high school feel to it.  There was a junior high cynicism and bias against taking the classes seriously.   One classmate who was probably the slowest in the group was made a hero for being a fool.  He bloomed under the attention and showed a good sense of humor.  He was voted the class valedictorian even though he wasn’t close to being at the top of the class.  One of my guests wondered what was he doing speaking for the class, but he was the cool group’s mascot.

I felt isolated and alone.  In my sixth grade John McAdam was the misfit in our class.  John wasn’t particularly bright and he was overweight.  He was desperate for friendship and didn’t have any friends.  He didn’t fit in.  He was the brunt of jokes and teasing.  Everything he did seemed to reinforce his not belonging.  I felt like the John McAdam of our class. 

I didn’t have any real friends among my classmates.  The one friend I had made was too wrapped up in her own world and her problems to be much help.  As scenarios approached it really became an issue.  Scenarios, going through realistic situations with actors, where we had demonstrate a knowledge of procedure and law, couldn’t be practiced alone and the cliques practiced together and excluded the rest of us.    

I was desperate and I sought out Denis Poole, the other cadet my age.  He agreed to practice with me and we began working together.  Thank god.  My friendship with Denis was the only way I made it through the Academy.  For some reason, Denis and I hadn’t connected before.  He lived not too far away and didn’t stay at Asilomar except when he needed to study.  At the end of April we began practicing for scenarios together.  Denis and I have been good friends ever since.  In a recent conversation, Denis said he didn’t trust anyone in that class.  Now that I think about it, I need to confirm with Denis that I was the exception.  Certainly since that experience Denis is one of my most trusted friends today. 

The training itself was challenging and enjoyable.  Our daily routine was physical training before breakfast three days a week, long runs, sprints, and  various exercises to get us ready for the physical test that was part of the academy experience including leaping a six foot wall on the run.  That was a challenge for almost all us but could be accomplished by having the right attitude and using the flow of your body as you hit the wall.  Even for the short people, using their own momentum could get them over the wall easily.  It was typical of these tests that at the end, when we had practiced on a smooth wall, the actual test was done on a wall with a small chink in it that could be used as a step. 

The other universal element that everyone dreaded was the pepper spray in the eyes.  It added to the feeling that some of the training was just plain hazing that all California police officers shared to become part of the fraternity.  The academy started in January and in April we received our training for pepper spray and tear gas.  We walked through buildings full of gas that made it hard to breathe and brought tears to our eyes.  At the end of the day, we waited in the classroom for our turn to go outside and be sprayed.  When my turn came I stood for a moment outside the classroom with my back to the wall.  When I stood at the wall, the Ranger asked me my name and when I looked up to give it to her, she sprayed me square in the eyes.  She was good at it and it hurt. 

Pepper spray  on your skin burns like hell and particularly burns in your eyes.  I had seen it done at the San Jose Police Academy we shared at Evergreen College.  There the cadets were pepper sprayed and then ran to a tub of water and washed their eyes out as soon as they could.  Typical of our academy, since we had a reputation for being warm and fuzzy, they made it harder.  Before we could wash our eyes out we had to handcuff a trainer using proper defensive tactics methods.  So for as long as it took for the pepper spray to wear off enough to think and act clearly we just stood there and suffered through it.  . 

Some of the cadets were in huge pain.  One of my friends began shaking uncontrollably as he wept his eyes out.  The people with lighter skin and lighter eyes suffered the most.  My mother used to make chili sauce when I was young and it seemed frequently the essence of it got in the air and burned our eyes and if we touched anything it seemed to get on our skin and then in our eyes as well.  I make chili sauce myself and sometimes forget to wash the oil off before I touch my eyes.  I’ve felt the burn and I knew the best thing to do is to keep my eyes open, not to touch them and to let the active ingredient oxidize.  I had a very bad 10 minutes and then was able to handcuff the trainer and go and take a shower.  The shower was painful but eventually I was able to wash my eyes out. 

Some of my classmates took a half hour or more to be able to handcuff the trainer.  They closed their eyes because it felt like it helped but in fact made the whole process take longer.    

The rationale for the pepper spray is that if we use it we need to know how it feels.  Someone asked, “Does that mean you’re going to shoot us next?”  In fact, it seems to me it is just a rite of passage that all cops share and afterwards we get to laugh about it together.  It’s sanctioned hazing and it works.     

I was surprised the whole physical part of the program was easy.  I was in good shape.  I’ve tried to stay in good shape most of my adult life.  I was a jogger and a runner, a mountaineer and a cyclist.  We ran about 12 miles a week and did strengthening exercises.  It was fun.  I managed to stay right in the middle of our class, coming in about 10^th overall.  The three mile runs became competitions.   The Tigers ran out front but there were plenty of us in the middle to compete against each other. 

I heard Jim Nelson comment one time that he felt OK as long as he stayed ahead of me.  The next run, I stayed right with him, and half way through he realized we were racing.  He kept trying to get me to lead and I kept dogging him, if I went ahead I went slower than he wanted to run.  At the last half mile I took off and left Jim in my dust beating him by a good 200 yards or more.  I loved it.  We did a rematch and I stayed with him but at the end of the rematch I didn’t try as hard.  I don’t know if Jim found his win as satisfying.  I loved mine.  I repeated this experience later with a Ranger at Mount Diablo and it was just as satisfying then. 

Besides the other academic training, hours and hours in the classroom with frequent testing where each test had to be passed or be terminated, we had basic medical training.  I particularly enjoyed the EMR, Emergency Medical Responder, training.  I found the physiology challenging and interesting.  It was a large section and took more than a week.  It was very involved and included practical tests, splinting, taking vital signs, bandaging and all the elements of advanced first aid.  The first few times in the field I was very unsure of myself with accident victims, there was always another Ranger that would arrive on the scene as a backup, but after awhile I developed a real competence in emergency medical treatment and a year after the Academy I even went through additional training to become an EMT, an Emergency Medical Technician. 

It was a grueling five months and the last step were the scenarios that we had to do.  We went out to Fort Ord, a decommissioned military base in Monterey.  We waited in a classroom and then were called out to various calls.  We drove in a police car to each station; domestic violence, robbery, burglary, felony arrests, sexual assault,  mentally deranged and one with live fire with paper wad loads.  A  sniper opened up on me with an AR-15 in what started as a medical call.  I fired back with my Smith and Wesson pistol, paper charges.  I wasn’t hit myself.  I thought maybe the trainer wasn’t that good a shot, but one of my classmates had a pattern of hits on his chest.  The sniper, a Ranger, was very accurate.  I think in immediately firing back I put the sniper off balance long enough for me to get to cover.    

The other scenarios used actors and Rangers who really got into it and we were passed or failed on following procedures and handling the situations.  It involved all of our classroom learning and using our defensive tactics.  It was extraordinarily stressful but I managed to pass all the scenarios with only one that I had to repeat or remediate as they called it.  I was able to do it the same day and pass the remediation. 

My friend Denis had to remediate three the next day.  We had two remediations for each scenario before we were out and Denis was on his last, but he also managed to pass all the remediations.  In fact, our whole class, those who were still with us, managed to pass.  It was the last test on the Friday before Memorial Day and we finished the POST part of the academy.  The last month was Park training for Interpretation and there was no stress to that.  It was a good class but not especially hard.   

Michael Greene was the instructor.  I think he was frustrated with some of us, because we didn’t take the class as seriously as he thought we should.  I was exhausted and didn’t put much effort into the last month.  The training was excellent and I learned it and incorporated it into the interpretation I did in the years afterwards, but Michael wanted us to be extroverts and flamboyant about it and that wasn’t my style.  I can do that and sometimes do, but I didn’t rise to the occasion at Asilomar.  And the weekend I should have put into my presentation I went to my eldest son’s wedding in New Mexico.  My final presentation was adequate.

On July 1^st, 2005 we were sworn in as State Park Rangers.  It was an incredibly satisfying accomplishment.  The last weekend before graduation one of our classmates had been arrested for driving under the influence.  He didn’t report it to the training officers and on Tuesday before graduation Mike was terminated for not having reported a negative police contact as required by the department.  It was a sad event, Mike had been one of the bridge cadets who got along with everyone, but it was the way our class had gone.  Also Bill Delasin showed up at the graduation dressed in civilian clothes without a badge or a weapon.  Bill had always worn his uniform and weapon.  He wouldn’t say why, but he said he was no longer a police officer.  We never learned why but whatever it was, it had been going on for some time, either a medical issue or a violation of the conduct required of peace officers.  It partially explained to me why Bill had been so negative to me.  I think it seemed unfair to him that I was becoming a Ranger at 58 and he was being forcibly retired in his 40s.

We left and as a group seemed to be glad to be done with each other.  There was no group feeling even at graduation.  We all seemed a little embarrassed being together.  We went our separate ways and I’ve only stayed in contact with a couple of people.  Twice when I’ve visited Parks where classmates were Rangers, our exchanges have been very warm, even though both times they were members of the inner clique.  Maybe the whole thing was in my head but I don’t think so. 

I am very proud of having completed a full police academy and I learned in the experience but it didn’t include much personal satisfaction with the group.  I survived, I got a badge and earned the right to train as a police officer in the field and I’m very proud of that.  I’m just sorry that we’ve never been able to share that accomplishment as a class. 

All of the training at the academy was just preparation for training in the field.  I went to Mount Diablo State Park east of San Francisco and my Field Training Officer was Cameron Morrison, an experienced Ranger and one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve every worked with.  For 90 days Cameron and I worked together as a team and in fact the rules which we followed rigidly required that whenever I was in the field armed and badged, that Cameron and I be together. 

The things I learned in the academy we did for real in the field.  We did traffic stops, wrote tickets, chased a drunk at high speed and even made an arrest.  At first Cameron led but then I began to take the lead and Cameron watched and critiqued.  It was not easy, but Cameron’s attitude was so positive that there was little doubt I would pass.  Two of our classmates did fail the Field Training. 

Field Training lasted 90 days and then another 9 months of probation during which I had regular training and support. 

The first day showing up to work actually wearing a loaded pistol and a badge was an amazing experience and after 90 days being in the field by myself most of the time wearing the pistol and badge was again a very unsettling and ominous feeling.  It took a year to get used to wearing a gun.  I don’t think any of us ever take it for granted and I was always aware of it but it did become routine and I became used to people’s reaction to an armed and badged police officer. 

I loved being a cop.  It was a great experience.  I got to work with incredible people and I enjoyed the respect and admiration of citizens when I did my job well.    

Becoming a Ranger

In 1999 I quit banking after nearly 30 years.  Enough already.  I took a year off to see what would happen and within a month writing happened.  Essentially I acknowledged what I really wanted to do and tried it, as I’ve done again now in retirement.  I wrote regularly for a year.  I wrote short stories mostly and posted them on Zoetrope.  I think they’re good but they’re not good enough.  I sent some off, I got good reactions, but not great but as a writer I learned a lot that year.  At the end of the year I went looking for work and in 2001 I had the good fortune of getting a job as an on call counselor at San Francisco Juvenile Hall. 

On call counselor is a part time position , no benefits, where I could work no more than 1096 hours or six months in any twelve month period.  As I’ve learned it is the normal first step to becoming fully employed in the public sector.  At Juvy the pattern for people who became full time counselors was to work the hours as six months straight and then be taken on as a provisional counselor, benefits but not full civil service protection.  The transition was accomplished by staying under the radar and becoming provisional because you worked more than 1096 hours and personnel didn’t stop it. 

I made the mistake of pointing out to a supervisor that I was close to my 1096 hours.  That week I was laid off along three other counselors.  I collected unemployment and the thought occurred to me I should at least look for other employment even though I was assured I would be rehired at Juvy either full time or brought back as an on call the next year.  So one morning while surfing the internet, I asked myself what I wanted to be when I grew up?

Park Ranger!  I went online and quickly found California State Parks.  They listed Park Ranger as an open position for which they were taking applications.  I could apply online.  So I did.  Two or three weeks a notification of the test came.  It was in February.  In November I was rehired by Juvenile Hall as a full time counselor along with three others who had been laid off.  Within a couple of months I was enrolled in the POST course for Juvenile Corrections Officers.  In the jargon of law enforcement, counselors are badged peace officers, but not sworn, that is they don’t carry weapons and they don’t have full powers of arrest.     

I was actually still in training when I went to take the State Parks Ranger test in February at Half Moon Bay.  A Ranger from the local State Park was there.  To my surprise he was wearing a large sidearm.   I had no idea State Park Rangers were armed and that’s when I learned Rangers are full fledged police officers with police academy training and the same powers as a Highway Patrolman or any municipal police officer. 

I struggled with the idea of being a cop with a gun but from my experience at Juvy working with police officers and asking myself how I really felt about it, I realized I really wanted to be a police officer.  I had wanted to be a police officer since I was five years old.  In daily practice I’m mostly a pacifist.  But I knew from juvenile hall that I could subdue kids when I needed to.  As a twenty year old facing the draft I had asked myself if I was a conscientious objector.  I really searched my conscience and the answer was no.  I believed armed force was sometimes necessary, in wars of defense or protecting the innocent, and the same held for police officers.  I knew then and I know now, that under the right circumstances I am willing to take a human life to save lives. 

I daydreamed of being a Park Ranger and a police officer and it became very attractive to me.  I couldn’t believe State Parks had no age limit for Rangers.  They thought that even though I was 56 years, that was just fine. 

In State Parks all superintendents are peace officers and one career path in State Parks is to work one's way up through maintenance to Maintenance Chief and then go through the Academy, become a peace officer and a superintendent.  So Parks had experience with people going through the Academy when they were well into middle age.  Many senior superintendents in park management had followed just that career path. 

Even though I really wanted to be a police officer and a Ranger I told myself I would just stay with it through the agility test as a challenge.  After all I really was 57 years old.  The agility test required normal good physical condition which most of my adult life I had maintained into my 50s with running and cycling.  In training I injured my left shoulder and worried about trying to carrying weights while running in one of the tests.  In June, 2003 my shoulder had healed enough that I did barely pass that test.  As I was doing the step test I realized in my training I had trained wrong and I ended up struggling through that test.  The rest of the test was relatively easy.  At the end we had to dive in a pool fully clothed, retrieve something from the bottom, and swim to the far side.  After passing everything else the dip in the pool was refreshing.  Lots of people didn’t pass the test and I felt 10 feet tall among all those 20 and 30 somethings.  I passed!

In December I went ahead and met with a retired Ranger who did the background check and in February of 2004 I took the pysch test.  As San Francisco had done the State asked about my experience in the service but instead of a short conversation and passing me as the psychologist for the City  had done, the State wanted my service medical records.  I was devastated.  I thought that was their bureaucratic way of getting rid of me.  No, a personnel clerk told me, I could send off and have my service records sent to the State.  So I did, but I wrote off becoming a Ranger.  I settled into Juvenile Hall and adjusted my thinking that I would stay there until retirement.  I even became a union steward. 

In August, two years after I had first applied, State Parks asked me to meet with a psychologist who by coincidence also contracted with San Francisco Juvenile Hall.  He was very interested in my experience on unit B4 with the 17 year olds, and then he passed me.  I didn’t hear anything from the State but in December I got a panicky phone call that said my background check was expired and could I quickly meet with an investigator and if I passed it again, could I attend a class starting January 2^nd in three weeks time?  

I couldn’t believe I was crazy enough to consider going to a Police Academy at the age of 58.  Then I happened to pick up Lance Armstrong’s biography and the message I got was, Go For It!  So I did.  I got notification that I passed the background two days before Christmas.  I spent the next week trying to get together the uniforms I needed and January 1^st, 2005 I l drove to Pacific Grove near Monterey and the California State Parks Ranger Academy.  

Benjamin

At the end of 1974 Cathy was a fulltime student a Cal State LA.  Sean was in kindergarten at Glenfilez Boulevard Elementary School and Ted was enrolled at the pre-school at Cal State LA.  I was working in the Urban Affairs Department at Bank of America.   Cathy and I had had a rough time in  our marriage.  We had gotten through England OK, even with a bad start, but when we got home, the tensions began to increase.  Cathy seemed to be angry and jealous of my going to school and then off to work.  I wasn’t committed to Cathy and things were rough between us.  I think we had married very young and it didn’t feel very comfortable to either one of us as we began to grow up.

Then we went to Marriage Encounter.  It was in the early days of Marriage Encounter and Chuck Gallagher, a Jesuit priest, was leading most of the weekends.  Chuck and a small circle of couples had adapted encounter groups to married couples and devised this weekend without much sleep.  The honest sharing of encounter was between the couple who attended it.  We were encouraged to tell each other our innermost feelings and to share them in a loving way.  For Cathy and me it came just in time to save our marriage.  It worked and that was a good thing.  

There were cultish aspects of Marriage Encounter.  They intimidated the participants into giving a lot of money and attending information meetings and other events over getting sleep and other obligations.  They proselytized with a heavy hand and we were expected to bring everybody we knew to Marriage Encounter.  We were encouraged to go to weekends as often as we could and outside the weekends we formed groups that met in homes and we got to know other couples.  Marriage Encounter was very Catholic and we began attending church.  Marriage Encounter created community in a way that wasn’t usually seen in Catholic parishes.    

It was a very good thing for us.  Cathy and I became respectful of each other and much more loving.  It helped us to develop and nurture the love we had for each other. 

These weekends conducted at local hotels, started Friday night and couples would share intimate aspects of their relationship.  After a sharing by a couple on a subject, we would go back to our rooms and write to each other about the topic.  The communication on difficult subjects made it a very intimate weekend with breakthroughs in our relationship that continued on.  We learned like other couples to bring a jug of wine on these weekends.  Alcoholism was never one of those subjects discussed.  The Catholic Church we threw ourselves into, was very Irish and alcohol was a common social lubricant.  I never heard it discouraged by anyone.  I think among Catholics alcoholism was the elephant in the living room. 

In February, 1975 Cathy told me she was pregnant.  We were Catholic but we still practiced birth control.  Early on Cathy had used the pill.  She had tried an IUD but didn’t do well with it and in 1974 and 1975 we were using a spermicidal gel.  It was inconvenient but easier healthwise and apparently not all that effective.  At the time, I thought Cathy’s pregnancy was convenient for her.  She was doing well in school, had gotten a job with the day care center as a clerical person and things were going well, but my thinking at the time was that she was frightened of success and the pregnancy let her off from that.  I had felt railroaded when pretty much on her own she decided to have a second child just before we got out of the service.  I think my role at the time was very passive and I resented that she seemed to take advantage of that. 

I think it’s important that pregnancies and birth be viewed in the most positive aspect and so I did when Cathy announced she was pregnant.  I don’t know how Catholic we are but I think children born should always be greeted as gifts from God.  We were in a good place and it was a good thing.  I was doing well at Bank of America and at Cathy’s insistence we began house hunting.  Before the baby was born we found a house in Glassell Park and bought it.  The house a little way up the hill from Eagle Rock Boulevard cost us $33,000 dollars and we used the GI Bill to make that purchase.  It stretched us financially; the payments were $333 a month.  I was making $12,000 a year and taking home about $700. 

Benjamin was born October 14, 1975, two weeks after we moved in.  Our friends from Marriage Encounter helped us with the move and we were welcomed into the new parish, St. Bernard’s, by couples we already knew.  Benjamin was born at Kaiser Hospital on Sunset, our first American born child.  As I had with Ted, I got to attend the birth.  Shortly after Benjamin was born we got a dog and became the classic family, three boys and a dog.. 

Life was good, little league, involvement in our local parish, community.  We went on vacations to Uncle Warren’s farm.  Warren and Frannie were Cathy’s aunt and uncle in Bellingham, Washington.  Benjamin himself was quite a character.  I think he had to be tougher than the other boys just to survive.  Early on he began wearing a red fireman’s hat, something he was never without from the time he was less than two years old for the next two years.  He was well known wherever we went.   He liked action figures and sports.  He seemed to have an easy going character and he was cute as the dickens.

It turned out Benjamin was great in sports.  He was a star in t-ball, one of the kids who could actually catch the ball. He went on to be an outstanding little leaguer and an incredible flag football quarterback.  He was an interesting young man.  He seemed to me to be quiet and able to take care of himself.  I think he had a hard time with two older brothers and they kept him in his place and while he was a sweet kid, he was a tough kid too, able to roll with the punches.   

Benjamin turned eight when Cathy and I separated.  I remember on his birthday, I picked him up and took him to the Grinder, a coffee shop in Glendale.  We were both enjoying our time out together.  I told the waitress that it was his birthday and he was surprised and delighted when the waitresses came with a birthday cake and candles burning.  He couldn’t believe they knew it was his birthday.  I remember also at that dinner, I drank numerous glasses of white wine.  Not unusually I was probably a little sloshed.  That is, thank god, the last time I remember drinking with any of my children around me.  I got sober two months later.

When we separated Benjamin had just turned 8, Ted was 12 and Sean was 14.  Benjamin seemed to do OK.  He was deeply involved in sports and sought after by coaches in baseball and football.  Ted was involved in swimming and went to long practices every afternoon and meets on the weekends.  Sean began acting out right away.  He was expelled from Loyola High School for having marijuana at a football game.  After that he went to Providence and after that Eagle Rock High School.  He dropped out of school when he was 16.  Neither Cathy nor I seemed to be able to get him to settle down and we had less and less control over him as time passed.

From then until Ben graduated from high school I tried to live as nearby to where they lived with their mother as I could.  I drove Ted and then Benjamin to school every morning at Loyola near downtown LA.  I stayed involved with them and while the divorce wasn't easy on anyone I think we survived it.  Cathy or I never did manage to regain control over Sean, still true today, but he managed to turn out very well himself.     .     

Banker

One job skill I’ve never had is looking for work.  In the fall of 1972 I went looking for work.  Mabel Wedlaw at the unemployment office sent me to Bank of America.  So I became a banker.  I had one other prospect also from Mabel for a company called Western Gear.  I took the B of A job.  It was a good job as a public relations representative, a writer for B of A.  It paid $9,000 a year, a good salary in 1972 and about $4,000 a year more than I expected fresh out of college.   

I wasn’t a very good writer and what I didn’t know at the time is that writing like any other trade is a skill to be learned.  I thought I had to be good at it out of the blocks and I wasn’t.  I was so uncomfortable having to do something I had no confidence in, I quickly got out of it and went into community relations with Bank of America.  Community relations was about talking to people; organizing people in taking action.   I learned how to do it as I went.  I don’t think I had a preconception of how good I should be. 

I transferred to Bank of America’s Urban Affairs Department and there I organized volunteer efforts that taught consumer finance in adult school, matched mentors for Job Corps participants and made connections between the bank and community groups.  I got to work for Joe Angello and I began learning how to interact with people. 

Before I got sober I had a tendency to burn myself out wherever I went.  In those days I was impressive in the start and poor in the long run, a flash in the pan.  My ambition took me to credit training just as my credit at Urban Affairs was running out.  I became a loan officer.  I really wasn’t very good at that.  I had some success opening a new office for the Walnut Fair Oaks branch as the agency manager.  After that it was downhill.  I found myself in over my head and after two years I fled Bank of America into commercial sales for a company that sold paper and rotary press forms. 

I made good money, but sales either takes a huge amount of self confidence or more often monster insecurities disguised as self confidence.  I had neither in sufficient amount.  I did a lot of birdwatching that year instead of selling paper.  One time the manager's wife came into the office and later commented to her husband, "For a guy who supposedly works indoors, he sure has quite a tan."  After a year I got back into credit and became the manger of mobile home financing operation for a medium sized independent insurance brokerage.  The credit market tightened up and I was struggling to make a living and after nine months I was lucky to get a job with City National Bank. 

By this time I had enough experience to actually learn to become a loan officer at City National Bank.  I enjoyed it.  Unfortunately, my alcoholism which had not served me well anywhere, got worse at City National Bank and my career was grinding down to nothing.  When I joined City National they were a small but dynamic Beverly Hills Jewish bank.  I started at Encino and after a year and a half I got myself the job of assistant manager of the Century City Office and failed completely.  There were challenges in the branch but I was not up to them.  I remember one time I had stayed up until the wee hours of the morning drinking wine by myself.  I came to work in the morning smelling of wine and still a little drunk.  Most of the time I was oblivious how others might see my drinking, but even I knew coming to work drunk was not a good thing.  

I was nearly fired, not for drinking but just incompetence, not measuring up.  My job at the bank was saved by a friend, a drinking buddy in credit administration, and I became a relief loan officer at various branches that needed someone temporarily.  I recovered a little and got assigned to a branch with an incompetent and tyrannical manager for whom no one else would work and I couldn’t do any better.  I got sober while working at the Sunset Doheny branch.  In AA they say you have to reach bottom before you can get sober.  In my career as a banker, Sunset Doheny was pretty near the bottom. 

Joe’s wife was from a well known and wealthy family and he rode their money.  The branch itself catered to wealthy Beverly Hills types, rock and roll bands and minor celebrities.  Cher without makeup or presence, looking like a washed out mouse, spent hours with our new accounts clerk who was a friend of hers.  Joe tortured his employees because he could and my customers were tattooed and pierced rockers in the days before that was common.    

In 1984 after 8 months of sobriety I left City National Bank and went to Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank in downtown Los Angeles.  As a career move it quickly proved to be the wrong place to go.  My first day instead of going to an office in headquarters as I thought I was, I was shown my desk on the branch floor, next to a retreaded B of A Vice President who I had known many years ago.  I thought I should have left the first day, but my pride kept me there.  DKB and its predecessor Japan California Bank had been in California 25 years taking care of the interests of its Japanese customers and trying to tap into the rich California market without any success.  They didn’t have a clue before and they didn’t have a clue after I joined them. 

The Japanese officers there worked hard to help their Japanese customers get into the California market, to take whatever technologies they were looking for, make quick real estate profits and generally take advantage of the American market in any way they could.  I stayed at DKB 9 years and after I left the orgy of buying eventually collapsed with the Tokyo real estate bubble and so did DKB, a zombie bank it was swallowed up by other Japanese banks who were only marginally healthier. 

I was still learning how to live a sober life when I joined DKB.  I quickly realized that being a token American officer in an organization that was lost was not the worst way to make a living.  I got a decent paycheck without very demanding work and I could put my energy and drive into learning to live sober.  At DKB they were strict about punctuality.  It was important to get to work on time and no one should leave before quitting time.  What I did in between, they really didn’t care.  I went to noontime AA meetings and long lunches with my sober friends afterwards.  My downtown AA community was my classroom for life and my evening meetings in South Pasadena were an opportunity to develop my leadership and community skills.

After the first year Yoshihiro Hayashi came to DKB from Tokyo and we became friends and I enjoyed working for Hayashi-san.  I felt like I was doing something and I learned how to work with the Japanese.  I’ve always enjoyed foreign environments and I learned a lot about collaborative work from my Japanese friends.  After getting used to that environment I much preferred it to the competitive American environment where people often seemed to work against each other.    

In 1990 I became the CRA officer for DKB.  CRA, the Community Reinvestment Act, was an obscure law that the first Bush administration revitalized as a way to put the pressure for economic development on the private sector and take the pressure off the Federal government.  Banks couldn’t operate without a satisfactory CRA exam, including foreign banks, who had no clue on how to develop business and lend in “disadvantaged” areas.  The meaning of “disadvantaged” at the time was people of color and areas where they were concentrated. 

DKB had no idea at the time that I actually had experience in working with community groups, and Latinos and African Americans. 

I went to meetings hosted by the regulators and consultants in the field.  I began to get a sense of CRA.  There was a regular circle of CRA people among the more sophisticated banks.  They didn’t have much time for the Japanese and Chinese who were mostly clueless.  They weren’t helpful to me at all with the exception of Bob McNealy, a very good man from Union Bank.  Slowly I began to figure things out.  I was lucky to link up with an old friend from City National Bank, Gordon Lejeune, who had become City National Bank’s CRA officer. 

In 1991 I was a member of the board of Casa de las Amigas, a women’s alcohol and drug recovery house and that year I became the chairman of their annual fundraising event.  I had a lot of help and guidance from people with experience and a wonderful committee and the fundraiser came off very well.  I learned a huge amount about organizing and got a great confidence boost. 

So at the end of 1991 when I finally had secured a seat on a CRA committee organized by the major banks, I was able to join Gordon on an effort to form a Community Development Corporation, one of the goals of the committee.  In March, we had a well attended public meeting with the all the banks and community groups from South Central Los Angeles to explore the way a CDC could be formed.  In April, the Rodney King verdict civil disturbance occurred.  In the aftermath from my work on the CDC I knew the players, City Hall, the banking community, their regulators and the community groups. 

The third day of the disturbance I volunteered to work for City Councilmember Mark Ridley Thomas and joined his office as a loaned executive for 90 days to work on the CDC.  Earlier Mark had given us his support for a CDC if I promised to follow through and make it happen.  DKB didn’t understand why they had to loan me to the City, but they were intimidated into going along with it. 

I spent 1992 and into 1993 working on the goals of the Community Reinvestment Committee.  We put together a coalition of banks that formed a CDC and got it off the ground in 1993.  I also worked with Bob McNealy on the same committee to get a Community Financial Resource Center opened at Martin Luther King Boulevard and Figueroa.  A couple of years later Bob and I were both screwed in succession by the executive director I pushed to hire.  She didn’t like the oversight Bob and then myself demanded on what became her own personal juggernaut.   

The director is still there but the CFRC is one of those organizations that in my opinion still gets funding but doesn’t do much other than promote itself.  The CDC was killed by Bank of America.  I didn’t realize forming the CDC was a back room agreement between Don Mullane of B of A and the City of Los Angeles during the Security Pacific “merger” talks.  After a couple of years the Southern California Business Development Corporation was struggling, it could have survived, and Don had succeeded as chairman and shut it down.  After the buyout was completed he had no further use for it. 

I also worked with Sister Diane of Esperanza Community Housing Corporation.  Esperanza built real affordable housing.  Esperanza and groups like it, built and rehabilitated housing in South Central Los Angeles.  They did great work that benefited the communities they served but it wasn’t much in comparison to the need.  Los Angeles needed real affordable housing and instead we got token affordable housing.  It’s always been difficult.  Do you take what’s doable or do you strive for more.  In the post-Reagan era we did the doable.     

DKB took credit for all of my work with the bank coalitions and community groups and received a satisfactory CRA. 

In 1994 I was ready to quit banking, my youngest son was graduating from high school.  For my own needs I no longer had to make the money I had been making but then I got a call from California Commerce Bank, a Los Angeles subsidiary of Banamex, the largest bank in Mexico.  Banamex had a serious CRA problem and needed help.  I was learning to speak Spanish and a year working for Banamex seemed like a great opportunity. 

I continued working with the community groups I knew.  I had an expertise in fundraising and building bridges between community groups and the banks.  I continued to work with Sister Diane and California Commerce Bank had a president active with Catholic Charities and I worked with Catholic Charities in supporting a Women’s Shelter.  I enjoyed working at Banamex.  I was well paid and when I went to the Bay Area, they kept me on working my own schedule and showing up when I needed to.  It was hard to give up a job where I made good money doing only what I wanted to do.  I stayed with California Commerce Bank until 1999.  I quit banking in October of that year and took a year off with the intention of looking for work in a completely different field. 

When the year was over I got a job as a consumer credit counselor, then a juvenile hall counselor and finally as a State Park Ranger.        

Three Wives

Cathy

When I first met Cathy, she was just gorgeous.  What an exciting young woman she was.  She was obviously smart, a bit zany, and had her feet firmly on the ground.  It was in 1966 and we still weren’t quite out of the thin tie 50’s mentality, but Cathy was at the vanguard of the 60’s.  My hair was short and my shirts were buttoned down.  Cathy was already on her own track.  She wore long dresses she made herself, wore her hair long and expressed herself freely.  She was an artist and loved books and movies.  She worked at Penny’s part time, was going to Mount St. Mary’s on a scholarship and came from a working class family.  She did all the cooking for her family and was a great cook.

I had never met anyone like her and she was crazy about me right from the start.  We were both out there, but we didn’t realize we were both pretty conservative.  Neither one of us used drugs.  I smoked marijuana maybe two or three times before I joined the service and I don’t think Cathy smoked her first joint until many years later.  Our friends were the artists of Loyola and some were smoking pot and using LSD but we were high on each other and high on life. 

Within a month or two I told her I loved her, which was quite true, and she loved me.  We were inseparable, a couple in the circle of friends I had at Loyola and with her family and their friends in the parish at St. Anthony’s in El Segundo. 

We were both working class Catholic.  Cathy’s parents were Midwest Germans and not that different than my Irish father and Ozark mother.  Both our fathers were in the aircraft business, doing almost the same job.

Being Catholic and from the backgrounds we were we didn’t talk about sex or our relationship.  We groped each other and made out until our hormones screamed, but our background and attitudes held us back from “going all the way.”  It was a different time and that was our culture.  It seems strange now, but it was pretty normal in our world.  The only thing to do was to get married. 

In May I asked her to marry me about the same time a classmate of mine from grammar school was killed in Vietnam.   So I went in the Air Force to avoid the draft.  When I got orders for England I came home on leave and married Cathy.  It was a great wedding, a quickly arranged event with family and friends pitching in.  Everyone was there, her parish friends and her parents’ friends, my childhood friends and family and all of our friends from college. 

It was a wonderful celebration and we had a wonderful honeymoon.  We drove to San Francisco and spent a week there exploring the City and mostly staying in our motel room.  We couldn’t have been happier.     

Our marriage was destroyed by our inability to talk about what was important, to be honest with each other and to face the disappointment of reality together.  It was also handicapped by alcoholism. 

We had a respite in the anguish of trying to live together when we joined Marriage Encounter in 1973 or 1974.  We renewed our intimacy and worked hard at being a couple.  Unfortunately Marriage Encounter didn’t address our two issues, alcoholism and true forgiveness.  Ten years later our marriage broke up on those rocks and we separated and then divorced. 

Susan

In July, 1994, I was introduced to Susan by Kathy Kenney, a woman I had met a couple of years earlier through work.  I was trying to recruit members of a work committee to form a Community Development Corporation.  The Federal Reserve Bank people told me I should meet Kathy Kenney in San Francisco.  She worked on the same things up there and they said she could advise me on contacts and people she had met in LA.  Kathy and I became friends.  Kathy was married and I think was a natural matchmaker.  

I had recently broken up with a beautiful but crazy woman in LA and I was getting tired of the roller coaster ride of the women I seemed to pick for myself.  The women I was most attracted to all seemed to be beautiful, intelligent and crazy.  I told my friends like Kathy that I was open to the idea of blind dates.  I had more confidence in my friends to pick good matches than I did in myself.

Kathy and another woman, Jan, took the charge seriously and did just that.  Jan’s friend was a wonderful woman but unfortunately not much attraction there.  And Kathy insisted I come north to meet a friend of hers, a work friend, who was just the right woman for me.   

Before I came up to San Francisco she warned me that Susan was the daughter of Rita, an LA City Councilmember and a former President of the School Board.  I had met Rita a few times and certainly knew about her, but I didn’t know her personally and I don't think before dating Susan I ever showed up on her radar.  

To me it made Susan all that more interesting.  I went up to San Francisco to a dinner party at Kathy's house.  Susan was there along with some other guests.  She is a Cal grad.  She had come up to San Francisco to go to school and stayed in the Bay Area and ended up working for Willie Brown when he was the Speaker of the Assembly.  She was political but outside her mother’s shadow.  I respected that; Susan was making it on her own. 

She had been involved in a number of issues and especially disabilities.  She knew Kathy through Kathy’s husband David who ran a nonprofit that served the deaf community.  Susan was in charge of disability services for Pacific Bell and on David’s board.  The phone company was under legislative mandate to provide services to the disabled and Susan’s job was to meet the mandate. 

My job was also based on a government mandate and while we didn’t work with the same groups, our worlds were overlapping.  We had a lot in common. 

She was an attractive woman, 36 when I met her, short like her mother with a manner and style that was strong and forceful, but she was charming at the dinner party and we agreed to meet again.   

She went on vacation to the Caribbean and our first date was in September.  I planned the perfect date, afternoon tea in the tea room at the Biltmore Hotel downtown and then dinner at La Serenata de Garibaldi, an elegant gourmet restaurant Mexico City style.   La Serenata was closed and we ended up at a very good Thai restaurant in Santa Monica, a favorite of a previous girlfriend.  Afterwards I took her back to her mother’s apartment on Bunker Hill and we stopped at the Water Court of one of the new towers and watched the water show, something new at that time.  We talked and told each other about ourselves.  It was a wonderful date and she was an interesting and solid young woman. 

Our next date was in San Francisco.  Susan’s considered herself a bit of a wanton woman, so when we got to her house we jumped in the sack immediately.  Unfortunately, I didn’t find Susan all that attractive, I’m not sure why, but I was able to get past it.  She was sincere but it all seemed very mechanical and forced.  It got better and Susan was a wonderful companion. 

After a few commuting dates back and forth, we decided I would move up to Mill Valley where Susan had a beautiful home on the side of Mount Tamalpais above Boyle Park.  Susan was interesting.  She was successful, doing very well at the Phone Company and sure of herself.  I could see why Kathy thought we were a good match. 

San Francisco was exciting.  I loved the City and the East Bay.  Marin and Mill Valley were beautiful but my fantasy of being Irish working class kept me from enjoying it.  But in a place where I didn’t fit in I had to admit, it was an incredibly beautiful spot.  Mill Valley is this once small town nestled among the redwoods on the south side of Mount Tam.  It had become a place for successful writers, lawyers and doctors.  For people from the City it was a place to visit on weekends and stroll the shops and galleries.  For me it was too expensive and too self consciously cool.

A year after we met, I proposed to her and in April of 1996 we were married.  I should have had some second thoughts along the way but I didn’t.  All of our friends thought it was a good idea.  Susan’s family liked it.  I liked them.  It seemed to make sense.  Susan’s lack of punctuality, she could leave me waiting for hours, her long work hours, and her inflexibility were all there, but she was a good person and she sincerely tried.  It seemed like we could do OK together. 

So what went wrong?  I think we set each other as a low priority.  We were busy leading our own lives and the other person either wasn’t cooperating or didn’t meet our expectations.  I became more and more irritated by Susan’s disregard for me and expectations that I would cook, clean and fold her laundry. 

In 2004 we found it easier to live apart, Susan in LA and me in the Bay Area.  Our excuse was our jobs, but it really was better for our relationship.  A long distance relationship where we only got together one week a month was better than living together. 

That changed in 2007 when Susan moved back in with me in my house in Mount Diablo State Park.   After a few months back together it was apparent we didn't like each other very much.  When my long smoldering friendship with Suzette turned into an affair, it seemed like it was time to face the music with Susan.  We separated in September, 2007 and divorced in June, 2008. 

Suzette

Suzette and I got married April 7, 2012.  We had been living together since July, 2009, nearly three years, we had been in a relationship since 2007, five years, and we had known each other since 2001, eleven years. 

Suzette and I first met 11 years ago when we both worked at Consumer Credit Counselors of San Francisco.  Suzette was 28 years old.  It was two years after she graduated from Cal.  She had a son, Arom, born in 1995 and was in a relationship with John his father.  They lived in Albany.  

We became lunch buddies.  She is and was a beautiful young woman, bright and full of life.  I enjoyed her youth, her humor, and her warmth.  After I left CCC we remained friends and every so often we would get together for lunch.  The first few times I told my wife but after that it didn’t seem quite appropriate to still be meeting a beautiful young woman for lunch long after we had worked together. 

When Susan and my marriage evolved into living in separate cities, Suzette and I got together more regularly for lunch.  Suzette emailed me to get together one time when Susan was going to be in the Bay Area.  I said in my reply that with Susan in the picture it was difficult to schedule lunch sometimes.  At the mere mention of Susan, I didn’t hear from Suzette for a year and a half.  I had broken the unspoken rule, neither one of us ever talked about our partners.  

Susan moved back up to the Bay Area and that wasn’t going very well when I received an email from Suzette.  When I hadn't heard from her for so long, I had guessed that maybe there was more to our friendship than what we admitted to ourselves.  In my reply to Suzette’s invitation to get together I said something about it.  In return I received a very surprising love poem.  And our affair caught fire.  We both had grown up Catholic so even a torrid affair took a couple of meetings before we held hands.  After all we had been friends for six years with feelings we never acknowledged and in all that time we never touched. 

By this time in my marriage Susan and I were mostly angry at each other.  I didn’t feel I was risking anything I would miss if I was discovered.  In July I told Susan I wanted to end our relationship.  She asked me if there was another woman.

As strong as my feelings were for Suzette at the time, in my own mind I wasn’t leaving Susan for Suzette.  My excitement about Suzette just told me it was time.  I wanted to end my relationship with Susan and Suzette gave me the energy and the immediate reason to do it.  So I said, “No.” 

Susan had been reading my emails and called me on it.  We separated in September when she could move back to her house in Mill Valley and we divorced in June of 2008.  Suzette and I kissed for the first time a month after Susan moved out; it was a memorable kiss.  I knew Suzette was a tease and it seemed that our friendship had an element of the dance of the seven veils to it.  

In October Suzette finally told her partner John there was someone else and he moved out in December. She told me it was something she had wanted to do for a long time.  Suzette did not tell her son about our relationship.  After that it seemed like we were still having an affair, only now we were keeping it a secret from Arom.   We never got into a normal dating relationship.  It was much more tenuous than that for over a year and as time passed she got more and more distant. 

And then in March of 2009 she told me she was pregnant and she wanted to keep the baby.  Shortly after that we went through a difficult four weeks while we waited to learn if our baby had Down’s syndrome.  She didn’t.  Suzette agreed to move to Angel Island to live with me.  Just before the move in July she told her son Arom they were moving to Angel Island and that she was pregnant.  At 14 Arom was not happy at all and in the coming year he did his best to make me pay for it.  I understood that. 

Suzette and I had planned to get married in August before the baby came.  But when the time got close things were too crazy and Suzette was overly stressed.  We postponed the wedding and concentrated on getting ready for the baby.    

Paloma was born October 12, 2009, I had a heart attack, May, 2010, and Arom moved to Florida to be with his dad in September, 2010. 

In April, 2011 we moved off the island to Oakland and in November I retired.  Living without Arom acting out around us made our relationship easier. And moving off the island made it even more so.  Wherever we went I introduced Suzette as my wife, including at the church we began attending, the Unitarian Church of Berkeley. 

I went to Kaiser one day for an appointment and they asked me if my spouse had health insurance.  I began filling out a form with the clerk with information about Suzette.  I said I needed to call her to get her employer’s address and her social security number.  As I was calling I remembered Suzette and I weren’t married.  I laughed at myself and thought I should fix that.  I went home to tell Suzette.  For some reason that afternoon she wasn’t talking to me. 

A month later I asked her to marry me.   We were married April, 2012. 

My Education

I started the first grade at St. Robert Bellarmine Grammar School in Burbank at the age of 5.  In those days Catholic schools didn’t have kindergarten and we didn’t go to public schools, even for kindergarten.  One of our classmates had gone to kindergarten and was always suspect after that.  Maybe he wasn't really one of us.  Our suspicions were confirmed years later when he transferred to Burbank HS in the 10th grade.    

St. Robert’s was a good place.  It had some odd characters.  The pastor, Monsignor Keating, lived in his own world, an amalgam of Catholicism, Americanism, and patriotic devotionalism.  He changed the name of the parish from Holy Trinity to St. Robert Bellarmine.  Bellarmine was a 17th century Jesuit Inquisition Judge.  Among the trials he was responsible for was Galileo's trial.  He is particularly hated by the English.  It seems he was the judge for a number of auto de fe’s of English heretics.  According to Monsignor Keating the Declaration of Independence was based on Bellarmine’s writings.  I took the Monsignor’s word for it.  I’ve never read Bellarmine. 

According to Monsignor the Inquisitor had been one of the foundational writers on political rights.  This was blended with the monsignor’s experience with the New York Fighting 69th.  The original Fighting Irish were a New York National Guard Regiment that distinguished itself in the Civil War, the Spanish American War and World War I.  Monsignor Keating for a short time was a stateside chaplain to them.  So we wore World War I uniforms, the girls wore nurses’ uniforms from the same period.  We were the Bellarmine-Jefferson Guards.  It was very complicated and included Cardinal Pacelli who had once visited Burbank and St. Roberts and then became Pius XII.  Pacelli is sometimes known as Hitler’s Pope.  A humanist inquisitor and a quisling Pope were icons at St. Robert Bellarmine Grammar School.  The nuns just went around it as much as they could. 

One of the assistants Father Granger had survived the Bataan death march. After that he became an Episcopalian seminarian and then converted to Catholicism.  I remember some of his ideas seemed a little different.  One of the nuns told us not to listen too closely to Father Granger, that his doctrine sometimes wasn't completely Catholic.

In the 7th grade it was Father Granger who gathered all of us all together in the church and gave us a lecture on one of the most horrendous of sins being committed by people like us.  He wanted us to know this sin was not only spiritual suicide but also a health hazard.  We had no idea what he was talking about.  I don’t know if it was then or later that we figured out he was talking about French kissing.  I think it was Sister Francetta who after this incident told us that Fr. Granger was just a little crazy.      

The nuns, members of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, tolerated Monsignor Keating and Father Granger.  The BVM's were an order founded in America and based in Iowa.  The order ran Clark College in Dubuque and Mundelein University in Chicago.  The BVMs were a progressive and open minded group of women, down to earth and practical like their Midwestern roots.  In those days they wore voluminous black habits with starched stiff headdresses, boxes around their faces and stiff collars around their necks, starkly white.  They wore heavy black belts under a layer of black cloth with large rosaries attached.  They were quite intimidating in this garb and when we offended their sense of decorum looked like battleships cruising toward you, a ruler or even a yardstick in hand. 

They taught reading, writing, arithmetic, history, church history and religion.  I don’t think we had any science classes and we did art but nothing frivolous except for etching.  I hated etching.  It made no sense to me and was just plain messy.  I liked the nuns.  I did well in school; I was one of the brighter kids and got attention for my performance. 

I think they did a good job of transmitting to us mid-century Irish American Catholicism, politically progressive, morally strict, with a touch but not too much mystery and devotionalism.  We believed in the Pope and John Kennedy.   

When I graduated from Grammar School it seemed important to my mother that I go to an all boys school.  My father was totally passive about everything in the family and left all the decisions about his children to my mother.  My father had been a player as a young man and I think between my mother and my older sister, there was some agreement that I was going to be protected from involvement with women.  Anyhow my mother chose St. Francis of Assisi High School in La Canada.  It was 12 miles away in La Canada in the days before freeways.  The boys in my class who didn’t go to the parish high school went to Notre Dame or Pater Noster which were both closer to Burbank.  The parish high school was a perfectly good co-ed high school where my sisters and most of my classmates went.   

I went to this Capuchin Franciscan High School completely out of the area.  My mother had read about Padre Pio, an Italian Capuchin priest with the stigmata. I read it too.  It seemed a little fantastic and far away.  At that time miracles seemed to me like snow, something that happened far from Burbank.  My mother liked the miraculous and there was a priest at St. Francis, Fr. Cyril who was reputed to have miraculous powers of healing.  Fr. Cyril was the principal at St. Francis and in the four years I was there I didn’t see any miraculous healings or even hear about them, but he was a good man, serious about his religious practice and vows and a strict math teacher. 

It seemed OK when I went there, but as the years passed and I realized what it was like in comparison to other schools, I found it less and less attractive.  It was a football school.  With only 400 boys in the school in my last year there St. Francis won the large schools Southern California Football championship.  The football coach was legendary and taught, if you could call it that, history at the school.  He also had the cafeteria concession and a number of other businesses connected to the school so that he was able to make a living that kept him there.  During football season he began his class each Monday with the statement, “Football players to the front, toadies to the rear,” and then would rehash the game on Friday excluding the rest of us.   

I didn’t play football and I didn’t like Jack Friedman.  The school was all about sports; academics were secondary.  Many of the teachers were also coaches.  Athletes were treated well and the rest of us were second class citizens.  I became an athlete later in life, but at the time, I lived too far away and because I had a November birthday I was smaller than my classmates in the beginning.  Add to that astigmatism, I couldn’t see the ball very well, and athletics were an ordeal for me where my poor performance was ridiculed.  I wasn’t an athlete and I didn’t fit in at St. Francis but I spent three hours commuting to get there each day. 

The school was in a wealthy neighborhood and took on the values and ethics of upper middle class La Canada.  I came from a pro-Union working class background and didn’t have much in common with my classmates and didn’t see eye to eye with most of my teachers who, mostly Irishman from rural areas, were seduced by the sophistication of wealth.  One of the priests was particularly taken with the fight against Communism and we read and studied the right wing literature he liked.  He liked to point out the insidious ways of Communist like the hammer and sickle hidden on the penny.  I went along with all that silliness for awhile.  I even read J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit.  By my junior year I had rejected all that crap, but that was much against the tide at St. Francis.      

When I had sons of my own I sent them to Loyola High School near downtown Los Angeles where they got a decent education along with athletics and arts. 

It’s funny, I was always one of the smart kids, but today as the social networks put me more in contact with my classmates from high school, I’m surprised that guys I thought of as thick headed athletes and others who didn't seem that bright went on to very successful careers, doctorates, MDs, JDs, and success in business.  They certainly aren't dumb and in retrospect maybe I wasn’t all that smart, smart enough, but not as smart as I thought I was.  I’m good in school; I still do well in classes, but . . .

Probably one of the most important contributors to my education was the public library.  The Burbank Public Library was outstanding.  It was well run and had a wonderful collection.  I started going to the library when I was in the first or second grade.  My first books were Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and through the years I worked my way into novels, history and current affairs.  Every week I went to the library for a fresh supply. 

From the first grade on I was a good reader and reading was my pleasure.  I enjoyed reading stories on my own.  I graduated from college as an English major, but really I was just continuing on with my first grade success.  I was a reading major.  I was good at it early on and I’m still good at it now.  I read well.  Of course, reading as much as I did it was inevitable that I would think about becoming a writer, but that didn’t really occur to me until much later. 

I wrote voluminous letters to my sisters away at college in the Midwest, but not much else.  I hated writing in school.  I never understood themes, starting sentences and all those rules.  It would have made sense it they talked about storytelling, but the standard instruction about writing a good paragraph left me cold.

I did my six months in the seminary and then applied to Loyola University.  My mother would pay for college as long as it was Catholic.  It was that conspiracy between my mother and my sisters again, to make sure I didn’t become a player like my father.  Somehow going to all male Catholic schools was going to make a difference.

I loved Loyola.  It was all about academics.  I didn’t seem to be the only smart kid around; everybody was smart.  I remember one young man, obviously brainy, still played the fool and I wanted to tell him, “It’s OK, the bullies and jocks aren’t in charge anymore.”

My freshman year I took English IA.  It was taught by Michael Duncan.  Mike had us write in a journal every day, anything we wanted.  I did the exercise somewhat, though at the end of the month I had to write furiously to turn it in.  Those were some of my first stories.  Mike liked what I wrote, gave me an A in the class, and I changed my major to English. 

After that I took the Survey of English Literature, the big hurdle for English majors.  The course went from Beowulf to Virginia Wolf.  At Loyola it was taught by Dr. Carothers, a wonderful gentleman. I barely passed it but I took a modern literature course from Dr. Erlandson, the department chairman, and I did well in that. Overall I was creditable as an English major.

Mike and I became friends.  That meant more to Mike than it did to me and when he tried to kiss me one time, that made me rethink his patronage but I was already an English major by then. 

I wrote my first stories at Loyola.  I published in the campus literary magazine.  I liked the stories.  Other people did as well.  That was the first time I began to see myself as a writer or dream of being a writer.  One of my best moments as a writer came some years later when in argument with one of Cathy's friends from college, her friend cited a story she had read to make her point.  As she described the story Cathy and I looked at each other and it was a story I had written.

I dropped out of college after my sophomore year.  It was a combination of a mid-college crisis and the military draft.  Uncle Sam didn’t want to give me a second chance to get my feet back on the ground.  He needed me in Vietnam.  I joined the Air Force and after training was sent to England.  It was pure luck.  My class from Keesler AFB drew the right number and we went to England for three years.  I went to night school classes at Chicksands Elementary school.  They were good classes.  When I left the Air Force in August, 1971, I had 60 units from the University of Maryland European Division

I started UCLA in September 1971.  One of my first classes was Pat Kelly’s Literary Criticism.  Pat asked the class how many of us were transfer students.  Nearly two thirds of us raised our hands.  In the group I became part of, it was a rare bird that had started UCLA after high school and stuck with it.  We were almost all transfers from somewhere.   

After my lackluster second year at Loyola University and my year of college credit from the University of Maryland I was a junior/senior transfer student.  I had courses in Shakespeare, Folklore and American Literature behind me.  I was an avid reader and a sometime writer.  It seemed natural I should continue on as an English major. 

UCLA was fabulous.  I took medieval courses from Ed Condren and Milton from Chris Gross.  Professor Dick taught Drama and Pat Kelly Literary Criticism.  The professors at UCLA were amazing.  They were original thinkers in their fields.  They were the authors of the articles in the journals on the library shelves.  Until I got my grades the first quarter I thought I was out of my league, but somehow I managed to ace all of my courses except for Milton.  Chris Gross was a young phenom in Milton at the time and all of the professors were excited that UCLA had landed him.  I just didn’t get Milton, I’m not sure why.  Thirty years later I finally read Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and loved it.  For some reason I couldn't get it before.   

My circle of friends were also an amazing group, talented young women and men.  Llon King was part of our group and there was a young Marine veteran who had been at Khe Sanh. There were Theodora Poloynis and other amazing women.  Even after four years in the service I felt liberated in public school.  I told people I finally made it to public school after the 15th grade.   I had a wife and two children and I was in a hurry to graduate.  I took four courses a quarter for four quarters.  I paid for UCLA with money I had saved in the service and we lived on $250 a month from the GI Bill. 

I took a course in Folklore that was taught by a young woman eight months pregnant who got up on desk and sang a cappella songs from Appalachia.  It was unearthly, ethereal and very beautiful.  We studied Gilgamesh.  I took Russian Literature in translation and a class in Celtic Literature from Pat Ford. 

In May, 1972 Nixon started mining harbors in North Vietnam.  For me it wasn’t the mining itself but just that we were still escalating the fight in Vietnam, a war we had already lost.  I enthusiastically joined the anti-War gatherings and protests.  Helicopters began circling the campus.  There was a feeling in the University that we were under siege by the establishment outside.

Jane Fonda and Angela Davis spoke at the rally on campus and they sounded like a breath of fresh air.  They made sense and it was the mainstream, the newspapers, and the rest of our world that seemed to be out of touch with reality.  My brief three years in England and exposure to another point of view, even though it was just the English establishment instead of the American establishment, made me sensitive to how much of the news is just business and government propaganda.     

The protests went on all week.  A few days into it there was a fire at Murphy Hall one morning.  Some protestors had set a mini-cart ablaze.  The local Fire Department was called and they refused to come without police protection.  There is a UCLA Police Department but they insisted on the LAPD.  Someone approved that and the Los Angeles Police Department came on campus.  They were confronted by about a 1,000 students.  No one at UCLA wanted the LAPD.  They were known for their brutality and heavy handed tactics.  The protest began to grow.  By noon, the LAPD declared UCLA an illegal assembly.  By three or four o’clock 10,000 students confronted the LAPD.  The police charged the students with batons and when that didn't work they drove their cars at high speed through the crowds.  Nothing they did could budge us.  We waited them out and at 5:30 that afternoon the LAPD left campus.  Within the hour the students disbursed and went on their way and the campus returned to normal. 

Many years later I was talking to an auditor at City National Bank.  Richard was a vice president and a very stolid member of the establishment at the bank.  It turned out he went to UCLA at the same time I did.  We compared notes.  We had been standing only a few feet apart from each other during the demonstration when the police cars were ripping through the crowds. 

I had been four years in the service but I had never seen anything like it.  The LAPD were crazed and full of rage.  The students were adamant and courageous.  The US withdrew from Vietnam a year later.  The War ended three years later in 1975. 

At the end of the spring quarter I went to visit the registrar and reviewed my record with a clerk at a window.  She said I had all my requirements and I just needed another 12 units to graduate.  I think there may have been some paperwork.  So based on what she said I quit going to school after the summer quarter.  I put UCLA behind me and hoped I would get a diploma one day.  Some months later I received one in the mail. 

UCLA was impersonal but what a great experience.  I loved it.  It was only one year there but I am a Bruin forever.  Go Bruins!

In Japan people get jobs based on where they went to school and when I joined Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank of California I was hired because I had graduated from UCLA.  But it wasn’t just the Japanese, I think everyone looked twice at that.  I’m not sure how much of an education I got in my short year there, but I had a great time.  It was an exciting year for me.  And it didn’t look bad on my resume.

Since UCLA I’ve taken classes: public relations, accounting, find yourself career classes, management classes, and writing classes.  Most were UCLA Extension classes but I also went to Glendale College.  When I became a loaned executive at United Way they sent me to a two week training at USC.  USC was great.  I did my POST (Peace Officers Standards Training) for Juvenile Hall at Evergreen College in San Jose.  The six weeks there was fun and taught us a lot.  The State Parks Ranger Academy was controlled by Monterey Peninsula College and I got credits there for 30 units or more.  Five months of classes 8 hours a day, five days a week turned out to be hard, hard on the bottom and hard to stay focused.

My last years as a Ranger I went to College of Marin and took math and science classes and did very well.  I told people I was a scientist in an English major’s body.  I was coming out.  My English major wife called me a nerd.  I bought a pocket protector like my father used to wear. 

Another influence in my education was the example of my father.  He spent his life studying as he called it; language, history and music.  He was a lifelong studier.  When he was in his 50s he started and completed an engineering program at UCLA Extension.  Like him I consider myself a lifelong learner.  All I know about nature, trees, plants, birds, animals, geography, I studied on my own.  I spent years studying and learning to speak Spanish. 

I still read, novels, history and current affairs, along with philosophy, foreign languages, and anything else I’m interested in.  I am particularly fascinated by ethnicity.  I suppose if I were to pick a college major today I would be a cultural anthropologist. Maybe I’d add some calculus and statistics classes.  I love knowing where people’s culture comes from, ethnicities, nationalities, religion, what culture is and what its foundations are.  I love cultural differences and similarities. 

I don’t trust institutions much, but I greatly admire scholars.  I was taught by some incredible scholars, I’ve known a few, and my son Ted is a scholar. My other two sons are artists.  I love scholarship. I consider myself a hedgerow scholar, undisciplined but enthusiastic.