My best friend from the summer after the 8th grade on was Rick Powell. Rick and I went to the same grammar school, St. Robert Bellarmine in Burbank. Rick was kind of a dorky guy, distinct features, when we were young he had a head a little too big for his body, gangly, not one of the cool kids, but a funny guy and kind of sloppy. We wore uniforms at St. Robert’s and I think Rick’s shirt was always untucked and his hair always messed. If you were one of Rick’s friends, he would let you slip your thumb and small finger into the indentations in his skull left by the doctor who delivered him.
In the first part of the 8th grade my best friend was Ray Ziegler. Ray was kind of a rough kid, strong, very smart but an only child and hard to get along with, no social graces, even in comparison to other boys our age. He lived in his own world but he was a good guy. He also lived two and half blocks from me up the street and across the street from Mary Ellen Boyd.
Mary Ellen was my unrequited love through most of grammar school. In the 8th grade Mary Ellen was the bandleader for our school band. She was a strawberry blond, a big girl, not heavyset but just good size, always a shade taller than I was and she developed breasts early on, a very remarkable thing in the 7th grade. She was smart, she was pretty and I pined for her, though she never much acknowledged me. I think I walked her home whenever I could which didn’t happen very often.
Ray lived across the street from her and he told me he had actually played football with her and her friends in the middle of the street one time. I started hanging out with Ray though I didn’t see much of Mary Ellen for the effort. I think maybe I got to play football with the kids up there including Mary Ellen one time.
I found Ray to be a pretty interesting guy. His mother and father were divorced and he lived with his mother. His father, an engineer at Lockheed, visited occasionally and took him places. His mother wore tube tops, short shorts, drove a 1957 white Thunderbird and had Johnny Mathis playing on the phonograph all the time.
Ray had electronics, speakers and microphones and most interesting of all a tape recorder. We took these things apart and put them back together. He had a miniature camera that used miniature film. I don’t remember any pictures from it. He had really cool stuff. Ray was a nice guy and we hung out together after school and played with his stuff, watched for Mary Ellen Boyd and went places together. His mother’s Johnny Mathis played in the background.
Ray was friends with Rick and Rick came by one day. I found out he was a pretty good guy, interesting and fun to be with. Ray moved to Sherman Oaks when his mother remarried and we didn’t see each other maybe once or twice after that, but Rick and I began hanging out together.
Rick and I had a lot more in common. He had a little brother and didn’t seem to live in his own world the way Ray had. He was actually pretty smart, not a dork at all. Rick read as much as I did and we quickly began exchanging books and walking down to Thrifty Drugstore to buy more. Thrifty’s had a large bookrack of paperbacks in those days. The Powells had a pool in their back yard but there were a lot more interesting things to do than swim usually. Rick had a great sense of humor and a real taste for adventure.
One of the things Rick and I did together was to take the bus to downtown LA during that summer. We would board the gold and white buses of the RTD, the Rapid Transit District, at Olive and Glenoaks and pay 62 cents to ride to downtown LA. I remember the bus driver got pretty irritated one time when I paid most of my fare with pennies. In those days there was no counting machine to throw them into, he had to take them and count them each one before he started the bus off again for our trip downtown.
Downtown we’d go to the LA Athletic Club and swim in the pool. I had never been in an indoor pool and it was fascinating to me to go swimming on the 5th floor of a building downtown. Rick’s father was a banker at Bank of America and a member of the club. We’d go swimming and then we’d go somewhere else. One time we took a tour of the Los Angeles Times when the building downtown had big presses running and linotype operators. We went to the top of City Hall and saw Los Angeles from its tallest building at the time.
After our day was over we’d go back to the Bank of America at the corner of 7th and Spring Street, up to the 5th floor, the executive floor, and squish across the carpeted offices. In those days Bank of America still had open floors and no private offices even for the top people. A.P. Giannini believed in accessibility and the spirit of A.P. Giannini was still strong at Bank of America. Mr. Powell drove us home. Mr. Quinn, the father of a classmate, and a lot of other Quinns, was the Manager of the main B of A in Burbank, but Mr. Powell was even more important than that.
Rick and I stayed best friends all through high school. He went to Bellarmine Jefferson and then Burbank High School. I went to St. Francis up in La Canada. I had a best friend at St. Francis but when I was home in Burbank, Rick was my best friend. We learned to drive about the same time. He had easier access to his parents’ car and we would drive around Burbank in a 1962 Cadillac, a brand new car, big with fins. It didn’t impress the girls much but it was comfortable. Neither Rick nor I had much success with the girls in high school.
But we hung out together and we read books and talked about them. We went to movies and we talked and we talked. When I went to the monastery in 1964 I lost contact with Rick but there he was again a year later when I started Loyola University in Los Angeles.
Rick was a sophomore and I was a freshman. We each had our own circle of friends. He ended up joining a fraternity and was a party guy. I joined the intellectuals and was a pseudo-writer type. We still had a lot in common and hung out together sometimes just to be with an old friend. I wrote a paper for him one time and one time he loaned me his car for a date.
Rick told me he had used my story once to charm a girl he was trying to meet. I worked for the phone company for nearly a year before I went to college. I was surprised by that. I didn’t think I was that interesting and I never thought of making up a life story. I admired Rick’s creativity.
When I went in to the service we didn’t stay in touch again but then I met Rick again when I finished UCLA in 1972 and joined Bank of America. Rick was already a loan officer in the International Division in San Francisco. We stayed in touch through Bank of America. When I went up to San Francisco, we’d get together after work. I don’t think Rick’s wife Maureen much liked me. One of the things Rick and I did together was to drink too much.
Rick went off to Canada and then Thailand with Bank of America and then came back to the US and left the bank. He and Maureen moved to San Diego. When he returned one time he and Maureen invited us to join them at Lake Arrowhead. We drove up there with our kids and they were staying in this wonderful 3,000 square foot “cabin,” nicer than any home I’ve ever lived in. Maureen’s father was a successful CPA and the cabin was his or someone closely connected to their family. We stayed the weekend with them and had a great time. There was a power boat that Rick and I drove towing the other one behind trying to learn to water ski.
The week before my family went up there we had had the flu and our kids had been very sick with it. We had just barely recovered when we went up to Lake Arrowhead. I heard from Rick later, that after we left Rick and his family all came down with the flu. Their week’s vacation at Lake Arrowhead was mostly going back and forth to the bathroom and dealing with sick kids. Rick indicated that Maureen wasn’t too keen on us as friends after that. Rick on the other hand teased me about it for years afterwards.
After I got divorced and sober we began getting together again whenever I showed up in San Diego for the bank I worked at. I went down to see Rick and Maureen a few times. Maureen and I got to be good friends. She’s a good lady, but Rick and I didn’t seem to have the same rapport we did before. One time we were in a restaurant eating lunch. We noticed the waitress looking funny at us. We were two bankers, middle aged and both in pinstripes, and without thinking about it we were sharing a dessert. We explained we had known each other since we were five years old, my older sister had babysat for Rick and his brother, and that we were each other's oldest friend, like it or not.
I like Rick. He’s a good man. He turned out to be much more like his father than either of us would have expected. He did OK in banking but never reached the prominence of his father. It was the wrong time for banks. Rick worked for one small bank and then another in San Diego. We fell out of touch again, though this time I’m disappointed to say we've lost contact. Rick likes to have a few beers. When I last saw him in the 80s he was running with the Hash House Harriers. I’m not sure why we’re not still friends, I wish we were. Rick and Maureen are good people.
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