Photo with TV actor Kirby Grant who played "Sky King" on the TV show of the same name. Photo was taken at the grand opening of the Tacoma Mall in 1965. About all there was there at the time though was the Bon Marche department store.
Childhood and Things no one believed me about when I was growing up
And yet they were too true!
It all began with:
5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953) - A brilliant film (from a child's perspective) written by Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss). This fantastical film amazed me as a child. But when I told anyone about this film I saw on TV one Saturday, no one believed me. It was simply too bizarre to even be considered a possibility of a movie and yet, it was made.
Then there was...
World of Giants (1959) - A TV show about a 6" tall secret agent in a brief case. People just thought I was nuts that there would be a TV show like this, and yet there was.
There was also...
Little Shop of Horrors (1960). This film eventually remade in 1986 with a big star cast, now a film that just about everyone knows about, when I was growing up people and I asked people if they ever saw this movie (looking for validation that this film that scared the hell out of me when I was up after bed time stealing TV time in the dark), people thought I was off in the head. My step father, never much of a big brain type of guy, said that no one would ever even make a film like that.
And this one...
Jack The Giant Killer (1962) - And he had been the one to take me to see Jack The Giant Killer at the Lakewood Theater when it came out. Which was a seriously messed up film. This may be one where people were correct and it never did happen in the film. There was a scene I remembered years after I saw the film where the giants wanted to eat more food than they could hold. Jack feigning the same, said he had a trick he always used and proceeded to pretend to cut his stomach open letting the food fall into a bag so he could keep eating. It was a clever attempt to get the others to do that so they could continue to be gluttonous and so they did, surprised when they found they had unintentionally killed themselves. I seem to have been unable to prove that was actually in the film, but that's how I always remembered it. It may instead have been from a book I read back then, Jack the Giant-Killer.
Now let's not forget...
Adventures in Paradise (1959-62) - A captain travels the Pacific ocean on his sailboat with a crew of all women. Adam Troy (Gardner McKay) was an American Korean War veteran who stayed in the Pacific after the war. As captain of the schooner "Tiki III", Troy drifted from adventure to adventure while carrying passengers and cargo anywhere from Hong Kong to Pitcairn Island.
Now onto a different consideration....
Aristotle and my step-father, Woody - One day when I was in about 5th grade the family was sitting around the living room as usual that time of day. Some how the conversation was going along and I injected something I had read at the library in a book by Aristotle. I got into trouble a lot as a kid. That first year at that location at South 50th and Park Avenue in Tacoma, WA (we had moved nearly every year up to that point but remained there through my high school years and beyond), my mother would only allow me to ride my bike to the Library which was six blocks south, then about four east on the corner of Pacific Avenue and 56th street. Woody looked at me like I was an idiot which he did a lot.
He said, "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard."
I said, "I didn't say that, Aristotle did."
He asked, "Who's that?"
I said, "Some guy from over 2,000 years ago."
He said, "Well he sounds like an idiot."
So I said, "But people all over the world think things he said were very wise and have used his teachings."
He asked, "What people." I was stunned at this, even as a fifth grader.
So I said, "Just about everyone, all over the world, all through history. It's the foundation for much of how we think today."
He didn't have much to say after that. Just harrumphed and went back to his newspaper.
Mother
About 9th grade, we were talking at the stove, she was making dinner and we were talking about something I can no longer remember. But during that talk I came to realize that I now knew more about things than my parents did. I remembered that she had quit school in 9th grade and even though my step-father had gotten through high school and the Coast Guard, I still seemed to handle thinking better than him and I seemed to have a broader range already of general information from my years of being grounded to my room and reading every chance I got. I loved science fiction and science, outer space and I followed the US Space program closely. I also got some experimental teaching aides in school. Whenever something new came into the school and they asked for volunteers, I raised my hand.
Father
My birth Father. I was only around my real father until about age three. I don't remember anything about him back then. Or when we lived in Spain in 1958 when my parents broke up. I saw him a few times after that but by about 1965 he was mostly out of my life, until I got a driver's license. I'd run into him sometimes at my grandparent's house, his parent's house, when I was visiting and he happened by. But it wasn't even as if we were related. Still the stories I head about him affected my development and knowing he was an electrician seemed to explain some things about me. I believed him to be solid as a rock in personality and so I grew in that same vein.
Step-Father
Another time around sixth grade - One day again in the living room but this time only the two of us standing there, I asked him a question. He didn't have an answer. I didn't realize till later, with this interaction in part being the reason I figured it out, that he simply didn't have the answer, he had no idea. I think this single incident had a lot to do with my going into psychology in college and phenomenology at my university.
His response to my question was:
"Think! Use your brain and just figure it out."
I questioned him further and he got angry and yelled at me to just think about it. I realize now he was panicked that I figured out he was at a point in my development that he would start not having answers and look inept, which he was much of the time. So I went upstairs to my bedroom. I stood in the doorway and "thought" about "thinking". But I couldn't figure it out. I couldn't get past the concept of thinking. What was it after all? So I went back downstairs and asked him.
"What exactly is, thinking?" He looked at me like I was brain damaged, a look I was quite used to seeing on his face when dealing with me.
"What do you mean, what is thinking. It's...thinking. You just, think."
"Yes," I said, "But what exactly IS thinking?" He geared up to yell at me again and then just froze, thinking, wondering himself what the answer was, and there he was, trapped with nothing to say.
"It's just thinking, work it out!" And that was the end of that conversation and the end of my thinking he was an adult who knew more than I did. Between the Aristotle incident and the thinking incident, I realized that he wasn't so much my superior as just a lot bigger and stronger than I was. I was still afraid of him, but I seemed to have more going on "upstairs" (in my mind) than he did. He had graduated High School, entered the coast guard and was a secretary, typist, and later after he got out had an orchestra. My mother had dropped out in 9th grade. Bit she was sharp. Neither was really educated enough to handle smart kids and we were all smart, though I never did well in school due to ADD and was ADHD as a little kid.
Extracurricular Activities
Martial Arts - I started Martial Arts in 5th grade in 1965 at the Steve Armstrong Isshinryu Karate Dojo in 54th Street and South Tacoma Way, in Washington state. Part of getting your next color belt was supporting the dojo through being a contestant in tournaments around the Pacific Northwest. In part as free publicity for the Sensei's Dojo. Something that has been going on probably for hundreds if not thousands of years in Asia. So I had an odd mix of self respect and confidence. In school I was not a great student. On the street, I seemed to be able to handle myself. In 1980 I started into Aikido as a college PE credit and thus began my career in that form leading to being on the board of directors for a local dojo as a 501c3 non-profit school.
Scouting
Then with other training I got after school, I development quickly with an unusually sophisticated kind of personality all supported through activities like doing search and rescue, belonging to a gun club for kids going back in years to when I was in Cub Scouts in 1965 and before that even with belonging to YMCA Indian Guides for a short time in 1962 when I was also taking guitar lessons all because of the Hayley Mills' film, In Search of the Castaways.
Civil Air Patrol
When I got to the end of the age for Cub Scouts, I had to consider going into Webelos, which leads into Boy Scouts. I attended a meeting and they seemed to childish I refused to join and that was the end of that path. I hadn't known about the Explorers and eventually ended up in Civil Air Patrol as the Tacoma Police Sgt. who lived a house away on the corner of our block was a leader with them and his family was involved. My sister checked it out, it wasn't for her and I begged to be involved.
The Sgt. tried to talk me out of it but I was so for it I joined and became a Flight Commander at my first meeting because of a suddenly influx of cadets at that next monthly meeting. I learned search and rescue in the Cascade mountains, learned radio operations, got my radio telegraph operator's license (still have that card) in the mid 1960s. I got to learn how to use CB (citizen band) and Ham radios. I was speaking to people in other counties like Australia. We could sometimes on a cloudy night contact Florida CBers using "skip", a condition where the short channel 2 band radio waves would bounced from ground to clouds all the way to Florida. I got to take pilot's flight \ ground school and fly in small planes. when I was in eighth grade at Tacoma Industrial Airport, I landed my first small craft in a "two point landing", touching down on two of three wheels. This had surprised and pleased the pilot and aircraft owner, an Air Force Lieutenant and "Senior" or adult member of CAP which had Cadets and Seniors.
Gun Club
Mom thought I was a little too into guns so she called the Tacoma Police Department and found me a youth gun club to join which I did while in eighth grade and led into my going into my high school rifle team for three years and getting my sports letter in that. In Jr High we were taught guns were tools and you could have fun with them, but they were very dangerous and needed a huge amount of respect to handle. Something many Americans are entirely clueless about and give only passing pause over, otherwise we'd have few if any accidental shootings. I ended up helping to teach Hunter Safety courses for people who wanted a state hunting license.
Work
I got $2 a week to mow our yard. I had a paper route for two weeks when my sister's crummy boyfriend (they were three years older than me) was on vacation and I hated it, dropping it like a hot potato after he got back. In ninth grade I started working at the AutoView Drive-in Theater where my step father was assistant manager and my older brother did some jobs in the field during the day and my sister had her first job working in the snack bar. I cleaned up the field from people dumping garbage out their windows during and after shows. It was a disgusting, back breaking job. In 10th grade I started working in the snack bar as I was old enough for a county food handler's certificate.
I eventually became snack bar manager and in my senior year of high school was also working as the ticket booth cashier where our step father had been robbed at gun point several times over the years. My first job post high school was at United Reliance (Later also \Pacific) Insurance company. I worked in the mail room, shipping and receiving and for whomever needed me to do things, but based out of the mail room. One week another guy my age and I got to take the van and drive around Tacoma and deliver insurance forms to every school in the city. I got to see schools I never even knew existed and the other guy and I had a great deal of fun being paid to drive around and be out of the mail room in the sub-sub basement with very poor ventilation. They didn't bother changing the filters in the ventilation as it just got clogged up right away. And yes, I had allergy issues while working there.
Childhood and Things no one believed me about when I was growing up
And yet they were too true!
It all began with:
5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953) - A brilliant film (from a child's perspective) written by Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss). This fantastical film amazed me as a child. But when I told anyone about this film I saw on TV one Saturday, no one believed me. It was simply too bizarre to even be considered a possibility of a movie and yet, it was made.
Then there was...
World of Giants (1959) - A TV show about a 6" tall secret agent in a brief case. People just thought I was nuts that there would be a TV show like this, and yet there was.
There was also...
Little Shop of Horrors (1960). This film eventually remade in 1986 with a big star cast, now a film that just about everyone knows about, when I was growing up people and I asked people if they ever saw this movie (looking for validation that this film that scared the hell out of me when I was up after bed time stealing TV time in the dark), people thought I was off in the head. My step father, never much of a big brain type of guy, said that no one would ever even make a film like that.
And this one...
Jack The Giant Killer (1962) - And he had been the one to take me to see Jack The Giant Killer at the Lakewood Theater when it came out. Which was a seriously messed up film. This may be one where people were correct and it never did happen in the film. There was a scene I remembered years after I saw the film where the giants wanted to eat more food than they could hold. Jack feigning the same, said he had a trick he always used and proceeded to pretend to cut his stomach open letting the food fall into a bag so he could keep eating. It was a clever attempt to get the others to do that so they could continue to be gluttonous and so they did, surprised when they found they had unintentionally killed themselves. I seem to have been unable to prove that was actually in the film, but that's how I always remembered it. It may instead have been from a book I read back then, Jack the Giant-Killer.
Now let's not forget...
Adventures in Paradise (1959-62) - A captain travels the Pacific ocean on his sailboat with a crew of all women. Adam Troy (Gardner McKay) was an American Korean War veteran who stayed in the Pacific after the war. As captain of the schooner "Tiki III", Troy drifted from adventure to adventure while carrying passengers and cargo anywhere from Hong Kong to Pitcairn Island.
Now onto a different consideration....
Aristotle and my step-father, Woody - One day when I was in about 5th grade the family was sitting around the living room as usual that time of day. Some how the conversation was going along and I injected something I had read at the library in a book by Aristotle. I got into trouble a lot as a kid. That first year at that location at South 50th and Park Avenue in Tacoma, WA (we had moved nearly every year up to that point but remained there through my high school years and beyond), my mother would only allow me to ride my bike to the Library which was six blocks south, then about four east on the corner of Pacific Avenue and 56th street. Woody looked at me like I was an idiot which he did a lot.
He said, "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard."
I said, "I didn't say that, Aristotle did."
He asked, "Who's that?"
I said, "Some guy from over 2,000 years ago."
He said, "Well he sounds like an idiot."
So I said, "But people all over the world think things he said were very wise and have used his teachings."
He asked, "What people." I was stunned at this, even as a fifth grader.
So I said, "Just about everyone, all over the world, all through history. It's the foundation for much of how we think today."
He didn't have much to say after that. Just harrumphed and went back to his newspaper.
Mother
About 9th grade, we were talking at the stove, she was making dinner and we were talking about something I can no longer remember. But during that talk I came to realize that I now knew more about things than my parents did. I remembered that she had quit school in 9th grade and even though my step-father had gotten through high school and the Coast Guard, I still seemed to handle thinking better than him and I seemed to have a broader range already of general information from my years of being grounded to my room and reading every chance I got. I loved science fiction and science, outer space and I followed the US Space program closely. I also got some experimental teaching aides in school. Whenever something new came into the school and they asked for volunteers, I raised my hand.
Father
My birth Father. I was only around my real father until about age three. I don't remember anything about him back then. Or when we lived in Spain in 1958 when my parents broke up. I saw him a few times after that but by about 1965 he was mostly out of my life, until I got a driver's license. I'd run into him sometimes at my grandparent's house, his parent's house, when I was visiting and he happened by. But it wasn't even as if we were related. Still the stories I head about him affected my development and knowing he was an electrician seemed to explain some things about me. I believed him to be solid as a rock in personality and so I grew in that same vein.
Step-Father
Another time around sixth grade - One day again in the living room but this time only the two of us standing there, I asked him a question. He didn't have an answer. I didn't realize till later, with this interaction in part being the reason I figured it out, that he simply didn't have the answer, he had no idea. I think this single incident had a lot to do with my going into psychology in college and phenomenology at my university.
His response to my question was:
"Think! Use your brain and just figure it out."
I questioned him further and he got angry and yelled at me to just think about it. I realize now he was panicked that I figured out he was at a point in my development that he would start not having answers and look inept, which he was much of the time. So I went upstairs to my bedroom. I stood in the doorway and "thought" about "thinking". But I couldn't figure it out. I couldn't get past the concept of thinking. What was it after all? So I went back downstairs and asked him.
"What exactly is, thinking?" He looked at me like I was brain damaged, a look I was quite used to seeing on his face when dealing with me.
"What do you mean, what is thinking. It's...thinking. You just, think."
"Yes," I said, "But what exactly IS thinking?" He geared up to yell at me again and then just froze, thinking, wondering himself what the answer was, and there he was, trapped with nothing to say.
"It's just thinking, work it out!" And that was the end of that conversation and the end of my thinking he was an adult who knew more than I did. Between the Aristotle incident and the thinking incident, I realized that he wasn't so much my superior as just a lot bigger and stronger than I was. I was still afraid of him, but I seemed to have more going on "upstairs" (in my mind) than he did. He had graduated High School, entered the coast guard and was a secretary, typist, and later after he got out had an orchestra. My mother had dropped out in 9th grade. Bit she was sharp. Neither was really educated enough to handle smart kids and we were all smart, though I never did well in school due to ADD and was ADHD as a little kid.
Extracurricular Activities
Martial Arts - I started Martial Arts in 5th grade in 1965 at the Steve Armstrong Isshinryu Karate Dojo in 54th Street and South Tacoma Way, in Washington state. Part of getting your next color belt was supporting the dojo through being a contestant in tournaments around the Pacific Northwest. In part as free publicity for the Sensei's Dojo. Something that has been going on probably for hundreds if not thousands of years in Asia. So I had an odd mix of self respect and confidence. In school I was not a great student. On the street, I seemed to be able to handle myself. In 1980 I started into Aikido as a college PE credit and thus began my career in that form leading to being on the board of directors for a local dojo as a 501c3 non-profit school.
Scouting
Then with other training I got after school, I development quickly with an unusually sophisticated kind of personality all supported through activities like doing search and rescue, belonging to a gun club for kids going back in years to when I was in Cub Scouts in 1965 and before that even with belonging to YMCA Indian Guides for a short time in 1962 when I was also taking guitar lessons all because of the Hayley Mills' film, In Search of the Castaways.
Civil Air Patrol
When I got to the end of the age for Cub Scouts, I had to consider going into Webelos, which leads into Boy Scouts. I attended a meeting and they seemed to childish I refused to join and that was the end of that path. I hadn't known about the Explorers and eventually ended up in Civil Air Patrol as the Tacoma Police Sgt. who lived a house away on the corner of our block was a leader with them and his family was involved. My sister checked it out, it wasn't for her and I begged to be involved.
The Sgt. tried to talk me out of it but I was so for it I joined and became a Flight Commander at my first meeting because of a suddenly influx of cadets at that next monthly meeting. I learned search and rescue in the Cascade mountains, learned radio operations, got my radio telegraph operator's license (still have that card) in the mid 1960s. I got to learn how to use CB (citizen band) and Ham radios. I was speaking to people in other counties like Australia. We could sometimes on a cloudy night contact Florida CBers using "skip", a condition where the short channel 2 band radio waves would bounced from ground to clouds all the way to Florida. I got to take pilot's flight \ ground school and fly in small planes. when I was in eighth grade at Tacoma Industrial Airport, I landed my first small craft in a "two point landing", touching down on two of three wheels. This had surprised and pleased the pilot and aircraft owner, an Air Force Lieutenant and "Senior" or adult member of CAP which had Cadets and Seniors.
Gun Club
Mom thought I was a little too into guns so she called the Tacoma Police Department and found me a youth gun club to join which I did while in eighth grade and led into my going into my high school rifle team for three years and getting my sports letter in that. In Jr High we were taught guns were tools and you could have fun with them, but they were very dangerous and needed a huge amount of respect to handle. Something many Americans are entirely clueless about and give only passing pause over, otherwise we'd have few if any accidental shootings. I ended up helping to teach Hunter Safety courses for people who wanted a state hunting license.
Work
I got $2 a week to mow our yard. I had a paper route for two weeks when my sister's crummy boyfriend (they were three years older than me) was on vacation and I hated it, dropping it like a hot potato after he got back. In ninth grade I started working at the AutoView Drive-in Theater where my step father was assistant manager and my older brother did some jobs in the field during the day and my sister had her first job working in the snack bar. I cleaned up the field from people dumping garbage out their windows during and after shows. It was a disgusting, back breaking job. In 10th grade I started working in the snack bar as I was old enough for a county food handler's certificate.
I eventually became snack bar manager and in my senior year of high school was also working as the ticket booth cashier where our step father had been robbed at gun point several times over the years. My first job post high school was at United Reliance (Later also \Pacific) Insurance company. I worked in the mail room, shipping and receiving and for whomever needed me to do things, but based out of the mail room. One week another guy my age and I got to take the van and drive around Tacoma and deliver insurance forms to every school in the city. I got to see schools I never even knew existed and the other guy and I had a great deal of fun being paid to drive around and be out of the mail room in the sub-sub basement with very poor ventilation. They didn't bother changing the filters in the ventilation as it just got clogged up right away. And yes, I had allergy issues while working there.