When you talk about “coming of age”, it’s hard to know exactly when it starts. For me, it might have started when I learned how to ride a bicycle. It took me a long time to learn – that is I didn’t learn until late – about the 3rd or 4th grade, because no one took the time to teach me and all the bikes I had to learn on were full size, and I was fairly small in stature until adolescence. When young with the available bikes, I could barely reach the pedals for a full stroke, much less touch the ground. This led to a lot of blood spilled and skin scraped away, in the process of learning. I can’t remember exactly when I finally figured it out, how to ride,, but I do remember, that it changed my life. My horizons were forever widened. I became mobile. To suddenly be able to go ten times faster than walking speed expanded, by that factor, the available ground that I could explore. New neighborhoods in the city of Tacoma opened themselves to my attention. The bicycle was to become one of the most beloved objects in my life.
Tacoma in the 1950′s was very ‘provincial”. Nothing avant garde in the art world was breaking in Tacoma. Although quiet and peaceful in most respects, amongst children, my age and older, there existed a territorialism that was often palatable, and there was always the fear of a good thrashing if one ventured far from home, through the neighborhoods of other gangs of kids.I never liked fighting, at least physically fighting other people. Being the youngest of three boys I knew well the felling of being the underdog in battle. I had at least my fair share of split lips and bloodied noses.
Not all of these injuries came from fights. The majority were the result of my own love of thrills; the type of thrills that go with speed and with jumping off high things; typical boy stuff, but I loved it as much as those who loved it the most. I once read an interesting quote from Sterling Moss, the famous race car driver, where I said that,”Speed is the only genuinely modern sin.” But I think he referred only to speed in a machine, because speed has always been an available ‘sin’, ever since a man could leap from a high cliff into water or ride upon a charging steed across some vast prairie. And it is in the family of other pursuits that have acquired the status of ‘sin”, because, like them, speed can sneak back on you and do you harm. But without the fear of harm, there is no thrill in the pursuit. Even at a very young age, I was always willing to try to overcome fear, for the promise of a good adrenalin rush. Many times I wound up scraping myself up from the dirt as a result, but I always got back on the diving board. I was once told by a friend that researchers had isolated something that they loosely defined as the “thrill seeking gene”, within the humane genome. And that, it was found in something like 50% of the male population, and 2-3% of the female population. This seemed to resonate with my experiences of observing people, and whether or not they seemed irresistibly drawn to risks, or not. I knew that I was drawn to risks, for the shear pleasure of surviving the sense of danger, and the accompanying rush.
By the end of my baby years I had knocked out both of my two front baby teeth. One was the result of falling head first down a staircase while playing. The other tooth was knocked out when the chair that I was leaning back in, tipped over and my head hit the floor. I was drinking a bottle of Coca Cola at the time, and after my brothers and parents searched for some time to find the tooth, we eventually found it inside the Coke bottle. Perhaps as a result of these early mishaps, I gained some level of judgement, because I never knocked out my adult teeth, though I had some close calls.
I did chip one of my adult front teeth at a fairly early age, but it was not my fault. I was lying on the cement floor of our home, with my head propped up by my hands, reading a book, when my middle brother who was passing by, thought it a good chance to kick my head down. This was a good example of the sometimes vicious sibling rivalry between my middle brother Gary, and myself. My parents were,of course, furious and my brother paid with a good whipping from my father’s belt.
The sibling rivalry was brutal between us, and remained so until we had a knock down drag out fist fight when I was about 16 and him 18. The results of the fight were thus: I started out in the lead landing two round house rights that left him clutching my knees. I could have finished him off easily, but never having had a killer instinct, I let him get up and he wound up knocking me out after landing a good blow to my face. I was later to discover in a college boxing class, that I have a true ‘glass jaw’ and am easily knocked out. In this case, I went down so hard that I had temporary amnesia for several hours. Try as I might, I could not remember what had happened earlier in the day. I guess the lesson is this: If you start a fight you better be ready to finish it. Still, I was always a bit miffed that my brother didn’t show me the same mercy I’d showed him. I think it says something of a difference in personality, mainly that I have never really had the killer instinct. Though I have always been a fierce competitor, I really don’t like to ‘beat’ other people. I always felt that I was at the top of my game when I was playing ‘with’ someone, not ‘against’ them. The outcome of the whole fight was that, my brother and I became the best of friends from then on. We had gained a mutual respect in a hard way. I wept uncontrollably on the day when I learned that he had been lost at sea.
My first bicycle was a Schwinn “Tiger”. It was a 26″ bike with front and rear hand brakes and a “coaster” brake for the rear wheel to boot. It had a three speed rear hub and single chain ring. It was a heavy, sturdy bike but, still, a bit of a cruiser with its 1 3/4′” tires.
I loved that bike. I wiped it dry whenever I came in from the rain, which was quite often in Tacoma, and kept it well oiled and polished. I quickly began to test myself on longer and longer rides. By the time I was ten or twelve I was riding on 50 mile overnight camping trips with my sleeping bag tied on to the bike and a pack on my back. That says a lot about the idyllic surroundings of the Puget Sound area when I grew up. The city of Tacoma was pretty small, and surrounded by vast and beautiful unspoiled forests and beaches. It was a very fortunate time and place to be young. Those days are gone forever, and I sometimes feel that I was in the last generation to experience in the full beauty of when it was still that pristine.I was fortunate to see the last of the best. It breaks my heart to see the way the world has gone down. By the time I was an adult, it had all changed.
My parents were not the type to discourage my adventuresome spirit and they granted me the freedom to pretty much do as I wanted. I think being the last child, that they had worn out on trying to exercise control. That was fortunate for me, because I chaffed hard at constraints. It became apparent early that I loved the joy and freedom of the open road.
Amongst the many places my pedals took me to, were different airfields in the area. When I was in the 5th grade (10/11 years old). I rode my bike several times to McChord Air Force Base. This was about a 30 mile round trip on my bike. When I arrived at the base’s main gate, I politely inquired if it would be possible for me to look at the airplanes. Security was pretty slack back in the good old days, and the guard would telephone his superior and he in turn would assign someone the task – perhaps a welcome one – of escorting this kid out to see some planes. I loved every minute and devoured the machines with my eyes. I remember being led to a Boeing B-47 “Strato Fortress”, an early post-war jet bomber. It had a long crawl tube that connected fore and aft and I was wild with imagination of heroic combat as I crawled through the passage.
At another airfield, towards Seattle I discovered a Grumman F4F ‘Wildcat’ and a TBF ‘Avenger’, decomposing off the edge of the tarmac. My dreams took the wildest flights of fancy as I sat in the cockpits of these derelict aircraft.
At the same time my leg muscles grew strong from miles and miles of pedaling. I was starting, unknowingly, to drift toward my love of endurance athletics. I some times referred to this as the bottom of the athletic barrel, but I loved it. At this point, in my life, I also spent countless hours in the library searching out everything I could about air warfare and in my youthful folly I appreciated little the actual horror of battle. It seemed romantic and heroic and I was drawn so passionately to the fascination with air combat, that I seriously wonder if I might not have been the reincarnation of some airman who crashed in flames. Perhaps the same adventuresome spirit flowed through veins of earlier blood, perhaps to the beginning of time, my type has been reincarnated again and again. Others have been couch potatoes. But variety is the spice of life, and everything that lives is holy.