He was very much a real rouge, and an extreme asshole sometimes, and he could be easy to hate, when he was at his worst. He was a womanizer, and cheated on his wife, who he loved.  But, he would never think to run out on a debt. He was a loyal friend and family man, regardless of his philandering. He was often strikingly generous. Yet at the same time, he could be extremely parsimonious. He was honest in all of his dealings, and operated with the highest respect for precision and craft, and elegance in design. He admired and demanded the highest standards of human performance, whether it was controlling an airplane, or a sailboat, or using a woodworking or machine tool. He was a hard and ambitious worker, who often could be heard whistling, as he labored.  At the same time, he could be, not just brusque, but, malicious, cutting, and even vicious in his dealings with people, especially if he held them in little regard. They were little better than dirt. He could go from a smile to a threatening scowl in a heartbeat. He once beat up another man, and was briefly jailed. He did not spare the rod with his children. When he became angry, his eyes narrowed and fired. Yet he would tear up at even the most maudlin of human situations, if they struck a resounding chord with his own experience. This included puppies and children, even if he had little patience with his own.
He was a master woodworker and shipwright, who created the most skilled and beautiful pieces, meticulously crafted and refined. He took tremendous pride in his work, though he never would have spoken of it. When he was pressed by others to tell any tales of his 36 years of flying, particularly the most terrifying, he was dismissive, and would say that he had better things to do with his time. He was medium in height, stocky in build. He was once championed by the local small town paper for dragging an unconscious man from a burning boat. He didn’t like the limelight, and hated politicians. He’d rant on about them using unchecked profanity. He was a very intelligent man, yet he had no use for higher culture, whatsoever. He didn’t understand it or care to. He preferred simplistic and dramatic crime movies and books, steamy and violent. When he was almost seventy, he took a beating from a young black mugger outside a downtown bar, when he refused to give over his wallet, preferring to fight, even if the odds were against him. Fight for the pride.
He was a hard drinker, but, he held his liquor well and never got sloppy. He was too proud to be sloppy.
When they made him stop flying, at sixty, he was lost. He’d spent more than half his life flying around the world, and to suddenly be confined at last, was a huge tragedy. He was ready to go to Saudi Arabia, because he could still fly there. But, his wife was not enthused. They made attempts at genteel vacations, and he tried hard, but it was not in him. He was not a tourist. He’d flown them for 35 years, and he didn’t want to be one.
He spent most of his time working on his boat, but there was only so much to do. He was lost, and then his wife got cancer and died, and he was more lost. She had set up their social world, and he had gone along for the ride, and loved it. He was able to be the curmudgeon, because her bright, merry friendliness made it so that he rode her skirts. Friends came often, over the years of their lives together, but with her gone, the friends stopped coming so much.
He wasn’t the type to invite them, so that he became isolated, and took to taking long car rides, for thousands of miles, staying in cheap motels at night, but mostly just driving, without much of a destination. It was the only thing that mimicked the life he had known flying. Things were timeless when he was moving through space, any space. He would arrive back home again, exhausted,  after a week, or so, and be lost there again.
One day he fell down the companionway ladder on his boat and savagely bashed his head. Maybe he’d had some kind of stroke, or maybe he’d drunk a bit too much. That was never quite clear. But it was clear that his isolation and lack of direction made him drink more, and by himself. He dated some of his old girl friends, stewardesses and such, but nothing stuck. He couldn’t, or didn’t fall in love again. He eventually started to stutter and be unable to find the word he was trying to grasp. And then he would just give up, and say, “Oh, hell.”, and just stop trying. Finally, he had another stoke, or something, and he was even less able to communicate. You could see the anger and frustration behind his eyes.
Then one night he fell asleep driving, and crashed his car, fortunately into bushes, where no one was killed, but, it was the end. He, who had always, throughout his life, been the captain who safely navigated the ship, and airplane, and motorcar, was shamed and humiliated of himself, with this moment. Once his driving privileges were gone, he was gone. He was 82 years old.
He eventually quit, or couldn’t keep, taking care of himself in his own home anymore. His children lived in other parts of the country, and he fought their attempts to provide him with live-in help, or help that came for a few hours a day. He locked the doors on them, refusing to play along. Eventually he had to be moved to a care home, a fine one, of quality and class, and really it was the best thing for him, even though he tried to fight physically from being taken from his own home. Yet, when he settled in a bit, he had people around him to talk with, and he made friends, as much as a man of his nature was able. He was like a tiger living amongst house cats.  One night he tried to escape. The police found him cold and exhausted not far from where he had started.
And he was not far from where he started in other ways. The house he had grown up in, and the house that he had built with his own hands, and lived in with his wife, and raised three boys in, and the “house” that was the senior home where he had wound up, were all within a one mile radius in the north end of his town of Tacoma, Washington, United States of America.
The biggest non-ferrous metal refining facility on the entire Pacific Coast of North America, run by the American Smelting and Refining Company, was also within that same one mile radius. All the natives called it, simply, “the smelter”.  His father had been the machine shop foreman at the smelter, and eventually died of the emphysema that he acquired over his working years. Yet, it was a proud position to have held. And he had worked there as well, as had his sons.   The smelter had a 571 ft. tall smokestack, which had once been the world’s tallest. When it was completed in 1917, he had been four years old, and had already watched for two years as a cognizant infant. He had watched the stack grow daily. When he was eighty years old, in 1997, the smokestack, which had been polluting the entire vicinity with arsenic and other poisons for over three quarters of a century, was demolished with dynamite, in four seconds time. He watched the entire spectacle, which generated enormous hoopla, from his own front yard, within that one mile radius of his life, and he wept uncontrollably.
Though he lived his entire life within that radius, he had also shouldered the responsibility of flying airplanes, loaded with trusting passengers, through every kind of weather and hazard, around the world and back again, over and over. He’d never lost a plane, or a passenger. He had build sailboats of his own design, with his own tools and hands there, within that same radius. He’d fished for salmon daily off the docks, during the depression, to help feed the family, all within that radius. And carried his new bride across the threshold, there, within that radius.  And finally, as is the human condition, now feeble, after gradually loosing the energy to live, watching out his window at the bay and harbor, right next to where he had been born, within that radius, the light flickered, and he up and died.
Well, you know, it’s damn hard to watch a good man go down.

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.

Sadly, on the strange and wonderful planet, such fortunate births were not always the norm. In the words of William Blake , a renowned poet, prophet, and seer who once lived on the planet, “Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to the endless night.” We can assume that our dear William was referring to the plight of those fortunate like Tom, and also those whose plight had been the misfortune of a birth surrounded not by love and affection, but rather hate, anger and resentment. The realms of love and hate produce quite different manifestations in the lives of men. Much of the story of our Everyman’s pilgrim’s progress through life, revolves around the clash of these opposites: Love and Hate, darkness and light, kindness and cruelty, ignorance and truth. The dynamics of human action are fire and ice clashing continually through the ages. They say that hate is but the absence of love, as darkness is but the absence of light. They say love conquers hate, and we can only hope that they are right. At any rate, in that dichotomy of forces, Tom was a fortunate son.

Within another dichotomy of the life experience, different individuals, are, to a greater or lesser degree, “of the world”, or “worldly” in their make up. This said, our Tom tended to be less. “Behold, here comes the dreamer.” Such was Tom often lost in his own thoughts. This was his nature as he grew.

But, at this point in the story, his nature was still largely obscured in infancy. It seems a defining characteristic of homo sapiens, that this infancy itself is like a dream. It is rare that any remember much from the first years. Each rests on a mother’s breast, before the claws and fangs of life are revealed. Like the Mothership before birth, that sweet breast, too, is lost to the memory, at least to the conscious memory. You could speculate on the reasons, but perhaps, it is that during infancy, life is a pure phantasmagoria, as yet void of any context other than the vague bliss of warmth and nurturing.There is no context for the memory to attach itself. Perhaps the bliss of infancy is so at odds with the harsh realities of life, the fight for survival, that the bliss can not be held long in the consciousness of the everyday. And yet,to be sure, the nature of the blissful years figures greatly as the psyche molds into its expanding cerebral context…….as the blank slate of neurons builds daily in complexity.

His worldly mother was as beautiful as only every Madonna of history could be. She was well formed and proportionate, sleek, and graceful. She walked like a willow tree. Her value was greater than rubies. She had a well kept household and was respected in the marketplace. She sang softly around the hearth.

His father was a Captain of the high seas. He was skilled and intelligent, strong in body and mind, a natural leader. Along with his wife, to better himself in the here and now, he sought wisdom from all of the great guidebooks of human history. Being as there’s only one common human condition, all guidebooks, the Bible, the Koran, the Bagada Vita, the Analects of Confucius, Aesop’s Fables, morality tales of all cultures throughout the ages, suggested pretty much the same game plan.. Laws of karma, the Golden Rule…..in a nutshell, that summed it up, but all the tricky weighing of complex circumstances, in each and every instance, was far from simple. And so through his childhood, Tom was instructed with the wisdom of the ages, through the diligence of loving Mom, and a loving Dad.

In addition to the moral lessons, there was the practical to be attended to as well….. like how to fish, how to shoe a horse or ride a bicycle, how to plant a garden or work on a machine, or build with wood, mortar, or stone. How to read the clouds or read the waves. How to tell an honest man, or how to keep a thief at bay. How to flip an egg. How to sew a button. How to cajole an angry dog. How to divide a pie into fifths. The list went on and on. There was a lot to learn in life, too much really.

It is said, that a zebra cannot change his stripes, nor a leopard change his spots. Just so, something in the core character of a human, likewise, does not change, from cradle to grave. And, in some sense, a person is never more the person that they truly are, than when a child. During those innocent years, the world is new and unknown, the persona is unfettered by pretense, the heart is an open book, and the eyes show a clear window to the soul. And yet, at the same time, a child can be a closed and unfathomable mystery, when amongst the unfamiliar. Tom was a typical baby, yet he seemed particularly thoughtful of his surroundings. As he grew into childhood,this thoughtfulness, seemed even, to flower onto his brow as a deep expressions of concern. It seemed to say,”What is going on here!”.

Some enlightened monk, once suggested, “Don’t Worry, be happy.”,but to those many who were unable to achieve that ideal, there seemed much to worry about. The world was a loose football, a run-away train, with the future uncertain, and the end always near. Since it is a common characteristic of man that he is terrified by the unknown, and since the only certainty of life, is its very uncertainty, there is always a lot of fear running about. Furthermore and unfortunately, fear seems to almost universally bring out the worst in people. Fear is the mind killer. Without it, the world might well be that proverbial Garden of Eden. With it, all hell breaks loose. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are continually on the loose, throughout the ages. But after all, death is a constant in life , so why make a big deal about it. It seems that children don’t.

Life was once described in the following metaphor: A river flowing towards a great precipice, is still a single river, yet at the start of the falls, that river breaks up into individual droplets and no longer appears as a river, but a falling mist until at the bottom the droplets all join, and become the river again. Such is life, that all of it is connected as one river, yet during the passage from birth to death, man is like the waterfall and thinks of himself as an individual droplet. He loses sight of himself as part of the one river of life. At the bottom of the falls, we all rejoin the river again. The Mothership. As our hero passed through life, it happened that whenever he saw a rose, a soft and fragrant breeze seemed to blow, and he somehow felt a distant connect with that unseen river.

The early stages of every life are a time of innocence. During these days, Tom played with bugs and stones, explored mud puddles with bare feet, and lay for long periods on his back, in the grass, starring up at the clouds, as they changed their form from one animal to another. Dreamily, he watched the big mountain. He watched the shadows change its face, as the sun moved. He felt the sun on his skin and felt the chill when it hid behind clouds. In autumn he watched the leaves color and fall from the huge maples. In winter he slid in the snow. In spring he watched the leaves return, and the flowers blooming, especially the rose buds. In summer he picked fruit from trees in the neighborhood….apples, plums, pears,cherries. He gorged himself. He picked blackberries from the thorny vines, and felt the pain of sharp pricks. He tried, as most do once, to touch fire. At these times, betrayed by the world, he ran with tears in his eyes to the comfort of mother. With each smart, another bit of innocence was forever lost. And so Tom grew, as every child.

He expanded his horizons and started to play with other children in the neighborhood. The games at that age invented themselves, and the days seemed to last forever. He had no sisters of his own and so discovering girls was a special wonder. They played different than the boys. Sometimes he joined them. Other times he ran with the boys. They travelled like a pack, exploring the woods and shorelines, and climbing trees. To Tom, that was the best fun of all, the thrill of climbing trees. The boys ran and jumped, wrestled and pushed. There were scuffed hands and knees, but one learned quickly to not cry for long. It was not tolerated for long within the pack. The bigger boys were the leaders, and set the challenges. One day,a bigger boy pushed Tom to the ground, for no particular reason, other than that he could. Of all the loses of innocence,this was the greatest,and left the most enduring mark.

At any rate, I soon found myself engaged in a situation where certain fairly inconsequential decisions were to be made by myself and others, working in various committees. I quickly discovered that, this aspect of the presidency was tedious and uninteresting. And what if, at times, the decisions arrived at were not my own or ones that I could stand behind ethically? (I am speaking strictly of my own personal ethics here, not the bland ethics of high school politics).

Things eventually came to a head when I was called upon to organize a class dance to raise money. I was enthusiastic about this chore. I felt as if my own tastes and sensitivities were on trial and I was eager to make the event one that would be enjoyed and remembered by all. I quickly ran into trouble. I had located a fantastic venue for what I envisioned as a magical night of music and romance. A local community hall, located some distance from the school campus, featured a breathtaking view from a vantage point above the harbor. At night the lights of the town sparkled magically off the water and the hall was surrounded by a lovely forest. It was perfect and the price was modest, allowing good profits for the class. I was excited to present my plans to all who would be involved.

When I did, I was shocked to find that the school administration vetoed my decision on the grounds that the dance needed to be held at the school campus – the lunch room cafeteria. This was not romantic, not magical, not a decision I wanted associated with my presidency. I protested the principal’s decision, but to no avail. Frustrated after all the ground work that I had already laid, I reasoned that if I were the person doing all the organizational work, in order to raise money for school, I should very well be allowed to do it as I best saw fit. Off campus dances were not an anomaly and were frequently held, but in this case, for no apparent reason the decision was that this dance needed to be held at the school, in the uninspiring cafeteria.

I chose a decidedly hard line approach. If I were not to be allowed free reign to create the event as I chose to, the school could make their own decisions, and I would sponsor my own dance, using my own front money the way,to create an event that would bring the maximum satisfaction and enjoyment to my attending clientel. At first, the school shrugged me off, but as the weeks went by, and it became clear that almost everyone in the school was excited about my dance plans, the school administration decided to stage their own event in an attempt to thwart my private dance. But, it appeared that the dance, that the school planned, was going to be a complete failure.

My vision of the magical evening, proved popular, as did my selection of a band. On the big night, a splendid time was had by all, the lights on the water were beautiful, and I walked away with several hundred dollars. Meanwhile there was no joy in the school cafeteria that same night . In retrospect, I regret that I didn’t take the higher path and give my profits to the school,but after all, I had taken the financial risk, and I was a rebel out to make a point.

Later, when I needed the recommendations of the school administrators for college, I was to learn the pitfalls of living outside the system. Though my grades were high, the support from the principal was not forthcoming. I was not accepted to any of the schools of my dreams. Most likely my first year of college would not have been spent at Washington State Univ. had things been different regarding my dance. However,I managed to make the Dean’s list my freshman year of college, and the next year I was able to transfer to Stanford, where I was now accepted on the basis of my college academic efforts.

School, though I enjoyed many of the social aspects, was a bore to me. I felt, perhaps sometimes not entirely off the mark, that I often knew more than my teachers. In extreme cases, I attempted to prove the point by ridiculing them, by exposing their lack of information, and, of course, my grasp of the same. One time, a female teacher, who I found particularly pompous and insufferable, was expounding on the dangers of car fumes and relating a story of how she was choked by the smell of Carbon Dioxide. I challenged her by asking if she was referring to Carbon Monoxide, the most well known dangerous component of auto exhausts, which, I pointed out had no smell. She responded with annoyance, and perhaps justified derision, that ‘no’, she meant Carbon Dioxide, to which I responded that Carbon Dioxide was also odorless. I got the laugh that I wanted, at the teacher’s expense, but the laugh was really on me as far as my reprehensible adolescent arrogance.

That attitude dove-tailed well with my love of the writings of Ayn Rand, and her extolling the virtues of selfishness in the Ubbermensch.Of course, I saw myself as a budding Superman, bounding along the fast track to the top, over the bones of the lesser humans, and deserving of all that I expected to reap in riches. I was not a pretty picture in many ways. And much of my selfish ambition stayed with me up until the “Umbrella Epiphany” that I experienced several years later. This epiphany, and the pot- smoking that accompanied it, did much to improve my personality and save me from becoming a Republican.

But, at the time,very much, the true, angry, rebellious youth, I was quite amused with my own cleverness, ignoring the demands of common decent manners, since I saw myself as a heroic warrior against petty authority. Many years later, after being married to a school teacher for thirty years, I was much more sympathetic to poor teachers who were struggling with a classroom full of raging hormones. When I experienced, indirectly, the paltry salaries and lowly prestige of most public school teachers, I cringed at how cruel I had been. In my own defense, I can only weakly say that boredom, to me, is one of the least tolerable of all demands.

There was another learning experience that revealed itself at this time. During my year as class president, I had learned that my main function was that of a fund raiser. I have always had a vivid imagination and, in this case, I was, as with the dance, able to draw others into my vision. It was during football season in the fall, and a particularly pivotal game with a rival school was approaching. The school mascot of Wilson High School was the ram. We were the Wilson Rams, Go Rams!! Rah! Rah! To say that I approached school spirit with chagrin, would be putting it mildly. I was not among the true believers. But I did find a fascination with manipulating a crowd and experimenting with group psychology. Mind you, I was only a teenager, so my cynicism on this point can hopefully be forgiven as youthful folly.

The plan that I devised was this: we would create a fad for the big football game. We would buy up surplus army helmets and custom spray paint them to wear at the big game as “Ram-Helmets”. I canvassed the market place for the best prices and created a sort of mini-hysteria, centered around the allure of every one having their “very own individual” painted army helmet. The plan was a huge success. My friends and I had a grand time orchestrating the craziness, the silly helmets sold like hot cakes and the school made a lot of money. On the evening of the Big Game (I can’t remember who won) upwards of a thousand people arrived at the stadium to root, root, root for the home team arrayed in their festive, surplus army helmets.

At the time, I was quite enthusiastic about entrepreneurship, but the truth and the real point of this story, is that the ease with which the students had been cajoled into eagerly buying into this trendy fad, was on some very real level, deeply repulsive to me. Had I not been the father of the sales campaign myself, I would have though the whole gimmick ludicrous. But then,on the other hand, it did seem as if everyone was enjoying themselves, so it’s a fine line to judge. But the point is, that the whole marketing/sales/manipulative process seemed a trifle too undignified somehow, and I think my life took a definite branch in the road away from these practices, as a result of my ‘Ram Helmet’ experience. Maybe I could have made millions? Of course, my antics could scarcely hold a candle to the type of sophisticated marketing strategies that have become standard faire in our modern lives. Be that as it may, I had discovered, that I did not have the stomach for marketing, which I now judged, both pathetic and shoddy.

My high school years, featured another noteworthy early experiment in trying to make a living, by being enterprising. It involved marketing of a sort, but it was marketing of my own talents, something I believed in more than ‘Ram Helmets”. Sometime during my senior year, I took a photograph of a friend and turned that into a small watercolor portrait, which I sold for $10. This approach to portraiture proved poplar, and before long I had orders lined up. Since each portrait took 3 to 5 hours to paint, not to mention the shooting and developing of the original photo, I was making little return for my effort. But, in the end I painted over a hundred of these portraits and the countless hours of brush work required, gave me a good base as I started to developing my own painting technique. That I made so little money from my efforts, seemed to point to the fact that art and mammon do not mix. At least that proved to be most often the case for me. At the time, I should have been sensible enough to raise my prices with demand, but with art, the money was always secondary, and at least I tried not to let its consideration adversely effect my creative interests.

I pursued my art education from as early as I can remember. Even in first grade there was a distinct focus of interest that was, I think, uncommon.In my grade school we had bulletin boards in the hallways, on which the art of the various grades was displayed. I always took interest in what the higher grades were doing. I really analyzed the illustrations I saw in magazines, and,of course, this was still the Golden Age of Illustration, so there was a lot to look at, and I was a careful observer. How much less often, you now see a truly great illustration in this age of ‘Photoshop”. Throughout my twenties, my fervent desire was to make it big as an illustrator. With the advent of computers, the craft of hand illustration largely fell to the wayside, much in the fashion of the disappearance, during the same period, of the watch repair trade. My chosen vocation, became a thing of the past.

I was self taught and pursued the study with vehemence, always paying attention to other people’s art, always asking, “how did he do that?”, when I saw a certain technique that caught my eye. I was always seeking what I liked, and then, trying to imitate it. In high school, I struck gold in the person of W. A. Phillips. Imagine a high school art teacher who was actually a great artist! I never met a more talented artist. The guy was fabulous in a variety of techniques, and what is more, he was a great human being.

The week previous to graduation, I had purchased my first automobile. It was a 1959 Mercedes 220S sedan that had been slammed so hard in a rear end collision, that the left rear tail light now occupied a position directly below the rear window. Apparently, whatever the car had hit, or had hit the car, had somehow missed or skipped over the rear axle, and the left rear wheel extended out a full eight inches beyond the nearest crumpled sheet metal of the bodywork. The frame, after all the crunching, had remained remarkably straight. I had passed the car, slumped on its deflated rubber, in a student parking lot, for an entire year as I came onto campus from my lodgings each morning. I contacted the owner, was assured that, yes, the engine ran, and, yes, it could still roll. We agreed on a price of $50. What was left of the interior was quite cushy, leather seats, real wood trim and that alluring luxurious Mercedes emblem in the middle of the horn button. I experienced imitations of luxury. I limped the car home on four of its six cylinders and, later that day, was able to get them all firing.

With a friend in the passenger seat, we headed out to the Bayshore freeway for a test drive. We pushed it past forty miles and hour, past fifty miles and hour, past sixty miles an hour and were approaching seventy when the front hood latch released and the hood of the car flew up in a solid wall, totally blocking our forward vision. The hood in fact wrapped entirely over the roof. I eased on the brakes and attempted to steer looking out the side window. Do not try this trick. Mercifully, I was able to maneuver over to the shoulder. The two of us stood on top of the engine and managed to reef forward on the hood such that when it was somewhat near its original location, we were able to climb up on top of the hood and jump up and down to crush it even closer to home. We finished the job with a stout piece of rope from the back seat, and limped homeward, damaged but undaunted.

In order to wholly partake in the spirit of those heady times, and to fully celebrate my own graduation, in the most expressive and enjoyable fashion I could imagine, I put together a costume mimicking the Captain America comic book hero, complete with the emblematic round shield. I wore this to my graduation ceremony.

The day previous to my graduation, I donned my new garb, and stuck out from Palo Alto hitchhiking. It was a sign of those Hippie Halcyon days, that I could hardly put out my thumb before some smiling car load of hippies would screech to a halt, to have the privilege, of helping out Captain America. I hitchhiked out to the coast, up past Half Moon Bay, on through San Francisco, down the Bayshore and back to my home, having hardly wasted five minutes waiting for a ride. Oh, what fun it was, to travel through the world as an alter ego, safely hidden behind my all protecting mask, always keeping it in place, something of absolute importance to any masked super hero. I was never seen as Tom, I was only Captain America.

The carefully sewn costume had a remarkably visual vividness to it, with the skin tight lycra in bold, red, white, and blue. In a visual field a quarter of a mile away, there was no way that the costume would not stand out like a beacon. By walking through the world inside the mask, you observed the instant attention of all within range. Most broke into spontaneous smiles as if an amiable clown had suddenly crossed their tracks, and indeed that was entirely the case. I felt myself the absolute soul of wit, and it seemed as if at every challenge I was able to leave the scene with all players smiling. I smoked some sweet flowers, early in the morning, and then spent the entire day of graduation walking about the Stanford campus, within my costume.

Remarkable as it seems now, I had most definitely caught the flavor of the day perfectly, as the distribution of the A.P. wirephotos was to attest. I received, later, newspaper clippings from Japan to Florida. The image had travelled world wide. I made the front page of my own local ‘Seattle Post Intelligencer’, which did not note that the masked man in the photograph, shaking the hand of the Stanford President, was a native son.

Everyone, on that day,wanted to be photographed, with their caps and gowns, with Captain America. At the ceremony, a long line of graduates snaked its way up to the stage to receive their diplomas. As I was clearly visible, the crowd was well prepared when I emerged on stage to shake the hand of the college president amid a roar of cheers. The laughter and mirth that accompanied Captain America, not me, on that day, will bring a smile to my lips when ever I recall. But the good vibrations were not just at the graduation, for it seemed as if everyone you saw on the streets back then, was smiling, with a knowing twinkle in their eye. Ahhh, the sweet flush of youth.

I left the stage that day, waving to the crowd. Then I left Frost Amphatheater, and still relishing my five minutes of fame, I climbed on my bicycle and rode home. I packed up the crumpled Mercedes and prepared to leave Stanford behind. I half assumed that I was somehow, also, irrevocably burning my academic bridges behind me. I guess this proved to be true, because I never looked back. But, ahead, I saw a whole new fork in the road, and this felt fine.

Two days later, the back seat of the Mercedes loaded with all my worldly possessions, I struck off, headed north, for an entirely new chapter of my life. Never before, or since, had I felt so liberated. The world was now my oyster, and I could barely wait to devour it.

The rear bodywork of the car was so crumbled and twisted it appeared as if it might have been a gigantic wad of crumbled paper. On this surface I had painted with red, white and blue paint, a perfect semblance of a rippling American flag. These were the heady and glorious sixties and exuberance seemed uncommonly welcomed by the man on the street. Many who I encountered on the highway yelped their support and flashed the ubiquitous peace sign, while some sad few, scowled at me, with red neck hatred. Any of these might have displayed the popular blindly loyal bumper sticker, proclaiming “America Love it or Leave it.” It too was ubiquitous. My bumper sticker would have read, “America, Love it or Change it.” Such were the times.

When I arrived back in Washington state, I wound up moving into a tent on Vashon Island, where my brother, Gary, and I had purchased four acres in the middle of the woods, at the end of a long dirt road, the previous summer. Over the next year the tent evolved into a driftwood and tar paper shack, that was to become my own first home in the World. Gary and I had pooled all of our money, saved from several years of odd jobs to come up with the $4,000 purchase price. There was no water, no electricity, but there was freedom in abundance. I was happy in my shack in the woods. I relished it like nowhere I had ever been. I soon found various employment on the island and met many other refugees from the city, who had moved to this rural location to try to return to the garden, and live off the land. This seemed the common objective of an entire wave of long haired, home spun visionaries who arrived collectively on the island during those years. Everyone shared and helped each other in any way they could to try to start their new lives. Many were still living there forty years later, tending their grandchildren. It was an incredibly special time and community, and I wound up staying there for most of the next ten years.

At the end of my first summer in my tar paper shack, which offering minimal protection against the coming winter, I looked for other options. Early in the fall before much snow had dropped on the pass, I drove into the Cascades to check out a new ski area that had just been built. They were looking for workers and I signed on for construction and for a position operating the chair lift once the ski season started. In retrospect, it seems amazing to me now that the entire ski area was run by people not out of their twenties. Except for a few gnarly old mechanics who kept the machinery running. It turned out to be a record snow year, and since nothing at that point in my life was more important to me than skiing, I was in heaven. Everyone on the lift crew and all the ski patrol smoked marijuana daily, yet we managed to run the area without a hitch. It was an amazing time which never recreated itself afterwards. I wound up working at the area for two years. In the spring of the second season while attempting to land a fifty foot jump, I misjudged my landing and crushed a disc in my lower back. I was laid up in bed for several months before I finally succumbed to spinal surgery. The better part of the next year was spent recovering. The event shattered my youthful illusions of immortality. In more ways than one, childhood’s end was lurking around the corner. The permanently injured spine was a lasting memory of youthfull folly.

About this time, near the summit of Snoqualmie Pass a large, state highway warehouse, that dated back to the Roosevelt New Deal Work Projects, was demolished to make way for a new highway. Using a rental trailer hitched to my ’61 Chevy pickup, I was able to acquire and transport a substantial stash of building materials back to Vashon Island, where I was planning to expand my tar paper shack into a more permanent structure, a real house. I had little real house construction experience, but I had watched my father use tools my whole life, and had often helped him. He was a remarkable cabinet maker, who had actually apprenticed as a wooden boat builder in his youth. He built a boat in our back yard when I was growing up. So I figured with hard work and paying attention, I couldn’t go too wrong, and I took courage in an old carpenter’s adage that: “you just have to be smarter than the hammer”. Undaunted, I set about the task of building my first house.

At about this same time, at the end of my second season at the ski area, I started dating Marilyn, my future wife. After about a year together, ‘Mer’ turned up pregnant and a whole new chapter of my life began to unfold.

When I first heard the news, I was still living in my shack on Vashon Island. I was making about $100 a month and living comfortably with my few needs, enjoying, above all, the complete freedom of time. Suddenly,everything changed. Immediately, I packed my Volkswagen Bug with all my possessions and moved into Seattle to seek my fortune. Marilyn and I were not yet living together, and I found a set of rooms that I was able to rent for about $100 a month. Seattle at the time was experiencing a huge economic downturn. Boeing had just laid off thousands and employment opportunities were slim. I started my professional life on the graveyard shift at a ‘Jack in the Box’ restaurant. When I was applying to the ‘Box’ manager for the position, he noted my Stanford degree on the application, and asked if I didn’t think I was over qualified. I said I hoped that wouldn’t be a problem.

Marilyn and I were married in a ceremony with only two witnesses, under a full moon at the end of August, 1974. We moved into the small apartment and struggled to make our way. The apartment was in the Renton area of Seattle, home of Pacific Car and Foundry, one of the biggest foundries on the West Coast. “Pac-Car” cast everything from military tanks to railroad cars. They had been in business for a long time, and were a prominent fixture of Pacific Northwest industry.

The employment lines at Pac-Car were packed with people trying to find a job. In spite of the dismal prospects, I came up with my own strategy. I learned a lot from this lesson. Every morning at 7:00 am, when the employment office opened, I was there fresh from the graveyard shift at Jack in the Box. I went to the same line every day, talked to the same woman, behind the same counter. Though the news was always the same, “no jobs today”, I bargained that consistence and persistence were the keys to success in this particular situation. At the end of the second week, I was told to step into an adjoining room, where I was given an entry level position: “Chipper/Grinder, on the foundry floor, graveyard shift.”

My first night at work, I felt as if I had arrived at a scene from Dante’s Inferno. There was exploding fire and the noise was so deafening that in order to communicate, you needed to yell directly into the ear of your audience. In my capacity as a ‘chipper and grinder’, I was using heavy pneumatic tools to smoothed the edges off huge steel castings, in this case, the huge housings (about one ton each) for ship winches. It took about 45 minutes to clean each one. The sparks from the grinder flew everywhere and burned away at any part of your clothing uncovered by heavy leather aprons. The chipper part of the operation, was a small (30 lbs.) jack hammer used to remove material that could not be reached with the grinder. There were a dozen other men doing the same work in the same area. The noise level was deafening. Not far away were huge furnaces of molten steel. Wrestling with the heavy tools over an eight hour shift, was exhausting, but I thought of it much like a athletic training work out.

Every week I would wear out a pair of work pants from sparks and tears. Of course, I purchased these from the Goodwill, trying to save every penny. The pay at the foundry,though, was much better than Jack in the Box, and I was relieved to have employment. Mer’s due date was approaching, and money disappeared as quickly as it arrived.

At this same time, I learned that Boeing Corporation,in spite of all their lay-offs, was offering a free school to train draftsmen in their own techniques. This dove tailed well with my career interests in illustration arts. I had picked up many drafting skills on my own already. I hoped to eventually get into an illustration group at Boeing. I was excited by the idea of painting beautiful photo realistic renderings of airplanes soaring through the clouds. Much of the art work I had done earlier in my life, even back to Jr. High School, had focused on airplanes. Characteristically the work of youthful aspiring artists, reflects their young passions. With me it was airplanes and race cars.

I signed up for their free school and was soon attending classes for six hours, five days a week in the evenings. This left few hours in the day to sleep and eat, since I went directly from school to the foundry, then returned to the apartment to eat breakfast and sleep from about eight in the morning, until four in the afternoon, when I started another cycle. It was a distinct change from my life as an idyllic recluse on Vashon. I saw little of Mer, except on the all too short weekends, when I mostly wanted to catch up on sleep.

I graduated at the top of my class and was set up to work for Boeing but my military draft deferment status, as a result of my Captain America theatrics, staged as a creative act of civl disobedience to avoid returning to Vietnam at any price, surfaced, and I was denied employment. Thus I learned another lesson about living outside the system. But living inside the system of the industrial/military complex, was simply not a fit for me on any level, and I never attempted to sleep with the enemy again in my life. In my self defense, at this period of my life, I was confused, and desperate to find a right livelihood.

I felt intense scrutiny from both my new in-laws, and my own parents, as well as friends and acquaintances. All seemed to be waiting to see how I was going to step up to the plate and provide for my new family. Meanwhile, I combed the want ads for any suggestion of an opening which would utilize my artistic skills. I had by this time, twenty six years old, made a mental commitment to pursue my artistic expression, at all costs. I made many sacrifices to stay on this path. It was painful to see past acquaintances, whose talents and drive seemed meager, some from High School or college, now prospering in their careers, buying new cars, while I was dumpster-diving in my spare time. My pride and natural vanity were taking severe blows and I felt that I saw in the eyes of people communicating with Mer, that they wondered at why she had wound up with such a loser. When I look back at those days, which could have been filled with the joy and excitement of starting a new family, I remember mostly a desperate struggle to find some path.

By an incredible stroke of irony, while seeking any employment related to my art, I was hired by a subcontractor to Boeing, named “Milmanco”, (Military Manual Company). The company made the manuals for newly purchased airplanes. Since each control panel of a different airplane was somewhat unique, the subcontractor had the job of creating the graphic representations needed in the manuals. The work ,all pre-computer, involved what was known as ‘cut and paste’ in the graphics trade. I found myself working at the main Boeing plant south of downtown Seattle. The mood in the office where I worked was unbearable. The energy level seemed geared to doing as little as possible throughout the day. There was not the slightest spark of inspiration or enthusiasm from any quarter. And the work itself was as boring and tedious as I could ever imagine. While there, however, I made all the inquiries I could, as far as finding work in an illustration group. But I sensed that within the huge corporate bureaucracy, my chances of making it into such an exalted group, were zero, unless perhaps, I invested my entire life working for Boeing, a grim prospect. Thus it was that I stayed with the Boeing position for exactly two weeks before I said “take this job and shove it”, and was back on the streets, much to the consternation of my new wife. It was around this time that I started my business with Tom’s Truck.

As business grew, I realized I needed a bigger vehicle. Outside a local boat yard, I had seen a 1947 Dodge Step Van. It had once been used by a local department store. The box of the body was quite spacious. I could stand up inside, and if I loaded lumber all the way to the front windshield, sixteen foot lengths would fit completely inside. With the rear doors open I could haul something close to 30′ long. It proved to be a great rig, a true ‘oldie but goodie’. When I first saw it, it was sunk down on its tires, covered with dirt, and had a meek ‘For Sale’ sign propped in the window. I knew that, I was in a good bargaining position. The agreed price turned out to be $150.00. But even this modest price was more than I had at the time. During this early stage of our marriage, I was routinely dumpster-diving for produce at local super markets, just to help put food on the table. Later that week, I received a telephone call from a woman inquiring what I would charge to drive a load of furniture to Modesto, California. I immediately said $150.00. She agreed. I returned to buy the truck.

When I went to meet the woman, I saw that the load of furniture would fill every square foot of the truck. It was then that she asked whether her and her sister could both accompany me on the trip. They both appeared to be in their mid-sixties and I questioned how smoothly such a trip might enfold. Mind you, at this point, I had driven the truck a total of about 10 miles. The round trip to Modesto would be about 1600 miles. It was a sketchy proposal all the way around. But, I tried not to let my apprehension show. I agreed that if they paid all fuel costs, they could drive with me.

We set the furniture such that one large arm-chair faced forward at the very front of the load. This would be just to my right as I sat in the driver’s seat. The only other seat was a small fold-down jump seat low in the right wheel well, just inside the door, not a comfortable location. The passenger in that seat could not even see out the windshield. As it later turned out, on the entire three day trip to Modesto, the same sister sat in the armchair and never once traded positions with the other sister. It seemed the type of relationship between them, that you might expect from two sisters, so lacking in social skills or even the most rudimentary of charms, that they are marooned in the world with only their own company. And it did not appear that they particularly enjoyed that company. Behind the three of us, in the truck, was a solid wall of their possessions, packed snug to the roof of the truck.

On the day of our departure I had driven barely to the edge of the Seattle city limits before I ran out of gas. The truck had no gas guage. I tried to reassure the two women that this was a minor set back. After running on foot to find gas and returning with a full can, I opened the engine cover which was inside the cab, just to my right, and just in front of the large arm chair. I primed the carburetor with a good slosh of gas, but when I fired the ignition the entire engine compartment erupted in flames. I quickly slammed the cover, which extinguished the fire, as the two women peered with alarm through the sliding passenger door. I assured them that this was no big deal, all the while envisioning the truck and its entire load of furniture blazing away on the shoulder of the road. On my next try I was able to get the engine started and we were soon on our way down the highway.

Within a few miles, however, I became aware that the truck had no front shock absorbers. This resulted in the front of the truck developing a bouncing up and down motion, as it picked up the rhythm of the sections of the concrete highway. It would get increasingly more exaggerated as I drove, and I tried to vary my speed, and even hit the brake pedal such that I might break up the cadence of the bumps. It must have looked strangely comical to an outside observer to see this truck pogo-ing down the the highway, but I knew that this was not a good situation. Nonetheless we managed 150 miles that first day and spent the night in Vancouver, Washington where the sisters had friends.

The next day, assessing the problem, I was able to install a set of shocks that I purchased from a local junk yard. That took the whole day. After sleeping in my now grimy, grease stained clothes, in my sleeping bag, the next morning we were on our way again with much improved steering control. Most of Oregon rolled beneath us without additional troubles. We were driving on what was then the practically new, and largely empty, Interstate 5 Freeway. We drove for about ten hours on that day. At pretty much every rest stop that we stopped at to relieve ourselves, I would surreptitiously slide into the woods to smoke a joint. This led to lively conversation with the two women, and it was an improvement on listening to their constant squabbling.

That night we all three slept in a single motel room, me on the floor in my sleeping bag, them snoring together in the same bed. The next day, again, went smoothly as the beautiful sunny California landscape rolled past us. At about nine o’clock that night while still light, we rolled into Modesto, and reached our destination, a second floor apartment outside the downtown area. I saw that it was to be my job to move every scrap of furniture up to that second floor. I was incredibly strong in those years, from weight lifting, running, and my high school wrestling, and I took the solo moving of couches, bureaus and tables as a physical challenge. It was not until the last scrap of furniture was in its place that the sister who had hogged the armchair the entire journey, finally coughed up my $150.00. With not so much as even a ‘thank you’, I was dispatched by the two ugly sisters, and happy I was for that to happen. On the return journey in the empty truck, the six cylinder Dodge flathead mill purred, and I flew over the pavement, back to Washington, often times reaching an awesome 70 miles an hour. The sweet cannabis wafted out the window into beautiful summer sunshine, and I was young and free, with $150 in my pocket, and life was good.

I used the same truck for 25 years of demolition work, and I tortured it in every conceivable way and it never stopped giving of itself, until it finally gave up the ghost in 1987. For years after that, I used to see it in the same junk yard just south of Hailey, Idaho. That truck, and the Mercedes flat-bed, and dozens of other cheap beaters that I bought and sold or kept and loved, made up an entire history of vehicles in my life.

I worked on all my own cars and trucks and motorcycles, throughout my life, and the long experience of wrenching on mechanical stuff, led to me formulating an entire philosophy of automobiles, and how they fit into our culture, and how the manufacturers have increasingly raped the unfortunate consumer, and how, despite the advertising campaigns, the cars we are able to buy have grown increasingly user unfriendly, and particularly hostile to the owner being able to perform his own repairs, or indeed anyone being able to perform the repairs. I am describing ‘planned obsolescence’ as one of the most insidious and evil trends of the modern human experience. (One need look no further than the meager trickle of useful information provided in a typical ‘Owner’s Manual’, to get a partial idea of what I’m describing. ) The way in which useless machines and products have worked there way into our modern life, and the extent to which our manufacturing capabilities, and natural resources are squandered as a result, was to become an important part of what I hoped to express in my life as an artist. More on this ‘Manifesto of Bogus Manufacturing’ later.