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| Copyright dreamstime |
In addition to the many anecdotes I've included in other articles about my life, there are still some stories I'd like to tell. I love listening to other people's stories of once-in-a-lifetime experiences, because we are all so different. All people, no matter how common they may consider their lives to be, have uncommon stories to tell. These anecdotes are part of my story. They must have been important to me, because I have not forgotten them.
You May Only Have One Chance
A friend of mine has written over 300 articles and essays for The Christian Science Monitor. She has a truly wonderful way with words and an endless fount of ideas for her essays, since she considers every aspect of her life as fair game for a second, quizzical glance. One of her essays, entitled "My Reluctant Brushes With Celebrity," especially captured my interest, because I developed the exact opposite tendency of trying to meet people, after missing my initial chance to meet someone famous.
Early as a teenager, I got backstage with my sister to meet Peter, Paul, and Mary. My sister was their "biggest fan," and so they knew her and greeted her warmly, but I was absolutely tongue-tied. I couldn't think of anything to say, and so I said nothing. When we departed, I felt terrible, because I felt that I had missed my one chance of conversing with someone famous. And, of course, I never did have another chance to meet them.
I thought long and hard about that experience, because it had been so final and defeating for me, and I vowed to myself that, no matter what, somehow I would think of something to say if I ever had another opportunity, if my common, uncommon life ever crossed paths with a famous person again.
Two years later I invited my girlfriend to see a Gordon Lightfoot concert at Chicago's Auditorium Theatre. Both of us were big fans of Lightfoot; we just loved his music. I picked her up at her Northern Illinois University residence, and we drove through a snowstorm to get to the concert hall in downtown Chicago. We were the first to arrive (big surprise), and they let us in from the cold to sit in an empty auditorium. We were more than an hour early.
As we sat in our seats, I had the wildest of ideas. I turned to her and said, "Would you like to meet Gordon Lightfoot?" I had no idea how I would accomplish this feat, but she quickly replied, with a startled look, "Yeah!" I said to her, "Follow me."
I don't recall where we headed next--to the back of the concert hall or out a side door, but finding our way backstage was not difficult. I knew several things were working in our favor. First, Lightfoot was most certainly already backstage in some "green room," a pre-concert gathering place for artists. He was probably practicing with his guitar player and bassist or reviewing the sets for his concert. Second, it was terrible weather outside and we were obviously very early, so we had little or no competition from other fans to meet him, at least not at the moment. With any luck, we might find him alone.
We started wandering through the cavernous hallways backstage, and I was stunned that we saw no one--not a soul--until we rounded a corner and saw two guards on duty far down the hallway. We backed up out of their sight, and I thought for a moment. How would we get past the guards? Surely that's where Gordon Lightfoot was, because they wouldn't be guarding an empty room! Then the most wonderful idea came to me. We were standing next to a garbage bin that contained a couple of used McDonald's bags on top of the heap. I grabbed the bags, handed one to my girlfriend and said, "Pretend that they're filled with food, and just follow my lead."
We started walking down the long hallway, and I began an animated, unrehearsed conversation with her, while we each carried a bag. She was so adept at holding up her side of the conversation, as if it were a real, important exchange between us. Our attention was squarely on each other, not on the two people ahead of us. When we got to the guards, I held up my bag and said to them, "Dinner for the guys," opened the door, and walked right past them without stopping. They didn't say a word but actually waved us through.
The door opened into a very small auditorium, and there stood Gordon Lightfoot, Red Shea (his lead guitarist), and Rick Haynes (his bass player). Before they could call the guards or tell us to leave, I started talking, and I remember exactly what I said, which was all true. "We just drove 200 miles to come see you, and we're big fans of yours, so we just wanted to meet you." (By then we had tossed aside the empty McDonald's bags.) Red Shea came over to us, smiled, and shook our hands, thanking us for coming so far. He asked where we were from and went out of his way to make us feel comfortable, probably surprised that we had found them backstage and been allowed in by the guards.
Gordon Lightfoot came over toward us and I asked when he expected their next album to be released. Red Shea turned to Lightfoot, and they had this amusing exchange:
Shea: When do you think the album will come out, Gord, February?
Lightfoot: Oh, that's a little hard to say.
Shea: February is a little hard to say.
We all laughed at that, as if we were old friends. The album was actually not released until April, 1970, and it was called Sit Down Young Stranger. It had the classic song, "If You Could Read My Mind," on it, which became so popular that the album was later re-released under that title.
Lightfoot asked us a couple questions, and then he announced that they had to get ready for the show. We thanked them very much for talking with us and left to return to the auditorium.
I don't know who was more surprised that our ploy had worked--my girlfriend or me, but it was one of the happiest times in my life. The concert that Lightfoot and his sidemen gave was superb, probably the best of the six times I've seen him perform. I'm sure they did several of the songs from his new album. It was a cool feeling to sit there after we had met Lightfoot. Probably no one else in the place had been so fortunate.
Devising a way to meet Gordon Lightfoot when presented the chance led to meeting many, many other well-known people. If you have one chance to meet someone you would like to meet, you should always remember two things to get past whatever anxiety you might have. First, most people who are well-known don't mind meeting fans, if it is done in a polite manner. In fact, they enjoy it. They are usually so insulated and protected from people that a quick, polite conversation is welcomed. Second, don't talk about yourself unless it is in the context of meeting the person, and try to say something that implicitly compliments the person but also solicits a response.
When I met Joshua Bell, who I believe to be the greatest violinist in the world, in 2015, I immediately told him that I had never heard such a rich, gorgeous sound from a violin. (His violin is a Stradivarius that is over 300 years old.) He looked at me sincerely and said, "Thank you for noticing that." It was a wonderful moment of connection between us as we chatted further, for my statement had been absolutely true.
Because I've attended many classical concerts where famous musicians often sign CDs after the performances, my wife and I have met many great artists. The most approachable have been Gil Shaham, Yuja Wang, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Hilary Hahn, Andre Watts, and Daniel Hope. The folk artists I've really enjoyed meeting include Jim Croce, Bob Gibson, Steve Goodman, and Loudin Wainwright III. With each person I came up with a question I wanted to ask--where is your favorite place to play? ...how is your tour going? ...can I ask you about your violin (or piano or guitar)? It's not hard to engage in conversation when you ask something about their life, and they will often return the favor by asking something about you.
Of course, if you have a special "in" to meet someone, take it. My stepson, Hal, had a friend whose father (Bart Oates) played on the San Francisco 49'ers in the 1990's. I picked up Hal at their home one day after school, and Bart Oates' wife greeted me at the door and said, "Come on in. There's someone I'd like you to meet." When I walked into their family room, 49'ers quarterback, Steve Young, was sitting there talking with Hal. After chatting with him for a few minutes, Hal and I left. It was years later that my wife and I noticed Steve Young sitting in the Palo Alto restaurant where we were dining. As he was getting up to leave, I made the quick decision to approach him and say hello. Of course, he saw me approaching and must have thought, "Here we go, another fan," until I said, "Hi, Steve, I'm Hal's stepdad and just wanted to say hello again." He stopped and his face lit up in a big smile. As he held out his hand to shake mine, he said, "Oh, Hal! How is Hal?" That led to a nice little conversation in front of a restaurant filled with people, probably each person wishing they had a step-son named Hal.
My friend who is shy of celebrities did have a nice conversation with Walter Cronkite once while riding a ferry out to a Massachusetts island, but her shyness of celebrities has not changed. Since meeting Gordon Lightfoot, I have leaned the other way when presented the chance. As Yogi Berra once said, if you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Hit And Run
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you had to make a split-second decision to take action, where you had no time to think about risk and reward? Certainly, all of us have had to make very quick decisions while driving, in order to avoid an accident, for instance. But what if the action involves more than just hitting the brake or steering out of someone's way? Have you ever wondered what you'd do?
It was on Tuesday, August 27, 1991, at about 5:00 p.m. (I've
kept a daily calendar since 1978, so it wasn’t difficult to find the exact date.) I was driving in Mountain View, California, to my girlfriend's home to go out to dinner. I was on Middlefield Road, a moderately busy street, heading west in a lot of traffic. It was a sunny, warm afternoon, and I was driving with the windows open. I was about 100 yards from the Middlefield and Shoreline intersection, going about 30-35 miles per hour, when I heard the sound of a collision behind me. I immediately looked in the rearview mirror and saw that a white van had hit a bicyclist. What I'd heard was the collision; what I saw was the cyclist crashing to the ground in the bike lane.
At that exact moment, the light on Middlefield changed to yellow, and I hit the brake to slow down for the red light. I was in the far left lane, with two lanes of heavy traffic to my right--one a right-turn lane onto Shoreline Boulevard, and I probably came to a complete stop exactly as the light turned red. That timing, in fact, is the only way my next action could possibly work!
I had kept glancing in my rear-view mirror, expecting the white van to stop after the collision. I still thought the van would stop when it pulled into the Shell gas station on the corner, but just as I came to a complete stop, I saw the van speed up through the gas station and head for the exit. By then the van was to my right, and I saw it through my right-side windows.
I made the split-second decision to chase the van.
There's a second or two pause between a traffic light turning red and the opposing light turning green, and within that interval, I hit my accelerator as hard as I could. I flew into the intersection, made a hard right turn in front of the other stopped cars, and gave chase. Everyone who saw me must have thought I was crazy. The van was half a block ahead of me as we both got through a green light at Terra Bella Avenue, and there were two or three cars between us, so I was sure the driver hadn't seen me. Right after that the van took the ramp leading onto southbound highway 101, and I thought for sure I would lose him when he disappeared around the curve for a moment.
But this was rush hour! Traffic on the ramp came to a complete stop before it reached highway 101, and I was sitting three cars behind the van. When we continued, I slowly inched my way up to the van as it took another ramp from 101 onto highway 85, and we were now heading south. Within the next two miles, I got close enough to see the license plate number, and I quickly wrote it down on a scrap of paper.
I followed the van as it turned off highway 85 onto El Camino Real northbound. At that point I knew for sure that this was a hit and run, because El Camino and Middlefield are parallel. The driver had made 360 degrees of turns and gone out of his way by five miles to head in the same direction he had been driving when the collision occurred. I watched him go as I turned and drove back to the "scene of the accident."
When I approached Middlefield, there was already an ambulance, two police cars and a fire engine on the scene, and traffic was so congested that I had to park two blocks away. I got out of my car and walked quickly to Middlefield, where there was a large crowd of people. Probably ten to fifteen minutes had passed since the cyclist had been hit. I walked up to one of the policemen and said, "I got the license number of the vehicle that hit him." He turned and, without moving, yelled out to the rest of the emergency people, "We have a number!"
The policeman took my identifying information and description of the van. It was a large, white panel van without side windows, and I'd heard the crash, seen the cyclist fall next to the van, and seen the escape route taken by the van. He thanked me and I departed for my dinner date.
I didn't hear anything else concerning the accident until two months later, when I got a phone call and found out the rest of the story. I first spoke with the attorney of the young man who had been hit. The white van was owned by a San Francisco newspaper, and the driver had been transporting young paper carriers! The van had not been empty, and he was afraid he'd lose his job for some reason if he stopped. The driver admitted the collision and didn't contest the charges, so I never needed to testify to what I saw.
Then the attorney said to me, "I have someone here who would like to speak with you." The next voice was that of the young man who had been hit by the van, and he thanked me for giving chase and acting so quickly, that it had made a huge difference in his life. He was going through a very hard time, because the accident had left him paralyzed from the waist down. That was heartbreaking to hear, but it was good to know that all his medical and legal expenses were being paid by the newspaper company. I never did hear what happened to the driver, nor did I even learn his identity. That didn't matter; I only needed to know that the victim's life would continue, and he'd recover to an extent.
I often thought about the events that unfolded late that afternoon. So many of the events were based on split-second timing and specific conditions--hearing the crash because I had my windows open, seeing the bicycle crash next to the van, glimpsing the van pull into the Shell station, having the traffic light turn red at that moment, being the first in line at the light and, therefore, not blocked by other traffic, having rush hour slow down the van so I could catch up to it.
I also think about the fact that I reacted without any careful thought process, without any hesitation. Perhaps I had half a second to make the decision to give chase, or I would have been cut off by intersecting traffic. It could have turned out differently, but I was lucky. Lucky and quick.
The Lives Of Two Kids
Twice I've saved the life of a young child, and both times--twenty-five years apart--it required a split-second reaction that involved no thought. In fact, had thought been involved, each child would have been killed.
It was about 1990 when I took a couple of volleyball classes at Foothill College in Los Altos, so that I might play with some very good volleyball players. Some of the men in the class would stay for an extra hour in order to scrimmage with the Foothill College women's team, and that always was a hard workout and lots of fun. I'd always leave class really keyed up, because adrenaline played a big part in the activity. With adrenaline comes a quicker reaction time to any stimulus, and that's what saved a child's life one night.
On that night I rushed home after playing volleyball for two hours, quickly showered, and jumped back in my car to drive to dance team practice, where I would spend another two hours learning dance routines. Close to my home I came to a four-way stop sign at an unusually dark intersection. Another car came to a full stop to my left, just as I reached the corner and stopped. Having the right of way, I proceeded to turn left in front of the car. The front of my car was about even with the other driver's outside rear-view mirror, and I was about to accelerate, when I saw a tiny speck of light glint just in front and to the left of me. Perhaps it was the reflection of the other car's brake light off the object.
I hit my brake as fast and hard as I could, and my car came to an immediate, screeching stop. Framed not a foot in front of and level with my left headlight was the head of a child, who had frozen still with the sound of screeching tires. I remember I had my window down, because I heard the boy's father yell at him and call him back to the near-side curb. The boy had dashed in back of the other car, which hadn't moved, and neither the boy nor his father had been in my sight, because it was so dark.
In retrospect I wished I'd stopped and talked with the father, but at the moment I didn't want to make it worse for the boy. His father was yelling at him, rather than acknowledging his own fault. His son easily could have been killed, and he blamed the small kid.
My first thought, as I drove away, was that the boy was the luckiest kid on earth. My reactions at that moment were so fast after the evening's volleyball that I may have been the only driver in town who could stop that fast. In volleyball you constantly react to quick, subtle movements of others, so it was my normal reaction. Had I killed the child, that would have changed so many people's lives, including my own, forever.
It was 2015 when I was sitting in a Starbucks outdoor cafe on a late Sunday afternoon, waiting for Suzanne and her sister, Melanie, to get our cafe mochas from the store. The sidewalk cafe was crowded, as Castro Street in Mountain View usually is on a Sunday afternoon, and it was a beautiful day. I always watch people as they pass by, sometimes with kids or dogs, and my dog, Cody, was with me.
I was fifty feet away from a crosswalk that traverses Castro Street, when I spotted a large family (three or four adults, several kids) enter the crosswalk. The adults were all talking and ignoring the kids, expecting traffic to stop. I started to look away, but, again, the tiniest of movements caught my eye. The smallest of the kids had become distracted and lagged behind. When he saw that his family had crossed the street, he broke into a run to catch up.
I instantly noticed the oncoming car and realized that the driver wouldn't see the kid coming, because the boy was shorter than the concrete planter next to the crosswalk. In my very loudest voice and without a moment's thought, I yelled, "Stay!!!" (I find it curious that my instantaneous reaction was to use one of Cody's commands, not the word "Stop!") Everyone in the cafe froze, but so did the kid, as the car roared by two feet in front of him. In fact, his family across the street also froze, and then the mother realized what she'd done. She didn't scold the child but came back across the street to escort the boy properly.
My shout probably startled a lot of people. It certainly shocked Cody, as he gave a couple of barks. Suzanne and Melanie were just coming out of Starbucks, so I explained what had happened. In this case I would not have been the cause of the child's death, but I was very thankful I had the power to prevent it.
Antics Of Brandy
Prior
to the writing of this essay, I have had three great dogs in my life. Most people know about my love for Casey and Cody. Casey was part Labrador, part Great Dane, while Cody was a purebred Labrador, and both dogs were sweet, well-trained, and devoted. They were also always with me. My first dog, Brandy, was part Golden Retriever, part Irish Setter, and just completely nuts. It wasn't his fault. I knew so little about raising and caring for a dog that he made up his own rules and lived by them. During the nine years I had him, I was forced to leave him home alone every day while I worked, so he didn't have the advantage that Casey and Cody always had of being near me.
Brandy was wild, independent, and smart enough to be devious. I got him in December, 1971, when he was an eight-week-old puppy, and he and I lived in a small studio apartment. The first time I took him outside, I set him down in the snow. He was so excited that his little legs began racing before he'd touched the ground, and he immediately spun around and ran full speed into a tree. I knew right then that his would be an unusual life. I had no idea what I was in for.
When Brandy was six months old, I left him with a close friend when my band, The Ship, traveled to Los Angeles for six weeks to record an album. My friend decided, after one day, that Brandy was too much for him, so he took him to a mutual friend's farm. That was probably the only period in the dog's life that he was completely free and happy, because the farmer, Bill Taylor, would let Brandy run wherever he wished. That worked out well until one day, after planting a row of almond trees, Bill looked back from his tractor to see that Brandy had pulled every one of them out of the ground. Brandy survived Bill's wrath and was hence confined to the farmhouse whenever planting was done.
When I returned from my six-week hiatus, I drove to the farm one night to reclaim Brandy. When he saw me, he ran head-long into my arms, and we were together again. Both of us were overjoyed. I was staying at another friend's home for a few days, and the elderly lady had told me that Brandy was welcome and would be no trouble. I left him alone in her backyard the next day. He was tethered to a 20-foot metal clothesline by a 20-foot metal chain that would slide easily along the clothesline, and he had plenty of water and shade. Of course, when I returned at dusk that day, Brandy, the chain, and the clothesline were gone. I ran to the front of the house and immediately could hear the far-off clanking of the metal clothesline, as Brandy ran down the middle of the dark street pulling his 40-foot tether behind him. Suddenly, we weren't so welcome to stay there much longer.
Within a week, I'd found a one-bedroom apartment, and Brandy and I were happy again. Our next year was probably our best, because I could spend more time with him. It was a quiet neighborhood, so I actually (stupidly) would let Brandy out of the apartment to run free during the day sometimes, as one might let a cat outside to play. He'd disappear for a few hours and always come back, and for some reason I was never scared of him being hit by a car. By late afternoon, I'd go looking for him if he hadn't returned. Once I was two or three blocks away from my apartment when a VW bug stopped in front of me at a stop sign, and there was Brandy sitting in their back seat. He saw me and jumped out the window when the car stopped. He was always happy to see me.
We lived in that apartment for two years and then moved to another apartment for two more years. There are plenty of good memories from that period, many of which portrayed how crazy smart that dog was. Brandy simply did things that I've never heard of other dogs doing. Here are several examples.
- Brandy locked me out of my apartment one day by throwing the dead bolt! This was not an easy task, because it had to be rotated up, shifted to the right, and rotated down. Before I kicked in the door to gain entry to the apartment, I peeked under the door to see him sitting there with a goofy smile on his face. He was quite proud of what he'd done, and I had to buy a new door.
- Brandy's communication skills were exceptional. When his water bowl was empty one night, while I was fixing dinner in the small kitchen, he sat down next to the water bowl and gave a little whimper. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye and decided to see what he'd do next. In thirty seconds, he lay down on his side and placed his head in the water dish and looked at me. Still I didn't acknowledge him. Finally, after another minute, he took the plastic water dish in his jaws and flung it across the kitchen like a frisbee, hitting the refrigerator. I looked at him, started laughing, and gave him a full bowl of water, praising him.
- Another dinner-related incident occurred one evening when I'd made myself a hamburger and salad. I took my dinner on a tray to the living room so I could watch the news. I realized I'd forgotten the ketchup, so I set the tray down and returned to the kitchen. Brandy was sleeping on the floor near the front door, about eight feet away from the tray, so I thought it would be safe. I slipped into the kitchen for the ketchup, and when I returned only seconds later, Brandy was still sleeping in the same place, but the hamburger patty was gone! Nothing else had moved. I actually looked on the floor to see if the patty had slipped off the plate. After another thirty seconds, Brandy did something I've never seen another dog do--he slowly raised one eyelid to check me out, feigning that he was still sleeping. I said, "Brandy," and he leaped up, dashed into the bedroom and, as he was wont to do, slid on the hardwood floor completely under the bed. For a minute he had fooled me.
- Friend, Les Urban, reminded me of a similar experience with Brandy in the early 1970's. He and I were chatting at the coffee and doughnut counter in the Red Herring Coffeehouse while Brandy was sitting quietly between us. Suddenly the dog jumped up to place his front paws on the counter, grabbed two of the doughnuts, gobbled them down, and then went back to a sitting position. It happened so quickly that Les and I looked at each other in disbelief; did that dog really do that--eat two doughnuts in one bite?! We were both too slow, because before either one of us could say a word, Brandy did it again--two more doughnuts gone! What's really remarkable was his degree of cunning during the episode. Most dogs would get to the counter, start eating from the box of 24 doughnuts and not stop, but Brandy thought it was appropriate to pause after one bite and gauge whether we'd react. When we had no immediate reaction, he did it again. (Thanks, Les, for reminding me!)
- When Brandy and I would rough-house together, I'd often use one of my hands to gently smack him on the left or right side of his head or body--only hard enough to distract him, not to hurt him. He thought that was great fun. His most enjoyable activity, however, was going out to run with other dogs on the U of I quadrangle. I'd let him run for half an hour, and then catch him (he was reluctant to come on recall) and take him home. The pack of dogs usually had a leader that claimed rights to the female dogs, and one day the leader--a big German Shepherd--didn't like Brandy's presence. Brandy was just being his happy-go-lucky, goofy self with the other dogs, but the shepherd ran over and started growling and snapping at him. What happened next was extraordinary. Brandy took a hard, cross-body swing with his right-front paw, just as I would swing at him during our play time, and he caught the shepherd full in the side of the head. The dog did two complete rolls in the grass and then ran away in fright, and suddenly Brandy was the leader of the pack! The guy standing next to me asked, "Did you see what that dog just did?" I happily responding, "Yep. That's my boy!"
- When I was in my second band, Appaloosa, in 1975, I took Brandy with me to a Labor Day music festival. There were thousands of people in the park's natural amphitheater, and there were dozens of dogs running free. Throughout the afternoon I'd occasionally catch a glimpse of Brandy. Appaloosa was the featured band, so we played last, and when we were done, there was no sign of Brandy. Though I looked for an hour, I couldn't find him and thought he'd either run into the adjoining state park or been taken home by someone. When I got home, I called the local radio station (which had sponsored the festival) and asked if they'd take one last look for Brandy when they went back to the amphitheater to retrieve their sound system, and, sure enough, they called me half an hour later and said they'd found him. Or, rather, he'd found them. In pitch dark, he had run in front of their station wagon at the park to force them to stop, and then he'd jumped up on the car hood, sat down, and stared through the windshield at them! That sounded just like Brandy. I went to pick him up at the radio station, and I had to carry him to the car, because he had scraped off one of his pads while running through the woods. He was dead tired, hungry, and happy to be home, and I was happy to have him back.
- I do have one other memory of Brandy from our time together in our first apartment. Brandy loved sleeping under my bed on the cool wooden floor. One night I was asleep when I was wakened by someone at the front door who was trying to break in! I must have forgotten to throw the deadbolt, but the chain was on the door. The guy opened the door, which smashed against the chain, and Brandy went crazy with barking. The only problem was that, with each bark, poor Brandy would smack his head against the bed's wooden slats. I was afraid that he would knock himself out before he was able to get out from under the bed, but he made it out and, enraged, flew to the front door to scare away the intruder. It was a scary moment that ended in a good laugh and a hug for my dog.
He took every possible opportunity to run away whenever he could. In the summer, he especially liked to run around the neighborhood in search of a front-lawn sprinkler that was on. Several times I found him sitting on someone's front lawn, as happy as a little kid in a summer heat wave.
I especially remember three other times when he ran away from that Saratoga house.
- It was one Saturday morning when he took off about eight o'clock, and I combed the neighborhood but couldn't find him. I wasn't especially worried, because he was often gone several hours before he'd either come back or I'd find him. I had a couple errands to run on that morning, and the first one was at a dry cleaners several blocks away in a shopping center. I picked up my slacks and happened to mention to the young woman, "If you happen to see a big, red dog walk by, invite him in and call me. His name is Brandy." Five hours later I got a call from the woman, just before the store was about to close. "I just saw a dog walk by, so I called 'Brandy,' and he ran in and jumped onto the counter! You can come and get him." She was amazed, but I wasn't. He was looking for someone to call me.
- I had my name and phone number on Brandy's collar, but he figured out he had to approach someone for them to look at the collar. He did that several times, in an incredible fashion. He was once over two miles away from my house when he ran onto someone's porch, jumped up, and rang the doorbell. When the woman opened the door, he was sitting there politely, tired as could be, and hoping for water. When she called me, she said, "You wouldn't believe what your dog did!" I immediately replied, "I bet he rang your doorbell." It wasn't the first time, although it was the furthest away from home.
- In all the times Brandy ran away from home, he was only gone overnight one time. I spent a day and a half looking for him, including the dog pound, but couldn't find him, so I thought someone had found and kept him. He'd run away on a Thursday morning, and it was after dinner with a friend that I returned home the next night, in absolute pouring rain, and found him sitting in the middle of my front yard. We were so happy to see each other. I took him inside, dried him off thoroughly, and fed him a big dinner. Such was our life together.
One night in September, 1972, I was driving my car in pouring rain in Urbana, Illinois, when I saw a police car pulled to the side of the road with its lights flashing. As I slowly passed the car, I caught a glimpse of the officer standing over what appeared to be a large dog. I have no idea why I thought it important, but I immediately stopped by the side of the road and got out to find out what happened.
As I approached the officer, he drew his gun and aimed it at the dog. I yelled, "Wait!" He stopped and I asked him why he was going to shoot the dog. Then I saw that the dog had been hit by a car and its lower jaw was crushed and bloody. The dog was sitting up but looked stunned and in shock. You could see that it was an Afghan hound, probably a purebred. It looked pathetic and lost, sitting there in the pouring rain.
The policeman said that the dog had no identification and, therefore, had to be destroyed, because it was badly injured. Without thinking of the consequences, I said, "I'll take him. Can you call a vet?" He was more than happy to not shoot the dog, so he got on his car phone to summon a vet that, for some reason, was on call. I went and sat next to the dog and talked calmly. I didn't want to touch the dog, because I didn't know how he would react. We both sat there in the rain until the vet arrived and approached the dog.
The vet checked the dog all over and thought there were no other injuries, but just a terribly broken jaw. I told him I didn't own the dog but would either try to find the owner or pay what I could to have the dog's injuries fixed. I already owned a dog, Brandy, and so adopting the Afghan hound was out of the question. I couldn't manage two dogs, but I'd try to find the owner. I told the vet that I didn't have a lot of money, but I'd find enough to pay for his services.
The vet loaded the Afghan into his kennel crate and drove away with him. What had I gotten myself into? I remember driving home in the rain, sitting down on my apartment floor, and hugging my dog for a long time. I called the vet the next morning and found out that surgery and boarding for the dog would cost $150, and I committed to paying for it. I had no idea how I would manage that, because I was living on about $250 a month, including rent and food, and had no savings. Didn't matter. I'd get the money together somehow.
Initially I thought that the Afghan must have an owner who was looking for him, so I posted some signs around the U of I campus and even placed an ad in the local newspaper (for about $15). No response. Rather than try to borrow the money from friends, I took advantage of my bully pulpit, since I was the emcee on stage at the Red Herring Coffeehouse in those days, announcing the folk music acts on Friday and Saturday nights. My spiel would go something like this:
"We're going to pass around the hat tonight to help pay for the surgery of a dog that was severely injured last week. He's a beautiful Afghan hound, and we haven't been able to find the owner, so if anyone wants the dog, he's yours. Please give what you can so we can pay for the surgery."
I'd pass around a tin cup and collect about $7 or $8 each night in dimes and quarters. Everyone was poor those days. One young woman (I have forgotten her name) got especially interested in the cause and offered to go from room to room in her dorm asking for donations. I was very happy over that turn of events, because it was getting close to the time when the dog would be ready to go "home," without having a home.
She collected quite a bit of money ($30 or $40), but she was unable to deliver it in person the next evening. She said she'd send a friend of hers from the dorm floor to deliver what she'd collected. That was October 2, 1972. It was the day I met my future girlfriend, Joyce, who was quite interested in my Afghan hound cause, and it was also the day, quite coincidentally, that my band's album was released by Elektra Records and I saw it for the first time. The Ship's Contemporary Folk Music Journey album arrived about the same time Joyce arrived with the money. It was a good day, as Hemingway would say.
I got the vet to agree to terms of payment--something like $100 down and $5 a week (big finance to me at the time)--but then another problem presented itself. What would I do with the dog?
I had asked many, many people if they would take the dog, but no one had said yes, so I quickly placed another ad in the paper to look for someone who wanted a free, beautiful Afghan hound that had been hit by a car, and I fortunately found a very nice woman within a couple of days. She went to pick up the dog at the vet's office, and I visited her and the dog a week or two later. The dog was already attached to the woman and gave a low growl when she welcomed me into her apartment. Finally, the dog let me pet him, but he may have associated me with the night of the accident, so he wasn't going to be friendly.
That was okay. I had a new girlfriend, a new record album, had met lots of nice people, and, on a whim, had saved the life of a dog.
Near Misses
Twice in my life I've been in car accidents when I was driving. In each case, the other driver went through a stop sign or red light, but, fortunately, no one was seriously hurt in either case.
In the first instance, in 1973, a woman ran a stop sign and paused in the middle of the intersection, looking to her right for oncoming traffic as I approached from the left. I made the split-second decision to not "t-bone" her car but to swerve into the opposing lane and, in the rain, skidded into another car head-on. The driver of that car was a man already familiar to me from TV ads, for he was a well-known politician running for state assembly. He had just picked up his new Mercedes not ten minutes before the crash. He and I told the same story to the police: the woman had gone through a stop sign and had caused the accident. She lied to the police, claiming she'd never driven into the intersection, but she was cited. There would have been a court case, but she decided to become a nun and move to Brazil. It was probably to repent.
In the second instance, in 1998, a young kid was stopped at a red light, glanced to his left and, seeing my green light, proceeded into the intersection and hit the right side of my car as we drove through. No one was hurt, but my car was inoperable from the crash. Another driver stopped to tell me that he had witnessed the accident, saying it "was the darndest thing I ever saw," but we didn't need corroboration, because the kid readily admitted that it was his fault. He was driving his young sister to violin practice, and their mother had just died, so his mind wasn't on driving. We comforted the kids and helped him call their father, who was upset but understanding.
There have been, however, many other near misses that I have, either through driving skill or sheer luck, avoided collisions. Three of them were really scary.
It was probably 1969 when I was driving to Rockford from college in Urbana, Illinois, with two friends in the car. I was almost to Rockford after driving 170 miles, and we were driving in heavy, pouring rain. It was on a separated highway with two lanes going my direction when I crested a small hill and saw a large mobile home completely blocking both lanes ahead of me. Evidently it had turned right from the highway onto a country road which was too steep, and it had slid back down the hill and across the highway.
I immediately started pumping my brakes hard, but it was also immediately obvious that I wouldn't be able to stop quickly enough in the rain. We would slam into the side of the mobile home. This was not long after my father had died, and somehow, at that moment, I channeled his driving skills. The highway had a narrow shoulder on the left, and to the left of that was a deep ditch. I began to pump the brakes rhythmically very hard, so that the front of the car dipped down with each pump. I went as far to the left as I could and turned my wheel slightly to the right with the final hard pump, which put the car into a diagonal position with the road. I timed it just right so that part of the hood of the car slid nicely under the rear end of the mobile home. We only needed half a second, because we were still traveling at a good speed. We came out the other side, I straightened the car, and we continued on the highway. In my rear view mirror I could see the mobile home start its trek up the hill again and clear the highway.
There was silence in the car for ten seconds, and then one of my friends said, "How the hell did you do that?" I just told him that it was the only thing that made sense at the time. We didn't have room to drive behind the mobile home, so the only possible way was to slide under it on three wheels. The left rear wheel was partially (or mostly) over the edge of the road, but we didn't need it.
Unlike the first near-miss, the second and third near-misses were almost completely luck. I avoided serious accidents by not reacting excessively.
In 1973 I was driving back from New York City to Urbana with two friends. I'd picked up one friend in Syracuse, New York, and the three of us decided to go through Canada and then Detroit on the way back. It was past sunset that evening when I was driving through Detroit on an interstate highway. I saw a flash of sparks about a hundred yards ahead of me, caused by a semi-truck somehow. I hit the brakes but did not change lanes, which was a really good thing. In another second I realized that the truck's rear axle had broken in half, and two tires had come off from each side. The sparks were caused by the axle dragging along the highway. I can't say for sure if other cars were hit by the truck tires, but I did see that I drove right between them as they bounced to the sides of the road, without my car getting hit.
Then there was the time in about 1985 when I was driving back on Interstate 280 from a customer's site in San Jose. I was in the second lane from the left during heavy rush-hour traffic going about 65 miles per hour, when a white pickup truck swerved into my lane. I jerked the steering wheel to the left and hit the brakes, thus moving half into the first lane to avoid a collision with the pick-up, but a moment later my car went into a total spin. I had purchased a full set of new tires just the previous day, and those tires gripped the road so hard that my car spun out of control. Everything seemed to go into incredible slow motion as my car flew back across all five lanes of traffic. Each moment I expected to feel the impact of another car hitting me, but there was no impact! My car came to a rest on the far-right shoulder of the road, perpendicular to and facing away from the highway, after revolving 2-1/4 times! I got out of my car, looked down the road to see if the white pick-up had stopped (it didn't), and then turned to see that all five lanes of traffic had come to a dead stop, looking at me. I waved to everyone, got back in my car, backed up onto the highway, and continued on my way. What an exciting morning.
Job Control Language
My first computer programming job was with the Illinois Natural History Survey on the campus of the University of Illinois. We shared a building with the Illinois Geological Survey. My office was in the basement of that building, and it was cool in summer and very cold in winter. I had a great boss named Bill Ruesink, and we worked for the Department of Economic Entomology. That's right. He was a bug expert, in particular, pests that threatened alfalfa plants, while I worked on eliminating software bugs.
I shared an office with another programmer, Barb Peterson, and we'd have to walk down a long hallway to a room where the Geological Survey had a remote job entry (RJE) station, so we could type in our programs on 80-column Hollerith cards and submit them to the university's main computer through a card reader. It was as primitive as it sounds, but this was between 1973 and 1976; it was really state-of-the-art. The university had a couple dozen RJE stations around campus, so hundreds of people would have access to massive computing power by submitting decks of cards. Of course, the university's IBM 360/75 computer had nowhere close to the computing power of today's laptops!
For a couple years I worked with Bill and one other scientist, Andy Hildebrand, on a computer model that simulated the life cycle of the alfalfa plant and environment, including rainfall, temperatures, use of pesticides, mowing dates, and presence of alfalfa pests and their predators. The goal of the project, which, in part, was done in conjunction with studies at Cornell University, was to minimize the use of pesticides in the environment for the alfalfa plant--a very noble goal. The model we used was based on partial differential equations. Bill and Andy devised and tweaked the systems of equations, and I translated them into computer code, using two different scientific languages, Fortran and GASP. (I also edited Andy's PhD thesis, which was based on these equations, so I was putting my math major to good use.)
The project took two years for many reasons, not least of which was that we could not submit the entire program all at once to the university's computer. It took eight minutes to execute, which meant that we'd tie up the entire university's public computer system for eight minutes. We had to get special permission from them to run the entire job, because it simulated the alfalfa plant environment, day by day, over the span of one year! To get around this problem, I would work on a small part of the program at any one time, which might only take one or two seconds to run on the IBM computer, rather than eight minutes.
Now, to run a program, I'd have to submit a deck of cards through a card reader. The first two or three cards in the deck were comprised of IBM Job Control Language (JCL) instructions, which identified the source of the program and several other "run time" parameters. The JCL cards were followed by the program's cards, and they were followed by about fifty cards that contained simulation data, such as historic, daily rainfall amounts. The program cards would use the data cards to run the simulation.
When we were finally ready to run the entire program, I remember that it filled an entire box of cards, with almost 2,000 computer statements. (This is not big in today's standards, until you factor in the complexity of the logic. It was not a business program, but a scientific program of equations.) I got permission from the computer center to run the program within a certain time frame and submitted it.
The university computer stopped dead! This was not a terribly unusual event; the university computer would go down once or twice a month, and such an event would inconvenience a lot of people. When it came back on-line ten minutes later, I prepared my stack of cards again and submitted it a second time. The university computer immediately stopped dead again. I knew the problem had to be my program, as unlikely as that sounded to me.
I called the computer center and spoke with the administrator on duty. I told him I believed that my program had caused the university computer to go down, and he laughed derisively at me. "That's impossible," I remember him saying. By that time the computer was already back up and running, so I said, "Okay, would you like me to prove it? I'll submit my program again." He said, "Sure, go ahead and do that." I submitted my program while I had him on the phone, and the moment I said, "Done," boom! The university computer went down within one second.
There was a very long silence on the line, and then he said, "You bring that deck over here right now. We want to see those cards."
With a great deal of satisfaction, I took my box of cards to the university computer center and presented it to them. They soon noticed that there was a single typo on one of the leading JCL cards--a single character mistyped. When the typo was fixed, the deck of cards no longer caused a problem with the computer. The university contacted IBM, and it turned out the typo revealed a bug in the JCL compiler that thousands of companies were using!
Every old computer veteran I know hated JCL. It was needlessly complex and illogical. I happened to stumble upon a JCL bug and bring down the university's mainframe computer in the process. I still chuckle about that.
A Lump In The Road
There are times when good intentions can turn into good deeds, while there are other times when good intentions can go for naught. This is a very short story of the latter kind.
One night in 1975 I was driving in very heavy rain (lots of these stories involve bad weather, don't they?) to a band practice with Appaloosa. On a whim, I took a deserted side street as a shortcut around traffic lights, when, half a block ahead of me, I saw a lump in the road. I couldn't tell what it was until the lump came into the path of my headlights. Then I realized it was a motorcycle lying on its side, its light out, and the motionless body of a person a couple of feet from the bike.
I stopped my car about twenty feet from the bike and body, turned on my brights and flashing lights, and got out. I was afraid I would see a pool of blood, but there was none. I rushed over to the body and could see that the man was at least unconscious, if not dead. I removed my jacket and placed it over the man's head, and then I rushed to the nearest house for help.
It was a residential neighborhood, so I thought it would be easy to stir someone to call for help, but the first couple of houses were dark and deserted. When I rang the bell at the third house, a woman's voice cried out, "Go away! I have a shotgun and I'll shoot you if you don't leave." I simply said, "Call the police. There's been an accident." And then I left. I couldn't see the shotgun, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt.
Just as I got back to the street, two things happened. A police car, lights flashing, rounded the corner, and, unbelievably, the motorcycle man stood up and started yelling at me! He was obviously drunk and very incensed that I would call the police on him. It was still raining very hard, so the scene had the eerie feeling of a horror film, where the mummy rises, crushes the police car in its hands, and takes out after me.
The policeman arrested the man for reckless operation of a motorcycle, and an EMT was probably also called, because the man's face was bleeding a lot by then. I gave my contact information to the policeman, grabbed my jacket, and proceeded to our band practice, where I told the story of the man and the motorcycle and got a good laugh.
The next day I tried having the jacket dry-cleaned, but the blood would not come out of the fabric, so I threw it away. I knew that stopping on a cold, rainy night to check on an accident victim was the right thing to do, but I hoped the next time would not involve a shotgun threat and lost clothing.
Spider John Koerner
In the early 1970's I spent a lot of time visiting The Quiet Knight in Chicago. It was perhaps the best club in the city, and my band, The Ship, had played there on several nights. I think my good friend, Rich Warren, first introduced me to The Quiet Knight's owner, Richard Harding, because my friend was very well known in folk music circles. He and I attended several concerts together at The Quiet Knight, including a Loudin Wainwright III concert at which we were two of only a dozen people in the audience, due to a huge Chicago blizzard.
Harding's club was exceptional in that he presented the best performers from several different music genres. Looking back at a single two-week period in 1975, his club hosted Chuck Mangione, Bob Marley, Martin Mull, Muddy Waters, and John Stewart (of the Kingston Trio)--five distinctly different genres! No club had the diversity and high quality that The Quiet Knight did.
Over the course of two or three years, I saw Jim Croce, Kris Kristofferson, Arlo Guthrie, Doc Watson, Steve Goodman, Chi Coltrane, Dan Fogelberg, Loudin Wainwright III, and several other great musicians there. Since I'd played there with The Ship, Richard Harding let me drift backstage whenever I wished. That's how I got to meet Jim Croce and Doc Watson.
Although it was not unusual for me to go backstage before a concert began, I was more than an hour early one night when I went backstage to wait for the arrival of Spider John Koerner. Spider John was part of the famous blues trio, Koerner, Ray & Glover. They had been more popular on the University of Minnesota campus in the 1960's than Robert Zimmerman (later known as Bob Dylan), and I loved their three albums from that decade.
I got to the club, and it was all but empty, except for Richard Harding and a couple of his employees. I went down the hallway to the "green room," where musicians prepare for the evening, and one guy was sitting there with a drink, so I struck up a conversation with him. Within a few minutes the conversation turned to blues music, and I was in my element. There was a time when the music of Lightnin' Hopkins, Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Robert Johnson meant more to me than folk music. I connected with the raw emotions of blues vocals and guitar work more than any other type of music, before I loved the Beatles and Henry Mancini and Gordon Lightfoot.
It was such an amazing, stimulating conversation that I lost all track of time. Suddenly I glanced at my watch and saw that it was five minutes before the concert was to start, and I felt a sudden panic, for I might not get a seat. I'll never forget the brief exchange that happened, and these were our exact words:
Me: Oh, God, I'm late! I have to go get a seat to see Spider John Koerner. Are you staying for
Spider John?
The Guy (after a very long pause): I am Spider John.
He and I just stared at each other in wonder, and then we burst out laughing. I'd had no idea that he was Spider John, for he didn't look like his album covers, and he had no idea that I didn't know he was Spider John. Suddenly our hour-long conversation gained a level of authenticity that could only be attained through a mutual love of the music. I wasn't there just to admire him, and he wasn't talking to me just to be nice to a fan.
We shook hands, and I rushed out to grab a good seat in front of the stage, for I was alone that night with Spider John and the blues.
In talking about my meeting with Spider John Koerner, I must include another anecdote about The Quiet Knight. This happened during The Ship's one-week appearance at the club in 1972.
As was customary after a show with all the performers who appeared there, we would pack up our instruments, talk with people who stayed to meet us (Studs Terkel was one of those people!), and then leave the club at about 1:00 a.m. On this particular night, however, I went into the bar, grabbed a drink, and sat there with my guitar. The club was absolutely empty except for the bartender and the night janitor, who I felt was clumsily stacking chairs and sweeping the floor. Then I noticed that the janitor only had one arm--his left arm--and I watched him more in admiration than anything else.
He didn't see me but continued his stacking and sweeping. I was about to leave when something truly amazing happened. He lay down his broom and hopped up on the stage, walked over to the piano, and sat down. Immediately he began playing Ravel's Piano Concerto For The Left Hand. I was really mesmerized by his playing, and when he stopped several minutes later, I couldn't resist going up to him and telling him how much I'd enjoyed it. He was very surprised that anyone had heard him play.
That is how I met Eddie Balchowsky. He had lost his right arm in the Spanish Civil War in 1938. I did not know that he was a concert-level pianist, a poet, and a painter. His art still hangs in the permanent collection of Chicago's Art Institute. I had only seen him as the janitor, doing his job.
We began talking about music and affairs of the heart. I told him about my songwriting attempts, and he told me about his painting. We both talked about our girlfriends. It was very late, so I grabbed my guitar and left after thanking him again for the Ravel.
When I got to the club the next night, Eddie was already there. He came over to me and said he had something for me, so we went into the Green Room. There he presented me with three of his poems, written with black marker on sturdy pieces of white cardboard about 20" x 16" in size. They were love poems he had just written about his girlfriend, although they could have been about my girlfriend. It was really a remarkable gift. He made some comment along the lines, "I wanted to give you these poems, because you seem to be someone who understands how to love."
After that week, I never saw Eddie again. It was years later that I began to understand how much Chicago musicians knew about and admired him. He died in 1989 after being hit by a CTA subway train. He was a tragic, beautiful soul. I still have those three poems he gave me.
You Don't Mess Around With Jim
One of my favorite things to hear from someone is when the person tells me, "I never knew that about you!" We easily form opinions and build our own stories about other people, without really knowing them, especially if we primarily share just one activity.
When I moved to California in 1976, I had trouble making friends for the first couple of years, because I went about it the wrong way. In the Midwest, you get to know people by talking with them. I realized this habit is rooted in the change of seasons, where you would sit on someone's front porch and talk during the heat of summer or sit in front of a fireplace and talk during the cold of winter. I finally realized that people in California get to know each other by doing things, not so much by talking about them.
This realization came to a head one night while I was playing volleyball and chatting between games with a guy who was on my team. Mike was a nice fellow and I wanted to get to know him further, so I asked if he'd like to have dinner some night. His immediate response was, "Why?" I didn't know what to say to that, so I tried to explain that it would give us the chance to talk. He grinned and eagerly said, "Oh, we can talk here." (One great irony is that, months later, he asked if he could go with me to see the symphony in San Francisco, for he had never heard live classical music before. That was a nice evening together.)
Although I had quite a few friends in my volleyball circles, as a rule, partially because the games were so fast paced, no one knew anything about my life outside of volleyball. I would ask people about their lives, but that was unusual during our volleyball nights and weekend tournaments. It was, however, a common habit that many of us would go out for pizza and beer each night after three hours of strenuous volleyball. Most of the talk centered on rehashing plays that had occurred during that evening; we didn't get much into personal conversation.
One night we went to a pizza place that had a country-rock band playing, and we all enjoyed listening to their music in the crowded room, which was filled with dozens of volleyball players. I was sitting next to a guy from my team, named Dante, and I knew he played guitar (although I didn't know how well). When the band decided to take a break, I leaned over and asked him if he knew Jim Croce's song, "You Don't Mess Around With Jim." He smiled and said, "Yeah, I love that song." I asked, "Do you want to play it with me now?" He paused for a moment, nodded, and said, "Sure." I guess I knew that he wouldn't have accepted unless he had played on a stage before.
We got up from our table without saying anything to our large group of friends, and we walked over next to the stage. It was a fairly large stage, raised above the main floor and with a good microphone setup, and I asked one of the band members if Dante and I could borrow an acoustic guitar and an electric lead guitar to do one song. Their response was immediate, because we were obviously fellow musicians, "Absolutely. Feel free." I grabbed one guy's acoustic guitar, and Dante took the electric, and we hopped up on stage.
At that moment, most of the place got quiet and everyone stared at us, for it was an odd sight. Here were two guys in gym clothes--volleyball shoes, shorts, and jerseys--standing at the microphones with guitars. As I recall, we didn't say a word of introduction but went right into a hard-driving version of the song. I knew the song well, and so did Dante, and he not only turned out to be a very good lead guitar player, but he added a harmony on the chorus. We had never played guitars or sung together, but it worked out quite well.
When we started playing, everyone's mouth just dropped open. There was serious disbelief, because none of our friends knew that either one of us played music. It was evident to me that playing in front of people was not new to Dante, because we were both nailing the song and playing up to the audience. Halfway through the song we had everyone (including the band) singing along with the chorus, and at the end we got a tremendous applause. We handed the guitars back to the band and walked back to our table.
When we sat down, the woman sitting next to me said, "I didn't know you could play guitar and sing!" I just told her that both Dante and I had played in bands before, and we had another beer. A couple people said, "I can't believe you just did that!" Lots of people came by our table to tell us how surprised they were by the performance.
There are a lot of ways our spur-of-the-moment venture could have gone sideways. The band could have refused to loan out their instruments, the guitars could have needed tuning, Dante could have turned out to be a novice, or I could have forgotten the words to the song. But it worked out perfectly. And a funny thing happened in our group of volleyball players that night. We started talking about things other than volleyball.
I Shot The Sergeant (But I Did Not Shoot The Deputy)
I was in Army ROTC for three years in high school, and it was generally a worthwhile, wonderful experience. The curriculum included military history, discipline and leadership, marching and drills, first aid, map reading, and, my favorite, marksmanship. All of the kids learned how to fire small-bore, 22-caliber rifles. With this training we learned about safety precautions with those weapons, and we learned to disassemble, clean, and reassemble them.
Marksmanship training is complicated when it involves a bunch of teenagers, because you must train everyone to constantly pay attention. A rifle should never be pointed in someone's general direction, even when it is not loaded. So, when we were on the firing range (in the basement of our high school), rifles were always pointed "down range." As you loaded a bullet into the single-round chamber, your rifle still had to be pointed "down range" the entire time. If you had a question for our instructor, Sgt. Willard "Mac" McHughes, you unloaded the weapon, placed it down with the barrel toward the targets (away from people), and then asked your question.
One of the exercises on which we were graded was to fire five shots from a prone position within a 30-second period. Since these were single-shot rifles, we had to manually load and unload each cartridge as we fired the five shots. The tricky part was that we had to start the exercise in a standing position, with the rifle pointed "down range" and the first bullet already loaded in the chamber. Both hands gripped the rifle and were about twenty inches apart, and neither hand was near the trigger housing. When the timer started, we would drop to our knees, plant the butt of the rifle on the floor (mat) for support, roll easily into the prone position, place our hand near the trigger, aim, and fire the rifle.
I had not only done this exercise several times before, but I was also on the school's rifle team, where we fired heavier, more powerful rifles. I knew how to fire a rifle better than most of the other cadets doing the exercise. For the five-shot exercise, rifles were not assigned to individual students; we each took one of the available rifles when the class began. It was the luck of the draw, so to speak.
On this one day, we were all in standing position with our rifles loaded and pointing "down range," when Sgt. Mac yelled his customary, "Commence firing!" I dropped to my knees, planted the butt of the rifle on the firing mat, and the rifle discharged with a loud explosion, followed by the sound of chairs toppling behind us! The rifle had malfunctioned from an overly sensitive trigger, because my hands had been several inches away from the trigger when it had fired. We all stopped immediately and looked back for Sgt. Mac, who was nowhere in sight. Three seconds later a hand came up from behind the firing table, and it was waving a white handkerchief in surrender.
All of us started to laugh, but it was really no laughing matter, for Sgt. McHughes came up with the side of his head bloodied. The bullet had grazed his head and left a six-inch gash, beginning not more than an inch away from his left eye. Sgt. Mac still carried a piece of shrapnel in his skull from his second Vietnam deployment, for which he had earned his second Purple Heart, so to get clipped by a small bullet was probably nothing to him. Still, it really scared all of us kids, and he was more concerned for us than for himself.
I readily admitted that it was my rifle that had fired early. Since my rifle had been pointed "down range," the bullet had hit the back of the large light fixture that shined down on the targets, flown back over our heads, and grazed Sgt. McHughes. I don't remember if we ever found the bullet, which was probably embedded in the wall behind us. Sgt. Mac was quickly patched up, and the incident was intentionally not broadcast to anyone outside of ROTC, since the whole program would perhaps have been in jeopardy.
At first Sgt. Mac was careful to comfort and reassure me, because we really were quite close, but then he and the other rifle team guys kidded me about it. That's okay. We both survived.
The Beautiful Game Of Golf
Looking back on my life, I would have to say that golf has been my favorite sport, both as a player and as a spectator. Baseball and volleyball are close rivals for "favorite sport," but the occasional thrill of a good golf shot (whether I hit it or someone else does) exceeds any other joy I've known in sports. I certainly understand Mark Twain's point of view when he said, "Golf is a good walk spoiled." All golfers experience the extreme frustration it can cause, but all golfers also know the exhilaration of hitting a good shot, and they will suffer through dozens of bad shots just to experience another good shot.
My father taught me to play golf, but I first had to caddie for him and learn the rules and etiquette of the game (for a year!) before he would let me play. I was only ten years old, but I knew how to behave, where to stand, when to remove the flag, and how to be quiet on a golf course--long before I really knew how to grip a club or swing it. Both my sister and I began playing when we were eleven years old, and two years later we were beating our dad, to his mixed feelings of dismay and delight.
My sister, Sue, who is eleven months younger than I, could have been a very good golfer had she taken it seriously and pursued it. She won two all-city women's tournaments in her age group and could shoot below 90 by the time she was 14. By the time she was 16, she gave up the game to focus on guitar playing.
I was not as good as Sue when playing against all-city competition, but I was still pretty good. My crowning glory was to shoot 82-83=165 in a two-day tournament, to finish 12th in my age group (of over 100 players). Neither Sue nor I ever had a lesson from a professional; we only learned from our father, whose idols were Ben Hogan and Arnold Palmer.
What do I like about golf? I like that it is outdoors and that the weather always plays a part in your game, whether it be the temperature, wind, or precipitation. I like that everyone's swing is different and that we never perfect it, no matter how much we practice. We are always working to correct something and get better. I like that it is a game that delights your senses--the sounds of birds and crisp shots and the ball falling into the cup, the smell of newly mowed grass and fallen leaves, the beauty of the landscapes of fairways, lakes, trees, and sand traps.
I especially like that you keep your own score, if you choose to keep score at all, and that you can call penalties on yourself. The game is unique in that respect.
I also really like that golf is a difficult game--more difficult than any other game--because of the variety of shots and conditions. Each golfer can carry up to fourteen clubs, each club with a different loft and feel to it. Each golf course has (usually) nine or eighteen holes, and each hole has a different length, direction, and challenge. In fact, each golf shot (except perhaps very short putts) is unique within a round of golf. You must consider the wind, how the ball is lying on the ground, where the hazards are on the hole, and how far you want to hit the ball--all before you swing the club. It is, indeed, a difficult game, and that contributes to its beauty.
But there's another part of golf that's beautiful, and only people who play golf really "get" this. More than any other game, it inspires us to tell stories. Golfers tell the best stories, and each golfer has dozens of stories to tell! Golfers laugh a lot about the game and their exploits, so there's a fine balance between socializing and seriousness on a golf course. So, here are a few of my favorite golf stories from over 60 years of playing:
- Never have I had a hole-in-one, but I have seen two of them and have come close to making a hole-in-one dozens of times. Twice I've holed out shots of over 100 yards from the fairway for birdies. My closest miss on a tee shot was about four inches from the cup, and many times my tee shot has come to rest within two feet of the cup, for "kick-in" birdies. A number of times I have even hit the pin, but a hole-in-one has always eluded me.
- One of the two holes-in-one I saw was in Palm Springs at Seven Lakes Country Club. Well, I didn't actually see it; I heard it. While relaxing on our condo's patio overlooking the 16th green, I heard the resounding crash of a ball hitting the bottom of the cup on the fly! As the guy came to retrieve his ball, one of his playing partners looked over at me and said, with a disgusted expression, "That's the second time he's done that this week!"
- My barber, Shige, grew up in Okinawa, and he knew very little English in the mid-1990's when I began seeing him. The first time we met, he was quiet for almost the entire hour while cutting my hair. Finally, he leaned over to me and asked, "So, you play golf?" I answered, "Yes!" That was the extent of our first conversation. At a later date, he asked if I had "hole-in-one" insurance, and I replied, "No, what is that?" He told me that it is very popular in Japan, because if you make a hole-in-one, you have to buy drinks for everyone in the club, and people can't afford that.
- When I was about 12 years old, my father and I were walking off the first green at our favorite course, Ingersol Golf Club, when I pointed out a robin pulling a worm from the ground that was nearby. On my next tee shot, the ball hit that same robin in mid-air, killing it. My dad turned to our playing partners and said, "Ah, his first birdie." With that I began to cry, and he knew he shouldn't have said it. He walked over to me and apologized, and we played on.
- We've all seen some remarkable shots on the course--shots that we wouldn't think in our wildest dreams we could pull off. Friend, Bill Adler, and I were playing Sunnyvale Golf Course when Bill hit his tee shot behind several trees with low-hanging branches that were in between him and the green. There was also an intervening pond that went right up to the green. I said, "Well, there's only one thing you can do, Bill. Bounce the ball off the pond onto the green." With that he hit a very low-trajectory iron shot that took two bounces on the water and hopped up onto the green. It was one of those shots that the pros wouldn't even try.
- Three times I've been hit by golf balls--once in the back, once in the thigh, and most recently in the hind end. That time I was playing with Suzanne's brother, Jon Newcome, at Crystal Springs Golf Course, waiting in the 17th fairway to hit our second shots on the par 5, when a ball zipped over the trees, took one bounce, and hit me in the wallet. With a resounding "pop," the ball came to rest on the ground between my two feet. Without skipping a beat, Jon said, "Oh, he laid an egg."
- I have seen abundant wildlife on golf courses. At the Gary Player Mission Hills North course in Palm Springs (my all-time favorite course), an eagle is often perched on a tree branch overlooking one of the greens. I once saw a lynx run across an Arizona National Golf Course fairway in Tucson, and I've seen foxes on multiple courses. Also at Crystal Springs Golf Course, I once bounced a golf ball off the forehead of a deer, right between his antlers. (He wasn't hurt.) Deer, rabbits, chipmunks, and hawks are common on many courses.
- I once drove a tee shot that hit an overhanging branch 50 yards from the tee, bounced back, and landed in bushes behind me. In fact, I had to move out of the way so the ball didn't hit me on the way back. I was playing in a boys' tournament, so there were plenty of kids around me who had a great laugh. It's the only time I've done that.
- My best score was a 77 on the Ocean Course at Half Moon Bay, including three birdies in that round. I did shoot a 78 on the course where I grew up, Ingersol Golf Club, while Suzanne was with me. Two or three times I've shot even par on nine holes, but that's really hard to do for my frequency of playing. I've had many, many birdies but only one eagle in my life. That was on a par 5 at San Jose Municipal Course in the early 1990's, while playing with Steve Rebello.
- The funniest thing I've ever seen on a golf course was a moment provided by my good friend, Rodger Lippa, at Indian Valley Golf Club in Novato, California. Rodger was upset over his game as he came off one of the greens, and he swung his driver extra hard on the next tee. Now, each tee box has several sets of tees, marked by metal, spherical tee markers that are anchored into the ground by heavy spikes. His ball was going about a hundred miles an hour but only got two inches off the ground, and it hit the back of one of those metal tee markers, unearthing it. Suddenly, the tee marker was bounding down the fairway, and his ball flew back over our heads and landed on the green we'd just left. For minutes we could not stop laughing.
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