Blogging My Autobiography - Chapter 14

My Generation, Baby!



Yes, I was a child of the 60’s and even though I lived in an ultra-conservative society, much of that time did filter to us as kids in high school. We saw Woodstock in the theater and talked about it a lot. I watched the Vietnam war statistics on the 10 o'clock news and saw the pictures from the 1968 Democratic Convention in Life Magazine. However, music had the greatest reach and invaded my little corner of the world every day. I started listening to the radio in maybe 3rd or 4th grade with a crystal rocket radio. By the time I was in 7th grade, I had the 7 transistor radio I listened to in Charlie Bangerter’s field. In 8th grade, I got my first FM radio. It was mono but it had a much bigger speaker and the sound was head and shoulders above AM. It also had a cool retracting antenna to play with under the guise of getting a better signal. The music played on FM was different. It was albums and non-mainstream acts like Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Ten Years After and others. It was Rebel Radio, unprogrammed and free form. I was drawn to that rebellious nature like a moth to the flame. It was DIFFERENT and so was I. One of the first songs I remember hearing on FM was Snake Skin Boots by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. They actually talked about stinky feet. Heady stuff for a small town boy.

FM opened my tastes to a lot of different music and we all obsessed over what was best. We would go down to the record store and buy an album, come home and listen to it with our heads between the speakers. We read the liner notes and tried to memorize the lyrics if they were written down. It had to be Hard Rock or Acid Rock or Blues or Dylan, Byrds, Beatles, Motown and everything in between. Bubble Gum like Tommy James and the Chandelles was OK. I did like Mony, Mony. It was a great rocker and still is now. The key was, the music had to have an edge to it. If it was safely in the middle, we didn’t really like it. I didn’t anyway. I liked some social commentary, but not the overt folky protest stuff like Joni Mitchell or Country Joe McDonald. Social commentary was better if it was sharp and somewhat hidden so you had to listen several times to get the meaning. Those protesters were too much of a blunt instrument for me. A good example of protest music that stayed with me is Fortunate Son by Credence Clearwater Revival. Here is a video of that song, you will recognize it.


The axis of the world tilted during the 60’s. One President murdered, his brother killed during a campaign and a great reformer shot down by a bigot. Another bigot was shot, but that didn’t bother me as much. He got what he deserved, in my opinion, though I don’t condone the violence. I thought Viet Nam was a bad idea then and my opinion hasn’t changed. There were a set of twins in our town, their father had been the principal of our elementary school. Sort of full of themselves from my point of view, but good kids. One joined the Marines to try and set his own course and the other decided to take his chances with the draft. The draft was a lottery. Every possible birthday was put into a barrel and tossed around. Think of a bingo drum with 366 dates in it. The first date drawn was number one. Everyone born on that day was probably going to be drafted. As the numbers got higher, the chances of being drafted went down. On draft day, their number came up, 366. One son was safe. The other in the Marines? Not so lucky. He was a casualty of war in Viet Nam. It made the news as a sad irony of war. I just thought it was just sad. My number the next year? 359.

Blogging My Autobiography - Chapter 8

My mother is English. She came to this country when she was 21 and married my father. I came along shortly thereafter. She had survived World War II in England, listening to the bombs at night, huddled in a shelter. 6 years after the war ended, she came to the US, got married and had a child all in the space of just over a year. A person in that situation would yearn for some familiarity, probably. Some connection to home, though home was difficult, even 6 years gone from the war.

One connection that my mother had was to a friend in England named Alice. My recollection of Alice is pretty sketchy, but I remember her as very upbeat and kind. She seemed to have a lot of energy and lifted my mother when she was near. So how do I know Alice if she lived in England? Well she came to visit one year and spent the entire summer with us. The Summer of Alice was a summer of travel. My father was working as a civil engineer down in the southern part of our state and so, of course we had to drive down and visit him. That was not the only place we went, though. We went to Yellowstone as well, driving our 1953 Chevy the length and breadth of the Intermountain West. The Chevy was cool because my grandfather had built a bed for us in the back. He took a piece of plywood and made removable legs for it. This was placed in the back seat, the legs on the floorboards, creating a large flat surface that a mattress could be laid on. My two brothers and I could then either sleep or look out the window as we chose. It was quite comfortable. No seat belts or car seats for us!


It was on a dirt road near Moab where the seat belt issue was tested for us on this trip. We were headed out to see my father in a remote area. The only way in was on a dirt road that wound around the side of the mountain, up canyons and down until we got to the camp where my father was working on a huge pipeline to bring water to this arid area. Similar, I suppose to his great grandfather working on the Canal 80 years before. Dirt roads out here need to be able to deal with the sudden thunderstorms that are prevalent in the summer months. They can drop 3-5“ of water in 15 minutes. It’s basically like God emptied a big bucket over your head. That amount of water will wash away almost anything in it’s path unless it’s channeled. So, every road has a barrow pit or deep ditch on the uphill side to keep the water from washing away the road itself. These ditches can be up to 3 feet deep and 4-5 feet wide. If you don’t pay attention to them, they can pull the car right off the road. My mother was never the greatest driver. In England, you just got on the bus or train or walked wherever you needed to go. She was not well equipped to handle a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. We were driving along and she was nervous. Alice was trying to talk and stay calm herself. We were somewhat lost as well and that added to the pressure. She was driving along, looking for landmarks and the right front tire slid into the ditch. The car jerked right and smacked into the mountain which in turn generated a flurry of English epithets from the ladies in the front seat. Then the realization hit my mother, ”George is going to kill me.“ I knew she was right. I could see his face when we met him, all screwed up and asking what happened. Alice, though was starting to laugh at the predicament and soon my mother was also. We were able to back the car out of the ditch and finally found my father. When he was told what happened and Alice started to laugh again, he had to laugh also. The car was not hurt (they were really tough in those days) and everyone was fine. It became the story of how Audrey Hit the Mountain.

Yellowstone, one of my favorite places on Earth to visit. Old Faithful, Big Thumb, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Mammoth Springs and the Handkerchief Pool these are all great to see, though the Handkerchief Pool is no longer called that. It was called the Handkerchief Pool because the rangers would demonstrate the convection currents in the pool by asking for a dirty handkerchief which everyone carried at that time. Kleenex was not that portable. They would drop the hankie into the pool and wait for a few minutes. The hankie would sink into the water and then reappear 5 minutes later, clean as a whistle! It was miraculous. Maybe they changed it because some hankies clogged the pool, I am not sure.

Bears were always a big thing in Yellowstone. I had a close encounter with a black bear on this trip. Back then, the bears would line up by the side of the road and people would feed them from their cars. My mother was leery of this and would not let us roll down the windows very far. Of course the bears came closer than they might have to get the goodies. I timidly held an Oreo cookie out of the window, which a bear promptly swiped away from the car, nearly taking my fingers with it. Well, that was the end of that and we rolled up the windows tight until the bears wandered back into the woods. Alice could not stop talking about the bears, she had never been so close to wildlife. My grandmother told me a bear story also. She went to Yellowstone every year for 50 years. She told me that they used to have an amphitheater where they would dump the leftovers and garbage in the center. At dusk, the bears would gather at the edge of the amphitheater. The rangers would tell everyone to remain very still and the bears would pad down to the garbage and start to forage. Of course there were fights among the bears, which was very exciting according to my grandmother. They would mark the trees around the amphitheater and if one marked above the other, there was a fight for dominance. Life was lived in those days, without seat belts on the edge of danger and no one thought it was a problem at all. I sure didn’t, I thought it was all very exciting.

Blogging My Autobiography - Chapter 1

So, it’s NaBloPoMo and it’s my first time doing this. I must admit that it is somewhat daunting, but I am committed now and it dovetails with a project that I have been thinking about for some time, my autobiography. When I was 12 in 7th grade English, my teacher, Mrs. Winmill asked us all to write a 3 page autobiography. I wrote it very carefully though at the time I wondered what I really would have to write about. As I got started, I found there was more for me to say than I could in 3 pages, so I condensed it and submitted the paper. Mrs. Winmill gave me an A on the project and told me that I had talent, I could write. It was a watershed event in my young life and from that time forward, I wanted to write and take pictures for a living. Unfortunately I believed other people as I got older and tried accounting, teaching and other things until I fell into computers. Computers were a choice, but not my heart’s passion. So, this month, you will be reading my heart’s passion and seeing some old photos from my childhood and teen years (scary, I know). The format will be 10 days childhood, 10 days teen years and 10 days for adulthood. Safire, my daughter, asked me how I was going to organize it and we came up with the chaptering. Thanks, Sweets!

My earliest memories are of playing around the house and at times in the fields around my grandparent’s home. These were pleasant places in a rural or semi-rural setting. Warm days in the summer and cold in the winter, bucolic in the small town I lived in and in the one my grandparents lived in. In front of our house on Redondo, there was a big porch. All of the homes in this neighborhood were little brick boxes with large porches. As children, we made up our own games and generally ran the street with no fear. This game involved a dare, who would go under the porch. It was dusty and dirty and I knew somewhere that my parents would not be happy if I brought any of that home on me or in my pants cuffs. However, I went in anyway. It was dark, with rays of light poking through the crossed slats that blocked out most of the area underneath. The smell was moldy, earthy and redolent of things that were either dead or maybe fed on dead things. We crawled in and I looked up at the light and tasted the dust I saw floating there. After a while more kids came in and we thought this would be a cool place for a clubhouse. It was private and we could hide from our parents here. Just as we were getting settled, one of us heard a rustle and looked down......

SNAKE!!!!!!

My eyes locked on the slithering creature as it wound it’s way towards my hand and I decided this was no good as a club house. The other kids were screaming and crawling to the exit with all speed. This kicked up more dust and I lost track of the snake. Frankly, I was not interested in where the snake was by that time, I just wanted out from under the dusty porch and into the sunlight. When we were all out, we wondered what type of snake it was and how big it really was. Truth be told, it was a garter snake and about a foot long (in my memory), but it grew in the telling as snakes in stories always do.

See you tomorrow.