Anarchist to Abolitionist: A Bad Quaker's Journey
Kettelman City and Avenel
As Dad was saving the farmers millions of dollars, he made a lot of new friends and connections. Once that ended, he quickly landed a job as a foreman at the Southdown Land Company, near Kettelman City, where he supervised the grounds crews that maintained the 40-acre management housing compound.
The Kettelman City farm was a perfect fit for my family. Dad had just bought an airplane and there was a mile long paved and lighted runway with plenty of parking, right there in the compound. There was plenty of storage space for him to park all of our equipment, and the grounds crew pretty much ran themselves. Dad was left to hang around the farm's huge repair shop and socialize with the mechanics and the rest of management. Mom, of course, loved it because it was steady income, with steady hours and company insurance. Plus, Mom had the nicest house she had lived in up to that time, right there in the management compound, provided free thanks to Southdown Land Company.
I liked the compound because it had its own 1/4 Olympic size swimming pool, with shower rooms and plenty of shaded seating. There were baseball and soccer fields. To the west of the compound were thousands of acres of untouched desert, where range cattle ran. To top it all off, I had a Honda three wheeler ATV, the predecessor to today's quadrunners, and that translated to almost unlimited riding.
Not long after we moved to that farm, Dad found a broken down 1947 Willys Jeep for sale at an almost give- away price, so he bought it. He and I tinkered on it together until we got it running. It didn't have a government-issued registration of ownership, so we couldn't get it licensed, but who cared about that? It also didn't have a starter, so I had to push start it, then quickly jump in to drive it. The seat and gas tanks weren't bolted down either, so you had to take it easy or you'd go flying out. But it was perfect for puttering around the desert.
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The farms close proximity to Kettelman City allowed me to slip out at night and frequent the beer bars in town. Not to drink, but to play pool. This aspect of the story will reappear later, but I wanted to mention that this was the time when I honed my pool playing talent, and learned how to behave around hardcore bikers.
The high school in the town of Avenel served the farm and all of the Kettelman City area. When I was in my sophomore year at Avenel, the school did some selective IQ testing for college placement and for counseling purposes. I suspected at the time that I was chosen to be tested because of the number of fights I had been in on their campus. I should rather say that the Vogons tested me to see where I should fit in the cogs of the State. They probably thought that I would make a splendid police officer or military drone. I could think of no other reason they would pick me to be tested. I was an average "B" student, and I was liked by my history and art teachers, but the rest of the Vogons either paid me no mind or outright disliked me, often because of my sharp tongue, my tendency toward fighting, or my disregard for rules. I was told by the librarian that I was in the only fist fight she had ever witnessed in a library, and she was quite old. She didn't like me much either.
Somehow I tested at an IQ of 145, and evidentially that's somewhat higher than what they expected. (And it's much higher than I would score today.) For the very first time, and only one of two times, an actual school counselor spoke to me. She explained that I had an exceptional IQ score and should consider what university I would like to attend. She said that she would help me make arrangements if I chose a school. She also said I needed to take "college prep" classes, rather than the standard classes I was taking.
I really didn't understand what any of that meant. It all sounded like a lot of work. That evening I asked my dad what university I should attend. At the time, my sister, Cheryl, was attending West Hills College with a major in horticulture. She was twice the top name on the Dean's list. But I was very different from Cheryl. My dad kind of chuckled at the idea of me attending a university. "Boy, why in the world would you think about going to college? You're strong and you're a good worker. College is for people who don't know how to make a living." However my mother told me I should consider the counselor's advice. This would be a good time to talk about the difference between my mom and my dad.
Mom graduated from McKell High School in South Shore Kentucky, and then went on to graduate from Morehead State Teacher's College. She then taught elementary school in Appalachia. Mom believed in the power and importance of a formal education.
Later, she was a nurse’s aid in San Jose, California, then later, a real estate agent and eventually an insurance agent. At one point, she decided to unseat a long time powerful mayor of a town we lived in. She found a person she wanted as a candidate, she convinced that woman to run for the office, and she created a ground swell of grassroots support for her candidate. Eventually, her candidate won and, together, she and her candidate fired the city manager, the police chief, the fire chief, and unseated most of the city council. She did all of this covertly without the general public knowing that she was the real power behind this takeover.
This political takeover happened in California City in the late 1970s. Mom was fortunate that she had done all this maneuvering covertly because, as it turned out, and as you may notice later in this book when we get to that time frame, the entire political machine she unseated was connected to the Mob. After one election cycle, every one of the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats were right back in power and many of my mother's allies had moved away in fear of reprisals. There was at least one kidnapping that we knew of, which drove away a whole family. Fortunately, no one was killed.
My mother could do pretty much anything she put her mind to do. She was a great mother to me and had a tremendous influence on my personal philosophy and my understanding of history. After an extended illness that was likely caused by a lifetime of heavy smoking, we lost her in December of 2001.
My dad, on the other hand, taught himself to read by the age of three by looking at newspaper comics, and by his mother reading those comics to him at night.
I should explain this in more detail. My dad's mother and father were gifted a new house built by the Stone family. It was on the family farm, where they were wed. It was a simple three room house, two bedrooms and one common room. The interior board walls were plastered over with a basic flour and salt plaster, and sealed with newspapers. The newspaper was literally the wall paper, and it kept the wind from driving through the cracks in the wood during the winter. In the nursery, which was the second bed room, newspaper comics, or "funny papers", were used to cover the plaster. They thought that whimsical for their beloved baby, my dad.
When my grandmother would put my dad to bed, she would read him the comics from the walls. Eventually, Dad could read all the comics by himself. By the time he was four years old, his parents sent him to a local one-room schoolhouse, where he finished all the eight grades available to him. He took a year off from school due to an injury I'll talk about shortly, but then at the age of ten, the decision was made to send him to the high school some miles away. On his first day, the teenage girls made such a fuss about this cute little curly headed blond boy, that my dad vowed to never attend another day of school, and he never did.
Dad left home at the age of fourteen to make his way in the world. His first job was shoveling coal into a boiler on a riverboat. Dad believed the best education is experience, and I agree.
Since I'm talking about my dad and Appalachia, this may be a good time to talk about the loss of my dad's left hand.
My dad was the eldest child and was even older than his youngest uncle, Jess. One day, a group of the boys, Dad being the oldest, were exploring the Appalachian woods and came across an abandoned cabin. It was dilapidated and had clearly been unoccupied for quite some time. The boys went in to look around, and my dad found a copper cup on the fireplace mantle. Inside the cup were three objects that my dad mistook for spent shotgun shells.
A little information on Appalachia and gun culture will help here. Smokeless gun powder was expensive around the time this old cabin would have been occupied, so lots of folks in Appalachia still used black powder well into the 1900s, specifically in loading their own shotgun shells. Spent shells were never discarded; they were always kept and reloaded.
The next thing to understand is that locally made black powder burned very inefficiently, and often left an unburned residue in the shell after it had been fired. That means that if you take a spent black powder shotgun shell and drop a lit match into it, very often you will get a little flash as the residual powder ignites.
The next thing you need to know is that dynamite will not explode by itself. Rather, it requires a smaller explosion to ignite it. In the early 1900s, that smaller explosion was provided by a "dynamite cap" or "blasting cap" that slid over the end of the dynamite stick. If you looked at a brass cup containing three dynamite caps with their open end facing upward, they would closely resemble spent 10 gauge shotgun shells. Modern blasting caps look nothing like that. They more closely resemble oversized needles that puncture into the dynamite stick, and ignite with an electrical charge.
My nine-year-old dad was standing in this cabin surrounded by other young boys, holding a copper cup that contained three dynamite caps that he mistook for spent 10 gauge shotgun shells. He decided to have a bit of fun, and lit a match. Jess stepped up close to get a look at what was in the cup, but dad shoved him back and said, "Boys, I'm gonna blow this place up!" He was expecting a small flash that would scare the other boys. Instead, the blasting caps exploded, taking away all of the flesh of the palm on Dad's left hand, along with many of the bones. The pinky finger and the ring finger were entirely gone. His thumb, index, and middle finger each lost the two end bones, but the outer skin of each, including the nails, remained hanging from his hand. Copper was splattered across Dad's chest and face, including a fragment that went into his left cornea.
Had Dad not shoved Jess backward, Jess would have taken the blast to the face, but as it was, Jess caught fragments of copper that specked his face with small slices. Several of the other boys caught small copper fragments to the face and body, as well.
Think about some nine-year-old boy that you know today. Can you imagine this happening to him, miles from home, and how he would react? That's probably how my dad reacted. But Jess summoned grit from within himself and took command. He told the boys to all go home and tell their parents what had happened. Then, he got my dad moving, headed home. He wouldn't let my dad stop.
Once home, my dad's mother put him on a mule and began the long walk to the Ohio River, where there was a ferry across to the city of Portsmouth, Ohio. This was around 1933, and no one in my family and none of their neighbors owned a motor vehicle of any kind.
Word was sent out, and as soon as Dad's father heard the news (we called my grandfather Pop), he headed toward the hospital in Portsmouth, arriving just after Dad had. The doctor suggested cutting off everything from the wrist. He said it would heal faster and with less pain. Pop stood his ground and said absolutely not. He told the doctor to save every bit he could. The doctor warned that the remaining stump would look freakish and would take a long time to heal, but Pop wouldn't give ground. He told the doctor again to save as much as possible, no matter how it looked.
The doctor did the best he could, and Dad was left with a sort of ball of hard scar tissue that resembled a pig's foot. In his later years, as I was growing up working with Dad on various projects, he used that mangled hand almost as good as most others can use their non-dominant hand.
These were the things that shaped my dad into the man he was. He was very intelligent in the fields he took interest in, and very ignorant about how the world actually works. He had a powerful voice and feared no man, and yet was a kind man who would go out of his way to help a friend. He was not a violent man, and didn't enforce his will with brutality, yet he was a natural leader that people chose to follow. He was a man of ideas and of engineering genius.
One last thing about my father before I move on. When Dad was ten years old, Pop bought the family's first motor vehicle. It was an old Model T pickup. Pop worked for the N&W Railroad at the time and walked to work, leaving the Model T for farm use. My dad was fascinated by this machine. It seemed almost magical to him, and he had to figure out how it worked.
Pop would walk to Portsmouth, to the big N&W rail yard, and would stay there several days or weeks at a time, working as many shifts as he could, while sleeping in the company bunk house and eating at the company chow hall. During one of these times when Pop was gone, Dad decided to find out how that Model T worked. So he took the engine apart. Completely apart. My grandmother found out what he did and was beside herself with worry. My dad assured her there was no problem, that he could put it all back together, and then he did. Once again, he was ten years old at the time, and one handed.
Having said all these wonderful things about my parents, I need to expose the flip side. During the years that we lived in California, the grocery stores didn't carry some of the foods that Mom and Dad were accustomed to, like collards and mustard greens. This was before more exotic and regional foods were available in California, so Mom bought the only "greens" the stores carried. Iceberg lettuce.
The way she had always made greens was to fry up a batch of bacon, then cook the greens in the bacon grease until they melted down and became tender. So, naturally, that's how she attempted to prepare iceberg lettuce. But iceberg lettuce melts the instant the hot grease touches it. Their solution was to serve the lettuce on the plate with the meal, then pour hot bacon grease on top. Because of this, I thought I didn't like salad. That is, until I grew up and moved away from home, and saw a salad bar at a Sizzler restaurant.
Now take everything I just said about my family's culinary tendencies, and imagine it expanded over a spectrum of food delights, like spaghetti made with hamburger meat, salt, pepper, and ketchup over spaghetti noodles, or tacos made with tortillas, hamburger meat, salt, pepper, and ketchup. Mom once made a pizza with dough, ketchup, American cheese product, and bologna.But, with that said, let me tell you, Mom could cook up a ham bone with pinto beans, corn bread, and fried potatoes that were better than anything a five star restaurant could serve.
My parents were wonderful, and they tried very hard to adjust to California culture, but they just never did fit in.
First post & table of contents
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