Anarchist to Abolitionist: A Bad Quaker's Journey
The Death of The Hundred Acre Woods, And The Spark That Followed
I believe it was the spring of 1969 when they bulldozed the Hundred Acre Woods. The orchard vanished quicker than I thought possible. I expected I would see men with axes chopping down trees. Nope. Big flat trailers delivered bulldozers and loaders and, in a couple days, the orchard was gone, hauled away in giant dump trucks. A few days after that, the excavators and graders moved in and began terracing and shaping the land. Streets were laid down and houses began appearing, first as skeletons and eventually homes quickly filling with families. As weird as it seems I didn't miss the orchard. Watching a neighborhood being built and climbing all over the equipment during the off hours, and eventually exploring half built houses, made up for the loss of the trees. This experience made me want to be a construction worker, driving the huge machines or climbing on the roofs of houses with no shirt on. It seemed these guys had the perfect life. They got to play all day, every day with the coolest of toys on the coolest playgrounds, and no one ever told them not to get dirty. That was the life I wanted. To be tanned dark like a surfer, with the wind blowing through my hair, while I pounded on things with a hammer. I mean, really, how could there be a better life?
The bonus to all this construction was that I got to watch the building of the storm drain system that interlaced under the neighborhood and connected back to the drainage ditches. They completely destroyed the north ditch and replaced it with a huge pipe. In a way, I loved Chevalier Drive even more with the orchard gone. Not only did I have a better understanding of how the storm drains worked and how to get around inside them, but I also had a bunch of new kids to play with right across the street. And they didn't know how the drains worked. The two group games I loved the most were capture the flag and hide-and-seek, and my knowledge of the drain system gave me a great advantage in both games.
Remember That Time That Engineer Taught Me About Lift and Drag?
For some time, Mom and Dad had growing concerns about living in a big city in California. In a way, Mom loved San Jose. She had a circle of close friends, plus her sister and one of her brothers with both their families, lived there at that time. Also, one of Dad's sisters lived there with her family. Mom loved that Dad had a regular job at the Ford dealership. Dad went to work at the same time every day and came home every night at the same time. Weekends were always for the family, and that was very important to Mom. Dad had been pretty wild back in the 1950s, going from night club to night club, playing music with his band. At the same time, Dad had a race car and he traveled the race track circuits. Income could go up or down with a turn of fate. My mom hated that life. But in San Jose she had stability. Dad made a good living as a transmission mechanic, and both my mom and dad were very frugal, so there was never a problem with money. But everything wasn't quite perfect.
Wikipedia
It was the late 1960s and we had watched firsthand as the Oakland Hells Angels grew more and more violent. The Bay Area drug culture exploded, and the fear mongers in the media exaggerated the dangers of the Black Panthers. The Zodiac Killer was also a constant topic of the local Bay Area media, as they did everything they could to sell every panic-inducing story no matter if an actual Zodiac Killer existed or not. The Manson Family murders took place and race riots shook many big cities. Mom became increasingly paranoid that hippies would somehow "dope" us. I never understood Mom's irrational fear of hippies. The State was doing everything it could do to divide people by fear and hate, but the hippies just wanted everyone to love each other. How were they the bad guys?
However in Ohio (no, seriously Ohio), eighteen-year- old government thugs were gunning down their eighteen- year-old Ohio cousins at Kent State because Befehl ist Befehl! Things were getting rough. Assassinations seemed like the new political norm, and later, by 1970, the economy was beginning to falter.
A possible solution began to take shape and it seemed to provide the answer to my mother and father's fears of California. Word was beginning to spread that the government was thinking of building a new "supersonic airport" somewhere in the Palmdale California area, along with a commuter train to connect the new airport to Los Angeles, all in support of the new SST (supersonic transport) that the government was dumping millions of dollars into. My mom and dad believed they could sell our house on Chevalier Drive and, because land in the Mojave Desert was so cheap, buy several hundred acres outside of Palmdale. My mother was a real estate agent at the time, so the primary plan was to lay out a track of houses and hopefully develop and sell them at a nice profit, as the land developer had done across the street from us in San Jose. As a back-up plan, Dad could easily get hired at a local Palmdale or Lancaster car dealer as a mechanic and we would still be better off than we were living in the Bay Area.
During this time we made several scouting trips to Palmdale to get a better feel of the area and to investigate the possibilities and risks of such an undertaking. We would often take a weekend and drive around that part of the Mojave Desert, talking to local real estate agents and contractors at building sites.
One sunny afternoon we stopped at a city park in Palmdale, where we enjoyed sandwiches and Popsicles. With Mom, Dad, my sister Cheryl, and me, each eating a double Popsicle, I had eight Popsicle sticks to make something with, as Mom and Dad relaxed and talked. I made a Popsicle stick boomerang that flew pretty well, and as a bonus, it would fly apart every time it hit the ground. I had a blast throwing it in the air and trying to catch it as it returned to me.
After a while, as I sat on a park bench carefully reconstructing my toy, a tall thin man sat down at a safe distance from me on the bench. He kindly asked if I knew why my toy came back to me when I threw it in the air. I answered that I didn't know. He then spent about the next twenty minutes or so explaining the concepts of lift and drag. He drew pictures on the bottoms of my flip-flop sandals to explain how wing designs change air pressure causing the air itself to raise an airplane into the sky. I was fascinated by this thin man and the way he spoke. It was as if he were also an eight-year-old child, explaining complex engineering concepts to me. I understood everything he said as he said it, and it seemed so natural that I felt he was simply recapping something I had already known. And my enthusiasm to learn excited him into talking about how the shape of a wing has to change to adapt to supersonic flight to keep drag from ripping it apart, just like my Popsicle stick toy when I threw it too hard.
Wikipedia
It all seemed so clear to me. Now I knew why I liked the shape of some cars and some airplanes, but didn't like the shape of others. I knew why my hand went up or down when I stuck it out of the car window to feel the wind. almost an instant, I understood that there is a reason for everything. Science is a chain, mostly undiscovered, that connects every event and every atom.
This was one of the events that shaped the way I thought. I would ponder it over and over through the years. Who was this thin man and why would he single me out to even attempt to explain such things? In story-telling this often happens. Some angel or messenger shows up with some vital information that the protagonist needs to hear, but this is no myth nor tall tale. I didn't normally even speak to adults unless absolutely necessary, but I actually enjoyed listening and learning from this man.
My mother and father watched at a distance, as the thin man talked to me and drew on my flip-flops. Eventually they came over to see what was going on. The man introduced himself to them and said he was an engineer at the near-by Northrop facility. He complimented them on having such a "bright kid", then he walked away. I refused to wear the flip-flops again because I didn't want to wear off his drawings. After that, I tried over and over to explain lift and drag to other kids, but I could never get any of them to understand the concept that seemed so simple to me.
Before Mom and Dad had a chance to sell our house and invest in land near Palmdale, the SST program and the supersonic airport plans were canceled. It would be years later before I heard about the Skunk Works program and figured out that the thin man was likely a part of that top secret facility.
First post & table of contents
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