Some Favorite Books So Far

2019

I've been known to tell the lie that the best book I've ever read is the one I'm reading now. Actually the best books gave me some direction, or insight, or joy, or sadness, or made me richer and I don’t mean just in experience. Here’s a bit about some. 

The Asiatics by Frederic Prokosch was the first adult novel I read. I was 12. Set in the 1920s it's about a young man who traveled on the cheap across Asia with adventures and entanglements all the way. He went with the flow to see where it was going and had a novel's worth of excitement. 

I think The Asiatics subconsciously motivated me in 1971 to vagabond on the road from Lisbon to Kathmandu. Went with the flow every day. Had a few adventures and entanglements. And have written six short stories about the trip so far. 

I first read Burmese Days by George Orwell while I was travelling across Asia. It's a story that emerged from his time as a military policeman in Burma in the 1920s. He shone a light on the disparate lives of the colonial British and the native population. Two competing cultures and hierarchies. More so, he saw the horror of people in a ruling class addicted to power. A theme he replayed in Animal Farm. Burmese Days gave me a sensitivity to class differences and their consequences.

Confessions of an Advertising Man is a David Ogilvy's memoir dressed up as a primer on how to run a business. I worked for him from 1975 to 1980 with many layers between his ownership plateau and my worker bee role. This slight volume has many lessons important to a working life and how to run an advertising agency. For example, his focus on writing well was a rallying cry intended to contrast his employees with those unlucky to be working elsewhere. Confessions is my go to thank you gift. 

I've just reread James Michener's The Novel. It’s four people's stories; a writer, his editor, an English professor and a literary benefactor. The book probes the difference between popular novels like those by Maeve Binchy and great  literature like Moby Dick. The notion is that big sellers are like donuts, enjoyable in the moment but ultimately empty, while the really good books inform the thinking of thought leaders, business mandarins and serious politicians to advance our civilization. A big difference.  

I read Atlas Shrugged around age 16 just when I was beginning to drive, a time I to had to deal extensively with government employees around a driver's license and car registration. You know the picture; long lines  disinterested, over managed bureaucrats who don't acknowledge your humanity, slavish adherence to rules and eternal wait times. At the same time I had a part time job in retail where I had to be nice to keep my job. I saw the difference. When, in Atlas Shrugged, I came across John Galt's impassioned soliloquy about his distaste for government run medicine with doctors who are employees of bureaucrats who in turn report to politicians his ideas resonated with me. And still do. 

In a cute little independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon near the beginning of my professional career in 1977 I picked up a thin volume of short essays by Richard Sloma called No-Nonsense Management. These 70 kernels of managing advice were helpful to me in my ad agency life and more helpful in my later work as an executive coach. Good examples. 1] Never tolerate mediocrity. 2] Your true adversary is time. Not competition, not legislation, not the economy - but time. One consistent aspect of all the tips is that when something is Important but Not Urgent it’s best to get cracking and do it soon no matter how difficult. 

Evening Class is the first of many novels I read by Maeve Binchy, a successful Irish author of popular books. 40 million copies sold in 37 languages. Evening Class is a sweet and rollicking tale about the fortune and misfortune that besets a cast of characters taking Italian Lessons at night school. The book is more meaningful to me now, twenty years after I read it, because of all the characters I've gotten to know in my Leaving a Legacy classes at Ryerson. 

I'm still at it. Right now I'm reading a memoir by Judith Miller, a world class reporter for the New York Times for 28 years. Best book I've ever read.

A Visit to L.A. Law

1989

In the 1980s my mum was a little old lady who competed for turf on Venice Beach with roller bladers and skate boarders. I travelled there more than once every year to visit her.

I had lived in LA during the 1960s as a teenager and college student so it was great to get back.

Different family members joined me on each trip. Sometimes it was all four of us; Margie, my wife, me, our daughter Amy and our son Stephen. Sometimes just me and one or both of the kids. In 1989 it was me and Amy.

At that time I was working in advertising with Shoppers Drug Mart as my main client. Our advertising campaign had morphed in the previous year from Bea Arthur, Maude, as spokesperson to a real life couple who played a pretend couple of lawyers on the hit TV show LA Law. Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry. 

Before this trip I had arranged through the Tuckerberry's agent that Amy and I would visit the set to see some of the TV show being filmed. It would be a chance to meet some actors in their cage. That is, while they were filming.  

So one afternoon during our 1989 trip we descended on a hidden, nondescript TV production studio off Olympic Boulevard in West LA. 

We had to talk our way in as we weren't on the list at security. They made some calls while they kept us waiting. Finally the seas parted and in we went. 

Once inside we said hello to Michael Tucker briefly as he was busy doing scenes. Jill wasn't on set that day.

We stayed for a couple of uneventful hours. We felt welcome but mostly no one talked to us. Why didn't they want to know who we were and why were we hanging out on their set? 

We had the run of the place as long as we stayed out of the shots. We had both attended Shoppers Drug Mart commercial shoots so we were able to act cool. 

We knew the actors working that day from watching the show. In addition to Michael Tucker, Susan Dey, Jimmy Smits, Harry Hamlin, John Spencer and Larry Drake were on set.

John Spencer was the only one who engaged us. You'll know him more famously as President Bartlett's chief of staff on The West Wing. He was brief but friendly and helped us feel a bit more comfortable. 

I finally realized everyone knew who we were. In reality I was the Tuckerberry's client as we were paying them something like $50,000 a day to be in our commercials. Maybe that was meaningful. Maybe not. LA is a strange place.

Short tangent on film production. It's edifying to watch a TV show being filmed. The thing is you start to understand the complexity of the work the director and editor does. 

Movies and TV shows are filmed or video taped in pieces that are sewn together by the editor to achieve a coherent story line. The impressive thing is that the director has to visualize all this in advance in order to film all of the right scenes and the building blocks of those scenes. 

You also get an extra appreciation for actors who are often solitary when filming a scene. For example, if you see a conversation between two characters the camera seems to be moving back and forth between the two. Well in reality they aren't conversing with each other but rather alone talking to the camera. And then the sewing happens in the edit. 

So now sometimes when I'm watching a TV show I step back and see it being assembled from behind the camera. More fun. 

Our trips to LA always ended with breakfast at the same new age natural foods restaurant on the Venice Beach boardwalk. Excellent pancakes. Terrific coffee. Just the right kharma to take back to Toronto. 

Almost Nothing in Common

May 2019

How good a job is cashier in an orphanage?

I wouldn't have thought to answer that question except recently my wife's brother Lloyd was in Toronto for his annual visit having flown in from India.

It's not that Lloyd lives in India. He was there because he is, more or less, always travelling. He doesn't have a home of his own. He had one  in the past but not now.

Lloyd has two home bases. My address is his Canadian residence so he can avail himself of a health card and a driver's licence. He sees his doctor when he's here.

He also stays for weeks at a time with his girlfriend, Varda, at her rented house. She is an astrophysics professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in California. That's near the Hearst Castle. They travel and hike together quite a bit. For example after Toronto Lloyd and Varda were going to meet up in Heidelberg, Germany for a month where she would be doing research. From there Lloyd will be off to Corfu to relax for a few weeks. I'm not exactly sure what he'll be relaxing from.

Lloyd is parsimonious so money is not an issue. He inherited some money. (Here's a pro tip. You want your parents to die owning a house in Vancouver.) Varda's research, paid for by grants, takes her to interesting places three or four times a year. And Lloyd joins her. As well he can poll his network to find a house sitting gig wherever he's going without Varda. Consequently Lloyd is able to live on not much.

A little more background. Lloyd started travelling in 1972 when he left Vancouver to do pre med at Hebrew U in Jerusalem. But wires were crossed. There was no English pre med program so Lloyd dropped out and started travelling. He went to India. It was all the rage at the time. I had been there the year before.

In India Lloyd became a member of the Rajneeshi ashram in Pune. The Rajneesh was the guy with the 92 Rolls Royces preaching a hedonistic life style. Lots of controversy in India first, and then Oregon where the group moved in the 80s before being booted back to India. There's a documentary about it on Netflix.

Lloyd learned to be a fine carpenter at the ashram, an avocation that sometimes gets him invited, via his network, to jobs entailing more travelling. He once worked on a half million dollar kitchen in Denver. And he built a deck for Margie and I during one of his Toronto pass thrus.

The network that Lloyd uses for house sitting and carpentry work is the Sannyasins, disciples of the Rajneesh, now spread around the world.

One thing about the Sannyasin Diaspora is they dance a lot. That's how Lloyd and Varda met and there are dances regularly around the world which have brought in a many new disciples. Varda is twenty five years younger than Lloyd and was never at the original ashram.

So when Lloyd arrived in Toronto last month from India and told us that he recently had been working as a cashier at an orphanage we were only partly surprised. Arriving from anywhere is no big deal with Lloyd. Last year he flew in from Germany where he was visiting his two step-grandchildren. He was married for awhile.

It was his work at the orphanage that had us asking questions. Most people don't think of cash registers and orphans in the same thought bubble. But in this case the guest house where Lloyd stayed was near an orphanage and the guest house had a cafeteria run by a friend.  So Lloyd was doing shifts on the cash register to pass some time and older orphans were earning an unfair days wage working in the cafeteria. Ah India.

Lloyd and I had a conversation about the fun of cashiering. I had been a cashier for several years while in university. We both see a certain something in the job.

It was my all time favourite job and it's something I'd like to do even now in my semi-retirement if a cashier job where I could sit landed in my lap.

The great thing about me as a cashier was that I was able to develop a brief relationship with almost every person as they were paying. “Hi. How are you doing today?” was an easy way to start a conversation that was destined to end before a reason for conflict would surface. I liked that.

So Lloyd and I have a lot in common. We've both been in Afghanistan, Nepal and India on the cheap and like to talk about it. We both like cashiering and his sister is my wife.

And we have our differences. I have a home. He doesn't. I travel a bit on $250 dollars a day. He travels almost all the time at little cost. He dances. I don't.

I think I should dance more.

June 14, 2019

My Cars So Far

1963 – 2019

I've had a car since I turned 16. They've given me mobility, fun and fodder for narcissistic self analysis. 

My first three cars were gifts from my mother. So right from the get go my self image suffered. I couldn't buy myself a car.

The first was a used, salmon and white 1955 Chevy Bel Air. It was too big for the meager parking garage in our apartment building. Bel Air suffered scrapes and dings and I developed a distaste for large cars. 

The second car was a 1964 gold Mustang convertible inherited cheap from my mum's friend who won it in a contest. From this car I learned that girls in real life were less attracted to sexy cars than in the movies. 

The third was a sports car, a white Volvo P1800, the car the Saint drove in the TV series and known as a poor man's Porsche. That became my mindset. I rarely buy the Cadillac version of anything. Instead I shop for a smart economical choice. I'm a poster boy for parsimony. 

One sweet bonus was P1800 drivers waved to each other when we passed. I was in a cool club.

The first car I personally bought coincided with parenthood. We opted for a copper coloured Mazda GLC in 1977. GLC stands for great little car. Smart and small, pushed many of this new father's buttons.

A company car was next. A Toyota Celica Supra, the sporty version of a bland car. I chose the buckwheat colour which looked good to me for a month. Then not so much.

That was followed by a black Datsun 200SX in 1983. It was a smallish, sporty family car which I really liked. I remember it got me thru a huge snow storm while many other cars got stuck. 

Next came a loaned car when a friend’s mum got too old to drive and we took her navy blue Volvo sedan. Irresistibly free carried the day. 

That was followed by a fully loaded slate grey Subaru family sedan. Options like power windows and door locks came standard not as overpriced optional extras. Parsimonious me jumped at the deal although I didn't like the styling of the car or the colour. 

When the lease on the Subaru ended I ran into a brick wall. I couldn't decide what I wanted next. So another loaner. A client lent me his red Volvo over the summer of 1993 while he drove his summer car, an MGB. 

Next came the first car I truly loved. Really who could love a four door black Buick Skylark. Well I did and here's why. Fully loaded, sporty, lowish price, not too big and a lousy seller. It was a minor brand. There were few on the road. I liked driving something few others did. 

Then came seven bland years followed by seven zingy years. 

My uninspired period started with a used black Oldsmobile Intrigue. Loaded but dull. That was replaced by another Oldsmobile, a ho-hum grey Alero. 

The blue Honda I got in 2003 had been on my mind since I'd seen one in a showroom a year earlier. A hologram of the car was like a flatworm in my brain that wouldn't leave until I bought the car. 

The zingy years started when I picked up the lease on a ruby red 2 door Jeep Wrangler. 

Finally after seven years of dull I was driving a car that excited me. It was a dilly of a car. I rode high on the road above the fray. It had the panache of it's off road capability. 

And like P1800 owners Jeep drivers wave at  their confreres on the road. A counterculture club to complement my bourgeois life. 

At some point Margie, my wife, and I decided we needed a four door Jeep to schlep our grandchildren hither and yon. So I sold the red 2 door Jeep to my son and purchased a gun metal grey four door version. Which I liked as well, except the colour which wore on me quickly.  

Two years later my son and I swapped Jeeps when he had his first child and needed a back seat so I had my ruby red beauty back.

The zingy time lasted until 2015 when the rough ride of the Jeep was mashing my aging bones. 

After a lot of research I chose the top rated compact SUV, the Honda HRV, in a fresh sea green. 

I really liked the car from the inside. Nice faux leather seats. Good sound system. A magic seat in the back that created lots of space to move things. But boy did I hate the car from the outside. It should have been called pukey green not sea green. I was apoplectic at what a bad decision I had made.

As often happens Margie bailed me out. We traded cars. I got her white Toyota Rav4 which was ok enough for me. She loves the sea green HRV. 

It's now a couple of years later and I've replaced the Rav 4 with a Mazda CX 3 which is the second rated compact SUV. 

The CX 3 may be the perfect choice for my 71 year old body and psyche. It's relatively low priced. Sporty, fast with firm steering. There's not many on the road. It has a bit of a bad ass design.

And, oh yeah, it's white, a colour I still like a year later. 

My Dad's History

I recently investigated my roots via relatives who either had been looking into the subject or were older and knew things.

My quest was to find out what my father and his parents were doing during the Russian Revolution, roughly 1918-1925. I had some bites of information but not much. So here's what I have now.

Tiable, my father's sister, and Morris, my dad, were living in Murafa, Russia in 1918. That's now in the Ukraine. I believe they were born there.

Marachva which is the name I grew up hearing was the Yiddish or Polish pronunciation of Murafa. It's in the region of Podolia. My cousin Sheldon, Tiable's son, visited in the 1990s travelling via Romania.

My grandfather, my dad's father, was Yisroel Yitzak. I have what might be my father's Russian passport. It has Russian [Cyrillic], French and an unknown language in it. Morris was identified as Moishe Abrahamovitch Chore on this passport in the French section. Of course the Chore was probably Shore. My father's embarkation card stamped St. John, New Brunswick February 20, 1927 said Moishe Shor. His ship was the Marloch.

Yisroel might have been Abraham since the Abrahamovitch on my dad's passport I think indicates son of Abraham.

Yisroel/Abraham had red hair and was a chicken merchant as reported my cousin Helen Rosen, Tiable's daughter in law. 

His first wife died in 1921. I believe in a flu epidemic. My grandfather remarried and had a third child with his new wife.

My grandfather had a brother, Uncle Ben Shor, who came to New York and was successful and an important person in the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. I remember his son Irving Shor from my childhood. Irving and his wife Minna had two children Arnold and Rita, both now deceased. Rita, passed away in 2010 with two survivors in New Jersey. You can see her obituary by googling Rita Binenstock Shor.

Tiable came to Canada in 1924 and married my Uncle Lou in 1925. Morris married my mum, Goldie, in 1931. Tiable was born in 1907 and Morris in 1909. Tiable was 17 when she came but had first gone to live in Riga before coming to Canada. Sheldon told me Tiable once met the mother of David Barrett a former premier of B.C. at a senior's event in Vancouver. The women had known each other in Riga [now in Latvia].

The following two excerpts about Podolia describes the situation around Murafa from 1918-25. These answer my question about what was going on at the time.

***

1. During the civil war in Russia (1918–21) Podolia was among the regions which suffered most severely. Pogroms began with the retreat of the Ukrainian army through Podolia before the advancing Red Army, fomented by Ukrainian army units, bands of peasants who rebelled against the Soviet regime, and units of the White Army commanded by A.I. Denikin . Massacres took place in Proskurov and Felshtin (Gvardeyskoye) in February 1919. Up to the end of 1921, 162 pogroms occurred in 52 localities of Podolia, 125 by the Ukrainians, 28 by the White Army, and nine by the Poles. The total number of victims has been estimated at about 3,700. The most sinister pogroms (after Proskurov and Felshtin) took place in Trostyanets (with 342 dead), Bratslav (where pogroms occurred 11 times), and Litin . The small Jewish settlements in the villages were destroyed and completely abandoned. Refugees from the villages and the townlets streamed into the larger towns of the region and Odessa . Many crossed the borders into Bessarabia and Poland. Typhus and famine also devastated the Jewish population. In many settlements (Orinin, Chmielnik, Kamenets-Podolski, etc.), Jewish self-defense units were organized against the pogroms. They withstood the rioters but could not resist the regular army units. Many Jewish youths joined the ranks of the Red Army, within whose framework Jewish units were occasionally formed. These were specially sent on punitive expeditions against rebellious villages.

Under Communist rule Jewish communal life ceased and the position of the Jews of Podolia was the same as that of the rest of Russian Jewry. In the 1920s Jews in Podolia organized cells of He-Ḥalutz and other secret Zionist youth movements. In 1925 a petition for the right to study Hebrew, signed by thousands of Jewish children in Podolian towns and townlets, was presented to the authorities. The Jewish population in 1926 numbered 347,481 in the seven regions which comprised the former province of Podolia (and some smaller areas).

2.Those few Jews who participated in the struggle for control of the Ukraine in the period 1917-1922 were mostly on the side of the Bolsheviks, though a small number threw in with the Ukrainian nationalists.  In July, 1917, the provisional Ukrainian government declared its independence from Russia and granted autonomy to all  minorities within its boundaries.  The initial reaction of the Ukrainian Jewish communities was positive; however, the Kerensky regime, then in power in Moscow, and the Bolshevik regime which followed it both opposed Ukrainian independence.  The seizure of power in Moscow by the Bolsheviks led to anarchy throughout the former Czarist empire, including the Ukraine, and Russia shortly thereafter invaded the Ukraine to put down the independence attempt.

The majority of the Jews took no position in the dispute between the Ukrainian nationalists and the Russian Bolsheviks, rightly having come to the conclusion that none of the combatting factions offered them anything better than the miserable life they already knew under the Czars.  There were numerous pogroms in this period as  well, resulting in many deaths and further impoverishment of the Jews. Before 1919, the pogroms primarily occurred in the cities, one particularly ugly such pogrom occurring in the city of Proskurov (Khmelnitsky).  After 1919, they were more prevalent in the villages.  Again, the Jews were unfairly accused, this time of being pro-Bolshevik and anti-Ukrainian. Jewish self-defence organizations were established in many cities, towns and villages, as once again the "ruling" authorities were either unwilling or unable to prevent attacks by the various factions on the Jewish population.

The defeat of the Ukrainian nationalists by the Bolsheviks was followed by numerous terrible pogroms against the Jews in the Ukraine; these actions were most often led by Ukrainian soldiers supported by Ukrainian civilians, and were "justified" as retaliation against the Jews for their support of communism.

Of the three periods in which pogroms occurred in Ukraine, the worst period was from 1917-1921.  In Podolia alone, 213 pogroms are recorded, the vast majority of them having been committed by supporters of one or another of the various Ukrainian nationalist movements that were operating at the time in the region.

The Casting Session

1981

I am haunted by high school. The bumbled and incomplete relationships. The experiences that started with promise and ended in fragments. I was too shy, too straight laced, too restrained. I missed out on too much of the fun. 

From time to time as an adult I've made up for  what I missed. Here's one example. Nothing to be proud of but this is a memoir not a confession.

In 1981 I worked on the Coca Cola account at the McCann Erickson ad agency branch office in Toronto. 

Ad agencies have buckets of people; account executives (I was one) liaise with the client; creative people make the commercials; media people arrange for the advertising to be seen and market researchers search for sneaky ways to fool consumers into buying more.

The typical ad agency drama is that the creative people are trying to get to the bleeding edge of advertising ideas because it enhances their portfolio while the account people are getting in the way trying to ensure the client feels their money is well spent and that the advertising works.

Most places where people work are like high school except with more money. Thank you Frank Zappa. At ad agencies in the 80s the creatives, dressed as they did in high school, were the cool people. Account people, dressed in suits, were the nerds. 

I became friends with a star copywriter named Harry Yates. Typical ad guy. Two failed marriages, huge tolerance for alcohol, off the charts salesperson. 

One glaring difference was that Harry stuttered - in a charming way, which I think led to the failed marriages. 

We got along because he was smart enough to appreciate my ironic sense of humour and I liked being his wingman.

We had to handle snafus which took us to New York from time to time. Usually to fix a TV commercial with technology only available in the big apple. It was  also a chance to test the limits of what we could put on an expense account.

Coca Cola had a huge advertising budget which meant wherever Harry and I went to chase a fix we were welcomed. Typically in the reception area of a recording or post production studio we'd just whisper Coca Cola and someone would point us in the right direction. If the receptionist was extra attractive Harry would stop and flirt in his native language, stutterese.

So far nothing to be less than proud of but then we jumped the shark.

1981 was three years before Diet Coke became a thing. At the time Tab Cola was the company's brand in the diet cola segment.

Tab Cola had its own aura not because it tasted ok, it didn't, but because it was promoted by one of the best commercials ever. In the ad a svelte bikini clad model was sashaying out of the ocean carrying a can of Tab Cola. The model, attractive to men and some women, was endorsing Tab. Good simple visual selling.

Neither Harry or I had anything to do with the creation of the ad. Tab was a New York client.

One time over a beer we were lamenting not having been present at the creation of the Tab advertising. Wishing we had. All those models. All those casting sessions.

And then Harry had a brainwave to muffle our lamentations. Why should we suffer just because we didn't work on the Tab brand? We worked on the Coke brand. People hopped when we said hop. 

Harry ran casting sessions all the time in New York as well as Toronto. All we needed to do was borrow a meeting a room and call a talent agency in New York. Easy peasy. 

There it was. We were about to have a casting session for a phantom commercial. All the castees would be good looking young women. They would come prepared to model in a bikini and walk seductively as if they were sashaying out of the ocean onto a beach while fondling a can of Tab. And we were going to sit in judgement of these women whose time we were stealing.

Do you think we went thru with it? Two polite Canadians in New York City in their thirties and forties taking advantage of a little power and our stale dated immaturity. 

Of course we did. 

I realize now in my seventies that like some things I did in high school, it was wrong. 

That confessed, it is a great memory. 

Off to College

1965

My best memoir stories cover one day that ends in some surprising way. This story has an unforeseen ending to my summer after high school.

Was I was the first in my family to go to college? My eldest sister and brother didn't go at all. My other sister went to Ryerson around 1960 when it was a community college. She is very proud of her child care diploma.

I was a foreign student living in West Hollywood, California when I graduated from high school in the fulsome class of 1965. I lacked perspective on what my future would or could be. I had interests but didn't have a guiding light. If I didn't go to college or join the growing war machine I'd have to leave the country. I wanted to stay in California. I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. College won the argument.

No one was pushing me at home that I noticed. My dad was long dead. Mum created a nice home but as a teenager I was immune to and didn't understand her survivor’s “safety first” mentality. My brother was there but he had an entrepreneurial view of the world that didn't include college.

My friends were mostly junior college types. Mediocre students like me. It's ironic that Beverly Hills was the centre of our universe yet none of us were particularly upwardly mobile. Too much time with the daughters. Not enough time with the fathers.

I lack the social skill of being busy. I have always spent a lot of time cultivating my own garden. In the mid sixties I did it reading news, political and sports magazines. My mainstay subscriptions were Time and Newsweek. I ventured into left wing material like Ramparts and the right wing National Review. I recall that at one point I was proud to have 13 subscriptions in all.

The place I was most popular at school was in civics class. People would crowd around. I had the answers. I knew all the state capitals.

Still I had no sense to be assertive applying for college. No dreams. Little confidence. No motivation. No one pushing me. Mediocre grades and SATs. No role model to emulate. Not even a girl to chase across a state line.

At the last minute I applied to LACC. Los Angeles City College. A junior college. Close to home. Low admission standards. The refuge for people who didn't have anywhere better to go. I didn't get in. The foreign student quota was full. It was August. I was in trouble.

A little research surfaced one more possibility. Pepperdine College. It has some buzz now. The new campus is in Malibu overlooking the Pacific ocean.

It wasn't like that in 1965. Then Pepperdine was a small Christian college in south central L.A. When it was built during the depression the school was in the ring around downtown L.A. By 1965 it was dead centre in the ghetto.

The devastating Watts riots took place blocks from Pepperdine about two weeks before classes started.

I had no trouble getting accepted. They had room for one more soul.

Pepperdine, lily white, christian and in the middle of a roiling ghetto was going to be an adventure for this nicely tanned irreligious boy who had no worldly experience. Aside from a few adventures in Beverly Hills that is.

My summer of 65 ended in a most unexpected way.


May 12, 2017