My mom and dad purchased this home in 1978 for $40,000. It was a crazy house that had 9 doors in the kitchen. I lived upstairs in the finished attic and there was an unfinished basement that I worked with a couple different contractors to finish off as a rental unit.

I had two rooms upstairs. I built a desk into one and slept in the other. I grew pot in the cupboard for a while till my dad asked me not to…actually what happened was that I came home from school one day and saw my dad sitting on the steps outside. He was literally green. I asked him what was wrong and he said “I discovered your pot plants”, I said “Oh, is that all?, I thought someone had died!” He asked me to stop smoking pot and I said to him “tell you what, I’m not going to stop smoking now, but if in future, you see my behavior changing, and you ask me to stop, I will”. He accepted that since I was an A student, held down an job and went to school.

At that time I worked as a furniture refinisher with a couple guys about my age and the owners Floyd and Max who were in their late 60’s. Dave was the son and Dan was a worker like me. I was the new guy, so I got the dirty jobs of stripping furniture and sanding it down. I learned a lot about how furniture went together, and how to refinish it. I also got to meet some interesting people.

At the time, the Sonics were a big deal in Seattle, and I refinished Paul Silas’s living room furniture. Bringing the item to his home was interesting. First of all, meeting him. He is a very large man. I think I took him up to his belly button! Second, he literally had a half court in his living room. Seriously.

I loved school. I was meeting people, learning a lot and earning an income to pay for school. I also met and enjoyed a relationship with Sue Newcomb who I met at a Halloween Party in one of the Dorms on campus. We dated for about a year. She was a lovely girl from Portland and she introduced me to American ways of life. It was a fun fling. I got cold feet when she asked me to marry her in a back handed way. She said she could “make me a citizen….if I wanted.”

After a couple of years I took a job at Sax Floral, a nursery, where I made potting soil, maintained the greenhouses, watered plants, and delivered flowers. For both the furniture refinishing job and the nursery job I made minimum wage of $3.00 an hour. During the Fall I used to spend the daylight hours fixing broken glass on top of the greenhouse. I remember writing physics equations on the glass so I could memorize them.

I went to see the movie Deer Hunter with my friend Josh Levine. I was sitting next to a girl on my left, who was sitting next to her friend. Her partner and Josh both left at the same time to go get refreshments or use the bathroom, so I struck up a conversation with her. As she was leaving, she slipped a piece of paper into my hand – her name and phone number.

I called her and we agreed to meet for a date. A BBQ at her place. What was weird about that was that the guy who she went to the movie with showed up…they had an argument and he left….it turns out he was her fiance! She had just broken up with him….It was a little awkward at first…but Maryellen and I got along great and we were together for a couple years. We went to Vancouver one weekend to stay with our friends Frankie and Barry. We explored the city and on our way back, we were in a long line at the border. We were smoking pot and the car was full of smoke. Maryellen asked “why do they have borders anyway?” I answered “Oh you know, smuggling, drugs that sort of thing” We looked at each other and laughed. We were about 3 cars from the front. We opened all the windows and Maryellen put the small amount of pot under her seat. The border guard took one look at us and told me to get out of the car. I got out. He said to open the trunk. I opened the trunk. He went through our stuff and walked to the front of the car. My door was open, so he climbed in. He started poking around and finally came up with the little box I had made when I worked at the furniture refinishing place with a small amount of pot and a small pipe. Maryellen was crying. He said “Pull over there” so we did. They told us to get out.

Once out he said to me “we are going to go through the car. Are we going to find any more pot?” I said “no”. He said “If we do, you are going to prison” I told him that I understood and “no, there was not any more”.

They put Maryellen and I in a room together. About every 20 minutes, someone would come in and say something endearing like “we are going to throw the book at you”…Maryellen was not coping well.  I would tell her “think of whales swimming, think of eagles soaring” to try to keep her calm. I was freaking out too. I only had a green card and it could be revoked. But eventually a senior officer came in and asked me where we got the pot. At that time, in Seattle, it was legal to have an ounce.

“I got it on the street in Seattle” I told him

He said “you can go, don’t be this stupid again”

I said “yes sir, and we left before they changed their mind”

We laughed all the way back to Seattle.

Maryellen was a PhD music major who played early music on the piano and old instruments like harpsichords. She finished up at the UW and went off to UCSB to complete her PhD. and she invited me to come down to visit her…I never had the money to go since I was paying for school on minimum wage, so I didn’t go. But years later, when I finally did get to Santa Barbara, I realized if I had gone, I would never have come back. Its amazing down there.

Working at the greenhouse one winter, I was sweeping snow off the glass when one of the owners kids threw a snowball at me. It hit me in the face and I took a step back only to fall through the glass. I was up about 20 feet off the ground…it was going to hurt….I was falling and as I fell I saw a pipe going past my face so I reached up and grabbed it. It was a hot water pipe, but it wasn’t scalding hot. I swung a second and then dropped the remaining 5 ft down to my feet. I suddenly appreciated my gymnastics experience. Needless to say, the kid ran away and I got fired for “playing dangerously on top of the greenhouse”.

Maryellen asked me to make a commitment to her, but I just couldn’t. I was in school and had just been accepted into PT school and she was done. Plus she was in California pursuing her PhD, and she wanted me to come down to be with her. She gave me an ultimatum. Either come or she was going to join the Peace Corps. I said no, so she joined the Peace Corps and went to Kenya for two years. She ended up marrying a fellow Peace Corps volunteer she met while in Africa. We lost contact during the time soon after she returned.

I continued to ride my bike to school along the Burke Gilman Trail and I rode everywhere. My mom had a little Subaru that I got to drive around and then later a Datsun B 210 they gave me when I graduated.

After I was accepted to start in PT School the Fall, I took some classes that I was interested in. I took Astronomy which was amazing and I took Philosophy which I excelled in and I took Child Psychology which I enjoyed as well. I took the summer off and worked at Tasty Home Bakery where I made 1,000 croissants before breakfast each day. The baker was this 80 year old guy and he was married to a 20 year old woman. When they hired me, they said “we have two rules. Rule 1. Don’t eat the profits and 2. do NOT hit on the owners wife. I laughed at the time, but she had said this in all seriousness. One day I met her. A seriously beautiful and super flirtatious girl who got the attention of the baker because she could literally crack 4 eggs at a time! She used to follow me into the walk in freezer and tease me…but I needed the job and I always thought she was setting me up. So I never bit.

While I was in my freshman physics class, I met Karlene who was this amazingly beautiful half Indian girl that I was in love with. But she was seeing a boy named Stephan. Karlene and Stephan and I became fast friends, and spent a lot of time together. Karlene and I used to study physics at my place weekly. I was so infatuated with her. She knew how beautiful she was and she loved the attention I gave her. I never one time hit on her. I just adored her. She became an MD and married an MD and has and MD son. They live in Spokane now and all is well with Karlene.

Stephan invited me over one night to his amazing Queen Anne home that had floor to ceiling windows that looked over the city from the top of the South slope of Queen Anne hill. Karlene was there and it was the first time I smoked pot. I remember getting so damn high.

Stephan was an amazing skier. I had taken the “graduated length method” at Fiorini Sports in the U-Village. Learning this way, you got slightly longer skis each week until you were able to ski on regular skis. I went up on a bus with the program each week in the winter to Snoqualmie Pass, and bit by bit I learned how to ski. Then I asked Stephan to take me skiing. He did. To Alpental.

We went night skiing. I drove up to the pass. Stephan smoked pot. Once I got there, I did too. It was strong stuff. We got super stoned before we got tickets. I managed to get my ticket and stuck it carefully to the wire (It was the first time I had bought a ticket), only to realize that the wire needed to be on your jacket. Oops! Anyway we got to the lift I managed to board it without too much trouble. Everybody seemed to know Stephan. Well the lift went up. And it went up and up and up and up and then it turned a corner and went up and up and up and up. I was terrified. I literally fell down the mountain that night. Stephan in the meantime, was killing the moguls, taking jumps, doing tricks and so on. I went into the lodge cold and wet and embarrassed. Later, when Stephan had had enough, we went to the car and I discovered that in falling down the mountain, I had lost my car keys on the hill. Luckily, I knew there was a spare set and my folks were home so we called and asked them to bring us the spares. We hung out and got higher and higher waiting for them to arrive. They had never driven to the ski slopes before so it was a treat for them.

My uncle Eric, who had moved with his family to Seattle after being recruited by Children’s Orthopedic Hospital (now Seattle Children’s Hospital)  became a  US citizen and applied for Green Card status for us. The riots had been ongoing for a couple of months when we had a family meeting, and there was no end in sight. At that point, mom and dad had been to Seattle the year before and fell in love with the city, my sisters Susan and Carol were both married to Rex and Malcolm respectively, and because both had English passports, they were going to head to England. My brother Derrick lived in Capetown, and was thinking of leaving the country too. I had received, with Eric’s assistance, an invitation to do gymnastics at the University of Washington. So I was committed to leaving the country too. My mom wanted to go be with her brother who she was very close to, and my dad was not having a great go of it in Johannesburg after his business failed, thought “why not?”. We took a vote and unanimously agreed to make our way to the United States.

We had tea with my Aunt Helen Suzman, who was the only Progressive member of Parliament, and she told us that she was privy to the plans that the government had to commit genocide if things got out of hand. Those were dark days. She said “I can’t leave, but if you can, you should.”  With her blessing, we set about making application.

You have to get that in addition to being in a revolution, we were on a larger scale, in the middle of the Cold War at the time. There was fear of the domino effect of communism taking over Africa. There were communist insurgent movements in Mozambique and Angola, both former Portuguese colonies, Mugabe was turning Rhodesia into a fascist state and was confiscating farms of white farmers. One of my high school buddies, Mike Cowan, was a Rhodesian ex pat. The ANC was partly managed by and aligned with the Communist party and that was all wrapped up in the fear that the government played on. The South Africans fighting Cubans in Angola was really a proxy war between the CIA and the KGB. So all of this was the backdrop of my final year of high school.

The matric exams were brutal. There was a lot of stress. You went into the hall, where desks and chairs were assigned. You were allowed to have a pen and a pencil and a ruler, and a slide rule for math. Thats it. All the work you did to work out problems before you answered were to be in blank workbooks that they handed out. Then you turned everything in. I wrote pages and pages and pages. Once the exams were over, we were done. No more school.

Before the matric exams at one of our final assemblies, several kids rigged the speaker system to play Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” loud and the entire song played. We were pretty care free.

I remember only one thing about the graduation ceremony. The speaker gave us the best advice. He read Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” and he implored us to follow that advice….I have had that poem in mind since then.

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

After the exams, I took off and went to Europe to see my friends. I had a Euro-rail pass, a few hundred dollars in my pocket, a couple of places to stay in England and in Austria, so I took off from the South African summer to the bitter cold of the Western European winter. It was shocking….

I arrived in London and stayed in a youth hostel. I saw my cousins Alan and Revely and our friends Colin and his wife Linda who put me up.

I explored London and fell in love with the city. I saw Arsenal play Newcastle at Highbury, and was so happy. I pretty much spent all my money so I buggered off to Europe. In Europe I went first to Paris where I got horribly lost then onto Geneva, then Grunewald and then Zurich. I stayed at a youth hostel in Grunewald that was closed, but since I knocked on the door and had nowhere else to stay, he let me stay there. I wore everything I had and kept the light on and used all the blankets there were …it was still freezing…In Zurich I met Suzi Schmid the cousin of a high school classmate, and I purchased some snow boots.  I went off to Austria to meet Barbara and Suzi and Gunther. It was so great to see them. Barbara and Suzie were beautiful and wonderful people and Gunther was an amazing skier. They took me sledding and skiing and I failed at both, but we had a blast and we continued to stay in touch.

When I came back from Europe, I had matriculated and I started at the University of the Witwatersrand or “Wits” (pronounced “Vits”). I was only able to get into the College of Education because of my grades. I mostly hung out with my friends Errol and Eddie and Ruth. We were thick as thieves. We did everything together. Errol and Ruth had an on again off again love affair but we were all good together. We even took a trip to a mountain resrort in the Drakensberg together.

Errol went to the Yeshiva College and played on their soccer team. I was playing for the Arts and Sciences College team at Wits. We were a good side, and several of our guys played for the University side that was promoted into the National First Division of professional soccer a year or two later. Anyway, Errol’s team made it into a cup final and he asked me to come play for them that game because they were short handed. It turns out to be one of my all time favorite games. There was a big crowd, about 5 deep all the way round the field. We were playing in yellow/orange jerseys and the other team was in blue. A late game situation occurred when Errol, who was a good dribbler, took the ball down the right wing. I trailed him as he got into the other half. He was confronted by two defenders and I called for the ball. He back heeled the ball to me and I looked up to see David, a tall blond kid in the penalty area in good space. I hit a curling cross with pin point accuracy and he rose above the defenders to thump a perfectly timed and placed header into the near top corner. The crowd erupted. David and I were mobbed by the players and the fans. It took a minute to clear the field and the game restarted. After two minutes the ref blew the final whistle and we were Champions!

At university I took classes in Economics, Biology, and Human Anthropology mostly for shits and giggles because our Green Cards had come through and we had committed to leaving in September so I could arrive in the USA in time for the start of the school year at the University of Washington.

So while I was at University, I mainly worked with a magazine called “CRISIS!”. The premise was that there were atrocities occurring in South Africa all over, but they were not being reported widely. For instance, there might be a column inch in a local paper that said “Black woman killed by white farmer” and a short paragraph about it. That story would never get widely reported, and it was happening all over the country. The editors pulled all of those kinds of reports together into one 8 page magazine that we distributed around the city. I was involved in distribution. The paper was banned and the editors and publishers were disappeared.

When I went to get fingerprinted by the police for our Visa application, the cop said to me “We know who you are. Get a one way ticket”.

I went to class to hang out with my friends and to get a taste of university life, but it really was a break from reality. Mostly I just goofed off, went to parties, played golf, and fooled around with the girls I was dating, and I also worked on distributing the CRISIS magazine and I got involved with the RAG committee. Rag was a parade that the University Students ran through the streets of Johannesburg to raise money for charity. All the students would get dressed up in crazy costumes and they would parade around on these elaborate floats throwing candy at the kids and collecting small change from the observers. It was fun, and a really good cause.

With months to go before we left, my dad and I worked out a month long vacation in the bush at my Uncle Ernie’s place near the game reserve. My dad and I went with Ernie and Harold, riding range rovers to the farm once we got to the gate.

Gong to the bush meant there were going to be guns.

Guns were ever present in the culture. My friends all had pellet guns and by the time I was 16 many had more powerful rifles. Most of us hunted. I had not had the experience of hunting until I went to the bush with my cousin Harold and my Uncle Ernie and my dad. Ernie was an amazing man. He had suffered polio as a kid and had one gimpy leg. But he never let that interfere in his life. We went boating with him at the Vaal River and he took me and Harold to Mozambique one year to go fishing in Baseruto. We had to dig for a little crustacean called Gafoof to use for bait. One time Harold and I were walking through the forest by the beach and we came across an old man who looked sad and hungry. He rubbed his belly and asked in Portuguese for food. All we had between us of any value at the moment was a coin worth about 25 cents. I offered it to him and he indicated that he could not eat it by biting on it. Shaking his head, he walked off. It was really sad.

Anyway, Ernie had this land he called his “farm” up on the border of the Kruger Park. He had built a house on the top of a hill literally within site of the fence to the park. The fence itself was a 3 strand barbed wire fence about 6′ high. We had to take Landrovers over pretty rough roads to get into the area he called his “farm” where his house stood. What was amazing about his place was that he had built a self filling watering hole, a pond really, down below the house so you could sit on the deck and watch the animals come and drink during the dry season.

The most incredible experience Harold and I had, was a moment that I will never forget.

Harold and I went down in the Landrover to the dry river bed nearby.  Ernie had a team of men digging river sand out of the river bed to bring up to the house in order to fill in around the pool he had recently installed.

Harold and I were armed to the teeth. We had buck shot, snake shot and an elephant gun, a 458 rifle.

We parked the vehicle and walked the 30 or so feet to the rivers edge to greet the workers and ask if they needed anything. They were about 10 feet below us digging sand and loading it into a truck and so could not see behind us. We chatted with them a few minutes and then turned to walk back to the Landrover.

We froze.

Under a tree, no more than 30 feet away was a pride of about 12 or so Lion just sitting and laying around under the tree. it looked about like this…

My heart started pounding and I stopped breathing. The lion looked calm and non-threatening, but I said to Harold “don’t make eye contact, walk slowly and confidently to the Landrover…shaking in our boots, we made our way to the car. As we walked away I called down to the men in the river bed “Lion!” (they scrambled for the truck). Harold and I laughed as we drove back….What was incredible about that walk back to the Landrover was that the lion had passed between us and the car. We could tell because their spoor were present…they had literally passed 15 feet away from us and we never had any idea.

Another scary moment at the farm was when we spotted a Black Mamba in the tree by the house….Scary because the Black Mamba is nominated as the most venomous snake on earth.

Ernie shot it with snake shot and the laborers cooked it up and ate it. I never got to taste it though.

Anyway, one day (we were there about a month) Ernie said “Lets go get an Impala!”.

We loaded into the Landrover and the servants came along behind in a flatbed. We drove for a while till we spotted a herd not too far away. We parked and using the hood of the car as a rest, Ernie shot a buck with a single well aimed shot. The workers raced out into the field, cut its throat to kill it for sure and dragged it back. We loaded it into the flatbed behind and headed back to the house.

There we butchered the animal and hung it to age for a week.

We then made the best venison Stew and ate like kings the rest of the time we were there.

I had a moment of authenticity with my dad one evening. We were drinking heavily for me really, (I had only been drunk once before when our high school prefect class had gone to a pub with Mr. Collins on a weekend trip where I got shitfaced) and the national drink Cane, Lime and Lemonade (Cane Spirits are like Vodka, and by “lemonade” they mean “Sprite” which we called lemonade) was brutal. Ernie, who had massive arms since he walked around of forearm crutches, challenged me to an arm wrestling contest…it was an epic battle that I won in the end (I was pretty strong in those days). My dad was drinking and cheering us on along with Harold.

My dad was as drunk as I had seen him…and after the battle he said to me …. “are we doing the right thing?” meaning leaving the country for Seattle.

I had made up my mind I was leaving. I was facing 5-10 years in the military, which meant fighting to defend the White Supremacist government of the time. I had no intention of staying and defending the apartheid government. But for dad, I can see now, at his age, which is about how old I am now, that it would have been a big risk, and very scary.

I told him “yes, definitely!” but I could see that he was doubtful.

The next day, Harold and I were sitting on the deck watching a large Kudu Bull surveying the fence. The three strands of barbed wire topped out at about 6 or 7 feet. This Kudu wanted to get to the water hole (it was the dry season). He stood there for a few minutes looking and then suddenly he leaped from a standing start, cleared the fence and went to the water hole. It was amazing to see an animal that weighed over 1000 pounds clear the fence from a standing start.

After I came back from the Game Reserve, I almost immediately went to Cape Town to spend a month with my twin cousins, Cindy and Shelly, a couple of sexy twins a year older than me, and their big sister Lynne and my Aunt Iris.

It was magical. We stayed on Clifton Beach in a swanky apartment on the cliff and we had a blast. We took a weekend and went to Umhlanga Rocks where the people who’s home we were staying in had beach cabin and a dune buggy.

A month in the bush and then a month at the coast made me love South Africa in a way that I really never had before then. As a result, I left the country with some fresh regret.

We packed our possessions into a container. We gave a lot of our things away. We said our tearful goodbyes and we left on an adventure.

First stop, London, England!

Destination, Seattle, WA in the good ole USA!

Some Thoughts on Living in and Leaving South Africa

Living under apartheid in South Africa as a kid was a little confusing. As a youngster, we had servants Rebecca and Abbiott. Rose used to do the ironing. Rebecca often had her kids staying and I played with her kids till I went to school. I don’t remember their names and I never saw them again.

Everybody had a servant or two. There were lots of African men and woman in the white neighborhoods, and I learned later that in order for them to be there, they had to have their “passbook” – papers – in order.

I also saw police, white and black, arresting, almost exclusively, black men for no apparent reason (usually their papers were not in order).

Whites had red buses, blacks had green buses. Red buses often had a conductor collecting tickets and there was always a seat…the buses were mostly empty. Green buses were crowded. There were fewer of them, none were double decker, and there were fewer stops where they gathered which meant that people had to walk miles to get to and from work.

Amenities throughout the city were segregated. Drinking fountains, toilets, movie theaters, restaurants etc.  I remember when I worked as a waiter at Mr. Steak and all the kitchen staff was black…every single person. Not one black person ever ate in that restaurant.

There was a palpable fear of black Africans among white people. I remember one time when my dad was lost on the way to the game reserve. I was in the back of the car about 11 years old. He stopped to ask a respectably dressed African man directions. The man made an effort in broken English to explain. My dad was having a hard time following. The man said “I can show you” and instead of letting him get in the car, my dad simply gunned it and took off. I asked him why he didn’t take him up on his offer…he said nothing.

I got to go to Soweto one time in my life. My uncle, Anthony, was making a movie for a black audience and there was an on-location set where they were filming that John and I were invited to. I got to help hold the microphone boom…which made me a Grip for the day.

The experience was interesting. The part of Soweto that we were in was made up of small seemingly well kept houses. Not middle class by my standards of the time, but certainly not the tin shanty town that Alexander Township was. You could drive by Alexander Township and see it from the highway, and it was really poor.

The Africans were tribal, and there were lots of languages…the most common, Xosa, Zulu. and Bantu – and in addition to speaking several languages, African’s often also spoke English and Afrikaans. We used to go to the mines to watch tribal dances from time to time. It was a nation of so many cultures. There were all those African tribes, and there were the Cape Coloreds, and the Malays, and the Indians, and the Afrikaners and of course, the English…and then there were also Chinese and Japanese immigrants too.

Nelson Mandela was a mythical leader to most white South Africans. he had been in prison for most of my awareness. But Robben Island where he was in prison became known as Mandela University. In fact, the prisoners, many of whom became South Africa’s leaders, used the formation of a football club, Makena FA to formulate the government in exile.

Ghandi was the source of inspiration to Mandela and also Steve Biko, who was one of the founders of the Black Consciousness Movement, which had started holding sit down protests. Peaceful, non- violent activism. Well the weekend I left the country, Steve Biko was arrested, tortured and murdered.

With all the unrest and institutional racism, and the coming civil war where I would have to defend white supremacy, I was relieved to be leaving that place behind. At one level I was glad to leave and at another I wanted to see justice. In the end, I admit that It was a relief to get on that plane and have it take off.

I am from South Africa, but I did not align with Apartheid at all, and I was glad to be leaving.

London, England

We left South Africa on September 1st 1977. We arrived in London and spent the weekend seeing our cousins and touring the city. I made my way to Highbury to watch Arsenal play Southampton with my cousin Mandy, who happened to be in London at the time. We connected with our cousins Alan and Rev, and Ian and Janice before we boarded the Pan Am flight across the North Pole to land in Seattle. It was a spectacular 9 hour flight on a Jumbo Jet.