The next 10 years were a blur. Having 4 children under age 8 meant that we were basically logistics minded creatures. At one point, we realized that we had over 100 adults we were interacting with around our kids activities. Between teachers, coaches, extra lessons, music and so on, it was amazing. When the kids were little, it was mostly Melissa who was the primary care giver. As they got to the age of about 6, I came into my own as they took on sports and camping events. For example, all the kids participated in the Y-Guides (When Sam, the oldest participated, it was still called the “Indian Guides”. Anyway, there is a great campsite called Camp Orkila which is located on the tip of Orcas Island in the San Juan’s facing into the Straights of Juan de Fuca.
I loved taking the kids to the camp. There were lots of activities, like orienteering, rock climbing, air rifle, archery and so on. The camp was fun, only dads and their kids, and it was either an all boy or all girl camp. The kids went from age 5 to about age 8, which means that I got to go about 12 times. The ferry ride to Orcas Island is really spectacular as the ferry weaves between the islands.
In addition to camping with the kids, I coached their teams. All of their teams, except for swimming and water polo, which they got to enjoy at the Mercerwood Shore Club, a private swimming, diving and tennis club on the East side of the Island that we joined after we moved there. In any event, I coached soccer (what Americans call football), baseball, and basketball. I found it difficult to coach these American sports since I did not grow up with them, so I read books about the sports and watched the pro’s, the Seattle Sonics basketball team, which was great in those days, and the Seattle Mariners, who were crap mostly but had a good run at one point. In addition to coaching all the sports, I also earned my Soccer Coaching “C License” which had me coaching at Mercer Island High School where I coached the Freshman girls for one season, and then the JV girls team for about 4 seasons. There was one season where I was coaching all four kids soccer teams and the high school team. My daughter Mia was playing recreational soccer, Josh was playing his last year of recreational soccer, Quinn was playing Club Select and Sam was playing Premier soccer and of course I had the high school team. each team had practices and matches each week. Between work and coaching I was working like 20 hours a day it seemed.
I felt that I contributed to their lives in a really meaningful way during their formative years and it occurs to me as I write this now, that I was an excellent dad.
I took on being a dad with the view to exploring childhood through the eyes of my children. I was essentially an only child growing up, my sibs were 8, 9 and 12 years older than me. To be fair, I really did explore my youth newly as my kids grew up. We took them on trips to Hawaii, Western Europe, Colorado, California, Florida, NYC, Montana, Mexico, Canada and more. In addition, we made sure they all had music or art, played sport and that we had dinner as a family each night. Our purpose was parenting.
This of course meant that our relationship was not a priority. The result of that was the massive distance that was created between us by the time Mia was about 3 years old. From that point forward, there was practically no intimacy between us, and certainly no sex. For the last 10 years of my marriage I was depressed. I gained weight, drank more and generally kept to myself at home (watching cooking shows). I coexisted with Melissa, and felt the pain of her contempt.
I was feeling ambitious, and because I had been staring at that piece of dirt for years, I hired a landscape architect to help me design the hardscape. I had sat with those plans a while, when at a party one night, I met a guy who sold landscape rock. I went to work and started shopping for rock. I rented a digger and went to work. In the end, it looked great! I had built a patio! I was very proud of it too.
I mostly did the work myself, but did get help from a couple of contractors for the technical work like to properly construct the wall and luckily, my rugby friend Ryan was able to lay the slate professionally. I loved doing this project and really enjoyed the result. In the end it added value to the house which looked like this at the time before I took this on.
It was not long after I completed that project that Mia graduated from high school where Melissa and took her off to school across the state. We went on an extended road trip to Yellowstone after we left Wall Walla (the town so nice, they named it twice,) and it was on that trip I do believe that Melissa made the determination to leave me. She said otherwise, but it was downhill after that. Her behavior toward me deteriorated to the point of abuse. She was rude, disrespectful, cruel and unkind. I did what I could to cater to her as she pulled away. I was under no illusions, and was clear that we were not going to stay together. That was crystal clear. The last straw occurred when she went off to the Bahamas with a girlfriend, and while there contracted a bladder infection. I took care of her when she returned, but something happened that precipitated her stating that she wanted a divorce. She had fractured her right shoulder in a bicycle accident a few weeks prior to her vacation, and we she returned, after we dropped off her friend, we went to the Roanoke, a local pub, for dinner. I was sitting to her right at the bar. When our dinner came, we began to eat, and our elbows touched, which unfortunately lit up her shoulder fracture. She freaked out and started screaming at me at the top of her voice in this crowded pub. I was mortified. “Don’t talk to me like that, and keep your voice down.” I said to which she responded, “I’m leaving.” and she got up and walked out. I quickly paid the bill and followed her out. She was standing at the car so, I unlocked the doors and she got in. We drove home in silence. We walked in and I went to the living room to sit and lick my wounded pride. She walked in and sat across from me. “I want a divorce” she said as matter of fact.
I said, “Thank you for being straight with me for the first time in your life.”
The next few years were a real challenge to navigate. My children abandoned me, which hurt a lot given how much I had committed to them and supported them throughout their lives. About the most most important thing I did at that time was register for Landmark education. I remember the gasps when I stood up to share and said, “My dog died, my mom died, my house flooded, my marriage of 30 years ended when my wife left me and my business of 30 years failed all during the last 6 months.” It was through Landmark education that I chose to live an authentic life, and I made the choice to live into the distinction of the teaching. I finally met Heather, who, after a period of courtship, became my lover and constant companion. The almost 7 years since we became lovers have sped by. That pretty much brings me up to date at the time of this writing. Heather and I are happier than either of us had ever been. We have such a beautiful relationship. From when Melissa and I first talked about divorce, as well as during the process of getting divorced all the way till Heather and I moved in together, my life was messy. Now all that has changed and while my kids adhere to their group agreement to have no contact with me, after 9 years of that, I am at peace with it. I have resigned myself to the knowledge that they are firmly in their mothers camp. Its their loss because they have never known me while I have been this happy and fulfilled. I am living my best life. I am blissfully happy, I am in love with my beautiful, sexy hot fun partner, and we are living a transcendent life of bliss.
In 2024, Heather and I got married. We both consider it our first marriage even though we were both married before. The reason is that we are seeing ourselves newly and marriage newly and what we are up to is nothing like anything that we participated in in the past. So, yes, it;’s really our first marriage.
I drove down to find a place to stay and I got a killer apartment near the Rose Garden on Vista drive. It was the 3rd floor of a big old house inhabited by a retired doctor and his wife. They had had twin sons, so, they built out the upstairs apartment for them. I worked at Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children for 6 weeks and then the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center. It was there that I met a girl named Vicki that I fell head over heels in love with. When I came back to Seattle, she came and spent a week with me and I asked her to marry me. She said no. (Ironically she was in a long term relationship at school – she went to Stanford – with boy who’s name was also Neil. Anyway she felt like she had promised herself to him, and so she declined. I was her summer fling.
Back in Seattle I did my last internship at Harborview Medical Center. I had worked there on weekends as a PT Aide, so I was familiar with the PT clinic on the rehab floor. But my clinical was rotation was on the Burn Unit and it was there that I met Melissa. The way that meeting went was like this. I had noticed her because she was beautiful and she seemed to laugh a lot. She was working as the ward secretary and I was a student PT. I had patient I was working with who had a closed head injury and one day she was alone at the desk as I walked Charlie by. He said to me randomly looking at my name tag “Say, did you ever try those Neil Chasan drugs?” I laughed and said to Charlie, “No Charlie, but see that cute nurse sitting over there behind the counter? (we all wore scrubs on the Burn Unit) Go ask her that!”
So he walked over to her and asked her….”Did you ever try those Neil Chasan drugs?” She said “what are you talking about Charlie?” I jumped in and said “He is talking about me…he is asking if you have tried me…” She laughed.
Later, I asked her out on a date. She was tall, 6′, blonde, and beautiful. Kinda my dream girl. We agreed to go see the movie “An Officer and a Gentleman“. Well I picked Melissa up at her condo and we started to head to the movie but it was a beautiful late summer afternoon and the lake was golden like On Golden Pond, so we decided to get teriyaki to go and to go have a picnic on the water’s edge.
We were laying on the blanket talking and getting to know each other when we discovered we had the same birthday. I mean exactly the same birthday. Well we worked out the time difference and we figured out that we were born about 10 minutes apart. We smooched a bit and we talked till dark, then I took her home. When I got there and was getting ready to go she said “dont leave”.
We literally had one date. I moved in and that was that. More or less. Melissa was going to school in Spokane and I was not quite done with school, well I was, but I had to take my Boards and get a job and find a place to stay and so on. So for the next 6 months or so we dated across the state. One week I would drive over and one week she would. He had this little 1600 chevy that ran out of oil one day up at the pass and I had to go tow her into town.
Probably the most significant thing that occurred during that time was in 1982 I became a US Citizen. The process involved taking a class to get familiar with US Civics, American History and to take in the culture. I remember the final interview at the State Department one day. A dour and very humorless man asked us questions like “Who is your Representative in Washington?” and “What at the Cabinet positions and who are the Cabinet members?” and the question I guessed at but had no awareness of the answer to “what do the colors on the American flag stand for?” (“The colors of the flag of the United States of America; White signifies purity and innocence, Red, hardiness & valour, and Blue, signifies vigilance, perseverance & justice.”). Well we passed the test in spite of my wrong answer, and we went to a Chinese Banquet hosted by Dr. deLateur at Harborview, who was the Head of Rehab, and who loved my mom and me. The banquet was amazing. One amazing dish after another, beautifully presented and shared at the table by the dozen or so people in attendance. By the end, I think the 10th course, the waiter would bring out an amazing platter of food and show us and we would all murmur our appreciation, then he would take it away. It was the most incredible eating experience of my life to this day.
I graduated from college and took off to see my friends in Switzerland and Austria. It was a great trip. I got to see my sisters who were living in London. When I showed up and Sue’s place, she was not aware that I was coming, I had wanted to suprise her. I knocked on the door and when she opened it she started jumping up and down and screaming. She hugged me and kissed me and made me feel welcome. I remember helping Rex wall paper the bathroom. I have this image of him in the empty tub, admiring his work. A few days later I took a boat train to Europe where I had the following experience. The day started out crazy. Rex, my brother in law, drove me to the train station. But he took me to the wrong station. So we had to run a few blocks to the right station. He was wearing sandals that had an opening on the top of the foot and a pigeon shit into that very spot as we were running…he was cursing and running carrying a bag for me. Anyway, I got on the train and transferred to a ship and off we went. I met this amazingly beautiful French girl, Natalie Cohen, and we got a along great. She invited me to meet her parents when we landed. So we landed and she had a heavy bag which I carried for her. She took my camera bag and was ahead of be because of customs. Well I didn’t have a French Visa, so they stopped me. I had her bag and she had my camera….I waited till she made her way back and we exchanged bags, hugged and cried and we went on our way. On the boat on the way back, I connected with a Greek fellow who had a big bottle of Ouzo and he got me and several people around us seriously drunk. A full 24 hours passed and I was back in London. I rebooked my ticket through Holland and tried again.
I arrived in Zurich and hung out with Suzi Schmidt for a few days, then went on to Austria to see my friends. I met Suzi at the train station in Vorarlberg. She looked sad and I asked her what was wrong. She told me that Barbara had accidentally shot and killed Gunther when they were playing with her dads Luger that they had found. It had a single bullet in the chamber and it had pierced his heart. He had died pretty much instantly. She was in an asylum and I could not see her. I was devastated. I made the most of my time in Austria, it was so beautiful there.
Suzi was a senior in high school, so, she invited me to come to her class for the day. I went and was asked to talk to her class about life in America, which I did. The kids all spoke english well enough to understand me. I went to parties with her and then her boyfriend drove me to Heidelberg in Germany where I could catch a train to Frankfurt. The Train ride along the Rhine was amazing. The castles are really quite incredible.
I had the good fortune to sit next to a man who spoke English, and who, it turns out, was an historian. He told me the history of every single castle along the voyage. I returned to the states after saying good bye to my sisters in London. I remember the last night in London. I wasstaying with Carol and Mal, and had made friends with the neighbor, she was 19 and super cute and she came over to say good bye. She hung out with me for a while and we shared all sorts of stories.
I came back and applied for a job in various places.
I planned on staying at my parents at least till I got a job, and I was lucky to get a job pretty quickly at Harborview Medical Center as a first year PT. My job was interesting. I was replacing the Chief who was out on leave and I got to have several rotations. I was to spend 3 months on the Rehab floor, 3 months on the Acute Orthopedic floor, 3 months on the Burn Unit and 3 months on Outpatients. The funny thing is that my first rotation was in Rehab replacing my mom, who was moved up to Acting Chief and my very first patient, Sheri, was an acute polio patient who contracted the disease from her baby’s live virus inoculation. It was crazy. She was in a lot of pain at first and I remember her crying…”I don’t want you, I want your mother…” It’s funny now, but then it was very scary. Nobody in the hospital had ever seen acute polio and nobody knew what to do for her. She and her amazing husband Rusty and I became good friends.
I continued to sail the Yellow Bucket with Bobby and Roland, and race Bravado on weekends again, but now there was a new twist. I was seriously dating Melissa and so my weekends were often occupied. Melissa finished school and moved to Seattle. She shared a house with a few nurses and I often spent the night there. Eventually, the home owners son came back from school so Melissa moved out I was in a house with a couple guys, Dave and Vern that Melissa had found for me, and Dave decided to sell the house so we were both homeless at the moment. We decided to get a house together. So we found this tiny little house on 81st in Greenwood, I cant remember the address. We lived there for a while.
Anyway, we campaigned the Yellow Bucket around the western region and qualified for the National Championships. In our last race of the series, we were out in front with a new suit of sales, and as we rounded the final mark just as we were taking down the spinnaker, a screw sheared off the diamond spreaders and our mast folded in half. It was a wooden mast and so the sharp splinters tore through our sails. Melissa happened to be watching us through a telescope when it happened. We were devastated. Well, Roland secured a new mast and got the sales repaired just in time for the Nationals.
We drove to Flathead Lake in Montana, stopping in Spokane to stay at Melissa’s parents home. It was very intimidating meeting Melissa’s parents. Her dad was a Presbyterian Minister and quite religious and I was this short Jew from Africa. Bob, her dad, was a recently retired Commander in the US Navy. I was quite intimidated to be honest. I don;t think he said 10 words to me.
We drove on to Flathead and camped out while we raced.
The first day we got there, there was a lot of measuring of the boats. Thistles are a one-design class which means that every boat has exactly the same stuff. Nobody has a technical advantage and so the result is due to boat handling and tactical skill. It was fascinating to watch this process both as an observer and also as a participant. We had a new mast and a newly repaired set of racing sails that we tore up when we demasted during the last race, and so we had to sail the boat to tune it up. The trouble was that there was really heavy air. It was howling.
Flathead was a long lake and as the mountain sides heated up, the air was sucked up the lake caucusing massive rollers at the end of the lake where the race was. So we had this 6 and 10 foot rollers coming in and 40-60 mph gusts and it was hairy!
At one point were heading down wind wing on wing with all three of us literally standing on the stern to keep the nose out of the water so we didn’t pitch-pole . The gust died a little and I dived to the mast to let the Mainsail down. Like the other boats in the water (there were a few), we just rode out the worst of the storm.
The first day of races had us racing an Olympic course in the morning, which meant light air. The cold air tumbling off the mountainsides set a steady breeze of about 10 knots with little variance and that meant all 100 boats on the starting line wanted to be at the same spot of the line at the start. We jockeyed for position but got skunked in dirty air at the start and finished 52nd overall. The Olympic class racers who were there crushed the race. The next day, the race was divided into two fleets. We were in the second fleet of 50 and as a result our races were very competitive. In fact, we won the last day light air race as the pictures below illustrate. It was very gratifying to be so competitive considering it was only our second year on the boat. ‘
These pictures were taken at the Nationals on Flathead Lake. In the image on the left, we are in the middle leading the race and in the image on the right we we are on the right covering the boat behind us. We won the race, our only win of the week. Melissa and I went on to Glacier National Park since we were all the way over there. It was amazing.
Over the next year or two we more or less lived life. I took the engine of my car apart when it started blowing blue smoke out the exhaust. I picked up a Haynes Manual and diagnosed that I had dropped a head gasket. I took the head off and took it to a shop to get skimmed and reinstalled it. I started the car up feeling accomplished and blue smoke came out the exhaust. I was stumped. With sense of failure, I drove the car down the street to the gas station to put gas in the tank, and as I was going in to pay (you could not pay at the pump in those days), an old man sitting on a coke box said to me as I walked by “you need a new automatic transmission modulator”. Just like that. I was like “Huh? what’s that?” so I went home and pulled out the Haynes Manual and looked it up. It was a little piece attached to the exterior of the transmission housing that took me a few minutes to remove and replace once I had a new one, and it cost about $23.00. I installed it, and cautiously started up the car and VIOLA! no blue smoke. I felt great. This is pretty much the color of the car I had…kinda ugly, but a very cool car.
My brother had started working at Chateau Ste Michelle, and so I bought a couple of cases of wine…Melissa freaked out. She was worried I was an alcoholic… it was sort of funny in retrospect when it actually took us years to finish the wine.
My relationship with Melissa continued to grow. We were living together in that little house in Greenwood. I had started my own practice doing home care after my stint at Harborview came to an end. My class mate, Tim Cavender, who worked with me at Harborview, and I had taken a couple of classes on starting a private practice together, so we set about creating our business identity. My parents were freaked out. “Where are you going to get your patients” they fretted. But not knowing what I didn’t know, I pushed ahead undaunted.
One day, Melissa’s sister Carol and her future husband Ray were over and I had been shopping for a diamond for Melissa and I gave it to her as a gift. She freaked out. We were engaged.
Now to be fair, Melissa and were struggling to get to clarity in our relationship. We loved each other and at the same time, we struggled with the Christian/Jewish thing. We struggled with our different way of arguing. I liked to argue and was righteous about it, and her family didn’t argue and were righteous about it. Melissa was very controlling and I hated that. I found it very hard to overcome, and add to that, that half her family were hard core evangelical Christians, I was dealing with an up hill battle to be complete about it all. In truth, we didn’t fight “well”. At times we would go on long car drives in order to make us sit next to each other and talk.
One time, we drove down to Disneyland, the happiest place on earth we got mouse ears. We had a blast. We liked the Oregon Coast, so we went car camping along the coast, almost dying one night from stupidity.
The situation was that we parked the car at the top of these cliffs. We walked down the stairs to the beach. The high tide line was a really long way away from the foot of the cliffs. There were lots of logs and then the tide was well out. We hiked around the cliffs to a slightly higher spot where it looked like the sea had not been in ages, and we pitched our tent. We went to sleep and at about 3:00 a.m., I had a dream I was on a submarine. I woke with a start and heard water. I went out of the tent and the ocean had filled the bay, we were stranded. The water was kissing the little hill we were on and occasionally a wave would push up on the mound where our tent was. I didn’t know what to do. Melissa was asleep. Should I wake her? What would we do? I sat there watching the waves, thinking at best we could hug the foot of the cliff and make our way back to the stairs leaving our stuff behind so we could move quickly. If the water started to fill in, we would have to go now. I watched the water closely, it seemed to have reached its high mark. Over the next 3 hours I watched thankfully as it gradually receded. The logs that were so far away had moved up the beach to almost the foot of the cliffs. We were really very lucky.
I had taken a communication course by Bob Weyant at Harborview called “Communication Skills for Supervisors”. Bob was an Industrial psychologist, and his work was super interesting and well conceived, so Melissa and I tried to practice the communication techniques for ourselves. But it wasn’t enough, so I asked Bob for a referral, and he referred us to a counselor. A guy named Gill Sandy who was not terribly sympathetic to our struggles and more or less said “You are not compatible, you should not get married.” I remember the last occasion we saw him, sitting in his office, Melissa taking off her ring and handing it to me and leaving the room in tears. I went after her and asked her to reconsider. “We can work it out” I said. She agreed to try to work it out. We seemingly loved each other and we wanted to make it work. I really should have listened to him.
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.
We arrived in Seattle on September the 4th of 1977. It was a beautiful day. Going through Customs as we entered the country, we dealt with an immigration agent who was an old hippie with long grey hair. He went through the forms one by one and when he came to one particular form, the one that said that if there was a draft, I agreed to be drafted. He took 10,000 pounds off my shoulders. Or at least if felt like that is what he did. Instead what he did was tear up the form saying ” we don’t have a draft in this country”. It turns out that just prior to our arrival, Jimmy Carter had cancelled the draft, which had an amazing impact on me. I had grown up with the idea that I would serve in the military for most of my 20’s and now that was gone as a consideration.
We went through customs and came out of the door to see Nicola, Terry and Jo along with Eric with a big bunch of balloons welcoming us. We got into Eric’s big green station wagon and he drove us to his home in Laurelhurst in the NE section of Seattle. We went on the Express Lane which was largely in a tunnel so I did not really get a glimpse of Seattle until we emerged and I could see lakes and water and green everywhere.
We pulled into their neighborhood and it was very clear that people were milling around, playing with Frisbee’s in the street, washing their cars, and so on…my impression was that the whole city was on vacation. I didn’t know that it actually WAS a public holiday.
Eric and June had a beautiful home in Seattle, with a wonderful view of Lake Washington and Mt. Rainier. They had invited friends, Bob and Marilyn, Beth and Marty, Gene and Rachel, who my mom and dad had met the previous year and we got adopted into the extended Seattle family. Eric and June had a spectacular view of the Lake and the Cascade range, and it felt really good to be here.
We lived in an apartment in the University Travel Lodge across from the University Village shopping center while my parents searched for a house.
I got a job painting the interior of a big old house in the University District with a woman in her 50’s named Virginia. She was wonderful. She had a southern accent and was married to her psychiatrist husband who practiced in the house. I hardly ever saw him. But Virginia and I talked and talked as we prepped and painted. She introduced me to a French Press for a delicious coffee blend she had concocted from this little coffee store in the U Village – Starbucks. At the time, there were two stores. One in the U Village and at the Pike Place Market. Who knew?!
I loved Seattle immediately. It’s a beautiful city, in a beautiful region, and there were no troubles like existed in South Africa. People were seriously chill by comparison. Terry and I hung out, we trained together. Terry was a top ranked cross country skier and was getting ready to head to the East Coast for college. It was really great to have my cousins in town.
Eric told me that I had to “show up for a test on Saturday” at an address he gave me and an appointed time. I didn’t know what it was, and it turned out to be the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or the “SAT”. and I had no idea what that was. I completed the test and scored well enough to secure my entry into the UW. I went to the college to register for classes.
My dad and I had an interesting experience that sort of illustrates what the change in culture was like for us. We went to buy a car and he and I were both amazed that every person we dealt with was a woman. South Africa was as sexist as it was racist….so the bus driver, the car sales person, the insurance sales person, the bank loan officer – all women. My dad and I actually talked about both that that was the experience and also that we were amazed by the experience of seeing women in those vocations.
My first day of school was the next day. The very first person I encountered on campus was a carpenter. She was a woman too and I realized what a different country I was in.
My first class at the UW was The History of the United States since 1940 lectured by Otis Pease. It was a brilliant class that gave me a context for the United States that I had moved to. You have to understand that in South Africa we had no American history at all. All we really knew was what we had seen in Hollywood movies. American history since 1940, the war years, WW2, Korea and Vietnam as well as the shifts in culture here at home with the Civil Rights moment and Title 9 made for an interesting introduction into the then current context.
I will say that I found the Seattle Times and Seattle PI to be very regional newspapers with little international or national news. Growing up in South Africa had made me hungry for news of the larger world.
I also registered for Math 101. This was a lecture delivered in Kane Hall…There were 1000 people in the class. It was really hard to get my head around a class that big – bigger than my entire high school. I made the point of sitting at eye level with the professor so that when I had a question, he would see me.
It was hard trying to get used to dealing with foreign grad students who didnt speak English. In my Chemistry class, for instance, my first TA was from China and literally spoke no English. My second one was from Italy and barely spoke English. I almost failed Chemistry as a result.
I used the money I made painting Virginia’s home to pay for school and to buy a bicycle and I rode my bike to school every day for 5 years. It wasn’t a long ride, but it finished with a stiff up hill climb both ways. The campus was huge. There were 35,000 students there every day and lot and lots of buildings.
As a Freshman, I had to go see the Freshman Adviser….a meeting that had a profound influence on my life.
I don’t remember the name of the woman I talked to. She asked me what I was interested in? I said “sports medicine and computer science” she said “There are no jobs in computer science”. And that was that.
I mean this was 1977 and at the very moment there probably were not that many jobs in computer science…but she directed me to PT where there were presently 40,000 jobs open in the USA. I figured that because my parents were struggling to get settled. My dad was having a hard time finding work, and my mom didn’t have her license yet, it made sense to go into a career where I could get employment quickly, so I agreed with her assessment and made the decision to pursue the pathway to PT.
I can’t help thinking how differently my life might have gone if I had pursued computer science back then.
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.
A couple of months before the matric exams, I was at a Highlands Park soccer match one Saturday afternoon in June. After the match I was walking across the field and a black kid grabbed my arm. It was the kid I went to Germany with who I sat with on the train. He said to me “Its time to leave” I asked why and he said “we are going to burn the country now”.
I was taken aback by that but I didnt really understand.
On Monday morning our assembly was interrupted and all the kids were sent home.
The tensions were incredibly high. There was a massive police presence. At night you could hear machine gun fire in Alexander Township on the northern boundaries of the city. People were scared. Everybody. Nobody knew what was going to happen.
I talked to Philemon, the worker at the apartment building were I lived. He said it like this…”I wont be killing you Neil, because I know you and you are a good person, but the boy next door, he will kill you, and I will kill his baas (boss)”
Everything had changed.
Where ever you went after that, shit was tense. You looked over your shoulder. You were less likely to walk around alone. It was not good.
And it was in that backdrop that we were getting ready to do our exams. Suddenly, the army seemed like it was seriously some place you didnt want to go. I mean we knew that you could get sent to the border, but that war seemed to be winding down. Nevertheless it was unsettling.
The African’s were angry and more free to express themselves. I got into an argument with a black man at the corner cafe one day. I don’t remember what started the argument, but it was most likely an argument over the pinball machine. All of a sudden he attacked me. He was a street fighter and he came at me kicking and punching. I had never been in an actual fight before so I did what I could to defend myself. I blocked what I could and punched and kicked where I could. I had rudimentary karate skills having been trained by Errol who was a black belt a little, so I hurt him on occasion with well aimed punches and kicks. I was really lucky though. He was kicking my in the nuts using his right foot, which swung up and to his left so he kept kicking me in my upper right thigh in the groin area. It turns out that I was wearing a bathing suit that day, and my nuts were hanging down the left side of the suit while my penis was on the right. He kicked my penis about 20 times hard. Finally I hit him in the throat hard enough that he backed off and two guys grabbed him and pulled him away because someone had called the police. I limped home and put ice on my penis.
The next day or maybe a day or two later, I was on a tour of the nuclear power plant with the school and I was in the bathroom taking a leak when the teacher came in. Mr Dal Bianco. I showed him my blue penis and he laughed his ass off. I really was very lucky…and he was too because I never called the cops or threatened him. I saw him again a few days later and we shook hands and made apologies….crazy.
After the rioting started, the country settled into what felt like a siege. The news from the townships was shocking. We were living in a war zone. You could see smoke and hear gunfire sporadically. It was very stressful.
In my Junior year (9th Grade), 1975 I was selected to the South African Gymastrada Team. A team of about 450 gymnasts from around the country of all colors. We went to this massive gymnastics display event in Berlin, West Germany. The reality was that South Africa was banned from international sport at that time. So we could not compete, but we could do a display. They selected 4 kids, two boys and two girls from each region. I was the best age group male in the Southern Transvaal, so I got picked. This picture is my high school pic of the kids who were selected to represent Southern Transvaal at regionals. I had a huge crush on Shanie James.
We did a display of floor activities with about 180 kids on the field. It was great. We flew into Berlin on a 737. At that time, West Berlin was surrounded by East Germany and you flew in on a specific corridor and dived into the city almost straight down. Being in West Germany was amazing. It was a super liberal city. Hash everywhere, porn everywhere, hippies everywhere, pubs serving kids and so on. At the same time, we were staying across from Spandau Prison where Rudolph Hess was still a prisoner of war.
The event occurred in the Olympic Stadium. It was quite dramatic. To march into the stadium knowing that Hitler stood there and Jesse Owens ran his race there…it was surreal. Especially while we were getting ready to march. The statues outside the stadium were definitely fascist in nature. Marching into the stadium was a trip. Our country was announced and there were massive protests to our entry. It was a bit crazy watching police hit people with batons for protesting against South Africa in Germany.
The event was cool, but touring into East Berlin across Checkpoint Charlie was special. The city literally looked like the war had just concluded last week. There were still bombed out buildings, and Russian flags hanging everywhere.
Check point Charlie was interesting too. Barbed wire and very serious guards who looked very very very closely at your passport
The flight home was eventful too. First we stopped in Greece and I had a window seat so I got to see the Acropolis as we came in to land.
We refueled there, and left for Johannesburg. I sat next to a girl I had a crush on and we cuddled the whole way back under a blanket…it was kinda fun. As we approached Johannesburg, the plane seemed to be running out of fuel. I say that because the pilot would gun the engines, then seemingly shut them off and glide, then gun them again and so on. It was like being on a long roller coaster ride. People were tossing their cookies all over the plane, but we eventually landed and the Captain said “sorry about that, the co-pilot was practicing” – a likely story.
At the gymastrada, I met my Austrian friends, Barbara and Gunter and Suzi. I went to Austria to see them when I graduated high school. More on them later.
I had a couple of great experiences in high school by participating in a couple of camps. One was a gym camp that I went to after I came back from Germany. A lot of the kids that went to Germany were there, and I was as good as or better than most so I got a lot of respect as a gymnast. I remember one day the boys having a competition to see who could climb the most flights of stairs on their hands. About 50 boys participated. I managed 4 flights and won the event tied with another fellow who’s name escapes me. the camp was an an army base. At gym camp one night, we were horsing around and this man in full military uniform came and told us to be quite because the men in the barracks had just returned from the border. We didnt understand why that was significant just then. A couple weeks after I got home, I was goofing around on my Short Wave radio searching for a station when I got Radio Moscow broadcasting to South Africa.
The reporter talked about how South African Troops were fighting Cuban Troops on the border of Angola and South West Africa (soon to be Namibia). I called my dad into the room to hear this and he was incredulous. But sure enough, over the next several weeks, we started to see news reports about how bodies were coming home in bags. Not long after that, Malcom and Rex were called up and Mal, being the good guy he is, kept Rex from having to fight by pretending he had cavities and needed dental work. We had all registered to go into the army and I was later called up to the Airforce, but with the country at war, it was an ominous future we were facing.
I continued to participate in gymnastics after Germany, and won the Southern Transvaal competition with 6 gold medals and I also won the trophy for the highest overall score and I was awarded Full Colors in gymnastics for a second year. I was captain of the gym team, a prefect and a high school senior. Even so, I was not in the best mental state for the Nationals where I was a favorite. I had not slept well, and had no mental energy. In many ways I had peaked at the S Transvaal meet. But I went to the Nationals thinking my chances for meddling was very good even though I had recently torn my rotator cuff on the rings (there is more to that story actually. involving being attacked by my big brother one day when he jumped me. That attack damaged my shoulder weakenign the tissue so that the next week, when I worked through my routine on rings, as soon as I pulled up, I felt it tear through). In fact, after that, I remember thinking “I wonder what its like to do this without shoulder pain?” Dealing with daily pain in gymnastics was part of the experience. I had broken my sacrum, had a few hard falls, sprained ankles, fractured my wrist and so on. Being in pain all the time had me develop a little mental trick to manage the pain. I imagined that pain was a red pyramid or triangle, and without pain was a blue circle or sphere. The game was to capture the red triangle, that expanded with increased pain, in the blue circle and then compress it down to a small little circle. It was something I got good at.
I arrived and greeted many of the kids I had seen at various camps, and we launched into the event. I fucked it up. I started the rings competition with the wrong move. I fell off the high bar and the pommel horse, and I stumbled on my landing on the parallel bar. I did manage a silver on the floor and a bronze on the vault. All in all it was a disaster.
The thing about being in top flight gymnastics in South Africa is that the sport was dominated by the Afrikaans.
You have to get that South Africa, as far as the white population was concerned, was really two countries. One a former British Colony, and part of the family of nations. The other, the Promised Land. The Afrikaans came to South Africa as settlers in 1652 or so, sent out of Holland by the Dutch..they were originally French Calvinists and the Dutch disliked them, so they put them on ships to South Africa. As far as they were concerned, South Africa was the Promised Land and they are the Chosen People.
When the Brits ruled, they rebelled. There were two Boer Wars (a Boer is the Afrikaans word for ‘farmer”) They largely kept to themselves. The countryside was mostly Afrikaans, and the cities, other than Bloemfontein and Pretoria, were largely English. The bottom line was that as the nation started to experience the spasms of revolution, the Afrikaans become sort of insular. It was for this reason that being part of their club, as I was naturally because of my gymnastics prowess, I got to be friendly with many Afrikaans boys and girls and was at one time fluent in the language. I remember my friend Errol had an Afrikaans girlfriend that he met somewhere, and he couldn’t speak the language fluently. So like Cyrano de Bergerac, I translated his phone calls in real time, expressing his love for her and hers for him.
When I was in Germany, many of the Afrikaans boys had never been close enough to a black South African as a young man to explore their hopes and dreams. I recall being in a compartment on a train in Germany with two Afrikaans boys and two African boys and being the translator. Although the African boys spoke Afrikaans, there was already a protest movement to stop using the language of the oppressor, so I “translated” for them, but more for the Afrikaans boys. Its fair to say that there was no understanding by the Afrikaans boys of the upset that the African boys had for the status quo. Everything was “as it should be” for the Afrikaans boys. They believed that God ordained them as the Chosen People and that everybody “had their place”. They literally could not see the injustice in the status quo. The two black kids looked at each other, exchanged a knowing glance and got up and left the compartment…I went after them and asked if they were OK. The one kid turned to look at me. He was clearly angry. He said softly “they will learn when the country burns”. With that, he turned and went after his friend. More on this fellow later.
When I came back from Germany, my parents went off to Seattle see Eric and June who had recently emigrated there after living in Johannesburg for several years. While they were there, I stayed with Carol and Malcolm. I had an experience with the Police that I will never forget. I was in the back of their car and we were waiting at a light to turn as oncoming traffic came by. There was a truck behind us, and I paid no attention to who was in the truck. The driver of the truck was being impatient and revving his engine and flashing his lights. Malcolm was not going to go ahead of oncoming traffic. The driver of the truck grew more impatient with his engine revving and light flashing…so I flipped him off….
We turned the corner, and the truck behind us followed but he turned on his blue lights…and we got pulled over. This young Afrikaans cop got out and and went after me saying “get out of the car, I am going to take you to the police station and teach you a lesson!” Mal was calm and he said “never mind officer, I will discipline him, thank you” and this went back and forth for a while…I was shit scared! Finally the cop relented and we went home…Malcolm, in only the way Malcolm could said “Now about that discipline, go get me a coke!” and then he laughed the way he did.
The other experience I had in High School that was formative was that I was named a Prefect. The Prefects more or less were the school cops. We had our own lounge and we got to give kids detention. We strolled the hallways and essentially were given the privilege of power that other kids didn’t have. It was a real insight into how the world actually worked.
As a prefect, there was a Head Boy and a Head Girl. They were invited to a leadership camp where other prefects from other schools were to gather for leadership training. Larry, our Head Boy chose not to go and it was opened up to the rest of us. I jumped at the chance, and volunteered for this week-long leadership training experience. It was probably the most significant High School experience I had if I am honest. For one thing, I got to know myself as a leader. Not only that, but I was a standout leader at the Camp. I was a leader of leaders. The prettiest girl, a girl named Karen, who went to a High School in a nearby town, was infatuated with me and became my girlfriend. I knew myself as potentiality lovable only because of her. Up until then I had lived inside of a story that I was not really lovable, I was more of a clown who made girls laugh. I had not really had a steady girlfriend up till then, although I had dated and kissed a few girls. Karen kissed me in a different way. I remember meeting her at the train station when she came to see me. She threw her arms around me and hugged me and kissed me passionately in a way that completely took my breath away. I was head over heels in love. It was a short romance though. Her parents were very very very conservative Christians and forbid her to see me (a Jewish boy). Nevertheless, I had a glimpse into what it was like to be the true-love of another human being and it was magical.
One thing that happened at that camp was that an Army General came to talk to us. He reminded us that South Africa was fighting communism and that “our enemy isn’t black, its red” as he put it.
Back at school I sought out girls who had shown an interest in me. I briefly dated Shaney James who was a gymnast, and a girl named Jenny from the year behind me who used to come watch me train in the gym every day. I was growing up. Even so, I never got passed first base. I was totally naive even though via my brother and my trip to Germany I had lot of girly magazines. Sex was entirely a fantasy to me.
I lost my virginity with Pam at a party one night when I was looking through the records choosing music to play. The stereo was in this boys room and the party was mostly outside. So I went in to select the next album and Pam walked in behind me and locked the door. She took off her shirt and said “I have been waiting for this moment”… I was shocked, and surprised and happy and scared and worried that I would ejaculate in her hand ….. it was a moment that I will never forget. Pam is still a good friend and is as beautiful as she was then. She actually came through Seattle soon after I had left South Africa and spent the night with me up at my Uncles cabin in the mountains. It was so great to see her and recreate that experience together. My cousin Nicola reminded me that she was awake when Pam came to my cot.
High school was really intense the last three years. The classes were hard. I was constantly taking extra math lessons to master Algebra, Trig and Geometry. My extra lessons teacher was a polish woman who was brutal and assigned the hardest work for me to do. I almost dreaded seeing her, but I appreciated her patient way of teaching me the difficult concepts. You need to understand that there was no such thing as a calculator when I learned Math. We actually learned with a slide rule. I remember the very first calculators that came out and they were simple, but could add, subtract, multiply and divide and they were the size of a good size book. I had gymnastics training almost 3 hours a day, I played soccer in the park seemingly daily. I played pinball at the corner cafe, I built airplanes and managed my fish tank. It was a busy couple years, and inside of that I was trying to figure out who I was as a sexual creature, and how to date girls.
While I had collected soccer cards as a kid, in High School we had Car Cards. We knew everything about cars. We quizzed each other and one upped each other and we knew it all. We were growing up! And soon all of us were driving.
When I was in my first year of High School, my cousins Terry, Joanne and Nicola came back to South Africa from the USA. Eric and June my Aunt and Uncle had earlier moved to the States and Eric, and anesthesiologist, had been recruited to come to South Africa and work on his incubator development. He returned and I got reacquainted with Terry and Jo and Nic. Terry is a year or so younger than me and Jo a couple years, Nic was more or less a toddler when they came back. Terry and I become fast friends and we played and played. Terry had this amazing collection of matchbox cars and Hot-Wheels tracks that we used to play with (that I later inherited for my kids)…my interest in cars started when I was about 12 I guess. Partly because of playing Hot Wheels with Terry, but mostly because my dad always worked on cars when I was a kid.
When I was about 16, I worked at the local movie rental place. My job was to rewind movies. The owner, a big fat gruff guy named Jeff used to give me all kinds of shit. He hated that I was in such good shape. He always tried to get under my skin. One day he called me to his office and said. “Do you have a gun?” I told him I didn’t. He said, pulling out a high-powered pellet gun – a Gecado – 50, and said “50 Rand”…I was surprised, it seemed cheap. (I just looked it up and found one on line for R5000 – about $400).
I said “deal” and went over and took the gun from him. He said, “Take it. You can work it off.” I asked if he was sure and he said he was.
That presented a problem. I had not asked my folks about having a gun. They were sensitive about guns because of my dad almost committing suicide. So rather than ask, I snuck it into my bedroom and hid it under my bed. To get it out to play with, I would put it out of my window, climb up onto the roof and go and get it. And to get it back inside, I would do the reverse.
It was a powerful pellet gun. I could accurately shoot a target within the size of a quarter as much as 60 yards away. Eddie had a pellet gun and the two of us used to go to the park to shoot at targets. I eventually gave the gun to Eddie when I left the country. More on guns a little later.
At about that time I was getting ready for my Matric Finals, These were 3 hour long final exams that covered 3 years work per subject. I had finals in English, Afrikaans, Math including Algebra (pre-calc), Trigonometry and Geometry , Science including Physics and Chemistry, Geography including South African Geography, Meteorology, Geology, and Biology including Physiology, Botany and Zoology. The exams were brutal.
I used to walk home with Heather Mirk. She was an English girl who was beautiful, soft spoken, really funny and super warm. She was the girlfriend of a guy named Barry who I think she married in the end. Heather and I used to talk about this and that related to classes we were taking on our walks. I loved Heather and had a huge crush on her and was insanely jealous of Barry. And even so I enjoyed walking her home and chatting.
Heather and Kathy Kaplan were fast friends. Kathy was the one girl who got caned in class. The teachers used to hit the girls on their hand with a ruler and Kathy refused. She used to sit in front of me and we used to kid around…One day the teacher called her up to punish her and she simply refused to hold her hand out and demanded that the teacher cane her. She was 17 years old, sort of a plane Jane but super bright. She literally bent over in front of the class and took a caning. She didn’t say a word. She walked back to her seat in front of me and sat. The teacher was speechless, as were all of us.
I earned Half-Colors in Form 3, the first year I was eligible to earn the equivalent of a high school letter. I remember it being a pretty big deal. The announcement was in front of the school at the school assembly, which happened every morning. We would gather in the quad (the netball courts) and the teachers would all stand up on stage. The entire school would then recite the Lords Prayer and sing the national anthem, and then there were announcements. I got my colors handed to me in front of the school in the morning. Then, I was called out to the front of the class in Biology the first day I wore the blazer (it wasn’t common to get high school colors, you had to be on the regional team Southern Transvaal to make it) and asked to tell the class about my accomplishments that had me earn a letter. I had won the Southern Transvaal championship that year and been on the team the previous two years. I was in effect, a star.
Between my second and third year of high school, for summer holidays (Christmas time), I am not sure how, but I got a job with a toy wholesaler to go into the major department stores and demonstrate a construction toy called “Plastikant”
You literally could build anything. It was only limited by your imagination. But is was during this time, sitting in the department store, near the Santa that I got to see Christmas in a new light. Being a Jew, up until then, I had only interpreted Christmas as a holiday where people put up lights and had cocktail parties. We used to go see the Zoo Lights as a Christmas treat. I never really understood Christmas gifts. I had only received one gift in my life till then. It was a bag of candy packaged in a stocking shaped bag that my grandma Frieda gave to me because she didn’t eat that candy.
We used to visit Grandma Frieda on occasion. She was my dad’s mom. She used a cane and mostly I just played with her colored coasters when I was a kid. I never really knew her.
The other thing that happened during those first couple years of high school was that Derrick, Malcolm, Rex, Howard and I got season tickets to see our favorite local team. Highlands Park
1973 Highlands Park. I LOVED this team. We had seats 5 rows up at the half way line behind the team bench and were quite intimate with the players. In fact, the back up goal keeper, not in this image, Eugene Kleinhans (which ironically means “small hands”) was a student teacher in the gym class, so I got to know him quite well. My favorite player on the team was Martin Cohen, who, besides being Jewish, was a great midfielder. Good on the ball, tireless, great vision and good shot. A great box to box player. The only drawback for Highlands, was that they wore Man United colors. I preferred them in black and white…LOL
This team, little later, with Albert McCaan, Chris Chilton and former England player, Barry Bridges, was a couple years later and just such a good side.
Eddie and I also used to build and fly airplanes. We started with U-line powered planes. We started with the P-51 Mustang Trainer
It had a little gas engine and about a 30 foot line that let you control the elevators. The rudder was set to have it pull away from you and it flow round and round and you could do various tricks with it.
This led us to start building balsa wood airplanes and eventually on to radio control airplanes. It was great fun.
Once I was in Form 3, about 15 years old, I started to get really good at gymnastics. I remember playing rugby for the high school U-16 team, and there was a situation where the play was on their 5 yard line. As the scrum half, I would put the ball in. The ball popped out on the blind side and with only one player to beat, I picked it up and made a dash for the line. I was sure I was in. What I didn’t account for, was that their flanker would spot me, disengage from the scrum and hit me from the side. He more or less crushed me. Naturally, I dropped the ball and then the 16 pairs of legs of the scrum more or less ran over me, kicking me in the head and knocking me out cold.
When I came to, the ball was at the other end of the field, and they were waiting for me to put the ball in. I staggered toward the scrum, and then I felt a hand on my shoulder. My gym coach Mr. Bam had walked onto the field and grabbed my by the shoulder…he said, walking me off the pitch…” Rugby is for watching, nobody should play it”…That was the last game I ever played.
That year, we had to do a project in Geography on were we would live in future. I had been looking at pictures of Vancouver, BC over at Frankie and Jan’s homes. They were Canadian girls who’s dad worked for Pepsi Cola in South Africa and they were friends with my sisters. Howard married Jan and Frankie married Barrie and they all lived in the same apartment block as Susan and Carol. Well I loved what Vancouver looked like and I did my project on living in Vancouver BC. I took a ration of shit about that from people who objected to the idea of leaving South Africa.
The other thing that made hanging out with my siblings significant to me was that Sue and Rex had a great record collection and the soundtrack of my youth was born there. I listened to Eric Clapton’s 461 Ocean Boulevard, Cat Stevens Tea For the Tillerman, Gethro Tull Aqualung, Dave Mason Alone Together, Van Morrison Tupelo Honey and other great albums that really sourced my interest in Rock and Roll and the Blues. Malcom’s Dad, Jimmy, was the RCA rep in South Africa, so I used to get his samples and by the time I left the country I had like 200 records. I brought the best of my collection with me to America.
My mom wanted to garden. So when an apartment opened up next door that had a yard, she saw an opportunity. We moved into the apartment building next door, going from being on the second floor of an apartment building to a townhouse with a yard. This was important for many reasons, the most significant being that my mom had a green thumb and loved to garden, and the other reason being that we loved to have people over for Sunday lunch and it had been difficult to do in the apartment. One of the first things I did there was cultivate an avocado seed to get it to root in a jar of water, then I planted the avocado tree at the bottom of the garden. In a few years we had avocados!
You can see in the picture above the apartment building on the corner, that was Marin View. Next door, to the left is Hiawatha. You can see the park to the left with the trees. That park had no trees when I was there and we used to play soccer and fly model airplanes there. The park to the right was a river valley really and not much good for sport, although I hit golf balls there. The building on corner of our block to the left with the white roof, was a bakery where they made the best kooksisters. and the red roof on the opposite corner from Marine View was the corner cafe.
I had the back bedroom with a porch off the back that was glassed in and it overlooked the garage area. My parents said I could make it mine, which was awesome. One day soon after we moved in, my dad said to come with him. I jumped in his car and he took me to a pet shop and be bought me a 2 ft fish tank, the odds and ends that go along with needing fish and a few fish. I quickly became expert at tropical fish. I read all I could and I spent as much time at the fish store talking to the proprietor about how to put a good tank together. I got sort of mental about it and found a 6 foot tank, and also bought another smaller breeder tank. My friend Eddie also got a 6 foot tank and we become super close around our fish
I started breeding purple cichlids
These were Egyptian Mouth Breeders and quite hard to breed. and I sold the fry back to the fish shop for a Rand each. I had about 20 at at time to sell them.
I painted the porch a shocking green to complement the fish. I had a Tropical Fish Factory. I was breeding Black Mollys, and guppies and had this amazing algae eating “shark” that I loved to watch.
I missed my dog, so I also got a budgie. Not a fair comparison, but I loved my budgie. He used to ride around on my shoulder. He was this green and yellow love machine.
I loved this little guy and even though he lived on the porch outside, I played with him every day. He used to crouch on my shoulder while I rode my bike and he chirped little love songs in my ear in a tone that was one of recognition. Later, I got him a mate when we moved into the apartment at Hiawatha. His mate was blue.
And I used to look in their cage every day for an egg. And sure enough, one day she had laid a couple of eggs. I was excited, and watched the incubation period with amazement and anticipation. One day I came home and there was a beautiful little turquoise budgie sitting on the stick next to his parents. I had not disturbed the eggs once I saw the mom incubating them, so I had no idea what the baby looked like. I had heard him, but not peaked. The delayed gratification was worth it.
Gradually, the parents died and I was left with the baby. He was being trained to be out of the cage and being the little one, flew away one day to my great sadness. I looked for him daily for months, but he never returned. I stopped keeping birds after that. One day as I was getting ready to leave the country, I heard budgie song and looked up into the avocado tree I had planted so many years before, and there was a turquoise budgie being a wild bird. Was it him? I don’t know…but it could have been.
I had other hobbies.
One day I went with my dad to a crafts fair. I am not sure why, but I got mesmerized by a woman making water candles. I immediately came home and purchased a bunch of wax, and Eddie and I started making water candles. I showed them around and a gift shop ordered some and also a Chinese restaurant nearby special order bright red ones that they purchased several for their tables.
Two events stand out for me during those first two years. The first was my Barmitzvah. I had taken extra lessons, gone to Hebrew school and prepared for ages. My Torah portion was Deuteronomy Chapter 4 vs 1-24
The barmitzvah itself was remarkable in one respect. I remember getting my tallit from my dad and him hugging me and kissing me on the cheek. It was the only time I remember my dad showing me affection up to that point or since, and it quite surprised me. Temple Emanuel was a reform shul so we read rather than sang the prayers. I completed the experience which was really to run the entire service and felt a great sense of accomplishment for doing so flawlessly. There was the Barmitvah Party where we had a DJ host a dance and I got to kiss a girl… I remember kissing either Gail Lashanski or Belinda Finch that night, but I cant recall which. We called it “getting off” as in “Gail, do you want to “get off”?” Then we would go outside, find a spot on the grass and lay down and kiss….we were so immature and it was very naive, but cute. I still have two gifts I got for my barmitzvah. One is the Guinness Book of World Records that I thumbed the pages ragged, and the other is a book called the Twentieth Century which I read cover to cover many times…its a big coffee table book, and it really informed me. In the Guinness Book, I especially loved reading about the crazy records people were up to in the Human Endurance and Endeavors section. You have to remember that this was LOOOOONG before the internet…so this sort of thing was magical.
The other major experience I had in the first couple years of high school was to go on Soccer Tour. This was organized by Benny Stalson at our temple, and he pulled together a bunch of kids from all over. Mostly kids who were from “the wrong side of the tracks”, and we would get on a train and go to Natal to play in soccer tournaments. I played my natural position as a central midfielder and captained the U-12 and then the U-13 teams the following year. The tour included kids up to U-16, but I only went those first couple years. It was a relatively inexpensive tour, so my parents could afford it. The journey was amazing. About 100 kids, many of whom were the kind of kids who look for and get into trouble, on a train, staying in hotels, free to roam a coastal town….We played in Durban, East London and also Port Elizabeth. It was so much fun. I remember the gambling on the train playing Klaverjas (pronounced “Clubby Ace”), a game that looked like, but was nothing like Bridge.
I had great experiences traveling with and playing on these soccer teams. I met and made friends with kids I would never otherwise encounter. Hardscrabble kids, many of them. They came to my defense once in East London, when I got picked on for being a Jew and some big guys started pushing me around. My soccer buddies stepped in and sent them packing. I came back thinking I was a tough kid. I remember that there was this one kid Alan, who lived in our apartment building, and he was always looking for a fight. So I agreed to meet him outside one day and have that fight he wanted. I remember being nervous standing there feeling like I was going to get hit, but I balled up my fist and hit him in the nose before he moved and he ran away crying. It was a relief. I don’t even think I hit him very hard. I felt bad about it though, and later I sought him out and took him to the cafe around the corner and got him an ice cream.
The cafe around the corner was run by a couple Greek guys who I became friendly with because I literally spent all my free time there playing the pin-ball machine “Doodlebug.” I still look for that machine whenever I see pinball machines.
I became a master of that machine and could ratchet up the games super fast. If someone was playing, you would put your tickie (5 cents) on the table top indicating you were next. I used to laugh because some people would put 20 coins on the table, and I would put one. I literally could play for hours with one coin. I would often sell my games to the next person.
I also used to spend my afternoons when I wasn’t doing gymnastics, playing soccer in the park across the street. There was always a game. Typically, there were about 20 African men, local workers, who would play and I would join in. That’s where I learned a lot of my footy skills.
I have two main recollections of my time in the Marin View building. Neither of them happy. The first was that my dad was depressed. His business had failed and he knew himself as a lesser man. He took a job with the Jewish Board of Deputies, which was essentially a fund raising job that he did at night. He spent most afternoons taking a nap. We were not terribly engaged, except we had dinner each evening and he did come to watch me perform in gymnastics. I remember that he tried to make a go with a multi-level company called Holiday Magic and he gave me Napoleon Hill’s book “Think and Grow Rich” which I read (and applied) much later in life. For most of my teen years, my dad occurred to me as sad and depressed. A shell of his former self.
The other memory was ultimately sad. I took a call on the phone one day from a stranger to hear the caller say that Pixie was dead. Pixie was my dad’s younger brother. He had been a big game hunter and was killed hunting elephant in Zambia. Pixie and Iris had three daughters, Cindy and Shelly who were twins, and Linda who was a couple years older. I told my dad that Pixie was dead and the anguish that caused him made me cry. I learned later that Pixie was killed by an elephant who ran her tusk through him before throwing up down wind. She then stomped a large area of bush looking for him, but he was eventually found up against a deserted ant hill. Very sad.
My Life: A Memoir 