Poor Man's Medicine

By Dayton Lummis

POOR MANS MEDICINE is the third volume of what can be called The Notational Trilogyacerbic views, interpretations and opinions about contemporary human existence, society, the environment, culture, and everything else. These pieces are sometimes wistful thoughts of things past, or often unease about the future that we are being dragged into. About previous books in this trilogy, readers have said they have been informed, amused andoftenoutraged! These reactions will continue, and, as before, the reader WILL NOT BE BORED!

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475966893

Dayton Lummis

Dayton Lummis is now of that advanced age where there is a confusing amount to look back on, and a frightening current scenario to confront and evaluate. His education and experience (Yale University and various Museum directorships), plus informal degrees from “The University of North Beach” and “The Cripple Creek School of Hard Knocks,” have enabled him to navigate through “The Sea of Sorrow and Regret.” He lives in a casita in Santa Fe, NM, with his pet armadillo “Crusty.”

Book preview

Poor Man’s

Medicine

Dayton Lummis

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Poor Man’s Medicine

Copyright © 2013 by Dayton Lummis.

Cover photograph by Dayton Lummis, Sr.

Rear cover photograph by Harry Gray, Colorado Springs

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-6688-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-6689-3 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 12/26/2012

Contents

The Cover Photo

Prologue

Poor Man’s Medicine (Why this for the title?)

PART I. Cosmic Relativity

PART II. Absolute Magnitude

The Oakland Museum

The Lure of Gold

PART III. Critical Density

A Tall Texas Tale

PART IV. Critical Density

End of the Lonesome Ranch Saga

Lonesome Ranch—Epilogue

1952 Kern County Earthquake

PART V. Quantum Vacuum

Memorial Day 2012

Mister Horst was Drunk!

The Barnes

PART VI. Invariant Mass

PART VII. Magnetic Quench Event

Epilogue

Postscript

Pickett’s Charge

To Meredith, who was the Ocarina champ

of West Texas in the late 1960s…

The Cover Photo

The cover photograph of this book bears no relationship to the title. It is a separate visual and mental image, not connected to the title (which is explained a bit further on). The cover image is a perception of staring into the unknowable—a slim, obviously young, Western sort of fellow, looking pensively (or so we imagine) into an undulating and darkening landscape of unimaginable distance, perhaps wondering about what is to come. Or perhaps not—we don’t know. The view is eastward, we think, from some place near the Western edge of the continent, perhaps into the lands from which this young fellow has come to stand on this particular mountain. Or perhaps into lands where he will someday wander, primitive, relatively un-populated regions where promise and disappointment coexist. He does not know anything of life’s complexities, being a young, somewhat ignorant and inexperienced youth. But, he will learn, oh yes, he will learn, and then perhaps he may be burdened with woes and cares that he never would have imagined or even thought about. But when knowledge of those future things comes to him he will be a man, an American man. And he will, in old age, look at this photograph and think of how it all started, how long and convoluted the journey has been. He will write much of all of it down, trying to make sense of it, to share with others, so they can read of it and wonder. But, somewhere in his interior mind he realizes that they can never truly know. Because they were not there.

This photograph was taken by the author’s father, with a Brownie Hawkeye camera, in the Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California in August of the year 1951. The view, in late afternoon, is indeed eastward…

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Prologue

Tom Englezos communicated recently that he had read Ramblin’ Bob down at Del Mar in Southern California, at a sort of reunion with Greek family members. He said, of the book, "Great stuff again! As good as Notes. Don’t quit. Let’s have one a year!" High praise indeed. And I am most thankful for it. But—one a year? This current book, Poor Man’s Medicine, is just about ready to go to my assistant for scanning and proofing—after I get it organized into some sort of readable, semi-chronological form. As with previous volumes, it is a ‘hit or miss’ sort of thing. Take it as you will. Read it on that beach in Thailand, or wherever it is that you are hiding out these days. As with the two earlier books of jottings, it will challenge you, perhaps upset you—but you will not be bored. Even Old Bill, a harsh critic if there ever was one, said of Notes that he was not bored. That pleased me. But with regard to more, I may have to disappoint Tom. I have to admit that, as they say in the oilfields near Bakersfield, this well, I fear, is getting pretty dern close to running dry. Not sure how much, if any, I can continue to pump up. Will have to go to the bar of the Padre Hotel in Bakersfield, have a few drinks and think on this. Ain’t no point to keep on pumpin’ a dry hole, no sir. Comes a time to just cap it and move on. We’ll see…

I can feel it in the air, this second half of August, the slight cooling of the nights. The summer is winding down. September and the leaves begin to turn. Then October and the harvest moon rising to the east in the early evening through the trees shredded of their leaves. Foxes bark, and coyotes yip at night in the woods, stealthy animals that have infiltrated these quiet suburbs, making off with the occasional nocturnal cat. Oh yes, we weave our way through these seasons, as we have learned to do, on this journey described by an ancient Greek poet as, We are all bound, for one sole harbor, underneath the ground… We leave what we leave, for others to sort out and deal with, for better or for worse we cannot and will not know. Only Time will tell, as Time always does. We have done what we could, lived perhaps not as well as we should have. But, what is done—is done (Described in The Random House Dictionary as: Worn out, exhausted, used up…).

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Doctor Avis said that Ramblin’ Bob is an important book. He meant that in it I touch on things that are changing America, and ask questions that are not politically correct but that should be asked—and answered. We are entering into a new period that is quite disturbing to many people, with the loss of jobs, the decline of the middle class, widespread uncertainty about the future. Young people today particularly feel a great sense of unease. They feel cheated out of the America that their parents grew up in. A new book by Bartlett and Steele, synopsized in The Philadelphia Inquirer addresses the loss of The America Dream, the idea that middle class people can retire in comfort and security. No more. There are an increasing number of corporations that are simply doing away with any notion of pensions or retirement benefits. Not even the proverbial gold watch is given anymore. In many cases, come fifty or so and you are out on your ass. Lucky to get a job as a greeter at Walmart. I remember my mother talking about women she grew up with who had ineffectual husbands for whom a job was always found. My father knew one of those chaps in New York. A handsome but not very bright man from a prominent family, he was finally taken on by The Bank of New York as a greeter in the bank lobby, so well did he know the socially prominent patrons, and they him. That sort of thing today? Dream on…

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Poor Man’s Medicine

(Why this for the title?)

Rolando was, for many years, off and on, my grandmother’s yard man at her two acre property on the north side of the railroad tracks in the Philadelphia suburb of Strafford. Rolando had showed up in 1926 looking for work. He was a skinny kid of fourteen from the Italian settlement in Strafford, south of the tracks—the wrong side, I guess might have been the term back then, no longer. The Italian settlement is long gone, its residents having either moved up or away. Now the area is a large shopping center, a Mercedes agency, and some sleek office buildings. Rolando worked for my grandmother all through the Depression, doing whatever she asked him to do, whether it made any sense or not. Often it did not. In the winters he shoveled snow from the long driveway and from the walk down to the three car garage in the woods. He chopped firewood for the nightly fires that my grandparents liked to enjoy in the big living room after dinner, and he spent a lot of time in the garage workshop sharpening lawnmowers and gardening tools for spring use. He never learned to drive an automobile and he always trudged up from sout’ a de tracks with his black lunch box containing an Italian hoagie that his wife Yolanda had made for him. Yolanda was a seamstress, a good one, and got quite a bit of work from my grandmother and her friends. That carried the Domenic (later back to di Giandomenica) family through the Depression, enough for a small house away from the Italian settlement, up in Berwyn where their daughter Toni could go to a better school. Then, about 1939 Rolando got on at the expanding bronze factory in Berwyn, a good paying job that exempted him from the army as an important worker in a war related industry. He hinted that he had supplemented his factory pay with some black market stuff, but he was always vague about that. Then, when the bronze factory closed down after the war, Rolando came back to work somewhat sporadically as a yard man for my grandmother, painting trash can lids to be used as bird baths, raking fall leaves, all the stuff he had done before. He also did some bartending at night down to the Italian Bocce Club in Devon, and even briefly bartended at the rather proper colored club that oddly existed in the midst of the Italian community. (The jigs, Rolando said, only operated on weekends and was real quiet and respectful—gave a nice contribution every year to the church.) I remember back in the late 1940s waking up on summer mornings of the sleeping porch at Strafford and hearing the sound of the hand-pushed lawnmower as Rolando ran it over the large front yard. I had lived with my grandparents since coming down from New York in 1940 at age three with my mother.

What I am leading up to here, rather convolutedly with this portrait of Rolando, is an incident that provides the title of this book. One summer afternoon when I was about fourteen I came upon Rolando washing up at the sink in the pantry just off the kitchen where the cook, Mabel Cox, was in her room listening to soap operas, her stories, on the RCA radio my grandfather had provided. Rolando was drying his face when he spied me at the door to the pantry. He smiled and put his finger to his lips, to silence me or to have me keep a secret. I nodded at him. Then Rolando reached up onto one of the pantry shelves and got down one of the bottles of my grandfather’s good whiskey, bourbon I think it was. Rolando took a slug from the bottle, then another, and replaced the bottle with the others on the pantry shelf. Then he went through the kitchen and out the back door, carrying his black metal lunch box. I followed him outside, onto the stone walk that led alongside the house out to the driveway. Rolando smiled at me, a bit goofily I thought, tapped me on the shoulder and said, Youse ain’t gonna say nothin’? All them bottle’s a booze your grandfather keeps in that pantry, he ain’t gonna miss a few inches of bourbon now’n then, huh? I nodded, thinking that Rolando was probably right about that. I walked with him out to the end of the driveway, where he would turn right on Homestead Road for the two-mile walk to his house in Berwyn. Or, as I learned later, sometimes detouring down south of the tracks to the workingman’s bar, The Little Paddock, on Lancaster Avenue, for a few shots with beer chasers. We stopped there, at the end of the driveway in the late summer heat. I looked at Rolando, asked him, about the gulps of bourbon, How come you drink that stuff? He said, looking at me very seriously, Ya know, when your granma don’ feel so good, she calls that doctor, he comes an’ gives her a few pills to settle her down. Right? I nodded, and he went on, Well, sometimes I don’t feel too good, but I can’t afford no fancy doctor an’ his pills. So I take a few belts of your grandfather’s whiskey before walkin’ home. That’s the poor man’s medicine…

So, why is that memorable phrase the title of this book? I am not sure that I know. I just like the imagery of it. Poor Man’s Medicine. Something the intellectuals do not understand…

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PART I

Cosmic Relativity

Back in the early 1950s, when my father went into Beverly Hills to see his broker, or to Hollywood to meet with his agent about some part in a B film, he would drop me off in Santa Monica, give me two dollars to have lunch at the counter of the Thrifty Drug Store at the corner of Third and Wilshire, maybe get an ice cream cone somewhere later, and to wander around, perhaps up to the park at Seventh and Wilshire to watch the athletic girls playing tennis. He always said to be at the corner of Wilshire and Ocean Avenue at 5:30P (I had a Mickey Mouse watch), where he would pick me up to drive back to the ranch in the hills above Malibu—a primitive place he had bought from an old pioneer/homesteader named Philip McAnany who had been born in Los Angeles in 1870, when the place had a population of just 5,000 and the West Side was nothing but bean fields stretching west to the Pacific. O.K. After lunch at the counter of the Thrifty Drug Store, where the worn-out Okie manager was a friend of my father and treated me well, and before my ice cream cone, I used to wander around the residential sections of Santa Monica, north of Wilshire, which were in those days blocks of modest, neat, well-tended middle-class houses on small lots with eucalyptus trees and palms lining the streets. I wondered about those houses, who lived in them—I imagined regular American types of people, like me and my dad, and the folks I saw all around Santa Monica—and how the inhabitants (fathers) made their money. Were there perky daughters who attended Santa Monica High School (SaMoHi), and clean-cut athletic sons who played on the championship SaMoHi football teams in the Southland? It was all a great mystery to me, as I wandered those quiet streets. Few people seemed to be around, and the few who were paid no attention to me, a clean-cut kid of perhaps 14 who probably lived nearby. I fit in, but did not, not in my mind. When my father picked me up, right on schedule, and we drove down the California Incline onto the Pacific Coast Highway (later known as the PCP), then towards Malibu and the turn at Big Rock Canyon Drive and the 2½-mile road winding ever higher, and onto the narrowing dirt road to the ranch, 120 acres of live oak and scrub brush and a shack with no indoor toilet or hot water, I used to think about those nice middle-class houses in Santa Monica, and envy their neatly mowed grass and bougainvillea, and all the order that I imagined went with that—normal, middle-class life that I was somehow missing. Did that warp me? Yes, I think it did. Made me into a sort of outsider, always looking in, wondering. And so, to this day. Thinking how it might have been different. And, if it had been—who would I be today?

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My book on Brad Bishop, Not Wanted, received a variety of reactions. There were those who believed that Brad could not have killed his family, that he was framed; that he did do it, but under influence of CIA drugs; or that he just plain did it and became a fugitive. And now is still on the lam somewhere in the world, with false identity, etc. Or he is dead. And has been for some time. Take your pick. What is fact is that it is not known whatever happened to William Bradford Bishop, not at this time. I think my book pretty well covers the possibilities. Most agree. The Bishop case screams to be solved, but at this point it very much looks like it never will be.

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The presidential campaign is not exactly heating up. Quite to the contrary, it seems to consist of a bunch of rather dull and uninspired accusations being flung around. There seem to be a few indications that Obama might not be re-elected, and some suggest that if that comes to pass, Romney might not be a bad president. But his positions, when he does elucidate them, seem to be rather extreme. In this is he reaching out to the far right wing? If so, that is not a good sign, but perhaps he feels that he cannot be elected without that support. On the other hand there are those who are sure that Obama—the symbol of America’s exciting, new diversity, as one newspaper columnist put it—has the support of the American people solidly behind him. The evidence does not exactly support that. In fact, the race seems surprisingly close. Independents will prove to be the key, and many are not totally supportive of Obama.

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I am in the downtown Santa Fe Plaza. It is a hot July Saturday. The Plaza is jammed with people—tourists, locals, exhibitors for the Spanish Folk Art weekend. I look over the crowd, examining the faces of the men, not the women, thinking. I see some men, a few, who look they may have been in prison. Some who might be headed there—three Hispanic males in their twenties who are posters for gang members. Heavily tattooed, bandannas around the heads, swagger walk. But, on this festive day they seem harmless, just wandering. I fail to see the sort of bland, young Anglo face, of the type who might open his backpack, get out a Tech-9 and start shooting into the crowd. No one can, it seems, ever spot that type until the violence begins. Never before. That sort of evil always seems to come out of nowhere. From the quiet, silent, neglected types, who suddenly open up. Who are they? How can we identify them? Prevent tragedies from occurring? Probably we can’t. It is just part of the world we live in. This recent tragic event in Colorado—could it have been seen coming? Prevented? I don’t think so. My father once said, about types likely to be violent perpetrators, We can’t just patrol the streets, look at crowds, and say, That one! I don’t like his looks! And that one, too, take him away!" No, that cannot be done. But, there is a recent article in Philadelphia Magazine on identifying potential trouble, titled, BORN EVIL: University of Pennsylvania criminologist Adrian Raine thinks that simple medical tests might determine whether your baby will grow up to be a psychopath. If he’s right, would you have your child tested?

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It was 1958. Bear Kinkead and I were driving north from Hamburg, which we had detoured, in the night in Germany toward the Danish border. We were beginning to despair of finding a place to spend the night. All the villages we passed through were darkened and without inns. Then, suddenly, in a small town we rounded a corner and the vehicle’s lights flashed on the wall of a building where it looked like something was going on. Lettering on the wall read, Hotel Glissman. Greatly relieved, we entered the establishment. To our right was a dining room that seemed well patronized by what we surmised were local burghers. A reception desk in front of us was quickly staffed by a sweating man in a rumpled tuxedo. In response to our request for Ein zimmer fuhr zvie personnen, he said, Yes, yes. Ein small minute. And rushed back to attend to the dining room. Then he reappeared with a key to a room, saying, Ein small minute, ja? Evidently the limit of his English. After we found our room we took a table in the dining room, enjoyed a simple German supper, served by what we now realized was Herr Glissman, saying, Ein small minute. In the morning we settled with Herr Glissman, leaving his hotel in a small town, and made our way to Denmark.

I have, from time to time, thought about Herr Glissman and his hotel. Was he Jewish? The rare survivor who remained in business in that small town? Perhaps a family business that was reclaimed after the War? Who knows. I rather thought that Glissman (meaning in German sparkling man) is a Jewish name. I find on the Internet that Glissman is a somewhat common name in and around Hamburg, Germany, often Jewish but sometimes not. So what about Herr Glissman? Jewish or not? Take your pick. He may have just been a good German in a small town running his business—Hotel Glissman. Ein small moment…

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Down at Cibola Creek Ranch in West Texas we arranged for a day horseback ride into the Chinati Mountains, mostly dry scrub but with 100-mile views. The Mexican vaquero who outfitted my horse provided some insight into the psychology of why such a large and powerful animal as the horse allows us on its back to ride and guide it around, in addition to all sorts of other activities. He said, The horse’s eye, Señor—do you know about the horse’s eye? I nodded, and he went on, "The horse’s eye magnifies, it makes us humans look gigante, muy grande, very much bigger than we actually are. So, before riding you must let the horse get to know you, smell you, feel your hand. Then, as soon as you mount, establish control. Have the horse back up, go in a tight little circle. Pat him on the neck, talk to him. Then your horse and you will understand each other. That is important. There must be trust…" A man who knew horses, that vaquero.

Meredith and I were led on our ride by a leathery young Anglo woman, who obviously knew her way with horses. Problem was, she never stopped talking. Some of what she said, gossip about the ranch, its owner and some of the guests, was interesting. Much of it was not. We had a nice lunch at the summit.

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When leaving the Rocking L Ranch in the East Mojave, usually to go to Needles 72 miles away (42 on dirt roads) to get weekly supplies, I would always stop two or three times on the three-and-one-half miles out to Black Canyon Road to draw, with a stick I kept in the truck, a line across the road behind me. Thus, when I came back I could tell whether or not any vehicle had been on that road. Sometimes someone would drive partway in, then turn off toward Sand Wash and the petroglyphs, if they knew they were there. They could not access the ranch because of a locked gate. But, whatever, I liked to know if someone had been in my territory. Just common sense precaution out in that lonely country. Once in a great while I would notice that my lines had been crossed. I would sweep the desert with my binoculars. Seeing nothing I would proceed to the ranch, very alert and with great caution. I would pull up in front of the ranch house. The five cats would be waiting. I would walk very carefully around the house, the cats following, inspecting everything, looking for footprints, anything. I never found any indication that anyone had been into or around the ranch. The five cats would come in for treats that I had brought from Needles. Sometimes, after dark, gun in hand I would make a more extensive