Seismic Events

By Dennis Venturoni

As we plod along into the 21st century, what constitutes a family has become as variable as the weather. There are all kinds besides the standard nuclear family: single parent, extended, reconstituted (also known as blended), co-parent, LGBT, childless, and probably some others I haven’t thought of. But even back in the 1960s, not every family was like the Andersons or the Cleavers of television lore. I was a part of three such families when I was growing up – blended, single parent, and what I like to call “makeshift.” Add to that a fourth – extended. Think of it as a variety of fruits and vegetables tossed into a vintage avocado green Waring blender. What comes out is often completely different and surprising.

Navigating childhood and adolescence through shifting family dynamics wasn’t easy. Doing it with the added challenge of a particular medical condition made it more difficult. And doing it during the rapidly changing and evolving cultural landscape of the 1960s and 1970s made it unique and unforgettable. It was an incredible time, coming of age in the San Francisco Bay Area. I grew up in San Mateo on the Peninsula, with San Francisco to the north and what would come to be known as Silicon Valley to the south. The Bay Area was ground zero for the countercultural revolution of the 60s and the technological revolution of the 70s. The Grateful Dead played at small clubs on the Peninsula, including The In Room in Belmont, where I live today with my family. Ken Kesey was throwing acid parties in a house off Highway 84 in La Honda, and his Merry Band of Pranksters once parked their bus “Furthur” outside my aunt and uncle’s house in Burlingame and dropped in on their neighbors. And a couple of guys started building computers in a suburban garage down in Los Altos and launched a computer revolution.

It was a dynamic and continually changing era. I watched the world around me morph in just a few years from the world of my parents and grandparents into the world we recognize today. During the same stretch, I saw my family situation change and reshape itself multiple times. Add to that, all the obstacles I had to overcome dealing with a neurological disorder on top of the everyday challenges of adolescence, and I can sum it up with the adage, never a dull moment.

My mom and I were poor. We sold our house, moved into an apartment, and we were always one missed paycheck away from bad times. But I never felt poor because, during that time, a whole network of support sprung up all around us in the little courtyard of an apartment complex in San Mateo, and in the unlikely figure of an airline mechanic who would become a fixture in our lives. Together, this random collection of individuals would experience the dawn of a new age in one of the most exciting places on the planet and come together to form a community.

I read that you should never write a memoir as a catharsis, and this is not that kind of memoir. Sure, there is some drama and pain and tragedy, as everyone experiences at some point in their lives. But there is much more humor and hopefulness and positivity. This story is meant to be a celebration of the people who were part of my formative years, and to bring that time back to life in a way that old photos in an album cannot. It is also a celebration of the era in which we lived, and a document of local Bay Area and Peninsula history that I experienced. Lastly, it is a record of my experiences with a disorder called Tourette Syndrome, and how I dealt with and overcame the many challenges and obstacles it threw at me.

As Harper Lee wrote in To Kill a Mockingbird, you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family. In my case, I had a family who chose me.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dennis Venturoni
• Release date: Mar 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005278847

Dennis Venturoni

I am an S.F. Bay Area native, growing up in San Mateo and graduating from Serra Hiigh School and Notre Dame de Namur University. I have a master's in systems management.I live in Belmont with my wife and daughter, our cat, Bonnie Blue, and our Shih Tzu, Whimsy. I have worked in various positions in IT for the past thirty years, more than twenty of those with Wells Fargo in San Francisco. I enjoy cooking, binge-watching shows, video games, target shooting, science fiction, classic rock, my favorite podcasts on history and the supernatural, and travel. I am a lifelong Bay Area sports fan who bleeds orange and black and crimson and gold. My bucket list when I retire includes visiting every continent, taking a skydive, doing some ghost hunting, and driving by car through the lower forty-eight states and Alaska.

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INTRODUCTION

As we plod along into the 21st century, what constitutes a family has become as variable as the weather.  There are all kinds besides the standard nuclear family: single parent, extended, reconstituted (also known as blended), co-parent, LGBT, childless, and probably some others I haven’t thought of.  But even back in the 1960s, not every family was like the Andersons or the Cleavers of television lore.  I was a part of three such families when I was growing up – blended, single parent, and what I like to call makeshift.  Add to that a fourth – extended.  Think of it as a variety of fruits and vegetables tossed into a vintage avocado green Waring blender.  What comes out is often completely different and surprising.

Navigating childhood and adolescence through shifting family dynamics wasn’t easy.  Doing it with the added challenge of a particular medical condition made it more difficult.  And doing it during the rapidly changing and evolving cultural landscape of the 1960s and 1970s made it unique and unforgettable.  It was an incredible time, coming of age in the San Francisco Bay Area.  I grew up in San Mateo on the Peninsula, with San Francisco to the north and what would come to be known as Silicon Valley to the south.  The Bay Area was ground zero for the countercultural revolution of the 60s and the technological revolution of the 70s.  The Grateful Dead played at small clubs on the Peninsula, including The In Room in Belmont, where I live today with my family.  Ken Kesey was throwing acid parties in a house off Highway 84 in La Honda, and his Merry Band of Pranksters once parked their bus Furthur outside my aunt and uncle’s house in Burlingame and dropped in on their neighbors.  And a couple of guys started building computers in a suburban garage down in Los Altos and launched a computer revolution.

It was a dynamic and continually changing era.  I watched the world around me morph in just a few years from the world of my parents and grandparents into the world we recognize today.  During the same stretch, I saw my family situation change and reshape itself multiple times.  Add to that, all the obstacles I had to overcome dealing with a neurological disorder on top of the everyday challenges of adolescence, and I can sum it up with the adage, never a dull moment.

My mom and I were poor.  We sold our house, moved into an apartment, and we were always one missed paycheck away from bad times.  But I never felt poor because, during that time, a whole network of support sprung up all around us in the little courtyard of an apartment complex in San Mateo, and in the unlikely figure of an airline mechanic who would become a fixture in our lives.  Together, this random collection of individuals would experience the dawn of a new age in one of the most exciting places on the planet and come together to form a community.

I read that you should never write a memoir as a catharsis, and this is not that kind of memoir.  Sure, there is some drama and pain and tragedy, as everyone experiences at some point in their lives.  But there is much more humor and hopefulness and positivity.  This story is meant to be a celebration of the people who were part of my formative years, and to bring that time back to life in a way that old photos in an album cannot.  It is also a celebration of the era in which we lived, and a document of local Bay Area and Peninsula history that I experienced.  Lastly, it is a record of my experiences with a disorder called Tourette Syndrome, and how I dealt with and overcame the many challenges and obstacles it threw at me.

As Harper Lee wrote in To Kill a Mockingbird, you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.  In my case, I had a family who chose me.

Dennis Venturoni

Belmont, California

November 6, 2019

CHAPTER 1

The New Frontier

American Graffiti is my favorite movie of all time. Not only for its theme, a cast of mostly nobodies who would become big stars, single night timeline, and cinematic style that placed you right in the middle of the action but for its location in northern California and the year in which it is set.  Where were you in ’62?  In my case, it was in a hospital being born.  There are many things to like about 1962.  JFK was in the White House and stopping the Cuban missile crisis, the Beach Boys were recording Surfin’ Safari, the psychedelic movement was getting underway down in Palo Alto, and four lads from Liverpool were making a name for themselves in Europe.

1962 was also a big year in the Bay Area.  The Giants had beaten the Dodgers to win the pennant, and a historic snowfall whitened the landscape in San Francisco and at sea level down the Peninsula.  It was also a time of significant change and growth in my hometown, San Mateo.  My dad was an electrician and a carpenter and helped build many of the homes in new neighborhoods as the city expanded.  Eichler homes, known for their modernist style with glass walls, open floor plans, and skylights, began sprouting in the hills and along the San Francisco Bay.

In one of those homes, along the windswept flats of the Bay, I began my life journey.  Sitting on a street named after one of our less distinguished U.S. presidents is a simple rancher on a street of simple ranchers, with the garage at the front and the living space at the rear.  A fence provides a small private front yard that wraps around the side to a backyard where I spent many hours on the swing set and playing tetherball.  When standing on the sidewalk out front, you can see the hills to the west where the College of San Mateo hands out AA degrees, and the Bulldogs play JC football.

Like countless families in the post-World War 2 boom, my family looked to prosper in the new frontier that Donald Fagen would sing about a couple of decades later.  Ours was a blended family, though back in those days, there wasn’t a term for it.  It was a divorcee and a widower moving their kids into the same house.  Kind of like the Brady Bunch.  No, not like the Brady Bunch.  The Venturoni clan was not your typical family.  My mom moved with her teenage daughter in 1960 into a home occupied by my dad, his son, and two daughters.  A third daughter lived in a house a block away with her husband and two boys.

Into this menagerie, I was born two years later, the sole product of their union.  It was entirely unexpected, not because my dad was 46 at the time, but because my mom was 43.  In the days before fertility clinics, women at that age didn’t have babies quite as often.  But fate intervened in my case, and my dad was thrilled to get another son.  The rest of my family, not quite so much.  My youngest older half-sibling was nine years old, and the rest ranged from their teens to their early twenties.  I was also the offspring of a marriage that was not particularly welcome on both sides.

My mom and dad met at a diner in 1959, and they began dating.  At the time, Eileen was living with her daughter Suzanne in an apartment building owned by my aunt and uncle on Tilton Drive.  My grandparents also lived in the same building.  Joseph and his kids lived in a house in downtown San Mateo.  My mom had left her philandering, alcoholic husband several years before after she caught him in bed with her brother’s wife.  Not surprisingly, he left her as well.

While my uncle Allan served with the Coast Guard in World War 2, and later toured with the USO, my mom raised his son and Suzanne back in Buffalo, New York.  After the war, my uncle would remarry, this time to a beautiful dark-haired professional dancer named Marigold, but who went by the nickname Woody.  The two of them would make a career for themselves performing in clubs like Bimbo’s in San Francisco, and Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas.  They had an exciting life together, rubbing elbows with celebrities from members of the Rat Pack to Liberace.  Our pet cat had belonged to George Gobel, the comedian.  But he couldn’t take care of the cat, so he passed it along to my aunt and uncle, who gave him to us.

In the 1950s, Al and Woody moved to California to pursue their careers in entertainment.  They brought along my grandparents and settled in Pasadena originally, before moving north to the Bay Area in 1957.  They bought the apartment on Tilton, and my mom soon followed with Suzanne, both to be close to family and to escape the notorious cold winters of Buffalo.  She found work locally at the Redwood City courthouse while Suzanne attended Mercy High School in Burlingame.  The two of them had a pretty sweet life in the sunny paradise of California, surrounded by family.  And then she met Dad.

My dad lost his wife to ovarian cancer in 1958.  Her illness lasted eighteen months and took a terrible toll on the family.  What made things worse was that Sophia, the second oldest daughter, had severe health problems throughout her childhood and died from lupus within months of her mother’s passing.  She was only 18.

Widowed and with three kids still at home, including his developmentally challenged son, my dad was soon looking for a wife and mother to help him handle the load.  It wasn’t long after he began seeing my mom that he proposed.  And he proposed again…and again.  He begged her to marry him.  My mom could see the red flags and was resistant, especially after she met the family for the first time.  Rachel, the youngest, was a nice and polite girl.  Henry, however, while considered slow on the intelligence scale, was very street smart and devious, and Debbie was a free spirit, to put it euphemistically.  Henry and Debbie would both log time over at Hillcrest, the juvenile detention center, for petty theft and other unlawful activities.  As my sister Brenda’s son Ted would joke to me years later, if our daughter ever got into trouble, we should ask Hillcrest for the Venturoni family discount.

I asked my mom once why she married my dad.  I mean, she had a wonderful life living with Suzanne and with her parents right next door.  She didn’t need to marry into a problem family.

My mom just shook her head and said, I don’t know.

I think the truth was, she was just lonely having been single for nearly a decade, and she wanted to be married again, even if it meant marrying someone with the kind of baggage my dad was carrying.  After announcing their engagement in the fall of 1960, they drove to Carson City, Nevada.  They stayed in a trailer for six weeks to establish temporary residence while my mom finalized her divorce from her first husband, who she was still legally married to after all those years.

Back then, Nevada was known as the quickie divorce state.  The migratory divorce trade would create an economic boon to the state, with 325,000 divorces filed between 1931 and 1970.  In the 1920s, the state lowered the residency requirement from six months to six weeks, prompting a flood of people into the state to take advantage of the liberal divorce laws.  Nevada was also the quickie marriage state, as other states, California among them, required blood tests, physical examinations, counseling, and a three-day waiting period.  Nevada had no such requirements, allowing for quick marriages that gave rise to a Reno and Las Vegas institution: the wedding chapel.

Brenda, my dad’s oldest daughter, and her husband Marty helped watch the younger kids along with their own two sons while my mom and dad were across the border, making her divorce legal and tying the knot.  They returned to little fanfare.  Rachel was still missing her biological mother, Debbie hated her new stepmom, and Henry was a full-time project.  Suzanne was unhappy with the situation, seeing her world turned upside down as she was forced to live with a strange family and share a room with Debbie.  It didn’t help when, according to Suzanne, Debbie started borrowing her things, like jewelry and perfume.  It helped less when my dad demanded Suzanne pay rent since she was over 18.  It might not sound unreasonable, but it left a sour taste in Mom’s mouth.

Suzanne was the polar opposite of my dad’s kids.  She was book smart, studious, and had a bright future.  She attended the College of San Mateo and got a job working in the office at 3M, the makers of Scotch Tape.  Suzanne also had a bit of a wild side, according to Debbie, keeping a bottle of booze hidden in her closet that both would share.  Considering that Suzanne did not have the greatest relationship with her stepsister, I can’t be entirely sure if it’s true.  But given that I was sneaking beers by the time I was 18, it’s a pretty tame and reasonable story.  Maybe Debbie rubbed off on Suzanne a little, at a time when Suzanne needed to rebel a bit against her mom.

When my mom announced her pregnancy a year later, it was also received with little fanfare.  Both my dad’s kids and Suzanne saw their familial worlds turned upside down, replaced by something they didn’t recognize and didn’t want.  Both sides saw their parents focusing their attention on the arrival of some new kid that only had one foot in each family, and that didn’t sit well.

I was born in the middle of the night in the middle of June 1962, at Peninsula Hospital in Burlingame.  According to my mom, my dad was exhilarated to have a son, and in her words, he worshipped me.  Dad never said it, but Henry was always somewhat of a disappointment to him because he could never be the son he wanted Henry to be.  In a way, I was his last chance for a male legacy.  They were going to name me Paul but settled on Dennis because Paul was the name of my dad’s boss, and he didn’t want it to look like he was naming me after his boss.

Things settled down into a routine, with my dad working at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard as an electrician and my mom taking care of me at home.  She also had to take care of Rachel and Henry, who everyone called Hank.  Rachel was a nice quiet girl, still shy of ten years old.  Henry had hit his teens and was always getting into trouble.  One of his favorite things to do was to slip out of the house and catch a random bus.  One night, my dad got a call from the police telling him that they had Henry down in San Jose, thirty miles away.  So, my dad had to get out of bed in the middle of the night, drive to San Jose to pick up Henry and bring him home, then get up early for work the next morning.  As my mom would say years later, Henry’s antics took their toll on my dad.  It would become evident in just a few short years.

I was baptized that summer, which wasn’t anything notable except for the curious choice of my godparents.  Since Aunt Woody was Lutheran, that ruled out her and Uncle Al since we were Catholic.  One would think that the logical next choice would be my grandparents.  But no, Mom decided to make Suzanne my godmother.  And since Suzanne wasn’t married, Suzanne’s friend – a young woman – became my godfather.  Today such an arrangement probably wouldn’t raise eyebrows.  People might assume the two of them were a same-sex couple.  But in 1962, it was certainly out of the ordinary.  All I remember about it was Mom complaining for years after about how my godfather could never be bothered to send me a birthday card and five dollars once a year.  I didn’t know what the fuss was.  I never saw my godfather again after the baptism, and I didn’t expect to.

In June and July of 1963, when I was just a year old, the family embarked on a great cross-country road trip.  My parents piled into their tan 1962 Chevy Impala four-door with me, Rachel, Henry, and Debbie, and headed to Lake Tahoe to visit Al and Woody, where they were living and performing on the south shore.  From there, we headed to Bevier, Missouri, my dad’s hometown, and spent time with his brother and his wife.  We were then off to Wheaton, Illinois, to visit his sister and father, and then Buffalo, New York, and Niagara Falls, Canada, to visit my mom’s family.  The month-long trip had us rounding back through Illinois and Missouri again, then down to Arizona, where we stopped at the Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon, and Hoover Dam.  The trip merited a mention in the local paper, the San Mateo Times.  In those days, anything could make it into print.  Today it would just be posted on Facebook.