A Pile of Rocks: A Boomer Memoir

By Kent DaVault

Disney published an old cartoon, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. Here, you are assured of a wild ride through the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s, and beyond. Join the "everyman" who:is a cross between Walter Mitty and James Bond; bumbles like Mr. Bean but gets silk purses out of sow's ears; learns the subtle art of "jack-of-all-trades, master of none

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Sep 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647735272

Book preview

Preface

I’m building a pile of rocks here. Let me explain. While this book is a memoir, it serves also as a memorial to the miraculous works God has done for me over my lifetime. I was born in 1947, and I’m quintessentially a baby boomer. Many boomer Facebook posts say, I grew up drinking from a garden hose, shooting squirt guns, having only three channels on TV, riding a one-speed bike, going to ‘gun clubs,’ and roaming around outside from dawn to dusk while playing with friends. My generation is in the middle of retiring. We look at the newer generations and feel like we’ve got stuff to share, but we were against the establishment, too cool to listen, and now the process may be repeating itself. We did it to our parents, I know. The title of this book is A Pile of Rocks.

In the book of Joshua in the Bible, Joshua must lead Israel into the promised land by crossing the Jordan River in flood stage. Joshua has a tough act to follow, Moses! I know you can’t imagine Moses without visualizing Charlton Heston from the Cecil B. DeMille film epic with a cast of thousands, The Ten Commandments. That’s okay, go with it. You remember the Red Sea parting, all the slaves fleeing Yule Brenner, So let it be written, so let it be done, the pharaoh in the movie. The Red Sea pours back on the pharaoh’s army and drowns them all, while the waves lap close to Heston’s feet on the other side.

So here stands Joshua with the job to take Moses’s place and make the Jordan River part for the Israelites to walk over and take the city of Jericho. The priests wade into the river, the river stands up on a heap, everyone crosses over, Joshua commands that twelve stones be carried out of the middle of the river on the shoulders of a man from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, and the priests exit the dry riverbed and the river returns to flood stage. The Bible in Joshua 4:6–7 says it this way: In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.

Younger people may not know, but they are standing on the shoulders of those who’ve passed before. I know it now. The love my mom and dad had for each other, living through the Great Depression and fighting WWII, was no less intense than boomers falling in love at Woodstock and living through the Vietnam War. WWII folks added a rock to the heap of stones called America. Now, this book is an attempt to acknowledge my parents and to add a stone for my generation, not just get stoned. Many in my generation crashed and burned in the sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll times, but there’s more. Those who are boomers will recognize the events in this heap of stones because earth-changing revivals occurred in our times. I hope to become an everyman in the narrative, because the names and events may be different, but my story, I hope, portrays much of what my generation embodies, the good, the bad, and the ugly we walked through. Proverbs 22:28 says, Do not move the ancient landmark that your fathers have set. I only aim to add our stone, not alter the heap, and hope the next generation will appreciate it and strive to add their own in due time.

February 25, 2020

Boom

I went to Narnia, you know. Let me explain. The tales of Narnia were penned by famed author C. S. Lewis. In his third book of seven, called The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he relates a story of how Edmund and Lucy Pevensie, along with a brat cousin, Eustace Scrubb, were in a bedroom, arguing. Lucy stopped and looked at a painting on the wall. It was a painting of a ship on the ocean. That looks like a Narnian ship! she exclaimed. It’s moving! The painting came alive, and the three were transported into the ocean and rescued by those aboard the Narnian vessel. So begins their adventure in Narnia, the land created and ruled by a lion, Aslan. How can a mere painting serve as a touchstone to transport to another realm? Was Lewis just giving a fanciful tale, or could there be a realm outside of this one we touch and feel? Could an ink pen drawing in a book serve to transport someone into another realm? I assure you, that’s what happened to me. Buckle up and I’ll tell you the story.

The sun-washed days of Southern California in the early 1950s was punctuated by sonic booms all the time. We lived close to El Toro Marine base, among others, and as a young boy born in 1947, I remember my kindergarten through third-grade years were immersed in the explosive growth of the nation, especially in Orange County and the Greater LA area.

Women had patiently waited for WWII to end, even entering an often-foreign workplace and doing their part for victory. Families nervously scanned for uniformed men who would arrive with dreaded news: the loss of a lover or a son. The boys, whether in the European or Asian theater of war, wrote home and expressed their dreams and desires to family and sweethearts via letters written from foxholes and ships.

Finally, flush with victory over Germany and Japan, the boys began to make it back home. The pent-up desires for civilian life, coupled with the sigh of relief in having survived, found its expression in the arms of new spouses, and over the next ten-plus years, there was, understandably, a baby boom and cry that exceeded the sonic booms over LA and the rest of the country—it was my generation’s cry in birthing rooms.

The memory of my biological father is scant, a couple of sentences and a brief visual snatch. I was born in Fresno, California, the birth certificate says. About third grade, I don’t know why, I was taken on a sentimental journey to Fresno. Mom pointed out the apartment she and my dad had lived in; it could have easily been from a scene in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and mom assured me that it was sweltering in the summer. I have a couple of old black-and-white pictures of my year-old body being held by my father, mother, and her mother, Lilly, known as Mimi. They had moved from Lamar, Colorado, possibly for the lure of work and a new life and opportunity. The memory of the Great Depression, and driven with the need for work, contributed to a population boom in California, the land of promise and prosperity. My only memory of my father goes like this: I was sitting in a car, legs not long enough to reach over the seat, looking at the dashboard, and somehow being aware that the man driving the car was Dad. That’s it! I was told over the years that Mom and Dad had divorced when I was about one year old. That snatch of memory must have come from a visit, but I don’t remember that story.

So my earliest memories are living with my mom and her mom, Mimi. We lived in a rural town, Duarte, California. My mom’s one-year-younger and only brother, Jim, lived close in an expanding tract home area known as Monrovia. Uncle Jim was growing his family with Auntie Alma, his wife, whom he snatched from the rural town of Julian, east of San Diego, in the mountains where her father had a Christmas tree farm. Interestingly, her maiden name was Farmer. They had two boys, my cousins Byron and Floyd. Byron was a mild-mannered, blond-haired boy, and Floyd was dark-haired, a consummate risk-taker, and sure to be injured almost daily. Auntie Alma’s mom was Native American (Indian, we said), so Floyd shocked our pretty vanilla family with ruddy skin and a full head of black hair at birth. No small stir, I was told, happened when new fathers and adoring family members viewed their newborns in the hospital. Look at that one! was the exclamation by the crowd of fawning family members who had come to see the many babies recently born. My mom said Uncle Jim ducked his head and would not admit he was the dad.

I was only two years older than my cousins, so they became great playmates on our frequent visits. Uncle Jim became my surrogate father, and what a guy he was! He worked with Westinghouse in electronics, and so they had the first black-and-white TV on the block. Neighbors would visit in evenings, crowd his living room, which they made pitch-black, and watch The Honeymooners with Jackie Gleason. Uncle Jim was six foot two, was always laughing and joking, had an easygoing demeanor, and never met a person that was an enemy. I imagine Will Rodgers would probably qualify as an example of Uncle Jim. Auntie Alma was a nurse and a quintessential support person, applying the many bandages I and my cousins routinely earned while playing.

Uncle Jim and Auntie Alma moved away to Culver City, California. It is nowadays only a forty-eight-minute drive from Duarte. Back then, we made the trek in the Puddle Jumper. In our family, thanks to Mimi, everything had a name. Mom and Mimi owned some Ford that was so old; it had running boards, the kind that Mafia guys shot their tommy guns from in Prohibition. It probably could have housed Bonnie and Clyde and the Barrow gang. I recall begging to stand on the running board while the car was moving at low speed. The road to Culver City seemed to always swallow me up in the back seat with a nap, but I so looked forward to playing with Byron and Floyd. Their neighborhood had a large concrete flood-prevention channel but was only a small stream of water most of the time. Auntie Alma would always warn us not to play in the nasty, dirty, peepee, caca water. That was where we always played. We caught crawdads with coat hangers and had loads of fun.

Mom, Mimi, and I ended up moving from Anna Banana’s rental in Duarte. I told you, Mimi always had a special name for everything and everyone. That naming gift came back to bite her later, because I overheard her and Mom referring to some special-needs person with a misshapen head at Mimi’s work as Gourdhead. One day when I visited Mimi at work and I saw him, I ran to his side and loudly said my greeting: Hi, Gourdhead! Though she was not cured of her gift, she used more wisdom around me from then on. So Mom became a switchboard operator and Mimi worked for J. C. Penney’s in Santa Ana, California. First through third grades were contained in those years for me. We rented the back of a house where an architect had an office in the front. I was always cautioned, "Be quiet, he’s an architect! I always wanted to tag along when rent was paid, because his office had an enormous grandfather clock that ticked patiently in the main entry. Ah, shhhhh, he’s an architect!"

Bush Street was lined with very tall palm trees. The frequent Santa Ana winds, which were hot, dry, and fierce, yielded a fresh morning crop of downed palm tree branches everywhere. One morning, poor little Rickey, a neighbor boy, learned about palm tree branches. As he picked one up, Russell, an older boy from across the street, yanked the branch from Rickey’s hands. Understand, the branch of a palm looks like the fish with a snout that is long and resembles a chain saw. Little Rickey’s hands were chewed into hamburger. He took one look at the blood on his hands, let out a scream I remember to this day, and hightailed it toward home in a trail of tears. The joys of neighborhood memories there are unending. Here is a random list of memorable events on Bush Street: One Christmas, I got my first two-wheeler and learned to ride it on the sidewalks. I begged incessantly for a jackknife, and my mom and Mimi finally relented. I stabbed it into a rotting log by the architect’s office window and pretended it was the accelerator to a boat I guided—quietly, of course. Another neighborhood boy, Gary, had what seemed to be a mythical dad. Gary got an erector set for Christmas, and they together assembled many amazing gadgets that even had an electric motor. They made an AM radio receiver with a crystal. When I got my one-speed bike, he received a three-speed English Racer with a saddlebag under the seat. It was dawning on me that I had no dad.

One day, as I played in the backyard, Mom came out and told me that my father had died. Remember, I never knew him, but I do remember crying. Now I really had no dad, and I started yearning for one. I think it was second grade. I’ve read newspaper clippings about the event. He was flying with a friend from Florida in a private plane, and they went down and were killed. I remember a long train ride back to Pratt, Kansas, where my other grandma lived, Grandma DaVault. Traveling by train was fun; I stayed in Grandma Lucy’s house during the funeral, and that was that.

Third grade saw us move to another house, and so I quietly bade adieu to the architect. I did not have to be quiet anymore! Another man came into my life at that time, Uncle Bob, my father’s brother. Mimi called him Bean Blossom. Uncle Bob showed up in a shiny white-and-purple DeSoto car that had electric windows. He took me to see Disney’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea at the downtown Cinerama. And the coup de grâce was realized when Uncle Bob took me to Disneyland, which had just opened in Anaheim. When we went, it was still not even finished. The ride on the tropical riverboat with hippos in the water was still in progress. Uncle Bob was a train engineer and took me into an engine once. I was beginning to yearn more for a dad, because the adventures seemed more intense than just Mom and Mimi.

One spring day, when we were nearing summer break, I came out of third grade, crossed the street to a car my mom was in, and excitedly greeted the man who was the driver. Hi, Hot Rod! I was vaguely aware that from time to time, Mom had gone out on dates. The one most recently had earned Mimi’s nickname, Hot Rod. It was not Hot Rod; it was Gene. Prior to Hot Rod, my only other strong memory of a man was Gordon. He came around when we lived in Duarte, and I remember he was a Navy frogman. That fired my imagination to the point that every time I was playing on the lawn, I landed on my stomach and pretended to swim because I was a frogman!

As it turned out, Harvey Eugene Smith wanted to marry my mom years before, but my father, Richard DaVault, ended up being her choice. He waited in the wings, tracked her down, and had proposed—Mom (Lila Opperman) had accepted. They were married at The Hitching Post in Las Vegas, Nevada. I and Mimi went, and I vaguely remember the ceremony. The Golden Nugget Casino had one million dollars on display in a guarded glass case just outside the casino; I could not go inside, but that was the Strip. Gene was a carpenter and lived in a very small town in Eastern Washington, Harrington. We exchanged the land of Santa Monica beach, palm trees, sun-drenched days, and Disneyland for a town of six hundred in Eastern Washington. Boom! Unbelievable culture shock!

Bust

I landed in the class of 1965 in 1956, third grade. I had worked hard to make the high reading group in my California school, but my new class was only twenty-seven kids. They had all grown up together up to that point, and it was a tight circle to break into with only one month of class left before summer vacation. What seemed to make it tough was my two strikes against me already. One, I was from California, which was always suspect. But more importantly was strike 2—I had already been to Disneyland! Even the girl from the rich family had not made it to the Disney mecca yet, so the class was green with envy. There was a certain celebrity that came with having been to Disneyland, but the jealousy evaporated like how a hot noonday sun clears a foggy lake. Luckily, summertime came soon. I went about making friends, living in the cozy apartments, and I had to endure the 1956 political convention on TV that re-nominated Eisenhower for his second term.

If you could take the next years, fourth through ninth grade, put them in water, and distill them, you would have a hybrid of Leave It to Beaver, Happy Days, The Andy Griffith Show, and A Christmas Story. This was quintessential small-town America in the fifties and early sixties. It is, in so many ways, my cultural DNA. We moved to a larger city between my ninth and tenth grades, but I have never gone to class reunions other than with my Harrington chums. Let me give a quick overview of each grade and its defining characteristics.

Fourth grade. A large woman who wore floral dresses for life, could turn you into stone with one look, and ran the classroom like a German concentration camp. Highlights were using fountain pens and learning to write cursive, learning square dancing and a box step where you could dance cheek to cheek with a girl. Wow! So soft! Snow forts and snowball fights on the playground were much more interesting than schoolwork. Class clowns, girl tattletales, genius shooters of spit wads, and academic prowess were identified, and I settled into acceptable mediocrity. Large leather boots with eyelet lace-ups were required for boys, informally, that is, and Bobby Watson was the one who never laced up but shuffled up to turn in lessons, shoestrings flailing desk legs on either side of the aisle. Our strict teacher would make him walk back, lace up, and come back to the front. As surely as the sun rose and set, that ritual was a certainty.

Fifth grade saw a much kinder version of fourth grade, but strict nevertheless. This was the time that there was an emerging geek or nerd group, although no such terms were available in the lexicon at that time. Eggheads seemed to be more a term of choice, although that, too, had not gained traction. I was torn. I loved playing softball, touch football, and basketball with the guys. I also loved playing chess and became an avid reader of books like Ivanhoe, The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and every Jack London-type book I could find. The egghead group would simply walk the perimeter of the football field during recess, discussing George Orwell’s Animal Farm, rather than playing the standard sports. That was the dance, the choice of two passions, which would become a defining conflict in my life.

Sixth grade was our first man teacher; he was tall, soft-spoken, and nondescript. Possessing the passion of a fire hydrant, I languished academically. One day, this teacher had a flash of motivational inspiration. He wrote every student’s name on the board in descending order of grades and test scores. I was next to last, avoiding last place due to a farm girl’s woeful performances and general lack of any discernible interest in anything in a book. She played sports with the boys and could run like the wind. She had real credibility with the guys. Wading through the embarrassment of my position and armed with the knowledge that I had read more classics than ten sports guys, I set about climbing to a more comfortable level of mediocrity in the class.

Seventh grade had enormous changes for all. Girls started growing boobs and wearing bras, dresses with waists, becoming cheerleaders, and growing a bit taller than many of the guys. We were shuffled off to all-girls and all-boys classes covering physical development. None of us guys could remember what the teacher said to us, but some pumped info from a couple of the more gullible girls after their class about their topics. Words like Kotex and periods began to emerge. We discovered a book with illustrations in the library about physical development. It contained dumb drawings where we could discern what a side view of male packets looked like. But the front view of the female looked more like a wildebeest than anything else—very disappointing. This became the era of The Twist with Chubby Checker and Fats Domino. Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, and Ricky Nelson began to hit the charts, and the teenager in love started to really roll. I must make mention of our teacher. We all learned in seventh grade about hacks or swats. His paddle had holes drilled into it to lessen the air resistance, and it would make a defining whistle as one held the position. One day, he offered trading swats in exchange for extra homework that had been assigned. Diana Parr volunteered to take four to avoid the massive amount of math homework she had accumulated. We could not believe that a girl would take swats in front of the class. But his effort would not have killed a fly on a table! All the guys cried foul. We all lined up to rid ourselves of unwanted homework if he promised the same effort on our backsides. He complied, we complied, and a record for swats in one day was set. As a postscript, Ernie and Rodger began a competition for who could earn the most swats in a year. Ernie won with thirty-three.

Eighth grade in Harrington had its own graduation. My stepdad, Gene Smith, was the only one of four brothers who graduated from high school. Rural America needed manpower on the farm, and eighth grade was the jumping-off point for many guys. So we participated in an eighth-grade graduation, and ninth grade marked the beginning of high school. Our eighth-grade teacher was the elementary principal as well. We guys passed the girls in height and never looked back. Two competing motivations dominated that year, hormones and everything else. Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine began to fill in the blanks that the lone book in the school library had left us, in living color. Whatever else we studied in school took a back seat to interest in girls. My mom organized a dance party to be held at our house. We invited about eight girls and seven boys plus me. Mom made snacks, and we danced the evening away, doing The Twist and slow two-step dances. I made enemies by not inviting some kids, but there was limited room. To this day, some girls at our high school reunions have expressed how much they fondly remember that party. Next year, the big dance—high school!

Ninth grade that year was where we learned about mortality. Diana Dee Parr drove the family car home after dropping off her mom in town. Understand, farm kids learned to drive long before sixteen. Driving on some graveled country road on the way home, she lost control, wrecked, and died. We moved soberly forward in high school, school sports, and initiation. There was a tradition for a ninth-grade initiation at Harrington. The junior class was responsible to guide, in an organized way, an initiation. We frosh had to memorize a poem to recite to any junior we met in the hall between classes. We, the class of ’65, hope today that we’ll survive, for the class of ’63 is so kind and nice to me. Every one of us was assigned some character to be for a day and a costume to wear. I was Little Bo Peep. I had to wear a large blue dress and blue bonnet and carry a staff, a cardboard lamb, and a bag of popcorn for any junior to graze on at any moment. Classes that day were just a time to laugh at one another and have juniors raid our popcorn bags. Typically, girls had to wear boy stuff, like Jo Ann, who became Castro, beard and all. Many boys ended up wearing girl costumes. Wayne had to be Marilyn Monroe. He wore a one-piece swimsuit, stuffed the bra part with tennis balls, and clomped around in red high heels and a blond wig. Being a true farm boy on a working ranch, he was very bow-legged from riding horses for years. Hairy, bowed legs in high heels were enough to set off anyone into uncontrolled spasms of laughter. If you were on the football team, you could avoid the homecoming football half-time craziness of rolling an apple across the field with your nose. That night, there was entertainment and then a dance. Each student had to perform something impromptu that juniors assigned. Wayne, as Marilyn Monroe, had to sashay across the stage reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb. He put one hand on his hip, the other on his blond wig, and recited the poem while strutting in his bowed legs and stilettoes. He won the competition handily, everyone laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe.

Hoping to turn the academic corner for the better, I was determined to do well in algebra. The school superintendent taught the class. He carried a heavy Southern accent and was a bulldog of a man. Once, Roger and Ernie were running in the halls in elementary school, sailed around a corner, and ran straight into, or course, the superintendent! Without missing a beat, he whipped off his belt and flogged both in the hall. For the first two weeks in class, I struggled to find the word in the algebra text he was teaching about. Finally, I realized that ayyyyyya, rheeeea was the word area, and I was woefully behind from that point on. Older high school boys had cars, and the phrase Making out with a girl began to come up in conversations. It sounded great, but how to bring that about was a mystery in ninth grade. Among girls, a bad reputation could spell real trouble. I ended up playing football in the fall and tennis in the spring, mediocre at best. In a last-ditch effort to jump-start my lousy academic status, I convinced Mom and Dad to send me to Washington State University for a month in the summer. I lived in a dorm, took art, radio and TV, debate, and stagecraft. I flourished. Being around older, mature students, college professors, and meaningful classes was so exciting. Some other Harrington classmates who were there, too, noticed how out of the box I had become—seeing girls, being active in classes, and becoming someone I had always felt I wanted to be but who had quarantined himself into a pigeonhole at tiny Harrington. They began writing home and saying, Wow, you should see DaVault and how he has changed. I was petrified to return to tenth grade and the new expectations. As fate would have it, I never had to.

Bombers

The Fat Man nuclear bomb, a plutonium-based atomic bomb, was dropped over the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. It was developed in Hanford, Washington, adjacent to the city of Richland, Washington. Richland had only become an incorporated city in 1958 instead of just a government town.

Tenth grade. Through an economic downturn, my dad’s carpentry job ended in Harrington and we relocated to Richland the summer of 1962. I dodged the bullet of tenth grade in Harrington, only to be thrown, like Nemo, into the big ocean. I went from a town of 600 to a graduating class of 610. Thus began my days with the Richland bombers. The school mascot was an empty bomb casing painted the school colors. To this day, the liberal politicians in Olympia, Washington, have begged the high school to adopt a different mascot. We alumni are not ashamed of the legacy or