The Confessions of My Youth

By Richard J. Grant Caldwell

From being a dirt farmer in South America to the heights of California Society, from a promiscuous lifestyle to the peace of Christian life, this is the story of the first thirty-four years of my life. While some sought money, fame, or education, or some other goal, I sought the experience of life, and to the best of my ability, I was a seeker of the Supreme Power in that experience. This story is factual according to the perceptions Ive encountered and remembered.
In a phrase, my father, Howard Orville Caldwell, lived the Grapes of Wrath. He was born in Oklahoma, and during the Great Depression, when his fathers job at the local zinc smelter ended, the family moved to South California: Grandpa, Grandma and the three children. That was in the thirties.
Dad grew up, went to school, and worked in South California when Los Angeles had only a few hundred thousand people. There was a definite division between rich and poor. Marlon Brando, then Bud Brando, was in the same public speaking class as my father in junior high school. Marlon was one of the rich, Dad was of the poor. This story begins there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 20, 2009
• ISBN: 9781465318657

Richard J. Grant Caldwell

Conceived as a baby boomer in southern California, born in Pennsylvania, and between I went over the Rocky Mountains in my father’s Model “A” Ford named “Clompetida”. My father was a grade school friend and my grandmother worked as a domicile with the late Marlon Brando and his family. I became an Eagle Scout in Staten Island, New York City and in Meadville, Pennsylvania. I’ve assisted at over 5,200 lifetime Roman Catholic masses. The family (with mom and dad) moved thirteen times in our first seventeen in various places in the U.S. At the university of Notre Dame, which I put myself through financially, I became fluent in Spanish and French language with a native Colombian accent and a southern French accent, and with a year living abroad. “I studied as a graduate student at five” other colleges and/or universities, “I studied poetry under” Dr. John Matthias who read before the Queen of England in the 1960’s; also, I wrote advanced calculus at Cal Berkeley 1973. I also raised 100,000 California red worms that I bought in what would become the “Silicon Valley”. By 1968-71 with Dr. John Dunne at N.D., I passed over into eastern religions and returned to Catholicism with new insights. My teacher, Professor Walter Langford, took fifteen of us to Cali, Colombia for a year. He had started the Peace Corps for JFK in Chile. I, myself, was arrested illegally with Doctor Spock, the pediatrician, in May Day 1971. After Notre Dame graduation, I traveled 22,000 miles hitch hiking around the U.S. and down into Mexico and Colombia. I am 34 years diagnosed schizoaffective. Since 1972 Jesus Christ is my highest power.

Book preview

Copyright © 2009 by Richard J. Grant Caldwell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

permission in writing from the copyright owner.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

56998

From being a dirt farmer in South America to the heights of California Society, from a promiscuous lifestyle to the peace of Christian life, this is the story of the first thirty-four years of my life. While some sought money, fame, or education, or some other goal, I sought the experience of life, and to the best of my ability, I was a seeker of the Supreme Power in that experience. This story is factual according to the perceptions I’ve encountered and remembered.

In a phrase, my father, Howard Orville Caldwell, lived the Grapes of Wrath. He was born in Oklahoma, and during the Great Depression, when his father’s job at the local zinc smelter ended, the family moved to Southern California: Grandpa, Grandma, and the three children. That was in the thirties.

Dad grew up, went to school, and worked in Southern California when Los Angeles had only a few hundred thousand people. The orange groves were the prominent aspect of the economy, and they stretched for miles. There was a definite division between rich and poor. Marlon Brando, then Bud Brando, was in the same public speaking class as my father in junior high school. Marlon was of the rich, Dad was of the poor. Marlon gave Dad his Boy Scout uniform. Dad was also engaged to one of the original Little Rascals. Mitzi was her name. Dad decided he didn’t want to marry her when she was seeing other guys while she was engaged to him.

When World War II came, Dad joined the navy. He wanted to fly, but was given an electrician’s rate. He sailed on the carriers and was to sail around the world more than once during his married life, while we children were young.

Mom was born in the humble town of Meadville, Pennsylvania. Her father was assistant postmaster of the local post office. Her grandfather held the number one union card of the newly formed Plumbers Union in the state of Pennsylvania. My mother, Jean Kress Caldwell, entered the service during the war too. She was a navy yeoman. She met my father at the Pepsi Cola Center in New York City while stationed there, and they corresponded for some two years after the war. Mom went to Southern California to be with Dad, and they were soon married.

I was conceived in South California, born in Pennsylvania, and between those two events, I went over the Rocky Mountains in a Ford Model A named Clompetida. That’s how I started life. I was born black and blue on April 24, 1949, as my mother was in labor with me nineteen hours. I weighed nine pounds and four ounces. I was baptized by Father John J. Cannon.

My first memory was the smell of baby oatmeal. I’ve remembered that sensation vividly over the years, and it brings me joy.

When I was young, my mother was always making bows and arrows for me out of twigs and string. When my maternal grandmother married a second time to Ford Evans Smith, an engineer for Chicago Bridge and Iron, I was going around bragging about how she had married an Indian. Even though he had only a few drops of Indian blood in him, I was a nut about Indians.

As an imaginative child, I had imaginary playmates named Kucken, Googen, Suckinsaw, Michael, Summy, and Sandy. Patty Kress, my cousin who was several years older than I, would always ask me about Kucken; and I’d tell her what he had been doing. One day she asked me, and I told her; he had been hit by a car, and I never spoke of him again.

Connie Ailsworth, Carl Johnke, Gary Shouey, and I played throughout the neighborhood. One of the games we played was a Chinese game called scissors-paper-stone. In the game, scissors cut paper, paper covers stone, and stone breaks scissors. The sign for scissors is two fingers separated, the sign for paper is a flat hand, and the sign for stone is a fist. The hands are held behind the back until someone says, One, two, three, shoot! Then the signs are shot out. The winner is the sign remaining untouched.

Another thing I remember quite vividly is my collection of cowboy heroes from the end labels of bread wrappers. I would go to buy bread for my mother at the neighborhood store, and when I brought the bread home, she would paste a label in my book. Another game I played was Jack Jumps Over the Candlestick. We had an old candlestick, and I put it to use.

I got in trouble one time for playing on the railings and steps of the Talon Inc. Building. Meadville is known as the birthplace of the zipper invented by Colonel Walker. Now zippers are used all over the world. Talon was at that time the biggest producer. We played on the steps and had a likelihood of falling, so my mother shooed us away.

My fourth birthday party was quite an undertaking for my mother as there were cakes, napkins, plates, hats, games such as pin the eye on the owl, and fifteen guests. We have home movies of that fourth birthday party, and it was quite a success. Another pal for me was the squirrel, which I called the squoil. Each night before I went to bed, I said, God bless the squoil.

In 1953, even though we had moved within Meadville and had been to Norfolk, Virginia, for a time, we went to Oakland, California, when I was four years old. I can remember the ferry ride, where we could see the Golden Gate Bridge and the Alcatraz. We have home movies of my mother and me in the wind, riding the ferry.

Picky was my friend in Oakland, and I had a small windup elephant that I really loved. I also played with cars and trucks. One day Picky said he had something else to do, and I was heartbroken because I loved my friend and I wanted to keep playing with him; so I told my mother, and she said, You’ll have to learn to play alone, Rick. You’ll have to be alone sometime in your life, and you will have to entertain yourself. Well, I did, and it was good advice.

I went to Fairyland, which was a children’s amusement park. There were a number of live animals, and you could go down into the belly of a cement whale. I remember going down there and how strange it was being in the belly of a whale as Jonah was.

There were beautiful flower gardens in Oakland at the time, and I would just love to smell the flowers.

One time Dad and a buddy of his from the service went frog hunting, and I remember what their spears looked like, like Poseidon’s spear. They didn’t get any frogs, but they got good and muddy. I recall them coming home, and Mom said something about their being muddy.

I flew for the first time when I was four years old. We flew from Oakland to Los Angeles to see family. I can remember seeing the people below growing smaller and smaller until they were like ants, and the cars looked tiny too. Grandma Caldwell lived in the Los Angeles area; just what part, I’m really not sure now. Nevertheless, she had me at her house for a while when we took the flight down. She let me watch a science fiction movie on television, where the aliens were throwing boulders at the astronauts on the moon. Another thing I remember is the smell of resin on the strings of my toy violin, which really played. Grandma Caldwell was so kind to me. Then we have a home movie too of me picking oranges off a tree. We had a party there at the old homestead when Grandpa was still alive.

In 1954, I was five years old, and we moved to Lackie, Virginia, not too far from Newport News and Richmond. Dad’s job was to clean the uranium in atomic weapons, and Mom liked the house we had. It was a nice house, she said.

One of my friends was Manning Rice. The thing that impressed me about Manning was that he was able to turn his eyelids inside out. His younger brother Dinty came up to me one day even though he was a stranger and asked if I would be his friend. So we became friends after that. I went out to the woods at that time with Manning and cooked and ate a half-raw potato.

I also recall walking a fence, a wooden fence that had long rails to it. I slipped and fell, and it caught me in the crotch, and I remember how painful that was.

Every day, I’d gladly give up my playing to watch Ranch House Tales, which was an early cowboy television series. And then Davy Crocket was the rage of all the youngsters around the country. It was a Walt Disney creation. I had a Davy Crocket record, a Davy Crocket hat, and who knows what else from Davy Crocket. I’d sing the songs, and we’d play Davy Crocket—my friends and I.

Dad took me out one time fishing, and he took me out to the bay, and we caught perch. We started fishing out on the end of a pier where it was dark, and we weren’t catching anything but snails and some crustaceans. Then we moved over to the place where the light was, and we caught a bucketful of nice perch in no time.

There was a hurricane when we lived in Lackie. I remember the garbage cans being blown away from the houses. There were large trees down, and their roots pointed upward like spider legs. Mom had to prepare baby formula in a heater that worked in the car cigarette lighter since the electricity was out. I mention baby formula because my sister Melinda was born on July 31 of that year. She was, and has been, my friend and love so that I was no longer alone in the world.

One time Dad took me to his ship, and there was a turkey leg given me by the cook. Even though I ate as much as I could each day, I think it took me three or four days to eat that drumstick. It was the biggest turkey leg I’ve ever seen to this day.

I remember there was a young guy that told me there were lots of good things in garbage cans. So he would go through the garbage cans, but I never did because I thought my mother would disapprove.

Then we’d get what we called pigs out of the woods. They were really cypress roots. We’d give them to the Cub Scouts, who made lamps out of them. But that was quite the thing for us: walking triumphantly home out of the woods with a pig suspended from a pole. We children used to climb trees a lot, and we explored throughout the woods to a large extent.

Well, I followed my instincts too strongly one time because I showed myself to a little girl. She told her mother, who told my mother; and when my dad came home, he gave me a licking. I remember waiting in trepidation all afternoon for my father to come home.

Dinty got caught in the mud one time. We thought it was quicksand, and that he would sink and die, but it was pretty deep mud. He was in up to his knees or higher, and I pulled him out.

Most memorable are the smell of honeysuckle and the sight of blackberries because we’d suck the honeysuckle flowers and eat the blackberries. We put up a picket fence, the family did, in that place. I found out what a posthole digger was. Once we had it up and painted, I remember finding three four-leaf clovers nearby. I also remember smashing my toenail in a car door and marveling at how the nail had split.

There was a monkey cage in back of a garage we went to one time. The monkeys weren’t well taken care of, but I was eager to see them. I soon left after taking in their squabbling. Dad got our Zenith television then too.

We saw Williamsburg, the battlements there with the logs sharpened and stuck in the ground to keep the invading force from reaching the high ground. I know we saw Richmond, but it is dim in my mind as to what we did there, other than my getting a butch haircut. And the barber tying me in the chair with the barber sheet. I got my first twenty-inch bike in Virginia, and I used it to the utmost.

In 1955, at age six, I moved with the family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was Lyons Avenue, South Philly. I attended St. Clement’s School for first grade. The thing that stands out in my mind is the difficulty of the Baltimore Catechism questions, which I had to memorize. While the other kids were outside my window playing, I had to stay in memorizing my catechism questions. My mother went over them and over them with me until they were solid in my mind. So much so that I still remember them today.

It was the first time I had become aware of disabilities due to the disabled driver’s hand-controlled car across the street. I got the mumps that year, and I got sand in my eyes when some boys down the block threw it at me because I got them angry or just for the meanness of it.

Getting on the school bus the first day of school was traumatic for me. I cried on the bus, but the lady in charge of the children on the bus comforted me.

Sister St. Rose was my teacher in first grade. There were three first-grade classes in my school, and there were seventy children in each class. One occasion in first grade was when I felt sick to my stomach, and I went up to Sister St. Rose, who was standing at the door talking with another teacher. I kept trying to get her attention to ask permission to go to the restroom, but she kept shushing me, telling me to be patient; and I couldn’t hold it down any longer, so I vomited on her habit.

In the playground there, we would pitch baseball cards and football cards of our heroes on the sports teams. There were different ways to pitch them. One way was to pitch them up against the wall, and whichever card was closest to the wall won the other cards. I soon had a pile of cards. I was first aware of making change with money when buying my marshmallow peanuts there in the playground at St. Clement’s.

One time we had to go to a lecture about something or other that I don’t remember. Being in first grade, I didn’t have the attention span to concentrate long on what was being said. I had a wax container with me, so I melted it in my hand and made a wax canoe.

Once, my lunch box was stolen. Mom told me when I went home that night to do some detective work and see what I could come up with. I found it with a young individual in one of the other first-grade classes. Out of all those people and being only in first grade, how I found it, I don’t know. My name had been scratched out of it, but I got it back.

One of the experiences that I underwent was going to the Protestant church. I didn’t know it was a Protestant church. For that matter, I didn’t know what a Protestant church was. My father had checked out the church and was told I would be involved only with the model club. So I went to the model club and was making a balsa wood airplane in which I was very interested when they called us for church. So once my father heard of that, I no longer went to the model club, much to my disappointment.

There was solitude in my life at times then too because I remember I went out to the end of the project, and at a pond there, I constructed a sailboat out of a few old boards. I was having the greatest time sailing it when my father called me for dinner.

We had some Jewish friends, the Margolits; and before they moved away, and before we moved away, they introduced us to bagels and lox.

My mother told me that in the song Nature Boy by Nat King Cole, the person sung about is Christ. So I went up to Sister St. Rose and asked her if the song was about Christ, and she asked me to repeat myself several times and simply said, I don’t know what you’re asking. I surmised later that she had never heard the song. So at that time that I had asked her, I had to learn to deal with misunderstanding.

There were Blue Angels, White Angels, and Green Angels in my first-grade class. I was in the White Angels, and I led the class. I heard that Fabian was a singer. Some people there knew where he lived. We also watched Bandstand, with Dick Clark, on local television.

One day, behind the public school across the street, I used painted parking spaces as barriers and rode in and around them to test myself in balancing in my bike well.

In 1956, at age seven, I entered second grade at St. Richard’s School in South Philadelphia. We lived in public housing, and it was great because there were so many other children. We played army on the construction site of what is now Schuylkill Expressway. I remember going under a grate and crawling through a tunnel, only to find a grate above me under which I could not exit. So then I