This Place of Wrath and Tears: A Comedy in Three Acts

By Clyde V. Collard

What appears to be a tale of progressive development and reversal of a life path in the portrayal of a single individual is, in reality, a quest for answers and a declaration of opinion concerning the questions we ponder. In describing the 78 years of his own chronological development, Dr. Clyde v. Collard has painted a vivid picture of the human condition and the forces explicit in shaping the biological and social existence of each of us. In the generic sense, that which applies to one human applies to all humans. John Donne expressed that sentiment when he wrote, And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. The author here states, Look, then into the glass, perceive yourself And now . . . choose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 24, 2009
• ISBN: 9781465330802

Clyde V. Collard

Clyde V. Collard experienced a wide variety of industrial and scientifi c occupations in his youth. After receiving his doctoral degree in sociology from Louisiana State University, he spent the next thirty years as a college professor. As an academician, Dr. Collard wrote and published in his chosen fi eld for many years before turning his literary skills to the realm of fi ction. In this electrifying tale the author uses his knowledge of human behavior to examine the personal feelings and social interactions of the people caught in a kaleidoscopic swirl of duty, love, challenge, fear, and horror.

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Copyright © 2009 by Clyde V. Collard.

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Contents

A C T O N E

A C T T W O

A C T T H R E E

A P P E N D I X

TO MY SIX DAUGHTERS

Nancy

Cathleen

Julia

Jennifer

Gaynl

Nadia

GOD BLESS THEM ALL, EVERYONE

A C T O N E

I’m not sure what this is supposed to be but let me start off with the essential caveat that this is my thing and I can’t vouch for the accuracy of anything herein stated. I will try to be accurate in every instance but though the flesh is willing ofttimes the memory is weak.

Now, what I think it is supposed to be is my thoughts and my life as best remembered. I have always wanted to set down my ideas philosophical, sociological, and psychological about life and history and humans and all other subjects pertaining thereto. I also want to describe the events of my life as I recall. The currently standard rationale for the autobiographical urge is so my children, grandchildren and all other progeny will be able to read about the way it used to be and how the old man lived and survived. Actually, I believe, I am doing it for myself for the above stated reasons that I want my great and marvelous revelations to persist and simply because I want to describe cohesively all the places I have lived and schools I have attended and activities I have perpetrated and/or endured. Essentially the idea is that I wish to leave something behind besides a headstone. Looking at it practically, ’tis likely to be no more than a confession.

Yes, first let us look at the title, if such it be. The line comes from a poem by William Ernest Henley which describes the ghastly vicissitudes of life and the terror of the expected end, Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade. Despite this certainty, Henley asserts his faith in the confidence of mankind that each individual is capable of controlling and is responsible for his own fate. Assuredly the future is blighted but man is well prepared to cope with that inevitability as Henley affirms, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. Supposedly, Henley was an avowed atheist who on his deathbed begged God for forgiveness. In the 1920s this popular poem became a popular song and I have been told that it was a favorite of my father. Many years ago I had thoughts of writing about my father’s life or perhaps making his life the basis for a novel and because of his pleasure in that song and because his life was often one of wrath and tears I had intended to use that line as a title. Since that project never got off the drawing board, I felt inclined to use it for my own. Hence, the title. That which follows is a fragmented fairy tale or, at best, a comedy in three acts.

I have no true sense of what this is going to be. I intend to present a subjective version of my life and hard times, the houses I lived in, the schools I attended, the places I worked, and some of the things I did . . . mostly the good things because I am highly unlikely to tell the bad things I did . . . much less put them down on paper. Put nicely, then, we could call this a closet confession. The other thing I wish to do is to chronicle in some vaguely coherent manner my thoughts about the world, people, religion, race, economics, history, society, family, and whatever else strikes my fancy. So the narrative will run in a sort of hip-hop back and forth presentation of my self, my life and my thoughts. If this ever gets turned out I intend to include various documents that pertain to my life, such as my birth certificate and copies of my academic degrees.

So let’s talk about life. Sometimes I feel as though I am right on the verge of a great revelation of just what IT is all about but I can’t quite get my teeth into it and then it slides away and is gone. What is the meaning of life? We can try, Ah, sweet mystery of life . . . ’tis love and love alone that is the answer. However, I’ve just decided that the meaning of life lies within the Infinite Number of Monkeys Principle. The supposition is that if an infinite number of monkeys pounded on an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite number of years that eventually they would type all the works of Shakespeare, or for that matter, all the great works of literature. What is life? I mean . . . there is no God, no system, no grand plan, no heaven, no life everlasting. So what is there? What’s it all about? Why do we have this brain? Why do we reason? (I do question the rationality of humans, I mean, are we rational or do we reason? More on this later.) Surely God gave us this wondrous brain so that we could figure out the whole scheme of life and think about it and philosophize about it and dream about it. But since there is no God that explanation is negated. I believe that life, the brain, whatever . . . just comes . . . like gravy (line from a movie). It has been estimated that the earth is approximately 4,500,000,000 years old and that life on earth is 3,500,000,000 years old and that multicellular, complex life has been around for about 600,000,000 years (Smithsonian Timeline). Now these are big numbers . . . far larger than humans can comprehend in terms of years. Sure, we understand 5 billion pennies or even 5 billion dollars . . . but we do NOT, or better still, CANNOT conceive of the total enormity of 5 billion years. We, of our three score and ten years, are temporalcentrically locked into our time and age. We can figure out 50 years oreven 100 years but the scope of what occurs in the vastness of that amount of time flees from the farthest reaches of our pitifully inadequate imaginations. In fairness let us drop the 5 billion figure which encompasses the totality of earth’s existence and deal with the possible years of complex life . . . 600 million. Here we come to the Infinite Number of Monkeys. Just as those innumerable monkeys can create any conceivable series of words, so too, can ANYTHING occur within the utterly irrational scope of six hundred million years. I take it that this last sentence means that life is a sort of accident. I like Sabatini’s description of things as they are;

 . . . this world of blindly striving, struggling, ever-restless men, who addressed themselves to their span of mortal existence as if it were to endure forever, was no better, no more purposeful, and of no more merit in its ultimate achievement, than a clot of writhing earthworms.

I have taken one of my favorite views of life from the movie Rainman. Dustin Hoffman plays the older brother of Tom Cruise. Hoffman is autistic and when he is upset he soothes himself by repeating aloud the ‘Who’s on First’ routine of Abbott and Costello. Cruise becomes so incensed at the droning recitation that he shouts, You’re never going to solve it because it is not a riddle. Who IS on first. It’s not a riddle, it’s a joke. If you understood that you might get better That line pleased me because I thought how applicable it was to the idea of life. Life is not a riddle, it’s a joke. If we understood that we might get better. Instead of trying to solve life it might wiser if we just tried to live it.

This document that I hold in my hand is a copy of my birth certificate. It certifies that the full name of the child is Clyde Vernon Collard, Jr. born in the state of California, county of Los Angeles, city of Long Beach, at 2639 A. East Broadway. Father’s name is Clyde Vernon Collard, Sr., age 26, born in Texas. Mother’s maiden name is Miss Elva Bethel, age 21, born in Oklahoma. Child was alive at 6:20 AM, October 11, 1930. Attending physician was W.P. Garrison.

When one seeks causal factors in the determination of one’s adult character it is essential to examine two influencing contributors; genetic codes and environment, both social and physical. Let us leave the genetic aspects until a later time and concentrate for the moment on the environment. I believe that the social (family, teachers, playmates, et al) has a greater influence on the developing psyche than the physical. Nevertheless, the physical surroundings can and often do have a strong influence on the social agents. This little preamble is leading us to my statement that up to and during my eighteenth year of age I lived in 30 different places and attended 17 different schools. Now I am going to list all those places and schools and then describe each of them in great detail. In some of these places we stayed only a few weeks or maybe a month or two but with the exception of the summer months I always attended school. The point I am making here is that I am not counting places where we stayed for a day or two but only those places where we stayed long enough for the kids to be enrolled in school. The longest we ever stayed in one spot was in Los Angeles where we lived in Aliso Village for three years. That is a sad statistic, considering that that was the worst place we ever lived.

PLACES I LIVED BEFORE AGE 18

1. 2639 A East Broadway . . . where I was born in Long Beach.

2. Torrence, a little town in southern California.

3. House where Fanny died (Long Beach). Fanny was my mother’s step-mother.

4. Earthquake house in Long Beach.

5. The Olde Homestead Inn. May be in Wilmington.

6. Hermosa Beach where my father opened a small café.

7. A court of apartments in Long Beach.

8. A duplex on Junipero avenue in Long Beach.

9. Temple street apartment where Sally was born 1936. Kindergarten.

10. House off Anaheim Boulevard after the hospital. Kept out?

11. Sunset Beach south of Long Beach Summer?

12. Santa Maria north of Santa Barbara. Summer.

13. Huntington Beach south of Long Beach. 1st grade.

14. Across the Flood Control in Long Beach 1st grade.

15. 548 Daisy in Long Beach where

Robin was born 1938 1st/2nd grade.

16. Marysville in northern California. 2nd/3rd ? grade.

17. Bakersfield motel. 3rd grade.

18. Olive Ave (Pine?) in Long Beach 3rd/4th grade.

19. Bakersfield on Beechnut Street. 4th grade.

20. Bakersfield in the tent. Summer.

21. Trailer on a friend’s farm. Summer.

22. Across the Flood Control on Alpine Street. Summer.

23. Court apartment in Long Beach. Hamilton School. 5th grade.

24. Carmelitas apartment, North Long Beach.

Gary born 1941. 5th grade.

25. Carmelitas apartment. Larger apartment. 6th/7th grades.

26. Aliso Village in Los Angeles . . . Gless St. 7th/8th/9th/10th.

27. Trailer in Turlock. Turlock High School 10th grade.

28. Livingston at Rigo’s place. Livingston High School 10th grade.

29. Livingston, back of the shoe shop. 11th/12th grades.

30. Modesto apartment on 13th street. MJC

This is the way I count it with my mother’s help. I don’t know about the first five places . . . those come from my mother. My memory does not begin until the sixth place, the Olde Homestead Inn, and even in some of the other places my memory is a little slim and dim. My memory is strong and infallible from number 21, Bakersfield in the tent until no. 30, Modesto. Most of the others are as correct as I can make them. Some of the earlier places may not be in order . . . for example, Sunset Beach, Santa Maria, and Huntington Beach may be transposed . . . but to the best of my recollection the places are in proper sequence. Now I would like to list my schools before I go down both lists and describe each place and each school in detail.

These are the 17 schools I attended before being graduated from high school prior to my 18th birthday. Hey, come to think of it, it had never occurred to me that I averaged one school per year.

1. Kindergarten Temple Street

2. 1st grade Huntington Beach

3. 1st grade Across Flood Control

4. 1st/2nd grades 548 Daisy Edison school

5. 2nd grade Marysville

6. 3rd grade Bakersfield motel

7. 3rd/4th grades Olive Street Lincoln school

8. 4th grade Bakersfield Beechnut Street

9. 5th grade Court Hamilton school

10. 5th/6th grades Carmelitos Jane Addams school

11. 7th grade Carmelitos Lindbergh Jr. High

12. 7th grade Alio Village Hollenbeck Jr. High

13. 7th/8th grades Aliso Village St. Mary’s Catholic school

14. 8th/9th grades Aliso Village Hollenbeck Jr. High

15. 10th grade Aliso Village Roosevelt High School

16. 10th grade Turlock Turlock High School

17. 10th/11th/12th grades Livingston Livingston High School

Just as there may be some discrepancy in the sequence of residences so there may be some misalignment up to the 5th grade. However, from the 5th grade at Hamilton school the sequence is completely (can one be partially accurate?) accurate.

The first residence I remember was the Olde Homestead Inn; I was two or three years old. It was a nightclub with our rooms upstairs. My mother claimed that my father was the biggest bootlegger on the west coast. I doubt this. I suspect that he was a booze hustler in a small way. Yet she talked about his contacts, toting a gun, making bathtub gin and homebrew beer, run-ins with the cops, and narrow escapes. However or whatever! He set up the Homestead Inn as a nightclub and sold liquor and put on live entertainment with a western band and wrestling matches. Mother claimed that Jack Dempsey refereed matches for my father. I remember the names of two of the band members; Stepladder was one and Little Bit was another. Another thing I seem to remember is a large refrigerator in the kitchen and mold on the jello. Tell me, how do you get mold on jello?

Mother said that Father was the smartest man she ever knew. He was pleasant when sober but he was a mean, ugly drunk. They hired a colored man to paint murals on the walls. He drank a quart of whiskey a night. Mother said that my father sat up nights to watch him paint and to talk and to drink. That, she said, was when he became a heavy drinker. He was mean and tough when drunk. The only man Mother ever saw my father afraid of was an ex-sailor who worked for them as a bouncer. According to the story, my father was in an argument with his older brother, Frank, when Clyde knocked Frank through a screen door and down a flight of stairs. When Clyde ran down the stairs and drew back his leg to kick Frank in the head, the bouncer grabbed Clyde and said, Don’t do that. And Clyde desisted. He didn’t back away from many men.

Those are tales from my mother. Personally, I remember walking with my maternal grandfather along the big high fence that surrounded the local baseball park. I remember jello in the club’s big kitchen refrigerator, huge magnolia trees around the building, a gang of tough kids who identified with Popsicle sticks. Finally, I recall sneaking out early in the morning with my brother Bob and swiping Hershey chocolate bars from the trunk of father’s car. And that is all.

I don’t know what happened to the Olde Homestead Inn but according to my mother it’s loss involved venereal disease which my father brought home to her and an arrest under a violation of the Volstead Act. My father won an acquittal and argued his own case so brilliantly that the prosecuting attorney asked to work for him.

In the account of these early years the repetitious phrase according to my mother is used to differentiate between my memories which come from her tales and those that I actually remember. I feel this is like the line the author uses to disclaim responsibility for the tale of the gingham dog and the calico cat in his poem, The Duel;

"I wasn’t there, I simply state

What was told to me by the Chinese plate".

My mother was an interesting person (fewer understatements have ever seen print). She was surprisingly naïve and childlike, yet tough and capable (she had to be tough to drag five kids up and down the state). She was book ignorant but street wise. She had an eighth grade education. She was married five times, had five children, eighteen grandchildren, twenty-five great-grandchildren, and at least three great-great-grandchildren during her lifetime, which lasted for ninety-two years.

She had sort of a Cinderella childhood. When her younger brother, Lee, was born her mother suffered a torn uterus and the pain brought about a collapse or a mental breakdown or insanity. She was placed in a sanatorium and my grandfather married a woman named Fanny who had a daughter named Jessie. My mother recounted many tales of persecution and abuse from that pair. The essence was that Fanny constantly harassed and overworked her and Jessie was wicked and destroyed my mother’s toys. Apparently her father did nothing because he believed the lies told to him by Fanny. However, not everyone believed her version of happenings. One story is that when my grandfather was going to whip my mother because of some infraction described by Fanny her own brother said, Elvie didn’t do that Calvin and if you’re going to whip that girl you’ll have to whip me first. There was no doubt that grandfather could whip both of them . . . mother thought he was the greatest thing that ever wore boots . . . but he reconsidered and a family squabble was averted. Whatever, it makes a good story.

Mother had an older brother, Noah, and a younger brother, Lee, who was called Judge because of his sober demeanor. Her father was partially raised on an Indian reservation because his brother was a teacher there. There is Indian blood in the family but just how much is uncertain. According to Mother the percentage was high enough to warrant allotment of government land but her paternal grandmother (who was a Swafford and full blooded Dutch) refused to acknowledge that her children had Indian blood. I believe that one had to be at least 1/8 Indian to qualify for the land grant. If that is true, my grandfather was 1/8, my mother was 1/16, and her children were 1/32. I doubt there was that much Indian blood is us. I think myself and my siblings were more like 1/64 or 1/128 but . . . who knows? When we were in grammar school entrance papers or such had a blank place for nationality. We liked to write Indian in that slot because we thought it was cool to be Indian. Supposedly our tribe was Cherokee.

This might be a good point to tell what little I know about our ethnicity. My mother’s mother, whose maiden name was Clark, was full-blooded Irish. My mother’s paternal grandmother was Dutch. Her maiden name was Swafford. The Bethel line goes back to some minor English gentleman who came to America in the early nineteenth century. That, with the Indian connection, is all I know about the maternal line. My father was the second eldest of seven boys and one girl. His mother was a Ruffin from Georgia. I believe the Collard line is English or possibly Welsh. My sister, Sally, claims she heard there was also some French blood in us. That ain’t much but it’s all I’ve got.

However, there is more. I had never known any of my Collard relatives but when I was in my mid sixties I began to communicate with a Collard cousin, Doris Jean Whitlock, and then went to Texas to meet her and another cousin, Carolyn Wilson. It was a delightful and informative meeting. Not only did I meet their families but I also, for the first time, met my uncle Hugh and my uncle Theodore. Doris Jean is the daughter of my uncle Theodore and Carolyn is the daughter of my uncle Frank. Since that time I have exchanged letters (e-mail) with those wonderful women on a fairly constant basis. In one of our discussions on family religious ties, Carolyn described some family background. I will share some of that information with you. Carolyn writes,

"Here’s what I learned from a bit of genealogy study a few years ago. I believe Catholicism entered the Collard line through the Mattingly family in Kentucky with George’s mother, Virginia. Apparently, in Big Clifty, Kentucky, where George was born, there were lots of Catholic families. Some family members migrated to Alma, Texas, in the late 1800s. There’s a large Catholic cemetery in Big Clifty that I saw about 12 years ago when I visited the gravesites of some of our ancestors. The family names that I recall are Mattingly, Whitfield, and Collard. Those family names are still in the phone book of the larger town near Big Clifty, a tiny town with only scattered houses, a service station, and a café.

The story is that George and his older brother Lewis headed toward Alma, Texas, from Big Clifty on horseback when they were young men to work for their uncle or cousin, a Whitfield who owned a cotton gin. George had grown up the youngest of a large family of children brought up by Virginia because George’s father had died before his first birthday. She must have passed on her Catholic faith to our grandfather. Our great-grandfather, George Washington Collard, Sr, was said to have no religion".

"As an aside, Uncle Hugh told me that our grandfather had a gift that is said to come to people whose fathers die when they’re babies, the ability to breathe on a child who was sick and heal them. Hugh had a word for that gift, but I don’t remember the word. Apparently, it didn’t always work for his two first children died of scarlet fever at ages 4 and 2.

On the other side of the family, Sally Ruffin’s family had a long history in the Methodist church. They had arrived in Alma from Georgia when Sally, our grandmother, was only five. The story is that when George and Sally married and had children, they had the children baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, and throughout their childhood George took them to church. Perhaps Sally didn’t attend church. I don’t believe she did. She had many emotional problems after her first two children died on the same day, and she was often aw ay from home for periods of time to be in a state hospital (mental institution). I really hate to type those terrible words! It must have been terribly difficult for each family member, not to mention Sally. Uncle Theodore told me of some of his pain through those years when they had nannies to care for them

And that does wrap up the reminiscences and sparse genealogy but before I close it I would like to relate one of my mother’s favorite tales from her early years as a child in Oklahoma. I have forgotten many of my mother’s wild tales, yet here is one about an incident in the oil fields of Oklahoma. My grandfather drove horses and wagons and hauled freight to the oil fields. One night a building caught on fire and trapped a rigger on the second floor. He got to an open window and his friend below shouted, Drap, Bill, drap. I’ll ketch ye Bill hesitated until his clothes began to smolder and then he drapped right on top of his friend and caught him on fire too. The flames were extinguished by others and Bill and his partner were not seriously harmed. This doesn’t seem as funny in print. Maybe, you had to be there.

After they lost the Olde Homestead Inn my folks opened a small beer/hamburger place in Hermosa Beach. I don’t remember a thing about this time but I do have a picture of them in the business and included in the picture is my uncle Frank and a man who may be my uncle Theodore. I also remember seeing another picture with them wearing little Spanish hats with dangling balls. Brother Bob, however, says that this was on the Pike in Long Beach . . . so what do I know?

Then we lived in a court somewhere in Long Beach. A court is two rows of single story (usually) apartments facing one another across a central garden aisle court of grass and/or flowers and shrubbery. This is the place that my mother says one of the neighbors was the wife or previous wife of the President of Mexico . . . so she says. This is another one of the places of hazy memory and I am not sure of the sequence but it is somewhere in there, more or less. I must have been about 3 or 4 years old. I remember two things about this place. First, we played with rubber guns. A rubber gun was made from two pieces of wood. One straight piece about 12 inches long was the barrel. Another pieces was nailed to the end of the barrel and constituted the handle. A clothes pin was nailed onto the handle. Then a rubber band was stretched from the end of the barrel and fastened to the clothes pin. When released the band flew some distance and stung sharply when it hit you. These were not office type rubber bands. The bands were cut from inner tubes (all tires used to have tubes within them to contain the air). Bicycles tubes were especially good for this. Some boys made rifles with long barrels . . . maybe three feet long . . . so that the bands went farther and stung more. Yeah, some fun.

The other thing I remember about this place was a nighttime crawdad hunt. My father had a drinking/fighting buddy called Red. He was a mechanic and a friend who . . . according to the story . . . had been known more than once to bring my father home bloodied from a fight. Anyway, Red and some friends were at the house one night having a beer and telling tall tales when they all decided to go crawdad fishing. Bob and I were supposed to be in bed but we were on the stair listening to it all and, of course, wanted to go along. So we all piled into cars and dashed out into the country to a small creek. There they fished off the bridge or along the bank and caught buckets full of crawdads. They tied chunks of bacon on strings hung from poles and when the crawdads grabbed on they jerked them out of the water. I don’t remember all of the details but everyone seemed to have a good time . . . even my father who was cut when he carelessly let a crawdad get a claw onto his hand. On the drive home early in the morning they stopped along the side of the road to steal green peppers out of a farmer’s field. It doesn’t sound all that exciting does it but it was one of my childhood memories that stayed with me and, as a result, even in my teens I considered myself quite the crawdad expert.

Years later I discovered crawdads at a waterdrop in one of the canals around Turlock. I took Gary and my father-in-law Bob Smith and Sally’s husband John Vilkofsky out there and we caught a gunnysack full using bait, nets, and our hands. We had to drag Bob Smith away from there and he almost cried. He said that was the only time in his life he had to quit fishing while they were still biting.

It doesn’t seem like much but that is all I can remember about living in the court. Next stop was a duplex on Junipero street where exciting things happened. First let me relate a small occurrence that took place on one of the major streets in Long Beach.

Some time in the early 1930’s after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president in 1932 he came to Long Beach and they had a big parade to honor him. I must have been around three years old. The sidewalks were jammed with people and when the president’s car came by my father wanted me to see him so he lifted me up on his shoulders. Look son, there’s the president Where? Where? I cried. There, in the big car. I looked and then made a sour face. Aw I said with scorn, It’s only a man. This is my mother’s tale and I believe it because it shows not only my early age perspicacity but that the depth of my cynicism existed long before old age struck.

My mother had a cousin she always called Eddie. I believe her name was Edna but I’m not certain about that. She visited us from time to time and the duplex on Junipero street is one of the places I remember her visit. She had polio . . . then it was known as infantile paralysis . . . as a child and was lame most of her life and could not walk without crutches. She was half Indian and mother had many tales about her youth with cousin Eddie. Eddie called me Clark Gable (because I was cute) and supposedly when my mother was after me for some transgression I would run to Eddie and she would hide me and not let my mother spank me. She also sought to protect me from my father. I don’t like to say that I take pride in my stubbornness but it has been one of my principal, if not admirable, characteristics . . . especially in my youth (I have since outgrown such callow, idiotic games). Once I wanted a nickel but my father didn’t have a nickel so he gave me five pennies. Apparently I didn’t like the substitution so I threw the pennies on the floor and demanded a nickel. My father insisted that I pick up the pennies and when I refused he said he was going to get his belt to spank me. I still refused but while he was out of the room my mother and Eddie cajoled me into picking up the pennies and saving my little behind. I think I had my jaw set and still would have refused to pick up the pennies if it hadn’t been for them. Or so the story goes.

Later in life Eddie taught me to play Oklahoma Rummy and I played many, many games of that rummy while in high school (Bob Odell. Joe Lema, Pete Jamero and myself used to play it in Bob’s upstairs apartment . . . hour after hour) and during my young adulthood. I can’t begin to recall the number of people I taught to play Oklahoma Rummy. It is played with two decks of cards. Each player is dealt eleven cards and players seek to meld books of three cards each or same suit runs of four cards. The hands are progressive so that in the first hand only six cards of two books can be melded and the balance of the cards in the hand are played on melded books. In the next hand seven cards of one book and one run can be melded . . . and so on until a player can meld all eleven cards from his hand. A hand ends when one player is out of cards. It is a draw from a central deck and discard game. A single card can be taken from the discard pile but a penalty card must also be taken from the deck. At the end of the hand each player counts the points left in his hand by card value and that number is recorded. At the end of the game low score wins.

In those days there were many vacant lots . . . plots of land that had no houses. These were our playgrounds where we dug caves, built roads for toy cars, played cops and robbers, fought clod wars pulling up clumps of weeds with dirt still attached to the roots and throwing them at each other . . . good on the fun register but hard on the eyes . . . and did any number of things our fertile imaginations could devise. Vacant lots were a part of the common landscape, not only great places to play but also good for easy access from one street to another and every lot had a path (or several) running through where people walked . . .cutting across the vacant lot was as common as stepping off your front porch. Brother Bob had a Mexican boyfriend and we used to get to his house by cutting across a big vacant lot. Scattered amongst the variety of weeds on this lot were tall weeds with crumbly seeds which turned brown. We used to strip off these seeds and call them Indian tobacco. It was said that some boys tried to smoke it but since I was only four years old I hadn’t yet advanced to that stage.

Let us now talk about power. Sociology perceives several types of power; physical power, social power, or charismatic power. Was it Mao who said power comes from the end of a gun? Who was it said Power means never having to say you are sorry? I wrote a book about power entitled The Superman Syndrome. I have often thought about power in terms of the Alpha Male and Men on Horseback. The Alpha Male epitomizes power; the number one man, The Man, the guy with the big stick. The Alpha Male is the top dog who runs everything and takes the best of everything; power, money, possessions, women, and the most comfortable chair. The rest of us want to emulate the Alpha Male and, if possible usurp his position as head of the pack but we can’t because we are not Alpha Males. So we slink about trying to sit as close to the throne as possible hoping that some of his discards will be tossed to us. How does one become an Alpha Male? There are various ways like having the biggest muscles or the largest brain or being the meanest or through breeding. Probably the last is the best way . . . to be born an Alpha Male, that is, to have a father who is an