Poor Little Rich Boy: (A Near Memoir)

By Alberto Palani

Life is a ride, but you are the horse, donkey, camel, or elephant transporting the load. The scenery you pass may be stimulating or dull, and it is often the latter. Life is also a series of lessons, but lessons learned do not necessarily prevent the horse from occasionally bolting out of control as if stung by a wasp! May your ride invigorate your imagination, but since you are the ridden, watch out for the occasional rider called ego! Buck him off if necessary to show he does not control you and that you control him! Enjoy this story of an unusual ride. Hasta luego. Alberto.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503577800

Alberto Palani

Alberto Palani is a retired cattleman with over fifty-five years’ experience in the following: breeding and raising beef cattle, hay and grain farming, as well as being a feedlot manager, a trucker, a real estate broker in Hawaii, a one-man manager of Bishop Trust Company’s Kona office, a business consultant and paralegal in tax and estate planning for a Hilo law firm, a past president of a rotary club in California, the founder of the New Mexico Limousin (cattle) Association, a multiengine pilot, and a medical transcriptionist. He was born in San Diego in 1935 and raised near Pine Valley, California. He studied high school at College Prep Midland School, Los Olivos, California. He has a BS degree in agricultural production from the University of California (1959), and he lives along the border between Arizona and New Mexico.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Alberto Palani.

ISBN:      Softcover   978-1-5035-7781-7

               eBook        978-1-5035-7780-0

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.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 06/11/2015

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

716525

Contents

1   GROWING UP

2   LEAVING HOME

3   LIFESTYLES

4   MOTHER

5   FIFTEEN WILLS

6   SOCIAL SECURITY

7   REAL SECURITY

PREFACE

A baby born on the 20th day of September, 1935, at the old Mercy Hospital in San Diego was termed the Exposition Baby by his parents, Frank and Harriet Belcher, and was named Mike. President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United Sates of America paid a visit to the new arrival at his mother’s hospital room just hours after birth, for the President was in San Diego to witness the opening of the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition, and the baby’s father was President of that exposition. The birth certificate later listed the newborn’s name as: Frank Garrettson Belcher, Jr., with no reference to this baby’s name being Mike.

Mike soon left the hospital in the company of his mother and father and returned with them to the Belcher home at Point Loma, where his first distant view was of San Diego Bay, and Coronado Island. Today, with the aid of binoculars, from the same site, one can see several landmarks that represent part of the legacy that Frank Garrettson Belcher, Jr. was born into. Looking eastward, from North to South, and from foreground to background, one sees the piers at the port of San Diego which his maternal great-grandfather, John D. Spreckels, built; then the successor bank building to the old First National Trust & Savings Bank, which was started by his paternal great-grandfather D.F. Garrettson, and later acquired by Spreckels, and of which his grandfather Frank Jonathan Belcher, Jr. was president for more than 20 years. Then one can look eastward to the Laguna Mountains and then south to Los Pinos peak, just above the Rancho Corta Madera valley, where both D.F. Garrettson and Frank J. Belcher maintained mountain cabins. Then swing to the right to view the Coronado Hotel on Coronado Island. The Hotel Del Coronado was purchased during its construction and finished by Great-Grandfather Spreckels. Nearly six hundred miles to the north, the city of San Francisco lies on the south side of the Bay, where the Holbrook building can still be found. Mike’s other maternal great-grandfather was Charles Holbrook, a founder of the mercantile company known as Holbrook, Merrill & Stetson, in San Francisco.

Harriet Holbrook was the only child of Harry Holbrook, son of Charles, born to his marriage with Lillie Spreckels, daughter of John D. Spreckels. As a third generation grandchild of those who pioneered the early development of California, having both parents born in California, Mike arrived in the Golden State born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. However, the money was on his mother’s side and not his father’s.

Frank J. Belcher (Jr.) arrived in California from Falls Village, Connecticut, in 1902, a year after he obtained his law degree from New York University, and soon found work as a teller in the Garrettson bank. He married his boss’ daughter, Virginia Garrettson. Two children were born: Frank Garrettson Belcher, Mike’s father, and Mary Elizabeth Belcher. Frank J., in due time, became President of the bank. Soon it was a case of the President’s son marrying the new boss’ granddaughter, after Spreckels acquired the bank. Frank G. Belcher, then a vice-president of the bank, married Harriet Holbrook, daughter of Lillie Spreckels Holbrook, at a lavish ceremony at Lillie’s Adella Drive Home in Coronado which was not far from her father John D. Spreckels’ mansion next door to the Hotel Del Coronado. The Spreckels mansion is known today as the Glorietta Bay Inn. Coronado, and the Rancho Corta Madera south of Pine Valley, California, in eastern San Diego County, were the environments in which young Mike grew up, visiting his grandmother at her Adella Drive home, and spending most of his time at the ranch, known as Corta Madera.

D.F. Garrettson, a cattleman from Iowa, acquired Corta Madera from the Benton family, of which Al Benton in recent times has operated a cattle feedlot atWalnut, California, near Pomona. But Garrettson had gone into banking with his First National Trust & Savings in San Diego and held the Corta Madera primarily as an investment and as a reminder that he had ranched previously on several hundred sections of land in Texas. His nephew, Ned Dulin, once owned the Cross Bar outfit at Springerville, Arizona, comprising some 700,000 acres and a cattle herd of 14,000, but Ned admitted in a letter to Mike many years later, that things got rough after World War I, and that he finally went broke during the l929 depression. D.F. Garrettson found himself losing his bank in that same depression, and he sold it to Spreckels. In order to keep his beloved mountain retreat at Corta Madera during these hard times, Garrettson organized a corporation for purchase of the Corta Madera, in which he remained a stockholder. The ranch became known as Rancho Corta Madera, Inc. Harriet Belcher, wife of Garrettson’s grandson, Frank G.Belcher, became a stockholder, then for a short time acquired all the stock. She subdivided several hundred acres from the main ranch which she put in her own name, then sold the stock back to the original shareholders. If you have the capital, this is a neat way to carve out a choice piece of real estate for yourself when it is in corporate ownership and the owners don’t care to sell a portion of their holdings. Then restore them to the original property less the acreage you severed from it! Harriet had access to the Speckels millions through her mother, Lillie. She was in her early twenties at the time, already a shrewd business person.

One day in 1942, as a second grader, Mike was chauffeured to the Pine Valley school, and he felt chagrin for the first time. Until then life had been quite sheltered for him, with time spent at his grandmother’s mansion in Coronado or for the most part with a nurse hired full time to care for him and his older brother Garry, at Corta Madera. His mother spent as much time as possible with his father, away from Corta Madera, at various stateside naval bases to which his father had been assigned at the beginning of World War II. His first day at this public school ten miles away, was memorable to Mike. As the long,de-chromed, battleship-gray (wartime colors) Cadillac limousine pulled up at the front door of the school, there was a uniformed chauffeur, wearing the traditional black cap with visor, at the wheel. Mike studied his options for a moment. He knew he was embarrassed. In a twinkling, second and third graders filing through the door stopped, and turned toward the limo. The chauffeur already had the back door open, and Mike faced about ten kids with books in hand, staring, with their mouths agape! As he started out from the rear seat of the limousine, in unison, the children began their chant: "POOR LITTLE RICH BOY, poor little rich boy, poor little rich boy, poor little rich boy………….." until the teacher came to the door. By then, tears were rolling down his cheeks, and an unseen boy took a poke at him. Mike fired back, dropping his books in the process. His punch landed squarely against the teacher’s stomach, for she had positioned herself in front, as the other children scattered upon her arrival. That landed Mike in the corner of the one-room schoolhouse for the rest of the morning wearing a dunce cap!

Soon afterward Mike found himself enroute to Caracas, Venezuela, at sea aboard the Grace Lines’ steamship Santa Rosa, on December 7, l941. His father, Frank, had been appointed naval attache’ to the U.S. Embassy and had been flown down there almost a month before. The Navy booked the family on this passage to Maiquetia. The ship was a couple of days out, and late one afternoon Garry and Mike were out on deck looking for the shuffleboard area when a crowd of passengers standing back on the fantail caught their eye. There was a broad circle of grown-ups, with their heads bent over, looking or listening to something. When the boys approached the group, they had to split apart to find a niche where each could look into the circle to see what was going on. They thought perhaps it was a fight. To their amazement, there was a man on his knees in the middle, leaning close to a portable short wave radio, which was in a wooden cabinet, and he was adjusting a knurled knob that rotated numbers of frequencies behind a curved window on the face of the radio. This was perhaps a twenty pound unit, resting on the deck, and about a foot and a half high. From it came the loud but clear voice of Franklin Delano Roosevelt stating that Pearl Harbor had been attacked by Japanese war planes that morning, and that the U.S.A. was now at war with the Japanese in the Pacific. Garry and his younger brother backed away and ran to tell the news to their mother. That night the crew of the Santa Rosa blackened all the portholes with paint so no light would shine from the ocean liner. Passengers were informed that German U-boats (submarines) were in the vicinity of the ship. The next day a U-boat cruised by, and Mike remembers to this day the sight of the German sailors looking upward and waving to the passengers on the deck of the Santa Rosa as the surfaced submarine slowly made its way past the big ship. World War II had now extended to the Pacific, and at this same time the Germans were rumored to be building bases in South America. This is where this book begins, in wartime, during World War II, fifty-six years ago,

AND IT ENCOMPASSES during the ensuing fifty-six years, Mike’s voyage through life as a privileged observer of things that make life interesting. This includes early flying experiences as a passenger in twin-engined DC 3’s to DC 4’s, 6’s, 7’s, Boeing Stratocruisers, piloting his own light twin-engined airplane, being an accomplished horseshoer, land developer, rancher, cowboy, heavy equipment operator, gas station attendant, bank trainee, cattle feedlot manager, bookkeeper, real estate broker, log truck driver, and seedstock cattle producer. From defendant to plaintiff in lawsuits, and from riches to debtor in bankruptcies, and from scion and heir to millions to disinheritance, it is the author’s hope that the reader of this book may identify with some of Mike’s activities in his walk through life, that you may even see a bigger picture, as Mike has seen, or perhaps lift your life out of despair by seeing how another person has shrugged off difficulties, or simply laugh with yourself. Many who know him think that Mike can’t get anything right, but perhaps that is the armor that protects the tortoise. Are we or are we not masters of our own destiny?

Does destiny matter, or does peace of mind? This book is dedicated to those who ask that question.

CHAPTER ONE

GROWING UP

Recently. One of Mike’s grandchildren asked him: Grampa, how many places in the world have you been to? Mike’s reply: I’ve lost count, but I’ll try to name most of them: I was born in San Diego, and have visited San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver; Ketchikan, Juneau, Sitka, and Anchorage in Alaska, and Los Angeles; in fact about half the towns in California; New York City, London, Paris, Rome, Copenhagen, Munich, Cologne, Zermatt, Lucerne, Venice, Salzburg, Vienna, Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, Mexico City, Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, Guaymas, Hermosillo; and in China : Beijing, Shanghai, Kunming, Chunking, Hong Kong, to name a few, and in the U.S.A. I have travelled through Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Nevada, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Washington, DC., Massachusetts, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. In Canada, I forgot to add Calgary, Banff, Montreal and Quebec. The rest of the world I have yet to see! My first visit anywhere outside of San Diego County, was Caracas, Venezuela. I was six years old then, younger than you.

"I don’t remember much about the city of Caracas itself. We lived on the outskirts of the city in a home provided by the U.S. Government, because my father was an officer in the U.S. Navy attached to the American Embassy in Caracas. One of my first memorable events while living there was an airplane flight with my Dad on official business. This was not my first airplane ride. My first ride in an airplane was in a single-engine Howard, in the back seat. That was a high-wing, single engine crate with fabric covered wings and fuselage, with a big noisy radial engine in the nose that looked as wide as a barn door when viewed head-on. It was privately owned, and we took off from San Diego’s Lindbergh Field on an excursion to the back country east of the city, near the Corta Madera Ranch where I was raised. We flew eastward over El Cajon, then Alpine, over the Viejas grade to Pine Valley, then Mt. Laguna, Los Pinos, and over Tecate, Mexico, then westward toward Tijuana, and back to San Diego. Today, my estimate of our altitude above the ground then, would be about l,000 feet. It was a short flight, about an hour in length, but it seemed like all day to me. I was so fascinated with the ‘bird’s eye’ view from above, that time meant nothing. I had to get up on my knees to see out the side windows, being not very tall at age six. I will always remember the noise, a deafening roar that