My Back Pages or Everyday Events

By Mylon Banks

I was born and raised in a small Northern California town. At one time, the population was very near that of the fictitious town of Payton Place with equal amounts of gossip and everyone knowing everyone else’s business. I graduated from the local high school in the late ’60s and couldn’t wait to get out of town. I moved to the city and began a series of counterculture adventures, which ultimately landed me in jail. Over the course of time, I came to think fondly of the time I spent in my then small hometown. The town has grown since then but is still small, relatively speaking.
I have always enjoyed writing and sharing my experiences with other people and now, at this point in my life, would like to relay what it was like growing up with “country ways."

Plain ole everyday events are what make up all our lives. What follows here are some of those events that have made up my life and those around me. Some of these stories are pieces I wrote for a writing group I was involved in at our local library. The group was “Down Memory Lane” and was anything about our past in our small town. Our pieces were usually printed in the local newspaper, and I came to appreciate the comments I would get on the articles. Of course, this is life in a small town, so usually everyone knows everyone else and their dogs. But as Wallace Stegner once said, “How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these?” This is that attempt. This is just plain old everyday events. Fellini once insinuated that what he creates is more real to him than what actually is or was. He created his own reality. Most of these stories are just as they happened. I did these stories in an effort to explain the time and the events that made up those experiences (my life and times).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664155657

Mylon Banks

I was born and raised in a small Northern California town. At one time, the population was very near that of the fictitious town of Payton Place with equal amounts of gossip and everyone knowing everyone else’s business. I graduated from the local high school in the late ’60s and couldn’t wait to get out of town. I moved to the city and began a series of counterculture adventures, which ultimately landed me in jail. Over the course of time, I came to think fondly of the time I spent in my then small hometown. The town has grown since then but is still small, relatively speaking. I have always enjoyed writing and sharing my experiences with other people and now, at this point in my life, would like to relay what it was like growing up with “country ways." Plain ole everyday events are what make up all our lives. What follows here are some of those events that have made up my life and those around me. Some of these stories are pieces I wrote for a writing group I was involved in at our local library. The group was “Down Memory Lane” and was anything about our past in our small town. Our pieces were usually printed in the local newspaper, and I came to appreciate the comments I would get on the articles. Of course, this is life in a small town, so usually everyone knows everyone else and their dogs. But as Wallace Stegner once said, “How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these?” This is that attempt. This is just plain old everyday events. Fellini once insinuated that what he creates is more real to him than what actually is or was. He created his own reality. Most of these stories are just as they happened. I did these stories in an effort to explain the time and the events that made up those experiences (my life and times).

Book preview

Prologue

My Back Pages

Crimson flames tied through my ears

Rollin’ high and mighty traps

Pounced with fire on flaming roads

Using ideas as my maps

We’ll meet on edges, soon, said I

Proud ’neath heated brow

Ah, but I was so much older then

I’m younger than that now.

Lyrics from this song would explain life to me more than any philosophy class ever could and I would think back on it to comfort me in times of need. Thank you, Bob.

Every time the weather changes it reminds me of something from my past. This condition use to bother me but now I accept it as a fact of life. It seems quite normal to think of the time we had a field full of new mown alfalfa hay ready to pack into bales and the unexpected early October rain would threaten it with disaster and my father would insist we try to save what we could. Of course this was before Doppler radar and the modern conveniences of scientific weather prediction. Boy that was a long time ago huh? Yet in the greater scheme of things it really wasn’t. Doppler radar was first conceived by Christian Doppler in 1842. And in the greater scheme of things, that’s not that long ago. It was Gary England of KWTV that first used Doppler to broadcast a tornado warning in 1982. By then my father had pretty much surrendered to the forces of nature and just accepted what ever happened. He had started to preach that was what farming was all about, just going with nature and accepting the inevitable. If one could not stand the heat, one should vacate the kitchen. I noticed a change in his demeanor at this point and I myself could never quite grasp this concept. If the weather gets to radical I still flinch. At the same time I love the weather changes. It proves my theory we are all are at the whim of some unknown force. It may be Buddha or it may be God, yet there is something.

Now to me Doppler is something, though not a religion, and soon to be replace by the James Webb system, it can be explained like this; Doppler radar beams a microwave signal at a desired target and listens for its reflection. It then analyzes the original signal to see how much it has been altered by the respective object. Variations in the frequency of the original signal give direct and highly accurate measurements of a target’s velocity relative to it. (Variations in the frequency of the signal give direct and highly accurate measurements of a target’s velocity relative to the radar source and the direction of the microwave beam.) Doppler radars are used in air defense, air traffic control, sounding satellites, police speed guns[1], and radiology. But enough Bill Nye the Science Guy, the point being, Doppler radar was not around to predict the ruination of my father’s beloved crops in the 60’s and 70’s. And he did love to farm, till early in the morning till late at night. He also felt everyone shared his love of agriculture, especially his family. I remember watching the old Bonanza with my family and my father was sure that was how our family would turn out. Pops, Hose, Little Joe, and Adam, all workin’ the farm, of course it did not turn out that way.

My older brother went to work for the then Pacific Western Electric, which was a division of Pacific Bell, a now defunct phone company. The company was once known as Ma Bell as it was the Mother of conglomerates, holding a monopoly on all telephone services in almost all major portions of the United States. The use of female voices to deal with customers furthered this concept. When speaking to the Phone Company one usually spoke to a female voice, Ma Bell. The company was deregulated in 1984, but controlled the phone business from 1877 until the advent of AT&T in ’84. Brother Gerald did quite well with Ma Bell but his ambitious nature spurred him onward and upward into other endeavors. I will have to go back to this later, but at this time it is enough to say that my older brother worked most of his life to follow the American dream and was quite successful at his pursuit.

My younger brother like myself, choose a more bohemian life style. This was the 60’s or late 60’s early 70’s and sex, drugs, and rock and roll was the anthem of the times. We both aspired to those goals. My younger brother worked as a ski lift operator and eventually worked in a lumber yard and got into the construction trade which he took to rather well. I went to the San Francisco area to become an artist.

The point of this is that none of sons stayed on the farm, which disappointed my father terribly. He continued farming until the day he died, literally. He passed away looking out his back door wondering if his cows had enough feed and water. We had set him up on a mobile gurney and placed him in front of a sliding glass door, and farmed until the day he past from this life to the next.

Chapter 1

I have to start this in kindergarten. It may be the first time I realized that I was a little different from most of my peers. Her name was Mary Jane Keller, and she was swinging upside down on the parallel bar. Naturally, her dress had floated down around her face and upper body. Her pretty pink panties were exposed as likewise her behind. For some reason, I felt obligated to reach over and give it a pinch. Wrong thing to do. She immediately snitched me off. I got in big trouble and was informed by all that I may be a troubled child. Of course, I was a troubled kid, but only in a manner of speaking. I felt that what I had done was a normal reaction to an exposed butt and a pair of pretty pink panties. I am sixty-two