Clint's Story

By Clinton Laird

This book explains with what went wrong in Mr. Laird's early schooling and the effects that teachers and parents have on one's ability to learn. It shows the difference between a mother that had great expectations for her child John McCook (who played Eric Forrester on "The Bold and the Beautiful") and a mother tha

• Language: English
• Publisher: Book Savvy International
• Release date: Jun 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781961204409

Clinton Laird

Clinton laird was born in Hollywood, California in 1943. He attended grade school in Carmel, California where it was determined that he had a noticeable learning disability. In1957, not being able to read or write Mr. Laird entered Brown Military Academy in San Diego, California as a high school freshman. Four years later in 1961 he graduated from Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia achieving academic honors. He went on to attend the University of Miami in Florida. In 1969 Mr. Laird went to work for the City of Santa Clara where he was employed as an Engineering Aide advancing to Senor Distribution Supervisor.

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Copyright © 2023 by Clinton Laird.

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ISBN-13

Paperback: 978-1-961204-41-6

eBook: 978-1-961204-40-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023909135

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Chapter 1

T

he Early Years

HOLLYWOOD

When one thinks of Hollywood, visions of an exciting film mecca full of glamour, eccentric people, and movie stars comes to mind. Having been born in Hollywood in 1943, my early childhood had its share of those things.

The town’s evolution to film the capital of the world was inevitable. Nickelodeons and theatres back East were hungry for product. Somebody had to put them out someplace. Why Hollywood, California? Well, if one forgets legend and pop culture talk, Hollywood was a place with ideal lighting conditions for the longest time, enabling one to film all day all year. Silent movie stars were not required to be great actors with a good voice. They did not have to be talented. They didn’t need to learn the accents for their characters. They didn’t need elocution or be able to express themselves verbally. Or be able to be heard in the back of the room. And don’t forget the glamour and natural appeal of California, the last stop in western expansion for this country. In those days very few people came from California or were natives; most were drawn there from other parts of the country. Hollywood was to film and the movie industry what New York was to Broadway and the stage. New York actors liked to live and work in beautiful, sunny California. It was the Great White Way of the West.

SNUB POLLARD

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Snub Pollard

As you will see, my relationship with my parents was hardly ideal, in that they basically got rid of me and gave my learning problems up to a military academy to solve. So, it is no surprise that my earliest memories are not of my parents but of our good family friend, Snub Pollard, one of the pioneers of silent movies. Snub was born Harold Fraser and worked in Australian Vaudeville with the troupe Pollard’s Lilliputian. During a United States tour, he became one of those lured to Hollywood. In those days, film technology was primitive, and movies were made with script written under the moving picture. An organist played appropriate music. For a Western, there would be music with the cadence and sound of the hoofbeats of a galloping horse. Remember Hopalong Cassidy? Tom Mix? Both silent film stars.

EARLY FILM TECHNOLOGY

For a train scene, there would be trainlike sounds. For murder and mystery there would be dramatic or spooky music. We all know the music that is appropriate with the appearance of a large band of Indians. And the audiences loved the movies. It was a boon to the American entertainment scene. All of the slapstick comedians of the silent movie era were known for their mustaches. When Snub started in movies, prior to World War I, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm was known throughout the world and was distinguished by his mustache. From a propaganda point of view, it was in vogue to poke fun at the mustaches of foreign leaders like the kaiser and Hitler. Snub decided to mimic the kaiser by putting on a fake mustache similar to his but upside down. This heavy mustache with its ends pointing straight down became Snub’s trademark and distinguished him from all the other slapstick comedians. He was in a number of movies but was most often portrayed as a police officer. Even to people who respect the law, nobody is too sad when a cop gets his comeuppance. Nothing cruel or vicious, but a good dousing by a lady dumping water on him from the third-floor tenement was hilarious to Mr. and Mrs. Small-Town America. The Keystone Kops were lovable clowns always being bopped on the head or nose. Nothing serious. Just funny

KEYSTONE KOPS AND LONESOME LUKE

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Snub Pollard and Clint Laird

In 1911, Snub worked with the Keystone Kops and Charlie Chaplin. In 1915 Snub costarred in the highly successful Lonesome Luke series, which ran for years. This was basically about a character portrayed by Harold Lloyd who wore size 12AA shoes, tight clothes, and a two-dot mustache and triangular eyebrows. As costar, Snub Pollard’s character was epitomized by slapstick comedy and animated action. There was little or no emphasis on character development. After eighty-six films and a long run of success, he eventually faded out around 1917. The coming of sound films, the talkies, was part of the reason for his demise. The talkies ended many a career. Now one had to really be an actor. Actors with great, trained (hopefully baritone voices) like Lionel Barrymore were sought after.

OWN PRODUCTION COMPANY

In 1919, Snub took a chance and launched his own production company featuring himself in various slapstick gags and gimmicks. Later in his life, he played Pee Wee McDougal, sidekick to cowboy Tex Ritter, in a series of minor Westerns. Snub’s face was recognizable to most people. His work in slapstick comedy without scripts or plots, often distributing the film the same day, was highly regarded by his colleagues, and he became the role model for the next generation of comic actors such as Laurel and Hardy.

MY SISTER AND MYSELF AS HIS PROPS

Snub often visited my mother and took a liking to me. He frequently dressed as a Keystone Cop and jokingly acted as if he could not tell the difference between his real life and his movie role. He often went to theaters in the area that featured his silent movies and portrayed his own character as he stood next to the organ player (which all silent movies had) as the picture played. As I was a boy of less than two years, he seemed quite normal to me and became a good substitute for a father who was never at home. Wouldn’t psychologists have a field day trying to figure out the development of a boy whose father was absent from his life and replaced by a comic film actor? Dressed as a Keystone Cop, Snub often seated my sister and me in the rumble seat of his vintage black car and drove us up and down Hollywood’s streets. He was instantly recognized as a movie star, and large crowds gathered around his car, stopping all traffic. He would then get out of his car and put on a short slapstick comedy routine using my sister and myself as his props. We often stopped and performed in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the Brown Derby. It was quite an experience for a little boy of two as well as for Snub who enjoyed every minute of it. The question was how it affected my development. This is not the usual upbringing of a middle-class boy. My only conclusion has to be that since I was pretty much a kid on his own, my father gone, and my mother working, the Snub and the diversion he provided had only to be good for a kid like me.

THE MCCOOK’S

My father, Glenn D. Laird, worked as a photographer and pioneered the technique of photo finishes at thoroughbred horseracing tracks. In l935 at the Santa Anita racetrack in California, he was a member of the first photo finish team to be used at thoroughbred racing tracks. The photo finish camera used at horse races was in place at the finish line. It differed from the normal cameras by the innovation of a small slot about the thickness of a human hair that was always open to admit light. It had no shutter. A few seconds before the horses passed this line, the camera was turned on and the film moved slowly in the direction of the running horses. The small slot displaying only the finish line would show anything that did not move as a horizontal line and for the most part gave the illusion of a well-groomed field. Anything that moved across this slot or finish line (in this case the horses) would show up on the film much like a regular photograph. His work required him to travel to horseracing tracks all over the United States, and he was seldom home for more than a few days.

This became a source of friction in my parents’ marriage and would eventually split them up. Unlike some, for whom absence makes the heart grow fonder, for them it drove them apart. Or at least that is how it appeared to this child. Not really knowing my parents’ relationship, I don’t know if that is all that was involved.

One day when I was about two and a half, my father was given an ultimatum by my mother to choose between making a home with us as a family or pursuing his career as a professional track photographer. Assuming he really wanted family life, most men would have been able to integrate his family and paternal responsibilities with career. Therefore, I have to assume he didn’t really want his family. So, he chose his career and that was the last we heard from him for many years. For anybody who has been through this, it is a wrenching experience for the children. Kids need a male presence. They need to know that a strong father figure is there for them and is going to take care of them. Few women can be mother and father too. So we suffered his absence from the home in all the usual ways, but for me another way. I needed a firm hand to guide me, and my mother was so overwhelmed with work and bringing us up she hardly had anything left to address my education and learning problems.

My sister and I were placed with friends of the family, Mary and Jake McCook for a short time in Ventura, while my mother moved to Carmel and established her own home. Ordinarily this would be a bad thing, this splitting up of the family even further than it was already. Now during these all-important formative years we were growing up without either parent. But as it turned out this was good, in a relative sense, for me and my sister, because the McCooks had two daughters about my sister’s age and one boy named John who was about my age. John and I became very close over the next few years, and even today I consider him more of a brother than a friend. And this brief stay gave us more of a family life than we had at home.

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John McCook and Clint Laird

When my sister and I moved back to join our mother in Carmel, John often came to stay with us, and I always looked forward to being with him and his family on their avocado farm in Ventura. His mother, Mary, whom I have great respect for, could be a very strict person. She seldom smiled, and I believe was not too happy with life. She often took out her unhappiness on her daughters and especially her husband, Jake. Even though they lived most of their life in the same house, I feel that she never talked or even saw her husband. Jake worked in the oil fields requiring him to work late nights. He stayed not only in a different room to his wife, Mary, but a separate part of the house. You never saw them together unless we went on vacation together or they visited us in Carmel. My mother also informed me that they never had anything to do with each other, and as the years went by it became obvious. In his later years, even though he still lived in the same house as Mary, he had a girlfriend. Mary McCook’s only interest in life was in her boy, John, whom she believed, from the day he was born, was going to be a famous movie star. When you see John’s eventual career, you can see how parental devotion and dedication can be the driving force behind a child. Naturally this can go the other way and be abusive and destructive too. The force behind the child really has to have the child’s ultimate welfare at heart and not the star-struck hope of the parent trying to live vicariously through the child.

Whether or not it was because of her lack of a committed marital relationship, it seems that John became the focus of her life. When one considers that her life was as grim as it was, this obsession with her son and a movie career were probably a safety valve for her. It gave her something to live for. I don’t think one needs to be a psychologist to see this. It is well-known that stage mothers are living vicariously through their children, and this might have been the case with Mary. Or maybe it was completely unselfish on her part, in wanting the best for her son. Since she seemed so unhappy in her marriage, John’s career or potential career could have been an outlet for her. Whatever the reasons, I could very easily feel jealous of John. My own mother seemed too stressed and overburdened to be able to give much of herself, and here John was getting a mother who was proud of him and behind him a thousand percent.

Although unhappy, Mary was always very nice to me. She was warmhearted but made sure that both John and I behaved. The truth was neither John nor I would ever dare to disobey Mary, which of course was a good thing in the development of any boy. She would reward our good behavior by taking us to the beach and to other special events and place that kids would enjoy such as Knotts Berry Farm, Little League baseball, and the Rose Parade in Pasadena, so I know that she was a big part of my life and a positive influence on it too. Discipline is always a good thing for a growing boy.

She made John take piano lessons each day starting at about 3:00 p.m. followed by singing lessons ending about five or five thirty. I was made to take a nap or play outside by myself. I guess the idea was that I shouldn’t be around to distract John from his lessons and in any way get in the way of his future career. On very special occasions, I was allowed to listen to John practice the piano. I have to say I was impressed as I could do little more than function as a kid. I had no special talents or interests. While, as I said, visiting with the McCooks was a good thing, this obvious preference to John did tend to make me feel left out and not really one of the family.

On Sundays, John was required to go to church and sing with the church choir. Mary continuously stressed to John that he was to become a famous movie star. As in many families it is well-established early on that the child would go to college, or become a doctor or go into the army; with John it was established that he would go into show business. I remember many times going with Mary to take John for screen tests in Hollywood or Burbank. Stage mothers back then were pretty much like they are today. They would assume a manager or agent’s role in their child’s career and answer every cattle call and read for every role she could. She was no doubt a regular subscriber to all the showbiz newspapers. The ones that advertised the various roles and jobs available. People were being discovered everywhere. Legend has it that Lana Turner was discovered in a drugstore. Like all the stage mothers, she was certain that John was going to be a major star. This feeling was shared by me, my mother, and many others.

On the other hand, I was almost completely neglected. My mother worked long hours and did not have the time or patience to spend with me doing homework, let alone guide me toward a particular career. Occasionally, she would read me a story from a book, but she never had the time or the inclination to teach me even the basic fundamentals like how to tie shoes, count to ten, do multiplication tables. Strictly from a kid’s point of view, and let’s face it, childhood is a pretty selfish time in one’s life, I felt neglected and abandoned by my parents. A child thinks pretty much only from his own point of view and only of himself, so I think this is quite natural.

When I think back on those days there were no day care centers for children. Besides the social stigma she had to bear, a single mom had to rely on friends or relatives to care for her children while she worked. Legally there weren’t as many laws on the books to help single moms with such things as child support and alimony. Also, although there were lots of war industry jobs open to women during the war, when the men came home these kinds of jobs for women dried up. A woman with no skills, and hardly any women had college in those days, could only expect menial work at low wages. However, to Mom’s credit she was a step up on the ladder of being a bookkeeper. So, saddled with all this, Mom left my education up to the public schools. Of course, the schools were hardly progressive back then. They were designed for the masses, and anybody who didn’t fit in was sort of shunned to the side and shuffled through the system. Today there are all kinds of programs for people who are handicapped in any way. There is special transportation, special tutoring, special teachers all funded by government money set aside especially for these minorities of students. While my mother relied on the schools to educate me, she never took it on herself to help me with homework. During all my school years, it never occurred to me that I was supposed to do homework at night.

My sister was never able to adjust to my parents’ separation, and by the time I was seven she had gone off, at the age of fifteen, to get married. As a girl, at least she had that option, and lots of young girls with unhappy home situations did it. But it was not so easy for me. I was expected to stick it out and do the right thing.

Between my own lack of confidence and the inattention of my mother toward schoolwork, school teachers became concerned that I might be mentally impaired; however, school officials never told me this. What they did can best be explained by a comparison to how a terminal patient in a hospital is handled. The doctors and patients’ families do not want to upset the patient by talking about their condition in front of them. So, what they do is wait till the patient is asleep or talk just outside their room. The problem is that the patient can tell about their condition from the doctors and his family’s facial expressions. Of course, their conversations were often overheard. The feeling one gets too is that things are so bad that they can’t be discussed in front of you. It makes you feel truly afflicted and odd. Does nothing for your self-esteem or ability to cope. Rather you are made to feel like an outsider, an oddity, frankly, a freak. This feeling, of course, is the exact opposite of how a kid wants to feel, and that is confident that he is one of the gangs and like everybody else.

GRADE SCHOOL

Toward the end of my first year in grade school, the principal called me into his office to talk about why I could not read. He gave me a reading test. Naturally, I did not do well. After this test my mother was called into his office to go over the results. I was not allowed in the meeting and was made to sit outside his office. I strained to hear their conversation. She was told that I was of borderline intelligence and probably would never advance more than the first or second grade level.

In the second grade I was separated from the rest of the class. This is also when facial expressions and conversation just outside my senses started. This continued and grew. Not only between my mother and her friends, and my sister and her friends, but also between schoolteachers and their associates. While they all were trying to be nice to me, I was aware of all their conversations. It was not until the end of the third grade that I was given another test. This time it was not a reading test. It consisted of a set of pictures, and you were to determine what was out of place in the pictures. I was also given a series of numbers to remember and required to repeat the number sequence when asked. All of this was work, and by this time they had all convinced me of my borderline intelligence. I was not interested in playing their game with pictures or numbers, so naturally I failed again. In a way I made a conscious decision to drop out of the school program, to forget about trying to learn. Rather than try, I would wallow in my own feeling of incompetence, and with no ambition to learn or to catch up with the others I simply floundered in a nether land where I gained nothing but a kind of bitterness with life, or rather my life.

The result of all this is that I became even less confident in myself and truly believed I might as well stop trying because I was naturally backward and would never be able to learn like other kids. My self-esteem was at its lowest level ever, and I was intent on putting forth no effort.

With some modern techniques and progressive thinking and with some caring teachers, things might have been very different. But I had to deal with life the way it was, not the way it should be.

Of course, all future tests went against me, and the public-school officials felt that I would have had a severe learning difficulty, if indeed I was not retarded.

From that time in the second grade until entering high school I was separated from the other children. It was a kind of selective segregation where I was with my class yet I was not. I was always in the same room with the other students but usually put in the back corner with at least one or two other subpar pupils.

This feeling of segregation does something to a kid. One of the biggest needs for a child is to fit in and be like everyone else. Sure, some like to stand out, but for positive reasons, like becoming a sports hero. Fitting in is most important to kids. There were times that other students were put in my group as punishment for not doing their class work. This, of course, made me feel even worse. It was a punishment to be put in the same area as me. It was a form of banishment. A quarantine of the spirit. It confirmed to me that I would never be like the other kids, nor would I ever have any kind of a future.

Sometimes, we were put outside on the classroom patio where I would play marbles while the other students were taught their lessons. When it came to learning, I was given only one spelling word to learn while the other students were given twenty words. No attempt was ever made to teach me the alphabet, addition and subtraction, or the multiplication tables. I sensed that they felt I was hopeless. In a natural childlike manner, and since learning is hard work, I felt that since the school had determined that I did not have the intelligence to comprehend, the question that I had was, why should I waste my time? I’d rather play marbles by myself. More modern psychological thought might say that a person left unchallenged will simply wallow in his own incompetence. Whether they’d say it or not, that’s exactly what I did. It was like a wounded animal deliberately hurting its wound.

I always joined the full class at recess or for school outings. At first the other students treated me as an equal. As the years went by the boys still treated me as an equal mainly because we played baseball and other sports together. I never wondered why I picked up the basics of these sports so easily. After all, learning a sport is like learning anything else. In any case, sports made me feel welcome and accepted. I fit in. I was pretty good at it. And it was the only endeavor where people had any appreciation of something I did well. In retrospect, this was kind of a natural thing since many kids had no reverence for learning or academics, at least not at this age.

However, the girls did not give me the same recognition, as sports prowess meant little to them. Instead, I was ridiculed. As I got older and expressed an interest in girls, my interest was taken as an insult. I can’t think of anything more destructive to one’s self-esteem than to be shunned by the opposite sex. Especially during the developing years that are so important. One of these girls was Pam Gamble, a girl who one day would come in second in the Miss America pageant. But her beauty—which at least in those days wasn’t in her mind or heart—was external. I remember her and the other girls chanting, Retard, retard, what is one plus one? over and over again during recess. The shame of this at times was almost unbearable. I soon learned to avoid them at any cost. Again, what would a psychologist do with a developing boy who needed to avoid girls in order not to be shunned?

In the seventh grade I was again given an intelligence test. This time it was more comprehensive and given by a very attractive woman in her early twenties. She started out by showing me a series of pictures and ink drawings and asking me about the first thing that came to my mind. I was almost a young man at the time, and to be honest I had only one thing on my mind, and that was how sexy she was. Needless to say, again I failed. The only good thing that came from that encounter was the knowledge that at least my libido was intact and functioning.

When I was in the eighth grade, my mother’s health had deteriorated, and she had to have a hysterectomy. I returned to stay with the McCooks in Ventura. Though Mother neglected my schoolwork, she was a good mother in other ways. She worked as a bookkeeper at a taxi company in Carmel and was the sole support of our family. Working long hours, she was always tired when she came home from work. She was always too worn out to help my sister or me with homework. She felt schoolwork was the responsibility of the school, not hers. Even if she didn’t feel this way, that was her rationalization, and she just didn’t have the energy to do it.

While I loved my mother and had a high regard for her, I couldn’t help feeling that she used her hysterectomy as an excuse to get rid of me. Or at least that was my feeling about her actions back then. She felt that she had spent her time raising me and that it was my father’s turn to raise me and provide all the financial support. Now she wanted to enjoy life, and that didn’t include working hard to support me, nor did it take into account my learning problems. In retrospect, I can understand her feelings. She had carried the burden of bringing up and supporting me and my sister for years and was looking for a respite. Also, in retrospect and from a more mature perspective, I saw her hysterectomy as involving loss of hormones and the onset of a change in her body that often causes upheaval in a woman’s emotions and attitudes. These changes can really mess up a woman and a mother’s perspective. In her later years she regretted this decision. Her main motivation at that time was relief from parental responsibility combined with bitterness toward my father, and she now felt it was my father’s turn. I came to understand that lots of divorced mothers eventually feel this way. My guess, though, is that not all of them handle it as my mother did.

By now, John McCook and I had drifted apart. At home we played football, basketball, etc., together and went to school on the same bus. But at school, he had his own friends and activities and did not want to share them with me. Naturally this rejection further isolated me and lowered my almost nonexistent self-esteem. After all, I was probably closer to John, at that time in my life, than anybody in the world. His rejection was particularly painful.

As usual, things at school didn’t go well. This new school now requires me to do homework. To make up for my lack of ability to do the homework, I became proficient at copying homework of other students, but I had no idea of what the copied homework papers meant. I especially remember one incident at my new school in Ventura. In my math class the teacher had us put our math homework on the blackboard. He put numbers on small pieces of paper into a hat. Ranging from one to thirty, the numbers represented the number of one of the math problems we were to do as homework. We then drew these numbers out of the hat and worked that problem on the blackboard. We always had one number that was blank. The teacher did not realize that I knew nothing about mathematics or that I did not even know what homework was. I drew a number out of the hat and went to the blackboard. I knew nothing about what he was talking about. He thought that I was being smart or a wise guy with him. It was