In The Beginning

How DOES one begin a blog. Perhaps with just a simple description of what I'm going to put here.

I remember looking at my Grandmother after she died. She was 103 years old, but her face, calm and peaceful after the pain and discomfort of her last weeks in hospital, seemed so much younger. She'd had an unusual life, a life full of little adventures and trials. As I grew up I heard about what had gone on before, sometimes from her and sometimes from her daughter, my dearly loved Aunt Ella, known forever in the family as Auntie Lala because a baby, me, couldn't pronounce "Ella".

I heard stories, family legends in fact, about my Grandfather, Edward Valentine 'Val' Moody, and about Ella's childhood in Santa Cruz, California, a childhood full of sun and water and pranks and adventures. They were all vivid in her mind, as clear as if they'd happened only yesterday.

But looking down at my Grandmother I suddenly found myself wishing I could have just another week, another day, with her so that I could ask her about all the stories, her stories and family stories, that were lost now forever. They were a rich heritage and I wished then, and have wished often since then, that I'd paid more attention when I first heard some of them; that I'd written them down.

I realized that now I'm the repository of family legends, the tale teller. Those stories, and some of my own, grand events or trivial, are my children's and my grandchildren's heritage, and if I don't record them somehow, they'll disappear with my passing and be gone forever, and that would be a waste and a tragedy.

So I'll begin recording some of them here and there. Some of them will be stories about the fore-bearers, the people who, in some often mysterious way, made me who I am, and made my children who they are too. We owe them a lot. Other stories will just be tales from my own history, some funny, some sad. They'll be mostly the truth, at least as much as I can remember. Others may have just a little artistic license applied; after all, I AM partly Irish by extraction.  I'll welcome any comments. And I'll be eager to hear some stories and legends from other families. They're important too, the kind of glue that binds not only a family but a whole community together, and heaven knows we need that glue now.

So here we go ........

A Little Light Relief: I'm Driven Into Puberty

A digression.

My family lived in the Parkside District of San Francisco all through my grammar school days, but we moved to Ingleside Terraces about the time I started Junior High.

I'd always stammered very badly and had a lot of difficulty communicating verbally. I sang OK, but the stammer made me self-conscious and shy and, after being skipped a grade just as I was entering Junior High, I was pretty retarded socially. Everyone in my class was a year older, and when you're twelve or thirteen, a year makes a big difference.

Nevertheless, shy or not, I had  terrific crush on Jeanette Wilson who lived just across the street from me. She was a year or two younger, and she had the cutest sprinkling of freckles across her nose. I would have walked on hot coals if at the end of the walk I could just hold her hand for five minutes. But being shy, I suffered in silence.

Imagine my surprise when I was invited to her birthday party. I was now in the ninth grade, she was in the eighth, and suddenly everything seemed to be coming up roses for me: Jeanette of the nose freckles actually wanted me to come to her party. Vision of ........ I don't know what ..... danced in my head. Alas, as I was later to learn,  I was being invited as the favored guest not of the delectable Jeanette herself, but because Jeanette's cousin, Alma Lou Jenkins, had a crush on me.

Anyway, ignorance is bliss and so I arrived at the party in a pretty blissful state for one reason and another. As I said, I was pretty naive and a little  backward socially. I don't know what I expected to find at the party: pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and that sort of thing, I suppose. But pinning the tail on any animal, donkey or otherwise, was the farthest thing from any other party-goers mind. I was a little surpised when, about ten minutes after I arrived, all the lights in the living room were turned out and a heavy game of spin-the-bottle began.

I suppose there are a lot of younger people who don't know anything about spin-the-bottle. It involved everyone sitting around in a circle and the person who was 'it' actually spinning a bottle, usually a milk bottle (once upon a time milk actually came in glass bottles, strange as that may seem). When the bottle stopped spinning it would be pointing at someone in the circle and that someone, if he or she was the opposite sex from the bottle spinner, had to kiss the person who had done the spinning.

Alma Lou must have been practicing bottle spinning in secret because she spun me on her first try. I was bound by the unwritten code of "teenagehood" to kiss her, but I was too shy to kiss her in front of everyone. I wasn't even completely sure how to do it: I'd never kissed a girl before, except cousins and other relatives, and I only kissed them because my mother threatened physical harm if I didn't. Cousin-kissing involved puckering as much as possible, putting at least a minimal distance between you and the kissee, and making minimal contact, usually with a cheek. Now, facing my first boy-girl kiss, I insisted that we do it in the dining room where no one else could see. To the derisive jeers of all the other party goers, Alma Lou and I traipsed into the dining room and situated ourselves behind the aforementioned door.

I 'puckered up' in a "kiss-your-cousin" pose, and aimed for Alma Lou's cheek. She had other ideas. She grabbed my head with both hands - which startled me more than a bit and put me off my guard - and gave me a kiss that she never learned practicing on a cousin. During the course of the kiss she stuck her tongue in my mouth and, as I remember it all these years later, about halfway down my throat.

The effect was wildly startling and yet somehow strangely pleasant. The overall effect was that basically I entered puberty instantaneously, in a split second, on the strength of Alma Lou's kiss. My voice changed, I could feel my beard starting to grow, and hot and cold chills ran up and down my back. It was not to be the only kiss I shared with Alma Lou that night, but none of the subsequent encounters had quite the same magical effect as that first one. I even, during the course of that game and a subsequent game of 'post office' (don't ask, it's too complicated to explain. Look it up on Wikipedia or someplace like that)  kissed several other girls. I was really starting to get into the spirit of things. Most of them were eager and enthusiastic, if somewhat less advanced in the kissing department than Alma Lou. I'll even admit that I tried to spin other encounters with Alma Lou but the milk bottle was recalcitrant and I was not 100%  successful. Even when I did buss Alma Lou again, the effect was less magical than that first encounter. I guess, when you stop to think of it, there's really only one 'first kiss'.

I was feeling less shy with every passing moment. I was even a little disappointed when Mr. and Mrs. Wilson turned on the lights in order to serve cake and ice cream. They managed not to cringe at the lipstick smears and other signs of bacchanal on various faces and the collars of white shirts. I guess, in their time, they'd had their own 'Alma Lous'.

Strangely, I never had a date with Alma Lou. I guess I was tested and came up short. Alma Lou was probably looking for someone who didn't have to stand behind the dining room door to kiss her. I don't know what happened to Alma Lou. I hope she had a wonderful life, full of passion and bottle spinning. I owe her, I reckon, a huge debt of gratitude. She got me started, so to speak. I suppose in time there might have been another young lady who was willing to test the - ahem - social waters with me, but Alma Lou was the one who did, and I'm still grateful. It's a well-worn precept that one should honor one's teacher, and she certainly taught me a few really important things.

Goodnight, Almo Lou, wherever you are. I thank you..... and I imagine my wife thanks you too.

An All American Boy

An All American Boy

I guess it must have been about 1951 or 1952 when I had my chance to achieve basketball glory.   I was in my Junior year at Lowell High School in San Francisco at the time. Lowell, still in the "Old Brick Pile" on Stanyan Street, was what was known as a "college-prep" school. There were no shop classes, just college-prep classes. No shop classes, and no football team. Oh, we fielded a team alright, but we were never very good. We were a basketball powerhouse, though. That suited me to the ground because I was a basketball fanatic.

I was sure that I was going to make the varsity soon, though I still hadn't manage to advance beyond the Junior Varsity. It was going to be, first, varsity, and then on to play in college, and maybe even in the AAU. I practiced every day. My Dad had built a basketball hoop in our driveway. Every afternoon I shot hundreds of shots. This year was going to be MY year. I was sure of it. I was undeterred by the fact that I was only 5'8" at the time and pretty uncoordinated. I was going to make up for my obvious shortcomings with zeal: zeal and dedication. 

On weekends I'd bike around the city looking for pickup games. One of my favorite places, not to far from my home in Ingleside, was the City College of San Francisco gymnasium down at the end of Ocean Avenue.

The basketball coach at CCSF opened the gym on Saturdays for pick-up basketball. Basketball players from every high school and junior high school in the city showed up there to take on everyone else in 3 on 3 basketball games, first team to 21 won. The unwritten rules were that if your team won, you stayed on the court for another game. If you lost you were off the court and had to take your place at the end of the queue of teams waiting to play. If you won two in a row you had to leave anyway so that one super strong team couldn't monopolize the floor for the whole day. It was fun, and it was pretty good basketball, too. 

Sitting out wasn't so bad either because the stands were usually full of the player's girl friends or other high school girls scouting out the basketball players. There were always other guys from Lowell there too. Like I said, Lowell was a basketball school and we had a lot of good players who loved the game almost as much as I did. 

One Saturday I showed up as usual and found the stands buzzing. George "Bird" Yardley had showed up to play a few games. "George Who?", I hear you think. Understandable. After all, this all took place about 70 years ago and I doubt that many of you will have ever even heard of George Yardley.

George "Bird" Yardley: All-American

George Yardley was an All-American basketball player from Stanford. He'd just graduated, I think, and was probably on the verge of joining the AAU team, the Stewart's Chevrolets, that he led to a national championship. Later he'd go on to play for the Detroit Pistons and eventually be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. In 1951 (or maybe it was 1952) he must have been just out of Stanford and looking for some basketball action. Whatever the reason, there he was, playing at CCSF on a Saturday.

He was a fairly tall - about 6'4" or 6'5" - but really skinny guy. He'd more or less invented the "turn around jumpshot" and was a scoring machine. Everyone was excited to see him play, and as chance would have it, eventually I found myself on a team trotting out on the court to play his team. 

I was really conscious of all the eyes in the stands. I was also determined that I wasn't going to be intimidated. I wasn't going to be made to look foolish.  I was going to play the game of my life and we were going to beat George Yardley, All-American. If we could pull that off it would show me that I was destined for bigger things on the basketball court.

For some reason I was assigned the task of guarding George Yardley himself, and I took on the task with a vengeance. I became an irritant. I swarmed around Yardley like a demented mosquito. I pushed him, I pulled him, I tried to step on his toes. Every time he went to take a shot I was in his face, every time he went to get a rebound I was there trying to block him out, elbowing him and backing into him. 

He didn't say anything; he just went on scoring jumpshot after jumpshot. I was getting a little irritated: he was making me look pretty feeble. But then my opportunity came. Someone took a shot and missed, but it was one of those freakish misses that bounces off the rim of the basket and goes straight up in the air and then straight down again. This was my chance, my chance at redemption, my opportunity to show everyone that one day I might be an All-American too.

I got the inside position on Yardley. I backed into him, pushing him away from the basket, and I crouched to take the biggest jump of my life. I was determined to jump higher than I'd ever jumped before. I was going to get the ball come what may. I timed my leap to perfection. I sprang off the floor like a leopard. Up, up, I soared. 

"Ha," I exulted to myself, "I've got you THIS time, Mr All-American."

George Yardley didn't even jump. He just waited until I went soaring into space and as I jumped he hooked his index fingers in the elastic waistband of my basketball shorts. I was at the pinnacle of my all-time jump when I realized that, for some reason, my shorts were now down around  my ankles and I was soaring clad only, in a Bicyle brand jock strap. 

I actually caught the ball, but it didn't matter. When I came down my shorts were around my ankles and as I tried to catch my balance I took a step and down I went. The basketball went flying and George Yardley corralled it and scored a basket. I realized pretty quickly that that was why he was an All-American and I wasn't, but it still seemed like a dirty trick.

The laughter from the stands, amplified in the huge cavern of the gym sounded louder than a waterfall. 

I pulled up my shorts, collected my jacket and my gym bag, and left. I didn't go back for about three weeks, but it was no use, anyone who'd been there for my "pantsing" hadn't forgotten. Even people who hadn't been there for my "denouement" had heard about it. I just had to grin and bear it.

Strangely, I became a George Yardley fan, and whenever he was playing for "Stewarts", or later when the Piston's played anywhere in the area, I was usually in the stands. 

I never got to be an All-American, but I competed against one once.