I was born in Portland, Oregon, December 16 1949; and raised in a small resort, logging, and fishing town on the Oregon Coast - as a matter of fact, the 45th parallel ran through the north end of town, so if you walk the Pacific shoreline from the equator to the North Pole and take a coffee break halfway, you will be about a mile from the house I grew up in.
I first picked up a guitar when I was 14, and also began to write songs, but the world has never heard them, and I would not call that a bad thing. This was a small town, you see, so the one am radio station had to keep everybody happy by playing all types of music - so we all got a very eclectic music education: everything from Johnny Horton (who I became a big fan of - my earliest records were Johnny Horton's) to Mitch Miller (I actually never got that one) to Motown (I got that one good) to Nat King Cole (he should be worshipped...). I didn't know that the different songs were country or pop or rock, and I liked the good stuff whatever its form was; but it was Hank Williams and Dave Dudley and Johnny Cash and Kitty Wells that made me feel like - even though life was hard sometimes - everything was going to be alright.
My first guitar had only four strings, because I couldn't be bothered with those pesky bass strings. It was a Framus: arch-top, f-holes...very elegant...not. By the time ten years had passed I could strum about eight chords. My strumming pattern corresponded exactly with the phrasing of the lyrics - danged if I could get an independent groove going... But I kept plugging away (unplugged). A few years passed and I kept trying to finger-pick. One day I couldn't and the next I could. My mind has never been the kind to focus on just any old thing, so I just kept plunking - til forty years and change later, I got to where I am today: which is about the same level as a hard-working second-year guitar student would be. Hey, but some of those kids are pretty good, so I can fake out a few folks. And don't tell anybody.
From the time I was 14 I worked: in restaurants, grocery stores, variety stores, as a laborer on construction sites. The night I graduated from high school at age 17, I told my folks I was leaving the next morning early for Kodiak, Alaska, where I worked on the waterfront, unloading crab boats and working in seafood canneries. I made it through 1 1/4 years at Portland State College (now University); then got the wanderlust and headed for California in a 1949 Plymouth which someone gave me, and which burned a quart of oil every 100 miles and went no faster than 35 mph. (My career in higher education can be neatly summarized in this internal dialogue, which actually occurred several times in my brain in the year 1968: "I have an important test tomorrow...would I honestly prefer to study all night, since I haven't at all this quarter; or would I rather go see 'Bullitt' again? Hmmm...that's simple..." When one of the options in any choice is a new movie with a car chase with Steve McQueen doing his own stunt-driving, it's an open-and-shut case.)
I eventually landed in Northern California where I worked in fish canneries and lumbermills (one mill I worked at was on the Hoopa Indian Reservation; and another was right on the beach at Orick - in the exact location where the Visitor Center for the Redwood National Park now stands). I worked briefly on a regional magazine there called Pacifica, which was owned and run by the only other staff member, Alan Steen, who was later one of the eight Beirut hostages that included Terry Anderson. I was lucky enough to hang out with some pretty good musicians there; learned a bit more, and continued to write songs. If I got drunk enough I might even get up in public and play - but I always had trouble finding that elusive level of inebriation where I was bold enough to perform, but sober enough to do so in a recognizable fashion.
Of the hippies I hung out with there one, Ro Purser, became a self-taught glass blower who eventually moved to Whidby Island in Puget Sound and has work hanging in the Smithsonian (plays hell out of a Dobro, too...); another was Jethrin Phillips, who started Spectrum Naturals - the finest collection of cold-pressed vegetable oils, available in natural foods stores everywhere (got to play once with BB King; sold me 1963 Fender Stratocaster for $250); and Ken Fisher - lived in a tree house then with his wife and sons; is now the longest-running columnist in Forbes Magazine, author of many books on the stock market and other subjects, and manager of a HUGE family of investment vehicles (and a pretty good slide guitar bluesman...).
A few years later I was working in a sawmill on Sauvies Island in the Willamette River near Portland, and one of my coworkers did something I had done a thousand times, and wound up slammed against the wall with finger-size splinters sticking out of one eye, only partly conscious. Every soul in that mill ran outside and threw up except the foreman and myself, and we took care of him until the ambulance arrived. A couple of years later, the memory of my own calmness and collectedness in that situation led me to undertake the levels of training necessary to become an Emergency Paramedic. I was by then living in Southern California. I finished my internship with Long Beach Fire Dept. in 1978. One of my instructors in paramedic school, and also the Medical Director of St. Mary's Hospital Emergency Dept., our base station in Long Beach, was Jeffrey MacDonald, later convicted of killing his wife and daughters while he was a physician in the Green Berets. When I knew him he had been released from arrest by the Army, and shortly after I graduated, he was re-arrested and tried. His story was immortalized in the book, and later in the TV miniseries based on it, titled FATAL VISION. I knew nothing about his history at the time, but I had a strong negative reaction to him. I worked for the next 23 years as a medic, including a year in refugee camps and in the war-affected areas along the Thai-Cambodian border after the fall of the Pol Pot government. I worked in Los Angeles, San Mateo, Alameda, San Francisco, and Mendocino counties; the place I worked the longest (and hardest) was for the City and County of San Francisco in the mid and late-eighties. I have run over 50,000 911 emergency calls.
My move back to California from Portland in the mid-seventies (before my paramedic training) landed me in the Malibu area. My friend from Portland, Dennis Hastings, had moved down a few months earlier. He had gotten hired on a crew building a beachfront house for Oscar-nominee Genevieve Bujold (KING OF HEARTS; ANNE OF A THOUSAND DAYS with Richard Burton; ALEX AND THE GYPSY with Jack Lemmon; COMA with Michael Douglas; SWASHBUCKLER with Beau Bridges; MONSIGNOR with Christopher Reeve; TIGHTROPE with Clint Eastwood; etc...); his good word got me hired on, too. Dennis and Genevieve took up together (at one point he was doing maintenance at an apartment complex and she was a movie star...he later became a successful contractor). They are still together to this day, 30+ years later; when I got married for the second time in the early 1980s, Genevieve and Dennis were the witnesses.
The whole time I kept playing and writing, and occasionally hooked up with some pretty good players: In 1969, a kid named Jimmy Ibbotson came to the house I lived in in Pacific Grove. He was REALLY talented, and on his way to L.A. to look for a gig - six months later he was on the radio doing Mr Bojangles with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band; in Thailand, this elegant lady named Joan Baez came and stayed in our house (as did Liv Ullman, the Swedish actress). Late that night, five of us were sitting around talking in our living room (being in Thailand, it was open-air, and the house was on stilts). Joan came out in her nightgown and asked if anyone wanted to hear some songs. Well, it WAS an intrusion on our conversation, but just to be polite we said yes. Just kiddin'... What a treat that was. Seventeen years later she and her sister Mimi Farina showed up at a dance in Berkeley and I reintroduced myself and danced with her to California Cajun Orchestra with Danny Poullard on accordion.
At the end of my year in Thailand I was in a terrible automobile accident out on the border with Cambodia. My left lower leg was shattered; my skull was fractured, my brain bruised. I spent a month in the hospital in Bangkok, and underwent the first of several surgeries on my legs. After I returned to this country... by the way, if you think you get culture shock going to another very different country - especially one in which conditions are dire and choices mostly of the life-and-death variety - try staying a year and then coming back to this country: I remember arriving on crutches at Sea-Tac in Washington State and being picked up by my folks who drove up from Oregon to get me. As we went south on I-5 I looked over and saw newish cars driving into and out of a McDonald's restaurant and thinking, "That's stupid... Why are they doing that? Don't they know what's going on in the world...?" Perhaps I was a little severe; slightly overwrought...
I stayed on crutches for ten months: the Surgeon To The Crown Prince of Thailand hadn't read the instructions that came with the plate that all the pieces of bone were to be screwed to; put it on the wrong side, interfering with blood flow to the bone so it took months more than it should have to heal (actually never has really healed properly), and permanently deforming my lower leg. The infection that followed and raged through my body as I hobbled on crutches around Bangkok after dark and into the wee hours did not help, either. (Perhaps hobbling around Bangkok after midnight did not help, either...)
While I was recovering in 1981 I took some extension classes at UCLA in Journalism. I regretted not recording more of the dramatic and heart-rending stories of the Cambodians I had known in the refugee camp, so I contacted a Los Angeles Cambodian resettlement agency in East L.A. and asked if they knew any refugees whom I could interview. They introduced me to a physician who told me his sad and hair-raising tale: I found my notebook a couple of years ago when I moved; at the top of the page I had written "Interview with Dr. Ngor Haing..." In Cambodia, the custom is to put the family name first. I had interviewed Haing Ngor, who received an Academy Award years later for his portrayal of Dith Pran in the movie THE KILLING FIELDS; and afterward was murdered at his home in Los Angeles by gang members - but had not been aware of it when I saw him in all those films he was later in. In the movie, the scene where Dith Pran and Sidney Schanberg are reunited was filmed in front of the 80 bed pediatric ward that I ran for several months in Khao I Dang Refugee Camp (population 100,000) near Aranyaprathet, Thailand. (My boss there briefly, and later and to this day my good friend, was Simon Cornwell, youngest son of British spy novelist John Le Carre'. Simon was many years later a co-founder and CEO in Britain of TWO-WAY TV, a world-wide pioneer in interactive television.)
(More To Come...)
