Growing up (“Bobby/Robert”)
After splitting with the Shockleys, my folks moved out to Van Nuys, in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, and had two boys. Dad wanted the first boy to be named after him – Mom had no problem with that, but she detested the idea of “Big Eddie and Little Eddie” so although my brother’s formal name is Edward, he has always been known as Ned. When I came along a year and a half later, I was named after one of my Mom’s relatives (although I no longer have any idea who), and my Dad always called me Bobby. Soon after, the family moved to Granada Hills, where we stayed until I was five (Fig 2.1). I have almost no memories of those times. However, I did retain the sleeping mat that we used for nap time in kindergarten (Fig. 2.2).
In 1958 our family moved to Santa Clara County for better employment opportunities for my dad (but even back then Mom complained about the smog in LA), moving into a duplex on Union Avenue in San Jose (just south of the Cambrian Park Plaza) for about a year. During that time, Dad applied for a job as a building inspector for the City of San Jose (when studying for the inspector’s test, he instructed Ned not to tell anyone that he never finished high school). Simultaneously, he built a house on Stonybrook Avenue in Los Gatos. He sold this house which provided him with the funds to build ANOTHER house, this one on Corrine Drive, just west of the intersection of San Jose-Los Gatos Road (now Los Gatos Blvd) and Los Gatos-Almaden Road; we moved into that house in 1960. This property was just north of the town limits, so I never actually lived in the town of Los Gatos proper (the land was incorporated into the town some years after I moved out) – the only downside to this, as far as I was concerned, was not being eligible for a free library card to the town library1.
This was a sizable house (perhaps 2000 square feet) with three bedrooms and a den, and a two car garage. When first built, the house had a patio on the north side, which communicated via two sliding glass doors into the living room and adjacent dining room, covered by the roof. At some later point (I never did know the impetus for this decision) Dad decided to enclose the patio, by adding walls to the north and western sides. The north side had a regular door and long length of windows, while the west side was taken up by a stone fireplace. The sliding glass doors were removed to provide easier access from the dining room, and thus we had a nice extra sitting room (later it became a great spot where Ned and I could spread out to play our war games). We also had a sizable front yard with lawns on either side of the driveway, and a huge backyard. The area was a former walnut orchard, so Ned and I had a lot of trees we could climb.
Dad was “good with his hands”, and made various “improvements” to the back yard over time. Once he purchased about a half-dozen Douglas fir saplings. The trees were only a few feet tall, but each one came in a square wooden planter, perhaps 3 foot square. With all the dirt in these containers, they were tremendously heavy, but Dad figured out how to move them from the front driveway to the backyard by copying the ancient Egyptians: Ned and I would place several rollers (actually lead pipes) on the route to the backyard and Dad pushed the containers along on those – as he moved along, we would pick up a roller that had been passed over and ran around and put it in front again. It was really a thing of beauty to see.
Then he decided to resod the grass in backyard just behind the house, but first trucked in a shit-load of shit (um, technically, he brought in a large amount of manure), which resulted in a tremendous fly population for one summer. After that, he installed a five hole putting green, using old coffee cans for the holes. The part of the backyard that was furthest from the house was left in dirt, on which he erected a structure that was half tool storage, and half green house. Once he wanted to grow some food stuffs in that section of the yard, and asked Ned and me what we wanted. Well, I was all in for watermelon, but alas, Los Gatos just didn’t have a warm enough clime for that crop and those seedlings went nowhere. But Ned suggested corn, and that took, and for a while we had corn tall enough for me and Ned to crawl around and hide in.
Dad also made a fort for us kids (more on that in Chapter 7, section1), that he later replaced with a carport (Fig. 2.3), and after that a huge net, made of chain-link fencing material, against which he could practice hitting golf balls. Years before it became au courant he built a compost pit back there; after he stopped composting, he turned that into a pile of dirt atop which he placed the launch site for a zip line for Ned’s two girls, Anne and Katie. He would also surreptitiously attach little toys or treats to the plum tree in the middle of our backyard lawn from time to time and allow one to girls to find it: thus this became the “magic tree”.
The backyard bordered on a vacant lot, which was a property owned by the State of California, bordering the newly completed Highway 17. As kids we had free-run of this area as well, so we had a lot of space to play in. After I moved out, the property came up for sale. It was largely landlocked, bordered on three sides by Highway 17 and other houses, with only a narrow frontage on Corinne Drive. This made it relatively inexpensive, and Dad was able to buy it. He subdivided the lot into two parcels: he resold the front parcel, facing the street to a builder friend of his, keeping the rear parcel (totally invisible from the street) to build another house for my brother and his family. As a building inspector, he had ready access to the leftover lumber and other building supplies when a construction job was over. The builders were happy for him to take it off their hands (otherwise they’d have to pay someone to haul it to the dump). Except for some finishing molding used in the kitchen, he claimed he didn’t pay a penny for any of the wood used in building the house – he got it all for free from various building sites. Our old family car was a 1967 Chevy Biscayne sedan. When we bought a newer car, Dad kept the Chevy as his work car, and later removed the original front and rear bench seats, installing a bucket seat for the driver (Fig. 2.4). This meant he could now use the car as a pickup truck, including hauling home the building material from those construction sites.
Sometimes however, the Biscayne was insufficient to carry all the stuff Dad get, so he’d borrow someone’s truck for bulkier material. Once Dad was given another chance to grab material from a building being demolished – this time it was cinder blocks from an old cheese factory (Ned remembers that Dad told him a mafia murder had occurred there2). He got Ned to help him load up a vehicle, and while Dad drove home (on the freeway), Ned laid down spread-eagled on top of the blocks to help keep the blocks on the vehicle – Ned felt he might fall off at any time, but they made it home without incident. Then there was the time that “Bobby fell off the truck”. There was another load of excess lumber at a building tract that Dad really wanted. He was told there was a tight time limit, and he knew it would take several trips to get all the wood he wanted. He got me to help him load up a pickup truck he had borrowed and asked me to sit on top of the load on the ride home to make sure nothing fell off. But he knew it would take several trips to get all the wood, and he was obsessed with the time limit. We packed up the first load and Dad got in the truck and started it up, driving slowly off the site towards the paved road. He was still focused on whether he’d have enough time to get everything and didn’t notice that I hadn’t yet gotten up on the back of the truck – I was still walking towards the truck, figuring he would stop for me after he drove over the curb to the street, but instead he just sped up. I’m scratching my head, because I was certain he wanted me to help unload when he got back home. But off he goes. So I sat down on a pile of lumber and waited for his return. Meanwhile, Dad is now driving down the freeway, still trying to figure out if he has enough time to get home, unload the first load, turn around and return to the tract and get a second, and possibly third load. It was only then that he glanced back and noticed that I wasn’t where I was supposed to have been. His first thought was “Bobby fell off the truck”. Did he turn back? No, he had a schedule to keep. So he kept driving, unloaded the lumber by himself, and drove back, this time keeping an eye out for me along the side of the road as he returned to the building site. He was quite relieved to see me back at the building tract of course, and we continued the job.
At least Dad got the material he wanted these times. He wasn’t so lucky with two other loads he had hoped to get. The first was a load (topsoil I think) being delivered by a guy whose truck broke down while en route on Highway 17, and the guy had to jettison the dirt off the side at the Hamilton Avenue interchange. Dad remembers driving by that spot many times afterward seeing “his” load of dirt just sitting there, getting smaller and smaller as the elements eroded it away, while he was unable to do anything about it. A second load (of sand, this time) boded far worse for an unnamed neighbor of ours. Dad knew he wouldn’t be there for the delivery, but gave the truck driver directions to the house … something like “Go down Garden Lane to the end of the street, turn left (on Corinne Drive) and it will be the first driveway on your right”. The driver asked Dad where he should dump the sand, and Dad told him to just dump it in the driveway and that he would take care of it after that himself. The problem was, the driver turned left one block too early, and dumped a quarter ton of sand on the first driveway on the right … on Benedict Lane. So when Dad finally showed up, there was no sand. It took him a little while to figure out what happened. Meanwhile, his neighbor’s driveway was effectively blocked for some time by a huge pile of sand.
As a youngster I never ruminated about our family dynamics. I suppose most kids consider their families as “normal” because that is what they grow up with and if they live mostly in one location, then that’s all they get exposed to. Certainly that was my experience, having spent all my formative years in the bucolic burg of Los Gatos. But looking back now, I realize that our family was not very emotionally demonstrative (possibly due to our demographics that ran 75% male to 25% female). This is not to say my folks were cold fish – certainly I recognized that they loved us and were supportive of us, but we never talked about ANY emotional or personal issues, nor, for example, did we ever hug.
Compared to what I see nowadays, I would say our family enjoyed an austere lifestyle, although I assumed it was one shared by most of the families we knew. Dad was the main breadwinner in the house, but after Ned and I started high school, Mom went back to nursing. My folks were certainly not lavish spenders, but I never had the sense we were hurting for money, as our family’s tastes were fairly frugal. We didn’t go out to eat very often, and when we did, more often than not it was at the Burger Pit3, while we probably went out to the movies once or twice a year. Up through high school, our folks gave Ned and me a weekly allowance (I can no longer remember how much it was, but each year it was raised by five cents) and because my monetary needs were virtually nil (I had everything I needed at home, including a bike for transportation, and didn’t have a circle of friends that might have required funds for socializing) I never felt the need to get a job.
But for several years we did take an annual summer vacation driving down to southern California. We’d leave while it was still dark: my favorite part of the drive was along 101 just before Prunedale (at the junction of Rocks Road) – the road ran through a hollow filled with Eucalyptus trees and fog in semi-darkness – a magical moment for me. Then we’d stop at King City and breakfast at a Sambo’s Restaurant (the only time I ever ate out for breakfast as a youngster). We always stayed in Whittier at the house of a friend of my Mom’s from nursing school. The husband’s name was Gene Smith, and my Mom’s friend’s name was Jean, so to avoid confusion, everyone referred to her by her maiden name, Glimpse (or Glimpsie). There were three things that stood out about that house to me: 1) they had a doughboy pool in the backyard, so we got a lot of swimming in, 2) they had a magnificent family room with a very high ceiling that served both as a bedroom for us kids, and a great communal space for us to hang around in, and 3) there was a neighborhood kid (Robbie) who spent a LOT of time there, which was my introduction to a situation wherein someone didn’t have as good a home life as everyone else I knew. Besides staying with the Smiths, each trip we’d invariable undertake the same two more activities. On one day we’d visit my father’s mother in Long Beach, where she’d always cook us the same meal – meatloaf. Then she and my mother would talk for a long time about various family members, during which time my brother and I were excused to walk around the neighborhood by ourselves. This was only marginally more interesting to me than listening about relatives I knew nothing about, as that area of Long Beach was nothing but houses – no parks, and almost no trees. However, our OTHER standard activity was great – Disneyland! I tended to go on the same rides each time –Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, the Jungle Cruise, and the submarine cruise for sure, plus a handful of other short rides. But the highlight for me (and the one I saved for last) was always Tom Sawyer’s Island, where I could easily spend an hour, just running around by myself.
There was one other trip in southern California for which I have a brief but sharp memory. I think we were still living in Granada Hills when my folks decided to buy some land in Palmdale as an investment, and once we drove out to see it. Well, the whole area was virtually desert – at least I remember it was really sandy with a couple of scrubby trees. Ned found a dead scorpion there, which further accented the “remoteness” of the area. Well, it turned out ALMOST to be a great investment, as years later the Palmdale airport was built there. Our property was along a road at the southern end of the development. Had our property been on the south side of the road, we could have resold it to any of a number of new businesses (hotels, restaurants, whatever) and made a nice profit. Instead, the property turned out to be on the north side of the road, and thus was subsumed by the airport itself, and my folks received just a pittance for the property. So we came THIS CLOSE to being real estate moguls.
Living outside the northern outskirts of Los Gatos, I never had any reason to visit downtown, which was about two miles from our house, so unlike a lot of my compatriots, I knew next to nothing about that area of town until I was in high school, and even then it was only a cursory knowledge. I never had a lot of friends as a kid, but in our immediate neighborhood, there were three other kids near my age that I played with: Mark Slattery lived next door, while Lee Charter was a couple of doors down the street the other way. There was a third boy (Wayne something) who lived at the corner of Garden Lane and Benedict Lane, but I think we considered he lived too far away (one relatively short block, in truth, but it was around a corner, so …) to join in regularly. All of them were a year younger than I, but I was happy to be a follower, and Mark tended to be the leader. One of our activities was the construction of a set of roads (well, paths actually) over and around irregular mounds on the empty State property just behind Mark’s house. But I actually spent more time doing stuff with my brother than anyone else. And Dad’s constructive abilities aided us considerably. He made a pair of stilts for each of us, astride which we would clomp all over the place – one time I made three consecutive laps (each about 0.6 miles) around the block circumscribed by Corrine Drive, Garden Lane, Benedict Lane and Chirco Drive without dismounting. But mostly Ned and I played war games, which merits a section of its own4. And it was a great neighborhood for trick-or-treating; the highlight for me was the year I got a TON of candy. I ate several pieces the next day, but then decided to parcel it out to eating one treat/day … and it lasted me until Easter!
I attended Louise Van Meter elementary school, but I only remember a couple of things from that time. When I started, I was an average student, right in the middle of the pack. Then one day we were being taught long division (so perhaps 4th grade?) (Fig. 2.5). The teacher did a few examples on the blackboard, and then gave us some problems for us to try on our own. As I was sitting there, wrestling with this seemingly intractable problem, I heard a sudden gasp of excitement from a desk somewhere in front of me – the smartest kid in class had figured it out! After another moment, I heard a similar sound and knew someone else had gotten it as well, while I was still struggling. And then, there was a third gasp – but this time it was me! The process of figuring division had clicked in my brain, and I continued with the remaining problems. And that was the day I became “smart”.
Throughout most of elementary school I was called Bobby, but at one point (possibly 5th grade) I suddenly became dissatisfied with this diminutive name. On my birthday, the teacher asked if I wanted anything special for the day. Well, I had recently come to understand that my given name was actually Robert (which sounded SO much more grown up to me), and so asked to be called by that name instead. And that day in class, I received several handwritten birthday notes addressed to “Robert”. And although I wasn’t completely comfortable with that moniker, at least it was better than the alternative I had been living with. But “Robert” didn’t last. This was right at the end of the school session, and when school reconvened in the fall, I became “Bob”, a name I was comfortable with.
My only other memories from elementary school involved music. Once in a small room towards the front of the school, five of us were taught the “Twelve Days of Christmas”. Each kid was responsible for learning the line for each successive gift. I was the third one, so it fell to me to learn the three French hens and the eight maids a-milking. My other memory was when the entire class was asked to sing. I admit I wasn’t paying too much attention as to the reason why we were asked, but dutifully sang along with everyone else. Immediately afterwards they started separating us out, and I was one of the ones they picked … to join the choir. Well, I had no interest in that, and started to cry. And that got me out of that.
1 Not that I missed that. We did frequent a library located way out on Union Avenue, where it intersected Los Gatos-Alamden Road. I think there used to be a Bookmobile parked there as well. I don’t remember which books I read, but Ned used to check out the Freddie the Pig books (by W.R. Brooks) – they were a lot of fun.
2 This was probably the California Cheese Company (on Sunny Court in San Jose, near Highway 101). A mafia dispute there in 1977 led to the shooting of a father and son, who were dumped in the trunk of a car, which was then driven to San Francisco where it was abandoned. When police found the car, the son was dead, but the father was still alive (although shot in the head, the bullet failed to penetrate the skull).
3 We frequented three locations: the closest was on the east side San Jose-Los Gatos Road between Lark Avenue and Los Gatos-Almaden Road, a second was in downtown Los Gatos, just off of Los Gatos-Saratoga Road, and the third was in the Town & Country Village complex in San Jose (near the intersection of Stevens Creek Blvd. and Winchester Road). There was at least one more location (near the intersection of Curtner and Union), but I don’t think we ever ate there. In 2024, Carolynn and I, joined by Ned and his wife Merryl, had lunch at the last remaining Burger Pit (on Blossom Hill Road), a few weeks before it closed forever (we just missed a number of other LGHS ’71 grads who ate there a couple of hours later).
4 Chapter 7, section 1, to be exact.