Costa Mesa is a small town in Southern California, just inland from Newport Beach. I was born in Pasadena, and have been told we lived on Balboa Island before moving to Costa Mesa but I don't remember those places.
When I was born, or shortly thereafter, my eyes got screwed up - turned in. I'm told I didn't crawl, just sat and listened. And why not? I could listen and keep track of where everyone was in the house, except the cats. I had eye operations, paid for by some relative of the family. I only remember a bit of the last one: being in a hospital bed and Dad giving me a glass of Kool-Ade and telling me, "The doctor will be in later with the 'sleepy juice', meanwhile, here's a glass of Kool-Ade". What great psychology. Next I remember waking up from the operation and being on some kind of a cart I thought was a market cart, and crying and yelling in anger and frustration at being on a market cart because "only babies ride on market carts".
So now, with something like normal vision, I set about learning to "drive" my body, running around and crashing into things, with perpetually skinned knees. Mom bought special large Band-Aids for them. Eventually I got things under control, and would walk around the block and explore. Eventually I was riding a tricycle and Alan showed me how to put playing cards on the spokes to make a "motor" sound.
We lived in a nice "ranch" house on White Oak Street in Costa Mesa. The local school, Mesa Verde, the local market, Market Basket, and such things were all walking distance, even for little kids. But to give an idea of what an unusual and great person my father was, the house had art, nothing trite, on the walls, objet d'art all over the living room, he was always playing good classical, "world", or decent popular, like Herb Alpert, on the stereo, and always teaching us words and how to spell them, singing little-kid songs with us, and taking us to the (cold) beach. There was a cave there, and my older brother was convinced he'd find bats there if he just looked hard enough. I was right behind him, but we found no bats.
In the back yard, Dad had built a simple plywood "play castle" with two stories. We could climb up there and see over the back fence. One time I remember (I'm sure there were many other times) we got kites and I guess it was probably my older sister's, Barbara's, that got up pretty high. So Dad tied on another ball of string and let's see how far up we can go! "The curve of the string looks like a wine glass", Dad said.
We went to the beach a lot, and to a place called Knotts Berry Farm, where we got a silly bench made from a log that looked like a goat, the log flattened on the sitting part and the neck and head being the part of the log that curved up, and carved to look like a goat. It was cool. We also went sailing, I remember, in some big sailboat that heeled over a lot. I was below, in a discussion with one of my Dad's friends: "That life jacket you have on, that's kapok", he said. "Cape-eyed?", I said. "No, kapok", he said. So kapok it was.
We had pets. We had, to the greatest of my recollection, a collie named Sunday and a black standard poodle named Monday (a friendly furry black wall for me to lean against and bury my face in) a garter snake named Crictor, a huge toad pollywog in an aquarium, two tortoises named Slow And Stolid and Fast And Flimsy, several cats including a black one named Dagmar who used to jump on the bed, for a short period it seems a monkey (who ate meal worms on the share plan, one for me and one for you; hey we were kids) and a goat. The goat lived on the bottom floor of the orange castle.
My older sister did grown-up things like go to the roller rink, and I looked up to her and to my older brother, Alan, who among other things taught me to count to 100 and gave me a toy dump truck. My younger two sisters, April and Carole later named Cinda, were there but they were still babies.
One time, Mom re-arranged the furniture in the living room and little me didn't like it and moved it all back! Well, OK maybe it was just the chairs, but still, I was a determined little kid. Barbara (oldest) knew how to draw a star on paper. She showed me and when my effort looked like anything but a star I remember sitting there for much longer than you'd expect a 5 year old to, drawing star after star in a near rage, until I could get at least a kinda-sorta good star, before I was satisfied with my effort.
Dad taught me words like "Dad" and "Bed". And sang little-kid songs with me, and had time for all of us. He'd gone to the college where the computer language BASIC had been invented, and where they'd also done a lot of research into child education. He did something with computers for Coast Federal, a local bank. Maybe having gone to Dartmouth and being exposed to child-education theories made him pay so much attention to us, but I think it's just because he was a great guy. One hilarious afternoon, Dad and I worked on funny words. 2nd funniest: "Stow". Funniest in the universe: "Fleebeedoo".
We had tons of books. Little kid books, educational books, literature, you name it. No trashy novels or anything like that. My dad's taste in books was superb. We had all the Time/Life Nature Library books that were out at the time. I remember Alan and I looking at a picture of scallop with its many eyes in one, and in another, deciding which prehistoric sea creatures we'd be if we could.
I did a bit of kindergarten. Both of my parents were frustrated artists and I was drawing and painting before I can remember. Some sort of big deal was made over one of my paintings because it was this cool geometric shape, a square standing up on one corner, with colored stripes. I called it the "peepeeweepee". It was entered into some kind of little kid art show. This was the late 1960s and abstract art was big at the time - a little kid doing it was interesting I guess.
I'm sure the kindergarten was great, but only two other memories stand out. I was "head-shy" because of the eye operations and I guess some kids found out, and they got some corrugated ventilation hoses like are used on clothes dryers and beat me with them, creating quite a fuss. I wasn't hurt, but at the time I guess I was terrified. And, in the school playground was a ditch, and as any kid can tell you, ditches are great. But this one was in a stand of pussy willows, the most wondrous things. So I discovered that one day and decided my time was best spent in the ditch with the pussy willows, petting their grey flowers. It took people a while to find me.
It may be Dad's sailing friends who got him interested in Hawaii. Dad had wanted to get a degree in naval architecture at Dartmouth but had had to settle for a degree in English, but that did not kill his interest in boats. But much more likely it was my (great) Aunt Mary, who'd been some kind of Commander Of All Pacific Librarians through WWII and a bit after, and had retired in Hawaii, and thought it was very nice. She and Dad were close.
Dad found a house, at 348 Portlock Road, and it was a fixer-upper. So he went over for 4 months and did all kinds of fixing-upping, and then came back, and then we were going to move. I remember how bare the Costa Mesa house looked as the Smythe truck took everything away. I wondered where Dagmar was going to go, but I guess homes were found for all of our pets, even the big pollywog.
I remember a bit of the flight over, on Pan-Am. My older brother had shown me pictures in one of the Time-Life books, about the different layers above us, the stratosphere, troposphere, ionosphere. So when a stewardess came by, I asked here which "sphere" we were in now, and she said, "No need to fear". I also looked carefully at the clouds, in case I might see an angel or two. We all got little tin pin-on pilot wings and Pan-Am bags.I'm sure we were pretty well-behaved on the plane as we'd been taught to be well-behaved in restaurants and at the dinner table at home.
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