Views from Crestmont Drive

(This is another essay to become a section of my “memoirs,” to be promoted to a page rather than a post, eventually.)

It’s a truism that once you become an adult and have a career job, no one cares about your GPA (Grade Point Average) in high school or college, or even what college or university you graduated from. (At best the university you graduated from got you interviews with companies who otherwise would have ignored you.)

Still, sometimes a look back at report cards and college grade reports can be interesting, even revealing. (I’ve seen a couple of my Facebook friends quote comments from their earliest report cards, to illuminate or contrast their early performance with their eventual careers.)

And since I’ve saved all my report cards, all the way from kindergarten, I think I’ll show some of them there, and comment about them.

I do have two particular points to make.

• First, the earliest report card comments were generally correct about my later academic performance. At the same time, I did not always excel in subjects that later became my central interests.
• Second, my college records from UCLA and later CSUN showed that my academic performance was dramatically different when I was just attending by rote, versus when I had a goal to reach. A B average at UCLA, and an A average at CSUN.

Kindergarten

This was in Apple Valley, 1960-61, at Yuca Loma Elementary School, in the windy Mojave Desert. I have two artifacts from this. First, a “Conference Summary” from November 13, 1960; I had been in school a couple months. There’s a long hand-written comment by my teacher, Elaine Kutrosky.

She wrote:

Social Studies—

Mark certainly seems to work hard during our work period. He is usually found working with the blocks constructing something practical, or crayoning or even in the playhouse working hard at being someone. He talks quite well for a five yr. old.

Work Habits—

Mark does concentrate fairly well and usually finishes all projects he starts out. He does need to be reminded to go back and clean up a little better.

I can almost say Mark had some adjustment problems but not quite. He seemed a bit mystified when school started but took our class situation in his stride and is doing fine. Sometimes it is hard for him to realize that sharing is a necessity but after talking with him he understands.

Also at times he need reminding to do his responsibilities. I feel that we should help him assume his responsibilities at school. I think if we both gave him some responsibilities at school and at home would help him realize that responsibilities are important.

And it’s signed by my mother, Helen E. Kelly. (I’m not sure what “responsibilities” referred to exactly. Cleaning up better?)

And I have my report card, or “Kindergarten Growth Report.” The scores are S, for satisfactory, S+, S-, or N, for needs improvement. I got one N, for “I accept responsibility.” I can’t imagine now what that meant. I got S+ scores for being able to relax (i.e. when we took naps on towels laid out on the floor), following directions, speaking well, being polite, and working well alone. (I’m still very good at this last item.)

The one comment from Elaine Kutrosky was “Mark seems to have potential for being a good student.” Note that this time my mother signed it as Mrs. Robert Kelly.

Grade School

I don’t have a report card from the few months I attended Grant Elementary in Santa Monica, finishing first grade. The next card I have is from the end of second grade (A2 meant advanced 2^nd grade, while B2 meant beginning 2^nd grade). Throughout elementary school we were graded on “knowledge and skills,” on the one side, and “school adjustment” on the other. The former group included Reading, English, Mathematics, Civics, Science, and other subjects; the latter group covered Effort, Work Habits, and Citizenship.

The possible scores are Outstanding, Very Good, Satisfactory, Needs to Improve, and Unsatisfactory. If these correspond to grades A to F, then in the second period I got As only for reading and spelling. Otherwise I got Bs and Cs, the latter mostly in School Development.

This time my father signed the card.

In grades 3 through 6 we got report cards that looked like this. Again, in 3^rd grade, I got high marks for reading and spelling, otherwise Bs, except a C in physical education. (As I’ve said elsewhere, I hated the enforced games, like dodgeball.) Yet in contrast to 2^nd grade, I improved and got As in Effort, Work Habits, and Citizenship. In 4^th grade I got similar marks, mostly As, Cs only in handwriting, music, and P.E. Slight variations in 5^th grade.

At the end of the 6^th grade – the ultimate judgement of elementary school – I finished with 12 As and 4 Bs. In those last two or three years, I’d always been recognized as one of the top students in each class. (As I recall, given the size of the school, each year’s class occupied two classrooms, about 30 students in each classroom.) But, as I walked out of Vanalden Elementary School for the last time, I understood that one or two other students had higher percentages of As than I did. Oh well; I would never see most of the other students there again.

It’s curious that a couple of those Bs were in science, and music, which later became core interests of mine. What did science consist of in 5^th or 6^th grade? I don’t recall. And in 5^th grade, when I got a C in music, that was the year we got “tonettes,” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonette), a basic wind instrument in plastic, like a simple recorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorder_(musical_instrument)), which I recall being pretty good at, or at least enjoyed. I suppose I wasn’t that good. (Later, I my 20s, I bought a plastic recorder from a music store at the Northridge Mall and played around with it for years, playing simple tunes from folk music or movie scores. I still have it, but haven’t played it in years.)

Junior High and High School

As explained on my Personal History page for these early years, the key fact about the six grades, from 7^th through 12^th grades, is that I attended five different schools over those six years. That was a consequence of family moves to Illinois and back, and of course the transition from Junior High to High School.

I began at Sequoia Junior High for the 7^th grade. I have “Progress Reports” with no grades, just comments. “Tops in class” my math teacher wrote. My English teacher wrote “good student—very perceptive”; my Geography teacher wrote “outstanding”; my homeroom teacher Mrs. Lamberto wrote in October “Use guidance room time wisely—read—study” but by December wrote “a ‘joy’ to have in H.R.—real gentleman of a student.” I also have a separate “Complementary Report to Parents” from my Geography teacher, dated 11/17/68, saying “Mark does very fine work.”

I have two report cards, one with four As (English, Geography, Math, Winds [music, beginning clarinet], one B (in wood shop), and one C (Phys. Ed.). The second with the same subjects, my grade in English fallen to a B, my grade in shop, now drafting, an A, and my grade in P.E. a D(!) – this was when we had to throw softballs, and I was ‘uncoordinated.’

And then a mid-school-year transfer to small town Illinois, to Cambridge Community Schools. I have one report card. Mostly As, but a B in arithmetic, and in vocal music (I don’t remember that class at all), and in Phys Ed, yet an A in instrumental music, even though, as I’ve written elsewhere, the move promoted me into a class of students with more practice learning instruments than I’d had, and I felt I never caught up, was always a minor 3^rd rate performer.

And then Glen Crest Junior High School, in Glen Ellyn IL, for one year. A school that used numbers rather than letters. I got 5s in Social Studies, Science, and Math; 4s in other subjects except (of course) a 3 in Physical Educ. My conduct was Satisfactory in all cases.

And then to Glenbard Township High Schools, for two years. I attended Glenbard East (https://www.glenbardeasths.org/). At the end of these two years, I got 5s in geometry, geography, freshman science, and chemistry. 4s in most other subjects including English, algebra, health (this was sex education), concert band, and driver’s ed. (We had driving simulators, in class, and then drove real cars out on the icy-slippery local streets.) And P.E.

And then back to California for the last two years of high school, and James Monroe High School in what was then known as Sepulveda, now North Hills (either way, a 91343 postal zone district of the city of Los Angeles). I was doing really well in high school in Illinois, but the high school in California didn’t quite trust those grades, and so didn’t enroll me in as many advanced placement classes that I might otherwise have been enrolled in. Thus, for example, I had no science course in the 11th grade, when ordinarily I would have taken biology; so I never had a biology course in high school. In my first semester I had Advanced algebra/trigonometry, US History (which as I’ve described wasn’t a comprehensive course, but rather a series of 10-week studies on particular topics), German, and typing. And P.E. I’ve discussed the significance of the typing class, even though I got a B; As in the first three, a C in P.E.

My final high school marks, in June 1973, were better. I got As in physics, AP math, AP English (that memorable course with Mr. Eugene Friedman, who in addition to having us read classic novels and plays gave us weekly quizzes on current events via Newsweek Magazine, who had a monthly soiree at his house, on Louise Ave., for his students), and a credit for P.E. because Mr. Friedman had worked with the P.E. teacher to have me work as Friedman’s assistant instead of attending P.E. class.

I graduated 40^th in a class of 1000.

And so my high school marks were high. As described in my Personal History for this era, I took the PSAT, did well, interviewed with CalTech and MIT, and ended up at UCLA.

IQ test

In the 11^th grade, after scoring well on the PSAT, one of the things that happened, in addition to being summoned and recognized by the college counselor, was that I was pulled out of class one day for a private session with some visiting official, who gave me what I gather was an IQ test, or some test about identifying special students. I don’t know; I never heard the results. I do remember a couple particular things about the test.

First, one part was a page of simple arithmetic problems. I started at the top and worked my way down. The instructor said, the ones at the bottom count more. Feeling manipulated, I determinedly kept working them in order. And the time ran out, I didn’t finish the entire page. What was being tested here?

Second, another part was that I was given a blank page and asked to draw a human. I can’t sketch for beans, but I tried to do something, and what I realized was that I was using just the upper left corner of the sheet to draw and small figure – not the entire page, with a large sketch centered in the middle. Was that what was being tested?

As I said, I never heard anything about the results of this test. Presumably I was not identified as any super-extraordinary student.

College Entrance Exams

I took the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, PSAT, sometime in 11^th grade (as discussed in my Personal History essay). I scored 61 verbal, 73 math. According to the booklet that accompanied my results, those corresponded to about 95 and 98 percentile of all juniors who later entered college (and higher for all juniors). I was among the top four scores at my high school. This is what attracted the attention of the college counselor/AP English teacher, and got my photo on the front page of the Valley News and Greensheet, along with all the other 11^th grade high-scorers in the San Fernando Valley (population at the time about a million).

The PSAT doubled as a test for the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (NMSQT). I don’t remember the details of that program; I think it depended on the college you went to, parents’ income, and so on. Since I went to nearby UCLA, where the tuition was something like $200 per quarter (three quarters a year, not counting summer), I didn’t qualify. So I never got any kind of scholarship.

Then in 12^th grade I took the SAT, Scholastic Aptitude Test, which is used by the colleges you apply to, along with your high school GPA, and in some cases personal interviews (as I had with representatives from CalTech and MIT). And, optionally, you take various Achievement Tests in particular subjects.

You can retake some of these tests, but from the paperwork I have, I only took the SAT once. Verbal 650, math 780; 98 and 99 percentiles among all students, 95 and 99 among college bound students.

I took several Achievement Tests, a couple of them twice. Math 2: 760 the first time, 800 the second time. English: 710. Chemistry: 710. American History (why did I take that? I never had a decent history course in high school. Maybe it was required.): 460.

Some six years later, as I enrolled at Cal State Northridge for a Master’s Degree (which I didn’t finish), I took the GRE, the Graduate Record Exam. There were three scores, for verbal, quantitative, and analytical. I scored 760, 790, and 770.

UCLA, 1973- 1977

I’ve said this many times in various places, that attending UCLA, living at home with my parents and younger kids, commuting to school over those four years, was the worst situation I could have been in. Parents: sent your kids away to college. Let them live on their own. That’s as much a part of the college experience as taking university courses. Whereas I was stuck at home, with three younger noisy siblings; my four years at UCLA, driving there every day from home, were to me an extension of high school.

At UCLA, I did OK. My initial ambition was to study astronomy, my early passion. But an astronomy major entailed studying physics for the first two years, and I did OK only up to a point. Many people, I’ve understood from some of my Facebook friends, have a point in their studies, especially in physics or math, where they suddenly don’t “get it.” Their intuitive understanding of the subject disappears. (This evokes a deep theme, the idea that perception of reality is limited or enabled by one’s native intelligence, one that I’ll explore in my book about science fiction.) For me, it was the third quarter of my sophomore, quantum physics, Feynman diagrams, and I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t work my way through them. I got Cs, even a D, in those courses.

I didn’t have any clear goal about a career. At the end of my sophomore year, I changed major to math, where I’d done better. As in any major, certain core courses are required, and beyond them are various options, specific courses of study one can select from; every field has specialties. I did better in some core courses than in others, and so I gravitated toward the fields I did best in. I hit a wall with what’s called “analysis,” which is the justification from first principles of calculus. It involved much study of infinitesimals, and asymptotes, and I struggled. On the other hand, I liked, and did well, in math classes on discreet topics: number theory (elementary topics there involve prime numbers and the Fibonacci sequence), linear algebra, group theory especially, and so on. I moved from getting Cs in math classes – my major! – to getting As.

I notice, riffling through my files, that on my SAT tests I identified my career goal as “doctorate.” My early ambitions to become an astronomer would obviously have indicated that direction, since there are few industry jobs for astronomers. During these years at UCLA, I had to recalibrate. For a time I considered becoming a teacher, say, a high school math teacher. Even then, I felt I was good at explaining things. (….whatever happened to that?)

As I look at my “Undergraduate Student Record Card” (shown here), i.e. my grades while in UCLA, I recall another issue about attending college. Having taken AP, Advanced Placement, courses in high school, I had license to skip introductory college courses in those subjects. In retrospect, bad idea: college courses are faster and more rigorous than those in high school. My first quarter at UCLA, I took math 11C – skipping 11A and 11B – and got a C. Similarly physics; I got a B, then a C in second quarter. I should have started from the beginning, in college.

CSUN, 1980- 1983

Here we come to the second point in my introduction. After working a non-technical job for a couple years after finishing UCLA, I rallied myself and decided to go back to school, this time in the more useful field of computer science. Part of the timing here is that I had to have supported myself for a couple years before I was eligible for student loans and work/study. Thus, I quit my day job and lived, for two full years, on student loans and a part-time job on campus. I took a full load of courses in each of four semesters, over two years. I enrolled at first for a second bachelor’s degree. Having the first such degree, I was exempt at CSUN from various “breadth” requirements, courses outside your major required to broaden your horizons. So I only had to take computer science courses, and some peripheral engineering and philosophy (i.e. formal logic) courses, to satisfy the requirements for a B.S. in computer science. I also took a few math courses, some of them perhaps required (e.g. combinatorial algorithms) but some perhaps just for fun.

Anyway, for four semesters running, plus one summer session, I got straight As. In 22 different subjects. (Some were small courses like labs or 10-week intros to old computer languages like Fortran and Cobol.) Of course, there’s a substantial difference between a UC school and a Cal State school; the Cal State campuses are middle-tier universities, somewhere between community colleges and the top-tier UC system. So it would always have been easier to get straight As at Cal compared to UC, whatever my determination.

By Spring of ’82 I’d decided to pursue a career job, and got much assistance from campus programs to bring corporate recruiters on site. But I’d also decided to continue school, and changed my intentions from a 2^nd bachelor’s degree (which I therefore did not receive) to a master’s degree. I started work in June ’82, but kept taking courses in the evenings for another year and a half, three semesters. The Cal State colleges, unlike University of California campuses, served many students who worked during the day and took classes at night.

But it was a lot of work. In Fall ’82 I enrolled in two full courses and one prep course on how to develop a thesis. Too much work. I dropped the latter, got an A in one of the others, but only a B in the third—only because I didn’t complete the special project required for the A. I took one course in Spring ’83, and got an A. And then I took one class in Fall ’83, one which required writing two or three big papers, and was not keeping up—so I dropped it and got an incomplete. Ironically, that last course was in “software engineering,” i.e. the process by which industry software projects are planned and managed – exactly what my day job was all about!

So I finished with a cumulative GPA of 3.95, without a degree. But the courses at CSUN had served their purpose. I had a full-time professional job, one that I kept, with variations in assignments, for 30 years.

Certificates and Awards

If in Boy Scouts you got lots of badges and patches, so many that you need a vest-like “patch jacket” to display them all, but no paperwork, in school and college (and later at work) you lots of paperwork in the form certificates and awards that one could frame and put on your wall (but no badges). Here are some photos of a bunch of them from Junior High and High School.

The earliest, at upper left, is for participating in an “Elementary School Mathematics Field Day,” in May 1967, i.e. near the end of 6th grade. I don’t remember this.

The next, upper right, is an “Industrial Arts Award” in 7th grade for having done well in that drafting course. I suppose my father was tickled, him being an architect.

The next two items, with ribbons, were for participating in Math Club test, the MAA; again, I don’t remember the details. I was 3rd in my school one year, 2nd the next.

The three at the bottom were consequences of my having scored well on the PSAT, and having become a finalist for the National Merit Scholarship and a life member of the California Scholarship Federation. My membership in that federation never had any consequences beyond receiving these certificates.

And the ones along the left are various “service” and “honor roll” certificates for having had high GPAs in 7th and 8th grades.

I’ll have a bunch more analogous certificates and awards when I summarize my professional career at Rocketdyne.

Another IQ Test

A few years later I took another IQ test, this one self-administered. That may sound odd, but the test was deliberately designed to be extremely difficult and not open to the casual looking up of answers. It was called the Mega Test – it even has a Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Society — and was designed to discriminate among those who score highly on standard IQ tests. (I seem to recall that I did take a standard IQ test at some point, and scored 132? But I have no record of it.) The test was published in Omni magazine in early 1985, and readers were invited to submit their answers, taking as much time as they needed to work them out, for scoring. I spent a considerable amount of time—I have a folder full of several dozen sheets of paper with calculations and diagrams trying to work out the answers – submitted my answers, and got a scoresheet in return dated May 23, 1985. Of the 48 questions, I answered all but 7, but I got only 31 correct and so was incorrect on several I thought I’d figured out.

Anyway, I got 31 of 48 correct, corresponding, according to their booklet, to an IQ of 162.

I can’t find the test itself anywhere online, though there’s a similar one here, http://miyaguchi.4sigma.org/hoeflin/ultra/ultra.html. But I’ll photograph the photocopies I have of the test I took, along with my answers and results. (I’ve inserted this photo at especially high resolution so you can read all the original questions.)

I never bothered to apply to Mensa (or similar organizations); I wasn’t interested in joining a club, I just took the test for fun, as a solitaire puzzle to see how much of it I could figure out.

Final Point

Of course, there’s an obvious third point to make: there’s not a high correlation between high grades, or a high IQ, and success in life. I had a decent career, earning a bit over six figures a year by the end of it (in 2012), but I didn’t move into management or become any kind of expert. Outside work I built some databases, wrote some reviews, created a couple websites. I even won a major science fiction award. But I’m not the least bit famous, and it’s unlikely anything I’ve done will be remembered once I’m gone.

I lived in (until kindergarten) or visited Apple Valley from the very late 1950s until the mid 1980s, with a couple visits even later than that. It’s the place I think of as “home” more than any other place in the world. I spent some the happiest times of my life there, especially during parts of seven summers in the ’70s (see third phase below), as alone as I could be.

\\

First Apple Valley: 1958 to 1962 (living there)

My family moved to Apple Valley around 1958, when I was three years old. We rented an apartment for a while, then rented a small cinder-block house in the far northeast part of the valley, and then settled into the house on Winnebago Road, shown here. (This is covered in family history, here and here and here.)

I have only a few specific memories from these years. In 1960 I started kindergarten, riding a big yellow school bus from a corner half a block from the house to Yucca Loma Elementary school (https://sites.google.com/avusd.org/yuccaloma-new/home) some 7 miles away. My memories of attending school there include 1) we brought towels from home to use during nap time, when we spread the towels out onto the floor; 2) the wind came up every afternoon, as I’ve explained, and during afternoon recess I and other boys would huddle in the corner of the low block wall surrounding the outdoor jungle gym, against the wind. (I didn’t climb up and down the jungle gym.)

Also in this period I was into plastic toy cars; see photos here. Outside were those big skies and hills that surrounded the valley protectively. In the daytime jet fighters flew low back and forth over the valley; to the west, northwest of Victorville, was George Air Force Base (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Air_Force_Base), decommissioned in 1993 but at the time we lived there a training base. The jets screamed across the sky.

This is when I had a coloring book with outlined drawings of things like horses and mountains, lakes with sailing boats, and big puffy clouds in the sky, mostly things beyond my personal experience.

And near the end of this phase was when that desert superbloom that I remember, in Spring of 1962, occurred.

Other photos from this era on the Second Apple Valley house page.

\\

Second Apple Valley: 1962 to 1967 (family visits from Reseda)

In 1962 (half-way through my 1st grade) the family moved to Santa Monica for 6 months, and then to Reseda for several years. (Family history here.) My grandmother, “Grammie,” had already moved from Illinois to California, and we moved her into the Apple Valley house, which my father had been unable to sell. (He kept ownership of the house until sometimes in the 1970s, when he sold it to my Uncle Bob.)

During these nearly 6 years the family tradition would be to drive to Apple Valley about once a month for weekend visits with my grandmother. Typically we would leave Friday evening after dinner. At almost exactly 100 miles, the trip, at that time entirely on two-lane mountain and desert highways, took a solid two hours. (California State Route 14, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Route_14, now known as the Antelope Valley Freeway, was finished through the mountains in 1964, shortening the trip a bit. [I’m always amazed at the detail of Wikipedia’s entries on any kind of interstate or highway.])

We would be there all day Saturday and Sunday until afternoon, returning home in time for Sunday dinner. Thinking back, I wonder where we all slept each night. The house had only two bedrooms. I think the answer was that my parents slept in the master bedroom, otherwise my grandmother’s; she slept on the sofa; and all four of us kids slept in the second bedroom, with one large (full-sized?) bed for the girls, two slender singles for the boys, taking up nearly all the floor space in that room.

And what did we do on those weekends? I only recall a couple things. We went to church Sunday mornings; this period would have been when, attending the local Presbyterian church, we met Roy Rogers and Dale Evans (or possibly that was in phase one). And later in the period, my father and I did a hike, in the rocky hills east of Apple Valley’s “village,” for boy scout credit, climbing over huge boulders up a gully where the rain water would gush.

There was a trip to a fish hatchery (of all things), which I remember; there was a trip to a garbage dump (according to my journals), which I vaguely recall was out near Oro Grande.

It was half way through this phase, in the Fall of 1965, when I discovered the TV series Lost in Space, and on reflection all these years later I wonder if my attraction to the show was that it was set in a place that looked just like the desert where I grew up! Or close enough. (Years later I would discover that for the pilot and early episodes, filmmakers actually did do some location shooting out in the desert, though far north of Apple Valley at the Trona Pinnacles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trona_Pinnacles) and in Red Rock Canyon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Rock_Canyon_State_Park_(California)).)

So was one of my earliest interests in anything science fictional triggered by nostalgia for a childhood landscape? Did Apple Valley inspire me to science fiction? That’s probably imposing too much story on coincidental events. But it did lead, as the years past, to the appreciation of the desert as a science fictional landscape.

This phase came to an end as we left California to move to Illinois, in the Spring of 1968. We made the trip in the family car, that Chevelle station wagon by then, staying one night with Grammie in Apple Valley before heading northeast across the country. As we left the house, we drove back through Victorville to get on Interstate 15, then headed northeast…and along the back of Bell Mountain. It was unrecognizable. Our view of its perfect shape for all those years had been from a privileged position.

\\

Third Apple Valley: Seven Summers in the Seventies (visits from Sepulveda, 1971 to 1977)

In the Summer of 1971 we moved back to California from Illinois. As we had done when we moved there, we left Illinois without having a house to move into, and so my father parked my mother and us kids in Apple Valley for the summer, with our grandmother, while he went to LA to work and to shop for a house. We arrived in Apple Valley about 25 June, and moved into our house in the LA suburbs, in Sepulveda, in mid-August.

After three entire years away, in an area of the country far more different from Apple Valley than Los Angeles was, returning to the desert was both a homecoming and a revelation; its strangeness and appealing isolation struck anew with full force.

By this time I was in high school, entering the 11th grade that fall. The family resumed its occasional weekend trips to visit Grammie, but at a reduced rate, perhaps four or five times per year. I suppose because all four of us kids were in school by then, and had things going on.

And I was of an age when, still living at home (even through four years of college at UCLA), I began pursuing my own interests, and grew a little frustrated at being in a house with three younger children. (I did not have high school friends to hang out with…) This played out in two ways. First, just as I declined to continue attending church, I sat out some of the weekend trips to Apple Valley, and stayed home just to have some time by myself.

Second, the reverse: over the summers for several years, I managed to arrange stays in Apple Valley of a couple weeks or more, sometimes with the other kids there but often by myself. These private retreats became of central importance to me. From 1971 to 1977 (the family moved away to Tennessee in early ’78) there were seven of these summers, that I look back on fondly, and have never been able to recreate. They were my refuge, my Seven Summers in the Seventies, when I was able to revisit the landscape of my childhood, escape household circumstances to read my books, look at stars through my telescope, and be myself away from the squabble and cigarette smoke of my family.

In was during these summers, weeks at a time being in the desert every day, that I noticed patterns that I hadn’t paid attention to as a child. Mornings were crisp and clear, and still. The San Gabriel range to the southwest stood blue and sharp against the morning sky. But the winds came up invariably at mid-day, blowing from the southwest toward the northeast. As smog from the “Inland Empire” (as it came to be called) of Riverside and San Bernardino pushed its way through the pass and onto the high desert floor, the view of those mountains vanished in the haze.

• In 1971, my mother and us kids spent about 6 weeks in Apple Valley while my father went to work and looked for a house in LA. The family had a 2^nd car by then – a used Buick Skylark with peeling paint on the hood – that my grandfather had driven out for us, so after he left we had a car to get around in AV. My grandmother was working, as a receptionist for some kind of social services office in Victorville, in a building at Victor St. and 7^th St (the latter the main drag in town), and across from a bowling alley long since torn down. I read some 22 paperback books during those 6 weeks, mostly books I’d acquired in Illinois and managed to pack in the interstices of the telescope box. I also had the telescope.
• In 1972 I spent 4 weeks in AV from late June to late July, returning home earlier than planned for a family vacation, a car trip to Oregon (Crater Lake), Washington’s Olympia peninsula, and the Oregon Coast (Salishan Lodge). This was the summer I had my father’s old clunker bicycle from Cambridge, that somehow we managed to move with us. I would ride from the house to “the village” area of town, a half mile stretch of commercial district along Highway 18 at Navajo. There was a pharmacy there that had a decent magazine rack and paperback book rack. On one such trip, the right pedal broke off, out of its socket, and I had to awkwardly finish the trip home pushing on just one pedal…
• Summer of 1973 was the period between high school and college. I spent a week in AV in early July, another 10 days in early August. A family vacation—a drive to Illinois—fell through. I applied for a couple summer jobs and did not get one (I didn’t want to bag groceries yet was overqualified for the one I applied for—I recall I had to fill out an enormous application with questions about which people we admired and why, which I realized later must have been a ploy to weed out kids who wouldn’t focus on their job).
  • Piano. During these second and third summers, my grandmother still had her job, so I would spend weekdays alone at the house. She had the piano that my family had had in Reseda, back when my mother had given me some informal lessons. (I still have a stack of the lesson books she’d used as a child.) I never had formal lessons, but I could play pieces from those lesson books. (Fun fact: back in the ‘30s and ‘40s when my mother was growing up, you could subscribe to magazines of piano sheet music, some pieces simplifications or reductions of classical pieces, some full original scores. One issue a month, with 30 or 40 pages of music. The days before TV! I have some of those too.) At best, I could finger my way through the entire original score of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (1^st movement), with its steady rhythm but increasingly complex accidentals.
  • Transcriptions. I also tried to write down, from tape recordings, a couple three pieces of music that entranced me. One was the main theme of the 1973 film The Day of the Dolphin, score by Georges Delerue, that I first heard on TV; another was the opening of the last movement of Mahler’s 9^th symphony; another was the main theme of Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon, a piece by George Handel. They all had had such clear, open chordal structures and harmonies, and the Mahler such clearly separate lines among the various strings, that I think my piano reductions were pretty accurate.
  • Astronomy. I had my telescope, I had my Star Observer’s Guide, by the summer of ’72 I had Brown’s What Star Is That?, and by 1974 I had Norton’s Star Atlas. I would sit out in the evenings and split doubles and find Messier objects. Moreover—I would occasionally sleep outside the entire night, in a sleeping bag on a chaise lounge, in order to wake up an hour or two before dawn and see another quarter of the sky than was visible after sunset. There were no dangerous desert critters. On the contrary, there were a couple stray cats that found me, jumped up on my sleeping bag, and befriended me. (Years later – 1980 or ’81 – my grandmother had adopted a couple stray cats, one white, one black. I was in a college computer science program at the time, learning about various historical computer languages. I named them Snobol and Cobol.) It was dark enough at night that the glare from a street light, a mile away, interfered with my night vision. I would block the light with my hand, or avoid looking that way, while looking through my telescope, to see the deep sky.
  • Jet planes. It was during these summers, either standing outside at night (I would step outside several times an evening, always, while my grandmother watched TV after dinner) or sleeping out overnight, that you could hear… high overhead… the faint roar of jet planes. They would move from the southwest to the northeast. That is, a standard flight path for planes leaving LA heading northeast would be directly over Apple Valley. (Whereas, I observed years later taking many such flights, returning flights from the east or northeast would aim first for Big Bear Lake, then angle the plane due west for LAX.) Moreover, when you looked up into the night sky to spot the plane, it would be over *there*, 10 or 20 degrees across the sky in the direction of travel from where the sound seemed to come from. Because it took that long for the sound to reach the ground.
• 1974. After taking a summer course (Freshman Comp) at Valley College, I spent 6 full weeks in AV, from early August to mid September. Grammie had just retired from her job, so she was home all the time. Kevin and Lisa spent one of those weeks there. We must have gotten that old bike fixed, because I rode around to libraries and bookshops. (In those days even small towns like Apple Valley and Victorville had two or three new and/or used bookshops each.) This was the summer a stray dog chased me on my bike and scratched my leg sufficiently badly that Grammie took me a doctor.
• 1975: Just two weeks in August, but the second week Lisa and Sue were there too, the latter with her ever-running radio.
• 1976: After taking two summer courses at UCLA, I spent two weeks in AV myself, just before construction began on a remodel of the house by my Uncle Bob. Earlier in August my high school buddy Phil Klutch, taking pilot lessons, flew me to Apple Valley for a weekend. During the day he took me up again for some practice stalls. That means stalling the engine and going into free fall for a few seconds, then starting the engine back up. Of course, I got sick
• 1977: Just after graduation from UCLA, two weeks, and instead of being dropped off and picked up, I drove the Skylark and had a car there. This is the summer I sat in the yard, looking northeast, and read new hardcover novels by Varley, Pohl, Bishop, Leiber.

This what the house looked like after the remodel in 1976. An extra room was added at the front left (behind a tree in this view), enclosing the laundry room and created a large dining room, and the entire house got this mock-adobe facade.

\\

Fourth Apple Valley: Apple Valley visits with my Uncle Bob (1978 to 1982)

My family moved back east in 1978, and I stayed in LA, working a job and going back to college, but having no car. I bicycled everywhere. (See sidebar essay about bicycling.) My Uncle Bob, now owning and having remodeled the Apple Valley house, took to visiting his mother there regularly now that my parents were gone. And so often I rode along with him. He would go once a month or so, do whatever chores needed doing, and relax. These trips were more efficient that my family’s had been; Uncle Bob wouldn’t leave until Saturday morning, and then return first thing Sunday morning. He’d pick me up at my apartment, we’d stop for breakfast along Highway 14 in Canyon Country (this is about the time I started drinking coffee), and be up there before noon. He’d run back into Victorville, or to “the village,” for supplies to do this or that home repair. These were about monthly in ’78, but ramped down to only three in 1981.

During this period I got my first camera, in May 1979, and in ’79 and 1980 I took lots of my own photos of the house, the hills, Bob’s car (a Mazda), later in ’82 my own car and my uncle’s Cadillac.

Meanwhile I got quite fit riding my bicycle everywhere, and at my most ambitious, and to connive yet more visits to Apple Valley, I embarked on 100-mile rides from my place in Northridge all the way through the mountains and across the desert to Apple Valley. And in one case, from Apple Valley back home; each time I arranged it so Uncle Bob could pick me up or drive me there for one leg of the trip. I did two of these in 1980, and one in 1981. Only the middle one was more than a couple days; that one was about 9 days, during which I cycled the fringes of valley, read books, maybe did some sky watching. (I think at some point I’d left my telescope at the Apple Valley house, since I never used it down in LA.) Unfortunately I don’t have photos from those bike trips, mainly because my SLR camera was too bulky to fit into the bike carrier along with whatever else I was taking.

\\

Fifth Apple Valley: Until my Grandmother’s Death (1982 to 1984)

In June 1982 I got a professional job and bought my first car. Now I could drive to Apple Valley any time I wanted! Except, I didn’t have the time for the week or weeks long excursions of earlier years. I had no vacation the first year on the job. I was still taking classes, at night, that Fall. So weekends at best.

And the visits themselves were getting less pleasant, because Grammie was getting batty with age. She’d always had silly peccadilloes -– one was her off-hand, obviously unserious brags, e.g. when seeing someone perform an athletic event on TV, she would say that oh she could do just as well if only she bothered to try. Ha ha. Check back at the hundredth repetition. (Another: Thanksgiving dinner was always a success because she made the gravy.)

A couple times I took friends with me to Apple Valley – once Phil Klutch, my high school and UCLA friend, for a “star party,” and once a fellow grad student named Taro. Those were awkward visits. What are your interests, Taro asked her? Oh, music, literature. In fact she sat around watching TV all day, and I never saw her read a book.

Here’s another memory just now — at some point, in the ‘70s, my parents taught my grandmother to smoke. My parents were near-chain smokers, as I’ve mentioned, and in the ‘70s people still smoked in offices, in restaurants, on planes. My parents convinced my grandmother that smoking a cigarette was a nice thing to do after dinner. So she did, for years, just the one each day. When I was there for summers or weekends, she would dutifully light up as we watched the TV news after dinner. I would move to the far end of the sofa away from her chair. She never took the hint. (There were no windows to open.)

I should give my grandmother some credit. She lived a long life, one shocked in her 40s by the death of her sheriff husband when my mother and uncle were about 13 and 12 — so she raised them herself from then on. Just 12 or 13 years later, following her children to California, she uprooted herself from a life in small town Illinois and settled, eventually, in the completely different environment of high desert California. There she settled in; she found a church community to belong to; she worked until her mid-70s; she lived there fully 20 years. She was always congenial.

\\

Sixth Apple Valley: Glancing Visits (1984)

My grandmother died in early 1984. Services were held at her church in Victorville, but no funeral – her body was flown back to Cambridge, Illinois, to lie beside her husband.

My Uncle Bob had talked for years about perhaps retiring to the Apple Valley house, had my grandmother lived even longer; but in 1985 he was only 50 years old, and not ready to retire. So over the months after her death, he cleared the house of her furniture and effects. (I got her 10-volume set of an encyclopedia called The American Educator, from 1938, which of course I still have. Fascinating to look back at what they thought about various subjects, 80 years ago.) He sold the house in November 1986, for $55,000, and according to Zillow, it hasn’t been sold since. Google views now show the property razed of all the trees and a big fence surrounding the house itself (it’s 15791 Winnebago Road, Apple Valley, CA).

My records indicate a couple trips to the house later in 1984. Once in May to pick up the encyclopedia, and a set of water glasses with cacti designs (all of which have, alas, broken over the years since then, though I’ve kept the last one, in pieces, in my display cabinet), and a bicycle – I think at some point I had two bicycles, and had left one at the Apple Valley house. And a trip in June to get my telescope, on my way to a bicycle club event at Big Bear Lake.

There was a final visit in 1985, when I spent the night in a motel, on my way to pick up my friend Larry from a bicycling event at Calico, northeast of Barstow. And a close pass in 1986 when I drove a couple guys from work, very early one morning, to see Halley’s Comet before dawn, from an area south of Highway 18 between Apple Valley and Lucerne Valley (we didn’t stop at the house).

\\

Seventh Apple Valley: Return visits since 2009

Over the next twenty years I had no occasion to go to Apple Valley, or even past it. Perhaps returning from a trip to Big Bear with someone, we took the back route home, through the desert along Highway 18? But never to just go there. It’s not a resort town, there’s nothing much to do.

But a new, final phase began in 2009 with a series of nostalgia visits. In October of that year my partner Yeong was out of town (in Europe on business), and I drove his recently purchased Subaru SUV (with its Nav function, the first of our cars to have one) to the area on a day trip. In part I was curious to explore some of the far north and eastern pockets of the valley, on the sides of Fairview Mountain, that I’d never explored because the dirt roads are too rough for an ordinary passenger car. So from Woodland Hills I drove through the mountains on Sierra Highway, through Little Rock, across the remote roads (where I’d ridden my bike on those centuries) through Adelanto, to Apple Valley, and poked around for a few hours on some of those roads. Of course I drove past the house. Though I never did find roads all the way around Fairview Mountain.

A year and a half later, in April 2011, Yeong away in China visiting family, I drove my six-month-old M3 on another day trip to the desert. One aim of this trip was to find a remote road (I used Barrel Springs Rd. south of Little Rock) to get the car up past 100 mph, if only for a few seconds. I also visited Wrightwood, a ski resort on the north slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains that I’d never had occasion to go to. Once in Apple Valley I drove out to the airport, just to check it out (Phil Klutch and flown us there back in 1976), and also visited the Victor Valley Museum in Apple Valley, which had opened in 1992. It was an interesting blend of natural history, about the landscape and indigenous people who once lived in the area, and memorabilia concerning Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, movie and TV stars who had settled in Apple Valley (and who are buried at the cemetery in the northeast corner of the valley).

It was during these trips that I saw, of course, how the area had changed. More and more houses. On Winnebago Road, where in the ’70s the half-mile stretch where we lived had perhaps three houses, widely separated, on each side of the road, now almost every lot was built. Along Highway 18 just south of the house there was now a Walmart (!) and a Target (!) in a two-block shopping center also filled with generic fast food restaurants. — This has been the course of American society, over 50 years, as national chains have replaced the local businesses that once made every village and town a unique place. The small market in “the village” where my Grandmother had shopped was now garden shop; the larger chain supermarket at Highway 18 and Navajo Rd. that succeeded it in the ’80s was closed and vacant. The main road through Victorville, 7th Street — a curving, gradually rising road from the Mojave River on the north up to the surrounding desert floor a couple miles south — was mostly shuttered, in favor of the big mall down the Interstate at Bear Valley Road. It was my personal illustration of the maxim, You can’t go home again.

Six years later, in June 2017, on the way home from an overnight trip to LA (from Oakland, where we’d moved in 2015), I took the long way home and drove through Apple Valley, barely stopping. I had a specific goal, though, to take photographs at a couple key places. One was Vasquez Rocks, just north of LA and on the way to the desert. They’re distinctive angled sandstone outcrops familiar from location shooting of dozens of films and TV shows over the decades (including Star Trek’s “Arena”). The second was to get a photo of the back side of Bell Mountain, which looks completely different than the symmetric profile view from the south, from the Apple Valley house. That done, I drove north through Barstow and west over Tehachapi Pass – a highway I’d never had occasion to drive on before – to Bakersfield and north home. (I posted about that trip here: http://www.markrkelly.com/Blog/2017/07/06/trip-report-apple-valley-2017/.)

And finally, just two years ago now in February 2018, I did a proper weekend trip to Apple. On a Friday I rented a car (a small SUV) rather than put miles on my M3, and I stayed at a motel in Victorville. I spent two full days in the area and drove home Monday. I found a small used bookshop in AV along Highway 18 that sold every book for a dollar. I poked around the now vacant Apple Valley Inn, and visited a tiny “Apple Valley Legacy Museum” in a corner of that property. I drove out to the far corner of the valley, the area where the 1^st Apple Valley house was, and is now an area called Sycamore Rocks, with higher-end homes than throughout most of the area. (Mentioned here: http://www.markrkelly.com/Blog/2017/07/10/apple-valley-dreams/.) And I explored an area east of the Village called Thunderbird Ranches, with a couple hundred homes, some quite large, but all accessible only by dirt roads. Went back to the area of the house and took some photos.

On Sunday I moseyed through the “old” part of Victorville, then headed south on the Interstate to the big mall at Bear Valley Road. From there, into Hesperia, just to get an idea of the place; again, one of those areas I had never had reason to explore. East of Hesperia, where the southern edge of Apple Valley runs along the slopes of the San Bernardino Mountains, I headed east until the roads forced me back onto Highway 18. Out to Lucerne Valley then, the intersection where the highway splits off southeast into the mountains where Big Bear Lake lies. Back along Bear Valley Road. I discovered something called Lone Wolf Colony (https://www.lonewolfcolony.org/), something like half a city block fenced off and with trees and shrubs inside. My Boy Scout Troop held a camp-out there, years ago! It has the appearance of an enclosed trailer park, though its site describes it as a “a recuperative health facility” with cottages and an RV park. There was an entry gate; I didn’t go in.

And I made one other serendipitous discovery that day. Driving back west on Bear Valley Road — now heavily lined with shopping center and commercial properties — I turned into Victor Valley College, and discovered, just off campus, the fish hatchery! Perhaps noticing Mojave Fish Hatchery Road was the first clue. This was amazing because I remembered being there once, with my father, when I was very little, in the years we lived in Apple Valley. Why should there be a fish hatchery in this remote desert town? Well, it’s along side the Mojave River, which flows north out of the San Bernardino Mountains and splits a ridge of hills at the junction of Victorville and Apple Valley. Apparently it’s a county function to keep parts of the river stocked with fish. Why would my father and I have been there? No idea. But it was a thrill discovering, quite by accident, a place that triggered such an old memory.

That night, after dinner at one of the row of restaurants by the shopping mall, I drove out to the far corner of Apple Valley to look at stars. It was windy, and chilly, and a surprising number of large trucks came down Dale Evans Parkways near me — there are a couple warehouses, one a Walmart Distribution Center, in the middle of the empty north valley, that of course weren’t there years ago. But I did confirm my teenage memory of seeing, passenger jets flying overhead, from LA in the southwest to points far to the northeast, but it was too windy to hear their sounds.

I reflected yet again on the allure of this area.

First, the attraction is partly about the raw topography. It’s all out there in the visible openness of the landscape, the hills and valleys, the knolls and bluffs, not shrouded by woods or grasslands or trees. The simplicity of the street maps is given multiple new dimensions, not just height, but visibility of surrounding areas, the changing horizon from one place to the next, the extensive horizons in so many places that puts everything in a larger context — as if refracted through another dimension.

Second, looking at the stars… The paradox is that, the clearer and darker the skies, the more stars are visible, and the less obvious are the traditional constellations, because their prominent stars are drowned out by the surrounding sea of only slightly less brighter stars that are visible in a very clear, very dark sky. This is especially true in binoculars (not in telescopes, where you tend to focus on specific stars or objects); the field of view in binoculars shows even more stars than you see with the naked eye, more stars than you knew were there, and implying even more if your light-gathering power were even greater. The deep sky view is seemingly infinite, more and more, greater and greater, and implying one’s own local pocket of experience is infinitesimally tiny.

The next morning I drove home. I’ll probably never be there again.