Views from Crestmont Drive

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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: https://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: https://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.

(As I said in previous post, this is an essay that will be cross-post as a page, accessible through the drop-down menus above. For now it’s just a post.)

Anyone entering my home over the past 30 years, maybe even over the past 40 years ago in the tiny apartment I lived in during my mid-20s, would first notice that my life has been dominated by books. Not just science fiction books, but also books on science and philosophy and religion, general literature, reference books, textbooks.

Dysart asked “Why, ultimately, me?” I can’t answer why, ultimately, books. Why are some people attracted to reading, or any other interest, and others not? Clearly there is a range of personality types that influence such tastes, but why any particular personality and not some other? I think part of it is random genetic shuffle, and part is early childhood experience. So, while I can’t answer why I developed a passion for books, I can trace back the events in my earlier life that triggered it.

And I can make some general comments about how a bookish person thinks about and treats books, that non-bookish people don’t appreciate.

History

• In retrospect it’s curious that my family, that is my parents, did not read books or provide them to their children. There were no picture books in the house when I was growing up, no Cat in the Hat or other Dr. Seuss books, nothing like that. My parents didn’t read books. They watched TV. (But never went to movies.)
• And yet my parents must have felt some certain responsibility to provide classical education to their children. I see from my notes that our household acquired a set of Harvard Classics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics) , a 50-volume set of classic literature, philosophy, and science, as early as 1962, when I was in 2^nd grade! And later, a set of Encyclopedia Britannica, a set of the Book of Popular Science, a set of a children’s books called A Bookshelf for Boys and Girls (my favorite volume of which was called “Things to Make and Things to Do”). These sets of books lay in the background as I grew up; I consulted them routinely. By middle school age, I was seen as a boy who read the encyclopedia. More about this here: https://www.markrkelly.com/Blog/2016/06/07/growing-up-with-books/
• The only household books remotely fictional (well, some of the Harvard Classics were classic plays) were 8 volumes in a set called Book Trails, collecting fairy tales and adventure stories in volumes beginning “For Baby Feet” and ranging to “Of Trail Blazers.” Somehow I’ve inherited only six of the eight volumes; I seem to recall some reason the set was split up between me and my cousin Paula, but then why would I have gotten 6 of the 8? Oh I know—I just realized. It was because when the split was made there were three kids in my family (so it must have been around 1963) and one in Paula’s. Thus the split. Such a split sends shudders down the spine of any book collector, of course.
• I discovered books on my own at the school library, in 5^th or 6^th (I had gone to that library in Santa Monica in 2^nd grade, but don’t remember anything I read there.) I liked certain mystery novels, I adored the series about the Melendy Family (by Elizabeth Enright) especially Spiderweb for Two, a puzzle/mystery novel involving a family of children following a series of clues that one year at Christmas I emulated (putting a paper clue inside an ice cube in the freezer, e.g., for my mother to find). And my favorites were a series of novels by an English writer, Enid Blyton, the Adventure books, about a family of four children who went off on “holiday” several times a year and discovered various amazing criminal plots, in mountains, valleys, rivers, castles. (More about those here: http://www.markrkelly.com/Views/?p=269 )
• And I discovered my own books, books that I purchased and owned, also in about the 6^th grade, where Scholastic Books catalogs were distributed in class, money was brought from home and orders placed, and books would arrive, one per classroom, weeks later. Much more about this and later processes here: https://www.markrkelly.com/Blog/2016/06/30/15-ways-of-buying-a-book-part-1/.
• From late elementary school, then, through my mid-20s, I acquired books of my own, given my limited resources, but also drew on libraries, both public and school. I read a lot of early Heinlein from libraries, before I later bought copies of my own. For a period in college (still living at home), I went to the public libraries (in Northridge and Granada Hills) and checked out stacks of 10 nonfiction books every two weeks. I didn’t read them thoroughly, of course, but I paged through them and gleaned a lot about the range of their topics. (Histories of classical music; chemistry and physics textbooks.) I was doing light inspectional reading, as described below.
• Once I had a full-time job and could afford to buy whatever books I wanted, I had enough to read and stopped going to libraries. And I’ve rarely been in a library since. As I write in April 2020, about two years ago I checked out a couple branches of the Oakland Public Library. They were pleasant, half-filled with computer stations and shelves of DVDs rather than shelves of books. The science fiction shelves were scattershot; seemingly random volumes by many major SF writers, but not the best volumes but all the best writers. In the nonfiction shelves, e.g. cosmology or evolution, it was a decent mix, but my thought was that my own library at home was better.

Themes:

Here are some topics about what people who don’t read books think about people who do, and who have large libraries.

• Have you read all those books? Accumulating a library is not about reading a lot of books and keeping them. It’s not like having a record/CD collection, where presumably you listen to every new item at least once, and keep everything for future repeat listening. It’s not a pantry, which you keep restocking steadily because you use every item eventually. A library is a collection of resources. It’s a collection of things that interest you, that you might want to visit. There is never enough time to read all the books that interest you. But you keep them, because you don’t know what your future self might deem interesting, even urgent.
• (As a side point – there are readers of books who treat books like, oh, movies or TV shows, to be seen or read once and then disposed of. This is why on Amazon, or at bookshops like Half Price Books (https://hpb.com/), there are dozens of copies of just-published books that have been quickly read and then put up for re-sale. These readers do not keep books, they don’t have libraries; these readers are transactional, not intellectual.)
• Downsizing and regrets. Over the years I’ve been in situations where it’s seemed reasonable to sell off books I’ve collected, because of space issues, or because I think my tastes have changed and I can identify books I will never have any reason to read or look at ever again. Again and again, at least in a few specific cases, I have been wrong. I keep discovering reasons why I want to see this or that book that I no longer have anymore. This meshes with the point that a library is a resource that is larger than what interests you at the moment. Still, practical issues intervene, and so in late 2014 I sold off, to the Iliad Bookshop in Burbank (https://www.iliadbooks.com/), some 30 or 50 boxes of books (a couple thousand books, I think) that I thought unlikely I would ever actually need to read, prior to moving to the Bay Area in early 2015. And of course, some of them I miss, especially some of the anthologies I could have used for my current anthology project.
• How to Treat Books. Transactional readers treat books like tissues to be used once and disposed of; thus, in used book shops, you see paperbacks with bent spines and hardcovers with cocked spines. Those of us who respect books treat them kindly. You don’t crack the spine. You don’t bend the cover. You don’t open the cover of a paperback and put a crease in the middle with your finger, the way you might a magazine. A new hardcover – this was true decades ago, not so much now, when books seem to be better built – needed to be broken in: you set the book spine side down, you opened a few pages on the left, and few pages on the right, back and forth, a few pages more, on each side so the spine would open it evenly, without creating any kind of spine cock (e.g. as seen here: http://www.mywingsbooks.com/coll-terms/spn_.shtml )
• The result is I have a library of 8000 books where – except for those few books I bought used, in bad condition – you can’t tell whether or not I’ve read them. They are all in perfect condition. I’ve read about half of them, and hope to have time to read many more.
• How do you decide which books to buy? Several strategies.
  • You go to bookstores and browse. When you’ve read a book by some author and liked it, you look for other books by the same author. If you have an interest in a particular subject, you look for new books on that subject.
  • As I mentioned elsewhere, I developed a brand loyalty early on. The Bradbury paperbacks I’d bought were published by Bantam; several Clarke reissues in the late ‘60s were published by Ballantine. And so I was more inclined to buy a Bantam or Ballantine book by an author I hadn’t heard of, than a book from some other publisher, like Berkley or Lancer. This is a dicey strategy however. There really are differences between publishers, at any given time and for any particular subject. But these differences change every few years, as the industry changes and editors come and go.
  • Better strategies are to read reviews and pay attention to awards. No strategy is guaranteed because tastes are different, but over time you learn which reviewers to trust, i.e. who seem well-informed and whose recommendations are worth following, and which awards to trust, given the people who vote for them and the kind of books that keep winning those awards.
  • One trigger in this regard was my inspiration to start reading The New York Times, around 1991, because a friend I met at the time and admired would read it every Sunday. So I started driving to a newsstand every Sunday morning to buy it, and some years later, subscribed to it daily, as I still do. NYT has the most substantial book review section of any publication in the country – and from there, especially, I first heard of substantial nonfiction books that I might not otherwise have known about.
• How do you read a book? Not a silly question. You start at the beginning and continue until the end, right? For novels and short stories, sure.
  • For nonfiction, not so much. One of the best books I’ve ever read was called How to Read a Book; I reread it recently, in 2016 (https://www.markrkelly.com/Blog/2016/03/01/rereading-how-to-read-a-book/). The idea for nonfiction begins much as you would do for books at a bookstore. You pick it up, read the flap copy, the back jacket; look at the table of contents; glance through the index if there is one; see if its intent is scholarly enough to have bibliography and notes at the end. Read opening pages of a chapter here and there to get a taste of the prose style. This is inspectional reading. This enables you to consider many books quickly—in order to decide which ones are worth more time. (Not mentioned in that book, but another perfectly reasonable way to get a take on a book is to see who blurbs it – who provides the laudatory quotes on the front or back jackets. Some authors (E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker) I respect enough to follow them everywhere, to take any of their recommendations strongly. Other people I might take as a reason to avoid a book, Dinesh D’Souza for example, or Deepak Chopra.)
  • Then there’s analytical reading, which I do by taking detailed notes as I read; and syntopical reading, where you pose a thesis and examine books that address the issue. I do the latter often, as I state in my summary/reviews on my blog, by posing questions at the very beginning, even if it’s a vague, what can this book (on a subject I know well) tell me that I don’t already know?).
  • I confess I’m too OCD to apply inspectional reading to books already owned, even though I have some 2000 substantial nonfiction books and am unlikely to live along enough to analytically read half of them. I keep thinking I should try; take a dozen books on similar themes, spend an hour on each, and have some idea of what they claim. Maybe soon.
  • Also, even reading fiction isn’t as simple as reading from start to end. In just the way I take notes on nonfiction, I take notes on fiction. (Usually handwritten notes as I read in an armchair, later written up into a computer file. More often lately, sitting at the computer and reading the book to one side, writing notes as I go. Much more efficient. This is why some of my blog posts summarizing nonfiction books are really long. To counteract such long summaries, my current strategy is to reread the long notes and then summarize in a few bullet points the themes and conclusions of the book at the top of the post that can be seen in one screen.)
  • This whole business of taking detailed notes is necessitated, for me, by having a poor memory for things that I’ve read. After a year or two, I barely remember the contents of a book in any but the most vague way. I’ll forget how the novel ended. Didn’t the villain die at the end? Did the hero get home? That’s one reason I’m rereading a lot of classic sf novels recently, because there’s no way I would be able to discuss them based on 30 year old memories (and secondary sources that provide summaries and commentary often aren’t very good and are, well, second-hand; the point of my discussing them is to provide some unique insight).
  • Having notes enables me to retrieve in detail the contents of books I read years or decades ago. Thus I read Silverberg’s Collision Course a full year ago, but was able to pull up my notes and fill them out into a substantial summary review for Black Gate (just posted as I write: https://www.blackgate.com/2020/04/09/a-fascinating-ordinary-1950s-sf-novel-robert-silverbergs-collision-course/). Thus the John Allen Paulos book A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, which I read way back in 1997, but took notes on, which took only minor ironing into full sentences to post here on the blog. (I have such detailed notes on about 200 nonfiction books, only maybe three dozen of which I’ve posted.)

I’ve been writing a series of autobiographical essays recently, to supplement the photo sets of scanned slides and prints I’ve promised to gather on this site. Most will be installed as WordPress “pages” which then automatically appear in the menu bar at the top of each page, though I can create parent/child relations and orders to control how the links appear as drop-down menus. As the pages multiply, I keep tweaking that drop-down menu structure. So I think for the time being I will be cross-posting such essays as ordinary posts, that will appear automatically at the top of the homepage; otherwise no one will notice new “page” essays without my pointing them out. Here’s one about my history with bicycling.

At my peak, in my late 20s, I bicycled obsessively, taking long rides on weekends, riding three “century” rides of 100 miles to Apple Valley or back, and two others as long or longer in Solvang and to Devil’s Punchbowl. In contrast to my school disinterest in P.E., I became very fit by bicycling. I was a slender 135 pounds with a resting heart rate of 48.

• How did this begin? How did it end?
• There were a couple false starts. Very early on, in Apple Valley, my father taught me how to ride a bicycle with some red bike he had, perhaps leftover from his own childhood and moved from Illinois. Don’t know whatever happened to that; It didn’t go with us to Santa Monica or Reseda. In Reseda I had a tricycle that usually I zoomed around the back yard, not sitting on it, but riding skateboard like with one foot on the rear platform and the other pushing off the ground, half-standing up.
• In Reseda, so sometime during elementary school, I was given a full-size grown-up bike for birthday or some similar event. I never had one of the then popular Sting-Ray bikes with high handlebars and banana seats, that were so popular with the other kids. The full-sized bike intimidated me, and I didn’t want to ride it. My father sold it. Another disappointment for him, I suppose.
• When I started at UCLA in the Fall of 1973, I saw hundreds of students riding back and forth across campus on bikes. The campus was large enough that it could be difficult to get from one class to the next in the 10-minute interval between session times. I became obsessed by wanting a bicycle, arguing to my parents that Phil (my UCLA car-pooling partner) and I could save money at the parking garages by parking off campus on residential streets, and riding into campus on bikes. That never did happen, but I did get a bicycle for Christmas that year. Typically, I’d done some research and picked a model, and when the time came, my mother and I went to the bike shop (on Sherman Way in Reseda) and bought the one I wanted, for something like $110. It was a white Nishiki, a 10-speed with the standard curled-down handlebars of a road bike. (And then in cruel irony, for a week after we brought my new bike home, it rained.)
• I did ride that bike off and on over the following years while in college, mostly from home to one bookstore or another. (For magazines and paperbacks my go-to place was Reseda Books, a small shop that sold magazines and paperbacks, at Reseda Blvd and Sherman Way, 5 miles from home.)
• And then I graduated from UCLA and couldn’t find a professional job; I’ll go into that elsewhere. As family plans for the move to Tennessee solidified in the Fall of 1977 after my graduation, I searched for any kind of job and got one with the County of Los Angeles (I’ll go into that elsewhere) at a facility in Reseda, just down the street from Reseda Books. Within a few weeks, from January to March of 1978, I began this job (on 17 Jan, initially driving the family’s second-hand Buick), the family departed for Tennessee (on 17 Feb), and I found a one-room apartment in Northridge and moved in (on 6 March). I’d stayed in the house on Hayvenhurst until then because it hadn’t sold yet. Once the family left… I bicycled to work. From Vincennes Street in Northridge, a couple blocks off the Cal State Northridge (CSUN) campus, to the job at Sherman Way & Louise Ave, was 4 ½ miles.
• So I bicycled to work for some 2 ½ years until I quit that job and went back to college, at CSUN. Weather in southern California is good most of the year, of course, but on those occasions that it rained, I took the city bus, an easy run down Reseda Blvd. There was one occasion rain hit unexpectedly during the day, and my Uncle Bob came to drive me and my bike home.
• After locking up my bike outside at the corner of the office building where I worked, for a year, one day it was stolen, the cable locking it to the rack cut. I had to get a loan to buy a new bike, a Centurion Le Mans.
• This is the Centurion Le Mans, or one of them; the photo would have to be 1979 or 1980. Centurion Le Mans, with a kickstand and horizontal brake handles. The latter were called ‘safety levers’ or ‘extension levers’ that experienced cyclists would never use, since their grip is indirect and riding with your hands on the crossbar isn’t the best way to keep control.
• I also used the bike to cycle from Northridge to Westwood, to Change of Hobbit bookstore, which had all the new science fiction books that the local mall shops (Walden and Pickwick) didn’t carry. That entailed cycling up Sepulveda Blvd over the pass from the valley to Westwood. I had a big orange luggage bag that mounted in front of the handlebars that would easily hold 4 hardcover books.
• Over the following two or three years, I went on increasingly long recreational rides, some half the day. South to Venice Beach (via Topanga Canyon or Sepulveda Blvd alongside the 405 freeway; north to Canyon Country (via the Old Road alongside Antelope Valley Freeway); northwest to Simi Valley over Santa Susanna Pass; east through Glendale, Eagle Rock, and Pasadena as far as Arcadia. Only the last route was mostly flat; the others all involved climbs over passes. So I necessarily got quite fit, at least aerobically.
• My ultimate rides were three, in 1980 and 1981, from my apartment in Northridge, all the way to Apple Valley where my grandmother lived – or back. In each case I coordinated with Uncle Bob for a ride in the other direction. Two of these were over long weekends, but one, the last one, came at the end of a week-long stay in the desert, returning home at the end of it on that long ride. Each ride took 7 or 8 hours, if I recall, and avoided heavily trafficked highways like 138 and 18 across the desert. Instead I took remote, empty streets like Avenue T, Palmdale Blvd, and El Mirage Road, all two lane highways across the desert flats. Fortunately I never had any serious accidents. A lot of flat tires of course. At worst, on long rides, I was very dehydrated at the end.
• (I don’t have any photos of these rides. Though I’d acquired a camera in 1979, it was too bulky to take along on such long trips when I had other stuff to carry.)
• My single longest ride was a run-up to the first Apple Valley century: a ride from my place in Northridge to Devil’s Punchbowl, an LA County park at the edge of the Mojave Desert and San Gabriel Mountains, near Pearblossom. 60 miles each way.
• In 1982 I got my first (and only) professional job, and first car. I didn’t need to ride as much, and cut back significantly.
• Here’s a later bike, another Centurion, with no kickstand, no horizontal brake levers, and toe straps on the pedals. (I never did use the cycling shoes that clip into the pedals, as most serious bikers do.)
• In the first couple years that I had my car, and a job, I tried various ways of socializing, and one was to join a gay bicycling club. It was called Spokesman at the time, and later replaced this rather sexist name with Different Spokes. Since cyclists are a passionate bunch, the group did lots of events: at least one weeknight evening ride in Griffith Park (convenient for those who lived nearby), and one longer ride on the weekend, in scattered locations (rather analogous to scouting campouts) that required driving to a particular location with bikes in your cars.
  • The first began out in Palmdale and took a path along the aqueduct for an hour or so, then came back. I had naively thought I could fill my water bottle at the parking lot. No. I was dehydrated to the point of cramped legs by the time we finished.
  • Another began in Redondo Beach and went through part of Palos Verdes.
  • Another up and down along Venice Beach. I have some pictures from this!
  • Here’s an iPhone photo of a page from my photo album, four shots from the Venice trip, with Larry Kramer in sweaty gray shirt, Alex Hernandez(?) in yellow and black.
  • And another, my friend Larry just reminded me, of a “citizen’s race” out in Calimesa, southeast of San Bernardino along Interstate 10, in which a team of five of us, Larry, me, Alex, Howard, and Kim, won.
• And the ultimate ride for southern California cyclists was the annual Solvang Century, a 100-mile ride that began in the quaint Danish town in the wine country northwest of Santa Barbara, went west to Lompoc, north past Vandenberg Air Force Base to Santa Maria, then southeast through Sisquoc amid many wineries along Foxen Canyon Road to Los Olivos and then back to Solvang. I did the ride just once. My friend in the club Larry Kramer did it a second year, while I provided driving support. Larry did an even more ambitious ride a year or two later: A Death Valley to Mt. Whitney ride, where again I accompanied him for the weekend and drove the car as backup support for the riders, since it was a one-way trip. (I have a bunch of photos from that trip that I’ll add here.)
• At some point in ’84 or ’85 I withdrew from the group’s busy schedule. Most of the members were passionate riders, riding every week, tinkering with their bikes, upgrading their bikes to more and more expensive models. I wasn’t that obsessed, or inclined to invest. Even before leaving my single-room apartment in Northridge, in mid-1984, I’d decided to take up jogging instead, to stay healthy, and to do something I could do in the evenings even after dark. By the time I moved to Tarzana in 1985 I had stopped biking altogether, and sold my bike.
• Decades have since past, and the only time I’ve been on a bicycle in those decades was May 2011 when Yeong and I did a weekend trip to Santa Barbara and stayed at Hotel Oceana (which doesn’t seem to exist under that name anymore), right along the boulevard across from the beach. They had bikes for hotel guests to use, and we took them out one morning. They were fixed single-gear bicycles, horrible things, that had to be kept pedaling; you couldn’t coast, and to brake you had to pedal backwards. We rode a mile or so west, and back.
• In recent years Yeong and I have hiked a lot, both in Southern California and here in Oakland, and for a decade I’ve thought about buying a trail bike to ride on the dirt fire roads, those part of Mulholland Drive that are dirt. Here in Oakland, our section of Crestmont Drive is very popular with packs of cyclists who pass by our house in the mornings, on weekends and weekdays. Again I’ve been tempted to invest – especially since our current living situation isn’t as amenable to gym visits, or jogging – but have been dissuaded by those same circumstances. Our street is flat for a few hundred feet to the southeast. Beyond that, any possible bike route involves going up and down hills, usually down and then having to come back up. If I had an easy place to ride on the flats for an hour, I would do so.

In scouts you earn lots of awards, merit badges and rank badges and patches for every significant scouting event. So many that your scout uniform shirt, and even the merit badge sash, had no room for all of them. So we had, what were they called? Patch jackets, I think. They were a thing with the Boy Scout troop in Illinois. Mine was orange felt (now a bit moth-eaten, as the photo shows), and every time I got a new patch, my mother would dutifully sew it onto my jacket. Here’s the front.

The right side in the photo (left side of the vest) shows cub scout badges. I was in Pack 215 in Reseda, California. Looking at this, I now recall that, even though I entered cub scouting later than I could have, my father had me retroactively earn the earlier badges for Wolf and Bear; Lion and Webelos I earned on schedule. I don’t remember what the silver and gold arrowheads were for.

In boy scouts I was in Troop 110 also in Reseda. I earned Second Class, First Class, and Life.

Back of jacket:

Most of the oddly shaped patches at the bottom are from scouting in Illinois — Du Page Area Council. The Blackhawk Trail, I think, was the site of that 20-mile hike. The center round patch shows San Fernando Valley Council. The semi-circular patches at the top are for Camp Whitsett, a camporee (that was the all-day event) and three scoutcraft fairs (I don’t remember what they were).

And there’s a bunch of loose patches that never made it on to the jacket.

The green sash is the standard one for merit badges. I only earned a few–astronomy and stamp collecting of course; first aid; camping? Not sure what they all are.

The white sash with the arrow is for being selected for the Order of the Arrow. The blue and yellow shoulder tassel was, I think, for being a “den chief,” a boy scout who would attend cub scout meetings and serve as a role model. I was a role model, for younger boys.

Family Dynamics

I wish I could say more about what my younger sisters and brother were doing, the whole time I was growing up.

I didn’t pay close attention mostly due to the age difference. I was the oldest, my next two siblings were girls, the youngest, Kevin, was 9 years younger than me. When you’re a kid, boys and girls don’t usually play together. And Kevin and I were too far apart to share interests.

It was while we lived in Illinois that I let go of one activity I shared to some extent with my father – scouting – and more fully developed my own interests. Stamp collecting for a short while (at the encouragement of my Great Aunt, Maude); discovering authors I liked like Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke and reading all their books I could find; then becoming somewhat obsessed with Star Trek when the original series went into syndicated reruns five times week. By the time we returned to California, and I was doing well in school, I think my parents figured they could leave me alone and I’d be all right; they could pay more attention to the other three kids. Susan was problematic in a few ways. She was the opposite of me in temperament and intellect. She hung out with the wrong kids. At home she sat in her bedroom playing teeny-bop pop music of the era, always too loudly, on her records player. The Monkees, David Cassidy, the Jackson Five.

By the time I graduated from high school, not quite 18 years old, Kevin was 9 and ready for scouting. My father turned his attention to Kevin and became more involved in active adult supervision in his Pack and later Troop than he’d been when I was a scout.

The most unfortunate circumstance in my life, I think, is that I didn’t go away to college. I commuted from home, and so four years at UCLA was like an extension of high school. Coming home every day to noisy little kids and Sue’s loud music and my parents’ cigarette smoke and the TV that was on continuously from mid-morning to 10pm or so when my parents retired. I went into my bedroom and closed the door and did my homework and read my books and wrote my journal.

So no, alas, I did not pay much attention to what my siblings were doing in the years I was at home.

Social Withdrawal

So then, a key theme of my life, one I wasn’t aware of as I grew up and only realized years later in retrospect. Here are the two factors that led to this result.

Factor One

My parents both grew up in small towns, in Illinois.

In Apple Valley, the route to the elementary school was by school bus. On the street where we lived, the area was sparsely populated, the nearest houses in any direction being typically 1000 feet away. There were no neighbor kids to play with. I grew up alone. I didn’t mind; it didn’t occur to me such a childhood was in any way unusual. Perhaps I was inherently solitary in nature, or perhaps the circumstances forced me to become self-sufficient. (Which is cause, which effect?) In those very early days in Apple Valley, I don’t remember what I did. There were no books in the house. We probably had a small TV but I don’t remember any shows from that era. I do recall I was fond of toy plastic cars. I think I had a basic model train set. I had coloring books. (–Now there’s a curious memory. Yes, I had a coloring book. Remember that I was four or five years old, and my entire experience consisting of living in this barren desert landscape. But this coloring book was full of outlined drawings of things like… lakes with sailboats. Big puffy clouds in the sky. Things that were utterly alien to me. It would be nearly a decade later, with the move to Illinois, before I saw sailboats and cumulus clouds in person.)

When we moved to Santa Monica, we were suddenly in a big city, but my school and the local library were only a few blocks away, that I could walk to. The area was populated mostly by seniors, like the nice lady next door to us who once gave me stuffed monkey. There was one kid a few doors down that I played with. In some incident, trying to build a pit that would trick his little sister, his hammer hit my forehead, causing a fount of blood, and his mother carried me up the street to my own mother.

In Reseda, the walk to school was a bit longer. I had two or three friends at school – Milton Lewis, Nader Omana, Gary Wein – but they all lived in other directions from my own home. The point is: I never hung out with friends outside of school. I had no friends outside of school. My mother’s priorities were that I should walk directly home from school. In retrospect, I think it was my parents’, or at least my mother’s, anxiety about living in a large city, compared to her small-town background. Of course I never questioned it at the time.

When we moved to Illinois for three years, the schools were farther away and I took buses. Again, I have couple good friends there in high school – Richard Pointer and Peter Serafin – but they lived in other directions, off other bus lines, and it never occurred to me that we could be friends outside school. I would come home and read my books or work my stamp collection or compile trivia from Star Trek episodes.

And even back in LA, when we moved to Sepulveda. The high school was two long or four short blocks away. I walked to school, walked back home. I developed one good friend there, Philip Klutch, whom I later car-commuted with to UCLA for most of four years, but whom my mother dismissed as a Jew. He, too, lived in another direction. Again, through all these years, I was self-sufficient at home, with my books, my diary, my TV.

And even more extremely: I attended UCLA for four years, commuting from home. I’d applied to MIT and CalTech, at my high school counselor’s suggestion, but only got onto MIT’s waiting list. UCLA was my backup, and it was close enough to home that I didn’t have to move away, to a dorm. I lived at home and drove the family’s second car, a 1964 Buick Skylark with peeling paint on the hood, on the days my car-pooling partner Philip Klutch didn’t drive himself.

UCLA was thus like an extension of high school. I came home every afternoon to the same family situation, with younger sisters and a brother squabbling and noisy, and my parents smoking constantly and watching TV throughout the day. (Apple Valley was my refuge, as I’ll describe on another post.)

Factor Two

This is hard to recover or think about clearly; memories are uncertain, being recalled and reinterpreted over and over, throughout one’s life. But I’m certain there was a transitional period in my mid-childhood where circumstances and influences, mostly due to my father, shut me down. As an early child, despite my isolation, I think that I was relatively voluble and sociable, when in social situations. But then there were a few key episodes. One was, in 5^th or 6^th grade, learning fractions, I had discovered some clever scheme to simplify the computing of fractions, and asked my teacher to show it to the class. (I’m pretty sure she was a substitute teacher, which might almost excuse her reaction.) I got to the front of the class, chalked my idea onto the chalkboard. And the teacher replied, that’s a cute gimmick. Gimmick?? I was mortified. She didn’t appreciate that I had some true insight into mathematics, at least for my age.

One other classroom demonstration went a bit better. I had a small, educational-toy computer called a Digi-Comp (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I; my blog in 2006: http://www.markrkelly.com/Views/?p=291), and I took it to school one day, likely in the 6th grade, for a show-and-tell. I described the basic mechanics of it, the plastic parts, the rubber bands, and showed how “programming” it with those plastic pegs let you do simple calculations. I thought I was done, but the teacher said, can you explain more about how it works? Um, OK, well–and I went into a tedious explanation of how the upright metal wires either did or did not move depending on those pegs, and so on. The teacher was satisfied, but I thought this extraneous detail was beside the point. It was about the concept of being able to program, not how the program mechanically played out. Again I was taken aback, from then on that much less eager to pass along things I found interesting.

More important were my father’s reactions to several incidents. He was extremely sensitive to shows of vanity; he disregarded expertise, and thought everyone on the nightly news a crook or a fraud. (My sister Sue has inherited some of this attitude, and even Kevin a bit.) A key incident must have been in the sixth or maybe seventh grade. I’d become interested in astronomy and had gotten a small refractor telescope for my sixth grade graduation (called a “culmination”). To encourage me, perhaps, somehow or another my father contacted a friend of a friend who was part of a high-end amateur astronomy group that owned and ran Stony Ridge Observatory (http://stony-ridge.org/), in the mountains off Angeles Crest Highway (and just a few miles northeast of the famous Mount Wilson Observatory). So one evening my parents and I drove up to meet this friend to get a tour of the observatory and actually look through the telescope. As we arrived it was near full dark and the constellations were clearly visible. We met this friend and I pointed out some of the constellations I knew – Orion, Canis Major, whatever. (More likely it was summer, so they would have been Hercules, Scorpio, whatever.) The friend went off to unlock the observatory, and my father took me aside and told me not to show off. Show off? I didn’t think I was; I was just establishing my bona fides, so to speak, as someone who knew something about astronomy. The astronomy friend had nodded along; he hadn’t rolled his eyes as if I were a twerp. But my father thought I was being too big for my britches; he was embarrassed. As the evening passed, we did actually look through the scope (which entailed sitting atop a high ladder to reach the eyepiece), and at one point this astronomy friend trusted me to change the eyepiece, even at the risk of an 11-year-old boy dropping the eyepiece onto the concrete floor below. (See the scope at this page: http://stony-ridge.org/76cm-f6.htm)

There were other incidents like this. On another occasion my father in effect blamed me for Susan’s relatively dismal academic performance. I was showing her up, and she knew she couldn’t measure up, so she didn’t try, he figured. I was thus obliged to stay quiet, not talk about anything that interested me, keep all my pursuits private.

Result

So there were those things, parental disapproval, and then we moved, and then we moved again a few months later, each time to a new school. And a year after that was yet another new school (from junior high to high school). And two years after that, moving back to California to yet another new school. Any friends I had at school lived in other directions. It became not worth the trouble to develop new friendships, except incidentally. I actively suppressed myself at school; I became acutely self-conscious and afraid of embarrassing myself. I attended classes, got good grades, but I never spoke up in class. I did the homework and took the tests and got good grades, but never participated in classroom discussion. I remained this way all the way through college, and was occasionally called out for it. I couldn’t explain.

Over the succeeding decades I relaxed somewhat in workplace situations. The interaction with the public necessary at my county clerk job helped. But in public settings among crowds – e.g. at science fiction conventions, or professional software conferences, where speakers would invite audience questions – I would never ever speak up in such situations.

Somewhere in here, either a consequence or another contributor, is my lifelong preference for working alone. I like big projects (e.g. my awards database) that I can manage and implement and maintain all by myself, for years, for decades; and in contrast bristle at having to attend meetings and have to compromise with fellow workers who have other ideas. (It was because I declined to attend weekly meetings at the Locus offices, not realizing it was a deal-breaker, that Liza took over the website in 2017.)

At some point at around age 10 or 11 I developed an interest in building model kits, especially of cars. (I’d always had a fascination with cars. In the early ‘60s, when I was 7 or 8 years old, I paid such close attention to various makes of car that, as we drove down the highway, I would call out the identification of each car passing by: Buick. Ford. Mercury. Dodge. Rambler. And so on. For a couple years my father took me around to all the car dealerships (in Victorville), in the Fall when the new models came out, to see the showroom models but especially to collect the new model pamphlets, at the time freely given away. I need to specify that I liked cars not because I wanted to race them or anything like that; I liked them for their designs, how they changed from year to year; I liked them aesthetically.)

I’m not sure what triggered my interest in building plastic models. It may have simply been an outgrowth of my interest in toy cars (see 1962 family pics). It might have been Star Trek, and the availability of AMT models of the Enterprise, by early 1967. In any case I developed an interest in building model car kits, but only those released by AMT, as opposed to those from Revell or Monogram, which were more typically “replicas” and not exact to-scale models; the replicas had obviously visible weird distortions of proportion and detail. Early on I became brand conscious, as I would years later about books from particular publishers. AMT kits typically offered three version of each car: stock, race, or custom. The custom options reflected actual activity in Hollywood, where Hollywood stars would have their cars “customized” to look distinct – this was decades before the availability of exotic European cars like BMWs or Mercedes. The most famous customizer was George Barris, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Barris_(auto_customizer), who would modify, one by one for his wealthy clients, stock cars by remolding the body or welding grilles and bumpers taken other cars. (The photos show the three ways you could build a ’57 Chevy Bel Air: stock, drag, or custom.)

I was fascinated by these—by the custom modifications. They appealed to my taste for the strange and the weird. And so I built all these model cars, usually the custom version, using the plain white plastic parts. I never painted them, as hobbyists usually did. My father didn’t understand. I wasn’t trying to create miniature versions of real cars; I was fascinated by the alternative shapes.

(The model companies like AMT, Revell, and Monogram did not, of course, create kits for every make and model of car. So it was quite a coincidence that one of AMT’s kits was of the exact car my father owned — a 1964 Chevelle station wagon. The final side of the instructions shows the bizarre grill and headlights used for the custom version, with some notes in tiny print about the actual designer, Bill Cushenberry.)

I must have built a dozen such kits, and at least one Enterprise model, by the time we moved from Reseda to Illinois. My father, typically, unilaterally, declared that we could not afford to pack up and move all my models. (Even though his company was paying for the move, presumably.) So I gave them away, and since I had no friends, they went to Linda Bigbee, oldest daughter of long-time family friends in Burbank. She probably tossed them. Once in Cambridge, and then Glen Ellyn, I did one or two more car models, then moved on to more Enterprise and Klingon spaceship models, and then to detailed models of the Gemini spacecraft, a large Apollo/LEM model, and the huge Saturn V stack. My father disapproved (as he did about so many things) of car models, so I built a battleship model (Prinz Eugen), an aircraft carrier model (Enterprise), and a large detailed model of some kind of WWII plane, which I never finished.