warrin with an i

The 1973 film American Graffiti, with that great soundtrack (by George Lucas of Indiana Jones and Star Wars fame) takes place in the summer of 1962.  1962 is the year Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game.  It's the year Marilyn Monroe was found Dead.  It's the year Johnny Carson took over the Tonight Show from Jack Paar.  It's the year of the Cuban Missile crisis and the year James Meredith enrolled at University of Mississippi.  It was also the year I turned 13 becoming an official teenager. 1962 was a great year for movies headed by “Lawrence of Arabia”, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, and “The Miracle Worker”.  It also included a bunch of other good flicks such as the first James Bond movie, “Dr. No”, “Lolita”, “The Manchurian Candidate”, “That Touch of Mink”, “The Birdman of Alcatraz”, “Whatever  Happened to  Baby Jane”, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence”, “Mutiny on the  Bounty”, “The Longest Day”, “Days of Wine and Roses”, “Requiem f...

Larry I met Larry in the Air Force. We both joined up about the same time in April of 1969. We both came in from the New York City (NYC) area but Larry came through the Whitehall Street induction center in Manhattan (the same induction center referred to in the Arlo Guthrie song “Alice's Restaurant”) while I came in through the Fort Hamilton induction center in Brooklyn. Larry was a city kid. He grew up in the Bronx, one of the boroughs of New York City, the only one of the five boroughs on the mainland. I grew up on Long Island which includes Brooklyn. It occupies the southwest corner of the island. Larry and I were inducted within a week or two of each other. We did basic training in barracks that were right across from each other but we never ran into each other as during basic training everyone is pretty much restricted to interacting with the guys in your barracks only. After basic we were both assigned to the same career field, Navigation and Radar Repair and con...

California Here I Come Again 20 Belvedere I n September of 1978 I arrived at 20 Belvedere Street in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco. I was in my little Toyota pickup truck packed full with all my belongings. 20 Belvedere was where my good friend Larry lived and I was set to stay with him and his roommates Robert and Debbie until I got on my feet and found a place to live. 20 Belvedere was a three story Victorian type building, the kind you commonly see in San Francisco and Larry and his roommates were renting the 2 nd floor. It was just a couple of houses off Haight Street and 3 blocks from Golden Gate Park. W hen I first arrived in SF the city seemed so busy and fast paced compared to what I had become used to in Oregon plus I was a little depressed about having to leave Eugene. However, it didn't take me long to adjust, after all, I had spent my first 18+ years in an even faster paced setting, New York and I am not really one to dwell in depr...