GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

In the summer of 1968, Munson was adamant that we try to support ourselves full time by playing the horses.  To kick it off, he wanted me to accompany him to Hollywood Park on opening day.  I'd never been to the races, but betting on horses was as natural as breathing to Munson since he had grown up living across the street from Santa Anita.  Attending opening day was a Munson family tradition and he hadn't missed one since he was twelve years old.  This applied equally for all five major tracks operating in California – Santa Anita, Hollywood Park, Del Mar in Southern California as well as Bay Meadows and Golden Gate Park located in the San Francisco Bay area. I arrived at his apartment late in the afternoon so we could spend plenty of time handicapping and head out to the track the next day.  Munson had picked up two copies of the Daily Racing Form and once we settled in, launched into a four hour tutorial trying to bring me up to speed.  Munson h...

My father's father was Clement Gardiol.  He was born in Prarostino circa 1887.  Prarostino (current population 1,268) is in northern Italy in the Piedmont region 25 miles southwest of Torino (Turin) and 25 miles east of the French Border.  Gardiol is a French name and one of a few hundred families that fled from France to Italy around 800 years ago and are known collectively as the Waldensians.  These families sought to escape religious persecution and took refuge in the alps.  The Roman Catholic Church and several European armies spent 700 years trying to eradicate the Waldensians.  There are many accounts on the Internet.  My favorite is a 30 pager covering 700 years in detail.  These families evolved into some of the most formidable mountain guerrillas in history who roamed the Alps between France and Italy and survived  centuries of military campaigns to eliminate them.  In 1848, prior to the...

My mother grew up in Boyle Heights which is a couple hundred yards north of downtown Los Angeles. Her parents were Basque having arrived in the USA from Spain just after the start of the 20th century. Her father was Alfonzo Cordoba, a political idealist, or anarchist depending upon your point of view. In those days Boyle Heights and Lincoln Heights (Northeast Los Angeles) was made up mostly of Italians, Jews and Russians. Alfonzo worked as a barber on north Main Street and wrote/edited/published a socialist newspaper ( the University of California at Berkeley Library has a few issues in their archives). He helped organize and participated in left wing political rallies, parading up and down Main & Broadway. In addition, he spent two weeks in jail as one of the usual suspects for an attempted bombing of the Los Angeles Times building. His outlook on life made my mother's youth somewhat unusual. He and his wife had six children. Four boys – names: Universe. Sol, Progre...

Someone sent some sort of text/special effects message to my  cell phone yesterday that I did not (nor ever will) see, view or listen to.  If it was you and it was friendly, thanks for thinking of me; if it was nasty because I did something offensive, please accept my apology; or if wasn't you at all, forget about it. The reason I can never see, view or listen to whatever it was is that I know only how to make outgoing calls from my cell phone and how to receive incoming calls.  The calls that I refer to are the kind where the two people involved (the caller and the callee) can actually hear each others' voice in real time (no visuals. sound track or recorded voice features). I find the cell phone experience to be off-putting and have no desire to venture  out beyond making and receiving calls.   So if it is a text, email, skype, GPS,  photo, face book, apps, musical, navigation or digital colonoscopy - I am going to miss it. Actu...

There is a single drab bathroom at work.  It is small in size and somewhat dusty and dingy.  The interior floor, walls and fixtures are original from circa 1960s - a good stretch of time without a new coat of paint or repairs made to cracked and curling vinyl floor tiles. If you are feeling a little squeamish at this point, let me assure you that nothing that  follows will violate your sensibilities. This morning I used the bathroom and when I had completed my business I stood up to flush the toilet.  The flushing mechanism performed as it should but I immediately noticed that the level of the water that was refilling the bowl was quite a bit higher than the normal level.  This has happened before and has always meant that there is a blocked pipe.  When this happens it has always been easily remedied by using the plunger which sits against the wall underneath the toilet tank.  I picked  up the plunger and proceeded to apply t...

A newspaper reporter convinces his editor to let him write a daily column that will  feature the wildest damn story overheard in a bar the previous day.   The reporter begins a daily grind of going each day from bar to bar, non-stop  with mounting pressure from the editor to find a story more outrageous that the day before.  A t first the stories flow like wine.  Bar p atrons from the valley to the harbor follow his column and often give him a standing ovation  when he enters a bar, any bar, even bars where he has never been.  Things take a bad turn.   A hellacious bar brawl brings in the cops  midway through a jewel of a story; bar patrons into their cups threaten him with liable suits:  he starts drinking too much, blacks out and can't remember the story when he is facing the deadline.  He resorts to  making up the stories but .......................... A recent immigrant to the US leases cheap land on which to park ca...

If you grew up in Los Angeles somewhere around the middle of the last century you may have watched a television show named Bowling For Dollars . I can't remember what station aired it but I am sure it was one of the local ones – 5, 9, 11 or 13. I also can't remember how many years that it was on, but I would be surprised if it was more than 2 or 3. There may have been more than one person who served as the emcee but I do remember Chick Hearn doing many of the shows that I watched. The basic bit was selecting post cards from viewers during each show to appear the following week as contestants. As a contestant, you would have a chance to throw a total of 3 balls down the alley with the top prize being a paltry amount ($100?) for 3 straight strikes (known as a turkey). This was a long time ago and the details are a little vague – I don't recall if they had automatic pin setters at the time or if the pins were replaced by hand. Chick would invite up each contestant a...

In the mid 1970’s, I worked for a few years with Dave Claeys at a consulting firm located in Culver City. We had a co-worker named Frank Reynolds who was delusional but harmless. He had written and had published a science fiction novel that he carried with him in his briefcase at all times. It was a cross between The Martian Chronicles and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington . He had his own vocabulary of terms and phrases that he would use in conversations without ever bothering to define or explain their meaning. This completely baffled the consulting clients as Frank would scatter these terms throughout presentations and technical discussions all the while implying anyone with an IQ of 45 surely was familiar with these terms. Frank also prepared complex visual aids that were completely incomprehensible with diagrams that highlighted “red, amber and green light vectors” that when compounded created the “delta difference”. Clients would sit in stunned silence until Frank finished and fe...

For a brief period in the 1970s I worked for a consulting firm in Culver City that was run by George Floret, a Puerto Rican from New York. The consulting services offered were directed at IT clients (referred to as data processing at that time). George knew nothing about computers but that never prevented him from making a sale. Dave Claeys had worked with me at Blue Cross previously and after he had been with The Berton Group for a month or so, he talked me into joining him. George and I got off on the wrong foot. When introduced, I searched for something to say and came out with "You're the first Puerto Rican I've ever met who wasn't a busboy or a standup comic". George started his sales career in New York selling Rainbow vacuum cleaners in the tenements of Spanish Harlem north of 96th Street and east of 5th avenue. The Rainbow vacuum sucked air and debris through a chamber filled with water and was also available with wet mop and floor waxing attac...