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 am only willing to make outgoing calls and  receive incoming calls.  I did at first listen to messages left on my phone but found the experience depressing and pointless and quickly disabled the voice mail feature.  I also disabled the text feature as soon as people started sending me those insideous multi-colored hieroglyphics. 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, app, musical, navigati...

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 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 the proper technique to free the clog.  Thankfully, my f...

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 cars ...

In the early 1950s, life in Los Angeles was very  innocent and uncomplicated - if you were a kid you could get away with a lot  largely due to the fact that that most everybody did what they were told and everyone was expected  to toe the line. There were probably 10 million fewer people, 5 million fewer cars  and 35 million fewer dogs. If anybody back then had said people would someday be picking up their dog's shit and taking it back home with them, they would have been institutionalized. There weren't any lines at the movies or anywhere else; there wasn't any traffic. If you wanted to go to Huntington Beach or any of the west LA beaches for the day, you had to take surface streets all the way and never thought twice about it cause it took less time then than it does now. When you got to the Beach there were places to park free of charge. The Pasadena freeway was the only freeway.   If lived in Los Angeles at that time you may have watc...

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 readlike 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 ...

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). A friend of mine went to work for the firm and after a month or so, talked me into joining him. 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 attachments. His pitch included demonstrating the floor waxer where he would furiously polish the victim's kitchen floor working up to a climax where he would feign an over enthusiastic shout "Look at that fuckin' shine!", He would then begin offering massive apologies for having gone off the deep end.  Somehow George transitioned from Rai...