GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

During the 1960's, a house-sitting gig fell into my lap.    The house was on Future Street at the base of Mt   Washington , about three miles north of downtown   Los Angeles .    The rent and utilities were paid and the house was comfy and very secluded but lacked any furniture or appliances.    I moved in with my stuff in a box and put a mattress down on the floor in one of the bedrooms.    These were the only amenities added during my two year stay. I began looking for a part-time job since this windfall arrangement left me needing money mostly for just food and gas.  In those days the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times had a classified ads section with twenty or more full pages of employment opportunities.  Several hours of reviewing job openings and their minimum requirements revealed that my best shot was an ad for "Drivers Wanted".  The four year bachelor's degree from the prestigious private liberal a...

The summer following my sophomore year at Occidental I needed to make some money to help my parents cover my tuition.    I was hired as a dishwasher by J's Restaurant in   Glendale , California .    My shift was 6 pm to 2 am, Thursday through Sunday nights - the busiest nights of the week.    The assistant manager told me straight out that it was not easy work.    The last three dishwashers he had hired all said they badly needed work but none made it through a full week before they quit.    The job paid $1.09 an hour. J's Restaurant was located on the corner of North Glendale Avenue and Monterey Road and was an A-frame structure with a natural wood interior.  Several years after I worked at J's it was demolished to make way for the 134 Ventura Freeway.  Foxy's Restaurant on Colorado Boulevard opened that same summer in 1964.  I assumed it was the same owner as J's as it was a bit larger but was built in...

It was around 10:00 a.m. Sunday morning and I was bent over my parent's dining room table reading the sports page of the Los Angeles Times.     It was 1966, half way through my senior year in college and I needed a jacket.    I walked  into the kitchen and dialed Hickson's apartment. He answered, "Hello?" I said, "I need a jacket." Hickson said, "Jesus, ten in the morning and you're off and running with the weird stuff already." I said, "Nothing weird about it.  I need a jacket." Hickson said, " You want to borrow mine?" I said, "Why would I want to borrow a jacket when they're giving them away?  Did you see the sports page yet?" Hickson sounded annoyed, "Hurry, you're losing me." Where upon I unveiled my plan, "There is an article in here that explains why our track team lost a meet to Arizona State yesterday by 2 points.  And I quote, 'contributing ...

The end of my sophomore year was ten days away.    The Dean of Students had sent word by way of one of his snitches for me to come to his office.     I'd had several run-ins with him before, none of which had gone well.    During these first two years he had found it necessary to (1) issue me countless warnings; (2) require me to offer written/verbal apologies to faculty and students for egregious behavior; and (3), present me with invoices for property damages.  I hadn't done anything terrible lately, so I assumed it was someone else's dirty work that I was going to get credit for.  Once I sat down in his office, I learned that instead of the usual accusatory rant, it was actually worse - he wanted to discuss my grades.  He said that my current GPA was 1.3 and that a C average of 2.0 was required to graduate.  In addition, I was quickly approaching a point where it would be statistically impossible to raise my GPA to a C in...

In September of 1962, I was sitting in my first history of Civ lecture with 400 other freshman in Thorne Hall at   Occidental College .    This History of Civ course amounted to one half of a student's total units for the first two years and was required for everyone.    Thorne Hall seats   3,650 which was nearly ten times more than needed to hold the freshman class, but the furnishings and appointments made a statement.    Plush seats, natural wood trim and handrails, Doric columns that framed the entrance and supported a portico that resembled a mini Parthenon. It all seemed intended to convince us that a liberal arts education was to be taken seriously. That day's lecture was on classic Greek literature and was presented by Basil Busacca straight from central casting – beard, tweeds, pipe, salt and pepper, mid fifties, the voice of James Earl Jones with an Italian accent, but appeared to actually be coming from God when amplified an...

In the 1950's, the Los Angeles Unified School District arranged for the Iowa  Test to be given every four years to every student in kindergarten through the twelfth grade.   The first time I remember taking it, I was enrolled in the eighth grade at Eagle Rock High School. The Iowa test covered basic skills and took all day for either four or five consecutive days, as best as I can recall.  Each day, students were given a booklet containing questions and multiple choice answers (a) through (e); and a separate page with empty circles for marking your answers with a number two pencil.  By the time Wednesday rolled around, I and the budding juvenile delinquents I ate lunch with every day were looking for a way out.  Jim Handy and I began tossing around some ideas and came up with the following theory.  The answer sheets were obviously scored by machine.  Marking your answer was to be done by completely blackening in a single ...

The threat of being drafted and sent to Viet Nam was largely responsible for my completing a four year college degree.  A student deferment granted by the United States Selective Service System was a terrific motivator for staying in school.  After graduating from Occidental, I had to continue on to graduate school to maintain my student deferment which I succeeded in doing for a little over 3 years.  If you could  maintain a C average, carry the minimum number of units required and avoid accumulating enough credits in any one discipline to qualify for an advanced degree, you could achieve permanent limbo.  Yet my hatred of school and the steady diet of dead-end, part-time jobs finally wore me down and I dropped out of school.  A few months later I received a letter from the local draft board directing me to appear for a pre-induction physical.  Shortly after receiving the letter, I had a conversation with someone who claimed I...