Boarhead

My dad attended Lincoln High School at the same time as Kenny Washington.  Kenny Washington went on to play at UCLA with Woody Strode and Jackie Robinson, and became the first African-American to play in the National Football League.  My dad was a gymnast at Lincoln and most of the other gymnasts on the team were the sons of Russian immigrants.  According to my dad, the Russian kids had exceptional natural strength.  They could do some moves, like an inverted iron cross, that were only done at the Olympic level.  In 1937, Lincoln easily beat the UCLA varsity gymnastics team in a pre-season meet. 

 

My dad was a tumbler and as such didn't have to compete with the strength of the Russians.  Tumbling was the gymnastics pre-cursor to today's "free exercise".  In tumbling, there was no music and you made three passes down a narrow mat 60 feet in length.  He had sliced up his big toe before the league finals, but decided he could still compete if he taped it up.  His first pass down the mat was a series of back handsprings which sent the bandage flying.  He completed his next two passes throwing blood like a pinwheel.  When he finished, there was a stripe of blood down the center of the mat and up the walls at both ends of the run.

 

After high school, my dad eventually went to work at Lockheed in Burbank.  When he was hired, a lady in the Personnel Department was preparing an ID badge as she registered him as a new employee.  She asked him for his middle name and he told her that he didn't have one.  She insisted that everyone had to have a middle name.  My dad thought to himself, "For Pete's sake, what is with this woman?"  The lady persisted, so my dad told her his middle name was "Pete".  His birth certificate has no middle name but every other official document from that day forward had Pete or the initial P. 

 

A few years later, my dad soon left Lockheed to join the U.S. Army and attend basic training at Camp Roberts, a few miles north of Paso Robles.  During the forth week of training, recruits were given their first opportunity to fire live ammunition on the firing range.  At the end of the exercise, recruits were to turn in their scorecards to the drill instructor assigned to their platoon.

 

The DI said, "Gardiol, this score card is blank".

 

My dad said, "I wasn't issued a pencil, sir".

 

The DI, "You what?"

 

My dad, "Sir, when I enlisted, I was told the Army would provide me with everything I needed to become a soldier".

 

The DI, "I don't want to see you out here again without a pencil".

 

The next time the platoon was sent to the firing range and finished shooting, my dad turned in a blank scorecard.

 

The DI, "Gardiol, did you come out here without a pencil again?"

 

My dad, "Sir, I was never issued a pencil.  When I enlisted, I was told the Army would provide me with everything I needed to become a soldier".

 

The next morning my dad was awakened by the platoon DI about 90 minutes before reveille.  The DI took my dad outside and explained that until he was able to locate a pencil, he would be getting up 90 minutes early every morning to water the trees.  He handed my dad a bucket, designated a single faucet to use, and told my dad that each tree was to receive a single bucket full of water.  The trees that were to be watered included all of the trees on the barracks and building grounds. 

 

This tit-for-tat continued until the end of basic training.  Every time the platoon practiced at the firing range, my dad would turn in a blank score card to the DI.  The DI would ask him why it was blank and my dad would recite the Army's promise to meet his every need.  Every morning, my dad would spend 90 minutes before reveille watering trees.

 

The morning of the basic training graduation, the DI assembled all of the recruits in front of the barracks prior to the formal ceremony.  The DI congratulated everyone for completing the required training, told them they should feel proud of what they had accomplished, and that they would make good soldiers.  He then went on to single out my dad.  The DI said he was thankful to be rid of him, and in all his years as a DI, he couldn't remember having met a more disgusting and detestable individual.  This was one of my dad's fondest memories from the Army.

 

After basic training my dad was shipped over seas and assigned to a motor pool in Korea.  The year was 1944 and my dad said it was quiet and boring the whole time he was there.  The best source of entertainment was a hole in the ground.  The hole had been dug for a second tank for the motor pool gas station.  The tank had never arrived.  My dad and his buddies would run enough gasoline from the service station into the open hole to guarantee a good show.  They would then lie flat on their backs a few yards away from the hole and toss in a lighted newspaper.  My dad said it would sometimes be so loud you wouldn't hear it so much as feel it.  They would lie there and watch the huge fireball roll up into the stratosphere.  It took several minutes before fire engines from the surrounding area sped by looking for the devastated remains of whatever had exploded.

 

My dad's father grew up in Northern Italy not far from the Alps.  My Grandfather missed the mountains after immigrating to California and this led to frequent trips to the Sierras with my dad.  This went on for 15 years before I was born and continued long after.  One of the places they liked to go was over Elevation Pass (today called Whitney Pass) and into the back country.  It was named Elevation Pass as it was the highest pass in the continental United States.  The pass is about 3 miles from the top of Mt. Whitney and my grandfather and my dad made a habit of going to the summit both on the way in, as well as the way out of the back country.  No big challenge really, if you take the trail it is a simple matter of just walking to the top.  In 1951, I was in Mrs. Funk's 3^rd grade class at Eagle Rock Elementary.  What ever the class was discussing one day involved Mt. Whitney.  As part of this discussion, Mrs. Funk asked if anyone in our families had climbed Mt. Whitney.  I was the only one to raise my hand.  She asked me who in my family had done this and I said my dad had climbed it probably 10 times (which was true).  Mrs. Funk conceded that someone might have climbed it once or twice; anything more than that was total bullshit – not in those words mind you, but there was no mistaking her message.  This was the first of countless exchanges with teachers over the years that helped form my opinion of our educational system.

 

Beginning when I was 9 years old, I would go with my dad to the Sierras for 3 weeks every summer.  In the early 1950s, hiking and climbing in the Sierras was a lot different than it is today.  You didn't need a permit, you just went.  Once we got to the back country, we might go an entire week or more without seeing another person.  My dad would get pretty worked up the day we would leave town.  He would come home from work early, throw all of our gear into the back of his pickup truck, and head for the grocery store.  He could never bring himself to sit down, plan out the menu and make a shopping list.  He would rush into the store, grab a cart, go up and down each aisle, tossing in things on the fly.  Most of the time things worked out since we would work up such an appetite hiking that we would eat anything.  However, for the final 3 days of one trip we had nothing left but prune juice and Kix.  My dad found this to be highly amusing. 

 

When I was 10 years old, my dad cleared a space on the garage floor and had me sit down with my legs straight out in front of me.  He was going to build me a go cart.  He used a straight edge to draw lines with chalk on the floor.  From these lines he welded the base of a frame out of angle iron and then built up the cage from the base for the driver and engine compartments.  This was in concert with the do-it-yourself mantra that came down from my grandfather – never pay for something you can do yourself, even if you've never done it before.  The finished product looked more like a midget racer than a go cart.  My dad had wanted it to be safe for me to drive and it ended up to be virtually indestructible.  It ran great for many years.  

 

We lived in a 2-story house on Norwalk Avenue in Eagle Rock.  Every year or two the ivy in front would clog the sewer line.  My dad would rent a 150-foot motorized snake and clean out the line himself.  The clean-out cap for the sewer line was above the basement door.  The only way you could take off the cap was to stand on a chair under the cap and reach up to loosen it with a huge pipe wrench.  One time the sewer line was completely blocked and sewage had backed up all the way to the second story.  I watched my dad stand on the chair, reach up to loosen and remove the cap, and saw a shower of shit rain down on his head.  He looked over at me while this was happening, smiled and said, "Here come the goodies".

 

My dad's approach to personal grooming was to cut his own hair and brush his teeth once every six months with Dutch Cleanser (the 1950's equivalent of Comet).  We had one phone in the house and it was in the dining room on a short cord.  My dad hated nothing more than sitting in the living room and having to get up and make his way into the dining room to answer the phone.  He would have happily done without a phone altogether.  One afternoon he was in the living room and the phone rang.  He dragged himself to the phone, picked it up, said hello, and the person on the other end hung up.  He put the phone back and returned to the living room.  Less than a minute later, the phone rang again.  This time when my dad picked it up he didn't say anything at first.  The caller, waiting for some one to say hello, was also silent.  It was then that my dad shouted at the top of his lungs, "BOARHEAD!!!!!!!!".  After a few seconds, from the other end of the line, came a meek and terrified little voice, "Frank?".  It was Mrs. Anderson our neighbor.  My dad got a lot of mileage out of this.  For weeks afterward, I would sometimes come home from school or the playground, and find my dad howling with tears running down his face, gasping for breath, unable to even speak.

 

Jim Handy went to Eagle Rock High School with me.  His parents had finally gotten over the Iowa test fiasco, and he was once again spending time with my dad and me.  Mrs. Anderson, the neighbor of boarhead fame, let Handy and me borrow her tape recorder.  It was a far cry from what is available today.  It was the size of a microwave, required to be plugged in to an outlet, had 2 plastic reels that held the recording tape, and a microphone on the end of a 5-foot cord.  We set it up on the picnic table in our back yard.  My dad had suggested a competition to see who could make the most outrageous noises eating the watermelon slices he had laid out on the table.  Handy was to get the first shot.  He sat like an Olympic competitor, hunched over a slice held in his two hands, a foot away from the microphone, waiting for me to hit the "record" button.  When he heard the button click, he took three rapid-fire ferocious chomps like a wild animal.  This set my dad off on a sustained laughing fit that was recoded in full.  We must have listened to it a thousand times before we returned the recorder to Mrs. Anderson.

 

Through my junior and senior high school years, my dad was obsessed with a series of card games and board games.  We tackled them one at a time.  Parcheesi, Chinese Checkers, gin rummy, canasta, battleship, Monopoly, hearts, cribbage and dominoes are some that I remember.  He would get on a relentless pursuit of one of these games.  We would the play game repeatedly every night until the wee hours of the morning for weeks at a time.  Inevitably, we would reach a point where my dad would announce that he was totally revolted by the game and would never play it again as long as he lived, and we would pick up the next game.  My dad would attempt to fine tune games whose original format was flawed, by introducing modifications.  Monopoly was an example of a game that cried out for improvements.  He established a rule that any financial transactions would be rounded off to the nearest $100; any paper bills smaller than $100 were discarded.  After each player had completed one turn the responsibility for acting as the bank would transfer to the next player.  Anytime a player made a mistake, they had to pay the bank $500.  The mistakes included a dice throw where both dice did not stay on the board, touching or moving another player's game piece, miscounting and landing one's piece on the wrong square, and any error made in handling money or calculating sums.  Three mistakes and a player was gone.

 

One winter, an unusually deep blanket of snow covered the San Gabriel Mountains.  My dad thought conditions were ideal for him, me and Handy to go skiing for the first time ever.  His idea was to avoid the crowds, ski lifts, lift tickets, equipment rental prices, and commercial ski locations altogether.  Early Saturday morning, we drove to the Retail Salvage Store on Foothill Blvd in Tujunga.  My dad was able to purchase four pairs of skis with poles for a total of $20.  There were only three of us but the store owner was insistent on getting rid of all of these relics.  The wooden skis were from a previous era with the front of the skis curved up and backward into a point like the shoes worn in the Arabian Nights.  The apparatus that attached your feet to the skis was described by the store owner as "bear trap bindings" which sounded good to us.  On the bottom of the wooden poles were wooden rings about 5 inches in diameter attached to the pole by a series of cross-hatched pieces of leather.  The store owner suggested some other items that we might need such as gloves, ski clothes, etc.  We passed on this as it was a warm day and we figured the jeans, t-shirts and hiking boots we were wearing would be fine. 

 

My dad drove us to Mt. San Gorgornio and parked the car on the side of a road as close to the top as possible.  He had looked at the sierra club maps and picked out a spot to start our climb.  It took us over 6 hours to climb from the car to the top of the 11,502 foot high mountain.  We had to walk the entire way through loose snow carrying our skis and poles.  We began to regret not having gloves.  When we got to the top we were freezing, and although tired, immediately began our descent on skis. 

 

We had never been on skis before, had no idea how to turn, and were only able to ski straight downhill.  We would point the skis, push off, gain speed to a point where we would lose all control, and then crash.  We would collect whatever we had lost due to the crash and then try it again.  We could do as much as 100 to 150 yards until we crashed.  The loose snow made it impossible to go fast enough to cause any serious injuries. 

 

From the top of San Gorgonio, we descended more than 2,000 feet before we reached the tree line.  The trees became more plentiful the further down we went.  This slowed us down a bit and made our runs shorter.  What had taken us over 6 hours on the way up, took less than 30 minutes on the way down.  According to the map, the distance on a straight line was just over 3 miles.  I figure each of us fell or crashed at least 100 times on our way down to the car.

 

None of us had any feeling in our hands so my dad started the car, turned on the heater full blast and we stuck our hands in the heater vents waiting for them to thaw.  When the feeling began to return to our hands, the sensation was like having an electric current running through your limbs.  We sat there screaming until the pain subsided.  We never went skiing again.  As far as my dad was concerned, anybody who skied needed to have their head examined.