GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

The year after John Kennedy was killed, I was in my junior year of college and being pressured to join the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity ( Fijis for short).  It wasn't so much that they valued my camaraderie as they were sick and tired of me eating and sleeping there without paying for rent, board and dues.  The Fiji house, was on the south east corner of where Alumni Ave and Campus Road intersect, directly across from the main entrance to the college.  The college had only four fraternities.  The other three each had a dominant characteristic that applied to almost every one of their members - the athletes, the preppies and the suck-ups.  There were some exceptions but not many.  The members of the Fiji house were best described as the lunatics. Steve Peters was one of the reasons I liked spending time at the Fiji house.  Peters, a minister's son, had grown up in Burlingame , California and like a great many of Occidental's students had been student body presid

A couple of years ago I was riding down Eagle Rock Boulevard with my son Michael and his wife Maria.  We came to Norwalk Avenue where Senor Fish sits on the northwest corner, Michael made a right turn, and parked next to the curb in middle of the block.  This was to be the chosen spot for unwrapping, assembling, installing and adjusting as needed, the newly purchased infant car seat – all without benefit of reading the manufacturer's instructions.  This struck me as a good time to get some air, so I exited the back seat and took a look around.  Directly to my right was the former WCTU home for women.  My family moved to a house on this same street in 1949 when I was four.  I was always curious about this place as it was the tallest structure in all of Eagle Rock.  It was built in 1927 to offer a new and expanded home that could accommodate up to 100 veterans of the Temperance and Women's Suffrage Movement.  Their former digs in Highland Park had been a conventional h

A vasectomy seemed like a good idea.  My wife and I had determined that we had met our quota by means of our two sons.  We asked the pediatrician for a referral and he steered us toward a Dr. Grady Harp in Pasadena .  I thought the name was familiar but couldn't pin it down.  We met him at his office for what I gathered was the standard doctor-couple consultation.  He wanted us to be made aware of the procedure, any potential side effects and the meaning of the word "irreversible".  Dr.  Grady Harp  was similar in age to me and seemed like a nice enough fellow, but the face-to-face failed to jog anything loose from my memory.  The name was still rattling around in the back of my mind and I continued to try and place it for a week or so until I returned to his office to undergo the out-patient procedure. If vasectomies were common practice back in the dawning of homo erectus, the technique would be identical to the manner in which they are performed by today's

The Keller's family car was a late 1940s Ford station wagon with wood side and rear panels.  His dad had installed an air horn that was powered by a compressor as the area under the hood offered a lot more room to work with than today's cars.  Set into the dashboard was an on/off toggle switch from which hung a short chain whose last link was a gold colored globe.  The chain was the same type that you always saw attached to a lucky rabbit's foot.  To operate the horn, you had to first flick the toggle switch to the "on" position, wait several seconds for the pressure to build up in the compressor tank, then grasp the globe and pull down on the chain to blow the horn.  The lag time made the air horn totally impractical for use in an emergency, but the standard issue horn that originally came with the car was still in working order.  The sound of the horn was not quite equal to that of a locomotive, but coming from a dingy green, eight-year-old station wagon mad

Encouraged by Professor Hansen, I switched my major to art despite not being able to draw a   lick.    In time, I found that I was not alone, as it is indeed among the rarest of gifts.    The ability to visually depict the physical appearance of things is granted to but one person in every thousand.    I base this on the fact that of the two thousand students enrolled in the college, only two (both art majors) had the gift.    True, not all two thousand students were art majors, but if they had possessed this gift, one can assume they would have been.  Fortunately, there was a rapid decline in representational work as the art world was over taken by abstract expressionism.  The ability to draw was no longer a prerequisite for creating great art, or art of any kind for that matter.  The artistic community experienced a flurry of one-upsmanship aimed at producing work that was devoid of talent altogether.  I found my personal favorite in an issue of   Art Forum Magazine .  It wa

LBJ was ramping up   America 's presence in   Southeast Asia   while I was searching desperately for passing grades.    My grade point average had declined to the point where my participation in the   Viet Nam   conflict appeared inevitable.    I began shopping for a new major so I might have a chance at turning things around.  As a freshman I had considered majoring in philosophy after being quite impressed by Dr. Loftsgordon, the brilliant Head of the Philosophy Department.  He was highly revered as one of the faculty stars, prominently noted in the college brochures, and a talking point during my interview with the admissions officer.  My first direct encounter was a lecture he gave as part of the history of civilization course.  He took delight in undermining every religious, patriotic and cultural belief that we students had carried with us in our hearts up until that day.  Once relieved of our sham safety nets, he invited us down a path to existentialism – because li