GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

My mother wasn’t actually thrown out of the theater, she left voluntarily.  I went with her to see  How The West Was Won  when it opened at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in 1963.  The film was a Cinerama wide-screen epic that became the second highest grossing movie that year hauling in slightly less than  Cleopatra .   How The West Was Won  was an overblown, soulless frontier saga with a huge cast and consisted of five segments, one of which was  The Rivers .  The climatic scene in  The Rivers  focused on a petite Debbie Reynolds aboard a hulking 30-foot long raft which she maneuvered with a flimsy pole through a wild and dangerous series of boulder-strewn rapids.   The scene had taken 7 days to shoot on location and must have been a logistical nightmare to capture with the triple cameras used in filming Cinerama productions.  The end result came with blaring sound effects and a frantic Debbie spread across the massive wrap-around screen and had the audience tugging at their armrest

By the third morning of the trip everyone knew to avoid the camp area until Quackenbush had finished eating.  He and his father referred to his condition as a “milk allergy” since the term “lactose intolerant” wasn’t bandied about back in 1958.  The Quackenbush duo, along with my dad and I were with a group of 6 adults and 14 teenagers spending 3 weeks in the high Sierras.  We had set up camp at timberline just below Wallace Lake about a day's walk from Mt. Whitney .  Every morning for breakfast Quackenbush would dump some cereal into a bowl, open a can of avocado milk and pour the bright green goop onto his Cheerios.  Despite the appetite one develops tromping around at high altitude, most everyone that had the misfortune to observe this ritual had passed on breakfast the first two days.  Ten months earlier I had joined a Boy Scout Troop in Eagle Rock whose camping trips had been limited to weekends in the San Gabriel Mountains .  I had spent the previous five sum