San Rafael, Summer 1996: Although the plan bombed later, I wanted to own my own home, and having very little money, decided to start with a houseboat or a house-trailer.

Sausalito has lots of houseboats, but frankly the mud beneath the dock stinks real bad at low tide, so yuck!

Marin County
Marin county, the most expensive real estate in California, so why was I living there? The answer: careful lack of planning. I’d developed my business in San Francisco, then moved across the bridge to Marin because Adrienne hated the Haight; too noisy, she said. When paying rent, $1400 in Sausalito was about the same as $1400 in San Francisco. But buying a house was out of the question, in these latitudes.

So why not start with a mini-house, save up more money, then parlay up to a small fixer-upper, then up to better?

Marin land values are high, so there are only four trailer parks: One in Olema (too far), one off Highway 101 (nothing available), one near the bay (that mud aroma again), and one in San Rafael, where I found the house-trailer that Waneta was selling.

While living here, I produced the MultiString Shopper. With a classified ad in Bass Player magazine, I offered to buy and sell used Stick brand musical instruments, because there was previously no existing market for used instruments. I made a pretty layout, and forced a free lesson onto one page, and on the reverse listed the instruments for sale. Popular with musicians, and most unpopular with Stick Enterprises, the company selling new Stick brand instruments. But that’s another story.

Meanwhile, the trailer was comfy enough in the winter, but on summer afternoons it was like sitting inside a waffle iron, so I started engineering. First I built a wooden framework with two arms between which I stretched a tarpaulin. This arrangement provided a kind of parasol for the trailer during the hot afternoons.

I Decided to Try Water Cooling
Next, I decided to try water cooling, so I bought a hose and a water-sprinkler and rigged it up on the roof. When I turned it on, it created a nice cool mist, and a big circle of coolth. It did sprinkle on the road, so all the cars passing got wet, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few dishes, you know?

And so it was that, as I was up on the ladder, attempting to adjust the sprinkler system to act more refined, that I looked over the top of the trailer and could see Tom, the rugged contractor-type guy who ran the trailer park. He was standing in the middle of the road, legs wide, arms crossed over his chest, wearing a plaid short-sleeved shirt and his usual crew cut.

He was shaking his head in wonderment.

Our eyes met, across the top of the trailer. An irate expression crossed his face. He said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

It was then that I realized that I was a wacko.

495 Third Avenue, San Francisco, June 1976: My friend Dennis B. and I had been writers together at the San Francisco Writer’s Workshop, which met every Tuesday night at the San Francisco Main Library. Before emigrating from Texas to San Francisco State, I’d found an announcement in Writer’s Digest magazine, and showed up at the Library as soon as I arrived in town.

After some weeks, we both stopped attending the Writer’s Workshop, but stayed friends. Dennis’s family were back around Chicago and had done very well in the metal fabrication business. Therefore, Dennis had joined the peace corps, became a photographer and writer, and drove a cab.

One day he confided in me that he’d invented the Cabdriver Philosophy of Life. Stated briefly, it was: “People come into your life. People go out of your life. You go round and round and see some things, and then the ride is over.” Not bad, all things considered, it seemed to me.

But I mention Dennis because of his odd habit.

Dennis was forever doing good, in this way. He read voraciously, and whenever he found something perhaps of interest to a friend, he’d clip it and mail it. Dennis had a lot of friends, so he must have been pretty busy. I myself got dozens of clippings over the years.

But this one said, “Whirr …”

It was a three-paragraph story in a box, and started out asking: “What’s about the size of a breadbox, can do thousands of calculations per second, and costs a few hundred dollars?”

The answer was the new crew of “micro-computers”. It seems that a company in New Mexico had taken an advanced calculator chip and realized that it had all the parts of a functioning computer. By adding memory and circuitry for display and typing, the Altair was born, followed by the Imsai, the SWP, and others.

The article said that you could see these computers in Berkeley on University Drive, at a store cleverly named The Computer Store. In those days I was postering Berkeley for my fledgeling business, the Thumbtack Bugle, so I parked my motorcycle outside, and went in.

Yup, there were some boxes about the size of bread boxes, with switches and blinken-lights. Completely incomprehensible; completely fascinating. A rotund fellow in a beard and overalls pointed things out to me, and then I bought copies of Byte magazine, and Kilobaud magazine. Byte. Hmmm. Kilobaud. Hmmm.

Hastening to a coffee-house across from the Co-op I devoured the magazines from cover to cover. The articles made little sense, but the ads weren’t too bad. For example, the Apple computer was then a single board, selling for $666. All you had to do was add a case, power supply, keyboard, and display monitor. Hmmm.

Somehow I learned that up at Lawrence Livermore Lab, in the Berkeley Hills, was a science museum where kids could play on the computer, so I motorcycled up there with a book on BASIC, and started learning how to print “Hello, World!” on the screen. Oddly, it wasn’t very difficult, which perhaps explains the large number of 11-year-old boys typing alongside me.

Somehow I learned that down in Silicon Valley, there was an organization that worked similarly, except that you could call in from your house to work on the computer. I motored down, and met Doug F. He was a thin, long-haired, brilliant, nerdy fellow who ran the computer, always and forever dressed in jeans and a t-shirt picturing a heavy-metal band.

Following Doug’s guidelines, I bought a teletype and a modem, which then meant a big box with two foam cups into which you stuck the telephone receiver. With this teletype in the closet, I started programming. I got a sorting program typed in, and set it to sorting 300 names. On this speedy time-sharing computer, it took fourteen hours.

But by then, I’d decided that I must have my own computer. The magazines were starting to make sense, and I settled on a Cromemco, which was very powerful. It was also expensive, so I got it in a kit, and Doug said he’d assemble it for me, which was good because I didn’t know how to solder. I raised part of the money from Henry, a local philanthropist I’d met once when interviewing for a bookkeeping job.

The assembly seemed to take forever, and if I nudged Doug, he’d exclaim, “Don’t go sweating on me!” Doug was eccentric, showing up at odd times. One day he said there would be a great sneak preview, so we walked up the next block to see what turned out to be the world premier of Star Wars. His job at that time was programming government computers so that satellites could determine whether a farmer’s fields in Russia were growing wheat or alfalfa.

Finally, the computer was ready. It was a large black box, sitting on a table in my tiny apartment. Doug plugged in the teletype, and tapped a few times on the carriage return. It began typing.

“Hello,” it said.

Henrietta, Texas, 1955: In our town were two movie theatres. The Dorothy, one block south of Ikard street (also known as highway 287), was near the Methodist Church and Grover Thaxton’s hardware store. One day, I heard a wonderful report from Billy Ray, who’d just seen a Saturday matinee called “Them“. Oddly enough, this movie was about ants, but they were very, very big.

This sounded great to me, so I wheedled and wheedled the price of admission from my mother, and went the next Saturday. It was then that I learned that the movie changes every week, as I sat through an incomprehensible film about grown-ups who just talked to each other. Nothing happened at all!

I knew that movies were supposed to have fights and mahem, because I’d seen a movie before, while visiting kinfolk in Houston. That movie was Treasure Island, a stirring adventure about a young boy very much like me, I then imagined. I remember it clearly, and in fact, sometimes I can still hear Long John Silver’s parrot, crying “Pieces of Eight! Pieces of Eight!”

After Long John Silver and the big ants report, this “talking” movie seemed pretty lame.

On the same street as the Dorothy theatre, and several blocks north, across from the courthouse sat the Royal Theatre. The Royal had exciting pictures out front, generally showing cowboys, but in addition to Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Hoppalong Cassidy, and Lash Larue, they also featured Abbot and Costello and Ma and Pa Kettle. I saw Peter Pan there, and This Island Earth, and a horrifying 3-D movie called House of Wax.

In the early days, the Royal’s Saturday serial featured Commander Cody, who wore a helmet and rocket pack, and after making a kind of jump could be seen flying through the sky. Flash Gordon and crew fell into eternal pickles with that rascal Ming the Merciless, and week after week Tarzan narrowly escaped being trampled, roasted, drowned, and eaten.

About the time I became a teen, the Dorothy burned down, leaving a hollow stone shell and the Royal, but a few months later, our town was abuzz with the news that a new drive-in movie was being built west of town.

The Clay County Leader newspaper trumpeted a big contest to name the new drive-in. My grandfather, usually taciturn, found this so exciting he decided to enter, because he’d figured out a sure-fire winner.

Since our town was named “Henrietta”, he reasoned that “The Henry” would be the perfect name for the drive-in. Sitting at his wooden desk, he wrote out a letter to enter the contest.

For weeks we watched the contest. I was there the day the paper arrived, announcing the winner. Grandfather fetched the mail and brought it into the kitchen and sat down at the table. He opened the newspaper. He stiffened.

“The Rietta?” he said. “What kind of stupid name is that?”

The concept of breaking a task into small parts, to accumulate small successes as building blocks, and to accrue these to build emotional momentum toward your target is presented clearly in Jim Sloman’s “May You Be Happy” website, in a short series called “Strategic Applications”.

He also addresses the concept of avoiding direct fighting, and adding the external energy from the universe to your own as an effective path to negotiation, enlightment, and success.

The marvellous thing is that he presents these spiritual truths in the context of their use by generals in historical wars on this planet. Along the way, Sloman provides a fascinating insight into times and places when the history of continents hinged on a small battle involving, sometimes, only a few thousand men.

An outstanding read.