The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

Wizard in a Cave

by // 1 Comment

Henrietta, Texas, 1951: My mother played her nice radio in the evenings, and we listened to Green Lantern, the Phantom, the Great Gildersleeve, the Lone Ranger, and the Inner Sanctum. Not long after, television would arrive, stealing drama from the radio, but in those days radio was one story after another. Hobby time went well with radio. For example, my mother was a great and wonderful crafts person, and made marvelous things.

As we sat in the evening with one lamp turned on, she was making colored flower stencils on pillowcases. I had a project too. She’d bought me a drawing toy called a Magic Slate. This cardboard rectangle has a gray plastic sheet attached, and a pencil-shaped wooden stylus. With this stylus, you write or draw upon the gray sheet. Whenever it’s filled up, or you get tired of it, just lift the sheet and all the writing vanishes, and you can start over. Oh, the sheer magic of it!

That night we were listening to Inner Sanctum, which was a scary show about some sort of bird or a bat. But I wasn’t scared. My mom was making stencils and I was a Wizard in a Cave.

I saw an image clearly — to be a Wizard in a Cave — staying up late, by candle-light, and writing mystical things upon the Magic Slate.

The only problem was, I didn’t know any mystical things to write.

I was staying up late. I had the Magic Slate. I was all set. I scribbled some words and alphabet things. … But they were only the things I knew. It wasn’t really magical. It made me kind of sad, having no mystical things to write.

This isn’t much of a story. I don’t even remember what happened to the bird or bat thing.

But there is this: I think that the Wizard in a Cave has been the guiding image of my life.

I was no good in sports, so I learned to be a wizard. I was fearful of girls, way too shy, so I tried to appear wizardly, intellectual, knowing magical things, wise. Haw! Seems silly, now. Seemed to make sense, then.

I’m writing this now, late at night. One lamp is on. I’m in my workshop, surrounded by magical contrivances. The musical instruments I design and build, and on which I can compose, play, and improvise. A library of books, on arcane subjects such as mysql and investment charting. Computers are here. On them I have written books, made pictures, calculated mystical things such as additive sine wave patterns.

It’s late, I am no longer young, there’s one lamp, and it’s cave-like. Welcome, Arthur. You are now a Wizard in a Cave, writing mystical things.

It’s been a long road, but to arrive at being a Wizard in a Cave is just the way I thought it would be. I know mystical things, and I can write them down here, on this erasable page. Now they are both hidden, and visible to wizards all over the Universe.

The funny thing is, the most mystical of these magical things are the plain truths of human experience, the stories we all share, the open secrets of mankind, the pain and joy of living, the gaining and the terrible, terrible losses. This is the truest magic.

Even a child knows some of this. I knew magic on that night, not recognizing it there before me. The magic was that night, the color of the light, the human dreams, and my mother making stencils of colorful paint, on pillowcases, making some beauty, for her home.

Changing Your Name

by // 1 Comment

The indians had the right idea. It’s said they believed the name of a thing captured its spirit. Some indians had a “true” name, that they only told to trustworthy folks, on the grounds that handing it out willy-nilly might lead to credit-card fraud in the spiritual realm.

I don’t know about that. But I do believe that each of us acts out our name. Or, rather, we act out the meaning of the name, as it appears to us.

It might not be as obvious as somebody naming himself “Ringo Starr” and then becoming a star. Or it might.

For myself, growing up in Texas as “Richard French” — no, as a child I was called “Dicky French” — this name was a mixed message. On the one hand, France was an exotic place, mysterious and unique, foreign. On the other hand, Dicky was a little name, and it grew suddenly worse when I became a teen.

I spent my teens coercing people to call me Richard, and acting like a foreigner in a strange land. I was a flop at sports. So I became a beatnik. Couldn’t do football, so I focussed on Band.

I was acting out my name, as it appeared to me. And I think this is common. And if so, then you could change your name to choose a new act. The life of my friend, Tom Pinch, improved in every way when he became Thomas Franklin.

OK. Maybe you agree. Maybe you have a different theory. But if you are thinking about changing your name, think on this:

First, in California you don’t have to do anything special to change your name. As long as you’re not committing fraud, if tomorrow you wish to be known as Bignose Butterfly, well, then that’s your new name. You can even go get a new social security card. Amazing.

If you’re in business, as I was, it seemed good to have a piece of paper, so I filed a paper with the San Francisco court. In due time, Judge Ollie-Victoire asked me, “You wish to change your name for business purposes?” I said yes. Bang went the hammer.

That was easy, wasn’t it? But next, there is danger. An early client at Network Answering Service was a black guy just starting an acting career. He’d chosen a name that would stand out: Buriel Clay. This name worried me, seeming a dangerous act to follow. My fears were founded. In less than a month, he became a statistic at the corner of Van Ness and Geary.

So did I learn carefully? I did not! For my new name, I chose “Arthur Cronos,” because it sounded good. Arthur, Lord of all Brittany, and Cronos, the father of Jupiter. Heads of our Anglo and Greek culture, no?

No. Think deeper. Remember the story of Arthur?

Guenevere ran off with Lancelot, right?

Well, now you know what happened to my marriage.

Bummer. So heed ye well. Ponder carefully. Don’t test the water with both feet.

God Save the Queen

by // Leave a Comment

Henrietta, Texas. June 2, 1953. I was nine, and Ricky Moyer’s grandmother had a television set. Free of school, with my mother I visited evenings, where in their den, with every lamp turned off — that’s how one watched movies, you see — we all watched Charlie Chan.

But on this day, a scorching summer afternoon of 106 degrees, we sheltered in his Grandmother’s air-conditioning, and on the television that day, we watched people on the other side of the world. A young woman named Elizabeth was being crowned Queen of England in a place called Westminster Abbey.

We watched the black & white procession. We watched the crown placed upon her head. That same day, we learned that a man named Edmund Hillary had climbed Mount Everest, even further away from our hot summer afternoon in north Texas, where farmers and cowboys could gaze upon the Queen.

Network Answering Service

by // 1 Comment

San Francisco, 1976: But it actually started with Lamont Johnson, a jazz piano-player in Los Angeles, in 1969. At breakfast, he told us roommates his great new plan. We would start an answering service, for musicians!

“A what?” I asked. He explained it. Answering services used switchboards to answer the phone when the musician was out. I knew how to operate a switchboard, because of my hotel jobs. As soon as we had a switchboard and some clients, we could all take turns. He showed us listings in the Los Angeles yellow pages. Not one of these answering services specialized in serving musicians!

It sounded like a swell idea. Quickly we were recruited. Me and another guy were sent to obtain an endorsement from the head of the Los Angeles musician’s union. I made up some charts with pictures of statistics going up. We got an appointment.

The gentleman was very kind, and never once laughed at our clown act. He just explained gently that he was not able to endorse one company over another, though he very much appreciated us letting him know about our new company.

I tried to find a pleasant-sounding way to explain to Lamont that we were abject failures. Luckily, none of the others had one whit of success either, and to our great good fortune, we did not start up an answering service for musicians.

Thus it was that, years later in San Francisco, when I opened my phone bill and a little advert fluttered to the floor, I read about this new feature, Call Forwarding.

“Hmmm,” I said to myself, “You could use that to forward a whole bunch of phones. You could build an answering service without a switchboard.”

I did some research, meaning that I got my friend Dennis to ask questions of his answering service. This company had 2200 customers and 30 operators. After allowing for different shifts, this meant that each operator could handle 280 customers. (Later experience revealed no truth whatsoever in this formula.)

After my careful research, I got some phone lines and a bootleg pushbutton phone. I wrote “Bad Air Detector” on the switching box so the phone company guys wouldn’t know what it was. I placed an ad. I waited for the phone book to come out.

The phone rang. The guy asked about our service and I told him about call-forwarding. Our hours? Our prices? He signed up.

In my studio apartment, thus sprang Network Answering Service.

Six a.m. to Midnight. At first, I was the only operator. My favorite station went off the air at Midnight, same as me. Every night, when Midnight came, they played this lovely song called the Pachibel Canon.

And every night, it sounded so sweet.

The Secret Service

by // Leave a Comment

Geary Boulevard, San Francisco, 1984. It was a big deal. Queen Elizabeth was coming to San Francisco to visit with President Reagan. Some days before the event, Secret Service men came to visit us.

They were examining every building along Geary Boulevard, inside and out. The reason being that, after attending a function downdown, Prez and Queen would motorcade along Geary Boulevard to a fancy do at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, out by the ocean.

As a perfect sniper site, they examined our office, even climbing to the roof. Network OPs (operators) were interviewed. They were looking for suspicious characters. I guess they found none, for they moved on.

During this time I was developing the Line Seizer, an electronic device, and so I was wearing overalls that night, because I was a computer guy. We had advance warning because Pauly O’Brien, our client who lived in a cheap hotel downtown, called us when the Queen’s limo passed his window.

In our second story office, we crowded to the windows. First came a battalion of motorcycle cops, stopping side-street traffic as far as the eye could see. Into this quiet and empty lane cruised a long black limosine.

The Queen wore a charming gown, somewhat formal, in a robins-egg blue, and a small hat with half-veil. Sitting inside with the light turned on, so that we could see her waving to all of us. Very considerate. She was using the official Queeny-wave, where the hand, held upright, rotates from side to side at the wrist. All lined up, we waved back the same way.

Oh, us Network OPs had a fine view! Then she was gone.

According to our advanced scout, the President was cruising about five minutes behind. But phones got very busy just then, and several OPs had to go take calls. In fact, I was the only one at the window when the President’s Limo came gliding down the road, with six Secret Servicemen somehow standing on the outside of the car.

I threw the narrow window open, grabbed the sill, and leaned far out into the evening, to shoot the bird at the President. Four of the Secret Servicemen jumped, and grabbed for their guns.

However, they did not shoot me, and in a moment the President was out of bird range. I didn’t feel nearly as elated as I thought I would; Instead, I felt like a stupid smartass.

The Synthesizer

by // 4 Comments

Tickling them Ivories

East L.A. 1969: I lived in a house with roommates, one of which was a jazz musician named LaMont Johnson.

One night I had a peculiar dream: I was a musician in a space-age society, and gave a concert for a small auditorium of people, playing music by moving my hands inside a square ‘grid’. The music must have been really good, because both myself and the audience just got caught up and we were all getting higher and higher and higher.

And somehow, we never came back. We just dropped those bodies. I woke up thinking I’d either been a stupendous musician or maybe an unusual mass murderer.

Over breakfast, I told my roommates about my peculiar dream. And LaMont said, “Such a thing exists. It’s called a syn-the-sizer, and I know a guy who has one.” We stared in amaze. He continued, “Would you like to go see it?”

Two nights later we drove to an industrial area. In East Los Angeles we found a warehouse filled with strange machines all covered over with cloth.

In a small side room I met Paul Beaver, who, along with a teen-age keyboardist, was making one of the earliest US electronic records, later to be called ‘The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music.’

Mr. Beaver and his keyboardist had Moog Synthesizer #2, looking for all the world like a row of suitcases filled with knobs and colored patch cords going from one to another. In the middle of the room, like a miniature refrigerator, was an Ampex tape deck. Beaver would write the arrangement and program the synth. The keyboardist would play the line, and they’d record the track. Line by line, instrument by instrument. It just knocked my socks off.

And that was that, until 1981.

Married and operating Network Answering Service in San Francisco, one day I went to the West Coast Computer Faire, and there I heard the strangest and most beautiful sound. It was faint through the hubbub, but I tracked it to a booth where a guy was demonstrating software which was played a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. I decided to learn to make that beautiful sound.

I told my wife that I was going to get a DX7, and she said, “That’s odd.”

Because one of our answering service clients had a message up about a DX7 for sale. We had served this musician for years; he wrote commercials in an office at Ghirardelli Square. I called him. Although I’d taken his calls for years, we’d never met. He lived in a gorgeous house beside one of the parks.

As I was sitting at his dining room table, writing his name onto a check, I suddenly got the impression I’d heard his name once long ago. His name was Bernie Krause. Flash! I asked him, “Years ago, were you a teen-age keyboardist with Paul Beaver in a warehouse in Los Angeles?”

Yup.

The Canyon

by // 1 Comment

Henrietta, Texas, 1952-1957: To the northwest of town, the homes came to a sudden stop, at the Canyon. We boys called it the Canyon, but our town being built on Texas rolling hills, it wasn’t exceptionally magnificent. Except to us, of course.

A stream or creek emerged from the rock, and fell twenty feet into a small pool, in which lived a legendary large fish. From the pool, when there was rain, the outbound creek trickled and cut through a wide and expanding sandy basin.

To either side, the long arms of rocky shelf stretched, reaching down to meet the plain, and beyond, a hazard of tumbled woods, open plains, and a great and empty distance.

For us boys, this was Heaven.

For one thing, no grown-ups. For another, the mind could range free, because a quarter-hour hike took you beyond civilization. That is, beyond houses, roads, telephone poles. It was wild country, and roaming free in the Canyon, we were wild creatures.

With my gang of friends, on a long Saturday hike, eventually we became lost. We’d found some burrows near the bank of a winding stream. We’d crawled into these burrows, and back out again. We’d followed a blue racer, a dark-colored snake capable of great speed upon the grasslands. It ran from us and finally glided up into an ancient mesquite tree.

We’d walked through a wood, never seen before or since. When the sun was high overhead, we became disoriented. Opinion differed as to the correct direction. Just like in the horror movies, where the incredibly stupid people decide to split up, we decided to split up.

The reason being that three of us believed that town lay over that way, and the other four were pretty sure that the town lay over in this other direction. As it turned out, both groups made their way back to town. This was just perfect for a Saturday adventure for us boys. We felt like mighty woodsmen.

In early teen years, Bobby M. and I used to head out to the Canyon after school. We were learning to smoke cigarettes. It takes a certain amount of practice. We got pretty good at it.

Then things changed. In Texas, you can get a driver’s license at age 14 1/2, if you take Driver’s Ed. That summer following, Driver’s Ed was a popular class. Most of the mighty woodmen were there, going to school in the summer, because automobiles beckoned.

With licenses, we began importuning parents to drive the family car. Some earned and bought their own. With my parents help, I managed a green 1951 Chevrolet which my mom had traded on a Chrysler. I was very proud of this green car, and managed to get into a wreck soon after, the repairs of which gave me an outstanding two-toned color scheme.

The canyon? Forgotten. Abandoned. In all these years following, I’ve never been back, and I’ll wager the others haven’t either.

But don’t feel bad for the Canyon. All of us had younger brothers. Some of those had brothers younger still. And now, many of the mighty woodmen have sons, and these now grown up with boys of their own. No, the Canyon isn’t lonely.

You can trust boys. They will find the Canyon.

Colorful Easter Time

by // Leave a Comment

Easter has come, arriving on the morrow, and Adrienne has made a vasty project again. Marvellous baskets for grandchildren Jessica, Dameon, and Rhiannon. What has happened to the naming of children in these times?

Jessica, becoming ever a more beautiful teen, should be too old for these baskets, but I guess she likes getting one, too. They’re very, very elaborate. Adrienne shops for weeks or months ahead of time, packing away trinkets, tiny toys, spongy yellow duck confections. Then, confetti and ribbons and cellophane. Frankly, it’s fancier than the VIP Fruit Basket at the Hilton.

 
 

reviews

[wprevpro_usetemplate tid=”1″]