A Letter I Received

Hi Cindy, I was over at the High School Class of 1963 site and saw the notice you posted that Bill had passed. I'm so sorry for you and your family and also for me as I was looking forward to seeing him at the 50 year reunion. My name is Daniel and I grew up with Bill, we were good buddies in elementary school/junior high and friends in high school. I really liked Bill and as kids we played a lot together. He was definitely one of the "coolest" kids in school and of course looking like Ricky Nelson certainly didn't hurt the attention girls gave him! When I told my wife (also a Cindy) about his passing, I had to explain who he was, and started telling her stories about us. I thought maybe you'd like to hear a couple of them. One is the "great adventure" we had when we were around 11-12. The other happened a few years later. Maybe I should start by telling you a little about growing up in our town in case you aren't from the area or Bill didn't tell you. People make jokes about the "perfect" families and strife-free life of the 1950s television shows like "Ozzie and Harriet" (the Nelson family) and "Leave It To Beaver." But for me and most of the kids I grew up with, that's pretty much the way it was...well, maybe not quite so perfect or strife-free, but it was a great era in which to grow up. Dads worked, moms stayed home and the kids, like me and Bill, roamed and played until darkness signaled it was time to go home. The town was in the citrus growing area. The air was clean (we didn't start to get any smog until around 1960) and the town was surrounded by orange and lemon groves. In the late 1940s the town had a population of a few thousand which had increased to over 10,000 by the time I left home in the mid-1960s. It was a college town having, in the early 1950s at least three private colleges. It was a safe (people left their doors unlocked), educated, affluent town of mainly professional people, middle-class businessmen (who commuted to downtown) and college professors. There were no liquor stores or bars allowed in town (I suppose because of the colleges) and no overnight parking on the streets. Almost everyone had a mom and dad. Although I knew a kid who's father had been killed in WWII, I only knew of one who came from a divorced (single parent) home, and I thought that very odd and felt sorry for him. We kids spent our time building forts and playing "cowboys & Indians" or "Army" in the orange groves, playing pick-up baseball games at the park, roller-skating around town or riding our bikes to the foothills to shoot at birds with our BB guns. The wonderful thing about the area is that living here is a year around outdoor experience. So as kids, we were rarely forced to stay inside...and we rarely were. In the 1950s the uniform of the day was a striped T-shirt, a pair of blue-jeans (usually patched at the knees), a pair of Buster Brown leather shoes or canvas sneakers and we were off for the day. If we couldn't find someone else's mother to feed us at lunch (which was unlikely), we might drop by the house for a sandwich and then off again until dinner. Or, if we were going off on an "expedition" we'd have Mom pack us a sandwich. As kids, our free time wasn't regimented into courses of activities by our parents as happens today. We basically entertained ourselves and found things to do, I never remember being bored. Of course during the school year we were confined from 8am to 3pm, after which we'd pedal our bikes home, announce that we were going to play with some friend and were off. Homework was done and inspected in the evening before we listened to the radio or watched our 14" screen television that we got in the early 1950s. I guess there were rich kids in town, but no one in my little play group had money to spare. I remember on hot summer days when Bill and I wanted a nice cold Coke (.10 cents + .02 cents bottle deposit), we would ride our bikes around town looking for empty bottles to turn in for the deposit money at the Market. Often if we could only turn up 5 bottles (a total of .10 cents) we wouldn't have the deposit money so we would stand at the counter, share drink it there, and leave the bottle! Of course even if we did have .12 cents in our pocket, it was better getting the drink for free! Although I lived my whole life there, I think Bill came into town in the mid-1950s and I met him in 5th grade although he wasn't in my class...that would be 1955-56. He was in my 6th grade class and in many of my classes after that. We became instant friends (what wasn't to like about Bill?) and spent a lot of time together. We lived about two blocks away from each other so he was often over at my house camping out in the back yard (or in my tree house) or I was over at his place. Now for the first story (finally!). I've had a few adventures in my life (including a year in Vietnam as a US Marine), but I've always remembered and smiled about this one. Actually, this was my first "great adventure" and it probably whetted my appetite for future ones. It all started on a very windy day, perfect kite flying weather. We were 11 or 12 and were at Bill's house...it must have been around 1956-57. As boys, we were naturally in competition with each other to see who could get their kite the highest. As I said it was a quite windy day and we were amazed at how quickly our kites ascended. Soon we each had to attach another spool of string and our kites were so high that we could barely see them! It was absolutely the highest we either flown kites and soon we were out of string. As it was beginning to get dark and it was dinner time, we had the choice to either start the laborious chore of reeling them in, or (as Bill suggested) I could sleep over and we could leave them up all night! Choice? There was no choice, of course I'd spend the night. We tied the strings off at the front of his house and checked on them constantly until we were told by his folks to come in and "go to sleep!" When we went to bed that night we had every expectation that the kites would be flying high the next morning and were up early to check on them. "Oh, man!" the strings were limp and lay parallel to each other and at a diagonal from Bill's house, across 8th Street and over the houses on the opposite side. We looked at each other and said in unison, "we gotta follow the strings and find our kites!" Thus began the adventure! Of course we challenged each other to "truly" follow the strings. That meant if they went over a house, we would have to go over the house...I think this was a case of the dreaded "double-dog dare!" We started rolling up the string (after all, it cost .50 cents a spool or 25 empty Coke bottles!) but quickly decided it took too long to do it. Since the strings ran at a diagonal from Bill's house toward downtown, it wasn't a quick journey across two homes per block, a street, and then another two homes if it had run perpendicularly...we had to do at least four houses per block at an angle. True to our word, if there was access to the roof (a wall or trellis) we would go over the house and/or garage. We crossed many yards, scaled many walls/fences and on one instance dropped into a yard with a very ugly and bad tempered bulldog! Bill being thin (I was slightly chubby), was a faster runner than I, and was over the next wall as I approached it with the snarling bulldog in hot pursuit. Obviously involved with my own problem, I didn't hear the "crash" of Bill's landing and having escaped the dog was soon laying beside him on some over-turned trash cans (they were metal in those days and hurt!). A shout of "Hey, you kids...get out of my yard" hurried us along and over the next wall. Part of our route lay through a little community of retired China missionaries. To us kids the average age of the people there seemed to be about 80, but they did drive these cool little three-wheeled Auto-ettes (golf carts) around town. Although us kids were admonished to stay out of the community to let the old missionaries live in peace, we had to go where the strings went. Apparently neither the strings, nor Bill or I, were as respectful to their gardens as we should have been, which evoked several very non-Christian shouts toward us and threats of police involvement! Finally, after what seemed like miles (actually blocks) we found our kites (intertwined) on top of a garage on 6th Street. Taking the Pilgrims' threat to heart, we cut the strings, took our kites and found a big old pepper tree to climb up and hide it until the heat blew over! Our clothes were ripped and dirty and we were bruised and bloody (what else was new?). We sat up there for quite a while and went over every step of the journey. We laughed and laughed and decided that we definitely had to do it again! It was great fun! Bill and I had a lot of great times together growing up in the 1950s/early 1960s in our wonderful little protected town...we had a fairly carefree life compared to many others. Bill did mature faster than I did and by the time we were in high school he was into another group of friends which I guess you could call the "social/dating clique." How could he not be, Bill was so cool and good looking that the girls were always chasing him. I fought growing-up (my wife of 42 years is still wondering when I will do so!) and was in the "arrested-adolescence clique" in high school. Bill and I just kind of drifted apart but were always friends until we graduated in 1963. Then we all made new lives/friends, rarely thinking about the "old days" until now as we have grown old ourselves. I think more about our town and all the great kids I knew, and I am regretful that I waited too long to get in touch with Bill. I hope that he had the great life he deserved. Cindy, if you liked this story, I have at least one other I could write up for you. Let me know. I'd also like to know a little about Bill after he left town (and you of course). Best wishes, Dan S.