Murder On The Humboldt Express

Spring 1970: By the time school began the older boys had been cured of leprosy. The red rash, the puss, the swelling, the boils and the pain had all subsided and they returned to the normal course of Hippie Life on Harding Avenue. In the meantime, my first day at Saint Monica's proved to be the 4th most embarrassing day of my my life (more about that later).

Karl had bought a new boat... well, new to us (pictured below).

It didn't have a motor yet, but it was fiberglass over wood -  though it was something from the early 1960's we felt like we were uptown Santa Monica or Beverly Hills... Beverly Hill Billies that is.  It needed a new interior - on second thought it needed a new everything.

But it was better than the old leaky-wood boat (which I loathed for good reasons and called a "controlled sinking"... pictured to the left). The old boat was under the palm tree in the front yard... next to the 16 foot sailboat and the 12 foot racing sailboat.


We had to make room for Karl's newest thing and had to shuffle around Mario's Borg-Warner, Karl's Morris-Minor and Erick's green MG (slightly pictured above) to make room for the new addition




We moved the scout bus to the driveway since we cleared space by sending the 16 foot travel-trailer up north to a remote place in the thick forest of Humboldt county with Kurt and Mario.

The "Salton Sea Flyer" had now become the "Humboldt Express."

Kurt and his good 'O Saint Monica's water polo chum, Mario, decided that dorm life had been too tame and cost too much money and had been too lame for the burgeoning hippies in their second year at Humboldt.

They thought the humble trailer was not just their ticket for living off campus, but also allowed them to live for FREE!

Besides... with all of the horticulture success in our backyard in Venice... a couple of free spirited entrepreneurs could grow all kinds of stuff in that heavily forested tundra...stuff that might have been frown on by Humboldt State University... Never-the-less this living arrangement could provide a little extra income for a pair of starving students.







The running joke in Venice was, "Would they be able to survive in such close quarters - since they both had deadly gas."  12 feet by six feet by six feet is only 432 cubit square feet of oxygen - easily burned up in a single explosion of flatulence.

Dad laughed and told them not to fart in the presence of lit pilot light...

We made fun of the two of them thinking that one of them just might not make it back alive... Little did we realize how ominous our thinking was that set the stage for murder.


YOU HEARD ME RIGHT.    MURDER!
Does this stuff ever happen to a Lennon or a Blaser? Not really... it could only happen to a Dahlin.

We got the phone call from a detective of the Arcata police...saying that Kurt was being held for questioning regarding a murder that involved his trailer that had been hidden deep in the woods.

Tune in next time: Whose bloody hand-print was on the door?  Where was the body? And will Kurt get sentenced to LIFE?