Running out of Suspects: The Big Fire and Love...

(Continued from last time).

First, I must apologize to the 30,000+ people who have visited me over the past year on this blog from 86 countries around the world. I want you to know that I appreciate you checking in from time to time to check in on the History of the World (in the 1960's from the perspective of that little kid in Venice - Markie D - that's me)!

You are important to me and I don't want you to feel like I'm neglecting you (I have been busy with another project unrelated to this and am down to my last chapter and am trying to make the final big push to finish it off - please forgive me as I come back up for a breath of air).

This is part 3 of the big fire... Sadly the majestic old lady at 900 Harding Avenue (pictured to the right) had burned to the ground during a very turbulent time not only in history, but what was also an extremely difficult time for everyone on the short block of Harding Ave in Venice.

Venice Troop 32 managed to spread the Venice contagion around the Western part of the United States - that helped shape the future of Bill Gates. Click here for this unfortunate encounter!

 Man had just landed on the moon. The Vietnam War had escalated... rioting on colleges was practically the norm and my hippie brothers along with many others across the fruited plain had burned draft cards in protest.

Civil Rights and race riots consumed our corporate National psyche.  JFK, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had all been assassinated.

This was a crazy time... "It was the best of times the worst of times."

All of this seem to spill over into our neighborhood. We were wigged out over the senseless murder and still grieving the loss of Bill Lennon Sr. This murder threw our tight-knit neighborhood into a tailspin of mourning, loss, fear and suspicion. The murder of the famous Lennon Sister's dad came at a time that Charles Manson and "The Family" had been out on a cultic killing spree of actress Sharon Tate and the high-profile LaBianca murders that convinced the authorities that "Americas Singing Sweethearts" might be the next target and put the entire clan under a protective detail.


Other than the heightened drama that the PTSD flashback caused by returning vet, Bobby Tripp, and the big fight on the front lawn next door to the blazing inferno - the quick action by Mr. Blaser, my dad and my brothers helped save all the Fraternity Members who had been trapped on the second floor of the house that had been engulfed in flames.

But now, it was time to find out - Who! Who was responsible for the attempted murder of at least a dozen college-aged students and was responsible for the Molotov Cocktail bombing?

I had a list of suspects whom I submitted to the Venice Fire Chief.

Poor Jimmy's nuts were still sore from being impaled on the gear shift lever of his new Schwinn Stingray and wouldn't ride me back over to the fire station. So now I was on my own to interview my top arson suspects.

Though Susie was young (as I mentioned last time), she was a prime suspect "in my book." Her older brother (not Bruce pictured here - to the left ) but her oldest Cameron had something to do with it. He ran the infamous Fraternity House and kept telling his little sister to stay away from his hallowed sanctuary of booze and "frat boys" and loose women.

Finding her sneaking in for the umpteenth time, Cameron had literally booted her off the second story balcony, but the biggest factor had to do with the time he dropped her smack dab on her head (which some say caused irreparable damage to her gray matter) either way - whether, brain damaged or not, she certainly had a motive for payback.    

I looked everything I could find out about how to make a Molotov Cocktail and there wasn't much in the World Book Encyclopedia. After interviewing Susie (I certainly couldn't disprove the rumors of her brain malfunction, but I was totally convinced that a "poor-man's hand-grenade" was definitely above her pay grade) and crossed her off my list of suspects.

Johnny Gillamonster (pictured to the right) could have done it!  He had motive and a technical expertise that was at a much more sophisticated level than Susie's.  He had been the paperboy to the fraternity house and had gotten jacked around so many times when trying to collect his paper-route money that he did indeed plan a diabolical payback. This he admitted!  Ah Ha!  I had him.

However, in my rather extensive investigation I discovered collaboration that backed up his spurious alibi of burying a pile of dog dooh-dooh which he took great pleasure in scoping off the Nargie's lawn and delicately placing the stinky, steaming, gooey pile right between the sports section and the funny pages of the huge Sunday morning edition of the LA Times.

Johnny laugh so hard in his recollection of the story that I figured it must be true and satisfied his felt need for revenge.

One by one - The Saint Mark Nuns, the Daniels, the Dahlins, the Nargies, The Manriquez, the Blasers, the Lennons, even Leeland had all come off my list for one reason or another.

I was stuck with one name - the owner who was my last suspect and the Fire Chief said that I was not allowed to "go down that road."

"Ah ha... I knew it... it was the man on the grassy knoll"  i.e. another conspiracy theory that would never be resolved.

At least I tried!  Now I had to get back to the more important things that consumed the minds of 8th grade boys which was to see if I could get one of the girls in my class to broker a relationship with the one true love of my life - Andrea.

I think the Fire Chief was glad to see that I was in love and had decided to moved on... It kept me out of his hair and restored order to the Venice Fire Station.

I can tell you this...love is not as easy as it looks on TV... especially for a 13 year old in the body of an 11-year-old... that definitely had issues in his gray matter!  

Somebody help the boy!

The Veloci-Raptor Cometh...

My dad used to be called "Daddio" by the brotherhood of the Viking "Wolf-Pack" when we were younger, but now the older guys just referred to him as Mr. D as though he was no longer a parent, but a roommate.  Mr. D moved our old hospital bed upstairs and into my bedroom.  The old rusty thing had smelled like toxic metal ever since it was donated to us, back in 1962 when Puke-Breath had broken his leg into a billion pieces (Okay, 8 to be exact),  That was when my brothers (affectionately known as the Wolf-Pack) climbed over the chain-link fence at Saint Marks school in their escape after breaking into the church vestry and drinking all the communion wine.                                                                                       There they were: 6 or 7 drunken' platinum-haired, midgets trying to pull Puke-Breath out from under 500 feet of schoolyard fence they had managed to knock over. 

YEP, it made the front page of the Evening Outlook (our local newspaper) like many of the other Dahlin Exploits like the "Salton Sea" story (blog 5/13/13) and the time we "Let all the monkeys out of the Zoo" (Blog 4/29/13)

Anyway...that bed ended up being pretty handy and stayed in our dining room for years, because of all the broken bones our daring brood had suffered.  (As you can see to the left we all had special climbing skills - it was like we entered military boot camp as soon as we came shooting out of the womb).

Now with the bed in my room... I felt like I had been banished to recover from the near-fatal accident when I lost the wrestling match with the glass wall at the McElliot's pool.  My mom prayed to Saint Anthony and said it was a miracle that I lived. (If my mom has any hope of being canonized a saint, she said this will be one of the two miracles she needs to qualify. She said the other miracle is living in the same household as the rest of her offspring. My brothers jokingly said her second miracle was giving birth to all of us - overhearing that, my dad piped in and said that the second miracle was that there were no shallow graves in the backyard.  I think what that meant, was that she didn't kill any of us. He felt - that alone was a miracle).  But I think murder might nullify one's candidacy for sainthood, since it broke one of the "Ten Suggestions"  Number 11 was "Thou shalt not electrify a Nun" and we already did that.  The reasons they were called suggestions in our house is that we had already broke most of them.                                                                               

As I lay here in that ancient, squeaky, metal-smelling, hand-crank hospital-bed I took comfort in my dog who loved me unconditionally and all the get well cards from my mom's classroom - 6S.  6 S is the classroom at Saint marks with the 33 kids in the sixth grade on the south-side of the long east-and-west running hallway - that stretches from one end of the school to the other. 

I kind-of wished I had received some cards from Marilyn or Theresa or Julie or John or Andrea or Keith or Ricky or RALPH or any of the other kids in my seventh grade class...but I didn't. So again I say, thanks to mom for her rescue and to the sixth grade class, which she made write all of my get well cards.                                                                       

I'm not going to lie; it wouldn't have been so bad to hear some kind words of sympathy from my brothers like, "Sorry you almost died"  "Sorry your leg was almost cut off" "Sorry you can't walk for a long time" "Sorry for your pain" "Sorry that we didn't stop dancing to the Rolling Stones and come to help" or  "Get well soon, you little dweeb,"  but like that was ever going to happen!  RIGHT?   They were still too mad that dad made them help carry the million-pound bed frame up all those flights of stairs which they blamed on me.

They gave me some Velcro-tipped sponge darts, knowing that when I threw them for the first time at the target, that I'd be stuck in bed all day without being able to retrieve them.  That was their form of sadistic torture...and let me tell you - IT WORKED! My beloved Poochie, wouldn't fetch them and it was like Dante's Inferno - the thing I desired most was just out of reach.

Anyway, the hippy-commies in my household had a big problem. Turns out that other peace-loving, anti-war, free-love hippies kept sneaking into our backyard and stealing sacks-full of carefully trimmed leaves from the my brother's coveted "Mexican Tomato Plants." So much for love and peace and anti-war - how do you spell "OXYMORON?"  Like generals in a war room, they declared war on the other hippies who they now hated and began planning violent counter measures in order to protect their self-interest.  Since the older boys were good at climbing, they devised a plan to steal a great, big, nasty, notorious rooster from drainage ditch near Marina Del Rey.

From the stories I heard, this rooster was 4 feet tall, had 9-inch razor-sharp talons, had one detached eyeball that hung down by its optic nerve to the goiter on its neck and attacked the chain link fence whenever anyone walked by.  I could hear them downstairs plotting about the rendezvous back at "Wall Drug" to smoke some "hooch" (they called it ) and how they intended to send the "little man crew" of Ulrich, Syndrome and Cosmo over the fence of the drainage-ditch/bird-sanctuary at midnight with a burlap sack and a couple lassos.

That was bound to be a great story! 

The time I spent confined in my room felt like purgatory, but between watching cartoons like Ricochet Rabbit and Mighty Mouse it did give me plenty of time to reflect on the world and contemplate the things around me. Things like: will we ever land on the moon....what does love feel like.... and what is going to happen to the "Chicken Lady" if the boys are successful in bringing home the dreaded and feared Veloci-Raptor of Annihilation to protect their precious plants. 



Those stories to come...  in the mean time... know that Mighty Mouse is on the way...

Take comfort in a good dog... tell someone you love them. I think hearing the "L" word is a good thing...
and know even when you don't hear someone say the words you long to hear -  that you are loved and pursued by the Greatest Love in the universe.