Equal and Opposite Reaction: Deadly Missile

I know this isn't the best photo in the world, but the picture above gives you a glimpse of what life was like at my house on just about any day of the week.  
   Chaos and Mayhem! 


On the very left (of the picture above) is one of our tribe members who had been knighted with the nickname, "Pinky." He joined our family when he was about 12 - that's when I was only about 6.  When he was in the 7th grade he followed one of my brothers home from school and just ended up staying - like forever. He had been around ever since I had a memory and so I figured he was part of our tribe, but I could tell there was something different about Pinky from the rest of us. Besides the obvious fact that Pinky had dark hair, he was also was about the size of three of us Dahlins put together.  I don't want to say anything that would hurt anyone's feelings, but the guy was...ummmm...large!  One of my brothers said that "Pinky was so big he could kick-start a 747-Jumbo jet."


All that to say, that Pinky and the usual amount of chaos prominently figure into the death story of McIlliot's Pool which started with something very much like the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when Ulrich launched the nuclear warhead of loogie onto American territory down my throat.

The conflict escalted into a full on nuclear retaliation of my own with a puke counter-launch that sprayed everything in a 20 foot radius. I figure it was probably jsut like something between the United States and the Soviet Union. 

This was all very much  like a Dr. Strangelove - if you know what I mean. 
 
I promise there wasn't much in the pool at all, but everyone made a "such a big deal" about it and climbed out of the water as if they would get Diphtheria or Diarrhea from the nuclear fallout of Fish-Stick particles that floated on the surface of the pool.

 Little babies!

I could see Tommy and Kjersten and Annie fussing, but Ralph was a 12-year-old with a mustache. He acted like the biggest baby of them all.
 
I might also be over-reacting, because it hurt my feelings that Ulrich had launch a precision laser-guided warhead of mass destruction and everyone was mad at me for some reason. I felt that someone should have taken my side and been mad at Ulrich with me, BUT NO!  Now, I'm the bad guy.  All I heard for the next 12 minutes is, "Markie D this and Markie D that... Barf-O-Bits this and Barf-O-Bits that... Oil spill this and Oil spill that...ha ha ha ha!"   "Ha ha yourself... I'm rubber and your glue"

How do you tell a little nine year old girl she just hurt your feelings without sounding like a girl yourself. So I just kept it all in while they watched me clean up the concrete pool deck all by myself.

We had about 50 cents between the 5 of us, so I told them to walk down to the corner liquor store and get some candy they could share, while I finished up the duty commensurate with Catholic guilt and penance.  I scrubbed the vomit off the sidewalk next to the pool, saying a couple "Hail Marys" and several "Our Fathers."




When the victorious troops arrived back... Tommy had already eaten the entire Chick-O-Stick without saving me one bite - Ralph was flaunting his candy cigarettes.. and Kjersten and Annie licked the necklace and candy dots they were sharing - knowing that I wouldn't want any.

( I wonder who thought of that one? Candy Cigarettes for kids!) 

Anyway, I figured that I would have the last laugh.

The filter had been running and the pool was clean, but no one in our rambunctious outfit was too interested in jumping into the cool water.

It became one of those games where... we challenged each other to dive in, but that didn't work. Then we tried the game where we could try to fake each other out... "Okay everyone, let's all go in on the count of three. Okay ready, One...Two...Three" we shouted in unison as Ralph and I get an Academy Award for pretending to jump while Kjersten and Annie leapt fool-hardheartedly into the deep end. Tommy didn't fall for it and the three of us boys laughed at the gullible girls.

It felt good for a change to be on the laughing end of something. Still demanding justice and a little hurt, I pushed in Tommy and then Ralph into the water.

I was King of the Universe... at least king of the McElliot pool universe standing all by myself as if I had just won another Olympic Gold Medal in the "king of the hill" competition.  It felt good for about 8 seconds and then it felt like a pretty empty victory after that.

Hang on I'm getting to the "Rat Killer" and to Joan and to the phone call and to the chaos and to the "Pinky" part!

Ralph ended up furious... more than any 12-year-old kid should be - for being pushed into a pool. My goodness, I was going to join him in a second, but he freaked out! He can after me with fire in his eyes that the cold water couldn't put out.

Around and around and around and around we ran. He just wouldn't give up!  He was the oldest boy in his family and had a bunch of older sisters. Maybe he felt like a neutered alpha-male at home and had something to do with his ridiculous rage. This thing was never going to end and I knew that he was never going to catch me! Didn't he know that I spend the greater part of my life running from brothers - EVERY SINGLE DAY?  Doesn't he know that I have learned to fight like a junk yard dog?  Doesn't he remember the infamous "Sour-Dough Toast Fight" of 1966 (blog post 6/29/13). 

There was just no way he was going to win, but I guess wounded pride and ego is a psychological force to be reckoned with. Although he was never going to catch me, I could tell he had no intention of giving up. I needed to offer him a sense of victory to settle things in his mind- the poor fella.  I shifted directions and dodged him for like the umpteenth billionth time, but this time I pretended to not to see him coming the other way and gave myself to him as a ransom.

He was so smug and so happy... but it wasn't real and now I felt guilty (either that or my own sense of evil pride kicked in)!  Kids have weird wiring, right?  I thought "You know what Markie D.. I'll let him push me in, but he'll have to earn it first." I pulled away easily the first time just to show that I may be small, but was a force myself to be reckoned with.  Yawn.. I let him grab me again...and was too squirrely for him to push me into the pool - there was just no way. If I was going to go in just to make him happy then he would have to pull me into the pool. The way I looked at it, if I had to go in, then both of us were going!

He turned and with feet planted on the edge of the pool, he leaned out over the water with the 50 pounds of extra weight he had on me...but I was Markie D!  I thought, "You know what...I'll show him one last time who is boss of this situation." I dug deep into the reservoir of my superhuman adrenaline strength (The kind a mother gets when she lifts up a car to save her baby), and made the decision to break his grip one more time!

My plan was to slip out of his grip,watch him fly backwards into the pool and then join him in the water by swan diving like one of those Acapulco Cliff divers. I wrote myself  to be the hero of this plot.

The only thing I failed to consider - was the fact that as he pulled me into the pool... I was pulling in the opposite direction - directly towards the glass wall of the adjacent pool room.

Do you know that thing about Sir Issac Newton's Third Law of physics, about how every action has an equal and opposite reaction?  Sister Edith said this was very important to space flight and I found out the hard way just how true this really was.

When Ralph took flight and shot backwards into the pool, it also sent me with the equal amount of force in the opposite direction.

Well, the second I left the launching pad with that much force and flying towards that stationary glass wall I knew I was in trouble

"Have you ever noticed sometimes that when you win - you lose"
                                                                                  Markie D

I Should Have Stopped at Three Laps

Thank you, to all who are tracking with my Blog and I want to welcome the people from the last 10 countries to my story!

Welcome: Nepal, Lithuania, Saudi Arabia, Czech Republic, Belarus, Colombia, Cambodia, Ecuador, China and Thailand!  

Captains Log: Star Date October 12th 1968.  It is two days after Detroit Tigers won the World series and the morning after the very first telecast from outer-space - that was really cool!

A lot had been happening on our street over the past couple of years. One of the significant developments is that the older Lennon boys down the street had gotten bitten by the "Long-Haired-Hippy-Bug." This infection must explain they reason they were migrating towards our house and I also think those "Mexican Tomato Plants" had something to do with it. That was like the proverbial "crack in the dike" which was followed by the flood waters of defection of Lennons down to and including the youngest girl - Annie. Annie was just around 9-years-old at this time and I can assure you that she had nothing to so with those skunk-smelling plants hidden in our backyard. Innocently, she just followed Karin to the black-hole of chaos at our house.

Chewbacca...no longer had his lunch breaks at the same time Karin, Annie and I ventured off the Saint Mark's campus for lunch everyday at our house. Though subjected to whatever mess, whatever creatures were loose and running around (maybe an escaping rattlesnake or something tame like guinea pigs, or something disgusting like Chewbacca's house-guest, a gross pigeon with a parasite that lived on top of the refrigerator! Did I already say "gross!"? GROSS!) At least Annie was safe from Chewbacca's cruel "Template of Torture" Chewbacca and the Terrible Templates). So, Annie was on today's short list of those invited to go and swim at the McElliot's built-in pool!


In the last year, Ralph had replaced "Gherhing the Great" as my new "Bestest" friend at Saint Marks. My buddy Gherhing had turned a corner. He came to school a month ago in what he affectionately called his black pointed "Beaner-Shoes," I didn't like that word very much, but he said the hard pointed tips were really good for getting into fights with. He talked about all the race fights that were taking place over at Mark Twain Jr. High School and how he couldn't wait to get involved. (No sir,  not me - I didn't feel like I wanted to invite any more conflict into my world than I was already dealing with at home so the two of us began to drift apart).

Ralph, like most of the other guys in the 7th grade, was about a head taller than me and had hair on his lip already like Ricky Arredondo. The nuns at Saint Mark's grammar school weren't too keen on Ricky's mustache and brought his parents in for a conference and told them they had to make Ricky shave it off.  The rumor around school was that either Ricky or his dad told Sister Superior that Ricky would shave off his mustache "When Sister ChaCha shaved hers." That was the latest rumor that made all of us kids laugh and will likely turn into a trend in the future like - "No Shave November!" or something like that.  

On the list with Annie and Ralph was Tommy from next door. It happened to be a Saturday that Tommy wasn't grounded. Tommy's mom, Mrs. Blaser, didn't particularly like the idea that our pool had always been green and mosquito infested, which she feared would spread the contagion of all the "A" ending words: Diphtheria; Malaria, Diarrhea and Ebola! (I think the reason my parents actually wanted us to eat that moldy, old sourdough bread was for antibiotic medicinal properties in fuzzy green penicillin. "Pshaw" - the Blasers might be susceptible to those diseases, but none of us Dahlins were ever going to get Diphtheria or Ebola because of all the moldy bread we had to eat).   

Anyway, Ulrich (against his will) was commissioned to walk us over to the McElliot's pool, which was just past Ricky's house - down Zanja a couple blocks and close to Venice high school. Ulrich was 15 and had his reputation to consider. Begrudgingly, he led us down the alley route, so that no one would see him with a bunch of little kids like us. It was a scary time and his job was to get us there safely, but we have to be extremely quiet and very careful "not to act like little kids" - he said. (I think it was because he "woke up on the wrong side of the bed" again).

Though we were in the middle of an October "heat wave" the water could have been warmer. Surprisingly, Ulrich stuck around longer than he needed to. After we changed into our swim suits he made sure to baptize us by throwing all of us into the unwelcoming temperatures of the pool water. Even more odd, was the fact that he even encouraged us in a game of "how many laps under water."  Pshaw - This was cake. It was me against three 9-year-olds and Ralph...and I was practically a fish. First Annie, then Tommy, then Kjersten, then Ralph! Kjersten nearly did two full laps. Driven by ego, Ralph made it all the way to two laps, just to prove he could beat a 9-year-old girl. (It nearly killed him though so I was glad that an older person like Ulrich was there, just in case one of the other kids drowned or something. I knew that if Tommy Blaser or Annie Lennon had drowned that neither mother would have liked that very much).

 Then it was my turn!  I had to beat my little sister and I HAD to beat Ralph.

One lap
Two laps...
...on my way to Three laps!  Ulrich had done three laps one time... if I could just touch the wall and turn back the other direction I would beat his record.  

I was already out of breath and should have stopped there...but I had prove myself and kept going. My stomach convulsed against me as if in rebellion, but I was determined to press on and win - as though this was something that really mattered.

For me it was like the Gold Medal of the Mexican Olympics was at stake...

At the Olympics this past summer was a 18-year-old hot shot by the name of Mark Spitz who had already won 10 world records. Mark Spitz had won 2 Gold Medals at the Olympics... and I WAS MARK SPITZ!

Four laps...I was making it... It might kill me but I was doing it. FOUR LAPS!  I'm sure it was Lennon record... a Blaser record... Dahlin record... a Venice record and quite possibly a WORLD RECORD! If I were to drown there was an older kid to rescue me - so I had nothing to lose.

Completely out of air, I was barely able to touch the end of the pool but somehow managed to make it all four laps when I shot up from the deep end...like a submarine -kaboom! Urgently surfacing from the depths of the deep I emerged with my mouth opened wide - gasping - and desperately sucking in volumes of air!  That is when heart sank - realizing the terror that awaited me.  Instead of the accolades of the crowds and the cheers of adoring fans; instead of a pat on the back and words of congratulations from my friends (which had motivated me to pursue this dangerous task) I received nothing of the kind. Instead, i was welcomed with the terrifying epiphany of knowing this whole thing had been a diabolical plot just like the time I was betrayed by Dooh-Dooh Pants with the insidious "Hamper of Death" scheme  Betrayal and Hamper of Death. In this case it was Ulrich. He was crouched in the hopeful anticipation of this exact moment in time - running from one end of the pool to the other with each lap waiting for me to emerge. Like an cunning animal of prey that had been patiently waiting for the timing to make his attack.

Bent low to the water's surface...Ulrich inhaled mucus through his nose cavity and with precision, launched the largest, greenest, thickest loogie ever recorded in the history of mankind - right down the center of my mouth - NO... right down the center of my throat - striking my uvula on the way down.

All the contents of his nasal passages ended up with all the contents of everything that was gurgling in my stomach. I was not Mark Spitz... He was Ulrich spits.  My gold medal was a loogie the size of The Beatles Yellow Submarine"      WHICH TRIGGERED MY....

Superpowers!

Vomit!  Hello?  I tried my best to direct the blast of steamy plasma on to Urich, but unfortunately I missed. He was no dummy and knew that it was coming and the second he launched his lethal warhead he had quickly retreated in order to avoid the gooey retribution. The warm confetti of Friday Fish Sticks (Catholics and Fish Sticks ) and the meal-worm laden oatmeal (that's a Dahlin thing) made quite a mess on the pool deck changed the complexity of our morning!

This was only the "Tip of the Iceberg." The five of us were alone and none of us were equipped to handle the tragic bloody episode that was about to happen next.

"If you think you're going to die, pray, 'Oh dear God, I love you and am sorry for my sins'" 

                                                  Sister Edith Mary

                                                                                           (My 7th grade teacher at Saint Marks)

     

                                         

    

My Apologies...and Arrested Developement!

Everyone I apologize...for leaving you on the cliff hanger.




I've been running crazy and am working on making another Video for this blog, which I am shooting in the morning. I will be telling the "LA Zoo" story in front of a live audience. This is the story where my family managed to let all the monkeys out.    Blog Post 4/29/13  








Oh, and I guess it is better to be telling the zoo story in front of a live audience instead of a dead one! Right?

As soon as I come back tomorrow, I will continue the story of the tragic and horrible accident that happened at the McIlliot's pool.





It involves an older brother, my younger sister and the baby Lennon girl  - Annie. She is pictured to the right circled in red. Of course she's not that young...she's my baby sister's age, who is 9 at the time of terrible tragedy that took place at the McIlliot's pool.  Trust me - the tragedy is not the horrible trick that my coarse older brother pulled to make me vomit... NO! It was simple tom-foolery that involved slippery, wet bodies and a large glass wall just adjacent to the pool.

By this time in 1968 a couple of the Lennon boys had begun to migrate off the Lennon family compound and had dared venture into the Dahlin backyard...with the snakes, the alligator, the snapping turtles, the chicken-eating giant bull frog, and the dreaded Veloci-Raptor - attack rooster. 

Those Mexican tomato plants must have some powerful magic to get the hippies to fend off the rooster for their horticulture project.

I don't know why it was... but Annie began to come home with Kjersten for lunch - TO OUR HOUSE!
It just didn't make any sense! After all those years of parents being Hüber-protective...now either they didn't know about this or Annie just threw all caution to the wind and passed by her own house (that I'm sure had real food) and joined me and Kjersten at our house for lunch where we would have to scrape the moldy penicillin off our Pioneer sour-dough bread.   I thought I would throw in "Hey Jude" for the sound of 1968.

 Hey Jude by The Beatles

  
Annie and Kjersten were friends and tomorrow she would join me, Tommy, Urich and Ralph for the fateful day at McIlliot's pool.

Mark Twain said, "Familiarity breeds contempt - and children."  

and let me tell ya... between us and the Lennons we had a lot of kids on Harding Ave and at our house a lot of "arrested development".


 

God Bless You - More tomorrow!



 

The Final Death Blow

This next blog entry is part one of the most tragic events in the Dahlin household. It is an event that happened in the "Indian Summer" heat wave of October 1968 two days after the World Series (Baseball Championship playoffs). 

The Dodgers stank that year, but with my Dad's relatives in Detroit, we at least had someone to root for during the series.

One of Detroit's pitchers, Lenny McLain, had won 30 games which hasn't happened since 1934...that was a big deal, but other than Detroit winning the World Series coming back from a  3 to 1 deficit and putting out an abundance of awesome "muscle cars" the world just seemed to be falling apart at the seams.



President Johnson hadn't had much to laugh about with everything that was going on and had decided not to run for re-election... which might be the reason he pulled his Presidential Motorcade over to the side of the road and figured he would harass the skinny-dipping Dahlin boys in the "Snapping Turtle" incident a month ago (Blog Post 9/14/2013). I guess the poor fella just needed a good laugh!

In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis Tennessee and "Race Riots" had erupted just about everywhere. I'd have to admit that it was pretty scary. After all, Watts wasn't too awfully far from us and I was worried about Irene - who lived out in that area (Blog 7/15/2013). 

AS A SIDE BAR: I am pround to say that in a little known fact, my Aunt Mary (Sister Mary Leoline) after the1963 "Red Ant" incident in Detroit where she and fellow nuns had to pick fire ants off my brother's naked boy parts (Blog Post 10/26/13) she was sent to Kansas for inner-city social work. From there, she and 5 other nuns answered the urging of Martin Luther King Jr. and flew to Selma to march with him. The Catholic Sisters lent ecumenical credibility to the "Selma March" that tilted the momentum of the Civil Rights Movements in public opinion.  For Dr. Martin Luther King the presence of the visiting nuns in the Selma demonstrations “had a special significance because the public knows a nun to be a woman of great sacrifice and dedication." (That totally sums up my Aunt).

My aunt Mary was the only nun to march the entire 50 miles, she managed to single-handedly stop a covert plan by Sheriff Clark to create a disturbance in order to put an end to the march and later testified before the House of Representatives on behalf of the participants.

Meanwhile, three of my hippy brothers had burned their draft cards...and two went into the service.

People were angry and Anti-War protest were everywhere...Columbia University had been taken over and shut down.

Robert F. Kennedy is shot by Sirhan Sirhan and died a day later on June 6th.

Need I go on?  Do I have to mention the thing that happened in Chicago during the Democratic National convention in August with the police and anti-protesters - let's just say it wasn't pretty!






It's a crazy world to be a 12-year-old! With everything going on in the world, a kid just wanted to find a little peace and safety in his own home, but my house seemed just as crazy. I just wanted my parents to be parents, but they checked out and left me and my little sister to fend for ourselves.  I was afraid of escaping rattlesnakes, of ill-timed baths and crocodile discoveries, big brothers, baby-pooh hampers, ropes, arrows, cliffs, cars, pits, BB guns, and ghosts. Little did I know that my days were indeed numbered.

We hadn't landed on the moon yet, but on Friday night, Oct 11th (the night after the conclusion of the World Series), we got to watch the first manned Apollo mission in the first telecast from outer space. That was groovy, a bit a good news in a chaotic world for a little dreamer like me and tomorrow was destined to be even better (at least that's what I thought). It was hot and I had a trip planned to the McElliott's pool since our pool had been transfromed into a happy hippy reptile habitat. "Pyschedelic man!"

Stay tuned: The gruesome and bloody details to follow.

When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop--that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can.
                                                                                              The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Reptile Dysfunction

So the liner of the old "above-ground" pool had been removed and my hippy brothers were determined to make use of the 4 foot metal enclosure for a pond and reptile habitat.

I had just turned 12 and was used to cleaning up the mess left behind from car parts and junk scattered throughout the universe of my disorderly home. (There is something about the 2nd law of Thermodynamics and Entropy Increase...that Irene, our once-a-week house keeper, and I worked very hard to push against constantly).

Trying hard to contain the mess was part of my nature, but the need for order or hard work just didn't seem to be on the cosmic menu for the herbal loving - easy going, carefree lifestyle of Haight-Ashbury influenced children of the 60's.

To see all the "long-hairs" out in the backyard with shovels in hand and sweat on the brow was quite the enigma and a demonstration of the commitment they had to this "pond" project of theirs.

Another paradox was the unusual care and attention to these particular plants that they were cultivating out in the very far reaches of the backyard.  To walk over clutter and and pay no attention to the disastrous disorder of our  house was more inline with their blithe character than was care, concern and cleanliness or anything that hinted of a modicum of elbow grease. So shocking was the paradox of this new found work ethic, that my Dad had to ask about this meticulously attended garden which had been deliberately hidden behind stacks of decaying Saint Mark's carnival booths (stored for centuries in our backyard).

"Mexican Tomato Plants," they told my dad!
 My dad raised a suspicious eye-brow and walked
 away.

I was curious as to why these beloved "tomato plants" got so much attention - especially since the dumb things never grew tomatoes.     What's up with that?    

Not only did my older boys water, weed and meticulously prune the leaves, but they also imported a 3 foot, mutant, wild eye'd, attack-rooter with 4 inch razor sharp spurs to guard the cursed plants.

Life use to be good for an imaginative kid in that great big 'O backyard of ours, but now it was a nightmare with that Veloci-Rapter of an guard-rooster hunting down and attacking anything that came near those precious plants.  

My dad always seem frustrated that the older boys just didn't seem to care much about anything having to do with keeping the place clean, so I did the best I could to try to please him. 

Only problem was that I think it made them mad and is probably why they tied me up and buried me and shoved me in that hamper of death...(blog 6/5/13) and maybe even kept their mouth shout when my parents left me behind at Salton Sea (blog 5/27/13). .

Anyway, the pond was near completion and at twelve I was up to taking a shower about once a week- whether I needed to or not. Today, however, no one was home and I felt that it was safe to take a bath. Usually that wasn't a good idea, because there was no handle on the door to the bathroom with the bathtub near my parent's room. You never knew who would walk in or what kind of torture they might put you through - like throwing hot or cold water on you or bring friends in to look at you naked.

None of that was fun!

I hadn't been in the bathtub in months and thought I'd give it a try. I turned on the water and let it run while I stripped down. I slightly pulled back the shower curtain and stuck one foot in the bathtub...
             ...do you remember the scene from the horror flick, "Psycho" - in the shower scene with the crazy-scary music?    Well, this was like that!

 Insert music from your head here...

No one was home and our house was scary enough.  I told you before that it was haunted by ghost or demons or other-world stuff that wasn't too good for a person my age. And so it was easy to be a bit jumpy...and afraid of noises and things that go bump in the night. So as I stuck my foot into the tub and was looking at the faucet to adjust the water temperature... something splashed inside the tub and grabbed a hold of my ankle. Okay this is the point where - if I wasn't just a kid - I probably would have had a heart attack and died. Something was alive in the tub. A dead corpse - maybe, that had come to life...and this thing (what-ever-it-was - began furiously flailing - the Creature from the Black Lagoon...a monster- LEVIATHAN!

I slipped and fell head-long on top of the cold creature and was eyeball to eyeball with death itself.


I stared into the eerie slit pupil of the alligator my brothers had been secretly storing in the tub awaiting the completion of the pond project.

I don't know who was more scared me or the alligator?  It opened it's mouth in fright.. I screamed and think the Lennons down the street could hear the shriek of my death cry. 

Both of us splashed helplessly flinging water out of the tub as the curtain tore off bar and fell over the top of our two naked bodies. The young cayman had razor sharp teeth, but somehow I managed to free myself without incurring a single wound and ran from the room dripping wet.

One flight of stairs... two flights of stairs.. down I ran.  Scared, wet, I ran down past the foul mouthed mynah bird into a oncoming gaggle of my sisters and her friends just entering in through the front door..

Scared, dripping wet and...oh yeah - NAKED!

Yeah, like they believed me that I just survived an alligator attack! 

That might be "TMI" (Too Much Information) so please just accept it, but don't feel you have to visualize it... I'm still traumatized by this memory - hopefully you won't have to be.

Just for clarity - it wasn't the alligator attack that I was traumatized by... it was the mocking of my sister and her friends who stood there and stared and pointed and laughed at me.

Hey,  it was cold by the time I got down stairs!

That wasn't a lot of fun. What I discovered is that girls can be just as mean as the Wolf Pack.

"An idyllic childhood is probably an illusion."
                              - Martha Grimes

Next time - the fatal accident!

The Shocking Discovery of 1968

 











We were back in 1968 before I began sharing flashbacks to the disastrous Kings River near-murder rescue in 1962 (Blog post 10/8/2013)...








...and the 1963 "Fire Ant" episode in Detroit with the naked teenager and a bunch of too helpful and too giddy nuns (blog post 10/26/2013)...







....and the Halloween video
where I tell the story of John The Baptist and his Identity Crisis i.e Wolf-Boy (blog post 10/28/2013) in front of a live audience,










It was October 1968 and I was in 7th grade (wearing Keith Bjelajac's sweater, my mom brought home from the lost and found - how embarrassing! But I had a sweater to wear for picture day, so I was happy with my Dad's sugar-water concoction that held my hair firmly in place.)   


Reminding you again where we had been:




This past summer while on our way across country to visit relatives, I had already described the unbelievable incident where the President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, detoured his Presidential motorcade under an overpass and orchestrated what could the funniest thing an American President has ever done in the history of this country. Stepping away from his secret service protection he pulled a prank of epic proportions by warning me and my big brothers about the hungry snapping turtles in the dirty river we were presently skinny dipping in(blog post 9/14/2013).
 
Anyway, on the way home on this trip we had visited Mount Rushmore, Reptile Gardens and the famous Wall Drug Store of South Dakota.

It was there that my hippy brothers bought a Wall Drug sign to hang on the ivy in the far reaches of our Venice backyard to designate the hippy man-cave.

Again the year was 1968, and it wouldn't take rocket science or a huge stretch of the imagination to figure out what was happening when the hippies convened in the dark hollow of the ivy grotto behind the infamous pool of electrocutions. 

By this time, the above-ground pool was far too green for chlorine redemption so the liner was torn out and the 4-foot-metal-sided enclosure was now the boarder for our new reptile habitat and Amazon rain forest pond - complete with cayman (caiman) alligator!

Lucky me... when I discovered the the sharped-toothed crocodile, while the habitat was under construction.

Okay... so it really wasn't lucky me when I discovered the big secret the older boys were keeping hidden from my parents.

Tune in next time for the this shocking discovery... along with the "Mexican Tomato Plants" and the mutant giant Veloci-Rooster imported from hades.

oh and JUST FOR FUN...

Can you guess where I discovered the temporary accommodations of this prehistoric crocodile? 

Please post your guess in the comments below! Let's see who can get close to guessing - not just where I accidentally encountered the ferocious beast, but also take a stab at describing the circumstances of this frightening discovery - and remember this is a "Dahlin event" so please feel free to use your imagination.  
 
until next time...  vet att du är älskad!

and remember "Never insult an alligator until after you have crossed the river"
                                                                                                      Cordell Hull 

 

RIP Bruce Grant - Iconic Harding Ave Surfer

 Today I take a break from the usual funny stuff to say goodbye to a friend and Harding Avenue "Surfer"

Bruce, or as we called him "Booty," is seen above in our front yard along with Pat Lennon (from the Famous Lennons across the street).  This is not just a classic picture of Bruce, but also a microscopic view of our front yard on Harding Ave.  To the Right behind the plywood is a green MG sports car - center behind the plywood is a 15 foot boat with a 1959 Johnson 35 horsepower motor that holds 4 comfortably that nearly sank when overcrowded with about 12 Harding-ites aboard in an unexpected storm at Salton Sea... Left far edge of the picture is the front of a 16 foot sailboat with mast pointing towards Pat's head. This is just to give you an idea of the ever evolving look of our front yard. 

In the mid-60's an old couple drove down the street one time with a celebrity map looking for the Famous Lennon Sister's house and slowed when they came to my house. The older lady looked at my house, saw all the long haired hippies...all the cars... all the boats... nervously calling me over as if I were diseased, she ask if this was a hippy commune!

I said, "No mam, this is my house."
"Well, is there anyone in charge."  She said from behind the window as if they might turn into hippies at the next full moon.
I said "No mam, the only one in charge of this place is the rooster out back." 

The tourists from the Midwest pealed off and eventually slowed in front of the Lennon's house.

Anyway...

Bruce has become a revered name among surfers as a world-class board-shaper.  To the right is a picture of one of his large boards on a dock in Marina Del Rey.




  
To the Grants, my condolences and to Bruce - you
           will be be missed by all of us in VENICE.

   good bye

      ha det

         Hej då

          au revoir

            До свидания

              adios

                枝节，小事，附属事物。

                    Wiedersehen!