Thinking: "I think I'd like to print out a photo of you, Mike."
Mike(on the other side): Don't do that Fred. Just remember me the way I was in the old days."
I thought back upon when I first met my friend Mike in 1958 when I was 10 years old. I was having health problems and had to give up my paper route. Mike was a serious kid like me. Not silly at all, like me. He learned my route fast and asked all the right questions and memorized all the streets and locations and everything I told me. He was a fast and good worker, like me. He was 11 years old and I was 10. He was in the same grade as I but went to a different school until he was 13 and started at Woodrow Wilson Junior High. I started the same day there. My parents moved to another district because Wilson was a better Junior High. It was about half rich kids so there was plenty of money in this district for a good school and good teachers there in Glendale in 1960. I saw Mike there the first day of school and he remembered me teaching him his route. I didn't really know anyone else there at that school but a few acquaintances that had also come from my district before and who had moved like my parents did so they could attend this school. But somehow Mike was solid and less threatening and more quiet like I was. I respected his basic serious nature like mine and I found I trusted Mike immediately and felt less afraid of this new school. As the 7th grade moved forward and I got to know Mike better he was more interested in wood shop and metal shop and building things because he was very mechanical. If there had been an auto shop he would have been there if there was one in junior high as well.
In metal shop he built an aluminum crossbow so both the stock was aluminum as well as the bow part itself. He used a really excellent design. The only trouble was that you had to wear gloves to cock it so it was safe enough to pull the metal bow string back to cock it. We practiced shooting the short arrow shafts into a bail of hay in his back yard. But we were in a city suburb and not out in the country. Eventually a crossbow arrow missed the bale and went through his whole house (all the walls from back to front). Luckily, no one was in there at the time and so no one was killed. We found the arrow sticking in a neighbor's house across the street. Another time we put Drano and aluminum foil in a bottle with I think baking soda and then put a lid on it to watch it explode. (This isn't really safe to do by the way) because you cannot know when or if it will actually explode or not and if it exploded while you are retrieving it while thinking it is a dud it might blind you or injure you. So, once you put it all together and put a lid on it don't walk back up to it. Instead put a carpet over it or something to absorb the explosion if it doesn't occur when you expect.
Later on he first bought a 1953 Mercury 4 door sedan and we rebuilt the automatic transmission together. This was in 1964 when the Beatles were on the cover of Life Magazine likely January of that year. A few months later I bought a blue and white 1956 Ford stationwagon that I nicknamed my "Surf Wagon" to carry our surfboards to the beach and scuba equipment and anything else that needed to be carried mostly to the ocean to surf.
Earlier, Mike had bought a 1951 Ford Convertible that was red. He drove me and my first date( a girl with blonde hair and blue eyes from Alaska) to the Alex Theater in Glendale. When we got out of the car in front of everyone waiting in line for the movie I accidentally kicked and broke his work thermos so I was a little embarrassed by that. Otherwise it was a great date with Gayle at the Alex Theater then in 1963.We used to sometimes put our surfboards straight down under the front seat but since the boards were 10 feet long or more they stuck almost straight up behind the seats with the top down. It was fairly dangerous to do this because of the wind driving 60 or 70 mph down the freeway. It was one of the reasons I bought my stationwagon for about $600 dollars back then. Since my 56 Ford Stationwagon was only 8 years old it was still a pretty good car in 1964 when I was 16.
From 1960 to about 1965 my life reminded me a lot of the movie "American Graffiti" if you added surfing to the movie and living within driving distance of a good beach like Malibu for surfing and Skin Diving and Scuba diving.(skin diving means snorkeling with a mask and fins). Scuba is with compressed air tanks and regulators to breathe through down to 50 or 100 feet usually.
Another time Mike and I went out to El Mirage in the desert where they were renting glider rides where you get towed up in a two passenger glider and you as the passenger also get to fly the glider from the front seat when the glider gets released by the motorized tow plane. I was amazed to gain altitude when we flew through an up draft air thermal there in the desert while gliding even without an engine. Also, I was amazed just how short a landing it could make.
Another time Mike and I went on the "Great White Steamship" to Catalina and rented a speed boat with a bunch of other guys around our age and drove the boat up to Emerald Cove and went scuba diving.
It was a pretty good time for adventures until Mike joined the Air Force so he wouldn't be drafted. He already had his jet engine certification so he was a Sargent in the Air Force maintaining fighter jets in Thailand that were flown into North and South Viet Nam during the war there. But since his mother moved to Santa Barbara and I moved to San Diego to go to college after living at the beach in Venice for awhile we never found each other after the war. But in the 1990s I found him through his yahoo address.
For a mechanic's mechanic like Mike, a VW bug was wonderful because it was just so well designed and easy to work on for a hobby mechanic like Mike. Too often cars are designed so no one can work on them except a dealership or a professionally trained mechanic authorized to work on that model.
When I attended his military funeral in Bakersfield yesterday I had never seen in person military personel firing a salute to the fallen before in person. It was comforting in a way to also watch them unfold and then refold the flag as present it to his oldest sister as well.
There are lots of memories and now you are past caring about all the problems of this world. May you have peace in the next world, old friend.
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