Hysterical Journey to Historic Places

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<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">THINGS I LIKE







In order to get on this list it has to be someone or something I liked at my very first exposure and that I like still. They are not in any sort of ranked order, nor is the list complete.







Beer



Frito Corn Chips



Mixed Nuts



Tacos



Red Jello with fruit cocktail



Cake donuts with chocolate frosting



Carolyn Wakefield



Roi Tan Bankers



Old Crow



Aircraft



Cats



Carl and Henry Yue



Garlon Wilson



Jimmy Jemeson



Sandra Hodkins



Raney



Jalapenos



Rosemary



Lillian







Beer. My dad was helping some pals of his drink up a little Burgermeister. He thought it would be cute to give me a wee taste. I was maybe 4 or 5 years old. OMG. I loved it. Ever since that day whenever the beer came out I was right there for another wee taste. My dad one time made some homebrew. It was pretty bad as home brew goes. Too much yeast in the malt. I liked it anyway though. That much yeast probably made it over ferment. I bet it was 10 percent alcohol by volume. Not all of those bottles survived capping. When they overflowed in the closet my mom made him take the homebrew operation out on the back porch. Us kids liked that beer so much, even my sisters, that my dad had to finally agree to make us some root beer. There was so much residual yeast left over in the beer crock that he made the root beer in that the alcohol took off again in the root beer. The root beer was only about 3 percent alcohol though. All of us kids got drunk from it. Even some neighborhood kids who tried it. My mom put a stop to all beer making after that. That original batch of homebrew was something else. I can still taste it sometimes. One day mom took us kids shopping downtown. My dad came home for lunch with some of his vacuum sweeper pals and they got into the homebrew. When we got home the house was a mess, the vacuum sweeper pals were all gone, and my dad was passed out, drunk as a skunk, on the bathroom floor. Beer is great.







Fritos. I first had Fritos on a picnic trip that we went on with Jimmy Gillette. Jimmy was one of my dad’s vacuum sweeper pals. The Fritos came out during lunch. Damn they were good. Lunch was followed, of course, by fishing. My dad loved fishing and was the best fisherman I ever saw. He always thought I liked fishing too. We went on hundreds of fishing trips together and had a good time of it, but I was mostly just there for the fellowship. And the Fritos.







Mixed Nuts. Mixed nuts were an uncommon treat when I was young. They were not available back then in every store like they are now. They did not come in vacuum packed cans. That packaging technology had not yet been developed. Mixed nuts were sold in drugstores out of a heated display case. They were almost always stale I guess, but the heat lamps made you think they were fresh roasted. I loved them.











Tacos. Oh man, my knees weaken here, I like them so much. My Aunt Carole served the first tacos I ever had. Probably up at Mountain Home Air Base. They consisted of fried corn tortillas, hamburger meat, grated colby cheese, red taco sauce, onions, tomatoes and lettuce. Each condiment came in a separate dish. You could add them to the taco as you wished. Aunt Carole learned to serve them that way from the Hispanic wife of one of my Uncle Dick’s air force pals. It is the way they were always served by my mom too. We all thought it was the authentic way to do it for decades. Silly damned gringos. Mexicans don’t ever serve them that way. The California State Fair always had good tacos too. The fair tacos were rolled, not folded, but they weren’t deep fried. The meat was very well seasoned and no vegetables were added. The tortillas were dusted with salt and with grated parmesan cheese. The Roseville Auction also had tacos like that. Sometimes the meat also had some diced potatoes. I make pretty good tacos myself. They consist of tenderloin of pork on the rotisserie, and then finished in lime juice in the oven. Serve it with fresh jalapeno and yellow chili salsa with green onion and cilantro. Put a little salt in the salsa and some lime juice. Add some mild green tomatillo sauce, and fresh grated parmesan (or asiago) on a fried white corn tortilla. Very toothsome.







Red Jello. I always have liked red jello with fruit cocktail. I first had it as a toddler at my grandma’s boarding house in Auburn. She had made a big dish of it for her boarders.



I saw it first though and pulled up stool and had half of it eaten with the serving spoon before I was caught. It was sure worth the beating I had to take over it. Yellow jello is good with bananas, black cherry jello is good with peaches, orange jello is good with mangoes, green jello is good with pears. My mom used to make raspberry jello with fresh raspberries and Cool Whip. The Cool Whip made the jello set in a froth. It was a delightful desert on a hot day. Somewhere along the line the makers of Cool Whip changed the recipe for it and it no longer makes the jello frothy. Terrible shame. I only can have the no sugar kind of jello anymore.











Cake Donuts. When we were small kids my folks used to take us to the drive in theater sometimes. We were more manageable in the car than we were in public I guess. The drive in had cake donuts. They were hot and fresh, and just dripping with grease. Damn they were good. The drive in also served a soft drink for kids that was called hot toddy. It was chocolate flavored condensed milk in a tin can. It is what passed for hot cocoa back then. You couldn’t just get cokes everyplace like now. The bakery in Auburn had cake donuts with chocolate frosting. I liked those clinkers from the drive in better, but the bakery donuts were much easier to obtain.











Carolyn Wakefield. She was my paternal grandmother. She lived long enough to have crossed the prairie in a covered wagon and fly to Europe on the Concorde. She died on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1982 at age 93. A finer woman probably never lived.







Roi Tan Bankers. When Will Rogers made the comment that, “What this country needs is a good 5 cent cigar” the tobacco industry responded with the Roi Tan Banker. It was a superb value. I would be enjoying them still if they had not gone out of business.











Old Crow. Easily the finest sour mash whiskey ever distilled. Try it with coke and some maraschino cherry juice, or you could chug it straight from the bottle. When I die and go to heaven I am going right back to drinking whiskey and smoking Roi Tans. I’m not drinking any of that cheap whiskey like I used to either. I’m heading right straight for the Old Crow. First time I tangled with it was in Viet Nam. Me and a buddy drained that first bottle in about 15 minutes riding in back of a deuce and a half between Long Bihn and our station at Xom Tam. He was fine with it, but it pole axed me. I passed out colder than a fart from it. Laying flat on my back in a puddle of rain water in front of our hooch. I had some pizza for lunch that day and puked it up right on my chest. My buddies had to step over me all night because I was right in front of the door. They took some pictures of me laying in that puddle to send home to their girlfriends. They told those girls that I had just been greased by the Viet Cong. Damn that was good whiskey.











Aircraft. I like propeller driven heavy bombers best. I like the sound those old aircraft engines made. It is the sound of freedom. B-17s and B-24s are what we used to pound the surly Hun into submission with during the Second World War. B-24s were ugly planes and they were beastly contraptions to fly. They were flown by the 15^th Air Force out of bases in Italy and Africa that were further from their targets than England was. B-17s were flown by the 8^th Air Force out of England. I love the contributions to our freedom made by all of those valiant air crews. B-29’s are what we used against the skulking Jap. The B-29 had a further range and could carry a heavier load of bombs. They were magnificent planes. The B-36 did not see action in any of our wars. It was developed to attack Germany from North America. It could carry a massive bomb load over astonishing distances, but it was a slow flyer, and required a very long runway to reach air speed on during take off. They also needed thick concrete runways to support their weight.







Part of the early warning defense system in the 1950’s were EC-121 radar planes. They were Lockheed Constellations modified for military use. They had radar pods both on top of the fuselage and on the bottom. A unit of those planes was stationed at McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento and Auburn was on their approach path. Everyday those planes would fly over. It was kind of like having Marshall Dillon as your neighbor. You could go to sleep each night knowing you were safe and protected. God Bless the Air Defense Command and the Strategic Air Command.







All Viet Nam veterans like Hueys. Whenever we hear one always we turn to look for it, and always we will. The Huey was our savior.











Cats. Anyone who does not like cats is a sumbitch. We have two cats. Mr Yoda and Mr Bones. Yoda is an Oriental, and in his youth was a show cat. He is very much a people oriented cat, but he is a dead beat dad. He got his girlfriend pregnant twice and then moved to another state and changed his name. Bones is an ocicat. It is a wild blood breed. He still has all of his feline instincts. Bones is all about running and chasing, and playing, and curiosity. Yoda’s feline instincts have been pretty much bred out of him. We had to teach him to play, and his eyesight is not the greatest.











Carl and Henry Yue. Them two. They were the proprietors of the Shanghai Bar in Auburn. What a splendid place that was for youngsters to grow up in. Back in the 50’s it wasn’t against the law, like now, for kids to hang out in barrooms with their dad. Listen to manly conversations, eat peanuts and throw the shells on the floor. Carl and Henry were always full of fishing lore and stories. I loved hanging out in their barroom as a child. Every summer the Shanghai would sponsor a street fair in lower town for kids. It lasted all day. There were all sorts of scheduled contests to compete in with other kids. Foot races, three legged races, sack races things like that. You had to wear your old clothes to it though because of the greased pole contest. The kid who finally shinnied his way to the top of the greased pole got to remove a dollar bill that was tacked to the top of it. Of course it ruined his pants and shirt. The Shanghai finally went out of business a few years ago. Auburn will never be the same.







Garlon Wilson. He was my dad’s best friend and fishing pal. Garlon was married to my gramma’s cousin, Lola. He was an excellent fisherman himself and he had a jillion stories to tell. He could swear like the devil, but never around women and he never used alcohol or tobacco. Garlon was the highway maintenance superintendent for the hi ghways in the Auburn District. His roads were always in good shape. He bought a set of hair clippers for my dad, and my dad cut his hair for free for several years. I got free haircuts too until I got in high school. Mine always had nicks in it though because I never could hold still during a haircut. Garlon was always making me laugh too much. He died of butt cancer in 1979, but Lola kept on scampering around like a teenager until she was a hundred years old.











Jimmy Jemeson. What a character, he had some stories too. He was married to Lola’s sister Lillian. They lived down in Martinez. Jemeson told me one time, when I was a kid, that he was a doctor. I believed that crap for years. He was a just navy corpsman who treated sailors of the clap, and monitored the venereal health of prostitutes all over the Bay Area. Unlike Garlon, Jameson was a drinking man, but I never heard him utter many swear words. Whenever Jemeson came up to Auburn he had a standing order with me for several years to supply him with leaf mold for a dollar a bag. He used it in his mulch pile I guess. He got a pretty bad rash from that leaf mold one year. Must’ve been poison oak. Jemeson bought me my very first model airplane as a Christmas gift. It was a B-25. I was too young to put it together then, so my Uncle Dick built it for me. Jemeson got phlebitis in his leg from having diabetes. They finally had to amputate it, and he had to run around on a pegleg until he died. A shoe could fit on his plastic foot, and he used to hide his money down in his shoe. In case he got mugged. I think I saw him one time pull a jug of booze out of his hollowed out leg too. It was a convenient storage receptacle for him long as he didn’t mind unstrapping his leg and taking it off whenever he needed a snort. Me and Garlon, and Bud and Rose are probably the only ones who really liked Jemeson.











Sandra Hodkins. I suppose I might have married that girl had we stayed in Auburn. I had a crush on her ever since we were in the second grade together. She was quite a shy girl. I used to walk her home from school sometimes and we sort of bonded. Sandra was cousins with Tommy and Billy and Gary Hodkins from up in Skyridge. I had been in plenty of rock fights with those guys. After we moved away in 1963 I never saw her again, and have always wondered what might have become of her.







Raney. He was my best friend and drinking companion for many years. A homlier man than he was has never been born. He was so damned ugly that nobody would even rob him when he worked at the Seven Eleven Store in Fresno. I know that store. It was on Ashlan Ave just west of Blackstone. It got knocked over on a weekly basis, but never when he was working there. It would have been impossible for him to survive on his good looks alone, so he needed to develop other tools. He was smart and funny, generous and kind, and he could play any stringed instrument well. He was a fantastic cook and the most dedicated civil servant in America. After a lifetime of heavy drinking, smoking and serious drug abuse he finally succumbed, at age 65, to complications of diabetes. He would not compromise on what he perceived to be the quality of his life.







Jalapenos. First time I ever had a pickled jalapeno pepper was at the wedding reception of Anthony and Peggy Cisneros. I have loved those peppers ever since. They are best when pickled in escabeche. I have always been fond of those little yellow hot peppers too. Del Monte used to make the best ones. They were always crisp, and never over-pickled. You can’t get them anymore though.







Rosemary. At the time she married my cousin, Bud Irwin, she outranked him. She was a flight nurse and an air force captain. Bud was a first lieutenant and a navigator in C-119 Flying Boxcars. Outside of my own sainted mother, Rosemary was the kindest most gracious woman in the whole world.







Lillian Hixson was my mother’s teaching pal at Guadalupe School. She always knew how to get the best out of me.

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