The Police State
Conversations with Judy and Roy, along with my own memories, produces three very different versions of this story, so what you read here is what I remember, with whatever flaws it may contain.
My first true memory of a cop was on the evening of July 4th, 1967. Roy and my brother-in-law, Don, Judy's husband, had obtained real fireworks. There's some question if they came from Mexico, Texas, or New Mexico. I suppose it really doesn't matter. But they had real Roman candles that fired burst after burst of little balls of fire, and actual fire crackers bundled together that sounded like a machine gun firing. But the show stoppers were the rockets. Actual sky rockets that shot up in the air and exploded with a huge bang that made my chest thump! These weren't bottle rockets, they were cannons. Dad wouldn't let the guys shoot off the sky rockets in front of our house, so they went down the street to fire them into the sky from a side alley. They fired off about a dozen, one right after the other. It seemed almost instantaneously a police car pulled up, just like my dad had warned. The cop got out and started asking my dad questions. Our driveway was splattered with the typical neutered legal fireworks available at every grocery store in California, but no signs of the good stuff. My dad pointed to the burned out sparklers, spark fountains, and smoke emitters and said something to the effect of, "We saw those ones in the sky that you're talking about, but you see here what these children have. These little guys don't have anything like those rockets." The cop nodded and said something else to my dad before leaving. What I didn't know at the time was that as Don and Roy were lighting off the last rocket, it slid sideways and shot its burst right over the police station.
The lesson I learned from that night was that police are not on our side, and their laws are just the opinions of some, forced on everyone else by the fist of the police. Laws do not represent right and wrong and the police don't protect and serve us. They are simply enforcers of the whims of politicians.
It's fitting that I learned that lesson in Coalinga, just miles away from Los Gatos Canyon, and both the hideout and the death location of the famed Joaquin Murrieta and Manuel Garcia, aka Three-Fingered Jack. I'll touch on that later.
My next encounter with a cop was a few months later when one spotted me riding my bike. He came over to me in his car and gave me what he called a "friendly warning". He explained that California law required my bicycle to have reflectors on both wheels, along with a front and back reflector and a state issued identification plate. He also said I couldn't ride a bike with no fenders. I listened carefully and nodded, then went on to do as I liked. This was my bike, not California's bike. Again, just another old man trying to tell me what to do.
Remember That Time I Sent Don A Surprise?
As I said earlier, Don was the husband of my oldest sister, Judy. By 1968 Don had been shipped to Vietnam by way of the US Marines. He was stationed at Da Nang Marine Air Base. There is nothing good I can say about that other than to say that somehow Don kept himself alive.
The Marines had issued their young American captives, or draftees if you prefer, leather boots with rivet vents near the arch, to sludge through the monsoons of the Vietnam summer. The thing about central and southern Vietnam is that the monsoons hit right at the peak of summer, and the rains do nothing to alleviate the incredible heat. It's like Atlanta in August, but hotter, wetter, and the locals were trying to kill you or at least trying to poke you with a poison stick. And the US Marine-issued boots did nothing to protect your feet, but they did a fine job letting in fungi and assuring tissue rot. So Don wrote to us and asked for one thing: rubber boots. Evidently, no one in the US government was smart enough to give the Marines rubber boots to wear in the mud of Da Nang. So Judy and my mother put together a care package for Don that included some baked goodies and notes with sweet thoughts, and a precious pair of knee-high rubber boots. I had a big rubber spider about the size of my hand, so I slipped that into one of the boots, just to remind Don how much we loved him and were thinking of him.
The package arrived at Da Nang Airbase and, as you would expect, all the guys in the barracks saw this big box and watched to see what yummy goodies were inside. Don pulled out the boots and immediately started to try them on. For a son of Kentucky, the Vietnam jungles were a strange place filled with odd creatures, so imagine what Don thought as he slid his toes up against that giant rubber spider. Unfortunately for Don, new rubber boots go on easier than they come off, so Don treated his fellow Marines to a humorous dance as he struggled to get his foot out of the boot, only to see my gift of a rubber spider fall to the floor. Without hesitation, he knew who had put the spider in that boot.
I could not have designed a better brother-in-law nor a finer human being than Don, even if I had unlimited resources and all the powers of the universe. He was a deeply good man. We lost him a few years ago and I will always blame the US government, the US Marines, and Agent Orange for his painful death. Vietnam won in the end.
First post & table of contents
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Crazy! My grandmother's family comes from quaker lineage . The Weaver family. On my grandfathers side, one of my great grandfathers was Rev. Henry Hammer Williams.