Once Upon a Time

0CTOBER 4, 2023 HAPPY 79TH BIRTHDAY, HOPE YOU ARE STILL HERE. 

AS YOU GROW OLD YOU TRY TO PUT TOGETHER SOME MOMENTS OF YOUR PAST THAT ARE THE HAPPIEST YOU KNEW. I GUESS THAT MIGHT UPSET SOME OF THE PLAYERS AND THOSE THAT CAME ALONG LATER, BUT IT REALLY IS NECESSARY TO SURVIVE, SO SORRY FOR MY BAD. 

65 years ago you said yes to my offer to go steady!  

64 years ago on 9/14/1959 you got off the school bus and said it was over. On my birthday 9/25/59 you made it final.  

We didn't make it through the Summer ( seriously, my behavior with the school and your family) and the six months Dec 17, 1958-June 17, 1959 were the happiest and the saddest  days of my life. 

 9/21/22

 A fun note: In 1967 I was in Berry Gordy Jr’s studio in Detroit, Michigan formally started as Tamla Records on June 7, 1958. Barry was 15 years older than me and was writer of songs also. While there trying to get a recording gig I listened to a demo of a song The Four Seasons had recorded that Barry refused to release because Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan who wrote were “White Breads” trying to sell a song out of the mainstream “MY EYES ADORED YOU”. I listened to the demo and paid $300 dollars for the rights to arrange it and record it, which I did. Barry was right and I couldn’t start the record anywhere. In those days you personally drove it around to all your local radio jocks. No dice and then in 1974, Frankie Valle, who had done the demo came back to Barry and bought the demo and song back for $4000 and took it to his record company for release. They said no so he went to an independent label, established a solo career with it and it was a hit. For me just another miss like “Piece of My Heart” and “Cry Baby” in 1963. Later they showed up with the great Janis Joplin in 1971. So take a listen to it and see what you think. The reason I recorded it was the song line “ though I never laid a hand on you , my eyes adored you”. This was my hallmark thought throughout the 8 years since she left me. My happiest thought was that I never took anything from her to cause any man she would fall in love with in the future to hesitate with her. Her conscience would be clear legitimately. That was my conduct because I had a very subconscious feeling that we would not be forever, and I was right.  

Interesting to me!

Well I got an email asking “ Was there any clue or warning before she walked away”? Yes, several previously mentioned before including making a date at the movies and not showing up with no warning, arranging for me to come down to her street and meeting her behind her girlfriends back fence with a no show.  When she went to Castroville in Monterey, in August of 59' we wrote constantly back and forth. Castroville was 88 miles from Campbell and I didn’t have a car. A week earlier I went to a party at a San Jose State College Frat house. While there my older friends systematically stole all the men’s sweaters from the hall closets. When I got home I was given my pick and selected 6 Cashmere men’s sweaters and put them in my drawer. Well one Saturday during this time she stopped writing me. After a week I got worried and induced one of the guys to take me to her Aunt’s house in Castroville. The price was the six sweaters. It was a one way ticket. When I arrived I knocked on the door and her Aunt came to the door. She was friendly but cautious. I’m sure my girl’s father alerted her about me. Anyway, there my girl stood as beautiful as ever, but strangely she had her arms crossed in front of her. She didn’t seem to be very happy I was there. So we spoke for an hour or so and her Aunt took me to the Greyhound bus depot in Salinas and I bought a ticket home. When we had spoke she couldn’t explain why she stopped writing me so I let it go. It had been about 5 weeks since she had been gone and something had gone wrong. She returned to Campbell and on the Friday night, before returning to school on Monday we spoke at length and everything seemed perfect. I still can’t figure out why she waited until Monday to dump me but it may have been her fear that I might come down to her house and cause a problem as I once did before. Anyway, anyone can stop loving someone and sometimes without warning. It was not the fact that she broke up with me, it was the way she did it! Like I said before it was years later when I found out the truth. The breakup was planned and occurred at the school without any discussion about why because it was the thought that it would be supervised from afar by certain teachers who could intervene if need be and that I would have the whole day to adjust and could be watched until I accepted it. It was a slick play and well  coordinated during the previous week. I didn’t know she was home and attended a parent teacher meeting for the upcoming year. I had been cast as a disturbed young boy by everyone and as I look back, I can see how I appeared and all they had to do was present their case to her and she was amenable anyway. It was simple, she was never “In Love with Me”. So I took my guitar, nylon jacket , white buck shoes, 5 t-shirts, 5 underwear, 5 sets of socks and two pair of pegged levies and moved back to the San Francisco slums on welfare and my old friends.

 Interesting to me! 

Many people are bewildered as to why something so apparently beautiful and created by mutual love could “Out of Nowhere, end in 5 minutes w/o explanation”? Well, it’s fairly simple really. I never asked myself why she never seemed to look my way or notice me when every girl at Campbell High ( in every grade) showered me with flirts and respectful attention. It was simple, she was not interested. Most girls approached me with caution thinking I was attractive and knew it and couldn’t be trusted. Guys were usually upset when I entered a room because the girls would say out loud “Who’s that or wow he’s really good looking”. So I just thought she’s gorgeous and knows it and isn’t going to show interest in me and lose her superiority. No, the fact was she wasn’t interested, period. I pursued her and even then she wasn’t really interested. I told her “You’ll never know what you missed if you say no to going steady with me and if you ever want to break up all you have to do is say it’s over, no explanation. Well, that’s exactly what she did. Saturday before returning to school on Monday we reaffirmed our love over the phone. She had been in Castroville California for 5 weeks prior to returning for the 59-60 school year. Then Monday morning came, I waited at the school  bus parking inside the school property and her bus rolled in and she got off the bus with that beautiful smile September 14, 1959. She walked over to me and I reached out to take her hand. She pulled away and said “I don’t want to hold hands, “I saw a lot of cute boys on the bus coming to school today”. WOW! I was stunned, and came unglued. How do you process this? She reminded me of my promise to except a “No Explanation”, I said “That was before we loved each other”. We had a long walk to her first class and I was becoming angry with her non responses to my questions. We got to the Portico connecting the main school building with her classroom building so I said give me our ring and put everything I’ve given you, including letters, in a bag and bring them tomorrow. She handed me the ring and I dropped it over a rail and it landed in the dirt below in a secluded area. I left and ran to class which was Study Hall. I sat for an hour and just held the tears back. Then I just walked through the day. 

The next day she showed up with a guy I knew, Ponce. She handed me a brown bag with my framed picture and letters and I handed her a bag with her stuff. She was happy and cheerful and showed no signs of regret of any kind and then said something strange “ You fibbed to me”. I was taken back and said angrily “What Fib”. She looked at me with a half smile and said “your grades last year”.  I didn’t understand what she was talking about. How would she know about my bad grades? Why would she bring that up unless she was using some negative information as an excuse to break up. Why did she bring a boy with a frown on his face with her? I turned to her and demanded a beautiful dainty gold necklace I had given her which she wore around her neck. I always wondered why she hadn’t taken her ring and the necklace off in preparation of breaking up the day before. I jammed the necklace deep into an almost full school garbage can a few feet away. 

I angrily walked off, never looking back, but I did see a look of hatred flash across her face along with a look of hurt. On the way to study hall the day before I tried to retrieve the ring but it was gone. That gave me some hope. 

On my birthday, two weeks later, I got on a school bus to go to the Campbell v. Santa Clara High Football game. I don’t know why but it might have been because I saw her get on the bus. It was funny, but everyone knew she had dumped me and no guy was going to sit next to her in my presence so I went over and sat next to her and asked “Why are you doing this to me”. Looking back at all of my conduct with her I certainly should have realized that her summer away from me caused her to listen to reason and realize that I would always be a loser. She reiterated my promise not to ask and then said “It’s simple, my father gave me a choice, it’s you or him”. I never believed that. I always believed she just woke up one day, looked in the mirror and realized that she had everything going for her and I had nothing going for me and said “I’ve got to get out of this dead-end relationship and get back to a peaceful life before him. She was right and made the right decision except I didn’t stay a loser and she was the reason why, but it was a year later that I shaped up. But way to late. There are some other pieces to this story that I’ll recall later.

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  NO, I DIDN'T FORGET OCT. 4, 2021 "HAPPY 77TH BIRTHDAY!

There was a teenager hangout run by the Catholic Church in Santa Clara called “The Whatsit”. The name derived from no one remembering the actual name of the City of Santa Clara Catholic Community Civic Center. So it became the “Whatsit”. Anyway it was a great place with a tv room, pool table room, restaurant and very large dance hall with a stage for live performances. So every weekend starting with Friday night, parents would drop off their kids and pick them up at 11:30 P.M. They played the top 100 Rock n Roll records and we would dance. Now the chaperones would rush in from time to time to push their arms out and between you and your girl so there would be no “Intentional Rubbing or Squeezing of Bodies”. All in all it was like the “Dick Clark Dance TV Show”. Now the cool part was you could arrive with the large crowd of teens and drift off and down the street to be picked up by a friend with a car. The same would happen with the girls. The Adventurous ones would meet their older boyfriends down the street because you couldn’t get in if over eighteen. You would return right when the parents showed up at 11:30 p.m. in long noisy lines and meld into the crowd returning to their parent’s cars to be picked up. You would have about 3 hours to drag the main, park in John’s or Mel’s or Spivey’s drive-ins and have a coke or go park and make-out. So she and I used to meet at the Whatsit and dance. Then her friends Shirley and Ron suggested we sneak out one night and ride around in his classic car. We did and she sat on my lap and we cruised the drive-ins as we kissed. We got back just in time to slip out and meld with the crowd and her father picked her up. So your thinking “Is this going anywhere”. 

One day we made plans for my girl to slip out with Shirley and they would all come to my apartment on Dunster Dr., just down the road from the Whatsit. So nighttime came and I waited and waited and waited and they never showed up and no phone call from the Whatsit. The next Monday at school she told me there were many, many girls using the phone so she couldn’t call and Ron was late so they had to go in and couldn’t get out past the door chaperone. Then that next Wed. the school had a Roller Skating Night and I was waiting for the school bus to take us to the rink when Carol Gates asked to see me around the back of the building before my girl showed up. She then told me that she was told by Shirley that my girl left with Shirley and another boy and got in Ron’s car last Friday. Shirley told her it was my girls plan to go out with the other boy. Carol was as honest as they come and I was stunned to tears. I gathered my composure and met my girl at the bus area and before we boarded I asked if it was true. She teared up and said yes. ( I could have and should have turned around, never looked back and walked away, gone to live with my grandmother in another city)  She said she sat on his lap and kissed him. Obviously it was planned in advance. I said to myself, “This will not last”. I forgave her and we roller skated, returned to the school and her father picked her up. We never spoke about it again even when she did it again. 

But before the above problem came along we had the Latin Club Dinner incident where the Latin Club members had to serve the dinner to guests. Ron was in the club and asked if I wanted to go to the drive-in to see the new Bridget Bardot movie after we were off at 9 p.m. So I say yes since I was going to walk down to my girls street to sneak a brief meeting at the house she babysat at on Friday nights. Just a quick hello since Ron didn’t want to be late for the movie. Sounds slick doesn’t it. Gonna see her, but quick and gone, instead of hanging around for a couple of hours on the porch. Well we show up and she comes out of the babysitting house (I should mention it was just 6 doors down from her house, requiring caution) She is just stunningly beautiful. Beautiful dress, hair and full makeup. Wow! What a knock out. She comes to my window, says hello, gives me a peck kiss and says “I love you” and we say goodbye, off to the drive-in. Well after the  Whatsit occurred the next month it donned on me that ‘who gets showered, dressed, beautiful lipstick and makeup, doesn’t give a big kiss just a little peck and sends me on my way quick’. Yep Shirley, Ron and my girl engineered my being away from the babysitting house on an extended visit so someone else could stop by and see her. A kid with a car maybe, maybe even the same kid who snuck out with her in the Whatsit deal. I am sure she was babysitting that night, just cheating on me. Of course I only put it all together this year 2022. I know I’m a little slow but I loved her and trusted her completely. My Bad.

Interesting story. (I think) 

So it’s February 1959, Buddy Holly is dead and our romance is in full Bloom. One of her friends invites her to a slumber party and a Cherry Tree Orchard cherry picking party. One of her girlfriend’s boyfriends agrees to bring me to the party. His name was David Mussey and we go to the party. Everybody walks across the street and we pick cherries and bring them back to the house. The party is in the garage. Everyone is dancing and finally my girl and I go into the backyard and kiss. Suddenly Tommy Edwards “Please Love Me Forever” starts playing. My girl brought the 45 rpm I gave her to the party and had a friend play it when we went into the backyard. It was our song. Up till then we had been kissing normally and from time to time she would wipe her hand across her lips and I thought that was funny. So I asked her to kiss me and touch the tip of her tongue to mine. She did and from then on our kisses were significant. We went out front and sat in David’s car. We pretended that I was driving and how we would be driving places together in my car someday. It became late and David took me home. What a great night. Close to 20 years later I was on patrol and got a call for a dune buggy fatality on Foxworthy and Camden. When I walked up to the body I was told the guy was racing his dune buggy in the vacant lot and it flipped over on his neck and killed him. When I rolled him over it was Dave Mussey. His girl friend was named Sherry Schmidt and I bought her parents home in 1978. In the Master Bedroom on a wooden closet door was a heart with DM loves SS carved in it. Life is strange.

Interesting story. (In my view) 

One day while we were at lunch break at Campbell High. You mentioned that the neighbor boy (same age) had once been talking to you over the back fence and grabbed at you. This was obviously in the past but you had just the previous weekend forgot to have me over to meet your parents. I had gotten a haircut and earned cab fare and was waiting at my phone to head on down to your house to meet your parents and thereby be able to see you more often. Terribly disappointed and felt you were either ashamed of me or your parents didn’t want to have anything to do with me. This was a unjustified anger because I didn’t think about a welfare kid with no father, a dysfunctional mother who didn’t see me 6 days out seven. She had a job as a child counselor at Eastfield Home For Disturbed Children. I always thought that was a fantastic joke if ever there was one. 

Anyway, I pondered on how to show your parents of my protective feelings for you. Ah Ha! I ‘ve got i. I’ll go down to her next door neighbor’s house and call out the kid. That’ll show them. Talk about horrible judgment , from a kid that until the recent haircut looked like he just jumped out of the motion picture The Wild Ones with Marlin Brando or Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean or more like Lords Of Flatbush. I went down to the house and called the kid out and accused him. His dad and mom came out and so did her Mom and dad and I was there to avenge her honor as my switchblade knife fell out of my shirt pocket and everything went down hill from there.  I picked it up and took off before one of the fathers grabbed me by the nap of the neck and kicked me in the butt. I went home thinking I might have screwed up royally. Yep, and then the next day I realized I had done it to vent my anger at her. No, she didn’t break up with me and everything stayed the same. No wonder her parents wanted nothing to do with me and waited until summer to ship her off to relatives until school started again. In the fall she finally realized what a loser I was and dumped me the first day of school. That’s the day I decided to make something of myself but I really never got over her after she completely stopped loving me.

Interesting story. ( for me) 1950 at ten I started exhibiting symptoms. Loss of weight, fevers, infections and soak and wet night sweats. Slum kids on welfare don’t get much medical care. Leukemia was the answer and a horrible struggle until 1957 into the spring of 1958 at  Sloan Kettering Institute. Remission out of nowhere and my hair started growing back and I regained my mobility just in time to go back to school for the first time in years. A move from the project slums in San Francisco to Campbell, California and the first day I saw her with her boyfriend going to classes. Later that day I found her going into my English class with Mrs. Couch. A one-sided Love Affair at first Sight. Three months later she was walking to class without the boyfriend, so my hair was back and trained into a pompadour and a DA comb in back. Dark Blue nylon waist length jacket with white fuzzy lining, white t-shirt, tight pegged dark blue jeans and white buck shoes. From time to time I would flirt with her and call her beautiful as a nick name. I started walking her to class and carrying her books and running like hell to get to my class before the tardy bell rang, all very coolly. Finally, just before Xmas I was walking her to class and we stopped just across from the snack bar and I asked her if she wanted to go steady. She said she didn’t know and asked why she should. I was a bit stung. I had one pair of Levi’s, three T-shirts. 5 pair of socks and one pair of white buck shoes and my confidence dropped for a moment until I caught myself and said “If you don’t you’ll never know what you missed”. Really dumb, but it worked and she said alright. She gave me her phone number and I took her hand and we walked to her next class. Happiest day of my entire life now and then. She was intelligent, gorgeous and the most beautiful girl I would ever see again and for six months, mine. I never laid a hand on her, but my eyes adored her. It was always two drop dead gorgeous teens who looked like they were born for each other, but it was always a one sided love affair. 

I wanted to tell her that I had cancer and one day while we were walking she stopped, turned around and said she had a confession to make. My heart stopped, I thought “Oh No, she realizes I’m a loser and she’s going to dump me, why didn’t I see it coming”. Instead she told me that because of her English name no one knew she was half Mexican and her real mother had died of cancer when she was seven. Well now I couldn’t tell her about my secret and cause her to be afraid of going on with me and my dying from cancer. So for the next 6 months life was great. She was unfaithful a few times and left me without warning on my following birthday. I was stunned but I realized she took my mind off all my previous bad luck and the deep deep fear of dying for a 9 month period. Long enough to start to survive again and for that I will always thank her profusely and any pain I may have caused her I deeply regret and apologize. 

Well the cancer returned alright but not until I was 76 years old.

natejaeger@natejaeger.com

Interesting  story, (to me) Remember when we were heading to see my  apartment across from the school on Dunster Dr? We stopped behind the Baseball Bleachers and we kissed. Out of nowhere comes Mr. Culp telling us to "stay right there". He came up and pretended to write down our names and sent us to the office. I told you to tell him that I caught you by surprise and it was a forced kiss. I don't know what you did do but our lunch periods were changed till the end of the school year. I ran into Mr. Crawford at San Jose State in the 70's and Mr. Culp in the 80's  and had a casual conversation about how it all came to be. Mr. Clup said it was no accident. Your parents were very concerned about me, generally a loser at the school in many ways. So they worked out a supervision program with Mr. Ercig, Mrs. Couch and Mr. Crawford. Culp knew where my apartment was and watched us every day after the call from your parents. This was for weeks. He was advised of our movement toward the apartment which was a considerable distance from the school building area. When he was told that it looked like we were leaving Campus, he jumped in his car just behind his office and drove to Latimer and Dunster and parked. We came along, stopped and kissed and he rushed over to catch us. They were right and all of them did the right thing. Mr. Crawford said he had been successful in the past with other teenage romances. He said "Separation"  and  "Out of Sight and out of mind was a good formula until they could passively separate us" with the summer.  Me being Me and that plan worked. Mr. Crawford said Ms. Bull once told him you and your parents had a meeting at the start  of September 1959 to plan your classes  where Ms. Bull laid out my terrible Academic Record and advised all concerned I would probably interfere with a beautiful and intelligent girls success going forward, I was an outsider from the Ny and San Francisco slums in a beautiful Middle class Community that stood out like sore thumb with a greasy Elvis hair doo, dark jacket , t-shirt, pegged levis and white buck shoes. I remember the day we broke up and I took back my ring and dropped it over the outside walkway rail onto the dirt. Later that morning I went back to get it and it was gone? The next day we gave back each others  pictures and letters and you blurted out in a sweet way "You fibbed to me". "I said about what?" You said "Your grades last year". That alerted me to the fact that my grades had been discussed recently and had never been a problem before. I was so angry I demanded my delicate gold necklace back and I shoved  it into the adjacent garbage can because I knew you liked it. We only spoke two weeks later, on my birthday, on the school bus going to the Santa Clara football game when you said you broke up with me because your father said it was him or me. I spoke to the boy you brought with you to do the exchange, Ponce, and he told me some information about what was said after I left. I have always wondered why you came to school that morning wearing my ring, what happened to the ring after I tossed it

From 1960-2019 N0 One Ever Wanted to go on stage before me or after me, I wonder why!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

POWER AND PRESENCE