Violence in Thompsonville - Part I

The early 50s remain among the most exciting for me. Dollie turned her back on the high desert oasis and the background music of the daily sirocco.  We headed south, to Escondido, a Cadillac paradise of rolling hills, filling up with orange and avocado groves.

The Korean War, one of those “dirty little wars” that we never declare.  In fact, it was never called anything more than a “police action,” pitting inexhaustible numbers of suicidal Chinese soldiers and North Koreans, who, under Stalin’s sinister nod, invaded Soul, South Korea.

My brother Gene and I were nurtured on the war.  My essential war vocabulary [such critical knowledge] came out of a ritual reading of the Los Angeles Times each morning over burned eggs and toast.  Gene and I mastered the MIG 15 vs. F-86 “kill” ratios.  We cut out the daily scorecard in the corner of page 1.  Dad and the dictionary defined such important new words as “atrocity,” while Gene and I absorbed a whole panoply of weaponry:  T-34 tank, bazooka, M-1 rifle, the old and unreliable “Tommy Gun,” along with a now arcane geography:  Chosen Reservoir, Pusan Perimeter, Inchon, Pork Chop Hill, etc.  

One of my most emotional moments came when I open the Times, astounded, overjoyed to see an artist’s illustration of a plane that would change the police action in the air war:  The Super-Saber, the F-100.  Surely our kill ratios [which the paper said ranged as high as 15 [us] to 1 of  “them,“ [who, we later learned, were Russian and North Korean pilots] would climb. Gene “flew” around the house, fly swatter in hand, killing MIGs.  His kill ratio was 445 to 0.  Democracy was safe.

Meanwhile our new business endeavor proved to be a kind of economic Mulligan’s soup:  6 apartments [mostly Marine wives from nearby Camp Pendleton], a noisy tin service station [Rio Grande gas at 17 cents a gallon], our house/shack, propane, and an old-fashioned trailer park.  Those were the days when a trailer was 10-35 feet long, 8 feet wide, without a bathroom/shower.  We provided a laundry room, and what we blithely called the “utility” room.

With 20 trailers and the apartments always full, we founded a new village:  Thompsonville.  Dad stocked the random shelves with groceries, lowered the gas an astounding pit bullish 1 cent, eager for a “gas war” with the boys down the road.

This rich cross-section of people of every walk of life became our university, observed insightfully and generously by my parents.  Mom proved to be a “good little business gal,” as Dad complimented her.  The wind, mid-summer whipped us about—yes, the dreaded Santa Annas.  But every day the sea breeze from Del Mar, a mere 17 miles away, wafted over our little community. The reprieve that eased Dollie’s nerves, and kept us “outside,” where she wanted us to be as long as possible, out of the house, “under-foot,” as she put it.

Our first encounter with “violence” was occasional fistfights with the “trailer park” kids, as we called them. Dad, like a boxing referee, stayed between us and the “paying customers.”  A few years later, Gene would make history by taking six of a swarthy group of “Junior Marines” across the street to a ground water-fed pool about 4 feet deep.  “We’ll trow you in,” they threatened in some kind of eastern accent.  Gene, now lifting weights and playing endless rounds of “Conflict,” a board game, “begged” them to try.  They had one wooden gun and a vintage WW2 helmet among them, but he was “steamed” for an encounter.  Fortunately, he didn’t have to “kill” all six and there was no drowning.

Gene’s on-going antics soon turned inward.  Carol, our sister, always fighting for a place at the trough with three brothers, now rode a fast Western Flyer.  As she rode away, having called Gene a challenging name,” he self-narrated the “kill.”  With broom in hand, he muttered, “I just may be able, . . . just might.”  The broom sailed into the front spokes.  She tumbled head over handlebars, recovering by the end of the day with what the cowboy movies defined as “flesh wounds.”  Sad.  And she never got revenge.

The Gene-led onslaughts continued.  Legend has the “death machine” as a true trebuchet.   Recent research proves the “attack” on little Jimmy Lail’s trailer was led by Gene and Michael, our younger brother, now grown up enough to play “Conflict” and throw water balloons. They did not machine-launch, but Mohawk-style infiltrated Lil’ Jimmy’s 3x3 yard and blasted his trailer and him head-on.  Banzai.

In a panic, Lil’ Jimmy [5 feet tall, a dishwasher at Chico’s] banged on our door.  It was 8 o’clock—nearly midnight by my parent’s pre-geriatric biorhythms. “Someone’s having a ball, ET, throwin’ water balloons at my trailer.  And they hit me on the shoulder [possible wound-velocity, here] while I was sneakin’ over here.”

And there was other violence---serious violence.  Fist fights between Marines over the same wife; three “natural” deaths, a lot of beer-inspired threats over the miniature yards and fences.  An ET-enforced clean-up of the Conover’s yard, which involved two pickups and a dozen verbal threats from both daughter and father.  As we loaded, Dad hummed, “Cruising Down the River on a Sunday Afternoon,” a primo melody on the Friday night “Hit Parade” television show with Snookey Lanson.

When “Little Joe”[everybody got a name; my mother was usually the name-giver. Always bestowing a kind of motherly tenderness] had not appeared for three days, Mom worried.  He lived on two Hostess fried pies a day, and then walked the railroad tracks across the street with his dog.  Gone till dark, we figured he was following the tracks down to “Dago” [San Diego  in cool talk].  Dad broke through Joe’s screen and fell directly onto the bed.  Little Joe was dead.  The coroner looked in the door.  “We have a ripe one.  Bring a tank.”  The moment that hot summer afternoon never left me.

Others died:  “Captain” Clegg, a slow death, without family or money.  Mom nursed him the two days and nights to death’s door.  He passed, pith helmet in place.

Or “Captain Bair,” described dramatically and entirely hypothetically by Dollie as an “old captain from an old ship.”  While his wife lay dying inside of cancer, he put Cal, his stepson in a pup tent in the yard.  Nights he drove while Cal moved “smudge pots” around the city streets in repair.  The violence culminated with the Captain’s systematic whipping of smudgy-faced Cal with a garden hose, in front of all of us children.  When we told Dollie, she waited till mid-day, while the one-armed captain lay in a beer induced afternoon “coma.”

She called his sister in Maine, bought a 25 dollar Grey Hound ticket, made him three lunches and clandestinely drove young Cal to the bus depot.  Escape.  Justice.

The next day, we watched what Mom called a “conniption fit” as the now broken and slaveless captain ranted and raved. “Can you blame a man for going hostile, Dollie?!” he screamed.

Silence.

Dort Palifox, a fragile-looking Philipino, could open beer bottles with his teeth.  He died suddenly in his diminutive living room [or killed himself] when his 300 lb. wife, Dorothy, “up and left,” as we said.  He looked even smaller dead.

Because of ET’s generosity, the charges [“put it on my tab”] sometimes got out of hand.  It was amazing how irresponsible, misdirected people, living on a minimal salary could lose control.  That frustration surfaced—occasionally.  A “long, tall drink of water,” as Mom described Eddie French,  a six foot giant, who seemed to live on beer and Town Talk white bread, refused Dad’s quiet request for payment of a burgeoning stack of charges.  Suddenly hostile, Town Talk challenged Dad. “You little…you feel safe behind that counter telling me when to pay what I’m never gonna pay.”  Dad sprang up like Michael’s Christmas Jack-in-the-box.  “Let’s go over to the tracks, big guy, that’s neutral territory.”  They walked across Highway 78, Dad a foot shorter, but Mom noticed what I was not there to see:  The always-ready channel locks in Dad’s back pocket.  I told you he was never without pliers.  Channel locks are grown-up pliers, heavy on the end.

When they squared off, Town Talk suddenly walked away.  “What would have happened, Pop?”  “Son, I had my handy pliers; he woulda been gummin’ his food the rest of his life.” Playing Man could be Fighting Man.  A violent man lay buried deep in Dad.  

He  became a Mormon “not because I think I can do what the church expects,” he said, in his honest, kind, existential way, “but because I knew my children and Dollie could live it.  Mormonism will save my children from the alcoholism that has and is killing 9 of my brothers, sisters and my dad.”

Integrity.  A goodness we never felt good enough to challenge.