Piecing the Story Together: Doc Macomber

A Visit With Doc Macomber at Dunn School

Bruce Edkins Macomber (1930-2021) affectionately known as Doc, was a living legend at Dunn School. Born in Illinois, Doc grew up during World War II and discovered a love of learning early on. He became a geologist and worked for several years with the Shell Oil Company. Fortunately for all of us, Doc found his true calling and became a teacher in the early 1970s. Doc's life and the history of Dunn School had been intertwined for three decades when a few of our middle school students interviewed him as part of our oral history elective in the early 2000s. Doc arrived for this interview carrying scrapbooks of photos and clippings to share with the kids. He was gracious and kind, as always. I heard only recently of his passing, and I decided it was important to honor him by posting his reminiscences here on The Living Stories Collective website.

In his own words:

I was born in Evanston, Illinois and lived most of my life until college in a town called Winnetka.

I went to a public high school, and then I went to Princeton, and after that, I got a master's degree at Northwestern, and I got my last degree at Rutgers -- always in the subject of geology. After getting my doctorate, I spent eleven years with the Shell Oil Company as a production geologist.I went out in old oil fields to find new places to put wells and get more oil out of the ground. After eleven years of that, I decided I wanted to try teaching, and so I came to Southern California.

My first year of teaching, I taught at the Howard School in Montecito, and after one year there, I heard that Bill Webb was looking for a math tutor at Dunn to go with his learning skills program, which was the first learning skills program in Southern California. Mrs. Roome started the reading and writing side of the program and they realized they needed someone to teach math, too, so I became a math tutor. Next year, the science teacher quit, so I got that job teaching chemistry and physics. I did that until I retired, which was about 1996.

I started at Dunn in the school year of 1974-75. The school was very different then than it is now, and the difference is due to the efforts of an enormous number of people. It's very impressive to realize what human effort it takes to change a small school or a small business. I think one of the nicest things about my teaching career has been watching Dunn grow from this little converted farm with dirt roads to what it is today. There was one soccer field where the old grandstand used to be - I remember there was one grounds keeper who worked all the time trying to fill in gopher holes. Then several headmasters went by, and when Ed Simmons became headmaster, he began to raise money, and the first thing he did was build a new science lab, and that was a real surprise for me. Up until then, I taught in an old Quonset hut from Vandenberg Air Force Base that Tony Dunn had bought to use as a science building. He had two of them, one for biology, and the other for physical sciences, and I figured that'd be where I'd spend my career.

It was dirty. Every day at exactly the same time, a garbage truck would come by the entrance to my labs, and the door was always open for ventilation, and all these clouds of dust would come in. It was always very dusty and dirty. Usually when we were having meals in the dining hall, a huge truck would roll by and then all this dust would come in. It was dust all the time.

One thing about the school's growth has been the effort to cover all that dirt with grass. You might take that grass for granted nowadays, but to put all those grassy fields in there, it takes an awful lot of work on the part of more than one fellow. I suppose Mike has five or six men working with him and they work on keeping the place beautiful all the time. That's what all the alumni remark about the first time when they come back. "Boy, has this place changed!

I got my nickname "Doc" from Ed Simmons, who was headmaster here for about ten years in the late 1970s and 1980s. It was because I have a doctorate degree in geology. I never had a nickname before in my life and he started calling me that in assembly, and the students picked up on it. I've been Doc ever since. It certainly is easier than pronouncing my last name.

The main reason I retired from teaching was - well, I was too old to continue teaching. For one thing, my hearing was beginning to go, and I now have hearing aids. But they still needed someone to drive the buses, so I drive the two buses now. And even there, we're getting bigger, because we have an assistant bus driver now. I hope we never have to have more than that! Driving the buses is a lot of fun. Beautiful countryside...

And one story that I've written about for the Dunn Journal is on the subject of team screaming. It involves girls. What happened was that Midland girls came down here for the first of two games for the Munger cup. And they beat our JV and tied our Varsity. And apparently they hadn't had a terribly good season, so that got them very excited. Well, when they have a game down there, they usually ask me to come up with a big bus and bring their teams down, 'cause they only have vans and they'd have to do a shuttle, and so I brought them down. They piled aboard all excited, and when they got to the driveway, they said, "Doc, please beep the horn."

I'd done that before - it's the same tradition we have here, beating the horn when you have a victory. So I got to the Midland driveway and started beeping the horn. It was cold outside. All the windows of the bus were shut. And these thirty-five girls swelled up their chests and let out the loudest noise I have ever heard.

When I was in the Navy, after my first four years of college, my position in a combat drill was right next to a pair of 40 millimeter anti-aircraft guns, automatic machine cannons. That noise is incredible if you have to stand next to it. The gunners all wear ear plugs. I figure that's where my hearing got damaged the first time.

Anyway, here I am driving along the Midland driveway, and they let out this unbelievable team scream. The windows are all closed, and so the sound is confined, and I can't take my hands off the steering wheel to turn off my hearing aids. They kept it up until we crossed the little bridge. The next day my ears were still ringing.

So this last game on Wednesday, I told the Dunn girls, "If you guys win, as we come back, you can see if you can scream louder than the Midland girls did." Well, they didn't win, but they tied, which meant that we keep the Munger cup. And so when we got behind the gym up here I started beeping the horn, and they made just as much noise as the Midland girls, but they kept it up longer. So they were really kind of the winners of the team-screaming contest.

The name of the trophy is the Munger cup, and it was given by our headmaster Jim Munger. For that game, his parents were there. Jim grew up on the Midland campus and the two schools are really tied quite closely together. His father and mother, who were headmaster and headmistress when I first came to teach here, were there for this game. When the game was about to start, the Midland girls lined up in a row, and all thirty of them gave Mrs. Munger a big hug and a kiss on her cheek. It's not something you see at an ordinary high school soccer game!

So that's the other side of my life. Driving the buses. It really is fun. In the old days, I had to sit at a game after driving the kids to the opposing school, and a lot of the time I didn't watch the game because I had a stack of lab notebooks this high that I was scoring. So there I'd be correcting these with all this yelling going on. Now I don't have to do that. I sit there and enjoy the game.

When I first started at Dunn, we had about twenty day girls and a few day boys, and about ninety boarding boys. We were just a little larger than Midland, not much. There's been quite an expansion with the dormitories built, and now we have boarding girls. I think that the quality of the students at Dunn improved as the school got bigger and started looking better.

One reason we wanted girls is because we were missing out on half of the good minds, and there were some boys who wouldn't come to a school without girls. And the boys mainly worked on their pecking order all the time. It was very aggravating. There was a certain amount of hazing. They'd wake someone in the middle of the night, spray shaving cream all over him, throw him into the swimming pool. If you reacted positively, you were okay. If you resisted or told, the seniors would make life miserable for you. A lot of that element.

When the girls came, the boys looked around and concentrated on making points with girls instead of being the big man in the pecking order. It always reminds me of fighting bulls. The steers calm the bulls down. So after we got some money to build girls' dorm, it became much more pleasant to teach here.

I do remember students in the earlier days as being a little tougher, maybe because the conditions were much rougher, so much dirt and dust. The fields were not as nice. And the food in the dining hall was very plain. Pam has worked miracles! One year we had a guy who fried everything and wasn't even very good at that. Mr. Simmons loved ice cream, so every night we had ice cream in the dining hall.

I come in the morning with some kids from Santa Maria. Then I have all day long. I live in Lompoc, and I used to go back and have lunch with my wife, but she got very busy selling houses, and it was kind of tiring to drive back and forth, so I started staying here, and one year I tutored a couple of kids who were being home-schooled by their parents. I tutored them in chemistry. We did the lab exercises right on the kitchen table. I stopped doing that when they moved on.

I enjoy walking. I go back and forth to Los Olivos by the back road, Park Avenue, or I do the circle. In high school I was a distance runner. I ran cross-country and track.. Eventually I started to get a pain in my hips. I stopped running, but I kept up walking. You have to walk pretty fast, not just a stroll. It beats running on a treadmill in your garage.

And in the last several years, I've been putting together a history of the school. It really involves gathering all the papers - the journals, the student newspapers, the photographs that are left over after the making of the yearbook.I've got several places marked off here about the middle school. For instance, in winter of 1979, there was an article - Ed Simmons invited anybody in the valley who had middle school age children who were interested to come to a meeting and they would talk about what parents expected in a school. So this little article is about the first step in the building of the middle school.

And here's a picture of house coming up a driveway. It became the third building in the middle school. The caption describes it as "Old Man Block's former home that stood at Mission Drive and Atterdag in Solvang since 1912."

At first it was a faculty home. Don Daves, the history teacher, lived in it his first year. Then we got some more faculty homes and the middle school was expanding and needed more room.I have a similar picture of the music building coming up the same driveway, missing its bell tower, 'cause that had to be taken off to get under the telephone wires.

This picture is Mr. Simmons addressing the student body of the first middle school, and here is the interior of the first building. I'm pretty sure this is the building we are in right now. I'm not sure you could recognize it now. This was twenty-two years ago.

Here - this is what Dunn Middle School looked like. There were two buildings -- the office, and the one we're in.

Look. There are the swings. And here they are having a Roman Festival. Bicycling trips were very popular, also.

And this happens to be a picture of my own wedding. My wife and I got married outdoors at an Arab horse ranch in Santa Ynez.

Anyway, that's what I do. I'm taking an awful lot of time with this, but I just wanted to show you what I'm doing as school historian so alumni can come back, thumb through this, and see what it was like. What was frustrating at the beginning was that the school yearbooks were collections of photographs, and some were very good, but if you wanted to know who was in the photo, it was very difficult to find out. There were no captions. So now there are boxes of photographs, and I take the yearbook, and the class list, and sometimes I consult with teachers and try to figure out who the people are. It's like piecing together a story.

For my own education, I went to public schools, and by some quirk of fortune, I grew up in a community that really wanted the best education they could get for their children, so we had schools that were always warm in the wintertime, with excellent teachers, good books. I lived in a place where I could walk to my grade school and the junior high and the high school, all kind of a circle not far from where I lived. It was near Chicago, and sometimes the snow was kind of deep, but it was fun. I didn't go away to school until I finished high school and then I went to college.

There were differences, of course. I think you would have laughed at the clothes we wore. We dressed up a little more. Not with coat and tie, but in lower grades we always wore shorts until we were forced by the cold to put on longer pants. When I first started school, it was the era when boys wore knickers, and then you had heavy socks that covered your calves. But that soon passed, and we got to blue jeans. In high school the boys wore lumberjack shirts and khaki trousers or blue jeans, and the girls - it was the era in which they wore sweaters, skirts, and bobby sox with loafers, The girls wore loafers, and you put a penny or a dime in your loafer. As for the teaching, you would probably think it was a little more like lecturing. But all teachers love to talk. They need brakes to slow themselves down.

The reason I am here now is probably because of a woman named Louise Mohr. She was my advisor when I was your age. Like most female teachers in those days, she was not married. There was nothing in the school regulations that said they could not marry, but it was something most of them never got around to. Anyway, back to Louise Mohr - I took a home economics course in the 7th grade. You made brownies and learned to sew. But my cousin and kind of sparked off each other and I didn't behave very well, so I had to be moved. Miss Mohr said, " I know just where you're gonna go. You're going into my public speaking class."

It gave me the chills to think about it. To stand up and give a talk in the seventh grade! For the last half of the year, I took this public speaking class, and it was a sweat every time I stood up to talk , but at the end of it, I had shown enough progress that she said, "Okay. There's no second year of public speaking, but I want you to be in my play."

I didn't enjoy this very much at the beginning, but once I got my lines memorized and we began to act, it was a lot of fun. And I always think that taking that public speaking class and being in that play - later in high school, I was in a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta - may have had a lot to do with my becoming a teacher later on.

I was in school during World War II. My older brother fought in the war. He got killed. I don't think anyone at home can really claim to have suffered during World War II unless they lost somebody. When my brother got killed, it was terrible. I don't think my parents ever really got over it. They lived for a long time after that, but they never got over it.

But until that time, the war at home basically meant that my dad had to do with less gasoline in his car. You had a ration card that was stuck to the window of your car and you presented that every time you went to get gas. Our diet was circumscribed a little bit. I happened to be a banana lover. I remember when my older brother graduated from junior high school, the family took him down to the drug store and bought him a banana split. Well, when my turn came, they took me down there, too, and woe is me, there were no bananas. The bananas all came from Central America, and German submarines had sunk all the banana boats, and so there were no bananas. We did without 'em. And we didn't eat quite as much meat, either.

It wasn't until 1949 - four years after the end of World War II - that the English gave up meat rationing and could eat as much as they wanted. The English really suffered. Great deprivations. But I don't think Americans really did. There were no bombing raids here. The Germans tried to land spies on our East coast but never succeeded. The spies were caught right away. And a Japanese submarine came up at California and scared everyone to death. In fact, a friend of mine had neighbors who moved from California back to the Midwest because they were so scared of the Japanese army landing on the Pacific coast. The Japanese had no plans to do that. Once they had bombed our fleet, they wanted the war to go away so they could enjoy their empire, but we didn't let them. So the Japanese subs scared Californians, put a leak into a couple of oil tanks, and that was it. I don't think we underwent any serious deprivation.

My brother was in Europe, in Patton's third army. It was terribly sad because he had survived the Battle of the Bulge and the campaign just before that, with Patton's army, and then I looked it up in the 87th Infantry Division record, and it showed that he was the last man in his battalion to get killed. Very soon after he got killed, the German army fell apart, and it was just a matter of getting into trucks and driving down the road in occupied Germany. He was the last man in his company even to be injured. He had survived an awful lot.

But discussion of war's impact would be incomplete without some mention of the way it changed the role of women. In the 1930's, our family included from two to five domestics, most of them young women for whom life on the family farm had become isolated and unappealing. They weren't paid much, but the got room and board while biding their time for better jobs and enjoying the social life of a town not far from Chicago. When war came, they quickly departed to jobs in factories or enlisted in the WACS or become nurses, and my mother found herself having to do much of the work of running a household. (Of course, I was old enough to help. My job was to fill the stoking machine in the basement with coal twice a day to keep the house warm.) At any rate, the war showed women they could do men's work, and they have never looked back.

Because of my older brother's tragedy, my father made me take ROTC when I went to Princeton. The Navy would pay me a small salary and you take one course a semester in Naval science or Naval engineering, you took a midshipmen cruise, then after you graduated, you were commissioned as an ensign in the US Navy and you were assigned for two years to a ship or shore station. Then you were free to continue in the Navy or leave the service in the reserve. I did my two years during the Korean war, a war that was fought mainly by the Army, and the Air Force to a lesser extent. But the soldiers are the guys that had to fight the Koreans and later the Chinese. And it was just as brutal as any war ever fought. But I think unlike Vietnam, we all believed it was the right thing to do. We were quite patriotic. World War II was only a few years back. The North Koreans had invaded South Korea and it looked like a giant beating up on some poor fellow. The government felt it was a ploy on the part of Stalin and his Communist regime to extend the Communist system all over the world. We felt we had to stop it.

Anyway, I was in Navy for two years. The Navy was not really involved in combat. The closest I got was when we were made the station ship for a town on the West coast of Korea. Soon after our ship came back from the Far East, I was sent back to the reserves, no longer part of the Navy. But the Navy was a very good place to be in that war, cause you got close to what was happening, but you didn't have to participate. We went through all kinds of exercises, but fortunately we never had to do any of it in actual combat. It was always exciting, riding in little boats to the beach, but not getting shot at.

I know that in growing up myself I was very shy and not a particularly good athlete, one of these bookish types. I always felt a little inferior because of that. You are bound to be hit by disappointment at one time or another. But the memories of the bad times begin to fade, and what sticks in your memory are the good times. Your problems look monstrous when you're growing up, but you look back and wonder why you were so upset. It's educational, or a mild ripple in your lifetime.

Talk to people about something that's worrying you. That's one of the greatest problems with boys. Girls do like to talk. They settle problems by talking. Boys tend to settle things physically or put things away without telling people - they sort of gunnysack things. Don't gunnysack. Talk to your friend first, or tell a teacher.

Come and visit. I'm in the library almost every day. Come and ask questions about school history. I'd be happy to see you.

Ol' Van: Legendary Teacher Frank Van Schaick

Trying to capture the essence of Frank Van Schaick on a few sheets of paper is depressingly futile; he was too many things and so influential to countless people, especially the generations of children he taught.

Room 10 at Wilson School was no ordinary place; it was Van’s Room. We had our regular studies, of course, but they occurred in a room full of wildlife captured on many trips, a room adorned with Greek statues and horse pistols. Navajo sand paintings and prints of the great masters hung beside our own works. Across the hall was a large closet allegedly for coats and lunches, but it contained tools and work benches on which we manufactured all manner of projects. Everyone had to make an ash baton and “conduct” the class music lessons. Best of all, we made bows and arrows from scratch and took them on our camping trips. Room 10 had no regular pencil sharpener; we used our knives, just as Van did. Van had us in noon league sports and after school we practiced for the Saturday games against other schools, where winning was good, but sportsmanship was paramount. We agonized over a class Constitution, then we lived by it. Van was a great one for democracy; he taught it and lived it.

Van had a calm forcefulness and a strong will never imposed; he simply set clear examples easily followed. Even today, 50 years later, former Room 10 students will ask themselves what Van would have thought before settling on their own course of action. His keen intellect was obvious, and as we grew older we appreciated his abiding wisdom. Van’s character and personality were perfect for the classroom, but more so for the wilderness, which, I think, Van assumed was another classroom more suited to higher learning. Love for his family was intense, but I doubt he was ever more content than deep in the woods or high in the Sierra, especially with a group of kids “doing all that neat stuff,” as he would put it, “learning to take care of themselves.”

I recall once, years after Room 10, stopping by his place for a visit. Van had yet another group of children down in his woods —Van had yet another group of children down in his woods —cooking, camping, tying knots, and studying wildlife — and I asked his wife Lois how he could put up with all of us over so many years. She replied, “He never met a kid he wouldn’t bring home.”

He was the recipient of countless accolades and awards, all graciously accepted, then never mentioned again. Humble legitimately describes Van, as does Man of the People, but he was by no means common. I once chanced upon a retired Stanford professor and mentioned that my sixth-grade teacher was a graduate of her institution. On hearing his name, she became excited and said, “Frank Van Schaick! He was the most gifted student I ever had.”

Van was ever a man of words and good literature, surrounded to his last days by stacks of books, especially of the West, Native Americans, natural history, and biographies. He wrote the “Nature Walks” column for the News-Press for many years, and co-authored two volumes with his good friend Dick Smith. After retiring, he wrote a memoir of sorts, Home of the Wilson Wildcats: Life and Death of an American Elementary School. He showed me a card he received from education guru Mem Fox; its essence was simple: “Mr. Van Schaick, this is the best book on education I’ve ever read.”

Van said teachers were buying it, then laughed, and said, “But not administrators, damned fools,” an epithet seldom heard by him and usually reserved for Congress.

Van topped off his literary excursions during our backpack trips. The last night out we’d build a fire along some quiet stretch of river and Van would tell us a story, usually something obscure from the fringes of Western literature. We’d lie there beneath the stars, mesmerized, wrapped in a special magic until the tale ended and the fire died.

The last pack trip of the summer was special because he’d bring his wife Lois and his daughters Susan and Mimi. Lois was every bit his equal and toted around more personality than ten normal folks could handle. When Lois showed up as a young teacher at Wilson School, Van was knocked off his feet. They both loved jazz and danced to favorite records before school in Room 10, a magical place in every sense. They lost Susan far too young and raised her children John, Vicki, and Jamal. And Mimi, that cute little imp and tease of so long ago — now a grandmother herself and mother of Jessica — sat beside her father the night of June 20; Van spent 94 years on this Earth and is gone too soon.

Bruce Brownell, the author of this tribute, followed the example of his mentor and himself became a beloved and unforgettable teacher. You can read an in-depth interview with Mr. Brownell at this link on The Living Stories Collective website.

What I Saw by Christine Beebe

I'm driving along the rugged California coast on my way to visit my friend Cynthia.  She's a talented writer whose dedication to her craft and enthusiasm for life has again beckoned the Gaviota Writers to come together for a morning of sharing, connection, and rejuvenation.  

We are a small but varied group and as we arrive, we'll exchange greetings and mingle.  Some will hug and others might be introduced as newcomers, then we'll settle in under the sheltering sprawl of a gnarled oak tree.  We'll take turns reading aloud the words we've each crafted into a story, an essay, a memoir or a song, and time will begin to slow.  There will be trust, appreciation and acceptance, as we listen closely to stories that are often deeply personal, exposing vulnerable bits of our humanity, reminding us that we're not alone on this conflicted planet.

A moody gray sky is hovering low this morning over a steely sea, and I slowly navigate the twisty road as it dips in and out of small canyons.  I veer around potholes and pass a sign that cautions:  "Cattle on Road."  Thick tendrils of fog reach up the cliffs from the ocean below and drift slowly across the road.  I ease through a sharp blind turn, and suddenly I'm upon them.

Three hulking black steers fill my windshield, and the sight of them causes me to inhale and brake sharply.  They are plodding deliberately in single file along the edge of the pavement, and they appear identical.  Their mud-caked hooves move in unison and their lowered blocky heads swing from side to side, as if choreographed.  Steam rises from their hairy hides and disappears into the fog. 

I don't stop, yet each detail remains inked into my vision.  It's not that I'd come close to hitting them, or even that I'd been unprepared. It's something else . . . it feels like an omen.  Three.  Not two, not one, but three.  In a perfect line, head to tail, as black as obsidian.  

I glance repeatedly into my rearview mirror even after they're out of sight, but by the time I turn onto Cynthia's road, I've forgotten them.  

Hours later, when the last of our group's written words has been spoken aloud and our gathering has ended, I head for home.  I brake at the stop sign where the road T-bones into the 101 Freeway.  I focus on my left turn across two lanes of speeding southbound traffic as it approaches from around a bend, then visualize where I will merge into the lanes of speeding northbound traffic.  

And now I'm moving north in tandem with cars and big rigs and horse trailers, away from the ocean and through the abrupt dark blink of the Gaviota Tunnel.  The freeway climbs over the pass and descends into the valley, between undulating hills of stubborn chapparal and ancient oaks.  

I'm driving fast in the slow lane, feeling light and blissful and a little more hopeful about everything in general.  It was a delightful morning, the sun has just emerged, and the afternoon seems full of possibilities.  

***

In my reverie, gaze fixed on the horizon, I don't register what I see until I've already passed it.  A dark shape in the dirt, in the weedy stubble at the very edge of the asphalt.  At first, I'm not sure what I've just seen.  But now my mind is reconstructing it, and I begin to see an image appearing and sharpening - like my black and white photos emerged many years ago when I swirled them in a bath of chemical developer.

And now I know it was a human being, a man, sitting hunched low to the ground, a grayish-black hoodie pulled down over most of his face.  He was motionless, facing the traffic, close enough to feel a slipstream slap from every passing car. 

I hurriedly voice-dial 911, but the operator begins to sound bored as soon as I describe the man and his location.  He's homeless, she tells me, and they've received calls about him before.  I find myself breathlessly repeating to her how dangerously close he's sitting to the edge of the freeway, but she remains unimpressed.  She'll send an officer out to check on him, she says.

As I continue my journey home, I can't stop thinking about the man.  How did he get out there in the open countryside in the first place?  What was his story?  

And then I have an unplanned mental segue, and find myself revisiting my African safari from several years ago.  My Tanzanian guide Isaac noticed how much time I was spending behind the viewfinder of my fancy new camera.  "Just LOOK at the animals," he whispered to me.  "Don't take so many pictures!  Use your eyes!"

When I took his advice, a large family of elephants materialized before me there in the shade of a monstrous baobab tree.  I could hear them, smell them, and see their trunks swinging, ears fanning, mothers nurturing their fragile babies.  They were wild and free.  I was witnessing a scene as timeless as Africa itself, and I wept from the intensity of emotion that swept over me like a tsunami.

As Mary Oliver wrote: "Pay attention.  Be astonished.  Tell about it." 

That man beside the freeway.  What was he looking at?  Did his view of the world ever give him joy or cause him to catch his breath in amazement? Could he tell someone about it?  Would anyone ever listen?

And then I inexplicably find myself remembering those three black steers, focusing on the path directly ahead of them, lumbering into a future they could never anticipate.

Spoken Word, Performed by Roderick Wright

I recently had the pleasure of meeting former California State Senator Roderick Wright, who seemed a kind of Renaissance man. An astute political analyst, an insightful cultural observer and commentator, and a gifted storyteller, he is someone I hope to interview in the future for this website. In the meantime, however, he gave me permission to share this cell phone video of his recitation of a touching and powerful poem about homelessness. The poem was written by Oscar Brown Jr. (1926 – 2005) an American singer, songwriter, actor, playwright, poet, and civil rights activist. Senator Wright’s compelling delivery brings the poem to life, and its topic is as relevant as ever. We are honored to share it here.

The Immensity

I have often felt there is a lack of ceremony in my life, that rites of passage to mark transitions are missing. Difficult events exert their crushing weight without the emotional release some kind of ritual might have provided, and the procession of years moves forward without pause or punctuation. I was therefore especially intrigued when a friend invited me to go with him for a hike that would mark his symbolic entry into elder-hood. We would be accompanied by three other companions, one of them a wise and gentle Chumash elder who would serve as our guide.  But whether it involved a ceremony or not, an opportunity to walk in the backcountry with people who know where they are going sounded wonderful to me, and yes is what I said.

It was a long drive and we started out early, winding along mountain roads to a campground at the edge of a wilderness area where we met our Chumash guide. We walked along a gently rising trail through oak woodland, stands of pine and fir trees, and fragrant chaparral. Along the way there were thickets of vibrant green grass and bursts of colorful wildflowers, and we soon descended into a sandy creek bed, which we followed for some time. The wonders of the wilderness unfolded before us, and every now and then our guide would stop to call our attention to a shift of environment and a different and palpable energy field, instructing us to acknowledge it and to enter with a spirit of attentiveness and gratitude.

Occasionally he paused to adjust the leg brace he was wearing to support his dodgy knee, but these too were teachable moments. "Getting older slows us down," he said, "but when we slow down, we notice things. That's one of the gifts of being an elder...we are allowed to slow down and notice. And when we notice, we acknowledge the spirits. We say thank you. We approach with the right attitude: humble, appreciative, and mindful."

He further explained that it is our responsibility as elders to become the best versions of ourselves that we can be. We must be good examples to others, and we must pass along what we have learned. One of the perks, apparently, is that elders have the right to scold. But scolding is not just venting and expressing disapproval; it is a means of correcting and teaching. We should make it count.

Also, "cherished ancestral wounds" do not justify bad behavior. That's the phrase he used, and I like it, because I think we all have wounds we sort of cherish rather than heal, and we masochistically dwell on them when we should be moving on. Forgiveness is the remedy, including forgiveness of self, although this certainly isn't easy to implement.

It happened to be Good Friday, which someone mentioned in passing. "It sure is a good Friday," said our guide. He had some thoughts about the Catholic church, too: "There's an emphasis on the birth of Christ, the death of Christ, and the resurrection of Christ, but not enough on the life of Christ, on really what it means to live a life of genuine kindness, forgiveness, and love."

And here we were, surrounded by beauty in the church of the outdoors, and this was our sermon for the day. Forgiveness again. And love.

"Everyone needs to feel that they have a purpose," he added. "And everyone does have a purpose, but they don't always see it. One of the best things we can do for someone is to help them find their purpose." He told us a story (one of many stories he shared along the way) about how he had helped bring peace of mind to a hardcore criminal regretfully nearing the end of his days by showing the man that his life had not been wasted, that in fact he had provided the crucial service of being a bad example to others.

"Everything in the universe has its purpose," he continued. "Every insect, every pebble, every snowflake...and each is part of the greater whole. All things are connected. We belong to this vast and wondrous universe, and it belongs to us."

"We must recognize the immensity of our being," he said.  The immensity of it. (It's a concept I am still pondering.)

He spoke too of his belief that we are at a hopeful moment in time, a hugely transformative moment. Opportunities exist that we could not have imagined. Changes are even now happening, good ones. And why not? I allowed his lofty optimism to displace my usual anxiety for the time being.

We walked further. We stopped at a bush of white sage, touched its leaves, smelled its aroma on our fingertips, said thank you, and continued. Sometimes there were fragments of conversation in the air, sometimes just the sound of our steps on good ground.

I heard a canyon wren. We saw a hummingbird darting about the flowers, a dragonfly hovering near, butterflies and red-tail hawks, the distinctive paw prints of a mountain lion, and bees setting their example of cooperative industry for the common good, just by bee-ing.

At a few special points our guide gathered us together. "This is a portal," he said. "Can you sense it?" And indeed we did, for the world at these junctures subtly transformed itself, humming and vibrating at a deeper level, shining more brightly, revealing itself in spellbinding clarity and detail.

Eventually we saw a distinctive rock formation looming on the horizon ahead.  "What you are seeing," said our guide, "is a space ship to another dimension." Those with the right attitude and perspective are welcome to board, he explained.

We approached.  Our guide cautioned us that the rock has absorbed the sorrow of many ancestors, and sometimes it is painful to touch. He said he had seen a visitor unexpectedly break into sobs as he placed his hand on it.

We each spoke silently to the rock, touched it, and felt its ancient heat. At first I felt sad, which is still my default state, although  I couldn't tell if the sadness was personally mine or some residue of humanity's collective heartache. I didn't know what to say except how deeply sorry I am, and I meant it with all my heart, and how I wished there could be release from the suffering and a beautiful outcome, even if I can't see it.  

I also expressed my thanks, of course, and my hope that I might be worthy and wise in this latter section my life, finding and being light.

But then a kind of giddiness crept in, beginning with an overwhelming sense of gratitude about being there. It felt deliciously implausible, as indeed my whole life is, but all of that delicious implausibility seemed to crystallize in the moment. It was absurd and timeless and wonderful. It was a very good time for not-thinking.

I was content to go no further. I am not one of those agile, sure-footed people who climb rocks and ascend to great heights. I told my friends that I would happily wait below while they went up to the top of the rock formation. There followed a bit of gentle coercion, peer pressure, and physical force, in equal parts.  One companion tied a rope around my waist and another pulled me up the rock's steep surface.

There was a beautiful pool at the top, and pale grass, and more rock sculpture forming a sort of bowl within which we sat and felt the earth's embrace. We took off our shoes and socks and stood in the water, and there was talk about what it means to be an elder, and about navigating life, and how good it felt to be right where we were.  Our guide sang a song to us, a kind of chant that reverberated against the rocks.  We ate whatever snacks each of us had carried, took some pictures, felt the wind and the sun.I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I never set the rope down and I never entirely forgot that I would have to get back down, and getting down turned out to be even more terrifying than getting up. I wanted to face outward, but I was told to lean in facing the rock.

"Be a lizard!" our guide kept instructing me, which was not really that helpful, and I honestly couldn't figure out what to grab hold of or where to place my feet, and I froze. I finally saw that I had no choice but to either stay and die there or allow someone to yank me by the rope and catch me. I still don't quite know how the removal of me was achieved, but oh, the abandon it required! And the trust in someone else's strength!  I suppose this too was a lesson.

Somehow I was down, and I'll never do that again, but it was worth it. I will never forget the pleasure and beauty of that place on the rock, and the whole experience, including the challenge of getting up and the terror getting down. Apart from any ceremony, the journey was in its own way transformative. Maybe I am an elder now. Or almost.

Then came the hike back, long stretches of just quietly walking, the light shifting on the mountains, colorful wildflowers and grasses, the fragrance of sage and chaparral, the murmur of the creek in deep places, its water spilling over rocks, glistening in the sunlight.

I wonder what I have brought back with me, and what I will give back. I have been noting my surroundings more carefully and consciously since returning, recognizing changes in environment, acknowledging and thanking unseen forces. And I do like the idea of talking to the ancestors, of including the presence of passed souls in my life in a more positive and participatory way. (When I mentioned this to our guide he said, "Whether you do that or not, they're there.")

I also carry the knowledge that I am capable and strong and occasionally brave, not only because I keep trudging along, but because I can trust in the strength of another to help me when I am stuck. And I'm diligently aspiring to fulfill the role of an elder and be a good example. I'll try to scold selectively and with kindness, and I'll try to keep learning, because I still feel far from wisdom and peace, if indeed peace is attainable.

But my biggest insight has been a realization of how limited and secular my ways have become, how small my field of vision, how mundane and concrete I tend to be. I have emerged with a greater openness to the spiritual and non-rational aspects of existence. And there is a place in my head that wasn't there before...that I can return to at will.  Maybe I am beginning to sense what our guide means by the immensity.

A Man of Many Gifts: Rim Kaminskas

I recently heard about the passing of a remarkable man, Rim Kaminskas. He was a brilliant, creative, and generous soul, perhaps best known for a homebuilt single-engine, single-seat biplane called the Jungster, first flown in 1962. But there was so much more, and I’ll let the stories about him speak for themselves. I’ll start with a piece I wrote several years ago about a beautiful grandfather clock he made from the wood of a fallen oak tree and presented as a gift to the Ranch. Afterwards, I shall post in the reminiscences of one of his friends and kindred spirits, a man named Ken Vadnais.

The Gift of a Grandfather Clock

One Monday morning in April, Rim Kaminskas quietly brought a gift to the Hollister House: a grandfather clock that he lovingly built from the wood of a fallen Ranch oak. More than a timepiece, it is a work of art, a focal point in the room that is a gathering place for our community, and a symbol of the many unheralded expressions of creativity, care, and diligence that are happening around us as the hours of each day pass. It’s a thought that elevates.

Rim Kaminskas was born in Lithuania, as was his talented and dynamic wife Lili, but the two met in the United States, where both their families had emigrated. They have been married for nearly sixty years, traveled the world, had successful careers, and are the parents of three sons and a daughter. Rim is an engineer and a physicist, well known for his ability to solve problems. As his son Michael says, “He just gets interested in things. He sees how they work or finds a better way to do it.”

Rim’s father was a woodworker who built beautiful objects–including walnut clocks– to replace the things the family had left behind in Lithuania, and Rim learned the craft from him but soon found his own voice. A true Renaissance man, Rim has designed and built airplanes, biplanes, steam engines, furniture, lamps, toys, harps, cannons, candlesticks, teak bowls and boxes, gallery-worthy sculpture, and of course, grandfather clocks. “The clocks are probably a nod to my grandfather,” Michael says. “But the airplanes are totally my dad’s thing.”

Rim also makes kimchi, brews beer, propagates fig trees, sails, plays the accordion, swims daily, and is an aficionado of Dixieland jazz. His curiosity about the world is insatiable and his creativity unceasing. His pleasure comes purely from the process of figuring out how things work and building objects and contraptions that are both functional and beautiful. Ego and profit are not what motivate him, and he often gives his creations away.

Rim and Lili bought their parcel at the Ranch in 1989. Rim’s maternal grandparents had once owned a ranch in Lithuania that was lost to the Communists when the family fled, and much lore about it lingered. In a way, the Hollister Ranch property might be a replacement for the Kaminskas’ yearned-for Lithuanian ranch days.

“Well, for some of us, it was about the surf,” admits Michael. “But you’ll never see my dad at the beach…what really sold my dad on the ranch was that this house had a shop downstairs!”

It’s a shop that has been put to good use. And it’s a good example of what an interesting and versatile community we have here at the Ranch, this place where wonders abound and where, if we pay attention, we cannot help but be inspired.

“When that old oak came down, and my dad saw the beautiful sections that were revealed,” Michael says, “he knew he would use it somehow.”

Now it lives on as a grandfather clock. Come by the Hollister House and take a look at it.

And thank you, Rim, for your artistry and kindness.

Remembering Rim by Ken Vadnais

I got to know Rim when he joined us for sailing from time to time, and on one of those Thursday afternoon outings I mentioned I was interested in getting the plans for one of his airplane designs. He told me not to bother because he would give me an airplane if I wanted it. Of course I already had a Twin Commander, but I was intrigued. We made arrangements to meet at Chino airport where he owned a hangar. I flew down in my Commander and he drove from his home in Palos Verdes.

After landing we met at an agreed location on the ramp and he drove me to his hangar, one in a line of forlorn sheet metal buildings tinged with rust and secured by one of the oldest pad locks I have ever seen. The lock was balky but it finally opened with a creaky, screeching protest which reminded me of Jack Benny opening his basement vault in an old radio show. The hangar was stuffed full of flight hardware of various descriptions to the point that walking around was difficult and at times hazardous. Rim wanted to gift me a couple of experimental aircraft projects that he had built years before, each a unique Rim design and not the Jungster he was known for. In fact the two aircraft were obviously the product of thinking far beyond the Jungster, much refined and built for speed. One had gull wings, which gave it greater clearance off the ground so it could swing a bigger prop. I'm not sure when the aircraft were built and flown but he said they had both taken to the air at some point. They were now old projects that he had lost interest in, as his mind moved on to the next great idea, and they had thick coatings of dust on the wings. Both aircraft were a long way from flying condition (maybe an infinitely long way) and I declined his offer of them, thinking I was not up to the task of stepping into his large shoes. But we had a great time knocking around his hangar as he explained all the things he was working on and thinking about. He was one of those people that had thousands of ideas, all of them good ones, and not enough time or bandwidth to get them all out of his head.

Afterward we headed over to the legendary Flo's Café where over lunch I learned more about his life and career. On the way from the café back to my aircraft we drove by the Planes of Fame Museum, one of the best and biggest private air museums in the country. Out front, up on a pedestal, was a beautifully restored B17, our workhorse bomber of World War II. Rim told me he didn't like that airplane. I asked why, thinking he disliked some aerodynamic aspect of the design, but after a moment of hesitation he instead told me they didn't look as cool from the ground perspective when viewing the open bomb bay after releasing their load. He explained he had narrowly missed destruction a number of times during Allied air raids on the German towns where he and his refugee family were hunkered down at the end of the war. He described the over pressure from an exploding 500-pound blockbuster bomb as one of the most terrifying experiences of his life, and the consequent destruction it produced was horrific. To Rim, the B17 was an evil predator bent on killing him and his family, not a nostalgic symbol of victory.

Luckily for the rest of us that knew him as a friend, he survived the experience.

Rim was a self made man in every respect, having come to this country after the war with nothing of any value except a brilliant mind and a willingness to work hard. As it turns out, in America that is sufficient starting capital to accomplish extraordinary things. He loved this country and the many opportunities it offered a poor Lithuanian kid full of hopes and ideas. It gave him the possibility to find Lili, the love of his life, and raise his family, and to have an exciting, productive, rewarding career, make many friends, and live a happy life. Which he did.

He will be missed.

One Shoe Boys

A Story by Jim Brady

Prologue

Helloooo. Anyone over there? 

Can anyone hear me? 

I can hear and see you. But you can’t. Maybe ya’ll are going deaf or blind.

Well, I was once, too, in those final years, before I became dead.

But now I’m a would have been a one-hundred-years-old spirit today. Yessiree you young still-alive whippersnappers, I may be gone, but I’m still here.

_______________________

Introduction

In case someone’s hearing, I’ll pretend someone is. Or maybe I’ll just talk to myself, which is pretty much the same thing.

You see, I’ve got some out loud thinking to do, so just bear with me. 

1

First of all, what a load of horse shit it is that as we grow older we grow wiser and have more answers to the big questions about life. Questions like, Why? How come? Says who? What gives? What if? What’s up?  WTF?

Trust me on that: I’ve been there and come out here on the other side, and all that search for answers and meaning of Life, with a couple of wanderings in the wilderness seeking wisdom….well, life sent me back a lot of questions with postage due, ‘addressee no longer lives here’ type of responses. Return to sender.

2

So, where was I?  Not having to deal with a decrepit body on the corporal plane of existence sure gives an old timer a boost of energy, but it doesn’t seem to help with memory.

Oh yeah. Questions.

My Main Question for pondering recently is…..

I wonder what happened to the two boys with one shoe? 

3

That might not make sense without some context.

You see, there was a  time when the former me returned to South Africa during the end of apartheid with some educators to meet and advise the new ministry of education people, and then I went by myself next door to Mozambique for a visit. The dust hadn’t quite settled yet from their twenty-five years of post-Colonial revolution and complicated series of civil wars. What a mess. Not to mention AIDs arriving and decimating the population. 

Whoops, sorry about that mental memory meandering. 

So, back in Mozambique, there’s land mines.  Blown-up and upside-down tanks and Toyotas and airplanes here and there, and a lot of likewise blown-up amputees on crutches. (My most memorable quote from a local resident:   “While we’re walking on this path, just be sure to step on someone else’s footprints; if they were ok, you probably will be, too.”)

4

So, I’m down along the shoreline of Lake Malawi dropping off a couple of large sacks of maize seeds and wheat flour for a community living around a mostly roofless church, a church lacking in pews and crucifixes, but with plenty of mortar holes and gunfire pockmarks in the walls. 

Two young boys appear in ragged shorts and t-shirts to help carry the 50kg bags from truck to church. The boys are smiling, from an inner-distance, with eyes that look too far beyond their years. And they’re barefoot. Sort of, mostly barefoot. Three of their four feet are bare at any given moment. What they do have is one shoe, which they share back and forth, each to the other, right to left,  One kid wears the shoe for a few minutes, then the other guy gets it. 

 5

 Back to the Question: 

The Question with no answer is: whatever happened to those two boys and their one shoe? 

Bigger Question:  why did what happened to them in their lives, happen to them? 

I got no answer for that, and I’ve even asked around this post-life spirit world to see if those two boys are around anywhere, so I can ask them.

But nope, no boys, no answers.

____________________

Epilogue

Shit. It seems we don’t even get answers to Life’s Big Questions on this side of the afterlife.

But I’ll keep asking.