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zBrown
Ice climber
chingadero de chula vista
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Nov 30, 2012 - 02:46pm PT
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Hi Pat:
I can't speak for Mouse (then again who can), but I can offer a little clarification on some of my stuff. A number of photos beginning at John Wesly Hardin(g) are references to Mr. Dylan's John Wesley Hardin song titles in their order of appearance on the album.
JWH -> As I Went Out One Morning -> St Augustine ...
Some of the other stuff is just reactions to things posted in the thread.
Some of the references can be rather obscure. For example, the Dylan (Repenthouse Magazine) can actually be found by seaching on Frankie Lee & Judas Priest via Google.
The rock is a phtographic representation of the Drifer's Escape (#1).
http://mountainproject.com/iPhone?action=showRoute&id=106523084
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 30, 2012 - 03:10pm PT
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Family-wise, I don't think Dingus is much better off than I have been. Tamales for the wedding, canning tomatos and salsa by the dozens of jars. Learning the secrets of cooking Spanish rice, how to cook fideo, how not to handle chilis.
"Huero! Git yer ass over here! Mija, too much salt, more lard, okay?"
Gramma Rose was a life-ong cannery worker. Her grandkids got raised by her. She was married four times. She never had a kind word, just so you know. She was fierce with others and we were all pendejos and cabrones but with her family, it was all mijas and mi corazons. We two belonged to the same unions, cannery workers and Bermingham-Hernadez, so we got along fine.
It must have helped that I loved making tamales and canning with the girls, because the first time Bevin came over from Castro valley to help one year, she got assigned by Gramma Rose to put the olives in the tamales, a job only worked up to in the Hernandez hierarchy of rollers and stuffers. the other kids knew she meant it as a compliment to Bevin, and a lovingly applied welcome to the family. Rose was wise and knew Bevin had to be part of the group, and a noticeable one. Gramma's ral name was Margaret rose, I think, but she liked the name Rose. [OLIVE DRAB ALERT!] So it stuck.
Her daughter Elsie was a master canner who got certified by UC Extension. She got her realty license and started making decent money in the 80s, even though she had been head shift operator for Pacific Tel and Tel, yet another link between Hernandez and Bermingham, which family was all telephone pioneers.
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zBrown
Ice climber
chingadero de chula vista
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Nov 30, 2012 - 03:19pm PT
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I'd love to get back in and Muddy up the waters, but ... if you gotta go, you gotta go now or else you end up staying all night
[Click to View YouTube Video]
You better come in my kitchen, it's going to be raining outdoors.
That chapel sure looks alot like Bonnie Beecher's apartment building.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 30, 2012 - 03:42pm PT
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I learned to glide, trot, and do the cha-cha-cha in that place, then got married in it twenty-nine years later. Eighth grade dancing class and a wedding. It was BITD the "new" hall of the Knights of Pythias Lodge, after their old one burned up downtown, zBrown.
In another time and another place I might have written that it burned down uptown, but this is me, it's Merced. I'm not Hughes, and it's not Harlem.
No Harlem, no foul. In Merced, we have one street called Harlem Ct, and many fowls, thanks to Foster Fowl Farms.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 30, 2012 - 05:17pm PT
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This innocent-appearing little lamb and I got in a lot of stink together. Literally. We were caught stealing cigarettes from a local store in Sacto. Our punishment was to sit in front of his parents, my parents and my family and smoke a pack of Camel unfilturds. I made the mistake sf inhaling one time and my mom really blew a gasket, came un-done, hissied out bigtme!
Mike Livermore and I go back to age one and under. I spent several summertime vacations in his company and the family caught up with us in Sacto. His dad was an engineer in PT&T and his wife worked with my Nana in the drugstore where my dad worked during HS in the hub city of Redding.
We hooked up in the fifth grade and then I had to move to Merced, but not before our final fling at the beach in Carpinteria and in the passes of the Sierra, like Monitor, Ebbets, Sonora. We traveled to the W. Walker River, by the USMC base, and campeda week then the delivered me to Merced.
Where I joined Sister Mary Justine's eighth grade class at OLM.
This is when and where I fell in with this guy, another Boy Scout. The Rev.
"Come the revelation revolution there'll be no more to say, everyone will have to tell the truth."--E. Vince Troothson
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Gypsy
Social climber
NC
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Nov 30, 2012 - 05:55pm PT
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The Rev had a laugh like a pileated woodpecker
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zBrown
Ice climber
chingadero de chula vista
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Nov 30, 2012 - 06:57pm PT
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not Tiny the Tramp, Tiny Montgomery
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zBrown
Ice climber
chingadero de chula vista
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Nov 30, 2012 - 08:33pm PT
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This is not failure to communicate Gypsy.
I was just thinking of Richard and Mimi today whilst running (exact song). I did not know this video exists.
Haven't read that one in a long time.
the police said the motorcycle must have been traveling at 90 miles per hour (140 km/h),
Los Tres Amigas
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Gypsy
Social climber
NC
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Nov 30, 2012 - 08:47pm PT
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I remember that poster of the three Baez sisters. It said "Girls say yes to boys who say no" in response to draft resistance during the Viet Nam war. (The Baez girls--Joan Baez, Pauline Marden, Mimi Fariņa. Pauline co-wrote Pack Up Your Sorrows with her brother-in-law Richard. Richard and Mimi were married in Paris when she was only 16)
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zBrown
Ice climber
chingadero de chula vista
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Nov 30, 2012 - 08:51pm PT
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Yep
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 30, 2012 - 09:11pm PT
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They named a big Street in SF for Tiny. Montgomery Street, located in the heart of SF's Financial District, is run by the NPS, now, you know. there's been a big shake-up in SF and nobody realizes it. Tiny, unfortunately never got to meet Tiny Theresa, who was already married at age 17. It runs in the Bermingham and Hernandez family, this pre-nuptial sex thing. but nobody in the family is exactly tiny.
Kathy is the youngest, has the most children, still is married to her ex-seminarian David, has five re-headed kids with the same middle name, David, and is a great person, willing to do all the family sucky jobs like planning church services for weddings and funerals. David's her accomplic with his great singing voice and guitar playing, which financed his way through USF, while she finished at Holy Names. Good family, the truest expression of Catholic family values. Not a single unwed dad, all are well on their way, so far as I know. But she never met Sonny Barger and she never lunched with Billy Idol or traveled to other cities with the carnies or rode through the night from Texas to Arizona on her old man's trike. And she never got to meet Werner and Merry Braun. but Liz did all that.
When you think about it in terms of real Catholic family values, maybe the parochial schools don't tend to do as good a job as they might if the Church simply embraced birth control. It might be a little hypocritical, but fewer family feuds and bitterness might be better than chastity belts and devotional candles.
Liz and her sisters, I and my siblings, Dolores and her sisters--all of us went to Catholic schools most of our lives. That's a total of nine girls and five boys. Two of the boys, four of the girls needed to be wed due to imminent births, which yields @ 43% fail. Liz, proud and stubborn, did not marry, but kept Michel-Jon, named for his father, AN AIRMAN AT CASTLE AFB outside Merced (the old Merced Army Airfield), the SAC base. Her dad was a crew chief on one of the B-52s. His family's from Chemung, NY, neighbors of some NASCAR racing brothers. He lived his last years selling bait and PBR to the fishermen and skiers on Seneca Lake. He and Michel-Jon resembled each other greatly. Mike works for the Mercy Medical Center. Small world, isn't it?
Liz's local products, Michel-Jon Freeman and Scott Ruffalo. Liz was Liz Freeman, then Ruffalo, then Bermingham.
I don't know anything about her genius prop-head boy friend, except he took a lot of acid, so she didn't really want to marry him and he was too free-spirited anyway. He got transferred, she never heard of him again.
Liz and Mike survived with some help from friends and by going on the road with a carnival for a few seasons, more or less. She began living on here own in Merced, selling Avon with Mike securely riding in the seat on the back of her bicycle.
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Then eventually she met this biker dude, named Rick Ruffalo, another genius, but his genius lay with motorcycle engines and running gear. He had his own small mechanic's shop, playing at it, really. She got in a pickle with Rick, too, and he married her out of deference to his own mom's wishes, and he may even have loved Liz. I wouldn't blame anyone for falling for her, after all.
Rick Ruffalo, who could fix that old Vincent or anything he put a wrench to. He had a genius for astronomy, as well, though this wasnt something he bragged on around the bikers. He may have been on sidereal time. Quien saab?
Rick's mom, with Scotty. Scott later got rally good on skateboards, opened his own shop here, closed it, moved out of town (this never changes), came back and re-opened the shop downtown, tired of the straight life as a title clerk in an office. He has a lot of Rick in him, I must tell you. He now has the honor of being the father of four, works for the title company, is buying a home, and has two cars and a wife who is a pseudo-Jehovah's Witness. Scott ran Bueno Boarding, this shop, a beauty, where kids gathered daily as they should, another two and a half years; and he took these kids along with him to compete in contests in places any kid would love to go to skate: Stockton, Moss Landing, Motown, Madera, Los Banos, even San Jose.
But the nasty lustful urge contacted him and blew the dream away. You can't survive raising a family and running a boarding shop in Merced. Facts are facts. But the boys don't drink, don't smoke, and are not in prison. Scott even is in school again.
Bevin's a respected member of her little community in Brooklyn. Her half-sister, Janey Doe, who knows? Overall, the 43% crapola is just that, really, in the eyes of such as Tom Paine, Helen Keller, and the sibelius of the North Country, the man who brought us the Tempest, who may be the fountain of most rock 'n roll since he electrified, tremendous writer in his own write as well as in the music business, Mr. Bod Ylanb.
[Click to View YouTube Video]Scarlet Town. PURPLE ALERT!
Brought to you by A Band Apart production company. Don't forget to tip the waitress.
Joe Fitschen: "So, you guys like to tell jokes, huh? Gigglin' and laughin' like a bunch of young broads sittin' in a schoolyard. Well, let me tell a joke. Five guys, sittin' in Camp 4, in Yosemite. All wondering how the f*#k they got there. What should we have done, what didn't we do, who's fault is it, is it my fault, your fault, his fault, all that bullsh#t. Then one of them says, hey. Wait a minute. When we were planning this climb, all we did was sit around tellin' f*#kin' jokes! Get the message? Boys, I don't mean to holler at ya. When this climb's over - and I'm sure it'll be a successful one - we'll get down to the Hawaiian Islands, hell, I'll roll and laugh with all of ya. You'll find me a different character down there. Right now, it's a matter of business."--Joe, to his colorful gang, reminiscent of flames in a Christmas fireplace.
I count the entire thing of being illegitimate as just BS, rooted in values nobody pays any attention to when they are young, and you can't make a horse drink the water as an old wise fart, it's a wate of time. Just tell your story and let the caravan move on...Right, Gypsy?
Edit: Richard and Mimi were married in Paris when she was only 16!!!
It must be the hot blooded Mediterranean types, or maybe we could blame it all on Miss X. Education. If we need to blame, which nobody has a right to. We could chalk it up, maybe. Put the load on Franny!!! Yah, mule!!!
Francis is my dad's real name, but he won't care.
[Click to View YouTube Video]Just weight, there'll be much more.
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zBrown
Ice climber
chingadero de chula vista
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Nov 30, 2012 - 09:31pm PT
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I thought that pony was Lucyfur. Shades O' Jerry Lee. They wouldn't serve him here, his neck wasn't dark enough
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 30, 2012 - 10:19pm PT
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dah - dit dit dit dit - dit / dah dah - dit - dah dit dit - dit dit - dah - dit - dit dah dit - dit dah dit - dit dah - dah dit - dit - dit dah - dah dit Cafe up on Telly! 5.9, let's jam to the espresso bar, dudes. Make mine a doppio! Good spot for a bivy. There's climbing content coming, so this is a ROYAL BLUE ALERT!
About here things should get very specific. I like this photo of Randy so much. He's looking at Jim, another North Facer, who ran the mail order business.
The photo is here because I don't think that he and Jim Shirley ever met in much more than perhaps a cursory fashion, during a rare visit from Jim to the shop on Telly, where he came a couple of times with Mark Ericson, the designer who took over from Justus Bauschinger. They were the "heavies" as we called them.
My partner on the Salathe Wall was Doug Ross, who you will remember, Gypsy, surely. His departure enabled me to fit in with the class of '73 at North Face, thanks to Randy's timely call which rescued his buddy and his new bride from a meager winter on UI living in the Okie Flats, wishing for more, hating themselves for doing what they'd done: They had ignored the Unbidden Fruit of the Alarm Clock Tree. So they were driven out of Paradise, involuntarily. Of course God had plans we were not privy to. At the time, however, I was really angry at myself for being such a dull boy. I think I might have told Angel Gabriel to stick his horn where there is no light, I was that miserable being away from the Valley and Camp 4 mates. Jeff visited, and Larry Jones. That was tremendous, to find out about Andy Cox's death, the happs in camp, prospects for the future. Larry arrived and left and came back and helped us load the van, then came north to Berkeley, where his life changed as well. He began working with the cream of the crop of the crazy teenagers of the Bay Area at St. George's homes in Northside on Arch St. That's where he met Barbara Worthing, Cal grad student and the future Mrs. Jones. They just celebrated the birth of Avery's first child! A gurl.
For those who may have missed "the Jokes" (aka Larry Hoad Scuzz Moab Jokes Jones) he's from Merced, lived over the back fence from me and was one of the original Flames by virtue of having been a founding member of the local chapter of the National Submarine Racing Association, NSRA. Jones is brilliant, a blues fan, a rhythm guitarist, and former comptroller of UCB's school of optometry. He is a cool cat, did some climbs with Jeff and I in Pinnacles, lived in Degnan's Dorms the winter of '71-'72. He supported his hippy butt with black Primo from Oahu that winter, obtained from the fundage provided by a National defense loan.
He rented Apathy House on 16th St. in Pacific Grove so Jeff and I and he could live together. Our presence in Monterey attracted the attention of two brothers, Leo Newburn, our classmate at Merced High, and Louie, his younger bro, and they made the move there in 1969 as well.
This Merced enclave in the penisula was a little restless due to the presence of Gloria, Leo's GF from back home, who just had to move there, too, hoping to get back with him. It wasn't happening. She wasn't cool enough to compete with Sharon Monteverde, Leo's new squeeze, also from Merced and who had, so she claimed years later in 2000, had continued a platonic relationship with the man through HS. She is the one who convinced me, so naive, she and Leo were happy together. She was part witchy woman, I think. Well, she and Leo were married, then divorced in the late nineties. She and Liz were friends back in the day in Merced, before she moved to Monterey. She's a lonely gal, living in a trailer park down by the canal in Atwater. A nice presence, and ethreal type, enjoying the hell out of her ill health and missing out on life's best part, growing old with someone who loves you.
I lived with them and Louie for a time when Apathy House broke up in spring of '70, Jeff going to the mountains and Larry going to live with some good friends in Seaside. Me, I left the mad Newburn place, which all of a sudden burst with chanting Nam Myoho Ringke Kyo, the Nichiren Shoshu mantra. Leo was a very good blues guitar player, and he took it to the next level, but in the service of his buddhist sect.
It was good to find Brother Don and his couch for the next month, reading Siddhartha, delivering mail on the quiet summertime MPC campus, waiting for the fall semester. For once, I wasn't on academic probation and willing to do the work. But I never made it to the fall semester. Like so few others, I headed for Yosemite via British Columbia.
Jim Shirley was at UCB in '70. He completed school the next year and got hired by Hap Klopp personally to run the mail order department. Not a typical graduation segue in the least. It has been my privilege to climb with Jim, have him stand up as my best man, and know he has my back. Merry Christmas, Jim and family in Simi Valley!
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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ROYAL BLUE ALERT!
The Snake Dike.The summit of Mt. Starr King.
There are far too many false flames. We are The Flames. It's cool to say Da Flames, or even De Flames, but The Flames is the correct designation. WE are drivers, but lack wheels. We only talk like Mexicans because they want the ridicule and eagerly seek out our advice...
The genesis of the Flames--just pretend I'm Orson Welles or Charlton Heston, hokay?
First, the Devil decided to take up residence in California, right here in the Merced Drainage.
Casa Diablo from the Merced S. Fork, the north side of the river from the south. The place the Devil found and occupied. He lived on the souls of the Mi-Wok.
Devil's Gate, upstream from Casa Diablo, but not far, on the south bank. It's a fine place to enter Paradise, which is just upriver a few miles in the environs known as Clark's or Wawona.
The Flames are basically the product of the melting snow of the Sierra. We started out as Boy Scouts, but soon switched to harder stuff. I could go on in that vein, but will lose the Boy from Bold. [Forgive me that, Patrick. Street punk wannabe talk. Not cool.] The NSRA led to the Dirty Hands of America, which lasted maybe a summer and a half.
By the time Jeff was in his second or third semester at Merced College and I was at naval basic training and Jones was at Defense Language Institute, the Flames spark began as the Dirty Hands began cleaning up their act, and from the conjoining of Mark McAllister and Jeff, who had been a model airplane enthusiast, archer, and astronomy buff (he and his dad built a telescope together, and went to the archery range together, too) and he got to do some silk screening as one of his electives.
He worked for his dad in the auto body shop and he was always tinkering, just like Lem, and he's still just the same way, never still--at least he has far more energy than I for that sort of thing. I think that he and Mark, aka Bullfrog, met out at the College in that class, and re-connected, having been friends in one or another club. Mark's father was an airman at Castle AFB and the family had spent a long time living in England, so Mark had that whole British thing down. He owned and played a Martin guitar and went with Belle Coats, the daughter of the man who owned the Record Rendezvous downtown.
I'm not sure of any of that about how the two connected, because I was out of town at that time. The two, Muskrat and Bullfrog, palled around quite a lot then, in 1967 and 1968. They had the same interests, which led to visiting the climbers' camp in Yosemite, meeting the Bircheffs and Jerry Anderson and some others.
When Jeff later in 1968 married Sharon Gomes and moved to the Bay Area, I had come back to town and had been to the Valley that spring of '68 with Jeff and Mark and Sharon, made a couple of trips there with guys from my barracks at Treasure Is., so I knew something of what appealed to me in short order. Jeff and Sharon separated and he began a time of working for Pacific Telephone, my dad's outfit. He lived in Oakland and then left, acquiring the climbing grant, and moving into Apathy House with Jones and myself. He made careful plans, emulating Chuck Pratt, I thought, who was Jeff's beau ideal, for the spring of 1970 in Yosemite, which he brought to fruition. He left for the Valley in early May. The Flames were thus brought to Yosemite, through these visits in early 1968.
I feel that we were the first noticeable groundswell of the tsunami of the tseventies, along with the Stuart-Donohoe-Moore gang. They were not official, like the Flames, just the locals, if locals can truly exist in a National Park. So Larry Moore cannot be said to have switched affiliations in any real sense. It's all farce anyway.
There will be a history quiz in the future. MAGENTA ALERT! ROYAL BLUE ALERT! It's an open book test.
You will be required to be able to spell Dolt, bolt, piton, nut, and belay, as well as ID Batso and Robbins from photos of Sheridan cartoons.
Study hard. TM's the guest grader. If he remembers.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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First time I ever saw TM he cracked a joke at the base of Moby Tick.
I forgot the joke, and the punch line.
He'll have to tell it over.
Question: If Tough Mother had a kid, just how tough would this poor kid's feminine side be compared to the masculine. A devil of a question, but the devil's in the details.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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He's a little more serious, but still likes to have fun.
But that was fifteen years ago. He may have lightened up.
Isn't T.M. Herbert's son Tommy an M.D.? Maybe he could weigh in on this topic.--aspendougy
Ron is still waiting for slack from Werner before he gets super-serious.
"SLACK, Dipshit!"
Oh, now I remember.
TM was concerned that we didn't seem to have enough iron to finish the aid section further on. We were at the belay station, p2.
You wonder why I put this up about Tommy. I figured you might.
I can't tell you of any Flame with kids whose kids climb.
One of the Bircheff's maybe, that I don't know of. Ariel, don't think so. Avery Jones has been seen in a rock gym, but that obviously doesn't count. My stepson Scott the skater, he's been to the base of Lurking Fear as a porter for me. He was alrady into the boarding when he was fourteen when we met, and he was happy with it, so I never really offered to take him out climbing. Michel-Jon would never try it, I'm sure. Bevin would rather knit in her free time.
John Yeates hardly climbed at all, in fact Delectable Pinnacle was the pinnacle of his achievement climbing-wise, so far as I know,
though "A climb does not a climber make." I can't think of any other climbs he did, as a matter of fact. He must have done Sunnyside or Monday Morning or something.
He had a boy with his wife, the former YL maid, Sha'ala, who let the child nurse till he was old enough to be cranky about not having the tit. When she was away from the house, and John had the con, the kid would just throw a fit like Joe Cocker, sprawling on the floor, wailing at the top of his lungs, embarfassing the sh#t out of me for John's lack of discipline over his boy. Sha'a'la was in La Leche League, and it was like her life, her touchstone, which said little for the marriage, which failed eventually with more kids. I thought That Kid was totally out of order, and gone-dog spoiled. I don't think the kid had climbing in his blood. Just lots of calcium.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Tommy got further up than I did. On everything...
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