LIVING AND DOING IN 1962
by Bryce Martin

Here I was with my first traffic ticket and scheduled court appearance, after five years of driving and countless miles traveled. It was just a few weeks ago when the odds caught up with me. An oscillating red light (dimmed some by the light of day) and the sound of a siren coming from a California Highway Patrol car near Red Rock Canyon clamored for my attention. I was driving just a few miles over the speed limit, according to the officer, but enough for a speeding violation citation. As noted on my copy, I was to appear before the judge in Johannesburg on such and such a date. That part rather threw me� Johannesburg. I mean it was not even a place you encountered along the highway. It was off the highway, kind of out of the way. However, since that was the closest settlement to the violation, I guessed that it made sense to attend court there.

At age 19, I considered myself to be an experienced driver, and my 1958 Chevrolet Biscayne was my fifth car; all of them stick shifts and two-doors except for this one, and all of them Chevies.

My first car was a dark green 1951 Chevrolet Deluxe two-door. The total cost for it in late 1957 was $312.50. It was equipped with a standard, column shift (�three on the tree�), fender skirts, and a sun visor. Next came a hand-me-down �54 Bel-Air, a light blue and white two-tone and clean as a pin; a �55 standard post 210 series, light green, two-door; and a custom-painted dark blue �53 hardtop with a converted floor shift.

The neglected undercarriage of the Biscayne creaked and groaned, especially when I slowed to corner one of Trona�s small streets. At one certain corner where an old man was usually sitting outside on his porch, I heard, �Hey, Flintstone,� when I cornered past. I did not know if he was commenting on how I resembled Fred Flintstone or how my creaking car sounded like some stone-wheeled vehicle from the television series.

I was 14 years-old and a freshman in high school when I was presented with the �51 Chevy for my very own. I enlisted an older cousin, Bill Cagle, to help me smooth out my shifting and to analyze my overall handling of the vehicle. We used a gravel road, one between two paved roads running in the same direction, near the Old Crow distillery site. He seemed to think I was taking it all too seriously and advised me to just relax more and I would be okay. It dawned on me that was the type of advice I would likely get from anyone older, and that I was on my own with the machine and Galena would have to suffer the consequences along with myself.

As it turned out, I did not do too badly, a couple of dings and nothing major or catastrophic over the delicate next few weeks. I was issued a restricted license, of course, one that you can receive in Kansas at age 14. I was only supposed to drive the car on agriculture errands, and certain other occasions, and not at all after six p.m. I drove it to school and back each day and on all occasions and at any time. I figured the more practice, the better. I have yet to run my first agricultural errand. If I had to wait on that, I would have never gotten behind a wheel.

I was so excited about the car; I just had to give my grandmother a ride. �No, no, no, Bryce, boy, you go on with it. I�m too old for that, � she said, good-naturedly. I politely insisted and finally talked her into it. �Just around the block or two, � I said. Returning in front of the house, she said, �Goody.� I was glad I took her for that ride, short though it was. It was the only time. She died not long after.

Just a few short months later in the summer of 1958, I drove, with my grandfather in his 1957 medium green Chevy, all the way to Trona from Galena for a two-week vacation. It was not that we would drive nothing but a Chevy. I remembered a roomy-as-a-house 1939 Packard. We stopped in Albuquerque where my grandfather called Virgil Duley from a roadside pay phone. Virgil was a young man who had lived across the street from us in the Spring Grove region of Galena. He had worked at the local Feezell�s Market, and the experience had somehow landed him a job as a grocery store manager off Route 66 in Albuquerque. We gave Virgil directions as to where we were located and waited while he arrived.

Albuquerque was about eight hundred miles from Galena and the unofficial midpoint to Trona.

Once in Trona, it was oven hot. Searles Valley, where most of the inhabitants work in one of two chemical plants, is just a short distance removed from Death Valley proper. My grandfather would sleep outside at night in either his car or his son�s, Walter. The cold air from the cooler in the house gave him respiratory problems. It did for me, too. The only type of air conditioning we were acclimated to was an open window. I was not about to sleep outside, so I suffered through some minor sore throat irritation and upper throat discomfort.

I attended the Foursquare Church in the evenings with Walter�s wife, Annabelle, and the boys. (Annabelle and Walter are both from Galena). Uncle Walter, like the other men in our Martin family, did not go to church. The Trona house of worship reminded me of my Assembly of God Church in Galena on Main Street. At the Trona church, I met a local girl, Bonnie Alter, who captured my attention. We were later to keep in touch with letters.

Near the end of the vacation, I drove us across more desert and down the El Cajon Pass among trees and grass to the city of Rialto, near San Bernardino, where my grandfather had a visit planned with a nephew, George M. Shaw. The two sat around George�s kitchen table and talked all afternoon. I drove us back to Trona the next morning.

When it was time to leave Searles Valley and reroute back to Galena, I drove to Barstow where we stopped to eat. I left the restaurant first, while my grandfather stayed to pay the tab. Outside, I was twirling the car keys when a pair of Marine M.P.�s wearing white armbands and wanting to see my identification approached me. I showed them my driver�s license, but they were not interested in that. Finally, my grandfather arrived. He listened and seemed to understand what they were asking. �He does not have a service card, he�s just fourteen,� he told them. That satisfied them and they drove away. �They wanted to see your military identification. They thought you were at least eighteen.�

I remembered all that while getting dressed and getting ready to drive to my first ever court appearance. I had fifty-five dollars in cash. I had no real idea what the fine might be, or if I was to receive a fine at all, but I did not think it would be any amount near fifty-five dollars. Oh, well, I had better place it all in my wallet, in case I have car trouble or some type of emergency.

I had already talked to some of my co-workers at Stauffer about the ticket. I was told that the judge would have a copy of my driving record, all previous citations and so forth. When I reminded that it was my first time in court, and that I had no previous citations, they all said the same thing: Then, he will go easy on you.

In court, the judge read the charges and asked how I pled.

�Guilty, your honor,� I said. I was not so sure, though, that he actually had a copy of my driving record or was aware that I had no prior violations. I felt it in my best interests to let him know.

I was quick to add, �This is my first time in court, my first ticket, your honor.�

�So, this is your first ticket,� he repeated, looking down at some papers and then focusing back on me. �That will be fifty-three dollars or three days in jail.�

I was a little stunned. I was angry at how he seemed to relish his words, and the severity of the punishment. If he was trying to prove a point of some kind, it was only that he came across as a jerk. The point being that life offers jerks galore and this is just one of many I will confront. I would have told him that, too, if he would have asked.

I left happy in the fact I had started the trip from my relatives� house with a full tank of gas. What had I learned from all of it? Something that I already knew: If you do not put yourself in such circumstances, you will not be subject to the particular whims of that fate -- something along those lines.

You do not necessarily live and learn; you live and do. I made that up for the moment and decided that would be my motto, at least until I thought of another one.

TO BE JUST SO POPULARLY GREAT
by Bryce Martin


Three things I just do not get: Garth Brooks, NASCAR, and pay per-view wrestling.

Now I can add another: awards shows. To be more specific, I should say televised awards shows.

Take music awards shows, please, any of them. You have people who, during the course of the year, had recordings that gained fame for those doing the recordings, adulation from fans, money, and all the big ticket add-ons. Are they not giving us all the pleasure we can stand? It seems not. After all that, they want to get together in some huge auditorium setting and pat each other on the back all evening for our viewing pleasure.

Not mine, thank you.

They are playing Big Shot.

It is not enough that these prima donnas get all the glory. They have to rub it in our faces, too.

Not mine, thank you.

I cannot imagine why anyone would watch such blatant pandering. Even worse, the same people who are labeled �artists,� are proving just the opposite by even taking part.

I have no problems with any of the entertainment groups having a private get-together to honor their own. I would encourage it. When it becomes a made-for-the-public event, it becomes forced and strained. The television awards shows are reduced to a party of self-centered swells back slapping each other into the night. At home in our living rooms we are reduced to fawning servility.

The whole shebang gives diarrhea a new egress.

How thrilling it is to watch them high-arm the trophies and thank the lesserlights for aiding their rise to fame and glory.

There amounts to a glut of these shows. The networks choose the participants for the shows, not the industry being honored. They are told what to wear, where to stand, what to sing, how long to sing it, when to clear out and go home.

The country music genre is toned down to where it is just a shadow of its true being. To appeal to the largest number of viewers, the networks take as much country as possible out of the country.

So much for honoring your own your own way.

Is That What You�re Learning in School?
by Bryce Martin

In 1960, a high school classmate came up with some new takes on some old Mother Goose rhymes. They were crude but too sophisticated for him to have made up on his own. I never knew where they came from. I guessed from some 78-rpm comedy album. Anyway, in my personal manner of giving all things a name, I called these bawdy little things Mother Goose-Me Rhymes:

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack burnt his ass on the candlestick.

Little Miss Muffett sat on her tuffet eating her curds and whey, along came a spider, sat down beside her and said, �What�s in the bowl, bitch?�

There was an old lady who lived in a shoe; she had so many children her snatch fell off.

Some others were even less tasteless.

These are some of those in the same vein that made the rounds in the halls and classrooms I inhabited only a couple of years earlier:

�Don�t Fence Me In� By Bob Wire
�The Ruptured Chinaman� By One Hung Low
�A Race to the Outhouse� By Willie Makeit
�Under The Grandstand� By Seymour Butts
�Tiger�s Revenge� By Claude Balls
�The Constipated Chinaman� By Hung Chow
�A Hole in the Mattress� By Mr. Completely

There were sloughs of others, these book-and-author one-liners, including a title I do not remember By I.P. Freely. Others I do remember are too crude in content to publish (not that the ones selected are couth).

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Don�t Mess With My Crayolas
by Bryce Martin


As a young kid, six years old to be exact, I loved my Crayola crayons. It was the colors that were fascinating, of course -- my favorites being burnt sienna, Prussian blue, blue violet, brick red, and flesh. I could not believe there was a color matching my skin, or that brick alone was significant enough as a shade to be a color by itself. I was learning more about colors on my own than I had ever imagined. I did not have one of those small packs of Crayolas, like all the rest of the kids in class. Actually, some of the kids had no crayons at all. The year was 1949 and my teacher was Mrs. Ditson, a kindly old woman who seemed ancient. She had given all of us several days to round up and bring in our crayons from home, and some still had none, others had new packs of the small boxes, some had worn and smashed boxes with empty spaces where crayons were missing, duplicate crayons, some with torn wrappers, and all sizes in length. I was careful with mine. I had kept the points sharp, tried to not waste too much of the waxy part when I sharpened one. I kept the wrappers intact. I kept the box they came in as new a condition as I possibly could. I had 48 crayons. It was a chevron box with a sketch on the front of the painter Rubens. It was the biggest box Crayola sold. When you flipped the lid all the way up, each row was exposed. Each row was tiered like the bleachers in a gym, each row rising higher and higher. I thought of them a little bit as being people sitting in rows of seats, each having their own personality. I liked the orderliness of the pack. If one space was empty, I would be upset. If one crayon was broken, I knew I would be upset. I used them, colored with them, but I wanted them to remain as tidy as the day I opened the box in wonderment. I liked their smell, too. I tried smelling different ones, red ones, black ones, to see if there was a difference. They all smelled the same. It was not so much that I had the largest box of crayons in the room, I sensed, I knew, actually, that my interest in colors was more than that of any of the others. My interest in the names of the crayons was a deep one. The box of crayons had opened up a new world to me, one I did not know existed. I had the crayons a good while before I started the first grade, so it was not just a novelty associated with school. I was not keen on the idea of sharing them. I only had to look at the crayons of the other kids to know they did not take care of theirs as well as I did mine. That is what my teacher was asking. Share because I had many and some had few or none. I protested but to no avail. I was assured that at the end of the class, the same exact crayons my teacher had picked out for loan would be returned. It did not happen that way of course. I became upset, not rowdy or out of control, but I made my feelings known. My teacher told me I was selfish. She told those who were raising me the same thing. They took her side. After all, she was a teacher. From then on, I heard the word selfish increasingly.

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Fancy Fielder
by Bryce Martin

1949
He is mine
She said, my dream in a tux
Eddie Waitkus, ballplayer deluxe

He moved well around first
Too well, perhaps
For a dame with a thirst
A desire for certain chaps
Those in uniform
Of Lithuanian descent
With smooth athletic form
No words spoken, not a hint
Until one night a note appeared
Asking him to indulge a whim
A bullet split his boutonni�re
She was so happy for her and him

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LIFE LESSONS FROM RECORD LABELS
by Bryce Martin

Among a multitude of others, I remember a 45-rpm record called �Forget Me Not,� by the Kalin Twins. It was a neat little recording. I recognized the song title as somewhat of a pun. Okay, it was a pun. I guess one either is or is not. I would not have thought of the song as a pun if not for my grandmother. She liked to plant and grow flowers. She liked forget-me-nots. I noticed many of the song titles were a play on words. �Don�t Gild the Lily, Lily,� was a weak one from Del Shannon. Of course, it was the B-side to �Hats Off to Larry,� the A-side. The side with the strongest chance of becoming a hit has an A, and the other side, called the �flip side,� is printed with a B. I do not think any of my friends have ever figured that out. Some times both sides are a hit, or both sides are a flop. I know for sure none of my friends knew what the name, or names, under the song title indicated, the one that is always in parenthesis. For example: (Leiber-Stroller). It is the name of the songwriter(s). I do not even think any adults � any that I knew anyway � were aware of that little fact. Should I have said "that little bit of esoterica" instead? Can some thing so obvious to one such as myself fall under the category of esoteric to someone else? Sure, why not? Some people are just naturally dull and unobservant. On a Ritchie Valens recording, I noticed the name in parenthesis was "R. Valenzuela." Based on that, I could see that he shortened Valenzuela to Valens, for show biz purposes. I was able to tell all that just by looking at the record. They seemed to be just records to everyone else. I noticed the same thing looking at �Robbin� the Cradle.� The singer, Tony Bellus, was apparently Italian. I say that because a Tony (Anthony, actually) with a much longer Italian-sounding last name, but one that would shorten nicely to Bellus, was the songwriter, the name inside the parenthetical signs (Anthony J. Bellusci). I was not certain, though, about Renato Carasone. He had a hit song called "Torero," which I knew was Spanish for bullfighter. The only other word in the foreign-language song I could decode was "sombrero." But was it really a Spanish song when the singer had what sounded like an Italian name? The B-side did not offer much of a clue. It was called "Che La La." Spanish or Italian? After listening to it a few times, I only knew it had no chance of becoming an A-side hit in America.

Don�t gild the lily, Lily
Don�t overplay your hand

Indeed.

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OLD SUNDAYS

You never knew who might show up on a Sunday. That is the way I remember it. Sunday was God's day, and on God's day all was forgiven. Especially sins such as being away for too long and not keeping in touch. Sooner or later, though, all those lost sheep came home, clothesline clean in their Sunday-best britches, dresses, halters and whatnot. Pies and cobblers were always at the ready, some tea and coffee too. The men would finally settle outside, gathered around a raised car hood, rolling their own. The woman would be inside, gathered in a circle, talking quilt patterns and praising grandchildren. I tried to write a song about it, a song mind you, not a poem. I wrote the music for it but I don't know how to show it. Here's the lyrics:


They All Came Over on Sundays
by Bryce Martin


I remember when I was just a kid
Church on Sunday you always did
Then when you would go on home
You never knew just who might show

You never knew who might come by
Oh, how the week just seemed to fly
Another rat race and another maze
Time to re-unite again on Sunday

No matter how long it might have been
Here came cousin Carla and Uncle Ben
Just when you thought they had parted ways
They all came over for a spell on Sundays

They would all came by to stay a bit
Sooner or later you could bet on it
No matter how long they had been away
They were bound to show up some Sunday

I remember it all just like yesterday
That one day was special so many ways
Never seen Barbara look so great
Diane was getting big for eight
The Dooley�s had a brand new Chevy
We always had food aplenty

They all came by if just to say hi
Out in the yard we waved good-bye
Next time don�t stay away so long
Have a good trip getting on home

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