Tape 5, Side A
[Begin Tape 5, Side A]
So here I am. Instead of going to this prison for high school I’m going to this sort of pleasant modern… it’s all full of light and glass, it’s all spread out, it’s like one story or two story.
What’s the area again?
Clayton, Missouri, it’s like a suburb of St. Louis. Takes a half hour or forty-five minutes to get there.
The Jewish people that you met there, were they from that area? Are there a lot of Jewish people living in that area?
I don’t know ‘cause I think a lot of them, I’d see them sometimes; sometimes I’d take public transportation and they’d be on the bus too, so they had to travel a certain amount. I don’t know. I don’t know where the… I got the idea that a lot of them lived there. I didn’t go over to their houses or anything like that. I’m not sure I made any friends while I was there at Clayton, Clayton High School. It was kind of too short. Just a little bit, soon after I started high school, which I guess was in, I’m not sure, sixty, because the election was going on and that was… Maybe I went a little bit… No, I think that’s all the time I spent in that place. Maybe a few months out of my, or half my freshman year or something like that.
That’s all that you went to that school?
Yeah, I think so. I think so. But it was a nice place. They even let the kids smoke, juniors and seniors, they had an outside smoking area. [laughs] And these kids were all dressed up you know, all the time. They weren’t just wearing jackets. One of the big things, we used to wear these vests back in St. Louis, and there was a fad of wearing vests with these tie tacks on them. So that was cool. That was very cool. But these kids were all dressed up, like in sport jackets and nice slacks with cuffs on them and…
Did you have all that stuff?
No, I don’t think so.
Did you notice class differences there? It sounds like at the schools you were in before you were pretty much in the same social strata.
Yeah, I think that’s probably the case, and you know high school is where, American high schools, where everybody starts to notice that kind of stuff and everybody starts falling into their groups, and I would see this all throughout high school. The jocks and the hoods and the greasers and the real power elite, the soshes—that’s what they call ‘em in California—the guys who are on the student body, the student body president, you know, those jokers. I didn’t start seeing it then, but that’s always there. It seemed like there was a higher proportion here of really well-to-do kids. I mean [laughs] for lunch they would eat out at restaurants. They would go to restaurants, not Jack-In-the-Box; there weren’t any fast food places. They would just go to regular restaurants and…
…really tuck in, eh?
… yeah, order from the menu. Sometimes I’d tag along and get their pickles or french-fries or something like that [laughter]. I could borrow money from ‘em and that kind of thing. They always had money. And they were smart too. This wasn’t a gifted high school but there were a lot of smart and funny kids, and I’m guessing that they could pay the highest teacher salaries. I’m sure they had a wonderful curriculum. I don’t remember. The only thing I remember about going to school there was stopping in bookstores along the way, ‘cause sometimes you’d have a long walk if you were trying to save your buss money. You’d get off early… ‘cause you could hold on to that money. Oh this brings up something I forgot to mention before about one of the little themes. Remember when I got into trouble because I took holy communion when I was in the Catholic home in Colorado? That was a sin. That was a sin. But later on when we went in the home, they would send us to the Methodist church on the corner, and once a month they would have communion in the Methodist church; and that was a whole different affair, basically it was just grape juice and bread cubes. It wasn’t fancy.
Really? They didn’t go all out like the Catholics.
Oh no! I mean they didn’t even have funny suits on, the preachers and so on. They just looked regular.
They didn’t use incense and all that?
No. It was just a big place. It was a huge gathering there and everybody was in pews and these fellers would walk around with trays of bread cubes and grape juice and pass them up and down the aisle, and you know kids liked that [laughs] ‘cause it was just, Oh, grape juice!
Snack time.
The reason I thought of this was because of the money. We were given money to toss into the collection plate because they took collection every week. We kept that money. I’ll tell you here and now. That money just went right into our pockets.
It sounds like you made your money stretch pretty far…
We had to.
…because you mentioned stealing…
Yeah.
…which sounds like it wasn’t a religion for you, but it was just sort of a practical way of—a little bit of a buzz too.
Sure. It was adventurous. This one particular time the guy passed the row that I was in, passed it, and I piped up [laughter]. I don’t exactly know what I said, something like: Yo! Mr Man, get yo’ ass back…
…hot dog!
So I said: You missed this row here. And the preacher was preaching while this was going on, and that little incident got us banned from the Methodist church for a couple months, and that was another strike against me, another blot in my copy book [laughs].
[laughing] Did you think that was a bad rap?
Well in a way because nobody told me—you know it was one of those: nobody told me not to do that. But again, if I’d thought about it I would have known better, because you know, it didn’t happen all the time. I had no precedent. But then he never passed us up again. But the other kids were laughing [laughs]; that’s what really… Maybe I instigated that too, from their point of view. So I never went down to the…I mean when we got back in I never went down to—they had a balcony and a lower, and I just stayed in the balcony, but you had to go.
You were banned from taking communion?
They banned us from church. They banned all the kids in the home from church, from going to that church. We could still go to Sunday school, but we couldn’t attend the services for a long, long time, and you know that just put all those kids’ souls into torment.
And it was all on your head.
Yeah. They’re probably all writhing in hell now, and we all will be, yep, just because of that. That was just a digression about that other communion thing that got me in trouble.
Digressions are the best part.
So I’d go into these bookstores and for some reason I wound up stealing a book about jujitsu [laughs]. And you know you were talking earlier about how I wasn’t into anything, wasn’t doing any sports or anything, but I got into this jujitsu.
Just through this book?
Just myself, yeah. I learned lots of little jujitsu moves, and I used a couple of ‘em on some of the bigger kids.
And it worked?
Some of ‘em worked, yeah. I remember being chased—maybe it was that kid with the beard was gonna get me or something—so he’s in back of me, he’s barreling down upon me, and I hit the ground and roll over and raise my leg up and it hits him in the stomach and I just let him go over and he flips over. So I remember that. I don’t know if that stopped him. He probably just turned around and picked me up and grrrrrrrr… I remember, a lot of jujitsu was grabbing people’s loose clothing and using their momentum and letting them just complete their act only you’re not there, complete their aggression, you’re just not there, in fact you’re helping them along.
Sounds good. Sounds useful in the circumstances.
That was okay. And later on… plus it gave me a little peek into a little Asian philosophy. Later on that comes into the picture too. I start getting into…
You mentioned before Buddhism, but you said you were what, in your teens?
That comes later on when I’m living in Manhattan Beach with my brother. So sooner rather than later, or… Oh, the other thing that happened during this time, like I say, was the election, and I’m starting to be aware that there’s the world beyond the world that I know.
This is 1960?
1960. Jack Kennedy! John F. Kennedy—whoa! Kennedy and Nixon. And Nixon, you know everybody hated Nixon. My father hated Nixon. I remember him hating Nixon from when he was vice president, you know, Nixon would come on and he’d say: I hate that man! So we grew up Nixon haters and we stayed Nixon haters. But Jack Kennedy, you know there was just nothing like that. So I remember watching… In school, you know, they try to, especially in high school, especially in this high school, the involved young teachers want to get everybody involved too, so I remember getting involved from the level I was in in the election, having Kennedy for president buttons and bumper stickers; I would go put them on cars randomly [laughter]. Didn’t have a car. And passing out flyers. I don’t remember the election or anything like that. Really the next thing I remember is being on a plane, an airplane with my sister and brother, and we’re flying out to California. I don’t remember how the transitions made it. I don’t remember how it came about or anything like that, but I remember we’re on the plane and we’re going to somewhere around San Francisco, and I remember we picked that on a map: oh there’s San Francisco here; there’s Los Angeles down there. We’re going to land in San Francisco and we’re going to go live with our father, who’s back from Turkey, in Sunnyvale, California.
So he didn’t come to St. Louis?
No. He’d already been in the country for a while.
Oh really?
Yeah, apparently, and he’s all settled down. I’m not sure that we knew at this point that it wasn’t just daddy that we were going to live with. I’m not sure that we knew, although we may have. I don’t know. There were probably letters back and forth.
But you think maybe the realization didn’t strike you until you actually got there.
Yeah. No. That’s true. I guess we probably did know because now it doesn’t seem like a surprise; we weren’t surprised, although I heard later on from the grown up son of this woman and my father, who when I first met him was three or four or five years old, whose first name was Abdule, and who was known as Abude or Abuddy, Abuddy Conkin [laughter]. I heard from him later on, just recently as a matter of fact, that he came back into the picture. And his thesis is that his mother, this Turkish woman that my father married, did not know that my father had another family until around that time. And I believe it.
That he had just not said...
On purpose.
It was like he had wiped out his past when he’d met her?
No, no. I think he was tricking her, and she was bamboozled from the get-go.
To get her over here, and then once she was over here she wasn’t gonna split on him.
Yeah. Oh, by the way my kids are flying out tomorrow. I don’t know. I don’t know how that happened; I can see it happening though.
Does that sound like the way your father would have played it?
Then I wouldn’t have said so, but the things I’ve learned since. I think he flipped after my mother died, and he got worse. I think it got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.
So it wasn’t a case of the immediate trauma of your mother’s death and your father reacting to that and then sort of straightening himself out and setting up a home with this other woman and all. It was more like he got crazy and stayed crazy or he actually got worse.
I think it was punctuated. I think he got crazy and then he tried to make things right, or he would repent and then be crazy again, ‘cause some of the things I heard later, they don’t have any relationship to the person I knew as my father. And I’ve heard this from lots of different people, people who were adults at the time and people who were children at the time. He flipped. He may have had periods of lucidity, but the cumulative result was bad. If it’s true that he did that, and I have no reason to believe that he didn’t do that.
And was all this sort of thing that he did, like springing this on her, or…?
He would fly into rages. He would be crying all the time. Still crying. Still whining and crying. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s kind of too mysterious for me. The simpleminded way I look at it is oh he had this other family and he wanted to find a mother for them, you know, he felt guilty that they were in this home for all these years, plus, you know, he was probably, on some level, there’s some momentum there that he was going to go back anyway. He was always going to go back.
To the U.S. from Turkey.
Maybe that was a fixed idea, that he was always going to go back, and the way he came back was with a whole family, two whole—even better than a whole family, two families.
So they had one child at that point?
Yeah, one child, and another one soon to come.
How old was he?
He was like three or four.
Really? So they must have gotten together soon after he went to Turkey.
Probably, yeah. Probably.
Do you know anything about her background. Was she very young?
She was not that young, younger than him certainly. But the way that we all heard it was that her parents ran a pension in Iskinderum, this Turkish town where he was headquartered doing this NATO work, and she was very cosmopolitan in the Middle-Eastern and European way. She spoke a number of languages and also was an ace cook and clothes-maker.
Had she been married before?
I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t know. I don’t know too many of those details.
Was there any sort of bonding between you and the new wife?
Not me; no, no there wasn’t, there wasn’t and I don’t know that there could have been given that she was tricked in the beginning, since before the beginning she may have been tricked. If that was the case I don’t see how there could have been. She did a sort of a, as I remember it, a workmanlike job of holding things together: she’d cook meals and keep the house and do shopping, and that was one of the biggest things that she would complain about was doing shopping because you know she came from a lifelong tradition where you went down to the village or to the markets and collected all your stuff and brought it back, and I guess she helped in the ongoing maintenance of this pension, of this hotel and kitchen. But in Sunnyvale you had to go to Safeway or Piggly Wiggly. It was a major undertaking, you know; she didn’t drive.
It was a real suburban enclave?
Yeah. Sunnyvale at that time was… there was a lot of empty land, a lot of new housing developments, and there was Lockheed, and that was it; Lockheed was the big thing in Sunnyvale. In fact the Sunnyvale High School mascot was the jets, the Sunnyvale Jets. So there was a lot of aerospace stuff there.
What was your father doing for a living?
I guess there was only one thing he was doing while he was there that I can remember: he had a paper route, the San Jose Mercury, and this was racks, paper racks. He was stuffing the paper racks. So he’d pick up a million papers. He’d go out at like 3:30, 4:00 am—I’d go out with him sometimes—and then he’d just drive all around: Sunnyvale, Campbell, Los Gatos, Los Altos, all the communities around there and put San Jose Mercury newspapers in the racks, and then he’d come home. Maybe he had some other gig. I don’t remember; I don’t remember anything about it. He was always trying to get into import/export, I remember that, but I don’t know if he ever did.
So he didn’t go back to the navy?
No, no, didn’t go back to the navy.
He was sort of shifting for himself the way he had before.
Yeah, yeah. Had this whole house, big house, three or four bedrooms, car…
Do you know whether you were renting, or did he buy it?
No, I’m pretty sure he bought that thing, yeah, with his NATO money. I’m pretty sure he bought that thing, I’m not absolutely sure. So after three or four years, five years maybe, living in the home in that environment, suddenly now it’s all, now we’re back in a family with my two younger brothers [sic], this other new kid, and a short, pregnant, high-tempered Turkish woman, and my father, who was basically a stranger [laughs].
Your father was a stranger because he’d changed so much?
We’d forgotten. No, we’d forgotten what it was all—you know, three years is a long time when you’re that old, and so we had forgotten. And Dennis probably didn’t even really remember any of that earlier stuff at all; Patricia may have. I remembered a little bit; yeah, I remembered a lot actually when I started to think about it, but we went along, you know, you go along.
Was your father at all affectionate? Did he take a fatherly way with you guys, or…?
That’s hard to say because I don’t know that we knew what that meant. You know we were talking about this earlier, about Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver and you know from time to time you read these protests from people who say: Well my family was never like that. And even the people in the series, Barbara Bain* would come out and say: It wasn’t really like that, I didn’t really wear pearls around the house, like she did in Leave It to Beaver. And Hugh Beaumont, the father in Leave It to Beaver, he was a basket case, so it really wasn’t all that... I don’t know of anybody who watched any of that television and believed any of it. It was just… We all knew, just like kids now today know, that’s not real and it had no more than entertainment value. In fact it was kind of creepy. You wouldn’t wanna live in a house where your father walked around in a suit all the time [laughter]. And Ozzie, Ozzie, again, he was scary. So we didn’t have any standard of comparison, especially after all that time had gone by where the three of us hadn’t been close. We didn’t really bond up, although my sister and brother are closer to one another—they were for a while—than I was to either of them.
They’re closer in age?
Yeah. They’re forty-five and forty-seven, just two years off. So we had no basis of comparison. It all seemed to start out okay, I mean we went to school, we got up and went to school. We were well fed. I had my own room. I think he was somewhat emotional. I think I got smacked a couple of times, but I wasn’t really laid into. You know the belt never came off. [gruff voice] Here comes the belt! I never got the strap.
So when you say ‘smacked’ do you mean spankings?
No, I mean smacked in the head; he was always smacking me in the head [laughs]. Yeah, in fact that was one of his… you know he had a temper too. He would yell at people on the street. What was it… he was always talking about somebody’s head, he was going to do something to somebody’s head. And he was a short little guy too; he was just a little guy, a little wiry guy: I’ll tear your head off, or I’ll crush your head or something like that. He was always talking about doing something to somebody’s head; never did anything but—as far as I know….
Maybe you’d be with him out in public and he’d be saying this to people?
Saying it to somebody who was messing with one of his racks, or did something to him or cutting him off or something like that.
Wow. And then he’d smack you in the head just kind of like one of these palm of the hand sort of a thing?
If I did something. I remember a couple of those, but nothing worse than that.
Had he done that sort of thing before?
I don’t remember. I don’t think so but possibly. It didn’t seem too out of hand to me. I probably went over the line or something. I probably knew it was coming, especially after the first time or two. It wasn’t that big. But you know I was trying to be good too, you know, at that time I was trying to make this work because somehow I could see that he had a lot invested here and he was trying to make it work. So I was trying to be good and I was trying to make it work, and it did for a while. The person it didn’t work for was Munire, this Turkish woman. She was already pregnant and then suddenly there was a little girl there too, a little baby girl. So there were five kids, two grownups. She wasn’t happy. She started getting less and less happy, and ah… I don’t know. I don’t know the whole story.
Your father had a temper and she had a temper and they both would go off.
Yeah, and she just wasn’t happy about being there. She was always talking about going back to Turkey.
Did that imply leaving him or was it: Let’s all go back?
I don’t think there was ever any Let’s all go back [laughter]. No, I don’t think there was ever any Let’s all go back, although I do sort of remember one time, I sort of remember a conversation about, you know: here’s how it would be if you were in Turkey, wouldn’t you like to come to—what if we went back to Turkey, we’d take you with us, or something like that.
Saying to you?
To me, just to me.
Like trying to sell the idea to you?
Yeah, something like that; something like that.
Did you think it sounded good?
No, it didn’t sound very good at all [laughter]. By then I was having fun, you know, fun of my own at school because I was starting to enjoy things that were happening at school, and I started to figure out how to get out of—you know it was really hard to figure out how to get out of gym class in high school [laughter], but I figured out ways to do it. But then you know I’d get bad grades. I got an F in gym [laughter]. Who gets an F in gym? But I was never there, you know, I was never there. And I was hangin’ out with some kids, and you know we started taking those scholastic scholarship tests for college prep tests.
We’re just about at the end.
Okay. To be continued….
[End Tape 5, Side A]
So here I am. Instead of going to this prison for high school I’m going to this sort of pleasant modern… it’s all full of light and glass, it’s all spread out, it’s like one story or two story.
What’s the area again?
Clayton, Missouri, it’s like a suburb of St. Louis. Takes a half hour or forty-five minutes to get there.
The Jewish people that you met there, were they from that area? Are there a lot of Jewish people living in that area?
I don’t know ‘cause I think a lot of them, I’d see them sometimes; sometimes I’d take public transportation and they’d be on the bus too, so they had to travel a certain amount. I don’t know. I don’t know where the… I got the idea that a lot of them lived there. I didn’t go over to their houses or anything like that. I’m not sure I made any friends while I was there at Clayton, Clayton High School. It was kind of too short. Just a little bit, soon after I started high school, which I guess was in, I’m not sure, sixty, because the election was going on and that was… Maybe I went a little bit… No, I think that’s all the time I spent in that place. Maybe a few months out of my, or half my freshman year or something like that.
That’s all that you went to that school?
Yeah, I think so. I think so. But it was a nice place. They even let the kids smoke, juniors and seniors, they had an outside smoking area. [laughs] And these kids were all dressed up you know, all the time. They weren’t just wearing jackets. One of the big things, we used to wear these vests back in St. Louis, and there was a fad of wearing vests with these tie tacks on them. So that was cool. That was very cool. But these kids were all dressed up, like in sport jackets and nice slacks with cuffs on them and…
Did you have all that stuff?
No, I don’t think so.
Did you notice class differences there? It sounds like at the schools you were in before you were pretty much in the same social strata.
Yeah, I think that’s probably the case, and you know high school is where, American high schools, where everybody starts to notice that kind of stuff and everybody starts falling into their groups, and I would see this all throughout high school. The jocks and the hoods and the greasers and the real power elite, the soshes—that’s what they call ‘em in California—the guys who are on the student body, the student body president, you know, those jokers. I didn’t start seeing it then, but that’s always there. It seemed like there was a higher proportion here of really well-to-do kids. I mean [laughs] for lunch they would eat out at restaurants. They would go to restaurants, not Jack-In-the-Box; there weren’t any fast food places. They would just go to regular restaurants and…
…really tuck in, eh?
… yeah, order from the menu. Sometimes I’d tag along and get their pickles or french-fries or something like that [laughter]. I could borrow money from ‘em and that kind of thing. They always had money. And they were smart too. This wasn’t a gifted high school but there were a lot of smart and funny kids, and I’m guessing that they could pay the highest teacher salaries. I’m sure they had a wonderful curriculum. I don’t remember. The only thing I remember about going to school there was stopping in bookstores along the way, ‘cause sometimes you’d have a long walk if you were trying to save your buss money. You’d get off early… ‘cause you could hold on to that money. Oh this brings up something I forgot to mention before about one of the little themes. Remember when I got into trouble because I took holy communion when I was in the Catholic home in Colorado? That was a sin. That was a sin. But later on when we went in the home, they would send us to the Methodist church on the corner, and once a month they would have communion in the Methodist church; and that was a whole different affair, basically it was just grape juice and bread cubes. It wasn’t fancy.
Really? They didn’t go all out like the Catholics.
Oh no! I mean they didn’t even have funny suits on, the preachers and so on. They just looked regular.
They didn’t use incense and all that?
No. It was just a big place. It was a huge gathering there and everybody was in pews and these fellers would walk around with trays of bread cubes and grape juice and pass them up and down the aisle, and you know kids liked that [laughs] ‘cause it was just, Oh, grape juice!
Snack time.
The reason I thought of this was because of the money. We were given money to toss into the collection plate because they took collection every week. We kept that money. I’ll tell you here and now. That money just went right into our pockets.
It sounds like you made your money stretch pretty far…
We had to.
…because you mentioned stealing…
Yeah.
…which sounds like it wasn’t a religion for you, but it was just sort of a practical way of—a little bit of a buzz too.
Sure. It was adventurous. This one particular time the guy passed the row that I was in, passed it, and I piped up [laughter]. I don’t exactly know what I said, something like: Yo! Mr Man, get yo’ ass back…
…hot dog!
So I said: You missed this row here. And the preacher was preaching while this was going on, and that little incident got us banned from the Methodist church for a couple months, and that was another strike against me, another blot in my copy book [laughs].
[laughing] Did you think that was a bad rap?
Well in a way because nobody told me—you know it was one of those: nobody told me not to do that. But again, if I’d thought about it I would have known better, because you know, it didn’t happen all the time. I had no precedent. But then he never passed us up again. But the other kids were laughing [laughs]; that’s what really… Maybe I instigated that too, from their point of view. So I never went down to the…I mean when we got back in I never went down to—they had a balcony and a lower, and I just stayed in the balcony, but you had to go.
You were banned from taking communion?
They banned us from church. They banned all the kids in the home from church, from going to that church. We could still go to Sunday school, but we couldn’t attend the services for a long, long time, and you know that just put all those kids’ souls into torment.
And it was all on your head.
Yeah. They’re probably all writhing in hell now, and we all will be, yep, just because of that. That was just a digression about that other communion thing that got me in trouble.
Digressions are the best part.
So I’d go into these bookstores and for some reason I wound up stealing a book about jujitsu [laughs]. And you know you were talking earlier about how I wasn’t into anything, wasn’t doing any sports or anything, but I got into this jujitsu.
Just through this book?
Just myself, yeah. I learned lots of little jujitsu moves, and I used a couple of ‘em on some of the bigger kids.
And it worked?
Some of ‘em worked, yeah. I remember being chased—maybe it was that kid with the beard was gonna get me or something—so he’s in back of me, he’s barreling down upon me, and I hit the ground and roll over and raise my leg up and it hits him in the stomach and I just let him go over and he flips over. So I remember that. I don’t know if that stopped him. He probably just turned around and picked me up and grrrrrrrr… I remember, a lot of jujitsu was grabbing people’s loose clothing and using their momentum and letting them just complete their act only you’re not there, complete their aggression, you’re just not there, in fact you’re helping them along.
Sounds good. Sounds useful in the circumstances.
That was okay. And later on… plus it gave me a little peek into a little Asian philosophy. Later on that comes into the picture too. I start getting into…
You mentioned before Buddhism, but you said you were what, in your teens?
That comes later on when I’m living in Manhattan Beach with my brother. So sooner rather than later, or… Oh, the other thing that happened during this time, like I say, was the election, and I’m starting to be aware that there’s the world beyond the world that I know.
This is 1960?
1960. Jack Kennedy! John F. Kennedy—whoa! Kennedy and Nixon. And Nixon, you know everybody hated Nixon. My father hated Nixon. I remember him hating Nixon from when he was vice president, you know, Nixon would come on and he’d say: I hate that man! So we grew up Nixon haters and we stayed Nixon haters. But Jack Kennedy, you know there was just nothing like that. So I remember watching… In school, you know, they try to, especially in high school, especially in this high school, the involved young teachers want to get everybody involved too, so I remember getting involved from the level I was in in the election, having Kennedy for president buttons and bumper stickers; I would go put them on cars randomly [laughter]. Didn’t have a car. And passing out flyers. I don’t remember the election or anything like that. Really the next thing I remember is being on a plane, an airplane with my sister and brother, and we’re flying out to California. I don’t remember how the transitions made it. I don’t remember how it came about or anything like that, but I remember we’re on the plane and we’re going to somewhere around San Francisco, and I remember we picked that on a map: oh there’s San Francisco here; there’s Los Angeles down there. We’re going to land in San Francisco and we’re going to go live with our father, who’s back from Turkey, in Sunnyvale, California.
So he didn’t come to St. Louis?
No. He’d already been in the country for a while.
Oh really?
Yeah, apparently, and he’s all settled down. I’m not sure that we knew at this point that it wasn’t just daddy that we were going to live with. I’m not sure that we knew, although we may have. I don’t know. There were probably letters back and forth.
But you think maybe the realization didn’t strike you until you actually got there.
Yeah. No. That’s true. I guess we probably did know because now it doesn’t seem like a surprise; we weren’t surprised, although I heard later on from the grown up son of this woman and my father, who when I first met him was three or four or five years old, whose first name was Abdule, and who was known as Abude or Abuddy, Abuddy Conkin [laughter]. I heard from him later on, just recently as a matter of fact, that he came back into the picture. And his thesis is that his mother, this Turkish woman that my father married, did not know that my father had another family until around that time. And I believe it.
That he had just not said...
On purpose.
It was like he had wiped out his past when he’d met her?
No, no. I think he was tricking her, and she was bamboozled from the get-go.
To get her over here, and then once she was over here she wasn’t gonna split on him.
Yeah. Oh, by the way my kids are flying out tomorrow. I don’t know. I don’t know how that happened; I can see it happening though.
Does that sound like the way your father would have played it?
Then I wouldn’t have said so, but the things I’ve learned since. I think he flipped after my mother died, and he got worse. I think it got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.
So it wasn’t a case of the immediate trauma of your mother’s death and your father reacting to that and then sort of straightening himself out and setting up a home with this other woman and all. It was more like he got crazy and stayed crazy or he actually got worse.
I think it was punctuated. I think he got crazy and then he tried to make things right, or he would repent and then be crazy again, ‘cause some of the things I heard later, they don’t have any relationship to the person I knew as my father. And I’ve heard this from lots of different people, people who were adults at the time and people who were children at the time. He flipped. He may have had periods of lucidity, but the cumulative result was bad. If it’s true that he did that, and I have no reason to believe that he didn’t do that.
And was all this sort of thing that he did, like springing this on her, or…?
He would fly into rages. He would be crying all the time. Still crying. Still whining and crying. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s kind of too mysterious for me. The simpleminded way I look at it is oh he had this other family and he wanted to find a mother for them, you know, he felt guilty that they were in this home for all these years, plus, you know, he was probably, on some level, there’s some momentum there that he was going to go back anyway. He was always going to go back.
To the U.S. from Turkey.
Maybe that was a fixed idea, that he was always going to go back, and the way he came back was with a whole family, two whole—even better than a whole family, two families.
So they had one child at that point?
Yeah, one child, and another one soon to come.
How old was he?
He was like three or four.
Really? So they must have gotten together soon after he went to Turkey.
Probably, yeah. Probably.
Do you know anything about her background. Was she very young?
She was not that young, younger than him certainly. But the way that we all heard it was that her parents ran a pension in Iskinderum, this Turkish town where he was headquartered doing this NATO work, and she was very cosmopolitan in the Middle-Eastern and European way. She spoke a number of languages and also was an ace cook and clothes-maker.
Had she been married before?
I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t know. I don’t know too many of those details.
Was there any sort of bonding between you and the new wife?
Not me; no, no there wasn’t, there wasn’t and I don’t know that there could have been given that she was tricked in the beginning, since before the beginning she may have been tricked. If that was the case I don’t see how there could have been. She did a sort of a, as I remember it, a workmanlike job of holding things together: she’d cook meals and keep the house and do shopping, and that was one of the biggest things that she would complain about was doing shopping because you know she came from a lifelong tradition where you went down to the village or to the markets and collected all your stuff and brought it back, and I guess she helped in the ongoing maintenance of this pension, of this hotel and kitchen. But in Sunnyvale you had to go to Safeway or Piggly Wiggly. It was a major undertaking, you know; she didn’t drive.
It was a real suburban enclave?
Yeah. Sunnyvale at that time was… there was a lot of empty land, a lot of new housing developments, and there was Lockheed, and that was it; Lockheed was the big thing in Sunnyvale. In fact the Sunnyvale High School mascot was the jets, the Sunnyvale Jets. So there was a lot of aerospace stuff there.
What was your father doing for a living?
I guess there was only one thing he was doing while he was there that I can remember: he had a paper route, the San Jose Mercury, and this was racks, paper racks. He was stuffing the paper racks. So he’d pick up a million papers. He’d go out at like 3:30, 4:00 am—I’d go out with him sometimes—and then he’d just drive all around: Sunnyvale, Campbell, Los Gatos, Los Altos, all the communities around there and put San Jose Mercury newspapers in the racks, and then he’d come home. Maybe he had some other gig. I don’t remember; I don’t remember anything about it. He was always trying to get into import/export, I remember that, but I don’t know if he ever did.
So he didn’t go back to the navy?
No, no, didn’t go back to the navy.
He was sort of shifting for himself the way he had before.
Yeah, yeah. Had this whole house, big house, three or four bedrooms, car…
Do you know whether you were renting, or did he buy it?
No, I’m pretty sure he bought that thing, yeah, with his NATO money. I’m pretty sure he bought that thing, I’m not absolutely sure. So after three or four years, five years maybe, living in the home in that environment, suddenly now it’s all, now we’re back in a family with my two younger brothers [sic], this other new kid, and a short, pregnant, high-tempered Turkish woman, and my father, who was basically a stranger [laughs].
Your father was a stranger because he’d changed so much?
We’d forgotten. No, we’d forgotten what it was all—you know, three years is a long time when you’re that old, and so we had forgotten. And Dennis probably didn’t even really remember any of that earlier stuff at all; Patricia may have. I remembered a little bit; yeah, I remembered a lot actually when I started to think about it, but we went along, you know, you go along.
Was your father at all affectionate? Did he take a fatherly way with you guys, or…?
That’s hard to say because I don’t know that we knew what that meant. You know we were talking about this earlier, about Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver and you know from time to time you read these protests from people who say: Well my family was never like that. And even the people in the series, Barbara Bain* would come out and say: It wasn’t really like that, I didn’t really wear pearls around the house, like she did in Leave It to Beaver. And Hugh Beaumont, the father in Leave It to Beaver, he was a basket case, so it really wasn’t all that... I don’t know of anybody who watched any of that television and believed any of it. It was just… We all knew, just like kids now today know, that’s not real and it had no more than entertainment value. In fact it was kind of creepy. You wouldn’t wanna live in a house where your father walked around in a suit all the time [laughter]. And Ozzie, Ozzie, again, he was scary. So we didn’t have any standard of comparison, especially after all that time had gone by where the three of us hadn’t been close. We didn’t really bond up, although my sister and brother are closer to one another—they were for a while—than I was to either of them.
They’re closer in age?
Yeah. They’re forty-five and forty-seven, just two years off. So we had no basis of comparison. It all seemed to start out okay, I mean we went to school, we got up and went to school. We were well fed. I had my own room. I think he was somewhat emotional. I think I got smacked a couple of times, but I wasn’t really laid into. You know the belt never came off. [gruff voice] Here comes the belt! I never got the strap.
So when you say ‘smacked’ do you mean spankings?
No, I mean smacked in the head; he was always smacking me in the head [laughs]. Yeah, in fact that was one of his… you know he had a temper too. He would yell at people on the street. What was it… he was always talking about somebody’s head, he was going to do something to somebody’s head. And he was a short little guy too; he was just a little guy, a little wiry guy: I’ll tear your head off, or I’ll crush your head or something like that. He was always talking about doing something to somebody’s head; never did anything but—as far as I know….
Maybe you’d be with him out in public and he’d be saying this to people?
Saying it to somebody who was messing with one of his racks, or did something to him or cutting him off or something like that.
Wow. And then he’d smack you in the head just kind of like one of these palm of the hand sort of a thing?
If I did something. I remember a couple of those, but nothing worse than that.
Had he done that sort of thing before?
I don’t remember. I don’t think so but possibly. It didn’t seem too out of hand to me. I probably went over the line or something. I probably knew it was coming, especially after the first time or two. It wasn’t that big. But you know I was trying to be good too, you know, at that time I was trying to make this work because somehow I could see that he had a lot invested here and he was trying to make it work. So I was trying to be good and I was trying to make it work, and it did for a while. The person it didn’t work for was Munire, this Turkish woman. She was already pregnant and then suddenly there was a little girl there too, a little baby girl. So there were five kids, two grownups. She wasn’t happy. She started getting less and less happy, and ah… I don’t know. I don’t know the whole story.
Your father had a temper and she had a temper and they both would go off.
Yeah, and she just wasn’t happy about being there. She was always talking about going back to Turkey.
Did that imply leaving him or was it: Let’s all go back?
I don’t think there was ever any Let’s all go back [laughter]. No, I don’t think there was ever any Let’s all go back, although I do sort of remember one time, I sort of remember a conversation about, you know: here’s how it would be if you were in Turkey, wouldn’t you like to come to—what if we went back to Turkey, we’d take you with us, or something like that.
Saying to you?
To me, just to me.
Like trying to sell the idea to you?
Yeah, something like that; something like that.
Did you think it sounded good?
No, it didn’t sound very good at all [laughter]. By then I was having fun, you know, fun of my own at school because I was starting to enjoy things that were happening at school, and I started to figure out how to get out of—you know it was really hard to figure out how to get out of gym class in high school [laughter], but I figured out ways to do it. But then you know I’d get bad grades. I got an F in gym [laughter]. Who gets an F in gym? But I was never there, you know, I was never there. And I was hangin’ out with some kids, and you know we started taking those scholastic scholarship tests for college prep tests.
We’re just about at the end.
Okay. To be continued….
[End Tape 5, Side A]
posted by epikles at 4:34 PM
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