Tape 6, Side A

[Begin Tape 6, Side A]

You mentioned right at the end last time about diseases, and you said off tape that you’d had smallpox.

Yeah. Smallpox: well I don’t remember having smallpox. It was when I was a kid in New Mexico, when I was one or two, something like that, and it must have been a mild case ‘cause I don’t seem to have any effects, but it caused a problem in all these schools I was at because I wasn’t supposed to get a smallpox vaccination, and those were the days when public schools were the vehicle for public health, all sorts, you know those tuberculosis vaccinations, there was the whole Salk polio vaccinations.

Do you remember that?

I do remember that. They would round you up… well the tuberculosis things, they would round you up and they would put you in a big room and you’d go up one by one and they would put this thing on your arm, and they’d not only shoot something into you but they’d mess about in the wound. I think there was scraping involved. There may have been some scraping involved.

It wasn’t the relatively painless thing we have now?

No, I don’t think so, no. And then you put a, there was some kind of, not a Band-Aid but some sort of fixture and you weren’t supposed to get it wet for three or four days or something like that, and then you had to go back in and they looked at it or something like that.

Like a plaster or something?

No, it had some sensitive stuff on it so you could tell whether or not there was a reaction, whether you already had TB or whatever it was. But the polio vaccine, I don’t remember anything different about that, that may have been the polio vaccine for all I know.

Did you have the sugar cubes? I remember we lined up for sugar cubes.

That was later, in the sixties, when we had the sugar cubes and the windowpane [laughter]. Whoa, I’m having a flash-forward there. No, it’s possible, but I don’t... No, I remember this was hands-on, and there was another thing where they stuck you, and it was just a shot or two, so that may have been the polio vaccine, but supposedly they didn’t want you in their school unless you had the smallpox vaccination. And I don’t know the mechanisms of it but I wasn’t supposed to, it was clear that I wasn’t supposed to get the smallpox vaccination; although I think in one of these schools I actually did get the smallpox vaccination; they had to do it anyway and I kept tellin’ ‘em.

Did it do anything to you?

Not that I remember. Even today the effects are not, but now I’m feeling the effects. No, I don’t think it did anything. That’s just one of the things I remember, oh, I had smallpox. Sometimes my parents had to come to school with my medical records and say, look, he had smallpox, he doesn’t need smallpox vaccination; he’s immune. Apparently you get smallpox, you’re immune. So that’s all that was. And I guess I had mumps and chickenpox and all that stuff, but the other thing that was odd that I remember was being, this was later on like in Kansas, six or seven maybe, and being taken from hospital to hospital and finally we had to go to the army hospital at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, because I had, well everybody thought it was measles, but then somebody else thought it was German measles, and what it turned out to be, as I remember, was a penicillin allergy, and it took ‘em a long time to figure that out; and that was another thing that was on my records: I wasn’t supposed to get any penicillin shots, and that made the school officials and the public health officials like the school nurse, whatever, they didn’t like that either because I guess there was a certain time everybody had to get penicillin shots.

What, you mean they were actually giving them to all the kids?

Yeah, they were using the schools for a lot of this public health stuff… and mind control too; that’s why I still hear the voices [laughter].

But it sounds a little like cattle breeding or something: line ‘em all up and…

It sounds like the Coyle and Sharpe routine: Madame, can we please take your baby? We just want to grow a fungus on his neck. You’re not interested in science? That whole thing. Other than that, no other diseases that I can remember. I wish I could remember the polio vaccine more because that was a real big deal.

They were panicked.

And then later on there was the Sabin vaccine. Maybe that’s the sugar cubes. It was oral; you could take it orally. That was the difference. It came along later. The Salk vaccine you had to be inoculated or scraped or whatever it was…

Oh dear…

…whatever it was, and then the Sabin vaccine came along some years later and that was oral. And the other thing I wish I could remember is duck and cover exercises, ‘cause I don’t. I don’t and I was right there in that time, but I don’t remember anything, even later on during the Cuban Missile Crisis it was, none of that stuff…

Your dad didn’t build a bomb shelter?

No, and the home had no provision for fallout shelters or fire—there might have been fire drills—nothing for nuclear missile attacks, no. I mean we knew all about it. It’s amazing what we, what the kids managed to pick up. We knew about intercontinental ballistic missiles, and throw weight and payloads. All this stuff was… maybe it came out in The Scholastic Reader or whatever that little, remember that little magazine that would come out every now and then and would be passed around the schools. But at various times in various schools—maybe it was in that gifted school—we had to read the newspaper, and they had classes on how to read the newspaper: what’s typically on the front page, and the local news is typically on the third page, and how it goes, and how news is reported, and how they make the editorial decisions and so on. And current events was a big deal, and aside from having to know all the names of the states and their capitals, we had to know, or there were opportunities where you could get into classes where they talked about world events, you knew all the countries and their capitals, that was taught, so you got an idea of your place in the world.

But that was only in the gifted…?

I’m not sure. I don’t know. I can’t separate it out, but I just know that… and then there was Sputnik, in fifty-nine I guess, fifty-eight or fifty-nine.

Do you remember that, the race to catch up with the Ruskies on sciences?

I remember that was a topic. You’d go to your science class, or whatever it was, physical sciences or… and I remember teachers talking about that: we’ve gotta catch up with the Ruskies. But the other thing that you had to catch up with the rest of the world was in physical development because there were all these...

The president’s fitness program…?

That was a little bit later, but even before that I remember gym teachers telling us that in Europe… American children are characterized by bad upper-body strength, so Conkin, do some chin-ups! [laughter] Take some laps! Oh there was one in Clark Grade School in St. Louis, I mentioned this before, this was the first time where, I think it was a black majority school, and there were black teachers, which was nuts, which was crazy.

It just seemed so strange?

I’d never seen anything… It was unprecedented. It didn’t have any racial overturns, overturns, overtones. It was just different. But the gym teacher was black. They said he was a former Golden Gloves champion, and yeah, he was very concerned about that, and as I mentioned earlier, I didn’t do too well in gym throughout my entire public school career, and I got punished a lot in gym too. They used to make you… He invented this; he must have invented this kind of torture where if you don’t do something right, what he would do he’d make you stand up with your arms spread out and flex your hand, open and close your hand, both arms spread out up high, open and close your hands. Now you think that’s not a bad punishment, but after two minutes it’s excruciating [laughs].

And you had to keep going?

Keep doing it ‘cause he’d watch you; it was that and take laps for infractions. I hated PE.

This is all going to come up when we get to the army, because wasn’t the army kind of a long PE class?

A lot of it is, but there’s ways, ways you can get around there.

And you probably learned them by the time you got there.

But then some other odd things happened that turned all that experience around. But look, I’m a little off on the chronology here. [Pulls out some papers]

Oh, you brought your transcript.

I found my complete high school transcript that was sent to...

That’s a picture of you?

Yeah, that’s a picture of me at some odd age… and it turns out that I spent I guess nearly two whole years in the high school at Clayton, Missouri and that I didn’t come to Sunnyvale High School until sometime in the junior year, and what was really amazing to me was...

So you spent longer, it was a little bit longer at Sunnyvale than you remembered?

Shorter, much shorter. That means, what it means to me is the… [looking at the transcript together] so this is like freshman year, sophomore year, and then just the first half of the junior year. Now I picture the time after I got out of the home, after we all got out of the home and lived in Sunnyvale, I thought that was for about a year before we had to go back to the home, or before everything, you know, we all split up. Look, it wasn’t even a year; it was just a few months. So a lot happened in that time, but it was a very short time. So that little experiment that my father tried blew up very quickly. So I only spent like a… I think there was some disruption, I came in the middle or something like that, so I only spent a semester at Sunnyvale High School, which means maybe there was a summer involved. So maybe six to nine months.

[Looking at transcript] This is your earlier, okay, so what we have here… 1959 through sixty. This is when you were in St. Louis, right.

This is the first year at that school in the suburbs.

For English: a C…

Don’t read my grades! [laughter]

For Basic Art: a C. PE: a D.

Yep, that’s how I got off to a good start there.

Physical Science: D; Algebra: C. You were…

Gentleman, that’s a gentleman’s average.

Just below normal.

Just below normal, that’s right. Actually it’s a little less than a gentleman’s average because of the two Ds.

And you got three Ds on the next report card.

Yep, yeah, but I moved up in PE though. I got a C in PE that semester. I’m doing better in Algebra.

A D there.

Yeah, next year.

Oh, okay, I see.

See, so this is the second semester. Then in my sophomore year, that’s when I went out for football, track, baseball, field hockey, lacrosse and sniveling [laughter], intramural sniveling.

Working your way toward the Olympic sniveling event.

Those are all just preparatory because I heard that napping would be a competitive event in the sixty-four Olympics.

Then the next semester you got three Cs and three Ds.

Yeah, I couldn’t even get more than a C out of Ceramics.

And then, the semester after that you got two Ds…

Look, there’s my first B.

You got a B in Arts and Crafts.

I made a hamburger press.

English: C. Now English and art kind of kept you from falling completely into the slough of…

Yeah, really…the Dean’s List, or the Anti-Dean’s List or whatever it is.

Sitting in the pointy-headed corner. Let’s see now though…

Here’s your dunce cap.

So then when you moved to Sunnyvale, your grades: you got a B in English, you got a B in US History, D in Chemistry, D in Algebra, B in French, and an F in PE. [Conkin laughing] So the highs are higher, the lows are just a little bit lower.

That’s right. Mood swings. It was a manic-depressive thing. Really, the only thing it shows is that I wasn’t doing any work, and the F in PE means that I wasn’t there; I just wasn’t there.

So you were skipping class. But this, so this is the next semester?

So now I go into Mira Costa High School, so we’re not quite there yet but that’s the next phase.

Last time we talked we left off with your return to St. Louis. It’s interesting though because the perspective is a little bit altered just because the Sunnyvale experiment, like you say, was shorter even than you’d remembered.

Yeah. A lot happened during that time, I guess just because it was new and different: from living in an institution to living in the suburban family life deal, and bicycling to high school, and having a paper route, and digging all the dynamics between my father and his new wife and his new family, and starting to be a little bit more aware of my own thought processes and understanding how I was different in a real way from others, from the other kids.

So you started to feel that more, that somehow…

Yeah, well I really started to understand that I was a bit smarter, or at least that was my idea at the time, because at that time—this was the beginning of junior year—the college prep tests started coming into the picture, you know, and the school would sponsor these and you just sort of did it, everybody had to do it, and you’d find out your scores and mine were pretty high, and the kids’ that I was hangin’ out with were pretty high too, and so we sort of separated ourselves from the others. You know we were taking high-level math courses, algebra and geometry and things like that. I wasn’t doing very well in them, but I was in them.

Did you feel that you were—in spite of your grades not always being the greatest—were you picking up things from these classes anyway.

Not really, except the math classes, and that one social studies class with Mr Liebermann, that was interesting. Other than that, no. I was reading more; I was reading more than the other kids, I know that, but that’s all part of what made that time period, short as it was, seem longer, in retrospect, comparatively, than it actually turned out to be. It was just a blip.

So you started to notice or feel different from other kids. Did it make you feel alienated? You say you found other kids, you started to hang out with other kids who were also kind of sharp and you could relate to them.

Yeah, sharp and funny, yeah.

They had to have that.

They had to be funny. That’s right. They had to be funny; they had to be able to make each other laugh; those are the interesting people to me, although I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at all. In fact that makes me think of… when I started thinking about this, how the time fit together, I’m thinking I must have come into Sunnyvale sort of in the middle because they didn’t exactly know how to fit my experience into their classes, so they gave me tests, and I remember you know like ‘what are you interested in’ type tests. The only thing I remember in all those tests there was a question like: Do you express yourself better in writing or in speaking? and I had no way to answer that question at all, no way. I’d never written anything, and I’d never expressed myself. I probably didn’t even understand what express yourself meant in that context.

Really, so in all the classes you’d had before you hadn’t actually been required to write anything?

Probably yes, but it didn’t register [laughs], you know, it was just another annoying thing you had to do to get by, to get over, to get through: I just want to get out of here! [laughter] I just wanted to make it go along so I could get back to whatever I was doing. It didn’t have anything to do with me.

So you didn’t think of it as expressing yourself. It was just What do I have to do to get out of here?

Yeah, and you know all those things like: What do you want to do when you grow up? What do you want to study when you go to college? What did you do for your summer vacation? I had no way of answering any of those questions truthfully because… [laughs] And then you know I started also developing this secretiveness where I didn’t want anybody to know what I did apart from school or anything, or at all.

Really?

Yeah.

So you thought of it as two lives. Your life at school you wanted to keep discreet from your life outside of school?

You know I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it like that or consciously explain it that way. It was sort of instinctive, you know. Perhaps I’d tried to talk with these kids who had families and an uninterrupted life of relative domestic tranquility and they just didn’t understand, just couldn’t talk about it, or something like that, I don’t know. But yeah, there was definitely a sense that I needed to make some kind of separation. But school was always an extremely artificial environment, always, and it was something that they wanted you to do. Left to my own devices I never would have gone to school. I don’t know what I would have done but… [Italian accent:] Where was Seniora Montessori when I needed her?

Yeah, they didn’t have those options for you.

Probably they were just coming into being. Well it could have been worse. I could have been raised by B.F. Skinner. He stuck his poor kids in a little box [laughter]. Okay Mary you can come out of your box now.

Like they put dogs in crates. [laughter]

So, yeah, so there I am in St. Louis.

You actually describe the airport, I mean getting off of the plane; they came to meet you?

They were there.

Who was it, the Matron, or…?

It was the superintendent, and he never did anything like that. He must have been alerted to the fact that I was aboard, because you know all I got from him was just stony silence and ‘You know we’re going to have to contact your father. We’ll let you stay here tonight, but as soon as we can…’ You know they wanted him—the way I understood it was they wanted him to send them money to buy me a ticket back. They weren’t going to even go so far as to wait to be reimbursed, I mean they didn’t want to get rid of me that bad [laughs]; they weren’t going to lose a hundred bucks on it, or whatever it was.

How did you feel about that?

Um… I don’t know. I guess in some way I felt glad not to have to go back there.

Did you feel bad about the idea of being separated from your brother and sister?

No. No. It didn’t enter into it at all, you know, I was too…

Did you imagine that your father would take you with him?

I had no idea. I just knew I wasn’t going there. I had no idea, in fact maybe there was a little bit of spite directed at him: See, you’re stuck with me again. You can’t dump me like that. You’re going to have to do something else, smart guy. Your little plan didn’t work. But I remember I was there a couple nights, and things had changed since then; they had a—instead of matrons in charge of the boys, they had a man and wife team—a man! They never had anything like that before, directly living there with the kids, a man and wife team that ganged up on us.

Did that seem like a good thing? Did you have an opinion?

No, no opinion; I didn’t like that guy though because... I guess I was there for more than a couple nights because I kind of have a clear picture of him. But I think he started right away saying: I know about you. I heard about you. You’re not getting away with anything around here, you know, things have changed, da da da…. But they gave me a room and put me up and right away I got some of the other kids that I knew, tried to find out what had happened, what was going on, and showed them, you know there were some new kids there too, showed them how to get out [laughs].

You did?!

Yeah. How to get out; so we went down and…

The fire escape and all that?

Yeah, through the back door, fire escapes, and you know, sneak around the bushes, and we went out and got some sodas, crackers or whatever, brought them back and had a high old time. And they found out about that. So… [laughter]

The irrepressible Michael Conkin.

I wasn’t an instigator there. At least we weren’t on drugs! and I wasn’t getting beer or anything like that, just pop, sodi pop. Oh yeah, I had some money, see, I had some money in my pocket, ‘cause I guess dad had given me some money.

Did you have some money left from your paper route?

No, I don’t think so.

So your dad had put some money in your pocket to tide you over.

Yeah, gave me some money, and probably we were supposed to surrender that too, you know [voice of Captain M. Renard (actor Dan Seymour) from To Have and Have Not]: Put all your personal effects in the envelop. I don’t know…. But, you know, sooner or later I was back in San Francisco, getting off the plane there.

So your father did send or wire the money?

Evidently. Evidently.

And they put you on a plane. Do you remember that flight or being in San Francisco?

No, I don’t remember that at all. The only thing I remember is: Here’s a hundred dollars, you’re going to go live with your brother Gene in Manhattan Beach, California. That’s all I remember. It all went by very quickly.

So do you think that essentially that was the extent of the plan your father cooked up for you?

That was all he could do was call somebody else and see how he could get bailed out.

Was he doing this from Turkey, he was already there?

No, no, he hadn’t left yet. He was still in San Francisco, they hadn’t [laughs]… They could have met me at the airport with their bags all packed, you know: Here’s your hundred dollars, we’re going to go catch this flight to Turkey [laughs]. But I could have been there three days or a couple weeks, or I don’t know, two hours; I don’t remember; that’s all I remember.

A hundred dollars, go to Gene’s.

Talk to your brother Gene, he’s going to da da da da, and then I’m on a bus.

And Gene was how old?

Let’s see, how old was Gene then? He was in his thirties I guess. Thirty-three, I’m picturing, thirty-four, something like that. And I barely remembered him. I knew that my other half-brother Bob was down there somewhere; didn’t really remember him either.

And I’m sorry, this is Manhattan Beach?

We’re going to Manhattan Beach, that’s where Gene lives. And then the next thing I remember I’m on a bus. I’m on the bus and I’m going down, then I get out at the... That’s the last time I saw my father, ever. And when I’d left my brother and sister in St. Louis, the last time I would see them for eight years.

Eight years… wow.

Yeah, but that ain’t nothin’ because after that I didn’t see my sister again for another twenty-eight years [laughs], or something like that, after we had a reunion in seventy.

So you couldn’t have known this was going to be such a…?

No, I didn’t know anything. But I started to…

We’re going to have to turn the tape over. Hold that thought….

[End Tape 6, Side A]