Hey, I Wrote That

In the last few months before I left the army, my commander, Col. Archie S. Cannon got me a position with the San Pedro News-Pilot, because he knew I wanted to be a writer. I wrote mostly obituaries but was sent out on a few assignments. One was to interview Guy Pullen, a hairdresser turned artist who created sculptures out of the wire and junk he found in landfills.  I drove to his house in Palos Verdes and conducted a very nice interview. As I was leaving he gave me a wire house he was working on.

I’ve carried that house with me for over 40 years, sometimes hanging it in my own homes, including my current one in Virginia Beach and sometimes simply storing it away in the attic or closet. Recently I gave it to my daughter, Danielle, who always liked it. And that was that until...

Planet of the Apes (three is enough)

In Hell on Earth, a love story I talk quite a bit about the Tiki Girls, which I discovered about twenty minutes after I signed in at the 19th Artillery Group at Fort MacArthur.


Cecil and I were spending another night in our second home, The Tiki Girls, making mindless conversation with the local fishermen, playing pool with the young toughs and old men, and having deep debates, which neither would remember in the morning. As Walter Cronkite would have said, it was a night like every other night and we were still there.

We first started going to the Tiki because of the barmaids. Rene was the first one. I met her the first day I was in San Pedro, a month before Cecil ever got there. It was 100° and she was sitting on the bar with her feet in the sink with the cold water running on them. After Rene, there was Linda, then Betsy and well, there really wasn’t anyone after them. In fact, a lot of the time, the Tiki didn’t even have barmaids; just some guy working the bar. That's how it was this particular night.