Hello.
Hey.
Sorry about that.
It cut off a little early.
Yeah, no problem.
Well, let's see.
So, the next question on the list.
I think we might have covered a lot of it on the last one.
It was, what do you love to do as a kid before high school?
Play baseball and read.
Yeah.
I think, yeah.
I like baseball and reading and working, and okay.
Yeah.
And I also like to camp before high school, or before high school.
Before high school.
Yeah.
We talked a lot about before high school last time.
But whichever one.
In high school, yeah, I would, well, before high school, before I moved from Oregon, I'm
still in junior high.
One of my best friends, Mike Smith.
Who Brad's, Brad's actually kind of named after one of his brothers.
His name is Brad Smith.
But one of my best friends, Mike Smith, when I was in junior high, him and I, and he was
LDS, we were active LDS at that time.
He and I would go camping on the weekends.
Our parents would drive us to a rock quarry and then we'd camp out like Friday and Saturday
and read and take our guns, our rifles and shoot.
This was high school, this was before high school, like junior high?
Yeah, this was junior high.
Oh, and they, like just you two would go?
Uh-huh, yeah.
Wow, that's cool.
Yeah, we, I liked to do that, it was fun.
We liked a lot of the same things and talked about it quite a bit.
At night in the tent, so.
Yeah.
Yeah, in high school, high school wasn't my favorite because we moved a lot, so I think
I was in five different high schools.
Oh, wow.
And so I never felt any one of the high schools was my home.
That makes sense.
One of the high schools I was at, it was in San Jose, and I had like maybe two or three
friends and one of the guys that I was friends with, he was, when I was in high school, that
particular high school, one of our PE classes, it was running.
And we had to run for like the whole period, which is 50 minutes or so.
Oh, wow.
And he would always come in first place.
I'd usually come in third or fourth or fifth or sixth, but he was just a distance runner.
They always tried to get him to come out for track.
So we would, that was one thing I remember from that high school was a lot of running
and that, but I wasn't, I didn't have very many friends.
That was not a fun time in my life.
That's that same school where, one of the schools where I had one of my friends lived
far away and when I'd go to his house and come home, I'd have to watch out for the
games and crossing some of the big huge fields or not get caught.
But yeah, when I was in high school, that was, I didn't enjoy high school.
Last high school that I remember that I graduated from was Vista High School in Vista,
California, which is about an hour away from San Diego.
And that's when I graduated from.
I can remember things about it.
That's when drugs really started to become prevalent and long hair and some of the guys
that I didn't know and they weren't personal friends, but I saw guys change from really
nice guys to drug addicts and abusers and pushers.
Wow.
It was quite a, quite a change and that's when the Vietnam War came along and at that
school, I think I was part of a junior, I was junior maybe and then senior.
I saw some of the seniors, they went off to the Vietnam War and they were killed.
Oh wow.
We found out about that, so that was taking place while I was in high school and also
in the first years in college.
That was a big, big, big thing.
But in high school, I never dated.
I was afraid to ask a girl anywhere through dance or anything, so I never had a date.
My sister Chris was extremely popular.
She was the one that was outgoing, but I definitely was not.
I really did not like high school.
In fact, one year, I think it was my junior year in high school, one of the high schools,
I'd always been placed into advanced placement classes because I always did well in school.
Oh wow.
And so in those advanced placement classes, you would have to do extra work and I just
decided that year I wasn't going to do it, so I didn't do any of the work.
And then I was called, I was in danger of flunking out.
They called me in, my parents were concerned, they called me in to the school counselors
and some of the teachers and said, what are you doing?
I said, I don't feel like I should have to.
I don't like being in these advanced placement classes.
You never asked me my opinion.
And I was just put into these classes without me being asked.
And so really in the classes I got, those classes, I got Cs.
They said, all you have to do is do one project and you'll get an A.
And I said, I'm not doing one extra project.
I'm not doing it.
So I wouldn't do, like I can remember, an English class.
Once in a while I'd read the story, but I wouldn't do any.
They wanted you to prepare a report and then you had to present it in front of the class
and I refused every single time, even though on some of them I'd read the stories
and actually enjoyed them, but I wouldn't.
You didn't want to?
No, I didn't.
I was very rebellious at that particular time.
I was just sick and tired of it.
Because nobody asked me.
I was just automatically put in those classes.
It was a very difficult time, high school was not my favorite period of time.
I really, I missed being up in Oregon with my friends.
And I just didn't make a whole lot of friends when I was down in California.
But I think, like I said, I think I attended five different high schools.
So I never felt like I was part of any of them.
And I only remember two of the high schools.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, so that wasn't...
Not your favorite time.
No, I would read a lot.
Come home and read.
I very rarely did anything with anybody.
So that's why I never go to any and never have gone to any high school meetings.
I had no desire to go back and see any of the people.
Oh.
None.
I can remember, I think it was my junior year that I was just a high school.
And I was in an advanced placement class.
We were taking advanced calculus and trigonometry and advanced algebra.
And one of the instructors that I had for that, she was a black teacher, black person.
You didn't run into that very often, but she was really, really good.
I enjoyed that.
I know when I was in junior high in Oregon,
one of the classes that I had signed up for was a cooking class.
But they didn't give enough people signed up for it.
And so it was canceled and I never got to take it.
I always wanted to do that.
I always felt that I was extremely disappointed.
Because that was something that I wanted to learn to do, was cook.
And my mom was good.
I mean, she insisted that I learn how to iron and learn how to sew,
learn how to do my own laundry, you know, cook the basics.
So that, I feel great, grateful for my mom,
because I always knew how to do that kind of stuff.
So when I finally did leave, probably the house, you know, moved away.
That basic town.
Yeah, I knew how to do that.
But yeah, high school basically, I got into weightlifting.
And I would weightlift a great deal on my own.
I really got into weightlifting.
I wrote my friends in Oregon quite often,
especially my best friend Larry Hunter.
He and I had never gone to the same school in Oregon, but we became best friends.
Yeah, he attended Henley High School.
Well, I never did get to attend Collins High School.
We moved away back to California before that happened.
But he and I wrote letters over the years.
And when we finally did move back to Oregon, he and I became best friends.
That's another part of my life.
Yeah, high school, not a pleasant time.
My parents were worried about me, and just not a pleasant time for me.
I don't remember it very well at all.
What I do remember, I didn't like.
I do remember though, when I was at Vista High School,
that was the high school I finally graduated from,
they introduced soccer.
Soccer wasn't a big thing at that time, but they introduced soccer.
And so in our one PE class, we got to play soccer.
And I can remember, I was quite proud of myself,
because I was able to play with the big ones and dish it out,
against the kids that were the popular kids,
who everybody thought were cool.
I could stand my own with them in soccer.
It was quite rough.
It was like playing tackle football.
A lot of hard hitting and stuff.
So I remember taking out some of my frustration there.
Wow.
Yeah.
But I learned that one of our friends of our group,
he kind of got, started not hanging with us,
because the popular kids started liking him,
and I learned how fickle some people could be.
So it wasn't a pleasant time.
I don't remember our high school very fondly at all.
But that's why I don't talk about it.
That's why I never went to any high school reunions.
What do you remember most about your team years outside of high school?
When you say I got into weight lifting,
I still like to read a lot, a lot of reading, science fiction and mysteries.
I did like to play sports, but I never played organized sports in high school.
I did go out for football once in high school,
at Vista High School, because one of the PE classes,
when we were playing baseball,
one of the coaches saw me run from the outfield to the infield
and catch a flight ball, and I guess I really was a fast runner.
He asked me, why don't you come out for football?
So I came out, and I think I did that for one or two days,
and gave it up because it was extremely hard.
It was weight lifting, and at that point I had never weight lifted.
And so as a result, I quit coming.
I didn't continue to practice, but I started weight lifting
because I thought this was not good.
So I got into weight lifting on my own.
That was kind of a motivation, and I continued it through.
I got an associate degree in San Marcos Junior College,
where I graduated junior college from in California,
and I continued weight lifting through all that year,
so that was some of my classes there.
But yeah, high school, it was a lot of being on my own.
High school, one of the years I went and lived in the summer
with my friend Ronnie Young in Oregon,
one of my buddies that I'd made there,
and that's when I went and worked in the potato fields on the ranch.
And we used to move irrigation pipe.
Oh yeah, just in between the school years?
Yeah, and so I lived with him and his mom and his sister.
And at that point I'd never been into rock music, and it was very popular.
It was becoming very popular.
There was like Metallica and Iron Butterfly Ball,
these really heavy rock groups.
I had never listened to any of that,
and he had joined a record club, and that's all we listened to.
So on our off times from working, and we worked six to seven days a week,
so we didn't have much off time, but he would play this music,
and I didn't have a choice but to listen to it.
And so one of the things that happened when I did that
through the whole summer and came home,
I started listening to rock music, which surprised my parents.
And one of the first two albums I bought, one of them was Iron Butterfly Ball.
And I can't remember the other one, but that was one of my favorites.
Albums, I used to listen to it over and over and over again.
I'll have to look that up.
Oregon, yeah, Iron Butterfly Ball.
And there was another one.
I think it was The Rolling Stones or The Beatles.
I think it was The Rolling Stones.
That was the second album that I bought,
and I'm trying to remember which album it was.
I think I still have it.
It's a record album.
I never got rid of any of their record albums.
I still have them in the concrete room here in the basement.
Oh, yeah.
But those two albums I used to listen to when we lived in Vista, California,
and my mom and my dad were very concerned about me.
But I can remember going up in that summer working in the potato fields in the ranch,
and Ronnie Young and I worked then, and we got our buddy Charles Hicks,
who was another one of my friends from when I lived in Oregon the first time.
He came out and worked with us.
He didn't last very long, though.
He hated mosquitoes, because it was pretty bad.
But we worked long hours.
You would end up moving these giant, I don't know if you've seen them,
but they're giant metal wheels.
Oh, yeah.
And those sprinklers, sprinkler lines are 20, 25 feet long in metal.
They're quite heavy, and we did some of that.
And then the other thing we did is some of the lines you didn't move with the wheels,
you moved the pipes themselves.
You'd place them in a row between the potatoes, and you'd set them up,
hook them together, and then they'd water the fields for so long,
and then they'd stop, and then we'd have to go out in the fields.
We'd wear giant rubber boots up to our knees,
because you're walking in these potato fields,
and the potato plants get quite high, and you're getting wet.
And I always admired Ronnie Young.
He'd done this before, and he had great biceps.
And when I first started doing it, I didn't think I could do it,
because you'd first pick up these pipes, disconnect them,
and they're filled with water and silt, because you'd get a lot out of there.
And you'd pick them up, and until you got used to them,
and you got used to balancing them and emptying the water, it was very hard work.
I mean, by the time we were done, at the end of the day, we were exhausted.
And so when we did get a day off, it was like, yoo-hoo.
Anyway, so I got to develop my arms that way.
Between moving those sprinklers, when we had time off,
we would rest under the trees on the dirt roads,
and we got to drive motorcycles, Honda 90 motorcycles, to different places.
Sometimes the sprinklers would plug.
You'd have to go unplug them, because, again, they'd get silt in them,
and the sprinkler heads were, they'd come up one or two feet,
and then they'd have the rotating sprinkler heads,
and you'd have to go out there and unplug them.
Of course, you got soaked, because the other sprinklers that were going,
well, you're trying to unplug each sprinkler head at the end of each pipe.
And there were snakes out there, rattlesnakes.
So you had to be careful of that.
And it's more than one time that we, snakes were killed out there,
and killed, like, a seven- or eight-foot rattler.
Oh, wow.
Rattlesnake out there, so you had to be really careful about it.
I can remember, so we traveled a lot on dirt roads and that,
and, again, we would do this either with a vehicle on the dirt roads
or on the Honda bikes, which was kind of fun.
But there was one time where Ronnie Young and I were in the truck,
in the vehicle, and I don't know what kind of vehicle,
it was kind of like a Scout, which is an early SUV.
And they're not giant like they are nowadays, but...
When he was driving, we were going pretty good quick,
we were on a dirt gravel road,
and on our right side there's this ditch that goes down
quite, probably 10 or 20, not 20 feet, but 10 or 15 feet.
And this little kid pulled out in front of us on his bike,
and Ronnie swerved and missed him.
And I'm in the passenger seat, and he's in the driver's seat,
and we swerved and crashed.
Went down in the ditch, and it flipped on its side,
and we crashed, and I'm laying in partial water,
because there's water in the ditch, but we were both unharmed.
Wow.
I remember that occurring, but...
I remember one time they took the Honda on the motorcycle,
and these weren't very big motorcycles, believe me.
I took it out on the paved road just to see what it was like,
and that was kind of... It was fun, but it was scary,
because you're just on this small motorbike,
and there's no protection around you.
Oh, yeah. They're not very high, are they?
No.
They're like, yeah, like two-thirds sides or something, I think.
Yeah, so that was an interesting experience,
but I always remembered that.
But that was one of my fond things,
and we got our days off when we were up there.
Well, we listened to music a lot.
We would go to the movies.
We would play poker, learned how to play poker, cars.
We'd play...
We'd go out in the Ronnie Young's shed,
so his mom didn't know we were playing poker,
and some of our other friends would come over,
Paul Ed, Charles X, Rick.
Rick was kind of a brainiac, nobody really...
We liked him, but we hated him, because he was so damn smart.
And...
But we would play poker.
First was chess, and then we got to start playing poker
with even a little bit of money, nothing big.
And it got to be quite fun, but you had to be careful,
because, you know, if you were winning a lot
and your friends weren't, that wasn't a good thing.
But I paled around with the same guys that I paled around with
before we moved to Southern California
and then San Jose, California.
So these were the same guys, and they were older,
so I got to pal around with them.
In between work.
And we had money, you know, so I could buy records.
I joined a record club, and then I...
Through high school and even junior college and even college,
I was a member of two record clubs,
and eventually it became...
What are they, CDs or DVDs?
Oh, yeah, Columbia House.
It became popular, cassettes became popular,
and then eventually eight tracks,
and then eventually CDs or DVDs,
whatever they are that you buy now or used to buy for music.
But I remained a lifetime member of two different music clubs,
so I had tons of music,
and I used to listen to that quite a bit.
That's cool.
And that's where I spent a lot of my money on the night.
In high school in California, that's where I became...
I got to work on the service stations,
Standard Oil of California,
and also what they call Chevron Station.
They were dealers.
They weren't employees of Standard Oil of California.
They were dealers.
So that meant they had their own station.
They were running their own business,
and they were kind of like franchisees, if you will,
before franchisees became a thing.
And I ended up working on the station
because my dad was a regional rep,
which meant that part of his job was to come into a territory
and get the Standard Oil stations,
the company-owned stations, up to snuff,
and also get the dealers up to snuff.
My dad was good at it,
and I always sent him to the worst regions in the company,
which is why we moved a lot.
He would get them to where they were number one in the entire company,
and then they'd ship him out to the worst one.
I can remember one year he refused to go
because they were going to ship us back to LA,
and it was a bad area of LA.
And he refused, and they wanted to become a Chevron dealer,
because if you were good, which he was,
you could become a multimillionaire.
And I remember that they were going to build the biggest mall
in the entire country in Vista, California.
And it was going to be the largest,
and they were going to have a Chevron dealership there,
and they promised it to him, and then they took it away.
And so we ended up not being a dealer.
But anyway, that's where I got one of my first long-term jobs,
was working on the service station,
working for different Chevron dealers there in San Diego,
and Escondido, and Vista, and cars by the sea, and Carlsbad.
And I worked at all different stations,
which was interesting because you'd have to go out
and service the vehicles.
That's when you go out and you wash their windshields,
you check their wiper blades, you check the air in their tires,
you check the oil on the engine, the transmission.
In addition, you'd pump their gas,
and you were also trying to sell them either tires or batteries
or fan belts or air filters or different things for their cars.
And so that's where I first got into selling
and getting more conversant with people,
and where I started meeting girls and becoming a little bit less shy.
Because you had to go out there and wait on them.
Yeah, you had to wait on them.
That was your job.
Because they'd pull into the station, they'd stay in their car,
and then you'd go out to the pump.
And it would get really busy.
And sometimes you were there by yourself and get busy.
That was a challenge because you had to go to each car
and make sure they were getting gas so they didn't drive away.
And that's when gas sold for like 20, 23 cents a gallon.
And then you'd have gas wars amongst the different service stations
of different brands like Texaco and Shell and Standard Oil and that.
You'd have gas wars and gas would go down to like 15, 16 cents a gallon.
It was just an incredible time.
But I can remember, and I worked at different locations
because I was pretty good.
And I worked there when I was a junior in high school
and then my senior year in high school,
and that was one of my favorite things to do.
Because by then I got my driver's license.
I got my first car, which was a 65 Ford Mustang,
which is why I've always loved Mustang.
So senior year, what would happen is that I'd get out of high school
and I would have time off or whatever.
It was maybe on the weekend too.
And I would go to the beach and do body surfing by myself.
And I would get tanned and then my hair would get really bleached blonde,
body surfing in the ocean.
And then I would go to work from the beach and work the graveyard,
or not the graveyard, but the night shift.
And then two of us would close the stations.
So that was always interesting, but I learned how to work on cars
because we would change oil and change tires and batteries
and fan belts and that kind of stuff.
That's also where we got robbed once.
That was an interesting experience.
Me and one of the guys, we were getting ready to close the stations.
This group of Mexicans came in their vehicles right at closing.
You always hated that because you were just trying to get closed.
You had to read the pumps, physically go out and read the pumps
and close out and close out the cash register.
When you worked nice after a certain period of time,
you always put money, cash that you got from your customers.
Because you process cash, you did credit cards.
Doing credit cards, that's when you had the sliders
and you had to fill out the tickets and slide the credit card,
emboss it and take it out to the customer and have them sign it.
With any cash you got, you're stuck in the safe, and the safe was in the floor,
literally in the floor.
I can't remember if one or both of you had a key.
Well, this group of Mexicans came in and we were really suspicious,
and they separated us.
I ended up being in the service bays,
which was where you did the work on changing the oil.
You raised the cars on these lifts and that.
That's where you changed the tires.
I grabbed a giant tire arm, which is about three or four feet long,
and was holding that.
Lance, I remember Lance was the guy, and he'd been to Vietnam.
I always worked with guys that were older than I was.
A couple of them I worked with had both served in Vietnam.
Then the guy I worked with had been in the Hells Angels games.
So I worked with some different people.
Anyway, this night they were trying to rob us.
They separated us, but when I grabbed the tire arm,
the other guys kind of, it was a standoff, so to speak,
and so they finally left, but we ended up giving them, they took,
at that time green stamps were a big thing.
That's where people would come in and you'd give them green stamps,
and they would save them, post them in books.
And then with so many books you could buy merchandise,
just with the green stamps.
So green stamps were a big thing, not just on the service stations,
but at stores and everything.
It's kind of like now when you have credit cards and you get points,
well then you had stamps and you literally pasted these stamps in a book,
and you could trade them in for merchandise.
That's what they got from us was they stole,
they never did get the money because it was in the safe
and we didn't give them the keys.
But it was quite, we called the police after it happened,
but that was quite scary.
Very scary, but that was, I enjoyed working on the service stations.
And one of the stations I worked at was Carmel,
and there was, that one I liked because you used to get tons of girls
coming in, in the cars and that.
And you're right there washing the windows and they're in the cars.
And there was a rate that you get all kinds of people,
you know some were drunk from being at the racetrack and they're driving.
So it was quite a, you met quite a lot of different people.
And I met a lot of interesting and a lot of good people that I enjoyed
and became friends with that they were, they were always older than me,
none of them were in high school.
And I was still a senior in high school.
And I can remember a couple of them started a side business,
this is for anybody, go ahead.
I need to cut you off, I got to go back.
My project manager is calling me.
Okay, well that's good.
So yeah, thank you.
I love listening to stories from you.
I think it's just cool to hear about your life.
That's good to reminisce and hear about these things.
It's good for me too, because they're a lot of good times.
It sounds like.
Yeah, but working on the service stations was great.
I thoroughly enjoyed that.
That's really cool.
I'll tell you about when I got my first car.
That will be another story.
Okay, yeah, we will cover that.
Okay, because that's when I got my first ticket.
Nice.
Racing a cop.
I will write that down, I want to hear that.
Okay, I'll let you go.
Okay, awesome, love you a lot.
Love you too.
Bye.
Bye.