Author: Tom Darby

Grandpa Bill didn’t mean for it to happen. And I never saw it coming.

We were in his workshop, where he did minor horseshoe repair and other odds and ends. I was fascinated by the clanging of the hammer on the anvil and the heat and steam that poured off the furnace and water tank.

Grandpa Bill pointed out a rubber mallet that he said I could use to strike the anvil while he was heating a shoe in the fire. Happily, I picked it up and swung it as hard as I could.

The rubber hammer caught the edge of the anvil and rifled back at me. Like I said, I never saw it coming.

My job delivering the Eureka Times-Standard had me out everyday of the week. Five of my customers were within the National Park boundaries.

After my last delivery and on my way back towards Highway 101 I stopped to talk with Karlene Rose. As we stood there chatting, we watched her younger brother Kurt riding his skate board down the hill towards the highway.

Suddenly she noticed he was picking up speed and unable to stop. She yelled at him to jump off the skate board, however he appeared locked in fright.

Without really thinking about it, I tossed off my paper bag, dropped my bicycle and sprinted straight down the hill in order to intercept Kurt before he reached the highway. I reached him within 20 feet or so of the road.

In order to keep from running out into the road, I aimed my body at the bus stop near the roadside. I twisted slightly and slammed into the heavy plywood building.

Kurt’s skate board continued out into Highway 101. It was demolished by fully-loaded chip-truck as it slipped into the drive-lane.

Karlene came rushing to us as we lay heaped beside the bus stop. She was shaking and crying and she grabbed her brother and hugged him for dear life.

She hugged me and thanked me for keeping Kurt from going out into the highway. Nothing more was said about the incident, that is until my senior year of high school when I asked Karlene to sign my annual.

When I got it back, she had written, “Dear Tommy, Thank you for saving my brother. Love, Karlene.”

At first I didn’t recognize the feeble old man as he stumbled by the window of the school districts multimedia facility. He was nearly to El Dorado Drive when it dawned on who I had jus’ seen: my fourth grade teacher — Robert Kirby.

Mr. Kirby first made himself known to me when I was in kindergarten. He had seen me walking along U.S. 101 to the bus stop when he stopped and made me get in his car because, as he later explained to my folks, “he was walking on the white line at the side of the road like a tight-rope walker.”

I wasn’t, but that’s my take on the incident.

Anyway, I rushed out of the building and caught up with the now fragile and former grade school teacher. I said hello to him but he didn’t have a clue who I was.

When I told him my name, his demeanor changed and his body stiffened a little. I continued to walk along side of him.

Mr. Kirby was using a cane, so I moved to his left side, figuring was his weaker side and offered him my arm to lean on. I could tell he was leery of my offer since we had never gotten along from the time I was first enrolled until I graduated from Margaret Keating School.

After another offer from me, and another stumble on his part, he slipped his left arm in and over my right arm and we continued east on El Dorado.

About 20 minutes later he pointed out the house he now lived in and I walked up the steps to the door with him. He stepped inside and started to close the door, when he turned, looked at me and said, “Good to see you, Tommy. I think you’ve become a fine young man.”

It would be the last time I’d ever see him. Mr. Kirby passed away in March 1982.

We were snooping through the two old barns my Grandpa Bill had on his property. In the second one, we found an old Jenny two-seater biplane.

My friend, Jimmy and I dragged it out from under the canvas tarp that covered it and rolled it out of the barn. It took us a while, but we finally got the Jenny’s engine to start.

Then we decided to try and get it off the ground. Several times I pulled back on the stick, hoping to clear the ground, but all we would get was a hop.

Then I saw the slight rise alongside the dirt road. We hit the rise at full speed and the biplane jumped into the air.

Much to our surprise we were sailing over Grandpa’s cornfield. As we whooped and shouted at our success, the nose of the plane dipped and we found ourselves mowing through the corn.

The plane finally came to a jarring-halt with its tail in the air. All that was left for us to do was walk back home and tell Grandpa what we had done.

We had trespassed, taken his property, crashed the plane and damaged his crops.

At the gate, Grandpa asked, “What have you two boys been up too?”

Jimmy looked at me and without a word, took off running for home, leaving me to suffer the coming wrath. But instead of trouble, Grandpa couldn’t wait to see where we’d crashed.

Evidently, it had been a long-time dream of his to get the Jenny air born. And while his dream never came true, he was pleased-as-punch to know his grandson had tried.

But for obvious reasons, I’m glad we never got the Jenny to fly.

Dad sent me into the kitchen to get him a cup of coffee. He would have done it himself, however he had my sister Deirdre sitting in his lap.

As I returned with the hot liquid, Dad twisted in his swivel easy-chair and the back of the seat struck the cup, knocking it out of my hand. The cup flipped over and it landed in Deirdre’s lap.

She screamed from the pain of the hot coffee. Furthermore, she was wearing tights and the coffee was trapped against her skin.

Within seconds, Dad had her tights stripped from her legs. But by that time the damage was already done.

He rushed Deirdre to the bathroom and placed her in the shower, where he turned on the water to cool off her blistered legs. Shortly thereafter, Dad and Mom decided to rush her to Seaside Hospital in Crescent City for emergency treatment.

I locked myself in my closet and cried until I was so exhausted I fell asleep.

As a child I had a problem that plagues most kids, who are first learning to write. I was ambidextrous.

My first grade teacher, Mrs. Helen Puls thought it was a problem and she set out to find out which hand I was more prone to use. Her plan was simple, but very effective.

Mrs. Puls had me slide, like a baseball player, into the corner behind her desk. The leg I led with would ultimately decide which hand I would learn to use when it came to writing.

Today, I’m right-handed and at times I still like to put my left hand behind my back when I’m writing, exactly like Mrs. Puls instructed me to do.

I’m also a better writer than I am a ball-player.

Over the years I’ve been called by a number of nicknames: Tommy, Little Tee, T.J., etc. Two of the worst involved being tongue-tied and the other was about a television show called “Kung Fu.”

But it can all be traced back to one singular event.

It was the day I introduced myself to my next-door neighbor, a blond hair and blue-eyed girl, named Goldie Arnold. We were the same age and became immediate friends since we shared the same duplex near the end of Sander’s Court.

Unfortunately I was horrified when I discovered she was introducing me as Tommy Garbage.

Adam and I were playing in the woods around a cluster of Redwood trees, we had named, “Darby’s Castle.” It was play off the old song, our last name and the fact that the trees created a natural fort, if you knew how to get inside.

It was situated on the right side of the old logging road that lead deep into the National Park’s “Experimental Forest.” While that’s what the sign read at the park’s entrance, we had no idea what it meant.

Anyway one late Sunday afternoon, the two of us were exploring the area, when I fell through a hole near a large fallen tree. I grabbed the end of a tree branch in order to keep from falling all the way to the bottom.

As I screamed for Adam to come help me, my mind raced and pictured all sorts of horrible things that could be waiting for me if I couldn’t hold on. It could have been a bear den or held some other wild animal or have pointed sticks to fall on or worse, be bottomless.

Adam struggled to pull me out. But I was too heavy for him to lift.

So he ran all the way home to get help. It felt like forever, but soon Dad rumbled up in his old Studebaker truck, to rescue me.

He yanked me out of the hole and made sure I was okay. Then he grabbed the large flashlight he normally wore with his service uniform and peered down the hole.

He looked up at me in disgust. He also complained about being pulled away from the last couple minutes of a football game he was watching.

I figured I was in deep trouble. But then he laughed, letting me off the hook.

Looking down the hole, I could see it ended about half a foot from where my feet had been dangling.

Perhaps it was to help curb the cost of heating or maybe Mom had been visited by aliens, either way she decided one afternoon to wallpaper our bathroom in aluminum foil. Yeah, I know — weird.

She didn’t take very much time in planning it out. She jus’ gathered together supplies on hand like some old contact cement used months before to put up paneling in the living room and hallway.

She also grabbed the several rolls of Alcoa aluminum foil she had stored under the sink. Alcoa Aluminum’s advertisement tagline was: Alcoa can’t wait.

By the end of the day, Mom had a real mess going. She had put up the foil and tried to flatten it out; however it tended to tear, leaving the wall behind it covered in the yellowish-brown glue.

It would take her three days to peal and reapply the aluminum foil to the wall. By that time she had discovered what she would later call her “technique.”

Once she was done, she proudly called everyone into the cramped little space to show-off her work. I’m sure we lauded her for her creative redecoration of our home’s only bathroom.

As she worked on this bathroom project the one comment that kept coming back to her time and again, and first uttered by my youngest sister

Marcy was: “Uh, Mom—-Alcoa can’t wait!”

It was potty-time.

As difficult as it is to admit…bad things of no fault of our own sometimes happened to us kids as we were growing up. One of those bad things was having been raped by a mentally ill man as I was delivering newspapers.

I will not name the family of this man, as I don’t want anyone to think I feel vindictiveness towards them.

What happened was beyond their control and how they dealt with it afterward came to be a point of grace in my life. It started one late afternoon when I missed the front porch of a residence.

I stepped into the brushes to retrieve the newspaper and was attacked, and forcefully raped from behind.

When I woke up, it was very late in the day and I realized I’d be in trouble if I didn’t hurry and complete my route. I pulled up my pants, jumped on my bicycle and rode for all I could to get the job done.

That night I decided to take a shower, something I normally did in the morning prior to school. I was a bloody mess in my skivvies and ended up using one of Mom’s sanitary napkins to stem the flow of blood.

Two days later, I was still bleeding and I needed to tell someone what had happened. As scared as I was of his reaction, I told Dad, fearful that what happened would be the gossip of Klamath.

He did neither. Instead he took me up to the base infirmary and had me checked out.

He kept the entire situation quiet. Furthermore, Dad quietly went to the family of the man and told them what had happened.

The family took immediate action and had their son placed in a mental health facility in Napa.

And while my physical injuries healed, I had some emotional wounds that no-one could see. And looking back, I know this caused me to act out in some very weird and embarrassing ways.

Like I said, it was no ones fault and I hold nobody responsible. I jus’ wish I could have talked about it back then.