Author: Tom Darby

It was a conversation between Dad and Mom. They were angry at the fact that a neighborhood committee had given them a list of approved colors they could paint the house and that each color had a fee of some sort attached to it.

As I recall the main complaint was that this group had the audacity to tell my folks what color they could or couldn’t paint their home. Worse yet, it would cost them for selecting a color scheme from the chart they’d been given.

Then my parents found a loop-hole in the committee’s planning. There were two colors that weren’t regulated.

One was on the list, but considered so outlandish that it was believed no one would use it. The other was so common, it wasn’t given a price.

That’s how our home came to be painted white with black trim.

My guard was up as I had been ambushed once and locked in the display case along Del Norte High School’s Senior Hall. I didn’t want it to happen again.

However my vigilance didn’t pay off.

Without warning I was jumped and dragged out of the locker room where I had jus’ stripped down, preparing to take a shower. This time I found my eyes and mouth being covered with tape.

I could neither see who was doing this to me, nor could I yell for help.

Within seconds I was back out in the main hallway, but instead of taking me to the right, I was carried to the left. It occurred to me that I was about to get tossed in the girls locker room naked so I started to struggle for all I was worth.

Turns out I was wrong. It never occurred to me that I’d be hoisted off the ground and duct taped in place against the wall, leading out of the girls gymnasium.

I had tape covering my arms from my bicep to my wrist and my legs, thigh to ankle.

There were also several straps of tape across my stomach and even more holding my head in place. I was trussed up with no possible way of escaping.

The bell rang and I heard girls streaming passed me. Some gasped, some giggle, others touched and still others, I’m certain, though I couldn’t see them, averted their eyes.

As I hung there, I remember thinking that I felt like a bad piece of art, left unattended.

One person later told me that when she saw me, she thought I was some sort of screwed up representation of the Crucifixion. Great!

Before the next bell rang I was being cut from the wall. I was quickly covered and hustled into the boy’s locker room, where Mr. Dowling worked for nearly two classroom periods removing the tape from my body.

I recall screaming more than “Ouch!” and Mr. Dowling allowing me to get away with it.

Senior Hall of Del Norte High School ran from the main entrance to the doorways leading outside, jus’ pass the girl’s locker rooms and gymnasium. Midway down the hall and in between the entrances into the boy’s gym was a large glass trophy case, mounted to the wall. P.E. for me was my very first period.

I had jus’ entered the locker room when I was grabbed up by several “jocks,” stripped down to my bare essentials and carried out into Senior Hall.

Without fanfare I was shoved inside the glass display case and it was locked. Minutes later the bell rang and the hallway filled up with kids going from one class to another.

While I did my best to hide my face, several people stopped to look at me. Some laughed, some, mostly the girls, were completely horrified at the sight of me locked in the case.

Then the second bell rang and the hallway emptied out. It wasn’t too soon afterward when the schools assistant vice-principle Mr. Raleigh and our custodian, Mr. Cassidy came rushing down the corridor with keys to the case.

The words “humiliation,” and “humility,” are so close in nature.

It would be three weeks before my cousin Billy would arrive from Washington State. He had already told me that he planned to out-fish me while he was visiting.

To keep that from happening, I decided to rig our fishing spot. Everyday until he arrived I took a can of corn with me to the old saw mill-pond and generously sprinkled handfuls of the yellow kernels into the brackish water.

Billy could hardly wait to get to the pond edge the day he arrived. We packed our bag lunches, dug up a few worms and hurried to our spot on the west side of the lagoon.

When we got there, I told him I wanted to try something a little different that I had heard worked. Instead of putting a worm on my hook, I balled up a tiny piece of Velveeta cheese, pushing it onto my hook.

“Worms have always worked for me, so I’ll stick with them.”

Within minutes I had a trout on the line. Billy was amazed, but he called it dumb-luck as he was six years old than me and felt he had the better fishing skills.

This continued for the next few hours and I eventually ended up with 12 trout in my basket. Billy had a total of three.

Billy mumbled all the way home. He was mad that he’d been out fished.

He was so mad in fact that I didn’t have the guts to tell him that I had “seeded” the old mill-pond. I knew that he’d hold me down and give me “purple-nerples” until I begged “uncle.”

The price of cunning in this case was silence.

When we went to visit our Aunt and Uncle, we also stopped at Don and Evelyn Chisum’s home. It was a post-Victorian building with three bedrooms and a full bathroom upstairs and a master bedroom, another full bathroom, kitchen, dining and living room on the bottom floor.

During one visit, Dad went upstairs to use the bathroom as the one down stairs was occupied. He reappeared a couple minutes later. He came to the top of the stairs and stepped out into nothingness.

Dad spilled out of the bottom of the staircase with an awful thud and jus’ laid where he had fallen. I couldn’t believe what I had jus’ witnessed.

Within seconds everyone in the house was in the living room to see if he was okay. It took Dad a minute but he finally rolled over onto his back and worked his way to he feet.

He said he wanted to take a moment to make sure nothing was broken on his body, then he got up and brushed himself off. As soon as it was apparent he was going to be okay, the question, “What happened?” was asked.

Without hesitating, Dad yanked his two-day old and first set of bifocal glasses off his face, answering, “These g-d damned glasses are going to be the death of me!”

Mom and dad were going to a function at the airbase. For the event mom went out and purchased a bright red dress.

They left the house at around six that evening and returned before jus’ 11 o’clock that night. Both looked nice as they left for the evening.

Dad was first through the door. He headed for his favorite chair, picking up the local news paper to start reading.

Mom however went into the kitchen to see if all of the chores were completed as instructed. From there she walked into the hallway.

And at the end of the hallway hung a large mirror.

Mom suddenly screamed, rushing towards her bedroom. She slammed and locked the door behind herself.

She must have seen what we all saw. Her bright red dress was turned inside out.

Mom and Dad were gone for the day. They left Adam and I with Ma and Pa Sanders.

We were forbidden to return to our home for any reason. However we disobeyed because we wanted to play with our new roller skates.

The two of us roller skated up and down Redwood Drive and in the huge parking lot of the old Bizzards building, now owned by Simpson Timber Company all day long. We were pretty worn out by the time day light started to fade.

Having to get back to Ma and Pa’s before the street lamps came on, we pulled the skates from our feet. Adam picked them up and went inside our home.

A few seconds later he came back and we rushed over to Ma and Pa’s home a couple of fence-lines away.

When Dad came to pick us up, I could tell we were in trouble. Once inside the truck I found out why.

Adam didn’t put the skates back in our closet like he was supposed too. Instead, frightened of being in our house, alone, he set them inside the front door.

That’s where Mom tripped over them.

For three months, I worked at the Requa Inn. I was filling in for my brother, Adam after he broke his arm in a bicycle accident.

At first Adam tried to blame Dad for breaking his arm. That’s because Dad grabbed it after Adam attempted to stab me with a dinner fork.

Dr. Kasper said it was already broken by the time Dad stopped Adam. Unfortunately Dad helped the fracture along and he felt bad about it for a long time afterwards.

Because I was jus’ filling-in, I busted my hump trying to do a better job than my kid-brother had ever thought of doing. Not only did I wash dishes, I bused tables, took out the trash, and even found time to do a little fooling around.

A waitresses and I slipped up stairs one evening, to spend several minutes in the room, legendary western novel and sports writer Zane Grey always slept in. However I had no idea about this piece of trivia at the time.

As we were leaving the room, the woman said in a matter of fact whisper, “You know, Zane Grey slept here.”

I remember thinking, “I wonder if he’ll mind?”

Mom and Dad had spent three months paneling the living room and hallway. They also put squares of gold-veined mirror up in the front room hoping to make the area look bigger.

One of the extra things they did was to mount into the wall an old piece of ship’s timber that acted as a resting place for our telephone. It was about five-feet long, two-and-half feet wide, three-inches thick and about four-feet off the ground.

One of the things that occurred every time the phone rang was a mad-dash for the hallway.  It was during one of these mad-dashes, we discovered how much Marcy had grown.

She flew out of the bedroom she shared with our sister Deirdre, yelling, “I got it!”

However we soon realized she didn’t “got it.” Instead we heard a large thump followed by an even louder thud.

Marcy had made the corner, but failed to duck out-of-the-way of the ship’s timber. She caught the massive piece of wood with her forehead.

Kid’s being kids — we failed to offer her any help as we were all laughing too hard.

One of the first photographs I ever took was of the stop-sign and telephone pole where Redwood Drive intersects with U.S. 101 in Klamath. I grew up in a home on Redwood Drive and anytime we went anywhere, we had to use that singular intersection to leave our neighborhood.

My parents bought me a Kodak 126 Instamatic, the cheapest camera available at the time and instead of regular film, they got slide-film by accident. I used it anyway.

The class was taught by Mr. Siegel. He was the new 8th grade teacher at Margaret Keating, replacing Mr. Wofford, who had retired the year before.

I liked Mr. Siegel because he was the first teacher who taught something I was truly interested in: photography.

Mr. Siegel was younger than most teachers at MKS.  The girls thought he was cute, the boy thought he was cool and Mr. Fizer thought he was a hippy.

He gave us a basic course on composition, lighting, color and subject. There was no singing, penmanship, math or memorization in his class. Instead he allowed us — he allowed me — to express myself through picture-taking. I had never experienced such freedom before and I enjoyed it so much that I’ve yet to stop taking pictures.

Unfortunately, he taught at MKS only one year.