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.

One of my part-time jobs was working as a summer-school teacher. The position turned out to require more interpersonal skill than I had at the time.

One afternoon I watched as a kid on a motorcycle raced around the playground while students were outside playing. I stopped him and told him he couldn’t be on the school grounds while other children were there. The next day, he returned and I confiscated the motorcycle.

I locked it up in the school’s office and called my supervisor Paul Rosenthal and the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office.

Minutes after hanging up, I found myself confronted by a very angry mother. Mrs. Teri Fisher was demanding that I give her son’s motor bike back, which I did.

She was mad as all get-out at me and cussed me up one side and down the other as if she were a sailor. I returned the favor.

Later that evening her husband came to our home and confronted me. He read me the riot act in a language one usually only heard out in the woods where the loggers worked.

In essence he let me know it was not polite to use foul language in the presence of a woman. Being a smart-aleck, I asked, “What woman?”

I was certain he was going to kick my butt right there on our porch.

Mary and Russ Thompson had been visiting the area for years. They came to spend their summertime fishing for salmon and they always parked their travel trailer in space right behind our home at Camp Marigold.

We came to know them a few years earlier and when they were in town, we often invited them over for dinner. And though they were elderly, they climbed over out backyard fence jus’ like we kids would do.

After dinner one night, we were standing on the front porch chatting, when Mrs. Thompson asked, “Is there supposed to be a fire burning out there?”

She was looking through our rumpus room window and out the back door window. We all looked in the direction she was looking and we could see flames dancing up through the pane of glass.

Mom answered, “No.”

A sudden panic swept through all of us. We scattered, rushing to get to the fire before it caught the side of the house ablaze.

It was a plastic garbage can that Mom had placed a bag of ashes from the fireplace in. The bag of ashes had been setting out on the porch in a metal bucket for the passed two days so she believed them to be safe to throw away.

While Dad grabbed the garden hose, I got the fire extinguisher from the tool bench. He was already spraying the fire down when I aimed the extinguisher at the flame.

The garbage can melted down and some of the paint near the backdoor blistered, but nothing else was damaged. It was our good fortune that the Thompson’s had come over for a visit that evening.

Unfortunately, the fire extinguisher failed to work, when I squeezed the trigger. That’s because years before Adam and I had been playing with it when we should not have been.

Yeah, we got in trouble for it, too.

The weather was wonderful for a winter-day in Northern Nevada, as last year at this time the region was covered in a blanket of snow. It was also made wonderful by the fact that the state’s constitution was in full swing and anyone who wanted to watch it operate was allowed to do so.

For the first time in 22-years of living in Northern Nevada, I attended the inauguration of Nevada’s Governor. I wanted to be there for the ceremony because he is a friend and I am very happy for him and his success.

Jim Gibbons was elected as these state’s 29th Governor after a hotly and sometimes intensely bitter campaign. Prior to this he was the 2nd District representative to the U.S. Congress. His resume includes having been a Nevada State Assemblyman and a combat pilot in both Vietnam and Desert Storm .

What I also enjoyed was seeing the number of dignitaries who came to the inauguration. There was Richard Bryan, Barbara Vucanovich, Bob Miller, Sharron Angle and Bill Raggio, to name a few. Even former gubernatorial candidate Bob Beers was there to congratulate Jim Gibbons.

Absent from the crowds was Nevada’s 28th Governor, Kenny Guinn. He said he didn’t want to be there because it was Gibbon’s day and he didn’t want to be the focus. But he did manage yesterday to announce the availability of his new book, documenting his 8 years in office .

All this aside, I enjoyed watching our state government work like it should. It is one of the pleasures of being a U .S. citizen and everybody should attend an event like the one held yesterday.

This is also why the United States is entrusted to defend those countries that do not have a system as great as ours system, as imperfect as it may SEEM. There isn’t a system as free as ours anywhere in the world.

My junior year civic’s class teacher was a Jules Legier.  One guy, two unusual names in a school full of Bob’s, Bill’s and Tom’s.

One day Mr. Legier chastised the entire class for not being able to spell “Crescent City.”  Evidently some of the students were having difficulty with the proper name of the town.

He scratched out the words “CRESCENT CITY” on the chalk board behind his desk. Mr. Legier then scribbled out the words”CRESENT CITY” The word “Crescent” was misspelled.

As soon as the class was seated, he launched into his talk about how they lived in Crescent City and that they should know how to spell it correctly and how he couldn’t understand why we couldn’t get it right. It didn’t make any sense to me either, because I knew how spell the name of my hometown.

Suddenly, Mr. Legier ordered me to the chalkboard, assigning me the task of spelling the name of my hometown correctly.  He erased the correct and incorrect spellings then handed me the chalk.

Like a good student, I obeyed Mr. Legier and promptly wrote down the correct spelling. The class snickered in unison as the teacher turned red.

Mr. Legier had forgotten where I lived.  On the chalkboard in white-yellow letters was the name “KLAMATH’ and it was spelled correctly.

It was an April morning when Tommy spoke with Roberta. Her husband had been killed in Iraq in October of the previous year. He wanted to find out why the Sergeant didn’t have plaque at the Fernley Veterans Cemetery near the couples home.

“The veteran’s administration is refusing to allow the Wiccan symbol to be placed on his plaque,” Roberta said.

Tommy was appalled by this news and immediately set about investigating the refusal. In his way of thinking and being a military veteran himself, the U.S. Constitution should have protected the rights of Roberta’s husband who had died for his country. It appeared it hadn’t worked in the case of his family

Tommy wanted to know why. Not only did he interview Roberta but he spoke with several people who had been fighting the same injustice for nearly ten-years. “What do you mean “nearly ten-years?” Tommy asked the Sergeant’s widow.

“The Department of Veteran Affairs has refused the Wiccan Symbol of faith for nearly ten-years because they claim that there isn’t a centralized church to represent the religion,” Roberta replied.

Tommy was on the telephone to former commanding officer Colonel Jim Gibbons, who retired after Desert Storm and ran for the U.S. Congress and won. He was now a candidate for Nevada’s Governorship.

“How can a soldier die for his country and then be refused the symbol of his religious preference,” Tommy asked Gibbons.

“I don’t have any idea, but I’m gonna find out right away,” the Congressman told Tommy.

Meanwhile, Tommy worked for three days researching and writing the news story. He also realized that even though he would “break” the story, it would only appear in the Sparks Tribune.

“There’s got to be a way to make a bigger splash with this story,” he said to himself as he continued to write the article.

The following morning Tommy called a his friend in Las Vegas, whom he’d met while covering another news story. Tommy explained to him how he felt it was more important to get the story out to all the media outlets, rather than allowing it to run in a small town paper and go nowhere.

“Here’s how we’ll do it,” he told Tommy. “You collect and write the information. I’ll use my name on the byline here and give you credit at the bottom and you do the same up there. We’ll run the story on the same day.”

The two conspirators agreed that their article would run on a Friday, however because someone didn’t like the size of Tommy’s article, they chopped it into three parts. The story didn’t run on Friday as planned, coming out on Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday.

Tommy realized that he was in a bad position. It would look as if he had plagiarized the story and that he could find himself fired from his job.

He had Monday’s off, but that didn’t prevent Angela from calling him on his cell-phone and instructing him to meet with her at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, the day the third installment was published.

When he arrived at the office, Angela was already there. He went directly to publisher office where he knew she’d be since he was out of town most of the time.

“This is crap,” she said. “You took this story almost line for line from this article.”

Angela held up a copy she had printed from the internet. It was written slightly different from Tommy’s but contained most of the material and quotes from his various sources. Then she added, “I have half a mind to fire you for this.”

Tommy sat there quietly. He didn’t say anything because he was certain that she would not listen or hear what he was saying. Tommy figured that Angela had her mind made up already and that there was no sense in attempting to explain what happened.

“Care to tell me how this happened?” she demanded.

Slowly Tommy laid out the details about how he had called his friend and together they planned to get the news story out in a bigger way than the Tribune could. Angela surprised Tommy by quietly listening.

“We had planned to run it on the same day, but it got split into three installments and was a day behind,” Tommy said. “That screwed everything up.”

“What you two did is wrong,” Angela said after Tommy finished talking. “This looks exactly like plagiarism on your part.”

She also said that once an article is published in a paper, that article was property of that newspaper. Angela told Tommy that she would discuss the matter with publisher and together they’d decide what to do about it.

Tommy worked for the next day and a half with what he felt was a gray cloud hanging over his head. He had succeeded in helping Roberta get her story out about her dead husband’s denial of a religious symbol, but now he believed that he would be getting fired for having done it the way he did.

“Look,” he said once the publisher arrived in the office later that week, “All I wanted to do was get it up onto the newswire. That’s something we don’t have the pleasure of doing around here like they do in Las Vegas.”

The publisher politely listened and then replied, “I’m just going to call it a mistake that you’ve learned from. Don’t do it again though.”

Tommy said, “Thanks, I won’t make that mistake again.”

As I was watching a TV piece about the English language, I realized that being lazy is not an excuse to act ignorant . That’s because this ‘educational’, show attempted to point out that Ebonics and other forms of slang-uage are just another form of the English language.

By the time the hour was up, I concluded that the English language is in deep shit.  A little voice inside my head asked, “Does ‘Latin is a dead language,’ ring a bell?”

The producers had a plethora of finely educated men and women who work in the field of language to present the point the Ebonics is the molding of two forms of speech ; These educated people also said that the fact that Ebonics is being spoken is a case-study of how our current English language has evolved from the old English of yester-year.

It was in the 70 ‘ s that I first heard what is called ‘Ebonics,’ however back then it was known as ‘Jive.’ The best example I can think of was during the movie “Airplane,” where the two then Black men talking ‘jive.’

It was humorous send up meant to be a spoof of an inner­ city language that only the two men should have known. It was made even funnier by the fact that an older White woman joined in their conversation.

And to really send the ‘gag’ into hysterics, the woman was played by Barbara Billingsly, the mother from ‘Leave it to Beaver. ‘

About five years before the movie premiered I recall my father coming home and saying that many of the ‘Blacks’ at the airbase were all pissed off because a new directive had been issued stating that ‘jive’ was no longer to be spoken while on duty. That is when I became interested in this language and asked my friend John about it.

He is Black and about 5 or 6 years older than me. He said that he never learned to speak it and that he thought it was the ‘dumbest’ thing he had ever heard of.

John ‘s take on speaking ‘jive’ was that, “It’s just the lazy way out of learning the harder rules of English.”

Years later I ended up working with two women who spoke Ebonics to each other at work. One was a dispatcher and the other worked as a telephone reservationist.

They would sometimes ‘forget’ to speak proper English, leaving the rest of the company and customers confused. The company eventually established a rule that said everyone had to use the ‘Universal language of English.’

Now, I am hearing a new kind of language among my many Latino friends call Spanglish. It is a curious mixture of Mexican and English, with words tossed together like a three-bean salad .

I understand very little Mexican or Spanish and I speak nothing of either; however I do know that there is real verb confusion between English, Mexican and Spanish languages. This has led some of my friend to ‘learning to speak both languages poorly,’ as my friend Hector points out.

“I go home and speak to my parents and grandparents in their ‘native ‘ tongue,” Hector explains. “Then I find myself being corrected because I have learned to confuse the verb which naturally occurs before the noun.”

In essence, Hector says he has changed the Mexican/Spanish language to fit the rules of English. He also realizes that he is hurting his english speaking skills by molding the two languages together.

This is what I believe has happened too many of our Black youth and in some cases middle-aged population. They grew up learning to ‘jive’ and nobody took the time to correct it.

Now finely educated men and women are attempting legitimize these ‘poor language’ habits.

The next time you see a ‘famous athlete’ at a press conference, listen and see if he or she is speaking in a clear and defined way. Honestly, there are times these interviews are to painful for me to listen too because of the inability of the speaker to form proper sentence structure.

What is more amazing is the fact that some of my Asian friends, one from mainland China, a couple from Japan and another who escaped North Korea are far more literate in the formation of a sentence spoken in English than most U.S. citizens. It leaves me to wonder if there is an ‘Asian’ form of slang-uage that is not being noticed.

If there is, it has not become mainstreamed like Ebonics or Spanglish.

The only reference I could to a possible trend within the Asian community ·belonged to that of the gang life-style.

There is also the effect that misspeaking one’s own preferred language created the unwanted affect of ignorance. I can’t speak Portuguese even though half my family comes from the Azores on my mother’ s side, so I don ‘t even bother trying. It would make me look pathetic.

However having hung out around ranches and cowpokes, I have also been the point of ridicule, because I will not submit to the slang-uage and misuse of English. It’s not because I prefer to ‘sound’ smarter than everyone around me or than I really am…it’s because I don ‘t want to pick up any permanent ‘bad habits. ‘

Here is an example: the slang word for, ‘you all,’ is ‘y’all.’

Though fun to say and easier than saying ‘everyone,’ I think everybody should be able to recognize that ‘you all. in and of itself is simply bad grammar.