Autobiography: Gary Eugene Andrews (1950- )
(A work in progress, dredging up memories, and events in the context of my times.)

BORN INTO A MAD, MAD WORLD
In 1896, in the 19th century, Maggie King is born, of Cherokee parents. When she is nine years old she becomes a member of the Christian faith, and will disdain her peoples' culture saying, "They were heathens." She will marry Edward Andrews, and they will have one daughter, Audrey, and a bunch of sons, Darst (Pug), Kenneth, Billy, Donald (Rayo), Wayne, Gene, and the boy who will grow up to be my father, Howard Edward Andrews.

In the early 20th century (1900's) an international criminal gang of violent extremists conspires to foment a global war, its purpose to loot the whole world, literally on the ground, house to house, company to company, country to country, World War II.

1939
In 1939, in Operation Case White, the Nazi arm of the conspiracy fakes an attack on themselves on the Polish border, killing Poles and dressing them in German uniforms, selling the story to the media that Poles killed Germans. This technique of faking something to justify what you want to do next will be used again. This one justifies the invasion of Poland and slaughter of anyone, everyone in the way. Poland becomes the killing ground, the destination for shipping the unterminsch, the sub-humans, for extermination.

Terrorizing the German people, the Nazis mislead millions of Germans to their deaths, to being maimed, and maddened. They loot Europe. They enslave 17 million people, systematically slaughtering 11 million, 6 million of those for being Jews. Card-punch machines of a company named IBM, enable them to keep precise records of the numbers. IBM technicians service machines in the slave and death camps on a regular schedule. The cards are manufactured in the U. S. and delivered.

ITT employees service Nazi phone lines, and show up at war's end in U. S. generals' uniforms, studying how to rebuild damaged telephone technologies.

German industrialists put their money and production behind the Nazis. Auschwitz Concentration Camp exists to supply slave labor to I. G. Farben industrie, a company that will continue in business until the 1990's.

The Trading With The Enemy Act written by some member(s) of the U. S. Congress enables U. S. companies to conduct commerce with the German Nazis, the Italian Fascists, and the Japanese Black Eagle-ists. Some of Rosie The Riveter's product goes to her grandfather's, father's, husband's and son's enemies, her enemies, sometimes before it goes to her own people. American junk dealers ship metals to the Axis Powers, Germany, Japan, Italy.

The international gang of violent extremists is capable of accomplishing such things. They get the Secretaries of the Department of Defense, the Dept. of Agriculture, the Dept. of Commerce, Congressional Representatives, Senators, and Presidents to sign off on this 'trade' with your enemy.

In 1939, sharecropper and coal miner Elzie Baldridge takes his wife Cona May Baldridge and his children from Prestonsburg, Kentucky, to Southern Ohio. Among his children is the girl who will grow up to be my mother, Nancy Ethyl Baldridge. They settle on Pond Creek in Scioto County, Ohio. Mom remembers being able to see chickens under the house through the cracks in the floor. Elzie goes to work for a man named Simon whose son still (in 2010) grows cane and makes sorghum there each fall.

1941
In late November, 1941, U. S. Navy signalman Robert Ogg begins tracking radio transmissions of the Japanese fleet as it leaves Tokyo harbor and crosses the Pacific Ocean to the point from which they attack Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, December 7. (Documentary: Sacrifice At Pearl Harbor). Other radio operators around the Pacific do too. Ogg duly reports to his superiors who order him specifically not to go 100 yards up the beach and report it to Admiral Kimmel.

General George Marshall is out horseback riding when word of the attack comes and can not be reached. Someone says they are going to make it the most famous horse ride since Paul Revere. Marshall thrives. The unnamed person who threatened to expose his possible dereliction of duty is forgotten.

My father, Howard Edward Andrews of Pulaski, Virginia, enlists in the U. S. Marines the day after the conspirators enable the Japanese arm of the conspiracy to eliminate the U. S. naval fleet with a single attack. It is not a surprise, but a contrivance. With the fleet destroyed, the gang are enabled to invade without opposition throughout the isles of the south Pacific and inland to China. They slaughter, enslave, loot, propagandize and terrorize the Japanese people into going along with them.

At Paris Island Marine training camp my father is told, "You are here to learn the finer arts of murder."

Henry Stimson becomes Secretary of War, and brings John J. McCloy to the War Department.

Italian Fascists terrorize the Italian people. The Mafia are logical conspirators for the criminal looting. Pope Pius XII, a man named Eugenio Pacelli, is criticized for not speaking out against the atrocities of the gang. As a Cardinal he had signed a 'concordat' with Adolf Hitler, front man for the Nazis. A researcher on news magazine 60 Minutes will report in the late 20th century finding Pope Pius' writings in the Vatican archive rival Hitler for anti-Semitism. The Catholic State aids the escape of Nazis and Fascists after the war through 'Rat Lines', using its global monastery system, and hospitals, issuing visas. lending priests' and nuns' garb.

The conspirators discover it is not necessary to control another country's border; just one or two people who guard it.

The conspirators loot art, artifacts, antiques, precious metals, gemstones, stocks, bonds, real estate, companies, vehicles, currency of every denomination of every country, drugs, arms, and humans. Sexually desirable humans can be sold, given as gifts, to curry favor in foreign lands. These might be children of either sex. Some of the people enslaved had been counterfeiters and forgery experts, and can be kept in captivity to continue their trade.

Organized criminal enterprises thrive in collusion with the political and commercial and military conspirators. They are logical 'fences' (buyers of stolen goods) for turning goods into other values, hard currency, supplying smuggling services of goods and people, medical care, transportation. Illicit trade is already their forte. They operate and cooperate globally.

The conspirators have allies in the United States, some in high places in government and commerce. Some 60% of the population is of German heritage. Germany promotes the idea in the late 1800's that, even though you have immigrated to other parts of the planet, you should maintain fidelity to 'the fatherland'. Italians are plentiful in the U. S. So are Japanese, but some 30,000 will be put into internment camps under California Governor Earl Warren, a hint at the status the oriental race will hold once they have outlived their serviceability to the gang of violent extremists. Organized criminal enterprises that thrive in other countries are also well-represented in the U. S.

1945
The conspirators perceive the law of diminishing returns and stop destroying the world, but keep their loot and proceed to enjoy their conquest. They leave the 'winners' of the war to rebuild what has been destroyed. They'd done it before; they did it again, and will again.

My father comes home, about three months on a ship, to Pulaski, Virginia. He paints a Mickey Mouse on the side of an outbuilding. His brother tells me years later that hundreds of people came to see it. He prunes all the fruit trees there on Mount Olive. And then he leaves t to find work.

Lots of the conspirators of the WWII looting operation come to California where they have relatives and collaborators. Some say California becomes 'a police state'. The influx of rich war criminals and their minions might explain why.

About 1945, a group of California bankers advertised for a political candidate who is 'for' this, and 'against' that. They get a young lawyer of Quaker descent, Richard Milhous Nixon, of Whittier, California. His father, allegedly, has been run out of Vinton County, Ohio, as a horse thief.

New candidate Nixon is suddenly surrounded by aides and 'volunteers' who are anti-communist, some who come from families that have been anti-communist going back to the early 20th century (1917) when revolution in Russia brings the red-flag communists to power. They will be with him for the rest of his political career, 'handling' him. How much he is a dupe, and how much a willing participant, is unknown.

1946
In 1946, employing the Nazi technique of accusing someone of Communist leanings, with no truth to the allegation, they propagandize against Jerry Voorheis and make Nixon a Congressman. Nixon says, "I knew (he) wasn't a Communist, but I HAD to win."

I heard they overthrew the Syrian government in 1946 or '47.

COMING TO AMERICA
1947
In 1947, President Harry Truman signs the National Security Act, giving the conspirators many irretrievable secret places to hide, secret power to wield, and continue their conquest. It creates many secret intelligence agencies. Truman will later say it became something he never dreamed of. Instead of doing the bidding of the Congress and the Executive branch, it comes to them to get approval for what its leaders and operatives want to do, and gets it.

Dulles recruits media people, having luncheons and dinners with every other person at the table being an agent, finding out how the media person on their left and right think, befriending, influencing, letting them play spy. They can count on their cooperation. They can tell them a 'drop story' and get it published to the public at large, to influence the 'truth' as it unfolds. They can suppress a story entirely.

In 2010, I hear the National Security Agency (NSA), created by the National Security Act, doesn't coordinate with anyone, not the CIA, not the Pentagon, not the Legislative or Executive branch. Since it's secret, there's no way you can get it back under control. NSA monitoring technology knew of this autobiography the instant I typed it. That's power, irretrievable power.

1950
In 1950, they make Nixon a U. S. Senator, defeating Helen Gahagan Douglas with the same propaganda technique.

In June, 1950, the Chinese communists, allegedly, invade Korea. Knowing the gang of violent extremists, this is probably a contrivance to justify the division of Korea, north and south. The ancient maxim, 'Divide and conquer' is tactics that work. By dividing you catch both sides in the middle, a classic Nazi 'pinscher' movement, chewing up everyone, employing them to do the work on each other.

About three months into the Korean war, John J. McCloy, who has become High Commissioner of occupied Germany, pardons all Nazis, swinging the prison doors wide. (Book: The Arms of Krupp).

That's the world I am born into in 1950 in Portsmouth, Scioto County, Ohio, on the Ohio River in the United States of America. My family lives in a house on Euclid Avenue on the west side of the Scioto River Valley. It will still there in 2010. For years I repeat the story I thought my mother told me, that there was five feet of snow on the ground, until she tells me she didn't tell me that. In 2010 a man will tell me Findlay Manor is on the site of his house and in 1950 there was five feet of snow there.

The rivers are out of their banks, over the low roads that cross the Scioto River bottoms. A ferry takes people and cars from the West side, West Portsmouth, to the East side of the Scioto River at Portsmouth, a slow, hour-long transit. They are staying with her parents, closer to the bridge on Rt. 348, accessing Rt. 23 South to the General Hospital on Scioto Trail. (Razed in early 21st century, where King's Daughter's Hosp. is in 2010). The water goes down a bit and they come home. She goes into labor and they hurry to the hospital, but it is deemed false labor and they come home. Then she goes into labor and they have to go right back.

1952
In 1952, the violent extremists make Nixon the Vice Presidential candidate to Dwight David Eisenhower. I'm inclined to believe they make Eisenhower the Presidential candidate too. They are that powerful, and getting more powerful by then.

1953
The Eisenhower-Nixon regime takes office in 1953. Nixon becomes CIA liaison n the White House, a meteoric rise from unknown to covert action liaison in the seven short years from 1946 to 1953.

Allen Welsh Dulles, the man to whom Nazi intelligence General Reinhard Gehlen surrendered, becomes CIA Director. Gehlen becomes head of West German Intelligence (until 1968). The CIA is structured on Gehlen's global ODESSA operation, where Nazi spies continue their intrigues. John Foster Dulles, Allen's brother, becomes Secretary of State. Their sister Eleanor had been head of a U. S. government department dealing with companies doing business with the Germans during WWII.

The Dulles brothers and McCloy all worked for Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, a player in the process of taking Panama from Columbia and making it a country unto itself. Panama was the best location for a canal between the oceans. Nicaragua is the best place for a land crossing.

Dulles' Deputy Director CIA is Charles Peare Cabell, who the conspirators will erase from history. He has had an illustrious career in the military, high up in the U. S. Air Force, head of A. F. intelligence. At one time he headed the investigation (or coverup) of Unidentified Flying Objects (Operation Sign? Grudge?). His brother Earle will be the mayor of Dallas, Texas, in 1963, riding in a motorcade with President John F. Kennedy. One of Cabell's CIA projects is training the 'Red (anti-communist) Squads' of big city police departments, like Dallas.

In WWII, Cabell shows up at Ploesty, Rumania's oil fields to check bomb damage on the Nazi's only source, allegedly, of oil. With him are Ukrainian generals. Many Ukrainians are anti-red-flag-communist (Reds). They flew a white flag (White Russians) and tried to take power in the 1917 Revolution. In Dallas, in 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald will be surrounded by White Russians, some of whom had 'fallen back' with the Nazis when they withdrew from Russia.

I read that Eisenhower's rise was meteoric, like Nixon's. From the 1941 date of the Pearl Harbor contrivance when he is a Major, after 30 years in the U. S. Army, he becomes a multi-starred general, and Supreme Allied Commander in World War II by 1944. He somehow is selected by General George C. Marshall to design the European invasion strategy. He delivers his plan and Marshall tells him, "Yes. Do it just that way." If the enemy knows your plan they can avoid you, and get away with their loot. And they do. What qualifies him? After the war they 'park' him as President of Columbia University for a while. What qualification does he have for that? In the White House Eisenhower reads romance novels.

OVERTHROWING GOVERNMENTS
In 1953, as if it has been in the planning all along, the Eisenhower-Nixon regime takes office, and authorizes the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran (Mosadegh). The Persians have a lot of oil. Mosadegh has been nationalizing foreign companies operating there.

One plan element supplied by the grandson of Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, Kermit Roosevelt, is to hire people to pretend to be opposed to the government. The mob mentality, terrorism unleashed, paid to act, makes it impossible to disagree. They'll turn over your car if it doesn't sport a picture of Shah Palavi. President John F. Kennedy will later refer to not resorting to the practice of "counterfeit mobs." The conspirators install 'The Shah' who one writer says is pro-Nazi. He will buy $20 billion in arms from U. S. companies between 1953 and 1979.

Kennedy's older brother, Joe, was killed in WWII when he piloted a plane full of explosives across the English Channel to be remote-control-crashed after he bailed out, into one of the huge Nazi guns (Made by Krupp Arms) on the French coast. The plane explodes prematurely. Kermit Roosevelt is in the 'trigger' plane following him. Richard Bissell is involved in the Iran overthrow.

Arab countries, with their anti-Jewish sentiment, are natural allies of the Nazi war and diaspora. German Nazis and Italian fascists and Japanese Black Eagle-ists come to the U. S., Canada, central and South America, and probably anywhere and everywhere else after the war. Operation Paper Clip is a CIA code name for the aiding and abetting of their travel. The conspirators simply add the word 'Not' to the file before the words 'An ardent Nazi' to 'sanitize' a criminal they want to get into the country they are infiltrating. Their 'loot' buys the way.


1954
In 1954, emboldened by success, flush with cash from the war and oil companies and sugar companies and soda-pop companies and other companies and individuals and the U.S. Treasury, the CIA's violent extremists overthrow Guatemala (Arbenz, said to be a dead ringer for actor Robert Mitchum, who works for The Skunk Works where the U-2 spy plane is built). One of the CIA players is E. Howard Hunt, later of infamy in the 1972 Watergate burglary, and accused of being one of three alleged railroad hobos at the Kennedy assassination. Immediately after the overthrow organized crime and "...other recent arrivals..." set up casinos, great places to launder money. Why the author of "Bitter Fruit" refers cryptically to "...other recent arrivals..." is a mystery.

In 1954, Joseph McCarthy is pretending to be on an anti-communist crusade. Like Nixon he is not so much anti-communist as he is pro-Nazi. He defends the Nazis charged with the slaughter of U. S. prisoners of war with their hands tied behind their backs at Malmedy, France, and gets them set free. His chief witness will write a book, "False Witness," wherein he confesses that they didn't investigate anything, and he just made things up. "How many communists are in the Dayton, Ohio school system?" they'd ask in Congress. "132," he'd answer. "No! 232!" he'd correct himself. While you were looking for communists the Nazis were becoming heads of security for large companies, presidents of large defense contractors (Bell Aerospace, Walter Dornberger, head of Peenemunde V-2 rocket factory), heads of North American Treaty Organization, employees of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Werner Von Braun, and hundreds of others).

1955
In (Jan. 1?) 1955, they overthrow Panama, by assassinating President Remon. The assassins allegedly meet with Nixon the night before.


1956
In 1956, the conspirators overthrow Costa Rica. Costa Rica does not have an extradition treaty with the U. S. to this day, a great place to hide. In the 1980's, the Reagan-Bush regime will build a refueling airstrip, Santa Elena, in the mountains there for their cocaine and other drug trafficking.

BIG BEAR CREEK
At some point we apparently left the house on Euclid Avenue. We parked our 32-foot trailer where my uncle Lee Spradlin had a saw mill, across Big Bear Creek Road from their big, old red tar-shingled house. I don't know if I have memories or just imaginings of being told about those times. I've seen pictures, I think, of me in underwear, swinging idly, and, I'm told, singing, 'Wing. Wong. Wing. Wong." Our chamber pot sits on the ground nearby. We didn't have a bathroom. In later years, visiting my uncle's place, I remember they had a two-hole outhouse. Bring a friend? The family that goes to the toilet together stays together? Supply and demand? I don't know.

Mom says I used to look out the window across Big Bear Creek Road at Aunt Gladys, her sister, working her garden in the early morning sun, and say, "Pretty sunshine Gosh!" (I couldn't pronounce her name. Lee had followed her here to Ohio when mom's family left Prestonsburg, Kentucky, Floyd and Johnson counties, in 1939.

In later years we visited. I remember dad finding a rowboat with a hole in the side. He finds a piece of canvas and some tar and patches it and takes me out on their pond. My cousin Joe turns over an upside down iron pot and finds a rat's nest with babies. He takes them and uses them for bait to fish in the pond. I think I let cousin Joe bury me up to my waist in sawdust once. I couldn't move. On the way there once we stop at an apple orchard and they give us juice from a huge wooden cask. It is delicious!

Uncle Lee sees someone racing down the road and says, "Tear it up! Hell ain't half full yet!" When we stay too late he says, "Gladys, we'd better go to bed. These people might be wantin' to go home." As I recall, he has a gold tooth or maybe more. I dream of encountering a bull named Arn there on their property, and having to jump the barbed wire fence repeatedly to escape its attack. It jumps the fence too. I escape riding on a vacuum cleaner! Years later I will walk by Horseshoe Mound Park in Portsmouth and see the name Arn on a house there.

Old Man Meade lives down the road. His house is still there in 2010, abandoned, paintless, grey wood, forgotten for who lived there and how. Once, probably when mom is having a baby, my brother and I decide to walk down the road toward Old Man Meade's. Uncle Lee comes out on the porch and yells for us to get back up to his house. He fires a shotgun and my brother falls, skinning his knee. We think Lee has shot him!

Once, when we're leaving, we have climbed into the back of dad's vehicle, and he is closing the back gate and window. He stoops, stands back up examining a hammer I think he'd found there on the creekgravel drive. He puts it in the back. I think he's stealing it, and I witness it. I don't know. But I think that's how I perceive it at the time. It's a bad lesson for me.

The woods across Bear Creek behind our trailer are full of hickory trees, huge hickory nuts. On some nights moonlight shines down through those hickory woods in ethereal beauty. A summer breeze whispers gently up the creek. Whippoorwills, concealed with their camouflage plumage in the nests in the leaves on the forest floor, give their nocturnal cry in the stillness of night. In my song, "Take It For A Ride" I sing of the enchantment of that memory.

CLAY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL (1956)
In 1956, we move to a trailer park at Rosemount, on the Scioto Trail, Rt. 23 north out of Portsmouth, Scioto County, Ohio. A motel stands there in 2010. I start first grade at Clay elementary school, probably in September. My teacher is Miss Easley. I cry and tell her my mom lied and I'm not even six years old yet, probably something my mother told me not to tell her. I tell my mother that Miss Easley's name should be Miss Hardy, and that she had broken a girl's arm. I think that came from seeing her handle a doll, trying to put its arm back on for the little girl it belonged to. Funny little memories. I't's intriguing to me that I comprehended the contrast of 'easily' and 'hard' at that age. I think Glockner Chevrolet stands where a bar called The Dugout stood. The school was somewhere in between the trailer park and the bar.

I learn to straggle behind my older brothers and hide under a big, round, metal corn crib that stands near the end of Rosemount Road on the edge of the trailer park where we live. I remember a red-headed boy riding by on a bike and flipping me the bird-finger, the first time I've ever seen the memorable gesture. I have no idea what it means, or what about me provokes him to do it.

A woman named Kalb has a company in her house there, repairing Venetian blinds. Behind her house is a cornfield. In July, 2010, I stop at a yard sale there, and learn she has recently died at age 95.

The Killdeer bird runs about, fluttering its wings, as if injured, to draw you away from its ground nest in loose gravel or dirt. I chase one relentlessly in the cornfield there, throwing a chunk of cinder block repeatedly, finally hitting it! I set the stone on it to keep it to show my brothers when they come home from school. It chirps. I repeat setting the stone a couple more times, to hear it chirp, then leave it with the stone on it. It's dead when we come back. I never deliberately kill a bird again.

About the second day of playing hooky I see my mom and sister come from the trailer to the wash house to do laundry. I leave the safety of the corn crib to try to get closer. My little sister sees me and walks right up to where I'm hiding in a ditch. Mom comes to see what she's doing and finds me playing hooky. I won't do it again until about eighth grade.

Some boys get in a rock fight and come to our door when one gets injured, wanting my dad to take him to the hospital. I think he was the son of the man who owned the trailer court. I think my dad asks how bad it is. The boy takes his hand off his neck and it spurts, obviously a ruptured corotid artery. Dad grabs a towel and off they go.

My dad sees me put my mouth on a spigot on the side of the trailer and then turn it on to get a drink, something I think I saw my brother do once when playing outside. Dad warns me there might be a spider up there and not to do it that way.

Someone says there is clay up the creek there, and I want some to do something artistic with. But they also say they've seen the eyes of a large cat in a dark cave up that way so I don't go looking. Someone's black cat gets killed on the road. Mom gives us boys a small, silver cap gun. I have it in my hand and start throwing limbs into the creek, rushing water after a storm, and absent-mindedly let go of the gun with a limb. Over the years I've lost tools, knives, things I was holding while throwing away weeds or tree limbs or trash. Running down the slag-gravel road in the trailer park I fall face first on horseweed stubble, giving me a scar at the left corner of my mouth I still bear.

FULLERTON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
We move to Oliver's Trailer Park, across the Ohio River in South Shore, Kentucky. I go back to Clay Township school, on a Monday I think, after Miss Easley thinks I'll be gone. She's upset because she's already sent my paperwork on to the new school. We move the next day I think.

There is a drive-in movie theater there by the trailer park in Kentucky. We ride in on a septic tank cleaning truck once, us younger kids sitting all around the big tank, getting in free as a 'carload' I think. One huge, older guy hides under a cover on the side away from the ticket booth. Once we are sneaking in where erosion has opened a gully under the fence. I see my brother go under and move to follow, putting my hand on a snake in the dark! It squirms!

We have a black cocker spaniel named Susie who has pups under the trailer. I hear the pups yelping and find a little girl under there picking them up and throwing them down. I play with toy cars and trucks under there. I have a large semi-truck trailer, that I can fit all the small toys in, but no cab.

I steal a fossil stone embedded in the yard of another trailer, after talking with the people who live there about it. He probably had explained what it was, probably giving me an interest in science. I work hard to get it out of the ground. I try to fill the hole with slag gravel from the road, as if they won't notice. They come looking for it. I don't remember if I give it back or what.

I wander the woods, finding out about leaves and weeds and trees and worms and sow bugs that roll up in little balls like tiny armadillos, granddaddy longlegs, spiders and their webs, butterflies and bees and birds.

At Fullerton Elementary School on Robertson Drive (?) I meet two other boys named Gary, and join in their cowboy game of wadding silver foil gum wrappers into little nuggets, and hiding them as silver in the pea-gravel playground. The building's still there in 2010, but it's a nursing home.

There is a kid in my class who wears glasses and has a disgusting runny nose. He lives in a house on Rt. 23 South right at the end of Ulysses S. Grant bridge. I see him there once as we come off the bridge. There are houses and maybe little stores all along there, when it is a two-lane. They all disappear in later years to accommodate the four-lane.

I'm in the first grade, on the right side of the room at Fullerton elementary. My brother is in the second grade, on the left side, with one teacher. One day I am oblivious to all the kids and the teacher, absent-mindedly licking my hands, tasting the salt in my sweat, when the teacher asks what I'm doing. I'm embarrassed, as I'm sure my brother was, as I explain. thereby cluing everyone else in on what she observed. I was a little animal. She could have been more discreet, but they don't teach that in teacher college.

Some Gypsies move in one day, lots of little travel trailers that park across the gravel lane where no other trailers are. Someone must have told me they were Gypsies. Gypsies are one of the groups slaughtered by the Nazis. I have a toy watch my mom or dad bought for me for a nickel at a little store somewhere up across the railroad tracks. A little gypsy boy in nothing but his underwear squats and pees by our trailer. Another boy notices my watch and I tell him where I got it. He offers to buy it, saying he isn't allowed across the tracks, and that I can take the money and go get another one. I see the logic of that, but then he explains he only has three cents, not the five cents it cost, but will pay me the other two cents tomorrow. The next morning I come out of the trailer to go find him and get my money. All the little trailers are gone.

I think a train hits a car up on the tracks. My dad goest up there but tells me to stay down at the trailer. He comes back and gets a blanket and goest up again. Someone drowns in the Ohio River there. My mom warns me not to go down there. I've already been there, standing on the precipice of an eroded cliff at the river's edge, watching whirlpools form and fade in the rushing water. I get poison ivy. Mom has me come to the wash house when she does laundry to put my arms down in the roller washing machine with the bleach water. While she's there once I see sparks through the kitchen window of the trailer and run to tell her. I think a toaster caught fire.

We have a TV for a while. Then it is gone. I ask my dad about it. He says, "I threw it in the river." I believe it. Mom plays the radio. I am enchanted hearing Johnny Mathis sing, "I must be go-ing. My heart is show-ing. I'd better hur-ry, A-way-ay-ay. What Will My Mary Say?" I hear Hank Williams sing, "Hey! Good Lookin'! What 'cha got cookin'? How's about cookin' somethin' up with me?" The song goes on to describe a "...place just over the hill..." where "...they've got soda pop and the dancin' is free..." Mom describes a drive-in restaurant that opened somewhere near her home once and they complained about the music playing late at night. The drive-in courteously turned the volume down and Mom says her family strained to hear the music.

Someone takes me to a ball park. I manage to wander out onto the field during a softball or baseball game behind a girl batter. Nobody stops me. The pitcher pitches. The batter swings and whacks me in the head! I put up both arms to cover my head after the impact, and people look at me and talk to me, but I don't think I ever go to a doctor, and I'm not sure I ever tell my parents about it. That could explain a lot.

ANDERSON'S TRAILER PARK
We move back across the river to Ohio, in about 1957, to Anderson's Trailer Park on Dorman Drive in Portsmouth. I go to Roosevelt Elementary School on Coles Boulevard. They have patches you can buy, saying "Roosevelt Rough Riders," for Theodore Roosevelt's exploits, specifically San Juan Hill in Puerto Rico. We tell dad about it and he is non-committal, but walks with us down Dorman Drive to where Coles Boulevard begins, to a store called The Cycle Inn. In 2010 it is Morton's Pharmacy. He has misunderstood and asks about the Rough Riders Patches there. We explain that it is at school. I don't think we ever got one.

Walking down Dorman Drive on the way to and from schol we step on bubbles the sun makes in the tar on the road. One day I find a golf ball in the stony ditch along the road and throw it at a great distance with my brother on the road while walking to school. At school I bounce it over his head and break a huge plate glass window.

Once a boy named Roger who lives in a house there in the park has his mother give us a ride to school. She says something impatient through the windshield to an old woman who is taking too long to cross the road in front of her. Her son yells, "Yeah! Get out of the road ya old bitch!" His mother jack-slaps him! The ride on to school is quiet. We get out and he stays in the car for further counseling with his mother. We never get a ride to school again.

Another boy's mother has these wonderfully colorful wind chimes, made in Japan I think, of strips of glass that tinkle beautifully when the breeze stirred them. She grows snapdragons and they fascinate me with their mode of scattering their seeds. The boy, named Windsor, has a large tricycle he lets me ride while he rides his bike with all the other kids. They ride up to the north end of the park and back to the loop at the south end. I'm about two thirds of the way to the north end when they come racing back. I turn and head back and they pass me headed back north. So I turn and...you get the picture. We play "Hide-and-Go-Seek" and "Kick-the-Can" sometimes at night.

A boy named Wayne is a Cincinnati Reds fan. He collects baseball cards, always hoping for a team picture. I climb up to the top of our refrigerator and find a Valentine card my dad has given my mother. It has a little toy soldier on it with a large heart on his chest. It says, "I've got a big heart on for you!" There is a fifty-cent piece in a bowl the card is in. I steal it and buy a pack of baseball cards at The Cycle Inn. Once my dad takes us to Mound Park to see a baseball game. He buys me a snowcone. I am observing how the whole ice mass rises up out of the cone as I squeeze it. It comes out and falls on Wayne's back, sitting in the bleachers in the row below me.

Mom buys me a bag of little, green, plastic toy soldiers somewhere, before we go to the A&P grocery on Second Street. I sit down by the ledge of the windows at the front of the store and start lining them up while she shops.

Another kid comes and plays with his and my little plastic army men in the dirt by our trailer. At one point I bury his bazooka man in his little foxhole. He leaves without missing it. I don't know if I know he'd left it or realize it later. I may be a thieving little bastard! I build little roads in the dirt, spending all the time building and never actually playing any stories out. A little boy named Tony knocks on the door and says, "Wanna go play in the dort?", mispronouncing 'dirt'.

We still live in our 32-foot trailer, a living room open to the kitchen, a sliding door back to mom and dad's bedroom. We go to the park's public washroom to use the restroom. Mom bathes us in a big pan. We still have the chamber pot. I take a butcher knife and go to mom and dad's bedroom, closing the sliding door to use it. The knife is for monsters I think.

(EDIT FOR TENSE, BELOW)

One day Mr. Anderson invited me and my brother in to see his reel-to-reel tape recorder. He thrust the microphone in my face and said to say something. I sang the Elvis Presley hit, "You Ain't Nothin' But A Houndog," just those words, and my brother did a 'raspberry'! Mr. Anderson said, "Oh. You mussed him up." So I was recording music back in the late 50's or early 60's!

There were two apple trees down over the hill. One was sweet apples and one was sour. We said the sweet one was Mrs. Anderson's and the sour Mr. Anderson's, matching what we thought of their personalities. I went beyond the trees once into the woods there. The underbrush turned to small black locusts on a barren ground, the reddish-yellow clay soil exposed. I think it had been graded or clearcut sometime.

Some guys had a trailer and they were going to spray paint it with a compressor and hose. The guy adjusted the nozzle to make a thin line and drew a cowboy on it, and some other things, before getting down to business and painting it. I think he was the one who went squirrel hunting and was cleaning them. I watched as he dug buckshot out of their flesh. Another guy had a tank of gas that he ignited with the flame blowing on a little bowl on top. He was melting lead wires or something into a large, half-moon ingot, and burning paper off a pile of copper wiring.

Dad brought home a pigeon. We named it Sammy. It died and we buried it. We dug it up and it was full of maggots. We had a box turtle in a drainage tile enclosure for a while.

I used to take an empty 'returnable' bottle to Vice's Grocery on Thomas Avenue at the end of Dorman Drive for the three cents deposit, and pay ten cents for a sixteen ounce Pepsi. Mom sent me there for a package of hamburger. I brought it back and it was full of maggots. The meat cooler had broken down and old Mr. Vice hadn't noticed. That may have been the end of his store. The cinder block building is still there. I think the sign was there for many years.

Some people named Strang (I think) had a boxer dog. Mr. Strang strained his back on a trip when a storm blew a pole down in the road and he tried to move it. Then they were both killed in a car wreck. There was a woman there named Bocock and mom thought that was funny.

Once my brother knocked on someone's door and asked if we could come in and watch TV. The woman made popcorn.

I saw a spider as big as a flyswatter in the washroom floor. I heard a bird twittering noisily and saw a blacksnake up in the tree. We saw lots of snakes there, green, black. Once my brother and I went down to the lower terrace level near Thomas Avenue where a guy had a pool and swam. Coming back up through a couple of terraces where no trailers were parked we carried our shoes, one in each hand. Just as we started climbing the last hill behind our trailer a light green garter snake leapt up and encircled my brother's ankle! That's why they call it a 'garter' snake. Being behind him a couple steps down the hill it was practically at my eye level. He screamed! I screamed! I threw my shoes behind me without thinking. The snake jumped off as quickly as it jumped on. We hurried back to the road below and hurled dozens of rocks in that general area. When we were sure it was safe we decided to climb the hill. When the snake attacked I had thrown my shoes behind me in some involuntary jerk. I found my shoes sitting side by side. I don't know if I or my brother had set them that way in the excitement, or if that's how they landed when I threw them. Just across the roadway on another occasion my other brother started to pick up what he thought was a strip of black rubber. It was a blacksnake! About six of us hurled a pile of rocks in that location about 3 feet in diameter and 10 inches deep. The poor garter snakes suffered. If we saw them we bombarded them. I seem to remember having a knack for hitting them on the head with a thrown rock.

Once we gathered up all the cinder blocks left from where trailers used to be parked and built a fort. We ran out of blocks when we had about five courses of a 10 X 10 room. "Shit a brick!" one of the boys said, a common expression among us. "We sure could use one!" I quipped, and got a laugh. I liked being the comedian.

I loved seeing small flocks of goldfinches, their bright yellow plumage, alighting for a moment in the goldenrod weed in bloom there.

Roosevelt School was torn down in the early 21st century. The terraces up to the level where it stood are still there, and I've begun to wonder if they were remains of ancient earthworks the invaders made use of for their school.

1959
In 1959, Fidel Castro led a revolution in Cuba. They say they don't know where he got the arms. If it was anybody but the CIA we'd know. But he knew they were not to be trusted. He expelled the largest CIA station on planet Earth from Havana. It took up residence on the campus of the University of Miami. He expelled the global capital of organized crime, making enemies of Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Sam 'Momo' 'Mr. Gold' Giancana, among others. The CIA, long a collaborator with these gangsters, continued working with them on assassination plots against Castro, Betancourt of Venezuela, and untold others, foreign and domestic. Castro expelled the Catholic State. The conspirators began trying to kill him. He's still alive in 2010.

These are some things they got caught at. What else did they get away with?

I completed the fourth grade at Roosevelt, I think, probably in 1960.

I remember mom and dad telling us to stay in the car on 5th street at Gay Street in Portsmouth while they went somewhere. We got bored and got out and walked just a few steps when we saw them through the large glass windows of a rental agent, named Miller I think. They later scolded us because they said they were telling the agent they had no children just about the time we came by the window. I think there were six of us kids by then, three boys, three girls.

SCIOTOVILLE, OHIO (1960-1964?)
We moved to a house at 1010 Harding Avenue in Sciotoville, Ohio, a big 3-bedroom, 2 up, 1 down, with living room and kitchen and 1 bath. It was so old all the paint had come off it so it had only the whitish vestige of that paint. At school one day a teacher said you could tell a house didn't have insulation if the snow had melted off it. On the way home, down Harding Avenue, I saw houses with snow on them, and some without. As soon as I came in sight of our house I looked at the roof, no snow. We heated with a kerosene stove in the living room. I don't remember any other heat source in the house.

We had a huge yard, on the corner of Harding and Kentland. We parked our trailer in the yard, to the dismay of the neighborhood I'm sure. We didn't have a lawnmower. The grass often got high before we got it cut. Once a guy was cutting it and would raise the mower and lower it down onto a clump of tall, tough grass, and he came down on a box turtle. It was horribly wounded. I put it out back to die in peace. The kids next door took it in their garage and said it was a copperhead.

There were three or four other old houses, all pretty much identical to each other, different from ours, on up Harding. Right next door lived two little girls, introduced as Lori and Beberly. Once their older sister gave me a nickle to go to Johnson's grocery, our landlord, it turned out, to get her a candy bar. I got it and came back but was too shy to just open the door and go back in their house. I just didn't have any experience with that kind of familiarity. I sat on the steps in the dark until I heard her wonder aloud what was taking me so long. When she opened the door I gave her the candy bar.

Once my sister came running in the back door shortly after I had just seen her go out the front and said there was a snake outside. We went out and saw a large, colorful snake, a King Snake maybe, on the sidewalk that ran from the front to the back of the house. I asked how she got past the snake. "I jumped over it!" she said. Once we had come back from Boy Scout Camp Oyo and had a tent spread on the front porch to dry. When I went to fold it up a small brown snake slithered out and off the edge of the porch.

Once a big mirror over the kitchen sink fell and broke while my sister was in there by herself. We ran in and she was white as a sheet!

Across Harding Avenue was an empty building that, I think, had been a bar. Peeking in the window I saw a booth with beer bottles on the table.

Dad slipped on ice on the back steps one winter and hurt his back and couldn't work. He later nailed a board across the roof and tarred it down to keep the water from draining down on the steps where he'd slipped. Hard times came. We had biscuits and gravy for breakfast, came home for lunch and had biscuits and gravy, and came home at night and had biscuits and gravy for supper. Then, one day, just as my brother and I were going out the door mom turned from the kitchen sink and said, "Don't bother coming home for lunch. There won't be anything here to eat."

A family named Hubbard lived across Harding. I remember they gave us some rhubarb from their garden. Mom made rhubarb pie and it tasted like strawberries.

We got commodities from the welfare department, I guess. There was powdered milk, and powdered eggs, big blocks of cheese I think, and cans of beef with lots of a jellied fat in it. Delicious!

Behind our house and facing onto Kentland was another house, Mrs. Allard. There was a gooseberry bush by her house. Nearby was Allard Park, the football field for East High School.

HARDING ELEMENTARY
We went to Harding Elementary. I think I was in the Fifth Grade there, probably in 1959-1960. I went to the Eighth Grade there. I remember walking with my two brothers the first day, coming by all the kids on the playground along Harding Avenue and my oldest brother commenting, "Same bunch of..." and calling them a derogatory name.

At Harding Elementary we changed rooms for different classes, something I don't recall doing at Roosevelt. I'm not sure what grade that

Mrs. Oldfield was a math teacher. She generally stayed seated at her desk and commanded such respect, no one spoke out of turn. It was just her calm demeanor I guess. One day there was a loud crash. No one left their seat. Mrs. Oldfield arose, walked calmly back to the second floor windows, and said, "There's been a car crash," her voice only slightly betraying mild shock. We all jumped up and went and looked then. A guy named Gary Payne was 'always' crashing out there, somewhere on Harding Avenue.

There was another little old lady, taught English I think. She talked about how the Nazis had concentrated people and enslaved them. I seem to recall her saying how they were only allowed four squares of toilet paper. I don't know where she got the story, if I'm remembering it right at all, but that 'kindness' was probably more than most of them got.

There was Mr. Kizor, a redheaded man who taught, was it History? His son was in my grade. He had a girlfriend named Beth who was a beautiful little girl. She had a swimming pool and they sometimes let us swim there because they didn't swim in it enough to keep it churned up and clean, I think. Sometimes we'd camp out and once we sneaked in and took a quick dip at night. There were beautiful flowers in the yard.

There were nice laboratories for Science at school. I forget who taught it. We handled a copper penny that had mercury on it, learning how the mercury clung to the copper. I guess the teacher didn't know how toxic mercury is. There was a Bunsen burner, and glass piping. We sprouted some corn on wet paper towels with rubber bands holding it between two panes of glass. Then we flipped them so the kernel was at the top and the sprout turned to continue growing upward.

A Miss Goodman came one year to teach art. As some part of a lecture on memory or vision or something she raised her hand head high and said, "You will remember me raising my hand for the rest of your life." She had us draw a small boxy house, teaching perspective, and a desert with Saquaro cacti. She took mine to a Portsmouth Art League show somewhere. She said they lost it. She was very flat-chested and pasty complexioned. I met her many years later, and we engaged in a discussion of the madness of 1980's political intrigues. I think I saw her obituary. She lived on Glover Street as I recall.

There was a boy named Steve who became my nemesis. I don't know why, now, if I ever did. He sat beside me in an assembly once and suddenly elbowed me in the side, very hard, very painful.
My dad asked me that night, "What's wrong?" I don't think he saw anything really. He often asked that, and, if he was drinking, pretty soon something WAS wrong! I think I had learned to give him something to work with rather than try to convince him of the truth, that nothing was wrong. On this occasion I had the story of the boy with the elbow to give him, and did.
He said, "If it's fun for him, if he gets away with it without it costing him anything, he'll do it again. Make it cost him something. Even if you get your ass whipped, if you fight back, he'll think twice about whether it was worth it and whether to do it again."
I don't know how much time passed between that advice and the day I was standing out by the hill at the edge of the playground behind the school where they threw the cinders from the school's coal furnace. I was lost in thought, idly looking down the hill.
Suddenly Steve was there at my side threatening, "Andrews, I think I'll just throw you down this hill."
Spontaneously, I grabbed him and threw him down the hill! I don't think he lost his footing but he couldn't stop on the steep, gritty surface 'til he got to the bottom. He came tearing back up, using his hands on the ground to maintain his balance and forward motion. His nose was wrinkled up in an angry sneer as he maintained eye contact all the way. I think I had an amused look on my face. He arrived at the top and got in my face but I stood my ground. He turned away and never bothered me again.

Once a large King Snake crawled onto the playground and a boy named King jumped up and down on it.

One day I remember watching a cloud zoom across the Eastern horizon, no other cloud in the sky, this one moving very fast, fascinatingly strange.

Across Harding Avenue from the school was a little store on the corner. We used to go over there at lunchtime, if we had money, and buy candy. Next to it was a little hollow down in the woods, leading down to the Little Scioto River. In the rainy winter the Ohio RIver valley filled up and backed up its tributaries, here a couple miles from the Ohio, farther as the Scioto meanders. There was a little one-story shack down there, red-tar-shingled, like uncle Lee's house. One night the man who lived there with a wife and a bunch of kids, allegedly kicked over the pot-bellied stove, setting the house afire, and grabbed two young children and waded into the backwater. I recall hearing that he said the water was too cold so he dropped the kids and came back. The kids were never found. He went to prison and died there.

The family came and moved in next door to us. The woman had a reputation, true or not, for promiscuity. Late one night I heard a man knocking on the door, slurring, "Come on! I need some lovin'" He wore a leather jacket with a crude painting of a blue light bulb on it, and a logo saying, "Blue Light Boys."

One day I looked out the stairwell window down between the houses and saw two of the little boys who lived there, about eight or nine years old, coming toward my little sister, who was about six. I went down and out the back door, reaching the corner of the house just in time to hear one ask her, "Wanna F---?" I ran after them and tried to literally kick the offending boy in the backside.

I had a dream we were in class and the teacher was having each of us read a portion of something in the book. When it was the turn of a boy named Dave he began to sing. I was looking around other students to see who was singing. I woke up remembering the refrain, "Riverville! Riverville, Them that loves you lives here still! Your back waters swirling deep, dark secrets they do keep!" I later wrote a song about the drowning of the children, using that chorus.

Once we started to dig a fish pond in the back yard, about two feet wide and five feet long. I think the police came and wanted to know what was buried there. Someone must have called them.

One Thanksgiving dad came home with a live turkey, a long-legged, long-necked bird. He tied it to the back porch. I was looking at it when dad came out of the house with a butcher knife and cut its head off.

Dad got a hair-cutting outfit and began cutting our hair.

He sat in the kitchen window once with a .22 pistol and shot at rats under the trailer. At some point I think someone made us get rid of the trailer.

1960
In November 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy defeated V. P. Nixon and became President. The fascists weren't happy. They'd been gearing up for a drug war in Southeast Asia, and 'resource wars' elsewhere, oil, sugar, uranium, and counting on Nixon to give it to them.

1961
The Kennedy-Johnson regime took office on January 20, 1961. About 89 days later, April 17, Kennedy allowed another Eisenhower-Nixon conspiracy to go forward, an ill-conceived Bay of Pigs (Bahia de Cochinos) invasion of Cuba by exiles, Ukrainians, mercenaries, with covert military assistance, against a Cuban army of 30,000. Lt. Col. Fletcher Prouty said he was ordered to change documents, adding two zeroes to the 30-man operation that had been approved, deceiving Kennedy into thinking it was authorized for 3,000, and letting it go forward. It was expected the underground would rise up and increase the revolution's numbers. But the government in exile were being held incommunicado at Opa Locka, an abandoned Naval base in Florida. They found a radio and heard themselves quoted. Suspecting a betrayal they got a man out to call and tell the underground to beware. So they did not rise up. About 1,200 invaders were captured, and Kennedy had to take the blame.

Involved in the operation were Richard Bissell, of the Iranian overthrow, and Charles Peare Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA, who tried to convince Kennedy to fly Naval support a third time, in daylight. Kennedy said it would not be possible to deny U. S. involvement if the planes were seen. Kennedy realized how he'd been manipulated and fired Allen Dulles, Bissell, and Cabell from their prestigious and lofty pinnacles of their careers. He said he would splinter the CIA.

1962
In that world, in 1962. I began writing poetry and fiction. I remember a story about Rose Charlotte, acting in a play, and after the show her boyfriend, a detective, came backstage to find her, but she had disappeared. I never finished it. I think I let my brother read it and he encouraged me.

My brothers and I began to run around with two Hammond brothers and two Gilpin brothers. We went up into the hills a few times. There was a frog-pond up there where I saw their great globs of eggs. We went to the Little Scioto River to fish, and to the Ohio River to camp and fish. I skinny dipped in the Ohio. Everyone else had brought trunks. The sewage treatment plant was just downriver about 100 feet, and we marveled at all the condoms that had come through the plant and now lay on the walls of the ditch.

Once a man had wandered off and they called us out as Boy Scouts to go door-to-door searching and telling people. We went into the Highland Bend neighborhood where a Navajo (Dine') family came out on their porch and conversed with us. Then we went up the hill above Bonser Avenue and headed back toward the Ohio River. At some point we got a call on walkie talkie advising that the man had been found floating in the Ohio River.

Once we fought forest fires, raking leaves away from the fire line to try to stop it.

The scouts were going to Camp Oyo and had a car wash at the Johnson Brothers gas station. We didn't earn enough by time to leave and I was odd man out. They left and I was still there when a guy pulled in with a pretty orange 1955 Chevy. He put his hand in his pocket and said, "I'll pay you whatever I have in my pocket to wash my car." I agreed. He had less than a dollar in change, but I fulfilled my agreement.

A man the other boys told me was 'queer' or gay had been hanging around there and one day I went fishing by myself down at the Little Scioto River. I think he followed me. He approached me down there in the remote mud flats of the river and made conversation. He asked how old I was and I think I was about twelve. He seemed to lose interest and went back the way he came.

Once JoAnn Hibbitts, the cutest little girl, came down there all by herself. I was too shy to make much conversation with her, and she soon left.

Once one of the Hammond boys had about ten feet of line and an aluminum hook tied to a stick. Something got on it and he was literally leaning back against the big fish hidden in the muddy water. It's struggles swirled the water. Suddenly he fell back and the line flipped out of the water. The fish had gotten away, having bent the hook nearly straight. Sometimes, if I was quiet for a while, a great carp would leap, looking to be four feet long, and splash back into the water. I saw it more than once in pretty much the same location. In 2010 I've heard the river is dead from the uranium enrichment plant on down.

We used to fish in Aker's Pond. We played ice hockey on it in winter. We had a transistor radio playing by the fire and while we were playing on the ice some guy stole it.

About that time a singer/songwriter calling himself Bob Dylan changed songwriting from Doo Wop to something old made new again, a folk filtering of current reality, love and life. He commented on the weirdities of our times, but I don't think he meant to change the world; just comment. Mainly, he was just a song and dance man. He's still singing, still dancing, in 2010.

I didn't know it then, but life on planet Earth was changing around us, him, me, you if you were born then. We had gone from about 1 billion humans in 1850 to 2 billion by 1925, just 75 years. Then we hit 3 billion in just 37 more years, 1962. We'd developed an industrial competence for consuming and dirtying our environment.

1963
On November 22nd, 1963 President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas while I was in wood shop at Harding Elementary school, Sciotoville, Ohio. I remember shutting down a saw to listen to the radio announcement played over the intercom. The teacher was out. They told us, played "Taps" I think. When it stopped, we all went back to work for about ten seconds before we stopped, like of one mind, and crowded together in the center of the room, just looking at each other. I don't remember what we said, if anything. We could not conceive what the implications were for our young lives. Kennedy wanted to lead us to the Moon and beyond. The fascists wanted to mislead us to war in Southeast Asia. I wonder how many of those boys in the room with me that day survived the new direction the fascists took us in after killing Kennedy.

The teacher came back. They dismissed school. I ran all the way home to 1010 Harding Avenue. I burst in the door. Mom was at the kitchen sink.

"Have you had the TV on?" I asked. She hadn't. I told her.

Your history book may not tell you this happened at all. That's the best evidence of conspiracy I've found, that they have the power to erase it from your history books and not teach your children about it. Kids tell me they never heard of it until they got to college. Then it's often the government version, with none of the abundant evidence of doubt that it happened the way the fascists said it did. On the President's Comission to Investigate the Assassination of President Kennedy was Allen Dulles, and John J. McCloy, friends of the Nazis. It happened in the city where Cabell's brother was the Mayor, where he likely trained the police Red Squad, who were the President's only protection, in contradiction to protective protocol. Nixon and Hoover and Johnson had all been at oil baron Clint Murchison's party the night before. Nixon and Johnson had both come for a bottler's convention, Nixon representing Pepsi Cola.


THE PRICE OF MILK
I remember a foot of snow on the ground one winter. My mom gave me a fifty cent coin to go get a gallon of milk. On the way I forgot I had it in my hand and dropped it somewhere, so when I got to the store I couldn't pay for the milk. I came back home retracing my steps, but not finding it. I told mom. She sent my brothers back with me to look for it in the snow. They went their own way, down the left side of the street, mad at me for making them have to do it. I again retraced my steps and found it! It was on the other side of Harding Avenue where I had crossed to avoid passing a girl coming up the snowy sidewalk toward me. I was very shy. In 2010, a gallon of milk is $2.99 or more.

1963
Dale Spradlin gave me a Salem Menthol cigarette in 1963. It made me sick. I ran into him 30 years later and thanked him for making me never pick up the habit that kills 435,000 Americans a year, year after year after year. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

1964
In 1964, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop put four warnings on tobacco packaging. People began to avoid this number one cause of disease and death. It still kills one of every five Americans who die, one of every four Kentuckians. http://www.cdc.gov It kills one of every ten humans who die on planet Earth. Nothing personal; just business.

Dale told me of an uncle who was on trial for murder, a man named Brown I think. He had "...knocked a guy in the head and retched [sic] in his pocket and he had twelve cents."

I got a crush on Dale's sister Glenda, who had a maturity of personality beyond our childlike ages, and a lovely figure. I gave her my Beatles cards. Dale invited me to spend the night at their house. I jumped at the chance. Glenda and I played Monopoly. I think I wrote her a note at school letting her know how I felt. I think she wrote back telling me she didn't feel the same way. I wrote her a note, with my blossoming poetic bent, saying, "You set a flame in my heart. Now that flame flickers." Two ruffians approached me in the hall and asked about it, apparently having read it over her shoulder. They didn't have it right and I didn't tell them anything.

An English band called The Beatles picked up from Dylan, expanding the possibilities for songwriting in a dozen directions. Anything was possible. Songs could be about love and teen angst, or anything you could tell a story about, any story you could imagine, and sung any way that was interesting to sing it.

I learned to like dancing with girls, holding their hands, kissing, desiring their company, and imagining it all, with the Beatles' tutelage and soundtrack. We kind of forgot about Kennedy. It was just the way the world was. Children accept it and move on. The fascists count on it.

About 1964, I was playing with an electric train in one of the two upstairs bedrooms in the old house we rented. Suddenly there was a banging on the side of the house! "Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!".

In those days military jets overhead broke the sound barrier, their sonic boom shaking the house. My mom would come to the bottom of the stairs and yell, "Gary! What are you doing up there?" After I explained it she still came to yell and make a joke of it. She came this time and I told her I hadn't done it.

I looked out a window at the top of the stairs to the ground below between the houses, where I thought the sound had come from. I didn't see anything. Suddenly the banging happened again! I came down and went outside. A man with a hammer was walking away. On both sides of the house were large, red-lettered signs condemning the house as "...unfit for human habitation." Roaches and rats thrived in it. A rat climbed into bed and bit my little sister one night.

About this time my father was driving down Harrisonville Avenue (St. Rt. 139) and spied his stolen car at the body shop owned by a man rumored to be organized crime. Organized crime was well-entrenched in the local government. The car had been stolen across the Ohio River, the state line, in Kentucky, making it a federal matter for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, since it was now in Ohio. But J. Edgar Hoover denied the existence of organized crime until Joseph Valachi testified to Congress about the initiation rituals of it.

NEW BOSTON, OHIO
We moved to a 'shotgun house' at 4229 Spruce Street, New Boston, a village a few miles downriver, geographically, a vast change culturally. While our old home area had traditional families, in traditional houses, here there were lots of people being raised by grandparents, extended families, lots of apartments. Nearby bars and the state liquor store would be my father's undoing, confusing the rest of us.



1965
About 1965 I worked, tearing down a house where Route 52 was being widened to four lanes, Wheelersburg, Ohio. The five or ten dollars I earned each weekend bought me a Norma guitar ($40) from B&B Loan, Portsmouth, Ohio. I'd wanted to play every since I'd seen my Dad and his brothers play at the old home place on Mt. Olive in Pulaski, Virginia, and my Mom's father play banjo up Bear Creek in Ohio. I was walking along Rt. 52 and found a piece of plastic that resembled a guitar pick and thought, "I'm on my way!" Of course, no one would let a kid touch the instruments back then. Now I'll let any kid explore my guitar, no matter how young or old. Thinking back, I wish I'd shared my guitar more with my Dad. He was an iron-worker, and had seven kids and a wife. He couldn't afford one. He taught me to play "House Of The Rising Sun." (Am C D F E)

Dave Craycraft (Hammond B3 Organ, Leslie speaker cabinet) lived down the street. He was in The Bare Facts band with Ronnie (rhythm/lead guitar) and Rusty Pruitt (drums). They had a song on the radio called "Georgianna," by lead guitarist William Boyd Williams. I began to write songs. They weren't great but had enough merit to keep me playing. I'd play in the morning and be late for school. I'd come home for lunch and be late getting back. I'd play during commercials while I watched TV. I didn't have any device to tune it so it was always either higher or lower than standard pitch, which affected the way I sing to this day. I sing in the key I play in. My brothers got into a tug-of-war over my Norma and broke it.

Back in the 1960's, black Americans people could not vote or even sit beside me in public places in some parts of the country. They were not allowed at Dreamland, a swimming pool open to 'the public' in Portsmouth. I remember some kids put their money on the counter and ran on in. They called the police. There was a newspaper picture of one kid, fully dressed as I recall, jumping past a policeman into the water. It's hard to conceive that, in my lifetime, human beings, children, had to resort to such tactics to be equal in the eyes of American society and the law, right here in river city, just to go swimming!

But then it's hard to conceive human beings being captured, kidnapped, bought and sold as slaves. Many Arab countries hold slaves to this day. We're a more primitive race of being than we pretend to be. They've got lots of oil so we pretend it doesn't matter.

Racism was prevalent and prominent in 2008 as Barack Obama, a black man, ran for President. He won! Idiots in media asked, "Is racism over? Has Dr. King's 'dream' been realized?" Please! Racism is alive and sick. I heard it from many that year, and the next. And all you have to do is disagree with racism to be discriminated against, regardless of skin color.

Hell, I couldn't vote either. "You're old enough for war, But too young for votin'," Barry McGuire growls in "Eve of Destruction." Boys graduated high school, and went to war. We began to question how the government was using us in the American war in southeast Asia. We had no idea. Many still don't. The truth is elusive, and even if you find it you're alone with it.

If you got in trouble with the law in the late 1960's the judge might ask, "Would you rather go to prison or in the Army?" With little concept of what being used for war would be like, many opted for the Army.

If the elite people of your local society who got appointed to your military draft board didn't like your daddy's politics, economic status, skin color, whatever, they had the power to send you to war. It was like Hitler's 'Send me your undesirables' order. The Nazi in power where you lived could decide you were 'undesirable.'

To make it seem less so they later assigned us all numbers and drafted us by lottery, numbering us like Hitler's concentration camps did by tattooing the arms of the 'workable' slaves among the 17 million people they enslaved. They slaughtered 11 million people, 6 million of the Jews. In the military draft you knew your number would eventually come up even if it was somehow random. The people went along with it. It was the government. They told us that's what we had to do to preserve America from something called 'Communism.' That was a lie of the variety damned by God. Companies conducted commerce with the Communists with government approval all during the so-called Cold War (1945-1989 and on).

In 1965, black Americans made up 20% of the front lines of the American war in Southeast Asia, far out of proportion to their numbers in the US population. The brothers called it 'Soulville' up there. They served for patriotic motives, economic motives, and often as victims of institutionalized racism in their local, state, and national government.

The average age of the fighting man in Vietnam was 19. We were children, fodder for the cannons, meat for the dogs of war. "America is eating its young," Daniel Ellsberg, the guy who exposed the fascists' plan in "The Pentagon Papers" said. In those papers is National Security Action Memo (NSAM) 263, Kennedy's order to withdraw the 17,000 troops and end the war. Lyndon Baines Johnson reversed it November 25th, with NSAM 273. The war escalated.

Black leader Malcom Little, calling himself Malcom X to discard his 'slave name,' tried to teach his people not to take 'the white man's drugs.' That was smart. He later realized 'the man' comes in all colors, and taught, "Don't take the man's drugs." Brilliant. He was assassinated in 1965. It seems the fascists murder anyone who tries to lead people away from their machinations.

1968
Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968. His dream for humanity is alive still, in 2008 as Barack Obama ran for President, a dream where we judge and are judged by the content of our character, regardless of the color of our skin. Obama paraphrased King's 'Dream' speech in his first speech after his election, reiterating that it was not just for some, but for everyone.

Robert Francis Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968. He too, had a dream for us, one that didn't include wasting us in a drug war in Southeast Asia.

I remember questioning the universe, "What in the hell is going on?"

I had no idea. You probably still don't. It's still going on in 2010. The fascists are financially powerful, equipped with arms, money, media, able to advance their agenda.

At Glenwood High School, I took an aptitude test. It came back as a graph with a small spike for clerical work. I was literate. But there was a huge spike for the fine arts. I liked things artful, visual, musical, conceptual, words. And that was all. With a little guidance I might have had a career in something like that. But nooooo! There wasn't guidance counseling in those days. Poor kids didn't go to college.

1968
I graduated from Glenwood in 1968. My mom made my gown. I think she found my mortar-board hat at a rummage sale. I don't know.

I went to Indiana with some people to try to go to work for Irby Construction Company.

I came back to New Boston and went to work for Janice, my buddy's sister, at Kentucky Fried Chicken, then on Gallia Street in New Boston. She married a boxer named Jerry and quit and they hired me as Manager at $90.00 salary a week, however many hours it took me to earn it.

1969
Life is what happens while you're making plans. Life happened. I was drafted in 1969, in a letter from fascist President Richard Milhous Nixon, "Greetings. Come and be used to some purpose in the American War in Southeast Asia, or else."

My best friend, Don Justice's girlfriend Diane and I said goodbye to him at the Greyhound Bus station, then on Gallia Street in Portsmouth en route to Viet Nam. Two weeks later he was dead. He laid in the bush for two weeks. They shipped him home refrigerated, a coffin with a little, fogged up window you could peek in to see his tiny mask of a restored face.

The Nazi Big Lie was that the war was to stop Communism, the 'domino' theory, 'If Viet Nam falls, other countries will topple, like dominoes. Soon we'll be fighting them over here.' Funny how that didn't happen, even though Viet Nam fell to the communists as America and its collaborators pulled out in 1975, having accomplished the fascist goal of taking the Southeast Asian drug trade from French organized crime and giving it to American organized crime.

But the government and companies were doing business with the Communists (1940's-1960's), just like the Reagan-Bush people did with Saddam Hussein (1980's). And others are surely doing in 2010, and ever on. They have their money invested in war and foment war to make a profit. Italian fascist Benito Mussolini's definition of fascism was, "...a collusion of government and big companies."

The Big Lie is a lie of the variety damned by God.

But, when your country calls, and you believe in your country, you come.

I didn't figure out 'til later "they" weren't my country; I was. I didn't come because I thought it was right. I came because I was afraid of what they did to people who didn't.

They still tell that Big Lie, with the latest updates.

"We're fighting them over there (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Nicaragua, Columbia) so we won't have to fight them over here," the Big Lie said then. That same Big Liie is being used by the fascists to eliminate the Constitution of the United States in 2008-10.

Here's hoping 'they' don't figure out all 'they' would have to do is ignore 'us over there' and come on over here and we'd be at their mercy.

To avoid the inevitable fate of being drafted into the Army or Marines, which they were doing at the time, I enlisted in the Air Force. My father was a Marine; landed on Iwo Jima. His older brother Arnold died there. At Paris Island he said they told him, "You are here to learn the finer arts of murder."

I went in in June, 1970. I had to go to Ashland, Kentucky to raise my right hand and be sworn in. There's a big federal presence there, a sinister stink about it. I had to take my draft letter with me and turn it in. Then I went to Columbus, Ohio and stayed in the Neil House hotel, a famous hotel across from the Statehouse, gone now where the Riffe Office Building now stands. I roomed with a kid from Canton, Ohio, Don Garvey. He told me it was up by Indian Lake, "...like the song..." that had been popular on the radio. That night we went to a bar and he ordered a six pack to go. We were both underage. When the bartender set it on the counter in a bag he asked Don for his Identification. I said, "Oh! Yeah! You'd better let me carry that," and picked up the bag. The bartender didn't ask me for ID and we walked out.

UNITED STATES AIR FORCE (USAF) 1970
I went to San Antonio, Texas, Lackland Air Force Base, for Basic Training.

I went to Denver, Colorado, to train as a Weapons Mechanic, to load bombs, rockets and missiles and aircraft guns

I never made it to the war zone, but a short hop away, in South Korea, and with occasional orders to that fate always canceled.

I loaded nuclear weapons. We kept them ready to go if the President gave the order. At the time it was that fascist I mentioned, Nixon. One of my jobs would be to pull the safety pin just before the plane took off, opening the electrical circuit, enabling the pilot to arm and drop the bomb if he had that order. That sure made me think, especially as it became apparent fascists had taken over the U. S. government, and the power to give ME that order to pull the pin.

They were exposed in the 1972 Watergate affair. I read about 10 books, consecutively, in the early 21st century about it. It is an astounding crime, much bigger than one break-in at a Washington hotel. Thousands of homes, offices, phones, cars, public places bugged. Infiltration of hundreds of operatives into peace groups, environmental groups, unions, opposition parties, companies. False evidence planted and people jailed based on it. According to one conspirator, murders on orders. Everything they told us to fear from the Communists, they were doing.

The cover-up worked. They got away with it, and still do.

I survived mis-leadership of the predations of the fascist military-industrial-political-intelligence-underworld complex which was feeding American teenagers into their undeclared drug-war machine in Southeast Asia. When I got back to the U. S. Nixon was selling oil to the Communists.

1973
I reported to my duty station, England Air Force Base in Alexandria, Louisiana, but refused to load bombs anymore. They sent me to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida for a psychological evaluation. A girl there, a patient like me in the nut hospital, wore her hair in pigtails, like a native American Indian might, though she was very much a white woman. She took me aside and we sat on a hallway floor. She talked of activism with the American Indian Movement (AIM). I listened and conversed politely, but didn't join her club. Another woman, also a patient, took me down another hall and told me a scary story about her mother's eyes in a little wooden box. I didn't join her club either. An older woman engaged me in a conversation, and by this time my paranoia was kicking in, because it seemed they were not patients but part of the operation, probing me to see how I thought. They just came across unnaturally contrived.

Finally they said to pack up and sent me back to Louisiana. I had grown a goatee such as the one I sported before I got drafted. They insisted I shave or they wouldn't let me go. I didn't shave. They took me to a Colonel's office, the base commander I think. He was on the phone when they took me in. I sat down without saluting him or standing at attention until he hung up. I began perusing a TIME magazine on the table. There was that picture of a little Vietnamese girl running down the road, her clothes burnt off by napalm. I had loaded napalm in Korea, a short hop away. When he got off the phone and started his praise of war I showed him the picture. "There's your war, Colonel," I said. He let me go, saying, "Don't ever come back to my base!" I didn't.

Looking back, I realize the bastards tried to kill me and my whole generation. They have killed a few hundred thousand of us, and that's just so far. We're still dying. A Marine just died from physical wounds, the shrapnel he's carried for 30 years. He had a 15% disability check each month. Thanks a lot. son for giving us your life. Roger Ginn came home with a drug addiction, heroin, and lived with it for years, and died. I ran into another buddy in 2009 who came home with it but found himself and is doing well all these years later. They used us for drug experiments. Some didn't survive that. Some survived, damaged. Some died after years of suffering with tropical diseases. Some lived sick and died from chemical exposures (agents orange, white, pink), and psychological trauma. After 30 years a guy I knew who suffered pain from agent orange exposure put a gun in his mouth.

1974
I escaped in 1974 when they said, "What day in April would you like to get out?"

I said, "April 1st would be cool man!" April Fool's Day would be a fitting end to the farce. They thought it was too cool. I got out some other day that month.

I could have flown from Alexandria, Louisiana to Ohio. But I took a bus. I wanted to see the landscape, swamps of Louisiana and forests in Tennessee, and fields, and the hills of Southern Ohio and Northern Kentucky where I grew up.

I got to New Boston early in the morning. The house was asleep. I walked around in the yard, kicked over the dead stump of a tree my brother and I had dug out of the fence as a sapling and transplanted 5 or 6 years before. It had been about 15 feet tall when I left but had apparently met its fate in my absence.

It was strange to be free, strange to be back here where things were normal. The world is not a normal place. When my father saw me he said, "Son, it's good to have you back." I asked him the name of a constellation in the sky. "Cassiopeia," he said. When the dope of alcohol was not on him he was very bright, well-read, a student of the daily newspapers, which were informative in those days. They gradually disappeared. Where most towns had two papers that might take opposite sides on an issue, one went out of business, strangely, all across the country, and the other now gives the one-sided view. The Columbus Citizen Journal is gone. The Columbus Dispatch remains.

The 'drug subculture' I'd left four years earlier was now a 'drug culture.' Not just a few young, aspiring hippies, those subject to the whim of their draft boards, but most of the young people were smokers. They even had a 'Waster's Union' and carried little cards as members. Their parents and grandparents were using prescription amphetamines and barbiturates. The fascists were pushing drugs through every doctor in the country. Even older folks were sharing with and selling their prescription pills to other people. It seemed to be the intent of fascist government to sedate America so they wouldn't protest its actions, couldn't think through what was being done to them and their children.

The fascists were trafficking in heroin and marijuana, the real purpose of their war in Southeast Asia. They got caught gutting U. S. soldiers, throwing their hearts and lungs out into the jungle, packing the corpses with heroin, and shipping them home to Dover AFB in Delaware and Nordstrom AFB, in California. A heroin epidemic hit the streets of the world, thanks to fascists using, as Nixon said, 'The apparatus of the federal government to screw our enemies.'

He also said, 'The real war is over here,' meaning we, the people, of the United States, resisting being used by the fascists, were that enemy.

Nixon hired Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld hired Dick Cheney. They began dismantling the Office of Economic Opportunity, which had 'made war' on poverty, decreasing it from 22% of Americans to 11%. Poverty is a weapon of fascism. I have an Army recruiting ad somewhere that I tore from a Reader's Digest. It shows a young boy in uniform coming through the mess hall with a tray, and advises, "Food, clothing, and shelter," are available in the Army, appealing to the basics of survival, which young people were having trouble getting in the civilian world. The fascists went to war on us, and have not stopped as of 2010.

In Asia I always wanted to help the people there build something, even work in the fields or rice paddies, something helpful, productive, positive, instead of what I was doing. Thousands of their daughters were prostitutes in the bars in the villages around military posts.

After I 'escaped,' I went to work in various fields, went to Portsmouth Interstate Business College (1976-77?), ending up in a 32-year career in that small spike I told you about. A guy I knew had a job as a cook in a group home for juvenile delinquents. He invited me to come and shoot pool. They heard me talking to the boys and hired me as a 'consultant,' some sleight-of-hand accounting trick. I was just the overnight guard. I went from that to rehabilitating homes of the poor, developing employability of young men and women, helping workers disconnected from their jobs to reconnect.

In the 1980's, when Detroit Steel closed, I went to work driving a motor home to Lone Star and Longview, Texas, taking people there to find work. Our unemployment rate in Scioto County increased to 26%, officially. About 1984 I became a Planner/Monitor for job training grants we got to help people go to school to train or re-train, and find work.

2008
In 2008 the fascist bastards robbed me of that ascendancy to a position where I could enact tactics based on my research. Now I deliver meals to elderly people. My friend Loran says, "The Universe knew those old people needed you more." I'll content myself with it.

The fascists struggled to maintain their status quo but freedom is hard to suppress when the 'free' don't know the fascists are trying to suppress it. They kept a low profile back then. In 2008-09 they were in-your-face about it, emboldened and unchallenged, entrenched, aided and abetted by the military-industrial-political-intelligence-underworld complex their puppet President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about as he left office in 1960. I think he'd just begun to see how he had been used too. I read he was a major, after thirty years in the Army, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. In a few years he was a four- or five-star general, Supreme Allied Commander. He said the 'influence' of the military-industrial complex was 'unsolicited and unwarranted.' And then he looked about nervously. The fascists were there, just off camera, and had Vice President Nixon waiting to take his place. Nixon had a similar meteoric rise, congressman in 1946, Senator in 1950, VP in 1953.

Fascism thrives on public ignorance. It's hard to fool people who are well-read. Most people aren't well-read. They're busy trying to keep gas in the car ($4.09 a gallon at one point in the early 21st century), food on the table (milk, $4.39 a gallon) a roof over their heads ($425.73 mortgage), and not be poisoned by the tobacco companies' food takeover (1980's) and the pharmaceutical companies' chemicals; not medicine to cure, just chemicals to get your money until you die. An epidemic of synthetic heroin has raged for the first 10 years of the 21st century, turning your people into desperadoes, thieves, bank robbers, prostitutes. People aren't well-read. They're busy trying to find a job since the fascists conspired to give companies taxpayers' dollars, taken from their paychecks, as an incentive to the companies to abandon the American people and take the companies just across the border into Mexico, to China and India, and elsewhere. They deregulated the banks and millions of Americans have lost their homes, foreclosures some places on 1 of every 13 homes in 2009, ongoing in 2010. The social implications of millions of lost jobs, millions trying to find new places to live, are complex and will be long-lasting. Many of the ills that plague humanity will arise from the mis-leadership of the American people by the fascists.

Who the hell's got time to study the big picture that's going on around them? Their survival is threatened in the 'little' picture of their personal lives, the lives of their families, friends and neighbors. America is under attack by a domestic enemy, fascism, a collusion of government and big companies. Big pharmaceutical companies write their own laws and make drug war on us. Big energy companies write their own laws and suck money out of our pockets, asking five or eight times as much for the same gallon of gas that will only take you the same number of miles. Big banks rob us of our American Dream of owning our homes. Our government colludes with them; fascism.

Having been pushed out of the little spike and scared by negative possibilities, I suddenly see outside that door, a new world of positive possibilities. It's out there. I'm sure of it. America can be the honest and honored dream you thought it was, but you'll have to work on it. You may have to fight for it. Pay attention. Your survival demands you know what the enemy is doing and figure out what you can do to prevent their success.

And now, I have a couple hundred songs to play I didn't have back when I was trying to decide what spike to work in. Wait until you hear them. I hope to upload them and sell them for ninety-nine cents like others do. Let's see; that means, if I sell a million of them...oh well, one day at a time. They're all available if anyone wants to license them for recording or publishing. I could use the money.

Gary E. Andrews
July 2010
Portsmouth, Ohio
Email: garyeandrews@yahoo.com
www.garyeandrews.com