CHAPTER 3
KING OF THE BACK FLIP
At the end of 1956, all six Hall family members piled into the station wagon and hopped onto Interstate 5, leaving our turquoise-blue house behind. Dad had applied for and got the job of Assistant Director of Public Works in Santa Ana. It was a big step up, with a significantly larger salary. On our way to the brand-new four-bedroom tract house, Randy wanted to know how long it would take to get there. Mom replied, “Sooner than you think, honey, sooner than you think.” Dad chimed in with “It’s a thirty-mile drive.” That seemed like a long way to go for a new home. I was ten, Randy eight, Robin six, and Dorrie three.
Our beige house at 905 North Wright Street seemed like an example of what magazines described then as middle-class modern living at its best. After our first few months, Mom wrote a letter, which I found in her Santa Ana family scrapbook:
Not wanting to sound like a candidate for the great American family, I must say these are happy days for us here in Santa Ana. Of course, it’s all due to Jack. I can’t put into words what a good husband he is, but I’ll let it go at that. His work is very hard. He seems to like it though. It’s done much to improve him for the world of public relations. As first assistant city Engineer not only does he maintain roads, bridges, and buildings he also helps with management skills and budgetary requirements. He’s very busy taking management classes on Tuesday night, Toastmasters on Wednesday night and usually Friday for the engineer’s meeting. On Saturdays, he tries to go to Indian Scouts with Randy. Jack and I are surely blessed by God. We are so thankful. Our children are a great joy to us. Randy, with his depth of feeling and sensitivity which I constantly pray to God we don’t ruin. Someday in some way he’ll be able to give and let out this ability he has to sense beauty and fine things. But most important of all is Daddy, and husband Jack, who has an uncanny knowledge of what’s right and wrong. He is the main reason we are such a close family. Daddy is definitely the head and we all know it, and like it. I haven’t words to put down my feelings for Jack. He’s part of me, that’s all, and that’s the best part.
In the new house we ate our meals at the beige tiled bar separating the kitchen from the dining room. Mom, seated on a stool near the stove, sat opposite the rest of us. Dad hunkered in near the window overlooking our neighbors Maxine and Joe’s identical home across the street. We kids didn’t have a designated spot. The Bastendorfs, our next-door neighbors to the right, had a jungle filled with desert plants for a lawn. We’d never seen anything like it. Laurel Bastendorf introduced Mom to the trendy 1950s-modern Sunset magazine. We were enthralled by her beatnik manner. Mr. Rohrs and his wife, our other neighbors, lived on the corner. Marie, their daughter, was painfully shy. We steered clear of Mr. Rohrs, who was a tough-minded high-school principal.
Every night, after dinner, Randy begged Mom to let him watch The Bullwinkle Show. Each episode began with Rocky, a flying squirrel, soaring over a snow-covered mountain. His companion Bullwinkle, a lovable moose, was, in my opinion, an idiot. Randy would endlessly repeat their lame jokes. “How about this one, you guys? So Rocky looks at Bullwinkle and says, ‘If you want to inherit a fortune you have to spend a weekend at the Abominable Manor.’ Bullwinkle says, ‘That’s no problem. I’ve been living in an abominable manner all my life.’ ”
Only Mom laughed, which of course encouraged Randy to try another. “Listen to this one, Dan.”
“My name is not Dan,” I would tell him.
“Okay, Dan. This is a good one. You’re going to like it. You know the evil Boris Badenov, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. So Boris shakes his head at Natasha Fatale saying, ‘Ah, it’s good to be back on campus!’ She says, ‘Boris, you went to college? Where? Penn State?’ He shakes his head: ‘No, State Pen!!!’ Get it?”
Dad didn’t get it and didn’t want to. But Mom, Randy’s greatest audience, cheered him on.
Four bedrooms was a big step up from three. Robin and Dorrie’s faced the roofed-in patio across from me. Mine looked onto the driveway, where Dad parked his Santa Ana City loaner car, one of the perks of his prestigious new position. With such a unique gift, we were suddenly elevated into a two-car family. On my desk, I displayed my very own hardback copy of The Diary of Anne Frank, the first book that made me cry. With time, I saved enough money to buy two travel posters from France, where, I decided, I was going to go as soon as I graduated from high school. Randy’s bedroom was at the end of the long hallway next to the kids’ bathroom, and across from Mom and Dad’s master suite. Besides a bed, Randy’s den of hibernation had a long table, where his collection of junk rapidly grew, beneath a window that seemed to offer no light. With time, his room became a haphazard mess, housing ugly plastic dinosaurs surrounded by stacks of horror comics and Mad magazines with weird-looking gap-toothed Alfred E. Neuman on the cover.
It was a rare occasion when one of us ventured into Mom and Dad’s bedroom and private bath. In a way it seemed like an off-limits, separate home of its own. We didn’t knock on their door. Once in a while, I felt sorry that Randy’s room was not only next to the ever-populated family bathroom, but also across the hall from the mystery of Mom and Dad’s suite. Through the doors, he must have been privy to their slowly evolving relationship.
As often as possible, Randy retreated to his bedroom. It was there that his preteen fantasies took form. I knew because Rocky Lee, his friend from up the block, took me aside one day and told me that Randy, who was thirteen, had found a Playboy magazine near the Rohrses’ orange grove and hidden it under his bed. Being a good Christian, I sneaked in, grabbed the Playboy, and ran down the hall screaming for Mom. After all, wasn’t sex a sin in God’s eyes? With Jesus Christ and his father, God, on my side, I conveniently erased the fact that Randy had never ratted me out.
As Randy’s fantasies secretly grew behind his bedroom door, Mom was busy spiffing up our new home. She took particular pride in decorating the mostly unused living room with homemade shell boards, a mosaic coffee table, and a framed print of a Maurice de Vlaminck landscape. Sunset magazines were laid on top of the coffee table in front of the modern couch, with two upholstered chairs on either side. On occasion, Mom would make popcorn and we’d all gather there as Dad projected our color slides. One image has withstood the test of time: Randy, standing on our brand-new Griswold-Nissen trampoline, three and a half feet off the ground, is smiling with unexpected authenticity. There is no blank-faced grin. His blond hair is short. His ears stick out like two small buttons. He’s wearing a white tee shirt and a pair of blue shorts that highlight a set of great-looking long legs. Contrary to my memory of a weak, unexceptional boy, Randy is handsome. But most of all, he’s self-assured. Standing on the trampoline, framed against a gray sky with me behind him, Randy is a study in confident, spontaneous joy.