Looking at this slide now, I’d lay ten-to-one odds he’d just completed a perfect backward flip. Why else are his arms flexed as if he were Superman? It’s not that Robin and Dorrie couldn’t perform their own stunts; it’s that Randy was the master of both the forward and backward flip. He wasn’t afraid of upside down. Maybe engaging in an out-of-sync world gave him a sense of power, even authority. He didn’t mind letting his body say goodbye to gravity.
* * *
—
As King of the Back Flip, Randy let go of everyday constraints. He must have had a plethora of eureka moments on that old Griswold-Nissen, but he never talked about them, nor did he boast of his dexterity. He was not a braggart. He chose to explore wrong-side-up thoughts in secret. I can imagine Mom’s disappointment when the click of the camera didn’t capture Randy spinning in midair. Perhaps she felt hemmed in by Dad’s mandates: “Don’t get carried away with lassoing dreams, Dot.”
That was around the time he nicknamed her “Dot.” Maybe it was inspired by Frank Sinatra’s rendition of “Polka Dots and Moonbeams”: “I learned the meaning of the words ‘Ever after’ / And I’ll always see polka dots and moonbeams.” Sometimes I wonder if he was jealous of her singular affection for Randy. I can imagine him laying down the law, telling her not to waste what little money she had in her budget by taking too many pictures of a son who needed structure.
For Dad, it was always about money, just as it had been with his mother. Grammie Hall was tight with a buck. Not only was she a fairly successful neighborhood loan shark, who hid money under the floor in her closet; she didn’t trust anyone, including her son. Somewhere in Mom’s old journals, I found a highly unusual letter from Dad to Grammie Hall dated June 11, 1960.
Hi Ma.
Well, Dorothy and I didn’t do too good in Las Vegas. I want to thank you for buying our meals and paying for the rooms. It made the trip very inexpensive. I am attaching the last payment on my loan from you. The amount borrowed was $7904.45 at 3 percent interest. This was a very good deal for me. Thanks. I made 185 payments to you of 100 dollars each. I never missed a payment once. If you have any questions. Let me know.
Love, Jack
Poor Dad. After he passed away, I remember going through a chest of drawers where I found several Gerber jars full of pennies, nickels, and dimes invading the socks. Quarters and fifty-cent pieces were saved in red-and-white-striped paper rolls the bank passed out to its loyal customers. Dad oversaw the saving of his hard-earned money with caution, care, and concern. And he chose to make sure every investment he made on behalf of the family was thrifty, almost to the point of causing a different kind of risk.
The letter to Grammie Hall, along with cutting back on Mom’s thirty-seventh birthday by presenting her with a box of See’s candy and a five-dollar bill, may have been a result of his “new idea.” Dad was determined to create his own engineering firm. He began to map out a plan, but, more important, cut back on family fun time to save money. There would be no pitched tent at Huntington Beach, and certainly no trips to Disneyland in 1958. Tucking us in at night, Mom would tell us Dad was wrestling with big ideas that would, she said, “change our lives for the better.” But it wasn’t clear to me what “better” meant. For Randy, stuck between Mom’s unvocalized demands to try harder, and Dad’s so-called helping out with homework, it was all too much. Sometimes I could hear Dad harping behind Randy’s shut door: “For God’s sake, think it through.” Or “I just told you, four times six is twenty-four. Got it? Add six four times and memorize the damn thing.” “Damn” and even an occasional “goddamn” became frequent additions to his vocabulary. He disappeared into longer workdays, and at home he’d stopped utilizing the soft sell with us the kids, and with Mom, too, in favor of the hard.
For all of Dad’s successfully executed plans, he didn’t have a methodology to solve the mystery of his blond-haired boy. I don’t know if Randy recoiled from Dad, or from his drive. I can’t imagine what it was like for him to be Jack Hall’s disappointment. “Pick up your junk.” “What are you doing? That’s not the way to mow a lawn. At least finish the damn job, son!!!” Dad’s struggles further fueled his impatience with all his children, but especially Randy. Following a host of mandated masculine endeavors such as Toastmasters, Boy Scouts, and skin-diving off the Palos Verdes cliffs with Dad’s friend Bob Blandon and his son Gary didn’t help. Even though Randy reluctantly learned how to string a bow for Indian Scouts, cut abalone meat from its shell, and on occasion catch a fly ball in Little League, he knew he would never become what our father wanted him to be.
Dad’s ambition, his work ethic, his awkward relationship with his son, his disappointment, his longing to help Randy even though he didn’t know how, were beginning to look like failure—Dad’s least favorite word. Randy had no interest in becoming Jack Hall, Jr. In his journal, he would later write:
I didn’t think much of my father. Every time he came home I was scared the whole night, which means every night. My youth was full of seagulls circling the beach, and a freedom that only came to me when I saw waves burst from the rocks or smelled salt on my sunburned skin. Now my eyes are full of saltwater. Dad left me long ago.
CHAPTER 4
A HAWK’S TALONS
In 1960, thirty-nine-year-old Jack Hall quit his job at Santa Ana City Hall to become the president of Hall and Foreman Inc. Mom wrote:
It was a risky choice, but Jack held firm with a kind of courage that surprised everyone. He must be given 100 percent credit for his business acumen by applying his mentor Dale Carnegie’s tried and true techniques. I’m sure we will all look back and remember when dad took off on his own and never stopped. I’m writing it all down so we will have evidence to make it clear that on June 18th he left the city of Santa Ana to start Hall and Foreman.
Dad was smart to partner with his former boss, Hugh Foreman. Their detailed résumé specified a responsibility for overseeing civil engineering, environmental planning, and land surveying on everything from housing developments to office buildings. As a mid-century modern businessman, not only was Dad a charming salesman, but he was, as the saying goes, honest to a fault. He didn’t take his cue from Grammie Hall, the former neighborhood loan shark. Oh no, he had a grander vision of what all his planning, self-improvement, and hard work would deliver, and it did.
I doubt any family member, including Mom, understood what engineering really meant. According to Wikipedia, “Civil engineers survey installations, establish reference points, and guide construction. They estimate the quantities and cost of materials and equipment.” In other words, he designed and created sound civil structures, “a series of connected elements that form a system which can resist a series of external load effects applied to it.” He worked hard on public projects like highway improvements and bridge construction, sidewalks, and parking lots.