Joseph Neubarth:  

Life I was born on the Ides of March in 1948 to Dr. Raymond Neubarth and Trudy Hubbell. I was her second child and his fifth (as best as we can tell.) Their marriage was his third and her first. She was the most beautiful mother a child could remember. For the quarter of a century prior to her death in 2010 she had been married to a man younger than me, so she has something going for her, even in her late eighties. If there is any woman in my high school class who can beat that, I'd like to hear the story. I spent my first three years of life in a beautiful environment out in the country where my dad had a rambling two-story house on many acres of land planted with fruit trees. There was a stream running along the length of one side of the property. Across the stream was a forested area where you could see deer and rabbits all of the time. As a three-year-old I used to chase after the rabbits and snakes in the yard. I was fast, but not as fast as the rabbits. I could catch the snakes and used to stick them in the empty milk bottles that my mother left out for the milkman. At the age of three, we had to sell that beautiful house and move to the South Pacific island of Tutuila American Samoa where we lived in the only house to be damaged from Japanese shelling in World War II. A Japanese submarine had surfaced on the other side of the island and lobbed shells over the volcanic mountains. The shelling managed to blow two coconut trees to pieces, created a five-foot wide hole in the parade ground, and blew the kitchen off of our future house. We had a brand new kitchen that was larger than all of the others houses on our block. We had to move to Samoa because Dad received a draft notice that would have taken him to a Korean MASH unit because the Korean War was raging. To avoid that he took a US government position as Chief of Dentistry for the South Pacific. When he got to Samoa he found the title was not as impressive as it sounded. He had to set up dental care for the islanders on many islands when they had never been provided dental care in their lives. The US had taken the Samoan Islands in 1898 and for half a century had never provided care for the people. Dad had to train assistants from the ranks of the Samoans and do a lot of traveling from island to island establishing case files for all of the people. He was a very busy man for several years while getting that program set up. Mom could not stand being married to a man who was gone more than he was at home and left Dad when I was five years old and took me from the tropical paradise of Samoa to live with her father a GP Doctor (Joseph A. Hubbell) on the south side of Chicago (Hyde Park Region). He was the doctor who delivered me years earlier and I was named after him (Joseph Allan)and nicknamed JAN. I attended public school on the South Side of Chicago until I was ten. When Jim Croce sang about Bad Bad Leroy Brown, I knew who he was singing about. I knew Leroy. He was a tall skinny semi-illiterate black kid about two grades behind in school who had a totally bad attitude towards authority and most white people. He liked me because I could speak Mississippi Black English which I had learned from my playmates who were almost all Black kids from Mississippi and Alabama. There was a strong Black migration to Chicago in the 1950's. I can still speak some Mississippi Black English to this day. Between kindergarten and first grade, I experienced a bout with what we believed was polio. I was sick for a day and a half. I woke up in the morning and could not walk very well. My legs just did not want to work like they used to. By concentrating I could shuffle. Over the next six months, I learned how to walk again, but could never fire my legs fast enough to sprint. Funny, the entire family were gifted athletes. My cousin was an Illinois sprint champion at the same time I was trying to play on the Freshman football team at EHS. As a freshman, I was all of 113 pounds. At that size, you need to be blazing fast to be of value to the team. I was not. That was very frustrating for me as a boy. As an adult it did not matter. In 1958, I went to live with my father who moved down to Mexico for a year and a half. We lived on a coconut plantation with a private lake outside of a primitive Indian Village called Santiago. their houses were all made from jungle branches and palm fronds. All of the floors of the houses were hard packed dirt usually about four inches higher than the street outside so that when it rained, the water did not run into the house. Pigs and chickens ran everywhere and the pigs wallowed in mud holes right in the dirt streets. Any vehicles had to go around the pigs, so to drive down the village streets you did a lot of S curving around the pig wallows. The Indian women all did their laundry along the bank of a stream that ran through the village. It was the most beautiful place to live for a 10 - 11 yr old. Just two hundred yards across the lake was the Pacific Ocean with miles of white sand beaches without a single footstep in the sand unless it was mine. I would go body surfing with my father almost every day. That has fun! For school, I wandered into the Indian village and attended a one-room schoolhouse. Basically, it was an opportunity to socialize with the Mexican kids. At the age of eleven we moved to Escondido, where I started 5th grade at Juniper Elementary. After half a school year, Dad bought a new house on the north side of town and I transferred to Lincoln Elementary where Mr. Kendall was my fifth-grade teacher for the remainder of the school year. I still think of him as the greatest teacher I ever had. Sixth grade was at Lincoln with some ex-Marine, a Mr. Jones (home room teacher). 7th and 8th were at Grant, just a half block from our house at 850 North Beech Street. Chris Young, Karen McCune, Sue Sims and the Milliorn twins lived on the same block with me. In 7th Grade, I went steady with the beautiful Debbi Cirilo and thought I was really in love (Is that possible in 7th grade?). That lasted for a few weeks. Her family moved to the Kearny H.S. area after 7th grade and I was heartbroken. 8th Grade was a blur and in 9th Grade, I left home and lived by myself in the Orange Glen district, but continued to attend EHS. Only Tom Galloway knew that I was living alone. He used to work at Kline's (Matson's) Market on 15th and Escondido Blvd where I used to come in and buy my TV dinner (Swanson's Fried Chicken) most nights. I signed my own report cards and Mr. Lievers wondered why he never heard from my parents. I brag that I graduated in the lower half of my high school class. I was always in the MAL (More Able Learner) classes (Ironically, MAL is Latin for "BAD") Those were the classes with the potential honor students. I was not interested in grades, but in survival.(Food, Water, Shelter and some clothes to wear.) Before I ever heard of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, I lived it. I didn't learn about Maslow until college, but I wrote a paper on it with full understanding. Got an A. Nothing like personal experience to show that you understand the subject. At any rate, after HS grad with the draft looming, I entered active duty in the Navy where I went through the Nuclear Power Program & other technical training. Served six years enlisted & then entered college where I met & married Michele Hiatt EHS 72. She was beautiful. In my opinion, one of the prettiest girls to ever graduate from Escondido High. Take a look at that Redhead in the photos. I finally got A's in school at Palomar and San Diego State and graduated in 1977 ten years after high school. An economic recession was lingering in place then, so I applied for a commission in the Navy as an Officer and was accepted. I was 7 years older than the average incoming ensign, but I had a family to feed, so it was a job of necessity. I served six more years as a Naval Officer but endured the breakup of my first marriage after an extended deployment off of the coast of Iran leading up to the Embassy rescue attempt in 1980. Seven-month separations do not add to stability in marriage as I & so many other Naval Officers and sailors have found out over the years. When I found myself single with two kids, I joined the Singles Group at Emmanuel Faith Community Church in Escondido, even though I was living in Long Beach. After a year of being single and commuting all the way to Escondido every Thursday night, I moved down to La Jolla. Determined to expand the singles group, I organized a few beach outings down at Del Mar for our singles group, the College Avenue Baptist Singles, and the Mt. Soledad Presbyterian Singles groups. Met my 2nd wife in the Emanuel Faith group. Prettiest and most accomplished young lady to ever walk into the singles group. She, Diane Nalani Cox, was a (San Diego) Madison Graduate class of 68. Both her brothers were Dartmouth Graduates -- Very impressive family! Driven to excel. I assumed that attitude of accomplishment once I entered the Navy. In high school I spent every evening talking to the seniors in that retirement park I managed. Never did homework but learned SO MUCH from those senior citizens about life, First hand accounts of WWI and II, the Great Depression, The Roaring Twenties and so on. Those four years with those old people were a fantastic time. I know most successful guys on the rebound try to land a cute young "Trophy Wife" for marriage number 2. (My father married 4 of them.) Having already been married to a cutie who was emotionally too young, I made up my mind that I would only date women closer to my own age. After all, if I remarried, that woman was going to be my companion for life (I was fairly religious at the time.) At any rate, Diane was a strong Christian, active in Christian Missionary work. She was also far more accomplish than I. She had been an honor student all of her life (unlike me) and had a dual degree with top hono...Expand for more