Ken Smith:  

Like everybody else with an email address, I have received about ten thousand emails and seen a million web page adverts for Classmates. Well, I finally clicked and registered and it is a pleasant experience seeing some names that I recognize. I am not really a member of the class of 1958 at West Covina High School. I was in the freshman and sophomore classes at Covina High, and I was in that first class at West Covina. But, I attended only one week because my parents moved to Lancaster, California. In Lancaster, I didn't attend Antelope Valley High School more than a week or so. My next door neighbor was Don Van Vliet, who went on to become Captain Beefheart -- fairly famous in the UK and Europe, but he never quite caught on in the US. Several blocks away was Frank Zappa. All that was an interesting way to spend some teen years. But, neither Don nor I liked attending classes -- so we didn't. Even though I was a 17-year-old punk, I realized that my life was going nowhere in Lancaster. So, I joined the Navy. I was trained as a cryptographer and as a Russian language typist -- I didn't learn to speak Russian fluently, but rather I was trained to hear Russian and then type what I heard. I was stationed in Japan, the Philippines and Hawaii. When I was 21, I was discharged from the Navy and I returned to Lancaster. I rented the house across the street from Don Van Vliet, owned by Don's grandmother ("Granny Annie", on the remote chance that you are a Beefheart fan). My roommates were various members of Don's bands and also the Blackouts, a group that preceded Zappa's Mothers of Invention. Lots of drugs and sex, but I was the straight one. I wore a suit and tie and I was the sports editor of the local daily newspaper. (Don't know how that happened because I knew zip about sports.) I was also a stringer for the Los Angeles Times and that led to a job offer as a general assignment reporter for a small daily in northern California. --I type fast and I get carried away, and I just noticed that Classmates is telling me that I have 18,000 characters remaining. But, I will cut this short.-- For reasons that I don't recall, I decided that I wanted to be the first American journalist in Peking. That was back in the day when communist China was closed to all foreigners. But, thinking that things might change, I enrolled at the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies, where I studied Chinese for two years. At one point, I was conversational in Chinese and I could read the People's Daily with the help of a dictionary. But, I never made it to China. Things change fast in our lives, often for the better. I got married to the prettiest, smartest, sweetest (who knew?) young woman I had ever met. We had two beautiful children. My daughter is a professor of geophysics in Houston and my son is a professor of philosophy in Montreal. Beautiful children, but we divorced after 17 years. Along the way, I earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy at the U...Expand for more