Wm. Phillips:
CLASS OF 1957
Hawthorne High SchoolClass of 1957
Hawthorne, CA
Wm.'s Story
After graduation I attended El Camino JC where after a brief flirtation with engineering found my home in the liberal arts: history , literature, music and philosophy. When they refused to give me a BA, I had to go to UCLA where teaching is a lost or unheard of art. It was enough to put one off learning, so I tried the arcane world of computer programming at Northrup Aircraft. I should have known, it was much like engineering.
My Uncle Sam graciously sent me on the grand tour of Europe after he polished off the rough edges at his finishing school at Fort Ord. I got married during leave and brought Mary to Salinas. I almost got caught coming back from one of my AWOLs one morning, but the Sargent thought I was up early and told the others to be more like me. Whew! Mary joined me after a few weeks in Frankfurt where we lived like locals. We toured nine countries for about sixty days during the year and a half we were there. What a honeymoon for two history majors. I suppose I shouldn't have pulled so many hjinks on my uncle's Army. I could have been the inspiration for some of Hawkeye's exploits in Mash. We brought two VWs home. Sold one at a nice profit and drove the other for the next thirty-four years.
Finally I decided that teaching with its long vacations was were to set up shop. CSULB gave me a credential and Mayfair High School, where I did my student teaching, gave me a job teaching English. I did mention that I was a history major, but in those days you rarely saw a social studies teacher who wasn't also a coach, and I who have an aversion to organized sports, preferring the disorganized ones, had to teach in my minor until the last few of my thirty-one year career. Mary put me through that last year working as a librarian for the City of Long Beach for which she has a masters from UCLA. The imbalance couldn't stand so I too got a masters on the GI Bill while we were fixing up old houses and having three kids and a major in English. I started a chess club at school which I turned into letter earning team and organized a league of six schools.
I remember a sociology prof. saying that the rich and the poor have more in common with each other than they do the middle class. I found this to be true when we bought a bit of a mansion with a big pool near the Virginia Country Club in Long Beach. Somebody actually asked me 'What are you doing in this neighborhood?' I didn't know my Hawthorne upbringing was so obvious. Where the noise in prisons and poor neighborhoods is ubiquitous these people hire live bands that threatened to break windows. The police say they will put a stop to it, but something happens and nothing is done. Rather than using my ax on the neighbors, we decided to retire at 41 and become the country recluses we really are. We sold the small mansion to a lawyer at a ridiculous profit and moved to southern Oregon, doubled the size of a new house on ten acres, raised 57 varieties of vegetables, built fish ponds, bought a canoe and sailboat, and went to the Shakespeare Festival in nearby Ashland, ran rivers, climbed mountains, built a model railway. Then the kids started abandoning us for college, we warned them against it, but you know how kids are. They did learn not to go to Mega University.
So what do you do with a big place in the country with no child labor, you move to a slightly smaller place and start teaching again. We found a beautiful English Tudor on five acres in the woods near Salem, OR. which we landscaped with a large pond and waterfalls. I started my second career as the honors English teacher and head of the National Honor Society, but small schools need teachers who can teach a variety of things. In sixteen years there I taught thirty-two different classes including drama, British Literature, economics, consumer econ., ancient and medieval history, sociology, psychology, and law and government. I was known as the Renaissance man of Dayton High. Lest you think that I became an establishment type: in southern Oregon I organized a class action law suit against the Medford School District for discrimination against the poor when they discontinued the school bus service. They settled for damages and reinstated the service. At Dayton HS I tried always to teach logic and critical thinking which got me in trouble with the religious right. When they faile...Expand for more
d to get me fired they went so far as to try to get the state legislature to pass a bill against me. My son Brennan said, "Dad you must be doing something right, look who your enemies are." Near Salem Mary and I helped found Friends of Yamhill County to fight to enforce the conservation laws of Oregon. We won many cases, but lost our effort to protect our own property, so the nomadic urge struck again. Again we sold for a very good profit retired and moved into a travel trailer in western Washington with our youngest son in the next trailer. After fixing up so many old houses, we decided we wanted something new, so we bought over seven acres on the Puget Sound, built a big house with room for our son and his wife, and a big shop or small factory for his hovercraft business. Check us out at Amphibiousmarine.com.
We actually did much of the work ourselves from cement floors to hanging trusses on twenty foot poles, electrical, plumbing, and of course landscaping. We just finished the seventh of nine waterfalls. The pond is nestled in a miniature mountain range, to remind me of the 200 days we spent in the high mountains over the years from So Cal to Canada. Our eldest son and our daughter have gone in with me on a small sailing yacht. I learned to sail by reading a book I got from the Hawthorne HS library.
A few words about the offspring: Brennan was ROTC and commissioned upon graduation. He just returned from Afghanistan where he commanded all of the allied EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) units in the eastern half of the country as a LT.Col.: he was on the Commission for decommissioning the Irish paramilitary units for about twelve years. In his spare time he works for the ATF as a special agent. He gets called to many countries to lecture about improvised explosives. He has shepherded both my grandsons to Eagle Scout, organizing the building of a native, skin covered, thirty foot, sailing canoe. They are both in college. My daughter teaches fifth grade, has her masters and achieved her national certification on the first try. She and my daughter-in-law ran a half marathon a few days ago. Our youngest son is a graduate engineer running his own hovercraft business, selling parts and completed craft worldwide. He is trying to train my liberal arts mind to be a machinist. So when I am not gardening, sailing, reading sea stories, scifi, or economics books or attending Wagner's Ring in Seattle, playing board games ,or playing the stock market, I work in the shop making parts to tolerances of + or- 1/1000 of an inch,where I often feel a complete idiot. Any of his high school graduate employees can run rings around me when it is mechanical solutions that are needed.
On our property we maintain a quarter mile trail that parallels a creek through a rain forest down to our beach on the sound where we go to watch the sun set. Of course there are deer, fox, owls, raccoons, bald eagles, osprey, clams oysters and some have sighted bear and cougar recently, yet we can be in a shopping mall in twenty minuets. When I am not being an idiot in the shop, I feel like a king of my little realm.
Last year I attended our 57 year reunion. Good show, Buddy. To bad there were only old people there.
I just finished my first novel, which I am calling "Thor's Ark". It is over 400 pages. I think it is pretty good, but what do I know, having read hundreds of books and taught English for thirty one years, so I am test marketing it. The reviews are generally good, but you can't please everyone. A twenty something says he doesn't understand all this romantic dating. They just "hang out". He says the love story wasn't graphic enough, while a sixty something widower said he liked the battle scenes, but the love story was too graphic. Those are just the icing. I also try to suggest some ways that could save ourselves from ourselves.
The next thing is how to get it published. Any suggestions? Do you know a good agent?
Though we live way up here in Washington we have been visited this summer (2015) by three ghosts of Hawthorne past. Phil Zoboblish flew in from Okinawa, Fred Rhoads drove up[ from LA, and my next door neighbor from the '50s flew in from Maryland with his wife, daughter, and granddaughter to go backpacking with me and my family on Mt. Rainier, and do some sailing.
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