I was born in 1956 in San Jose California. What I miss was what I had that my kids don't seem to have now and don't know they're missing. In the summers I would run barefoot for 3 months. I had a great single-speed red Schwinn bike that I had to earn by getting straight A's in school for a year, and I was 12 and in 6th grade before I managed to do it. My Dad was firm, and said that if I was 18 before I managed to pull it off, then so be it, but he wasn't going to spend 60 whole late 1960's dollars on a new bike unless I went a whole year with perfect grades.
I loved that bike, and my Dad threw in a set of S&K sockets and ratchet and some open end wrenches. I could take it down to the last nut & bolt and fix anything on it. In the summers I rode everywhere, and my legs were like iron. I would ride 10 miles out to Coyote Stables in East San Jose with my little sister on the middle bar in front of me, my legs feeling like they were gonna fall off, and then we would rent horses for $2.00 per hour and go riding the trails out there. On the hot summer days we would sit all day under the elm trees that lined the street and drink Kool-aid and play cards (War, the game that never ends) and listen to AM pop radio (KLIV, the BIG 610!), and read my friends enormous collection of comic books. Back in the day when the only music we knew was on AM. I had a big yellow Case Sodbuster folder my Dad had given me, and I would spend hours throwing it into the lawn, or go hunting bugs or small birds with my trusty BB pistol.
My kids have nice bikes but never seem to want to ride them, and my oldest has outgrown his. Their summers are one long TV program or computer game, and the hours I could spend just in my backyard entertaining myself when I was their age seem silly to them.
South San Jose then had one huge building out in the middle of the fields on Blossom Hill Road (IBM), and everything else was orchards and fields. Cherry trees, with row upon row of huge prickly pear cactus between them, plums, apricots, walnuts, apples, lettuce, grapes, strawberries as big as a tennis ball, watermelons and cantaloupes and peaches as big as your fist. You name it. All of it available super fresh at roadside stands for a song, but since we didn't have much money, we kids were hungry only so long as it took to climb a tree or saunter into a field. The farmers would sometimes yell at us, but we always felt it was in a good-natured way (the birds ate more in a day than we did in a year) and many of us worked for them at times if we needed some extra $. (All the fruit you could eat and .25 cents a lug. You learned not to eat while you were working, and it took one hell of a long time to fill up a lug of apricots or cherries. The Mexican field hands outpicked us at least 4 to 1.) At night, when you drove along the Bayshore freeway (101) which skirted the east side of town, the smell of fruit in the air was almost overpowering.
It was an interesting mix of rural and city, and when we left in the early 70's to move to Sonoma County (Petaluma and then Rohnert Park/Santa Rosa later), the gangs had about taken over. With my brother and I it wasn't a question of IF we were going to get beat up that week, but when, and how many Mexican gang guys was it gonna be doing it this time. One at a time and we would happily whip them, or at least have a fair shot at it, but 8 or 10 of them at a time was the norm for our heroes.
That year my Dad shot a couple of guys who tried to rob the Richfield gas station he was managing for my Grandfather, our house was robbed, our pets were killed in horrible ways (the one thing I will never forgive those sonsabi^%es for), and our car tires were slashed. They stopped kicking in our front door at night when my Dad put a few rounds of 12 ga. through it to discourage them. At the end we were the last Caucasion family to hold out and the development was all Mexican with some very few Black folks.
The last straw came when we heard screams on our front lawn in 1972 in the middle of the night. We woke up and ran to the porch. A drunk black fellow was cutting the hell out of a woman (his wife it turned out) with a straight razor. She had run down the street trying to get away from him, but he had her on her back on our lawn and was really doing a number on her. She had cuts on her hands and forearms (defensive wounds) and he was starting to go for her chest and had already slashed her blouse practically to shreds. My Dad ran outside and put a round from his old Ithaca 1911 .45 into the ground and told the guy to hold up or the next one was going to be a bit higher, like in the middle of his head.
About then, the San Jose keystone cops show up, tell my Dad to drop the gun, slam him to the ground while we were watching, grab his gun and arrest him and put him in the back of the patrol car. Meanwhile the nut-job slasher gets up and calmly saunters away, with blood dripping off him and the razor still in his hand, and the woman lays there bleeding and screaming while the cops stand there staring at her, doing nothing but wait for an ambulance and shooting the breeze! Far as I know the guy who did the cutting never got arrested, but my Dad spent the night in the can.
Anyway, long story short. My Dad knew most of the SJPD because he reloaded most of their range ammo for them and did armory work for them as a gunsmith, and also had sold guns both primary and backup to about half the department, so he got out quick with no charges. But that was the straw that broke it for my Dad and he quit his job and moved us within a couple of months up North.
Anyway, sorry for the long post. Always good and bad, now and then. I'm glad my kids have more than I did, and don't have the same worries with gangs, at least in our neighborhood, but I worry that my kids don't know the simple pleasures to be had in an afternoon walk or ride or running down the street late of a summer night barefoot and playing hide 'n go seek. On my rides and walks I would be ready for all eventualities, with my pocketknife, an empty soup can wrapped in fishing line and a couple of weights and hooks tied on, a Crossman BB pistol loaded against attackers shoved into my belt, and a peanut butter jar with holes punched in the top to hold any interesting creatures one might happen to come across!
Thanks for letting me share.
Best regards,
Norm
. They would line up with their backs to the wall at the local bar and fight their way out to the parking lot.....and dad doesn't even know what I did the first 3 years i was in the service 
:footinmou 
