Life at 5

When you almost burn down an apartment building, it’s hard to call that a “highlight” of one’s year. Yet in the summer of 1963, that’s precisely what I did and unsurprisingly it remains a vivid memory to this day. No way of knowing what gave me and the other kids who participated the idea. Perhaps it was watching the nefarious doings of the bad guys on TV westerns we slavishly viewed on our parent's black-and-whites, but there was no doubt as to the raw material that made it possible – tumbleweeds blown in from the desert by the Santa Ana winds. And what more perfect place to find those tumbleweeds than in Santa Ana California! I recall being the ringleader, not because of some innate magnetism, but instead because I had the crucial element to our enterprise – matches I had stolen from our kitchen.

The apartments were constructed as an outer ring of housing with an inner courtyard. It was little effort for us to go out to the parking lot and corral several of those brambled monsters (ah, the days that parents could let their kids roam freely with the illusion that they were safe!) and then transport them back into the enclosed area. There was a substantial palm tree tucked into a corner; at least it seemed as such to my then-diminutive self though in retrospect it might only have been 6 feet tall or so. This seemed like a logical spot for us to construct our fort and soon we had a tall enclosed space. What inspired us to then set it on fire, I have no recollection of, but it was little trouble to light the brush.

What happened next was what any adult could have predicted, but our pre-school selves had not an inkling of. The tumbleweed fort became in seconds what I was to learn 

Don't Do This at Home Kids 

a decade later via the magic of movies, was called a “Towering Inferno”. Flames shot into the air far beyond the top of the spherical tumbleweeds. The other children predictably scattered in all directions. I wasn’t far behind as adults poured out of their apartments yelling that most famous of all warnings – “FIRE!” I cowered in a corner of the courtyard as people appeared with buckets trying to douse the flames assuring one another that the fire department had been called. To make matters even worse, the palm tree also caught fire due to the intense heat.

By now I realized my little behind was in for a serious whipping and I looked desperately for escape. One of my comrades ran into an open door and I followed though it was not mine. There was a coat closet immediately to the left and I buried myself quickly into it, closing the door behind me. Minutes, tens of minutes, then an hour passed. I could hear my father and mother’s voices calling for me once the general hullabaloo had died down; at first angry, it took on a pleading tone. Some sort of 5 year old reason finally took hold of me and I emerged out to a surprised strange family who didn’t know they had a closet stowaway.

My memory of this ends there. I’m sure there was yelling. Probably abuse of my buttocks, which my elder self now would heartily approve of. Except for the palm tree, there was no damage to the apartments, something I will always be grateful for. In the balance of things, it would be a terrible thing to carry with you through life that an immature act could cause serious damage or even injury or death. For the remainder of the time we spent there, which was to only be six months, the dead palm stood as mute witness to my overreach.

Thankfully there were some happy times to balance out my fifth year. My dad was a vacuum cleaner salesman for the Kirby Co. which meant that his work was at night traveling to homes all over the area demonstrating the efficiency and power of their product. At some point, due no doubt to my pleading, he began to take me along with the agreement that I would be quiet and stay out of the way. Eventually I would violate that edict, but in a good way. Since I was such a quick study, I observed him doing the

entire put together /cleaning/shampooing/take apart process, and surprised him with my ability to perform in essence his entire presentation. He saw $$$ in this, and he wasn’t wrong. One of the main objections to his sales pitch apparently was the relative complexity of the Kirby vacuum compared to competitors such as Hoover. Well, if a 5 year old could go through the motions with ease, that sales resistance went out the window. Soon, he began selling double then triple his normal percentage, and it was good times in the Miller auto on the way home. Often, he would stop at a drive-in and reward me with a milkshake for a job well-done. To this day, milkshakes are still my favorite of all treats.

It was through his job that I had a brush with greatness that summer also. One of his fellow salespeople was a then-famous football player for the LA Rams named Deacon

David "Deacon" Jones

Jones. This is comical to people who have only known of multi-million dollar salaries for pro athletes, but in 1963 it was not uncommon for players, even good ones – and Deacon was a Hall of Famer – to make less than $20,000 per year. To supplement their income from football, most players worked a job in the off-season and Deacon was no exception. My dad had taken me to work with him one day and I met Mr. Jones but since I didn’t watch football at the time he was only a giant dark man to me. He became much more than that with one act. Downtown Santa Ana was having a parade that evening, which is why I suppose I was there in the first place. Dad had bought me a helium balloon which not surprisingly thrilled me senseless. As kids are wont to do though, I relaxed my grip on the string and it flew away into the Southern California night. Death itself could not have felt any worse to my 5 year old psyche, and I cried bitterly. I felt a hand on my shoulder, turned around; it was Deacon handing me another balloon he had bought for me. My sadness flipped to joy almost instantly, and he now was a giant dark God to me. Years later, when I finally started watching and understanding football, I watched Deacon then at the tail-end of his career still wreaking havoc with opposing quarterbacks, whom I intuitively understood also saw him as a giant dark God, albeit for far different reasons.

Year 5 was also the last time I saw my grandparents, my mother’s parents, before their death. To understand the significance of this, I have to indulge your patience by retracing events before my birth of my Grandmother Helen’s family, the Stewarts of Springfield, Illinois. To say the Stewarts were among the wealthiest of their era might be under-reporting. The family owned a substantial part of downtown Springfield including the block that the 1^st National Bank sat upon. The Stewarts would winter in the Florida Keys, packing all their living and having it shipped on train cars until the nastiness of the season had passed. Helen married my grandfather Ralph Baker, whose family was well-off in their own right, in the 1920’s and they moved to start a new life in the promised land of So Cal. My mom was born in 1930, and one of her earliest memories as a young girl was her neighbor, Walt Disney (yes, that one) giving her a handmade toy for her birthday. Eventually, the Bakers would birth 4 children, each of whom had their own personal nanny. Yep, that kind of rich. In 1963, they lived in a house on Newport Beach that could be charitably be described as a mansion, with a private beach in back, dock, and the obligatory yacht moored to it. Uh-huh, that kind of rich.

I had a great emotional bond to both Ralph and Helen, but things even to my naïve 5 year old mind seemed always a bit off-center. It took many years forward and my maturity to situate the disease. Helen and Ralph believed my mother had married beneath her by procreating with my Marine enlisted man father, James Robert (who later morphed into “Toby” a high school nickname which eventually became so used that most forgot his real name). They had offered Mom a chance for the two of us to live with them, the caveat being she would have to leave my Dad. The story would have had a far different ending if she had taken the offer. I would have had my own personal nanny, grown up with every advantage a person could have, gone to an elite college, bedded debutantes left and right, and in general been a West Coast playboy. Mom chose love, or whatever it was, and so our lives descended into the unique Hell that only being ridiculously poor in Arkansas can create.

Helen and Ralph Baker

But I jump ahead of myself. My last memory of my grandfather was a day trip from the Newport house to Catalina Island and back. It was as though I was being given one last glimpse of a life that I was so tantalizingly close to, but would forever be shut off from. I wish to this day I could squeeze more than a few fleeting memories – sea spray foaming over the bow, Ralph with his mariners cap at the wheel – but at least I have those. With Grandmother Helen, it was my favorite activity, going to the beach. To my young mind, the Pacific was a deep dark mysterious creature whose power was unfathomable. I loved playing in the surf, looking back occasionally to Helen in her broad bonnet for reassurance. One last image of her remains: me sitting in the front seat looking at her steely gaze surveying the road. 

A seminal event in October was the birth of my sister Elizabeth, who as soon as she could protest verbally, demanded to be called Liz. Yes, my mother was pregnant during my fire starter shenanigans. Hey, the vagaries of stress on pregnant women were unknown to me then. This picture of

me was taken the day she and Mom returned from the hospital. I look at this and wonder if that little 5 year old had even an inkling of the future to come. It would be another 4 years before the next Miller, my brother James Henry came into the world, so Liz and I would develop a strong bond over the years that still remains, despite often being a tense relationship during those younger years as it was hard to keep my socially hyperactive Libra sister from being up in my business 24/7.

My first tentative awakenings with sexuality happened shortly thereafter. A girl next door who was in second grade and who walked home with me from the school across the street (I was in afternoon kindergarten) decided she would play with me, and so would come to my parent’s apartment. I have no idea how it started, but eventually she wanted to

play a game she called “Doctor”. This involved taking the play thermometer from my kid’s doctor set and testing the temperature at various places along her body. Apparently in need of more rigorous data, she instructed me to place the instrument between her legs inside her shorts, and after directing my efforts finally seemed to be satisfied as she would open her mouth and begin to breathe fast. From my perspective, this all seemed to be good fun and I was happy that I could accommodate such a demanding patient. Happy that is until during one of these exam sessions my mother walked into the bedroom and, seeing what was afoot, screamed at us. My first response was to dive into the closet and hide (seems to be a Cancerian trait – under stress seek a shell to crawl in). Her anger was mostly directed at my chagrined friend who quickly zipped up her pants and ran out, never to play with me again. I’ve often wondered what effect this initial negativity about sexual hijinx has had on my psyche: perhaps nada, maybe a lot. But like the proverbial spilt milk, there’s no way to get it back into the glass.

November 1963 is a month that many can remember, of course because of the events on the 22^nd. I’ve read so many missives over the years of “when JFK was shot, I was  _____”  - fill-in-blank with work, play, on the toilet, etc.. When JFK was shot, I was playing with toy cars in my living room. My mother was watching the soap opera “As The World Turns." The show was interrupted by a man who I later learned was Walter Cronkite, and seconds later he spoke the words that marked a fork in the road for America, if not the world. 

My father came home within the hour full of anguish and shock. He years later would suspect something was not kosher about the official story of the assassination, and his interest, fed by books discussing alternative explanations, was my first attractant into the world of conspiracy theory, a realm that has been part-and-parcel of my life to this very day. That’s “Conspiracy FACTIST” thank you very much!

Despite things being on the up tick for our family in Santa Ana, there was some undercurrent of disorder in the air. My grandmother (actually my father’s biologic grandmother, but that’s a tale for another year) was calling continually begging us to come back to Arkansas (we had left in ’62). The pleading escalated when she broke her hip. Even though money was being made and sun was always shining, the Miller family packed house, piled into a Willys jeep with a trailer in tow, and set out for the southern homeland. Unfortunately, this late December 1963 was not the idyllic time that the Four Seasons were to 12 years later memorialize in song, at least not in the desert Southwest. We encountered one of the worst snowstorms I have to date seen. The drifts were over the height of the car on the sides, and we were forced to stop at a truck stop which became home for over 24 hours until the roads were cleared. When we arrived in Fort Smith two days later than planned, New Years Eve night, my grandmother was….out dancing with her boyfriend. Guess the broken hip had healed supernaturally.

“Beside himself” is far too tame of a description for my dad’s demeanor, more appropriately it was “frothing at the mouth”. When Mawmaw, as we called her, came back from that night on the town, World War III commenced. This was probable causation for selling her house just months later, which for some strange reason I specifically recall had the very manageable payment of $62 per month. It would be the last abode that our family would ever call ours, and would begin a string of 13 years, 13 moves, 13 substandard rentals.

The next place we lived was an older house at 1209 N. 5^th. I know, my incessant penchant for detail is both aggravating and amazing. Three specific senasations/memories remain from the last half of my fifth year. One was the terrible case of common measles I developed, which as soon as I recovered morphed into the even itchier and more painful German variety. For over a week, I turned into Pink Bobby from the application of Calamine lotion all over my festering red-blotched body. Second was the amazing aroma of a bakery two blocks away, which sent me into ecstasy each morning. To this day I have a weakness for fresh-baked smells, I respond to it like most animals do to sex. Lastly was my persistence in demanding my family switch its soda preferences to Royal Crown Cola. That company had a promotion in which you saved a certain number of bottle caps that could be redeemed for a movie admission. My single-minded determination, which is hard to understand because at the prevailing prices of 25¢ per child admission even my family could have afforded a few trips, was

rewarded by being taken by my mom to see “The Incredible Mr. Limpet." Now that movie, featuring the inimitable comic stylings of an in-his-prime Don Knotts – better known as “Barney Fife” on TV’s Andy Griffith – still holds a dear place in my heart, both for it’s ingenious combination of live action and animation. Okay, it's because I saved those damn bottle caps to earn it!

Right before my 6^th birthday, I amazed my dad and maybe myself by mastering not only addition and subtraction, but the multiplication table as well. This set me up to unfortunately be so far ahead of the normal cut of elementary school student that teachers for years would use me as a tutor rather than feel the need to teach me anything, since to them it would be remedial. To me, I felt more like a freak and outsider. It was the first, but certainly not the last, message from life that be to very intelligent was maybe not the greatest thing one could hope for. But much of that remained to be lived through – at the completion of 5 years, there was still hope waiting to be dashed.