The Incredible Power of Serendipity! Highlights of an Uncommon Life!

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The Incredible Power of Serendipity! Highlights Of an Uncommon Life!

—A Very Personal Memoir—

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR

Photo by Scott Holland

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

—George Bernard Shaw—

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR

The Incredible Power of Serendipity! Highlights Of an Uncommon Life!

—A Very Personal Memoir—

Boyé Lafayette De Mente

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR

CONTENTS

Publisher’s Preface My Jack-Off Uncle Again Introduction Impaled on a Log HIGHLIGHTS OF AN Moving to Redford UNCOMMON LIFE Pell Pirtle’s Hole Cutting Winnie’s Tongue! Sex Education 101 & 102 Doorway Squirrel Shoot! Avoiding Sunday School Killing a Pig The Death of Uncle Bill Shattering an Elbow My First Movie Deer Hunting & The Poisonous Snake Bite Rattlesnakes Going into Business Running Over Winnie Holy Roller Entertainment Moving to Sawmill Shack On the Dole An Untimely Death Struck by Lightning Killing a Chicken Sex Ed 103 Fern & the Hornet Attack Logging with Dad School & Golden Cory Working in a Sawdust Pit My Nose in a Circle Dad’s Copper SS Card Almost Losing Fern The Move to St. Louis Dad Loses a Thumb Clinton-Peabody School Coon Hunting Pearl Harbor 1941 Moving up the Valley & Becoming a Paperboy L’s Arrival My First Boxing Match The Shack that Dad Built Visiting Mother Evans Living on Potatoes Hawking Stolen Goods My Jack-Off Uncle Starting High School Flying off the Truck Working at the Lennox Hanging a Dog Hotel Chopping Down a Tree Discovering an Allergy Hitting Don with an Ax Learning about Life Moving Again My Second Boxing Match The Bologna & Cracker The Arizona Connection Treat The New Mexico Adventure Freezing for Pine Nuts The End of World War II The Chicken Pox Escapade Joining the State Guard Curling Wagon Wheel Hub Sailing on the Mississippi Rings Joining the Navy Losing a Toe Nail Getting to San Diego

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The Boot Camp Experience Service. The Hard-On Show-Off My Year at Thunderbird Shipping Out and Falling The Zǒri Story The Shooting Fiasco Going Back to Japan The Life Changing Letter More Serendipity Kicks In Living Next to Lincoln & End of the Zǒri Story Jefferson Attending Jōchi University A Close Encounter with The Japan Travel Bureau Admiral Nimitz Looking Up my Hatsu-Koi Becoming a Writer Becoming Editor of My Biggest Embarrassment PREVIEW Magazine Out of the Navy Appearing in Japanese The Search for Work Movies Joining the Army Security The End of PREVIEW Agency Magazine Meeting Brother Don Turned Down by Tuttle Assignment in Japan Teaming Up with a “White Arriving in Tokyo Russian” Fixing Up the 1st Tokyo The KEMBUN Episode Arsenal Getting My Degree from The Ernie Pyle Theater Jǒchi University Encounter with a Sumo Japan Will Never Amount to Meeting my Hatsu-Koi Anything! Hamburger & Milk Shake Encounters with the CIA The Mobile Whorehouse Creating TODAY’S JAPAN The Incredible Black Market The Incredible Amphibious Meeting the Imperial Hotel’s Jeep [“Half-Safe”] Story Famous Tetsuzo Inumaru Jumping Jeep in Alaska My First Book / 1950 Valley National Bank Story Seeing the American Meeting Margaret Warren Caesar The ORIENTAL AMERICA The Korean War - IMPORTER Saga Brother Don’s Ordeal The Amazing Sony Story Truman’s Year Margaret Arrives with a Starting a Newspaper Typhoon A Visit from my Hatsu-Koi The IMPORTER Magazine Losing my Security Success Story Clearance First Business Book A Serendipitous Meeting Some Wonderful News and Creating the Bender the Shocking Aftermath Bulletin Japan’s Amazing “Water Leaving Japan and the Business” V

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Seeing John Glenn Circling The U.S. Discovers Japan the Earth Naming NEW TIMES Leaving Salaried Employ- The Gordon & Roberta ment Story The Tokyo Guide Cards The Arizona Trading Post A Visit Home Gamble Reuniting with Jim Walker The Apple [Japan] The Voyage Home Connection Niki Woodside Dies Arizona Authors Add to the Half-Safe Jeep Association Story Shoot-Out at Dawn Demetra Arrives Prentice-Hall Comes Thru Moving to Honolulu Margaret’s Travels ONCE A FOOL published The Meiji Memorial Story Meeting John Wilcock The National Textbook Visiting the IMPORTER Connection Phone Call that Changed Japanization of America the World Episode Daughter Dawn in Charge The Code Word Approach Some Prefer Geisha to Understanding The Bachelor’s BEAT story Cultures The Amazing Larry Flynt Daughter Dawn’s Wedding Saga The Tokyo and Japan The Nude Jackie Kennedy Journal Episode Photos The Mike Ohshima Story Following Hugh Hefner The Michi Matsumoto Story Face-Reading for Fun & The Kata Factor Book Story Profit The Kodansha International Appearing on What’s My Episode Line? In New York Take Down by Shintō Guru Girl-Watching in the Orient The Tanka Master Mutsuo Rest of the Merle Hinrichs Shukuya Story Story The Yoshio Karita Story The Richard Woodside The Japanese Brain Man Episode Story Watching the Moon The Subway Guide to Landing Tokyo Fernie’s Rise in the PR Demise of Charlie Tuttle World Losing Brother L and Teaching at Thunderbird Becoming a Basket Case The Insider Guides The John Banta & Sheraton I Like You Gringo—But! Miyako Hotel Story VI

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The Japan Info Network My Amazon “Shorts” Knocking a Rib Cage Askew The Heart Scare that was a False Alarm An Honor that Didn’t Happen Lecturing in Beijing Farewell Trip to Tokyo Margaret’s Heart Surgery The Best Thing that Ever Happened to Me Five Writers in the Family NOT THE END List of My Other Books

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Cultural authority and author Boyé Lafayette De Mente credits serendipity for a remarkable career that encompassed a diversity of things no one could have imagined, given his early background. This included playing a pioneer role in the rise of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China as economic super- powers; in the emergence of Thunderbird School of Global Management alumnae brother Merle Hinrichs as the largest trade magazine publisher in Asia, major financial donor to Thunderbird and a member of the board of directors of the school; and in the rise of go-go entrepreneur Larry Flynt to prominence and great wealth as the publisher of HUSTLER magazine and other publications and a powerful influence on American culture and civil rights. Then there were encounters he had with a wide variety of notables, including Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, one of Ame- rica’s top World War II Naval leaders, as well as relationships with Yoshio Karita, former protocol officer for Japan’s Imperial Family, and other famous people. Another memorable event in his career: he is in the Guinness Book of World Records for a 1957 four-month long journey he made from Japan to Alaska on an amphibious jeep named HALF-SAFE with the world-circling jeep’s Australian owner and “captain” Ben Carlin…a feat he later chronicled in a book entitled ONCE A FOOL! – From Japan to Alaska by Amph- ibious Jeep. According to De Mente, at no time in his long career did he think that what he was doing was remarkable or that it would have a fundamental influence on the lives of so many people or that it would contribute to the future of so many nations. A full list of books written by De Mente is included at the end of this memoir. ***

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INTRODUCTION

I was born the fourth of ten children and first son of Elza Lafayette Dement and Ruby Ila Bounds-Dement at 7:30 a.m. on 12 November 1928 in a tiny isolated valley known as Mayberry in the Ozark Hills of southeast Missouri, USA. “Just in time to start for school!” my mother is said to have quipped. Mayberry—which as of this writing has only one family—is about one-quarter to one-third of a mile wide and some four miles long. It was named after the first Anglo resident who arrived there in the early 1800s. My father Elza was born 2 October 1903 in the French- established community of Brunot near the Mississippi River in southeast Missouri. My mother, of English lineage, was born in the small township of Centerville, Missouri [the county seat], on Highway 21 several miles west of Mayberry, on 11 January 1907. She was 16 and my father was 20 when they married. Their first child, Velva, born in 1923, died of a child-hood ailment shortly before her second birthday and five months after the birth of their second daughter, Jessie. They were to have eight more children—spaced about 22 months apart. On the morning of my birth my mother named me Elza Lafayette after my father, but from Day One I became known as Boye, which everyone then pronounced as boy. I was born at home with no doctor in attendance. My birth was never officially recorded, and there is no record of my original first name [Elza] ever having been used by anyone. My mother, who had only an 8th grade education, was a closet romantic and far more intelligent and accomplished than most of her nine surviving children realized during her life. She was vague about where she came up with the name Boye (written without the macron over the “e” until the invention of devices that made it possible), later telling me that it was the word “boy” with an “e” added to give it a French look because I was the first son following a string of three daughters and my father’s ancestry was French. 9

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The difference in the spelling of the family name that I use [De Mente] and that of my parents [Dement] did not come about until just before I started to high school in St. Louis, Missouri in 1943. That year my older sister Winnie climbed our family tree and discovered that one of the oldest French branches spelled the name De Mentier, with De Mente eventually becoming an alternate spelling. After our paternal ancestors arrived in the U.S., ending up in western Kentucky and southeastern Missouri in the early 1800s, the spelling evolved into several different versions including DeMent, Dement and Demint, because these spellings were what it sounded like when pronounced by Anglo-Americans. Winnie prevailed upon me to officially adopt the De Mente version of the spelling, which was easy to do since I had no birth certificate or any other birth record, and I was impressed with its exotic appearance and the idea of emphasizing my French heritage from my father’s side.

Mayberry RFD

The frame house where I was born was located between a small creek and the base of the hill that formed the north side of the narrow valley. The creek, fed by rainwater and underground springs, enters the valley from a long hollow that connects with Mayberry about a mile and a half west of where we lived. A single-lane dirt road ran along the base of the hill on the north side of the valley, with our house fronting on the road. A short distance west of our house there was a rail fence along the side of the road to keep cattle from wandering into the hills. The fence, which began a few hundred yards west of our house, enclosed a tiny farm owned by my parental grandparents. At the time of my birth there were half a dozen families living in the valley, including my maternal and paternal grandparents. My father’s parents lived about a mile west of us. His father farmed and alternately operated a lumber mill. [The heavily forested Ozark Hills area of Missouri’s Reynolds County became known for its logging and railroad tie industries following the end of the Civil War and the spread of railroads throughout the country.] 10

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR

My maternal grandmother, Effie [known by everyone in the family as Mother Evans] and step-grandfather, Tom Evans, lived half a mile further west at the mouth of the narrow hollow, mentioned above, that branches off from Mayberry to the northwest. My mother’s father, Jesse Elisha Bounds, Mother Evans’ first husband, died at the age of 25 from tuberculosis, a common disease in those days, following which she married Tom Evans. The east end of Mayberry valley ends at Black River, about two miles from my birthplace. The west end of the valley, also some two miles from my birthplace, rises gradually in elevation, finally merging into a range of low hills. Mother Evans’ home was situated on an embankment on the west side of the creek where it enters Mayberry proper. Each year she planted a large vegetable garden on the elevated area to the south and behind her home. Step-granddad Tom Evans planted cane (for molasses) and corn in the upper end of the valley, and kept milk cows, hogs and several horses. There was a natural spring enclosed in a shed on the opposite side of the creek where they lived. During the summer months they kept milk and butter in the spring shed. A chicken house adjoined the spring shed. There was no electricity in Mayberry and no indoor plumb- ing. Toilets were outside, some distance from the houses. My material grandmother’s two-hole shack toilet, about 50 yards from her house, hung out over an almost vertical embankment of Mayberry creek that ran in front of her place...and was “flushed” when the level of the creek rose after heavy rains. None of the families in Mayberry had water wells, and there was only one natural spring that I recall—the one near Mother Evans’ house. According to my older sister Jessie she and Winnie sometimes carried water from that spring, which was about a mile from our house. Everyone else living in Mayberry got the water they used from the creek that ran through it. Bathing (when it happened) was from large pans of water—although during the summer months boys and men would more often wash off in the creek where it pooled.

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Apparently it never occurred to anyone living down-stream from my grandmother’s place to be concerned about fishing in, bathing in, and using water from the creek that periodically carried away the waste from her outhouse. To my knowledge there was no attempt by anyone in May-berry to use excrement as fertilizer—a traditional practice in China and Japan.

The Town of Redford

Redford, the town nearest Mayberry, had a population of about 150 if you included all of the farming families in the vicinity. There were two ways to get to Redford from Mayberry. The shortest route, about seven miles, was on foot or horseback via a long curving ridge on the south side of the west end of the valley then down a steep slope that ended about three miles east of Redford. For wagons and vehicles going from Mayberry to Redford there was a graded road up a steep hill from the central portion of Mayberry valley on the south side—in line with Mother Evans’ place—over the summit, down into Low Hollow (the adjoining valley), then west over a winding hill road for some six miles to Redford—a total distance of about 15 miles. Redford had one grocery store [owned by Eli Brooks], a combination drugstore, post office and miscellanies dry goods [owned by the Sanuff family], a Baptist church and a tiny school house that was originally built as a meeting place for some kind of club. For some reason, we moved from Mayberry to “downtown” Redford for a short period in 1930. I was only about 22 months old and have no recollection of that but I know it happened because in the early 1960s while visiting Redford [from Phoenix, Arizona] with two of my sisters [Fernie and Becky] and our mother, Mom pointed to a small house with a front porch and said: “That’s where we lived when your brother Don was born!” That auspicious event occurred on 25 August 1930. I did not have the presence of mind to ask Mom why we had moved there and why we lived there for only a short time because by the time my next brother, Doyle, came along on 12

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR

April 1932 we were back in the house in lower Mayberry where I were born. Jessie, my oldest surviving sister, was born in Centerville, about seven miles northwest of Redford; and Winnie, my second oldest sister, was born in Ellington, a small town about six miles southwest of Redford. Mom was apparently taken to Centerville for Jessie’s birth and to Ellington for Winnie’s birth so she could be attended by a doctor. When I, Don, Doyle, Fern, L and Becky were born Mom was attended by a relative acting as a mid-wife. Sharon Rose, our youngest sister, was born in a hospital in St. Louis. Not surprisingly, everything I can remember about my life relates to events that were unusual in some way—happenings that for one reason or another were hard-wired into my brain. The mundane and otherwise routine events have long since faded into the fog of the past.

HIGHLIGHTS OF AN UNCOMMON LIFE

Mayberry / 1931

My first clear memory involves a snake and Mom. One Sun- day afternoon my parents, older sisters Jessie and Winnie, brother Don and I started up the single-lane dirt road to visit Mother Evans. The road curved along the base of the hill on the north side of the narrow valley. Dad was carrying Don. I was walking a few yards in front of everyone and saw a snake wiggling its way across the road. I picked the snake up, turned around and held it up for everyone to see. My mother, who for some reason was carrying a stick, began shouting for me to drop the snake and trying to hit it with the stick. Her blows landed on my arm and hand, but I dropped the snake. 13

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Cutting Winnie’s Tongue! Sister Winnie had a speech problem. She could not enunciate words clearly. It turned out that she was tongue-tied. Mom and Dad finally took her to Ellington to the same doctor who delivered her to have the membrane under her tongue cut, freeing it to move normally and making it possible for her to make up for lost time. There were times later when some members of the family said her tongue should not have been cut because she became such a big talker!

The Doorway Squirrel Shoot! One Sunday afternoon I saw a squirrel on the limb of a tree on the hillside across the one-lane road from our house. I told Dad. He got his 22-caliber rifle from a closet and, standing in the doorway, killed the squirrel by “barking” it—hitting the bark of the limb the squirrel was laying on to keep from messing up its body with a bullet. Mom fried it for our supper.

Killing a Pig One day Dad brought home a pig from his father’s farm to butcher for fresh meat. The pig’s front and back feet were tied together so it couldn’t stand up. Dad started a fire to heat a large kettle of water. After the water was boiling he told me to hold the pig’s head steady so he could shoot it. The pig squirmed around so much the bullet didn’t kill it. I couldn’t keep the head of the pig still enough for him to try another shot. He told me to go get a hammer. He then straddled the pig’s head and I held its back feet. It kicked its hind feet and squirmed like crazy. It took several blows of the hammer before he was able to kill it. We hung the pig from the limb of a tree, poured scalding hot water on it, scrapped off all the hair, gutted it, then cut it into large chunks. Dad took about half of it to his parents. We had fresh pork for dinner that night. Mom salted the rest of it.

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Shattering an Elbow One Sunday morning in 1933 Dad announced that he was going fishing in Black River and said he would take me with him. He had made a new pole for a gig that was on top of a cabinet in the kitchen, and asked me to get it. I climbed up on a stool and began reaching for the gig but lost my balance and fell off, landing on my left arm, shattering it at the elbow. Dad carried me some two miles to the home of one of his brothers who had a car, and got him to drive us to Ellington, some 20 miles away, where there was a doctor. Dad told me later that I went to sleep shortly after we started for Ellington, and woke up only when the doctor was encasing my arm in a slatted metal cage that immobilized it in an L- shape. My elbow swelled up to the point that my flesh pro- truded through the square holes in the cast, which I ended up wearing for about three months. When the cast was finally taken it off I could hardly move my arm at the elbow. For around a year after that my father manually exercised my arm every evening when he got home from work. Both Dad and Mom also encouraged me to use my left hand to do things I would normally do with my right hand, resulting in me becoming fairly ambidextrous. My elbow healed and I eventually regained full use of it, but my arm was bent downward and to the right several degrees at the elbow when I held it out palm down. It still works after more than eighty years.* ______*When I joined the Navy at the age of 17 in St. Louis, I was herded into a doctor’s office with several other recruits. The doctor had us strip to our shorts and line up in rows in front of him and do such things as bend over, and move our arms and legs about to see if everything worked. My left arm was crooked at the elbow when held out with the palm down, so I held it out with my palm turned upward so the doctor wouldn’t notice the deformity] ______

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An Untimely Death

In late December of 1933 (or in early January 1934) Granddad Dement was operated on in St. Louis for throat cancer—no doubt caused by him chewing tobacco. When he was brought home from the hospital Dad went to visit him and took me along. The dark bedroom where Granddad Dement was in had a kerosene lamp, and I remember it being very dim. I could see the bandage around his neck. But what embedded the memory of the visit in my mind was the overpowering smell of ether that permeated the room. He died on 29 January 1934. He was 61 years old.

Deer Hunting & Rattlesnakes In the spring of 1934 we lived for a short while in Low Hollow, the next hollow over (south) from Mayberry, either on or next to a farm owned by a man named Jim Stevenson. I don’t know why we moved there but it probably had something to do with Dad’s work at different sawmills at that time. There was a trail from Lower Mayberry that led up a steep hill, along a narrow ridge and then down the south side of the hill to Low Hollow. Dad’s older brother Dan had an adjoining farm at the west end of Low Hollow. I remember the house in Low Hollow but not how long we lived there or what Dad did while we were there. It had a half- basement that was used as a storage area. Dad was gone most of the time but I have one memory of him during that time and four very strong memories associated with the house. (1) Mom was very pregnant (with Fernie) when we made the move to Low Hollow, and I remember how big she was and us having to stop and wait for her to rest several times as we climbed the steep hill separating Mayberry and Low Hollow. (2) During the trip I was running ahead of the family. My bare right foot landed on a rock, severely bruising my heel—an injury that was to come back to haunt me in my early 70s. (3) One Sunday I went deer-hunting with Dad on the west side of Stevenson’s property, inside the rail fence that marked

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR the boundary of his farm. He came out of his barn, saw us, and began shouting and motioning for his get out of his field. And (4), one day Jessie went into the cellar of the house to get something for Mom. Seconds later she ran back out of the cellar and into the house, screaming like crazy. After Mom finally got her calmed down she said there was a giant snake in the cellar. She was petrified by snakes. I went with Mom to the cellar, and there it was—a huge rattlesnake coiled up inside a large open-mouthed jug. Mom told me to go to Uncle Dan’s house and get someone to come and get rid of the snake. Before getting to Uncle Dan’s house I saw someone working in a field. I don’t remember if it was one of his older sons or a hired hand, but whoever it was returned with me and managed to get the jug outside of the cellar, dislodge the snake, and kill it. The snake was around seven or eight feet long and had 14 tail buttons (the things that rattle when rattlesnakes are riled)— meaning it was 14 years old. The snake killer and Mom agreed that it was the largest rattlesnake they had ever seen. We draped it over the fence in front of our house for all to see and it caused a lot of talk for weeks afterward. A short time later we moved back into my birthplace house in Mayberry. I do not know who owned the house but we moved in and out of it three times over the next few years.

Running Over Winnie Following out move back to Mayberry Dad began plowing a small section of land across the creek a short distance away from our house. He let me try my hand at plowing, but it was new ground, the plow kept hitting roots and rocks, jerking me this way and that, and I couldn’t get the team of horses to turn properly at the end of a furrow, so after a few furrows he took over. After he finished plowing he planted something in the furrows—I don’t remember what but it was probably corn. He then hitched the team of horses to a 7x9 railroad tie to drag horizontally across the rows to cover up the seeds.

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As the tie was being dragged across the upturned ridges of soil he stood on it to give it more weight. Winnie came out of the house and asked him if she could ride on the tie with him. He stopped the team to let her get on. Within seconds she fell off of the tie; forward instead of backward, and the tie passed over her before Dad could stop the team. Because the upturned ridges of soil were fairly high and soft and she fell in between two of them she got only some scratches and minor bruises.

Moving into a Sawmill Shack and a Flash Flood In the early spring of 1934 Dad went to work at a lumber mill located about three-quarters of a way up Mayberry hollow and on the south side, near the road that went up and over the hill to Low Hollow and on to Redford. The mill was about 1.5 miles from where we lived. On a Sunday shortly after he started working at the mill some of the other workers helped him build a shack about a hundred yards from the mill. We moved into the shack. I don’t remember why Dad moved us into the shack because the mill wasn’t that far from where we lived at the time. The only reason that has occurred to me is that he was responsible for watching over the mill at night and on Sundays. One day after a heavy rainfall we kids went outside to play in the sandy-bottom of a wash about a hundred yards from the shack. We heard an odd noise that kept getting louder and louder, and were alarmed enough that we stopped playing and climbed out of the wash. Seconds later a wall of water three or four feet high roared down the wash where we had been playing. I do not remember other flash floods occurring in the valley, or seeing the water unusually high in the creek behind the house where I was born. But there were floods because in the early 1960s one carried away the bridge over the creek between Mother Evans’ house and the spring house on the other side of the creek.

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Wringing a Chicken’s Neck One Sunday afternoon my mother asked me to kill a chicken for dinner that evening. I had seen others kill chickens by grasping their heads in one hand and twirling them around until the head was severed from the body. I opted to do the same. It took much longer than I expected, and when the body of the chicken finally went flying, it got up and ran for several yards before collapsing, with blood spurting from its neck stump. About this time Dad and two of his brothers went fishing in Black River. They caught and killed a Red Horse fish that must have been nearly four feet long. They nailed the fish to a board and then nailed the board to a tree alongside the nearby road. A short while after that—apparently in just a few months— we moved back into our original house in lower Mayberry.

Fern’s Birth & a Hornet Attack In the late afternoon of 13 August 1934 when it became obvious that Mom was going to give birth to my sister Fern, Dad took me and my brother Don to his parents’ home to stay overnight. Grandmother Dement spread thin pallets on the floor for us to sleep on. The next morning after breakfast Don and I went outside to play. Not far from the house we came across a large hornet’s nest hanging from a tree limb. We first threw rocks at the nest but nothing happened. We then got some sticks and began whacking it. A cloud of hornets stormed out of the nest and began stinging us on the head, face and neck. We started running and trying to fight them off, but they kept up their attack. We finally jumped into nearby Mayberry creek and ducked out heads under water to get rid of them. We were in bad shape. When we went back inside Grand- mother Dement’s house she put some kind of medicine on our bites [I think it was coal oil] and had us lie down. We stayed put, moaning and carrying on for the rest of the day. Dad came to get us in the late afternoon. When Dad saw our condition he said we would know better the next time we encountered a hornet’s nest. 19

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School & Golden Corey I started to school in September, 1934 when I was six years old, going on seven. The school, about a mile east of our house in the direction of Black River, consisted of one room that was about 14 feet wide and 20 feet long. There were 16 or 17 students in grades from one through eight. The teacher, a man named Golden Corey, was married to my mother’s half sister, Faye. He had close-cropped curly golden red hair, thus his name. During the lunch period he would entertain the youngest kids by bending over and letting them take turns getting a firm grip on his hair, following which he would straighten up, lifting them off the ground.

My Nose in a Circle The toilet for the Mayberry school hose was across the road and down an embankment on the edge of the creek that ran through the small valley. One snowy day someone got up on the elevated area containing the two holes to squat instead of sitting on one of the holes. Whoever it was missed the hole and soiled the edge of the place where one would normally sit. One of the girls came back from the toilet and told the teacher about the pile of crap next to the hole. He loudly said: “Alright! I want whoever did this to speak up now!” There was dead silence. I must have tried to hide my face from his searching gaze and must have otherwise looked guilty as hell. He marched over, took me by the arm, picked up a bucket on the way out of the room, marched me down to the creek, and made me carry a bucket of water up to the toilet where he flushed off the dump. When we got back to the school house, he drew a circle on the blackboard and made me stand there with my nose touching the board in the circle for fifteen minutes. I never forgave him.

Almost Losing Fern

The first summer after Fern’s birth Mom and Dad took all of us down to Black River for a fish-fry. Dad went down the river a 20

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR short distance to gig-fish in a shoal where hog suckers could always be found stationary in the moving water or hiding in clumps of debris. In the rippling water of the shoal the stripped fish were almost invisible. We kids started playing on a sandy beach-area of the river. Mom waded out into the river to where it was about knee-deep to cool off. Fernie crawled into the river and was swept away by the swift current. The rest of us kids started yelling. Mom chased after her and caught her some 15 yards away. For some reason, Fernie used to say that Mom was trying to get rid of her, but at that time she was far too young to have any conscious memory of the incident.

Dad Loses a Thumb Dad worked for a turkey ranch for several weeks during the summer of 1935. The ranch was some two hours walk away— each way—so he left early and came home late. Following this short stint he once again went to work at a lumber mill. On this job he was working as the operator of the wheel- mounted carriage that carried the logs forward to the revolving circular saw. One day someone rode up on a horse behind him and yelled out to get his attention. Dad turned around to see who it was but kept pushing the saw lever forward. When he twisted around it caused his grip on the lever to shift and his right thumb to stick out. The saw cut his thumb off. One of the sawmill workers went down into the sawdust pit beneath the saw, retrieved his thumb, put it in a match box and gave it to him. The short stub of thumb that was left caused Dad intense pain and for several days afterward he walked the floor, holding onto the stub.

Coon Hunting by the Full Moon One evening in the fall when the moon was full Dad and two of his younger brothers [Inman and Arch] took me with them on a coon-hunting venture. The dogs didn’t find any raccoons but 21

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR they treed an opossum. Somebody, I don’t remember who or how, knocked it out of the tree. It “played opossum” while Dad carried it home by the tail and put it in a box. The next day he killed it. Mom cut it up and cooked it. We ate it for supper.

Moving Up the Valley and L’s Arrival Once again we moved; this time into a frame house in Upper Mayberry that was on Granddad Evan’s property. Brother L [his official name was Clayton D. L.] was born in that house on 15 March 1936. Shortly before he was born, Don and I were sent outside, and for the next two or so hours played in the ash-dump a short distance from the house. I don’t know why or how our brother L became known as L

The Shack that Dad Built And Living on Potatoes

That fall Dad was out of work again and for some reason we moved once more…in later years it never occurred to me to ask why we moved so often…but it seems obvious that we moved to be closer to wherever he was working at the time, since he had to walk to-and-from work. With my help (handing him boards and nails), Dad built a 2- room shack on the side of the hill across the creek and swampy area from my maternal grandmother’s house [Mother Evans]. He got the ties for the foundation, the 2x4s for framing and boards for the shack walls and ceiling from the lumber mill a short distance away where he had previously worked but was then closed down. The material had been left on the site when it closed down. The foundation ties for the shack were placed on fairly large rocks we dragged into place. Dad built the place in about eight hours. Mom later papered the walls with pages from a catalog to cover the cracks between boards and keep the wind out. After we moved into the shack Dad and Mom went somewhere looking for work and food, leaving us kids alone. Before leaving, they went over to Grandmother Evans’ house and 22

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR bought back a sack of potatoes. I have no idea why they got only potatoes. While our parents were gone, Jessie sliced and fried the potatoes for our meals and for us to take to school for lunch. We were so embarrassed by not having any other food to eat that we would go off by ourselves during the lunch period so no one could see what we were eating. We also ran out of wood for the heating stove so when not in school we spent much of the time in bed in order to stay warm. Mom and Dad were gone for a few days—I don’t remember how many days or where they went or how they got where they went. They brought some groceries with them when they came home.

My Jack-Off Half-Uncle One winter day during class at the Mayberry school the teacher [Golden Corey] went outside, apparently to go to the toilet. Immediately after he left my half-uncle Truman Evans, who was about 14 years old and one of the 8th grade students, began horsing around, teasing the girls near him by exposing his hard- on, and finally openly jacking-off. Teacher Cory returned suddenly and caught him in the act. A tall, strongly built man, Cory grabbed Truman by the arm, dragged him outside, cut a switch from a tree, made him remove his shirt and then whipped him so hard that part of the switch broke off and stuck in his back. That was not to be Uncle Truman’s last jacking-off incident that I was aware of…and comments he made decades later indicated that his mindset had not changed that much.

Moving Again and Flying off the Truck

In the late spring of 1937 Dad got some temporary work from the WPA [Works Progress Administration], a government- sponsored program to provide work for millions of men who could not find jobs because of the Depression. He and several other men were hired to build concrete culverts on the county road leading to and from Redford. 23

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Dad borrowed a truck (I think from sawmill owner Wes Martin who lived about three miles east of Redford), and loaded our furniture for the 12-or so mile trip to an empty frame house east of Redford and about half a mile from the Wes Martin home. The house was at the base of a hill within a hundred yards from where the first culvert was to be built. The last piece of furniture put on the truck was a sofa, which went on the very top because Mom didn’t want anything piled on top of it. But she did agree that my brother Don and I could sit on the sofa during the trip, since there was already two adults and three kids (Doyle, Fernie and L] in the cab of the truck (older sisters, Jessie and Winnie, were gone somewhere). Shortly after driving away from the shack we were living in (the one across from Mother Evan’s house that Dad had built), I suddenly became aware that I was running behind the truck, crying and yelling, “Stop! Stop!” and I could see my brother Don pounding on the top of the truck cab to get our father’s attention. It turned out that the truck had hit a huge pot-hole that had been washed out by a recent rain, and the sudden down-and-up impact had sent me flying off of the sofa onto the road behind the truck. Dad stopped the truck and Mom rushed back to me. She found that I had landed on my back and hit by head on a small rock that left a v-shaped hole in the crown. She put something over the hole to help stop the bleed-ing, wrapped my head in a piece of cloth and then wedged me into the cab beside her and the younger kids. I went to sleep within minutes and did not wake up until we reached the vacant house we were moving into. Don was left alone on the back of the truck because there was no room for him in the cab. After waking up, I apparently behaved normally [!] and was not taken to a doctor—the nearest one being in Ellington, about 12 miles from where we were. I still have the scar in the crown of my head, so when I wash, comb or scratch my head I recall the incident.

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Hanging a Dog Shortly after we moved into the house east of Redford, Don, Doyle and I became aware that there was a dog hang-ing around that we thought was rabid. We managed to catch it with a wire loop at the end of a long stick. We then hung the dog from a tree limb on the hillside behind the house, and proceeded to hit it with rocks while it slowly strangled to death. Our younger sister Fernie [who was then approaching the age of three] witnessed this sorry event, and it was to give her nightmares for years afterward.

Chopping Down a Tree Shortly after the dog incident, and on the same hillside, Don and I cut a fairly large tree most of the way down. Then Doyle, the next youngest brother, and Don climbed up into the tree while I proceeded to chop it the rest of the way down. When the tree hit the ground Doyle was shaken loose from his perch among the branches. Three of his front teeth were knocked loose. He went home crying. Crestfallen, Don and I followed him. Mom was not happy with us.* ______

*In 2005 when I and my youngest daughter Demetra visited Redford for the annual Dement family reunion, I was amazed to discover that the house we lived when the above events took place was still standing—boarded up and weathered black, with vines growing on it but nevertheless intact after more than 65 years. Demetra took pictures of it. Later one of my second cousins drove us to Mayberry. Near where Grandmother Evans used to live we spotted a man outside of a house, feeding some penned-up pigs. I spoke to him briefly. He said he was the only one living in the valley. When I told him we were on our way to see the house where I was born he said the road in that direction was no longer drivable. I believe he said his name was Coil. He was right about the road. About half a mile from his house we had to stop, get out of the vehicle and walk the rest of 25

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR the way. We found that the house had been torn down, leaving only the concrete flooring. However, I did find my initials carved into a tree next to where the house had been. Demetra took a picture of that as well. The area was desolate and sorry looking so we stayed for only a few minutes. ______The first culvert my father helped build after we moved into the house east of Redford was literally across the road from the front of the house. The work there lasted for only a few days. I took Dad’s lunch to him each day so he could sit and eat with the other men. The WPA job itself lasted for only a few weeks.

Hitting Don with an Ax One day Mom asked me to chop some firewood for the kitchen stove from strips—pre-cut from boards with knot holes in them and therefore not useful as lumber. I was using a double-bladed ax whose blades came to a sharp point at each corner, swinging the ax in a high arc over my right shoulder to increase the power of the swing. Don walked up behind me without me being aware of it. When I swung the ax high and to the back, he cried out. I turned around. He was holding a hand over his left eye. I took his hand away, and saw a trickle of blood on the outside of the upper portion of his eyelid. I took hold of the eyelid and pulled on it. I could see inside his bloodied eye socket. One of the sharp corners of the double-bladed ax had sliced through the top of his eyelid. We went into the house and showed Mom. She became very upset but when she saw that only the eyelid had been cut and that there was very little bleeding, she quieted down and put a square of cloth over his eye, covering it with a strap that went around his head to hold it in place. His eyelid was completely healed in about a week, and there was no apparent damage to his eye. Sometime after that, Dad went to work at a lumber mill owned by Wes Martin. Martin had a flat-bed truck I was really impressed with. You started the engine by pushing a button; not 26

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR turning a crank in front; something I had done before on a car. On several occasions when Dad was driving the truck he let me sit in his lap and steer it.

Moving Again After Dad went to work for Wes Martin we moved again, this time into a house owned by Martin that was located only about a quarter of a mile from where we were living at that time. The house was at the foot of the narrow slope that led up to a long ridge that was a shortcut back to Mayberry—a shortcut I had once taken with Dad on horse-back, sitting behind him. I went to sleep and fell off of the horse but was not hurt. On a later occasion I walked the same route with Dad from Mayberry to Redford, and one time on to Ellington.

The Bologna & Cracker Treat One day Wes Martin asked Dad to drive a load of railroad ties to Annapolis on the eastern side of Black River some 20 miles from Redford. He took me with him. After off-loading the ties at the railroad depot we went on into the downtown area where Dad bought several slices of bologna and some soda crackers for our lunch. It was the first time I had ever tasted bologna and crackers, and the taste was out of this world. I still regard it as a special treat! Dad also bought two bottles of orange soda. I had never seen much less tasted a soda before, and after one sip I gave it back to him. I thought it was some kind of alcoholic drink and refused to drink any more of it. He got a big laugh out of my reaction. During that visit to Annapolis I saw the first train and the first black person I had ever seen.

Freezing for Pine Knots On a Sunday in the middle of that winter [1937] I went with Dad in a borrowed wagon to White Mule Hollow to pick up pine knots for our heating stove. I got so cold I was sure I was

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR going to freeze to death. Dad kept saying, “Move around! Help me load the wagon! That will keep you warm!” I tried, but it didn’t help much and when we got back home and he had stoked up the stove with pine knots I stayed closed to the stove for a long time, causing my mother to have to call me several times to sit down for supper. The Chicken Pox Escapade That same winter, all of us kids came down with chicken pox. Mom told all of us to stay in the house and keep warm, but my brothers and I climbed out through a back window and played outside for several hours. Our sister Fern watched us climb out the window and snitched on us, but we were out and gone before Mom got there. Our chicken pox cases were very light, while those of our sisters were heavy.

Curling with Wagon Wheel Hub Rings One of the favorite outdoor activities for Don, Doyle and I at that time was called curling, using old metal rings that had been on the hubs of the wooden wheels of wagons. We beat tin cans flat with a hammer, folded up the two sides to create a two- sided box-like shape and nailed them to short flat strips of wood. We would then place one of the metal hub rings upright inside the flaps of the tin can and run forward, rolling the rings in front of us, more or less like hockey players drive pucks forward with sticks.

My Lizard Act One day I was playing with a school friend named Warner who lived about a mile away on the main road going into Redford. We were both rolling one of the large, heavy metal rings or hoops that went around wooden wagon wheels to hold them together and give them strength. The discarded rings were virtually worn out, had sharp edges and were rusty with age. Warner lost control of the wheel hoop he was playing with and it fell. The sharp edge of the heavy ring struck the back portion of the big toe on my bare left foot, cutting a deep gash 28

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR in it. A few days later the toenail came off. It did not begin to grow back until I was around 60 years old. By the time I was 75 it had grown back completely, but it had an odd streaked look. Talk about lizards regrowing severed tails!

My Jack-Off Half-Uncle Again One day I was in the kitchen standing near Mom while she was cooking dinner. Someone called out that her half-brother, Truman, whom Golden Corey had whipped for jacking-off in class, was coming up the road toward our house. I said something I had heard men say: “I wonder what that bastard wants!” Mom reacted automatically. She slapped me across the face, hard, causing my nose to bleed. I ran out of the house and stayed away for over an hour. That night I had to sleep with Truman who proceeded to jack-off, messing up the bed. That was the first and only time I remember ever being physically punished in any way by Mom.

Impaled on a Log I went with Dad on a log-float down Current River—riding logs lashed together to a railhead near Popular Bluff. One of the logs I stepped on was loose and rolled when I put my weight on it. I fell into the river, and on my way down I snagged my right leg on a nail that had been driven into the log. Dad grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled me out of the river. I still have the scar on my leg. On many sections of Current River where the stream narrowed it became a swift-flowing torrent.

Moving into Redford In the summer of 1938 we moved again, this time into a large white house behind the Baptist church in the middle of Redford [the total area of the town was about three uneven blocks in all directions]. We may have moved to get closer to the Redford school house in the center of town.

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The large white house was partly furnished, but we did not have enough beds for everyone. Mom rigged a bed for me by laying an unused door between two facing chairs, and covering it with a thin pallet. Jessie and Winnie slept at the top of one bed, with Fernie and L at the bottom. Don and Doyle slept on a floor pallet. We kids were enrolled in the Redford grade school, a small two-story building a few dozen yards from Brooks’ Grocery Store on the west side, that was originally built as some kind of meeting place. It was only about 150 yards from the large white house we had moved into. While playing outside of the schoolhouse one day Don lit a firecracker and started to put it under a tin can to shoot it up into the air. It exploded when it was only half under the can, injuring his hand. A Wild West show came to town, and we kids got to see the famous cowboys Tom Mix [or Tim Holt!] and Behoe Graves (sp?). A circus came to town and I got a job carrying buckets of water for the animals from nearby Sinking Creek—which ran along the base of the hill on the south side of the town—in exchange for tickets to the show. When winter set in I got a job starting a fire in the town’s Baptist church heating stove early every Sunday morning before services began. My pay was five to ten cents, depending on how many pennies were put in the collection plate. On a few occasions I managed to leave the church after starting the fire, skipping the service. Pell Pirtle’s Hole A Red Wagon & Becky’s Arrival The stay in the big white house in the middle of Redford was short—if memory serves me, only a few weeks. Our next move was about a mile and a half east of Redford into a house owned by a man named Pell Pirtle on an embankment overlooking Sinking Creek on the south side. There was a pool of water below the embankment that was referred to as Pirtle’s Hole, and that is where my brothers and I learned how to swim.

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During the first winter after we moved into this house I tried to emulate a boy my age whose family lived near Black River and was known to everyone in the area as being so tough he went barefooted all year. He was one of the Ratliff boys (related to Mom’s side of the family). After a heavy snowstorm I left the house barefooted to go rabbit hunting. I got about half a mile from the house before hot-footing it back home and putting shoes on. That Christmas Dad bought a small red wagon, which thereafter we used to haul firewood and to play with. It was the first gift I member him buying for us children. A few weeks later, on 25 January 1940, sister Rebecca was born, and afterward much to her chagrin I would always tell people that she was born in Pirtle’s Hole, rather than in Red- ford, something that caused her to cringe and complain.* ______

*When daughter Demetra and I attended a family reunion in Redford in 2005, we spotted a house with a mailbox that had the name EVANS on it. Since that was my mother’s maiden name we stopped and I knocked on the door. When a young boy came to the door I explained that we seemed to have a family connection. He pointed to a house that was around the corner of the lot and said his father was there. He ran toward the house. I got back into the car and drove around the corner, parking in front of the house he had pointed to. As we were parking the car, his father…a big pot-bellied man wearing only cut-off denim shorts… came out to greet us. We introduced ourselves and I told him about our living in the neighborhood when I was a young boy; first in a house owned by a man named Pell Pirtle and then in a house across from the picnic grounds. I was astonished when the man told me that Pell Pirtle was his grandfather and that his own mother had married into my mother’s family line. A friendly man, he welcomed us warmly, and we had a short but marvelous time exchanging memories. After leaving his yard on the outer edge of Redford [which consists of about a dozen buildings] we went the short distance to a natural spring that came out of the hill framing Redford on 31

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR the south side. Decades earlier some-one had stuck a metal pipe into the hillside spring, so the water would flow through the pipe rather than course on down the hillside …and thereafter it became known as Pipe Spring. The spring is on the opposite side of Sinking Creek [so- called because sections of it would disappear underground during dry summer months] and at the time of our visit the creek was flowing in that area. We couldn’t get all the way to the spring without taking off our shoes and wading...so I just pointed it out to Demetra and recounted the story of an encounter I had with it when we lived about a quarter of a mile away from there in the late 1930s. During that period I was often called upon to carry water from the spring for cooking and drinking. On one occasion after a heavy rain I put my mouth up to the end of the pipe to get a drink. Several pieces of gravel being washed down the pipe ended up in my throat, and for a moment or so I thought I was going to choke to death. I finally swallowed the rocks…..and never thought to check to see if they were eventually discharged. ______

Our Last Home in the Ozark Hills

Shortly after Becky’s birth we moved into a house [known as the Gilmer place] about half a mile east of downtown Red- ford—midway between Pirtle’s Hole and the center of town. It was across from the bottom grounds of Sinking Creek, which was the site of Redford’s annual 4th of July picnic. Black walnut and pawpaw trees were abundant on the grounds, and it became a favorite place for us kids to play. On the first July 4th picnic after we moved into the Gilmer house Dad performed a solo jig on the dance floor [to fiddle music]—something I had never seen him do before, and never saw him do again. Different members of the Dement family provided the music, playing fiddles and guitars.*

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______

*In the late 1960s when I visited my cousin Ralph Dement in Lesterville about 40 minutes from Redford, he and his wife threw a dinner-dance party on my behalf. He and his older sons all did the same solo jig dance I had seen Dad perform when I was a young boy. They tried to persuade me to do it, but I didn’t know how, so they let me off the hook when I volunteered to join in a square dance. It seemed that all of my cousins who had grown up in the Redford area knew how to jig-dance. Several of them also played musical instruments and regularly entertained at parties. ______While adults were making home-made ice cream for the 1940 4th of July picnic dinner—using hand-cranked freezer con- tainers—somebody noted that no one had brought an ice-cream scoop. One of Wes Martin’s sons who was old enough to drive volunteered to go Centerville [about eight miles away] in his father’s truck and get one. He agreed to take a bunch of us kids with him for the ride. About a dozen of us climbed onto the truck bed, which had high sideboards on both sides of the truck bed but none on the back. On the return trip, three or four of us boys climbed up on the sideboards on the left side of the truck bed to look out over the top. A short while after we left Centerville on the gravel road leading back to Redford, the Martin boy made a rapid right turn at an intersection. The sideboards that I several other kids were on broke off because of our added weight and we went flying onto the intersection. Incredibly, none of us was hurt because the sideboards acted like a sled, skidding across the gravel with us lying on top of it. About this time I became involved in a “fight” with one of the Pogue boys who was my age. A group of us kids were playing in the middle of Redford when older boys in the group began egging the Pogue boy and me to wrestle. Finally, I grabbed the boy in an attempt to throw him, and in the following quick tussle we both hit the ground at the same 33

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR time. I relaxed and he instantly squirmed on top of me. He was declared the winner.

Sex Education 103 and 104 We had a dog that apparently smelled a female somewhere in the vicinity that was in heat. It kept humping our legs, causing the girls to squeal and kick at it. One day the female dog showed up in our yard. Our dog mounted it and began pumping away. But when it was done it couldn’t dismount, and the female dog kept dragging it around the yard. I finally dumped water on both of the dogs to cool them off, resulting in the male being able to withdraw. Soon after this our dog got hot again and started humping my leg. I masturbated him and discovered that dog peckers have a ball-like bulge at their base, and when this bulge ends up inside a female, as it did when he was on the female dog, the male can’t easily disengage. Influenced by this interesting experience I later went across the road into the creek bottom, climbed high up in a tree and masturbated for the first time. The sensation was extraordinary but there was no semen. I was apparently too young for that. Fortunately, human males don’t have peckers like dogs. But they do have a number of dog-like behavioral traits.

Avoiding Sunday School Mom insisted that we go to Sunday school at the Baptist church in the middle of Redford, but one day Don and I inadvertently came up with a unique way of avoiding that uninteresting chore. While Mom and Dad were still getting ready for church we went ahead and came across a small bunch of tame cattle that had gathered in the Pipe Spring area to drink water from Sink- ing Creek. For the next half an hour we played cowboy, riding the cows and getting dirty and smelly. Trying to turn one of the cows while standing in front of it I tried to punch it in the nose but hit one of its horns. When we finally entered the church we stank

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR so badly Mom sent us home. How-ever, that was the first and last time we were able to use that ploy.

The Death of Uncle Bill Mom’s uncle, Bill Bounds, visited us one day in 1940, walking all the way from wherever he lived at that time. He was a jolly man in his 70s, with a white goatee. I remember the visit because one morning that winter when it was snowing he went deer hunting down by Black River, and did not return that evening. Several people joined in a search but didn’t find him. The next spring loggers working in the area found his skeleton and gun. He had walked off of a high embankment and died from the fall.

A New School House And My First Movie The government authorized a WPA project to build a new school of stone and concrete on a slight rise about half a mile from the center of Redford on the northeast side of town. At the end of the first year in the new school my grade teacher gave each of us four kids in her class a silver dollar, which I promptly lost. She also took us in her car to Ellington to see the very first movie any of us had ever seen. It was a silent film. I can still remember some of the scenes in the movie and recall the dialogue that appeared at the base of the screen. Encounter with a Poisonous Snake One Saturday when Don, Doyle and I were gig-fishing in Sink- ing Creek near Pirtle’s Hole, walking around in the shallow creek barefooted [we went barefooted from mid-March until mid-October], I stepped on a water moccasin snake. It curled around and bit me on top of my right foot. We chased the snake for several minutes, trying to kill it but it got away. When we got home I told Mom about the snake bite. She began crying and lambasting me for not coming right home, saying that I could die.

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The snake had been able to puncture my skin with only two of its fangs. Mom soaked my foot in kerosene and told me to stay off of it. Within an hour or so it had swollen up to the point that I couldn’t get a regular shoe on. Over the next several days I wore one of my sister’s galoshes when I had to walk around. My foot turned an ugly brown. The skin came off, and I had a light fever for several days. But I was back to normal within about two weeks. It seems that since the bite was under water and only two fangs broke my skin at an angle, I didn’t get a full dose of poison. Water moccasin snakes were very common in Sinking Creek, so we had been lucky up to that time.

Going into Business Don and I started a business of digging up mayapple roots and selling them to Mr. Brooks at his grocery store. He sold them to an outfit that used them to make some kind of medicine. [Back east the flowery mayapple plants are known as man- drakes.] We used the few cents Brooks paid us for the roots to buy candy, which we shared with the other kids. On one occasion I stole a neighbor’s chicken that wandered near our house, and sold it to Brooks. That was my first and last theft. Holy Roller Entertainment A “Holy Roller” traveling preacher came into town and con- ducted a number of services under a large tent. We kids would sneak under the tent to watch the people roll around on the dirt floor and otherwise act like freaked-out zombies. That was one of the several forms of religious behavior I witnessed as a child that made me question the value of other religious practices I’d seen; like dunking people in cold creeks during winter months. Thinking back, there must have been some Holy Roller members in Redford for the preacher to have come there.

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On the Dole In 1940 work in the area was still hard to come by and when found paid very little [$1 a day was a good wage], so Mom and Dad signed up to receive an allotment of food each week that was part of a government-sponsored relief program. I forget what the program was called, but I was the one designated to go to the delivery truck each week in downtown Redford to pick up our handouts. The few items passed out were not enough to sustain us, and we continued to get vegetables from Mother Evans’ garden and from the garden of Grandmother Dement. During that period, both Dad and Mom went to St. Louis a number of times, looking for work. It seems that on these occasions they were gone for three or four days each time, during which Jessie was in charge.

Struck by Lightning One day Dad and I were returning home from “down-town” Redford when three of his bothers [Sherman, Inman and Arch] came along in a four-door sedan car that had running boards on each side. It had just started lightning and raining. We were only about 500 yards from our house, but they stopped and told us to get on the running boards and they would drive us the rest of the way home. They had been drinking and were feeling no pain. Within seconds after the car started moving, it was struck by lightning. The current traveled through my and Dad’s bodies, but for some reason we were not hurt…just shaken up by the weird feeling. When his brothers saw we were not hurt they laughed uproariously. Sherman and most of Dad’s younger brothers dabbled in making and drinking moonshine liquor. Apparently as a result of drinking the home-made brew, Sherman eventually developed a conspicuous tick in his left cheek that he had for the rest of his life. I never once saw Dad take a drink of liquor, during that period or any time later, apparently because Mom dis- approved of drinking. 37

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Sex Education 105 One winter day after the school lunch break and playing outside on some swings, I went back into the school and entered the walk-in cloakroom to hang up my coat. Winnie and several of her girl friends were in the closet, obviously engaged in some ribald boy talk. One of the girls was leaning back against the wall and doing a very realistic version of a boy jacking off. She stopped the instant I entered the closet, and the girls rushed out into the classroom and sat down, giggling and joking. Some days later when I was playing on the school swings I caught the side of my trousers on something, tearing the right leg of the pants apart from my hip down to my foot. The teacher sent me home to change clothes. Some of my classmates somehow convinced Lois Allen, the prettiest girl in my class, to agree to be called my girl friend. The relationship never went any further than that…but she has been in my head ever since…and some 40 years later one of my older and favorite cousins [Ralph] claimed to have been the first one to “get to her” when they were still teenagers. My second “fight” occurred during the first year after the new school opened. The boy who sat behind me was a known bully and was constantly picking on me—doing such things as hitting one of my relaxed arms with his fingers closed but his knuckles protruding to increase the impact and cause excru- ciating pain. One day when we were filing into class with him be-hind me he kept jabbing me in the back. Exasperated, I turned around and slugged him in the face as hard as I could, knocking him down. He never bothered me after that.

Logging with Dad In 1940 the demand for railroad ties picked up, and Dad went back to work for Wes Martin, whose sawmill was then located several miles southeast of Redford [the mills moved frequently as areas were logged out].

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On Saturdays I teamed with Dad working in the woods near the mill with a crosscut saw, helping him fell trees, trim the limbs off and then cut the trunks into railroad-tie-sized logs. He did virtually all of the pushing and pulling; I just tried to keep my end of the saw from whipping. We were cutting logs in an area that consisted of numerous narrow ravines. On one occasion we cut a log [destined to become a 6x8 tie] in a ravine that was so steep the mule team used to drag the logs out to where they could be loaded on a truck couldn’t get down to it. Dad upended the log, balanced it on his shoulder and carried it out. He was 5’-8” tall and weighed about 170 pounds. The log must have weighed close to 300 pounds. On one occasion, Dad and I cut 47 logs—a one-day record for any of the log-cutting teams that worked for Martin. We were able to do that because we were cutting in a grove of very tall trees and got two logs out of most of them…and Dad sawed so fast he was able to cut through a fallen tree in four to five minutes…all the while pulling me forward and ramming me back as if I was a rag doll. We worked eight to nine hours a day, rain or shine. One day when it was raining lightly and so cold that there were patches of ice in some areas, Dad said he was sure his pecker had frozen and fallen off.

Working in a Sawdust Pit That winter Dad began working at the mill as the saw-carriage operator, and took me with him on Saturdays to work in the sawdust pit beneath the saw. I used a 2-wheeled cart to haul sawdust from the pit and dump it onto a huge pile on a slope about 50 yards away from the mill. When the cart got stuck in sawdust that had not been beaten down making a firm runway—which if often did because I wasn’t big enough or strong enough to get it out—Dad would jump off of the carriage and push it out for me. We were at the mill by or before daybreak, when it was freezing cold. Dad taught me to dig a pit in the sawdust dump

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR and squat down in it to get warm while the men got the mill running. When school was out that spring [1940] Dad got Martin to hire me to work full time in the sawdust pit at 50 cents a week. During my first five weeks Martin neglected to pay me. I complained to Mom. She cajoled Dad into asking Martin to pay me, and he gave me $2.50. The Sunday morning after I got paid I was outside in the yard chopping strips to be used as firewood for the house and kitchen stoves. Mom came out and asked me if she could have the money I had been paid. She said she needed it buy food. I gave it to her. She saw I was hurt, hesitated for a few seconds, and handed 50 cents back to me. I spent it on candy at Brooks’ Grocery Store and shared the candy with my brothers and sisters. Jessie, then 14 years old, entered Centerville High School, about eight miles from Redford, going to and from in a van along with six or seven other teenagers. I’m not sure but I think our half-uncle Truman was one of the other students who shared the daily van ride to and from Centerville.* ______

*In 2005 when Demetra and I stayed overnight at my cousin Hope Dement Bowles’s rustic Centerville bed-and-breakfast place we saw that the high school Jessie had attended was still standing, but it was boarded up and had not been used for many years. The county sheriff’s car, parked at a house near cousin Hope’s place, had spider webs on all of the wheels, indicating it had not been driven for some time. We got a big laugh out of that. ______

Dad’s Copper Social Security Card At noon one day a man on a horse rode up to the sawmill where Dad and I were working and said he was selling Social Security cards made out of copper…. because the paper cards issued by

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR the government disintegrated when they got wet from sweat or rain. He said the cost of a copper card was 25 cents. Dad took his half-disintegrated paper card out of his wallet, looked at it and agreed to buy one of the copper cards. The man proceeded to use a small hand tool to punch Dad’s name and Social Security number into the copper blank. During the process Dad repeated his SS number two or three times, and for some odd reason the number has stuck in my memory ever since. I remember it to this very day, over 70 years later, more clearly than I remember my own. For some reason I still think of it often.

Jessie Moves to St. Louis By this time, Dad’s youngest brother Arch and his wife Eva lived in St. Louis. In the early summer of 1940 after Jessie, my oldest sister, had finished her second year at Centerville High School, Dad made arrangements for her to stay with uncle Arch and aunt Eva in St. Louis and look for work. Her first job was in a laundry. Her second job was at Carter’s Carburetor Co., where she washed metal parts in gasoline…without of rubber gloves. We Move to St. Louis In the summer of 1941 Uncle Arch learned that the St. Louis Box Company was going to hire a few men. He drove down to Redford, got both Dad and Mom and took them to St. Louis so Dad could apply for a job at the company. Early the following morning Dad went to the employment office of the company and found over a hundred men already lined up. When the office opened only six men were hired. When the personnel manager announced that the hiring was over and thanked the men for coming, Dad quickly made his way up to the manager, and said to him: “I really need work! If you hire me and I don’t do twice as much work as any of the men you just hired today you won’t have to pay me!” The manager hired him, but he continued to look for work elsewhere.

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Mom’s half-sister Faye lived on the second floor of a red- brick duplex at 1217 Dolman Street, fairly close to the center of St. Louis. The first floor of the duplex was vacant. Mom and Dad rented it. It consisted of four rooms plus a laundry room and toilet—all in a straight line from the street to the service alley behind it. The duplex was in a row of other duplexes that were only a few feet apart. All of them had half-basements with steps in the front leading up to the first floors. The duplex on the north side of the place Mom and Dad rented had been torn down and the lot left vacant. In addition to the front door, there was a door on the north side of the house adjoining the empty lot, with a small landing and steps leading down to the ground. The two front rooms of the duplex they rented were off-set to the left, with a hallway going from the front door to the third room in the line. The first Sunday after Mom and Dad rented the house Mom got her uncle John Henry Hampton to drive her and Dad back to Redford to get the rest of us. Uncle John Henry had rented a small flat-bed trailer to hook up to his car. The trailer was about six feet wide and 12 feet long, with 4-ft. high sideboards. All of our goods were loaded onto the trailer, with Mom, Dad and six of us kids packed into the front and back seats of the car. Jessie and Winnie were already in St. Louis—Winnie staying at Uncle John Henry’s house. This move marked the beginning of a new kind of life for us, including a house that had electricity, running water and an indoor bath. The vacant lot on the north side of our duplex was used by neighborhood boys as a baseball field. Brother Doyle quickly joined the gang and became an outstanding left-handed batter. He became known as Duke to his play-mates…which he vastly preferred to the nickname some of his siblings sometimes called him Doodle, said to be a take-off on dung-rolling doodle bugs. Still today most of his friends call him Duke.

Clinton-Peabody School Don, Doyle and I were enrolled in Clinton-Peabody Ele- mentary School, only two blocks from our house. I should have 42

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR gone into the 6th grade but was enrolled in the 7th grade, apparently because of my age and my school record from Redford. Shortly after school started in September I was appointed a “street-crossing guard” to make sure kids going to and from school crossed the street safely. I got to wear a combination broad white belt and shoulder band, made of thick canvas, as my uniform. Winnie enrolled in McKinley High School, located on the south side of Lafayette Park; a large park that began at the intersection of Dolman Street and Park Avenue, two blocks from our house. It took her about 20 minutes to walk through the park to school. [When I followed her to McKinley the next fall my morning walk through the park was a one-way trip because I went to work directly from school.]

Pearl Harbor In the early morning of December 7, 1941 [a Saturday or Sunday?], I was sitting on the brick walkway just outside of the landing on the north side of the house, cracking and eating black walnuts I had brought from the picnic grounds in Redford. Mom opened a window overlooking the landing and told me that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor. I thought Pearl Harbor was in the Philippines, and was not very excited or concerned about the news. When I later went inside Mom told me the Japanese had attacked the U.S.; explaining that Pearl Harbor was in Hawaii, which was a U.S. Territory. [It became a state in 1959.]

Becoming a Paperboy & My First Boxing Match I got a weekend job selling the evening edition of the St. Louis Post Dispatch newspaper at the Intersection of Chouteau Ave- nue and LaSalle Street, some four blocks from our house on Dolman. On Sunday mornings I also joined a neighbor boy my own age delivering coal in a two-wheeled cart to homes in the area that still used it for heating and cooking purposes. Each time we 43

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR went out from the coal supplier he would add an extra un- ordered basket of coal to the load, sell it and keep the money. Brother Don also got a job selling the St. Louis Post-Dis- patch on a route near our house that included a shoe factory. Near the shoe factory there was some kind of club house for young people, where we sometimes went to play. One day during a practice-reading of a dialogue for a skit I impressed the director of the program by adding a bit of acting to the dialogue. The action was spontaneous, and I have no further memories of being interested in a thespian career. At the club I was enticed into getting into a boxing match with a neighborhood boy who was known as a tough bully. Dur- ing the punching and flailing I let loose an uppercut that appeared to connect with the bottom of his chin, literally raising him off the floor. The audience cheered. In actuality, my glove hardly made contact with his chin but because he had abruptly thrown his head backward and kind of jumped into the air it looked like I had scored a great blow. Immediately following that he proceeded to punch me repeatedly, with almost every blow landing on my nose.

Visiting Mother Evans In the summer of 1942 I convinced Mom to let me go visit Mother Evans, since one of Uncle Dan’s boys was in St. Louis (delivering lumber) and said he would take me to Mayberry and arrange for me to ride back to St. Louis on the next delivery a week later. Mother Evans was living alone by that time, but continued to plant and care for a garden and keep a milk cow and several dozen chickens. After a few days of exploring the area of her farm I was ready to go home. In the late afternoon of the day before I was to catch the lumber truck back to St. Louis I walked from Mayberry to Uncle Dan’s house in Low Hollow, where he owned a farm. Before I reached his house it was totally dark. Trees overhung the narrow road, and noises coming out of the dark tempted me to run…

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I stayed all night at Uncle Dan’s, and after breakfast the next morning walked to the top of a ridge about a mile from his house, where it had been arranged that I would be picked up sometime around 10 a.m. by the lumber truck going to St. Louis. The truck was delayed until mid-afternoon. While wait-ing, I picked and ate blueberries growing alongside the ridge road. When the truck arrived there was another passenger sitting in the cab of the truck. The driver [not my cousin this time] agreed that I could ride on top of the load of lumber. With the heavy load of lumber the truck’s speed was only 15 or 20 mph on level ground, and when we hit rises and hills, it slowed to a crawl. It was dark by the time we were about two- thirds of the way to St. Louis, and at a refueling stop the driver asked me to get into the cab. It was after midnight when we arrived in St. Louis, via Broadway. The driver let me out of the truck at the inter-section of Broadway and Choteau, where I intended to catch a streetcar that went to Choteau and Dolman, about four blocks from my house. When I got out of the truck cab I couldn’t find my wallet. Finally, I climbed back up on top of the load of lumber, and there it was. It had fallen out of my back pocket. At that time of night, streetcars came along only about every 30 minutes or so, and while I was standing at the stop, waiting, with a small cloth bag over my shoulder, a police patrol car stopped, The police presumed I was running away from home, but they drove on when I convinced them I was going home, not running away. When I got home I knocked on the landing window on the north side of the house. Mom got up and let me in.

Hawking Stolen Military Goods Following graduation from Peabody Elementary School in the spring of 1943 I got a summer job hawking excess (or stolen!) military clothing and equipment from a sidewalk stand on Broadway Avenue (paralleling the Mississippi River in the old

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR section of downtown St. Louis). This job lasted for about two weeks. I then worked in a bowling alley for two weeks, setting the pins in the pin-pit…a job that worried my sister Jessie, who was aware that the pins were sometimes knocked flying. I quit when I got hit in the cheek by one of the pints. After that experience I went to work in the evenings as an usher in a sleazy theater a block west of Broadway. My first evening there I learned that the theater was a favorite haunt of homosexuals and poor couples who used the dark balcony to get it on… This short stint was followed by a few weeks working evenings and weekends at an ice-cream parlor in the same area with one of my friends and classmates, Harvey C. One of the rules of the manager of the parlor was that employees could have one free serving of ice-cream or a milkshake each day. I limited myself to one dip of peppermint ice-cream per week…and have no idea where that kind of restraint came from but it was to play a significant role in my life. Harvey was not one to obey rules, and one day the manager fired him on the spot. For some weird reason he [Harvey] slapped me on the face, hard, as he was heading for the door. The manager grabbed him by the arm and said he was going to have him arrested, but I told the manager I wasn’t hurt and to let him go…that it was just his way.

Starting High School I started at McKinley High School in early September 1943 (about two months before my 15th birthday), signing up for five subjects rather than the usual four. Before the end of the spring semester I also registered to go to Summer School that summer—at Roosevelt High School.

Working at the Lennox Hotel

In the meantime my wayward friend Harvey, who was several months older than me, had been hired as a busboy at the Rath-

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR skeller Restaurant on the first floor of the high-rise Lennox Hotel in the business section of St. Louis. Immediately after we started to high school he insisted that I go with him to the restaurant, where he convinced the manageress to hire me as well even though I had not yet turned 15. My weekday hours were from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday was my day off. My Sunday hours were from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. On weekdays Harvey and I went to work directly from high school by streetcar, and got home each night at about 10:30 p.m. On my very first night when I picked up a large tray of dirty dishes to carry them to the basement kitchen, the dishes shifted to one side because the tray was wet, and the whole thing went crashing to the floor. I was mortified. But the restaurant manager, a very wise and professional lady in her forties who was standing near me said instantly: “It happens to everybody! You go on… I’ll have somebody else clean it up!” You can image how grateful I have been to her to this very day. The kitchen of the Rathskeller was located in the basement, at the bottom of two levels of steep stairs, making it a hardship for the middle-aged and older waitresses to carry trays of food up the stairs. I was picked by one of the older women [named Bella] to carry trays for her from the kitchen to her station in the dining room. This was in addition to my busboy duties of cleaning up tables and carrying the dirty dishes down to the wash area of the basement kitchen. Depending on how busy Bella was each night and how many tips she got, she gave me from 50 cents to $1 at the close of each day. On evening when I was carrying a tray loaded with eight steak dinners [with the plates stacked on top of each other on aluminum rings made for that purpose] and was about half way up the steep stairs leading to the restaurant floor the whole load shifted to the right because the tray was still wet from having just been washed. The shifting load caused the tray to fall to the right and jam up against the wall of the stairwell. This prevented the contents

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR of the tray from spilling onto the stairs, but steak sauce and other liquids began streaming onto my neck and shoulder. Two other busboys standing on the landing at the top of the stairs immediately rushed to my rescue and managed to right the tray without any of the dishes falling off. I took the tray back down to the kitchen where a cook put the steaks on clean plates, replaced the sauce and side dishes, and I delivered it to Bella. The restaurant cashier was a very pretty young woman in her early twenties. One evening when I was standing at the cashier desk with Bella the young woman was wearing a loose off- shoulder blouse. When she bent over I could see her bra- covered bosoms. Bella [who was about 5’-10” with a voice to match], said brusquely: “Why don’t you take’em out and show- em to him!” The girl straightened up, blushing a bright red. I was also embarrassed. My first duty after arriving at the restaurant on Sunday mornings was to make coffee in a huge vertical tank-like container that held several gallons. One of the interesting things I remember about this chore is that the recipe included some salt. In the early afternoon on most Saturdays [my day off], I went to the Merry Widow movie theater [on Choteau Avenue] about five blocks from our house and stayed for some four hours, watching two feature-length films, one or more news documentaries about the war in Europe and in the Pacific, and two or three cartoons. At the age of 15 I still looked young enough that I passed as “under 12” and got in at the “children’s rate.” On Saturdays before going to the Merry Widow theater I sometimes went to a White Castle hamburger shop on the northeast side of Choteau Avenue at LaSalle Street intersection [about four blocks from our house on Dolman], and had from two to three nickel hamburgers for lunch…a special treat that I tried to relive decades later.

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Discovering an Allergy Busboys at the Lennox Hotel were allowed to eat dinner before starting to work—ordering anything we wanted from the regular menu. One evening I ordered a raw shrimp cocktail—something I had seen the patrons eat and was impressed with its looks. Within ten minutes after eating it I became seriously nauseous and was sure I was going to vomit. I hung in for over an hour but the nausea persisted and I felt like I was going to vomit at any moment. The manageress saw I was in bad shape. I had no idea why I was so sick, but when I told her there was something seriously wrong with me she said I could go home. I was sick for several hours after getting home but did not vomit.* ______*The next time I ate shrimp was in Tokyo, Japan in 1954 at a Chinese restaurant named China House. I became ill within minutes and vomited massively. It turned out that I had become violently allergic to shell fish, and on the occasions thereafter when I inadvertently ate shrimp stuff-ed in fish balls or something else, I lost everything within ten to fifteen minutes— including the most expensive meal I’ve ever had…on a floating restaurant in Hong Kong’s Aberdeen Bay in 1960, when I was editor of the Tokyo-based IMPORTER trade magazine and was in Hong Kong with the publisher, Ray Woodside. One of our advertisers took Ray and me to the rest-aurant on his private speed boat. I knew something was wrong midway through the meal, and immediately began trying to dilute or “absorb” the shrimp juice in my stomach by drinking fluids and eating a lot of bread. Within five minutes after we boarded the boat to go back to our hotel in Kowloon I was hanging over the back of the boat throwing up. My dinner came up with such force that it bruised my vocal cords, making it sound like I had laryngitis when I talked. ______

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From the first day I went to work at the Lennox Hotel until I graduated from McKinley High School in the spring of 1946 I never took a book or a work-assignment home. I got up at 6 a.m. every morning, had a piece of a nut- encrusted coffee cake [which I bought each morning at a bakery shop about 100 yards from the house] and a glass of milk for breakfast [with Winnie], and was at school by 7 a.m., where I did my studying and homework in an empty classroom. Since I ate lunch at school [each dish cost five cents, and I normally selected three dishes] and ate dinner at the hotel, the only time I saw other members of my family and ate full meals at home was on Saturday mornings and evenings, and on Sun- day evenings. All during the time I worked at the Lennox Hotel Dad worked six days a week on the swing-shift (4 p.m. to midnight) at Carter’s Carburetor Company on the west side of St. Louis, so I saw him only once a week, on Sunday evenings. My sister Jessie worked at the same place on the day shift for several months after we moved from Redford to St. Louis, but finally quit because using gasoline to wash parts was seriously affecting her hands and arms. She and a girlfriend went to De- troit, found jobs and stayed there for several months.

Learning More about Life! After I had been working at the Lennox Hotel for about a year I was sometimes asked to serve as a room service waiter. One night I took an order to the penthouse suite where there was a party going on. The party host turned out to be the owner of the hotel, who was going at it with my boss, the manager of the Rathskeller, on a couch. She acknowledged my presence with a wave of her hand and a big smile. Other similar incidents at the hotel became an integral part of my early education! One of the teenage black boys who worked in the kitchen of the Rathskeller was deaf and partially dumb but could mouth words well enough that he could communicate fairly well. He was into boxing, and one Sunday afternoon when we were in the locker room [I was done working and was getting ready to

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR leave the hotel] one of the black cooks who was also present started egging him and me on to get us to box. The black boy was eager to show off his skill, and after a lot of pressure I finally agreed to put the gloves on. He won! As one of the leading hotels in St. Louis, the Lennox attracted its share of celebrity guests, including well-known movie stars. I believe one of the female stars who stayed at the Lennox and ate at the Rathskeller while I was on duty was Jean Tierney. The other one was a small, thin man whose face I clearly remember [as well as the table where he sat] but whose name I cannot clearly recall. It may have been Bob Crane, who was later murdered in a Scottsdale, Arizona motel incident.

The Arizona Connection Wilma, one of my married cousins—who was one of the many daughters of Uncle Oscar and Aunt Nell and was close to Mom’s age—lived in Tempe, Arizona with her husband Paul. She had been writing to Mom since the mid-1930s, urging her to move the family to Arizona. Finally, intrigued by her de- scriptions of Arizona and its weather, Jessie and Winnie went to Phoenix by themselves in 1944, and soon found work. I recall that Wilma’s husband, Paul, a thin, gaunt man, always seemed to be on the verge of dying. But he was still alive in the 1960s, by which time he and Wilma had retired to Iron- ton, Missouri, her birthplace. Soon after arriving in Arizona Jessie met a young man named Gene Holland from Oklahoma City who was a lieutenant in the Air Force stationed at Luke Air Force Base west of Phoenix. They were married a few months later. Winnie went to work for the Phoenix Pie Company, and about a year later married the owner, Gayland Simpson. Later they went into real estate and became quite wealthy.

The New Mexico Adventure

In early 1945 Jessie and Gene visited St. Louis for a few days, following his transfer to Kirtland Air Force Base outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. I had been giving Mom part of my

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR busboy income each week, but on this occasion she asked me for an additional sum so she and Dad could take Jessie and Gene out for dinner. In the second week of August 1945 I decided to take a short vacation and went to Albuquerque, New Mexico by Greyhound bus to visit Jessie and Gene. The morning after my arrival—I was staying at the YMCA—I was attracted to the mountains to the east of the city. I rode a city bus to the outskirts and then not realizing how far it was, started walking toward the foothills, taking what appeared to be a shortcut through open desert country. It took me over three hours to reach the foothills. I stopped twice to drink water out of tanks that ranchers kept filled for their cattle. In the foothills I rested on a huge rock for about half an hour before starting back, this time heading toward High-way 66 in a southerly direction. A short time after I got to the highway leading back to Albuquerque a guy came along on a motorcycle and gave me a ride to the YMCA where I was staying. From there I walked the few blocks to Jessie and Gene’s small apartment. They were upset with me, to say the least! I stayed in Albu- querque for only one more night. Jessie was working somewhere and Gene had duty every day, so I was not able to spend much time with them and was not interested in exploring any more of the area.

The End of World War II I left Albuquerque on a Greyhound bus in the early morning of 14 August 1945 to return to St. Louis and my work. When the bus reached Oklahoma City, the street we were on was so crowded the bus had to slow to a crawl, and was forced to stop several times. The bus driver finally opened the side window next to his seat yelled out, “What’s going on!” “The war is over! The Japanese have surrendered!” someone yelled back. [The formal date of the ending of the war was 15 August 1945, because it was already the 15th in Japan when the announcement of the surrender was made.]

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Joining the Missouri State Guard Immediately after my 17th birthday on November 12, 1945 I joined the Missouri State Guard, and thereafter went to the guard armory every Saturday for training. The only military type activities I was required to participate in were close-order drills and listening to lectures. I vividly recall that during one of my last close-order drill training session on June 19, 1946, the commander of the unit came out of his office, and motioned for the sergeant drilling us to stop. The commander then made this announcement: “Gentlemen! Joe Louis knocked Billy Conn out in the 20th second [?] of the eighth round!” We all cheered loudly. Joe Louis was the most famous American boxer of the era, but his reputation had lost a lot of its aura following his years in the army and some questionable bouts afterward.

Sailing on the Mississippi I attended two school events during my time at McKinley High School—a football game in 1944 and the prom dance in the spring of 1946 held aboard the Admiral, a classic Mississippi riverboat, which cruised down the river for several miles and then returned to its dock a few hundred yards from the original St. Louis Court House. I don’t remember dancing during the cruise but I clearly remember looking at and being impressed with the large paddle wheels on the back of the boat. I do recall, however, that I had tried jitterbugging one time at some kind of dance club that I went to with my friend Harvey. That was not to be my only visit to the Admiral.* ______*In 2005 when daughter Demetra and I attended a family reunion in Redford we stayed in St. Louis for two nights after the reunion. While there we visited the Admiral, still tied up in the same place. However, it no longer sailed up and down the river and was being used as a kind of museum with some con- cessions, including a soft drinking vending machine on the

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR deck. We also found a White Castle hamburger shop just off of Broadway. I ordered two hamburgers in a gesture to relive one of my early childhood memories. I took a few bites of one of them and then threw both of them into a trash can because it tasted so bad. ______Joining the Navy Because of the extra credits I had earned by taking five courses instead of the usual four and going to summer school twice, I had enough credits to graduate from McKinley High School in the spring of 1946. The day I passed the final exams I decided to skip the graduation exercises and join the Navy. I had been in high school for precisely two years and seven months…and had never missed a day. At that time the military draft was still in effect and I would have been subject to it that fall when I became 18. Since I had no birth certificate, I had to get a notarized affidavit signed by my parents and two other witnesses attesting to my age in order to enlist in the navy. When I and seven other inductees showed up for our phy- sical examination at the induction center in a downtown St. Louis office building the eight of us were told to strip to our shorts and line up four abreast. The doctor then told us to bend over, squat, stand up and extend our arms out and rotate them. My left arm was conspicuously crooked at the elbow when I extended it with my palm down [because of the childhood accident], so I kept my palm facing up so the doctor wouldn’t see that it had been busted in the elbow. He then glanced at our bare feet. When he came to me he asked if I had trouble walking…apparently because my arches were unusually low. When I said no, he let it go. He then individually examined our mouths, throats and ears. When it was my turn and he had looked into my ears he told me get down on the floor and put my head between his legs. He then squirted a liquid into them to remove the wax build-up. As soon as we were sworn in we were put to work washing the windows and sweeping and mopping the floor of the office. 54

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We were then sent home and told to report back to the office the following Monday to pick up our files and orders for our travel to the Navy training facility in San Diego, California—something we were all pleased about because going to California was far more appealing than the Great Lakes center in Michigan. That weekend Harvey C., myself and one other person, whose name I have forgotten (!), went on an overnight fishing and camping trip to the Meramec River a few miles south of St. Louis. The only things I remember of the trip is that we did not catch any fish, that sleeping directly on the ground was very uncomfortable, and that after we laid down for the night we could hear the engines of trucks as they ascended a steep grade some two or three miles away. The roaring of the engines went on periodically all night, as trucks delivered various goods to markets in St. Louis.

The Trip to San Diego I went to the Navy recruiting office on Monday afternoon and met up with the other recruits who had been sworn in with me. One of the recruiters, a chief petty officer, accompanied us to the St. Louis train station, and just before we boarded he gave all of our records to the nerdyest looking guy in the bunch, apparently because he looked the most trustworthy. Much to our surprise, our tickets called for private compartments, each of which had two bunk beds. However, when we reached Kansas City that night we were routed out of the compartments and escorted to ordinary seats in one of the coaches…with the explanation that some paying passengers took precedence over military recruits! After trying to go to sleep in my seat, I finally curled up on the floor in between the facing bench seats. There were two girls, sisters, one about eight and the other about twelve or thirteen on the seat facing mine. One of the seven recruits in my group took the vacant seat next to the two girls. After talking to the oldest girl for several minutes the recruit put his right hand between her legs and began trying to feel her up (as the saying goes). The girl kept her legs tightly clinched 55

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR but the guy wouldn’t stop trying to force her. She began a kind of moaning cry and the scenario continued for what seemed like several minutes. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I raised up on my elbow and said, “You’d better stop that!” The guy glared at me for several seconds, continuing his efforts, and then abruptly withdrew his hand. “It’s your loss!” he said to the girl. After one more night we reached Los Angeles, where we were scheduled to change to a train going to San Diego. There was about an hour between trains, so we had time to walk around and stare at things we had never seen before. What I remember most vividly were the palm trees around the station. The stop-over lasted for only about twenty minutes, so we did not leave the vicinity of the station.

The Boot Camp Experience Immediately upon arriving at the naval training center we became a part of dozens of other recruits arriving that day, and were first shunted into a barber shop where we were all given “crew cuts.” Then we all filed into a large supply center where we were issued a duffel bag (the navy equivalent of a suitcase), a ditty bag (for our dental and shaving equipment), shoes, underwear, dungarees for everyday wear and white uniforms for formal wear. We were then divided into “companies” of about 165 recruits and assigned to our barracks and beds. I ended up with a top bunk in a long line of bunks. Our company commander was a chief petty officer named Crowder, who walked with a slight limp. He had several lower grade petty officers as his assistant trainers. We were then told to fall out and fall in…with the trainers showing us where each line was to begin. As soon as we had formed lines we were told to switch places in the order of our height, with the tallest recruit at the head of each line. Chief Crowder then outlined the training that we would go through in the next 12 weeks, following which he asked if there was anyone in the group who had had any military training. I 56

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR held my hand up, and called out: “Six months in the Missouri State Guard!” Two or three others had had similar training. “You are now honorary petty officers third class, and will assist in the training program!” Crowder said. One of the regular trainers than gave each of us newly “commissioned” petty officers a wide white canvas web belt to signify our honorary rank. The next morning at 4 a.m. two of the trainers suddenly barged into our barracks with their wooden stanchions in hand and began pounding on large overhead metal pipes that went from one end of the barracks to the other. The noise was incredible and startling. The trainers yelled out: “Get up! Get shaved! Get showered! Get dressed! Go outside and wait for the breakfast call!” The breakfast call did not come until 6 a.m.

The Hard-On Show-Off

It was widely rumored that the food we were being served was laced with saltpeter—something that was supposed to prevent males from getting erections so we wouldn’t become raunchy during our training. It was either just a rumor or it didn’t work. Several mornings after our training began a guy who also had a top bunk like me some four or five bunks away began yelled out “Hey! Look at this!” just seconds after reveille had sounded. He had a hard- on, had thrown off his blanket, and was waving it around with great glee. What I also remember from this incident is that when he was not holding his pecker upright it laid down flat against his stomach, pointing toward his chin. I realized later that this was because he had worn tight brief shorts all his life, with his pecker positioned upward instead of to one side or the other. I promised myself that if I ever had a son I would not allow him to wear briefs. There was one black guy in my company. Later, in our swimming classes we were required to jump with our clothes on into a pool that was about eight feet deep and do a number of

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR things. In the first such exercise the black guy sank to the bottom of the pool like a rock and appeared to be stuck there. Finally, one of the trainers who had a long pole stuck it down to the guy who grabbed hold of it and was pulled out. He had never been in deep water before and didn’t know how to swim. One Sunday when we were all in our barracks a bully began picking on one of the smaller, weaker guys. Another recruit, from either North or South Carolina, told him to stop. The bully was furious at his interference, turned and tried to hit the Carolinian, a slender guy who did not look at all tough or dangerous. The Carolinian blocked the punch and knocked the guy half way across the room with one blow. “I eat people like you for breakfast!” he said to the fallen man—a comment I will never forget. The bully didn’t bother anyone after that. There was one guy in the company who went for about a week without showering. One morning four of the guys who bunked closest to him pounced on him, dragged him to the shower in his shorts, held him under the shower and scrubbed him down with hard-bristle brushes (that were used to clean the walls and floor of the shower room). Afterward, he took a shower every morning. On one occasion I was posted as a guard on the seaside of the training center, and went on duty at 4 a.m. Besides being dark, it was so foggy I could see only six or eight feet. An hour or so after I took up my post, the security officer making his rounds suddenly materialized in front of me. I was so flab- bergasted I forgot to challenge him with the “Who goes there?” question until he was almost within arm’s length. He let me go with, “You’d better stay more alert!” On another occasion on a Sunday when there was no training it was so foggy all over the training center that it was necessary to string ropes between the different buildings so that people going from one to the other could hold onto them to keep from getting lost. I had discovered that I could avoid make-work assignments during our free time by wearing my honorary petty officer belt

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR and walking rapidly to different places [like the gedunk shop for a milkshake] as if I was officially going somewhere. On our first weekend pass, following three weeks of training, my whole company went into downtown San Diego, where most of us just walked around in our white uniforms and tried not to look like raw navy recruits. A few of the guys went to whorehouses in Tijuana across the border in Mexico. Some of them came back with the clap. We were taken to a nearby Marine base for our weapons training. The first time I fired the M-1 rifle I held it tight against my right cheek. The kickback was so strong my cheek was swollen for a week. We were given a battery of tests to determine our I.Qs, and our subsequent assignments after we finished boot camp. I and six other guys scored well above average, which got us assigned to Naval Communications Supplementary Activities (NCSA), the navy’s intelligence arm, in Washington, D.C. I remember the name of only one of those guys—a fellow named Floyd Pollard, from Beaumont, Texas.

Shipping Out & Falling Off a Ladder Our first assignment out of boot camp was as seamen 3rd class on the U.S.S. Fillmore, which was then in San Diego Harbor. The ship had served as a troop-carrier during the Pacific War and was then used as a target ship (on the outer ring of ships) at the Bikini Atom Bomb Test in the early summer of 1946. [Our backgrounds were being checked, so the Navy apparently thought it might as well get some use out of us.] The ship was anchored some distance from the dock, and we were taken to it by a shuttle boat. There we had to climb a flexible ladder draped over the hull to get abroad. The ship was bobbing in the waves. My duffle bag was heavy and rolled off of my shoulder, leaving me and the bag dangling and holding onto the ladder by one hand. I finally managed to get the bag back on my shoulder and climb abroad, much to the amusement of those on deck watching our arrival. Within an hour after we left the harbor we hit high swells, and the ship began to buck and wallow. All of the six other new 59

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR seamen got seasick. I had been ordered to mop the floor in the mess hall. A cook saw that I was beginning to look queasy. He gave me some crackers to eat and told me to go outside and walk around deck. The nausea passed within about fifteen minutes, and thereafter I was never ever to suffer from this sickening malady. A few days after we left San Diego harbor a full-dress inspection in white uniforms was announced. I and one of the other members of my group got ready early and went out on the fantail to wait for the inspection. While there we sat down on large low metal posts used to secure the ship with huge ropes when at dock. After the inspection it was pointed out to us that our rear- ends were totally black from oil soot that had coated the tops of the posts. The captain and his inspection team obviously realized what had happened, and chose not to not say anything to us. I should have known better because my first early morning duty immediately after 6 a.m. reveille was to “clean-sweep- down fore and aft;” in my case, sweeping and mopping the deck just below the veranda of the captain’s private quarters. One morning when I was mopping away I looked up and saw a women standing on the captain’s poop deck. When she saw me she turned and quickly went back inside. I never saw her again while I was on the ship, and no one else ever said anything about there being a woman on board.

The Shooting Fiasco

One day the ship’s gunner’s mate (a chief petty officer) arranged for us new seaman to practice firing the anti-aircraft guns on the ship. He had the boatswain’s mate construct a large kite, attach a very, very long line to it and launch it from the fantail of the ship. Floyd Pollard was the first one in line to fire. The gun did not have a normal trigger and while he was fumbling around for a trigger he pulled a switch. The gun fired a burst, and the huge

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR kite spiraled into the sea. He had cut the line somewhere between the ship and the kite. That is why I remember his name. The gunner’s mate then allowed some of the regular crew members to shoot at a group of large sea turtles that were swimming a few hundred yards from the ship. That bothered me, and still does to this day.

Balboa, Panama & the Life-Changing Letter

One Sunday afternoon when the ship was tied up at a dock in Balboa, Panama I was sitting on an upturned bucket on the fantail chipping paint when the mailman brought me several letters—one from my older sister Jessie who was then living in Phoenix, Arizona with her husband Gene Holland. In her letter she included a small clipping about the opening [by a retired Air Force general] of The American Institute for Foreign Trade (AIFT) in Glendale, Arizona on what had been an air force training base [known as Thunderbird] for Chinese pilots during the war. She had written on a corner of the clipping: “A nut like you might want to go to this kind of school some day!” She obviously regarded me as a character for some reason. I have no memory of keeping that thought in my mind, but six years later I did go to the school and it changed my life in ways that I could not have imagined .* ______

*After several name changes over the years, AIFT is now the famous Thunderbird School of Global Management. [The only memorable speaker who addressed my 1952-1953 class was Barry Goldwater, who landed in his own plane on the school’s airport runway. He was running for the Senate and later was a candidate for the presidency. In the early 1970s I taught at the school for two semesters. ______

During the several days our ship was docked in Balboa I and most of the crew went ashore to visit Panama City, where several crew members visited prostitutes. A week or so later some 61

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR of them came down with gonorrhea. From Balboa we proceeded to sail through the Panama Canal, with its lakes and locks—an extraordinary experience. Within minutes of entering the Caribbean Ocean on the east side of the Panama we encountered huge swells, resulting in the ship rising and falling to great heights. I was on the fantail coiling ropes. When the front of the ship dipped and the rear end rose it exposed the propeller blades to the open air, creating a whirling sound. The third time the fantail dropped like a huge elevator out of control my hat flew up some fifty or more feet in the air and sailed away. We rounded the western end of Cuba at night, and could see the lights of Havana. As we got farther north along the Atlantic seaboard it got windy and cold. My watch outside the pilot’s wheel house was 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. One morning about six o’clock a steward came out of the cabin and set a cup of coffee down on the railing beside me. He said hello, but nothing else. After a couple of minutes I presumed that the coffee was for me, and began drinking it. A few minutes later the captain came out, looking for his coffee. I apologized. He accepted the situation with good grace, stepped back inside and told his steward to pour another cup.

Living Next to Lincoln & Jefferson By the late fall of 1946 I was living in a prefab complex called Quarters I [Eye], built in 1941 in West Potomac Park to house navy personnel. The complex fronted on the Washington D.C. bank of the Potomac River. The Lincoln Memorial was some 400 yards to the north, the west end of the Tidal Basin was about 50 yards from my back window, and the Jefferson Mem- orial was some 500 yards away on the southeast side of the basin. The Tidal Basin is, of course, famous for many things, one of which is the fact that it is ringed by Japanese cherry trees that blossom each spring, attracting hundreds of thousands of viewers. The cherry trees, 3,020 of them altogether, were

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR presented to the United States as a friend-ship gift by the people of Japan in 1912. My new address had to be one of the most extraordinary locations for housing in Washington, D.C. that one can imagine, but to this day I am not sure that we sailors who lived there were aware enough to fully appreciate it! A Close Encounter with Admiral Nimitz Immediately after arriving in Washington I and my group began six weeks of intense training in cryptography, and then were assigned to Naval Communications Supplementary Activities [NCSA] headquarters in a former girl’s school on the northeast side of the city. Apparently because someone took my last name as being Hispanic, I was assigned to the Spanish language code-breaking division, which was headed by a Hispanic-American Ph.D. A Navy shuttle bus picked us up at Quarters I each weekday morning at 7:30 a.m. and brought us home each evening. The NCSA headquarters building was T-shaped, with the top of the T as well as the bottom consisting of long hallways with offices on each side. The hallways floors were covered with linoleum that was waxed and buffed every day. The first shuttle bus back to Quarters I left the front of the building (formed by the top of the T), every evening at 5 minutes past 5. My office was at the far end of the bottom of the T, and I usually missed the first bus if it left on time. One evening I decided to make sure I got on the first bus and at 5 I took off running down the long aisle. The “rotunda” where the leg of the T joined the top was fairly large, and as I entered this open space I saw a group of high-ranking officers entering the area from the corridor on the right side. The man leading the group was five-star Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the highest ranking officer in the navy at that time…and the man who had commanded the U.S.’s naval forces in the Pacific during World War II. I tried to stop, but I began sliding on the waxed linoleum floor as if I was on ice. The closer I got to the admiral and his

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR entourage, the more strained their expressions. The admiral kind of leaned back as if to avoid any impact. I finally came to a stop some five or six feet from the group. I snapped to attention and started to give them a snappy salute. When I got my right hand half way up I realized I had my hat in it. I didn’t say it, but I instantly thought, “What the Hell!” and instantly dropped my hand and my hat back down to my side… and just stood there at stiff attention. I can only imagine the look on my face. The admiral and his entourage walked on by, staring at me in disbelief. Nobody said a word, but if the looks I got from some of the lower ranking officers could have killed, I would have been history. There were no repercussions resulting from this incident, probably because there were no other witnesses who might have taken some action against me.

The Urge to Write I had started a journal when I was in my mid-teens [writing pithy sayings that I thought were both smart and wise] but had stopped when I joined the navy. I started writing again—this time commentary about people in the news and public events, and hanging the sheets of paper on a string used to turn on an overhead light in the PR office in my wing of the building after the staff had left at 5. I was soon identified as the culprit but since the com-ments were mostly humorous and people liked them, I was just told to stop. Another writing experience at that time was also un-usual. Some social-type organization published the names and addresses of high-school age girls around the country who wanted to correspondent with members of the military to boost their moral. I began writing a girl in Illinois. However, after about three months she informed me that her mother had ordered her to stop because our writing had became too personal. It was this experience that revealed to me how easy it was to get caught up in and controlled by words. 64

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My Embarrassing Failure As my two-year period of service approached I became eligible to take the test for Petty Officer 3rd Class for my rating as a cryptographer. I prepared for the test by virtually memorizing the manuals. But when I took the test and the results were posted, I had failed—the only failure among several others who took the test with me. I was shocked, as were my superiors and friends. I was also embarrassed beyond words. The only explanation I could think of was that I had put many of the answers in the wrong boxes. The following month I took the test again and passed.

Out of the Navy In the early summer of 1948 Dad became seriously ill. Mom asked me to request a hardship discharge so I could come home and help support the family. I went through the unit chaplain who got the request approved in less than a week. However, by the time my discharge papers had been pro- cessed and I arrived in St. Louis some 10 days later my father had made a miraculous recovery (and lived for 33 more years!). I attempted to re-enlist in the Navy but was refused. That was one of the most depressing events in my life up to that time. I loved the Navy and everything about it, and had fully intended to make it a career.

The Search for a Job

I began looking for work but could not find anything. The competition in St. Louis from other recently discharged servicemen was awesome. I decided to go to Los Angeles just because it sounded exotic. Since I had been out of the service for less than a month I still qualified for military transportation so I hitched a ride on a military troop transport plane which happened to be going to Cheyenne, Wyoming. I was the only passenger on the plane, and on the way the pilots forgot about me and ascended to 14,000 feet. 65

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I was lying across several seats dozing. When I began to feel strange, I started to get up but passed out from lack of oxygen and didn’t come to until we started descending. As I slowly became conscious, I first became aware that my cheek felt like it was touching ice. And after a minute or so I realized I was lying on the metal floor of the plane, and managed to crawl back up on a seat. I recovered fast enough after the plane landed, and from Cheyenne took a Greyhound bus the rest of the way to L.A. In L.A. I checked into the YMCA. One of the directors gave me an introduction to a friend who had a small metal shop…and I went to work polishing metal shoe inserts in a machine filled with ball bearings. I then rented a room from an elderly lady who lived closed by. I enlisted in the Navy Reserve and the following week-end went on a cruise aboard a destroyer escort to Catalina Island. One night the next week I turned on a gas stove in my room because the nighttime temperature had begun dropping off, and opened the window about six inches. The next morning when I woke up I had the worst headache imaginable. The buildup of carbon monoxide had nearly done me in. I went to work but was very sick. By lunchtime I had decided to return to St. Louis. When I told the shop owner that I had decided to go home at the end of the week he said: “You can go now!” The following day I put my navy uniform back on, put my stuff in my duffle bag, and began hitchhiking. My first ride took me to the outskirts of LA. My second ride took me to an isolated intersection [just like in the movies] in the desert several miles outside of Desert Palms. My third ride was with two young men my own age who had also just been discharged from the service, had bought an old car, and were on their way to Oklahoma City where their families lived. We took turns sleeping in the back seat of the car and driving. By the time we reached Oklahoma, one (or more!) of the rods in the car’s engine had come lose, and the engine was clattering like someone was beating on it with a hammer. The

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR noise was such that people on the sidewalks stopped and stared as we passed by. I stayed that night at the home of one of the boys, and the next morning boarded a reliable Greyhound bus. Back in St. Louis I bought a car—a 1939 Chevrolet coupe that was forest green and the prettiest car I had ever seen. At that time Dad was working at two jobs—at Kroger’s food warehouse during the day and at Carter’s Carburetor at night. He got me a job at Kroger’s dumping potatoes onto a belt where a line of women picked out the bad ones. On my second day one of the women asked me what I was going to do, now that I was out of the service. I said I wanted to go back to school. The foreman heard me, and when Friday came he fired me. Brother Don and I loaded some baggage in my green coupe and we headed for Phoenix, Arizona to see Winnie and look for work. We planned to stop off in Oklahoma City to pick up Jessie and take her with us to Phoenix. About three hours after leaving St. Louis on Highway 66, with me driving in a hilly section of southeast Missouri, I dozed off when we were in a long line of cars heading down a curving slope on the two-lane highway. When I abruptly woke up—I don’t know why—we had drifted into the opposite lane of the highway and were headed toward a line of cars coming our way. Someone in the lane where we should have been saw our predicament and slowed down so we could squeeze back into the right lane. The shock kept me awake and wide-eyed for the rest of the day. We stayed over one night with Jessie and Gene in Oklahoma City and then continued on toward Arizona, with Jessie going with us so she could also visit Winnie. From Flagstaff we headed down Oak Creek Canyon toward Sedona. Midway down the canyon we came across a vertical pipe alongside the road that connected to a spring higher up on the canyon wall. It had a short horizontal spout at the end. We stopped to put water into the car radiator and get a drink. Don and I started horsing around, trying to push each other under the pipe. After shoving him I turned quickly to get away

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR and ran into the spout, cutting a gash in my forehead between my eyes. I still have the scar. On the outskirts of Phoenix, we stopped somewhere [I don’t remember where], but I do recall shaving. After dropping Jessie off at Winnie’s house, Don and I began looking for work. We went to a place where fruit growers came each morning to hire workers to pick oranges and grapefruit. We were selected and boarded a truck that took us to a grapefruit orchard. After working for about four hours in the unbearable heat, we decided that wasn’t for us. When we saw that the truck that brought us to the orchard was going back into town, we climbed aboard. The foreman who had hired us saw the truck leaving with us sitting in back. He jumped into his car, caught up with the truck, stopped it, and told us if we left he wasn’t going to pay us for the work we had done. We said OK, and stayed on the truck. Winnie did not have room for us to stay with her, so the following day we headed back for St. Louis, sleeping in the car and eating baloney sandwiches on the way. In New Mexico we picked up two young hitchhikers, who shared the driving with us and helped pay for gas. One night we pulled off the highway into a field and went to sleep on the ground. The next morning when we woke up cattle were graz- ing all around us. The two hitchhikers stayed with us until we reached St. Louis. Shortly returning to St. Louis, I drove Mom and Dad, Fern, Becky and Rose to Mayberry to visit Mother Evans. On the way back home it started raining. At the bottom of a long slope the road turned to the right without being canted. I was driving rather fast. The car went into a spin, and spun like a merry-go- around three or four times down the blacktopped road, then went off of the road and down an embankment, with Mom screaming all the way. The car tilted up its side as if it was going to turn over, and then righted itself. The jarring killed the engine. I restarted it and, surprisingly, was able to drive back up the embankment onto the road. When the car was back up on the road I hesitated

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR for a minute. At which point, Dad, a very cool man, said very quietly: “Would you like for me to drive?” He drove us the rest of the way home.

Joining the Army Security Agency A day or so after the car incident when I was on a main street in downtown St. Louis after having interviewed for a job, I was approached by an army master sergeant who turned out to be a recruiter. When he learned that I had been in the intelligence branch of the Navy for two years, he told me he could enlist me directly into the Army Security Agency, the army equivalent of the branch of the Navy I had been in, at my rank [Petty Officer 3rd class], and have me back in Washington D.C. in no time. I signed up but instead of being sent directly to Washington D.C. as promised I was required to take basic training again, this time at Ft. Knox in Kentucky. Before leaving I signed my car over to Dad—to my knowledge the first vehicle he ever owned.

Meeting Brother Don While I was at Ft. Knox I learned that Don, who had also joined the army, was in training a short distance away, and one Sunday went to see him. When I and a friend arrived there we found him in his bunk, reading. We talked for a few minutes. That was the last time I was to see him for more than 15 years. Shortly after he finished basic training the Korean War started, resulting in him being shipped to Korea in the fall of 1950. What befell him there could have been one of the greatest family tragedies imaginable.* ______

*On 1 December 1950 Don and some 16 surviving members of his unit were captured by Chinese troops shortly after a large Chinese army crossed the Yalu River in support of the North Korean invasion of South Korea.

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Held in a prison camp for some three years, during which over half of his fellow prisoners died, Don remained in the service after the Armistice ended the war in 1953. We finally met in the summer of 1963 at our parents’ home in Phoenix when he was on his way to some assignment and I and my wife were making our first visit home from Japan in more than four years. I was astounded to see what good shape he was in, and learned that during his last year in the prisoner- of-war camp the prisoners had been provided with corn to eat— while during the two years preceding this they had been given a thin rice gruel and reduced to eating mice and rats…when those rodents were caught. During Don’s post-war military service he became a commissioned officer, rose to the rank of major and had a remarkable career with assignments on Kwajalein Island, in the Philippines, Vietnam, Paris, the Pentagon, and elsewhere. Following his retirement from the army at Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona he became the City Clerk of Tucson, serving in that capacity for some 20 years—longer than anyone else in the history of the city. After retiring from the city job Don and his wife Donna moved to Phoenix, where he became a paragon of a grandfather to the children of their three daughters, and a wise advisor to the extended Dement family. ______I went from Ft. Knox to the ASA’s training unit in Ar- lington, Virginia on the west side of the Potomac River and about fifteen minutes from the Lincoln Memorial on the D.C. side; near where I had lived while in the Navy. What awaited me was to set the stage for the rest of my life, with profound results that could not have been imagined

Assignment in Japan Following several weeks of intense training in using IBM machines to create matrixes for coding and decoding, I and six others who had gone through the course with me were assigned to the ASA’s Asian headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. The IBM 70

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR equipment that we would need to set up and operate a support unit for the Agency had already been shipped. Immediately after being assigned to ASA Japan I got orders to report to a small military airbase in Petaluma, California north of San Francisco to catch a military transport plane to Tokyo, and was given leave to visit my family in St. Louis en route. Using a military travel voucher, I went from Washington, D.C. to St. Louis by train. After two days and three nights in St. Louis visiting my parents and younger siblings I boarded a Greyhound bus for Phoenix, Arizona, then a small town, for a stopover to see sister Winnie. I walked from the Greyhound bus station in central Phoenix to Winnie’s house, about 12 blocks away. When I arrived she was outside in the yard raking up leaves—and was very pregnant with her son Gayland, Jr. [known as Dobbie when he was young]. I stayed only one night at Winnie’s, and that evening she and her husband Gayland took me to a restaurant that set astride the county border—where it was dry on one side of the restaurant (no alcohol) but wet on the other side (alcoholic drinks served.) My next stop was a small military airfield north of Petaluma that the ASA used when shipping personnel to destinations in Asia. [Petaluma was known as the egg capital of the world.] At the airbase I met up with the six other guys in my group, one of whom [the ranking master sergeant] had a new Ford sedan. One afternoon he and I headed for San Francisco in his car, and shortly after getting onto the highway he stopped to pick up two girls hitchhiking. He asked me to drive, while he got into the backseat with the girls. What often happened in the backseats of cars during those years happened during the drive into San Francisco. The only other memorable event at the airbase occurred when I and another member of our team went for a walk in the surrounding desert and ran across a herd of jackrabbits. They appeared to be as tall as small kangaroos and for a boy from the Ozark Hills they were a sight to see.

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The Trip to Tokyo Getting to Japan was an experience. From the airfield north of Petaluma we boarded a no frills military transport plane for the eight-hour flight to Hawaii. We landed at Schofield Barracks Airfield adjoining Wahiawa town in the high-lands northwest of Honolulu, and stayed there for three nights. On our second afternoon there I and another member of the group [Ed Wei- demer] took a shuttle bus into Honolulu, walked up and down Kalakaua Avenue, went to the Kuhio area of the beach, stared at the waves, ogled the female sunbathers, watched surfers—and when walking back down Kalakaua at sunset passed several of Waikiki’s famous streetwalkers. From Hawaii we flew to Johnston Island, a tiny sliver of land between Hawaii and Guam. The highest point on the island was 14 feet—seven of which was a pile of rocks. The only native inhabitants of the island was a huge flock of gooney birds—which were so heavy and ungainly that they had to run for several yards before they could take off and get into the air, sometimes stumbling and falling in the process. Our next stop was Guam, where we stayed for two nights. I and Weidemer shared a one-room two-bunk sleeping hut whose side walls stopped some 18 inches from the concrete base to allow air to flow through. The bunks had unusually long legs, which we commented on but had no idea why. The hut, along with several others, was in thick jungle some two hundred yards away from the main buildings of the facility. Around midnight I was awakened by Ed shouting and jumping around. He finally found the string attached to a single overhead light bulb between the two bunks, and turned the light on. “There’s a shit-eating rat in my bed!” he yelled. Sure enough, a second after he got the light turned on a huge jungle rat jumped off of his bunk and scampered away, bump- ing its head on the wall as it went out. We arrived at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport in the late afternoon, where we were met by a U.S. military truck driver assigned to pick us up. We piled ourselves and our duffle bags into the back of the truck, the top and sides of which were covered with 72

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR canvas. Our destination was what had previously been the First Tokyo Arsenal in the Oji district on the north side of the city. Until shortly before we arrived in Japan the Army Security Agency headquarters had been located in the Sanshin Build- ing in downtown Tokyo, about 100 yards from General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in the Dai-Ichi Insurance Building facing the Imperial moat. MacArthur was the Supreme Allied Commander of the of the military forces occupying Japan following the end of World War II in August 1945. The Sanshin Building, which we were looking forward to, was just a block from one of the most famous theaters in Tokyo, the Takarazuka [renamed the Ernie Pyle Theater during the U.S. Occupation of Japan], with the famous Imperial Hotel just across the street from the theater. The trip through the central part of Tokyo was strange. Some of the city was still burned and bombed out. During the entire trip we saw only two Japanese cars, both wood-burning and steam-driven. Some of the streets we traversed had no sidewalks, and were filled with pedestrians. We could only see out the back of the truck, and we watched, fascinated, as the crowd of walkers that had parted to get out of the way of the speeding vehicle flowed back together behind it, reminding me of the wake of a ship. Virtually all of the women we saw were dressed in very old and ragged kimono, while the men were in ancient workmen’s clothing—some wearing the short traditional happi work jackets. What struck me most was the fact that many of the women appeared to be missing their left hand, and I wondered if their hands had been cut off for some reason. I found out later that it was common for women to draw their left hand back into the voluminous sleeve of their kimono, especially when it was cold.

Fixing up the 1st Tokyo Arsenal

The First Tokyo Arsenal into which the ASA headquarters had just moved consisted of over a dozen buildings of various sizes, including living quarters, warehouses, a large garage, and the large Western-style headquarters of the former Arsenal. This

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR large building was situated on a low hill near the front gate of the large compound—and was the site chosen by the ASA commander for his head-quarters. The arsenal compound had been completely deserted by its former Japanese occupants when the war ended in August 1945, and part of it was still a total mess. Our group was assigned to a large building that had housed offices but had not yet been cleaned up. We set up bunk beds amidst the debris and then spent several days hauling trash out of the rooms, sweeping, scrubbing and painting. By the time we had finished making one small part of the building livable, the IBM equipment necessary for our work had arrived, and was soon set up in one of the buildings adjoining the headquarters on the low hill. Our first foray away from the post [the day after our arrival] was an indoctrination lecture along with a large group of other recent arrivals in Japan, at the Ernie Pyle Theater in the center of the city. The lecture was about the relationship between the Japanese and the Occupation Forces, and how we should conduct ourselves. Encounter with a Sumo And Meeting my Hatsu-Koi My first solo visit outside of the former Japanese military arsenal was on a Sunday to an ice-skating rink in Ryogoku where Japan’s famous sumo wrestling stadium was located. The rink had been taken over by the U.S. Forces and was operated by the military for Occupation personnel and their families. The ASA post was about a 10-minute walk from Oji Station on the Keihin-Tohoku commuter line that went from the northern outskirts of Tokyo, through Tokyo Central Station, and on to Sakuragicho Station, the second station after Yokohama Station. To reach Ryogoku I had to change trains at Akihabara Station, only 15 minutes from Oji. While I was standing on the boarding platform in Aki- habara waiting for a train to Ryogku a sumo wrestler who was well over six feet tall and weighed perhaps 300 pounds walked up within a few feet of me and stood glaring down at me in

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR what I took to be a very intimidating manner. I very carefully moved a few feet away and avoided looking at him. That was the only occasion during my many years in Japan, before and after the Occupation by the Allied Powers, that I felt threatened. However, late one night when I was strolling in a bar area in Oji not far from the ASA post—in a narrow lane that was totally deserted except for me—an empty beer bottle came sailing out of the darkness and landed off to my right. I always suspected it was thrown by a GI. At the ice-rink in Ryogoku I went to a concessionaire to rent skates. I was waited on by a pretty 16-year old girl name Fujie Yamamoto, who turned out to be a niece of the man who ran the shop. On my second trip to the rink a week later, I managed to get it across to the girl that I wanted to meet her away from the shop, and suggested the entrance to Ueno Park, which adjoins Ueno Station on the line that went to my stop in Oji. She arrived at the appointed time to find me sitting on a park bench. After several minutes of trying to communicate followed by long silences, she said several times, Sanpoh shimasho? (sahn-poe she-mah-shoh?). I understood that shimasho meant “shall we?” but I had no idea what sanpoh meant. Finally, she managed to say Wahku! Wahku! It took another minute for me to realize she was trying to pronounce “walk” She was saying: “Shall we take a walk?” That was the beginning of my hatsu koi (hot-sue koy), or “first love” in Japan…and my effort to learn how to speak Japanese. However, this relationship was truncated after our second date because she did not want to go as far as I did. She was the epitome of sweet innocence and naiveté but she had a very strong will. I was not to see her again for nearly two years.

A Hamburger & Milk Shake On another Sunday in the fall of 1949 I took the train to downtown Tokyo [about 20 minutes away] and got off at Yurakucho Station, which served the Hibiya and Yura-kucho theater districts, the Imperial Hotel, General MacArthur’s headquarters 75

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR and the famous Sukiyabashi and Ginza shopping and entertainment districts. Chuo Dori [Central Avenue or Central Street] the main north-south Ginza thoroughfare, was the first street in Japan to have sidewalks and streetlights. A short distance from Yurakucho Station I crossed Suki- yabashi (Sukiya Bridge) spanning one of the several canals that still ran through the city. There was a pizza parlor, named Nicolas Pizza House, built on the sloping east side of the canal, setting on stilts. The owner was an Italian named Nicolas. Shortly after the Allied Occupation of Japan ended in 1952 he moved the restaurant to the Roppongi district, still known for its collection of restaurants, bars and nightclubs. I went on some three blocks to the center of the Ginza, the most famous shopping district in the city for over 200 years, heading for the main military PX in the city on the northeast corner of Chuo Dori and Hibiya Avenue. Early in the Occupation of Japan the U.S. Army had com- mandeered the huge Mitsukoshi Department Store* on the northeast corner of the most famous intersection in the city and turned it into the main military PX (Post Exchange) in Japan, reserved for the use of Occupations forces and their dependents.* ______

*In 1971 Ken Fujita, a Japanese businessman, got the franchise for McDonald’s in Japan, and opened the first store in the foyer of the Ginza’s famous Mitsukoshi Department Store. There were no seats, only a serving counter with a kitchen behind it, so patrons had to eat standing up on the sidewalk in front of the store. As of 2011, the Fujita franchise had 3,800 stores in Japan, with a stated goal of reaching 10,000. ______After walking around in the huge multi-level store for a while I went across the street to the famous but much smaller Wako Department Store. Its basement had been turned into a combination ice-cream parlor and cafeteria style restaurant that was also for the exclusive use of Allied Powers military per- 76

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR sonnel and their dependents. I had a hamburger and a chocolate milkshake. Some five years later after I had left the service and returned to Tokyo as a civilian I was standing on the corner of the same intersection when my high school Latin teacher came by with a group of her friends. I recognized her instantly. We were both amazed by the chance encounter.

A Mobile Whorehouse Makes the News

The Stars & Stripes military newspaper carried a story about two enterprising GI’s who were ambulance drivers for the military hospital and had developed a part-time business that was indicative of the American spirit.. Afterhours, they put two prostitutes in the ambulance and cruised around GI hangouts looking for customers. According to the article business was very good but it was soon closed down as a result of the story. Most of the larger buildings and hotels in the Yurakucho and Hibiya districts of Tokyo had been taken over by the U.S and at night they attracted swarms of prostitutes.

The Incredible Black Market The volume of American goods stolen and otherwise obtained from U.S. bases and GIs that began showing up on the Japanese market from 1947 on was incredible. In early 1950 the word came out that a group of American officers and GI’s who were in charge of delivering goods to U.S. PX’s around the country by train had a side business going. They were stocking several coaches on the train with goods not ordered by the PX’s, and selling them to black marketers along their routes. The monthly value of goods being sold was said to be in the millions of dollars, contributing enor- mously to the creation of Asia’s first mass market.* ______

*In 1958 when my wife Margaret and I first set up housekeeping in Tokyo we regularly shopped at places that carried 77

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR black-market American goods, including canned oatmeal, black-eyed peas, pumpkin, corn, and baked beans. In 1964 my friend Fred T. Perry and I wrote a book entitled THE JAP- ANESE AS CONSUMERS – Asia’s First Mass Market [Walker- Weather-hill, New York]. It was the first description of post- World War II Japan’s black market-seeded consumer market.] ______

A significant number of individual ASA personnel engaged in selling goods to the black market, with cigarettes being a favored item, since all members of the service were issued a carton a week free-of-charge… something the tobacco industry had negotiated with the War Department during WWII [as a patriotic gesture!]. I didn’t smoke, and gave my rations to a friend, Bob Black, who was later to play a one-time but key role in my subsequent life. Several members of the ASA who were involved in the black market bought homes from their destitute Japanese owners as investments and in later years sold them at huge profits. Others bought homes for their Japanese girl friends. I made a $200 donation to the mother of my then girl friend [who worked as a waitress on the ASA post] so she could buy the house they lived in—a gesture that later was to have extraordinary consequences on my life. At that timed you could buy a modest house in some Tokyo districts for as little as $400. [My girl friend’s father had been killed in the war.] Later that year, in a move to curb some of the black-market activity, the U.S. military Occupation Forces decreed that all military and Department of the Army civilians in the country would thereafter use military script as money instead of greenbacks. Hundreds of thousands of GI’s had paid for things on the Japanese market with U.S. currency, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in the hands of Japanese. Only foreign military and civilian personnel could exchange greenbacks for the new script, so there was an incredible rush by the Japanese to try to find foreigners who would convert their greenbacks into script. There was a 15-day period for making the exchange.

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Many Japanese lost huge amounts of money. During this period there were dozens of Japanese lining the approach to the ASA compound, approaching GI’s who came along, asking them to convert greenbacks for them. The lady who ran a laundry about three hundred yards from the gate to the ASA complex accosted me when I was returning to the site from a trip downtown. I felt sorry for her but refused since changing currency for the Japanese was a serious offense.

Meeting the Famous Tetsuzo Inumaru

In late 1949 I had occasion to visit the lobby of the famous Im- perial Hotel, designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and opened for business in 1922. The original Imperial Hotel, built in 1890 by the government for visiting dignitaries, was strictly Japanese style, and was closed in 1919. The young Tetsuzo Inumaru, who had trained in hotels in New York and Paris, became the president and general manager of the new Imperial. The day after the Imperial opened in 1922 Tokyo was struck by a major earthquake that destroyed virtually ever Western style building in the downtown area of the city…except for the Imperial Hotel. Wright had designed it to set on huge pillars pounded into the soft reclaimed land to both stabilize the foundation and make it possible for the hotel to sway from side- to-side and bounce up and down without breaking up. All of the foreign correspondents and many of the foreign businesspeople in Tokyo at that time moved into the Imperial Hotel until their own homes and office buildings could be repaired or rebuilt. Their stories of the survival of the hotel made it famous worldwide. When the American Occupation of Japan began in the fall of 1945 the U.S. military took over the hotel as quarters for senior officers. The day that Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Japan, arrived in Tokyo [he had stayed for a few days in a hotel in Yokohama after arriving at Atsugi Air Base northwest of that city] he had Tetsuzo Inumaru accompany him in a chauffeur-driven car around Tokyo for a view of the bomb-and-fire wrecked city. I under- 79

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR stand that was the first and last time MacArthur ever toured the city. He then took up residence in the mansion of the prewar American ambassador to Japan and limited his travels to going to and from the residence to his office in the Dai-Ichi Insurance Building in Hibiya, near the southeast corner of the Imperial Palace grounds. The officer I was with on my visit to the hotel introduced me to Inumaru. In later years I stayed at the Imperial many times and became well-acquainted with his son, Ichiro, who began working at the hotel in 1949 and followed his father as president and general manager. In the late 1960s I wrote a short history of the Imperial Hotel at the behest of its advertising agency, headed by Ben Izumida. The small book was richly bound and used by the hotel as a gift for VIP guests.

Seeing the American Caesar In the early spring of 1950 I happened to be in the Yurakucho - Hibiya district a few minutes before noon, and joined with several dozen other people, mostly Japanese, on both sides of the entrance of the Dai-Ichi Insurance Building, where Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Allied Commander, had his headquarters. Every day precisely at noon, MacArthur would come out the front door of the building and walk swiftly across the sidewalk to a waiting car, which took him to his home—the hillside mansion on the grounds of the American Embassy where prewar ambassadors lived—for lunch. People continued to gather on the sidewalk to get a glimpse of the famous general until he was fired by U.S. President Harry S. Truman in April 1951 for ignoring the president’s policies regarding China and North Korea. The president and his ad- visors were afraid China would join the Korean War in a much greater force than they eventually did.

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My First Book / 1950 Immediately after my short-lived would-be romance with Fujie Yamamoto from the Ryogoku Ice Rink, I began an effort to study the Japanese language but couldn’t find a suitable text book. In early 1950 I wrote my own book, entitled JAPANESE SIMPLIFIED, for which I created my own system of English language phonetics for every word and expression in the book, making it possible to pronounce the terms and sentences properly without previous study or instruction. The book was very popular among ASA personal on the post primarily because it made it possible for them to communicate with their Japanese girl friends.* ______

* Some thirty years later my wife Margaret and I were invited by one of her friends to the home of a Scottsdale, Arizona couple for some kind of party. When I was introduced to the man of the house, he got a surprised look on his face, and said: “You’re Boyé De Mente?” I said “Yes...and you can verify that with my wife!” “Wait just a moment!” he said. He disappeared into another room, came back within seconds, and handed me a copy of JAPANESE SIMPLIFIED, which had been out of print for at least forty years and I didn’t even have a file copy of my own. You can imagine the interesting conversation we had after that!* ______

*Many years later I used an improved version of the phonetic system I had created in a new book entitled SPEAK JAPANESE TODAY – A Little Language Goes a Long Way! [the latter a tag line the American Armed Forces Radio had used in a language program broadcast during the Occupation years], which has since been one of my best selling books. It has vocabulary and expressions for a wide range of people, from businesspeople and travelers to doctors, hotel staff, tourist guides, anime fans, home-stay hosts, immigration officials to airline pilots.

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It appears that many of the buyers of the book are devotees of Japan’s martial arts, particularly judo and karate. ______

The Korean War

Following the end of World War II in August 1945 the U.S. Army occupied the southern half of the Korean Peninsula and allowed Russian troops to occupy the northern half—with the midway separation point being the 38th Parallel. American politicians screwed around with establishing a democracy in South Korea—which finally happened [in name only] on August 15, 1948 with former exile Syng-Man Rhee [who had fled to Hawaii during the Japanese occupation of Korea] appointed the first president of the Republic of Korea. Shortly thereafter the U.S. pulled most of its troops out of South Korea. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had proceeded to make Kim Il Sung, a dedicated North Korean Communist who had been educated in Moscow, the leader of a Communist regime in North Korea. On September 9, 1948 Kim announced the for- mation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [a non sequitur if there ever was one]. He was obsessed with the idea of capturing the southern half of the peninsula and incorporating it under his rule. Over the next year and a half North Korea created a huge army with the help of the Soviet Union, and began stationing troops along the 38th parallel that had become the border between the two Koreas. By January 1950 North Korea had some 200,000 troops outfitted with Russian-made tanks and mobile guns amassed on their side of the 38th Parallel. It should have been obvious to everyone that this constituted a clear and present danger to South Korea. On 25 June 1950 this huge North Korean army launched a blitzkrieg attack on South Korean, capturing Seoul and quickly overrunning the peninsula to within a few miles of Pusan [aka Busan] at its southern end.

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Shocked into action the U.S. and its Allies scrambled to launch a counterattack against the North Korean forces. General MacArthur, America’s proconsul in Japan, planned and directed a massive Allied invasion from the sea, at Inchon on the west side of the Korean peninsula a short distance to the northwest of Seoul. The Allies cut the supply lines of the North Korean forces that were spread throughout the peninsula, and began pushing them back across the 38th Parallel and on toward the Yalu River, which marked the border between North Korea and China. Earlier, Gen. MacArthur had informed the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Harry S. Truman that the war would be over by October of that year, so there was no need for U.S. forces to be outfitted with winter gear for the frigid weather that literally freezes North Korean during the winter months. Within days after the Allied counterattack started over half of the ASA personnel stationed at Oji had been shipped to South Korea. One of my friends [not a member of my code unit] was included in this transfer. Three days later he was in Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington D.C. He’d been shot in the butt. I never heard how it happened that he got shot in that particularly part of his anatomy...or heard from him again, for that matter. American war planes flew missions from U.S. airbases in Japan, making bombing runs on the North Korean forces. After dropping their bombs and making strafing runs the pilots and their crews returned to their bases in Japan, and those with families there went home for dinner that evening. In November 1950 the Chinese entered the war on North Korea’s side with an army of some 850,000 so-called volun- teers, quickly pushing the Allied forces back to the 38th parallel, killing and capturing thousands of Allied troops in battles of epic violence. Brother Don’s Ordeal

Brother Don, who had enlisted in the army in 1948 and whom I had last seen when we were both in training in Kentucky that year, was among the hundreds of thousands of American GI’s 83

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR shipped to Korea following the outbreak of the war. He and the 16 surviving members of his company were captured by Chin- ese troops on December 1, shortly after the Chinese crossed the Yalu River to aid North Korea and began sweeping southward. Don told me later that he and members of his unit were lucky to have been captured by Chinese rather than North Koreans because the latter kept no prisoners, killing them on the spot—a policy the Chinese changed. Because American troops had no winter clothing in the frigid weather, with temperatures as low as 70 degrees below zero, many of the men froze to death—according to Don, their bodies becoming as stiff as logs. The treatment of prisoners of war by their Chinese and North Korean captors was brutal, to say the least. Over half of the prisoners in Don’s camp died the first year from wounds, various ailments and a poor diet [some were reduced to eating vermin during the early years of their captivity], but my brother survived, and was finally released after an Armistice was signed in 1953. He said later that during the negotiations for the armistice he and the other prisoners received an allotment of corn that was sufficient for them to regain the weight they had lost. They were also allowed to work out on parallel bars they constructed in the prison yard. I was aboard the Japanese passenger ship Hikawa Maru on my way back to Tokyo in the summer of 1953 [after graduating from The American Institute for Foreign Trade, now the famous Thunderbird School of Global Management], when I received a cable notifying me that Don had been released and was on his way back to the U.S. Our parents had not learned that he was still alive for many months after he had been reported missing, finally learning that he was a prisoner of war from a shortwave ham radio operator in Australia, who forwarded the information on to Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater [also an avid radio ham operator] who called my parents and gave them the news.* ______*Some years after my wife and I moved from Tokyo back to Arizona in 1963 we bought a home not far from the mountain- 84

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR top Paradise Valley residence of Senator Goldwater, but he was seldom there and I never had the opportunity to thank him. Mom, in particularly, always spoke highly of Goldwater, even though she didn’t like all of his political views. ______

“Truman’s Year!” My 3-year enlistment in the ASA was scheduled to end in the summer of 1951, but soon after the Korean War began in June of 1950 the U.S. government extended all military enlistments by one year. That was referred to as “Truman’s Year.” Starting a Newspaper In the early summer of 1951 I completed a mail-order course in journalism, and on my own time started a weekly newspaper called the ASA Star. Thereafter, I wrote, printed and distributed the 12-page 11x14-sized publication during my free time. It was an immediate hit. I also began sending feature stories on Japanese culture to an English language magazine called PREVIEW—started some three years earlier by an ex-G.I named Robert Booth—and then the second largest circulated English language magazine in Japan, topped only by Reader’s Digest. A few weeks later my supervisor where I worked apparently complained to the second in command at the ASA outpost that I was too involved in my newspaper and was more interested in that than in my work. The major called me in and asked me if I would like to be a newspaperman full time. I said yes and was reassigned as publisher and editor of the weekly. Shortly thereafter I signed up for a series of mail-order college courses offered by the military, and in short order completed enough courses for two years of college credit. This credit was to play a major role in my life after I was transferred back to the U.S. in 1952, discharged from the service, and went to Phoenix, Arizona where my parents then lived.

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A Visit from my Hatsu-Koi In the summer of 1951 I got a telephone call from the Guard Post at the entrance to the ASA compound which was manned by uniformed Japanese employees, saying that I had a visitor at the gate. I asked the guard who called me who the visitor was but he didn’t know. He said it was a girl. I immediately left my office, less than a hundred yards away, and walked to the gate. The visitor was Fujie Yamamoto, my hatsu-koi from the ice-rink. I was surprised to say the least, because I had not any contact with her since our second meeting in the fall of 1949—following which, I was to learn much later, her uncle had told her to stay away from me. The guards let her come through the gate and walk around behind the guard house to talk to me. I later surmised that she must have decided to renew the relationship that had ended abruptly because she was older and no longer concerned about her uncle’s opposition. She immediately noticed that I had been promoted and congratulated me. By this time I could speak a fair amount of Japanese and was able to communicate with her. But I was then keeping company with a girl who worked on the post, which made the meeting awkward for me, and within a couple of minutes I told her I had a girl friend. She began crying. She was still crying when she went back through the gate a moment later, earning me some hard stares from the Japanese guards.

Losing My Security Clearance In early 1952 a member of my former code-breaking unit began asking me to loan him money, offering to return $25 for a $15 loan. I didn’t think much about it and gave him $15. A few days later he handed me $25. A week later he came back with the same proposition. This time I lectured him on his spending habits, telling him he needed to be more careful with his money… But I gave him another $15.

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The third week he again asked me for a loan, and I was naïve enough to give it to him without becoming suspicious. He had been with me and the six other members of the code-breaking unit from the beginning, I thought of him as a good friend, and liked him a lot because he had an wonderful sense of humor and kept us all laughing at his amazing portfolio of jokes. A few days later I was called in by the major who was second in command at the post and told that loaning money at onerous rates was unacceptable and warned me to stop it immediately or risk losing my security clearance. He then added: “You are too good of a man to let something like this ruin your career!” I was shocked speechless for a few seconds, but finally had the presence of mind to thank the major for warning me and to promise him I would never do it again. A short time after this when I was making my regular weekly rounds delivering the ASA Star, I walked into an office I thought was empty, and found myself confronting an officer interviewing my girlfriend who worked on the post as a waitress. I was as surprised as they were. I apologized and quickly walked out. I knew something was going on, and was curious to say the least but was not prepared for what was to happen shortly thereafter. A few days later I was notified that my security clearance had been pulled because one of the close friends of my girlfriend’s mother had been identified as an active Communist. I was stunned at this incredible turn of events. I was given two days to vacate the ASA facility and report to Camp Bender, about an hour’s train ride north of Tokyo. The second day I was informed that a jeep driver had been assigned to take me to Tokyo Station to catch a train. That morning while I was in my room packing, my girlfriend and one of her co-workers suddenly entered the room—a place that was off-limits to them. She had somehow found out about me being transferred. She was beside herself with grief, and kept asking why, why. There was nothing I could do or say, and the situation was such that I finally asked them to leave.

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Later that morning when the jeep that was taking me to Tokyo Central Train Station was backing out of the park-ing area, my girl friend suddenly appeared at its side, clinging to it as it began moving away, calling out my name and crying uncontrollably. Again there was nothing I could do or say. I was still in a state of shock, and just stared at her until she finally let go of the side of the jeep as it picked up speed. When my train arrived at Utsunomiya, where Camp Bender was located, I was picked up at the station by another jeep driver and taken to the camp, where I presented myself to the second in command, a major. He asked me why I was transferred out of the intelligence agency to his camp, a huge supply depot for military goods destined for Korea. I told him everything I knew. Then he asked me what my job had been at the ASA post. When I told him I was editor of the post newspaper, he pointed to an empty desk in his office and said: “You can use that desk and publish a newspaper for us!” He then told a sergeant in his office to take me down the hallway only a few doors from his office, where I was to be billeted.

An Auspicious Meeting And the Bender Bulletin

The billet turned out to be a large dorm room that had two occupants: Jim Walker and Sam Boggs, both of whom were former soldiers who had taken jobs as Department of the Army civilian employees, and were to become lifelong friends. The following week the Bender Bulletin made its debut and was an instant hit with the military and civilian personal on the base. A month later I was asked to promote a lottery in the paper. I drew the winning ticket, but gave it back to avoid any hint of impropriety but there was a lot of laughter and a variety of good-natured comments from the assembled group.

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Leaving Japan & the Service After less than three months at Camp Bender, I was shipped to a staging center in Tokyo then airlifted to Colorado Springs, Colorado where I was discharged from the service. From there I went by Greyhound bus to Phoenix, Arizona, where my parents had moved in the meantime. Within days after arriving in Phoenix I went to work as an IBM operator on the swing shift [4 p.m. to midnight] for Arizona’s Salt River Power Project that supplied water to com- munities in the central part of the state. I took the evening shift because I intended to enroll at the American Institute for Foreign Trade (AIFT) in nearby Glen- dale, Arizona—the new school my sister had mentioned to me in her letter in 1946 when I was aboard the USS Fillmore in Balboa, Panama.

My Year at Thunderbird

On the basis of my two years college credit [obtained while I was in the ASA] I was accepted by AIFT in their Far Eastern Area Studies program, taught by Prof. Emily Brown, a former UPI correspondent in Asia. At that time all courses at the school were two-semesters long over a nine-month period. After enrolling at AIFT I bought a new tract house on the west side of Phoenix using the G.I. Bill that provided home loans for ex-servicemen. Shortly thereafter I signed it over to my parents—the first home they had ever owned. Attending AIFT was an extraordinary experience. I was one of the three youngest students in my class—the majority being WWII veterans in their late 20s and 30s, with a number in their 40s and 50s. Altogether there were about 165 in my class, including six women. Some of the older students were married and lived on campus with their wives. There were some really far-out characters in the group, a number of whom were to play various roles in my life over the next decades. One of my dorm mates, Gilbert N. Drake, was a Boston patrician who had spent three years in Japan in the military and 89

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR became a life-long friend, dying at the age of 81 in 2009. Gil remembered only one full sentence in Japanese from his Japan experience: Anato to issho ni netai desu! [I want to sleep with you!] He and I and a couple of other classmates followed a prece- dent set by earlier AIFTers—making weekend runs to Nogales, Mexico to party with the bar girls on Canal Street. One Sunday afternoon when we returned to the campus a pair of my shorts had been tacked to the school’s public bulletin board, labeled with my name and the question: “Guess where these were found!” I had no memory of losing the shorts and never discovered who pinned them on the board. On another occasion when we returned from Nogales we found that all of the furniture of one of our dorms had been removed and placed on top of the building.

The Zōri [Zohh-ree] Story Immediately after starting classes at Thunderbird I began to make use of the two swimming pools in the middle of the campus quadrangle, about 25 yards from my dorm. When I discovered how hot the concrete borders around the pools got in the Arizona sun I began to wear the zōri [thronged “slippers” now often called flip-flops] that I had brought with me from Japan. At that time they were made out of cuttings from used automobile tires. My classmates wanted to know where I got them. I quickly dashed off a letter to my Camp Bender friend Jim Walker asking him to ship me two dozen of the thronged sandals. I sold all of them except for two samples at $4.00 a pair the first weekend after they arrived. The following weekend I canvassed a number of foot-wear stores in Phoenix and showed them the zōri. They all said they would stock and sell them. I learned later that at that time there was one other ex-Japan-based GI selling zōri in Philadelphia. I had visions of returning to Japan and going into business as an exporter. But that was not to be for reasons that both then and now seem to be at odds with the image of the Japanese. 90

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Going Back to Japan By the middle of the last semester at AIFT [spring 1953] I had not yet been offered a job by the recruiters [mostly bankers] who came to the school. I obviously was not banker material. However, I had already resolved to return to Japan with or without a job, and had applied for admission to Jōchi Daigaku [Sophia University] in Tokyo as a student in the International Department, which offered evening classes from 6 to 9 p.m. Immediately after graduation the AIFT campus emptied out, leaving only a few who, like me, were waiting to de-part. The first Sunday after graduation I was hanging around one of the two pools in the center of the quadrangle, and got the urge to go to the toilet. Rather than go to my own dorm that was a short distance away I stepped into a room adjoining the pool that I thought was empty—and came face-to-face with one of the older female students [in her earlier 30s] who was stark naked. She had just stepped out of the shower. Instead of screaming or running back into the shower room, she smiled, languidly covered her breasts with her cupped hands, and said very quietly: “Eek.” It took all of my will power for me to rise to the occasion and demonstrate a similar level of savoir fare.

More Serendipity Kicks In My admission papers to Sophia and my student visa to Japan arrived shortly after this incident. I made reservations on a Jap- anese passenger ship [the Hikawa Maru] sailing for Yokohama from Seattle, Washington, and bummed a ride with two other AIFT graduates who were driving to Seattle. Aboard the Hikawa Maru I met an employee of the Japan Travel Bureau [JTB], Tsutomu Sugiura (“Tommy”), who was escorting a number of Fulbright Scholars on their way to Japan to teach for a year. When I told him I had enrolled for night classes at Jōchi because I would need to work, he said he would introduce me to his boss in JTB’s Overseas Travel Department, located in the Marunouchi Building in front of Tokyo Station. 91

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We had been at sea for just a few days when I received a cable informing me that my brother Don had been released from the prisoner-of-war camp on the Chinese side of the Yalu River. Upon arrival in Tokyo I went to the YMCA and within a minute after I had booked a room I met a distinguished elderly foreign man in the lobby who identified himself as the owner of a Vicks salve company on the shores of Lake Biwa near Kyoto—a place he described as “the center of the universe.” When he leaned that I had just arrived in Tokyo to enroll in Sophia and had just booked myself into the YMCA he immediately called a Japanese friend who had been an executive with Japan Airlines, had cancer, had been off of work for over a year, and whose wife was looking for a boarder to help with the family finances. I quickly de-booked myself at the YMCA and within an hour was in the large two-story European style home of Mr. and Mrs. Maruoka, a three minute walk from Iidabashi Station on the Yamanote commuter train line…just three stops from Yotsuya Station where Jōchi University was located. The Maruoka’s and their teenage son, Tokuo [nicknamed Paul] greeted me warmly, and I became a member of the family. Paul helped me get settled in a vacant first floor room that had to be cleaned up and thereafter made a point of talking to me at every opportunity to practice his English. Paul went on to graduate from McAllister College in the U.S., become a banker in Chicago rising to the vice president level, VP of a major consulting firm in New York, and then head of the Bank of Hawaii’s operation in Japan, and we have now been good friends for some 60 years. After getting settled in at the Maruoka house and registering at Sophia, I presented myself at JTB’s Overseas Travel Department and was duly hired as the first full-time postwar foreign employee of JTB. My adjoining desk mate was a Japanese my own age, a graduate of Tokyo University named Akira (Charlie) Inouye [nicknamed “Hot-Kiss Charlie because of his success with the ladies], who was to become a lifelong friend and eventually a multi-millionaire businessman.*

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______

*In 2005, I had dinner with Tommy Sugiura, who had risen to become president of JTB International before retiring, and three other old JTB friends: Hot-kiss Charlie Inouye, M. Itoh and Y. Yoshida, at the Sheraton Miyako Hotel in Tokyo where I was staying. Over the decades I had had an extraordinary relation-ship with Charlie, helping him leave JTB and become sales manager of Tokyo’s Hilton Hotel [following which my wife and I attended his wedding], and then Managing Director of Reader’s Digest [Japan]. He eventually became president of Blue Chip Japan and a multi-millionaire. After his retirement he bought a lux-urious apartment within a short walk of the Sheraton Miyako Hotel. For the next five years we often met at the Miyako when I was in Tokyo. ______

My working hours at JTB were 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. five days a week. My assigned duty was to write and edit English language copy for the department and to take care of the odd foreigner who wandered into the office. I also volunteered to tutor ranking managers in English at the nearby Head Office once a week.

End of the Zōri Story Once settled in at Jōchi and JTB I went to the Asakusa district of Tokyo where there were half a dozen small zōri shops that did their own manufacturing—the largest with six or seven employees. I approached three of them and asked them to quote me wholesales prices because I wanted to export zōri to the U.S. All of them refused, saying that selling the sandals at discounts was too much trouble. Six years later another ex-GI named Bob Dunham, who had a one-man one-girl office in the basement of the old Fukoku building in downtown Tokyo, was exporting some 200,000 zōri per year.

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Five years later Mitsubishi Shoji and several other large trading companies had entered the zōri export business—by which time the sandals were made from sponge rubber and sold in the U.S. in the millions of pairs for as little as 69 cents a pair. Variations of the zōri have since gone both high-tech and high fashion and sell for big bucks.

The Jōchi University Experience At Jōchi University my primary subjects were economics and the Japanese language. Among my classmates were Sandra [Sandy] Martine, Lou Segaloff, Len Walsh, Ray Moore and Peter Gibbons—the first two of whom were to play significant roles in my life in the following decades. Both Sandy [who had been in Tokyo with her American family since childhood] and I already spoke basic Japanese [she far better than me] so during the first semester we mostly read Japanese language comics while the professor was lecturing. We had two Japanese language classes per week, each for one hour…which is not nearly enough to actually learn any language. One Friday after classes, Segaloff, Walsh, Moore and I went to a bar in Shinjuku. After we had been drinking and chatting with the bar hostesses for about two hours we decided to go climb Mt. Fuji, and went to Shinjuku Station, about three blocks away. The last train had just departed for Fujiyoshida, a gateway town at the base of the north [Tokyo] side of the mountain. We went back to the bar and stayed there for the rest of the night, returning to the station early in the morning and catching the first train out. At Fujiyoshida we boarded a bus that took us to Station 5 on the waist of Mt. Fuji, and began our climb from there. At first the incline of the trail was fairly modest, but it got steeper and rougher as we went up. From Station 5 there are seven more stations, each with a number of sub-stations in between. It took us about eight hours to reach the top, each one of us about 20 minutes apart. Moore, the heaviest drinker and the skinniest, reached the top first; Walsh was second; I was third, and Segaloff came in last. That night we slept in a hut in the shallow 94

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR bowel at the top of the mountain. It was so cold I ended up with around ten heavy futon [thick, padded quilts] on top of me. After a bowl of hot noodles we started down, but not on the trail we had climbed up. We descended the mountain on an adjoining smooth portion that consisted primarily of volcano ash and small rocks, which resulted in us slipping and sliding down with great speed. It took us less than two hours to reach Station 5. The train from Fujiyoshida back to Tokyo was packed so we had to stand up in the aisle. I finally passed out and stayed slumped down on the floor for over an hour. At the end of the first year at Sophia classmates Len Walsh and Ray Moore transferred to International Christian University [ICU] in Mitaka just west of Tokyo because the first year there was devoted totally to learning Japanese in a very intensive course that required several additional hours of home study. When Len and Ray left Sophia my Japanese was much better than theirs. By the time they finished the two-semester course at ICU they were fully fluent in the language while I was still on a basic level. As a result of their fluency in Japanese, both Len and Ray went on to have successful careers—Len in intelligence work and Ray as a professor at Amherst University.

Looking Up My Hatsu-Koi

Several months after going to work at JTB I gave in to the impulse to see if my would-be hatsu-koi Fujie Yamamoto was still working at the ice-rink in Ryogoku. I went to the rink on a Sunday and found that she was still there. The meeting was short because her uncle was there and his glowering presence made her uncomfortable. I did tell her I had left the service and was in Japan as a civilian, going to Jōchi Daigaku at night and working in the Marunouchi Building office of the Japan Travel Bureau during the day. A few days after my short visit to the ice-rink Fujie telephoned me. This time I was intimidated by the presence of my co-workers listening to the conversation, and didn’t say much. After that she called me several times, but I did not see her. I

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR learned that her uncle and her parents were still pressuring her to stay away from me. The calls from her finally stopped. In the spring of 1954 Tommy Sugiura, my JTB bene-factor, told me he was going to escort one of the Fulbright families who had been on the Hikawa Maru with us to Yokohama for their return to the U.S., and asked me to accompany him in a chauffeur-driven limousine. The family had two daughters; by that time four and six years old. During the drive to Yokohama the two young girls chatted away in Japanese to the driver, Tommy and me. The youngest one was especially fluent. Their parents had a Japanese vocabulary of five or six words. Over the years I was reminded of this incident because educators in the U.S. refused to understand and accept the idea that the best time for people to become fluent in more than one language is when they are infants and very young kids.

Becoming Editor of PREVIEW Magazine A little over a year after I began at Sophia and started working at JTB one of my old ASA friends, Bob Black, who had taken his discharge in Japan, introduced me to Robert Booth, the publisher of PREVIEW Magazine that I had submitted articles to when I was still with the Agency. Booth had arrived in Tokyo several years earlier as a member of the Occupation Forces, taken his discharge there and gone into the publishing business. Booth said he was in need of a new editor for the magazine and offered me the job. I resigned from JTB and went to work for him. My Sophia University classmate Sandy Martine was already a contributor to the magazine. Booth was a famous character in Tokyo at that time. Absolutely fluent in Japanese, he had appeared in several Japan- ese films, performed in rakugo [rah-koo-go] comic skits on stage at the Nichigeki Theater, and on the side was co-publisher of the book I Was Defeated, the story of Yoshio Kodama, one of the most notorious nationalists in the country who had been charged as a war criminal, put in Sugamo Prison by the U.S. Occupation forces after the end of World War II, and finally released in 1948. 96

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Another reason for Booth’s unusual notoriety was that he had bought a Rolls Royce that had been owned by the Imperial Household in the 1930s and used by Emperor Hirohito. The Imperial Household sold the car to a private owner during the war years. The new owner converted it to a kind of pick-up truck with a flatbed taking up about half of the length of the vehicle. After Booth bought it from him we used it to tool around Tokyo, creating quite a stir. However, my time at PREVIEW Magazine was to be short- lived. Shortly after going to work there I learned that the magazine was near bankruptcy because with the end of the U.S.-led Occupation of Japan in 1952 the number of foreigners in the country had diminished dramatically, causing the circulation of the magazine to drop below 3,000 copies a month. But I hung in and edited the next four issues.

Appearing in Japanese Movies

During that period Booth got me parts in two Japanese films, one of which was a famous series called Sugata Sanshiro, in which I got to dance with the leading lady, Takachiho Hizuru, and fight the leading actor. I lost the fight. Not long after I went to work for Booth I came down with a severe case of hemorrhoids and was told that I needed an operation as early as possible. I introduced my classmate Peter Gib- bons to Booth as a stand-in for me while I was in the hospital. The operation, at a Catholic-run foreign clinic in west To- kyo, was routine—at least for the doctors. On the third day I found out from a Japanese patient who shared my room that he was being charged far less than me for the same procedure. I started to get up and get dressed, intending to check myself out. But I passed out on the floor. On the fifth day I manage to leave the hospital, and thereafter disputed the bill, finally managing to get it reduced by half. After staying home for an additional five days I went back to work.

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However, my erstwhile friend Peter Gibbons treated me like a newcomer seeking employment, saying that he had taken over as the editor. This odd impasse was not to last very long. Shortly after I returned to work at PREVIEW I got a call from Fujie Yamamoto’s uncle who said he wanted to talk to me. I agreed to meet him in a nearby coffee shop. It turned out that Fujie had been insisting that I was an honorable man and that she wanted to marry me. Her uncle asked me if I wanted to marry her, and I said no…I just wanted to be her friend. He apparently told her, and that appeared to end the matter. At that time, there were dozens of large cabarets and nightclubs in Tokyo. Booth had been instrumental in start-ing one of the cabarets on the Ginza not far from our office, named Mississippi after his home state. He sometimes treated us at the cabaret, and I ended up getting acquainted with one of the hostesses, Kimiko, who spoke good English and fancied herself a singer. She soon became my steadiest girlfriend. There were two other girls I had taught at a special English language studio that I spent some time with. One of my students at the studio was a high-born lady in her 60s who was married to a former count or duke, and did her best to seduce me by taking me out after class to exclusive inns, ostensibly for dinner, that were primarily patronized by people having illicit affairs. I also found out that Booth and my new girl friend Kimiko had had an affair. He was married to a Japanese girl but also had another girlfriend on the side.

End of PREVIEW Magazine

Soon after this, Booth, who had not paid his printer for several months and couldn’t pay the salaries of his staff, suddenly disappeared. For several days after his disappearance no one at the office knew where he was. It than came out in The Japan Times that he had been arrested and was in jail. I went to the Toranomon Police Station in an attempt to see him, but was not let in. That night my landlady told me that the police had been there asking questions about me, but I was never contacted directly by the police.

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Our office was located in the Yuasa Denchi (Yuasa Battery) Building at 8-chome on the Ginza. Booth had not paid the rent for several months, and with him out of the picture the angry owner of the building barred the office, making it impossible for us to get in and retrieve our personal things.* ______*It was to be some 20 years before I heard anything else about what had happened to Booth. I finally learned from Sandy Martine [by then married to Seichiro Mori of the Mori Silver Company) who knew Booth’s Japanese wife, that he had somehow been released from jail, left Japan unofficially on a freighter going to New Zealand, and eventually ended up in the U.S. working for a major magazine publishing conglomerate in Iowa. By the time I finally heard from him directly [as a result of him contacting me about my books on Japan] he was living in New Orleans. ______

Booth had a managed to pay me only a token amount after my first month with the magazine. Without income for the next several months I was reduced to borrowing money from Tom Hitchcock, a Thunderbird classmate who was stationed in Tokyo as an executive of a New York bank, in order to pay my rent and eat. It was three months before I was able to pay him back. He went on to become a vice president of the bank.

Turned Down by Tuttle Publishing Company After PREVIEW magazine closed down in 1954 I first went to the Tuttle Publishing Company, the leading Eng-lish language book publisher in Tokyo at that time, and applied for a job. The editor, Meredith “Tex” Weatherby, was friendly enough but [fortunately] didn’t hire me. Tuttle Publishing, founded in Tokyo in 1948 by Charles E. Tuttle, a former officer in the Occupation Forces and a member of the Tuttle publishing family in Rutland, Vermont, had become the largest publisher of English languages books in Japan…in Asia for that matter. In addition to publishing new 99

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR books on Japan, Tuttle picked upon some of the classics like The Book of Tea and the titles of Lafcadio Hearn whose copyrights had expired. These and similar titles became a backlist gold mine for the new company.

Teaming Up with a “White Russian”

During my short tenure at PREVIEW Magazine I had become acquainted with one of the advertising salesmen, George Po- krovsky, the son of a White [non-Communist] Russian family who had fled Russian during the Communist Revolution in the early 1920s, making their way across Russia to Mukden, and finally to Japan in the late 1920s. The refugee father had been an orchestra conductor in Moscow. George, born and raised in Yokohama, was my age. With PREVIEW closed down George decided to start his own monthly magazine called Far East REPORTER. I agreed to become the editor. Our office was in the unused, unfinished basement of the Konwa Building on the border of the Ginza shopping district and Tsukiji, just east of the famous Kabuki-Za Theater. But this didn’t work out for me because the magazine didn’t generate enough income to pay salaries. I left after one month. George persevered, however, eventually changing the name of the magazine to The Far East TRAVELER and riding the wave of Japan’s economic rise to become the most successful travel publication in Japan at that time, making him wealthy. He had came up with an outstanding way to get exposure and readership for the magazine by getting it distributed free-of- charge in hotel rooms in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, a type of distribution that appealed greatly to airlines serving Asia, to the huge Duty Free Shoppers organization, and to other advertisings wanting to reach affluent travelers. Some years later I became a contributing editor and advisor to the Far East TRAVELER, and then after another time-gap of several years, I became a columnist for the magazine after it survived the crash of 1991-2001 by morphing into a monthly publication called TRAVEL PLAN, a relationship that con-

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The KEMBUN Episode

After leaving Far East REPORTER I teamed up with Lou Sega- loff, my former Sophia classmates. who had managed to get a 3- month subsidy from the American Embassy to publish a weekly English language newspaper named KEMBUN [which literally means “See / Hear”] aimed at Marxist-leaning Japanese university students. Our office was located on the second floor of the Victoria Coffee Shop on Hibiya Street in Yurakucho, adjoining the elevated railway tracks—a space now occupied by the South Tower of the twin Yurakucho Denki Building complex and adjoined on the west side by the Japan branch of Hong Kong’s famed Peninsula Hotel. The Peninsula Hotel is on the site previously occupied by the Nikkatsu Hotel, the first modern hotel built in Tokyo after WWII. I watched the process from the excavation of the lot for the basement floors and was a frequent visitor after it was completed because it contained a number of trading company offices and was popular with visiting importers.

Getting my Degree from Jōchi I finished my studies at Jōchi University in the spring of 1954, and turned in my graduation thesis on the history of the political relationship between Japan and Russia. The thesis was some 280 pages long. My professor—if memory serves, a guy named Chalmers Johnson who was later to become famous as a CIA consultant, author and advisor to presidents—hefted the thick manuscript in his hands, flipped the pages, handed it back to me and said: “Cut it down to about 75 or 80 pages and bring it in again.” Some weeks later, on a hot summer weekend day, I was sitting on the tatami-mat floor of my one-room apartment, working on the thesis manuscript. I could hear crickets chirping outside. I slid into a kind of reverie and clearly saw myself as a 101

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR wandering priest making my way along a path through the head-high grass that covered the plains west of Tokyo during the 8th and 9th centuries. When I came out of the reverie I felt like it had been totally real, and it was to remain fixed in my brain thereafter. Because of the set-back with my thesis I did not receive my diploma from Jōchi until the spring of 1955. When the Dean of the University handed me the document he said: “De Mente! I never thought you would make it!” He had never been impressed with my off-campus activities!

Japan Will Never Amount to Anything! I also had begun to have doubts about the wisdom of hanging on in Tokyo, and one day when I was at the Foreign Cor- respondent’s Club I ran into the famous British foreign correspondent Hessel Tiltman, and asked him if it was a good career choice for me to remain in Japan. His reply: “No! Go Home! Japan will never amount to anything.” Encounters with the CIA

While working at KEMBUN I was approached by an American civilian who had access to U.S. military installations in Tokyo and invited me to one of them for lunch. It turned out he was a member of the CIA. He offered me an assignment—asking me to write a confidential report on the character, political views and activities of my foreign friends, namely Lou Segaloff, Len Walsh and Ray Moore, my Sophia classmates. I duly wrote out a completely neutral portrayal of the three, and turned it in. The agent paid me ten thousand yen [at that time the equivalent of a few hundred dollars in purchasing power]. He then gave me a second assignment: digging up confidential information on the activities of a fairly well known Japanese businessman who had some mysterious connections with several organizations, including the American Embassy. I called the fellow up, told him I was a journalist, and said that I wanted to interview him. He readily agreed. I spent an hour in his office asking him all about his activities—which as related to me were not incriminating in any way. I wrote up the 102

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR interview and gave it to the CIA agent. He paid me another ten thousand yen and I never heard from him again. That, however, was not that last time that I came under the CIA radar in Tokyo. The agency had agents following all of the staff of the Russian Embassy whenever they left their building [always in a group]. One evening when Lou Segaloff and I were on the Ginza in one of the bar and cabaret-filled backstreets an official car from the Russian Embassy, with what appeared to be two high- ranking officials in it, stalled-out right in front of us and was blocking traffic. Lou and I and several Japanese revelers pushed the car until the driver got it restarted and drove away. On another weekend occasion, Lou, myself and two other friends went to the beach in Kamakura. We laid our towels next to other towels already spread out on the beach, and went into the water. After frolicking for an hour or so we came out to rest and sunbathe for a while. The owners of the towels next to us had returned by this time. They turned out to be members of the Russian Embassy. On still another occasion I went to a hospital in Shinbashi to see if I could get a tattoo removed [the doctor literally carved it out with a knife]. The doctor told me that he had treated several members of the Russian Embassy who had come to him for other reasons. And finally, one day when I was in the waiting room of the office of Dr. Theodore King [an ethnic Chinese who was fluent in several languages] to get a radiation treatment for a severe jock rash that wouldn’t go away, the telephone rang. The receptionist answered the phone, listened for a few seconds and then held it up and said: “De Mente san, it’s for you.” I got up and started for her desk. Another man got up and got to the phone first. He listed intently for a few seconds and was obviously confused. He said something in Russian, looked even more surprised, and then handed the phone to me. It was Lou Segaloff my friend and coworker. When I was called into Dr. King’s office I asked him who the man was. I learned that Dr. King had spent years in eastern Russia, spoke

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Russian fluently, and that the man, whose name was also De Mente, was from the Russian Embassy. Dr. King became our family doctor after Margaret War-ren and I were married in Tokyo in 1958, and delivered our first child—a story within itself. I wish I had learned more about his extraordinary background. His son is still in practice in Tokyo, not far from where Margaret and I lived.

Creating TODAY’S JAPAN

When the KEMBUN subsidy from the American Embassy that Segaloff had somehow finagled ran out I went to work for a small company called Cross-Continent owned by an American from Philadelphia named Marvin Meyer. One of his enterprises was TODAY’S TOKYO, a weekly entertainment and shopping tabloid-sized newspaper. Meyer’s chief interpreter and assistant was a Japanese man my age named Haruo (Harry) Shinoda…who was to become a lifelong personal and family friend. Shortly after joining Meyer’s company we inaugurated a monthly magazine called TODAY’S JAPAN – The Magazine of Modern Japan. As the editor, I had the great fortune to meet an interview a number of well-known individuals, including the master potter Shoji Hamada and Zen master Daisetsu Suzuki, and to work with the great artist Taro Okamoto, authors R. H. Blyth, Glenn Shaw, Junichi Tanizaki, Donald Richie, and others. Richie had written one story for me when I was editor of the ill-fated PREVIEW Magazine…a penetrating essay on To- kyo’s famous coffee-shop culture. To supplement the salary I received from Cross-Continent I went to work for The Japan Times, Japan’s leading English language daily newspaper, on the swing shift – from 4 p.m. to midnight. Since I had a way with catchy phrases, I soon became the head-line writer. Editors around the square of desks would toss their completed stories to me and I would write the head- lines.

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The “Half-Safe” Amphibious Jeep Saga

In the late fall of 1956 there was a story in The Japan Times about an Australian named Ben Carlin who had arrived in Japan on an amphibious jeep dubbed “HALF-SAFE” [after a “don’t be half-safe” deodorant commercial], on the final leg of a journey around the world on the jeep…a trip that had begun in New York in 1948 with his American wife Elinore. The story said that Carlin was looking for a “mate” to join him on the rest of the trip from Tokyo to the U.S. via the North Pacific, the Bering Sea, the Shelikoff Strait and on up to Anchorage, Alaska…and from there on to the east coast of the U.S. The story added that Carlin’s American wife Elinore who had accompanied him across the Atlantic and then on as far as India had left both the jeep and him in India, following which he had recruited another young Australian man to join him because at sea the jeep could not be operated safely or efficiently by one person. By the time they reached the southern shores of Japan this new mate had also had enough of the jeep and Carlin, and had returned to Australia. I was intrigued. I called Carlin, who was living in a rented room in the Shinagawa area of Tokyo, and set up a time to visit him. One of my Japanese friends who also worked for Cross- Continent drove me to the meeting. In short, I agreed to join Carlin on the last and longest sea- going portion of the trip…which was to start in the spring of 1957 by which time the weather in the North Pacific, and along the Kurile Islands, the Bering Sea and the Aleutian chain would be more amenable. That winter I came down with what turned out to be pneu- monia. I didn’t go to a doctor or hospital and was laid up for three weeks, It was not until I was in my 70s that I learned it had scarred the bottom half of my left lung, making it useless. As the day for the departure of Half-Safe approached there were some ominous incidents involving Carlin that were to come back to haunt me during the forthcoming voyage. After one of these incidents, which occurred just days before we were 105

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR scheduled to leave Tokyo, my then Japanese girlfriend, Kimiko, said to me: “You’re not near-ly as smart as I thought you were!” But I was committed to making the journey, and we subsequently left Tokyo on May 3 1957, arriving in Anchorage, Alaska on September 3, exactly four months later. Our departure from Tokyo from the front of the Mainichi Newspaper building was covered by a large group of reporters, one of whom noticed my girlfriend Kimiko at my side. He asked her if she was Mrs. De Mente. She said yes. I quickly informed the reporter that she was my girlfriend, not my wife. Carlin smiled and invited Kimiko to ride in the jeep with us to our first stop—a restaurant on the outskirts of Tokyo. That was not to be the end of that story. Our first landfall after leaving the port city of Wakkanai in northeaster Hokkaido was the island of Shemya in the Alaskan Aleutian chain, after 28 days at sea. Our arrival and 10-day stay on Shemya was an adventure in itself but suffice to say at the moment one of the people I met on the island was a fellow named John Rohrbough, who had just been assigned to the island by Northwest Airlines as a Flight Controller to guide planes in for landings, and was undergoing training. I was in the control shack where he worked when he was called on to talk his first plane in. There was a heavy fog with a ceiling of no more than 300 feet, and John was nervous. Just seconds before the descending plane broke through the fog, he said something to the effect of “Taken over and land!” However, at that time the pilot still could not see the runway and he knew there was low hill at the far end. Rather than continue descending blind in the fog he gunned the engines and headed back up. The plane passed almost directly over the top of the control shack with a shattering roar. There was dead silence in the control shack, but the plane made it back up into the air. That was not my last encounter with John Rohrbough. Some time after I returned to Tokyo in 1958 he showed up in Japan as an employee of a CIA front-company, along with a new wife, Mary-Alice, who had been a stewardess on Alaska Airlines and had also met him on Shemya. Following my marriage to

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Margaret Warren in September 1958 we all became good family friends, and this past Friday [20 May 2012] Margaret and I had lunch with Mary-Alice and her second husband, who were visiting Phoenix from their home in Port Angeles, Washington. She and John had divorced years ago. He moved to Perth, Australia, became a citizen, and died there. To keep this reference to the very long and incredible jeep story short, after my portion of the journey was over I too had had far too much of Carlin and jumped jeep in Anchorage, Alaska. I left him and the jeep three days after we arrived in Anchorage and flew to Phoenix, where my parents still lived. The trip made the Guinness Book of World Records, Life Magazine and dozens of other publications around the world. My book about the experience, ONCE A FOOL–From Japan to Alaska by Amphibious Jeep, is available from Amazon.com.

Meeting Margaret Warren And Returning to Japan During my first week at home following my arrival in Phoenix from Anchorage an employment agency got me a job as editor of the weekly Glendale News in Glendale, a small satellite city northeast of Phoenix [and the location of The American Institute for Foreign Trade that I had graduated from in 1953]. After three weeks at this job, which did not pay well, the same employment agency sent me to The Valley National Bank, headed by banking pioneers Walter Bimson and his brother Carl, who were looking for an assistant for their flamboyant public relations director, Charlie Pine. I was interviewed by Carl Bimson, second in command at the bank, who asked me why I was not married at the age of 28. I told him I had spent the last eight years in Japan, where there were few choices other than Japanese, and that I was looking forward to finding someone in Phoenix. He approved my employment. My office, next to Charlie Pine’s, was in the Security Build- ing across the street from the bank headquarters. One day when I was standing in the doorway of Charlie’s office, waiting for him to get off the phone with Bimson, the president, he leaned 107

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR so far back in his chair that it fell over, sending him sprawling. Without losing a syllable he said to Bimson, “I just fell out of my chair!” and continued as if nothing had happened. In the early spring of 1958 I was invited by a woman employee of the bank to attend a Young Republicans rally for a Phoenix politician, Paul Fannin, who was running for governor. At the rally, held in a banquet room at The Islands restaurant on North 7th Street in Phoenix, I was introduced to 22-year old Margaret Warren, who was also an employee of the bank and worked in a first-floor office in the Security Building. After the rally began to wind down I ask Margaret if she would like to rendezvous with me at the Carnation Restaurant, at the intersection of Central Avenue and Indian School Road for a snack. She agreed. After we ate and talked we made a date to go to a movie that weekend. We went to the Palms Theater on Central Avenue and saw “Bridge over the River Kwai.” That date was followed by several others, during which I introduced Margaret to my parents and my sister Winnie who owed a vacation home in Oak Creek Canyon above Sedona, Arizona and whose hospitality we enjoyed a number of times.

The ORIENTAL AMERICA / IMPORTER Magazine Saga Some two months after meeting Margaret I received a phone call from Emily Brown, my old professor at the American Institute for Foreign Trade [AIFT], who asked me if I would like to go back to Tokyo as editor of a new monthly trade magazine called Oriental America that had been started by AIFT-grad Ray Woodside and his Japanese wife Niki some 18 months earlier. I naturally said yes, and then reluctantly informed Charlie Pine that I had decided to go back to Japan where I had already invested eight years of my life and was hooked on the unique Japanese culture. On my next meeting with Margaret when she was driving us somewhere, I turned to her and asked: “How would you like to live in Tokyo for a few years?”

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She was fast on the uptake. “Is that a proposal?” she asked. When I said yes, her face lit up in a remarkable smile and she squeezed my hand. I still remember today how good her response made me feel. I then told her I would be leaving for Tokyo as soon as I could get a work visa; and that after I got settled in my new job and found a suitable apartment I would send for her and we would be married there. I was back in Tokyo with-in the month. Ray Woodside and his Japanese wife Niki [oldest daughter of a prominent Honda family in Nagoya] had started Oriental America in 1956 with the idea of featuring traditional Japanese products, thus the name of the magazine. The office of the new magazine was the two front rooms of the house Ray and his wife lived in near Sendagaya Station on the Chuo commuter train line on the west side of Tokyo.

The Amazing Sony Story

One of the first advertisers in Oriental America in 1956 was a small company with an unusual product and odd name. In the late 1940s two remarkable individuals, an engineer named Masaru Ibuka and an ambitious young man named Akio Morita had founded a small company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. [Tokyo Communications Industrial Co., Ltd.], bought the rights to a new transistor device invented by an American and began the development of a small radio that used transistors instead of vacuum tubes. Ibuka was 38, Morita was 25. Morita’s family, which had been in the sake brewing business for 14 generations, put up the seed money for the new company. During the development period both Ibuka and Morita slept on cots in the factory [in the Shinagawa district of Tokyo] for months at a time, with their wives bringing them food. Soon after they had a working version of the radio they chose the made-up word Sony as its brand name. It was later explained that they had chosen “Sony” because it sounded a bit like “sunny.” Their first efforts to export the new radio were not successful, so one of the steps they took in 1953 was to change the 109

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR name of the company to Sony because foreigners could neither pronounce nor remember the name Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. In 1956, still struggling to market the radio abroad, Sony placed an ad in one of the first issues of Oriental America. The company took a one-sixth of a page ad in the magazine [the smallest ad offered] on a three-month con-tract [the shortest contract], promoting the tiny hand-held radio. The advertisement resulted in General Distributors in Canada and Delmonico in New York becoming Sony’s first major foreign importer-distributors—and the rest, as the saying goes, is history. But what really put Sony on the world map was the fact that Morita, who turned out to be a master promoter, moved to New York in 1963, set up Sony USA and brought the importing and distributing of the radio in-house.

Birth of The IMPORTER

By January of 1958 Ray had realized that the primary focus of Oriental America should be serving the American retail chains and importers who had begun coming to Japan looking for Japanese companies to knock-off a broad range of consumer products at prices far below what was then prevailing in the U.S. Thousands of new Japanese companies had begun manufacturing a wide range of department store and novelty store merchandise, with their sales depending on foreign buyers who came to Japan or were stationed there. By 1957 Sears had 65 buyers permanently stationed in Tokyo alone. When I arrived in Tokyo in the spring of 1958 the office of Oriental America was still the two front two rooms of Ray and Niki’s home. That was awkward to say the least [not to mention that they had two young sons who could not be kept out of the office space], but my work went well. I was able to provide a professional touch to the content of the first issue of the magazine I edited. Ray had already bought a vacant lot a short distance away, near Harajuku Station, and had started construction on a new

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR two-story office building...a five-minute walk from the Hara- juku apartment I had rented. We moved into the new office building in August, with one of the greatest advantages being able to greet visiting buyers and executives from the U.S. in an attractive office…that was, however, done up in traditional Japanese style [under Niki’s direction], which meant that both employees and visitors were required to remove their shoes in the entrance foyer. Shortly after we moved into the new office building we changed the name of the magazine from ORIENTAL AMERICA to The IMPORTER – Asian Products for Western Markets. The subscription list of American and European importers and would-be importers ballooned from the first issue of the newly named magazine. [The only newsstand sales of the magazine had been in leading hotels in Tokyo and Osaka, and we stopped this form of distribution.] The number of visiting importers who wanted to meet the people who published The IMPORTER also spiraled upward after the name change. Ray’s wife, Niki, who tooled around Tokyo in a large chauffeur-driven car they had brought with them from the U.S., had proven to be a master salesperson. We also had Japanese sales reps in Nagoya and in the Osaka-Kobe area. With the new format and ad sales climbing rapidly, we began taking steps to open sales offices in Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. In addition to covering trade shows, visiting Japanese manufacturers searching for new products and interviewing foreign buyers, I began a series of articles de-signed to explain the mind-set and behavior of the Japanese to our importer sub- scribers—a course that was to fundamentally change my life. Shortly after moving into the new office building Ray and I joined the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Japan as associate members. This led to a variety of experiences, including hearing many visiting notables speak at the club, including Yuri Gagarin, the Russian astronaut who be-came the first human being to go into space, and Robert Kennedy, who was then running for the presidency of the U.S. I also met and talked

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR briefly to Valentina Tereshkova, the Russian astronaut who became the first female in space. I was both surprised and shocked by the reaction of virtually all of the American correspondents to the Russian astronauts. Their questions were juvenile and disparaging. The only exception to this display of childish envy was Mack Chrysler, Asian correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. In those encounters as well as other interview situations his questions were professional and resulted in interesting responses.

The Ongoing Sony Story

In addition to Oriental America’s success story with Sony the newly named IMPORTER magazine was to become directly responsible for thousands of other Japanese manufacturers and trading companies establishing their first contacts with Ame- rican and European importers—and was to play an incredible role in the rise of Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea as economic powerhouses. But the story of the tiny transistor radio maker, which had changed its name to Sony, and The IMPORTER was not over. Within days after we moved into the new office building Sony sent a full page ad to our advertising department that was designed to celebrate the fifth anniversary of their name change from Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. to Sony. There were several conspicuous mistakes in the copy of the advertisement. Our office manager [Kozuka San] telephoned the company and asked for permission to correct the mistakes. The export manager, who doubled as the advertising manager and spoke no English, refused his request. Ray then told Kozuka and me to go to Sony and make the case directly. We went to Sony’s small headquarters building in the Shinagawa district of Tokyo to ask that we be allowed to correct the language in order to avoid embarrassing both Sony and the magazine. Both Ray and I believed that my going with Kozuka and showing my foreign face would make a difference. It did not. The export manager not only refused our request, he got angry about it.

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Ray refused to run the full-page ad. Sony blacklisted The IMPORTER, and to my knowledge never again advertised in the magazine. Later there was to be another chapter in my run-in with Sony. [At this writing, foreign competition and the passing of the original Sony pioneers have apparently sapped both the vision and the strength that marked its early years.]

Margaret Arrives with a Typhoon

Margaret Warren, my soon-to-be-wife, arrived in Yokohama in September 1958 on a Japanese freighter just ahead of a typhoon. The wind was already so strong that the ship anchored out in the bay and the dozen or so passengers on board were offloaded onto a shuttle boat that brought them to the dock. My boss Ray drove me to Yokohama to pick her up. By the time we got to our apartment on a narrow sidewalk-less lane in Harajuku [a 5-minute walk from our office] it was raining hard. When Margaret exited from the car she stepped into an 18-inch deep drainage ditch that was already filled with water. That was her introduction to five extraordinary years of life in Japan. Three days after she arrived I left for Hong Kong on a 5-day trip with Ray to set up an office there. Before leaving, I took Margaret to two shopping streets within short walks of the apartment and taught her how to order a few things like meat and eggs in Japanese. The lesson she learned best was how to say 200 grams in Japanese. For the next few months, she ordered almost everything in ni-hyaku guramu [nee-h’yah-kuu guu-rah-muu]. We were married on 29 September 1958. A short time later we got a telephone call from the Japanese Immigration Office in Yokohama, where Margaret had landed. On the disembarkation form she had filled out she had put “To get married” as the reason for her coming to Japan. That was not an acceptable reason for being admitted into the country and some clerk had finally discovered it when reviewing the document. When the caller asked for Margaret Warren I told him there was no Margaret Warren…that she was my wife, Margaret De Mente. The caller didn’t know how to respond to that and hung 113

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR up. A few minutes later he called back and asked if we would come to the Immigration Office in Yokohama and re-register her as Mrs. Margaret De Mente. We did so the following day. A month or so after this event Margaret got a job as secretary at the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan…a job that lasted for only a few weeks because her typing ability and short- hand speed did not compare with that of the lady she replaced: Kim Kawahara, a tournament quality high-speed typist whose abilities had spoiled the director of the Chamber. Margaret was sorely disappointed, but I was pleased that she could stay home and avoid the traffic and pollution that kept Tokyo smothered in a blanket of thick smog. [Children in Tokyo at that time had never seen the stars in a night-time sky.] As an added bonus, Kim, a Canadian from Montreal, and her husband Frank Kawahara, an American from St. Louis, quickly became our best friends — a relationship that was to deepen, expand and endure after we all moved back to the U.S. Frank died in 2011. Kim and their remarkable children and grand children are flourishing. The IMPORTER Magazine Success Story By the end of my first year with The IMPORTER we had opened offices in Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and thereafter I covered these areas on the editorial side. South Korea still looked like a basket case at that time, and even though I found Koreans to be an incredible people, in the next few years I was still astonished at how quickly they modernized the country and become an export power-house. This came about because for the first time in the history of the country ordinary Koreans were free to better themselves, and prompted by a compelling concept subsumed in the word han (hahn), which refers to unfulfilled desires and longings, they were motivated to study and work with a kind of frenzy…a trait that continues today—to the point that in 2011 the government issued orders requiring independent afterhours cram schools to close by 11 p.m. so students could go home, get some sleep and rest for school the following morning.

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The first manager of our Hong Kong office was an Eng- lishman who had been born and raised in China, had a Chinese wife, and was totally fluent in Chinese. But he was totally inept as a salesman. We then hired James Sweeney, a new AIFT graduate, to run the office, which at that time was located on the mezzanine floor of the famous Peninsula Hotel. All of our Asian branch sales offices thrived because of the insatiable desire of new small manufacturers and exporters in these countries to make contact with American and European importers looking for cheap foreign-made products. The drive of newly freed Koreans, Taiwanese and Hong Kongese to better their lives by repeating the pattern set by the Japanese was incredible.

My First Business Book

In the early spring of 1959, with Ray’s approval, I strung together all of the magazine articles I had done on the Japanese way of thinking and doing things, wrote several more, added an introduction, entitled it STRANGE BED-FELLOWS – Japanese Manners & Ethics in Business, and sent the manuscript off to McGraw-Hill in New York. The word came back that there would not be enough interest in such a book to warrant its publication. I got the same response from Prentice-Hall. I then went to the Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Company in Tokyo, the leading publisher of English language books in Japan at that time, and talked to Tex Weatherby, the editor-in- chief, about publishing the book. Weatherby quickly glanced through the introduction and the chapter headings on the contents pages, liked what he saw and said he was interested. He then tapped the subtitle, Japanese Manners & Ethics in Business, and said: “This is your title; not Strange Bedfellows!” He asked me what royalty percentage I wanted and when I said fifteen percent he replied: “I’ll have to think about that. Give me a couple of days to talk to our marketing people. Call me later in the week.” I reported this to Ray. He thought for a while and said that if I agreed, East Asia Publishing Company, his company, would 115

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR publish the book, pay me a twenty per-cent royalty and promote it through The IMPORTER. I accepted his very generous offer then called Weatherby, explained the arrangement and ask him if Tuttle would distribute the book in Japan. He agreed. He also agreed to let East Asia Publishing Company retain the right to supply the bookshop in the Imperial Hotel directly… something I really wanted because that was where most of the importers stayed when they came to Tokyo. Ray did some minor editing on the manuscript and sent it to Dai-Nippon, our printer, which scheduled the printing and binding of 5,000 copies for the first week in November. We then created a full-page advertisement for the November 1959 edition of the magazine. The mail-order response to the ad in the magazine was extraordinary, several times surpassing orders for two hundred copies a day. Some companies ordered up to a hundred copies at a time to give to their clients. Local foreign companies with American and European clients also ordered the book in large batches. Sales continued strong in early 1960, resulting in a second printing in February. But it was sales at the small bookshop in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel that both surprised and pleased me. The shop, owned by an American lady whose husband had been a big wheel in the American Occupation of Japan [1945-1952], and managed by a Japanese lady named Kagami, went through from ten to twenty copies a day. For the next year my wife and I lived entirely off of the royalty proceeds I received from sales just at the Imperial Hotel bookshop! As the first of its kind, the book created quite a stir. Early in 1960 Japan’s UPI bureau chief Bob Klaverkamp was in the Imperial Hotel book shop talking to Mrs. Kagami. She told him that the last copy of the book she had in stock that day had just been stolen. Bob did a short piece on the theft and put it on UPI’s wire service. I’ve forgotten the headline but it was something like “Book on Japanese Ethics Stolen from Bookshop.” The story caused an immediate surge in mail-orders for the book. It also resulted in a company in Yokohama ordering

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1,000 copies of the book for a forthcoming series of lectures scheduled in Japan by the famous American Evangelist Billy Graham. I personally delivered the 1,000 copies of the book to Graham’s agent in Yokohama. I never found out how Graham fared. Generally speak-ing the only Asian converts to Christianity were children who didn’t know any better and oppressed women who appreciated the social elements of the religion, not its theology. The next time I saw Bob at the Foreign Corre-spondent’s Club of Japan I bought him a beer!

Some Wonderful News And a Shocking Aftermath In early 1961 Margaret began to experience serious cramps in her lower abdomen, and one weekend when we were visiting Frank and Kim Kawahara we mentioned this to them. Frank’s mother, who lived with them, insisted that Margaret should see a doctor and volunteered to take her to a small clinic within a short walk of their home. When they returned from the clinic about an hour later both Margaret and Obā-chan [Grandmother] Kawahara were all smiles. Smiling hugely, Margaret said: “I’m pregnant!” Since Obā-chan had done the talking to the Japanese doctor she was the first to learn that we were going to have a baby. In December the night before the baby was due Margaret and I went to Chaco’s Steak House in Roppongi, a famous entertainment district, and from there directly to the Seibō Byōin Hospital in Meijiro—checking her in early just to be safe. She was to be tended by Dr. Theodore King, whom I had known for years…a multi-lingual Chinese doctor who had lived in Tokyo since before the Japan-U.S. war. Early the following night Margaret gave birth to a baby girl and everything appeared to be normal, so I went home. At around 2 a.m. Dr. King called me and said there had been a problem. He said that Margaret was in a coma and was suffering severe convulsions [eclampsia!]. When he added that they expected to get it under control and that there was nothing

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I could do if I came to the hospital. I thanked him and hung up the phone. I stayed in bed for another minute, hesitating, then got up, dressed quickly and caught a cruising taxi as soon as I got to the main street about a block from our apartment. When I arrived at the hospital and went directly to Mar- garet’s room she was still in a light coma and was thrashing around in her bed, trying to sit up and reach a small stand at her bedside. There were three nurses around her, trying to keep her down. She was gasping for breath through her mouth, which had some kind of apparatus in it, and I realized instantly what she was trying to do. Since becoming pregnant she had gradually developed some kind of allergy that made both of her nostrils close up, making it impossible for her to breathe through her nose, and had to use nose drops every hour or so to keep her nostrils open. She was trying to reach the nose drops in the stand. “She can’t breathe!” I said brusquely. “She’s trying to reach nose drops in that stand!” A nurse quickly opened the top drawer of the stand, grabbed the medicine and put several drops into Margaret’s nostrils. Within seconds she was breathing through her nose and had stopped struggling. Moments later she appeared to be sleeping. I told the nurses to put drops in her nose every hour or so, and more often if she started to breathe through her mouth. I stayed with her for about an hour, watching her. The nurses then told me that she would probably sleep for several hours and be ok when she woke up from the light coma, adding that it would be alright for me to go home and come back around 10 a.m. They said they would call me if there was any change. When I asked one of the nurses about the baby she said she was a beautiful girl, and escorted me down a hallway so I could look through a window into the nursery. The nurse then added that when the baby was first born her head was tilted to one side, but that another nurse had massaged her neck for about half an hour, resulting in the tendons and muscles lengthening to the point that her head stayed upright.

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I went home and returned to the hospital at around 10 a.m. Margaret was awake, and smiled feebly when I came in. A short while later a nurse brought baby Dawn Ruby in for nursing. We had chosen Ruby as her middle name because Ruby was the name of both my mother and Margaret’s mother. After staying with Margaret for about an hour I went to the magazine office but couldn’t concentrate on anything, and told Ray I was going home. Before going home I went to a cable office in Shibuya and sent to message to both of our families in Phoenix: “Baby girl doing fine. Margaret recovering.” This message puzzled and scared them, and I got a flurry of cables asking me to explain. Margaret was in the hospital for more than a week before Dr. King would release her. After she got home it was some three more weeks before she was fully recovered from the ordeal. It was not until later that we found out that Margaret’s mother had also suffered from eclampsia when giving birth but had never told any of her three daughters, and only Margaret in- herited the tendency. Daughter Dawn fortunately did not inherit the tendency from her mother Margaret, and we hope it will not show up in our granddaughter Haley. [Haley was married to Greg McCray in a picturesque ceremony in the backyard of our Paradise Valley residence in 2011.]

Japan’s “Water Business” & My Second Book

Japan traditionally had several of the world’s largest and most exotic entertainment industries, ranging from drinking estab- lishments, sumo wrestling and geisha inns to large prostitution districts throughout the country—the larger ones virtual towns within themselves.* ______

*In 1956, as a result of pressure from newly elected female members of Japan’s Diet [Congress], prostitution, a major industry, was banned and the red-light districts in the country were given one year to close down, April 1st. the following year. On the very last night, March 31, 1957, I and two friends 119

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR went to the Yoshiwara in Tokyo’s Asakusa district, the largest and most famous prostitution district in the country. By that time it was like a ghost town, with paper trash blowing around the once glittering streets that had bustled with life for almost three centuries. The area morphed into a popular restaurant and traditional arts and crafts shopping district. ______

With no religious taboos against sexual activity [by men] inside or outside of marital bonds, and with the indigenous religion Shintō endorsing the vital role of sexual reproduction, the country was traditionally a kind of sexual paradise for the male population. While this aspect of Japan began to change following the end of the Pacific War in 1945 and the introduction of democratic principles into the government and growing influence of women it did not disappear altogether, and there was a new development: the proliferation of hostess-staffed bars, cabarets and night clubs on a prodigious scale. These new postwar enterprises catered to the several hundred thousand members of the U.S. Occupation forces, and from 1948 on to the foreign importers who began descending on the country to reestablish prewar contacts and make new ones. By 1950 some five million Japanese girls and women were employed in these industries, and had become an integral part of the relationships between Japanese businessmen and their clients. Japan’s large cadre of senior politicians were also major clients, particularly of geisha houses where they could party and politic in private. Traditionally referred to as the mizu shobai [mee-zoo show- bye], which literally means “water business,” the cabarets and nightclubs in particular played integral roles in the efforts of Japanese businessmen to make and maintain relationships with their customers and suppliers, both foreign and domestic. Virtually every foreign importer who came to Japan was taken to one or more cabarets whose hostess staffs were made up of some of the most beautiful and talented women in the country—at that time one of the few well-paying jobs available

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR for them. At its peak in the late 1950s the Mikado Cabaret in Tokyo’s Akasaka district had over one thousand hostesses on its roster. Many of the most beautiful and talented women in the mizu shobai became wealthy. Many thousands served as mistresses to well-to-do men and politicians and some made high- profile marriages. One married Suharto, the president of Indo- nesia from 1969-1998, after his aides called her to his suite at the Imperial Hotel during a visit to Japan. By that time many foreign importers who came to Japan every two or three months had also set cabaret hostesses up as mistresses in Western-style apartments—a phenomenon that created extraordinary interest among the foreign com-munity about how the cabarets worked and how the hostesses operated. Japan was also the first country in the world to have a nation-wide network of inns established and maintained for travelers and vacationers that also functioned as houses of assignation, with their own compliment of women avail-able to male travelers as bed-companions. I began writing about the mizu shobai in 1961, and in 1962 published Bachelor’s Japan, in which I discoursed on male- female relations in Japan and described the role that Japan’s huge number of hostess-staffed bars, cabarets, nightclubs and inns played in business and politics. Bachelor’s Japan was also the first book of its kind and like my ethics and etiquette book it became an immediate bestseller, with foreign women in Japan being among the biggest buyers. It was to have a very long run. My third book, The Tourist & the Real Japan – How to Avoid Pitfalls and Get the Most Out of Your Trip, was also published in late 1962. Another first, this book featured such chapters as: The Fairyland; The Real Japan; The Ugly Tourist; The Importance of Face, Good Guides and Bad; The Traveler: His Stomach and Manners; The Language Problem; Mixed- Bathing for Everybody, and The Toilet: A “Convenient Place” (the literal meaning of benjo, the colloquial term for toilet). The book cover was designed by Hollywood’s noted Douglas Carr, who I met when he happened to be in Tokyo in the early summer of 1961.

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Seeing the John Glenn Space Flight

In February 1962 I stayed up late on the night that astronaut John Glenn’s space capsule was scheduled to pass over Tokyo in the first orbital flight by an American. There was a tiny lanai outside of our second floor bedroom window and I stood there waiting and watching. At precisely the time predicted the capsule, which looked like a shooting star, passed over the city in a long arc. He made four trips around the Earth but I saw only one of them. I also kept rocks on the lanai to throw at neighborhood cats that would begin screeching and yowling about 4 a.m. when the females were in heat.

Leaving Salaried Employment By the summer of 1962 income from my books made it possible for me to retire from The IMPORTER and take up writing full time...a move that had been overdue for some months because I had begun to clash with Ray’s wife, Niki, who did not like my influence in the company or the fact that I felt that her management of the company was “too Japanese” and conflicted with the role and needs of the magazine as an international trade publication. Ray was silent about all this… He had let Niki run the personnel side of the company since its beginning when all of the other editorial and sales employees were Japanese. The end came when Niki telephoned Margaret and lam- basted her over my attitude and behavior, causing her to cry. When I got home and heard about the phone call that was the last straw. The next morning my reaction was to say to Ray, “The shit has hit the fan! It is time for me to move on!” He didn’t object. Obviously, Niki had been bending his ears with criticism about me. Two weeks after I stopped going to the office he called me and asked I would come back in temporarily and edit the next issue of the magazine because he couldn’t find a replacement. I did. Before leaving The IMPORTER I had already finished a fourth book, How to Do Business in Japan [Simpson-Doyle &

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Company], which covered specific details of contacts, contracts, hiring employees, dealing with distributors and retailers, advertising, marketing and so on—another first in the field. Remarkably, I was to have the Japan business book market entirely to myself until 1968, when a Japanese businessman named Kobayashi and a foreigner teamed up to publish The World of Japanese Business. After leaving The IMPORTER in the summer of 1962 I founded a small press called Orient Holiday Publishing Com- pany, and over the next eighteen months published a series of my own small tourist-oriented books, along with several written by my good friend Fred T. Perry, an American who had become bilingual and an authority on Japanese culture during a self- imposed teaching-and-study exile in distant Kyushu. One of my titles in this series was an attractive quasi-leather bound shirt pocket-sized Businessman’s After Hours Guide to Japan. I sold large printings of the book to Air France on an exclusive [airline] basis. I took samples of these small-format travel related books to the publishing division of Japan Travel Bureau [my old employer] and asked them if they would distribute them in their many offices in Japan and around the world. They declined, but within a year their publishing di-vision introduced its own line of pocket-sized tourist guides patterned after mine—all attractively illustrated with original art and very interesting content. My former relationship with JTB obviously had not done me any good, which was surprising. The Tokyo Guide Card Concept One of the small bilingual pocket guides I published, De Mente’s Self-Guide to Tokyo, consisted of a deck of cards held together by a chain. Designed to be shown to taxi drivers and others, the cards gave the names, addresses and phone numbers of over 300 of the most popular destinations in the city, ranging from airline offices, banks, cabarets, department stores, antique and gift shops to popular restaurants, along with the same information in Japanese plus maps on the backs of the cards. 123

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I sold one large printing of the cards to Air France as premium giveaways for their first-class passengers. A number of other companies also bought the cards in bulk. Within a year or so hundreds of Japanese shops and stores in Tokyo had begun copying the map idea on their own store cards and small pro- motional flyers, and thereafter the practices became com- monplace. The reason for the maps was that only a few of the primary streets in Japan had names, and none of the addresses of any building had any relationship whatsoever to the street it was on. Addresses were [and still are] based on areas that diminish in size: ward, district, “block,” and section within the block...all of which vary in size and shape. A sample address: Tokyo, Shibuya Ward, Harajuku (district), 3-chome (third “block), 2-23 (2nd section in the block and 23rd building or home in the section). The size of the chome as well as the order of the houses and businesses in them varied greatly and were not always in sequential order. A Visit Home In the early spring of 1963, after an absence of nearly five years, Margaret and I decided to pay a visit to our families in Phoenix to show off our daughter, Dawn, who was nearing the age of two. I made arrangements with Jim Sweeney, the AIFT- er who had recently arrived in Tokyo to train for the job of sale manager in Hong Kong, to stay in our apartment during the month we would be gone. We flew into Honolulu and stopped over for three nights at the low-rise Waikikian Hotel on the edge of Waikiki. We arrived in the afternoon tired and sleepy and laid down for a nap which was continuously disturbed by the roar of large machines driving foundation piles into a vacant lot next door for the construction of the high-rise Illikai Hotel. On our second day in Honolulu Margaret came down with serious food poisoning that required medical attention, and had not fully recovered when we arrived in Phoenix. Soon after reaching Phoenix, I went with Mom and Dad on a trip to Mayberry, leaving Margaret and Dawn at their house. 124

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Dad had recently had his stomach totally removed because of cancer and was not up to driving, so I volunteered. We went directly to Mother Evans’ house in Mayberry. It was dusk as we approached the house, driving slowly in deep ruts that had been cut in the water-soaked ground. Large over- hanging trees in the creek bottom area made it fairly dark. As we were approaching, the headlights of the car lit up the side of the ancient chicken house that was still there on the east side of the creek. As we got closer, we saw a hand in a fingerless cloth glove appear in a crack between the boards. The hand slowly pushed one of the boards aside, and Grandmother Evans slowly emerged through the opening with a basket of eggs in her other hand. We stayed with Mother Evans for five nights…by which time Mom was ready to walk back to Arizona. She couldn’t take any more of the mosquitoes and other bugs, the lack of running water in the house, no electricity, and a bare shack toilet that was several hundred feet away. A recent heavy rain and runoff had washed away the bridge over the creek in front of Mother Evans’ house. I built a new one, using mostly logs and lumber that had washed down from further up in the hollow. Dad supervised the construction while sitting in a chair on the bank of the creek [He was to live for 15 more years without a stomach, by eating small amounts every two hours or so during the day.] Mother Evans continued to live alone in the house until she was about 90, by which time there were only two other families living in Mayberry.] On the way back to Phoenix from Missouri we stopped off in Oklahoma City to see Jessie and her husband Gene. After over 15 years of marriage they still had no children, and then they had three sons in rapid succession. After Gene died an early death Jessie and her youngest sons moved to Prescott, Arizona. As of this writing Jessie is still surviving and thriving, and keeps up with her long study of Arizona’s Navajo Indians and contributing to needy families.

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Reuniting with Jim Walker My friend Jim Walker [from my few weeks at Camp Bender following my ousting from the ASA] was then living in Tokyo with his Japanese wife and sons. I contacted him and he volunteered to do some shopping for us at the American military commissary in Washington Heights [a large fenced-in housing community of American military personnel and their families, built in the winter of 1945 in what had been Meiji Park and the parade grounds of an elite Japanese military unit that served the Emperor]. Jim bought us large bags of canned foods that we could not buy on the Japanese market. One evening he also took Mar- garet and I into the Washington Heights American residential complex for dinner and a show, featuring a popular skinny thin- faced American male singer [not Frank Sinatra] whose name I can’t recall! Jim later took a job with the American forces in Korea, as head of a procurement office, leaving his family in Japan—and stayed there for some 15 years, living with a Korean woman. I visited him a number of times and met him in Seoul on several occasions. On one of these occasions he took me to the Demilitarized Zone on the 38th Parallel a few miles north of Seoul, where American and South Korean troops stood guard virtually nose-to-nose with North Korean soldiers [all especially selected for their height in order to match the Americans and South Koreans].

The Sakura Maru Voyage Home In the summer of 1963 Margaret and I decided to move back to the U.S. I sold controlling interest in Orient Holiday Publishing Company to another Thunderbird-grad [Ed Fernandez-Roberts], and turned Bachelor’s Japan over to Tuttle Publishing Co. The Center for International Business at Pepperdine University in California had picked up How to Do Business in Japan. We booked passage on the brand new Sakura Maru passenger ship for its first ever voyage: to the U.S. and South America. The passengers included many Japanese immigrants 126

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR moving to Brazil. The day before we were scheduled to sail we checked into the Yokohama Silk Hotel near the port, and that evening hosted a dinner party for a group of our friends at the hotel. On the long voyage to San Pedro, California via Hawaii and San Francisco, I began a series of commentaries that I entitled FACES OF JAPAN—23 Critical Essays. They were published as a book in Tokyo in 1966, first by Simpson-Doyle & Com- pany, and then by Yen Books. For some reason, the new Sakura Maru did not have enough ballast in its hull to mitigate its rolling and pitching, even in minor swells and waves. This contributed to Margaret suffering from sea sickness for the first few days, but otherwise it was a great trip. Our daughter, Dawn, then going on two, had trouble walking when the ship heaved and rolled, but soon got the hang of it. The bunks in our cabin were perpendicular to the sides of the ship, and when we put her down for a daily nap and the ship was really rolling from side to side, she would slide from one end of the bunk to the other while sound asleep. Other children on the ship used the waxed linoleum-covered passageways that were crossways as slides, skidding from one side of the ship to the other when it rolled. Because the ship made a detour southeast to Honolulu and then northeast to San Francisco it took us three weeks to reach San Pedro, where we disembarked. Brother L, along with Mom, drove to San Pedro from Phoenix to pick us up….pulling our baggage and few household possessions on a small open trailer hooked to his car. On the way home we were stopped by a highway patrolman for speeding. While the patrolman was writing on his pad L turned to our mother and said; “Mom! Why did you let me drive so fast?” The patrolman smiled, tore up the ticket and said to L: “Pay attention to your Mom,” and let us go. Back in Phoenix Margaret and I rented a house on El Ca- mino Drive just east of Central Avenue on the outskirts of Sunnyslope in what was then north Phoenix. Our second daughter Demetra arrived on February19, 1964, completing our family.

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Moving to Honolulu When Demetra was four months old I decided to do a book on Hawaii, so we moved to Honolulu. For the first few days we stayed with a Japanese couple who lived in Wahiawa in the central highlands near Schofield Barracks. The wife was the older sister of Reiko Emmi, a girl who was then serving as the secretary of one of my old friends, John Leinfelder, who had temporarily replaced me as editor of The IMPORTER when I resigned in 1962. John was an ex- Navy lieutenant who owned an English-teaching academy. Both John and Reiko were to remain lifelong friends and play significant roles in my life in Japan and in the U.S. Margaret and I moved into an apartment near the University of Hawaii, where I intended to do some studying and interviewing. We had no baby bed so Margaret put Demetra in a partially opened dresser drawer. We bought a used Renault car, and I began working on a new book—Bachelor’s Hawaii—to be published by Tuttle in Tokyo. In an interview with a Hawaiian language professor I ask her what them term haole [how-lay], used in reference to non- Polynesians living in Hawaii, actually meant. I was amused beyond words when she told me it meant “white pig.” Our next door neighbors in the apartment building we lived in included Bill and Barbara Lowe. Bill worked for the government at a radio-monitoring site on a mountain on the northwest side of the island. They had a son slightly older than Dawn. They later moved to a small town on the same side of the island where Bill worked, and on a subsequent trip to the Orient I stayed with them for a couple of days. They later moved to Mesa, Arizona, near Phoenix, and our friendship continued until Barbara died early and Bill moved to Florida. We stayed in Hawaii for just a few months, returning to Phoenix and renting a home on west State Street, just north of Glendale Avenue. We lived there for about a year, during which I continued to write. It was to be more than a year before my first return to Japan, and follow-up on the various things I had started there.

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Since I worked at home I often ended up “baby-sitting” Demetra, while daughter Dawn was in pre-kindergarten school. Demetra began walking when she was eight months old, and from an early age loved to play hide-and-seek and climb trees. In October 1965 we bought our first home—in the 1600 block of East McClellan, only a short distance from Madison Elementary School. When in her early teens Demetra took a course in taikwando, the Korean version of Japan’s judo. One day Dawn’s boy friend, a six-foot tall muscular football player named Rick was horsing around with Demetra in our front yard, teasing her about taking a course in a martial art. He attempted to grab her. In a remarkable display of what she had learned she flipped him up in the air and he landed on his back on the ground with a thud. With a shocked look on his face, he quickly scrambled to his feet, mumbling that it was an accident. We lived on McClellan until 1969 when we bought a home in Paradise Valley, a ritzy residential township between Phoenix and Scottsdale, where we now live.

Niki Woodside Dies Not long after we moved back to the U.S. Ray’s wife Niki, my former nemesis, came down with liver cancer and died within months. About half a year after her death Ray married a hostess he had met at the Mikado Cabaret, primarily because he needed help with his two sons—the youngest of whom had become a serious problem. Niki’s aged mother, her sister [Kazuko] and brother, members of a prominent Honda family of Nagoya, were shocked by Ray’s second marriage, came down hard on him and refused to recognize his ex-cabaret hostess wife…whom I had met a number of times when I went with Ray to the Mikado. Add to the Half-Safe Jeep Story Shortly after Margaret and I moved back to Phoenix from Tokyo in 1963 one of my sisters told me that Ben Carlin, the master of the amphibious jeep Half-Safe on which he and I had

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR traveled from Tokyo to Anchorage, Alaska over the four summer months of 1957, had showed up in Phoenix some weeks before our arrival, called my sister Winnie and subsequently held a private showing of his films of the jeep trip for her and some of my other siblings. She said he was the perfect host, charming and entertaining…a far cry from the SOB traits he had exhibited from shortly after I first met him in Tokyo until we reached Anchorage, where I jumped-jeep, as his wife and her replacement had done before me. We had stayed in Hawaii for less than a year, moving back to Phoenix in 1966 where I began working on a new book, Bachelor’s Mexico—a project that was to have a series of extraordinary ramifications over the next several years. One of the benefits of my writing career was that when I was home I was a stay-at-home dad. On one occasion when Dawn was at pre-school, I lost Demetra. That is, I couldn’t find her in the house. I kept searching and calling out her name. Finally, after what seemed like a long time, I saw one of the window curtains move a little bit. She had climbed up on the couch, stepped up on the window ledge, and closed the curtains—a new hide-and-seek ploy she hadn’t used before. She was about one year old.* ______*Demetra grew up and began working in the health industry as a licensed respiratory therapist, but when the high-tech information society developed she decided to join it, attended and graduated from DeVry University with a degree in Information Technology in 2001. But the year she graduated the bottom fell out of the high- tech industry and there were no jobs available. She re-entered the health care industry and a short while later signed up with an agency as a “Traveler,” meaning she would accept short- term assignments anywhere in the country where there was a sudden need for respiratory therapists. Her subsequent travel assignments included stays in Honolulu that amounted to around two years, where I, Margaret and Dawn visited her on several occasions.

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In 2010 Demetra adopted a 11-year old girl named Rosalie whose dysfunctional parents had given her up to the state some six years earlier, resulting in her being bounced around to different host families who sorely neglected her education, abused her in many ways, and finally kept her sedated on drugs to keep her passive and obedient. With patient and professional care by Demetra she is developing into a fine young lady. [She just now came into my home office and we chatted for a while.] ______

ONCE A FOOL Published When I agreed in early 1957 to join Australian Ben Carlin on the amphibious jeep Half-Safe for the final and longest sea- segment of his trip around the world—from Japan to Alaska—I also agreed that I would not write about the voyage for at least five years…giving him time to do his own book. I began working on my account of the extraordinary experience in early 1964, writing from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. every night until it was finished. The events of my meeting Carlin and the subsequent trip to Anchorage, Alaska were so compelling I found I could remember every detail with absolute clarity, including the rare verbal communications we had from our departure from Tokyo to the last time I saw him in Anchorage. [In addition to the fact that we had absolutely nothing in common the noise in the enclosed cabin of the jeep made conversation a strain. Our 4-on 4-off 24-hour a day schedule also kept us groggy and we came alive only during times of emergency. I had instantly come up with ONCE A FOOL as the title for the book—a clear indication of what I thought of the adventure once it was over for me. [After I left Carlin in Anchorage three days after our arrival on September 3rd, 1957 he later continued driving on his own, down the Alaska Highway to California and then across country to New York and Halifax on the East Coast where he had originally started [with his wife as the co-driver]. Incredibly, in the late-1960s a young Phoenix lawyer named Sidney Rosen who had come across my book when he was in

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Hong Kong, telephoned me with a remarkable story. He said he had just spotted the jeep Half-Safe being driven through downtown Phoenix, and described it perfectly. I invited him to come to my house. We talked for some three hours, and thereafter over the years shared some adventures of our own. Obviously, Carlin was still stuck on the jeep, like some weird character on a ship that couldn’t reach any port. He eventually returned to Perth, Australia, his home, and donated the jeep to the boys’ school he had attended as a youth. It is still on display there, behind glass. After returning to Perth Carlin remarried and had a daughter. When she was about 20 years old she also came across my book [which was not complimentary to her father] and wrote to me about him and my book. I put her letter in the front-matter of a subsequent printing of the book, which is still available from Amazon.com. Carlin died of a heart attack in 1981. Still today I get occasional emails from people in England about the HALF-SAFE story. The IMPORTER Visit On my first return trip to Tokyo following our move back to the U.S. I paid a surprise visit to The IMPORTER, where my old boss Ray Woodside welcomed me warmly. By that time, he had constructed a new two-story office building on the opposite side of the same street, adjoining the famous Nogi Shrine. On a subsequent visit he rented the former office building to me and my then Tokyo partner Ed Roberts. We turned the former private office where Ray and I had had our desks into a makeshift bedroom, where I stayed when in Tokyo and where Ed took the girls he picked up…something he was so good at he became legendary.

Meeting John Wilcock In 1965 when I was back in Tokyo I met author/columnist/ John Wilcock, who was in Japan researching for one of his famous $5 a Day travel books—the series published by Frommer in

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New York—beginning with Mexico on $5 a Day which came out in 1960. Both John and I were staying at the Asia Center in Tokyo [a bare-bones non-profit hotel in Tokyo sponsored by a foundation for Asian educators and scholars], and soon became acquainted. We made a date to go see a Japanese film in Shinjuku, one of the city’s primary entertainment districts. When I knocked on his door John yelled out “Just a minute!” and I could hear muted voices and scurrying sounds. A moment later when he opened the door he had a funny grin on his face and was still in the process of getting dressed. I stepped inside the small room and when I partially closed the door behind me I saw there was someone behind the door, squatting down on the floor under a small throw-rug. I saw immediately that it was a girl who was stark naked. She wasn’t completely covered, and began giggling. “I’ll wait outside,” I said to John. It was several minutes before they came out. We went on to Shinjuku and saw a Kuro- sawa samurai film. On another occasion I invited John to join me for an official luncheon at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Japan. When the speech-making began John lit up a marijuana cigarette and blithely smoked it. He also mentioned that he had planted marijuana seeds on the grounds of the U.S. Embassy Annex. John’s pot habits obviously did not dull his creative writer and editor abilities. Originally a British journalist, John was one of the five co-founders of New York’s Village Voice in 1955, and was a columnist for the paper for the next 10 years. He then became the editor of East Village Other, following which he served as the travel editor for The New York Times for three years. He went on to write more than two dozen other travel books, guest-edit newspapers, coordinate the Underground Press Syn- dicate and publish his own newspaper [Other Scenes]. He is still active as a writer and publisher—apparently unharmed by his years of pot-smoking. Few people have done as much with their lives and times as John.

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A Phone Call that Changed the World! In early 1965 I had a phone call from a young man named Merle Hinrichs, who explained that he was a student at my old foreign trade school in Glendale and that he and two of his classmates would like to come to my house in Phoenix and talk to me about The IMPORTER Magazine and Ray Woodside, my former employer. Merle and two of his classmates had been contacted by Ray about a job in Hong Kong as advertising sales manager, re- placing AIFT-er Jim Sweeney who had started his own company in Hong Kong [Chatham Industries] and left the magazine. Following the meeting with Merle and his classmates, I wrote to Ray telling him that Merle was the most impressive of the three, and recommended that he hire him. Merle was hired, spent several weeks in Japan getting acquainted with Ray and becoming familiar with the company, and was then dispatched to Hong Kong as the new sales manager. That was the beginning of a remarkable series of events that were to impact on the economic and political history of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and the rest Southeast Asia, not to mention the United States and the rest of the world.

Daughter Dawn in Charge

When daughter Dawn was about five years old she came into my home office and asked if she could do something [I don’t remember what]. Like many parents, I started to hem and haw. With a stern expression on her face she said: “Just give me a yes or no!” I said no. She turned around and walked out of the office without another word. I was momentarily stunned, and then realized that she was going to be in charge of her life. She grew up, graduated from Arizona State University, married classmate Mark Schofield, had a daughter, Haley, and a son, Trevor, and became a career math teacher.

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Some Prefer Geisha In March of 1966 John Weatherhill Inc. [ran by Tex Weatherby, formerly senior editor of the Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Company], brought out my new book Some Prefer Geisha: The Lively Art of Mistress-Keeping in Japan under his Wayward Press imprint. The book, beautifully illustrated by the Japanese artist Tadahito Nadamoto, quickly became a classic—as much for the drawings as for its content. The drawings illustrate both the origin and the cultural content of the ideographic characters that make up the Chinese and Japanese writing systems…a factor that makes the characters intrinsically interesting in their own right and therefore much easier to learn than what might be imagined.* ______*Later that year when I was staying at the New Otani Hotel in Tokyo the Japanese language edition of Bachelor’s Japan was the topic of discussion on a television show with a panel consisting of a famous actress, a famous base-ball player, a comedian and a fellow named Soichi Oya, Japan’s best known sociologist. When the four were asked to sum up their opinions of my book, Oya said: “Everything De Mente San wrote is true, but I wish he hadn’t written it!” Somehow, the news media learned that I was a guest at the New Otani….and my phone rang until about 3 a.m. with people asking for live radio interviews. I finally consented to doing one. ______

The Bachelor’s BEAT Story

Back in Phoenix in 1967 I received a telephone call from a 27- year-old guy named Jerry Evenson, who had just started a new weekly entertainment newspaper called Bachelor’s BEAT. He said he had come across my bachelor books when researching the idea at the Phoenix Library, and said he would like to meet me.

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We met, I liked him and the idea, and soon joined the new enterprise as the editor. The paper was an instant hit, attracting significant advertising from bars and nightclubs throughout the metro Phoenix area…and was soon to have an extraordinary impact on my life.

The Amazing Larry Flynt Saga The appearance of the notorious magazine Hustler in 1974 was big news, but its story actually started several years before that with my first meeting with Larry Flynt, the publisher of the magazine. One afternoon in 1967, several months after I started editing Jerry Evenson’s Bachelor’s BEAT, I was sitting in the office doing my thing when a visitor came in—a husky guy in his mid-twenties with curly reddish hair and a hillbilly accent. He laid a $100 bill on my desk and said he wanted a subscription to the newspaper. I asked Jerry’s wife to take the money and give him the change. He said: “I don’t want any change. Keep it all.” He then introduced himself as Larry Flynt, the owner of a chain of go-go clubs in Ohio called HUSTLER, who said he was in town looking for dancers to work in his clubs. We then had an extraordinary conversation that lasted for more than two hours. Flynt was one of the most intelligent, best read and most erudite person I had ever met. Before leaving he said that he wanted a franchise agreement to publish Bachelor’s BEAT in Ohio. When I later brought this up to the owner-publisher Jerry Evenson he readily agreed. When I got home that evening I said to Margaret these exact words: “I just met a man who could be president of the United States as soon as he is old enough to qualify!” Some weeks later Flynt called me and asked me if I would come to Ohio and teach him and a newly hired staff how to publish a weekly newspaper. I agreed and spent three days with him and his team. Before long, Flynt also began publishing a monthly newsletter named Hustler after his go-go clubs, to publicize the clubs. He sent copies of the newsletter to me for me to critique, and then asked me to become a contributing editor. 136

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In 1974 Flynt decided to convert Hustler newsletter into a porn version of Playboy magazine. When he brought a veteran porn editor in from New York, I severed my relationship with the magazine. One particular issue of Hustler was so gross it shocked magazine distributors, several of whom refused to distribute it. But Larry personally visited key distributors and used his extraordinary powers of persuasion [and their natural greed] to get them to put the magazine out because he knew it would sell. Larry was a master at manipulating the media. Earlier in his career as a go-go club chain operator he got into a dispute with a bank over a multi-thousand dollar loan he had received. When the bank demanded repayment Larry had his staff buy up pennies in the exact amount of the loan, and then had several of his bikini-clad go-go dancers deliver the pennies to the bank in wheelbarrows and dump them in the lobby of the bank. The prank got him massive publicity.

The Nude Jackie Kennedy Photos

In 1974, shortly after the flap with his distributors over the gross content of Hustler, Larry got a phone call from a freelance photographer in Italy who had used a long-range camera to take shots of Jackie Kennedy in the nude. The widow of the deceased president John Kennedy and then the wife of shipping tycoon Onassis had been photographed lounging around a pool naked at the Onassis estate on a Greek island. Flynt sent his younger brother Jimmy to Italy with a cache of over a hundred thousand dollars to buy the photographs in a calculated gamble that publishing the photos in Hustler would rocket sales and make it and him world famous. At that time Larry was over half a million dollars in debt and in danger of losing everything, but the gamble was the beginning of his incredible rise to great wealth and notoriety, and his emergence as a public figure sought after by the news media. Shortly after the nude Jacqueline issue came out I was in Larry’s tiny apartment kitchen, watching him eat a peanut butter

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR fold-over sandwich [one slice of bread folded over], when a $2 million dollar certified bank check was delivered to him by a special courier. Following the publication of the Jacquline Kennedy-Onasis photos and the huge influx of cash Larry bought a large mansion in a ritzy section of Dayton, Ohio as a central piece in his new image as a publishing tycoon. He moved into the mansion with Althea Leasure, a young girl who had been a go-go dancer in one of his clubs. Incredibly bright and aggressive, she had become as much a business partner as she was a live-in mistress. She later complained to me that Larry was so busy the only time she had a chance to talk to him was when they were sitting on their adjoining His and Her toilet seats in the master bathroom. During the first year or so of their live-in arrangement one of Althea’s activities was to bring Larry girls from his clubs as extra sex mates. In 1976 Larry called me and asked me if I would write a biography of his life up to that time, for which he would pay me a $1,000 a month retainer during the writing period with the promise of a huge royalty payoff in the end. I agreed and a few days later met him, his girl friend Althea and a male buddy/bodyguard in Chicago, and traveled with them back to Dayton where he put me up in one of the many [24!] bedrooms of his mansion. For several weeks thereafter I interviewed all of his key employees and friends, including an ex-wife in Florida, and traveled with him on his frequent trips around the country. One of these trips was a visit to his birthplace in the hills of Kentucky, where as a kid one of his jobs was plowing with a team of mules—or as he called it, “Looking up the ass of a mule.” [He had conned his way into the Navy when he was 16, beginning an amazing career that was based on a combination of superior intelligence, an obsessive ambition to learn by devouring books, unrelenting courage, peerless guile, the will to use people to achieve his goals, and a powerful sex drive.] Larry left for Lakeside first, with me following in a second chauffeur-driven limousine accompanied by his brother Jimmy.

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By that time I had given Larry a rough draft of book he had commissioned me to write and it had been read by his girl friend Althea [who became angry because in the manuscript I described her sister as the real beauty in her family] and by Jimmy. An hour or so after we left Dayton, Jimmy brought up the subject of the manuscript, and said: “Do you really think Larry will let you publish it?” I was taken aback a bit, but Larry had always treated me with a great deal of respect and had frequently referred to the benefits that both of us would get from its publication. I told Jimmy that at that point I would only rely on Larry’s word. A short time later Larry was invited to give a lecture on pornography at Ohio State University. He had never made a speech before a public audience before, and I was amazed at how well he did. He spoke for nearly an hour without notes, getting a number of standing ovations from the students. It was a remarkable performance. Two of my trips with Larry were especially noteworthy. Another freelance photographer had come up with some very explicit pictures of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner engaged in some very non-missionary type sex with one of his many girl friends, and offered to sell them to Larry. Larry bought the photos and negatives, but rather than publishing them in Hustler magazine he sent them to Hefner, with a note saying he had learned a lot from Hefner and Playboy and chose not to publish the photos. An obviously grateful Hefner called Larry and invited him to come to the Playboy mansion in Hollywood for one of his famous parties. Larry asked me to go with him, and also took along a large rolled up proof of the coming HUSTLER HONEY center section of to show to Hefner. We arrived in Los Angeles late in the afternoon and checked into one of the top hotels. Larry asked for a limousine to take us to the Playboy mansion, but none were available so we had to go in a taxi—much to Larry’s chagrin.

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When we arrived at the Playboy mansion movie actor Ryan O’Neal who had obviously been drinking was acting as the doorman and opened the door for us with a dramatic bow. Inside the huge foyer, a male employee of the mansion who had obviously been stationed there to greet Larry asked us to follow him to the backyard where the party was already in progress. At that moment Larry had second thoughts about showing the centerfold proofs he had brought along to Hefner, and asked the attendant to put them somewhere. He put them in a hallway closet. The very instant that Larry and I stepped out of the back door overlooking the party grounds, Hefner saw Larry, jumped up from the table he was sitting at and rushed forward to welcome him. Larry introduced me to Hefner as “a novelist,” and for the next several hours we were treated as his special guests. The final event of the evening was a movie in the mansions large showroom. After we sat down Larry nudged me and said “Look there.” Cher, the famous singer-actress, was seated some three chairs away from us. I had not recognized her without her war paint. Movies at the Hefner mansion were a nightly affair for the large number of Hollywood celebrities who were happy to take ad-vantage of his generosity. On another occasion I accompanied Larry and Jimmy to a conference of magazine distributors in Las Vegas. As soon as we walked into the suite, Larry turned to Jimmy and asked him if they should order in a couple of hookers. Jimmy, who had recently married, said no thanks, and then took off to do something. While Larry was unpacking an overnight bag he turned to me and said: “Boye, you are twice as smart as I am and you taught me everything I know about publishing. How come I’m rich and you’re not?” I didn’t have to think twice. “Because your balls are bigger than mine,” I replied instantly. In fact, Flynt was one of the most aggressive and cou- rageous men I had ever met—confronting events and doing

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR things in situations that most people would avoid like the plague. Among many other things he had shot a man who wronged him and nearly beat another man to death with a baseball bat after the man set him up for a beating by rival bar operators—a beating that crushed several bones in his face and nearly killed him. Perhaps the most impressive event that I witnessed while traveling with Flynt as his biographer was his appearance as a lecturer on morality at the University of Ohio. Given the fact that he had hardly finished grade school, had come out of the hills of Kentucky and was never exposed to any additional formal education, I was astounded by his eloquence and logic, which earned him standing ovations from the huge audience in the school auditorium. Some weeks after this event Larry, Althea and Larry’s go-go days buddy showed up in Phoenix and came out to my house by taxi. Margaret and I loaded them up in the backseat of our small car and took them to a Mexican restaurant on the north side of town for dinner. Sometime later Larry called me and asked me to go a prison facility in Clifton, Arizona, pick up his buddy and take him to the airport. He had been arrested on a marijuana charge and sent to the prison camp, and was being allowed to travel on his own to a similar facility closer to his home in Ohio. Several weeks after I finished the manuscript of the book, which I had entitled LARRY FLYNT’S WORLD – From Raunch to Rich in the Grand American Tradition!, and mailed it to Larry I had a late-night call from him. “It looks like we have a book,” he said. Some weeks later he called again to say that he had retained a New York writer-editor named Black to do the final editing of the manuscript and that he was sending the editor to Arizona to work with me. The editor showed up and we met—once for dinner and once to discuss the manuscript. The editor said that Larry wanted the book jazzed up a bit—that it was too “fact- oriented.” The editor returned to New York. A month or so later I received check for $10,000 and a letter from Larry’s attorney,

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR noting that the verbal agreement between me and Larry was terminated and that the check was payment in full for my services. The book was never published. I still have my file copy of the manuscript in my office closet. It would have been a bestseller. About a year after the book incident Margaret and I received a formal invitation to attend Larry and Althea’s wedding at their Dayton mansion. [She was to be his fourth wife.] The invitation had been handled by a secretary, and we were on our own as far as transportation and hotel accommodations were concerned. On our way to our hotel in downtown Dayton we shared a taxi with one of the most notorious of the New York porn publishers who had also been invited to the wedding and was also on his own. The wedding was the following day, and was attended by some 200 guests, including magazine distributors from around the country and some of Larry’s early friends and employees from his go-go nightclub days. We also later learned that the guest list included several men for whom Larry had previously arranged a sex orgy in a hotel suite featuring half a dozen totally nude go-go girls from his clubs, recounted to me by both Larry and one of his friends during my earlier interviews for his bio. Two events made the wedding, held in the huge back-yard of the mansion, stand out. One of the gangster-looking guests got roaring drunk and began grabbing at some of the women. Two of Larry’s go-go days male bouncer friends grabbed his arms and a third one knocked him out with several blows to the body. After the wedding ceremony several of Larry’s friends suddenly picked him up and tossed him into the backyard swimming pool. He didn’t appreciate the unexpected act, and when he dragged himself out of the water he said plaintively: “Why did you do that?” I was not greeted by Larry or Althea and did not make any effort to greet or congratulate them. The whole setting was simply too surreal; so strange I simply didn’t feel like confronting them. That was the last time I was to see Larry in person.

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Following Hugh Hefner

Although Larry’s role model Hugh Hefner had moved his own residence from Chicago to Hollywood, he left his publishing operation in Chicago. Larry went further. He not only bought a mansion in Hollywood, he moved his entire publishing operation to Los Angles, morphing it into a major conglomerate. On March 6, 1978 Larry was shot by a sniper while he was in Georgia for a porno trial. The shot shattered his spine and left him permanently paralyzed from the waist down. After returning to the management of his empire [from a gold-plated wheelchair] Larry continued his obscenity bouts with the government, winning all of his cases, including one that went to the Supreme Court. His numerous activities since then have included making movies, publishing books, and making PR-based gestures toward running for president of the United States and the governorship of California. He also became noted for having his own private jet, making frequent trips to Las Vegas to gamble and for entertaining Hollywood movie stars a’la Hugh Hefner. Larry also periodically placed full page advertisements in the Philadelphia Enquirer offering $1 million dollars for information about any Congressman or Senator who had a mistress, frequented prostitutes and or otherwise engaged in sexual behavior that was not in keeping with their role as leaders of the country. He “outed” a number of members of Congress who were guilty of sexual peccadilloes. On fairly regular occasions over the years he has continued to be featured in the national news for a comment or some other action that resulted in a swarm of media attention. In the early summer of 2011 he appeared as a solo guest on the new Piers Morgan TV talk show program, using some of the trenchant one-liners that he had first come up with decades ago. A movie entitled “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” based on his development of HUSTLER magazine into a porn publication, his legal battles, his arrests, the attempt to assassinate him, the drug-related death of his wife Althea, and finally his victory in the Supreme Court, has been playing on TV nightly this past 143

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR week. Filmed in 1996, it stars Woody Harrelson and Victoria Love, and features numerous raunchy scenes that depict the very basic view Larry had of the female genitals. In earlier times he wore a colorful bola tie in the form of the female genitalia. Larry himself plays a judge in one of the court scenes in the movie.

Face-Reading for Fun & Profit

In addition to working for Bachelor’s BEAT I finished writing a new book, Face-Reading for Fun & Profit. It was based on information I had gleaned from an interview with the Japanese face-reader called in by the Japanese military in 1939 to help it decide on the specialized training new recruits would have the most aptitude for, combined with research I had done in Chin- ese archives at the Diet Library. [I learned at that time that the Japanese had imported the art from China some 300 years before and improved on it. The Japanese term for face-reading, ninso-mi (neen-so-me), literally means “body-reading.” The face-reading book was brought out by Phoenix Books / Publishers, which I had founded the year before.* I sold purse- books rights of the face-reading book to Dell in New York. They marketed it in drugstores and super-markets, and sold around one million copies at 69 cents each. I got less than a penny from each sale. Dell kept the purse-book edition out for only about a year, and I never understood why they let it go out of print. I subsequently published around 75 titles under the Phoenix Books imprint, some 15 of them my own books. I had become acutely aware that regular book publishers were incapable of handling more than two or three dozen writers successfully, with most of their other authors getting little if any advertising and marketing effort. According to the book trade, some 85 percent of the books brought out by New York publishers did not sell out the first print-run…meaning that most publishers lived off of their Back- List of books…and if lucky they added a few titles to this list each year—usually written by their small number of name authors. I found that if I could sell 3,000 copies of a book I 144

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR owned outright I could make as much or more than what I would get from a royalty publisher on sales of 15,000 copies.

“What’s My Line?”

When I was in Hong Kong shortly after the face-reading book came out Margaret called to tell me that the popular TV show What’s My Line in New York wanted me to appear as a guest. When I returned to Phoenix my appearance was scheduled and I did the show. Panel members included actress Arlene Francis, publisher Bennett Cerf and comedian Soupy Sales. As a finale to my appearance the host asked me to read the faces of the panel. When I got to comedian Soupy Sales I said that his most prominent facial feature was his big mouth. He did have a very wide mouth. He jumped up from his chair and came at me with his fists up in a mock attack. That was the highlight of my appearance. Back at my hotel a short time later, I was a celebrity among the crowd in the lobby who had witnessed the show. The face-reading book is now at Tuttle Publishing, re-titled ASIAN FACE READING – Discover the Secrets Hidden in the Human Face, and available from Amazon.com and other book retailers. By that time I had left the Phoenix Bachelor’s BEAT, but continued to contribute a weekly news service called Bachelor’s New Service [BNS] for the next year, including when I was traveling in Asia. I then turned the news service over to a bright young journalist named Bob Golden.

Girl-Watching in the Orient

Back in Tokyo in 1967 I met my old Sophia classmate and friend Len Walsh. One of the topics that came up was my idea of eventually doing a girl-watcher’s guide to the Orient. He asked me why I didn’t continue on around Southeast Asia and do it on that trip. When I told him I had already spent by travel budget, he insisted on advancing me the money to cover the extended trip.

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I made the tour and subsequently wrote Girl-Watcher’s Guide to the Far East, published in Tokyo by Bachelor Books, another imprint I had helped establish before moving out of Japan. It was distributed worldwide by Tuttle Publishing Com- pany. The book detailed the sensual appeal and sexual behavior of the girls of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Viet- nam, and the Philippines. A long-time best-seller, it was to be the cause of a number of significant events in my life thereafter; some constructive and some not! Three unusual events occurred during my girl-watching tour of Southeast Asia. In Taiwan I ran into John Rohrbough, whom I had met on Shemya when en route to Anchorage, Alaska aboard the amphibious jeep HALF-SAFE. John took me to the notorious Peitou hot spring spa in the hills outside of Taipei, where one of the bath-house girls told us they often had visits from the Catholic priests who taught at Sophia University in Tokyo. In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the minister of tourism took me in his chauffeured limousine to his favorite ocean-side seafood restaurant about an hour away from my hotel. In Manila I stayed at the hotel that had served as Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s home and headquarters in the 1930s when he served as marshal of the Philippines, and received a private tour of his suite that had been preserved in his honor. My next book. RETIRING IN ARIZONA – Senior Citizens’ Shangri La, was also a “bestseller” primarily because it was purchased in large bulk by First Federal Savings in Phoenix and used as a premium in attracting new accounts. I then wrote a series of “insider’s guides” to Arizona’s main cities [one of them for Frommer in New York], to the state’s twenty-two Indian Reservations, and to the most popular border towns and beach resorts of northwestern Mexico. The book on northern Mexico’s tourist resort towns was picked up by Banco de México as a marketing premium. While I had succeeded in exporting books to several countries around the world it was these commercial tie-ins that made my publishing efforts successful.

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The Rest of the Merle Hinrichs Story Merle Hinrichs, whom I had recommended in 1965 to my old boss Ray Woodside as a sales manager for The IM-PORTER magazine’s Hong Kong office, turned out to be an outstanding salesman and a master manager. Ad sales in Southeast Asia climbed rapidly as a result of his efforts. In 1967 on my first visit to Hong Kong after he took over the office I stayed in his apartment as his guest. On my next trip to Singapore he was there on a sales visit and invited me to share his hotel room. By 1969 Ray was so impressed and appreciative of Merle’s amazing sales record that he agreed to make him a director and part owner of East Asia Publishing Company. But in 1970, before this agreement could be officially formalized, Ray suddenly died of a pancreatic rupture [he had become a heavy drinker]. His deceased wife’s sister, Kazuko Makino, whose husband was the owner and president of a successful manufacturing company in Nagoya, was dispatched to Tokyo to take over East Asia Publishing Company and act as publisher of The IMPORTER. Immediately after learning of Ray’s death Merle hurried to Tokyo to follow up on Ray’s intention of making him a director and part owner of the company. Kazuko and her family refused to honor Ray’s promise. This resulted in Merle returning to Hong Kong and setting up his own publishing company, Trade Media Ltd., and starting his own magazine, ASIAN SOURCES. Kazuko knew nothing about business or publishing…and could not control the Japanese department heads in the company who began competing with each for power the day Ray died. She ended up appointing a magazine design studio headed by a foreigner who quickly took control of all of the production of the magazine, including all contact with the printer. This gave him virtual control of the magazine. During a trip to Tokyo I made a casual visit to the company, met Kazuko and also talked to the department heads who were continuing to battle with each other, finally coming to understand the depths to which the magazine had sunk.

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The only rational senior individual in the group was the office manager, Mr. Kozuka, with whom I had a good relationship. He was the one with whom I had gone to Sony in 1958 about a badly written ad they wanted to run to commemorate the 5th year anniversary of the change of their name from Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. to Sony. The whole situation at The IMPORTER was untenable. In the meantime, Kazuko had arranged for the company’s lawyer to put Ray’s sons Jay and Richard on very generous monthly retainers so they could pay their own expenses. Rich- ard, the youngest son, repeatedly gambled his stipend away in illicit gambling parlors in Shinjuku. I was staying at the Imperial Hotel and one evening had a call from Kazuko who broke down and cried. I knew her situation but there was nothing I could do, and a few days later I returned to Arizona. Exactly five days after I got home Kazuko called me and begged me to come back to Tokyo immediately and help her straighten the mess out. I reluctantly agreed. She said she would set up a meeting for me with the department heads and the foreigner who had taken control of the operation of the company. The meeting occurred at The IMPORTER building in Harajuku on the second day after my arrival in Tokyo. It was a very tense situation. I made an opening statement, blaming all of the participants for the mess the company was in. This resulted in a loud outbreak of accusations that was finally quelled by Kozuka. I then went on to tell the foreigner that his control of the company was outrageous, amounted to theft, was illegal, and could not continue. To my surprise, he said he would return the production of the magazine to the company and severe his relationship altogether if the company would pay him a fee of several million yen. Kazuko agreed to his demand. Soon after Kazuko and her staff regained control of the magazine she took my advice and moved the editorial production and printing of the magazine to Hong Kong, where the cost was less than half of what it was in Tokyo.

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She sent her oldest son, Tsuneyoshi, to Hong Kong to set up the office and remain there as the manager. Just out of university, Tsuneyoshi knew nothing about publishing or managing, but he made a valiant effort. In the meantime Merle Hinrich’s new magazine, ASIAN SOURCES, had flourished from the start and he had added new titles based on different product categories. Taiwan manufacturers in particular came into his new magazines in droves. Merle had the good sense to buy stock in a number of these companies. With the inept management of The IMPORTER and increasing competition from Merle’s magazines, East Asia Pub- lishing Company continued to spiral downward in both advertising and circulation. When the representative of an British publishing company approached the Hong Kong office of The IMPORTER with an offer to buy the magazine, Kazuko asked me to go there and help Tsuneyoshi investigate the English firm and let her know if the offer was legitimate. She was so anxious to get out of the situation she was willing to accept far less than what the company was worth. I went to Hong Kong, met the agent for the British publishing house, which had a good reputation, listened to his proposal, and asked questions about how they proposed to take over the magazine without any disruptions. In short, the offer looked legitimate and the steps to turn over all of the operations of East Asia Publishing Company to the British firm appeared both reasonable and practical. The IM- PORTER was to be continued without any break in its publication. I had no qualms about recommending to Tsuneyoshi and his mother that they proceed with the sale. The price settled on was U.S.$150,000, far less than what the magazine was worth…but the sale covered only the magazine; not East Asia Publishing Company’s two buildings and land in Tokyo. After Tsuneyoshi and the British agent signed the contract in The IMPORTER office, with me as a witness, Tsuneyoshi and I were invited to a noon-time banquet to celebrate the occasion.

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When we arrived at the banquet room we found more than a dozen individuals already seated around a large table. Merle Hinrichs, the company’s former Hong Kong sales manager and now its primary competitor, was sitting at the head of the table, along with the British agent who had negotiated the sale. Merle got up immediately and rushed to greet us. Both Tsuneyoshi and I were shocked; he speechless and looking like he was going to pass out. While Merle was shaking my hand, I said: “This wasn’t well done!”…with the intention of adding, “I could easily have arranged the sale to you if you had approached us directly” but Merle immediately began to introduce us to the other members of the group who had also rushed up and I didn’t have a chance to finish my opening comment. When we got back to The IMPORTER office Tsuneyoshi called his mother and told her what had happened, breaking down and sobbing and unable to continue the conversation. He had been even more desperate than his mother to get out of an untenable situation, but having unwittingly sold the company to Merle was more than he could handle. It was natural that there would be some suspicion that I had been part of Merle’s scam because we were friends and fellow alumnae brothers. But I knew nothing about the original approach and the discussions with Merle’s British “agent” before I arrived on the scene, and the only time I was ever alone with the agent was the last two days when I accompanied him to Taipei to apprise the Taiwan office manager of the change that was taking place; that The IMPORTER had been sold to Merle’s group. Knowing of my early role in recommending Merle to East Asia Publishing Company and my subsequent friend-ship with him, Tsuneyoshi did ask me outright if I had known all along that Merle was behind the scheme to buy the company. I assur- ed him that I was as surprised as he was. He apparently accepted my denial of any knowledge of the scheme prior to the banquet, as did his mother, Kazuko. When the money for the purchase was deposited in the company’s bank in Tokyo she used virtually all of it as severance pay for

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR the employees who were not offered jobs by the new owner, which included Kozuka, the office manager, and the Tokyo ad sales manager. While there had been no previous discussion about me receiving any kind of pay off for my efforts she had a $5,000 fee wired to my bank in Phoenix. At first, I was very disappointed in the way Merle had handled the buyout but this was quickly cancelled out because I soon realized that if Kazuko had been aware that he was the buyer she would not have sold the company to him regardless of my recommendation. In retrospect I was pleased at the way everything turned out. Within five years after his takeover of The IMPORTER, Merle and his junior partner Joe Bendy had magazines in virtually every product category coming out of Asia, and would eventually have some 3,000 employees, making him the largest trade publisher in Asia and a key player in the subsequent growth of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China as economic powerhouses. Merle had a multi-million dollar yacht built for his personal use, became a major financial donor to Thunder-bird school, was appointed to the board of directors and continues as of this writing to support the school. [His name is on one of the school’s main buildings.] Merle was wise enough to quickly adopt all the new technology that came along and to stay ahead of the economic and political changes taking place not only in Asia but around the world, gradually morphing his operation into Global Sources, Ltd., and becoming a prime leader in international trade. A few days before the 9-11 terrorist attack on the twin tower buildings in New York and the Pentagon in 2001 Margaret and I received an invitation from Merle’s office to attend a reception to be held at a new home he and his wife Miriam had bought in Paradise Valley where we lived. The party was cancelled because of the terrorist act. My last meeting with Merle occurred on 11 November 2011, his 70th birthday, when the newly renovated old airfield tower building on Thunderbird campus was dedicated at a large public gathering. [My 83rd birthday was the following day.]

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Merle’s wife Miriam officially put up the money for the reno- vation of the building, but Merle was the star of the show. I had received a formal invitation to the ceremony and Merle greeted me warmly when I arrived, but I spent only about two minutes with him because he was in great demand by others. I later contacted Merle’s head office in Hong Kong and asked if Merle had a private email address. I didn’t hear back. The Richard Woodside Episode With East Asia Publishing Company dissolved and its office buildings and landholdings in Tokyo sold, the Family Court awarded major settlements to Ray and Niki’s sons, Jay and Richard. By this time Richard had increased his gambling and dissolute lifestyle and was completely alienated from the Honda family. Some months later when I was again back in Tokyo I phoned Kazuko and Tsuneyoshi in Nagoya. After the sale of East Asia Publishing Company both of them had re-turned to their home in Nagoya, where Tsuneyoshi began working in his father’s company. As a result of my phone call I got a call from Mrs. Honda, Richard’s 80-plus year-old grandmother in Nagoya. She literally demanded that I take Richard with me when I went back to Phoenix. She was well aware of my long association with Ray and her daughter Niki, and was famous in the family for her strong will and unbending character. I recalled that when I had visited her in her home in Nagoya some years back and asked how she was, she replied in a loud, forceful voice: Kuchi dake mada ugokeru! Figuratively, “The only thing that still works is my mouth!” Mrs. Honda was adamant about my taking Richard with me, speaking loudly and forcefully—and as far as she was concerned leaving me no choice. She gave me no opportunity to question or debate her demand. I finally said I would do it if he willingly agreed to go. She said she would have him visit me at the Imperial Hotel. That evening Richard showed up at my hotel door. I had not seen him for several years. By this time he was well over six 152

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR feet tall, handsome, sure of himself, brash and outspoken—but like an over-grown kid. His older brother, Jay was already in the U.S., married, and had used his portion of his inheritance to establish a construction company in Denver, Colorado. Richard agreed to return to the U.S. with me. In Phoenix my wife and I found him an apartment, and got him to enroll in nearby Phoenix College. A short while later we learned that he had quit going to class, taken up with a young prostitute, given her substantial amounts of money, and made several trips to Las Vegas to gamble. One day he and the girl showed up at our home, driven there by her father who stayed in his car. She asked me to step outside with her, and there she told me that Richard was out of control, that he was throwing his money away in Las Vegas, and that she was afraid for him and of him. All I could do was tell her I would talk to Richard and advise her to be careful and take care of herself. Several days after this our front doorbell rang. When I opened the door Richard literally threw an overnight bag inside the house and pushed his way in. He had come by taxi, which was turning around to leave. I quickly discovered that he had gambled and given away all of his money, had not paid his rent for several weeks, and had been locked out of the apartment by the landlord. I had no intention of taking him in or finding him another place to live and paying his rent for him. I called his brother Jay in Denver and explained the situation to him. He finally agreed to take Richard in temporarily and to send me the money for his airfare to Denver. For the next three nights Richard slept on the couch in my home office. I took him to the airport on the third day, and never saw him again, but years later I heard that he was in San Francisco working as a tout, sending Japanese tourists to shops that paid him a commission on their purchases.

Watching the First Moon Landing

I was in Tokyo on 20 July 1969, the date that America’s Apollo 11 space craft was scheduled to land on the moon just before 153

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR noon Tokyo time. I was in the Harajuku area of Tokyo as noon approached, and began looking for a public place that had a TV so I could watch the landing. Finally I found a bar on the lobby floor of the Central Apart- ments Building on the northeast corner of Omotesando Blvd and Meiji Street that was open. The bartender was cleaning the place up in preparation for the afternoon and evening business. [The apartment building was well-known for the number of mistresses who lived there.] The bar had a TV with a 10 or 12-inch screen setting on the counter that was turned on. I asked the bartender if I could switch it to the NHK news channel and he said yes. So I got to watch Neil Armstrong step off the Lander onto the surface of the moon, and heard him make his famous statement which was something like: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind!’ What is curious about the experience is that I did it in the company of a Japanese bartender near where Margaret and I used to live.

Fernie’s Rise in the PR World In 1967 sister Fernie and her family moved to Redmond, Wash- ington where she was hired as a columnist and reporter for a weekly newspaper. They next moved to Lake Oswego in Oregon, where she became a staff writer and assistant to the PR director of First Interstate Bank of Oregon. When her marriage broke up in 1972 she returned to Phoe- nix, Arizona where she was hired as the PR director for The Arizona Bank. Her responsibilities included writing, editing and overseeing the design of a monthly magazine for bank employees, clients and others. She knew this was an area in which I had experience and frequently turned to me for guidance, but she had great aptitude for the craft and mastered in quickly. After a number of years this experience led to her founding and directing her own public relations firm. It was during this time that she met and married Kenneth Welch, founding publisher and owner of PHOENIX Magazine, one of the top city magazines in the country. She went on to become editorial 154

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR director of the magazine, a freelance travel writer for The Los Angeles Times, a contributing editor to One Planet Magazine, an essayist, and ultimately the author of three books. Continuing to act as her advisor over the decades has been one of my special pleasures.

Teaching at Thunderbird

In early 1970 the former dean of Pepperdine University, who was familiar with my books on Japan, took up the same position at the Thunderbird Graduate School of International Manage- ment [as it was then known], my old school. He called me and asked me to teach a course on doing business in Japan at Thunderbird. I accepted his offer and taught two semesters; in the fall of 1970 and the spring of 1971. In the second semester, enrollment for the course was too large for a regular classroom, so it was move to the campus chapel. However, teaching the same course for two semesters was enough for me, not to mention the constraints on my time and travel so when the spring semester ended I went back to writing full time, concentrating again on Mexico, Korea and China as well as Japan. As the years passed, however, I began to benefit from and appreciate my Thunderbird teaching experience far more because a number of my former students went on to have successful careers in Japan and elsewhere in Asia and aid me in various ways when I encountered them during my travels.* ______

*In early 2011 one of my former students, James Fink, managing director of a major real estate leasing company in Japan, and his family visited Margaret and I in Paradise Valley, Arizona. Prior to that he and his wife had visited Perth, Australia, went to the school where the amphibious jeep HALF-SAFE is on per- manent display, had photos taken of themselves in front of it, and sent them to me. ______

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The Insider’s Guides

In the early 1970s I researched, wrote and published Insider’s Guide to Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa & Tucson—a pioneer work. I arranged a tie-in with The Arizona Bank for this title, subsequently selling the bank some 100,000 copies to be used as marketing premiums. Following this, I wrote and published Insider’s Guide to Rocky Point, Nogales, Guaymas, Mazatlan & La Paz—all tourist destinations for Arizonans. I was later able to arrange a tie-in with Banco Nacional of Mexico, and sold them a 10,000 copy print-run. My ties with the Arizona Bank ended when a new marketing director came in.

I Like You Gringo! – BUT! The Mario [“Mike”] de la Fuente Story While researching the book on the Mexican border cities and Sonoran tourist destinations that were especially popular with Arizonans I met Mario [“Mike”] de la Fuente, one of those rare individuals whose personality and mindset makes them stand out among millions. Mike was a senior advisor to the Nogales Visitor’s Bureau, and readily agreed to assist me. Shortly after I met Mike he said to me: “My motto is to work like a Gringo and play like a Mexican!” I knew then he was an extraordinary man. I was to find out later just how extraordinary. Mike was the son of a prominent Mexican businessman and political power who was marked for execution near the end of the 1910-1921 Mexican revolution. To escape this fate his father secreted the family on a train going north, and crossed the border into the U.S. at Eagle Pass, Texas. Mike graduated from the University of Texas where he was a standout baseball pitcher. Following graduation he joined a semi-professional baseball team, pitched against the great Babe Ruth, and struck him out. He was then hired by a Mexican baseball team. After this he became a representative for Shell Oil in Mexico.

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This led to him being stationed in Nogales, Mexico on the Arizona-Sonora border where he put his business experience, bilingual skills and entrepreneurial spirit into gradually building a business empire of his own, including a bank, a newspaper, a bull ring, a real estate portfolio that included property in Ari- zona, as well as part ownership of Arizona’s professional baseball team. During our third meeting Mike showed me an autobio- graphical manuscript he had written and asked me to read and consider publishing it. The title of the manuscript was: I Like You, Gringo!–BUT! The style and tone of his writing was not natural English but it had an incredibly delightful flavor and charm of its own, and I decided to publish it without any editing whatsoever. When the 20,000 copy print-run came off the press I traveled with Mike from California to Texas, promoting it and lining up distribution channels. Mike himself sold several thousand copies of the book in Nogales, Mexico, Nogales, Arizona and in Tucson [where his two sons had attended the University of Arizona]. Margaret and I were subsequently guests of Mike and his wife in Nogales for a bullfight at his ring and a night out on the town at the Caverns, the most famous nightclub in the city. At the club Mike and his wife put on an exhibition of dancing that would please today’s Dancing with the Stars fans. Many of the stories in Mike’s book—his romantic affairs, his parties for visiting bigwigs in the sports and political worlds, and more—were the kind of things that make people legends in their own time. Mike lived into his 90s, and was still going strong when in his late 80s. In the 1990s when I was researching for my book Mexico’s Cultural Code Words one of my most important interviewees was Mike’s youngest son, Lorenzo [named after the great Spanish toreador]. Totally bilingual and bicultural [he attended school in Tucson, Arizona] he made a valuable contribution to the book, including naming what he considered to be the most important culturally laden “code words” in Mexican-Spanish.

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The U.S. “Discovers” Japan It was not until 1973, when the so-called “Oil Shock” occurred and it seemed that Japan was going to colonize the United States that American businessmen and educators finally began to pay attention to Japan, resulting in a flood of other business- related books appearing on the market. By this time several of my earlier books were out-of-print, and the spate of new business-related books on Japan began cutting into the sales of my titles that remained in print.

The Naming of NEW TIMES My brother L who had his own small construction company and was doing some kind of work in Tempe, met a group of Arizona State University students who wanted to start a weekly newspaper. He advised them to come to see me, and a meeting was arranged. The group of six or seven, headed by Michael Lacey, showed up and we spent the next three or so hours talking, with some of them sitting on the floor in my front room because there weren’t enough chairs. As the conversation began to come to a close one of them asked if I could help them get a Japanese camera. As it happened, I had just bought a new Nikon on my last trip to Tokyo and offered to sell it to them for $400 [I think it was], the amount I had paid for it. I also showed them the fancy new mimeograph machine I had just bought. The group quickly took up a collection among them-selves and came up with the money for the camera. And then one of the asked: “What should we call the newspaper! Do you have any suggestions?” Based on the theme I had proposed that the newspaper pur- sue, I said almost instantly: “NEW TIMES!” They were delighted with the name. The inauguration of NEW TIMES a few weeks later was extraordinarily timely, as Phoenix was growing rapidly and there was no real competition from other newspapers in the Valley.

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By the early 1980s Lacey and his group had turned the New Times enterprise into the largest weekly entertainment newspaper chain the country, buying out the famous Village Voice in New York along with several other well-known weeklies, and starting a number of others. There was a remarkable postscript to my experience with Lacey and his cohorts. A few days after their visit my wife and I and our two daughters took an overnight trip to the Grand Canyon. When we returned we found the front door of our house slightly ajar. Obviously, someone had broken in during our absence. When we took our overnight bags into the main bedroom we found a window had been broken and there were muddy footprints on our bed. We then discovered that my brand new mimeograph machine had been stolen! We called the police and a patrol car came out. The policemen asked a few questions, wondered why the thieves took only the mimeograph machine, said they seldom if ever caught burglars, and left. It was obvious that one or more members of the group of would-be publishers had paid me a visit, but I let it go. Some 20 years later I emailed a note to New Times, recounting this incident and hinting that they should be obli- gated to me. A columnist from the paper called me and invited me to meet him for lunch. I told him the story and we talked about other things. He subsequently mentioned some of my books in the article he wrote but nothing about my having named the newspaper and losing my mimeograph machine. I had another accidental encounter with a staff member of New Times in 2011, and related the above incident to him. He did not seem to be surprised at the revelation.

The Gordon and Roberta Haas Story

During one of my trips to Tokyo in 1977 when I was staying at the Imperial Hotel [still the original Frank Lloyd Wright version at that time] I stopped by the lobby book-shop to talk to the manager, Mrs. Kagami, about my books. During the 1960s she had sold more copies of my first book, Japanese Manners & Ethics in Business, than any other outlet worldwide. [In sub- 159

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR sequent editions the title of the book was changed to Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business.] When I finished talking to her and stepped outside of the doorway I was accosted by a nattily dressed smallish young man with a beard who had been in the shop browsing the book shelves. He obviously had been listening to my conversation with Mrs. Kagami. He introduced himself as Gordon Haas from San Francisco, said he was interested in getting a book printed and wanted to ask my advice. He also said he was visiting in Tokyo with his wife Roberta and infant child Courtney Flower, and that they were staying at the home of a friend in the city. It turned out that he and Roberta had operated a real estate company in San Francisco, made a substantial amount of money [with Roberta being the moving force in the agency], and recently sold the company. Both he and Roberta were classic “flower children” of the 1960s—in dress and in behavior…but Roberta had maintained a very practical streak in her behavior and view of the world. They had started the construction of a large Hawaiian temple-style home [which I later visited] in a very narrow re- mote gorge on Kauai Island that was just beyond a state park and arboretum. A fast-moving stream ran down the gorge, and there were banana and coconut trees on their property. Gordon wanted to find a printer for a book he and Roberta had created featuring exquisite drawings of a “flower child” [based on their daughter Courtney], with only a small amount of very poetic text. I turned him on to Dai-Nippon, the huge printing firm that printed The IMPORTER magazine and several of my first books. I advised Gordon to have no more than 3,000 copies printed, and that 1,500 would be enough to start out with. He had 10,000 hard-cover full-color copies printed, and because he had no other place to send them he had them shipped to a warehouse in Phoenix, Arizona. He and Roberta then moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, rented an apartment and began trying to sell the book at a kiosk in the

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR popular town’s famous shopping district, with Roberta manning the kiosk. She sold a few copies a day. Some months later they gave up on this project, went back to the construction site of their isolated home on Kauai [construction had stopped mid-way] and began housekeeping in a tiny wooden shack that had been put up as a storage shed. I visited them on one occasion during a stop-over from Tokyo, and on another occasion took Margaret and Dawn and Demetra along. They were impressed when we ate lunch off of large tee leaves instead of plates. After that I saw both Gordon and Roberta, or at least her, two or three times a year during my stopovers in Hawaii. Roberta finally became disgusted with living in a tiny shack away from everything. She and Gordon began to have serious problems. She rented a condo apartment in Princeville, a picturesque resort village on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, moved in by herself and went to work for a local real estate company as a secretary. One of the clients of the firm was the entertainer Bette Midler. On one of my later visits she and Gordon [who had returned] had rented an apartment in Honolulu, where both took lessons and succeeded in getting licensed as real estate agents in Hawaii. I went with them to one of their meetings, where the whole group smoked pot. I waited outside in the hallway. This was the period in which I was putting together a monthly magazine called Arizona Trading Post to feature articles and cultural-related Western and Indian products. Roberta engaged a photographer to take shots of some Hawaiian fashion apparel to feature in a special section of the magazine. There is more to the magazine story. Some months later I got a call from Roberta saying she was in Los Angeles, and asking me to stop by on my way to Tokyo. She was renting a cabin on the retired Queen Mary passenger ship docked in Long Beach, and said she wanted to show me something. I stayed with her one night and the next day she took me to a nearby prison com-pound. We were allowed to enter the visitor’s area of the compound. A few minutes later I was shocked when Gordon appeared, wearing a prison uniform.

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He had gone to Columbia, bought a substantial amount of marijuana, attempted to bring it into the U.S., got caught and was sentenced to two years in prison. Following this episode, they broke up. Roberta stayed in Hawaii, running a real estate agency on Kauai. Gordon rented a beachfront condo home outside of Malibu about 50 miles north of Los Angeles, and set up a development company…selling shares in an oil well. He called me at my home in Paradise Valley and invited me over for a visit. The very first thing he did when I arrived was to take me to the basement of the condo [built on the slope of a fairly high cliff overlooking the ocean], slide open a set of doors and point inside. There, scattered around on the sloping dirt embankment were hundreds of cartons of the book that had been printed in Tokyo and then shipped to Phoenix. He had finally had the Phoenix warehouse ship them to him. The next day Gordon took me to his office and from there to an old oil well he had leased and was trying to put back in service. Most of his employees spent their time on phones, trying to sell shares in similar oil properties. He was living with a voluptuous hippie-type girl. Gordon himself was the top salesman. He could mimic accents with incredible perfection and present himself and the company as a very legitimate enterprise. That was the last time I was to see Gordon, but I heard later that he was back in Hawaii running a taro farm. I also learned that Roberta had moved to Florida to be near her family, and that their daughter Courtney had married.

The Arizona Trading Post Gamble In 1977 I came up with the idea of publishing a monthly mail- order catalog entitled ARIZONA TRADING POST, with the subtitle: Your Western Heritage Mail-Order Catalog – Unique Tri-Cultural Products. On the front cover just below the title and subtitle was a hanging “shop sign” that read: A Better Way to Shop – Home Delivery Anywhere in the U.S. or Abroad!

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The plan was to feature Indian, cowboy and Mexican handi- crafts and other items in free advertisements, along with cultural and historical insight articles as reading material, and have it distributed to magazine outlets around the country. The idea was to take advantage of, promote, and add to, the Cowboy, Indian and Hispanic mystique of Arizona and the American Southwest with free display advertisements for Ari- zona and Southwest products, barter arrangements for goods and services, and paid advertising from hospitality and service industries. Each product advertisement was to include historical-heritage content to enhance the image of the catalog and the products and encourage sales. With the help of my sister Fern and anthropologist Dr. B. Alan Kite and others I published one issue of the mail-order magazine, printing 5,000 copies, and got it distributed as a test in key outlets by the local branch of a national magazine distributor. Where ATP was on sale it outsold Arizona’s famous Arizona Highways magazine, and results from the free advertisements started dribbling in. But I was unable raise financing for the project and had to let it die. I still have a full business plan for ATP—but now designed to be an online web-based magazine instead of a printed product. Attempts in 2010 to get someone interested in taking on the digital-based project failed—I believe because of the ongoing economic recession. I still think it is a viable idea, and could be very profitable for many Arizona businesses and the tourist industry.

The Apple [Japan] Connection On a visit to Tokyo in late 1977 I met with the American manager of the newly established Japan branch of Apple, Inc. who was having problems interacting with his Japanese staff. He was aware of my books on the Japanese mindset and business practices and was favorably inclined to take my advice. I recommended that he hire a non-Japanese bilingual assistant who was intimately familiar with the Japanese way. 163

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I didn’t have any such foreign individual in my address book but I did know someone whom I thought was amply qualified: a Japanese girl named Reiko Emmi, in her early 20s, who had been the secretary of an old friend, John Lienfelder [a former Navy officer and then the owner-director of a successful Eng- lish language academy who had originally replaced me as editor of The IMPORTER magazine in 1962 but lasted for only about three months]. Reiko had not only become sufficiently fluent in English, she had also absorbed American culture to the point that her reactions were American first and Japanese second—if and when the latter was of value. She was recently divorced from a Japanese dentist and had a son. The Apple manager hired her and she worked for him for around three years—until it got to the point that the top Apple brass in California concluded that only an experienced Japanese manager could grow the company, and they let him go—a step that senior Japanese managers in the branch had been virtually demanding since shortly after the branch opened. One of the first steps that the new Japanese manager took was to fire Reiko, who then went to work at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California. After several years there she established her own consulting company in San Francisco and operated it until illness forced her retirement in 2009.

Arizona Authors’ Association In 1978, responding to the increasing number of inquiries I got about book publishing from writers and would-be writers in the Phoenix area, I obtained a mailing list of authors living in the state from Diamond’s Department Store’s book department which sponsored an annual “Authors’ Day” program, and sent a mail-out to the list. The response was quite extraordinary. Some 75 people attended the first meeting during which I was elected president of the Arizona Authors’ Association by acclamation. I began publishing a monthly AAA newsletter and conducting bi-annual seminars for which I brought in literary agents, book editors and book distributors as speakers. I also inaugurated an annual short 164

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR story contest and the Arizona Literary Magazine to publish the winning entries. By the end of the second year the Association had over 400 members, making it the largest writer’s organization in the western of part of the country. I remained president of the AAA for its first eight years, but it was managed successfully only because of the contributions made by my wife Margaret, who functioned as the office manager, secretary, accountant, seminar coordinator and mail- clerk for the monthly newsletter—leaving me free to make two or three annual trips to Asia and continue my own research and writing. During these years we staged two major meetings each year, in the spring and fall, featuring lectures and panel discussions by editors, book distributors and literary agents we brought in from around the country. Among our most memorable members and speakers were the famed mystery author Brad Steiger [what a voice that man had!]; the man who wrote the original “The Greatest Story Ever Told!”; and Dan Poynter of Para Publishing, the self-publishing guru of the universe who had probably done more for would-be authors than anyone in history. As of this writing a much smaller version of the AAA is still in business. Shoot-Out at Dawn In 1981 a man named William McCreary who lived in Safford, Arizona contacted me about a manuscript he had describing a tragic shootout and the largest manhunt in Arizona history. The shootout occurred on February 9, 1918, and re-sulted in the most controversial gunfight in the history of the state—far surpassing that of the famous OK Corral in Tombstone. On that morning the sheriff of Graham County and several deputies, reputedly all drunk, sneaked up on the Galiuro Mountain cabin home of gold miners Thomas Jefferson Power and his two sons, Tom and John, along with an old army scout named Sisson. The raid was ostensibly to arrest the Power brothers for not registering for the World War I military draft.

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In the unprovoked melee that followed the father was killed and both of his sons were seriously injured in their left eyes by wood splinters sent flying by gunshots. They returned the fire, killing the sheriff and two of his deputies. One of the survivors took off to get reinforcements. Tom and John, with the old army scout, escaped from the cabin, and for nearly a month eluded over 3,000 posse men and soldiers in the dead of winter in some of the roughest terrain in the state. When captured and tried the brothers were sentenced to life in prison, despite evidence that the raid on their home was a setup to get control of their gold mine and the fact that the sheriff and his deputies shot first. The original manuscript, written by Tom Power after he served 42 years in prison, was later burnished by writer John Whitlach who interviewed many of the surviving families, with contributions added by journalists Don Dedera of The Arizona Republic, Bob Thomas of The Arizona Daily Star and Rose Stewart of The Copper Era. Others who were alive during the shootout and attended the trial also came forward to contribute to the manuscript. After McCreary came into possession of the manuscript and brought it to me I edited and published it as SHOOT-OUT AT DAWN – An Arizona Tragedy. It is an extra-ordinary read and I thought it would make a great movie, but that never happened. I printed 5,000 copies of the book, but was unable to get widespread distribution for it. I finally sold most of the print- run to McCreary, who had become disillusioned with my efforts to market the book.

Prentice-Hall Comes Through! In 1981, twenty-two years after my first book Japanese Man- ners & Ethics in Business was turned down by Prentice-Hall, the company had a change of heart and brought out a revised edition under the title The Japanese Way of Doing Business: The Psychology of Management in Japan. This delay was in keeping with the time it took American business people and educators to recognize that Japan had become a powerful economic force, had already smothered 166

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR large segments of American industry and was continuing to threaten many remaining industries. P-H did not sell many copies of the book, and dropped it some two years later. Meanwhile, after Nick Ingleton [a former Kodansha Inter- national man] had taken over as editor-in-chief at Tuttle Publishing Company’s Tokyo office in the early 1980s he asked me to do a series of small business and travel-oriented books on Japan books…which I did. I was only partly pleased with the results because by that time the distribution and marketing arms of the company had degenerated and there was a great deal of new competition.

Margaret’s Travels After our daughters Dawn and Demetra reached their late teens Margaret began to work part time for the Phoenix Convention & Visitors Bureau, becoming an expert at handling the details of conventions and meetings of other kinds. Later she began to accept short-term assignments with convention planners around the U.S, several of which specialized in international events in various cities around the world. This resulted in assignments that took her to Cancun, Mexico, the Bahamas, Egypt, Italy, Singapore, Spain and other countries, during which she met the senior executives of many major corporations, movie star entertainers and other notables. On a number of occasions I was able to rendezvous with her in such places as Honolulu and Tokyo after she completed assignments. She was still accepting out-of-state assignments when the international convention business fell victim to the 2008 economic debacle brought on by Wall Street bankers and their political cohorts.

The Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery Story

In the early 1980s Haruo [Harry] Shinoda and his wife Kyoko, among my oldest and closest Japanese friends, visited Margaret and I in Paradise Valley. I had met Harry in the mid-1950s

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR when both he and I worked for Today’s Tokyo, published by Philadelphian Marvin Meyer. Harry later became a salesman for The IMPORTER while I was still there as the editor. At the time of this visit Harry was the owner-president of a company that made plastic decorative striping for automobile manufacturers as well as inscription signs for companies and various other organizations—a company he had set up in the 1960s after leaving The IMPORTER. He had received a commission from the historically famous Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery [Meiji Jingu Gaien] in Meiji Park to prepare new signs for the 80 murals framing the walls of the huge gallery room—murals commemorating events in the life of Emperor Meiji, who reigned from the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1867 until his death in1912, and Empress Shoken. The signs were to include Japanese inscriptions and their English translations. During Harry and Kyoko’s stay with us he retained me to do the English versions of the inscriptions. Still today the signs are key parts of the gallery. My fee was substantial, but I get much more satisfaction out of visiting the gallery and viewing the inscriptions; a rare legacy that I prize. Japan historical buffs might want to check out the Gallery at www.meijijingugaien.jp.

The National Textbook Company Connection In early 1986 at the annual book fair of the American Book- sellers Association [ABA], where I had a booth, I met the publisher and editor [his son] of National Textbook Company {NTC], a mid-sized publisher based just outside of Chicago. I had about maxed out my efforts as a small press publisher, having brought out some 75 titles, including about a dozen of my own, over a 20-year period, and was looking for a personal connection with a company that had far better distribution and marketing capabilities. I invited the NTC people to stop by my booth. They liked what they saw and agreed to take on several of my titles. Over the next several months I turned all of the other Phoenix Books titles back to their authors and virtually closed the operation 168

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR down, keeping only the name Phoenix Books/Publishers as my dba for bank account purposes. I recently resurrected it as an ebook publishing imprint. Over the next decade NTC brought out all of my new etiquette and ethics and cultural code word books on Japan, Korea, China and Mexico. This relationship, too, was to have extraordinary consequences on my career as an author—some more pleasurable than others.

The Japanization of America Episode And My Second Face-to-Face with Sony

In late 1986 I sent a manuscript entitled The Japanization of America to NTC [the National Textbook Company] in Chicago, which had several of my other business and language titles. My purpose in this new book [besides making money!] was to shock American companies into taking the Japanese more seriously and to learn from them. But the founder-owner of NTC, S. William Pattis, did not like the implications of the title and told the publisher [his son Mark] to change it to something else. Mark changed it to MADE IN JAPAN. Three weeks after the title was released another book with exactly the same title was published in New York. The author of this second book was Akio Morita, co-founder and leading light of Sony Corporation, which had become an international phenomenon. His book was reviewed and promoted by every major newspaper and business magazine in the world, and became a world-wide bestseller. My book didn’t sell out the first short print-run. Some months later I met Morita at a business conference in Denver, Colorado, and told him that his book had killed my book. Of course, he didn’t know what I was talking about and gave me a puzzled look. After I explained, he smiled wanly but I don’t recall him saying anything about the books. I did, however, manage to get permission from NTC to offer the book to a publisher in Japan for a Japanese language edition. My Japanese agent, Kiyoshi Asano [The Asano Literary

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Agency], placed the book with [Chukei Shuppan] which was delighted with my original title. When The Japanization of America came out in Japan as Nihonka Suru Amerika [which literally means “The Japani- zation of America”] it had a pretty good run, but at that time the Japanese were so sure they were going to Japanize the whole world that it was not such a big deal. In 1996 NTC was bought out by the Tribune Company, publishers of the Chicago Tribune newspaper. In 2001 the Tribune Company sold the NTC imprint to New York-based McGraw- Hill, one of the largest book and magazine publishers in the U.S. So after having been turned down by McGraw-Hill in 1959 when I sent them the manuscript for Japanese Manners & Ethics in Business [JMEB], my first book, they ended up with all of my NTC titles, including JMEB which, in its 8th edition, was kept in print until 2011 as Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business. I got all rights to the book back, but have not taken the time to update and republish it. Copies of the McGraw-Hill edition are still available on Amazon.com as used books.

The “Code Word” Approach To Understanding Cultures In the latter half of the 1980s I made several trips to Japan, Korea and China, researching and writing a series of “etiquette and ethics” and “cultural code word” books on those countries. My experience with my first book had clearly revealed that the content of cultures is bound up in key words in the languages concerned—words that are pregnant with cultural meanings, and control both the mindset and behavior of people raised in those cultures. I spent well over a year researching and writing China’s Cultural Code Words, a large book that explains the cultural content and role of 305 of the most important words in Man- darin, which had been made the national language of China by Mao Tse-Tung, founder of the Communist regime in China and its head of state from 1949 until 1959.

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At that time China was already beginning to show results from its new “To Get Rich is Glorious” policy, made famous by the new leader Xiaoping Deng after he made an inspection trip to Shenzhen just outside of Hong Kong and saw the fantastic progress the city had made in less than a decade after becoming a free-wheeling center of capitalism. On my first foray outside of my hotel in Beijing following this transition my taxi driver claimed that his monthly income from fares and tips was greater than that of a top government minister and that he would soon be rich enough to start a business. On that same trip I read in a local Beijing newspaper that a group of farmers in some outlying province had chartered a plane to fly them to Beijing to go shopping—an incredible event in the history of China.

Daughter Dawn’s Wedding While a student at Arizona State University in Tempe daughter Dawn began dating a fellow student named Mark Schofield, from Ohio. Mark was an exceptionally bright, handsome fellow whose character and various manual and management skills delighted both Margaret and me. When he formally asked our permission to marry Dawn we were equally delighted. They were married in June 1986. Our great friends from Tokyo, Frank and Kim Kawahara and their children came from their home in Torrance, California for the wedding. The wedding and reception were held at the famous Hermosa Inn Resort in Paradise Valley, some two or three car minutes from our home. Mark had a bent for business and upon graduating from ASU he formed his own company, Marker Graphics, a design and printing service for other firms, with Dawn working with him. For a short while he also took over management of my Phoenix Books imprint. Mark operated Marker Graphics for several years before selling out to Bowne Company, a major Philadelphia printing firm that dated back to the days of Benjamin Franklin, where he then headed up the computer division of the Phoenix branch.

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The Tokyo Journal & Japan Journal Episode In 1987 while I Tokyo I was introduced to Peter Yamauchi, the Japanese president of a company who owned and operated several private English language schools that together had some 3,000 students, making it a very profitable enterprise. Six years earlier Peter had financed the founding of a new monthly magazine called Tokyo Journal and hired a European- born editor to run it. Not knowing the publishing business and taking a hands-off approach, he inadvertently allowed the editor to take absolute control of the publication and treat the company has his own. When Peter was told that I was an author and had had experience editing magazines and dealing with rebellious employees he explained the situation with Tokyo Journal, and asked me to help him resolve the situation. I agreed, and we settled on a monthly retainer for my ongoing services. We went to the office of the magazine unannounced. Peter introduced me to the editor as the new associate publisher. The editor was furious at Peter and began to use some very strong language aimed at both him and me. After a lengthy word battle then and a later follow-up meeting with the editor by myself he finally said he would return control of the magazine to Peter and leave the company in exchange for several million yen. When I reported this to Peter he said: “So it’s all about money!” and agreed to pay the editor off. I wasn’t privy to the amount of money Peter later gave him. Peter then rented space in a new office building in the Yotsuya district of Tokyo [near Jōchi Daigaku, the university I had graduated from in 1954/55]. I rented an apartment a short walk away, and we started the first steps to resuscitate Tokyo Journal. Peter assigned some of his school staff to the magazine and I began looking for a new editor. I also invited youngest daughter Demetra to come to Tokyo, stay in the apartment with me, and take lessons in Japanese at one of Peter’s schools. She turned out to be an excellent student, absorbing the language with ease. One evening we were invited to Peter’s home for dinner. While there, his wife dressed Demetra in a beautiful kimono. A photo of her that Peter took 172

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR has since been featured in our family gallery. She made some lifelong friends while at Peter’s school. To serve as editor of Tokyo Journal I brought in one of my journalist friends Glenn Davis, a tall Texan who had been in Tokyo for more than a dozen years, was also a graduate of Jōchi Daigaku, spoke excellent Japanese, and was a successful freelance writer for major American magazines, Glenn was a Mackintosh computer user, and came up with the idea that the magazine should be created on a computer instead of depending on typesetting by a traditional typesetter and formatting by a designer. We made an appointment with the American manager of the newly established Japan branch of Apple, and convinced him to donate two Macs to us in exchange for the publicity benefit. Converting the production system over to Macs was a slow and painful process. No one in Japan had produced a publication on a computer so no one had any experience doing it. Both Glenn and the foreign “typesetter” we hired to do the inputting nearly put themselves in the hospital over the next three months. But they survived and persevered, making the Tokyo Journal a pioneer in the use of computers to create magazines from scratch. With Yamauchi San’s full support I then began laying the ground work for a second magazine, Japan Journal, for international distribution, with Glenn to serve as the editor of both publications at the beginning. I went to New York and succeeded in getting a contract with the magazine distribution division of Warner to distribute Japan Journal in the U.S. We then convinced Northwest Airlines to agree to carry the first issues of the magazine to the U.S. in exchange for advertising. The first small test issues of the magazine had good sales. Soon thereafter the decision was made to open an office in California to produce and print the magazine in the U.S. I went to Marina del Rey in Los Angeles, rented an apartment and office space and hired a small staff to initiate the transition. I also rented a car, in my name, for use by the office staff.*

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______

*Shortly thereafter, during one of my stays in the apartment, Margaret called to tell me that our oldest daughter Dawn De Mente-Schofield had given birth to a baby girl, Haley Katherine Schofield. Dawn later had a son, Trevor, giving us two grandchildren. Jumping ahead a bit, when Haley was 14 years old she was awarded a black belt in karate and when she was 17 years old she was certified as a piano teacher. ______

However, communication between me and the Tokyo office was virtually nil [no email at that time!], resulting in a variety of problems I could not solve on my own—paying the local hires, contracting with a local printer, etc. I went back to my home in Phoenix for a visit. Peter and his younger brother came to Marina del Rey, staying in the apartment I had rented in the company name. Peter then insisted that all three of us go to New York for some important meetings. I met them at Los Angeles Airport for a flight to New York. There we checked into an expensive hotel. I have no recollection of any meetings or accomplishing anything on the trip…except going with Peter to the campus of Princeton University, which he had attended when young. I then went to Tokyo and was asked to accompany Peter’s brother on a trip around Southeast Asia to set up more distribution for Japan Journal. It turned out to be more of a pleasure trip than anything else. I returned to Marina del Rey but the problems continued so I scheduled another trip to Tokyo, and there I found that things had fallen apart. It seems that Peter had borrowed large sums of money from a yakuza gang, and had been ordered to pay up.* ______

*Yakuza gangs, some numbering in the hundreds, had been a significant part of Japanese society since the early days of the Tokugawa Shogunate era [1603-1867]. They originated as gambling syndicates and remain prominent today in the so-

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR called entertainment trades—bars, cabarets and illicit prostitution—as well as in construction. ______

One of the ways the yakuza gang got its message across to Peter was to have a gunman member spray the front of our office with bullets one night—a common yakuza ploy. When I arrived at the office the following morning to unlock the front door the police were there. They had been called by people in the neighborhood who heard the shots. In the next few days the plans for Japan Journal felt apart. I ended up giving a month’s pay of my own money to one of the new editors I had hired who was loudly upset at this turn of events. The Marina del Rey office was closed down, I vacated my apartment there and returned to Phoenix. A few weeks later I was sued by the company I had rented the car from because it had not been paid and the former employees of the magazine had continued using the car for several weeks. An Arizona attorney introduced to me by my brother Don got the lawsuit dropped, but I ended up voluntarily paying the lawyer a fee. On my next trip to Tokyo I was staying at the New Otani Hotel when I run into Peter in the lobby. I said to him: “Peter, I’m so sorry…!” but that is as far as I got. A yakuza member grabbed him by the arm and led him to a table in the lobby bar area. I waited and watched for several minutes but not want-ing to make any kind of scene with the yakuza, I walked away. About a year after I had returned to Arizona I heard that Peter was dead, There was no mention of how he died or his connection with the yakuza gang, but it was obvious that the gang he had borrowed—and squandered!—money from had taken their revenge in the usual manner.

The Mike Ohshima Story Shortly after this debacle I was contacted at my Paradise Valley home in Arizona by a Scottsdale company that had been approached by a Japanese entrepreneur who wanted to import 175

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR cosmetic products from them. The company retained me to meet the man, Shichiro [“Mike”] Ohshima on my next trip to Tokyo and find out what kind of operation he had. I found Mike Ohshima to be extraordinarily friendly, out- going, personable and very likeable. We hit it off in minutes. He was from a very good family in Shizuoka, had become fluent in English during the war and the years that the U.S. occupied Japan [1945-1952], and was making a good living acting as an agent for American and Japanese firms, with the huge Mitsu- bishi Trading Company his largest client. My involvement with Mike and the Scottsdale company was minor, but I became involved with him directly on a number of projects that he was trying to put together, including creating a new “residential enclave or town” for American Navy personnel stationed in the Fukuoka area of Japan. At that time, any kind of construction in Japan invariably involved the yakuza, Japan’s professional gang groups. On one memorable occasion I and Mike met his yakuza con-tacts in the tea/coffee area in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel. The head yakuza, an impressive looking man with an out- going personality, came in carrying a fairly large suitcase—the kind of case the yakuza often used to carry around large sums of cash in their business and political deals. Smiling, I asked the yakuza if the case contained his laundry. He roared with laughter, and the meeting was off to a good start. In addition to making several trips to Fukuoka with Mike to discuss the project with the head of the U.S. Naval Command in Fukuoka I also contacted Pentagons officials in Washington and the military attaché at the American Embassy in Tokyo to help further the project. Ultimately the plan failed, apparently because the construction contractor and the yakuza gang boss in Fukuoka could not resolve all of the political and official issues involved.* ______

*Mike knew the top yakuza boss in Japan personally and told me he was so powerful politically that he was known as the unofficial emperor of Japan—and that without his approval few things could happen in the Japanese Diet [Congress]. 176

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______

Mike was also involved in the Senior Olympics program in Japan, serving as chairman of the program for several years. He and I jointly staged several lecture programs at different venues in Tokyo, including the Sheraton Miyako Hotel where I often stayed. I edited a number of books Mike had written in English, and together we put together an anthology of famous Japanese and Western poetry in a large volume we entitled POETRY FOR THE SOUL – Enhancing the Quality of Your Life! It was published by 1st Books Library in a beautiful hardcover edition and is still available from Amazon.com. When in his mid-60s Mike moved from a ritzy suburb of Tokyo back to his hometown in Shizuoka, buying a house on the slope of a mountain that had a magnificent view of the pinnacle of Mt. Fuji some 100 miles away. Daughter Demetra and I visited Mike’s home in Tokyo just prior to his return to Shizuoka, and I later visited him and his wife Masako in their beautiful mountain-side home. Mike was a good soul who spent his life trying to help people. My last “project” with him, shortly after the turn of the century, was helping to arrange a tie-up with the American Asso- ciation of Retired People [AARP] and a similar organization that he co-sponsored in Japan.

The Michihiro Matsumoto Connection In 1988 a magazine article about NHK [Japan Broadcasting Corporation] talk-show host and author Michihiro Matsumoto caught my attention, and I made arrangements to interview him. The meeting turned into a talk-fest and a series of collaborations on books and lecture events that were to continue for more than 20 years. Matsumoto [“Michi” to his foreign friends] turned out to be a modern day samurai in his approach to writing and lecturing, and, in fact, styled himself after Japan’s most famous samurai, Musashi Miyamoto who lived in the 17th century. Musashi killed his first duel-to-the-death opponent when he was only 13 177

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR years old. When he attained his 15th birthday and was formally invested as a samurai, he re-fused to become the retainer of a lord, and began roaming the country as a pennyless shugyōsha or “samurai in training,” killing over 60 other veteran warriors in death duels by the time he was 28 and living another 35 years, giving demonstrations, teaching his way of fighting, and writing poetry. For much of his last years he lived in a cave. Just before dying of natural causes Musashi wrote the now famous treatise “Book of Five Rings” as an instruction manual for his students. The book was translated into English and had a good run in the U.S., despite the fact that the content was so obtuse few people could understand it.* ______*In 2005, in collaboration with Matsumoto, I published a modern day interpretation of the Book of Five Rings under the title of Samurai Strategies – 42 Martial Arts Secrets from Musahi’s Book of Five Rings [Tuttle Publishing], now one of my bestselling books and available in several languages. ______

Michi had become perfectly fluent in English on his own, without attending English language schools or leaving Japan— attacking the challenge of language learning the way Musashi psyched out and defeated his opponents. He went on to earn a Ph.D and teach at several universities. His English language fluency led to a series of jobs with the American Embassy and major Japanese corporations, including NHK, the huge public broadcasting company—all of which he left or lost because he did not accept the Japanese way of blindly accepting the traditional approach to things—kow- towing to seniors and never questioning or speaking up. A prolific writer [over 100 books] Michi became a master debater, demolishing his opponents by asking why, why, why— forcing them to explain their claims and statements… something that went against the Japanese grain. In an essay on his life I described him as the most dangerous man in Japan. Michi’s best-known English language book is Haragei, which translates as “The Art of the Stomach,” in which he 178

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR identifies and describes the Japanese use of culture-based in- tuitive knowledge—the kind of knowledge that made Matsu- shita, Honda, Sony’s Morita and other great Japanese business leaders so capable and formidable. Matsumoto headed a foundation that sponsored regular training lectures in English. I became a frequent guest lecturer at many of his meetings.

The Kata [kah-tah] Factor

In the late 1980s, Ben Izumida, an American Nisei from San Francisco who was the manager of an advertising agency in Tokyo and had gotten me several writing assignments for Japan Air Lines and the Imperial Hotel, told me that my use of culturally pregnant key Japanese terms in my books was a break- through in explaining Japanese culture and suggested that I take the concept all the way with a book devoted just to that concept. That was the genesis of what may have been my most important book on Japan: THE KATA FACTOR - Japan’s Secret Weapon. My then son-in-law Mark Schofield published the Kata [Kah-tah] book in 1990. In the book I attempted to get down to the absolute basics in identifying and describing the cultural factors that created and controlled the mindset and behavior of the Japanese and made them a superior people. Over the previous decades I had learned that every aspect of the mindset and behavior of the Japanese was controlled by specific kata, or “way of doing things,” that was the foundation of their culture. But it was not until Ben Izumida put the bug in my ear that I took up the challenge of addressing it directly. On the cover of the book I described these kata as the Ro- setta stone of Japan’s enigmatic culture…as the keys that unlock the mystery and the mystique associated with how the Japanese do business and conduct all of their professional and personal affairs. [The cover that Mark designed for the book was outstanding, and remains today one of my favorites.] A subsequent edition of the book in Japanese [KATA – Nihon no Himitsu Heiki] by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich [Japan], was only a modest success as far as sales were concerned but it

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR got me a number of speech and writing assignments that were to have a far-reaching influence on my life. An updated version of the book is now at Periplus-Tuttle, as KATA – The Key to Understanding & Dealing with the Japan- ese. Overall the role of the kata has diminished over the years but there is still a precise “Japanese way” of doing everything that must be understood and taken into consideration.

The Kodansha Intl Episode

In the late 1980s I had occasion to meet several of the top executives and editors of Kodansha International [KI], the English language publishing arm of the huge Kodansha publishing conglomerate—Japan’s largest book and magazine publisher— founded in 1909. KI was known for its beautiful coffee table type of books on Japanese culture but sales were down and the division was losing buckets of money. I was retained to act as advisor to the company and to look for a new editor for the division. My advice consisted of suggesting that they begin publishing mass-market type of books that would have a far wider appeal than their expensive hard-cover and full-color laden books that sold only a few hundred copies a year, primarily to institutions. They accepted this proposition. I then went to New York to interview some candidates to head up this new approach, and found one individual who not only had an excellent background in mass-market books but also had a Japanese wife and therefore had a special interest in Japan. He was subsequently hired and spent something like 10 years at KI, helping to put the company back in the black. In later years KI published a number of my books, some of them joint ventures with my author-debater friend Prof. Mi- chihiro Matsumoto. In 2011 Kodansha International was shut down by its parent publishing company, Kodansha, Inc. Competition from the new Periplus-Tuttle-Berkeley Group of companies and Internet publishing companies finally did it in. My royalty checks from KI had dribbled down to a few dollars, so I was not surprised.

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Taken Down by Japan’s Shinto Guru After THE KATA FACTOR: Japan’s Secret Weapon came out in Japanese in the early 1990s I was invited to lecture to some 300 Japanese professionals from all fields. During the Question and Answer session that followed all of the Japanese who spoke up, except one, expressed amazement at my use of the kata to explain the Japanese mindset and behavior….something they had not thought of. The one who disagreed with the book was later described to me as Japan’s premiere Shintō authority. He said: “Everything Mr. De Mente said is wrong! Shintō, not kata, is responsible for how we Japanese think and behave! He does not mention Shintō at all!” When he added that, I knew he had not read the book all the way through because I had attributed much of the early core of Japanese culture to Shintō precepts. . Tanka Poet Master Mutsuo Shukuya One of the people who attended my kata lecture after the book came out in a Japanese edition was educator and tanka poet Mutsuo Shukuya. After the meeting adjourned he introduced himself to me, and with a number of his friends, invited me to a coffee shop in the huge Tokyo Central Station underground complex on the Yaesu side of the station. This was the beginning of a close relationship that continues today. Shukuya San later wrote extensive reviews of my kata book and other titles and had them published in the monthly bilingual cultural magazine Plaza-Plaza as well as in nationally circulated daily newspapers. He was impressed with my pioneer use of kata to unveil the mindset of the Japanese, and went on to corroborate my theory as well as to compare my books with those of prominent Japanese authors such as Dr. Michinobu Kato, especially known for his bestselling Shin Ninhonjin-Ron [New Japanology]. Mutsuo later gave me a key and free use of a 3-bed-room guest house he owned in Funabashi on the eastern edge of Tokyo, where I stayed many times on subsequent trips to Japan. 181

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On a recent trip both author-debate enthusiast Michi Matsumoto and I were there at the same time. In addition to his pursuit of writing tanka poetry in the classic Kamakura [1185-1333] style, Mutsuo was also a pachinko player who had become so good at the pinball-type of game he consistently won large baskets of small ball-bearings that he then converted to cash at special windows in alleys behind the pachinko parlors. Mutsuo, whose ancestral antecedents put him in the upper class, was also a patron of kabuki and noh, and often invited me to attend performances with him, where I met other devotees of these traditional art forms. Over the years I returned his many favors by editing many of his translations of tanka poetry [his own as well as that of other master poets], profiling him and his work in some of my books and blogs, and finally, in 2010, creating a blog featuring his commentary on tanka and his lectures on how to compose it. Among the several high-ranking people in Mutsuo’s circle of friends whom he introduced me to were Yoshio Karita, former protocol officer for the Imperial Family, and Dr. Tadanobu Tsunoda, noted authority on the function of the brain and the author of numerous works, including the classic The Japanese Brain. Over the following years I had many meetings with Karita San, including day and night-time forays around Tokyo and Yokohama’s famous China Town. He was also a frequent visitor at Shukuya San’s guest house where I stayed. For the last several years Karita San has been Senior Advisor to the famous Mori Building Company, the developer of major office and apartment complexes around the world, including the famous Ark Hills complex in Tokyo’s Roppongi district, and a second more elaborate complex in the same district that is designed to look like, feel like and function like a full-fledged town—a town “with heart,” said the president of Mori. Karita San also serves as Mori Building’s roving ambassador in its dealing with foreign governments and businesses. He is a wonderful example of a cultured gentleman.

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Dr. Tadanobu Tsunoda, the Brain Man Dr. Tsunoda is best known for his work on distinguishing between the functions of the left and right sides of the brain, and determining that the Japanese are programmed to be primarily right-brain oriented and then bring in the left side if pure logic is required, whereas virtually everyone else in the world [except for Polynesians] are programmed to be primarily left-brain oriented. The reason for the right-brain programming of the Japanese and Polynesians, according to Dr. Tsunoda, is the number of vowels in their respective languages. Approximately half of all the words in the Japanese and Polynesian languages consist of one or more of the vowels a, i, e, u and o—pronounced in Japanese as ah, ee, ou, eh, oh. I later served as one of Dr. Tsunoda’s linguistic guinea pigs, and used his theories as the basis for two of my books: Which Side of Your Brain Am I Talking Too? and Why the Japanese are a Superior People! – The Advantages of Using Both Sides of Your Brain! These two books go a long way toward explaining why men and women have difficulty communicating fully with each other, and why women have traditionally been at a disadvantage in the male-dominated world.

The Subway Guide to Tokyo Tokyo has long had one of the world’s largest subway systems to help the millions of residents and visitors come and go in the huge city. While this has been a great boon for the Japanese it did not solve the problem for foreign visitors who could not understand or read Japanese Tokyo was [and still is] a frustrating maze to most residents and visitors—including the Japanese—became most streets are still not named, there is no specific pattern to most of them, and addresses of places have absolutely nothing to do with whatever street they are on or near. As noted earlier, addresses are based on districts that diminish in size from indiscriminately sized wards and irregular-shaped sections until you get down to “cho” 183

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR that may have from a dozen to several dozen buildings within each of them. Furthermore, subway stations have from one to 20 or more exits that can bring you up as much as half a mile from your destination if you don’t know which one to use. The reason for the Tokyo maze is that the giant city started out as separate “towns” created because from the 1630s to 1867 the country’s 200-plus clan lords were required by the Shoguns to maintain mansions in Yedo / Tokyo [the shogunate capital], keep their families there are all times and themselves spend every other year in Yedo in attendance at the Shogun’s Court. All of these mansion estates developed into small towns populated by the lords’ retainers and the tradesmen who served them. Following the end of the shogunate system of government in1867 almost nothing was done or has been done to integrate the streets, alley ways and byways of the former towns into the now huge city of Tokyo. In early 1996 I resolved to help alleviate this problem by putting together a comprehensive list of the major destinations in the city linked with the subway line or lines, the closest disembarkation stations and the best exits, and putting the list in an easy-to-use book form. My agent in Tokyo, Kiyoshi Asano of the Asano Literary Agency, sold the guide idea to a quasi-publishing company, getting me a $25,000 advance [the largest advance I have ever received from a publisher!]. But the publisher defaulted on the contract and I got the rights to the guide back…and legally kept the money. My good friend and fellow author Fred T. Perry then arranged for the guide to be published by Shoeido Co. Ltd. [as the Subway Exit Guide to Tokyo] Altogether the book provided precise guidelines for the subway line, station and exit to over 1,000 key destinations in the city. Updated several times over the years it was later re-issued by the Tuttle Publishing Company and has since morphed into a guidebook with area maps under the title GETTING AROUND TOKYO, with the subtitle: Tokyo Atlas.

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Demise of Charlie Tuttle And the Rise of Periplus Editions

Charlie Tuttle, the founder-publisher of the Chares E. Tuttle Publishing Company in Tokyo in 1948 and one of my first publishers, died in 1993. Charlie was a drinker and a gambler but he was also a smart publisher. Shortly after his death the company was bought out by Eric Oey, his Japanese wife’s cousin, who had founded Periplus Editions in California in 1988 and later added a number of additional imprints including Berkeley Books and Java Books. Oey merged Periplus and Tuttle in 1996, Incorporated in Hong Kong, Periplus-Tuttle is headquartered in Singapore, has major units in Tokyo and in Rutland, Vermont [the ancestral home of the Tuttle family]. The company is the leading publisher of books on Asian, and is my primary publisher, with over 20 of my titles, several of which have foreign language editions, including Croatian, French, German, He- brew, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Rus- sian. Although I have been published by over half a dozen Japan- ese companies, none of the books caused more than a small ripple. Two of the bi-lingual titles I co-authored with author Michihiro Matsumoto, published by Kodansha International, made Japan’s Amazon.com bestseller list for a few days before dropping out-of-sight. They did, however, gain me some benefit from the contacts that resulted from the mention of my name in Japanese publications. Losing Brother L And Becoming a Victim In 1999 my youngest brother L came down with what was di- agnosed as colon cancer. He was operated on but the operation was not a success and soon thereafter he was informed that the affliction was fatal. He died within a matter of weeks. L had been the tallest, strongest and most physically active of my three brothers. After serving in the U.S. Air Force in Europe he founded his own small construction company, and in

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR his free time became an avid hunter [with some kills that made the record books], a Colorado River rafter, and an outdoorsman who roamed the White Mountains of northwestern Arizona. As a result of this tragedy my family insisted that I go in for a colonoscopy. When the procedure was performed Margaret was staying nights at a resort hotel in northeast Scottsdale, working at a convention. In the afternoon of the day following the procedure I began to experience twinges of pain in my lower abdomen. When the twinges became more frequent and pronounced I call the clinic where the procedure had been done and was told that the twinges should go away and that I shouldn’t worry about it. By 9 p.m. I was feeling bad enough that I went to bed. I woke up around midnight because of serious stabs of pain in my abdomen. The pain subsided and I dozed off. About an hour later the painful stabs returned and were so bad I began having short fainting spells. I finally acknowledged something was seriously wrong and managed to call 911 and ask for an ambulance. I told the 911 operator that I would open the garage door and the back door, and for the ambulance staff to come through the garage door and look for me. I was able to get dressed and lie down on the couch in the living room. I vaguely remember the ambulance crew arriving, being put on a gurney and wheeled outside. My memory of the ambulance ride to John C. Lincoln Hospital and being rushed inside are vague. The only thing I seem to recall is that once in the hallway of the hospital the gurney was being pushed so fast I could feel a breeze. The next thing I became aware of was waking up in a bed with a man sitting in a chair close to the bed, leaning toward me. The man identified himself as Dr. Charles Matlin. He then folded the bedcover back off of my stomach, revealing that a long incision had been made in the center of my abdomen. There were two holes in the right side of my stomach and one in the left side. Plastic bags were attached over two of the holes.

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Dr. Matlin explained that my colon had been perforated and that the excrement that should have been expelled the normal way had poured into my stomach. He said that he had first used suction and then pumped water into my stomach to flush out the remainder of the excrement but since there was no way he could be sure he was able to get all of it he had cut a section out of my colon and attached the “working end” to the larger hole in my stomach in order for me to expel excrement into the largest of the plastic bags. He added that I had had no more than 90 minutes to live when he began the operation. I went back to sleep. The next time I woke the female doctor who had performed the colonoscopy on me was sitting by my bedside. She asked me why I had called 911 instead of her. I finally managed to say, “It was the only thing I could think of.” She was silent. I was barely conscious and closed my eyes, at which point she apparently got up and left without saying anything else. On the second day after the operation, with a nurse’s help, I had to get out of bed and walk around the corridor, pulling all the tubes and wires attached to me on a wheeled device. That was a painful experience. I ate only a few bites over the next few days and did not expel any excrement into the plastic bag. I was allowed to go home on the fifth day after arrangements were made to have a nurse visit me each day for the next few weeks. Emptying and cleaning the excrement-bag was a daily unpleasant chore that I had to do myself. Some two weeks later I went to Dr. Matlin’s office for a checkup. The long incision in the center of my stomach was oozing pus. He poked a drainage tube into it and instructed his intern to use a suction device to pump the pus out and inject an antibiotic into the hole. Thereafter the visiting nurse took over the pumping and anti-biotic treatment chores, which went on for an additional three weeks. I was a virtual basket case for several more weeks but finally got to the point that I could leave the house. My brother-in-law Dwight Steiner took me to a law office to see if one of the

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR attorneys would represent me in bringing a suit against the doctor who had perforated my colon. The attorney we talked to asked me if I was prepared to pay a substantial fee up front, and warned me that doctors have powerful law firms to represent them in malpractice suits and that it could go on for months. I let it go. By this time I was able to work at the computer for a couple of hours each day, and I attended a family picnic. My strongest memory of that event was that daughter Demetra drove me to the picnic grounds and the normal jostling in the car hurt my stomach and made me nauseous. I managed to get to one of the toilets in the picnic area before vomiting. Some four months later, after several more visits to Dr. Matlin’s office, he asked me if I was ready to have my cut colon rejoined so I could get rid of what I was inclined to call the “shit bag.” I said yes. That operation was another major affair. Among other things Dr. Matlin had to cut through a lot of scar tissue. When I woke up Margaret was there. I was in such pain and felt and looked so bad I asked her to leave and not come back for about three days because I didn’t like for her to see me in that condition. I did not have a bowel movement until the fifth day after the operation—a painful and noisy process because my colon was filled with gas. On two occasions after I was released from the hospital I was back in the hospital for additional operations to remove things from my stomach area that apparently were supposed to have dissolved but didn’t, making a total of four operations resulting from the colon examination. It was not until the spring of 2,000 that I felt strong enough to make another trip to Tokyo. Somewhat to my surprise my reconnected colon has stayed connected. However, as a result of this near catastrophic incident I vowed to never again bend over in front of a doctor.

John Banta & the Sheraton Miyako Hotel Story By this time I had made over 100 trips to Japan—many times going on to Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and other South-

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR east Asian destinations. On a few of these occasions I managed to arrange for complimentary nights at various hotels to help defray the expenses of traveling, Most major hotels traditionally grant free stays of up to three nights for recognized travel writers. In 2002 John Erskine Banta, a professional hotelier and then general manager and director of the Sheraton Miyako Hotel in Tokyo [a branch of the famous Miyako in Kyoto], invited me in for a much longer stay—I believe it was for 10 days. He had read a number of my books and credited them with providing him with insights in dealing with the Japanese owners of the hotel and the Japanese staff, and said it would be a special pleasure to accommodate me. Our first meeting quickly morphed into a relationship in which I was authorized to stay at the Miyako twice a year for up to 20 or 21 days on each trip. In exchange for this very valuable largess I began arranging for noted authors and businesspeople to speak at the Miyako Hotel on topics of special interest, and helping to promote these events through the news media and Internet. The program was designed to attract more Tokyoites to make use of the hotel’s restaurants and recreational facilities—a major source of income for upscale Japanese hotels. I also began publishing a monthly web-based newsletter entitled AMAZING JAPAN [Miwaku no Nihon] – Fascin-ating Facts & Features, on which the Miyako Hotel was prominently featured as the sponsor, and for which I wrote a special front- page column in John’s name. My Amazing Japan staff included daughter Demetra as the associate editor & graphics designer; and old friends Sandra [Sandy] Martine-Mori and Glenn Davis as contributing editors in Tokyo. Three of the special features in the monthly newsletter were Haiku-of-the-Month, Travel-Word-of-the-Month and Business Word-of-the-Month. It also included a selection of Japan Links on the Internet. I sent monthly email announcements about each new edition to over 3,000 travel agents around the world, and all evidence indicated that the newsletter was well-read. But there was no

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR direct way to measure its influence, if any, on the guest count at the Miyako. Despite strenuous ongoing criticism about the news-letter from the senior Japanese sales staff at the Miyako—because my monthly fee came out of their sales budget—John hung in with me for some three years. He finally had to acquiesce to the sales department’s demands and terminated the agreement. I had no grounds for objecting. The senior Japanese managers had also done everything in their power to sabotage the Speakers Program that I had ini- tiated to promote local traffic to the hotel’s facilities, finally resulting in John firing the top Japanese executive who led the campaign against my involvement with the hotel. But the relationship had been a boon to me and I will forever be grateful to John Banta the hotel man for his goodwill and support. The reaction of the senior Japanese staff of the hotel was once again a good example of the tension that invariably existed in Japanese companies in which there were foreign managers—a cultural syndrome that still has not disappeared from the typical Japanese mindset.

The Japan Information Network Story

In the spring of 2005 year I received an email from my Tokyo Journal colleague and friend Glenn Davis who asked me if I would like to come to Tokyo and get involved in a new enterprise called Japan Information Network [JIN], which was to be both a web-based site that lived up to this name and a broadcasting company providing news about Japan in several languages. I said yes, of course, and some two weeks later arrived in Tokyo where I was introduced to the president of the new enterprise, Makoto [“Mike”] Asabuki, who had been connected with the Japanese Foreign Office for many years, running a government-sponsored news network. I agreed to spearhead the accumulation of tourism-oriented cultural and travel information on Japan, and was put on a monthly retainer. I returned to my home and began organizing

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR scads of information I had already accumulated, and trans- mitting it to Tokyo. In addition to myself and Glenn, who was to be in charge of the broadcasting unit, Asabuki brought in several other individuals, including one man who [I learned later] had helped finance the concept and turned out to have purely political motives. The design company that had been engaged to create the website also appeared to have some authority over the content. To further complicate matters, the New York public relations firm hired to promote the project was headed by a man who was a friend of the above politically oriented investor. There was some kind of row between the two that was delaying the project. I referred to the stalemate as a hissy fight. The man in New York accused me of inferring that he was a homosexual, and turned his hissy vocabulary on me. Asabuki stayed quiet. On a follow-up occasion when I was in Tokyo JIN had a tiny window-space in a bar-restaurant in Roppongi that was being used as their broadcast studio. I met the secondary investor there, but got no straight answers about what was going on. He seemed to be working on something entirely different from the original JIN concept. Within three months I had submitted some 300,000 words of copy, none of which was incorporated into the website. I submitted my resignation to Asabuki. Glenn hung in for a while longer before opting out. A short time later Glenn moved back to his home state of Texas where he became a lecturer at a number of universities and began working on several of books.

My Amazon.com “Shorts” In the spring of 2006 Amazon.com announced a new program designed to feature short articles [up to 3,000 words] in its Books section, and price them at 69 cents each. It was assumed that a collection of such articles by published authors would sell well, provide a new cash-flow, and make everybody happy. I had some 20-plus important [I thought] more-or-less time- less essays and articles I had done for various English language publications in Japan, and immediately uploaded them to 191

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Amazon’s new Shorts feature. I don’t know how other authors made out but my sales have been minimal.

The New Print-on-Demand Publishing Connection In the summer of 2006 I approached a small publishing house and distributor in Phoenix about the possibility of them distributing some of the Phoenix Books titles I still had on hand. They declined but recommended that I check out a company called Lightning Source, Inc. [LSI], a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ingram Book Company, the largest book distributor in the U.S., which offered a computer-based automated book printing program, and had distributor tie-ins with its parent company and with Ama-zon.com. I subsequently signed a contract with LSI and uploaded 10 of my Phoenix Books titles to their Print-on-Demand and ebook data base. Sales began to go up, quickly reaching around $300 a month—which was not bad because it was totally automated…I didn’t have to do a thing. The LSI connection was looking good until Amazon decided to jump onto the new Print-on-Demand band-wagon in early 2009 by buying out a company called Create-Space.com [CSC]. The immediate effect of this new Amazon move was that my LSI sales dropped down to 10 or 15 copies a month. Amazon quickly became the top POD and ebook seller in the country, so it turned out to be a plus for me. My challenge since has been trying to figure out how to use social media to promote my books.

Knocking a Rib Cage Askew

I had not begun to feel old and have age-related health issues until I was approaching 80. One major incident contributed to this decline. A large tree in our front yard had begun to die. Margaret used a hand-held electric powered chain saw to cut the tree down and cut the limbs and trunk into liftable pieces. I loaded the first batch of the heavier pieces of the trunk into our large wheeled trash can. When I tilted the can forward to

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR engage the back wheels and roll it out to the street for the garbage truck to pick up, I was standing too close to the can. It fell forward, knocking me down and landing on my chest. I couldn’t move but I managed to call out to Margaret to help me. She rushed to my aid, lifting the forward end of the can up several inches, allowing me to wiggle out from under it. She then drove me to our family doctor’s office about five minutes away. The heavy trash can had obviously caused some damage to my chest area. An x-ray revealed that the impact of the can had dislodged my left rib cage, shoving it down and out about half an inch at the bottom. The doctor had no idea about how to get it back up where it belonged, and suggested I wear a tight stretchable band around by chest and wait to see if the position of my rib cage had any serious side-effects. My chest was sore for several weeks and when I leaned to the left, bringing downward pressure on the rib cage, it hurt— and still does. But I was not about to undergo any kind of surgical operation to put it back in place. The right-hand corner of my left rig cage still protrudes out about half an inch further than my right rib cage but there is usually no pain as long as I avoid leaning to the left. That does, however, limit my movements.

The Heart Scare

Shortly after the trash can accident I began having symptoms that appeared to be related to a heart problem, resulting in my family insisting that I go to a doctor and have it checked out. Our family doctor sent me to a heart specialist at a hospital. Daughter Demetra, a respiratory therapist at a Mesa heart hospital, accompanied me. The doctor began a series of tests, including having me run on a treadmill until I collapsed. I was sure I was going to die on the spot. I couldn’t breathe or talk, resulting in some quick responses by the doctor that included putting a nitroglycerine tablet under my tongue. Demetra watched this with horror, but there was nothing she could do about it.

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The doctor then had me carted to another department of the hospital where a team snaked a camera into a blood vein in my right groin area and pushed it up into my heart—the whole process taking over an hour. They found no blockages. The doctor told Demetra that there was a slight blood leakage from my heart but that such leaking was common in older people and not serious, and she could take me home. The procedure left me sore and sick as a dog, and so weak I could barely walk. Instead of taking me directly home Demetra took me to the hospital’s garden coffee shop where we stayed for about an hour, waiting for me to get some of my strength back. I told her I would rather have had a heart attack. My groin area remained black and blue and sore as hell for about three weeks, and is still tender.

An Honor that Didn’t Happen In 2009 two of my Japanese friends, master tanka poet Mutsuo Shukuya and Yoshio Karita, former protocol officer for the Imperial Family, submitted my name for one of the awards given each year by the Emperor to noted artists, authors, crafts- men and scholars who have made substantial contributions to Japan’s cultural and economic assets. The annual presentations of the awards, held at the Imperial Palace just after New Year’s, is one of Japan’s most notable cultural and social events. Each year some-where between 200 and 300 individuals are so honored, out of more than a thousand names submitted. Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is generally responsible for recommending foreign individuals for one of the awards, which come in six different classes beginning with the Order of the Rising Sun with Paulownia Flowers. The advance administration of the awarding ceremonies is handled by the Décor- ation Bureau of the Office of the Prime Minister. Several hundred other individuals receive awards that do not fall into these special classes, and are not invited to the Palace event. Among those in this category was my old friend Jack Se- ward, another ex-member of the Occupation forces who had

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR become fluent in Japanese and wrote several books on the language, as well as novels with Japanese themes.

Lecture in Beijing, China

In the spring of 2009 I received an email from the executive director of the International Air Transport Association [IATA] in Geneva, Switzerland, asking if I would be interested in being the featured speaker at their forth-coming IATA conference in Beijing. The IATA branch office in Singapore had come across my book, Chinese Etiquette & Ethics in Business, and sent a copy to the association’s Executive Office in Geneva. Naturally, I said yes. The director came back with a request for me to go to an office in downtown, Phoenix, Arizona that provided video conferencing services. He wanted a face-to-face meeting with me before making a final decision. I passed the test. A fee was agreed upon and arrangements were made for me to fly directly to Beijing, with a stopover in Tokyo on my way home. It was also agreed that the theme of my lecture would be the importance of having in-depth knowledge of other cultures in the conduct of international business. The audience was made up of IATA agents from countries around the world, so the level of expertise was high and I didn’t get by without a lot of adlibbing and some sharp questions from some of the more vocal participants. I stayed in Beijing for three days, and used the extra time to travel around the city and marvel at all of the construction going on. In some of the shopping and restaurant sections I could have been in any large Western city—an incredible change from the China of the late 1950s when I first became involved with the country. My two-week stopover in Tokyo was mostly devoted to spending time with old friends at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, walking around the many districts I knew so well, visiting a number of the restaurants I had frequented over the decades—especially Tonki [Tone-kee] in Meguro, which is

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR internationally famous for its tonkatsu tone-kot-sue] breaded deep-friend port cutlets. When we lived in Tokyo Margaret came to like Tonki’s tonkatsu so much that after we moved back to the U.S. and I went to Tokyo on my own I would sometimes stop at Tonki on my way to the airport to bring tonkatsu to her. While in Tokyo on that trip I spent my last two nights at the guest house of my old friend tanka poet and professor Mutsuo Shukuya, who was set to retire the following year.

A Farewell Trip to Tokyo

In the spring of 2010 I decided that it was time for me to make what might be my last trip to Tokyo—which by that time numbered well over 130. I had no business reason for going; it was motivated strictly by nostalgia and a powerful desire to re- experience the sights, sounds, tastes, places and people who had meant so much to me throughout my adult life. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. While waiting in San Francisco for my plane to Tokyo I ate a boxed sandwich that had mayonnaise on it. I arrived at the new Tokyo branch of Hong Kong’s famous Peninsula Hotel at 8 p.m. and after checking in I walked to the Yurakucho Denki Building next door to visit the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan on the 20th floor, and see old friends. Over the next hour I became increasingly nauseous and went back to the hotel. By 9 p.m. I had a killer combination of vomiting and diarrhea. I called the Front Desk and had some medicine for stomach poisoning brought up. The treatment didn’t work. Around 11 p.m. I caught a taxi in front of the hotel and went to the Emergency Room of St. Luke’s Hospital in the Tsukiji district. I spent the rest of that night and two more days in the hospital. Back at the hotel I called my friend Mutsuo Shukuya, checked out, wheeled my baggage outside, and signaled one of the taxis lined up in front of the hotel. When the driver saw I was having problems handling my baggage he got out of the car, loaded the bags for me, then took me to my destination—a subway station only about three blocks from the hotel. The 196

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR station connected to a network of subways and surface trains that would take me to Chiba, a short taxi or bus ride from friend Mutsuo’s guest house, just across a narrow street from his own home. Because of the taxi driver’s kindness and the less than two minutes I had been in his cab I handed him a ¥500 tip. He handed it back to me, saying “Kekko desu.” Which can be translated as: “It’s fine! The regular fare is enough.” Tra- ditionally, Japanese taxi drivers had never expected or taken tips, unless the circumstances were extraordinary. Mutsuo met me at the Chiba train station where I had to go directly to a toilet to vomit again. After I came out of the toilet he took me to his guest house where our mutual friend, Michi- hiro Matsumoto, was also staying at that time. The following day I felt well enough to keep an appointment at the Foreign Ministry with Mutsuo and Yoshio Karita. They had previously submitted my name to the Foreign Mini- stry department responsible for selecting people to receive an award from the Emperor—a major annual early January event. The appointment was to encourage the Foreign Ministry officials to approve of my selection. Three days after the meeting at the Foreign Ministry I still felt sick, weak and listless. I called my airline and booked passage home. Mutsuo escorted me to Narita Airport and stayed with me until my flight was called. A few weeks later Mutsuo informed me that I had failed to make the Foreign Office cut, apparently because I did not have—and have not had—any ongoing relationship with a government entity, a university, or a widely recognized cultural or professional association. Then again I may have failed to make the grade because some of my books looked at the darker side of Japanese culture. Another factor may have been that my writing and teaching career had not been entirely focused on Japan.

Margaret’s Quadruple Bypass Heart Surgery On May 11, 2011 on the advice of our family doctor Margaret went to the Banner Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix for 197

A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR what was expected to be a routine heart examination, expecting to be home within three or four hours. Demetra accompanied us to the hospital. After the examination a doctor came out to the Waiting Room and told Demetra and I that that Margaret needed a quadruple heart bypass without delay and that the operation would be performed the next day just after noon—something that was incredibly shocking to us because she had not had any symptoms and because she routinely did seriously heavy yard work that included cutting down and cutting up large trees and digging the stumps and roots out…and had spent some seven hours working in our backyard the day before she went in for the examination. I left the 5th floor Waiting Room and walked down a hallway to an upper level floor of the parking garage to phone daughter Dawn. But I was so shocked by the news that while making the call I collapsed onto a bench in the garage. Demetra found me and had me checked into the hospital on an emergency basis. My problem turned out to be a severe anxiety attack that left me unable to breathe effectively and unable to speak. However, after a thorough examination and three hours of observation I was released and went home. The following day daughter Dawn and Margaret’s sisters Marie and Lelia joined Demetra and I at the hospital, and were briefed by the doctor on the procedure he was going to perform. He went into far more detail than any of us liked to hear. Margaret was operated on in the late evening of May 12, following which she had a number of problems, including mal- functioning kidneys and low blood count that required a blood transfusion and intensive care beyond what was expected. The suffering she endured during the first six days she was in the hospital was terrible to see. Most patients who undergo heart bypass surgery are released from hospital in about seven days. She was not released until the 11th day...three days before her 75th birthday. She was told that she wouldn’t be back to normal for at least six months. But within three weeks she was doing all of the cooking and housework in a very big house. Within five weeks

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR she was driving…and within two months she was back at her part-time job as a travel coordinator for convention planners and conventions…work that frequently started as early as 5 a.m. and lasted until midnight. The only significant change in her freelance work was that she gave up accepting jobs that required traveling out-of-state. In addition to going back to her convention and travel guide work she also went back to doing house and yard chores for daughters Dawn and Demetra. In the spring of 2012, before the first anniversary of her operation, she painted the entire outside of our very large house by herself, including the woodwork around the edges of the roof and on top of the house. This involved moving and using large heavy metal ladders.

The Best Thing that Ever Happened to Me

Although my life has ranged from unusual to extraordinary, even incredible, meeting and marrying Margaret Warren in 1958 was the best thing that ever happened to me. She is the most practical, the most rational and the most diligent person I’ve ever met…in addition to being a paragon of goodwill, kindness and generosity. She has managed all of our home and financial affairs, including serving as the family carpenter, landscaper, painter, plumber and general all-around handy person, and allowed me to do my thing as a writer who was often gone on long trips to Asia…and when I was home to spend up to 10 hours a day six to seven days a week holed-up in my home office.

Five Writers in the Family

There must have been something unusual in my life and in the lives of my surviving eight brothers and sisters, since all of us had unforeseen careers and five of us turned out to be writers. Brother Doyle Laverne, my second younger brother, flowered early, becoming an accomplished poet while still in high school. After one hitch in the U.S. army he began writing children’s books that in my judgment are superior to some of the old

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A VERY PERSONAL MEMOIR classics. They are now available from Amazon.com’s Kindle ebook division. To see a list of his titles put his name [Doyle Laverne DeMent] into Amazon’s Books Search Box. My older sister Winnie became an editor in mid-life and spent time in Iran working for a U.S. government agency. And as recounted earlier sister Fernie had a long career as a public relations specialists, and then as a prolific columnist, essayist and author of inspirational and self-help books based on her own incredible life experiences. Two of her book titles: The Heart Knows the Way, and Tea with Elizabeth. Younger sister Rebecca worked as an editor at PHOE-NIX Magazine and then as an editor at Arizona Highways, nationally and internationally known for its superb articles and photographs on the state of Arizona. That’s five writers in one family—not bad given the fact that our father had a fourth grade education and our mother had an eighth grade education, and that we were born in the backwoods of the Ozark Hills of southeast Missouri and spent our early years in virtual isolation from the rest of the world. How it happened that five out of nine children became writers despite the fact that when young we were deprived of most of the things that are now taken for granted is surprising to me. It has been said that adversity builds character and con- tributes to success. There must be something else involved.

NOT THE END

Life is a journey, not a destination!

—Ralph Waldo Emerson— 1803-1882

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OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR [Books on China] CHINA Understanding & Dealing with the Chinese Way of Doing Business The Chinese Mind—Understanding Traditional Chinese Beliefs and Their Influence on Contemporary Culture Chinese Etiquette & Ethics in Business China’s Cultural Code Words [Key Chinese Terms that Reveal the Culture and Mindset of the Chinese] Chinese in Plain English Survival Chinese / Instant Chinese Etiquette Guide to China—Know the Rules that Make the Difference

[Books on Japan] Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business JAPAN Understanding & Dealing with the New Japanese Way of Doing Business KATA—The Key to Understanding & Dealing with the Japanese Japan’s Cultural Code Words The Japanese Have a Word for It! EXOTIC JAPAN - The Sensual & Visual Pleasures Business Guide to Japan / Japanese in Plain English Survival Japanese & Instant Japanese SPEAK JAPANESE TODAY! - A Little Language Goes a Long Way! JAPAN MADE EASY - All You Need to Know to Enjoy Japan Dining Guide to Japan / Shopping Guide to Japan ETIQUETTE GUIDE TO JAPAN - Know the Rules that Make the Difference THE JAPANESE SAMURAI CODE—Classic Strategies for Success JAPAN UNMASKED - The Character & Culture of the Japanese

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ELEMENTS OF JAPANESE DESIGN - Understanding & Using Japan’s Classic Wabi-Sabi-Shibui Concepts SAMURAI STRATEGIES - 42 Secret Martial Arts from Musashi’s “Book of Five Rings” Why the Japanese are a Superior People—The Advantages of Using Both Sides of Your Brain! AMAZING JAPAN - Why Japan is one of the World’s Most Intriguing Countries SABURO—The Saga of a Teenage Samurai in 17th Century Japan

[Books on Korea] Korean Business Etiquette Korean in Plain English Korea’s Business & Cultural Code Words Etiquette Guide to Korea Instant Korean & Survival Korean

[Books on Mexico] Why Mexicans Think & Behave the Way They Do— Cultural Factors that Created the Character & Personality of the Mexican People THE MEXICAN MIND – Understanding & Appreciating Mexican Culture Mexican Cultural Code Words [hard-cover] There’s a Word for It in Mexico [paperback]

[Other Titles] Which Side of Your Brain Am I Talking To? – The Advantages of Using Both Sides of Your Brain How to Measure the Sexuality of Men & Women by Their Facial Features Samurai Principles & Practices that will Help Preteens & Teens in School, Sports, Social Activities & Choosing Careers ROMANTIC HAWAII—Sun, Sand, Surf & Sex ROMANTIC MEXICO—The Image & the Realities ASIAN FACE READING—Unlock the Secrets Hidden in the Human Face

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Why Ignorance, Stupidity and Violence Plague Mankind MISTRESS-KEEPING IN JAPAN—The Pitfalls & the Pleasures Bridging Cultural Barriers in China, Japan, Korea & Mexico EROS’ REVENGE - Brave New World of American Sex! THE PLAGUE OF MALE DOMINANCE! – The Cause & Cure! ONCE A FOOL—From Japan to Alaska by Amphibious Jeep

[Books on Arizona] AMAZING ARIZONA—Fascinating Facts, Legends & Tall Tales Visitor’s Guide to Arizona’s Indian Reservations THE GRAND CANYON ANSWER BOOK—Everything You Might Want to Know and Then Some! AMERICA’S FAMOUS HOPI INDIANS - Their Spiritual Way of Life & Incredible Prophecies THE LORDS OF THE LAND - The History, Heart, Traditional Customs & Wisdom of the Navajos

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