I no longer recall the genesis moment of my life in tennis. There were no summer parks lessons in grade school or PE courses in junior high despite four crumbling courts on campus. My parents never introduced me to tennis. But one day, there I was in junior high, with a cheap wooden racket, hitting balls against the backboard at Rivercrest Park because none of my friends played. That all changed when my dad took up the game and that became a major part of our social time together once my parents separated for good when I was 12.

I suspect now my interest in tennis began while watching the Grand Slam tournaments on television. It was the golden age of American tennis, the mid to late late1970s, the Studio 54 days of fiery golden rivalries between Connors, McEnroe and Borg, when the Rolling Stones played, when super models played, when Virginia Slims cigarettes sponsored the women’s pro tour, when the New Yorker routinely ran long fact pieces on tennis, when 35 million Americans played tennis with mostly wooden rackets, making it the number one recreational sport, when cities around the country built thousands of public courts (many lighted) to accommodate the boom, when parks and recreation departments (even in rural areas!) staged clinics and tournaments for all ages on lazy summer evenings. Americans moved a lot more back then, and tennis was a game of graceful movement, conversation across the net, and mingling.

And there I was in Oregon City, entering high school, and about ready to live the most unlikeliest, preposterous American tennis story of all time! Man, that high school tennis team—my four years as a varsity member. There is a novel there, the great laid-back American coming-of-age tennis novel for an uptight nation that doesn’t play tennis anymore.

Where to begin with team?

How about this crazy story from my first year. We had one player on my team, a kid named V, who had never picked up a racket in his life before trying out his senior year on a lark. The interesting thing about V was that, infrequently, he would practice naked (before the coach arrived from his teaching job at a junior high across town). There V was, on the courts at Gardiner Junior High, dinking forehands with a Jack Kramer Autograph, rushing to the net, chasing down lobs, slicing serves, while the junior high boys and girls track team’s distance runners would jog around the courts and act as if a senior boy playing tennis in the nude was a perfectly normal thing to do in 1979. No one ever said a word and the coach never found out. We were all loose and undetected.

In my freshmen year, Oregon City belonged in the Wilco League with schools like Lakeridge, Lake Oswego, and Tigard, some of the best white collar tennis schools in the state. There was really no such thing as a best blue collar tennis school.

These rich schools had the best courts in the state, all newly surfaced with crisp nets. All their players were club members and played year round with professional coaches, traveling to matches around the region. All their players had multiple rackets and wore the finest Fila and Rossignol European apparel and tennis shoes. They had harems of girls at their matches, where they routinely defeated us 6-0, 6-0 in 45 minutes or less, and that included the warm up. Once, the number one player from Tigard pulled up in a convertible sports car, an MG I think, and left the motor idling outside the court, won his match in a matter of minutes, and then drove away with his blonde girlfriend, his feathered hair somewhat blowing in the breeze. He didn’t take off his warmups or break a sweat. He didn’t even take off his sunglasses.

It was a peculiar feeling getting your ass kicked every match, right out there in public, inside a galvanized fence. I did cry after one particular humiliation. There was just no way to beat them, let alone compete. They had it all and often laughed at us and our cheap gear and terrible form. I mean, we had one player who routinely whiffed first and second serves for the strangest double faults in tennis history!

Then, divine intervention came from the merciful Gods of Tennis who wore nothing but all white. They surely saw us suffer and moved heaven and earth to alleviate our pain. Their leader must have been Arthur Ashe, the compassionate graceful black God, not the other white American tennis assholes of my youth.

(Note to reader: It is my wish that the reader will support the idea that Pioneer Pride is a “book.” It is also my wish that the reader consider “buying” the book as it rolls out in installments. A purchase supports an author and future literary endeavors by Nestucca Spit Press. To purchase, look to the right on the blog to use Paypal or contact me to make other arrangements.)

There was rafting without cops on the Clackamas River, something I never experienced although I was asked to join in. There were Dazed and Confused seduction scenes on the boats launched at Clackamette Park, where beer was beer and jean cutoffs, tube tops and the occasional macrame garment reigned, and big combs and chew canisters fitted tight in back pockets, and the high school boys all looked like cross country runners, even most of the football players.

There was that one senior prank where someone somehow sprayed deer scent into the radiators of the old building of the high school and the smell was ghastly for days.

There was music. In junior high I listened mostly to soul and funk music: Brothers Johnson, Commodores, Earth Wind and Fire, Ohio Players and Stevie Wonder. How I came to discover this genre is lost to me now. I surely must have heard some of the songs on Top 40 radio stations when they crossed over to the pop charts, but certainly not on KGON. I never listened to KGON. Oregon City had no record store so I would ride Tri-Met #33 alone to downtown Portland and shop at the groovy, incense-filled Crystal Ship tucked inside a secret corner of the Galleria. It was surely there where I bought the 12-inch single of “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang and then put it on my little Hitachi stereo’s turntable and listened in my room, perhaps even with Tex the beagle. Later, I got somewhat into rock, and the Rolling Stones’ double album Hot Rocks certainly captured my attention. It was pretty much the soundtrack for our tennis teams.

There was that time when the school’s star athlete stole my math book and vandalized the cover with the misspelled words “fuk” and “shitt.” It was so absurd that I knew one day I would use the incident in a book and here I am doing so.

There were times in junior high when a pebble tossed against my bedroom window around midnight would interrupt my solitude. That pebble sound was wonderful and always unexpected. How did we set them up? They weren’t set up!

There was being a godless preacher’s kid and living in the preacher’s house across the parking lot from Oregon City Church of Christ and it’s football field-shaped front lawn where my dad played football with my grade school friends and taught me how to go long and run the sideline route. There was inviting my friends for sleepovers in the basement of the church and trying to make coffee in a gigantic percolator and playing tackle football on the carpet and chipping plastic golf balls into the baptismal.

There was the berry bus picking up the last generation of white Oregon kids and teens who would pick (or throw) berries in the dusty fields or cull berries on conveyor belts in a jam factory. I don’t have a berry bus or berry picking story because I lasted exactly one day. I couldn’t hack it. Many others did, every summer, all day during the picking season. They had a sack lunch and a thermos of Kool-Aid and that was it. Child labor! And barely any supervision. I have no idea how kids were signed up. I recall getting paid by bringing something over to be weighed. Pennies a pound. You didn’t pick, you didn’t get paid. There is great Oregon novel titled The Berry Bus waiting to be written. It needs to be written.

There was one summer afternoon in 1975 or 1976 when a naked woman sunbathing in Rivercrest Park, our park, sent titillation rippling through the neighborhoods and had us spying on her with toy binoculars we usually reserved for glassing imaginary Panzer divisions massing in the ruins of a demolished city that actually was an old miniature golf course gone to seed and rubble and our own little private Stalingrad.

There was walking to elementary and junior high school in hard rain. There was seeing Apocalypse Now in the Oregon City Drive-In with three buddies and me being the only one who knew it was a lot more than a war movie. I think when I realized that, I might have become a writer right there.

There was the whiffle ball field we sculpted out of a vacant lot (complete with plywood home run fence) and the league we invented, and the statistics I kept with a golf pencil in a spiral notebook.

There was endless days of playing army in the woods along Coffee Creek, and in the marshes of a wetland now buried in asphalt. We were never home and took along sack lunches. We made campfires and roasted hot dogs. We built forts, bunkers and pillboxes. We climbed trees and constructed dams.

There was Saturday Night Fever in seventh grade, in the front row of the Southgate Theater, with a seventh-grade girl with a royal biblical name, wearing a silky floral-print blouse and blue jeans while John Travolta danced onscreen.

There was Portland Wrestling in channel 12 on Saturday nights and the Tom Peterson ads. I never missed it but I never went to a card in the flesh. What a fool!

There was the first McDonald’s opening and everyone going crazy and it being cool to work there, like the mall in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

There was the foos ball craze in junior high and foos tables in the cafeteria and brooding boys who wore foos ball gloves in the back pockets of their jeans all day.

There was a smoking area. For students!

There was driving to the Eastgate Theater to see Raging Bull by myself and then taking a date to Kurosawa’s Kagemusha.

There was hoping that “Hotel California” would or would not come on at a junior high dance depending on whom you were dancing with right before it did come on.

There was home construction class that built a new home every year, and art classes and pottery wheels and kilns and home ec with sewing and cooking, and auto, wood and metal shops and boys taking five periods of shop a day and then graduating with skills that employed them with a middle-class living for the rest of their working lives and skills they taught their children that served those children the rest of their lives when they went on to do home improvement or fix a car.

And there was the darkroom and all the darkroom shenanigans. Darkroom Shenanigans would have been a great name for a rock band in 1981. Sadly, I don’t have a darkroom story. Many do.

There was getting lost finding the prom venue (Holiday Inn off I-5) and walking into a cover band with a female live singer butchering “Start Me Up” but later nailing “Private Eyes.” I got lost trying to find my senior prom! It was awesome.

There was never touching a single computer in my public education, but the Apples and IBMS were there at the very end, gaining a quiet foothold with a certain kind of kid.

(Note to reader: It is my wish that the reader will support the idea that Pioneer Pride is a “book.” It is also my wish that the reader consider “buying” the book as it rolls out in installments. A purchase supports an author and future literary endeavors by Nestucca Spit Press. To purchase, look to the right on the blog to use Paypal or contact me to make other arrangements.)

I cut class for the first and only time of my Oregon City High School career to participate in “senior skip day.” A cell had organized it for Milo McIver State Park, a 30-minute drive from Oregon City. There would be kegs.

How that was done in those days, I have no idea. I do know it certainly wasn’t sanctioned and chaperoned like “senior skip days” are today in many contemporary high schools. They go to water parks and zoos and take a school bus.

Seventy-five dissidents showed up at sunny McIver Park. When I arrived, the kegs were tapped and flowing, boys and girls drinking from plastic cups. Rock music was playing loudly from muscle cars. Hackey sack was going on. The smell of reefer drifted on the breeze. Oregon never produced a finer day for mellow teenage rebellion.

From my senior year journal:

6-2-82

Last Friday I participated in the senior skip day. What an absolute waste of time, money and energy. These lizards and jocks sit around on their ass doing nothing but drinking beer, listening to mind shattering music and it’s so senseless. I wanted to experience this phenomenon because I wanted to know what made seniors tick. Why they did this? I went in with an open mind but shortly after there was no substance—no depth. I’m not any better than anybody else but my priorities are so different (and I feel somewhat more mature). Drinking beer in a park is not my idea of a of a good time. There is no use of this mind. I could go on all day about the waste but it would accomplish nothing. Talking about it, and condemning it, it’s just like drinking beer in the park. It gets you nowhere and serves no purpose.

I cringe when I read that entry today. I should have just enjoyed the moment, drank a single beer, and rejoiced that only one week remained in my high school career. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know how.

While I was there, I overheard someone say that during the Vietnam War, McIver Park had hosted a free rock concert where thousands of naked hippies took a lot of drugs and the cops did nothing. Apparently Oregon’s governor put it on. It was called Vortex. For some reason, the casual mention of the rock concert at McIver Park intrigued me. I considered investigating when Sheriff deputies showed up and busted the scene. Apparently, the campus cop had ratted us out.

I will never forget a deputy telling one of the boys, who happened to be holding a full cup of beer, “Son, you’re going to have to empty that beer.”

The boy said, “Yes sir,” and drained the cup in a single chug.

Deputies wrote a few minor-in-possession tickets and confiscated the kegs. I didn’t get in trouble. I did remember the story of Vortex, and some 20 years later, would do something with it as a writer.

(Note to reader: It is my wish that the reader will support the idea that Pioneer Pride is a “book.” It is also my wish that the reader consider “buying” the book as it rolls out in installments. A purchase supports an author and future literary endeavors by Nestucca Spit Press. To purchase, look to the right on the blog to use Paypal or contact me to make other arrangements.)

How could I not be a child of Oregon City without a relationship to the town dump, the one near Kelly Field and the adjacent landfill with its Mad Max methane torches? In the early days, it was open-air if I remember correctly, and you just drove right up to the edge of a concrete precipice, paid a few bucks, and then cast your shit deep down onto a pile of more shit.

Perhaps once or twice a year my father would borrow a truck and we would make the dump run. I quickly learned that the experience of a dump run was greatly enhanced if you had large, breakable objects to smash upon the pile. TVs were obviously the best. (Remember, this was long before recycling.) No wonder rock stars loved hurling them out of hotel windows and watching them explode on contact. In a sense I became, for a few precious seconds, a rock star at the dump when I got to throw a television set over a precipice and watch and hear it explode. Furniture and full-length mirrors were fun, too. And small lamps would fly through the air for what seemed like hours and then shatter ever so beautifully. Oh, and the old church coffee percolators were fun to heave as well. I also recall flinging a speckled bowling ball, too, and watching it pulverize a shower stall’s glass door.

Often I would accompany my friends with their fathers to the dump. The call would come early Saturday morning, I’d ask my mom or father permission, and later, a friend and his father would pick me up in some kind of truck and off we went. I preferred these dump runs with my friends’ fathers because my father was not the kind to amass a lot of shit, or the really good stuff that broke apart on impact. These other fathers hauled all manner of appliances, windows, lawnmowers and furniture. I once participated in throwing a drill press over the precipice. What a sound that made when it landed and cracked in two.

When I think back to what was thrown away, most of it was in pretty decent shape and today would be donated to thrift stores, which were uncommon in my Oregon City youth. I don’t think there was one.

Journalism was my life in high school. The staffs of The Elevator my junior and senior years were the smartest, most talented, funniest, best read, most informed, and most bawdy group of people I have ever met.

Everything was cut and paste with the newspaper, and with the rest of our lives, too. If that doesn’t make any sense, then you never cut and paste putting anything together. It is a skill I still use in the digital age.

There was nothing like the feeling of the paper coming out and watching teachers and students read it around campus. Reading you! Nothing!

I wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein and expose corruption, muckrake with gusto, tear down the false football gods. Savage. That was the word we always used, straight from Hunter S. Thompson, whom we all had read. There was a writer who wanted to be Hunter and ingested mescaline, walked down the halls during passing periods, and wrote a column about it called “Justin Buffalo and the Cows.”

There was the phrase “making an ad run,” which was code for driving off closed campus to get stoned, park, and make out with the females on staff. There were political debates that rivaled Buckley versus Vidal. I would regularly write seven or eight articles an issue, news, sports, movie reviews, features and editorials. Yes, those scathing editorials ripping everything in sight: jocks, teachers, Republicans and Ronald Reagan, always Reagan.

From my senior year journal:

2-18-82

I can’t stand to look at Reagan’s face. There is no one on earth I hate. He is one. His policies, his family, his asshole face. I can’t stand the man! How could he get elected?!! The American population could not possibly elect this kind of man. I don’t wish him ill— only that bastard would fade away— for good.

A couple editorials landed me in the Principal or Vice Principal’s office, but nothing ever happened. I got straight A’s, had perfect attendance, and didn’t do drugs. But it was a brush with censorship, THE MAN, and I sort of liked going up against…whatever it was.

One time I wrote a satire from the perspective of a cheerleader, as if she were keeping a diary and was a secret, repressed intellectual. I commissioned illustrations to accompany the piece. Something happened when that paper hit campus. A couple cheerleaders came looking for me. I liked that, too.

There was often a lot of downtime in journalism, so to waste away the hours, we held spitting contests out the third floor window of the old building, staged races with rolling chairs, played Vietnam War on the IBM Selectrics, and wrote low-grade Penthouse forums and read them aloud. For some reason, there were dozens of Sears catalogs from the 70s in the room, and one staff member routinely perused the ladies underwear and bra sections and made collages with the photographs, illustrations and text, and gave them away as gifts.

Another staff member was a boy, who was easily the best writer, and read nothing but read Zane Grey and Louie L’Amour novels—during class, in all his classes. He never did a lick of schoolwork except his newspaper articles, and scored a perfect score on his SAT. I have wondered for decades what became of him.

We probably drove our adviser to a nervous breakdown of some kind. She despised us. She was in over her head with this crew. We were grade-A assholes and wielded words like machetes.

Many years later, I became a high school newspaper advisor and never let students pull the kind of shit we pulled. Quite possibly because no one tried or even conceived of trying! It just wasn’t in them anymore. Rebellious minds had been directed elsewhere. They weren’t angry with the political system. They found niches within popular culture that served their rebellious needs. Perhaps that was a good thing. Or maybe it wasn’t.

As for Oregon City High School’s newspaper today…The Elevator is gone….print there is dead, and that breaks my heart.

(Note to reader: It is my wish that the reader will support the idea that Pioneer Pride is a “book.” It is also my wish that the reader consider “buying” the book as it rolls out in installments. A purchase supports an author and future literary endeavors by Nestucca Spit Press. To purchase, look to the right on the blog to use Paypal or contact me to make other arrangements.)