I have never been arrested. But I was given the benefit of the doubt once when I didn't know any better.
In 1972, my life was photography, ping-pong, travel, and being clueless. I was about to graduate from high school, go on a three-month backpacking trip to Europe and then head off to U.C. Davis to become a food scientist, whatever that meant.
Hardly working
Using a squeegee
To make money for the trip, I worked three summers and countless Saturdays for a janitorial company in Pasadena, on Lincoln Blvd. It's where I learned how to clean windows with a squeegee, hang and clean Venetian blinds, how to break down boxes for the pickup (they did recycle paper back then), and how to pack a van so that the stuff in the back wouldn't crush me if I had to stop suddenly. All lessons I use to this day.
By my third summer, the boss trusted me to work a few night shifts by myself at the San Marino public library cleaning toilets, sweeping, vacuuming, and making a note of the ballast's going wrong in the overhead fluorescent lighting. My boss came by one night to check up on me. It never occurred to me to open a book. NOT BUSTED! Remember? Clueless.
The job gave me insight into how super-rich "others" manifested their passions. We worked in one Mediterranean-style mansion in San Marino that had a pipe organ. The keyboard was in the living room while the bellows and mechanics took up the basement. The larger pipes came up into the walls at one end of the living room, where hinged baffles adjusted the volume. I guess pipe organs either are loud or they're not. "We" were there to help take it apart and dust it, prepping it for a repair that was to be handled by an expert. I was there to clean the bathrooms.
Another job took us to Beverly Hills to clean and tidy up a modern ranch-style house situated on a hillside. It had a ballroom with a parquet floor and a bandstand. At one end was a two-story tall glass window that overlooked the smog hanging over the city of Los Angeles. I'm sure the nighttime views were terrific, though. I vacuumed what felt like a mile-long hallway while the others disappeared into various rooms in the house. The place belonged to Diana Ross. She wasn't home.
The rest of the year, I was a high school kid. When I wasn't at school, I lived in the pool, Middle Earth, or my bedroom. I lettered in swimming a couple of times. I was the only senior on the swim team who was not also on the water polo team.
The Mighty Mustang swim team with Walt Culbertson as coach, clothed.
Swimming can be the most boring thing ever. I persevered and even spent my summer vacations swimming for a club team that used the pool at CalTech. I enjoyed competing against myself. By that, I mean, I was never really very good, but I kept getting better. By the time I hung up my Speedos, I could have qualified for a spot on the 1924 U.S. Olympic team.
All this points to me being a loner. And I liked it that way. Outside of activities such as scouts, lunch, and swimming, only a few people beyond my family were allowed into my inner sanctum. They were both named Steve.
One I had known since Miss Maguire's first-grade class at Altadena Elementary, the other I ate lunch with almost every day in high school. My grammar school friend Steve eventually moved to the other side of town with his family. He ended up going to Pasadena High School.
My friend Steve from grammar school visiting the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, Austria.
While we were together in scouts, we drifted apart as kids do. Still, he was going to be my travel partner in Europe because our parents stayed in touch. He was interested in girls, surfing, and (looking back on it) reefer. I was into science, Life magazine, and practicing my photography.
My other friend Steve and I ate lunch almost every day with the same group of friends on a grassy mound in the quad of John Muir High School. I don't remember how we met. It was just kind of organic. He and I tended to like the same things. Ping-pong and science topped the list. Our lunch-time pals were smart and funny and active in school activities, including student government.
Nixon was president, Vietnam was still a possibility for us, and table-tennis was the rage. Steve would come over to my house to play ping-pong. The table was under a low-slung pergola held up by a wooden post. As good as we were playing against each other, we could never master what we saw the Chinese do on TV. Our knuckles couldn't take it because of the low ceiling and the post. Those hazards forced us to play like Bobby Riggs against Billie Jean King. Our nasty backspins were so aggressive we could land the ball on the opponent's side of the table and watch it bounce back over the net toward us.
Steve and his family invited me over for New Years once. It was the first time I had Japanese food or sushi. It was a special day.
He never ate at my house. But then, no one else did either. My mother assumed my friends were slobs and wouldn't have it. She always referenced my 10th birthday party to prove it. Someone wiped their chocolaty hands on her curtains.
Steve and I shared a physics class that gave us access to an oscilloscope and a ruby laser. And by access, I mean the teacher let us take the equipment home. I wonder why the chemistry teacher didn't do the same. Maybe the answer was, "Kaboom!"
We designed our experiments to prove or disprove what we had read about in the news. Three stories intrigued us:
1) A Life Magazine or National Geographic story described making three-dimensional images on a glass plate using a ruby laser – holograms.
2) A lie detector connected to a plant that ID'd a murder suspect in solving a murder.
3) How laser light sent from Earth bounced off a mirror on the moon that could be seen on Earth. In theory, if you could stand in the middle of the shaft of light on the moon, you could see where it came from on Earth.
Magnifying glass and chess pieces bathed in ruby laser light.
We started with holograms. We made them in the basement of my house. It's a long story, but you needed a cellar. I still have the plates that show a magnifying glass focused on a chess piece. The piece is upside down and enlarged in the glass. If you were to tilt the plate slightly, you could see behind the magnifying glass, and the standard size chess piece turned right-side up. Steve invited a girlfriend over to watch us work. I'm not sure how impressed she was with the laser setup. She seemed to be more interested in Steve. I think we put her to sleep.
Oscilloscope and plant witness.
In another experiment, we tried to recreate the conditions under which a plant could identify emotions — the murder story. We used an oscilloscope instead of a lie detector. Steve hooked it up to a rubber plant in his house. We yelled at the poor plant. Steve ate yogurt in front of it. We might have killed an apple. Nothing.
Nothing that is, until Steve's girlfriend showed up. She was more than excited because she had received an acceptance letter from UCLA. She came by to tell Steve because he was to go there, too.
She didn't know about the experiment, but Steve and I looked at the oscilloscope as the squiggle on its screen was going nuts. I think Steve was excited about her news, but I couldn't tell. We just proved plants recognized human emotions!
A room with a view over the Rose Bowl. The laser in on the ladder.
The last experiment involved pointing the laser out from a window at my house toward the Rose Bowl. It was this experiment that gave us our first experience with the cops.
We planned to turn it on, point the monochromatic red light at a road just above the stadium lights, and drive over and measure the width of the beam. I had never been in that neighborhood, one of the richest in Pasadena – Linda Vista. If I had to guess, the road we chose was Linda Glenn Drive, about 5 miles from my house. In 1972, there were a few houses there, but it was mostly empty lots and new constructions.
We grabbed my camera equipment, hopped into my family's VW camper van, and headed to Linda Vista. I think I told my parents where we were going, but I'm sure all they heard was "laser" for the hundred thousandth time.
VW camper vans weren't exactly known as stealth vehicles in those days. I can still recognize the clatter of an underpowered VW engine as it tries to push a metal shoebox down the freeway. The clattering of that engine driving that same box up a hill brought out the neighbors.
Before the internet, these neighbors were probably avid readers of The Pasadena Star-News. My English teacher Mr. Hoyt pointed out that the Pasadena Star-News liked using the phrase "roving bands of..." followed by the boogie-man of the day: "drug-crazed hippies," "negro youth" or "child ballot thieves."
Steve and I, I guess, fell into the "drug-crazed hippy" category only because we were prowling the neighborhood in a VW van with "That's all Volks" painted over the head of Porky Pig on the front tire cover.
The problem with laser light is that its beam is very focused, which is why NASA could point it at the moon and know where to place its mirrors. Over a short distance, it was a bit more tricky. There was little margin for error. If we pointed the laser too high or too low off the road, we wouldn't be able to see it, and our experiment would be a bust. So, we drove up and down Linda Glenn Drive while staring off toward Altadena, the VW in first or second gear just creeping.
Then bingo! We saw it — a brilliant pinpoint of red light just above the stadium lights of the Rose Bowl. We got out of the van and stared off into the distance, and then walked up and down the street to measure the width of the beam.
Red glow of a laser light throws a shadow of a telescope and my body onto the family VW camper.
It was at this point that a Pasadena police cruiser pulled up.
I can't remember the exact conversation we had with the two officers who approached us, because it was just that.
"What are you two doing?"
"Looking for a laser."
Looking toward Altadena from Loma Linda, 1972.
"A what?"
"The light of a laser."
"We got a call. "
By now, one cop had walked up to the van. We pointed, "Look!" He turned toward the Rose Bowl and Altadena.
"What am I looking at?"
"That red light on the hillside. That's the laser."
At some point, we probably babbled about lasers, the moon, our experiment, our high school, JPL (in two-part harmony like Alison's Restaurant). In short, we were putting him and his partner to sleep.
He told us to finish what we were doing and to get out of there.
I took some pictures. We measured the beam. And we left.
While we may have been hippyish, neither of us were black. I can't speak for Steve, but while I was probably surprised by the cops' visit, I never believed it would turn out any different.
That's privilege. I was 17.