Artesia—1952 to 1954
O Fair New Mexico
We moved into a small three-bedroom house at 612 West Quay Street, which was about a block and a half from where my father’s brand new office was being built at Seventh and Main Street. The wooden sign planted in the ground in front of the office read “Dr. William E. Toney, MD, Physician & Surgeon.” As it had been in Lahaina, he was still within walking distance from work. He drove his car to his office, however, in case he had to make a trip to the hospital for a scheduled surgery or rush out to go on a house call.
My brother Brian and I shared a bunk bed in the smallest bedroom. My three sisters shared a larger bedroom, and my parents had the master bedroom. Although it was a little crowded, it was livable. Even though about three years later we would move into a much larger house further down on Main Street, I loved that little old first house we lived in—maybe because of all the pleasant memories that were associated with it. I was ten years old when we first came to Artesia, and I found that my horizons were rapidly beginning to expand.
Somehow during the move from Hawaii, my vast comic book collection, my old Victorola and a good many of my records, my Men of Iron book, as well as many other precious childhood possessions were left behind. Although I felt their loss at first, I can’t say that I truly missed any of them. Fortunately, I still had my stamp collection and, in time, I would find other people in this new town that shared the same interest.
Whenever I arrived at a new place, my first instinct was always to wander around and explore. Everything here was totally new to me and, I was fascinated to find that I now lived in a version of small town America that I had only experienced while watching movies.
An old train station at one end of town seemed as if it were right out of the Western movies that I had seen. Freight trains and passenger trains stopped there and passed through with clockwork regularity.
Almost in the middle of the downtown area on Main Street was the slightly more modern edifice that housed the City Hall where the political business of governing the town was conducted. It was wedged between the various shops and stores that were typical of a small town at that time: a drugstore, auto store, clothing store, grocery store, and the like. Nearby, there was also a post office and a public library and the local newspaper, the Artesia Daily Press.
There were also two theaters on Main Street, a new one and an old one. The newer theatre was called the Landsun Theater, and the older theatre, which showed second-run movies and Mexican films, was called the Ocotillo Theatre. (An ocotillo, I learned, was some kind of desert flower.)
My first really close friend was a guy who was two or three years older than me named Joe Murray. One day he just came up to me and asked if I was Chinese or Japanese or what, and after I told him he simply nodded and we just started hanging out together.
Joe and I managed to get ourselves into all sorts of innocent trouble as he showed me around the town. When the football season rolled around, Joe and I got a job selling bottles of soda pop at the high school football games. Joe carried the large metal cooler strapped around his neck and I handled the money and went around shouting, “Ice cold pop!” as we made our way up and down the aisles around the football stadium. Joe was not only older but also much bigger than I was, and we must have made a strange-looking pair in a Mutt and Jeff kind of way. But whenever he was around, nobody thought to pick on me. Having Joe by my side was sort of like having my own personal bodyguard. Our friendship lasted all through that first winter and then into the next summer. After that, he and his parents moved away and I never saw him again.
After Joe moved away, I was left without a best friend. Of course I had my school friends, but they were more like acquaintances whose camaraderie never seemed to go beyond the schoolyard. Looking back on it now, I realize that I was always pretty hesitant about forming close relationships. Perhaps this was because at the time it seemed as if I had very little in common with most of the boys my age that I met at school.
Another kindred spirit came in the form of the waif-like young girl who was a classmate of mine named Theresa Shockley. To this day I really don’t know how it happened, but she became my first girlfriend. By the time we entered the fifth grade she had found someone else to fall in love with and our brief relationship had become a thing of the past. I wasn’t brokenhearted about it. In fact, I never seemed to lack for girls who became interested in me. At that time, however, romantic entanglements were the furthest thing from my mind.
At school I had the opportunity to interact with kids of different racial backgrounds from all strata of society, although at that time in my life I really didn’t know a whole lot about class differences. I was aware, however, that some came from rich families and some came from poor families.
There were my white friends who, like me, never seemed to want for anything. Other white friends came to school wearing dusty work clothes because they had spent the very early morning chopping cotton or working in the fields with their parents. For the first time in my life, I also had several Mexican friends and even a Cherokee Indian friend. Unlike Hawaii, where different races tended to freely intermingle, the Mexican kids here seemed to keep to themselves. Some of them had families that were better off than some of the others. My Cherokee Indian friend, Johnny Tyner, divided his time between living with his mother in Oklahoma and living with his aunt, a schoolteacher here in Artesia.
I think the culture shock affected my mother much more than it did me, although she never actually let on that it did. It must not have been easy, being the only Asian woman in town. But she was extremely intelligent and adaptable.
The kids at school were a little curious about me at first when I showed up in the classroom, but when that curiosity eventually faded I became just another one of the kids at school. I guess acceptance is much easier when you’re young. Looking back, I find it pretty amazing that in New Mexico I was never taunted because of my race, as I had been in Hawaii as a small child.
Even among the adults, there seemed to be no outward show of prejudice against my mother and myself, which, in retrospect, I find somewhat surprising. World War II had not been all that long ago, and most Caucasians weren’t able to actually tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese people, so you’d think there might still be some hostility. But there wasn’t. In southeastern New Mexico it appeared that most of the Caucasians inclined toward racial prejudice apparently tended to reserve it more for Mexican and black people.
Somehow I managed to make a few friends. Like me, these friends tended to have more esoteric interests and were not particularly good at sports. Unlike my birth father, I was pretty terrible when it came to sports. When we played baseball and it came my time to be at bat, my walk up to the plate was always greeted by derisive shouts of “easy out!” which pretty much summed up the extent of my batting abilities.
My fielding abilities weren’t much better, so I usually got stuck way out in left field because the guy playing center field was usually fast enough on the uptake to make the catch for me should the ball somehow be inclined to head my way. Once, however, I did manage to catch a high fly ball all on my own. Everyone else was as surprised as I was, especially since it was the final out of the game.
But, in spite of my unexpected heroics, my team still lost. I found that in many ways your popularity is determined by your ability at sports. I really didn’t give a shit about being popular. At least, that’s what I always told myself. Deep down, I suppose, I was just like everyone else: I wanted to be liked. Although I was far more sensitive than I thought I should be, I wasn’t thought to be a nerd, even though my interests could have been considered pretty nerdy.
My saving grace, I suppose, was that I wisely kept such unmanly interests as stamp collecting and reading and collecting books pretty much to myself. They were more or less my very solitary pastimes that I could escape to and enjoy whenever the mood struck. In a way, I had public and private personas.
In New Mexico, I came to appreciate a totally new genre of music called country. There was a record and music store in downtown Artesia called Natalie’s House of Music where I would buy my Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Jim Reeves, and Homer & Jethro records.
With the change of my place of residence had also come a change in my taste in music. My favorite recording artist was now Hank Williams.
As I recall, the first Hank Williams records that I bought were the singles containing Lovesick Blues, Jambalaya, Half as Much, and Hey Good Lookin’. As time wore on, I would add to the collection.
Like just about everyone else, I was surprised and saddened by the news of Williams’ untimely death on New Year’s Day, 1953, and I was one of the first people in the music store to pick up the posthumous release of Your Cheatin’ Heart and Kaw-Liga.
One day a blue disc attracted my attention but Natalie, the owner of the House of Music, told me that I wouldn’t like the music because it was only meant to be listened to by black people.
If someone tells me I won’t like something, then naturally I just have to try it. I saw no reason why I couldn’t listen to a blue record as well even though I wasn’t a black person. So I bought the record anyway, and after listening to it I almost immediately began to cultivate a taste for what I later learned was called blues.
So aside from adding country records to my collection, I began to appreciate the music that was on the blue records. I bought One Mint Julep by The Clovers and a couple of records by a relatively new recording artist named Ray Charles, whose innovative style seemed to be a cross between down-home blues and jazz. To me, these were all new sounds that reflected the culture and soul of mainland America, the place I now called home.
It was in the fourth grade that I began reading biographies of famous people. There was a bookshelf in the classroom that contained books that we could borrow and take home. I was immediately attracted to The Man Who Changed China by Pearl S. Buck. It was the story of the revolutionary first president of China, a man named Sun Yat-sen. I also read Harold Lamb’s Genghis Khan and the Mongol Horde.
Being just about the only Chinese-looking kid in school had made me more aware of my Asian heritage, and I had begun a somewhat serious search for role models in an effort to bolster my self-esteem. I became fascinated by Sun Yat-sen’s story, and I began to take an active interest in learning more about China and further exploring my Chinese heritage.
But I didn’t limit myself to my Asian studies. I also read and became quite fascinated by biographies of some famous Americans such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Luther Burbank, George Washington Carver, Henry Ford, and others. How inspiring it was to read about people who possessed the courage, determination, and talent to rise up from lowly backgrounds, suffer even the most adverse of conditions, to end up not only succeeding in life but even effecting the most dramatic changes in the world that they lived in!
These biographies also made me aware that although our country was a democracy where all people are supposed to be considered “equal,” there were still three distinctly different classes of people that existed in America: the upper class, the middle class, and the lower class.
This idea was something I hadn’t thought much about before. We were neither poor nor rich, so I wondered just what we were. Naturally, contemplating this perplexing sociological situation led to me to pose what I considered to be a very serious question to my dad:
“Are we members of the upper class?” I asked him.
He looked at me as if my question had come out of left field before he replied, “I’d say we were more like members of the middle class, son.”
“But you’re a doctor and everyone looks up to you and treats you with a lot of respect. Not only the poor people but the rich people, too.”
He laughed and said, “Well I suppose I am what you might call a professional person, son. So that probably puts us somewhere in the upper middle class, if you had to categorize us. But all this stuff about class is really of no importance, so don’t you go around thinking that it is.”
Now that all that was cleared up, I put such things out of my mind and never really thought much about them much again. If my dad didn’t put any stock in the social class system, then neither would I.
Dr. William E. Toney, however, was not, judging from his occasional comments, altogether free of other kinds of prejudices. Being a medical doctor, he looked down on osteopaths and chiropractors. He was of the opinion that their short term of medical training didn’t really qualify them to call themselves real doctors.
When it came to religion, he had little patience for Evangelicals, whom he referred to as “Holy Rollers,” and from some of the comments that he occasionally made, he really didn’t seem to care all that much for Catholics either, although he apparently seemed to tolerate them.
Although my dad would make such off-the-wall comments about things like that from time to time, I knew that he was joking and was not really prejudiced when it came to race, religion, or social or professional status. In reality, Dr. Toney was a very kind and compassionate man. In fact, I never knew of anyone who loved or cared for his fellow man as much as he did.
I definitely wanted to make a success of myself and, if at all possible, become someone who, in the course of his life, would leave the world a better place than it had been before. And somehow, if I could make a whole lot of money while doing this, I thought, I would then be on my way to making myself what might be considered a true success.
These were lofty ideals, but I didn’t want to do this simply so I could become a member of the upper class, I wanted to do it because money had begun to suddenly interest me. As a small child, one of my favorite comic book characters was Walt Disney’s Scrooge McDuck, whose vault contained so much money that he could actually dive in and swim in it. To me this symbolized the ultimate in wealth.
I knew what a nickel or quarter or dollar bill could buy, but to have a whole swimming pool-size vault of money like that boggled my mind. But how was a kid like me ever going to make that much money? The answer, I soon found, would be revealed in an enticing ad on the back cover of a comic book.
The advertisement said that kids like me could make a fortune selling White Cloverine Brand Salve, a wonderful product guaranteed to provide soothing relief for dry, rough skin, burns and scalds, sunburn, chafing, chapped lips, etc. The product was even endorsed by celebrities like Yogi Berra! And it had the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval! It only stood to reason that every household should have at least one of those small round tins of this essential medication on hand for such emergencies.
I immediately filled in the coupon and sent it off, and three weeks or so later a small shipment of the stuff arrived by parcel post. After selling it, I would be rewarded in either cash or valuable prizes. I would opt for the cash. I was almost certain that I was on my way to becoming the world’s youngest millionaire.
It didn’t take long for that particular bubble to burst. No one wanted to buy that stuff. I only managed to sell five of those little tins in the course of a very long month, and one of those five was bought by my mother who gave it to me to remind me that the secret of financial success, or any other kind of success for that matter, was not to be found on the back of a comic book.
Since this was obviously the case, I began to lose faith in comic book ads, even those that promised to build my body up so that no one would ever pick on me or kick sand in my face at the beach. Not that there were any beaches in the area. I reluctantly decided that I would just have to accept myself as somewhat of a skinny weakling.
When my dad learned how I felt about my puny body, he did something totally unexpected, because he felt that self-image was very important to a growing boy. He made a trip to the local sporting goods store and bought me a set of barbells and dumbbells, which we kept in the basement.
Thus equipped, I would religiously work out with them from time to time, but I discovered that trying to build a muscular body was really a lot of work. After months of strenuous exercise, I had very little to show for all of my effort, and I became somewhat resigned to being a skinny weakling.
That didn’t prevent me, however, from sending off the comic book coupon for a consignment of a publication called Grit, America’s Greatest Family Newspaper, which I was sure that everyone would be interested in buying.
After all, how could a family not want to read America’s Greatest Family Newspaper? There were a lot of families in Artesia.
But not that many families in Artesia, it seemed, really cared about reading America’s Greatest Family Newspaper, and I soon realized that selling five or six copies was not going to make me a rich man.
It occurred to me that it would be much easier to simply walk down Main Street to the printing plant of the Artesia Daily Press to hawk a handful of those on the street. At least people would buy the local town newspaper.
I managed to sell a lot more of those, and I didn’t have to spend money to mail back the leftovers. The newspaper sold for a dime and I got to keep a nickel of that, so I was really just making pennies unless I sold an awful lot.
It didn’t take long to realize that I wasn’t going to get rich selling newspapers, so I would also supplement that income by putting advertising handbills on parked cars and delivering them from door to door.
Not long after we moved to Artesia, something new broadened my horizons immeasurably: my dad purchased a television set, which proudly took its place in the living room as our new entertainment center. It was a brand spanking new Sparton twenty-one-inch console housed in a mahogany cabinet.
I would spend many exciting hours in front of this marvelous invention watching everything from old serials and feature films to a couple of shows featuring wrestling matches telecast from Texas and Chicago and virtually anything else that was broadcast from the local television station some forty miles away, in Roswell.
After school, I would hurry home to catch a chapter of the current serial. Over the course of time I would see Red Barry, Radio Patrol, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and several other exciting vintage serials from the 1930s. The serial chapters were usually followed by a vintage Western starring Harry Carey, Hoot Gibson, or a seemingly endless number of other stars that graced Hollywood’s Poverty Row independent film products in the 1930s.
The movies that I particularly enjoyed watching were the old monogram Charlie Chan films starring Sidney Toler and Roland Winters, and the Mr. Wong films with Boris Karloff in the title role. The fact that the heroes in these films were Chinese like me made them particularly appealing.
I was quite surprised to learn that back in Los Angeles my mother had known Benson Fong and Victor Sen Yung, the two Chinese-American actors who usually played Charlie Chan’s sons, as well as the Korean-American actor Philip Ahn. I was also very surprised to find out that Grandmother Chinn, who now lived with us, had been friends with the actress Anna May Wong, who appeared in some of the old 1930s movies that came on late at night.
But what really fascinated me was that my grandmother had also met many of the really famous old movie stars from the silent era. Downtown Los Angeles had been a very popular location for filmmaking in the early part of the century, and during the lunch breaks, actors such as Charlie Chaplin, Clara Kimball Young, Milton Sills, Crane Wilbur, and many others would frequently eat at my grandfather’s restaurant. My grandmother also recalled that the magician Harry Houdini used to always come to eat there whenever his show played in Los Angeles.
Most of the feature films shown on television at that time were either the cheap productions from old independent American Poverty Row producers or cheaply produced British or Australian feature films. But for a curious kid around the age of nine, it was all good.
My dad told me that he had seen many of those old Hoot Gibson, Harry Carey, Jack Hoxie, Tom Tyler, and Bob Custer Westerns in theaters when he was a kid himself back in Missouri. A love for these old Western films was instilled in me that would last throughout my entire life.
The bulk of the British movies on television were the so-called “Qutoa Quickies” from the 1930s, cheap B-pictures produced by various American studios in England. Since American films virtually dominated the market in England, forcing the British film industry into a decline, the government passed the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, which stipulated that 20 percent of the films that played in British theaters had to be British films.
Not wanting to lose their lucrative market share, the American studios immediately began churning out low-budget pictures through their British subsidiaries to meet this quota, since the Cinematograph Films Act made no mention about the quality of the pictures required to fill the quota. Most were extremely cheap comedies, thrillers, or direct recordings of stage plays.
Some of them were fairly imaginative. Fortunately, some of the other British films that I also got to see on television were wonderful movies like The Four Feathers, The Drum, Elephant Boy, The Jungle Book, and Catherine the Great. Many of these films awakened in me an enduring passion to visit and experience foreign lands and exotic places.
When summer came to Artesia, I was in for another major shock. Hawaii had accustomed me to hot weather, but the hot weather in Artesia was totally unlike anything I had ever experienced before. The temperature was frequently in the high nineties, occasionally rising up over the hundreds, and there was no cooling sea breeze to blow in occasional relief. Instead, the overheated desert wind continually blew in dust, dirt, sand, and tumbleweeds. The weather tended to alternate from one uncomfortable extreme to the other. In the winter, one had to endure the bitter cold, and in the summer there was no respite from the relentless heat. If there ever was such a thing as a “hellhole,” I thought, this truly must be it.
I spent most of the summers of 1953 and 1954 in Arkansas at a place called the Arkwild Boys Camp, located just outside of a little village called Hatton in Polk County, not far from the Ouachita Mountains.
It just so happened that the son of one of my mother’s new friends was going to attend the camp that summer, and my mother thought it might be a good experience for me, if I wanted to go. I was always up for a new experience, and ever since I had spent my summers with Uncle Wilfred in Kaneohe, I was used to being on my own away from home. There was also the prospect of numerous camping trips, fishing trips, marksmanship contests, and all kinds of fun activities.
The camp was run by a middle-aged man named Captain James Branch, who, during the school term, worked as an English professor at the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell. The good captain made the trip to Artesia to discuss the benefits and merits of his summer camp in the wilds of Arkansas with my mother and me and, since it sounded like fun, I agreed to go.
When the time came for me to leave for Arkansas, my mother outfitted me with the appropriate clothes, including a bunch of brand new socks and underwear, all with my name carefully sewn onto them. She also presented me with a brand-spanking-new Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera, along with a few rolls of black-and-white 620 film. This was the first camera that I had ever owned and I was indeed proud of it.
Jack Miller’s mother drove us to Arkansas. Jack and I sat in the backseat while Jack’s ancient grandfather was ensconced in the passenger seat, comforted by a good supply of bourbon, along with a thermos full of water, which he constantly sipped throughout the long trip.
When we arrived at the camp, we were greeted by Captain Branch, his wife, and his two teenage kids, Byron and Phoebe, who had brought her dog along. They were the primary staff for the camp. Byron was one of the counselors. Each cabin had a counselor to herd the boys.
Phoebe, the eldest teenager, helped her mother run the kitchen and was in charge of the camping and sporting equipment. Phoebe was a vivacious dishwasher, blonde Doris Day All-American girl who was kind of pretty and somewhat sexy in her cut-off jean shorts.
The shorts showed off her long legs and shapely posterior to extremely good advantage. Unfortunately, at the age of ten, I was still relatively ignorant about girls and sex. This didn’t keep me from joining the other boys trying to peer into the bathhouse whenever she took a shower, however, in hopes of seeing her naked.
Of course we were usually disappointed because we never really got to really see anything other than the wooden boards of the inner walls of the bathhouse. I think that Phoebe eventually became aware of our clumsy attempts to spy on her and was probably amused by them.
In the evenings, after supper, we would gather around a small campfire and Captain Branch would tell either scary stories or historical tales to inform us about the region we were in.
The lush, green forests of Arkansas were a welcome change from the parched deserts of Artesia, but they did have their downsides in the form of swarms of mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers, and the constant threat of poisonous snakes. One always had to check the floor of the bathhouse to make sure that one of those snakes hadn’t slithered in from the nearby woods.
On Sunday, we had a choice of going to either the Baptist church or the Catholic church in Hatton. Going to one of them was mandatory. The first week, since the Baptist church was the closest, a couple of my friends and I chose to go to that one, figuring that we would sneak out sometime during the course of the sermon.
Imagine our surprise when, as the church service began, the doors were closed and bolted shut, and we had to remain there squirming on the hard wooden pews in the stifling summer heat for the whole time. From the next week on, we walked the additional quarter-mile and joined our Catholic friends at their church, where the doors thankfully remained unlocked and even open to allow the breeze in.
All of the boys at camp were required to be members of the Arkwild Boys Camp Baseball Team. With my track record in sports, I didn’t particularly look forward to this, but for some strange reason I managed to play better baseball in Arkansas than I did in Artesia.
I still wasn’t particularly good, but I wasn’t all that bad either. A couple of the older boys took pity on me and began coaching me on my hitting and catching, and it wasn’t long before I gradually began to improve.
We had baseball practice every day in preparation for a big game with a team of boys from Vandervoort. When the day arrived, we were driven to Vandervoort to face the challenging team, which was composed of kids around our age with one spectacular difference: all of them, even the youngest member of the team, were openly smoking cigarettes.
And as if to prove just how strong and tough they were, they were smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes and Camels, definitely among the unhealthiest of all of the available cigarettes. They also smoked during the game, both when they were at bat and in the field and even after the game. It’s the first time I ever came across a team of chain-smoking kids.
Of course, Captain Branch wouldn’t allow any of us to smoke, even though he was constantly puffing away on his pipe. In spite of the fact that the Vandervoort team became winded much faster than we did and had to deal with the smoke getting in their eyes while they were batting, they ended up winning the game.
Although I missed catching a couple of fly balls, I did, however, finally manage to score a run after their smoking pitcher fumbled the ball I hit for a single.
The smoke from his cigarette probably got in his eyes.
After that, I was able to steal second base, and then, after the pitcher hit a bad streak and walked the next two batters, I was able to walk to home. It was a run by default, but it was still a scoring run. Anyway, this was certainly a major accomplishment for me, and I felt proud of myself.
After the game was over, the victorious members of the Vandervoort team all sat down on a nearby log and posed for a picture for me.
The time I spent at camp not only proved to be a wonderful learning experience but it also bolstered my self-confidence.
Before then, it had bothered me that I wasn’t handsome enough or athletic enough to be one of the really popular guys that everybody wanted for a friend. I had been too introverted to pursue friendships, possibly fearing ridicule and rejection if I attempted to do so.
At camp, I interacted with total strangers from all stations in life and all parts of the country. They made me feel accepted and liked as a person. My experience at camp helped me to come out of my shell.