Artesia—1954 to 1955
Expanding My Horizons
When I got back to Artesia, things continued on as usual. I found that I was growing accustomed to small-town American life.
My friend Mike Shipley and I were in the same class at school together, and after school we always had a good time going out and raising all kinds of hell together. We’d buy a pack of Viceroy cigarettes and share it with each other over the course of a week, smoking one apiece as we walked home from school. We took turns taking possession of the pack, which we both had to keep hidden from our parents. Mike and I talked about all kinds of things that I suppose kids our age normally did, but mostly we talked about movies.
Mike had a big crush on the gorgeous, buxom redheaded movie star Rhonda Fleming. Well, Rhonda Fleming was nice, and I’ll have to admit quite beautiful in her own way, but the beautiful redhead that I myself had a crush on was the movie star known as Maureen O’Hara.
We also liked music and listening to records. It was Mike who first introduced me to Elvis Presley, who had recently recorded a song called Mystery Train on the Sun Records label.
Mike’s father had recorded a single record for some obscure label in Texas under the name “Singing Bill” Shipley, and Mike was very proud of that fact. He would constantly play that scratchy old record, which he treasured.
While we weren’t really nerds, we were both pretty shy and not socially outgoing. Neither of us had enough guts to ask a girl out on a date, so we went to all of the movies by ourselves.
I remember having to sit through an insipid 3-D Technicolor film called Those Redheads from Seattle three times, wearing those cheap cardboard 3-D glasses so long that I got a headache, just so Mike could get his Rhonda Fleming fix.
In retaliation, I made him sit through The Redhead from Wyoming with me twice. It was an even worse picture, but this one at least starred Maureen O’Hara. A couple of years later we would both fall in love with Anita Ekberg. It must have really been true love, since we faithfully sat through a terrible film like Zarak three times!
One day, Mike brought over a small, thick catalog printed on thin, coated, tissue-like paper from a mail order house in Detroit, Michigan, called the Johnson Smith Company. The catalog, which was now well-worn because it had apparently been thumbed through so often, had previously belonged to Mike’s older brother David. As we pored through this newly discovered treasure with childish excitement, I was surprised and delighted to find that it contained offers of all kinds of unusual, both useful and useless items that had a great deal of appeal to kids of our age.
It had joke items like exploding cigars, whoopee cushions, realistic plastic dog turds, sneezing and itching powder, a wide variety of cheap magic tricks guaranteed to amaze your family and friends, authentic life-like replicas of shrunken heads in a couple of different sizes, miniature pistols no bigger than a postage stamp that fired miniature blanks, cast-metal starter cannons, Keystone 16mm movie projectors, abridged versions of Hollywood home movies, and all kinds of books and pamphlets—one of which purported to reveal what happened during the lost years in the life of Jesus Christ.
They even offered what they called authentic replicas of modern handguns, guaranteed to be completely safe. The pictures looked great, so of course I had to send off for one of these. What arrived was a heavy, black cast-iron copy of the gun with absolutely no moving parts. Of course it was completely safe; it was little more than a paperweight.
Still undaunted, Mike and I decided to pool our money and sent off for an all-metal starter cannon that purported to be an authentic replica of a genuine military cannon. Of course the starter cannon did not fire actual cannon balls. Instead it shot off blanks, using an explosive compound called “bangsite.”
We found that by adding more of the bangsite powder than was recommended by the safe and sane instructions, we could get a suitably loud explosion. It didn’t occur to us that doing this might be at all dangerous; we just wanted the explosion to be loud, and believe me, it was. And then the neighbors began complaining.
My dad couldn’t figure out why we had wasted our money on that thing but we were very happy with our purchase.
After my eleventh birthday, my dad presented me with the .22-caliber Remington rifle that Mr. Moir had given to us back in Lahaina. My dad also gave me an Outers firearms cleaning kit that he had purchased at the local sporting goods store. The cleaning kit, which was housed in a beautiful wooden box, contained an assortment of cleaning brushes, cleaning rods, and cleaning patches. He also gave me a small bottle of Hoppe’s Number Nine solvent and another small bottle containing linseed oil. My dad painstakingly instructed me on how to clean and care for the rifle.
After I used it, he said, the gunpowder residue always had to be cleaned from the rifle barrel. The linseed oil was to be rubbed into the wooden stock to keep it polished and looking like new. I was very fortunate to have a father who believed that all young boys should learn how properly handle and use a rifle. When he was a kid, his dad had taught him how to do so, and now he was teaching me.
When he was able to take some time off from his medical practice, he drove me a few miles out of town into the desert and taught me how to shoot the rifle. Even though I was bigger now, the rifle was still very heavy and I struggled with it at first, but my father was very patient. We set up some old empty cans and bottles against a dirt hill and before long I was hitting those targets like a pro. I remember the feeling of satisfaction that came over me when it dawned on me that I now knew how to successfully use a firearm.
Of course, like everything else that I found interest in, guns became somewhat of an obsession and I had to learn everything that I could about them. Fortunately, the local newsstand was well-stocked with all kinds of magazines and specialized books on the subject.
I bought a copy of Stoeger’s Shooter’s Bible and began keeping up with every new issue of Guns Magazine. My dad even got me a junior membership in the National Rifle Association, which sent their wonderful and enlightening publication, The American Rifleman, in the mail every month. I was rapidly becoming more and more knowledgeable about the world of guns.
Sometimes my overenthusiastic interests would get me in trouble, and this was the case with my newfound obsession. In New Mexico, at that time, if you were big enough to put the money on top of the counter, you could buy a handgun.
There was a little pawnshop just off of Main Street that had a selection of new and used handguns in its showcase, and I became particularly attracted to a shiny, nickel-plated Italian-made Galesi .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol. It was brand new and priced at thirty-five dollars.
After going to the shop and looking at it a few times, I felt that I simply had to have it, so I saved my money and, without telling my father, I walked in there and bought the gun.
The Galesi was small enough to easily carry in my coat pocket. Nowadays, a pistol like that would be called a Saturday night special. The next day I took it to school and showed it to a couple of my friends. They were suitably impressed, and we pooled our money, went to the sporting goods store, and bought a box of .25-caliber ammunition.
Armed with the pistol and ammunition, we proceeded over to the landfill outside of town and set up some old tin cans and bottles against a dirt hill to try the gun out. The slide on the autoloader had to be pulled back in order to chamber a round, and it proved to be a little harder to pull back that I had first expected. But after a few practice tries I could do so with ease. Unfortunately, not a single one of us could hit any of the targets that we had set up, which proved to be a major disappointment.
When my dad found out that I had bought the handgun, he became angrier than I had ever seen him—in fact, he was furious. “I let you have a rifle,” he said in a voice much calmer than he actually was, “but you’re much too young to have a handgun. I’ll permit a rifle, but I won’t permit anyone to have a pistol in this house. Handguns are far too dangerous to have lying around.”
Being a doctor, my dad told me, he had seen too many victims of serious and sometimes fatal accidents caused by the mere presence of handguns. He always used a similar argument whenever we kids asked him if we could have a dog or a cat for a pet, as he had seen too many painful accidents and diseases caused by these seemingly innocent household pets.
He told me in no uncertain terms that I would have to return the pistol for my money back. So that was that. Following his specific instructions, I cleaned the handgun thoroughly until it appeared to be as brand new as when I had purchased it, and replaced it carefully in its original packaging.
I took it back to the pawnshop where I had purchased it. I should have known that things weren’t going to be all that simple from the moment I walked into the shop.
The pawnshop owner was in the midst of yelling at a Mexican woman holding a small baby and cowering next to him. I supposed that she was either his employee or wife or girlfriend, and I had the bad timing to walk in just as he shouted, “You stupid bitch!” at her and had raised his hand as if he were going to hit her.
I have to admit that I was shocked and a little scared, because I’d never heard an adult yell at another adult like that before, but I remembered what I had come there for and quickly regained my composure.
The man stopped and turned to me as I walked up to the counter. I had never seen an adult man actually strike an adult woman before, and fortunately he didn’t carry on with his intentions, even though it was pretty obvious that he really wanted to.
The pawnshop owner was actually a small, ugly sort of hunchbacked man, with a face that reminded me of a ferret, who was probably in his middle or late thirties, perhaps around the age of my dad. He had weird eyes that seemed to look off in two opposite directions whenever he was talking, and he definitely did not give off the impression of being a very kind or understanding person.
When I showed him the re-boxed gun and explained why I was there, he simply looked at me incredulously and laughingly said, “You bought it, kid, it’s yours now.”
The pistol was so difficult to shoot accurately that I really did want to return it and get my money back anyway, so the pawnshop owner’s attitude was particularly disheartening. With my tail between my legs, I returned home, still in possession of the now unwanted handgun.
When I told my dad what had happened at the pawn shop he let out with his most volatile curse, which for him was something like “Dad-gum it!” before saying, “That idiot shouldn’t have sold someone as young as you a handgun in the first place!” Then he immediately loaded me into the car and we drove back to the pawnshop.
After a few words from my dad, this time the pawnshop owner didn’t hesitate to take the gun back and give me my money. As we got in the car to go home, my dad said to me, “If you ever do something like this again, I’m really going to tan your hide.” And I knew he meant what he threatened because he had tanned my hide before.
Since I now had my money back and my dad had said that it was all right for me to have rifles, I decided that I should have a hunting rifle since deer hunting season would be coming up in a few months. This time I opted to go the mail order route, and sent off for a rifle that I had seen being offered for sale in Guns Magazine. I wondered, however, if he would really go along with my latest brainstorm, so I bided my time for an opportunity when he was particularly busy and distracted to ask him.
He hastily gave it his blessing before going back to his work. So I quickly ordered the 6.5mm Bolt-action Mannlicher Carcano Carbine, Model 91/38, an Italian army surplus weapon offered at the bargain price of only $12.95!
When the rifle finally arrived, my father suspiciously examined it and then took me out to our place in the desert a few miles from town to make sure that the old firearm was safe to shoot. The Carcano Carbine was surprisingly much lighter than my solid old .22-caliber Remington rifle with its heavy walnut stock.
We soon found that the ammo it came with wasn’t the best in the world, after experiencing a couple of misfires the first time we tried to shoot it. But the most disappointing thing of all was that the bullets from the cartridges seemed to strike a couple of feet or so to the right of our aim.
No adjusting we attempted seemed to remedy that strange and frustrating situation. The only way I could manage to get close to hitting the target would be to aim a couple of feet to the left of it.
Once, a few years later, I did take the rifle when I went out hunting. It was the first time that I had ever gone deer hunting. I had been invited to go along with our local pharmacist, J.D. McClintock, a friend of his, and Mr. McClintock’s stepson Beryl Rogers. Beryl and I were the same age. Mr. McClintock ran the Farmco Drug Store right across the street from my dad’s office.
My mother brought me a bright red insulated hunting jacket and a bright red cap for the occasion, so that the other hunters in the area wouldn’t shoot at me. At first I felt a little silly wearing this outfit, until I saw that Beryl, Mr. McClintock, and his friend were all dressed in the same way.
It was a cold winter day and we were up in the mountains outside of Cloudcroft when Beryl and I spotted a deer in the distance. We both raised our rifles and I aimed for the deer’s head, compensating a couple of feet to the left because of the weird trajectory of my rifle, and I managed to fire first. I apparently wounded the animal because it staggered as if it were going to fall just as Beryl fired his first shot. Then the deer suddenly bolted and ran off.
We rushed through the woods after it, frantic to find it and put it out of its misery. After chasing it for ten minutes or so, we finally brought it down with two more shots. It was still twitching and its legs were moving as if it were trying to keep running, but after a couple of minutes it went still.
“I’m pretty sure I hit it with my first shot,” I said.
“Yeah, looks like you did,” Beryl agreed, pointing to a small bullet hole in the animal’s ear. There was little doubt that it was from my bullet. There was also little doubt in my mind that Beryl had made the final kill shot through the deer’s throat. His .30/30-caliber Marlin lever-action carbine was far more accurate than my Italian rifle.
Beryl handed me one of the two large hunting knives he carried. “What’s this for?” I asked.
“We have to gut it,” he said.
“We have to do what to it?” I asked.
“Cut it open and take out the insides.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. I’d never heard of such a thing.
“No, it’s just something you have to do. And it makes it a lot lighter, too.” Then I suddenly realized that we were going to have to carry the carcass, one of a fully-grown doe, all the way back to the car. This hadn’t occurred to me when I decided to go out hunting. I was beginning to wonder if hunting was something that I really liked to do after all.
There was dark red blood all over the white snow where the deer had fallen. This was the second time that I had watched an animal die, and I realized that this was something that I didn’t care to see.
After we gutted the deer, Beryl and I picked it up by the legs and began the long trek back. It was much heavier than I had expected it to be. The farther we walked, the heavier the carcass seemed to get. Eventually we would only be able to take a few steps at a time before we had to put it down so we could rest.
When we finally reached the car with our gutted deer and dried deer blood all over our hands and clothes, we found Mr. McClintock and his friend waiting for us. They were empty-handed; Beryl and I had been the only successful hunters in our little hunting party that day. There was dried blood on my hands, which turned black on my new coat.
I was grateful when Mr. McClintock handed me a canteen of water so I could wash the blood off my hands. We drove back to Artesia with the dead doe tied down to the hood of the station wagon, but Beryl and I both had been so exhausted from carrying the gutted deer carcass across the countryside that we slept most of the way.
After we got back to Artesia, Mr. McClintock and Beryl skinned, dressed, and butchered the deer, wrapping up the meat in waxed butcher paper. He gave me my share of the meat, which was quite a bit. After my mother cooked some of it, I found out that I was not particularly fond of venison, and since neither was anyone else in the family, we gave it all away.
The experience of gutting the dead doe was a task that I really didn’t care to ever do again, so as a result this was the first and only time that I ever went deer hunting. The Italian Carcano Carbine gathered dust in the closet.
It might be interesting to note that this was the exact same model rifle that Lee Harvey Oswald reportedly used to kill President John F. Kennedy many years later on November 22, 1963. However, from my own personal experience with the accuracy of that rifle, I don’t see any way Oswald could have made the clean headshot that killed the president.
That summer, my dad took the whole family on a vacation to Hawaii. It was my job to chronicle this vacation, so to do so properly—since my Brownie Hawkeye camera had long since outlived its usefulness—my mother bought me a brand new camera: a Kodak Junior II folding camera.
Unlike the fixed-focus Brownie Hawkeye camera, however, this new folding camera gave me some focusing options, so it was a definite step up.
When we got to Kauai, we immediately headed for Hanalei, where we would all be staying at Grandmother Chock’s house. I found the place to be exactly as it had been before, and our Kauai apo was much the same good-humored little old lady that she had always been.
We drove around the island, enjoying the sights and revisiting old friends. My dad had a great time rummaging through the old country stores for distinctive, handmade silk Aloha shirts because these could not be readily found on the mainland. By the time we were ready to go home, he had a whole suitcase full of them.
We spent carefree days on all the various beaches ranging from Kauai’s east to north shores. But I especially felt at home on the old familiar beach at Hanalei Bay. From the channel outlet at the base of the Princeville cliff, where the cold fresh water of the Hanalei River met the warm salt water of the vast Pacific, down the expanse of sandy beach toward the old pier, where Chock Chin had herded cattle onto the waiting boats, and beyond, this is where I knew I truly belonged, if indeed I belonged anywhere, and I felt as if I never wanted to leave. But eventually, it came time to leave the islands once again.
When we got back to the mainland, we stayed for a few days in Los Angeles. I brought my autograph book along with me and obtained the signatures of character actors Hans Conried and Max “Alibi” Terhune, Tex Ritter, David Sharpe, Chief Thundercloud, and Candy Candido.
We drove down to Anaheim once again, where we went to the newly opened theme park called Disneyland. It was a place that the adults seemed to enjoy as much as the children. We all had a wonderful time. But I still missed Hawaii.
After we returned to Artesia, life for me somehow never quite felt the same. This small desert community on the mainland was certainly not the island paradise that Kauai had been. I felt strangely adrift and displaced, although I knew that this was now my home.
Eventually, my allowance was raised to the fantastic sum of twenty dollars a week, but along with the extra money came extra duties. Aside from raking up the leaves and weeding, watering and mowing the lawn both front and back and along the sides of the house, I was now responsible for washing and drying the dinner dishes and taking out the trash.
There was no doubt that I had more than enough money to indulge my various hobbies and whims, although I was always on the lookout for other ways to make more. I started a business at age twelve that lasted for several years, until I eventually left home to attend boarding school at the New Mexico Military Institute.
Over the years I had accumulated a great many duplicates in my stamp collection, and initially I began making a little money by selling some of them to my slightly gullible younger sisters, who I encouraged to begin collecting stamps, and some of my friends.
Since no one else in the area sold stamps for collectors, I had the market all to myself. In an era when not every home had accessible entertainment, a time-consuming hobby like stamp collecting was a far more popular pastime.
One thing that helped my business was a good-sized feature article in the Artesia Daily Press about me, my stamp collection, and my budding stamp business. Never underestimate the power of the press—at least in those days.
The day after the article came out, several people showed up at the front door with old stamp collections they had inherited that they wanted me to appraise.
Armed with my Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue for reference, along with whatever knowledge I happened to possess at that time, I did my best to inform them about what they had.
Of course, everyone came around with the hope that they had something that was worth a small fortune. Unfortunately, most were small, insignificant collections usually housed in a beginner’s stamp album that someone had started and then, after losing interest, eventually abandoned. There was really nothing of any significant value, so those people usually left somewhat disappointed, understandably so.
One middle-aged cowboy brought with him a huge hoard of old American stamps he had found in his attic that his father and grandfather had accumulated over a good many years.
Since most of the stamps were over fifty years old, he had hoped that they might be valuable, but with the exception of a few stamps with a catalogue value of a quarter to seventy-five cents apiece, most of them were relatively common standard mail varieties—essentially worthless. I really hated breaking this bad news to the hopeful man who had brought them.
When I showed him the value of his stamps in the current edition of Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue, he simply sighed and said since they weren’t worth all that much he didn’t want to waste his time dealing with them and he just left the whole lot with me to compensate for my time and effort. I was flabbergasted. There were well over forty pounds of stamps that he had left in two large shopping bags and a weathered, old cardboard box.
As a result, my stock of stamps was suddenly growing by leaps and bounds. In fact, it was even beginning to overflow the small bedroom that I shared with my younger brother who, fortunately, was still too young to be annoyed by this fact. Eventually I would get the bright idea of parceling out a lot of those common but old American stamps in wholesale lots that I would sell abroad in the foreign market.
Eventually, by the age of twelve, I became an active stamp dealer. I went to the local printer and had a fancy letterhead complete with matching legal-size envelopes made up for my stamp business and printed. This letterhead enabled me to set up accounts and buy merchandise through the mail wholesale.
I sometimes wonder now what all those companies I did business with at that time would have thought if they had realized they were doing business with a twelve-year-old boy.
I had realized from an early age that in order to succeed at anything it was important to learn about it as much as possible. In a small town like Artesia, there was no one to teach me about how to become a stamp dealer, much less how to run a successful stamp business. This knowledge could only be gained through extensive reading, so I firmly set about to do just that.
The Artesia Public Library had a surprisingly large selection of books on philately, perhaps because the librarian, Mrs. Knorr, was an avid stamp collector herself. Immersing myself in the wealth of material available to me at no cost, I soon found that while books were great for gaining a kind of historical perspective and general knowledge of the subject, one could only really keep abreast of the current market situation by reading the latest philatelic periodicals.
The local newsstand carried a publication called Linn’s Weekly Stamp News, so I bought a copy and read it from cover to cover several times before sending off for a subscription to it, as well as four other philatelic periodicals advertised in it.
One thing I quickly learned was that I didn’t have to make a huge investment in albums and accessories in order to sell them by mail order. Stamp album and accessory distributors were more than willing to accept orders for drop shipment, and they would process and ship the order directly to the customer.
The distributors supplied me with large bundles of these glossily printed retail-priced catalogues listing all of the different lines that they carried, with my name and address as the dealer imprinted on them.
All I had to do was send these out to my customers and wait for the orders to come rolling in. And surprisingly enough, the orders did come in, most of them from rural areas where people didn’t have ready access to a big city where they could buy this kind of merchandise.
For my dealer’s stock, as well as for my own collection, I purchased stamps wholesale through my various contacts through Linn’s Weekly Stamp News, the Western Stamp Collector, The Stamp Wholesaler, and the British trade publication the Philatelic Exporter, and even began bidding on stamps and philatelic material offered in mail auctions both in the United States and abroad.
When it came to bidding on the auction lots, I usually went for the exotic and hard-to-find stuff, which was what primarily appealed to my adventurous nature. I figured if the merchandise wasn’t commonly available over here, then I’d have a much better chance of selling it. Fortunately, probably purely by chance, I ended up with a lot of good deals and some unusual stuff.
On the other hand, sometimes I ended up stuck with interesting stuff that was very hard to turn, like a fascinating lot containing hundreds of letters called stampless covers from the pre-postage stamp era of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. One contained a letter sent by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II to a merchant. This particular item I was later able to authenticate and sell at a healthy profit.
I determined that autographed philatelic items might indeed someday be worth something, so I decided to try an experiment. I composed an elaborate letter to several reigning and deposed monarchs humbly requesting them to sign and return the stamps that I enclosed bearing their image.
After a long wait, I heard back from only two of them: former King Peter II of Yugoslavia graciously sent the autographs of Prince Rainier and Princess Grace on a card bearing the Grimaldi family coat of arms along with the stamps that I had sent to them.
Eventually, I simply had to sell in order to keep my business going. The only way I could move this stuff out in any kind of quantity would be to sell it in bulk lots.
So I began making up big mixtures of stamps thrown together. It was amazing how the right combination of words in an ad could get people to spend good money on what essentially was a “pig in a poke.” No one really knew what they were going to get, but they ordered them anyway.
To make these lots more appealing, I salted them generously with some more unusual and desirable items from some of the lots I had bought at auction, and filled out the bulk of them with stamps that the cowboy had given me. I even started to get repeat business on “Mystery Lots” containing the hard-to-turn items mixed with attractive stuff. So go figure. I was now an importer and exporter as well as a wholesaler and retailer.
Thus began a somewhat successful mail order approval business for stamp collectors.
By this time, of course, I had opened a checking account at the local Peoples State Bank because it was far more convenient to write checks. Also, it had finally reached a point where my customers were sending me a lot of checks, and I needed somewhere to deposit them.
What started out as a small approval business that brought in dimes, quarters, and half-dollars had somehow morphed into a wholesale as well as retail enterprise. Aside from having a somewhat profitable small international mail order business going, I was in the seventh grade.