Roswell—Hawaii—Miami—1958 to 1962
Welcome to the Real World
In military school, for the first time in my life, I was completely stripped of all self-control and self-indulgence. My previous life was a thing of the past. The fact that I had once made myself into a successful businessperson meant absolutely nothing here.
In my current existence I was now a “Rat,” the appellation used for a first-year cadet. The term was derived from the official designation RAT, Recruit At Training, in the eyes of most of the “old” cadets we were of little more significance than the rodent. In addition, I was also a “Half-Ass,” the derogatory term for a cadet entering at the semester break. These cadets were generally looked down upon by the regular cadets because they hadn’t been there from the very beginning of the school year.
As a result, we were segregated from the regular body of cadets to undergo a period of intensive training to catch up. As a Rat, I already had two strikes against me, so I had to either shape up or ship out. I decided that I was going to shape up.
On our first day at the institute we had been taken to the institute barber, who gleefully gave us GI haircuts right down to the scalp. Looking like shaved rats, we were marched to the Post Exchange (PX) and issued a large white canvas laundry bag and several pairs of khaki pants and shirts for our Class C uniforms, along with the army green cap, which everyone referred to as a “cunt cap.” Next, we were each fitted for a pair of black leather combat boots, along with a bundle of regulation socks.
We received a loose-fitting army green military field jacket, a mess kit and canteen, and other essentials. We were also measured for the dress coat for our Class A uniform to be worn for formal events. We were required to wear a clean uniform every day.
At the PX we could also purchase things like cigarettes, lighters, cigars, glass ashtrays, shaving cream, aftershave lotion, razorblades, class rings, leather dress gloves, underwear, school sweatshirts and jackets, snacks, and other sundry items. The one thing you could not find there, however, was booze, which was prohibited on campus.
During the period that we were to undergo our “Half-Ass” training, we were housed in the rooms above the Post Exchange. There were two of us assigned to each room, and the assignments must have been made alphabetically because when I walked into my assigned room and dropped my rucksack with my initials R.C.C. onto the floor, my assigned roommate pointed to his and it had the exact same initials. I was Robert Clarence Chinn and he was Robert Carrol Claar. We called each other Bob among ourselves, but from that time on we would be known by our military school nomenclature designations as Chinn, R. C. and he would be Claar, R. C.
My roommate was from Moriarty, New Mexico, a small town along the famous transcontinental Route 66. His father owned a store there called The Hitching Post that, like many other similar establishments along the popular Interstate Highway, catered to tourists by selling souvenirs and curios.
We soon learned that the upper classmen training us had one purpose and one purpose only, and that was to make our lives miserable. Their first task was to strip us of our personal pride and individuality in order to instill in us a strict sense of obedience. Shaving our heads had been the first step in this process. Without hair, we all looked alike. We were to become a disciplined, well-trained, functioning unit before we would be allowed to become a part of the corps of cadets. Our spare time was spent learning the various techniques to spit-shine our boots to a high gloss and keep our brass uniform accessories impeccably shined. These were time-consuming tasks that had to be done to perfection to avoid getting demerits and being called out in front of your peers as being sloppy.
After we were integrated into the regular corps of cadets, we found that in some ways, life at the New Mexico Military Institute was structured like life in the regular US Army. We were awakened by a bugler sounding Reveille and went to sleep when the bugler sounded Taps. The primary difference was, instead of living in a large communal barracks, we bunked two to a room.
Robert Claar remained my roommate after the first semester, and we were both assigned to F Company. There were ten companies in the quadrangle. Each company was composed of two platoons of three squads each and had a company commander, two platoon leaders, a first sergeant, and six squad leaders.
I definitely did not look forward to the Saturday field problems that were part of our military science and tactics training. These were always tough, grueling, and left everyone totally exhausted by the time they were over. For the field problems, we would be outfitted in full battle gear, which included the heavy metal helmet that we called the piss-pot, ammo belts, metal canteen, and so forth.
At that time I tipped the scales at about ninety pounds and I was skinny as a rail, but I had to carry a field pack on my back that weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty pounds.
On our very first field problem, aside from all the weight I had to carry on my back, I was assigned to carry the squad’s .30-caliber machine gun, which to me, at that point, weighed a ton. Even though I was getting more mandatory exercise than I had ever had in my life, I wasn’t in the greatest physical shape. All the smoking I was doing didn’t help matters either. I was so out of shape that toward the end of the field problem I felt as if I were dying and slowly descending into hell.
These field problems simulated actual warfare, and we were all issued, along with the firing pin for our rifle, blank cartridges to fire at the enemy. We had to be very careful when shooting off these blanks so that no one would get injured.
During one of the field problems, a sergeant from the Military Science and Tactics department flew over us in a light plane, dropping sacks of flour around us to simulate bombs. Tragedy struck when the plane stalled out and crashed near our group, killing the sergeant and one of the students. It was a shocking experience that drove home, in a horrifying way, that anything can happen at any time.
The academic side of life at the institute was definitely not the walk in the park that my previous educational experience had been. Here, we were expected to truly study. English still remained an easy subject for me. My English professor that semester was a published science fiction author named Jack Williamson who generously encouraged me with my creative writing while gently pointing out all of the things that I was doing wrong with it.
One thing that I particularly liked about the institute was their library, and I spent a good deal of my spare time there. It contained over seventy-five thousand volumes, most of which were housed in the basement in four large rooms called the stacks. Many of the books had been donated by the estates of wealthy ranchers and alumni, so the quality of the books was exceptional, and there was a remarkably large selection of works on just about every subject you could think of.
Toward the end of the year, my Asian descent even worked to my advantage. I was approached by the upperclassmen to be the art director for the Final Ball, the theme of which this year happened to be—perhaps the recent popularity of the John Patrick play or the Marlon Brando movie—The Teahouse of the August Moon.
I suppose they thought that since I looked Asian I could naturally make Asian decorations and write Oriental characters on banners to fill the gym where the Final Ball was going to be held. From then on I was treated with kid gloves by all the upperclassmen, who persuaded all of the old cadets that I should be left alone so I could concentrate on my Asian decorative inspirations.
During my first semester at the institute, my family moved from Artesia to a small town in northwestern New Mexico called Aztec, where my dad set up another private practice. He had bought some property near the edge of town where he had a large house built to his specifications on a small hill at the end of a road overlooking a vast arroyo. When summer vacation came, this is where I went.
I soon learned that there was no action at all in Aztec. Whatever action there was in the area was happening in a larger town a few miles down the road called Farmington. They at least had a small Chinese restaurant, where I got to know the owner who would cook up special dishes for me.
The most interesting thing about this new area was its proximity to the Navajo Indian reservation. I was surprised to learn that this reservation, which was the largest in the United States since it contained about twenty-seven thousand square miles extending throughout New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, was actually an autonomous government known as the Navajo Nation, which had its own police force and was governed by an elected Tribal Council.
Whenever I went back to Aztec, I would take time to explore the surrounding area, perhaps drive over to Shiprock and poke around the trading posts on the reservation to see what life there was like. I would check out the bars at the edge of the reservation and drink with the Indians, most of whom were friendly and curious as to why I was there.
A lot of the Navajos that I drank with and talked to expressed that they felt a kind of kinship with me because their ancestors had crossed the Bering Strait over from Asia, but I suspect that they were probably more interested in me buying them a drink. Eventually, I would return to film a documentary called Navajo Winter, which I submitted as a class project when I went to film school. It was no easy task as the older Navajos intensely disliked being photographed.
Returning to the institute for my senior year, I found that I had been promoted to the rank of sergeant, and I was now assigned to be a squad leader. I was still in F Company and was still rooming with Bob Claar, but at this point in time, after having spent three semesters together, our relationship was beginning to wear thin. I would eventually move in with a new roommate named Larry Young from A Company.
One of the new cadets in my platoon was a second classman named Roger Staubach. Being a second classman meant that Roger was a year older than I was and an academic grade above me, but he was still a new cadet, and as an old cadet I had seniority over him. He had to call me “Sir” and I could order him around. Staubach was a nice guy, however, who also worked as a cadet waiter in the mess hall. In fact, he was the cadet waiter for my table, which meant that he had to serve us food during mealtimes.
Roger was also a star player on our Broncos football team, and he would go on to be a distinguished quarterback and Heisman trophy winner on the US Naval Academy’s football team before becoming the star quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys and Super Bowl MVP. People don’t know whether to believe me when I tell them that Roger Staubach once served me my food.
My senior year was also a time of continued enlightenment for me. The remarkable resources of the institute library allowed me to pursue whatever subjects happened to interest me.
Encouraged by my English teachers, Captain Jack Williamson and Major Dwight Starr, I continued to write short stories. One thing I had never lacked was an imagination. The institute put out an annual literary publication called The Maverick, and my short stories were accepted and finally appeared in print.
There were also a yearly fiction competition with cash prizes, and I would inevitably win one with every issue, which was encouragement in itself. Thinking that perhaps I could put that imagination of mine to work for me, I began seriously considering a career in journalism.
One of my classmates at the institute was a young man from Pacific Palisades, California, named Chuck Carter. Chuck was a laid-back guy and an avid surfer. I told him that I was planning to get a job in Honolulu this coming summer, and he said he’d like to go over with me. He could go to summer school at the University of Hawaii, but, more importantly, he could surf the beautiful beaches of Oahu.
Fortunately, with the money that had been sent to me as graduation presents, I had enough to buy my own round-trip plane ticket with some to spare, and after I won the cash prizes for my publications I had even more. After graduation, we headed for California, the first leg in our journey to Hawaii.
We arrived in Honolulu and checked into the Central YMCA on Atkinson Drive while Chuck took care of his summer school enrollment and looked for a place to stay near the university. While Chuck found a place and got settled, my cousin Evelyn and her husband Kinny Mun put me up in a small room just off the garage. So that I wouldn’t be totally imposing on them, I paid them a rent of ten dollars a week for my room.
The drinking age in Hawaii at that time was eighteen, so I could now legally drink there, but I was still underage on the mainland. One of the first things I did after I got to Honolulu was get a Hawaii driver’s license. I used an art-gum eraser and an old office typewriter to carefully adjust one number in my date of birth, adding a couple of years to it. I was all set for when I got back to the mainland.
In Hawaii I could legally spend a good deal of time drinking in the downtown bars and dives around Nuuanu and Hotel Streets and in Chinatown, where they never looked too carefully at the driver’s licenses anyway. I loved going into those places, soaking up the atmosphere and watching the people while I sipped my beer and nibbled on the little dishes of delectably tasty, salty pupus they brought after you ordered a couple of drinks.
If I was going to become a writer, I thought, I needed to experience and know all this stuff. So I would hang out at the old Hoffman Bar & Grill—the oldest surviving bar in the city at that time—the Pantheon Bar, the old Unions Bar, and the small, cozy Joe Guiterrez Bar where I would put away many bottles of Primo or Lucky Lager in the course of an evening while soaking up the atmosphere before eventually staggering back home. Fortunately, my room had a private entrance off the garage so I could enter the house relatively unnoticed.
Getting drunk every night, however, was not what I originally came to Honolulu to do, so I diligently set about getting a job. After a week or so of answering newspaper want ads for better jobs and not meeting with any success, I finally settled for a job as a stock clerk and box boy at the Star Super Market in Mo’ili’ili, one of a chain of supermarkets owned by the Fujiiki family. After my first month in Honolulu, I received word that another job that I had applied for, film editor at KHVH-TV, had finally come through.
I had gone to the initial interview and lied through my teeth about my previous experience. Apparently they couldn’t find anyone else that was more qualified. I immediately accepted the job as film editor and switched my supermarket job to part-time on the night shift. I was now working a twelve-hour day. My job at KHVH-TV was actually ideal for my purposes. I had been hired as the full-time summer replacement for the senior film editor, who was taking his vacation, and my contract called for me to work until August 20.
My job was to splice local television commercials in the places that indicated “Place commercial here” for all of the filmed television shows about to air and then to remove the commercials from previously aired shows and prepare them for shipping to the next TV station in Guam. At lunchtime, I would drop these shows off for shipping at Ala Moana Center. After I got back to the station, I would have to retrieve the next airing feature films from the feature film library. I had to watch the film if it had to be cut down to fit a time slot, so I would know where to make cuts that wouldn’t affect too much of the story, and then I would have to edit it and insert the commercials at the appropriate places. It was a very easy job for me, one that required only a modicum of intelligence and effort. Looking back on that job after having been a film director, I can only compare it to that of a callous butcher.
My plane arrived at Miami International Airport on a swelteringly hot September day, and I disembarked with my single suitcase and my portable Adler typewriter in hand. If I had expected the weather in South Florida to be somewhat like the weather in Hawaii, my expectations were immediately proved to be terribly wrong.
The heat and humidity in Florida was totally unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was so hot and muggy and the air was so stifling that I could barely breathe. I couldn’t see how people could actually live in a climate like this.
The off-campus apartment I had been assigned to in South Miami did not have air-conditioning, but there were a lot of windows, and the breezes that flowed through them kept the place cool enough to be livable. Thanks to those cool breezes, I would eventually begin to get used to the climate.
The University Gardens complex consisted of several blocks of seemingly identical apartment buildings. Each building contained four two-bedroom four-person apartments, two of which were street level and two upstairs. My apartment was upstairs. I never figured out why they called it University Gardens; there were no gardens anywhere.
My roommates, as it turned out, were all from New Jersey. It seemed as if a great many University of Miami students were from New Jersey, but there were also a few I got to know in the surrounding apartment buildings who were from New York, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Virginia, and California.
I was not used to being around so many people from the East Coast, and it took me a little while to get used to their accents and some of the words they used. Many of them would say “youse” instead of “you.” Up until then I had thought that people only talked that way in comic books. They also tended to speak more rapidly than I was used to and that, combined with their accents, made it difficult to understand them at times.
The University of Miami campus was a little over a mile from our apartment, and I soon found that I enjoyed the walk that it entailed. It was a beautiful modern campus and when I first stepped on it I had the gratifying realization that I was now, finally, a college student. I walked to and from the campus while most of my roommates had cars. They were all pretty affluent and, unlike me, seemed to possess no shortage of disposable income. We had different class schedules, so I didn’t ride to school with them, but I liked the time to be off by myself, exploring the area.
The student bookstore on campus carried a fine selection of books, and I ended up spending a lot of money there. My tastes are very eclectic so there was never a shortage of subjects for me to explore.
My roommate once said, “You sure read a lot of books.”
“It’s my way of coping,” I answered.
My acquisition of the latest hit records was something my roommate could more easily understand. There was a record shop where I could buy the latest hits and music from the new recording artists that I was becoming familiar with. There were East Coast singers and groups that I had never heard of before, but what really made an impression on me was all of the wild and seemingly uninhibited rock music by the black singers which constantly played on the airwaves.
My collection of records was growing by leaps and bounds. I added Ike and Tina Turner to my list of favorites with recordings like “It’s Going to Work Out Fine” and “Tra La La.” I bought records by Aretha Franklin, Ben E. King, Solomon Burke, The Marvelettes, the Supremes, and many others. I discovered Lloyd Price with “Stagger Lee” and “Personality” and Dee Clark with “Raindrops.” Later I would get to hear and meet Price and Clark in person at a somewhat seedy blues bar and nightclub in downtown Miami. I also heard and had to have Arthur Alexander’s blues-inspired hit “You Better Move On,” Barbara George’s soulful hit record “I Know,” the Isley Brother’s wild and uninhibited “Shout,” and such dance tunes as Chubby Checker’s “Slow Twistin’” and Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time.”
I was now getting a new education in contemporary Black American music, something that had totally eluded me when I lived in New Mexico and stayed in Hawaii. Of course I had been familiar with the music of Ray Charles and like everyone else had bought records by Johnny Mathis, The Temptations, The Coasters, Fats Domino, and Little Richard, and I had also been exposed to some honky-tonk and blues music in the bars on Hotel Street in Honolulu. But now my horizons were certainly expanding.
What really surprised me, however, was when I found out that blacks weren’t allowed to attend the theaters that white people went to. They had their own segregated “blacks only” theaters. While I was drinking in the bar at the Formosa Restaurant one evening, a light-skinned black man wearing a suit came in and sat next to me. A Fats Domino record was playing on the jukebox and we got to talking about music, and then out of the blue I suddenly brought up the subject of the segregated theaters.
He just shrugged and said it didn’t bother him. If he wanted to go see a movie in a “whites only” theater, he told me, he just put on a Spanish accent so people would think he was Cuban. Cubans, he said, were considered to be almost white so they weren’t discriminated against like the blacks in those places.
My enduring love for Jewish deli food began in Miami. Living in one of the apartments below mine were two brothers from New York whose surname was Wasserman. One day, as I was heading up to my apartment, they called out to me and invited me into their kitchen. There, spread out on a kitchen table, was an opened package with all kinds of goodies that they told me their grandmother had sent to them.
One thing they were anxious for me to try was their grandmother’s homemade chopped chicken liver. Although this didn’t really sound particularly appetizing to me, it was simply delicious! It had a roughly chopped consistency and was blended with chunks of onion and hard-cooked egg. The smoked fish that she had sent along with it was also a real treat.
The Wasserman brothers took me to Lindy’s Restaurant where they introduced me to lox and cream cheese on a bagel. The proper way to eat it, they told me, was with a thick slice of tomato and a thick slice of onion, and there always had to be one of those salty, black cured olives speared on a large toothpick in the middle of the thing. I liked this dish so much that it soon became just about my favorite thing to order for breakfast.
Otherwise, my social life in Miami was practically nil. Whatever I wanted to do I usually had to do by myself. I did take the bus to Coral Gables to see a play at Ruth Forman’s Studio M Theatre on Bird Road where Jay Robinson was appearing in the title role of Albert Camus’ play Caligula. Eight years before, I had been very impressed with Jay Robinson’s remarkable over-the-top portrayal of the mad Roman emperor Caligula in the 1953 CinemaScope motion picture The Robe, and its 1954 sequel Demetrius and the Gladiators. I wanted to see how he recreated the role on stage. He did not disappoint.
At the University of Miami, since I was a whiz at English literature, I found that I could make some additional money by writing term papers for my lazy and often English-class-challenged roommates. Soon word spread of my special abilities throughout the University Garden apartment complex, and I found that I had more work than I could actually handle.
At one time I almost had a regular factory going, turning out the things. I even thought of recruiting an assistant because I was beginning to neglect my own studies. I found that I had become totally disillusioned with the writing restrictions of my journalism classes. So in the next semester I would change my major to Radio/TV/Film.
When Thanksgiving vacation rolled around, most people in the University Gardens housing complex went home. I was left by myself in what appeared to be two deserted blocks of apartment buildings.
To pass the time I did some writing, and when I got bored with that I went out and bought a couple of cases of beer, drank them, and built a pyramid in the middle of the room with the empty cans. Around that time I began to realize that alcohol was not a cure for loneliness, although it sure made you feel good.
At the beginning of the second semester I met another freshman named Lou Thiem. We both shared a couple of interests, namely drinking and picking up girls. He was a tall, All-American Boy with crew-cut light-brown hair and a mischievous sparkle in his eyes. We both had fake IDs that said we were twenty-one.
We went to the bars in the big hotels in Miami Beach to drink. We both didn’t have much money, so we had to hitchhike there. As we stood along the roadside, inevitably a gay guy in a big car would pick us up and casually try to hit on us before he somewhat disappointedly dropped us off at our destination, but that was all just part of the adventure.
It didn’t take us long to drink up whatever money we had, and when this happened Lou came up with what he thought was a brilliant scam. He would introduce me as the Prince of Bhutan and I would act out the role of an Asian prince who was in Miami to go to college. This was long before the Internet, when people couldn’t look up the truth on their phones, so the scam worked.
People would buy us drinks because they thought it was interesting to be in the presence of some kind of Asian prince. All I had to do was to continue to feed them this big line of bullshit.
I’ll have to admit that I did feel somewhat uncomfortable doing this. I had always been taught not to lie to people. I could only justify the deception to myself by trying to believe that by doing so I was providing people with a form of entertainment by playing that exotic character. However, these misgivings didn’t stop us from trying the same scam the following week at another hotel bar.
I had spent my freshman year in Miami going out, partying, and virtually ignoring my studies. Unlike high school, college, I learned, was a much more serious affair, where you were actually expected to do your homework and score well on the tests.
I was scoring only acceptably, and my grade point average was going down the tubes. The only classes that I actually paid any attention to were the Radio/TV/Film ones, and I determined that I was now going to make my living in the entertainment industry.
This became a given on one very hot spring day when I decided to seek the comfort of an air-conditioned theater in South Miami showing foreign films. I had never seen an Italian film before, but as I walked out of that theater after having seen Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, I knew once and for all that I wanted to become a film director.
This desire not only intensified but was wholeheartedly confirmed after I saw the Luis Bunuel masterpiece Los Olvidados at the very same theater. For some reason I was drawn to the movies showing that life could be the pits.
I had always been an avid researcher with a tendency to study whatever interested me, but the cinema had become more than simply an interest. It was more like an obsession. As I grew older and more knowledgeable about life, aside from serving as entertainment, movies would come to mean even more to me because they would reinforce my education and contribute to my understanding of the world.
More than anything, I too wanted to make movies that mattered.
It was the summer of 1962. I had finished my first year of college at the University of Miami, and had decided to attend summer school at UCLA so I could check out their film school. I carpooled with three other students who were making the long drive to Los Angeles. The deal was that we would equally share the expenses and the driving equally, since we were driving straight through without any motel stops.
We started out sometime in the afternoon and it was night by the time we were driving through North Florida. At that time there were just regular old two-lane highways. It was in the very early hours of morning so it was still very dark.
We were going through a rural area, approaching a small town, when suddenly the driver struck something in the road with a loud thunk that startled the hell out of all of us.
We stopped and got out of the car and found out that we’d run over a dog. Suddenly, the headlights of a cop car approaching us illuminated everything as it pulled up to us and stopped. Two redneck cops walked over to see why we had stopped.
When they saw the dead dog in the road, they began talking as if killing a dog was just as serious as killing a man. Our faces betrayed the sinking feeling rapidly growing in the pits of our stomachs as we realized that perhaps we were in deep shit.
One of the cops was shining a flashlight into the interior of our car before turning to face us with a serious look on his face. We thought then and there that they were going to haul us off to jail.
But the other cop, the one who had been examining the dead dog, looked up and said, “That there’s Joe Stubbs’ dog. I reckon he’d prob’ly take thirty dollars for it.”
We gladly paid the thirty dollars, and since there was no significant damage to the car other than a small scrape, some blood, and a bunch of dog hairs caught on the side of bumper, we hastily proceeded on our way. I was certainly glad that I hadn’t been driving.
When dawn broke, we were driving through the beautiful lush countryside of Alabama and Mississippi. We drove by places advertising fried catfish and other Southern delicacies. The two-lane highway ran through the picturesque little villages and small towns along the way.
It was Sunday, and people were going to church dressed in their Sunday best. I was getting an unforgettable look at the unspoiled lifestyle of rural America, a scene that soon would vanish after the takeover of shopping malls and fast food franchises.
Whenever we stopped for gas there in the Deep South, we were confronted with separate restrooms marked White and Colored. I wondered which one I should use.
As we drove into Louisiana and through New Orleans, the music of the Fats Domino instrumental “The Fat Man,” with its honky-tonk jive beat and the plaintive wail at the end, echoed in my mind. As we approached East Texas, we made a food stop and a prominent sign in the restaurant window flat-out stated, “WE DO NOT SERVE MEXICANS, NIGGERS, OR DOGS.” After some hesitation they did serve me, however, since I didn’t seem to fall into any of those prohibited categories.
As we drove through Texas, I began to feel that I was in more familiar territory, and especially so when we finally reached El Paso. We went through a small part of southwestern New Mexico, Arizona, and California, and finally arrived, totally exhausted, in Los Angeles.