The passing of my Father

Sorry about the delay on another entry here. In February my Dad passed away from complications with COPD (emphysema), this was something that we all new was coming, but yet it was a very very hard thing to go through. It is very hard to watch someone you love go through several days of hanging on, just barely living and not being concious of their surroundings. This was the man that taught me how to fish, how to camp, how to drive and how to be a responsible person, all of those little life lesson that parents teach their kids. He always made sure that my sister and I had what we needed and kept us fed us and gave us a home. My Dad's name was Gordon also, we have different middle names so I am not junior, this man was the one that I had all my hormonal teenage battles with, and some how he always won those fights. We never got physical, just loud, but boy did we knock heads for a few years.
I have all these things in my head of what I want to write here, but somehow I just don't know how to express them, he was the man that I loved as a child, hated as a teenager and loved again as an adult, we would spend hours chatting on the computer after he retired and when I was trying to get disability it was almost every day that we chatted. I had noticed in the last few months that he wasn't online very much, and almost confronted him for avoiding me, but it wasn't that he was avoiding me it was that his health had deteriorated to the point that he couldn't pay attention long enough, he would just go to sleep if he sat for very long.
One thing I am grateful for is that my Dad was coherent enough to meet my wife Barbara, my folks hadn't met her yet, they had talked to her on the phone but we hadn't made the trip to California so they could meet. He told me she was a keeper then he said no.....she's a triple keeper, and I agreed with him cause she really is. My sister and I now really worry about our Mom, she is now alone after 59 years of marriage, it was very hard for her and it was good that my sister and I could be there for her, she would have had a rough time if she had not had us there with her, we all were around Pop when he actually passed. His lungs filled up with fluid and he didn't have enough lung function to clear them. He was to the point that the doctors couldn't do any more for him, and had sent him home to die with end of life hospice.
I don't really know what else to put here, I am grateful for the years my Dad has been alive and for the time we had together, I am also grateful for the sense of family we always had even though we lived so far apart. Barb and I live in the southwest and my sister lives about as far away as you can get from California and still be in the continental US. I am very very grateful that I got to say goodbye to him and to see him off on his next journey.
Godspeed Pop..............................................Godspeed

Life after Work

So here I am retired from driving at the age of 43, I figured I should go out and find another job but my wife Ruth said "why don't you try to get on Social Security Disability, so we can have regular stable paychecks". So that's what I did, I filed the first attempt by myself and waited for several months and was turned down, which I found out was the normal thing to happen. Even if you have a totally disabling problem, you will most likely get turned down on your first attempt. I then hired a social security attorney that had an office next door to the social security office, so now I had someone to fill out all my forms for me and that's about all he did. This all took about 2 years and I was turned down again and then had to wait for an administrative judge hearing which is where most people get their disability. This took almost three years to get to that point and then you have to wait for the decision to be mailed to you, which takes another six months. But in the mean time just after I went for the hearing I found out that my wife of 25 years had been having an affair with one of her ex coworkers for over five years. This was very devastating for me and for a short while I really wanted to die, I figured that I was going to be alone for the rest of my life and didn't know if I could live with that, after all who would want a middle aged disabled guy.

I really didn't know what to do, all my friends told me I needed to have my own attorney, so I hired my own attorney to protect myself asset wise, not like I had a lot of assets, but I didn't want to be taken to the cleaners because it wasn't me that did wrong. Of course according to Ruth it was all my fault and that "I made her do what she did", but I don't want to get too deep into all that stuff here, but suffice to say she had her way of rationalizing things so that they were never her fault, at least in her own mind, and that's all I have to say about it. One day while I was at an appointment with my heart doctor, the nurse practitioner told me I ought to set up a request page online to find someone to talk to, so I set up a little page on excite.com for that. I had a lot of women respond to it most of them were looking to do to their husbands what my wife had just done to me, some were just looking for a booty call which would have been fine with me if the circumstances had been different, all I wanted was someone to talk too. One lady that I met was just looking for the same thing I was, her name was Linda and we started chatting on IM regularly. It was really great to have someone to talk to about all this and Linda was a good listener so over several weeks our relationship grew and after 3 months or so we finally met for a night out.

Linda and I dated for several weeks and got to know each other better and at the same time I was going through the divorce process with Ruth and after it was all settled she wound up having to pay me support because I was still on disability and hadn't finished the process yet. This really pissed her off no end and she really hated it, she would call me up and gripe about me spending "her money" on that "other woman", in fact it got so bad that I had to threaten to file harassment charges on her to get her to quit doing it. As time went by Linda and I got closer and closer and I started spending more time with her even staying at her apartment during the week. I finally got my response from the social security board and was turned down flat, so no disability for me. It was about this time that we signed the final papers to make our divorce final and as soon as we signed them Ruth and her lover moved out of state and she immediatelly stopped my support payments, because she knew that it would be very hard if not impossible for me to force her to pay when she lived out of state. This put me on welfare for a while and boy was that embarrassing for me to have to go to the county office and file for benefits just so I could eat and have a place to live and then to have to use my EBT card to buy groceries, everyone looks at you like your some kind of leech when you pay that way. I had been working part time for a company called Road One for a few months as a relief release clerk at impound lots in San Diego county, so I told the supervisor that I needed to start working full time and after a several weeks he got me set up as a full time worker with benefits and all. I didn't make a whole lot of money but it was enough to get by on and when Linda and I decided to move in together we were doing pretty good with our combined income. More later...............stay well.

Driving My Life Away

Working for McClinton Trucking was the stereo typical truck driving job, long hard hours, low pay. They only paid $8.00 per hour but you could have all the overtime you could handle, it was quite often that I had more hours due to me than they could legally pay me for a week. It wasn't uncommom for us to work 80 hour weeks plus. I had worked for them for almost 4 years when they moved up to Corona California which was about an hour and a half up the I-15 Freeway. The owner of McClinton Trucking became partners in a silica sand plant up there and so became the competition of the plant in Oceanside and was told to leave the plant property.
Dalton Trucking Inc. came in to be the primary hauler for Crystal Silica products and I made the jump over to them, and this was possibly one of the best moves I ever made as far as work goes. I went from driving a 20 year old worn out truck to driving one that was only a year old and was in very, very nice shape, and looked really sharp too. One of the things I remember most about it was the difference it made between the two trucks during a haul to Las Vegas and back. When I worked for McClinton I would be toyally worn out when I got back from Las Vegas because there was no air conditioning in the McClinton trucks and they all had millions of miles on them and were very noisy.
The Dalton truck was like driving a car over there, it was smooth and quiet and had an airconditioner that would freeze you out of the cab if you turned it high enough. In fact one of my buddy Pat's and my favorite things to do was drive down the freeway in the middle of summer wearing an overcoat while everyone else was burning up in the heat. After working for Dalton Trucking Inc. for over a year we were given brand new Peterbilts and for the first time in my driving career I had a brand new truck front to back. It was a 1990 Peterbilt 379 truck with a Superior tub type dump box with transfer trailer and transfer box, all brand spanking new, when I went to pick it up at the main yard in Fontana it had 17 miles on the odometer, boy was I proud.
I worked for Dalton until September 1993 when I found out the hard way that heart problems ran in my family. I had my second heart attack and had to have bypass surgery winding up with a triple bypass at the age of 39. I went through the recovery period of 90 days and went back to work at Dalton. I worked for another 3 years and then had more heart problems and in September 1996 I was diagnosed as having Ventricular Tachycardia which for those of you that don't know what it is, it makes your heart race so fast that it cannot fill with blood to pump which can make you pass out or even kill you, it is also known as sudden cardiac death. This ended my driving career, I was no longer insurable, so at the age of 43 I had to retire from Dalton Trucking...........more to come later........be safe

Life after the Navy

Ahh......finally after six years serving my country I am a civilian again. Now it's time to go find a job. I tried being a car salesman for about a year at the local Pontiac GMC Mazda dealer, but that didn't work out too good, I found it very hard to lie to people and unfortunately that is what it takes to be a real good salesman for cars. After that I worked at a Stoney's Tire Shop doing car,truck, big rig and farm implement tires, really hard work physically but fairly decent pay. I really wanted to find something else that wasn't so physically hard, so one of the local tow drivers talked me into going to work for the local AAA tow company and so started my driving career. I worked for Carpenter's Towing Company in Oceanside California for about three years, starting in a regular one ton tow truck and working my way up to the big rig tow trucks and aquiring a class one drivers license. During my time working for Carpenter's my son Gordon II was born and made us a family of 4. I found a real good job driving big trucks at Ocean Pacific Sunwear better known as OP Sunwear. They were also in Oceanside Ca, and I worked for them for about 4 years until they restructured the company and got rid of all their trucks and warehouses and almost all of their personel. So back to the towing business I went, that was at a time where we were having a recession and jobs were tough to find. I worked at Carpenter's again and was there a year or so and started driving the first flatbed tow truck in north San Diego County at that time there were only two of these trucks in the county, one was in San Diego itself and Carpenters had the other. Now you see that type of truck everywhere. I got fed up with doing the auto club thing and moved across the river to Inderrieden's Road Service another local tow company, the conditions were a lot better and better people to work for, the owner Gene and I became good friends and are still today, his towing company is now known as
TOWizard Inc. After working for Gene for about a year I found a job driving big trucks again and hired on at McClinton Trucking to haul silica sand out of the Crystal Silica Plant in Oceanside Ca. But that's another story, be well...................be back soon

Naval Air

My good buddy Al and I decided about half way through our senior year in high school that we would join the Navy and see the world. So we joined through a program called the "cache" program that would let us serve six months of our inactive reserve obligation before we even went into boot camp. So right after we graduated high school, we were off to boot camp and went all the way to beautiful San Diego Ca. just 30 miles down the road. Boot camp was pretty uneventful, got through it with no problems, then I was off to NAS Memphis for schooling to become a Jet Engine Mechanic. I had a great time in Memphis, got to see a lot of the city and did real good in my schooling graduating 3rd in my class. Then I finally thought I would get to go see what the world was all abought. NOT!!! I was stationed at NAS Kingsville Texas and your going "where in the hell is that"? Kingsville is in south Texas close to the gulf coast and is the final training base for Navy and Marine pilots flying jets. We were at the height of the Vietnam war, so they needed lots of pilots, boy was I disappointed, I wanted to go see the world. I spent 4 long years at Kingsville, got married to Ruth while I was there and my daughter Malinda was born just before I was transferred to NAS MiraMar for sea duty.....OH Boy......I get to go see the world. Once again, NOT!!! I was assigned to VF-92 which had just come back from a West Pac cruise, so once again.....no world tour. I was with them for about 6 months when the sqaudron was de-comissioned and I was then assigned to VF-111 which by the way had just come back from a West Pac cruise......I guess world tours just aren't in the cards for me. I stayed with VF-111 until June of 1976 at which time I got out of the Navy and began civilian life again.Stay well.........be back soon

Some background stuff.....(a little about my childhood)

I was born in June of 1952......yup that makes me an old fart, in the eastern part of Washington State in a town called Soaplake. This town gets it's name from the local lake that has naturally occuring soapy water.........suppose to be really good for skin ailments. When I was about 4 1/2 or so my Dad went to work for the California State Park System and we moved to Humboldt Redwoods State Park in northern California.

That was a real neat place for a young boy of five years, lots of frogs and snakes and animals to catch and observe, and the fishing was out of this world. We stayed there for 4 or 5 years and then were transferred to Mount Diablo State Park which is 50 miles east of San Francisco. For the first 2 or 3 years we were at Mt. Diablo we lived at the very top of the mountain with no other famlilies within 6 or 7 miles of us, which made life very hazardous for my younger sister and I'm sure she came close to death more than once. We became acomplished rock and mountain climbers because there wasn't much else to do except ride our bikes in the parking lot.

After a couple of years living at the "top of the world" we moved about half way down the mountain and were much closer to the other park families. We stayed there for another few years and in 1964 we were transfered to South Carlsbad State Beach, which is about 30 miles north of San Diego California and we lived 4 blocks from the ocean.

What a change in lifestyle that was for me and my sister, we had never lived in town in our lives that we could remember, we were not used to having all the people around us all the time. I was in the first semester of 8th grade when we moved, but at least I was used to making friends quickly, because on the top of the mountain the only friends I had were the kids that came up to the top with their parents and they were only there for an hour or so. I started high school in 1966 and graduated in 1970 from Carlsbad High School.
..................more later......stay well.

What do I do now??

I have a few friends that keep telling me that I need to do a web log. I always ask them, who would be interested in my story? I'm not a very interesting person, just kinda average. They say that I have a lot to tell, so here it is, not all at once but a little at a time. Hopefully I will not bore anyone to death..........be back soon, stay well