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Randy Fry, baritone saxophone<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cI think I just have an indomitable spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Both of my parents were both born in 1925.\u00a0 My dad grew up in Oakland.\u00a0 My mother grew up in what is now the Ukraine which was still part of Poland then.\u00a0 In ’39 Hitler and Stalin drew up a non-aggression pact.\u00a0 Germany invaded Poland from the west and Russia invaded from the east where my mother was. \u00a0Her uncle had been an agricultural minister.\u00a0 He had a property where there had been a brewery so all the brewery castings were in the ground and the soil was really rich.\u00a0 They had people working for them.<\/p>\n She and her family were taken at gunpoint in the middle of the night, put on cattle cars and taken to Siberia.\u00a0 (editor:\u00a0 From February to April 1940 the Red Army annexed territories in the eastern parts of Poland.\u00a0 About 250,000 Poles and thousands of Ukrainians and Byelorussians were deported in three major waves to Siberia and to Central and Far Eastern Asia in order to remove the most active populations from the annexed territori<\/em>es.) \u00a0They were there somewhere between two and four years.\u00a0 My mom’s brother and sister did not survive. \u00a0Around 1945 she and her mother and father went overland from Siberia through all those \u201cstan\u201d countries to Tehran in what was Persia then and Iran today.<\/p>\n My father was a non-com stationed in Tehran with the US Persian Gulf Command.\u00a0 (editor: It maintained a supply line through Iran for the benefit of our Soviet allies<\/em>.) \u00a0\u00a0They met there shortly after she arrived.\u00a0 They were just in their 20s. \u00a0I have some photographs of them as a young couple.\u00a0 My mother was a classic Slavic beauty with high cheekbones, fair hair\u2014just a gorgeous woman.\u00a0 My father had good taste.\u00a0 They were married in Persia and she was able to come to the states pretty much right away.\u00a0 My brother was born in Oakland. \u00a0He’s four years older than me.\u00a0 I was born in Alameda.<\/p>\n It seemed like their lives were the American dream.\u00a0 They had a dog and a house in the suburbs.\u00a0 My dad was working as a golf professional.\u00a0 It was sort of the family business, his father and several of his uncles.\u00a0 His father had played against Sam Snead.\u00a0 \u00a0I have a picture of him and Ben Hogan sitting on a tee waiting. \u00a0It was at a time when golf was being democratized.\u00a0 A lot of public golf courses were being built.\u00a0 George Archer, who came from San Francisco and won the Masters in 1969, was illiterate.<\/p>\n My mother was separated from her family from 1945 until 1952. \u00a0Right after the war Poles were not allowed in the country so most of my mother’s cousins and aunts and uncles ended up in Edmonton, Alberta. \u00a0But my father sponsored her parents and my uncle, my mother\u2019s brother.\u00a0 He put up a $10,000 bond to guarantee there wouldn’t be a cost to the government.\u00a0 That\u2019s like $175,000 or more today.\u00a0 At that time they were in London so they came over on the Queen Mary and took the train to Oakland from New York.\u00a0 And that’s when things started to go south. \u00a0My grandmother was a very strong-willed woman.\u00a0 That\u2019s probably how they made it through as well as they did.\u00a0 She was protective, but almost paranoid at times. \u00a0This was a family that was traumatized\u2014uprooted by a war, losing two kids.<\/p>\n And she did not approve of the way my father made a living.<\/p>\n You can see the change in the photographs of my mom.\u00a0 The color was taken out of her life.\u00a0 It’s just remarkable to see her gradual deterioration.<\/p>\n My father wanted to get away from that caustic environment.\u00a0 He had a friend from the military whose father owned a furniture business in Cave Junction, Oregon, so he went up to visit, looked around and landed a job on the local country club as the golf professional. \u00a0He was driving back to Cave Junction when a car came over the center line and ran him off the road.\u00a0 It was 1953; there were no seat belts in those days.\u00a0 He was killed.<\/p>\n By that time my mother had been committed into Agnews State Insane Asylum.\u00a0 I was three and my brother was six.\u00a0 I was separated from him because the guardianship hadn’t become finalized. \u00a0He was being cared for by my father’s side of the family but once the courts decided that the guardianship was going to my Polish grandmother and her son, my uncle, then we were reunited.<\/p>\n Apparently there was a lot of rancor about the guardianship.\u00a0 My father’s older brother was paraplegic so that grandmother had her hands full.\u00a0\u00a0 But the focal point of my Polish grandmother\u2019s contempt\u2014she\u2019d shake her fist and spit\u2014was that my father\u2019s mother had been divorced.\u00a0 That was worse than being in Agnews.\u00a0 A divorcee!<\/p>\n We would visit my mother at Agnews.\u00a0 My grandmother made me go in. \u00a0It was horrible. \u00a0Given the state of psychiatric care, I know she was on Thorazine, and I’m pretty sure shock treatments. \u00a0I always had to pretend like I was really happy to go see her. \u00a0But I hated it down there because it was so creepy.\u00a0 You drove on the grounds and there was a profound silence and it seemed like there was like an edge in the air. \u00a0And sometimes you’d hear women screaming at the top of their lungs.<\/p>\n My brother wouldn’t go.\u00a0 He would just refuse.\u00a0 I was young and malleable. \u00a0I was going to be the good kid. \u00a0But it was awful. \u00a0And then, of course, we could never talk about it at home; I couldn’t tell any of my friends about it. \u00a0It was this shameful thing.<\/p>\n And in the meantime, my father’s gone.\u00a0 When I was a kid, I would spend hours thinking of what it would have been if my dad hadn’t gotten killed, just fantasize about how it would be.\u00a0 I finally outgrew the fantasizing but those things never go away. \u00a0We learn to live with them but they are just part of who we are.<\/p>\n Fortunately he had left a life insurance policy for $10,000 and with $5,000 of it my grandmother bought the house where I grew up in.\u00a0 It was in San Francisco in the Sunset on 21st<\/sup> Avenue right off of Irving Street, one of those stucco houses with the garage underneath and the house above, redwood construction throughout, all the floor joists and beams. \u00a0So I never felt like we were poor because we always had a place to live and we always had enough to eat.\u00a0 A lot of the old country stuff that I grew up with is now very current, au courant<\/em>.\u00a0 We were eating marrow bones and she was pickling our own food.\u00a0 She made her own soap.\u00a0 In fact whenever we had family get-togethers, it was no problem for her to feed 20 people.<\/p>\n And she would pick up these odd jobs.\u00a0 She worked at Shriner’s Hospital for a while in the kitchen and she did a lot of house cleaning and babysitting.\u00a0 She never had much formal education. \u00a0She could read and write but her English was poor and she spoke a combination of English, Polish and hand signs.\u00a0 When I was a kid, the Polish Club Hall was down on 23rd and Shotwell.\u00a0 The 3rd of May is a Polish national holiday and there would be Polish folk dancing. \u00a0On Friday nights I used to have to go to rehearsals there.\u00a0 We’d dance in the park on the stage at the Band Concourse.\u00a0 And when Nixon was running for governor of California, he made a campaign stop there.\u00a0 I had my photograph taken for the Chronicle with Old Tricky Dick and Alma Isaeff, one of the kids she babysat. \u00a0And wow! He had halitosis.<\/p>\n But it was tough living with my grandmother\u2014lots of guilt trips. \u00a0I once told her that she was lucky to have me to take care of because otherwise she wouldn’t have anything better to do. \u00a0Gave her some purpose in life.\u00a0 That she shut her up because there was probably some truth to it.<\/p>\n But I was outside all the time as a kid.\u00a0 T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of Keds and I was gone till it was dark.\u00a0 I had a bike.\u00a0 And we lived on a good enough hill that we’d make coasters.\u00a0 Sports was a big thing.\u00a0 We played basketball, baseball, softball. \u00a0After school we’d go home, change and run back to the schoolyard and play shirts and skins to 100.\u00a0\u00a0 And strikeouts. \u00a0You paint a rectangle on a wall.<\/p>\n Our first record player was a wind-up Victrola\u201478 records with polka music.\u00a0 Every once in a while we’d roll up the carpets and crank up the polka in the front room.\u00a0 But as a kid growing up I had rock ‘n’ roll, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones.\u00a0 I loved music.\u00a0 In my early teens my life was music and sports and girls.\u00a0 That was it.\u00a0 But I never played an instrument until I was middle aged if you don\u2019t count a stainless steel nose flute I had as a kid\u2014a weird instrument.<\/p>\n I started in public school\u2014Jefferson Grammar School but in the fourth grade this kid, Magid, burned the school down.\u00a0 Later he burned down a Boy Scout building and he started another fire, a Spanish chapel that the Hearst family had purchased. \u00a0It had been shipped in wooden containers and they were going to rebuild it in the Golden Gate Park.\u00a0 Every rock had a number but he burned all the crates they were in and the numbers were gone so they could never put it together. The rocks sat in the corner of the Japanese Tea Garden for years.<\/p>\n So Muni buses shuttled us over to Laughton grammar school.\u00a0 I went there for the fourth grade but my cousins were being enrolled into the Catholic grammar school, St. Anne’s, and at that time if you had multiple kids going to the school, you would get a family discount so they threw me in on that deal. \u00a0It went to the eighth grade. \u00a0And from there I went to SI (editor: Saint Ignatius High School<\/em>).\u00a0 I think it was $400 a year but after my freshman year an anonymous family gave me a scholarship.<\/p>\n In grammar school I played baseball, basketball, soccer. \u00a0I was blessed with a responsive, sturdy body\u2014good peasant stock.\u00a0 Always had a good sense of balance and we ate well. \u00a0\u00a0We used go into Golden Gate Park, 25th Avenue.\u00a0 There was a meadow there.\u00a0 Sometimes it’d be mud and slime.\u00a0 We’d play full-on tackle football games.\u00a0 I just loved knocking people down.\u00a0 In fact, to this day, I still like to do it.\u00a0 There\u2019s something about the physicality of it.\u00a0 And being a part of a team\u2014participating, contributing, being selfless. \u00a0In music, too. \u00a0I’m playing like the middle guard of instruments.\u00a0 I learned a lot of lessons playing team sports.<\/p>\n At SI I got involved with the football program which was pretty good. \u00a0And I found out that during the football season my grades would always be better because the more I did, the more I could do. \u00a0I’ve taken that lesson to heart too. \u00a0I keep busy.<\/p>\n I played Middle Guard and linebacker.\u00a0 I could have gotten a football scholarship but I realized that some of these big-time football coaches were just not nice people. \u00a0I was just a tool for them.\u00a0 I knew that I would be used and discarded. \u00a0I saw the writing on that wall. \u00a0We had a kid on our team that USC wanted.\u00a0 They were a football power, still are.\u00a0 They were grooming him. \u00a0And they were going to give him a football scholarship. \u00a0They had a seminar at the Sheridan Palace Hotel that I went to with him. \u00a0One of the coaches was doing a demonstration of blocking techniques and he put me up against a kid who was about 6’4″, 220 pounds. \u00a0And I was about the height I am now, about 5\u2019 11\u201d, but weighed about 170 pounds.\u00a0 We had helmets on and nothing else. \u00a0And the coach had us going through a practice before the seminar started.\u00a0\u00a0 He wanted to see what this kid could do. \u00a0I was used to going against bigger kids.\u00a0 My brother was always bigger than me but I would never take anything from him. \u00a0I’d always fight back.\u00a0 And that mechanism kicked in, right?<\/p>\n So I\u2019m hitting as hard as I can and the coach is eating it up.\u00a0 He’s a freaking madman, making animal noises. \u00a0And I’m getting all worked up. \u00a0And then so he goes, “Okay. Okay, fellas. All right. That’s good for now.” \u00a0But then we do the demonstration in front of the audience. \u00a0There’s a couple hundred people in the audience.\u00a0 And I come out with the same attitude and he goes, “Oh, no, no. Come on now, fella. \u00a0I know you’re excited.\u201d \u00a0I could see he was just playing me. \u00a0That kid who went to USC?\u00a0 They just gobbled him up.<\/p>\n And things were really happening in the Height\u2014\u201867, the Summer of Love.\u00a0 At that time SI was just a couple of blocks away from all this mysterious stuff.\u00a0 Weed.\u00a0 I had to find out what was going on.<\/p>\n Then I went to USF for a couple of years.\u00a0 I had gotten a state full ride scholarship.\u00a0 I was majoring in sociology but I ended up switching to SF State and gravitated towards the arts\u2014theater appreciation, music appreciation, film appreciation, things that people do just for the love of it or just for self-expression.\u00a0 Those outlets weren’t offered to me as a kid.\u00a0 I remember a nun telling me that maybe<\/em> you\u2019d get art on Friday if you behaved. \u00a0If you didn’t, you didn’t get art.\u00a0 And she looked at one of my pictures and said, “Oh, that’s not very good.”\u00a0 \u00a0We used to have to do formal presentations to the Monsignor on his birthday. \u00a0You had to stand there perfectly still with your arms to your sides and sing. \u00a0She came up to me and Steve McDonough and said, “Yeah, you two, don’t sing. Just move your mouths.”<\/p>\n So at State I took Zen courses and poetry.\u00a0 I used to write a lot of books.\u00a0 Given my grandmother and my early home life where everything had to be practical, that was just foolishness. \u00a0Unless you can make a widget or sell a widget, forget about it.\u00a0 There wasn’t an ability to explore, a sense of creativity.\u00a0 My physical needs were well taken care of.\u00a0 My emotional ones, maybe not so much.\u00a0 But it was the ’70s and everybody was working on themselves.\u00a0 That was the deal. \u00a0I used to joke that we all wore coveralls, but instead of working on automobiles, we were working on getting our heads straight.\u00a0 I went to therapy.<\/p>\n And I think I just have an indomitable spirit.<\/p>\n So then I traveled for two years. \u00a0I started in Spain. \u00a0Franco was still there. (editor:\u00a0 The Franco army overthrew the\u00a0Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War and he ruled oppressively over Spain from 1939 to 1975 as a dictator.<\/em>) \u00a0The first thing I saw when I got into Madrid was some old guy pissing on a wall.\u00a0 I thought, “I like this place. \u00a0This place is okay.\u201d \u00a0And people are eating dinner at 10 o’clock at night and in the streets till 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning. \u00a0“Man, this place is different.”<\/p>\n In Andalucia, I was traveling alone, hitchhiking, and taking buses.\u00a0 I met a\u00a0 kid in Sevilla and he said, “Why don’t you come visit me where I live?”\u00a0 He gave me his address so I took a bus to this foothill town with cobblestone streets and whitewashed buildings. \u00a0I’m walking up the street with my rucksack. \u00a0Most of the Americans had those big backpacks. \u00a0But I thought, \u201cI’m not going to the woods, man. I just need a convenient way to carry my clothes.\u201d \u00a0And I even brought a sports coat and slacks and a tie.<\/p>\n I walked to this guy’s house in the middle of this town with a dozen kids following me down the street. They’re all dancing and pointing at me and laughing. \u00a0I get to the guy’s house and knock on the door.\u00a0 His mom answers. “Who are you?”<\/p>\n I had taken three years of Spanish at USF so my Spanish was still pretty good. \u00a0She just looked at me with the stank eye, then called, “Hey, Jose, your American friend\u2019s here.\u00a0 And he ain’t staying with us, by the way.”<\/p>\n I ended up staying in a pension, essentially a family that took in travelers, which was really cool. \u00a0\u00a0It was a cold May. \u00a0They had a round table with a heater underneath and a wool tablecloth in a family room. \u00a0We all sat around the table staying warm.\u00a0 The women were knitting or crocheting. \u00a0The guys were reading the paper.<\/p>\n In the town there was a bodega with a wine bar with olives.\u00a0 There were flamenco dancers.<\/p>\n When I left I headed south and went through North Africa to Italy. \u00a0\u00a0I was going to Poland. \u00a0I was like a salmon headed back upriver to the ancestral spawning grounds\u2014although I didn’t get to spawn.\u00a0 But I made it back and visited my grandmother’s brothers.\u00a0 She also had a sister but they were estranged, maybe because she had become a Jehovah’s Witness.\u00a0 Poles are Catholic.\u00a0 By that time I’d been traveling for about six months.<\/p>\n They were living in Poznan. \u00a0And this was Uncle Pavel, my great uncle who I’d seen photographs of. \u00a0My uncle had written him telling him that I was coming. \u00a0I knock on the door, he answers, I tell him who I am and he’s hugging me and kissing me, calling his son and his wife and the kids.\u00a0 \u201cLook who’s here!! \u00a0This is our boy from America.\u201d \u00a0It was unbelievable. \u00a0I was in Poland for about six weeks and every relative I went to visit was the same thing.<\/p>\n When I was there, it was still behind the Iron Curtain, like those pictures of the Cold War\u2014gray and depressing, shortages of everything, people waiting in line.<\/p>\n The only difficulty I had was leaving Poland because the official exchange rate for dollars to zloty was 33 to 1 but on the black market it was 400 to 1. \u00a0So when I was on the train at the border they looked at my visa and I hadn\u2019t exchanged enough dollars for the amount of time I’d been there. \u00a0You were supposed to spend a certain amount of money per day. \u00a0They took me off and sent me back to Poznan to a big bureaucratic building made of marble and wood, all cold and hard and polished.\u00a0 I’m sitting on a hard oak bench while this bureaucrat who is holding my papers in a folder keeps walking past me back and forth, clicking his tongue, shaking his head.\u00a0 He’s Polish but he’s wearing an old Russian suit that doesn’t fit quite.<\/p>\n “How did you survive?”<\/p>\n “My family took care of me. I didn’t need money.”<\/p>\n He shakes his head, leaves the room again.<\/p>\n Finally he said, “Look, we’re going to let you go, but if you ever come back . . .”<\/p>\n But I didn’t really care. \u00a0I figured, “What can they do to me?”<\/p>\n By that time I only had $50 but I had a return flight ticket to New York from Shannon in Ireland so I took the train through Europe, crossed on the ferry, took a train through England and spent a few days going through Ireland.\u00a0 Wonderful experiences there.<\/p>\n By the time I got to New York I had $6. \u00a0I’m at the bus station in Manhattan which was scary. \u00a0I had never been in a place where there were drug people and transsexuals or whatever. \u00a0It was the first time I’d ever been really happy to see cops. \u00a0I called my uncle and I said, “Hey, Uncle Frank, could you send me some money for the bus?” \u00a0I ended up talking to this kid from Denmark.\u00a0 “I just hitchhiked from California,” he tells me. “It was great. \u00a0People are really wonderful.\u201d \u00a0He asks me what I am doing.\u00a0 I tell him, “I’m waiting for a bus.” \u00a0He goes, “No, you should hitchhike back. It’s great. I mean, it’s your own country. \u00a0Why aren’t you hitchhiking?”<\/p>\n So that’s what I did. \u00a0Here I am in New York hitching and all these cabs are pulling up and I was getting grief from these surly cab drivers.\u00a0 And it’s against the law to hitch in New York City. \u00a0So I ended up walking across the George Washington Bridge to get to New Jersey where I got a few rides.\u00a0 And then two kids who had just gotten married picked me up.\u00a0 They were from Rhode Island. \u00a0They had a 1964 Comet, a pretty small car. \u00a0“We’re going to San Diego and we really could use somebody to help us drive.” \u00a0I said, “Yeah, well, that’s great but I only have six bucks.” \u00a0\u201cIf you drive, that would be cool.”<\/p>\n We made it to Colorado and they run out of money.\u00a0 Their friends had given them a bunch of stolen eight track tapes for a wedding gift but they can’t hock them because they’re not old enough.\u00a0 That was probably one of the reasons they picked me up. \u00a0So I hock them for them and give them the money.<\/p>\n They picked up two other people, a guy named Cornflakes and his girlfriend who were heading down to the islands that are off the coast of Texas. \u00a0They said it was the best ever.\u00a0 You could pick the fruit off the trees and take the fish out of the water. \u00a0God’s country. \u00a0Cornflakes could have sold them a used car. \u00a0These kids are eating it up and I’m trying to remind her about her brother who was stationed in San Diego but they decide they’re going to go with Cornflake and his gal down to these islands.<\/p>\n And to celebrate Old Cornflakes buys two six packs and a bottle of peppermint schnapps and proceeds to drive because he was apparently a truck driver in a former life. \u00a0And it’s getting pretty gnarly, just weirder and weirder. \u00a0We get to Albuquerque and I tell them, “Oh, I\u2019ve got to get out here.\u00a0 I forgot. \u00a0I’m meeting somebody here.” \u00a0They let me off at a gas station and as they’re pulling out Cornflakes fires up the car and runs into a fire hydrant.<\/p>\n So I ended up calling a girl that I knew who had a Volkswagen van and she drove out from San Francisco and picked me up. \u00a0We kept traveling.\u00a0 We drove through California and up to Vancouver Island and then back down and continued into Mexico.\u00a0 Her parents were both Mexican so we visited her parents’ hometowns.\u00a0 Her mother was from a town on the coast not too far from Guadalajara and her father was from Oaxaca. \u00a0It was very beautiful. \u00a0The markets, the Indian ladies down on the river washing the clothes.\u00a0 Bare-breasted women walking around, sturdy mountain women. \u00a0It’s matriarchal.<\/p>\n We drove to the Gulf coast and found an isolated cove south of Campeche.\u00a0 No one there. \u00a0Papaya fields that just looked like jungle.\u00a0 We spent three weeks there.<\/p>\n After that, I was all done traveling. \u00a0I really have no desire to travel much anymore.<\/p>\n When I came back, I wanted to develop my relationships with the other side of the family.\u00a0 My uncle had built a little pitch and putt golf course in Oakland by the Oakland Airport on leased property.\u00a0 They set up a little nine-hole course where he could play and give lessons and that’s how they made their livelihood.\u00a0 I think they charged 75 cents a round.\u00a0 My uncle was always improving the place.\u00a0 It was his thing.\u00a0 He put in lights so people could play at night.\u00a0 It was his impetus that made it work.\u00a0 He was always very actively trying to grow the business because to do well you have to do something special for people and he was good at it. \u00a0My grandmother supported him in doing it and she was involved but it was his energy that made it work.\u00a0 Even as a little kid I’d go over and hang out there during the summer.\u00a0 He was always my uncle buddy.\u00a0 But he died in ’67 and after that the place never changed.\u00a0 My grandmother was running it.\u00a0 She hired guys to do the maintenance and if there were projects going on, I would help out.\u00a0 I learned how to change the holes and aerate the greens and run the equipment.<\/p>\n I had told her, \u201cWhen I come back from traveling I’d like to work for you and maintain the golf course.\u201d\u00a0 I worked for her for three years.<\/p>\n In February of 1974 I was putting a sprinkler in the ground to water the greens and I said to myself, “This is wrong.” \u00a0That was the first taste I’d gotten of our California droughts. \u00a0To this day, I hoard water. \u00a0I can’t help myself. \u00a0So I told her about my concern and I said, “Grandma, I think I should be more involved with what’s going on here.” \u00a0She was very direct about it. \u00a0\u201cI don’t think so. \u00a0This is my thing.”<\/p>\n It was frustrating because I always felt like I was not taken seriously. \u00a0I was always her little baby.\u00a0 It’s like she didn’t see me except for the little towheaded boy.<\/p>\n So I got a job with the Real Food Company, sort of the precursors to Whole Foods\u2014food in bins and organic produce and vitamins. \u00a0They had three stores in San Francisco and one in Sausalito. \u00a0I was doing outside sales and I was driving up to South Lake Tahoe when I saw a little health food store and the name of the owners was Isaeff.\u00a0 That was the last name of the family that my grandmother babysat for, these two kids Alma and Johnny Isaiah.\u00a0 Alma and I were photographed with Nixon.\u00a0 So I walked into the store and asked, “Are you Leo Isaiah’s brother?”<\/p>\n “Yeah, how did you know?”<\/p>\n “Well, your grandmother and my grandmother were best friends.”<\/p>\n And it was great, like another one of these homecomings. \u00a0They took me to their house for dinner. \u00a0Gene Isaeff had been a professional musician, played the euphonium and the trombone. \u00a0At one time he played with the Minneapolis Philharmonic.\u00a0 And his wife Mary she was a violin player.\u00a0 They were performing up there so they gave me a ticket to their show.<\/p>\n But all those little mom-and-pop stores were dying on the vine.\u00a0 They had just bought this place and didn’t really know they were doomed but I could see it coming. \u00a0Raley\u2019s had put in a big natural food section.<\/p>\n I lost track of them but one day year later he shows up at the New Horizons Band. \u00a0They had moved from Tahoe and ended up at Oakmont. \u00a0I couldn’t believe it. \u00a0Small world. \u00a0They played together at one of our talent shows.<\/p>\n But in those earlier days I wasn\u2019t playing music and the company I was working with was going bankrupt so I wondered, \u201cWhat am I going to do now?\u201d \u00a0I got a phone call from my grandmother telling me that I’d gotten a postcard from the City of San Francisco. \u00a0I’ve always told people that I didn’t grow up in San Francisco. \u00a0I grew up in Golden Gate Park because I was two blocks from there.\u00a0 So I had taken a test to be a gardener and I’d kind of forgotten all about it.\u00a0 The position was assistant gardener. I didn’t even know what an assistant gardener did but it was a job. \u00a0It was like I walked off a sinking ship and found a landfall.<\/p>\n That was around the time I was married a second time.\u00a0 The first was a whirlwind 14-month marriage that obviously didn’t go too well but the second lasted 26 years.<\/p>\n I worked for the City for 30 years. \u00a0I never had much ambition for money or power so civil service worked for me. \u00a0As long as the job gets done you\u2019re good.\u00a0 When I worked at Stern Grove, I had a section of the park that I was responsible for. \u00a0I ended up at Harding Park Golf Course and it was the same though golfers can be awful grumpy.\u00a0 We worked as a crew, eight or nine of us and they all grew in Noe Valley, Irish Catholics.\u00a0 In fact, several of them had gone to grammar school through high school together. \u00a0It was like I had joined an Irish family or a team and one of the problems with this team was that a majority of the players really enjoyed drinking and maybe that was one of the team activities I should have done less of in retrospect. \u00a0It kind of got away from me at a certain point.<\/p>\n I had a friend who had a kid, and it really seemed to change him for the better. \u00a0I thought, “Well, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll have a kid. \u00a0And maybe I’ll be better too, a better person.\u201d \u00a0I don’t know if it worked or not. \u00a0\u00a0But my wife was a DES daughter.\u00a0 (editor: A DES daughter is a woman whose mother took diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic estrogen, while pregnant with her.\u00a0 The drug was prescribed between 1940 and 1971 to prevent miscarriage and other complications, but was stopped in 1971 due to medical problems in the children of women who took it.\u00a0 Their offspring had difficulty with their pregnancies and often had miscarriages.<\/em>)\u00a0 So my daughter was the kid that wasn’t going to be.\u00a0 We lost the first baby because the doctor she was seeing didn’t respond to the dangers.\u00a0 When we got pregnant again, we went through the UC Med Center.\u00a0 Even so, my first daughter was extremely premature, born at 29 weeks.\u00a0 She weighed a pound and a half at birth and spent three months in an incubator.\u00a0 Even though she was teeny tiny, her vital signs were really, really high.\u00a0 She had some of that peasant will to live.\u00a0 Today Natalie is a beautiful young woman with a child of her own with no complications.\u00a0 Will is going to be four in May.<\/p>\n My other girl was only seven weeks premature.\u00a0 She did well.\u00a0 They’re three years, nine months separated.\u00a0 Like my brother and I are three years, nine months apart.<\/p>\n It\u2019s interesting how a little kid can bring so much joy and energy brings into your life.\u00a0 Natalie was going somewhere recently and wanted to drop Will off at my place, and I’m thinking, “I don’t know, man.” \u00a0And he’s not in the house more than a minute or two and I’m infused with his life force. \u00a0I was at my cousin\u2019s house at a yearly get together and there were 15 kids under the age of seven. \u00a0The place was humming, a tornado. \u00a0Her house is laid out like a racetrack so they’re doing laps.<\/p>\n When my older daughter was in the fourth grade we were living up here and the Old Adobe School District had some money for music programs.\u00a0 The teacher, Laura Cummins, sent home a note saying that she was going to start an adult band and anybody who had a musical instrument was welcomed no matter what level, even if they didn\u2019t know how to read music, even beginners.<\/p>\n My former wife’s father had been in the San Francisco Fire Department and firemen have a lot of time on their hands so he used to play his sax between going out on calls.\u00a0 I never met the gentleman but from what I hear he was pretty good.\u00a0 In fact he had just gotten a musician’s card from the union and intended to follow his dream to play on cruise ships when his life was cut short\u2014a heavy smoker and drinker.<\/p>\n But he had a Selmer Mark VI alto saxophone and a clarinet.\u00a0 I never saw the clarinet because the former wife hocked it.\u00a0 And she actually hocked the saxophone at the same time but as she was walking out of the pawn shop on Mission Street she had second thoughts.\u00a0 She doubled back and the guy gave it back to her. \u00a0So for years we took it from place to place whenever we moved.\u00a0 It sat in a closet. \u00a0I knew nothing about Selmer or Mark VI so I didn\u2019t know what I had. \u00a0But I remembered that it was there and I said to myself, \u201cWhy not?\u201d<\/p>\n Louise Graves who played alto sax was in that Old Adobe community band. And she kept telling me about New Horizons. \u00a0\u201cReally, you should come to New Horizons.\u201d \u00a0But I was still working at the time.\u00a0 When I retired almost 10 years ago I took her up on it and I stayed.<\/p>\n And now I’m finally getting to do something that I always wanted to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Randy Fry, baritone saxophone \u201cI think I just have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-955","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=955"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":962,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/955\/revisions\/962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}