Dos Palos

I was born and raised in a small, rural farming community in the Central Valley of CA. We were best known for our cotton fields and football team. Kids from the town next door (Firebaugh) attended our high school and my class of 1970 had around 220 students.

My Dad was the ranch manager for a large, privately owned farm located in Oro Loma where we lived for a couple of years and where I attended kindergarten and first grade. We moved into the town of Dos Palos when I started second grade.

We didn’t travel much when I was young so most of my early childhood memories are from Dos Palos. The house we moved into on Marguerite St. had a swimming pool and I used it lot as summer temperatures often climbed above 110 degrees. My first competitive sport was swimming, and I won lots of ribbons and medals beginning at the age of eight.

Dos Palos had an active little league program which I played in for four years (ages 9 to 12) where I was an all-star pitcher and catcher. The empty lot next door to our house became our practice field, and me and my friends would spend hours playing baseball games and slamming homeruns over the fence into our neighbor’s (the Nicolettis) plate glass windows.

My Dad dragged me out to the farm at an early age, and I have fond memories of picking cotton, hoeing weeds, irrigating cotton fields, and learning to drive a tractor. The farm life began before sunrise, and I’ve been an early riser ever since.

I also had a few jobs in-town delivering newspapers on my bike and selling Christmas cards to the neighbors door-to-door.

I started playing basketball in sixth grade when we attended Bryant Middle School, a few miles out of town. While I could have taken the bus, I often chose to ride my bike across town and down an unpaved canal bank. I doubt that sort of freedom could happen in today’s world. I was a natural at basketball and worked hard at improving my game. We had a basketball hoop in our backyard, and I would spend hours (day and night) shooting the ball from 15 to 20 feet.

My Dad was a Cub Scout leader, so I naturally joined and stayed with it through Boy Scouts, attaining the rank of Life. One of my life regrets is I didn’t stick it out and become an Eagle Scout. I was only a few merit badges away.

My Mom was an artist and musician, and I learned how to play on her piano. Gracie, our neighbor two doors down, was my first piano teacher. I can still remember playing in her recitals. Another life regret was I didn’t keep playing the piano. I should never have stopped playing, but my priorities as a teenager got a little messed up.

I was always a good student, and my report cards were always A’s and B’s. I also spent a lot of time at the local public library. I especially liked the biography section and reading about historical figures like Daniel Boone and Abraham Lincoln.

I joined the band in Middle School and learned to play drums. I was a big boy, and they immediately had me carry the bass drum in marching parades. I made the award-winning high school marching band where I learned to play all the percussion instruments including timpani and chimes.

I followed in my older brother Roger’s footsteps and became the quarterback for the high school football team. Our JV team during my Freshman and Sophomore years was unbeaten, extending a consecutive win streak to 45 games.

I started playing competitive golf my freshman year, making the Varsity team that first year. I was the #1 golfer on the team the last two years. The 9-hole golf course we played on was out at Eagle Field in Oro Loma. It has since been shut down and mother nature has reclaimed its very alkaline soil that was never good enough to be farmland.

There wasn’t a whole lot to do in Dos Palos for kids our age, so once we got our driver’s license, we would spend a lot of time dragging the main drive between Butch’s drive-in on one end of town and Don’s Frosty on the other. Watch the movie American Graffiti if you are not sure what dragging means.

Some of my friends had hot cars (like GTO’s) and were always willing to take them out into the country for drag races.

Well, this ought to give you a glimpse of what life was like in Dos Palos in the 1960s. It kept me safe and out of trouble. I was pretty shy as a teenager so girls didn’t enter the picture until I got to Berkeley in 1971.