60 YEARS AGO TODAY — A NEW BEGINNING

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

It may not have been exactly 60 years ago to the day, but what turned out to be a crucial change in my life came about towards the end of summer 1966 when our family left Tucson, Arizona for Redlands, California. Moving to Redlands itself was not the final solution, but had we stayed in Tucson, I’m pretty sure that all that came from autumn of 1966 onward would have been terribly different, and I have my doubts that life would have been better than it turned out for me. Certainly being in California put me closer to the show biz world I was pretty sure I wanted to be in.

None of the blame can be put on the city of Tucson itself, though politically it’s not my cup of tea. It’s now ranked 33rd among most populated cities in the US with over half a million people, so I’m sure it’s found its own culture, but where I was going to school 60 years ago catered geographically to the wealthiest segment of the city’s then quarter of a million. Our family wasn’t among the wealthiest, so I had to make a pair of trousers last a month or two and if the knees developed holes in them, my mom just had to patch the holes. The shabby trousers, mixed with me being skinny, shy, acne-faced and big-nosed, plus playing cello in the school orchestra, made me a target for the people I was hoping to impress, and mostly failed. I never got beat up, but only because I let the guys get their insults in, and I tried the self-deprecation ploy, but didn’t have the confidence I would develop in dealing with club hecklers some 10-20 years later.

Early in that final Tucson school year, I attempted my only public class clown act. Every Friday, the students were encouraged to wear the school’s colours, blue and gold, to show school spirit. Even at that point, having previously served on the Freshman class advisory board, I realised I didn’t give two shits about school spirit. So, as a bit of a lark, I chose one Friday to wear my old blue and gold Cub Scout uniform, and I was sent home about 15 minutes after arriving on campus. I understood why they were sending me home, as I did look (intentionally) ridiculous, but I was astonished by how many STUDENTS were offended, as in “How dare you mock school spirit!” (Ten years later, I saw a photo of former Tucsonan Linda Ronstadt performing onstage wearing exactly the same thing and looking cool in it!) Things spiralled enough after that day that my parents decided I needed to see a psychiatrist, as I seemed to be so insecure I needed to call attention to myself in what they and the shrink determined was an unflattering way.

So I laid off any further showy comedic displays, even though I knew I was funny and could prove it if given the chance. My salvation, as I’ve said before, was learning the guitar and leading my first band. We never had enough time to really develop as a band, because I knew by March that we would be leaving Tucson at the end of summer, but there was a moment in May where we played at a Battle of the Bands with several hundred in the audience. Most importantly, three of my biggest school antagonists were in that audience, and clearly entertained by what I was doing, as I could see in their faces, and as they told me later. For the rest of the school year, I gave a little less of a fuck what they thought, but still was annoyed that I wasn’t given the respect I thought I deserved..

It turned out that when we made the move to a new town, Redlands High School covered an entire metropolitan area, so there was an equal balance of poor kids and rich kids, thus a lot less class warfare. I still had zits and all the other things that had made me a subject of ridicule in Tucson, but just learned to take any ribbing a lot less seriously, and I wound up making my own little niche with people who truly did think I was funny. I was also developing leftist political views that would point me in a certain direction that most of the people I knew in Tucson would frown on. In my final year of high school, my nerdy friends and I started a satirical newspaper that was widely read and appreciated. I don’t know if I would have had the confidence to do that in Tucson.

I’ve had many conversations with my brother, who practiced psychiatry for almost 50 years, about the shrink I was seeing in Tucson, and he agreed my parents wasted a lot of money when the simpler solution was relocating. It was a liberating day at the end of August, 1966, when we left the Southern Arizona desert for the Southern California desert. Our family went back there to visit a few times over the next couple years, but I was last there in 1969, and surprised I was never booked there in all my comedy road trips, given how many times I worked in Phoenix, a mere 120 miles away. Life’s little disappointments!

August 30th, 2026



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