First There Was Music

This is the story of a Kansas farm boy, a third generation son of German immigrants, growing up in the fifties of Eisenhower, black and white TV, racial and sexual prejudice so ubiquitous, so much a matter of the woodwork, that most white citizens, especially men, were not even aware of it. A reality our character gradually understands as he matures through small town fisticuffs and clarinet lessons to come of age in 1960 as the first of his clan to enter college. He is dubbed the 'teenage gadfly' of his music department, and after his freshman year transfers into the more interesting fields of psychology, English, philosophy, history. Seduces the girl next door, then first tastes the joy of sex with a coed who happens to be black. Graduates in 1965 with a degree in English that will be necessary for no job he will ever hold, though it is useful in several. He settles in San Francisco doing menial jobs to support his dream of becoming a writer in the context of a beat culture transforming into a hippie revolution to replace the old salvation ethic with a self-realization ethic. Does many and extensive adventures with LSD and becomes a life-long devotee of marijuana. Overcomes his homophobia and confirms that he is hopelessly straight, and falls into the first of many long term relationships that evolve into serial monogamy as a way of life inimical to marriage and parenthood. He puts on a suit and tie for a couple of years as a college traveler for publishing companies, where he meets several young women with better educations than his own who are stuck, to his embarrassment, behind desks with no career prospects comparable to his own. He uses the publishing experience as the basis for his first novel. The book is rejected for reasons he agrees with; so he learns carpentry, buys and remodels dilapidated properties and in a decade as an urban pioneer works his way up to owning a San Francisco house. He rents out rooms and becomes a taxi-cab driver for several decades. In his early forties he buys himself a clarinet, starts a Celtic Fusion band, turns back to the study of music and becomes a competent jazz musician. Then he returns to writing, eventually rewriting that bad first novel and, in his retirement on the fruits of his real estate investments, completes several more novels and books of poems in addition to this memoir.