A friend of mine had an electrical business on the shore in New Jersey. One of his employees had been a U-boat sailor during World War II and he and his shipmates made rubber raft trips into Point Pleasant to attend the “great American cinema” and partake of the hospitality and cuisine the sea town had to offer. As soon as the war was over ,he and several of his buddies came to America and eventually obtained U.S. citizenship.
Having gone to art schools on the East Coast, I was at that time painting and doing photography work as well as teaching art in a New Jersey junior high school outside New York City.
My new wife Carol and our children decided to “escape the rat race” and we moved to Mexico, Maine. A job as a museum curator at the Portland Maine Museum of Art brought us closer to the Maine coast. We lived for a few years on a peninsula in Biddeford and had a landlady who witnessed surfaced submarines in the Atlantic during World War II. Perhaps these two incidents put THE TRIP BACK story seed into my head.
The economy in the early 1970s saw the curator job eliminated and the “California dreaming” was becoming more of a reality. My wife’s sister lived in southern California and we had a chance to see what the “left coast” was like. Resumes and feelers went out and I soon obtained a job as an art director for a large glass company in the city of Downey. Carol taught elementary education for a school district near Alhambra.
In the Los Angeles area, I worked in the movie industry at WARNER BROTHERS and UNIVERSAL and COLUMBIA STUDIOS as a prop maker and then for the OFFICE OF THE STATE ARCHITECT on the restoration of the SIMON RODIA TOWERS in Watts and at the home of WILL RODGERS in Santa Monica.
A robbery/murder in a nearby fast food establishment and a body on our front lawn soon convinced us we didn’t want to bring the children up in the city environment. Camping trips to Death Valley and then north to Reno and to Shasta Lake gave us some ideas for new areas. In 1981 we moved north to a place half way between San Francisco and the Oregon border. I eventually worked in construction and Carol worked for the SHASTA COUNTY OFFICE OF EDUCATION as a Special Education Severely Handicapped Teacher. While looking for work, the employment councilor saw where I had worked and asked if I would like to help develop a new community theatre he and his friends were starting. I told him if he got me a job, I would volunteer at the theatre. In a week I had a job as assistant art director at an International Hair Care Company and I started to help at the RIVERFRONT PLAYHOUSE in Redding. Life was good.
In 1983 a friend came by to tell me of a horse for sale nearby. I saddled up my horse and went with him to see about getting another horse for Carol. I ended up in the hospital and eventually had one quarter of my skull replaced with plastic.
Though I am not a twin or female, my trip back was similar to Kate and her trip back. My horse accident did not involve a covered bridge collapsing in Maine, but a throw from the saddle and landing on my head on the only boulder in a field in northern California.
THE TRIP BACK was, for me, a trip back to creating things that had not existed before.
Inner determination to overcome obstacles in the path of life can take different forms – either mental, physical, or both. I stopped painting and took up writing again. My son collected soda and beer cans to earn money to buy a Commodore VIC computer and he taught me how to use it as a word processor. Each time he upgraded to a better computer I inherited his old one. I stopped painting and continued to write.
I decided to take the U-boat seeds and the thoughts I had after my accident to bring a story that had no sex or violence. THE TRIP BACK is family entertainment with suspense, action, and a delicate love story woven together with historic and true facts of American Indians and German U-boat sailors in caves on the coast of Maine. I hope you enjoy.
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