Derby day adventures, 1959

On the day of the Kentucky Derby I always think of Derby Day 1959. I was in Louisville, 19, walking the streets with only a few dollars in my pockets. I had hitch-hiked from Berkeley and was halfway through my first great adventure in life. I was keeping a journal, which I still possess, fascinating reading indeed. (You can read journal excerpts in this 2007 post.)

Today what I remember most from that personally important trip are the characters I met, the stresses I felt and the acts of kindness I received. Even though I had traveled a bit as a Navy brat by 19, I still was a sheltered, naive kid. I saw a lot that shocked me.

• Characters
  
  • the old woman living on the road, tattooed on every visible area of flesh
  • the teenage boys who wanted me to help them rob a bank
  • the man who wanted me to screw his wife with a rubber so he could drink the semen and regain his potency
  • the young men who gave me my first taste of moonshine, which we drank from a jar just like in the movies
  • men who befriended me only to sexually proposition me
  • the drunk who was going to invade the Soviet Union and save the world for democracy and wanted my help
  
  
• Stresses
  • being alone and sick as a dog, perhaps with food poisoning, puking in a farmer's field, sleeping, puking some more, then seeking shelter from a rain storm
  • stuck 7 hours without a ride on the California desert
  • broke in Louisville, wondering how I was going to hitch-hike home with only a few dollars in my pocket
  • wondering how I was doing to ditch the young bank robbers (they finally just let me go)
  • being hassled by police in North Platte, thinking I was going to jail for vagrancy until they drove me to the outskirts of town and told me never to come back
  • arriving in Pasadena at end of trip, breaking into my house because no one was home, and then waiting to face my parents, who thought I was still going to school in Berkeley
  
  
• Kindness
  • the guy who saw me on the streets of Louisville and asked if I were hungry. Out of the blue. Took me to a fast food restaurant, where I had several cheeseburgers. He later drove me to a good spot to catch a ride west. And he made no advances.
  • the teenage girl who found me hitching in the rain at night. She offered me a dry spot for the night in the family barn. Later delivered me dinner. Never told her parents. And found me gone in the morning.
  • the newly weds who let me out of the car after a ride with a twenty dollar bill, which saved my young ass the rest of the trip.
  • my parents, for getting home and not giving me the riot act.

For a sheltered 19 year old, this was one hell of an introduction to a world out there I had never seen before. So I always remember Derby Day. 

And in August I would join the Army in Berkeley, be put into the Army Security Agency because the recruiter had a quota to fill, after Basic get sent to the Army Language School in Monterey, leaving for Germany a year later as a Russian linguist in the Cold War, on a new adventure even more life-shaping than the trip to Louisville as a teenager.

My novella Baumholder 1961 tells more of the Army adventure.