One night in the summer, Gary, David, and I decided to camp out on the beach. We fortified ourselves with a couple of bottles of Thunderbird and Ripple (cheap wine that we conned someone into buying for us). We built a fire. After dark, we went surfing in the buff. Sitting on our surfboards, we began talking about sharks and what part of our anatomy they might nibble on. We headed back to the beach while we had all parts intact.
After more Ripple and Thunderbird, I got the sickest I can ever remember being. I could not even lift my head, much less crawl into my sleeping bag. It marked the end of any more Ripple or Thunderbird adventures.
High school was good. Although a very indifferent student, I somehow got included in a group of excellent students. Several had swimming pools that made for some really good parties. I played football and wrestled in high school with limited success. My senior year, the year that should have been my year, I got hurt playing both sports. It prematurely ended my high school athletic career. The real athletic success in the family was my younger brother Paul. He was a terrific wrestler on a nationally recognized high school wrestling team. He could have been a scholarship athlete in college but chose to concentrate on academics. Okay, well, there may have been some partying in there, too, but I think Paul’s United States Marine Corps boot camp experience clarified his priorities as far as college went. Both Gary, who also wrestled in high school, and I played a little rugby in college. Gary played at the University of Oregon.
My mother continued her visits with one teacher or another due to my conduct or lack of academic endeavor. I managed to intercept a mailed report card and change the grades, only a very short-term solution. Another time, she came home to find the truant officer waiting on our front steps. Probably the highlight came when she received a call from my chemistry teacher right before graduation, informing her that I was failing chemistry and would not graduate. It took some negotiation with the chemistry teacher to slide out of that fix. In my defense, all the really good-looking girls were in my chemistry class. I thought my time much better spent chatting them up than doing any of my work.
Needless to say, when it came time to go to college, I couldn’t find any four-year school that would accept me. Consequently, I enrolled in San Diego City College, a two-year school. I spent a year there, then transferred to Grossmont College followed by San Diego State University.
I enrolled at San Diego State midterm, went through rush, and joined Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity. I thoroughly enjoyed college, which is probably why I spent four years at what should have been done in two. I carried a full academic load while working nearly full time at various jobs. My academic record remained less than stellar. My senior year I got a job that left my afternoons free, so I was able to join the rugby team at San Diego State. That began a lifelong love of rugby.
Kenny Jones, a fraternity brother, and I both were on academic probation. We got a wild hair to join the Coast Guard. There were no openings in San Diego, so we hitchhiked to Phoenix, Arizona, to join up. We got there on the weekend, so if they had an opening, we wouldn’t have known because they were closed. Of course, Phoenix seems an unlikely place for the Coast Guard, and we certainly didn’t check it out beforehand. With that sort of planning, it was no mystery as to why we were on academic probation.
As it turned out, we joined the California National Guard along with fifty other students from San Diego State. The only time I saw my dad tear up was when I told him I was dropping out of school to go to basic training at Fort Ord. He had put his hopes in me being the first in the family to graduate from college despite my dismal academic record. Of course, in my perpetual hubris, I knew I would return to school, and his emotions were unfounded. The irony of my relationship with my dad is that I wanted to please him, and yet, I continually did things that upset him.
What I remember most about basic training was I always seemed to get KP (kitchen police) or guard duty while Kenny always managed to find a way to get out of it. He never missed the opportunity to rub it in either. I would be outside, scrubbing pots and pans, and he would be at a window of the squad bay, whistling and waving. Well, actually, I also remember the Army giving us a class on brushing our teeth. Of course, after visiting the dentist as part of our induction physical, many recruits had fewer teeth.
Jones and I survived basic training, returned to school, got off probation, and actually graduated from college, no doubt shocking everyone involved.
In 1968, I was helping my roommate and surfing buddy, Claude Lubin, as he painted some of the apartments in our complex. From the second floor, he dropped an open roller pan of paint for me to catch. I knew that was not going to work out well, and I took off running. The pan hit the ground, and the paint reached out and covered me head to foot.
On the ground floor, standing with her suitcases next to all this paint splatter and slapstick comedy, was a young lady just moving in to the apartments. Fortunately, none of the paint got on her or her luggage. I wasted no time in striking up a conversation with this attractive young lady who had beautiful long auburn hair. The paint splatter provided the icebreaker. Her name was Carol Cords. She grew up in Ocean Beach, attended the University of Arizona for a year, and currently was working at Sea World, saving money to enroll at San Diego State.
Had the paint gotten on her or her luggage, history might have been changed. As it turned out, Carol Cords became my wife and the mother of my children.
I signed up with a group of high school boys during the summer to pick pineapples for the Maui Pineapple Company in Maui, Hawaii. I was to supervise a group of pickers in the field as well as the boys in our sleeping quarters. The sleeping quarters consisted of a large room, part of a local elementary school in Lahaina, a small town on the coast. I was thoroughly entertained, lying in bed, listening to teenage boys interact with each other. The teasing and pranks were constant and at times quite clever. One boy, a favorite target of the others, drew a very detailed figure of a naked woman on his bottom bed sheet. He found his sheet missing one day. The boys told him they had mailed it to his father, a minister.
We all showed up with our surfboards, intending to spend our time waxing our boards, working on our tans, and surfing. Actual work was an afterthought, so it came as shock to find out we were expected to work six days a week and eight-plus hours a day in the heat, picking pineapples. We were divided into shifts and teams and assigned jobs. The best job as far as the boys were concerned was driving one of the monstrous trucks carrying pineapples from the fields to the sheds. The most arduous job was moving down the rows, picking pineapples. A day in the fields exhausted us and definitely impinged on our surfing time.
Much to my parents’ relief, I graduated from San Diego State University. Seen here with my mother, my father and “Foxy,” my grandmother.
The Curry brothers: Paul, Mike and Gary, no doubt contemplating many weighty matters… “Do you think Dad has any more beer in the refridge?”
Many Maui residents, far more accustomed to the heat and hard work, also picked pineapples. They lived in areas referred to as camps that seemed to be identified by their ethnic origin (e.g., Philippine Camp, Japanese Camp, and Hawaiian Camp). They came to the fields with their lunches in small two-part cylindrical cans. The bottom portion held rice, and the top portion had their fish or vegetables. I found it all interesting and exotic. Their lunches looked far more appetizing than ours.
After work, we gathered up our surfboards and headed out for Lahaina. We surfed off a jetty next to the small town. This very picturesque setting had few tourists and maybe one hotel. Maui had not yet been discovered by the tourist industry. It paid to be a proficient surfer because the surf broke over coral, and you could get pretty cut up with a few mishaps off the board. I swapped out my board for a much better one and got to be a fairly decent surfer.
I was a big fan of James Michener’s book, Hawaii. I envisioned