In the year of 1917, I was raised in Palo Alto, California. I first got into trouble in Palo Alto by stealing a wedding cake at a house. Before the wedding started I carried the cake to the basement to eat it. The people attending the wedding noticed the cake was missing. They came to the basement and found me. I was very sick from eating too much of the cake; also I got a good beating for it. In Palo Alto, 1919, one of my first jobs in Palo Alto, California, at the age of seven years was that of helping a man sell ice cream cones from a horse-drawn wagon. Sometimes the man allowed me the driver’s seat and I was plenty proud holding the reins and managing the horse.
I never could understand why we kids had to recite poetry in our school, and having contempt for the whole thing, I made comical faces when the kids began reciting the stuff. Usually the alert teacher caught me being comical and stood me in a corner with a dunce cap jammed over my ears. It was a punishment, but I had the awareness of having amused some of the kids in our school class.
I managed getting into lots of minor troubles while adventuring about the streets of Palo Alto during the time I was a school boy. The police would follow me along the main street and they wondered what I was going to do “against the law” this next time I started making trouble for no apparent reason at all. Sometimes I fooled the police. I wanted to see what they did while they thought they were following me. In those days me and my gang of kids would raid a certain bakery and come away with armfuls of fresh loaf bread. Then we would raid the front porches of people and take their bottled milk. Loaded with our loot of bread and milk, we would go to a certain “haunted” empty house and have a big feast.
The first movie scene I was ever a part of landed on a cutting room floor. It was in 1924. Out of the race track a movie was being filmed featuring Warner Baxter, a star of the silent movies. I noticed a fancy car drive through the race track gate and I followed as though I was welcome. I was all wrong. A movie scene had been spoiled by me. A guard seized me and kicked me off the race track grounds.
Any of you kids reading my life story, keep out of trouble, otherwise the police will hound you all your life. Best way to beat them is keep out of trouble, then you can always tell them to jump in the lake if they try to pinpoint something on you.
Those wonderful days of mischief with my kid gang! I was known as “the Peck’s bad boy” of the San Francisco Peninsula. This was in the 1930’s. My gang of kids called themselves pirates and I was their “Captain Kid.” We would descend upon a local “five and ten” store and steal minor trinkets, then we would “borrow” a nearby automobile without the owner’s consent and drive to our “haunted” empty house. Arriving there we would dig a hole in the cellar ground and bury the loot in an old trunk. One day one of the kids had done wrong by the other kids of the gang and, when forced to walk off an extended plank jutting out from a high porch, he broke his leg. The kid told the police all about Captain Kidd and the pirate gang. We were all hauled into the presence of a judge in court and sternly warned against robbing “five and ten” stores, and then were put on probation.
In my mind and feelings, I was a leader of a gang of kids looking for adventures. Even though our pirate gang was just about ruined by now, I decided I would have one more adventure.
I stole the Palo Alto mayor’s automobile. The police chased me all over Palo Alto, but could not catch me. In driving the automobile, I was something like a race track driver. I learned to drive an automobile dangerously while employed as a “helper” on a meat truck.
The local employment office would give me no jobs. Often, being idle, I found difficulty keeping out of mischief. Money and activity I needed. One day, while I was sitting in the employment office, I heard the lady at the desk taking a telephone call for a certain type job and, remembering the address of the job, I got excited and jumped on my bicycle and lit out full speed for the job. I got the job and it lasted a few months. A fellow has to “get along” somehow.
A few months after my job ended I decided to join the United States Navy. The Navy accepted my application and took me in and I was assigned to a destroyer. Our first cruise was to Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles, California. I was a seasick sailor during the entire cruise. The captain believed that I had fallen overboard. When his search party at last found me, they reported to him that I was in the boiler room and seasick.
At Santa Catalina I was numbered among those Navy men allowed to go ashore. I went to a dance and, after meeting a nice girl, I strolled about the Island in her company. She did a lot of talking. I happened to notice our destroyer ship was slowly departing from the Island. Checking the time, I realized I lost all awareness of the fact I was due aboard the ship. I frantically yelled to the girl, “Thanks and goodbye,” and lit out for the beach where I was able to swipe a canoe, and then I rowed “double speed” to my slowly departing ship. I sneaked aboard and into bed and no one was wise to my almost being left ashore because of a gabby girl.
I got out of the United States Navy after two years and, I believe, I was free in 1929. I went back to Palo Alto, California and entered high school. I went out for football. One day while we were having a breathing spell after football practice tactics, I got caught hiding behind a tree smoking a cigarette. The detective-minded coach kicked me off the football team. I quit high school in my second year of studies there. I believe my exit from that field of educational endeavors happened around 1932. Relaxing a bit, I loafed around Palo Alto, and eventually began trying to obtain a job through the same employment bureau that had previously proved unfavorable toward me in my quest for work. As usual, the employment bureau staff members informed me that they had no job for me. I became restless, and another automobile belonging to someone captured my interest. I was all set to borrow the automobile without the owner’s consent when I looked up from where I was sitting in the car and saw the police coming toward me. I leaped out of the automobile and sprinted away from the police and escaped because I outran my pursuers. The dark night was my good luck.
The next day I decided to put space between me and Palo Alto. I caught a ride to San Francisco and there I got on a freight train headed for Reno. My benefactor dropped me off in a little one-horse town in the middle of the desert. I was “stuck” and, of all places, in a spot unable to boast having a population of people I could “strike” for help.
Lucky for me a Greyhound bus came by this desert town made up of a gas station, a restaurant, and a few houses. I waited. The bus stopped taking on one paying passenger, while I quietly went around to the rear of the bus. I climbed up the steel ladder to the top and deposited myself in the miscellany of baggage. This, one could do in 1933. I stayed there among the “stuff and things” until we were entering Salt Lake City, Utah. An alert policeman spotted me, and I decided to get off and “run for it” rather than be arrested. I jumped off the moving bus and, running down a street, got on a freight train heading away from Salt Lake City.
Some weeks later I arrived at Portsmouth, Virginia, and managed to land a job at five dollars a week pay, with board and room added gratis. My job of washing dishes and mopping floors did not appeal to me as an exciting living, so I decided to hitch-hike back to Palo Alto and I surrendered myself to police. I was tired of running away from the law and justice. I knew I had a rough deal coming to me from the judge. I remembered my having feared the penalty for my stealing another person’s automobile. I decided to face the music, if it proved unpleasant, I would be humble.
The judge sentenced me to a reform school. Eight months was the period of time I was to surrender sweet liberty and “all of that” and “all that”. So, in I went, a fish - a dejected one. This was in 1931. I was pushed around plenty by some of the tough guys in the reform school, and because I had been caught smoking a forbidden cigarette, I was given a punishment. My head of hair was shaved and I felt some disgrace. I had plenty of company in the state of depression, because the year was 1934, a time of depression throughout America on account of money being tight everywhere in the nation. So, I was in a fix and not entirely alone in my sadness; being aware of this somehow softened the blow.
When I was released from reform school, I returned to Palo Alto. I contacted the fellows making up my pirate gang and we had a serious problem concerning our being unable to get Jobs. We decided the C.C.C.1 camps offered us some security and we promptly joined the C.C.C.. The year 1934 was a dark year. All of us were sent to a C.C.C. camp located seven miles above King City, California. I had decided by now that “crime does not pay a profit.” I was twenty-two at this turn in the direction of living and thinking right, with deep-felt resolve to be a good man. As soon as we had been assigned to our C.C.C. bunk house I began organizing a pugilist club. I intended to make good somehow and prize fighting and boxing appealed to me.
I made good progress in pugilism. I boxed in several of the C.C.C. camps. We boys of the C.C.C. camps were busy building a road direct from our camp to the Pacific Coast. Pick-and-shovel work! Yes, we had plenty of it and we enjoyed working. Sometimes I was assigned to being the “water boy.” I had a routine job of hiking two lonely miles up a trail, burdened with canteens filled with cool water for the work crew. I found time for feeling and thinking considerably about plenty during those two-mile hikes. Sometimes we fellows would launch a few practical harmless jokes during the evenings in the bunk house. We did not have any store magic stuff we could use but we managed with an occasional dead snake or some other dead thing to cause some harmless bed terrors. A laugh was a laugh and we certainly needed good humor on some occasions.
Every week-end my camp’s boxers and I were a big attraction in King City’s boxing matches. I was becoming a skilled pugilist and developed a routine of good-humored clowning in the fight ring. This taught me things about “show biz” and the art of being able to cause people to enjoy good-humored belly laugh. At this time I was totally unaware of the fact that I was to become a skilled pugilist. National depression was yet a fact and I was yet determined I’d be a good spirited man. After I had won the Central California middle-weight pugilist title in 1936 at the Monterey Presidio as an amateur pugilist I glanced back in my mind to my rugged training days of C.C.C. problems.
All my C.C.C. camp experiences added up to my subsequently being a star attraction in the pugilist profession throughout the entire State of California. I was the amateur pugilist and clown of good humor in the fight rings in the towns and cities in California, putting on fights and being the star attraction is somehow significant.
My name, and remarks about my skill and gift of good humor, appeared in the columns of sportswriters for California newspapers covering boxing events.
Some years later I got away from the business of pugilism and returned to Palo Alto, California and began trying to promote some sort of work that would give me opportunity this time to enjoy some honest activity in regard to automobiles. I decided to go into business operating an automobile parking lot. My first effort was futile because I had contacted a shallow person intent upon making me his victim in a practical joke.
Business men must have a crude idea of good humor. I had gone to this particular Palo Alto business man and asked him to give me a note directing his bank to allow me to have a loan of twenty dollars. This man was aware of my desire to go into business, as I have described. When he wrote the requested note for me I was unaware of his being a mean soul, desiring to humiliate me through an ill-humored practical joke. I presented the note at the man’s bank and, when the official read the message in the note, I was amazed observing his seizure of laughter.
Eventually this official told me that I had been the victim of a practical joke. I got in touch with my girl friend then and told her what had happened to me. She loaned me the needed twenty dollars for paying the first month’s rent on an automobile parking lot site, and reassured me that I could make good despite such mean-minded type business people.
1. Civilian Conservation Corps. (CCC) enrolled mostly young 18-24 year old unskilled and unemployed men during the Great Depression. They enlisted for a minimum of six months. Each worker received $30 in pay per month for his services in addition to room and board at a work camp.
This little book is an amazing piece of Californian history. Buy yourself a copy.
These excerpts from the book Whiskey Road by Parkey Sharkey are published by Powerless Press™ and Chapin & Wardwell Book Publishers.
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