Memoirs

Bleeding Like a Speared Mammoth… The Joys of High School Chemistry Lab

/ Curt Mekemson / Leave a comment

I would have made a good Greek Philosopher, working out problems in my head. I quickly learned in high school that I am not particularly fond of long dead frogs pickled in formaldehyde or chemicals that smell worse than an old dog’s fart.

But there is more to it than that; I am convinced that good lab technicians are mechanically inclined. They like to tinker.

I have lots of friends like that. They love to take things apart and put them back together. They can fix anything and go out of their way to find things that need fixing. My brother Marshall is a good example. He had an old Citroen in high school that he’d spend hours working on out in the back yard with grease up to his elbows.

Ask him anything about carburetors, water pumps, generators, horsepower or timing and he had a ready answer. I admired him for it, but my interest in carburetors was zilch and my primary interest in automobiles was (and is) that they get me from point A to point B without breaking down.

I feel pretty much the same way about other fix-it items. I am just not excited about getting into the bowels of a toilet and replacing its thing-a-ma-bob. Nor am I interested in replacing light switches to see how much voltage I can send coursing through my body. Yeah, yeah, I know… you turn off the electricity first.

I am not sure where this lack of enthusiasm for things mechanical came from but it was probably a combination of aptitude and attitude. Me father wasn’t particularly fond of working on automobiles and some of that may have rubbed off. But he was very handy. In addition to being a skilled electrician he loved puttering around outside making things.

I classify all such activities as chores to be avoided if at all possible. In fact, over the years I have developed a number of strategies for not having to fix things. Here’s my guide on how to avoid fixing things:

  • Don’t own any tools. You might be tempted to use them, or even worse, someone such as a wife might suggest that you use them.
  • Don’t buy a house. Every scientific study ever done confirms that the single most important reason for having to fix things is owning a home. I was 53 years old before I made that mistake.
  • If something doesn’t work, go buy a new one.
  • Plead ignorance. “What do you mean there is more than one kind of screw driver?” As a corollary, hide your repair manuals. My wife Peggy has the irritating habit of looking up things that need fixing and then saying sweetly, “Oh, this looks easy to do, Curt.”  My manliness has been challenged. It doesn’t matter that this ‘easy’ chore requires that I make four trips to the hardware store, purchase $500 worth of new tools, work ten hours straight and injure myself at least once.  I have to do it.
  • Or you can praise your wife’s ability to fix things and then hide. Peggy is a natural with hammer, saw, paint brush and screwdriver.
  • Curse a lot. Your partner may figure that leaving something broken is easier than listening to you.
  • Stall. “I’ll do it right after I cook dinner, honey.” Stalling is easier if you are doing something the other person finds desirable.
  • If all else fails, compromise. I have an agreement with Peggy that I will do one manly chore per month. That’s my quota. Some activities such as fixing toilets even earn two months of credit.

Even my hobbies as a kid reflected my non-mechanical tendencies. Building model ships, airplanes, cars, trains, etc. had no interest. My concept of a great hobby was rock collecting. I would hike along the Southern Pacific railroad tracks in Diamond Springs and pick up interesting rocks until all four pockets were bulging and my pants were about to fall off. I would then go home and smash them apart with a hammer to figure out what I had found. Geology became a life-long interest.

I do understand the arguments for being able to fix things: saving money, being self-sufficient, and obtaining satisfaction from a job well done.

These same arguments, however, apply to going out in the pasture, shooting Elsie the Cow, gutting her, bringing home the meat, grinding it up, and throwing it on the grill. Just think of the satisfaction involved and dollars saved! Or, you can go to the local fast food joint and help employ a kid who might otherwise turn to a life of crime.

Now, back to chemistry. One day we had to shove little glass tubes through rubber stoppers. Apparently this is an important skill for budding chemists. It’s not a difficult task if you ignore the fact that the holes in the stoppers are approximately half the diameter of the glass tubes and, more importantly, you have a gallon of Vaseline.

I was half way through my first masterpiece when the damn tube broke and ended up jabbed into my hand. Bleeding like a speared mammoth, I was carted off to the emergency room of the local hospital and sewn up.

There was plenty of time while sitting in ER to contemplate my future as a scientist. My conclusion: there wasn’t one. I decided that the best way to avoid long-dead animals, smelly chemicals and miscellaneous dangerous objects (not to mention higher level math skills) would be to choose a career that depended on verbal agility. In other words, my future would be based solely on my ability to BS.

This blog is part of a series in celebration of the 50th High School Reunion of the Class of 1961 of El Dorado Union High School in Placerville California. Next up: A Choice: Graduate or Go to Jail.

The Train Wreck and Miss Kaste

/ Curt Mekemson / Leave a comment

I did better at academics in High School than I did at sports. Fortunately.

I quickly learned that the humanities were my forte. I also did well in English. It was a natural given my love of books and communication skills.

Science and math proved to be a bit more challenging.

There’s an old adage that we are supposed to work hard at those things we find difficult, that it gives us character. My belief is that I already have plenty of character. If I had any more, little men in white coats would be chasing me with nets.

I prefer to spend my energy on things I enjoy, like reading a good book or hiking in the wilderness. I have little tolerance for doing things that I don’t do well or fail to interest me. In other words, the Protestant Ethic and I have serious compatibility problems.

But I can be stubborn. Math is a good example. In the fourth grade I discovered that long division was nasty. I got beyond that but word problems gave me a complex. Two trains are hurtling at each other on the same track with Train A going 90 miles per hour and Train B going 70. They are 252.5296 miles apart. How long will it be before Train A conductor says, “Ooooh shit!”

Not nearly as soon as I did.

My own expletive arrived on my lips .0000001 seconds after seeing the problem. I concentrated on sending the teacher vibes. “Curt is not here today. You do not see Curt. You will not call on Curt.”

But I continued plugging away at math. I even managed to get A’s in Algebra I and Geometry. Algebra II was different. That’s when I ran head on into Miss Kaste. It was not a pleasant experience.

Miss Kaste, according to those who were seriously into math, was very good at what she did. Students leaving her class were reputed to have a solid foundation in the basics and be well prepared to move on to the ethereal worlds of calculus and trigonometry.

Basics, I quickly learned, meant that there was one way of coming up with answers and that way was chiseled in stone. One did not diverge from accepted formulas or leave out steps; right answers obtained the wrong way were wrong answers. Wrong, wrong, wrong!

This created a problem. I had a true talent for coming up with right answers the wrong way and this brought me unwanted attention. I could have lived with that except for another problem, Miss Kaste’s teaching technique. She oozed sarcasm. She made people cry. My response was to freeze up. I started dreading her classes and developed the proverbial ‘bad attitude.’ I received my first C in high school and vowed never to take another math course. Life is short and then you die.

It was my decision and my loss. Miss Kaste was not to blame. Still, it speaks to the power of teachers to turn students on, or off, to various subjects. I wasn’t a total dunce at math; ironically, I scored in the 98th percentile on the Iowa Test in math the same year. Theoretically, that placed me in the top two percent of math students.

The upside of my decision was that I saw an immediate improvement in my GPA and attitude. The down side was that it eliminated a number of future options, particularly in the fields of higher education. It was an era when the social sciences were eager to prove their scientific nature.

This blog is part of a series in celebration of the 50th High School Reunion of the Class of 1961 of El Dorado Union High School in Placerville California. Next up: Bleeding Like a Speared Mammoth… the Joys of High School Chemistry Lab.

A Penguin’s Guide to Long Distance Running

/ Curt Mekemson / Leave a comment

I am not a jock. It isn’t so much physical as mental. You have to care to be good at sports and I find other things more challenging.

Part of this evolved from a lack of enthusiasm for sports on the home front. There was little vicarious parental drive to see me excel on the playing field.

Being as blind as a bat didn’t help much either. Like most young people, I was not excited about wearing glasses. When Mrs. Wells, the school nurse, came to class with her eye charts, I would memorize the lines and then breeze through the test. As for class work, I sat close to the black board and squinted a lot.

While I got away with this in the classroom, it became a serious hazard on the Little League field.

I remember going out for the team in Diamond Springs. All of my friends played. Social pressure suggested it was the thing to do. Nervously, I showed up on opening day and faced the usual chaos of parents signing up their stars, balls flying everywhere, coaches yelling, and kids running in a dozen different directions.

“Okay, Curtis,” the Coach instructed, “let’s see how you handle this fly.”

Crack! I heard him hit the ball. Fine, except where was it? The ball had disappeared. Conk. It magically reappeared out of nowhere, bounced off my glove and hit me on the head.

“What’s the matter? Can’t you see?” the Coach yelled helpfully. “Let’s try it again.”

My Little League Career was short-lived. I went back to carrying out my inventory of the number of skunks that lived in the Woods.

This didn’t mean I was hopeless at sports. In the seventh grade I finally obtained glasses and discovered the miracle of vision; trees had leaves, billboards were pushing drugs and the kid waving at me across the street was flipping me off. I could even see baseballs. It was time to become a sports hero.

It says something about your future in sports when your career peaks in the eighth grade. Thanks to Mrs. Young kicking me out of the first grade I was slightly older than my classmate and, thanks to genetics, slightly bigger.

More importantly, I had mastered the art of leadership: make noise, appear confident and charge the enemy.

As a result I became quarterback and captain of the football team, center and captain of the basketball team and pitcher and captain of the softball team.

Unfortunately, such glory was not transferred to El Dorado Union High School in Placerville. I blew it. Any red-blooded American male knows that you have to go out for football to become a high school sports hero.

There’s some glory in basketball and a little in baseball, but other sports are pretty much on the level of “Oh I didn’t know you did that.” What did I do? I went out for the cross-country team. Now if you are really, really good at cross-country, like best in the state, you might get an occasional story in the school paper.

But say you are the quarterback of the football team and you throw the winning pass in the annual game against your major out-of-town rivals. You are immortalized. You get the front page of the school paper and major coverage on the sports page of the community paper. As for the babes, they come out of the woodwork.

As it turned out, I wasn’t the best runner in the state, or in the community, or in the school, or the freshman class for that matter. In fact, I am not really built for running. My friends sometimes describe me as penguin-like. I have the upper body of a six-foot-six basketball player and the lower body of a five-foot-five VW bug racer.

It was only excessive stubbornness that usually found me somewhere near the middle of the pack in my cross-country races. It certainly wasn’t a love of running. There was to be no glory in the sport for me, and certainly no babes. But a lot of character building took place. Great.

By my sophomore year I decided I would have more fun playing football, but it was too late. I didn’t eat, dream and sleep football. I lacked the necessary motivation to smash my way to the top. I would come to practice after a long day of work in the fruit orchards where I had put in nine hours of hard, physical labor.

The first thing I did was don miscellaneous body pads that were still slimy with yesterday’s sweat and smelled like week-old dead fish. By then the coach would be yelling at us to hurry up and get out of the locker room and on to the field.

I decided there must be a high correlation between football practice and boot camp including push ups, wind sprints, humiliation and more push-ups, everything it takes to turn a wild bunch of undisciplined young men into an organized group of would-be heroes eager to go out and win one for the Gipper.

The hard work was okay, even fun, but I was highly allergic to being yelled at. I still am. My rapidly waning enthusiasm took a sky dive leap when the coach decided my position would be second-string left guard.

Now don’t get me wrong, guards and tackles are critically important to the success of a team and I confess that smashing into opponents and sacking the quarterback resembled fun. Where else could I practice physically aggressive behavior and be applauded? Even second-string made sense. The other kids had played freshman football and earned their places.

But I lacked the psychological orientation for being second string and had something else in mind in terms of position. I envisioned myself charging down the sidelines with the people in the stands on their feet cheering wildly.

I dutifully put in my time, finished out the year and decided to forgo a career in sports. I am glad I played. I gained new friends and new experiences, both valuable. But I can’t say I learned anything of great significance. What I recall from the season was there was little ‘thrill of victory’ and lots of ‘agony of defeat.’ We were not a team destined for glory.

The Most Desperate of Times: PE Dance Class 1… The 50th EUHS Reunion of the 1961 Class

/ Curt Mekemson / 2 Comments

Forty-six years ago I became a freshman at El Dorado Union High School in Placerville California. The number of young women on my horizon was zero. I was deathly afraid of girls.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and I was a desperate man. I signed up for dance classes in P.E. I would learn to dance and become a combination of Arthur Murray and Elvis Presley. (Yeah, I know that dates me a little.) Step, step, slide and swivel your hips. Girls would flock to me.

It wasn’t until the day of the class that I learned the magnitude of my mistake. I would have to dance with girls to learn how to dance and there they were, lined up on the opposite side of the gymnasium, staring at me.

“God, why did I do this to myself,” I thought as I stared across the distance at twenty females who I knew were thinking, “anybody but Curtis.”

“Okay, boys,” the female P.E. teacher announced in a stern voice, “I want you to walk across the room now and politely ask a girl to dance with you.” Wow, that sounded like fun.

Reluctantly, I began that long walk across the gymnasium floor. I was a condemned man and the gallows were looming. I walked slower. Maybe an earthquake would strike. Maybe the Russians would shoot off an IBM missile. Maybe one of the surly seniors would throw a match in a wastebasket and the fire alarm would go off.

Maybe nothing.

I approached the line and looked for a sign. One of the girls would smile at me and crook her finger. But the girls looked exceedingly grim. A few looked desperate, like deer caught in the headlights of the proverbial 18 wheeler rushing toward them at 90 miles per hour. I picked out the one who looked most frightened on the theory that she would be the least likely to reject me.

“Uh, would you care to dance,” I managed to blurt out.

“Uh, okay,” she responded with about the same level of enthusiasm she would have if I had offered her a large plate of raw liver. It was P.E. Dance Ground Zero after all, and she wasn’t allowed to say no. We were destined to be a great couple.

“You will put your left hand in the middle of the back five inches above the waist line.” The teacher, who was beginning to sound like a drill sergeant, carefully described what we would do with our hands. It was quite clear that there would be minimal contact and no contact with behinds.

“With your right hand and arm, you will hold the girl away from you.” There would be no accidental brushing of breasts either. I assumed the correct position with marine-like precision. I was going to get this right.

I studied the chart the teacher had put up to show me what I was supposed to do with my two left feet. I listened carefully to the lecture on rhythm and down beats. I watched with intensity as she demonstrated: step, step, slide, step-step.

All too soon it was our turn. A scratchy record blasted out a long-since-dead composer’s waltz. I didn’t know who it was but it wasn’t Elvis or even Benny Goodman. With one sweaty palm in the middle of the girl’s back and the other sweaty hand holding her a proper distance away, I moved out on the floor. Step, step, slide, step-step.

One, two, and three, four-five the coach barked out. My feet more or less followed the proscribed pattern as I avoided stepping on the girl’s toes. I tried a turn and managed to avoid running into another couple. Ever so slightly I relaxed. Maybe things would be okay. Maybe I would have fun. Maybe Hell would freeze over.

“Stop class!” the teacher yelled as she blew her whistle and yanked the needle across the record, adding another scratch. We dutifully came to a halt. What now?

“I want everyone to watch Curtis and his partner,” she announced.

“Hey, this is more like it,” I thought to myself. Not only was I surviving my first day of dance class, I was being singled out to demonstrate. I smiled, waited for the music to start, and boldly moved out on the floor where many had trod before. Step, step, slide, step-step. We made it through all of three progressions when the teacher abruptly blew her whistle again.

“And that, Class,” she proclaimed triumphantly, “is not how you do it. Curtis is moving like he is late for an important appointment in the bathroom.”

The class roared… and I shrank. I don’t know how my partner felt, but I wanted a hole to climb in, preferably a deep hole with a steel door that I could slam shut. And I was more than embarrassed, I was mad. My normal sense of humor had galloped off into the sunset.

“You don’t teach someone to dance by embarrassing him,” I mumbled. An angry look crossed the teacher’s face and she started to reply. I turned my back and walked for the door.

“Where do you think you are going Curtis? Get back here!” she demanded in a raised voice.

“I am leaving,” I replied without turning, calm now the decision made. The class was deadly quiet. This was much more interesting than P.E. Other kids might challenge teachers, might walk out of a class, and might not even care.

But not Curt. This was a guy who always did his homework, participated in class discussions, and was respectful toward teachers.

I reached the door and put my hand on the handle.

“If you walk out that door, you may as well walk home,” the teacher barked. “I will personally see to it that you are suspended from school.”

I opened the door, walked out, and went straight to the office of the chairman of the P.E. Department, Steve O’Meara. Steve worked with my Dad in the summer as an assistant electrician but I knew him primarily as my science teacher.

He was a big man, gruff, and strong as a bull elephant, a jock’s jock. He demonstrated his strength by participating in the annual wheelbarrow race at the El Dorado County Fair. The race commemorated the fact that John Studebaker of automobile fame had obtained his start in Placerville manufacturing wheelbarrows.

The County’s strongest men would line up with their wheelbarrows at the starting line and then rush to fill a gunny sack with sand at the starter’s gun. They would then push their wheelbarrows and loads at breakneck speed around an obstacle course that included mud holes, a rock-strewn path, fence barriers and other such challenges.

In addition to making it across the finish line first, the winner had to have fifty plus pounds of sand in his gunny sack. Underweight and he was disqualified. Steve was always our favorite to win and rarely disappointed us. He had a very loud voice.

“What’s up, Curt,” he roared when I entered his office. I knew Steve didn’t eat kids for lunch but you always wondered a little.

“I think you are supposed to expel me,” I replied. He started to laugh until he saw my expression. Mortification and anger on the face of a 14-year-old are never a pretty sight.

He became serious. “Sit down and tell me what’s happening,” he suggested in an almost gentle voice.

Ten minutes later I walked out of his office with a reprieve. I didn’t have to go back to the dance class and could finish out the quarter playing volleyball.  Steve would have a discussion with the dance instructor.

I imagine she ended up about as unhappy as I was. At least I hoped so. I entertained a small thought that she would hesitate the next time before traumatizing some gawky kid whose only goal in attending her class was to become a little less gawky. It would be a long time before I would step onto a dance floor again.

Next Blog: A Penguin’s Guide to Long Distance Running

A Terminal Case of Puberty Blues… The 50th Reunion of EUHS’s 1961 Class

/ Curt Mekemson / Leave a comment

The 50th Reunion of El Dorado Union High School’s 1961 Class was approaching like a runaway freight train. Emails from Placerville California were filling my inbox. Ancient memories kept bubbling to the surface. Fortunately time and a sense of humor had smoothed off the sharper edges.

Something happened between my eighth grade in Diamond Springs and high school in Placerville. It hit me right between the eyes with all of the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Here I was a happy, well-adjusted and relatively successful young man one day and a serious candidate for a strait jacket the next.

Pimples popped out on my face overnight and my voice became dedicated to practicing random octave jumps. Teenage-hood, which had promised to be a mild adventure, arrived with a vengeance. I was being hormonally challenged; I had a terminal case of puberty blues.

Things I had taken for granted became illusive, almost impossible to obtain. Take girlfriends, for instance.

I expected to lose a little ground in the field of romance when I became a freshman in high school. Sophomore, junior and even senior boys cruised the hallways in a mad scramble to harvest the new crop of freshmen girls while the older girls weren’t about to date a freshman boy, that lowest of low creatures.

But I didn’t expect to bomb the way I did.

I became intensely, almost painfully shy. I would walk down the hallways staring at my feet in fear that some young woman would look me in the eye. If a girl tried to talk to me, I would mutter inanities and make a run for it. The strangest statements came out of my mouth. As for asking a girl out, the odds were a little less than being struck by lightning and the latter seemed like a less painful alternative.

It wasn’t that I didn’t notice girls. My body was one huge hormone. I just couldn’t bring myself to do anything about it. I pined for a young woman who sat in front of me in Mr. Crump’s Geography class. She was gorgeous and came with a full complement of accoutrements: smile, brains, hips and breasts. I was in deep lust.

My knee and her fanny were mere inches apart and her fanny was like a magnet. I had the most intense fantasies of moving my knee forward until it made contact. In my fantasy she would of course turn around, smile at me and suggest we get together after school.

In reality, she would have turned around and bashed me with her geography book, or worse, told Mr. Crump. I would have died. I kept my knee where it belonged. It is a strong testament to my love for geography that I didn’t flunk the class under the circumstances.

Next blog: Desperate times call for desperate measures. I sign up for dance classes in PE.

Diamond Springs, California: From Gold Rush to Sleepy… The 50th EUHS Reunion

/ Curt Mekemson / 2 Comments

The message arrived by mail. My 50th High School Reunion was coming up. Once again the mighty Cougars of Placerville, California’s El Dorado Union High School would roar.

Or at least meow.

Teenage angst, hormonal overload and dreams of glory had long since been dimmed by the realities of life and aging bones. My classmates and I have reached the point where looking back is easier than looking forward.

A Memory Book was being created. What had happened to us since that warm June day in 1961? It was time to sum up our lives in 400 words or less. Should I lie?

Naah. I dutifully begin to put the words down on paper. I found, however, that my mind kept wandering back to what had happened prior to our graduation, during the formative years of our lives. Always on the lookout for blog material, I decided to post a few stories from those years. First up:

Many things influence whom we become. DNA, parents, friends, teachers… it’s a long list. Where we are raised also has to be included. It doesn’t matter where we go in life; our hometown remains our hometown. And this takes me back to Diamond Springs, a small town outside of Placerville.

Sleepy is too lively a word for describing where I lived from 1945 to 1961.

In Old West terminology, Diamond was a two-horse town. There were two grocery stores, two gas stations, two restaurants, two bars, two graveyards and two major places of employment: the Diamond Lime Company and the Caldor Lumber Company.

On the one horse side of the equation there was one church, a barbershop, a hardware store and a grammar school. High school was in far off Placerville, three miles away.

It hadn’t always been quiet. Located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, Diamond was once a major gathering spot for the Maidu Indians and later became a bustling Gold Rush town.

To the Maidu it was Mo-lok’epakan, or, Morning Star’s Spring and a very holy place.  Indians came from miles around bearing their dead on litters for cremation. Souls were sent wafting on their way to where ever deceased Maidu went.

Apparently they had been living in the area for a thousand years. It is a sad commentary on both our education system and how we treated the Indians that I grew up in Diamond never hearing the name Morning Star’s Spring much less Mo-lok’epakan. Our only connection with the Maidu’s lost heritage was finding an occasional arrowhead or Indian bead.

Then, in 1848, John Marshall found some shiny yellow baubles in the American River at Sutter’s Mill, 13 miles away. The worlds of the Maidu, California, and Morning Star’s Spring were about to be shattered. “Gold!” went out the cry to Sacramento, across the nation and around the world. Instant wealth was to be had in California and the 49ers were on their way.

They came by boat, wagon, horse and foot… whatever it took. And they came in the thousands from Maine to Georgia, Yankee and Southerner alike. They came from England and Germany and France and China, pouring in from all points of the compass. They left behind their wives, children, mothers, fathers, and half-plowed fields. The chance of ‘striking it rich’ was not to be denied.

Soon the once quiet foothills were alive with the sound of the miners’ picks and shovels punctuated by an occasional gunshot. Towns grew up overnight: Hangtown (Placerville), Sonora, Volcano, Fiddletown, Angels Camp, Grass Valley, Rough and Ready and other legendary communities of the Motherlode.

In 1850 a party of 200 Missourians stopped off at Morning Star’s Spring and decided to stay. Timber was plentiful, the grazing good and a 25-pound nugget of gold was found nearby. Soon there were 18 hotels, stables, a school, churches, doctors, a newspaper, lawyers, vineyards, a blacksmith, some 8000 miners and undoubtedly several unrecorded whorehouses.

Morning’s Star Spring took on a new name, Diamond Springs. The Wells Fargo Stage Company opened an office and the Pony Express made it a stop on its two-year ride to glory.

The town burned down in 1856, 1859 and again in the 1870s. By this time most of the gold had been found and the residents were forced to find other means of gainful employment.

The timber industry came to the rescue in the early 1900s when the California Door Company out of Oakland set up shop in Diamond to handle the timber it was pulling out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Starting with oxen and then moving to steam tractors, the company finally settled on a narrow gauge railway for retrieving rough-cut lumber and logs from its forest operations. By the 50s, it had moved on to logging trucks.

A couple of decades after Caldor was established, Diamond Lime set up business by opening a quarry two miles east of Diamond and a processing plant on the edge of town. The lime was so pure that a block of it was used in the Washington Monument.

This was pretty much how things were when the Mekemsons arrived at the end of World War II. Next blog… the Mekemson/Bray gang terrorizes Diamond Springs.

An Old Dog Learns New Tricks in Alaska: California’s Proposition 99

/ Curt Mekemson / 2 Comments

Alaska's strong anti-tobacco legislation in the early 80s would help inspire California's Proposition 99 in the late 80s.

The Alaska Lung Association Board recruited me to serve as its Executive Director in 1983. By then I had learned I don’t do boss well. Wisdom would have been ‘just say no,’ but I jumped at the opportunity. I wanted to go play in the woods.

I soon found I was up to my lungs in tobacco politics.

The organization was involved in a major legislative battle to pass a statewide smoke-free law. In addition to requiring restaurants to set aside smoke-free areas and public meetings to be smoke-free, it eliminated smoking in public and private workplaces.

The fight for non-smoker’s rights ‘had come a long ways, baby,’ to quote an old cigarette ad,  but it hadn’t come that far. If we succeeded, Alaska would have the strongest statewide law in the nation.

Heart, Lung and Cancer had taken on an Alaskan size challenge. The incidence of tobacco use in the state was high and Alaska was a do-your-own-thing kind of place. Individual freedom was stitched into the state’s psyche with steel thread.

Telling Alaskans when and where they could smoke might get us shot.

I knew that a majority of the Association’s resources and every skill I had picked up in community organizing and lobbying would be called upon. I also knew we couldn’t succeed by ourselves. We set out to expand our small coalition of Heart, Lung and Cancer, develop a hard-hitting case statement, initiate a media campaign, and triple our lobbying efforts.

One lobbying technique was particularly effective. Alaska’s small population meant the Doctors on our Board and in the Thoracic Society knew every doctor in the state. They committed to contacting the physicians of the individual legislators and having them make personal calls urging support.

When doctors are committed to prevention, they can be a powerful force for public health.

I found myself spending a lot of time in Juneau, the State Capitol, and on the phone talking to Legislators. One call to a rather crusty Senator from the bush was particularly amusing.

“If you had called six months ago I would have told you to go to hell Curt,” he informed me. “But I had a heart attack and my Doctor made me quit smoking. If I can’t smoke, I don’t see why anyone else should be able to either.” It reminded me of my early involvement with GASP in Sacramento.

I laughingly thanked him for his support and was about to hang up when he told me he had another story to share.

“About a month after I quit smoking I noticed my urine really smelled bad. It worried me so I decided to call my doctor. ‘Doc,’ I said, ‘since I’ve stopped smoking my urine has started to stink something terrible.’”

“Do you know what he said to me?” the Senator asked, letting the tension build. I confessed I didn’t have a clue.

“The Doc said, ‘Senator, your urine has always smelled terrible. You couldn’t smell it because you smoked.’”

Working in Alaska did have a particular flair.

After several months of intense effort the bill was ready for floor consideration. I tallied up our committed votes and knew we could win. There was one final hurdle; the Chair of the Senate Finance Committee was holding the bill hostage. She would only let it out of the committee if we agreed to remove the private workplace.

It was one of those damned if you do damned if you don’t type decisions and the clock was ticking. If I said no the bill would die for the year. We could come back but we would have to start all over. If I said yes our legislation was substantially weakened. I made a command decision and said yes.

Legislation is almost always a matter of compromise and we would still have one of the strongest statewide laws in the nation. I also believed that time was on our side. Once Alaskans became used to breathing smoke-free air they would demand more.

The bill made it out of committee that morning and through the Legislature that afternoon. We were in business, almost.

Legislation is a two-part process, passage and implementation. If the agency charged with implementation doesn’t like the law or has other priorities, your victory can be rather shallow. Fortunately, the Department of Natural Resources had been assigned the responsibility. The staff was on our side but very, very busy.

I offered to save them some work and draft the implementation guidelines for consideration by their legal counsel. Surprisingly, they agreed. It was like turning the fox loose in the henhouse.

Needless to say, the Department came up with very strong and clear guidelines. Some of the weaker sections of the law had even been strengthened.

A few months later I was out in Nome on Lung business and needed lunch. Nome is where the Iditarod sled dog race ends and is about as close to the end of the earth as one can go. I walked into a very rustic restaurant. “Smoking or nonsmoking?” the waiter asked. Several nonsmoking signs were dutifully posted.

Maybe, in the overall scheme of things, the fact that a small restaurant in remote Alaska had a nonsmoking section in 1984 was not of great significance, but it meant a lot to me… and it spoke strongly of the future of the non-smokers’ rights movement

A primary reason for our success had been the strong coalition we had put together. It seemed a shame to let it disband. I suggested we take on another challenge, doubling the tax on cigarettes from $.08 to $.16 and using a portion of the funds to support anti-tobacco and other health education efforts.

The Healthy Alaska Coalition, fresh off of its victory, eagerly agreed. So did the Lung Board. Our challenge this time was that Alaska hadn’t passed any new taxes in years. Quite the opposite, the State gave money back to its residents each year from oil revenues.

As it turned out, passing the tax was relatively easy in comparison to our smoke-free legislation. Again, the Coalition deserved much of the credit. We were even able to add strong Native American backing since their leadership felt the health promotion opportunities provided through the revenues would be valuable.

Another reason for our success on both bills was a lack of opposition from the tobacco industry. Perhaps Alaska was too far off and had too small a population to be of much concern. As far as I know, only one legal firm received a small retainer to represent tobacco industry interests.

Two years later when I was working to push similar tax legislation through the California Legislature, the tobacco lobbyists outnumbered the Legislators, or at least they seemed to. But that’s a story for another blog.

My Alaska experience had reconfirmed my belief in the power of the non-smokers’ rights movement. And, of equal importance, it had introduced the germ of a new idea: using tobacco tax dollars to fund anti-tobacco programs. I was an old dog who had learned new tricks.

I was prepared to participate in creating California’s Proposition 99… but didn’t know it.

A Phone Call Forces Me to GASP: California’s Prop 99

/ Curt Mekemson / Leave a comment

The roots of California's Proposition 99, the Anti-Tobacco Initiative, reached back into the 1970s when the American Lung Association of Sacramento teamed up with GASP, the Group Against Smokers' Pollution, to pass one of the nation's first non-smoking ordinances. (GASP would eventually become Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights.)

The path that led me into the tobacco wars had enough twists and turns to scare a contortionist snake out of his skin. There are lots of stories. Two are particularly relevant to the creation of California’s Proposition 99, the Anti-Tobacco Initiative.

I was recruited to become Assistant Director of the American Lung Association of Sacramento in 1971. The organization wanted my environmental expertise, not my anti-tobacco fervor. In fact I smoked a pipe. I loved my pipe. “No problem,” the Executive Director told me. He, his secretary and almost everyone else in the organization smoked. It was almost required.

One day in 1972 I was sitting in my office counting Christmas Seal Dollars and happily puffing away when I got the call that would lead me to sacrifice my pipe and eventually advocate that Prop 99 include nonsmokers’ rights.

“Mr. Mekemson” the caller began, setting off a red flag. I always get nervous when someone calls me Mr. Mekemson.

“Yes, this is Curtis,” I replied. “What can I do for you?”

“My name is Alice Fox, Mr. Mekemson. Some friends and I would like to meet you.”

Alice Fox, Alice Fox, Alice Fox… the name raced through my mind. I had heard about her recently. Then it came to me. I had read about Alice in the Sacramento Bee. She was leading a charge to shut down a nude beach on the American River. But why would Alice call me. I was a Seventies type of guy.

“Exactly what would you like to meet about,” I asked. Now was the time to be very careful.

“Some friends and I would like to talk with you about how tobacco smoke impacts our health,” she replied.

I relaxed. I was on safe ground. “There is a great deal of information that smoking causes lung disease,” I responded in a positive tone. “I would be glad to send you some pamphlets on the medical evidence. I also have a brochure that provides tips on quitting.”

“No,” a somewhat exasperated Alice Fox shouted in my ear, “we don’t smoke. It is other people’s smoke that makes us sick.”

There was a pregnant pause on my end of the phone. If Alice heard me coughing, it may have been because I had swallowed my pipe. Not knowing what to say, I stumbled into agreeing to have lunch with her the following week.

The die was cast. But first I tried to persuade my boss, Larry Kirk, that he should go. He was, after all, the Executive Director.

“No way,” Larry said with a nervous laugh as he took a deep drag. They had specifically asked for me and I was stuck with it. There was nothing to do but square my shoulders, put my pipe aside, and dutifully go forth for Mother Lung.

I expect the nonsmokers smelled the pipe smoke on me 20 feet away. We met at a small restaurant in the old Public Market at 13 and J Street. The Market would eventually morph into a Sheraton Hotel.

“We are so glad you were willing to meet with us,” Ed Randal, their leader greeted me. “We are having a difficult time persuading people that second-hand smoke makes us sick.”

He handed me his card. It read, “I don’t smoke but I chew. If you don’t blow your smoke on me, I won’t spit on you.”  I immediately understood why Ed might have difficulty selling his cause.

“Not too subtle,” I noted.

“We can’t afford to be,” was the response. Over the next hour I was educated as to why. Gradually, I became convinced that second-hand smoke did indeed make them sick. They all had compelling stories.

I also came to understand something of the frustration they felt in convincing society in general and smokers in particular that second-hand smoke was an issue. In 1972 it was a message far ahead of its time. Most smokers assumed they could smoke whenever and wherever they pleased. I know I did. The vast majority of nonsmokers went along with the idea. It took guts to challenge the norm.

I also had an ‘aha’ experience. I started out being resentful about leaving my pipe behind but over the hour my attitude began to change. These folks shouldn’t have to breathe my pipe smoke.

How many other people had my thoughtlessness harmed?

The question had a strong impact on me. Eventually it would lead me to give up smoking. This was something that neither my knowledge of health effects nor my responsibility as a health professional had been able to accomplish.

As a result, I became convinced that we had a powerful new weapon in our fight against lung disease. If I used myself as an example, “Please don’t smoke around me” was as effective in discouraging tobacco use as it was in protecting the nonsmoker.

Somewhat to my surprise, I volunteered to help Ed, Alice and Company in their effort. An organization called GASP, the Group Against Smoking Pollution, had been set up in Berkeley and the local folks wanted to establish a chapter in Sacramento. I offered the Lung Association for meetings and myself as staff backup. Before we broke up for the day, we had agreed on holding a general membership meeting the next month.

I can’t say that Larry was enthusiastic about my offer or conclusions. A surprising number of Lung Execs smoked and were no more prepared to accept nonsmokers’ rights than smokers in the general public. Mainly they saw their role with tobacco as discouraging young people from starting to smoke.

But Larry had hired me as his assistant because he respected my instincts and judgment. Reluctantly, he agreed to have Lung support GASP. But it would be my baby, not his.

So we set about organizing a meeting. Alice and Ed corralled their friends and I had a small article placed in the Bee. We came up with an agenda and refreshments. I warned our organizing committee not to expect much the first time out. Ten people and a few ideas for expanding membership would be a roaring success.

Fifteen minutes before the meeting was to start the room was packed. Apparently, I was the only one surprised. As we went around the room for introductions two things became apparent. First, this was a broad-based group of people. We had health professionals, a couple of lawyers, several business people, housewives, a househusband, an electrician, and others.

Second, everyone had stories to tell and they were ecstatic they had empathetic listeners. I felt like I was in the middle of a revival, which is often the atmosphere created by grassroots organizations.

Once we worked through the preliminaries and had a semblance of order, I facilitated a brainstorming session on what we might do to create awareness of non-smokers’ rights in Sacramento. If my pipe smoking was to be limited, I might as well have company.

The ideas came fast and furious. We should arm nonsmokers with fans to blow smoke back at smokers. We should print up and distribute thousands of the “I don’t smoke but I chew,” cards. We should picket grocery stores, clothing stores and restaurants. We should create an ordinance.

“Whoa,” I interjected, abandoning my facilitator’s role. “Let’s talk about the ordinance.”

Sacramento would be one of the first cities in the nation (or world) advocating such a law.

“Our chances of winning are slim,” I began, thinking out loud, “but that may not matter. The effort will generate great media coverage, probably more than all the other activities combined. Think of the awareness we will create.”

The idea was greeted with enthusiastic support. The newly formed Sacramento Chapter of GASP had a mission.

“I can take a stab at drafting the ordinance,” one of the attorneys volunteered.

“I know a reporter who will support us,” another offered.

“Anything you need,” another called out. We would not lack volunteers. As for myself, I agreed to set up meetings with members of the City Council. I knew most of them from my work in the environmental movement and had worked on several of their campaigns. We were off and running.

The ordinance seems rather tame now, but it was radical for its time. We targeted grocery stores, retail stores, restaurants and movie theaters. It was still the era when a newly purchased suit might smell like cigarette smoke and a harried shopper might inadvertently lose her ashes in the vegetable bin at the grocery store.

It didn’t take long for things to heat up. As we suspected, the press had a field day. Reporters didn’t necessarily agree with us, one of the smokiest atmospheres in town was the local newsroom, but controversy is the bread and butter of the media business. Imagine a smoker having to wait until he got outside of a grocery store to light up.

Each time the media ran a story, awareness increased. We were achieving our objective. Non smokers were learning it was okay to say “Yes, I do mind if you smoke,” and people who suffered adverse reactions from second-hand smoke were learning they weren’t crazy. We took every opportunity to educate the public and pound home our message to decision-makers.

And then a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. We won. A majority of City Council became convinced, as I had, that a significant number of nonsmokers were adversely affected by second-hand smoke.

Of equal importance, the local grocery store chains and clothing merchants let the decision-makers know they would prefer smoke free environments.

And finally, we had minimal opposition from the tobacco industry. It was several years before the industry fully realized the threat posed by the non-smokers right’s movement, or how dedicated the non-smokers’ rights advocates were, or how effective a small group of people can be in making change.

Sacramento had become a leader in the anti-tobacco movement and would continue to be over the next quarter of a century. While I moved on to other issues, the local Lung Association under the leadership of Jane Hagedorn and her Board of Directors became one of the strongest advocates for a smoke-free society in the United States.

Ten years later I would rejoin the Tobacco Wars, this time in Alaska.

One Million Lives and 86 Billion Dollars Saved… California’s Proposition 99

/ Curt Mekemson / Leave a comment

In the late 80s the tobacco industry mounted an "unprecedented campaign," to defeat California's Proposition 99, an initiative designed to increase the California tax on cigarettes by $.25 and devote a substantial portion of the funds to discouraging tobacco use. The Tobacco Institute recognized that the initiative posed one of the greatest threats to tobacco consumption it had ever encountered.

My friend Ken Lake sent me an article from the Sacramento Bee a few weeks ago. It reported on the latest results from California’s Proposition 99, a massive tobacco use prevention effort kicked off by a tobacco tax initiative passed by California voters in the late 80s.

According to the California Department of Health Services, an estimated one million lives and 86 billion dollars in health care costs have been saved because of prevention programs funded by the tax. California now has the second lowest incidence of tobacco use in the nation and the state is virtually smoke-free. It has the lowest incidence of cancer for 6 of the 9 cancers caused by tobacco use. Fewer teens smoke in California than any other state.

These figures are remarkable. How many times in history has a single act saved one million lives? How often do health care costs go down instead of up? And there is more, much more.

Tobacco use is the single most preventable cause of death and disease in America and a major factor in preventable death and disease worldwide. The revolution in disease prevention that took place in California is a revolution that has reverberated throughout the United States and around the world, a fact recognized by both the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.

As a result, the million lives and billions of dollars saved in California can be multiplied several times over on a national and global basis. Prevention works.

Credit for the success of Proposition 99 in the quarter of century since its inception goes to a cast of hundreds, if not thousands. Certainly the Tobacco Control Section of the California Department of Health Services and its dedicated staff have been critical but dozens of organizations, hundreds of staff people and thousands of volunteers have also played key roles.

In the beginning, however, in the very, very beginning, it was a handful of people in Sacramento who put the effort together and made the critical decisions that would allow Proposition 99 to become the revolution in prevention it has become.

I was privileged to be one of those people.

Over the next two months I will do a series of blogs that provide an inside look at what happened during Prop 99’s first critical months starting in September of 1986. It’s a story of how and why a small group of friends decided to take on one of the worlds most powerful, amoral industries in the cause of preventing the death and crippling disease caused by tobacco use.

It’s a good story, worth telling on its own merits. Greed, power politics, human emotion and sacrifice are all included. There’s even some humor. But I also want to make the point that a few dedicated and knowledgeable individuals can make a significant difference. It’s an important message for today’s world where ideology, ambition and greed triumph over working together in the common interest.

In my next blog I will tell the story  of Prop 99’s beginning and how I became involved. Believe me, I did not start out to become an anti-tobacco warrior.

The Great Tree Race

/ Curt Mekemson / 1 Comment

My grandson demonstrates his tree climbing skills on a large madrone.

“I can climb that tree, Grandpa,” my six-year old grandson announced proudly to me yesterday. It’s a refrain I’ve heard frequently over the past week from the visiting six-year old. His three-year old brother has similar ambitions, if not abilities. Their father is building them a tree house in Tennessee. It’s the ultimate dream of all impassioned tree climbers.

I remember when my dad (Pop) built a tree house for my older brother Marshall and me in the graveyard next to our house.

I’ve posted earlier blogs about the graveyard’s jungle-like nature. It’s potential as a playground was impossible to ignore. Young Heavenly Trees made great spears for throwing at each other.

That game ended when we impaled Lee Kinser’s hand. Neither Lee nor his parents were happy about this development and our efforts to master spear throwing were brought to an immediate halt. But a greater challenge remained.

Two incense cedars dominated the Graveyard. From an under five-foot perspective, they were gigantic, stretching some 75 feet skyward. The limbs of the largest tree started 20 feet up and provided scant hope for climbing. As usual, Marshall found a risky way around the problem.

Several of the huge limbs came tantalizingly close to the ground at their tips and one could be reached by standing on a convenient tombstone. Only Marshall could reach it; I was frustratingly short by several inches.

Marsh would make a leap, grab the limb and shimmy up it hanging butt-down until the limb became large enough for him to work his way around to the top. Then he would shimmy up to the tree trunk, four to five Curtis lengths off the ground. After that he would climb to wonderfully mysterious heights I could only dream about.

Eventually I grew tall enough to make my first triumphant journey up the limb. Then, very carefully, I climbed to the heart-stopping top, limb by limb. All of Diamond Springs spread out before me. I could see the school, and the mill, and the woods, and the hill with a Cross where I had shivered my way through an Easter Sunrise Service. I could see the whole world.

Except for a slight wind that made the tree sway and stirred my imagination about the far away ground, I figured I was as close to Heaven as I would ever get

By the time I finally made it to the top, Marshall had more grandiose plans for the tree. We would build a tree house in the upper branches. Off we went to the Mill to liberate some two by fours. Then we raided Pop’s tool shed for a hammer, nails, and rope.

My job was to be the ground man while Marshall climbed up to the top. He would then lower the rope and I would tie on a board that he would hoist up and nail in. It was a good plan, or so we thought.

Along about the third board, Pop showed up. It wasn’t so much that we wanted to build a tree house in the Graveyard that bothered him, or even that we had borrowed his tools without asking. He even seemed to ignore the liberated lumber.

His concern was that we were building our house too close to the top of the tree on thin limbs that would easily break with nails that barely reached through the boards. After he graphically described the potential results, even Marshall had second thoughts.

Pop had a solution though. He would build us a proper tree house on the massive limbs that were only 20 feet off the ground. He would also add a ladder so we could avoid our tombstone-shimmy-up-the-limb route.

And he did. It was a magnificent open tree house of Swiss Family Robinson proportions that easily accommodated our buddies and us with room to spare. Hidden in the tree and hidden in the middle of the Graveyard, it became our special hangout where we could escape everything except the call to dinner. It became my center for daydreaming and Marshall’s center for mischief planning. He, along with our friends Allen and Lee, would plan our forays into Diamond designed to terrorize the local populace.

It also became the starting point for the Great Tree Race. We would scramble to the top and back down in one on one competition as quickly as we could. Slips were a common hazard. Unfortunately, the other boys always beat me; they were two to three years older and I was the one most susceptible to slipping. My steady diet of Tarzan comic books sustained me though and I refused to give up.  Eventually, several years later, I would triumph.

Marshall was taking a teenage time-out with our grandparents who had moved to Watsonville down on the Central Coast of California. Each day I went to the Graveyard and took several practice runs up the tree. I became half ape. Each limb was memorized and an optimum route chosen. Tree climbing muscles bulged; my grip became iron and my nerves steel.

Finally, Marshall came home. He was every bit the big brother who had been away at high school while little brother stayed at home and finished grade school. He talked of cars and girls and wild parties and of his friend Dwight who could knock people out with one punch.

I casually mentioned the possibility of a race to the top of the Tree. What a set up. Two pack-a-day sixteen-year old cigarette smokers aren’t into tree climbing but how can you resist a challenge from your little brother.

Off we went. Marsh didn’t stand a chance. It was payback time for a million big brother abuses. I flew up and down the tree. I hardly touched the limbs. Slip? So what, I would catch the next limb. Marsh was about half way up the tree when I passed him on my way down. I showed no mercy and greeted him with a grin when he arrived, huffing and puffing, back at the tree house.

His sense of humor was minimal but I considered the results a fitting end to The Great Tree Race and my years of close association with the Grave Yard.