No Experience Necessary: The Redemption of a Bohemian Zero

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Introduction

Walking down wind-swept Market Street in San Francisco on a July day in 1980 – my first of 23 summers in that city – I spied a particular street corner musician, whom I would see again and again on subsequent walks downtown. Street corner musicians, evangelists, hawkers, chess players, and beggars are not unusual fixtures. They are a constant and intimate part of the mosaic that also includes tourists, shoppers, workers, and local bohemians whose paths cross daily at the Powell and Market cable car turn around.

Today a flagship GAP store dominates that corner. In 1980, however, that corner was decidedly shabbier, as was I – a newly arrived expatriate from New York who had at last succumbed to the seduction of the West. In the years before my migration, I had read and taken too seriously the works of Jack Kerouac, was uninterested in anything that had to do with working for corporate America, and was mildly delusional about my prospects for getting serious about a writing career in my enchanting new city by the bay. I was unemployed. But I had found a flat to share for $50 a month with three other young bohemians on the top floor of an old, three-story Queen Anne Victorian house on Sutter Street.

My companion that day was B. June, one of my new roommates, who would later become my first wife. At the time we were new friends, and she was taking the newcomer under her wing and orienting me to the life of a hip San Franciscan. As we passed the plaza by the cable car turnaround and entrance to the BART station she said, Check this guy out. I love him! He’s here every day. Standing near the railing above the subway entrance, was a tall, lanky, cadaverous-looking young man, stubbly-faced, with close-cropped, blond hair. It was a warm day, yet he wore long pants, worn and dirty looking, a dress shirt open at the neck – exposing a grimy collar – and a polyester, hound’s tooth jacket. Strapped over his shoulder was an electric bass guitar hooked up to a small amplifier. He plucked one note with a steady beat and intoned these presumably original lyrics – Work, work, study, study. Study, study, work, work – over and over.

On subsequent trips downtown, I would find him in the same spot chanting his mantra. I could not tell whether his song was a lamentation of a life made meaningless through mental and physical overexertion or an admonishment to stop dicking around and make something of himself. It was hard to tell since he mostly stared straight ahead and rarely changed the intonation of his delivery. Clearly he was a madman. Or was he? I concocted all kinds of origin stories for him. Scion of a wealthy family whose patriarch wanted him to graduate from Harvard as generations before had, our hero cracked under the pressure, ran away to Haight Street in the Summer of Love, dropped one too many tabs of acid, was ignominiously cast from the family, and was now forced to rely on the kindness of strangers passing by to drop a coin or occasional bill as he droned his hard luck story, Work, work, study, study. Study, study, work, work.

He became my favorite street artist, albeit a sentimental one, for there were many more with greater talent – the dreadlocked, loin-clothed classical violinist who played in the BART station, the Viking helmeted songstress who accompanied herself on keyboard and sang an airy version of Stairway to Heaven, and the Turret’s guy, who held court at the California Street cable car terminus, sitting on a bench looking well-groomed and sane and then suddenly blurting out loud, angry, epithet-laden diatribes about Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. But I loved my bass playing, walking cadaver. He reminded me of the thin line between sanity and madness. He made me think, There, but for the grace of God, go I. He was a poster boy for a life of struggle.

I had struggled too, though admittedly my struggles were the typical, ignoble ones of a youngest of three children raised in 1950s suburban middle class comfort. My greatest struggle revolved around the post college graduation question, What am I going to do with the rest of my life? Unable to answer this question easily, I protracted my adolescence while drifting through a series of jobs I hoped would give me an answer. Along the way, but especially after reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, I decided I wanted to be a writer, and the jobs I took thereafter were more for expedience than to answer any philosophical pondering of life’s purpose. Between jobs I would immerse myself in solitary travel and self-study. At times I felt like I was careening on an inexorable course towards insanity and despair, for the question, What am I going to do with the rest of my life? nagged me incessantly even after I had proclaimed to my family my intention to lead an artist’s life. In retrospect, what I was slowly doing was answering the question, "What don’t I want to do with the rest of my life?"

Going back to childhood, I have had close to two dozen separate, distinct jobs in my life before finally settling into a career. Each one taught me something about the nature and rules of work, played a role in the development of my character, and ultimately led me out of the morass of my post-college, bohemian life. Those places of employment included: a boys’ camp, a beach and tennis club, a radio station, a private psychiatric hospital, a construction site, a factory, a famous television broadcasting company, an art studio, an import store, an oil company, a customs brokerage, and finally a public school district.

Along that circuitous path, I had jobs that I loved and jobs that I loathed. I encountered both career opportunities and dead ends. I had bosses I liked and admired and bosses I detested. Most were simply innocuous. I forged friendships with fellow worker bees that have lasted a lifetime. Other friendships flared hot while we shared both the agony and the élan of an office, factory, or construction site but have been left behind and mostly forgotten with time. Most of the jobs I quit. I was fired from two. Some simply ran their course, and it was time for me to move on. Until I started working for the SOHIO Petroleum Company in downtown San Francisco in 1982 at the age of 29, the longest I had stayed at any one job was less than a year. Some of the jobs lasted only weeks or even days. I drove my poor parents crazy, for they worked at their respective corporations for most of their adult lives. Mostly, though, I drove myself crazy.

In my mid-30’s I finally found my calling as a teacher. I have been an educator now for over 25 years. Sixteen of those years were spent in the same suburban San Francisco public school district. I even rose to be an administrator for five years – first as an assistant principal and later as a principal – of a 450 student middle school. I have enjoyed career success and satisfaction while having my share of challenging experiences in my chosen field. I suppose I do not need to continue to pose the question, What am I going to do with the rest of my life? But lately I have been pondering how I got to where I am and if the path I took is typical for people my age? Am I a true product of the Baby Boom generation – possessing both the negatives of being pampered and self-indulgent and the positives of being independent and idealistic? What part has work played in my life? What were the lessons that I learned along the way, as I embraced and then shed my bohemian identity?

Sometime in the1980s, my Market Street muse disappeared. I do not know what became of him. Maybe he became homeless and perished on the mean streets like so many do. Or perhaps someone took him in or away. Still, his madman’s chant has stayed with me all of these years – sometimes like a mantra, sometimes like a clarion call to strive for success, and sometimes just like any inane song that gets stuck in your head. Work, work, study, study. Study, study, work, work. That has become the story of my life.

Part One: Role Models

The Melting Pot

I have never truly been in danger of starvation or homelessness. Even while flirting with being a starving artist in Manhattan in my twenties, I was never more than a 30 minute train ride away from my sister Ellen’s house in Rye where a Sunday dinner awaited me, and despite being mildly paranoid about my health – a trait inherited from my father – I have never suffered from any serious illness. That is if you do not count allergies to grass and pretty much any flora on the planet. I outgrew those, thankfully. My late older brother, Bob Jr., would have attributed that to all of the fresh cut grass clippings he stuffed down my shirt as a kid, the subsequent exposure to those histamines building an eventual immunity to anything that might cause swollen sinuses and watery eyes. My mother, Betty, would have attributed that to the weekly visits, when I was six years old, to Dr. Adams, the allergist who used my scrawny, emerging deltoids as pin cushions, injecting me with potions that in time bolstered my resistance to anything toxic the natural world had to throw at me.

Actually, I had the proverbial happy childhood. Blissfully happy? Of course not. I suffered from the same fears that plagued any kid growing up in the 50’s and 60’s – being buried by shoe thumping Kruschev, being told I was hell bound by Sister Sirah, being pinned to the ground by my brother while he dangled luggies over my face, managing only occasionally to suck them back into his mouth before they landed right between my eyes or in them. Most of my suffering as a kid came from external sources and my reaction to them. As a kid, when you are dragged to Latin Mass every Sunday morning for twelve years and told in catechism not that Jesus loves you but that you are a sinner, you believe it. Having ancient English roots on Dad’s side of the family combined with Mom’s good Irish/German Catholic ones certainly helped my innate emotional stability as a child. Those roots have much to do with the life of work and study I pursued.

I was raised in Rye, New York, a Westchester County suburb that dates back to the late 1600’s when a Dutchman named Peter Manursing – if memory of childhood lessons on Rye’s history serve me correctly – swindled some local Indians out of their land. What grew along that pristine shoreline on the mainland side of Long Island Sound was a picturesque village of farms and shipyards. As the village grew to a town and later to a small city, due to its proximity to the ever-expanding metropolis to the south, the farms gave way to estates and eventually comfortable neighborhoods of houses both modest and grand.

The Gedneys were among America’s earliest settlers, descendants of fen dwellers along England’s North Sea coast in Lincolnshire. The name even appears in the Doomsday Book as De Geddenay. Unlike others of William’s conquered who took surnames based on occupation, the closest family historians have been able to come to an explanation of the derivation is a reach at best. Gedney is a combination of two words of Norse origin – gedd, a type of fish from the North Sea and ney, a spit of land. Fish island in other words. The family crest prominently displays two crossed fish. Not swords, lances, or even axes, but fish.

John Gedney, a Puritan who hightailed it out of England in the year 1637 and settled in Salem, Massachusetts was our forebear. He was a shipbuilder and a merchant who prospered in the New World and left his progeny well off. I presume he achieved his status in old Salem through hard work and study of the Bible and passed this ethic onto his sons.

One of those sons, Bartholomew, had a distinguished colonial career fighting Indians and burning witches. After returning from battle in King Philip’s War – a bloody conflict that ultimately broke the back of Indian resistance in coastal New England – old Bartholomew was called upon to sit on the panel of judges for the Court of Terminer and Adjoiner, the court that oversaw the trying, sentencing, imprisonment, and execution of witches during Salem’s infamous period of hysteria. Batholomew apparently had one opportunity to stop the madness when an old war buddy, the son of Priscilla and John Alden, was called before the court as a suspected witch. Apparently, Mr. Alden had scoffed at the proceedings and was summoned forth to answer for his cynicism. When he appeared in court, he appealed to Bartholomew to speak in support of him, but Bartholomew remained silent. Those twitching, teenaged Salem Sabrinas had apparently gotten the better of him. Alden stormed out in defiance, mounted his horse, rode away, and was never bothered by the witch hysterics again. Bartholomew was not the only Gedney to be connected with ignominy.

In 1826, naval Lieutenant Thomas Gedney was cruising along in his ship the Washington in the coastal waters off of Montauk Point when he spotted the drifting ship the Amistad, upon which a bloody slave revolt had occurred. He and his cohort Lieutenant Meade took the ship to port in New Haven as Connecticut had not yet outlawed slavery. Hooray! I thought as I watched the Spielberg film a number of years ago, a noble Gedney who has rescued some would-be slaves. A few frames later, Lt. Gedney is in court suing for the right to take the Amistad slaves as salvage! Very noble. Way to go, you prick. No doubt, he was another hard working Gedney who studied long hours to become an officer and knew that selling the Amistad slaves could mean an early retirement from endless coastal patrolling.

I have been told another Gedney once owned the famous abolitionist Sojourner Truth. She sued him for her freedom and won. On the other hand, one Captain Gedney, a merchant based out of Rye, gave sanctuary on one of his ships to a fugitive slave and faced down, with a brace of pistols, an angry mob that came to reclaim the runaway.

But it is Bartholomew’s brother Eleazar to whom all living Gedneys are indebted, for he left Salem some time around the end of the 17th century and moved to Mamaroneck, New York, where he married Ann Richbell, the daughter of the town’s founder. A chip off the old block of father John Gedney, Eleazar started a shipbuilding business, prospered, had kids, and founded an uninterrupted line of Gedneys in Westchester County who subsequently spread out and gobbled up large tracts of land in White Plains, Mamaroneck, Harrison, and Rye. Some carried on as shipbuilders and merchants and others became farmers. A few had to flee to Canada or hide out up the Hudson River Valley where they remained loyal to that debauched oppressor King George III during the Revolutionary War.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the Westchester Gedneys became quite wealthy and well known throughout the area. When the original family plot – which today remains preserved in a curve of land adjacent to the Mamaroneck Avenue off ramp of the New England Thruway – filled up, Gedney deceased were spread out to populate large sections of Greenwood Union Cemetery in Rye, their large headstones a testament to their prosperity.

Perhaps it was because lesser known Gedneys had eschewed hard work and begun leading lives ruled less by their Puritan ethos, by the time my grandfather John Gedney was born in 1880, the large tracts of Gedney land and Gedney homesteads had mostly passed out of the family. The reasons for this are pure speculation because I cannot recall my father or any of his seven siblings ever being able to tell us what happened specifically to the symbols of early Westchester Gedney industriousness – their land, their homes, and their businesses.

By the time I was born, the only symbols of that former wealth were some streets and a park in White Plains named after the family, the large headstones in Greenwood Union, and the historic preservation of the original family plot on Mamaroneck Avenue, where Eleazar’s modest brown headstone has eroded to the point where one can no longer learn that he was born in Boston Government. And what happened to the Salem Gedneys? Those witch burning descendants of Bartholomew exited the stage, his line dying out by the end of the 18th century.

While my Gedney origins stretch back to a time when William the Conqueror drove some poor fishermen out of the squalid swamps of coastal England and made them take last names, my mother’s family origins are far less clear, even with one of the most common names of Irish descent in the world – Kelly. When her siblings traveled to Ireland many years ago in hopes of finding Kelly ancestors, every Kelly they met became a beloved cousin. After many wild goose chases that wound up in pubs with pints, they resigned themselves to never knowing exactly where their grandfather – my great grandfather – John Kelly came from. Anyone in this pub know the John Kelly who had American descendants? One can imagine twenty eager Irish pub patrons willing to raise a pint and claim the Americans as their long lost cousins.

I do know that my great grandfather, John Kelly, was born in Ireland in 1843 and arrived in America in 1855 at the age of twelve. I can only surmise what childhood horrors of famine and death he might have experienced. Could a twelve year old have made it to America on his own? In our era where individuals three times that age still live with mom and dad that would seem unlikely. However, in that age, who knows? Whether accompanied by his dad Patrick and mom Margaret or alone, the fact is he made it here and began a line, one of gazillions I am sure, of Kellys in America.

I also know that he became a citizen of the United States on October 5, 1864 at the age of 21. The Civil War dragged on at that time with Grant pursuing Lee and their armies clashing with carnage unimaginable. Draft riots rocked New York City – many involving Irish immigrants. Did John Kelly at the prime age of 21 participate in any of these great historical events? Beats me. At some point, though, he migrated to Rye and eventually became the herdsman on a large estate owned by the Parson’s family. The estate would later become the grounds of the Rye High School, and the herdsman’s home on the grounds of the estate – later the site of the football team’s field house – was the birthplace of my grandfather, John Jordan Kelly.

Like the Kelly ancestry, my maternal grandmother’s lineage becomes obliterated within a generation or two before her. I do know that my great grandmother on my mother’s side, Kunigunde Hollmann, was born in Germany in 1870, and like John Kelly before her, came to America in one of those large, nameless waves of 19th century immigration. She settled in New York City and met and married my maternal great grandfather, Hans Herdrich. They had three children, my grandmother Gertrude, her sister Anna, and a younger brother, Hans Jr.

Sadly, the Herdrich clan was touched by tragedy. Great grandfather Hans was the subject of one of the tragedies. Hans was the victim of a traffic accident in Manhattan. While crossing a busy city street, he was run over by a team of horses. What else Hans may have accomplished in his life besides the siring of three children has faded into oblivion. It is unfortunate that he is remembered only for his demise.

His untimely end, however, led my great grandmother Kunigunde to remarry, this time to a German innkeeper named Frederick Niedringhaus, and sometime in the early 20th century, they moved to Rye where Frederick established a hotel. It was behind the bar of that hotel that the second tragedy occurred. My grandmother’s brother, Hans Jr., found the loaded pistol his stepfather kept there, started playing with it, and in front of my horrified grandmother and her sister, Anna, accidentally shot himself in the head. What followed is again obscured by time’s passage, but I do know that my grandmother ever after had an extreme fear and loathing of guns.

The hotel eventually closed its doors, but the apparently resilient and industrious Niedringhaus obtained yet another property on the Boston Post Road and, like Fitzcaraldo lugging his steamship up an Andes mountain, moved the entire building to the convergence of five streets in another part of Rye. In the basement of that three-story home, he opened in the 1920s a club where he and his friends could play cards. One can speculate on the other activities of Frederick’s card club – later on a den of inequity one floor below my ancient great grandmother, Kunigunde, and two floors below my grandparents, John and Gertrude – for in the years to follow it morphed into The Five Points, the most notorious dive bar in Rye. This banned establishment became a magnet for area teens and being served a drink there a rite of passage. It was infamous for drunken brawls with cross border interlopers from Connecticut who drank in New York where the legal age for alcohol consumption was then eighteen. It was also a hangout for me in the blue collar phase of my life many years later.

The convergence of those streets in Rye symbolize the blending of two hardworking families, the Gedneys and the Kellys – one with known origins going back many generations, the other newly emerged into middle class respectability from more humble beginnings. I came from the convergence of those two families with a genetic propensity towards both hard work and occasional dissipation. Moreover, I was to learn from the example of both of my parents the role that tireless labor plays in the life of a man.

Can I Help?

Mom liked to tell my siblings and me that we were not born with silver spoons in our mouths. The first time I remember hearing that expression – at a ripe young age – I did not know what that meant. I thought all spoons were made out of silver, but because the answer was given somewhat curtly in response to a query I had made about why my mother was going to start working full time, I figured it had something to do with our being poor. Now, we weren’t really poor, although by Rye standards you would not call us well off either. I was five years old and had just started kindergarten when my mother announced she had found a job working in the test kitchens of some place called General Foods. I thought that was a funny name for a military man but thought it odder still that my mother was not going to be home with me anymore. The plan, I later learned, was for Mom to return to work full time so that she and Dad could save money faster and be able to move out of the little two-bedroom apartment we lived in. Dad’s mom was living with us at the time. Bobby, Ellen, and I shared the large bedroom while Mom and Dad slept in the living room. To a five year old this seemed like a perfectly satisfactory arrangement. But come to think of it, we had just moved from our own house in Maine where we had moved to from Rye right after I was born.

Dad had moved us to central Maine to start a television business in the little town of Pittsfield. I suspect there is a complicated family history that goes along with that move, for my father was not the particularly adventurous type. So for him to have taken a gamble on starting a business in the early 1950s selling, installing, and servicing televisions throughout central Maine, there had to have been a compelling reason.

I liked Maine, what I remember of it. I had a sweet shepherd-collie mix named Pal for a while. He got run over. I used to lie in the pool of sunlight on the kitchen floor with my head on his body stroking one of his ears between a thumb and forefinger while sucking contentedly on my other thumb. I had my tonsils removed and tried to sneak out of the hospital. Bobby kicked me in the mouth when I followed him too closely up the stairs. He later claimed this saved me from developing a cleft pallet. Nice. But then, like a nice big brother, he searched tirelessly until he found my stuffed dog, Dorg, in a rain soaked field after a mean neighbor kid had stolen it off my swing set. I fell backwards off the top of a snow bank and sunk headfirst into what seemed to me at the time a crevasse to rival the Khumbu Ice Field on Everest. I screamed bloody murder, and Dad pulled me out. I had a coonskin cap, a sandbox, and one of those metal cars you sit in and peddle like a bicycle to make go. Excluded from playing outside after my tonsillectomy and being taunted by Ellen caused me to have a fit of apoplexy in which I knocked over a scythe that cut her shoulder. I slipped one day while running across the slick wood floor of the front foyer and cracked my right eye socket open on the bottom, central hall stair. Two stitches fixed that up and left me with a lifelong scar. Dad came to my rescue again saving my sorry little ass when he pulled a piece of bacon from my throat one Sunday morning after I had tried greedily to consume the whole piece in one bite. Mom taught me how to tie my shoes and comforted me with a story as I cowered indoors during a ferocious thunderstorm the summer before we moved back to Rye.

Mostly what I remember about Dad from these earliest days was that he was always working. He had that good Protestant work ethic just like all those old farmer and shipbuilding Gedneys back in Salem and Mamaroneck. But he was not a church goer, so I guess he had the work ethic, without the Protestantism to go with it, because it had become so encoded in the Gedney make up by then as to be innate. In the heat of summer and the dead of winter, he installed those TV s, braving thunderstorms and icy roofs to metal strap an antenna to a chimney and bring the magic of the television age to yet another eager family. He sold Margaret Chase Smith, the Grand Old Dame of the United States Senate, her first television. She is reputed to have been a classy lady who did not introduce a single piece of legislation throughout her long career in the Senate, but who nonetheless was re-elected time and time again. I guess she got too busy watching The 64 Dollar Question to think about writing laws.

Even when he was not working, there was work to be done. He was an inveterate putterer. The grass had to be cut; the hedges trimmed; the house painted; the gutters cleaned out. When he wasn’t doing things to or around the house, he was building radios in the basement and having short wave conversations with other HAM radio enthusiasts around the world. A quiet, solitary, and retiring type, this was his escape from a wife who was his polar opposite and from three hyper kids. The basement, the attic, a closet, wherever he put his radios in whatever home we ever dwelt in – they all became his Fortress of Solitude.

Then, according to Mom – the repository and the dispenser of all family history – we moved back to Rye because Dad did not want my sister, Ellen, marrying some farmer. I imagine it was more complicated than that, but this was the oft-repeated reason down the years that followed. I think Dad, then in his early forties, just got tired of working from a pick up truck all day, lugging televisions around, climbing up and down ladders, and driving around all over creation to the poorer parts of rural Maine, the places my mom referred to as tobacco road. He got an eyeful of rural squalor in those isolated hamlets – yards strewn with rusting junked old cars, refrigerators, and other appliances so deteriorated as to be unrecognizable. Huge families would be living in tarpaper-covered shacks and would pour out of their door when the TV guy pulled up in his truck to install their brand new oracle. He was in a world far from his Rye roots, and though really just a working class fellow himself, the nobility and pride of pistol packin’ Captain Gedney, who chased off the slave catchers, ran deep in his veins. Not that he would have ever expressed any of this or admitted for a second any reason past the most practical, I, nonetheless, now believe he was heeding a call to return to his roots.

He sold the television business and took a job in Stamford, Connecticut with the Pitney-Bowes Corporation – famous for all of the machines used in post offices and mail rooms around the world – and it was there he stayed for the rest of his working life. The Maine adventure was over before it had barely begun for an audacious lad like me. I imagine those five years seemed a lot longer to my parents, although Mom always claimed later that those "five wonderful years’’ were the happiest of her life.

Back in Rye, we settled into the little two-bedroom apartment on Walnut Street, and Dad and Mom hatched the plan to work their way to middle class respectability and home ownership. Of course the plan was complicated with three kids – a high school student, a middle schooler, and a kindergartner – not to mention an elderly mother, my Grandma Emma Mae Weeks Gedney, who was in frail health at best. Dad had taken care of her off and on throughout his entire life going back to the age of thirteen when he had to drop out of the eighth grade to help support her and his seven siblings after Dadder, my grandfather Gedney, dropped dead of a heart attack while playing baseball. The silver spoon those earlier Gedneys had sure would have come in handy then, but alas Dad’s fate would be a life of labor.

He never talked much about those days, but a photo from that era, the late 1920s, shows Dad at about age fourteen, squinting into the sun, a slight smile on his face, his hair slicked back, dressed in a white shirt with a tie, one arm akimbo, standing with pride next to the bicycle he rode to make deliveries for a local pharmacist. A stint in the Navy in the 1930s climaxed with being stuck at sea in a great hurricane off the coast of Cuba and cured him of any further desires to see the world. Back in the States and a civilian again, he attended an RCA trade school where he learned to make radios and began his life long affair with the airwaves. He was a self-made man, who overcame a childhood that demanded much in the way of responsibility towards other family members. He had worked hard to get where he was in life, so when that assembly line job at Pitney Bowes arrived, he was ready to settle in for the long haul. And that is what he did, rising over time to become a foreman and then a manager. He often preached loyalty to a single employer, but as he grew closer towards retirement, I saw a man who looked tired and worn down by his life of labor and corporate dedication and was hanging on by his fingernails for that day when he could retire.

From him I learned that working for yourself selling and installing televisions meant you got to drive around in a cool pickup truck, but you were secretly worried some farmer was going to marry your daughter. So it was better to work for someone else and to do