You want brief?!! I'll give you brief! I was fifteen.

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It's kind of funny; I hardly remember any detail of that particular period of my life. All I have is a fast moving jumble of vignets of things that were going on then, and they all seem to have something to do with being a teenaged boy, living in a hormone induced state of pubescent angst. I have virtually no memory of anything that was happening in the larger world, outside of my own little space.

We were living in Azusa, California, (when that Plymouth was put in the vault) I was just out of school for the summer, between my soph and junior years, I was just about a year short of getting my drivers license, and hauling really hard at the traces - I was a fairly accomplished driver, already, just not legal. I was a good kid, with decent values, in Scouts - Life, and Silver Explorer, youth group at church, a "band groupie" at school (I didn't play an instrument, but all of my friends were in band, so I hung out with, and went along as a sort of "equipment roadie"). But I had a real wild streak (I guess I always have), and it's a great wonder that I didn't get into any serious trouble. Seems like I was always breaking and fixing stuff, and almost always had a wrench or a hammer in hand, or was machining something in metal shop or wood shop, or doing leather or plastic crafty stuff. Underlying, or perhaps overlaying all of that was that hormone fog - I was seriously in lust with almost any human female between the ages of thirteen and thirty, and frustrated beyond expression. Howinell did it all fit into a day?

Just a short year later, we moved to Twentynine Palms, and life changed dramatically. But, in my memory, that summer of '57 was either empty of substance, or so packed full of it that it is too dense to see into.