Straddling Two Worlds in Old San Jose, Part 2
Crime in the Suburbs (Counterfeit Dough and the UNICEF Mugger) and Letting Trillions of Dollars Slip Through My Fingers
Part 1 of this 2-part extravaganza can be found here.
Our neighbors also contributed to making life in our neighborhood more interesting.
One weekday after school, I was visiting the home of a couple of boys who lived at the other end of the cul-de-sac. For reasons that will soon become apparent, I won’t divulge the family name. It was the make of a car, though, so we’ll call them the Ford family. Mr. Ford came home from work. He was in an ebullient mood, which was a side of him I had never seen before—normally, the gruff and portly gent, who was a bigwig (or so he said) at a company called Best Industries or something similar, was a growling sourpuss.
He obviously had some news he was anxious to share with his family, but first paused and looked at me suspiciously. A storm cloud passed over his visage; it seemed for a moment as if he was going to tell me to go home, but then thought to himself, ‘Ah, he’s just a dumb kid,’ shrugged his shoulders, and pulled a sheaf of papers out of his attache case.
“I did it! After all these years of working on it!” proclaimed Mr. Ford, proudly displaying his handiwork to his family. I was curious, of course, and looked at the sheets, too. Not only was I quite impressed by the workmanship of what I saw, but also shocked.
Admittedly, I was only eight or nine years old at the time, but the counterfeit $20 bills, six to a page, looked completely authentic to me. To make a long story short, I told my parents about it, but my tale was apparently too far-fetched for them. Not long afterward, quite a few police officers were at their house attending to another matter. I tried to interest one of the cops in the counterfeit bills, but he only half-listened briefly and then waved me away. So, after being ignored twice, I gave up my career as an informant.
The other noteworthy incident took place on Halloween (probably the last Halloween I ever celebrated). I was out coercing candy from neighbors and strangers within a few blocks of home with my older brother Teddy, a mutual friend of ours named Mitchell, and about ten other “camp followers.” While my brother and I and other sugar fiends were after the candy, Mitch was collecting money for UNICEF. He had a tube with that acronym printed on out. At each door, after the “Trick-or-Treat!” candy grab perpetrated by the rest of us, Mitch would tell the householders what he was doing, and ask for a charitable donation. Most people gave him a few coins. We didn’t recognize one of the kids in our informal group of candy extortioners, but we hadn’t paid him much attention—we just assumed he was only intent on collecting confectionery like the rest of us.
We were disabused of that notion when, after Mitchell’s UNICEF tube was almost filled to the brim, this little delinquent suddenly stepped up to us, slugged Mitch in the arm, grabbed the tube of coins, and took to his heels.
“Hey! Come back!” we yelled (as if that was going to work), “He was collecting that for charity!” His deed was not only illegal but downright rotten. Here was Mitchell selflessly collecting money for others instead of giving in to sweetsgreed, and this hooligan comes along and steals the donated funds, not just from Mitchell, but from the intended beneficiaries. We gave chase, but were unable to catch up to him.
My other memories of San Jose are of almost getting hit by cars on a couple of occasions while riding my bike (I was a bit of a carefree daredevil), collecting Marvel comic books, and being gifted a large stack of Beatles cards from a kid I didn’t even know: I was walking home from school, and he was standing in his yard, looking for a likely candidate for his largesse. He approached me and asked, “Hey, do you want these Beatles cards?”
“Sure!” I said, greedily grabbing the pile of cardboard rectangles.
The stack was several inches high. I wish I still had them, as they are doubtless worth several trillion dollars now (as are the early editions of several Marvel superhero comics I had in my collection, too).
After our two years in San Jose, my dad was able to get a transfer to rural Calaveras County. By then I had grown to love the excitement of San Jose, and had good friends there. Just as I hadn’t wanted to leave Eureka two years previously, now I didn’t want to leave San Jose.
But my mom (she’s a clever one) “sold” me on the idea of relocating to the country by comparing life in the Sierra Nevada foothills to the one led by the adventurous Tom Sawyer. I pictured Teddy and I building a raft and floating down the river on it, and so—albeit still somewhat reluctantly—“bid farewell to woods and fields, and scenes of play, and playmates loved so well.”