Going to see the Dead, thumbing it down the Pacific Coast

The early days of Eneput Day Care Center.

Back when I was 14 and my sister was 11, mom got this great idea to see if the Grateful Dead would do a concert in Fairbanks, Alaska. Back then, the Dead would give a portion of the gate receipts to benefit nonprofits in the area.

Mom had inherited a bunch of money and like a good hippy used it all to create a foundation for a day care center and day camp that she called Eneput, which in Yupik means "our house." The place took care of scads of kids, mostly those of single mothers so they could get work in what was then a pretty godforsaken economy up North.

It always needed money. We had nothing. Mom was a true believer. We lived the life of the Last Whole Earth Catalog and Diet for a Small Planet. We raised our own food. We didn't have a car. We got cold and hitchhiked every day. Eneput always needed money. Mom was a fundraising fiend. She was into politics, and she helped write the Alaska Day Care Assistance Act, which subsidized day care for poor people.

But the Dead was a wild idea. Greg Herring was a friend of all the hippies who ran Eneput. Everybody called him Bigfoot. He was bearded and had the hair and persona of the day. He said he got to know the Dead following them around on tour.

He was an original Deadhead. He really did know them.

I didn't care. I was 14. However, one Friday after working all day as a camp counselor at mom's day camp — which had several hundred kids at Fairbanks' AlaskaLand — I found Bigfoot at the house. Not a good sign. Bigfoot always had big ideas. And he had no money. Neither did mom. I rode my bike home the 12 miles from AlaskaLand. I hated hitchhiking. Back then we mostly got picked up by people with trucks and rode in the back. That sucked in the cold.

"So," mom said. "Bigfoot will take us to meet the Grateful Dead."

"Oh?" I said, knowing that he was usually full of malarky. Then she explained. We would travel by plane to Seattle and thumb a ride at Sea-Tac. No big deal. It was 1975. Hitchhiking isn't legal on the freeways until Oregon but we wait at the on-ramps.

"It will be an adventure," mom said.

It was. We bought one-way tickets to Seattle from Fairbanks International, landed in Seattle with no cash. Of course the banks were closed. Mom had a check book and her voter registration card. Nobody took her checks. I had $20 I didn't tell her about until later.

We got a ride immediately from the airport. Some insurance salesman in a rental. He was nice. Loved the Dead story. Then we got stuck at every on-ramp on Interstate 5. One place had a line of us hitchhikers. One group had been there over night. It didn't look good.

He's the kind of cop who's been there and treats everyone with respect, even those he arrests

Henry Diaz in his squad car.

Editor's Note: After an absence from journalism of about five years working on clean energy for a nonprofit and then on getting clean trucks for California's roadways for an air district, I went back to writing at a weekly newspaper. This is one of my favorite stories so far. It appeared in the Sanger Herald April 30, 2015.

Henry Diaz is a throwback, the kind of cop who knows just about everybody on his beat.

He's a police officer who understands his town of Sanger, Calif., population about 25,000, because he's part of it. He is Sanger, which is generally poor and 80 percent nonwhite. He was raised in the notorious Chankla neighborhood, the son of a hard-working single immigrant mom who wanted the best for her children. He went to Jefferson Elementary. He graduated from Sanger High in 1994.

"He's the same guy, the same person I met years ago," said his wife, Maricela Diaz. "He's very humble. He likes people, and he's very friendly."

She said she was pleasantly surprised when she learned her husband of 17 years was named Officer of the Year by the Sanger Police Department in early April. Yet, she was a little concerned that the online posting of the news would generate snide comments, since police officers these days aren't often getting the greatest press.

She shouldn't have worried.

The initial Sanger Herald Facebook post about Henry Diaz receiving the honor in early April garnered 226 likes, 15 shares and a then-record more than 4,400 views. The brief post and photo about Diaz getting named Officer of the Year generated scads of comments like this one from Bobby and Denise Perez: "Congratulations Henry. You (are) a great role model for our Kids! Sanger is lucky to (have an) Officer like You."

And this from Jason Boust: "Very well deserved."

And this from Jessica Guerra: "Congratulations to my compadre Henry! Sanger is blessed to have an officer like Henry."

Diaz is the kind of officer who stands in stark contrast to the negative publicity given to police officers nationwide by the plethora of cell phone videos chronicling abuses against suspects. He's the counter argument — the guy people know and trust.

Apu's epitaph: The old Hungarian who went to Heaven for an Olde English 800

Me, Jennifer and Apu on the final road trip.

Editor's note: I wrote this the morning my father died. It's been some years now. The avowed socialist, anticommunist freedom fighter and Hungarian patriot was a stubborn sort. I still get sentimental thinking about him.

My dad was 71 when he died. He called me one night 2 1/2 years earlier saying the SS (the Shutzstaffel, the Nazi paramilitary corps) were on his doorstep with guns and were going to take him to the camps. My dad, Imre Antal Nemeth, had a Jewish mother and had been hidden in Hungary during World War II. He was raised Catholic and squirreled away with his maternal grandparents in a tiny village on the Croatian border. 

The SS Nazi  soldier reference was my first real clue we had any Jewish heritage. Then his friend Steve a month later called to say I had to do something. Luckily, Jennifer, my daughter, drove from Bellingham, Wash. to Seattle every night and slept over and went back to work (two hours each way). She spent weekends with him, too. She took leave for the final weeks, continuing for five or six. But he had clearly lost his mind. She could no longer distract his crazy plans with a cookie.

He was just months from retiring after decades welding big steel girders for commercial buildings as a union ironworker. Most people called him Red. Nobody could prononce his real name. He gave it to me, too. That's why I'm called Mike.

I flew up to Seattle and in three hours loaded up six boxes of his stuff and told him to get in his little Ford Escape. "You're coming with me," I said. He had been eating rotting meat, had nearly burned his house down and was seeing imaginary people. And he was angry others couldn't see it. He almost killed a woman in a car accident, so Jennifer had taken his keys. He berated her something awful, but she is tough. 

After I got him to Clovis, Calif., where I live, I tried to keep him at my house, but he flew into a rage and tried to beat me up. I stayed up all night the first night after driving 17 hours (he tried to escape once at a gas station). I had to keep him in the house. I put on double locking deadbolts that next day. 

For the first couple of months, he lived OK in assisted care at $1,500 a month. Then he ran off twice, once when it was 107 degrees. He found his way to an Indian casino. We found him a second time confused and sun burned. He had wandered near my house. Three cop agencies were out looking for him. He was the first ever to escape from the facility's memory care center, sneaking out a window and scaling an 8-foot gate. Dogs tracked him for nearly a dozen miles of weird wandering.

How my son Calvin smelled worse than a tiger with explosive bowels

Calvin in his tiger suit with sister Jennifer.

This is a simple story about the most explosive shit my son ever took. I was unprepared as usual. What did this kid eat? I asked at the time. How could anyone shit his pants so fully?

Here's how we get to that fateful day in the shadow of Seattle's Paramount Theater. I was a semi-young father, thinking I had an answer for things I didn't have a clue about.

It was Saturday, and Saturdays meant I had my son Calvin from about 5 a.m. until my wife finished delivering the mail in nearby Marysville, usually after 5 or 6 p.m. We lived on the west side of remote Camano Island near the beach. All the responsibilities she shouldered most of the previous week fell to me, and I wasn't all that great at dealing with them.

By responsibilities, I mean Calvin. He was a fussy kid. He needed a lot of distraction. I couldn't do anything else. No work, no projects. I once took him to my father's 5 acres on the south side of the island where we lived and did some maintenance. He was right next to me. The next thing I knew, he had wandered uphill to the highway and some older couple was escorting him back. The look the lady gave me was "what kind of inbred loser are you?"

Calvin was all or nothing. So those Saturdays, I kept him busy. I would bundle him up and head out running. I'd push him in the runner's stroller while Sajo, our black Lab, ran alongside. He loved it and would continue a running commentary of the trees, weeds, houses and the blasts of wind off Puget Sound. But that only took an hour. I ran just 5 miles.