Weirick Lake: August, 1976

Shortly after returning home, my dad invited me to his trailer park located just south of Corona, California.

While this isn't technically part of my bi-centennial trip, I decided to include it, primarily because my dad is a great example of living the American Dream.

By the time my dad was old enough for school, the Great Depression had already taken hold, and rural Ryder, North Dakota, wasn't exempt from its wrath. While his family with six kids lived in town, my dad started working on a nearby farm when he was seven to help the family make ends meet.

He also started smoking at that age, because he felt like it kept him warm walking through the bone-chilling winters. Despite working at such a young age, he completed high school, graduating in 1943 so that he could head off to World War II. Talk about starting life at a tough time.

In spite of this, or perhaps because of this, my dad was the perrenial optimist. He always knew the best was yet to come. He eschewed caution and fear, taking the paths without safety nets.

He went to Alabama as part of his Army training, and that's where he met and married my mother. They were very young, but who knew how long they would be alive with Nazi Germany and Japan looking unbeatable to many?

He became a barber on the GI Bill after honorably discharging from the Army at the conclusion of the war, but when the Korean War broke out, he re-upped.

He headed out to California after his second hitch ended.

In Los Angeles, he worked in a barber shop, and one of his customers was Howard Hughes. Not knowing much about HH's early life, I made a comment about him being nuts, which is what the mainstream media stressed.

My dad told me Hughes was a great man. Hughes apparently valued his anonymity in getting a hair cut a great deal, because one day my dad acknowledged him by name. "Thanks Mr. Hughes." My dad said that when Hughes turned and looked at him, he knew he would never see Hughes again. Apparently, HH thought nobody knew who he was at that barber shop. After that, my dad went to beauty school, again on the GI Bill, to become a hair dresser.

I remember being a small boy of two and sitting in an empty storefront as my mom and dad built half wall partitions and installed beauty chairs in Belmont Shores, where he opened his first beauty salon.

I can't think of a much financially riskier business than the beauty business, with all its competition for a service that no one really needs, but my dad never doubted his ability to attract customers.

He was an expert, entering and winning beauty contests with my mom and sister as his models.

Every summer at some point in August, he would come home and say, "Let's go on vacation," and off we would go on a road trip.

One time, we went to North Dakota, and I must say it was a depressing place. The most interesting thing was the giant grasshoppers, and in the fields, farmers would skewer grasshoppers and cook them over a fire. It grossed me out, but they said they tasted great. No wonder my dad hadn't been back in so many years.

My dad always listened to Earl Nightingale and other positive thinking speakers, and while he made a good living from his beauty shop, he was always looking for a way to "mulitply his hands."

He sold Nutrilite and Amway with Mom, building up large organizations and reaching the "Key Agent" milestone, but it never did exactly what he hoped.

When he was about 45, he became enamored with mobile home parks. He liked the idea of owning residential real estate but not owning the part above the ground. It was a good dream for him, and eventually through a series twists, he ended up buying rundown Weirick Lake Trailer Park directly from the owners on favorable terms. The park wasn't much to look at, but it "penciled out," as he would say. More importantly, it had the right zoning so that he could expand it to a class A mobile home park. 

That's about where he stood when he invited me out to his trailer park for the day. At the time, the rest of his invitation seemed a little unusual. "Bring that big guy Sam with you. Maybe Pete. Maybe a few other friends."

Now my dad in his Nutrilite days had held a lot of parties with my mom at our house, and every Saturday night he had a poker game on our patio with a half dozen friends, so I guess it wasn't that unusual for him to tell me to bring some friends, but he had never done so before. "Maybe we'll do some fishing and shoot guns." Shoot guns? Okay, I thought, maybe he's thinking about all those summer road trips when we would shoot guns in Alabama at my granddad's farm.

Pete and his wife Phyllis, Sam and his future wife Debbie, Sam's brother Frank and a few others whose names slip my mind headed out to Weirick Lake.

We found my dad, wearing Farmer John overalls, out there mowing the lawn on his tractor, and that furthered my assumption that he had mentioned the guns out of nostalgia, but indeed we did shoot shotguns and rifles out on the dry river bed. It was a lot of fun. We also went fishing at the pond that was the park's namesake. We had a big barbecue and enjoyed a great day.

It wasn't until later that I learned my dad had been having run-ins with some rough tenants he was trying to evict. The tenants had some motorcycle buddies ride around in circles through the park a few nights earlier, and my dad and my Uncle Bob had gone out there with guns and fired into the air from hiding places until they left. My dad had brought us out there as a show of force, and it apparently worked, as the tenants got the hell out of there. Had we only known, we probably wouldn't have worn our short shorts.