Old Age

[Rick Hurst]

It just creeps up on us all.

[Ted Menelly]

It just creeps up on us all.

How is he even still alive after all these years in the pen??????

Simply amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[John Arnold]

How is he even still alive after all these years in the pen??????

Simply amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

He has to be one tough scary dude.

[Ted Menelly]

He has to be one tough scary dude.

You do know who that insane f*** is, right?

[John Arnold]

You do know who that insane f*** is, right?

Absolutely. Charles Manson.

[Rick Hurst]

How is he even still alive after all these years in the pen??????

Simply amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ted,

Thats because he is in a maximum security prison and I'm sure he is protected by guards extremely well.

No one can touch him is what I've heard.

rick

[Ted Menelly]

Ted,

Thats because he is in a maximum security prison and I'm sure he is protected by guards extremely well.

No one can touch him is what I've heard.

rick

Gees. The guards could not have done an oops and left his cell door unlocked

[Nick Ostrowski]

He actually tried to escape from prison years ago in a homemade hot air balloon. If you're trying to fly under the radar and not be seen, you might want to pick something other than a hot air balloon Charlie.

[Jim Luttrall]

I heard in prison you have to use what you have plenty of... he had plenty of hot air for the balloon and b/s for ballast.

[Michael Thomas]

Many many years ago, when I was young man a hitchhiking around the country, I stopped for the winter in Forestville, CA then a tiny little town, next to a tiny little bridge along the Russian River.

It happened that I acquired a girlfriend who lived near Cotati, which was then another little semi-rural town, and I hitchhiked there and back pretty frequently.

One of the places where I was likely to get dropped off to to look for my next ride was near some kind of mental health facility, and I met all kinds of very strange people also hitchhiking at that spot.

Most of them were pretty pathetic people, heavily drugged out on prescription drugs plus whatever they were freelancing, with a really tenuous connection to reality and often some very strange and grandiose stories about who they were, what they done, and who they were going to be.

One of these characters still stays in my mind: a little bedraggled loser of the creature , who I assumed was an outpatient there, and who struck up a conversation and hit me up for dollar so he could buy some yogurt at a nearby fruit stand. When he came back with his yogurt he told a bizarre story about having composed a song for the Beach boys, and how he was going to be rich when he was paid for it, and how in the meantime they promised to supply him with a recording studio to cut a record.

He insisted on getting my mailing address and giving me an IOU for the dollar, which is how I happened get Charles Manson's autograph.

At the time I met him he possessed neither a dangerous presence nor any kind of special personal magnetism, he was just one of the many, many such characters I met, and it was more or less pure chance that his IOU remained in a wallet that I tossed into a drawer when I replaced it, or that I for no good reason tossed all the paper in the wallet into a plastic sandwich bag when I returned to Chicago.

Odd thing is, he was telling the truth, more or less, about the Beach Boys, the song is "Never Learn Not To Love" on the 20/20 album.

And I occasionally wonder if a slightly different fork in the road would've left Charles Manson one of several moderately successful songwriters I knew back then, instead of a mass murder.

[Rick Hurst]

Michael,

Great story, bet you wished you held onto that autograph?

Rick

[Ted Menelly]

Man.....Thats were I got that autograph from

[Michael Thomas]

Michael,

Great story, bet you wished you held onto that autograph?

Rick

I still have it around here somewhere, in a box along with some other stuff - diary, letters, a few photographs. from that era.

But what I REALLY wish is that we had digital photography back them...

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Actually, I've got several good hitchhiking stories from that era, plus a lot more - likely true and otherwise - collected from people I met at the time.

Sometimes I look back and it seems so strange to me - hitchhiking in those days was a reliable means of transportation - for example I hitchhiked to work and back every weekday that winter, and it was almost like taking the bus. As best I can judge the willingness to pick up hitchhikers was a remnant of the Great Depression, and sometime around the mid-70s something changed (at least in California I think this was probably related to a number of murders involving hitchhikers and the drivers who picked them up) and it was like somebody had flipped a switch, and that phase in American life was OVER.

[John Arnold]

...

Actually, I've got several good hitchhiking stories from that era, plus a lot more - likely true and otherwise - collected from people I met at the time....

My best friend and I hitchhiked from New England to California in 1971 to enroll him in college. There was one on-ramp in the midwest where we stood for hours with no luck. We even started doing weird things to get attention, like putting my friend up on my shoulders and dancing around.
Finally someone stopped. He told us there was an institution for the criminally insane nearby and that our antics probably just scared folks off.

Then there was the big car full of rodeo cowboys in the northwest. They squeezed us in and starting giving us beers. By the time they let us out we could hardly stand up.

[John Arnold]

Oh, yeah. Then there was the very friendly guy that picked me up, and then, when he stopped to let me out, offered me $$ to perform a certain, uh, service. I politely declined and we went our separate ways.

[Michael Thomas]

Oh, yeah. Then there was the very friendly guy that picked me up, and then, when he stopped to let me out, offered me $$ to perform a certain, uh, service. I politely declined and we went our separate ways.

Happened to me from time to time as well, though I was as likely to get offers to have a service performed as a request to perform it.

Oddly, it was the former who tended to be more unhappy when I declined - they really seemed to take it personally.

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The absolutely scariest ride I ever had though was from was from a nerdy looking engineer who picked me up west-bound on the long narrow causeway from Vallejo to Novato.

Like a lot of my rides he had a story to tell, his was that he just received notice at work that his son had been killed in Vietnam, and he was on his way to tell his wife.

Seems the son had been opposed the war and that originally wanted to move to Canada, against his mother's wishes the father had worked out a compromise with the son to go in as a CO, serving as a medic.

He was really in a state - clearly, I thought, potentially suicidal - and he was getting more and more tightly wound the closer he got to home, and our speed gradually increased from the 50 mph or so that was reasonable to whatever the top end of his Dodge sedan was, meanwhile he was getting whiter and whiter and gripping the wheel tighter and tighter as we passed other cars with complete disregard for safety, diving back into our lane and out of oncoming traffic at the last possible instant, all the while headed toward the middle of the causeway, where there were some really solid things for him to hit.

Then, he suddenly returned from wherever he has been, and asked me with an intensity that I've not seen equaled by anything else in this life what I thought about the war, and what my plans were.

I had no idea what he wanted to hear, or what was least likely to make him decide to permanently solve both our problems sometime in the next mile or two, but before I could answer he told me with the same unbelievable intensity "Whatever you do, you MUST not let anyone decide for you, the way I decided for my son... ".

And then, gradually, he unwound, and said not another word until he dropped me off at an exit ramp in San Rafael.

OTOH, the time I got picked up by time travelers was kinda' fun.

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Ah yes... WAY "back in the day"...