Looking Back: Life's What Ifs?(Martin Green) Looking Back---Life’s What Ifs

Author’s Note: When you’re an old guy, like me, you tend to look back on your life and ask yourself “What if.” This piece is mostly true.


I grew up in the Bronx in New York City and when I turned 13 I could get a work permit and look for a summer job. It was 1943 and World War II was going on so, although I didn’t know it, with so many young men being drafted summer jobs were easy to get and I probably could have gotten an office job. As it was, I knew nothing about the business world. I did know there was a garment district in Manhattan so I got a job as a stockroom and delivery boy at a wholesale button place and worked there two summers, or until the war ended. What if I had gotten an office job? Even back then I liked to read and write so if I got a job for a newspaper or magazine or publishing house I might have ended up as a reporter or editor and had an entirely different life. What if?

When I graduated college the Korean War and the draft were still on. I can’t say I was looking forward to being drafted. When I was I went to basic training, then to clerk-typist school, then to another school, and then, not to fight the North Koreans but to Seventh Army Headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, to help stem the Red tide. There I met another draftee, R--- F---, who was a Cal Berkeley grad and lived in San Francisco and thought that was the greatest city in the world. When I returned to New York I found that the city was hot, crowded, dirty and noisy. It was also expensive and on my starting salary I couldn’t afford to move out of my parents’ apartment in the Bronx to a place of my own. I’d kept in touch with R--- F--- and he kept urging me to come out to San Francisco. After two years in New York I did, stayed with R--- in a house he and some other Cal grads were renting, got a job, found an apartment I could afford and within walking distance to work. So, if I hadn’t been drafted and sent to Germany where I met R--- F--- would I have left New York for San Francisco? Another what if? Oh, yes, I eventually met the girl I married in San Francisco, the best thing I’ve done in my life. No what ifs there.

When I was 18 or 19 I worked for the summer in the Forestry Service. How did this happen? A high school friend had worked in the Forestry Service the summer before. It was in the Kiniksu National Forest in Idaho. You got minimum wage, time-and-a-half for working on Saturdays and, most importantly of all, there was nothing to spend your pay on so whatever you got was clear. It sounded good. I was to meet him at Grand Central Station and we were going to hitch-hike out to Idaho. Of course I didn’t tell my mother we were hitch-hiking. I told her we were going by bus. I got to Grand Central Station at the appointed time but my friend wasn’t there. If I was sensible way back then I would have taken the subway back to the Bronx and looked for a summer job in the city as I’d done the summers before. Instead, I somehow got myself to the outskirts of New York and from there managed to hitch-hike to Pittsburgh by the end of the day. In another five or six days I made it to Spokane, Washington. From there I took a bus to a small town in Idaho called Priest River and there someone from the Forestry Service picked me up and drove me to the camp out of which I’d be working.

My adventures as a city kid out in the forest In Idaho is another story but suffice to say I managed to get through the summer and, having successfully hitch-hiked out to Idaho I planned to hitch-hike back to New York. I found it difficult to get rides from Idaho and by mid-day was only someplace in Montana. I got a ride from two men in a pick-up truck that was going to the next town. I hopped up into the back of the truck and sat down on one of the boxes there. I then noticed the boxes were marked with “X’s” the symbol for dynamite. After a while a beer bottle was thrown out from the driver’s side and smashed on the road. After another while a beer bottle was thrown out from the passenger’s side and smashed on the road. After still another time the truck stopped and the two men got out and started arguing about who was too drunk to drive. I grabbed my gym bag, hopped out of the truck and went behind it. The two men stopped arguing, got back into the truck and drove away. I was sure they’d forgotten all about having a passenger in the back.

So there I was, somewhere in the mountains of Montana and in the worst possible place for a hitch-hiker, on a curvy road where drivers couldn’t see me until they’d driven past. There was nothing to do but trudge on until I found a relatively straight stretch of road. Time passed, it was getting dark and I wondered if there were wolves in these mountains. Then a car sped by me and braked up ahead. I ran up to it and got in, no questions asked. The driver was a teacher who’d been visiting his sister out West and was going back to Waterloo, Iowa. I stayed with him for the next three days and was then more than halfway home. I was back in New York, safe and sound, in another three days.

I recount this long tale, not because of what if I’d been blown up but because of events following my retirement. In short, I became a free-lance writer. This happened because, first of all, I started writing for an alternative paper in downtown Sacramento as a volunteer, no pay. My wife called my attention to a feature in the local paper, the Sacramento Bee, called, I think, “My Story.” You wrote about some incident in your life and if the Bee printed it you got $25. I wrote about my hitch-hiking incident with the dynamite truck. Shortly after, someone from the Bee called. They were printing my story and needed some information like my social security number. I asked if the Bee used free-lance writers. He said they didn’t but maybe the Neighbors section did. Neighbors was a section that once a week printed stories from local areas. He gave me the name of the Neighbors assignment editor and her phone number. I called and yes, Neighbors did use free-lance writers. She told me to write something and bring it in. I wrote a couple of pieces, one on a group of senior tennis players (of which I was one) who played in a local park, and one on a neighbor who had formed a group to fight drugs, subjects I knew my alternative paper editor wouldn’t be interested in. I brought them in and evidently the assignments editor liked them because I was assigned a story and my two early pieces were eventually printed in my local Neighbors section.

So, what if I hadn’t gone out to Idaho that summer and hadn’t gotten onto that dynamite truck. I may have written about something else for My Story or maybe not. And whatever I wrote might not have been interesting enough to get printed. Who knows? What if?

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