Keep Swinging: A 75 Year Journey
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About this ebook
A lively account with diverse, often humorous stories and anecdotes tracing the author's ancestors and then spanning 75 years from the Great Depression to the fall of 2012. The author tells of youthful adventures, numerous business enterprises beginning with his first at the age of eight, the many inspiring individuals as well as a few scoundrels and a number of celebrities encountered along the way. And beginning with marriage at the age of 19 that has lasted over 55 years, he takes the reader through a tumultuous family life that moves from the San Francisco Bay area to Palm Springs and then to Nevada, with times of scarcity and years of plenty, scarred by tragedy but always marked by a determination to overcome all obstacles that was inbred from a very early age.
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Keep Swinging - Raymond O. Kechely
KEEP SWINGING
A 75 YEAR JOURNEY
RAYMOND O. KECHELY
Smashwords Edition
(c) 2013, (c) 2012 RAYMOND O. KECHELY
REVISIONS
All rights reserved
ROK Press
P.O. Box 22752
Carson City, Nevada, USA 89721-2752
e-book ISBN-13 978-0-9858607-2-1
e-book ISBN-10 0985860721
0209
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 - A Bit of Family History
Chapter 2 - The Early Years: 1937-1957
Chapter 3 - The Middle Years: 1957-1966
Chapter 4 - The Middle Years: 1967-1981
Chapter 5 - Later Years: 1981-2000
Chapter 6 - The Home Stretch: 2001-2012
Photos
Acknowledgements
I could not possibly have relied on my memory alone for much of what is included in this book, and I have a debt of gratitude for those who provided much useful information and helped my recall many of the events I have related.
Clara Kechely, the youngest daughter of my great grandmother and grandfather on my father’s side of the family, Melchior and Catherine Kechely, traced the family lineage back to their parents in Germany over two centuries ago and shared her findings with family members, including my Aunt Zelda Mary Kechely Zenge (Little Mary
) who passed it along to Jean and me a number of years ago. The family history she so thoroughly produced was invaluable in my being able to chronicle much of the first chapter. Also contributing to the first chapter were my cousin Edward Bruce Richards and his wife Joan, both of whom prepared and made available to the family materials they had prepared, and I am also indebted to my Aunt Beryl (Elsie Beryl Kechely Richards) for the materials she authored on the family histories of the Kechelys and the Richards. A number of missing elements were filled in through Ancestry.com, where I was able to find some previously unpublished information and confirm much of the information provided by research other family members had already done.
My brother Donald encouraged me to write this book and helped me with some of the events in my early life. My son, Mike, filled me in on details I had forgotten, and my daughter, Diana, not only refreshed my memories on some of her years growing up but was an invaluable aid in editing the original manuscript and making suggestions intended to make it more interesting to the reader. I am also most grateful to my wife, Jean, for her input, proofreading, suggestions and undying support.
Introduction
How often my wife, Jean, and I wish we had sat down with some of our older relatives when we had the opportunity to let them record their memories of growing up and raising families long before we knew them. All we remember are some of the stories we did hear, but really how little we know about them. Now, the opportunities have long passed us by, and it’s too bad. I’d like to know more about my grandparents and great grandparents and even about my parents’ lives before I came along.
So, I thought it worthwhile to recount my life’s journey of seventy five years, as of this writing. Not that my life has been of huge accomplishments or my story one that would inspire someone to greatness. But, during my lifetime, I have come across people who do inspire, who do demonstrate great perseverance, and who did not let obstacles stop them. Many are people all of us can admire and respect and from whom I have learned that honesty and character count, that setbacks can’t be allowed to defeat you and that perseverance will eventually be rewarded. Some have been, what shall I say, more colorful, and I will share some of their stories with you, right along with the others.
Hopefully, you will enjoy learning about some of the businesses I have been involved with, and there were a lot of them. My hope is to leave you with some lessons that might help you or, in any event, that you will enjoy reading the stories of some very successful enterprises, as well as a few that ultimately failed.
Certainly, my life is sprinkled with episodes I am not terribly proud of, mostly from my youth, but I will share them with you because they are a part of my life and it would be less than forthright to leave them out.
And, please excuse a memory lapse or two or my not getting something just right, and chalk it up to the frailties of an aging mind. I admit, it isn’t what it used to be. Maybe that’s why it’s important to me to get this all down in writing while I am still able.
Remember, this is written in the fall of 2012. Many of those living where they live today or doing what they are doing today may not be situated the same when you read this. Some may have even passed on.
Finally, mine is not a story of my life alone. My lifetime partner, lover and best friend, Jean, is as much a part of me as I am of myself. Without her there would not be much of a story to tell and, certainly, there would be no joy in telling it.
Chapter 1 - A Bit of Family History
According to my birth certificate, I entered the world at 6:30 a.m. on April 5, 1937, the son of Ethel Blanche (maiden name Thode) and Lynn Lee Kechely, at Humboldt Hospital on Marin Avenue in Albany, California. The hospital later became Albany Hospital, but it is no longer there, at least not as a hospital.
Albany, California is a tiny city of five and one-half square miles squeezed between Berkeley on its east and south sides, El Cerrito on the north, and San Francisco Bay on the west. From its shoreline or, even better, from vantage points on its landmark Albany Hill, one can look westward and marvel at the San Francisco skyline, the expanse of San Francisco Bay and the spectacular beauty of the sun setting behind the Golden Gate Bridge.
Once a dumping ground for its neighbors’ garbage, the village was incorporated in 1908 as the City of Ocean View, but the name was changed a year later to Albany, after the city in New York that was the birthplace of its first mayor.
The little city’s chief claim to fame is Golden Gate Fields, a filled-in marshland that shares a strip of the San Francisco Bay’s eastern shoreline with its neighbor Berkeley and that is now the Bay Area’s only major thoroughbred race track. The great jockey Bill Shoemaker is buried in the track’s infield along with the famous race horses Silky Sullivan and Lost in The Fog. (I tried my luck there a few times, and have a few other horses I might recommend for burial there.) My memories of Golden Gate Fields include trying to learn golf from my brother, Don, on the nine-hole golf course that was on the track’s infield when I was a teenager and a bicycle trip that I took with Jack Hooper, my neighbor and constant companion when we were growing up in Berkeley, to see what was a focus of the nation’s attention, a match race between triple-crown winner Citation and the huge English-bred thoroughbred Noor. We dodged cars and scampered across the busy highway and watched the race through the chain link fence that surrounded the track. It was exciting. We watched the two horses thunder together down the backstretch right in front of us and then roar into the final turn that would take them into the home stretch, but we had no way of knowing which horse won until we returned home and heard the results on the radio. Noor won.
I can trace my ancestry back to the 1800s, to my great grandparents. Both of my grandfathers were German. My grandmothers were of other mixed ancestries.
My mother’s father, Rudolph N. Thode, Rudy,
was born on March 30, 1884 to parents who immigrated from the northern part of Germany and somehow wound up as sharecroppers for the Fernandez family in El Sorbrante, a sprawling Spanish land grant in Contra Costa County, the indigenous population having died off of disease or driven from the land. In his mid-teens, Rudy journeyed each week to the ferry boat in Richmond that took him across the bay to San Francisco, where he attended pattern making school during the week, only to return on weekends to help tend the family plot. The skills he mastered making wood patterns used to form metal castings earned him a job as a pattern maker at the Hercules Powder Plant, where he worked in the same plant with his future bride, Nellie. My grandfather had features typical of the Teutonic races found in the northern part of Germany, fair skinned, blue eyed, and blonde.
My grandmother Nellie was the fourth of five children born to Oliver T. and Mary A. Mcdowell in Crockett, California, a community on San Pablo Bay near Hercules, on September 18, 1884. Oliver’s parents were from Kentucky, and he was born in Oregon. Mary was born in New York to parents who were from England. Somehow, Oliver and Mary found their way to California and met and married in the Hercules-Crockett area. I remember meeting my grandmother’s younger brother, Jim, and am under the impression that he was friends with Rudy when they were growing up. My grandmother and grandfather were also good friends in those days with Minnie and Fred O’Neill, and the stories that Fred and my grandfather told later in life about the pranks they pulled put Jean and me in stitches. They all wound up employed at the Hercules Powder Works and living in Hercules, then a company town that bordered on San Pablo Bay, not far from Rudy’s birthplace and home in El Sobrante. He once showed us the home in which he was born, still standing after some seventy years at the time. I am under the impression that my grandmother assembled bombs and other explosive devices at the powder works and, in my early youth, remember hearing stories of plant explosions there. Somehow, they seemed undaunted by the dangers inherent in their occupations.
I don’t know when Nellie and Rudy were married, but it had to be between 1905 and 1909. By then, he would have finished his schooling in San Francisco and begun working at the powder company. Knowing the morals of the times, their marriage had to be prior to 1909, the year my mother was born.
By the early 1930’s, the family had moved on from the powder works and was living on Curtis Street in Berkeley, in the same neighborhood as my father’s family. Somewhere along the line, Rudy must have gained carpentry skills. I remember stories about how he was the foreman of the first construction crew that went into the San Pedro Oil Field (now the Wilmington Oil Field), a field discovered in 1932 in Southern California, to build housing for the workers there. So, he must have left home for a period of time to work at the oilfield, before returning to Berkeley.
By the mid-1930’s, Rudy had returned from the oil field and opened a hardware store on Cedar Street. Soon thereafter, having listened to women in his store complain about the rust that was transferring to their clothes from their outdoor clotheslines, he determined that the rust was coming from the cast iron pulleys that supported the lines. Using his patternmaking skills, he made patterns for casting pulleys using non-rusting zinc-based metal, primarily scrap from auto bumpers and trim. On the floor above his hardware store, and remember this was before zoning laws and fire department permits and all that nonsense, he built a cauldron, a large pot heated by natural gas, in which he melted down the scrap metal he bought from the scrap yard and began pouring it into the dies he had made to produce rust-proof clothesline pulleys. It’s a wonder the whole thing didn’t come crashing down through the floor and a bigger wonder still that, with the gas and the flames spewing forth from the melting pots, he didn’t blow up half of the neighborhood. The rust-proof pulleys did, however, become an instant success in his hardware store and led to a successful manufacturing business that supported my grandparents and our family for many years. However, the depression wreaked havoc on small businesses everywhere, including my grandfather’s hardware store, and he went broke.
My mother, Ethel, was born on September 6, 1909, the first of two daughters of Nellie and Rudolph Thode, in Pinole, California, a tiny little stop in the road right next to Hercules. (I recall the many times my brother and I would tease her when the family would be driving through Pinole. We would laugh and call it Pin Hole.
Of course, I didn’t know then that Jean and I and our family would make our home in Pin Hole
many years later.) My mother was an extremely bright child, skipping several grades in school and enrolling at the University of California in Berkeley at the age of sixteen from which she was graduated in 1929 at 20 years of age. Pictures of her reveal a very beautiful young woman, and it’s little wonder she had more than a few suitors. Finally, though, she chose my father, and they were married on Saturday, June 13, 1931 at her parent’s home on Curtis Street in Berkeley.
My brother and only sibling, Donald Lee Kechely, was born on September 15, 1932. As we will see later, he was a wonderful brother and a big part of my life growing up.
My mother’s sister, Ruth Adele Thode, was born on August 18, 1918, some nine years after my mother was born. Ruth was a bright, attractive girl, but her daughters, my cousins Carol and Pam, told me years later that my mother was highly favored over Ruth. Growing up, it was Ethel who got the new clothes and Ruth the hand-me-downs, and it was my mother who was encouraged to go to the university, not Ruth. While it’s probably true that my mother was the favored daughter, my grandparents, Ruth’s family and our family spent a lot of time together, including vacations, holidays and special family events, and I never noticed the favoritism. Noting the time between my mother’s birth and Ruth’s, it may even be that Ruth was a surprise and, perhaps, an unplanned addition to the family. In any event, I remember my Aunt Ruth as being a loving person, always good to me and my brother. She married William Palmer in 1939, who was a recent Coast Guard veteran and had by then become a member of the California State Police force. He was on duty at the 1939 World’s Fair on Treasure Island and later on the docks in San Francisco. It was a rough period on the docks after the war, with Harry Bridges’s International Longshore and Warehouse Union battling for power and supremacy on the San Francisco waterfront. I remember a newspaper photo of my Uncle Bill escorting some tough looking characters to the lock up. Uncle Bill was tough as nails but had a heart as big as a watermelon. During his career he was a policeman, an Alcoholic Beverage Control officer, and an agent with the State Board of Equalization. Although he never made a big salary, Ruth never had to go to work, and he was able to provide a nice home for his family and put two beautiful daughters, Pamela and Carol, through college. Ruth passed away in 1989, and he remarried some years later, living out his life with Jackie until his passing in 2005. One of my cousins (Bill’s daughter) told me he left a very substantial estate, accumulated through savings and wise investments. Not bad. Not bad at all for someone who started out with nothing and worked all of his life as a civil servant. His hard work and perseverance were an inspiration to me.
My great grandfather on my father’s side,