Lefty, page 3
As the youngest, he was also in charge of slinging cow dung out of the box stalls. “The only reason I made good in baseball,” he noted later, “was because I didn’t want to go back to that dairy farm. It’s not all Chanel No. 5 out there.” Irene and Gladys bottled the milk in the kitchen, then hitched up the wagon to old Maude, the Gomez dray horse. The younger children took turns delivering the milk that their mother had sold to the neighbors, five cents a bottle, a label reading “Gomez Dairy” affixed to the side.
“Old Maude worked the dairy route like a machine,” Lefty said. “She ground to a halt the very instant Gladys and Irene bounded out of the wagon and ran down the path to a customer’s house. As soon as they left the milk bottles on the back porch, she revved up her engine and moved on down the road. Gladys and Irene ran back, taking a flying leap onto the wagon, and Maude pulled them to the next stop.
“Sometimes my sisters saw a girlfriend at the back door and they lingered a bit too long for the old horse. She had no patience with talkative kids. Maude allowed them just so much time from doorstep to wagon. Then she pulled the wagon around in a wide circle and plodded back to the barn. Gladys and Irene ran down the road, pigtails flying. ‘Stop! We’ll be late for school!’ But Maude never stopped plodding homewards. No second chances from her.”
Vernon got no allowance. Even at five or six, if he wanted money for ice- cream cones or candy, he had to earn it. “Rodeo awakened to a pack of wolves howling down the moon. I ran all around town, turning off the streetlights. Every corner had a glass globe atop a wooden pole. At the bottom was a white ceramic knob. I twisted the knob off at sunrise and on again at sunset. Mr. Downer, who owned the power company, put me on the payroll. Ten cents a day.”
Not every task was so benign. One day, he was helping out at the ranch with his brother Cecil.
“Cecil was like a mustang, never broke. He was part of the land. Tall, blond, and spare, his jingling spurs accounted for most of his weight. By fifteen he was bringing home trophies and prize money as a rodeo competitor in saddle bronc, roping, and bull-riding. Cecil became a rancher like Pa and he had little patience with crybabies working a ranch. ‘I’m running a cattle outfit,’ he’d say, ‘not a kindergarten.’
“That day, a couple of heifers had wandered off into the hills … one to drop a calf, the other to die. ‘Swallowed nuts and bolts,’ Cecil told me. Trouble comes in batches. Another steer had slipped in the boggy bottom of the Rodeo Creek. He was stuck fast with split shins. The coyotes were circling. Cecil had to go tend to something else. Back in the tack room, he told me to ‘buckle on the six-iron with five beans in the wheel,’ then go creekside. ‘Steer’s past fixin’. He’s sufferin’ bad. Put him down, Vernon, before the coyotes do.’
“Thinkin’ about those miserable eyes lookin’ up at me, suddenly I didn’t feel so good. I moaned and doubled over. ‘I’m gonna vomit.’ Cecil was having none of it. ‘Chrissakes, Vernon, you’re nine years old. What are you, a goddamn baby?’ He walked past me out of the barn, then turned back. ‘If you got any quit in you, don’t hit the saddle.’
“I stood in the doorway, watching Cecil ride out until he was just a speck on a faraway hill. ‘He thinks I’m yellow,’ I thought, and the thought pained. I brushed away the tears with the back of my hand and picked up the Colt. Then I swung into the saddle and rode out to Rodeo Creek.”
But being the youngest of the seven Gomez kids wasn’t all mending fences and killing injured cows. Four years younger than his nearest sibling, Gladys, Vernon was indulged by everyone except Coyote, and Coyote was only around one day a week. While he was certainly expected to pull his weight, Vernon also got to run off to swim, play baseball, or just hang out with his friends.
“I swam probably every day in San Pablo Bay, year-round, skinny-dipping down at the beach. At low tide, I undressed in a sandstone cave by the water’s edge and left my overalls on the rock ledges that protruded from the walls. I swam for miles up and down the coastline, long-distance conditioning. I loved the rhythm of swimming all my life.”
Often at night Vernon swam with his friends in settings that might have been lifted from early twentieth-century sketches such as Booth Tarkington’s Penrod. “Frequently we built a campfire on the beach and threw potatoes on the fire, watching them pop and explode in the flickering firelight onshore as we splashed in the water.” But Penrod was hardly angelic, and neither was Vernon.
“When we heard a freight train approaching along the shoreline, we ran out of the water, dripping wet. The train had to slow down to crawl around the bend at Lone Point. I grabbed hold of the rail on the ladder on the side of a boxcar and climbed up. In the spring and early summer, the open-topped boxcars were loaded with grapes, peaches, and melons, and in autumn the harvest trains carried sugar beets.” Vernon was always designated to jump on the moving trains because he was the most agile. When he got to the top, he reached between the slats of the crates piled up inside and tossed out peaches, bunches of grapes, or whatever fruit was in season. Then, before the train gained too much speed, he jumped off to share the booty.
Vernon’s partner in crime was often Reder Claeys. “We were all hellions,” Reder recalled. “On warm summer nights, I knocked on the Gomezes’ back door and asked his mother if Vernon was home. Most times, I could tell he was home if his collie, Jack, was in the yard. Jack followed Vernon around like he was tied to him. Vernon organized the kids into groups of three. Two guys stood lookout while Vernon went over the fence to grab a watermelon out of a vegetable patch. Vernon was very springy on his feet. At Halloween, he took the gate off the schoolyard fence and ran it up the flagpole in the town center.”
“Vernon could size up a situation quicker than most,” one of his grammar school teachers observed. “When he wanted a vacation from school, he put skunks under the schoolhouse.”
School personnel won their share of skirmishes, however. Anastasia Dean, the grammar school principal, also taught penmanship. “Her eyes were as cold as a gray sky on a bleak February morning,” Lefty later remembered. “She began class by telling us how much she pitied the students who failed the writing drills. I was the only left-hander in her class, the only left-hander in a lifetime of teaching penmanship. Miss Dean didn’t approve of my hooked writing, said I was ‘an aberrant deviation in the evolutionary process.’ So there I was, a dead end on the road of humanity. She cracked my knuckles till they bled, and I switched. When fans ask me for my autograph I sign Lefty Gomez with my right hand and they look at it like it’s a forgery. I can thank Miss Dean for that. She whacked every bit of left-handedness out of me except the way I pitch, play golf, and think.”
Rodeo’s Independence Day celebration in 1917 was in honor of all the local boys who had signed up to fight in Europe, Milfred and Lloyd Gomez among them. Earl had been rejected because of a withered arm, injured when he fell off a roof on a construction job, and Cecil was too young. The town hosted a barbecue—steer donated by S. J. Claeys—
fireworks at the beach, and, of course, a parade. Invited to march was a forty-piece navy band from the nearby base, conducted by a young officer named Paul Whiteman. The highlight of their program was a rousing, jazzed‑up rendition of George M. Cohan’s hit song “Over There.”
Eight-year-old Vernon Gomez was transfixed. “Right then and there, I told Earl that I wanted to play sax and have my own band. I even had the name picked out. The Syncopats. ‘A sax?’ Earl asked me. ‘Costs around $26, Vernon.’ ” Lefty was thunderstruck. “Where can I get that kind of dough?” he moaned to Earl. “By the time I do, jazz will be gone.” The following November, Earl had a surprise. “Happy birthday, squirt,” he said, and presented his brother with a tenor sax.
Of course, owning a musical instrument was only the first step. Vernon asked Coyote when he could start lessons at Del Turco’s Music Studio in Crockett, a five-mile walk up the road, a dollar an hour, eight lessons a month.
Coyote’s response was terse: “You play. You pay.”
Eight dollars a month was a heady sum for a kid who generally earned only dimes turning on streetlights. An increase of that magnitude would involve not only more rigorous employment but also forgoing the ice- cream cones and candy on which his earnings were generally spent.
His first attempt to raise the money was hiring himself out to the local spring water company, owned of course by S. J. Claeys, but he was fired his first day when two customers caught him tromping barefoot through the spring. His next job was at Claeys’s Meat Market, plucking chickens. “Ninety chickens a month, plucked clean of feathers at ten cents a chicken. It would have netted me nine dollars, but Pa believed in tithing, giving away 10 percent of your earnings to St. Patrick’s Church, which meant I paid a penny on every chicken I plucked.”
But ninety chickens equaled eight dollars for lessons and a couple of five-cent ice-cream cones a month. Each afternoon Lefty was escorted into the back room by the cleaver-wielding butcher. “Whack! Off came the chicken’s head, the feathered body tossed onto the floor next to the table where I sat waiting to pluck it clean. Life taken by force. But its headless body with the blood oozing out did not drop down dead right away. Yuck! The feet skittered across the floor, the claws scratching their way through the sawdust. Feathers in my hair, down my shirt, up my nose.”
But Lefty wanted to play sax, so he stayed at the job for two years. And no one had to admonish him to practice. “Any kid who plucks feathers off ninety chickens a month to pay for sax lessons,” he would say, “is self-motivated.”
He played constantly. “In and out of rooms, up and down stairs, I blew my lungs out on my sax, a long line of jazz-tinged notes with emotional conviction, thinking myself a slick cat, in the blues vernacular. Ma brought me back to reality. ‘Vernon,’ she shouted, ‘take that noise to the cow pasture!’ ” Vernon did precisely that. Neighbors remember him tootling away as he drove the cows home after school.
And, true to his word, Vernon Gomez started the Syncopats, six preteens blowing hot jazz. They practiced in various members’ houses until the adults couldn’t take it anymore, then moved on to a new venue.
Two years earlier, Vernon had discovered another lifelong passion when Coyote and Lizzie took the ferry across the bay to the same 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in which S. J. Claeys entered his cattle float.
Commonly referred to as the San Francisco World’s Fair, the exposition occupied 635 acres and was filled with enough modern marvels to leave even the most sophisticated adult goggle-eyed. For Vernon Gomez, who lived without plumbing or electricity and had rarely even seen an automobile, it was like walking through a portal to another world.
At the east end of the grounds was “The Zone,” sixty-five acres filled with rides, games, food from around the world, concessions, performers, and exhibits, including replicas of Yellowstone Park, the Grand Canyon—to scale, of course—and a five-acre working model of the Panama Canal. The actual Liberty Bell was on display, on loan from Philadelphia, and the news of the day was churned out automatically on an immense Underwood typewriter. States, counties, and industrial firms exhibited their wares and their wonders. There was a “Street of Fun,” hula dancers, midgets, a railway, a submarine ride, and a compartment on a swing arm that sent those inside swinging to and fro over the grounds.
At the Palace of Transportation, the Ford Motor company had set up an assembly line that turned out a car every ten minutes for three hours every afternoon except Sunday. More than four thousand cars were produced during the fair’s ten months. A wood and steel building called the Palace of Machinery was more than three hundred yards long, one hundred yards wide, and forty yards high. The entire complement of U.S. Army and Navy personnel could have stood at attention under its roof. Mabel Normand and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, two major stars of the silent screen, were filmed touring the fair by the Keystone Film Company.
The effect of the fair on its visitors was electric, literally as well as figuratively. The General Electric Illuminating Engineering Laboratory put on perhaps the greatest display of lighting ever seen. William D’Arcy Ryan, the director, who eight years earlier had lit Niagara Falls to a brilliance of 1.115 billion candles, outdid himself in San Francisco. One historian later wrote, “When he presented his plans before the architects, designers, and color artists who were involved in preparation for the Exposition, his proposals seemed so fantastic that there was scarcely a detail which was not opposed.” The centerpiece of Ryan’s plan was a forty-three-story “Tower of Jewels,” which was decorated with more than 100,000 pieces of polished stained glass, called “novogems,” imported from Vienna, strung on wires, and each backed by a tiny mirror. Twenty colored spotlights, hidden from spectators’ view, illuminated the tower each night. Edwin Markham, a local poet, announced after seeing the General Electric display, “I have tonight seen the greatest revelation of beauty that was ever seen on the earth.”
But outdoing even the tower was the air show. At a time when many Americans could still not understand what held an airplane aloft—or believed it could actually be done—for fifty cents a fair visitor could ride in a biplane, sitting behind the propeller while the pilot soared, dipped, and banked over the Pacific Ocean. For those who remained anchored to the earth, the Panama-Pacific had engaged the services of the world’s greatest stunt flyer, “The Genius of Aviation,” “The Man Who Owns the Sky,” Lincoln Beachey.
Beachey, born right in San Francisco, was only twenty-eight but had already flown loop-the-loops for President Woodrow Wilson, skimmed Niagara Falls in a biplane, performed a corkscrew twist directly over a crowd of 20,000 spectators, and won a race with a train. His signature stunt was the “dip of death,” a vertical dive from 5,000 feet with the plane’s engines turned off and his arms stretched out to the side. Beachey pulled out of the dive at the last possible instant by tugging the stick with his knees and then glided to a safe landing. There had been accidents as well. Beachey had crashed often and on one occasion had flown too close to the roof of a hangar, sweeping four people off and killing a twenty-year-old woman. He had once quit flying, “disgusted with the public’s morbid expectation of spectacular accidents,” only to return weeks later to attempt even more dangerous stunts.
At the San Francisco World’s Fair, Beachey planned a spectacular display of aerobatics for the home folks, including a run through the Palace of Machinery, the world’s first indoor flight. After watching Beachey’s incredible performance on February 15, Vernon immediately asked his parents to allow him to take flying lessons, a request ridiculous on grounds of both practicality and cost. But his decision on that day to become a pilot turned out to be as irrevocable as his decision to play the sax or his determination almost from the moment he picked up a baseball to become a pitcher. Vernon Gomez seemed to be one of those rare children who knew his mind, even at six, and he set out on a lifetime quest from which he would never look back and never regret.
On March 14, Vernon returned to the fair, this time escorted by Earl. That day, Lincoln Beachey was to try a feat of aerobatics never before attempted. Rather than the biplane in which he customarily flew, Beachey had designed an aluminum monoplane, then fitted it with an engine powerful enough to set up a dive from 3,000 feet. A crowd of 50,000 had gathered to see Beachey attempt in this new machine stunts that he had previously only performed in a biplane.
Beachey made two flights that day. In the first he “electrified the crowd with a series of aerial somersaults,” then landed before attempting the perpendicular drop. That would be a finale all its own.
Soon afterward, Beachey took to the air once more, circling up into the sky above San Francisco Bay. To prepare the crowd for the grand climax, he looped-the-loop and even flew upside down. Then, at 3,000 feet, he switched off the power. The monoplane hurtled toward the water in a vertical drop. Nearing the surface of the bay, Beachey pulled back on the stick. Instead of sending the plane into a glide, the increased air pressure from the change in trajectory ripped the aluminum wings from the body. The fuselage turned over and over, crashing into the bay. As thousands of spectators rushed to the waterfront, launches from the battleship Oregon sped to the site. Sailors threw grappling hooks into the water in an attempt to grab the sunken plane. Minutes later divers from the ship arrived and plunged into the water. Joseph Maerz, one of the most experienced divers in the navy, succeeded in attaching a line to the plane’s tail in forty feet of water. The fuselage was hauled up; Beachey was dead, still strapped in his seat. Examination proved that he had drowned. The crash had merely broken his leg. If Beachey could have freed himself from the cockpit, he could have floated to the surface and survived.
Six-year-old Vernon watched the accident with the same horror that gripped the other spectators. “What really brought the tears to my eyes was the fact that Beachey was one of our own, a San Francisco boy who had taken to the sky. I never forgot that day at the fairgrounds.”
But he also never lost his love of flying. Coyote later said something to him about keeping his feet on the ground, but Vernon wasn’t dissuaded by the danger. He might, in fact, have been drawn to it. Coyote had pioneered in his way; Vernon would pioneer in his.
“When Uncle Vernon pitched for the town team, I was in kindergarten,” recalled his niece, Vivien Sadler, “and he put me on the handlebars of his bike, told me to hang on for dear life, and off we’d go, bouncing over the potholes. But he didn’t talk endless baseball. Uncle Vernon read every newspaper he could get his hands on. When the Frisco papers and the New York Times were thrown off the train, Vernon was grabbing copies and diving into articles, especially ones about aviation. Vernon was going to be a ballplayer and an aviator all at the same time. This was before Lindbergh’s flight to Paris. He was going to get his pilot’s license and fly one of those puddle-jumpers when he grew up. And that was just what he did.”
Vernon came home from his visits to the fair with a far grander ambition than simply to become an aviator. He had discovered there was a bigger, more fascinating world outside Rodeo, filled with adventure, and he intended to experience it.
