My wife Rebecca died this year. Just over four months ago, to be exact. She and I had been together for more than half our respective lives, having started a whirlwind courtship in 1994 that moved very rapidly into coupledom, then into living together and then marriage four years later. While her death was something that I ultimately saw coming, given the severe regression of her health the previous couple of years, it’s those final months that I spend the most time ruminating over, and in particular, the final two months, from February to April 2025. These were months spent trying to pull her back from the abyss; in trying to convince ourselves that it was possible; and in grasping in futility any evidence that supported positivity of any kind. 

Of course I think about the rest of our 31 years together all the time, most of which Rebecca spent healthy and strong. We created a now-22-years-old son whom we love and loved; we traveled everywhere; and she worked a variety of careers during that time, including as a social worker, an after-school science teacher and as a bending, twisting, long-posing yoga instructor for both adults and children.

Yet my brain can’t seem to let go of her end, those last two months.

I think about these months and I feel them so viscerally. They are intense, and they pull up emotional turbulence from me that ranges from congratulatory, back-patting self-satisfaction (for having been a great caretaker and for having been verbally acknowledged as such over and over by my dying wife) to regret (for not having been even more devoted to her in her final days) to guilt. 

For some reason, I have this intense need to catalog these months, to put them accurately on the record, and to attempt to not forget a single detail. I think it’s because the rest of our life together was often lived publicly, and in concert with others – in the sense that the many happy parts were shared widely, and were documented in photographs, social media posts and verbally, in places well beyond the confines of our home. Her final two months were not shared, except with me.

It all started when Rebecca had a tumor removed from her chest way back in 2002 to help combat an autoimmune disease she’d been suffering from called myasthenia gravis. Ultimately, this extraction was successful, and she went into full remission within a year of giving birth to our son in 2003. For ten years, we never discussed this removed tumor as “cancerous”, either with her doctors or between the two of us, and yet that’s exactly what it was. Its remnants showed up on a scan in 2012, leading to two surgeries and an intense round of chemotherapy. Hair loss, sickness, the whole deal – and yet by 2014, and for the following eight years, the marginally remaining cancer was just a slowly-ticking phantom that showed up on scans but barely budged each year. 

It certainly didn’t affect her daily vigor. On the contrary, she worked out and lifted weights, she raised our son, she aggressively pursued new hobbies, made new friends, and far more. It was what you’d call a normal life, albeit one that lived with a dangerous, hard-to-track specter. All of a sudden, it began sending haywire and hard-to-decipher signals across her organs and systems in 2022.

Rather than spreading and multiplying as cancers typically do, Rebecca’s instead wreaked havoc during her final three years on her lungs, her digestive system, her blood and, of course, her ability to live life to the fullest the way she had been. Doctors, especially at first, treated each issue individually and not systemically, something that impressed upon me repeatedly just how little we often still know about disease and illness in 2025, despite everyone’s best intentions and extensive training. 

Coming right after Covid, we had to be extremely careful to make sure that she, an immunocompromised adult, didn’t get it. Ironically, when she did, her symptoms ended up being no worse than anyone else’s. She kept up regularly with friends and showed immense love and care for both myself and our son, and only really slowed down significantly in 2024 after a January hospitalization, and then particularly in 2025, tipping over into those final two months that we didn’t know were the final two months.

I have extensively documented for myself, and very deliberately for no one else, how we managed during the time between when she was released from a two-week stint at UCSF Hospital in late February 2025 to her death in April. I was very much on duty during this time, working full-time from home for my work – which is a remote job anyway – while also serving as Rebecca’s cook, her driver to appointments, her daily outdoor walking and then wheelchair-pushing partner; her administrator of increasingly complex daily medicines, including intravenously; and of course her husband and best friend. Even in her final seven days – when I’d finally admitted that she might not make it through the end of the year – there were tests and readings and hopeful signs that we held up together as evidence that she could improve, that she might rebound.

I regret, with the benefit of sad hindsight that fills my eyes with tears every time I think about it, that I didn’t drop everything at all times to just be with her. This regret bleeds over into guilt. This guilt can be intense in brief moments, and it takes many forms. Most often it is thankfully quickly leavened by the rational knowledge that any behavior I might feel guilty for was normal and explainable behavior in the moment. For instance, I too often brought up that I needed eventually to go to Oregon to help my 81-year-old father, who’d recently suffered a stroke. We talked about ways that this could happen, knowing that it really couldn’t. Same with a business trip to Chicago, where my company is located, for “face time” that I hadn’t been able to have for the previous 14 months, and got nervous about due to having been laid off from previous jobs. I even hoomphed a couple times about the timing of her daily walk if it didn’t line up with other ridiculous priorities of my own, such as getting my own exercise, or some inane work meeting I almost definitely could have easily rescheduled. 

There’s also the guilt that comes from knowing, after the fact, that she would die from an inability to breathe, and for not concentrating anything and everything on fighting just that part of her illness alone. Alas, she was fighting a multi-front battle. I do wonder if delaying her death would have also meant deepening her suffering. I always said to her how I would do anything to keep her from suffering and from pain. All things considered and relatively speaking, both suffering and pain were minimal, and I know that my care had a lot to do with this. Although that’s all very easy for me to say on both counts.

What would my coping and grieving process be like under different death-of-spouse circumstances, I wonder sometimes? How does the abrupt, accidental death of a healthy spouse, a woman in the prime of life, hit for the surviving spouse in the months and years following? There are certainly plenty of people to ask. I suspect – and I think quite rightly – that it’s far worse than what I’ve gone through. In the grand scheme of things, it would have been far worse for Rebecca as well.  

What about a long, slow, eminently foreseeable decline? The “you’ve got five years to live” diagnosis. The “you’ve got cancer, and there’s nothing we can do” diagnosis. Rebecca did not have this. At times we were frustrated that she didn’t have this, if you can understand the sentiment. Her final two years were more a purgatory of waiting for the scales to tip one way or the other, even if, in retrospect, she was very much headed to her death in a relatively linear fashion. We just didn’t know it for certain, and I don’t think the doctors did either.

Mentally, she had shouldered an enormous load for over three years, and given that cancer diagnosis and chemotherapy back in 2012, even longer besides. So when she lapsed into “anxiety” after being sent home from the hospital at the end of February, no one on either her medical team nor in her personal life batted an eyelash. Of course you’re anxious, honey. Post- traumatic stress. The accumulation of everything you’ve gone through. She was given drugs to help with this, and they did very little. This is because her shortness of breath – from “anxiety” – ended up being the end result of the cancer doing its mysterious work in her lungs, messing up her passageways with a disease called bronchiectasis, and then the hammer blow of pneumonia on top of this that she was unable to survive. Not anxiety. It really hurts to know this.

Yet would you believe that six days before her death, she attended and participated in an online film studies discussion class that she loved? Or that five days before her death, she and I watched the White Lotus season three finale? Or, going back eight days before her death, I wheeled her around Golden Gate Park’s flower arboretum? I’m under no illusions that these were entirely comfortable things for her given what she was dealing with. They were not, and yet she still found joy or moments of peace in her final days. 

I think I just can’t truly grapple with a death like hers, not merely because she was mine, but because she was just here, you know? It’s why the final months play on a loop in my brain, and frankly, I want them to. I want the intensity of this feeling. I don’t want it to flatten out when I think about her. I want to feel the injustice and the tragedy of it all, while also navigating my way through and eventually out of intense grieving. 

If you’re wondering, I’m mostly doing well. Seriously. I know that grief spills out in different ways, and mine just spilled out into this thing you’re reading. It’s a catharsis of a kind. I am in no way against therapy or support groups, nor do I find myself “above” them in any way. But weirdly, I find that typing words on pages is the single best way for me to grapple, the thing that helps me the most. I also know that grief is non-linear and moves in stages, and therefore I am open to whatever form it will take and whatever intervention, self-driven or otherwise, I’ll need. Perhaps her final months will flatten out into an overall composite picture of her, and of us together. Perhaps I won’t need that intensity of feeling any longer, and I can come to see her final two months merely as my least favorite out of the 370 months we spent together.

September 1975 was an especially heady period for a precocious, jittery, news-obsessed nearly eight-year-old in Sacramento, CA. Right there in my hometown, we had a big-deal assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford by a member of the Manson family; this was followed in the next two weeks by a second assassination attempt on the president in nearby San Francisco, and then, also in San Francisco, we learned of the surprise apprehension of FBI-most-wanted-criminal Patty Hearst, the culmination of one the strangest and most compelling spectacles of the 1970s.

This jarring news played out on nearly successive covers of TIME magazine that month, interspersed with a cover story on the racist busing battle taking place in Boston at the start of that school year. I read it all gleefully and cover-to-cover, over and over again. While I myself was just beginning the 3rd grade, my parents had benevolently allowed me to marinate and pickle myself in the era’s America-coming-undone news, which was playing out in our weekly delivery of Time; the nightly 6pm national news; and gravely-intoned 24/7 news reports on KCRA radio of happenings around the world – hijackings, wars, bombings and New York City bankruptcies – that provided an ever-present ambiance to cross-town car trips to baseball practice, the library and Herfy’s Hamburgers in our Ford Pinto. 

It was the Patty Hearst kidnapping, bank robbery and eventual SLA immolation in Los Angeles that captivated me the most. The brazen snatching of the wide-eyed, rich, innocent heiress from Berkeley and her gradual absorption into the Symbionese Liberation Army’s cockeyed schemes of revolution was and remains totally fascinating, even then to a 7-year-old who could only skim the surface of what was really going on. Their multi-headed cobra logo was extremely cool. I knew at the time that their pseudo-overthrow of the establishment was taking place near us, if not in Sacramento proper then only 90 minutes “down the road” in San Francisco. I remember clearly news reports of the robbery of the Hibernia Bank at 1450 Noriega in SF’s Sunset District in April 1974 – the one in which Patty Hearst, now “Tania” and a full-fledged member of the SLA, menacingly stood guard with a gun. The shock of silver-spooned Patty Hearst, whether willingly or unwillingly, enlisted into the services of the batshit-crazy SLA was palpable, and was a frequent subject of discussion among parents, news anchors and Time Magazine pundits over the course of that next year.

It was the terrifying end of the SLA the following month that I remember the most clearly, the May 1974 shootout and fire in Los Angeles that killed six members of the group. We listened to it taking place on the news – to this very day I can remember the story “breaking” into music programming of whatever radio station my mom was listening to in the car, and then breathlessly following regular updates of the gun battle and engulfing, organization-ending fire that followed. 

I know it all sounds implausible that a 6½ year old kid claims to have not only followed but to have moderately understood even a fraction of what was going on with the SLA and Hearst. While I can reasonably assume that my sociopolitical sentience only went so far at that age, I truly did hoover up each issue of Time and every news broadcast, so much so that I’d intermittently be brought out amongst my parents’ friends to rap about the news or to count down my memorized American Top 40, usually as a sort of parlor trick that I of course was only too delighted to partake in, to the oohs and aahs of the assembled guests. 

All this American psychopathy was stamped upon me at this young age, and so when Jeffrey Toobin’s well-reviewed history of the Patty Hearst saga, American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst came out in 2017, I devoured it and it in turn, at some level, devoured me. See, Toobin’s book was not merely thrilling and a terrific history of the saga and the times – which, forty years later, really placed the homegrown American left-wing revolutionaries as relics of a very different ethos and place – but it provided just about every street address where every act in the story went down. And most of these street addresses were located within a 5 mile radius of my San Francisco home. 

I did what any of you would have done – right? – and proceeded to “collect” photographs of each location as it stands today, much to the chagrin and dismay of my immediate family. This project was completed earlier this year, in 2022, when I accompanied my wife and son on their trip to Disneyland, but rather than share the joy of Disney with them, I basked in my own joy spent standing and ogling the exact site where 6 Symbionese Liberation Army members died in a violent revolutionary gun battle with the Los Angeles Police Department.

To wit – my photographs.

Our story begins at 2603 Benvenue Avenue, Apt. #4, where Miss Hearst was kidnapped while a college student at UC-Berkeley and taken away by the SLA. Here’s what it looked like in 2018 when I visited. This is several blocks away from campus, in a typically lovely, leafy and ramshackle Berkeley neighborhood.

Here’s where the SLA took Patty after her kidnapping, to 1827 Golden Gate Avenue in a neighborhood somewhat bordering Pacific Heights now commonly called “NOPA” (North of Panhandle). My understanding is that this is the location that she spent the bulk of her captivity in.

I don’t know how the SLA thought they could then safely hide Patty out one half-block away from Haight Street, but one helpful site posits that “The SLA was able to hide in plain sight because the counterculture was prevalent in the area during that time”. This area is full of lovely Victorians both then and now, and the only whiffs of the counterculture are the omnipresent self-congratulatory murals, signs and t-shirt shops lauding the 1960s heyday of the place.

Toobin’s book pinpoints this location as the place where Patty Hearst was locked in a closet and underwent most of her psychological torture, which then transformed her into the most famous exponent of “Stockholm Syndrome” of her day. It’s an unassuming home near a cliff overlooking the ocean in the outer reaches of Daly City, just south of San Francisco.

The former Hibernia Bank, the robbery of which by the SLA with Patty in tow really made this case a cause célèbre around the world.

This location in the Mission/Bernal Heights area was used as a safe house by SLA members Bill and Emily Harris in 1974 until they were arrested.

I think I was the most excited when I came upon this one. It’s where Patty was arrested, and the safe house that she was using up until 1975. The neighborhood was eerily quiet when I took this photo, and I had half a mind to knock on the door to see who was home and if they wanted to talk Hearst arcana with me. I wisely decided against it, but at least I took this snapshot.

This was the culmination of my journeys, the house where the dream died. The house itself is gone now; as you see, the canopy in the driveway to the right of 1464 East 54th Street is where the destroyed house once stood; to the right of that stands 1468 East 54th. When I visited, I had to deduce that the house was no longer there, as I’d thought it had likely been rebuilt.

If you want to watch what happened there on May 17th, 1974, this is a good video to watch. And if you really want to experience the psychological weirdness of those times, I recommend not only the Toobin book but Death To The Fascist Insect, a collection of communiques and writings by the SLA during their underground terrorist peak. It’s a wonder that most of us who marinated in all of this at a young age seemingly made it out okay.

(Several names have been abbreviated, and in some cases changed, in order to protect the adolescence of some folks now in their early 50s. Other names, when I’ve so deemed it appropriate, have been kept as they truly were)

On December 24th, 2020 I dropped off a Christmas gift at my parents’ house in San Jose, CA, and on my way out of town and back home to San Francisco, I somehow found myself magnetically drawn toward parking my car on the premises of John Muir Junior High School, a mile away on Branham Lane. My alma mater. They call it a “Middle School” now, and it now takes a young teen through the 6th, 7th and 8th grades, yet way back in 1979-1982, it was junior high, and consisted of the 7th, 8th and 9th grades. 

This was quite the life stage for me, age 11 to 14. I was introverted, young for my grade and small for my age – a terrific place to be in a school packed with feathered-hair, jean-jacketed, tough-talking heavy metal adolescents. The 2020 campus of John Muir is exactly the same as it looked in 1979 – I’m not kidding, save for a few coats of paint, it’s the EXACT SAME SCHOOL. A true testament to California educational funding. I snapped a few photos and felt the proverbial surge of memory overtake me at every vantage and view.

Let’s start with this one, since it’s where my junior high journey itself started in ‘79-’80: Mr. Davis’ English and Social Studies classroom, where I spent my 1st and 2nd period every day that year. Remember how excited you were to matriculate to classes held in different rooms after elementary school? I sure was, yet had to suffer through a milquetoast Southern gentleman of a teacher who had no idea how to corral the young burnouts who ran roughshod over him every day. The class was blessed with the two most popular girls in 7th grade, best friends named Kristi H and Judy S. Tall girls with feathered hair who lorded over even the taller boys, and who were talked about incessantly by every young male of my acquaintance – until an even prettier young hairsprayed lass named Jennifer Denman joined our class about a month into the school year, and became every young man’s topic du jour. The class featured insufferable and unending male peacocking and showboating for these three girls’ attention, all in front of a teacher who hemmed and hawed and stammered at low volume to no avail. If any actual learning took place in this room, I don’t remember any of it.

The class had a newly-arrived Iranian immigrant named Majid whose first year in America unfortunately overlapped with the Iranian hostage crisis and a whole raft of jingoistic, anti-Iran idiocy across not only our school but throughout America. Majid was frequently grilled by my classmates about whether he stood with “the Shah” or with “the Ayatollah”. There was, of course, only one correct answer in those days of “Ayatollah Assaholla” t-shirts and “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran” (sung to the tune of “Barbara Ann”) parody songs on the radio. The poor shellshocked kid barely spoke a lick of English, and I remember feeling very sorry for the abuse he took, while of course doing nothing whatsoever to either help lessen it, nor to bravely befriend him. 

That same year we were going through a presidential election later in 1980, and I remember many campus-wide jokes about Jimmy Carter, and how no one would vote for “peanuthead”. There was one notable dissent from a most awesome redheaded, long-haired, heavy-lidded jean-jacket hesher whom I shared a class with, a guy named David Fogg (!). His informed opinion was to not vote for Reagan, as “Reagan’s definitely gonna start World War III”. Neither David nor I would be able to vote for another 6 years.

Before the year started I had an opportunity to sign up for one elective: woodshop, or something called “Art and Everyday Living”. Woodshop – where I’d have to make things with saws and hammers and whatnot – sounded like a total drag, so I chose the other one, which ended up being what had once been called “Home Economics” in earlier days – i.e. cooking and sewing. Thus, the class was me, about 15 girls, and for some reason, David Fogg. The teacher was a matronly seventy-something named Dixie Bullard. I had a female friend in the class, Kristi H (a different Kristi H!), who shared the same dopey sense of humor that I did, and we found ourselves in frequent “trouble” for goofing off, giggling and whatnot. Ms. Bullard once threatened to have the two of us stand in front of the class and kiss, which didn’t derail me in the least. Her bluff having been called, she unfortunately never followed through. As a result of this class, I now know how to sew a potholder.

Our next picture shows the area just in front of the cafeteria, where I’d buy a “peanut butter chew” every day to complement my brown-bagged lunch. One lunch period in 8th grade, as the bell had rung and I was shuffling back to whatever my next class was, I happened to be present in this exact area, next to the flagpole you see pictured. I was collared from behind by a small but stout little burnout named Mike Havard. He pushed me and said “You call me a fag?”, then proceeded to push me again, and repeat “Call me a fag? Call me a fag?” over and over again. I barely knew who this guy was. Naturally, a circular crowd immediately formed. These sorts of inane fights with packs of onlookers – full of guys with enormous colored pocket combs in their back pockets; girls holding Trapper Keepers and wads of Hubba Bubba in their mouths – were typical lunchtime entertainment at John Muir. I myself had observed many a tussle. 

This time it was me, and though most onlookers probably had no idea I existed, they certainly wanted to see some punches thrown. Good thing I was getting pretty steamed over this quote-unquote mistaken identity, and I knew it would definitely not be a good look to back out of this one, given the large and boisterous crowd. After the 8th or 9th push and “Call me a fag?”, I awkwardly lunged at the guy; we both threw each other into headlocks and fell onto the cement, and within seconds the fight was broken up by a vice principal. I was suspended! Me – suspended for fighting. Once they heard what happened, my parents, far from being angry, expressed pride in me for “standing up for myself”. Hey, call it what you want. About 7 or 8 years later, when I was visiting San Jose from college, I stopped at the Togo’s sandwich shop at the nearby Almaden Mall. My server behind the counter was none other than Mike Havard, who recognized me, smiled, and said, “I fighted you, hunh?”.

This next photo sparks a couple of good stories. First, let’s talk about the man whom this gym is now named after. He was the school P.E. teacher when I was at John Muir; a short, gruff, little mustachioed brute who had the demeanor of a drill sergeant and the personality that fit my conception of the type of redneck dad who gave birth to most of my idiot male classmates. I guess they’ve now named the gym after him for some reason. He was the teacher of children who, trying to get the attention of a recent Vietnamese immigrant in one of my classes, shouted at him, “Hey! Hey, boat people! Get over here, boat people.” That guy. The one they’ve now named the gym after.

A funny thing once happened inside this gymnasium. We had an earthquake drill, as one sometimes does in California. These usually consist of ducking under tables, but as were in the gym, ours was to get on our hands and knees against the wall. Now, we hadn’t had a felt earthquake in Northern California in years when we did this drill around 1981, and I don’t think we’d even had a drill in a year or two. Yet when the alarm went off, we did as the teacher told us, and dropped down and lined up against the wall. Suddenly, the ground started shaking, and we all turned and looked up at each other, totally stupefied. “Is that….?” “Do you feel….?” “Did, did they plan this…?”. It was a 4-point-something quake, definitely a solid temblor, happening at the exact moment as our drill. The school therefore got a mention on that night’s local news as a result, one of those kooky wrap-up-the-newscast bits, “the school that had a real earthquake during an earthquake drill”.

I hope I’ve thus far been able to evoke that John Muir Junior High was a “heavy metal” school. I’m not sure if I remember it this way because I’d felt so out of place as a burgeoning punk rock/new wave music obsessive who stood in defiant (if silent) opposition to all things AC/DC, Black Sabbath etc, or because it was truly a golden age of hesh. I sincerely believe it was the latter. I felt like I was in the wrong school, in the wrong era, with the wrong set of friends – when I had friends at all – and I longingly looked to San Francisco, a mere hour north of us but a million psychic miles away, a place where kids could find cool records from England and didn’t have to fake-laugh when heshers like Robert Mejia would tell the school’s few black kids, “AC/DC, rock and roll, disco sucks and so does soul”. 

Our photo here shows the curb where the “stoners” would hang out. I believe that there was actually a wooden railing here in the early 80s, so perhaps one thing has changed in 40 years. Now, a “stoner” at John Muir Junior High was then an interchangeable term of endearment with “burnout”, so bestowed because the person in question smoked cigarettes at this very spot. I don’t believe I actually saw an illegal marijuana cigarette until high school, but the greasy metalheads who smoked here were deemed to be stoners nonetheless. 

Their radio station of choice was KOME, pronounced “come”, legitimately infamous for their on-air tagline, “Don’t touch that dial, it’s got KOME on it”. The diamond-shaped KOME sticker, which could be picked up for free at any local Fotomat booth (!), was ubiquitous on every Pee-Chee and Trapper in the school. The station cranked out a steady diet of Scorpions, AC/DC, Led Zep and The Who, and had the most inane radio personalities imaginable, totally perfect for a sexually pent-up 13-year-old male demographic. Late nights belonged to a clown named “Dennis Erectus”, who would go off about his phony lust for Nancy Reagan in a stupid, unhinged voice that predated Bobcat Goldthwait, and then crank the album-oriented guitar hits until everyone had gone to bed. Erectus’ routines would then predictably be played out at recess by every would-be stoner looking to impress the chicks and the fellas.

One time the aforementioned Robert Mejia and his ne’er-do-well pal Steve chased down a nerdy guy named Sean McGillicuddy, after McGillicuddy incorrectly claimed to be an AC/DC fan. With fists held above his face as he was pinned down — I watched this myself — they said, “Name two people in AC/DC! Name two, motherfucker!!”. It was heartbreaking to watch as a trembling Sean answered “Bon Scott” (technically correct but everyone knew Scott drank himself to death a couple years earlier) and – uh oh – “Led Zeppelin”. Ouch. They “whaled on his ass” right then and there. I meant to take a photo of the spot where this incident occurred; it happened to take place about 20 feet to the right of the tennis court you see below.

The far side of this tennis court was where I ate my lunch every day in 8th grade with Sean D and Bill C. It was our respite from the rest of school’s “social whirl”, and gave us a place to just be dorks for 45 minutes a day. The previous year, my best friend had been Ted E, with whom I walked to school every day, yet late in the year we suffered one of those all-too-typical junior high ruptures, where he’d found several more athletic kids who’d taken a shine to him, and I was undoubtedly trying to bend his ear far too often about The Pretenders, B-52s and Adam and the Ants, or whatever other absurdities I was obsessing about that week.

Out of what was almost certainly a profound sense of insecurity, I spent an inordinate amount of time during my lunches with Sean and Bill spinning tall tales about myself that, in retrospect, really don’t make a ton of sense. I’d “grown up in Canada”, and had played hockey on teams for many years there – the only reason I wasn’t playing it now was because Eastridge Mall, home of the town’s only ice, was “too far away for my parents to drive me to practice”. I also “had an older sister in college”, for some reason. I’m sure we talked about a great deal more than my useless lies, but I remember being mentally trapped in the suffocating cycle of lying, then shame about lying, then fear of the lie being uncovered – a great coda to add to an already difficult year in a young man’s life.

Our final 2020 photo is of the grassy “quad”, I guess you’d call it. You can see the flagpole where I “fighted” Mike Havard in the distance. This is where we’d have John Muir “spirit rallies”, where the cheerleaders would dance in an effort to bestow a greater sense of “Falcon pride” throughout the school. It’s also where most kids hung out for lunch, and where the majority of fistfights took place. 

In 9th grade, I was still hanging out with Sean D and I had thankfully stopped lying, yet Sean had gained a bit more confidence, and moved his lunchtime activity to the quad to hang with a group of much taller and more football-focused guys, led by the 6-foot pair of Brian B and Allan H. (All of their real names are seared upon my brain, somehow never to be forgotten even if I’d like them to be). I was allowed to tag along, and somehow spent the first half of 9th grade at the runt end of a more-popular “crew”, even though I almost never talked with them and was simply allowed to move in their midst. It was a survival mechanism in a dog-eat-dog school, as I still hadn’t found a single friend who shared my all-encompassing weirdo enthusiasm for underground music. We staked out a place every lunchtime on the benches at the top right of this photo – our turf, as it were – and all twelve of us went to the Marriott’s Great America amusement park on Halloween together, with me again tagging along and saying very little.

At some point halfway through 9th grade, I stopped hanging out with them, and I honestly can’t remember what I did or where I went or whom my friends were, if any. Wait, actually I just remembered right this second – it was Jon Grant, a too-smart-for-his-age 7th grader who totally cracked me up and who was in the school’s “ELP” class with me. ELP stood for Extended Learning Program, a more polite version of the “MGM” (mentally gifted minors) program I’d been in during elementary school. All of us had somehow scored highly on childhood IQ tests years ago, by answering questions such as “what is a helicopter?” both correctly and with wit and panache. Jon liked kooky reggae music like Eek-a-Mouse and Yellowman; his favorite band was Devo; and I’d actually found a true pal, just in time for high school to start and for the two of us to eventually drift apart due to lack of proximity.

I’m now relatively thankful that my three years at John Muir passed with any truly major incidents or much psychological scarring. I was not at the very bottom of the male totem pole, nor was I a true “nerd” who’d get routinely stuffed into a garbage can by large future sociopaths, though I did observe this happen to a handful of boys. I was, I think, a relatively innocuous, quietly nervous guy who was mostly ignored. In my head I was dreaming up great concert bills I wanted to put on; rejiggering the San Francisco Giants lineup so that they might actually win some games; thinking about Jennifer Denman or Tammy S or Anna M; and/or trying to figure out how to posture and preen just enough to be moderately accepted by the school’s great unwashed. I was neither depressed nor failing scholastically; I merely endured my three years there, followed by further endurance of three years of high school. 

It’s difficult to look at the campus in 2020 and graft onto it a modern teen’s world of smartphones, vaping, hip-hop and TikTok, particularly as my photos were taken during a holiday break from a middle school year spent entirely online and penned-up at home. Here’s hoping the kids of John Muir Middle School, once they come back, are now blessed with a more tolerant, less towel-whipping-inclined student body – and yes, I’m talking about you, David de Aragon.

Suckering the gullible and “the great unwashed” has been a time-honored tradition in America since the Articles of Confederation. From 1800s medicine shows to 2010s online Viagra and Cialis scams, the list of methods used to successfully part Americans from their money is perpetual and never-ending. My personal role in this cavalcade of cruelty is quite small, yet is ultimately a stain on my conscience nonetheless.

Our story takes place in 1988, at the unmarked offices of Broughton Hall Publishing at 3554 State Street in Santa Barbara, California. I was a 20-year-old college student in desperate need of spending money. Broughton-Hall were a mendacious peddler of hokey booklets that promised riches and rewards to credulous and similarly desperate rubes all over the United States. We operated a pseudo-boiler room, of sorts, in which we’d take incoming long-distance calls from people all over the country who’d been pulled into our orbit by classified ads placed in their local throwaway weekly papers and in niche magazines. These ads promised them “Foreclosed Homes Available for $1”, “How to Get a Job in TV Commercials” or “How to Get a Job on a Cruise Ship”, among other schemes.

This was how I made my living during the summer of 1988, between my Junior and Senior years of college at UC-Santa Barbara. Upon reflection and further investigation, the whole thing has turned out to be even more unseemly — and criminal — than I’d remembered.

The Job

I don’t recall how I stumbled upon the gig answering calls at Broughton Hall, but my background in outbound phone soliciting (aka “telemarketing”) was obviously impressive enough. I’d attempted to sell storm windows to homeowners in sunny San Jose, California for a few months while in high school, working for a company called Roval; I’d similarly earned some subsequent drinking money conducting surveys for a Board of Supervisors candidate in Santa Barbara earlier in 1988 (he lost).

The woman who hired and brought me into Broughton Hall was a mousy thirtysomething who effectively gave me my script and then set me loose. Her oversight, as we’ll soon learn, was nearly nonexistent, which made for a much more satisfying work environment than I’d anticipated. I worked elbow-to-jowl with about 25 or 30 other “sales reps”, I guess you’d call us, taking calls for four hours at a time from our hapless marks. We were a motley mix of college students, housewives and yes, pseudo-professional phone solicitors, some of whom had been putting in daily 8-hour shifts at Broughton Hall for several years. I remember at least one dopey lifer who let it be known it was that he — not us moonlighting part-timers— who was the top telemarketing dog in the office.

The Set-Up

What we were “selling” to our callers was a variety of dreams, escapes and get-rich-quick ideas — and ultimately, a pack of lies. Broughton Hall would place simple classified ads that peddled some fantastic hook — “Earn money Reading Books! $30,000/year potential”; “Repossessed VA and HUD homes available from government from $1 without credit check”; “Wanted: People interested in becoming actors for TV commercials”, and so on.

These ads weren’t running in the Wall Street Journal nor the New York Times classifieds; rather, they’d go into the ludicrous supermarket tabloid The Weekly World News, or in local publications such as the Jewell County Record, the Kokomo Tribune, the Tustin News and the San Bernardino County Sun. I was also able to uncover placements in magazines like Black Enterprise, Field & Stream and Kiplinger’s Personal Finance (!).

Each ad provided an (805)-area code phone number to call for details. This was usually 805–682–7555 or 805–962–8000. The caller would identify to us that they were calling “Extension T-1018” or “Extension “J-1060”, which would then tell each rep in the call center which pitch we needed to read off. “T” might mean we’d talk to them about how to get a government job; “J” might mean how to get a job on a cruise ship; “X” might be how to buy a home for $1.

The codes for which scripts to read were on a taped-up piece of paper on the walls in front of our tiny desks. I’d take a call from someone looking for a job in the airline industry, for instance, and I’d start talking about how the airlines were hiring right now, how the opportunities were too lucrative to pass up, and that — wait for it — for only $10 we’d send you a book called “How To Get a Job in the Airline Industry” that would tell you all about it. No homes, no jobs, no cars, no TV auditions. A book.

Invariably and predictably, this was a big letdown for my callers — and it’s where my finely-honed sales skills would have to come into play, had I had any. With the passage of time, I’m a bit fuzzy on which skills I even used, exactly, but I recall being at least decent at the job, if not quite a “top seller”. I also recall that my soft-spoken, mousy-haired boss really didn’t care much one way or the other.

The whole scam was to sell books — not books, mind you, but cheap paper booklets. These were written by pseudonymous authors like “Robert Hancock” and “Sylvia Carpenter”, both of whom, judging by the range of titles they published, certainly knew a great deal of information about a great many completely unrelated things.

Broughton Hall wouldn’t really let the telemarketers see those 8.5”x11” paper booklets, shameful as they were. They were kept in a locked back room, yet I was able to find my way in there once with some co-workers who had tipped me off as to just how sordid this whole endeavor was. The booklets were flimsy and poorly-written lists of tips and advice, more than anything else — nothing that would truly enable one to buy a home for $1 nor get a job in TV, but that pretended to do so well enough that, I’m assuming, the company could claim “truth in advertising” on some delusional level.

Our customers, if they didn’t balk at the $10 price, would then be asked to provide a credit card for the book (most didn’t have one), or accept the book “C.O.D.” (cash on delivery), which was the inevitable payment method of choice for most. While COD ran the risk of remorseful non-acceptance once the mailman showed up at the door, the decline rates for the book were far smaller than one might expect. I seem to recall a figure along the lines of 25% rejected and returned, which meant that 75% of our COD customers were still excited and eager for their promised financial or employment windfalls, even when the sad and depressing booklet actually arrived a week later.

The Prey

Who were our customers, ultimately? For lack of a better term, they were the near-permanent denizens of America’s lower socio-economic stratas — my countrymen and countrywomen who habitually read publications like the Weekly World News, and who would spend money on long-distance calls based upon promises made in a 2-line classified ad. Toll-free 1–800 numbers did exist in 1988, but ours was a full-charge long-distance call to the 805 area code. I suspected that Santa Barbara’s “805” area code played to our advantage, as it may have reminded our callers of the free calls they’d previously placed to “800” numbers.

They called from places like Murfreesboro, Tennessee and Hemet, California. They called from Dothan, Alabama and Alligator Point, Florida. They did not call from New York City, Cambridge nor San Francisco. I recall most calls ending in a disappointed “oh…no thanks…..nevermind”, once I’d provided my punchline, but occasionally I’d truly have to work hard to overcome objections to close the sale. “Wait, is this really going to work?”, I’d be asked. My response was invariably, “Take a look at the guide — it will tell you everything you need — and I’ll have it in today’s mail for you. Can I mail it out today? Will that be credit card or COD??”

One guy who’d called in about the foreclosed homes told me, “Ten dollars?! I only have two dollars — one for the home, and one for the call!”. Others might regale me with tales of their previous “acting experience” in junior high school musicals, or tell stories about that one time they’d flown on an airplane to grandma’s in Corpus Christie, and how they’d always had a love of airplanes and wouldn’t it be a real treat to work on one…? We even had an suckers-bet closing pitch for money-conscious consumers: “Send us a copy of your phone bill, and we’ll pay you back for the call!”. I have little insight into how, or whether, this was actually ever done.

Sometimes one of the two supervisors would tape a $10 bill on the wall in front of our row of phones. Whoever first conned, say, twenty customers into giving us their addresses and accepting COD delivery of these booklets that day would get the money. Tactics like these enabled Broughton Hall to become a powerhouse in their field, such as it was.

The Hijinks

I believe in retrospect that my demoralization set in early, because even though I only worked at Broughton Hall for about 5 months, I moved quickly with several co-workers into “improving” our calls, solely and completely for our amusement. For instance, we’d dare each other to take calls using ridiculous foreign accents. I remember trying on my best “British” for one of my Tennessee gentleman callers, and then laughing so hard in the middle of my spiel that I hung up on him.

We inexplicably had the ability to each jump onto each other’s phone lines, using the landline phones with 6 square, clear-plastic punch-buttons that represented line 1, line 2, line 3, and so on up to 6. Getting onto each other’s calls was simply a matter of each of us pressing the same blinking square, indicating an incoming call, at the same time.

One other college student co-worker and I perfected this game in which we’d both jump on the same call as it came in, then “trade” lines in our script, one after the other. I’d read one out to the caller (“We’re excited that you called in about getting a government job today”), then he’d read the next one (“That’s why we’d like to tell you how to unlock the secrets of getting a job in the government”) — with no thought given to how absurd we must have sounded. Amazingly, we actually made it through most calls doing this gag without being caught, nor without cracking up. I only remember one person saying, “Hey — there are two of you talking!”, which we hotly denied before carrying on the gag. We tried to take it to the next level once, in which we traded off every word, but this unfortunately lasted about one sentence (“We’re.” “Excited”. “That”. “You” etc.) before we each lost it, and abruptly abandoned our caller.

I had a favorite co-worker toward the end whose name escapes me, but he was a Mexican-American who deliberately did everything in his power to make me laugh on his calls. In the course of taking down a customer’s mailing information, he loved to confirm the spelling of their names or streets by saying things like, “That’s a B, as in Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwich?” or “That’s a T, as in Turkey with Extra Gravy”? I don’t know how he held it together while doing that routine, but I know many of my own calls were severely disrupted by half-listening to his.

If it sounds like my aforementioned supervisor was fairly “hands-off”, that would be 100% correct. She either didn’t believe in call monitoring, or didn’t care to do so. Perhaps she liked the paycheck and hated employee conflict; perhaps she was retaliating on behalf of economically oppressed America by letting us persist in our shenanigans. I know that I skipped my final scheduled day of work in October 1988 due to having stayed up until 5am with the members of the rock band Mudhoney, who had played on my college radio show the night before and drunkenly crashed at my cousin’s and my apartment. When I sheepishly showed up a few days later to collect my final check, my absence was only barely noted, and I happily put Broughton Hall behind me.

The Aftermath

Until I started writing this “wasn’t this early job of mine so funny?” piece, I didn’t even recall the name Broughton Hall. I only remembered where it was located on State Street, and using Google Earth, I was able to grab the photo you see here of the exact building in which it was located in 1988, which now houses a fitness center, as well as its address at 3554 State Street. Noting that it was located then next to the still-active coffee/tea/gift shop Vices & Spices, I called that business, and I asked them if they remembered the name of their next-door neighbor of 28 years ago, and after the longtime owner Henry Wildenborg went off to ask his longtime partner, Mr. Wildenborg called me back with the name Broughton Hall, which then fired off not only my memory synapses but also a furious Google search.

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported the following on August 27th, 1999, in a piece written by Debra Barayuga:

The ad jumped out at Nichole Cook, an at-home mother with one child and another on the way.

Read books at home and get paid for it, it basically said. Unable to work outside the home but needing the extra income, Cook, of Wahiawa, jumped at the chance.

She called the company and was impressed at how much they said she would be paid for proofreading manuscripts. “This is cool,” thought Cook. “This isn’t one of those scam things, or so I thought.”

Broughton Hall, a Santa Barbara telemarketing firm that advertised work-at-home guides in newspapers across the nation, including Hawaii, yesterday pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to one count of false advertising in interstate commerce, a violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act.

“In their ads, they represented that people could earn $30,000 a year working at home and they had no basis for making that claim,” said U.S. Attorney Brent Whittlesey.

The violation carries penalties of a maximum six months in jail and $10,000 fine. Broughton Hall was ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $236,000 to victims of their fraudulent advertisements, Whittlesey said.

Broughton Hall, one of the largest telemarketing companies in Southern California, was also ordered to dissolve the corporation and is prohibited from conducting business anywhere in the future, he said.

The company had been operating for the past 20 years, with revenues of $4.5 million a year. Broughton Hall officials could not be reached for comment.

It turned out that this 1999 conviction was not Broughton Hall’s first brush with the wrong side of the law. In 1998, The Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the California Attorney’s General office and the Tulare County, California, District Attorney’s office charged Broughton Hall and five other Santa Barbara-based telemarketing companies with fraud, and sought redress for complainants.

From a November 1998 press release:

The California Attorney General filed a civil action in state court in San Diego against Broughton Hall and its president Pamela R. Byrne. The complaint alleges defendants engaged in false advertising and unfair business practices and seeks an injunction, restitution and civil penalties.

According to the Attorney’s General office, Broughton Hall, which does business under the names of “Employment Information Center” and “Information Center,” places classified ads in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States. The ads are generally under the “Help Wanted,” “Employment Services” or “Business Opportunities” headings and promise $30,000 or more per year income potential for reading books or for doing typing or word processing at home. Broughton Hall does not, however, provide employment or employment services, the Attorney’s General office said. And consumers who call the company to get a refund are put on hold for as long as an hour, treated rudely, and hung up on.

Having been wholly shut down in 1999, there’s not much of a further online trail to follow for Broughton Hall. It appears that they received their proverbial just desserts. I had mostly forgotten this unsavory job of mine save for some of the wacky stories I’ve just relayed until my memory was jarred by my cousin Doug, who’d remembered me unwinding over a beer with stories from each day’s telemarketing sessions. I’m honestly surprised and chagrined that the scam lasted as long as it did at Broughton Hall.

Later, in the 1990s, we’d see the introduction of the nationwide “Do Not Call” list that legally prevented telemarketers from rudely interrupting one’s dinner (it is not a coincidence that Roval Storm Windows of San Jose, CA is no longer in business?). We got the internet, which provided far better ways to lure in unsuspecting prey. We saw the evisceration of the classified ad marketplace by CraigsList and others, which lessened or removed these sections from both supermarket tabloids and weekly newspapers (in the latter’s case, the classified ad-pocalypse removed weekly newspapers themselves). We effectively saw the death of COD.

And — perhaps FTC and local law enforcement actually kept their eyes on the ball for once, it would seem, and decided to prosecute deceitful and harmful trade practices such as Broughton Hall’s.

My role in all of this doesn’t keep me up much at night, given that I was a doofus post-teenager with zero true work experience and a lack of a finely-honed ethical compass. Rather, the story illustrates a small link in a long chain of hucksterism that undercuts the stories American commerce tells about itself, and illuminates uncomfortable truths about class, education and small-e exploitation. That would be “E”, as in “English Muffin with a Poached Egg on Top”.

Thank you to Doug Miller for the inspiration, and to Henry Wildenborg for the detective work assistance.