Bakersfield: School and Small Consequences

By Cliff Potts
Bay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — June 4, 2026

This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts.

The Cyst

Around that time, I developed a cyst on my neck. It did not hurt. It was simply visible — large enough that adults asked questions.

They wanted a cause. Had I fallen? Hit something? I invented a story about reaching for aspirin and falling against the sink. It was not true, but once stated, it was difficult to retract.

I was taken to the hospital, placed under anesthesia, and the cyst was opened and drained. It healed gradually. I still carry the scar.

My father was not present. My mother handled it.

The Wrong Line

On the first day of kindergarten, I entered the wrong classroom. Some first-grade classes were housed in identical bungalows. I followed the wrong group.

The teacher checked her roster, did not find my name, and handed me crayons instead of reprimanding me. Eventually my actual teacher located me and escorted me to the correct room, directly in front of the one I had chosen.

Kindergarten was half-day. My mother picked me up at noon, dropped me at the babysitter, and returned to work.

The Duck

In first grade, walking from school to the babysitter near the fairgrounds, I saw plastic yard ducks arranged on someone’s lawn. I decided I needed one of the smaller ducks.

I removed it. The spike anchoring it to the ground broke off. I discarded the spike and carried the duck to the babysitter’s house.

When questioned, I said I had found it.

The woman who drove us home knew otherwise. We stopped on the way. I returned the duck.

The matter ended there.

Processing Speed

First grade also revealed something else.

Oral reading was difficult for me — not because I could not read, but because my mind moved faster than my speech. I absorbed the page quickly and then stumbled when trying to express it in sequence.

My teacher responded by giving me a felt board and story pieces. When I told the story visually, there was no difficulty.

#archivalRecord #autobiography #BakersfieldChildhood #Chapter3 #childhoodLearning #CliffPotts #earlyDiscipline #elementarySchoolYears #lifeNarrative #memoirSerialization #serializedAutobiography

Bakersfield: The Early Return

By Cliff Potts
Bay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — May 28, 2026

This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts.

Before Dawn

We left Tucson before dawn.

We always left early when driving long distances. It was cooler and quieter. This time it was my mother driving, my sisters Geri and Lauren, me, a small square fish tank with guppies, and a cat whose name I no longer remember. My father was not with us. That tells me he was still working on Kwajalein.

The fish container was more reinforced bowl than aquarium. It sat in Geri’s lap. Somewhere between Tucson and Los Angeles, the rising sun poured through the car window. The water heated gradually. By the time we realized what was happening, the guppies were dead.

I remember the sunrise more than the fish.

Desert Light

I was four, not yet five, and I saw a desert sunrise unlike any I have seen since. Reds and oranges across a flat horizon. Silence and scale at the same time. It remains one of the clearest visual memories of my early childhood.

The cat became carsick and vomited in my lap. I reacted in kind. Somewhere inside that remarkable sunrise was a miserable cat, a crying boy, and a station wagon heading west.

That was our return to California.

A Project Family

We were not a family that planted roots.

We moved where contracts required — Tucson, Kwajalein, Bakersfield. Stability was provisional. Addresses changed.

My father was gone for extended stretches. Kwajalein Atoll. Defense work. Important work, as it was described. To a small child, the description did not matter. He was simply absent.

When he returned from one of those stretches in Bakersfield, I made a smart remark. I do not remember what I said. I remember being taken into a bedroom and beaten with a belt.

That was discipline as it functioned then. There was no discussion. You obeyed.

Years later, when I had children of my own, I repeated what I had been shown.

Patterns pass forward unless someone interrupts them.

#1960sChildhood #archivalRecord #autobiography #BakersfieldCalifornia #Chapter3 #CliffPotts #familyRelocation #lifeNarrative #memoirSerialization #projectFamily #serializedAutobiography

Tucson: Lessons in Independence

By Cliff Potts
Bay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — May 21, 2026

This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts.

Too Young for Baseball

There was a city-run youth program of some kind — crafts, games, structured activity without the formal label of school. I was four, perhaps four and a half. Not enrolled in school. No preschool. My mother was not present that day.

I remember the announcement clearly:

“Time for baseball.”

The older children gathered. Two teenage camp leaders conferred briefly, then delivered their decision.

“You’re too young to learn baseball. You should go home.”

There was no modified role, no escort, no accommodation. Simply a dismissal.

I was apparently too young to learn baseball — but not too young to walk home alone across blocks and intersections.

So I walked.

I arrived safely. I never learned childhood baseball in Tucson. Years later, in Chicago, I would play 16-inch clincher softball through Awana — gloves unnecessary, the ball large and soft. It was enjoyable, but it was not the same beginning.

My father favored individual sports such as golf and auto racing. He disliked the way team sports credited one player for collective effort. Baseball never became central in our household.

It remained peripheral — and later, personal.

The BB Rifle

The early 1960s are often described as safer years. My experience complicates that narrative.

One afternoon, Geri and I walked to a small soft-serve stand on a main street. On the way back, we passed a pair of older boys. They watched us. We continued walking.

A sharp impact struck the back of my head.

One of them had fired a pump-action BB rifle.

I do not recall whether I dropped the ice cream cone. I remember crying as we walked home. My mother cleaned the welt and then went, with Geri, to the boy’s house.

His father was a county sheriff.

The conversation was direct. The rifle was taken away. Discipline followed. In that moment, authority functioned as intended.

The early 1960s were not without danger. They were simply managed differently.

The Apricot Tree

Across the street lived an older woman who guarded her apricot trees with vigilance. Pie tins hung in the branches as improvised alarms. She sat nearby with an air-pump BB rifle. When birds descended, she struck a tin with precise aim, and the metallic snap scattered them.

She allowed me to shoot as well.

I was too young for baseball, but apparently old enough to handle a BB rifle under supervision. That contradiction did not occur to me at the time.

Old Tucson

Old Tucson was a movie set converted into a tourist attraction. One ride simulated a haunted gold mine: rail cars, flashing lights, staged explosions. I was unprepared for it.

During the ride I panicked completely. When we emerged into daylight, I declared through tears that I had known God would save me. My sisters laughed.

Later that day I reached for my mother’s hand while crossing a street and grasped the hand of a stranger instead. Realizing the mistake, I ran forward until I found her.

We ended the outing in a saloon-style establishment where I first heard the word “sarsaparilla.” It meant root beer.

The Collapsed Lawn

One afternoon my mother set up a metal sprinkler near the carport and we went inside for a nap. When we returned outside, a large section of lawn had collapsed into a cavity beneath it.

Before city sewage, the house had used a septic tank. When the system was removed, the pit had not been properly filled. Boards had been laid across the opening and sod placed over them. The sprinkler softened the ground, the boards failed, and the lawn gave way.

The situation was repaired, but our time in Tucson was already nearing its end.

My father secured work with General Electric on Kwajalein Atoll, installing generating equipment for the missile test range. He departed first. Not long after, we packed and left Tucson by car, returning to Bakersfield.

The desert chapter concluded as the others had — with departure.

#1960sNeighborhoodLife #archivalRecord #autobiography #Chapter2 #CliffPotts #earlyIndependence #familyRelocation #lifeNarrative #memoirSerialization #serializedAutobiography #TucsonChildhood

Tucson: The House and the Desert

By Cliff Potts
Bay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — May 14, 2026

This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts.

The House Near Davis–Monthan

By the time we settled in Tucson, my father’s work was tied to Davis–Monthan Air Force Base. The house was a typical post-war Southwest stucco structure — single story, compact, functional. In memory it was off-white with a green roof.

Inside details are incomplete. Kitchen to the left, living room to the right, hallway toward bedrooms that no longer hold clear images. I do not remember where I slept or whether I shared a room.

What remains is the exterior.

Lawn and Boundary

There was a small patch of grass in front and a white picket fence with a spring-loaded gate that snapped shut behind you. Beyond that fence, the desert began immediately. Not down the block — at the edge of the yard.

My father’s truck sat in a simple carport. One afternoon I dropped pieces of my plastic train set into the round stake holes in the truck bed and became convinced they were lost forever. When I told my mother I had dropped them “down the hole,” she imagined a hole in the yard and nearly panicked. Once she realized I meant the truck bed, she opened the tailgate and retrieved them.

Four-year-old logic operates differently.

The Boat in the Sand

Behind the house ran a long block wall. I walked along it often, scanning the sand beyond for anything of interest. One day I found the bottom half of a plastic bathtub boat lying on the desert surface. It was intact and unburied.

I brought it home.

Days or weeks later — time had little structure then — I found the top half in the same area. I checked to see if anyone was watching and carried it back as well. When the pieces snapped together, the boat was complete.

I never learned how it arrived there. For a child, explanation was less important than possession.

Food and Small Economies

If any food defines Tucson in my memory, it is Cheerios. Plain cereal, heavily sugared by my own hand. The milk turned gray from what settled at the bottom of the bowl. I scraped and ate that too.

Lunch was often tomato soup with bread or peanut butter and jelly. Dinner varied. I disliked lima beans and liver then and still do.

I collected cereal box tops to mail away for a model car kit. When it arrived, I realized I lacked the skill to assemble it. The older boy next door — perhaps eleven or twelve — built it for me after my mother spoke with his mother. Glue marks, mismatched seams, fingerprints in the plastic. It did not matter. It was finished.

He helped without obligation. That remained with me.

#1960sArizona #archivalRecord #autobiography #Chapter2 #childhoodMemories #CliffPotts #DavisMonthanAirForceBase #lifeNarrative #memoirSerialization #serializedAutobiography #TucsonNeighborhood

Tucson: The Mother’s Knee

By Cliff Potts
Bay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — May 7, 2026

This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts.

An Injury Before Memory

I have no memory of my mother’s knee from Tucson. The injury happened years before I was born. What I know came later, in fragments — partial explanations, offhand remarks, and medical facts gathered long after the event itself.

Sometime after my sister Geri was born in 1950 and before my sister Lauren was born in 1955, my mother rose one morning, twisted slightly, and her knee collapsed completely. The joint failed without warning.

The timeline around those years is not perfectly clear. My parents were married in Boise, Idaho. Geri was born in Chicago. The movement between those places was never fully explained to me.

The Bone Man

The doctor who treated her was described as an old-school orthopedic surgeon — direct and unsentimental. The procedure he proposed was experimental. There were no guarantees.

The knee joint was beyond repair. The solution was fusion: bone to bone, permanently fixed. It worked. From that day forward, my mother lived with a leg that did not bend.

The Cause

Decades later, I learned the underlying cause was tuberculosis. The infection had begun in her lungs and migrated to the joint, gradually destroying it from within. By the time the damage was understood, the knee could not be salvaged.

Years later she was told she could consider a knee replacement. She was also told she was “too young.” She did not pursue it again.

Practical. No drama. Adjustment over complaint.

By the time I was born in 1957, the fusion had healed. The straight leg was simply part of who she was.

#1950sFamilyHistory #archivalRecord #autobiography #Chapter2 #CliffPotts #familyResilience #lifeNarrative #medicalHistory #memoirSerialization #serializedAutobiography #tuberculosis

Tucson: Arrival in the Desert

By Cliff Potts
Bay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — April 30, 2026

This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts.

A Bus Somewhere in the Southwest

My first clear memory does not begin in Tucson. It begins on a long-distance bus somewhere in the American Southwest. I was four years old, small enough to sleep folded into positions that would not make sense to an adult body.

I woke up in a stranger’s lap.

He was not my father. I understood that immediately. My mother and my sisters were several rows ahead across the aisle, exhausted from travel. Why this man was the one holding me, I do not know. Perhaps my mother needed help and he offered it.

I was not afraid. I blinked at him, took in the moment, and the world continued.

That is where memory begins.

Entering Tucson

We were headed to Tucson, Arizona — toward heat, dust, and a city tied closely to military infrastructure. We arrived in 1961, between the U-2 incident involving Gary Powers and the Cuban Missile Crisis that would follow the next year. I did not understand those events then, but they formed part of the era’s background.

Tucson was not random. My father had secured work connected to Davis–Monthan Air Force Base. He understood military systems and military structure.

My Father’s Military Years

My father had served in the Army Air Corps during World War II in the Pacific theater. His role was as a cook. It was not glamorous work, but it was necessary. A newspaper clipping once noted that he had won an award for being the best chicken fryer in the United States Army.

After the war, he re-enlisted in the newly formed United States Air Force, made sergeant, and eventually left the service to care for my mother when her knee collapsed completely.

A Life Already in Motion

By the time we reached Tucson, movement was already the family norm. Military service had been followed by civilian heavy-equipment work. Contracts shifted. Locations changed. We adjusted.

The bus ride marked another transition — one of many.

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Return Without Echo

By Cliff Potts
Bay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — April 23, 2026

This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts.

A Visit at Twenty-Five

I returned to San Rafael once, on my twenty-fifth birthday. At the time, I was working in San Francisco in the production department of Jews for Jesus. A couple of friends drove me across the bridge so I could see the house where I had been born.

I did not knock on the door.

The Structure

I stood outside and looked at it. There was no emotional recognition. It was a house — four walls and a roof. The fact of my birth had occurred there, but nothing in the structure carried memory for me.

The visit required no ceremony.

California’s Mark

By 1968, my parents’ California chapter was effectively closed. What California left behind was not nostalgia but pattern: movement, machinery, practicality, adaptation.

San Rafael did not leave fingerprints. It established direction — forward.

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Movement as Routine

By Cliff Potts
Bay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — April 16, 2026

This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts.

The Toolbox

When a project ended, the family packed. The largest and most important object was my father’s steel toolbox — nearly the size of a steamer trunk. He could lift it as if it weighed far less than it did. It contained the tools that kept the machines running.

When the toolbox moved, we moved.

Early Geography

I do not remember San Rafael. My early life is reconstructed from sequence rather than memory. Bakersfield, California. Tucson, Arizona. Then back to Bakersfield by the time I reached kindergarten.

Bakersfield became the first stable reference point — oil fields, truck yards, construction crews, heat, and dust. It was not glamorous, but it was functional.

Sound and Environment

My infancy unfolded in the background noise of construction: engines idling, hydraulics hissing, steel against earth. Entire sections of the state were being cut, graded, and reshaped. My father’s work placed us inside that process.

The landscape was not sentimental. It was under development.

Record Over Memory

If memory fails, documentation remains. According to Catholic records, I was baptized on the Feast of St. Blaise. Two crossed candles were held at my throat during the blessing. Tradition remained steady even when location did not.

Family called me Clifford. Others called me Cliff. The name carried no decoration.

#archivalRecord #autobiography #BakersfieldCalifornia #CatholicBaptism #childhoodMobility #CliffPotts #familyRelocation #lifeNarrative #memoirSerialization #serializedAutobiography #TucsonArizona

Building California

By Cliff Potts
Bay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — April 9, 2026

This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts.

A State Under Construction

The California of the late 1950s was not the polished image it later became. It was being built — graded, blasted, and engineered into modern form. Subdivisions replaced farmland. Highways cut through mountains. Entire water systems were designed to reshape population growth.

The California Aqueduct

One of the largest undertakings of the era was the California Aqueduct system, created to move water from northern reservoirs to the dry and expanding south. Canals were dug across valleys and deserts. Pumping stations operated continuously. When hydraulic systems failed, the work stopped.

The machinery was large and constant. Breakdowns were inevitable.

My Father’s Trade

My father was a heavy equipment mechanic specializing in hydraulics and automatic transmissions in earth-moving machinery. Cars held no interest for him. He worked on dozers, scrapers, loaders — machines built to move land itself.

Somewhere among my belongings is his old Caterpillar key, a universal starter used across much of the equipment on those sites. It was not a symbol of authority. It was a symbol of competence. He needed to move a machine before he could repair it.

The Grapevine and Interstate 5

Another major project involved the early carving of the Grapevine and what became Interstate 5. Mountain terrain had to be cut, blasted, stabilized, and graded into something that could carry continuous traffic. Engines overheated. Hydraulics failed. Equipment required constant maintenance.

That was his environment. When machinery stopped, someone like him was called to bring it back to life.

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