Posted by bobby1776
on August 28, 2009, 3:02 am
How many guessed to whom we refer?
Show of hands...
OK, ten out of ten.
In memory of the first drop out I ever knew, a guy who yanked his family from Fresno schools in 1964 and lived on a remote gold claim amid the rusted junk and the roaring waterfall a few feet away.
Add to that: They consistently pried loose some larger boulders and gradually created a non road from a road. You had to WANT to get there.
Along with this hard core Bircher, two sons and a wife, the surrounding caves, etc became a haven for the hide out hippies and draft dodgers of the late sixties. The road ? was so bad, that instead of gazing, platonically, at the many naked hippie girls in the river, one slip and your truck would have joined them. It was here that I learned mental discipline, kind of.
And as the greatest minds, writers and hard core activists were invited, that place became a hard core constitutionalist's dream. The conversations and plots (never carried out , but dreamed about) that took place from about 1968-72 were thrilling to the max.
It was here that I first tried using the hookah set up to dive for gold, using dental picks and the like to clean the crevices below the waterfall.
Day one: damn near lost it, being T shirt and B/suit in water that was snow a few miles away.
Next week I bought the whole gear. Farmer Brown wet suit, weights, the whole Mary Ann and we helped Vern stay alive up there by putting our flakes and an occasional small nugget in the test tubes and he survived on that, plus we all brought up tons of stuff.
We just lost Alan Stang a couple of weeks ago.He made a trip or two up there. Talk about uncompromising hard core. I knew him in the early Birch days in LA, then spent some evenings at the Bay Area (SF) Saturday night hang out for the duke's mixture of Hard Core Birchers, the new Libertarians (the party was formed in Burlingame, where my room mate and I had an apartment) We also got some Ayn Randites on occasion and other offshoots of the "intellectual vein".
Best of all was Maureen Salaman's purple pudding.
Every Saturday there would be a houseful, and it was a big house.
That was the routine. One Saturday night bash at Maureen's and then up to Vern's the next weekend.
A long trip ... actually followed the Donner rescue party's trek, for that is the way they made their way up to Donner Pass.
So in memory of Vern Whipple, Patriot, I offer his limerick about the Drunken Killer Womanizing Traitor Weakling Sell out, who sure as hell wasn't Irish. Musta been a mistake in babies at the hospital.
"Massachusetts has a Senator, Ted.
"Bad Judges" were under his bed
In College he cheated
At Chappaquidick, retreated
AND MARY KO PECH NEE IS DEAD.
Vern Whipple, 1969
Rest in Peace, Vern.
El Bobby
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