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Sunday, 24 April 2011 22:49

This last weekend I had to cut my work and storage space down due to the landlord wanting some of it back (right! ...after 30 years of living in this same place you take our storage away!). I finally finished moving things and getting rid of a ton of stuff. A lot went in the trash, a lot went to Goodwill and some to the local equipment recycling plant. The rest I had to rent part of a new storage facility in Compton to keep (the facility is cheaper there).

In the 80s I did a evening TV show on cults with TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network) because Paul and Jan Crouch wanted to educate Christians on cults - but they didn't care for Walter Martin's style (author of the major hit Kingdom of the Cults). Jan read my Refuting Jehovah's Witnesses book and said "I want him on instead."

So I was reliving my life up to present by going through all these old memories.

The animal days were my earliest education in facing reality. I was like a parent with 200+ kids - you can't make 'em all happy! I learned how to establish relative priorities in my life when it came to time spent with other creatures, including friends. (Good training for being a pastor (that came 16 years later).

Earlier Memories Found

I was a straight A student for all my school years except high school. One of my high schools gave us an SAT test as an experiment to see how younger kids would do, and to my surprise I had the highest score in the school - a badge was another piece of memorabilia I found. I was especially good at spelling, and beat out two girls who were considered the brains of the school in a spelling bee (one was a Jehovah's Witness).

As a kid, I felt I really did not belong in this world. For the first 12 years of my life I felt just as comfortable by myself as with friends - often taking long trips alone. This is where I developed my "bullshit detector." When you are away from society you look back at it from a different perspective and learn to love people enough but not to be so quick to believe in what they believe. Besides, it was time to grow my hair long and be a hippie.

Back then, Las Vegas was owned by the Mafia, the bad 14-yr. olds were on heroin and there was no modern Strip with its giant ostentatious buildings. The first Caesar's Palace had just been completed (only a few stories tall) and Wayne Newton and Tom Jones performed on the Strip for years. My girlfriend made me drive her down to visit him in his dressing room a couple of times on my motorcycle (this was when you could ride a motorcycle in Vegas at 14 yrs. old). I always picked the wild girlfriends.

On the left was my girlfriend, Renee who was living with me in Newport Beach as a Rosicrucian. We both became Witnesses by looking them up, and we BOTH got our mothers, sisters and brother-in-laws into it! (Mine are all out now. Renee won't talk to me.)

Learning the Ropes

I don't exactly know how to describe this transition in my life. For the first 13 years I was more like my mom, then I slowly became more like my dad - outgoing, life of the party, crazy and the jokester. But I also learned all the tricks of working with people, since he spent 30 years in the car business and I often worked at the same agency he did. He was in demand by Ford agencies all over Southern Calif. because wherever he went sales would triple, especially when he started managing. You might want to watch my interview with my dad, made in Arkansas the year before he died, where I asked him how he managed to stay honest in the car business (back then it was more notorious and crooked).

I found the mountain and hiking pictures. Sometimes I feel partly autistic - preferring the world of nature and hikes with friends in the mountains of Yosemite and Yellowstone... hunting, fishing, riding horses and eventually dirt motorcycles.

But I also found pictures of my souped-up Mustangs and Orange Country raceway, where my auto shop teacher worked in the evenings. It was a two-hour class each day, and we built our own funny car and raced it there.

I always had two cars - one that cost $50 that you race through the thousands of dirt miles on unpoliced Irvine property that was mostly orange groves. Now the same uninhabited land is now the cities of Irvine and El Toro.

City life was not for me. I used to tell people the last place in the world I would ever live is New York City. God's joke on me? When I came back to Orange County and Los Angeles in 1980 it was like rural territory in comparison to Brooklyn!

So originally I was living in the early stages of the Hippie generation and we used to do LSD and barbituates and go vandalize the rural neighborhood, doing dares and double dares.

Once my buddy and I tried sleeping in a haunted house - we tried twice and on the second attempt we hopped in the old Ford truck 7 miles up a dirt road in the Capistrano mountains at a 100 acre ranch owned by my Scottish neighbor. Bob Fraser is one of the heads of the large Fraser clan that has their own castle in Scotland (which I visited years later). It is still family-owned and operated, and is seen in movies occasionally where they need a real late-medieval-looking castle.

This time around I've lived at the beach for 30 years since leaving Bethel! Ahh, 30 years of memories in a small room.

[On the left is a picture taken on the Pacific Crest Trail on one of our 3-week horseback-riding trips when I was 16.]

My Space

This storage room is where I kept my shipping supplies, unused equipment, and was really the only storage I had. So now my Free Minds Journal (newsletter) folder is in my kitchen (we have two kitchens fortunately, and one is all mine, due to my seniority!) It is where I work all day. All my shipping stuff is now hidden away in cabinets that you THINK might be reserved for food. It's the hidden office, looks normal and not cluttered on the inside, but with the usual fridge, microwave, etc. and connects to my room, which other than a bed and couch would not look like your room.

I can lock myself away from the rest of the house when the gang (4 roommates) gets too noisy. We have probably had about 20 roommates over the years, thus gaining it the silly title of "Herman's Hotel."

In my room it's pretty much an office as well. There are so many pieces of equipment: video machines, lighting, 3 computers, 3 printers, and a big old TV. My ergonomic bicycle stands by the door. All shelves under my waterbed are full of paper and wires and other misc equipment.

This house has many memories, from my first year out of Bethel, when I worked graveyard at Anderson Lithograph in downtown Los Angeles, and came home at 6 AM and slept on the beach for awhile. Then I quit this job (my last employer) and started washing and waxing cars 20 hours a week so I could start writing my books, including Thus Saith the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses (now called Thus Saith Jehovah's Witnesses), a collection of photocopies of WT false prophecies, etc. published in May 1982, the first of several self-published books. As the Watchtower has changed its teachings, so it has gone through several printings. Ha! They sit on my bookshelf as reminders of my need to chronicle my findings while in New York.

The house is old, built in 1934, and was a cocaine party house I found out years later from the locals. I am only two miles from LAX airport, so a lot of stewards and stewardesses moved in this area and shared the house and partied here. The movie "Blow" with Johnnie Depp was filmed in the beach parking lot a few hundred yards away, since it was the scene back then.

So I came from New York and turned it into a church. I even have two small stained-glass windows upstairs looking up at the sky. We met on Wed. nights in the big living room overlooking the ocean, and rented a local property owners clubhouse for Sunday night church meetings.

Nowadays the house is almost an eyesore, but it sure has a lot of stories to tell!

Thanks for listening. Now back to work in the kitchen. :-))

Randy

http://www.freeminds.org

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Dogpatch

Earlier Memories Found

Learning the Ropes

My Space

Murray Smith

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