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Fontana

Pic link to bike

    My mom's younger brother, Lalo (Eulalio), lived with my aunt Noni and four sons, Federico, Tony, Eddie, and Alex, in a small house on 5 acres of land in Fontana, California. The boys shared a bedroom that was converted from a one car garage.

     Visiting them was so much fun, there was so much to do. And I loved to be around my cousins. 

    In front of their house was a row of five eucalyptus trees.  Freddy and I were standing under the trees and we heard a plop. It was a baby bird, not quite a hatchling. The fall had broken his wing, and he was pretty beat up. We made a splint for his little wing out of a popsicle stick and string. We fed it worms and little pieces of hotdog and baloney.  As the weeks went on, this tiny bird grew to be a hawk, about a foot and a half tall. It learned to fly and to bring us lizards from the field. It had grown into a beautiful bird.

     A while later we went to visit, Freddy told me that the redneck white kids next-door had beaten our bird to death with sticks.

@    In my 20s, a great joy was riding my bicycle out to Fontana to visit my cousins, a trip of about 60 miles. Read more about it on page.     

     In those years Fontana was a company town. The company was Kaiser Steel. The largest steel foundry this side of the Mississippi. If you were wondering, the Kaiser steel company came up with the idea of  Kaiser Permanente health insurance. They offered it not only to their employees, but to the entire city of Fontana.

      When we were in our 20s, Freddie and I would go to the Fontana bars and play snooker. 10,000 steel workers got paid Friday afternoon, and they would be Whooping it up and having a good time drinking their paychecks. Each and every one a redneck. And nearly every business in Fontana had armed guards over the weekend. Sometimes heavily armed guards. One night, at the next pool table, two big ugly steel working rednecks got into a bottle fight. Beer, glass, and blood ruined the felt on the table.

     This was happening all over town, guys with guns and rifles acting  as guards, and guys just walking along with guns looking and waiting for a fight. And if that wasn’t enough, Fontana was a Klan town. Here was the biggest Klan “Association” in the US. There were billboards on Highway 10 and many more in town bragging that this was KKK country.  

                                                                  A  parade in 1981 in Fontana                                                   

      At the time I thought all of this potential violence was exciting. Looking back, it looks entirely different.

                             “The Ku Klux Klan is not a club for snobs;

it is a device for organizing inferiorities into a mystical superiority.”

H.L. Mencken