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The Wright Stuff
A Story of Perseverance, Inspiration and Hope
By Victor J. Wright AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2014 Victor J. Wright
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4969-3929-6
CHAPTER 1
Tennessee Connection
My mother is the backbone of our family. She got married at fourteen—my father was twenty-one—and had her first child at fifteen. We had a little grocery store/diner that my dad's family owned. My dad, Donald Wright, was an only child. His mother gave him away to one of her sisters to raise. He didn't know who his father was, and still doesn't to this day.
He joined the army after dropping out of high school at age seventeen, when he was in ninth grade. (He got held back two or three times.) He served in Korea, was based in Japan for some time, came back to the United States, and went into the air force reserves. When he met my mom, she was twelve and he was nineteen. He would come home on leave and see my mom, because her mother lived only two houses down from the store that his family owned.
When my father got out of the military, he took over running the store, but it wasn't that successful in the beginning. My mother started working, got married, and got pregnant. She dropped out of school in the eighth or ninth grade and had to work at the store to help pay the bills.
I had a sister, Tawana, who passed away from SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) at three months old. She was the fourth oldest of my siblings. Before her were Milton, Dexter, and Tobytha. My mom was only eighteen when she lost Tawana. She was twenty-one when I came along, the sixth of nine children. My grandmother was her midwife. My other older sibling is Deborah; my younger siblings are Rebecca, Myron, Joseph, and Cheryl.
I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, April 8, 1961. Income was always hard to come by, and my dad worked all kinds of odd jobs to support his growing family. I was born just three months after the inauguration of President Kennedy, and change was in the air. It was a time of hope and anticipation. It was a time of westward expansion, of California dreaming. The Dodgers were already in town, and the Lakers had recently arrived from Minneapolis.
I was less than three months old when my dad decided to pack our things and move the family to LA, without telling anyone. Personally, I think we left Tennessee in the dead of night because he was fleeing from his problems. He was a drinker and a gambler who had debts.
I also remember not being able to walk properly until age three. I wore corrective shoes and leg braces, like Forrest Gump. I remember constantly having to go to Children's Hospital to have adjustments made to the shoes and braces. Because of this, my parents never thought I'd be able to play sports.
Though my dad has always been with us, he hasn't always been the primary breadwinner. My mom has always worked to keep the family afloat. She went to work every day, catching the bus a lot, and paid the bills. She paid for the things I needed to participate in sports. There were times we had to go on welfare and food stamps, but we always had a roof over our heads and food on the table.
My dad was strict. We suffered through a lot of family dysfunction because my parents fought a great deal when we were young. My dad smoked and drank, and now none of my siblings do that. We saw what it did to him, and we didn't want to be like that. We wanted to be like our mom, who went to church and tried to give us a weekly allowance. My dad did want us to be successful, professional people.
We stayed in a hotel when we arrived in California, all eight of us. Mom found a job as a school cafeteria cook, and later worked as a domestic and an in-home nurse. My dad found all kinds of odd jobs, mostly door-to-door sales. He delivered phone books. Later he sold suits, clothes, dresses, jewelry, perfumes, and framed prints of President Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He also went to school to study carpentry and brick laying, but had trouble finding jobs because blacks weren't allowed in those unions at the time. These are some of the earliest images that remain in my mind about my childhood.
My dad was always a physical presence in the household. He was always very strict, and when we were growing up, my siblings and I didn't feel he was as close or as loving as most people thought. As far back as I can remember, I watched my mom go to work, all day, every day. Back then we didn't have a car, so she'd walk to the bus stop and ride to Santa Monica for her job at the school cafeteria. (That job was similar to the one she had in Tennessee when she was fourteen.)
I started working with my dad when I was four years old. He wouldn't take me with him and hold my hand. He would leave me with a bundle of stuff, and then tell me he'd meet me at a certain time at a certain intersection. That went for my siblings as well. We were all affected by that. We all hated the word sales. People tried to cheat me, thinking I didn't know how to count. People would try to steal stuff from me too. They would try things on in another room and not bring everything back. What was a boy who was four, five, or six years old supposed to do? It was mostly men who took advantage of me. Sometimes we'd work from eight or nine in the morning until eleven at night. A lot of times our car broke down, and we'd have to work on it or sleep in it. When we started school, we'd have to come straight home afterward, because we'd have stuff to do. I was attacked by dogs, some of which were sicced on me by their masters. There were the winos and drunken people who'd cuss at me, chase me, and attack me. For a four-year-old, that was a tough thing to go through.
As our finances improved, we moved from the hotel room to a one-bed, one-bath house near the station for the Newton Division LAPD. It took some time to find it because few landlords were renting affordable housing to large families. But this one woman made an exception with our family. Her name was Corine Thomas, but my siblings and I simply referred to her as Miss Corine. She stands out in my childhood memories because she really got to know our family. Miss Corine spent a lot of time with me as a toddler, when my older siblings were off at school. She told me I was special, and she taught me to share. We lived there until I was three, then we moved to another back house on Jefferson Boulevard. Miss Corine was still our landlord as well as our friend and babysitter to Myron, Becca, and me. She made me feel like her own child.
Unfortunately, our stay in the Jefferson home was short-lived. We were displaced by a fire, which destroyed everything we owned except our lives, the clothes on our backs, and, of course, our resolve.
After the fire, we moved to the Ramona Gardens housing project in East LA. This was the neighborhood where I began kindergarten. It was also the one where I got into my first fight. Not just myself, but my brothers as well. It was the first neighborhood we lived in where we looked different from most of our neighbors. I remember wanting to join a gang, since that's what I saw around me. That's what I was exposed to. I was too young to hang out with my older brothers, so I hung out with my sisters.
Before moving to Ramona Gardens, I don't remember our family being as deeply religious as it is now. I believe a number of factors contributed to it. Maybe it had something to do with losing the house on Jefferson Boulevard. Maybe it had to do with the new neighborhood and the troubles we were getting into. More than anything, though, I think it had to do with the religious influences surrounding us that just hadn't been in the other neighborhood. I remember the sounds of singing nuns and piano music coming from one of the units near our house as I walked by with a friend to go to his house after school. The nuns would invite us in and ask us questions about God. When we got them right, they would give us candy. They invited us to come back and attend Bible study classes on Wednesday evenings, which we did for a while.
I'm not Catholic, but I believe it was this experience early on in life that brought me closer to God. Eventually, Mom started taking my siblings and me to a storefront church nearby.
CHAPTER 2
The Bullet
In 1967 we moved to Pasadena. We rented a house on North Marengo Avenue, around the corner from the Boys Club on Villa Street. I attended Madison Elementary School, where my troublemaking ways continued. Living close to the Boys Club, though, kept me out of trouble when I was out of school. My best friend was Barry Lessard. He was white. I always felt my best friends were like brothers to me. I had another best friend, Danny Wilson. We always got in trouble. We would dare each other to do things we knew we shouldn't do. The principal was going to kick us out of Madison, but my teacher promised she'd keep us out of trouble. She separated us, and I remained in her class. That means so much to me today. She stood up for me whenever I would get in trouble, and all along I just thought she was mean. I never got a chance to tell her how much I appreciated that. Her name was Mrs. Harvey. Even though I still got into trouble a lot, bullying the other kids, I was a gifted student. I participated in spelling bees and math contests, some of which I won.
There were other friends, such as Michael Williams, Fred Tucker, and Roland Brown. But my best friends at Madison were Barry and Danny.
The Boys Club gave me a lot of exposure to competitive sports. My dad used to umpire and coach baseball games. When I was still too young to play, I was a batboy and a ball boy, and I kept score while my older brothers Milton and Dexter played.
It was also at the Boys Club where I met Johnnie Lynn, one of the greatest athletes Pasadena ever produced. He went on to letter in three sports at John Muir High School. He ran track and was on a national record-setting relay team. Johnnie also was all-league in football and baseball, and went on to star at UCLA as a defensive back. He has spent more than twenty years as an NFL assistant coach after an eight-year playing career with the New York Jets. He has been an assistant coach with several NFL teams, most recently the Oakland Raiders.
Johnnie had two sisters, who hung out at the sports fields while he played. Kathy was my age, but I didn't spend much time with her at Madison. Leslie was younger but shy. Until we switched to another school, we would say we were cousins, because our families had gotten to know each other so well. Our moms were good friends.
Coincidentally, the Lynn family moved from Pasadena to Altadena at about the same time our family did. We kids attended Thomas Edison Elementary, which has since been closed down by the Pasadena Unified School District, due to budget cuts. The property was later leased and used by two charter schools before they were shut down. But in 1971, the Sylmar earthquake rendered the old administration building unusable, and it was razed by a wrecking ball. It was quite a spectacle to see a building that large come crumbling down.
Our neighborhood is 1,400 feet above sea level, at the base of the Angeles National Forest. Wildlife is abundant, with rodents and reptiles, insects and birds. I don't remember my time in Tennessee, but I have been back there a lot since we left, and I'm sure this setting reminded my folks of home.
Life in general was better for our family. We lived in a middle-class neighborhood in a somewhat rural setting. There were no sidewalks, and every now and then you'd see someone walking or riding a horse down the street.
My dad stopped his door-to-door selling when we moved up to Altadena. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic and determined to be mentally disabled because of its effect on his judgment. My mom took on three jobs. We always thought he could work but he never did.
I got my competitive spirit from him. As a result, I didn't treat other kids fairly in sports because I didn't play by the rules. I would play to win, even if I had to hurt some of the kids. I learned to take it easy on the girls, but never any boys, like Drew Domenghini and Darrell Smith. I didn't think they were very masculine, not very tough or athletic, so I picked on them.
My troubled days as a student continued at Edison. I got into a fight the second day of school with Lamont Fairley and was suspended for a week. No recess, no lunch, no PE. It actually helped my grades, because I had to write sentences and do homework after school.
In third grade, my best friends were Kirk Pruitt, David Thompson, Andy Andrews, and Anthony Barlow. In fourth grade, my friends were Craig Jamerson and Gary Richardson, and later that year, Byron Templeton, who transferred from Ms. Dixon's class. She became pregnant toward the end of the school year, and our class was split up among the other fourth-grade classes. I ended up in Ms. Golly's class.
I had a fun time at Edison. I was flag monitor and ball monitor. I sold ice cream, milk, and orange juice. I was class president, class representative, and served on the student body council.
I started playing football when I was nine years old. I was captain the first and every year I played. I did really well, but never got a pat on the back from my dad, never got any praise. He never took me out for a soda or a hot dog after a game. I would get these things from my mother, and she'd tell me I was good and that I could make it. I don't think he ever felt it or believed it. This goes back to memories I have even as a young child. I never felt a bond, a feeling of love. He always said he was king of the castle, and the rest of us were treated as servants. I always felt he was my mother's husband, not my father. I looked at other men, some of my teachers, coaches, etc., as father figures, the role models in my life.
I started playing Little League in third grade and Pop Warner in fourth grade. I remember watching Alan Wiggins play at the Boys Club during my years at Edison, when I was too young to play. He was another one of the Pasadena area's great athletes during the 1970s, excelling at second base. He had a successful Major League Baseball career, mainly with the San Diego Padres. He stole seventy bases in the 1984 season, when the Padres went to the World Series (a team record that still stands to this day). Sadly, he got involved in drugs, which affected his performance on the field. The Padres suspended him, traded him to the Baltimore Orioles, and before long his career was over. He is believed to be the first major leaguer to die of AIDS. A lot of people only remember the negative things about Alan because that's what was exploited in the media, but he was a great mentor to me.
I cut my right hand when I was eight years old, my first year trying out for West Altadena Little League. At the time, the teams in that division were the Diggers, the Hornets, the Raiders, the Rangers, the Red Devils, and the Warriors. I was the first player picked for the Diggers at Loma Alta Park. Alan Wiggins was also on that team, and his younger brother Kenny was automatically drafted to the Diggers.
Alan was told to mentor me and take me under his wing, to practice with me, work with me, and mold me into the next third baseman, which Alan played at that time. He started calling me his little brother. At that time, Kenny didn't want to practice or run laps. He'd whine and cry, which embarrassed Alan, but I always tried to practice and play hard. As a result, Kenny was cut from the team. We became friends anyway, and he ended up making the team the following two years. At one point, he led Loma Alta Park in home runs. He was always an intelligent, smart, gifted guy. Bobby Grant and Chucky Mitchell were other teammates my first year on the Diggers.
In fourth grade, I missed being in the gifted resource program by two points, partly because I refused to wear glasses. I wanted to be seen more as an athlete than a bookworm. That didn't look cool.
I got the nickname Bullet at the end of my first year of Pop Warner. Some people believe it was because I would hustle during wind sprints when the other players didn't. Guys like Chucky and Dennis Mitchell, Thumper and Orlando White, Eric Grant, and Michael Taylor. But the real origin of the nickname came from Curtis Ganther, who lived a block away from us on Las Flores Street. He attended Sacred Heart, a private school. He used to make fun of me for being poor. For example, before I got my first pair of cleats, I used to play in tennis shoes. When I took off my helmet, it left an impression on my head in the shape of a bullet, so Curtis started calling me Bullet Head. My teammates came to my defense, though. They dropped head from the nickname and started calling me Bullet because of how fast I ran wind sprints.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Wright Stuff by Victor J. Wright. Copyright © 2014 Victor J. Wright. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
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