American Rebel Read Free Page B

extra after-school jobs on top of his paper route. He worked at the local grocery and as a caddy at the golf course; he baled hay on a farm in nearby Yreka, cut timber near Paradise, and was a seasonal forest firefighter. All these jobs were purely physical, the type of work he could forget about as soon as he punched out. But they were time consuming and exhausting, even for a young and strong teenage boy. They left him even less time for his studies at Piedmont High, and when his parents and school authorities realized he wasn’t going to graduate with a regular academic degree, he transferred to the Oakland Technical High School, a vocational training institute where he would specialize in aircraft maintenance. This would give him his best chance, upon graduation, to attend the University of California, which had an affiliated program with the high school, or to land a well-paying job.
    After school Clint hung with a crowd of tough-looking teens decked out in leather and T-shirts, with greased-back long hair. All strong, tall, and lean, they tucked cigarettes behind their ears and held bottles of beer in one hand while they drove, usually to the local dives where the hottest girls hung out. And they were all into jazz. Most often they found themselves at the Omar, a pizza and beer dive in downtown Oakland where Clint liked to play jazz on a beat-up old piano in the corner. Whenever he could, he would go to hear Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Flip Phillips, Lester Young, or Charlie Parker. Sometimes they played alone in the small dark clubs that dotted the streets of Oakland; sometimes they performed together at the Shrine Auditorium,where the heavily mixed crowd regularly gathered to see and hear them.
    It was Parker, more than all the others, who opened his eyes to the new music’s emotional power. As Clint later told Richard Schickel, “I’d never seen a musician play with such confidence. There was no show business to it in those days, and this guy just stood and played, and I thought, God, what an amazing, expressive thing.” His cool, aloof sound held great appeal for Clint.
    He was nineteen when he finally graduated from Oakland Tech in the spring of 1949. By then, he had grown tired of school and often cut classes to hang out with boys, among whom he was the only one still in school.
         M eanwhile the war’s end had brought new prosperity, especially along the rapidly growing Pacific coast, where jobs were plentiful, wages generous, and mobility upward. Clinton Sr. found work with the California Container Corporation, was quickly caught up in the flow of automatic promotions, and soon was offered a major managerial post in the company’s main plant, in Seattle. Together he and Ruth and fourteen-year-old Jeanne packed up the house and loaded the car for the drive to Seattle.
    Clint didn’t want to go, and because he had graduated, he said he didn’t have to. Harry Pendleton’s parents agreed to let him stay with them for a while. Harry and Clint had been friends since junior high school and long hung with the same crowd. With his family in Seattle, his education finished, and no clear plan for the future, Clint was, in his own words, “really adrift.” He found a job on the night shift at Bethlehem Steel, tending the blast furnaces, then moved to the day shift at Boeing Aircraft. For the next two years these hard and charmless jobs kept him in cars, girls, and music, allowing him to roam aimlessly through his early twenties unfocused and unconcerned, the perfect West Coast rebel without a care.
    Then, in 1950, border hostilities broke out in Korea, and the United States began a massive buildup of forces in Seoul. Knowing his A1 military status made him a prime target for the draft, Clint’s unlikely next goal was to go back to college, to get a student exemption. He moved up to Seattle and in with his parents to enroll at SeattleUniversity. He figured he might major in music, since nothing else