Tag / The District
- Photo By Jason Wilson
The Adventures of Gordy McNeill
Story by Jason Wilson
In December 1964, Gordy McNeill saw Bob Dylan play at the Wilson High School auditorium. This one-and-only west coast performance on the tour lasted almost two hours (with an intermission), and consisted of a stool, guitar, and Dylan. That was it. No opening band and no nonsense. As he remembers it, tickets cost about four dollars, but that didn’t stop the show from being sold out way before he could get his hands on one.
Scott McKenzie was his surfing buddy who also happened to work at McCabe Guitar on Anaheim Street, one of three store locations in the Los Angeles area. They were the only ones selling tickets to Dylan at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach. When McKenzie informed McNeill that his manager still had three tickets to the show, McNeill (13 years old at the time) immediately went down to McCabe Guitar and told the manager that he would work for him two straight weeks in exchange for the tickets and the show poster hanging on the wall. A deal was struck, and for those two weeks, McNeill mopped floors, took out trash, moved heavy boxes, and dusted the music shop. At the end of that time, he was awarded the tickets and the poster. He invited McKenzie and his other good friend Mike Smith to accompany him.
More tickets were sold than the Golden Bear could handle, so at the last minute they changed the venue to Wilson High School. As it turned out, they were great floor level tickets; the only drawback was that none of them were remotely close to each other. The boys were a tight group, so they decided to trade tickets with someone else who had three together in the front row of the balcony.
McNeill remembers the set opening with “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and being transfixed with his chin resting on his arms on the balcony ledge in front of him. He was sitting in one of only 1200 west coast seats and he soaked up every moment of it, including when Dylan played “To Ramona” for the first time live.
Supposedly, there were only three posters made for the event, one for each of the McCabe Guitar shops. McNeill recently turned down an $8000 offer for his tattered copy. He says the other two (both in mint condition) sold for around $30,000 a piece.
Photo by Kate Jones
Wayne Wilms
by Caitlin Cutt
Long Beach, a city hugged around its own little chunk of the Pacific Ocean, seems to have been built for people like Wayne Wilms. Wilms has been in the Marine industry one way or another, since he was twenty years of age. He lived in his VW van parked around the city for several years so he could be close to Marine Stadium where he enjoyed his favorite past time, water skiing. He became most well known for his bare-foot water skiing, a skill which brought him much esteem when he set a record for going 70 MPH in 1970. “There wasn’t much money in it,” says Wayne. “You could pay for gas, and some food…but it was fun!”
Today the owner of Long Beach Boat Movers works in a boat yard fixing trailers, motors, and everything in between. It is his knack for fixing things that earned him the nickname, “The Wiz”. He claims that, as a boy, instead of dreaming of owning a plane, or even a house, he had aspirations of owning a junkyard. Surrounded by discarded motors and orphaned boat parts, it would appear as though this part time longshoreman fulfilled his childhood dream.
Unfortunately, Wayne’s passion for restoration was tragically interrupted at the beginning of 2008. His daredevil son, Randy, who shared his father’s talents and “wiz-abilities” was killed in a dirt bike accident at the age of twenty. In an attempt to comprehend what happened, Wayne spoke to each witness on the police report, including the nurse who rode with his son in the ambulance.
After all the facts were checked, Wayne emerged with a remarkable perspective of tragedy: “It’s like a fraternity no one wants to belong to…My friend’s daughter was murdered and no one was ever prosecuted…I have to be thankful that I at least know what happened.”
Perhaps this father’s appreciation for closure is what drove him and his brother to travel to Las Vegas to witness the sentencing of O.J. Simpson last winter. When the Wilms brothers arrived, they learned only a select few would be given tickets to watch the proceedings inside the courtroom. Surprisingly, both Wayne and his brother were selected to gain admittance. However, upon discovering that Ronald Goldman’s father had not received a ticket, Wayne unselfishly handed his over and said, “I know how important this is for you.”
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Photo by Jason Wilson
Avis Atkins is a senior at CSULB. By summer, she will have graduated in four years, majoring in Human Development with two minors in sociology and psychology. As an honor student, she is the founder/president of Black Scholars, the vice-president of the Rotaract Leadership Club, and a senator of the College of Liberal Arts Associated Students Incorporated. She is hoping to become a college counselor and eventually a college president.
This would be a lot of weight for anyone to carry, but when you understand where she came from, these accomplishments and goals become astounding.
Avis and her four siblings grew up with her father, a Vietnam war veteran who battled an addiction to crack. During her elementary years she regularly begged for money on the street, lived in five cities, attended eleven different schools, lived in a West Hollywood apartment, two motels, two homeless shelters, and a van.
With a smile, she recalls one cold winter night when Reginald VelJohnson (Carl Winslow on Family Matters) gave her $20 and a bucket of chicken.
At the age of seven, she met her mother for the first time (who was by then, a clean crack addict). Her stepfather was physically abusive, an active crack addict, and a thief who would steal money from her and her siblings and get in fistfights with her father. After a lengthy custody court battle, she and her siblings lived with her father in an Atlantic Avenue G.I. house.
Blaming his father for not spending enough time with him, her older brother committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. In his latter days, her father suffered from a deep depression, dabbled in crack, and developed an aggressive cancer that rapidly spread throughout his body. Avis tenderly remembers seeing the bumps under his arms and on his torso.
And then he died alone on his bed at home.
Throughout her entire senior year of high school, Avis lived at home completely alone.
During the last days of her father’s life, she asked him why he treated her so differently than the rest of the kids. She had a deep love and respect for him, but wondered why she always had to do most of the begging and assume so much more responsibility than the others.
With quivering lips and tears streaming down her cheeks, she told me the answer that would change her life forever:
“Because I always knew you could handle it. I see something in you. You got something real special.”
“A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.” (a Chinese Proverb provided by Avis)
// JASON WILSON
Bob Hurt waving on 7th and PCH Photo by Randy Baransky
For some of you, Bob Hurt is part of a daily routine. Standing on the corner of PCH and Seventh Street from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., Hurt smiles and waves at passing drivers as they inch toward the freeway. But he never leaves.
The story of how Hurt arrived at the intersection is as brief as the exchanges he makes with commuters: He’s learned his lesson with alcohol, he says, but doesn’t offer much beyond this. His son, born at Long Beach Memorial, lives in Arizona; they don’t speak. He also doesn’t speak to his older brother. Now, living under a bridge, Hurt supports two other men—his younger brother and a friend—with what he pulls in standing on Seventh.
Long Beach became home to Hurt at the age of 5, when his father landed a job as an electrical engineer and moved his family from Indiana to California. Memories from his childhood reveal our city’s forgotten history: He remembers getting into dirt-clot fights along the edges of the town dump, which would later be paved over and become Loynes Drive. Daydreaming of one day owning his very own bait-and-tackle shop, Hurt also fished in the city’s channels. And he recalls chasing rabbits in a dusty plot of land not too far from where he stands today. It’s now the Ralphs shopping center.
A genuinely happy, warm, engaging man, Hurt is filled with stories that he is all too happy to share. And while he could certainly use whatever you have to spare, he says, “I know times are hard for everybody. The goal is really just to make people happy!” Don’t worry if you pass by empty handed; wave back, then give when you can. Bob Hurt just wants to make your day. // CAITLIN CUTT
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We want to LOVE this city! Photo by Jeff Gould
So deliberate is the manner of Scott Jones and so demonstrative are his actions that at one point during our conversation—most of which concerns We Love Long Beach (welovelb.com), a secular/nonprofit community advocacy group the 26-year-old Long Beach native formed with his sister, Robin, 30—I jot down “love lobbying” in the corner of my notebook. Which is to say Scott Jones takes love—and all its meanings, forms and implications—very seriously. And he’d like you to, too.
In the time since 50 people showed up to the first neighborhood breakfast on March 31, 2008, We Love Long Beach has become something of a grassroots get-to-know-one-another phenomenon: 500 people attended a bands-and-BBQ bash last summer, featuring such local greats as Deep Sea Diver and the Fling; monthly dinners (at restaurants like Caffe La Strada, On the Mark, Number Nine Noodles and, on Jan. 29, Smooth’s Sports Grille) are regularly attended by upwards of 40 residents; another community breakfast will be held the morning of Feb. 28 at Livingston Park; and there is a BBQ scheduled for May 23 at Marine Stadium Park.
And that’s to say nothing of the offshoot club Scott formed for students at the Jones’s alma mater, Wilson High, where members earn service hours by hosting luncheons for special needs students and, in April, their teachers.
“I’d like to know more people in the city than anyone else,” he says. “It’s one thing to say we’re a diverse city, but it’s another to say we are a city that gets along.”
To that end, the essence of We Love Long Beach lies in its vision statement: “To know and serve the people, neighborhoods and the city of Long Beach.” And the first step toward achieving it, Scott explains, is saying hello to our neighbors—“knowing what they do, where they work.” Which leads to trust: “Every relationship is based on trust—husbands and wives, friends,” he continues. From there, Scott jumps to community, or “working off different gifts and passions,” with the ultimate goal being addressing needs, the kind that are far greater than borrowing a box of sugar. “You go off deeper needs and you become friends,” he concludes.
One could look at Scott and Robin’s efforts and see only idiosyncratic wishes rooted in youthful idealism—or, conversely, note in their accomplishments (delivering four dozen new diners to a restaurant, for example) the potential dangers that come with such influence—namely, power.
But to this Scott offers a sentence, written by Arts of the Wise Leader author Mark Strom: “True humanity is to take people places they haven’t been, so that they might go places I can’t go.”
“The goal for this year is to fine tune and get good at what we can do,” Scott says. “We’d like to be able to do what we do well in every neighborhood.”
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