Texas Blog: Tapestry

This history is dedicated to the memory of Marion B. Haines, and Charles L. Haines Jr.   Back in the water together again.  August 2011.

Introduction

We live in scary times.  And the ending of this story, be it happy or sad, is yet to be written.   Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine this would be our story until just the last couple of years.  But first a little background.   A snapshot of my times.   From the anti Vietnam era, 60’s fragmentation of society time in high school, to the life of a surfing family going to San Onofre religiously to ride waves.   Forgive me if I jump around in time. I’m a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut’s  Slaughterhouse 5.  We are all loose in time, and to cope with the bad times, we try and concentrate on the good times.

I was born, Charles L Haines III, in Sept. 1952 in Texas of all places, as my dad was doing his time with the military as part of the Korean War effort.  He was splinting broken thumbs on soldiers who had forgotten to fully close the bolt on a rifle before firing it.   The military had paid for part of his medical school education, so doing some time in Texas was the payback.   Anyway, of Texas I remember nothing other than the stories about freezing cold or off the charts hot.   Mom’s delivery of me was in the most Spartan of hospitals imaginable.  So two months after Lil Tex arrives, my dad’s enlistment ends, or the war ends, and we head back to Altadena, one of the first suburbs of Los Angeles, to live on Grand Oaks.   My dad had been raised in Altadena, the son of a pair of doctors.   His mom, Steve Haines, being one of the first females to graduate as a full-fledged doctor, and Charles L. Haines Sr., set up a practice of family medicine and general surgery.

Charles L Haines Jr., aka Roy, or dad, had attended Elliot Jr. High, and Pasadena Junior College, played football, and had made it into Stanford University, and gone on to Stanford Medical School.   Pretty amazing guy, big, and smart, and a noble heart.   They say you never become an adult man until your father passes.   Very true in my case.

At Stanford he meets my mom, aka Marion McCreary Bush, aka Marion, who is right off the boat from being born and raised in Hawaii.  Japan has just bombed Pearl Harbor and life for her was changing

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