Another character I worked with at McCarty Paint 40 years ago back in the 70's was Roscoe. He was in his late 50's at the time but seemed like an old man to me back then. Boy howdy, would I love to be in my late 50's again! He was born and raised in Shamrock, TX, a little nothing of a town in the Eastern panhandle. I have driven through it a couple of times and it is about as nowhere as one can find.

Roscoe was in the Coast Guard during WW2 and spent the whole war guarding the Santa Cruz Beach and Boardwalk from a Japanese attack. Not bad duty if you could get it. He did a good job too. I don't recall one Japanese soldier landing on the beach. He spent the entire war flirting with Beach Betties and riding the Boardwalk rides for free. Like so many others, Roscoe decided California looked like a pretty good place to go to after the war, so he packed up and moved here. Him and his new wife bought a little house on May St., just up from the old DMV.

I enjoyed hearing Roscoe telling his small town Texas stories, which usually involved drinking, sex, and general debauchery. He had that quality of that generation of men that made all sex stories seem really dirty and disgusting without a hint of erotic content. I could close my eyes and see "The Last Picture Show" playing. His other big themes were how country music had gone to shit and Santa Cruz was ruined because of the "dirty hippies".

I saw Roscoe once downtown in the 80's and we talked for a bit as he complained about the dirty hippies. He should see it now. No, maybe he should not have. Roscoe died of cancer not too long after that. He definitely was one of the tiles in the mosaic of my life that I will always remember......