DONATING THE GUZZI

 To everything, there is a season... 

(Ecclesiastes 3:1)

In the summer of 1967, after moving on from Chico Junior High, Bill Reed*, my ninth grade English teacher, took a job managing the Channel 9 auction. He’d been a casualty of staffing cuts at Chico Unified. KIXE studios were then housed under the dome in the administration building at Chico State. Bill asked a few of his former students if we’d like to volunteer to help move merchandise on and off the set. I was the only one who bit.

 

The following two summers, Mr. Reed, then soon to be station manager (if he wasn’t already), asked me if I might volunteer to catalog donated items, manage inventory coming on and off the set and distribute merchandise to high bidders after the auction. He offered to double my pay but then reminded me that ‘Two times nothing is still nothing.’  Again, I bit. 

 

The day we closed our distribution location in 1969, Mr. Reed showed up with an envelope. I’d seen a one hundred dollar bill once before, but I’d never actually possessed one. This one, I would put to good use. 

 

With it and a few other shekels I’d cobbled together, I made a down payment on my very first motor vehicle, a brand new Honda Trail 90. Oh! The places I explored! I’ve been riding a variety of motorcycles ever since.

 

Fast forward nearly 60 years and I find myself less confident in the saddle. Aching joints and slowing reactions have told me it’s time to dismount for good. It is time to part with my beautiful, low mileage 2022 Moto Guzzi travel model that gathers dust in my garage. 

 

Honoring William T Reed who progressed to much bigger (but perhaps no better) things with PBS and remembering our station’s earliest days, I have donated the Guzzi to KIXE.

 

...to everything, there is a season...

 

© 2026

Church of the Open Road Press

 

* One summer evening after the auction had concluded, Mom invited Bill and Marianne Reed to dinner. At the table over a couple of Lucky Lagers, Mr. Reed and my dad discovered they both spent some years of their youth in the Mojave; both attending Barstow High. Dad shared that during his senior year (about 1935), he played center on the Barstow Bulldog football team. It was the first time the Bulldogs won the Desert League championship. Bill shared that he, too had played center and during his senior year in the late 50s. That was the year the Bulldogs won their second Desert League championship.

Reflecting on “The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!”

 …history, as they say, repeats…

 

As kids, my folks would pile Beebo and me into the Ford and venture from a simmering Chico over to a naturally air conditioned coastal Fort Bragg for some summertime cool to visit a friend’s vacation beach house. Located on the north bank of Pudding Creek, the abode was a cozy affair, cinderblock downstairs for dorm-style sleeping and a redwood upstairs with a well-stocked kitchen, a futuristic funnel-shaped fireplace (very Jetson’s) for heat and expansive west facing windows that offered sunsets over surf more glorious than anything Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color” could ever produce.  (Our family had a black and white Admiral TV, so what’d I know?)

     Each day, a bunch of us would climb down the bluff to play in the sand, make structures out of driftwood, swing kelp round and round over our heads and play tag with the surf. On one of those trips, we were beyond amazed to see two US fighter jets screaming across the ocean, almost skipping on the wave tops, plumes of black exhaust billowing from their twin-engines. They roared by three, maybe four, times. Maybe more. Awe-struck and petrified, steeped in the ‘Red Scare’ of the ‘50s and ‘60s we couldn’t help but wonder: Was this going to be it? 

 

The little get-a-way house is long gone, replaced by a pair of motels. But everything else seems the same. The rugged Mendocino County Coast, lashed by waves and currents has yet to erode away. Gulls still circle and light on white poop-frosted sea stacks a few yards offshore. The occasional doe stands knee-deep in the prairie grasses. Morning fog eventually melts while a crashing surf offers soundtrack for a week or two of upcoming dreams. Always cooler than summertime inland, the drive to the coast always pays dividends. Quaint shops. Cozy B&Bs. Pretty good dining. And those wind-blown bluff trails with all their recollections. 

     A recent predicted 100 degree day in Cloverdale prompted us to escape to a 72 degree Mendocino Coast. Candi and I enjoyed the drive that coursed from vineyards to redwoods, ultimately out to that coastal prairie and the sea. This day, after a bluff walk on the Mendocino Headlands, we wound through the bergs that dot the distance up to Fort Bragg. Tiny streets and homes that seems to have withstood a century of weather’s greatest abuse stand behind crippled fences that once held paint now twined in thistle and blackberry vines. 

 

Returning home, we rented “The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!” The flick was Norman Jewison’s 1966 send up about the Red Scare and what might happen on Nantucket should a Russian submarine, getting a bit too close, run aground. Except Jewison didn’t film in Massachusetts; he filmed on the Sonoma Coast. Carl Reiner, Eva Marie Saint and Alan Arkin (best actor nominee for the role) lead a cast of character actors we’d seen countless times; each playing with comic seriousness the roles of people who’d allowed a mishap and misinformation to become a credible flashpoint for world destruction. 

     Though the circumstance seems eerily similar to today, we laughed at the absurdity of it all. I enjoyed the peek back at my early days visiting Fort Bragg and the old cars that were not old cars then -- one was a near mirror of our ’54 Ford Ranchwagon. The inlet at Noyo hasn’t changed. Nor has Caspar village. Nor some of the old Fort Bragg downtown. Nor the seascape we’d hiked along only hours before. 

     In a tension-wrought, tongue-in-cheek conclusion, two very real US F-4s scream over the ocean seemingly intent on doing what fighter pilots are ordered do. In that moment I am back on the beach with my buddies, swinging kelp, constructing something with driftwood, paying tag with the surf and wondering if this is the end. Of course it wasn’t. It was just Norman Jewison pulling our leg.

Perhaps related? After 60 years, the movie holds up.

© 2026

Church of the Open Road Press