Summer of 1929

Southern California in the mid to late twenties was as good a place as any to grow up in and far better than some. A few weeks before David was born in late August of 1923, then president Warren G. Harding had died suddenly at the young age of fifty-seven of what was presumed to be a heart attack, although the exact cause of death remains a mystery, to the point of possible scandal, to this day. His last public address, made on his “Voyage of Understanding” tour, was to a lukewarm crowd at Husky Stadium on Seattle’s University of Washington campus...David’s would- be alma mater some eighteen years later. Harding’s untimely death in San Francisco left the terse, retiring vice-president Calvin Coolidge at the helm of a prosperous nation, where his laissez-faire approach to government as well as business allowed for the “boom” in the boom and bust cycle of capitalism to prevail. And so it was that Coolidge, with his the chief business of the American people is business approach to leadership, was just barely sworn into an office he had never coveted as David was being born in Everett, Washington. He would reluctantly remain president for the first part of David’s childhood, publicly supporting the biggest controversy of the day – Prohibition – all the while privately opposing it. Young David, for his part, would find much childish humor in the one-liner, “Repeal the Eighteenth Banana,” not quite understanding its societal significance. The glamorous world of the speakeasy and the dramatic rise of organized crime that abounded in places like Chicago in those days dubbed The Roaring Twenties were all beyond young David’s purview and were more than likely not part of his parents’ reality either. While in her later years Marguerite Wolter was known to imbibe on a predictable basis, as a young wife, mother and wage earner in the 1920s she adhered to a strict Christian Science practice, one which her husband came to share as well. Like most converts to a cause, it was Tony who would wax fanatical about his faith, a faith that his sons came to recognize and later reject as cult-like and rigid to the point of irrational. Even so, David recalls that his father would indulge in a beer when they’d go to the horse races in the 1930s, perhaps expressing his German heritage that couldn’t possibly consider beer real alcohol.

By the time David and Freddy Hunziker met and bonded on that dusty road in South Gate, Republican President Herbert Hoover had taken over where Harding and Coolidge had left off, promoting his notion of the Efficiency Movement in the then prevailing Progressive Era, a position that held that a technical solution existed for every and any social and economic concern. This notion was to be severely challenged and ultimately foiled in the face of the Great Depression that loomed less than eight months after Hoover’s inauguration in March of 1929. At age six, David was only tangentially aware of the social and economic stresses that surely added to the strain upon his parents’ already troubled union. Again, it was a clever quip that typified the era for the boy – “Scott Tissue hits bottom…thousands wiped clean!”

The challenges of the period were so pervasive that there seemed an almost noble dignity in the degrees of despair that so many shared as the nation and ultimately the world slid into what surely must have felt like an inexorable decline to the adults who sought to cope with making a living. Young David recalls periodic visits with Mr. Smith, an elderly gentleman friend of his father’s, who resided in what was referred to as a “poor farm” – a kind of communal living arrangement for older citizens who’d lost their retirement savings and were forced to pool their talents, adhering to the concept that a shared burden is a lessened one. Invariably Mr. Smith would present the boy with a dollar – a fairly impressive sum at the time, advising him to invest wisely, which to David’s way of thinking meant ninety-nine cents worth of penny candies! On other darker days David recalls sitting around the family dinner table with his mother and brothers, passing the time, as they awaited their father’s homecoming, in prayer that he might have earned enough that day to supplement the rice their mother had cooked. Still, as is the way with childhood reminiscences, the desperation of the epoch is not what remains when memories are shared. This was a time of concentrated creativity and ingenuity, not only on the part of the adults who made ends meet, but also on the boys who continued to scrounge supplies with which to build dreams.

In that summer of 1929 Claire and his crew of two built a boat which they christened the Bozo II – in honor of Freddy’s bull terrier, but also in recognition of the raw materials supplied by Fred Sr. from his auto shop. The Bozo II was constructed rather expertly from drawings that nine-year-old Claire had made. Its wood frame was covered with canvas donated by father Fred and then painted over several times with more contributions from Hunziker Auto Repair so that, in the end, it was more or less waterproof. Freddy’s amiable mother, Thelma drove the boys and their boat down to the water at Long Beach where they launched the Bozo II on her maiden voyage. Because her hull was basically round, she immediately capsized, but here again, Fred Sr. saved the day by attaching vulcanized inner tubes to Bozo II’s gunnels so that when fully loaded, she would float with the assistance of the car tire tubes. David recalls playing with Freddy, Claire and their boat for over two years in the Long Beach bay created by the horseshoe-shaped pier’s breakwater. It was there, too, that Freddy and David, ages six and seven, learned to dive and swim after a fashion. They’d craft kick boards out of pine and spend the day, or as much of it as an impressively tolerant Thelma would donate, thoroughly engrossed in water play. Thus began David’s love affair with swimming, one that he pursues to this very day with his frequent plunges into Lake Washington’s waters, often in the company of several generations.