Craig Salter was my next door neighbor in our new Milwaukie neighborhood. He was of slight build, and he was a slow talker. He may well have been a creative genius, but his “dreamy” state of existence was indicative of some fundamental issues going on inside of him. I suspected from the beginning that his mother was mentally ill, as she was quite peculiar, and apparently quite a hypochondriac. What concerned me was Craig’s similarity to his mother, as far as his mannerisms. And I also suspected that Craig was bonkers too, but, hey, he was my neighbor, and as far as friends go, I could not be too choosy, eh? I still wondered why I deserved to have such strange friends. He was smarter than most people, yet he did not consistently apply his smarts to school, which was too restrictive for him. On his own, before he was age 15, he had already designed a sophisticated internal combustion engine totally unlike what we use in today’s world. He also designed and built his own models, FROM SCRATCH, of supersonic jet airplanes, complete with spiral staircases made of pins and tiny pieces of paper glued in a spiral fashion. He was also already designing transistor circuits by age 14, which just blew me away at the time. HE WAS AMAZING! I wanted his creativity so bad, as I felt that I had none.
My abilities appeared to be quite mechanical, which left me having the sense that I was just another boring automaton, that I was just parroting/repeating others’ thoughts and behaviors. I enjoyed building model airplanes and ships from the WWI and WWII eras, and building sailing ships from kits that were based on sailing ships of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. I enjoyed building them, but then I would be so critical of my efforts, usually by comparing them to the “perfect” models that Craig could produce. I would become so unhappy with my projects, and an unusual perfectionist phenomenon would occur where I would feel pleasure at destroying my great works because they did not measure up to some (presently) unattainable standard that I had set for myself. This is huge, as it reflects something “fundamental” about an aspect of darkness of my human soul (see “He just wanted to watch the world burn”).
There were many nights when I slept outside and gazed into the night sky with either binoculars or one of many telescopes that I, or my friend Craig, owned over the years, searching for flying saucers, or other interesting otherworldly objects. I needed to know that there were other options for life, life away from the trauma of this planet. Craig and I became obsessed with building rocket ships and developing our own rocket fuel. We were both quite impacted when between 7th and 8th grades, a friend of ours (Charley Davalos) died when his fuel cell exploded, sending shrapnel to cut his jugular vein. Undeterred, I still became an avid rocketeer, building rocket ships and installing manufactured solid fuel booster cells into them, and then launching them thousands of feet into the sky. Craig was stay in my life until 1987, though I only infrequently saw him after my first college years of 1973-1976.
I tried out for the cross country team, because I was in great running shape from training throughout my eighth grade with Craig’s older Mark (who ended up designing the sophisticated software for the US Defense Department to use in the computers of their top secret spy planes). Mark was 3 years older than Craig, but he was much more athletic and was incredibly involved in the community. He was an inspiration to me, and I trained with him because he was so smart and motivated, and I wanted to hang with him. I ended up running 3 miles a day for a whole year while in 8th grade, so I thought that this would be a good fit for me. Craig and I attempted to run cross country, but I quickly became discouraged by the “faster” runners who were already on the team, so I dropped out. I joined the chess club and the golf team my freshman and sophomore years, then dropped both of those options when I started using pot.
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