Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt Revealed By Clive Cussler with Craig ...

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into the bed next to mine. The police had found him half frozen in an alley. Old Charlie was a neat guy.
He taught me card games and told stories no six-year-old should have heard in the days before TV and
R-rated movies. One morning, when the nurse came into the room to check on me, I nodded over at Old
Charlie and asked why he had turned blue. She gasped, whipped the curtain around Charlie's bed, and
within minutes he was whisked out of the room covered by a sheet. When Dad found out an old drunk
had died in the bed next to his little sonny boy, he damn near tore the hospital down to its foundation.
Boy, was he mad!
Against doctor's orders, he and Mom carried me to their little apartment so I could enjoy Christmas at
home. They had sacrificed their small savings to buy me a Lionel electric train complete with a tunnel, a
fort with wooden soldiers and a little switchman who came out of a tiny house to swing his lantern when
the train went past.
About this time, Dad was offered a promotion within the company that called for a transfer to
Chicago. At the same time, there was also an opening in the Los Angeles office if he remained at his
present salary level. It was the dead of winter in Minnesota, the snow was piled eight feet high around
our apartment and his sickly son looked like death warmed over. He never thought twice. Within the
week, we were all in our 1937 black Ford Victoria and headed for sunny Southern California. Dad
drove straight south to Texas to get out of the snow and cold as quickly as possible and caught old
Highway 66 west into the Golden State.
CRAIG DIRGO:Where did you live in California?
CLIVE CUSSLER:We settled in a small suburban community outside Los Angeles, called
Alhambra, where I lived for the next twenty-three years. My inaugural in the first grade was an
introduction into the differences between east and west. All my classmates were healthy, tanned
Californians, while I was this pale, sickly kid with ribs poking through his chest who looked like an
anemic ghost. I recall they laughed at me because I wore short pants when no self-respecting California
kid would ever be caught dead in short pants.
I survived and still treasure happy memories from my eight years at Fremont Elementary School in
Alhambra. The principal was a tough old bird, rather attractive as I think back now, and well respected.
Her name was Mary Mullin. Those were the days when teachers took no crap from their pupils. A
number of fathers, including my own, wrote letters to Miss Mullin, stating that if their boys were naughty,
she had their express permission to paddle their asses, which she did on numerous occasions. I only felt
her wrath twice, as I recall.
Amazingly, at my fortieth high school reunion, nearly twenty kids out of my old Fremont grammar
school class attended.