By Bob Aldrich
The Jan. 13 New Yorker has a long article by the Southern California writer John Gregory Dunne about a triple murder that occurred on New Year's Eve of 1993 near Humboldt, Neb. The magazine notes that the murders, which brought five aimless youths together in an isolated farmhouse "reveals a small-town youth culture that is dangerously adrift." Because the incident happened in eastern Nebraska where I grew up, it was of special interest to me.
About the time I picked up the magazine, I was reading California Fault, by Thurston Clarke (Ballantyne, 1996), which contains several references to Los Gatos and Saratoga. The author writes of an incident that took place when members of a South Bay youth gang, calling themselves the "Insane Hoods," were arrested in several high schools, including eight arrests from Saratoga High School. Youths were charged with intimidation and felony battery. My own conversation with deputy Ted Atlas of the sheriff's substation in Saratoga pinned the incident to the fall of 1993 when students were removed from the schools in handcuffs.
It is common knowledge that there is a serious drug problem in the schools of even prosperous communities like Los Gatos and Saratoga.
I suppose there is a tendency, as one grows older, to look back upon one's childhood and early youth as either idyllic or the exact reverse. In my case, I tend to think of growing up in a Nebraska farm village as possibly happier and more peaceful than it in fact was. These were, after all, Depression years; while I was lucky enough to escape most of the period's horrors, there were kids who came to school hungry. There were hardworking farmers who lost their land, and businesses were forced to close. Terrible dust storms added to the woe. My folks struggled to keep open a little country bank.
My friends and I had fun. To tap a bottle of beer or light a cigarette experimentally in back of somebody's barn was about the extent of our transgressions. We suffered from a general impression, stressed by Sunday School and family values, that Sex was confined to Forbidden Territory and, no doubt, this severely scarred our psyches.
Serious crime was almost unknown. We had a few scamps who were picked up by the sheriff for stealing hogs or chickens. One of my boyhood acquaintances went to prison for check forgery; extreme poverty explained, though it didn't excuse, his downfall, and he later reformed.
People left their front doors unlocked when they went "uptown" to get their mail at the post office. You had faith that your neighbors would notice any strangers lurking about.
Dunne's New Yorker piece depicts young people who seem to be without any compass or anchor in their lives, who know nothing but the impromptu impulse of the moment, who lack even self-protective judgment. The killers tossed their weapons in the Nemaha, apparently forgetting the river was frozen over. Their weapons were found and easily identified. There seems something here beyond mere stupidity--a disconnection with reality. The article suggests a youth culture that has cut ties to anything real, permanent or guiding.
Who or what robbed these young people of a center in their lives? Why is there now such antipathy between generations? We always knew older folk were a bit slow on the uptake, but we didn't hate their insides. According to Thurston Clarke's account of the Insane Hoods, the gang drew most of its ideas from television crime shows. We were strongly influenced by movies and came home to reenact Tarzan and Jane or Cagney gangsters or Errol Flynn pirates, but I don't think we ever confused "the show" with reality. Reality was getting the garden weeded before Mom came home or getting homework done before Monday; it had nothing to do with the thrills of fantasy.
I have no answers, only questions. I suspect I am not alone in this quandary.
Bob Aldrich is a regular writer for the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, January 22, 1997.
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