by Julie Moss
One of Carlsbad’s greatest assets was our neighborhoods. While the city’s history stretches back to the Californios, the rancho owners of the 19th century, Carlsbad didn’t incorporate until 1952. City planners built new neighborhoods with families and droves of playing children squarely in mind. Some homes had fences, but very few had gates. Play dates? That would be all day every day, interrupted only by school. Texting your kids? Our parents gave us our instructions before school every morning. Often, we didn’t talk to them again until dinner. Parents didn’t care much whose yards we ran around in, or which fences we climbed, as long as we finished our homework and got home for dinner and bed. We didn’t care either, as long as we could satisfy our playtime thirst with random garden hose water and maybe pick up a quick snack from someone’s mother. Plus, we lived a quarter mile from Hosp Grove, a huge eucalyptus grove planted in the 19th century for railroad tie lumber—until workers realized eucalyptus wood is far too soft. “The Forest,” as we knew it, was about three square miles in size, a small world to playing children. We trampled up and down the huge hills, through Box Canyon and on the many trails for hours on end, trails that still serve Carlsbad High’s cross-country team in practice after being the Lancers’ home course for three decades.
My childhood took place on Belle Lane, a cul-de-sac. My parents purchased our home in the mid-1960s for $24,000. No kidding. Now, you’re looking at about $1 million for a comparable house and location. It’s also where the first indication of my lot in life would appear, my earliest bike ride being one of them.
Another Belle Lane incident involved Jay Jardine, a neighborhood boy Marshall’s age. (Later in life, Jay would write and play cartoon soundtracks for Hanna-Barbera, and mentor and influence two generations of local rock musicians.) One day, Jay and I decided to take the surrey down our steep driveway for a spin around the cul-de-sac. The problem? My grandfather’s Thunderbird was parked at the bottom of the drive, blocking our way. In the house, the adults were busy celebrating some occasion or another with food and cocktails; parents seemed to celebrate a lot. There were always parties. I was supremely confident that the surrey would somehow make it past my Grandpa Marshall’s car. It was an innate confidence, a knowing we could pull it off, without second guesses and double-takes dragging my certainty down. Maybe the confidence originated from my growing up on Disney movies and Roald Dahl books, where random acts of magic and wonderment abounded. However, this surrey was no Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as much as I believed we could magically make it avoid or fly over the Thunderbird. Still, I must have been convincing: Jay was behind the wheel of the surrey, ready to go.
Moments later, we took off down the hill—and broadsided the passenger door of the Thunderbird. Jay and I were unscathed, but the Thunderbird had a big dent. The collision was loud. Needless to say, the cocktail party came to a screeching halt.
That wasn’t the only trouble I stirred up. I arrived at Magnolia Elementary School dressed in beautiful handmade dresses sewn by my maternal Grandma T, Lucille Tubach. I wore tights and matching ribbons in my hair and started every day looking the part of the angelic little girl. Then we sat, eight or ten students to a table—and I started talking. I always got in trouble for talking. I ended up at the thinking table most days, alone, strongly encouraged by the teacher to talk silently—with my brain. Maybe I should blame my Chatty Cathy doll. When the day ended, I headed home, ribbons missing from my hair, holes in my dirty tights—something about those playground recesses and my love of action—and a dejected look on my face from having to sit at the thinking table.
My mom would ask me what I’d thought about at the table. I usually answered “nothing.” When telling the story many years later, she speculated I was sitting at that table thinking of what I’d like to do to my teacher!
Maybe I wasn’t the best-behaved kid, nor the one who followed instructions to the letter, but I did have people I looked up to, mainly through books, TV shows, and movies. I sought out those I admired, both fictional and real, because I couldn’t easily find them in my daily life. They were characters, not yet a regular part of our society, because their heroic, powerful ways weren’t readily accepted. Yet.
First on the list were Pippi Longstocking and Scout Finch. Both were strong girls, tomboys. They played in the dirt, embarked on various adventures, and beat up obnoxious or bullying boys. I absorbed these stories in the way small children instinctively wrap their hearts and souls around characters, taking Pippi and Scout deep into my heart. Then I headed off to kindergarten, full of their assuredness, and spoke out directly, loudly, and confidently. Off to the thinking table I went. Now that I reflect on that, it was my first expression of feminism. I was five.
Pippi Longstocking was such a huge influence on girls of my generation, and she had red hair to boot. She was such a symbol of the qualities we associate with confident, self-assured women, I was thrilled to see her literary essence return in surprising ways. She reemerged through the pen of Stieg Larsson, whose Millennium series, beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, has enthralled millions with its fiercely unconventional, dark, and socially awkward anti-heroine, Lisbeth Salander. Larsson was deeply impacted by fellow Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, who created Pippi. If I wrote a Lisbeth/Pippi book, it would be, The Girl Who Colored Outside the Lines. The May 23, 2010, edition of the New York Times wrote of Lisbeth’s character:
“They need only read the tales of Pippi Longstocking . . . who has been a soul mate to generations of children longing to color outside the lines. . . . Mr. Larsson especially liked the idea of a grown-up Pippi, a dysfunctional girl, probably with attention deficit disorder, who would have had a hard time finding a place in society but would nonetheless take a firm hand in directing her own destiny.”
Sadly, Mr. Larsson never saw his Millennium books in print; he died before The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was published. In an interview before his death, he noted, “My point of departure was what Pippi Longstocking would be like as an adult. Would she be called a sociopath because she looked upon society in a different way?”
Maybe, but she would also be called strong and assured. Just like my other heroine, Scout Finch, the headstrong, spunky, routinely barefoot, “unladylike” heroine in overalls at the center of To Kill A Mockingbird. Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch got all the headlines, but to me, Harper Lee’s greatest genius was planting Scout in the story. Scout is very much like the scrappy fireplug Idgie Threadgoode, portrayed by Mary Stuart Masterson in the award-winning 1991 movie Fried Green Tomatoes. Like Idgie, Scout avoided dresses, threw punches like a boy, climbed trees, and swung from tires. She was outspoken and opinionated . . . right up my alley. She was the badass feminist role model a young tomboy like me needed to tell her it was okay to be yourself.
Like millions of others, and like my mothers’ generation, my growing fascination with strong, problem-solving girls continued with the Nancy Drew mysteries. I read as many of the 175 books as the library carried, and found my ideas of what a girl could do and how she could act continuing to expand. Not only did they expand within myself, but, as I looked at the world, Nancy, Pippi, and Scout also expanded the square box of social conventionalism that was apparently my lot for being born a girl. I don’t think so! Nancy’s draw for me was her intelligence, style, and ability to solve mysteries. I wasn’t the only one moved to action by her character, either: Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and current Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg all cite Nancy Drew as early inspiration. (The book series began in 1930.) When I sat back and thought about Nancy Drew’s impact on my early years, I came across a list of her role model attributes that still ring true every day of my life—she’s fearless, well-rounded, a feminist (even if she did not call herself that—she was not afraid to take charge of her own life), and even today, more than fifty years after she solved her first crime, she has staying power.
I also had a couple of favorite male authors who
se imaginative, fantastical works awakened parts of me I would fully experience and express later. This began with books about the ocean, particularly when they spoke of its power, mystery, and beautiful creatures. I loved Karana, the twelve-year-old girl trying to survive in Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins, but it was Frank Bonham’s The Loud, Resounding Sea that awakened my dreams of riding waves. It’s about a team of oceanographers, lab assistants, and Horace Morris, a sea-struck hermit. Assistant Skip Turner tries to “shoot” (surf through) Scripps Pier, hits the pilings, and is rescued by a dolphin, with whom he has a friendship afterward. The mix of surfing, deep-sea diving, and sea life really connected with me, which wasn’t too hard, since I lived in a beach town.
The author who truly sent my imagination soaring was Roald Dahl. I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and watched the original Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory starring the great Gene Wilder, but I adored some of Dahl’s other stories. When I thought Jay Jardine and I could drive our little surrey around the parked T-bird, I was recreating Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in my head. Roald Dahl wrote the movie’s screenplay.
My favorite was the first edition of The Magic Finger, in which a little girl (who never reveals her name—love it!) gets back at her neighbors who are killing animals by holding up her finger and stopping them. Talk about a powerful girl! You could also hold the book up to the light, and the pictures would turn into these wonderful, almost animated images. The Magic Finger is a really cool book. There’s even a fantastic audio narration by Academy Award–winning actress Kate Winslet on roalddahl.com. The Magic Finger is about achieving our dreams and finding and using our innate power, but Dahl was very realistic about the obstacles we would face along the way. In this case, the girl transformed people who made her angry by pointing her magic finger at them. When a teacher rebukes her for misspelling “cat,” for instance, guess what? The teacher is transformed into a cat. It offers a moral lesson in a funny, lightly frightening way.
If you were a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, you often circled the television set with your family to watch the network news, then feast on an incredible lineup of shows. Given the gold mine of great shows, you’d never know we were limited to the three network channels. It was a golden age, and like every other kid, I had my favorites. My early reading preferences seemed to cross over, because the first TV show hero with whom I identified was a she—Honey West, played by Anne Francis. Honey West only aired for one season, when I was seven, but it made a huge impact. It was almost unheard of to see a female private eye in a lead role in the midsixties. I was mesmerized by the self-assuredness and determination of Honey, a private investigator who honored her father by taking charge of his agency. I also loved what she wore, such a fashionable alternative to my scruffy book heroes like Pippi and Scout. Honey stopped at nothing to solve her cases, which made her a role model to me. Whatever it takes to get something done. Once, my mom even took me to a department store to meet Anne Francis. She had already left, but I was able to get a Honey West doll.
Honey West was just the beginning. More and more, shows with strong female characters popped up—charming, confident, deliciously mischievous take-charge characters with whom I found myself identifying more and more, whether it was Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island, Catwoman, or even Sister Bertrille in The Flying Nun. Then there was my all-time favorite cool, fashionable California girl, Julie Barnes from The Mod Squad. Baby boomers can close their eyes and still see the tall, leggy, gorgeous girl with sunlit blond hair, a great personality, and badass martial arts skills if you ran afoul of the law. Later, I had to deal with a real-life Julie Barnes and all of her charms and talents when Kathleen McCartney entered my racing life. There are millions of fifty-five- to sixty-year-old men out there for whom Julie was Crush Number One. I had a different kind of crush on her: a Girl Power crush. My fascination with strong, powerful characters rolled right into the seventies, featuring people like Gloria Stivic from All in the Family, and of course, Wonder Woman (for whom fellow Carlsbad athlete Cindy Gilbert, an Olympian, stunt doubled at times).
One of the coolest things I’ve experienced in writing this book is how seemingly unrelated examples, experiences, details, or connections appear. Like the source of many of these characters. Behind every strong woman is a strong mother, right? The unofficial “mother” of Mary Ann, Jeannie, Gloria, and many others is Irma Kalish. Irma and her late husband, Austin (known as Rocky in the TV world), warmed up by writing episodes of the huge 1950s live hit The Colgate Comedy Hour, and sent us laughing ourselves to sleep with now-classic ’60s fare like F Troop, Family Affair, and My Three Sons. Later in the 1970s, she cowrote countless episodes of Maude, Too Close for Comfort, The Facts of Life, Carter Country, and Good Times, among others, all racial, social, or women’s lib groundbreakers in their own way.
Now ninety-four years of age at this writing, Irma brought great pedigree to network television in the late 1950s as an assured, powerful woman with an incredible sense of humor. That she wrote some of my favorite characters and filled them with these qualities makes her a heroine to me. That she knew of my own up-close-and-personal appointment with Girl Power fame at the 1982 Ironman was even more astonishing.
“I remember that moment, because some of the young girls on set were talking about it for weeks afterward,” Irma said. “We were always told what our place was—especially in my time—what not to do with our own dreams, how to be strong and supportive for our husbands, but not necessarily for ourselves. What Julie did illustrates what Rocky and I tried to show with our stronger female characters—you can be charming, funny, sweet, wear dresses, and take charge of your life in ways that will change your life, bring out your gifts and strengths, and make a positive impression on the people around you. And,” she added, “you can make them laugh too. Laughter is so important to being healthy.
“I thought often about young girls and women growing up, like Julie, and how something Jeannie or Gloria said, or something they did, might make them feel better and more certain of themselves. When I hear about girls who watched our shows becoming self-assured women, it warms my heart. If they have a little mischievous side, all the better!”
There was also a very real character I loved: Nancy Sinatra, whose live TV performances of her song “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” and her appearances to troops serving in Vietnam, made her the bomb among men nationwide, as their wives looked at them and laughingly thought, “You wish . . .” As Nancy danced, pranced, and sang with her minidresses, go-go boots, and legs that seemed to keep on going, I dialed into something far different: her power, energy, and style. Between Honey West, Nancy, and Julie Barnes, I knew that whatever happened in my life, dressing stylishly and colorfully would be part of it. Now, we know this combination of styles as “boho” or “boho chic”—and it’s still my style.
Nancy was the subject of a report I wrote in second grade about people we admired. My subject was scrutinized and deemed inappropriate by my teacher, Mrs. Noise. She brought it up at my next parent-teacher conference, only her principal complaint wasn’t about the content. It was about my habit of singing the song in class:
These boots are made for walking
And that’s just what they’ll do
One of these days these boots
Are gonna walk all over you . . .
Nancy’s song still makes me want to get up and dance. The melody and what it represented for me—style, power, grace, beauty—will stay with me forever.
Mrs. Noise told me not to sing that song anymore, because I was tone-deaf. Sadly, I never tried to sing in public again. I still feel awkward even singing “Happy Birthday,” but I make myself leave singing birthday messages for my family and close friends. I hated second grade, and this was the biggest reason. It is a stark reminder of why I feel we, as parents, mentors, teachers, bosses, siblings, coaches, and friends, owe it to our kids and grandkids to give them positive messaging, and dial into how they can become the best
of themselves in what they do. Who knows? I might have become a better singer. But that fire was extinguished by one mean teacher. Now, I’d rather spend eleven hours running an Ironman than sing in public.
As I grew older, I continued doing girls’ things, but with the mischievous spirit and skinned-up knees of a tomboy. In fifth grade, like most girls, I played with Barbies. No Kens invited. Jenny Jones and I spent hours sewing outfits for them. Jenny was an amazing seamstress, as well as a badass surfer. Mr. Jones and Jenny’s brother, David, were devoted surfers and taught Jenny to ride a longboard. With her strong build, Jenny had no problem carrying her heavy nine-foot longboard down to Tamarack Beach, known locally as The Rack. I didn’t know how to surf, but I’d read The Loud, Resounding Sea and lived near the beach—and it appealed to me. I don’t know why I didn’t start with Jenny and take advantage of her dad and David as my mentors, and along with that, a guaranteed place in the waves without aggressive locals chasing me away.
While the surf bug first visited me then, it didn’t sink its teeth into me for good until the summer before I started high school. The shortboard revolution of the late ’60s had taken over surfing, and longboards were considered “old people’s boards.” If you were young and desperately trying to fit in, you weren’t caught dead on them. I started on shortboards, no longer than six feet. It was very difficult to get the hang of it, because the shorter the board, the more side-to-side movement it has, and the less your stability on the deck, where you stand. By high school, Jenny and I no longer hung out together, but occasionally I would see her surfing and admire how graceful and fluid her style was on both short and longboards.