Steve Gibbs Autobiography

For Sunday April 28, 2024 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 1,354 words College and Pennsylvania were behind me. I graduated on Saturday, caught a bus on Wednesday, and moved to California. Today’s episode marks the crossover – the end of Pennsylvania memoirs, and the beginning of California memoirs. Expect a more mature me now, because, of course, I’m all grown up, and I’ve learned all my lessons, and I have an English diploma. Stories need hooks to live, just like fishermen. The hooks for my PA Survival Years were these questions, “What kept an intelligent rural hick disinterested in college? What turned him around in those three years after high school? The hooks for the California memoirs will be these: “Who do I think I am now? What influenced me to get here? Did I ever get published with my Berkeley return address? My last day on Penn State campus, I was feeling so happy, I cut into my counselor’s office and said, “I might want to stick around and get my

For Sunday, April 21, 2024 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 1,313 words For my final summer job, I decided to become an oil-field roughneck in Oklahoma. My Uncle Bill had been taunting me to come out and make some real money. He’d find me a job in no time. I caught a bus to Blanchard, Oklahoma. Uncle Bill was a big-shot tool pusher – in other words he was highly skilled at unsticking the giant Hughes drill bits when they got stuck in rock two miles underground. He could wriggle them free. Aunt Maxine set me up in a bedroom, but I seldom saw my Uncle Bill. He was always too busy to find me a job. Something urgent. He had early-morning helicopter-in-the-yard kind of urgencies. I wandered around Blanchard and met a guy, Rick, my age. I explained how I was seeking summer oilfield work, but my uncle was too busy to help. Rick was bored. He said, “Hell, I’ll take you out to the rigs. Get in.” We hopped into his dusty, dented Ford Capri and drove to the first rig, a

Sunday, April 14, 2024 1,284 words Abio 18 - Two stories for the price of one Dorm adjustment. Year three, University Park, student dorms, me trying to adjust, my roommate is studying for the ministry. Always noise in the halls. Water fights. Three large connecting buildings that house over a thousand students, most of them three years younger than me. Three cafeteria meals a day. No Gino cooking. Slowly, I got used to the kookiness and busy pace. I was resigning myself for the mere year. Made a few friends. Then the unspeakable happened. Please don’t be too angry with me, but I got a call from Suzie Sunshine, the California artist I met in Ridgway over the summer. We’d hooked up briefly. I’d shown her my log cabin. She was calling me from her home in Rancho Palas Verdes, Southern California. Daddy was a navy admiral. “I’m pregnant,” she said, “and I don’t know what to do.” I couldn’t handle another abortion. I said, “Drive back to State College and we wi

For Sunday, April 14, 2024 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 1,284 words Dorm adjustment. Year three, University Park, student dorms, me trying to adjust, my roommate is studying for the ministry. Always noise in the halls. Water fights. Three large connecting buildings that house over a thousand students, most of them three years younger than me. Three cafeteria meals a day. No Gino cooking. Slowly, I got used to the kookiness and busy pace. I was resigning myself for the mere year. Made a few friends. Then the unspeakable happened. Please don’t be too angry with me, but I got a call from Suzie Sunshine, the California artist I met in Ridgway over the summer. We’d hooked up briefly. I’d shown her my log cabin. She was calling me from her home in Rancho Palas Verdes, Southern California. Daddy was a navy admiral. “I’m pregnant,” she said, “and I don’t know what to do.” I couldn’t handle another abortion. I said, “Drive back to State College and we will share an a

Sunday April 7, 2024 1,015 words By the start of my second year of college, I had learned many things that I didn’t know I needed to know. If I hadn’t enrolled, I may have died in the house I was born in, blissfully ignorant. Instead, I had a head full of new concepts: I’d learned that time is bigger than it looks; infinite smallness fits the universe inside of us; the Socratic Method is a great way to fend off bull; you can travel in time, but its fixed. Physics explains the Twin Paradox. Passion controls reason. I learned to edit a newspaper, practiced a tracheotomy when I earned my Lifeguard Certificate, made a movie in a boxcar graveyard, and I can speak a little French. Over the summer I become a hotel-motel-restaurant manager, by default, and many of our guests were French Canadians who arrived by the bus loads. My weak French came in handy. Several families invited me to visit Montreal to stay with them. They had kids, and we all got along. I visited Montr