1992 L.A. Riots (Rodney King) I was there!

 

I was attending The University of Western Ontario in London when I received a fairly substantial legal win. And as usual I did the reckless thing and dropped out suddenly for some fun.

My long time close friend Director Tibor Tackacs invited me to be a guest in Los Angeles for a bit.

I couldn’t say no.

I should have stayed in University. The University of Western Ontario was my THIRD university after Ryerson University and the University of Toronto. It wasn’t until 2000 that I was diagnosed and treated for ADHD (inattentive type). 

The tyranny of the shoulds. 

I SHOULD have stayed in the field of Systems Analysis and Electronic Data Processing after being Military Immersion trained by Honeywell Corporation in 1982. If I stayed in that field I would be worth a fortune today. C’est la vie.

What happened is I won  CASBY award for most promising male recording artist. My ambitions inflated, I chose to focus on music.

So Director Tibor Takacs invited me to L.A. His house was on North Arden about a block away from Hollywood and Vine. There was a guest house in the back where Tibor had a home office and a couch for me to sleep.

I left my apartment in London and headed for Toronto. There I stayed at my brother’s apartment near where my parents Clissold Road Etobicoke house. My mother was in a tizzy because working for him at his chiropractic clinic and office of International X-Ray Company Limited, she became suspicious of my father and investigated him.

My mother had discovered that my father had been leading a double life, and for years had a relationship with a woman named Carmen Turdgeon. We will explore that rabbit hole later.

My mother was quite upset and wanted to divorce my father. She should have. She told him he would never see the kids ( my brother and I) again if she left him.

To which my father wept. All of this traumatized me and I calmly told my father that he had ruined my life. That was in 1992 and this is 2024. It could be said that my words were oddly prophetic all these years later, yours truly now 68.

So after notifying Dear Old Dad he had ruined my life, I went to the bank and grabbed $US5000.00 for travelling money and boarded a train bound for Los Angeles. From Toronto you take a train to Chicago and stay overnight, then board an AMTRACK train that takes you to Los Angeles.

At the border the train stopped and the customs officers bordered the train.

(I’ll finish this story in a bit…)