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Text Box: While living with Aunt Florence in Red Bluff, I would finish my last 3 years of High School. I would develop some life long friends and devote myself to school work. I was terrible in the sciences: math, chemistry, etc. But, I excelled in the arts: drama, radio announcing, and public speaking.

     In Red Bluff, I lived only a few blocks from the high school. I would walk to school every day. Granddad and Grandma Tracy's house was on the way back so I would drop by and visit. Grandma was a coke-a-holic. She drank Coke-Cola all day long and insisted that I have one each visit. (Then, as now, I really do not care for the stuff.)
    I had lots of opportunity to ask about the family history. Even though I saw my Grandparents almost every day for three years, most of my family history I got from Aunt Hattie.
    When I was 16 years old, my brother Wilbur came to Red Bluff to see me while he was on leave from the Army. He did a little detective work and located our father. He was still running a "Gypo" outfit in Quincy. Arrangements were made for me to spend the summer with my father working with his timber cutters.
    I didn't spend much time with my father that summer. He lived in town and rarely came out to the work site. I lived in the forest in a camper.
    My father was a man who was born at the wrong time. If he were to be born today: diagnosis, treatment, and medication would be available. What he did was what most of the mentally ill do when medical help is not available. He self treated. His treatment of choice was alcohol. (Until late in life he never touched a drop of alcohol. This was all part of his health food regimen, which he thought would cure him.)
    Dad gave me a Studebaker car. So, after working for the summer, I returned home with a car ...and the impression that my father was very erratic and unstable.
    I graduated from high school in 1958, left Red Bluff, and headed for Pasadena.

Mother attended Red Bluff Hi, as I did 20 years later. As it would be, we had the same writing teacher, Ruth Hitchcock. Mother tells the story that Ruth asked her to write about the ‘Moon House’. Mother declined. She didn’t want to write about a Chinese place.

    At the same time that I graduated from high school in 1958, Wilbur (He now goes by the name Will.) was discharged from the Army, and Al was discharged from the Air Force. We joined up, moved to Pasadena to live with our mother, got jobs, they used the GI Bill and we started Pasadena City College.
    A couple of blocks away from the college was Ed Parker's Kenpo Karate School, one of only a handful of karate schools in the country at that time. We took lessons, and for the last three years in Pasadena, we actually ran the school while Ed Parker taught the powers that be in Hollywood and wrote karate books.
    We moved to San Francisco in 1962, opened our own karate school to finance our way through San Francisco State College and then, hopefully, law school. Forgetting law school, we stayed in the karate business and between 1967 and 1973, Al and I opened 150 franchise Tracy's Karate Schools throughout the United States and Canada. It was the largest chain of karate schools in America, the largest chain of karate schools in the history of the world. During the early years the Tracy brothers literally dominated the karate business in America.
    The history of Tracy's Karate Schools is for another book at another time.

Al Tracy
    Married Frances Ann Besset on 16 October 1965 in Reno, Nevada. He has two children: Mark Guerin Tracy, born 27 January 1968 in San Jose California; and Kristina Lynn Tracy, born 15 December 1970.
    Mark operates a karate school in Cincinnati, Ohio. Tina works for Intel in San Francisco.
    Al divorced and remarried Pat Amundson. Both of her parents are from Iceland.
    When a youngster in the 4-H, he won the Washington State Rabbit judging contest. He attended Bothell High School all four years, solving the problem of the family constantly moving by hitchhiking to school.
    In high school, he won the Washington State Debate championship. With the championship went a four-year full scholarship to Washington State University. Not wanting to go to an agricultural school, he joined the Air Force. He was promoted to Staff Sergeant in an unheard of time of less than two years.
    He remains in the karate business and is considered to be one of the world's foremost karate masters. Running his operations out of Lexington, Kentucky, he travels
the country putting on karate workshops. Also, he sells by mail order, via the Internet, over 700 karate products.
    Two year's ago he sponsored a convention in Las Vegas called, "A Gathering of Eagles," which drew 2000 of the world's top karate men. Some came from as far away as Japan to attend the convention.

Will Tracy
    Will married Mary Ellen Elizabeth Poleskie on 1 October 1964. They would have eight children: Steven Austin Tracy, born 21 August 1970; Michael Lion Tracy, born 2 December 1971; Tamara Mary-Ellen Tracy, born 21 August 1974; Jared David Tracy, born 12 September 1976; Sharla Antoinette Tracy, born 28 April 1978; Crystal Casmira Tracy, born 15 May 1980; David Tracy; and Roarke Tracy.
    For a number of years Will operated two highly successful karate schools in Portland, Oregon.
     He now lives north of Los Angeles.

Jim Tracy
    I married Carol Buck 12 October 1970 in Carson City, Nevada, and divorce in 1974. 1 have one daughter, Jennifer Leigh Tracy Specter, born 28 October 1971 in San Jose, California.
    Jennifer was a straight "A" student in high school, graduating and starting at the University of San Diego, Revelle College, at the age of 16. She then attended graduate school at Flagstaff, Arizona.
    She is married to Bruce Specter and they live in Reno, Nevada. She has a wonderful job with Charles Schwab.
    For the last 20 years I have been on disability with a chemical imbalance in the brain. I am not able to do anything so I spend my time writing this family history.
    I live in Sacramento.

Mother
    She married Ed Espinosa in1967. He was a good man. Ed died in 1988. As previously stated, she died in December 2003 at age 86. We lived together for the last few years of her life.

    Granddad Tracy would suffer a massive heart attack when he was 65 years old. He got off the wagon he was driving and laid down on the ground to die. He would then go on to live a healthy 25 more years, dying on the 28 of November 1962 at 90 years. His obituary said he came to California from Iowa when he was 18 years old, settling first in Sutter County before moving to Tehama County. The greatest regret he had all of his life was the fact that he did not volunteer to serve in the Spanish-American War. He thought he had let his country down when it needed him.
    There were lots of old people at his funeral. They were very very old people. Even Aunt Beulah's elementary teacher was there. They would come up to Al and say, "You look just like Alva when he was young." They would come up to me and say, "You look just like Austin when he was young." The Tracy genes are very strong.
    Granddad is buried in the family plot at Oak Hill Cemetery.
Side Story: Granddad Tracy was a good guitar player and played at the dances. Whenever Woody Guthrie was in the area they would get together and play their guitars. They became friends.
    Grandma would die on the 25 January 1965 and is buried next to him.
    My father, Austin, became more unstable as he grew older and at the age of 66, committed suicide by gunshot on 22 November 1966. He is buried in the family plot.
Another side story: Austin made as much as $90,000 a year during the depression and even paid $5,000 for a single dog. Not bad money for running a Gypo logging outfit.

Background for this Chapter
    It was still during the war years, mother had three children and had lived and worked in the Red Bluff area for 25 years. She wanted to get out of Red Bluff!
    She was working for the railroad in Gerber. (Everything was railroads in those days.) Gerber was just a very small railroad town outside of Red Bluff. This was a layover spot for crew members. There was only one telephone in town and that was at the rail station.
    Mother’s job was to receive phone calls on behave of the crew, then go and find them and tell them where they were to go next. Here job title was "Call Girl."
    Here she met another railroad worker named Howard Mulholland. He suggested she move to Seattle. So she packed up us kids and did just that. Then she married Howard Mulholland. He had been married before and had a set of twins, John and Lorens, and another son, Andrew.
    Howard Mulholland had a brilliant mind enhanced by a photographic memory. He could succeed at virtually anything he wanted to do. He was also a very good artist and magician. He was one of those rare men that never had a sick day in his life. They divorced in 1954 (?).

My family history web site has 79 chapters. If you would like to know more about the other chapters then go to my Home Page www.thetracyfamilyhistory.net

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