About the Author

 I decided to write my autobiography and place it at the end of the family history for anyone who might be interested. The first chapter tells several different stories all at the same time, which can get a little confusing. By the end of the chapter it should all makes sense.

16 chapters, about 98 pages, finished March 25, 2008

When We Were Black Belts

                            James E Tracy Copyright Ó 2007

Chapter 1

 In the summer of 1957, three brothers walked into Ed Parker’s Kenpo-Karate School in Pasadena, California and paid $60 each for the three-month beginner’s course.

 In less than ten years two of these brothers would begin building a chain of 150 karate schools throughout America and Canada. It was the largest chain of karate schools in America. It was the largest chain of karate schools in the world.

            This is the story of how these two brothers, Al and Jim Tracy, challenged the way the martial arts had been taught throughout Asia for thousands of years and made the karate business what it is today. It is ironic that two young Caucasian Americans who took their first karate lesson in Pasadena far from the ancient homelands of the martial arts did all this.

The three of us were born in the small Northern California town of Red Bluff: Al in 1936, Will in 1937, and myself, Jim, in 1940. We descended from an old California pioneer family, which was the first to settle the region in 1844.

            Today, Red Bluff is a small city of 13,000. When we were born it was less than 4,000.

             Our mother and father lived in the mountains at Hunter, twenty miles west of Red Bluff. So remote that even today one can only get to the place by dirt road. So obscure is Hunter that many in the county have never heard of the place. Our father ran cattle and a gypo lumber outfit. (A gypo outfit is a small independent timber cutter.)

            Our father was thirty-five when he married our seventeen year old mother. (Mom always married much older men.)  Dad was erratic and unstable. He would get up from the table and walk out the door and not return for one or two months. When he returned he would walk through the door and sit down at the table never saying where he had been or what he had done. No one, including our mother ever asked. His hair was always cut the same as when he left and he always wore the same clothes on return. Walking back through the door, he always looked exactly the same as when he walked out the door weeks before.

             Mother said he was “odd.”

            Our father may have been “odd,” but he was no fool. In just one year during the depression he made $99,000, and even paid $5,000 for a single hunting dog. In today’s money he would have earned over one million dollars and the dog would cost sixty thousand.  And that was just one year! This was at a time when taxes were almost non-existent, and a family could live on sixty dollars a month.
            Our father always knew he was mentally ill. He thought he could cure himself by diet. It did not work. As a teenager he spent a year in the Adventist Psychiatric Hospital at Loma Linda in Southern California. Mom said, “I don’t know what it cost Granddad Tracy!”

Our father ended it all by committing suicide in 1966. His sister, Aunt Beulah, then sent Al a copy of Dad’s tax return for the year of 1938.  That is how we know he declared $99,000 to the IRS. Al says that if he declared less than $100,000 then he would have had to pay taxes at the rate of only 3 to 4%. Anything over $100,000 would be taxed at 94%.  No one knows what he truly earned, but it must have been staggering for the times.

            Our mother was erratic and unstable at the time she married, and she would continue that way until her death. Amazingly, this strange marriage lasted five years before ending in divorce with our father going into the Sierra Nevada mountains where he continued his gypo work.

            We were so young at Hunter that none of us even remember our father. Al has no recollection of the man. When Will was a teenager he visited our father for a few days in the mountains, never to see him again. Dad left Hunter before I was even born. Basically, he was a father who never existed in our lives.

            We kids never enjoyed Hunter that much. The place was so small that there was nothing to do. There were no other kids to play with. All we had were the dogs!

Dad’s best dog was “Trailer.” One time Will followed a bull snake into the woods and got lost. Dad, and everyone else at Hunter, took their tracking dogs and tried to find him. Dad let Trailer go by himself. It took Trailer three days to find Will and then bring him home the three miles to safety. Will almost died of starvation in the wilderness. To this day Will is afraid of snakes. (I must confess I have a snake phobia, too.)

We were used to going hungry in the wilderness of Hunter. To put it truthfully, ours was a neglectful mother. One time she did not feed us for a week. Our grandparents owned and ran the forest ranger station at Saddle Camp, which was seven miles away. Granddad and Grandma Tracy went looking for us, and saved us.

Aunt Florence, mother’s sister, tried to get custody of us. Uncle Harry and Aunt Beulah, Dad’s sister, tried to get custody of us. Granddad and Grandma Tracy had a big lawsuit trying to get custody of us. All failed. So much for parental rights.

Will and Al both have astigmatism, which they believe was caused by malnutrition. Will told me that malnutrition as a baby is what caused me to be sickly all my life. Mostly what Al and Will remember about Hunter was always being hungry.

            My mother recently passed away in relatively good health at the age of eighty-six. About a year before her death she was reaching up in the cupboard to get a spice container, laughed and said, ”He wanted to marry me.”  

            It seemed that Ed Schilling, of the Schilling Spices fortune, took his inheritance, and with his brother went into the cattle business in Texas. Ed Schilling went through a bitter divorce and the brother died. Mother emphasized that the brother’s death had a strong effect on Ed Schilling.

Ed Schilling wanted to get away from it all. He wanted to get out of Texas. Really, he wanted to get out of the world.  So he did the next best thing. He moved to Hunter. The place was so small that everyone knew one another.

At Hunter, like our father, he ran cattle. There he lived a primitive life style like everyone else: no running water, or indoor plumbing, no electricity.

            The only luxury he allowed himself was the biggest car money could buy. Ed Schilling wanted to marry mother. He kept asking and she kept saying “no.” As was her pattern with men, he was old enough to be her father. Mom said he even had a son her age. He even took mom and her girl friend on a two-week vacation to Oregon. Mom said it was the fanciest car she ever drove.

            She still said “no.”

            As far back as the frontier days, Tehama County has a history of the rich and famous moving in. They are always treated the same as anyone else. The exalted get no respect. Recently I told Aunt Arla, mother’s brother’s wife, the story of mother and Ed Schilling.

            “Was he the one who lived west of Red Bluff?” She asked.

            “Yes,” I replied.

            “He had a crush on me. I wouldn’t date him.”

            “Was he from the Schilling spice family?”

            “Yes.”

            That is how it is in Tehama County. It is not like Beverly Hills.

            The wealth of our father would bypass the three Tracy brothers, as did the vast Schilling fortune. We would be around wealth all of our lives, but we never had great wealth. We would have to be satisfied with our fifteen minutes of fame.

Mother divorced while still pregnant with me and after awhile moved in with Granddad and Grandma Tracy in their house at Red Bluff. Granddad had retired, sold Saddle Camp, and bought a modest home in Red Bluff. By having Mom move in with them it would guarantee that we kids would be taken care of.

Then mother connived with grandma’s sister, Aunt Hattie, to sneak us all out in the middle of the night and move us into our own house downtown.

The house we lived in was next door to our Chinese doctor and his family. The Chinese had been in Northern California since the Gold Rush. At one time, Red Bluff had a good size Chinese community. There was more than one Chinese doctor in town. They were all herbalists.

            Doctor Yuen was a “number one” Chinese doctor. The government even gave him a grant to do herbal research. The government was especially interested in his cancer research. This was before the days of modern medicine. When your family doctor gave you a prescription, you took it to your pharmacy and they made the medicine in the shop from herbal compounds. Although, these were western herbs and not Chinese. Chinese herbs are different. Chinese medicine is different.

Mother came from a long line of herbalists. Her grandfather was a famed herbalist in Glasgow, Scotland, in the later part of the 1800s. He was known for “The Laying On of Hands.” She did not know exactly what this meant, but it was not a religious thing. People came from great distances to be treated by her grandfather.

            This knowledge passed down through the family and mother was knowledgeable about all herbs, although, she did not know Chinese herbs.

            Al was born with a colon problem, usually always fatal. The Chinese doctor cured him. Will was born with a gland problem in the throat, usually always fatal. The Chinese doctor cured him. I was born very premature. I should not have lived. The Chinese doctor cured me. This drove our already unstable mother to be even more insane.
            Mother could not stop bleeding during one of her periods. Pale and weak, Aunt Hattie took mom to another Chinese doctor in town. When they walked in the door the doctor said, “No! No! You die! You die!” Aunt Hattie grabbed the Chinese doctor and shook him vigorously screaming, “You SOB. You fix!” The doctor gave mother an herbal brew, which saved her life.

Mother was a waitress for most of her life. She always made good money. One of mother’s jobs, the best she ever had, was at Richardsons Springs Resort in Chico. It was a world famous resort... with nothing to offer its guests. The rich, more than famous, would vacation here. They had a large clientele of European Jews, who were very rich, for this was one of the few resorts that did not discriminate against the Jews.

            The Jews would take 3-4 rooms for themselves and another 4-5 rooms just for their luggage. When the Second World War started it cut off the Jews from Europe. Then the wealthy Jews from the East Coast came by train and took their place. It was not just the Jews but also wealthy American families. Mother was the waitress for the Rockefellers.

            The tips were fabulous!

            Mother, to her dying day, never could understand why these rich, and sometimes famous people from around the world, would come to Chico, to this resort. There was nothing there. There was nothing to do. The only movie theater, or other social activities, were in town. The guests never went into town. They just sat around doing nothing, coming to dinner in baggy clothes and slippers.
           What I could not explain to mother is that their great wealth had bought them every activity, material goods and comforts of the world. For a few days, this is the world that they wanted to get away from.

            Although Chico was only forty miles from Red Bluff, the staff was required to live on the premises. This was especially true for mother for she managed the crew of waitresses.

            For a few years, while still small children, we moved in with the Chinese family. It was a large family with eight or ten children. One of the girls was my age and we became very close. Al and Will attended parochial school as did our Chinese brothers and sisters, although we were not Catholic. It was a good school, not expensive and mother was making good money. Although we were Caucasian, we were raised Chinese. Al, and Will, still remember taking their rice balls to school every day.       

            The family only spoke Chinese at home. Al and Will lived in a Chinese world at home and the America world at school. They both understood Chinese well but did not speak it as fluently. I was too young to go to school and had almost no contact with the world outside of our Chinese family. Thus, I never spoke English as a child. I only spoke Chinese.

            It was a typical Chinese family with friends and relatives constantly coming and going. The other Chinese accepted us three Caucasian kids without question. As Al explained, “The Chinese were always taking in orphan children.”

We didn’t see mother much when we were living with the Chinese family. Usually she would visit us once a month. Being raised in a different culture would cause mother-son bonding problems. When mother would visit she would say something to me in English and I would reply in Chinese. This drove mother crazy! One time a girlfriend was visiting with mother, and I was talking Chinese. The friend asked mother “Is he retarded?”

            The Chinese in California saw the Second World War coming and bought farms. (“Acquired” farms, would be the proper word, as the Chinese were not allowed to own land in California until the1950s.) The Chinese are survivors and knew there was going to be rationing. On their small farms they raised the necessary livestock and produce to get through the war comfortably. Being Chinese, on temporary loan from our mother, we ate well during the war. Al remembers the children ate separately from the adults, and the food was excellent!

            The Chinese doctors imported enough herbs from China to get them through the war.

            In reminiscing, Al recently said that it would have been better for us if we had been raised by Grandma and Granddad Tracy. To which Will replied that it would have been better if the Chinese family had raised us.

Mom left Richardson Springs and took a job working for the railroad just outside of Red Bluff. The town of Gerber was a layover for the train crews. There was only one phone in town and it was mother’s job to take the phone messages to the individual crewmembers and give them their next assignment.
            It was at Gerber shortly before the Second World War ended that she met a train worker who would become her second husband, Howard Mulholland. Howard soon moved up to Seattle and then told Mom to come on up. Mother jumped at the chance to get far away from the relatives who were always criticizing her motherhood.

            I left my Chinese family and Chinese world in which I had been raised and eventually forgot how to speak Chinese. I slowly learned English. Will still remembers my first English words, “California Piggy.”
            We soon settled on a small fifteen-acre farm on the outskirts of Seattle called Woodinville. None of our neighbors could support their families on their farms. They had to hold down other jobs. Today, Woodinville is an upscale suburb of Seattle.
            Our stepfather went from job to job, none of which made us rich.
            Will developed an allergic reaction to cow’s milk, so Howard bought a small herd of goats to provide the families’ milk. We lived on biscuits and goats milk with Al usually feedings us.
            However, goats browse and that is seasonal. Out of season Howard had to buy feed for the goats, which he could not afford. So the goats starved to death until some caring soul bought the whole starving herd. With the loss of the goats went half our rations. All I remember about Seattle was being cold and hungry. 
            I just hated Seattle. It was always cold, foggy, constantly raining.
            When I was twelve years old we did get out of there for a short while. Mother made arraignments for us to spend the summer in Red Bluff with her brother, Gordon, and his wife Arla. We three kids got on the bus in Seattle and went back to Red Bluff.
            Uncle Gordon and Aunt Arla lived on a small farm outside Red Bluff called Dairyville. Al always called it “the ranch.” They had two younger children, Dee and Nick. I loved that dry desert hot summer in Red Bluff. It was never cold and when you got hungry you got food.

A couple of years ago I revisited the ranch. Uncle Gordon died at a young age, which left Aunt Arla with enough life insurance money to tear down the old house and build a new one. Then she sold the house, which was resold a few years later to Arla’s dear friend, Audrey, and her husband, Marion.
            I spent two hours visiting Audrey and Marion. Upon leaving I told Audrey that my summer there as a child was the happiest time of my life. Audrey replied that other people had told her the same thing.

We moved around a lot in and around Seattle. Eventually, we moved into a combined house in back with a real estate office up front. It seemed that Mom and Howard had decided to go into the real estate business.

For a change our family prospered. Howard and mom were finally making money. Then Howard could not take the pressure of living with our insane mother anymore. Instead of getting a divorce he drowned himself in alcohol for a period that lasted  three years and mother matched him drink for drink.
            In addition to her newfound world of alcohol, mother took it upon herself to diagnosis her body as having multiple sclerosis. She could not get a doctor to agree because they all said her problem was mental. So she put herself into a wheelchair for one year.
            Al established some stability in his life by staying in the same grammar and high school during the Seattle years. Whenever we moved he would simply hitch hike to the same school at Bothell. Will and I moved from school to school.
            Al was into public speaking in High School and even won the Washington State Debate Championship. With the title went a four-year full scholarship to Washington State University. Not wanting to go to an agriculture school he joined the Air Force.

His official job was fighter aircraft radar technician. In the Air Force he worked on diagnosing the problems with the radar of the F-89 and F-102 Fighters. These radars were as complex as working on hundreds of television sets at the same time.

He also moonlighted as bartender at the Officer’s Club. One of the officers was a psychiatrist; also an alcoholic.  He helped the psychiatrist with his drinking problem and in return the psychiatrist gives Al nearly a year of psychoanalysis for free. This is a time when psychoanalysis was the fad, very popular and very expensive. Al learned the techniques of diagnosing the complexities of the human mind.

            Al becomes a good friend with the base commander. (Al served in an Air Force Fighter wing stationed at the Portland International Airport in Oregon. The civilian airport was the home for the commercial airlines as well as the US Air Force fighter interceptors and the Air National Guard.)

            The base commander never paid for his drinks, courtesy of Al. This friendship pays big dividends as Al is promoted to Staff Sergeant in the unheard of time of only one-year. The base commander let Al go to any school of his choice. In his four-years in the Air Force, Al would spend two-years in technical schools.

            When Will turned seventeen he wisely quit high school and joined the army. He entered boot camp being five feet six inches tall and weighing ninety-eight pounds. He finishes boot camp at five foot nine and weighing one hundred and forty two pounds, all muscle. Making up for sixteen years of frailty he goes Air Borne.

            I am now alone with two alcoholic parents and without the help of my two older brothers.

Then Howard and mother separate. Howard moves to Pasadena, California. Mother soon reconciles and we move to Pasadena. On leave from the army, Will talks with Aunt Florence and Uncle Kay and they agree to let me live with them and finish out my last three years of high school in Red Bluff.
            Will got me away from our crazy mother for my high school years and Howard finally had enough sense to divorce our mother. Once divorced Howard never took another drink.

            It is then that Will locates our birth father in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in Quincy, and spends a few days with him. He would never see our father again.
            I was now back in my hometown of Red Bluff, living with a pretty normal family and their two children, Millie, who was one year older and David who was three years younger.

In school I was terrible in the sciences: math, chemistry, anything that required a technical mind, including English grammar. I would sit in these classes and not understand a word they were saying, wondering why I was even there. I got good grades in English class because I read one book a day and turned in a book report on each one. The instructor, Mr. Scantlebury, had me read all of the works of Shakespeare, and I remember not one word!        

            I did excel in the arts: public speaking, radio announcing and drama. I was “big man on campus,” directing and acting in the school plays. I would win public speaking contests. Unlike Al, all I got were trophies minus any college scholarships.

            One semester I was carrying a pretty heavy schedule of classes. I decided to take a class that was easy, sort of balance things out. Journalism looked like an easy class, so I signed up. The instructor started off by telling the class that if they thought journalism was going to be easy, then drop the class immediately, as it was going to be the toughest class we had ever taken. She then went into great detail explaining why it was such a tough class. When the class ended, I went up to the teacher and thanked her for being so honest. Then I explained that I was looking for an easy class to balance out my tough schedule. Upon her advice, I was going to drop the journalism class.

            I do not know why, but I allowed her to talk me into staying in the class. It was the toughest class I ever had. But, I learned to write. The class was so tough that at the end of the semester I made a vow that I would never be a writer.

Will made arraignments for me to spend the summer working for my father. I took the bus up to Quincy and asked around for Austin Tracy. I was told to go to the local bar. I found him, the only customer in the bar,  having a drink at one o’clock in the afternoon. I figured right then that this guy had a lot of problems.

I was around my father very little that summer. He lived in town and I lived on the timber-cutting site in a camper. What little contact I had with him quickly gave me the impression that he was an unstable alcoholic.

Mother said he never drank until after the marriage ended. That would be beyond the age of forty. Like many who turn to drugs and alcohol he was self medicating. He was born a generation too soon. If he had been born later, in the world of modern medicine, he could have been diagnosed and treated with psychiatric medication. His timing in life was off.

When I left Quincy at the end of the summer I did so without any pay. Dad did give me a car. I would never see my father again. I could have asked him for financial support to finish high school, but I never figured he owed me anything. None of us ever figured anyone owed us anything. We were used to working for what we got.

Our father would fight mental illness all of his life, living erratically, although successfully. Finally, he would shoot himself at age sixty-five. We suspect that he had timberland in Canada and property in Mexico, and possibly other South American countries, plus mining interests wherever and various other investments and banking accounts. We never could locate the assets after his death. We didn’t even know where to look. So erratic was his mind that he did not know what, or where his holdings were during his lifetime. These possible fortunes would go unclaimed.

            At the same time I graduated from high school in 1957, Al got discharged from the Air Force and Will from the army where he was finishing a tour of duty in Korea. We all three headed to Pasadena to live with our mother.

            Our choice to live with our crazy mother was out of necessity. None of us had any money and we wanted to go on to college, and California had a free two-year junior college system.

            We had the following plans: We were going to go to Pasadena City College, then onto law school. We were going to study judo. We were going to learn hypnotism.

            As for college, both Al and Will had the GI bill and we all expected to work part time to make it through school.

            As for judo, we were not big people and wanted to learn judo chops and be able to throw bullies over our shoulders.        

As for hypnotism; it was popular at the time.

Everyone in Red Bluff expected me to continue in the arts, but I had to face reality. In high school I took two-years of radio announcing and felt I could succeed as a professional radio announcer. But, it would be a long, slow grind with very little money.

            The process began by going to radio announcing school in Portland, Oregon, for one year. Then you tried to get a job with a hick radio station in the middle of nowhere like Red Bluff. If you got a job, then you would send a tape recording of your work to a slightly larger station, and hopefully, work your way up the ladder. The pay was below living standards.

            The idea of working in TV broadcasting was out of the question. You had to have the looks and I was a little, skinny, not-too-good looking kid. When I got my first drivers license at the age of sixteen I only weighed one hundred and eleven pounds.

            Strangely, moving to Pasadena put me in perfect position to further a career in the arts. In Pasadena was the famous training ground for actors, The Pasadena Playhouse.

            Again, realistically, being a little, skinny, not-too-good looking kid, I figured that I would never have a chance of making a living in the tough competitive world of Hollywood and the professional theater. When I left Red Bluff, I left any thoughts of making a career in the arts behind, and never looked back. I quickly forgot, consciously, everything I learned about the theater. Subconsciously, I retained a lot.

            I would visit The Pasadena Playhouse to watch the plays, but never enrolled as a student.

            Mother was working as a waitress at the Pasadena Athletic Club. She got me a job washing dishes and mopping floors at the club. Al got a full time job with an electronics firm heading a team designing the nation’s first air traffic control system for the New York City Airport.

            Mom also got Al a second job at the athletic club tending bar part time. Will got a job as an instructor at a local health club. We all worked ourselves to death and started night school at college.

The staff at the health club told Will about an Hawaiian named Ed Parker, who had recently taught private self defense lessons at the club. It was an unheard of Oriental form of self-defense called “karate.” (The word then used was “Oriental” to be replaced by the word “Asian “ many years later.) That is, it was unheard of by anyone in America.

In 1957, when the American public thought of Oriental self-defense they automatically thought of judo.

            Will was told that Ed Parker had gone on his own and opened a self-defense school here in Pasadena.

            Will had just returned from Korea. He had been stationed in Korea for eighteen months serving in Army intelligence as a courier traveling between Korea and Japan. While in Japan he took a few judo lessons and in Korea he took some karate lessons from his houseboy. He was one of the few people in America at that time who had heard of the word “karate” and knew what it meant.

            Will got the full details: the address of the school; the hours of operation; the cost of instruction, which was sixty dollars for the first three months beginners course, then fifteen dollars a month thereafter. You received two one-hour group classes per week.

            We did not call and make an appointment, just walked into the school with sixty dollars each in our pockets. As the four of us sat in the office, three brothers and Ed Parker, none of us realized that we would be making history.

            From that first meeting we developed a close bond with Ed Parker that would last until his death in 1990.

            To understand how the Tracy brothers accomplished what we did in the world of karate it is necessary to know about Ed Parker, where he came from and what brought him to Pasadena.

             He was born in Honolulu in 1931, one of the many poor cousins to the branch of the family that owned the famed Parker Ranch. Located on the island of Maui it is one of America’s largest beef cattle ranches.

             Hawaii is not always picture-perfect as illustrated in the travel brochures. Some parts of the islands are just as the travel industry promotes so effectively to the world. Honolulu is a beautiful town, but it has its bad areas. Due to economics the family is forced to live in the roughest part of Honolulu. How tough an area did they live in? In Ed Parker’s own words, “Of my thirty-two friends, only me and two others did not go to reform school.”

             Ed Parker’s father works for the reform school system. It is a chain gang during the day where the inmates work the plantation fields and stay in camp by night. The camp keeps them out of the neighborhood and family influences that usually created the juvenile delinquent in the first place.

             The father is big enough and tough enough to crack heads together. This was before the days of Constitutional rights. The main goal was to instill enough discipline to get them into the military. This sounds funny today when the military has high standards, looking for high school graduates at the minimum, and shunning anyone with a criminal background. But in those days the military took the bottom of the barrel, and with discipline, training and good luck, turned many of them into respectable citizens.

            These troubled kids could join the military and get three meals a day, a uniform, a monthly paycheck, training and a career in the military if they choose. Or, if the timing was right, the GI Bill, which afforded higher education.

             Such is his integrity, so fair and respected is the father that when there is a riot some of the inmates would surround him with a wall of protection.

            The “operative word” for Ed Parker is now “protection.” In order to stay alive in this land of paradise he starts to take karate lessons. At this time, Hawaii is a US Territory with a large Asian population. Martial arts instructors were easy to come by. He graduates from high school just in time to face the draft and be sent to fight in Korea. He avoids the draft by joining the Coast Guard. The family is able to pull the right strings to get him stationed in Honolulu.

            Life now goes on as usual except he now has a uniform he wears eight hours a day, gets three meals a day and a pay check each month.

            At the end of his four-year hitch in the Coast Guard he uses his GI Bill to attend college at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. While working on his degree in sociology he teaches a few students karate in a club he forms on campus. A friend who has a health club in Provo allows him to teach a few private students at the club.

            Ed Parker graduates with his bachelors degree in 1956 and receives a job offer from the probation department in Pasadena, California.

            Ed Parker is now looking at a civil service career, which would provide him with a descent living, and obscurity, for the rest of his life. And that was perfectly all right with him.

            However, there was one hitch with the job offer, which would one day propel Ed Parker to fame and power. Ed Parker was an impressively tough looking guy, in a handsome way. He stood a shade under six feet tall, weighed one hundred and eighty pounds, and was a self defense expert.

            The probation department wanted him to work with the toughest, hardened adult criminals. Parker knew from his father’s years of working with juvenile delinquents in Hawaii that there was little chance of reforming the ways of a hardened adult criminal. If you were going to have any chance of changing a person with criminal behavior you had to get them in their youth. Parker insisted on working only with the youth offenders. The department insisted that he worked only with the adults. He works for the probation department for one month. Then, in his blunt way Ed Parker told them to shove it and walked out the door.

             He walked out the door and decided to teach karate... in a world that had never heard the word, let alone had any idea what it was.

That one decision would change the way that the martial arts had been taught for thousands of years.

The owner of the health club that Ed Parker used to teach a few private lessons at in Provo also owned a health club in Pasadena. Ed Parker starts teaching private karate lessons to a few of the health club members. It does not work out. The bodybuilding customers complain that the karate instructor is taking up their space that they are paying for. Also, he can’t get enough business from the health club members.

Now Parker takes a giant step and borrows $300 from a friend, rents a commercial building on a good street, and opens up a full time commercial karate school.

 In California, Ed Parker is still the Hawaiian. In the warm Southern California climate he lives as if still in Honolulu, wearing cotton pants, Hawaiian shirts, and thongs (Now called flip-flops.). This was just before the thong craze had hit Southern California. Not only was karate unknown in America, but thongs were also unknown.

            Soon word spreads throughout the small martial arts community. “There is a real live karate man in town. He doesn’t even wear shoes!”

Ed Parker has a monopoly, being the only commercial karate school in a nation of 151,326,000 people; a state of 10,586,000 people; and a county of 1,970,408 people; and he barely makes it!

The Japanese had a toehold in America through a student at Cal-Tech (California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena). The Japanese student had a small karate club on campus. Chuck Norris had not yet started his tour of duty in Korea. The Koreans, who would open a Tae Kwon Do school in every Middlesex, village and farm, had not yet set foot in America.

What saves Ed Parker is a new freeway that has been built…that makes Hollywood just a few minutes away.

 As soon as he opens his school, Ed Parker becomes the darling of the film world. He would now spend the rest of his life associating with celebrities, the rich and powerful, the most famous people in the world. From this day to his death in 1990, one of the greatest status symbol in Hollywood, from the highest to the lowest, was to let it be known that Ed Parker was your friend.           

            To show you the prestige Ed Parker had in Hollywood: Ed Parker is on set with his movie mogul friend, Blake Edwards. Parker is intensely concentrating on how the scene is being set up. The time is well set in Ed’s mind as he recalls it is during the time when the whole world is watching the TV series Dallas and wondering, “Who shot J.R.?” This would make it March of 1980.

            Out of the corner of his eye he sees Blake Edwards talking with someone. He doesn’t know who as his concentration is on the scene at hand. After a few minutes Blake Edwards comes over and says, “Ed. This man ask me to introduce him to you.”

            Ed turns, smiles and says, “Of course.”

            The man sticks out his hand and says, “Mr. Parker, my name is Larry Hagman, and I just want you to know that I have always wanted to meet you.”

            What helps him make it?  In addition to his regular students in the school itself, he also teaches the Hollywood stars, some in the school, and some in their Beverly Hills homes. These are private lessons at rates that the movie stars expect to pay.

            Ed Parker would have a reputation of being an instructor to the stars. That he was. But he never had that many movie stars that he taught. He did not give eight hours of private lessons every day, five days a week.    

To add to his financial burdens, he had just gotten married and soon had a baby on the way. The couple lived modestly, in a humble apartment and with a car that ran. What he did make teaching private lessons to the stars keep his family alive and the school afloat.

When his money situation became desperate, Ed Parker resorted to a unique way of increasing his income. It was the custom in Hollywood, then and now, “Lets do lunch.” Ed did lunch a lot with the stars. He never paid. Because of their status, they always tipped big. No coins, always bills were left on the table. Parker made sure that he was always the last to leave… then he would reach back and steal the tip.

            That is how the karate industry in America was originally funded. 

            The jobs that Will and I worked had flexible hours. We might work mornings, afternoons, or evenings. We decide to give Ed Parker the extra help he needed in running the school. Between the three of us and Ed Parker, we were usually able to keep the karate school open full time.           

            Being beginning students we did not have enough knowledge to teach karate lessons. However, we could organize. The karate business consisted mostly of evening classes. Beginners classes were at 7 PM, then the intermediate classes were at 8 PM. The advanced class was at 9 PM.

            This required that Ed Parker be on the mats teaching during those hours. He was constantly being called off the mats to conduct the business of interviewing perspective new students, answering the phone, writing out receipts for lesson payments, etc.

            We took over these jobs, which left Parker available to teach uninterrupted.

            We also were able to cover the school on the days Ed Parker drove over to the Beverly Hills mansions to teach private lessons.

            Ed Parker was not the first person to teach karate in America. He would be the first person to teach karate successfully in America. Karate is a Chinese thing, Kung Fu, which is part of the Chinese culture today, as it has been for thousands of years. Gold was discovered in California in 1848 and my people were among the very first miners being in California before the first gold strike. It took six months for the news of the gold discovery to reach the far corners of the world, and another six months for the emigrants to reach California.

            20,000 Chinese would immigrate to Northern California in the first two-years alone. The second great Chinese immigration would come in the 1860s to build the Trans-Continental railroad.

            The Chinese brought with them their ancient art of Kung Fu as well as their ancient healing art of herbal medicine.

            However, the Chinese were a clan society. The Wong’s did not teach the Chan’s. The Chan’s did not teach the Lee’s, and so-on-and-so-forth. The Chinese did not teach the Koreans or the Japanese, or any other Asian people because they didn’t like one another very much.

            In addition to the Wong's not teaching the Chan's, the Wong's sometimes did not teach the Wong's, and etc... Within the “etc…” are the Caucasian Americans, which were not even Chinese, let alone one of their clan. When the Kung Fu instructors did teach their own clan, they usually did so in a negative fashion. The students had to first prove themselves worthy of being taught by the master. They would be taught just nothing, such as a stance. They would learn nothing more than this one thing for several months. Then, when they had perfected nothing, they would teach them another basic. This learning of nothing would go on for years. It was not unusual for a student to be taught material for years, only to be told by the instructor that it was no good and forget everything they had learned. The traditional system required ten years of patient obedience before the student started learning the true art. It then took several years before they became proficient in the correct material.

Any Kung Fu student who studied for just ten years did not know enough to defend themselves in a fight. A student had to study a minimum of fifteen years to develop any proficiency.

            Al tells of talking to one Kung Fu master who had studied twenty years before he realized he was being taught wrong. Why? “He was a Wong and I am a Lee.” Another time Al walked into a Kung Fu school and watched a student doing a technique the wrong way. The Kung Fu master looked at Al, and just smiled.

            There were exceptions to the rules. Not all Chinese are the same.

            There was a time in China that the Kung Fu instructors were willing to teach the Americas legitimate Kung Fu and at a fast rate. The Chinese wanted the American money. They found out quickly that the American servicemen were not going to put up with any nonsense. Junk teaching meant the Americans were out the door! Beside, the Americans were only stationed in the Chinese ports for a few months tour of duty. They did not have ten years to waste learning nothing.

            Robert Trias first studied under a Chinese instructor in 1942, while being stationed in the British Solomon Islands. Two-years later he studied again in Singapore. Other Americans studied in Hong Kong.

            Even though there were karate men who had good knowledge and teaching ability, none of them could make a success in a business sense. They simply could not make a living teaching karate. It would still be several years in the future before the Tracy brothers would create a system where a karate instructor could make a good living teaching karate full time. The day was yet to come when one Kung Fu master would say in admiration, “You have to hand it to the Tracy brothers. They really made it work.”

Bob Trias opened a karate school in Phoenix, Arizona in 1946. This was ten years before Parker opened his school in Pasadena. However, Trias’ school never made any money, although a commercial school, it was never a commercial success. Trias was a Highway Patrol officer who made his living and pension working a government job. Although his school was open to the public, for the first few years most of his students were Arizona Highway Patrol officers and people he came into contact within his official position. Besides, Phoenix was in the middle of nowhere, right smack dab in the middle of a desert. If Trias had opened his school in Hollywood maybe his story would have been different.

            In 1966, Trias called me and pleaded with me to send him a good salesman who could show him how to make money in the karate business. “For all of the years I have been in the karate business I have never been able to make any money.” This phone call came after Trias had been operating his school for twenty years!

            In our second semester of college things began to change. Al quit his job at the electronics firm and we all started taking daytime classes at school. Our majors were business administration with minors in communication.

Pasadena City College was an outstanding college. Not a Harvard, but for a two-year college it was right at the top.

The following story will explain the difference between California’s two-year college system and that of the rest of the nation at this time in history. When I was in my late twenties I was on a train near Richmond, Virginia visiting the Civil War battlefields. In the same car was a very pretty eighteen-year-old blond girl. She said, “I am bored. Would you talk to me?” I sat down next to her and we talked. As was the Southern tradition at the time, she had graduated from high school and was taking the train up the East Coast to visit the various junior colleges and pick the one to attend. I explained that in California the junior colleges were free. However, I knew that on the East Coast these same two-year colleges were very expensive. I told her that I had the impression from talking to her that her family could not afford the tuition to send her to an East Coast junior college.

            She replied that it was true. Then explained, “My grandmother set up a trust fund so that all of the children could have a college education. My father is a poor farmer. My mother is a DuPont.”

At Pasadena we had some excellent college professors, with a few exceptions. (Everyone has had the experience with a high school and college teacher who should not be teaching.) Al took several classes in accounting from an outstanding teacher. He was taught how to analyze a business, how to diagnose financial statements to see what was obvious and to find what was not obvious. He had two-years of electronics training in the Air Force, which was highly complex math oriented. Al didn’t necessarily like math and its spin-offs, algebra, etc... but he had a complete understanding of the subject.

Al’s mind was trained to diagnose mathematical problems. This is the one thing that would make the Tracy organization different from the others in the industry. Al Tracy understood accounting.

            I did not take accounting courses at Pasadena because math was always beyond my comprehension. It wasn’t until I took a bonehead math class in college that I even learned what an integer was (a whole number).

            We took a lot of literature and creative writing classes. The instructors were a husband and wife team who knew their profession well. They were both published authors. She always encouraged me by writing across my papers, “You’re not a Hemingway yet.”

            We got back into public speaking by joining the debate team.

             So the reader can understand; In California they are called junior colleges, or community colleges, and as in this case, city college. They are all the same in that they are two-year colleges and teach pretty much the same courses.

            At one time in American history there was a witch-hunt for communists. The purpose was to purge liberals, dubbed communists, from all positions of importance. 

            The witch hunters worked quietly in the background taking over the boards of many of what I will call prestigious four-year colleges.

            In1953, the infamous Senator McCarthy began his senate hearings with accusations of communists infiltrating all levels of government. This was the trigger for the witch hunters to start purging the four-year colleges of their liberal professors. Some were fired outright and others not being hired. There was nowhere for these professors to go in the America college system as they would not be accepted in the other schools.

There was only one place of refuge for them and that was to go into California’s liberal two-year junior college system. The nations’ purge of professors was Californian’s gain. The state’s junior college system picked up some top-notch professors, and Pasadena got its share.

There are three divisions in debate: high school, two-year junior colleges, and the four-year state, universities, and private colleges such as Harvard and Yale. As mentioned before, Al had won the Washington High School debate championship and turned down the full four-year college scholarship that went with the title, and joined the Air Force.

The three divisions never debated outside of their own division. That is except for Pasadena City College. So good was our debate coach, and such was the reputation of his debate teams, (mostly because of Al and myself), that Pasadena was the only junior college in the nation that was allowed to debate the four-year colleges. We were in both divisions.

There were thirty students in the communications class, called the forensic class. Debate was just one of the five areas of public speaking. It was the most prestigious. Oratory was the next most popular.  When Al was in high school, one of the major Seattle newspapers had a state wide oratory contest. Al took second place. This time picking up a hundred-dollar bond, which was pretty good money for the time.

Of the thirty students in the forensic class, half were on the debate teams.

Such was the power of the forensic students that in our first year alone, the students in the Pasadena City College forensic class would win ninety awards in competition. And this was before the season was even over!

Al and I usually debated as a team, but not always. Sometimes Al worked with another partner.

It was with another partner that Al would enter a weekend tournament against all four-year colleges. Pasadena City College was the only two-year college invited to debate in this all four-year college tournament. The first day Al and his partner won four straight debates and they were the talk of the tournament. It was unheard of for a two-year college to wipe out four upper colleges in a row.  The next day he lost three straight. There was no way that a two-year college could beat UCLA, USC and Stanford. For the two-year students debate was a hobby. Remember, Al was working his way through college. In addition he was helping run the karate school.

Debate requires that you do a lot of research yourself, which is very time consuming. The prestigious colleges had students from rich families. They did not have outside jobs. They debated, leaving the research to other students who specialized in research. Then the research students would just hand the debaters the information. The debaters from the prestigious schools were not playing. They were serious! There was no way that a two-year college debate team could beat a four-year prestigious college team.

Except. The easiest team we ever beat was Cal-Tech (California Institute of Technology). We destroyed them. Engineering geniuses don’t necessarily make good debaters.

The big prizes were the Nationals. For the four-year colleges the Nationals were held at schools like West Point and Harvard. The two-year college nationals were held in unheard of places like Hutchinson, Kansas. That goes to show you the difference in status between the two divisions.

When working together, Al and I always followed the same pattern. Al would be the first speaker and establish the case. I would be the second speaker and follow Al’s lead, backing him up on all points…until that one debate.

When Al started his speech I could tell that he was making a big mistake. He had it all wrong on every point. He sat down as we listened to the opponent’s turn to speak. I wrote notes to Al telling him he was heading in the wrong direction and to follow my arguments. Al wrote notes back telling me to follow his lead. When it came my turn to speak I ignored Al’s lead and went on my own separate and opposite direction. I sat down, and the notes went back and forth more furious. The debate was a disaster. We both went in opposite directions never backing each other up.

After the debate Al and I started screaming at each other to the point that we were about to come to blows! At that moment our debate coach came over and told us that he had just finished talking to the judge who had judged our last round. The judge said that he had just gotten back from judging the final championship round at the four-year nationals at West Point and he considered the two of us as good as the national champions.

This is the way that we spent our four-years in Pasadena: working whatever jobs we could get for low pay because jobs were hard to come by; taking college classes, running Ed Parker’s karate school and traveling the state and nation attending debate tournaments.

After a few months of karate lessons we started teaching the beginning classes. This promotion to karate instructor was done in the time-honored way. One evening the beginners were on the mat waiting for Ed Parker to start teaching. But Parker was busy doing something else. Seeing that the class would never get started, I walked out on the mat and started teaching the class. I was now the schools beginners’ class instructor, by default.

I have told you how the Chinese masters had taught Kung Fu for thousands of years. However, Ed Parker had come up through the Hawaiian method of teaching the martial arts. (The term “martial arts” was not used in the beginning years.)  No one in Hawaii taught full time. This was more of a hobby, teaching here and there, out of the YMCA, Boys Club, Recreational Halls, in the parks, churches. The fee was $2 to $5 a month, which was not a bad sum of money for the time, and for someone teaching part time. If you were poor there was no charge. All of the instructors in Hawaii had regular jobs outside of the martial arts to support themselves.

Although this Hawaiian system of teaching produced many good karate students we soon realized that Ed Parker had no organized system of teaching. A new student was signed up and told when to attend class. The new student would go out on the mat with the full class and try to figure out what to do. We instituted the policy of taking each new student to the patio behind the school and giving them a one-hour private lesson on the basics to prepare them for the class.

Ed Parker taught the Hawaiian version Of Kenpo-Karate, which is the deadliest form, but also, the most complex. The instructor would go out on the mat and then decide what he was going to teach as the class was going on. It wasn’t unusual for the instructor to ask the students what they wanted to learn that day.

We decided to break down the karate movements: kicks, punches, etc… according to their degree of difficulty and started teaching the least difficult in the beginners class.

In the beginning Parker was around a lot running the school with the Tracy brothers taking over when he was gone. I scheduled my college classes for the morning usually getting out of school no later than one in the afternoon. I worked this schedule because I had food allergies. Whenever I ate I would get drowsy afterwards and could not concentrate.

             I would not eat breakfast so my mind was clear for school, then after my last class I would walk the two blocks over to the karate school where I would run the school and eat a sack lunch and do my homework.

A typical day would go like this: Parker would open the school at ten. I would take over at noon or one. Parker would then drive over to Joan Collins’ house to teach Warren Beatty. From there he would go over to Natalie Wood’s house and teach Robert Wagner. Then he would make it back in time to teach the evening classes.

             In addition, the Hollywood crowd would come to the school for private lessons. Because there were so few daytime classes, Parker usually had no problem working these in around his group-teaching schedule and his Hollywood trips. It was only the Hollywood elite that took private lessons, not the man off the street.

In order to get more desperately needed students, Ed Parker resorted to public karate demonstrations. For this he needed a demonstration team. These were his hand-picked best students. The Tracy brothers were on the demonstration team.

             During our earliest years with Ed Parker there was published a best selling book, “The Ugly American.” It is about the improper behavior of American diplomats in Asia. It was a good book. The movie rights are sold and it would star Marlon Brando.

One of Parker’s first students and Hollywood friends was Joe Hyams. Joe was one of Hollywood’s top writers. Being at the very top of the Hollywood scale, Joe would open many doors for Ed Parker.

The producers of the movie wanted to have an Oriental choreographed fight scene. Joe Hyams sets up a karate demonstration for Marlon Brando and his crew. (I think it was Joe. There were so many people that I forget who did what.) This is all new to Hollywood and Marlon Brando. Like the rest of American they had never heard of karate, never seen a demonstration.

 I was on the team for the Marlon Brando demonstration. It was outside on a large concrete patio. Wrestling mats had been provided for the demonstration. Brando walked on the scene like a mother duck with her gaggle of ducklings, suited Hollywood executives, following behind. On their faces was the look of adoration of the most famous movie star in the world.

 He appeared to me to be a young, good looking, virile man about twenty-eight years old. (Recent research shows that he had to be at least thirty-five.) He was dressed casually, in clothes that looked tailor made, and on him looked good. In fact, he looked just like Marlon Brando. The star and a few others sat down with the rest of the studio executives standing.

            I must have looked out of place on the demonstration team because I was a little skinny kid among a bunch of athletic looking young men.

            There were two reasons why Ed Parker wanted me on the demonstration teams. We had a sixth sense for what each other was going to do. Second, I could take a judo fall. Parker taught judo falls in a limited way because karate does not use falling. Only the advanced students were taught how to take a judo fall. However, the training was not very extensive. I took falling more seriously and practiced a lot on my own. I was no where near as good at taking a fall as even a beginning judo student. But, for karate I was pretty good, and more importantly, I was available.

 Because I cold take a fall, Parker could throw me all over the place and pound me to pieces. I could take a real beating. On one demonstration technique for Brando, Parker literally half-threw me and pounded me into the mat. The only problem is that he misjudged and threw me halfway off the mat onto the concrete patio. I looked down and had to make a split second decision. If I tried to break the fall with my arm, slapping the concrete, (standard procedure) then the right side of my body would be paralyzed for twenty minutes. If I didn’t break the fall I would have cracked ribs, which would cause intense pain for months to come. I broke the fall, then faked it before the distinguished audience making them think everything was normal, and the little skinny skid was really macho.

            Looking bewildered, Brando asked me, “Do you have some kind of protection?” my answer was “No.” Protective gear was still years in the future. Your bodies had to take the punishment.

            I don’t think they ever incorporated a karate scene in the movie. At least Parker never got the job to choreograph a fight for the movie. Good book. Not a very good movie, anyway. But, what did Parker care. When he worked fight scenes he got paid scale no matter if the movie was successful or bombed.

            Years later Al would be at a Hollywood party. Brando was there. All night long Brando just sat before the wood fireplace staring at the burning logs.

             Another time Parker’s friends set him up with a demonstration in the courtyard of an elite hotel in Beverly Hills. There were about twenty-five people in attendance. Again, the purpose was to get more students. I did not go because it was a Saturday and I had to run the school.

            During the demonstration a young man came crawling over the fence. “Hi” he said. “I am Elvis Presley.” He explained that he was staying at the hotel, heard that a karate demonstration was going on and rushed down to see it. At that first strange introduction, Al described Elvis as being humble and polite, which was typical of his Southern upbringing.

             There were very few people in the karate world in America at this time. Elvis was one of the few who was in at the beginning. He started studying with an instructor when he was in the army in Germany. He would have several instructors, all very good, with Ed Parker becoming the most famous.

            Elvis and Ed Parker would become very close friends. Whenever Elvis was going on tour and had a premonition that there would be problems he would call Parker and ask him to come as his bodyguard. Parker always replied, “I will come, but not as your bodyguard. I will come as your friend.”

            Elvis paid Ed Parker well, which added once more to his list of income generated outside of the school.

            Years later when Parker was prospering he got into tax problems and owed the  IRS $80,000. Parker could not pay and it would have ruined him financially. Elvis wrote out the check.

            Al and Elvis were friends. They would talk at karate tournaments. Al was at Graceland twice staying for several days each time. Al said that Parker took him along to show Elvis his friends. By this time the Tracy brothers with the dominant force in American karate.

            At the time of the Graceland visits Elvis had deteriorated to the point that he could not carry on a logical conversation. Elvis told Al, “Al, sex doesn’t do it any more. Fame and fortune doesn’t do it any more. What does it is food!” With that, he took half a cube of butter, slapped it onto a piece of white bread and gulped it down.

            Al said that he was a simple, big farm boy who was surrounded by people who fed his ego. Elvis' karate moves were good. He moved like Ed Parker. Elvis was a legitimate black belt but not of the highest caliber. When Al traded moves with Elvis he always made sure that he didn't look better than Elvis. It was not a good idea for 'The King" to "lose face."

           We would become very close friends with a man who would one day become the most famous actor in the world. He wasn’t extraordinarily handsome like Warren Beatty or Robert Wagner. He really couldn’t even act that well. We didn’t even meet him in Hollywood. We met him in San Francisco. He was a young Chinese kid. He was a Kung Fu man. He was one of us.

But, we have not moved to San Francisco yet. We are still in Pasadena.

            For me the most interesting demonstration was another arraigned by Joe Hyams. Joe had just divorced and married Elke Sommer, who was the reining sex queen of the time.  Joe and Ed Parker wanted to know if karate could be worked into American western movies. There was no one better to ask then the most famous western movie star of the time, Gary Cooper.

            Joe arraigned for a karate demonstration at Gary Cooper’s house. We drove up in Parker's big station wagon. “Coop” was in the carport polishing his Bentley. Parker gets out of the station wagon, walks over to the movie star, explains who we are and why we were there. Cooper looked surprised. I am not sure he knew we were coming. Cooper goes scurrying off to tell his maid and butler to prepare lunch for us after the demonstration.

            What surprised me is the modest home in which he lived. It was a one-story ranch style house with only three or four bedrooms. The rooms, including the living and dining area, were large but not gigantic. He had a large back yard with a swimming pool of average size.

            We put on the demonstration and afterwards “Coop” and I talked for a few minutes. As usual, Gary Cooper had never heard of karate. He showed me a tree that he had replaced a week earlier. It seems that a windstorm had come roaring through Beverly Hills and had uprooted the tree. It was a small tree, two inches in diameter and five feet tall. The nursery charged him $500 to replace it. A tree is a tree! It wasn’t worth more than five bucks.  

            Gary Cooper seemed reserved. I considered it to be a culture difference. He was upper class. I was working class and he wished to maintain a social distance. I saw his daughter being interviewed on TV a few years ago. She said her father was an extremely shy man. That could have been it. Or, it could have been the fact that he knew at the time that he had terminal cancer.

            It was a warm afternoon so after the demonstration Gary Cooper offered to let us take showers in the bath off his main bedroom. When it came my turn to shower I went into the bedroom and noticed the queen size bed and on the bedstead was an Oscar. I went over to look and it said “High Noon.”

            The shower had three showerheads: one in front; one in back; and one coming at you from the side. Interesting!

            After showering we all sat down for lunch. It was a long table with the karate team sitting on one side, the wife and daughter sitting opposite. (Women born to the very upper class do not sit. They pose.)  I recall that neither woman was tall.

            Gary Cooper sat at the head of the table.

            I sat directly across from the daughter, Maria. She was an attractive blond college student two-years older than me, (seven pounds overweight).

            To her left was her mother. She was a brunet with the smoothest most pure face I have ever seen. Her face seemed to be of Oriental purity. Over the years I thought she must have had the world’s best face-lift, or the world’s best facial. I think it was a facial. I have never been able to get her face out of my mind. Nearly fifty years later I can still see her haunting beauty.

            The two women never engaged us in conversation. Maria never asked me about my college or engaged in casual talk. Again, it could have been a culture divide. Again, it could have been that the two women had no idea who we were or why we were there, as they did not watch the demonstration.

            The two women were most gracious providers, constantly asking the butler and maid to bring on more food. The food was fabulous, the best I ever looked at and almost ate. I was thoroughly intimidated at the lunch, a duck out of water. I was comfortable during the demonstration because I was in my element. But here at the dining table I reverted back to being the little, skinny, not too good looking kid. And I was sitting at the table with the world’s most famous western actor and his East Coast socialite wife in their Beverly Hills Mansion. In front of me lay a dozen plates with fifteen pieces of silverware lined up on each side of the dozen plates.

I didn’t know what to do or where to start… and I was starving! Not wanting to appear the fool, I faked it, just eating a little bit of the food and left the lunch starving to death.

Parker was intimidated by no one and ate like he was at a Hawaiian luau.

Telling this story to women, I am always told how easy it is to eat in a formal setting. All I have to remember is that if I am in the Northern Hemisphere I start with the further silverware to my right. If it is the Southern Hemisphere I start on the left.

I then use the first piece to eat the head lettuce, third piece from the right if it is romaine lettuce. For the cucumber slice you hold the second from left in the right hand and fifth from the right in the left hand to counter-balance the weight. I am told that the simplest rule to follow is to start with the outer silverware and work in until you use the last piece of silverware. If there is any food left over you grab your neighbor’s fork.

I have come to the conclusion that social dining is a woman’s thing.       

A few minutes into lunch something very strange happens, something you only see in the movies. Gary Cooper is at the head of the table with the maid and butler standing at attention at the far opposite end of the room. Coop then takes his table knife and tapes the rim of his coffee cup. “Ring. Ring.” “James,” says Gary Cooper. (The butler’s name really was James. I remember because it is my name.)

“Yes Sir”

“Sugar please.”

The sugar bowl is only six inches away from the coffee cup! James walks all the way across the room behind us, stands next to Coop and says, “One lump, or two?”

“Two please.”

The butler takes thongs and puts one sugar cube and then another into his coffee cup.

“Will there be anything else, Sir?”

“That will be all James.”

James then crossed back and took up his stationary position next to the maid.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! Maybe I was hallucinating because of hypoglycemic shock due to starvation.

After lunch we all sat in the living room and listened to Joe Hymns and Gary Cooper talk. It was an interesting conversation.

Gary Cooper’s advice was that he could see no way that karate, or karate fight scenes could be incorporated into an American western movie. He would not live to see his prediction proven wrong.

Gary Cooper died a year later.

Mother knew well the story of my afternoon at Gary Cooper’s house. Strangely, it was only a year before her death that she told me that she knew Gary Cooper quite well. She managed the Blue Ribbon café in Red Bluff. It seems that Red Bluff would produce two US Senators. One of them owned two restaurants on Main Street in Red Bluff. One was the Blue Ribbon.

            Gary Cooper owned property in Oregon. I assume it was a ranch. He would drive up to visit quite often. Highway 99 was the only way of getting there. Highway 99 went right through Red Bluff, down Main Street. Because the Blue Ribbon was owned by a US Senator, the rich and famous would always eat there on their travels.

            Gary Cooper, never alone, but always with friends who were also movie stars, would drive into town around 8:30 to 9:00 o’clock at night, always dead tired and starving. This is the days before your twenty-four-hour Denny’s. In these days restaurant cooks always went home at eight o’clock.

            Mother would cook dinner for them and chat. She said that Gary Cooper liked talking to her about nothing. He liked getting away from the Hollywood crowd.

            “Did they tip big?”

            “No. They didn’t have too. They were normal people.”

            When telling this story to people about my lunch at Gary Cooper’s house I always get the same response that it must have been a thrill to meet the great man. I reply, honestly, that I didn’t really care if I met Gary Cooper or not. His best friend was supposed to be there for the demonstration and lunch. His best friend didn’t show up. I did want to meet his best friend. His best friend was Ernest Hemingway.

            As time went on the three Tracy brothers’ financial situation was becoming desperate. Jobs were hard to get and the pay was poor. We took whatever jobs we could get. Will lost his job at the health spa when it went out of business. He then went through several different jobs during the Pasadena years. Our stepfather, now divorced, got him a job at the garden nursery where he worked. There was a post office job and selling life insurance for awhile. He would drive down to Los Angeles and spend all night at the backbreaking work of loading trucks. Al still tended bar.

            I continued washing dishes and took what side jobs I could get, which included selling Fuller brushes door to door. I worked for JC Penny as a clerk for awhile.

            Al had purchased a new Volkswagen Beetle paying cash just before moving to Pasadena. We sold the beetle to live off the cash and bought a 1951 Chevy.

            The three of us were still running the karate school, at pay, which Ed Parker could afford, which was absolutely nothing. Parker kept increasing his social position but not his financial position very much.

I came up with an idea that would cost Ed Parker nothing and at the same time provide me with a few dollars steady income from the school. Occasionally, I would have inquirers from parents wanting lessons for their children. In an industry today where the enrollment is ninety-percent children, it is hard to believe that in those days children were rarely taught.

            It was Ed Parker’s policy not to teach any one below the age of fourteen. They simply did not have the physical and athletic ability to keep up with the adults. If you enrolled the eight or ten-year-olds then they could not be put in with the adult class. They would get run over. What few children you could enroll would not be enough to create a separate children’s class. Ed Parker simply ignored this market and never enrolled children.

            Women were never taught. They never inquired about lessons. It is not that the karate instructors in America were against teaching small children or women. It is just that there was no market.

I made this offer to Ed Parker: let me teach the children and let me have all the money. Parker was agreeable. The children were all mine. Parker never knew their names or how many I taught or what I was charging. It was like having a school within a school.

            I never had very many students, usually between six and ten kids. Although we did not realize it at the time, the Tracy brothers were beginning to create what would become the karate industry in America.

            Later, when we opened our first karate school in San Francisco we learned that to make a school successful you would have to have between 60 and 80 group paying students. Less than 60 students for any period of time and the instructor would have to go out of business or take a daytime job and run the school evenings only.

It was kind of funny. We were right on the edge financially, yet we were surrounded by the wealthy. One of our students was Larry, an eighteen-year-old USC freshman. His family lived in a Beverly Hills mansion with a twenty-six-car garage. We never double dated or went over to his house for dinner, but we were friends.

            I told Larry that the previous week I had lunch at Gary Cooper’s house and that Gary Cooper owned eleven acres of barren Beverly Hills land right next to his property.

            “My dad sold 200 acres of Beverly Hills land two weeks ago,” Larry said.

            One of Ed Parker’s private students was a popular actor, MacDonald Carey. He was best known for his role as Dr. Tom Horton on the soap opera “Days of Our Lives.”

 “Mac” came in every morning at ten a.m. for a private lesson, five days a week. What that one actor paid for private lessons was equal to thirty regular group class students. And Parker only had 40 to 50 group students.

            Parker wants to buy a house. He borrows the money for the down payment from a friend. He chooses a home in an upscale neighborhood only to be told, ‘We don’t want your kind living here!” Parker is Hawaiian. He looks Hawaiian. He grew up in a multi-racial land. This was the first time in his life that he ever experienced prejudice. He was devastated! He had to settle for buying a small home in an integrated neighborhood.

            Over time he added on to the house by trading his students’ lessons for construction work: carpenters, electricians, etc… Through this arrangement he eventually had a very nice house.     

The movie stars help Ed Parker in ways other than taking private lessons. They get him stunt work and work as extras, all at union scale. One time Parker came into the school in the afternoon and told me he had just taken a fall off a boat for a movie scene for $200. This is when minimum wage was a dollar an hour.

            Another one of his friends had a really bad TV series. The actor had written into his contract that whenever there was a fight scene that Ed Parker had to be on set to direct it. One time the director told the actor to throw a punch. The actor sat down and refused to work until they called Parker at his school in Pasadena. Parker then drove over to the set in Hollywood.

“Throw the punch, “Parker said, and then turned around and left.

The largest single expense the average person will have in a lifetime is the purchase of a home. The second largest expense is the purchase of a new car. A home appreciates. A car depreciates and has to be replaced every few years.

            One of Ed Parker’s friends is actor Nick Adams. Nick had been in many movies but was most famous for his “Rebel” TV series. This was a western at a time when western series dominated television. The plot was that of a Confederate soldier and his adventures after the Civil War.

            The series would run for three years during the time we were in Pasadena. It was a very popular series and could have run much longer except for the typical infighting one sees so often in Hollywood between star and producers.

             Money is no problem with Hollywood stars. Nick Adams gives Ed Parker a new white Cadillac. This would start a Hollywood tradition with a star giving Ed Parker a new white Cadillac, not on an annual basis, but when they felt like it, which was often enough. Elvis Presley gave the last white Cadillac to Ed Parker. It was a very big white Cadillac

            Two-years later Nick Adams replaces the first white Cadillac with another white Cadillac.

            Al said that the gift cars were usually used and not new. However, they were in near new condition. Besides, when some one gives you a white Cadillac how can you complain.

            I am not telling of the Pasadena years in chronological order for nothing during those years happened in a well organized, chronological, order. Also, after nearly half a century the memories of the three Tracy brothers have faded a bit. So, there may be errors in exact times, years, happenings and events. But it all happened. Also, what happened in Pasadena was normal, every day living for us. Again, at the time, none of us realized that we were making history. We didn’t take notes.

            With Ed Parker’s appearance of success at running a karate school, Bruce Tegner, over in Hollywood with his judo school, was beginning to think. Parker was a karate man. Tegner was a businessman. A visionary, he could see the potential of karate in America. He started teaching karate, with one slight problem. He knew judo and other Asian arts, but he did not know karate, because no one knew karate, that is except for Ed Parker, now his competitor. Bruce Tegner couldn’t very well come over to Pasadena and ask Parker to teach him karate so he could compete with him.            

            How did Tegner solve this problem? Simple. He faked it, simply made up karate moves and karate kicks. The Tracy brothers went over to Tegner’s school and watched him teaching a good size karate class. What did the instruction look like? It looked like he was making up karate moves and karate kicks. That is...for now.

            Bruce Tegner was not stupid. In the beginning years, a few karate men would filter into the country. Mostly they were return servicemen, like Chuck Norris, who had studied during their tours of duty in Asia. Although, Chuck was now still in Korea.

            In the first two or three years most of these return servicemen with their karate training were really bad. As time went on they were not so bad. Then they started getting good. Eventually, like Chuck Norris, they were darn good.  The day would come when the return service men would come flooding back into America, and some would become legends in their own lifetime.

            Bruce Tegner started hiring instructors as they returned to America. Maybe the quality wasn’t that good, but at least he was now teaching legitimate karate. He kept hiring and the quality kept getting better. The day would come when even Ed Parker would have to acknowledge that what Tegner was teaching was “decent.” Tegner kept hiring and his quality became better until the day came that the quality of Bruce Tegner himself, his instructors, and his students was very good.

            Parker and Tegner had a mutual respect for one another. Parker even referred students to Tegner for judo lessons. Parker in the early years had a closely guarded secret, he also had his black belt in judo. Years later, when he was heavily promoting himself, he added his judo black belt to his resume for the whole world to see. With his judo training came the customary injuries. He had a bad back, which sometimes flared up and put him in intense pain. Again, he kept his back injury a secret.

            Ed Parker first brought karate to America, physically.  Bruce Tegner would bring karate to America in another way. Bruce Tegner’s contribution to promoting karate in America came not from his Hollywood school, or his movie fight scenes, nor his Beverly Hills students. 

            Bruce Tegner envisions another market for karate, writing books.

            For a new, aspiring, unknown writer, getting a book published is difficult, nearly impossible. Tegner brilliantly creates his own publishing company, lines up distribution and starts writing books on the martial arts, including karate, and his books sold well, all over the world!

Ed Parker’s major source of income continues to expand outside his school, which brings us back to Bruce Tegner. As I told you previously, Tegner saw what Ed Parker was doing in karate and decided to get into the karate business. Ed Parker now looks at what Tegner is doing writing a karate book and decides to get into the author business. Parker figured, rightly so, that if Tegner could be successful at writing a karate book, knowing nothing about karate, then he should be even more successful writing karate books, because he did know karate.

            Getting a publisher for his first book was no problem as Parker had added a publisher to his ever-expanding list of friends.

Writing a book is very time consuming and cannot be done in an environment of distraction: i.e., a karate school.

            Parker now spends time at his house writing his first book. He does not even step into the school for one, two, or sometimes even three months at a time. The Tracy brothers are running the school not only full time, but now completely. Of all of his friendships in Pasadena, the friendship with the Tracy brothers is his closest. He told us stories that only we know.

            Closing the school every night at ten p.m., we then drive over to Ed Parker’s house and give him the money collected for the day. Parker doesn’t even come over to the school to pick up the day’s earnings.

            I do not know what kind of money Ed Parker made off of his books, but the size of his first royalty check made him very happy.

            Al recently made the comment that he had reviewed some of Tegner’s old books. “Very good.” By the time of his death, before the age of sixty, Bruce Tegner would write and market fifty books. Some would say that the real key to the success of his publishing empire was his wife.

            Two men are now successful in the field of karate, and the rest of the nation still doesn’t know what karate is. And, the Tracy brothers are in now the karate business.

            As the servicemen with karate training started returning to America, they saw Ed Parker’s success, which they all wanted to imitate. They saw Ed Parker’s nice school, with mats. They saw his new Cadillac, and many were welcome to visit his nice home. This was awe inspiring for most because they all came from humble backgrounds. (“Humble” is a karate word for poor.)

            It was all an illusion. They did not realize that his success came not from his karate school but from his Hollywood friends: the private lessons for the stars, directing fight scenes, stunt and extra work, and now his royalties from writing books. There was always a very generous Elvis Presley lurking in the background.

            It was a very insecure business that Ed Parker had created for the nation. In the early years there were few days of feast and many days of famine in the karate business.

Through the grapevine, the Chinese Kung Fu men in San Francisco also hear of Ed Parker and his success at running a karate school in Southern California.

Chinese Kung Fu students travel to Pasadena to meet Parker and watch him teach. They are impressed. They recognize that Parker is teaching Chinese Kung Fu, Hard Style, or fighting style.

            This starts Parker on trips to San Francisco's Chinatown to visit the Kung Fu instructors. (When I say Kung Fu instructors, I mean that they were all masters.) In San Francisco he meets Jimmy Wu, a very capable Tai Chi master.

An arraignment is made between Jimmy Wu and Ed Parker. Jimmy Wu moves to Pasadena and lives with Ed Parker and his family. Jimmy Wu then teaches the advanced class at Parker’s school. This makes Jimmy Wu the first Chinese Kung Fu master to teach a class of Caucasians in American history.

Ed Parker is not trying make history. Nor is he trying to advance the martial arts in America. Ed Parker confided in us that he had run out of material to teach his advanced students. By bringing Jimmy Wu to Pasadena he expanded his teaching material almost indefinitely. The last year we lived in Pasadena we studied under Jimmy Wu.

            Jimmy Wu was different from almost any other Kung Fu instructor. The difference was to our benefit. Jimmy Wu now teaches the advanced class only. Beginning students are not taught because Kung Fu is too advanced. Even the intermediate students are not taught for the same reason.

            Jimmy Wu teaches traditional Kung Fu to the first class of Caucasians in an American karate school. He is not teaching beginning students, but the best Parker ever produced. We did not have to put up with the traditional ten years of learning nothing. Three years studying under Parker put us all on the fast track. When Jimmy Wu took over the class, he was working with students who already had the equivalent of fifteen to twenty years of Kung Fu training.      

            Jimmy Wu has a lesson plan. You started learning the first time he stepped on to the mats. In addition, he would teach you anything you wanted to know outside the lesson plan.

Al took to Kung Fu like a duck to water. For me it was a nightmare. The stance and movements were foreign, pulling on different muscles than I had ever experienced before. The bow stance twisted my kidney muscles. After the first class I went into the bathroom and urinated deep red blood. The heavy blood flow in the urine would last for days then suddenly stopped. The doctors almost put me into the hospital.

            Al was starting a new life with Kung Fu. I was facing death.

            Parker would drop Jimmy Wu off at the school during the day. He would sit around and talk, drinking his tea, answering any of our questions. We would walk down the block to a small restaurant and have lunch together.

We would go on the mats and ask him to teach us this, or that. He was always willing. Jimmy Wu held nothing back. He taught the formal advanced class, in an informal way, four nights a week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings from nine o’clock till ten, sometimes ten thirty.

            For a year we picked Jimmy Wu’s brain, and learned Kung Fu, day and night. I worked hard to become a Kenpo master. By the time we moved to San Francisco I had succeeded. I worked equally hard to become a Kung Fu master, and failed.  It was just too complex for me.                         

            By the time we moved to San Francisco, Al had become not only a Kenpo master, but also a Kung Fu master. He had acquired more knowledge of Kung Fu under Jimmy Wu then all of the advanced students put together.

            The advanced classes were never that large; six students, ten at the most. Only the Tracy brothers were there four nights a week. By this time the advanced students, the instructors, did not come to the Kung Fu classes on a regular basis. They just showed up whenever they wanted.

             Ed Parker was now living the