sonora2sonoma

by Tim Konrad

Chapter Sixteen

The political climate in the Sierra foothills when I was growing up was decidedly conservative. It remains predominantly so today despite the influx of many newcomers seeking respite from the pressures of urban life. My father always voted Republican despite being a registered Democrat, something I never fully understood. He and I would engage in heated arguments around the dinner table during the Vietnam era and continuing into the Reagan administration. Nothing was ever resolved and we doubtless both would have been better off had we avoided discussing politics altogether, but cocktails before dinner insured there would be lively discussion over the newscasts. With a certitude often expressed by the uninformed, I comforted myself in those days with the knowledge that I could cancel my father’s vote for Reagan with my own vote for his competitor.

The Vietnam Era was a difficult period for the United States and its effects were felt in Tuolumne County just as they were all over the nation. The spectacle of the nation’s being lied to en mass about the bombing in Cambodia and Laos, while not on a scale seen today with the current administration, was shocking for its time. Unlike WWII, where the country was under obvious threat from abroad, there were serious questions about why we were in the war at all. The government’s deception concerning how it was going only served to further erode trust. The draft had not yet been abolished, so the casualties were felt by people from all strata of society.

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When I was a senior in high school, my senior English teacher was a colorful character. Young and gifted, he was vaguely reminiscent in appearance to a young Jack London. Dale Koby loved Shakespeare, and could lecture with passion and conviction about Henry the 4^th, Part One. He also, for whatever reason, had a chip on his shoulder that manifested in an ongoing disagreement between him and the school administration concerning his teaching style, which was exacerbated by the disrespectful statements he shared with our class concerning certain administration officials. The principal, Mr Stoker, he called “the great white father,” while the “Dean of Girls, Claire Sargent, was referred to as “Aunt Claire.” He made little effort to disguise the scorn with which he regarded these personages. They had the power, however, and, in the end, he was dismissed half-way through our senior year.

After his departure, Koby began publishing novels under the imprint of a publishing company known for producing “dime novels” of an erotic and titillating nature. Not what one might term literary by any means, these works capitalized on his experience teaching in Sonora, with titles such as “Campus Sexpot” and “Yankee Hill Lover.” In these novels, Kobe made little effort to disguise the true identities of some of the participants. Campus Sexpot told the tale of a high school teacher having a sexual affair with his babysitter, who also happened to be one of his students. In the spirit of “art imitating life,” the tale bore more than a little resemblance to a biographical work. Mr Stoker became “Mr. Stoper.” Other characters’ names were also similarly thinly disguised. The name of the babysitter, Linda Franklin, was close enough to the name of the girl in my English class, whose initials were similar and who, we all knew, was babysitting his children at the time. I had an opportunity to catch a glimpse of his grade book at the midterms and noted that this co-ed received an A+ for her efforts for the semester.

Yankee Hill Lover was another novel Koby wrote based on his experiences in Sonora and also featured some characters whose identities weren’t difficult to figure out due to the similarity of their names to those of actual people.  Lust on Wheels, written after he had left Sonora, was advertised as a “dramatic story torn from today’s headlines,” a tale of “two average ‘nice’ girls”, who “operated their ‘business’ behind the respectability of a trailer camp.”

Campus Sexpot became the inspiration for a later work of fiction, written by David Carkeet, a coming-of-age piece that sought to use the earlier work as a vehicle to explore the author’s adolescence.