Chapter 3, From the Swamps to the Sticks

Our family moved way out to our 140-acre farm in Sussex County at the beginning of the summer of 1966. As school ended that year and we said our goodbyes to our Harding Township school friends, I had no idea it would be almost 40 years before we would see or talk to each other again.
At the time, I was still a prisoner in the St. Bernard’s School for bad boys. I had no friends outside of school I could spend time with for the entire time at St. Bernard’s. I wasn’t involved in any extracurricular activities except religious school.  My only friend from religious school was David Shaw, a rather unusual character who went on to become a biker and eventually owned a Harley dealership, long before owning a motorcycle came into vogue.
David and his family were odd, but David taught me all kinds of valuable skills like how to pick locks and use pay phones without paying anything. During this period, I experienced my first look at what an alternative lifestyle might look like. David’s father and mother were still married, but they were not living together. His mother and the three kids lived in the family house in Whippany.
David's father, who was an architect, owned his own office building in downtown Morristown where he lived with his secretary Jackie; who was his mistress. The building and business were once a thriving and successful concern. I can only assume that as David’s father became more involved with Jackie the business began to fail. By the time David and I became friends, Mr. Shaw had no employees, the office building was more or less empty, the desks and workspaces were in shambles, and he and Jackie shared a living area in the office space, which was never designed to be living quarters. David and his brother spent nights sleeping on mattresses on the floor in the abandoned offices. I don’t think there was even a shower or tub and there was no cooking facility. They always ordered out.
David and his older brother Aaron were also students at Morristown Prep. Only when I started to write this memoir did I realize I knew a bunch of boys from various parts of my early years who were preppies at that school, all at the same time.
As I worked through the book and reached out to some of them, I was surprised to find out that even though they all came from different areas of New Jersey, they all knew each other from their four years of prep school. The connected energy is real. Had my Dad and Mom just sent me to Morristown Prep instead of St. Bernard’s, I would most likely have stayed connected with my friends and had some sort of circle of support and probably a very different life journey.
Having moved to the farm and being separated so completely from my childhood friends only deepened my sense of being isolated and alone. I learned to make friends quickly and then let them go just as quickly. As Mother often told me, “Nothing is forever.” This theme repeated itself over and over throughout my journey.
First summer in the new farm was somewhat exciting, but very lonely. It was a new place to explore with all kinds of opportunities for mischief. I did not drive yet. We lived way outside of any real civilization. Hitchhiking was hard; out in the country there was not a lot of traffic. There were a couple of farm kids who lived on farms adjacent to ours, but no social network. We did not even have our own private phone line. We had what was known at the time as a party line.
Most people in urban areas have never experienced a party line. It is a shared phone line whit all of your neighbors, just like an open conference line. What that means is that when you are using the phone, any one of the neighbors can pick up their phone and listen in to your conversation without you knowing. The Stone family had no experience with party lines and no idea that anything they said on the phone could very easily become very public knowledge, very quickly. The party line got almost everyone in the Stone family in trouble that first year. 
"Besides whatever negative crap" that befell me and my siblings, my parents also suffered from the effects of a party Line. They ended up embroiled in a business project that cost them dearly because the business information discussed on our phone was, unbeknownst to us, subsequently shared with everyone in Green Township. We were surrounded by very conservative second and third generation farming families.
The story is this. Dad bought the first part of the farm, about 90 acres, contingent on getting a 50-acre parcel bordering our property from an aging old farmer named Gus Whittingham as part of the original purchase.  Gus was a nasty old fucker, maybe in his 80s. He was at the end of his life and had no heirs. He was well known around Green Township. The Realtor convinced him to sell the piece for around $30,000. The deal was pretty clean, no contingencies, just a straight cash transaction. The purchase went through all the proper legal paperwork. We took over the property and moved in.
Mom and Dad had never met Gus face to face. After we moved in, he came around to visit. To his surprise he discovered that we were Jewish. He was a classic bigot. He had lived in Green Township for most of his life. He decided he made a mistake selling his property to a Jewish family and started a very negative campaign against us in an effort to void the sale. His efforts did not have any legal merit and were ultimately unsuccessful but cost our family much.
What it did do was alert everyone that a new Jewish family had just moved into Green Township. We were the first and only Jews living in Green Township at the time. My family suffered the Whittingham curse for many years to come, culminating in an engineering/planning battle that ultimately cost my father his farm. But Dad had the last word, so to speak. He was so pissed off about the dishonest way it all came down that he somehow became the Senior Engineer on the planning board in Green Township and quickly brought that type of dishonest bullshit to a halt for many years.        
The nearest high school was in Newton. Despite all the "interpersonal antisocial challenges’ of being in a "farming school,” where most children graduated to become farmers, housewives and trades people, there was much that happened in Newton High School that also helped me along my journey for many years to come, maybe for my entire journey.
Before I even became a student at Newton High School, I arrived with an already well cemented and unflattering reputation. In ’67 my older sister who was a senior at Newton threw a party. I invited my St. Bernard’s schoolmates. Even though we were a bunch of delinquents at St. Bernard’s, many of the boys were courteous and respectful to adults, most of the time. That is one of the benefits of attending a religious high school. It’s kind of funny that you can be a very bad person and do awful things, but still treat people respectfully when you need to or want to. That was all part of the negotiating skills I learned at St. Bernard’s. Be nice, smile and you can lie till the cows come home and get away with it.
Mother, who was always about feeding her guests, made a bunch of food for the party and the Newton farm boys showed up for the free meal. They were already pretty well lit up on way too much cheap beer. After a bit, the St. Bernard’s boys showed up, at the same time, probably because we lived so far away from Bernardsville and Morristown where most of them lived. They carpooled 5 or 6 per car and followed each other out to the sticks. 
As soon as they walked in, I got a very bad feeling. The St. Bernard’s boys were a very tough and arrogant bunch who had been playing together and getting into trouble together for a long time. They also were dressed much better than the farm boys and far more articulate.
Like a bunch of testosterone-fueled young bulls, the two gangs started to lock horns immediately. It started with words. Mom could also tell that it wasn’t going well. She was in the kitchen doing the Jewish mother thing trying to calm the moment with food when Larry Crawn, the biggest and meanest of the Newton gang, said something very rude to her. Larry was a big tough farm boy who had graduated a couple of years earlier. He, like his brothers, was a celebrated high school football star. However, he did not have a job and was still hanging out with the high school kids two years after graduating because he could get away with being a loudmouthed bully to the younger kids. I knew all too well what that looked like. 
At St. Bernard’s there was a student named Richard Finely who came from a wealthy family. Rich had his share of troubles growing up. His parents, in a first attempt to straighten him out, sent him off to the Army. He finished a tour in Vietnam and came home, different. His family wanted him to have a college education. St. Bernard’s was the exact place for him to finish high school and move on to college. I remember Richard as a funny and friendly guy who was always joking around. Even though he was much older, I got along with him fairly well. But as he was already a senior, the only place I really interacted with him was on the football field.
Rich was an animal of a football player. The hardest hits I ever took on the field were from him. He was like a freight-train and merciless. He would go out of his way to hit you knock you down and then give you a hand up and apologize. He was a truly battle-hardened,trained fighter. He also had learned respect for older people while in the service.
When Larry mouthed off to Mom, Rich told him to cool it. Larry puffed up his chest and mouthed off to Rich. Mom was trying to keep it from getting out of hand. Rich very calmly told Larry that if he wasn’t such a "pussy" he would step outside and they could handle it like two grown men. Larry was a fool. He had no idea who Rich was. I suppose he thought just because Rich was slightly smaller than him, or Larry wasn’t used to being challenged, that it would not even be a match-and it wasn’t.
They walked outside to the front lawn. Larry took the first swing and missed Rich all together. Rich quickly spun around and kicked Larry in the face and knocked him right off his feet. Larry got back up and tried again. Rich kicked him in the head again. Rich had learned some of martial arts while in the service. Long before any of us had heard of martial arts. Rich actually kicked Larry’s teeth right out of his mouth. Larry never even landed a punch. The Newton boys gathered up an unconscious Larry, and in disgust, hauled him away.
I had never seen anyone take a beating like that. At one point, Larry was bleeding so badly that when Rich kicked him, blood flew off his face. That was the merciless guy I knew from the football field. I had no idea that somehow my future at Newton High was now directly and permanently connected to that beating. After all, I wasn’t part of that fight; it just happened at my house.
A month later I happened to run into Larry in the local pool hall. He was still black and blue from the beating and he was missing his front teeth and it looked like he had a broken nose and had not had it straightened.
He grabbed me by my collar and angrily demanded to know, who was that guy who beat him up so badly? I sure as hell was not about to give up Rich; I still had to go to school with him for a few more months. Larry and I argued about it and he threatened me. Through my negotiating skills, I was able to escape unharmed, and it was years before I returned to that pool hall. Shortly after that incident that Larry was drafted and did his own tour on the other side. Thankfully I never saw Larry or any of the Crawn boys again.
This incident with Larry and Rich became the main part of my future history in the student social circles at Newton High. Even before I started school there, I had a reputation.
The following fall I started my sophomore year at Newton High School where the next chapter of my life started with the usual bang. On the very first day of school, a guy named Terry, who I did not know, came up to me and said, “I know who you are. If you don’t meet me on the football field after school I’m coming looking for you and I’m going to kick your ass.”
Being taught by Dad to never back down, that day I ended up in a multiple-person brawl on the football field. It was going to be a show on the first day of school in a new school, for all the students and teachers to view. Terry thought that by beating me in a fight, his standing in the school would be enhanced. However, what those farm boys did not know was that I came from that very same tough school where Rich came from. A place where, if you could not stand up for yourself, you just got beaten, almost daily. I was also smart enough to understand that whatever happened on the field that day would set the tone for how people would treat me for my remaining time at Newton High.
Unfortunately, I ended up hurting Terry, pretty badly. And there you go; it started all over again, on the very first day of that reboot. By the end of my junior year, I was again chucked out of school, yet another repeat of a life-long theme.
By the way, years ago Terry, thanks to the power of the internet, showed up on my radar and stalked me for a while. We did not speak to each other or make two-way contact, but all the same, he went through the effort to track me down. Obviously, I made a lasting impression.
There truly was also so much that happened at Newton High School that was good. Newton did much to shape my future, both good and bad.
By midway through my junior year, life was once again spinning out of control. I instinctively knew I had to make yet another escape or bad things were going to happen. I had heard about an overseas exchange program for graduating seniors. Even though I was not a senior I applied. Thank God, the process was totally independent of the school system. I was able to ignore most of the requirements. Lo and behold, after an essay and several interviews I was selected for the program and ended up on my way to one of the best and most healing years of my life. But first I had to do something about being thrown out of school.
While at St Bernard’s, another skill I learned was how to negotiate - almost anything. I had developed a sort of bravado which gave me courage to say anything to anyone. So off I went to meet with the vice principal, Mr. Hollinbach, to make a deal so I could get a diploma and move on to college. And a deal we made.
I sat alone all day long in the study hall for the final weeks of school. The deal was that if I completed the first year of college overseas without incident, he would give me my diploma upon my return. I was never as thankful as I was on my last day at Newton High in June of 1969.
One last thing to deal with before leaving the country was the draft. We were in the Vietnam crank-up phase, and young men were being drafted by the local draft boards. I was once again lucky. Because I was in school, I got 2S deferment. I was off to college on a “scholarship” outside the United States. I was about to become a diplomatic student representative of the United States of America. What a laugh!
Because Newton High School served the children of local farm families, the farming ethos was deeply engrained in the culture and education curriculum. Most students were members of the FFA, Future Farmers of America. There were shop classes like woodworking, machine tool class, an aluminum casting class, and most importantly, a welding class taught by an old teacher named Mr. Stump.
He was a grand old guy. I liked him and he was very willing to help me pursue art instead of farming equipment repair. I was the only artist in the class. All the other boys were real honest-to-goodness farm boys. They talked like farm boys; they walked like farm boys; they dressed like farm boys.
When I started to weld up sculptural artistic pieces out of the scrap steel lying around the shop, the farm boys would come by and ask what I was making and then start to laugh. Mr. Stump was OK with me making sculptures as long as the actual welding was good quality. He would not accept shoddy work just because it was art.
It was a good class and I became a competent stick welder. I really liked working with metals and made some very interesting expressive pieces. Little did I know that Mr. Stump’s tutelage would give me a skill I would use for the rest of my l life. Remember the old Chinese proverb, “If the student does not exceed the teacher, then the teacher has failed.” I hope I have helped to make Mr. Stump a great success.
Another great class was art class. The teacher, Mrs. Jones, was a hoot. She never said anything negative about any student or their artistic efforts. Her class often felt like a recess bell had just rung as class started because we could do anything we wanted as long as it was productive and fit within her perception of art. Her class was always a free for all. Once, one of the farm boys decided to make a kinetic sculpture by stacking every chair in the room on one of the art tables. I suppose that it was an early form of the Jenga game I have played many times as an adult.
I don’t know that I came away with any more real artistic knowledge than I did from Mr. Nice’s class at St. Bernard's, but art with Mrs. Jones was always fun. In that class, I became good friends with Ilene Andrews and her family of crazies. I’m still friends with her to this day.
That first summer after moving to the farm I did not have much to do. I finally went to look for some type of work, partly for the money; partly just to have something to do so I could get away from my siblings. A few miles down the road there was a true “farmer’s market.” It was only open on Sundays. Here very small independent businesspeople could open up a one day a week store and sell to the public. Very much like what I do now with my artwork when I do art shows.
The Springdale Farmer’s Market was in a long low set of very old and rickety farm buildings at the corner of State Route 206 and Springdale Road. The property was owned by an old farmer, one Ken Layton. Nothing about these building could ever or would ever comply with any current building code or laws. The “vendors” did not have licensees or sales tax ID numbers. All transactions were cash.  It was all very fast and loose, just one day a week. The vendors here mostly older people, many were immigrants who lived someplace else and used the Springdale Farmers Market as a side hustle.
My folks would shop for the entire week at that market. At that time, the Sunday outing was my only exposure to the outside world. It had a very carnival like atmosphere. I loved buy food off the stands. Remember I always had a thing for food. I loved the butcher stand and the fruit and vegetable stand most. The baker made sweets that were to die for. One of my favorite vendors was “The Pickle King.”
The King, long before Elvis got the title, made his own pickles right there at the market. Every week after the produce stand close for the week he would come over and buy all the cucumbers that had not sold that day - at a deep discount. He would carry them back to his stall, dump them into the pickle barrel, and add water, salt and garlic. The following week they would be “Greenies.”
If they didn’t sell that week, he would just cover them with some burlap and over the following week they would become “Full sours.” What a great business model, no refrigeration costs, no electricity - only the space rental, which was next to nothing, water, salt, garlic, and occasionally some fresh dill. He sold them by the pickle, only for cash. To this day, I make my pickles the exact same way.  Every time I eat my own pickles I think of the King. I wish I had a cash business like that today.
The produce stand operator was named “Blue Goose” or Billy Blue Goose to those who worked there and knew him. He was a very interesting old Italian character, right out of a Francis Ford Coppola movie.
One Sunday when I was at the produce stand with my family, the Goose asked me if I would like to come to work for him. He needed a big husky guy to help unload the trucks and restock the stand as people purchased the produce. He offered me $10.00 for a day’s work.
I was thrilled. First, it got me out of the house. The next benefit was that the job was around food I also got paid in cash and I liked the hard work. Besides, it put me into the market where I met all kinds of interesting and weird people, and I had already scoped out the butcher’s daughter and was looking for a way to get closer to her. So, I began my career in the produce business. There was so much that was really interesting about being in that market.
Billy Blue Goose, “The Goose” once you started to work there, was a big fat Italian guy missing most of his teeth. He had a big deep goose - like squawk. He would sit on a high stool in the corner of the market in front of the cash register, which was broken with the drawer open. From his perch he could watch everything that went on inside the market. Outside was a different story. In the beginning there was an outside boss, some fierce Italian guy who watched everyone and all the goings on outside. He directed the cadre of underaged male workers very closely. 
And then there was Helen,  the Goose’s wife, and Helen, the Goose’s daughter, and Bernie, the Goose’s oldest son. They ran the family business. There were also a bunch of other Italian guys who worked for him. At the time, I was the only non-Italian working for him and it stayed that way for a long time.
In the early years, all of the significance of that situation was lost on my innocence. Only years later did I begin to understand what his business was all about, the people who were I was working with, and what it all meant? Eventually, bit by bit , I began to understand what a privilege it was to work for the Goose and what it meant to be trusted by him.
First thing that happened was the name confusion. In those days I went by Jimmy. When I first went to work at the Goose’s place, I would hear him call in his deep throaty voice “Jimmy, Jimmy,” and I would come running. He would say “Not you, the other Jimmy.”
That happened over and over again the first few times I worked there. It was all very confusing because as I met my co-workers, they would tell me their names and they were definitely not Jimmy. Finally, about my third day I went to the Goose and asked why did he call everyone Jimmy?
The Goose explained that they all had jobs down on the docks in Newark and this was just a second job. They did not want anyone to know their real names. So, while I was working with them, I wasn’t supposed to call any of them by their real names in public. I then understood that I was supposed to call everyone in the shop Jimmy. I thought that was a bit weird, but I wanted to fit in and keep my job.  So from that day, everyone except the two Helens were called Jimmy. As I got older, I began to understand the reason for this practice.
These guys were part of the “Mob” as in Cosa Nostra. They were the tough guys who worked on the docks and warehouses. In some way they were instrumental in the Goose getting produce for a very cheap price. In return he put them to work and paid them very well for their time in the market. This was the classic “quid pro quo”.
I learned quite a bit about life from these guys. Every one had large easy open knives, ostensibly for cutting and trimming the fruit and vegetables. But the speed and accuracy in the way they handled those knives was something to behold. I felt then, and still to this day, those guys were skilled in using those knives to defend themselves or for some other nefarious use. I used to practice with them, pulling out my knife and swinging open the blade in a single fast move. I fit right in except I had to get a bigger knife, a much bigger knife.
I worked outside the entire summer. It was good wholesome work and I loved being able to eat any fruit, anytime I wanted. In those days, avocados and figs were delicacies. That market was where I met and fell hopelessly in love with my first pomegranate and persimmon.
As fall approached, Goose started to bring me in and teach me to sell. He made it easy. All the fruits and vegetables were sold for even dollar amounts, like three pounds for a dollar or six pieces for a dollar. That way totaling someone's purchases was easy. He taught me to write it all down on a brown paper bag, add it up very quickly and collect the money. There was never any tax to consider. We would to collect the money and run it up to the Goose. He would take it and give us the change to return to the customer. A customer might ask me to carry the bags to their car. When I did, they gave me a couple of dollars as a tip. I pocketed the tip and said nothing.
In the early days, the Goose would pay you based on what he perceived was the value of the work you contributed on that day. In the beginning, I got paid in quarters. At the end of the day, he would put the money in a brown paper bag and hand it to me. If I asked how much or tried to count it in front of him, he would chase me away.  Sometimes I would get home and there would be ten dollars—sometimes more and sometimes less. I got paid in nickels once and once I got paid in pennies.
Even at 15 or 16, I was never afraid to call out an adult for what I thought was wrong. The next week I confronted the Goose and asked him the penny thing was about. He explained that he had been watching me the entire time last week and that I had been gone from the stand for much of the day, so he paid me just for the work I did when I was there. Interesting concept, don’t you think?
He told me that if I worked harder, I would make more money. I sort of got it and quickly became aware of when he was watching and when he wasn’t. That insight did two things for me; first I became aware of what he saw and what he did not see. I realized there were times that I needed to look like I was working very hard and times when I could just screw off and do nothing or worse.
This was going on at the same time I discovered I could get tips. But in order to put those tips in my pocket, I had to be out of sight. The next thing I discovered was that people were always glad to have someone carry their full and heavy bags to their cars. By delaying payment until I got them to their cars, I thought I could pocket the entire sale and no one would be the wiser.
That was until the outside boss, Angelo, got suspicious and gave me some good old mob schooling. We went into the walk-in refrigerator and had a few very scary words. In the dim light of a small wattage bulb inside this very cold, dark box, he made it very clear that if I was stealing from the business, I was stealing from all of them. And that in Newark they dealt with thievery by cutting off one digit of a person’s finger at a time. He flipped open his giant knife and showed me the index finger on his left hand that was missing a digit. I got the message loud and clear. From that point forward every Sunday I worked hard and accepted the Goose’s assessment of the job I did and was thankful to never make another trip into the walk-in for guidance. But I did see some strange comings and goings on in the walk-in, and from experience I knew it was a place to be avoided.
I ended up working for Billy Blue Goose right up until I graduated college. I truly loved that old man and was honored to be the only non-Italian to work there for many a year. In my final days at the market, he sometimes asked me to take over the cash register so he could take a nap. Usually, he only trusted a family member. I guess after my initial poor judgement was straightened out, he came to trust me, too.
Back in St. Bernard’s one of the addictions I acquired was the car disease and I got it bad. Unfortunately, it’s one of those addictions with no cure, even today. I find that I still lust for and dream about cars, all the time. By the time we moved to Newton I wanted one really badly. Any car would do, as long as it had four wheels and was fast.
I had been following the antics of Carol Shelby, a person who I later in life was to meet and video for a television show and the likes of Ferrari. Lamborghini had not yet made it to the world stage so they were not in my vision, at least for the moment. Dad would not have anything to do with my obsession with fast convertible topped cars. He was a practical guy. If it did not have purpose, it wasn’t part of his or our lives. He used to give me a hard time about owning a “fair weather” car, one that could only be driven during sunny summer days. 
It was during that first summer before I went to Newton High. I was still a prisoner, but when I was working at the Farmers Market, I met Jerry Van Skiver, Keith Jackonetti and Dickie Hild.  For a while that summer they were all friends, but something happened between them that fall and their friendship withered. Meantime, I bonded with all of them; they became my first friends in Newton. As Miss Harvey, the Latin teacher from St. Bernard’s taught me: “Tell me who your friends are and I will tell you what you are.” I just wanted to be a member of the gang that I thought they were. This was a seriously dumb mistake, on all counts. My wannabe friendship became yet another source of a painful learning experience about myself and my Gollum.  
First thing that happened was that Jerry owned a 1958 two door Chevy he was working on building into a hotrod. Cool! All of a sudden, I was around a real hotrod car. One day Jerry and I were talking, and he mentioned that he wanted to replace the front bench seat of his hotrod with a pair of bucket seats but didn’t have any seats or any money to buy a set.
At the time, our family was still in mid-move mode from Harding Township. Dad had this old rotted out little Renault four banger that Uncle Kurt had dragged to our farm with the plan to restore. It spent a couple of winters outside and never ran. It had bucket seats. It was still on the abandoned farm in Harding waiting for some disposition. I thought Dad was going to send it the junkyard, so I foolishly offered the seats to Jerry without mentioning it to Dad. I just wanted to be part of the gang. I was once again on the outside looking desperately for a way into the inner circle of these car guys.
Jerry went to our old farm that week and took the seats. I didn't think much about it until a few weeks later when Dad returned from yet another moving trip to the old farm very upset. Someone had stolen the seats out of his unlocked abandoned rotting car. Even though Dad had stopped beating me for any infraction real or perceived, I did not have the courage to tell him I had given them away.   
But the story gets better. Jerry paid to have the seats reupholstered in this beautiful blue Naugahyde with bright blue metal flake on the seats and backs. They were stunning and would have made a great add to any hotrod project. When Jerry got the seats back from the upholstery shop, he was not ready for them and had no place to store them. I happily agreed to store them in my bedroom. I put them in my bedroom and would sit on them every day and dream about my own car project.
Towards the end of the summer, he was ready for his seats and asked for them back. I flatly refused and said they were never really his and that I had no right to give them to him in the first place. You know where that went. Yet another “Jimmy Stone” story that circulated around Newton High long before I was even a student. Jerry never spoke to me again - probably a good thing.
Next was Dick Hild, who came from a very strange family as well. Dick’s father owned a small three-bay auto body repair shop in Cranberry Lakes, about 10 miles from our new house. Mr. Hild was considerably older than his wife. There were two children, Dick and a much older sister who did not live at home.
Dick’s mother was wheelchair-bound. Dick’s father was a drinker and a chain smoker who spent most of his waking hours in his body shop. I wanted to learn about fixing cars so that entire year while I was still at St. B Bernard's, whenever I was on vacation or on weekends, I would hang out there and help Dick work on his 1953 Corvette.
I really wasn’t very good at auto body repair. But I enjoyed being around another real hotrod. Dick had taken out the six cylinder and installed a 327 cubic inch motor with a four-barrel carb. He also took out the original automatic transmission and put in a four speed with a short throw Hurst shifter. I put lots and lots of hours into his project for free because I really thought that by helping, I would eventually get to drive his Vette. Well, I never did get to drive that Vette because as often happens with car projects, he did not finish it - at least not while we were friends.  
He also had a 1957 two door Chevy Belair. That car was also hot rodded, and I did get to drive it. That was the first time I got to go way over 100 miles per hour. In those days, the big barrier to break was 100 mph. That drive just whet my appetite for more speed.  I wanted to go as fast as I could. I subsequently bought a small Austin Healey and thought that Dick was going to paint it for me, which he did, but not very well, certainly not as well as we did on his Vette.
Dick and I sort of stayed friends throughout high school. Even after leaving northern New Jersey, I occasionally stoped by his Dad’s shop to chat and catch up. It was only after I became an adult that I realized just how fucked up he really was. The last time I saw him, he told me a long and sad story that he had been married and divorced three times, twice to the same girl, whom he said was a preacher at some church. I wondered if she thought she was going to “save” him. He told me he had sold his beloved Vette and the 57 Chevy and lost his family’s house after his parents passed. During that last visit he told one sad sack story after another. As I left, I thought to myself, Miss Harvey was right.
My third new friend, Keith Jackonetti, was an even sadder story. To start with, his family was really screwed up. They lived just on the other side of the Springdale Farmer’s Market. They had a lovely little property with a small pond, a medium size main house and a guest house. There were three boys - Brian, Keith and Clyde (Who would be so cruel as to name their son Clyde?) Like Dick's father, Mr. Jackonetti was an absent dad. He worked someplace towards Newark on the docks and was gone most nights during the week. Keith’s mother was nice enough and always spoke well. But she was what I later understood as deeply depressed. Her husband was often gone, and she lived in the country trying to raise these three boys, basically by herself. I think she also drank.
Brian, the oldest, was sort of the “Dad” figure in the family. He was also a very unhappy person and quite brutal. Even though Keith was much larger than he was, Brian would often just smack the shit out of Keith right in front of me. It did not matter how hard Keith hit back Brian just kept whopping him. I think that Brian also brutalized Clyde. I did notice that Clyde suffered from the same of symptoms that my brother suffered from: being beaten repeatedly. Painfully, Clyde finally hanged himself in front of their kitchen window. It was just so sad. In those days, we did not even know what victims of abuse looked like or how depression would drive a person to commit the final act. From my own experiences, I fully understood how he must have felt in the end - to have no other options.  It's a very lonely place.
In turn,Keith’s mother could no longer take the pain and she also committed suicide. I don’t know what happened to their dad. I always liked Keith the most of my Newton friends. In fact, when Maria and I got married, I asked Keith to be the best. I stayed in touch with Keith for almost 30 years.
I had an opportunity to visit with Keith’s brother Brian some years after their parents were gone. He was a very sad and broken soul. He could barely speak and would not look me in the eyes.
Keith was also a very troubled person. I had already moved to California and kept inviting him to come for a visit. Shortly after my marriage fell apart, he said he was coming. I called to just get some idea of what date he picked, and he went ballistic on the phone.
I was shocked because we never had that kind of relationship. In all the years that we were friends, we never even had a single cross word. Based on my other experiences, I should have recognized that he was at the end and needed help. But I didn’t hear the message. A few months later his phone was disconnected. I started to call around and was deeply saddened to hear that he also took his own life. I still feel that somehow, I missed my cue to help. To this day, I miss and morn my friend and, as it turns out, it wasn’t the only missed cue in my life.   
In the early years at Newton, my mother kept a very elegant and formal European style home. We lived in yet another 100-year-old farmhouse that was right in the middle of the property. On one side, there was a 40-acre swamp Dad owned. On the other side were rolling hills which we sharecropped with the dairy farm behind our property. They raised cows for milk and would grow their own hay on our property. We got hay for our sheep as part of the deal.
That first summer - when I wasn’t at the Goose’s place or the body shop - I had to work in the fields with Mike, their oldest son. Mike was a good guy and didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He was also a famous Newton High School athlete. He was so darn quick and skilled that as we worked the fields, if he saw a rabbit, he would jump off the tractor, run down the rabbit, snap its neck and be back on the tractor before the tractor had a chance to veer off course. I saw him do this over and over again. No rabbit in our fields was safe if Mike was on his tractor. Mike might have had a bright athletic future if he had been college material. Unfortunately, after he graduated high school, he returned to the family farm. We are Facebook friends; probably should ask him.
As the fall of ‘66 began and I was back to the St Bernard’s prison, my siblings went to public school. Even though I was used to being around the older kids at St. Bernard’s and I wanted to be friends with the older kids, I really did not like any of my older sister’s friends. In fact, I really did not like my older sister. I still have lots of stuff we never worked out-yet another whole other book about family abuse waiting to be written.
Anyway, my younger sister brought home this little farm girl friend named “Susie Q" (not really her name, but since Susie is a still a FB friend, let’s just call her Susie Q for now). Susie Q was really an innocent and lovely virginal young thing. I was a tortured experienced older bad boy, three years her senior. I had no idea that there was ever anything attractive about me in general. I was still rather fat.
It never occurred to me that I already had a reputation that preceded me. I was already known around some circles in Newton as the “bad boy” brother of Sandie Stone. I eventually learned that to some girls “bad boys” were very exciting. The confluence of all these elements should never have come to pass. But it did in a whirlwind storm that summer.
Susie spent a lot of time hanging around at our house. She and my younger sister were close friends that summer. She became one of the only females (other than my sisters) with whom I had any interactions with during this time. We certainly seemed to like each other, and the relationship just kept getting closer.
Eventually, we just started cuddling and kissing. You know exactly where that went. At some point, I convinced Susie to join me downstairs in the library after everyone else was asleep. I pulled the Annie Lennon on her, but went all the way. From that night forward, we made love almost once a week for that entire year, 1967.
All was well as long as I was still at SBS and she was not yet in high school, and we kept everything as is said” On the downlow.” It seemed like a comfortable relationship. But as my mother would always say “Nothing stays the same.” The first thing that changed was I finally convinced everyone that I was ready to rejoin the mainstream public-school society. I finally released back into the public school system.
The following year while I was out of the country in the college exchange program for the entire year one of my friends who knew I was having sex with little Miss Suzie Q also became sexually involved with her. The very day I got home from overseas, Bobby showed up on my doorstep and confronted me about Suzie Q. He informed me that he is now her boyfriend and if I even spoke with her, he will do me harm. It was all very strange.
It was during those early years in Newton that I finally seemed to fulfill my car fantasies. It started with my dad’s old Saab. He said I could have it. But it did not run, and I really did not know enough in those early days to understand what was even wrong with it. Dad, for whatever reason, was not going to help me fix it. That old Saab became the first in a long line of unfinished car projects. I finally gave up on the Saab.
But my buddy Keith had an old 46 Ford flatbed truck he was driving around his dad’s property. Keith sold it to me cheap. But I had to get our two dads to tow it to my dad’s farm because when I went to pick it up, we could not get it started.
Keith’s father was embarrassed and apologized to my father for selling me that piece of junk. The 46 Ford became the next casualty of my inexperience. It ended up as a permanent monument to my bad judgement - which haunted me every time I visited the farm, right up to when the farm was sold. We never once got that old Junker to run. It was parked next to Dad’s workshop - where it rotted into the ground the same as the outhouse in Harding. Dad did, however, mount a vise onto the flatbed so he could work outside on his own cars and projects. 
In those years, I was pretty good at finding and bringing home stupid car deals. From the time we first moved to Newton until Maria and I moved to Las Vegas it was a long line of Junkers, one after another. Right after the truck fiasco, I bought a bug-eyed Sprite. It was running OK when I first bought it, but by the fall I had broken it, too, and it needed a rebuild. I was able to get Dad to rebuild the engine. He even paid for the parts and did the work. I just drove the little beast. But it wasn’t fast enough for me, so I bought one with a bigger engine. I got that one painted at Hild Auto Body. It was OK, but still not fast enough.
My next misadventure was to purchase a fully prepared, race ready TVR Vixen. I bought it in Pennsylvania from a race car driver. But I did not have a trailer to trailer it home. On a cold winter day, I got dad and Uncle Kurt to drive me to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Being a race car, it had a very high compression engine that would not start in the cold. We had to use ether to start it. The guy I bought it from was more than willing to let me drive it on the street just to get it out of his garage. 
So here comes the next dangerous Fuck You. Because I had negotiated a price less than the sale price he had asked, he kept the race tires and wheels that were on the car when I bought and paid for it. Before I came to pick it up, he had replaced the race gear with road tires and wheels. That was clear bait and switch. I should have suspected something was up from the moment he started to explain the switch. But I was so excited to think I would finally own a real race car I just accepted the switch.
Here comes the funny part. The wheels he gave me were not the originals. They were wire wheels off some other English sports car. For them to fit, he needed four matching wheel adapters. But he only had three. He used some other adapter for the fourth wheel. On the way home, I could not wait to take that baby to full speed, so I passed Uncle Kurt, took an alternate way home and opened her up. Because the odd adapter had threads going the wrong way, at about 100 miles per hour, the knock off retainer came loose and came off. The wheel came off next.
I truly live a very blessed life. First thing, the car was very well balanced, so it did not immediately lose control. But I heard the knock-off  retainer fall off and I started to slow down. When the wheel came off, I saw it go rolling down the road, so I put on my brakes. This was a snowy winter day on a country back road, so the plows had just moved the snow to the side of the road. When I applied the brakes, the car lunged right and the brake rotor caught the snowbank, spinning the car around and sending it up the snowbank into an open field with about a foot of snow. The snow saved the car from total destruction.
It was 4:00 in the afternoon. I did not have a coat or a flashlight, and because I had deviated from the planned route home, no one even knew where I was. The temperature was dropping, and I knew I had just survived a potentially life-threatening crash. Though the car was still intact, if I didn’t do something quickly, I was going to literally freeze to death before I could get help.
It took me over an hour walking in the freezing dark cold to reach the first place where I could phone for help. Lucky for me, Dad and Uncle Kurt had already gone home after looking and were just getting ready to go back out and try again. It was all pretty stupid on my part, from the very beginning. I never should have bought a race car, and letting a teenager drive a race car on city streets during a snow-covered winter twilight was incredibly stupid— no coat and no flashlight and the list of stupidity just continues.  
As my story is about how everything in life is connected, let me explain some of the connections. First thing I discovered was that this very car was the one that the famous race driver Mark Donahue drove in the Sebring race in 1964. Further, it was originally a Penske-funded race team. But in classic James Stone style, about three years later while attending Fairleigh Dickenson University, I become friends with a guy named Mike Moss. Which was weird unto itself because he and I had almost nothing in common except our love of cars.
When we started to chat about cars and I told him my TVR story. Not only did he know the guy who owned the car before I bought it, Mike had worked on the car while it was being raced in Pennsylvania.
Mike and I spent some time hanging out together but not much. He became responsible for making the connection for me to buy my Sunbeam Tiger, which was a basket case. Dad had to help me get that one back together. And while I was still dating Maria, my first wife, Mike took advantage of my lack of commitment to my girlfriend and enjoyed her briefly. Mike went on to become a very successful businessman after college. But we never stayed connected.
Eventually I sold that Tiger and used the money to get Maria and me out to Vegas for our series of adventures after college.
Before leaving this chapter, a couple of points that mentioning. The first is that while my mother was traveling the world speaking about women in the engineering field, she stopped in Barcelona. She brought home a large-format picture book about Barcelona. She was very proud of it and kept it on the center table in the formal living room. I suppose she was proud to display her accomplishments as a world-famous woman engineer and speaker.
On many a cold winter afternoon, I would sit in front of the fireplace thumbing through the book. The pictures were very compelling. Much of the book was dedicated to the artists who influenced the splendid architecture of the city. Featured in the book were people like Antoni Gaudi, Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, and Pablo Picasso - the fathers of the modern art movement.
 As I look back, I can easily see and feel their influence on my own artistic journey. Their courage and design aesthetics were my first real art training, which I had to learn on my own. Many years later, I was blessed to make the trip to Barcelona to visit those artists, art and inspirations. But it really began right there in the sunny formal living room of my parents’ 100-year-old farmhouse in the rural New Jersey countryside.
The last part of my experiences in Newton I want to share had to do with my short-lived friendship with the musical group from high school called “The Fallen Angels.” These five guys had been playing music together for years before I showed up. Joe Santora could do a darn good cover of Jimmy Hendriks. Brian,lead singer, was a very handsome guy, great musician and quite smart. The drummer was a wild man, and the two guitar players were brothers, maybe even twins; I can’t quite remember.
I used to eat lunch with them often, and one of the Wright brothers was in my Spanish class.  They were as close as anyone could be to me at that time, which is not really that close. After all, I was sort of the interloper. I had some skill at helping them set up all their sound systems. So, I sort of became their only “roady.” It was a great gig. I could hang out with the band backstage, ride on their fame and popularity and get into dances for free. At some point I was able to get them a paid gig playing at the local Green Township “Grange” Hall for a fund raiser. At the time, I did not really understand that there was money to be made promoting a musical group, probably because they always got all the money,and I just got all the grief.
On the night that they played, I hauled all their equipment to the hall and got them set up. But I really had no interest in being there because I really did not like the Green Township farm boys. So, I decided to just go home and hang out. As I pulled out, a car pulled in behind me and followed me. The driver in the car behind me was very aggressive, driving right up close, riding my tail with his bright lights. By that time, I had a fair amount of high-speed driving experience, and I knew the roads around my home really well. So, I just put the pedal to the metal and outran them. They tried to keep up with me but could not. At the first opportunity, I made a quick turn to an alternate road home and lost them, or so I thought.
A few hours later, I go back to dismantle the show and get the guys out of that stinking farm venue. As I worked, one of the farm boy said, “Hey the cops are here, and they are looking for you.” Really? What was that all about? Remember three things. First, I had that incident with Larry Crawn two years earlier. People still remembered it and talked about how the toughest kid in Newton was taken down before he could land a blow. Next, these were “Podunk” country folk who did not have a city-funded police car; they had to use their own cars for work. Lastly, three hours earlier someone chased me and I had evaded them.
I went outside and they were walking around my car with their flashlights. First thing, one got right behind me, within inches. The other one got in my face and points the flashlight right in my eyes. I thought “OK, this is not good.” The flashlight cop demanded "Have you been drinking tonight? Do you own this car? Can you prove that you own it? Where is the registration? What is your address? Where were you three hours ago?” It turned out that I once again embarrassed a Green Township high profile resident, and a cop at that.  
Thank God for my St. Bernard’s negotiating skills and my experience in the walk-in cooler with Angelo at the Goose’s. Even in those days, I wasn’t intimidated by much asked, “What are you guys talking about? Have I done something illegal and are you planning to arrest me? If not, please take a step back. I’m not armed and I’m not looking for any trouble. I’m glad to answer all of your questions. Just give me a little space and can you please take that light out of my eyes?"
I think they realized they were in public, on public view, and that a crowd was starting to form. There were now witnesses, so they stepped back. After some discussion they issued me a speeding ticket, supposedly for my high-speed ride home.
It took both of them to figure out how to write the ticket. But ultimately, they got mixed up when they put down the time. Also, they could not prove that it was actually me because they never actually stopped me, and they could not assess my actual speed because I evaded them.  
I fought the ticket in court and prevailed. Here I was, an 18-year-old high school student with no legal training, yet I convinced the judge that the ticket was a case of mistaken identity.  After he dismissed the ticket and warned the cops to be more careful with how they issued a summons, he called me to his desk and said “Son, you did a good job here today. You should consider a career in the legal field.” I probably should have listened. That was not the last time I ended up in a courtroom. By the time this is published I will have been the plaintiff in 13 court cases, I won twelve of them.
Here are a couple of other quick notes on this time of my life, and some threads that were developing even though I did not realize at the time. When I arrived at Newton High School, noticed a very pretty girl named Joanne. She was a cheerleader and looked very similar to one of my teen heart-throbs, Cher. Joanne was also a lead singer in a local high school band.
When I arrived at Newton High School, she was dating a guy a year older than her named Junior DeAngelo. Junior hung out at the same pool hall that I did, and he was also a car guy. At one point, he told everyone that he was going to go down to Morristown Ford and buy a Shelby. He did go to Morristown Ford but came back with a Torino - which was a very different car. Anyway, Junior graduated that year and was gone from Joanne’s life.
As soon as Junior was out of the picture, I made my move and asked her out on a date. We dated several times, and on the third date, she tearfully told me I was not her type, and we could be friends, but we would not be dating. I had heard that before, so I just moved on. What was really interesting, though I did not realize in significance at the time, was Joanne was the first female in my life who grew up without a father. I really can’t remember what the story was about her dad, except that she and her older brother, Jack (who was a local sportswriter), were raised by a single mother.
Two threads started here. First, Joanne was the first in a life-long trend of being attracted to women without father figures. Second, Joanne was very Cher-like in appearance and attitude. Joanne, Cher and the fatherless aspects of women’s lives would make future appearances during my journey, another repeat theme.
Right after Joanne came the next fatherless woman in my life. During my last year of high school, I joined a religious youth organization called United Synagogue Youth.  It met monthly to celebrate being Jewish. The various chapters got together for recreation, usually a Saturday evening dance or an occasional weekend retreat or convention.
During one of those meetups, I met a gal named Cookie Shurgin. Cookie was wonderful, on all levels. She was beautiful, smart, an athlete and Jewish. She was a cheerleader at her high school.
She really enjoyed being physical with her dates, kind of tomboyish. She wasn’t afraid to attempt anything. My parents loved her. She lived someplace south of our farm and had her driver’s license, and her mother had a 396 SS convertible which Cookie would bring on dates. She seemed like the perfect matchup. We dated quite a bit for that last part of the year. At the end of the year, she was headed off to a premed program someplace and I was headed off to the college exchange program in India.
Cookie was the second woman I was involved with who was raised without a father figure. She and her sister were raised by a single mom who worked in a dental office. Cookie would also reappear in my life some years later. 
The seeds of my future were planted in the farm town of Newton. High- high-speed cars, and the core of my artistic skills came right out of the bag in Newton. I experienced many life lessons during this period, but did not learn anything from most of them, I was destined to relearn many of those life lessons. That list is long - my having been targeted, the whole sexual experience thing, playing with the liars and thieves, and of course learning how to escape being caught. Great skills that only developed further as the road continued.  So here we go, off to India next.