By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Near the end of my first decade of life, singer Neil Young penned and recorded a song called “After the Gold Rush.” The haunting lyrics of his musical elegy mourned a “Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s.” My family was on the run then too.
Twenty years earlier, just after World War II ended, my parents Kathleen Mavourneen Gleason and Kevin Peter O’Brien were high school sweethearts in Burlington, Vermont, a lovely northern New England town nestled on the shores of Lake Champlain.
Kay was a quick-witted, chestnut-haired, local beauty who—after surviving being orphaned at an early age—was looking forward to better life prospects. Kevin, called “Obie,” was a tall, thin, handsome transplant from the suburbs of New York City who, at times, felt adrift among six rowdy siblings and loving but distant parents.
When their budding relationship blossomed, Kay and Obie set a wedding date for September 22, 1951, just after both had graduated from Cathedral Catholic High School. As they mapped out a life together, however, they hit an early bump in the road.
My father and his family overslept, and were late for the early morning nuptials at St. Patrick’s chapel in Burlington’s Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. As they raced to the church, my furious mother threatened to call off the whole thing. At the last minute, she relented.
Despite that chaos, the local Burlington Free Press described a lovely fall wedding in an old stone church on a hill overlooking the changing autumn leaves surrounding the lake. My cousin Michael Winslow, 15 years my senior, was their ring bearer. He recalls watching my parents embrace in a very passionate kiss.
Although there was love in the beginning, two decades and four kids later, it was gone. I may never know exactly why.
Maybe they got married too young. At age 20, they were not even old enough to drink the champagne served at their own reception.
Maybe ongoing financial troubles—and there were many—turned romance into recrimination.
Maybe that recrimination tempted my father to look elsewhere for romance and to gallop into the arms of a Northern Utah rodeo queen.
Whatever the cause, in the summer of 1970, we were a family on the run.
My father drove us to Sacramento, California. The youngest and most naive of my siblings, I thought we were taking a family vacation to the home of his sister, who also was my mother’s good friend. My father left us there, however, raced back to Utah, ran around with his rodeo queen, and filed for divorce.
Stranded in California with no income, no job, no car, and four kids, my mother faced some tough decisions. She could not afford a lawyer, and so she signed the one-sided divorce papers as drafted. A Utah court entered a final decree ending the marriage in November 1970.
Out of necessity, Mom also sent the family scattering. She loaded my older brother and sister onto a bus and shipped them back to Utah to live with our father. And she sent the nine-year old me to Southern California to stay with her brother Jack Gleason, a kind man who had offered to help out during the difficult circumstances.
So in the late summer of 1970, I rode down along the Pacific coast highway to cool SoCal, with a hippie family friend driving an old beat up Volkswagen van. Before dropping me off at my uncle’s place, he stopped at Redondo Beach, threw open the van door, and let me run and jump in the ocean for the first time.
With his good taste and keen eye for classic fashions, my Uncle Jack managed the upscale men’s clothing section at Bullock’s Del Amo, a popular department store in Torrance. He and his wife Edith lived in nearby San Marino and had three children. These cousins-I-had-never-met-before were age 20, 16, and 8 at the time I burst into their otherwise placid domestic abode.
I was not a bad nine-year-old kid, but my life at the time was so unsettled that I was always on the run, subconsciously trying to stay just a few steps ahead of the unpleasant reality of a broken home. Before long, I would exhaust the patience of my quasi-foster family.
Early in my LA stay, I woke up with perhaps the fullest bladder I’d ever known. I also found myself on the wrong side of the doors of several occupied bathrooms. I was desperate. Luckily, I found an empty mason jar in the trash can out back. I relieved myself in front of the family pets.
Their quite-dignified cat watched in horror. The dog skeptically sniffed the full jar. Both animals scrupulously avoided me thereafter. My poor aunt was shocked. She probably had hoped that this wandering visiting unknown nephew of hers was at least housebroken.
It was an inauspicious beginning, and things only got worse.
The family kitchen featured a toaster oven, a novel and modern contraption I had never seen nor used before. One day, I put some food in it, hit the settings, raced back to watch a TV show, and promptly forgot all about the kitchen. I almost set their house on fire.
Another day when Uncle Jack got home from work, my enthusiastic rush to greet him generated enough seismic activity on the floor to tip over a decorative but unfettered wall shutter. It crashed near—and almost concussed—my poor younger female cousin.
A few weeks later, just after I had started the fourth grade at San Marino’s Carver Elementary, Uncle Jack announced that I soon would be reunited with my mom in Sacramento. He bought me my first-ever airline ticket, took me to LAX, and hugged me before putting me on a plane that whisked me away to yet another unfamiliar destination.
What followed was a lot more racing and running around. My sister tried to finish high school. Mom struggled to find decent work, and to make ends meet, while we lived in a small apartment just outside of McClellan Air Force Base. I went to a new school in North Highlands for a few months.
In fact, I attended three different schools during my fourth-grade year. The last one was back in Clearfield, Utah. In the spring of 1971, Mom loaded us on a dreary Greyhound bus and, after a scary nocturnal ride, brought us home to start a new life—the four kids and her together in a cramped basement four-plex.
Before all that additional commotion and emotion, however, I encountered Neil Young.
At Uncle Jack’s house, I slept on a cot in a small, enclosed hallway, just outside the bedroom of my twenty-year old cousin who was in college. One night, I was lying on the cot…rhetorically bound there by my surrogate family’s gentle admonitions to keep still.
Perhaps to help tame the savage boy-beast who lurked just outside his door, my cousin put on some music. He turned the volume up a little higher than normal, so I could hear too.
His chosen album was brand new—released in September 1970—and called “After the Gold Rush.” The lyrics of the lead song with the same name described a struggle with unpleasant reality (“I was thinking about what a friend had said, I was hoping it was a lie”) and mourned a “Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s.”
As the golden warm Southern California day gave way to a cool blue inland coastal night, I fell asleep listening to Neil Young sing about my life.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here: https://michaelpobrien.com/) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (https://www.amazon.com/Monastery-Mornings-Unusual-Boyhood-Saints/dp/1640606491), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press in August 2021, and chosen by the League of Utah Writers as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
