I Know My First Name Is Steven (3 page)

At five feet ten, Del is just slightly taller than his wife, Kay, and with a lean build and a deeply lined, suntanned face, he looks every bit like a man devoted to hard outdoor physical labor who could easily be a character from a Steinbeck novel. A folksy, entertaining spinner of tales, Del enjoys people. His favorite subjects are his family, his friends, his work, and the San Joaquin Valley. Inside or out, he is never without a stained gimmie cap, emblazoned with a farm equipment or fertilizer logo, which hides his ever-increasing baldness. Almost a decade older than his wife, Del was born during the Great Depression in dusty, remote Farmington, New Mexico. After the war, while he was still a teenager, his family moved west to California so that Del's father, Tal, could find work in the expanding agricultural industry of the San Joaquin Valley.

A robust young man, Del worked in the Valley's fruit and vegetable fields himself until his late twenties, when he struck out for northern California and found a job as a laborer at a sawmill in the isolated hamlet of Hyampom in Trinity County. He soon met pretty, black-haired, olive-complexioned Mary Katherine "Kay" Augustine, the eighteen-year-old daughter of local dairy and truck farmer Bob Augustine and his wife, Mary. After four years away from home at a Roman Catholic girls' boarding school in Redwood—four years away from boys, too—Kay had graduated and returned. Quiet but headstrong, she was immediately struck by this no-nonsense man boarding near her home. After a courtship of just a few weeks, she and Del married on July 1, 1960.

In November the couple moved south to be near Del's family in Merced. With the fruit and vegetable canning season almost over, Del was lucky to find work as a year-round machinery mechanic for the Consolidated Canners & Growers (CC&G) fruit and vegetable packing plant east of Merced on California 140. Del and Kay settled into a small rented house on Charles Street, where they were content with their simple life: nearby relatives, like-minded friends from CC&G, and, in August of 1961, their firstborn, a son they named Cary. Then, at roughly two-year intervals, while Del worked and Kay ran the household, the couple had four more children: a daughter, Cindy, in October 1963; a second son, Steven, in April 1965; a second daughter, Jody, in January 1967; and, after they moved from Merced, their last child and third daughter, Cory, in November 1968.

What the couple craved was a country setting in
which to raise their growing family, and in early March of 1967, the lure of rural life led them to buy a modest almond ranch in northern Merced County, near the small agrarian community of Snelling. Del proudly moved his growing family into one of the two older frame houses on the twenty acres of gently rolling land and began dry-farming his orchard of hundreds of almond trees, selling his small crop to the Blue Diamond Cooperative. Even though the ranch required his almost constant attention, Del continued his full-time job at the CC&G plant twenty miles away. It made for eighteen-hour days six days a week during a canning season which corresponded with Del's own harvest season.

Stevie—Del's pet name for Steven—was a dynamo of a little boy who loved being outside with his father as Del pruned, sprayed, and harvested his almond crop. Reminisced Del, "When he was small, Stevie wanted to go everywhere I went. I wouldn't let him ride on the tractor when I was goin' under the trees because the al-mond"—Del's distinctive pronunciation of the word—"branches was so low I was afraid he was goin' to get hit in the face. But he'd walk behind, and he'd just keep on walkin' . . . he'd walk miles following me. Then, when I'd come in from work and lay on the couch and watch TV, Stevie would come and curl up with me on the couch and I would bite him on the ear and he'd laugh. He was always just like a puppy dog."

Kay, as much family manager as mother, remarked that Steven liked to follow Del around, because "Papa did all the exciting things . . . and me, all I would say
was, 'Go clean your room, go wash your face, go blow your nose.' "

Agreed Steve, "Yeah that was me. I was just like a puppy dog. Everywhere he went I wanted to go. That's why me and him did a lot of things together when I was little . . . a lot of things happened to us together." Years later Steve recalled his family's life at the ranch as the most idyllic period of his childhood: "I loved it. I could go just about anywhere I wanted with my dog Daisy."

"Yes," Kay recalled with a smile, "he still talks about his Daisy. She was a collie. All of the kids went with us to pick her out, but Steven considered her his. Daisy would run through the orchard with him and fetch a stick and play with him and wrestle with him on the ground. Daisy was the kind of dog that you picked up and loved. And at the ranch we never did have to worry about anything happening to Steve, because we had twenty acres of almond trees around us, and he could have been missing for three hours and we wouldn't have known it."

Having experienced a surfeit of Catholicism during her four years studying under the nuns in Redwood, Kay had deferred to her husband in the matter of the family's religion. Del's great-grandfather had marched to Mexico with the U. S. Army's Mormon battalion, which had fought under General Zachary Taylor in the Mexican-American War, and Del had been raised in a family with a Mormon faith as resolute as that of their pioneer forebears. Through the 1960s and into the early 1970s a solid, participatory Mormon faith was an integral part of the Stayners' family life. Steve's sister Cindy fondly reminisced that even when
they lived at the ranch, twice a week they drove the twenty miles each way to services at the Mormon Stake in Merced, there not being one in Snelling. "Mom and Dad didn't make us go, we always liked it and wanted to go."

Kay laughed as she joyously recalled her family's rural life: "It was your average ill-run agricultural operation. But the kids did have fun there. We had cows, goats, and pigs . . . the pigs we were constantly chasing down the road. At one time we tried to raise some calves, but we didn't grow any feed, because there was no irrigation on the place, so we really didn't do it economically. And then we raised chinchillas. It was some success . . . we bought two. One died and the other ran away."

But the days of the family's bucolic existence on the almond ranch were numbered. Del's struggle to dry-farm the almonds by himself and work for CC&G finally took its physical toll on him. One morning in 1970, while he was shaving in the bathroom with Stevie at his side, he suffered a slipped disk, passed out from the pain, and fell to the floor. Kay called an ambulance to take her husband to Mercy Hospital in Merced, where he underwent back surgery. The incident so terrified Stevie that for many years afterward he thought his beloved dad had suffered a heart attack.

When he got home from the hospital a few weeks later, Del somehow found the intestinal fortitude to continue his single-handed dry-farming, but he soon thought it wise to take on a partner. He asked his good friend and cannery coworker Mac Scoggins to join him, and Mac and his wife Sandy and their three children soon moved into the other house on the ranch.
Kay and Sandy had been good friends for as long as Del and Mac had, and both women relished their new lives as farm mothers watching their children grow up and interact with each other. Even though the Scoggins' offspring were older than Steven, he played with them as much as he did with his own brother and sisters. Kay remarked that her son was so amiable that he would mix well and fit into any group of children with ease, regardless of age, adding, "He never did anything really out of line. He was just normal . . . an ordinary boy who would drive you crazy asking can he please do something."

But Del recollected an occasion when Stevie and Cindy failed to ask. "They was about three and five, and here was this cap and they got it off and here was this hole where the cap had been, and so they figured that they had to find somethin' to put in it. So they found a lot of sand and gravel in the driveway, and they just had a ball. The next mornin' I couldn't figure out what the heck was wrong with my truck. It wouldn't run . . .just sat there and idled . . . They was standin' there watchin' me cleanin' it up. Then Cindy said, 'Stevie put that stuff in there.' And he said, 'No, not me.
You
put that in there.' And they tickled me so much that I never did spank 'em, I got to laughin' so hard. I just sent them inside."

As Steven got older he continued his affectionate me-and-my-shadow relationship with his father. The two of them went on frequent hunting or fishing trips, or Stevie just rode around with his "Papa."

"Naturally," Steve fondly said, "I was around my dad a lot and, of course, I loved my dad and I admired him."

The exceptionally dry summer of 1971, coupled with the property's scant irrigation, forced the Stayners and the Scoggins to reluctantly sell their ranch and move back into Merced. It was a sad day for Stevie and his dog Daisy when his family moved to the house on Bette Street. Years later Kay told of Daisy's unhappiness after the move. The collie had had the run of the ranch and its considerable acreage on both sides, but on Bette Street she found herself confined inside the fenced backyard and she paced around its perimeter until she wore a path into the grass. Then one day Kay took her children to the local zoo and they saw a wolf pacing back and forth along the front of its cage, just as Daisy did. This so disturbed Kay that when they returned home she talked with her children and they all agreed it would be better to give Daisy to friends living in the country.

But Daisy's life wasn't the only one affected by the move. At the ranch Steven had been free to roam his family's twenty acres of almond trees and the adjoining vacant land. But in town the active six-year-old found himself getting into trouble for unconsciously cutting through neighbors' yards and flowerbeds.

And as if giving up Daisy wasn't enough, Steve had to leave behind the friends he had made in his Snelling kindergarten class. It was a very unhappy first-grader who started at Merced's Charles Wright Elementary School in September of 1971 . . . so unhappy that he cried and picked fights with his classmates. His teacher found it necessary to call in Del and Kay for a conference. His brother and sisters had adjusted well to the move, but to Steven this reordering of his life was almost the end of the world. Said Del, "Stevie
didn't like the move one bit. The only thing he did the same as at the ranch was that while the other kids would play in front of the TV, Stevie would always come and get on my lap."

Kay remembers, "That first fall absolutely seemed like forever to that child. But after spring of that next year, he was a little more happy because he had some friends . . . Steve really did make friends rather quickly. But I guess he's always been a little spunky. He's never been one to sit back and let somebody walk on him."

At that time, except for his parents, grandparents, and a few aunts and uncles, Steve's contacts with adults were limited to his teacher and to the family's closest friends, like the Scogginses, with whom the Stayners frequently went camping. But as far as people he did not know, Del said, "Steve wasn't the type of guy who just walked up and started talkin' to strangers . . . he was kind of shy. But he was polite. We taught all our kids to be polite!"

On one of the family's camping trips, Steven's sister Jody recalled an incident when he was very compassionate toward her. She had been accidentally shot in the leg with a BB gun. "I started crying and I remember Steven coming up to me and trying to comfort me. He was just six, but he was tryin' to be really comforting . . . and I'll always remember that."

Many were the times that Stevie and his dad went fishing alone. But, Del and Kay laughed in unison, he never did catch anything. "The reason I never did," a chagrined Steven later recalled, "is that you had to sit there and be quiet, and I just couldn't . . . Another thing is that I was very good at snagging lines. Dad
would always try to break the line, but he'd wind up breaking the pole instead. . . . And that would be all the fishing for me for a while. But I didn't mind, because then, while he kept on fishing, Dad would let me run around on the shore and play while he was in the boat trying to fish."

To Del, whether he took along just Stevie or all of his children, outings to the lake were among the joyous highlights of fatherhood. On one fishing trip, Del had all five of his active young children in the boat with him, and he thought that they were going to turn the boat over. "I was tryin' to fish while the kids were playin' around. I told them to stop, but about that time this big ol' catfish swam right under the boat and they all got to the other side of the boat to see if they could see it. And that catfish came up on top of the water and slithered onto its side and they was just a hollerin' and laughin' and it was so funny. And I can't swim a stroke and I was just sittin' there and holdin' on real tight.

"And that fish just kept on stirrin' up the water and the kids was havin' the best ol' time. I was leanin' back this way and that boat tilted, and I looked down into that water—and screamed. I think you coulda' heard me all over that lake, it scared me so bad! I just knew that boat was gonna' flip over, but it didn't."

In the early 1970s, the family went to the lake at least twice a month, camping out at least one weekend every month. Del ruminated happily, "We'd go to Ex-checker, Don Pedro, or Alpine Lake . . . we'd just load up and take off and go."

But these lake outings weren't for Kay. Even though the Stayners had a backyard swimming pool, she was
the only competent swimmer in the family. Disapprovingly, she recalled, "When we'd go to the lake it scared the bedeavors out of me. If I got into a boat with all that crowd of people, even though they had on life preservers, who was I going to help first?"

By September of 1972 Steven had made a good many friends at school and in his neighborhood, and it was a very happy seven-year-old who entered Mrs. Walsh's second-grade class at Charles Wright Elementary. Even though he had not forgotten the ranch and his Daisy, Steven did have family dogs Puggy and Brownie, his brother and sisters, and scores of other kids to play with . . . and the exceptionally close relationship with his father.