Kicks on Route 66 - Umberto Tosi
I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if my parents had stayed in Boston instead of taking me west to California in 1942 when I was five years old. I suspect I would have been more like most of my New England cousins, whose stable, prosperous lives I've often admired, but rarely wished for. I wouldn't have been as itinerant, definitely not married so many times. If I had children they would not be the four I have now, and that I wouldn't want. It's unlikely that I would have become a journalist by trade and a writer by aspiration. I might have applied myself to the piano better, given the musicians in the family. There's no going back, of course. I could not imagine growing up anywhere but California, with its beaches, Pacific palisades, deserts, and mountains, its dreamers and con artists. Back then, I still wore short pants . There was a world war on , and the Great Depression had far from given way to war-inflated prosperit...