In the mid-60s, I opened a branch dojo in Santa Cruz, a beachside town about 30 miles from San Jose. I had opened one not long before in San Jose. But signups were slow. I attributed it to the fact that there were two other schools in the valley, which must have had a population of around 300,000 at the town. I thought there were too many schools in San Jose – 3, counting mine. Now, there’s one on every corner and we do fine.
Santa Cruz, at the time, was a small town, with a very conservative attitude – almost like you would find in small towns in the Midwest. We once tried to rent their civic auditorium so we could hold a tournament on a Sunday and they refused. They told us that decent people were in church on Sundays. (They had no problems, however, hosting the Miss California pageant there each year on a Sunday. I guess decent folks were either in church on Sundays or watching beautiful women in bathing suits.) After the University of California, Santa Cruz, opened its sprawling, very liberal campus there a few years later, the area made a drastic change of directions politically.
Before opening the branch dojo, I wanted to test the area. So I rented a junior high gym for the night and ran an ad in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, their top newspaper, offering a free karate class. When I got to the gym, I found 85 people waiting to be taught. Only around 20 stayed with it and became regular students. I had some great fighters come out of that small group.
Santa Cruz, counter to its very conservative population core in the early days, was long one of the surfing capitals of the world. So there were always a bunch of non-conservative surfers who trained on occasion. One offered to swap me marijuana for instruction. I passed and his own liking of the substance made him an occasional student at best. But he was one of the top surfers at the time.
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| Me (right) and Bill Burja, with his trophy for winning Brown Belt Division at GM Ed Parker's Internationals. |
One of my best students from the Santa Cruz group was Bill Burja. His family owned a mushroom farm in the area and Bill had lived there all his life. Bill was a handsome, muscular, nice guy, who the ladies absolutely LOVED. While he was training, women would leave photos of themselves under the windshield wipers of his car with their telephone numbers. Problem was he was married to a woman called Tony. (I don’t know if I am spelling it right or what her full name may have been.) But she was very watchful of him. When all the photos started appearing, she began driving him to the dojo and picking him up after class. (There’s a great story about the night she didn’t show up and I drove him home that I may tell one of these days.)
After we relocated the dojo from the junior high, which was on one of the main streets of town, she let him drive in again. I received a call at the dojo one night from Tony. She asked to speak with Bill. I hadn’t seen him. So I looked around to make sure he hadn’t just come in without me seeing him. But I came up empty. I struggled a bit over what to tell her. I had a personal policy of always telling the truth. That was how I was raised. But the truth could end in a divorce. I couldn’t lie, however, so I told her I hadn’t seen him. “He’s not there!” she screamed, angrily. “Ah, no,” I said. Then, she laughed. “I just called to tell you he wouldn’t be coming in tonight. I wanted to see if you would lie for him or not.”
I was glad I had been raised as I had and honesty was held in high esteem. So the moral is this story is always tell the truth.
Thanks for your patience and continued support.
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