From: yma823@yahoo.com   
      
   Excerpt   
   The following is an excerpt from the book Catch a Wave   
   by Peter Ames Carlin   
   Published by Rodale; July 2006;$25.95US/$34.95CAN; 1-59486-320-2   
   Copyright © 2006 Peter Ames Carlin   
      
   Chapter 1   
      
   Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' original songwriter, producer, and visionary,   
   is in his sixties now, a man of age and wealth and almost no discernible   
   interest in the world as it existed before him, particularly with regard to   
   his family and their own journey across the continent to the golden coast   
   where he was born. "We never talked about that stuff," Brian says. It is the   
   spring of 2004, and he's in one of his favorite restaurants, a bustling   
   hillside deli in a mall down the street from his home on the crest of   
   Beverly Hills. "That's the one thing they never did, never talked about our   
   ancestors at all." Now, it's hard to know if Brian is saying this because   
   it's true or because he just doesn't remember any such conversations. Or,   
   more likely, he just doesn't want to address the issue. He's an intimidating   
   man, both for all he's achieved in his life and for all he's suffered along   
   the way. And given the remove of his celebrity and his psychic torment, it's   
   hard to separate the humor from the horror in his eyes when he does recall   
   something his father did like to say.   
      
   "Kick some ass!" Brian is smiling now, in his silly, sad way. "Exactly,   
   that's what my dad said. Kick ass! Kick ass!"   
      
   Murry Wilson was a big guy with a big personality and even bigger dreams of   
   glory. That he would attain them through the work of his sons was a source   
   of great pride and outrage from the old man. "My relationship with my dad   
   was very unique," Brian says. "In some ways I was very afraid of him. In   
   other ways I loved him because he knew where it was at. He had that   
   competitive spirit which really blew my mind."   
      
   "Don't be afraid to try the greatest sport around." That's the story of   
   Brian's life. But also the story of his brothers, his cousin and friends,   
   and all of the ancestors whose ambitions, fears, hopes, and determination   
   delivered them to this land beneath the unyielding sun. California, here we   
   come. Right back where they started from. "Catch a wave and you're sitting   
   on top of the world."   
      
   As described by Timothy White in his intricately researched The Nearest   
   Faraway Place, the story of the Wilsons in America begins in the late   
   eighteenth century, when the first Wilson to venture to the New World   
   settled in New York. The first American-born family member, named Henry   
   Wilson, was born in 1804 and eventually moved west to Meigs County, Ohio,   
   where he worked as a stonemason. His son, named George Washington Wilson in   
   the spirit of the times, was born in 1820, and he and his family farmed a   
   plot of rich, river-fed land in Meigs County for more than six decades until   
   his own son, William Henry Wilson, decided to pursue fortune west to the   
   wide-open plains of Hutchinson, Kansas. So west they went, with patriarch   
   George in tow, settling onto a large, if relatively arid, farm that William   
   Henry soon abandoned in order to go into the industrial plumbing business.   
   Contracts to work on the state's new reformatory system, along with the many   
   opportunities afforded by the modernizing world around them, provided a   
   decent working-class living and a solidly built clapboard bungalow on one of   
   Hutchinson's nice residential streets. As the nineteenth century gave way to   
   the twentieth, William Henry began to think again of chasing fortune into   
   the western horizon.   
      
   California! At the dawn of the new century, this was the setting of every   
   ambitious man's dreams. The real estate flyers papering the town painted in   
   the details, describing the valley soil as every bit as rich and fertile as   
   the sun was warm and the breezes gentle. Thus inspired, William Henry   
   scraped together the cash to buy, sight unseen, ten acres of prime farmland   
   in the southern California village of Escondido. William Henry loaded up his   
   wife, kids, and even his eighty-five-year-old father into the family jalopy;   
   they arrived in 1904 and spent the year laboring on their new vineyard. And   
   though the sun did indeed shine, and the water flowed as promised, and the   
   vines did erupt with fat, juicy fruit, the farming was every bit as hard as   
   it had been back in Kansas, and the money not nearly as vast as previously   
   anticipated. By 1905, William and family were back in the plumbing business   
   in Kansas. Still, memories of the California sun and the dreams of ease and   
   fortune that had once stirred William Henry's soul came to rest in the   
   imagination of his teenaged son, William Coral "Buddy" Wilson. As the boy   
   grew, so too did his visions of the golden future that awaited him in the   
   Golden State.   
      
   Dark-eyed, heavy-browed, and thick-featured, Buddy Wilson took off for   
   California in 1914. Then in his early twenties, the young man -- already   
   married to Edith Shtole and the father of a child or two -- fairly seethed   
   with ambition. Surely, he imagined, a man with his drive and appetite could   
   find an untapped stream of gold somewhere in that rich, open economic   
   frontier. Leaving his family back in Hutchinson, Buddy would spend months at   
   a time searching for his place in the sun, looking increasingly in the oil   
   fields of the southern coast. Guys could make a fortune if they latched onto   
   the right rig, and so Buddy used his plumbing skills as his entrée, working   
   as a steamfitter on the pipes that channeled the gushers out of the ground   
   and into the pockets of the rich men whose example he was desperate to   
   follow.   
      
   But Buddy would never join them in the gilded halls of the powerful. Moody   
   and scattered, plagued by searing headaches and a self-destructive thirst   
   for whiskey, Buddy wandered from job to job to long stretches of   
   unemployment, which he passed grumbling into a glass in a dim barroom. When   
   Edith and the kids finally joined him in 1921, taking the train to the   
   elegant-sounding village of Cardiff-by-the-Sea, he couldn't afford to lease   
   an apartment in town. Instead, the family spent their first two months   
   living in a snug eight-by-eight-foot tent with all the other squatters on   
   the beach.   
      
   Edith took a job pressing clothes for a garment manufacturer, and eventually   
   the family moved to a small home on an unpaved road in Inglewood where the   
   eight Wilson kids attended school, worked weekend jobs, and marched the thin   
   line dictated by their sour father and stern, demanding mother. Escape, such   
   as it was, came in the occasional afternoon bike rides to the open, breezy   
   expanse of Hermosa Beach.   
      
   Escape was a necessity for Buddy Wilson's kids. Buddy, now in middle age and   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)