I found some pictures of my son Tommy in an old cigar box recently, and I’m posting a few of them here. The cigar box actually belonged to my Aunt Vivian years ago and dates back to her childhood in Los Angeles in the 1930s. Vivian’s father (my step-grandfather), Ernie Voigt, was a California […]
Category Archives: Point Richmond and El Sobrante
Twenty-five years ago today — on a spring morning in 1991 — I sat in the audience in front of the Oviatt Library at California State University in Northridge and watched Tommy receive his Bachelor’s degree. I think of that day often, with gratitude that I could be there to see that ceremony. Tom’s mom was also there, along […]
In the early months after Tommy’s death, I rarely dreamed about him, but lately he appears in my dreams very often. Like most dreams, these recent dreams about Tommy are a juxtaposition of fantasy and reality, of “wish fulfillment” and the ever-present memory of the boy and the man we all knew and loved so […]
On Saturday I drove down to the Bay Area to visit a couple of the places we lived when Tommy was small. I stopped first in El Sobrante, then Point Richmond, and on the way home I spent the night in Paradise in Butte County. It was about a six-hour drive to the Bay Area, […]
As I mentioned in a previous post, we moved to Point Richmond in the early 1970s, while I was working for Chevron. Our apartment at 521 Hillside Ave. was virtually adjacent to the Chevron refinery and Chevron’s Richmond Long Wharf, home port for the Chevron tanker fleet. The photo below shows a panoramic view of […]
Below is a photo of Tom’s Grandma Ida taken in about 1926. It’s a particularly poignant photo, from my perspective. My mom was always a dog lover, and she passed that sentiment along to her children. When my brother Fred and I were little, we had a dog, a cocker spaniel named Friskey, when we […]
Tom’s birthday is coming up later this week, and I’ve been experiencing thoughts and images of the day he was born. I was 20 at the time, a midshipman at the California Maritime Academy, and I had just returned from a training cruise to Brazil. I had been gone for several months, with little news […]
As mentioned in the posts before this one, I spent my early career as a ship’s officer working on board oil tankers. When Tommy was a toddler, we actually lived in Point Richmond, on San Francisco Bay, right next to the Chevron refinery. Tommy and I would walk from our house down to the bay, […]
Tom loved San Francisco and the Bay Area and spent a lot of time there at different times in his life. When Tom was little, we lived in the east bay for several years, and that was his initial experience of the Bay Area. Later, when he was living in Santa Monica with his mom, […]
During his early childhood, Tom lived in a variety of places: Point Richmond and El Sobrante (near San Francisco), and Mount Shasta in northern California. But he spent most of his childhood in Santa Monica, went to Santa Monica schools, and eventually graduated from Santa Monica High School (Samohi). Tom and his mom lived on […]
memories of tommy 