The Last Season by Eric Blehm Read Free Book Online Page B

evening’s music. He’d gladly set to the phonograph some classical record fitting of the weather or mood. While many of his teen peers were busy wearing out Elvis Presley’s new single, “Don’t Be Cruel,” Randy remained drawn to classics such as Artur Rubinstein’s rendition of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor.
    With or without a VIP guest, dinner was always a sit-down affair at the Morgensons’. Esther mimicked her English mother’s regimen of a perfectly set table. The meat was carved by the man of the house, milk was served in a pitcher, and hats and elbows weren’t tolerated.
    Entertainment after the evening meal was generally focused on conversation, either around the fire or at one of the venues in the valley where visiting scholars, authors, artists, and photographers frequently gave lectures and slide shows and presented documentary films. In later years Larry would veer off to a high school party while Randy would almost always tag along with his parents—unless he was absorbed in a good book. In that case, even as a teenager, he’d stay home and keep the fire stoked for his parents’ return. Randy was the cliché boy under the covers with a flashlight. Many mornings, he’d wake with the house flashlight (batteries dead) in bed with him, having pushed it for one too many pages the night before. Even if television reception had been possible, the Morgenson household would have resisted. Radio, records, and newspapers were the main sources of news and entertainment, the San Francisco Chronicle and columnist Herb Caen being the family favorites.
    In the winter, Randy would ice-skate on the pond at Curry Village and ski at Yosemite’s ski area, Badger Pass, where his brother was an instructor and resident hot-dogger, who Randy looked up to and tried to keep up with.
    During the late-1950s, Larry was drafted and stationed at the tense border between North and South Korea. While he was away, Randy and one of his best childhood friends, Bill Taylor, outgrew the “tame terrain” of what they coined “Badger Piss.” The wooded glades and steeper slopes of the backcountry became their new playground.
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    NEPOTISM REPORTEDLY is a major factor in securing choice positions in the national parks, and so it was in 1958, when 16-year-old Randy Morgenson applied for the coveted job of bicycle-stand attendant at Curry Village. The $1.35-an-hour job—his first—consisted of 28 hours per week renting and repairing bicycles, giving directions, and answering questions about the park. He was rehired the following summer for the same job at the same pay rate and, by age 17, he had saved enough money to buy his first car, a 1932 Ford Model B five-window coupe, for $200. By the end of that summer, he’d torn out the stock Ford engine and replaced it with a Cadillac engine. According tohis friend Randy Rust, it “purred.” For a time, it was his passion. “If he wasn’t out in the woods somewhere,” says Rust, “his head was either in a book or under the hood in their driveway.”
    In June of 1960, at 18, Randy took a job at the park’s only gas station, where he serviced cars, repaired flats, sold batteries, and acted as a guide to the steady stream of visitors who were relentless in their barrage of questions regarding Yosemite. Randy had absorbed enough trivia from his father—the park’s resident walking, talking Yosemite guidebook—to answer most queries with a flare, unexpected from a youth with a greasy rag hanging from his back pocket.
    If someone asked directions to Snow Creek Falls in early June, he’d rattle off road directions, then probably suggest the Mirror Lake Trail, recommending, “Keep your eyes open for a heart-shaped leafy plant at ground level in the shady spots. Rub one of the leaves between your fingers and smell it for a surprise.” The “surprise” was wild