Eight year old James Seigal had very white skin with faint freckles and dark straight hair that he combed back, or he let it fall off to one side He was slender with sharp features, a pointed nose, and I considered him an Okie because he was recently from Mississippi, and he had a southern accent. In California we felt everyone who came from other states to work in California was an Okie. We saw lots of cartoons about the Okies in our newspapers. I lived in Anaheim, a German town and the paper was right winged and Republican. My friend James and his pretty sister were not twins, but they were both in my grade at Lincoln School in Anaheim. James was quiet and well behaved, and I never saw him get in a fight.
M.C.P. was an orange juice plant three blocks west of our house next to the rail road tracks by Santa Ana Street. The place was closed on Sunday, so James and I snuck in to the plant yard. There was a metal ladder that led to the top of a tower. We climbed to the top of the tower and decided it was too high for us to chance climbing back down. We were like people who freeze in an airplane and refuse to jump out in a parachute. We climbed from the tower platform to a steeply sloped corrugated tin roof, and that was even more frightening to us, so we sat on the tower looking fearfully down at the ground below.
Two Anaheim policemen arrived and one shouted, "All right you kids, we see you up there. Who in the hell do you think you are? Don't you know you're not supposed to be climbing up there? We received a call that someone saw some cats climb this tower, and we came here to shoot the cats. We almost shot you by mistake, so you better get down here right now!" We were more frightened of the cops than we were of the height, so we climbed down the ladder. The cops chewed us out some more and put us in the police car to show our mothers.
James kept pointing at me saying, "He put me up to it." I sort of lost a best friend that day.