Some people are shaped by a single defining moment. Others are shaped by a decade of unlikely preparation, each experience stacking quietly on the last until one day something extraordinary happens and they discover they were ready for it all along.
"Gordie" was that kind of kid.
He was born into an east coast family -- his mother a Brooklyn girl -- and spent his early years moving. There was a stretch in Spain that seemed like it might become permanent, until it wasn't. Family tensions built to an explosive final confrontation, and his grandfather threw his father out of the country.
The now family of three moved to Philadelphia, back near relatives, trying to find solid ground. Eventually his mother remarried and the new configuration -- mother, stepfather, Gordie, his sister, and a new little brother -- who made their way back, across the country to Tacoma, Washington, to where the oldest brother, from another father, lived with his dad.
They moved around a lot before finally settling. Home, when it existed, was complicated -- a difficult stepfather, a mother doing her best, a household held together by obligation more than ease. That arrangement lasted until he graduated high school and eventually went into the Air Force. But long before that, home was somewhere to leave.
So he left it, early and often, and in doing so stumbled into one of the most unusual informal educations a young American could receive in that era. Asking his mother decades later why she allowed him to always be taking lessons of some sort of another, she smiled and said, "I knew I had to tire you out every day, so you'd go to sleep at night. You were like that since birth. Always wanting to see the next new thing."
His sensei Steve Armstrong, ran one of the Pacific Northwest's premier karate dojos...in a style called, Isshinryu.
Sensei Armstrong ran one of the Pacific Northwest's premier karate dojos, a Marine veteran who had studied directly under the founder of Isshin-Ryu on Okinawa, eventually becoming his number two student. This wasn't a strip mall operation.
This was the real thing, brought back from postwar Japan by men who understood it as a discipline and a philosophy, not a hobby. Gordie trained there from age twelve, rode the city bus in his gi, competed in tournaments alongside future legends of American martial arts, at least one who made the cover of Black Belt magazine, and on one occasion performed kata in a boxing ring at a main event in front of a packed international tournament arena.
He joined the Civil Air Patrol, eventually rising to cadet flight commander. He trained in search and rescue. He earned a ham radio license, a radio telegraph license. He learned first responder first aid. He went on mountain missions, rappelled cliff faces, and on one search and rescue operation found a downed aircraft and its frozen passengers -- an experience that stayed with him. He spent only a single year in a Catholic school in eighth grade where the class was taught Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics and he graduated that reading at ten thousand words per minute. With a tested eighty percent level of comprehension.
He shot competitively, three years on the high school rifle team, earning his varsity letter. He got his SCUBA license in tenth grade. He went skydiving the morning after a birthday party, badly hungover, with his best friend and his older brother. On his second jump alone without his friends, he experienced a parachute malfunction at three thousand feet, fixed it himself rather than deploy his reserve -- because he didn't have the two dollars and fifty cents to pay for the repack, and landed hard, but safe.
He managed the snack bar at a drive-in theater through high school. Once graduated, he got a job downtown Tacoma and was paying his own rent from the age of seventeen, driving himself to work in his 1967 red Camaro convertible.
By that age, Gordie had accumulated a set of capabilities that no institution had deliberately assembled in him. They had simply accrued, experience by experience, in the life of a kid who preferred being useful to being comfortable.
None of it was preparation for what happened in May of 1974. And all of it was.
A phone call from a friend. A woman who needed a ride. A newspaper clipping about a murder. A question that would have sent most teenagers running:
Do you have a gun?
Unbelievably, as it happened -- he did. A Ruger Blackhawk 357cal. magnum.
Would you stay with me for the week -- until I can get out of town?
What followed was one week in the life of a seventeen-year-old who found himself between a witness to an organized crime murder and the mafia crime family who wanted her silenced, in a city where the Sheriff, and others, were on the payroll and the police couldn't be trusted.
A mafia crime ring so pervasive and insidious -- its reach extending into local, county, and perhaps even state government -- that when the federal government finally moved in, aided by the very Sheriff's office deputies who had refused to be bought, the trial had to be moved to California.
The case gathered newspaper headlines across the entire country for months. The corruption ran so deep that Pierce County voters eventually approved a new county charter abolishing the governmental structure that had made it all possible.
He wasn't a hero. He was just ready.
And nobody knew about his story -- for decades.
Until now --
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
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