Los Baños, California: Family, Fog, and Departure

By Cliff Potts
Bay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — August 13, 2026

This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts.

The Soundtrack of the House

Geri controlled the television the moment she came home from high school. Whatever Loren and I were watching ended. The dial turned to Shindig.

The show carried the California sound of the mid-1960s — bright stage lights, beach sets, choreographed dancers. Paul Revere and the Raiders anchored the energy. Reception required precise tuning. Weather and atmospheric conditions affected the picture. If the fine-tuning was off, the screen dissolved into static.

Understanding that machines had inner workings that determined performance became a quiet fascination for me.

The soundtrack of the house included “Till There Was You” by the Beatles, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” and “Purple People Eater.” It was the soundscape of that period.

Halloween and Stitches

Halloween was close to my birthday, October 28th. One year, newly seven, I chose to dress as a scarecrow. The plastic mask smelled strongly of manufactured chemicals and held heat against my face. We moved block to block, then drove to the fairgrounds.

Between Halloweens came a different memory. I fell in a yard and struck a metal sprinkler head with my knee. The cut was deep enough that my father could see white beneath the blood. He took me to the doctor. The injection of xylocaine into an open wound left an impression. After that, I did not protest stitches again.

The following Halloween I wore the same scarecrow costume, slightly tighter. At a fishing game booth I accumulated enough points to win a deck of dinosaur flash cards. I kept them for years.

Fog and Donuts

During a brief period of unemployment, my father took us with him on early-morning drives to the unemployment office. The Central Valley fog was dense and disorienting. He stopped at a donut shop on those mornings and bought donuts and coffee.

It felt routine. It felt shared.

Christmas and the Bank

Los Baños was the only place that felt close to settled. Christmas there was structured and intact. One year my father brought home a small feral black kitten from the fields for Loren. She named it Christmas. The kitten climbed the tree repeatedly.

My parents applied for a GI loan to purchase a house. The bank denied the application, citing instability in my father’s construction work. In practical terms, the denial ended any possibility of permanence.

They accepted the decision. They did not challenge it.

We left Los Baños in 1966. I was nine years old.

It was the closest thing to home I had known to that point.