The first time I met Clay Delong was on the beach at the Yankee Clipper in late August of 1966. The world was in black and white. I had listened to Clay tell a story about his older brother. I found that Clay looked up to his brother, a fallen Vietnam War hero.  We hit it off. In a few days school started and we were in a few classes together. We had a lot in common. For one thing, I knew how to fix cars, and Clay knew how to break them. 1966-1967 the year of doing the best we could balancing a life between the Armory, The Tigers Den, school and on the six o’clock news. At a teen dance club on U.S. 1 in North Lauderdale I introduced Clay to an attractive outgoing girl I had met the week before. Her name was Gail. The first time he and I went to her house in Hollywood her sister Janet came to answer the door. Janet asked who we were. Clay said “I am CLAY_ CAMPBELL_ DELONG_ ESQUIRE”. And he was. An Esquire that is. The one and only. Janet was the 12-13 year old version of the now famous Super Model Janet Dickenson. The woman she grew up to be.  Later Clay married Gail while he was in the army in California.

Fast forward to 1969:
It was the infamous Summer or Summers of love between San Francisco and Big Sir on the California coast. Clay was out of the army by then. I hitchhiked to California where I lived with Clay and Gail in a small cottage in Monterey / Pacific Grove, just off 17 Mile Drive. The world was changing to vivid Technicolor. There were few jobs and we lived fishing mostly between the mountains of Big Sir, Monterey, and the beach along 17 mile drive. One night while Mick Jagger was on the FM radio station asking for everyone to have Sympathy for the Devil, the phone rang and Clay looked weird as he gave the phone to me. It was my mother. She told me I had been drafted. Later when I got out of the army I lived back in Monterey. Clay and Gail had divorced. When Clay finished a collage Geology course. Clay, his German Sheppard dog “Saber” and I hitchhiked back Fort Lauderdale. It is a long ways to hitchhike and longer with a big dog. The times were like something Richard Brautigan or Tom Robbins would write for a Cheech and Chong novel. The words Glory Days come to mind.

My memory of Clay is a snapshot in my brain of me meeting a teen in cutoffs on a Honda 305 Scrambler heading West on Davie Blvd with right hand raised off the handlebars, palm open like an Indian greeting on horse back saying “hi”. Clay was a “Free Spirit”

The Last time I saw Clay in 1972, he told me that he was hitchhiking back to Monterey.

Submitted by J.R. (Rod) Smith 8/27/10