in 1954, I was born in the unincorporated community of Whitesboro NJ, Cape May County, and sparingly lived and worked on our family farms as a youth both in Whitesboro and El Dora before moving to Vineland to attend the city's public schools.
 

To my knowledge, to this day, the only person remotely famous from Whitesboro is Steadman Graham longtime beau of Oprah Winfrey who was a couple grades ahead of me at Middle Township school.

At the age of 12, the family along with my six siblings moved to the Eastside of Compton, CA in 1967. Primarily, we were one of the first Black families to move to Compton's Eastside until around 1970. Of course, all that changed rather quickly. By the time I graduated from high school, Compton had gone from being predominantly White to mostly Black. 

I had always been an athletic type of person and had played on our high school football during my junior year at the school. After high school, I decided I wanted to play football again and got word that a few Cal State colleges had shown interest in me but wanted me to get an additional year of football experience since I only played my junior year in high school. They also wanted me to get my grade level up since my grades suffered at the hands of me playing football which was really my only interest at that time.

I then decided to attend Compton Community College in 1974 and began practicing with the football team. However, one day after football practice I was hanging out at a friend's house across the street where I lived when all of a sudden near dusk a car pulled up and began shooting indescribably at everyone standing in the driveway. The year prior was the first time I had heard of a gang named the "Crips" which by 1974 had congregated around Alondra Blvd. and Pannes which turned many of the young teens in the neighborhood into "Crips" especially when "Crips" Co-Founder "Big Tookie Williams" came to the neighborhood to recruit Compton kids into the L.A. "Crips" Gang.

Soon thereafter, many of my close friends became "Crips" while others from the same four-block neighborhood became "Piru's" an upstart gang that hated "Crips" after the Micheal Balou incident. Several of my younger brothers became "Crips" but I always stayed away from the ganglife activity. Needless to say, they didn't stay away from me. In May of 1974, after football practice, like always I'd hang out across the street at my friend's house which was now the hangout for the Compton Crips, but I just knew them as my friends. Later that evening, while I was hanging out in my friend's driveway drinking cheap wine, a car slowly rode by and a guy yelled out the window "Piru" before letting off a barrage of gunshots.