JT with his Norton motorcycle in Florida in 1963.

The following narrative was written in 2010 and edited (with particular attention to dates) in 2021 and 2022. Some of the details were gleaned from JT's notes and diaries from 1964-1965.

Returning from Spain in late 1962 or early 1963, JT set out to rediscover his roots and reconnect with America. While crossing the Atlantic by ship, and without entirely understanding why, he had decided to abandon his Spanish persona and give up his flamenco career. Somewhat adrift, JT imagined that economic success might provide the new identity and connections that he was looking for and he decided to focus all his energies on making money. So it was that in early 1963, JT talked his way into a job as a copywriter at a Madison Avenue advertising agency. But he wasn't planning on writing copy for long. With naive optimism, JT believed that he would be able to rapidly move on from copywriter to account executive and would soon have his first million.

As one of his first tasks, JT was asked to come up with a concept which would land a new corporate client with three to four million dollars of annual billing. When he presented the concept, H-------, the account exec who was assigned to approach the client, rejected it. JT saw this as an opportunity. Using the law of "seven degrees of separation" he soon found his way to the chairman of the board of the client corporation and pitched the concept. Even though he felt it best to refrain from mentioning the name of the agency he worked for, the client liked the proposal and requested a meeting with the agency. But when JT returned to the agency and spoke to his superiors about the success of the meeting, he was shot down. "Didn't he realize," his bosses pointed out, "that H------ controlled many important accounts. JT's initiative was sure to offend H------."

"But I've only been here a few weeks and I've already sold this client," said JT. "Can't you see that I'm a go-getter and will bring in lots of business."

"Just stick to writing copy," he was told.

This did not fit with JT's plans. Perhaps if the agency has been less conservative they might have handled the situation differently. Perhaps if JT had been more patient he could have built a career in advertising. As it was, when three musicians from Nova Scotia approached him one evening in a cafe on MacDougal Street and asked him to become their instrumental sideman, he was only too happy to have an excuse to leave the advertising agency. After less than two months on Madison Avenue, JT was back in the music business and on his way to a month-long gig at The House of Pegasus in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with The Halifax Three, a Kingston Trio type group consisting of Denny Doherty, Pat LaCroix and Richard Byrne.

As the month in Fort Lauderdale progressed, JT's relationship with the three Canadians came apart over finances and, when the gig was over, Denny, Pat, and Richard purchased an old hearse and headed north while JT stayed on at the House of Pegasus, performing solo as an all-American singer songwriter. With the money he earned at the house of the flying horse, JT bought a 600cc twin-cylinder Norton Dominator and learned to ride it on the roads around Davie, then little more than a ranch town.

Eventually tiring of Florida, JT headed north on highway 301, his Gibson CF-100 guitar strapped to a homemade luggage rack made of plumbing pipe which had been bolted to the Norton's rear faring. Somewhere in Georgia the left-hand muffler fell off the motorcycle but JT fastened it back on with two tractor bolts and a coat hanger. He passed through South Carolina without incident but in Fayetteville, North Carolina, while coming out of a gas station after filling the tank with a dollar's worth of gas, he was hit broadside by the driver of an Oldsmobile sedan and knocked unconscious. Fortunately the driver of the car had managed to slow his vehicle down and there was minimal damage to the bike (a slightly dented fork) and none at all to the guitar. When JT regained consciousness, he paused for only a moment to check for broken bones and consider his situation. The way he saw it, he was a drifter on a motorcycle who had been in an accident which was probably his fault and he had very little money. JT figured that this was not the profile most likely to inspire "southern hospitality" in Fayetteville, the home of Fort Bragg. The movie "Easy Rider" was still five years in the future but JT previsioned the entire scenario as hes dusted himself off. Getting away as fast as possible seemed the most prudent course of action. Minutes after he regained consciousness, JT mounted the motorcycle and continued north, stopping only when he had crossed the border into Virginia where he hid the bike behind some bushes, lay down next to it, and slept until the next morning.

When JT reached Pennsylvania he passed through Kennett Square and then Chadds Ford, home of one of America's two most prominent artistic families, the Wyeths. In Philadelphia, he stopped to perform at The Second Fret, and was encouraged by the response of the audience. Even though some of them had known he had had performed there in his flamenco days, they seemed to accept the manner in which he had reinvented himself and he was pleased.

JT continued on towards New York. It's not clear exactly when he arrived there but it was probably June or July of 1963. He wrote of stopping for coffee at almost every rest-stop on the New Jersey Turnpike in an effort to delay his arrival. It seemed that he was reluctant to face "the city" again. But eventually he rode through the Lincoln tunnel and surfaced to find himself surrounded by the cacophony and confusion of 40th Street and 9th Avenue. Heading down to Greenwich Village, he rented a space to park the motorcycle in a garage on Third Street near Sixth Avenue and began to carve out a new career for himself as a singer-songwriter.

There is a substantial part of the summer of 1963 which is undescribed in JT's notes. But three things that are known are that 1) He was really unhappy with the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, 2) on August 28th, he boarded a bus with Dorothy Day and some members of the Catholic Worker Movement and rode down to Washington DC for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where he heard Dr. Martin Luther King deliver his "I have a Dream" speech and 3) a few months later, on November 22nd, he was standing by the coffee machine in the Fat Black Pussycat Cafe on MacDougal Street at 1:30 PM when the news came over the radio that President Kenndy had been shot in Dallas.

To say that JT was stunned, disillusioned, and confused by Kennedy's assassination is an understatement. As it did for so many other young Americans, the death of JFK shook the ground on which JT walked. "I am an American," JT wrote, "and my country is coming apart at the seams. There must be something I can do..." And as JT reflected further, he came to believe that in order to find out what he could or should do, he would have to reconnect with America, reconnect with his roots, and reinvent himself.

JT didn't believe that he could achive this in New York. Too many people knew him by his flamenco stage name, Juan Moreno. And somehow he felt that the pressures of New York would not allow him the quiet-time he needed to reflect on who and where he was. JT resolved to go to Boston, a much less high-tension city where things would be easier for him.

Selling his flamenco guitar and everything else he owned which would not fit on the back of his motorcycle, JT rolled his bike down the garage ramp and headed up First Avenue on Manhattan's east side. Leaving the city, he detoured north to follow Route 22 through Westchester and then along the west side of the ridge that divides New York from Connecticut. A right turn onto South Quaker Hill Road near Patterson, NY allowed him to pass by his childhood home which was just south of the Dutchess County line. This was, after all, at least in part, a journey in search of his roots as well as an effort to reconnect with America and leave Spain behind. At the top of Quaker Hill he passed Mizzentop and the Oblong Friends Meeting House and made his way across the ridge into Sherman, Connecticut. Eventually, mostly on back roads, he made it to Boston.

From the Fall of 1963 to the Spring of 1964, JT lived, for the second time in his life, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Navigating the New England Streets and countyside on his motorcycle was slow going but he did get around. He performed at The Kings Rook in Ipswich and some other folk venues and found manual labor day jobs to augment his income and make ends meet. But he wasn't any closer to finding the clarity, the connections, or the sense of place and self that he sought. So sometime in the spring of 1964 he purchased an old panel van for $200 and, loading the motorcycle into the back of the van, headed back towards New York.

The van broke down a couple of times during the two hundred mile trip and JT regretted buying it and finally abandoned it. Once again, JT found his possessions limited to what he could carry with him on the bike. When he arrived back in New York he easily found work at more than one Greenwich Village nightspot. But things did not feel right and after just a few weeks, JT resolved to explore America by riding his motorcycle to the West Coast. "Maybe," he said to himself, "if I can discover America, I can discover myself."

No one has ever mentioned noticing JT's departure from New York in the late spring of 1965. The Village embraced newcomers and let go of old-timers easily in those days. JT had only five dollars to his name, so even 'though gas was less than 30 cents a gallon, He only got as far as Sea Bright, NJ, a small community less than thirty miles from Manhattan by sea but more than twice that distance by land, before stopping to perform at a club called The Quay. With a little more money in his wallet, he moved on to Philadelphia where, after a couple of weeks of sleeping on the sofa's of various acquaintances and spending his days as a trucker's helper, JT found work with Sonny Pelaquin's "Wall of Death" (see photo below), a motor drome which was the main act in a Reithoffers' carnival unit that he connected with in the small town of Trooper, not far from Norristown, PA. Working the carnival, he was sometimes the outside "talker" and ticket seller and sometimes he worked inside the drome, standing in the center of the 32 foot barrel while the riders whirled around the vertical walls so that when they descended, he could appeal for donations to the "riders insurance fund."

After a week in Trooper, the carnival's next scheduled stop was a shopping mall in Greece, NY, a suburb of Rochester. After the drome had been disassembled and loaded onto its tractor trailer along with the antique Indian 45s on which Pelaquin and the other riders rode the wall,there was no room for JT's Norton so JT rode his bike behind the eighteen wheeler driven by "Big John" while Sonny and some of the others went on ahead with Sonny's mobile home. About three hours into the nine-hour trip, just south of Scranton, the truck blew a spark plug right out of the head. The engine lost considerable power and made a great deal of noise. On a long slow climb up a steep grade near Clarks Summit, PA, Big John was pulled over by the State Police. Finding something out of order with the Alabama plates on the truck, the police gave Big John a ticket and since neither he nor JT had enough money to pay the fine, the cops took Big John to a jail near Wilkes-Barre, leaving the truck by the side of the road. Big John's instructions were "catch up with Sonny and tell him to get me out."

Following those instructions, JT followed the planned route to Greece as fast as he could, hoping to catch up with Sonny along the way. But somewhere near Watkins Glen, NY he could no longer keep his eyes open and had to sleep for a few hours and so Sonny, having multiple drivers, made it all the way to Greece before JT caught up with him and reported the incident. Everyone immediately piled into Sonny's car and headed back to Wilkes-Barre to spring Big John from the calaboose and retrieve the truck and the drome. This time JT got to ride in the car but still it was another grueling six-hour drive back to Wilkes Barre, another six hours to get the drome to Greece and eight sweat-filled hours to set it up for the following day's performances.

This adventure took the romance out of carnival life. The work was dangerous, the set-ups and tear-downs were grueling, and the rides between gigs were difficult. The audiences were meager and JT's small share of the take was not enough to live on. Before long he was on his way to a Coffee House in Baltimore where he knew he could get work singing.

After a week or two in Baltimore, including two or three nights spent in the ritual pick-up circle at Champs on route 40, JT placed a stick on top of a road map and drew a pencil line from Baltimore, Maryland to St. Louis, Missouri. He intended to leave Baltimore and, staying as close as possible to the line, make his way to St. Louis.

Following this line took JT through West Virginia where he stopped in the hamlet of Norton to send postcards to some of his Phildelphia motorcycle friends. He then continued west through Spencer and Ripley and crossed the Point Pleasant-Gallipolis bridge (which only two years later collapsed, killing 46 people) into Ohio. Somewhere near Willow Wood, Ohio the front tire of the motorcycle went flat and JT had to detour to Ashland, Kentucky, the nearest place where a new tube could be found. Then it was on through Louisville, across Indiana and Illinois, and on to St. Louis.

In St. Louis, JT looked up the brother of guitarist John Stauber with whom he had shared an apartment in New York. Stauber's brother gave him a place to sleep and he looked for work. He was unsuccessful at finding a singing job so he went to work for Manpower, loading and unloading trucks and freight cars. Most of those work days merged into a haze of fatigue and sweat but one stands out in JT's memory. It was the day he and his aptly-named partner Ulysses unloaded a freight car containing eighty thousand pounds of marble chips in 100-pound sacks. Their job was to load the sacks on hand carts, wheel the carts across the loading dock into a warehouse, and, building a staircase out of the sacks themselves, pile them twelve feet high against the wall. The pay was five cents per sack and by the end opf the day JT and Ulysses ehad ach made twenty dollars!

After a month or so in St. Louis, JT continued west to Kansas City where he stayed at a commune called Toad Hall which was located across the street from the Art Museum. His next stop was the mile-high city of Denver. At the Folklore Center in Denver, JT met Pete Smith who later became an important part of JT's musical life. Pete, JT, and some others shared a communal living space over an old movie theater on East Colfax. But JT was still searching and, before long, he headed south over the Raton Pass to Taos, New Mexico and then on to Santa Fe. In Santa Fe a kind soul whose name is not recorded in JT's notes, but whose front door handle was a carved wooden gargoyle with a long tongue which the user grasped to open the door, put him up for a few days. JT spent a brief guitar-centered time in Santa Fe with one of the Romero brothers but his restlessness soon got the better of him and he headed west on Route 66 headed towards Flagstaff, Arizona. But JT had not counted on the quixotic weather in the New Mexico mountains.

Even though it was still fall, somewhere near Gallup JT got caught in a blizzard and was forced, covered with frozen snow and ice, to seek shelter in a roadside diner. He must have looked really forlorn, for Ray, a middle-aged man who was heading west in a pickup towing a house trailer, offered to put the motorcycle in the back of the truck and take JT as far as he wanted to go. So it was that JT rode through Flagstaff, Kingman, and the Port of Entry near Needles, California in rare comfort. Along the way, Ray, who was Ozark-born, entertained JT with numerous versions of the Ballad of Little Omie Wise, Pretty Polly, The Banks of the Ohio, and many other melancholy traditional songs. Somewhere in the desert west of Needles, JT got to earn his ride when the house trailer blew a tire. Ray and JT loaded the blown tire onto the back of the motorcycle and JT carried it thirty-five miles west to the nearest repair stop. There a new tire was mounted on the rim and the wheel was once again loaded onto JT's bike and he rode the thirty-five miles back to where Ray was waiting by the side of the road. With the wheel remounted and the bike lifted back into the truck, Ray and JT continued west.

In Santa Fe, JT had been given the names and address of a couple in Barstow who would be likely to give him a place to stay so it was there, just west of the Mojave Desert, that Ray and JT parted ways. Back on the motorcycle for the first time in hundreds of miles, JT found the couples' house easily but nobody was home when he knocked. So JT sat down on the stop and waited and a few hours later the couple showed up. They were as hospitable as they had been described to be, but their resources were limited and JT knew that his being there made things hard for them. Two days later he headed for Los Angeles.

JT's arrival in Los Angeles went as unnoticed as his departure from New York. Completely without funds, JT begged for food and gas money outside a music store in Santa Monica or Venice. Later he stayed for a while at the home of Hoyt Axton, a musician he had known in New York. Hungry in more ways than one, JT made the rounds, trying to sell hi songs and himself as a singer-songwriter (a term that was not yet popular). He had meetings with Phil Spector and other record producers and even gave acting a try, doing a screen test for Doris Day's husband Marty Melcher. Nothing panned out. Eventually he found work waiting on tables at a bar on Sunset Strip named after the protagonist of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Fred C. Dobbs (the role was played by Humphrey Bogart). Because the job didn't pay enough to rent a room, the manager of the bar allowed JT to spread out a sleeping bag in one of the storerooms behind the bar. Disappointed at his failure to find any success with his music and further depressed by his dismal living situation, JT started drinking. Alcohol and motorcycles are not a good combination and one afternoon the real wheel of his Norton got caught in the trolley tracks on Santa Monica boulevard and he skidded into the rear of a nineteen-fifty-something Desoto, the car's fin opening the shin of a passenger riding behind JT before the bike went down, and breaking one of the bones in JT's foot. The passenger needed fifteen stitches to close the wound. Luckily he had medical insurance. Medical care was out of JT's reach so he stuffed his foot back into his motorcycle boot and didn't take it off until two or three weeks later. But by that time he had left Los Angeles because of a portentous chain of events at Fred C. Dobbs.

It started at closing time a couple of days after the accident. Among the few remaining patrons was an attractive woman who had downed more drinks than she should have. Tom, the bartender, offered to drive her home.

"Which is your car," Tom asked when they got to the parking lot.

"The Green VW," replied his companion drunkenly. "The key's in the dash..."

Tom located the vehicle, found the keys, and drove off, anticipating pleasant rewards for his good deeds.

What Tom didn't know was that there were two green Volkswagens in the parking lot, both with the keys in the dash. He and his companion had driven to her home in the wrong one. In the morning, when they realized the mistake, they immediately headed back to the bar. But it was too late. The police where already there and despite all excuses and the fact that there had obviously been an error, Tom was arrested and taken to headquarters.

Why the owner of the bar sent JT to headquarters to post bail for Tom is something JT can neither remember nor figure out. But that is what happened and it was an experience that JT wrote about at length.

When he got to the police station the police asked for JT driver's license.

”Why," JT asked ingenuously, explaining that he was just there to post bail for someone.

"Shut Up and hand it over or we'll lock you up for associating with a known criminal" was the response of the officer on duty. JT handed over his license.

JT sat down to wait. Never having had any adversarial interaction with law, he was confused. Minutes turned to hours while the police, presumably, checked on JT. During those hours the threat of the officer sank in and JT's confusion was replaced by fear. Clearly, in Los Angeles, the presumption of innocence was a fiction. It was all about power and the police had the power.

Finally, hours later, JT's documentation was returned to him and he was allowed to hand over the money for Tom's bail. But the visit to police headquarters had shaken his confidence. The next day he sold the motorcycle for $200 and, with just his guitar and the clothes on his back, JT set out to hitch-hike east. As he left Los Angeles, JT thought about the Okies who had traveled west during the great depression with signs on their Model As which said "California or Bust." "California has certainly been a bust for me," JT thought.

What JT didn't know was, that when he traced the route of the dust bowl refugees in reverse, he would be given a ride from Oklahoma City to Tulsa by Frank Carbone, a distributor for Paramount Pictures, and that Frank, out of the goodness of his heart, would orchestrate an encounter with a group of his colleagues which would change JT's life forever.

(to be continued)