16. 1st steps to LA Dodgers

1991

Dear Dad
All is fine.
The children are visiting Lesia for three weeks the longest they’ve spent with her in six years.

We found that we could stay in the house where we were for longer so we’re not moving to Victoria. We rented this house for six-months because we thought we’d move. The property was going to be redeveloped and two town houses were to be put up but the economy is so bad the owner has put it off for six-months. I spoke with him yesterday, he doesn’t know so we could be here for several years. The last three houses we rented were sold due to the economy. We hate moving.
When I had the tofu business I was buying a house on seven acres in Mount Compass  but…

At least I can continue my university studies as I’m doing them off-campus.  The university is in Geelong near Melbourne (Deakin University). I’m taking a four-year B.A. in journalism.

I’m still writing lot, sending off manuscripts to publishers. I’m also writing about my whole tofu experience; making tofu and raising two boys had to be the hardest thing ever. I still do picture-poems and I have them in a few shops.

This is just a short letter I thought you’d like to see a local tourist guide. I haven’t taken the Christmas film in for development yet but I will. The children were so happy because Lesia stayed for Christmas.

The children hadn’t seen us together for over six years. I made a big dinner:  turkey, bread etc. it was the worst meal I’ve ever made. The bread didn’t rise the yeast was out of date and the turkey was tough I burnt the potatoes and the Jello didn’t set. All that is true. Leigh said I couldn’t cope because there was a woman in the house. I told him that seven-year-olds weren’t supposed to make those sorts of observations.

Leigh is very big for his age. He wears size 10.  He is almost as big as Sacha. Sacha is tall and slim. Leigh has the Russian Lesia’s side of the family, big boned. As all children they have their obsessions. Sacha’s is trains and Leigh’s is baseball. He’s very good at it.

If you find you have too much time on your hands, write the children. Leigh runs out to the mailbox every day.  He loves mail.
We have a kitten now (we’ve had a dog for years). I think someone left it and Leigh brought it home. I don’t care for cats but it’s here to stay, I think. We named it Cincinnati.  I think because they won the World Series last.
Love Terrell January 8, 91

I enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts program at age forty-two.

We bought our first computer in late 1990. I had been accepted into Deakin University and I was very excited. I enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts program, February 1st and chose to major in literature and journalism. I had completed my first year of the TAFE certificate course in Writing for the Media and I had another two years of that at the rate I was going. Continuing with my TAFE courses I was well on my way as a college student at the young age of forty-two and a half. Perhaps I was a late bloomer; got married and had my first child at thirty-three and my first (and only) divorce at the age of thirty-seven. I had first started university at age thirty back at Towson State University though I never completed that. Now I was amongst the ranks of those who would be getting a college degree at age forty-two.

Society looks at age as such a certain thing, but I always thought that whatever we are doing at the time we are doing it is the age at which we should be doing it. My (adopted) father received his ten-year driver’s license renewal last year from the over-regulated state of New York. He can drive until April 2012 at which time the State of New York will no doubt send him his next renewal. Of course the fact that he was 97 when he received the renewal (and still driving and Homeland Security never considered him a threat to American life; but as anyone who has ridden in the same car as he was driving would know he most definitely is a threat to the American way of life) and that he will be one-hundred and seven when his current license expires does not seem to matter. Age is not an indicator of much.  My father eats all the wrong things. For the past decade or two he has lived mostly on desserts and junk food.

He has not taken herbal supplements that health food stores try to convince us we need to take to live longer and generally he has not done any of the things that people who are selling longevity are hustling.

Young people die, old people die, young people finish university and I, as an older person was going to complete a college degree no matter what.
When I received the first books and assignments from Deakin I was so excited. It was like getting Christmas presents. I tore open the packages and began reading then and there. It seemed so ideal, the children were in school and now I was. I had signed up for three subjects even though I was told the most I could do as an off campus student was two. There also had been the question of whether I should take a foundation course as I had not actually finished high school even though I had a high school diploma. I had completed almost three years though closer to two years of academic study at Towson State. Somehow, I convinced whoever was in the administration office that I should jump right in and that I should take three courses and here I was with all the books and assignments. I was at the top of the world. Usually, students will take six to ten years to complete their BA as off-campus students but I was convinced I would do it in four, maybe even three years. I realised it was much different than doing it on campus, but I had become quite use to being home and doing whatever I did without anyone there to assist me in person. Doing three courses per semester would put me on track to finish my schooling in four years which would take me to the end of 1994.

1994 seemed so far away. I wrote down where I would be in four years.  Of course, I would be living in upstate New York, in the Clifton Park area and my children by the end of 1994 would be eleven and thirteen years old. It would be good for Leigh for his baseball as he could be in a little league team and Sacha would be playing basketball for Shenendehowa and I would be completing my university degree and running whatever business I would be involved in at the time. I still had one year left of my bankruptcy to complete before the children and I could leave Australia. I had not said anything to Lesia about our moving to the States at any time and there was still the problem of a little court order that proclaimed that I “shall not remove the children from Australia” but… of course I just figured at the right time the cosmos would shift gears in my favour and everything would work out for us to escape Australia.

 When Lesia came to share Christmas with us I was already deep into my studies having gotten the material a month earlier. I showed her what I was doing but she had no enthusiasm for what I was doing in life as usual. I suppose in all fairness I did not give a shit what she was doing either but as all humans are basically self-centred, I wanted acknowledgement that what I was doing was as special as I believed it was. Lesia looked at the material and expressed her doubts about distance education and proclaimed that I was not really getting an education and that it would not really. By now I was so use to her running derogatory commentary about me that I did not pay any attention except to wish that I had not shared the fact that I was going to university with her. She said even though I was enrolled at a university and that it was insignificant the fact was that this was just another one of my flighty tangents and that I would never complete it anyway because I was the type of person that was incapable of completing anything. Granted she was right in the sense that a lot of my projects, well at this point in my life, all my projects, never seemed to come to anything.

The reality, in my mind however was that the reason my projects or endeavours never succeeded was because of outside influences and given the chance I could do anything I wanted to and going to university off-campus was something I could do because there was no way anyone or anything could stand in the way. She was an astrologer too so she must have noticed that I had Mercury in the ninth house of higher education and not only that but that transit Jupiter was making its once every 12-years journey through my ninth house. Really? Who would not have seen that? And of course, about 12-years later whilst doing my PhD Jupiter was once again going through my ninth house and eventually goosing my Mercury.

My tofu business was different, I was trying to do the whole thing plus raise children on my own and I had machinery problems as well money problems because my biggest distributors went bankrupt. I was also very bad at keeping track of money and business generally, but hey, we cannot all be good at everything. The fact was, even though I was in my forties I had not exactly found what I was good at. I was good at parenting I thought though not parenting with someone else. I knew I was much disciplined and that had to be useable for something. I knew I could work hard at whatever I did and I had proven that with my tofu business. Putting these two basic traits together I knew I could persevere to get a university degree in four years. I was going to do this school thing simply.

 I did not say I was going to go off and study for a heap of years and get a lot of degrees and end up with a PhD so I would be Doctor Terrell. That would be just a stupid thing to say. I was going to study for four years and that was that and I would have a BA which would prove that I could complete something. Of course, sitting here writing this now in March 2004 having done university study without a break since 1990 and putting the final touches on my final edit of my PhD before sending it to the examiners makes the past future’s speculatory thoughts a liar or at least an unforeseen mental masturbatory miss. (I received my doctoral degree in 2005 – University of South Australia)

I wish I could get my futures correct. I think something will happen and it does not no matter what I do or plot. Using astrology does not work, using tarot cards, or the I-Ching does not work and palmistry is just another wank. I used to believe in all these things and I still do but now only in a misguided hopeful way. I stopped believing in palmistry soon after observing that Leigh had a very short life-line it just stopped in the upper third of his palm and I could not imagine losing either of my children so I stopped believing that there was anything to palmistry because it is only proper for one’s children to outlive them and I knew intuitively that my children would outlive me. At the end of the day we do not have a clue what will happen five minutes from now. Just like the people who walked into the World Trade Centre Towers on the morning of September 11th, 2001, did not know they would not walk out.

Our house in Victor Harbor was large. Sacha had his own section with the largest of the bedrooms. We moved so often that we took turns for who would get the largest bedroom. I had the largest in Mount Compass then in Port Elliot it was Leigh’s turn and Middleton it was my turn again but that was only for six months and now I got the smallest room. I had to walk through Leigh’s room to get to my room which was more like an afterthought of architecture than an actual room. I think at one time it was a shopfront. It was about five feet wide and twenty feet long, so I put my bed in sideways, and I had a small desk. There was a door to the street that was sealed from my room, and the two windows were painted over so it was more of a storage room than an actual living space. What I did like about the room was that I could hear the ocean all night washing up on the shore a block away. This was our third house that I could go to sleep listening to the sea. Even now writing this I listen to the sounds of the ocean meeting the shore and I am in upstate New York far from the ocean. I have a CD called Neurosync that has subliminal messages scrolling across my screen and it has sounds and the one I listen to most often is the ocean with alpha program. I had to walk through Leigh’s room to get out of the house or go to the bathroom or any other part of the house. The two boy’s bedrooms were larger than the living room and both of their rooms were probably built as extra living rooms to begin with. Sacha had a door out of his room and now that he was ten years old, he felt he was old enough to control his own coming and goings. He had his own toilet too.

We got our first computer soon after we moved in. I was still unemployed and when I started university I got an extra supplemental allowance and one day there was an extra $300 in my account so we went off and bought the newest and greatest gadget imaginable; a Commodore 64. I still have it packed away somewhere in a shed in Australia. We were so excited when we first got it. The Commodore 64 was essentially a keyboard with 64 megabytes of memory, and it connected to the television. My father, at the age of 98, tells us stories of his family’s first car. It was late 1990 when I was accepted at Deakin to begin in January 1991. By the time January arrived I had already done my first few assignments, and we had our Commodore 64 going almost non-stop. Sacha turned ten in January 1991 and Leigh was seven and a half.

When my father was the children’s age it was somewhere between 1912 and 1915 and his family had their basic black Model T Ford. My father lived on a farm on the Clifton Park and Halfmoon line in upstate New York in a relatively poor family but there was a neighbour who had a bigger luxuriously car and they were the only ones who were rich enough to have a car that was not a Model T. It was much the same in our world with most people having a Commodore 64 and a few well off folks with an IBM computer. At the beginning of any technology, it seems someone comes along and makes a product for the masses. Model T for the masses, Commodore 64 for the masses, then the Apple Mac, mobile (cell) phones for the masses, life for the masses. I was so happy with our computer. Leigh was the first to learn how to write some programs on it. Sacha and I never did learn how to write programs on the computer and it was clear that the world of computers was going to be Leigh’s thing. Sacha was happy with computer game modules like our Atari console, then the Sega and finally (for our history together anyway) the Nintendo. Leigh had a few computer games which were all baseball games, and Sacha had those street fighting types that parents were constantly complaining about. It is interesting how we are drawn to distinct behaviours and lifestyles when we are young and they often give clues to our adult life: My brother used to dress up as a woman for Halloween and I use to dress up as a hobo.

Every afternoon when the boys would come home from school we would walk the one block to the beach.  Puppy would chase seagulls. We seldom went into the water and instead our daily beach culture would consist of us building things and throwing a ball. When the children were at school I would often sit close to the water and write. This was a decade before the popularity of laptops or at least before I would get one, so my writing was all done on paper. I was writing a story about being a single parent.  I have no idea where it is now or even what I had to say. Other times I would work on my lessons for Deakin. I was taking a full load of courses which considering I had not been in school for about fifteen years since Towson State in the mid-1970s was quite an endeavour.

I loved my courses:

• Strands of media criticism for the first semester and comparative journalism studies for the second
• Narrative
• Introduction to the performing arts

And when Lesia told me she did not think it was like getting a real degree when she came to visit that Christmas of 1990 soon after I had begun the academic trek, I knew she was wrong. I continued with my Writing for the Media courses through TAFE and I felt overall that I was learning stuff. I worked hard at my studies. As it would turn out I would only receive one good grade in my four years of study and that was a D (distinction with a grade in the 70% - 79% RANGE). Most of my grades were C (credit 60% - 69%) and P (pass 50% - 59%). My grades were similar to the ones I got whilst at Shenendehowa and at Towson State; it was obvious I would never be an A student no matter how hard I tried. The subject I got my one D for was narrative and that was the second semester of my first year. When I received that I thought I was really doing it all right. The fact that I got only a pass for journalism and for the performing arts course meant little to me. After all my lifelong ambition had always been to be a writer and narrative was about writing. For these off-campus courses not only was there a lot of reading to do but also a lot of writing. For each course there would be between three and four essays with each about three-thousand words. I loved writing and I was quite shocked when my first essays came back with low marks and lots of red lines through what I had written. I was forty-three years old and I had been writing all my life; how dare these academics give me low marks? But I did not give up I would study harder and rewrite an essay until I least received a passing mark for it.

The children began to go to their mothers every weekend for a while. I would put them on the Premier Bus that trolled from Port Elliot to Adelaide, stopping at Victor Harbor, Mount Compass, Mclaren Vale and Noarlunga, on a Saturday morning at ten AM and collect the boys Sunday at five PM from the bus stop in Victor. Each weekend I would write a story to them and it became a ritual that the first thing we would do when we got home would be to listen to a story or two I had composed whilst they were at their mothers.
I wrote my stories on the Commodore 64 which sat on Leigh’s desk. The weekends when the boys were with Lesia and when they were at school was the only time I would have to use the computer. Leigh had basically two places at our home. Either we would be outside throwing a ball or he would be inside in front of the computer. Leigh would write little programs that could be done on the computer to make a ball bounce across the screen or draw some figures that would move.

He spent a large amount of time typing in his baseball cards. Leigh had thousands of cards. In the early 1990s there was a trading card frenzy in Australia and baseball cards were very popular. Unlike the States where baseball cards are always popular, they were only in fashion for a few years at least in the State of South Australia. I use to look at some of the cards with Leigh and I would tell him that each person’s dream had come true. Each baseball card represented a story of how someone had worked hard at their dream and having themselves appear on a card meant that at least some part of their dream had manifested. We would make up baseball cards for Leigh. Even though he had as of yet not played on any team he knew someday he would be a ballplayer. We would cut out a photo of him with a bat in hand and on the Commodore we would type up some stats for his pitching, of course he would have a few 25 wins and two or three losses, years, and we would print and glue them on the back of his photo and make up his baseball card. A decade later he would be on a baseball card and his rookie card for the Los Angeles Dodgers shows the manifestation of a dream.

My father used to send boxes of baseball cards and whenever we could afford to, we would buy packs of cards. Leigh had decided to list all his cards and sell off the duplicates. He had prices on many of his cards and his collection continued to grow. When I moved out of my last home I shared with the boys in 2001, I lugged a huge box of thousands and thousands of baseball cards out and put them into storage. Someday when I am caught up with things I may sit down and go through them – maybe even sell most of them on E-Bay. Now in March 2015 they are in my shed, and I am still thinking of selling them one by one. Perhaps that is what retirement is for. If you want one just shout out.

Every baseball card would be a story, a potential novel or movie script. To look at all the cards it is easy to dismiss the person whose picture is on the front and whose stats are on the back but having gone through the cycle from throwing that first pitch to Leigh when he was six-years old to the day he became Channel Seven Junior Sports Star of the Year, signed his contract with the LA Dodgers, to having his own real baseball card to the present day has been an amazing trek and I know everyone who is on a baseball card has gone through a lot of work to get there; especially for those who were signed from a foreign country. It is easy to dismiss a ballplayer and to complain about how much money they get but when the story is told and we realise that the player has spent more than a decade of hard work and dedication and sacrifice and he or she stays away from drugs and alcohol then it makes sense to pay them for their efforts and dedication.  

I collected a few baseball cards when I was a teenager but it was not cool to collect them by the time the mid-1960s came into being so I stopped. The only memory I have of them is one time I stole a pack of baseball cards from the gas station next to our farm house in Clifton Park and the owner told my father and he prayed for me heaps so that if I suddenly died I would not go directly to hell for stealing. Just think of it – burn in hell for eternity for grabbing some baseball cards – now there is a creator that I want to worship. I was in the bad books for a few weeks over that and if only my father knew what I had done (so far) in this life the mere pinching a pack of baseball cards would not have been such a bad thing. Everything is what we want to interpret it as or give it value as. I could say that because the gentlemen reported me to my father for stealing one cheap, probably ten-cent, pack of baseball cards that the wrath of God was visited on that place of the world.

When I liberated my pack of baseball cards Clifton Park was a peaceful community. We had our nice country farm and next to us was a small service station and across two-lane Route Nine was another service station and there was one next to that. That was the sum of commerce in our area; three gas stations. I believe the one next to us where I was offered the baseball cards by my inner self was an Esso station. I do remember the one across from us was a Mobile station. So the karma that God visited upon the area was to smote the place with concrete and to wipe out not only the Esso station that was there but also She levelled the whole area turning it into a shit wasteland of highways and shopping centres and fast food places full of fat, mentally inapt, socially unfit, and ugly people from upstate New York.

Forty years later I was helping my son collect baseball cards and fostering his dream to one day be on one.
The years 1991 to 1994 were a period of somewhat settleness. Sacha learned to surf and would spend a lot of time surfing.

Leigh Neuage and Sacha Neuage with surfboard

He was also becoming a good basketball player. Sacha tried to teach me to surf but no matter how hard I would try I could never stand upright on a board. Leigh never tried and was not interested in the ocean. We even got ourselves into a routine for a few years. Starting in 1991 both boys began schooling at Victor Harbor Primary, the fourth school they were in. We had the old Ford Falcon that the grandmother had bought when Sacha had done some seven-year-old ritual at the local Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Hindmarsh or one of those Adelaidean suburbs. Leigh was in about year three and Sacha would have been about grade six in 1991, and I would take them and collect them from school each day, as Victor Primary did not have any buses. After school we would go the couple of blocks to Victor Harbor High School and play baseball. There was no formal baseball in the area and no one would join us so I would pitch, and the boys would hit.

Puppy was not a fetch type of dog and he would just chase some birds then lay down and go to sleep. Only once, when another dog came through the Victor Harbor High School oval and chased after each ball the kids hit did Puppy run after one and bring it back. After proving he was just as capable of fetching a ball as any other dog he never did it again. For the first couple of years, we went out and hit a ball Sacha would hit them a lot further than Leigh could until one day Leigh hit the ball as far as Sacha. After a year or so Sacha no longer was interested in baseball and concentrated on basketball and surfing. My overall memory of raising Sacha and Leigh was how different they were. They never quarrelled and rarely even disagreed; they just did not have much to do with one another.
We did a lot together and were together most of the time. They both just had totally different interests from music to sporting interest. I was always amazed at how different they were even though they looked like they just had incredibly different personalities. Ah there is the proof of astrology you wanker new age people would rabbit on about.

Instead of having the children ride the bus the whole distance from Victor Harbor to Adelaide I began driving to the train station at the start of the suburban train to Adelaide at Noarlunga, a half hour drive from Victor Harbor. Lesia was supposed to meet me and I would drive back but sometimes she would not be there so I would take the train into Adelaide with them; another half hour ride. On the train to Adelaide the first stop after Noarlunga is Christie Downs. It was the first time that we had ridden the train and the side we were on faced what would become an important part of our life. It would be where Leigh’s career would be born and established. It would be the ceremonial site of Leigh’s career from beginning to end. Leigh saw it first, pointing to the baseball field and saying we should check the place out.
We had not found any place to play baseball down south and driving to Adelaide several times a week would be too difficult. I wrote down the name of the baseball club from the sign on the corner of the field.

Lesia met the children in Adelaide at the train station and I went back to Noarlunga. I did not think anything more about the baseball park that weekend and on Sunday I took the Premier bus to Adelaide to collect the children. I do not remember why I did not drive in. Lesia dropped the children off at the bus station and the first thing Leigh asked was whether I had found out about the baseball park that we had seen and when he could start playing baseball.
I looked in the phonebook and the only listing under baseball for Christies Downs was Southern District Tee-Ball Club. We did not want tee-ball, as Leigh wanted to play baseball and tee-ball did not use a pitcher but instead had the batter hitting off of an apparatus instead of hitting a ball thrown at him.

I rang the number and spoke to a lady who told me that baseball was also played at the park. I said my son wanted to play baseball that he was very good at it and his ambition in life was to play professional baseball in the States. She asked me what position he played and I said he was a pitcher and that he was very good. She said that the seniors were always looking for talented ball players and a good pitcher would be welcomed. We chatted for a while about when the season began and she said that registration was the next week, so I was feeling quite positive about finding the place at just the right time. She then asked how old my son was, and I said, “He is eight years old”. There was a pause and I think a laugh on the other side of the phone and she said he would have to play tee-ball until ten. I asked about little league as they play it in the States, but I was informed that there was no little league in Australia and that there was only tee-ball until the age of ten then they could play pee-wee. I was quite distraught and told Leigh we would have to wait a couple of years to play baseball, but he thought playing tee-ball would at least be doing something with baseball. Leigh insisted on going to the park as soon as possible so when we got home, we drove back to Christies Downs and walked around the park and onto the senior’s playing field. Leigh pitched some to me from the pitcher’s mount. It was then I realised how far it was for seniors to throw and that Leigh had been pitching to me a lot closer than baseball would have it and that is why I thought he threw so fast. We met the groundskeeper, and he told us about the club. It was almost one hundred years old, and we should sign up right away to play the upcoming season.

1991/92 Southern Districts Tee-Ball Club U-10 Leigh Neuage first left Sacha Neuage third from right 1st row.

The next week the children and I went to Southern Districts and signed up. Sacha and Leigh were now officially baseball or at least tee-ball players. It was the first official team both children were since the school basketball team that we were eventually unceremoniously booted off. We got brown uniforms that were sponsored by a chocolate company. The team’s name was the Warriors, and the coach was the first American that I had met in Australia, Richard Teague. He was from California and had been stationed in the Northern Territory in the military. He married an Australian, had a couple of kids and had settled south of Adelaide in Christies Beach. Being an American, baseball was in his blood, and he was the coach of the tee-ball team because his sons were the same age as my boys.
Leigh had a playmate from school whose father wanted to start a community radio station. Sandy was the first single male parent I had met. Over the next couple of years whilst living in Victor I would meet several other single male parents but Sandy became the closest to being a friend in all my years in Australia. I kept very much to myself but Sandy would talk me into going to the pub with him on weekends when my boys were at their mother’s home. Sandy was a guitar player and he once had a recording studio in the Adelaide Hills where he recorded several famous people.

Sandy wanted to set up a radio station in Victor and was recruiting volunteers to help. He had all the equipment to get started. Our first meeting was at the Victor Hotel and consisted of Rik Rosalski, a Mr. Beard, Sandy and myself. I wanted to be the news person to full fill part of my university requirements in journalism. At our first meeting we elected Sandy as president and Beard as the vice president. I was the secretary. It would be my job to draw up a charter so we could get a license. I went into Adelaide and gathered what information I could and copied the charter of some other community radio station and on our Commodore 64 wrote up what would become the new radio station.

At our first meeting we discussed what should be our format, goals and name. Because we lived on the Encounter Coast I suggested Encounter FM to be our name. It was like my tofu name, Light Food in that there was more than one meaning to the name. Encounter Bay is the place of encounters, and I thought that it always would be. It was also the name of the sitcom that the boys and I were writing to sell to a major production company – though that became lost somewhere along the way.
“In 1802, Matthew Flinders met the French sailor Nicholas Baudin who was also navigating the waters off the mouth of the Murray River. Baudin named this region after the French wanderer Charles Pierre Claret, Comte de Fleurieu. Aboriginal communities have lived along it for over 30 000 years. Europeans first charted it when the Dutch came along its western fringe in the early seventeenth century. But the first systematic charting was by a British expedition under Matthew Flinders and a French expedition under Nicholas Baudin in 1802. After that sealers and whalers established rough camps and rough lives on Kangaroo Island and the mainland. With official white settlement in 1836 came the beginnings of systematic colonisation and the start of the many coastal communities that line the coast today.” Viewed 20 March 2004 on the Internet at, http://www.Geocities.com/Wellesley/1552/ourguide.html (geocities went out of business in 2000-something.

I also wanted to see my sons get involved, I knew Sacha would want to. I was excited about the whole idea of being involved in the beginning of a radio station and of course I was not content with simply a small community radio station in Victor Harbor. I often wonder what it is in my genes that makes it impossible to just let things be and not attempt to make everything so much more than what it could possibly be.

We got the radio station up and broadcasting. I do not recall all the details, but I know a lot of hours went into it especially with Beard, Sandy and me. Somehow, we got a caravan to put our equipment in and at some point, in 1991 we were on air. Sacha had his own radio show and played music for his age group. He wrote up funny little stories, as he was a fan of the American tabloid Weekly World News with their strange stories about UFOs and fat people, two headed cats, three-legged people and whatever else they created. I tracked this newspaper for many years as they would make all these dour predictions and just like the various Internet conspiracy sites and predictors, many who claim direct linkage with Nostradamus or who claim they are the new Nostradamus none of the predictions came true. Sacha would write up some very creative stories from UFO sightings to monsters in Mount Compass. He got himself into trouble at times for allegedly swearing on air or for reading the letters from young girls in some teenage magazine that were asking about their first period or other intimate topics.

Sacha  and Leigh  on air at Encounter FM

Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 77.