Hai! Karate!

Summer of 1966, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the first ever karate school there opened its doors. Had to be Goju-ryu though nobody ever got that detailed back then, it was just called "karate," and that to differentiate it from judo.

The teacher's name was Kako Martinez, an ex-GI who had been stationed in Okinawa for a couple years, and who got his black belt -- first dan -- just before he shipped home. He was probably three or four years older than I.

More than forty years ago, and I can remember how excited I was to hear that a dojo had opened in my town. Back then, such places were rare outside the west coast or New York City, and the only source of information about those was Black Belt Magazine.

I was out of high school and attending LSU, just eighteen, and I signed up for the first white belt class. There were only four of us to start, though a few more joined in the next couple of months.

The place was on Florida Blvd., behind a drugstore in what would eventually become a mini-mall.

The pictures are from my first Polaroid Land Camera, probably a Swinger, Model 20, and taken by my then-girfriend, later mi esposa. You shot the picture -- B&W only -- and it developed outside the camera. You had to wipe some vile-smelling chemical goop across the image using a little plastic-sponge thingee, or it would fade away. Miss a spot and it did just that -- you can see that on the edges of these pictures.

Most of my first karate lesson was spent doing a sanchin form. Basically, this is a convoluted and passing-weird breathing exercise, with a pigeon-toed stance, and you go back and forth in a kind of sweeping step while punching and blocking in slow motion. I was a lifeguard at the time, swimming a mile a day, and fit, and I can remember how exhausted I was after a few minutes of this.

Kako -- he wouldn't let us call him sensei -- gave out rank in small degrees, in order to keep student interest. You started as a white belt, then dyed half your belt yellow. Next step was full yellow, then half-orange, half-yellow, then full orange, then half-orange, half-some other color, etc. I was there about six months, made it to yellow belt. Then I got married and my bride and I pulled up stakes and moved to Los Angeles, where I spent a couple weeks checking out karate schools there before settling on Okinawa-te.

In La-La-Land, I could have trained with Chuck Norris, who had a school then; or at a Chinese kung-fu school on Hollywood Blvd. that allowed round-eyes, or in any of several other Korean or Japanese halls that were open in 1967, but on the day I went into Doversola's school, they were sparring, kicking the crap out of each other, and laughing about it, and I thought, "Wow! How tough are these guys?"

Turned out not as tough as they pretended, but they did play hard, and it was the most impressive school I'd seen back then. Plus Doversola had minor parts doing heavies in the movies and on TV, and had trained some actors for martial arts roles. There were pictures of them up on his office wall. Two I recall the most: Anne Francis -- you will recall her from Forbidden Planet -- did a short-lived series trying to become the American Emma Peel, Honey West. And Henry Silva, who was the houseboy/spy who duked it out with Frank Sinatra in the original movie version of The Manchurian Candidate, the best paranoia-brainwashed movie ever.

I signed up, and spent three years there, taking classes three or four times a week, getting to brown belt, and becoming an assistant instructor -- I had a key to the building! -- before we left town and moved back to Louisiana. Toward the end, I used to spar with folks like Jim Kelly, from Enter the Dragon, and was pleased that I could hold my own with anybody who walked in the door ...

Ah, the good old days ...