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By Root 320 0

could get girls to join them on the Ferris wheel at the Playland at the Beach amusement park. For this and other purposes, the underage party animals had to figure out how to find booze. Sly had copped an identification card from someone of legal age and had talked Frank into making use of it at a Vallejo convenience store, even though the cardholder's "race" was designated "colored." When Frank somehow succeeded in scoring a large green bottle of Rainier Ale, the friends shared a good laugh along with the intoxicant. Sly seemed to regard most racial issues lightly. Charlene recalls a Viscaynes gathering in the living room of the Stewart household and Sly entering the room from mama Alpha's kitchen. "Now I know," he declared to his fellow Viscaynes sardonically, "how funny I must look in your house."

But in one rare instance, Sly shared with Frank a deeper reflection on being a young black man in the '60s, closer to what he'd express lyrically later in "Underdog," on the first Family Stone album. "He felt," says Frank, "that he was on a ladder, and that he was trying to climb up the ladder. And there were people above, pushing him down, and there were people below him, grabbing his legs and pulling him down. And that was his struggle, more or less. It is tough being black, I guess. But I'm glad he realized there were people of his own race trying to pull him down, and people of other races pushing him down. I never had that much of a problem."

There were problems, Frank also remembers, with interracial dating, even though Sly's natural-born attractiveness transcended any color barrier. Frank compares the young Sly with their black piano-and-trumpet-playing schoolmate John Turk, who'd known Sly since childhood and would continue their musical relationship into the 1970s. "The difference was, John Turk was kind of like a lounge lizard, everybody knew what he was there for, and John Turk was there just to go get some white women. Sly, on the other hand, was there and had white women go for him.... They bugged him, they'd call him, and I was there for some of those calls, the finest girls. He'd make a date with 'em, and then he couldn't go pick 'em up. So guess who did? Yours truly!"

Thus Frank found himself yet again pressed, or persuaded, into service for his buddy. "I'd say, `How the hell do you think they're gonna like a Filipino pickin"em up any more than a black guy?' He goes, `But, man, you're not a nigger: It worked. We never had any problem. I got a few weird looks, but nobody told the girls, `You can't go out with him: Then the parents would say, `But you guys be home by twelve."' Frank would take the date to a prearranged meeting point, deliver her to Sly, and then connect with one of his own. "I'd say, `Okay, be back here by 11:30 and I'll take her home.' But I'd have to wait till 1:30 or 2:00, and then take 'em home! Thanks a lot, Sly."

Frank thought that Sly shared everything with him, but he didn't realize how well his friend was living up to his new nickname. During the L.A. stay, for example, Sly had been taking side trips with songwriters Motola and Page to record solo projects without the knowledge of his fellow travelers. Back in Vallejo, Sly had started making recordings with his younger brother, Freddie, and others, and on some weekends sustaining his instrumental chops with club bands in the black part of the Terraces, also without telling the other Viscaynes that he might have competing gigs.

On a double date shortly before spring graduation in '61 (Sly had to wait and make up a unit in summer school before getting his diploma), Frank came to the realization that his best friend had been secretly carrying on a relationship with a sister Viscayne, Ria Boldway. More than any other member of the group, Ria seems to have been sensitive to racial issues in their community. She and Sly and John Turk all joined a group called the Youth Problems Committee, specifically to address these matters. Ria was also more interested than most of her white girlfriends, even as a preteen, in the rhythm and blues being