Get It Done.
Enjoy What
You Have.

Preface

OUT OF OAKLAND 1968 · EDDIE GASTON

It was dusk, and we were still playing kickball in the street. We had been running free for what felt like nearly all day. Now the chill was setting in.

One by one, parents came for the other kids. I watched them leave and waited for someone to come for me and my little brother, too.

No one came.

I have carried that memory through a lot of places and a lot of years. I was too young to explain what was missing. I just knew that going home, meals, something circling “care” seemed to work differently for the other children. Someone knew where they were. Someone expected them. Someone came.

I was born in Oakland, California, in 1968. My mother, whom people called Pumpkin, died when I was very young. I never knew my father. There were relatives and places we stayed, but the steady care a child needs was missing from much of my growing up. I had to figure out things in a way that was more meandering, perhaps less direct than when you have someone beside you to connect the dots closer to real time.

I learned to get through the day. Understanding how those days had layered within me would take much longer.

This book begins with that child and follows the life he kept trying to make. It moves through the streets, basketball and boxing, work sites and unfamiliar cities, love, friendships, family, and the effort of finding my place to belong. Along the way, I became useful in a lot of ways. I could work hard, play hard, learn, help a player prepare, keep things moving, and do what needed doing. Or I’d make it so.

There was music in that life, too. Tupac was my friend. We used to hang out, finding ways to say what we saw in the world around us. I remember his early performances. When I think back on that time, I remember the friendship and the freedom of making something that came from us.

I knew rap and hip-hop before they were even named. Parks in Oakland. Performers—really just people—were finding a way to speak from their own lives. It was healthy. We were part of that creative world. I look at parts of the industry today and feel that something has been corrupted along the way. The part I want to bring into this book is the part I knew with a friend: making music, finding a voice, and having something meaningfully our own to say.

Basketball took me into a world I could hardly have imagined as a child. I spent about 20 years alongside professional players and their families, helping with training, travel, and the everyday responsibilities around a demanding career. That is what many don’t understand about elite athletics. Tens or hundreds of millions don’t happen by chance. A family and trusted relationships support it. I also worked with young athletes who were trying to find out how far their own ability could take them.

Through those years, by the grace of God perhaps, I came to live within a family whose general circumstances were very different from the ones I had known. There were extraordinary homes and opportunities. What many others watched through a media blurb or a window at a distance, I came to know from within. I became part of the daily life behind it.

I am grateful beyond my ability to communicate for so much and to so many. What stayed with me was how much it matters to have people around you who care what happens next. A family means tension and challenge. But it can give you somewhere to return to, someone to ask, and a reason to believe that your troubles do not have to be handled alone. Having lived so much of my childhood without that steadiness, I see its value more wholly (or is it holy).

There is another side to my working life. It has taken me through construction, heavy equipment, trash collection, recycling, manufacturing, and landscaping. I know the satisfaction of getting a difficult job, getting it done, and leaving a place better than I found it. There is dignity in being dependable and doing what most would never willingly do but still needs to get done. There is also a person behind the work, carrying a history that may never come up during the day.

I am a father and a grandfather now. This means there has been and still is great joy and love. I am still learning how to give my sons and their children things I needed help learning myself. But I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, caring about them is real. Finding the words, knowing how to guide them, and making that care useful takes work. That learning belongs in this story too.

Writing this book gives me a chance to look closely at the life I have lived and put words to parts of it I have carried for years. I want my family to understand more about where I came from. I want the people who have known me along the way to see how pieces connect. And I hope someone who recognizes a part of their own life here will feel there is room for their story as well.

Out of Oakland 1968 starts with a child waiting for someone to come. The years that followed brought people, work, losses, and chances I could never have seen from where I stood that evening.

What emerged spawned a look that apparently caught on—some say it’s that of an O.G. But I am not telling my story so someone can copy the swag or the roughness. I hope to shed a light that broadens perspectives so the world has more understanding, more love, more life. A child learns ways to survive—a man can carry the weight of experiences too long. Understanding that gives us a chance to write our story—to choose what comes next.

At the end of the day, maybe our purpose is to move forward. Always forward. To use the past wisely, without letting it stunt our growth or narrow possibilities for ourselves, our families, or humanity. Let’s go!