TRUE HUMAN INTEREST STORY: GROWING UP A TWIN

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                          Doug and Ken Otten at 9 years of age.

As an identical twin, I have often been asked what it is like to be a twin.  I usually reply: “Gee, I don’t know.  What is it like NOT to be a twin?”  But it is a valid question that deserves an answer.  Growing up an identical twin does have its unusual aspects.

By way of background, Ken and I grew up in Huntington Beach, CA, a coastal town with magnificent surf and a famous pier jutting out 600 yards into the Pacific.  We lived in the country on a piece of property surrounded by wooden oil derricks.  On the property was a substantial grove of eucalyptus trees and a grocery store run by our Grandma James.  Her customers were mostly oil field laborers ,known as “roughnecks,” and residents from a nearby Mexican-American community.  Ken and I were high-spirited, robust, curious kids with a good dose of mischief.  “Hellions” is probably too strong to describe us, but “hell on wheels” comes close.  Mom, who had us 3 weeks shy of her 18^th birthday, was a laid-back young mother, imperturbable, and able to take most anything in stride.  Dad had run away from home when he was 17 to join the Navy.  He thought the best way to raise boys was to treat them as recruits, chew them out when they did wrong, and make sure they kept things “ship-shape.”

The first thing about being a twin is that you are never lonely. Consider: 9 months before I was born,  I had a WOMB MATE, who subsequently became my CRIB MATE, then my ROOMMATE and PLAYMATE.  Loneliness wasn’t in the cards.  Ken saw the light of day 6 minutes before me and got the name KENNETH DOUGLAS.  I got DOUGLAS KENNETH.  We were inseparable.  We did everything together.  For example:

-Early on we discovered a love of climbing trees and jumping from high places.  We would swing through the eucalyptus trees, imitating the famous Tarzan ape-call.  Tarzan was our idol.  Our adoration of Tarzan was reinforced by the fact that Johnny Weissmuller, an Olympic gold-metal swimmer before becoming Tarzan, would occasionally come to Huntington Beach to swim.  We had soon climbed all of the surrounding oil derricks.

-When we were 7 we decided to take on a 10-foot diving board.  I was the first one off.  When I came up, Ken asked, “How was it?”  I answered, “OK, but I went down awfully deep in the water.”  Ken then launched himself from the diving board in a spectacular bellyflop.  When he came up, I asked, “Why did you do that?”  He answered, “I don’t want to go down deep in the water like you.”

-When we were 9, we jumped off the 35-foot Huntington Beach Pier, a rite of passage for the local ”beach rats.”  By jumping off the pier, you avoided swimming out from the shore through sometimes heavy surf.  When we got home and excitedly told Mom about our first jump, she nonchalantly replied, “That’s nice, boys.  Watch out for the riptide.”

-When we were 20, we jumped off the 70-foot Rainbow Bridge in Folsom, CA.  At this point, we thought the only remaining challenge was the 100-foot cliffs in Acapulco, Mexico.  But we decided it was too far away and best be left to the professional Mexican cliffdivers.  We retired from jumping from high places.

-We played football together, starting as sophomores on the junior varsity.  Ken and I played left and right halfback, respectively.  We had a novel situation there.  The fullback and the quarterback were also identical twins.  This “all-twin backfield” captured the interest of the local newspaper when reporting on our games.  By midseason, Ken and I had been promoted to first-string varsity as defensive halfbacks.

-We sang together in the high school glee club.  Ken was always the better musician.  He played trumpet in the high school band, could read music, and sang in the barbershop quartet.  He could always stay on tune while I inherited some of Mom’s inability to carry a tune in a bushel basket.  Ken and I started off together in the bass-baritone section, where I stood next to him so he could keep me on key.  Then the Glee Club Director decided he needed me in the tenor section.  Bad decision.  I missed my Rock-of- Gibraltar brother who kept me on key.

Being a twin also means putting up with a certain amount of confusion, such as: “Which twin are you, Ken or Doug?”  We looked so much alike as youngsters that even today, when I look at old photos, I don’t know which is which.  But 2 events were about to happen to make it easier to tell us apart.  When he was 8, Ken fell against an Ice cream case and badly injured his nose.  When it healed, his nose was a bit crooked.  Not to be outdone by my brother, I fell through a glass meat showcase and so severely cut my forehead that numerous stitches were required.  These childhood injuries had the positive effect that it was now easier to tell us apart.  Savvy teachers and friends would study Ken’s crooked nose and my scarred forehead and exclaim, “Aha, you can’t fool me.  I know which one you are.”

On one occasion we used our resemblance to pull off a minor coup.  The circus was in town and Ken had been hired to lift kiddies into and out of toy autos mounted on a carousel.  At the same time, the local movie theater was playing a Tarzan movie, but Kenny couldn’t go because he had to work.  So I temporarily switched places with him for 2 hours.  The carousel owner never noted the difference.

While always having someone to do things with had its good side, there was a dark side:  You always had someone to fight with.  Perhaps influenced by Grandma’s roughneck customers, who felt the only way to solve a serious disagreement was to “duke it out,” Ken and I engaged in an occasional battle.  Our fistfights always followed the same pattern: We would spar and jab at one another until someone would land a telling blow.  This would enrage the other, who would go on the offensive, throwing a flurry of punches until he landed a telling blow.  This would enrage the other, who would then counterattack.  This went on until the point of exhaustion.  Finally, one of us would ask: ” Had enough?”  The other would reply: “Yeah, I’m not mad anymore.” Then we’d go home, arm-in-arm, best buddies again.

Then there was the BB gun war.  Mom bought each of us a Daisy BB gun. There were lots of thing to shoot at around our home, like tin cans, beer bottles, an occasional mouse, rat, or gopher.  Then one day, I was climbing around some old oil field rigging when I felt a sharp, stinging sensation in my back. I wheeled around and there stood my brother with his BB gun.  Understandably angry, I confronted him and asked: “Why did you do that?”  He replied: “It was getting kind of boring shooting at inanimate objects and I was curious if it would hurt to get hit with a BB gun, so I decided to try it out on you.”  He wasn’t mad at me or anything like that.  He presented it as a bit of scientific research.  I didn’t think that was a very good answer.  I thought if he were THAT curious, he could have asked me to shoot HIM in the back.  Which I soon did.  About this time Mom got wise and took our BB guns away.  If this were to happen today, we might have said to Mom, “Mom, did you ever consider that you are violating our right to bear arms?”  And she surely would have answered, “Let’s get this clear, I’m the boss until you guys are 18 and I want RESPONSIBLE gun owners, which you‘re not.” We eventually got our BB guns back after reaching a truce never to shoot each other again.  And we didn’t.

Now, one last story about growing up a twin. Ken and I were fond of playing a game called “Older Brother-Younger Brother.”  Ken’s role as older brother was to give me good advice about how to handle life’s many problems. My role as younger brother was to follow it.  But I would sometimes be rebellious.  Kinda like the Prince William-Prince Harry situation.  After all, he only had a 6 minute lead and maybe, just maybe, they mixed up the birth certificates and I was really the older brother.  I thought I won the upper hand when I lived in Germany, which was 8 hours ahead of Boise time.  I would call Ken at midnight on the 7^th of December, our birthday, and say, “Hey there, Bro, it’s midnight and I’m one year older than you.  Now I’m the older brother and I’ve got lots of good advice for you.”  Kenny would laugh and reply, “Nope, Doogie, you’ve got it wrong.  In a case like this we go by Zulu time, which is Greenwich Mean Time.  I’m still the older brother.“ Then I would insist on local time and he would insist on Zulu time.  There we would leave it until next year, when we would go through the same ritual.  But the truth is, I was happy to be the younger brother because I knew I could not have gotten a better older brother.  I felt that way many years ago and I still feel that way after 85 years of twin-ship.  Even if he did shoot me in the back with his BB gun.

The publishers of Alpha-Phonics hope you enjoy this article about what is a fairly rare occurrence and also a part of Americana.

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