The Myth of My Dumb Friends

Here is a brief article that appeared in the December 2008 edition of Alameda magazine, written by Mary McInerney:

If you love the story of Jim Morrison of The Doors placing a marker in Jackson Park in memory of his “dumb friends” at Alameda High School, maybe you shouldn’t read any further.
The truth is he didn’t do it. Yes, Morrison lived in Alameda. And yes, he attended Alameda High. He may have even hung out in Jackson Park with his friends. But the real story of the marker is a whole lot more ordinary—albeit pretty amusing and kind of weird, too—than the legend that surrounds it.
In 1920, 37 years before Morrison arrived in Alameda, Isabelle Clark, an old-time resident of the neighborhood, had the marker and a giant, curved concrete bench built at the south end of Jackson Park. According to Woodruff Minor’s book Alameda at Play, the marker was placed by Clark in honor of her late husband. It reads, “In Memory of My Dumb Friends.” A slight? Not at all. “Mrs. Clark loved animals, hence the inscription,” Minor writes. A drinking trough—presumably for her beloved but speechless animals—was originally part of the Clark Memorial but has since been removed.
Over the years, the urban myth arose that Jim Morrison, who was 13 when his family moved to Alameda for two years in 1957, came back and placed the “Dumb Friends” marker to remember his high school buddies. The year Morrison moved to Alameda, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was newly published. “Fud” Ford, who met Morrison during the first weeks of ninth grade at Alameda High, remembered the time well.
“We wanted to be beatniks like the characters in On the Road,” Ford recounts in Frank Lisciandro’s A Feast of Friends. “We’d put on sweatshirts and Levis and wear sandals and go over to San Francisco, to North Beach and hang out … in front of the coffeehouses, or go in and listen to the poetry sometimes.”
When his family left for Virginia, Morrison didn’t leave much behind in Alameda, other than his friends’ fond memories. “We wanted to get on the road and travel and go taste beer in Mexico and see if we could pick up women in France,” Ford told Lisciandro. “Just mostly fantasies: what turned out to be fantasies for me, reality for him.”