By Lee Schoenbart

Carmel Valley motocross champion Broc Glover’s mother remembers when her son was one of three future racing stars that lived a half dozen blocks from each other as kids.

She also remembers as a young girl telling her friends her father was on narcotics. What she meant was her dad was on the narcotics division of the San Diego Police Department.

“People used to ask me when I was a kid what my Dad did and I said, ‘Well, he’s on narcotics,’ which wasn’t exactly what I meant. He was a narcotics officer and it sort of raised eyebrows,” said Barbara Mueller-Glover with a laugh.

Mueller-Glover is a third-generation San Diegan and the mother of Broc Glover, a six-time American Motorcycle Association National Motocross Championship winner.

Barbara is the daughter of Will Mueller Jr. and Geraldine Mueller.

“My Dad – Will Mueller, Jr. – was a native San Diegan. Will Jr. was a policeman for 25 years,” she said. “He went to high school coincidentally at Herbert Hoover with Ted Williams (the late Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer).”

Her mother, Geraldine, moved from Colorado and married Will Jr. Barbara recalled her father as “a good guy” and “a great big six-foot-four tall, quiet John Wayne sort of fellow.”

“His father – Will Sr. – was a native San Diegan and a Naval officer, she said.

Will Sr. died an untimely death around 1933 or 1934 when he was hit and killed by an Adams Avenue streetcar in Kensington. It fell to Will Jr., 17 years old at the time, and his older sister to help their mother provide for the family that included three other children.

“After his father was killed, he finished high school, went to work and made a career at the San Diego Police Department and put three younger siblings through college,” Barbara said of her father. “In those days, you did that. If something happened to the parents, then the older kids took over and did the finances and such and lived on the pension from the dad and contributed to the home. It was different than it is now.”

On the other side of Barbara’s family was Charles and Betty Lou Morris who came to San Diego in 1939. Barbara’s grandfather – Charles – worked for the 11th Naval Supply District all through World War II.

“Betty Lou, ‘Granny,’ as we called her, was pretty much a housewife,” she said. “Granny was born in Kentucky and lived in Ohio. Granny loved the ocean and being able to grow flowers here that would not survive in the inclement weather back east.”

It was the drives and the daytrips to the beach Barbara best remembers of her Grandpa Charles and Granny.

“It was sort of an all-day trip to drive to Torrey Pines (State Reserve) along the coast and you could go fishing in the surf,” she said. “My Grandpa and I used to do that because there weren’t very many people, so you didn’t have to worry about throwing fishing hooks out there in the water.”

Barbara’s childhood was bookended by pre- and post-World War II.

“I remember as a little child, because it was during the war, driving along Pacific Coast Highway and looking across at what was Convair (previously Consolidated Aircraft and later General Dynamics) and all the camouflage,” she said. “They had Convair camouflaged so that it looked like fields of produce. You couldn’t tell there was a defense plant.”

During the war, the automakers in Detroit suspended family car operations and aided the military effort. Chevy last produced a car in 1939 before World War II. Its 1946 Chevrolet Sedan was one of the most coveted vehicles of the post-war era.

“Our big, thrilling car was a 1946 black four-door Chevrolet, and I remember my Grandpa (Charles Morris) bought it for $800 and he let me hold the money,” Barbara said. “I held it in my hot little hands and thought there was nothing more amazing.”

Personal tragedy for Barbara Mueller led her to fate when she met and married Broc’s father Richard Glover in 1954.

“Our family is very complicated,” she explained. “I was married and pregnant with Dana (her first and only daughter) and my husband – Robert Hampton – was in a car accident and died six days later and so I had Dana by myself.”

They had been married less than a year.

“It was sad because we had grown up together,” she said of Hampton’s death. “He was the big brother of one of my playmates and so I had known him since I was 5 years old.

“Bob went to Hoover High School and I went to San Diego High,” Barbara said. “We lived right on the border between El Cajon Boulevard and University Avenue and you could choose either school. He chose the red-and-white and I chose the blue-and-white. He lived on Georgia Street and I lived on Park Boulevard.

“He was a very nice, sweet young man,” she said. “I was three months along when he was killed.

“Robert,” she said, “worked at Ryan Aeronautical where they made airplanes. He wasn’t an engineer; he worked within the production.”

Two years later, when Dana was 1-and-a-half-years old, Barbara met Richard “Dick” Glover who moved from Oregon to San Diego when he was discharged from the Navy.

“Then I had Marc, Eric and Broc,” she said. “Broc is our baby.”

Glover was an air conditioning contractor and they built the family home east of San Diego in El Cajon in 1965 because, as Barbara said, “It was a good place for Dick’s air conditioning business, certainly much better than San Diego proper with that beautiful weather that they have.”

El Cajon proved to be fertile ground for athletes including racecar driver Jimmie Johnson and baseball players Brian and Marcus Giles. However, the area’s most prolific sport was motorcycles.

“We were in a neighborhood of motocross champions out here,” Barbara said. “Broc lived on a corner lot. Ricky Johnson was two doors down from us and then little Scotty Brady.

“There were three motocross riders within six blocks that became champions, except all of those little boys are now gray-haired dads with teenage kids,” she said with a laugh.

Broc is the youngest of the four children, which includes his sister Dana and brothers Marc and Eric.

About the three boys having four-letter given names that all end in “C” Barbara said, “It’s not a coincidence and I’m sure Broc would not want this to be public knowledge,” she said with another laugh without elaborating on the family secret.

The four siblings have given Barbara 12 grandchildren and are the family’s fifth-generation San Diegans.

“At one point we have five generations of living family here in San Diego,” Broc said. “That’s pretty darn rare.”

Back to the beginning Broc’s mother noted that both sets of his great-grandparents are buried at Fort Rosecrans.

Charles Morris, Broc’s great-grandfather and Barbara’s grandfather, served in the Army during World War I.

“He was gassed with the mustard gas in France and it ruined his lungs,” she said. “He spent the last six or seven years of his life in military hospitals.”

Will Mueller Sr., also Broc’s great-grandfather and Barbara’s grandfather, was a career Naval officer.

Reflecting on his own life, Broc said, “Part of my motorcycle training I spent in Del Mar. I’ve been going to Del Mar, surfing and other things, since the 1970s.

“I knew that once I got done with my motorcycle racing career, I was going to end up in Del Mar eventually.

He said, “I remember Del Mar when there wasn’t anything east of the freeway,” which is true to form as the Del Martians refuse to recognize “the Heights” as part of Del Mar where a sign was erected noting the community of Carmel Valley.