"Father Time" fondly remembers the good old days of meth.

He lives on the third floor of the Stanislaus County Jail in downtown Modesto, and the nickname comes from jailers who've been letting him in and out since anyone can remember. At 63, he's the elder statesman of Central Valley meth chefs, a walking encyclopedia on the history of cooking crank in the Valley.

He's a big man with thinning, shoulder-length hair and a white beard touched with patches of brown. He has a piercing stare, and he coughs frequently. His teeth are missing, a feature made more noticeable by a tongue that moves wildly about his mouth. He gives the appearance of being ruggedly unhealthy.

Father Time grew up in Modesto and has used drugs since he was 13. But he didn't start cooking meth until he was well into his 30s. One day, a friend who had run out of gas showed up at his front door with a copy of the "Doctor's Referral Book" that he'd stolen from a medical office. Father Time didn't want the book but gave his friend $10 for it.

Two weeks later, as he sat in his living room, bored with television, he began thumbing through the section on pills. At the time, he worked as a bodyguard for a pill dealer who sold drugs between Fresno and Modesto. When the pill section ended, Father Time started to close the book, but the next section caught his eye. Methamphetamine. He turned the first page, and there was a recipe.

"I thought, 'Why the hell should I pay $2,000 an ounce for this stuff if I can make it?' "

He and his girlfriend drove to Modesto Junior College and purchased some chemistry textbooks. They bought used glassware. Then they stopped by drug and farm-supply stores for the ingredients. That night, they set up their lab and began cooking 4 ounces of meth.

Two days later, he approached his girlfriend with the finished product and said, "Here, try this."

They laughed because they both were afraid to try it. So they drove to a small Modesto biker bar and found some friends who liked crank. And they loved Father Time's crank. They paid him $2,400 for 3 ounces. The entire batch, including glassware and books, had cost just $200 to make.

"When I started, it was for fun more than anything," he said. "At first, it was just something to do on the weekends, if we had a  run or something. Then we got playing around with the s***. Making Halloween crank. St. Patrick's Day crank. We done everything."

People walking into Father Time's Christmas parties weren't served eggnog; they were directed to a table with two dishes full of red and green crank rocks. They wished each other Merry Christmas, and then some tried to stay awake until the new year.

Before long, Father Time had become one of the pioneers of the meth trade. When ephedrine became a restricted substance in the states, he made trips to Ensenada, Mexico, where it still was legal and easily obtainable, and smuggled loads of it back across the border. When that grew too risky, he paid Mexican "border brothers" who were desperate to make it north. They would carry 100 pounds of ephedrine on their backs in late-night border crossings, and he would pick them up in spots near San Diego and drop them off in the agricultural center of their choice.

When smuggling ephedrine from Mexico got too tough, Father Time turned to pseudoephedrine, a substance found in over-the-counter asthma and allergy pills. When California's laws governing the sales of pseudoephedrine stiffened, he made runs to the East Coast. But he was always careful: "Buy a car. Make sure the tags are legal. You stay the speed limit. And don't try to stay up four straight days. Eat regular. Get a motel. Just a tourist, that's what you are."

When he was back East, he would rent a motor home for two days, using it as a mobile office that had enough room to extract the pseudoephedrine from the cold pills. He would drive the motor home to a park or camping area. When he was done, he'd pack the drug in homemade baggies and coffee cans and head home in his car. "If you get stopped, always have a dog. The [police dog] is going to smell the dog, not the crank. Or if you really want to screw with them, buy cayenne pepper and put it along the inside of the door. The dog smells that, he's through."

Amazingly, Father Time's first arrest for manufacturing crank wasn't until 1997, and he is awaiting trial on that and two additional charges of meth production. Nowadays, he proudly talks about his history, and he boasts that his crank always was the best.

"I liked saying, 'I cooked that, what do you think?' " he says. "There used to be pride in making crank, but not anymore. The stuff that passes for crank today is complete bulls***."