California Dreamin'

My mother was four or five years old when she came out to California on the train from Indiana with her mother and her new step-father. This was in 1916. California's population stood at about 3,000,000 at the time, mostly concentrated in two urban areas: Los Angeles with about 350,000 people and San Francisco with about 450,000.

The rest of California's population was scattered in rural areas and in small towns up and down the Coast and Valley. There were remnant Gold Rush towns in the foothills and mountains of the Sierras in the east and the Cascades in the far north, but most had become ghost towns when the easy gold was got.



My mother's parents settled in Santa Maria, which was at the time quite a fresh little town on the northern edge of Santa Barbara County. It was bordered on the west by newly plowed farm fields that led to the Guadalupe Dunes and the Pacific Ocean some ten or twelve miles away. On the north intermittently flowed (and sometimes flooded until it was dammed) the Santa Maria River. On the east were the Coast Mountains which blocked the Santa Maria Valley from the far more extensive Central Valley. And to the south were more rolling dune fields that seemed to stretch for dozens of miles until they blended into the Santa Ynez Mountains north of Santa Barbara. Oil had recently been discovered under the dunes.

Santa Maria had been founded sometime in the 1870's as Grangeville/Central City by a handful of farmers who saw potential in this windswept and rather chilly little valley that had once been part of the Rancho La Purisima that was headquartered at La Purisima Mission in Lompoc. When the California Missions were secularized in the 1820's, the land was pretty much abandoned except for the Chumash Indians who lived in the hills round about. It wasn't until the 1860's that settlement in the Valley was attempted by (Anglo) families whose names are still very prominent in the Santa Maria area.

The name of the town was changed to Santa Maria in 1885 because they say mail meant for Central City, California was being delivered to Central City, Colorado. Such were the vicissitudes of pioneering.

When my mother's parents settled there in 1916, Santa Maria had a population of between 2,000 and 3,000. It was a small town, but not a tiny town by the standards of the day, and Santa Maria considered itself highly progressive -- which in many ways it still does. Public education, water, sewage, electricity and so on were hallmarks of progressive infrastructure, along with active public health campaigns, scientific farming methods, irrigation systems, public parks and recreation and so on. Tidy little bungalows housed most of the people along wide tidy streets -- the width of Santa Maria's main streets is still impressive -- and the Southern Pacific Railroad ran a line along the Coast that stopped at Guadalupe on the eastern western margin of the farm fields to pick up the abundant produce that was grown then and still is. A spur line, the Santa Maria Valley Railroad, was run from the SP tracks in Guadalupe through the fields and to the produce packing plants in the Valley.

El Camino Real, the Spanish road in the province of Alta California, ran through the middle of town along Broadway. It's path is now followed or paralleled by Highway 101.

Perhaps most astonishing to these immigrants from Indiana were the flowers. The Valley was filled with wildflowers in the spring, and all through the growing season -- which was practically year round -- vast acreage was devoted to growing flowers for seeds and cutting in some of the most remarkable agricultural displays ever devised.


Well, of course, that and the fog and the ocean nearby. The Pacific wasn't visible from town but you could get to it reasonably easily either by going north to Pismo, which was even then a working class beach resort, or east through the dunes to what was essentially a wide deserted beach west of Guadalupe. The only thing about it -- apart from the wind and the cold and the fog -- was the tarballs. Oil leaked from fissures off-shore, and so the Guadalupe beach was often fouled with the smell of oil or the balls of tar that were washed up by the surf.



Oil would become my mother's step-father's key to living the relatively good life in California, for shortly after arriving in Santa Maria he was able to either open or become manager of an Associated Oil filling station. Car travel at the time was still in its infancy, but in California, the motor trip was already a way of life. My mother's step-father also worked as a mechanic at the Dodge Brothers dealership (I have the feeling that the dealership and the filling station were on the same site, though I have no real proof of it). Eventually, he wound up selling the Dodge Brothers cars as well.


Associated Oil became Flying A sometime in the 1920's or '30's, and I remember my mother telling me how proud her step-father was to have the Flying A logo on his station when the change came.

He retired in 1940 or 41 and bought a motor court up in Willits in the Redwood Country. Unfortunately for both him and his wife (my mother's mother) died within eighteen months or so and never had much enjoyment out of their retirement.


I'm surprised I remember as much of this story as I do. My mother was rarely inclined to talk about her childhood, and she harbored an intense resentment against her step-father (and her natural father, for that matter, whom she barely remembered.) From everything she said about him, her resentment was difficult for me to understand because she described her step-father as a very kind and generous man, strict but fair, and always willing to help a friend or a colleague in need.

She said he was never cruel to her, but she was always aware that she was not his natural daughter, and that seemed to make all the difference to her. She saw her mother as a saintly figure, but so far as I can recall, she never really had much to say about her.

I have often wondered what it must have been like for them to move from the gritty and hard-scrabble life of Indianapolis in the 'teens of the last century to the relatively easy life and lifestyle of pre-WWI California, and what they thought about it -- if they thought about it.

Picking up and moving to California was something that Americans did in those days, lured by the railroads and the real estate developers to low-cost land and homes and to pioneer communities where fresh starts were always under way. People were lured by the brochures, by Sunset Magazine, by incessant stories in the weeklies, and by a psychology of westward movement that almost assured that every year more and more people would depart from Back East -- which was anywhere east of the Mississippi -- and head out to California, or perhaps to Washington or Oregon if they could stand the constant rain.


California was a Promised Land like no other, and at least for some of the immigrants from Back East, it proved to be almost exactly as advertised. They came and prospered, living an adventure, and living well at lower financial cost than they knew where they came from, and with a far better sense of security than they had ever known before. It was possible -- back then, anyway -- to live modestly but well in California on a good deal less money than it cost to live poorly in any city Back East. It was possible to grow your own fruits and vegetables in your own yard or, if you wanted, to buy a few acres in the not-so-distant country and set out orange trees or any other crop you chose, and make a go of it as a small farmer or rancher. Many did and decided the rural life was not for them, but many others found they could take up residence in cities and towns in California and surprisingly fit right in almost immediately -- because nearly everybody was from somewhere else for one thing, and for another, because the early settlers tended to be friendly and welcoming.

Of course they were. They needed newcomers in order to prosper themselves.

The whole point of the California Dream was endless growth, after all, and without newcomers constantly arriving, there could be no economic growth, and without economic growth, there could be no Dream.

The Dream was built on the pocket-books of those who kept coming, and come they did for generation after generation.

While Santa Maria doesn't seem to be an obvious destination -- and it certainly wasn't in 1916 -- I can easily understand how my mother's parents would find it an almost ideal place to settle once they found it. I was never sure how they got there to begin with -- there was no direct passenger rail service, for example, and I don't know when they got a car, but driving continued to be something of a challenge for many years due to poor roads and unreliable vehicles. My mother never said what exactly brought them to Santa Maria rather than keeping them in -- say -- Los Angeles.

But I've lived in Santa Maria and I know it as one of the friendliest and most charming towns -- now a city -- in California, with a very "at ease" way of life. It is entirely unpretentious. Well, let me modify that a bit. The pretentious people tend to be known for what they are, and their pretensions tend to be the subject of friendly ridicule. This characteristic is said to go back to the earliest ranching days in the Valley, and I tend to believe it. A style was set back in the Old Days, and it's been carried on from then till now, and it shows no sign whatever of changing any time soon. Despite the fact that Santa Maria has grown substantially in the last 50 years (the span of time I've known the town), it still shows very much the same way of life and personality characteristics among the people as ever.

For me, it's not the place to be. I'm not very well suited to it, but I have no problem understanding why others -- especially newcomers from Back East -- find it delightful.

My mother's parents fit right in, and soon enough, they prospered modestly. They lived in a succession of tidy bungalows on the broad and tidy streets of the town, traveling extensively around California when they had the chance. My mother said she had been "practically everywhere" in the state by the time she was out of high school, going on road trips with her parents as often as possible. She was always happy to return to Santa Maria and said she didn't have any urge to live anywhere else until... well, after she was married the first time.

She married an oil jobber who worked for Associated and then for Standard Oil of California (now Chevron.) He had been coming by her step-father's station for some time, and they first met while she was still in high school. Her step-father did not approve of the young and somewhat flashy Texan who was making eyes at his step-daughter. He much preferred her to see the rancher's son that she had gone on dates with a few times.

As it happened, the rancher's son's family -- one of the First Families of the Valley -- did not approve of my mother, largely as far, as I can tell, as a matter of class. My mother's people were obviously working class, and her step-father was an actual mechanic. The ranchers of the Valley still consider themselves to be a kind of nobility (derived, I think, from the Spanish rancheros). They do not marry mechanic's daughters. They marry in their own class or above -- or they become monks and nuns.

As friendly as the Valley people are, there are certain lines and certain taboos that one does not cross or violate. Class lines being chief among them.

So my mother wound up marrying the Texas oil jobber who set her up quite nicely. I remember asking her how the Depression had affected her -- she married in 1932 -- and she said "it didn't." She showed me some pictures (I wish I had them now) taken of her outside her home in Santa Maria next to her car (she said it was a Dodge roadster purchased from her step-father). She was dressed stylishly for the time, looking very smart indeed. She said they lived very well and she never lacked for anything.

Except... the marriage was a failure. Her husband, it seems, had to travel a lot in his job, often staying overnight or longer at some of his destinations, and he was -- everyone agreed -- a charmer. One thing led to another... and another... and another... and so on. The fact that he was having affairs was well known to those in the business, but he was always devoted to his family -- which included his daughter, my (half)sister, and so it was a shock when my mother sued him for divorce after ten years of marriage.

It was apparently quite rancorous. My mother and sister moved in with her parents in Willits for a time, then my mother decided to strike out on her own, which wasn't a success, at least not initially. The story of her life from 1942 to 1949 was pretty chaotic, at least as I understand it, for even with the expanded opportunities for women in wartime, she still struggled mightily to maintain equilibrium and independence.

She said it was especially hard for her after her mother died in 1943, "so young" -- she was 54 -- as my mother put it. She never really talked about her mother with me, though, so I have only the sketchiest image of her, some coming from my sister -- who was very fond of her grandmother -- and some coming from friends of my mother's who were also friends of her mother. They said she was a strong and very sweet woman, and very fun to be around, and a damn good bridge player. She taught elementary school for a while, but as soon as her husband was making enough money to take care of the family well, she left the classroom and never went back. I've never seen a picture of my mother's parents, so I have no idea what they looked like. I can imagine, but beyond that, nothing.

It would have been so much easier for my mother simply to stay with her first husband (easy for a man to say!) since he had no wish for their marriage to end... I met him when I was a teen ager, and at that time he was a vice president for sales with Chevron; he was indeed a very charming man, married to a delightful woman he met soon after his divorce from my mother; they'd been married 25 years or so when I met them. They lived up on a hillside above Walnut Creek, in a sprawling ranch house with a spectacular view of Mt. Diablo. "California Dream" indeed.

I can't say that my mother ever looked back. Her reasons were complicated and tied in with other things in her life that caused her heartache and trouble till her dying day. Her relationship with my father was no less stormy.

But that's a story for another day.

The California Dream went well for my mother's parents, not quite so well for her. Subsequent generations -- my own, the two or three that have come after -- have a very different view of California. There's much about it I like, much about it that I question, and some -- not much -- that I despise, but I find I'm much happier in New Mexico -- "so far from God, so close to Texas." And I realize that a lot of my happiness in New Mexico is due to the fact that in many ways it is like the California I knew as a child, and indeed, it's not that different from the California my mother knew when she was a child. In some surprising ways, New Mexico is almost like California was 50 or 100 years ago.

Well. But the weather is different! And it's so close to Texas but so far from the sea!

[I may be on this tack for a while, I'm not sure. Biographical material is always interesting to me, though I'm sure it can induce catatonia in others. I beg readers' indulgence...]

The Servant Problem

Few of us are old enough to remember what an illustration like the one above refers to. Fewer still were raised in a house full of servants who did the necessary drugery so the rest of the household could frolic and play at will -- or at least maintain itself in the manner to which it was accustomed.

In fact, the idea of "servants" is almost bewildering now; did people really "serve" in other people's houses? They lived there? They took care of Their Betters? How can this be?

Indeed.

You'll note that in the illustration, three of the five smartly turned out servants are women, two are men, but in the real world of the Servant-filled Household, the ratio of female to male servants was closer to 9 t0 1; few households had even one hired man, while many -- never a majority, it is true -- had at least one female servant.

My father grew up in a household that had one live-in servant, a woman named Harriet who did the cooking and looked after the younger children. There was also a man who looked after the yards and the car, but he apparently didn't live with the household. A woman came in to do the laundry once a week. And from time to time, "girls" would come to do the heavy cleaning. There were a lot of children when my father was growing up (he was the second oldest of nine) and it was too big a job for my grandmother to handle alone; my grandfather certainly had enough money to afford "staff," and though he'd grown up on a farm, he had no intention of being saddled with yard work and other chores himself. He had business to conduct and politics to engage in after all.

My father called Harriet the Housekeeper not the maid or the cook or the nurse or the nanny. The idea of servants was somewhat troubling to him as it was, he said, to many of those in his household and his community. His family was reasonably prosperous at a time when many people were not, so he considered himself and his family very lucky on the one hand, and obligated to the less fortunate on the other.

Being less fortunate, however, did not mean that someone necessarily had any less dignity.

"Housekeeper" is much a more dignified title than maid or nanny or cook.

My grandparents had servants because they believed they needed them in order to maintain their preferred lifestyle, and most of the servants they had were women because most of the work of the household was "women's work" and most of those available to serve Their Betters were women.

We may ask why that was so.

Why was it necessary -- especially among the middle classes -- to have servants at all, and why was there apparently a surplus of women in the working classes who were willing to go into domestic service?

The larger families of the era (my father was born in 1901) don't really explain it. In fact, the larger families should have made it possible for most people to get by with fewer or no servants. And that's essentially what happened. Most people in America at the time were poor, couldn't afford servants, and wouldn't have known what to do with them if they could afford to have them. The middle class was really quite small, a cadre of professionals and small land-owners who primarily served the interests of their Betters -- the Plutocrats and Oligarchs of the Gilded Age.

Those men lived very well indeed, in vast houses -- often several of them -- staffed by troops of servants who took care of every need and whim of their masters, to an extent almost unimaginable -- indeed, almost perverse -- by modern standards.

The Master/Servant relationship was critical to the social and employment conventions of the times. It was barely possible to even think outside that box.

My grandfather had grown up on a farm in rural Iowa, and his father -- I found out not so long ago -- had been brought to this country as a boy (well, a teenager) from Ireland by his father (who I know nothing in particular of, but I assume he was a tenant farmer in Ireland before the Potato Famine. According to the records I've seen, they emigrated in 1850, at the tail end of the Famine.)

I had been told that my ancestors were deeply involved in the American Revolution, descended from stalwart and quite early Colonial stock, at least back then they were immensely wealthy. I found out a few years ago that none of this was true. It was all Blarney. They were Irish not American Colonialists, and from what I could tell, they were Shanty Irish to boot. Which helped explain some of the things that never quite made sense to me when I was younger. Certain characteristics persist...

They had pretensions, though, as did many Americans, specifically many recent American immigrants, and so they did what they could to fulfill them.

Having someone to do the work of the household was part of it.

In 1910, according to Census records, there were approximately 1.9 million women working in domestic service nation wide; that works out to about one "girl" per household or family, but only about 10% of households had even one servant in their employ, which strongly suggests that only a few households employed most of the domestic servants (male and female) then at work in the United States.

It wasn't unusual for some of the more pretentious and better off households of the Plutocracy to have 30 or 70 or even 100 domestic employees, something that would be considered highly unusual now, even for our most robustly overcompensated CEOs.

There were so many servants in some of the larger estates because there was so much to do and there were few labor-saving devices available and used by households, even the most pretentious, in those days.

My father said for example, that they didn't get electricity in their house until around 1913. Cooking was done on a coal-burning range until the 1920's. I can only guess when the ice-man stopped coming.

Laundry was done by hand until washing machines were widely available, and even then, the process of using an early wringer washer wasn't that much of a labor-saving endeavor over the previous boiler and washboard tedium.

House cleaning was a twice a year affair during which the entire house was emptied of furnishings -- so as to "air" -- every surface was scrubbed to the bone, new paint or paper was applied where needed (sometimes even where not) and everything was put back more or less where it had been. This entailed days of effort and one can anticipate that several hired individuals (men and women) would be necessary to do all the moving and scrubbing and painting and restoring.

For the most part, poor people -- which meant the vast majority of Americans -- didn't follow this routine in their own households; they couldn't even if they wanted to. Some would be put to work serving other people's households, but most were kept more than busy trying to keep their own households together and to survive as best they could on their unstable earnings from "at will" employment in factories or working hard-scrabble farms.

My mother's father was a streetcar conductor in Indianapolis, for example. He wasn't well-off at all. During my mother's early childhood, the Indianapolis street railway was subject to a number of strikes, and I've read some of the testimony about the working conditions that led to the strikes. It wasn't pleasant reading. Many workers were paid -- when they were paid -- less than $.10 an hour, and their workdays were typically 12-14 hours long, so their earnings could be $20 a month or more if they could keep up the pace, but often they couldn't do it. Often, too, they were shorted in their pay-packets by various deductions and fines levied by the transit company. If they weren't able to maintain the pace of work, they were called on less and less, say only for fill-in work, and their pay plummeted even below the meager amounts they could make on a full time schedule.

Strikes were called to force an increase in wages, more regular scheduled employment, an end to common practices of favor and disfavor by the transit company, and a maximum 10 hour day. The strikes turned ugly, and from what I was told, I assume that my mother's father paid the price for his temerity in striking with his life. His death when my mother was 4 years old was deemed an accident, "crushed between the cars," but it happened soon after the end of one of the strikes, and at least in my view, it was probably not an accident at all. More than a few strikers were killed and injured during and subsequent to the Indianapolis transit strikes.

All this was before World War I, and as it happened, the transit strikes were essentially for naught as none of the objectives of the strikers were achieved.

After my mother's father was killed, her mother was in dire straits and in a quandary as often happened to widows in those days. She had no benefits, no savings, no property. But she had a little daughter to take care of and few or no prospects for either employment or re-marriage. So what was she to do?

As I understand it, her own mother took her and my mother in for the time being, but what arrangements were made, I don't know. I was told my mother's mother did go into domestic service briefly but found herself unsuited to serving other people and was either fired or quit within a few months. Lucky for her -- I guess! -- she did remarry not long afterwards, to a man who had been a friend of her late husband's, and shortly the new household moved to California, Land of Opportunity, where my mother's step-father ran a Flying A filling station, providing a modest living that was in many ways far better than anything they might have had in Indiana.

In those days you could live modestly and well in California whereas doing so in many places Back East was more and more difficult or downright impossible.

Since I've lived in the Gold Rush Country of California for many years, I've often wondered why so many people made the expensive, arduous and dangerous trek out here from what should have been a kind of libertarian paradise Back East, when they must have known there was practically no chance at all that they would find Gold and become rich, rich, rich.

I've read a lot of the correspondence of Argonauts from 1849-52 or so, and their stories are really striking and heartbreaking. It was, first of all, very costly to mount an expedition to California in the early years, and those who did so spent a lot of money up front for transport and supplies and continued to spend on the trek. Assuming they survived the journey, once they got to California, they were in almost every case deeply disappointed. They were barely alive, they were broke, many of the supplies they had so carefully assembled for the trek were long gone, much of it abandoned along the route. Often they were sick and could barely put one foot in front of the other. Everything they found in California was "wrong." It wasn't what they anticipated at all. Few ever found even a flake, let alone a nugget, of Gold. Many -- initially very many -- died shortly after arriving. Despondency, depression, starvation, murder and disease stalked the land.

And still they came.

Eventually, more came than perished and bit by bit a new society was pieced together on the ruins of what used to be and of expectations of what would be.

It was a new society that depended on more and more people coming West, something that was still true when I was a boy, and to a limited extent is still true today.

It depended on people who were dissatisfied enough with their previous lives to pack up and head to The Coast, prepared to risk everything for the possibility of a Better Life. California existed as a Land of Opportunity for the poor, the working class, domestic servants, and for others who were far better off, to try their luck at Something Else Again, and if they were lucky and persistent, they could do very well indeed -- as many did for many years, and a few still do today.

An elemental aspect of this New Society was to limit and eventually eliminate the need for servants and to ensure a sense of Dignity for all Californians. (Well, as long as you were White; racism in California was endemic and virulent when my mother was a girl; it still was in many ways when I was a boy.)

In California, you got rid of the Servant Problem by getting rid of the need for servants. Small households, efficient houses, easy and cheap access to electricity and water (often through public power and water companies), extensive public health and educational facilities, a relatively benign climate, all contributed to make it possible to live well without household help, and without the expectations and the strictures of hide-bound societies Back East.

It was a form of liberty few ever thought would be theirs, especially in the smaller cities that dotted the state. Finally, people could "relax." It was more a psychological than a physical relaxation, because people were still working very hard, but often it was in work they wanted to do rather than "had" to, and in many cases, it was work for themselves rather than someone else.

In a kind of ironic twist, the trade off for such relaxed liberty was conformity.

I'll try to get into that another time.

Living With the Old Stuff

The picture above is from a 1954 home decoration volume. The room is similar in size and layout to our Library in New Mexico, the desk and the desk lamp are very similar too, as is the upholstered armchair. The far wall has two doors in our Library, though, one of which gives access to the closet. And there are no book shelves on the far wall; they are on the long walls as well as the outside wall. There is, of course, no sofa. We have many more books in our Library than are shown in this picture. We also have many more pictures on the walls, mostly prints and posters.

During the last few weeks, I've been continuing with the long term project of clearing out the house in California for the eventual permanent move to New Mexico.

The most recent project in New Mexico was getting a horse fence put up, and I don't know even now if it was ever completed (though it has been paid for.) Our property in New Mexico has never been fenced, at least not near the house according to all the signs and the neighbors, so it was kind of exciting to them when I said we were going to put up a horse fence to enclose our little patch of ground. Not that we're getting a horse any time soon. Maybe a goat?

Of course, getting the fence done -- at all -- was the issue. It always is in New Mexico. I would refer readers to the Journal of a Mud House by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant for pointers on how... complicated... it can be to have something done in New Mexico.

At any rate, the last I heard, the fence was almost done, and it looked great from the pictures I saw, so I'm not about to fuss too much over the length of time it took and the difficulty it was to get it done.

Some have asked what kind of place we have in NM, since I've said it is adobe but I've been at some pains to explain that it does not partake of the wide spread "Santa Fe Style." After all, our place was built in about 1900, well before the flat-roofed and mud-plastered Pueblo Revival Style was officially adopted in Santa Fe. It's "style", such as it is, is late Victorian, actually almost neo-Colonial in some respects, but very, very simple.

It was one of the first houses in the area, and it is supposed to be the house where Toney Anaya grew up (though I don't believe it myself). When he was a boy, he said, the house where he grew up had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, and no electricity. I've combed over this house many times, and it's simply impossible that there was no plumbing and no electricity fifty or sixty years ago when Toney Anaya was a boy. There are remnants of old plumbing fixtures and piping in one of the closets -- in what I'm sure was formerly the kitchen -- and there is knob and tube wiring in much of the house that had to have been put in during the early part of the 20th Century. There were porcelain light fixtures in two of the bedrooms that looked to be from the '20's or maybe '30's, there was fancy patterned linoleum from the '30's at the latest on one of the floors, and much of the original woodwork clearly dates from the early 1900's. Old fashioned baseboards are at the current floor level, and the floors are wood, some of it fine, some of it kind of sketchy. It appears the wood floors, too, date from very early in the house's history. Toney Anaya was born in 1941, well after our house was built and the basics of plumbing and electricity and such were installed.

Nevertheless, it is quite possible -- indeed, likely -- that at first, there were no raised wooden floors, no indoor plumbing, and no electricity in this house. The current bathroom, for example, was clearly carved out of another room (now the South Bedroom), and the fixtures indicate it may have happened as late as the 1940's or 1950's. I've tried to get a sense of the sequence in which the house was built, but there have been a number of remodelings and expansions over the years, and it's hard now to be sure of what came first and what it looked like when time was. I've decided that what I call the West Wing was build first, though: essentially two 16' squares sections put together, with a flat roof, a mostly southern exposure, and a wide front porch or portal.

It was probably just two rooms, too: a kitchen/living room and a bedroom. Then -- and not long after, probably around 1910 or 1915, two more rooms were added in a wing on the east 16' wide and 40' long, fancier than the original house, and having a peaked roof. Quite a bit later, I'd say in the 1930's, the West Wing also got a peaked roof, the original kitchen was turned into two bedrooms, and part of the portal was enclosed to make a new kitchen. Then in the fifties, the whole portal was enclosed, new fixtures were put in the kitchen and bathroom, the house got a complete tin roof, and the whole was clad in white aluminum siding.

This picture is from the Google Street View. It was taken about 3 years ago, and there have been some changes since then...



The walls in most of the house are what they call "double adobe", which is to say they are about 24" thick. On the north side, they are actually thicker, about 30". Most of the windows are relatively small compared to the thickness of the walls, so you would think it might be dark inside much of the time, but not so. The light in the house is simply astonishing, takes my breath away. But then that's one of the benefits of living in the mountains (we're at about 6300 feet) and in New Mexico. "You're closer to the sun."

I made a little video last October of part of the interior, to get a feel for what it is like in there.



There are nominally 4 bedrooms and one bath, but we only use two of the bedrooms. The others -- in what was once the kitchen -- are used as a library and a storage/workroom which we call "The Jesus Room." The current entrance hall/ kitchen/dining area/laundry room were at one time outdoors. They were enclosed from the portal that went across the south side of the house. From the interior, it looks pretty good, but the construction was rough to say the least. The remodel was done in the Fifties some time, and it is pretty wonky now. Of course, that adds character!

There's a central living room and a couple of hallways, and that's pretty much it.

Even so, the house is close to twice the size of our place in California. Yet it is "too small."

Well, we have a lot of stuff, as you can see from the video, and that's only part of it. Though we are busily emptying out the house in California, it's still "full," and I haven't even started on the garage yet! We just don't like to throw things away (you never know when you might need them, as they say) and we are inveterate collectors of... things.

I think I did a post once on The Toasters. There are also The Waffle Irons. The Clothes Irons. Mixers. Record Players. Radios. Clocks. Jeebus the Clocks! The hundreds of Paintings. Books! Tens of thousands of them. Cameras. Quilts. Stuffed Animals. Globes. Vacuum cleaners (an extensive collection of Electrolux and Kirby vacs, want one?). Santos.

Most of what we have is old. We don't really buy much new, never have. What we do buy, we keep. And much of what we need and use (let alone collect) comes from thrift stores. I just got a dryer, for example, to replace the 30 year old model that died on us. Well, the one I got is probably close to that age, and it came from a used appliance store that's been a resource for us for a long time.

It seemed bizarre to me to pay $400 or $500 (or much more) for a new dryer when a perfectly good used one could be found for a fraction of the cost and with a guarantee and no-hassle delivery to boot.

The toaster we use in California every day is 75 years old (a 1934 two slice pop up toaster by Toastmaster, quite deluxe for its time) and it works wonderfully. It's beautiful, too. It looks like this one:



The one we use most in New Mexico is only about 60 years old, and it's not nearly as good looking. The Sunbeam Radiant, model T-35. It looks like this one:



The waffle iron we use on weekends in California is said to be the first automatic thermostatically controlled waffle iron introduced in 1931 by Hotpoint. It is identical to this one:



I had to repair it as the internal asbestos covered wiring had deteriorated, but it was a fairly easy task when I cannibalized wiring from a much newer model that was otherwise useless.

The waffle iron we use in New Mexico most often is an early model Universal dometop, just like this one:



Love that nickel plating. And it actually makes better waffles than the fancy chromium 1931 Hotpoint in California. And both of them make better waffles than the new model Belgian Waffle Makers.

Our coffee is brewed in several brands of percolators or in Silex vaccuum coffee makers like the ones in this ad:



We have lots of different mixers. This model is perhaps the earliest Sunbeam in the house (identical to the picture, except we don't have the jade green smaller bowl, but we do have other accessories including the meat chopper.)



We don't actually use it. A couple of other later model Sunbeam Mixmasters are set up to use, and a mid-sixties Hamilton Beach hand mixer gets the hardest work out because it is so convenient.

I could go on. We have several dial phones in New Mexico, one or two of which I think are hooked up (or were -- I may have undone them to set up the wireless internet. One forgets!) There are 6 chrome frame dining chairs, but no table yet, that are intended for the patio that we haven't had time to build in New Mexico.

You get the picture.

I've thought about all this Old Stuff we've got -- some of which I bought intending to sell during the Boom Times when all sorts of "collectibles" were salable in a twinkling for a good deal of money -- and recognized more than a simple pattern. Much of it, obviously, is evocative of my childhood, stuff we might not have actually had back then. We didn't have a stand mixer, for example. Instead, my mother used a hand-cranked egg beater -- much as her mother had used. There was no coffee maker until I was an adult (coffee didn't agree with my parental units), and I think the first ones I bought were the early "Mr. Coffee" drip models, so I had no idea how much better a percolator makes coffee, let alone the subtleties of vaccuum coffee, until I tried them for myself.

Some of the furniture in both the house in California and in New Mexico are antiques that I bought almost 40 years ago to furnish an apartment in Santa Maria that we were renting unfurnished for the summer. The pieces were late 19th/early 20th Century, imported from England or France, and they were at the time very cheap. We've hauled them from place to place ever since, and some of them are in desperate need of repair (one day, I keep saying, one day!)

In the interim, we've picked up some Mission Oak pieces, mostly tables, along with a few pieces of mahogany (a desk, bookshelves, dining furniture.) When I was a child, there were some Mission pieces in our home, a library table, a chest of drawers), and so I tend to be attracted to similar pieces when I see them. There was no mahogany (my mother preferred maple) but mahogany was very stylish among the Better Off when I was young whereas maple was considered "common." (Which, BTW, was no shame.)

I know I bought a 1942 Philco radio because it reminded me of the one in our house when I was little. Evoking childhood is a constant among collectors. I may or may not have said on this blog that the first car I had was a 1950 Packard Convertible like this one:



And the first car I bought was a 1951 Buick Roadmaster just like this:



(As an explanation, the first car I remember we had was a Packard, and my mother's best friend when I was little was the widow of the town's Buick dealer. Talk about evocations of childhood! Well!)

The question is, when does "collecting" become "hoarding?" You would think it's not a fine line, but I think it is. You "know" what hoarding is because there are shows on the teevee that demonstrate it and provides "treatment" for the victims (and plenty of judgmental blame, too) and we all know people like that. Extensive "collecting" such as we do becomes "hoarding" when it becomes overwhelming, chaotically taking over every square inch of living space. Well, maybe it's not that simple.

We have lots more collections than the ones I've described here; coins, music industry stuff from various eras (mostly the '60's), lamps, sewing machines...

While I can cheerfully dispose of things and do -- give them away, donate them, or sell them -- more stuff always seems to "show up" to take the place of what's been disposed of. So there's a constant level of stuff round about. And it is always more than is necessary, more than can be enjoyed or displayed simultaneously, too. We have no more wall space for all the paintings, for example, so more than half is in storage at any given time.

Of course while the stuff is being sorted or when we don't take the time to find places to put the various items, it can -- and does -- pile up. THAT can easily be interpreted as a "hoarding" scenario. The "pile" can grow, to the point where, at least temporarily, it is overwhelming.

And what do you do then? When the stuff is overwhelming, the answer is to leave it, at least for a while, and get on with something else. And that's where people who sit in judgement of "hoarders" may have no idea what's going on with them and don't bother to trouble themselves to find out. Judgement of them (and their possessions) is the far more important matter. A chaotic pile of unsorted stuff must be condemned simply because it's there and the owners of it aren't doing anything with it (except perhaps making the pile higher.)

I disagree, obviously.

You get to it when you can. And that may take quite a while given all the other matters one is expected to attend to right now.

Though we don't have cable teevee at either house, I have seen a couple of the "hoarding" shows online, and they tend to trouble me. The people who have been profiled in the shows I've seen seem to be buried in "stuff," and yet listening to them, it's clear enough that even if they recognize that the "stuff" has taken over their lives and sometimes burdens them so much they cannot even move from room to room in their houses, they are just trying to get by the best they can, burdened as they are. For whatever reason, their process of getting by is never recognized in the programs I've seen; instead, they are treated as if they were some kind of monsters. And they are not. In the shows I've seen, the people profiled are some of the kindest, sweetest people I think I've ever seen on teevee. They are harmless and are harming no one.

They are overwhelmed, to be sure. But oddly, the therapists sent in by the programs to "help" never think to help lighten the burden these people carry. Instead, they make it worse, deliberately and in some cases with malice. It's no wonder that "hoarders" wind up even more deeply depressed and suicidal when they are faced with such... "help."

Lightening the burden is not necessarily getting rid of the stuff, for that process can be horrifying and painful in the extreme for some of these people. Their "stuff" is symptomatic of the burden; it is not the literal burden itself. In many cases, the "stuff" is comforting.

Some of the therapists seem to understand that intellectually, but they cannot for the life of them act on their intellectual understanding to help these people emotionally. They don't even try. The only thing they are interested in is forcing the victims of hoarding disorder to get rid of the stuff that is overwhelming their homes.

Which can lead to panic, deeper depression, suicidal thoughts or actions, or simply rejection of assistance/treatment.

What is the point of that? Of course: entertainment for those who are convinced they are better than the people depicted on these shows.

Sigh.

We have come so far, it seems, but have so far yet to go...

Movies, Movies, Movies -- And A Few Plays

When I was searching for a clip of the "Mendacity" scene from "Cat on A Hot Tin Roof" the other day on the YouTubes, of course I ran across all kinds of juicy, melodramatic interludes from movies of yore. I got to thinking about how immersed I must have been in movies when I was little (though at the time I didn't think so), and I got to thinking about which ones made a lasting impression on me -- even thought I might not have known it at the time.

"Cat on A Hot Tin Roof" (1958) is the first Tennessee Williams film I remember seeing, and it made a huge impression on me. Not that I understood it. Nope, not a bit. What I saw, though, was incredible, wild people just tearing each other apart, wreckage of lives scattered everywhere, all in glorious color and spoken in a language that was literally poetry. It left me breathless.



That same year, 1958, there was another Southern Gothic melodrama starring Paul Newman called "The Long Hot Summer" that was nearly overwhelming in scope and sweat and fire. It was in Cinemascope, and absolutely saturated color, and was another extraordinary emotional roller coaster. Watching the clip, I actually had a visceral negative reaction to the character played by Anthony Franciosa, just as I did when I saw the picture so many years ago, and the barn burning scene is still searing. I haven't seen the picture since 1958, and yet there are parts of the trailer that can still get a rise out of me. Who says movies don't influence people in ways they aren't even aware of.



The entire James Dean oeuvre (1955-56) left another big impression on me. I was very young when I saw "Rebel Without A Cause," no more than seven years old, and it was fascinating, not just for the pumped up melodramatic story, but because it was filmed in Los Angeles in locations I recognized, and the climactic scene at Griffith Park Observatory felt so strange. I had been there not long before I saw the picture, and I couldn't for the life of me imagine how these horrible events could be taking place at that site. One of the things that happens when you're very young is that it is difficult to separate truth from illusion, and what a kid sees on a movie or television screen is in some sense "real" even when the frame and the screen tell you it's "make believe." Yes, make believe, but...



So imagine how "East of Eden" must have struck me. What I recall is that I didn't understand it. It wasn't visceral enough for me. Too cerebral, and yet there are so many scenes that stuck with me for years and years afterwards, especially Cal's complete frustration in trying to please his father. I may not have understood the picture, but I sure understood the emotion -- when it was there.



Oh, but then there was "Giant." Another of those super-saturated, wide screen melodrama-epics that was overwhelming in scope and raw emotion. It was another one I couldn't understand -- except for the feeling of it all. What's stayed with me are the visuals, especially the oil gushing and the flat, empty plains of Texas. It was strange. I was familiar with "oil" as I'd lived my early childhood in Santa Barbara County oil country, and there were wells all over Los Angeles County when I lived there, though none of them I knew of were gushers. The flat, empty plain was something else again. That was something I don't recall ever seeing before, at least not as starkly as limned in the movie. And yet even now, I'm strangely drawn to that kind of landscape. Interesting.



Another one that made a lasting impression was "The High and the Mighty," (1954) which I saw for the first time again last year. I was struck by how much of it had stayed with me all these years. It was all very glamorous and exciting, scary and funny at the same time. At yet I was only six year old when I saw it the first -- and until last year -- the only time.



One of the first plays I produced independently was Tennessee Williams' "The Two-Character Play," one of his more obscure works, to be sure, and one that he wrote when he was pretty fucked up on drugs, but an astonishing piece of theater just the same, with absolutely compelling characters in conditions that raise them well above the ordinary.



Williams has a whole raft of "obscure" works, all of them astonishing in their own right. Try "The Red Devil Battery Sign" sometime. I dare you. Our production was not the best, but... boy! Something to remember.



I do like Williams, and I like him because he knows what real drama is and he knows how to create true-life characters that are way bigger than life, and thus he knows how to move an audience as deeply and cathartically as any modern playwright has ever been able to do. Even as he himself became consumed with sex and drugs and liquor, he could still bring to life iconic, believable and strangely sympathetic characters that stand as some of the highest achievements of dramatic art.

As I was trolling for the "Mendacity" scene from "Cat" the other day, I came across a long clip from a production of the play at a small, non-professional theater outside of Chicago (the Circle Theatre) in 2009 that I thought was just brilliant. To see these characters created so well and so fully on such a tiny stage by actors who clearly understood who these characters were and how to communicate the depth of feeling and power Williams imbued them with was thrilling. So I'll close this post with that clip.

"Mendacity!"

On Mental Health Issues

I haven't really gotten into this topic much, preferring to rant rather than delve into it to the extent I could, but I've left hints here and there that there have been many -- severe -- mental health issues among members of my family. I've lived with the consequences all my life. It's not an easy topic to broach or to discuss.

But the recent upsurge in interest in mental health issues following the dreadful shooting in Tucson has opened the door a crack. I realize that most people have no idea what mental illness is -- let alone does -- and they see it as a relatively trivial matter that doesn't concern them. In fact, mental illness, and the price all of us pay for the lack of mental health care services in this country is an ongoing catastrophe.

The shootings are only part of the picture, a relatively small part -- though they are the ones that get the most attention. My impression is that far more mentally ill individuals wind up getting shot, either by Authority or by others, than they shoot, and most people are just as happy it is so.

Punishing and killing the mentally ill -- or simply "allowing" them to die -- is the way things have been in this country for many a long year.

To review: My brother was autistic; my sister suffered from a serious bi-polar condition. My mother became more and more demented as she got older -- but there were signs of serious trouble from early on. My father was an alcoholic who suffered from severe -- untreated -- depression most of his life. And I myself have struggled with alcoholism and depression and various forms of PTSD most of my life.

Oh yes, I had a very traumatic childhood, one that I can recall with both joy and horror -- depending on circumstances recollected -- in almost too great of detail.

That said, when I was young, mental health care was available through public health agencies as well as private providers, and while there could be stigmas to utilizing mental health care services, it wasn't that big an issue for most people. If you needed to get your head shrunk -- or thought you did -- you did it. If you were acting out, the 'van men' came (the term is from an Edward Albee play, "The American Dream") and took you away for a while, sometimes a long time, in a public facility, and you would be provided with at least minimal care and treatment, not necessarily based on "The Snake Pit," either. Millions of Americans were housed or treated in the mental health care system -- when there was one -- in this country.

Involuntary commitment was relatively rare, though it did happen with somewhat more frequency than I believe was necessary. Voluntary commitment was far more common.

Treatment, unfortunately, was primitive when it wasn't downright barbaric. Professionals in the field did not know what caused mental illness and so they often did not know how to treat it effectively. Often it seemed that the basic premise of mental health care and treatment was "This too shall pass." In truth, that's how it sometimes works out. Provide the mentally ill with a safe and positive environment, listen to them, provide therapeutic activities and wah-lah!, something approaching a cure. Well. For a while anyway.

That was the easiest, and in my experience, the most common approach, but if a patient did not improve through utilization of simple methods, there were others. Electroshock. Cold and hot baths. Insulin shock. Other means of "forcing" the patient to get better. If nothing else worked, there was always the lobotomy. That worked real good. Oh yeah.

As I say, primitive if not barbaric. But most patients did not go through those treatments. Too many -- far too many -- did, but most were treated as simply as possible, and many who could not recover for whatever reason (ie: brain damage, dementia, Downs and other syndromes, autism, etc.) would be housed, as safely and comfortably as possible either in a public facility or with local providers for the rest of their lives.

Yes, there were abuses, terrible abuses, and in too many cases, those abuses were not addressed adequately -- or at all -- until very late in the game, indeed, not until the policy decisions were made to shut down the entire public mental health care system as it once was. Abusing the mentally ill was sport for the sadists who all too frequently had free rein in public and private facilities. Sadists on the street could be just as cruel if not more so. Too often, they got away with it.

But the effort to dismantle the entire system of mental health care was based on truly horrific concepts that should not have ever been allowed to prevail.

The basic premise: "Let them fend for themselves; let their families take care of them. If they make any trouble, punish them or kill them."

And this was marketed far and wide as "liberation!" "freedom!"

It was and is a grotesque perversion of the terms.

But you see, I'm getting into rant-mode again. And I don't want to stay in that place, so I'll have to stop for a little while.

---------------

Rant mode off for a bit.

My brother had the most severe long term mental illness in the family, and he was cared for at first by family members; when that became impossible, he was cared for by friends of the family; when they could no longer care for him, he was transferred to a state facility where he did not live much longer, not because of any neglect or abuse that I'm aware of but principally because he couldn't handle the change and lost his will to live.

My sister became a mental health care professional and worked in the field for forty years. She died as a consequence of being caught in the middle of a take down of an obstreperous inmate at Atascadero State Hospital -- really a prison for the criminally insane. Her injuries required surgery. She got a blood clot. She died the day after surgery.

She suffered from what was eventually diagnosed as "Manic-Depression", now known as "bi-polar disorder." She voluntarily committed herself to a private, locked facility several times, and she received repeated courses of electroshock therapy. I wouldn't say it helped. It just gave her another set of challenges and problems to deal with. She was put on lithium several years before she died, and it really did seem to help. She was somewhat distant due I think to the shock therapy, but she was highly functional to the end.

My mother went untreated for many years, though she knew there was something wrong in her head. She saw a series of therapists when it became harder and harder for her to get along in the world, and she was put on high doses of psychotropic drugs. They helped in a sense. She was much calmer and able to function, which she and everyone else appreciated, but she became more and more unfocused and to my eye at any rate she became more and more unhappy, until finally she decided to stop taking the medications. Mistake. It took several months to clear the medications from her system, and the person who emerged was all but unrecognizable. That's why I posted the "Nan" videos. My mother had become someone very much like "Nan." One can cope with people in that condition, but it isn't easy. She deteriorated, moved north, could not take care of herself, was looked after by one of her granddaughters and finally died of lung disease -- for she never stopped smoking right up to the end.

My father's depression started soon after his first wife's death. It wasn't really recognized. It was never treated. He tried to self-medicate with alcohol -- which had the effect of making him a drunk. As he got older, he completely withdrew from the outside world. The only people who even saw him toward the end were some religious nuts who had moved into his house. They... didn't help, and by the time he was taken to the hospital suffering from cancer, it was really too late to do anything to save him. He died within a week.

I've seen counselors and psychiatrists for some of my own issues, but strangely, they've tended to say I'm "fine" -- or at least doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances. I've never taken drugs, but for a time, I was drinking very heavily and came to understand, when I hit bottom as they say, that drinking was my attempt at self-medication. Getting better took a long time, but I haven't had a drink in almost 20 years, I keep working on recovery, and I certainly don't miss the sauce ;-). I have developed a lot of coping strategies when depression comes over me, most of them suggested by one or another counselor, and for what it's worth, in a halting way, my ad hoc efforts work. I still get occasional panic attacks, but far fewer than before I retired.

That's the nutshell version of my own private nuthouse.

While I recognize that my family's situation is unusual, it's not that unusual. At one time, help was available -- even if it wasn't the best -- and it was utilized by most of us at one time or another.

It is not the case that "help is available" any more. I read over and over that people who are trained in dealing with mentally ill people are trained to call the police if there is any suspicion that the individual might be a threat to the safety of himself or anyone else. Time after time, when the police respond, they kill the suspect. It is always justified homicide. Always.

Why do people call the police? They think they are supposed to on the one hand, and they literally have no other choice on the other. Mentally ill people acting out -- or even threatening to -- are "always" a matter for Authority and too often summary execution. There is no other option.

If they are not killed on the spot, they are taken away either for a 3 day observation, or if a law can be found that they have broken, they are taken to jail, where they are likely to be beaten and abused by the guards for sport. I could go on and on and on detailing what happens to the mentally ill caught up in the grip of our punishment obsession and the absence of appropriate mental health care services.

I can't help but think what would have happened to members of my own family if this regime of mal or non-treatment of the mentally ill had been in place when they were diagnosed and suffering.

It's appalling.

Which is why I tend to rant about it rather than calmly consider.

It all goes back to Reagan, his wife Nancy, and her (step) father. Well, that and the series of lawsuits filed by the ACLU to "liberate" mental patients.

I'm getting back into rant mode, so I'm going to stop for the time being, maybe look up some links to include here later, and consider more deeply what it is we really need in this country to provide for mentally ill people.

Nan

I'm quite the fan of Catherine Tate. She's a brilliant comedienne whose characters are absolutely true to life as well as hilarious.

In this sketch, Tate plays Nan, an older woman barely holding on from the grip of dementia. Nan is sarcastic, funny, cruel, sweet, and often impossible, and yet she is beloved both by those in the sketches with her and by the public. She behaves like many older British women who are holding on to their independence in a more and more difficult period of their lives.

She reminds me of my mother. And this sketch is very close to what a partial family get-together at Christmas might have been like 30 years ago or more. At that time, my mother was in her 70's late 60s, my sister in her late 50's 40s, her son in his 20's. My sister was married at the time to her third husband, but he was never entirely accepted by my mother as one of "us." He was an artist rather than an East Indian, but to my mother's eyes, he was just as exotic if not more so.

My mother looked a lot like Nan. She dressed the same way, had the same frizzy hair, sat with her legs apart as Nan does. She behaved erratically, cursed like a sailor, laughed like a banshee. She told tales about those who weren't around, and as Nan does in the sketch, she would attack her own daughter when she left the room, only to smile becomingly when she returned. Her daughter was happy to return the favor.

So, apart from the British accents, this sketch is a little scene out of what might have happened in my own life -- if I had been around for a Christmas get together 30 years ago, but I was not.

My mother was a very unique person, fiercely independent, bright, when she was younger quite beautiful, clever, cruel, deeply distrustful of people in general, an animal lover, and as she got older, quite addled.

I had never encountered anyone quite like her until I read D. H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers" and there was a scene in the midlands during which a proud middle-aged woman (character name I can't remember) who essentially has a raging fit. And I thought, well! Isn't that something. Yeah, I recognize that!

I learned later that my mother's grandmother had emigrated from Nottinghamshire in the 1880's. Her ancestors had been Irish and moved to England to escape the Potato Famine. My mother's grandmother had come to America alone. And she made her way in America on her own. Whether she was ever married, I don't know, but she had a daughter, my mother's mother, who instilled a sense of fierceness and independence in her daughter, my mother.

And so we get to Nan.

May the circle be unbroken.



--------------
Just as an aside: My mother was born in 1911 and would be 100 years old this year (she died when she was 74). My father was born in 1901 and would be 110 this year (he died when he was 69).

El Encanto

I did a quick websearch on Restaurants on San Gabriel Canyon Road the other day when I was writing about the house where I lived in LA County from 1954 to 1959. I mentioned that from time to time, we would go out to dinner at a "roadhouse" in the mountains above Azusa. I didn't remember its name, but "El Encanto" is what came up, and that sounded right. From what little I found about it online in that search, it was apparently closed and had been for quite some time. But from Google Mapping, the building was apparently still there.

Today, I did another search, and I found out what happened, or at least what is happening now. It is a remarkable story.

The picture above is indeed of the entrance to the restaurant I remember. It has changed little in 50 years or more. The restaurant closed, it is said, in 2003 or 2004 after many years' operations -- well over 50 -- and the property sat vacant. It was purchased in 2006 by the Watershed Conservation Authority for inclusion in the Azusa River Wilderness Park.

A Master Plan [warning: 253 page PDF; do not open if you don't want to download the whole thing!] for re-use of the property was completed in 2007, and it is really quite a wonderful plan for an urban wilderness park along the San Gabriel River, incorporating the former restaurant as a park headquarters.

The Master Plan itself has not yet been implemented as the Watershed Conservation Authority has continued to acquire adjacent properties to combine with the El Encanto property in order to create an 80-100 acre wilderness park. Apparently last year they achieved their land-holding goals and one might imagine that they would begin implementation of the Plan sometime this year. Well, they would if California weren't on the verge of bankruptcy.

The restaurant I remember was certainly the fanciest place we ever went to eat out. We weren't poor, but we lived as if we were, and going out to eat at all was a fairly rare occurrence. When we did, we usually went to places like the lunch counters at Woolworth's or Grant's, or sometimes, when we were really feeling de luxe, we went to Bob's Big Boy. Very, very occasionally, we'd go to someplace "in town" -- ie: in Los Angeles or surrounding areas.

El Encanto was a surprisingly frequent destination given the infrequency we usually went out at all. I would guess, looking back, we must have gone there eight or ten times in the five years we lived in that part of California.

The drive up to El Encanto was certainly exciting, passing as we did through the (then) little, mostly agricultural towns along the way. There were orange groves and orchards and palm trees all along the route. The orange groves were protected from frost by smudge pots, oil burning heaters that were lit whenever the temperature was expected to drop. They made a powerful stink and of course contributed to the smog which was really bad in the area at the time. There is still a smog problem in the area, but it is nothing like what it was in the mid-50's.

El Encanto wasn't very far up the San Gabriel Canyon Road, but it was completely cut off from the urban/suburban area below. It was beside the San Gabriel River against a steep rise in the mountain. The San Gabriels, like many of the mountains surrounding and in the Los Angeles Basin, rise abruptly from the plain with no real foothills for transition. One gets on the canyon road and the climb is steep.

Once you got to the restaurant, you were really in a different world. How fancy was El Encanto? Well, there was a maitre d' who sat you at a white linen covered table, either in one of the glass walled rooms or, if the weather was good and you requested it, outside on the patio. You were served by a uniformed waiter who was as solicitous as any I've seen anywhere. You were brought a relish tray and bread with your huge, leather covered menus, and of course, you were offered cocktails -- even I was. Non-alcoholic drinks were brought for me; the adults, I recall, liked their vodka gimlets.

The rooms were dark, the tables lit by candles; there were strings of colored lights criss-crossing the ceilings and outdoors. There was a bar, if I recall correctly, near the entrance, and it had colorful neon lighting. Overall, the place was quite large, but it was also very quiet. The floor was carpeted and the tables were far enough apart for privacy. There was sometimes "cocktail music" played by a live band somewhere in the place, but I don't remember ever seeing musicians.

The place smelled of grilled meat, and it was the steaks that drew the clientele. Steaks and baked potatoes and huge iceberg-lettuce salads. The food was good.

At the time, I wasn't much of a beef-eater, though I would have a hamburger now and again. I can only recall ordering a child's portion of steak once, and while it was all right, I preferred other items on the menu. Sometimes I was content with just a baked potato, bread and the relish tray. Simple pleasures.

I really looked forward to going there, enjoying the service and exotic locale, enjoying the food and the adventure of getting there, the beauty of the site on arrival.

In addition to the grilled meat smell of the restaurant itself, there was a very bracing fresh river/forest smell outdoors as well. The view of the river along the edge of the parking lot was really captivating. The whole area was beautiful. And that helped make the restaurant unique. On the drive back home after dark, the lights of practically the whole LA Basin were spread out in front of you as you rounded a corner on the canyon road. The sight was spectacular, as anyone who has seen it from any vantage point above LA can testify.

I really hope that as the site is transformed into a wilderness park, the special nature of the restaurant building will be preserved and that -- who knows -- maybe in the future, on a smaller scale, a new version of the old El Encanto will reopen. I can easily imagine that a new generation -- the grandchildren of my generation -- would enjoy it.

---------------------------

UPDATE: Not that it's at all important, but I've been puzzling over a couple of partial memories I have of eating at El Encanto when time was.

One is that I recall the sign being neon, with a dark background, not the plastic-covered fluorescent sign in the picture above. I seem to recall the bzzzzing sound of the transformer and the smell of ozone when passing by, but I'm not sure of the memory because I've been around a lot of neon signs since then, and they all bzzzz and smell of ozone. So I could be recalling something else.

Second, after I wrote the piece on El Encanto, I had some very strong recollections of eating shrimp cocktail there. This gets a bit dicey because there is another "meat" restaurant up the coast that I frequented as a young adult that served small shrimp cocktails as part of the meal, prior to bringing on the meat. But I was recalling large shrimp arranged in a circle around cocktail sauce in a bowl set in a goblet of ice, which is not the way it was served at the restaurant up the coast, and I can't recall any other place I might have had shrimp cocktail the way I remember it (or think I remember it) at El Encanto.

I only bring this up because it illustrates what happens to memories -- even seemingly crystal clear ones -- over time. They become a mashup of so many things, and what you think you recall with such certainty may or may not be at all what happened -- or how it happened.

4th Grade

In keeping with the nostalgia theme, I thought I'd write a little bit about an incident I was involved in in the 4th grade.

I believe that in California public schools it is still required to teach "California History" in the 4th grade. I actually have a couple of 4th Grade California History textbooks from the late 50's and the early 60's, and they are, to say the least, rather sanitized pictures of what went on during the several phases of California history up to then. Sanitized? Well, "cleansed" I think is the better term. Cleansed of any hint of Unpleasantness.

Part of our 4th Grade historical experience in my day was a visit to one of the Spanish Missions that were established along El Camino Real starting in San Diego in 1769. The closest mission to my school was San Gabriel, and dutifully, my 4th Grade class bussed off one day to see it.



I thought it was fascinating.

All my life, I've rather liked things old an musty and somewhat crumbling around the edges, and in the mid 1950's San Gabriel Mission, though still an active parish church and long a destination for area tourists and school children, was still in a not-quite-fully-restored state, and I liked it for that.

We toured it, heard the story of how the kindly padres ministered to the cheerful, willing Indians, how they raised cattle and grapes and lived their lives in peace and harmony, and then we went back to the school where teams of students were assigned to work on models of California Missions for display on History Day. It was all quite wonderful.

During the period that we were creating our models of missions, another boy and I were playing a fantasy game in the corner of the school yard, something we would do during most recesses. We were making up and acting out a kind of fantasy of California's past, based on what we were learning in class and what we were seeing on TV of what Used To Be -- remember the Cisco Kid and The Lone Ranger? -- and one day, we were playing our game after a grader had been over the school yard in the corner where we usually went, and I noticed what looked like a large rock poking out of the ground. I went and pulled it out and saw that it was a long, cylindrical piece of granite or some such stone with tapered ends. My friend said, "Somebody made that." It looked to have been made, indeed. And the rock, whatever it was, wasn't something commonly found in the area.

Moments later, I came across another rock which I dug out of the ground and discovered it was thin and flat and that the cylindrical rock fit its width. My friend said, "That's Indian stuff."



Hm. So we took the items to class and showed them off. The teacher was amazed and wanted to know where we'd found them. We took her to the spot and showed her how I'd dug them out of the ground. She, then, called the anthropology department at Cal Poly, and they sent out some researchers who did some gridding and digging in the schoolyard over a period of weeks. The class would assemble from time to time at the dig site -- which was rather heavily featured in local newspapers for a time -- and we would hear about what was going on.



Ultimately, one of the researchers came to our class and explained that they believed the site was that of a Gabrielino Indian village, probably dating from the latter 1700's though it may have been established well before San Gabriel Mission. They had found arrowheads, bits of crockery, some unidentified wooden objects, and the outlines of two brush shelters used by the Indians. They said it was not a camp but was, so far as they could tell, a more or less permanent village under the influence and guidance of the Mission, but more or less independent. The residents had a pretty good source of food nearby in the oak forests, game was available, and crops could be grown; they had at least intermittent water from the stream (that had been concreted and turned into a drainage ditch in recent times) and in good times, it was probably a very pleasant place to live.



Artifacts were taken away, the site was graded over again, and lawn was eventually planted in the schoolyard.

I got to thinking about the kind of life these Indians must have lived, and how strange it was that outsiders -- whether Spanish or Mexicans or Americans -- could simply wipe away their village and the Indians that lived there and pretend as if they never existed, how they could casually plant orange groves over the remnants of the former village, then casually rip out the groves to replace them with houses and schools, where I, a simple 4th grader, could accidentally stumble across what little still remained of the Indian village, and scholars could come to study the site for a few weeks, only to cover it all over again and plant lawn over the remains. How transitory everything is.

It was a startling revelation to me. One that I have never forgotten.