Another Memory Exercise. Some Things About This House

There are lots more memory aids now than once there were. It's easier to remember but also easier to get confused. One of my memory aids for the house in the San Gabriel Valley I've posted about several times is Google Street View. It's become something of a historical record because it records the appearance of the house and neighborhood over time, in this case from 2008 to 2022. A major change -- to me -- took place after 2011. 

This is a screenshot of my house and the house next door (where the Vegas lived when I lived in the neighborhood) taken in October 2011:

 

Several things: The Vegas' house is light brown, which it was when I lived in the neighborhood. The house where I lived is painted yellow -- which it wasn't when I lived there. But it was yellow the last time I saw it in person in 1969. When I lived there, the house was painted white with dark green (Hunter Green) trim. 

There's a heavily cracked blacktop asphalt driveway, the only one still remaining in the neighborhood. That was put down some weeks or months after we moved in in 1954. All the driveways in the neighborhood were blacktop initially. Before the driveway was installed, it was just graded dirt which turned muddy when it rained. My mother was livid about it. But the house itself wasn't finished when we moved in. There were still parts needed stucco and plaster, some plumbing fixtures weren't installed in the shower, trim still needed to be applied on the interior and exterior, and the house hadn't been painted. 

Part of the problem was that our house was the last one on the street to be built and finished. This was the Post War housing boom, and houses were being built all over the Los Angeles Basin at a furious clip. This neighborhood was being developed so fast that Life Magazine did a feature on one family that moved from Connecticut to California and faced the dilemma of the New and Incomplete Reality of Los Angeles -- and this particular neighborhood --  at the time.

What had been essentially wild country -- hills and pasture, hills and oak forest, etc -- was turned into housing overnight. Initially, there were no curbs, gutters, sewers, or other amenities that would come later. Finishing the neighborhood, to the extent it ever would be finished took years. 

The curbing you see in the picture didn't arrive until long after we moved out in 1959. I'm not sure curbs were there in 1969. And I've noticed on Street View that the sections built on street extensions later (in the '60s and '70s) have street lights while the sections built in the '50s do not.

In the picture you see a rusty rural mailbox. That was put in by my mother after a dispute she had with the post office. It was probably 1956 or so. Initially, she'd mounted a fishing creel on the wall beside the front door to collect the mail. One day she got a notice stating that her mail receptacle was not regulation and must be replaced or US Mail would no longer be delivered to that address. If I recall correctly (ha!) there was no indication of what would be acceptable. So I suspect she marched down to the post office (I don't remember where it was) and demanded to see the regulations, and she found that a rural mailbox would be... fine. 

She went to the hardware store and bought one with a metal stand. She painted the box with flowers and vines and such, mounted it on the stand and put the whole apparatus in the ground (may have had help from a neighbor) beside the driveway. With a note that said, "Put Mail Here."

Later she found out that a rural mailbox in a suburban neighborhood like ours wasn't regulation either,  and she got a British iron letterbox at an antique store and mounted it where the fishing creel had been, and that was where the mail was deposited until we moved. I think she took that British letterbox with her when we moved, but I'm not entirely sure. I seem to remember it turning up in several later houses but it may have been another one.

There's a large tree next to the mailbox in the picture up top. That's an oak (madrone?) that I planted between 1956 and 1958. It was a seedling that sprouted up in the hills beyond the end of the street. I dug it up and carried it down the hill in a can of some sort and planted it in the front yard when I got home. It grew. It's somewhat unusual because oaks don't like being disturbed especially as seedlings. But this one did fine. It was maybe two-three feet tall when we left.  Sadly, the oak tree and the mailbox are now gone (a/o 05/22). But they had quite a long run.

An Automatic Death Sentence From Which There Is No Appeal

I can't tell for sure what all is going on here, but a man is dead after being shot by police in Los Angeles, that much is clear.

Yet another execution on the streets of LA. Happens all the time.

The man is seen in the video disobeying and struggling with the po-po. He should have known that would be a death sentence. Many of those commenting on the video say as much. Po-po seem to believe it without question: disobedience and struggling with the police is justification for use of lethal force in most jurisdictions, most especially in places like the meaner streets of Los Angeles where this incident took place.

The police claim that the man they shot and killed was "going for the gun" of one of the officers. This is the justification police use almost as often as the "reaching for his waistband" justification. They are often false justifications, but you can see for yourself that it is difficult/impossible to tell whether the man they shot and killed in this video was "going for" a gun or anything else. It looks like he's simply trying to ward off the blows raining down on him, but it's too dark and the distance is too great to be sure.

Po-po lie routinely and they are routinely allowed to get away with it, so I would not take their word without question.

On the other hand, video isn't necessarily conclusive. This one certainly isn't, but it will have to do until something more definitive shows up.

The point here, obvious as sin, is that the man who was shot and killed was disobedient and struggled with police, and whenever that happens, it seems that the police have full authority to kill at will.

Just as they have the authority to kill any Negro they see with a gun -- or who they think has a gun. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not. All that matters is their perception.

At any rate, another man is dead on the streets of LA, killed by police. He was black and homeless and possibly mentally ill or impaired, but all that really matters in the eyes of the police is that he was disobedient and struggled with the police.

Doing so is in their eyes justification for summary execution.

They are cowards, every one of them.

Just Incredible -- Two Men Shot and Killed by Deputies in East LA

No, it's not really incredible, it happens all the time. Practically every day. Sometimes several times a day, but in this case, the story out of the LA County Sheriff's Office and the CBS Local station is absurd.

"They did indeed shoot two suspects. Both of them died." As if the action is not directly connected with the result.

The story is weirder in that the men who were shot and killed by deputies are called "suspects" in a crime that is never mentioned.

EAST LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Detectives are investigating the circumstances Sunday surrounding a deputy involved shooting with two male suspects.

[Suspects in what crime exactly? Shooting? The suspects were shooting deputies?]

According to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, deputies were sent around 2:40 a.m. to the 5300 block of Verona Street for report of an assault with a deadly weapon.

[Assault?]

Once on scene, a witness flagged down authorities and said two suspects in a vehicle pointed a weapon at him.

[Is this the crime in which the suspects were suspected?]

KCAL9′s Joy Benedict spoke with Lt. John Corina who said the witness did not know the suspects.

[Relevance?]

Around 2:20 a.m. the victim, a 32-year-old man, was walking through a business parking lot in the 1100 block of Atlantic Boulevard when he noticed a light-colored SUV driving through the same parking lot.

[Who is the victim here? The suspects? The deputies? The man claiming that a weapon was pointed at him? How would that make him a victim?]

The suspects drove alongside the victim while pointing a gun, but no words were exchanged. They then drove away heading North on Atlantic Boulevard.

[So how exactly is the "victim" a victim? Of what?]

“They were strangers to him,” Corina explained. “He was a little shaken up that they pointed a handgun at him. That’s why he called 911 to report it, and that’s when deputies picked up the vehicle.”

[Had he known them, would that make him less shaken up? What exactly is the crime for which the victim is a victim? Is he a victim because he claimed a weapon was pointed at him from a moving car, though the car drove off and no one was harmed? Or is he a victim because he called 911?]

The witnesses gave a description of the suspect vehicle, which led officials to locate the suspects.

[The vehicle was the suspect? Or the suspects were the suspects? Of what? Pointing a weapon? Being in a vehicle? Assault?]

Four deputies reportedly pulled over the suspect vehicle and ordered the two men to step out.

Police explained the car continued a short distance and proceeded to park in the driveway of an apartment complex located in the 5300 block of Verona Street.

[How exactly was the suspect vehicle pulled over and yet continued a short distance where the suspects parked in the driveway of an apartment complex? How exactly did that happen? How were the two suspects ordered to step out as the car was proceeding a short distance to the driveway of the apartment complex where the suspect vehicle parked?]

After parking, one suspect exited and pulled a handgun out of his pants, pointing it in the direction of the deputies. The second suspect exited the driver side of the vehicle and stood behind the suspect.

[Ah, the waistband gambit once again. Suspects, even unarmed ones, are always pulling handguns out of their waistbands and getting shot for it. It is routine. Necessary too. Cause you never know, do you?]

Deputies then discharged their weapons at the suspects.

[I see. The deputies -- four of them -- shot the suspects until they were dead, right?]

The two suspects — a 26-year-old passenger and a 57-year-old driver believed to be from the area — were shot and killed at the scene.

[Right.]

They were reportedly drinking at a nearby bar before the incident occurred.

[Well, there you are, then. Drinking Mexicans. Oh. My. God. Better shoot them before they shoot you! Bam!]

Family members told Benedict the younger victim — Eduardo Bermudez, 26, of Hesperia — was dropped off at his sister’s house in Verona for a child’s birthday on Saturday where he had been drinking all day.

[Drinking all day? Clearly the man needed killing. Regardless of whether he was "pointing a weapon" or "reaching for his waistband" or whatever. The drinking alone is reason enough to terminate him. Well, as long as he is a Mexican. It helps that the incident happened in East LA. Gangs you know!]

Bermudez’s family also claimed he had a BB gun with him, not a hand gun.

[Ah ha! So the Drunken Mexican was armed, the scum! Deserved to die! Lucky he lived as long as he did! BB-schmeebee. A gun is a gun.]

Officers have confirmed that the handgun recovered at the scene was found to be a replica of a .45-caliber handgun.

["Replica" or no, there was a gun, on a Drunken Mexican. That's all anybody needs to know.]

Deputies said a containment area was set up in the residential area of Verona Street and Amelia Avenue to further investigate the crime.

[Again, what crime? The Shooting by the deputies? Drunk driving? Pointing a handgun that was actually a replica? Or a BB gun? What crime?]

An initial report from witnesses indicated deputies were searching for a third suspect, however, the search was called off.

[There was no third suspect. Reports of witnesses to be discounted when the deputies have to justify what they did.]

Deputies reported they do not believe the driver was armed.

[Doesn't matter, does it? He was drunk, he was Mexican, and he is dead, dead, dead, killed by police because he was there and they were scared. Right? Right.]

At this time, it is unknown if the incident is gang related.

[What!? What "incident?" The Drunken Mexicans are dead. That is the ONLY "incident" that occurred. Two men were shot to death by LA County Deputies. No one else was harmed.]

No deputies were injured during the shooting.

[Thank. Gawd!!!]

The victim’s identities are being withheld pending family notification.

[Wait. Which victims? I'm all confused again. Are we talking about the dead men as victims now? I thought they were suspects. What happened to the supposed victim who called 911? His family needs to be notified? Or what?]

This is how the stories so many of the police shootings in this country are garbled to the point of complete incoherence. No one can say with any certainty -- barring video -- just what happened, how and when, and to whom. No one can quite figure out who the victims are, or why. These deaths are just due to forces of nature or acts of God it would seem. There is nothing to be done.

What a world, what a world.
-----------------------------------------
I saw part of the Die In in University City, St. Louis, today on the Ustream. (Scroll to about 28:10) It was very effective and affecting, though the wags on the Twitter tried to make believe it weren't nothin'. It was actually one of the most effective Die-Ins I've seen in a while, as the street was slick and wet, snow was falling, and the misery quotient in front of the Tivoli Theatre (Oh, I know that theatre) was high.

Tomorrow, they say, the Grand Jury's non-indictment of Brave Officer Wilson who killed Mike Brown in Ferguson on August 9, because he was scared for his life by this big black bruiser, will be announced and the Riots will commence.

Well. They Didn't Mention Sister Maya Except In A Rude Way...

Escabosa, NM, July, 1940, courtesy of the Library of Congress

Yesterday included a lot of driving time, a lot of sitting time, some chatting time, a lot of listening time. Interesting.

Maya Angelou was mentioned, as it turns out, but not politely.

No, Sister Maya was mentioned by one of the poets at the José Montoya event in Albuquerque, by one of the more incendiary poets, who said something to the effect that there were more accomplished and dedicated female poets in the room last night, each of them of a higher caliber than Maya Angelou, but none of them would ever be on "Opal", and none of them would ever have the honors and recognition that Maya Angelou had -- because each of them was Chicana, and in America Chicana doesn't count.

We were exhorted to mount a protest at Bookworks because of it.

Well, now, that's just wrong, but in some ways, it's not. Chicanas do count, but they don't, too. How can things be two opposite things at the same time? That was an underlying theme for the discussion at Santa Fe's Museum of Contemporary Native Art in the afternoon with artist Shan Goshorn, scientist Jennifer Dunne, and former CIA operative Valerie Plame. The panel never mentioned Maya Angleou (I wonder why not?) but they did get into the contradictions between things that simultaneously are and are not what they appear to be, things that have and have not the linear qualities Anglos come to expect, and how one's conditioning to those expectations differs... and what to make of it.

Maya Angleou was lucky, and she knew it. She was in the right place at the right time -- and she was the right color for the time. She took absolutely full advantage of it, shamelessly, without qualm or hesitation. She was brilliant. And she rose. But she knew it wouldn't have happened if things outside herself, things that she could not control, had not conspired with her own will to make it so.

So, in some ways, was it with mi hermano José Montoya, who was honored last night at the National Hispanic Cultural Center by a stellar gathering of Chicano/a poets (many of them poets laureate) from throughout the Southwest and California. And there was music. Oh, la musica!  Baile!

What a time it was.

Jose, it turns out -- and I didn't know this -- was born in Escabosa, NM, just down the road from our place. Well. I say that with such confidence, but in fact, I'm not sure exactly where it is, or rather was. There is an Escabosa loop road between Chilili and Tijeras, but whether that's where Jose's Escabosa was, I don't know. There is no sign of a town there at any rate. No sign that a town ever was there, either. If there are ruins, they have so melted back into the earth, you'd never know, much like some of the Indian pueblos in the vicinity.

There's another Escabosa indicated somewhat north of Edgewood, however, on the way from the Walmart to the foot of South Mountain. There's no town there, either, but there is a school and some dirt tracks that indicate there might have once been a town there of sorts.

Which one was where Jose Montoya was born, I don't know, and the truth is, I kind of doubt he would know for sure either. It wouldn't really matter all that much, as he and his family decamped from Escabosa, New Mexico when he was very young and set out for the hard path of field work in California's Central Valley.

Of course, why not? At least it was green there. There were crops that could be harvested. Not so much in New Mexico, in Escabosa and round about, where a decade long drought had shriveled everything and dust blew high in the air. The economy -- such as it was in the New Mexican backwater-lackwater -- had collapsed. Families left for greener pastures in their multitudes, joining the Joad jalopies on the Mother Road, the road to Needles, Bakersfield, Sanger, Fowler, Fresno, Modesto, Merced, Stockton and Sac-a-ra-men-to.

Oh god I have traveled that road so many eff-ing times. So many! Well, not exactly on the road that the Joads and the Montoyas and the Escobars and the Trinidads traveled. I was on that road perhaps only once, when I was driven in the backseat of a 1942 Packard Clipper, hell bent for leather, from Iowa to California when I was barely 9 months old, passing through New Mexico, perhaps stopping for the night, but I certainly can't remember that trip. Or can I? There are time I really think I do remember, a body memory perhaps, or maybe something else...

In California/Califa, Jose grew up to be bad, to be a 'Chuco -- Pachuco -- the Devil Mexican as far as the Anglos were concerned, and he liked taunting Anglos like a Pachuco for the rest of his life. And why not? The Anglos had stolen everything they could get their hands on and forced the people they had stolen from to work in the Anglo fields stooped over in the blazing Central Valley sun for next to nothing -- but at least it was something, some of the time.

Farm work in California was tough, still is. It was crippling. It was necessary. It would kill you. Or it would make you strong.

Jose and his family worked the fields up and down the Central Valley, and finally, when Jose was old enough, he went into the Army and survived. When he came out, he took advantage of the GI Bill, and behold! He became a professor of Chicano Studies (well, not instantly, but eventually) at the new state college set up in Sacramento -- where my sister would go, too, and get her masters (eventually, not immediately) -- but I refused to go there on principle. That's another story for another day, but I will say here that there was no escape from Sac State (whether college or university) in Sacramento, and in due time, there would be no escaping Professor José Montoya, nor the art collective he created, the "Rebel Chicano Art Front," re-dubbed "The Royal Chicano Air Force" when some newspaper reporter got the initials (RCAF) wrong.

I knew mi hermano José but I did not know him well. He was a presence, a force of nature (much like Sister Maya, come to think of it), but I was not his student, did not work with him, had little close contact with him over the years. I had friends who were much closer to him than I was. I considered him a friend of mine in a very casual way, an acquaintance. No, intimacy was much more a factor of my working and social relations with other RCAF members such as Juanishi Orosco, Armando Cid, Juan Carrillo, and of course Joe Serna. Many other relationships I don't care to go into here constituted the threads of a web of relationships, some of which are still active, many of which are now broken, in part because there have been so many deaths along the way. We don't last forever, do we? No. We die.

And we also move. The Montoyas moved from whichever Escabosa it was to the fields of California's Central Valley, and we, the Chés, for our part, have moved from the Central Valley to somewhere east of the East Mountains of New Mexico, not far from whichever Escabosa José and his family departed from so many years ago now.

The future for them was in California. The future for us has been in New Mexico.

Go figure. Somehow there is a pattern there. One that could be identified if our eyes were clearer and we had the means to see. There are many uncharted webs of relations come to think about it.

José never moved back to New Mexico. I have no idea if he ever wanted to. He came back many times, and he was a major influence on the development of the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque where we attended the Poets Conclave in his honor last night. In other words, he never cut his ties to New Mexico, though he never returned to live here. Family relations are still here. His daughter, Gina, who lives in Los Angeles, pointed out that he'd bought a "little plot of ground" in New Mexico, and the family fully intended to do "something" there. In time. In due time. So. We can look forward to a 'Chuco center near the center of New Mexico... no? That would be wonderful.

LATINOPIA WORD JOSE MONTOYA "PACHUCO PORTFOLIO" from Latinopia.com on Vimeo.

When I was a kid living in one of the few racially mixed neighborhoods in Los Angeles at the time (a neighborhood that has become almost entirely Hispanicized -- is that a word? -- since then) 'Chucos were talked about in somewhat hushed tones at my neighbor's house. The Vegas. They were terrific people, very influential in my childhood, and I will never forget their warmth and their many kindnesses and the hot, fresh tortillas I had for lunch at their house on many a day, sometimes dipped in enchilada sauce, sometimes rolled up with meat and onions and chile. Or just plain with a little butter...

They would mention 'Chucos and the zoot suits and the riots in LA. During the War.

The War was the center of history, and LA was the center of the world. And so many things happened in the War and in LA to destroy Chicanismo. My neighbors, the Vegas, dared not speak Spanish in public, even then years after the War and the Riots, they only spoke English, because if they spoke Spanish they were afraid they would be deported or worse, because that's what happened to "greasers" and "beaners" in California back in the day. They were rounded up, put on trains and sent "back" to Mexico, whether or not they had any connection with the place. They were beat up, they were shot, they were denounced, they were marginalized. That's what Anglo Angelinos did to Mexicans, without a qualm.

So the Vegas were careful, never deviating from Anglo demands and expectations, except in their own home when they felt they were safe. And even then, they were careful.

I thought it was wrong, I thought it was cruel. There was no reason for them not to speak Spanish if they wanted to. At least I didn't think there was. There was no reason for them to hide their Catholic saints behind the lace at their windows, no reason for them not to pray and laugh and grow roses the way their ancestors had.

No reason at all.

It hurt no one for them to be Chicanos, a word they would never use.

José gave them something back. Whether they knew it or took it or no.

So we sat last night at the National Hispanic Cultural Center hearing poet after poet after poet laureate honor Jose Montoya and his legacy and his memory, and it was wonderful and warm and moving and almost giddy at times.

Jimmy Santiago Baca mentioned Sister Maya last night, but only in a rude way. I thought that was sad, that he could only see her rudely, for I think what she did helped enable what José did and both together did more for the poets laureate that have proliferated around the country ever since than perhaps even Jimmy Santiago Baca can realize.

It was a good day and night, filled with connections and insights and brilliance.

Viva.

Disturbing

Michael Hastings was killed in a fiery crash on Highland Ave near Melrose in Los Angeles early this Tuesday morning.

Hastings, of course, was a well known Rolling Stone journalist who caused all kinds of trouble for the White House and the Pentagon over the years, and whose dogged determination to get the story was legendary in the field.

Raw Video, taken soon after the crash:



Witnesses reported what sounded like a bomb. The witness quoted in the video above -- though his English is poor (and I wish he were quoted in Spanish instead) -- indicates that he saw the car traveling very fast, maybe 100 miles an hour, on Highland, and that it was on fire as it crossed Melrose.

No wonder there is speculation this was a hit, not an accident.

Change of Pace: Memory Jogging At The Movies. "Kronos" (1957)

Kronos, ready to stomp Los Angeles to smithereens while sucking up all the energy in creation

While tooling around the YouTubes over the weekend, I stumbled on this little SciFi effort from 1957, and after some Other Important Matters were tended to, I was able to watch it, mostly without interruption.

It was quite a trip. Deja vu all over again. I'd seen the picture before, and I was pretty sure I knew where and when: At the Saturday kiddie matinee at the Covina Theater in the summer of 1957. I went every Saturday from about 1954 to 1959, and that's where I saw most of the SciFi pictures released during the era. Also lots of Warner Brothers and Walter Lantz cartoons.

I was pretty sure I had not seen "Kronos: Ravager of Planets" since then, either. It's a very, very strange sensation to watch a movie that you haven't seen for more than 50 years and to recognize the scenes, and to even be able to anticipate the dialogue and what would come next.

It's hard to describe the effect this movie had on my young self, but I seem to carry a body-memory of it. It was frightening and energizing and intriguing all at the same time. Many of the sensations I must have felt while watching the movie all those years ago, the feeling of being in the theater, even the smells of the place (let alone the noise of the children who were there every Saturday like I was) all came back, almost as if no time had passed. It was very strange.

The theater was in downtown Covina, California, out in the far eastern part of the San Gabriel Valley; it was in an old building, but the theater had been fairly recently remodeled and brought up to MidCentury Modern Movie House standards. I paid a quarter at the box office to get in, bought a popcorn, a small Coke, and a box of Jujubes at the counter (maybe another 35 cents) and went in to what seemed to me to be a very large auditorium, but I doubt it was really that large. It had a stage, though, and a balcony. And I think it had a red velvet or possibly damask curtain. I should remember, but I can't be sure. I went to movies at many different theaters all my young life, and I can't recall for certain the details of the decor of any of them.

Science fiction was by far my favorite genre after I got over my cowboy phase -- which was at about the age of four or five.

I saw many turgid melodramas and thrillers at the movies when I went with my mother to see the regular programs in the evenings, but on Saturday afternoons, I was on my own. I would be dropped off at the theater a few minutes before the start of the kiddie matinee and would be picked up a few minutes after the program ended. Typically there would be several cartoons, an episode of a serial, a game or contest or prize promotion from the stage, then the feature presentation, and sometimes there would be another cartoon after the feature. Usually my head would be reeling from so much stimulation. Now and then, I won a prize offered by one of the sponsors of the matinee. I looked forward to the science fiction pictures. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" was a favorite.

"Kronos" wasn't far behind, and because I was older when I saw it, I understood it better and identified with the characters somewhat more. I could enjoy "Invasion" for the scare. It was very much a character piece, but "Kronos" was an accessible story for young people and a feast of visuals that I really got into.

I noticed right off when the YouTube version began that I had seen it before -- when I was a child -- because I recognized the very distinctive and unique flying saucer that would be seen repeatedly in the early sequences. "Labcentral" was a familiar destination, too:

Labcentral, whereat SUSIE computated

Of course the special effects were primitive even by the standards of the time, but that didn't matter so much. The story was gripping, especially after the appearance of the Kronos Machine on the beach in Mexico.

The Machine I saw on YouTube was very familiar, and I recalled how intrigued and horrified I was with it when I saw it stomping its way up the coast toward Los Angeles and the area of my home at the time. Science fiction set in or near Los Angeles naturally had an immediate appeal that stories set far away did not. And the more plausible the story was -- at least to a kid-mind -- the better the picture. And this story, for whatever reason was highly plausible to my kid mind, so much so that this movie became the basis for a fantasy-game that my friends and I played in the schoolyard at recess and after school.

We were playing with notions of "what could be" if the aliens landed one day and took over one of our bodies (this was a popular theme in the SciFi genre of the time.) And we were trying to imagine what the Future -- or what advanced alien civilizations -- would look like. The helicopter and B-47 seen in the picture were the latest things. The B-47 is, to my way of looking at it, the most elegant bomber ever built. The Kronos Machine, too, was extraordinarily spare and sleek, and it was visually striking because it completely eschewed both streamlining and the "googie" look of the era.  We knew from "googie." It was everywhere anything new was, and out in the far eastern suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1950's most things were new, and a lot of it was quite fanciful.

The idea of aliens coming to Earth to extract energy -- including the energy of the hydrogen bomb -- was really an interesting notion in that it carried an underlying assumption that Earthlings were producing and using a shit-ton of energy via electric power and nuclear weapons that some other civilization "out there" noted -- and wanted. We didn't have much of a conception in those days of how very tiny the Earth is compared to almost anything else in space, and how practically unnoticeable (and probably uninteresting) the Earth would be to actual aliens searching for energy resources. No, we saw the Earth as large and important and central to our lives -- and therefore of primary and central interest to the aliens, too.

"War of the Worlds" was perhaps the most thematically similar movie of the genre, but it was a blockbuster compared to the modesty of "Kronos" -- and frightening as hell to my young self (I wouldn't have been much more than five or six when I first saw it). Of course watching a model of Los Angeles get destroyed in the movie was deeply disturbing to me. The scenes of destruction of Los Angeles in "Kronos" were not so scary -- because they didn't look anything like Los Angeles. As far as I could tell from the YouTube version, they looked like they were from the 1935 movie of "The Last Days of Pompeii." But maybe it was some other movie that featured the destruction of Pompeii. There were a lot of them.

In order to save what was left of Los Angeles and the lives of those who survived, the science team at Labcentral has to figure out how to reverse the insight that brought forth the atom and hydrogen bombs. It's pointed out that while "we" know how to make energy from matter, the aliens use energy to make matter. By reversing the polarity of the Machine, they will be able to turn it into energy and thus destroy it. It will "eat itself alive." This is perhaps the most intriguing notion in the film.

What would happen if E=MC² were reversed thus: M=E/C²? Would matter spontaneously appear from the background energy if the velocity of energy were somehow reduced?

In the film, "omega particles" -- whatever they are -- are sprinkled (by a bomb, of course) between the electrodes of the Machine, and behold, the polarity is reversed and the thing commences to consume itself until there is nothing left but a heap of smouldering rubble. Yay! Close call, but we survived.

There's much to like and to ponder in this somewhat silly low-budget SciFi picture, and I was delighted to see it again after so many years. I wonder what else I'll stumble across I haven't seen in all these many years.

OT: Something Interesting

Children at play, San Jose Elementary School, c. 1962 (?)

I saw this picture the other day and it caught my attention -- because I recognized those jungle gyms. The picture was taken at my elementary school in eastern Los Angeles County, but I didn't know that right away. The caption said the picture was taken in 1962. I moved away from there in 1959. Yet there was something very familiar about the picture, and then it came to me.

The second boy from the left looks very much like... me... c. 1957 or perhaps 1958. The third boy from the left strongly resembles my friend Mike. I wonder if the picture was taken some years before the date given in its caption and if I am the boy second from left, and Mike is the boy third from left. It wouldn't surprise me too much.

I was featured in a couple of newspaper articles around that time, and photographers from a number of publications, including LIFE Magazine, paid visits to our school in 1957 and 58 for other feature stories. We were thought to be on the cutting edge of education at the time...

Strange...

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.

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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.

Cadillac Desert -- the Story of William Mulholland and the Making of Los Angeles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkbebOhnCjA&feature=BF&list=PLE7C2A70A8FB767D3&index=1

This is the Real Story behind Robert Towne's brilliant 1974 picture, "Chinatown."

There are nine parts on YouTube, from a 1997 VHS videotape that's not in very good condition, but if you put up with the glitches and watch it all, you'll gain some knowledge about Los Angeles as it was and is, and from that it becomes possible to understand something of why so much of what is seems so far out of whack.

The "Chinatown" syndrome is not the only explanation for the vicissitudes we're facing, but it is a key to understanding.

A Bit of Nostalgia

The picture is of the house where I lived as a child from 1954 to 1959 in Los Angeles County. I was idly Google mapping one day, decided to plug in the address -- which I have never forgotten -- and there it was, behold.

It was a three bedroom, one bath house, with a living room, dining room, entry hall, and a kitchen with an eating area and a space for a washing machine. The garage did not connect directly with the house. There was a small patio out the back, and a trash incinerator in the back yard. We built a little pond in back and for a time, hosted a multitude of frogs and a tortoise we called Myrtle. Those who remember Duck and Cover know who Myrtle the Turtle was. Myrtle eventually moved on.

At the time it was built, this house was the last one on the block; beyond it to the east was a scrubby field and then a rather high hill, a steep climb into an oak covered wilderness. There was a small lake or pond about half-way up the hill, the water was pretty yucky. There were tires and other bits of flotsam in the water, and some sort of black sludge around the perimeter. One ordinarily didn't choose to swim in the water or get oneself wet with it. I remember building a raft out of scrap lumber up there with some friends though. We launched it, me and another boy on it, and of course it sank promptly.

But the oaks made for an excellent forest environment, and once you got to the top of the hill, the view was breathtaking. To the north were the San Gabriel Mountains and Old Baldy; at their foot and to the east was Pomona. Stretching out directly north was the flatlands leading to Azusa. At first at least, these flatlands were mostly covered with orange groves. In fact, there were orange groves directly behind our house across the concrete drainage ditch. There was a large picture window in the living room at the back of the house, and on clear days -- which unfortunately weren't too frequent -- the mountains made a stunning backdrop for the orange groves.

No, the air was not very clear very often. Even then, stinging smog was the rule, especially the farther east of Downtown LA you were. And then there were the fires. Every year, the slopes of the San Gabriels would catch fire, and the smoke and ash would fill the air for days at a time. One time -- but just once -- the hill mentioned earlier caught fire, and everyone in the neighborhood was panicking about it. We were pretty far out from civic services, and people were terrified that the fire department wouldn't come before the fire got to the houses, but in fact, they did come and put the fire out very quickly.

I'm really surprised at how little has changed at this house. It is still the same pale yellow color it was when I lived there. The trim is still painted white. It still has the same blacktop asphalt driveway. The roses appear to be gone from the property line on the left, but the shrubbery in front of the porch is the same. The kitchen was extended onto the porch -- which appears to be the only physical change to the exterior. There is what appears to be a patio on the left side which wasn't there when I lived there, and the chain-link fence appears to have been replaced with a wooden one. The shrubs around the garage are the same. The oak tree by the street is actually one I planted more than fifty years ago. I brought a seedling down from the hillside one day and put it in a hole I dug in the lawn. I didn't think it would last, but it did until we moved away, and now to see it so much larger is quite a surprise.

When I lived there, there were no sewers in the neighborhood, and there were no curbs or gutters on the street. At first, there were cesspools in front of every house for waste. Then they were replaced with septic tanks. It's actually hard to imagine that an entire suburban neighborhood would have been built without sewers even in those days, but so it was. There was a kind of ditch on either side of the street where the rainwater was supposed to run, but we often faced street flooding even though the street ran downhill.

The drainage ditch in back was a concreted version of the little streamlet that ran down from the hill. It was mostly dry most of the time, of course, but sometimes, after a heavy rain, there would be a lot of water flow, and one time, foolish child that I was, I climbed over our back fence to have a closer look. Naturally, I fell in. Oh. What fun. I was swept downstream quite a ways, but luckily I found some debris to hold on to and managed to work my way out of the water and crawl back up the steep concrete slope to the ledge that ran along the backside of neighbors' fences and eventually made my way back to my own house, where, of course, I didn't tell anyone what had happened. These ditches are everywhere in Los Angeles, and children -- and others -- fall into them all the time. It's quite a wonder that so many survive.

The orange groves behind our house were ripped out within a year of our moving in. It was sad. Very sad. They pulled up the trees, bulldozed them into a pile and burned them. To the left -- or west -- of our property line, new houses were built. We called them "cracker boxes" because they were low or flat-roofed and they were built on concrete slabs rather than raised foundations. They sold for somewhat less than our house cost, too. To the right -- or east -- of our property line, a new elementary school was built. The following school year, I would be among the first 3rd grade students to attend. [Strangely, I have absolutely no memory of where I attended 1st or 2nd grade. But I do remember kindergarten in Santa Maria quite clearly. Hm.]

A little later on, I would climb the hill mentioned earlier (I don't think it had a name, though there were named hills in the area) and watch the freeway being graded and built to Pomona. It is now Interstate 10, the San Bernardino Freeway, but the only name I knew it by then was "the Freeway." A little later, I could climb the hill and watch one of those new shopping centers being built, I think it was called Eastland.

There was a small grocery store on the main street fairly near our house, but there were no supermarkets, no "town shopping" nearby. In fact, when my mother wanted to go shopping, we did it in Downtown Los Angeles, perhaps twenty miles west. It's remarkable to think how far out in the country we really were. It's certainly not that way now. When Eastland opened there was jubilation for miles around. Finally, some nearby major stores! May Company! Think of it!

On occasion, we'd drive up into the mountains and have dinner at a road house that is apparently still there (although if my websearch is correct, it's been closed for years). I didn't remember its name, but when I did a websearch, "El Encanto" came up, and I think that's what it was called. It was dark and smoky and dripped with neon and strings of colored lights and excitement. I would have hamburger, but the adults would have steak. That was its draw, the meat and the location in the San Gabriel Canyon.

Just a handful of memories; there are many more, but this will have to do for now.