The Lake

When I was in the fourth grade my mother went back to work. My parents arranged for our after school care to be provided by the parents of Harvey Jr. and Gary. Gary was my age; Harvey Jr. was my sister’s. Neither my sister nor I were particularly friendly with these boys.  They just happened to be in our classes.

Every school day we would walk to Gary and Harvey’s home.  This wasn’t an ordinary Silver Lake home, it WAS Silver Lake. The boys’ dad was the caretaker of Silver Lake Reservoir and they lived in a compound within the fence.  It was like living in a private park.  Adventures abounded.

One day after school. we ventured into the laboratory that tested the reservoir water. The scientist, surrounded by test tubes and charts, and having plenty of free time on his hands, asked our names and spelling. He wrote each name with a thick leaded pencil onto strips of paper. Then he weighted our names on a small scale.  Until then, and never since, was I aware that a name could weigh something.  Unless it’s something like Hitler. 

A regular duty of the caretaker was to keep ducks from establishing a home on the lake. Harvey Sr. would put us in the motorboat and go out on the lake to shoot ducks.  Then we would have to pick them out of the water so they wouldn’t pollute it.  The small boat was awash with blood and feathers, and this was perhaps the grossest thing I had ever seen up to that point. And I think the family even ate the ducks.

It was quite a change being in a family that had boys.  There were older brothers as well. And a teenaged daughter whose room I snooped through when I was home from school with some ailment; the thrill of my paper dolls having waned. I learned odd things like how to hone an axe on a grindstone, how to ride a boys bike with gears and that inexplicable bar that hits your crotch, and that the olives on the tree in the yard were nothing like the Lindsey ones we ate at my house. I learned how to insert caps into guns and to love the smell of the gunpowder.  And I stole my first thing at the lake too.  Harvey Jr. wore a rabbit’s foot chained to the belt loop of his Levis.  Under the guise of wrestling, I got him down, unclipped it and he was never the wiser.  I still feel guilty.  And now that I think about it, a rabbit’s foot was almost as gross as the bloody ducks.

 

 

 

 

 

The Cuban Missile Crisis

 

I was in the sixth grade and every morning our family would sit down to breakfast in the dining room.  In retrospect, I have no idea how my mother managed this, drove to Burbank where she was a music teacher and then came home and repeated the scene for dinner. With the exception of Tater Tots she never used frozen food.

But in October of 1962 I had no appetite for breakfast.  I was scared. 

Even an eleven year old could pick up the tension of the nation.  Mr. L talked about Cuba in class, the TV had pictures of families building bomb shelters and people were stocking up on food and water.

One of the kids I walked to school with even went so far as telling us that the huge white paint stain spilled on the roof by her inebriated father was actually a signal to the Russians to bomb her house as a sacrifice to others.  It was indeed a crazy time.

I, of course, had the confidence of knowing that we had practiced “drop drills” and “red alerts” at school.  Surely my fake wood Formica school desk would protect me from a nuclear blast.  And in our garage was a strange, tiny room that had once been used as a darkroom and smelled of the chemicals.  This was to be our bomb shelter. Better than nothing.

But the most frightening part of those days in October was the fact that when I walked to school each morning I never knew if I’d see my parents again.  I had calculated that if the bombs dropped while my mother was is Burbank she MIGHT be able to walk home in a day or so. On “Wagon Train” they covered about ten miles a day. My dad’s job was more flexible, so I figured he’d be okay.

Because I wasn’t eating, my mother grew concerned.  When I told her why, she wrote a note to Mr. L, my teacher.  She asked him to not talk about the crisis as it was too upsetting for me.  Later that day, he told the class that we shouldn’t be concerned by any of the news.  I guess his mom didn’t work in Burbank.

 

 

Troop 2277

Brownies.  The word implied little pixies, elves and magical things.  I wanted to be one and so did most of my friends. And when I was seven I joined up.

Two mothers volunteered to be our leaders and troop 2277 was born. This being Los Angeles, and near Hollywood, our investiture was sprinkled with the fairy dust of glitter.  For a reason unknown to me, Troop 2277 was going to be the lead story of the family section of the Los Angeles Times.

In our brand new uniforms, we practiced our pledge and our one-hand salutes. When the day came, we assembled in the back yard of Mrs. M’s house and a photographer showed up.  We were a little group of para military baby boomers dressed in brown felt hats, earnest in our beliefs and not yet jaded by the thought of selling cookies outside of grocery stores. In the picture that was on the front page of the newspaper section I am either the only one getting the salute correct, or the only one getting it wrong. 

Some of us stayed a part of 2277 until we were 17 years old. It wasn’t for the scouting experience, trust me. It was because we were friends. We survived poison oak, first kisses at a beach campout, baked biscuits in coffee cans, grunion running, eating a tube of Alka-Seltzer without water and dancing a very bad version of the hula to “Little Grass Shack” in front of a packed auditorium.  We also dealt with death.

I first learned about communism while “camping” on Mrs. H’s shag carpet. The girls slept in sleeping bags, lined with cozy flannel decorated with flying ducks and hunters.  I claimed the spot under the dining room table, and as the evening wore on the adults started talking about “reds.” I could not fathom why it would be better to be dead than red.  But it certainly sounded frightening; especially when one adult added that there was a “red under every bed.”  At least I was under the table, not the bed.

For years we raised money to go to the Girl Scout chalet in Zermat, Switzerland.  It was the thought of the cool, clean Alpen air that inspired more car washes than I can remember. Years of them.

When the remaining stalwarts graduated from high school, Troop 2277 finally retired. We counted the funds that had been growing for eleven years. There certainly was not enough to take us to the real Matterhorn, but we’d been to Disneyland enough times to know what it was like.  Instead, now college students, we flew up to San Francisco for the weekend.  The year was 1969 and we couldn’t have gone to a cooler place. 

The Jellybean Contest

There were two ways to walk to Ivanhoe Elementary School from my house—three if you count the shortcut routes. One was up Angus Street and around and down. The other was down Angus Street to Hyperion Boulevard and then to Rowena.  This route took us by the stores and shops and gave us respite from the snippy dachshund that sometimes bolted from a garage along the other way.

One of businesses we passed was a portrait studio and in the window was sign advertising a jellybean-guessing contest. Inside the store, on the counter, was a large jar of the candies.  You wrote your name and guesstimate and gave it to the nice lady. There were lots of “nice ladies” in those days. (And note that in the picture they are wearing the requisite pearls and high hells.) My guess contained a lot of the number three for my birthday month and day.

The lucky winner would get ten dollars, which was a lot of money to a kid back then. Second place was five dollars. And third prize was all the jellybeans.  All three winners would get a free family portrait to boot.

I guess my choice of many threes was an auspicious one, because I won third prize. I think this was the first time I had ever won anything, and third prize looked pretty good. It never occurred to me that someone must have pawed over all those jellybeans to count them.  For one brief shining moment I was a minor neighborhood celeb, in spite of the fact that my eyes were shut in the picture.  Looking back, you think a professional photographer could have done a bit better.

Later, my parents, sister and I went and had our stiff family portrait taken.  I still use that picture in my 20^th Century America class as an example of a baby boomer family. And I’ve never really been that fond of jellybeans since then…except for the black ones.

Pets

My family ran the gamut of benign, low key pets. Pseudo pets, I like to think. There were mice, hamsters and guinea pigs…even rabbits and once a duck named Alexander who had a “rebirth” in Echo Park Lake. There was a parakeet that drowned in the dishwater. Once we were given some sort of cameleleon on a chain with a pin that you could buy at the L.A. County Fair. It was sort of a living broach.  The thought now is appalling. Second only to my mother putting our dead goldfish down the garbage disposal.

None of these creatures gave us what we really craved.

The guinea pigs were slaughtered by some unknown night marauder, the rabbits bred with too much fecundity and were dispatched to places unknown, and the hamster reminded my father of a rat.

When you were growing up in the 50’s and 60’s the only REAL pets were either a dog or a horse.  And not in that order.  A pony came first.

On TV there was Flicka, Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, and Spin and Marty on the ranch. Sky King and his niece Penny had a ranch with horses and a Cessna to boot. Johnny Crawford got to ride a horse and hang out with The Rifleman.  Roy Rodgers and Dale had Trigger and Buttermilk and their dog Bullitt.  And a Jeep called Nellybelle.  Then later came that kid in Florida with a dolphin called Flipper.

It seemed like every kid in America had a REAL pet except us. 

It got so bad that I started cutting out Purina Dog Chow ads and pasting them to my wall.  Granted, they would soon be replaced by pictures of Warren Beatty and Richard Chamberlain.  But….

Then one day my mother came home from work in Burbank.  She had seen some puppies and the dam broke.  She and my father and I conspired to get a puppy for my sister for Christmas.

It wasn’t a horse. There was no smell of hay in the air, no reek of leather saddles and no collie rushing to tell me of impending danger. But the puppy changed our family.  My father and sister picked her out at a Humane Society.  My dad liked her because she was the only puppy not yapping.  He loved her more than any of us.  Her name was Betsy. 

Child of a Mother with Bad Feet

My shoes were not the Silverlake norm.  My mother had “bad feet” and wanted to ensure that her daughters didn’t.  New shoes meant going to Penny’s in Glendale and buying white oxfords—basically what today would be called “nurse shoes.”  Sometimes they were black and white “saddle shoes.”  But our shoes were never anything as exciting as a pair of Keds.  No support, my mother said.

After school, upon the encouragement of my teacher, I would lug out the polish kit.  Needing both white and black touch ups, I became adept at keeping within the lines of the stitching.  I loved buffing the best.

Then one day it came time for new shoes.  When we arrived home from Penny’s, my sister and I watched television.  There in full black and white was an advertisement for PF Flyers that showed a cartoon figure able to jump ten feet high because of the sporty canvas shoes.

Since I had brand new shoes, I thought I might get the same results.  I went into the back yard, through the fence to an  “open lot,” and jumped off a wall.

I didn’t bounce, nor did I go ten feet in the air.  I rolled on a piece of broken glass, went to the Hollywood emergency room and got stitches.  My sister hid under the bed with her friend because of my screams.  That friend would later visit me in Sweden. 

Despite the scar, saddle shoes ruled our lives until junior high when I sneaked a pair of patent leather, candy apple red, slip-ons into my locker and ditched the saddle shoes until it was time to walk home.

 

The Yo-Yo

I really, really wanted a Duncan Imperial yo-yo. And my mother was not one to give you what you wanted without a “pleasurable struggle.”  My task was set.  I had to perform some piano piece—long forgotten—perfectly. When I finally did it, I was rewarded with an orange/gold Duncan Imperial.  Not the “butterfly” model, but the Imperial..  Secretly, I was not thrilled with the color. But I had my yo-yo.

I spent the night before taking it to the Ivanhoe Elementary School playground practicing my “around the world” moves. The next day, at lunch, I whipped it out and yo-yoed with the other Duncan crowd. The bell ending lunch recess rang and I lined up.

Mrs. B. was on recess duty that day and she also happened to be my teacher.  She was the sort of woman who really wanted to look good to her fellow teachers and principal.  Every morning she entered the classroom; a hastily built “bungalow” meant to accommodate the baby boom’s press upon the school’s original building, in spike heels.  Within seconds, she was wearing flat canvas shoes.  The spike heels would re-appear as she went to faculty room, assemblies, lunch and recess duty. This was a daily ritual.

It might have been the heels she wore for recess duty that made her grumpy.  But grumpy and illogical she was on the day that I first unleashed my “around the world” moves on the playground.  With neither rhyme nor reason—nor cause—she took the Imperial away from me.  Not just my yo-yo, but my friend Alice’s as well.

The injustice seemed painfully intolerable.  I had done nothing wrong.  I wasn’t playing with it after the bell rang. I had behaved in line.

My mother was fond of telling us that the “teacher is always right” and I held little hope of getting my newly won Imperial back until the last day of school.  But that night the yo-yo gods were watching over me.  For some unexplained reason, my mother thought it was unfair too—and much to my grateful surprise, actually sided with me.  She wrote a terse note to Mrs. B asking for my yo-yo back.  It was only one of two times when my mother did something so out of character.

The next day I rather cockily entered the cloakroom and handed Mrs. B my mother’s note.  Alice did the same with her own note.  Except Alice had forged hers.  I got my yo-yo back.  I don’t think Alice did.