The 4th of July at Angus Street

My family always did something special on the 4^th.  We had friends or relatives around, we churned home-made ice cream, I made pickle and potato chip “sandwiches” and we had a very tame fireworks display.  All this was done in our back yard.

Before my mother met and married my father, she had been married to a man who died within one week of contracting polio.  He left her an insurance policy and she was smart enough to use it to buy a house.  3018 Angus Street.

When my father entered the scene, married and moved in, he took the back yard in under his able wing. I have no clue what it looked like before his arrival, but by the time my little memory was at work, it had three distinct levels.

The bottom tier was grass and raised flowerbeds with roses and agapanthus, and a small grapefruit tree.  In years to come it was transformed into “golf driving range”.  The next level was grass surrounded by flowerbeds, a concrete wishing well and a latticed love seat alcove. There was a plum tree with very scratchy bark and an apricot tree. When my father finally retired, he felt compelled to use every single piece of fruit from his land. We had apricot jam, plum jam, apricot “leather” until my mother could no longer stand coming home from work to a kitchen filled with sickly sweet smelling pots and pans.

Adjoining this lawn was a slate covered area with a built in bar-b–que, large redwood picnic table with benches and a bed of fuchsias.  In later years it would also be home to a wood rat that would appear during party dinners, much to the utter embarrassment of my mother.

The top level of the yard was where I spent most of my time.  It backed, for many years, onto an open lot. When the “open lot” was in the process of being built upon, my mother was horrified at the language of the workmen.  She complained to the boss.  I was enchanted by the forbidden words.

Along this upper level, my father made a small trail to a play area. At the opposite side was a large white peach tree.  The Babcock tree was later axed to make room for a playhouse constructed from our neighbor’s garage door. I have always thought of that tree. The play area changed over the years and saw a swing set swapped out for a ping-pong table.  And then, with my adolescence, the area fell into disuse.

But on the 4^th of July, the backyard always came to life. 

Sparklers were always a big hit.  And once we discovered that you could “spell” with them in the night air, their lure grew stronger.  Hearts, initials, circles lasted just that few seconds longer than they should, and made them magical. We were never a family for the high-flyer type fireworks.  We kept everything close to the ground, always wary of fires and lawsuits, I suppose.  Nothing ever went higher than a foot. This may explain why my favorite “firework” of all time is THE WORM. 

The Worm was a slate gray pellet the size of a thumbnail.  We would put them on the bricks that lined the lawn:  the same bricks that my father had carefully laid when he took over the back yard of Angus Street and made it into a three tiered oasis.  When a match was put next to the worm it would start to grow and an ashen “worm” would grow into a curling, snaking shape.  It left permanent marks on the brick that would be a reminder of 4^th of July for years to come.  I’ll bet they are still there.  

 

Thomas Starr King Junior High Here I Come

When it came time to “graduate” from Ivanhoe Elementary School, things quickly began to change.  The assembly celebrating our passing was made up of our class singing the Doris Day hit “High Hopes.”  I guess I should have taken that as a harbinger of things to come.

Thomas Starr King Junior High pulled from a much wider and diverse catchment area than Ivanhoe. Frankly, I was nervous to be starting this new adventure and very jealous of my friends who were twins who could face the new challenges together, and my friends who had older brothers and sisters who had gone before.  I felt a bit like an explorer without an expeditionary force.

I think it’s ironic that I spent three years at a school named for someone I had never heard of and never was educated about. 

At King, life changed.  No longer was it important to kick a home run at recess or beat someone at handball.  Calluses earned from doing turns on the rings counted for naught. New words quickly joined my vocabulary:  Vato, Saint Christopher medal, Pendleton shirts, rat comb and scrub. It was now important how you held your blue notebook binder.  Girls to their chests and boys down at their side.  If this was not done correctly, one’s sexuality might be in question.

Wearing socks with your shoes made you a dork, hair spray was a must and suddenly deodorant became important.  The smell of Rite Guard Spray permeated the girl’s locker room as if it were the finest French perfume.

A year earlier, I had made a plea to the gods of bodily functions to PLEASE DON’T LET ME GET MY PERIOD IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL.  This prayer was answered, but the onset was made no easier by the horrible contraptions designed to deal with our “curse” and the hall monitors who patrolled the bathrooms during break and lunch.  “Recess” was a long gone bittersweet memory.

I think one of the things that junior high, and the entire educational system, teaches is that LIFE lets you get to the top--just every now and then (6th grade, 12^th grade for instance) and puts a most addicting and tiny taste of omnipotence onto your tongue. Then it pulls out the rug with a twisted twinkle of the eye and makes you start climbing the ladder all over again.

At King, we had to start at the bottom, and not with just our “Leave it To Beaver” Silverlakers.

 

When I first started to ask for a St. Christopher medal my very Protestant mother was a bit at a loss.  She was not to know that a shiny blue medal hanging from your neck made you a “Surfer” and not a “Vato.”  The Vatos were a group whose females wore their hair in huge beehives that had enough hairspray to support a skyscraper.  It was rumored that inside of those intricately backcombed styles were razor blades and cigarettes.

On my family summer travels we had passed through Pendleton, Oregon and I was well aware of the fame of its woolen blankets and shirts. At King, I was to learn that a Pendleton was also a badge that said you were a “surfer.”  Those pseudo tartans were worn by boys who cultivated long, blond—often bleached-- bangs hanging just over their eyes. A Pendleton and a St. Christopher medal was all it took to be a “surfer.”  Think Beachboys.

Surfers

One summer when I was about 14, my uncle and aunt went off on a freighter to parts unremembered by me.  They offered their new beach house to my mother who scooped up the offer of a free vacation locale with relish. 

My family moved in for a week, maybe three, watching the waves and the surfers of Manhattan Beach.  I spent the time riding the waves on an inflatable canvas raft and reading SURFER magazine.  The raft had a blue side and a red side and I always rode it red side up so sharks wouldn’t think it was blood. I envied the wet suited boys with sun-bleached hair who walked passed our house to the beach carrying their boards and their egos with confidence.

In those days women didn’t surf…. especially if they were a 14 year old from Silverlake who only had the Pendleton and the St. Christopher medal to prove her worth.

In a moment of great patience, my mother drove me to a surf shop in town to look at the goods.  I coveted the Gordon Smith and Dewey Weber boards and wished more than anything that I could own one.  I think a came away with a decal.

When I wasn’t fishing off the pier or riding the raft, I wiled away those days reading SURFER magazine. I taught myself about the sport.  I learned about far off places called Sunset Beach, Makaha and Pipeline.  I knew what “ hanging ten” was and became familiar with the names of great surfers and their feats.

Little did I know that one-day, by the oddest of confluences I would live in Hawaii and see these places. And odder still, I would end up teaching school with the daughter of one of the most famous surfers I had read about many years earlier. 

My husband wore my Pendleton until it got holes in the elbows. And as for the St. Christopher medal, who is to know what long ago drawer it got lost in. But, to this day, I’ve never been on a surfboard.

Thomas Starr King Jr. High: Bad Teachers Part One

I have had some memorable, fantastic, caring and inspiring teachers.  And then there was Mr. N. 

Mr. N was very short and his lack of height was exacerbated by the size of his head.  He looked like a bobble doll that rode on a dashboard of a GTO. He lacked any teaching skills whatsoever.

I had the unfortunate luck to have Mr. N for both an English and a history class in two different semesters.  He made no bones about the fact he just didn’t like us.  He was humorless, uninspired, and uninspiring.  And he wasn’t even retirement age.

It was in his class that I perfected my “married woman” signatures; writing “Mrs. Steve Stone”, “Mrs. Kristie Stone” over and over.  It was also in his class that I selected my children’s names: twin boys would be named Kirk and Kyle….or maybe Keir.  Keir Dullea had just made “David and Lisa” and seemed very exotic.  Oddly, I never selected a daughter’s name. Prophetic perhaps.  And thirty years later I named our son Keir.

In his English class Mr. N would write a weekly list of vocabulary words on the side blackboard.  The only one that I remember was “buxom.”  He droned on about Greek gods and goddesses while I stared out at the gym field wishing I could be out in the smog playing softball. 

Once, our 8^th grade class got together and agreed that everyone would shove their books off their desks at an appointed hour.  Deliciously anticipating this prank, we pretended to be interested in whatever it was Mr. N was saying.  When the time came, we slammed our books to the linoleum in unison.  He was not amused.   He just stood there rubbing his giant forehead.  The only words I can ever remember him saying—while he rubbed the dolphin-esque brow were “Take your seat.”

In his history class, from which I remember absolutely nothing except my grade, things were no better.  I missed two weeks of it because of very bad case of poison oak and got a D.  Yep, a D in 8^th grade social studies.  And now I teach it. Granted, I got the grade up to a B by the end of the semester, but it was my first experience of having a grade on the “dark side.”

I hope Mr. N left teaching and got into something he liked. He did go on a bit about martial arts. Maybe he found solace somewhere in that field.

The Gold Chair

In the 1950’s, before my mother and father re-decorated our house, we had a wing chair that sat in the living room next to the fireplace.  It was covered in a gold fabric that was embossed with a pattern.  This became known as “The Gold Chair.”

When I was feeling odd or icky—that feeling where your stomach churns and you just KNOW that things aren’t right with the world—my mother would take me to The Gold Chair.  I would sit in her lap and she would try to make me feel better.

One of these occasions was shortly before she and my father were to go off on a romantic weekend together—obviously, without me.  Even at that young age, I appreciated that my parents needed time to be together and I secretly admired their marriage for that. My mother’s mantra was “your father was here before you were.” BUT, I never relished being left behind for a weekend with one of my mother’s unmarried friends.

That day my mother held me on her lap in The Gold Chair and told me that she was putting a special green vest on me.  It would stay on me while she was gone and I was to think about the green vest whenever I felt sad or lonely. It kind of worked.

As a music teacher in the Burbank School District, my mother collected unmarried women friends like some women collect shoes.   With only one exception, I think all of her female friends were without spouse or children.  In some ways, that gave them an advantage over her.  They had a lot more time and freedom to do whatever it was that they did.  On the other hand, my mother had the advantage of my father.  And that was quite an advantage.

On those getaway weekends, one of unmarried would come to tend my sister and me. And life wouldn’t return to normalcy until my parents walked through the door late Sunday afternoon.  The food wouldn’t be right, bedtimes would be odd and everything was akimbo.

The worst time was when we were left during the school week.  I think this was after my mother retired so she could spend more time with my father who was fifteen years her elder. They must have gone on a business trip together. My sister and I were in high school.  The Gold Chair was long gone. I was far too big to sit in my mother’s lap. And the little green vest story wasn’t cutting it anymore.

The unmarried lady was adamant that we didn’t need to set the morning alarm because she “got up at the same time each day. “That theory works if you are in your own bed, subliminally listening to your own neighborhood’s predictable morning noises and awakening to your own day.  This woman was not doing any of these things. 

Being tardy to school was something we just didn’t do. Had never done. Nor was having a burnt breakfast that suffered from having been broiled rather than baked. 

Wild Things

This has nothing to do with Maurice Sendak or misbehaving.  This is about all the stuff that we ate while walking to and from Ivanhoe Elementary School. Not the stuff we bought at Mike’s little store, but the stuff we culled from the neighborhood.

First, there was the lemon tree.  I now know that it was a Meyer lemon.  We would pick a fruit, peel it and sprinkle the remains of the small Morton’s salt container on it.  Our teeth would lose whatever they lose when you eat pure acid, and our salivary glands would kick into high gear.  The lemons weren’t like the ones my mother bought at Hub Mart. They had a distinctive flavor that was not as sour.

Then there was the wild weed—usually growing in an empty lot that today would be worth at least half a million dollars—that we called the licorice plant.  We’d shake the head and dislodge the seeds and chew them. I now know that it was wild anise.  The last time I tasted it in seed form was at an Indian place that gave a seed mixture as an after dinner palate cleanser.

We also ate the stems of the little purple flowers that grew all over.  They were sour and tart and it is no surprise that my generation grew up with a candy called SWEET TARTS.  Wild sorrel.  I think this may have been a subversive move on the part of dentists who would later advise products to strengthen one’s enamel.

There was also the pomegranate tree that we eyed enviously but waited until Halloween night when it’s owner would bestow us with a fruit or two in lieu of candy.

And lastly, was the magical little drinking fountain on Panorama Drive.  Why it was there, I have no idea.  But I always loved drinking the cold water and wondering about who put it there.

Easter

My grandfather was a minister and a quite prominent one at that.  If you google his name—Cleveland Kleihauer—you’ll see that he is credited with (cough) being a mentor to Ronald Reagan.

So at our house, Easter meant several things.  Both my sister and I expected, and awaited, the arrival of the Easter Bunny and the cellophane wrapped baskets that would be sitting at the ends of our matching twin beds when we awoke on Easter Sunday. Somehow, though, this was nothing like the thrill of Christmas morning. No explanations as to the entire oddity of Jesus dying, bunnies, crucifixion, chocolate and Jesus returning were ever mentioned. But, in return for the Easter Bunny gifts, we were put into the scratchiest, stiff, pastel colored dresses that we’d ever worn.  And, almost worse, were the little hats we had to wear.

At Hollywood Beverly Christian Church we were THE GRANDCHILDREN.

Our church didn’t DO Lent, Ash Wednesday or Shrove Tuesday.  Just Sunday. Women would pinch our cheeks, comment on our dresses and suck up to our mother. My sister and I stood stiffly in white socks and, sometimes white gloves, and smiled. Once home, we were free to explore the chocolate—after my father did the family photographs in the back yard where I could still see the stains from the Fourth of July worms on the bricks.

My mother would switch out of her “church clothes” and begin dinner. Our father would hang up his tie.  My sister and I would eat candy free from the crinoline.

I’m sure this must not have been a good day for my mother. I’ve never liked it, in spite of the candy.  But, I’d rather eat potato chips anyway.

I really don’t like this holiday.