Vern’s Stories: Beautiful World - A Bad Time Ahead
I guess I have had a bad week so I want to quickly say this before I start crying on your shoulder.
I think we are the most fortunate generations in the history of the world, to be born when we were, especially my generation. I am so glad I was born during this transition period. Before this time, things had gone on almost the same for thousands of years. Then came the industrial revolution, the electrical, electronic, aviation and the computer age. To be born during the time that all this was developing is so exciting and so much fun. I am enjoying life to the full.
Just think when I was a little boy, they were still delivering milk and ice and other commodities in horse-drawn wagons. The first airplanes were not much more than motorized kites, made of cloth and sticks and held together with wire. They were barely able to get off the ground with one man. To see all these things develop over the years into what they are today is exciting. I have flown in jets with over 400 people on board. I have lived to see man walk on the moon and probes blast off to far-off planets. I have seen man soft land equipment on Mars and control it from earth. What a time to live!
However, with all these marvelous time-saving gadgets, (I use the words "time-saving" advisedly; there seems to be some differing opinions on this.) there is always the chance that some of these little electrons will jump the track, get going in the wrong direction or something causing a flub-up, which brings me to my aforementioned "bad times." Did I hear someone say, "Here we go again"?
Sometimes when these wonderful gadgets are behaving badly and I really get agitated and frustrated, I wonder if I am going bonkers, but so far I have returned to normal after a short lapse of reason.
The other day our power went off for a few minutes. When it came back on I looked around and it seemed that everything in the house was screaming for attention. Every digital clock in the house was blinking frantically . The VCR was saying, "Set my clock." Out in the yard our six-station watering system had returned to "0;" the clock had to be re-timed. The starting time had to be set and each station had to be reprogrammed. You guessed it: After everything in the house and yard had been reprogrammed, the power went off again. After that we decided to wait for the power and our nerves to settle down before going through that rigamarole again.
Previous to this, I had wanted to buy something at the catalog desk in town. When I went to order the clerk informed me that their computer was out of order. I asked her how long it would be before it would be working again. She said maybe an hour, maybe eight hours or maybe a day or so. I said, "Can't you just phone the order in like you used to do?" She said, "Oh, no, I couldn't do that; it would foul up the whole system and throw the system into convulsions."
Well, I gave up on that and decided to go over to the Green Tree Inn, since later on in the month we wanted to go up to Yosemite National Park. The Green Tree Inn is in the Best Western motel chain and there was a Best Western motel near Yosemite where we wanted to spend the night. I told the man the day we wanted and he sat down at his computer and began plunking away. He plunked away for quite awhile, frowned, shook his head and started over. This went on for sometime. Finally after about 30 minutes he got a printout. I looked it over and it was for the right day, however it failed to note the year. The price was $58.00 which didn't seem too bad. I paid the $58.00 and went home feeling good because everything was set for our trip but wondering why it took so long to get a printout. In the days before computers, the man would have phoned the other motel and if they had a room, the transaction would have been over in probably ten minutes. Still regardless of the time it took, I was glad the reservations were taken care of. Now comes shock one and two.
Later the phone rings at home. The man at the Green Tree is on the line. Says he: "That printout has a mistake on it. I hate to tell you this, but it is for next year, not this year." I look at it and sure enough he is right. He continues, "I guess next year would be a little late for your trip." I say, "Yes, it would be a year too late." He says, I've been in contact with the motel and they say they're all booked up now for the rest of the year." I say, "Look, it's your mistake. Our plans are all made and we need that room on that night." "Well," he says wearily, “I’ll see what I can do." He calls back the next day, real happy like, "Hey," he says, "It's all fixed up; they found a room for you." Shock number two: "There was another mistake on the printout. The price should have been $20.00 more, not $58.00 but $78.00."
Well, now that problem is straightened out, another day goes by and I get a letter in the mail from a company. The letter has something in it that I don't quite understand. No problem, their phone number is on the letter, I will just call them and get it all straightened out. I dial the number. This sweet female voice comes on the line and says, "If you know the extension you want, press one. If you don't know the extension you want, press two." I press two and she just keeps on with this lingo. "For this, press four; for that, press five." On and on she drones, gets to the end and starts over, "Press one, press two, press three." By now I have pressed about every button on the phone and she still drones on. By now I am so frustrated I am practically shouting into the phone, "I just want to talk to someone; I have some questions." Still she
drones on, "Press one, press two, press three." Finally she says, kind of disappointed like, "Sorry we couldn't help you; have a good day." By now I am almost hysterical and I shout back, "How can I have a good day when I have to deal with the likes of you, you dumb computer chip or whatever you are." Oh boy, what a day!
Well, it's a wonderful age in which we live with all these wonderful gadgets and inventions, but I sometimes wonder if the stress, strain and frustration in time will cause us to end up in the funny house. They haven't been around long enough yet, so I guess the jury is still out on that one. Things seemed so simple when I was a kid, compared to today, but then I suppose in time, maybe that would get monotonous, too. I have heard of people going crazy from boredom.
Well, now that I have cried on your shoulder and a couple of tears have dropped on your crying towel, I feel much better. I had better get into my story for today, if you are still with me.
SANTA MONICA, A BEAUTIFUL CITY BY THE SEASHORE
We are leaving the San Joaquin Valley where Daddy has been operating a steam shovel and hauling gravel with his big white truck, and we are moving to Santa Monica, California. It is winter time 1922 and it has been raining a lot lately. Today as we start our journey, the weather has cleared and it looks good for the trip, only a little wind blowing. Daddy will be driving the big White with most of our worldly goods stacked in the dump bed. Mama, bless her heart, will have to jockey that old Model T Ford over mountain and dale with the rest of our belongings and us kids perched on top.
As we approach the Ridge Route, the wind has picked up to a howling gale and dark clouds are scudding across the sky. We reach the little town of Lebec, high in the mountains. Now it is getting dark and it looks like it is going to be a stormy night. Daddy pulls off the road and Mama pulls in behind him. Mama and Daddy talk a few minutes and decide we better camp for the night rather than be on the road in these mountains during a storm. The wind is howling and blowing so hard it is hard to put up a shelter for the night. A family that live up the hill a short distance, see our plight and come to our rescue. We sometimes overlook the fact that there are multitudes of loving, caring people in this world, because of a few bad apples. This family took us into their home where we spent the night in comfort out of the storm and fed us breakfast in the morning. They had never seen us before and as they sent us on our way, asking nothing, they probably realized that they were not likely to ever see us again.
There was a very light snow in the night and as we resumed our journey, the roads were open but icy in places. As we came around a bend in the road, a woman standing in front of her car crossway in the road, was waving her arms for us to stop. "I skidded around on that curve and almost went over the bank," she said in a shaky voice. "Please be careful; these roads are treacherous." I guess Mama and Daddy took her advice because we made it through O.K. Farther on we came to a place where they were re-paving the road. It was all torn up and they had made a detour up on the side of the mountain. It wasn't the nice paved detours we see today. They had more or less just knocked the brush down and smoothed it out a little and it was full of soft dirt and ruts. Daddy was afraid Mama wouldn't be able to make it through with the T Model so he drove the big truck through and came back and drove the T Model through.
There were no more hitches in our get-a-long after this and we drove into Santa Monica, imagining in our childish ways that the flags were flying and the bands were playing for us. Daddy soon found a house which he rented from a man named Mr. Peters, who lived in a room on the back parch. We were just one block over from Grandma Harris, Aunt Lillie, Myrtle and Uncle Bert and Aunt Emma.
Santa Monica was a beautiful city, clean and wholesome, no crime to speak of. It was flanked on the northwest by the beautiful Santa Monica mountains and on the southwest by the long white sandy beaches of Santa Monica bay. Although there were some businesses all over the city, the main downtown business district centered at Santa Monica Blvd and 2nd, 3rd and 4th Streets, where all the big well-known stores of that day were located. To name a few, there were Kress, Woolworth and J.C. Penneys. The big red inter-urban street cars traveled down Santa Monica Blvd. from Los Angeles, through the main part of town, then turned left near the ocean front and went to Ocean Park and Venice, (Ocean Park was part of Santa Monica.) Then back to Los Angeles on the Venice short line.
The Pacific Electric Railway that operated the big red cars had the most extensive network of rail lines probably in all of California at that time. From the Pacific Electric Terminal building in Los Angeles where people were hurrying to catch cars to all destinations, the rail lines spread out like a giant spider web all over the Los Angeles basin, to San Bernardino, Santa Ana, Long Beach, Venice, Santa Monica, Glendale and the San Fernando Valley as far as the town of San Fernando. Most of these lines didn't follow streets, but went almost straight to these cities on their own right of ways. (Although the tracks are no longer there, the right of ways can still be seen in many places in Southern California.)
The bay area had three piers, Santa Monica pier, Ocean Park pier and Venice pier. These piers had many attractions for young and old, roller coasters, Ferris wheels, giant slides on high towers, fun houses, Toonerville, (a comic strip of the day featuring a funny little streetcar and a funny little motorman) merry-go-rounds, warm water plunges and various other attractions.
The beaches were a big drawing card for the area. On weekends and especially on holidays like the Fourth of July, the big red streetcars would be coming into town loaded with holiday crowds. Sometimes you would see maybe three big reds joined together to accommodate all the passengers coming to the beach. On the beach the sand would be almost covered with humanity. Sometimes you had to do a little searching around to find a place to park your carcass.
Roller coasters were one of the big attractions to the beaches. Disneyland had not been invented yet and Knott's Berry Farm was just that, a berry patch of maybe 10 or 12 acres with a modest little restaurant in the middle of the berry patch. We used to go by it on Beach Blvd. on the way to Grandma's house in Huntington Beach. The Knott's, in order to attract more business, started to add a few buildings in the western ghost town motif and a little jail. As business picked up, the berry patch began to disappear as more buildings and attractions were added. In time the berry patch was all gone, but the name stayed.
So, in these early 1920 years, if you wanted the thrill of the roller coaster rides, you had to go to the beach cities. These roller coaster structures were built on the piers and rose five or six stories into the air. They were all built of wood with twists and turns, ups and downs and were all painted white. They all had distinctive names like, "The Cyclone," "The Twister," "The Big Dipper," and they all had their reputations. Some had such bad reputations that some people were afraid to ride on those certain ones. If you were a kid and you had been on a bad one you could brag to the other kids, "Yes, I rode on The Cyclone." Some kids were so scared they were crying; me, I wasn't scared at all, in fact I was just barely hanging on.
Well, us country bumpkins seemed to adapt quite easily to city ways and soon had the run of the town. We were discovering new and interesting things like Kress's five and dime store. It was really a five and dime store then. It was really surprising what you could buy for a nickel or a dime or fifteen cents.
Back on Ninth Street we kids sit idly on the front porch as the milkman comes down the street in his milk wagon, pulled by two well-groomed horses. The wagon is open in front with a roof overhead and enclosed in the back where the quart bottles of milk are stored. There is a wide door on either side for easy exit. The milkman has a wire bottle carrier which he fills with glass quart milk bottles, steps off the wagon and goes from house to house down the street, leaving milk and picking up empties. Out in the street, the horses are plodding along keeping pace with him. When he gets to the end of the street, the team and wagon are right there. He steps on board and goes on to the next street. Now we kids suddenly come to life. The ice man is coming up the street and all the kids on the block are running out to meet him to get a piece of ice to chew on. The households of those days have wooden ice boxes that held 25 or 50 pounds of ice. The ice man has a leather shoulder pad that reaches from his shoulder part way down his back. He smiles at the kids, amused as they find little pieces of ice to put in their mouths. With his ice tongs, he hoists a large chunk of ice to his shoulder and disappears into a house.
Sundays on Ninth Street seem to fall into a regular routine. We kids would get up, put on our Sunday finery and Daddy would drive us downtown to the large church on 4th and Arizona Streets where we attended Sunday School. In the meantime Mama and Daddy would go over to Grandma Harris and Aunt Lillie's house or sometimes Uncle Bert and Aunt Emma's house. After Sunday School, we kids would walk back to Grandma's house on Lincoln Blvd. and Michigan Avenue. After dinner the old folks would settle down in the large dining room to an afternoon of talking and visiting and us kids were left to our own devices. Along with Myrtle (Aunt Lillie's daughter, four years older then I) we seemed to be a combination of Peck's Bad Boy and the Katzenjamer Kids, which was our favorite funny paper page in the Sunday Examiner newspaper. We liked to play pranks on adults, mostly. We had to amuse ourselves some way; it was no fun to listen to the adults chit-chat, so we made our own fun. At least to us it was fun.
Myrtle had some good ideas as did the rest of us. Myrtle had a coin purse, the kind that has the two little knobs that snap past each other. We would fill it with paper wadded up to make it look like it was full of coins, yet light enough to pull in easily. Myrtle had a long string tied to it that a few dead leaves would hide. We were all hiding behind some bushes anticipating with great joy what was going to happen next "Oh, here comes a lady down the sidewalk. S-s- s-h-h! Be quiet, you kids, quit giggling or you'll give it away." This sedate lady almost falls on her face as she reaches down to pick up the purse and it is whisked from her grasp. The bushes instantly erupts with howls of laughter. Sounds like a bunch of laughing hyenas. She is probably saying something like, "Must be a bunch of street waifs, probably orphans with no bringing up."
If the weather was bad, windy, rainy or something, we would adjourn to the parlor in the front of the house, which wasn't used much but kept nice for company. There was a phone there and a phone book I'm not sure which kid thought this one up, but we would look up all the funniest names we could find in the phone book. One kid would be dialing while others would be looking up funny names. I can't remember very many of the names. I do remember some. One I remember was Hamburger, also Parson. It was really pretty silly but kids are sometimes that way. It went something like this: "Hello, Mr. Hamburger. Called to see if you could spare a couple of pounds?" "Hello, Mr. Parson. We just called to tell you we are good kids. We went to Sunday School today." Or maybe we said something like, "Hello, Mr. Vesuvius. Just called to see if you have blown your top lately?" Of course we all laughed at the end of each call. The response was something like, "Who is that on the phone, just a bunch of crazy kids," as he hung up the phone.
On other Sundays we had several versions of this one. We would get a cardboard box, the kind stores receive canned goods in; get different kinds of empty cartons like butter, breakfast food, coffee tins, etc. and fill the big box up with all these items. We would take it out in the street next to the curb, tip it on it's side and sort of lay it all out like it had fallen out of the back of a pickup or some other vehicle. We usually went down the street to Uncle Bert's house where there were lots of big timbers in his yard to hide behind. A car would come down the street, whiz by the box, thoughts going through the driver's brain. All at once it dawns on him, "Hey, that was a box of groceries back there." His brakes go on with a thud and he starts backing up. When he gets back to the box, gets out ofhis car and reaches down to pick it up, he realizes he's been had. Our heads pop up from behind the timbers and we give him the old "Hee Haw." He gives the box a kick with his boot and returns to his car. He would probably like to give us his boot but probably realizes we can scramble over the timbers faster that he can.
Another version of this was that as soon as the driver went by and started to stop, before he looked back to back up, we would scramble out and quickly carry the box behind the timbers. The man would back up to where he had seen the box, get out and look all around. He would scratch his head, stand in deep thought for a minute like, "Am I having delusions or what?" He would shrug his shoulders, get back in his car and drive away. All the time, we kids are trying to suppress our giggles behind the timbers, so we wouldn't give our trick away. I don't know if we caused anyone to see their psychiatrist or not. Kids never give a thought to anything like that.
Well, June 1923 has come and gone and Vernon has finally gotten through the second grade. Maybe if he didn't have so much foolishness on his mind, he would have done better in school. Vernon has been notified to report to a brand new school in September to start the 3rd grade. The school has just been built on the corner of Lincoln and Ocean Park Boulevards. It is called John Muir, named for a famous California naturalist.
Before this happens a very happy, wonderful event will happen at the Harris home on 9th Street. On August 24, 1923, our little baby sister Nellie May was born to bless our home. She was so cute and adorable, we all fell in love with her.
Daddy is busy with his big White dump truck, hauling decomposed granite from the Hollywood hills, where there is a huge mountain of it, to Santa Monica where it is used in service stations. Decomposed granite is granite rock that is so many ages old that it has started to crumble up into the consistency of sand or pea gravel. Possibly there is some chemical process involved here also; I don't know. Anyway, this decomposed granite when spread out on a driveway or around a service station would pack and harden almost as hard a rock, when driven over by cars and trucks.
Service stations of that day were quite different from the big fancy company-owned stations of today. They were privately owned by individuals. Instead of one brand of gas like your stations today, a station might have six or seven pumps, each with a different brand of gas. The pumps were much taller than the pumps today. They were about five and a half feet tall, with a clear glass bowl at the top that held 10 gallons of gas. The gallons were marked on the sides of the glass from one to ten with one-half and one-fourth gallon marks in between. Each company had it's own color of gas. There were reds, blues, greens, purples or oranges so you could easily identify the gas you were using. Stations were quite colorful with all these colorful gasolines. Service stations were really service stations in those days. When you drove in, they would fill your gas tank. You could look at the pump and see exactly how much gas they put in. They would check your oil and water and put air in your tires if they needed it. You didn't even have to get out of the car, just hand him the money for the gas and be on your way.
When the newfangled pumps came out with the enclosed pump and the little hand that went round to tell you how much gas was being pumped into your tank, some people were afraid they might not be getting as much as they were being charged for. With their gas in a glass, they could see exactly how much they were getting. There was a period of time in the transition period when stations were changing over to the new kind of pump. Some stations had the new, some still had the old. The people who didn't trust these newfangled pumps, would drive around until they found a station with the old-style pumps to get their gas. Finally after a few years, all the old pumps were gone and everyone was stuck with the new. Progress, well maybe?
Time is passing and it is now 1924. Daddy is 36, Mama is 32, Vernon is 9, Glenn is 7, Ralph is 5, Genevieve is 3 and Nellie May is 1. You might say it is a well-graduated family.
Mama and Daddy had been thinking for some time about having a place of their own. Now they have bought two lots on Ashland Avenue near 18th Street. Daddy has bought an older house in Ocean Park and moved it onto the property. We will soon be moving to this new location where we boys (I'm not sure about the girls) will find a new love. We will be near Clover Field, Santa Monica's airport, where we boys will spend many fun-filled hours and fall in love with airplanes.
Well, I think that will be another story. I think I'm getting cross-eyes from looking at these white sheets of paper and if my hand gets more tired, Genevieve won't be able to read this. My pen is running out of ink and you are probably getting tired of reading, so we will say, "Bye for now."
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