Vern’s Stories: Santa Monica - The Growing Up Years - Part II
Well, as much as we Harris kids loved airplanes and Clover Field, we did do other things that were enjoyable. As kids we never had an allowance. I don't know of any kids that did. I don't think allowances had been invented yet. Even in our younger years we devised ways to make a little money. Later we would carry paper routes, but you had to be eleven or twelve to get a paper route and we were too young for that. Now I don't mean to imply that the folks never gave us money, but times were tough and with a large family to feed, clothe and shoe, they had to be very careful with their money. When we went to the beach, they might buy us a hot dog and a soda, maybe an ice cream cone. At the pier they might give us money for several rides. On the other hand, if we wanted to start a capital project, like making a surfboard or something, we sometimes had to raise a little capital on our own.
Some Japanese farmers had a truck garden down the hill on the flat land in Venice. They seem to grow a lot of cucumbers. I am not sure why but if the cucumbers were larger than a certain size, they were discarded. Maybe they were raising them for the pickle makers or a market that called for a certain size. At any rate here was all these nice cucumbers being thrown away. These Japanese people didn't seem to understand much English but seemed to indicate it was alright for us to help ourselves to these oversized cucumbers. We loaded up our little red wagon and we were in business.
We went down the street selling our cucumbers, as l recall, for five cents each. Business was brisk. Our balance sheet looked good. Our overhead and the cost of our product was nil so it was all pure profit. Looking back, I can't remember what caused the demise of such a lucrative business. It must have been that the cucumber season came to an end or maybe a winter frost came. Anyway, l think it was after this that we decided to make our surfboards.
Sometime later when the folks were running a neighborhood grocery store, we would load up our little red wagon with soda pop, packed in ice. There was a lot of building going on in the new tracts in the neighborhood. It was July and it was hot and the carpenters were hot and sweaty. We would pull up to the job site with our bottles of Coke, Hires root beer, Delaware punch, orange, grape and strawberry pop. (All pop came in glass bottles back then.) The carpenters were glad to see us and were glad to cool off with a break and a cold drink. Business was good. This was during prohibition days. There was a non-alcoholic beer called "Near Beer." This old man who evidently had been a heavy drinker, drank a bottle of this Near Beer. He held the bottle out from him, looking at it. Someone ask, "What do you think of it?" He replied, "Well, all I can say for it, whoever named it Near Beer was sure a poor judge of distance."
Well, back to our surfboard project. We went down to the lumber yard and picked out some nice clear l' x 12' white pine boards and had the nice man at the yard cut them into five-foot lengths, then round one end on his bandsaw and round the other end to fit the curve of our bellies. We took them home and rounded the edges with a wood plane. We sanded and varnished them and we were ready to go surfing. We did what you call belly surfing. (There didn't seem to be any standup surfing on our beaches in those days.) We would wade out, maybe forty yards or so where the small breakers were breaking. As the breakers were beginning to break behind you, you would throw yourself forward into the water and the breaker would propel you forward. If you hit it just right, sometimes it would give you a ride almost to the sandy beach. One thing we learned real quickly. Be sure to have your board pointed up at a steep angle. If you hit the water too flat, the suction of the water would pull it to the bottom and the front of the board would stick in the sand. The sudden stop would ram your belly into the back of the board. It would just about knock all the wind out of you.
Sometimes our whole family would go down to the beach together for a day of fun. We kids would go on several rides together, the roller coaster, fun house, merry-go-round and maybe the giant slide. The slide was built like a tall lighthouse with an elevator in the middle and a slide spiraling around and around the outside, all the way to the bottom. When you got off of the elevator at the top, an attendant handed you a heavy mat to sit on and you were on your way to the bottom, moving quite fast. Near the bottom, the angle of the slide tapered off to flat so you slowed down to a near stop at the end. I don't recall Mama and Daddy going on any rides. I think they enjoyed the day, just watching us kids having fun.
One time we had a bad scare when Genevieve got lost as we were walking from our car to the Venice pier. There were all kinds of attractions along the way. We stopped to watch some kind of demonstration or act. After watching for awhile, we started on but Genevieve was so fascinated with the act and watching so intently, she didn't realize that the rest of us were moving on. She usually kept close to Mama. With the crowd thronging around, the rest of us didn't realize Genevieve wasn't with us for sometime. All at once, Genevieve looked around and realized she was alone in this huge crowd. She was scared so bad she was shaking and crying and was almost incoherent with fear.
Now enters the scene what appears to be a kind, motherly-looking woman. She asked Genevieve what was the matter and tried to comfort her, telling her that she would find her family. She took Genevieve to her car on the street and put her in the back seat and left her. Genevieve lay on the seat and cried herself to sleep. This woman didn't notify the police or anybody else that we know about, that she had found a little girl. Meanwhile we went back where we had last seen her and everybody fanned out all over the pier looking for her. The police were called and they were also looking for her. Mama was beside herself with worry and fear. We looked out over the water as a little four-year-old could easily wander over and fall into the turbulent water below. All of a sudden Mama had an inspiration. (I'm sure it was the Lord.) She decided to walk down the street and look in all the parked cars. Mama didn't go far until she spotted her little girl asleep in the back seat of a car. Genevieve awoke to look into the face of her Mama. What a joyful reunion. They hugged and shed tears ofjoy.
No one knows to this day what this woman had in mind. Did she want a little girl for herself? Was she going to kidnap her and hold her for ransom, sell her or what? This will be a mystery that will never be solved in this life because no one ever saw her again.
There were two other places we enjoyed at the beach. There were two large indoor plunges, one at Ocean Park and one at Venice. They were huge public places to swim and frolic and have fun. They used ocean water, pumped in from pipes that went out to sea a ways. The water was filtered, heated and dispensed over a fountain in the middle of the plunge. This fountain was a huge thing and had a curved place that went full circle around it where people could sit and let the warm water cascade down over them. The fountain would probably hold about ten people. Daddy was a good swimmer and we kids could swim good enough to keep from sinking. Daddy could do an amazing thing. When he got tired of swimming, he would just lay over on his back and float. It looked so easy but when we tried it, we sank like a rock. We came up sputtering, spitting water and coughing so we decided to stick with swimming.
We occasionally went to Grandpa and Grandma Murdy's place between Westminster and Huntington Beach. Some trips, I am sure, were planned ahead of time, but some seemed to be a spontaneous decision to head for Grandma's. I remember one time, we kids were helping deliver wood. We had one more load to deliver to a big mansion in Beverly Hills. We would go along to help Daddy when we could. During school time, we would help on Saturdays. This day we had just unloaded the wood and had stacked it nice and neat in the big garage. As we started for home, Daddy surprised us by saying, "Well, all our orders are filled. I think this would be a good time to take a trip to Grandma's house." We kids were all saying with one accord, "Let's go, let's go!"
We were always ready to go to Grandma and Grandpa's place. They had a small farm on ten acres of land in Orange County and there were all kinds of adventures waiting for us as soon as we got there. The road into their place crossed the railroad track, then over a little bridge down a lane along side of the house and into the back yard. No one ever went to the front door; everyone went in the back door. The back yard was big and open and full of chickens and turkeys, all running loose. The chickens were scratching and pecking around all over the place and the turkey gobblers were strutting their stuff to get the attention of the hen turkeys and gobbling to be sure they were seen. Throw in a few ducks and it was quite a yard to drive into. As we would be getting out of the car, Grandma and Aunt Ella would come running out to greet us. Such hospitality you will never see today, I don't think. They were so happy to see us, you would have thought they hadn't seen us in ten years. Grandma would grab a couple of chickens that were scratching around, wring their necks and leave them flopping all over the yard while she invited us into the house. Later after the chickens quit jumping around, she would bring them into the house and fix some of the best fried chicken man ever put his mouth to. I think Grandma's fried chicken had "Kentucky Fried" beat. It was not only finger-lickin' good, it was lip-smackin' delicious.
Grandpa, during the day, was out with his team and wagon hauling in hay or doing other chores. Grandpa was always a hard worker and he wasn't about to quit now that he was getting older. Grandpa and Grandma were down to earth good, wholesome, honest people, the kind of pioneers that made America great. It just made your day to be around them for a spell. Grandpa was quite a kidder and had a habit of sizing up different ones in the family, seeing something about them and giving them a nickname. He noticed Ralph seemed to be a happy little kid so he named him "Happy.” This name stuck and everybody called him Happy until he started to school.
This time while at Grandpa's, no one had seen Happy for a while. He came staggering into the yard, clothes torn, lacerations and blood on his face which was dripping off his chin. He was breathing hard like he had been running a marathon or something. Everyone was wondering what happened. Mama and Daddy were concerned and asked him what happened to their little boy. "Well," said little Happy, "I was out in the pasture and this little airplane came flying by me. It was only about this long," he indicated with his hands. Someone said probably it was some kind of a flying bug. "No," Happy said, "it was a real airplane. It was a biplane with two sets of wings and a long round fuselage and I could see the little pilot's head above the cockpit behind the wings. I had to run fast to keep up with it and it went through all kinds of maneuvers just like any plane does." Someone said jokingly, "What happened, did you run into it's propeller?" "No," said little Happy, "I was so excited to see such a tiny airplane, I was running to keep up with it and changing directions every time it did. There was this barbed-wire fence that I didn't see. The little plane went right between the wires and I crashed right into the barbed-wire fence." Well, that probably was little Happy's first encounter with a dragonfly. That is what everyone later decided it was. I expect Grandma had him all patched up in no time and ready for his next adventure.
There were so many things at the farm that was attractive to us kids. The railroad was just in front oftheir property. About every mile or so along the tracks, there was a beet dump. These were large wooden structures about 400 feet long and about ten feet wide, made with heavy planks, making a roadway for horses and wagons that slanted up from both sides to a height at the top of about thirty feet. There was a level place at the top long enough for horses and wagon to stand while the load of beets was dumped over the side down a chute into a gondola railroad car below on the tracks. When we first came to Grandma's in the early twenties, we witnessed this operation in progress. There were long lines of teams and wagons waiting their turn to climb to the top of the beet dump to be unloaded. When all the rail cars were loaded, it made a long train of cars loaded with beets. A steam locomotive would pull off down the tracks with the long train of cars, headed for the sugar factory.
In later years these teams were all replaced with motor trucks that hauled the beets directly to the sugar factory or to a central point. The beet dumps were no longer needed. For years they just stood there, serving no useful purpose except for kids to play on now and then. If you had something with wheels, you could take it to the top and coast down in either direction. If you were in a mood to climb, you could start at the bottom. There were lots of braces and cross braces for little hands and feet to hold onto so you could climb to your heart's content.
Along the north side of Grandpa's property there was a drainage ditch that ran into a pond on the south side ofthe property. There was always water in the drainage ditch and pond. There were big red crawfish with big wicked-looking claws. We loved the challenge of catching them without being grabbed by their claws. There were poliwogs, frogs, various kinds of water bugs and a kind o f spider that could skate across the top of the water without any skates. We could spend hours playing with all these little creatures in their natural habitat. In the pond there were fish and we sometimes went fishing. There were also water turtles, always mud hens and sometimes wild Mallard ducks would fly in.
Meanwhile back at the ranch house it is now evening and everyone is gathered around in the parlor. We are all listening to Grandpa's favorite serial radio program on Long Beach radio station KFOX. It's sort of a mystery thriller, something like "Tom and Pete Jones and the Mysterious Caves on Ward Mountain." Every episode is a thriller and Grandpa never misses a program if he can help it. Well, tonight's episode is a real cliff-hanger and it will be awhile before our pulses get back to normal. The program is now over and Grandpa gets up, shuts off the radio, walks across the room to the mantel clock and begins winding it up. This happens every night at precisely nine o'clock and everyone knows what this means. It's bedtime and not a peep out of anyone until morning.
We will be heading home in the morning. Funny thing, I guess Daddy likes a change of scenery when he travels. He has about three different ways he goes home and comes to Grandma's. Sometimes he goes Beach Blvd. through Buena Park, sometimes through Inglewood and sometimes through Long Beach, Redondo, Manhattan Beach and El Segundo, along the ocean to Santa Monica. We never knew when we started out which way it would be.
We are home now and having been gone for a while we are anxious to see what is going on at Clover Field. As we approach the field, we are all excited because there are truck loads of movie-making equipment being unloaded from many trucks. There are movie cameras, big reflector boards, platforms, cranes, wind machines and all kinds of miscellaneous items used in movie making. We kids are awestruck as we watch movie making in progress, directors shouting instructions through their megaphones, personnel on big silver foil boards, catching the sun's rays and shining them on the actors in just the right way and amount to bring out the photography artist's best. In some scenes, usually where airplanes are involved, the big wind machines are wheeled out.
In one scene, they have their large biplane suspended above a platform and the wind machines are blowing a mighty blast on the plane. There is a man on the end of each wing rocking the plane just a little like it would do in regular flight. The actor, probably the star of the movie, climbs into the cockpit, pulls on his helmet, adjusts his goggles. Now the director shouts through his megaphone, "Cameras! Action!" The cameras are filming a closeup of the pilot and don't show the men rocking the wings or the platform below. The plane is disabled and is going to crash. The tail comes up, the pilot climbs out of the cockpit with his parachute on, climbs out on the lower wing and jumps off a few feet to the platform below. Sometimes the scene may be repeated several times because it didn't turn out just the way the director wanted it. He will retake until he gets it just the way he wants it. Later the plane will be lowered to the ground and will take off with a stunt man on board. He will climb out on the wing from high in the sky, open his chute and float to earth while it is being filmed from an other plane, probably a Jenny with a camera platform on it.
There was another scene taken at a different place on the field. This scene was taken at night with big flood and spot lights. A plane was hoisted high in the air by a crane with a high boom. The leading lady arrives in her big white automobile wrapped in furs and silk. She goes into her portable dressing room and comes out with a very plain uniform-type dress on. The lights are on, the cameras are rolling, the plane is dropped, our lady runs into the scene as the aviator crawls out of the wreckage and dies in her arms. Other movies were made from time to time, mostly in the air with stunt men doing all kinds of daring stunts.
All three of us boys were born during the World War I years. Glenn and I were born during the height of the war. Ralph was born just one day before the war ended. Of course we were too young to remember anything about the war but after we started going to Clover Field and were around all the World War I fighter planes, we became interested in what happened over there. I enjoyed history; it was my best subject in school. I remember that we would go down to the public library in Ocean Park and bring home these huge volumes on the war to study. I think they were several years of Popular Mechanics bound together in one volume. They were as big as an unabridged dictionary. We would lug these huge volumes home. They were filled with all kinds of pictures and stories, details all about the war. We learned there were two new machines in this war, new to warfare, tanks and airplanes. Our main interest was airplanes and this is what we found out about them.
The U. S. Signal Corp bought their first airplanes in 1907 and 1908. They were Wright Brothers' planes and their engines developed 35 horsepower. Despite the U.S.A.'s early entry into aviation, because the big brass in the army and navy didn't think there was any practical use for airplanes in war, we entered W. W. I on April 6, 1917 with only a few officers and a few second-rate training planes and two airfields. When our pilots were sent to Europe to fly in the war, they had to fly British or French planes.
What the Europeans had learned early on, was that airframe design improvement could only go forward as fast as engine design and power improved. Early aircraft engines were more or less an adaption ofautomobile engines to aircraft use. These early aircraft engines developed a small amount of horsepower and were very heavy for the amount of horsepower developed. One problem with early aircraft engines was overheating. Many times in those early days pilots were forced to make an emergency landing because of overheating.
It is said that when Louis Bleroit was making the first-ever crossing of the English channel by airplane, he was only part way across when his engine began heating up. It was so bad that he thought he was going to have to land in the ocean. All of a sudden a rain storm came up and cooled his engine enough so that he made it on across to England.
Probably one ofthe first engines designed exclusively for aircraft was the radial engine.
In a radial engine, the cylinders are in a circle, evenly spaced around a one-throw crankshaft. There is one master rod and all the other rods to the pistons are pinned to the master rod. Usually the radial engine has an odd number of cylinders unless it is a two cycle. This is so the firing will be even all the way around. These engines had the same problem of the conventional in-line engines; they would overheat.
Two Frenchmen, the Seguin brothers, overcame this problem in a novel way. They made the crankshaft stationary, bolted to the frame ofthe airplane, and the whole engine rotated around the crankshaft. The engines ran cool because the cylinders were rotating through the air stream. They called their engine Rhone. They now had an engine that was very light for horsepower developed . They could build engines that were very powerful for that day, without the problem of overheating. This engine was widely copied by all the Allies and by the Dutch and Germans. The planes ranged in power from 80 horsepower at the beginning of the war to 150 horsepower in the last year of the war.
The rotary engine, although solving the heating problem, had other problems. As you can well imagine, with the mass of the engine rotating at high speed, it was hard to control the lubricating oil. They used a special lubricant, castor oil, which gave rotary engines a distinctive smell. The oil consumption could be as high as one-fourth to one-third as much as the gasoline consumption. The expediency of war and the short flights over the lines made this no big problem, but after the war, it would make this type of rotary engine obsolete because long flights and efficiency were more important.
The aviation contribution of the United States to the war effort during the first year we were in the war, was building thousands of training planes. One example was the Curtiss JN4 which was nicknamed “Jenny.” Another well-known trainer was the Standard. No doubt our greatest contribution to the aviation part of the war was the American-designed 400 horsepower Liberty engine. Over 20,000 of these engines were built by Ford, Lincoln, Mormon and Packard. This engine was so good, it was still being used in new aircraft after the war and into the twenties and thirties. The Around the World Flyers’ planes used these engines.
When the war ended November 11, 1918, the various governments declared many of the World War I airplanes “surplus” and they went for bargain prices, some as low as three hundred dollars. In the early twenties the airports around the Los Angeles area were filled with war surplus airplanes, fighters of all kinds and trainers, especially Curtiss JN4’s. For years they were the workhorses on many airfields.
The war had been over for just fourteen months when 1920 rolled in. Los Angeles had a population of 516,000 and Los Angeles county had a population of 2,200,000.
This is a little background of the early days of aviation as the three little Harris boys entered the scene in 1924 and walked around Clover Field, looking at the various types of little fighter planes from far-off Europe. They were hooked for life on aviation.
In the decade of the twenties, aviation historians have said that “civil aviation made its greatest advancement.” We were there to see and or hear it all. We were excited and thrilled to see some of the people and planes that made history. Our own Art Goble won the Dole race to Honolulu. Sir Captain Kingford Smith flew from California to Australia in his trip-engine Fokker, “The Southern Cross.” Oceans were being crossed, records were being broken for the longest non-stop flights, altitude records were being made, and also endurance records and cross-country speed records. Aviation was making headlines all over the world and it sure wasn’t going unnoticed by the Harris boys.
As I said in a previous story, Clover Field was wide open in those days, no chain-link fences, no keep-out signs, no alarms or guards. You could walk up and down the flight line and look over the aircraft. No one seemed to worry about anyone wanting to damage anything.
It seems a sad commentary on our country today when humans have to protect themselves and their property from other humans who seem to think their only purpose in life is to hurt other people or mess up their property or destroy it. Take Clover Field today, all fenced in with no-trespassing signs, alarms and guards. This is a necessity today. It’s sad but that’s the way it is. I wonder why things have changed this much in just my lifetime?
Well, it’s about bedtime so I guess I’d better draw this to a close. If I was Grandpa Murdy, I would get up and wind the clock and hit the feather tick, but now all we have to do is to replace the battery once a year.
‘Till next time, my love to all.
VERN
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