ANNA M. POWELL
THE RIDGE ROUTE.
Suddenly, it seemed to me, in 1922, when I was 6,
my parents decided to leave the mist and rain of Oregon for the sunshine
of California. We rode the train to Oakland, and after a brief stay there,
it was on to Los Angeles, which in the twenties was a mecca for people
from the rainy north.
Encouraged by friends in Oakland, we had taken the plunge,
and bought a car: a shining, black, Buick touring-car. Now, come what may,
and ready for adventure, papa and I put ourselves in the hands of a brand-new
driver: mama fresh from her course of driving lessons.
She had bought a stylish motoring-costume, which
seemed to give her extra self-confidence. This costume was a long, tan,
heavy-linen, belted dress, a wide-brimmed straw hat, whose veil could be
drawn over the face to screen out the dust, driving-gloves, and . . .riding
boots!
We had heard that the Ridge Route was the only way
to get to Los Angeles, and we had found out how to reach it, but no one
seemed to know what it was like, except that it wound over and in places,
through the Tehachepi Mountains.
The first part went smoothly; enjoying the feel
of riding in our new car, as we watched the countryside go by, stopping
at a campground for a night and then a hotel. It was a happy adventure
thus far.
Inexorably, though, we at last came to the base
of what looked like a rocky, dirt road. This must be The Ridge Route! We
began our bumpy climb, a bit unsure, but in good spirits; we couldn't know
yet that this road was fit only for mountain goats!
We were soon to face short stretches of missing
road; small, deep chasms over which boards had been laid. We drove shakily
across, and kept slowly moving along, our hearts full of dread that we
might meet an oncoming car around the next bend!
At one point mama, in a momentary lapse of judgment,
started to drive into a narrow tunnel without turning on the headlights,
or honking the horn. Papa and I yelled "Lights!" She turned themon. . .and
honked. . .and it was O.K.
Looking back on that reckless trip, I picture us
as a trio from the "Keystone Cops," bouncing along in our dust-cloud, concentrating
on the dangers of the road, unconscious of the natural beauties to our
right. Hugging the cliff wall, and trying not to look over the edge, we
crawled along, staring straight ahead, and prayed and held our breath.
Finally, and feeling the greatest relief and sense
of freedom, and surprised beyond al1 belief that we had made it at all,
we rolled down onto the blessed flatlands, and headed for Los Angeles!
Ultimately, once in the city, we found ourselves
at the top of a small hill in the downtown area. Halfway down this hill
was the hotel where we planned to stay.
Utterly spent, Mama parked the car, set the brake,
and, turning to Papa, said, "Please. . .go down to the hotel garage and
get someone to drive us to the hotel!"
After a short stay in the hotel, mama
found a roomy apartment on Bonnie Brae St., a few blocks from Westlake
Park, (renamed "McArthur Park.") It was in this large, solid building that
we experienced our first earthquake, in 1923. The chandelier swung alarmingly;
we were just able to stay on our feet! As it subsided, people rushed into
the hall, yelling "Earthquake!" It was pretty exciting!
At last there were playmates; plenty of children
in that neighborhood. We would run together down to the park, carrying
bread to feed the birds. We swung on the long-roped wooden swings, and
threw little stones into the water. Sometimes, when an adult would pilot
a boat for us we floated around the lake in a world of sunlit water, fellows
with dabbling ducks and swans, watching for fish in its watery depths.
In those days Los Angeles was young and vigorous,
still unsure of its identity, and lacking in culture, but brimful of optimism.
"Pep" was an often-heard word. Clara Bow was the "IT" girl. Autos, especially
Fords, were becoming a common sight.
Entering school can be a scary experience,
I, who had never been inside a school, was not keen about starting. However,
my parents rightly thought it high time for it, and so together Papa and
I walked bravely into the nearby Catholic grammar school.
Although I was now only 7, Papa and I, having studied
together, had brought me up to what he thought was probably an upper grade
level, though he had no idea what this grade might be.
We arrived there early, Papa holding my hand, We
were met by a girl of about 10, who led us into a small office. Our little
usher eyed me critically. She asked me what grade I was in. I replied,
"I don't know yet. The teacher is going to decide."
"Well," she said officiously, "Can you spell 'butterfly?'"
I did. "Now spell 'handkerchief,"' At that moment Sister Pascal entered,
in time to hear me spell it. "What's this all about?" she asked; then,
sizing up the situation, sent the critic on her way, and closed the door.
Seated before this kindly, older nun, I answered
her questions in Arithmetic and Geography; I read, and I spelled. At last
we reached the 7th grade; Sister Pascal was reluctant to place me there.
After some moments of serious thought, she said, "I think she is capable
of doing the work, but I don't see how she could fit in with the class."
Nevertheless, we tried it out; as a sort of hapless
experiment it turned out as expected. A total mismatch! Physically, the
desk was way too large for me. (I must have looked like an early-days Lily
Tomlin.) Socially, the class regarded me suspiciously as some kind of freak!
7 years old in the 7th grade?!
Sister decided on a compromise; she dropped me to
the 5th grade. There I gradually settled in. It helped that this was Sister
Pascal's class; I liked her very much. True, I was half-kneeling, half-sitting
in an oversize desk, but I got used to it, and years later, in 8th grade,
my desk fit quite well. The "little sister" role with the girls of my class
was fine with me: Back at home, there were my own-age friends to play with
every afternoon. It was a higgledy-piggledy life!
A year later my parents decided that
a small town would suit us better; they rented a house Instead of an apartment.
We settled into a 2-bedroom, redwood cottage in a park-like setting on
Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood. It was like a small Green & Green house,
with a front porch that was cool in summer; its smooth cement surface was
perfect for "Jacks."
In those halcyon days, Hollywood was a family town:
friendly people, living in their small homes on pepper and palm tree-lined
streets. The motion picture industry was its heart; brand-new, brash, creative,
and above all "glamorous!" Living in Hollywood in the twenties was like
living in a fairy-tale that had come to life!
One day, we kids watched a scene from a Harold Lloyd
film, being made on our very corner; the flower-shop was its setting. Over
and over, perhaps twenty times, the actors rehearsed the simple scene,
until Lloyd felt it was perfect. That was the way movies were made in those
early days.
Every now and again we would be treated to the vision
of Mack Sennett cruising along in his open touring-car, surrounded by a
bevy of bathing-beauties, or Jackie Coogan walking along Sunset Boulevard
with his father. Johnnie Weismuller coached us kids in swimming at the
Hollywood Athletic Club across the street; he would come leaping into the
enclosure with a great Tarzan yell! For a brief time after coming to this
country, a movie director named Murnau, and his family, lived just a few
doors from us. He directed Sunrise in 1927. In a walk through town, you
were apt to see at least one movie star. George Raft and his gangster friends
used to frequent the drugstore at Hollywood and Vine, or the Brown Derby
kitty-corner from it. Once, Lewis Stone, that courtly gentleman-actor,
politely moved his car so that my mother would have room to park.
Mickey Rooney was in my theater class. Like a lively,
young monkey, he loved to jump up on a table, and tap-dance madly while
singing "Madenciselle from marmontieres". Indeed, he needed no encouragement
to go through all of the verses. The next thing we knew, we were all attending
Max Reinhardt's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Hollywood
Bowl. There was Mickey as Puck; a marvelous performance, and the beginning
of his career.
It was a wonder, I guess, that my friends and I,
growing up in Hollywood, in the roaring twenties, were so normal. Hudson
Avenue, near where we lived, was alive with the sounds of our skates, the
crack of the baseball bat, and our happy yelling. No grown-up ever interfered
or guided us in our play; we were happily free to enjoy the game of the
moment: jump-rope, baseball, tag, hopscotch, marbles, jacks; we even had
a clubhouse up in a Sycamore tree.
It was on dear Hudson Avenue, and I think the year
was 1925, that my friends and I discovered that a certain elderly lady
on the block possessed a radio, the first one in the neighborhood. When
we heard that the Dempsey-Tunney prizefight was to be broadcast at a certain
time, we made sure to be there, quietly crouching beneath her window, listening
breathlessly. I can still feel our sense of wonder at the magical power
of that radio!
High School was a happy enough time.
First there was a year in private school in Hollywood, then a semester
at Holy Names Academy in Oakland, where a friend and I used to ride in
the hills, which are now covered with houses. Returning again to Hollywood,
I attended Immaculate Heart High School, from which I was graduated in
1931; then to the College, which meant merely moving up the hill.
In those depression years, many poor
people roamed the streets. One could scarcely leave the house without being
stopped along the way. Most often the question was, "Can you spare a dime?"
I recall my mother giving out many dimes. With each, her advice was, "Use
it for a streetcar ride down to Aimee Semple McPherson's Temple in Los
Angeles, where you will get a hot meal, and a bed, and maybe a job." Aimee
helped thousands of destitute people during the depression, and whatever
one might say about her evangelical style, still she brought in bundles
of money, most of which was used to alleviate the miseries of the poor.
She used to say at the collection time, "I can't stand the jingle of coins,
so please put in a bill!"
My father was a sound businessman, as
well as a good doctor. In the twenties I recall him saying that heavy speculation
in the stock market, which the country was doing, was a very risky thing.
Several of his doctor friends lost everything in the Crash of '29.
After graduation from College at 19,
I enrolled at UCLA to work towards a Master's Degree in French, and a Secondary
Teaching Credential, which degrees I received in 1937. Moving from IHC
to UCLA was like going from a village to the big city. The excitement of
a university after all those quiet years was a wonderful change.
My first awareness of communism as an active part
of college life came in the years 1935-'37. UCLA had its share of communist
students; small demonstrations were, for a while, an almost weekly occurrence;
sometimes the police were called, and administrators were nervous about
crossing campus alone at night.I was invited by Psychology-student friends
to sit in on discussions of how to overthrow the government, and how to
gain more power at the college. I soon came to dislike these fanatical
meetings, and tried to avoid the Psych majors as best I could. Most students
at UCLA were there because they were seriously intent on finding a way
to make a living; many were poor, and struggling hard.
When Pierce and I were married in 1937,
(he was 25 and I was 21) we moved to Chicago, where his father for whom
he worked, had opened a branch of h is health-cereal company. As ever,
it was hard for small businessmen to compete with big companies, and it
failed. But for the almost a year that we lived there, we thoroughly enjoyed
being in this grand, big city. In spite of the depression, night-clubs
and hotel dining-rooms were always full. Marshall Field and Carson, Pirie,
Scott were larger and finer than any department stores in L.A. But the
depression was nevertheless widely-felt in Chicago; thousands of destitute
people shuffled along in hopeless poverty, a few blocks away from the expensive
shops and restaurants on Michigan Avenue. Rarely did you see people from
the two proximate worlds mingle.
The West side of Chicago was the worst; it was the
factory and slum district where our cereal plant was located. Sometimes,
when I was lonely, I would catch the "L" near Evanston, where we lived,
and ride down to visit Pierce, and help him a bit with his work. At night,
on the way to dinner, we saw an occasional street fight with knives. The
crime wave, which surged through the city, especially on the West side,
reached terrifying proportions.
Pierce was touched by it, when a gangster and his
two bodyguards in long, black overcoats and felt hats visited him in his
office to pressure him to pay for "protection." He refused, saying merely
that he hoped to get a more substantial kind of protection from the police,
if he needed it. At that moment, Mr. Henning, the night-watchman entered
the office with his German Shepherd watch-dog. The dog, sensing trouble
from these strange gents, snarled ferociously. Even though the watchman
had him on a tight leash, the gangsters quickly backed out; they never
troubled Pierce again.
Another interesting incident occurred in the Chicago
Club dining-room in 1936, when Pierce had been in Chicago only a short
time. He had visited the office of a friend of his parents, Thornhill Broome,
a wealthy industrialist, who invited Pierce to lunch with him. This man
was a member of the Secret Six, a group who successfully brought the protection
racket under some semblance of control, when Mayor Kelly and his henchmen
were no longer able to handle it.
During lunch, a tall, thin, youngish man came into
the dining-room, and seated himself at a nearby table. Mr. Broome told
Pierce that the man was an educator named Robert Hutchins, the President
of the University of Chicago! Later the head of Fan Steel Corp. stopped
at their -table to chat, but in a moment he was called to the phone. He
returned, to laughingly report that his workers were going on something
called a "sit-down" strike, which to him seemed absurd. Pierce thought
it was interesting that in one place, there were important men from three
areas of society: education, industry and public service.
Graft in government in Chicago, especially in the
late thirties, when we were there, was as widespread as the gang problem.
Mayor Kelly was one of the crookedest mayors that city ever had. One of
his steadiest and most lucrative sources of income was the garbage collection
business. He owned and rented out the horses and wagons, hundreds of them,
at $25.00 a day! Which in those days was a lot of money!
The ghettos were an integral part of the Chicago
social structure: Polish, Italian, German and Jewish. Pierce recalls going
to Weinstock's Dept. store, one of a chain, to buy shirts, and coming away
empty-handed; they spoke only German. The man who did his printing, Mr,
Domine, had a wife and 7 children. This family was so poor they lived in
an unheated apartment above their print-shop; fortunately some heat radiated
up through the ceiling. In winter some of the children went to school barefoot;
they had no money for shoes. Pierce gave him as much business as he could,
and plenty of health-cereal as well. Shortly after we moved back to Los
Angeles, they also came, and by 1945 were prospering; Mr. Domine worked
as a die-maker for a defense plant.
Back in West Los Angeles, we lived briefly in a
small house near Beverly Blvd., had our first baby, David Pierce in 1938,
then moved to Alhambra to Pierce's old family home, a big, redwood house
on an acre of land. In 1939 we built a home in San Marino, where our first
daughter, Christie was born in 1941.
World War II had been brewing for several
years, when suddenly America became involved. I shall never forget how
astonished we were to hear of this on the afternoon of December 8, 1941.
We had been staying at the "Trading Post" in Thousand Palms, and were driving
back to it from Mass. We switched on the radio, and the voice said, "The
Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor!" Just like that, we knew it meant war!
My recollections of the war years, 1941-45 are indelibly
clear. The blackouts; our neighbors, who were air-raid wardens, checking
to make sure no light was visible from the street. Myself as a "block-mother."
The night we knelt at our upstairs, bedroom window to watch the shelling
along the coast, . . .like a distant fireworks display. Pierce turned to
me and said, "War on our shores!" We could hardly believe it. An aunt of
mine was strolling the beach at Seaside, Oregon, when she almost stumbled
over the dead bodies of Japanese soldiers washed up on the sand. She reported
it to the police, who, after examining the bodies, that, because of
their army uniforms, they must have been part of a landing-force. This
same aunt wrote us that some people in Oregon, who lived near forested
land, were nervous about the many balloons which the Japanese loosed, and
which hovered and burst into flames, starting fires.
Here in California the fear of Japanese in our state
seemed to many of us to be unreasonable. From our home, just below Huntington
Drive, we watched trainloads of them go by, bound for the Santa Anita race-track
parking lot, where temporary shelters had been built to house them, until
they were transferred to various inland internment camps. In all probability,
more of these Japanese were loyal to the U.S. than not. However, Pierce
and I wondered about one Japanese family, who ran a nursery on San Gabriel
Blvd. where we liked to shop. Shortly before Christmas of '41 we stopped
at their place to purchase a small living pine for our Christmas tree.
Instead of the polite and friendly treatment we had come to enjoy from
them, they greeted us coldly, and the transaction was short and business-like.
The following day our local paper carried a story which made us wonder
about Japanese-American loyalty; in this nursery federal agents uncovered
a complete set of short-wave equipment.
In many ways the war changed our lives: swapping
ration-stamps with friends, sharing scarce items such as birthday candles
and buttons, and trading vegetables from our Victory gardens, saving aluminum
foil, and scavenging old tires to turn in at the depots, riding our bicycles
instead of driving; it all made us feel closer to our neighbors, and friends,
our community and to America! I remember loving and appreciating my country
with a patriotic fervor I have never felt before or since. The rousing
war song, "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition", the wistful "When
the Lights go on again All Over the World" and the funny "They're Either
too Young or too Old," and "The White Cliffs of Dover" were all part of
our wartime lives. Most of the people we knew accepted the sacrifices cheerfully,
which is not too surprising, since those sacrifices did not include any
real deprivation. "Inconvenience" is a better word.
It was the scarcity of toys that inspired Pierce
to manufacture small wooden jeeps and tanks, with wheels stamped out of
linoleum, and wooden army rifles. It was a land-office business. For quite
a while his were the only toys in the dime-stores. To those who frown on
war toys, "I would say it was a war-oriented society, from which no child
could be sheltered anyway." For a year before the toy business, he worked
nights at ALCOA Aluminum rapidly rising to a point where be was offered
an attractive permanent position. But, ever independent, he turned it down,
and continued to be his own man!"
Several changes in our style of living came about
as a result of the war. Housewives learned to wait on themselves in the
vegetable section of the market, (the help had gone to war,) new mothers
stayed in the hospital only a few days, (maternity wards were crowded,
doctors no longer made house calls, except in an emergency, (so many of
them were serving in the armed forces.) The day of the housemaid were practically
over, at least for middle-class families, (housemaids were now defense
plant workers.) It all resulted in this young housewife quickly learning
to cope with it all!
With a great ringing of church-bells, the war was
over! Everyone went on a big buying spree, as soon as the things we had
done without were again available. For us it was a new Willys Jeep station-wagon.
When Joseph was born to our household in '43, we
decided to move back to "the big, redwood house on an acre of land". We
are very glad we did this, because it was in a neighborhood which was a
cross-section of America, a heterogeneous mix of rich and poor, educated
and ignorant, white and blue-collared workers and their children. It was
an unusual street in this respect, and our children loved it. I think it
taught them more about all kinds of people than they could have learned
in any other way.
In 1946 Vincent was born to us, and then Frank in
'49, followed by Steve in '51, and a last son, Barney, in '55 and finally
another daughter, Margaret in '58, to make a total of 8. In those days
people were again having large families, and we have never regretted having
so many children. They have been mostly a joy, in spite of tonsillectomies,
appendectomies, at least thousand colds, and a hundred trips to the dentist.
MAY GOD BLESS THEM, EVERY ONE!
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