Grandma's House Again
Railroad trains
rolled over our bodies
as we slept.
The very house
trembled,
fearful at the passing
of the iron horse.
Some lonesome
cowboy engineer
whistled a memory,
whistled the engine
past a graveyard crossing
and the fireman worked
at Hell's own hotbox
envisioning a cold draft beer
as just his ticket.
When the train had passed
Grandma snored,
the most comforting
sound I'd ever heard.
Grandma Myrtle Dot Love by the front porch of her house at 6421 California Avenue, Bell, CA circa 1950. The window behind her is from the bedroom where she and I slept in twin beds on either side of the window.
Grandma Myrtle Dot Love’s house was a wood-frame, semi-bungalow-style place probably built sometime between 1910 and 1920 at 6421 California Avenue in Bell, California, an early suburb of southwest Los Angeles. I once saw a receipt for the monthly mortgage payment: $26! The exterior, once in old-style wood siding of beveled, clapboard siding about 3” wide, has been refinished in stucco sometime in recent decades. The old casement windows have been replaced by newer models. Otherwise, as of this writing in 2022, it looks pretty much the same as when we moved there sometime during the World War II years, I’m guesstimating about 1944 or ’45.
The house is basically rectangular, with a sun porch and a big front porch occupying the first segment, the living room and one bedroom in the second segment, a dining room, two bedroom closets and a bathroom in the third segment, and a kitchen, bedroom and utility porch in the last segment, going from front to rear. A cellar about 8 by 10 feet was under the laundry room with a door next to the back porch to provide entry. The house was old enough that there was still a flue for a wood-burning stove in the dining room, but that was covered and not in use. The only heating in the warm Southern California climate was supplied by a stand-alone gas heater next to one dining room wall that I would stand near on cold winter evenings and mornings, letting the heat flow up into my jacket or pajama top before I headed for school or bed, as the case might be. The house was on a fairly large lot, I’m guessing about 50 feet by 150 feet, and my earliest memories include one large WWII Victory garden on the back third of the property. There was also a V Garden on a vacant lot next door to the west. That was where the apartments Mom and I would live in were built after the war. The side yard on the west side of the south-facing house was fairly small, probably 10 or 15 feet or so wide
Grandma’s front yard was big enough to play in, and had three loquat trees along its western edge. A concrete walkway ran parallel to the front porch, then around the southeast corner and along the east side of the house to the back yard and back porch. The east side yard had a rose garden out front, a lemon tree, and a flower garden consisting mainly of nasturtiums. There also were poinsettias, fuchsias, honeysuckle and other plants along the front and east walls of the house next to the walkway. We kids would suck the nectar out of the honeysuckle blossoms in the summer.
In the back yard were two large trees, an elm and a non-bearing avocado. Under the avocado tree was a weathered, grey, one-room, flat-roofed shack that Joe and Paul used as a bedroom and that Mom and I occupied for a short time after we moved in. It had a wash basin and hotplate, but no toilet. There was grass in the back yard until it was let go to dirt as Grandma got older and no one tended it. Just beyond the official back yard were a one-car garage with an attached carport that opened onto the alley parallel to the east side of the house between California and Lucille avenues. The space just beyond the garage that had been occupied by the Victory garden was later the site for a two-story, two-unit apartment complex built by my Uncle Paul Clyde Love in the early 1950s, when the old sleeping shack and garage/carport were torn down to make room for a concrete pad for access to the apartment garages. After those were built, Mom and I moved out of the four-unit place next door to Grandma’s and into one of those two new one-bedroom units and Uncle Paul became our landlord, and initially our first across-the-landing neighbor, with his new wife, Irene. Later, my Uncle Joe Love, Paul's older brother, occupied the other unit. As I recall, the rent was a bit cheaper ($65 a month, compared with $70 for the apartment next door to Grandma’s) and each unit had a two-car garage and some storage space and a laundry area downstairs. The old apartments next to Grandma’s had only a large, uncovered concrete parking pad out back.
Another early feature that you won't find today: An incinerator out next to the back west edge of Grandma’s property. The incinerator was made of concrete slabs bound together with metal straps. There we burned our paper trash once or twice a week. This, of course, was in the days before the proliferation of plastic packaging and before air pollution, or at least before anyone was particularly aware of it. Burning the trash was probably my favorite chore. Organic garbage was set out in front of the house in a metal garbage pail for pickup once a week.
The first smog I recall was caused during the winter by the burning of the smudge pots to keep the (now long gone) orange groves safe from the frost. In those days, you could look eastward on a clear day and see the San Gabriel Mountains and Mount Wilson off in the distance. Across the alley east from the property and facing Gage Avenue were a welding shop, from which the sound of a mechanized hacksaw was almost constant throughout business hours. That was so much a part of the sonic landscape that we seldom noticed it and usually only when it was absent. There also was a deserted gas station at the corner of Gage Avenue and California Avenue that was out of business from the time we moved to Grandma's, probably because of World War II gas rationing. A McDonald’s restaurant now occupies that site. Everything was rationed during the war, and you’d receive a booklet of ration stamps to keep track of your consumption of rationed goods. These included meats, gas, bread, milk, etc.
In several empty bays of the old gas station, there was an incredible array of junk ranging from old café fixtures to old lumber. There were three huge, rusted boilers behind the blacksmith shop. All these places provided play areas for us when grownups weren’t around to chase us away. Behind grandma's property and facing on Lucille Street was a house, garage and what would now be called a grannie unit where elderly friends of my grandmother, Mr. and Mrs. Gillespie, lived. In the main house on Lucille was a family who had a very pretty daughter, Susie, one of my first crushes.
The kids who lived on Lucille Street, especially on the side where back yards were next to the railroad track, were generally considered enemies of those of California Avenue kids. Once we had a rock fight, Lucille kids vs. California kids, in the alley between the two streets. There were plenty of inch to inch-and-a-half-size rocks on the alley surface for ammunition. Miraculously, no one was injured. Some grownup, possibly Uncle Joe, came out and made us all stop. Usually we were friendly enough and occasionally played together. Generally speaking, though, my friends were all on California Avenue, the main two being James Patrick “Jimmy” O'Sullivan and Donald “Donnie” Winant Jr.
One of my earliest memories of Grandma's House is the day Donnie appeared at the bottom of our back steps. Grandma told me "I think he wants to play with you. He can't talk. He's deaf-mute." And so began about 10 years of
From left, Donnie Winant, me and Jimmy O’Sullivan in Grandma Love’s
back yard, standing in front of the cellar door.
close friendship, rekindled in 2018 when Donnie, his wife and I met up for dinner in Southern California. Donnie, his parents and his older sister Marjorie had moved into the the downstairs unit just across the landing from where Mom and I lived then, at 6423 California Ave. He, I and Jimmy became the Three Musketeers, playing cowboys and war games and cars and tag and riding our bikes endlessly, or just sitting at one or another's homes and reading our collections of comic books. I can't recall how or when Jimmy and I met, but I somehow knew him since moving to Grandma`s. Later, around age 11 or 12, Carl Paul Santowsky became one of us when his family moved into the apartments next door to Grandma's when we were about 11 or so. I think we were around ages 6 or 7 when Donnie moved in next door. Sorry to say I’ve lost all track of what became of Jimmy and Carl Paul (as we always called him). Even the Internet has so far been no help. Both Carl Paul and Donnie moved away about the time we entered high school.
We communicated with Donnie by semi-talking and gesturing, mouthing words with sort of grunting sounds similar to those Donnie uttered. Donnie was learning lip reading at the special school for the deaf he attended, so communication improved as the years flew past. Nobody thought our friendship strange or odd and the adults around us thought it was wonderful that we were close friends.
We played cowboys and Army endlessly, moving freely up and down California Avenue to Jimmy's house, the apartments or Grandma's or the nearby vacant lots as our whims dictated. We became whatever western film hero we’d just seen at the Nu-Bell Theatre (TV with Hopalong Cassady and the like came later). We shot guns out of the hands of bad guys “Bascomb and Lobo” and galloped imaginary steeds along the sidewalks. Mind you, the only real horse we ever saw in those early years was the sway-backed critter that pulled the junk man's old wagon up the street about once a year collecting old items and offering saw-, scissors- and knife-sharpening. Otherwise we saw only the ponies at the pony rides that used to be at several locations around L.A. We would be 12 or 13 before we actually got to ride real, full-size horses at a riding stable oddly located in a semi-industrial area off Atlantic Avenue on Bell’s southern edge. It featured a trail out and back along the northern bank of the Los Angeles River. It was a dollar an hour – so, a rare treat in those days of 50-cents-a-week allowances -- to rent a horse. You could ride out the trail and imagine you were a real cowboy -- if you could get your horse to move rather than stopping to browse on the tall brush. I remember almost coming to tears (very un-cowboy-hero behavior!) in frustration when I couldn’t get my horse to leave off browsing one afternoon, no matter how hard I kicked his sides. I needed spurs!
The fodder for our cowboy games was the B movies we saw almost every weekend at the Nu-Bell on Gage Avenue. For 14 cents, you could see two shoot-`em-ups and 10 cartoons and sometimes a few serials such as “Buck Rogers in The 21st Century” (cowboy B-movie star and former Olympics swimmer Buster Crabbe, who starred in a series of Billy The Kid cowboy films, was featured as Buck Rogers, too). The space serials of those times didn’t capture our imaginations like the cowboy or war films. Of course, they were totally fictional, lacking the dramatic digital special effects of today’s films. We preferred the Buck Rogers Sunday newspaper comic strips when it came to space odysseys. We could more easily imagine cowboy and war scenarios because they were more based on historical realities. It’s worth noting, however, that at some point near the very end of our game-playing boyhoods, just before we began lifting weights to try to become real he-men, we set up a spaceship control room in Jimmy’s garage. This was after the advent of TV and stemmed from watching a cartoon show called “Captain Video.” I think that may have been one of the last “kid” games we played as high school impended.
Except for the almost constant background presence of wars (World War II, Korea, the Cold War), the societal violence that exists now in urban areas did not exist in my childhood years, not in our world. No gang wars in Bell, very few armed robberies, basically very little crime in Bell. The only gangster we knew of was Mickey Cohen, the notorious Los Angeles mobster, whose brushes with the law were headlined in the larger Los Angeles daily newspapers. It wasn’t till I was in high school that I heard of the White Fence Gang of Watts. It was said that once you joined it, you could never leave, under penalty of death. Gang fights in those days reportedly involved fists, ball bats, chains and switchblade knives, not military-style weapons and ghost guns. We never actually saw a gang fight. As kids, we roamed the streets of Bell and Huntington Park freely almost without fear about kidnappers or molesters, though of course we were all warned never to get in a car or go anywhere with strangers.
So, some random memories of Grandma's house:
-- Old-fashioned Christmas decorations that included a Santa and his sleigh and reindeer arranged on a white-rimmed, frosted (to resemble ice) oval mirror on the dining room table for the Yule holidays at Grandma's. And the family gatherings on Thanksgivings and Christmases.
-- Aunt Betty singing and playing “Bill Grogan's Goat” and “San Antonio Rose” on the spinet piano that stood along one living room wall for some years. Don't know exactly when or why it departed Grandma's, but I think it went with Betty when she and Clarence Vigario moved into their own home in Hanford CA around 1957.
-- I especially recall my uncle-to-be Clarence's visit to Betty while he was on leave during WWII after basic training. I was fascinated with the obvious energy of their love for each other and immediately liked Clarence, who was all smiles and very outgoing compared with the more taciturn men in our family. He radiated good vibes and you could tell he meant it, he wasn't just putting on a show. He enjoyed life. He had a dapper pencil-thin ‘40s film star mustache and an Army uniform and was missing two fingers on his left hand (the result of an auto accident and fascinating to me as a child). It might be that his somewhat similar appearance to my own father held some unconscious appeal to me, too. I was awed by the way he and Betty giggled and cuddled, obviously in love. They soon wed and will always be my favorite aunt and uncle. No offense to the others, mind you.
-- Getting up early in the morning to fix my own breakfast and head off to school. Kix or Cheerios cold cereal or fried eggs and toast and jam or toast and avocado were my favorites, and in the winter, oatmeal. In those days you had to cook the oatmeal five minutes, there were no instant or microwaveable varieties. You had to hand-squeeze your own orange juice in those days, too, and one of my early wounds was when I sliced a hand halving an orange. That citrus juice in the cut stung! Bloody Hell! For toast in the early years, we had an old-fashioned toaster with doors on either side to lay the bread on, then close the doors and plug it in. The electric coils in the center glowed hot orange and you had to keep close watch to be sure to turn the bread over to toast the other side and so you didn't char the bread. If that happened, you could sometimes use a butter knife to scrape the burnt part off and to make it edible, important what with tight budgets, food rationing and my family’s depression-born “use everything” mindset. Pop-up toasters came a bit later as I recall, probably after World War II.
-- Endless fascination with a built-in secretary that made one of the two partitions on either side of the entryway from the living room to the dining room. The partition on the other side of the entry to the dining room was a built-in glass-doored bookcase that held my Uncle Joe's 78rpm classical records and set of great literary works (Shakespeare, Dumas, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Balzac, etc.), all of which I acquired and owned for many years as a young man. I’m sorry to say I let them all slip away at some point after 1968. At the secretary, I would sit on the arm of Grandma's couch (with the tight living room space there wasn’t room for a chair) and open the hinged door/writing surface to pore over anything I could find – pencils, old fountain pens and ink, discarded eyeglasses, paper clips, receipts, etc. That was where I found the previously mentioned check stub noting a $26 monthly mortgage payment.
-- The cellar. A dark, scary place lit only by a single dim bulb that hung from the huge beams overhead with a pull-cord switch. That meant you had to walk down the concrete stairs into the scary darkness to turn it on. Along two walls were shelves of preserves in Mason jars canned by Grandma during World War II. Those sat untouched for decades until finally thrown out by my Uncle Paul sometime in the 1950s. They were a sick-looking grey muck by then, and probably would have been lethal if eaten. During our "Tales From The Crypt" comic book phase, we kids had a Creepy Crypt Club in the cellar where one day we so thoroughly group-hypnotized ourselves that we all fled up the stairs screaming, believing we'd seen a door opening in the solid concrete back wall, through which we imagined a ghost or corpse or zombie of some sort was about to emerge! Adults present at the time assured us that was impossible and finally we timidly crept back down several times with flashlights until we were almost sure there was no danger. Nonetheless, that was the end of the Creepy Crypt Club.
All in all, Grandma Love’s house was a sanctuary, and home to me even after we moved next door then later to the apartments at the rear of Grandma’s. It is still so much “home” in memory that sometimes tears well up when I think of all the good times and good family moments there and how irretrievably those days are gone. But the house and apartments still provide shelter for today’s residents, mostly Latinx families and other renters the last time I visited in 2016. The young man who came out to see why we were walking past in the alley and looking so closely at the place could hardly believe it when I told him I’d lived there. Bell’s demographics have changed from Okies, Arkies, Irish and Italians, but it is still home to working-class folks, though at prices we could not have believed when I and my kin lived there.
Grandma’s house in 2008.
Copyright Bob Loomis, 2022
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