Today's Riff: 05-11-2023

Cars backed up 

as far as the eye

can see.

How did we

arrive here?

TV news

all shootings

and mayhem. 

Overhead, the clatter

of a police chopper.

05-11-2023

Today's Riff: 05-06-2023

 My Music Bonanzas

Put 'em
on the list 
of things
that haven't quite
panned out.

More fun
than if
if they hadn't
happened
at all.

Enough
to keep 
me playing
my solo

back yard
house concerts.

So far
the neighbors
haven't
complained.

Occasional 

flashes
of gold
that feel like
Eureka!

Concord, 05-06-2023

Today's Riff, 05-05-2023

war     war     war
yet another war

even spring grasses

help hide

landmines

Today's Riff, 05-04-2023

two sparrows
hurry after tidbits
near the laundromat door
     a young couple
     flirts while folding clothes

By me, from a manuscript in progress titled "Concrete Seasons."

Today's Riff, 05-03-2023

More rain

expected this afternoon

as our drought
continues to end
at least for now.
Thank the weather gods
for long, hot showers
and flushing toilets
and geese honking
across the morning sky
and thank the universe

for another miraculous day.

Bob Loomia

Good-bye, Poetry Month, 04-30-2023

 It's the last day of poetry month, so I offer this tanka:

I miss my nightly wine

but it’s clear that I must 

be my own savior,

change it to water 

most evenings.

Robert Loomis, 09-09-2022

Keepin' On

Poetry Month is winding down, so here's a prose poem. I hope you enjoy it!

Keepin' On

It all came out better than might've been expected, blessed really, considering the constant squirming and mental chaffing against the reins of common sense. Could've been much worse. Now I pray for even more time outside the rat race. Vague guilt. What should I do to repay this sumptuous repast, this feast at life's vast table, this gathering of angels lost and found, this beast of all possible worlds, this many-versed blues ballad, this epiphany of joy and sorrow? Keep on singing, keep on playing, just keep on keepin' on!

By Bob Loomis, 2023

Poetry Month #2: Fan Man

Fan Man is a reference to a William Kotzwinkle novel that was very popular in the 1970s. More about that after this:

FAN MAN
By Bob Loomis
04-17-2023

I had a
good one
late
last night but
I let
it
get away.
Why do
I always
let ‘em get
away? OK
I confess:
a big streak
of yellow
do-nothingness
has always been
the spinal lack
in my
having done
so
little.
I tend to
drift away
into sleep
right when
The Muse
begins to whisper
in my ear.
I’m a regular
Fan Man
when it comes
to staying awake
long enough
to make
dream
reality.

From Wikipedia: The Fan Man is a cult comic novel published in 1974 by the American writer William Kotzwinkle. It is told in stream-of-consciousness style by the narrator, Horse Badorties (the titular "fan man"), a down-at-the-heels hippie living a life of drug-fueled befuddlement in New York City c. 1970. The book is written in a colorful, vernacular "hippie-speak" and tells the story of the main character's hapless attempts to put together a benefit concert featuring his own hand-picked choir of 15-year-old girls.

Horse is a somewhat tragic, though humorous, character with echoes of other famous characters in popular culture such as Reverend Jim Ignatowski of Taxi fame. In his inability to follow anything through to completion he displays symptoms of attention-deficit disorder though this could equally be drug-induced. His defining characteristic is his joy in renting or commandeering apartments which he fills with street-scavenged junk articles until, full to bursting, he moves on to his next "pad". The name "fan man" is a reference to another of his traits; the collecting and selling of fans of all shapes and sizes. The book's most memorably absurd section is the chapter titled "Dorky Day" which features the repetitive statement of the word "dorky" by Horse as a cathartic mantra to dispel the ennui of a dead-end day.

Poetry Month: My Tanka/Prose Piece

It's Poetry Month, so the following is my tanka/prose piece published in the Winter 2023 issue of Ribbons, the Tanka Society of America's quarterly magazine. I hope you enjoy it. And here's a link to information about Ribbons and TSA:

https://www.tankasocietyofamerica.org/home

Saturday's Child Redux: The Oregon Coast And You

This is a redo of one of my Saturday's Child songs originally written in 2013. The chorus and a verse came to me while we were in Cannon Beach, OR. I hope you enjoy it!
https://soundcloud.com/bob-loomis/the-oregon-coast-and-you

Old Newsies Yakking

Friend Robin Mayer is doing a series of podcast interviews with old fart journalists by that title.  Here's her session with yours truly:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/old-newsies-yakking/id1672804008?i=1000601605863

Sunday Sermon, 03-05-2023: Just Asking

Wrote this the night of 03-04-2023 at Cannon Beach OR after rereading some of Gary Snyder’s “Riprap”:

JUST ASKING

Surf pounding Haystack Rock
Rushing over sand and
Up creek,
Cutting new channel
On the ebb and flow
The same symphony
And shifts
Our forebears heard
10,000 years ago.

What if we had not
Evolved/devolved
Beyond atlatls
And obsidian arrowheads
Beads and feathers
Animal skins
But remained just
Another mammal
In Mother Earth’s tapestry?
Would we really be
Much worse off
Than in this morass
Of self-made problems
Now devouring our planet?

Would a less clever,
Less rapacious pace
Have left more time
For our children
And theirs
And theirs?

Would our wilder lives
Have been less rewarding?
Would we have killed
One another and
Reproduced one another
In such overwhelming numbers
That even Nature cannot
Keep pace?
Would we still
Worship gods unknown,
Still rape and loot Mother Earth
Even as she unleashes
Countermeasures
And we try to possess
The unpossessable?

Thank whatever gods
There’s still music,
Storytelling,
Sounds of drums, flutes,
Strings, voices
To echo ancient songs,
Strands connecting
All to all
Whatever else may happen.


Copyright 03-05-2023

Happy New Year 2023!

This is a slightly revised version of last year's greeting since not much changed other than what we watched on TV via YouTube: A wonderful 1984 concert by the Dinosaurs and a 1980 Jerry Garcia Band show. It was a lovely evening! We even stayed awake past midnight. I hope your evening was fun, too. 

Copyright 2022 Robert Loomis

Dream Journal, 12-25-2022: Merry Christmas!

 Or merry whatever you observe this time of year. The Muses were kind enough to give me a strip this week. So, here it is:

Copyright 2022 Robert Loomis

Sunday Funnies, 12-18-2022

        When the going gets weird, the weird get abstracted:

Copyright 2022, Robert Loomis

Saturday's Child: The Conversion

 I'm still working on other sections of this memoir but I stumbled across a 1997 graphic version of this early-adolescence chapter of my life. I have a written version, too, but love this one, so I'm going with it for now. I was at the top of my cartooning game at the time. Caution: this section contains what used to be considered "adult" content. I did the original drawings slightly too wide for scanning, so the left borders of the panel is missing.

Copyright 2022, Robrt Loomis

Saturday's Child: Grandma's House

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

Saturday's Child: Moving On

Mom with Ladybug, circa 1938 in Salt Lake City, I'm guessing. 

Dad with Ladybug.

Dad and Mom, Long Beach CA, 1935.

  (Author's Note: The preceding episodes are the graphic presentations of my earliest memories. At age 83, it's become apparent that I probably have too little lifetime left to try to continue in a self-illustrated mode, so going forward I'll turn to written form and include as many old photos as possible to augment my sometimes hazy recollections.)

My early years, from birth to age 5 or so, became increasingly punctuated by a series of health issues, perhaps related to my premature birth, perhaps partially psychologically based, impossible for me to really define the causes. 

The earliest "infirmity" I recall is just a sliver of a memory: I'm in a small snack shop near Huntington Park High School with my parents and my Mom is explaining to the clerk that I am wearing leg braces to correct "knock knees." I remember absolutely nothing more about the braces, don't recall how long I wore them, and in fact, don't recall any other instance of being aware of them. It would have been when I was a wee toddler, age 2 or 3. There are no photos of me in them among those saved from the family collection. It had to have been while we were still living on Seville Street.

I underwent a tonsillectomy when I was perhaps 4 years old. It was at Doctors Hospital, where years later Mom would work and would meet her second husband. I had to spend a night in the hospital and was terrified. Where was Mommy? What am I doing here? I cried and the night nurse scolded me, which didn't please Mom when she heard about it. But I enjoyed the post-surgery diet of ice cream and Jello back at home on Hood Avenue!

Other health issues were more recurrent and a bit more serious: a years-long series of allergies, asthma, bronchitis and pneumonia. This seems to have begun after Mom and Dad enrolled me in kindergarten at a local Catholic school, the name of which I don't recall. It may have been St. Matthias, now the only Catholic elementary school on Cedar Street in Huntington Park. I was frightened and uncertain in my first days of school. I didn't understand why I was there, nor the routines. I was reprimanded by the nuns for trying to sit somewhere I wasn't supposed to sit. That embarrassed me and increased my anxiety. At recess one day, a bigger kid pushed me out of line at the water fountain. I had no idea how to handle that or why he did it. I guess I hadn't yet had my Mom's lesson on the necessity of defending yourself.

I really don't recall going to kindergarten more than 3 or 4 days. I hated it so much that it may be Mom intervened and pulled me out of school. Or it may be that I was ill so much that going to school was impossible. I do remember that period as one where I was ill much of the time, no doubt further frustrating my Dad's need for his son to be "manly." Good ol' Dad.

Meanwhile, things weren't going well with Mom and Dad's marriage. They were often at odds over various things. I recall them arguing over whether I should wear my bobby sox rolled down or pulled all the way up. Dad said rolling them down, as Mom preferred, made me look like a "sissy." I felt guilty at causing such a conflict.

On the plus side, I recall Dad bringing home and setting up a Lionel electric train for me, but I was too ill to really be able to enjoy it. I kept that train for 20 years, should have kept it forever.

Then came the biggest argument I ever saw between them, an almost-physical confrontation in the living room that ended with my Mom grabbing a broom and brandishing the handle at Dad, warning him not to touch her. I had no idea why they were arguing, and as on other occasions, wondered what I'd done to cause it. I am certain now that that argument was most probably triggered by Mom's finding a lipstick-smeared shirt among Dad's clothes in the laundry basket. I unknowingly met the source of the lipstick when Dad took me along to the SPRR offices to pick up a paycheck and introduced me to a receptionist who was to become his second wife. More about that later. She turned out to be a much better match for Milton than Ruth. Mom and Dad were such opposites. Milt liked to spend money even when he didn't really have it. He'd buy a car on time credit and keep missing payments, making up excuses to string the dealers along until they sent a repo man to take back the cars. Mom was a true child of the Great Depression, intent on saving every penny she could in case those harsh days returned, upset and embarrassed at the cars and the repossessions and impatient with Milt's laissez-faire money attitude. The lipstick stains spelled the beginning of the end.

But I do recall Dad once trying to do something for Mom that he must have thought would please her. Before I was born, they'd had a toy bulldog named Ladybug that Mom loved. When I arrived, she decided they should find a new home for Ladybug for fear she might be jealous and harm me. So, on this occasion -- I don't recall if it was a Mom's birthday or Mothers Day or what -- Dad and I went and picked up Smoky, another little bulldog, as a gift for Mom. Smoky was nice enough when all was well, but we soon discovered that if left alone in the house while we were out running errands, he would pee and poop indoors. He doomed his future with us when he got into the cupboard under the kitchen sink and pulled out all the paper bags Mom was saving and ripped them to shreds scattered across the floor among his bodily dog waste. Bye, bye, Smoky. Dad had to return him, the good-will gift a failure.

By that time the Milton Loomis-Ruth Love match was crumbling anyway. Whatever flame once burned had turned to ash. Hard to rekindle ash. Sometime around then Milt became busier driving World War II war-materiel trains and Mom and I moved into a 12-by-12 sleeping shack that Uncles Joe and Paul had built behind Grandma Love's house on California Avenue in Bell. We would live there and/or in apartments next door and behind Grandma's for about 10 years, until I was around 15 and Mom remarried. 

Which brings us to Part Two,

World War II and Apartment Living, 1945 to 1955.

Bottlecaps #1

    Here's a sketch I did while sitting on the patio of our weeklong vacation rental in Stinson Beach CA. Done using a number of bottlecaps and other items saved from among our daily trash. I hope you like it, thanks for looking!

Saturday's Child: The Prank

The corner grocery store where we played our prank is visible in left background. The garages are at the right rear. That's me at around age 8 or 9 with Duchess, Aunt Dorie and Uncle John Hofius's dog. My Uncle Paul's Ford is just behind me and Duchess.

By Bob Loomis

When I and my childhood best friend, Jimmy O'Sullivan, were about 14 and 13, respectively, we were old enough to begin to want something besides bicycle riding, toy soldiers and cowboy movies to pass summer vacation. In those days you got three months off, a lot of time to fill when you were tumbling into the grey area between childhood and adolescence. One day we came up with a practical joke that killed two or three hours. Its victims were Hugo and Max, who ran the corner grocery store we'd patronized for years.

So, a bit of back story about the grocery store and the state of food shopping in Bell, California, around 1950.

In those days there were no supermarkets as we know them now, no 7-11 or am/pm stores, and most gas stations didn't sell food other than maybe having a soft drink cooler and maybe some nuts or candy bars on display with the oil cans and engine additives. What would later become convenience store space at service stations was usually an auto repair area with one or two bays for car repair and lube jobs. 

The very few larger markets in our area were independently run, not huge chains. I always picture the Owl Market, at Santa Fe and Florence Avenue in Huntington Park, an L-shaped building with a circular structure in the angle of the L. That part was shaped and painted to look like a giant, one-and-a-half-story owl staring down at the parking lot. Pretty neat, but far enough away from us that we seldom shopped there. There was another large market at the corner of California Avenue and Florence Avenue that we also infrequently patronized. 

In contrast, we went to Hugo and Max's little store on the corner quite often. It was where my Mom or Grandma would send me when we needed a loaf of bread or quart of milk. In those days, memory tells me, a small loaf of soft, white Weber's or Barbara Ann white bread was 18 cents a loaf and a quart of milk about the same price. Jimmy and I and the other neighborhood kids also went to the store on hot summer days to buy a nickel soda pop or ice cream or candy bar if we had the money. We would save the empty bottles at home then claim the return deposits to add to our purchasing power. Royal Crown Cola (RC Cola) and Dad's Old-Fashioned Root Beer were my favorite soft drinks, Eskimo Pie my favorite ice cream bar. 

The grocery store -- I actually can't remember its formal business name, it was just "the store" -- was in a two-story, red brick building that had three retail spaces on the ground floor facing East Gage Avenue at the corner of California Avenue. Grandma's house was at 6421 California, diagonally across from the store with a view of its back lot. I'd guess both Grandma's and the store were built in the 1910s or '20s. From east to west, the retail spaces housed a tiny shoe repair shop (ah, the scent of leather and shoe polish in there!), the grocery store and a fairly large corner space that was usually vacant. 

I only recall two periods when that third space wasn't vacant. The first occupant was a sort of vaguely interesting (if you were bored enough) second-hand store selling mostly used furniture. It lasted longer than its successor after another period of vacancy, a truly awful greasy spoon cafe. The owners had acquired a used restaurant counter and stools somewhere and installed them along the longer east wall. The stools all wobbled when you sat on them and were too low because in their original configuration they'd have been elevated on a step-up riser. Scattered in the remaining space was a motley assortment of used and mismatched tables and chairs that also wobbled and tilted when you used them. It looked as though more furniture was needed, seemed somehow hugely empty, especially under the high ceiling that made everything look out of proportion, weirdly wrong, surrealistic even before I knew what that word meant. I ate a hamburger there just once, the burger of doom, for doom was the aura that emanated from everything about the cafe. It soon closed. Its owners, now only dim ghosts in chef's caps and blouses, and all the accoutrements vanished. It was vacant from then until I moved away from the neighborhood about three years later.

***(Photo here)***

Hugo and Max and their families resided in two apartments upstairs over the ground floor. The whole building was at the front of a long, rectangular lot that had an old, four-car garage along the eastern edge at the rear of the property. The rest of the lot was dirt and rocks, a large parking area that never had more than one or two cars in it. A clothesline strung on pulleys ran from the top landing of the back stairs of the apartments to a pole attached to one corner of the garages. On it, Max's and Hugo's wives clothes-pinned their weekly washings. Hugo and his wife had a daughter a bit younger than Jimmy and me. We never knew her name or the wives' names, though occasionally Hugo's wife would work at the counter in the store. We never socialized with the daughter. I have no idea what her name was or where she went to school, unusual since we neighborhood kids always knew everyone for two blocks around.

My Uncle Paul sometimes referred to the grocery store people as "kikes." I didn't exactly know what that meant at first, but could tell by the way he said it that to him they were not worthy of acceptance as fellow human beings. My guess looking back is that they were Jewish immigrants who'd somehow left Eastern Europe or Germany before the Nazis took over and prior to the Holocaust and World War II. They spoke English fairly well, with slight accents. I don't really know how long they'd been in the United States or where they were from originally. I think probably my Uncle Paul's scornful prejudice must have helped prepare the ground for our prank. There was a history of racism in the Love family. Grandpa William Love, Mom's and Paul's father whom I never met, was from Tennessee and lived and worked in oilfields, mostly in Oklahoma and Texas, for much of his adult life. I was told he referred to my father, a Spanish descendant of a historically important New Mexico family, as "that goddamned Mexican."

In any case, Jimmy and I didn't give much thought to the sociological or cultural aspects of our prank. We were bored, just hanging out in my Mom's and my apartment over the garages in the two-unit rental that Paul had built in the former Victory Garden area behind Grandma's house. He was always the best businessman in the family (a Capricorn) and he saw opportunity in the huge demand for housing in Southern California after World War II. It seemed everyone who'd passed through the state in the military during the war wanted to flee the snowstorms, tornados, hurricanes, floods or other miserable weather in their home states and move to the land of sunshine, orange groves and ocean views. Most didn't know or care that their very movement west would smother the best aspects of California living, wiping out the orange groves and jamming the roads with traffic, fouling the air with smog. Almost everyone focused on the short-term economic opportunities of growth and development. Money almost always trumped aesthetics and quality of life, especially in those days before anyone but the occasional maverick or sociologist began factoring in environmental consequences. Humans were rulers of this planet and expected to extract whatever they wanted with no thought to the future. It would last forever, an unending cornucopia. Nor were we thinking about any of that when the prank was hatched. We were just trying to find new summer fun and adventure. 

The trigger was, as so often in my bookish life, a fascinating tome about spiders I'd been reading. It was a key factor in my overcoming my previous terror of them or at least seeing them a bit more realistically. The author, a scientist, believed spiders capable of extremely logical thought and behavior. As to the prank, the book provided its main feature in a chapter on an aggressive South American spider that is deadly venomous, large enough to attack and kill birds, and moves so fast that it can be extremely dangerous to encounter. Its name I forget. It is not the Golden Bird Eater, and now I wonder if memory has conflated what I read in the book with an article about a deadly arachnid that I'd read in a True magazine that may well have been creatively embellished by the author and editors. Whatever the case, reading about some such spider seeded our prank.

We formulated the plan and assembled the main prop: a shoebox filled with green weeds. We added a large yellow weed with long stems that we bent to look like huge  spider legs. We punched a few "air holes" in the lid and headed for the grocery store, eagerly anticipating the reactions we hoped to see. We weren't disappointed.

We walked in nonchalantly, me carrying the box cradled under my left arm as we passed the counter.

"Hi, boys. Whatcha got there?" asked Hugo from behind the counter. 

"A spider," I said. "I got it from a zoological supply company." As I explained what it was, Max came from behind the butcher counter just across the aisle from the checkout counter and listened intently.

"Can we see it?" said Hugo.

"I guess a quick look would be OK," I said, "but we have to be very careful and it'll have to be very quick. We can't take chances with it getting loose."

I set the box on the counter and snapped the lid open just a crack at one end, just long enough for Hugo to see the fake spider legs, then clapped it shut again. 

"I shouldn't be risking that," I said, "It's very fast, very aggressive and very poisonous. One bite could be fatal. If it gets loose, catching it would be almost impossible."

"Then it shouldn't be in here," said Hugo, a worried look on his face.

"Don't worry, we just need to buy a can of soup, then we'll be out of here," I said, and we moved toward the back of the store even as he objected that he really didn't want us there with the  spider. We stopped at the back shelf where canned goods were shelved, reassuring him that we'd be done quickly. Back by the soup shelf I pretended to drop the box. 

"OH, NO!" I yelled, "It got away!"

"Got away?" exclaimed Hugo with fear in his voice. "You have to catch it!" "Nope, not us!" I replied as we headed for the door. "We're getting out of here, and you'd better do the same! That thing's too dangerous to take any chances with. We'll call the American Society of Archnidologists (something I made up on the spot) and get someone to come and trap it."

"And you better close the store till they get here!" said Jimmy as he followed me out the door.

Hugo was too stunned to answer more than a plaintive "Close the store?" as we beat a hasty retreat out the door and back to the apartment. 

After a brief period of gleeful restraint, curiosity got the best of us and we snuck around behind the vacant service station across California from the grocery store, peered around the corner of the building and saw Max and Hugo standing in front of the store nervously awaiting the arrival of the spider rescue squad, which of course didn't exist. 

I remember little of the rest of the afternoon. Now that the prank had worked, we lost interest  and did other things. An hour or two later we again looked to see if Hugo and Max were still waiting in front of the store, but by then they'd apparently figured out the hoax and gone back inside. 

After that, it was awkward to go back to the store. I put it off as long as possible. When I finally did go back on some errand for my Mom or Grandma, no mention of the prank was made by either them or me. An awkward and formal silence prevailed, the transaction was quickly completed and I left, greatly relieved.

I'd like to apologize here and now to Hugo and Max, but it's almost certainly  a posthumous apology where they're concerned. They were older than my Uncle Paul and he departed this life years ago at age 82. The prank mildly embarrasses me now, but then again, it's the best, most elaborate practical joke I ever devised so my red face comes with a smile.