Much is unchanged from Paul Dimitri’s day

Paul Dimitri will not be surprised to learn that I didn’t find any sheep in my drive through South L.A.

Nor did I see the horses he remembers from his day. Back then — way back — he used to guide those animals from farms on the edge of South L.A. to the studios in Culver City for film shoots.

Dimitri, who turns 92 this week, knows a lot has changed in South L.A. since he lived there in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, when his neighborhood was made up mostly of European immigrants.

On some streets, South L.A. is doing better than ever, with shimmering lawns and well-appointed homes that resemble little slices of suburbia. And on other streets — too many others — the old homes are sagging under the weight of time and neglect.

On Thursday, I recounted some of Dimitri’s many memories of his South L.A. youth. “We were all on the same economic level,” he told me. “No one was a high roller.”

South L.A. is still home to scrappers and survivors. Back in Dimitri’s day, many were Polish, Italian, German and Greek immigrants, and their sons and daughters. Now they’re black, Latino and Korean. Few are high rollers.

Rhonda Dawson, a 47-year-old grade-school teacher, lives at the corner of 8th Avenue and 57th Street, where Dimitri gathered pomegranates from a tree about 80 years ago. The tree was cut down long ago, she said, though many of the neighbors still have lemon and apple trees.

“Mostly people here are working-class people,” she said. “We get a bad rep. But it’s not the people that live here that cause trouble. It’s the people who pass through here.”

Dimitri long ago retired to Laguna Niguel, after a career as a Marine Corps officer and restaurateur. This week, I promised I would go and take a look around the old neighborhood for him.

Walking through South L.A. with Dimitri’s memories and photographs showed me there’s as much continuity as there is change in L.A.’s history. We live with the ghosts of L.A.’s past all around us. And those ghosts are more like us than we think.

Dimitri’s father was a motorman with the L.A. Railway, his mother a housekeeper at a downtown hotel. They were Greek immigrants and sent him to weekend Greek school, but he hated it and can’t speak the language. The family raised rabbits and bartered their meat. Dimitri sold newspapers on the street.

Today, vendors are still hawking goods at South L.A. intersections. And it’s still a culturally diverse place of many languages, even though the cast of characters is markedly different.

“There’s African Americans and Spanish-speaking people, and a few Caucasians and some Asians and Indian people too,” said 13-year-old Dejai Yopp, the student body president at Dimitri’s alma mater, Audubon Middle School.

When Dimitri attended Audubon in the early 1930s, it was mostly people of various European nationalities, with a smattering of Japanese students. When things got rough in the hallways, the administrators handled discipline a lot differently than they do today.

Once Dimitri saw a male student grope a girl as she opened her locker. “I had two sisters at home, so I slugged him,” he said. A vice principal shuffled the two young men off to the gym and gave each a pair of boxing gloves.

“I whipped [him] black and blue,” Dimitri recalled. “All the teachers treated me like a hero.”

The old gym at Audubon is gone. And so is the Greek Orthodox church where Dimitri was baptized on San Julian Street in 1919.

But the brick grocery on 54th and Van Ness, where Dimitri was working when the 1933 earthquake struck, is still standing.

Much has happened there in the 77 years since. In the 1990s, the store was owned by Korean-born Chung-Bok Hong, known as “Momma” to the locals. She was killed in a 1999 robbery.

“She’d extend credit to people,” said Connie Gordon, 64, who arrived in L.A. from segregated Arkansas in 1955. “People loved her.”

When I told Gordon, a retired Los Angeles Police Department officer, Dimitri’s story about working at a bookie’s on Arlington, his face brightened with recognition.

“A guy called Mouse ran that place in the late 1970s and ‘80s,” he said. “It was an after-hours club. A speakeasy. A bootleg bar.”

Around 1900, Dimitri’s parents left the Balkans, a region then in conflict. Jesus, a 44-year-old immigrant from Panajachel, Guatemala, also left a country torn by war, in 1984. “They were burning down villages,” he told me. Now Jesus, who wouldn’t tell me his last name, runs a meat market inside the 54th Street grocery.

The Leimert Theater is still standing too, with most of its Art Deco flourishes intact. “I was the first newsboy that opened the Leimert Theater,” Dimitri said. That was in 1932.

Leimert Park was restricted to whites until the 1950s. “My grandmother was one of the first blacks to buy a house on Welland Avenue” in 1955, Rhonda Dawson said.

Dimitri’s old home on 3rd Avenue is still standing too. I told Anita Williams, one of the current residents, how Dimitri’s parents hired a crew that raised up the small cottage to build a second floor underneath.

“You mean this floor was on the bottom?” she said.

Dimitri’s sister was born in the house, I added. “It’s hard to believe a family with five kids lived in this little place,” said Williams, who lives there with her adult daughter and son.

The old Dimitri home is divided into two units now. Williams thinks that, at $1,300 each, the rent is too high. Life for working people in South L.A. is the same struggle with scarce dollars it’s always been.

“Tell him we’re taking care of his house for him,” Williams said with a smile. And with that I left her, to call Paul Dimitri and tell him what I had seen.

hector.tobar@latimes.com