O, Happy Days! : WHEN WE WERE VERY YOUNG
LOS ANGELES is kaput, they say. The quality of life has gone to the dogs. In the city that was for so long the fastest-growing in the world, you can hear natives talk about moving out, to Portland or Seattle or somewhere. The Golden Age of L.A. was the decade of “the good war,” followed by the optimistic ‘50s. And now all the good times are gone.
Every age romanticizes the past, of course--usually the age before the last because memories have had longer to mellow. We’re right to hold a vision of the past: It steadies our views on life. Still, it should be an accurate vision. In these harried times we need some detailed nostalgia, a closer look at the Golden Age.
In the early ‘40s, I had no idea I even lived in Los Angeles. My home was a little farm town called Van Nuys, and so far as I could tell, it was the dusty, ragtag, tail end of the world. Everything on the radio was happening somewhere else, like the war in the South Pacific, or whatever it was that went on in a mysterious land called Hollywood.
Though the San Fernando Valley was all about to change beyond recognition, my street was still full of chicken and turkey ranches, and there were commercial cornfields within a mile or two. Whatever else they might have done, everybody on my street raised a couple of acres of walnuts. Every fall, a family of braceros would come and shake down our walnuts with long pruning hooks and camp out in the orchard at nightfall. These were the only non-Anglos we ever saw.
To the north, my world practically ended at the Southern Pacific tracks a few hundred yards from our orchard. Beyond the tracks, there seemed to be nothing but dirt roads and an occasional sunburnt paved road patched with tar, all in a vast sea of orange groves. For years, oranges were so important that when a frost was expected, the weatherman would tell orange growers to light heaters called smudge pots in their groves.
We were so remote that the mailman made only one pass down our street a day, so all the mailboxes had to be on the same side of the street. That’s the way a lot of our neighbors liked it, the Midwesterners who had achieved the great ‘30s dream of retiring in California and raising chickens. There was a strong Midwestern flavor to Los Angeles in those days, even some lingering dry sentiment. One local supermarket chain didn’t start selling beer and wine until well into the ‘50s.
Maybe I remember Van Nuys as dusty and ragtag because it was dusty and ragtag. After all, there was a war going on. All the cars were old, and the tires were worn down to fabric because of the rubber shortage. I remember my mother making soap from bacon drippings.
She was sturdily patriotic about the war, and whenever she was asked to spell Van Nuys, she’d begin, “V, as in victory .” However, she hated rationing as much as anybody and sometimes bought black-market hamburger meat in North Hollywood. Needless to say, it was injected with water to increase the weight, and when you put it in the pan, boiling droplets would skid everywhere.
The war was actually changing Los Angeles in ways I couldn’t see. It brought a lot of people, many of them black and Mexican, from out of state to work in the war industries. And they were just the beginning of the boom. After the war, there was a popular song titled “I’m Gonna Make the San Fernando Valley My Home.” I couldn’t believe my ears; a song about this old place? I almost blushed.
It turned out people had started moving to L.A., and particularly to the Valley, in unbelievable numbers. There were whole industries catering to the newcomers. At Christmas, a company called Mission Pak would send boxes of exotic California fruit to your friends and relatives back East--gloating souvenirs from the land without snow.
After the war, there was a terrific housing shortage, and at one time an estimated 162,000 families were living in tents, garages and other makeshift dwellings. A poor family whose kids always had the sniffles moved into a converted chicken coop down the block from us. The city lumbered into action and maintained some Quonset huts left over from the war as cheap public housing.
But the problem solved itself with amazing speed. Instead of going into a tailspin, as experts had predicted, L.A. started building houses at a dazzling pace. To me, the smell of the late ‘40s is a combination of pine, gravel and plaster. And what strange houses they were! One-story stucco houses without fireplaces, the kitchen counters topped with Formica in a peculiar pattern of tiny boomerangs. And all these little tract houses were advertised as “estates” or “ranchos” or “villas.”
For years on end, we were told the Valley was the fastest-growing place on earth. The flood of newcomers diluted the rural quality of Van Nuys. By the time I was in junior high, it was considered a stylish insult to call somebody a “dumb farmer.” Even so, in the late ‘50s, Van Nuys High School still made a great fuss over its senior classes, a tradition from the days when few, if any, of its graduates went on to college.
There was an industrial boom, too. Overnight, there were businesses everywhere, at first small, hopeful, undercapitalized places, and then major manufacturing. The words prices slightly higher west of the Rockies started disappearing from advertisements. The vacant land north of the Southern Pacific tracks, where my sister and I used to pick cattails, became the General Motors plant and called into being a place called Panorama City.
Television finished off the isolated quality of the Valley. The big year was 1949, when the number of TV sets in Los Angeles went from 80,000 to 354,000. By 1951, when I was 10, if your family didn’t have a set, you really couldn’t get away with the excuse “we’re waiting for color,” and your parents finally had to buy one. This introduced you to the ordeal of doing without TV whenever your set was being repaired; there were no transistors yet, and a tube would blow every couple of months.
There wasn’t any satellite transmission, of course, so apart from some fuzzy recordings from New York called kinescopes, most of the programming originated locally. We were shocked when we finally saw “Howdy Doody,” the New York children’s show. How lame and patronizing it was compared with our own “Time for Beanie,” the work of a bunch of hotshots straight from the Warner Bros. cartoon factory! I figured New Yorkers must be a bunch of dumb farmers.
Ultimately, television undermined Hollywood’s position as the center of the universe by siphoning off the general-interest audience that had been the mainstay of the old studios. Of course, by that time, Hollywood was already deglamorized for us--it was just that place over Cahuenga Pass, and we accepted the presence of show people in our midst quite casually. Across the street from the Crystal Plunge, where if you went swimming too often your hair would turn green from the chlorine in the water, lived the comic cowboy actor Andy Devine, the “unofficial mayor of Van Nuys”; his son went to public schools with us. Jane Russell’s family lived down at the end of my street, and later on, band leader Frank DeVol lived there, too. His daughter went to Fulton Junior High, so he wrote the school song for it.
Even after TV, we went to the movies a couple of times a week, either to the Fox or the Bijou (I forget which one we called the Flea Bag). We were pretty blase about them, though. I had a friend whose father worked for a cartoon studio, and he would loftily critique the animation in the “Superman” serial as we watched. After a while, his family suddenly disappeared from sight, and we heard they’d been found out as Communists.
My father worked downtown, which meant about an hour’s commute for him. Then came the freeways; for years we saw maps with dotted lines that indicated where freeways were going to go. First came a short patch over Cahuenga Pass, and then, in spurts, the Ventura and San Diego freeways. Now my father could go to work without having to mess with surface streets, but it was still about an hour’s commute. Everybody knowingly said the freeways were all obsolete as soon as they were built.
Mayors Fletcher Bowron and Norris Poulson, who both looked like school principals to me, presided over a pretty placid time. Nearly all the issues revolved around the city’s growth. The freeways: They were never built fast enough and were always too expensive. The Dodgers: Why, my father demanded, did he have to pay extra taxes to bring them here when he never watched baseball?
And smog, which was much worse than it is today: Once or twice a year it was so bad that the schools would be closed. In the ‘50s, the County Air Pollution Control District didn’t issue smog alerts, but it did measure what was in the air, and on the smoggiest day of 1955, it found an ozone level of 0.69. These days, they call a third-stage smog alert if the level ever gets above 0.50, something that hasn’t happened in more than 10 years.
For a long time, nobody was sure what caused smog. On Oct. 1, 1957, burning trash in a home incinerator became a crime, and everybody had to get an extra trash can just for non-combustible rubbish. The smog didn’t go away, though particulate matter, which had sometimes been so bad that I saw strings of soot trailing from goldfish gills, got a lot better. At least the incinerator ban showed that the automobile was the chief culprit.
The California car culture had been in bloom since the ‘40s. I remember my older brothers customizing a Model A Ford, tearing off the fenders and blowtorching the springs to lower the rear so that the car seemed to be leaping out of the road. By the ‘50s, cars were a full-fledged life style, and we all knew the cars to customize were old Mercs and ’39 or ’40 Fords.
We ‘50s kids were more polished than the ‘40s kids with their wolf-whistle horns and loud “Hollywood” exhausts. We were into gorgeousness. We painted cars with flame designs or the fine outline patterns of a car painter named Von Dutch (both styles have long since been reduced to decals you can just stick on). We went to Tijuana to get plush “tuck and roll” upholstery. You had to remember to bring stout American thread for the workmen, or your upholstery job would come out after a couple of months.
By now, it was a teen-ager’s right to spend most of his non-sleeping and non-school hours in his car. A lot of kids’ social lives revolved around cruising Van Nuys Boulevard and hanging out at Bob’s Big Boy or Curry’s ice cream shop. The hope was that two guys in customized hot rods would challenge each other to a drag race.
To many grown-ups, this obsession with cars and rock ‘n’ roll smelled of juvenile delinquency. There certainly were young hoods around, but their criminality was pretty mild. They weren’t on drugs, and their most fearsome weapons were the switch-blade knife and occasionally a primitive, homemade zip gun.
Cars also made it possible for us to hit the beaches, where we discovered the car culture paralleled the surf culture, which was already a total way of life but as yet unknown to the rest of the country. A filmmaker named Bruce Brown was showing his home movies of surfing up and down the beach towns--for instance, in the public shower room at San Clemente State Park. Eventually, he’d make feature films that would create a nationwide surf craze. My cousin was one of a number of Valley boys who thought of becoming professional surfboard makers.
By the end of the ‘50s, it was obvious that things were going to change even more. The first low-rise apartment building arose on my street. One of my teachers at Van Nuys High predicted commercial jet airplane flights, and another told about an amazing drug he’d tried, under doctor’s orders, called LSD.
Amid this growth, we lost a lot of things, of course. Much of what we lost was what every small town loses when it becomes a city: a ready neighborliness and a certain amount of innocence. By the ‘60s, you’d have to have been crazy to leave your house or your car unlocked for very long, or to accept anybody’s check without ID. We also lost a certain small-town attitude of local pride. For a long time, there was a famous rivalry between L.A. and San Francisco, but only San Francisco is interested in keeping it up.
But nostalgia for that time is not for everybody. The population of Los Angeles today is five times what it was in 1940, and that means there are about 6 million people living here to whom the ‘40s are dim or blank. Old-timers always tend to glamorize the past, too. The Red Car trolleys, for instance; I remember them as scary. You had to stand out in the middle of traffic to catch them, and sometimes people got hit. And Red Cars didn’t go everywhere. If you were near one of the stops, they were a pretty good deal, but if you weren’t, you really wanted a car.
And while some things may not have changed--GTE was notorious for bad service even 40 years ago; it’s nickname was “Drip, Drip and Tinkle”--much has improved. The people who complain that the Los Angeles River is a “cement scar in the landscape” just don’t know what it was like before our waterways were tamed. Every time there was a big rain, the Pacoima Wash would overflow and stores on Van Nuys Boulevard would have to be sandbagged.
This is the bottom line: I don’t remember a single bookstore in Van Nuys in the ‘50s, and at the same time there was a restaurant that used the slogan “Tough Steaks and Dull Knives.” Altogether, with all its faults, I prefer the present.
