O, HAPPY DAYS! : MID-CENTURY MEMOIRS : SEVEN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIANS RECALL GROWING UP IN THE ‘40’S AND ‘50S

Guy Dyer McGonagill retired as a lifeguard in 1980 but believes that he never really stopped being one. Now 63, he lives in an apartment above a garage in a wooded glen in Santa Monica Canyon , just east of Will Rogers State Beach . Every wall is covered with photographs of the ocean, and the bathroom still houses his diving gear. He was born in Santa Monica and was a member of the wrestling team at Santa Monica High School. I grew up in Ocean Park, and Muscle Beach was great. All those big guys that were out there, they were hustling the chicks. The little guys were learning horizontal bars and rings and things like that. And the lifters were around. The lifters were a small, select group that stayed by themselves. But they never hesitated to teach you, and they were very patient with us kids growing up down there.

During the war, some guy in Redondo Beach rode a heavy board and gave exhibitions--picked it up in Hawaii. That was the start of surfing out here. Surfers were always considered oddballs. There was an old guy named Mr. Crawford that made paddle boards down opposite the gas tanks at Sunset and Washington (in Venice). And guys learned to ride ‘em. Then they put a little skeg on ‘em. I think Tom Blake was the guy who learned the skeg trick. Up in Malibu, there were guys who put their horses out in the sand and started whittling away with an awl, and clamping the wood together, making custom boards for guys like Dale Velzy and Hobie Alter. A lot of guys got a lot of scars from being hit by those heavy boards. You couldn’t steer them, and there weren’t any leashes either. You lose your board, you’re in trouble.

I started out at Brooks Street in Venice. Bodysurfing, board surfing--I was on the beach all the time, diving off the pier for pennies. I didn’t start lifeguarding until ’49. You had to swim a thousand meters in under 20 minutes, and you had to be aware of the water. You made rescues; you learned how to paint towers; you learned first aid; you learned CPR, which was very crude. On the beaches, you always learned to watch people and see what trouble they were going to get into in the water. There were fewer people, and they obeyed authority in those days.

Everybody on the beach knew each other and kind of got you in on it. Lot of dancing girls around, lot of parties, lot of luaus. There was a big Hawaiian group out here in the ‘50s. The city of Santa Monica would throw some luaus once in a while. Once we stole the pig, working one of these luaus, and we had some of Governor (Earl) Warren’s kids with us, Honey Bear or somebody, and we all went up to the Uplifters club, which is now called Rustic Canyon Park, and we all sat up there and skinny-dipped and ate the pig.

Surf was a lot better in those days, too--bigger, higher. You had bigger and longer rides--more power to it, it seems. The beaches were shorter; there wasn’t as much sand. I think they started to build all those groins, like small piers, in there to retain the sand. All these bright marine engineers somehow never really figured it out, but an old rule of thumb is, you take something out of the ocean someplace, the ocean’s gonna put it back in someplace else.

The water was pristine clean. You could stand out at the end of the Santa Monica Pier and look straight down into 35, 40 feet of water, and you could see bottom. Look what they’ve tossed into the water now.

Lifeguards are people who have sand in their toes. The best thing I ever heard was, “He’s got sand in his toes.” You like the beach, you like the sunrises, you like the sunsets. You like walkin’ the beach. To this day, I can’t go down to the beach and sit there and enjoy reading a book with my headphones on. In my time, the rules were: Don’t turn your back to the sea, always watch the water, and never trust the lady. She’s an unforgiving old lady. You learn to live with the ocean; it doesn’t learn to live with you.

Loren Miller Jr., a second-generation judge in Los Angeles County Superior Court, is the grandson of a slave. His father, who went to law school at Washburn University in Topeka, Kan., came to south Los Angeles to practice law in 1932. Miller, who was born in 1937 and now lives in the Wilshire District, attended the University of Oregon in Eugene, and received his law degree from Loyola Marymount .

When I was a child, I went to Jack and Jill, which was an elite social organization for the kids of middle-class blacks. They used to take us to the Philharmonic to hear music, and they would have little social parties. The high school kids went horseback riding and had wienie bakes at the beach. In those days, Jack and Jill mostly consisted of light-skinned blacks. As prejudices go, that was one. The light-skinned blacks tended to be the people that got educated. They were obviously related to the slave owners, and when the opportunity presented itself after the Civil War, they got to go to college. If you look back at the people who were in the positions of leadership--Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Lester Granger, Thurgood Marshall--they’re all very fair-skinned.

Middle-class blacks lived along Country Club Drive, between Pico and Olympic, west of Western going to about Arlington, and they lived along Jefferson Boulevard, say between Jefferson and Exposition, and into the avenues, and a little bit into Leimert Park.

Right after the war, they built the Pacific Town Club. It was made up of professional people. It had a pool and a bar and a place where you could hold parties and such. It was on the corner of Montclair and Adams. In those days, there weren’t a lot of social opportunities for blacks, you know, before the civil rights revolution, and the social life was pretty confined.

A large number of our neighbors were Japanese, and they got relocated during the war. I remember visiting one family at the camp at Santa Anita race track. Soldiers with guns wouldn’t let me go on the other side of the table, and they wouldn’t let me play with my friends.

My life was kind of protected because I’m sure my parents shielded me from lots of things until I went back to Kansas City with my father in 1948. I found segregation there for the first time. I saw a black movie house. From the back, the screen looked like a postage stamp. You could only go swimming one day a week. There was a particular day to go fishing, and we went in the park and a cop ran us off ‘cause it wasn’t our day.

When I think back about it, Los Angeles was a segregated city. We didn’t have legal segregation. I knew that. But all blacks knew you couldn’t go to Bimini Baths, a very fancy bathhouse just east of Vermont on Bimini Place between 1st and 2nd streets.

My dad handled some of the really big civil rights cases that the U.S. Supreme Court handed down at that time, especially dealing with restrictive covenants. In other words, you could always buy a piece of property, but there were covenants restricting the occupancy. The Supreme Court decided that was unconstitutional, and he handled that case. I remember my mother showing me the clipping from the Examiner because at that time, as I remember it, the L.A. Times did not print anything about blacks. If you were black, and accomplished something other than on the sports page, it was not going to make the L.A. Times.

As teen-agers, we knew not to drive into Compton, to Inglewood, not to drive into Glendale ‘cause you would just be out, with your hands on top of the car, filling out those white cards. LAPD did the same thing. You got too far south on Western, they would stop you.

I went to high school, not on the west side of town where the (black) social strivers lived, but downtown, with the not-so-well-to-do. I think that it shaped my life a great deal in terms of knowing people and having compassion for people. There were some bad guys at Belmont; there were some gang bangers--but school was neutral territory.

There was something about L.A. in those days. There seemed to be always things to do. You could go to Beverly Hills to a little theater called the Hitchin’ Post that showed nothing but cowboy movies or to the beach ‘cause you could get there on the streetcar even when you were in junior high school. I’d walk to Griffith Park, but mostly we would ride our bikes there and go swimming. Then we’d ride up to the zoo, there by the merry-go-round, and play on the freeway they were building.

The yearbook entry for Marian Saxon might have read: “Whittier High School Class of 1958. Class Song Leader, Freshman; Class Council, Freshman, Sophomore; Hi Jinx Variety Show, Sophomore. Future Business Leaders of America. Spanish Club. Favorite school lunch: spaghetti and pie. Cutest guy at Whittier: Ron Line. Or maybe Rod Gilliland.” Bramlett, 49, lives in Hacienda Heights, where she is married and has a grown daughter . She oversees personnel for the Whittier High School District.

I came to Whittier from Iron River, Mich., when I was 7. Before we left, my dad bought a brand-new 1947 blue Nash. Oh, I remember, that was luxury. We traveled 2,500 miles straight through. When we came into Whittier, all of Whittier Boulevard was just solid orange groves. It was the first time I’d ever seen an orange tree, and we stopped and picked an orange.

My mother was a fantastic cook. She was of the old country (Finland). We always had homemade bread and pies and cakes. For breakfast, she’d make anything any of us wanted. If someone wanted a waffle, they’d have waffles. If the other one wanted bacon and eggs, she’d fix that one bacon and eggs. If another wanted oatmeal, then they’d get oatmeal. I can’t imagine latchkey kids now, coming home to an empty house, because I came home to a mother who said, “What would you like for a snack?”

My life was school and my friends. I remember going to an all-girl assembly. Seventh grade was when you saw the movie-- the movie--that told you about menstruation. They talked about the reproductive organs, and how babies--although it wasn’t clear to me at all what they were talking about. And I remember seeing little old sperms. I said, “What are those polliwogs doing there?” I remember coming home and asking my mother, “What is all this stuff about?” My mother said, “We don’t want to talk about that. You’ll learn when you get older.” Well, I thought, my goodness, if my mom can’t tell me about it, it must be something really different and strange, and so for years I didn’t know what to make of all that.

I was academic. I did belong to--they called them service clubs, but as I look back now, we blackballed people. They were sororities. They were very big on the Whittier High School campus. I belonged to a club called Taimos. I remember Bedecs, Rianns--about five clubs on campus. You pledged them. This was all forbidden on campus. In fact, I was looking through a stack of old newspapers, and right on the front page of the Cardinal and White was a little article on how it’s against the education code of California to have secret sororities on campus. But we met once a week at somebody’s house.

Balboa Island during Easter week--that was the place to go, and that’s where all the teen-agers were. We rented a house and stayed there for a week. We had parties and we danced, ballroom dancing and the jitterbug. God, I met Ricky Nelson. He was “in” at that time. “Ozzie and Harriet” was on. He came into the house where I was staying--brought his bongo drums. He sang and played the bongos until everyone learned he was there, then the police had to escort him off the island. Oh, well, now him. He was good-looking.

We cruised Whittier Boulevard. That was the thing to do on Friday night. On Friday afternoon, we’d go to a ballgame. After the game, you’d just grab something to eat at somebody’s house, then you’d hit the boulevard. There’d be four or five girls in the car, and Whittier Boulevard would be bumper to bumper, starting down near Washington, all the way back up to, gosh, where Bob’s Big Boy drive-in was, which is California Street. And they’d come from all over--Montebello, Fullerton, Pico Rivera, Anaheim.

You dressed up for this. We wore Angora sweaters with matching Angora socks--that was “in.” Or cashmere sweaters, with detachable Peter Pan collars that slipped inside them. Your hair was just perfect. I had long blond hair, flipped up on the ends, and bangs.

And then the guys. A lot of them would park their cars and sit in front of the restaurants--the main ones were Bob’s Big Boy and Nixon’s. It was owned by Richard Nixon’s brother, Donald. Nixon’s had the girls on roller skates who delivered the food on trays and hooked ‘em on your cars. And the boys would sit on the brick wall in front and hoot at the girls as they went by, and we’d yell back and wave. I don’t know when it ended. It had to be well into the ‘60s.

When I was in school, kids really turned out for activities. I remember one prom was a spaceship theme. Back then, we decorated for days. We would hang white fabric, like clouds, to hide the gym. Proms were always held in the gym. School was it. I remember there being so many things to do. And everything was so much fun.

Kurt Niklas began his restaurant career as a boy in Germany and came to Los Angeles in 1949 when he was 23. He landed a job as a captain at Romanoff’s, an exclusive Beverly Hills dining spot of the stars, and moonlighted to make ends meet. After Romanoff’s folded in 1963, Niklas opened the Bistro later that year and the Bistro Garden in 1978. Now 63, he lives in Beverly Hills .

I recall that when I came here I had one job at the Mocambo. In those days, there was the Mocambo, Ciro’s; the Trocadero had just burned down. Those were the three big nightclubs on Sunset. And the owner of the Trocadero was a legend, the founder of the Hollywood Reporter, William R. (Billy) Wilkerson. The Mocambo was owned by Mary and Charlie Morrison. Ciro’s was started by Wilkerson also, then bought by Herman Hover in the ‘40s.

I don’t know exactly what year the Mocambo opened, but the war years were the good years. At its height, all the names, from Lana Turner to Betty Grable to Clark Gable, were there. But when I came, business was already declining. The fame of Sunset Strip was, of course, before TV.

The Mocambo had--in fact, they all had in those days--some palm trees. Very tacky. Sort of Polynesian, I would say. It looked like a medium-size firetrap. On Monday nights, they had a Charleston contest. They had the Dixieland band, five firehousemen that came with the fire engine and parked it. . . . Ah, the Firehouse Five Plus Two. That was the big night. Louella Parsons would be interviewing some celebrity from the Mocambo. Then when things got even worse, famous entertainers like Frank Sinatra, Johnny Ray--they all did free performances to help the house, to help Charlie Morrison pay the rent. But even they didn’t help. The Mocambo just had to close in 1958.

Nightclubs didn’t serve dinner. You went to dinner first--either to Romanoff’s, to Chasen’s, to Perino’s or to LaRue, on the corner of Sunset Plaza Drive. There were four restaurants in town. Period. LaRue was more elegant and had better food than any restaurant at the time. The good people went there. The good people means the people who are not connected with the movie business, just well-to-do. I couldn’t say professionals because doctors and lawyers are not the ones who keep a restaurant open.

Romanoff’s opened in ’41. Before that, (Mike) Romanoff was a daily guest at Chasen’s. He had no money at the time. He was the most charming liar since Baron Munchausen. (Dave) Chasen would most of the time feed him for free. He was with a group of single guys, and single guys are a pain in the ass: “Get me my check,” “Put it on his check”--something that waiters throughout the world don’t like. Anyway, this group felt unwanted at Chasen’s, and they said, “Mike, you’re going to open your own joint.” And that’s how Romanoff’s started.

I remember that one night (show-business lawyer) Greg Bautzer and Joan Crawford spent $51 at Romanoff’s for a four-pound tin of caviar, a bottle of 100-proof vodka, a bottle of Dom Perignon, and with the main course, a bottle of Romanee-Conti. So, you see, the value has changed. And I remember other people who were Romanoff’s customers, who were well-dressed and you could see that they never worked a day in their life; they had money from their parents and they had a home either in Pasadena or in Bel-Air, and I’d say to myself, “I bet they must own $100,000.” That was wealthy then .

In a well-known restaurant--I don’t care if you are in Rome or Munich, or New York or here, or you have many millions--there’s two things that are universal. Number one, if you don’t get the table that’s supposed to be the table, no one, not a billionaire, will have the self-assurance to say, “Well, I say this is a good table.” They all have to sit in the pecking order that makes it the good section in any restaurant. That’s number one. Number two, if the owner sits with them, you can always see them looking around to see whether the others see that the owner sits with them.

The social attitude of the ‘40s and ‘50s was very cliquish, just like it is today. You know, you have your A group, your B group, your C group. If you are A group, it’s like a fortress; you cannot penetrate it. There is the A group of the movie people, mixed with the A group of the business people. But there’s an A group of the social people that don’t give a damn about movie people or business people.

There are very few “normal” people that are not impressed by superficial values. Normal means not a celebrity. I’m sure there are some very accomplished people that couldn’t care less. I think it’s enviable, their life, that these people are not trapped by these superficial values.

Louise Sheffield was born in 1933 in Cambridge, Mass., where she began working at the age of 5 to help support her family. They moved to Silver Lake in the early ‘40s . Sheffield graduated from Marshall High School in 1950 and became one of Los Angeles’ first women police patrol officers. A job in the Monterey Park detective bureau led to her career as an undercover investigator for the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department under Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy. Now 56 and retired, she lives just outside Los Angeles.

I started in with the California Rangers in junior high. It was a group of kids who got together around horses. We wore military uniforms and learned to do military formations with the horses at the old Sleepy Hollow stables over on Riverside Drive. I remember teaching marksmanship at the age of 12 with a .22 bolt-action rifle.

I think the Rangers were a factor in my joining the Marine Corps Reserve after high school. I was the first woman--allegedly--on the rifle and pistol team. Later I was brought into the intelligence unit, and I was the only woman in it. They started out teaching us Russian and the rest of it, the spying.

I’ve always preferred being around men. Even when I was going to L.A. City College, I worked as a bouncer in a bar called the Sambah Room on Sunset near Virgil.

As a woman, my main problem was my idealism. One evening I went out with a pro football player. We were going over to the old College Grill, near City College at Santa Monica and Vermont. As we approached the restaurant, there was this old man--a tall, skinny, rickety old man on crutches--and there were a couple of teen-age boys, big ones, pushing him around. I thought, “That’s terrible!” So I said to the football player, “Look, you go break it up, and I’ll make a phone call to the police.”

“What do you mean?” he says. “I can’t get involved in that.” So I went over and broke it up. That set me. I thought, “I want to be a cop so I can keep people from being hurt.”

Clifton’s Cafeteria! They had lemonade springs in there. They had neon and gas lighting that was absolutely outrageous, and it was flowing throughout Clifton’s. And--this was proper then--the police got their meals for half-price.

Then there was the Case Hotel, down on Broadway near Olympic, and they had the Marine Corps League Club meetings in there, and they had dances on the weekends for the servicemen, primarily Marines. I used to go there. We’d play games like checkers and cards, and dance and have refreshments. Elsewhere in the hotel, there was a swimming pool high above, and the idea of a suspended swimming pool was very exciting.

When they had the opening of Curry’s ice cream parlor on Riverside Drive, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello came. They were big then. I remember it as one of the thrills of my life. Mr. Costello had just lost a son who died under tragic circumstances. And, gee, he could relate to children, and children could relate to him. He bought me an ice cream cone, the most exciting one I’ve ever had. It was layered at an angle with all these different flavors. It had so many layers of ice cream I could hardly hold the darn thing. And he gave it to me.

Ruth Simon, a university lawyer for 11 years, has been associate campus counsel at UCLA for the past two. The daughter of a retired merchant, she was born in Chicago in 1937 and moved to Los Angeles in 1941. She grew up in Westwood and, at 52, still remembers her fifth-grade music teacher’s name: Glorus S. Chambard. The Beverly Hills High School graduate earned her law degree at Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley.

When I was a kid, we walked to school with our lunch pails and sweaters that our mother knitted for us, which we lost with great regularity. We knew everybody. You’d walk by their houses, and then you’d pick people up--a snowball effect. We knew kids back up to Sunset, down all the way to Holmby Park, down all the way to school. My neighborhood looked the same in 1946 as it does now.

Where I lived was very secure. Our mother bought our clothing at Vera Eigner in Beverly Hills. I took dancing lessons at Miss O’Kane’s in the Beverly Hills Hotel. We had a very strong sense of neighborhood. The milkman came around, the Helm’s Bakery--we knew all those people. You have a feeling when you’re little that you don’t ever have to go out of it. Everything you need is there. But the fact is, I did go out of it. Our parents didn’t drive us places.

I remember when I was still in grammar school, I went with two of my friends, Billy Orcutt and Ricky Bond, who both liked music, and rode the bus downtown to the L.A. Philharmonic to go to the children’s concert--from Westwood. Which would be unthinkable now. We met our school music teacher, who we were all very fond of. Then, on the way home, we got off at MacArthur Park and took a boat ride. Then we got back on the bus and came home together--when we were maybe 9.

So many kids now don’t go to neighborhood schools. They go to private schools; they’re driven places. They don’t get to go places alone because people are fearful, so they’re coddled in a way we were not. I grew up in an affluent environment, and in many ways I was spoiled, but I wasn’t wrapped in cotton. I didn’t feel there was someone in my life who was fearful for my safety. Which means I didn’t get fearful.

Frank Romero, 57, lives in West Covina, where he owns Frank’s II Hair Salon, a 39-chair hair salon in the West Covina Fashion Plaza. He also owns La Plazita, the Mexican restaurant upstairs, and several rental properties. As each of his four children marries, he helps the newlyweds buy a house.

I was raised up in Phoenix. My mom died in 1940 when I was 7 years old, and my dad, well, just him and I were living together, and he had an alcohol problem. I was on the street, shining shoes, cleaning bars.

When you don’t have anyone to say, “Do this,” you know, you usually don’t do it. The teacher said, “If you don’t do this, you’ll never pass,” so I flunked the seventh grade and never went back to school.

In Phoenix, I got involved with whatever you want to call it, gangs. At the time, that was the thing to do, you know, join a gang. It was the pachuco era. We’re talking about ‘46, ‘47, up to ‘49, and you know how it is, you get involved with a group here, and there’s an enemy over there, and you start talking back and forth. Whatever it takes, you do.

In those days, we used to wear those real baggy pants and the shiny black shoes with double soles, the big ducktail and long coats and the big chain. I never wore a hat, the Stetson hat, ‘cause I couldn’t afford one.

There were a lot of fights, a lot of killings. I couldn’t live that life. That was going nowhere for me, and I figured, I’ll go into the service and go to school in there. Six months later, I was at the front lines in Kyongwon, North Korea. I was like a first scout for the platoon, and I was out in the front and somebody else stepped on a land mine and that’s how I hurt my hand and my back. I got out a disabled vet in 1951.

I didn’t have a home to go to, and I had an older brother living in L.A., so I stayed with him until I started looking for work. I was just making enough to survive. Myself and two other guys, we rented an apartment downtown on the corner of First and Hope, which is now the Music Center, right there on the corner. There was a lot of gangs, a lot of prostitution, alcohol, drugs in that area. We just wanted to go out drinking and dancing.

There used to be a ballroom called the Zenda Ballroom right across the street from the Hilton Hotel down on 7th and Figueroa. Latin people used to have players like Tito Puentes, Tito Rodriguez, Perez Prado. El Sombrero was another. The Rutland Inn. There were six or seven more. They were mostly places where you had to have a tie to get in, unless you rented or bought one at the doorway.

I met my wife at the Zenda Ballroom in ’55. I was sitting at the bar, she walked in, and I told this guy, “See that girl, yeah, I’m going to marry her.” She was just something special.

All I wanted was one thing: to go straight ahead on the path. And I couldn’t find my way quite yet, how to get into that path, until I got married. So that’s when I went to the VA, and they sent me down to USC to take all kinds of tests. I said I want something that I can get into now, and they mentioned the barber college. I said, “I’ll be a barber then.”

I lived in East L.A. back then, and it was rough. Dames, drugs--I would catch kids smoking grass in front of my yard. They were always loaded and partying and having their personal fist fights. If I had never changed, my kids would grow up thinking that’s part of life. And I didn’t want that.

I go visit East L.A. once a week now to buy my chorizo. The place I go to makes it delicious. I go see my mother-in-law; she lives in one of our rentals. I visit one of my wife’s nieces; she lives in one of our rentals. I love East L.A. because it seems like I never left the place. The environment, the Spanish-speaking people. They haven’t changed. They see how I changed. They look up to me in a way.