Nostalgia Permeates the Houses in Memory Lane

I drove down to Whittier the other day to give a talk at a fund-raising dinner for the Whittier YMCA’s proposed building.

Knowing the unpredictability of late-afternoon freeway traffic, I left three hours early and arrived one hour later, with two hours on my hands.

I had lived in Whittier from 1927 to 1931, my formative years, and it has always had a powerful nostalgic pull on me. I decided to drive around and see what was left.

I drove south on Painter Avenue, past Whittier College. It was reassuring to see that the rock was still there on the grass. It is a large hunk of granite in the shape of half a loaf of French bread. Through the years it had been surreptitiously painted and repainted in the colors of Whittier’s various athletic foes. At the moment it was white, with a blue P. For Pomona, no doubt.

I drove south on Painter to Ramona Drive. We had lived for two years in the second house on the south. It was still there, a neat stucco cottage of 1920s architecture, with a protuberant breakfast nook at one side. The lawn was freshly cut. The yard looked cared for. I couldn’t remember who had mowed our lawn. Certainly not my father.

My father was in stocks and bonds. He wore expensive clothes and drove a blue Chrysler roadster. He was the image of Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby. He had a bootlegger and read H. L. Mencken, neither of which endeared him to the abstemious folk of that Quaker town.

I had not yet read “The Great Gatsby,” and thought of my father as an idol to be emulated. However, as protective coloration I joined the local Friends Church, and went unfailingly to Christian Endeavor meetings for children on Sunday afternoons, having discovered at an early age that girls in the throes of religious fervor are vulnerable to the overtures of boys. We never did anything but sing hymns together (“Let the Lower Lights Be Burning”), but it was a start.

I rang the doorbell, not knowing what I was going to say. I remembered that the door to the back bedroom was cater-cornered to the hallway. That knowledge might serve as my credentials. I had reason to remember that door. I had been in the hall one day when it opened and my older sister stood there in her teddy. She reminded me of Clara Bow. Embarrassment struck me dumb. We were not a casual family. Then she stepped back and shut the door. The incident was never mentioned.

My ring was not answered. I drove back up Painter to Hadley and took a narrow street up the hill to the small frame house we had lived in for the first two years of our Whittier period. I had loved that house. It was built on a slant, so that the living quarters were upstairs and the bedrooms downstairs.

Jane Hildreth answered my knock. She invited me in. She and her sister, Bernice, had lived in the house for 45 years. They had bought it in 1945 for less than $5,000. The Hildreths were gracious. The furniture was old but elegant. Memories stirred me.

My sister had had a magnificent contralto voice. Because of it, she had been given a scholarship to Whittier College. To accommodate her, my father had moved us there. My brother enrolled in the college too. Like our father, he was short. But he doggedly went out for freshman football.

He could pass like Joe Montana but there were no receivers in those days, and the coach played him only when a game was lost or won.

In track he ran the two-mile race; he always finished last, but he always finished. In his senior year, the year Richard Nixon was a freshman, he was student body president.

My sister fell in love with a star lineman on the college football team. Never a serious student, she dropped out and married him.

I had gone one year to Jonathan Bailey elementary school, then two years to John Muir Junior High School, and one year to Whittier High School. Of the three, I found only the high school left.

At the dinner that evening I was to relive my days of glory as left forward on the YMCA’s 95-pound basketball team.