She Remembers a Different Time--Before the Decline, Drugs, Despair

Although she lives in the shadow of Watts’ Nickerson Gardens housing project, home to some of the most notorious street gangs in Los Angeles, Mary Bolding has a hard time understanding all the to-do over the Crips and Bloods. They never bother her.

But those chicken thieves of the early 1900s--now, there’s her idea of a public menace.

“I’ve never had any problems with the gangs,” insisted the 82-year-old Bolding, sitting with daughter Dorothy in the living room of their small clapboard home. “But the chicken thieves, they burned down our first house. They were trying to steal chickens out of the back when my mother and stepfather heard them.

“My mother put a kerosene lamp in the window to shoo them away. But they shot the lamp, and gas spilled all over and set the house on fire.”

The chicken thieves who stalked her back yard that night in 1916 have long since abandoned Watts, as have the chickens. But the silver-maned Bolding remains as something of a fixture in the district she has called home since her mother and father migrated there from the South in 1910.

The fiery riots of 1965--and the crime and declining conditions that persisted before and since--have driven hundreds of blacks from the community. But Bolding has stood fast, bound to the district by indelible recollections of a Watts most in the district never knew, a Watts without hoodlums and housing projects, despair and drugs.

With her perseverance have come memories. Memories of a Watts covered for miles with weeds so high that they shielded the tiny homes from passers-by. Memories of the black and Latino community when it was a close-knit neighborhood also heavily populated by Italians, Jews and American Indians. And memories of a district rocked by one of the most violent riots of the 1960s, an upheaval that left 34 people dead and hundreds more injured.

“I didn’t participate or even go up close to look,” said Bolding, who lives about a mile from the areas that suffered the heaviest damage. “I stayed in the house, but I could still see the smoke and the fire. People were walking up the street with TV sets.”

The riots scared a lot of families, recalled Bolding, prompting many to look for new lives outside the district. But Bolding, lashed to her home by roots that ran wide and deep, stayed put.

“I won’t leave because my father bought this lot before he and my mother got married,” said Bolding, her voice halting, her tiny frame swaddled in a purple-checked sun dress. “He passed, and she married a Bolding. They were some of the first people to move here. When the house burned down, he built the second house on this same spot.”

Growing up in Watts in the early 1900s, Bolding said, there was always plenty to do. After she finished tending the chickens, rabbits and geese her parents raised in the back yard, she would sometimes venture over to 103rd Street and watch people shop along the bustling business strip.

From there, she would stroll down to the edge of Leak’s Lake in Watts, where many of the area’s residents gathered for church baptisms and amusement.

She attended 102nd Street Elementary School, finishing the eighth grade there. Like many blacks of that era, Bolding never went to high school. Instead, she went to work as a maid in several of the luxurious mansions in Beverly Hills and the Hollywood Hills, cleaning up after millionaires and movie stars.

“One of the men I worked for was Jack Bailey, the man who used to have the show, ‘Queen For A Day,’ ” Bolding recalled.

At 16, Bolding fell in love with her stepfather’s son, Nathaniel Bolding, and the two were married in 1924. They lived together in the house until he died in 1965, seven months before the riots.

The shape of the community was radically altered by the end of World War II, said Bolding and Dorothy. Thousands of Southerners seeking work in the local factories during the war had moved into the area, bringing with them lifestyles and attitudes that clashed with those who had become more adjusted to urban life.

No confrontations resulted, they said, but quietly, the fabric of Watts started to fray.

“Things were just different,” Bolding said. “They had their ways of doing; we had ours. They would come out of their homes, and a lot of them wouldn’t speak. People just stopped chatting like they used to.”

Still, the community remained relatively calm over the next decade and a half, Bolding said. That is, until the smoldering evening of Aug. 12, 1965.

“That was the night it, the riots, started,” Dorothy noted. “I remember coming home during the riots and people were shooting at each other from across the street . . . just shooting.”

For the first time, Dorothy Bolding, who has spent all but seven of her 65 years in the district, wanted her family out of Watts.

“Right then, I was ready to go,” she said. “It was just too crazy.”

Instead of leaving, though, the Boldings just stayed home, watching from their porch and windows as rioters sacked the only community they had ever known.

“The smoke and the flames, they were high,” Mary Bolding said. “I wasn’t going out there. I didn’t know what was going on. When I went out when it was over, it looked terrible.”

When the riots ended, an exodus began. Many of Mary Bolding’s good friends fled the area. The Stewarts, the Swansons, the Fischers--all pulled up stakes and moved away in the years after the riots.

As unemployment, housing conditions and crime worsened, even more families abandoned the district. Many shop owners closed up their businesses and few people cared to venture out at night.

Then, the shooting began. Between 1980 and 1985, Bolding was startled by the riveting sound of gang gunfire puncturing the evening silence. A bullet even came through their window once.

“It hit above the (living room) door,” Dorothy Bolding said. “Now, we know just to lay down when we hear it. We don’t hear it as much, though. It stopped being so regular around 1985.”

But many in the neighborhood are still uneasy. The presence of the gangs and drug dealers make renewed violence a very real possibility.

“I’m ready to leave again,” Dorothy said. “I haven’t been really ready since the riots, but now I’m ready to get out of here, go somewhere else. But I know I’ll have a hard time convincing my mother.”

For her part, Mary Bolding insisted that she will not be moved.

“This is my house,” she said. “I’ve never been anywhere else except in Watts. If I leave now, where will I go?”