For a Budding Artist and Novelist, Postwar Los Angeles Was a Magic Place

My first experience in California was when I came home from World War II. My parents had moved from Philadelphia, my birthplace, to Venice in 1943. I had been planning to go with them, but the day they were leaving the letter arrived telling me to report for military service.

My memory of that first day in Los Angeles was getting off the red streetcar running down the center of Venice Boulevard, my heavy duffel bag slung on my back and an envelope with my parents’ return address clenched in my teeth. I was all of 20 years old.

*

My parents, recent arrivals, had no phone. The local draft board helped me track them down. I was still physically weak after a considerable stay in a military hospital recovering from inner ear damage I suffered when an artillery shell landed between me and two German prisoners I was taking to safety.

As a disabled, decorated infantry veteran, I could, if I had the grades, go to any university of my choice in America. I would be on Public Law 16, a program for disabled veterans even more generous than the GI Bill. It would pay all tuition, books and material costs as well as my $160-per-month disability pension while I was in school. It seemed the chance of a lifetime. It was.

After being received with joy by my parents, I enrolled at UCLA. I didn’t even know what the acronym stood for. Despite family resistance, I enrolled as an art major.

After three years, I graduated. I then started trying to sell my paintings to galleries along La Cienega Boulevard and sending them to various art shows. Not one of the students with whom I graduated could sell enough to make a living. We’d literally painted ourselves into a corner. I finally accepted a position teaching art with the Los Angeles city schools.

Through my sister I met and fell in love with a young friend of hers. She and I were eager to get on with our lives and so were married at the first St. Mark’s Church in Venice. After we were married, they tore the church down. This was my first experience with the California propensity for change.

My wife and I bought a shack (so described by the Realtor) in Topanga Canyon. It cost $2,150, of which we had $500. (At that time, one could buy a house in the San Fernando Valley on the GI Bill for less than $10,000, with a government-backed loan at 4%. The houses were small, as alike as peas in a pod, but adequate.) We borrowed $1,650 at 4%, which we paid off within a year or two.

I began trying to teach my students at a new junior high school in Canoga Park, way out in the west suburbs. I wanted them to know that art was fun and each of them was a potential artist. I was also honing my own aesthetic.

Public transport at that time was practically nonexistent in Los Angeles, so my wife, then my fiancee, and I bought a car. We saw it sitting on a lawn in Santa Monica under a For Sale sign. It was a 1939 Bantam Austin convertible with no top to convert. It was painted red, yellow and black. The four-cylinder engine had little power, at least not enough to take two people over the Topanga summit to the Valley. I bought, repaired and learned to drive a 5-year-old 250-CC AJ motorcycle. For three years I guided and tilted this machine every morning over the serpentine Topanga hills to the school. This was much to the dismay of the principal and the delight of my pupils.

Riding the hills of Topanga was an enlightening experience. I began to feel the magic of a desert close to the ocean, with coastal mountains between. My wife and I were wooed by the charm of the piers in Santa Monica, Ocean Park and Malibu. These, along with the beautiful beaches, captivated us. We fished from them, danced on them.

We were beginning to enjoy the special magic of Southern California. In the early mornings, my wife and I would climb up in the hills of Topanga to watch the sunrise. There would be the scent of sage and sorrel. It was such a restoring way to start our days. We were even getting accustomed to sunsets in the west.

*

Everything in our California lives seemed possible, that is, everything except selling paintings. Most of my fellow students at UCLA dropped off into advertising, films, TV and other allied areas to use their skills and talents, or, like me, into teaching.

My wife, amazingly, as an actress in a high school play at St. Monica’s, had won a contract with Paramount Studios. John Farrow, the film director probably best known as Mia’s father, and Maureen O’Sullivan, his wife, whom he shared with Tarzan in films, were responsible for this miracle. None of this seemed real to us, but they paid her more than her father and mine combined were earning at regular jobs.

For us, it was all part of our dreamlike California experience. I admit to having enjoyed a perverse pleasure at driving the little black, yellow and red Bantam Austin through the Paramount gates and parking it with the sleek autos of directors, actors and producers.

Both of us were amazed at how easy everything seemed to be. With our UCLA friends we went to incredible places, such as Lake Arrowhead up in the mountains, not three hours’ drive from where we lived. We swam in small ponds in the pockets of mountains. We visited a few of the California sights, such as Knott’s Berry Farm, and the missions. With the new freeways it was easy to explore, even with our cheap used cars, and we did. We were often visitors to the Getty Museum, then in Getty’s home on the Pacific Coast Highway. It sharpened our growing desire to go to Europe.

My wife and I love to dance. It was the time of the big bands. We went regularly to the Casa Manana in Culver City, where we saw Charlie Barnet with his band. The intermission band was the King Cole Trio. There was the Casino Ballroom in Ocean Park, where Harry James played his trumpet. Also appearing there were the Dorsey brothers, Tommy and Jimmy.

My wife obtained a “need scholarship” from UCLA, and any expenses she couldn’t meet by working (Paramount had dropped her contract after two years), they paid. It was all so unbelievable to us. In Pennsylvania, we could never have both gone to quality universities.

Upon graduation from UCLA, my wife was hired by the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica, a classic of the times, a “think tank.” Opportunity was everywhere, and we were enjoying the first freedoms of adulthood.

Weekends or summers, we’d go down to Santa Monica, where we could watch the physical antics put on by the denizens of Muscle Beach, the pumping-up of muscles and intricate gymnastics on the rings and chinning bars. It was the beginning of the health awareness that is so much a part of the Southern California lifestyle.

It wasn’t all watching, either. We buried each other in sand, swam in the clear, clean waters and picnicked. Evenings, we’d often gather at the beach and catch the delicious grunion. We purchased a seven-man inflatable raft at a war surplus store, floated it out past the waves and dived from it. The war seemed very surplus at this time.

We had a friend from UCLA named Scotty who sang and played the guitar. With him and other friends we’d have evening beach parties and dance on the beach. It sounds so idyllic I can scarcely believe it myself.

But it wasn’t particularly unique. This was the beginning of the ‘50s. We’d married on the cusp of this magic, easy time and had the luck to participate in it. It was with the arrival of children that we began to have concerns about California as a place to live. It wasn’t because of something indigenously Californian; it was a phenomenon invading the lives of all Americans. But California, as a virtual inventor of network TV, was especially culpable and vulnerable. We trashed our TV, took a sabbatical and left for Europe. Our friends were convinced we were crazy to leave California, and we weren’t sure they were wrong.

We came back from Europe changed, and on a typical starry summer California night, sleeping outdoors on our upside-down rubber raft, with a new baby coming, we made our decision to go live in Europe. This meant we needed to pay off the money received for the sabbatical, rent our house, take out the retirement money we’d saved and leave for a peripatetic life with the meager income of an artist.

This turned out to be easier said than done. Our hand-built (our hands) home burned down in the great Topanga fire of 1958, along with 80 other houses. It made things difficult, but with the help of a little insurance, another year of teaching and some luck, we persevered.

We brought up our children outside the burgeoning American culture. They are natural and continuous readers, speak several languages and graduated from good schools. We don’t think our children will ever live in California, but my wife and I are fairly sure it is the place we will settle in the end. Also, we recognize that nothing of our idyllic lives could have been possible without our incubation time in Southern California.