Bridging the Centuries

They blinked their way into the 19th century world, these fin-de-siecle babies--the blessed arrival of now-100-year-old Cliff Holliday of Gardena, for instance, was handled by a midwife on a Canadian grain farm lit by oil lamps.

By year’s end, knock on wood veneer, the turn-of-the-century babies will have seen all of the 20th century go by, in Houdini-like defiance of the odds. When they were born, the life expectancy was 45 years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

But on New Year’s Day 2000, about 72,000 Americans--centenarians, at age 100 and older--are expected to see three centuries, along with a new millennium. (Strictly speaking, 2001 marks the millennium, but the zeitgeist calls for celebrating early.)

Montebello resident Lupe R. Leyvas, a 100-year-old great-great-grandmother, awaits in triple-century suspension.

“So I can see the young ones grow up,” she says in Spanish. “See what kind of future they have.” She points a finger to the heavens: “Maybe one or two of them will go to the moon.”

At their three-century mark, we asked three local centenarians for a freeze-frame memory of early Southern California, a place with dreams to sell, with blooming orange groves promising la dolce vita. To say how they got here--to the brink of the 21st century--is to tell the bumpy story of our time, the oral history of coming-of-age Southern California:

Freeda Bogad; Born Nov. 12, 1895

She did not mean to break her mother’s heart in this new place, America. Not this slip of a girl who came to New York City from a small Austrian farming village at age 13, with her nine brothers and sisters.

On Friday nights, after a week’s work in the garment factory, Bogad would trudge up five flights of stairs to the family’s one-room apartment and hand over her paycheck to her widowed mother. A dollar fifty. Maybe, Bogad would say, she could have a nickel for a picture show. Her mother would cry and usually say no--the family owed the milkman, the grocer, the pushcart peddler.

In the early 1920s, Bogad got married, and with her husband, boarded a bus to Los Angeles, where they heard you could buy a big home for nothing. Nobody kissed them goodbye, except family, not with the tuberculosis scare.

On the bus, with each clutching a bundle of clothes, the young couple asked the driver where they should go. He said, take a street car and go to Boyle Heights, to Soto Street, that’s a real Jewish neighborhood. So they did and rented a room in a house, living for the first week on nothing but cooked beets.

“Los Angeles looked like heaven, heaven on Earth,” Bogad says. Her eyes close, and in a wheelchair, her shoulders sigh with the memory. “New York . . . was so crowded. It was so filthy. The streets, they were never washed. And here, they were washing the streets every day. It was something wonderful.”

Her husband found work at a fruit stand for $1 a day, and Bogad walked downtown to work at a factory in a big room, with two rows of machines for 100 workers. For $1.50 a week, she sewed cotton blouses in the hot, dusty factory. She sewed as fast as she could, through calluses and blisters on her thin fingers. She would ask the foreman: Can I open a little bit of window? Can we have paper in the bathroom for wiping our hands after we wash? He told her, Oh, you want everything.

But one day, when a man from the union came to talk, she dived under her sewing machine. She did not know what this union was, and she couldn’t afford to lose her job.

Better pay, better conditions, organizers told her, and they proved it--her pay shot up to $2 a week. She signed up, for 25 cents in weekly dues, and told other Jewish immigrants to join. And then the bosses tried to make an end run.

They started to hire workers in their homes and pay them by the piece; that was cheaper than workers on salary. The foreman started to tell the factory workers that there was no work.

Bogad was not going to stay home. One night, she hid on the floor of a taxi and told the driver to tail her boss, who was dropping off bright bolts of cloth at people’s homes. She burst onto the scene.

“You know we have nothing to eat, and you’re taking our work away,” she told the piece workers.

The foreman tried to shove her away and tore her coat sleeve. Someone called the police, who took her to jail for disturbing the peace. Union organizers bailed her out for $5. Later, she coaxed the piece workers into joining the union too.

A stranger once wrote to her to thank her for championing workers’ rights. We can afford to go out a little now, a woman wrote, and have a little better life.

“I still have the letter, if I could find it,” Bogad says, and chokes up.

Bogad and her husband eventually saved enough money to run their own businesses, a grocery store in Boyle Heights and then a candy stand in downtown Los Angeles. After her first husband died in 1962, Bogad remarried twice. She’s a widow at the Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda. She has two children, eight grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. At the home, she likes to wear a black Nike cap and double strand of white beads. She is a member of the drama group and chorus. Does she sew anymore? “Nooooo,” she says and smiles. “Only the singing.”

Clifford Holliday; Born Sept. 27, 1898

He was a farmer’s son from a small town near Winnipeg, Canada, the first of seven boys, and knew nothing of this motion picture business. Back then, on a 320-acre farm, he knew horse grooming, pig feeding, wheat thrashing, and a bit about electrical work, which landed him a job as an electrician in Hollywood, U.S.A. Everyone knew where that was.

But the work with an electrical contractor for the movie studios--well, he didn’t think much of it. The job: rewiring the movie studios for the first motion pictures with sound.

At the time, Holliday had seen only one shake-the-seats-with-laughter movie. That was a Charlie Chaplin movie in 1915, when he was a teenager in the Canadian Army, just before he fought in the front-line trenches in France. Still cracks him up, just thinking about Chaplin’s goofy hat and little mustache and wriggly body. See, Chaplin walks down the street, reading a book, and he falls down the manhole, and he’s white when he goes down and black as coal when he comes up!

But Holliday was no movie fan when he decided to take the train to Hollywood in 1922. He was tired of Canada’s snowy winters. In fact, he heard that the hotels in Southern California put in all their advertisements: Eat a free meal on the days when the sun don’t shine. And the pay would take the edge off any homesickness--$44 for a 54-hour week, union scale for electricians.

He rented an apartment at 11th and Georgia streets in downtown Los Angeles. In coveralls, he headed to work at Columbia, Paramount or 20th Century Fox studios by hopping on a street car so crowded that commuters hung off the sides.

“ ‘Course, I was younger then,” Holliday muses, his voice still booming, sitting on the edge of a straight back chair, “and it might be my imagination, but it just seems like everyone was enthused about what they were doing, like creating a new world.”

His job didn’t seem so revolutionary at the time. In the early 1920s, the world was spinning with progress, and whirring with all kinds of new cars on the roads.

By contrast, on the movie lots, Holliday and the other electricians simply rewired the old studios, before the carpenters lined the sets with 4 inches of sound-absorbing cork. Pretty routine, sort of like wiring a house for electricity. Except he got to see some sights on the back lots, like Will Rogers playing a Mississippi steamboat captain.

The studio work then led to the next step: equipping theater projection rooms for sound in the early ‘30s. The old movie theaters were grand. Take the Orpheum Theater in downtown L.A. In its heyday, the place had what he’s sure was thousands of dollars of gold leaf in the lobby decor.

On opening nights, movie stars showed up in their fancy clothes, in ball gowns or tuxedos and top hats. A red carpet spilled out of the theater, and some announcer would say here comes Fred Astaire or Douglas Fairbanks or Mary Pickford. But Holliday wasn’t much for all the glamour.

He only stuck around to make sure that the sound wouldn’t quit on him. You never know with all this newfangled technology, and the world on a blue streak of progress.

“It was dreams, dreams, people dreaming. It was natural for people to dream.”

Holliday now lives in his own home in Gardena, where he rents a room to a young couple. He retired in 1970, after working in the electrical business, defense work and real estate. He and his wife, Annie, who died in 1974, raised one daughter. He is an active senior volunteer and sometimes take a six-hour bus ride to Las Vegas, where he visits his grandson and daughter. He has had a spell of bad health but plans to hold on for the century change. “That’ll be exciting,” he says. “Two years in the 19th century, all of the 20th, a day or two in the 21st century.”

Lupe R. Leyvas; Born March 16, 1899

She crossed the border into El Paso at age 16 and would never step back again. Pancho Villa and his revolutionary forces had destroyed her country, her family’s bakery in Chihuahua, Mexico. Basta. Enough.

Leyvas would raise any future children as Americans, with liberty and justice for all. She would learn English and become a U.S. citizen. This she would do, even when the terrible thing happened to her boy.

Her son, Henry Leyvas, 19, was one of a dozen young men convicted of murder in 1942 (Henry’s story was featured in the Luis Valdez play and movie “Zoot Suit”). Her boy, in San Quentin! On phony baloney charges because of his brown skin! Not her boy, who was supposed to go off to war for their country, the U.S.A. How could this happen in her country?

Her America was simpatico. In the early ‘40s, she and her husband, Seferino Sr., left the door open for fresh air, even at night in East Los Angeles, even with a family that grew to 10 children. Her husband worked as a laborer at a manufacturing plant, and she watched over the children and neighborhood kids. Didn’t matter if they were Jewish, Italian or Russian. They were all Americans, and for parties, she did not serve Mexican fare. Everyone ate bologna sandwiches, and the neighborhood was like family.

She thought she knew America, and then the terrible thing happened. Trouble reared up when Henry and the boys started wearing zoot suits--baggy pants with sharp creases, knee-length custom-made jackets with shoulder pads, shiny shoes and gold waist chains that dangled like nooses. Put on the suit in the barrio, and you stand out like a bull’s-eye.

The press made it out like only Latinos put on the gangster-cool zoot suit, but Leyvas doesn’t remember it that way. All the neighborhood boys wore them, blacks, whites, everyone. She didn’t like the look one bit, but she could not say no to her boy.

Henry and the neighborhood boys hung out at Sleepy Lagoon, an Eastside reservoir shaded by weeping willow trees. The police called them the 38th Street gang, but she knew her boy was no hoodlum.

The boys were at the reservoir on the night that 21-year-old Jose Diaz was found beaten to death. Police questioned them, along with hundreds of mostly Latino youth and charged them with murder. Leyvas was scared. No one would listen to what her boy said. In January 1943, Henry and the boys were convicted of murder and sent to San Quentin, and it was like the Statue of Liberty had crumbled.

But then she found justice outside the courts; one nation under God. . . . Community activists organized a defense committee to steer the boys’ appeal. The whole neighborhood was behind the boys, everyone from a Jewish activist to Rita Hayworth. Eighteen months later, an appeals court overturned the convictions, and the court reprimanded the local judge for what Leyvas knew to be true--his prejudice and hostility toward the defendants. This was the America of her dreams, with justice for all.

Three of her sons, including Henry, eventually fought in World War II, and she put three cloth stars in the living room window to show the world her boys’ service to the country. And a few years after the trial, she would become a U.S. citizen.

Leyvas lives in her own home in Montebello, with two attendants. She has more than 200 grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren (Henry died in 1972). On her 100th birthday, she wore a flowing red-and-black dress with black hose and put her salt-and-pepper hair into pin curls. She would not talk until everyone in the room--about two dozen people--ate a taquito or enchilada.

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Renee Tawa can be reached by e-mail at renee.tawa@latimes.com.