Blackouts Could Prove to Be Illuminating

Four days into it may be a little early to wax nostalgic about the rolling blackouts in Orange County. Still, it has gotten Eddie Grijalva thinking.

What if, he says, there’s a silver lining?

As one in perpetual search of silver linings, I go to see him.

Grijalva is a 68-year-old former school custodian living in a small house on a Buena Park cul-de-sac, where he takes care of his 91-year-old mother and a souped-up Maltese named Max. Divorced, with two grown children, Grijalva in recent years has made a bit of a name for himself as a self-taught expert on both his family’s heritage and Orange County’s past.

But it’s not that research he wants to discuss. It’s his boyhood recollections of World War II--his first brush with blackouts.

“I sort of enjoyed them,” he says. He wonders why we couldn’t enjoy them again.

Yes, Orange County has gone dark before.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and when fears of an invasion ran rampant, Grijalva remembers, his father put heavy shades over the windows of their house in El Toro. And, when driving his ’32 Model A, Grijalva’s father put black tape over half the headlights. The idea was to make it harder for invaders to pinpoint Southern California bombing targets.

Sound scary? Grijalva remembers it as a time that brought his family closer together, united by their common concern and sacrifice.

If it served a purpose then, why not now? Maybe what the American family needs, he says, is a little quality time without electricity.

Parents, Kids Might Actually Talk

“If you’re not prepared with a lantern or lamps [during a blackout], what’s a family going to do?” Grijalva asks. “You have to eat by candlelight. After that, no TV, no computer. Maybe the family will sit around and start talking like a family should. Nowadays, families don’t talk. Most kids have their own rooms, and you don’t see them till bedtime.”

Of course, it’s not that families never talk. But, tell the truth, aren’t you a bit intrigued what it would be like if a blackout forced your family unit into relative darkness for 30 or 45 minutes. An hour? How about two hours?

What would you do? What would you talk about?

I suspect parents and children would learn all kinds of things. I’m guessing the conversations would run deeper than the ones that fly by in our usual fast-paced world.

Grijalva laughs when I ask if, to follow his logic, blackouts are good for us. “People would think I’m being nuts thinking that way,” he says. “But it’d be nice. It’d be nice if people had to pull out lamps and just get to know each other. They think they know their kids, but parents don’t know what the heck their kids are doing. They don’t talk.”

To double-check Grijalva’s boyhood memories, I touch base with local historian Esther Cramer, who, as a La Habra teenager at the outset of World War II, remembers a darkened Orange County.

“I can remember all the lights being out,” she says. “It was blacked out.”

At her house, construction paper covered the windows. She remembers the “eerie, eerie” sound of sirens in the night.

“I was at kind of an emotional age, and I remember going up the stairs and peering out from under pulled-down black shades. And, of course, the house was black, and I was wondering whether anyone was going to see me looking out the window.”

Cramer doesn’t remember how long the blackouts lasted. “It was dramatic,” she says. “It left an impression on us, because we were so uncertain what was going on. Rumors were so wild: There were spies in our midst; we were going to have an invasion--it was imminent. After what happened at Pearl Harbor, we were able to believe anything.”

Families today wouldn’t have that kind of conversation, but I bet they could think of something juicy enough. Sit in the darkness long enough, minus the TV and Internet, and something will come out.

It’s stretching it to say Grijalva is hoping for protracted Southern California blackouts. He’s merely suggesting that not only would we survive them, we might actually learn a thing or two.

He convinces me, and that’s why I don’t ask if he’s being metaphorical when he says, “It’s frustrating to be in the darkness. We take so many things for granted.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821; by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626; or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.