You Are Here

For three years, I dug into my family’s remote past. I went back as far as I could. It wasn’t very far. I got stuck at grandparents and great-grandparents--those folks who were run out of town or who left villages never intending to return. These are people who would rather not be followed. Not bad people, but careful. Private. I had romantic notions of going back centuries, uncovering what life was like in Chicago, New York and Missouri, Canada, France and Italy. Instead, after I tapped the few veins I’d hit, I gave up and locked my notes in a secondhand briefcase that my grandfather, Jimmy, had bought for me.

The briefcase collected dust in my hallway, but my questions had sparked my parents’ interest. Maybe my parents were surprised by the minutiae I’d located: Chicago addresses, ship manifests, newspaper stories that dated back 80 years. My mother tried get my grandfather to talk about his Italian American heritage and his parents, who’d left--or run--from Italy. That yielded little. My father seemed uninterested in the deep past, but he understood why I might be. I contacted his aunt in Fresno. She sent me photographs, notes and took the time to write letters with random recollections. About the time I stopped bothering everyone with questions, my mother suggested we drive around the area where she had grown up. She said she’d chart the map: Inglewood, Hawthorne and Los Angeles.

It was a rainy Friday when I drove from Orange County to my mother’s house in Redondo Beach. At the door, she handed me a list of landmarks, cross streets and addresses, and we set out across town.

Much of the ground we covered was in Inglewood, where she had lived on 77th Street from about 1945 to 1960. Every house she remembered in those few blocks was still standing and neatly kept. My mother pointed and doled out surnames. Two doors down from her house lived aerialist Tiny Kline--the famous person on the block. We drove to Market Street, where her family had shopped. She showed me St. Anselm’s School and Centinela Park, with the pool in which she’d learned to swim and had broken a toe.

We drove to the Academy theater and the 5th Avenue theater and found their signs intact even though the buildings haven’t been theaters for decades. When I asked if she could remember seeing a film at the Academy, she said no. She thought longer and said “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” as if questioning her memory too. The film starred Tony Randall and Jayne Mansfield. My mother swears it was a premiere and that Mansfield was in the audience. That would have been 1957. As for the 5th Avenue theater, my mother pointed to it as the place where a film first frightened her. Along with her mother and younger siblings, she’d seen “Les Diaboliques,” starring Simone Signoret; on the dark walk home they were afraid of their shadows. The film choice was telling; my grandmother never cared what was screening because she’d see it anyway, taking along the children.

Of course, there were places we couldn’t find. One disappointment was our search for Irish World, a bar with a green neon sign where my great-uncles used to drink. In its place at Prairie and Imperial we found a vacant lot. We had to imagine the Sunset Stages--she recalled taking those buses to visit her grandmother in Hawthorne. When we branched into neighborhoods that had changed rapidly after LAX was built, we got turned around. She wanted to show me the first apartment I’d lived in after my birth at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital. We couldn’t find the street or the apartment, and finally figured out that it was gone, built up and over.

At home, I got a phone call from my Uncle Joe, who had heard about our trip. I told my mother’s brother where we had gone; he promised to show me places my mother had forgotten. Then I talked to an aunt. She promised yet another tour--her version. I began to worry that I’d set myself up for endless tours of Inglewood, Hawthorne and their environs. Later, my father said he’d like to take me on a drive around the neighborhoods where he’d been raised, just a few miles nearer the coast. I was grateful for the offer to see something else.

A few weeks later I found myself driving from Orange County to my father’s house in San Pedro and then across town to Westchester’s southern edge, where LAX now sits and where my father had grown up with 10 siblings. He didn’t have a list or a map. His tour was different. He showed me schools he hated, fences he jumped and fields--or what used to be fields--where he had spent days catching frogs and lizards among castor beans and high grass. He regaled me with tales of running in storm drains and hanging out on the Westchester Bluffs. We drove his paper route across Vicksburg, Earhart, Airlane, Osage, Kittyhawk and Croyden. When we got hungry, he drove me to Pann’s, of the famed cantilevered roof. It was a Sunday, and the line wrapped around the building.

My parents have been divorced for decades. It was fascinating to see how fondly they remembered Westchester and Inglewood, to hear what they recalled on these drives, and how their differences have wound their way through time and me. My father’s solitary enchantment with place was apparent. My mother’s memory of conversations--what her teachers said and walks home in the dark--narrate a story that was social. I could see how their experiences shaped them.

Corners of Inglewood and Westchester are largely unchanged architecturally. Who knows how long that will be true? I’m not sure I could show someone around my childhood neighborhood of Redondo Beach based on what I remember from 1970: the bar that burned to the ground, the gypsy’s old place, the strip of stores beyond a circular parking lot. Those places are gone; in their stead, a grand hotel, condominiums and a Rite Aid. To show someone the landscape of my past, I would take them to the beach--Avenue C--where I spent eight hours a day for three summers. I’d point toward the water to illustrate. And then I’d drive them past where my schools’ playgrounds or parking lots had been, places where I had felt most at home.

My mother was right to suggest that I look nearby. Someday I’ll get to Canada and France and Italy and dig deeper. But we’ve been here for more than 60 years. And here is a good place to begin.