Grateful Marine Now on a Mission

He was a naive teenager who’d bitten off more than he could chew at Camp Pendleton. Now he’s a man of 63, but like lots of boys who grow up and inevitably look back on times long gone, there are loose ends to be tied.

And that put me on the other end of the telephone with Jack Granstrom of Arlington, Wash. He had e-mailed, wanting help in finding some people from his past -- a small group of Angelenos who have been in his thoughts off and on for more than 40 years.

He doesn’t know if they still live in Southern California. Or even if they’re alive. He’s put off doing what he’s wanted to do for years: Find them and thank them for being there when he was a young Marine in this strange land of Southern California.

He’s sure of some names: Louis and Peg Smith, Franklin and Virginia Hurd. And there were the Kemps, whose first names he’s not sure of.

He thinks the Smiths lived right off Slauson Avenue. The other families lived in a place with “Hills” in the name.

They were the people he’d met through Dwight Smith, a Marine buddy he called “Smitty” who took young Granstrom home with him to Los Angeles and thrust him into his circle of family and friends.

If he didn’t fully know it then, Granstrom knows it now: They helped him through homesickness and a growing feeling that, although he’d signed up for a three-year hitch, he wasn’t all that thrilled with the life of a leatherneck. “They sheltered me,” he says, “from the cultural storm.”

Granstrom grew up in a small logging area in northern Washington known as “the Finn Settlement.” It was a collection of farms in an unincorporated area north of Seattle. He’d never been on a plane until the day after he signed up with the Marines in 1960 and found himself airborne for San Diego. He was 18.

When he first met Smitty, he thought he was a big-city wimp. Then the kid from Washington saw the big city for himself.

“It was like a whole new world,” he says. “The weather was beautiful and the homes Smitty and the others lived in were really nice, the palm trees. The streets were clean. To me it was like, ‘My God, this is so beautiful.’ Almost like a fairyland.”

But today he’s thinking about people, not places. “It was just the kindness,” he says, when I ask why he has never forgotten them. “These people did what I thought was a wonderful thing. They opened my eyes to the real world.”

His new friends took him places. One of the moms, Mrs. Hurd, gave him a book on the U.S. government. “She said, ‘You might find this interesting,’ ” Granstrom says. “I read it. I did find it interesting.”

He remembers seeing the stage production of “Under the Yum Yum Tree” at a West Hollywood theater. One of the friends took him to a coffeehouse in Redondo Beach. One of the singers was an unknown Canadian named Gordon Lightfoot.

Granstrom’s tour of duty ended in 1963. He never returned to Los Angeles but says the memories of his second family circle never left him.

This year, he went to his high school class’ 45th reunion. Not surprisingly, nostalgic waves washed over him. One of them reminded him again of L.A.

In his first e-mail to me, he said the Smiths’ help was “like a lifeline thrown to an undesirably ignorant country hick.”

And now? He’s been married for 40 years and has two grown daughters. But he’s still the kid who grew up in a place with no telephones and where the nearest paved road was four miles away.

He hopes there’s still time to thank his L.A. families. I sense that part of him knows he’s waited too long. The L.A. parents would be in their 80s by now, at least. But when young, they’d taken him in “to this whole new world. They basically educated me. They were unbelievably kind to me. They put up with my ignorance. It’s like I really owed them this major debt and I never really said thanks.”