Still smitten with California

Kenneth Larson’s California life began when he opened the pages of a Los Angeles newspaper.

FOR THE RECORD:
Kenneth Larson: In the Dec. 31 Section A, a column by Hector Tobar about Kenneth Larson, who in his frequent published letters in the Los Angeles Times has often celebrated life in California, said he had battled alcohol addiction when he was homeless in Los Angeles. Although Larson says he was indeed homeless for several years, he never drank. —

It was 1953, and Larson was a war veteran and former POW living in Spokane, Wash. In a local public library, the rather hefty Sunday L.A. Times caught his eye.

The classified section offered up “page after page of want ads” for jobs in the aerospace industry, Larson remembered. America was tooling up for the Cold War, and California’s job market was brimming over thanks to the powerful stimulus of military spending.

“There is a place for YOU on America’s first line of defense at Northrop,” declares an ad for that company’s Hawthorne plant, listing 851 open positions in the May 31, 1953, edition of The Times.

“Douglas El Segundo and its Torrance location needs unskilled and skilled men to be trained with full pay,” says another. “No Experience Required.”

So Larson left Spokane on a Greyhound bus. When he got here, he stayed at a brother’s house in Compton — then a mostly white community — and very quickly found a job as an illustrator “with the Douglas plant out by the international airport.”

“You could say that I reinvented myself here with thousands of other Americans,” he told me.

Those abundant times are a distant memory. The monthly California unemployment figures remind us of this sad truth, as do the census figures released last week. Back in the 1950s, California was growing four to five times faster than the rest of the country. Now we’re puttering along at the national average.

California is no longer the new thing. Some people are ready to give up on the Golden State, but not Larson. He’s 85 now and still lives in the heart of L.A., in a corner of the city tucked between Koreatown and Silver Lake. Tagalog, Korean and Spanish are among the many languages spoken in the surrounding streets.

“We have a Filipino family across the street, and every year they put up a marvelous Christmas display,” he told me. Today, he wouldn’t live anywhere else.

“I guess we were meant to stay here,” Larson said of himself and his wife, Carol, a retired librarian. “We could have left, but we didn’t.”

Yes, California is an older place now. And we have many of the problems of the middle-aged, including big debts and a creaky and much abused body politic.

But it doesn’t make sense to lament California’s lost greatness — our state was healthier back then simply because it was younger. And you can only be young once.

Kenneth Larson has stuck with L.A. through good times and bad. And, in its way, L.A. has stuck with him.

Over the years, he’s faithfully written to The Times, and has had 70 letters to the editor published, most since he retired in 1983. Often his missives celebrate what a great place California was and still is.

He’s praised the renovation of Pershing Square and described the joys of a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. He’s remembered Bing Crosby, a Spokane native like him, who drove to L.A. in an old Ford Tin Lizzie. And he’s told Times readers about his stay at Montecito’s Miramar Hotel in 1945 to recuperate after coming back from World War II.

“What a great hotel — midnight snacks, buffet-type dining tables, stocked refrigerators, swimming pool, ocean beaches and nearby Santa Barbara and Los Angeles,” he wrote in a 2000 letter to The Times.

In some of those letters, and his e-mails to me, he’s revealed a bit about the most traumatic event in his life — his experience as a teenage soldier in the U.S. Army.

Larson was shot and captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. As a POW, he endured bombings and hunger. German doctors once linked him with tubes to a fellow prisoner for a transfusion, and then operated on that soldier without anesthetic — his screams haunt Larson to this day.

But one morning the Germans suddenly switched on the prison camp’s loudspeaker — to Bing Crosby singing “Blue Skies.” “I knew then I could make it through to the end of the war,” he wrote in a 1994 letter to The Times.

When Larson resettled in L.A., he still hadn’t quite shaken those World War II memories. After getting that job at Douglas, he fought a long battle with addiction to alcohol that eventually led him to be homeless for several years, he said.

“Among the ‘lost souls’ that I met and knew in slums and missions were a former All-American football star, a former U.S. Navy officer pilot … and the younger brother of a celebrated American movie star,” he wrote in a 1989 letter to The Times.

“It’s a wonder I didn’t give up and become a lost alcoholic,” he continued. “But through the love of the woman I later married and a strong trust in God, I found myself.”

He met Carol at the Los Angeles Central Library, near the old card catalogs. “I asked her out to Clifton’s Cafeteria on a date,” he told me.

They moved into an apartment just off Wilshire Boulevard, near the since demolished Ambassador Hotel. Larson took a job with the State Lands Commission, worked there for many years and retired. Then came the L.A. riots.

On April 30, 1992, he and Carol watched some of their neighbors carrying looted goods back to their homes, Larson told me. It seemed time to leave.

“I went to northern Arizona to look at places to move,” he said. But none had the charm and excitement of L.A.

Instead, Kenneth and Carol ended up moving to a little duplex a mile or so north. Today, various city and state programs help him get by.

Larson, who doesn’t drive anymore, relies on a city program that subsidizes taxi rides for seniors. “Sometimes I get a driver who doesn’t speak English so well,” he told me. “But the immigrants try to learn basic English as soon as they can.”

And he’s still writing about the city around him, about the new and old.

“Like the Phoenix — the legendary bird that according to legend rose alive from the ashes — the colorful new Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex … is a sight to see,” he wrote about the facility on the site of the old Ambassador Hotel.

Kenneth Larson has never lost his love for California. It’s a state that gave him work and love, and an adopted hometown called L.A., where even in lean times there are still many things to admire and remember.

hector.tobar@latimes.com