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A Fond Farewell to Will Rogers SHP

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The Will Rogers Ranch House—Gone Forever

One of my favorite places in the Los Angeles area was the Will Rogers Sate Historical Park in Pacific Palisades. It was the home of Will Rogers for many years. On the grounds was a polo field where in the summer polo games were played. There were also hiking trails and a horse barn.

Now all are gone, burned in the Palisades Fire. Martine and I will no longer be able to relax in the shade of the oak trees in rustic rocking chairs or tour the ranch house to see the western memorabilia of one of my favorite actors.

Will Rogers was a genuinely good person as well as one of the most popular actors of the 1930s. There was not a contentious bone in his body. What the political divided United States needed was another Will Rogers, but alas it is unlikely we will ever find one.

Leapfrogging Embers

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Flying Embers Being Carried by Wind Gusts

One of the reasons this week’s Southern California wildfires were so devastating is that the wind gusts were so powerful that flaming embers were being carried up to five miles by the winds. And some of those gusts approached the velocity of a category 2 hurricane (up to 100 miles per hour or 161 km per hour) without benefit of the moisture that usually accompanies a hurricane.

Typically, January is a wet month in Los Angeles. This year, the relative humidity levels were frequently 10% or even less.

One of the reasons the Palisades Fire was so devastating was that the wind gusts would send flaming embers leapfrogging over the hills and valleys and starting new fires. This is what happened along the Pacific Coast Highway (Route 1) where dozens of beachfront homes burned down as the waves of the Pacific Ocean gently lapped over the ruins.

Martine and I remain sick at heart following the news and seeing nothing but devastation everywhere.

Back to … This?

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Still from Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1949)

I was in the hospital until a few days ago—and that wasn’t even the worst thing that happened at the start of this inauspicious New Year. What affects me more are the wildfires that are destroying the city of Los Angeles.

One of my best friends has lost his house, his church, and his neighborhood from the Eaton Fire in Altadena. To this point, I have not been affected, but in the nearby city of Santa Monica, just two miles to the northwest, residents are being warned they may have to evacuate.

The hurricane-force winds buffeting the area are sending flaming embers for miles, each one of which is capable of burning down a house, place of business, school, apartment building, or church. I have never experienced such powerful wind gusts in the sixty years that I have lived in Southern California.

First Responders at the Palisades Fire

Over the decades, I have come to love Los Angeles. What is happening to it now is tearing me apart.

Christmas Cheer

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Christmas Display at the Grier Musser Museum

This afternoon, Martine and I visited our friends Rey and Susan Tejada at the Grier Musser Museum near downtown L.A. The Victorian house is being dwarfed by a four-story apartment building under construction just north of them, but the Spirit of Christmas is very much evident in the holiday-related antiques on display.

I forgot to bring my camera along, so the picture above is from our 2019 visit at Christmas time.

As Christmas Day gets closer, I have pretty much surrendered to the good feelings that supposedly prevail at this time. Martine is listening to the Classic Christmas Music channel on Music Choice, and I no longer grit my teeth—unless they decide to play “The Little Drummer Boy,” in which case I feel it incumbent on me to leave the room. Pah-RUP-pup-PUM.

I just want to make Martine happy this time of year. On Monday, I will cook up one of her favorite dishes, a beef stew from a recipe in the New York Times. And we already have a couple of bottles of her favorite wine, Egri Bikavér (Bull’s Blood of Eger) from Hungary.

If Martine is happy, I will be happy.

The Heat Wave Continues

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Today was the fourth (or was it the fifth?) day of a brutal heat wave. I haven’t been able to accomplish much, and I refuse to cook any meals, as long as my living quarters resemble a sweat lodge.

If there are still any climate change deniers out there, I invite them to ascend a podium in the middle of the afternoon wearing a winter coat and explain their position in a hours-long speech without dropping dead.

Blazing Hot Sun

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Hot! Hot !! Hot!!!

It had to happen eventually: the wind suddenly started coming from the east and blowing the hot air of the desert all through Southern California, even by the coast where we are usually protected by the Marine Layer. Well, now there is no Marine Layer. Only the beginnings of a nasty Santa Ana Wind that makes L.A. about as comfortable as the Mohave Desert.

Because I live in an apartment building that was built around the time I was born, before there was the slightest hint of global warming, we have no insulation in the walls and ceiling. That means the apartment gets super hot and stays that way until the wee hours of the morning.

Today I have gone through three trays of ice cubes fixing iced water and iced tea for me. I was going to cook Spanish Rice for dinner, but then I thought, “To hell with it! No way am I going to make the kitchen hotter than it already is.” Instead, Martine and I scrounged around for what we had lying around in the pantry and in the refrigerator.

As is usual with these Santa Ana Winds, they always last longer than predicted. To give you a feeling for what life is like under these conditions, just read the opening of Raymond Chandler’s story “Red Wind”:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge..

It’s Greek To Me

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The Iconostasis at Assumption of the BVM in Long Beach

On Saturday, Martine and I attended the annual festival at Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox Church in Long Beach. It was our third Greek festival of the year, and probably not the last. We like the food, the music, and the churches. The Long Beach church was perhaps a bit on the gaudy side, but it was all reverently done.

There remain two more Greek festivals over the next six weeks: St Anthony Greek Orthodox Church on September 20-22 and the big event at Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Church on October 5-6. I am pretty sure that we’ll be at Saint Sophia. We’ve never been to St Anthony, but we’ll go if I could talk Martine into it.

I love ethnic festivals, particularly if they’re Hungarian. But these are becoming fewer in number as time goes on, and the Magyar population of Southern California becomes more acculturated and dispersed. The Greek festivals seem to be more of a going thing. I hope that it continues to be.

The Beach Zone

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If you hate hot weather and have to live in California, near the beach is the place to be. My brother in Palm Desert is experiencing temperatures over 100° Fahrenheit (38° Celsius) on an almost daily basis. My friends Bill and Kathy in Altadena are typically getting temperatures over 90° Fahrenheit (32° Celsius). Martine and I, on the other hand, live two miles (3.2 km) from the beach and have been comfortable in temperatures not much warmer than 80° Fahrenheit (27° Celsius).

The reason for this is that we are enjoying what is referred to as the marine layer, which is what you get when relatively warm and dry air moves atop a body of cooler water. Sometimes, this layer only goes inland several hundred feet, or several miles, or even all the way to the edge of the desert.

As I drive to the beach, I enjoy looking at my Subaru’s thermometer reading dropping as I near the water. Today, fore instance, from Centinela Avenue to Chace Park in the Marina, a distance of two or three miles, the temperature dropped six degrees Fahrenheit from 83° to 77°. Plus there was a steady breeze that disappeared only a few hundred feet inland.

We live in an apartment that was built in 1945 (the year I was born) without insulation. We have fans, but no air conditioning. (We couldn’t afford it.) It is generally cheaper to live farther inland, but one cannot survive without air conditioning.

Only later in the summer and into early fall does the marine layer becomes less of a factor when the Santa Ana Winds bring the hot dry desert air to the beach communities and blows the marine layer offshore.

Chacing [Sic] Comfort

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Squirrel-in-Residence at Chace Park

As the heat continues, I occasionally seek the cool ocean breezes of Burton W. Chace Park in Marina Del Rey. I say occasionally because, on weekends, the park is being loved to death and the parking lots are all parked up. Yesterday, I sat down in the shade at the edge of the Marina while reading Paul Theroux’s The Last Train to Zona Verde (2013).

The squirrel pictured above approached me nonchalantly as I waited for my 90-minte free parking window to expire. The peninsula seems to have scores of squirrels all busily hunting nuts, seeds, insects, and food scraps.

Shade Trees at Chace Park

En route to the park, I had stopped at Ralph’s Supermarket at Mindanao Way and Admiralty, where I picked up a tasty salmon and tuna poke bowl and a can of Japanese iced green tea. I consumed it at one of the three roofed picnic pavilions seen in the distance of the above photo. Then I sat in one of the stone benches with a good view of boat traffic and relaxed while the breeze ruffled my hair.

Sailboat in the Marina

I returned home, where the temperature was about 8 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) warmer and cooked stuffed peppers for dinner. Afterwards, I relaxed for an evening of Roger Corman Poe films starring Vincent Price on the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) channel.

Tit for Tat

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Cumulus Clouds Over Los Angeles

In terms of the calendar, summer began on Thursday; but in terms of the actual weather, it began today with high humidity (76%), relatively high temperatures (around 80° Fahrenheit or 27° Celsius), and a parade of majestic cumulus clouds.

If I were to identify the “microseason” we are entering, I would say it is Mexican Monsoon Season, where we are the recipient of the northern edges of Mexico’s summer monsoons.

That’s a fair trade, I suppose, because the united States begins sending in late autumn its nortes, or “northers,” which wreak serious havoc along the Gulf Coast of Mexico. In November 1992, I have memories of two nasty northers which led to extensive flooding in both Campeche and Mérida. I remember wading to the Campeche bus station in knee-deep water to buy tickets for the next morning’s ADO first class bus to Mérida.

When the next morning dawned, I was surprised to see that most of the flooding had subsided considerably.