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Boardwalk

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There’s No Place Quite Like It

Today I took a walk along the Venice Boardwalk. I could swear that I actually heard a couple of people speaking English. There was French, German, and something that sounded vaguely Slavic. And that was in addition to the frequently heard Spanish.

My destination was Small World Books, near the corner of Pacific and Windward (under the Venice sign above). If you’ve ever seen Orson Welles’s film Touch of Evil (1958), you will remember the colonnades meant to be a sleazy Mexican border town. Except now it’s all tattoo parlors, T-shirts, surfboard and bicycle rentals, food take-out places., and Hippie paraphernalia.

When I first visited the Boardwalk, I was put off by all the Hippie associations and suggestions of violence. After all, the Manson Family was in residence there in the 1960s. (But them, so was Jim Morrison of The Doors.) That’s still part of the Venice scene, but I’ve come to terms with it. If anyone tries to sell me a rap music CD recorded by a local garage band, I’ll just answer pleasantly in Hungarian and continue on my way.

Venice was the creature of a developer named Abbot Kinney who founded the community in 1905, complete with canals, gondoliers, and bath houses. And there was also an amusement park jutting out on a large pier (Pacific Ocean Park), Some of the canals still exist and are another pleasant walk,

At Small World Books, I bought books by Roberto Bolaño and Salman Rushdie.

“The Fair Breeze Blew”

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The Boat Channel from Chace Park

Whenever the summer heat of Los Angeles becomes too unbearable, I pick up the book I am reading and head to my magic peninsula, Burton Chace Park, which is surrounded on three sides by the boats in Marina Del Rey.

There is a Hungarian expression from my youth that aptly describes this week’s weather: dög meleg, or, in English, damned hot. Although the temperature has been in the low 80s Fahrenheit, the humidity has generally been over 50%, and there has been no cooling breeze.

Even when the area even a few hundred feet inland is like a blast furnace, there, for some reason, always a cooling sea breeze blowing at Chace Park. Unfortunately, the secret is out, especially on the weekends. Even if it can get crowded, it’s always nice to have a respite from the dög meleg.

The title of this post comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free:
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.

Fun in the Sun?

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Family On Summer Beach Vacation Run Out Of Sea Towards Camera

Ah yes, Paradise on Earth. As a people, we have traditionally viewed summer beach vacations as the closest one could get to Heaven while alive. When I first came out to California in the late 1960s, I thought so, too. While working part-time at System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, I spent many afternoons lying on a towel and reading steamy fiction like Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.

The water was fun to a certain extent, but I was never a board or body surfer, though I went in often enough to be savaged by the occasional rough wave. Also, I tended to burn—especially as I had no one to slather my back with sun tan lotion.

While I live only two miles from the beach at Santa Monica, I don’t spend time there any more, unless I take a walk on the boardwalk connecting Santa Monica to Venice. Part of the reason is that the water is more polluted than ever, especially because we are only 20-30 miles (32-48 km) from the nation’s largest port, where freighters and tankers regularly foul the waters with petrochemical waste.

So when Martine and I go to Hawaii in a couple months, are we planning for any beach time? Not really. Although the waters at Waikiki are less polluted, the sun is stronger; and we both have fair skin. We are more interested in visiting Honolulu as a destination rather than trying to live in a pharmaceutical commercial.

I suppose if we lived east of the Mississippi, we would yearn for sunshine; but, living in Southern California, we have sunshine on most days of the year. In fact, September tends to be one of the hottest months of the year in Los Angeles. So we are likely escaping even hotter (albeit drier) weather at home.

A Good Walk Spoiled

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It was Mark Twain who said, “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” All across the United States, Europe, and the world there are some 40,000 golf courses, The average 18-hole golf course covers some 150 acres. At 640 acres in a square mile, that means that some 9,375 square miles (24,281 square kilometers) across the planet are dedicated to golf courses—approximately the area of the State of Massachusetts.

That’s a fair-sized piece of land. What makes the statistic interesting is that golf is on the decline, at least in the United States. According to one source, “The number of core American golfers (those playing eight rounds or more per year) has fallen between three and 4.5 percent every year since 2006.”

The Three Stooges at the Golf Course

If that trend continues, I see a giant land rush forming to convert golf courses into expensive subdivided real estate.

In fact, in the news there is a big kerfuffle about a dispute between the PGA and Saudi Arabia’s LIV, which is making inroads on the PGA’s monopoly. You can read about it here.

So don’t spend too much money on golf clubs and golf fashions. They may not be around much longer.

VTAC

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Today, Martine and I went with our friend Jeanie to the VTAC Car Show at Warner Center Park in Woodland Hills. VTAC is short for the Valley Traffic Advisory Council, an agency of the Los Angeles Police Department. In addition to various police vehicles, such as a police helicopter, several search-and-rescue vehicles, and a K-9 unit, there were hundreds of mostly classical Detroit cars that were immaculately polished and cared for by their collector/owners.

Although the weather was cool and cloudy near our West LA apartment, Woodland Hills was sunny and warm—but fortunately not hot. We strolled around for a couple of hours talking to police officers and car owners.

Poster for the Car Show

One positive aspect of Los Angeles’s car culture is that there are a lot of car shows around the city, and even a number of automobile museums. And now during a time when so many cars look alike, it is amazing to consider that for many years the design of automobiles was like a fine art. I love my Subaru Forester, but it won’t win any beauty contests, as good a car as it is.

Classic Corvettes

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On Saturday, Martine and I went to the Zimmerman Automobile Driving Museum (ZADM) in El Segundo. Martine has always loved Corvettes, especially the classic models of the 1960s.

There were over sixty Corvettes on view, surrounded by Corvette aficionados and the cars’ affable collector/owners. Martine loved talking to the owners about how much she hates bucket seats, and how they should bring back bench seats. That’s not terribly likely to happen because, as one of the owners remarked, you need bucket seats if you are racing on a slalom course (which is not something Martine is likely to do).

The ZADM has become a meeting place for collectors with show cars of various models. I(n a couple of weeks, they will have another show on B-Body cars, which were manufactured by GM originally for Buick and Oldsmobile before spreading to their other makes and models.

Smokey & the Firefighters

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Smokey at the Los Angeles County Fire Museum

This morning, Martine and I trekked all the way to the southeastern City of Bellflower to visit the Los Angeles County Fire Museum. This is one of three firefighters’ museums in the L.A. area. (The others are the L.A. City Fire Museum on Cahuenga in Hollywood and the African-American Firefighters’ Museum on Central downtown.)

Martine brought along her 50th Anniversary Smokey Bear to show the museum staff. Smokey was a big hit to the retired firefighters who served as docents. Martine collects Smokey memorabilia, has a Smokey zipper pull on her jacket, and regularly receives a catalog from Woodland Enterprises in Moscow, Idaho of Smokey Bear goodies.

Many of the fire engines and other equipment on display were used in the television series Emergency! which aired on NBC from 1972 to 1979. That accounts for the Number 51 on many of the vehicles, as they belonged to fictional Squad 51 on the series.

The docents were all retired firefighters themselves who knew a great deal not only about the series, but how the firefighting equipment was used. Our guide was Javier Torres who patiently walked us through the exhibits.

Our Guide, Javier Torres

The Los Angeles County Fire Department covers fires outside of Los Angeles City, especially the sparsely populated areas to the north of the county where most of the wildfires happen.

I have always admired firefighters, as it is one of the few careers which create heroes. When a visitor to the museum asked me if I was a retired fireman, I quickly answered, “No, I’m not quite good enough for the job.”

The Last Mexican Governor of Alta California

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Pio Pico and His Wife Ignacia

Pio Pico lived in California under three flags: Spanish, Mexican, and the Stars and Stripes of the United States. One would think that he would not have fared well under the last of these. Actually, he had many friends among the American settlers who had moved to California earlier and adopted Mexican citizenship.

That did not prevent Pio Pico from being swindled. But then it seems that swindles were more the rule than the exception in early Southern Cal. Even his friends, the Workmans and Temples lurched from prosperity to disaster and back again. It seems everyone was in court suing one another. And justice did not always come out ahead.

As one who has lost his pituitary gland to a tumor, I feel for Pico, who also had a pituitary disorder: in his case, acromegaly. In the picture above, note the fleshy lips and the enlarged ears and nose. Acromegaly results when the pituitary gland produces too much human growth hormone during the adult years. Exactly the opposite of what I had.

When Pico died in 1894 at the age of 93, he was buried at Calvary Cemetery in the Elysian Hills. When several years later, the tomb of him and his wife was vandalized, Walter Temple, the grandson of William Workman, obtained permission from Pico’s family to re-inter the remains in a mausoleum he built on the grounds of the Workman-Temple Family Homestead Museum in the City of Industry. If you are interested in learning more on the subject, consult Museum Director Paul R. Spitzzeri’s blog on the ties between the Workmans, Temples, and Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of Alta California.

A Pioneer Family

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Fountain Incorporating Two Millstones from the Family Mill

For the first time since the Covid-19 outbreak, Martine and I paid a visit to one of the historic Los Angeles area homesteads, the Workman & Temple Family Homestead Museum in the City of Industry. The museum includes two houses in their original location:

  • The Workman House, originally built in 1842 by William Workman while California was still a part of Mexico
  • La Casa Nueva, built by the related Temple family between 1922 and 1927

Below is a picture of the Temple family:

Unfortunately, the mother in the above picture did not live to see the completion of La Casa Nueva. As is not unusual in the story of many of the pioneer families of Southern California, there were alternating periods of boom and bust, which included two bank failures, droughts, and other misfortunes. Not long after it was finished, La Casa Nueva was turned into a boarding school and later became a nursing home. It has been a museum only since May 1981.

Also part of the museum is a family mausoleum, in which Pio Pico and his wife Ygnacia Alvarado were buried. William Workman and his family had become Mexican citizens and were friends of the Pico family.

The museum is open for free guided tours on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays only. For more information, consult the museum’s website.

L.A.’s Police Museum

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Yesterday, Martine and I drove to the L.A. Police Department Museum in Highland Park. When we were in Vancouver some years back, we visited the local police museum and were enthralled with what it said about the differences in Canadian vs. U.S. culture (or lack of same).

The 2½ floors of exhibits covered a wide range of subjects, but the best exhibits were all on the second floor:

  • The 1997 robbery of a Bank of America branch and the ensuing gunfight with the two well-armed burglars
  • The Patty Hearst kidnapping and the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) terrorists (1973-1976)
  • The kidnapping of two LAPD police officers and the killing of one of them in a Kern County onion field (1963)

In the garage of the museum were two cars with multiple bullet holes that were part of the 1997 shootout. Also there was a police helicopter which Martine sat in:

The museum was only a few blocks east of one of our favorite stores: The Galco Soda Pop Stop, which deserves a post of its own. Stay tuned.