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A Sense of Loss

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Huell Howser (1945-2013)

Huell Howser (1945-2013)

Every evening after dinner, I usually get on the computer and enter my income and expenditures on QuickBooks. During that time, about twelve feet from me, Martine watches one of Huell Howser’s TV shows on KCET, usually California’s Gold, California’s Green, or Visiting. What all three shows have in common is the amiable host paying homage to some locale or event or person connected with California.

People have made fun of Huell’s Tennessee drawl and his seeming naiveté in doing his interviews. There’s even a drinking game in which the participants have to take a swig every time Huell says “Wwwwwooooowwww!” or or “Gooooolllllllyyyyyy!” or “That’s amazing” or “historic” or any number of other of his habitual expressions.

Many were the times I would walk away from my computer and sit next to Martine because I found myself getting interested in one of his interviews. Over the years, Huell and I have visited many of the same places—because Huell got me hooked.

But now we no longer have Huell Howser, because he died yesterday in Palm Springs at the age of sixty-seven. He had retired in September from his show, sparking rumors that he was being forced out. Despite his approachability, however, the Tennessean was a private person who was fighting a long illness which was getting the upper hand.

Both Martine and I feel a sense of loss. In a city where there are not many really likeable public figures, everybody loved Huell. And he loved California and delighted in introducing interesting sidelights of his adopted state to anyone who would listen. And listen we did. For KCET, insofar as I’m concerned, he was the whole station’s raison d’être. When some people leave us, they leave behind a gaping hole. Who can replace someone so amiable, so knowledgeable, so adventurous, and withal such a character as Huell?

I know that his shows will continue to be watched in reruns. He will continue to influence our road trips through the State of California, especially in our Southern California neck of the woods. A neck of the woods that somehow has gotten more lonely without Huell to appreciate them.

To get a flavor of his shows, watch this video on YouTube (about a dog that eats avocados). And read this tribute that appeared in today’s Los Angeles Times.

It’s a Wexler

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Back Yard of Wexler House at 499 Farrell Street

Back Yard of Wexler House at 499 Farrell Street

Until I spent a few days with my brother in Palm Springs over the Christmas Holiday, I had no idea of the work of architect Donald Wexler. Apparently, he has had an outsized influence on the architecture of Palm Springs and the more posh Coachella Valley cities adjoining it. My brother rented a Wexler house at 499 Farrell Street at the corner of Alejo in Palm Springs’s “Movie Colony” neighborhood.

I tend to take a dim view of much modern domestic architecture, but I must admit that Wexler’s work looked good in its lower desert setting, with Mount San Jacinto looming in the background. Not that his houses are particularly comfortable: The house that my brother Dan rented had no windows per se, only massive sliding glass doors that tended to superheat in the afternoon sun, plus a few glass ceiling panels.

If I had to rate the Wexlers I saw, I would give them an A for looks, but only a C for comfort. The lower desert can be fiercely hot, especially in the summer months with temperatures soaring to 115-120 degrees in the afternoons. Many of these houses were built in the 1950s and 1960s, when energy costs were low. During the summer, I would expect that one’s electric bill would likewise soar. Perhaps that’s where the pool and patio (see above) come into play. December can be pretty cold in Palm Springs, so Martine and I didn’t bother to bring our swimsuits.

Apparently, Donald Wexler is still alive, though, in his eighties, I am sure his architectural career is a thing of the past. Still, it is interesting to view his work, which you can do by clicking here, here, and here.

 

Foodies

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Thirty-Something Foodies Grazing

Thirty-Something Foodies Grazing

Foodies are to dining what indie films are to movies. They represent a dilettantism gone ape. It’s very like those guys who hog the self-serving soda dispenser mixing Dr. Pepper with Mountain Dew and Raspberry Ice Tea in hopes of coming up with the magical beverage that tastes just right—as if they were some kind of gonzo new-age alchemists.

I work in Westwood, which adjoins the southern boundary of the UCLA campus. In the last year, a number of decent restaurants have shuttered their doors forever and been replaced by restaurants appealing to Foodies.

What are Foodies? They are essentially amateurs who concentrate on consuming, preparing, analyzing, and (endlessly) chatting about food. You can find them on the boards of Chowhound.Com making fine distinctions about tacos, hot dogs, Asian noodles, pastrami, and any number of other esoteric food-based subjects. In Los Angeles, many are aficionados of various catering trucks that tweet their next parked locations to their customers. Now, there is even one restaurant in Westwood (TLT Food) that started out as a catering truck operation.

Characterizing Foodie-oriented restaurants is a certain cluelessness regarding what most people who are not 30-Somethings like. For instance, as a diabetic, I scrupulously avoid sugared drinks. One nearby Foodie restaurant called Fundamental is typical of the genre, with unusual concoctions that you have to be of a certain age to like. If, like me, you are a diabetic, fuggeddaboutit!

I used to rely on Foodie chatter to find new restaurants: Now I can only assume that the websites will send me to some 30-Something dive where the hamburgers are loaded with mango chutney, the hot dogs topped with aioli, and the French fries laden with celeriac root and vindaloo paste. Almost always, sugar is added to make the incongruous mix more palatable to the young.

It’s not that I’m against any kind of food experimentation: It’s just that experimentation for its own sake rarely produces a tasty meal. It gets more complicated when I go out with Martine, who refuses to eat at restaurants that have incongruous foods on their menu, even when they are among other plainer and more traditional foods. For this reason, she refuses to eat at California Pizza Kitchen, even though she would probably like their thin-crust Sicilian pizza.

 

Bighorn Sheep

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Bighorn Sheep at Palm Desert’s Living Desert

Bighorn Sheep at Palm Desert’s Living Desert

Christmas weekend was our third or fourth visit to the Living Desert in Palm Desert, California, but it was the first time I actually saw any bighorn sheep close enough to photograph. Bighorn sheep are famously shy with regards to human contact—for good reason. Every once in a while, one could see them at a great distance wending their way across some remote crags.

Once, at Capital Reef National Park in Utah, we saw a group of them close up. But this is the first time we saw any of them in California, though I’ve looked at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, Joshua Tree National Park, Death Valley, and other places over the last thirty years.

Disney and the Gipper

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Mock-Up Costume Upon Which the Dress of Snow White Was Modeled

Mock-Up Costume Upon Which the Dress of Snow White Was Modeled

When we were at the Grier Musser Museum yesterday, its curator, Susan Tejada, told us about a large Walt Disney exhibit at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in the Simi Valley. It didn’t take much convincing for Martine, who likes the library at Christmastime because of their Christmas Trees of Other Nations exhibit.

Well, things didn’t turn out as we expected. To begin with, the parking lot was filled to overflowing, so we had to park a mile down the hill. Fortunately, the crowds had been anticipated; and there was a shuttle bus service that plied up and down the hill all day. Even then, we had to wait in a line for almost half an hour just to get inside. And when we did, the exhibits were a mob scene.

You see, Southern California is full of tourists who have come to see the Rose Bowl and its Tournament of Roses Parade. While they are here, they take bus tours to such locales as Hollywood (why?), the Reagan Library, and the Santa Monica Pier. We ran into several hundred Wisconsin Badgers fans sporting name tags hung around their necks.

What Martine and I did was to force our way through the crowds to the Disney exhibit, which was put on by D23, the Official Disney Fan Club, and then we split up. Martine went to see as much of the standard exhibits as she could, while I repaired to the Ronald Reagan Country Café and read W. Baring Pendleton’s excellent biography of English journalist and reformer, William Cobbett.

It was worth seeing the Disney exhibit—despite the crowds—but I think I had the better idea of sitting in the café with some green tea and reading a good book. I was already familiar with most of the regular exhibits. Oh, and the Christmas Trees of Other Nations? The Reagan Library stopped doing that three years ago. Tant pis!

 

A Glance Back at Christmas

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Christmas at the Grier Musser Museum

Christmas at the Grier Musser Museum

Today, Martine and I finished up our Christmas by seeing the holiday-oriented antiques and special collections on view at the Grier Musser Museum near downtown Los Angeles. Susan and Ray Tejada have the most incredible collection of memorabilia related to the different holiday seasons. We have seen their displays for Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day—and I understand they have other displays for Chinese New Year, Presidents Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and Independence Day—to name just a few. Below, for instance, is Susan Tejada holding a recently purchased George Washington commemorative plate:

Susan Tejada of the Gier Musser Museum

Susan Tejada of the Gier Musser Museum

At a time when so many of our Christmas observances have been nipped in the bud by recession-related budget cuts, it’s nice to know that one can get a real feeling for the Yuletide season by seeing a collection of music boxes, dolls and statues, old Christmas cards and wrapping paper—all relating to the season.

Although Huell Howser has done two shows that I know of featuring the museum, I feel that more people should know about it. Most spectacular are the occasional Sunday openings preceding the major holidays, with such extras as punch and cookies and an occasional film or slide show in the basement theater. If you are interested in visiting, you have to make a reservation by calling toward the end of the week at (213) 413-1814. The museum is open on Saturday afternoons, by appointment, and on selected Sundays.

The building in which the museum is located used to be a maternity hospital connected with Susan’s family. Her father, Martin L. Krieger, was not only a physician, but the author of several stories about the sea which he co-authored with Fleming MacLeish.

 

Phoenix dactylifera

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Deglet Noor Dates

Deglet Noor Dates

During the relatively fruitless months that stretch between October and February (when the first fresh strawberries become available) is a good time to appreciate the fruit of the date palm, or Phoenix dactylifera.

Approximately 95% of the dates sold in the United States are grown in California’s Coachella Valley near Indio. While we were in the Palm Springs area, Martine and I spent the afternoon preceding Christmas Eve visiting two date gardens, the Oasis Date Gardens in Thermal and the Shields Date Gardens in Indio.

There are a number of different varieties of dates, ranging from the large and hypersweet Medjools to the Deglet Noors (my favorites), Zahidis, Barhis, and Khadrawies, to name just a few. When one buys relatively recently harvested dates in the Coachella Valley, they tend to be more moist. Supermarket dates just don’t cut it. Sometimes I will buy dates from our local farmer’s market in Santa Monica, because the dealer there drives in all the way from Mecca near the Salton Sea.

Below is a photo I took at the Shields Date Gardens:

Date Palms at Indio’s Shields Date Gardens

Date Palms at Indio’s Shields Date Gardens

Note the ladders dangling from the top of some of the trees. During the harvest, they are joined to other ladders so that the dates could be hand-picked. There is, insofar as I know, no mechanization possible that would maintain the quality of the crop. The trees are relatively bare now: As October approaches, the bunches of dates are covered with a cone-shaped paper wrap to prevent rain and predators from damaging the crop.

Most Americans tend to be relatively unfamiliar with dates, which comes as something of a surprise to me because they are sweet, loaded with vitamins and minerals, and relatively inexpensive. But then, I have been buying them from the Coachella Valley for over forty years.

 

B-17 Walkthrough

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Martine with Boeing B-17 in Background

Martine with Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress in Background

Aviation museums run the gamut from “gearhead” airplane body shops to extensive collections of aircraft and exhibits. In this latter category is the Palm Springs Air Museum, adjacent to the Palm Springs Airport on Gene Autry Trail. We allotted four hours to seeing this museum, and—to Martine’s point of view anyway—it was about four hours too short.

Apparently, the Coachella Valley is home to many aviation veterans of the Second World War. The museum was crowded with volunteers who knew the planes intimately and were willing to answer questions.

Near the little café in one of the hangars was a huge Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress that was being restored by aficionados. For a five dollar donation, we could walk through the plane from the cockpit to the rear door. It was a tempting challenge, though I knew it would be a tight squeeze for my portly frame. So we ponied up the ten bucks and did it.

B-17 Cockpit

B-17 Cockpit

For starters, the highly analog cockpit controls (see above) were a revelation to a digital denizen such as myself. We barely managed to make it up the ladder to squeeze in the space behind the cockpit. The B-17’s crew of ten must have been immune to claustrophobia, especially the tail gunner and the gunner in the 360-degree rotating gun position under the aircraft. The former was totally cut off from the rest of the aircraft by the rear bomb bay.

The B-17 was featured in a number of war films including Memphis Belle (both versions: 1944 and 1990), Flying Fortress (1942), Air Force (1943), 12 O’Clock High (1949), and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970).

If you ever find yourself in Palm Springs, and if you are as much of a history nut as I am, you could do worse than spend a whole day at the Palm Springs Air Museum. (I had to promise Martine that we would return so that she could finish viewing all the exhibits.)

 

 

A Family Christmas

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Lori, Hilary, Danny, Jennifer, and Dan

Lori, Hilary, Danny, Jennifer, and Dan

I just returned from Palm Springs about an hour or two ago after spending one of the best Christmases in my adult life. My brother and sister-in-law rented a house in PS’s “Movie Colony” neighborhood.

Present were Dan and Lori, my brother and sister-in-law; Hilary, just returned from Guatemala by way of her home in Seattle; Danny, from L.A.’s South Bay; Jennifer, from San Diego; and Martine and me from West Los Angeles.

As you know, I tend to be something of a Grinch; but the events of the last five days have melted the residual ice that encased my heart. It was great fun talking with my nephew and nieces, and spending the days touring the Coachella Valley with Martine while the kids were involved in hiking, swimming in hot pools, and such like.

Martine and I got to visit the Living Desert Zoo and Botanical Gardens in Palm Desert, which we’ve seen two or three times before; the Palm Springs Air Museum, a labor of love by WW2 veterans; the Oasis Date Gardens in Thermal, California; and the Shields Date Gardens in Indio, California. (Yes, I guess I really do enjoy eating dates.)

In the days to come, I will post blogs about the first two places above, which I think are world-class tourist destinations. And I will try to write something about the Coachella Valley’s date palms.

In the meantime, I hope all of you had a Merry Christmas!

 

Tuscany on the Pacific

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Erin Hill’s Painting of Montalcino in Tuscany

Erin Hill’s Painting of Montalcino in Tuscany

When I first moved to Los Angeles during the last Ice Age, everything that was classy had a French name: The restaurants, the big real estate developments, and so on. Sometime over the last twenty years, suddenly Tuscany became the measure of all things ritzy. Although it is still filled with empty storefronts with “For Lease” signs, I can see the developers trying to turn it into a little Tuscany.

I can’t think of Italian food in Southern California as being so rarefied if for no other reason than it tends to be pretty mediocre. Take meatballs, for instance: If one is a gourmet chef, one doesn’t make meatballs that are nothing but differently-shaped hamburger patties. It is necessary to mince onion, garlic, parsley, and perhaps a few herbs into the ground meat mixture first. Even my Hungarian Mom knew that when she made hamburgers. But in L.A. that never happens.

I remember a huge meatball at a Buca di Beppo in the San Fernando Valley that was nothing but a large hamburger hockey puck.

So I don’t take Los Angeles’s Tuscan dreams with anything but a grain of salt, and perhaps some minced onion, garlic, parsley, and perhaps a few herbs.

The painting above is from the Erin Hill studio website. It’s quite pretty and a steal at $220.00. Maybe my hijacking the JPG file will make you want to buy the painting.