No-Go: My mother took the photograph from the shore where, I think, she sat on a blanket with the picnic basket, because there are other pictures showing her there. 1953, so, of course, the photographs are black and white. I’m two or three years old, standing in an inner tube, at the water’s edge in a white jumper about the same shade as my towhead, an English bulldog, Pretty Boy, white with a dark saddle stands beside me. In the water in front of me is a runabout boat with an outboard motor. My father stands beside it at the back, about up to his knees, and he’s pouring fuel from a five gallon can into a fuel tank that’s affixed to the engine, an Evinrude engine with two huge opposed cylinders, and no cowling or engine covers. In the far background, to the right, my oldest brother, about eight, I think, stands in shallow water and has just flung a rock which you can see skipping on the water. Now, this would be Lake Hamilton in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a manmade lake that was formed by damming the Ouachita River in 1932. So the lake was fairly new, and Lake Ouachita, up river, was just beginning to fill. Trees fill the far shore, not butt to butt houses and boat docks like there are now; no other boats are on the water, no other people on the shore.
Joy-Toy: This is a color movie, 8 mm, 1956 or so; occasionally, you can see me running by on the sand, sand because we are now at Marine Stadium in Long Beach, California; California because Dad moved us out there where he attended City College, earned his A&E, went to work for Douglas Aircraft and helped build the DC-8. Our house was on Lomina Avenue, next door to Compton. Dad and two buddies back a boat into the water, another runabout with an Evinrude or Johnson outboard. They take turns driving the boat, putting it into tight turns, making it jump across its own wake waves. Sometimes when it turns, sunlight flashes off the paint (white with a red stripe). Over the decades, watching the movies together, we always await and comment on the flash. Someone, not my father, skies behind the boat. He has trouble getting up, as it’s not a ski boat, but eventually does. Oil derricks stand like bare, inverted trees on the opposite shore. This is where Dad fell in love with boat racing, going out to Marine Stadium to watch the Crackerbox races.
Bullet: When Dad joined the Long Beach Sportsman’s Club with his engineer buddies from Douglas and started duck hunting in Mexico, bird hunting in the lagoons, bear and deer hunting in the mountains, and sport fishing, the speed boat was replace with a cabin cruiser. There’s a color photograph of the boat sitting on our driveway on Pattiz, and I, along with a couple cousins and brothers Charlie and Jerry, stand, in order of height, alongside the boat. Jerry is smiling while holding a 25 pound yellow fin tuna by the tail. We were on Pattiz when the airplane crashed into Signal Hill and caught it on fire with consequent explosions that rained oil on Long Beach, on our house and the laundry that hung on the line. The oil company paid to have laundry replaced and houses repainted. Mom and Dad considered it a stroke of luck.
We lived next door to the Penny’s, Dick Penny being an engineer at Douglas who designed the cabin door on the DC-8. There were three Penny kids of my age and younger who were being raised in the Dr. Spock, hands-off the children method. For what those kids got away with, we would have been murdered. They took Christmas decorations off their tree, carried them out to the garage, lined up the bulbs which they broke with a hammer, just to watch glass shatter. They filled their mouths with Bosco chocolate syrup, and, turning in a circle, sprayed it. The oldest boy, my age of seven or eight, walked around sucking on a pacifier.
Except for the pacifier, I not only witnessed these actions, but took part. Hearing this story recently, my daughter-in-law, a school teacher, asked, “How do you think those kids turned out?” Without much thought, I replied, “Well, having gotten it out of their system, I imagine they turned out well-adjusted and quite successful, while I, at 64, am still getting it out of my system.” The room erupted in laughter, while I tried to decide whether or not I had told a joke. Anyway, over at our house, my brothers and I huddled around the TV to watch King Kong for the sixth or seventh time. Local television in those days ran and repeated movies for weeks, usually Shirley Temple or Westerns, but this was different; this was King Kong! Still, after that many viewings, Dad announced he had had it with King Kong, and so, consequently, had we. There would be no more watching of King Kong. Not to be denied, we snuck, we thought, over to the Penny’s and watched it yet again. When Dad learned of the transgression, we were whipped sufficiently. As he sometimes told our mother, “Someone has to be the son-of-a-bitch around here!”
Also on Pattiz, I learned that if, with the water on, I pushed the garden hose nozzle into the lawn, it tunneled into the ground, deeper and deeper, but that with the water shut off, and later in the day, the hose was impossible to pull out. Neither could Dad pull it out when he came home from work. I didn’t receive a whipping for that one, probably because Dad worked in Experiment and Testing at Douglas and considered it a valid exercise in hydraulics. On the other side of our house lived a Mexican family, and the wife, Sarah, taught Mom how to make flour tortillas, and here’s the recipe, circa 1957:
Sarah’s Flour Tortillas
4 cups flour
2 teaspoons salt
½ cup shortening
Add one cup lukewarm water to above and blend well. Knead about 50 strokes. Divide dough into twelve balls. Cover with cloth and let stand 15 minutes. Roll each ball into 8 inch round tortilla [She wrote eight inches, but I remember them a bit larger and paper thin, and once rolled out, she placed each tortilla on a plate, each separated with a sheet of waxed paper]. Cook on a moderately hot ungreased skillet until golden brown in spots, turning once and being careful not to break air bubbles. [I’ll add, too, that the tortillas were served with, in bowls placed on the table, salsa, shredded iceberg lettuce, diced tomatoes, shredded cheddar cheese, refried beans and ground hamburger with onions. As soon as the tortilla came off the skillet, she added hamburger meat and folded the tortilla. Once several were done, we started grabbing, while Mom, unbelievably happy at the stove, made more until her husband, and each of her three boys, said, “Oh, no, I can’t eat anymore.” Anyway, you opened up the tortilla and added cheese (maybe a slather of refried beans), lettuce, tomatoes, salsa, rolled it up, added refried beans to your plate, and chowed down. In 1957, we called them tacos; today, they might be called burritos. And at that time, we had nothing else on the side, no sour cream, no guacamole and chips, just the tacos and refried beans, and that was plenty.]
In the backyard, we had a large sandbox, but Pretty Boy and Betsy the cat were the only family members who used it—the sand was alive with fleas. To walk across the sand was to invite attack, and to stand in it for mere seconds, ones legs would be covered, as was Pretty Boy and the cat, for that matter. The neighborhoods were full of kids; every house had them. A tough kid who lived down the street was larger than and tormented Charlie. On bicycle, Charlie had to plan his escape and return to the neighborhood. One day, Jerry borrowed Charlie’s bicycle and took off on an errand. The bully, thinking him Charlie, emerged from bushes and knocked Jerry off the bicycle. Having learned how to box in Arkansas, Jerry got up and demolished the bully, who ceased to be a problem.
(Photos of No-Go and Bullet)
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