My younger brother, who went to John Muir Jr High, once dated a Reagan daughter. He tells of waiting for her in the entrance hall of their Beverly Blvd home, while Reagan was in the library with friends. He says the language coming out of that room -- n-words and jew-baiting -- was some of the vilest stuff he's ever heard.
I still believe the modern hamburger (juicy 1/4 pounder with cheese, lettuce and tomato and thousand island dressing on a bun) was invented at that time. The rest of the country was eating crappy dry little tasteless things from White Castle. Glorious!
BobW
--- cgrimes at rawbw.com wrote:
>
> I grew up in LA, all over LA from South Central out
> to Northridge,
> wondering into near downtown, and out to near West
> LA toward Venice, back
> when Venice was still a faded and dreary absurdity
> with fake canals,
> and bogus Arabesque or 1920s Spanish facades. I went
> to thirteen
> elementary schools in the LA School district and
> only remember one of
> them. Union Avenue, back when it was also a faded
> run down inner city
> school, with the best teachers I ever had. I suspect
> it was a
> target school of some sort where the district sent
> teachers who wanted
> to experiment in saving kids. It certainly worked
> for me. I loved
> it. From the old hard core, Anacartha M. Standard
> and bright eyed,
> wiley Miss Jackson, to the soft hearted Mister
> Mendenhall. Yes they
> were exactly who and what their names implied.
>
> LA is like that. My parents specialized in finding
> cool places in
> the urban sprawl, and just for a moment, while we
> lived in a strange
> fourplex old house like affair on top of a hill
> overlying Lucas and
> Beverely, I lived almost everyday in joy. I marched
> up crowded, scary
> Beverely passed the old Belmont High School, passed
> the busy dinners
> and quick-stop coffee places up toward Union, and
> turned right, to
> enter a huge playground asphalt yard and stall
> waiting for the
> teacher-drill sargents to line us up and march us
> into the back door
> of the main building. This was done with whistles
> and those strange
> colored cardboard conical things that coaches used
> to use. The
> playground had more different kinds of kids than I
> could keep track
> of. Some where from places I never heard of, like
> Lithuania.
>
> It was there that I first learned the lesson of
> anonymity. The
> standard class room was 36. I hid for days before
> Miss Jackson
> spotted me, lurking in the back. Her sharp dark eyes
> and linear jaw,
> made her look Egyptian. She would look at her chart,
> and then call me
> by name. Oh, god. Kids went to the black board
> usually in small groups
> of ten.
>
> To my horror, Mister Mendenhall liked my watercolor
> painting of
> Christopher Columbus's ship the Santa Maria---which
> I also built as
> model from a kit I got hiking up Lucas to 3rd where
> there used to be a
> small hobby store. I was star for a day (a horrible
> experience), and
> the principle hung the painting in his office. I
> spent hours on it.
>
> That's LA. Nothing, then wonderful, then back to
> nothing.
>
> I have a love hate thing about LA. I love all the
> part I loved, and
> hate all the part I hated. I hated the Valley where
> we ended up in the
> very heyday of the place, circa 1958. Mile after
> mile after mile. Long
> open blouvards stretching into the night horizon. It
> always took hours
> to get anywhere. All my favorite dates involved long
> drives. Linda
> whose father was a reed play for Nelson Riddle lived
> nearby in
> Northridge, but we would drive to some place in
> Hollywood or West LA
> where a movie house was showing a Euro flick of the
> era (circa late
> 50s to early 60s). We always dressed up to look
> older. It did get us
> passed a waiter's scrutiny on Ventura
> Blvd's fancy steak resturant, and a glass of wine. I
> once blew fifty
> bucks (earned as a pizza cook on Van Owen) in the
> eleventh grade on a
> single date. Linda put her hair in a Euro bun, wore
> silver earings,
> and pearls, black low cut dress. I tried to pretend
> she was Claudia
> Cardinelli. I was in my dark suit, tie, white shirt,
> pointy Euro
> shoes, we were driving my mother's aquamarine
> Cadillac
> convertible. Man that was some date. We ate at a
> French resturant
> somewhere on Melrose and then drove up to Hollywood
> Blvd at the
> Egyptian Theatre to see `On the Beach'. Very fucking
> cool, especially
> the winding drive back over Laurel Canynon and then
> along
> Mulholland. Other cool dates, me and Stephanie who
> lived in Canoga
> Park, went to Pickwick Books on Hollywood Blvd,
> bought a couple of
> things (Christmas presents), then drove down to
> Carolina Pines for
> coffee and desert. We were beatniks by then, and
> dressed in all
> black. Or there was Stevie and her leftwing radical
> father who lived
> in Laurel Canyon, a photographer and cameraman for
> some studio. LA is
> arty and full of money. You just have to look
> around.
>
> LA is cinascope. The scale is vast, especially at
> night. The
> secrete is to learn the grid.
>
> The geographical perspective on LA is the grid
> itself. These are the
> old major blouvards that traverse the city and
> have since before there were freeways. I remember
> them from childhood
> to young adult as the signature of the place. The
> names just roll
> around in my mind in no particular order: Crenshaw,
> Western, Hoover,
> Figerora, Slauson, Vermount, Sunset, Hollywood,
> Santa Monica, La
> Cienega, Olympic, Melrose, Wilshire, Alvarado....
>
> Get a car, a car you love, because you are going to
> spend a lot time
> in it. What I wanted was something sporty, but I
> couldn't afford it so
> I got weirdos European cars and repaired them from
> the truly awesome
> junkyards out along Tujunga or Lankershim.
>
> You need somebody who knows the place like the back
> of their hand to
> pick a cool area that hasn't been discovered yet.
>
> Maybe Dennis Claxton or Marta Russell. Somebody who
> has kicked around
> LA a lot. Whole nieghborhoods are wiped off the map
> on a routine
> basis. The LA from my era doesn't exist anymore,
> except in my mind.
>
> And yet, it always felt as if I was living in the
> future. How is that
> possible? It was as if, the future place that all
> cities would descend
> to was Los Angeles.
>
> Fredrick Jameson did a lot of writing about
> Postmodernity, but what he
> was really writing about was Los Angeles. It was
> postmodern, before
> there was a postmodern to write about.
>
> The trick is to find one of those arty
> neighborhoods, a few weird
> people living in a cul du sac with too many trees.
> You just never know
> where that is. Could be anywhere maybe surrounded by
> barrio noise, or
> just off some main drag everybody hates. Deleuze and
> Guttari
> trajectories on the Oedipal plane---strickly
> horizonal chaos.
>
> Manaugh's Culver City sucks. There is nothing there.
> You gotta go deep
> into the beast and look around the old lost parts of
> the city. They
> must be everywhere. I imagine lost streets where old
> ladies still
> serve tea on silver platers as if they were the
> grandmothers to
> Nathaniel West, quoting the bible and have no idea
> there is a new
> freeway, five blocks away. Blocks in LA are about a
> 1/4 mile
>
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