Oh! the Places I've Been

By Xlibris US

Oh! the Places I've Been is a memoir Bernice Livingston Youtz has written primarily for her family and a few friends. She relates childhood in the Depression of the 1930s (she always knew that it was spelled with a capital D), adolescence during World War II, young adulthood, marriage, children in the post-war 1950s. She recalls an early love of reading which led, not surprisingly, to an aspiration for travel, although there was no opportunity for that until she was an adult, no "study abroad" programs or summers hosteling in Europe. She made up for that in work and travel in post-war Europe, and--after her marriage--she and her husband lived in Beirut, Lebanon, for three years. She writes of the great pleasure she took in raising her three children and in the travel she has been privileged to enjoy in recent years. She is grateful for the privilege of having lived in Lebanon and on two occasions in France, has traveled in some sixty countries. She still reads, thinks often of the many people she has known throughout the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493177929

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Copyright © 2014 by Bernice Livingston Youtz.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 02/28/2014

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.     Memories

2.     Childhood

3.     Adolescence

4.     High School

5.     College

6.     Berkeley

7.     France

8.     Europe 1950

9.     Home Again, Marriage, Beirut

10.   Beirut and Cairo

11.   We Settle In To Life In Lebanon

12.   We Become Parents!

13.   Summer 1955: The Grand Tour

14.   Third Year In Lebanon

15.   Re-Entry

16.   Life On Upper Main Street

17.   Japan And On Beyond…

18.   New York Interlude

19.   Olympia

20.   Europe Again!

21.   Sabbatical

22.   Europe 1977

23.   Summer, 1977

24.   Olympia Once Again

25.   China: 1983

26.   The Eighties

27.   Transition

28.   The Nineties

29.   Summing Up

30.   Reflections

Dedicated to my children

Margot and Philip, Gregory and Becky, David and Mary

To my grandchildren: Elizabeth, Katherine, Philip, Clara,

Sophie, Nora, Alice, Anna

And to the memory of my husband, Byron L. Youtz

OUNTRIES I HAVE VISITED

The United States

Mexico

Canada

France

Belgium

The Netherlands

Monaco

Switzerland

Italy

Germany

Austria

U.K. (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland)

Ireland

Lebanon

Syria

Egypt

Greece

Turkey

Jordan

Yugoslavia

Hungary

Spain

Morocco

Andorra

Denmark

Sweden

Norway

Portugal

South Africa

Namibia

Botswana

Zimbabwe

Luxembourg

Thailand

Cambodia

Japan

China

Vietnam

Taiwan

Russia

Lithuania

Latvia

Estonia

Finland

Trinidad-Tobago

Brazil

Urugauy

Argentina

Chile

Peru

Ecuador

Guatemala

Costa Rica

Panama

Colombia

Israel

Iran

Cuba

I

MEMORIES

M y earliest memory is of hearing my mother tell someone that her husband had lost his job. I would later learn that that memory was dated 1929. The stock market had just crashed, and Union Oil, my father’s employer, cancelled plans on the new refinery which he, an engineer, was helping design. No doubt that was a prudent management decision, but it meant that men like my father were laid off, ominous words I would hear all too often in my childhood. There was no severance pay, no unemployment insurance, no job retraining, no welfare. Government was a lot smalle r then.

I was an only child, born August 14, 1926, in Santa Ana, California, in the home of my maternal grandparents at 610 Orange Avenue. As I grew up, I was the only one I knew who had been born at home. I was somewhat embarrassed; I did not talk about it; it sounded like not having indoor plumbing. One time I asked my mother why I had not been born in a hospital, and she had laughed, not happily, It was cheaper. There had been a doctor, kindly Dr. Wherly with his Swiss accent, who had cared for my mother and uncle during their childhood illnesses, would later see me through mine, would set my grandmother’s broken leg, ease my grandfather through terminal cancer. Also, my grandmother was a mid-wife, by experience if not license. A Kansas doctor had trained her to assist him at homestead farm births when no nurse was available. After they moved to California, my mother said, desperate parents sometimes sought my grandmother’s aid. She always urged them to seek a doctor, but if he could not be found in time, or if they could not afford his fee, Grandma knew what to do.

My mother recalled one Sunday morning when the family had just left the house to walk to church when a little boy ran up crying, Miz McCord! Miz McCord! The baby’s coming, and Pa can’t find the doctor! My grandmother told him, The doctor’s already at church. You run uptown as fast as you can and tell the usher to find him. Then she unpinned her hat and handed it to my mother, turned down the street to the neighbor’s house. She had the baby safely delivered, the mother comfortable, both bathed, before the doctor pulled up in his horse drawn buggy.

It was something of a mystery to me why I was born in Santa Ana, for my father was a San Franciscan, and he and my mother had lived there after their marriage and until two weeks before my birth when my mother had traveled alone by train to Santa Ana. My father, in fact, was still in San Francisco, selling their house and finishing his work as an engineer for P.G. & E.—Pacific Gas and Electric, when I was born. It was never clear to me why he had left that position, no doubt a secure one, to move south where he had to start job-hunting in unfamiliar territory. I would have known nothing of that, of course, and in later years it was never explained. He first found work, I was later told, at the Los Angeles shipyards, and we lived my first year in San Pedro. That was a job my father would happily have held for a life-time, designing marine engine rooms. He loved ships. He liked San Pedro, had lived there for four years as a boy when his father had been construction superintendent on the massive harbor breakwater. But the work was not permanent. By 1927 the demand for new ships—these were ocean liners—was declining, and my father, recently hired, was laid off.

My earliest memory of my mother is of her telling me that she was running away. Most children, I believe, run away, or threaten to, at some point in their childhood. I never did. I had a fear of being away from home, of being lost. I did not like fairy tales: Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, and the others, because they were about lost or abandoned children. Even Alice in Wonderland, at a much later age, frightened me, and I asked my mother not to continue reading it to me.

I do not remember why my mother was running away, but it seemed to be my fault. I had been bad, and she was punishing me. I cling to her skirt and begged her not to go as she moved about her bedroom packing a small suitcase. She folded a nightgown into it and took her brush and comb and hand mirror from her dresser top. I was crying frantically by now and promising to be good, and finally, she relented and unpacked. I remember no more of the matter. I loved my mother. I had what I remember as a happy childhood, and the memory did not bother me for many years until I recalled it after I was a mother myself, and it horrified me.

Before I could remember it, my father had lost the job at the shipyards, and we moved to Los Angeles where he found employment with the Union Oil Company, working on the design for that new refinery. My childhood memories are dominated by my father’s almost continual search for employment. He would leave the house early each morning, and I recall him returning in the evening, sitting on the bed, taking off one shoe, then the other, as my mother asked, Did you find work today? and he would reply, No, but I will try again tomorrow, his voice small and sad. The next day he would go out again, and sometimes he did report success: a temporary job. Three weeks was an event to be cheered. My parents would pay bills, buy groceries, wait for the end of that job. Early on, I learned to appreciate my father’s education. I had not yet started to school myself, but I saw that there were many things he knew how to do. Sometimes there would be a temporary engineering position, something to do with blueprints, and he would leave the house with slide rule and briefcase. For years we had a drawing table set up in our small living room for the occasional free-lance job. There were short term jobs of surveying, meter reading, or fighting brush fires. At the bleakest of times he took a pick and shovel job digging ditches for the transmission lines bringing power from Hoover Dam to Los Angeles. The work was based at Cajon Pass, miles east of L.A., and he had to live in a construction camp, coming home only on week-ends.

We had a car by then, bought during a brief burst of prosperity when my father had a position which lasted one entire year, teaching math at Inglewood High School. I never knew how he obtained that position. He had no teaching credential, and there were certified teachers looking for work. In later years I did not think to ask. Children then were not encouraged to ask questions, especially about sensitive adult matters like jobs and income.

We moved to Inglewood and rented a complete house, larger than the duplex in Los Angeles, and—for the first time—I had my own room. I started kindergarten, learned to roller skate, survived whooping cough, and my parents bought a car. My father, a San Franciscan, had never felt the need for a car. As a student at the University of California in Berkeley, he had commuted by street car and ferry. In Los Angeles, when we visited my grandparents, we had walked a half block to Temple Street, boarded a yellow street car which took us downtown to the Pacific Electric depot. There we boarded one of the Red Cars, several hooked together, for the trip to Santa Ana, where we would get off and walk a few blocks to my grandparents’ house. Occasionally we made other excursions via P.E. to Long Beach or San Pedro, even to a place called Mt. Baldy. I have fleeting memories of such a train trip to San Pedro, then boarding a great white ship called the Avalon for a cruise to Catalina Island. I was frightened by the blast of the ship’s horn as we pulled away from the dock, and my father took me up in his arms to comfort me. Later, he took me on a tour of the engine room, the first of many such visits. I think that that must have been the summer I was three, for after that, my parents could not afford vacations.

But at Inglewood, at the age of 42, my father bought his first car. It was a black, 1931 Model A Ford, and a Mr. McDaniels from the agency taught him to drive. There must have been a few private lessons, and I remember my father at the breakfast table, intently studying the manual. Then my mother and I were allowed to sit in the back seat as my father, Mr. McDaniels at his side, practiced driving around town, out into the country toward Redondo Beach and Palos Verdes, or through Baldwin Hills where housing was being constructed for the 1932 Olympics. My parents talked to me about the Olympic Games, about their origin in ancient Greece and how athletes would come from all over the world. The Sunday Los Angeles Times printed color reproductions of the flags, and I clipped these and pasted them into a scrapbook.

My mother never learned to drive. My father tried to teach her one time as I sat silent in the back seat. She sat at the wheel, the car bucked, moved a few feet, and stalled. She burst into tears, No! No, I don’t want to, and, as far as I know, she never tried again.

That year I learned to roller skate. My beloved Uncle Cack, my mother’s brother and his wife, Auntie Helen, gave me skates for Christmas. They had no children and spoiled me delightfully, often giving me presents which my mother thought were either too dangerous or too expensive. I think that she worried about the skates, but I struggled to master them in our driveway, then ventured out to the broad, flat sidewalk. It was a real achievement the day I was given permission to skate all around the block.

I liked kindergarten at Queen Street Elementary School, a block away. We had a wooden bungalow separate from the main building and our own play yard. On a parents’ visiting day I remember hearing the teacher say that the boys usually preferred the playhouse while the girls chose the workshop: probably the opposite of what was provided at home. My father helped me with woodwork projects; he bought me a small hammer and a jigsaw and brought home scraps of wood scrounged from the high school wood-shop. I still have the hammer and find it useful. I do not know what happened to the jigsaw.

One day at kindergarten our teacher took us outside and told us to look up into the sky as something called the Graf Zepplin floated overhead, a great sausage-like thing. We were told that it was a sort of giant balloon with a streetcar sized compartment beneath it in which people were riding. We observed airplanes frequently, as the airport was not far away, and we learned to distinguish mono-planes and bi-planes.

My father did not need the car to drive to work. Inglewood High School was a block away. We used the car mostly for trips to Santa Ana and to Redondo Beach. Sometimes my father would take me swimming there in an indoor pool which everyone called the plunge. It was a huge old red domed structure built on pillars over the beach at water’s edge. We entered a maze of dressing room corridors painted white and lined with little cubicles and lockers. My mother would help me change into my red wool bathing suit; then she would return to the bleachers overlooking the pool. She did not swim and never went into the water.

In the pool, the atmosphere was a murky green, lighted by skylights far above. I recall the pool as stretching into unseen distance, but my father assured me that I was safe behind the bobbing white floats at the shallow end. I loved the water—pool or ocean—and cannot remember a time when I could not at least paddle to keep afloat. I sometimes wondered why my mother did not want to come into the water with us. She would sit stiffly on the benches, or on the sand on a hot day at the beach, dressed as always in a dress, hat, shoes, stockings and under it, I knew, her stiff pink corset. In later years I would appreciate her patience.

After a swim at the pool and a picnic lunch in the park we always walked out along the pier. Fish stalls lined one side of it, and fishermen sent up their catch from little boats bobbing below. We always walked the length of the pier and inspected all the wares before my mother made her decision. She might buy several fish steaks or a few pieces of sole, and the fisherman would often toss in an abalone for free. Fish was less expensive than meat and was a change from the chickens my grandfather raised. I liked fish and all kinds of seafood. I have been surprised by children who will not eat fish. I think that those of us raised during the Depression (always with a capital D) were given little choice and no sympathy about our food likes or dislikes.

Our return trip from Redondo usually included a loop into the Palos Verdes, then hills high above the ocean with occasional scattered houses and acres of truck farms carefully tended by Japanese farmers who sold the produce at roadside stands and lived in tiny houses behind them. My mother had a favorite vendor, and as she selected vegetables, a solemn little boy and I would eye each other.

On a real excursion day, instead of the swim at Redondo, we might drive the entire Palos Verdes loop, stopping at Point Vicente lighthouse for the view down to what my father called Portugee Bend. Once we went inside the lighthouse and climbed the spiral stairs to the great multi-faceted lantern.

At Cabrillo Beach my father and I would swim in the sheltered waters inside the breakwater my grandfather had helped to construct. Mother would sit patiently and, no doubt uncomfortably, on a towel on the sand. We never owned a beach umbrella; that would have cost money.

After a swim we would drive to Point Fermin Park for a picnic in one of the shady little arbors at cliff’s edge overlooking the ocean. Or we would drive to a parking lot overlooking a main shipping channel and watch ships leaving or entering the harbor. Sometimes the ships were beautiful passenger liners—the Empress of Britain was one—and I vowed to be aboard one someday. Most were freighters, some bristling with scrap metal bound, my father said, for Japan. That’s a mistake, he said.

Sometimes my father would take me aboard a ship moored at a dock. One was a Japanese training ship. I remember a young cadet trying to explain a sextant to a visiting American couple. His English failed, and my father quietly and kindly supplied him with the words he needed. As the couple moved on, the young man bowed deeply and thanked my father, saying, You are very good with the explain.

My father was good with the explain, but he knew that his days as a high school teacher were coming to an end. Inglewood High was cutting back, and his position as a teacher of math was being eliminated.

He began again his search for work. There was one good possibility. A man named Hughes was starting a plant to manufacture airplanes; perhaps my father’s experience in the design of marine engines might be useful. Always an avid reader, my father went to the Los Angeles city library to research the meager information on aircraft engines. He made an appointment at Hughes. He, my mother and I, drove to the airport. Mother and I waited in the car while my father entered what appeared to be a large garage adjacent to the airport. He returned quickly, They already have an engineer, he told my mother.

I have one other vivid memory of that year in Inglewood. We had a radio, an impressive piece of cabinet work purchased several years earlier and, like the trip to Catalina, one of my parents’ last luxuries. I heard them listen to something called the news. Except for a few of the bleakest months, they subscribed to The Los Angeles Times. Events happened beyond our immediate neighborhood, I learned. I overheard the grown-ups say that a baby had been stolen, kidnapped, was the word, from a family named Lindbergh, which seemed to have something to do with airplanes. Kid, I understood, and nap, but the connection was puzzling. Our next door neighbor did not have a radio, and every afternoon she would appear at our door to listen to the five o’clock news with my mother. One day they both burst into tears. They had to explain to me that the baby was dead, a concept still new and difficult to me. In the following days there were stern instructions from my mother about never talking to strangers, above all—never to get into a car with one. I was to shout, yell, run, hit and scream to get away. It was a strange prospect, all the more frightening as we were about to move back into the big city where I would start first grade in a new school with classes after lunch.

I do not remember just where my father worked after the Inglewood job ended, but my parents apparently decided that prospects were better in Los Angeles, so we moved back to the same duplex on Coronado Street. The only change was that we lived on the other side of the building. Apparently the renter who followed us had preferred the east unit, so the landlord, Mr. Hite, obligingly moved. My parents urged him not to move again, they were content with the now vacant unit. It was a mirror image of the apartment I remembered, a bit confusing at first as I tried to remember which way to turn. It was much smaller than the Inglewood house and had only one bedroom. I slept and played in the dining room, open to the living room through a wide arch. I slept in a Murphy bed, pulled down from the wall each night. Our dining table was pushed into a corner of the living room, and we almost always ate at an alcove in the kitchen. My toys and a small red table and chair (made by my grandfather) were in the dining room.

I may have missed my room. I do not remember. I was glad to be back with some of the playmates I had known. My best friend was Eleanor, six months younger, down the street with one house between us. I feared and avoided her older brother, Norman. Their mother had died when Eleanor was two, and while they had a father who visited weekly, they lived with their maternal widowed grandmother and two unmarried aunts. Miss Alice was vice-principal of Garfield High School, and Miss Ethel was a teacher there. They drove off each morning in an impressive Buick sedan, much larger than our Ford, with wooden spokes in the wheels. The grandmother (I heard it said) had taken to her bed at age seventy, announcing that she was an old woman, not likely to live much longer. I was terrified of her. We children would be summoned to her bedroom from time to time, entering timidly, to be admonished or scolded. I remember her sitting up in bed, supported by an upholstered contraption which resembled the top of an easy chair (another strange term) and issuing edicts about what we were to play, when and where, and for how long, about the length of Eleanor’s dresses and her hair. She also delivered instructions to Mrs. Steen, the housekeeper, on menus, groceries, and cleaning. Her daughters apparently followed her orders as obediently as we children did. I heard it said that Norman and Eleanor’s mother had married against her mother’s wishes and that the widowed father of the children was now barely tolerated in the house. Years later I would learn the word matriarch.

One day she summoned my mother to her bedside and told her that I was too bossy. My mother discussed this with me and suggested that I let Eleanor have more choice in our play. Eleanor was an extremely docile child, and I do not remember that she ever protested anything. I told my mother, If I ask Eleanor what she wants to play, we’ll never do anything!

Fortunately, this was Southern California, and we played outside most of the time, year around. Grandma could not see us in the back yard. There were just the two girls, three to five boys. Norman was there, but with the other boys around, he was bearable. Only when he was alone with us did he persist in teasing, hitting, taking our toys or breaking them. No doubt, no mother and control by a family of women made its mark on him. As an adult, following combat duty in Europe during World War II, he came home remarkably pleasant.

The other boys all fully accepted the company of Eleanor and me in games of work-up baseball in the street (few cars), in building model airplanes, and in construction projects in the back yard where we built roads, bridges, dams for model cars and trucks. We also built a tree house in the apricot tree and rigged a dumb waiter with pulleys to haul lunches and snacks up to a perching level. Never was there any suggestion from my mother or Eleanor’s guardians—even the grandmother—that we should be little girls in dresses and bows and play with dolls. We wore what were called coveralls or shorts and spent most of our time in the dirt. One of the first toys I remember was a dump truck. I had a few dolls, but I remember playing with them in the evenings or on rare days of rain.

I began the first grade in the fall of 1932, soon after my sixth birthday, at Rosemont Elementary School, now perilously close to a strip of the Hollywood freeway. Eleanor was not yet old enough to start school with me, and, after the first day, my mother entrusted me to the care of an older girl, Paulette, a sixth grader who would walk with me the half block to Temple Street where we made a right turn past Mr. Ober’s grocery store, then two blocks uphill to an underpass beneath Temple Street. It was an eerie experience at first: descending steps to dim, gray light, and the rumble of a street car overhead. There were school rules against running and shouting in the tunnel, never enforced, and we all knew the fun of hearing our voices echo and bounce off the walls.

I do not remember the name of my first grade teacher nor of the process of learning to read. I do recall the reading groups as eight or ten of us sat in a circle of chairs at the front of the room and did something with colored cards. Both my parents had been reading to me for as long as I could remember, and I had long known the alphabet from the linen pages of a book which had belonged to my mother and uncle. I remember the struggle of learning cursive writing. We were given pieces of paper with lines three inches apart, a crayon, and directed to fill the space with a repeated cursive letter. We were to pace an arm flat on the desk, sliding the entire arm to form a letter! No one wrote like this! I resorted to much smaller letters and had a good time writing out the entire alphabet. I was soon caught by the teacher and set to laboring on an enormous page of as. At home, my father let me use his pencils, meticulously sharpened. I liked to salvage a letter, preferably one from my grandmother, who had beautiful penmanship, and trace over the letters. I never did master the school method; it seemed as clumsy as trying to write with a house painter’s brush. After a year or two, our teachers had other things on their minds and paid little attention to our writing styles. A few years later we would be given pens and ink. Each wooden desk top held an ink well containing a small glass cup covered with a hinged metal lid. Monitors, honored for good behavior or completed assignments, were permitted to refill the wells from a quart bottle of ink. The possibility for disaster, accidental or mischievous, was ever present. Along with the straight pens we were issued sheets of glossy, lined paper and a manual of the Palmer Method. Again, we were required to make abnormally large letters in awkward fashion. It was fun to copy the loops and swirls from the manual, but as a means of writing, I found it impractical.

I remember little of first grade, probably because I missed a lot of it. I had the chicken pox, followed by measles, the hard kind, and I wondered if I might be dying. After that came earaches, which called for a tonsillectomy, even more frightening with an overnight at a hospital, and then croup an ailment which caused me to gasp for breath. A tent of sheets was erected over my bed, a kettle of boiling water containing oil of eucalyptus, placed on a pillow by my bed, while I was ordered not to move but to breathe deeply. I may have been frightened back to health, but the major achievement of first grade must have been getting me through the childhood diseases. From then on I enjoyed almost perfect school attendance.

Long before multi-culturalism entered our vocabulary, our elementary school practiced it. Today we would probably be known as an inner city school, a scant few miles, if that from the Civic Center of Los Angeles. We were a neighborhood of working people, few of whom were working, at least steadily. We came from diverse backgrounds. Paulette, who escorted me to school and her brother, Otto, had been born in Germany. I played with two little girls recently arrived with their parents from Germany, and with a brother and sister who were cared for after school by a grandmother who spoke only French. In my class were children whose parents had come from Poland, Holland, Russia, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Japan, Greece, and Mexico. There were American black children. Our teachers took advantage of the situation, probably with no direction from above. They invited parents—usually mothers, but an occasional unemployed father—to come to tell us something of their homeland, to speak a few words of their language. Sometimes they wore costumes and might bring food, or teach us songs. I remember Japanese dolls and kites, Dutch wooden shoes, learning the Mexican hat dance and Negro spirituals (no complaint about religious content).

There must have been some racial incident which one day prompted a teacher to gather the white children in our class together at benches under a pepper tree. Another teacher must have taken charge of the black children while our teacher explained to us that we must not use the word nigger. We agreed. Our parents had taught us that. She added that the word Negro was not appropriate either, Colored was preferred. One little boy shot up his hand and announced that he would not want to be called colored as that could mean purple or green. I do not remember how the teacher handled that, but I do recall that, as children, we all got along pretty well. I remember no racial problems.

My parents—and probably most other white parents then—subscribed to a general rule: We get along with them at school or work; we do not socialize in each other’s homes. I once asked my mother why, and she responded, Their morals are not the same as ours. My mother was a kind and a good woman, and I am sure that she sincerely believed that this was proper behavior. I suspect that she probably felt sorry for blacks being born black but did not know what to do about it. She had probably seen few if any blacks in the small town in which she had grown up, while Mexicans worked in the orchards and lived somewhere out of sight. There was a black, then called Negro (in spite of the teacher) neighborhood of several square blocks a few streets away from us. We children were warned not to walk through it, although, as we grew older and were allowed to cross streets on our own, we sometimes did. It was a short cut to Beverly Boulevard en route to the library, and we felt challenged by the forbidden. Nothing ever happened. A woman hanging out laundry (as our mothers did) might smile at us, and sometimes a little boy would let us pet his dog. We did not see signs of overt segregation, certainly no Whites only signs on buses, at movie theaters, or restaurants.

I occasionally heard a grown-up, as we called them, express fear the blacks might try to move out of their little enclave. A For Rent sign sometimes caused unease until a white family moved in. Once, from our car, I saw a black man and a white woman walking arm in arm. That is shameful, both my parents commented.

They were not bigots, and it was years before I began to understand. Some of the worst arguments I had with my mother in my adolescence and even into adulthood, dealt with my attempts to defend the rights of people of color. Mother would become very defensive. After her death, as I sorted through belongings from my grandparents’ house, I discovered a small text book of geography and history which my great grandmother had studied in the 1860s. It was in question/answer form, and it was clear that students had been expected to memorize the right answer. My grandmother may have used the same or a similar text. I remember her pride in her good memory and of the prizes she had won for correct recitations. The questions began, What are the races of the world? answer, White, Brown, Yellow, Red, Black. Question: Which is the superior race? Answer: the White race. I began to realize that several generations of students dutifully memorizing correct" answers had tragic consequences.

The Japanese occupied only a slightly higher rating on my mother’s scale. I never heard her question their morals, and I knew that she had a somewhat grudging respect for their industry: she was well aware of how hard they worked in truck gardens and on fishing boats. One of her friends taught in a school in San Pedro with almost 100% Japanese pupils. She told my mother that teaching there was a breeze. Never a discipline problem, and each child turned in prompt, neat, correct assignments. Certainly the Japanese children at our Rosemont school were the academic stars. I played at school and ate lunch with Ayako, whose mother had brought exquisite dolls to show us as she explained Girls’ Day (there was also a Boys’ Day, and someone brought kites for that).

Ayako and I often walked part of the way home together, and one day I asked her to come inside to see my doll house. My mother stood rigidly as I displayed the doll house. She did not welcome us with cookies and milk and go about her house-keeping tasks as she would have with any white child. Her tension was unwelcome, and both Ayako and I sensed it. Ayako dropped a brief curtsy to my mother, thanked us both and said good-bye.

My mother then repeated her dictum about being friendly at school but not going to each other’s homes. Why? I asked (I was not encouraged to ask questions and rarely did). They are different, was all she could say, they prefer it that way too, she added a bit lamely.

There was a small group of Chinese at our Presbyterian church, and they seemed to enjoy special status. The Mission Field, of course, was all important, and the brutal Japanese invasion of China had engendered great sympathy for the Chinese, while General Chiang Kai-Shek’s American educated and Christian wife no doubt provided these local Chinese their seal of approval. The Chinese Consul and his wife were members of our church. The wife wore beautiful silk dresses and the only mink coat I had yet seen. Their two nieces lived with them, sent by parents from war endangered Shanghai, and Sylvia was in my Sunday School class. We became good friends. I think that I was already fascinated by other lands and languages. My mother raised no objections when I asked to bring Sylvia home for lunch one Sunday. Later that afternoon the Consul’s chauffeur-driven Cadillac provided uncommon interest up and down Coronado Street as it was sent to call for Sylvia. I developed a sense that people of other colors might be acceptable if they were rich enough. If Negroes (as we still called them) lived in fine large houses and rode in limousines, could I go play with them? But then, would their mothers allow them to come to my humble home? I lived with a lot of questions.

All this occurred over a period of several years, of course. Certainly the most memorable event of my first grade year was the 1933 earthquake, remembered as the Long Beach ’quake. It came on a March evening as my mother was standing at the old gas range preparing dinner. I was sitting in the alcove with a book. My father had returned from his most recent temporary job: clearing fire breaks in the San Fernando Valley. He had come home dirty and with a poison oak rash, was in the bathtub as the earthquake struck. Later, we would find that much of the water had sloshed onto the floor.

I felt terror as the entire kitchen seemed to tilt upward at a sharp angle and the lights flickered. My mother grabbed my arm and hurried us both out the back door to the driveway. I looked up to see my father’s face in the bathroom window, could see his mouth working but could hear no words. I stood holding my mother’s hand and realized that I was hearing voices from all over the neighborhood. Whatever had happened was not limited to our house. Finally I heard my father’s voice and tugged my mother’s hand. He was telling us to step away from the two story brick chimney just above us. We moved.

I continued to hear a babble of voices as my father, now dressed, came to lead us to the center of the front lawn. There will be after shocks, he told us. Our landlord, Mr. Hite, then walked up the steps and asked mildly, What happened? He had been coming home on the Temple street-car, a high, yellow, sort of gondola-like conveyance that always swung like a ship at sea as it gained speed coming down hill. Mr. Hite told us that he had seen people run out of a store and thought that there must have been a hold-up, but as the street car continued, block after block, and more and more people were running out on both sides of the street, he decided that there could not be that many robberies.

On inspection, our house seemed to have suffered no damage. Pots containing our dinner slid onto the floor, but that was the worst. The radio worked and reported major damage in Long Beach, forty miles away. Early rumors that the Los Angeles City Hall, our tallest building, had collapsed, proved untrue. Schools would be closed until further notice. My parents phoned to my grandparents in Santa Ana. We now had a telephone, a recently acquired luxury, as my father found that he was expected to provide a phone number when he applied for jobs. I do not recall that he ever was offered work over the phone, but we had one. In retrospect, I am surprised that we were able to get through to Santa Ana with the basic service of the time. Following a 1994 earthquake in the area, I could not reach anyone for several days. Perhaps, in 1933, fewer people had phones and human operators stayed on the job.

My grandmother reported that they were safe, although there were a few things for which they could use my father’s help whenever it was convenient for us to come.

There was no school the next day. Eleanor and I and a girl named June played school in the back yard. None of the boys ever played school. We had a new companion, a girl named Pessel, who, with her father, a Russian tailor, had fled from their damaged home on the East side to our next door neighbors. Mrs. Samples lived next door with three unmarried, adult children. I remember nothing about the man, but I liked the two sisters: Miss Crystal and Miss Beatrice. They were nice to me. Miss Crystal was a teacher and sometimes brought me books and art supplies. Miss Beatrice was a seamstress at one of the Hollywood studios and brought scraps of wonderful fabrics: velvets, brocade, lace, lame, which my mother would fashion into elegant doll clothes. Pessel’s father was a tailor at the same studio, and my mother—with pursed lips and arched eyebrows indicating something between amusement and disapproval—said that he appeared to be Miss Beatrice’s boy-friend. Pessel did not seem to have a mother. She proved to be a good play-mate, stayed with the Samples for a week until school re-opened, and we missed her when she went home.

When we drove to Santa Ana a few days later, my grandmother showed us her china cabinet, standing upright about eighteen inches away from the wall. She said that she and my grandfather had been seated at the dining table when she saw the cabinet begin to sway, and she had started up to steady it, but my grandfather had shouted, No! Clara! No, certain that it would fall over on her. They had watched it tip back and forth, finally stop, upright. Not one piece of my grandmother’s cherished china and cut glass had been broken! My mother and grandmother and I carefully transferred each piece to the table, and then my father and a neighbor moved the heavy cabinet back to its place against the wall.

Schools reopened in a week, following inspections. Many schools were so badly damaged that they were condemned, and classes were held in tents, sometimes for several years. My school was declared structurally sound for the class-rooms, but we could no longer use the cafeteria, auditorium, or library. I did not miss the cafeteria. I had eaten there only once, as my mother always packed my lunch in a metal lunch box which contained a thermos for milk. We ate outside on benches beneath pepper trees. One day she had given me fifteen cents to buy lunch, and I had my first experience in a cafeteria line. The main course that day was red kidney beans, which I had never tasted before. I found them dry and too peppery, stopped eating them. Someone, possibly a teacher or one of the sixth grade monitors, ordered me to clean up your plate. I did my best but nearly choked on each huge bean. Back in class, I suddenly threw up over my desk, and my father (not working that day) was called to come for me. I still do not like kidney beans, and I was in junior high before I would again enter a school cafeteria.

There were aftershocks, almost constant for a few days, then frequent in the coming months. At school, earthquake drills were added to the fire drill routine: everyone under the desk. It was a tight fit with our old fashioned seat-desk combinations, and some of the larger boys could get only their heads and shoulders under the desks as their legs sprawled in the aisle. We all laughed. At home, I had a nightly routine: when my Murphy bed was lowered from the wall, I would place two pillows in a V position and burrow into it. As an adult, I mentioned this to my mother one time, and she asked, Is that why you did that?

The other major event to mark my memories of 1932-’33 was the election and inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, at least as cataclysmic as the earthquake and—in my parents’ eyes—more disastrous. By this time I was aware of the size of the United States. I had a puzzle map and could quickly tell from the pink piece which represented California, large as it was, that we were only a part of a very large country. I knew that we had an over-all leader of the country known as the President, and that his name was Herbert Hoover. My parents were adherents of a Party, and I had learned that this had nothing to do with cakes and presents, called the Republicans. Some people seemed to prefer another party called Democrats, and my mother did not think much of them, was—in fact—wary of their company. If they were truly nice and honorable people, according to her, they would be Republicans.

My parents greatly admired Herbert Hoover, and, in my own hindsight, I realize that they were no doubt right to have credited his post World War I humanitarian work. He might, or he might not have been able to prevent the events which triggered the 1929 Crash and Depression, two words which marked my childhood vocabulary, and which I knew began with capital letters. My parents thoroughly disapproved of the presidential candidate of the Democratic party: Franklin Roosevelt. My mother’s objection seemed to be the end of something called Prohibition. I had no idea what the word meant, but someone told me that there was a strange liquid which some people drank and which made them do bad things. This liquid—whiskey or beer—was banned, but the candidate Roosevelt was promising to end the ban if elected. My mother, an ardent teetotaler (my father was less so, but kept his opinions to himself) stated emphatically that Roosevelt was buying votes. She must have felt both vindicated and frustrated on election night as the radio confirmed a Roosevelt landslide. One of my father’s sisters, the only one who lived in Los Angeles, phoned to say that they and their neighbors were out on the sidewalk singing Happy days are here again! and drinking beer.

It was not a kind or tactful move by my aunt, but I would learn years later, that my mother had not endeared herself to my father’s side of the family when he had first taken her to meet his Irish grandmother. The old lady had poured her a welcoming glass of whiskey which my mother had promptly poured into the kitchen sink.

As much as they dreaded Roosevelt, my parents feared the possible election of a man named Upton Sinclair as Governor of California. He was a Communist, I heard the grown-ups say, and life under him would be frightening. I found my day to day life pleasant enough but did worry about them. Election night passed. I remember going to bed wondering what the morning might bring, but my parents were relieved that Sinclair had been defeated. They remained disgruntled about Roosevelt. His name would dominate my childhood. I would be in college when he died, and my parents never wavered in their disapproval of his administration. They had lost savings in bank closures, and they seemed to think that Roosevelt’s bank reorganization, even coming after the fact, was somehow to blame. In coming years they would claim with certitude that my father was denied certain jobs because they had checked voter registrations and found that he was Republican. I wondered about this. Did they really have enough people to run checks on everyone, and why would they care? More heretically, I wondered why my father did not register as a Democrat, get a job, and then vote as he pleased. The ballot was secret, I knew. On election days I would accompany my mother to the polling place two blocks away. A series of curtained cubicles, something like changing booths at the beach, had been set up on the broad porch of a stone house. My mother would accept a slip of paper from a woman seated at a card table, then take me with her into one of the booths where she stood at a shelf and marked the paper with a rubber stamp. I would look around at pairs of legs—male and female—beneath the curtains and realize that this was another of the mysterious rituals of the adult world. My mother explained the need for the curtained privacy, so that no one could see how she had voted. In that case, I wondered, why did my father not register Democratic, then slip into the booth and vote for a Republican? I did not ask, of course.

My parents were always ready to answer my questions about the spelling of a word, the names of stars, how to work an arithmetic problem, or about my growing interest in California history, which I shared with my father, but I knew that overheard discussions of obviously adult matters were not open to my questions. On a few occasions, very few, I recall protesting some order or reply, and I would be sternly reprimanded, probably sent from the room. I had no recourse, no opportunity to explain what I might emphatically feel was my right. If my father, always so reasonable in other matters, heard me differing, ever so slightly, with my mother, he never stopped to learn the cause, never heard my side. He would just say, That’s enough! A few times my mother slapped me on the mouth. Possibly it had been some such misbehavior by me which had prompted my mother to threaten to run away, although I think I was hardly old enough to ask questions at that time.

By the time I was in school, I would writhe with the injustice of being refused the right to explain what I thought was the obvious justice of my complaint. I resolved that when I had children, I would always hear them out, no matter how unreasonable they might seem. I think that I did (you would have to ask them). Sometimes my children did answer me with angry words, shouts, or tears which would have brought retribution—slaps and worse from my mother.

Still, those occasions were rare. I truly loved my parents, and I knew that they loved me. I just learned to be careful, to keep doubtful matters to myself, and to avoid disagreeing with my mother. I know—and I knew then—that my parents had no wish to be unkind. They knew that children needed discipline and that it was their duty to provide it. This is all for your own good, I can hear my mother saying, to my silent resentment. I also realize now that my own upbringing was far less stern than my parents’ had been. My father, eldest of seven, had been required to leave school at the age of fifteen to support himself. My mother had been the daughter of an invalid father and working mother. Both had known responsibilities and rigid rules from an early age. I can only guess at some of the frustrations and—no doubt—real injustices both must have experienced.

My childhood might have been easier, or at least different, if I had had siblings. Together we might have presented a united front to our parents, or at least we could have commiserated with each other. Perhaps not. Whenever I told a friend I would like a sister or brother, she would say, You can have mine. I was in high school before I gave up looking at my mother to see if she might be pregnant. By then, of course, it was far too late for companionship. When Paulette escorted me to school in the first grade, I so wished that she was my sister that I told someone she was. Of course, I was soon found out and, mortified, learned my lesson: tell a falsehood, and you are sure to be found out. I am glad that I learned it so young.

When I asked my mother why I was an only child she laughed and said, The Depression. Yet I was three years old before my father lost his job. I think there is little doubt that my mother did not want another child. Although the word sex was never mentioned in my presence, I learned in later years that she had never enjoyed it, found it only a repugnant act necessary for procreation. When she could finally bring herself to broach the subject to me a few weeks before my wedding, she could only say, I think you will find it highly over-rated.

As I continued at my culturally diverse school, I was increasingly fascinated by languages other than English. Even before I started to school, before we moved to Inglewood, I played with two sisters, Ursula and Ruth, who lived in a house on the corner. They and their parents had recently arrived from Germany. I was to learn much later that their parents had decided, even in 1930, that Germany was not a good home for Jews. They were hardly refugees, having shipped their household furnishings which included a grand piano and massive wardrobes, such as I had never before seen. They also had the first oil paintings and Persian carpets I had seen. Ursula, the elder, was having difficulty in school and, somehow, my mother had taken on the task of tutoring both girls in English. My mother had no knowledge of German and certainly no experience of teaching English as a second language, but I recall sitting on the floor at her feet as she patiently directed Ursula and Ruth to turn the pages of my alphabet and picture books and repeat words after her. Sometimes I was enlisted to repeat words so that they could try to sound like me. Mother was convinced of the need for foreigners to learn English and was glad to do what she could. Later she helped the girls’ mother, reasonably fluent in English, to study for her citizenship exams. Once free to play, Ursula and Ruth reverted to German and expected me, the younger child, to join them. In later years my mother told me that I often came home using words or phrases which she did not understand. I have never studied German, but even now I sometimes hear German words or a phrase which flash into my memory, and I occasionally overhear a German conversation which I can almost understand.

I also played with a brother and sister in the next block whose family had moved from France. The parents worked in a French restaurant downtown, and the children were cared for by a grandmother who spoke almost no English. I remember the after school gouter she gave us: bread with chunks of chocolate and small amounts of grape juice poured into glasses of water. I thought that they must be even more poor than we, for I was accustomed to undiluted juice. One day I spilled a glass on my dress, and when my mother took the dress off me to soak out the stain she sniffed and pronounced it wine. Fortunately she seemed amused and did not forbid me to play there again. I wish that I could have continued these opportunities. I might have learned much more German and French at the best possible age to learn another language. But the German and French families moved away and eventually we moved to a less diverse neighborhood. At least, I learned that there were other languages, and I was very eager to learn to speak them. As soon as I would get to high school, I promised myself, I would sign up for classes: French one year, German the next, and then Spanish—rapid mastery in all.

Meanwhile, as we went home to play after school, our Japanese class-mates headed for their Japanese language school. Sometimes they would draw the characters of their written language for us: interesting figures which looked like a lot more fun than our prosaic letters. Some of our elders looked with disapproval on these schools, They would be better off perfecting their English, some sniffed, although it seemed to us that the Japanese kids spoke as perfect English as any of us, and they certainly excelled in all school subjects.

Most sad is the fact that the school made no effort to teach us any Spanish. Spanish place names were a part of our lives. We lived in Los Angeles—its full name El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles (and we loved to rip that off), adjacent to La Crescenta, Duarte, Alhambra, San Gabriel, and San Fernando, with the San Jacinto mountains overlooking it all. We knew street names: I lived on Coronado, and nearby were Pico, Alvarado, La Cienega—all pronounced with dreadful Anglo flatness, but no one ever told us what they meant. No teachers ever made an effort to teach us a little Spanish, or to enlist some of those mothers who could. No doubt the teachers knew no Spanish and were just as oblivious to the Spanish heritage as our parents.

Every second or third week-end we would drive to my grandparents’ home in Santa Ana, about forty miles away. There were no freeways, and my parents liked to vary the route. We might take Beverly Boulevard through downtown and to the East Side, or south on Vermont Avenue. Whatever route, the road would take us on the Main Street of towns named Montebello, Whittier, Bellflower, Anaheim (long before Disneyland), Garden Grove, Fullerton, and Orange. I wondered about the names of those towns, who had decided what to call them? My father would drive through the center of each town, shifting gears at red lights, then we would be in the country again between rows of orange trees before coming to the next town.

As we approached Santa Ana the orange groves gave way to houses. My father knew a back road which avoided Main Street, and we would turn onto First, then Orange, and continue about six blocks south on a shady street with houses set comfortably back from the street. An alley served the garages behind the houses, so that front lawns ran together the full length of the block, something I found preferable to the driveways which broke our Los Angeles neighborhood into little patches of front yard. The alley itself was special: a place reached at the end of a garden path and through a latched but unlocked gate. The alley was unpaved, dusty, slightly mysterious: a private short-cut to the neighborhood store and houses of friends reached through their garden gates.

My grandparents had built the house in 1899, my grandfather doing much of the construction, and it had originally been smaller, rooms added as family and savings grew. My grandfather had suffered a heart attack in his early forties and did not recover sufficient strength to do the hard work required on a Kansas farm. My grandmother, fifteen years younger, tried to carry on. She had been raised on another homestead and was fully capable of milking cows, driving a team of horses, plowing, planting, and harvesting, but she had found that even her strong and youthful determination had not been equal to the farm work and care of two small children, one of them, my uncle, sickly. My grandfather’s older sisters and their husbands had moved to California some years earlier and wrote that it was Paradise on earth, perfect climate, easier living, a better place for all, especially ailing Brother Will, and the asthmatic little boy.

My grandparents sold their equity in the farm and relocated in California. My mother, then five, could remember sitting up coach on the train and eating cold provisions from a hamper. She never again liked hard boiled eggs.

My maternal grandparents were William Harris and Clara Wyatt McCord. The McCords had come from the Isle of Skye to the Carolinas in the 18th century, probably loyal to Bonnie Prince Charlie and hence Catholic, but at some time they had migrated to Kentucky and become Quakers, not necessarily in that order. Sometime before 1820 they decided to free their slaves. As this made them unpopular with neighbors, and as farming without slaves was essentially impossible, they had moved with the freed slaves to Indiana. I do not think that they had many slaves; there are no memories of a great southern plantation. A family story was handed down that one of the McCord daughters was captured by Indians but returned safely to the family several years later. They settled in Indiana, first in Vincennes, later in a Quaker community at Bloomingdale. I have seen the small Friends Meeting House there and have a photo of the modest farmhouse in which my grandfather was born in 1853. His mother died in his infancy and the oldest sister, Minerva, then sixteen, raised him, the three younger sisters, and managed the household. My grandfather told me that Min always had a ball of yarn and knitting needles in her apron pocket, and whenever her hands