Looking Back: An Autobiography

By James A. Meyler

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984563361

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Copyright © 2018 by James A. Meyler.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2018912977

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-9845-6338-5

Softcover     978-1-9845-6337-8

             eBook           978-1-9845-6336-1

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.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 10/29/2018

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1   The Beginning

Chapter 2   Before the Beginning

Chapter 3   Bob and Eve

Chapter 4   School Days

Chapter 5   Far Above Cayuga’s Waters

Chapter 6   Across the Deep Blue Sea

Chapter 7   On the Queen

Chapter 8   In the Army Now

Chapter 9   Home From the War

Chapter 10   Changes

Chapter 11   Love at Last

Chapter 12   Nicholas and Karen

Chapter 13   Interesting People

Chapter 14   General Business Services

Chapter 15   The Arts Council

Chapter 16   Rotary

Chapter 17   Donald McLean and Successors

Chapter 18   Comissioner Jim

Chapter 19   Fighting Grief

CHAPTER 1

The Beginning

Everything has a beginning. There is a date and a place. In my case the date was June 15, 1928 and the place was 12 St. James Park, Los Angeles. Astute readers might observe that 12 St. James Park doesn’t sound like a hospital address and they would be right. My mother had my brother Bob in a hospital and my sister Eve in a hospital. She decided to have me at home. This permits me to say that I have never been a patient in a hospital. I hope I never will be.

Mother was assisted in my birth by Dr. Frank Browne who later became our family doctor. He and his wife Margaret were friends of our family and I can recall a number of meals shared with them. Later, in my early twenties I had a few dates with their daughter Jane and I was friends with their sons Alan and Harry.

My earliest specific memory is of myself, walking along in the sand with my dad at the Santa Monica Beach Club where we were members. I remember thinking This is my birthday. I am three years old today. Over the years and up to my college days we spent a good deal of time at the Beach Club. One of the persons seen there was the comedian Joe E Brown. Another was Johnny Weissmuller who played Tarzan of the Apes in the movies. Dad taught me to swim at the Beach Club, or rather next door to the club. There was a pier structure next door that made the waves better to ride on than at our beach.

When I was very young I used to be taken by my mother into the lady’s locker room to change into my bathing suit. It was a real sense of graduation when I received my own locker in the men’s locker room. Some months later, I was looking for my mother and I walked into the ladies locker room. Judging from the reaction from several partially clothed ladies, I never did that again.

We had nice neighbors. On one side were the Wordells. Eddie Wordell was my best friend in the early years. They used to raise turkeys in their back yard. On the other side was the Keller family. I got to know their daughters in later years.

A half block away were the Dockweilers who had a state beach named after them. My sister’s best friend, a block away, was Catherine Silent whose father was a judge in Los Angeles.

I think I was seven before starting school. For some reason my parents didn’t want me to go to kindergarten and I started about a year older than most of the kids in first grade. I can remember that I knew how to read before starting school and they advanced me fairly quickly up to second grade. Norwood Street School was a very old two story wooden structure. We were lucky that no one started a fire. The building would have been gone in minutes. The good news was that during my first year a brand new school was being constructed alongside of the old building and we moved into it during my second year in the school.

I started learning how to get along with others, and also, to not get along with some. One day I got into a fight with a classmate. We traded blows and I quit when he gave me a bloody nose. I was expecting sympathy from my family but my dad was furious when he learned that I had quit the fight. The surprising outcome was that he and I became best friends for the remaining years in elementary school.

My brother and sister were several years older than I, and they both had taken piano lessons for some time. At age six, I decided that I wanted to learn to play the piano and asked my parents if I could take lessons. They said that I was too young. But I was determined. With my brother’s help I learned how to play several measures of Bach’s Prelude in C major. That impressed my parents and I got to take lessons, first from a local piano teacher and later from a coach in Pasadena who dealt mostly with professionals.

I was convinced that my life’s work would be as a concert pianist, but