A World to Shape: Life, Times People and Places that shaped my me

By Edward J. Blakely

Edward James Blakely was born on April 21, 1938 San Bernardino, California to a modest African, Native American family. His life mirrors a racially and socially divided post World WarII America. Ed parents and grandparents along with his uncles and aunts were social & civil rights pioneers. His autobigrphy traces how he followed th journey of civil liberty across the United States. Ed carried his famil aspirations into the White House and leading cities and nations globally to become a world renowned and highly decorated urban planner and professor.

This book contains his reflections as he shapes and is shaped by the world of his times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: May 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781669831273

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Copyright © 2023 by Edward James Blakely. 843173

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.

Xlibris

AU TFN: 1 800 844 927 (Toll Free inside Australia)

AU Local: 02 8310 8187 ([phone] from outside Australia)

www.xlibris.com.au

ISBN: 978-1-6698-3126-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6698-3127-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022915027

Rev. date: 05/15/2024

This work is dedicated to Cobi and Jame, the latest family flag carriers. This tome is for them and their children and grandchildren until our tattered Blakely flag flies no more.

Contents

Chapter 1 The Big Black Sea

Berdoo

Blakely Family Celebration

The Blakely Colton-Carter Riverside Merger

Riverside Gramps

San Bernardino Grampa

Chapter 2 The War

The Riverside-Europe War

Colton, San Bernardino, Pacific War

New Teachers Take Over

Chapter 3 Never Be a Victim

The End of Eden

Sport

The Village

No Time for Tears

The Gas (Petrol) Station

Black Rock

Chapter 4 A World for Me

LA Watts - Dad’s Turf

Nolan’s Clan

The Riverside Mob

Pasadena Folks

Rose Bowl/Brookside Park

New Lands

Seattle Surprise

Pops

Lincoln Park

Extra Dad Time

Devil’s Workshop

Chapter 5 Coming and Going

Rocky

The Big House Community

St T’s

School Sport

Little Madmen

Friends and Travel

Getting By

School Sports

Prep

Prep Classical Education

Chapter 6 Can You Go Home Again?

SB Football

At Home

Me and Mick Move Again

Mick Leaves the Nest

Racism

Mick on His Own

Mom

McDonaldization of My Life

Cal-infatuation

The End of the Beginning

A Rope around My Suitcase

Jock Job

What to Do?

Football Spirit Dies

Chapter 7 Make the Path

Berdoo Ugly as Ever

Junior College

Football Bust

SBVC Classroom

University Where?

Decision Time

Mom on the Move Again

Senior Year UC Riverside – Life Mates

Cal Football – At Last

Rhodes Scholar?

Chapter 8 The Real World

Officer and Gentleman

A New Day

Soldiering

War Clouds

Off to Berkeley

A New Frontier

Saying No to Vietnam

Chapter 9 Life-Changing Journey to Italy

Heavenly Days

Londres (Spanish)

Bitter Cold

Paree

The Cold Place

Chapter 10 From Gentleman to Village Architect

Transition to Diplomat

Diplomat

The Foreign Service Family

Foreign Projects

Global Engagements: Japan

Study Tours: United States and Global

Georgia Breakaway, Abkhazia (Autonomous), and the Former South Ossetian Autonomous Regions

Iran Assignment

Public and Community Service

Fighting Poverty in the United States, 1966–1970

Academic Appointments

Books

Business and Professional

Real Estate Development

Sydney Design and Development Team

Broadcasting

Chapter 11 Steven Wilson Blakely Psalm

Themes, Strategies, Directions

Moving from Theme to Goals and Actions

Start

I traveled 13,000 miles for my brother’s 80th birthday party. That was the reason but not the cause for me being in Riverside, California. I stepped out of the hotel, walked to the parking lot, picking up the keys to the rental car from the attendant. My watch said 6:00 a.m. Peter Turner, my best friend, lay asleep, expecting an eight-o’clock breakfast call for a pre-birthday tour of our alma mater, the University of California, Riverside. Pete and I traveled together for my brother’s party scheduled at noon in the adjacent Mission Inn Hotel. Pete is part of my life but not my youth.

I drove the old Sana River route. My visit to Perris Street, San Bernardino, came from my need to see the place it all started.

I pulled the car to the curb on the wrong side of the street so I could have a clear view of the poplar tree in front of John Blakely, my first cousin’s neighbor’s home. My story starts under this tree over 70 years ago, when I was only 11 years old. Under this poplar tree, on a sweltering summer day, two weeks after my parents announced their divorce, I decided on my future course. The substantial branches of the tree are symbolic of the path I chose, shaping who and where I am. The decisions made under this tree are my story.

Chapter 1

The Big Black Sea

Berdoo

Most people describe their hometowns as cute, attractive, by a river, magnificent views, a beautiful place to live. I remember no one describing San Bernardino in those terms. San Bernardino’s best attribute is that the city sits at the base of the mountains, making it a stagecoach stop and later the place where trains took on new fuel to cross the mountains. It is a dreary place even for kids, especially for black and brown kids. When you hear people growing up in severe circumstances, this usually means their neighborhood with their surroundings squalid, oppressing adults and limiting aspirations of children. San Bernardino is simply a poor ugly place.

San Bernardino lies at the base of the mountain range you must cross to reach Nevada or Las Vegas. But I was born long before Las Vegas became a gambling center. Las Vegas, in the old days and still, is a major transcontinental transportation hub for East to West. The San Bernardino Mountains are a formidable barrier to transport. Like all frontier shipment hubs, San Bernardino was a dodgy roughneck place with a bad reputation. Many sad things grew up in San Bernardino, including the Hells Angels—the notorious motorcycle gang known for all kinds of venal criminality plus drug dealing and prostitution. The Hells Angels were just an early bloom as I came into the world in 1938 at the end of the Great Depression and the beginning of the Second World War. Both events shaped my life. The Depression was the reason my father and his family came to San Bernardino in 1934. Dad’s mother, along with his siblings, left Los Angeles amid a national economic collapse.

I was the biggest baby born a little after midnight on 21 April in San Bernardino County Hospital. One nurse called me a fat little thing. From that 12:30 a.m. until adulthood, I was Fats to everyone, except my schoolteachers.

The Blakely clan fled Los Angeles because their ventures near the railroad station downtown went bankrupt during the Depression; they moved to the farmlands they purchased to service colored hotels and restaurants in Los Angeles, 60 miles inland. It is a story of riches to rags. But people with riches also have elegance and confidence, a hallmark of our Blakely lineage. Confidence and a touch of arrogance made it possible for the family to live in Colton, California, a bypassed side of the highway suburb. Colton is a small ugly little rail stop nudged between San Bernardino and Riverside, a nearby urban center on the Santa Ana River, ran through both places for transportation and natural life along the river.

I will never know how my grandmother Bertha acquired the capital to buy the farm or how her husband Edward Blakely Sr died just before they fled Los Angeles for Colton. We understood a streetcar killed Edward Blakely Sr What I do know about Edward Blakely Sr is that he was a dapper dresser and a successful businessperson. Grandmother moved to Colton with her brood of six children. As she repeated regularly, the Colton move was out of necessity. The Blakelys were among the first black families and the largest vegetable farmers in the small locality. The Blakelys thrived in prewar Depression Colton as athletes in the 1930s. My father and his sister, by two years, had graduated from Jordan High School in Los Angeles before the move. Edward II needed work near the farm. His sister Juanita was a bright child, winning a scholarship to the local private University of Redlands. These were tough times. Edward II had mechanical abilities, so he worked in the shop. His mechanical knowledge he gained at Jordan High in Watts, East Los Angeles. Juanita became one of the student leaders. She was far too busy to bring any bread home. The Blakelys were respectable landowners, athletes, and had a child in a private university; a feat few white families anywhere in the Los Angeles area could boast.

Grandma Blakely’s Colton House

I’m not sure what you call this genteel poverty or lower-middle class with pretentions. Boy, my grandma was pretentious! Somehow my grandmother became the political oligarch of the small town. She reigned as the most feared black woman in the berg. Colton was insignificant, allowing Bertha, a city woman, to overpower locals.

Bertha, with detectable Native American blood, was born in Kansas City in 1895. She married well into an upwardly mobile Blakely clan that made a move from Kansas City, serving black rail travelers migrating from St Louis and Chicago to Los Angeles. Grandma Blakely was more informed than the local hicks. She openly riled civic leaders as inept and incompetent, straightening them out in letters to the editor or at city council meetings. There were racial lines, but Colton was so small she controlled the black and Mexican areas of the town.

Watts was Grandma’s Negro power incubator. My memories of visits to Watts were meeting with well-dressed, articulate black people. The Blakely family were entrepreneurs in Los Angeles at the turn of the 20th century. Grandma Blakely’s city skills made her a small-town queen pin.

Blakely Family Celebration

Blakelys celebrate Christmas, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Easter as holidays. All celebrations centered on Grandma Blakely’s grand house in Colton. Each party took the same pattern. All the members of the Blakely Colton, San Bernardino clan, with various plates or parts of food already prepared, arrived early in the morning. I don’t know how instructions as to what food to bring got determined. Mom brought desserts. Grandma’s farms were filled with vegetable gardens, chickens, cows, and fowl. The adults sat in a vast room adjacent to the kitchen, where large heaping plates on the table consisting of Mexican American foods.

The kids sat at the small table in a long narrow hallway adjacent to the kitchen. Granny blessed food then eating commenced.

Before the meal, the kids assembled outdoors for games suitable to age. In all celebrations, there were small gifts usually for the children and the families as group toys rather than individual items.

We celebrated infrequently in our modest house in San Bernardino. Most birthday celebrations were across the street at Johnny Blakely’s house. Our parents only celebrated Christmas until we started school, and then since we knew there was no Santa Claus, there was no need to pretend. Dad was never much into any celebration, so it was easy to taper down even birthdays. We never celebrated our parents’ birthdays, and we didn’t celebrate my brother or my birthday until adulthood. Mom and Dad felt small souvenirs over the year were better than the required celebrations.

So my childhood memories start from the position of contagious confidence with personal discipline transferred to everyone in the family through my Grandmother Blakely’s offspring. In a few moments, I’ll describe how remarkably similar kind of less showy confidence came from my mother’s side of the family.

The Blakely Colton-Carter Riverside Merger

My parents came together through the black clan. My mother is a Carter-Randolph of Riverside, California. The Carter-Randolph came to Riverside about the time the civil war started. Safe to say my grandfather on my mother’s side, Charles Carter, was the third black baby born in Riverside County. He was born just post-slavery and married one of the few black girls in the entire county, Hattie Randolph. Hattie was the daughter of a former slave who came to California primarily by wagon train and walked to get away from the South and slavery. And like Blakely’s family, Azor Randolph quickly established himself as an entrepreneur. Azor worked as a landscaper in citrus crops. Like my Grandmother Blakely, my grandfather Charlie Carter married Hattie and took on the mantle of black civic leader in Riverside ala Bertha Blakely in Colton. Grandpa Charlie would call the candidates for elected office in Riverside County to his home and interview them to see if they were qualified to get the black and Hispanic vote. I can remember sitting on the floor trying to figure out why these big white people looked and acted so uncomfortably in my grandmother’s big living room. I understood this family power when I joined the University of California, Riverside. I realized the capacity of the family when the local newspaper lauded UC Riverside campus for enrolling a Blakely-Carter scion.

Understandably, the oldest Blakely would marry one girl. It was short courtship. My father was older than my mother. Unfortunately, Dad treated Mom like his child bride rather than a faithful companion in every respect. My parents were handsome and were quickly identified as a couple by anyone on the street. I can remember walking with my brother with well-groomed parents drawing comments from white and black passers-by.

My parents were joyful people. After marriage, we lived on a portion of my Grandmother Blakely’s farm. I can remember waddling around the vegetable garden mud with Mom smiling and laughing. She played with my brother and me, while Dad was at work. She was just a big kid more than a mother figure. She was eating the veggies directly from the ground with only a minor amount of washing. Mom is small, over 5 feet, very model slim.

The family seemed happy to have a little house, and shortly, I had a little brother called Mickey as a companion. My father named Mickey after the Disney cartoon character Mickey Mouse for his small birth size.

My dad’s railroad was conscription-exempted from military service because he worked for Santa Fe. He was directly in our lives all the time. It seems strange to hear so many great athletes, men and women, black and white, talk about how distant one or both of their parents were to them. My mother was gay and playful, like the little girl she was. She was always cheery. She was just a young girl. She delivered me at 19 years old and my brother at a little over 20. So before her 21st birthday, she was a full-time mother of two with a small house across the street from a very dominating mother-in-law. Thank God we were across the full Congress Street from Granny. We had a near tragedy, when, as a two- or three-year-old, I pushed the window screen on an open window overlooking our driveway, falling over 2 meters. My dad saw the screen give way as he washed his car. Dad leaped, catching me by the head. The entire family repeated this father-heroism story throughout my early years.

My father was laid off from the Santa Fe. We were happy he was at home with us every day for a year, taking piano lessons. Like Mom, he had an attractive personality and was impeccable dresser. Before he got laid off, Dad came home from work dressed more like a grocery store clerk than a railroad worker. He put on overhauls at work and washed up with naphtha soap. He carried a light soapy smell I still remember. Dad usually wore a newsboy cap to work, exchanging for fedoras and other stylish hats with dress clothes. Dad and Mom were always smart, even if traveling to our grandparents’ or friends’ homes in the era of dress and style. My brother and I dressed according to the fashion.

My parents played sports. My brother and I traveled with our parents to watch them play ball. We sat together in the back of a little rumble seat with no seat belts as toddlers. We went to see my mother pitch softball and play second base on the girls softball team. I remember nothing other than my mother is fast. My brother and I couldn’t outrun my mother in a foot race until we were in our teens. She was small and quick. My father played on a men’s team and boxed. I think he was a good athlete. Dad was jovial and somehow