Imprint
I lived for several years of my childhood in an undeveloped area of the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles called Sun Valley. We had to turn off a meandering canyon road, across a dry wash that became a torrent without warning in winter, through a cut in a hill, past truck farming fields, left past a few houses along a hillside tiered with Prickly Pear cactus planted by long departed Italians, to get to our flat roofed clapboard house in the middle of someone's attempt to start an orchard. We had kerosene heat, a butane stove, scorpions, rattlesnakes, and a model A ford sedan that my father and his friends rebuilt as a second car for my mother. He bought it for five dollars and sold it several years and many miles later for ten.
Our little house was against a hill that formed, along with the hill full of cactus, a narrow valley which seemed a million miles from Los Angeles where my mother grew up and my grandmother and aunt and uncle still lived. Our neighbors were a family living in even more sparse circumstances than we were. There was a Scottish woman, primal and stolid with a very thick accent, named Effie, her husband Steve who looked like Clark Gable, a stunningly handsome man for such a no-frills wife, their two children, Stephan and Stephanie born ten months apart, a Doberman named Chips and a some of chickens. They lived in a trailer with a few decrepit out buildings and chicken coops. Steve worked swing shift at Lockheed in Burbank with my father, and went to the USC dental school during the day. My father set tile during the day. They worked hard.
We moved to better quarters when I was in the 5th grade, to another part of the valley, there were sidewalks, curbs, housing tracts, and 2 blocks away, not always down wind, was an enormous dairy, with cows, feed lots, and barns full of hay. The agrarian past of the area was receding but still present. Our neighbors from Sun Valley had a change of fortune around the same time. Steve graduated from dental school and was now a medical professional. He took a job as the dentist at a men's prison 150 miles up the coast. He bought a small apartment building with vacation rentals upstairs and a dental office downstairs and set up a dental practice in Pismo Beach California.
In the summer following the sixth grade Steve and Effie generously invited my family to stay in one of their rental units for a period of time. My father brought us there and then went back to work, leaving myself, my mother, brother and sister to enjoy the seaside resort. When my father came to fetch his brood it materialized from somewhere that I should remain for several more weeks, alone!! An astounding departure from what I felt was a micro-managed life full of requirements and limitations.
My life was absolute paradise- I stayed in a spare room in my hosts house behind the dental office. I went to the beach after breakfast, walked the beach until it disappeared a mile or so north of town, hung out on the pier, went fishing, body surfed on an air mattress, wandering amongst the tourists and vacationers at my own pace. I came back for lunch and them started on my afternoon routine. Around three in the afternoon the surfboard rental stand and snack stand closed and I sifted the sand around the counters of these two enterprises, some days there was nothing there, and some days I made upwards of a dollar in small change which, augmented with discarded soda bottles which could be returned for deposit, became the agency of my first tastes of independence. After dinner I was free to go to the local movie house where the movie changed twice a week, mostly westerns and monsters, my favorites.
Or, I could hang out or skate at the roller rink a block away across a vast parking lot. The skating rink was paradise. There was the otherworldliness of the darkened cavern with the saccharine music, the constant flow of the skaters circling, skilled skaters darting past the herd, going backwards, a mechanical fantasy of horizontal weightlessness and abandon. There was peripheral activity, people clomping to the snack bar, parents fetching children, all transient vacationers enjoying a collective other. Connected to the Skating rink by a long hallway by the bathrooms was a raucous penny arcade, filled with pin-ball machines, shooting gallery games, a pool table and most importantly, a juke box- The tunes were a nickel, the records were 78 RPM platters like my fathers boogie-woogie records, soon to be replaced by the smaller 45s, and I got to hear Little Richard, Bill Haley and the Comets, the Platters, Etta James, all the rhythm and blues and rock and roll records that were beginning to dominate radio. These sounds were as much a source of deliverance as the skating rink with its immersion in darkness and shadow and wheel noise, only this was bright and percussive, with bells and jackpots, rattling arcade machine guns blinking colored lights, and roars of approval and dismay as games ended. I was content to watch- I played a few games, skated once in a while, but mostly watched- how people treated each other, who was paying attention to who, families squabbling, teenagers plotting time out of bounds, all pulsing with promise just like the music.
One day, one afternoon, after the sand had been sifted for change, I was walking toward the concrete seawall that divided the beach from the parking lot and arcades above. It was my favorite time of day, late afternoon, a breeze usually came up then that seemed to make the waves come more often, longer shadows and shorter wave intervals, that was the late afternoon, and the air was cooler than the sand which retained the radiant heat from the day. The warmth came upward from beneath my bare feet. I walked toward the stairs that led up to the parking lot by Tony's Clam Stand, headed for the Esquire newsstand where I bought candy and furtively glanced at girlie magazines. Tony's was a definite part of the beach ambiance because there was a speaker connected to the juke box inside that would blare the hits onto the beach at random intervals. Tony had more jerky tunes like the Tennessee Waltz and stupid Vic Damone moaning about something, but he had some cool ones too. As I approached the stairs I noticed something sticking out of the sand to the right of the stairway. I turned toward it and saw it was the corner of a comic book and I felt like I was pushed to my knees in the warm sand before this treasure, and at the moment that I pulled it from the sand to reveal that it was a Phantom comic book, a sought after title for me, the juke box in Tony's Clam Stand burst forth with Stranded in the Jungle by the Cadets, my all time favorite hit of the day, and something was done, a schematic for a life was imprinted, vitalized and imprinted in that intersection of sudden music, unexpected discovery, radiant warmth, foreshortened waves and lengthening shadows, it was my imprint of what was priceless, against which all meaning would be measured.
The beach time was over and I returned for my first semester of Junior high school. I was eleven years old, a little younger than most of the students. The place was huge compared to elementary school, with lots of moving between classes, a miniature city with its traffic and its menaces. Music played at lunch time, played by the school student DJ over the PA system in the Quad, and two guys, Richard Valenzuela and Ortilio Perez would bring their guitars and sing and play, Oobie Doobie and Honky-tonk are tunes i remember. A crowd would gather around them. It was the first live music I heard that was mine, by people my own age, not chosen or played by someone else. Richard Valenzuela became Richie Valens a year later and returned to the school to perform a year after his transformation, the prodigal homebody made good, and was dead yet in less than year after that. I have always wondered what happened to Ortilio Perez.
On January 31 1957, at around 10 in the morning an airplane, a DC-6 four engined airliner on a test flight, collided in mid-air with a fighter plane over the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. The fighter crashed near my old house in Sun Valley, and the airliner landed on the church next to the gym field where I and my second period gym class were waiting for our report cards. The world was full of fire and metal tinsel glinting in the winter morning sun, and things were never the same.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.
Our little house was against a hill that formed, along with the hill full of cactus, a narrow valley which seemed a million miles from Los Angeles where my mother grew up and my grandmother and aunt and uncle still lived. Our neighbors were a family living in even more sparse circumstances than we were. There was a Scottish woman, primal and stolid with a very thick accent, named Effie, her husband Steve who looked like Clark Gable, a stunningly handsome man for such a no-frills wife, their two children, Stephan and Stephanie born ten months apart, a Doberman named Chips and a some of chickens. They lived in a trailer with a few decrepit out buildings and chicken coops. Steve worked swing shift at Lockheed in Burbank with my father, and went to the USC dental school during the day. My father set tile during the day. They worked hard.
We moved to better quarters when I was in the 5th grade, to another part of the valley, there were sidewalks, curbs, housing tracts, and 2 blocks away, not always down wind, was an enormous dairy, with cows, feed lots, and barns full of hay. The agrarian past of the area was receding but still present. Our neighbors from Sun Valley had a change of fortune around the same time. Steve graduated from dental school and was now a medical professional. He took a job as the dentist at a men's prison 150 miles up the coast. He bought a small apartment building with vacation rentals upstairs and a dental office downstairs and set up a dental practice in Pismo Beach California.
In the summer following the sixth grade Steve and Effie generously invited my family to stay in one of their rental units for a period of time. My father brought us there and then went back to work, leaving myself, my mother, brother and sister to enjoy the seaside resort. When my father came to fetch his brood it materialized from somewhere that I should remain for several more weeks, alone!! An astounding departure from what I felt was a micro-managed life full of requirements and limitations.
My life was absolute paradise- I stayed in a spare room in my hosts house behind the dental office. I went to the beach after breakfast, walked the beach until it disappeared a mile or so north of town, hung out on the pier, went fishing, body surfed on an air mattress, wandering amongst the tourists and vacationers at my own pace. I came back for lunch and them started on my afternoon routine. Around three in the afternoon the surfboard rental stand and snack stand closed and I sifted the sand around the counters of these two enterprises, some days there was nothing there, and some days I made upwards of a dollar in small change which, augmented with discarded soda bottles which could be returned for deposit, became the agency of my first tastes of independence. After dinner I was free to go to the local movie house where the movie changed twice a week, mostly westerns and monsters, my favorites.
Or, I could hang out or skate at the roller rink a block away across a vast parking lot. The skating rink was paradise. There was the otherworldliness of the darkened cavern with the saccharine music, the constant flow of the skaters circling, skilled skaters darting past the herd, going backwards, a mechanical fantasy of horizontal weightlessness and abandon. There was peripheral activity, people clomping to the snack bar, parents fetching children, all transient vacationers enjoying a collective other. Connected to the Skating rink by a long hallway by the bathrooms was a raucous penny arcade, filled with pin-ball machines, shooting gallery games, a pool table and most importantly, a juke box- The tunes were a nickel, the records were 78 RPM platters like my fathers boogie-woogie records, soon to be replaced by the smaller 45s, and I got to hear Little Richard, Bill Haley and the Comets, the Platters, Etta James, all the rhythm and blues and rock and roll records that were beginning to dominate radio. These sounds were as much a source of deliverance as the skating rink with its immersion in darkness and shadow and wheel noise, only this was bright and percussive, with bells and jackpots, rattling arcade machine guns blinking colored lights, and roars of approval and dismay as games ended. I was content to watch- I played a few games, skated once in a while, but mostly watched- how people treated each other, who was paying attention to who, families squabbling, teenagers plotting time out of bounds, all pulsing with promise just like the music.
One day, one afternoon, after the sand had been sifted for change, I was walking toward the concrete seawall that divided the beach from the parking lot and arcades above. It was my favorite time of day, late afternoon, a breeze usually came up then that seemed to make the waves come more often, longer shadows and shorter wave intervals, that was the late afternoon, and the air was cooler than the sand which retained the radiant heat from the day. The warmth came upward from beneath my bare feet. I walked toward the stairs that led up to the parking lot by Tony's Clam Stand, headed for the Esquire newsstand where I bought candy and furtively glanced at girlie magazines. Tony's was a definite part of the beach ambiance because there was a speaker connected to the juke box inside that would blare the hits onto the beach at random intervals. Tony had more jerky tunes like the Tennessee Waltz and stupid Vic Damone moaning about something, but he had some cool ones too. As I approached the stairs I noticed something sticking out of the sand to the right of the stairway. I turned toward it and saw it was the corner of a comic book and I felt like I was pushed to my knees in the warm sand before this treasure, and at the moment that I pulled it from the sand to reveal that it was a Phantom comic book, a sought after title for me, the juke box in Tony's Clam Stand burst forth with Stranded in the Jungle by the Cadets, my all time favorite hit of the day, and something was done, a schematic for a life was imprinted, vitalized and imprinted in that intersection of sudden music, unexpected discovery, radiant warmth, foreshortened waves and lengthening shadows, it was my imprint of what was priceless, against which all meaning would be measured.
The beach time was over and I returned for my first semester of Junior high school. I was eleven years old, a little younger than most of the students. The place was huge compared to elementary school, with lots of moving between classes, a miniature city with its traffic and its menaces. Music played at lunch time, played by the school student DJ over the PA system in the Quad, and two guys, Richard Valenzuela and Ortilio Perez would bring their guitars and sing and play, Oobie Doobie and Honky-tonk are tunes i remember. A crowd would gather around them. It was the first live music I heard that was mine, by people my own age, not chosen or played by someone else. Richard Valenzuela became Richie Valens a year later and returned to the school to perform a year after his transformation, the prodigal homebody made good, and was dead yet in less than year after that. I have always wondered what happened to Ortilio Perez.
On January 31 1957, at around 10 in the morning an airplane, a DC-6 four engined airliner on a test flight, collided in mid-air with a fighter plane over the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. The fighter crashed near my old house in Sun Valley, and the airliner landed on the church next to the gym field where I and my second period gym class were waiting for our report cards. The world was full of fire and metal tinsel glinting in the winter morning sun, and things were never the same.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.