“We interrupt this program to bring you this important news bulletin, ‘The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor by air, the White House announces!’”

The world war that followed was not a faraway event. It became ever present here in Southern California, and even in the lives of those of us too young to serve in it.

Practice air raids almost immediately became common in Los Angeles. Sirens announced that homeowners should shut off house lights. Mother rapidly put up heavy black curtains to cover the windows. Helmeted air raid wardens wearing armbands walked down the middle of our street checking that no interior house lights were visible to them.

A December 11 front page story in the Los Angeles Times headlined “City’s Black-Out Called Success” reported that a “gigantic black-out covering the area from Bakersfield south to San Diego” had gone into effect after 8 p.m. “A yellow signal indicating the approach of enemy planes was flashed on the state-wide police teletype.” At Ft. Macarthur, anti-aircraft gunners scrambled to their weapons and the Army reported sending up its own planes to investigate.

To help “the war effort” citizens collected and turned in old automobile tires, metal pieces, inner tubes, scrap metal, cans of cooking grease, newspapers, and the little sheets of aluminum that served as wrappers for chewing gum. We turned in baseball-sized collections of the shiny metal.

Ration books were issued with coupons that allowed us to buy scarce items like shoes, sugar, meat, and gasoline. Mother invariably traded our meat and sugar allotments for additional shoe coupons, since she had many growing children. In the corner of automobile windshields, drivers displayed decals with A, B, and C printed on them. The decals represented how much gasoline one could purchase in a given time. We didn’t own a car so gasoline was no problem for us.

After 1941, the skies above Los Angeles filled with planes. We learned to identify the B-17 Flying Fortress, a bomber, from its regular flights. My favorite airplane was the twin fuselaged P-38 fighter that Lockheed Aircraft produced in nearby Burbank. Northrup Aircraft and Douglas also built planes in our area. Production of civilian automobiles ceased in 1943 to devote resources to the manufacture of airplanes, tanks, ships, jeeps, trucks, and other weapons of war.

Listening post and air raid lights positioned in Pershing Square, Los Angeles, 1941.

Popular songs evoked the war directly: “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” and “Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer.” Sentimental songs about loss and loneliness were popular: “I’ll Walk Alone,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me)” among many others. Movies with names like Back to Bataan, A Walk in the Sun, Guadalcanal Diary, Battleground were popular, but not with me. I must have known that they were largely fiction and stayed away.

The war gave children, especially boys, a new vocabulary: Blitzkrieg, Stukas, Zeros, Panzers, Spitfires, the RAF, battleships, aircraft carriers, the Maginot and Siegfried lines—concrete defenses that protected neither France nor Germany.

I listened to radio reports of the war with my father but got only a scattered idea of what was happening. Names like Dunkirk, Iwo Jima, Wake Island, Stalingrad, Midway, meant little to me. I needed to visualize the war so I got into the habit of going downtown to the Tower Theater that showed hours of newsreel war footage. Still, radio voices like those of William L. Shirer, broadcasting from Berlin, and Edward R. Murrow, broadcasting from London, along with his CBS colleagues Charles Collingwood, Richard C. Hottelet, and Larry Lesueur all became very familiar to me.

Wartime was a somber time. Some neighborhood front windows began to exhibit decorative pieces of satiny cloth with gold tassels and stars. Gold Stars were awarded to families that had lost a relative. A distant cousin named Luis Acosta served in the Navy in the Pacific, where he drove landing craft that transported soldiers and Marines to the coasts of enemy-held islands. When I asked him what combat felt like he answered, “I was lucky. I drove the LCI back to the ship. The guys who disembarked had no choice but to stay and fight.”

At certain times, the war receded from constant attention, though I knew it was there and wondered at times if it would ever end. I worked after school and summers, beginning at age nine, and knew my earnings would help the family. I worked in a little grocery store for a German immigrant named Fischer, in a furniture finishing shop, in a bakery that made fruit tarts, and in a print shop.

The front page of the Los Angeles Times, Aug. 7, 1945.

My father and mother both worked, he as a glazier and she in the garment industry in downtown Los Angeles. Father worked all through the Depression and the war. Despite their joint efforts there was never enough money for our growing family. Wartime was more difficult for us than the Depression had been.

I also sold newspapers, a chore my brother Raul did with me at the intersection of Slauson Avenue and Main Street. As I stood on my corner, I made it a practice to read headlines and bits of the front pages of several papers. One item I recall reading was of the raid that General Doolittle led to bomb Tokyo on April 18, 1942. Sixteen B-25 medium bombers made the raid. I learned that Doolittle had graduated from nearby Manual Arts High School.

I worked later at a liquor store located near the corner of Vernon Avenue and Wall Street. Times were getting better if one judged them by the number of bottles of liquor we sold. That would be 1944 or so. The owner discovered a clever stratagem. If a customer wanted to purchase a case of high-quality bourbon or Scotch, he also had to buy a case of sloe gin or apricot brandy, liquor that had sat in the back storeroom for years.

As workers flocked into Southern California to work in defense plants, housing—particularly for large families—became difficult, if not impossible to find. The year 1944 found us living in places that made me feel ashamed. One day in November when I was home alone, two men dressed in business suits came to the door. They said that they were from a charitable agency and had come to give us a turkey. I must have blushed at the sudden realization that strangers knew of our plight and considered us poor. I told them that we did not need a turkey and closed the door.

(Despite the low points the family reached in those years, in 1948 mother managed to save enough money to purchase a home at 76th and Hooper. In time she was able to buy a very nice house in Alhambra.)

When I heard the news of the surrender of Japan on the radio after the two atomic bombings, I was alone at home and went out onto the street, feeling the need to be near other people. Little groups were gathered there to celebrate the end of the Second World War.

I was 15 at the war’s end, and, with one exception, had never met anyone who had seen combat. That changed when, at age 20, I began working at the U.S. Post Office, Terminal Annex Station. There I worked with several veterans. One was Gus Oelrich, a chain-smoking native of Cleveland who was forever ribbing me about how Los Angeles had stolen football’s Rams from his hometown. Gus was a paratrooper and veteran of the 82nd Airborne that had preceded the sea invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944.

Bernard Rensky was a solid fireplug of a man who fought in Germany. He liked to tell the story of an experience he had there in the waning days of the war. Tramping along a road one day he heard sounds in the trees above him. He looked up and saw a German soldier whom he motioned to descend. Rensky saw immediately that the soldier was a mere boy. Rensky paused until I asked him what he did then. “I shot him,” was his reply.

Leo Strauss was a large man who worked part time as a test pilot for Northrup Aircraft. In 1939 after deciding that he wanted to fight the Germans, Leo went to Canada and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. His wish was fulfilled and he saw combat. When the United States entered the war, Leo flew fighter planes for the Army Air Corps. When I worked with him, Leo was always dead tired and often fell asleep on his feet.

I held those men in awe. I still do.

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Up until about six months ago, Bob Baker—who’s 90—performed his signature act for my tour groups. It featured a special marionette he made in 1939 of tap dancer Bill Robinson.

Since 1961, people have been coming to the theater on the outskirts of downtown L.A. to be entertained by Bob Baker’s one-of-a-kind marionettes. Sometimes they visited as children and then return as adults with their kids or even grandkids.

When a fund was set up recently to raise money for Bob Baker’s in-home hospice care, there was an outpouring of love for him and comments about the joy and magic he brought to so many people.

When I first visited the Bob Baker Marionette Theater in 1999, I was completely swept away by everything about the place. The building doesn’t look like much from the outside as you pass it on Glendale Boulevard. The years have unraveled some of its original whimsy. But once you step inside, you enter a time warp.

The theater is so honest and unpretentious. On my first visit I noticed the beautiful and well-worn red velvet curtain and the handmade decorations hanging next to light fixtures made from coffee cans. Then the show began and I was even more awestruck by the marionettes themselves. They had so much character and were so beautifully dressed. Watching them move across the stage right in front of me, they almost seemed like they were alive. Each one is a work of art and has been performing for decades.

When I finally had the privilege to meet Bob, I had so many questions and he was happy to answer them. I was so impressed by his photographic memory of growing up in Midtown Los Angeles.

This is a man who found his life’s work at age 6 and began performing professionally at 8! He told me his first puppet came from Bullocks Wilshire, where he learned puppeteering from the woman who ran the puppet department. By the time he was 19 in 1943, he was manufacturing and selling his marionettes to the finest toy stores in the United States.

Not only is Bob a master puppeteer—he is a master puppet maker. One of his experienced puppeteers once told me that working a Bob Baker marionette must be what it feels like to play a Stradivarius, referring to their craftsmanship and how well they move.

Bob Baker’s marionettes were even sold on Main Street USA at Disneyland. Bob told me he made a handshake deal with Walt Disney in 1955 to produce a line of Disney character marionettes. Up until about 10 years ago, you could buy a Bob Baker original at the theme park.

His marionettes also appeared in many television shows, from Bewitched to Star Trek, and movies, from GI Blues with Elvis Presley to A Star is Born with Judy Garland. In the early part of his career, he provided entertainment for children’s parties at the homes of Hollywood stars like Lucille Ball, Joan Crawford, and Ronald Reagan.

Once I got to know Bob, I asked if we could put on a big retrospective show. My goal was to feature more of his puppets than any show he’d ever created. In 2005, we produced Bob Baker This is Your Life. I presented film clips and slides that told the story of Bob’s life and theater. The puppet show was an extravaganza and featured more than 200 marionettes, including many of my favorites: the flying purple people eater; the fly-apart, glow-in-the-dark skeletons; the dancing dodo birds dressed as 1920s flappers; and the enormous ostrich that lays an egg, which hatches a baby bird that stumbles across the stage. Just like every show at Bob’s theater, the performance was followed by cake and ice cream in the colorful party room.

Bob’s work has touched so many lives. Since he opened the theater in 1961 with his late business partner Alton Wood, there has been a performance almost every day. He and his troupe of puppeteers have also performed at countless fairs, festivals, pageants, parades, and parties.

The Bob Baker Marionette Theater has survived against all odds for more than 50 years. But nothing lasts forever. A developer who purchased the theater last year is now threatening to build an apartment complex on the site. But for now, and for as long as I can, I will continue to thrill my tour groups by bringing them to the Fantasyland that is Bob Baker’s Marionette Theater.

The post The Man Who Brought Flying Purple People Eaters to Life appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In its two decades as a touchstone of American culture, the Simpson case has been an enduring platform for shamelessness and hypothetical thinking—the most notorious example being O.J.’s 2006 confessional, If I Did It. In that tome, Simpson “imagined” how he might have brutally killed his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

So here’s another hypothetical: Let’s imagine that Al Cowlings—known as A.C.—hadn’t been there to take his friend (they were football teammates from high school in San Francisco through the pros) into his white Bronco. Let’s imagine that A.C. hadn’t driven O.J. safely and slowly (35 mph on the freeway) before helping him surrender to police. Let’s imagine that A.C. had failed to convince O.J. not to pull the trigger of the gun he reportedly held to his head during the drive.

Let’s say that O.J. Simpson had not survived that day, and that the Simpson case had ended before it began. Let’s say there were no criminal charges against O.J. Simpson, no trial, no acquittal, no subsequent civil trial (where Simpson was found liable for the deaths), and none of the cultural conversation and media spectacle and social reflection the case inspired.

Without Al Cowlings, where would any of us be today?

At the time, commentators from left to right saw the Simpson case as one more sign—along with the riots two years earlier, the early ’90s recession, Proposition 187, and the Northridge earthquake—that L.A was falling apart and could not be redeemed. The country was supposedly in trouble, too. Depending on what you read, Simpson’s trial represented the crackup of the news media, the collapse of the criminal justice system, the beginning of a race war, and the end of public trust in government.

I say that the Simpson case, despite the horrific crime at its heart and the cultural traumas and legal blunders that defined it, left L.A. and California and the United States in a better place.

Would the Innocence Project and its work using DNA evidence to exonerate the wrongfully convicted have become so prominent without the Simpson case, which made its co-director, O.J. defense team member Barry Scheck, a household name?

Would we have seen the surge of interest in forensic science—both legally (heightened courtroom scrutiny of problems with evidence-gathering and fingerprinting) and culturally (CSI and its spin-offs and imitators)?

Would the country and California have made so much progress in combating domestic violence—in new laws and new infrastructure to protect women—without the revelations of O.J.’s battering of his ex-wife? How many lives were saved as a result?

What would policing be like without the Simpson case? Before Al Cowlings’ Ford Bronco drive, the LAPD (and too many of the nation’s other major police departments) was a mostly white preserve that tolerated racism from people like Detective Mark Fuhrman. Can we credit the Simpson case—along with the 1992 riots and a later scandal in the Rampart division—with forcing the LAPD to better represent the city? In exposing the department’s failings, did the Simpson case contribute to greater oversight and created a more effective, better educated, and more diverse police force in which whites are no longer a majority?

The Simpson case—and the disparate public response it provoked along racial and class lines—also made apparent, especially to older whites, how divided L.A., and the country, were. Today, divides of race and class remain a fact of life in L.A., but Angelenos have become far more willing to undertake major investments to bridge those divides. The Los Angeles Unified School District has spent billions to build dozens of new schools, and remake old ones, including a middle school named for the late Simpson lead attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. In 2008, county voters agreed to tax themselves for 30 years to build a new system of transit, with rail lines and new roads that better connect the various parts of L.A. to one another. (Today, if A.C. wanted to spirit O.J. away, he could use carpool lanes on the freeways, and the cops might not have had to close things down completely to give chase.)

But many of the case’s most far-reaching impacts—for better and for worse—have been to our culture, which has become undeniably more populist in the past two decades. Without the Simpson case, would we ever have had the chance to keep up with the first family of American pop culture, the Kardashians? Robert Kardashian—father of Kim, Kourtney, Khloe, and Robert—made the name famous as one of Simpson’s attorneys. Would we ever have had the Southern California economy of reality TV shows, magazines, and paparazzi that attend to the Kardashians and their ilk, 24-7? Without Al Cowlings, would Kim Kardashian ever have met Kanye West, and produced North West, the world-famous baby?

Would California’s most aggressive and successful news organization—TMZ—exist today without the Simpson case, which raised the profile of its founder, the legal journalist Harvey Levin? (And without TMZ and its exposure of the racist tapes of Donald Sterling, what would people in L.A. have had to talk about for the last month?)

How might California political history be different without the blunders of prosecutors working for L.A. District Attorney Gil Garcetti? Might Garcetti—who would later lose more support because of his handling of the Rampart scandal—have gone onto higher political office instead of being voted out after two terms? Without Al Cowlings, would the Garcetti family’s political ambitions have turned so quickly to Gil’s son, Eric?

Unlike so many others in the Simpson drama, Al Cowlings, who brought us together with his driving 20 years ago, has stayed out of the limelight. And he was never properly thanked for his service. Hopefully, it’s not too late. Why not locate and buy the white Ford Bronco and place it in Grand Park? And why not present A.C. with the key to the city where his actions opened so many doors?

How ’bout it, Mayor Eric Garcetti?

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Los Angeles’ Union Station opened on May 3, 1939 and turns 75 this year. It’s now the subject of a new exhibition organized by the Getty, which has a Union Station archive of architectural drawings and sketches. If you go to the exhibition, which is hosted at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library, you’ll also see treasures from the Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens and the Automobile Club of Southern California.

Like L.A. itself, Union Station is a cultural hybrid, sporting a unique blend of Mission Revival, Southwest, Spanish, and Art Deco styles. It took nearly seven years to plan and build—and you can see all that time in the details of the station.

Since our station is still used, much of these details go unnoticed. I’m guilty of dashing through the South Patio without stopping to smell the roses (many are in bloom this time of year!). But perhaps we forget the architectural herald of Union Station because it seems so timeless—it’s simply part of the Los Angeles aesthetic.

Here are 10 details you won’t want to miss next time you’re running to catch your train.

No Further West: The Story of Los Angeles Union Station is on view at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library, May 2–August 10, 2014.

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But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t hurt. Earthquakes only last a few seconds but can cause damage that will never be fully repaired.

It was before dawn when the shaking started. Within seconds, my wife, my two young kids, and I were huddling under the hallway doorframe in our upstairs apartment in West Los Angeles. Furniture skidded across the floor and dishes crashed in the kitchen as we waited for the shaking to stop. There was nothing to do but hope that the ceilings and walls would hold up.

They did. And we carried our 3-year-old boy and 6-month-old girl down the outside stairs, side-stepping the splattered ceramic tiles that had fallen from the apartment building’s roof.

On the street, we conferred and commiserated with our neighbors, including the couple next door whose car top was crushed by our dislodged chimney. The quake’s epicenter had been 25 miles away, in the north-central San Fernando Valley, but our block had been rocked by the seismic wave, and, just a mile southeast of us, a Santa Monica Freeway bridge had collapsed at La Cienega Boulevard.

At that moment, we thought that we, and everyone in our immediate area, were OK. It was reassuring that nearby buildings and utility lines were still standing. But we also could hear a hissing sound from across the street—a suspected gas leak that the L.A. Fire Department would check on later that morning.

At first glance, we had escaped. Upon closer inspection, we hadn’t. When we went back upstairs a few hours later to straighten up the apartment, we discovered that the living room floor had been separated six inches from the wall. There were cracks in the walls of most of the rooms. The apartment itself appeared to be tilting. Back outside again, we noticed that one side of the building seemed to be bulging or swelling. Something was wrong.

For seven years, we had been renting this second-floor apartment in a charming and affordable 1930s “Spanish-style” duplex on Sherbourne Drive in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood. But after the quake, it would no longer be home. Soon, our building and (if memory serves) three others within 100 yards became officially uninhabitable, “red tagged” by government inspectors.

My family was “dislocated.” Several weeks after the quake, FEMA sent a $2,700 relocation stipend.

For the first few days, we stayed with relatives. Then we managed—through a friend—to land a new rental. It was a house in nearby, upscale Beverlywood, an “off-the-grid” curvy, hilly neighborhood of single-family properties with back window views of Century City and downtown. The house was for sale and the realtor wanted people living there until the market settled.

Getting our stuff to the new place was harrowing. With no time to organize, we packed and carried boxes downstairs to the truck. Two strong young guys, dispatched by the moving company, helped us pull small appliances off the shelves, clothes from the closet, bathroom supplies from the cabinets. It felt like an evacuation.

All that day, aftershocks rattled the building and my nerves. There would be more than 11,000 Northridge earthquake aftershocks in 1994, more than 400 of them palpable. Work began quickly on both residential and commercial buildings. Heroic, round-the-clock efforts repaired the Santa Monica Freeway bridge in 74 days.

Infrastructure can be fixed. Human beings are more difficult to repair. Though the region was healing, my family faced uncertainty and insecurity. We were comfortable enough in the Beverlywood house but knew it was transitional. That wasn’t all. Our income was down, since all the chaos and moving had made it hard to concentrate on building our businesses (mine as a union-side labor relations consultant, hers as a clinical psychologist). And we were ringing up debt paying for—among other things—additional rent, daycare, and help at home with the kids.

A couple months after the quake, the house we were renting was sold, and we were forced to move again. My wife and I argued about what to do. Could we afford to rent a house or should we scale back and settle for another apartment? This time, we spent days looking for a place before finding a single-family, three-bedroom home on a large lot in Mar Vista (west of Sawtelle, north of Venice). The second move was less frantic than the first, but still costly and exhausting.

The earthquake had messed with our lives and our relationship. Not that everything—including our marriage—had been fine before. At the time, we seemed to be managing, but in retrospect, there was disruption, chaos, and stress. Despite couples counseling and other remediation, we never quite recovered.

Could our marriage have lasted if not for the conflicts triggered by the quake? There is no way to know. The earthquake exposed cracks and fissures in us. We separated less than two years later.

Memory is selective, particularly when reconstructing a narrative or ranking the pivotal events of one’s life. No matter how I cut it, the Northridge earthquake always ends up near the top of my list.

The post The Northridge Earthquake Rattled My Marriage appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This idea of floral origins for Hollywood is romantic. It’s also not true. Hollywood got its name for a much more mundane reason: someone wealthy liked the sound of it.

In 1886, Harvey Henderson Wilcox, a rich prohibitionist from Kansas, and his wife, Daeida, purchased 120 acres of apricot and fig groves near the Cahuenga Pass at $150 an acre. Harvey, an inveterate businessman, realized he could make a lot of money by subdividing the land and selling the lots for $1,000 a pop. And so the Wilcox subdivision, as Hollywood was then known, was born.

A year later, on a train journey back to Ohio, Daeida Wilcox befriended a fellow wealthy traveler who just happened to own a fine estate in Illinois. Its name was Hollywood. The story goes that Daeida was so taken with the name that upon her return to California she encouraged Harvey to apply the name to their property. On February 1, 1887, the name was immortalized when Harvey filed a subdivision map to the Los Angeles County recorder’s office with the name “Hollywood.”

But long before Daeida’s chance encounter and the installation of an enormous “Hollywoodland” sign, toyon was growing in the Hollywood Hills. These shrubs and the brilliant red berries that adorn them have been growing in Southern California for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. We’re not quite sure how far back they go: Scientists at the Natural History Museum, where I work, haven’t found any in the La Brea Tar Pits yet, so it seems they’ve been here less than 10,000 years.

Before the Europeans showed up, the indigenous peoples of the area used toyon for food, medicine, and tools. Making use of a plant isn’t unusual, but this plant’s name is. According to California Native Plants for the Garden (co-authored by the Natural History Museum’s director of the nature gardens, Carol Bornstein), “Toyon is the only California native plant that continues to be commonly known by a Native American name.” Toyon was the name given by the Ohlone people, and it stuck.

Two years ago, we planted about 25 toyon in the Natural History Museum’s new Nature Gardens. Toyon are a mid-sized shrub in the rose family and can grow up to 20 feet; ours are now standing tall at a stately 10 feet. We knew they would fill in the garden pretty quickly and provide great cover for many birds, mammals, and insects we wanted to attract.

In early summer their showy white flowers are magnets for native pollinators, which help to produce the bright red fruits that catch our attention at this time of year. If you cut open a berry—more technically known as a pome—the inside looks a lot like the core of an apple, and birds love them. Last year a large flock of cedar waxwings, Bombycilla cedrorum, descended on our mini toyon grove. One of our gardeners noted that it only took these birds a matter of two weeks to clear out every last morsel.

Thankfully, there’s plenty of toyon to go around: The shrub ranges all the way south into Baja California and north into the Sierra Nevada.

To Angelenos of the early 1900s, Toyon was better known as California holly. The shrub closely resembles another winter evergreen, European holly, Ilex aquifolium. Both have green leathery leaves with spiky edges and bright red berries that fruit in winter, and consequently were used to adorn people’s homes as yuletide decorations. Lore has it that over-harvesting of the berries in the early 1900s led to a California state law outlawing the gathering toyon on public lands. I couldn’t find any evidence for this, but the story is repeated in many places, including on Wikipedia’s toyon entry.

Is California holly our state’s most apocryphal plant? Perhaps. In 2012, it also earned the distinction of being named L.A.’s official native plant by the City Council. But we remain lucky that it ultimately wasn’t a neighborhood namesake. Can you imagine a huge sign over our city that reads TOYONWOOD? No, neither can I.

Toyon and the Hollywoodland sign

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My status at UCLA was precarious in a different way. Mother was the only breadwinner in the family, which included six minor children, a fact that weighed heavily on me, her eldest. Getting from south Los Angeles to Westwood and back also meant that I spent four hours every day riding streetcars and buses. To make matters worse, I was majoring in engineering and realizing that I had chosen the wrong field of study. I did not enjoy lugging surveyors’ instruments around open fields near campus or struggling with calculus. I dropped out on December 2, 1948. The only acknowledgement of my departure came from the Army major in charge of my R.O.T.C. unit when I turned in my uniform and rifle. Why, he asked, was I withdrawing? “Family financial difficulties,” I answered. He gave me a sympathetic look of disappointment.

How did I react to dropping out? I felt only a sense of relief. I gave no thought to the future. I had to attend to the present and look for work.

I found a job in the mail order department at the Sears, Roebuck located at Olympic and Soto. Then, encouraged by postal clerks we worked closely with, I landed a job at the U.S. Post Office at the Terminal Annex just north of Union Station. In 1951, I got drafted into the Army and took a leave of absence from the post office. My postal experience proved crucial in the Army’s assigning me to a postal unit in Alaska rather than sending me to Korea, where war was raging.

Despite my initial relief over leaving school and helping my family, I’d also been unhappy about it. When I was discharged from the Army in May 1953, I applied for—and was granted—readmission to UCLA. I also returned to the post office, which allowed me as a veteran to set my own work schedule while I attended school. The G.I. Bill paid veterans a small monthly stipend but not enough to allow me to help Mother, so I decided to work while getting a university education, an arrangement that was not unique at the time. UCLA’s tuition of $75 per semester helped make our goal achievable.

One difficulty was deciding on a major, and I didn’t know anyone who had attended college whom I might ask for guidance. Eventually, I wound up going in a direction I hadn’t expected. Until I was 5, I spoke only Spanish. My brother Raul was also raised speaking Spanish. (Although our U.S.-born father was bilingual, our parents spoke Spanish with one another.) But Raul was hospitalized once and unable to communicate with hospital staff. A nurse then spoke to Mother about the importance of teaching children English. After that, English predominated in our home. Only shards and fragments of Spanish remained in my head. This caused me considerable frustration, because with any attempt to speak Spanish I committed errors that made me a target of scorn and laughter among native speakers. I decided to major in Spanish.

In the first few minutes of my first Spanish class Professor Donald Fogelquist called me to his desk. “What are you doing here?” he asked bluntly. His assumption was that I spoke Spanish and had enrolled in his class in quest of an easy grade. I apprised him of my situation and later took several advanced classes with him. Despite his initial brusqueness, I came to enjoy his quiet, dignified manner and dry sense of humor. In my customary seat in the back row I often struggled to contain my laughter at his witticisms.

I was five years older than most of my classmates. Veterans were common in the colleges and universities of the era, and younger students referred to us as DARS—damned average raisers. We DARS were serious about our studies and willing to study hard. I had no time to waste.

For the next several years I took courses on Spanish grammar, linguistics, and phonetics, and on the history, civilization, and literature of Spain, Mexico, and Latin America. In time, I recovered my first language.

Seeking as broad an education as possible, I chose a social studies minor and studied psychology, anthropology, geography, history, sociology, and political science as well as mathematics and philosophy. There were times as I sat in class when I experienced a physical thrill from learning, as when professor of anthropology Joseph Birdsell lectured on DNA, still in the early stages of study. Years later, thanks to that class, I read with pleasure The Double Helix. Education does not end with the acquisition of a college degree.

The teacher of my English Composition class was a young English woman named Loftus. She graded my first essays as Cs, which caused me a crisis of confidence. I believed—I knew—that I wrote better than that and told her of my concern. She was noncommittal but advised that I continue to work hard. The following week she gave our class a vocabulary test, and my score was well above the others’. That was her way of ascertaining that I had written my own essays. My subsequent compositions received As, and on the grade card she mailed me at semester’s end she wrote, in pencil, and in a pale, delicate handwriting, “You have done some very nice work. Keep up with your writing. L.”

I got caught up in a daily routine: driving to Westwood to attend classes, parking my 1950 Ford at the corner of Sunset and Hilgard (when it rained, the dirt became mud that students maneuvered out of with the aid of wooden planks), and then, after class, following Sunset Boulevard all the way to the Terminal Annex. During weekends and holidays, particularly the Christmas season, when the mail was heavy, I often worked 10 hours or more.

When final examinations began, I cut down on work and spent many hours in the bowels of the library in a cubicle designed for individual study. Fortunately, I enjoyed it.

Between classes I occasionally went to the student lounge in Kirchhoff Hall to relax in its magnificent leather chairs and sofas. On the black-and-white television set there I watched Don Larsen pitch a perfect game in the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

In early 1956 the department head, Dr. Anna Kraus, called me to her office to inform me that the Spanish department had chosen to submit my name to the University as its candidate to study for a year at Oxford University. I was grateful but declined the offer. I was getting married that summer.

I graduated, with honors, in January 1957, after three and a half years of study and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa “in recognition of high attainments in liberal scholarship.” When I got to work that afternoon I was so elated that, losing all trace of modesty, I told everyone I ran into, whether I knew him or not, about my accomplishment. The next day I was back to normal.

That month I resigned from the post office.

I wound up staying at UCLA, because Professors Fogelquist and M.A. Zeitlin each asked independently if I would like to be a graduate assistant and teach beginning Spanish. The idea was that I would teach two semesters while taking courses toward a teaching credential and a master’s degree. I was surprised and honored, and I accepted. I was now called Mister, and my work uniform was a suit and a tie.

I taught my classes in Royce Hall, the beautiful Romanesque building that is the symbol of the University. The supervising professor visited my class early in the semester, and I was apprehensive about being observed. At the end of the class, as my students filed out of the classroom, one of them, Charlotte Bass, said in a loud voice to no one in particular, “We weren’t very good today, were we?” She was being protective of me.

In 1958, having earned my master’s degree and teaching credential, I began teaching full-time, at Huntington Park High School in the L.A. Unified School District.

In 1961, to explore another career possibility, I enrolled in Loyola Law School and attended night classes at its downtown L.A campus for four years while teaching my high school classes during the day. I passed the bar examination, but after practicing for a few years I found that I preferred teaching. So I took a competitive examination for a position at the community college level and was hired. Thereafter, I taught Spanish in the daytime and law in the evening.

In one of my final teaching years I received a note from a former student who
was a secretary working her way through college. She wrote:

Mr. Rodriguez, I want to thank you for something. I don’t know if you remember telling me one day that I should go to a better university—you mentioned UCLA, Harvard, etc. I was never able to get that comment out of my mind—so after graduation I went to USC and applied. I was accepted and received a full scholarship—and I love it there. I feel I owe it to you—I don’t think I would have tried, because it’s hard to evaluate oneself sometimes as deserving something better. I can’t thank you enough. Sincerely, Nancy Dalton.

Throughout my life many people held out helping hands to me. It was only fitting that I follow their example.

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