It was one unit within a 1-square-mile section of apartments informally called “The Jungle.” The area included apartment buildings with whimsical names like Coco Capri and The Islander and boasted swimming pools, large living spaces, courtyards with palm trees and birds of paradise. There were scenic views of the Santa Monica Mountains, the glimmering Hollywood sign, the white dome of Griffith Observatory, and the homes perched atop Baldwin Hills.

I was 7 years old then and didn’t notice the shady goings-on in the alley beneath my bedroom window. Nor did I really care about the thwap-thwap-thwapping coming from that helicopter that circled over our neighborhood. I had other things to do: playing with a new baby brother, watching the Family Film Festival on KTLA, and gobbling canisters of these new things called Pringles.

But by 1982, I was in seventh grade, and had developed angst and the ambition to be a writer. I wrote in my journal every night, and began to see my parents, to see me, and also, note my surroundings.

The police helicopter was looking for someone and we didn’t hardly hear the television. (My journal, August 1982)

I started visiting the homes of church friends. I noted the differences between our apartment living and their more comfortable house living. Lawns. Washers and dryers in laundry rooms in the house. Driveways. Someone mentioned that Ray Charles lived in one of those houses up the hill from mine and … Huh? Those giant things were houses …? One family lived in …? And Ray Charles? The singer? Ray Charles is black. You mean black people, one family of black people, lived in those giant houses way up on that hill …?

Pop-pop-pop. Somebody shooting again. Crawl over to the television or the stereo, twist the knob until the sounds of Dance Fever or Earth, Wind & Fire overtook the noise of angry men in the twisty, dead-end streets below us.

But then, nothing—not Deney Terio, not Philip Bailey—competed with the ghetto birds. Helicopters, lots of them, often pulled my gaze away from those houses. Cops in the sky. Almost always at night, the police helicopters roared by with bright lights that ripped through bedroom curtains and past the squeezed-shut eyelids of men, women, and children. And they’d come so low, I imagined feeling the chop of the blades against my numb cheeks. My stomach vibrated with the rumbling, and my heart skipped and I forgot to breathe as sirens wailed so loud and so close and swirling blue and red lights reflected off my bedroom’s yellow and green floral wallpaper and I prayed for it to be over.

And it was over … until pop-pop-pop or a woman screamed or glass broke in the darkness. In the early ’80s, the breaks between quiet and violence shortened as more young men began to hang around the neighborhood—they lounged on car hoods, blocked the sidewalks, and huddled on the balconies of the front units. We walked quicker now from our car to our apartment. My siblings and I no longer met the eyes of kids we weren’t allowed to play with. And then, the owner of our apartment complex erected wrought-iron security gates. Drugs and gangs—and the Los Angeles Police Department—had finally hijacked Santo Tomas Drive.

Today at the Crenshaw Shopping Center a man got robbed for $100,000. I got a blue denim mini skirt and a plaid shirt that buttons to the sides. See ya! (My journal, September 1982)

I only got asked once in my life if I was a gang member. A girl at junior high school asked: “Where you from? What set you claim?” I gawked at the question because did she not see me? Did I look like I was a Blood or a Crip? Thirteen years old, wearing thick glasses, rummage-sale green Chemin de Fer jeans, and a plaid shirt that buttoned on the side. Honor roll student but bad at math. Played hand-bells at church. Had a crush on Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. But she asked. And I told her that I didn’t claim anything. She believed me and didn’t hurt me.

Unlike the countless boys and men in the Jungle who got hurt, or worse. Every week, I heard tales of so-and-so was shot, or so-and-so was jumped. Bullets peppered concrete and tree trunks. Gunshots became birdsong. The nuts who lived in the apartment beneath us shot at each other every other new moon. What the hell?

I started looking up at those houses on the hill more and more. Did those people, the ones who looked like me, have their sleep interrupted by police helicopters, gang noise, and domestic drama that spilled into courtyards and alleys? Did the kids in those neighborhoods play with each other? Did their birds of paradise look ashy like ours? And how did you get to live in houses like that anyway?

We drove up there sometimes—my mom’s best friend lived in an apartment in Baldwin Hills. Black people watered those lawns and painted eaves, washed nice cars, smiled and waved at each other as they walked dogs. Smelled like fresh grass up there, honeysuckle and barbecue smoke. So quiet. So … clean. Mom and Dad deserve to live up here, I thought. They worked hard. And our apartment was clean. We got good grades. We went to church every Saturday. I was no different from my friends LeToia and Gigi and all the rest. Sure, their parents had suffixes and prefixes before and after their names. And they wore Gunne Sax dresses to church, and went on vacations that required climbing aboard airplanes.

What was my family not doing that kept us from being up on that hill?

I wanted up that hill. Not because I was ashamed (although high school is a time in every child’s life, no matter their socio-economics, that they are ashamed of something). No. I wanted up that hill because of the order that hill promised. I was, and continue to be, a child of order.

… the helicopter woke me up this morning. (My journal, September 1982)

My family moved out of the Jungle in 1985—I was 15 and my sister was 13, and we had started to attract the attention of neighborhood thugs. At 7, my little brother was still too young and too protected to be “jumped in” by gangs, and my older brother had graduated from college. Mom and Dad had successfully shielded us—but for how long? Gang violence and police abuse had worsened, and the apartment complex’s security gate door no longer locked.

For three years, we lived in a pistachio-green house off Central Avenue, a neighborhood of taquerias, chickens roaming the block, Iglesias Pentacostales. Then, in 1989, Dad landed a great promotion, and like Weezy and George Jefferson, our family moved into a deluxe apartment (well, not deluxe but the nicest place we’d lived) in drama-free and relatively safe downtown Los Angeles.

My last April at UC Santa Cruz, I watched televised coverage of my former neighbors looting and fighting. Watched palm tree fronds catch fire. Watched the National Guard setting up sandbags in the parking lot of the Sports Arena. Awed, I could only shake my head and hope for the best.

“The best” has happened in some ways: gang injunctions and better community policing. Slumlords have been forced to improve living conditions in those apartments between Crenshaw and La Brea. Businesses like Cinemark Theaters and Sears bring money into the area. A fancy meal at Post and Beam makes you forget, for a moment, the still-abandoned Santa Barbara Plaza across the street. Crenshaw Boulevard will get its own Metro rail line. And the city of Los Angeles now refers to “The Jungle” as “Baldwin Village.” There’s even an official blue sign just like those hanging in Los Feliz and Silver Lake.

For several years now, rumors that “They” (an always amorphous group that includes business leaders, politicians, and the Yeti) will tear down the Jungle have drifted around. Parts of me say that’s cool, because too much craziness happens there. Equal parts of me worry—the parts that remember being a member of the tribe of “Those People” (the ones in Those Apartments).

We weren’t all thugs, felons, and addicts. We were teachers, warehouse workers, gardeners, administrative assistants, taxpayers, and voters … on a budget. And today, the economics of that area have worsened—the median household income is $36,500, with almost a third of families living at poverty level. And both black and Latino gangs continue to survive despite injunctions. So tear down the Jungle and then what? Those residents who don’t gangbang, who work hard, who obey the laws, would move where?

Today, I still live in Los Angeles, specifically, in Windsor Hills, one of the wealthiest African-American areas in the country. I don’t live in one of those hillside homes that I grew up looking at, but I am just a mile away. My 10-year-old daughter is living the urban-suburban life I had always wondered about as a kid. Walking dogs on clean streets. Waving to neighbors you know by name. The smell of freshly cut grass and orange blossoms.

Alas, living in the city still means police helicopters and sirens sometimes waking us at 1:00 in the morning. But no one has asked my girl if she bangs. She knows crime because I write novels that feature an LAPD homicide detective. In my daughter’s world, people die because they are old or sick or their cars crashed or their planes fell from the sky. She knows that Mom grew up in the Jungle because we pass it nearly every day, and she sees that I always look over there, every single time, to glimpse my childhood home.

The post Growing Up in ‘The Jungle,’ I Wanted to Head for the Hills appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Twenty-six years ago Collins, a Rolling 60s gang member from South-Central Los Angeles, was strolling down Broxton Avenue in Westwood when he fired two shots at a rival Mansfield Hustler Crip. One shot missed the rival. The other shot killed a 27-year-old woman, Karen Toshima, a graphic artist out for the night celebrating a promotion. Toshima was window shopping with a friend when she was struck in the head by the stray bullet.

The head of the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP called the crime, at the time, a “watershed moment” for the city. But what that watershed moment represented depended on who you were and where you lived. To many on the Westside, the shooting highlighted, with a single errant bullet, that gang violence could not be contained within the borders of South and East Los Angeles and, ultimately, no one was safe. But to people in other parts of the city, the intense focus on the shooting demonstrated that a life in Westwood seemed to have more value than a life in other parts of Los Angeles. Two young people were being murdered almost every day in the county during the late 1980s because of gang violence, but few merited a line in the newspaper or a mention on local news. Over-burdened South-Central homicide detectives struggled with much heavier caseloads and less time to investigate murders than their counterparts on the Westside and the San Fernando Valley.

I was a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, based in placid Santa Barbara, when Toshima was killed in 1988. I didn’t pay much attention to the shooting at the time, but five years later when I returned to Los Angeles and began covering crime for the paper, I was surprised at how often residents of South Los Angeles brought up Karen Toshima’s murder as a glaring example of inequality.

This single murder on a January night precipitated massive media attention and police scrutiny. Thirty detectives were assigned to investigate the homicide, and police patrols in Westwood were tripled. A neighborhood merchant’s association offered a $10,000 reward, and City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky asked that the city post a $25,000 reward, but later withdrew his request after the angry response by those who saw this as part of the Westwood-South L.A. disparity.

A week and a half after the shooting, a “gang summit” was held where law enforcement officials from across the county met to devise a strategy for battling street gangs. They dubbed 1988 “The Year of the Gang.” Later that year, the city of Los Angeles hired 650 police officers and devoted more than $5 million of emergency funds to battle gangs. During the summer, then-Police Chief Darryl F. Gates launched a task force called “Operation Hammer” that was assigned to sweep through neighborhoods and target gang members and drug dealers for interrogation and arrest.

As the years have passed, writers have frequently contended that the Toshima shooting precipitated the end of Westwood. “With that that one fatal round, Westwood’s fall began,” according to a 2006 account in a Southern California magazine. This narrative is an oversimplification. In the years before the shooting, nighttime crowds and foot traffic had already declined rapidly in what had been a cynosure of the city’s nightlife, with more than a dozen movie theaters as well as tony restaurants and clubs and one of L.A.’s few pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, according to Juan Matute, associate director for UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. The Century City mall and Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, with their multiplex theaters, upscale shops, and plentiful parking, had begun siphoning patrons from Westwood. UCLA added stores and restaurants on campus and later, Old Pasadena, the Grove, and Universal CityWalk provided even more competition. The shooting did, however, “coalesce community concern,” Matute said, and led to regulations that made it difficult for Westwood clubs to obtain permits for live music and dancing. So many young people flocked to Hollywood instead.

What cannot be overstated, however, was how the shooting focused attention on the city’s gang problems and on how the Los Angeles Times, other Southern California newspapers, and local television stations covered crime. Sergio Robleto, a retired LAPD lieutenant, headed the department’s South Bureau Homicide during the years when there was more than a murder a day in his division. “The news media was jaded during this time,” he recalled. Before the shooting, “I’d get calls from reporters asking me, ‘Is this run-of- the-mill murder or is there anything different about it?’ They were getting desensitized. People viewed the south end murders different than murders in other parts of the city. It made you wonder what the value of a human life was … My detectives were overwhelmed and overworked. I was fighting for resources, and the LAPD didn’t seem to care, except for a few members of the command staff.”

Don Wanlass, managing editor of the Wave Newspaper Group, which circulates in South Los Angeles, Compton, and Inglewood, recalls how in the 1980s the rest of the city seemed blithely unaware that South Los Angeles was being inundated by violent crime. “The Toshima shooting woke people up,” he said. “It made them realize that gangbangers don’t just stay home and cause havoc in their own neighborhoods.”

More realizations would follow. Three years later, in March 1991, three officers repeatedly pounded motorist Rodney King with their aluminum batons—while their sergeant and a group of more than 20 other officers looked on. Two weeks after that, Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old African-American girl, was shot and killed in South-Central during a confrontation over whether she had paid for a bottle of orange juice. The Korean-born storekeeper who shot Harlins was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, but was given probation and served no jail time. The next year, the officers who had beaten King were acquitted by a jury in suburban Simi Valley, more than 30 miles from Los Angeles. Some contended that while the acquittal was the final fillip, the cumulative effect of the Toshima shooting and the other incidents, in addition to the stark economic conditions in some parts of Los Angeles, contributed to the rage that sparked the 1992 riots.

By then, people throughout the world knew about South-Central and the grief and grievances of its residents. The cost, however, was high. Almost $1 billion of property was destroyed, and 51 people died in the most deadly urban riot in the nation’s history.

The Toshima killing resonated with me when I covered crime because it was such a stark contrast to the other murders I was writing about. Occasionally, when I would arrive weeks after a homicide in South Central, I was often the first reporter to interview family members. They felt it was the ultimate sign of disrespect that nobody seemed to care. I decided to write a book about homicide in South Central—The Killing Season—and extensively cover every facet of the cases, paying close attention to the lives of the victims.

Hollywood is enthralled with murder stories, but most movies and television shows focus on titillating viewers with violence, and ignoring the victims and the suffering of the family members left behind. When I turned to crime fiction, I tried to ensure that no victim was slighted.

The post The Shooting That Didn’t Kill Westwood appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No Independence Day was more important than July 4, 1904, when the city held its very first Fourth of July parade. That day saw the arrival of the city’s very first electric passenger train. About 50,000 people were on hand for the event—far more than the population at the time. The train literally opened up Huntington Beach to the rest of Southern California, establishing a crucial link to the neighboring cities of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

This was also the moment that gave Huntington Beach its name. Originally called Pacific City, the area was rechristened in honor of Henry Huntington, who owned the trains. He deserved the honor. Huntington knew that a railway to Huntington Beach would not have enough riders to be consistently profitable, but he built one anyway, on the theory that those people who did take the ride would purchase property that he and others owned in the area. A visit to today’s Huntington Beach is all the evidence you need to know that Huntington was right.

In the 110 years since the railway’s arrival, Huntington Beach has acknowledged this anniversary by building up its Fourth of July parade into an essential Orange County tradition. Since the beginning, the parade has mixed the customs of small-town parades—tug-of-wars, beauty contests, airshows, eating contests, horse races—with more spectacular attractions. One unforgettable such special offering, in the 1930s, featured Fire Chief Bud Higgins, who wore a fire suit, slathered his face with petroleum jelly, covered his entire torso with alcohol and then lit himself on fire—all before diving from a 50-foot platform above the pier into the ocean. Talk about a showstopper.

For a half century, the train powered Huntington Beach year-round. In the 1940s, Los Angeles had more than 900 Red Cars that traveled over 1,100 miles throughout the Southland. In Huntington Beach, there was a big depot located right at Pacific Coast Highway and Main Street. Three lines came to Huntington Beach—the La Bolsa Line, the Santa/Huntington Beach line, and a line that connected to Seal Beach and Newport Beach—and the stops defined neighborhoods.

But by the early 1950s, the car took over Southern California, and the depot was little used. Later, it was torn down. The last Red Cars in L.A. stopped running in 1961.

Today in Huntington Beach, you’ll find remnants of train tracks on the beach, as well as a stretch of “right of ways” (the actual paths that the trains ran on) for the La Bolsa Line. The tracks may be gone, but narrow grass medians mark where the trains once creaked along from First Street and PCH all the way to Ellis Avenue between Gothard and Huntington. To feel what Huntington Beach once was, you can go to the Red Car Museum in Seal Beach or ride an old Red Car in San Pedro, where there’s a 1.5-mile vintage trolley line.

Of course, the best way to understand Huntington Beach, and connect to its history, is to drop by on Independence Day. The trains may be gone, but the parade goes on. Huntington Beach now boasts the longest-running July Fourth parade west of the Mississippi.

The post A SoCal City Born on the Fourth of July appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In spring 1971, much of the mountains had been zoned for subdivisions by the developer-friendly Los Angeles City Council and Mayor Sam Yorty. The Los County Board of Supervisors did the same with the mountain land it controlled outside city boundaries.

The late Marvin Braude, then a Los Angeles city councilman representing West L.A., including parts of the mountains, was one of the few fighting the developers and their political allies. But it was tough to beat those powerful forces in a city where growth was part of the civic psyche.

A young lawyer, Joel Wachs, decided to run against the incumbent in the 2nd District, James B. Potter, a pro-development councilman supported by Yorty. The district reached from the mountains to the San Fernando Valley flatlands

I covered the race for the Los Angeles Times. Although I had reported presidential and governor elections for the Associated Press, my previous employer, I had never written about anything as local as a council election, and I was amazed how personal it became, with both the paper and I turning into central characters.

I went to the candidates’ forums where Wachs and the other candidates ganged up on Potter. I trudged through the district, going door-to-door interviewing voters, a workout on some of those steep mountain streets. This was in more innocent times when homeowners, unafraid, opened their front doors to reporters like me, and were glad to talk.

I found that voters in the flatlands didn’t know much about Potter, but those in the hillsides knew all about the mountain development issues and didn’t like the way Potter handled them. When I reported that, I found myself attacked by name in a local weekly and accused of prejudiced reporting.

Wachs, a former UCLA student body president, was well connected and had plenty of money for his campaign, starting off with $10,000 from his father, Archie, a wealthy retiree from the clothing business. Archie also stood outside Gelson’s and Ralphs, both markets patronized by politically active Jews, handing out brochures urging them to “Vote for My Son Joel.”

Wachs looked like a sure winner until the Friday before the election. That day, he came home with his campaign aides Harry Sloan and Mark Armbruster. In his mailbox he found a copy of the Record newspaper.

Over its masthead was the slogan, “One of the world’s great black newspapers.” On the front page was another slogan, “Good Neighbors Come in All Colors,” along with a story praising Wachs. It had been deliberately mailed throughout the predominantly white district.

Wachs and his aides panicked. Los Angeles, then as now, was a racially tense place. Memories of the 1965 Watts riot were fresh, as were those of the racist campaign run by Yorty when he defeated Tom Bradley, an African-American, in 1969, just four years after the riots. Yorty, with the help of a couple of inflammatory TV news anchors and talk show interviewers, stoked racial tensions and beat Bradley. Wachs feared the same thing would happen to him.

“We’ve blown the campaign,” said Wachs.

In the midst of the panic, a middle-aged man wearing expensive clothes and smoking a high-priced cigar walked into the Wachs headquarters. His name was Manning J. Post, and he had been fundraiser for the legendary state Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh. As I wrote of Post at the time, “he knows every angle.”

Post, who had been introduced to Wachs a few weeks before, looked at the near hysteria of the Wachs crew with disdain, “Kids,” he said. “Kids. What do they know?” He looked at a copy of the Record with the interest of a longtime student of smears. “That’s clever,” he said. “I haven’t seen anything like that since I left Chicago.”

Post calmed the Wachs supporters down. A phone bank went to work and by Monday had made 20,000 calls. One of the calls from Wachs headquarters was to me, from Wachs aides Armbruster and Sloan. They told me about the Record. What a story, I thought—an election eve smear. I’d better nail it down in a hurry.

They gave me the address of the paper and the U.S. Post Office bulk rate permit number. The Record office was on South Vermont Avenue, in a predominantly African-American part of town, miles from the 2nd District. I called the Record. It was a real newspaper, but this run was a special edition, a man on the phone told me, adding, “Some sort of committee paid for it.” I chased down the bulk permit number, which was held by a big political mail-advertising firm. The paper put my story on page one with the headline, “Opponent Says Potter Injected Racial Issue Into Vote Campaign.” It wasn’t covering a presidential campaign, I thought, but local politics were pretty exciting, a belief I’ve never been able to shake.

The counterattack warded off any damage the Record might have caused. Wachs was elected, thanks largely to the growing strength of environmentalists and slow-growth homeowners in the Santa Monica Mountains and adjoining parts of the San Fernando Valley. On the council, he joined Braude, by then an increasingly respected and effective environmentalist.

The political atmosphere changed. Grassroots organizations, once small and ineffective, became smarter. In those pre-computer days, women and men labored over skimpy paper campaign contribution reports and painstakingly tied politicians to those profiting from growth. Then they used the mail and newspapers to publicize their findings.

With grassroots support growing and the backing of Braude, Wachs, and other Westside politicians, the Santa Monica National Recreation Area was created in 1978 and the Santa Monica Mountain Conservancy two years later. Land that had been zoned for subdivisions was acquired by the conservancy under the aggressive leadership of Joe Edmiston, the executive director, and by the federal government.

The mountains were saved—not entirely, but enough for today’s Southland residents to roam among them and hike their length.

And that’s how a dirty trick helped give us a regional treasure.

The post The Dirty Politics That Saved the Santa Monica Mountains appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Frenzied, the people fled to higher ground along the far bank, saving little more than the soaked clothes slung over their bodies. Some of the last to escape had to swim to safety. They grouped at the Cuerro de Harpero, the hill to the east, and huddled together in the Capilla San Salvador. They choked in anguish as the unrelenting Santa Ana River consumed the town, crashing first through the dance hall, melting houses, flushing away cattle, sheep and fowl, the river gentle no longer. The church and the house of Cornelius Jensen to the east were the only buildings on high ground and the only ones that escaped the destruction of the flood.

—Based on the testimony of an eyewitness to the destruction of a town in western San Bernardino County. For more, see Pioneer days in the San Bernardino Valley (1906) by Mrs. E.P.R. Crafts.

We live in the Arid West; it seems like the region is always described this way, especially now when drought dominates the news. But we should not forget that California and the West have at times been very wet.

There may be no better moment than the dry present to remember the extraordinary washout of 1862, which brought what was likely the most expansive flooding in the recorded history of America’s West. Bearing heavy rains, a succession of cold and warm storms drenched the Pacific Coast that winter. The cataclysms devastated settlements across California, Nevada, and Oregon as well as communities in what is now Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Arizona.

Melting snow joined rainfall and poured down mountainsides, flushing into the lowlands of the West. Rivers swelled—submerging valleys, drowning towns, pulverizing bridges, barns, and mills—in a Charybdic froth of mud, bobbing with debris and bloated livestock. In the floodwaters, henhouses mingled with sluice boxes, dressers, parts of a mill, and giant pine and spruce trees that had survived California storms for hundreds of years.

People too, disappeared under the swirling latte broth. The numbers of the missing and killed remain lost in the sediment of history.

When the unrelenting sequence of storms arrived, California had been a state of the Union for a mere 12 years, and the nation was grinding out the early battles of the Civil War. Estimates of property damage in California alone ranged in the tens of millions of 1860s U.S. dollars.

Cascading water and debris transformed the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys into massive lakes, one at least 300 miles long. Floodwaters swamped California’s new capital city, forcing freshly elected Governor Leland Stanford to jockey a rowboat to his inauguration. Still, the rain fell.

The deluge raised the level of the San Francisco Bay several inches, and anglers pulled freshwater fish out for months while the inundation subsided. Trees and telegraph poles vanished beneath frothy currents. Steam-powered paddleboats dodged wreckage and dead cattle while delivering vital supplies and rescuing the survivors still clinging to trees or huddled on rooftops.

In the Southland, much of modern Los Angeles was subaquatic. A great arm of the sea reached inland, creating a bay from Huntington Beach northward to present-day downtown L.A. The gorged Santa Ana River overran its banks and created vast lakes in modern day San Bernardino, Riverside, and Orange counties. In San Diego, floodwaters backed up in the bay and reshaped both the city’s harbor and river. The one house on the San Diego River flood plain recorded to have survived had all of its first floor doors and windows left open, which apparently reduced the force of the current on the frame, sparing the structure and the survivors on its roof.

The floodwaters receded at different rates across the state. Fishermen in San Francisco noted several weeks of fresh fish in the bay; parts of what later became Orange County were flooded for at least three weeks by one account; and Sacramento was still mired in water for three months.

The floods ended, but disaster didn’t. The floods were followed by multiyear droughts that brought with them economic, social, and political challenges. The cattle industry, which was the foundation of the region’s export economy, bottomed out. Unable to maintain their ranches or afford costly land rights cases, many lost land titles while of course, others gained them. Entire communities, including families, dispersed. The region was primed for a new rush on land, and a population avalanche.

Aridity is the norm here, but it is only part of the story. Despite its reputation for perpetual sunshine, Southern California may face as great a risk from cataclysmic flooding as any other major metropolitan region in the United States. Its geologic history tells us so. Massive floods might be the exception, and yet, these events have factored into California’s history for millennia. Whether it is cyclical, the product of a changing climate or some frightening combination of both, extremes of weather, flood, and drought appear to be occurring with more regularity. We fear how dry we are now, but we will be wet again. And we should be prepared for that, too.

The post When California Was Waterlogged appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But toys can have deep meaning, and their loss can involve pain. We talk today of Los Angeles as a place of the Lakers and other winners. But the Lakers, when they first arrived, inspired pain and frustration. In the 1960s, led by Elgin Baylor and Jerry West, they made it to the National Basketball League finals six times. And they lost each and every time.

As an L.A. sports fan, I learned about the agony of defeat early. After World War II, the Pacific Coast Conference agreed to have its winner play the Big Ten champion in the Rose Bowl Game. The 1947 game was the first of the series, and Illinois beat UCLA 45-14, a defeat this 15-year-old loyal Southern Californian took very hard. The following year was even worse: Michigan humiliated the USC Trojans 49-0.

But the 1940s also created the L.A. sports scene we enjoy today. In 1948, John Wooden, in his youth a Purdue University All-American basketball player, came to Los Angeles to coach at UCLA. It took 16 years for the Bruins to win their first national title—being a sports fan here always has required patience—but that was followed by nine more championships over Wooden’s final 11 years.

The first college football game I attended was a 1944 USC-UCLA game. In that war year, the schools faced off twice. They tied 13-13 in the first game, and USC won the second, 40-14. Unfortunately, I—a UCLA alumnus—went to the second game. Bob Waterfield was the UCLA quarterback.

Waterfield also helped teach me that being an L.A. sports fan meant being lonely. In 1945, Waterfield, who had attended Van Nuys High School, quarterbacked the Cleveland Rams to the National Football League championship. The next year, the team moved here and became the Los Angeles Rams. Many of my co-workers at the Terminal Annex post office on North Alameda Street were transplants from the Midwest who retained their loyalty to their home states and even appeared to resent living in California, which irked me no end. Gus Oelrich, a Cleveland native and veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division, who’d parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, took the Rams’ move as a personal affront. He razzed me unmercifully when my teams lost—and enjoyed seeing me squirm when a Midwest team defeated a California team. It was all in fun, of course.

Cleveland had its revenge. In 1946, the new All-America Football Conference and its Los Angeles Dons began playing in the Coliseum. The price of admission for kids was 25 cents, so I took my younger brother Raul to many Dons games. Every Thanksgiving at 11 a.m., the Dons played the awesome Cleveland Browns, coached by Paul Brown, with Otto Graham at quarterback, Marion Motley at fullback, Dante Lavelli at end, and Lou Groza kicking field goals. All became Hall of Famers. The Dons lost every Thanksgiving Day game the two teams played. Raul and I had the consolation of then going home for Thanksgiving dinner. (Mother was an excellent cook.)

Norman Van Brocklin, who played at the University of Oregon, became the Rams’ quarterback in 1951. His favorite receiver was end Tom Fears, a UCLA alumnus. We attended Ram games on Sunday afternoons. I parked the car on Hill Street, and we’d walk from there to the Coliseum, tramping through the autumn leaves that covered the Exposition Park lawn.

In 1951 the Rams played the Cleveland Browns for the league championship. I was then in the Army, stationed in Alaska. Bob Kelley, the enthusiastic Rams announcer, did the play-by-play of the game for Armed Forces Radio. Usually a reserved young man, I let myself go that day cheering my team on. My fellow soldiers had never seen me so animated. Late in the fourth quarter with the game tied, Tom Fears got open and caught a 73-yard pass from Van Brocklin that won the NFL title for the Rams.

There were many other Ram teams to come, but the 1951 team was one I never forgot.

The Rams made an impression on Los Angeles that has lasted despite their departure to St. Louis in 1994. In the 1960s Merlin Olsen, Roosevelt Grier, Deacon Jones, and Lamar Lundy, the “Fearsome Foursome,” anchored the Ram line and Los Angeles sports. Roman Gabriel was the celebrated Rams quarterback for 11 years, from 1962 to 1972.

L.A. was a football town then, but it wasn’t the only sport that would shape the city. My father was a boxing fan and listened to many fights when Joe Louis was heavyweight champion of the world. But I didn’t see a professional fight until 1950, when I went to the Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. The two heavyweights who fought that night were Lloyd Marshall and “Irish” Bob Murphy. The atmosphere was what I might have expected: the pungent odors of beer, cigarettes, and cigar smoke, seedy-looking characters mingling with what might have been movie stars. What I did not expect to see was blood, a great deal of which spilled in the ring that night. Blood was never a factor on radio or on black-and-white television screens. I was shocked.

The first fight I saw in person was also the last.

In 1943, my family lived in a duplex at the corner of 43rd and Wall streets. Our yard was a large, dusty lot that fronted on 43rd Street. Not far from us, at 42nd and Avalon Boulevard, was Wrigley Field, home of the Los Angeles Angels of the Triple-A Pacific Coast League. On weekends, baseball fans headed for Wrigley cruised around looking for parking. I obliged them by allowing many to park in our yard. I set the price, 10 cents, and collected the money.

Raul and I attended many games at Wrigley, which was within walking distance. The Angels were a farm team of the Chicago Cubs (the park was named for the Cubs’ owner, William Wrigley, of chewing gum fame), and players sometimes left the Angels and moved up to the Cubs. Players on the way down also came to our team. They were unforgettable. Angel outfielder Lou Novikoff was called “The Mad Russian” because of his alleged erratic behavior. Mickey Kreitner was a catcher whose throws to second base too often ended up being fielded by his own center fielder. The Angels won pennants in 1943, 1944, and 1947. In that last year the star was first baseman Steve Bilko, whose name inspired the TV writers who gave the world “Sgt. Bilko.”

Other Angels with recognizable names were Tommy Lasorda, Gene Mauch, and first baseman Chuck Connors, who became a movie and TV actor. Fred Haney, who in his youth had played for the Detroit Tigers with Ty Cobb, was the Angels broadcaster from 1946 to 1948. His broadcast signoff was, “This is Fred Haney, rounding third and heading for home.”

In 1947, the year Major League Baseball dropped the color barrier, I attended an exhibition game at Wrigley that pitted a team of white players against one composed of black players. New York Yankee Joe DiMaggio hit a home run over the left field wall that day; Stan Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals played as well, and Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians pitched. The aged pitching legend Leroy “Satchel” Paige pitched for the black team. But the star of the day was the UCLA alumnus who that year had made history for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Frenetic cheers greeted every contact Jackie Robinson’s bat made with a pitch, even when the result was an easy out.

I (barely) made the baseball team in my junior year at Mt. Carmel High by tirelessly chasing after batted balls during practice. I got into one game. In my first at-bat, facing a tall, lanky Leuzinger High School fastball pitcher, I learned that it takes courage to stand in the batter’s box while a stranger throws high-speed baseballs in your direction. A scorer would record my two appearances at the plate that day as resulting in a K and an F4—a strikeout and a pop-up to second base.

When I saw our coach at the 50th anniversary of our class’ graduation, I announced, “Coach, I never made it to the major leagues.” Mr. Honer took the news well.

Los Angeles made the majors, though. The Dodgers arrived from Brooklyn in 1958 and played in the Coliseum, with a long oval field that was an odd fit for baseball. The short left field was fitted with a high wire fence to make it less easy to hit home runs. Outfielder Wally Moon’s fly balls over that short, high fence were called “moonshots.”

Brooklyn Dodger Roy Campanella never played in Los Angeles after an accident left him in a wheelchair. But I was in the Coliseum on May 7, 1959, Roy Campanella Night, one of over 93,000 fans who came out to honor the great catcher and see an exhibition game with the Yankees. Campanella was there. They shut off the Coliseum lights and asked fans to light matches in his honor.

And so we did. It was a powerful, emotional moment. L.A. sports fans know all too well what disappointment and loss feel like. But we also know how to rally. We are not so easily defeated.

The post The Lonely Life of an L.A. Sports Fan appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I grew up a few short miles from Los Alamitos Race Course in Garden Grove in Orange County in the 1960s and 1970s. My earliest memories of the modest track—now in the news as the unlikely home of Kentucky Derby winner California Chrome—are seeing it from the back seat of my mother’s car as we drove down Katella Avenue to the Pasty House for Cornish meat pies. Who were the people, I wondered, that frequented the Starting Gate Bar or stayed at Don’s Turf Motel?

When I was around 9, Los Alamitos began to take some hazy shape in my mind, as rumor spread that a family on my street spent their nights at the track. The idea that people left their houses and glowing television sets after dinner was incomprehensible to a young boy who had dinner at home—5:30 sharp every night of the week as soon as Dad pulled into the driveway.

It was years later when I realized what a glorious place Los Alamitos was. At barely 16, my best friend Dave and I would put $3 of regular into his brown Ford Maverick and head to the old Cypress golf course, where you could play 18 holes for less than $10. A few of the back nine holes were behind the barns on the track’s property, and we always got a great view of the infield lake and the grandstand that stood empty during the day. All the action would come under the lights, beginning at 7:30 p.m., when the quarter horses and harness racing began.

Which is what I discovered when I lumbered over legal drinking age. Or maybe I was nearly at drinking age when my friends and I finally took advantage of our proximity to this track and its welcoming attitude toward beer coolers for the quarter horses races. Quarter horses are literally a breed apart—they sprint fast and run shorter than the thoroughbreds, turning their races into seconds-long bursts of excitement. There is nothing quite like it. My friends and I relished, too, the contrast between Los Alamitos and Disneyland, where we were working summer jobs. Every night, they’d scrub the theme park down and repaint it. But the track always smelled like rot and decay.

The Los Alamitos of my youth was a small track, and it’s still a small track—though without the frame of reference of bigger venues, it didn’t seem small to me then. Bets were made, and races won and lost, but what stood out for me were all the characters you’d see at the track. My buddies and I bet for fun; the people around us—mostly men, from all kinds of backgrounds—placed their wagers with the faces of those making life-or-death decisions. Kids roamed around picking up betting slips off the ground to sort through later, looking for a discarded winner. The sights and smells of the place did not fit my cloistered upbringing.

My mother still lives in the house I grew up in, though my childhood friends and I have scattered. But the track is still in me. I’ve dabbled in owning thoroughbreds over the years. And I still go to races with friends, though they’re not the same friends, and it’s not the same track, either; living in L.A., Santa Anita is now the destination. Los Alamitos, always the little track in the O.C., seems even littler.

But give Los Alamitos this much: It’s outlasted Inglewood’s Hollywood Park—originally the horseracing playground of the movie elite—which shut down in December. The fact that Los Alamitos has held out is a testament to its current owner, Dr. Ed Allred, who is also well-known as the co-founder of Family Planning Associates Medical Group, an abortion services provider. Some say that the track will only last as long as Dr. Allred does.

Los Alamitos is currently undergoing millions in renovations needed to accommodate a mile-long track for thoroughbred racing. Perhaps I’ll finally stop by the Starting Gate Bar for a quick one on my way to first post next season.

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A hundred women and men, representatives of almost every Jewish organization in the city, gathered hastily to plan an event to honor of the couple. They rented the most lavish room in town: the Fiesta Room of the Ambassador Hotel where, three months earlier, Hollywood’s finest had gathered for the third annual Academy Awards. There, the Jews of L.A. would stage the “the most important event” in their community’s history, a “monster banquet” (as their press release boasted) honoring a personage the L.A. Times called “the man Jews generally regard as the greatest member of their race.”

Jews of all sorts came out for the February 16 gala: Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform; Ashkenazim and Sefaradim; native-born and greenhorn; Zionist and non-; intellectuals and businessfolk. Rabbi Shlomo Neches, the immigrant traditionalist from the Breed Street Shul, offered “grace,” while Rabbi Edgar Magnin, the tony doyen of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, introduced the great physicist. In between, Los Angeles Mayor John Clinton Porter welcomed the crowd.

Albert Einstein spent three winter terms at Caltech, in 1931, 1932, and 1933, and his visits with his wife were a unifying event for a Jewish community divided by background, language, class, and sorts of observance. Everyone, it seemed, admired the physicist. The leaders of La Communidad Sephardi invited him to speak at the dedication of their grand Tifferet Israel synagogue in the West Adams neighborhood of South L.A. Samuel Untermyer, the best-paid lawyer in New York and one of America’s most renowned Jews (“A millionaire many times over [and] a defender of the poor and oppressed,” as H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury magazine described him), hosted the Einsteins at his new hotel in Palm Springs. Jack Warner and Carl Laemmle, the Jews who headed Warner Bros. and Universal, limousined the Einsteins to their lots for private showings of favorite films. Ben Meyer, president of the Union Bank and a Jewish community leader, insisted the couple join him at his Montecito ranch.

Every edition of the local Jewish paper, The Bnai Brith Messenger, carried Einstein news. In his honor, L.A. Jews made out checks to cover “a huge reforestation project in Palestine which [would] be known as the Einstein Forest.” Something about Einstein had moved the Jews of the city in a way that no one before ever had (and no one after ever would). It was only after the scientist left that they sobered, leaving Dr. George J. Saylin, the head of the Los Angeles Jewish Kehillah, the official representative of the local Jewish community, to observe:

[W]e have overdone it, [and] we have permitted our emotions to get the better of us. Hero worship is as old as worship itself. Though we have accepted but one God, most of us cannot resist the temptation of manufacturing demigods a sideline.

Saylin had a point.

Still, it was not just Jews who venerated Einstein. Five hundred high school girls greeted his ship in San Diego carrying poinsettias; he was a guest of honor at the Tournament of Roses Parade and the L.A. Chamber of Commerce annual banquet; 10,000 Angelenos greeted him at a ceremony on the steps of L.A.’s City Hall; Charlie Chaplin twice hosted the Einsteins for dinner at his home; and California Governor James Rolph visited the Einsteins at their borrowed bungalow in Pasadena. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, when the L.A. Times reported that Einstein “was deluged with offers from firms and corporations, running into thousands of dollars, for signed testimonials to the value he had found in their toothpastes, cigarettes, toilet waters, disinfectants, and this, that and the other.”

Einstein refused to go Hollywood and cash in on his fame, but he could never escape it. From 1929 to 1933, the L.A. Times published 1,322 articles about him, or just under four a week. Even in a town used to regarding celebrities with studied dispassion, sophisticates became worshipful schoolgirls when confronted with Einstein.

There’s a complex relationship between the adulatory reverence that the Jews of L.A. felt for Einstein and the reverent adulation that other city residents felt. All of them, to be sure, recognized that the man in their midst was the greatest physicist since Newton. (Einstein was 51 years old when he made his first L.A. visit; 10 years had passed since he had won the Nobel Prize, and his image was recognized around the world as the very icon of genius.) And they all understood, as Einstein’s host at Caltech, Nobel laureate Robert Millikan put it, that Einstein somehow represented a “scientific … approach to all problems … that throws into the discard all prejudices and preconceptions.”

But just what this meant was different for Jews than for the Protestants and Catholics among whom they lived. For Jews, Einstein represented a new, scientific social compact, in which a person’s mettle was measured not by how he prayed or by the music of his accent but by his accomplishments. Einstein represented these things in his vocation; the universe cared not a whit if its laws were decoded by a Protestant, a Jain, or a non-believing Jew. He represented these things in his actions, denouncing tyrants, preaching internationalism, embracing Zionism, and, while in Southern California, petitioning Governor Rolph to release two labor leaders doing time for a bombing many suspected they had not committed. Einstein demonstrated that a Jew, no less than anyone else, could speak truth to power without apology.

Einstein proved, as one L.A. Jewish leader put it, that “the question of the cultural value of the Jewish race no longer need to be asked.” Through the blinding brilliance of his science, Einstein transcended his Jewishness—and everyone knew it (and this, while never denying or regretting his Judaism). And so it was that L.A.’s Jews both loved Einstein like all the other Angelenos did and loved Einstein because all the other Angelenos did (as well as almost everyone else).

The way Einstein was regarded helps to illuminate a perplexing commonplace. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Jews have succeeded extravagantly in science. The statistics about Nobel Prizes are well-known: Of America’s laureates, a third in chemistry have been Jews, and more still in physics and medicine. Tabulating handshakes with the king of Sweden is a crass measure of scientific excellence, but it reflects something—though we don’t know exactly what.

A century ago, sociologist Thorstein Veblen hypothesized that it was because Jews, as outsiders, were skeptical of received wisdom, a trait that paid dividends in science. Others since have argued that Jewish “love of learning” accounts for their successes, or Jewish genes for intelligence. Recently, “Tiger Mom” Amy Chua and her husband Jed Rubenfeld argued that it is a tense combination of feelings of superiority (“we’re chosen”) and inferiority (“we’re loud and pushy”), along with a talent for deferring gratification that explains the success of Jews (among other immigrant groups) in America.

Whether or not there’s any truth to these claims, Einstein’s months in Los Angeles and the adulation that endured long after he had left suggest another explanation. Jews embraced science because they thought that science promised a society that would accept them, a society in which a Jew—even one of poor lineage, inadequate coiffeur, and radical sympathies, like Einstein—can be regarded as a great man among great men.

When Einstein died in 1955, although 22 years had passed since he last visited the city, the L.A. Jewish Community Council (LAJCC) quickly organized a memorial service, co-sponsored by UCLA, Caltech, and USC. Judge David Coleman, the head of the LAJCC, eulogized Einstein in the great physicist’s own words:

The striving for knowledge for its own sake, … the love of justice and the quest for independence—these are the motivating traditions of the Jewish people which cause me to regard my adherence to them as a gift of destiny.

By then, the three great universities that took part in Einstein’s memorial—and the best universities across the nation—boasted dozens of brilliant Jewish scientists striving for knowledge, justice, and independence. These women and men were embraced with some of the same enthusiasm that Einstein had found a quarter of a century earlier, and for the same reasons.

A lot has changed in the 84 years since Einstein caught his first glimpses of California and 500 girls with bouquets of poinsettias. No one much wonders today about “the cultural value of the Jewish race,” and thank God for that. But the need has not passed for a worldview that, as Millikan said of Einstein’s, “throws into the discard all prejudices and all preconceptions.” It was the hope that such a worldview would spread that drew so many—the Jews of L.A. and all the rest, all over the globe—to Einstein and to science. It was a beautiful and forlorn hope then, and remains one today.

The post When L.A.’s Jews Went Crazy for Albert Einstein appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The next morning, father, following his ingrained habit, immersed himself in the newspaper stories about the earthquake, sharing his reading with mother. The headline of the Los Angeles Times read: “Scores Perish in Southland Quake.” I was three months short of my third birthday.

My own love affair with Los Angeles newspapers began when I was 8 years old, when Raul and I took turns fetching the Sunday morning paper, the Los Angeles Examiner, off our front lawn. Raul and I loved the color comic strips that served as an outer wrapper for the rest of the bulky paper. The newspapers of the late 1930s and ’40s gave children an enormous variety of funnies to enjoy: Blondie, Popeye, Krazy Kat, Barney Google, Prince Valiant, Terry and the Pirates, and Mutt and Jeff were just a few of them. We peeled off this funnies section and spread their pages out on the living room floor.

Father read the Examiner every day, in later years switching to the Herald-Express. He perused the sports section only when it ran stories about professional boxing and horse racing. I knew about Seabiscuit long before the bestselling book a half century later. Father and I listened together to the radio broadcast of Santa Anita track announcer Joe Hernandez’s call of the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap when the storied thoroughbred defeated a field that included Kayak II. His attention wasn’t just sporting.

Betting on the ponies was extremely popular back then, and his workplace, the Pacific Glass Company, like other companies, had workers who doubled as bookies. The Herald devoted a good deal of space to information that was helpful to readers who handicapped and bet on the horses. This coverage likely explains the change in my father’s newspaper loyalties.

Father’s faithful reading of newspapers distinguished him from most of our relatives, who never read anything. It astounded me that so many of their homes were completely devoid of reading material. But our particular line of Rodriguez men had an especially deep relationship with newspapers. A 1906 photograph of my father’s first birthday showed his father—my grandfather, then a copper miner in Clifton, Arizona—standing next to my father with a folded newspaper in his right hand.

Father was loyal not only to newspapers but also to the glass workers labor union. He was very interested in politics and was a devoted supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. When he listened to FDR’s radio addresses to the nation, the so-called Fireside Chats, I sat on the living room floor listening along with him, thrilling to the sound of the president’s voice. So when, still a child, I began reading the newspapers’ more serious material and its criticisms of this beloved president, the experience shook me. On the first day I read him, the Examiner’s Westbrook Pegler mocked Mrs. Roosevelt and her newspaper column, called “My Day.” I was shocked but learned an early lesson about freedom of the press.

Raul and I sold newspapers for several years, and it became second nature for me to read the headlines as I stood on my corner. There were many headlines and many newspapers then. In addition to the morning Times and Examiner, readers could pick up the Herald-Express or the tabloid Mirror, also an afternoon paper. The Daily News, owned by Manchester Boddy, who would later give his estate—now Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge—to the county, was the only local daily that supported Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and his subsequent New Deal. (The city’s only Democratic newspaper would cease publication in 1954).

With the onset of World War II, radio came of age, its immediacy an appealing alternative to waiting for the morning or evening paper. The first news of the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor was broadcast on the radio. Our family was gathered around the kitchen table that Sunday listening to a musical program when CBS announcer John Daly interrupted with a news flash of the bombing. We listened the next day when President Roosevelt gave the address to Congress in which he declared that a state of war existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire. The Los Angeles Times front-page headline of December 11 was “Axis Declares War on America.”

I followed the news of the war principally by listening to radio broadcasts about the Battle of Britain and the bombing of German cities like Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Dresden, and Berlin. Hearing of news events was fine, but seeing them was even better. The Tower Theater downtown showed only newsreels, many about the war, and I went often to see them. And television was just around the corner.

But it is the headlines I remember—of the fall of German-occupied Rome to the Allies on June 5, 1944, and of the Allied landings on the Normandy coast the following day. The Times’ headline of June 6 consisted of one word: “Invasion!”

Post-war Los Angeles was a far more violent place than today’s Los Angeles, and the newspapers let us know it. On January 17, 1947, the mutilated body of a young woman was found near Leimert Park. The Hearst papers—the Examiner and the Herald-Express—were known for their exploitation of the sensational, and no one did crime stories better than Herald reporter Agness Underwood. Some credit her with popularizing the name Black Dahlia, which was given to the murder victim, Elizabeth Short. In the middle of the case, Underwood was promoted to editor of the Herald’s city desk, becoming the first U.S. woman to hold such a high position at a major metropolitan daily. The Black Dahlia story was astonishingly popular and reached even into the high school I attended. It was rumored that a colleague of mine had been questioned by the police in connection with the crime. (He didn’t do it.)

In 1962 the Herald-Express and the Examiner merged to become the Herald-Examiner. That publication announced the news of its own demise years later on November 2, 1989, with a headline that read, “So Long, Los Angeles.” Despite the swan song, the paper published for several more weeks, running the following on November 11:

The Times pompously declares in its Nov. 2 editorial that the Herald-Examiner folded because ‘the public’s appetite for such reportage is satisfied by lesser television talk shows.’ In the same editorial phrases such as ‘working class tastes’ and ‘entertaining sensationalism of yellow journalism’ are used. This display of arrogant elitism will make the loss of the Herald all the more painful. The Herald considered its readers as peers writing for them and not at all as a didactic parent.

Newspapers were essential for living here. I could not have done without the movie reviews and screening times for a great number of movie houses. (Like Woody Allen, I had to see a movie from the beginning and never deviated from that rule.) I loved the columnists, with whom it was possible to connect personally. A Times reporter named Bill Kiley took a 7 a.m. beginning Spanish class I taught at Valley College, and I ended up being an item in his friend Matt Weinstock’s column; he became my favorite columnist. I also exchanged letters with the legendary L.A. Times columnist Jack Smith, chiding him about pieces he had written about Spain.

It was often said that there was nothing as useless as yesterday’s newspaper. But old papers weren’t entirely useless back then. Thrifty types like me saved the old papers and periodically bundled them up, tied them with twine, and earned pocket change selling them at a salvage center.

In the pre-smog days, Los Angeles backyards had incinerators where old newspapers were often burned along with the rest of the household trash. But after the smog came—but before the arrival of garbage disposals—garbage was gathered in sturdy cans whose contents were emptied every several days into city trucks and hauled away. Old newspapers were very helpful—we lined the garbage can with them. Those who took their politics seriously could put their least favorite politicians’ photos on the bottom of their can.

The post My L.A. Life Through Newspapers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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.

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