I lost my mom to COVID in February 2021. She died alone, after spending 10 excruciating days in the hospital. A year after her death, a white envelope with no return address arrived in my Pomona College mailbox. Inside was a photo of my mom from the early 1970s.

In the photo, she is standing between two corridors of Sparks Middle School’s brick campus in La Puente, where she taught until she retired in 2008. She smiles gently, with her arms by her side. Her hair is long and straight, and she is wearing a sleeveless dress. She looks so young.

She was gone, and there were so many things I couldn’t ask her. For years, as a researcher and resident, I wrote about La Puente’s Mexican community and its fight for educational justice. My mom’s death—and that precious photo—made me consider new questions about the past. I began wondering about Greenberry, East San Gabriel Valley’s first Black suburban neighborhood, sometimes called “Little Watts.” Some of my mom’s early students lived there. I first heard about this neighborhood from her, but still knew next to nothing about it.

I wanted to be near my mom, and I wanted to learn Greenberry’s history. I began reaching out to some of the students she taught in the 1970s, and digging through yearbooks, newspaper articles, church records, and city council and school board minutes. I learned that Black residents in La Puente, so often forgotten, challenged multiple forms of racism. At times, they found common cause with Mexican Americans and other allies, including my Sicilian American mom. Indeed, Greenberry and its now-hidden history of activism helped forge today’s multi-racial San Gabriel Valley.

My family’s history, and specifically my mom’s early years at Sparks, intersected with Greenberry’s growth and its residents’ fight for equality. First-generation college graduates committed to social justice, my parents returned to La Puente—the multi-racial blue-collar city where their Sicilian and Nicaraguan immigrant parents lived—to become junior high school teachers. In the early 1970s, they rented a house on Evanwood Avenue, less than a mile south of Greenberry.

Pushed out of South Central Los Angeles by urban renewal, eminent domain, and the 1965 Watts uprising, Black families, some originally from the South and Midwest, moved to Greenberry in the 1960s. Newly suburbanized La Puente had relatively affordable homes, so Black families bought there and created a thriving community. White real estate agents, however, sought to preserve all-white neighborhoods. Fueled by racist beliefs that Black residents would lower home values, they steered Black families south of Francisquito Avenue into an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County just outside the then-white middle-class city of West Covina. Greenberry Drive led to the enclave’s three main blocks—Greenberry, Glenshaw, and Evanwood.

Former residents fondly describe late midcentury Greenberry as a “village.” Black families integrated existing churches, and Black pastors established new ones. Black women hosted parties and games of bid whist and dominos. The community discussed issues that impacted the village and in 1964, frustrated with ongoing discrimination, established the La Puente-West Covina branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They fought segregated housing in West Covina, and curriculum tracking and IQ testing in schools.

Children who grew up in Greenberry went to Sparks, where my mom taught Spanish and language arts to the area’s Black, Mexican, white, and few Asian American students. She wanted students to leave feeling better about themselves than when they entered. During Mom’s Zoom memorial, former student and Greenberry resident Keith Williams recalled, “The thing I valued most from Ms. Francesca Ochoa is the way she always finished her Spanish class, ‘Que tengas un buen día. Have a nice day.’ She showed us that she cared.”

Living in the school district where my parents taught, the lines between work and home often blurred. My mom’s 1970s students told me they occasionally dropped by our home to make the 10-minute walk to school with Ms. Ochoa. Some even remembered hearing toddler-me crying in the background.

Shortly after Mom arrived at Sparks, the local NAACP allied with the La Puente-area Organization of Mexican American Communities and La Raza Unida Party to fight police brutality and to increase the number of Black and Chicana/o educators. They pushed for Chicano and Black Studies classes, and in 1972, demanded that the school district make one year of Chicano and Black Studies a graduation requirement for all high school students. My mother taught Chicano studies for several years.

As I learned more about Greenberry and its history of Black activism, I found my mother in the historical record. Lionel J. Brown came up often in my research: a president of the area NAACP, an organizer against police violence, and a teacher who advocated for, and then chaired, a council to address racial discrimination in the school district. Through school board minutes, I discovered that my mom and Mr. Brown participated together in a multi-day workshop in 1974 titled “Different Aspects of Mexican Culture.”

I was eager to find Mr. Brown, and I looked for him at his old address. The owner told me Mr. Brown lost his home to foreclosure in the early 1980s; he stored some of Mr. Brown’s items for a few years, but never saw him again. This was the closest I came to finding Lionel Brown. I was overcome with sadness—a sense of loss thinking about how he was pushed out of his home and community, and a sense of loss reflecting on how his labor to improve our area is unknown to too many.

Almost none of the Black families in Greenberry remain today. In the late 1970s, many of the neighborhood youth left for the military, college, or work. Priced out of the area and able to purchase newer and larger homes further east, young families went to the Inland Empire; their parents, like mine, passed away. I spoke with 65-year-old Ethel Smith, who lived in Greenberry from 1969 to 1976, and recently visited the neighborhood, hoping to reconnect with old memories. “It’s sad,” she grieved, “I went through Greenberry to reminisce, and I can’t remember people whose houses I’ve been to. I can’t remember where they lived.”

But relationships endure, even as the community is now physically dispersed. Greenberry’s former residents have met for yearly reunions since 2012. “How many communities from the ’70s—communities not families—get together once a year?” Keith Williams marveled when I visited him as part of my research into the neighborhood. “I don’t know of any communities that have such an interwoven connection with one another,” he reflected. The seeds that the original residents planted, Keith observed, have connected the former Greenberry residents’ kids, grandkids, and great grandkids.

Recovering local histories of placemaking, like Greenberry’s, teaches us about our interrelated and unequal pasts, and about the times that people have united for change. Researching Greenberry’s past has been part of my own remembering—a way to stay connected with my mom, honor the relationships she maintained, and hold onto the love she conveyed. It has exposed interconnected and transgenerational relationships and on-going struggles for justice.

For all of this, I’m grateful to former Greenberry residents. I hope to ensure more people learn about this past, and the community’s work—for them, for my mom, and ultimately for us all.

The post Searching for My Mom, and the History of La Puente’s ‘Little Watts’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And some were looking for Steve.

I had no idea who they were talking about. I certainly didn’t know that Steve was dead. I didn’t even know that Steve wasn’t his real name.

But I would learn, slowly, the story of the gentleman who used to live in my house. His family left no forwarding address for the mail that still arrives for him, and my attempts to reach them have not been successful. But the knockers kept coming, and the neighbors, who have never stopped talking about him, have filled in details.

Steve’s story has also taught me some larger lessons: that our homes don’t really belong to us, that there is no greater gift in this deathly world than a talent for long life, and that you should count yourself lucky to occupy a haunted house—if you’ve got the right ghost.

Stavros Koutis—whom the knockers knew as Steve—was born on January 20, 1909, on the Greek island of Ikaria, then part of the Ottoman Empire, according to an account published for his 100th birthday party.

Ikaria is named for the mythological Icarus, who famously died young, falling into the sea after he flew, with wax wings, too close to the sun. But Ikarians are famous for living longer than virtually any other population on earth. Indeed, Ikaria is one of five global “blue zones” where people live unusually long lives—routinely past 90 or 100. The other four blue zones are: Okinawa, Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, Sardinia’s mountains, and the Seventh Day Adventist community in Loma Linda, in California’s San Bernardino County.

Longevity experts attribute the phenomenon among Ikarians to eating fruits and vegetables, drinking goat’s milk and herbal tea, lots of exercising and socializing; afternoon naps; and low-stress lifestyles.

Like so many of his fellow Ikarians, Stavros, too, would be blessed with a long life, and a health and vigor that would awe his California neighbors well into the 21st century. But his journey took him a long way from home.

In a tribute published in the magazine of the Pan-Icarian Brotherhood of America in 2011, Stavros’ daughter said that her father dreamed of becoming a schoolteacher. But poverty, family conditions, and wars (Italians and Germans occupied Ikaria during World War II, and an estimated 20 percent of the population died of starvation) kept that profession out of reach. So, starting as a teenager, Stavros made a living as a sailor, transporting coal around the Aegean.

In 1938, he married Polyxeni Tsakalia, a dressmaker from Dafni, and they had four children. To support his family, he enlisted in the Merchant Marines, traveling the world. In the early 1950s, while at a U.S. port, he jumped ship. For nearly 10 years, with his wife and children back at home, he worked in painting and construction in Chicago, Cleveland, and other cities, while dodging immigration authorities.

Eventually, the family was able to immigrate legally in 1966, after his son established U.S. residency. In 1968, the family purchased the 1,400-square-foot house where I now live for $20,500, according to county records.

Stavros became a community pillar. When he wasn’t babysitting grandchildren or traveling back to Ikaria (where he’d restored a family home), he chatted with locals on long walks to visit friends to drink Greek coffee and discuss Greek politics and Ikarian history and genealogy, subjects upon which he was an expert.

He also had the greenest of thumbs. On the small lot he created a magnificent garden of peppers, tomatoes, eggplants and other vegetables, and cared for a canopy of trees producing avocados, oranges, lemons, limes, nectarines, and persimmons. A giant South American cactus plant guarded the house’s rear, and also produced fruit. He gave some of this bounty to grateful neighbors and used the rest in his own skillful cooking.

After his wife’s death in 1997, Stavros chose to stay in his home—and he aged so gracefully that he became a local marvel and mystery. How could any person, of any age, be so generous, know everyone, and have the health and energy to exercise vigorously in his yard? After he turned 100, he was still doing sets of 1,000 repetitions on his rowing machine.

He lost some of his eyesight in his 90s, but little of his memory. After he died in 2011—eight days after his 102nd birthday—the neighborhood couldn’t quite believe it. Which is why people were asking us about Steve when we bought the place for $750,000 eight months later. And it’s also why neighbors were still talking about him at our 2019 block party.

“My father was a simple man of the sea and the earth and enjoyed both to the fullest,” his daughter wrote after his death.

Can any life be better than that?

I’ve long written about the history of other Californians’ houses, but not my own, because I didn’t really know the place. In normal times, I’m rarely home—instead, I’m traveling around the state, taking meetings at the office, or shuttling my three young sons to their activities.

But then the pandemic confined me to the house last year, and I finally managed to get to know the place. I couldn’t help but feel Stavros’ presence. His fruit trees still produce reliably, his roses bloom various colors, and the avocado tree seems to get more bountiful every year. The yard is perfect for exercising, and the front stoop remains an easy place to be social with the neighbors.

Our family is no emblem of healthy living. But we have managed to avoid getting COVID-19, at least so far. Maybe that’s just luck, or being careful to wear masks. Or maybe, somehow or somewhere, a great, Greek ghost is still watching over his place.

The post A Healthy Haunting in the San Gabriel Valley appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

After a few failed attempts, we obtained our tickets online and went there on a Wednesday morning. We arrived barefaced; the CDC would not recommend the wearing of face protection until April. Andrew and I drove up through the eerily peaceful suburbs to the garden’s parking lot.

As we looked for a spot, we saw a flash of bright blue feathers and heard unearthly screaming. Even though I have lived in Los Angeles County since 1995, this would be my first encounter with the Arboretum’s famous peacocks, who would soon become my icon and totem for the pandemic.

At the Arboretum, peacocks ran and flapped everywhere. Stunned-looking human visitors lumbered about the entrance’s closed Garden & Gift shop, attempting to avoid the male birds that stood in the centers of the one-way paths, fanning out their luminous green tail feathers and shaking their bottoms to a higgly jiggly beat. The insistent peacocks were attempting to attract the attentions of the little brown peahens, whose only concession to beauty standards is their brief spray of emerald plumes at their necks and jaunty crown of brown quills sticking out from the tops of their heads.

The peacocks’ butt-dance was the only funny thing that I had seen in a month, but these males turned out to be really mean. Several times I saw toddlers attempt to make contact with the beautiful creatures, only for the peacocks to issue their inimitable honk and scream: BLAP AYAA AYAA AYAA! Some of the parents in the Arboretum crowd smiled wanly as they clutched their trembling-lipped offspring, while other people ignored the birds and instead stared daggers at others who dared stray within their six feet of space.

As Andrew and I poked around the Arboretum’s Engelmann Oak Grove and Ficus Collection in those early weeks, we wondered how bad this new disease would be. Was it just “the flu” as Trump suggested, or would it be the end of the world? Andrew said it was not the end of the world. Andrew said that we should continue going to the Arboretum, and I should look at the flowers and the horrible, gorgeous peacocks and think about nicer things than the strange varieties of death that SARS-COVID-2 appeared to render possible—death by suffocation; death by organ failure.

We continued our morning Arboretum ritual through the spring and early summer. We bought a membership ($60 per person, but discounted to $50 for teachers). People at the Arboretum were wearing masks by late March, even before the CDC recommended it. At first, Andrew and I tied T-shirts around our faces, looking like bandits and trying not to touch anything. The Arboretum admits people through a large iron turnstile that we would push with our elbows.

On March 31, the journal JAMA Ophthalmology reported that people could get COVID through the eye, despite the low prevalence of the virus in tears. I would bend over purple bearded irises in the Arboretum’s Rose Garden, attempting to rid myself of any COVID by sobbing over the flowers. I later learned to manage my anxiety by bringing my camera and taking plangent photographs of the peacocks racing hither and thither, then texting my friends daily images of the birds’ aggressive pecking and shrieking. In short order, the peacocks’ surreal dramatics embodied for me the growing sensation that we had all stumbled into an alternate world full of exotic threats and operatic crises.

I was not the only visitor embracing therapeutic photography. On the Arboretum’s Aloe Trail, in its Madagascar Spiny Forest, and around its shimmering blue Baldwin Lake, one could find a large assortment of Angelenos almost obsessively snapping the garden’s peafowl, as well as its succulents, hollyhocks, and Shot Silk roses. Were they trying to distract themselves from the rising COVID-19 death toll, or the agonizing news of George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s murders at the hands of law enforcement?

In August, the heat hovered between the 90s to 100s, but Andrew and I continued our morning pilgrimages. The Arboretum’s roses now looked seared and a layer of dust seemed to cover everything. Still, we were grateful for the access. By this time, the Fryman Canyon trail near our home had opened back up, but it was so crowded, and its users so often maskless, that I was too scared to run on it. On September 6, though, the Bobcat Fire let loose in the San Gabriel Mountains and soon after, the sky turned orange. That same day, it was 114 degrees in Arcadia—too hot for a trip to the Arboretum. A week later, parts of the city were under an evacuation order.

When Andrew and I finally returned to the Arboretum on a weekend in late October, we strolled around the pale blue vantage of Baldwin Lake, with its encirclement of dark palm trees and plashing Great Blue Herons and Mandarin ducks. After an hour of flower basking, we made our way to the exits, only to get ambushed by our old frenemies, the peacocks. They ran past us on the paved path outside the Arboretum’s Gardens for All Seasons, honking. As we looked at them, I raised my camera and then lowered it, shaking my head because I already had six hundred shots of the birds bullying children and fanny-waggling. Back in March, the peacocks had briefly struck me as paradisiacal symbols of our new surreal world, but I now saw them as gargoyles who manifested the grouchiness and fear that we all felt.

Meanwhile, a gardener with a long, white beard put-putted past us on a motorized cart. “They attack you, the peacocks,” he said, squinting at a bird shaking its butt. “They assemble in a V-formation and hunt you in packs.”

Andrew put his hands in his pockets and looked up at the sky. I kicked at a rock and tried not to think about the fact that COVID was spreading everywhere, that the world had just reported a million new cases in three days, and that the presidential campaign still had another month to go.

“That sounds about right,” I said.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> L.A.’s Arboretum, Where the Peafowl Hunt You in Packs appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But more than that, the water powered Southern California’s first center of industry, including a $20,000 a year cattle hide and soap export business. So impressive was the mission that one of the first visitors from the United States to this Spanish (and later Mexican) settlement remarked that its value was equal to a mine of silver or gold.

The extensive network of waterways was no product of nature—it was shaped entirely by human hands. And as it was improved, the system provided one of the most important early examples of industrial agriculture in western North America, and contributed directly to the rise of the young city of Los Angeles. It’s a story that reminds those of us gripped by one of California’s worst droughts on record that control over water has shaped our region’s destiny for centuries.

The San Gabriel Mission’s water system developed over a 60-year period through trial and error. The first version of the system, in fact, was an utter failure. Unaccustomed to Southern California’s fickle waterways, missionaries initially placed the mission in the fertile floodplain of the San Gabriel River in 1771. After four difficult years, the padres realized that the river’s annual flooding represented as much a threat as a blessing, and they relocated the small community to high ground. Rather than bringing the mission to water, they decided to bring water to the mission.

Tapping into artesian springs more than two miles to the north, the mission’s native Gabrieleño neophytes (captive laborers) hand-excavated a series of zanjas, or ditches, bringing precious water to the growing mission town. By the second decade of the 19th century, lit by the first rays of the dawning Industrial Revolution, clever, self-taught engineers had expanded the simple trenches into a vast system of rock-lined canals, brick and plaster reservoirs, dams, and water-powered grain and sawmills.

Only the broad outlines of the San Gabriel Mission water system’s scope and function have been preserved in the inventories, letters, and histories that the mission priests and their successors left behind. Few images, and no maps, survive from the mission’s active years, and those that we have fail to capture the details of the system. The story that was passed down has its flaws, however, being heavily biased in favor of the handful of men of European descent who designed and profited from these works. So how do we know what it looked like, and how it worked? The science of archaeology specializes in filling this kind of gap by exposing and interpreting the material remains of past human activity.

On another hot fall day in 2014, a team of archaeologists cleared nearly two centuries of soil away from the stone foundations of the San Gabriel Mission water system. Time had been surprisingly kind to the site. In a historical irony, the construction of a railroad atop the ruins in 1874, while initially destructive, had preserved the heart of the water works just across the street from the iconic mission church.

Another train project made the dig possible. The construction of the Alameda Corridor-East San Gabriel Trench, a project that will lower the Union Pacific Railroad tracks below the intersecting streets, required that the tracks be temporarily shifted to the north. This displacement represented a rare opportunity to examine the long-buried foundations, which underlay the entire railroad right-of-way, directly across the street from the mission church. My team of archaeologists excavated those foundations with machines and by hand to reveal the pattern, associated artifacts, and history of the waterworks’ construction.

Workers excavating a historic water system in front of railroad tracks and the Mission San Gabriel

Project planners have long known that archaeological materials were present in the area, prompting them to hire my firm of professional archaeologists in advance of construction. We have spent years documenting the physical remains of the mission, including numerous foundations and hundreds of thousands of artifacts and food remains. This latest dig has uncovered four major iterations of the water system: from simple earthen ditches, to cobblestone-lined canals and tanks, to masonry reservoirs connected by segmented ceramic pipes, to the pinnacle of the mission’s hydraulic technology—a massive cement flume that served as the millrace and millpond for a New England-style grain mill dating to 1825. In exposing and documenting these systems, we continue to be impressed by the innovation that marked their evolution, and the increasing sophistication that they gained as they were improved. This improvement was not simply about increases in scale—with each new version of the water system, the designers got better at conserving water. They did this not by reducing their use, but by recycling the water several times before releasing it downstream. The network of canals simultaneously powered mills, flushed tanning vats, watered animals, irrigated crops, and supported cooking, bathing, and washing needs.

We preserved the most intact portion of the 1825 flume two years ago by picking it up and moving it across the street to Plaza Park and installing a self-contained plumbing system. It once again flows with cool water so that visitors can experience the look, feel, and sound of the historic waterway. Our finds in 2014, however, included the largest and least expected element of the system, representing a kind of missing link between the earliest zanjas and the late Mission period millworks.

I have been conducting archaeological research for 20 years, excavating in Arizona, New Jersey, Honduras, British Columbia, Florida, and Peru. But much of my career has focused on the early history of Los Angeles. I have learned how deeply L.A.’s roots are entwined with water issues. After making the 9-mile walk from San Gabriel to their new town site, one of the first acts of Los Angeles’ pobladores (settlers) was to create their own Zanja Madre, a “mother ditch” connecting the Los Angeles River to their houses and fields. More than a century later, a former zanjero (ditch tender) named William Mulholland took the idea pioneered by San Gabriel’s missionaries to its logical end, bringing water from the Sierra Nevada to Los Angeles in a ditch of epic proportions, the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

As Los Angeles looks to the future, the thirst of its growing population remains to be satisfied. In both Los Angeles and her predecessor, San Gabriel, bringing water to the people was only half of the equation. The other half—seeking new ways to conserve the water—was the key innovation upon which this great city was first built, and will be built again.

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Flight? No one needs an airplane to get to Apple Valley from L.A. The town of 70,000 is only a 90-minute drive from downtown Los Angeles, even less than that from my home in the San Gabriel Valley.

Too many California places remain stubbornly invisible, despite their proximity to population centers. Apple Valley, in Southern California’s High Desert, is one such place. Apple Valley is one of four big municipalities in the Victor Valley that, taken together, have as many people as Oakland. But getting there requires a climb up Interstate 15 and over the 4,000-foot-high El Cajon Pass. Millions of Californians eager to make it to or from Vegas speed by without giving Apple Valley a second thought.

If they bothered to stop, they probably wouldn’t think much more of it. The bucolic name may lead people to assume it’s in Northern California, but there haven’t been apple orchards in Apple Valley in decades. It’s a safe place, but the people are poorer and less educated and more sprawled out than is common in today’s California, where such communities are thought of as anachronistically dispensable.
I drove up to Apple Valley because Uncle Dale–really my great-uncle–lived there and died there. And he was indispensable.

For Dale, the High Desert offered the dream of a big piece of land, a great home, and quiet after a life of considerable toil and struggle. During the Dust Bowl, Dale, barely a teenager, made his way west from Oklahoma with his father Bull, stopping to pick cotton in New Mexico and Arizona before finally landing in the Redlands area. There, the rest of the family, including his big sister (my grandmother), joined them to work in the orange groves and packing houses.

As an adult, Dale started driving trucks and never stopped, building a small family trucking business. But mostly, he took care of his family. When other male relatives behaved irresponsibly—a far too frequent occurrence—Dale stepped in, serving as a father figure to younger siblings, nieces, nephews, and untold numbers of younger cousins who all called him “Big D.”

His interventions could make all the difference. In the 1950s, Dale was hauling sand to build much of L.A. State College (what we now know as Cal State L.A.) when he suggested to his baby sister Fern that she get her bachelor’s degree there. To make it happen, Dale put his three kids in one room and gave Fern her own bedroom in his home, then in the San Gabriel Valley. She graduated and spent 41 years as one of Redlands’ most popular elementary school teachers.

My mother likes to tell the story of how Dale took her in hand after she failed her California driving test–an unacceptable result for a niece of a great truck driver–and explained his three rules for navigating the roads of our state.

First, stop means stop.

Second, only amateurs change lanes–so stay in your lane, dammit.

Third, and most important, the secret to success in driving (and perhaps in life) is to maintain a constant speed.

A man with this kind of wisdom belonged in the High Desert, and so he moved up there 30 years ago. Dale could live like a cowboy–he loved to wear boots and big hats–without entirely leaving behind Southern California. In the 1970s and ’80s, this kind of life on the edge was a common dream, and the Victor Valley’s population grew. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans established their museum in Apple Valley in 1967. By 1988, Apple Valley had grown enough to incorporate, though it insisted on being labeled a town, not a city. (About two dozen California “towns” have made a similar choice.) The irony–that parched Okies like my family members had found their slice of paradise in the California desert–was not lost on them. From dust to dust.

Dale’s home was a wonder. It had a big barn with actual hay, a horse you could ride, and scrub where you could play all kinds of invented games. The house’s main room was a man cave with better natural light and a full bar in the center: I loved big family Thanksgivings there. My grandmother, an aerospace line worker, bought a piece of property nearby and planned to build a place near her brother’s, but cancer took her before she got around to it.

Dale’s business was strong; he and his sons moved all kinds of things–most recently milk–around California and the West; he sometimes parked his truck on our leafy street in Pasadena when he had to haul something “down the hill”–his name for Los Angeles.

Then the recession–the one in the early 1990s–hit, hard and brutal. Trucking and other businesses soured, and never quite came back. Eventually, Rogers and Evans moved their museum to Missouri. (Before people proclaim a “California comeback” from 2008’s Great Recession, maybe we ought to consider recovering from the earlier collapse first.) Dale and his wife Verb–their marriage, ended only by death, lasted 67 years–eventually moved in with one of their sons in a nice spot in Apple Valley, but Dale still couldn’t, or wouldn’t, retire, driving into his 70s.

He spent the last couple years in pain, often stuck in bed, amusing himself by shooting vermin he spotted out the window. Relatives noted that his passing last month had been a blessing, sparing him hurt and allowing the local squirrel population a chance to recover.

The graveyard service was in a little cemetery, a couple hundred yards from the Route 66 Museum. The wind never stopped blowing as we told tales of Dale. (Theological question overheard at a trucker funeral: If you were damned for all eternity, would you rather do the time in hell or at the California Air Resources Board?)

Then we made the right turn onto State Route 18–the “Happy Trails Highway”–to Apple Valley for lunch. It was the usual overwhelming spread: yards-long sandwiches, every form of carbohydrate, and KFC, because it just isn’t a Humphrey family gathering without fried chicken.

After four hours of food and reminiscing, my 3-year-old started to tire. We said our goodbyes and headed back to the car. It was Friday afternoon, and it would be a long, tricky drive down the hill.

I resolved to maintain a constant speed.

The post My Uncle Dale’s California Dream appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In a neighborhood full of community, I like to walk alone.

Yes, I will walk into the hills with my husband when the kids are asleep and we have a babysitter. Sure, I will walk to get an orange balloon and a three-pack of strawberries with my sons on a farmers market Sunday. But walking with just about anyone else? Sorry, but no.

These walks write my life. They blow out the static of last-minute lesson plans and frozen turkey meatballs and towels on the floor. They regulate my mind, step after step accruing into calm.

Down the driveway we share with our neighbors, onto the sidewalk recently repaved by the city, and I’m already breathing better. Up the block with the Japanese maples, past the cactuses in the median. Right onto Broadview Drive, with its old-fashioned street lamps, its corner houses with party voices spilling over the hedges.

Sometimes, if the dust of the day is taking too long to clear out, I write to-do lists on my phone. E-mail Dad. Screen DVD for class.

Other times I choose a soundtrack to shape the night, listening without headphones, lowering the volume if someone gets close. It might be Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” and “Out in the Street” if I’m bursting to get outside. The Indigo Girls’ “Watershed” and “Closer To Fine” if I’m looking for answers after a crazy day. John Denver’s “Rhymes and Reasons” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane” if I’m feeling quiet and want to remember doing errands with my mom when I was a kid.

Sometimes I don’t listen to music or take notes. The phone sits in my pocket only in case my husband needs to call. Then I try not to check it.

Tonight the moon is full and low over the sloping Glendale hills to the east, beyond the 2 Freeway that flows downhill toward Dodger Stadium. At 8 p.m., the temperature is almost 80, like bathwater. My 9-year-old said at dinner that he waits all year for nights like this—nights when he can stay up late, and it’s light late, and our cat frisks around.

As I walk east onto Ocean View Boulevard, the houses turn to businesses. The strip mall’s munched-in parking lot is packed tonight. Mathnasium is closed, but La Cabañita with its smoky mole sauce is doing its usual heel-kicking business. Through the window framed with pink and green fabric, a man on his phone nearly drops his chin into a half-full salt-rimmed margarita. Did his friends leave? Did they not show up?

EmbroidMe has a sign saying the delivery entrance is on the other side. A pizza guy peels up Ocean View. Lights reach out from the back of Berolina Bakery, carrying the smell of rosemary loaves. There’s rosemary everywhere, it seems, in someone’s yard or on the sidewalk medians.

A mechanic is still open. A tan Mercedes convertible sits on the floor, a silver Honda sedan rises in the lift. With the doors up, the place seems strangely intimate, a well-lit living room with wrenches and oil.

Floodlights shine on the baseball game two streets over. A tapas restaurant is closed because of kitchen plumbing problems, says a note on the back of an envelope taped to the glass door. A 6-month-old on dad’s shoulders stares, his eyes glazed and sleepy, as his parents walk past a pizzeria. A man emerges from a sketchy bar, standing in place just a beat too long, his reflexes shot. The California dream, it still exists, if you squint a little.

On this dreamy bathwater night, I don’t write notes to myself, don’t reach for music. Instead I make a to-do list of the soul, what-ifs of the heart.

What would it look like for my boys to become good men?

How do I want to be different when summer ends?

Why do I find it so difficult to relax?

What does it mean to have walked this neighborhood almost 1,000 times over the past two-plus years?

How can I take the peace these walks drop upon me and sift it like sugar over my life?

I’m gathering up all of this, the questions without answers and the full moon and the jacked-up cars and the conversations on coffeehouse patios. I have nobody to talk to except myself, and I love it.

But as I come to the end of my daily mile and a half, heading down the street to our house, its windows open to the night and our children asleep inside, a chill drifts through me.

It’s enough to make you cry, this neighborhood with its pure aspirations that sometimes sublimate into provincialism, holding onto the small-town feel of 60 years past.

It’s enough to make me cry, the thought that my sons will grow up and leave these streets edged with rosemary. I want to embed the storefronts in my brain as I want to etch memories in my sons’ minds, building a warehouse of images against any impending darkness.

It’s enough to make me fumble for Springsteen after all, to listen to “Thunder Road” as the piano lilts: “Don’t turn me home again / I just can’t face myself alone again.”

I pass our house and keep on walking. One more loop around the block before I go home.

The post Walking Alone After Dark appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yeah, right—and I’m Thomas Jefferson.

If you want to know what the Fourth—and this nutty country—are really all about, head to the intersection of Huntington Drive and Alhambra Road in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley. There, at the southeast corner, in front of Cheney’s Tropic Liquor and the 99 Cent Store, you’ll find a fireworks stand—one of hundreds that go up across California for a week each year.

In our bone-dry state, most fireworks—the kinds that explode and go airborne—are illegal to sell or possess. Which only makes sense. The public airwaves are full of warnings from the authorities—the same folks who like to talk about how we’re all equal before the law—against buying or setting off fireworks, lest you hurt yourself or burn your community down.

Of course, that is not the whole story. Liberty is never so simple. This week only, the state permits the sale of “safe and sane” fireworks—sparklers and things that don’t fly. Provided you are at least 16, you can buy such fireworks between noon on June 28 and noon on July 6; the sales fund local nonprofits (many raise more than $10,000 this week). But there is an important caveat: Cities and communities can choose to ban even “safe and sane” fireworks, and more than 200 of California’s nearly 500 municipalities have done so.

The result: California for eight days is a crazy quilt of fireworks sales and bans. And the intersection of Huntington and Alhambra is perhaps the best illustration of that. Three cities converge here. Two of them ban fireworks: Los Angeles (to the west of the intersection) and South Pasadena (to the north). But the third—the city of Alhambra—is a hotbed of fireworks sales.

A sign advertising fireworks sits on the border of Alhambra (to the left) and the city of Los Angeles (to the right)

Indeed, the large fireworks stand sits on the Alhambra corner of the intersection, literally steps away from cities that have banned them. There are other fireworks stands in Alhambra near the city’s borders with San Marino and San Gabriel, which also have bans.

In these times, this may sound like another example of how our country is divided. The wise men of politics and punditry are currently afraid that America is too polarized, that we are splitting into red and blue nations. How, they ask, can we be the “One Nation Under God” the Founding Fathers intended if gay couples can get married in Boston but not in Birmingham?

In California, people in power are similarly worried about the political and economic divides between regions—especially the split between the liberal, prosperous coast and the conservative, struggling inland. We are also told that we are too often living among people who are too much like ourselves; we are said to be retreating into separate realities.

But would we truly be better off if our laws and freedoms were the same everywhere?

The fact that we have such different laws in different places can create peril: You can buy a dangerous firecracker or automatic weapon in one place and wreak havoc elsewhere. But it also makes us freer. If you have a little bit of time and the ability to travel, you can do just about anything in this country, for better and for worse. (Which is why fireworks—loud, volatile, powerful, dangerous—are such a fitting way of celebrating ourselves.)

We may even be less divided because of our differences. Remember that in California, our biggest political conflicts involve areas—taxes, prisons, water, and budgeting—where we all have to live under the same rules. We get along much better when our communities can go their own ways.

This idea—that American freedom would create crazy divides of all kinds, and that we shouldn’t get that upset about them—is an old one. “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires,” wrote James Madison, who may have set off unpermitted fireworks in his day, in The Federalist Papers. “But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.”

While Madison died long before California entered the Union, I suspect he would have felt vindicated by a Fourth of July in our state. He also might have been overwhelmed by all the choices at that fireworks stand in Alhambra. When I visited last weekend, there were dozens of individual fireworks options—the Mini Monster, the Purple Rain, Mad Dog Fountain, En Fuego, Black Widow, Orchid, Zombie Zapper—and combo packages all the way up to The Big Bang, which, for $500, appeared to provide enough firepower to allow me to wage war against San Diego.

I don’t care much for fireworks, but this stand supports an admirable band, the Mighty Moors of Alhambra High. And so I purchased a six-pack of Piccolo Petes, which produce a shrill whistle and gold sparks. So what if the neighbors call the cops or I set myself on fire? It’s the American way.

The post How Fireworks Divide California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The state of California has a new Local Control Funding Formula. Under the formula, districts are required to develop a Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP), a summary of spending priorities and goals for student achievement for the next three years. For the plan to be approved, the district must demonstrate that parents had the opportunity to weigh in (“meaningful stakeholder input” is the key phrase), particularly on the question of how the money will be spent.

These plans must be finished by July, so districts have just a few more weeks to involve parents in the process. But many parents are unaware of this opportunity for engagement. According to a Public Policy Institute of California survey conducted in mid-April, only 48 percent of parents surveyed said that their district had provided them information about how to get involved.

As president of our local education foundation in the San Gabriel Valley community of Temple City during the worst of the budget crises, I found my own input on budget issues frequently met with resistance and skepticism by educators, but that may change now that districts are mandated to listen to parents. Here’s some advice for making your voice heard in the plans for your local school district—and to avoid becoming frustrated and cynical.

Parents shouldn’t wait for an invitation to get involved.

When it comes to the future of your local school district, it’s up to you to grab the opportunity while it’s available. Sure, maybe the flier for the public meeting is buried in the bottom of your kid’s backpack. Maybe this is the first you’ve heard about the LCAP. But it is likely that some of your fellow parents have been engaged—while other parents have been left out of the loop. If you don’t know how to get involved, you need to ask.

In my own case, I contributed my input to the LCAP largely by accident. I just happened to be at two of the school site council meetings the district staff used as a proxy for parent engagement. Many districts have chosen to make use of these existing committees with parent representation. To reach a broader swath of parents, our district sent out an automated phone call asking parents to take a five-question online survey. Unfortunately, the school district didn’t make clear that the survey was intended for developing the LCAP plans, so many parents didn’t participate.

The process will be rushed, and it will be different in every district.

The way that your district collects “meaningful stakeholder input” could look very different from what happens in the school district in the next town over. As of yet, there is no standard process for collecting (or using) parent input in these plans, and there is no standard by which districts will be judged.

This uncertainty will add to the stress on well-intentioned school officials, who, as they work to complete the plans by July, are also running trials of the new Common Core curriculum testing process. As a result, collecting your meaningful input for the LCAP may take a backseat to other priorities.

The information you receive will be inconsistent and confusing, particularly when it comes to funding.

No matter how many times I ask how much additional funding our district will receive under the new Local Control Funding Formula, I never get a clear answer. The best and most truthful answer is: “We don’t yet know.” While the new formula eliminates much of the crazy categorical program rules that made previous California school funding calculations look like quantum physics, the new formula is still pretty complex.

In many districts, there won’t be many funding decisions for parents to influence—yet.

The new formula funds will be phased in over eight years and are based on optimistic economic growth projections. Districts with large concentrations of “high needs” students—low-income students, foster children, and English learners—will likely see large, immediate increases in their budgets because the intent of the new formula is to drive more money to those students.

But a small district like mine may not see a whole lot more money until the new funding formula is fully phased in, despite the fact that half of our students fall into the state’s definition of “high needs.” In fact, full funding may not happen at all since the tax increases from Proposition 30 expire in less than eight years. School districts are still recovering from several consecutive years of starved budgets. The small budget increases we gain in the short-term from the new formula won’t buy us many more programs, but maybe we can afford printer paper again.

“Local Control” is not about you.

If you think that the term “Local Control” means that parents will have significant say in a school district’s spending priorities, you don’t have the whole story. Local Control actually refers to the flexibility that districts have now that dozens of categorical funds and their corresponding regulations were consolidated into a simplified base grant. Even with the greater flexibility, the state still mandates that the LCAP plans cover eight broad priorities, such as student achievement and implementation of Common Core. And the state has all kinds of rules to direct what plans must include when it comes to those eight priorities.

For example, one of the eight broad priorities is student engagement, a big topic. But in the LCAP input survey for parents in our district, the question about student engagement was: “How can our district help more students attend school regularly?” Based on that question, one might conclude that we have a lot of kids cutting class, but in fact we have a 97 percent attendance rate. That 3 percent are missing school because they’re sick. Nevertheless, the state requires that we develop a plan to improve their attendance.

So our parents suggested that we use the LCFF money to buy more Kleenex to reduce germ spread. Even though improving attendance is not a priority for our parents, we still had to give input and come up with a plan for it anyway.

One element of the LCAP plans is supposed to be the development of goals to increase parental involvement in programs and school decision-making. The irony is that parents can’t shape future goals for their involvement if they don’t participate now. So look through those backpacks, listen to the automated phone announcements, and show up to the meetings. Seize this rare moment when they have to listen to us.

The post Seize the Moment to Change Your Kid’s School! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My father introduced backyard chickens into our family in 1960s Orange County. Back then, there were still some patches of agriculture—an orange grove, strawberry fields—near our Stanton home. Dad, who grew up in eastern Texas where raising chickens and rabbits was a way of life, thought the chickens would teach my siblings and me great lessons in responsibility. These were lessons that have lasted us all our lives [and made our spouses crazy].

When I left home, I lived without a yard (or even a window box) for a number of years. Anne and I were apartment dwellers with a cat for some time before we bought our first home in 1998. The first thing we did while moving into the house was to get a puppy. Shortly after that, the opportunity to raise chickens presented itself. My sister and her family were leaving California for Virginia. So we inherited three small “silkies” (a breed of hen with fluffy feathers) and a half-bag of feed. Before I knew it, I was recreating a childhood experience. I even built a coop, though it made me wish I had paid equal attention to the carpentry skills my dad tried to teach me. [So do I, said the wife who has chased those biddies.]

Not only the birds survived, but so did our marriage. You see, Anne’s sense of humor is exhausted when it comes to the chickens. Why? Let’s just say she’s not a fan [I should say not]. The chickens don’t have much in the way of personality [Oh, please. Those biddies are just mean]. You’ve heard of the term “pecking order”? Well, it involves a chicken establishing dominance by pecking another chicken into bloody submission. This is how chickens form social order as a flock. If a chicken from a different flock shows up, they will gang up and kill the intruder. Doesn’t sound very nice, does it? So I keep only one flock at a time.

My source for chickens is a tale worth telling. Before infecting the crows that spread West Nile virus, the mosquitoes will bite the chickens. The San Gabriel Valley Vector Control (SGVC) places sentinel flocks in various locations —including my backyard—to collect blood samples from the flocks. The idea is to find the virus before crows start dropping from the sky.

Every year, our friend at SGVC contacts me to see how many birds I want. I take one flock—usually five chickens. The chickens are immune to the virus, and I have been assured that the virus cannot be transmitted to eggs.

By November, the days are short enough that the hens no longer lay eggs. A commercial operation would bring in lights to extend the daylight hours to keep up egg production. I decided I didn’t want to do that. I also decided that I didn’t want to feed chickens all winter. So I located a small processing operation in Sun Valley where the chickens would be butchered and cleaned. I know it sounds cruel and inhumane. But part of the exercise is remembering where my food comes from. I admit to being a hypocrite in not doing the actual killing myself. I also admit there is a five-minute pause when I consider whether there will be a flock next year. So far the answer continues to be “yes.” I find that keeping chickens still manages to ground me as an urban farmer.

I have three hens now that produce about one or two eggs daily. They have a free run space of 30-by-6 feet to dig, take dirt baths, and hide their eggs in interesting places. Egg collection time reminds me of another tradition—hunting for Easter eggs. I’ve learned to accept the critters where they are since I can’t reason with them. I occasionally find them curious, but they are not very bright.

You might wonder how I get along with my neighbors. One set are from Mississippi and the others are from Mexico and Guatemala; for them, having chickens around isn’t unusual or strange. I try to be accommodating in the name of being a good neighbor and steward. I don’t have noisy roosters, but hens can get loud at times. The run is cleaned out regularly to reduce flies, and waste goes into the composter. A mesh on the chain link fence keeps feathers from blowing into our neighbor’s yard. And extra eggs go to the neighbors first.

I’ve heard about people in the Los Angeles area abandoning their chickens for several reasons. They didn’t check their local codes for compliance. They didn’t consult the neighbors first. (You have to do that if you expect to get along with your neighbors.) The yard wasn’t secure enough. (You have to keep both chickens in and predators out.)

What do backyard chickens taste like? A 2-year-old is far too tough to roast or fry. I’ve made great soup stock and tried a coq au vin, which my wife refused to try. One rubber chicken was enough for her. [Blech—patooey!]

When I was a kid, my mother never allowed my dad to kill our chickens. We grew up a few miles from Buena Park and the Knott’s Berry Farm theme park. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, the attraction was rural enough that chickens ran around the property where the replica of Independence Hall stood. Every fall, we’d head off in the station wagon to the Knott’s parking lot off of Beach Boulevard. We kids stayed in the car while Dad took a cardboard box containing the chickens and walked out of sight from us. He would return a minute later with the emptied box, and we went home, knowing that the birds were free.

I still remember the lessons I learned as a kid from chickens about life, death, and keeping the coop locked. That last one is important. Otherwise, a curious hen might find her way into your parent’s garden party and startle a guest with one drink too many in him. It wasn’t always about the eggs.

The post The Clucking Hens of My Altadena Home appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You’ll need at least 15 bags to survive, he told me, with a hollow look in his eyes. Maybe more.

But I couldn’t imagine the terrible hunger that the dark night would bring. So, while grocery shopping on a Saturday afternoon, I threw a mere eight small bags of candy into the cart. That would have been more than enough to satisfy the trickling of trick-or-treaters in my old neighborhood, a crowded section of apartments and duplexes in L.A.’s Miracle Mile. Little did I know that in moving to a house in the heart of the San Gabriel Valley, my family and I had crossed a dividing line unmarked on any Los Angeles County map, a line that becomes clear only when the ghosts and ghouls show up at your door on the night of October 31. We had moved from a Halloween desert to a Halloween destination, one of those communities to which people travel to do their trick-and-treating.

Yes, Halloween may once have been a neighborhood event, the sort of night when communities come together to share candy with their children and cheerfully tolerate the impromptu art installations of hormonal teens armed with shaving cream and eggs. But those days are long gone, particularly here. Halloween, like too much else, has become aspirational. We Californians are more than willing to get in the car or hop on the bus in search of a better Halloween a couple of towns over.

There is data on this, as there seems to be on everything, and the folks at Zillow, the online real estate company, have compiled an index of the country’s best neighborhoods for trick-or-treating. It is based on four criteria: high home values (rich people = better candy), high population density (making trick-or-treating more efficient), walkability, and low crime.

Four of the top 12 cities in the nation for trick-or-treating are in the Golden State. In first place is San Francisco, thanks to the neighborhoods of Noe Valley (the best), Sea Cliff, Cow Hollow, Presidio Heights and Glen Park. San Jose comes in fourth in the United States (top neighborhood: Willow Glen), Los Angeles sixth (top neighborhood: Pacific Palisades), and San Diego 12th (top neighborhood: Kensington).

Zillow’s is far from the only ranking. In Southern California, major TV stations have lists on their websites of the best trick-or-treating neighborhoods, many of them in Orange County. Try Aliso Viejo for the walking and Trabuco Road in Irvine for the neighborhood feel. Commercial districts like Old Town Pasadena and malls like the SouthBay Pavilion in Carson have also set themselves up for trick-or-treaters.

This sort of thing, like Halloween itself, is at once fun and scary. The fun part is the mixing of children and families from around the city, crossing geographic and other lines for at least one night. Warriors against income inequality can take comfort in having at least one holiday that’s redistributionist.

The scary part is that so many of us prefer to take candy from better-heeled strangers rather than from our own neighbors. That’s how weak the bonds of community are. According to surveys, Californians are less likely to know their neighbors or work together on community problems than people in most other states. Halloween is one natural opportunity to meet the people down the block, but only if you stay in the neighborhood.

You might think Halloween wanderlust has weakened, given that crime is down and gas prices are up. But no. Streets like mine—upper-middle-class, low-traffic, with plenty of parking—continue to be deluged. A certain holiday spirit can also be part of the draw. In my city, South Pasadena, a local theater has been turned into a haunted house, and there are at least two pumpkin patches nearby. The city has even declared this Halloween “John Carpenter Night,” in honor of the director of 1978 slasher classic Halloween, which was filmed in town. It was about a child murderer who escapes from a mental hospital and—demonstrating what now seems like a refreshing commitment to his home community—returns to his old neighborhood to terrorize teenage babysitters. (Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to hire one around here.)

My own night of horror came last Halloween. By 5:30 p.m., every parking spot on our street was taken, and there were lines at almost every door. It was a great scene; I met families from as far away as Long Beach and La Verne. But I ran through my eight candy bags in half an hour. Then I drove out in desperate search of more supplies. Vons and Ralphs had been cleaned out; Rite Aid had 10 bags of mini-chocolate bars, all of which I bought. Those only lasted one more hour. My night ended in disgrace before 8, when I hung an “Out of Candy” sign on the door.

I’m still haunted by that night. So this year, I braved the impossibly crowded Costco in Alhambra, where parking is like a John Carpenter movie, and buy 20 industrial-strength bags of candy. I just hope it will be enough to sate the vampires and zombies who come knocking on the door.

The post Even Halloween Has Become Aspirational appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.