Just
back from another trip to Southern California, this time with my
daughter, Nancy Beth (just Nancy to her friends but Nancy Beth to us to
avoid confusion), for the family/history tour and some art. First we
went to Long Beach, staying Friday and Saturday night at the Westin
Hotel on Ocean Boulevard between Long Beach Boulevard and Elm Street. My
travel agent picked it out and the location turned out to be perfect,
two blocks from the Passport Cafe, where Claudia and I had coffee when
we went in February, and about five blocks from the building where my
family had the naval tailor shop. We wanted to go to the Passport to get
a bite to eat, but it was closed and the intersection cordoned off
because CSI was filming an episode there. How Southern California! We
watched, and walked around looking in the windows of galleries and
antique and craft stores but too tired to go in. We found smoothies and
then took a nap and I swam in the hotel’s heated outdoor pool. Nice.
After
a good dinner at a nearby Italian deli full of police officers, we
walked down to Pine Street to see where the store had been. There’s no
store at all there now, just the blank wall of the lower level of the
office building, where Pine Avenue slants down to what was the Pike (the amusement zone) and the beach.
The shop was in the lower floor of this building, behind the torsos of the people crossing Ocean Boulevard.The
equally large building across the street, where I used to get
boysenberry-orange juices at the juice stand in the beach side, is gone.
Parking lot now. The beach itself is gone. Where it was, there’s a
Border’s and a bunch of chain restaurants, the street ending at a sea
wall but no sea—it’s part of the harbor now, and the water is still. It
was hard to convey to Nancy Beth what it all looked like...the Rainbow
Pier, gone, the Spit-and-Argue Club where my mother spoke on the news of
the day, gone, the municipal auditorium where I saw ballet and
operettas with my grandmother, gone, replaced by a convention center and
a performing arts center.
Nancy
Beth’s camera battery ran out before she could take a picture of the
light standards in front of the convention center, so we went back the
next night. I wanted a latte, so we went into Borders and there I found
the Souvenir Picture Postcard Album of Long Beach, California,
with black-and-white photographs of the beach and Pike and buildings of
my childhood and earlier. Bless you, Mr. Kenneth Larkey. He published
this little book from his own postcard collection and “from the archives
of the Long Beach Heritage Museum” in 1997. I’ll have to look up that
museum next time I go. Anyway, in the book Nancy Beth could see what I
was having such a hard time describing.
Back
to Friday night—walking back to the hotel on the ocean side of Ocean
Boulevard about 9:00p.m., we saw marchers—maybe a hundred—coming toward
us on the sidewalk on the other side. We crossed over and saw they were
carrying “No on 8” signs and chanting “What do we want? Equal rights!
When do we want ’em? Now!” We waved and cheered but didn’t think of
joining them, we were walked out. Next morning we found the Long Beach
Press-Telegram in the hall with its largest headline proclaiming “Nearly 2.000 march against Prop. 8 in L.B.”
Seems we had seen one contingent continuing to march after the main
rally. Big color photos, captioned “The crowd marched about three miles
to denounce the passage Tuesday of the same-sex marriage ban.” Maybe the
ones we saw were the “...100 stragglers who returned to the start of
the route and blocked a street, drawing police in riot gear.” The whole
thing was started by a guy text messaging his friends the afternoon
before.
This
was the big difference from the Long Beach of 1952. Not the new
buildings and streets or the hemmed-in water, but the large, vocal
gay and lesbian population (whose business district, according to the
paper, we had been walking through that afternoon). I remember my high
school artist-poet-and-musician friend John Kelly using the word
“homosexual” once but I can’t remember ever hearing the word “lesbian”
in those days.
John
Kelly was in French class with me, and he and Dawn Gardner and I were
in the French teacher’s office one day during class supposedly
practicing a skit, but we had found the menu of a French restaurant and
were making up new dishes for it. John’s was the best: Blanched
Fallopian Tubes.
Saturday
morning we visited the old brown shingle house on Elm between 15th and
16th. We could see all of it because an alley runs alongside the house
and the apartments behind it. We didn’t have a real back yard. The
rotary clothesline was in full view of everybody. The older woman who
lived in the front upstairs apartment admonished me to hang
undergarments first, in the center, so the outer clothes would hide
them. (Surfing from Orion Magazine, I found a whole site devoted to the
joys and virtues of drying clothes on lines and racks. And they have a
song! www. laundrylist.org )
We
looked for sun block at the little store (now Mexican) a block away,
and drove by Poly High School, two blocks away in the other direction. I
was always late to school because it only took a minute to get there.
My mother baked oatmeal cookies with all sorts of nourishing
additives—rice polish, brewer’s yeast—so I could grab breakfast as I
tore out the house.
We
drove by my old junior high school about a mile east to find it’s now
Long Beach City College (with added buildings). Then we drove back
toward the water to the house on Third Street my grandparents were
living in when they were raided by the Ku Klux Klan. We wandered around the neighborhood, Nancy Beth taking photographs of tropical plants to paint pictures from (she does watercolors,
but is starting to learn oil painting). Then we headed for the bluffs
overlooking the beach and the water. The art museum was just a block or
so down Ocean from where we came out. The museum was started in 1951,
the summer before the last year I was in high school, in an old mansion
that had been a navy officers’ club during the war. Now there’s a new
museum building and the old mansion is the museum cafe.
We had a good lunch on the terrace, overlooking the water. Perfect
weather. Then Nancy Beth took in the museum and the beach while I went
back to the hotel for a nap.
Sunday
we drove to Pacific Palisades to stay a couple of days with our cousins
Mike and Mo (Mike’s parents, my mother’s brother and sister-in-law,
were in the house that was raided, and I showed Nancy Beth the newspaper
with photos of my mother and Aunt Lil at the trial of the Ku Kluxers).
Nancy Beth hadn’t met these cousins before (if you’re coming in late
here, I gave Nancy Beth up for adoption when she was a baby, and we
found each other through a registry when she was 37). Nancy Beth told me
that Claudia had said Mike and Mo really know how to make visitors feel
welcome, and she found that to be true. We all celebrated Nancy Beth’s
birthday a day early Monday with dinner out, and Tuesday she and I went
to the Getty. We wandered around separately, then compared notes—we both
liked the garden much better than the buildings. Friendly people, good
lunch and good view in the restaurant. Yesterday she flew home to
Seattle and I to Berkeley. Clear weather, so I got to see the show out
the window.
Pelicans circling off the end of the Santa Monica Pier. A couple of seaplanes did the same.
We didn’t see my friend Ginny Walter this time because she’s teaching for a month at a library school in Croatia. She’s blogging from there.
Next
on the agenda: I’m performing Saturday morning (Nov. 15th) at 10:30 to
11 a.m. in the Saturday Sing Along Series for families at Tumble and Tea Cafe, 4120
Telegraph Avenue, Oakland. I’ll be singing and telling stories. The
series is organized by yet another name-alike (except she spells it the
other way), Nanci Armstrong-Temple, whom I met at the Educators for Non-Violence conference a few months ago.
©2008 by Nancy Schimmel
Thursday, November 13, 2008
ANOTHER BIRTHDAY IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
