I mentioned in a previous post
that my grandparents’ house in Long Beach had been raided by the Ku
Klux Klan in 1932. I was going to be in Los Angeles in February for a
women storytellers’ retreat, so I wrote the people who live in the house
now, hoping that they would be interested in the story and would let me
come in and look around. I wanted to be able to visualize the setting
as I wrote about it. I enclosed a copy of a newspaper article about the
raid with the address in it, and gave my website address so they could
check me out. I got no answer, and figured either they weren’t
interested or they were out of town. So I settled for seeing the outside
of the house and the neighborhood.
Claudia
flew down to join me after the retreat, and we planned to visit Long
Beach on the way to see a friend of hers in San Diego. I took the Long
Beach exit off the 405. The main streets looked all different but I
went right to the house on Elm Street where I lived from fifth grade
through high school. It had looked a bit neglected when Claudia and I
drove around Long Beach with my cousins about fifteen years ago, but it
has a picket fence now, and two gilded lions guarding the front steps.
The fellow in front didn’t speak any English.
We
found good coffee at the Passport in what is now called the “East
Village,” just east of downtown. Then we drove east on Ocean Avenue past
the art museum that started in one bluff-top mansion when I was in high
school (Poly) and has now expanded to three. The address we were
looking for was a few blocks inland. It belongs to a lovingly kept-up
craftsman bungalow a block from a little park. All the houses in the
neighborhood looked original and well cared for, mostly twenties and
thirties bungalows in different styles, including a fairy-tale-type
house with curving shingle roof and stained glass windows. I walked up
the driveway of my grandparents’ former home to take a peek at the back
yard. A dog barked and stuck his nose under the fence.
I
walked back to the sidewalk where Claudia was waiting and the front
door opened. A slim, dark-haired woman came out, followed by the dog.
“Hi,” I said, “I’m Nancy Schimmel. I wrote you a letter...” “It’s on the
bulletin board,” she said. “We were out of town. Come in!” So in we
went. The inside was all white and airy with dark-stained woodwork. She
explained that in the nineties, before they lived there, there had been a
fire in the kitchen, so it and the wall between it and the dining room
had been completely redone. The kitchen was modern, but the built-in
sideboard in the dining room was a reproduction of the original. She
even had blueprints of the house as it had been and as it was restored,
so we could see that the big living room had once been two smaller
rooms. Her husband, she said, was interested in history, so we left a
copy of the chapter on the raid with her and promised to let them know
if we found out anything new. I came away feeling the visit was a total
success.
It
started to rain the next day, and we were afraid we would miss the
total eclipse of the moon that night, but it cleared up as we approached
Los Angeles and we got a good view. The next night we celebrated my
seventy-third birthday with my cousins and Virginia Walter. Ginny and I were in library school together back in the sixties. I’ll tell you about her new book in an upcoming post.
I’ll be telling the story of the Klan raid at the Malvina concert at the Freight and Salvage Coffee House March 23, and singing “The Battle of Maxton Field.” the song my mother wrote about a Klan rally being raided. It’s on the reissued album, Malvina Reynolds Sings the Truth.
In my hurry to tell you about the CD last time, I didn’t mention the
graphics, which are great. The serious photo on the cover gives way to
the three color photos of Malvina eating an ice cream cone which are on the Malvina web page and then some pages from her song books with illustrations by Jodi Robbin and Emmy Lou Packard.
©2008 by Nancy Schimmel
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
A HOUSE IN LONG BEACH
