Grandpa gave Dad his, nearly new at the time, 1959 Ford, because Grandpa gave up driving after he forgot where the ignition was located, and he kept running over curbs. Besides, Grandpa walked to work everyday because he only lived across the street from his work at the Omaha Municipal Utilities District office.
Dad packed up the car with Rodney, Allen and me, loaded a trailer with what belongings he could fit in it and we headed west.
Mom, Lorie and Kevin would follow on a train. I'm sure that Mom lectured Dad thoroughly on the care and feeding of us boys before he left with us. Mom was a real worrier when it came to Dad and us boys. She could worry about anything… will we get in a crash, will the car break down in the desert, will we get sick on the road, will Dad go off and forget one of us at a road side stop. Mom worried so much that her hair turned white before she was 30-years old. Grandma said it was because of Dad and us boys.
We got about 30 miles from Omaha when Dad ran into the back of a car driven by an old farmer and his wife who pulled out in front of us. The car wasn't damaged much, and no one was hurt, but the trailer hitch was bent below the rear bumper. Dad had to bend it back in place as good as he could get it then chain the trailer to the trailer hitch on the bumper of the car. He told us not to mention it to Mom, but I'm sure that it was a worry to Dad for the rest of the trip to Arizona. My brothers and I were going to stay with our Grandma and Grandpa Barber until Dad could find us a place to live in California. On our trip west we even got to see the "Thing" because we pestered Dad for about 300 miles to stop when we got there. This sign keep teasing us that the "Thing" was coming up in just 300 miles, then 250 miles, then 200 miles, then 100 miles, then only 50 miles. We were in a dither by the time Dad pulled into the roadside attraction, which housed the "Thing." He realized that we would never have forgiven him if we bypassed the "Thing" without stopping. Besides I think Dad wanted to see the "Thing" as badly as we did. I don’t want to ruin the suspense for other travelers and tell what the “Thing” is. But I will give a hint… Think Egypt!
We eventually made it to Grandma and Grandpa Barber’s house in Tucson. Dad and Grandpa spent the next two hours talking about Dad’s highway strategy and the hours of driving it took him to get there. Setting mileage records are important to the males in my family. Even today after someone makes a long drive to some place it's the topic of conversation for hours afterwards. We discuss routes, stops and the time it took us to get to where we were going. We even discuss lessons learned from long road trips.
Despite stopping to see roadside attractions, Dad was proud of the fact that he once drove 2,000 miles in 24-hours. Of course by the time he got to where he was going, everybody in the car had a bladder problem. We usually had to time our pee stops with fuel stops when Dad was driving. My wife says that I do the same thing now. I think that this is an inherited male pride thing. It is in the same class, as not needing to stop to ask for directions... our pride won't permit it, besides most males have a wonderful sense of direction. I am one of the few who can't tell north from south, or east from west. I let my wife read the directions or a map to a new location when I am trying to set a new mileage record… but I rarely mention that fact to others.
Finally, after about a month at Grandpa and Grandma Barber’s house in Tucson, Dad and Uncle Alvin came to pick us boys up to take us on to California. Grandpa Barber, my father and Uncle Alvin discussed the trip from Los Angeles to Tucson and the route they would take back to Los Angeles for a couple of hours. Grandpa and Grandma Barber were happy that we wouldn't be homesick anymore, and I think they agreed with our other Grandmother Hersh that we were a bunch of heathens.
We drove into California in the evening and I was amazed at how many headlights and tail lights streamed ahead of us in the dark. I never imagined that there could be so many cars on the road. I thought... what an adventure!
A short time later, Mom, my little sister Lorie and baby brother Kevin arrived in Los Angeles by train. Grandma came along on the trip to help my Mom out with the little ones. We were together as a family again, except Grandpa who was still in Omaha working.
We stayed at Uncle Alvin's house for awhile until us boys got on everybody's nerves. Mom and Dad bought a three-bedroom house with a nice bathroom in Rowland Heights, California. The bathroom even had a modern electric wall-heater to warm up the room with. Mom lectured us boys on not trying to cook anything with the wall-heater, or to not to try and pee on it. We moved into our new home on Halloween night in 1961. The first night, we had no electricity and one bed for Grandma and five kids.
The next day our electricity was turned on and our furniture was delivered. Finally, we had television with three channels.
Once again, Mom and Dad found a wonderful place for us to live. Our house was almost brand new when we moved into it. And Rowland Heights was out in the country... 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles!
Grandma had to return to Omaha so Grandpa wouldn't starve to death, or spend too much money eating out. We put her on the train and said goodbye. I wouldn't be able to spend the weekends with Grandma and Grandpa for a long time.
I entered the fifth grade at Rowland Elementary School. And once again I met some buddies... Larry, Larry, Donny and Eddy... again we all had names that ended in y. Although one of the Larry’s was nicknamed "T" because he had a cool baseball cap that had the letter "T" on it. Besides, he needed a name so when we were talking to one of the Larry’s both of them wouldn't get confused. Dad and I got into one of the San Gabriel Valley Council's Boy Scout Troops and I started playing Little League baseball with my new buddies.
Baseball was all consuming to us boys. Our heroes were the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Angels. We each had a new modern transistor radio so we could spend the night at each other’s houses in the summer time and camp out it the back yard and listen to the immortal and ageless Vin Scully call the Dodgers games. It was almost as if we were right there in the stadium. Sometimes one of our fathers would take all us boys to a game at Chavez Ravine in LA. We loved sitting by the opposing team’s bullpen so we could harass the players there. We never could get any of them mad enough at us to pay us any mind though.
When we weren't listening to baseball on our radios or going to games in LA or playing organized games on the Little League field, we were playing a pickup game on an empty lot that eventually became the Fullerton Road exit off the Pomona Freeway.
The only thing around Rowland Heights when we first moved there was a Market Basket grocery store, a liquor store called “Fifth Avenue Liquors,” which retained the name even after someone thought it sounded much nicer to call Fifth Avenue Colima Road, and a gas station that looked like it was built when gasoline was invented and empty fields and hills that stretched for miles and seemed reserved just for us boys to run across and explore. Diamond Bar and Phillips Ranch weren't housing developments yet... they were still real ranches. Because I was no longer interested in being a cowboy, but wanted to be a baseball player instead those places held no interest to me.
Right behind the housing track where we lived was a hill we called "Tree Hill" because it had a bunch of Oak trees at one end where we could spend hours playing. This grove of Oaks became our haven from reality. We spent hours playing cowboys and Indians. We staged war games in those trees, and sometimes just lay on the ground watching the clouds float overhead. Even as kids we couldn't bring ourselves to attach anything to the trees such as tree houses or forts to destroy their grandeur.
Right in the center of Tree Hill was an old cattle watering hole that a long-past rancher had dug into the hill. To us kids it resembled the caldron of a volcano... that we firmly believed it was. We would dare each other to run across the caldron from edge to edge before the volcano blew and swallowed us up in fire. We ran through this caldron of danger many times... and survived each trip. When we weren't feeling particularly lucky, we would always skirt this dangerous place.
A trickle of water ran through a creek bed along side Tree Hill. In the soft limestone banks of this creek we could break off layers of the soft limestone to discover fish fossils imbedded in them. We thought that we had found wonderful treasures that a museum would pay us huge sums of money for. I even saved some of these fossils for my Grandpa back in Omaha. I figured he would be real proud of me for making such an important discovery. We spent hours, days, weeks and months playing on and exploring Tree Hill and the creek bed.
More water ran through another creek that ran through Rowland Heights, so my buddies and I set out to dam part of it up to create a swimming hole. We developed another spot where we could spend countless summer days wading in our swimming hole... it wasn't deep enough to swim in. During the winter months we spent hours fishing in this spot... we never caught anything, because the only fish in the creek were small minnows, but we were sure if we spent enough time there we could eventually catch something that would swim along.
We did have a wonderful place to fish in Rowland Heights one summer. An old Spanish hacienda next to our Little League field had a wonderful large pond on its grounds. The owners opened up the pond for kids from all over to come and fish for Bluegill. We often came home from a day of fishing that summer with a stringer full of fish. We were unaware that we were allowed to do this because the pond was going to be filled in, the old Spanish hacienda torn down, and our Little League field next to the old house leveled so apartments could be built in their place.
Losing a wonderful fishing pond and a local ancient landmark was bad enough, but to lose our beloved baseball diamond was worse. Our fathers got together and located another donated parcel where a new and improved ball park could be developed. Fathers and sons spent days, weeks and months picking up rocks, raking, building fences, installing irrigation systems and planting grass. Then we spent more weekend mornings mowing the grass, installing sponsor signs on the new fences and taking care of the ball park so we kids could play baseball. The new ballpark turned out to be a big improvement over the old one. We had not one diamond, but two.
Eventually, my aunt and uncle and two cousins moved to Rowland Heights. We then had more family for gatherings. My older cousin also joined us for baseball and in the Southern California winter time... street football. This is where I received my first football injury. My cousin and I ran into each other going for a pass. Because he was bigger than I was, I got the worse of it... a concussion. I spent about two weeks in the White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles. The worse two weeks I spent in my entire life. White Memorial didn't believe in supplying televisions in their rooms, and they didn't believe in serving meat to patients. I almost starved to death and would have if my Dad hadn't smuggled hamburgers up to me. Another problem was expiring from boredom with no television and not being allowed out of bed. After my stay the nurses on the ward probably wished that they didn't have a ban on televisions.
Finally the day arrived when the doctor said I could go home. On the drive home with Mom is when we learned, from the car radio, that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas. Mom and Dad were pretty upset about that. For the next week we watched all of the special reports on his life, assassination and funeral. We even witnessed live on television, the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Because of the spaciousness and hills remaining to be explored in Rowland Heights and a television commercial for Honda motorcycles I figured that I would take a chance and ask for a motorcycle for my 12th birthday. Mom was totally against it, but Dad's argument for such a wonderful thing for me to learn to drive and deliver my newspapers on so Mom wouldn't have to get up at four in the mornings to help me, won her over.
Dad got real excited about having a motorcycle in the family. He even spent a lot of time looking around for just the right motorcycle. I was set on having a Honda 50 and kept telling him so. On television they looked really slick and fast. Dad on the other hand, had other ideas. One day he came home from work all excited that he found something called an Indian he was going to buy for me! I wouldn't hear of it. As I said, I wanted a Honda! Besides who ever heard of an old-fashioned motorcycle called an Indian! I thought that it was a real hokey name for a motorcycle. Mom told Dad that the motorcycle was for me, not him. So I got my Honda 50. I realized years later my horrendous mistake, but if Dad would have won the argument, I would never have learned to ride a motorcycle. I probably would have been an expert passenger though.
Mom and Dad made me pledge to never drive it on the streets. I could only drive it up and down Fullerton Road, which as mentioned before was just a large dirt area bisecting our housing tract that ran from some railroad tracks to Fifth Avenue. As I mentioned earlier, years later Fifth Avenue was renamed Colima Road.
One day, when "T" and I were "pushing" my motorcycle up to the hills so we could ride it, we spotted a girl we knew. Of course we just had to show off our skills by popping wheelies and doing doughnuts. The location we were doing this just happened to be on a paved street. A police car pulled around the corner with its lights on. I immediately knew that my parents would kill me after bailing me out of juvenile hall.
The police officer took the keys to my motorcycle got my address and told me to push it home. He said to hurry along because he was going to wait for me there. I knew that I couldn't run because then there would be an "all-points bulletin" put out for my arrest. So I took off pushing, "T" of course decided that he'd better get on home for dinner... even though it was only about 2 in the afternoon.
I think the policeman calmed my mother down enough after she discovered that he wasn't there to tell her that I was killed, so she didn't have the energy at the time to really kill me. She just said, "Wait 'till your father gets home." I immediately knew that I was off the hook on this one with my Dad. All I had to worry about was the traffic judge sending me off to reform school.
After explaining to Dad what had happened... with the girl there and everything, he told me not to ever drive my motorcycle on the street again. Dad did have to take a day off from work to take me to juvenile traffic court. On the way there, Dad got pulled over for speeding and got a ticket himself. I thought that I'd better keep my mouth shut... just in case. He just said, "Your mother doesn't need to know about this." The juvenile traffic judge told me to never ride my motorcycle on the street again, and "I don't want to see you here again!"... No fine... no jail time... I was free to go. My Dad had to pay a fine for his ticket, but I thought it would be better if I didn't rub it in.
I got my first car at 14-years old. A 1949 Chevy fast-back. The same kind of car my Mom and Dad drove as a hot-rod when I was a baby. It was given to me by my uncle for washing dishes in his restaurant one day. It had dents, no first or reverse gears and was pretty ratty looking... but it was wonderful for the possibilities that I dreamed up sitting in it for the next two years until I could legally drive.
Dad used this car for my mechanical education, which was fine by me. Luckily the lady who lived next door to us had a 1950 Chevy that she was going to sell to the junk man. I purchased it from her for $10. The body on it was in better condition than my '49 Chevy and it was a whole year newer. Dad and I took parts from the '49 Chevy to fix up the '50 Chevy. Another neighbor took care of some minor body repair on it. Dad took care of the upholstery and Earl Schibe painted it blue for only $29.95 plus tax. By the time I got my license when I turned 16, I had a 1950 blue Chevy cruiser.
I was finally a teenager in Southern California with a cool car. Dad had to make three more trips to the juvenile traffic judge with me up until I was 18 because of that car. We saw the same juvenile traffic judge each time... thank God he never remembered me from before. I did get a letter from the Department of Motor Vehicles stating that if I got one more ticket my license would be suspended until I turned 21... my traffic law violator days were over. I needed my car for dates! I lived in Southern California! If I didn't have a car I would never be able to go out on a date again... I couldn't see that not happening.
Luckily for me, Dad loved working on cars. We were always repairing something or other in the garage. Dad worked on cars like some men play golf... it was a hobby for him. It also gave us something in common to work on together.
A couple of years earlier I had a heart-to-heart talk with my father about scouting. I told him that I knew that he liked scouting, but it really didn't interest me anymore. He told me that I should have said something earlier because he didn't care about going to all the functions and camping trips either. He was just doing it because he thought I liked doing it. We both dropped out of scouting. However, my father got back into it when my brothers started scouting.
When I became interested in cars, I was too old for Little League baseball, and despite my desire, wasn't good enough to make the high school baseball team, and surprisingly, both my parents refused to let me try out for football. Because of my father's desire for us boys to be athletes, I was sure I could talk my father into signing the permission slip… thinking about this years later maybe the doctors who treated my childhood accidents and concussions probably dissuaded my parents from allowing me to do dangerous stuff.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you looked at it, the county took over our Little League park's upkeep. The fathers and sons no longer had a community activity to participate in together. The county put in more grass and picnic tables, and hired people to mow the grass and take care of things. The park is still there, and when the county's budget permits, the park is taken care of. They even named it years later for a politician who had nothing to do with building the original park.
That park played a very important part in our family history. Kevin, my youngest brother and his future wife, Maria were babies when I played Little League baseball at that park… and I’m sure both of them were ignorant to their future when they were sitting next to each other in their strollers at the games needing their diapers changed. Maria had older brothers so her father and mine were part of the grounds-keeping fathers at the field.
Eventually a developer came along and decided that tree hill would make a good location for some more houses. Our volcano disappeared, and the creek with the fossils was cemented over to create a storm drain. At the end of the hill, our wonderful Oak trees were cut down and the end of the hill chopped off abruptly.
Somebody else decided that something needed to be built to give the local kids "something to do." Where our wonderful Oak trees and hill once stood, somebody built a fake hill with a water slide, and fake trees... and charged the kids $10 to get in to use it. One day some kid was hurt on the slide, so the parents sued. The water slide on the fake hill with the fake trees was shut down so kids wouldn’t be hurt from having fun.
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