More Walking in Homeless Country

Homeless at beach with loose dog

I was born in Los Angeles and as usual I can't remember. My Father's parents lived at 78th and Vermont which is probably  where I lived. My father was building an apartment in Santa Monica at 1710 Tenth Street and that is the first place I remember living at.

Some Homeless can carry large loads

There was a war going on when I was a wee one so I spent lots of time with my Grandmother and Grandfather. My Grandmother had a little cart for groceries and she would take me with her when we walked a few blocks South on Vermont to the Ralph's.

Drunk before Eight AM

The Street Cars ran up and down Vermont and we would ride them into the City. Sometimes we went the other way South to the end of the line where the Conductor would flip the seats that were on a hinge so the passengers faced in the forward position.

Homeless apartment

At that time my Grandfather no longer drove an automobile but we have tons of him with pictures taken earlier when he was a proud owner of a car. My Father also has many black and white prints of him standing by his car with one foot resting on the running board. 

A common site

My earliest recollections of cars would be probably be a Nash, then a 1946 Hudson that my father drove across country to New York City with stops along the way in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Ohio. He later did the trip again in a Giant Hudson four door maybe a 1951.

Using the bathers shower

My Father also had a Ford Model A Coupe but the rumble seat had been removed and a stubby pickup bed was installed. The stock rear bumper was still there with the round rubber steps that had been used for getting into the rumble seat.

Extra points tent, bicycle and wheel chair

All my friends on Tenth Street loved to hang out with my Father. He then owned three apartments building in Santa Monica and only worked as a contractor once in a while. He would lets us ride in the Model A mini bed and we would drag our feet on the streets when ever we turned a corner. 

Need bike parts?

I can't say I worshipped my Father as we seldom went to church when I was a kid but I greatly respected his abilities. He had a drafting table with the triangles and T-Square where we drew building drawings. He went somewhere,I have no idea where, and brought back his Blue Prints. 

When he built our house at 988 Olympic he rented a Caterpillar and graded the lot by himself. He built the two story house by himself and only hired others that were required to sign off for the building inspector. He did the plumbing,framing and all the brick work, designed  his own Bay Windows with sliding glass for ventilation, The front room Bay windows would sound like a B-29 every time there was an earthquake.

Post Office San Pedro

So having lost where I was headed with this blog I will continue to ramble just line a Nash. My Father had his car and my Mother had hers. It wasn't that always that way when we only had one family car. But my Mother must have started winning at the horse tracks and she went to Santa Monica Ford on Santa Monica Blvd, and bought a brand new 1951 Ford with a fancy Continental Kit. Flat Heads were still being used and my Mother's cars was quite sporty. 

more post office

She later got another blue Ford from the same dealer and once the two of us drove it to Arkansas to visit my Aunt in Mountain Home. I was only fourteen but my Mother let me drive the car and I wanted to go see the Grand Canyon and she let me turn off the main highway and I drove to the Rim.

ugly lime green bike

Later my Mother and I drove to Arkansas in our Dodge 500 which was a 1956 model with a Hemi and lots of power but a two speed auto tranny. 

Most of the earlier Muscle Cars didn't have a matching transmission. The Fuel Injected 1957 Chevy could go a hundred in the quarter and it had only a three speed.

couple are extra points

These pictures are of the homeless and what I see when I walk my two dogs every morning. I have several cameras and enjoy taking pictures. I do not point my lens at a homeless directly and always tried to take candid shots. Some homeless don't give a fuck and some get rather upset if they see me with a camera strap around my neck. 

Fucking drunks at 8 AM

I have been reading Rachel Carson lately and there was an extreme low tide this morning. Since I live on a sailboat I don't have to use a tide chart to see what is happening I just look. The two furry ones and myself went towards the tide pools at Cabrillo Beach but at low tide the rocks were mostly denuded  and the pools were not full of color. On the way back from the tide pools (there is a walk way) we encountered three fucking drunks that were having a party (8 AM) at a bench on the sand. It is not uncommon to see homeless or drunks on the beach in the morning here. I still had my Nikon around my neck and we started climbing the uphill trail away from the beach when we were hasseled by the drunks. They started chasing us and yelling at us.  My German Shepherd weights around a hundred pounds and could probably rip someone apart but he was not trained to do that to humans, only squirrels and raccoons. He never catches his prey but he loves to bark at them. My other dog DeDe who is hiding out some where in the blue sky actually caught squirrels and rabbits. Any way the trip to the tide pools turned out to be a bummer when you can walk to the beach here. There is all this graffiti on the signs and walls, one wonders while there isn't someone who can fix that. Earlier I had seen two LA Port Police cars in the parking lot and on the way back from the beach I told the officers about the shitheads (not my two loving dogs) and the Port Police went over there and later there was a backup of a car and a M/C. 

Homeless can be violent  

Most of the writing here has nothing to do with the homeless problem here but serves as an autobiographic look at my past which at times is forgotten.

The pictures shown here are by the author and were taken with a Nikon camera.

Remembering Movie Titles (part one)

The other day I was having a texting session with Frances (AKA Beanie) and I mentioned riding bicycles with my father to go watch movies in Ocean Park when we lived in Santa Monica. There were several movie houses in town but the boardwalk between the Santa Monica Pier and Ocean Park Pier was popular just as it is today for riding a bicycle.

Going to the movies predated my bicycle riding days. Towards the end of WW2 I would spend Saturdays at my cousin's house. The house was on Pico Blvd and someday I will go riding over there to see if anything looks familiar. My cousin Ronald's father was still in the Army and had  not came back from Europe yet. Ronald and I would walk to the movies and watch the kid's shows which consisted of serials and one movie.

One morning we had an adventure and traveled by the Red Cars through Culver City rode by Venice finally to reach Santa Monica. We saw Gulliver's Travels at the Criterion on Third Street. On the street car journey I can remember the newspaper vendors at various intersection shouting out the headlines about a bomb and Japs.

Several years later when I was in Junior High I had a morning paper route with The Los Angeles Examiner. It was always creepy in the dark early hours before the sun came up. Especially the Criterion Apartments where I had to drop off a couple of papers inside.

Thanks to Google and IMDb I can set dates that match some of my memories. My Grandfather, Grandmother and Uncle lived on Vermont at 78th Street. There was a theater on the East side of Vermont a few blocks away. We saw "The Picture of Dorian Grey" there. That would set the date around 1945 when the movie was released. The film scared me when the character's picture kept changing. So as a four year old it made quite an impression. Scary movies usually drove me to the lobby to sit until the movie sound track softened and it was safe to return to my seat.

Another movie that frighten me even though it was billed as a comedy was "The Secret Life of Water Middy" which I saw at a theater in the Pacific Palisades when I was six. Travel around Southern California was not complicated by freeways then and if you did not have a car handy there was always the bus or the street cars. Some cities didn't allow street cars and one time we got stranded in Beverly Hills trying to get back from watching radio shows in Hollywood.

Often my father would take me to the theaters on Broadway by riding the street cars along Vermont. Once we went to a matinee at the Orpheum to see a double header of Vaudeville and a movie. The star billed was Eddy Peabody the "King of the Banjo". My father beside being a movie buff was also a banjo player. My father played the piano, violin, cornet, reeds, trumpet and banjo. He played by ear. I could never do that and had to read sheet music. Even while playing in the high school band and performing the same damn song over and over I rarely could play a complete piece from memory.

Since I lived on Tenth Street the walk to any of the four movie house in down town Santa Monica was not very far to walk. One of our favorite haunts was the El Miro on Third Street where I saw "Blackboard Jungle". The music from that apparently started Rock and Roll. A side note about Blackboard Jungle was the star was Glenn Ford who attended Santa Monica High School. If you left the ticket office of the El Miro walked down the side walk entered the arcade that went through to Fourth Street you came out next to the Hitching Post Theater. The Hitching Post played only cowboy stuff. The tickets were twenty cents so all you had to do was search the alleys for returnable bottles and go to the market or liquor store and cash in. The lobby of the theater had racks behind the candy counter to hang your cap guns and holsters as guns were not allowed in the theater.
 My favorite cowboy then was Lash La Rue. He didn't sing like Roy Rodgers or Autry se was just cool.