Homes and Friends of My Youth Part II

Homes and Friends of My Youth-Part II

I left you way back in 2006 when I wrote we had to move to Riverside County. My father had found a job working for Northrop Aircraft at Ontario Airport.

It was a typical post war job during the Eisenhower administration which paid very little money. The country was not at war, and Northrop was not making any warplanes, so money was tight.

We lived in a rental home in a rural community called Mira Loma. Our house was on Troth street, just a few hundred feet from the crystal clear waters of the Santa Ana River. (Now, of course it isn’t so clear.) In the heat of the day we could traipse down to the river and cool ourselves off in the sandy dykes that held large pools of water and minnow fish.

Mira Loma was hot, sandy and scary. I was used to concrete curbs and gutters, and most of all, street lights that kept the moonless nights from closing in around you. Mira Loma had none of these. Worst of all, there was no Leon! I cannot remember having any friends in Mira Loma. My life was tragic.

Next door to us lived an elderly couple who were our landlords. Knute Anderson was the old man and he had a 17 year old son named Stanley. Stanley had a terminal disease, and died sometime after we moved away. I remember going to the funeral.

About all I can remember about that home was my aunt Delores staying with us for a time, but I am not sure why. Aunt Del was very sweet to me, and she was very beautiful.

One day while I was walking home from school, I saw my two uncles who had loaned a car to my Dad speeding away from the house. As I can best remember we had an old 1946 Mercury Sedan that had to have the engine rebuilt. My uncle Harold loaned him his car while the Merc was down. Anyway, they went roaring down the street passing by me all the while shaking their fist at my Dad and calling him very bad names I cannot repeat here. My dad would never tell me what it was all about.

I later learned at my dad’s funeral from one of the two uncles that there was a dispute over how my dad had failed to take proper care of the car. I think the radiator was low on water, or something like that. Evenso, the behavior was unwarranted, and my dad never seemed to get along with them after that.

The uncle who confessed this to me was telling me in a moment of contrition, admitting he had felt bad about this and other incidents as well. I was touched by his tender feelings as I had always believed they never much cared for my dad. I know the feeling was mutual on my dad’s part. He had a temper, too, which often led to clashes with the uncles.

Be that as it may, I feel I must hasten to add that in time of need in the later years, my uncles always pitched in to help my dad out with his recurring transportation problems. My uncles Kenneth and David in one single week-end rebuilt the automatic transmission in my dad's old '52 Pontiac station wagon. I can still remember it clearly. David was in a big hurry to get it finished and got the others snapping at him. Well, David had a date, could you blame him? Time was running out. They did it in the parking lot where they lived in Compton in a place called Victory Park. They lived on S. Coral.

Anyway, back to Miral Loma…. In the summer of that year (1953?) my mom and dad found a small two-bedroom home on Avon street in a neighboring community called Glen Avon. It had a half-acre of land with it and we soon settled down into raising chickens, goats, rabbits, and even a pig. I would help my dad butcher the rabbits and chickens and we stored the meat in a rented freezer locker in Rubidoux. We ate rabbit meat for years and drank goats milk. Oh, and the pig was butchered for us and we ate that pig for months!

It turns out our house was an old army dormitory that had been brought in from somewhere in the county and converted to a house. Most everything in it was handmade by either my dad or uncle Orson. I remember my uncle bringing over his table saw and in one weekend he and dad knocked out an entire set of kitchen cabinets and hung them in the kitchen. I was so proud of my dad and those cabinets. My dad suspended shiny chains from our living room ceiling and hung bookshelves on them on a trapeze-like system.

We always had septic tank problems, so to alleviate the problems my dad dug drainage trenches throughout the yard. You could hardly get away with doing something like that these days, and truthfully I am not sure how we did then.

Anyway, these trenches were always wet with grey water, and had mosquito larvae or whatever wiggling around in them. It was gross! One day my cousin Dennis was staying with us, and he went out into the backyard to play. He wasn’t more than three or four years old as I recall. He approached one of these nasty ditches which was about two feet deep to peer into it and see what it was. Suddenly our billy goat lunged at him from behind and butted him squarely into the ditch. Poor Dennis came up crying, sputtering and spewing that nasty stuff out of his mouth! I nearly puked at the smell and sight and thought of it all.

About the time my parents bought this house, my grandparents bought a farm on Mission Blvd just about a mile or so away from us. That meant, of course, Leon was nearby and life was grand again! The farm was a child’s paradise. Not only did it have cows and pigs and tractors and electric fences, it had huge granite rocks to play on and a large pond in which we would go swimming. The pond was next to a long row of huge eucalyptus trees from which was suspended a long thick rope that you could swing on way out over the water in the pond. It was exhilarating, and terrifying all at once!

In the pond were crawdads we would capture and do mean things to them or with them. Once we let one clamp its pincers to the wire on the electric fence and laughed hysterically when the electrical jolt knocked the ugly critter off the fence. Another time we put one on the end of a pigs nose. The poor thing squealed with pain and the crawdad had enough strength to cut into the flesh on the poor pig’s snout. Yeah..we were brats!

Leon and I one day thought it would be fun to see the chickens fly. We grabbed a few and tossed them as high into the air as high as we could, whereupon they furiously beat their wings to save themselves from utter disaster. I am pretty sure this shenanigan netted us another tanning to our backsides. We didn’t know at first how they had known what we had done until we noticed at least one layer hobbling around on a broken leg. We deserved every lick of that belting!

Leon, it seems kept at his shenanigans when I was not around. He did not need me to get into trouble. One day he decided the cat’s kittens needed to be laundered. So he grabbed grandma’s washboard and stuck it in a briny water solution sitting in a recently used wooden ice-cream maker. He dutifully dunked each kitten into the solution and proceed to scrub the life out of them, literally. He rinsed them, again and again in that briny solution until he pronounced them clean. (And dead). Do you think these furry and feathered little critters will be there to witness against us in the next life?

We lived in that house on Avon street until 1959. My best friend lived up the street. His name was Jimmy Wyly. We were very close friends until high school. I lost track of him afterwards.

Jimmy was a Catholic boy of Irish decent. Both his mother and father had a disgusting habit of being heavy smokers, and they both cursed loudly taking the Lord's name in vain. His father was a hunter and it seemed he was gone all the time hunting. Jimmy’s mother, Dorothy, would later die from a terrible disease called liver cancer. He also had several brothers and at least two sisters who all slept in one huge bedroom which was once their garage. They totaled ten kids in all. (I said they were Catholics!)

Jimmy and I were in the same school classes in grammar school until about the fifth grade when they began to separate us according to level of achievement. I ended up with the high achievers, and Jimmy was with the lesser ones. I couldn’t care less about that, he was still my good bud for years. His weakness, as I recall was reading. I excelled at reading, and of course that made all the difference in my education.

Behind our house on Avon street lived the Morrison boys whom I played with a lot, or when Jimmy wasn’t around. The Morrison boys had a deaf father and a short, shy Mexican mother who looked worn out from the boys antics. They grew up to be delinquents.

Like I said, we hung together for a few years until the boys began their catechism lessons. Then they began to berate me for being Mormon. My mom called an end to all that and I never played with them after that. The last time I saw them a police car was in pursuit of a stolen vehicle they were driving.

Across the street lived two little toe heads named Charlotte and Elaine Braun. Mr. Braun owned a dairy down the street and around the corner. I think the girls were German or Swedes and I thought they were the cutest things around. I had a crush on Elaine. So, I played with them for quite some time. We would often go down to the dairy and play in the mucky pond water capturing pollywogs.They never went to our school. Papa had money so he sent them to the local Catholic school. Bummer!

While we lived on Avon street, my second sister Claudia was born in 1957. Around that time my grandfather Baguley was diagnosed with colon cancer. After failed attempts to rid himself of it holistically, he finally agreed to go under the knife at the City of Hope Hospital in L.A. He convalesced in our home for several weeks, and it was really special to me. I think that was one of the highlights of my mother’s relationship with her father.

Speaking of grandparents, I was always closest to my grandparents Baguley in my early youth, mainly because they were always around.

My grandparents Harrington, however, lived in Spokane, Washington, and I got to see them only on rare occasion. Then, one day my dad told us they were coming to live with us. In a week or so a huge tow truck showed up in front of our house with a trailer behind it. It was my grandparent’s trailer, and it was going to be parked in our backyard! I don’t remember how long they lived back there, but it was sure neat to go visit my grandparents in their trailer. Later they moved just down the road to a mobile home park that was just built on the corner of Pyrite and Mission Blvd. right next to my school!

I don’t quite remember what was the reason, but in 1959 my parents decided they needed a bigger house, and an elderly couple in our church needed to get rid of theirs quickly because the old man was too sick to care for it. We went to look at it, and I thought we had stepped out of the Podunk side of town and entered the real world.

The homes were in a recently-built tract near Highway 60. It had raised hardwood floors, hardwood cabinets, a separate dining room and real stucco exterior! Best of all it had three bedrooms and one and half baths. To top it off, it had an attached two-car garage! All the surrounding homes were similar in construction, with neatly manicured lawns and real paved driveways. It was like a dream to me! The kids playing in their yards did not look like poor little waifs. I could hardly wait to make the move. All was needed was the financing.

To Be Continued in Part III