Long Beach, Long Ago
I have no tattoos. I am decorated with the faint patterns of scars from head to toe.
You might not think of Los Angeles as an oil town, but since the 1920's, that's what it was. The whole of Southern California sits on a vast deposit of petroleum, mostly heavy crude and tar. Driving from the center of Los Angeles going south on Figueroa Boulevard was akin to crossing a roller coaster of parallel ridges, like enormous ocean swells, of alternating synclines and anticlines down over Signal Hill and into Long Beach. The route bristled with towering oil rigs everywhere; a vast area with an oil derrick every 200 feet in every direction for miles, so many that the local nickname was "Porcupine Hill". In the 1920's this area accounted for 25% of the world's oil output. So much oil was pumped from Signal Hill Field and the adjoining Wilmington Field that the entire Los Angeles Basin has subsided considerably from its original terrain, in some areas more than 20 feet.
My mother was born in the town of Brea, East of Los Angeles. Brea means "tar" in Spanish. Her family moved north to the California's central valley and had a farm near Tulare. When they lost the farm to the bank during the depression, they moved to the coast near Santa Barbara, Carpinteria. My grandfather worked in the oil fields in Ventura for the rest of his life. My mom's brother, my Uncle Harold, spent his whole career working for Shell Oil.
In the mid 1930's, my father was a partner in a trucking company and he had regularly duties, in the days before pipelines, driving crude oil in tanker trucks from Cat Canyon Field near Santa Maria, to refineries in Ventura and Los Angeles. That's how he met my mother. In Carpinteria, at the midpoint of his trucking route, he would stop to flirt with a waitress in her family's cafe, The Village Inn, next to the Palms Hotel. By the early 1944, they were married with two kids, and living in Torrance, in the center of the oil boom.
Our generation was called "War Babies". We were the generation before "Baby Boomers", who were the children of the returning soldiers, sailors and airmen after 1945. My father was born in 1903. Too young for World War I, and too old for World War II, he was going about his life raising a family while wars raged far away.
It was a dark and stormy night when the calamity of my birth began to unfold. My older sisters were 4 and 3 at the time; Mommie and Daddy's two little princesses; Joan and Judy. In February 1944, they were living near the intersection of Figueroa Blvd and W. Carson in Torrance, then a rural town south of Los Angeles proper, now part of LA's South Central urban sprawl. My dad ran a big nursery on nearby Avalon Blvd, and sometimes the family boarded horses on our dusty corner in Torrance. It was my mom's third pregnancy and she anticipated smooth sailing. The nearest place to have a baby was the Seaside Memorial Hospital in Long Beach.
As the date of my expected arrival neared, my grandfather, my mother's father, had become deathly ill. He was admitted to the same hospital where I was to be born. My grandmother had come to stay with us and help out when the baby came. She had the heartache that her husband was probably dying.
On the night of February 29, 1944, the time had come. It was raining a steady downpour, and my parents were in the back of a four-door sedan as my Uncle Dale, a sailor home on leave, drove us through the night to the hospital. Someone had dropped a lit cigarette, and the upholstery had begun to smolder. By the time we pulled up in front of the emergency entrance, the car was filled with smoke and the seat was starting to flame. My mom staggered into the hospital by herself while my dad and uncle put the fire out.
It was the middle of the war and Terminal Island in Los Angeles Harbor was the home of an enormous Naval Base. The hospital had a shortage of beds because of the wounded servicemen from the brutal combat in the Pacific, and routine births were being rushed through as quickly as possible. I was born the next morning, and we went home the following day.
It seemed a normal birth, and it was as far as my health was concerned. When she left the hospital, my mom still had some bleeding, which was thought to be of little concern. After she got home, however, the bleeding increased to the point that would be called hemorrhaging. She was rushed back to the hospital, where she nearly died, first from the loss of blood, and then a medical error. A piece of the placenta had remained in her womb, and her body was hemorrhaging to flush it out. She was given a transfusion with the wrong type of blood. She had negative blood and was given positive. By the time they corrected that, her blood had become "sensitized", a condition which meant that I would be her last child. She remained in the hospital another week to regain her strength.
Meanwhile, where was I? Days old, I was with my father, two little girls and my distraught grandmother, all trying to cope. I can imagine how the whole series of events must have affected my sisters. Everything had been rosy until I came along. Then, there was blood, blood, blood, and their mother is taken away to the hospital, grandfather is very sick in the hospital, their new baby brother won't stop crying and their father doesn't know what's wrong, and neither does grandmother.
So that was the scene at the house in Torrance. Everybody's life was upside down. My dad had a newborn baby to take care of, and I would not stop crying. He took me to the doctor's office. The receptionist told him he could have an appointment in a few days, but my dad refused to leave. "I'm not leaving here until someone tells me what's wrong with this baby!" He sat in the waiting room with me making a ruckus until the doctor invited us in.
The problem turned out to be simple. I was hungry. My grandmother had 5 children of her own, the last one in 1915, and therefore had no experience with formula in a baby bottle. She simply had no concept of how much a baby needed. With breast feeding, she had never visualized the amount. My father didn't know either. They began to feed me more and I shut up.
Mom came home from the hospital after another week, and two weeks later, her father died. Her mother went back to Carpinteria, in Santa Barbara County 100 miles North, to bury my grandfather. After the convulsive months of March and April, things settled down for our family of five.
That much of the story, I reconstructed from the family legend as told to me. I don't have any direct memory of anything until September of 1946. My very first memory is a moment of separation.
I was two years old. It was traumatic enough at the time to be burned into my memory forever, but in fact, it was the most miniscule of tragedies.
In front of my grandmother's house in Carpinteria, where we lived for a short period of time, it was Judy's first day of kindergarten, and our older sister, Joan, in first grade, was leading her by the hand across the street. They were walking away. The elementary school, "Main School" was right across the street, and the adjoining Kindergarten was just at the far end of the block. My tragedy was: I wasn't allowed to go with them. Kindergarten was breaking up my childhood gang of three. Before that, I had been a puppy in a litter of puppies. After that, I was my own kind of dog, separated from my sisters by 4 and 5 years, and gender; learning that the path I am on is for my steps alone.
Copyright © 2022, 2024 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
You might not think of Los Angeles as an oil town, but since the 1920's, that's what it was. The whole of Southern California sits on a vast deposit of petroleum, mostly heavy crude and tar. Driving from the center of Los Angeles going south on Figueroa Boulevard was akin to crossing a roller coaster of parallel ridges, like enormous ocean swells, of alternating synclines and anticlines down over Signal Hill and into Long Beach. The route bristled with towering oil rigs everywhere; a vast area with an oil derrick every 200 feet in every direction for miles, so many that the local nickname was "Porcupine Hill". In the 1920's this area accounted for 25% of the world's oil output. So much oil was pumped from Signal Hill Field and the adjoining Wilmington Field that the entire Los Angeles Basin has subsided considerably from its original terrain, in some areas more than 20 feet.
In the mid 1930's, my father was a partner in a trucking company and he had regularly duties, in the days before pipelines, driving crude oil in tanker trucks from Cat Canyon Field near Santa Maria, to refineries in Ventura and Los Angeles. That's how he met my mother. In Carpinteria, at the midpoint of his trucking route, he would stop to flirt with a waitress in her family's cafe, The Village Inn, next to the Palms Hotel. By the early 1944, they were married with two kids, and living in Torrance, in the center of the oil boom.
Our generation was called "War Babies". We were the generation before "Baby Boomers", who were the children of the returning soldiers, sailors and airmen after 1945. My father was born in 1903. Too young for World War I, and too old for World War II, he was going about his life raising a family while wars raged far away.
It was a dark and stormy night when the calamity of my birth began to unfold. My older sisters were 4 and 3 at the time; Mommie and Daddy's two little princesses; Joan and Judy. In February 1944, they were living near the intersection of Figueroa Blvd and W. Carson in Torrance, then a rural town south of Los Angeles proper, now part of LA's South Central urban sprawl. My dad ran a big nursery on nearby Avalon Blvd, and sometimes the family boarded horses on our dusty corner in Torrance. It was my mom's third pregnancy and she anticipated smooth sailing. The nearest place to have a baby was the Seaside Memorial Hospital in Long Beach.
As the date of my expected arrival neared, my grandfather, my mother's father, had become deathly ill. He was admitted to the same hospital where I was to be born. My grandmother had come to stay with us and help out when the baby came. She had the heartache that her husband was probably dying.
On the night of February 29, 1944, the time had come. It was raining a steady downpour, and my parents were in the back of a four-door sedan as my Uncle Dale, a sailor home on leave, drove us through the night to the hospital. Someone had dropped a lit cigarette, and the upholstery had begun to smolder. By the time we pulled up in front of the emergency entrance, the car was filled with smoke and the seat was starting to flame. My mom staggered into the hospital by herself while my dad and uncle put the fire out.
It was the middle of the war and Terminal Island in Los Angeles Harbor was the home of an enormous Naval Base. The hospital had a shortage of beds because of the wounded servicemen from the brutal combat in the Pacific, and routine births were being rushed through as quickly as possible. I was born the next morning, and we went home the following day.
It seemed a normal birth, and it was as far as my health was concerned. When she left the hospital, my mom still had some bleeding, which was thought to be of little concern. After she got home, however, the bleeding increased to the point that would be called hemorrhaging. She was rushed back to the hospital, where she nearly died, first from the loss of blood, and then a medical error. A piece of the placenta had remained in her womb, and her body was hemorrhaging to flush it out. She was given a transfusion with the wrong type of blood. She had negative blood and was given positive. By the time they corrected that, her blood had become "sensitized", a condition which meant that I would be her last child. She remained in the hospital another week to regain her strength.
Meanwhile, where was I? Days old, I was with my father, two little girls and my distraught grandmother, all trying to cope. I can imagine how the whole series of events must have affected my sisters. Everything had been rosy until I came along. Then, there was blood, blood, blood, and their mother is taken away to the hospital, grandfather is very sick in the hospital, their new baby brother won't stop crying and their father doesn't know what's wrong, and neither does grandmother.
The problem turned out to be simple. I was hungry. My grandmother had 5 children of her own, the last one in 1915, and therefore had no experience with formula in a baby bottle. She simply had no concept of how much a baby needed. With breast feeding, she had never visualized the amount. My father didn't know either. They began to feed me more and I shut up.
Mom came home from the hospital after another week, and two weeks later, her father died. Her mother went back to Carpinteria, in Santa Barbara County 100 miles North, to bury my grandfather. After the convulsive months of March and April, things settled down for our family of five.
I was two years old. It was traumatic enough at the time to be burned into my memory forever, but in fact, it was the most miniscule of tragedies.
In front of my grandmother's house in Carpinteria, where we lived for a short period of time, it was Judy's first day of kindergarten, and our older sister, Joan, in first grade, was leading her by the hand across the street. They were walking away. The elementary school, "Main School" was right across the street, and the adjoining Kindergarten was just at the far end of the block. My tragedy was: I wasn't allowed to go with them. Kindergarten was breaking up my childhood gang of three. Before that, I had been a puppy in a litter of puppies. After that, I was my own kind of dog, separated from my sisters by 4 and 5 years, and gender; learning that the path I am on is for my steps alone.
Copyright © 2022, 2024 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com