Fair Oaks

After WWII the growth of many industries, aeronautical businesses included, dramatically increased the population drawing graduates from the East and Midwest. My father was in the Navy during the war, and graduated with an Engineering degree from the University of Minnesota afterwards. My mother got a teaching degree from Iowa State and moved to LA, where they met at a Newman Club dance. The first house I remember was off of Workman Avenue in West Covina, a suburb of Los Angeles. It was a dead-end street surrounded by undeveloped land and orange orchards. Our Church and school, Sacred Heart, was at the end of the street and almost everyone was Catholic, so we all went to the same school and church. New houses, where orchards once stood, were coming in at a fast pace. It was the 1950’s, and America was living large.

Mom was tall for moms. She had light brown hair, an aquiline nose with green eyes that were very expressive. Dad was as tall as Mom, with black hair and brown eyes with a slightly turned up nose. He smoked Camels and devoured Time magazine to the extent that he underlined paragraphs of interest.

The Lovejoys lived next door but had no children. The Seguins were next to them and they had five children; Jay and Johnny were Mark’s and my age. Behind our house was a greenhouse where we threw small rocks off of the glass roof and watched them tinkle down. Behind the Seguin’s was a free standing orange orchard where we sat in a tree and ate oranges until we had an acidic attack like boils.

Our bicycles had only one speed, the push-on-the-pedals-as-fast-as- possible. We’d race our bikes and jump off them onto a neighbor’s grass and tumble. This was our block and no one needed to leave the street as everything we wanted was here. TVs were still rare. We’d walk to one of the neighbor’s to watch a program which never started when promised as it was still a new technology and a new frontier. So part of seeing the TV program was getting together and talking to our friends.

We compared when Santa arrived at each house on our block to see the remarkable, yet efficient use of his time. Mustard weed fields were behind the Santiago’s house, the only open field where we built forts, dug tunnels, had our battles based on Disney programs like Swamp Fox. One of our buddies, Dwayne Shorne, lost his 2 front teeth in Jerry Tucker’s fist in a fight in that mustard weed field. Who could imagine breaking teeth by a fist?

Airplanes flew overhead and that meant we lived in a big city. “Your Dad is on that plane,” Mom said as she pointed toward the sky to a small sliver in the graying daylight one day. Dad was on a business trip, so that meant that planes took only men on business travel. But where did he go and how did he come back to us were questions that my brother Mark and I asked. Paul was only 3 years old and didn’t bother with this stuff.