[sic]

In September of 2005 Susan and I made our second hike that year in Point Mugu State Park. The first time a few months previous we explored the expansive grasslands of its La Jolla Valley, but this second time we hiked to Mugu Peak (about 1,300 feet).

About a third or so of the way up on the eastern, landward side of the mountain we passed this imprint of what had been a fossilized shell embedded in the rock from waaaaay back in the Cretaceous day when a majority of California was underwater and marine reptiles like plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs swam in what’s now the air over our heads. Unfortunately since this remnant from that time is situated directly on the hiking path it’s been subject to vandalism as people have pried off the remains of the actual shell from its resting place, leaving only fragments and its impression:

I wonder how many millions of years did it remain unspoiled until some jerkball hominid had to come along and break it trying to take it as a souvenir?

Anyway, I just happened to be scrolling through the archives when I landed on this image and it reminded me not only that humans suck but that no matter much things seem to stay the same, they don’t.

My cousin Laura turns the big Five-Oh this month and as such her sister Margaret put out a request to all friends and family to submit something for a keepsake book she’s putting together for her younger sibling. “Give it your best shot,” Margaret wrote, owing to the fact that I’ve only seen Laura on a total number of occasions in my entire life that I can count on one hand and not use all the fingers.

So I resorted to combing the archives that are the parrot green photo albums my mom organized in the mid-1970s (garish now, parrot green was a huge color back in those bygone days). I hadn’t perused albums in yeeeeeears, but I knew somewhere inside the multiple volumes there had to be a photo of me and Laura from my visit to her family in the early 1970s when I accompanied them in a station wagon with one of those rear-facing seats in the back on a vacation from their home in Chattanooga, Tenn., to Canada and back.

I didn’t get to photos from that experience because I first found an even better photo from the summer of 1965 when I was 13 months old and had been sent to be cared for by Laura and Margaret and my cousin Allan and my Aunt Frieda and Uncle Jack because of financial difficulties my mom was facing as a single parent — difficulties that were tremendously exacerbated because she was almost entirely unassisted by the sadsack pathetic excuse for a human that was the person of the male persuasion whose genetics I may share but into whose gut I would punch or upon whose grave I would spit should I ever be introduced to him living or dead.

Abandonment issues? Ya think?! Let’s move on.

The photo I found was of Laura and me sitting at a table. From the info written to my mom on the back of the snapshot by my aunt I learned my hands are covering my face after having successfully stuffed my mouth with as much of a luscious fresh peach as it could hold. Behind me Laura supports me at the shoulder and the elbow and has a marvelous expression that’s bottled up laughter held back by amazement perhaps at how I can be both so cute and so voracious:

That’s Margaret behind her who’s understandably contemplating how a 1-year-old child could have such an impossibly large head. What can I say, from the get-go I was a big-ass baby.

Anyway, this photo totally captured what I was looking for better than anything from our roadtrip so I scanned it and sent it off to Margaret this week with a note to Laura telling her how much it means to me at such a tumultuous time in my life to have been cared for and supported and loved by her.

Of course with the albums out and accessible I had to flip through to reacquaint myself with images from days gone by and happy was I to find without much searching the image which is one of my favorites from my childhood.

Taken from somewhere in the early 1970s, it’s an accidental double-exposure made by my mom featuring Mickey Mouse-shirt-wearing me and my childhood friend Randy during a visit to the sun-dappled oasis that is the botanical garden at UCLA, a place I first discovered only because any dentistry done on my teeth back then was via the UCLA School of Dentistry nearby:

It’s not a happy picture so much as what I consider a serendipitous one… a rare moment captured that is candid and real and evocative as opposed to most that are posed with fake smiles. Just thought I’d share.

Robert F. Kennedy was shot 40 years ago yesterday, just after midnight. Just after declaring victory in the California primary in the Embassy Room Ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel, a landmark whose demolition was completed last year.

It’s become tiresomely cliché to recall one’s location at the occurrence of calamitous events — especially on anniversaries. And as an entirely unaware 4 year old, where I was at the time and place Kennedy was assassinated carries no significance whatsoever. But still there’s something compelling to my “as the crow flies” proximity… at least to me. Perhaps because I grew up obviously knowing about the murder — and even its location — but in such an abstract, almost otherworldly context. And only in the last year or so did I realize it wasn’t near as far as I’d always thought.

(click to enlarge)

At the moment the shots rang out in the pantry area between the hotel’s ballroom and its serving kitchen (pinpointed in the lower right of the map image above), I was 1.15 miles away — no doubt sound asleep upstairs in the front-most bedroom of the front-most apartment that was part of a Hancock Park-adjacent building centered around an open courtyard that stood on the northwest corner of 5th Street and Westminster Avenue (in the upper left of the image above), until it was torn down in the early 1970s for the condo complex that’s there now.

I remember the view from my bedroom window included the large Union Bank moneybag/bird logo hung high on the windowless western side of the skyscraper that occupies the southwest corner of Wilshire and Western, eight blocks from the hotel. I loved staring out the window at that big bird all lit up at night.

I don’t remember anything from that day that transpired between the time of the shooting and the time he died. It may have been, but I don’t remember the television being tuned to news reports. She may have, but I don’t remember my mother crying or commiserating at length with any neighbors or friends. I can’t recall anything particular or specific about that day, but in all likliehood I can say with some confidence I was most likely loaded up into my mom’s old Corvair that workday morning and dropped off at the Bambi preschool I attended in Hollywood and had a mega toddlercrush on my teacher who I recall wore those white go-go boots that were the style then. Her name escapes me.

Some time later I can recollect leafing through the pages of the old “Look” magazine my mom had gotten and being very intent on photos that featured the locations of the assassinations of Robert and his brother John. I remember being frightened

Robert Kennedy died 40 years ago today at the hospital where I’d been born on the same day as his brother.

Did you know that back in the day if cyclists in Los Angeles dared to want to bring their bikes aboard any of the MTA’s trains (which back then consisted of the Blue Line, the Green Line and a Red Line that only ran between Union Station and the Wiltern Theater), the MTA wanted to know all aaaaaaaaall about them by insisting that a signed and completed invasion of privacy application be submitted in order to obtain an official “Cycle Express” (whatever that means) permit that featured the cyclist’s name and address and photograph, documentation of which they were then obligated to maintain possession of despite its inconvenient un-wallet sized dimensions of 3.5″ x 4″.

And the kicker? If so demanded, permit holders were required to present the permit — not just to fare inspectors or law enforcement personal but “any Metropolitan Transit Authority employee” when mass-transiting with their two wheelers.

If that’s not ridiculous enough, the permits were issued with expiration dates, necessitating a stupid renewal process.

How do I know all this? Because I was the recipient and holder of MTA Cyclist Permit No. 3046, which expired 11 years ago last September (click thumbnails of the front and back to enlargify):

It’s no wonder this insulting, discriminatory and invasive program was canceled, but it’s absolutely amazing that it was ever implemented.

UPDATED (04.18): I also found my Metrolink Bike Permit, which didn’t expire (there’s an expiration date line on the front but it was left blank), and its rules on the back were a little more well-thought out (i.e. permits must be presented only to fare inspectors upon request — not just any old employee like the MTA permit):

Last opened to the public 16 years ago, you can bet when I heard a couple weeks ago that a tour was being offered at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Millard House (aka “La Miniatura”) in Pasadena I didn’t waste much time getting two tickets for Susan and I today to see this remarkable piece of Southern California’s architectural history.

Photographs weren’t allowed of its extraordinary interior, but I snapped away on the outside. Flickr set viewable here.

(click to quadruplify)

The dome of St. Vincent de Paul Church at the corner of Adams and Figueroa.

This doesn’t come close to being a find of any type of archaeological proportions, but in a city so often faulted for covering up its history, I can’t help but feeling somewhat similar to what I imagine a palentologist might feel discovering  preserved footprints of some ancient creature.

In this case it’s the pawprints of some dog (or maybe even a coyote, perhaps?) that happened to trek out from the apron of our driveway across the still drying concrete that had been poured to pave the street we live on. Here’s a a pair of side-by-side prints:

The year: 1925. That’s right, 82 years ago. Our house had been standing some nine years already when the city got around to covering up the dirt road that had existed for who knows how long before that.

I didn’t just now discover them. I first saw them perhaps a year or so ago, and since then I’ve attempted photos that never quite showed the worn impressions satisfactorily. I even once tried to take a molding of one with silly putty but that failed miserably too. So yesterday I just said screw it, and snapped several shots. The one after the jump shot from the center of the street has red circles that indicate the progression of the prints as they move away from our garage, disappearing across the center line.

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While killing some time waiting for Tuesday night’s downtown bike ride, I rolled around taking snaps of some of the local dramatic landmarkery (click to biggify):

The First Congregational Church of Los Angeles

The rear of the Bullocks Wilshire Building with beacon lit.

What I find most interesting about the two buildings is that the department store, opened in 1929, predates the cathedral like church that’s situated a block north by three years.

With some time to kill before meeting up with the iaal•maf near LaFayette Park for a downtown art ride followed by some barbecue and beers at Spring Street Smokehouse I rolled around the way a bit, snapping

I’ve long admired the Bullocks Wilshire building and equally appreciated the Southwestern School of Law for taking possession of it and keeping it intact, but this was my first time this close to it and the bas relief above its front door, whose inscription reads “To build a business that will never know completion.”

That “completion” started when Bullocks left the building in 1988. Retail operations continued under the I. Magnin name until 1993 when the completion became permanent.

One might argue that the legal profession is a business much better suited to never knowing completion and thus it’s appropriate that Southwestern has assumed ownership, but still… I don’t think this is quite what John G. Bullock and P.G. Winnett had in mind when they conceived this landmark.

If you’ve read this blog for any length you know I get a kick out of digging things up out of the backyard, which is a steady supplier of stuff — most of it as worthless as it is intriguing. Be it marbles, figurines, opossum jawbones, World War II era German army helmets, whiskey bottles stamped with prohibition restrictions, circa-1950s toothpaste tubes, fragments of a license plate from 1920, lumps of coal, Batchelder tiles, and all sorts of old nails and whatnot, there seems to be no end to the excavationings.

As an aside I keep meaning to photographically catalog the collection into an online Museum of Backyarchaelogy, but haven’t yet gotten around to it.

Well today’s find comes not from beneath the soil out back, but from the basement beneath the house. Having gone down there to see if our cat Jiggy had gotten down there and if so to try to get him out, I poked around a little bit and found some crate siding that had been hammered up against the floor beams for whatever reason, maybe to create a little storage area. Burned into the wood was the last name of “Haskett” and the words “Los Angeles Cal.” Upon further examination I found the other side of the wood was lined with pages of some sort and sure enough when I gave one piece a gentle tug down came the following piece fom a magazine called “The Woman’s Home Companion.” Dateline?

The fragment of page below shows the partial headline to read “…TTING OF THE WHITE HOUSE,” but other than that there’s not much else decipherable. Turn it over though, and there are three articles whose headlines are clearly visible through the decades of dust and dirt that have settled on it: “New Liquid That Clears The Skin,” “Problems in Dressmaking” and “B. & B. Styles Fit For A New Century.”

See for yourself (click to triplify):