[sic]

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):

In the obituary section of today’s L.A. Times can be found news of the death of one 86-year-old Heinz Barth. An SS Officer in World War II, Barth was tried and convicted in 39 years after his participation in the “Das Reich” armored division’s massacre of 642 men, women and children in the French village of Oradour-Sur-Glane on June 10, 1944.

Barth didn’t deny his role in the obliteration but defended himself by arguing that he was just following orders, which he testified were to “burn the whole place down and eliminate every person, from babies to old men” on their way toward Normandy to battle D-Day invasion forces that had landed on June 6.

From the article, which describes what is “widely considered to be the worst atrocity in Nazi-occupied France”:

“Men were herded into barns and shot. The women and 202 children were locked in the church, which was set on fire with grenades and then shot at with machine guns.”

Barth was promoted to lieutenant Colonel a few months after the massacre and after the war reportedly assumed a phony name and identity and lived in communist East Germany where he worked as a decorator and ran a grocery store until his base and wicked past finally caught up with him in 1981, a past that East German judges found included his volunteering to participate in the execution of 92 Czechoslovakian civilians in 1942.

For his crimes against humanity he was sentenced in 1983 to spend the rest of his life in prison, but having lost a leg in the war and suffering from diabetes and high blood pressure Barth was freed on grounds of poor health by a state court after serving 14 years.

“I feel guilty about the terrible crimes in Oradour,” he’s quoted as saying at the time of his 1997 release, “but I have paid enough.”

Sorry Heinz, but I’m thinking you’ve only just begun to pay.

Wiki: Oradour-Sur-Glane

I don’t know how I failed to see this when I first extracted this lock from the bedroom door some months ago to successfully fix it so the door would actually latch for as long as Susan had owned the house, but when she notified me that the lock began not latching again last night I made a note to haul it back out of the door again today and have another look-see, which I did just a few minutes ago, diagnosing the problem as a slipped spring.

Look, see?

click to triplify

Pretty old school, eh? I had no idea.

In my moderate Mr- Fixitness I realigned the spring as I had done the first time around, but this time in an attempt to prevent it from slipping in the future I applied a small piece of electrical tape to the coil’s base where it seats against the back of the lock’s box.

I can never say “lock” and “box” together without thinking of Al Gore.

Not that the tape will definitively keep the spring from slipping again, but it can’t hurt. And soon afterward I was replacing the panel I had removed to gain access to the mechanism’s guts, Flipping it over to the other side about to put it back in the door, that’s when I found this stamp (photographed through an 8x lupe on macro in really bad light so sorry for the crap quality):

Don’t know how I missed it the first time around, but what it says is:

RUSSELL & ERWIN
MFG. CO.
NEW BRITAIN
CONN. U.S.A.
PAT. JAN, 29, 89.
JUNE, 11, 89.

No, not 18 years ago. Subtract another century to the same year that Vincent Van Gogh painted “Landscape with Cypress Tree” and a guy by the name of Eiffel designed a tower for Paris and Mark Twain published “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” and Adolph Hitler was born and that sucks so let me mention that astronomer E.P. Hubble was born too.

And so was this lock on June 11. 1889.

I hung Old Glory off the front porch this morning for the Memorial Day weekend. My first time doing so. The base was pre-existing except for being relocated to the column from the front door frame prior to painting the house last year. Had to improvise the pole from a garden stake that I drilled two holes in for the s-hooks.

The flag I’ve had since 2001. Bought it on september 12 from a small place in Burbank that was almost sold out of them. A lot of people were buying flags then. But I only displayed it once and very loudly that first weekend after the horror. I drilled eye hooks into a large wooden post that I then seated and secured to a weighted base used for patio umbrellas. The whole thing then went into the bed of my truck and I proceeded to drive all around the San Fernando Valley with the star-spangled banner flapping and whipping around in the back. Proud to be an American, and all that. Afterward, my pride went a bit more understated via a small flag that I mounted to the inside of the rear window. It hangs there still.

This one though, it came inside and has resided since in a variety of dressers and boxes until I stumbled across it last month and found it rather ingloriously lining the bottom of my sock drawer.

I’m happy to put her to a far more appropriate use.

My ballpoint pen of choice for some 20 years has been the Montblanc Meisterstuck. I don’t mean I load up on pallets of them every five years, like so many disposable Bics. I mean that in 20 years this is the pen I’ve carried with me and used for writing purposes great and small. Yes, I call it Monty. In fact the pen I have today is a direct descendant from the first that I bought back in my wanna-be yuppie days/daze of the mid-’80s. By that I mean that when the black resin barrel of Monty The First cracked apart in 1990, I shipped it off to Montblanc with a mournful letter regarding its demise and Montblanc responded to my plea by replacing it free of charge with Monty II.

I’ve had it ever since and today was the day it suffered its own similar and seeming mortal injury. The end of its barrel just shattered into several pieces as I was writing a check to pay a bill. There was no sound other than the clickity clatter of the broken bits onto my desk. I stared sadly at the carnage and supposed I could package it up and send it off to Montblanc just like I’d done the first time some 17 years ago with a sob story (or just go buy a new one), but instead I pulled out the superglue, hauled the desk lamp close and as surgically precise as I could be I put the tiny little three-dimensional puzzle back together (and bonus: did so without gluing my fingers together). Then for reinforcement I wrapped a piece of electrical tape around the reconstruction.

Good as new. Or old, as it were.

Even though the black tape blends in with the color of the barrel nicely, perhaps setting an adhesive cast around the pen barrel’s busted nose isn’t a very dignified addition to such a dignified writing implement. But it will have to do because this particular pen and I have been together a long time and through a lot and I’m not ready to say we’re finished. Monty II and I have been to college together and Italy and Greece and Brazil and Argentina and across the United States. Monty II survived my 1994 motorcycle accident and rode with me all the way down the coast for the 475-mile bike ride from San Francisco to L.A. back in 2003. We’ve signed documents important and trivial. Written stories and ideas. Taken notes. Cut countless checks. We’ve doodled.

But perhaps the fondest memory of Monty II came when it was stolen from me back in August 1993 in Sherman Oaks and miracularously recovered several days later in Long Beach. It’s a longish story that you can read here if you’d like in the form of a column that I wrote about the enterprising ordeal for the fall 1993 Pierce College Roundup when I was its editor.

Suffice it to say me and Monty II have been through a lot and I want to go through some more together.

Twenty-four miles and a big old jet airliner… all before breakfast. Unfortunately as my digivideo cam is not equipped to wirelessly transfer its data into the ether I have no capability of uploading my footage of the awesome on-time landing of the Airbus A380 at LAX at 9:30 a.m. this morning… but that should be no big deal as I’m pretty sure a search of YouTube and or any of the newschannel videostreams should yield one or two thousand other captures of the historic landing.

So for now and the remainder of the day you’ll have to content yourself with someone else’s video(s) and my impression that it was fantastic and mind-blowing to behold such a behemoth on its inaugural L.A. touchdown.

And I certainly wasn’t alone. Lincoln Boulevard and Westchester Parkway were loaded with a couple thousand like-minded airplane geeks, one of which was Julia, a Blogging.la reader, who met up with me on the side of the road not too far from the Sepulveda Boulevard In-N-Out and not long after that the big bird came calling.

Afterward I biked the long way around the airport (Westchester Parkway to Pershing Drive to Imperial Highway) to get to work.

UPDATE (12:45 p.m.): Julia’s got a post on her blog up with video of the landing, and me after it touches down.

UPDATE (8:14 p.m.): Here she is from my POV…

The new folks over at L.A. Voice want to know just how bad L.A. is at historic preservation. Linking to a Preserve LA post that links to a Preservation Online article by Chris Epting titled “Lost in Los Angeles,”  L.A. Voice’s Ryan Knoll takes issue with Epting’s characterization of L.A. as one of the worst cities in the country in terms of preservation of its historic landmarks. Knoll sites Epting’s examples of the Ambassador Hotel and the Garden of Allah residential complex as just not being very heavy hitters in the history ring:

The Garden of Allah was a compound of bungalows that served as pieds a terre for celebs like Gretta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart, and Ernest Hemmingway. It was built in 1927 and bulldozed in 1959. Does a 32 year old apartment complex merit the “Historic” tag? If so, I want a tax deduction for my house.

You can make a strong argument for and against the Ambassador Hotel. It’s greatest claim to fame (or infamy), of course was as the spot of Robert F. Kennedy’s assasination. But the Kennedy family (I believe) wasn’t all that fired up about saving the building, and if you remove the Kennedy factor from consideration, the Ambassador becomes just another hotel that hosted famous people.

As an issue near and dear to my heart of course I started posting a comment in response to Ryan but it quickly rambled and so instead I decided to pop it up here, as follows:

Ryan, I would be interested to know where the line is to be drawn. If we look at a landmark and shrug about it not being old enough or that its only claim to fame is that it housed some celebs or hosted the murder of a presidential candidate then it shouldn’t be too difficult to shrug off all those vacant theaters on Broadway or that Frank Lloyd Wright house up on the hills or that luggage shop on Vine Street.

You can make the argument that historically speaking there’s not all that much going on and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree — not because few things actually qualify, but because there are so few things left. L.A. may be 225 years old but in the last 100 or so this city’s become the capital of reinvention and make-believe where the automobile is king, and our sprawled out drive-through cityscapes can’t help but reflect that.

As a prime example very near and dear to my heart, I site the “1,000 year old” oak tree that for the first 950 years of its undisturbed and unencumbered life was one of hundreds upon hundreds of oak trees growing in the area. But for its final 50 years or so it became isolated and imprisoned in what became the suburban bedroom community of Encino a hundred yards or so south of Ventura Boulevard until it finally succumbed to years of illness and indifference along with that winter’s relentless El Nino storms and fell in 1998. Sure, it was recognized in 1963 by the city as an historic and cultural monument (No. 74), but did that prevent the grand arbor from being relegated to a small island surrounded by the asphalt encroachment of the post-war boom? Of course not. City planners were so reckless in their disregard that they actually split Louise Avenue’s lanes around the tree, allocating a mid-sized shopping center to the north and a bank building to the south and multi-unit aparment buildings behind it. Why? Because what was it other than nothing but a big old tree. Never mind that it deserved a park of its own and even the slightest in protective distance from the pavement and pollution, this historic and cultural icon couldn’t even get the slightest consideration beyond being acknowledge for its longevity in a city whose residents ceaselessly strive to ignore the clock rather than recognize its forward progress.

And now it’s gone.

So while historic significance might be an oxymoron in L.A., it would be from a perspective of cultural significance that I would definitely say L.A. qualifies as one of the most ignorant cities at preservation. On a small scale countless are the landmark businesses that are nothing more than memories and pictures: Perino’s, C.C. Brown’s, Wallach’s Music City, Pickwick Books, Jay’s Jayburgers. Hell, rather than restore it the city came very close to razing downtown’s central library after it was torched by arsonists in the 1980s.

And the erasure is easily evident on a larger scale, too – and not without some irony. Union Station is an untouchable landmark in its own right, but it resides on what used to be the original location of Chinatown. Same with Dodger Stadium. I would throw myself in front of any bulldozer that threatened my beloved House of Blue, but it was built on the dirt that buried the barrancas and canyons and history of Chavez Ravine. And what they couldn’t fill in they chopped down. Bunker Hill used to be much more of a hill than it is now, but it was lopped off and trucked down and leveled and with it went so much of one of the city’s most historic residential cores.

The bottom line for me is that be it historic or cultural, Los Angeles’ past is a slate that’s historically been far more easily and regretlessly cleaned than most other American cities.

So a few weeks ago in hopes of getting it transcribed in time for this past weekend’s Veterans Day, I went diving through the archives of my Pasadena Weekly days and wouldn’t you know they’re just about complete except I’m missing the issue that had one thing I was looking for: a feature article I wrote back in 1999 on Retired Marine Corps General and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Louis H. Wilson and his wife Jane, who I had the pleasure to meet and interview.

How it all came about is a matter of luck and nice timing. For whatever reason I was in attendance at the re-dedication of an armed forces reserve center in Pasadena and during the ceremony’s speeches and such reference was made in passing to Wilson, who was in attendance, and his illustrious much-decorated career with the Marines.

So with that Veterans Day approaching I figured an interview with him might make a good piece for the corresponding issue and so I put a call in to the media contact who put me in touch with the General’s wife directly and who were gracious enough to invite me to their San Marino home for a couple hours trying to get him to do more than modestly and curtly recount not only his bravery in the face of the horrific action he saw in Guam that led him to be given the Medal of Honor, but also his career that culminated with him being the 26th Marine Corp. commandant and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff appointed by President Gerald Ford.

I wasn’t very successful. In fact the most animated he got was when I made reference to him being a Medal of Honor “winner.” I knew my mistake immediately but before I could offer up a correction he did it for me. “Medal of winner holder,” he emphasized.

And yes I had the distinct honor of holding the actual medal.

The day the article ran I wrote the General a letter of gratitude and thanks:

November 11, 1999

General Louis H. Wilson
San Marino, Calif.

Dear General Wilson:

I want to again thank you for the privilege of allowing me into your home to interview you for the article that appears in today’s issue of the Pasadena Weekly. You’ll find enclosed two copies of the newspaper, along with the material and photographs you provided me. The story appears on page six. If you need more copies, just say the word and they’ll be on their way to you.

I’ve been asked to relay greetings and best wishes to you and your wife from Walter Neely of Millsaps College and from Charlton and Marie Roby of Jackson, Miss., who requested I send them copies of the feature as well.

I hope the article meets with the approval of you and Mrs. Wilson. My only regret is that I didn’t have enough room to tell a more complete story of your service after World War II and your time as Commandant — but such a limit on space is a reality of newspapers.

General, I can say without reservation that meeting you was a distinct and profound honor. While I can picture you modestly shaking your head at such a comment, I regard the opportunity you provided for me to write about you and your wife as one of the most memorable of my career in journalism — and my life.

You have my prayers for your improved health and my best wishes for a very happy anniversary.

Very truly yours,
William Campbell

Anyway, as luck would have it I chanced upon a tearsheet of the article this morning. So in honor of Gen. Wilson (who died last year in his home state of Mississippi at age 85), his wife and all veterans, I make the seven-year-old feature available here, albeit a couple days later than I’d hoped.

When false accusations of child abuse and abandonment by my ex-wife led to things falling apart and I opted to quit fighting and instead completely remove myself from my daughter’s life in the summer of 2000 after receiving a letter from her in which she was prompted to write horrible and hateful things to me, I did a radical thing: I purged my Encino apartment of all traces of Kate. Everything. From the $500 doll house I’d bought her for Christmas a couple years earlier down to the littlest trinket and everything in between, I either threw it out or got it the hell over to Goodwill or into my mom’s Sherman Oaks garage later to be either sold in a yard sale or thrown out or given to charity.

In the matter of one day my one-bedroom flat went from being an obvious shrine to my daughter, to a place that held literally no trace that I was a proud father — albeit an every-other-weekend one — to a wonderful little 10-year-old girl.

Cold-hearted bastard as I can be I didn’t get rid of e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. A number of boxes of her drawings and our photographs and whatnot survived the exorcism. I just stowed them way the hell out of sight and mind. And they stayed stowed through my moves from Encino to Sherman Oaks (2001) to my first Silver Lake address (2003) and my current one (2004) — even o with our remarkable reconiciliation and reconnection last year they stayed put away.

When I moved in with Susan some of the stuff went down into the basement and some went into the storage space above the library closet where it was forgotten about until yesterday when I decided to clean out and organize that storage space that had become stuffed and a mess. During the extraction portion of the proceedings I pulled out an old Crate & Barrel box that was stuck way in the back and when I opened it up to investigate its contents I was greeted with this picture:

The buttons all around the matte are courtesy of Kate who decorated it as a Father’s Day gift. The photo was taken of us I’m not sure when — maybe 1996 or ‘97 — or exactly where… somewhere up PCH around Malibu or perhaps even further north. I do, however, remember the event. It was a fathers-and-daughters outing. I’m not sure who it was organized by but it involved many of her classmates at St. Cyril’s school in Encino. I remember it met at the school parking lot off of Ventura Boulevard from which a mass caravan of dads drove to the ocean for a beach party that at one point included climbing to the top of a bluff and watching for any whales passing by (we saw a couple off in the distant waters as I recall).

It’s always been my favorite picture of me and my little girl during some of our happiest times. And though I finished reorganizing the space above the closet and moved the Crate & Barrel box down into the basement, this picture now sits on my desk. Where it belongs.

Growing up L.A. I don’t know if one ever gets accustomed to things going away, but I think a certain immunity against loss builds up over the long term. The Herald Examiner, C.C. Brown’s, Steve Garvey, Jay’s Jayburgers, the old Chinese Theater box office are just a few on my RIP list. All of them hold some personal signifigance and all of them now share an epitaph that’s not much more than a nostalgic sigh. Let me now add Tower Records to the list, and permit me to slice-of-life eulogize it a bit, albeit in a very roundabout way.

Back when I was a teen in high school, ATM cards had only been on the scene a really short while. So new were they that the banks hadn’t yet wised up and made twenties your only withdrawal option. In fact you could get as little as a fiver and even select the denominations you wanted with larger amounts. Yeah, sweet. To further date myself this was also the time when Sony Walkman players were all the rage — and get this: they cost something crazy shit like $100-plus. Yeah, bogus. But what do these two things have to do with Tower Records? Come with me after the jump (which I just figured out how to do) and I’ll tell ya.

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