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Above is our beloved mid-1950s O’Keefe & Merritt stove that I’ve gotten so enamored with in since the oven’s valve failed and we had the fine folks at Antique Stove Heaven come out to make repairs last week — which included fixing the range’s “Grillevator” broiler that has not functioned for at least the 10 years Susan’s lived here and cooked with it, and perhaps a lot longer than that.

As an aside, the only reason I knew about Antique Stove Heaven wasn’t via The Google but rather The Old-Fashioned Way. I found the place on Western Avenue when me and my friends Julia and Dave and Jeff and Amanda put on our crazy shoes and spent a day walking the 28-mile length of the street from Griffith Park to the sea in October 2008.

As we await the repairman’s return with the repaired and rechromed frames to the gaping holes you see behind the burner/griddle deck — that’s the broiler’s vent on the left and on the right the oven’s “Hi-Vue” periscope window (a niftycool and energy efficient golden-age gimmick that allows looks at whatever’s cooking in the oven rather than opening its windowless door) I’ve paid some attention to some of its long-neglected bits. I’ve put lights back in the oven’s dual sockets, and I’ve cleaned the periscope’s mirror as well as the internal piece of glass in the oven’s roof that one looks through to see a reflection of whatever’s in there baking, like so:

And in between such administrations in hopes of finding out if the unit was made in 1954 or 1955 (the internet is surprisingly lacking readily available pages devoted to these dinosaurs), I’ve tried unsuccessfully to read the info on the ID plate attached rather inaccessibly under the deck’s lid, down there with burners, and worn down by wear and tear and time and grime.

So today I finally quit craning down in there and failing and just extracted the plate:

Trouble is after 56 years it’s pretty much as hard to read out in the open as it is down in its regular location, but here’s what I’ve deciphered through the wear and tear of time and grime:

Sadly, no actual year is stamped into the plate, but it’s cool knowing it was made right here in L.A. In fact, odds are our O’Keefe and Merritt didn’t travel far from its birthplace as the company’s main manufacturing plant was on OLympic Boulevard in Boyle Heights.

An offshoot/evolution of my Watts Happening rides has been my discovery/inclusion of the location of Wrigley Field and the history of the city’s true native baseball team: The Los Angeles Angels. I’ve become so enchanted with the club from an historical perspective as one of the most successful Pacific Coast League (PCL) franchises (who also played their first major league season there; followed by the next four at Dodger Stadium before moving permanently to Orange County) that I’ve gone a little crazy (don’t judge) over at Ebbets Field Flannels buying replica uniform memorabilia (a Wrigley Field groundskeeper jacket, a 1957  “Los Angeles Baseball Club” tee, and a 1935 home jersey. On top of that I joined the Pacific Coast League Historical Society — and most importantly have switched from a dismissive disdain to an entire embrace of the team’s seriously scoffed-at official name that owner Arte Moreno changed a few years back: The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Many angelenos — myself included — openly mocked the new title as nothing but a marketing ploy to capture the L.A. audience — and I have no doubt that was part of it. The city of Anaheim even sued to block the switch, unsuccessfully and understandably. But now I also recognize that in my native city whose history is one overly populated with examples of a wanton disregard and destruction of its history, Moreno has boldly anchored a line to our past and rightfully secured the team to the place where it played its first games some 107 years ago.

From 1903 through 1925, the team played at the long-gone 15,000-seat Washington Park, at Hill and 8th Streets in downtown Los Angeles. Owner William Wrigley then built Wrigley Field as their home beginning in 1925 and it stood until 1966 (some accounts have it torn down in 1968). On three occasions of my Watts Happening rides I’ve visited the location, each time having discovered and shared a bit more info with the people accompanying me. My most recent one, this past May, spoke of the facts that among the many Angel greats along with those throughout the PCL two of the Greatest To Ever Play The Game — Joe DiMaggio then of the San Francisco Seals and Ted Williams of the San Diego Padres — no doubt played at Wrigley Field; DiMaggio in 1933 (the year of his PCL-record 61-game hitting streak), and Williams in his sophomore season with the club 1937, his hitting helped his team to the pennant that year.

So what? Well, if you’re asking that I can’t blame you. It was a long time ago in a place that no longer exists, in a sport you may not be as interested in as I am. But consider the legendary stature of those two, and perhaps you can realize the impact this local angle has on me. For me, it was something akin to discovering something previously thought impossible, like Michelangelo having painted in London.  See, DiMaggio’s and Williams’ amazing careers were forged far away from here, in New York and Boston. From a baseball fan’s perspective that was the other side of the world really what with the closest Major League Baseball team at that time being in St. Louis. So to suddenly learn they specifically took to our Wrigley Field — that they caught and threw and swung and ran its base paths, that they spat and swore and stole and slid — brings these mythological figures not down to earth, but down to my corner of it. These are two of baseballs most glorious gods and they played here. They. Played. Here.

Or rather, they played at what once was here.

Can you imagine having been at one of those games and bearing witness to what was to become such future greatness? Damn. Pardon the digression, but the closest I’ve ever come to doing that was in the early 1990s at the Forum in Inglewood for a tennis match. Before the main event started, two little girls no taller than the net took to the court to play a few games. I’ve long since forgotten the names of the established pro players we’d come to see exhibit their skills, but I’ll never forget the names of those unknowns who wowed the crowd: Venus and Serena Williams.

Anyone still alive who can say they saw “Joltin’ Joe” or “Teddy Ballgame” when… well, that’s almost as ephemeral a thing as the place where they were seen. After the Angels debut major league season ended in 1961, stately Wrigley Field under its signature 12-story clocktower never hosted another baseball game, and five years later in disrepair was demolished.

It’s some consolation at least that the block upon which the stadium once stood now serves the community rather than the for-profit needs of some subdividing residential developer. But it’s sadly typical that what was built there was done with little consideration for what once was and as far as I know there’s nothing to memorialize the ballpark that served a larger community so ably for so long. No sign. No marker. No commemorative plaque sits where once sat home plate to which DiMaggio and Williams and so many others strode.

And that got me thinking: Where might that base be in relation to the place today?

Looking at the satellite image of the block in Google Maps (bordered by 41st and 42nd places to the north and south, and San Pedro and Avalon to the west and east), then comparing it to images I’d found of the ballpark, the location of home plate looked to be beneath a building that’s part of a community mental health center complex standing centrally located.

I then did some entirely unscientific pinpointing on the Google Maps image using neighboring buildings as rough coordinates and at first I was heartened that the intersecting lines (seen in the upper left of image below) seemed to place the base just north of one of the building’s walls.

To verify that I remembered the awesome Historic Aerials website and sure enough I found an image of the block from 1948 (pictured at left).  But then when compared to an image on the site from 2005, indeed and sadly, home plate is underneath the structure south of my original intersection, practically equidistant between the building’s north and south facades. Darn it.

There is good news though. Drawing a diagonal line 60 feet and six inches to the north and east of home plate, shows that one can still stand outdoors where Wrigley Field’s pitcher’s mound once stood, albeit now it’s under however much parking lot pavement. Better that than a building.

You can bet on my next Watts Happening Ride, that’s where we’ll be.

Because I haven’t posted in a couple days, here’s a random photo from October in San Diego, where I’ll be these next three days…

… and a random circuitous School Daze story from some of the places I was a substantially longer time ago…

Early into fifth grade, I left Beverly Hills for Hollywood. One day I was a student at Horace Mann Elementary just south of Wilshire Boulevard that I’d attended since first grade, and the next I was a student at the now-defunct Founders School a private institution just south of Hollywood Boulevard. The quick change had to do in large part with my fourth grade teacher Mrs. Moore, an African American woman who apparently decided I was a junior white trash racist when it came my turn to tell the class that what I did that summer, which was that I spent part of it with my grandmother in the deep south of Carbon Hill, Alabama. Suffice it to say I had an educational year that Mrs. Moore seemed to relish making pretty miserable, and as a result there was talk of me repeating the 4th grade. But since murder is illegal my mother sought a less violent, more productive alternative, based on the knowledge that my lack of scholastic advancement was because of an idiot teacher, not because I was an idiot.

My teacher at Founders was an Austrian woman with a heavy accent named Mrs. von Hanwehr (which is probably spelled incorrectly, but was pronounced “von Han-vare”), and the class was very small — no more than 12 kids.

Each Friday Mrs. von Hanwehr gave everyone of her students a packet of Sugar in the Raw as a treat. To this day if I find them in a restaurant, I’ll take a couple and later dip a licked finger in and enjoy the stuff until the last crystal’s gone. Mrs. Von Honwehr was my favorite teacher, but not just because of the sugar. Because she made learning sweet again. I started at Founders  with a third-grade educational level. I ended the year at a ninth-grade level.

One of my classmates was a tiny hyperactive Asian kid named Harry who wore thick black-rimmed glasses. He was crazy intelligent. Always had to be moving or climbing or something — which Mrs. von Hanwehr allowed him to do — but he was never distracted. When she would ask him a question he’d fire back the answer while opening and closing a window or looking through an unrelated book or making his way halfway up the bookcase on the back wall of the room.

One day we were out on the playground during afternoon recess. It was one of those dreadfully smoggy days in mid-1970′s Los Angeles where your lungs would burn at the end of the day, but you could look prolonged and wide-eyed at the sun directly without it hurting your eyes. I was playing foursquare with others from my class when out of nowhere Harry charges through the court, grabs the ball and runs off. Immediately I’m in pursuit. And gaining. Gleefully he tosses the ball aside, but I’m angry at him for interrupting the game so I keep going and we rip around the asphalt with me closing on him. Suddenly he comes to a skidding stop and unable to avoid contact I barrel into him, one of my clenched fists connects with his shoulder and he gets knocked to the ground.

You’d think I’d shot him the way he picked himself up and glowered at me, his chest heaving with spittle-flecked inhales and exhales coming from his mouth as he worked himself into a rage. With no time to tell him it was an accident, I just took off, now with him chasing me. I ran until I’d opened up a few yards of distance between us, but in running out of playground and looking over my shoulder and seeing he wasn’t going to quit, I stopped and turned, facing him with whatever type of poor defensive stance I could muster.

All I was able to yell out was “Harry wait —!” before he beelined up at full speed and a full foot shorter than me and landed a hard punch right in my stomach. I fell to the ground gasping for air as other kids circled looking on while Harry stood triumphantly over me. A teacher quickly intervened and I was sent to the nurse. Harry was sent home.

When I next saw Harry Mrs. von Hanwehr told him to apologize to me, and he did from where he’d climbed to the top of his beloved back wall bookcase.

The following year my mom couldn’t afford Founders’ tuition so at the beginning of 6th grade I left Founders and  went to Cheremoya Avenue School at Beachwood and Franklin for 6th grade. My teacher was Mrs. Mulenthaler (pronounced myoo-len-thall-er) and one of my classmates was Janet Weiss who would later gain fame as the drummer for Sleater-Kinney. She had this huge mop of long curly hair and a penchant for Foghat tee shirts. As such, I had a huge crush on her.

After Cheremoya I went to Le Conte Junior High in Hollywood — the only school in my history of schooling I ever started and finished: seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. I saw Harry again that ninth grade year, entirely coincidentally, on 6th Street in the mid-Wilshire area. I had finished my Herald Examiner paper route for the afternoon and was just riding around when I passed him and his mom coming out of a store. I was still about a foot taller than him. He asked me if I remembered our “fight.” I told him I did. He apologized again. He said he was going to Hollywood High.

So was I or at least up until practically the last minute. Literally a couple weeks before my first day, our increasingly psychotic landlord forced my mom into an apartment search, but rather than just look around Hollywood, she broadened her search and found a two-bedroom flat back in the slums Beverly Hills where we’d previously lived, this time on Hamilton Drive, directly behind the historic Wilshire Theater (now the Saban Theater, though why it had to be renamed is just so much stupid ego bullshit).

Against my wishes we returned to that city for me to attend its high school, leaving me no notice or opportunity to tell the friends I’d made at Le Conte where I was going. By and large my three years at Beverly High was a miserable and lonely and discouraging experience initiated by my mom because of her rationale that Beverly Hills’ school district was so much better than its Los Angeles counterpart. Maybe that’s true, but looking back, I think if I’d had the wherewithal to remind her it was that same school district that had produced Mrs. Moore we would have stayed in Hollywood and my life would’ve ventured down a much different path.

I’m not dwelling on what might’ve been, just bumping into it like I did with Harry on 6th Street.

And while I didn’t encounter a Mrs. Moore during my three years in those shallowed halls, I did have an enthusiasm-crushing Mr. Stern for sophomore English.

Alternate Title: Just In Time For The Ides Of March 2010, Let’s Flashback To My Finest Moment As An Acting Student With A Monologue From Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”

I was a far better acting student than I ever was an actor. In fact, I’m not quite sure what drove me to study acting, other than it sounded like a fun thing to do and a fun way to meet people and it was something to do besides go to a real school and learn a real trade.

There was probably more to the story than that — like my secret desire to be a world-class movie star — but during the course of my days at the mouthful that was The Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting – West, I never took acting nor the business of it too seriously.

The school can now be found in the space above the Hollywood Wax Museum, but the conservatory’s original home was further east on Hollywood Boulevard just south of the Walk of Fame on Argyle. Like many of the landmarks of my past it’s gone, bulldozed in the early ’90s for the Hollywood & Vine Red Line subway station.

The year was 1987 and I was 22. My technique teacher was a fellow named Arthur Mendoza, and I don’t think I could’ve asked for a better one. He was flamboyant, outrageous, outspoken and fully centered in his own universe, but he was also quite perceptive, motivating and intuitive, which are things a student wants from his acting teacher.

As to my fellow students, there was a bunch of talent there, but there weren’t too many names to drop from that class in particular — save one you’ll certainly recognize: Benecio Del Toro. Arthur referred to him as “Beno.”

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With a few minutes to kill I logged into my long-dormant account at Zazzle.com and did as I’d said I would a couple days ago: turned the 1932 Los Angeles Summer Olympics badge image captured at a car show by my friend Frazgo into a tee (click it for the bigger picture):

Then I ordered one for me and one for him — no charge Frazmatazz, since I couldn’t have done it without you!

Want one? Didn’t think so, but you can check out its Zazzle page here.

In these years of fading memory I can’t seem to recall the specfix of how I came to have this image below that I rediscovered this weekend whilst stumbling around my archives. My best recollection is that I found it via my fellow LA Metblogger Frazgo, either via a post he made on the find somewhere or from his Flickr photostream.

What is it? Well, I’m a little fuzzy on that as well. Obviously it’s a weathered treasure from the 1932 summer Olympic games here in L.A., but specifically I’m thinking that in the original image the badge was attached as an ornament  that adorned either the grille or the hood of a car from that time, and that the end result you see above is from my efforts in Photoshop to separate it out and stand it alone, maybe to put it on a shirt or a —.

[Sound of tires screeching]

Mystery solved! Instead of sitting here writing about scratching my head about it, I zipped over to Frazgo’s Flickr photostream and found the original image. Yep, it’s just as I’d thought.

Next stop: shirt creation!

Chicken Boy on Broadway 1974

Originally uploaded by mr. rollers

My friend and fellow walking and biking and Los Angeles history enthusiast Walt has posted on his 90042 Blog the picture at right taken by my friend, awesome photographer and urban cyclist extraordinaire Stephen “Mr. Rollers” Roullier.

Beyond being awesome, it reminds me I don’t do enough to chronicle and document my city. My biggest internal struggle as someone who always has some sort of camera with him when he ventures out and about, is one of apathy and procrastination pitted against a latent desire to document street scenes such as this one.

In the immediate they might be dubbed mundane, worth little more than a glance, but in a city as ever-evolving as Los Angeles, they have value as they age, demanding closer examination of what was and what’s changed.

As a teen, when my friends were blowing their allowances or minimum wage money on video games and cigarettes and clothes and drugs and music, I spent a few months saving up the $120 needed to step me away from the Kodak Instamatic of my childhood and up to my first “real” camera, a simple SLR outfit from Sears, back in 1980-81. Little did I realize that the initial cash outlay for the hardware would be the least of one’s expenses. The package deal even came with a couple 12-exposure rolls of film and I burned through those. Then came the need for money for more film and money for developing. And more film, and more developing. Having so little of the former, subsequently I often went long times without being able to acquire the latter.

And as an obvious result I did a lot more not taking pictures than taking them. I was pretty strict in what I snapped — even as I got older and had more disposable income. It was a simple matter of economics. Of making resources count.

Today, powered by a rechargeable battery, my digital camera can take thousands of pix stored on its memory card. As such, you’d think I’d have pixelized my city like mad, but I have not. One might presume that’s because old habits die hard, but I think it’s primarily laziness coupled with an attitude of “Agh, it’ll be there tomorrow.”

But that’s the point. Just like Chickenboy, and that RTD bus (and the RTD!) and that sapling tree, and Cisco’s in Stephen’s photo: it might not be there tomorrow.

I often wistfully imagine what long lost people, places and things and events of my youth and early adulthood might be contained in my archives had digital cameras been born 20 years earlier than they were, and I’d been able to snap away with a greater degree of reckless abandon.  I envy and respect people like Stephen who’ve done what I couldn’t or wouldn’t, as well as those who’ve grown up with the technology. To them I say don’t under-appreciate it. Exploit it for what it can do to capture the past in the present. For the future.

Forty years ago this summer my Aunt Frieda, Uncle Jack and cousins Margaret, Laura and Allan came out to visit my mom and me from Chattanooga, Tennessee. We were living in a two-bedroom apartment in a building on the corner of Hamilton Drive and Gregory Way in Beverly Hills, and being 5 years old I could not tell you how we housed everybody — but that’s not important.

What’s important is that the high point of their visit included my very first trip to Disneyland. Being that there was no internet and my social network was a couple neighborhood kids, plus I couldn’t do that whole reading thing with any consistency yet, I can only guess that I learned of the park’s newest attraction — The Haunted Mansion — via TV commercials, but however it branded itself on my brain it quickly became my entire reason for being on this planet as a human being.

On the big day I could barely contain myself, and we drove down to Anaheim in style with mom renting a 1969 black Impala convertible to tranport all seven of us.

I won’t beat around the bush with all the other rides we went on first and all the wonder and happiness I experienced, because honestly I don’t remember anything accept maybe a bit of Autopia and the submarine ride. Anything else fun that happened got cloaked because when we arrived at the awesome house to finally fulfill my dream of going on the ride I’d been dying to do there was a sign on the entrance: CLOSED. For what? I don’t know. Probably to work some kinks out as it had only been open a short while.

I can’t quantify the devastation I felt there at what’s purported to be the Happiest Place On Earth. I literally thought this had been my One Shot and I was never ever ever going to get another chance to go to Disneyland or ride The Haunted Mansion. Ever again.

When you’re 5 there’s no tomorrow, only Tomorrowland. And  it would be three more years of tomorrows before I returned and finally got a chance to fulfill my long-denied amusement park destiny.

Fast forward to this morning and I’m up at this insane hour because Susan and I are going to do our second-annual Super Bowl-Day Disneyland run. Last year was my first time back in 22 years and I fell in love with the place all over again. The only bummer for me was the Jungle Cruise was closed for long-term refurbishment (It’s A Small World was also shuttered, but that was more Susan’s disappointment than mine). Wondering what might be down for this visit, Susan and I looked online but we couldn’t find any info. Then this morning after I Twittered prior to bedtime about today’s excursion my friend David Markland tweeted back about the status of The Haunted Mansion, and it wasn’t good.

Indeed, I found the right webpage and confirmed that on the 40th anniversary year of its arrival and the 40th anniversary year of me learning about disappointment because of it, The Haunted Mansion won’t be looking for its 1000th resident today. Kinda bummed, but it’s kinda appropriate.

Way back in October 2001, the boss of where I worked at that time implemented a program wherein during the regularly scheduled monthly meetings he wanted his employees to give presentations. The topics could be about pretty much anything, so I was one of the few to actually volunteer for a time slot and then got to work putting my thoughts down in a paper I titled “Bicycling For Fun & Profit,” the first — and incomplete — draft of the narrative which I just accidentally stumbled on whilst diving around the archives on my back-up hardrive..

Some of it seems so quaint now: Gas at $1.50 a gallon. Me resolving to bike 1,001 miles in 2001. Pretty much the total lack of any so-called bike culture (at least in its current and evolving form) worth mentioning.

I remember boiling a lot of the info down into a bulleted, Powerpoint-style presentation and probably have that file somewhere, but anyway… if it’s your bag or interest, a glimpse of me prepping to preach the power of the pedal from the wayback is on the other side of the jump (replete with a photo of my old Raleigh mountain bike — still sporting a number from what looks to be an LA Marathon ride –  at rest on the L.A. River Bikeway around Atwater Village).

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There was a time when you were my one and only. The day I brought you home from the Sherman Oaks bike store on Ventura Boulevard in February of 2002, you forever changed my previous stubborn belief that a mountain bike was all I would ever need to get around. You were lighter, far more agile and maneuverable. And tough? Dang, you were. From that point forward you and I went everywhere.

Then came late 2005 and my venture into the single-speed realm of abandoned bike resurrection, and I hung you and your 24-speeds up in the garage like an old shirt in a closet. Sure, I’ve called on you from time to time, but not out of nostalgia so much as mostly when some sort of malfunction befell, such as the last time I rode you in January in the several days that spanned between the frame of my beloved The Phoenix fatally cracking and the arrival of its replacement, recently dubbed Le Noir.

On one of those days we were forced to ride home in a gusty deluge that left both of us drenched and dirt-encrusted and some readers questioning my sanity. I didn’t even give you the courtesy of wiping you off when I hung you back up on the garage rack. And there you sat being an anchor for webs of several generations of daddy longlegs, while Le Noir and I rolled out some 3,500 miles.

Well, last night while working on getting her some new handlebars, brake levers and tires I discovered that with the configuration of the new bars, her existing rear brake cable/housing was coming up about a foot short, and there’s simply nothing that can be done about that except to buy some new cable and housing.

So out you came this morning, to my embarrassment and self-disdain still caked with the road junk and long-fossilized grime that I left on you six months ago — and in need of some brake tweaking as I’d borrowed yours for Le Noir and only returned them to you this past weekend.

After apologizing to you profusely while getting you road-ready I outfitted you with Le Noir’s light set and took a cloth and cleanser to you out there on the porch, removing the layers of gunk that stuck to you like barnacles to a ship’s hull:

And you look grand my deserving and trusty friend. Even better: you got me to work safely this morning as if it had been only one day and not 180-plus since our last trek.

You are a remarkable machine my six-year-old entry-level Giant OCR-3. We’ve shared thousands upon thousands of miles on all manner of roads and conditions across town and the state, but other than chains, tires, innertubes, and an occasional worn out seat or spoke you’re still sporting your original drivetrain and components and everything works as well today as it did when I brought you home and you forever changed my perception about what a good road bike is and can do.

You continue to do so.