another memory lane

When I was five years old and living on Armadale Avenue in Eagle Rock my mother left for a few days and came home with a step father. His name was Gilbert Hugh Porter and he worked for the post office at UCLA. We moved soon there after all the way to West Los Angles. My mother gave birth to a younger brother about a year later however he died soon after birth leaving me the youngest surviving of my siblings. The area was largely rural or a least in the stage of being built up. Lots of open fields and farms stretched towards the Pacific only four miles west. My step father didn’t like to be tied down to staying home in our apartment so most weekends and available holidays were spent at the beach, fishing. Our week end travels took us up and down the coast of California, where I had the experience of seeing much of California prior to the growth that would populate every corner of the Golden State.

This weekend I had the opportunity of re-tracing some of my earlier steps as a young adolescent. Prior to Freeways being built that take us everywhere, two lane country roads ran from one end of the state to the other. Needless to say it took forever to get anywhere without expressways. Several wrong turns or detours off the freeway this weekend brought back the memories of the long drives of long ago. The city, if you could call it that, stopped at Santa Ana and the highway ran along the railroad tracks to San Diego. San Juan Capistrano was a small town across the tracks. 25 miles down the road. San Clemente had a few homes around the historic train station. One gasoline station and that was it. In San Diego I thought the Ocean ended because it all turned to mud. Actually I was looking at the southern end of San Diego Bay. The area south became Mexico but as far as I was concerned Mexico was on another planet.

Mom and I walked across the border this time and walked along the roadway shopping where most of the Americans waited in their cars to get back into the USA. We rode the trolleys to the border as well as ride to Old Town San Diego. This is the spot where the Mormon Battalion laid claim for the United States to the territory of California. Some of the buildings though modernized were built then and have lasted till now. A morning journey to the A gold rush town of Julian was special and on the drive back we ended up taking the PCH to slow the journey down. It was nice to travel what was a two lane road from San Clemente to Long Beach. What is now built up most of the way now, was just a few small towns separated by long distances. Near Seal Beach, which is still somewhat open space on the military base, I can recall mountains of larger round metal objects with spikes coming out of them. They were all stacked very carefully in a very orderly manner. I asked what they were back then and my parents said their were mines. I couldn’t quite grasp what they had to do with mines (?Gold Mines) until as I grew older I realized they were explosive mines left over from World War II just 10 years prior. There were literally millions of these mines stored for years afterwards in this area.

Well enough of a trip down memory lane. Hope you enjoyed the trip.

Dad