The photo above was taken decades after Mom, Ann and I lived there. The area directly behind the apartment was a Chevrolet dealership when we lived there. From the apartment building to Long Beach Boulevard to the right were a few homes, with a Fortune Teller lady's house sitting directly on the corner of Orchard Place and Long Beach Boulevard. Apparently, several years after we moved away, the dealership purchased all of the homes to the right of the apartment, tore them down, and expanded their auto storage and repair space significantly. However, from this photo and current Google maps, the Chevrolet dealership is long gone, to be replaced by an auto repair shop.
The main window in front was the living room. The narrow window to the right of that was to the single bedroom. In the back, right of the apartment was the bathroom. The small dining room and old-fashioned kitchen were also in the back of the unit. Off the kitchen was a utility room with an exit door that lead down wooden steps to the small backyard with some grass and a clothesline upon a concrete slab. On Mom's birthday, July 4th, 1963, I must have taken the next photograph of the picnic we had. She would have turned 42 that year.
Before we left E Lomita, I had brought several plastic model kits and worked on them on the small dining table. Unfortunately, I once spilled a bottle of Testor model paint upon the area rug underneath the dining table. Mom had to buy the carpet from the landlord who lived in the house to the left in the photo at the top. At some point, the landlord had his wife committed to the mental health facility in Norwalk. Mom always believed that he did so in order to obtain sole possession of the house and our apartment. She died not long after being committed of something as simple as strep throat or pneumonia. Mom was secretly furious with him.
That summer Mom took us to downtown Huntington Park to get Ann and me Social Security numbers, and she enrolled us at South Gate Junior High School for the fall. One day she picked us up from work at noon and took us to South Gate Park to have our lunch on a picnic table there. Again, while we never were told how the agreement was reached, Dad began to pay Mom $75.00 per month for child support. In turn, Mom took the two of us to an Orthodontist in Huntington Park, on the corner of Seville and E Florence Ave, agreeing to make monthly payments so that our crooked teeth would be fixed over the next few years. Clearly, a single mother now raising two children mostly on her own became her priority. The significantly older, short, rotund Orthodontist had a framed map of the world in his second floor waiting room. Using red yarn and push pins, he outlined the communist countries of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Mongolia, Cuba, Red China, North Korea and North Vietnam on that map.
In both South Gate and Huntington Park were popular neighborhood movie theaters. Not too many blocks to the south along Long Beach Blvd from Orchard was the Vogue Theater where I would spend many weekend hours in the years ahead. In Huntington Park were The Warner Theater and the Pacific Theater. Since I had a cast recording of the musical, Mom took me one afternoon to a double feature in HP of Flower Drum Song and The Ugly American, a rather odd pairing of films. Before we moved from Orchard, we also went to a Drive-In theater off of the north side of Firestone Blvd. just before The Long Beach Freeway to see Robinson Crusoe on Mars with Paul Mantee.
Soon after we arrived on Orchard, Mom explained that we were too late to see the vintage trolley cars that turned around at The Loop, a few blocks North of Orchard by the unincorporated residential area of Cudahy. This removal of electric powered trollies throughout the L.A. Basin had been part of a larger movement to convert mass transit across the nation solely to gasoline powered buses. The rails were paved over. The block just north of The Loop featured two local markets, one of which--The Loop Market--I will get to later, along Palm Place.
When Ann and I needed milk or other small grocery items when mom was at work, we shopped at a small, neighborhood market, now OP Market, on the corner of Independence and Chestnut Avenue, on the other side of the railroad tracks that still run between Independence and Ardmore Avenues. I have no memory of what the market was called then though it might have had the same name as it does now.
I was holding close to my face a WWII C-47 model that I had painted camouflage. I was looking intently at the side cargo door when I inexplicably, and strongly, inhaled. I accidentally sucked the cargo door into my mouth and down my throat. I could do nothing else but swallow. I cannot imagine that the paint and plastic did my system any good. I was too embarrassed to mention it to anyone. I doubt that I would have had my stomach pumped. Also, Mom probably did not have the money to make an emergency hospital visit.
An example of her lack of money for medical care was when I had my first ear infection sometime that year. My head throbbed for days and days. All Mom had to combat the constant pain was Bufferin which I took repeatedly though it never seemed to take even the slightest edge off of the constant agony. Mom never even mentioned taking me to a doctor. Very early one morning as I tried to sleep, my eardrum broke. Warm fluid drained from my right ear that finally felt so soothing, and the pain was gone. Years later, whenever I had a physical and a doctor would check my ears, they would note the scar that remained. Fortunately, it sealed itself back up after draining the fluid and I did not lose any hearing. Years later, doctors who would check my ears noticed a slight scar on my eardrum.
Even closer than Whittier, South Gate lay under the flight path to LAX. And living in a second-floor apartment put us a few feet even nearer. That first summer, I would run out to the 2nd floor landing when I heard a jet approaching. Soon I was able to identify all of them: the BOAC Boeing 707 flying in from London, the Air France 707 from Paris, the Scandinavian Airlines DC-8 from Stockholm, the Air New Zealand DC-8 from Aukland, the Mexicana Comet 4 from Mexico City. Although it usually flew almost exclusively in the East and Midwest, I once saw a United Airlines Caravelle while looking up from the school yard at South Gate Junior High. Lockheed Electra's from PSA or Western Airlines or F-27's from Bonanza Airlines were a daily sighting. The piston engine airliners overhead were becoming an increasingly rare sighting in 1963-4.
Haircut
At some point, I needed a haircut. I tried to do it myself and it looked awful. There was a local barbershop on Firestone. But how do I explain my butchered head of hair? I know I was embarrassed to admit that I had tried to do it myself, so when I sat in the chair and it was obvious something untoward had happened, I made up an even more embarrassing story about having a young cousin visiting who overheard my admission the night before of needing a haircut and who had grabbed a pair of scissors and began the effort while I was still asleep that morning. All of these decades later, while I remember that a couple of the barbers chuckled at my story at the time, looking back I am sure they believed not one word of it. I am embarrassed for my younger self for not just telling the truth. Lies are just silly.
The odd thing about this haircut is that since I always asked for a regular haircut all of my life, and this barbershop visit was my first in South Gate, I have no other memory of getting any other haircut while we lived in South Gate after that one. I would obviously get a regular haircut every month but in what barbershop or from which barbers, I have no recollection. The memories are simply not there.
Summer awakening
Being on the second floor of an apartment that was not air conditioned, and where we lacked even an electric fan, the days could be warm and stuffy. I would take a shower to cool off. One day, I played with myself while resting on the floor of the tub, but something entirely unexpected happened. I had once asked Dad in the garage on E Lomita to tell me about the "facts of life" since Dave Moore had told me that his father had imparted some key information to him. Dad's eyes glazed over, he became extremely uncomfortable, and all he could tell me was, 'You need to wash yourself down there." That response was incredibly lame. I never asked anything of a sexual nature again.
Like so many other boys at that age, I immediately thought I had broken myself. But upon further review, I realized that--whatever had happened--it felt good. From that day forward, I would take a few showers each day. And, soon, I accepted the fact that it was the male body that got me off: Paul Mantee taking what appeared to be a naked dive into an underground pool of water on Mars from Robinson Crusoe on Mars; Burt Lancaster wrestling in the crashing waves wearing a tight bathing suit on the beach in From Here to Eternity; the sexy cast member, blond actor Gary Vinson, on McHale's Navy were some media types who inspired me. I would also discover that Tomorrow's Man and several other men's "posing/physique magazines" were carried on the wooden magazine shelves of The Loop Market. The entire front of the store was open to the sidewalk on Palm, and the magazine section was on the front, left corner of that open-air market. In those days, the most revealing article of required clothing in these magazines were posing straps. As the decade progressed, the rules regarding nudity in publications seemed to lessen. A few of those posing straps were eventually made of mesh rather than solid fabric. You could see more of the outline of the model's member as well as his pubic hair. But the only magazines that showed total nakedness were the several available nudist magazines, and they could show only flaccid members--no erections allowed in California in the 1960's.
I would buy a Time magazine or Newsweek, or some other such innocent publication, and then pick out one or more of the digest-sized posing magazines. I sometimes spent a lot of time pretending to scan the other periodical publications before passersby left the area and would not see me buy a gay mag. When Randy Bancroft visited, we hiked over to The Loop Market because they did carry a British aviation publication that we both liked. When he noticed the gay magazines on the wooden display shelf, he remarked, "Oh, they have Playboy magazines for women." I was not going to tell him that he had it all wrong. And when I wrote to Dave Moore about discovering masturbation--he already had weeks before I did--I would not tell him that naked men were what got me off instead of the naked women who inspired him. As was typical for most of us gay guys then, I believed that there were no others like me--we did not exist in regular media. It was Greg Steed on the line to buy milk or ice cream cups at Yorba Junior High who turned around to me one day and said something that I knew was derogatory, "Back off, homo!" At the time he said that to me, I had no idea what it meant. And I seriously doubted that he really knew either. But what I did get, without anyone actually telling me so, was that being a homo was not something one wanted to be or be called. So, I hid the gay magazines in the apartment, and I kept from anyone else that I was attracted to men. (The existence of gay mags on regular magazine shelves ought to have clued me in that I actually wasn't alone.)
Mom's relatives
Living with mom allowed us to connect or reconnect with her side of the family. We met Great Uncle Pug and Great Aunt Pat, brother and sister, respectively, of our late Grandpa Breeze who had died in 1956 of a heart attack. Each sibling would outlive him by many years. Uncle Clarence "Pug" Breeze was married in those days to a woman from the Philippines who had a teenaged daughter who was unable to walk without assistance. The three visited us one evening and stayed overnight since it was too late to drive back to Santa Monica that night. I slept on the floor in the living room as did Ann. When morning arrived, Uncle Pug was gone but his wife and daughter were just getting up. We called their home and finally managed to piece together the fact that Uncle Pug had sleepwalked through the darkened living room, not stepping on, or awakening, any of the rest of us. Only when he got home did he come to, apparently, and wonder what had happened to his wife and daughter. That marriage did not last long.
Here is Great Uncle Pug with Mom when Pug had remarried a few years later. He and his then wife Pat lived in a trailer park near Santa Monica. Mom was furious not long after when he died and learned that his wife had him cremated.
Spring break 1964, Mom planned a trip for us to visit her sister, Norma-Jean, her husband Lloyd and our cousin Doug in San Leandro, CA. We boarded a Greyhound bus in Los Angeles on a Saturday. We made what we thought would be a temporary stop in Santa Maria, CA, to have dinner with Uncle Robert who was living there at the time. When we returned to the bus station where we had stored our bags in a locker until the next bus passed through around midnight, the station was closed. Robert had to contact the manager from a payphone. The manager was none too pleased to have to leave home and reopen the station so we could retrieve our luggage in the middle of the night. Mom and I sat together, but I shared a seat with an attractive enlisted sailor who occasionally rested his head on my shoulder.
We arrived at the downtown bus depot in San Fransico early the next morning. Cousin Doug drove across the Bay Bridge in his dark blue, 1958 Chevy to pick us up. This was early Sunday morning so there was very little traffic as we returned across the bay to San Leandro. One day Ann and Mom went with Aunt Norma-Jean into San Francisco to see the sites. Rather than go with them, I decided to hang out with my cool Cousin Doug, three years older than I and a High School senior. Not only did he have a hot car, he had a 4-track tape player in the glove box (this was before 8-track tape players became available). He had a professional tape of Marvin Gaye's Greatest Hits from Motown. Not only was Doug handsome, he was muscular from being on his school's swim team.
Here are Mom, Doug and me on top of an observation platform of Oakland International Airport on a windy day that Spring break.
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Here are the three cousins at the airport.
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Aunt Norma-Jean and Uncle Lloyd jointly owned rental property north of San Leandro with his brother and sister-in-law that would eventually lead to bad blood among them. Mom, Ann and I road with her in their Corvair Monza to visit that apartment complex. They held onto that Corvair until Aunt Jean sold it after Uncle Lloyd died in 2008.
I am not even sure who took the picture above. When I showed the photo to Aunt Jean decades later before she died in 2017, she did not even recognize herself on the right. When Cousin Doug died of cancer in 2003, the two sons of his Uncle Gene related how they, too, admired Doug as I had because he seemed to be one of the cool kids and had all the cool toys--he had a drum kit in his bedroom and used to drive down to, and surf at, Monterey, CA. Doug took Ann and me to a Drive-In theater in San Leandro with his high school girlfriend, Pat. We sat in the front seat while they necked in the back seat. The double bill was The Pink Panther and Mouse on the Moon.
The day we departed for home, Aunt Norma-Jean drove us to San Francisco International Airport. We were taking a Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) Lockheed Electra for Ann and my first airline flight. I was thrilled though I worried just a bit about becoming airsick. The flight, however, was a smooth one, and PSA's airfare was the lowest between LA and San Francisco in those days, $13.50 in an all-coach configuration. The aqua pools of Southern California sparkled in the sunlight as we headed toward LAX.
Uncle Robert
When we saw Uncle Robert in the 1950's, he was in a VA hospital. He had been drafted into the U.S. Army at the end of WWII, so it was too late to fight against the Germans or Japanese; however, he did spend his short career in Japan during McArthur's occupation. He married after the war, had a son (as had Aunt Norma Jean, Aunt Doris Rowe, and Mom) name Ray after Grandpa Breeze, but his marriage did not last long. He tried to maintain a relationship with his son, but that was difficult because his ex-wife constantly poison his son against him. When he visited us, he drove a 1960's Woody wagon.
Toward the end of the decade, he worked for Douglas aircraft, likely a well-paying Union job. But like his late father, he seemed to have a restless spirit. He grew his hair long, took on a Western name of Wolf River Bob (the Wolf River lay South of White Cloud where he grew up), and wanted to have some kind of media career, TV or film. His long hair in the early 1960's put his Douglas job in jeopardy. He exploited the clash with Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach and parlayed it into newsprint. Since almost nobody wore his hair long back then (the Beatles were still a few years off), his long-haired protest became a cause celebre. He finally parleyed actually cutting his hair on local TV.
Even though he cut his hair on local TV, none of this translated into a TV or film career. He eventually quit Douglas. When we saw Uncle Robert after we moved in with Mom, he was working on a ranch near Santa Barbara. Great Uncle Pug drove Mom, Ann and I to see him. We stayed in a old wooden house in serious need of refurbishing and got to ride horses for the first time in our lives. Robert had developed Western rope and whip skills. He also acquired Western wagons. After we moved to Cypress, we again visited him because he had developed his Western show at The Timbers restaurant, north of Santa Barbara. The Timbers claim to fame was that it was partially built using timbers from the wooden pier that a Japanese submarine briefly shelled during WWII. They served great steak dinners and seafood fare and featured old time Melodramas in an attached theater space to the side of the structure.
Uncle Robert
When we saw Uncle Robert in the 1950's, he was in a VA hospital. He had been drafted into the U.S. Army at the end of WWII, so it was too late to fight against the Germans or Japanese; however, he did spend his short career in Japan during McArthur's occupation. He married after the war, had a son (as had Aunt Norma Jean, Aunt Doris Rowe, and Mom) name Ray after Grandpa Breeze, but his marriage did not last long. He tried to maintain a relationship with his son, but that was difficult because his ex-wife constantly poison his son against him. When he visited us, he drove a 1960's Woody wagon.
Toward the end of the decade, he worked for Douglas aircraft, likely a well-paying Union job. But like his late father, he seemed to have a restless spirit. He grew his hair long, took on a Western name of Wolf River Bob (the Wolf River lay South of White Cloud where he grew up), and wanted to have some kind of media career, TV or film. His long hair in the early 1960's put his Douglas job in jeopardy. He exploited the clash with Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach and parlayed it into newsprint. Since almost nobody wore his hair long back then (the Beatles were still a few years off), his long-haired protest became a cause celebre. He finally parleyed actually cutting his hair on local TV.
Even though he cut his hair on local TV, none of this translated into a TV or film career. He eventually quit Douglas. When we saw Uncle Robert after we moved in with Mom, he was working on a ranch near Santa Barbara. Great Uncle Pug drove Mom, Ann and I to see him. We stayed in a old wooden house in serious need of refurbishing and got to ride horses for the first time in our lives. Robert had developed Western rope and whip skills. He also acquired Western wagons. After we moved to Cypress, we again visited him because he had developed his Western show at The Timbers restaurant, north of Santa Barbara. The Timbers claim to fame was that it was partially built using timbers from the wooden pier that a Japanese submarine briefly shelled during WWII. They served great steak dinners and seafood fare and featured old time Melodramas in an attached theater space to the side of the structure.
Mom's friend Joy
Joy had red hair, a much darker shade than Mom's, and also not her real color. She drove a Cadillac convertible. She might have been a Realtor. Her house was behind the Lutheran Church on Poplar Street and Long Beach Blvd. She lived on Poplar. I think she and Mom were drinking buddies. Mom had bought me Peggy Lee's Latin a La Lee, a fine collection of Broadway showtunes, that fall for my birthday, my favorite album from Dad's collection of Capitol Records LPs. Julie was impressed that a kid would want a Peggy Lee album. She bought me a card that said something about my studying "a broad" with a woman's image inside the card. Her mother, sadly, was a drunk. A nice drunk, but a drunk. There were tales of her getting on the wrong plane at airports and ending up in cities she was not intending to go to and then having to pay more to fly to her actual destination. A tale of one Thanksgiving where she was cooking the turkey in the oven, taking it out to baste it, only to drop it and have it skid across the floor.
I remember Mom calling and telling me one day to meet her at Joy's house. On the walk there, not far from Orchard Place, I was walking along Beechwood Avenue, a cross street to Poplar. I happened to notice a black man walk into a house not far from the corner of Beechwood and Poplar and mentioned it in passing when I arrived. I had not thought much about it, only that one almost never saw black people anywhere in South Gate in those days. Joy's response was akin to my having told her that aliens had abducted her neighbors and that they were coming for her next. She demanded to know what house he had entered and was intent upon finding out the details. She was almost in a panic to get the facts. (I would later learn that she discovered there was nothing to his visit to that house and that her fears of a black people's invasion to her neighborhood was not imminent.)
When I attended South Gate High, a friend who lived in Cudahy told me that when a black couple looked at a house down the block that was for sale, suddenly "For Sale" signs popped up on lawns up and down that block. When word was passed that the black couple was not going to be buying that house, the "For Sale" signs in front of other houses just as suddenly disappeared. Yet another example of why "block busting" tactics by Realtors could work so well by introducing black families into all-white neighborhoods to create "white flight" by taking advantage of white prejudice.
This was the summer of 1963. Watts wasn't more than a mile or so away to the West. The riots were two years off. I remember Mom driving along Manchester Blvd (Firestone Blvd became Manchester after passing by the Firestone plant and entering Watts), heading to the airport. Suddenly, street traffic ground to almost a halt as cars were inching along. I could see a black man in a wife-beater T-shirt who was being hurried along by his buddies. Coming toward him was a visibly angry black woman with a kitchen knife in her hand, directed toward the black man. The several cars driving in both directions were mostly filled with white people who rolled up their windows, attempting to avoid being drawn into an obvious personal dispute. This was not something any of us would see on a busy street in South Gate or Downey.
I remember standing on Long Beach Blvd with Mom and Joy, across from a well-known furniture store, Moomaws. I had to laugh at the title but immediately got chided by Joy because they were an upscale store for South Gate and she took personal offense. At some point in the next year or so, Mom and Joy had a falling out. I don't know whether it was the drinking or an abusive boyfriend Joy had or what caused them to end their previously close friendship.
South Gate Junior High School
With summer '63 finally over, we started to attend our latest new school in the fall. The first week or so of school, mom would drive us down Ardmore Avenue to Otis Street, an industrial district, and drop us off near the corner of Otis Street and Firestone Blvd. (A large Firestone tire factory that employed many local men and gave the street its name was situated on Firestone, between Santa Fe Avenue and the railroad tracks that informally became the dividing line between all-white South Gate and all-black Watts.)
For whatever reason, after that first week, Ann and I had to walk to South Gate Junior High instead of Mom driving us there. The walk was extensive along Firestone Blvd since it was over 20 city blocks away from our apartment. We had to start out early each morning. At one point, I accompanied a male classmate and his younger cousin, who lived a couple of blocks even further away than Orchard. However, they started picking on me mercilessly, possibly out of boredom during our long walk. From then on, I walked by myself, once or twice stopping at a Winchell's Donut House a block or so before the campus (that Donut House is still there, by the way, though thoroughly remodeled). Mom would give us each a dollar each week. I did not realize the money was meant to last the entire week--I'd never had that kind of cash just given to me like that. When I became friends with a couple of girls from one of my classes early on, Rhonda Sewell and her friend Maureen Samler, I bought us all Cherry Cokes at a burger joint by the High School one day on our way home from school. (I think I believed that Mom was going to be giving us a dollar every day when we headed off to school--she quickly disabused me of that notion after I had squandered most of that first dollar on those Cokes.)
It was incredibly sweet of Rhonda and Maureen to befriend a new kid like me that first day of school. Most of the students at South Gate Junior High had likely attended the school for the previous one or two years and knew one another well. The two of them were also friends with pretty Jane Buchanan. All three of them volunteered as Candy Stripers at a local hospital. Jane was dating handsome Alan Cobb. Among our varying entourage was also Debbie, who lived in an apartment building on Chestnut, a couple of blocks away from Orchard Place, with her waitress mom, younger sister, Nancy, and older brother. Debbie was dating ruggedly handsome Rick Easter. Even in the 9th grade, Rick already had a muscular chest and rippled stomach. On our walks home along Firestone Blvd., Rick would take off his shirt, to take advantage of the afternoon sun and work on his perpetual tan. Our English teacher, Ivan Evans, saw our small group one afternoon and began to call Rick "nature boy" the next day in class for walking along with his shirt off. (I would have done the same had I had Rick's sexy body.)
Rick's parents had a house north of Independence, the same with Rhonda, Jane and Maureen. Rick's garage was entirely taken up with a custom-built slot car racetrack. Problem is that the cars were so fast that it was way too easy to get up too much speed on the straightaways and have your car go flying off the track on the curves. One evening before Christmas, a few of us were visiting Rick's house; his parents were away. He was smoking a cigarette from a pack he had somehow gotten that day. When he wasn't looking, knowing even then that cigarettes were nasty and bad for one's body, I hid his pack. When he realized what I had done, he chased me out of the house and pinned me down in the backyard, trying to get me to confess where I had hidden the pack. I quickly caved as he pressed his muscular arm against my neck while the girls tried to get him to relent (they didn't like his smoking either since we were all just 13 years old). I told him that I had hidden the pack in the manger under the Christmas tree.
If it wasn't clear already, most of the families of the students in South Gate were strictly middle class or lower middle class (I considered us lower middle class if I thought about it). Unlike the kids of Yorba Junior High, far fewer of these kids were overly concerned with style. In the photos, several of the girls wore their hair heavily ratted and puffed up. This was 1963-4 afterall.
One evening after visiting Debbie at their apartment, Rick and I were chatting on the corner of Chestnut and Ardmore when a police car rolled by. They continued down Ardmore for a block more but were in the process of turning around when Rick yelled to me, "Run!" Without asking why, I took off toward Mountain View and home around the corner on Orchard. Rick took off running back down Chestnut. The cops apparently were after him and not me. I was totally unaware that South Gate had a 10 PM curfew for kids our age. (Running from the cops after curfew almost got me in a lot of trouble a few years later.)
One afternoon, I was in Debbie and Nancy's apartment. Debbie was attempting to straighten up the mess. Her working mom hadn't the energy or the time when she was home, and her older brother was attractive but a bit of a slob, to keep the place clean and tidy. Dirty dishes were everywhere. Even though they did not own much furniture, couch cushions were strewn about the floor. I had never seen anyone's house this deliberately untidy before. Nancy and I went steady, very briefly, that fall. She gave me a chain with half a heart on it; the other half she had on her matching chain. She also gave me a 45 record by a group I did not know called, "Nancy, My Love". Their family may not have had much, but they had 45 singles by Neil Sedaka and others. Sadly, before the Spring semester ended, the fatherless family suddenly moved away, but not before February 9, 1964. On the old B&W TV, I watched the first appearance of The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. So had most of my peers, including Debbie and Nancy--we talked excitedly about it the next day.
Mom had bought me a single of Bobby Rydell singing his hit, Forget Him, in the late fall of 1963; and That's The Way Boys Are by Lesley Gore in early 1964. But The Beatles were something else entirely. And we all instinctively knew it. Teenaged culture was now forcefully taking the forefront of America and Britain. Baby Boomers were beginning to become transcendent.
Rhonda Sewell was dating Richard Watson, who lived on Mountain View, on the north side of the tracks from Orchard. He and I became friends, along with his buddy, Michael Leonard. Richard's parents owned an older home along that tree-lined street. He would polish their beautifully massive stereo console during his house-cleaning chores on Saturday mornings. He owned both Meet the Beatles and The Beatles Second Album LPs, not something I could even conceive of being able to buy in those days.
I wasn't especially attracted to Richard except as a friend because he was straight, but I started to give him massages in his bedroom off of the living room. Perhaps it was just being able to touch another boy that gave me some satisfaction. This went on for several weeks until his parents seem to have become suspicious and told him to leave his bedroom door open while the two of them watched TV in the living room. (The door had been closed before as Richard and I watched TV on his own portable set.) I felt as if I were being spied upon, so I told Richard I was not comfortable massaging him with his shirt off while his parents could easily watch us. Interestingly, his older brother returned home for several weeks when his time in the Army ended. He was so much hotter than Richard. When he had a fever and was dousing himself with rubbing alcohol, he asked Richard to massage his back with the rubbing alcohol. Instead, Richard volunteered that I gave good massages. Next thing I knew, I was giving a back rub to Richard's hunky older brother.
I made another brief acquaintance with Steve Page that year. He was a classmate who told me that he knew of some of the hobby shops around town where I could buy model kits. He told me to stop by his place on a Saturday morning and we could walk to those he knew well. His family had converted their garage in back, and that is where Steve told me to knock at the appointed time. He opened the door. Obviously, he'd just taken a shower and only had time to put his Levi's on but no shirt. Steve was a nice looking enough guy, but I had never realized what a beautifully muscled chest and rippled stomach he had. His skin was as smooth and unblemished as fine marble. It was tough to focus on the search for hobby stores after that. He could easily have posed in any of those digest magazines I was secretly buying at The Loop Market magazine store. (One of the hobby shops was just north of Palm on Seville.)
In our class was a true, physical stud, Grant Hoagland. Someone would later tell me that he'd gotten all the sex he wanted from several girls in our class. He was handsome in a Rock Hudson kind of way, and far more finely muscular than any of the other boys in the class, especially when he was showering in gym class.
Mr. Shermer was one of those handsome, nicely muscled gym coaches that make it into many gay boy's fantasies. Chiseled and handsome, with a 1950's blond crewcut, I lusted after him as I am sure others, both boys and girls, did as well.
On the rare occasions that rain threatened, the girls would file upstairs to the second-floor gymnasium from their locker rooms and showers below, and the boys would do the same from their side of the first floor. Each of us would be randomly paired with the opposite sex for square dancing. I remember vividly seeing that the least attractive and most overweight girl in our class was going to be my partner. When she realized the same, her face crinkled up as if to say, "Why did I get this creep?" when it was obvious that I was to be her partner. I realize now that she probably reacted that way instinctively, and defensibly, because that was how boys likely reacted to being paired up with her.
In Ivan Evans English class, I sat behind Michael Mebs. Somehow, Mr. Evans thought I was from Cuba. (Perhaps my having been born in Florida made him think I was of Cuban decent.) Michael was impressed by that (false) information. We would not become friends that year, but we would in high school and to this very day.
Even before Junior High started, I enjoyed reading. Mom had new paperback copies of George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984. I read them both that first summer. Visiting the school library, I would check out and read 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, Captain Ted W. Lawson's personal account of the B-25 Doolittle Raid in WWII, as well as They Were Expendable, the PT boat saga in the Philippines at the time McArthur was forced to depart, promising to return. Both books had been made into major films by Hollywood a couple of years after each book was published in the 1940's. I also repeatedly read Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne, also made into a spectacular film with an all-star cast. I have no memory today of why I was interested in reading any of those particular books.
Junior High kids definitely could be cruel. Sherry Fleener, whom I liked and whose parents had a genuine Juke Box in their garage, was called "Bongo Lips". Sweet Julie "Boobs" Ferris was called that behind her back because she had prominently developed earlier than the other girls. And I had my own bully, Dennis Brouard. One day in a class we shared on the second floor of the academic building, as he sat at a back table, when the teacher was not looking, he slid around the table and slugged me, hard, in the middle of my back. A couple of the girls who sat nearby me even blanched at the sound his fist made when he hit me. To this day I have no idea why he singled me out for punishment, and why he continued to haunt me even in High School.
It was from this class that we all descended the side stairs, to assemble around the flagpole with the entire school on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, to pay tribute to our assassinated President Kennedy. President McKinley had been assassinated in 1901, well beyond our lifetimes. We had never experienced something tragic like this. We were too young to know much about too many earlier Presidents, Kennedy being only our second familiar president. I had watched his inauguration at Handy Elementary School slightly more than two a half years before. Years later, Michael Mebs would tell me that when he was descending the stairs that November day, Richard Wright, another classmate descending next to him, cold bloodedly said aloud, "It was about time someone put a bullet into him!" While we were friends with Richard Wright in the next years ahead, his family's extreme rightwing views eventually caused me to end our acquaintance. JFK would not be the last assassinated Kennedy Richard would refuse to morn.
I took a Journalism class that year. I introduced to our school paper a column the idea of which I pilfered from a girl at Yorba Junior High the year before. Her name was Kathy Struthers. Her column, borrowing from the phrase from Lil' Abner, was "I'd Druther by Struthers". "I'd druther do nothing than go to Ivan Evans's English class", that sort of thing. However, without telling me, the instructor would sneak around my back and cut out the comments that mentioned any teacher by name. He only announced it to the class later what he had done because he claimed we were not supposed to involve teachers in our remarks or articles for the paper. At least not in the way I did it. The only personal benefit I got out of the journalism class was when we were asked to submit potential themes for our class yearbook. I submitted "Memories of the Past to Dreams of the Future". I was never even given credit for my submission when the annual was published. I never took another Journalism class again, but I certainly have used the typing class I took that year. The teacher placed an awkward phrase on the wall of the classroom, "Don't Trust to Luck - Learn to Type". I would take another typing class in high school. More about that later.
Here is a photo below from the annual of our journalism group. Steve Page wrote in the margin a comment about me. Michael Leonard wrote the comment further down. I am standing in the upper right of the photo.
We had homeroom to attend each morning. I forgot to bring in a signed form from mom in time toward the end of the academic year. My homeroom teacher decided that I did not deserve to be in the class photo that year as punishment for being late. The sad part about graduation from 9th grade and from Junior High to High School was that several of my classmates' parents decided that then was a good time to move to some other city and a different High School. Richard Watson's family moved to a new housing development in Lynwood, breaking up with Rhonda Sewell; and none of us would never see him again. Maureen Samler left, as well. Beautifully sculped Steve Page did, too, as did several others such has handsome Rick Easter. Debbie and Nancy had already left before the term ended. Jane Buchanan's family also moved away that summer.
Mom briefly attended our indoor graduation ceremony in the auditorium, June 1964. A classmate tapped me on the shoulder, to point out that Mom was now just a row behind her. Mom had come down to the rows of students at the front of the auditorium to tell me that she had to leave early for work. I was wearing the black suit we had bought in a men's clothing store in Huntington Park a few days before. With school out, I trudged those many blocks for the last time to the apartment on Orchard Place. When I arrived and looked up those familiar red flagstone steps to the second-floor landing, I was shocked to see that our jerk of a landlord had taken all of our possessions out of the apartment and stacked them on the landing outside the apartment door. Not knowing what to do, I called Mom at work to tell her what had happened. She was furious, mentioning that we were paid up through the weekend so we would have time to move out. She told me to meet her at our new address at 8940 Cypress Avenue, just a few blocks from Orchard, on the south side of Firestone. Later that evening, my friend Michael Leonard helped us pack all of our belongings into Mom's white 1960 Rambler for the short drive to Cypress Avenue and our new home, a place that, even though we were renting, felt like the first home we had since moving from Whittier in 1959. We had dinner at a restaurant on Firestone that night, Mom treating Michael for helping us move.
Muscle Beach Party
Having seen Beach Party, likely at the Vogue Theater in South Gate the previous year, I very much wanted to see the sequel, Muscle Beach Party, after it debuted in March of 1964. On one of Dad's monthly visits to see us, he agreed to take Ann and me to Huntington Park where it was showing in one of the two theaters there. He paid for our tickets, and we entered the lobby. Once inside the main auditorium, we were faced with an immediate dilemma. Every seat on the floor was already taken. We returned to the lobby and hiked up to the balcony. The balcony was also packed. We were finally able to find three seats that were together in the very back row off of the aisle. The Beach Party franchise was certainly a popular one, with several films to follow the first. But that did not explain why the theater was totally packed with African-American young people and adults. We were the only three white people in the entire theater besides the staff. One rarely saw any Blacks in either Huntington Park at the time or in South Gate. How was it that an entire movie theater in HP was filled with African-Americans. To see Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello and an entire cast of bronzed white people in what had to be the whitest of white films, and not a particularly good film at that?
The movie began and everyone settled into the comfortable seats. There were a few chuckles here and there--it wasn't the most amusing film either for a comedy. I still could not figure out why they were there to see this movie. Eventually, the musical interlude occurred where the Beach Party gang was at a small club to hear some entertainment. What happened next explained everything. As soon as "Little" Stevie Wonder appeared on the screen to perform, the theater went wild. This was his debut, and the patrons were standing up and dancing by their seats or in the aisles. I believe he only had one number, but that seemed to be enough for the audience. When very few African-American actors or performers appeared in any movie, and even far more rarely on TV, one had to endure even a lame surf movie for the chance to see an emerging musical star such as Stevie Wonder.
Joy had red hair, a much darker shade than Mom's, and also not her real color. She drove a Cadillac convertible. She might have been a Realtor. Her house was behind the Lutheran Church on Poplar Street and Long Beach Blvd. She lived on Poplar. I think she and Mom were drinking buddies. Mom had bought me Peggy Lee's Latin a La Lee, a fine collection of Broadway showtunes, that fall for my birthday, my favorite album from Dad's collection of Capitol Records LPs. Julie was impressed that a kid would want a Peggy Lee album. She bought me a card that said something about my studying "a broad" with a woman's image inside the card. Her mother, sadly, was a drunk. A nice drunk, but a drunk. There were tales of her getting on the wrong plane at airports and ending up in cities she was not intending to go to and then having to pay more to fly to her actual destination. A tale of one Thanksgiving where she was cooking the turkey in the oven, taking it out to baste it, only to drop it and have it skid across the floor.
I remember Mom calling and telling me one day to meet her at Joy's house. On the walk there, not far from Orchard Place, I was walking along Beechwood Avenue, a cross street to Poplar. I happened to notice a black man walk into a house not far from the corner of Beechwood and Poplar and mentioned it in passing when I arrived. I had not thought much about it, only that one almost never saw black people anywhere in South Gate in those days. Joy's response was akin to my having told her that aliens had abducted her neighbors and that they were coming for her next. She demanded to know what house he had entered and was intent upon finding out the details. She was almost in a panic to get the facts. (I would later learn that she discovered there was nothing to his visit to that house and that her fears of a black people's invasion to her neighborhood was not imminent.)
When I attended South Gate High, a friend who lived in Cudahy told me that when a black couple looked at a house down the block that was for sale, suddenly "For Sale" signs popped up on lawns up and down that block. When word was passed that the black couple was not going to be buying that house, the "For Sale" signs in front of other houses just as suddenly disappeared. Yet another example of why "block busting" tactics by Realtors could work so well by introducing black families into all-white neighborhoods to create "white flight" by taking advantage of white prejudice.
This was the summer of 1963. Watts wasn't more than a mile or so away to the West. The riots were two years off. I remember Mom driving along Manchester Blvd (Firestone Blvd became Manchester after passing by the Firestone plant and entering Watts), heading to the airport. Suddenly, street traffic ground to almost a halt as cars were inching along. I could see a black man in a wife-beater T-shirt who was being hurried along by his buddies. Coming toward him was a visibly angry black woman with a kitchen knife in her hand, directed toward the black man. The several cars driving in both directions were mostly filled with white people who rolled up their windows, attempting to avoid being drawn into an obvious personal dispute. This was not something any of us would see on a busy street in South Gate or Downey.
I remember standing on Long Beach Blvd with Mom and Joy, across from a well-known furniture store, Moomaws. I had to laugh at the title but immediately got chided by Joy because they were an upscale store for South Gate and she took personal offense. At some point in the next year or so, Mom and Joy had a falling out. I don't know whether it was the drinking or an abusive boyfriend Joy had or what caused them to end their previously close friendship.
South Gate Junior High School
With summer '63 finally over, we started to attend our latest new school in the fall. The first week or so of school, mom would drive us down Ardmore Avenue to Otis Street, an industrial district, and drop us off near the corner of Otis Street and Firestone Blvd. (A large Firestone tire factory that employed many local men and gave the street its name was situated on Firestone, between Santa Fe Avenue and the railroad tracks that informally became the dividing line between all-white South Gate and all-black Watts.)
For whatever reason, after that first week, Ann and I had to walk to South Gate Junior High instead of Mom driving us there. The walk was extensive along Firestone Blvd since it was over 20 city blocks away from our apartment. We had to start out early each morning. At one point, I accompanied a male classmate and his younger cousin, who lived a couple of blocks even further away than Orchard. However, they started picking on me mercilessly, possibly out of boredom during our long walk. From then on, I walked by myself, once or twice stopping at a Winchell's Donut House a block or so before the campus (that Donut House is still there, by the way, though thoroughly remodeled). Mom would give us each a dollar each week. I did not realize the money was meant to last the entire week--I'd never had that kind of cash just given to me like that. When I became friends with a couple of girls from one of my classes early on, Rhonda Sewell and her friend Maureen Samler, I bought us all Cherry Cokes at a burger joint by the High School one day on our way home from school. (I think I believed that Mom was going to be giving us a dollar every day when we headed off to school--she quickly disabused me of that notion after I had squandered most of that first dollar on those Cokes.)
It was incredibly sweet of Rhonda and Maureen to befriend a new kid like me that first day of school. Most of the students at South Gate Junior High had likely attended the school for the previous one or two years and knew one another well. The two of them were also friends with pretty Jane Buchanan. All three of them volunteered as Candy Stripers at a local hospital. Jane was dating handsome Alan Cobb. Among our varying entourage was also Debbie, who lived in an apartment building on Chestnut, a couple of blocks away from Orchard Place, with her waitress mom, younger sister, Nancy, and older brother. Debbie was dating ruggedly handsome Rick Easter. Even in the 9th grade, Rick already had a muscular chest and rippled stomach. On our walks home along Firestone Blvd., Rick would take off his shirt, to take advantage of the afternoon sun and work on his perpetual tan. Our English teacher, Ivan Evans, saw our small group one afternoon and began to call Rick "nature boy" the next day in class for walking along with his shirt off. (I would have done the same had I had Rick's sexy body.)
Rick's parents had a house north of Independence, the same with Rhonda, Jane and Maureen. Rick's garage was entirely taken up with a custom-built slot car racetrack. Problem is that the cars were so fast that it was way too easy to get up too much speed on the straightaways and have your car go flying off the track on the curves. One evening before Christmas, a few of us were visiting Rick's house; his parents were away. He was smoking a cigarette from a pack he had somehow gotten that day. When he wasn't looking, knowing even then that cigarettes were nasty and bad for one's body, I hid his pack. When he realized what I had done, he chased me out of the house and pinned me down in the backyard, trying to get me to confess where I had hidden the pack. I quickly caved as he pressed his muscular arm against my neck while the girls tried to get him to relent (they didn't like his smoking either since we were all just 13 years old). I told him that I had hidden the pack in the manger under the Christmas tree.
If it wasn't clear already, most of the families of the students in South Gate were strictly middle class or lower middle class (I considered us lower middle class if I thought about it). Unlike the kids of Yorba Junior High, far fewer of these kids were overly concerned with style. In the photos, several of the girls wore their hair heavily ratted and puffed up. This was 1963-4 afterall.
One evening after visiting Debbie at their apartment, Rick and I were chatting on the corner of Chestnut and Ardmore when a police car rolled by. They continued down Ardmore for a block more but were in the process of turning around when Rick yelled to me, "Run!" Without asking why, I took off toward Mountain View and home around the corner on Orchard. Rick took off running back down Chestnut. The cops apparently were after him and not me. I was totally unaware that South Gate had a 10 PM curfew for kids our age. (Running from the cops after curfew almost got me in a lot of trouble a few years later.)
One afternoon, I was in Debbie and Nancy's apartment. Debbie was attempting to straighten up the mess. Her working mom hadn't the energy or the time when she was home, and her older brother was attractive but a bit of a slob, to keep the place clean and tidy. Dirty dishes were everywhere. Even though they did not own much furniture, couch cushions were strewn about the floor. I had never seen anyone's house this deliberately untidy before. Nancy and I went steady, very briefly, that fall. She gave me a chain with half a heart on it; the other half she had on her matching chain. She also gave me a 45 record by a group I did not know called, "Nancy, My Love". Their family may not have had much, but they had 45 singles by Neil Sedaka and others. Sadly, before the Spring semester ended, the fatherless family suddenly moved away, but not before February 9, 1964. On the old B&W TV, I watched the first appearance of The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. So had most of my peers, including Debbie and Nancy--we talked excitedly about it the next day.
Mom had bought me a single of Bobby Rydell singing his hit, Forget Him, in the late fall of 1963; and That's The Way Boys Are by Lesley Gore in early 1964. But The Beatles were something else entirely. And we all instinctively knew it. Teenaged culture was now forcefully taking the forefront of America and Britain. Baby Boomers were beginning to become transcendent.
Rhonda Sewell was dating Richard Watson, who lived on Mountain View, on the north side of the tracks from Orchard. He and I became friends, along with his buddy, Michael Leonard. Richard's parents owned an older home along that tree-lined street. He would polish their beautifully massive stereo console during his house-cleaning chores on Saturday mornings. He owned both Meet the Beatles and The Beatles Second Album LPs, not something I could even conceive of being able to buy in those days.
I wasn't especially attracted to Richard except as a friend because he was straight, but I started to give him massages in his bedroom off of the living room. Perhaps it was just being able to touch another boy that gave me some satisfaction. This went on for several weeks until his parents seem to have become suspicious and told him to leave his bedroom door open while the two of them watched TV in the living room. (The door had been closed before as Richard and I watched TV on his own portable set.) I felt as if I were being spied upon, so I told Richard I was not comfortable massaging him with his shirt off while his parents could easily watch us. Interestingly, his older brother returned home for several weeks when his time in the Army ended. He was so much hotter than Richard. When he had a fever and was dousing himself with rubbing alcohol, he asked Richard to massage his back with the rubbing alcohol. Instead, Richard volunteered that I gave good massages. Next thing I knew, I was giving a back rub to Richard's hunky older brother.
I made another brief acquaintance with Steve Page that year. He was a classmate who told me that he knew of some of the hobby shops around town where I could buy model kits. He told me to stop by his place on a Saturday morning and we could walk to those he knew well. His family had converted their garage in back, and that is where Steve told me to knock at the appointed time. He opened the door. Obviously, he'd just taken a shower and only had time to put his Levi's on but no shirt. Steve was a nice looking enough guy, but I had never realized what a beautifully muscled chest and rippled stomach he had. His skin was as smooth and unblemished as fine marble. It was tough to focus on the search for hobby stores after that. He could easily have posed in any of those digest magazines I was secretly buying at The Loop Market magazine store. (One of the hobby shops was just north of Palm on Seville.)
In our class was a true, physical stud, Grant Hoagland. Someone would later tell me that he'd gotten all the sex he wanted from several girls in our class. He was handsome in a Rock Hudson kind of way, and far more finely muscular than any of the other boys in the class, especially when he was showering in gym class.
Mr. Shermer was one of those handsome, nicely muscled gym coaches that make it into many gay boy's fantasies. Chiseled and handsome, with a 1950's blond crewcut, I lusted after him as I am sure others, both boys and girls, did as well.
On the rare occasions that rain threatened, the girls would file upstairs to the second-floor gymnasium from their locker rooms and showers below, and the boys would do the same from their side of the first floor. Each of us would be randomly paired with the opposite sex for square dancing. I remember vividly seeing that the least attractive and most overweight girl in our class was going to be my partner. When she realized the same, her face crinkled up as if to say, "Why did I get this creep?" when it was obvious that I was to be her partner. I realize now that she probably reacted that way instinctively, and defensibly, because that was how boys likely reacted to being paired up with her.
In Ivan Evans English class, I sat behind Michael Mebs. Somehow, Mr. Evans thought I was from Cuba. (Perhaps my having been born in Florida made him think I was of Cuban decent.) Michael was impressed by that (false) information. We would not become friends that year, but we would in high school and to this very day.
Even before Junior High started, I enjoyed reading. Mom had new paperback copies of George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984. I read them both that first summer. Visiting the school library, I would check out and read 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, Captain Ted W. Lawson's personal account of the B-25 Doolittle Raid in WWII, as well as They Were Expendable, the PT boat saga in the Philippines at the time McArthur was forced to depart, promising to return. Both books had been made into major films by Hollywood a couple of years after each book was published in the 1940's. I also repeatedly read Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne, also made into a spectacular film with an all-star cast. I have no memory today of why I was interested in reading any of those particular books.
Junior High kids definitely could be cruel. Sherry Fleener, whom I liked and whose parents had a genuine Juke Box in their garage, was called "Bongo Lips". Sweet Julie "Boobs" Ferris was called that behind her back because she had prominently developed earlier than the other girls. And I had my own bully, Dennis Brouard. One day in a class we shared on the second floor of the academic building, as he sat at a back table, when the teacher was not looking, he slid around the table and slugged me, hard, in the middle of my back. A couple of the girls who sat nearby me even blanched at the sound his fist made when he hit me. To this day I have no idea why he singled me out for punishment, and why he continued to haunt me even in High School.
It was from this class that we all descended the side stairs, to assemble around the flagpole with the entire school on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, to pay tribute to our assassinated President Kennedy. President McKinley had been assassinated in 1901, well beyond our lifetimes. We had never experienced something tragic like this. We were too young to know much about too many earlier Presidents, Kennedy being only our second familiar president. I had watched his inauguration at Handy Elementary School slightly more than two a half years before. Years later, Michael Mebs would tell me that when he was descending the stairs that November day, Richard Wright, another classmate descending next to him, cold bloodedly said aloud, "It was about time someone put a bullet into him!" While we were friends with Richard Wright in the next years ahead, his family's extreme rightwing views eventually caused me to end our acquaintance. JFK would not be the last assassinated Kennedy Richard would refuse to morn.
I took a Journalism class that year. I introduced to our school paper a column the idea of which I pilfered from a girl at Yorba Junior High the year before. Her name was Kathy Struthers. Her column, borrowing from the phrase from Lil' Abner, was "I'd Druther by Struthers". "I'd druther do nothing than go to Ivan Evans's English class", that sort of thing. However, without telling me, the instructor would sneak around my back and cut out the comments that mentioned any teacher by name. He only announced it to the class later what he had done because he claimed we were not supposed to involve teachers in our remarks or articles for the paper. At least not in the way I did it. The only personal benefit I got out of the journalism class was when we were asked to submit potential themes for our class yearbook. I submitted "Memories of the Past to Dreams of the Future". I was never even given credit for my submission when the annual was published. I never took another Journalism class again, but I certainly have used the typing class I took that year. The teacher placed an awkward phrase on the wall of the classroom, "Don't Trust to Luck - Learn to Type". I would take another typing class in high school. More about that later.
Here is a photo below from the annual of our journalism group. Steve Page wrote in the margin a comment about me. Michael Leonard wrote the comment further down. I am standing in the upper right of the photo.
We had homeroom to attend each morning. I forgot to bring in a signed form from mom in time toward the end of the academic year. My homeroom teacher decided that I did not deserve to be in the class photo that year as punishment for being late. The sad part about graduation from 9th grade and from Junior High to High School was that several of my classmates' parents decided that then was a good time to move to some other city and a different High School. Richard Watson's family moved to a new housing development in Lynwood, breaking up with Rhonda Sewell; and none of us would never see him again. Maureen Samler left, as well. Beautifully sculped Steve Page did, too, as did several others such has handsome Rick Easter. Debbie and Nancy had already left before the term ended. Jane Buchanan's family also moved away that summer.
Mom briefly attended our indoor graduation ceremony in the auditorium, June 1964. A classmate tapped me on the shoulder, to point out that Mom was now just a row behind her. Mom had come down to the rows of students at the front of the auditorium to tell me that she had to leave early for work. I was wearing the black suit we had bought in a men's clothing store in Huntington Park a few days before. With school out, I trudged those many blocks for the last time to the apartment on Orchard Place. When I arrived and looked up those familiar red flagstone steps to the second-floor landing, I was shocked to see that our jerk of a landlord had taken all of our possessions out of the apartment and stacked them on the landing outside the apartment door. Not knowing what to do, I called Mom at work to tell her what had happened. She was furious, mentioning that we were paid up through the weekend so we would have time to move out. She told me to meet her at our new address at 8940 Cypress Avenue, just a few blocks from Orchard, on the south side of Firestone. Later that evening, my friend Michael Leonard helped us pack all of our belongings into Mom's white 1960 Rambler for the short drive to Cypress Avenue and our new home, a place that, even though we were renting, felt like the first home we had since moving from Whittier in 1959. We had dinner at a restaurant on Firestone that night, Mom treating Michael for helping us move.
Muscle Beach Party
Having seen Beach Party, likely at the Vogue Theater in South Gate the previous year, I very much wanted to see the sequel, Muscle Beach Party, after it debuted in March of 1964. On one of Dad's monthly visits to see us, he agreed to take Ann and me to Huntington Park where it was showing in one of the two theaters there. He paid for our tickets, and we entered the lobby. Once inside the main auditorium, we were faced with an immediate dilemma. Every seat on the floor was already taken. We returned to the lobby and hiked up to the balcony. The balcony was also packed. We were finally able to find three seats that were together in the very back row off of the aisle. The Beach Party franchise was certainly a popular one, with several films to follow the first. But that did not explain why the theater was totally packed with African-American young people and adults. We were the only three white people in the entire theater besides the staff. One rarely saw any Blacks in either Huntington Park at the time or in South Gate. How was it that an entire movie theater in HP was filled with African-Americans. To see Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello and an entire cast of bronzed white people in what had to be the whitest of white films, and not a particularly good film at that?
The movie began and everyone settled into the comfortable seats. There were a few chuckles here and there--it wasn't the most amusing film either for a comedy. I still could not figure out why they were there to see this movie. Eventually, the musical interlude occurred where the Beach Party gang was at a small club to hear some entertainment. What happened next explained everything. As soon as "Little" Stevie Wonder appeared on the screen to perform, the theater went wild. This was his debut, and the patrons were standing up and dancing by their seats or in the aisles. I believe he only had one number, but that seemed to be enough for the audience. When very few African-American actors or performers appeared in any movie, and even far more rarely on TV, one had to endure even a lame surf movie for the chance to see an emerging musical star such as Stevie Wonder.
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