Month: January 2007

10194 Ramona Dr

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This is a picture of the back yard of the house located at 10194 Ramona Dr in Spring Valley, California.

backyardWelcome to suburbia.  Actually I don’t think we lived in suburbia with neat tract homes all in a row.  All of the homes on Romana Drive—or most of them at least—had been built independently as it were by its individual owner.  None of them looked alike though they were all one story and sort of boxy and cheap looking.  And most people had more land tacked onto their property than is usually the case in suburbia.  Nor did people on Romana Drive have lawns out front.  Nor did we have sidewalks.

People sometimes kept animals out back.  One time our neighbor grew a cow out back.  One guy parked his collection of Hudson Hornets in his backyard.  People kept gardens out back too.  Usually some sort of dog was running around in the yard.

We had a slop bucket.  Who the hell has a slop bucket?  What the hell is a slop bucket?  I think it was a left over from a rural way of life.  You kept a pig and you fed it slops.  You kept your slops in a slop bucket.  Any sort of organic matter could serve as slop: coffee grounds, egg shells, moldy bread, chicken bones, orange peelings, apple cores, corn cobs, pork chop bones, potato shavings, squishy tomatoes, and rotting meat.  Your slop bucket could get damn stinky in the heat; that’s why it had a special lock down sort of top to keep in the stink.

The slop bucket was sort of a vestigial organ, like the human appendix, left over from a previous evolutionary stage.  After a while, we stopped keeping a slop bucket.  We didn’t have a pig out back.  We would take the slop and dump it on the compost heap.  Seems as if we were always heaping compost.  After a while all our decaying organic matter ended up in garbage cans out by the road.

So we didn’t live in suburbia—but in some sort of half way place between that and a rural way of life.  I call it “urbia.”

 

Yard Chicken

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Here we are back in South Carolina again.  That’s me upfront and brother Steve right behind me.  He looks about 3 so maybe I am about 5 or so.

 

clothesline

 

As you can see there in the back ground we had one of those newfangled labor saving devices called a clothes line.  This is no store bought clothes line but one constructed in our own yard out of one pole of wood with another pole of wood propping it up.  Wet clothes and sheets can be quite heavy.

We had no so-called dryer like people have now.  But we did have a washing machine that sat right outside the kitchen.  It had an agitator.  You put the clothes in the machine and it agitated the clothes.  On the top, it had a wringer; that was for wringing some of the water out of the clothes and once you had done that you hung them on the clothes line and used the sun as a dryer.  I think the washer was called a wringer washer, because it had a wringer up on top.

If you look to the right and below the white stuff on the clothes line you will see on the ground a real, live (though now long dead) chicken walking around like it had a right to be there or something. 

wringerwasherToday I suppose that chicken would be called a free range chicken, because as you can see it was roaming about freely in an unconstrained manner.  Us, we called them chickens “good eating.”  I do have to say those yard chickens were pretty scrawny; and when you cooked them up there was not much to them at all compared to the fat, chemically fed, chickens you can buy today that have wing bones as big as the drumstick of those yard chickens.  Still the chickens of yesteryear tasted like chickens; the chickens of today don’t taste like much of anything unless you fix them up with stuff before cooking them.

Dewdrop

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In the summer of ’63 I think it must have been the clan took a trip back to South Carolina.  As usual, I don’t know why we did this.  But I think there might have been a bit of a crisis in the family dewdropdealing with Grandma Tingle’s future wellbeing.  But I am not sure.

That was one miserable trip, both ways.  It was sweltering hot.  One night we parked on the West Side of the Mississippi, right across from Memphis, I think, and the heat was just unbelievable, plus bugs, and of course we were “camping out” which meant my brother, Steve and I were sleeping in the very back of the Plymouth Station Wagon.  When I was young I could go to sleep almost anytime.  But I am not sure I got any sleep that night at all.

This picture was taken at Grandma Tingle’s place when we finally got back there.  Off to the left, you can see the open door of the old barn and the other building back there was the smoke house, as I recollect.  Things got smoked in there for later eating though I remember it mostly as having been filled with cobs of corn, or dried up corn still on the cob that was shucked off and then fed to the chickens.  I recollect some sort of corn shucking device because you couldn’t get those little corns off by hand.

Actually, I do believe “shucking” corn refers to taking the green leaves or shucks off the corn.  And taking the corn off the cob is called decorning and there are machines for doing that called “decorning” machines.

In the middle there of the picture is a white vehicle that was called by some in those days a “dewdrop” trailer and sometimes called a “teardrop” also.  Joan and WB slept in that along with brother, Dan, I imagine who wasn’t that old then.  Just three.  As you will note the thing has no windows.  It sweltered inside that thing.  On the other hand, they had a mattress to sleep on and not hard, cold car metal.  And I may be wrong but I think the back of it opened up and there was a propane stove there.  So you could pull over, sleep inside the thing, and then get out, go round to the back, open it up and cook breakfast on the propane stove.

We were driving through the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, not that I knew a thing about it.  Still, when we stopped for gas, WB said to the old black man who came out to operate the pump, “Fill’er up Uncle.”  And the black man said, “I ain’t your uncle.”  And WB just laughed as if he were laughing at a child; I didn’t like that laugh at all.

It just came to me.  But when we started that trip back to SC, I can remember sitting in the back of the Station Wagon with a copy of Wilde’s “The Portrait of Dorian Gray.”  It was a paper back and the cover had a picture of a young man looking into the mirror and seeing the old man version of himself.  I thought that book was pretty spooky.

So I sat in the back reading Dorian Gray while we drove across the country in our 59 Plymouth station wagon pulling that darned dewdrop or teardrop trailer through the middle of the Civil Rights movement of which I was as yet unaware.

Ramona Drive

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We’d heard you could find oranges just lying around on the streets for the picking up in California.  ramonadrThe Land of Milk and Honey at the end of our Exodus.  But we didn’t find any free oranges, and the place turned out to be pretty dirty really.  Moving from SC to CA was a big change.  We gained things economically and lost our connection to the culture we had been raised up in.

This is Dave, in the cowbow hat, and me, and Steve with that big metal pole. We are standing out back of the house on Ramona Dr, though the house wasn’t probably built yet, but in its first stages.  As you can see we had much managed to move into the middle of nowhere again; this time East County San Diego which wasn’t all that built up in 1956.

We had about ¾’s of an acre that went back to about that pile of wood you can see behind us, and then on down the gulley and up the hill on the other side you can see to the right a darker patch.  That’s the truck farm that grew tomatoes and peppers.  On beyond that stretch pretty barren hills right on up to Mount Helix—that you can’t see in this picture.

Directly behind us you can see the ’47 Studebaker that carried us and towed all our earthly belongings in a U-Haul trailer from one end of the USA to the other.  That car gave us its life for us because by the time we got to CA the rear axel had broken, and the car sat out back for a number of years, as is the Southern tradition.

The dirt immediately beneath our feet looks pretty white and was called locally leche, which is Spanish for milk.  All white and crumbly, it wasn’t real dirt at all.  You couldn’t grow anything in it.  As far as I was able to learn, it was dried up sea shells and such left from a time long ago when the whole area had been under the ocean.

California Dreaming

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Aunt Betty sent this telegram to 731 West Prinston, Orlando, Florida where I guess we were living at the time.  It’s dated August 4, 1955.

bettystelegramI have no memory of Orlando except for mosquitoes.  The place we were in had no air conditioning of course.  If we were to sleep at all the windows had to be open, but the screens were in bad repair.  So I have a recollection I believe accurate that we slept with mosquito netting hung over our beds.

Before that we had been in Tampa for a while that summer as WB looked for work.

Since we arrived in San Diego, more specifically La Mesa, before the school year started we must have lit out for California not long after that telegram arrived.

It reads:

Talked with Johnny Melega for Etching 5831 El Cajon Blvd says good brick masons badly needed here advises you to come on house plentiful beautiful GI close to beaches here there is no other place like San Diego I drove it in a 38 please come home love Betty.

So that’s what happened.  WB got a job with Etchings and worked it till he retired.  We did not settle close to the beaches of course.  “I drove it in a 38”—I don’t know what that means unless Betty was indicating that she was able to drive from South Carolina to San Diego in a car made in 1938.

We drove it in a ’47 Studebaker.

In “The Southern Diaspora,” James N. Gregory argues that southerners, both black and white, had been moving out of the South in considerable numbers since the turn of the 20th century.  The 50’s were the decade of greatest migration. More than four million whites, blacks and Hispanics moved out to other parts in that decade.

We were part of a great migration whether we knew it or not.

His Majesty, the Infant

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I don’t know what the deal was exactly, but I have noted that in pictures of me from about 6 to 18 months I am elevated or stuck up on top of things.  A fence post in one case; atop a hay wagon in mewheelbarrowanother; on the hood of the Reo, and in another case on the fender of the Reo. Also seated in a wheel barrow.  In all cases, my feet are not touching the ground; you might think I had something against earth.

I was being posed in what was perhaps a fad of the era.  Put Baby up on something high, and if he is not up on something high, you get down on your belly and point up with the Brownie so it looks like Baby is up high somewhere.

But I am pretty sure this is not a fad, but more a case of Freud’s “His Majesty, the Infant.”  Baby is elevated because baby is King.  In the infant, Freud says, the adult sees his or her own narcissism reflected back in a way that can be admitted into the light of day.  If that’s the case, then Joan, who am I pretty sure was responsible for my various placements, was pretty grandiose since she insisted on my being elevated in Kingly fashion.

But then brother Steve has long claimed that Joan thinks she is the Queen of England.

I for my part did not apparently always like being posed or stuck high up on things.

In this photo clearly I am somewhat distraught at having been stuck in that ugly-assed wheelbarrow, that is not, as I look more closely, a wheel barrow at all but most probably a fertilizer distributor. Possibly I did not feel the fertilizer distributor a truly regal conveyance.

ProtoDork

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When recently I assisted, one day, in helping my brother’s clean out Joan’s house for the purpose protodorkf selling it, I was given the responsibility of collecting the pictures and other documents Joan had stuck in a cedar chest or left lying about.  I spent some hours over this Christmas break plowing through the stuff, sorting out pictures I found of historical interest largely.  I found also a couple of envelopes: one labeled Dan and another Dave, containing pictures of my brothers Dan and Dave respectively.

I gave Dan his envelope of picture stuff on Christmas day.  We went through it and got a couple of laughs, and Dan on his blog has used some of the pictures to tell the story of his early years as a dork.  Well, not as a dork, exactly, but as a dorklike person in the land of dorks.  He told me that he almost pissed his self laughing at that Napoleon Dynamite movie.  I didn’t think the movie was funny really, just sort of sad, and peopled largely with drooling idiots.

But Dan is 14 years younger than I and completely a California Kid born and raised.  Fads come and go quickly under late consumer capitalism.  I was spared the Dork phenomenon.

I have got to mail Dave his envelope of picture stuff but I keep forgetting.

The Old Reo

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The Old Reo was called the Old Reo back then in 1945, so who knows how old the Old Reo was reoeven then.  Over the years that car became for me a sort of mystical and mythical beast—the car I rode in to get from San Diego to Ora, South Carolina.  Some might say we were going in the wrong direction, but who cares.  We went where ever we went in the Old Reo.

Suffering as all kids do from Infantile Amnesia, I have no recollection of the trip; and by the time I started having a memory the Old Reo was defunct.  I remember it only as a car carcass sitting past the barn at Grandma’s place and slowly sinking into the weeds.  It did not decay as most old cars do via rust, but actually rotted since a good portion of its frame and paneling was wood.

 So that’s me in the Old Reo with the old man.  The Old Reo was probably related to the more famous Reo Speedwagon.  Along the hood of the truck—for I think the old Reo was technically a truck—appears in a little inlay the word Delivery.  This is in another picture and I cannot make out the word before Delivery because I am sitting in front of it.  But this suggests the Old Reo was a Delivery Truck.

If this is the case, in all likelihood, the truck probably had only a front seat and a lot of room in the back for other stuff.

So we crossed the County in a Reo Delivery Truck.  And so we were Delivered.

My Dog

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Now is that love or what?

That’s me and MY dog.  I had other dogs or I was told they were my dogs so I would feed them.  mydogThey were big and rangy yard dogs and they either ran off or became chicken killers and that was the end of them.

But that was MY dog.  I don’t know what kind of dog it was, but it was a little dog for a little fellow like me at the time.  It would be waiting for me outside and it would follow me around and knew your basic orders like “sit” and “stay.”  From the picture I would say we had a pretty good dog human relationship.

But one day I am out collecting coke bottles from along the road, and I have my little dog with me though Joan had said over and over don’t take that dog down by the road or it will get run over.  And sure enough I walk across the road to look in the ditch on the othe side of the road, and as I turn to go back I see MY dog has started towards me from the other side of the road.  And there is car, coming out of nowhere.

I was paralyzed.  The car was on us so fast, I didn’t have time to move.  I didn’t even have time to yell as the car ran right over my dog killing it instantly.

The car just kept on going.

I picked up the dog and took it back to the place and I started crying and couldn’t stop and I went and threw myself belly down on my bed and just couldn’t stop crying.  And Joan was completely useless per usual.  She prided herself on being a Mother par excellance, and she did an OK job I guess at keeping us in clean clothes and fed alright, but when it came to the emotional side of being a mother she was completely clueless.  All she could do was sit by the bed and say over and over that she had told me so and the dog wouldn’t be dead if I had listened to what SHE said.

A fat lot of good that did.  I knew I had a mistake.  I didn’t have to be told that.

Any way, when I came across that picture recently, I almost regretted it because I started remembering that dog and that moment by the road.  I can almost feel that dog sitting in my lap.  It liked me and was an affectionate animal.

The Old Homested

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Below please find the official legal description, duly signed and notarized, for the former Tingle family acerage near Ora, SC.

acre 

Apparently, WB couldn’t get any bank to lend him the money for the land; after all he lacked any collateral, except maybe that white mule.  So he borrowed the money from AY Bryson.  1800 bucks for one acre.  I don’t know but that seems a bit steep to me for one acre back in 1946.  But maybe he was paying for the prime location.  Below please find the terms for the loan:

terms 

 And from the Greenville News, date line Wednesday, November 3, 1948. I sadly report:

Jasper Barton, 50, Route 1, Woodruff, was still in poor condition last night at General Hospital where he was admitted Monday for treatment of injuries recveived when a mule reportedly struck him while Mr. Barton was trying to hitch him to a wagon.  What the mule struck Mr. Barton with is still unknown.