Category Archives: Tingles

Art’s Mobile

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Here’s brother Dave sporting some new threads.

artsmobileWhy he is standing in front of the gas pumps of Art’s Mobile, I don’t know.  I do know he worked there for a while.  But that still doesn’t explain why he was wearing new threads in front of a gas station.

If I knew cars better, I might be able to date the picture a bit.  I reckon though that it was taken most likely in the early to mid seventies.

I have cropped and blown up the picture a bit to try to get some of the background detail in focus.  Unfortunately I didn’t really succeed, but this is the only picture I have of old Casa De Oro.

Actually this is late old Casa De Oro.  The one hour Martinizing wasn’t there when we first arrived in the late 1950s.  But if you look closely up in the left hand corner of the picture you can see the sign for the Club 94.  It reads “Club 94.”

It wasn’t a club by any stretch but a pretty down and dirty bar.  A stifling, windowless room whose sole purpose was to sell booze.  It had no atmosphere at all unless one counts the blood stains on the floor.

I might be hallucinating, but down the road to the right a stretch I think I see the Taco Barrel.  Originally, it was a Root Beer Barrel—a barrel shaped building of metal construction painted to look like a Hires Root Beer Barrel.  It changed hands a number of times.  I remember it best as the Taco Barrel.

David—or was it Dan—or maybe it was both of them—bought some Tacos there or different occasions and got pretty sick.

No, wait.  I think they bought “tacquitoes,” I think they were called, like 10 for a a dollar.

Suburbs Meet Urbs

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From the backyard of 10194 Ramona Dr one may observe the penetration of the suburbs into what I have previously called the “urbs,” a kind of fringe area off in the boonies where one could buy tractland sufficient to grow gardens or chickens or cows or attempt to ressurect in sunny Southern California some aspects of the rural farming environment from which one had recently traveled.

This picture documents a penetration that happened around 1960 or so.

While the “urbs” were irregular with houses of all sorts and shapes next to each other and no side walks and no sewage system to hook up to, the suburbs came with all those things, neat houses in a row, with sidewalks out-front, small backyards, grassy lawns and a sewer system rather that your trusty septic tank.

The suburbs are here visible as a row of houses in the mid-distance; the urbs are visible as our backyard.  One may note the white soil, known as leche, and off to the right my basketball standard.  It leans a little bit and running across the ground in front of it one may note black snaky lines that are hoses running down to the garden off to the left and out of sight. 

One may see also our neighbor’s back yard directly in front of the row of houses.  At that point they had not yet put up their chain link fence beyond which they would eventually keep chickens and cows. 

The suburbs cut directly into the heart of the urbs.  In a matter of a day, to make as much space available for housing as possible, bulldozers scraped away the accumulated topsoil of a thousand years and scraped out flat spaces in the leche to lay down the slabs on which to erect ticky-tacky plastered houses.  Later, ridiculously, they had to cart in topsoil to put in front so people could have their stupid, little green lawns and backyards, having buried the perfectly good topsoil that was there under mounds of leche.

Indeed, while our neighbors had previously an unobstructed view up the hill, with the coming of the tract homes, they found themselves located next to a nearly perpendicular wall of compacted leche on top of which sat a house, looking more or less down on our neighbor’s house.

I don’t know what the people did who moved into these houses.  But they were people clearly of non-rural origins.  I know a professor at the state college lived in there somewhere because his ridiculous dog bit me in the back of the leg one day.  We had to track him and his dog down because the bite broke my skin and we wanted to make sure the damn dog wasn’t rabid or something.

WB’s Stone

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This is WB’s stone located now in the cemetery of the ARP Church in Ora, South Carolina.

As the stone indicates WB died last year on February 7, so in a way getting the stone made, up, and in place serves to commemorate the date of his death.  Jewish people, I do believe, burn a candle every year on the death date of a beloved relative.  Probably not a bad idea to make us remember things do pass quickly. 

 

wbstone

 

When we—me, Carol, and my brother David and his son—went back to the Church to put our father’s ashes in the ground, Carol and I went to the phone book and looked up a place where we might get a stone made.We drove out of Laurens on the Greenville Highway and found a place on the right that said Wilson Memorials.Nobody was there, but we could see into the yard work area and it looked like a place where memorials might be made.There was a big yard dog there behind the fence, but he was asleep and would not be disturbed by our presence.

After a while, Mr. Wilson showed up as Carol and I were looking at the stones out front. 
For some reason, I wanted one that stood up and didn’t just lie flat on the ground and it had to be big enough for two names since Joan had told me she wanted to be placed next to WB when her time came and I had said I would see to it. 

In this picture, the stone looks too big to me, as if it might be blocking out the view of other stones or something.  But I have been reassured that it is not too big, but looks big the way the picture is taken.  That is probably the case.

Mr. Wilson gave us a brochure to take with us, and some time before Christmas I pulled it out, and called Mr. Wilson and told him what we wanted.  But he wanted to be absolutely sure he had the right one, so I had to fax him a picture I had taken of the one I wanted out front of his place.

I think Mr. Wilson did good work, and the punctuation is solid.  That “G” in the middle of TinGle looks sort of big to me.  But I have always found a capital G hard to make with a pencil much less carve one in stone.

Mr. Wilson sent me this picture so I could see he had put the stone up.

Romana Drive Christmas 1957

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This might be our first or second Christmas at 10194 Ramona Dr.  We have that damn dog Micky

xmasramonadrive

already.  Did we get him the second or first year at Ramona Drive?  For some reason he appears in a number of shots of us “boys.”  Seems like boys with dog included or maybe dog with boys included, since it seemed like we all had to compete with the dog to get the old lady’s attention.  Usually I am the one holding the stinking mutt.  Perhaps that was a job that fell to the eldest.

 

Looks like we made out that year like bandits.  I have my baseball glove and appear to be scrutinizing it.  That means I was already playing Little League Ball or was going to that spring.  Also I have those horrible glasses.  I got them in fifth grade when I stopped being able to see the writing on the blackboard.  Man those glasses were a pain.  They kept breaking and always it was my fault as if I were the one responsible for the rapid aging process of cheap plastic.  Those things had no flex in them and the plastic would get real hard and fragile in a few months and then snap.

Dave is looking abstracted and sort of staring off into space.  He has a bb gun on his lap.  I doubt it was his bb gun; maybe it was Steve’s BB gun.  The bb guns were always Daisy bb guns, made by a company called Daisy I guess.  All electric trains were made by a company called Lionel.  My baseball glove was made by Wilson.

Steve is looking alert.  Apparently our wardrobes back in that day consisted entirely of jeans and striped t-shirts and dirty white socks.  Later on I wore tennis shoes; Converse All Stars black and high topped. 

Dan is not yet on this earth yet.  That will be in a couple of years.

That tree looks pretty dinky to me; but the parental units didn’t really believe on splurging on the amenities.  

Christmas day was usually pretty awful.  So was Thanksgiving.

Ramona Drive Hill

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Behold! The very front of the upper eastern corner of the Tingle property as it abutted Romana Dr.  The house was in the early stages of construction, as is suggested by the pile of block sitting there in the lower left corner of the picture.

 

upfrontramonadr

The little redwood fence beyond the block marked the property line of our neighbors at the time, the Schmits, I believe they were called. Beyond the Schmits was more truck farm off to the left of Ramona Drive as it ran on up the hill, past the Casa De Oro Elementary school (that rather official looking structure off to the right), up a pretty steep bit of road that I hated biking, and beyond that more homes, the homes of the more affluent.

 

The class structure was pretty well laid out by the hill; the poor at the bottom, the upper poor more towards the middle, and then the solidly affluent up at the top.  These houses were in general just as ugly as the houses lower down the hill, but they were bigger, and boxier and they all had “views.”  The price of a house could go up or down depending on this intangible thing: the view.  At the very top of the hill, one might on a clear day make out the glisten and glimmer of the Pacific, way off there somewhere.

We had a view too but it was sort of a lateral view, a south to north view out the back window and not a truly valuable east to west view of the Pacific.

In a general way, this picture confirms my earlier description of Southern California as a rather dry and dusty place lacking green weeds.  True, up the hill a bit the truck farms stopped farming and tumble weeds took root in the abandoned dirt. These were actual tumble weeds and during a good wind they would become uprooted and tumble right through our back yard.

My brothers and I all attended Casa De Oro Elementary for all or a portion of our elementary school education.  The Boy Scout Troop that I was forced to belong to met in the basement cafeteria of the Elementary School. 

Micky the Dog

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Here somebody is tormenting that damn dog, Micky, known as Micky the Dog.  Truthfully though we did not in general believe in tormenting animals.

mickydogMicky the Dog appears in the previous photo of the backyard of 10194 Ramona Drive, Spring Valley, California.  This picture too shows the backyard of 10194 Ramona Drive, Spring Valley, California, though in the opposite direction from the previous photo.  The previous photo was pointed east; this one is more a picture of the west of the yard.

We did not have a lawn in the front yard, but we did have one, as this and the previous photo indicate, in the back yard.  I think this was to keep the dust down.  In South Carolina weeds would grow up of their own accord to keep the dust down, but in Southern California you couldn’t count on anything to grow due to a lack of naturally occurring water, i.e., rain. So if you wished to keep down the dust in your back yard you either had to cover it with concrete or asphalt or grow a lawn.

This lawn was never in prime condition.  In the summer months we watered it only erratically.  In the darker months it died out.  The dogs would poop on it or pee on it.  Female dog’s pee kills a lawn.  Sometimes the poop would just lie there in the darker months and white mold would grow all over it.  Those piles of moldy dog poop looked like some sort of ulcers growing out of our scab of a lawn.

Sometimes, though, the lawn would grow up enough so that it had to be mowed.  This was done with a push mower with very dull blades.  The grass cuttings were then raked up and thrown over the back fence into the compost heap with the rest of our decaying organic matter.

Mickey the Dog was already a year or so old when we got it.  We did not acquire it as a pup and perhaps for that reason I never fully bonded with it.  It was part rat terrier and chihuahua.  This was a little dog with a somewhat nervous temperament; it was a fierce yipper and caused no end of swearing on the part of WB telling the m-f…king dog to shut up.  Also its penis was too large for its body and stuck out like a sore thumb. 

It had large thick fingernails or claws, as I suppose they are called on dogs.  Because the house at 10194 Ramona Drive had hard wood floors, where ever you were sitting you could hear that dog, when it moved about, clicking its fingernails on that hard wood.  Sometimes, if a person came to the front door or something alarming like that, the dog would rush out from the back of the house, round the corner into the living room, and slide clear across the floor and bang into the wall because it couldn’t get any traction on those hard wood floors.

At first that was funny as hell; later on it was only mildly distracting.

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.

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.