Close association with Tim Gorline and his widowed mother Myrtle starting in 1930 is a wealth of fond memories. I don’t recall them clearly, but a brief summary seems in order.

Timmer’s father was a motion picture projectionist. Tim was born in Montana, and the event that caused the family to move to Los Angeles was the destruction of their home in a forest fire. Part of Tim’s inheritance was a motion picture projector and a small library of Laurel and Hardy films, which made him uniquely popular with our neighborhood gang at 80th and Avalon. Myrtle was employed as a document copier by the LA County Recorder. Her daily regime was piecework, and she was proud of her ability to complete her daily assignments long before the end of the 8-hour shift.

When I had a day free from school, she would drive Tim and me downtown in her 1925 Model “T” Ford coupe and we would spend her short day, exploring and adventuring and usually find her waiting for us in her car parked on Fort Moore Hill. Tim was excused from attending the public school because of a severe asthma condition and Myrtles efforts at home education was somewhat more successful than local public schooling was on the rest of us.

Tim’s house was a chem-lab where the pipe bombs were made. Tim’s backyard was a replica of the trenches of the Great War, complete with underground bomb shelters where we kids fought with brickbats and suffered occasional injuries.

I, myself caught a case of trench mouth and this was before the age of anti-biotics. One cutting edge of Tim’s home-ed was his subscription to the Scientific American magazine, which issues I should review regarding, for instance, Wegener’s Continental Drift, etc. A cement fishpond complete with craw-dads, pond-scum, pollywogs and turtles on rocks and a microscope inside to study that stuff. Later, when we renters moved apart, Myrtle would invite and transport Tim’s friends so we could spend weekends and school vacation time at their houses across town, in Monterey Park, and Tujunga, where the dryer climate favored Tim’s asthma.

From Tujunga, long camping hikes in the San Gabriels filled out my school vacation years. Once, Tim suggested to Myrtle that she shop for some more concentrated food for his rucksack. She came back with an assortment of Gerber’s baby foods, which was a close-to- starvation experience for us.

Myrtle had a friend who let us stay in her very isolated cabin at Hi-Vista, and we drove Myrtle’s Ford up a canyon of Adobe mountain where the axle broke, and Tim and I walked 12 miles to the nearest telephone where we called my father who drove up on a Sunday and towed us back to LA. Other times, Tim and I drove down to Baja, climbed Mt. Whitney and painted our initials on a rock below the summit in red enamel.

Remembering the week(in the early 1960s) that Flossie(Tim's wife) died, it was explained to me much later, when Elsa, repeating women’s gossip via Ruth: Flossie had explained that Tim, who carried a machete under his car seat, was being bullied by a colleague at the machine shop where he worked about a parking place dispute, and in self-defense, Tim slew the guy with his weapon. Tim, upon returning home, where his wife was in her last days of terminal cancer, clandestinely used cyanide, simulating death by a heart attack.

Tim is buried at the veteran’s cemetery at Point Loma. This all happened in one week, including Flossie and Tim both dying, and we were all frustrated by the arrangement Flossie had made on her deathbed with a neighbor friend, to have her two sons flown to her family in Virginia.

For the past 50 years, I have felt guilty of not doing more for my friend Tim’s family after that tragedy…