| Of the great 1933 LA earthquake, Bob recalls:
On Friday afternoon,March 10, 1933 the students of Bret Harte Junior High School had the opportunity of watching a stage play performed by the school's Drama Class. I have forgotten the name of the play, but I do remember thar Edna May Durbin sang a part. Later, she changed her name to Deanna (becoming a famous actress, at one time the equal to Judy Garland).
At 5:45pm I was kneeling in front of our family's radio console turning on my favorite program, "Little Orphan Annie", when the house jerked so hard that the marble statue on top of the console was hurled down on me and I caught it in my arms, and, with everything shaking wildly around me, bolted out the front door, stumbling to the middle of 91st Street, still carrying the statue.
The concrete pavement, as I looked East toward Avalon Boulevard seemed to have waves advancing rapidly. The line of wooden utility poles were doing a jerky dance. Wires were snapping and fallen snaky wire ends on the ground sparking and singing a menacing 60 cycle hum.
Half of the houses on our street were sitting on inadequately-braced props which toppled. Water and gas erupted from the street and for two weeks I carried household water from the water company's well pump, 6 blocks away. A tall brick incinerator chimney attached to the school's brick auditorium collapsed into the seats that we students had been occupying 2 hours previously.We all survived, using Sterno canned heat to cook with and played Monopoly by candle light in the evenings.
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| Regarding extracuricular activities this year, Bob recalls:
While attending Bret Harte Junior High School in south LA, two of my schoolmates told me there was a job selling newspapers on a street corner to passing motorists. Don and Duane sold the Evening Herald and the job open was to sell the Record. You earned one cent for each paper sold. Don and Duane shared the two heavy traffic signals, charging 5 cents for the Herald and I had a monopoly for charging two cents for the less popular Record. The afternoon street corners traffic sales netted the three of us between 25 and 50 cents per each peak traffic day, less than $2 per week. Since we each came from families enduring financial difficulties, these wages helped for our necessities.
Don and Duane were dues paying members of the BSA and I went to the meetings at a local school. One advantage of my brief membership consisted of participation in two camping trips. I spent a week at Camp Arthur Letts in the Hollywood Hills (located near the hilltop mansion of film actor Errol Flynn), where all the boys swam naked in the pool. Then we camped in tents for another week in a valley adjacent to the LA sewage disposal pier at El Segundo beach where the camp’s sanitation consisted of each camper using a shovel and squatting over a shallow hole dug in the sand dunes behind the row of tents. We were allowed to fish for the halibut, mackerel and tom cod that prospered under the pier. One experience I had with these Boy Scouts was that some of them had a weird idea about “Scout’s Honor”. After one meeting, we went into an ice cream parlor. While we were waiting in line to pay for our ice cream, an indecisive lady ahead of us in line with one selection on the counter waived us ahead on her while she went to make another selection and we paid and left the parlor. Outside, my scouts were cheering one scout who had also carried out the lady’s selections that sat on the counter.
Bob also recalled, after son-in-law Doug sent him a Zane Grey book in 2011:
In 1933 our neighbor
who lived across the alley had the only show in town that would interest a 12
year old. Alden Richardson, a 40 year old man kept his garage door open for
ventilation while he earned his living manufacturing fishing equipment. His main
product was a 12 foot long fishing pole, made from Calcutta bamboo, ruby-brass
leads tied on with colorful silk thread, rigged with turks-head knots, etc,
top-of-the-line beautiful work coated with multiple coats of varnish.
He enjoyed the diversion of us kids being his audience, so much that he occasionally
entertained us with his yarns. Alden's other enterprise was his small machine
shop. He would buy an off-the-shelf deep sea fishing reel and increase its length
of fishing line capacity by making the reel wider. He explained that a
sports-fisherman trying to land a large gamefish must sometimes "play" the fish
for hours until it tired and landing the fish involved having the option of
having enough fish line to release while using the reel brake to make the fish
work itself to death. When you had no more line on the reel, all you had left
for working the fish was your poles' flexibility, and when you came to that, the
fish could jerk out the hook.
One of Alden's customers was Zane Grey, who Alden
said, took Alden on one of his expeditions to New Zealand, to demonstrate to him
his need for a wider fishing reel!
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