We were kids growing up in a white, middle class American neighborhood that happened to be Hollywood, California. To us, the glamor of the silver screen seemed another world. Considering the way Hollywood sentimentalized us relentlessly in movies and would soon in television entertainment, we -- the real kids who lived in the Los Angeles district of Hollywood, could well have come from another planet.
Me, 1948
We were in that sense, the evil twins of those saccharin screen kids played by the likes of Margaret O'Brien and other child stars of the 1940s. By our own lights, we weren't a bad kids -- not spawn of the devil - but full of the devil nonetheless,
pranksters who fought a running guerrilla war with parents and other adults who we somehow knew we must resist.
Me, 1948
pranksters who fought a running guerrilla war with parents and other adults who we somehow knew we must resist.
Some of us did have parents who worked in the studios, but as grips, extras, office assistants, and even some who played character roles occasionally. But living in the movie capital of the world held no special magic for us. Only the movies themselves retained their magic -- for good or ill -- as they did for everyone everywhere.
The large screen and the small screens beginning to invade households, showed us heroes and villains, lovers and brutes, fools and wise guys, vamps, dolls, dames, long-suffering mothers and everything as it might be but seldom was in real life. But it seemed as real as a rainstorm in the darkened theater where my mother took me often twice a week and I went along on Saturday for the 15-cent four hour kiddie matinee at the neighborhood bijou.
The two Hollywoods just didn't fit together, and it seemed usually that our real world was the one that didn't measure up. Maybe we became tricksters intuitively to even the scales.
Life -- aside from the drudgery of school, was about getting out of the house or apartment, out of sight and earshot of our parents. Those were days when kids were told to go out and play.
I did like books - which marked me as a wierdo -- but there was no TV, no video games to keep any kid inside, and even radio dramas and comedies only were broadcast at night. Daytime one only heard soap operas. Having to listen to soap operas when I was home sick -- to pass the time -- seemed worse that any flu or even the chicken pox.
Don't think it was innocently Beaver-ish, however. Home lives were usually less than ideal. Adults and their fights, fears, depressions, delusions, and what seemed arbitrary rules were to be avoided.
My best friend's Dad didn't wear cardigan sweaters and unlike Ward was known to smack mom around after a few beers. My father was away on the road most of the time, and when he came home, nothing but fights which I'd avoid by heading out the back door and getting my bicycle.
Out there I'd go around the block and find my usual friends -- a half-dozen neighborhood kids -- five boys and a girl we liked because she was what was then called a "Tomboy." I dressed and looked like Beaver Cleaver a decade before "Leave It to Beaver" debuted on TV in 1957 and terminally sentimentalized the kind of "Beav" I had been in real life. .
This 1948 model Beav looked all wide-eyed and innocent for the growups, but. when alone, fancied himself cryptic -- a character out of Edgar Allen Poe -- a schemer who wished he could be The Invisible Man real life around his parents and other adults, except maybe at Christmas and my birthday so I could get presents.
This "Beav-Cleave" doppleganger had a father he feared and was happiest when away on business, which was at least half of the time. His mother was no June Cleaver either -- depressed and frustrated, thwarted from following the musical career she's started on the East Coast, felt alienated in Los Angeles, constantly struggling to make ends meet with the tiny, inadequate allowance my father would leave her before taking off in his big, fat, black Oldsmobile 98 for weeks at a time.
The evil "Beav" had a best friend named Bobby, a shy,, skinny, beanpole whose father owned a local grocery store. Bobby had an older brother, a mom and dad who did not seem on the edge of divorce. (I was only to learn later of their strife behind their respectable church-going exterior.) The lived in a normal, house with a yard, a dog and a fat, calico Persian cat, instead of the apartment where i lived and slept in a pull-down Murphy bed in the front room.
People would think if anything, I with the foreign-sounding name and being the smaller one, would have been "the bad influence," initiating mischief . Bob had a normal name everyone could pronounce.
But he wasn't popular. He was an outcast like myself at our grammar school class. That associated with the odd-ball, Boston-Italian boy who talked funny, with soft "r's" He was my pal because he was six-feet tall in the fifth grade and looked upon as something of a freak himself. And, of the two of us, he was the one who most often came up with dares and urged us on to the next level of trouble.
We didn't stay after school and play kick ball. We didn't get invited to birthday parties at local miniature golf courses. But like other kids in that day, we spent most of our free time outside playing, unless we were sick.
Bobby and I rode our fat-tired, stripped down, bicycles all over Hollywood, and out to Santa Monica beach, through Beverly Hills and up into the Hollywood Hills, and along a still- glamorous, clean, upscale Hollywood Boulevard lined with palm trees, department stores and big first-run movie palaces like the Pantages, the Egyptian and, of course, The Chinese.
We often rode our bikes up to Hollywood Blvd. to goof around, shoplift candy from the Woolworth's, have a malted milk or banana split at the counter and maybe take in a movie for 15 cents apiece.
Sometimes we locked our bikes and went into the Broadway Hollywood, then a posh, 12-story department store on the famous corner of Hollywood and Vine. Our mothers often shopped for dresses and shoes there, instead of Sears where they bought our corduroys, khakis, cotton shirts, sneakers and jeans for school.
I hated Sears with a passion, because the company would put up billboards reading "First to Sears and Then to School," early in August that reminded me that we had less than one month left to our enjoy the dolce vita of summer vacation. I still feel nauseated in remembering the slogan.
The only good thing in our boyish minds about the big Sears store, then on Santa Monica Boulevard where the Big Red Pacific Electric trolley cars ran, was the special "Rite-Fit Shoe Vision" machine in the children's shoe department. It was Sears exclusive -- a four-foot-high metal stand that looked something like a gum vending machine.
There was a step in front and a hole big enough for me to slide in my feet while standing up against it. At that point I could look down into a flat glass shaded by a black plastic cowling. I'd press a large button next to the cowling and hear a buzzing.
People would think if anything, I with the foreign-sounding name and being the smaller one, would have been "the bad influence," initiating mischief . Bob had a normal name everyone could pronounce.
But he wasn't popular. He was an outcast like myself at our grammar school class. That associated with the odd-ball, Boston-Italian boy who talked funny, with soft "r's" He was my pal because he was six-feet tall in the fifth grade and looked upon as something of a freak himself. And, of the two of us, he was the one who most often came up with dares and urged us on to the next level of trouble.
We didn't stay after school and play kick ball. We didn't get invited to birthday parties at local miniature golf courses. But like other kids in that day, we spent most of our free time outside playing, unless we were sick.
Bobby and I rode our fat-tired, stripped down, bicycles all over Hollywood, and out to Santa Monica beach, through Beverly Hills and up into the Hollywood Hills, and along a still- glamorous, clean, upscale Hollywood Boulevard lined with palm trees, department stores and big first-run movie palaces like the Pantages, the Egyptian and, of course, The Chinese.
We often rode our bikes up to Hollywood Blvd. to goof around, shoplift candy from the Woolworth's, have a malted milk or banana split at the counter and maybe take in a movie for 15 cents apiece.
Sometimes we locked our bikes and went into the Broadway Hollywood, then a posh, 12-story department store on the famous corner of Hollywood and Vine. Our mothers often shopped for dresses and shoes there, instead of Sears where they bought our corduroys, khakis, cotton shirts, sneakers and jeans for school.
I hated Sears with a passion, because the company would put up billboards reading "First to Sears and Then to School," early in August that reminded me that we had less than one month left to our enjoy the dolce vita of summer vacation. I still feel nauseated in remembering the slogan.
The only good thing in our boyish minds about the big Sears store, then on Santa Monica Boulevard where the Big Red Pacific Electric trolley cars ran, was the special "Rite-Fit Shoe Vision" machine in the children's shoe department. It was Sears exclusive -- a four-foot-high metal stand that looked something like a gum vending machine.
There was a step in front and a hole big enough for me to slide in my feet while standing up against it. At that point I could look down into a flat glass shaded by a black plastic cowling. I'd press a large button next to the cowling and hear a buzzing.
The glass would light up and there, in dark gray against a glowing, sickly green background I could see the skeletal bones of my feet through the tops of my shoes!
Parents could peek in to make sure they were getting the right fit -- with room to grow -- on shoes they were about to buy. But I always ran to it to see "my skeleton" through the old sneakers I was wearing, and so did the swarms of other kids drawn to the machine and ignored by clerks busy selling to their parents and other paying customers.
The button only activated was obviously was an X-ray for a few moments. But like the other kids, I'd just push the button over and over as I gazed down at my toe-bones in fascination. Once, on one of the rare occasions one of the Sears staff walked over to shoo us off the shoe-viewer, I asked him if the x-ray machine could make people sick -- having seen the 1943 bio-pic "Madame Curie," with Greer Garson in which the heroine dies of cancer having discovered radium without realizing the side-effects.
"Not at all, son," I remember this pasty-faced, clerk answering me as if he knew what he was talking about. "It's perfectly safe radiation, not an X-ray. It's a fluoroscope!" It wasn't till several years later than I found out that a fluoroscope is just another kind of x-ray machine.
Not even the super-dooper see-through shoe-skeleton machine could draw Bobby and I to Sears when we were on our own. Besides, we favored the then, genteel glamour of Hollywood Boulevard to the blue-collar Sears. We could pretend to be movie stars.
Sometimes we'd go to the Mayflower Coffee Shop on the boulevard. There was a donut-making machine constantly running behind the plate glass of the coffee shop's front window. It was worth watching for a long time to see how long we could resist the temptation to go inside and buy some of them.
Next we headed to the Broadway Hollywood department store.
We took elevators and escalators to the top floor and slipped into a storage area behind the glassware department. With a little exploring, we found what we sought - -- a stairway to the roof.
We sneaked out onto the roof, from where we could see the whole city, and on some days that yellow-gray stuff people had started calling "smog," because they thought it came from a blend of local fog with sludge-pot smoke used to protect citrus groves in the nearby San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys (Now, of course, all suburbs).
The Broadway Hollywood was one of those Belle Epoch-style buildings with ornate facade and ledges that curved outward from the roof.
The Beav and Bob used to crawl out on the lip of those ledges, lay on our stomachs with our heads hanging over so that we could see people and cars far beneath us moving about on the boulevard.
We would work up a lot of saliva and spit and giggle seeing if there was any reaction from the unwitting shoppers walking on the sidewalk below who may have thought they felt a raindrop, oddly on a perfectly sunny Southern California day. Sometimes we spit gum or little pieces of hard candy.
One time, Bobby stood up, teetering right on the edge, unzipped his corduroys and pulled out his boy-thing. "What are you doing?" I yelled. "You're going to fall off. Your going to get us in big trouble. He paid no attention and began to pee in a long arc out over the edge, his yellow stream dispersing into a spray of vaporous drops that fell below on the unsuspecting pedestrians. At one point, a breeze blew the stream a bit sideways as it flew out into space and back at us. I started laughing. So did he, causing his hosing to go even more awry.
We kept laughing like hell and he almost lost his balance. I tried to reach out to grab his pant-leg but almost went over myself.
I kept looking nervously at the roof door, worried some Broadway guard or other employee would burst through it and discover us in flagrante dilicto.
i gazed below again but didn't see anyone opening an umbrella or seeming to react, except one old man to paused a second and seemed to look up right at me. I pulled in my head like an alarmed turtle.
After a while, we quietly slipped back down from the roof and took an elevator back to the street level.
I noticed that Bobby had some droplets of wet on one leg of his trousers. I grabbed sample bottles of perfume and sprayed him as we walked past the cosmetic department and he retaliated in kind, until we got dirty looks from a very pretty clerk there.
Off we went on our bicycle, little disheveled devils smelling like Chanel No. 5, and Lilac perfumes. We repeated our Broadway adventure several times until it became too risky because the clerks started to recognize us and wonder what we were doing there alone.
Besides, it got boring after a while. We moved on to other mischievous pastimes. (What anti-social, nasty little buggers we were!!!)
Indolently we rode our fat-tire Schwins for miles along the right side of streets next to parked cars. And as we rode, we'd reach over every once in a while to slap a side view mirror out of line so the driver would have to re-adjust it when he or she returned to their autos.
As an adult, I've often wondered if some boy is spitting or pissing on me from tall buildings when I walk downtown. Sometime a feel a raindrop, and look up, seeing nothing but blue sky and the sides of the buildings that don't have ledges anymore. I wonder.
Parents could peek in to make sure they were getting the right fit -- with room to grow -- on shoes they were about to buy. But I always ran to it to see "my skeleton" through the old sneakers I was wearing, and so did the swarms of other kids drawn to the machine and ignored by clerks busy selling to their parents and other paying customers.
The button only activated was obviously was an X-ray for a few moments. But like the other kids, I'd just push the button over and over as I gazed down at my toe-bones in fascination. Once, on one of the rare occasions one of the Sears staff walked over to shoo us off the shoe-viewer, I asked him if the x-ray machine could make people sick -- having seen the 1943 bio-pic "Madame Curie," with Greer Garson in which the heroine dies of cancer having discovered radium without realizing the side-effects.
"Not at all, son," I remember this pasty-faced, clerk answering me as if he knew what he was talking about. "It's perfectly safe radiation, not an X-ray. It's a fluoroscope!" It wasn't till several years later than I found out that a fluoroscope is just another kind of x-ray machine.
Not even the super-dooper see-through shoe-skeleton machine could draw Bobby and I to Sears when we were on our own. Besides, we favored the then, genteel glamour of Hollywood Boulevard to the blue-collar Sears. We could pretend to be movie stars.
Sometimes we'd go to the Mayflower Coffee Shop on the boulevard. There was a donut-making machine constantly running behind the plate glass of the coffee shop's front window. It was worth watching for a long time to see how long we could resist the temptation to go inside and buy some of them.
Next we headed to the Broadway Hollywood department store.
We took elevators and escalators to the top floor and slipped into a storage area behind the glassware department. With a little exploring, we found what we sought - -- a stairway to the roof.
We sneaked out onto the roof, from where we could see the whole city, and on some days that yellow-gray stuff people had started calling "smog," because they thought it came from a blend of local fog with sludge-pot smoke used to protect citrus groves in the nearby San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys (Now, of course, all suburbs).
The Broadway Hollywood was one of those Belle Epoch-style buildings with ornate facade and ledges that curved outward from the roof.
The Beav and Bob used to crawl out on the lip of those ledges, lay on our stomachs with our heads hanging over so that we could see people and cars far beneath us moving about on the boulevard.
We would work up a lot of saliva and spit and giggle seeing if there was any reaction from the unwitting shoppers walking on the sidewalk below who may have thought they felt a raindrop, oddly on a perfectly sunny Southern California day. Sometimes we spit gum or little pieces of hard candy.
One time, Bobby stood up, teetering right on the edge, unzipped his corduroys and pulled out his boy-thing. "What are you doing?" I yelled. "You're going to fall off. Your going to get us in big trouble. He paid no attention and began to pee in a long arc out over the edge, his yellow stream dispersing into a spray of vaporous drops that fell below on the unsuspecting pedestrians. At one point, a breeze blew the stream a bit sideways as it flew out into space and back at us. I started laughing. So did he, causing his hosing to go even more awry.
We kept laughing like hell and he almost lost his balance. I tried to reach out to grab his pant-leg but almost went over myself.
I kept looking nervously at the roof door, worried some Broadway guard or other employee would burst through it and discover us in flagrante dilicto.
i gazed below again but didn't see anyone opening an umbrella or seeming to react, except one old man to paused a second and seemed to look up right at me. I pulled in my head like an alarmed turtle.
After a while, we quietly slipped back down from the roof and took an elevator back to the street level.
I noticed that Bobby had some droplets of wet on one leg of his trousers. I grabbed sample bottles of perfume and sprayed him as we walked past the cosmetic department and he retaliated in kind, until we got dirty looks from a very pretty clerk there.
Off we went on our bicycle, little disheveled devils smelling like Chanel No. 5, and Lilac perfumes. We repeated our Broadway adventure several times until it became too risky because the clerks started to recognize us and wonder what we were doing there alone.
Besides, it got boring after a while. We moved on to other mischievous pastimes. (What anti-social, nasty little buggers we were!!!)
Indolently we rode our fat-tire Schwins for miles along the right side of streets next to parked cars. And as we rode, we'd reach over every once in a while to slap a side view mirror out of line so the driver would have to re-adjust it when he or she returned to their autos.
As an adult, I've often wondered if some boy is spitting or pissing on me from tall buildings when I walk downtown. Sometime a feel a raindrop, and look up, seeing nothing but blue sky and the sides of the buildings that don't have ledges anymore. I wonder.
