This is a homage to California. The humble abode in which my parents lived in El Monte in 1958 before they moved the little house trailer to Ellsworth Air Force Base.
When they left California, pulling the trailer, with (then) two little kids and another on the way, they headed across the desert, skirting around the mountains, heading in a circuitous route to Rapid City, S.D. A highway patrolman pulled them over somewhere between the border of California and Nevada and informed them that the trailer was just a tad over width. My father got out a tool, removed the doorknobs in front of the patrolmen, met the regulation, and on they went. Later they stopped somewhere south of Zion National Park. My mother told me all of this, and wrote a lot of it down, to boot.
While they were living in California, without substantial funds — my father was an enlisted man — my mother ran a bit of a “day care” in their home. They took in some of the local and inexpensive entertainment, such as a carnival with rides for the kids. The Los Angeles baseball team at the time was the Dodgers, and my father (wearing his uniform) and mother could attend for free, no doubt leaving their two small children with other El Monte trailer court neighbors. Thus it was that my mother cheered for the Dodgers the rest of her long life, despite the fact that one of her beloved sons became a Cubs fan.
Nearby in Long Beach lived two of my mother’s maternal aunts, single women, daughters of Norwegian parents, who operated a haberdashery and tailoring business.
But back to present-day California. I don’t give a tinker’s damn about most of the rich folks who live there, nor much about their entitled descendants. My heart breaks for the middle class and poor folk whose lives are going up in smoke. And I think my picture shows you why.