15 March …
Friday morning snow overnight with fox tracks across front snow pile-up.
Sunday time change. Snain. I was up at 5 PDT Still dark at 0700.
Tuesday all day… Raining. Fortunately I don’t live near a creek or river or I’d be on possible evacuation order due to the melt of the snow pack added to the rain in any area burned over in one of the fires last summer.
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Last thursday Putin launched nighttime multiple attacks on no real military sites but multiple civilian sites during hours when he knew people would be asleep. He has repeatedly aimed at hospitals, schools, various care facilities such as elder care, new born, other maternity, critical care, and comparable facilities.
If that kind of pinpointing doesn’t qualify as war crimes what does?
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Just read an article about the 6.4 earthquake which killed 120 people and caused $50 million in damages centered in Long Beach, California in 1933.
I was 3-years-old and I remember Mama grabbing me and pulling me with her under the stove (in those days stoves stood on strong legs rather than right on the floor like now). She told me that was the strongest place in the house and would protect us from falling whatever.
I’m not sure I believed her but I wasn’t more than a toddler so I didn’t know much about anything and Daddy was at work at the gasoline refinery in El Segundo, but when Mama allowed us out I remember seeing everything other than a couple of broken vases and glasses. Otherwise the house looked the same to me. But that wasn’t the
case for many others.
I looked up the quake and it was an underwater fault running from Newport to Inglewood just off the coast which means the fault ran south to north.
I do remember the first of the Northridge earthquakes. It was a 6.6 quake. “ The Sylmar earthquake occurred on February 9, 1971, at 6:00:41 am Pacific Standard Time (14:00:41 UTC) with a strong ground motion duration of about 12 seconds as recorded by seismometers, although the whole event was reported to have lasted about 60 seconds” (copied from Wikipedia).
Neither George nor I wore night clothes and I was nursing a baby. George’s favorite story about that quake was that “Wilma grabbed the baby and ran to the upstairs bath yelling for George to check on John, who was a teenager, while she took the baby and Michael, who was 5, and got into the into the tub with books falling out of the bookcases on either side of the bathroom door nattily attired in child, baby, and wedding ring.”
I don’t remember that but I do remember George yelling “It’s an earthquake” over and over and me yelling “I know”.
I don’t know what was happening with John, but he told me later that he stood looking down the street at the view out his bedroom window and watching the pavement rippling toward the house.
It was quite destructive.
The Olive View UCLA Medical Center
The I-5 freeway looking north
The interchange near the center of LA
Residential areas in the San Fernando Valley
And this is only a smattering of photos.
I neglected to mention all this happened while we were on the second floor of our house on Celtic Street in the San Fernando Valley.
Our neighbors were away skiing at Mammoth and I was to check on their house while they were away and found their refrigerator door had swung open and everything was on the floor. Talk about cleaning up a mess.
Our kitchen was angled in a different direction and its door stayed closed. But our backyard swimming pool had tilted and the tiles around the top edge always looked strange after that quake because water level showed the tilt.
The other thing about the pool was that the neighborhood was without water delivery so all the neighbors came to us with buckets to take home to flush their toilets.
George, being a Chicago boy, had never been in an Earthquake. Hence the “It’s an earthquake” “It’s an earthquake” “It’s an earthquake”
That one was a big one.
I grew up beside the San Andreas fault and often watched things in the house sway such as the Coleman lantern over the kitchen table where I sat to do my homework.
Quakes were fairly common while we lived there, the “big” ones being 5 somethings while most were so little they probably were not worth noting by any one other than seismologists.
We were no longer living there when a really big one shook parts of Southern California in a magnitude 7.1 quake later when more than 100 homes and businesses were damaged, and the terrain shifted upwards of 14 feet.
The area is still waiting for the REALLY big one everyone knows is coming.
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Another memory was triggered at this year’s Academy Awards when Jamie Lee Curtis won her Oscar as Best Supporting Actress and mentioned that her parents were each nominated for an Oscar but never won and there she stood looking dazed.
That memory was of something I hadn’t thought of for years.
I had just graduated from high school and was working at the Idlewild Lodge where the cast in what we knew as “Quantrill’s Raiders” but which was released as “Kansas Raiders” were being housed.
I met several of the actors … among them was Brian Donlevy (who was so short he needed a stool to get up on his horse), James Best (a good poet), Richard Long (who thought because he was a ‘movie star’ any girl was easy), a fairly new actor whose name was Bernie Schwartz (more about him later), and the WWII hero Audie Murphy, whom I didn’t meet because he was not in any of the scenes being shot in the mountains of the San Jacinto Mountains, not in Utah as some film information claims.
But back to Bernie Schwartz.
A classmate named Gerry was working at the Lodge with me as maids. You know … cleaning, changing bed linens, etc. and Gerry had a baby in diapers which we kept with us in the baby’s buggy (now known a prams or something else).
One day we were assigned to be on the set to do whatever maids are required to do on movie sets and either Gerry or I were always with or near the baby trusting she would be okay.
She must have started to cry and by the time it registered to either of us she needed something, and before I got to her, a very nice young actor found a diaper bag and was in the process of getting the baby ready to be changed.
I thanked him and took over and he nodded as he went back to the filming area.
It wasn’t until dinner that evening as I was helping wait tables (Gerry had taken the baby and gone home) that I learned his acting name as Tony Curtis.
By the way, on another much later interaction with a cast member from that movie I wrote a letter asking if James Best was the actor who, as the Sheriff in the Dukes of Hazzard, was also the actor I had met so many years ago while he was making movie western in the mountains near Idlewild and who was in addition to being an actor was also a poet. He wrote back saying yes and we exchanged a short trade of notes about poetry.
Small world. Long memories.
P.S one of the things a young maid does on a movie set is to make sure a footstool is always available for a short actor. Too bad I was not still in a situation to perform the same for Alan Ladd.
Oh well …
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To end this week …
Character is how you treat those who can do nothing for you.
So ‘til next week …