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Echo Park Sundays - Going by Car

In an earlier post, I said my family didn’t go camping. That’s not exactly accurate. They went camping; they just never went with me. My mother’s family liked to vacation in Yosemite. This was a long time ago. I have photos of women in long dresses, or jodhpur pants, lounging on rocks in the mountains. A few of the men had automobiles, and a throng of relatives would pile aboard, joyously singing their hearts out during the long drive for weekends in the wilderness. I don’t think camping suited my mother’s tastes, though. I’m pretty sure she would rather have spent long weekends in casinos where someone else did the cooking. My father experienced the great outdoors at a camp for Jewish boys from the tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Actually, what he told me was that Eddie Cantor helped send him to camp. My father learned how to swim by being tossed into a frigid lake, and got plenty of fresh air by being locked out of the camp house until nightfall. His fondest memory, however, was of sneaking into the kitchen at night and eating all the leftover bread. The cook knew what he was doing, but since the purpose of the camp was to nourish hungry children, she never ratted him out. Thereafter, my father had no further desire to go camping but he was a sucker for egg bread and jelly donuts for the rest of his life. We may not have gone camping as a family, but we still lived in Echo Park and we still had Sundays. Automobiles had replaced the trolleys and now each family owned their own car so we no longer traveled as a tribe. We splintered off into single family Sunday outings. In our case, my father discovered the joys of Lake Arrowhead. We went there every Sunday except for snow season. We never went anywhere remotely near snow. I was 42 before I saw my first live, falling snowflake. It startled me so much I made my husband turn around and drive back to civilization. During our Lake Arrowhead era, you could still swim in the lake. There was a sandy strip, maybe a lifeguard tower or two, and rocks. Lots of rocks. Ma would spread a blanket and start unpacking the sandwiches, Dad would start his nap, and my sister would swim. She was a really good swimmer, and really brave. She would swim back and forth between two large rocks that loomed out of the water in the deep part where I was not allowed to go because the water was over my head. They needn’t have warned me. I never waded past knee deep. I was not brave, and besides, by the time I got ankle deep my toes were already bleeding from stubbing them on buried rocks. Every week, the same place, the same rocks. You’d think I’d remember, but no. Then we discovered Pickwick Pool, which offered tree-shaded lawns for my father’s naps, and a bigger pool with more teenage company for my sister to enjoy. As always, it was my mother’s duty to keep us supplied with sandwiches and fruit, only there was a food stand where we could buy ice cream bars. Would it surprise you to learn that I never liked ice cream bars? I’m telling you, if it’s not potato chips or unfrozen chocolate, save your money. We took a hiatus from having fun on Sundays to taking work trips on Sundays. By then, my sister was old enough to decline the invitation, which was a smart move on her part because the work involved driving to the Mojave Desert to buy chickens. Seriously, no air conditioning, windows down, my mother’s bare feet hanging out the passenger window, me flat out on the back seat, no energy for singing songs together, nothing but hot air, sand, and chicken ranches. At that time, my father owned a chicken processing plant and he would visit the ranches, order the chickens, and send someone to pick them up in the company truck the following week. To this day, I can identify the scent of a chicken truck two miles away. There are so many good stories about Mojave Desert days, I’m going to end with a few and tell you about Sunday horse racing and deep sea fishing in Mexico another time. The first is the “Beware of Turkeys.” During our Sundays in Mojave, as soon as we arrived at a ranch, I was permitted to wander around while my mother fanned herself in the car. This is how I learned what happens to sick chicks. Don’t ask. One of the ranches had an open field with turkeys roaming around. They looked intriguing so I was heading toward them when I heard people yelling behind me, “Get away from the fence!” I looked up and saw hundreds of turkeys charging at me. They only thing between me and death by turkey stampede was a wood-framed chicken wire fence. I froze in terror. My father got to me first and pulled me to safety. Then I got in trouble with the rancher. The turkeys didn’t want to attack me. They were simply curious to see what I was, so they ran toward me to check me out. Only they were so stupid, they smashed into the fence and the turkeys behind them kept piling in. I don’t know how many turkeys were crushed to death by their brethren that day but I was never again allowed to get out of the car if there were turkeys on the ranch. Stupid turkeys. The other Mojave Desert story isn’t as funny as dead turkeys but it’s still not run of the mill. One evening my father had to drive the truck to pick up chickens. If you know anything about our local desert towns you know paved roads are not as abundant as you would like. This was more true back then. It was dark by the time the last crate of live chickens was loaded into the truck and my father headed down what he thought was the right dirt road to town. Driving for what seemed like forever, he suddenly found himself on a paved road. This was a good sign, so he thought, until he heard a pronounced, “Halt! Who goes there?” He halted as ordered and a rifle-armed sentry approached my father and his stinking, chicken-clacking truck. Turns out it wasn’t a paved road he was driving on. He was driving chickens down the runway of Edwards Air Force Base. Had he been in anything other than the chicken truck, I think he would have been asked to step inside and answer some pointed questions. As it was, both he and the sentry agreed it would be a very good idea for him to turn around and drive the other way. The chicken truck played one more vital role in our lives. My father’s company was being audited by the IRS and the agent was determined to find some fault. Finally, my father told the auditor that every existing business record he owned was downstairs; could the auditor please go retrieve them.? The auditor followed my father to the street where the chicken truck was parked. In a fit of frustration, my father had thrown all his boxed paperwork into the back of the truck where they sat tumbled into a mess of chicken poop. The auditor decided he didn’t need any more documents and the case was closed. We still continued our Sunday play days after we left Echo Park. When my daughter was born, my parents would come to our apartment. I often forced them to go with us for outdoor picnics, but the magic was gone. I think the missing ingredient were my mother’s sandwiches.


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