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Show As we rolled westward toward California Father must have been trying to forecast the new future for all of us. We were leaving high drifts of snow for the sunshine and orange groves our parents had promised us from their earlier trip to Los Angeles and the Bay District. So far so good. But would Father be happy as a retired man for the many years he might well live if rest and a change of scene enabled him to rebound from illness? He would rebound physically-he^had abundant resiliency and energy. But he would not be happy. This we soon discovered. We arrived in Los Angeles in the Christmas season. Although there were varied diversions, Father soon showed he was bored with mere leisure activity. He bought an acre and a bungalow in the Centinela Valley near Inglewood. With gusto he told us we were living on part of the estate which the gambler "Lucky" Baldwin had acquired when he married a lovely Spanish heiress. We passed the rambling Baldwin house whenever we drove to Los Angeles. I roamed over wide expanses of the Old Spanish Grant now being broken up into grain fields and truck gardens and building lots. A new school chum of mine took me to a thick-walled old adobe ranchhouse where his father, ranch foreman, and his mother lived. We scrambled over vast barns roofed with hand-split shakes, gray and crumbling. We followed avenues bordered with royal palms but curving only to empty foundations of vanished houses of pre-American days. Resolved to be happy, Father took us to the Ostrich Farm, the Alligator Farm, to the ramshackle beginnings of the movie studios in Hollywood and Culver City just beyond low hills from our house. We toured San Gabriel Mission and saw the Mission Play. We frolicked on Pacific beaches at Santa Monica, Venice, Playa del Rey. But as Father's energy and buoyancy rebounded he grew restless. That's why he found men eager to show him radiant opportunities for a new life. Or they found him. It worked both ways. |
