‘55

“In the sun that is young once only

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means”

D. Thomas

The year was 1955, Ike was finishing his first term and LA was a world waiting to be explored. On a Saturday morning, once we were up and fed, my mother would send us out the back door with little more direction than to stay out of trouble and “God help you, if you come back in and dirty the house”. It seemed like an unwritten rule that the mother in whose backyard we were at noon fed the lot of us out the kitchen door. Those rare days we were allowed to play inside, we were either contagious with something or it would be raining cats and dogs. If it was daylight, kids belonged outside. When daylight savings time arrived, we were allowed to go back out to play after dinner, a rare enough treat in itself, but even more rare because the entire block seemed to come out in the evening to watch us play ball in the street or for someone’s father to hit us towering fly balls that we would circle under in a pack. Other than those memorable long summer evenings, it felt that we were left much to our own devices, as long as we made it home for dinner. From out after breakfast to home for dinner the west of Los   Angeles was ours to explore.

While much of my memory has me walking miles at a time, taking in shops and neighborhoods, interesting factories, train yards, parks, and back alleys, most of those days were spent with wheels under me. My bike was my ticket to the world beyond family and neighborhood and I wasn’t alone. On any given weekend, six to twelve of us would set off across the city in a pack. Dangerous in our own minds and open for entertainment and adventure, we felt the freedom of being out on our own and the power of numbers. We were a kind of irresistible force and no construction site, shipping yard, or vacant lot was safe from our rolling explorations. One Saturday would find us cruising the Santa MonicaAirport, in and out of hangers, checking out the rows of small planes, each claiming favorites for our own.

“I got the Commanche!” “I got the twin engine Piper!” “You can have the Piper. I got the Cessna 310!”

Another Saturday we would ride the rows of the vast nurseries which then covered spans of West LA. Green and thick as jungle, and guarded only by an old Japanese man who would wave his trowel and take a step or two. But he knew what we knew. We could outrun anybody on our bikes and we could go in a dozen different directions. In truth, we weren’t out to cause damage, even though more than a few times damage inadvertently occurred. We were just out to explore, drunk with the power of youth and mobility.

The sights and sounds and textures of those days remain vivid for me, along with the first rush of realization that the world held mystery and wonder in unexpected places. We quickly discovered that most alleys were more interesting than most streets and a ride down the lanes that backed the homes and shops could lead to unlimited quantities of discarded treasures as well as unexpected glimpses into foreign lives. Lined with the discarded and peopled with somewhat the same, alleys seemed the boulevards for the underbelly of the city. We knew that they were there for us and we patrolled them with a purpose and efficiency that was beyond our years.

Any novelty was grounds for entertainment. A sidetracked boxcar had to be climbed upon. Any dangerously high hill had to be ridden. Pushing and dragging our bikes to the top, we would hurdle, laying out over the handlebars for ultimate aerodynamics, headlong toward the intersections below with no hope of stopping or even turning if we had to, racing breakneck into immortality. A construction site was always good for an afternoon’s entertainment, where climbing to the highest point of the freshly framed building, we could fling ourselves into space to fall, as dramatically as possible, onto a waiting mountain of sand. But the most unique of these adventures entailed a ride into Culver City where the studio back lots sprawled over countless acres, a land of western towns and Roman ruins and castles and haunted houses and river boats in perpetual dry-dock. From first explorations in the summer of the fourth grade to later forays with girls and six-packs in high school, the studio lots offered, slam-dunk, the most variety, mystery, and opportunity for mayhem of any other piece of acreage in LA. Vast and surprisingly lightly guarded, lagoons stretched into African villages, fake storefronts lined cobbled streets, and battlefields led to bombed out villages where our private wars could be waged and death after tragic death could be enacted. In 1955 there should have been an Oscar category for Best Dramatic Fall From a Balcony (Onto a Stunt Air Bag) By a Nine Year Old, Pretending to Have Been Shot. The ability to die with flair held great status in my neighborhood.

One Saturday would find us following the tracks along Exposition Blvd. all the way to the Los Angeles Coliseum at the other end of the line, a ride only accomplished once, the spirit of adventure being finally supplanted by dogged determination. Another day would drive us south to the delta of Bologna Creek, an area of expansive marshland stretching between the canals of Venice and the fire pits of Playa del Rey, dotted with pneumatic oil derricks and rich with wildlife of jarring variety. The largest wetland in So.California and home to nesting birds by the millions, it would soon be dredged to create the Marina del Rey, miles of condos and nightspots and slippage for yachts.  But,
for those afternoons, the vast beauty of the saltwater marsh was the closest thing to wilderness that we knew.

In subsequent summers, organized sports began to fill our weekends and the reality of after school and weekend jobs slowly eroded our free time and spirit of adventure. Bikes were used for paper routes and I suppose that the limits of our possibilities had been explored enough to hold us until we got our first cars and the circumferences of our lives could be once again extended.

Ahead of us were girls and parties and high school, the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, and college. But for that summer and the next we were honored among trash cans and vacant lots, famous in the alley ways, as we sang our lives at full voice across the yards and streets only to hear them echo back these years later. I don’t know if we were ever quite as free again.