ABSTRACT
There aren’t many real Losangelinos of my generation, but I’m one of them, born during World War II. My infancy was spent travelling with mom and dad from one heavy bomber base to another (San Antonio, Texas; Ardmore, Oklahoma; Boise, Idaho; Sioux City, Iowa; Salt Lake City, Utah) until dad was finally sent to the Philippines in 1945. He really shouldn’t have been in uniform at all, as a petroleum geologist in oil exploration, but he had been in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps in both high school and at UCLA, and he decided that the shortage of officers in 1942 was greater than the need for petroleum geologists. They made float a meteorologist, no doubt concluding that one -ologist was much like another. While mother and I awaited the arrival of my baby brother in Los Angeles, with his mother and a houseful of pregnant aunties, dad actually overflew Japan for weather reconnaissance on 5 August 1945. They thought that there was going to be another massive firebombing of Japan. But the next day the bomb was dropped. Life back in Hollywood wasn’t exactly uneventful. My very clear memories of toddlerhood kick in at this point. Shortly before VJ Day I managed to put my arm into an old-fashioned washing machine mangle, while ‘helping’ grandma with the wash. Grandma was an intelligent woman, but she never had a cool head, so I
hung there and she screamed until heavily-pregnant aunt Maxie precipitated herself downstairs into the cellar and gave the mangle a god almighty whack. Maxie’s stock rose in my estimation. (She had been an army nurse before marriage to my uncle Tod.) On VJ Day I was in plaster (sprained not broken), but gamely I set out with my single aunt Ruth and eldest cousin Lola to join in the celebrations. It was wild, and I actually recall a drunken sailor hanging from the top of a lamppost.
