galoshes blog

Galoshes – A Memoir

PART II      

By Gavin Murphy

My father’s exile to the great woods of the Pacific Northwest ended when he landed a job with the Los Angeles Times. I was six and had started first grade at a Catholic grammar school – Holy Cross – where I wore a green sweater and salt and pepper corduroy pants as a uniform. 

My parents had made good friends in Aberdeen and Tacoma in the four years or so we lived there. My dad and I had even spent a couple days at one of these friend’s rustic cabin in the wilderness and there were drives in the ‘56 Ford to see Mount Rainier close up. Later my mother would bemoan that perhaps we should have stayed in this beautiful area and at one point I learned my dad had considered going to law school there, leaving me to wonder how things might have been different if dad had become a lawyer.

But we were off to L.A. 

Our first rental abode was, I believe, somewhere in North Hollywood but we quickly moved from there to Van Nuys. We shared a duplex with a single fellow who took to lizard-napping the “horned toads” I collected in a sand-filled box on our shared front porch. Horned toads, or horned lizards, have wide flat torsos and stubby tails covered with small spikes and heads wreathed with something resembling a crown of thorns. They were abundant in the neighborhood and I usually had two or three at a time residing in my box as they were pretty easy to capture, burying themselves in sand to stay warm, with their horned heads sticking out.

Every night as the temperature fell the lizards buried themselves in the sand in the box, leaving only their pin prick nasal passages uncovered so they could breath. My ritual was to get up in the morning before school – I went to public school now – and run my hand through the sand to find them. On some mornings one would be missing and I would see our neighbor, Gil I think his name was, standing nearby smoking a cigarette with a mischievous glint in his eye. 

Okay Gil, let me have him back. Gil would deny possession for several minutes then produce the lizard from his shirt pocket or some such hiding place. 

California was wondrous to me because of the abundance of reptiles – from legless lizards to king snakes. I also liked another thing about Southern California – built-in swimming pools. 

At one point I made a friend who had a pool in his backyard and he invited me over for swims. I remember his dad was usually around and he was kind of strange. Whenever I was treading water in the pool and breathing hard in the process, the father would say to me – You’re not peeing in the pool are you? I would assure him I wasn’t.

One time I was invited to spend the afternoon swimming and so forth and when we all were done with the pool we went inside the house to take showers. My young friend and I were sharing the stand-up shower stall when the father – naked like us – hopped in. He was rather rotund and we were all three crowded into the shower stall and I remember wondering why we all had to take a shower at the same time? At some point mention was made of my genitalia, whether a compliment or a criticism I can’t recall. 

At the time I didn’t think much about this and I never mentioned anything to my parents, but I had encountered my first pervert.

I liked being outside in the fresh air hunting critters and scavenging about and hated it when I had to stay inside for too long, so I remember when we all three kids had the dreaded chicken pox at the same time. 

The apartment became an infirmary as we were all bedded and mom did her best Florence Nightingale with the wet towels for our fevers and all. Once the initial fevers broke, our close proximity in adjacent beds provoked an outpouring of brotherly love, at first verbal, and then gradually escalating to exchanged projectiles – toys, books, cups, shoes and so forth. A day or two of this and my mother decided we were well enough to be discharged.

California was a car-oriented society so my dad had to occasionally pile us kids into the backseat and take us someplace, like the doctor’s office (where it seemed we spent innumerable hours reading Highlights Magazine while waiting to be treated). Having been both a cop and a reporter, he was petrified by the notion we could all be injured in a car accident, so he decided to have seatbelts installed in the backseats. This was before seatbelts were required in cars, so he was way ahead of his time in this regard. So we three boys would be strapped into the backseat (dad even made my mom sit in the back with us sometimes) and naturally we would get rambunctious. My dad would yell at us from the front seat and, when that didn’t work, he would reach over the back seat with his right arm and swat anything he came into contact with, usually our heads. One day I shut the car door on Tim’s finger and all hell broke loose as neighbors scrambled for crowbars to pry it open. Fortunately nothing serious happened to Tim’s finger, and all I got from from my dad as punishment was a verbal lashing and a quick swat on the the head.  Sometimes dad used his belt.

Around this time my grandmother from Peoria began making annual Christmas pilgrimages to see her only daughter, my mom, and her only grandchildren. Once we left Chicago and Illinois we seldom got back there although I do recall that while we still lived in Washington, my grandfather in Peoria died. John Trager had come back from World War I in France with a Croix de Guerre and been awarded a Distinguished Service Cross and Purple Heart. He’d been gassed and that didn’t do much for his health.

My brother and I accompanied my mother on the sad flight back home for the funeral. It was a prop plane and I remember that the engine, visible from my window seat, showered sparks throughout the night flight. Mom, is the plane going to catch on fire from the sparks? No, honey. Are you sure mom? Yes dear. It was a long flight on a prop plane from Seattle to Chicago in those days.

My grandmother, Lola Trager, was a prototypical grandma. Not too tall and bespectacled with gray hair and moist eyes. She was the only relative we ever saw with any regularity. She usually paid us a visit during the Christmas holidays. My dad’s mom had visited us in the Pacific Northwest one time and the visit didn’t go very well as she was critical of my mom’s parenting skills. She could be sharp tongued and also liked to take a drink or two and that would bring out more of her challenging personality. I loved grandma Lola all the more because when she came she brought lots of Christmas presents. My mother didn’t drive in those days and my father hated shopping malls and the like, so my mom did a lot of catalog shopping, especially from Sears. It got to the point that I thought Santa made his rounds in a brown UPS truck instead of a sleigh. Those trucks would arrive at our place and the driver would deposit large boxes, which my mother would “hide” in various closets and she told us not to touch or look at those boxes. 

Right mom. 

Unfortunately, my mother also did a lot of our clothes shopping by catalog. This meant that when other kids had cool brand sneakers like Keds or Converse we had Jeepers, the Sears brand, which were not cool at all. They were so uncool that we would immediately tear off the Jeepers label as soon as we pulled them out of the box. The real problem with this catalog clothes shopping was my mother would have to guess our sizes. She was pretty good at this but, there were many times when I had shoes too big or too small and the like.

My grandmother would stay for close to a month and I know that this sometimes cramped my dad’s style. My mother, raised Protestant and converted to Catholicism when she married my dad, was a teetotaler. My father, on the other hand, was a drinker, who struggled with a propensity to go off on the frequent binge. He didn’t know how to simply have a glass or two of wine with dinner. In fact, he didn’t drink wine. He had learned to drink in taverns in Chicago, where you had beer with your whiskey or whiskey with your beer.

Actually my father was pretty sober during our years in California. He had to drive to work and back and he was trying to make a success of his career. He had blown jobs before because of booze and now he had real responsibilities, including three kids, with a fourth in the wings. In a fit of middle class propriety he even decided to buy a house. 

Dad’s family had always lived in rented quarters, moving frequently as his father, an Irish immigrant, sometimes failed to pay the landlord, preferring to bet the ponies instead. I don’t know that this background really had anything to do with the radical decision to make such a huge investment as buying a house, but apparently someone my dad worked with convinced him that purchasing a brand new tract home in San Pedro would be a good investment, as this person had just done the same. 

So dad, a Vet, took out a “VA mortgage” for pretty much the whole cost – maybe about $15,000 – a sum that must have seemed staggering to him at the time – and bought a green stucco four-bedroom house on a cul-de-sac. (Current Zillow valuation: $1,004,400.) We moved into the neighborhood, which was being built on former dairyland and such. These were homes for World War II vets and their burgeoning families. 

I quickly made new friends. There was a boy about my age and his brother and sister. There was another boy and his sister. There was Greg, whose dad was a construction worker. They had a built-in pool in the backyard. Greg’s mom took us to see Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando when it came to the movie theater. That may have been the first time I ever “went to the movies.” The critics didn’t think much of Brando’s Mr. Christian but it was a three hour color spectacle that blew my young mind as I only saw movies in black and white on TV.  I still think it’s a great flick.

We also went to see Bye Bye Birdie. Ann Margaret, with flaming red hair, swooning into the camera on the huge movie screen while lustily singing the title song, made a strong impression on me. The rest of the movie not so much.

We brats ranged across the landscape, a plague of scruffy young bipeds, rummaging through the homes under construction after the workers had left for the day. These were vast tracts of houses in various phases of completion, acres of framed two by fours and plywood and tar paper and stucco rising on the seared plains above San Pedro. We pilfered wood and material for forts and go carts. Even as a child I was amazed at the piles of empty beer cans scattered about the construction site by the workers. How did these guys get anything built? In those days in California, if you said your dad was a construction worker it was like announcing he was a doctor or lawyer, as they were making so much money with the boom in home building.

There was a big dairy farm, not yet subsumed by the tsunami of residential development. It was easy to slip under the barbed wire fence that surrounded the dairy and spend an afternoon stampeding the Holsteins. There was a stream that ran through the dairy pasture, brimming with tree frogs and tadpoles, which we hauled home by the bucketful. After several days of storage in the garage, the aroma of brewed amphibian would permeate the residence and provoke edicts from my mother that I was never to bring anything alive home again, not frogs or snakes or lizards. 

Right mom. 

I once brought a snake home after I somehow stuffed it into an empty egg carton. I had captured the snake – I have no idea what kind it was – by sitting on it. My mother was terrified of snakes and ordered me to get rid of it immediately.

Near the stream was a field that contained a mysterious collection of rotting gray Navy beach landing craft, from which we extracted small engines and gauges and other perfectly useless hardware. This stuff was piled in the garage, along with pilfered wood, nails and other junk, until the cache became large enough that it finally drew the attention of the old man when he pulled the car out in the morning. The order was issued. Get rid of all this crap!

Aw Dad! I need this stuff! 

Alfred

The Harbor Freeway was only a few years old and one afternoon, sitting in the back of a neighbor’s station wagon screaming down the freeway, I lost Alfred. Alfred was my favorite pet lizard, a small skink I had captured who was now so tame he would stay in my shirt pocket for hours at a time. Sometimes I snuck him inside the house to watch TV. My neighbor had drafted me to help him and his son, a friend of mine in the neighborhood, transport some large potted plants somewhere. We were to sit in the back of the station wagon and hold the plants so they would not fly out the back of the station wagon because their size required the tailgate to be left open.

We were carrying out this task, blasting down the freeway, and I remember thinking this was a little crazy as I could see the blacktop falling away at great speed behind the open tailgate of the car only three feet or so from where I braced myself against the precious potted plant. Just then Alfred fell out of my shirt pocket and landed on the metal floor of the station wagon, just out of my reach. Several moments of high drama ensued as my friend and I watched Alfred frantically churn his little legs in a futile effort to resist the draft pulling him across the slippery metal floor toward the open tailgate. “Come on Alfred,” I shouted. I didn’t dare move to help Alfred because I was sure that if I let go of the potted plant I would be hurled out the back of the vehicle myself. I knew there was no hope that a shouted appeal to the adult at the wheel would result in any emergency maneuvering in freeway traffic in order to save the hapless soul of a small lizard. The heart-wrenching sight of Alfred gradually sliding backwards to oblivion ended when his tiny body was sucked from the vehicle at high velocity to an almost certain death. For days after I berated myself at being so stupid as to bring Alfred on such a dangerous mission.

My parents were not as social in California as they were in Washington. My father was not the type to barbecue with neighbors on the weekend or coach Little League or anything like that. My mother, having married my dad at age 29 and having me, her first born, at 30, was older than many of the other wives in the neighborhood. But they must have gone out a couple of times because they hired a babysitter to watch us. 

I fell in love with this babysitter. She was a 15-year-old California lovely named Cathy. She had a woman’s curves and a friendly personality that made her smile a beacon to which I was drawn like a bug to a back porch light. She thought it was cute when one day, after some wandering and ringing of doorbells, I succeeded in locating her house in the neighborhood. She answered my knock, smiled, and invited me inside, where we sat on a couch in her living room and read coffee table books about nature, how ant colonies worked and such. I liked nature and I was infatuated with her. Just sitting on the couch cuddled up to her blossoming female form was an early almost erotic experience I’ve always remembered. I visited her a couple more times and she was very nice to me each time. Years later, when I was 18 and hitchhiking around California, I returned to the neighborhood and again found her house, where I stood in front and waited to see if I could catch a glimpse of her. Yes, this was weird behavior. I was no longer a young boy but a long-haired hippie and it was a wonder I wasn’t arrested as a suspicious person guilty of loitering or worse. Figuring she would be in her mid-20s by now and wouldn’t find me as cute as my eight-year old version, I restrained myself from knocking on her door.

The public school I attended in San Pedro was located around the corner from my house. It was a brand new school and I was able to ride my skateboard there and back. I remember once being sent to the principal’s office after I leapt from the top of the monkey bars, a forbidden act, to the rubber-matted ground. I liked this school and my friends from the neighborhood all went there.

So I wasn’t too thrilled when my dad finally got us enrolled in the local Catholic school, which was a fairly long car drive from where we lived, or so it seemed to me at the time. It had taken some effort on the old man’s part to get us into this school. He had to teach weekend confraternity classes to public high schoolers in the parish and pay some other bribes, but he finally got us in. Meanwhile, my brothers and I had been required to attend weekly confraternity classes (formally Confraternity of the Christian Doctrine) held in a garage in the neighborhood, where we were given Catechism lessons. 

My First Communion happened to coincide with these garage classes, where I was instructed in how to partake in the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist for the first time, how to ingest the “host” – which was the body of Jesus – properly with my outstretched tongue and so forth. We rehearsed our parts in the procession to the altar, when to kneel, stand, walk etc. When the day came I was instructed to appear Saturday morning at the church where we confraternity Catholic kids would take Communion as group. I relayed this information to my parents and my dad – in typical dad fashion thinking I’m a knucklehead – said I must be wrong, that I meant Sunday not Saturday. I repeated: Saturday. So of course we went Sunday and – I had been right. I had missed the whole rehearsed ritual. I asked my dad: So what now?

“Well,” he grumbled, “just go ahead up there with everybody else.”

Of course there was no bus service to the Catholic school, Holy Trinity I think it was, so my dad made an arrangement with a local woman who had two daughters in the school that he would drive us all in the morning on his way to work if she would carpool us back in the afternoon. I hated this arrangement because the woman’s two daughters were somewhat insufferable and worse, she would never just pick us and bring us home. She always had a bunch of errands to run on the way home and would drag us all along with her. This routine seriously diminished my after school play time. In those days, adults thought nothing of leaving their children alone in parked cars for extended periods of time, and we would sit in the parking lot for what seemed like hours while this woman rummaged through Sav-on or the supermarket or god-knows where.

The school itself was decent enough. The big excitement was waiting for the nuns to emerge from the convent before school in hopes you would be selected to carry their stuff – books, whips, handcuffs and all their essential teaching gear. There was a gate at the entrance to the convent where the biggest brown-noses among us would jostle for position as you were not actually allowed to set foot on the sacred ground of the nunnery itself. When a nun emerged there was pushing and shoving for position in order to get first grab at the stuff in her arms. I quickly tired of this competition and, in fact, took to attending mass before school almost every day. It was quiet in the church with only scattered murmuring of prayers at that hour and I felt devout and my regular attendance impressed the old man to no end when he dropped me off in the morning and I humbly entered the holy sanctuary. This daily mass habit ended when I discovered the before school kickball game, which was a lot more fun than sitting in church with the old adult regulars mumbling responses to the priest. I think I even convinced my parents to get me special kickball shoes. 

JFK

I was in fourth grade at this school when I heard the news about John Kennedy’s assassination. We were in class and suddenly the public address system came on, with no word of explanation from the usually sonorous voice of the holy mother superior as to what it was we were hearing. It was a radio broadcast and the announcer repeated several times in shocked tones that the President had been shot in Dallas and had been taken by motorcade to the hospital and now there were reports from priests emerging from the hospital room that John Kennedy was dead. This went on for several more minutes and then there was an official confirmation that the president was dead. At first there was only stunned silence in the classroom and then the nun said it was okay to cry if we wanted to cry. Some of the kids, having received permission, wept. I sat, stunned, sad and numb as I tried to process the news, but I didn’t cry.

Smoking lesson

One long evening when I was about 8, I sat alone on the curb in front of the house when I noticed a cigarette butt in the gutter near my feet. I picked it up and put it to my lips, pretending I was smoking. I didn’t know that my dad was seated nearby on the small retaining wall that bordered our driveway, actually smoking his own cigarette. 

He noticed what I was doing and called out, Hey Gav, you wanna smoke a real cigarette? Yeah, I shouted. I dropped the nasty butt, jumped to my feet and ran to my father. Dad held out his pack of Pall Mall or some other brand of unfiltered coffin nails and I grabbed one.

OK, dad said, this is how you smoke it. After it’s lit, you take a long puff and inhale the smoke deep into your lungs and then you hold it there, like this. He took a long drag, swallowed it all, held it, and then smoothly exhaled. 

Got it?

Yeah, Yeah. 

He lit a cigarette and handed it to me and I did just what he said, inhaling a large quantity of smoke into my virgin lungs. Within a couple of seconds my throat was on fire and my chest felt like it was going to explode. I heaved the smoke from my lungs, gasped for air and ran for the house, leaving the old man doubled over in laughter. 

I ran past my startled mother and into the bathroom, where I swallowed about ten glasses of water trying to douse the burning in my throat. 

It was years before I ever put one of those damn things to my lips again. 

We continued to hunt lizards and scavenge and build forts and generally we were safe and secure except for the threat sometimes posed by the “big kids.” These were kids in their early teens with nothing better to do than to pick on us younger kids. 

Sneak rock attacks were their most frequent tactic as they were cowardly yellow bellies and we were fast runners who could get away from them if given a good head start. One time I remember being pursued by a band of these adolescent misanthropes. They were throwing rocks and a bunch of us were running to get away. My brother Tim was ahead of me, as he could run like a scared jack rabbit. Tim’s sandy blonde hair was cut short so I saw clearly when suddenly a red gash opened on the side of his head. The bastards had hit him with a rock! His head was bleeding and he was crying and I don’t remember exactly how I reacted but I vaguely recall losing my fear and halting to return fire.

Another time these morons surrounded us in a fort we had built and systematically destroyed it with large rocks while we cowered inside. People talk about kids being sick in the head nowadays. These guys – actually there were girls too – were true sadists and my only consolation is I’m sure some of them later got theirs in Vietnam. They were the prime age for duty there and likely participated in the massacre at My Lai if given the chance.

California Here We Go

The biggest family event that took place in San Pedro was the birth of my sister Ann. After three boys, I’m sure my parents were happy to have a little girl, even though I doubt it was a “planned” pregnancy. Ann was a little doll, with a sweet personality that in short order would be tested by a cross-country move.

I sometimes imagine my dad around this time, asleep in bed. His eyes suddenly bolt open and he stares at the ceiling, thinking: What have I done? Dad was a good Catholic (he had been a seminary student after all) and tried to abide by the church’s restrictions on birth control. The result: four kids and a stay at home wife to support. He was responsible for the whole dog and pony show and it was a lot of pressure. I’m sure the situation led to more than one or two benders. My mom told me years later that after the fourth child a priest told dad he could now use birth control because “he’d done his part.” All this baggage didn’t stop dad from pursuing his career. He still was willing to take the whole three-ring circus on the road.

You could say the early 1960s was a golden age for California. With its spectacular natural beauty and perfect climate it was as close to paradise as you could get in mid-century America. There were other beautiful places in the country but they didn’t have all the amenities that California had: the beaches, the mountains, the desert, Redwoods, Yosemite. California also was a model for the country about what progress could look like. Its state university systems and schools were models for the country. It was known for good governance. It was less corrupt. An idealistic place where anyone could make a success of themselves.  

As I said, I had made several good friends in San Pedro, one of whom was such a good friend that we had regular bouts of fisticuffs, as true a sign of friendship as can be had between two young boys. So, I was apprehensive when rumors surfaced that a move might be in the works. It was 1964 and I was in fourth grade when my dad formally announced we were moving from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. He had a new job at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The old man, restless in his role as suburban reporter for the Los Angeles Times, had decided that Southern California was too ersatz and that a dose of Eastern traditionalism was in order for the sake of culture and career. Everybody else was coming to California. Not leaving it. Except apparently, for us.

We quickly sold our green stucco ranch house at a modest profit and I said goodbye to my friends. Left behind was my skateboard, a two by four with a split roller skate nailed to each end, and the shoe box that had contained my collection of captured reptiles, now liberated.

As we drove out of the neighborhood we passed the house where, following a recent afternoon of foreplay with her naked Ken and Barbie dolls, a precocious girl named Tracy had given me my first kiss. She took me into her family’s two-car garage and closed the big plywood garage door with the twangy springs and stood me in a darkened corner. There she planted a quick peck on my lips and turned to leave. A warm feeling washed over me, a very pleasant flush of heightened sensation I had never experienced before. I blurted out: “Again please!” Tracy marched back and kissed me again, a little longer this time. As she opened the garage door and the light rushed in, I stood frozen in the corner, contemplating my first true carnal experience.

All these memories, of Tracy and Cathy and Alfred and my friends and the golden sun-soaked fields of Southern California were in the back of my mind as we pulled out of the neighborhood, passed the drive-in theater and the Little League baseball diamond and the Hostess bakery that in my imagination emitted the aroma of warm Twinkies and headed for the train station and the journey to a new life in a mysterious and far away place called “back East.”

Next: The City of Brotherly Love

Posted June 2024