Boomers – 3,679 words

I’m a “boomer”.

I grew up in the San Fernando Valley. I was born in 1947 in Burbank and moved to Calabasas in 1955. Calabasas was paradise for me. My dad had been apprenticing under his father-in-law as a silversmith and it was time for him to take over the flatware portion of the business. He bought a small lot in a development called Craftsman Center and built a shop and a house on the lot.

Our address was 23951 Craftsman Rd. and there was only one other family in the neighborhood. They lived a hundred yards up the street and had a ceramics factory on the same lot. Dad carved a really cool wooden sign to hang out front. It said “Lewis A Wise Silversmiths” and we made flatware under the name of Porter Blanchard, my grandpa.

This was the company logo and was carved into the sign out front. Below is how the house looks today. The photo just shows the house portion; the shop is left of the house and mostly out of frame. Both buildings were identical sized rectangles parallel to each other, almost touching at one corner.

The development was the dream of Archie Hanson who had already built Rolling Hills on the coast south of Redondo Beach and Hidden Hills in Calabasas. Both were upscale gated communities with lots big enough for horses. We were just over the hill from Hidden Hills. There was a huge sign at the entrance telling everyone that this was Craftsman Center but the landmark that everyone remembers is the bigger sign set back a ways and much higher which said “LA Pet Cemetery”. There was a large building which housed Scandia Toys. They made wooden toys for toddler aged kids.

We kids would play on the cemetery grounds, fascinated by the crematorium. There were collars hanging on rusting nails on the outside wall; the rust stains running down the wall were blood stains as far as we were concerned. The original MGM lion was buried there with a huge tombstone which had a picture of him set in the stone.

The first new business that moved into Craftsman Center with us was Sarkissian Carpets. They were a family business owned by an Armenian family with a boy my age, Sirak. Sirak an I were instant friends. We would spend the day hiking in the local hills and playing in their factory. They would glue a rough jute string (like that used in macrame) to rag wool. The string was glued to scraps of cloth on a conveyor belt, each string 1″ apart. Then the cloth was sliced into strips 1″ wide with the string right down the middle. Then the strips were used like yarn and woven into an incredibly heavy and dense rug about 3/4″ thick after raking and trimming.

They had 50 gallon drums of the latex glue they used and Sirak and I would dip the thick string into the glue and then wind it into a ball. The result was a less than perfectly round ball with slightly more bounce than a baseball and a nice thick latex glove on each hand. The latex glue was lots of fun to play with but I’m pretty sure my mom wasn’t too thrilled with it because it stuck to clothing with great tenacity.

One day in our early teens tragedy turned the Sarkissian family upside down. They lived in Woodland Hills rather than at the factory site, so I only saw Sirak when he came to the factory with his dad or at school. Our families would get together for dinner occasionally but didn’t see each other a lot.

He was at a swimming party in Woodland hills and tried to jump into the pool from the roof of the house. He made it to the pool but hit bottom in a sitting position in the shallow end. The resulting damage to his spine was devastating. He would spend the rest of his life a wheelchair bound quadriplegic.

I had no idea how to deal with that. Hospital visits were bizarre for me. I didn’t know how to act or feel. I knew we had to be upbeat and encouraging about the future but I wasn’t good at acting cheerful about his prognosis. My only experience with devastating illness or accident was when my grandma died with lung cancer. I was very young so never went to the hospital (little kids were not “allowed” to visit in the hospital in those days) and I only briefly saw her when she finally came home to die.

Sirak eventually got a powered wheelchair and even got a van equipped for him to drive. The family closed the factory and opened a retail carpet store on Ventura Blvd. called Sarkissian Carpet Villa. It is still there as of this writing but I haven’t visited or kept up with the family since the 80’s.

There were deer in our back yard and a family of pheasants. My friends and I had lots of wild pets. I had many snakes, a weasel, a turkey buzzard, civet cat (he got released after I learned he couldn’t be de-scented) and numerous owls and hawks. All collected in the hills around our house.

I grew up idolizing my cool older brother; imitating him whenever I could. My earliest memories were of he and I using drafting tools at the kitchen table to draw pictures of the perfect truck and semi trailer that we would each own and drive when we grew up.

He and his friends would build the coolest forts. More on that later.

My maternal grand parents, Porter and Betty Blanchard, moved to the San Fernando Valley in the thirties with their two daughters, Rebecca and Alice. I didn’t learn this until much later, after both my parents had passed away, but my Aunt Becca was miss Burbank of 1936.

They settled in Pacoima on acreage with two houses, an orange grove and horse corral filled in the back half of the property. They hand dug a swimming pool that had a pump to empty it but no filtration system. Grandpa would periodically dump a gallon of chorine bleach in the pool to keep the bacteria levels down and then he would pump it dry once a month to water the oranges. I used to love to follow him around the orchard opening and closing the irrigation ditches with a hoe. As I remember the oranges were thin skinned but tasty.

They rented the second house out to a family with horses that we used to ride bareback around the orchard. The first time I got thrown off a horse was when I gave her the signal to go fast right before the last turn onto the long straight run back to the corral. The horse bolted, when we got to the turn she made a great cut to the left and I didn’t. I recall that the landing wan’t graceful but nothing was damaged but my pride.

I remember seeing pictures my folks had of me in footed pajamas and Ralph in grown up PJs playing with some toy on the floor when I was about 3 or 4. Being five years older, he was always the super cool big brother. I’m pretty sure I was the pain-in-the-ass little brother. When I was allowed to tag along with he and his friends, it was always doing the coolest things.

We’d ride our bikes down to the industrial area and go through their trash cans. You wouldn’t believe the gold they throw away. His closest friend, Garin, was a genius at electronics. He would salvage any thrown out electrical device, take them home and strip them down for parts. Once I got to go along and test tubes at the grocery. He had shopping bags full of tubes of all kinds and we used the Tube Tester to sort them into bags of good and bad tubes. The good tubes he used to build magical things. The bad tubes were magic too.

Garin showed me how to carefully twist off the base; then you hold the tube under water and snip off the protruding tip of the base. Kids, don’t try this at home, but you can still do this with incandescent light bulbs. If the tube hadn’t lost it’s vacuum, it would magically fill up with water. This was cool enough in itself, but then he explained how the smaller tubes would then be excellent sling shot ammo. Not usually fatal but really cool when they hit and splattered.

The Bircsak’s backyard

Garin lived behind our grandparents house on Montague St. His folks (the Bircsak’s)  were old country German and had a fantastic back yard. The house was full of really neat old furniture and there was a cat every five feet. No space went unused; every bit of horizontal surface had a treasure. I remember they had the first feather bed I’d ever seen. Every time I heard John Denver sing about grandma’s feather bed it took me back to their house. The house was cool but the backyard was magical.

Mostly overgrown with the foliage barely kept at bay, it had a pen with sheep and goats, chickens and geese running everywhere and numerous small sheds housing Garin’s collections and workshops. You could navigate it using the many paths or if you were adept at climbing trees, get around by trees and rooftops. Very handy during rotten egg fights.

It was here where I learned about slaughtering livestock for food and various farm facts. They had one goat and several geese that you’d best not give a clear shot at your backside. We would collect rotten eggs and then use them for ammo in mock combat. Way more fun than laser tag or paintball. There was a much bigger incentive to be stealthy when the penalty was getting hit with a rotten goose egg.

Blow Guns

Another cool thing I learned from my brother was blow guns. A six to ten foot long section of thin walled electrical conduit makes an excellent blow gun; surprisingly accurate. But the best thing he showed me was the fire cracker dart. First you make a long slimly tapered cone out of a full sheet of notebook paper. Then you insert the cone into the blow gun and mark the place where it becomes too big for the tube. Remove the dart and tape it just below the mark, cut off the larger section and you have a dart ready to go. But the best part is what you do to the pointy end.

Cut it off far enough back to allow a firecracker to just fit inside. Insert said fire cracker into the dart with the fuse end sticking out about 3/4”. Then you tape a strike anywhere match to the side of the dart with the head of the match sticking out just ahead of the firecracker, wrap the fuse around the base of the head of the match and tape it all down. What could possibly go wrong.

I’ve tried it and can vouch for it’s coolness. You essentially have the ability to silently launch a firecracker over fifty yards and have it go off right after landing. The whole thing is sorta untraceable as long as you don’t walk around with the blow gun in your hand afterwards.

Forts

Another thing that Ralph and Garin excelled at was building forts. Forts were just spaces you could carve out of the environment that were yours alone. A good place for secret meetings. They could be visible as in tree forts or hidden. For hidden forts they would find a vacant piece of land and dig a pit deep enough to almost stand up. Then they would scrounge up whatever they could to cover it, usually old lumber and various sign boards. Usually, it was not the soundest of structures but they were always quite temporary anyway. They would cover them with dirt and plants from the immediate vicinity, make a trap door entry that was usually a piece of plywood with a few tumbleweeds tied to it for camouflage. How no one was seriously injured or killed is beyond me. One unaware real estate agent almost fell into one next door to our house when he was walking across the vacant lot. Seems they were using the ad sign for part of their roof.

Tree forts were harder to keep exclusive and the neighborhood kids kept getting in. On one they put pitch on the tops of the lower branches so that you couldn’t see it from below but would get it all over your hands if you tried to climb up to their fort. Then they found an old piece of pipe that would hold their weight and used it as a bridge from the fort to the next tree over in the higher branches. The neighbor kids didn’t figure out the trick of using the pipe like a monkey bar to get to the fort and got pitch all over their clothes trying to climb the tree. I remember Ralph caught hell from our parents for that one. We thought it was a pretty good example of how stupid the neighbor kids were.

I honestly don’t know how anyone could have grown up in my day without a big brother to teach you these things. Today I guess the online world fills that void nicely.

Cars

Ralph went through a lot of cars. He always seemed to have a new one, usually a project car. One of my favorites was a 1950 ford. It was classic; black with chrome reverse rims or spinner hubcaps (I can’t remember which, maybe both as he was always working on it), fuzzy dice hanging from the rear view mirror and tuck and roll upholstery done in Tijuana.

I remember one car had “cut outs”. Cut outs were a modification of the exhaust system. You installed a Y in the exhaust right after the front wheels and in front of the muffler; then put a cap on the end of the branch that wasn’t muffled and stuck out from under the car between the front and rear wheels. When you removed the caps, you had unmuffled exhaust and lots of noise. This helped improve both your power and testosterone levels. Unfortunately, it also attracted the police.

He and his buddies would buy junkers and take them “mud wamping”. That was driving them through muddy fields (rare in Southern California) until they finally got it thoroughly  stuck. Then they would jump up and down on the roof and hood, break out all the windows and leave it there. Many of them were cars that would be considered classics today; but if you think about it most every car from that period is a classic today. One day it didn’t work out well.

I don’t know what kind of car it was but it had wind wings, remember those? When it became time to break the windows, Ralph insisted on breaking out the last wind wing; I envision a “here, hold my beer and watch this” moment. Anyway, he managed a heel kick that did the trick. Only problem was, after his foot broke out the wind wing, it came down on the broken glass nearly severing his Achilles tendon. I was not there as this was not a “little brother can come along” event, so all I remember is he came home in a body cast that covered everything from his foot to the bottom of his rib cage.

Model Airplanes

We were always building model airplanes. Ralph built mostly U control planes that flew around you in a circle, connected to the “pilot” by two strings that controlled the elevator. He would spend hours to build beautiful models that would crash on the first flight. We both got pretty good at repairing crashed models. It was good training in structural engineering.

One model I remember vividly; not the plane so much but its two flights. I think it was a P51 but I do remember it was pretty nice. On it’s maiden flight Ralph kept it straight and level and did pretty well. He did break the prop on landing but after replacing the prop it was ready to go again. We were all very encouraging and asked for some aerobatics.

Ralph refueled the plane and took off for some aerobatics. He made a few level laps and finally got his nerve up to try a loop. He pulled up and the plane went straight up, straight overhead and straight down. It built up a nice head of steam during a perfect vertical dive into the asphalt. The plane more or less exploded; I think the only salvageable part left was the U-control string. Maybe the wheels.

He built a beautiful free flight glider that had a small motor to take it up to altitude. The motor would quickly run out of gas and the plane would then glide back down. Even this free flight mode had it’s development problems.

Built from a kit, it looked quite airworthy with the wing mounted on a pylon about 3” above the fuselage. He took it out for it’s first glide test which were always necessary to get the proper balance. We had a flat field next door with thick grass/wheat about two feet high; perfect for a gentle landing on these test flights. I remember that first flight; the balance was perfect and it gently settled into the tall grass. The fuselage slowly came to a stop and the wings broke off, continuing on another few feet.

Thus the detachable wing was born. From then on we built models with wings that were held onto the fuselage with rubber bands that would release on landing. This reduced the need for major repair after each flight. Reduced, not eliminated.

I was no better than he at U-control, so I stuck to free flight gliders; usually launched by a towline. I would make a disastrous foray into radio controls while in flight school, convincing me that I should stick to free flight. But that is another story.

Before college most things came easily for me. Natural agility gave me an edge in sports during the pre teen years enabling me to be a big fish in a small pond. When the pond got bigger (huge LA City high school) I still did well both physically and academically but I failed to notice the effect of the bigger pond. I got decent grades and enjoyed lots of popularity without much effort on my part.

I was into photography and surfing. After a few photography classes, I landed the position of school photographer for the yearbook. That was a lot of fun and I toyed with the idea of photography as a career.

That would make me among the oldest of the group; the ones who were teenagers in the sixties. I was 14 for the Bay of Pigs invasion, 15 for the Cuban missile crisis, 16 on the day JFK was assassinated, 18 when I dropped out of college, 19 when I was drafted. I’m pretty sure I had killed several human beings before I was 21. Luckily (?) most were faceless enemy soldiers.

I grew up adopting my father’s fears and ultra right wing politics. By the time I finished my second tour in Vietnam ( at the ripe old age of 23 ), I was well on my way to the left, politically.

I didn’t know it at the time but I was going to put a lot of energy into fixing my karma. Already an atheist, I didn’t think that God had been looking out for me; but I knew that if there was any justice in the world, I’d be dead. Many times over.

I am a “Boomer”. According to Google baby boomers are the demographic group born during the post–World War II baby boom, approximately between the years 1946 and 1964. I think that group should be divided into those influenced by the draft and those who turned 18 after the lottery. At that point those with high numbers could proceed with their lives without the draft hanging over their heads, influencing every big decision they made.

For those of us in the first group the draft was a factor in every important decision we made. College, careers, marriage, kids, all had to be juggled around the draft. The criteria used to determine your status changed frequently as the needs of the military changed. Deferments were given by your local draft board for various reasons that were not published (to my knowledge, remember, there was no internet).

The word on the street was that you had about a year after you were classified 1A before you could expect your induction letter. Student deferments were given after you proved that you were enrolled full time at an approved institution. During the early years of the war deferments were given for married men; then, as the war effort ramped up, it was necessary to be married and have a child to maintain that deferment. Deferments were harder and harder to get as the military’s requirements grew until the lottery changed the whole game in December 0f 1969. I was inducted in August of 1966, about 12 months after I dropped out of college.

My good friend, Roger, worked tirelessly at positioning himself for a career as an airline pilot. He saved and paid for lessons for his pilots license. By the time we graduated (1964) he had the ratings that United Air Lines had told him would be all he would need to get hired. They then told him that he would need to satisfy his military obligation before they could hire him. They wouldn’t hire and train someone that would then be drafted before they could get any return for their investment.

My brother is five years older than me, so he is outside the boomer definition given above, but in 1966 he received his notice to report for induction while still in college.