What's It All About?

Illustration: Interrogative Point (1824) by Mr. Stops

When I started this blog in 2008, I was living in the San Fernando Valley. I thought I would find all the Valley's historical landmarks and cultural sites, and perhaps collect enough material to write a book. Hah!

I learned that the sites that had once been officially declared historical landmarks were no longer in existence, not open to the public, or not perticularly interesting in the first place. Although not completely devoid of culture (despite what the critics say), the Valley had no museums and no tourist attractions. There is a university (Cal State Northridge) and some other educational institutions.

The old ranches and movie sets were long gone. The area had become known as a major center of the pornography industry, with studios in big, unmarked structures in a quiet industrial zone. That wasn't the story I was looking for.

I wrote small pieces about my personal encounters in the area: the problem of billboards parked on the street, my annoying neighbors, the weather. At some point, I gave up on the Valley as a topic and began writing about social issues. I left the Valley in 2017, and now I just write about whatever is on my mind. The blog now has an account on BlueSky, @touringthevalley.bsky.social, with links back to these posts, as well as memes and items of interest from the news.

 

The Giant Faucet

Immigrants

My mother's paternal grandparents were German.

Johann came to the U.S. in 1877. He was 18 years old, and came to join his older sisters who were living in Philadelphia. He lived in Chicago for a while and then in 1884 moved to Rock County, Minnesota, where he took up farming. He became a U.S. citizen in 1891.

Martha was born in 1863 in a small town in New York. Her parents were German immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. as children. They moved to Rock County, where Martha and Johann were married in 1887.

Johann and Martha's first two children died of diphtheria, and the third of whooping cough. With three more children, the family moved to California, where my grandfather John was born. They lived in a rural area where most of their neighbors were German, and their home language was German.

When the older kids started school, they discovered that English was the dominant language. As they learned, they also taught their younger siblings, so by the time my grandfather got to kindergarten, he was prepared.

The children were bilingual, speaking German at home with their parents, and English everywhere else. After their parents died they stopped speaking German altogether.

During World War II, when Japanese-Americans were hauled off to internment camps, the local German community was horrified. They feared that they would be next. The older people were especially frightened because many of them did not have their paperwork in order. In fact, a relatively small number of Germans (mostly non-citizens) were imprisoned, but as it turned out, there was no real threat to the members of my great-grandparents' community. Germans were safe largely because there were so many millions of them (either immigrants or the children and grandchildren of immigrants) living throughout the U.S. They also had the advantage of not being targets of blatant racism as the Japanese were.

All this happened long before I was born. Growing up, I knew little about the German branch of my mother's family until we traveled to Europe and she looked up some distant cousins. My grandfather and his surviving siblings hadn't spoken German in decades and were no longer fluent. They did not define themselves as German, or even as German-American. Like so many ethnic groups before and since, they were simply, and proudly, Americans.

 

Shorty

I had a summer job at a car dealership. I had not been introduced to the service manager, although I had seen him from a distance. As it happened, he was a Little Person. One day, I needed to talk to him about something, and I asked one of the salesmen what his name was.

The guy said, "It's Shorty," and I cringed.

"I can't call him that," I gasped.

"His real name is Elmer, but he hates that. Shorty is his choice -- he's got it on his business cards."

Well, if it's on his business cards....

I got used to calling him Shorty, and life went on.

Until the moment three months later when a customer asked me for the service manager's name.

"It's Shorty," I said, and she cringed.

"I can't call him that," she gasped.

"His real name is Elmer," I told her, "but he hates that. Shorty is his choice -- he's got it on his business cards."

She sighed and walked off, looking grim, for her conversation with Shorty.