Touring the Valley

Random Thoughts

Illustration: "Hospice for the Incurable" (ca 1764), Anonymous

A lot of parking facilities are designed with no awareness that, once a car is parked, the occupants need to get out and walk somewhere.

The WWII generation believed the U.S. could and should be a force for good in the world. That belief carried over into the Cold War and justified, in some minds, questionable things that were done to "fight communism". But eventually the belief in supporting "the greater good" was replaced by "greed is good", whereby affluence was widely perceived as proof of moral superiority. Eventually, the goal of having an affluent society that benefited nearly everyone was abandoned, and affluent individuals who benefitted no one but themselves became role models.

Most people aren't as funny as they think they are. Some are unintentionally funny. Many aren't funny at all.

No doubt, corporate executives do important work. They have to wear suits, go to meetings, have lunch with important people, attend banquets, and, um, make decisions. I was working for a big corporation at one time. My boss, the head of the department, needed back surgery, so he was absent for a few weeks. The company just kept rolling along, as everyone else kept on working as usual. Then one day it was time for the department head to make some decisions about how products would be allocated to various distributors in the region. He was still absent! So his assistant and I sat in his office, went through the list, and made the choices. There was no disaster or failure, and no more complaints than usual. Eventually, the boss came back to work, feeling better, and we all just kept on doing what we did.

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.

Playing Doctor

"The Bad Doctors" (1892), James Ensor

When I was little, I had a lot of toys, and usually the things I really wanted appeared on my birthday or Christmas.

One wish-list item I still remember was a doll whose name I can't recall, but whom I'll call Medical Marva. Marva's role in life was to be a patient. She came with a hospital bed. Her accessories included arm and leg casts, a sling, crutches, a thermometer, medicine bottles and equipment, bandages, and plastic dots that could be stuck on her face to resemble measles or chicken pox.

I really wanted that doll, but it did not show up under the Christmas tree. My guess is that my mother found it extremely unappealing, too much like a sick child. Of course, I saw it from a different angle, envisioning myself as the heroic doctor who would make the doll well again.

Once or twice I've searched online to see if I can find Medical Marva. It doesn't help that I don't remember her real name. Even so, searching for "doll" and "hospital bed" sometimes yields interesting results. I tried it yesterday, and found a company that crafts miniature insane asylum furnishings for dollhouses. Crutches and a few bandages seem pretty tame by comparison.

Jean

I went to see a band at a club last night, and the singer suddenly reminded me of Jean. She was fresh and bold, enunciating the lyrics in a clear contralto, prancing across the stage in denim shorts and torn fishnets. She was relaxed and aware, fully present in the moment, having a wonderful time. It was her smile, and the way she tossed her hair back with a quick turn of her head, that put me in mind of someone I knew one summer when I was young.

Jean and I were party friends. We first met at a party, and I often ran into her at parties, or she would call me and we'd go together. She was pretty and vivacious, someone people loved to invite. Jean was easy going, and always seemed comfortable no matter what was happening. Once, some awkward person spilled a drink on her sweater, and she immediately, and quite naturally, peeled it off. She wasn't wearing anything underneath, but no one was shocked. Jean was no exhibitionist, just a girl who wanted to get the stain out as quickly as possible. She took the sweater into the bathroom to rinse it, and later I saw her dressed in one of our host's t-shirts.

There were a lot of parties that summer, somwhere to go nearly every weekend. Sometimes we would just go out for drinks, and talk about boys. It wasn't a very deep relationship, but we laughed a lot.

Jean drove a van. I never saw the inside of the van, because when we went out together, she came to my place and parked on the street, and we took my car, or we met at the destination. Looking back, it occurs to me now, as it never did then, that she may have been homeless. She used an answering service for her phone calls. That didn't seem unusual at the time. I knew a lot of actors and others trying to make it in the business who used a service. They thought it was more professional to have their calls answered by a live person rather than a machine. Someone who didn't have a stable phone number (or no phone number at all) could just keep the answering service as a permananent contact number.

Once when Jean and I had been out somewhere and came back to my place, she asked to use my shower. That didn't seem odd to me. The weather was hot, the party had been intense, and she probably felt sweaty and wanted to freshen up before the long drive that would mean arriving home quite late and tired. That long drive home might have been fiction. I had never visited her inconveniently distant apartment. Thinking about it now, I wouldn't be surprised if there was just a special location where she parked the van to sleep.

At some point, Jean moved away. I heard from her nearly a year later. She had been diagnosed with an STD and was calling me as a courtesy because we had once, very briefly, dated the same guy, and she was concerned that I might have been exposed. I was okay, but I thanked her for her consideration. That was the last time we talked.

Random Thoughts

Illustration: The Effects of Chloroform on the Human Body (1912) by Richard Tennant Cooper

Being young is great, but it's not sustainable.

Even if our government had the power to rename the Gulf of Mexico - what a waste of resources that would be. The expense and time-waste of reprinting maps, changing signs, retraining meteorologists to use the new name, etc.

A few years ago, I had a conversation with the plumber who was unclogging the toilet in our vacation rental. He said he used to work for a big hotel. They were using low-flow toilets, and they to deal with clogged toilets daily, at least a dozen per week. When the hotel weas refurbished, they replaced all the toilets. The new ones were also low-flow, but of a different design that flushed more efficiently. They went from a dozen clogs per week to less than 5 per month.

I've seen this effect in my house. When we had to replace a toilet, the one we bought had a promotional sign and video claiming it had the power to flush a bucket of golf balls. I happen to own a bucket of golf balls, and I don't plan to flush them. Even so, it is obvious that this one is powerful. The design matters more than the amount of water. I've seen high-volume toilets that could barely flush a single sheet of toilet paper, and new low-volume models that could do whatever was needed.

I used to be funnier, but the times have worn me down.

I will speak up in defense of paper maps. When we took our big trip around the country, we didn't use paper maps for navigation, but we used them to get the "big picture". We would spread out a map of a region or state (or the entire country) and say: We're going from here to there. What cities and points of interest are on the way? What are the potential side trips? Where will we want to stop for the night? Where are the rivers and mountain ranges? That's information you don't get from the GPS device in your car or phone.

Once upon a time, each U.S. president saw himself as serving or leading ALL citizens, not just small factions of extreme loyalists.