Tag Archives: Pasadena

TRAINS

July 30, 2015UncategorizedAMTRAK, bing crosby, California Zephyr, Football game souvenir programs, Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Northern Pacific Railroad, Pasadena, Providence Rhode Island, Railway passenger travel, Rose Bowl, Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, Santa Fe Railroad, Southern Pacific Railroad, The Lark, uc berkeley, Western Pacific Railroadgarymessinger

Every now and then, when I see images of old trains, I ask myself whether there is much interest in that form of travel anymore. Millions of children eagerly watch the television adventures of Thomas the Tank Engine, and some of them may see The Choo Choo Bob Show. On PBS, adults can view documentaries about iconic old routes like the Trans Siberian Express and the Durango narrow gauge mining network in Colorado. But the big excitement for most people relates to other forms of travel such as the space ships in the movie Star Wars, space capsules, and big airplanes like the Boeing 777. Even luxury cruise ships seem to attract more interest than trains.

But perhaps there are still people who appreciate old railroads. I hope so, because I want to talk about the role that trains have played in my life.

I was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1943. I believe that my love of trains began even before I was born. In 1942, my father, then twenty one years old, was in his second year of service in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps, working as an Operating Room Technician at the military hospital in Providence. At the time my mother was still in the East Bay Area of California, where the two of them had grown up, met, and married shortly before the start of the Second World War. When my mother became pregnant, the Navy paid for her and a friend to travel across the United States by train so that I could be born in my father’s presence. I have no conscious memory of that trip, but I am convinced that it was the experience that first made me love to travel by rail.

My mother and I lived in Providence with my father until he was assigned to be the entire medical department on a Navy destroyer that was directed to make its way south through the Panama Canal and then perform combat duty in the Pacific. Then for a while my mother and I lived in New York in the Bronx, where her father, recalled into the Navy, was imparting his experience as a gunnery officer to new recruits at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Shortly thereafter, unaccompanied except by me, my mother made her way back to the East Bay Area. I remember nothing about the trip. But I was told several times while growing up that a passenger on our transcontinental train was Bing Crosby. Insisting on no special treatment, he traveled on crowded troop trains just as my mother and I were doing. At one point my mother happened to be sitting across from him and introduced me. “Pleased to meet you, Gary,” Crosby said. “You know,” he added, “this is a special pleasure. I have a son named Gary.”

My next encounter with travel by rail occurred when I was eight years old. My mother, my five-year-old sister, and I were living in the Bay Area and my father was at sea on a Navy transport serving in the Korean War. We got word that his ship would be anchored for the summer of 1951 in San Diego Harbor and that it would be possible for the four of us to live together in San Diego during that time. My father came up to the Bay Area from San Diego to accompany us on the train trip south.

We put some of our belongings in storage, packed the rest in suitcases, and were driven to the railway station in Oakland by my mother’s parents. They waved goodbye to us as we boarded an enormous, chugging Southern Pacific passenger train, The Lark, to take us south. It is my first conscious memory of riding overnight in a rail passenger car — the lights passing by us outside the window of our safe compartment, the sounds of whistles and of bells at crossings, the constant rocking motion, the buttons and doors and secret spaces inside the compartment, the smell of fresh bed linen, and the certainty, whenever the porter answered our buzzer, that we were royalty.

For my sister and me, the summer in San Diego was hot and boring. I did enjoy some fascinating visits to my father’s ship and the harbor area. But otherwise I was anxious to leave.

Finally at the end of the summer we received news that we would be returning to the Bay Area where my father would be stationed at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo. Within the week, we were on our way north. This time we went by plane. I had never flown before. The experience was an adventure. I even had the good luck to be invited into the cockpit and sit in the pilot’s lap and pretend I was steering. You would not be allowed to do that today. We were on Pacific Southwest Airlines, which had been founded by a World War II pilot and was only a couple of years old at the time. The owner happened to be acting as the co-pilot that day. He was fond of children and also knew how to please customers. But the most interesting thing to me about the flight, looking back, is that it did not enchant me the way my first train trip had.

After a few months at Mare Island, we got word that my father was being assigned to go north by ship to the Navy base in Bremerton on the west side of Puget Sound, where he would be serving at the large naval hospital. My mother, my sister and I would take the train north and move into the base housing that was being arranged for our family.

My mother’s parents, by that time relocated to the East Bay, drove us to the Southern Pacific station in Oakland where my mother, my sister and I boarded a train that went all the way east to Salt Lake City. There we transferred to the Northern Pacific line and made the rest of the journey to Seattle. The Southern Pacific train was sleek and modern. The Northern Pacific train was in good condition but very old in its decor, most noticeably in the dining car which had walls of brown wood, brass lamps on each table and red, cut glass chandeliers. This was my first encounter with fingerbowls. When the waiter put them on our table I thought they were rose-flavored cups of water for us to drink and I was lucky that my mother explained them to me in time.

The last and final train trip of my early boyhood was the return journey from Seattle to the Bay Area after we had lived in Bremerton for about two and one half years. From that time on there was no need for long distance family travel because my father was able to get tours of duty at various Navy installations in San Francisco and Oakland.

My next train trip was therefore voluntary. In 1959, when I was in the tenth grade at Berkeley High School, my best friend Steve and I got jobs selling souvenir programs on Saturdays during the UC-Berkeley football season. We were good at it. So, when the news swept the Bay Area that Cal’s great football team would be going to the Rose Bowl, the supervisor of program sales invited Steve and me to be part of the small group of high school students who could hawk our wares in Pasadena.

Steve’s parents arranged for us to stay with friends of his family in Los Angeles. Soon thereafter we were on board a Southern Pacific train heading south. The trip took about twelve hours. It went down the Central Valley, stopping at numerous farm towns with names I found exotic, like Tipton, Tulare and Cucamonga. During a long, flat portion of the trip we went through the southern portion of the San Joaquin Valley at speeds of ninety miles per hour. The track bed was old and seemed not to be in good repair. Our train vibrated precariously but gave us all a good adventure.

The train had a couple of Vista Dome cars, the kind that were always featured in ads in the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines of the era. The cars provided the part of the trip that was the most fun. They were filled with UC Berkeley students and several young musicians. Most wore white wool sweaters decorated with blue and gold UC Berkeley insignia. Everybody sang the famous Cal drinking song: “California, California, the hills give off their cry, we’re out to do or die, California, California, we’ll win the game or know the reason why.” This is just a part of the lyrics. The whole song takes around ten minutes; longer if you are drunk. Many of the students drank beer as they sang. Steve and I ordered Coca Cola.

After the Rose Bowl and a few days with Steve’s family friends, it was time to take the train back to the Bay Area. This trip was quiet. Everybody was tired. I slept part of the way but also managed to catch up on reading for my high school World History class.

My next big train trip occurred in 1964. I spent the summer of that year in Washington DC as a college intern at The Pentagon, thanks to a wonderful, generous program called Stanford in Washington. At the end of the summer, I drove across the country to Mesa, Arizona, with a college friend who lived there, and then boarded a Santa Fe train to take me north to the East Bay. There was a flash flood in the desert along the way, adding three extra hours to our trip while the train proceeded slowly and cautiously at each large gulley. The high point of the journey was the conductor. He had taught himself the history of the area and told us fascinating stories as he stood at the front of the our car and pointed out sights.

My last experience with train travel as it used to be came in 1971, after I got my Ph.D. in History at Harvard and returned to the Bay Area to look for a job. Because I needed several months to find employment, I had a lot of spare time. I spent a great deal of it with a classmate from Stanford, Bill Moore, who was working as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Bill had grown up in Arizona and had numerous memories of old trains. He had flair and an amazing ability to attract groups of people for bizarre adventures. One of his favorite activities was to organize Bar Car Expeditions. We would board the southbound Southern Pacific train in Oakland, have many drinks and tell stories in the bar car, enjoys the views of the brown hills dotted with Live Oak trees, get off in Santa Barbara, wait twenty minutes, and then board the northbound SP train to take us back to Oakland. The scenery was gorgeous, the drinks were excellent, and the shared feeling of friendship was memorable.

That’s about it. After 1971, when I got my own car, there was little need to travel by train. And I didn’t really want to travel that way. The old passenger lines like the Southern Pacific, the Northern Pacific and the Santa Fe went out of business and were replaced by AMTRAK. I do ride on AMTRAK from time to time and I feel a stubborn form of nostalgia whenever I do so. But it isn’t the same.

While he was a reporter at the Chronicle, and before he became Managing Editor of the Sacramento Bee, Bill Moore won a prize for an article he wrote about the last run of the famous Western Pacific train the California Zephyr. I never had the pleasure of riding on the Zephyr, but I sometimes encounter it in my dreams.

The California Zephyr in its later years

THE GRAND DADDY OF THEM ALL

March 9, 2015UncategorizedCollege football, First Rose Bowl game, Joe Kapp, Pasadena, Pete Elliott, Rose Bowl game, Rose Parade, Rose Parade floats, Rose Parade on television, uc berkeley, University of Iowagarymessinger

This last January, on New Year’s Day, I turned on my television set and watched the Pasadena Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl Game, as I have been doing, I recently realized, for more than half a century. For me, as for millions of others who have watched or attended the game and the parade over the decades, this New Year’s Day ritual is part of my identity and the culture of my country. Like anything that is deep in one’s consciousness, watching the parade and the game is for me almost an unreflective act. It is simply part of who I am. In recent years, however, I have begun to sense how much the whole thing has been changing, and how much the changes reveal about American life. I first heard the words “Rose Bowl” in the early 1950s, around age eleven, when my family and I lived in Berkeley and my young friends and I made the trek, on Saturdays in the Fall, to the University of California campus, where the ticket takers at the football stadium let us into the games for free. Midst all the cheering and pageantry and exciting plays, there was always speculation whether Cal would “go to the Rose Bowl,” even though, in most years, the team did not.

But in 1959 Cal did make it to the Rose Bowl, led by their All-American quarterback Joe Kapp and their great coach Pete Elliott, who had installed a “Split T” offense that gave his talented players an advantage over teams that relied upon the less deceptive, traditional “T” offense or the brawny, simple-minded “Single Wing” formation. This happened to be the season when, at age 15, with my best friend Steve, I had a job selling football programs before each game. When the news came that Cal would be going to the Rose Bowl, Steve and I learned that we were among the top sales boys and would be eligible to sell programs in Pasadena and would probably be able by this means to earn enough to pay for our travel, with free admission to the game guaranteed. When the time came, Steve and I took the Southern Pacific train down to Los Angeles where we stayed with friends of his family. From there we made our way via a combination of buses and old trolley cars to Pasadena, where we encountered an almost deserted Colorado Avenue and learned that we had arrived too late to see the Rose Parade. But we were early enough to arrive at the stadium well before the game, and to make a good profit as sales boys. The game itself was disappointing in some ways. We did get free admission, but had to sit in the aisles on the cement stairs because all the regular seats were for paying customers. The location of our seats was a long way from the field, the players looked like dots, and it was difficult to follow the action. The stadium itself felt very old, with its weathered, splintery timbers, and lighting that proved to be inadequate as twilight neared. Worst of all, Cal lost to Iowa. But the pageantry was unbeatable, and I still cherish the fact that I can say I once actually went to the Rose Bowl. The Rose Bowl game at that time was still frequently referred to as “the grand daddy of them all,” in honor of the fact that, having begun in 1902, it was the oldest bowl game. It was truly a national event. At the same time, it was an integral part of the identity of the state of California, an affirmation of pride in a vibrant region of the country. But things have changed over the years. Los Angeles no longer has its old trolley cars. The Southern Pacific railroad no longer exists, and the view cars you get on today’s AMTRAK are no rivals for the old Vista Dome that was proudly featured in every SP magazine ad. Today, if you make the journey to the Rose Bowl game, you are likely to fly or, thanks to much better highways and upscale motels, to drive. And today, in probably the biggest change of all, the Rose Bowl game occupies a much different place in national life. It is no longer a good-natured competition between two regions, the Pacific Coast Conference and the Big Ten of the Midwest. It is now a way station on the road to the National Championship. And the announcers for the game no longer project a feeling of being in people’s homes as part of a family gathering. Instead, the phrasing and accompanying toughness of voice is mostly about who has just “made the hit,” who is “dominant,” and who “is a contender for the pros.” The Rose Parade, likewise, is a more high-pressure event. The amounts spent by corporations to create prize-winning floats are enormous. The television announcers do little more than read from their briefing books. There are just as many plugs for TV network shows during the parade as there are actual commercial during the breaks.

Some things do remain the same, of course. There are smiling boys and girls in marching bands drawn from all around the world. The local community service clubs sponsor floats. There are the numerous, very happy queens and princesses and sub-princesses. The military bands play the rousing songs. The mounted horse formations strut their stuff in their ornate Spanish costumes. The floats, even today, continue to be made from all natural materials: seven thousand petunias, four thousand and twelve zinnias, six hundred begonias carefully intermixed with orchids to form a faithful representation of the solar system.

The Rose Bowl that I knew as a boy was by no means perfect. To take two examples: The press never talked about the fact that Cal’s star quarterback, Joe Kapp, was the product of a troubled childhood in a racially segregated community. By sanitizing his biography to make him into a mainstream American, the press diminished Kapp’s achievement. Nor was it disclosed, until a couple of years later, that Cal’s seemingly upright coach, Pete Elliott, had been breaking the rules with regard to players’ financial aid. But I do believe something has been lost over the years as the Rose Bowl has become like the world of professional football. Someday, I’m sure, a few decades from now, someone who is the age I am now will look back with nostalgia on the Rose Bowl of today. That will be OK, I suppose, as long as the petunias and the zinnias continue to be all-natural.

THE CASE OF THE MULTIPLE MASONS

January 19, 2015UncategorizedBarbara Hale, Defense attorneys, Denver, Detective stories, Donald Woods, Erle Stanley Gardner, Hamilton Burger, Harvard Law School, hollywood, Los Angeles County Courthouse, Lt. Tragg, Mystery writers, Pasadena, Paul Drake, Perry Mason, Ray Collins, Raymond Burr, Temecula, Ventura, Warner Bros., Warren William, William Hopper, William Talmangarymessinger

In 1965, during the first of my six years studying for a Ph.D. in History at Harvard, I lived in an on-campus residential complex that housed around 600 students. Perhaps one-third of them were at the Law School. I soon noticed that, each weekday evening from 5 to 6 pm, nearly all of the Law students were gathered in the residence hall common rooms to watch the mesmerizing trial lawyer Perry Mason on the small black and white television sets provided there. Then, a few minutes after 6, with Perry Mason’s courtroom legerdemain concluded, the law students proceeded, as in a herd, to the nearby cafeteria for dinner, animatedly discussing the just finished episode as they walked.

In conversations with those students, a large number admitted that Perry Mason was their reason for wanting to become attorneys. From a young age they had watched the TV show and they wanted to pursue careers inspired by his example.

This was the start of my own interest in Perry Mason. I didn’t want to be an attorney, but I was fascinated by the Perry Mason cultural phenomenon.

The creator of Perry Mason, Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970), was born in Malden, Massachusetts. At the time of his death he was the best-selling American author of the twentieth century. Gardner is best known for the Perry Mason stories, but he also wrote many other successful crime stories under pseudonyms such as A. A. Fair and Robert Parr, and travel essays about Baja California, a region that fascinated him.

Gardner’s father was a mining engineer who moved the family from place to place as jobs required. Gardner eventually landed in Palo Alto where he graduated high school in 1909. Gardner then enrolled in law study at Valparaiso University in Indiana but left after one month because of poor grades, caused in part by too great an interest in boxing. He moved back to California, got a job as a secretary at a law office in Oxnard, studied at night, passed the state bar exam in 1911, and married in 1912. He opened a law office in Merced in 1917, and then in 1921 joined a law firm in Ventura where he worked until 1933. In 1937 he moved to Temecula where he lived for the rest of his life.

Gardner liked trial work but was otherwise bored by law practice. In his spare time he wrote for the many pulp magazines of the era, such as Black Mask, Argosy, and Dime Detective, publishing his first story in 1927. In the early 1930s, Gardner wrote a series of six stories for Black Mask about a crusading defense attorney; these were probably the basis for the Perry Mason character. The first Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, was published in 1933. The Mason series eventually ran to more than 80 novels and gained a very large international readership. Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels enjoyed sales of more than 100 million copies during his lifetime. Gardner wrote with amazing speed. In the early days he typed out his stories using two fingers. Later he dictated to a team of secretaries. He was, nevertheless, a careful author. He worked out every novel in longhand outline before starting to write.

Many authors, including Rex Stout, regarded the Perry Mason stories as hackwork. But some writers disagreed. For example, the English author Evelyn Waugh declared approvingly that Gardner was the best living American writer, and the famed detective story writer H. R. F. Keating thought very highly of Gardner’s work.

The character of Mason has undergone many changes over the years. Mason was hardboiled at first but in some later stories was softened by Gardner so that the novels could appear in serialized form in the family magazine The Saturday Evening Post.

Large modifications occurred when Perry Mason appeared in a series of Hollywood movies produced by Warner Brothers in the 1930s and 1940s. One distracting element was the almost total lack of awareness of a sense of place, noticeable in the first two films, The Case of the Howling Dog (1934) and The Case of the Curious Bride (1935) starring Warren William as Mason.

Weak awareness of place was conspicuous as well in The Case of the Black Cat (1936) with Ricardo Cortez as Mason and in The Case of the Stuttering Bishop (1937) with Donald Woods as Mason. There is very little in the films to convey the fact that Mason operated in Los Angeles. Mason works out of a tall office building that is indeed in downtown Los Angeles, but feels more like an office building in 1920s Manhattan. When scenes shift to more suburban locations, the story feels incoherent, as if it is missing one of its major characters, namely the city of Los Angeles itself.

The films also stray from the novelistic emphasis upon the steadfastness of the Mason character. Warren William seems like a playboy and constantly flirts with his secretary Della Street, who is a girl Friday and good friend in the novels. In one of the films Mason even proposes marriage to Della. Ricardo Cortez coveys too much of an ethereal quality and relies too much on his haunting voice, making Mason overly mysterious and not at all solid or logical. Donald Woods as Mason is overly clerical, hard to distinguish from the bishop mentioned in his film’s title. Given such drawbacks, it is easy to see why Erle Stanley Gardner never liked the way Warner Brothers treated his creation.

Perry Mason was the lead character in a very popular radio program, which ran from 1943 to 1955. Mason also appeared in a popular comic strip from 1950 to 1952. In both formats the character was generally faithful to Gardner’s original conception.

An old time radio, probably from the 1940s, with a Perry Mason paperback, probably from the early 1950s

The TV series began in 1955 and continued to 1966. There have been reruns continually ever since, along with expansions into DVD and other formats. Raymond Burr originally auditioned for the role of District Attorney Hamilton Burger in the TV series, but Gardner persuaded producers to cast him as Mason. Burr had begun acting in the 1930s, appearing first in stage roles and then in films ranging from Biblical epics to film noir productions to science fiction offerings. Burr had the stocky body of a Turkish wrestler, haunting eyes, and a deep, resonant voice that could convey both compassion and menace. He also projected a quick, powerful mind. Fans loved him.

Raymond Burr as Perry Mason and Barbara Hale as Della Street

The TV series of the Burr years very much conveyed the sense of place that had sometimes been lost in earlier versions of the Mason stories. One knew that one was unmistakably in the Los Angeles of the late 1950s and early and mid-1960s. Mason’s cases take him to aircraft factories in the area, Hollywood-style mansions, the Navy base at nearby Long Beach, small businesses in the downtown area, local restaurants, and cabins and lakes in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains that were known to be frequent weekend getaway spots for Los Angeles residents. In almost every episode there are establishing shots of the Los Angeles County Courthouse, where Mason works his courtroom magic and also sometimes visits his clients in jail. And Mason’s office is definitely in the Los Angeles of the era. We know this because of the view through his office window, which shows a skyline of new, boxy, steel and glass buildings of the kind being hastily constructed all over Southern California at that time. Nor should we forget the buxom women, the hunky men, and the sleek, long cars dripping with chrome that evoke Hollywood as it was back then.

After conclusion of the Burr-based Mason series in 1966, a TV revival, entitled The New Perry Mason, ran from 1973 to 1974, with Monte Markham as the title character. Markham conveyed intellectual penetration but lacked the stolidity that viewers had come to expect from Raymond Burr’s interpretation. His series did not last.

After his first stint in the Mason role, Burr began a new TV show, Ironside, in which he plays a wheelchair-bound detective based in San Francisco who mentors and directs a team of younger assistants. The series ran from 1967 to 1975 and was a hit worldwide.

After Ironside ended, and in response to continuing demand, a series of 26 made for TV movies, beginning with The Return of Perry Mason, and starring Burr in the title role, ran from 1985 until Burr’s death in 1993. For this series the locale was moved from Los Angeles to Denver to save on production costs. The Denver backdrop was scenic but added little to the atmosphere of the stories. Filming the show in color may also have been a problem. The black and white format of the original TV series had a Manichean feel that the Denver stories lacked. The series was successful mainly because of the legendary status by that time of both Burr and his co-star, Barbara Hale, who continued in her role as Della Street. Other major actors from the original TV show (William Talman as Hamilton Burger, Ray Collins as Lt. Tragg, and William Hopper as private detective Paul Drake) were by that time deceased.

The Perry Mason novels continue to sell well, and the TV shows are re-played around the world. I do not know if young law students still turn to Perry Mason as their career model. And yet, over the years, every time I have had dealings with an attorney, I have, in the manner of Perry Mason, had my suspicions.