A West Coast Kid in Massachusetts (Part I): Promised Lands

The following is the first of a series drawn from memories of Massachusetts as a young boy. Although I grew up in Southern California during the 1950s, I traveled to Massachusetts several times with my mother. She referred to the West as the "frontier"; she called Boston, Massachusetts, "home."

In 1937, a doctor told my grandfather that his health was declining with a failing heart. He suggested that his middle-aged patient leave a successful grocery wholesale business in Marshall, Missouri, and move west to sunny California. This medical advice, not unique in those days, brought many Midwest families to California to seek health and new fortune. Many settled in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles. My grandfather cashed out and bought a 45-acre citrus ranch there and my father and brother agreed to learn and run the business. So it happened that my grandfather, grandmother and their two sons set out for new adventures with probably much the same enthusiasm as earlier Missourians in covered wagons headed for the Promised Land.

The ranch prospered in a then bucolic San Fernando Valley and my grandfather's health improved. After my father and uncle returned from service in World War II, the ranch expanded into the poultry business. Again this was not unique to those times; there were many poultry and citrus enterprises in the new land of milk and honey or more appropriately, eggs and oranges. In those halcyon Valley days, Hollywood boomed just "over the hill", the California aqueduct brought water to Los Angeles and a great post-War migration to the west began.

During the war my father enlisted in the Navy and because of his age and educational background entered a "90-Day Wonder Program" at the Navy base in Norfolk, Virginia, designed to rapidly expand a Naval officer corps. He met my mother there who at the time worked for the Naval Submarine Research Laboratories as a secretary. My mother came from Boston, Massachusetts, although the story is not quite that simple. Her parents had emigrated from Norway to America, passing through Ellis Island the gateway to yet another Promised Land. Settling at first in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, tragedy came in quick succession to these new Americans. My mother's brother died suddenly of Leukemia and her mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis. In those days, tuberculosis meant a trip for life to the sanitarium and my grandfather quickly headed back to Norway. Without the chance for a second son, Old World ways were a force greater than the plight of a young daughter in a foreign land. My abandoned mother grew up in foster homes in Massachusetts and by singular resolve excelled in her studies to eventually become a successful executive secretary in Boston. The timing of this makes that accomplishment even more significant. My mother landed her first job during the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929. She would tell me in later years of witnessing a man jump from a tall building during a bus ride to her first job interview. Her enduring words were, "If I could get a job under those circumstances, you can always find a job if you're willing to work!"

Hard work as a secretary in Boston's business district was the not the dream of this strong young woman. She had taken classes in drama and art, but the hard realities of those times trumped the desires of a creative spirit. It would take many years to rekindle those spirits but under enormously different circumstances. She would eventually marry a successful Boston businessman who was on his way to make a "Million" by his thirties. This was a mark of "having arrived" in Boston society in those days and the mark apparently became more important than a wife and thoughts of family. Divorce followed and my strong and adventurous mother decided that a trip to Europe in 1939 would provide the elixir for new beginnings. Again timing was everything in my poor mother's life. I remember great stories of her being hassled by obnoxious Nazi tourists on a Mediterranean cruise and a bold train trip through Switzerland to avoid the clutch of war.

Back safely again in the States, and for reasons not completely clear to me, my mother eventually ended up working at the Naval Submarine Research Laboratories in Norfolk. After meeting a proud graduating Lieutenant j.g., she and my father took the train to San Francisco to marry. The honeymoon was short. The next day after marriage, my mother and many other women in a similar circumstance went to the top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel at the crest of Nob Hill. There they sadly watched their men pass under the Golden Gate Bridge on their way to war.

The next in the Series: Part II  Part III 

Cheers,

Colonel Possum

19 June 2006