My Father's Memoirs Part 5 (Echo Park Lake and the Swan)

NOTE: This is a series of my late father's writings, which I promised to publish to the web.

Other parts can be found here:

Introduction

Part 1 (WWII, Hot Peppers, and the Accident)

Part 2 (A Murder and the Chinese Restaurant Revenge)

Part 3 (No Bologna on Fridays)

Part 4 (Trips to Downtown L.A.)

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As I sip my coffee before daylight this day in my quiet time, names of places in the great city come back to me: Amies Temple and Echo Park Lake. All I remember about Amies Temple was a big building, but Echo Park then was a whole different thing. You were not allowed to fish in the Park Lake where we would go for picnics, but Dad would make dough balls like Mom made biscuits, only he rolled them up into little tiny balls with cotton inside. I never did figure out why fish liked to eat cotton. Anyway, we didn't have fish hooks small enough to catch bluegills. So we just used safety pins and a piece of string. Most of them got away but we put the ones we caught back anyway, so it didn't make any difference. I was learning how to catch fish.

There were beautiful white swans swimming in the lake and I heard Dad say one day, "I wonder if you could eat a swan." And Mom said, "Hush, you silly man. They are too beautiful to kill and eat." But a wonderful thing happened one Christmas in the city of angels.

It seems a poor man had nothing to make a nice Christmas dinner for his family, so he caught one of those swans and the police caught him and put him in jail. There was a story in the newspaper and all of Los Angeles read about this poor man and his family. That Christmas, the city of angels earned its name as the people poured their hearts out, and the man's family had toys and food and all kinds of wonderful things. It could only happen in the city of angels.