When the family car, the ’52 Plymouth Cranbrook, finally gave out, Dad gave no thought to a Jag or a Mercedes. He splurged on a new car for the first time in his life, but it was a red Chevy Nova Super Sport in candy-apple red. Dad was proud to own a new car and even prouder that he paid for it in cash. Somewhere along the way, Mom got a new car, too, a big, bulky Plymouth whose yellow body was pocked with parking-lot dings within a few months of its being in her possession. She was a solid driver but the other Burbank moms who frequented the local supermarkets were not.
We rarely went on vacation, busy as we all were with work. When we did, our trips were austere affairs. One of our reliable destinations was the Apple Valley Inn, located in the high desert a hundred miles from Burbank. The resort was run by Roy Rogers, who tried to do for Apple Valley what Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra had done for Palm Springs. It never quite took. Maybe the cold, thirty-mph nighttime winds were too much for the Rat Pack. But Dad loved the inn’s western kitsch, the decorative wagon wheels and wood paneling. He was in his element, and his happiness at Apple Valley was contagious.
CORDOVA STREET WAS nevertheless a big step up for us. Within a few blocks stood the entire world that Ron and I occupied when we weren’t working and just being kids. Two blocks away was Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary School, a campus of low postwar buildings and wide-open asphalt and grass playgrounds. You name it, we played it at recess: softball, basketball, kickball, dodgeball. I never understood the appeal of dodgeball. It seemed unnecessarily cruel, with some poor kid, usually a nerd, getting whacked in the face with the ball.
A few blocks past Stevenson was a public parks and recreation center, Verdugo Park, which had a gym where Ron shot baskets at every opportunity. I still live a few minutes away from the site of our ancestral pile. With the exception of our house, which has since been torn down and replaced with a McMansion, very little has changed.
Mom didn’t really like to cook, though we did eat at home most of the time. Meatloaf, ham, hamburgers, hot dogs, and fish sticks were the regulars in her rotation of entrées. The vegetables came out of a can, though Mom, to her credit, knew how to whip up some tasty mashed potatoes. Mac and cheese was a side dish almost every night. It’s amazing that Dad kept his weight at a consistent 173 pounds, a number he proudly reported to us whenever he stepped off the scale.
We also dined out a fair amount, too. The local Sizzler, part of a chain that had only been founded a few years earlier in Culver City, was a go-to spot. Once in a while, we went to the Kings Arms, a medieval-themed luxury restaurant where there was a sword set in stone by the front entrance. Ron and I drank Shirley Temples there. Between the sugar high from those, the cartoons that I had seen about King Arthur’s court, and the Olde English interior decor, I was often motivated to make a dramatic scene of trying to pull that sword out for laughs.
My fondest early memory of brotherhood is of jumping out of bed, before Mom and Dad were up, to join Ron in the hallway, where he lay stretched out near the wall heater, absorbing the Los Angeles Times’s sports section. After our dog Gulliver died, Mom and Dad got us a cat, who we named Mitts because he had an extra pinkie claw that made him look like he was wearing a catcher’s mitt. Ron woke up early to feed Mitts. After that, he brought the newspaper in. I liked to climb onto Ron’s back as he studied the box scores aloud and recounted the highlights from the Dodgers game. Snugly in place atop my big brother, my blond head peering out over his red head, I listened intently as he narrated to me what Don Drysdale, Maury Wills, Tommy Davis, and his beloved Sandy Koufax had done the night before.
There was no safer feeling: the warmth of that heater, the softness of our PJs, the encouraging voice of my brother as he taught me how the game worked.
RON
I loved that sensation of Clint’s weight on my back, and of having someone to evangelize to about my beloved Dodgers. Dad was athletic but never cared much for team sports, being a product of the lonesome prairie. His things were boxing, wrestling, and horseback riding.
I was so successful at explaining batting averages and other baseball statistics to Clint that the teachers at Stevenson Elementary believed that he was a math prodigy. He was bringing some of my lessons into the classroom at kindergarten level. Someone from the school called my parents and said, “He doesn’t just know his numbers, he understands the concepts of multiplication, division, and percentages.”