4 March 2008
Let’s look at changes made by progress in this country. I’d like to invite you to take a little trip with me down MY memory lane. My parents moved from New York City to Los Angeles in 1929 when I was six months old. I was a child of the depression. My father found jobs here and there, never for very long, and while we never had any kind of public assistance, this was pre FDR, things were pretty lean. To this day I cannot eat canned tuna. At ten cents a can it was a cheap source of protein. My mother didn’t have much imagination in preparing it and we had creamed tuna several times a week either on toast or mashed potatoes. It was filling and I don’t remember ever feeling hungry. Liver was given away free and once a week I was sent to the butcher shop for liver for our cat. We didn’t have a cat but we had fried liver and onions once a week. As a nice change from tuna, I grew to like it.
Gasoline was cheap and a big Sunday outing was a drive in our very old Ford. Within a few minutes we were out in the country. I can remember the sweet smell as we drove thru orange groves and past small truck farms run by Japanese Americans. December 7th 1941 changed our lives. My father went to work in a shipyard and the Japanese were taken from their farms and put in interment camps in nearby states. Relocation to me was very unjust and a big mistake of a previous administration. I lost my friend, a Japanese classmate and I really couldn’t understand why she was sent away as she and her extended family were very gentle people.
Gasoline rationing stopped our Sunday drives. At that time we didn’t know what smog was. Progress soon changed that. I went east in 1948 and when I returned in 1955 I couldn’t recognize my beautiful LA. It was gone forever. Several freeways were built while I was gone and I could hardly find my parents house the day we returned. People had flocked to the Los Angeles area, during the war years, to work in the aircraft industry and the shipyards and stayed. Smog arrived in full force. More progress and people’s health soon started paying the price. With bumper to bumper traffic there were no more lazy Sunday pleasure drives. Another loss due to progress.
By summer of 1960, with six children, we decided that LA was not a good place to raise a family so we moved to the Pacific Northwest. What a wonderful change, fresh clean air and great things to do outdoors. Little did I realized then, what progress would do to our new city of Seattle.
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