Coastline Pilot/LA TIMES

20 July 2005

 

Chasing the Muse

Catharine Cooper

 

A large wooden box sat amidst the broken remains of my parent’s garage.  Its dark scratched surfaces spoke of years of travel; its loop latch might once have held a lock.  My folks, weary from sorting through 50-some years of accumulation, had disowned themselves of its contents.

 

“No more!” both had verbalized, their storage units filled to capacity.  Especially, not junk from the garage.

 

Charlie wasn’t quite so sure. “There’s stuff in there from 1925,” he said in phone call.  “I think you better take a look.”

 

And so the treasure chest came to me.

 

The musty smell of old permeated the air as I cleared the latch and opened the lid.  Inside, amid the scatter of paper fragments, dust and dead silverfish, lay three scrapbooks and five stuffed manila envelopes.  These remains carefully recorded the teenage years of my mother’s mother, Catherine “Gretchen” Stevenson.

 

I carted the heavy box back to my own home in order to slowly savor its contents. Who was this young woman who had been my grandmother?  What fragments of her life might I pull from her high school and college mementos?  What gracious stroke of luck had led me to this box?

 

I knew Granny Gretchen as one of the tellers at the downtown Long Beach branch of Bank of America.  She had her own cubicle, behind a swinging gate, and a typewriter on a dark wooden desk.  If I was good, she’d let me type when we came to visit.  She lived in Naples, in a Spanish style house with a garden filled with flowers, frogs and a grey cat.  Together we explored the world, via globe and encyclopedia in her home.

 

As I read through her papers, suddenly, she is not my grandmother, but “Dudie” Weber, a high-spirited young woman at Manual Arts High School, with a boyfriend named Champ Culver.  She relished football games - her scrapbook is laden with individual photos of all the players. Class songs, play bills and election flyers have been carefully pasted into book pages. Black and white photographs of her friends make her alive in the moment.

 

Her she is, dressed in tall lace-up boots on a snow trip to Mt. Baldy.  Again I find her, amidst giggly fun, on the top of a human pyramid of six girls at the beach.  Her boyfriend, Champ, gazes with handsome presence over the wheel of an automobile.

 

I would not have known her as “Dudie” without the notes from the autograph section.  The nickname, it appears, was reserved for close friends.  Champ writes, “Dudie, I know what I want to write but I can’t think of the words which will express my thoughts.”  Bob, states that Champ is certainly a lucky guy, and Pete expresses his never-ending affection for her. Willy wrote that she was a “swell all around girl,” while Ruth called her the “dearest girl I know.”

 

Maps and timetables for the Wilmington Transportation Company’s trips to Santa Catalina are included in the book.  In the summer of 1921, a special two-day trip could be booked for $5. This included round trip transportation to and from Avalon, a Glass Bottom boat ride, and one night in an island villa.  This “Gem of the Pacific” was reached via the steamship “Avalon”, and in Catalina Harbor, now known as one part of Two Harbors at the Isthmus, the pirate ship “Ning Po” could be boarded for “the romance of pirate days and maritime adventure.”

 

Of all that she saved, the strangest to me are the cigarettes, half smoked, and pasted into the pages.  Each bears a note of who smoked it.  Empty packs fill out the page - Pallmall, Camel, M. Malanchrino, “111”, Mavis and La Boheme.  These commemorated items certainly speak to the power of tobacco advertising and market infiltration.

 

Dudie went on the attend the University of California, Southern Division. She graduated two years before the name was changed to UCLA, and ground was broken for the Westwood campus. 

 

After graduation, she made application to the Los Angeles School District to teach.  She was granted a position at Luther Burbank School.  Her starting salary was $1150 for 9 ½ months of work.  2¢ stamps decorate a handful of envelopes from the Board of Education, which culminated in her job offer.  Amongst the school related papers is a copy of the “Written Examination of Applicants for Positions as Teachers, Assistant Supervisors of Attendance, Physicians, etc.,” for the Los Angeles city School District.  This is dated July 11, 1925, the date that my father was born.

 

How is it that I had known so little of my grandmother’s life, when she was such a force in mine.  A confidant when times were rough at home, she continually expanded my horizons with our shared explorations of far-away places. 

 

Out of the tragedy and ruin of Flamingo, there have been tremendous gifts.  Thanks Charlie, for your keen eye, and understanding of my proclivity for pieces of my past.  Guess it’s not quite time to toss out my own Laguna Beach High scrapbooks.

 

Catharine Cooper can be reached at 949 497 5081 or ccooper@cooperdesign.net.