The Angel of Olvera Street

It was my Irish Catholic grandmother from Missouri, a refugee from the Dust Bowl, who first turned my attention to the work of Leo Politi.  She loved his books and paintings, and that was strange.  She did not seem to find much connection with the Latinos that populated her adopted city, but maybe in their search for gainful employment on the farms up and down the state they triggered some empathy with what she knew in her life, the life of the farm, its hardships and difficulties and back-breaking labor.

Politi was born in the central valley farming town of Fresno in 1908.  His parents were Italian and they owned a vineyard there and raised horses.  During the Great War, the Politi family returned to their native land taking six year old Leo away from his American life but they could not stop him from drawing.  He drew on every piece of paper he could find and at fifteen, won a scholarship to study art.

In 1931, at the tender age of twenty-two, Leo returned to California and fell in love with a young waitress named Helen Fontes.  While she brought customers their dinner orders, Leo sketched her.  He bought her a ring at Woolworth’s for fifteen cents.  Married and living in Los Angeles, Leo began drawing and painting the people and shops on the most famous Latino street in the city, Olvera Street, which is now a well-known tourist attraction.  His work morphed into illustrated children’s books, and he won many awards, including the prestigious Caldecott Medal in 1950 for his book, The Song of the Swallows.  His work celebrated not only the Latino community he found on the street, but the vibrant colors of the cultural milieu.  He particularly loved the yellows, the browns, the burnt sienna sunsets, all earth tones and village color palettes of Latino heritage going back to Mexico, Central America, and South America.  Politi seemed to connect with that culture, steeped in Catholicism and Church rituals.  His scenes came from the pueblo, the early days of Los Angeles, rich with music and dance and crafts.  For his love of Latino culture, he is a unique figure in California art, a true treasure of the city.  However, during his lifetime, he was often poor and destitute, and he sold some of his work for pennies just to provide his family with food and clothing.  His work now is worth much more.

Politi died in 1996.  According to his obituary in the Los Angeles Times, “a park near Dodger Stadium bears his name, as does an elementary school in the Pico-Union district” not far from the special street he loved.  The article goes on to say that like his subjects, Politi was always “simple and humble.”

I recently acquired new copies of four books I remembered from my grandmother’s library.  They are the most celebrated children’s stories of Leo Politi published by Getty Publications.  The tales are simple and heartwarming, but at first I thought they could just as easily be too naïve, too simple.  I remember, over the years, hearing that some Latino activists were up-in-arms over the depiction of the simple Mexican characters in the books.  This is a miscasting of Politi’s work.  His Los Angeles, however, is an idealized place, a small pueblo where people supported each other in their small businesses and looked out for one another in daily life.  I find Politi’s books no different than Thornton Wilder’s Our Town or his fellow artist from Fresno, William Saroyan and his Ithaca as portrayed in the novel The Human Comedy.  These fictional towns like the Los Angeles in Politi’s work are based on truth.  They are the places denoting a simpler time, but the naiveté they portray does not negate their importance to the American narrative.  The story of America is the story of small towns, and turning those long ago places into sepia memories is part of American history.

In Pedro The Angel of Olvera Street (1946), a young boy with a gift for song prepares with his community for the coming Christmas holiday.  The Latino businesses and the people of the community pull together to put on the yearly Christmas pageant.  Olvera Street becomes a stand-in for Bethlehem, and the tradition of Las Posadas is re-enacted in a beautiful candle-lit ceremony through the streets.  For this book, Politi was a runner-up for the Caldecott Medal in 1946.  He would go on to win the award for Song of the Swallows (1950), the illustrated story of the swallows returning each March to the Mission San Juan Capistrano.  Juanita (1948) was a Caldecott runner-up and details the Easter celebration on Olvera Street through the eyes of a daughter of a shop keeper.  Emmet (1971) is the story of a wayward pooch who causes trouble in the neighborhood but winds up saving lives when fire breaks out.

All the books are beautifully illustrated in the vibrant colors of Politi’s best work.  They are treasures to have and hold, and I am so happy Getty Publications has reissued them in hardback editions.  Leo Politi is Los Angeles’ own painter and story teller, an artist who has left a lasting impression on the city.  Olvera Street might seem a little too touristy today, even a little tacky, but it is part of the history of the city.  Today it exists as a Mexican marketplace that tries to preserve that history in modern times.  It is well worth the time to walk the streets Politi walked and see the sights, sounds and smells he tried to capture in his most vibrant work.

That Distant Rumble

Every morning at almost exactly 6:30, a bird alights on the balcony outside my living room window.  He sings a quick melody, a pass through a whistling pattern of notes, at most thirty to forty-five seconds.  Then he is gone.  The light continues to unfold.  Day breaks.  The bird returns each day, letting me know as I sleepily drink my first cup of coffee, that it is time to get moving.  I consider this fine feathered friend a good omen, a welcomed greeting to the fresh page of a new day.

But I could be very wrong.

The bird is singing out of season.  His trill each day would be more common in April, May or June, but it is only February.  Why has he started practicing so early for spring?  Maybe because we have had no winter here, and barely measurable rain.  Day time temps are in the 80s, and the mercury drops no lower than 50 degrees overnight.  Los Angeles is a desert, saved from arid wasteland by William Mulholland’s aqueduct and his theft of water from the Owens Valley two hundred or more miles to the north.  This year is a dry one, even by L.A. standards.  It is abnormal in a city that relishes its strange and manufactured image.

People laugh and talk about how great it is to live in L.A., even as they watch the snow cascade down upon the rest of the country.  No polar vortex here.  This is the land of make-believe, but the nightmare lingers in the shifting earth, the dwindling water supply, and the bird’s song outside my window each morning, all of which could be signs of a region desperately out of sorts.  Deny all you want, but something is wrong here, and nearly everywhere else on the globe.  Climate change is present with insidious consequences.  I never liked the personification of Mother Nature.  No, she is not angry.  That’s too rational, too simple.

Talk about the wrong book to be reading in this mood!  Some of my concern has been fueled by reading Five Days at Memorial:  Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Crown, 2013) by journalist Sheri Fink.  This is the story of Memorial Medical Center, New Orleans in the days immediately following Hurricane Katrina.  It is a harrowing, brutal, apocalyptic story, and it scares the hell out of me.  No American city, no hospital in this twenty-first century in a first world nation should be knocked out so completely and horrendously.  This is primal stuff, and I wonder if animals might have more instinct and intuition to survive better than the characters in Fink’s reportage.  It is, even with solid writing, an unimaginable tale.  How could this happen?

I’ll tell you.  One, we are not prepared for the complete devastation of such cataclysmic proportions.  Two, there is really no way to be prepared for such a crisis because collapsing infrastructure creates a cascade failure that ripples out beyond the region of the disaster.  There were not enough boats, there were not enough helicopters, and there was limited real estate to land either craft.  The folks at the hospital had not used the helipad for years, so they were not even sure the platform would hold the weight of the aircraft.  Patients could not easily be transported to the helicopters that did land.  Everything was under water.  There was misdirection, miscommunication, mishandling—the whole thing was a miss and a mess, coupled with gunfire, strange encounters with dangerous people, looting of buildings, unreliable law enforcement, and the threat of even greater catastrophe due to a lack of resources and clean water.

Then, of course, as Fink explains in painful and frightening detail, the doctors decided to play God.  I’m not judging here, because things were beyond desperate in the hospital.  In the face of dwindling hope and significant anarchy, doctors and nurses injected several terminal, suffering patients marked “Do Not Resuscitate” with a lethal dose of morphine and muscle relaxers which most likely eased their way out of this life.  A grand jury declined to charge the health care professionals involved in the case.

Whether or not the doctors and nurses were wrong in administering the fatal doses, or if they were in ethical error for helping their suffering patients off this mortal coil, we cannot help but see the overwhelming tragedy and horror in the situation.  The ethical debate is a subject for another essay.  But what really frightened me about this case as I read Fink’s book is that what happened in the fetid corridors of Memorial Medical Center could happen anywhere in the U.S.  All it takes is the right disaster.  The possibilities are endless and the probability of something like that happening almost certain.

Here in Los Angeles, we recently passed the anniversary of the Northridge earthquake.  Fifty-seven people died, more than 5000 were injured, and the price tag topped $20 billion in damages.  Driving around the city, there is little evidence now that anything happened, but I remember those days clearly:  red-tagged buildings; people sleeping in public parks; lack of clean water; looters in destroyed buildings; the National Guard blocking off whole streets of apartments; and the sound of terror, the persistent rumble of the aftershocks.  Often, the shaking grew in amplitude and we wondered if this would be the one that knocked down everything else that remained standing after the main shock on that January day.

We are not prepared.  Sure we have drills, and students duck and cover under their desks.  We have a few bottles of water in a closet somewhere, and some canned goods at the back of the pantry.  But truly, we are not prepared for the magnitude of a disaster that destroys infrastructure and cuts us off from the rest of the world.  We cannot fathom complete devastation, the kind of screaming terror only hinted at in the pictures of Syria on the evening news.  What if, what if, what if?  Not if, when.

The riots in 1992, the earthquake in ’94, the fires in the canyons, all tell us that when things fall apart, we are reduced to our animal natures.  Wars do not happen on the streets of America, until they do.  There are snow plows to take away the towering drifts; there is always a source for clean water; the supermarket will be open twenty-four hours and be fully stocked; fire and police personnel will be there to rescue and protect us.  And then the rumble starts on the edge of the horizon, we must fight for our lives, and no amount of preparation could ever make us ready for what is to come.

The San Andreas fault, the largest of the faults threatening southern California, suffers a major rupture every 150 to 200 years.  The last major rupture was in 1680.  Not if, but when.  Los Angeles may ride through the disaster without complete devastation, mainly because as an urban area, L.A. is spread across so many square miles.  But in a cataclysmic event of such magnitude, everyone in the region will be affected, and a great many of us could perish either in the event itself, or in the aftermath, like at Memorial Medical Center.

In the end, it will probably not be only about bottled water and canned food, or flashlights, batteries, and generators.  No, it will be about humanity.  It will be about recognizing the human being next door, and worrying about his safety as much as our own families.  The disaster can rob us of our livelihood, our resources, even our faith in the goodness of a higher power.  But if the coming disaster robs us of our humanity, it will be every man for himself.  When that happens, as we saw in New Orleans, the water will rise, the violence will spread, and people will die.

Manson

It’s tough to write a book about Charles Manson.  Even if you find new material and interview people who haven’t been interviewed before, as Jeff Guinn did in his new book Manson:  The Life and Times of Charles Manson (Simon & Schuster, 2013), you are still competing with the book about Charlie and company:  Helter Skelter:  The True Story of the Manson Murders (Norton, 2001) written by the prosecutor in the case, Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, first published in 1974.  However, Guinn diligently fills in the killer’s childhood and teenage years as well as offering an update on the current status of all the players involved in the case.

Every native of Los Angeles knows the Manson case.  When I was in high school, friends used to dare each other to drive up to the house on Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, or to Leno and Rosemary LaBianca’s home on Waverly Drive in Los Feliz, or even out to the old Spahn Ranch property in the Santa Susana Pass on the way to Simi Valley north of Los Angeles.  These excursions were innocuous jaunts during daylight hours, but they were good for a creepy thrill at night, the later the better.  According to Guinn, the LaBianca house now has a different address number, but is relatively unchanged.  Cielo Drive was torn down in 1994 after being owned for several years by musician Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (he recorded the band’s The Downward Spiral album there).  Reznor sold the place because it “made him jumpy,” and “because he kept returning home to find bouquets of dead roses and lit candles placed reverently at the front gate.”  Did he really help matters by naming his recording studio on the property “Le Pig,” a reference to the word written in Sharon Tate’s blood on the door of the house by Susan Atkins during the murder?  The Spahn Ranch burned down and the property is now “owned by a church organization,” according to Guinn.  I believe he is referring to the Church at Rocky Peak.  However, the old movie set portion has been incorporated into the Santa Susana Pass State Historical Park.

Guinn is one of the few authors to tackle Manson in a biography.  Most books focus on the crimes, his extended Family of followers, even the cultural impact of the murders.  There is a clear reason why biographies have proven difficult to write:  Charles Manson is a liar, and the public record of his troubled life is spotty.  So it is up to Guinn to separate fact from fiction.  Manson is an “opportunistic sociopath,” says the author, “a lifelong social predator.”  He consistently demonstrates Manson’s ability to lie and manipulate in nearly every situation, including during his trial for murder.

One of the more interesting parts of the book is the discussion of Manson’s behavior during the trial.  In a private area next to the courtroom, Manson and his fellow defendants, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten, as well as their attorneys met to coordinate strategy.  In the courtroom, the women acted as Manson’s Greek chorus, chanting, laughing and shouting out or turning their back on the judge in an effort to disrupt the proceedings.  When Manson carved an X into his own forehead to symbolize that he had been “X’d” from the world, the women did the same.  In the end, their antics had no effect; all four were found guilty and sentenced to death.  They avoided the gas chamber when the death penalty was overturned in 1972, reducing their sentences to life in prison.  As Manson sought alliances with the Aryan Brotherhood in prison, the X on his forehead became a swastika.  Guinn writes that the Brotherhood eventually turned on the diminutive murderer and beat him badly, resulting in Manson’s transfer back to San Quentin.  He now resides at Corcoran State Prison in Kings County, California.

Charles “Tex” Watson was finally extradited to California from Texas to stand trial for his role in the Tate-LaBianca murders, and other followers of Manson faced charges in a number of murders and other crimes, the most notorious being Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975.  Guinn updates the current status of most of Manson’s Family, and it is surprising how many have simply disappeared into American life.  Krenwinkel and Van Houten remain incarcerated as do Tex Watson and Manson.  Susan Atkins died in 2009 of brain cancer.

Guinn provides a lot of details and tidbits of interest to those intrigued by the case.  However, there is nothing earth-shattering here that has not been revealed elsewhere or in the Bugliosi book.  In fact, Helter Skelter figures prominently in the notes and bibliography of Guinn’s book.  He does manage to fill in some of the gaps in Manson’s life story, and he scores interviews with the killer’s adopted sister and cousin.  He is forced many times to speculate when the truth simply cannot be determined.  He writes sentences like:  “Fueled mostly by Charlie Manson’s statements as an adult, it’s a popular belief that during this time Kathleen [Manson’s mother] was a prostitute.”  Or, referring to Charlie’s misbehavior in school, he says “every truant officer in Charleston probably knew his name.”  His use of conditional adverbs does not give us absolute facts, but leaves the door open to speculation.

Forty-four years to the day after the events on those hot August nights, Charles Manson and his knife-wielding followers continue to haunt L.A. dreams.  “Had the California Supreme Court not overturned the death penalty in 1972,” Guinn writes, “and had Charlie been executed a few years later, he might be mostly forgotten…”  As for Manson himself, he no longer attends his parole hearings and has sent word that he intends to remain incarcerated for the remainder of his life.  This is no bombshell as revelations go.  It is unlikely Charles Manson would ever be paroled.  For Los Angeles, this is the most reassuring truth in the whole horrific tale.