Jack Smith The Big Orange Ward Ritchie Press: Pasadena, CA, 1976. 252 pp.
Sister Aimee's Temple
"Angelus Temple
Aimee Semple McPherson
Founder
Church of the Foursquare Gospel"
"Gaudy and notorious she was, but Sister Aimee was also adored by tens of thousands of her followers as the personal handmaiden of God. As an evangelist she was bold, inventive, tireless and courageous, and these were qualities that served her with abundance in the great crisis of her life.
"Sister Aimee was born in rural Canada of a Salvation Army lassie and a Methodist farmer. In her teens she was converted and wed by an itinerant Holy Roller with whom she hit the sawdust trail. They sailed to China to save souls and there Robert Semple died, leaving his bride stranded and expecting. When her child was born Aimee returned to America. In a year or two she married Harold McPherson, a grocer. But Aimee had her call. After a son was born, she divorced McPherson and set out with her two children to spread the gospel." p. 42
" I sometimes look back upon those years with amazement, and wonder just how the Lord enabled me to go into new cities, without even an invitation or any earthly backing, search out a piece of vacant land, erect a tabernacle, swing the sledge hammer, drive the stakes, tie the ropes, build the seats, erect the platform, distribute handbills on the streets and paste posters in the windows, hold several street meetings each day and conduct two or three tent services, play the piano and lead my own singing between each testimony, lead in prayer, preach the Gospel, give the altar call, pray for the converts, dismiss them, put out the lights, put the babies to bed and cook our own late supper over the campfire . . . " p. 43 quote from Aimee
"If it was this tranquility that drew Sister Aimee to Echo Park, she was soon enough to shatter it. Here, in 1922, she built her temple, with seats for five thousand, and added a Bible school and the chateau and started radio station KFSG (Kall Four Square Gospel) with the third radio license ever issued in Los Angeles. . . . services . . . featured Sousa's band, a Wagnerian opera and the burning of Joan of Arc.
"Angels descended. Cardboard waves crashed against cardboard lighthouses. The Devil appeared in person. Heaven and Hell were rolled in from the wings. And the singing, wrote a contemporary critic, was 'stupendous, cataclysmic, overwhelming.'" p.43
"[Her severest trial]+ began on May 18, 1926, the day Aimee Semple McPherson vanished; it ended, officially at least, nearly eight months later when the Los Angeles Superior Court reluctantly dismissed the criminal charges against her for conspiracy to corrupt morals and obstruct justice. On that May day half a century ago Sister Aimee disappeared while swimming, supposedly, at Ocean Park. Her mother, the redoubtable Minnie (Ma) Kennedy, a partner in her temple affairs, announced to the world that 'Sister is drowned. She has gone to the arms of Jesus.'
"For the next five weeks Ocean Park was the scene of a macabre carnival. Thousands came down to see where Sister had gone into the sea. A human chain, miles long, kept vigil on the sands around the clock. Boats and airplanes searched for Aimee's body. At night searchlights played over the water. Divers probed the pilings of Lick Pier. At least two men were drowned." p. 45
Venice
"'It is a kind of no man's land, given up by default and occupied by irregulars and their dogs.'
"In the early morning, even in high summer, our Southern California beaches are often overcast and misty, and for the genuine beachcomber, like me, this is the best time of all.
"On these mornings the sky is as gray as the sea. It is hard to tell one from the other. There are no horizons, and sometimes a distant sailboat will seem to be sailing in the sky.
" . . . on an overcast Saturday morning I drove down to Venice for my own communion with the sea around us. Now that I have given up waiting for the ninth wave, I find a fascination in this place which seems to be lost in time. I parked near the old Ocean Park Pier; a grand piece of wreckage it was then, like something bombed out in" p, 113 "the war, before they cleaned it out. The sky was opal, with a hint of fire in it, and the sand was more yellow than gray." p.114
"Venice had fallen into decay from the vain-glorious splendors of Abbott Kinney's dreams. It had been taken over by the new barbarians, as some saw them; and now it was under siege, its bohemian life-style threatened by affluence.
"It was only seventy years ago that Kinney had turned a slough into a new Venice, building a system of canals with arched bridges and a central lagoon. There were genuine gondolas from Italy and genuine singing gondoliers. Stores and hotels with mock-Renaissance fronts and cast-iron Italian columns were built around the lagoon and down Windward Avenue to the sand and along Ocean Front Walk. Now the lagoon is asphalt; the canals broken down, weed-grown and scummy; half the Venetian fronts are missing, like pulled teeth, and the others are scabrous and decayed, their columns rusted. It is a funky slum, not without its charm, in which the inheritors of the vanished beatniks, disdainful of the affluent life of the nearby marina, have rooted their counterculture.
"In the winter, and in the night and early morning, before the lemmings of the inner city come swarming down to the sea, there is a strange and vital community along the Venice beach front; an incongruous mixture of young bohemians and hippies, black and white, and remnants of old people, mostly Jews, who live in tacky Victorian hotels on Ocean Front Walk, shop at the kosher delis in between the hot dog stands, and worship at painted stucco temples with Stars of David painted over the doorways. An uneasy harmony seems to exist, stabilized perhaps by the black and white police cars that creep silently back and forth along the front.
"Venice is a place where the past is still hanging around, waiting for an appointment with the future; but the future hasn't shown up. In the meantime it is a kind of no man's land, given up by default and occupied by irregulars and their dogs. . . .
"It is astonishing how much human energy is expended along this exhausted-looking front, by young and old. . . .
"Outside the pavilion old men were playing at bowls on the clay courts, and half a dozen shuffleboard courts were in use. The pace here was slower, but the intensity no less than it was up the walk a way, at the basketball and {paddle-} tennis courts and the weight-lifting enclosure, where young men with bulging thighs and biceps tremulously lifted 200-pound barbells, for reasons known only to themselves." p. 117
"Riders were beginning to appear on the bicycle path. It was rather new, a concrete path separate from the walk, with six lanes painted on in yellow. Some locals had protested the bike path, for fear it would bring in more people, which it did. The Venice front had been isolated when they took out the jitneys that used to shuttle down from Santa Monica with tourists and other outsiders, and now the bike paths had brought them in again.
"At the end of Rose Avenue there is a small pavilion . . . The regular weekend music festival was already going on with two men and a woman on bongos and a small crowd sitting around absorbing the beat. Nearby, enveloped by the sound, a row of four old women sat on a bench, like old sparrows in their threadbare wrappings, watching life go by on Ocean Front Walk . . . They had survived the beatnik generation and the hippie generation, these ancients from middle Europe, and they would probably survive their successors." p.119
Watts Towers
""They tried to knock it down, you know."
"In the southeast corner of the section know as Watts there is a piece of 107th Street that is cut off by old Pacific Electric tracks. It can be entered from Wlllowbrook Avenue, but it runs only one short block, and there it dead-ends in the rusted old tracks that slash across the neighborhood on their way to nowhere.
"In most ways it is a typical Watts street; two rows of small frame houses, dateless houses that have outlived their time but are trying to keep up appearances, like old chorus girls, with paint and flowers. But this is a distinguished street, because at its dead end, on a small lot cut like a piece of pie by the old tracks, stand the Watt Towers. They are the most remarkable works of open air art in Southern California, and perhaps in the nation.
"They are the work of the late Simon Rodia, an immigrant Italian who gave up women and liquor at the age of forty and spent the next thirty-three years of his life erecting these implausible monuments." p. 121
" . . . The Watts Towers are a wondrous poem, built in the sky by a man who was possessed by unquenchable urgings and fancies . . . "
"'I wanted to do something big,' said Simon Rodia; and he did.
"More than anything else, the towers reminded me of the boojum tree, which is also unique and improbable. It is found only in the wilderness of Baja California, and there is nothing even close to it anywhere else. Ot the three towers, the highest is one hundred feet. They rise like upside-down ice cream cones made of lace and encrusted with costume jewelry.
"A wall runs around Rodia's triangular garden, and it also bears his mark. The wall is a mosaic of Rodia's improvisations. There are panels of broken tile and panels of green bottle glass and plaques of cement in which he impressed his initials, SR, and the date, 1923, and the shape of hammer and tile cutter and the other tools of his trade, or perhaps it should be called his passion. The wall seems without design, without order. Bits of broken tile, yellow and red and blue and purple; pieces of china plates; pieces of green and blue bottles; hundreds of white seashells - all are pressed into the cement of the wall without apparent pattern; yet the wall is a masterpiece. It dazzles the eye and delights the spirit. It is all one lovely harmony." p. 122
" . . . I sat in the gazebo and studied the towers.
"They are made of steel rings and spokes and central cores, all covered with cement, set in chicken wire and encrusted with the humble materials of Rodia's art - the debris of a wasteful society. They are connected by bejeweled spars that leap from one to the other and to the other fancies in the garden - the gazebo and the Marco Polo ship and the fountain - so that all is one interlocking structure.
"Rodia was only a tile setter by trade, without any schooling at all. He owned and boasted of a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, but nobody was ever sure he could even read, Yet he had created from some infallible inner sense of order this exquisite feat of art and engineering. For thirty-three years he worked alone, rising with his towers, coming down to fill his cement pail and climbing up again to add another bit of frosting. He used no ladders. The towers themselves were his scaffold.
"Why did he work alone?
"'I no have anybody to help me out,' he said one. 'I was a poor man. Had to do a little at a time. Nobody helped me. I think if I hire a man he don't know what to do. A million times I don't know what to do myself.'
"Why did he build his towers at all?
"'Some of the people say what was he doing . . . some of the people think I was crazy and some people said I was going to do something. I wanted to do something. I wanted to do something in the United States because I was raised her you understand? I wanted to do something for the United State because there are nice people in this country. . . " p. 123
"Paul Laporte wrote: "Even the ornamentation, the bits and pieces of tile and glass and china, was essential to provide a protective shell over the reinforced cement. . . . 'Thus every part and combination of parts in these structures is a technical necessity while at the same time emerging as the character and beauty of the whole.'" p. 124
"A wood flooring has been laid over the foundations of Rodia's little house. Only the fireplace is left, and the arched doorway, which is faced with pieces of broken mirrors. Everyone come back for a second look at the doorway, seeing himself fragmented, abstracted, in that wall of broken mirrors." p. 124
{One historical consideration might be that so much has been written about the Ocean Park/Los Angeles landscape because it has changed so much so radically that it is always renewing itself, and that writers can find cheap digs from which to write about themselves in that landscape.}
"It was a dramatic day, October 10, 1959, when the main tower was put to the test. Reporters and television crews were there. A crowd gathered in the street, some hoping the tower would win, some hoping it would fail. A hydraulic jack was used to apply a ten thousand- pound load to the tower, much more than any wind or quake would give it. It was to be a five- minute test. A minute went by. The crowd was tense. The tower leaned almost imperceptibly. And then the main beam of the test rigging began to give.
"The city surrendered. The test was over. Simon Rodia's innate engineering skill was proved, and his work prevailed.
". . . Many people on the street had been there a long time and remembered Simon, the odd little Italian with the gnarled hands and the big nose.
"Simon used to sing as he worked, forty, fifty feet up, arias from operas and songs nobody in the neighborhood had ever heard anybody else sing. Funny man; complained about everything; taxes and painted women and drinking parents. But loved the country, loved America.
"'He used to go off down that railroad track walking, . . . all the way to Wilmington sometimes, with his gunnysack, picking up things. Be gone all day, come back with a sackful of junk.'" p. 125 to 126
"'You know he even put his car in those towers there?' . . . 'Old Hudson. He put the springs and the wheels and everything he could use.' 'What happened to the rest of it then?' . . . "Buried it. Right there by the tracks.' . . ." p.126
Santa Monica
"'Title to the ocean, the sunset, and the air is guaranteed by God.'
"More than any other place in Southern California, the Santa Monica bay front perhaps fulfills the fantasies of the inlanders on their first pilgrimage, despite the disappointment of the lady from Iowa {who, looking out at the Pacific Ocean for the first time from Palisades Park, judged that it wasn't as big as she had expected}.
"The beach is broad and tan and scattered with sun-browned people in bits of dazzling color. Small boats nod at their moorings or glide back and forth inside a crumbling breakwater. Sumptuous homes and beach clubs with tennis courts and swimming pools sit at sand's edge, just inside the highway. To the north this vision ends in the dark bulk of Point Dume; to the south, in the voluptuous silhouette of Palos Verdes Peninsula." p. 247
"The Santa Monica pier is antique. Naturally many people want to tear it down. Naturally, many people want to leave it up. At best, it is on reprieve. It has an embattled look, somewhat misshapen and askew. It creaks and groans on its weathered pilings, and supports a ramshackle row of shops, fish markets, galleries and cafes. At its shore end it is ornamented by an enchanting old merry-go-round." pp. 248 and 249
"It has stood there throughout the century, this Victorian playhouse, while generations of concrete buildings have come and gone. the little horses of the carousel are exuberantly sculptured, obviously of Arab blood, with wild eyes and flaring nostrils. The old organ pounds and clangs and wheezes as if trying gallantly to finish this one last song before expiring. A sign tells its story:
"'Welcome friend. The music you are listening to is coming from one of the oldest organs in the country, built in 1900 . . . Constantly playing for seventy years. The merry-go-round has the happiest record in the U.S. The horses were imported from Germany and are all hand-carved. There are no two horses alike. Your grandparents and mom and dad probably rode this ride when they were children. All the great actresses, and their children, too. Come aboard, close your eyes and listen to the music . . . '
"This was the first merry-go-round my own sons had ridden. We had lived in Venice then; the older boy was three . . .
"I . . . walked out on the pier, looking into an 'art gallery' awash with pop posters and urns and statues of chalky white Venuses and elongated cats; a gift shop offering such marine novelties as dried starfish, driftwood and abalone shells; a penny arcade, its pennies inflated by time to dimes and quarters; a shooting gallery; a palmist who was out to lunch." pp. 249 & 250
""Fishing is free from the end of the pier, and there is always a hardy group of fishermen out there, whatever the hour and the weather. . . .
"He looked out at the breakwater, a ragged dark line, like the back of some enormous sea monster. It had been made of great blocks of granite, many of which had tumbled into the sea.
"'Fishing hasn't been so good here, though,' he said, 'since they built that new breakwater.'
"'New?' I said.
"'Well, new in Thirty-three, it was. I been fishing here since Twenty-eight.'" p. 250
"The view inland from the pier is as pleasant as the view from the palisades - the opposite side of the picture postcard. Behind the beach the palisades run for a mile or two - the visible end of the continent - pinkish-brown cliffs, agonized by the centuries. The park runs along their top, a thin green line, and beyond that the row of structures on Ocean Avenue - . . .
"Below the pier in the water near the shore, a school of surfers floated on their blue, red or yellow boards like water bugs. Umbrellas of brilliant hue polka-dotted the beach; pink and brown flesh and scraps of cloth covered the sand like fluorescent confetti.
"It seemed incredible that only a hundred years ago there was nothing here but land, sea and sky. An Easterner, writing years later of a visit he made to this shore in 1869, recalled that it was 'an unpeopled waste - no light (dressed) brigade of sportive bathers charged the angry surf; neither keel nor oar vexed the breakers that broke on the desolate shore.'
"Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and his crew were the first white men to see Santa Monica Bay, on their voyage of 1542. Then two hundred and twenty-seven years passed before Gaspar de Portolá and his soldiers camped at a spring above the bay. It is said that one of Portolá's men named the place Santa Monica, likening the spring water to the saint's tears for her wayward son, Augustine.
"It was another century before John P. Jones, a Nevada senator, and Colonel R.S. Baker, a cattleman, who had bought the old Mexican land grants, formed a township, filed maps and started selling lots. The sale was held on a hot day in 1875. They hired Tom Fitch, an orator and auctioneer of note. Hundreds of people buggied down from Los Angeles to hear Fitch and to see the ocean. Both were magnificent.
"Fitch promised that anyone who bought a lot in Santa Monica would have the Pacific Ocean as a backdrop, with a daily sunset of 'scarlet and gold' and 'a bay filled with white-winged ships.'
"He went on to say that the title to the land was guaranteed by his employers, but the title to 'the ocean, the sunset and the air is guaranteed by God.'" p. 251
"South of the merry-go-round are the volleyball courts. They are used exclusively by the very young, good-looking and sun-tanned, of both sexes, who play the game with a fierce animal energy, leaping high, lunging through the sand, tumbling head over heels and bellowing Tarzan cries of triumph or dismay. Bronze thighs and biceps twitch and ripple as the contest see-saws.
"On the sidelines other youths, equally flawless, take their ease beside lissome young females in bright bikinis, together worshipping their youth, the Lord's wisdom in providing two sexes, and the blessed sun.
"Only a hundred feet on down the promenade another generation is at its games: Old men on benches at long tables, bent over chess or checker boards, their seamed faces knit, their concentration as intense as that of the volleyball players, . . .
"Walking back past the merry-go-round I stopped to read the weathered sign over the entrance: 'Merry-go-round apartment house. The only apartment house in the world that has a merry-go-round and an organ. In the morning the guests awaken to the tunes of the organ and all day they go about their duty with music in their ears, When they are ready to go to bed music helps put them to sleep . . . '
"What a wonderful thing, I thought as I drove back to the heart of the city, to live one's life at the beach above a merry-go-round." p. 252