Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (23 page)

Dad and Mom drove around the neighborhood. They set their sights upon a three-bedroom home on a quiet street called Calle de Ricardo. Compared with the older home in south Los Angeles, the G.I. home was cheaply constructed, with plywood walls, skinny pine cupboards, and tiny bedrooms. But the new home was in a brand new G.I. neighborhood with lots of young G.I. families and a park nearby for the G.I. kids.

“
It was like starting life all over again!” said Mom.

Yet again, Dad and Mom didn’t have enough money to close the deal. The new home cost about $20,000, well beyond their means. Even with the favorable G.I. loan, and even though Dad had made steady progress in his career—from bookkeeper at Associated Battery Corporation to accountant at Haskins & Sells to chief accountant at MacFarlane’s Candies to internal auditor at Douglas Aircraft Company to chief internal auditor at the McCulloch Corporation—he still couldn’t foot the bill.

He turned to his best friend from college, a man named Bill McCarthy. Bill had young children of his own and didn’t have cash to spare. “I wish I could help, Joe.”

Mom spoke separately to Bill’s wife, Jo.

“
I know someone who might be able to help,” said Jo. “My mother.”

And that’s how Dad scrounged together the money to buy the new G.I. home: with a loan from the mother of the wife of his best friend from college.

In April 1956, the Godges family moved to Calle de Ricardo. And with that move, Dad and Mom had fulfilled nearly every aspiration that the Southern and Eastern European immigrants of the early 20th century could have dared to imagine: to learn English, to work their way out of poverty, to earn their citizenship, to assimilate, to practice the Yankee work ethic (if not the Yankee religion), to buy a piece of the American dream, to Anglicize their names, and, if they made it all the way to California, to live on a street with a fancy Spanish name like Calle de Ricardo.

None of the people who lived on that street pronounced its name correctly. That would’ve exposed them as foreigners. The correct Spanish pronunciation would’ve been the mellifluous CAH-yay DAY Ree-CAR-doe, with a flourish of rolled R’s. But in those days, the correct incorrect pronunciation was the rambunctious CAL-lee DEE Rick-CAR-doe, with no rolled R’s.

Dad and Mom agreed, though, that their kids ought to learn to speak proper Spanish. Not Italian. Not Polish. “If our kids learn any foreign language,” they promised one another, “it’ll be Spanish, because we’re in California now.”

That was the American way.

Dad’s first project in the new house at 5619 Calle de Ricardo was to enclose the front yard behind a six-foot wall. He felt he needed to create a safe place for the kids to play in the front yard, because the back yard was puny, just an easement of grass and raspberry bushes beyond which tumbled a hill of ice plant. The back yard offered a sweeping view of the Los Angeles basin, from the autumn fires in Malibu to the winter snows in Big Bear. But the real action was in the front yard, because that’s where the kids had room to play. Dad wanted to protect them from the street, although it was never busy.

He began by reconfiguring the garage and driveway. The original driveway had curved directly in front of the house and toward the garage door, which stood perpendicular to the house. “Talk about a waste of space!” Dad disparaged the circular driveway for having ceded way too much territory to the automobile, as if it were the most important thing about the house. So Dad installed a new door on the street side of the garage and walled off the door on the house side of the garage. That way, he could roll his 1954 green Mercury sedan straight from the street and into the garage. He made sure the new curb cut and driveway didn’t carve any slope into the flat sidewalk, because a sloping sidewalk could’ve posed a dangerous disruption to kids on roller skates.

Dad then constructed his six-foot-high rampart around the front yard. The lower three feet were made of brick. The upper three feet were made of green scalloped fiberglass. The lower brick and upper fiberglass portions struck Dad as a reasonable compromise between security and frugality. He framed the top and sides of the fiberglass in redwood. Once the wall was firmly in place, the only way for visitors to find the front of the house was to trespass through the single opening in the wall: a six-foot-high wooden gate that stood flush against the sidewalk.

“
It looks like a fortress!” the neighbors complained.

But Dad had built it for that very reason. The fortress wall extended to the perimeters of the property and made the front yard safe for a sandbox, swing set, and plastic kiddy pool.

The fortress also made it easier for Mom to juggle the kids while Dad worked during the day or traveled on business for weeks at a time. When Stan and Genie played in the fortress, Mom didn’t have to worry about their running into the street while she changed diapers on Geri or on the fourth child, Joe, who was born in December 1956.

Mom added chickens and a mallard duck to the fortress. She then raised the fortress walls yet higher with wire mesh to keep out the neighborhood cats.

Not all the neighbors minded the fortress. Many discovered its merits. One of the moms developed a habit of furtively opening the front gate, scooting her son inside, shutting the gate, and then running off. She knew she could dump her kid there and let him play with the other kids and critters in a safe place. The fortress became a playpen for lots of neighborhood kids.

In many respects, Dad was the typical “company man” of the 1950s. He slicked his hair back each morning with greasy, gooey, sticky, eucalyptus-scented La-Nu hair styling cream. His wife darned his socks, polished his shoes, and ironed his shirts and slacks. Once at the office, he did everything by the book. In fact, it was his job to do everything by the book. Being an accountant rewarded all of the detail-oriented precision of his training and disposition. He made steady progress up the company ladder at the McCulloch Corporation, maker of chainsaws. Most typical of all, Dad wasn’t home much during the 1950s. Like many of his professional peers, he sacrificed massive amounts of time at home so that he could travel most of his time for work.

Whenever he was home and could pull himself away from mowing the lawn, paying bills, or preparing tax returns with painstaking care, Dad took everyone to the beach. He was just as methodical in preparing everyone for the beach as he was in preparing his taxes. He began by slathering Sea & Ski suntan lotion on everyone, with the goopy cream going on so thick that there was no chance the sun could get through. As the ecstatic cream-coated kids piled into the back of Mom’s junky 1953 Ford station wagon with the torn seat covers and the frayed ceiling fabric, Dad escorted Mom into the front passenger seat as if he were chauffeuring her to the opera. Only when everyone else was seated did he put himself in the driver’s seat, whereupon he performed his customary ritual of adjusting the mirrors, turning on the ignition, and then reverentially pausing—in that hallowed moment between turning on the engine and shifting the car into reverse—to make the sign of the cross for a safe trip.

At the beach, Dad used his own lungs to blow up the vinyl, ribbed surf mats until they ballooned into gigantic blue and green hot dog packages. The kids couldn’t catch any waves on their own, but Dad pushed the surf mats at just the right time, steering the kids over the crashing surf. He was fit and trim in his navy blue loincloth bathing suit.

Other dads at the beach sat in the sand drinking beer or smoking. But Dad played in the water with the kids and enjoyed every minute of it. All the while, as he gazed upon the vast outstretched arms of the encircling mountain ridges that formed the welcoming arc of the Santa Monica Bay, from the tip of Point Dume in the north to the rocky fingers of the Palos Verdes Peninsula in the south, he marveled at the good fortune that had befallen his beloved family in this beautiful country.

“
God has been very good to us,” he told his kids at the beach.

Once back at home, he allowed Stan, Genie, and Geri to hop right into the bathtub with him and to scrub the sea salt off his big broad back. Stan scrubbed one side. Genie scrubbed the other. And Geri scrubbed underneath near the base of the spine.

“
You have to get all the soap off before you’re done,” Dad instructed them.

But none of them hurried. They were having the time of their lives making a mess of his back.

And then he left on another business trip.

As the years spun by and the four kids grew bigger, everyone began to feel cramped in the house with the three tiny bedrooms. And when the kids started attending school at the bottom of the hill, Mom grew tired of shuttling them up and down the long, twisty roads.

“
It’d be nice to be closer to the school, church, and grocery store,” Mom told Dad.

Dad could see that the family’s expanding needs were outgrowing the G.I. house on the hill. There might have been an easier solution to the problem, but it prodded him to embark on the most ambitious financial challenge of his life. He committed himself not only to moving his family to yet a bigger home near the bottom of the hill but also, even more important, to moving his family as close as possible to God.

It was 1958. Local Catholic leaders were trying to build a new church on virgin soil—where no man had ever developed property before—at the southeastern corner of Redondo Beach near Pacific Coast Highway. There was already a rectory for the priests, a convent for the nuns, and an elementary school for the kids. But there was only a skeletal frame of a church, which had been christened Saint Lawrence Martyr.

Dad enlisted in the Redondo Beach chapter of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization that was raising money to complete the construction of the church. The pastor needed 100 volunteers from the organization to go door-to-door to local Catholic households and to solicit 20-month pledges. Dad befriended the pastor and joined the foot soldiers who worked in pairs to comb the streets for cash.

As Dad knocked on doors, met his fellow parishioners, and solicited their pledges, he dreamed of moving his family to a home “in the shadow of the church.” He noticed that additional virgin soil lay on the hill that sloped downward to the immediate north of the church—in direct line of the noon shadow that the steeple would cast during winter. The hillside consisted mostly of sand dunes, dirt roads, and mud.

But there was one dilapidated house about 200 yards north of the church. The house just so happened to be for sale. It sat on a lot of 120 feet by 180 feet—almost half an acre. The lot had chickens, plums, figs, and concord grapes. It was like a little farm.

Further north, at the very bottom of the hill, stood a public school, Tulita Elementary School, where the paved roads resumed. The public school was well beyond reach of the shadow of the church, but the little farm seemed close enough for Dad.

He couldn’t afford a farm, let alone renovations. But his head swirled with calculations. He went to the house, knocked on the door, and spoke with the owner.

“
The city of Redondo Beach has approved the subdivision of this property into two separate lots,” the owner tantalized Dad.

“
Is that right?” Dad began recalculating. If he could somehow purchase the farm, he could then subdivide the property and maybe sell the original house right away, put the money in the bank, earn interest on the money, and use the earnings to build a new house someday on the remaining part of the property closer to the church. Maybe.

The idea involved several risks. Chief among them, Dad might not have enough money to build a new house while keeping the house on Calle de Ricardo. He might have to sell the G.I. house and temporarily move everyone into an apartment. He wasn’t sure how much it would cost to build a new house. Hmm. It would take years of sacrifice. Hmm. There was no guarantee that everything would work out right.

“
But I could think of no greater cause,” Dad recalled. If everything worked according to plan, the kids wouldn’t even need to cross a street to get to school each day. They could walk home for lunch. And they could dwell in the shadow of the church.

By the time Dad drove away from the little farm, he had shaken hands with the owner and agreed to buy the property for $20,000 in two separate transactions: $16,000 for the house and $4,000 for the adjacent, soon-to-be subdivided lot. That way, Dad could pay off the empty lot faster and negotiate sooner with builders to build on it. Maybe.

Yet again, Dad was short of money for the down payments. A sister-in-law and Mom’s old landlord had loaned him money for his first house. The mother of the wife of his best friend from college had loaned him money for his second house. Who could loan him money now?

“
Let me ask Leola,” Mom called her sister who had saved the little family farm in 1934.

Aunt Leola sent $4,000, exactly enough to cover the down payments.

Dad bought the farm and subdivided the property.

There was no turning back now. He and Mom installed a new fireplace in the original house, cleaned it up, and put it back on the market as fast as they could.

One of the first people to view the partially renovated home was a woman who wanted to send her four kids to the Catholic school up the road. Her name was Patricia Jersin. Three of the Jersin kids would be in the same classes with three of the Godges kids.

Deal.

Her father bought the house for her “as is.”