ST. JOSEPH'S CATHEDRAL, SAN DIEGO, CA

I am kind of shocked that I have not had any post on St. Joseph's Cathedral located in San Diego, CA. Shocked because any time we went down to San Diego, Dad would always take us down to St. Joseph's.  I know for sure there is at least one photo of me, Tom, and Joe standing in front of the cathedral.  

This might be 1968.

There might be more than that.  I recall, too, how we may have scored some donuts one morning if we helped out with the mass at all.  That is one thing that Dad always taught us--was to help out. Volunteer.  Not because of what we might earn from it, but for the sake of participation.  

I loved the steps of this church.  It was up on a hill, where virtue should be.  The last time I was there was probably 2004.  It was summer.  The lights were dimmed to keep the church cool and to save on electricity. And in that cool, dimmed environment, I lit a votive candle for Dad.  He loved this church from his days of being on leave from the Marines perhaps.  Not sure.  But I am sure that when he was on leave that he spent a little time in San Diego.  And just as he stopped off at the Plaza Church in Downtown LA near Olvera Street after stepping off the train up from San Diego, that he also stopped in here to pray when disembarking from a ship.  

On Wednesday, September 23, Joe wrote that

yeah after WW2 ended dad was stationed at the El Centro Marine base...he would visit this church on his way back to see mom or driving to & from Camp Pendleton til 1947...

The following shot captures the red carpet and the two columns of pews.  It was a straight-forward church design.  I like the arches.   

I love this shot because you can see the stained glassed windows better. 

I think it was 2003 that I took Joanne down to San Diego to the Coronado Hotel to Old Town and the La Pinata restaurant, of which she made little mention, to Presidio Park, but she was no fan of walking, then drove up to Solano Beach to relive those wonderful memories for me.  

DAD'S FAVORITE SONG: SNOWBIRD by Anne Murray

Dad's favorite singer was Canadian, Anne Murray.  He really did love her. Perhaps his favorite song of hers was "Snowbird."  The song appears on her album, "This Way Is My Way," 1969, and was released as a single in 1970.  The song, written by songwriter Gene MacLellan, a prolific Canadian artist, was a good friend of Anne Murray's.  I don't think I ever heard Dad mention Gene MacLellan.  

Beneath this snowy mantle cold and clean
The unborn grass lies waiting
For its coat to turn to green
The snowbird sings the song he always sings
And speaks to me of flowers
That will bloom again in spring

When I was young my heart was young then too
Anything that it would tell me
That's the thing that I would do
But now I feel such emptiness within
For the thing that I want most in life's
The thing that I can't win

Spread your tiny wings and fly away
And take the snow back with you
Where it came from on that day
The one I love forever is untrue
And if I could you know that I would
Fly away with you

The breeze along the river seems to say
That he'll only break my heart again
Should I decide to stay
So little snowbird take me with you
When you go
To that land of gentle breezes
Where the peaceful waters flow

Spread your tiny wings and fly away
And take the snow back with you
Where it came from on that day
The one I love forever is untrue
And if I could you know that I would
Fly away with you.

Songwriter: Gene MacLellan.

I will never forget a memory I had with Dad.  We were in Denver.  We were visiting Aunt Gertrude or the Haases, and Dad called me to join him to go to the store to get a paper and a beverage.  Well, he bought sandwiches for just he and I.  He found a park and pulled over.  He carried his sandwiches and his encased radio to a picnic bench there at the park. 

And he dialed his radio into a station that played Anne Murray's "Snowbird."  He was in heaven.  I'll never forget Dad's tone when he heard or commented on her voice: it was adoration.  Anne Murray, a turkey sandwich, the local paper, and one of his devoted sons to keep him company.  

I don't know if it matters or not, but Dad's sentiments of love seem to align with those of Gene MacLellan, particularly in this song, "I Just Want to Be Loved by You."  I don't know if Anne Murray ever sang or recorded this song.  

2011 and Beyond

View of Downtown Los Angeles from the Sierra Madre Trail, 2011.

A leafless tree just off the trail of Sierra Madre.

 The Balian Mansion, Altadena, CA, 2011


 Chuck's old studio apartment on Mariposa in Altadena.

Altadena Community Church

Trailhead or parking lot, Eaton Canyon, 2011

 A river runs through it at Eaton Canyon, 2011.

 South stairs at Grand Avenue Park, Monrovia, CA 2011.

Monrovia Park Tennis Courts.  Paul Parker pretty much taught me to how to play tennis here before I took a tennis class at Citrus College where I ran into Vincent, the red-headed kid I knew from middle school and high school.  The other key event was my date with Sylvia Schiveto.  I liked her more than I could express.  She left me with some terrific memories.

This is an upstairs room I had at the StarDust Motel in Pomona right on Foothill Blvd.  I stayed here one week before driving out to Denver in 2014.  But I really loved this room.  It made me feel like I was living the life of Jack Kerouac.  I loved the red tones.  In the course of the week here I saw some pretty good movies, too.  One memorable movie was the 2013 picture, The Counselor.  Brad Pitt plays a friend and confident conman to the counselor.  I liked him most in this role than any other.  It fit him perfectly I thought.

My dad always wanted a desk like this.  I think they're called secretarial, roll-top desks.

Dad's 1962 Volkswagen Beetle

My dad owned a 1962 VW Beetle.  He bought it from a guy in Monterey Park, who lived on or near Bradshawe.

I post these pictures because the previous owner of the car lived right around the block from this famous waterfall landmark in Monterey Park.  The city calls it the Monterey Park Cascades Waterfall, what the LA Times called "a waterfall-like terrace of pools."  Okay.  

Here is a black and white photo of the cascade dated 1945.  Note the conspicuous absence of homes around the cascades.

The following are found on Yelp, and a few of these photos are quite good, stunning, in fact.  

When he drove it home, he told his sons not to sit in the back portion or luggage section of the interior.  Fine.  We didn't.  Not for a while.  But we were small enough to fit and so ultimately one of them tested it to my dad's annoyance.  But he got over it.  He loved his Volkswagen bug.  He called it his paramour. 

In retrospect, he loved that car.  He drove it to work every morning from the 210 Freeway west to Orange Grove and then wind his way behind the hills in El Sereno on the Pasadena Freeway, getting off Hill Street and into Downtown.   Here is what his '62 Bug looked like.  The pictures come from here.

I loved the narrow running board.

But perhaps more distinctive were the turn signal lights above the door.  The Beetle also had the turn signal lights above the headlights as well.  It's just that the ones above the door made it distinctive.  

And initially at least I loved the simple design of the interior. My dad loved cars and had a good sense of their design.  Check out the door pockets below the handles.  Pretty cool.  He kept a map there. And note how the dashboard is flat, vertically flat.  On it he pinned a crucifix, a medallion of the Virgin Mary, and the Holy Family and turned the dashboard of his "salon," as Volkswagen calls it, into a private chapel.  perhaps more distinctive were the turn signal lights above the door.  The Beetle also had the turn signal lights above the headlights as well.  It's just that the ones above the door made it distinctive.  Dad's Beetle was a hard-top and not a convertible.  And the color?  A baby blue. 

This is about how my sisters and mother dreamed.  We had a Singer sewing machine in our house, used mostly to repair things and for the girls to design things.  It was not a tool for men, especially with all of the girls in the house. 


Then there's this



Love this nostalgia.

Mom's Paintings

It must have been about 2007 when I told my mom that I wanted to buy and then frame a Gustav Klimt print, Sonja Knips, 1898, (see below), that she could put up in one of her rooms.  

Several years earlier, I bought my mom a Van Gogh print and asked Catherine if she would frame it for me and she was happy to.  The Van Gogh was titled "Orchard with Blossoming Apricot Trees," 1888.  Catherine framed it at Chato's Gallery in Pasadena.  I loved most things by Van Gogh back then. 

Brief background on this painting:

Between late March and early May of 1888, Vincent van Gogh created some 15 paintings (with 8 in existence today) of apricot, peach, pear, plum, and other types of orchards just outside Arles in the South of France.  In letters to his brother Theo, sister Wilhelmina, and artist Emile Bernard, Vincent provides us with a record of his progress. 

I have just finished a group of apricot trees in bloom in a little orchard of fresh green.

To Theo, March 25

My mother also loved the painting and particularly the framing.  She loved Catherine's work.  She hung the print up in her dining room opposite the back sliding glass door.  See here.  The slight glare is from the light coming in from the sliding glass door.

So it was in 2006 that I got her to sit down with me and shop online for another painting Catherine would frame that my mom would put up in her home. The price of the print was nominal, less than $20.  The real costs were in the framing and the frame that Catherine chose appreciated the value of the print in my mom's eyes immeasurably.  Catherine, my dearest of friends, framed it for her at her gallery up in Santa Cruz.  And Catherine was kind and generous enough to meet me in San Luis Obispo to hand-deliver it to me.  So I drove up to San Luis Obispo, met Catherine, had lunch and coffee, then walked around the neighborhood a spell. We stopped at the local library, one of many libraries around the country funded by the Carnegie Foundation. Here is a list of all the Carnegie Libraries in California.

It was from my own early experience that I decided there was no use to which money could be applied so productive . . . as the founding of a public library.  --Andrew Carnegie

It was here at this library with Catherine that I first learned of Andrew Carnegie's library legacy.  And within the next two years, I found myself at the Azusa Library behind its City Hall, and sure enough there contained in a little cut-out of the marble wall was a bust of Carnegie behind glass, paying tribute to his efforts and civic contributions.  The Azusa Library was built in 1959, but the original Carnegie Library in Azusa looked like this:

What life was like about when I was born.

“Labor, capital, and ability are a three-legged stool... They are equal members of the great triple alliance which moves the industrial world.”  --Andrew Carnegie

The painting I got for my mom was Gustav Klimt's Sonja Knips.  It is beautiful.  I had a copy of it hanging from my apartment wall.  I loved it so much that I thought I would share it with the kids at school.  The look, the alerted posture, the dark and light contrasts scared a few of the kids but ultimately they liked it.  

But my mother absolutely loved this painting, especially the frame. Catherine has an extraordinary grasp of design, shades, contours, themes, and more.  The color of the frame was similar in color to Sonja's hands and the lighter browns in her dress.  The frame's pattern was subdued curved lines.  And my mother loved it.  She would offer unsolicited praise for it almost every time I stopped over.  

After securing the beautifully framed painting, wrapped in protective framer's paper, in the trunk of my car, I got southbound on the 101 just before night fell.  The remaining sunlight mixed with layers of fog turned the sky into an abstract painting itself, weaving inland and over the hills from out over the Pacific.  I was 5 miles north of Santa Barbara when the engine on my burgundy 1998 Ford Contour died.  I pulled over to the side of the road only to see the implacable "Check Engine" light beaming back at me.  I called AAA, the Automobile Club of Southern California.  I could not figure out what was wrong with the engine, nor could the AAA tow driver.  He wanted to pull me into Santa Barbara but it was late, coming up on 9pm when most, if not all, shops were closed.  A gas station would not have a mechanic on site at this hour, so I asked the driver how much he would charge me to tow me home to San Gabriel.  "$300" was his answer.  I agreed.  I needed to get home and get to work.  Two hours later and a few moments of dreamland, I arrived home.  I had him drop the vehicle across the street at Richard's.  I paid him, went up to my apartment, and went to bed, content to be in my own bed and that I had that painting framed and packaged for Mom.