Where I Was From (15 page)

People in Lakewood often mentioned to me how much there was going on in the area. There were the batting cages. There was bowling. There were many movies around. There was, nearby in Downey, the campaign to preserve the nation’s last operating original McDonald’s, a relic of 1953 at the corner of Lakewood Boulevard and Florence Avenue. “If they’re going to tear this down, they might as well tell Clinton please take your business to Taco Bell,” one observer told the
Press-Telegram.
And there was, always, the mall, Lakewood Center, the actual and figurative center of town. During the days I spent in Lakewood I had occasion to visit the mall now and then, and each time I found it moderately busy, the fact that its sales figures had decreased every quarter since 1990 notwithstanding. There was a reflecting pool, a carousel, a Burger King, a McDonald’s, if not an original McDonald’s. There was a booth offering free information on prescriptions. There was another displaying photographs of houses for sale. I said to a woman leafing through the listings that I had not before seen houses for sale in a mall. “H.U.D. and V.A. repos,” she said.

One day at the mall I walked over to the freestanding Bullock’s, which, because it was about to close its doors for good, was in the process of selling everything in the store at thirty-five percent off the ticket price. There were women systematically defoliating the racks in the men’swear department, women dropping discards and hangers in tangles on the floor, women apparently undiscouraged by the scrawled sign warning that register lines were “currently in excess of 3+ hours long,” women who had already staked out positions for the wait, women curled with their children on the floor, women who had bulwarked their positions with forts of quilts, comforters, bedspreads, mattress pads, Cuisinarts, coffee makers, sandwich grills, Juice Tigers, and Heart Wafflers. These were the women and the daughters and granddaughters of the women who had seen the hundred-foot pylon in 1950 and decided that this was the place to start. The clerks and security personnel monitoring the register lines were men. These were the men and the sons and grandsons of the men who used to get what seemed like half the A-4 line out to watch Little League.

7

“W
E
want great cities, large factories, and mines worked cheaply, in this California of ours!” That was Henry George, in “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” rhetorically setting forth what was in 1868 popular local sentiment. Then he proceeded to count the cost:

Would we esteem ourselves gainers if New York, ruled and robbed by thieves, loafers and brothel-keepers; nursing a race of savages fiercer and meaner than any who ever shrieked a war-whoop on the plains; could be set down on our bay tomorrow? Would we be gainers, if the cotton-mills of Massachusetts, with their thousands of little children who, official papers tell us, are being literally worked to death, could be transported to the banks of the American; or the file and pin factories of England, where young girls are treated worse than even slaves on southern plantations, be reared as if by magic at Antioch? Or if among our mountains we could by wishing have the miners, men, women and children, who work the iron and coal mines of Belgium and France, where the condition of production is that the laborer shall have meat but once a week—would we wish them here?

Can we have one thing without the other?

In those towns off the San Diego Freeway that had seemed when times were good to answer Henry George’s question in the affirmative, 1993 was a sullen spring. In April, about the time the Lakewood Center Bullock’s was selling the last of its Heart Wafflers, the ten-year-old girl who said that she had been assaulted by a Spur Posse member gave her first press conference, in Gloria Allred’s office. Her mother had been seen, on
Donahue, The Home Show
, and
20/20
, but the child, by that time eleven, had not. “I have been upset because I wanted to be on TV,” she said at her press conference. “To show how I feel. I wanted to say it for myself.” Also in April, Spur Posse members approached various talent agencies, trying to sell their story for a TV movie. An I.C.M. agent asked these Spurs if they were not concerned about how they might be presented. Their concern, they told him, was how much money they would make. I.C.M. declined to represent the Spurs, as did, it was later reported, C.A.A., United Talent Agency, and William Morris.

It was April, too, at the Douglas plant on the Lakewood city line, when Teamsters Local 692 went on strike, over the issue of whether or not Douglas could contract out work previously done by union members. “They can’t do that to people after twenty-seven years,” the wife of one driver, for whom the new contract would mean a cut from $80,000 to $35,000 a year, told the
Press-Telegram.
“It’s just not right.” It was in April, again, that Finnair disclosed discussions about a switch from its mostly Douglas fleet to buying Boeing. It was in May that Continental, just out of bankruptcy reorganization, ordered ninety-two new planes, with options for ninety-eight more, all from Boeing.

In a town where it was possible to hear, unprompted, a spirited defense of the DC-
10
(“Very quiet plane,” John Todd told me, “nice flying plane, compared to those Boeings and those other airplanes it makes about half as much noise”), the involvement with Douglas went deeper than mere economic dependence. People in Lakewood had defined their lives as Douglas. I had lunch one day with a 1966 graduate of Lakewood High who had later spent time in the Peace Corps. It seemed that somewhere in the heart of Africa, he had hopped a ride on a DC-
3
. The DC-
3
had a plate indicating that it had come off the Long Beach line, and he had thought, There it is, I’ve come as far as I can go and it’s still Douglas. “It’s a town on the plantation model,” he said to me at lunch. “Douglas being the big house.”

“They’re history,” an aircraft industry executive said that spring to
The Washington Post.
“I see a company going out of business, barring some miracle,” Don E. Newquist, chairman of the International Trade Commission, said at a hearing on commercial aerospace competitiveness. Each was talking about Douglas, and by extension about the plant on the Lakewood city line, the plant with the flag and the forward-slanted logo and the MD-
IIS
parked like cars and the motel with the marquee that still read “Welcome Douglas Happy Hour 4-7.” “It’s like a lifetime thing,” one Lakewood High graduate said on
Jane Whitney
, trying to explain the Spur Posse and what held its members together. “We’re all going to be friends for life, you know.”

I
t was 1997 when Douglas was finally melted into Boeing, and the forward-slanted letters reading
MCDONNELL DOUGLAS
vanished from what was now the Boeing plant on the Lakewood city line.

It was 1999 when Boeing shut down Douglas’s MD-
90
program.

It was 2000 when Boeing shut down Douglas’s MD-
80
program, 2001 when Boeing shut down Douglas’s MD-
II
program.

It was 2000 when Boeing began talking about its plan to convert two hundred and thirty acres of what had been the Douglas plant into non-aircraft use, in fact a business park, “PacifiCenter,” with its own condominium housing and the dream of attracting, with what inducements became increasingly unclear as the economy waned, such firms as Intel and Sun Microsystems.

It was 2002 when Boeing obtained an order from the Pentagon for sixty additional C-
17S
, another temporary stay of execution for what had been the Douglas program, which had been scheduled for closure in 2004. “It’s a great day,” the manager on the program told employees on the day he announced the order. “This is going to keep you employed through 2008, so rest tonight and start on sixty more tomorrow.”

It was also 2002 when the first stage of a multi-billion-dollar public works project called the “Alameda Corridor” was completed, a $2.4 billion twenty-mile express railway meant to speed freight containers from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to inland distribution points. This “Alameda Corridor” had been for some years a kind of model civic endeavor, one of those political mechanisms designed to reward old friends and make new ones. During the period when the Alameda Corridor was still only an idea, but an idea moving inexorably toward a start date, its supporters frequently framed it as the way to bring a “new economy” to the twenty-six “Gateway Cities” involved, all of which had been dependent on aerospace and one of which was Lakewood. This “new economy” was to be built on “international trade,” an entirely theoretical replacement for the gold-standard money tree, the federal government, that had created these communities. Many seminars on “global logistics” were held. Many warehouses were built. The first stage of the Alameda Corridor was near completion before people started wondering what exactly these warehouses were to bring them; started wondering, for example, whether eight-dollars-an-hour forklift operators, hired in the interests of a “flexible” work force only on those days when the warehouse was receiving or dispatching freight, could ever become the “good citizens” of whom Mark Taper had spoken in 1969, the “enthusiastic owners of property,” the “owners of a piece of their country—a stake in the land.”
California likes to befooled
, as Cedarquist, the owner in
The Octopus
of the failed San Francisco iron works, told Presley at the Bohemian Club.

I
n 1970 I was working for
Life
, and went up to eastern Oregon to do a piece on the government’s storage of VX and GB nerve gas on twenty thousand acres near Hermiston, a farm town in Umatilla County, population then 5,300. It seemed that many citizens wanted the nerve gas, or, in the preferred term, “the defense material,” the storage of which provided 717 civilian jobs and brought money into town. It seemed that other citizens, some of whom lived not in Hermiston but across the mountains in Portland and Salem, making them members of what was referred to in Hermiston as “the academic community and Other Mothers for Peace or whatever,” saw the presence in Oregon of VX and GB as a hazard. The story was routine enough, and I had pretty much wrapped it up (seen the mayor, seen the city manager, seen the anti-gas district attorney in Pendleton, seen the colonel in charge of the depot and seen the rabbits they left in the bunkers to test for leaks) before I realized that the situation had for me an actual resonance: since well before Elizabeth Scott was born, members of my family had been moving through places in the same spirit of careless self-interest and optimism that now seemed to be powering this argument in Hermiston. Such was the power of the story on which I had grown up that this thought came to me as a kind of revelation: the settlement of the west, however inevitable, had not uniformly tended to the greater good, nor had it on every level benefitted even those who reaped its most obvious rewards.

O
ne afternoon in September of 2002 I drove the length of the Alameda Corridor, north from the port through what had been the industrial heart of Southern California: Carson, Compton, Watts. Lynwood, South Gate. Huntington Park. Vernon. It was a few weeks before that fall’s dockworkers’ strike shut down Pacific trade, and I saw that afternoon no trains, no containers, only this new rail line meant to carry the freight and these new warehouses meant to house the freight, many of them bearing for-lease signs. On the first hill north of Signal Hill there was what appeared to be a new subdivision, with a sign, “Vista Industria.” Past the sign that read Vista Industria there were only more warehouses, miles of warehouses, miles of empty intersections, one Gateway City after another, each indistinguishable from the last. Only when the Arco Towers began emerging from the distant haze over downtown Los Angeles did I notice a sign on a warehouse that seemed to suggest actual current usage.
165,000 Square Feet of T-Shirt Madness
, this sign read.

S
ave the Aero—See “Tadpole.”
This was the sign on the Aero Theatre on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica in September of 2002. The Aero Theatre was built in 1939 by Donald Douglas, as recreation for his workers when Douglas Aircraft was Santa Monicas biggest employer. During the ten years when I was living not far from the Aero, 1978 to 1988, I never saw anyone actually enter or leave the theatre. Douglas built Santa Monica and then left it, and the streets running south of what had been the first Douglas plant were now lined with body shops, mini-marts, Pentecostal churches and walk-in dentists. Still, Santa Monica had its ocean, its beaches, its climate, its sun and its fog and its climbing roses. The Gateway Cities will have only their warehouses.

Part Three

1

“What had it all been about: all the manqué promises, the failures of love and faith and honor; Martha buried out there by the levee in a $250 dress from Magnin’s with river silt in the seams; Sarah in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; her father, who had not much cared, the easy loser
(He never could have been
, her mother had said and still loved him); her mother sitting alone this afternoon in the big house upriver writing out invitations for the Admission Day Fiesta and watching
Dick Clark’s American Bandstand
because the Dodgers were rained out; Everett down there on the dock with his father’s .38. She, her mother, Everett, Martha, the whole family gallery: they carried the same blood, come down through twelve generations of circuit riders, county sheriffs, Indian fighters, country lawyers, Bible readers, one obscure United States senator from a frontier state a long time ago; two hundred years of clearings in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and then the break, the void into which they gave their rosewood chests, their silver brushes; the cutting clean which was to have redeemed them all. They had been a particular kind of people, their particular virtues called up by a particular situation, their particular flaws waiting there through all those years, unperceived, unsuspected, glimpsed only cloudily by one or two in each generation, by a wife whose bewildered eyes wanted to look not upon Eldorado but upon her mothers dogwood, by a blue-eyed boy who was at sixteen the best shot in the county and who when there was nothing left to shoot rode out one day and shot his brother, an accident. It had been above all a history of accidents: of moving on and of accidents. What is it you want, she had asked Everett tonight. It was a question she might have asked them all.”