Guest post by Steve Jensen
In my earliest memories, my family lived on one of the naval bases in San Diego—I don’t remember which one—where my dad was stationed while he was in the Navy. (I do remember that our address was 18 Freidel Drive, and our phone number was BAyview 5-7272.) In 1953, Dad took his 20-year retirement from the navy, and we moved about 100 miles up the California coast to Hermosa Beach, a beach suburb of Los Angeles. Here my parents bought a property, right next door to the property already owned by Dad’s niece Dee and Mom’s sister Jeanne, and the new house that was being built on that new lot. On July 17, 1954, two days after my fifth birthday, we moved into the new house, next to Dee and Jeanne.
Dad’s favorite sister, Chris (who was Dee’s mother), also lived nearby in Hermosa, on 18th Street, with her husband Tom Brown. They had beautiful gardens and a spaniel named Taffy. If I’m not mistaken, Chris may have been an officer in the South Bay Begonia Society, and maybe even president once or twice.
Our new house faced east on Silver Street in Hermosa, facing the whole sweep of the L.A. basin, all the way to the San Gabriel Mountains (on a clear day). The house thus had its back to the Pacific, but we could see the ocean from the back windows, and it was an easy walk west to “downtown Hermosa” and the beach.
Much of what will follow takes place in the living room of our new house at 1527 Silver Street, Hermosa Beach. This was the living room: fifteen by twenty-one feet, with an interior ceiling that peaked in the center (at about eleven feet up?) and one exposed beam that ran directly under the peak, maybe nine feet up. The front door was on the north side, the picture window showing the whole L.A. basin (and sometimes the mountains) faced east, over the front yard and the street. The doors to the kitchen and the hallway led off westward from the west wall of the living room. We had an L-shaped sectional sofa that curved from the middle of the south wall to the beginning of the picture window on the east wall. Mom would sit on the south end of the sofa, my sister on the east end, and I in the middle of the curve. From there we could all get a pretty good view of the TV set, which was near the north wall but didn’t obscure the fireplace in the middle of the north wall. In the southwest corner of the room was a free-standing armchair—just to the left of the sofa—where my brother Mike usually sat. Another free-standing recliner chair stood between the two doors in the west wall, and my dad sat there.
From about 1959 to about 1964, my dad worked nights, the graveyard shift, doing the electronics and refrigeration maintenance necessary at a poker palace in nearby Gardena. Dad worked from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., Friday through Tuesday nights. He’d leave our house at about 7:30 of an evening, and arrive home the following morning at about 4:30 a.m. As an avid late-night reader-in-bed for most of this period, I was quite often still awake to hear his car come up the driveway in the morning.
When I heard that car coming up the driveway, I would instantly douse my reading lamp, but I don’t think Dad could possibly have missed the change in the light from my bedroom windows. He would come into the doorway of my bedroom and just stand there and watch me and my long-sleeping brother. I tried not to move a muscle, pretending to be asleep, and tried even harder not to smile. But I think I rarely succeeded in these pretenses.
“‘Possum,” my dad would say, before going across the hall to check on my sister Lisa.
Wednesday and Thursday nights, Dad was off work, and he stayed home with us those evenings. He was always off for Thanksgiving (Thursday), and always off for Christmas, no matter which night of the week it fell. (He traded with a childless buddy who’d work his Christmas Eve and Christmas Night shifts for him.)
When Dad was home, we had family game nights, and game nights galore. All of us were addicted to board games, from chess and checkers and caroms and backgammon to the trademarked board games like Clue, Pirate and Traveler, Around the World in 80 Days, Careers, Camelot, Bridg-It, Life (would you wind up in Millionaire Acres or The Poorhouse?), Cootie and Blockhead (not exactly board games), and, later, Risk. Alfred Hitchcock’s Why? was a pre-Clue mystery board game, but I can’t remember any of the rules now. Maybe you had to figure the motive from the cards in your hand? Dad, the navy veteran, called backgammon “acey-deucey.”
We also played cards. Mom and Dad taught us kids how to play 500, a variant of bridge. Like bridge, you had two teams of two players each, who bid in advance to take a certain number of tricks, which the declarers then had to take to win the hand. Unlike bridge, you threw out the twos and threes from the deck, but you did include the joker. This left a deck of 45 cards. Each player was dealt 10 cards (10 tricks), with five left over, placed on the table face down, for “the kitty.” The declarer of the bid took “the kitty” and could either improve their hand with it or ignore it if there was nothing much in it.
Again, unlike bridge, there was no dummy; each of the four seated players played his own hand. And further unlike bridge, the rank order of the cards in the trump suit was quite different: Joker was always the high trump, followed by (2) Jack of trumps, (3) the “Jick,” which was the Jack of the opposite suit of the same color (i.e., Jack of clubs if trumps were spades; Jack of hearts if trumps were diamonds), (4) Ace of trumps, and then down through the ranks in order of the trump suit. You had to remember that a Queen, King, or even an Ace of trumps would not take a Jack of trumps, or a Jick. But in any non-trump suit, the usual order held.
I go into such detail about the rules of this game because I’m not sure that anyone remembers 500 now. For that matter, I’m not sure that many people remember bridge now. But both were good games. 500 caused great grief in our family for anyone who had to partner with my brother Mike, who was always an angry loser at 500, and quite often an angry winner. It got so bad that for some years my sister Lisa would refuse to play the game at all, with any of us.
We also played a few parlor games. Mom and Dad taught us kids Murder one Thanksgiving night in the early Sixties, and from then on it was a staple of our Thanksgiving celebrations. Mom liked to be the Detective, because she could sit in her comfy spot in the lighted living room while the rest of us roamed through the rest of the pitch-dark house, murdering or being murdered. Once, when Dad was the designated Murderer, he “killed” my brother, my sister, and me, before turning upon himself to “commit suicide”—leaving Mom to wonder, after 15 or 20 minutes, what on earth had happened to the rest of us, since nobody seemed to be “discovering a body.” When she came back to investigate, she found the four of us all sprawled in a heap on the floor of Lisa’s bedroom, trying not to grin but giggling like crazy.
Thanksgivings in the Sixties: We’d watch the parades in the morning, football in the afternoon, and eat dinner at about five. Then we’d play Murder for an hour or two. Then we’d have pie—pumpkin, and mincemeat, and cherry, all of them homemade by Mom. Then if there was a good movie on TV we’d watch that. People stayed home on Thanksgiving evenings in the 1960s. Nobody rushed out to start Christmas-shopping at midnight; the very idea would have been considered barbaric.
Our Thanksgiving menus didn’t vary much, nor did we want them to. There was always a 25-pound (or so) roast turkey, usually stuffed with some mixture of croutons, sausage, and herbs, with mashed potatoes and gravy, cut green beans or other frozen vegetables, cranberry sauce (canned, jellied), Jello salad (various flavors of Jello with crushed pineapple, carrots and celery), and the crowning glory, Mom’s superb homemade Parker House rolls with butter and cherry jam. (Though now that I come to think of it, I’m not sure Mom always made the Parker House rolls herself; sometimes I think she ordered them from a bakery, back when you could still get real Parker House rolls from a bakery. She was busy enough with the turkey, the potatoes, the gravy, and the pies.)
Since neither Mom nor Dad was much for wine or cocktails (unless we went out to a “fancy” restaurant), we drank Mom’s Thanksgiving punch: grape juice, pineapple juice (left over from the crushed pineapple that was in the Jello salad), and ginger ale. I loved it. We did not do squash, sweet potatoes, yams, anything with marshmallows, or casseroles featuring “roasted” (burned) vegetables.
I’ll go on to Christmas after the reader has had a chance to digest Thanksgiving!
But much of what I recall now about this happy period happened on the nights when Dad was not home—after all, that would have been five nights out of seven. My father was a good, decent man, an FDR Democrat from Iowa, fair-minded and honest, and I loved being with him when he was at home. But somehow, his absence from home most evenings of the week seemed to increase my sense of security, rather than the opposite. On the nights we three kids were home alone with Mom, Dad’s absence, while he worked to make the money that sustained us all, somehow increased my sense of being safe and protected. I felt that I was in safe hands, surrounded by love both at home and (slightly) abroad. Mom and my sibs and I were like the protons in the nucleus of an atom, protected by Dad, the wandering electron that protected us all.
On weeknights during the school year, when home alone with Mom, Mike, and Lisa, I’d do my homework in the living room while listening to the TV with one ear. My homework through middle school was never difficult, and I could have done it with my eyes closed. I think Lisa (three years younger than I) did the same thing. But I don’t remember brother Mike (four years older than I) ever doing homework in the living room. I think he always did it in the bedroom he shared with me, and only came out to the living room when he was done. Of course, his homework would have been harder—high-school level.
When homework was done, I liked to draw maps of U.S. states and foreign countries, which I copied out of atlases. My favorite atlas was C.S. Hammond’s, which depicted all U.S. states and most foreign countries in full color, with their counties or states or provinces picked out in multiple colors. I would trace the outline of the state or nation, and then carefully fill in the provinces or counties and cities free-hand. Don’t ask me what the point of this exercise was! I couldn’t have told you then, and I couldn’t tell you now. I just enjoyed doing it. Maybe it was eye-hand co-ordination training.
My mapmaking zeal lasted from about 1959 to 1961. As that gradually faded, I began to fancy myself as a cartoonist, and I would rule off ordinary sheets of typing paper into panels, after the manner of comic-book pages, and then fill in the panels with character and story. I did the drawing in basic pencil, then filled in the color with colored pencils.
My main inspiration from the Sunday newspaper comics at the time was the comic strip Mary Perkins: On Stage, written and drawn by Leonard Starr. This was a beautifully rendered, “realistic” strip, and I admired its style. The strip was about a young actress working in the theater in New York and elsewhere, and not only did I admire the visual style, but the way the tone combined typical comic-strip romance and soap opera with comedy and adventure. Following Starr’s leads, but adding my own extra dollops of comedy and adventure, my own “comic strip” was about a married couple, Jonathan and Kuta, who lived in New York. Jonathan was a detective who solved crimes, and brunette Kuta, who was part Asian, was an actress on Broadway. Their best friends were Anthony, a genial, bearlike drama critic (think “Sebastian Cabot type” if you recall that particular era, or, more generally, “Monty Woolley type, but younger”), and Vanessa, a slinky blonde who was actually a girl from the planet Venus, though only Jonathan, Kuta, and Anthony knew this. Imagine the hi-jinks, though I’m afraid I’ve now forgotten most of them myself!
Lisa soon followed me into drawing comic strips of her own, ruling sheets of typing paper into comic-book panels, as I did. So by 1961 or ’62, after homework and while watching TV, Lisa and I would keep our hands busy drawing our comic strips.
So on a typical Friday, Monday, or Tuesday night during the school year, after dinner and after Dad had left for work, and after homework was done, Mom and Lisa and I would be sitting in our places on the sofa, and Mike in his chair, mostly watching TV. Lisa and I might be drawing our comic strips as well. Mom would be smoking cigarettes and doing crossword puzzles (she bought all the New York Times puzzle collections that were published as books), or else doing the double-crostic in the Saturday Review. For these efforts, she kept a considerable stack of reference books (Bartlett’s, Roget’s, The Reader’s Encyclopedia) next to her on the sofa, which separated her “spot” from mine. Those books would help me a lot, later, in high school.
I don’t seem to recall my brother Mike doing anything with his hands, except maybe sharpening pocket knives on a whetstone. He too would be smoking, from the time he was about 15. All of us would likely be sipping at tall glasses of iced tea with sugar and lemon, even in the winter—except for Mom, who drank a Pepsi every night. Always Pepsi, never Coke.
You must remember this: In the 1950s and 1960s, everybody smoked. Everybody. Doctors smoked in their offices. People smoked in hospitals (though maybe not in the operating room), People smoked in courtrooms, in airports, on airplanes, in trains, in theaters, in restaurants. Ashtrays were everywhere. The typical clay-modeled knicknack designed to be given by an elementary schooler to their parents at Christmas would be an ashtray. We kids all grew up in a succession of smoke-filled rooms. We didn’t think there was anything strange about that, at the time. We were all used to it. I think most of us just took it for granted. I know I always did.
Teachers (below college level) were not supposed to smoke in classrooms, and for the most part they did not. But on rare occasions a more rebellious teacher might risk one on the sly.
But to get back to the family circle on Silver Street, Saturday nights in the early Sixties were a little bit different than weeknights: No school tomorrow, and no homework that had to be done tonight. Saturday TV was different, too. At that time there was nothing that interested us much on the networks on Saturday, but we wouldn’t be done out of our TV jag. So we watched B movies on L.A.’s local networks, from the cheapest, grungiest Fifties horror movies, with people running around in “monster” suits, to the gaudiest Italian-made gladiator epics starring Steve Reeves and lesser lights. The cheaper and trashier these pics were, the better we liked them, because their ineptness gave us all the opportunity to toss wisecracks at the TV screen at regular intervals. By the time my little sister was 10 (in 1962) we had all developed into pretty good wisecrackers.
In a similar spirit, we never missed a televised beauty pageant—which were also usually televised on Saturday night in those days. We watched Miss America in September, Miss Universe and Miss International Beauty in the late spring or early summer. Miss International Beauty was what the City of Long Beach came up with to replace Miss Universe, after the latter departed Long Beach for more glamorous international locales. Miss IB was Miss Universe on a lower budget and with lesser “names” attending, but it had its own sort of clunky-imitation appeal. My family would watch these pageants in a half-satiric spirit, sometimes commenting on the real beauty of some of the girls, but also hurling wisecracks at the TV screen about the general tackiness of it all.
As spring approached and advanced, came the annual return of televised baseball to L.A. We were all avid Dodger fans, and there was very little that made me happier than sitting in our living room, of a spring or summer evening, with the front door and windows open to the screens on a warm night, drinking iced tea, and watching and listening to the inimitable Vin Scully broadcast a Dodger game. Vin Scully usually broadcast a game—either on TV or radio—without a partner. When Scully called a game, he wasn’t talking to his partner; he was talking to YOU. After a season or two of radio and TV games, you knew all about him, and he became a cherished and intimate friend. His dulcet voice just embodied a summer night in L.A., from 1958 well into the 21st century. These Dodger broadcasts might embrace, of course, all seven nights of the week, the nights when Dad was home and the nights when he wasn’t. Both ways, it was just heaven for me, and I remember those baseball summer nights with deep contentment to this day, sixty years later.
Of course, we didn’t all go out to meet the Helms truck every single day. Many days, none of our family went out. Sometimes, nobody on the whole street went out to meet them. On those days when they didn’t make a sale on Silver Street, I always imagined that the whistle of the truck sounded a bit dejected as they retired down our street. I felt a little sorry for the truck and the driver on those days. I believe they stopped sending the trucks around some time after I moved away to college in 1967. And then, alas, they were gone. Now they are only another memory I cherish.
I can still recall a few other treats that I loved in the Sixties, but that I don’t think exist any more. An Abba Zabba was a candy bar without chocolate. The outer part was a stiff, chewy white taffy that stretched slowly when you bit into it. Inside was a dryish peanut butter filling, without much oil, that broke into tiny peanut butter granules as the taffy stretched. A Charleston Chew was a white taffy bar robed in chocolate. As soon as you bought it, you put it in the freezer and froze it hard. To eat it, you took it out of the freezer, still wrapped, and cracked it against the porcelain divider in the kitchen sink. This would break it into nice, bite-sized bits. Delaware Punch was a delicious fruit juice, like grape juice, only richer and with more flavors besides the grape (passion fruit? Pomegranate?). I never could quite identify it all. Bireley’s Grape Soda was a non-carbonated soda that came in a bottle just like all the carbonated sodas. I loved it to pieces.
The Fourth of July was a special day in our house for all the usual reasons, plus one. It was the only day in the year when we kids were allowed to climb up onto the roof of the house—to watch the fireworks. From the roof of our house, with its slight elevation at the “top of the hill” in Hermosa, we could see west over the Pacific, north to the Hollywood Hills, south to the great rocky bluff of Palos Verdes, and east all the way across the whole L.A. Basin to the San Gabriel Mountains beyond. Well, we could if it was a clear night. And by about nine p.m. you could see a whole circle of various L.A. suburbs simultaneously putting on their different fireworks displays, in a ring that stretched about three quarters of the way around you, Nothing to the west, of course!
My birthday fell in mid-July, Lisa’s in August, and Mike’s at the beginning of September. Several of Mom’s relatives lived in Hermosa Beach or its Greater Environs, and a couple of Dad’s did, too. Before Mom’s siblings had children of their own, those who lived nearby would tend to gather at our house for birthdays, because we had the space, and because Mom usually made the cakes! In the usual course of the year, we would celebrate my uncle Carl’s and my uncle Philip’s birthdays in February, Mom’s and her sister Jeanne’s, both in March, Grandpa Bader’s (Mom’s father) in May, Aunt Nadine’s in June, the summer siblings’ as above, Aunt Dorothy’s also in August, and Dad’s in November.
For most of these occasions, Mom made a big elaborate cake. It had to be pretty big, because there were a lot of us, It also had to have two layers, chocolate and white, because my Grandpa Carl Bader would not eat chocolate cake, and his son, Carl Jr., would only eat chocolate cake. So we usually had 13-inch-by-9-inch sheet pan cakes with two layers. For my own birthday I always wanted the two layers covered with Mom’s delicious fudge: Brown-sugar fudge spread thickly over the bottom layer, inside, and chocolate fudge spread thickly all over the top and outsides. Mom was great with caketop decorations, too.
Once in a while we wouldn’t have a cake. Aunt Nadine, whose birthday fell right in the middle of the rhubarb season, always wanted a rhubarb pie for her birthday, and she got it. I loved the rhubarb pies: The sweet red filling tasted “cherry” to me—but it looked exactly like red celery! In his teen years, my brother Mike too stopped having cakes, and preferred a kind of lemony cream pie he or Mom had seen in a magazine ad, made with Borden’s evaporated milk and some lemon. This was deliciously creamy.
End of summer heralded the approach of our family’s annual pilgrimage to Disneyland—about 30 miles east of Hermosa Beach, in Buena Park in Orange County. This was always at the end of August, and stretched over three days in the park and two nights at the Disneyland Hotel. Mom, who didn’t drive herself, was terribly afraid of the new California freeways in the 1950s, and made Dad take the “back roads” (mostly Artesia Boulevard) to get there. This took about an hour one way, and for the last 10 minutes or so we could see the top of Disney’s “Matterhorn Mountain” floating tantalizingly, beckoningly, in the distance.
I can still remember that, in the late 1950s, most of our drive from Hermosa Beach to Buena Park took us through nothing but orange groves and dairy farms. Ah, southern California in the 1950s! Not yet overpopulated. Paradise lost.
The Disneyland Park opened in the summer of 1955. Dad didn’t have a car until early 1957, but in the summer of 1956 my Uncle Philip and Aunt Dorothy decided to go, and to drive the Jensen family there and back, just for the day. (Phil was a cab driver at that time, I believe, and privately he drove a great big green-and-white Chevy sedan that easily held all of us.) I believe the Hotel opened in 1957. From then until 1966, we Jensens made our own pilgrimage every year, and stayed at the hotel overnight. Of course we visited all the “lands” and rode all the rides, but I’m not going to share too much detail about these visits, because they’re the same memories shared by everyone in my generation whose families made the trip to the park.
Once in a while, on a night when Dad was home, we’d all go out to a real, sit-down-at-the-table-and-relax restaurant. Usually, in the late ‘50s and ‘60s, our restaurant of choice was the Bay ‘90s in Manhattan Beach (the next town north along the beach from Hermosa). The place was a bar with an old-timey “Gay ‘90s” atmosphere, complete with “naughty” reclining semi-nude lady in the painting that hung over the bar, but the place catered to families as well. These were the only times during that era that I can remember Mom and Dad ordering drinks in a restaurant. (Of course, they didn’t serve alcohol in Disneyland.) Dad always had a vodka Gimlet, and Mom always had a vodka Tom Collins. Usually just one each.
The “Gay ‘90s” theme continued in the menu. They started everyone off with a green salad, followed by a small plate of spaghetti. (The spaghetti was very good, by the way, and this was the place where I first learned to like the dish, since I couldn’t avoid it. With its “threatening” olives and tomato sauce, and malodorous Parmesan cheese, I would have rejected spaghetti as a smaller child. Here I learned to like it well enough to start devouring it, later on, whenever Mom made it at home!) For mains, Mike always had the plate called the “John L. Sullivan,” which was a giant sirloin steak that he liked blood rare. I always had the “Jim Corbett,” a New York cut steak, medium for me, with a baked potato or French fries. Lisa always had something that I remember as “The Saucy Lady” or “The Saucy Bustle,” or something like that, but I’ve forgotten exactly what the dish was.
A few years later, at the end of the Sixties and into the Seventies, on Christmas Eves while Mom deliberately stayed home by herself to wrap Christmas presents unseen, the rest of us would all go out to a steak house in Redondo Beach (the next town south along the beach) called the Windjammer, to eat a long leisurely dinner while Mom stayed home, enwrapped. I still loved my New York steaks! I always had mine here with French fries, and they came with a slice of cross-cut apple (a hole in the center where the core had been) that had been sweetly spiced with something that turned it bright red. Always pleasant memories from the Windjammer.
Oh, my, is it Christmas again, already? Christmas on Silver Street began its underground rumblings around mid-November, but it didn’t become overt until the Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend. In mid-November Mom would start mixing, wrapping, and freezing the various doughs for the various cookies she was going to bake. Happily, we had a big stand-up freezer in the garage that would accommodate many huge bundles of cookie dough, as well as steaks, turkeys, and hams.
On the Monday after Thanksgiving, Mom would usually start playing our family collection of Christmas carols on 33rpm records. We had the Harry Simeone Chorale (the famous “Little Drummer Boy” album from 1958), the Robert Shaw Chorale (like all the rest of Harry Simeone’s record, all traditional Christmas carols in truly magnificent and glorious instrumental and vocal arrangements), Harry Belafonte, Andy Williams, and several others. We knew it was Christmas when the house started ringing with those carols. My own favorites were Robert Shaw’s rousing arrangements of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and the Spanish carol “Fum! Fum! Fum!” and Harry Simeone’s meltingly beautiful “Lo! How a Rose E’er-Blooming.” I could have listened to that last one for an hour, and I always wished there were more of it.
We also knew Christmas was approaching when Dad would start singing around the house, “Christmas is a-coming and the goose is getting fat, / Please to put a penny in an old man’s hat!”
Since of course it never snowed in Los Angeles, and I for one would have been thrilled if it had even rained on Christmas Day [it didn’t], around 1960 we kids started decorating all our windows with food-colored Glass Wax. Glass Wax was a regular window cleaner that also marketed itself as a holiday decoration by selling stencils cut into Christmas-y or wintry themes—bells, stars, angels, Santas, etc. You just put the stencil up to the inside of your window and daubed your food-colored Glass Wax through it. The Glass Wax was soft enough for the daubing, but solid enough to stay in place after you removed the stencil. No drips.
In early December, Mom would start in on her actual baking, because of course we had to have a lot of home-baked goodies in the house to welcome in the Advent! These included cinnamon rolls, brownies, and two kinds of fudge, brown-sugar and chocolate. But Mom really went to town during the Christmas season with cookies.
I am now going to try to remember all the different kinds of cookies Mom baked for Christmas. Wish me luck! Chocolate chip, with chocolate chips. Chocolate chip, with butterscotch chips. (Both kinds also contained corn flakes and walnuts.) Peanut butter. Scotch shortbread. “Refrigerator cookies,” or pinwheels, which were two kinds of dough (plain and chocolate) rolled into a spiral, with sliced walnuts, then sliced thin and baked to show the pattern. Plain chocolate drop cookies, with chocolate frosting. Chocolate drop cookies with chocolate frosting and a date inside. Oatmeal raisin. “Spritz” cookies, which were a plain vanilla dough that had been forced through a pastry tube with a decorative floral or star-like nozzle. Grandma Bader’s Sour Cream Cut-Outs, a dough that contained two full cups of sour cream—and that proved almost impossible for me to work with at all, when I tried to make them myself many years later. The dough was simply too soft to hold a shape, and stuck to everything. I don’t know how Mom did it, in the warmth of a southern California kitchen. But she did it triumphantly, year after year. She’d roll out the dough and use cookie cutters to cut it into such shapes as Christmas trees, stars, Santas, wreaths, bells, reindeer, and angels. Some of the delicate shapes she got out of that dough were truly astounding. After the baking it would be up to us kids to decorate the cookies with multicolored butter frostings and assorted doodads like colored sugars and sprinkles for the tops.
Those frosted sour cream cut-outs were my second favorite among our Christmas cookies. For my absolute favorites, Mom used the same sour cream dough again. This time she took two plain but generous-sized circles of the dough (the size of the palm of a man’s hand), covered the “bottom” one with sweet pineapple pie filling, set the second round on top of the first one and pinched up the edges, sprinkled the top with red and green colored sugars, and baked. The result was soft, warm from the oven at first, and heavenly, and just as heavenly after several days cold. Perfect little in-hand pineapple pies, hot or cold.
Not more than a week before Christmas, we’d go out and get our tree from a lot, almost always a Scotch pine. The perfume from that type was delicious, and the branches were strong enough to hold a lot of weight in the tree ornaments without being bowed down. And we always got the tree a bit “late,” by American standards, because we didn’t want it drooping and losing its needles by Christmas Day. Ours was going to stand up through early January.
Dad would string on the electric lights throughout the tree, and some years we also had electric bubble lights around the base (when turned on, bubbles would start rising up through some liquid in the multicolored glass tubes). Then everyone in the family would help pile on the ornaments—we must have had hundreds of them, from several once-complete sets, and never used them all. I liked the china bells (with tiny clappers that clinked a bit but didn’t exactly ring), and the miniature birds and musical instruments the best.
As with the extended-family birthdays, our house on Silver Street tended to be the locus of the extended-family Thanksgivings and Christmases through the end of 1961. We had the space, we were central, and none of my mom’s siblings had any children until 1958, when I was almost nine. (We had some slightly older cousins on Dad’s side who lived not very far away, but they were never very close to us and years might go by between their visits.). So, on the big family holidays Mom’s relatives would all come to us, through the end of 1961: Grandpa and Grandma Bader, Uncle Carl and his wife Nadine, Uncle Phil and his wife Dorothy, and Aunt Jeanne. From Dad’s side of the family came his favorite sister Chris and her daughter, Dad’s niece Dee, who was only five years younger than Dad and was also one of Dad’s favorites. She was a great favorite of us all. Dee was tough, funny, sassy, rode a motorcycle, and drank beer out of the can. In the 1950s! She also painted in the modernist vein, knew a lot about art, and collected kachina dolls.
I should also point out that nothing in particular happened at the end of 1961 to stop these family gatherings. There was no family crisis or family feud. It was just that by that time Mom’s sibs were starting to have kids, families, and home traditions of their own. They started staying home on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.
In the Fifties, we kids would get up at about 2 a.m. Christmas Day, to play with our Christmas stockings (which would have been left on the foot of each bed maybe an hour earlier). There were always an orange and an apple in the toe of each stocking, and a sprinkle of gold-wrapped chocolate Christmas coins. In the calf would be rolled-up comic books, paperback books, small toys, little plastic math puzzles, Chinese puzzles, decks of cards (often Authors cards), and so on. These would keep us occupied until Mom and Dad could crawl out of bed, maybe five hours later. Sometimes we kids read our comic books and other times we tried to play Authors—quietly!
By the Sixties, we kids could stay asleep until maybe 7 a.m., and thus the stockings would keep us occupied until a bit later. By the Sixties, my stocking also always contained a great little box of Callard & Bowser’s English butterscotch toffees, individually wrapped, slightly soft on the outside and harder on the inside. Plus, a pretty little round box of red currant drops (the size of lemon drops) that were imported from somewhere in Europe by one of our local candy shops. Oh, and I usually got a nice box of fancy little petits fours, another of the many sweet treats that just jazzed me!
Early on Christmas morning, my brother Mike, who would not eat fresh fruit, usually returned his orange and apple to Mom’s big fruit bowl in the living room. I always thought this was crass. Who returns a gift? Well, Mike did, quite often.
Christmas Day itself saw the grand melée of the gift unwrapping, around mid-morning. Even when it was only the five of us Jensens at home, in 1962 and after, the gift wrappings and ribbons would be piled knee-high all over the living room by the time we were done! Books—ever more and more of them as the years went by, as all five of us had a taste for them. Records—comedy albums for Mike (he must have had all of them), Broadway cast albums for me (I loved them, but didn’t quite have all of them), more Broadway cast albums and, later, the Beatles, for Lisa. Board games galore, getting more complex in nature as we grew up. A growing collection of Barbie dolls for Lisa. One year, Dad made identical writing desks, with drawers underneath, for all three of us. Lisa and I still have ours, more than 60 years later. Another year, Dad made Lisa an elaborate split-level dollhouse. You could place both halves down on the floor so that they faced and opened into each other (there was no roof—you put the miniatures in from above), or you could stack them on top of one another. One year we all got a ping-pong table. We all went through a Wham-O phase at some point, when we got Frisbees (then called Pluto Platters), Slip-’n’-Slides, and Hula Hoops.
Christmas Day also marked the debut of Mom’s cookies-and-candy-laden coffee table (the low, round table that sat in the angle of the curved sectional sofa), once she was through wrapping presents on it the night before. It was also the first time we opened our candy boxes. We always, for as long as I can remember, had a five-pound box of California’s exquisite See’s Chocolates every Christmas. See’s, like the Helms Bakeries, was another iconic longtime Los Angeles institution, but this one still exists today. We only ever had See’s Chocolates at Christmas (and, occasionally, See’s giant fondant-and-candied-fruit-filled Easter eggs at Easter)—but boy, did we ever splurge at Christmas! Everything that candy company made was first-rate, with the very best ingredients, and they never cheapened the product by deciding to go national—though it does have shops in a few other states besides California nowadays.
Lisa always liked the molasses chips, chocolate covered, which were oblong and flat enough that a single paper wrapper in the See’s box would hold three of them. Until he died a few years ago, Mike would send Lisa a box of just See’s molasses chips, every Christmas.
During the Sixties, besides the See’s, we also had a five-pound box of chocolates from Sears Roebuck, and these were very nearly as good as the See’s, though I don’t remember the individual varieties so well now. (Sears is gone, but you can still buy most of those See’s varieties in California.) We also had open dishes of less show-stopping candies, like pecan turtles and colorfully wrapped Hershey’s kisses. And tall glass jars, with fancy glass tops, full of the pretty, multi-colored, filled hard candies that Grandpa Bader liked.
I know this fast survey must make it sound like we were all in deep sugar-shock all the time, but we weren’t. For one thing we kids were all teenagers by the Sixties. Growing rapidly. And the gorging didn’t all happen in one day; we spaced it out over more than a month, from at least the first of December through mid-January, with solid-food meals in between. And lots of exercise, of course—Sixties kids played, and Sixties teenagers had lots of school activities when we weren’t on vacation.
Christmas dinner (in the evening of Christmas night) always followed the same template, but it was a different template from a Silver Street Thanksgiving. For Christmas, we always had a ham—a big fat ham sliced thickly across our plates. Accompanied by “Tater Tots,” those commercially processed but tasty little drumlins of chopped potato, which we baked in the oven in a separate pan. Now that I’m older and come to think about it, I don’t know why we didn't bake the Tater Tots in the same pan with the ham so as to soak up the drippings. But we didn’t. Then there’d be pineapple chunks (applesauce with pork, pineapple with ham was our rule), and asparagus or a frozen vegetable like French-cut green beans or a vegetable medley. Mom’s Jello salad would appear again, as would her grape juice, pineapple juice, and ginger-ale punch. As would her Parker House rolls. And then—more pies! Yes, Mom would have been making pumpkin, mincemeat, and cherry pies again during Advent (and freezing them in the garage freezer), as she had done in the run-up to Thanksgiving.
All day long on Christmas Day and into the evening, we played our Christmas carol records as a soft accompaniment to everything else.
The week after Christmas—and it was usually New Year’s Eve, I think—saw the last “special event” of the Silver Street year. The piñata!
As the paragraphs roll by, it occurs to me more and more that this may all come off sounding like boasting, bragging, crowing about the good fortune I was born into in Postwar California. Does it? Please let me assure you that the last thing that entered my head when I started writing this memoir was to show off. In 1960, nobody in Hermosa Beach would ever have dreamed of showing off. None of us believed that we were even “upper middle-class,” let alone privileged. At the same time, none of us thought we were “lower middle-class” either. Everyone—everyone in my own family, and all the kids I knew at school—in Hermosa would have said in 1960 that we were all right straight down the middle of the middle class, about as average as Americans could get.
The moral of the story, if there is one, is that you could be, in fact, perfectly average in statistical terms, but live as if you were privileged, on a single wage earner’s income in the United States in 1960. Everybody did it. Our family on Silver Street was not special. A single wage earner’s salary, from one single job, bought all this in 1960, all the things I’ve described above. House, car, abundant food, clothes, lavish gifts, vacations, healthcare, college for three children. All the wage earner had to do was stay sober and stay employed. That’s impossible in 2025. And that is the real Lost Paradise.
Photo captions:
1) Art Jensen & baby Steve, naval housing, San Diego, ca 1950.
2) Art Jensen, Lisa & Steve, in "Daddy's chair," watching TV, Hermosa Beach ca 1959. (Look at that vintage rotary phone!)
3) Helms Bakery truck!
4) Disneyland, 1956. Phil, Dorothy, Lisa, Mike, Steve and Barbara.
5) Disneyland, 1956. Phil, Dorothy, Mike, Barb, Lisa and Steve.
6) Grandma Bader's (notorious) Sour Cream Cut-Out Sugar Cookies! I made these for years after I left home. (That's me in Santa Cruz, 1974.) The trick was to keep the dough frozen until the minute you roll 'em out and cut 'em!
7) More tinsel! Hermosa Beach ca 1964.
8) Aunt Jeannie, Barb's sister, Aunt Chris, Art's sister, and Dee, Chris' daughter and Jeannie's roommate, in Jeannie and Dee's cozy little Bohemian house on the lot next to ours in Hermosa Beach, late '50s.
9) From the Sees Candy website.
10) Assorted Baders, at Chris' house on 18th Street, Hermosa Beach, ca 1952: Chris and husband Tom Brown seated on the porch; Barb and Jeannie, standing behind them; Art, little Steve, and Phil, foreground.
