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Santa Barbara, 1957
The summer after I graduated from kindergarten, Papa took a job with G.E. TEMPO, a
defense-oriented think tank and we moved from Williamsville, New York, to Santa Barbara,
California.
Some of our things could be moved; the giant wooden box and the jungle gym, our
furniture, clothing, my toy guns and even my yellow Japanese parasol came with us, but
other good things had to stay behind. The swing set was stuck in the ground too well to
be removed and our black and white cat, Little Bit, had to be put to sleep because there
was no way to bring him along.
The twins and I went with Mom on an airplane. We wore our very best clothes and had
to be on our best behavior because it was so special. The airplane stopped in Chicago
and again in (I think) Denver before it got to Los Angeles. It was extremely noisy and
my ears hurt and popped, but very exciting, particularly because it turned out that Roy
Rogers was on the plane too! Since he was wearing ordinary clothes and did not
have his horse, Trigger, I wasn't really sure it was him, but Mom said it was him and
I was sure she was right.
When we arrived, we stayed with ‘Gla-ha’, Auntie Gladys Gockley, Grandma Hendrick’s
widowed sister-in-law. Gla-ha’s house had wall-to-wall carpeting which I had not seen
before and which seemed very elegant. In California, we had three sets of
grandparents and a ton of relatives. I knew Grandpa and Grandma Hendrick because
they had been to Williamsville when the twins were born but I did not remember having
met Nanna and Gramps (Mom’s mother and step father) before. Mom’s father, Grandpa
Berg, was re-married and also lived in the Los Angeles area, but Mom had had
a falling-out of some sort with him, so we did not meet him then or ever.
Pop and Roy drove across the country in the Plymouth. When they arrived, we all
drove to Santa Barbara and stayed in a motel on the beach while Mom and Pop looked for a
house. The beach was a wonderful and frightening place that smelled of brine, seaweed
and strange marine things. The water was cold and the waves in the harbor seemed
enormous. High tide left kelp and seaweed in piles that were just waiting to be poked
through and there were shells free for the taking – clams, mussels, sharp little
pointed twists and smooth rounded ones.
Our new house was located in the "La Coronilla" subdivision and it had
never been lived in before. It had three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a den that my
parents used as a bedroom for themselves. The three bedrooms were at one end of the
house and the den at the other end, so this was a prudent move on their part. I had one
of the bedrooms faced the street and the twins shared the other while Roy had the back
one that had been intended by the builder as the ‘master suite’. One of the
bathrooms could only be gotten to by walking through Roy’s room and, since his bed had
a trundle bed under it, when we had overnight guests, he was evicted to make space for
them and came to sleep on a roll-away bed in my room.
Our house in Williamsville had been made of brick and had special extra windows that
Pop put up in the Fall and took down in the Spring. Our house in California was
typical construction for that era, a post-war plywood palapa: no insulation,
single-paned windows and thin hollow-core doors. There were six different floor
plans for our subdivision and four colors of house paint – pink, grey, green and
yellow. The roofs were slightly sloped and made of tar and colored gravel, so that every
time it rained, sparkly little rocks in white, green or pink fell the ground around the
edge of every house.
The builder must have gotten a great volume discount on the interior paint because
all the walls in all the rooms of every house were painted a strange muddy grey brown
that I hated on sight. In Williamsville, everything in the bathroom and kitchen
was crisp white – sink, bathtub, toilet, stove, refrigerator. In the new house,
everything was done in the latest, coolest colors In our house, one set of
bathroom fixtures was pink and the other gray, but some of our neighbors had ones that
were pale green or blue. The counters in our kitchen had Formica on them that sported a
pattern of gray and pink outlines in the shape of deformed boomerangs and the flooring
was speckled linoleum. Everything was very stark, square and modern. There was virtually
no attic area and the ceiling of the main living area was actually just the underside of
the roof. It was sprayed with some sort of bumpy acoustic coating and it was fun to lie
on the floor, stare at the ceiling and imagine that the house was upside down and we
were walking on the ceiling. I thought the surface would probably tickle my feet.
The floor plan of the main area was completely open with the kitchen separated from
the living room simply by an eight-foot wall of pink cinder block (soon painted white in
our house) that stopped about four feet short of the ceiling. There was a little alcove
for the washer and dryer off the kitchen and, courtesy of the builder, a Formica-topped
breakfast bar that matched the kitchen counters. The bar was a narrow sort of
four-person table that was higher than a normal table so it had to be furnished with
stools and was where the 1950’s family was supposed to enjoy cozy casual dining.
Given that the surface was all of about 24 inches wide, 'coziness' was virtually
assured. As soon as we moved in, Pop removed ours with his hacksaw
Colored appliances were all the rage: pink, gray, avocado, pale yellow and aqua. Our
new washer and dryer were aqua. Because G.E. owned TEMPO, we could get reconditioned G.E.
appliances for a very good price. Shortly after we moved in, we got a dishwasher – the
first one on the street. There really wasn’t much of a place to install it, so Pop
built a little addition on the house, moving the water heater and creating a pantry
where one of the back doors had been. The Hendrick side of the family is very
comfortable with doing construction and not much of a fan of civil bureaucracy, so I
think it is extremely unlikely that he got a building permit for this exercise, but
since the addition was in the back of the house, no one noticed and there was no trouble
about it. As part of the construction, he extended the counter top to make space for the
new dishwasher. The dishwasher was essentially a 3-feet deep tank that was pulled out
like a drawer, loaded with dishes and then run. The twins could not load it until they
were in first grade because they were not tall enough to reach over the top and get at
the things in the bottom. It was brown on the front and pink inside. Over the
years, as it developed leaks and fell ill to all those problems that appliances are heir
to, Pop patched it up with epoxy paint, made special gaskets for it and even at one
point replaced its motor with one that had formerly been in a vacuum cleaner.
When we moved in, all the houses were new and there was no landscaping
anyplace. The back yard was just dirt, the side yards were dirt, the front yard
was dirt and the parkway was dirt too:
Dirt, dirt everywhere - April 1958
Dirt all over and not very good dirt either if you were a gardener like Mom:
the sandy yellow clay required a lot of amendment before plants would grow well. It was,
however, great for making mud and in the vacant lot across the street, a giant mud lake
formed in the rainy season and we found that stomping in the goo at the edge of the
puddle created a sort of emulsified quicksand that had a fascinating texture. We
made bike trails and ramps and hills in that vacant lot and it was a sad day when
construction started on the houses that were to become the Morgans' and the Worrells'.
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