Chapter II

First U.S.A. Days

My mother's paternal uncle, Fred Winkmann, not only paid for our passenger passage to the United States, but also sponsored us; which meant he warranted we would not become wards of the state at taxpayers' expense. He and his wife had living quarters behind a souvenir shop they owned and operated on the Long Beach Pike, a wonderfully exciting amusement zone, which, sadly, was torn down some years ago and no longer exists. The shop was located directly opposite Looff's Merry-go-round on the other side of a concrete promenade which was as wide as a two-lane street and extended the entire length of the Pike.

Charles I. D. Looff, a German immigrant, was the foremost and a world-renowned merry-go-round designer and wood carver. When Looff arrived at Ellis Island from Germany in 1870, he was told he needed a middle initial for ID (identification) purposes; so, he chose I.D. Looff carved the horses for Coney Island's first merry-go-round in 1875. After moving to Long Beach from the eastern seaboard in 1910, he spent his final years living in an apartment above the merry-go-round on the Pike. He died there in 1918. Today genuine Looff wooden horses and other animals, which he had carved for merry-go-rounds all over the world, command as much $50,000 each - that is, if you can find one for sale.

I felt very privileged because the people that ran this popular attraction on the Pike allowed me to ride free during slow periods. I guess I served as a sort of shill when they needed visible passengers to attract customers. My parents had to drag me off the wooden horse I was riding to get me home. The highlight of a ride was snagging the gold ring.

My mother's uncle and his wife were childless; and, to the best of my knowledge, they were our only close relatives living in the United States. For a brief time after arriving in the U.S. we shared the living quarters behind the store with them; but, it wasn't long before a major difference of opinion arose between my mother, a strong-willed alpha female, and her American benefactors. Mother believed that her uncle and aunt were too controlling and trying to take advantage of her and my father by treating them more or less as indentured servants. As soon as they felt it was financially feasible, my parents moved away from the shop into a beach-front bungalow-apartment complex in the fall of 1929.

Our new dwelling unit was located at the north-west end of Long Beach beyond the Pike on the beachfront adjacent to a truly exclusive and beautiful resort called the Hotel Virginia. This showpiece boasted an abundance of luxurious amenities, including vast grassy expanses complete with lawn bowling, croquet, tennis courts and rose gardens. The interiors were opulent to a fault. Tragically, after the devastating Long Beach earthquake of 1933, the hotel was condemned and torn down; a truly lovely landmark was lost forever. It was never rebuilt. What a shame!

Since rents for properties on the beachfront rise during the summer months when tourists are willing to pay high weekly rates, we knew we would have to find a place to live where the rent was not dependent on the season of year. My parents found an apartment about a half a mile inland in a seedier, but much more reasonably-priced area located at the corner of Sixth and Daisy Streets in north-west Long Beach. It was laid out much like a multi-storied motel is today - three stories high with central hallways running the entire length of the building from which one entered apartments on either side.

Located diagonally across the street from the complex was the Edison Elementary School that I would soon be attending. When I did start school, I was placed into the First Grade; but, after one year, because I spoke very little English, I had to repeat First Grade. When I finished the Third Grade at Burbank Avenue School, we moved and I attended Atlantic (Now Stevenson) Elementary School. There, instead of progressing to the Fourth Grade, I was skipped into the Fifth Grade . I apparently still had an accent, though I didn't realize it at the time. When we were planning our 50th Long Beach Polytechnic High School reunion for 1990, I received a call from one of my former classmates in the Fifth Grade. After we talked for a few minutes, he commented that I had lost my German accent.

In modern parlance I can best be described as a Great Depression Era 'latchkey' child. Thinking back on the many opportunities that were available for me to get into serious trouble during those early years in Long Beach, it is nothing short of a miracle that I didn't succumb to at least one of them. To call us poor begs the obvious. Both of my parents had to work hard in order to bring in a half-way decent income. Most of time we lived in shabby apartments causing me to be squeamish about having friends visit.

I was only seven years old when we arrived in Long Beach, but it was love at first sight when I spotted the beach, ocean and waves. Apparently, lacking any fear of the water, I nearly drowned when a wave swamped me and started to tow me out to sea. I had rushed very bravely, but extremely foolishly, right into the ocean.

I must have been a slow learner as well, because that near-tragedy did not deter me one little bit from doing something very similar, but much more dangerous, that summer. One of Walt Disney's illustrators, Al Chin, supplemented his income by working as a lifeguard during the summer months. Part of his time was spent on the beach and the other part in the famous Long Beach Plunge, an enormous indoor pool. He more or less adopted this little German boy and allowed me to enter the Plunge free-of-charge when he was on duty.

On my very first visit I immediately and impulsively leaped into the deepest part of this huge pool right at the base of the 10 foot diving platform despite not knowing how to swim. Most of the bathers were at the shallower end of pool; apparently, nobody saw me jump or struggling to survive. Out of sheer desperation I managed to pull myself up and out by grabbing the lip of the overflow trough installed along the edge of the pool. I was one lucky little boy; and, in spite of being behind the learning curve based on bad experiences, I didn't test my good fortune a third time. I made sure that I learned to swim.

Many years later, when I was attending Long Beach Polytechnic High School (Poly High,) we lived on Linden Avenue only four city blocks away from this love of my life, the beach. Long Beach had built a one-mile-long oval-shaped automobile drive out into the ocean and back to shore, it was called the Rainbow Pier, popularly referred to as the Horseshoe Pier. It extended from the foot of Linden Avenue, outward into the water in an arc northwest then veered north and finally headed northeast to the base of Long Beach's main downtown street, Pine Avenue.

At the foot of Pine Avenue the Rainbow Pier ended merging with the older and more-conventional straight-out-into-the-ocean Pine Avenue Pier. During the very severe rainstorms and subsequent flooding in February 1938, I watched the old pier topple into the ocean from the pounding of groundswells (huge and very rough breakers.) Most of the bridges crossing the nearly-always-dry Los Angeles River also collapsed from the unusual rush of water which filled its bed with run-off carrying debris from the foothills and mountains.

The junction of these two piers also marked the beginning of the Pike to the north. About a quarter of a mile straight out into the Pacific at the end of the older Pine Avenue Pier was a large building housing a huge whale skeleton and a museum of sorts. The point where the two piers merged also sported an open-air platform where local knee-jerk philosophers could vent their spleen on any and all subjects. We called it the 'spit and argue club.'

Approximately one-half a mile separated parallel-running Linden and Pine Avenues. Cars could use these streets to enter and drive in one direction on the Rainbow Pier from Linden Avenue to Pine Avenue. While motoring on the pier one observed water on either side - the ocean on the outside and the Rainbow Lagoon full of stagnant water on the inside. The pier had street lights that reflected on the water at night making everything look very attractive. It was a popular romantic ride for lovers; stopping was not permitted, but some lovers couldn't resist the temptation. Sometimes brave souls dove into the ocean from the pedestrian walkway that extended for the entire length of the pier. I and my beach buddies frequently swam that mile-long stretch around it on the ocean side.

The inside of the pier was lined with huge granite boulders which had been trucked in and dumped into the water so as to form a dam from the ocean creating a still-water lagoon. This rock dam was about 15 feet wide and was filled to about three feet above water level along the inside length of the pier. People could walk on these rocks for the entire distance from Linden to Pine, or vice versa. At high tide and on very stormy days the ocean waves would crash under the pier splashing with great force across the rocks making them a dangerous places for a person to be sitting or standing. But, that didn't stop the more foolhardy, some of whom were injured and a few even lost their lives.

The ocean side was used by fishermen, who had to be very careful when they cast their lines on poles, making sure that cars or people were not passing behind them. They caught tom cod, corbina, spotfin and sometimes bass or halibut on the ocean side; the tom cod were usually too wormy to eat even during the Great Depression and were thrown back; and, in spite of the fact the lagoon was rather stagnant and didn't house many fish, some diehards fished in it off the rocks anyway just to pass the time. Some of the larger and flatter rocks made for great sunbathing. Occasionally, some of the more daring females of the populace, young and old alike, would lower the tops of their one-piece bathing suits and the more brazen even took it off entirely in order to give their bodies more exposure to the sun's rays and any surprised oglers' eyes.

I favored sunning myself on the sandy beach before, after and in between surfing, playing volleyball or handball; and, I preferred to fish in the surf very early in the morning, the art of which I had learned from an old local Scotsman. He lived in one of the apartments located on the promenade facing Linden Beach. He was a typical red-headed, ruddy-faced and tall hulk of a man - the kind only a fool would try to engage in a fight. He showed me how to make copper fishing leaders in five interlocking and freely-twisting sections. To these we attached three or four 8-inch long catgut leaders, each ending in a hook. On the end of the copper leader we attached a triangle-shaped lead sinker which he made in his own molds. For a few pennies one could buy very thin copper wire from one the many pawnshops that lined Locust Ave. one block east of Pine Ave. just north of Ocean Blvd.

Halfway between Pine and Linden Avenues, the Long Beach Auditorium jutted out into the Rainbow Lagoon from the wide concrete promenade which followed the shoreline south continuing from the end of the Pike promenade at Pine Avenue to the foot of Los Alamitos Blvd. for a distance of about a mile. This walkway stopped at the very exclusive Villa Riviera Apartment-Hotel which had its own private beach.

The auditorium, which had been built by President Roosevelt's Works Project Administration (WPA,) was later converted into what we currently know as the Long Beach Convention Center; later, the Rainbow Lagoon was filled in and built up to create the huge parking area that exists today.

At the foot of Linden Avenue to the south on the ocean side was a short stretch of beach which boasted a bodysurfer's dream-ride on a wave with a hump. As a wave came in contact with the curve of the Rainbow Pier, it developed a huge hump, which, as it moved away from the pier, nearly doubled the size of the wave. About a quarter of a mile out from shore we die-hard bodysurfers would tread water sometimes for as long as 20 minutes to catch just the right wave with its hump, yelling "water" when we spotted the one we liked.

We tried to pick a wave which began curling slowly at the top and then breaking gradually all the way into shore; it was like going down a smooth watery slide. Waves that broke all at once - cuppers - were to be avoided, since they could slam you to the bottom and cause severe injury. More than one inexperienced bodysurfer learned that lesson the hard way, some ending up permanently disabled from a broken neck or back. Most of the time we were able to ride a wave all the way into shore until we scraped our stomachs on the sand. It was a virtual paradise for bodysurfers.

The beach had another great asset - a volleyball court. That is where I learned to play the game. There was also a makeshift handball court between two buildings facing the promenade which separated the shops and dwellings from the sandy beach. The court was fashioned on the site of a building, which had been condemned and razed after the 1933 earthquake and not rebuilt. Buildings on each side were left standing. We used the brick wall from one of them as the front of the court, the one from the other building as the back and the concrete floor from the razed building to serve us as a playable handball court. Most of us kids were dirt poor; those three activities - bodysurfing, volleyball and handball - which were free-of-charge, used up our excess energy, kept us busy and probably helped a lot of us to stay out of serious trouble.

At the other end of the Rainbow Pier, at the foot of Pine Avenue on the lagoon side, there existed another volleyball court and another quality of play. It was the premier beach volleyball court of Long Beach. At Pine Avenue players had the luxury of using a rope for line markers and a water faucet with a hose to wet down and compact the sand court. The net was kept taut and measured with a pole to maintain its uniform eight-foot height; it was taken down each night and stored in a locked box to protect it. The ball was leather, not rubber like the one we used at Linden Beach. This was where the elite of Long Beach volleyball played primarily during the summer months. The quality of play was every bit the equivalent of that found at the better-known beach in Santa Monica. A lot of the Pine Avenue players were members of the Long Beach YMCA 'A' and 'AA' teams.

Bob Allen, my beach buddy, and I both attended Poly High School. We were considered a couple of the better volleyball players at Linden Beach. Increasingly often we wandered to Pine Avenue to play, eventually being accepted as regulars. As a result of that exposure, Bob, who was 18, and I, at 17, were given free memberships to the Long Beach YMCA to play on the Y's volleyball team. This was quite an honor since the next youngest player on the team was 25 years old - a really old man.

Over the years quite a number of the Long Beach YMCA volleyball team members were counted among the top players in tournaments sponsored by the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) and United States Volleyball Association (USVBA), helping their team to win championships at local, state and national levels.

At Poly Bob was a star high jumper on the track team. When he spiked a ball, he was able to leap very high into the air, arch his body like a spring, unwind and drive the ball with a great deal of force and at a high speed. Once, while we playing in a mixed men's and women's volleyball tournament - three women and three men on each side - he spiked the ball so hard it broke the wrist of a girl who tried to field it. He and I played extremely well together as a team, so we decided to enter a Southern California Doubles Championship tournament at the Los Angeles Athletic Club. We succeeded in placing third after being barely edged out by the Hazard brothers, also of Long Beach. Ours was such a hard-fought and fatiguing match that the Hazards had very little energy in reserve when they lost the title match to a team Bob and I could have defeated quite handily. In those days men's indoor doubles was played without any protective gear on a full-court hardwood floor. Cuts and bruises went with the territory.

In 1940, after graduating from high school, I was awarded, but did not accept, a $100.00 scholastic scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley. Instead, I took a job in Los Angeles and commuted from Long Beach six days a week for one year to Ninth and Boyle Streets at the spread-out, multi-storied Sears, Roebuck & Co. warehouse. It was located in a very tough and dangerous neighborhood. Zoot-suiters, the 1940s Mexican (Pachuco) gang members, lived in the area and regularly cruised the streets surrounding the warehouse. Knifings were a daily occurrence.

I was able to stay in shape working as a stock picker working on roller skates in this huge warehouse. During lunch breaks we would have skating races up and down the very narrow aisles of merchandise. Stock pickers worked on skates that had wide, tough bakelite-type rollers and pushed a wooden cart on wheels to gather and fill stock orders placed by Sears, Roebuck & Co. stores from all the western United States. When an order was complete, we would push it to an area where other workers packed it for shipping. Fork lifts indoors were not used much in those days, so the packed merchandise was placed on large dollies and physically pulled to elevators which took them down to the truck bays from which the orders would be shipped to their destinations.

As a result of working at Sears for that one year, I was able to earn and save enough money to pay for my tuition, books and housing at UC Berkeley for the school year beginning in August 1941. Between rowing on the freshman crew, working as a salesman in a Sears store in Oakland on week-ends to earn spending money and practicing volleyball with the highly-ranked San Francisco Embarcadero YMCA team, I managed to do a little studying and still enjoy a reasonably-good social life.

It was while we were studying for finals in our dorm on that 'day of infamy' December 7, 1941, that we were suddenly interrupted by a shocking radio announcement. Everyone listened very intently to the broadcast about a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We immediately recognized this was a defining event - our lives would be changed from that moment on. Our hopes and aspirations were put on temporary or, perhaps, even on permanent hold.

I had often wondered what happened to some of my house-mates at Atherton Hall in Berkeley, especially Bill Rockwell. He was the originator and portrayer of 'Oski,' the cub bear mascot of U.C. Berkeley. I recall that he spend a considerable amount of time in the basement of our residence boiling the makings of his papier-maché masks of Oski. While researching material for my memoirs, I found the answer on the Internet. Unfortunately, he had passed away the year before. I had hoped to renew our acquaintanceship.

Most of us vacillated between the emotion-driven urge to sign up for military service immediately and the more rational approach of enrolling in one of the military programs at the university which would allow us to complete our coursework for a Bachelors degree. While the latter alternative would assure us that our education would not be interrupted, after graduation we would be commissioned and required to meet our obligation of serving in the military.

The fraternity I was pledging at the time had a number of alumni who had been called back to active duty and who held fairly high ranks in the reserve or national guard. They counseled their fraternity brothers and the pledges regarding some of their military options. They also used their influence to help them enroll in the various programs offered by the military services at the university. Unfortunately, because I had not completed at least one year of college training, the minimum required, because I had worked for that year after high school, I did not qualify for any of the programs. So, it was either enlist immediately or wait for the draft.

It was common knowledge that the government was going to lower the draft age from 21 to 18. I would turn 20 in March of 1942. After trying to enlist and being rejected by the Navy, Marine Corps and the Army Air Corps because my left eye had been damaged by a shoe hook while I was a boy in Germany, I decided to return home to Long Beach to enroll at the Long Beach Junior College (LBJC.) I would just study there until I found out what fate the draft board had in mind for me. When the law lowered the draft age as expected, I registered and much to my surprise, I was classified 1A (prime draft material) despite the bad eye. Obviously, the Army, wasn't nearly as fussy about whom it would take as were the other services. It became quite clear that it was just a matter of time before I would be called up to serve.

At LBJC, in the meantime, I began dating a very beautiful and highly-intelligent young lady whom I had known since Franklin Junior High School and Poly High, but had never gone out with - Barbara (Bobbie) Bogart. She had very recently broken up with a fellow I had known since the Fifth Grade. They had been going steady for over three years. Bobbie had been considered unavailable by many other fellows who also admired her. Ours turned into a whirlwind affair culminating later that year on September 2, 1942 in our marriage in Long Beach at a wedding chapel located near the corner of Ocean Blvd. and Linden Ave. The chapel no longer exists. Six weeks later on October 16, 1942 I was drafted into the Army and shipped to Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, California.

Our marriage has endured despite some trials and tribulation. One caveat: don't ever let anyone tell you that the path to a lasting marriage is an easy or smooth one to follow. Extremely large doses of patience, understanding, and perseverance are mandatory; and, sometimes, in spite of all precautions, a union is doomed to failure.

The biggest challenge to our marriage came when I returned home after serving overseas for one and one-half years during World War II. Neither of us was the quite the same person that either of us had been when we married and thought we knew during our first 18 months of marriage. This was a problem faced by all returning military personnel who had been engaged or married before being shipped overseas.

Our love and respect for each other overcame the challenge of a period of adjustment. We succeeded in having a very close and loving relationship in our marriage and subsequently reached our 60th wedding anniversary on September 2, 2002. A few days later on the September 7 over 100 friends and relatives helped us to memorialize our achievement with a luncheon complete with a '40s band at the Tustin Ranch Golf Club in Tustin, California. As of this writing, we are approaching our 67th wedding anniversary.