2500 STRAND:

GROWING UP IN HERMOSA BEACH, CALIFORNIA, DURING WORLD WAR II

A MEMOIR

By

C. Scott Littleton

 We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or 

 chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug

 and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

               Marcel Proust, “The Captive,” Vol. 10 of  Remembrance of Things Past (1923)                                       

Prologue

Plate 1: My grandfather, C. H. S. Littleton, circa 1910, that is, about the time he built the house at 2500 Strand.

In those days, the number of houses along the Strand could be reckoned on the fingers of both hands (plus both sets of toes). In its original incarnation (Plates 2 and 3), before my parents took the house over, it was a classic craftsman/Swiss-chalet-style Southern California house, tailored to meet the demands of the ocean front. At that point, 25^th Street slopes down to the Strand, and so the house has three stories on the ocean side and two on the side facing Hermosa Avenue.  In 1910 the center of Hermosa Avenue was occupied by the Pacific Electric “Red Car” line, which ran from downtown Los Angeles to Redondo Beach. The PE tracks were gone by the spring of 1941, although one of my earliest memories of the house, several years before we moved in, was watching them tear up the tracks.  (Like many Southern Californians, I consider the demise of the Red Cars extremely unfortunate, especially since we’re currently scrounging for money to build another light-rail network that will eventually cover much the same territory.) 

Plate 2: 2500 Strand, Hermosa Beach, viewed from the beach, ca. 1912. This is how the house looked shortly after it was built in 1910.  Note the classic “craftsman/Swiss chalet” design. At that time, the dressing rooms in the basement, later to become bomb shelters, and the door leading to the Strand had not been added.  Plate 3: 2500 Strand, viewed from Hermosa Ave., ca. 1912.

In any case, by the time we moved into 2500 Strand, the shingles were gone, the marvelous, chalet-style overhang had been cut back, and the house had been plastered and painted white. It seems that just before the war my grandfather had decided to “modernize” the place, and, in the process, much of its original character was lost (Plates 4 and 5).

Plate 4: 2500 Strand, viewed from the beach, summer, 1941. This is how the house looked when we moved there in March of that year. My grandfather had “modernized” it two years earlier.  Plate 5: 2500 Strand, viewed from Hermosa Ave., summer, 1941.

However, I’m happy to report that more recent owners have seen fit to remove the plaster and replace it with blue wooden siding. They’ve also re-extended the overhang, and so today, although different from both my earliest memories and the way it looked between 1941 and 1946, it has regained a fair amount of that lost charm (Plates 6 and 7).

Plate 6: 2500 Strand, viewed from the beach, October, 2005.The new wooden siding and restored windows give it something of the feeling it had when it was new. And the landscaping, nonexistent when we lived there, adds significantly to its appeal. Indeed, in my humble opinion, the place looks far better today than it did in 1941, let alone 1912! Plate 7:  2500 Strand, viewed from Hermosa Ave., October, 2005.

The house had four upstairs bedrooms, two of which faced the ocean.  My parents slept in one of the front bedrooms, and my father, Scott Littleton, a sometime screenwriter and free-lance short-story writer, when he was not working as an investigator for the War Production Board, some other wartime government agency, or the Warner Bros. Security Department, used the other as his “writing room.” There were also two upstairs bathrooms and a small sun porch off the writing room. The back upstairs bedroom was occupied by my grandmother, Clara Littleton, who was universally known as “Gagie” until the day she died in 1965 at age 98.

Downstairs, in addition to a large living room overlooking the ocean, a small dining room, and a commodious kitchen, there was a bedroom and bath, added sometime in the 1920 as a maid’s quarters, that extended off the laundry room behind the kitchen. This room, in which my grandfather died at age eighty-three in November of 1942, faced a small yard separating the house from the detached, two-car garage that faces Hermosa Avenue. Behind the garage was—and still is, I believe—a tiny, studio apartment, which also originally served as a maid’s room. After my grandfather died in 1942, we rented these two extra rooms to war workers (notice that I didn’t say “aircraft workers”), and a woman who, for a time, occupied the garage apartment and came to play an important, if not altogether pleasant part in the life of my family.

Beneath the living room, at ground level, and accessible by an inside staircase, were two small dressing rooms, also later additions. They opened onto a short hallway, at the far end of which was a small door that led directly to the Strand; after changing into their swim clothes (Plate 8), guests could walk straight out to the beach.  However, in the months following Pearl Harbor, these dressing rooms took on an altogether different function:  they became bomb-shelters. And in the wee hours of the morning of February 25, 1942, during what has come to be called the “Battle of Los Angeles,” they were used in earnest, or at least we thought so at the time.  

No one has ever adequately explained what we saw in the sky over Hermosa Beach that morning, despite the fact that it triggered a huge barrage of anti-aircraft fire that seemed to have no effect on it whatsoever. At first, we thought it must have been an enemy observation plane and that our gunners were woefully inept. But after the war it became clear from captured documents that no Japanese plane was ever over Southern California, on that day or any other day during World War II. Other proposed explanations have included an errant weather balloon, a barrage balloon that had lost its tether, a mass hallucination, or even a flock of remarkably flack-resistant, high-flying sea birds!  Strange as it may seem at first glance, in retrospect, there’s a strong possibility that the mysterious object was a bona fide UFO. As we’ll see, in the absence of any hard evidence to the contrary, and in light of the similarities between it (Plate 9) and a host of other anomalous objects that have been seen in the sky since 1947, this explanation is perhaps as reasonable, if not more reasonable, than any that have so far been advanced.

Plate 8:  Beach-goers in front of 2500 Strand, ca. 1910.  Plate 9:  A photograph, taken by a Los Angeles Times reporter, of the mysterious—and perhaps alien—object that appeared in the night sky over Southern California in the early hours of February 25, 1942. From all indications, the photograph captured the saucer-shaped object as it crossed the Baldwin Hills shortly before it flew over Hermosa Beach. The white dots appear to be exploding anti-aircraft shells. Almost 2,000 rounds were fired at the object before it finally disappeared over southern Orange County. The photograph was published on February 26, 1942.

My own bedroom, from which I first noticed the searchlight beams pinpointing the object just mentioned, was the smallest of the four upstairs bedrooms, and, being an only child, I had it all to myself. It looked south onto 25^th Street. The front door was directly beneath me, and my room jutted out slightly, forming a rain-shelter over the entrance. Although I didn’t have a direct view of the ocean, I could certainly hear it, and the sound of surf still lulls me to sleep better than any sleeping potion ever invented. 

            It was in that room that a number of the events that will be chronicled in this book occurred, such as the time a neighbor kid named Conway Leovy and I built a fire under a small cane-bottomed chair, to which we’d tied another kid in the course of playing “Gestapo.” As you can imagine, my parents didn’t find this event anywhere near as amusing as we did, as it damn near set the house on fire. Luckily, we had enough sense to untie the victim before he suffered any injuries, but the chair was history, and it took hours to get rid of the smoke.

So in a great many respects this is a coming-of-age account. I was seven-years-old when we moved to 2500 Strand and almost thirteen when my father sold it in early 1946.  It was in that house—and in that bedroom—that I underwent puberty, with all that that implies. And it was in that house that I agonized over my first unrequited crush on a girl (yes, her name was Bonnie; the husky girl who used to push me off my bike was named Virginia and lived at 18^th and Strand, and I have no idea what became of either of them). It was also where one evening, near the end of our stay, I underwent what amounted to an epiphany of sorts, in which I came to understand that I was what today would be called a nerd, a kid with little or no athletic ability who habitually read the Encyclopedia Britannica the way other kids my age read comic books, and that I wanted desperately to become popular.

But it is also more than that. We who came of age in Hermosa Beach during the war years were the kid brothers and sisters of Tom Brokaw’s “greatest generation.”  During the first anxious hours following Pearl Harbor, our awareness of the “good war” then raging around the globe was heightened by a beach covered by barbed wire and a machine gun nest that magically appeared at the foot of 25^th Street in the afternoon of December 7^th (both it and the barbed wire only lasted a few days) and the anti-aircraft batteries in Malibu and Palos Verdes that banged away nightly at towed targets—and, on the night of February 25, 1942, at the unknown object mentioned earlier. Later on, like the rest of America, we experienced  the home-front phenomena of ration books, scrap drives, War Bonds, and the steady flow of  propaganda war movies at the local Saturday matinees, many of which were unabashedly racist, at least when it came to the war in the Pacific.

All of this triggered an unquestioning patriotism that seems almost quaint today. We always stood at attention whenever the “Star Spangled Banner” was played on the radio, even in the privacy of our living room.  And during the war, from Christmas, 1941, to Christmas, 1944, my father hung a large American flag behind our Christmas tree. Far from being raving right wingers, both he and my mother were committed liberal Democrats who adored FDR and the New Deal.   

At the same time, we lived in what would soon become, in the popular American imagination, something of a lotus-land. Hermosa had already discovered surfing and what later came to be thought of as the “beach scene.” It was a place where being a Junior Lifeguard was as important as being a Boy Scout, although for a brief time I was both.  It was where the beach itself was more than simply a place to lie on and get tan;  it was also our playground, as well as a metaphor for just about everything we beach kids held dear.

And so, while our elder brothers were off saving the world from the ravages of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, we were busy growing up as best we could, not exactly in “middle-America,” but in a place that had already begun to attract a steady stream of would-be lotus eaters. In more recent decades such folks, including some bona fide artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers, have become far more numerous and, in some cases, famous—it’s perhaps no accident that the well-known writer-director (and actor) Quentin Tarantino lived in Hermosa Beach at the time his movie career began to take off.  But by 1941 the town already had more than its fair share of drunks, beach bums, flakes, long-board surfers, deadbeats, wannabe artists, writers, and musicians, and just plain weirdoes, as well as some marginal Hollywood people, some of whom, like my father, undoubtedly ended up on the infamous blacklist.

It’s curious that a few years ago the current avatar of the quaint wooden church I briefly attended, St. Cross Episcopal Church, which also sponsored the local Boy Scout troop, figured prominently—and almost certainly erroneously—in the infamous McMartin child molestation case as the supposed site of Satanic rituals. Although it’s difficult to conceive of a mainstream religious institution like St. Cross playing host to such bizarre activities, the town does have a well-earned reputation for being a haven for off-beat, hang-loose people and behavior. Maybe there’s something in the air that wafts in over Hermosa from the Pacific that makes the folks who live (or have lived) there, surfers, would-be artists, occultists, and solid citizens alike, slightly different even from the rest of the inhabitants of Southern California, which, as Frank Lloyd Wright famously observed, is where all the fruits and nuts ended up after the continent began to “tilt” toward the West. Hermosa was—and still is, along with Laguna, Venice, Santa Cruz, and a few other spots along the coast—about as far west in California as these fruits and nuts have been able to roll without ending up in the ocean.

 I should emphasize that Hermosa, then as now, was also home to a great many more conventional, mostly middle-class white people, including Bible-believing Protestants, a fair number of  Roman Catholics, and a scattering of observant Jews who wouldn’t have dreamt of using the four-letter words with which Tarantino so liberally lards his films. (Other racial, ethnic, and religious groups were scarcer than hens’ teeth in those days, especially after the local Japanese-Americans, most of them native-born citizens, were forcibly “relocated” to concentration camps in early ’42.) Thus, despite its eccentricities and the influx of “aircraft workers” and “Okies,” my hometown was still compact enough in those days to share a lot of features with more mainstream, small-town America.  In the 1940s, it was a place where Norman Rockwell might have felt at home, or at least until he encountered the town’s eccentricities. Most of the old-timers knew—or were related—to one other. For example, Helen Sheehan, my third-grade teacher and the principal of nearby North School, was the daughter of the mayor, whom my parents always referred to as “Old Man Sheehan,” although never, of course, in his (or his children’s) presence. Sheehan owned a dry goods store of the sort you don’t see much any more next to the Fox Hermosa Theater, and his son Tommy was the manager of the local Safeway, the only supermarket in town. My fifth-grade teacher at North School, Margaret Kemp, was the wife of a popular city councilman, Jeff Kemp, who eventually succeeded "Old Man Sheehan” as mayor.  And we all knew Hollie Murray, the chief of police, who, out of respect for another old-timer, agreed not to jerk my grandfather’s driver’s license when, at age eighty-one, he began running stop signs simply because he didn’t think they belonged there. Murray did insist, however, that my father confiscate the keys to my grandfather’s car. 

The local Baptist minister regularly engaged in heated and thoroughly public theological debates with the guy who handed out the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Watchtower at the corner of Hermosa Avenue and Pier Avenue, in the center of town. Whenever they went at it, they always drew a crowd.  And a few years earlier, during Prohibition, one of Chief Murray’s predecessors was apparently the town’s principal bootlegger! My grandparents didn’t patronize him that much, because my grandmother made what was widely considered first-rate home-brew in large crocks that were still stacked under the house when we moved there.  My father later incorporated them in the construction of our bomb shelter. (My grandmother said she always gave the Chief a couple of complimentary bottles of each batch she brewed.)

The bulk of this book concerns events that unfolded during the five years (1941-1946) we lived at 2500 Strand.  However, to make these events more intelligible, I lead off with an overview of my family history, from the early 1900s to 1939. I then zero in briefly on the two years we spent at another beach house in Playa del Rey, California, from the spring of 1939 to March of 1941, which we rented while waiting for 2500 Strand to become available (my grandfather had leased it to another family).  Those two years, which saw the war begin in Europe in September of 1939, the fall of France in June of 1940, and the Battle of Britain in the late summer and fall of the same year, was also crucial as far as I was concerned.  One of my most vivid early memories is joining my mother and father and a French family that lived next door in singing “La Mareseillaise” after the news came over the radio that France had capitulated. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room. Yes, I know this sounds like a scene from “Casablanca,” but I assure you it happened.

Finally, in addition to some flashbacks and a few flash-forwards that will help to ground certain specific events and people I mention and/or to assess their subsequent impact on my life, I include a brief Epilogue that sketches with a broad pen what happened to me, my family, and 2500 Strand after we left it for good in March of 1946.  It will also include a few ruminations on the long-term implications, personal as well as societal, of the tumultuous years on which this memoir focuses.  

To illustrate some of what I touch on, I’ve included thirty-five plates, a few of which have already been referenced.  Several of them (Plates 2-5) trace the evolution of the house.  There are also pictures of my grandparents, my parents, me, and other people who figure in this story, as well as contemporary photographs of places that loomed large in my young life, such as North School (Plate 10); Pier Avenue School (Plate 11), which has been a community center since 1979; and “The “Green Store” (Plate 12), at the corner of 22^nd Street and Hermosa Avenue, where my friends and I used to hang out after school, gorging ourselves on penny candies and that sweet, red and green liquid that came in tiny wax bottles.  Amazingly, the Green Store is still there. The building is still painted light green, with the trim and sign sporting the same dark green color that gave the place its name.  Moreover, kids still hang out there, although today it has a much wider range of merchandise, including beer, wine, and cigarettes, which, I assume, are not being sold to my 21^st-century counterparts!  

In short, I hope you’ll find my account of growing up next to the surf in Hermosa Beach, California, during World War II both entertaining and historically interesting, as I do my best to tease a coherent image of the past from my “fickle mistress.”  

Plate 10:  North School, Hermosa Beach, October, 2005.  The main building is almost unchanged since I attended it from 1941 to 1944, although it's currently occupied by an adult education center.  Plate 11:  What used to be Pier Avenue School, October, 2005, which I attended from 1944 to 1946.  The main buildings have survived pretty much intact and look much as they did in my day. However, since 1979 they have housed the Hermosa Beach Community Center, which includes a theater and other recreational and educational facilities.  But the inscription on the front wall, “Where there is no vision, the people perish,” is still there and is as appropriate to the place’s current incarnation as it was

when it housed a junior high school. 

Plate 12:  The Green Store, Hermosa Avenue and 22^nd St., October, 2005.  It looks almost exactly the same as it did in the early ‘40s.  To be sure, it now sells beer, wine, and cigarettes,  in addition to candy bars, sodas, etc.  But local kids still hang out there after school.