Garfield Park
Posted Monday, March 14, 2011 09:15 AM

 

Garfield Park
I was fortunate to grow up in South Pasadena. We lived on Milan Avenue, which was a short walk from Garfield Park, a ribbon of semi wilderness in an urban area. When I arrived at the ALL Class South Pas High Picnic I took the opportunity to take a walk around, exercise for the old. It has been a while since I had walked around the entire park, and my old neighborhood. Some of the old familiar landmarks were long gone, and the park looked somewhat different because it was so well groomed.
When I moved to South Pasadena and for some years afterward, a train track ran along the outskirts of the park. It was so seldom used that the railroad would run an old steam engine and caboose with a full crew up to Pasadena at 6:30am in the morning, then it returned to the freight yard in Los Angeles at 4:00pm. Apparently if the railroad didn’t use the route, they would lose their right of way. In those early years I used to watch the old engine puff black smoke as it rolled across Garfield Avenue and disappeared past Las Flores Elementary School. This must have a lot to do with my lifelong fascination with trains.
The train moved slowly and the bells clanged loudly when it crossed Garfield. Sometimes the engineer actually stopped to talk and we gave the crew, which consisted of an engineer, a fireman, a brakeman and the conductor bottled Coca Colas.
The cokes proved to be a wise investment. Once a couple of us neighborhood kids were allowed to meet the train in Pasadena and ride back home in the caboose, probably a violation of some company policy and something that would never happen in today’s world. When we were older, we explored the wilderness along the right of way all the way to Pasadena. We could see the remains of fires where bums had camped, and occasionally one of these free spirits would ask my Aunt Helen if he could do some work for a meal. The looming memories of the depression were still very strong, and she never failed to feed them.
I left South Pasadena in 1961 to attend college and never returned except as a visitor. My folks sold the house in 1972, but South Pasadena will always be my home. Nevertheless, changes that would have been so slow as to be invisible jumped out at me on visits. Businesses changed hands, new construction abounded and a freeway threatened to ruin “Our Town” for the convenience of people in neighboring towns, a democratic danger inherent in majority rule. I began to understand Thomas Wolfe’s dictum that “You can’t go home again.” He once wrote:
 
You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
And so on this bright June day I could see the park had changed some, but I knew where I was as I walked the shady paths, and a host of memories came rushing at me like the white water of a wave. Children’s games won and lost, birthday parties, walking with a special girl, running through the park each evening to get the evening edition of the Star News for my Uncle Emory [If you’re back in 10 minutes you can keep the change from the quarter] and the horrible Scout Day when John Deibel’s brother was killed.
The upper park had a tennis court and an undersized field that was perfect for small children’s self-organized games of football and baseball, interesting contests between little boys whose knowledge of the actual game rules bordered on ignorance. Often the arguments were settled when the most compelling faulty reasoning by the most eloquent and popular player carried the day. This was true of many things from sports to the mysteries of females and finally to reproduction. Undoing the psychic damage of such misinformation took years. A shock to find that something you have accepted as absolute fact turns out to be bogus and every bit as devastating as the Johnson/Nixon era.
At the middle of the park, on the Garfield/Grevelia side of the one lane road that once bisected the park, there were overgrown areas that were great for games of ditchem, capture the flag, and of course, war. The road that connected Hope Street with Park Avenue was filled in long ago I’m told, and most SP residents today probably don’t even know it existed. Once again we diminutive litigators worked out the rules defining the ability of leafy vegetation to protect us from the rain of bullets our imaginary weapons poured forth. The play guns never needed to be reloaded, just like the cowboy heroes that filled the small screens of our newly purchased television sets.
Also on the Garfield side of the small road was a fish pond, artfully created from river stones, filled with guppies, frogs and crawdads just waiting to be caught and studied by future zoologists. It also teemed with mosquito larvae, which was the compelling reason why the city removed the pond with the magic sound of running water sometime in the 1960s. The area is even now shaded by ancient oaks which contain the carved initials of the youthful lovers of yesteryear if you know where to look. In the 1950s the park’s many trees were not groomed the way they are today, allowing even the smallest of imaginary Tarzans to reach the low branches to scale their lofty heights and yodel, or whatever it was that Tarzan did.
On the Mission Avenue side of the park were a couple of swings, a slide and a merry-go-round. The slide quickly lost its thrill as we grew older, although the application of wax paper accelerated trip down its smooth surface considerably. I think it was Steve Ware who discovered that if you pumped yourself really high on the big swings, a bail out at the top of you trajectory could give you a brief sense of flight. My short-lived experiment with this exhilarating sensation resulted in a badly sprained ankle that discouraged any further experimentation, but Steve and Randy Ware remained undaunted, and continued to successfully, if only temporarily, defy gravity.
But ah, the merry-go-round, which could be pushed to breathtaking speeds before you hopped on. Once connected, we performed a variety of injury-defying tricks that were worthy of our cowboy heroes Bob Steele, John Wayne and Crash Corrigan. Of course we didn’t think of our actions as tricks, but rather cowboy means to the end of catching bad guys who could be identified by their black hats, dark colored horses and accompanying musical score. The most evil guys in the stories wore suits, so it was pretty realistic, and not much has changed. Anyone not wearing spurs cannot be fully trusted. We were good guys in training.
We would jump on, ride underneath, and simulate shooting the villains from different positions. To lose your grip and drop off when the merry-go-round was full was to land in four inches of fine dust. You had to fight the urge to rise up at once, for to do so would lead instantaneously to a thorough pummeling by everyone who was seated conventionally with their legs hanging down.
Finally there is still the ancient watercourse that once ran full and bubbling through the middle of the park. It provided some great jumps for our bicycles [horses] as we rocketed down its steep slopes at what was considered warp speed.
I’m sure that now there are probably a score of city ordinances about what kids can and cannot do in the park, and most of the kids I observed were closely watched by their parents lest they fall and hurt themselves in any number of ways. There were no kids playing sports. We were unsupervised in those simpler days, and I think organizing our own activities helped us in many positive ways. There was no one to tell us that the tree was too high, and so we aimed for the highest branch, giving no thought to the fact that we lacked prehensile tails. There were any number of things that could happen to children playing, but we gave them no thought.
As I looked at the grassy area of what had been the fish pond, imagining a giant crawdad barely visible lurking beneath a lily pad, a young family walked by. The dad stopped.
“What you lookin at?” he asked.
“Oh, there used to be a fish pond here. It started at the base of those rocks and came all the way out to here,” I replied.
“No kidding,” he said. "I've lived in South Pas since 1980. I never knew that."