In 1930, we were headed northbound on a narrow, two-lane road in the San Fernando Valley called Ventura Boulevard. Our family’s entire possessions were jammed in and on top of the car because we had again moved in the middle of the night to avoid paying back rent. Apparently, my father didn’t feel like working and since it was the bottom of the depression, he thought he had an excuse, except I don’t think he even tried to get a job that paid a regular salary.
After traveling through what seemed like endless orange orchards and other farms, a two-story building appeared in the distance. We turned left on Havenhurst and on the side of a hill in the distance stood the imposing Encino Country Club. There, instead of my two sisters and me sleeping on mattresses on the floor, we each had our own bedrooms with attached bathrooms.
In the center of all this luxury was a massive dining room and a ballroom ready for big bands and dances of that era. The kitchen was equally large and capable of preparing meals for about 100 people at one sitting. It was a 1-mile walk to the Encino grade school.
During the first summer, I was attacked by a large dog, knocked to the ground and received a lot of puncture wounds and tears in my shoulder and upper body.
Someone beat the dog off of me with a 2 x 4 and my parents put me in the car and took me to the hospital where it took four adults to hold me down on the table as a doctor put some liquid in each puncture wound and each time he did, steam came out of the wound.
Years ago, when I first talked about this dog bite incident, I remembered that I was lying on a stainless steel table. It was then that I remembered that emergency ward tables have pads and sheets and my father had probably taken me to a veterinarian instead of a hospital because it was cheaper.
After the acid ordeal, the vet told my parents that when we got home to tie up the dog for 30 days to see if he developed rabies. When we got home, however, someone had already shot the dog.
In the spring, it was wonderful to watch the green grass grow 2 or 3 feet tall in the surrounding hills and earn my $.10 a day helping to herd the horses. When one of the cowboys gave me his old cowboy hat, that evening when my father saw it on my head and slapped it off me, saying that no kid of his was every going to be a cowboy. I lost a prize that the cowboy gave me, something that helped me define what I loved just as my experiences on Topanga Beach opened the world of the ocean for me.
During the couple years that the family lived in Encino, every day was a new experience for me. I roamed the nearby hills and got as far away from the country club building as possible, but making sure that I could get back home before dark so I could get dinner.
Sometime in the second spring of living the good life, I found myself once again in the backseat of the car with my two sisters and all of our worldly possessions skipping out on a lot of unpaid back rent.
This time we settled in a three-bedroom house in Las Felis, below the Griffith Park planetarium with one-bedroom for my parents, another bedroom for my sisters and the third bedroom for a $5-a-month bachelor friend of my parents. I still had my blanket and my mattress in the hall, still living the good life.
This is when my grandmother again came to my rescue and gave me back a lot of my freedom by giving me my first pair of roller skates for my 10th birthday. I was so excited about the skates that I was strapping them on before the sun came up the next morning. By the time I had to go to school, I had accomplished roller-skating around the block twice.
My mother was working for the WPA at the time and the government decided to give all the ladies $.20 a week to sharpen their scissors. My mother gathered them up and one day a week she would wake me up at 4:30 and I would roller skate the 2 miles to my grandparent’s house so my grandfather could sharpen the scissors in his machine shop. While he did that, my grandmother cooked me a bowl of hot oatmeal and I got to sleep for 45 minutes before roller-skating back to meet my mother at the streetcar stop so she could take the scissors back to work.
As I’ve said many times, I was born with good luck on my shoulder and it has been there ever since.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller. Read more of Warren’s stories at TheTahoeWeekly.com.
