It’s weird how some incident or image can trigger a flood of memories from the past.
This morning, Charlie and I were watching some home remodeling show on TV where the homeowner revealed that she is a member of a club in New Jersey that does “roller derby”. That mention caused me to think back to the 1950’s when I used to watch roller derby on TV at my grandpa Benny’s house in Los Angeles.
Actually, the house was the same home that my mother grew up in. It was located on Rodeo Road (not the fancy Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills!) near the L.A. Colosseum and belonged to my maternal grandmother Pearl (we called her Nana). Way back in the day, my Nana married Alfred Powell, who co-owned (with his brother) a grocery store in Monrovia, a suburb east of Los Angeles. Pearl and “Alf” were good-time folks and alcoholics who did a piss poor job raising my mom Barbara, and eventually Alf and Pearl divorced. According to my Mom, her mother Pearl continued her good-time ways, becoming a barfly and floozie. Eventually, she met a guy named Benny Cobo at a bar, they got along, and later married.
In the early- to late-1950’s, my parents would occasionally drop off my brother Terry and I at Nana and Benny’s house while they took some much-deserved “together time” away from their brood. (My sisters Kellie and Claudia would stay at grandpa Alf’s house, with his wife Dorothy, near the San Gabriel Country Club because Nana and Benny’s little house could not handle four little kids running amok.) Terry and I each got our own little room to sleep in; I loved mine because it had a very comfy feather bed.
Benny was the breadwinner of the family. He worked at U.S. Steel, as I recall, and took a streetcar to and from work each day. He got up pretty early, Nana would make him breakfast and fill-up his lunch pail, and he would trudge off into the darkness. I had a habit of getting up when Nana and Benny did (Terry slept in), and I would play dominoes with Nana each morning after Benny had left. I was about 8 in 1955, and I guess it was unusual for a kid to get up that early when he didn’t have to, so Benny came up with a nickname for me: The Farmer.
He called me “Farmer” as long as he lived.
My Nana was always nice to Terry and I. She must have given up the booze by then, because I never saw her drink alcohol, nor did I smell it on her breath, and she never appeared intoxicated around us. And I doubt that my parents would have left off their precious boys with an alcoholic, as my Mom had suffered through that in the very Rodeo Road house that we were staying.
Benny still drank beer back then. At the end of a long day of work, Benny would stop each day at a small grocery store at the end of the streetcar route and purchase a four-pack of Brew 101 quarts, which he would bring home for the evening. He would come into the house, greet everyone, set his four-pack down on a coffee table near his sofa, turn on the TV, plop down, and receive his dinner from Nana. She was a good cook, specializing in burritos, spaghetti, and fried chicken (made from live fowl that wandered around the backyard).
Back in those days, the variety of TV programming was meager. Benny controlled the TV, and he liked baseball, boxing, wrestling, and roller derby, so we got a healthy dose of that virtually every day when he got home. Nana wasn’t that much into those things, and I recall that she would knit or otherwise keep herself busy while Benny was watching his sports and sipping his suds.
More often than not, the both of them would fall asleep on their respective sofas while the TV was running.
Television back in those black-and-white days, with the small screens and crummy reception, was primitive by today’s standards. Commercials, on Benny’s sports broadcasts, were often live. Car dealers, like Felix Chevrolet, “Cal” Worthington, and Chip Lambert, would do commercials where some dude would drive a used car up to the announcer, he would showcase various features of the car, and then motion to the driver to move on so that the next car could roll up for its moment in the spotlight. It was not unusual for a car’s engine to stall out when its big moment came, and I can remember a fender or side mirror falling off when the announcer kicked the tires or pounded on the hood while exclaiming what a “solid vehicle” the jalopy was. Benny, Terry, and I got a big kick out of that.
I can remember watching the World Series with Benny in his living room. It was always the New York Yankees against another team, and the Yankees always seemed to win. There were no Major League teams yet on the West Coast (the Dodgers and Giants moved from New York in 1959), but there was a minor league team in Los Angeles called the “Hollywood Stars”. I believe that we watched some of the Stars’ games on Benny’s TV.
A regular feature on TV was the Friday Night Fight, a televised boxing card featuring at least one preliminary bout followed by the main event. It was live, which presented a problem if an early bout ended quickly by KO… requiring the TV announcers to kill time until the next scheduled bout commenced. Often, the producers would then throw the broadcast to commercials (also live), where’d that crew would be caught off guard and have to improvise on live TV. It was a televised comedy, in some respects. I recall a main event one evening, a heavyweight bout, involving a fighter named (as I recall) Mike DeLong. The nationally-broadcast fight was scheduled for ten or twelve rounds, so probably at least an hour of programming had been set aside by the network. When the bell clanged, DeLong walked to the middle of the ring and cold-cocked his opponent, knocking him unconscious. Including the ten-count by the referee, the entire bout took 12 seconds. There was no instant replay at the time, so the network was stuck with a 60-minute hole to fill in its programming. Benny was highly annoyed, as it ruined his evening of TV.
We watched a lot of wrestling with Benny. This was back in the salad days of professional wrestling, long before the WWE and the WWF. Unlike the bronzed, steroid-enhanced body-builders/actors that we see on cable TV today, the wrestlers in those days were a tad more dignified and normal-looking; some had actually been amateur grapplers back in the day. However, they were the pioneers of many of the antics that we see today, like chair-throwing, tag teams ignoring the rules, competitors being thrown out of the ring into the crowd, illegal “holds”, distinctive costumes, and copyrighted “moves”. Some of the big names were Gorgeous George, Haystacks Calhoun, Mister Moto, and Freddie Blassie. It seemed that the big stars were always matched with some regular-looking wrestling guys (i.e. no costumes), whose main job it was to be pummeled mercilessly, jumped on from the corner buckle, get “clotheslined” while running across the ring, and then get unceremoniously thrown over the ropes into the crowd. It was high entertainment, and we lapped it up.
Maybe our favorite sports show was roller derby. There might have been a dozen teams on the professional circuit, but our favorite was the L.A. Thunderbirds. We knew all the stars, both male and female, and all the tricks of the trade. One of our favorite T-Birds was a small, speedy Latin-American skater named Ralph Valadares. The TV announcer for the roller derby was a colorful, bespectacled, bald guy named Dick Lane, one of the pioneers of sports broadcasting in America (he also did the boxing and wrestling shows on local network KTLA). Lane used the phrase “Whoa, Nellie!” long before legendary college football announcer Keith Jackson copied it. In fact, Mr. Lane popularized it on those roller derby broadcasts, when he would see the T-Birds getting ready to “crack the whip” and send Little Ralphie Valadares through the opponents defense and rack up a big score.
We loved these “contests”, particularly when the two opposing teams would get into a brawl. It was the National Hockey League… before the NHL ever came West. Lots of gals sucker-punching each other, folding chairs being used to bludgeon opponents, competitors going over the rail into the crowd, spectators getting in on the action, and general mayhem. It was professional wrestling on skates, the best of both worlds.
Oh, those were the good old days when I was the Farmer.
As I mentioned, Benny took the streetcar to work each day. However, he did have a car, an old 1940’s pile of junk that usually sat in the driveway. I don’t think I ever saw him drive it; maybe it was broken down. I do remember that poor Benny was under that car one day, repairing something, when he got bit on the elbow by a Black Widow spider. He was a very sick guy for awhile. I don’t recall seeing the car after that.
In the late 1950’s, my Dad got a job opportunity in Santa Cruz (400 miles north of Los Angeles), a lease on a gas station which also included a garage for car repairs. My Dad was an excellent Ford mechanic and thought that he could turn around the fortunes of the gas station. So, we relocated to the Santa Cruz Mountains (Ben Lomond) along with my grandparents. Our family of six lived in Nana and Benny’s converted garage for a time, and Benny worked with my Dad at the service station in Soquel. They did great, but the landlord pulled my Dad’s lease after a year and gave it back to her son, who had run down the business previously. My Dad was devastated and we ended up moving back to Southern California.
Nana and Benny stayed up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and Benny ended up getting a job at a service station in Felton, where he became a fixture in the community for many years. Our family occasionally visited Nana and Benny at their home, and the girls summered up there several times.
I can’t remember now exactly how old I was when Benny taught The Farmer how to drive a stick shift automobile; maybe 16 or so?
He had an old, beat-up panel truck with an on-the-column manual shifter. As I recall, Benny, me, and one of my sisters went out one day for the big lesson. As is normal when one learns how to use a stick shift, I had some problems stalling out when engaging the clutch. Benny, who had a bit of a Mexican accent, kept yelling, “Chift it, chift it!” as I floundered. Finally, he changed seats with me to demonstrated the proper use of the column shifter. Once he got the revs up, he jammed the engine into gear and… the column shifter detached from the steering wheel shaft and fell onto the floorboard. He got angry and flustered and we howled with laughter.
Good times.
Benny was a simple guy with a big heart. He loved Nana absolutely and would do anything for her. The two of them had their own sofas in the living room and, at some point, Nana decided that hers was too big: she wanted a more petite sofa. So, Benny got a chain saw and cut it in half.
Problem solved.
Nana and Benny are gone now, as are my Mom and Dad. All I have left of that part of my life are those memories of the good times, like watching roller derby on TV with Benny and rooting on Little Ralphie Valadares.
And being “The Farmer”.