Views from Crestmont Drive

When my father died in 2001, I acquired his boxes of slides. The earliest were in three or four metal boxes with rows of slots that would hold two slides each. These were mostly taken from my early childhood and before – many of them early family pics from before I was born, of relatives I never met. Some of them are of road trips my parents took in England, when I was a babe. Some are from later back in the US, where we settled in Apple Valley, the high desert northeast of Los Angeles. Many of these I recall seeing as I was growing up, in evening ‘slide shows’, when we would set up the slide projector to look at them, projected on a portable screen, sometimes for ourselves, sometimes for visiting friends. (There was a social cliché for a while, perhaps now obsolete, about boring your friend with slides from your latest vacation.)

It turns out there are more than those three or four boxes of slides. There are several ‘carousels’ of slides that were taken later than those in the metal boxes. (One of Don Draper’s moments of genius, according to an early episode of Man Men, was coming up with the word ‘carousel’ to describe what before were termed merely ‘wheels’.) I haven’t looked these carefully, because the carousel projector itself is malfunctioning; the carousel doesn’t advance in order to move to the next slide automatically. Which means I will have to manually take the slides out the carousel and either insert them directly into the projector one at a time, or look at them via the slide sorter that I fortunately acquired along with all the pics. (It’s a big square plastic tray, illuminated from behind by a light bulb, mounted upright at an angle with ledges to place the slides on. Enough ledges to look at 20 or 30 slides at a time.)

Most of these slides were I think from trips my family took after I’d moved out and was living on my own, and they’d moved from Los Angeles back east to Tennessee.

There are also, I hadn’t appreciated until now, lots of loose boxes of developed slides (little boxes that hold 10 or 12 slides in two stacks each), that were never loaded into metal boxes or carousels, and mostly slides that I’ve never seen, I am discovering. Some are from events after I’d moved out… but some are from years before. My college grad pics! Alas, many of them are faded and completely reddish… though amazingly, some older slides, of my brother and sisters in the early ‘60s, still have full color.

Again before moving on, let me mine my own photo albums for relevant print photos. As I said in the first installment of this personal history, I visited England for the first time (since my birth) in 1990, and made a point of renting a car (driving on the left!), and drove from London out to Felixstowe and that area to see what it was like. As I said, it looked pretty much identical to my father’s slides from nearly 40 years before. I have yet to mine his slides, but for now I’ll scan and post a few photos from my album.

For this first set of scanned photos from my own photo albums, I’ll save larger scans at 1000 pixels wide, and ‘thumbnails’ for display here at 500px wide. Click on the displayed images for the larger ones.

First: here’s the house where my parents lived in Felixstowe, England: 10 Bath Road. First a street view:

Then a front view:

Here’s a view of the pebble beach (what they call a ‘strand’?)

And then a pic of the grassy strip just above the beach, with those strings of lights. In the distance are the gantries of Felixstowe harbor.

The town sits on a bluff somewhat above the beach; here is a section of garden just above beach level, at the base of the bluff.

And here’s a section of downtown, very quiet on a Sunday morning.

Then, a shot looking out over the North Sea. It must have been morning, since the view must have been the northeast.

Two more. Driving north from Felixstowe, here is the entrance to R.A.F. (Royal Air Forcebase) Woodbridge, where my father worked as a weatherman in the early/mid 1950s.

And then, Phyllis Memorial Home, my birthplace, looking unchanged since 1955.

A bit more family history, as far as I can recall it, before I get to my personal memories of growing up in the high desert, and how that affected me.

In Felixstowe [England, where I was born], the family friend was a neighbor woman named Ruby. (When I delve into my half dozen metal boxes of family slides, I think I will find photos or her, and us at that time.) And one of the stories I remember [again: in a crucial sense, everything we remember about our past are stories, told over and over again in our minds or whenever we relate them to others, and not necessarily reliable as actual history — but nevertheless meaningful, as meaningful as anything from our past can be] is that my mother would leave me outside in a pram during the day, despite the weather being (since we were right on the coast) cool and damp. I have always attributed this to my relative tolerance of cool weather. I am the last one to put on a coat. In the mild SoCal weather, I can go a whole year without putting on a coat. (At the same time, given my high desert experience, I withstand dry heat easily as well. It’s hot humidity I have difficulty with.)

Thinking back, I think my father was not completely out of the Air Force when my family returned to the US. This was when I was about 1 ½ years old I’ve been told; late 1956 or early 1957. The reason we settled in Apple Valley (despite the name, a rather desolate desert town 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles) is that it was near George Air Force Base, just west of the larger town of Victorville, CA. (The base was decommissioned in 1992.) I think my father must have finished his Air Force commission there, and chosen to return there (as opposed to someplace in the Midwest, where he grew up) since it was relatively near the friend he’d met in the service, Rollin Bigbee, who lived in Burbank.

Let’s do a map. I’ve always been obsessed with maps, knowing where I am, knowing where places are. It’s common for me, reading a book, to check the atlas (I have several) or, these days, Google, to see where these places are. So, where is Apple Valley? It’s northeast of Los Angeles, thus:
(Click on the image for a larger one.)

Apple Valley is in the upper right, near Victorville and Hesperia. The big green bands between there and Los Angeles below are the San Gabriel Mountains, with Big Bear Lake, Mt Baldy, the Angeles Crest Highway, and more. The world to the north is utterly different from the world to the south. It is an area of sand and rocky hills and vast expanses, at an elevation of roughly 3000 feet. The western end of that desert, between Victorville and Palmdale, is the area the rock band U2 took as the setting for their 1986 album “The Joshua Tree” – which included the song “Where the Streets Have No Names”. (This is true: all the roads out across the desert there have designations like Avenue F, or 152nd St east. No names.)

So: I believe my father finished out his Air Force commission at George Air Force Base. Then he got a job as a draftsman, for a man named John Blesch, who had an office in the area of Apple Valley called ‘the village’, about midway along the stretch of Highway 18 that runs straight west-east, in what is actually the southeastern end of the valley.

At first, we lived in what must have been a rented house, in the northeast corner of the valley, out by Fairview Mountain – a cinderblock house, and this is the place where I have my earliest memories… of lying in a crib with my parents in the other room; of a dog called Tammy running up the driveway. Everything was sand and scrub brush, alongside rocky hills.

In a pattern that was to be repeated, we moved from a rented house into a house that we bought: on Winnebago Road, to the southwest of the rented house and just north of what was then the small Apple Valley airport. This is the house where I lived for four years or so, through kindergarten and the 1st grade, and where later my maternal grandmother lived into her 80s. My family visited her many times over the years, and after they moved back east, I visited her over the years, until her death in 1984. My long-time connection to this place is why I list it as my hometown on Facebook. I have many pics, which I will scan and post eventually.

But a little bit more family background. My mother had one brother, Robert (my ‘Uncle Bob’), who I think must have also been in the service at some point, though I don’t think I ever knew the details, and who settled in the Los Angeles suburbs (the San Fernando Valley) afterwards. Because both he and my mother’s family settled in southern California, my grandmother on that side, who’d previously lived her entire life in a small northwestern Illinois town, relocated to southern California herself. For a time she lived in an apartment in Costa Mesa, down in Orange County. To get just a bit ahead of my personal timeline: when my own family moved from Apple Valley down to Santa Monica, when I was in 1st or 2nd grade, my grandmother moved in with us, in an apartment that was adjacent to the garage at the back of the property along the alley. And when, after 6 months, my father gave up that Santa Monica rental and bought a house in the San Fernando Valley… my grandmother moved out to Apple Valley, to take possession of the house my father had not been able to sell.

End of part 2.

My parents were Robert Harry Kelly and Helen Elizabeth Pierce, born 1933 and 1934 respectively. They both grew up in small towns in northwestern Illinois – Cambridge and Kewanee, respectively.

(This entire post, and others to follow, are advised IIRC.)

(My mother, in later years, I realized was quite beautiful, and reminded me of the actress Veronica Hamel, who starred in the ’80s TV series Hill Street Blues. This link has a pic.)

My particular branch of the Kelly family derives from the Isle of Man, an island in between Great Britain and Ireland, and the earliest ancestors in the family tree that some of my relatives compiled several decades ago came over the US in the 1860s. The family coat of arms is a triskelion. My father’s side, the Kelly side, was roughly ¾ Swedish, and ¼ Manx. My mother’s side, I was given to understand, was a mix of French, German, Swiss, and English. So the result is that I am a mix of various European roots.

The Kelly family in America goes back to a Swedish ‘colony’ called Bishop Hill, again in northwest Illinois. I have early memories of visiting my great-grandmother there, in the early ‘70s; she lived into her 90s.

My father was from a relatively poor background, as far as I have gathered; his father, a farm hand, lived in a house at the northwest corner of Cambridge, Illinois, that was so basic it didn’t even have a fireplace. My mother was from a relatively well-off background. Her father was the sheriff of Henry County, Illinois, who was killed in the line of duty, in a shoot-out with some criminal, when my mother was about 10 or 12. The family story is that after this tragic event, my grandmother on that side was, according the law at the time, made temporary sheriff herself, until a special election could be held to elect another.

Two of my grandparents were long-lived, with two others being exceptions, the first being the aforesaid maternal grandfather, of an accident, and my paternal grandmother, who died of Parkinson’s Disease in the early 1970s, in her early 70s. All my grandparents were born around 1900.

Alas, I have no detailed records of my parents’ lives. I believe they married in about 1952. My father had gone to college, I think at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (or whatever it was called then), wanting to be an architect. But before he finished, he went into the US Air Force, became a meteorologist (or at least a weatherman), and was assigned to an American base in southeast England. He was married by then, and my parents lived in Felixstowe, near Ipswich, and in 1955 I was born in a maternal hospital, Phyllis Memorial Home, a bit north of there, in a small town called Melton. Because I was born off-base, I acquired British citizenship, as well as American citizenship because of my parents. So I had dual-citizenship until just before I was 18, when my parents had to file some papers to renounce my British citizenship in order to avoid my being drafted into the British military.

My parents returned to the US when I was only a year and half old (I’ve been told), via a long flight that landed half-way for refueling in Newfoundland. So I have no direct memories of England. I do have boxes of photo ‘slides’ [an antique term, now, which is why I put it in quotes] that I inherited from my father on his passing about 10 years ago, including a number of their apartment in Felixstowe, the beach strand with strings of multicolored lights, and even of the maternal hospital where I was born. I do intend to mine these and scan the best ones for uploading, for my family members at least.

On my first trip to Europe, back in 1990, I took a sidetrip to England, rented a car, and drove out to Felixstowe. It looked exactly the same as in my father’s slides. Though the pier was then a raucous late-night party scene, which, in our hotel along the beach, kept us awake long into the night.

When my father’s Air Force service was over, he came back to the US and settled in the high desert of southern California, because of a friend he met in the service, Rollin Bigbee, who lived in Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles. And so my earliest memories are of the desolate high desert, and being far away from everyone else.

More to follow.