Before catalytic converters and unleaded gasoline, there was Regular or Ethyl.
If you were a child of the 60s, you probably amused yourself with the question, “Who’s Ethyl?" I thought it was a character on the "Honeymooners" or "I Love Lucy.” And, I wondered why gas station attendants (remember them?) kept asking my parents that question. I learned the answer later in life, but by the time I could pay for my gas, Ethyl had gone from the pumps in California.
Those were the good old days when air pollution in Los Angeles felt like something. By that, I mean, the air was so stinking and noxious it made my eyes water and my lungs burn. When the weather got warm, you were likely to find me in one of two places at Altadena Elementary School: either playing kickball on the asphalt playground or in the nurse’s office gasping for breath. One led to the other. If you want to experience the feeling for yourself, light a match and inhale the fumes. But don’t. Really. Don’t.
I vaguely remember the mayor of Los Angeles, Sam Yorty, making what today I would call a Trump recommendation – to put giant gasoline-powered fans on top of the San Gabriel Mountains to blow the smog into the desert! Politicians played scientists even then.
In San Francisco
My grandmother visited us in California in 1965.
In 1965, my German grandmother came to visit. We flew to San Francisco to meet her. My dad rented a Chevy Impala ragtop and drove us back to Altadena via Yosemite. If you look closely at the photograph taken in front of Yosemite Falls (above), you can tell that eight 1960s adults could easily fit in that car. Today, maybe five.
My grandmother spent the summer with us in Altadena. My brother and I didn’t speak a lick of German and my grandmother was equally talented in English. So to entertain her we would perform pratfalls, magic tricks, and my favorite, seemingly banging my head on an open door (you make the noise by kicking the door with your foot). It always got a hearty “Um Gottes willen!” from my Grossmutti. My brother got the same result whenever he would throw himself up against the dashboard of the car while my mom pulled up to a red light. At least I think he was pretending. Maybe he’s the reason seatbelts were invented.
Between shows, my mom and grandmother would put on shows of their own. The dining room table became their stage.
They took turns standing on it. Whoever was standing was being measured by the other with a cloth measuring tape in preparation for a new blouse or suit. When the logistics were finished, the table was covered with the pattern my grandmother brought from Germany and a bolt of cloth that my mother picked up somewhere in Pasadena. In the middle, they placed a fabric tomato bristling with straight pins. And you thought clothes came from a store.
There were other days when the table became a staging area for an assault on tarnish. You see, the components of the Los Angeles smog at the time were hydrogen sulfite and sulfur dioxide. Not only did the smog burn my lungs, but the sulfur in it was blackening my parent’s wedding gifts.
Who knew?
Well, my high school chemistry teacher and my grandmother did. And she thought it unacceptable.
All the tarnished items she could find in our house were arranged on a newspaper at one end of the table. At the other end, she placed a few other sheets of newspaper. Then she and my mother would arrange themselves across from each other in the middle with some rags and homemade cleaning solutions and begin the assembly-line task of polishing.
The process probably took an hour, but because there was afternoon coffee to be had with a piece of homemade Apfelstrudel or a piece of Zwetschgendatschi (plum cake) with homemade whipped cream, the hour lasted maybe three. That was the part my brother and I enjoyed the most.
It was also where I started learning German, or at least Bavarian. Watching my Grossmutti and my Mutti enjoying each other’s company over a pot o’ joe (drip, not percolated) and a nice piece of kuchen is a great way to learn anything.
Family reunion
This photo was taken in the 1950s in New York City. My grandmother came to America on a ship.