I mentioned in a previous post that my grandparents’ house in Long Beach had been raided by the Ku Klux Klan in 1932. I was going to be in Los Angeles in February for a women storytellers’ retreat, so I wrote the people who live in the house now, hoping that they would be interested in the story and would let me come in and look around. I wanted to be able to visualize the setting as I wrote about it. I enclosed a copy of a newspaper article about the raid with the address in it, and gave my website address so they could check me out. I got no answer, and figured either they weren’t interested or they were out of town. So I settled for seeing the outside of the house and the neighborhood.
Claudia flew down to join me after the retreat, and we planned to visit Long Beach on the way to see a friend of hers in San Diego. I took the Long Beach exit off the 405. The main streets looked all different but I went right to the house on Elm Street where I lived from fifth grade through high school. It had looked a bit neglected when Claudia and I drove around Long Beach with my cousins about fifteen years ago, but it has a picket fence now, and two gilded lions guarding the front steps. The fellow in front didn’t speak any English.
We found good coffee at the Passport in what is now called the “East Village,” just east of downtown. Then we drove east on Ocean Avenue past the art museum that started in one bluff-top mansion when I was in high school (Poly) and has now expanded to three. The address we were looking for was a few blocks inland. It belongs to a lovingly kept-up craftsman bungalow a block from a little park. All the houses in the neighborhood looked original and well cared for, mostly twenties and thirties bungalows in different styles, including a fairy-tale-type house with curving shingle roof and stained glass windows. I walked up the driveway of my grandparents’ former home to take a peek at the back yard. A dog barked and stuck his nose under the fence.
I walked back to the sidewalk where Claudia was waiting and the front door opened. A slim, dark-haired woman came out, followed by the dog. “Hi,” I said, “I’m Nancy Schimmel. I wrote you a letter...” “It’s on the bulletin board,” she said. “We were out of town. Come in!” So in we went. The inside was all white and airy with dark-stained woodwork. She explained that in the nineties, before they lived there, there had been a fire in the kitchen, so it and the wall between it and the dining room had been completely redone. The kitchen was modern, but the built-in sideboard in the dining room was a reproduction of the original. She even had blueprints of the house as it had been and as it was restored, so we could see that the big living room had once been two smaller rooms. Her husband, she said, was interested in history, so we left a copy of the chapter on the raid with her and promised to let them know if we found out anything new. I came away feeling the visit was a total success.
It started to rain the next day, and we were afraid we would miss the total eclipse of the moon that night, but it cleared up as we approached Los Angeles and we got a good view. The next night we celebrated my seventy-third birthday with my cousins and Virginia Walter. Ginny and I were in library school together back in the sixties. I’ll tell you about her new book in an upcoming post.
I’ll be telling the story of the Klan raid at the Malvina concert at the Freight and Salvage Coffee House March 23, and singing “The Battle of Maxton Field.” the song my mother wrote about a Klan rally being raided. It’s on the reissued album, Malvina Reynolds Sings the Truth. In my hurry to tell you about the CD last time, I didn’t mention the graphics, which are great. The serious photo on the cover gives way to the three color photos of Malvina eating an ice cream cone which are on the Malvina web page and then some pages from her song books with illustrations by Jodi Robbin and Emmy Lou Packard.
©2008 by Nancy Schimmel
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
A HOUSE IN LONG BEACH
