Life, love, lust and lunacies from the Sage of Topanga

Night quickened into a golden morning on the day Cindy died.

It glowed over the still dampened leaves of the oak trees in our yard and reflected off the windows of the house.

Days of rain had ceased but the world continued to glisten with an afterthought of the storms that had shrouded us for what seemed an eternity.

Our extended family of 12 took turns standing around our Cindy’s bedside and watching her struggle for life with short, shallow breaths and then at last sigh and settle gracefully into her dreams.

For days she had been in a semi-conscious state, awakening long enough to whisper her pleasures and annoyances in words we had to lean closer to hear, but the disease that was taking her life would not even allow her that, and she drifted into a coma.

Her full name was Cinthia Louise. She was 59, born in May, 1951, just two months after I had been shipped out by the Marines to fight in the Korean War. When I came home on a rainy night in San Francisco she was handed to me by my wife Joanne who said simply, “Meet your daughter.”

She was our first born, to be followed by another daughter, Linda, and a son, Allen. Like her father, she was often defiant and willful but also possessed a wicked sense of humor and could laugh out loud even when the joke was on her.
Two and a half years ago after a routine colonoscopy she was told by an oncologist at Sacramento’s Kaiser Hospital that she had inoperable cancer of the liver and her days were limited. It stunned us all. We began asking why her?

Cindy had never smoked and only drank alcoholic beverages in moderation. She lived alone in her roomy apartment with three cats she dearly loved, not far from her boyfriend’s home. While she didn’t exactly live on a diet of spinach and carrots, neither did she limit herself to Fatburgers and candy bars. Her culinary choices lay somewhere in between.

A polished photographer, she was creative in many ways, working with colorful tiles to fashion designs and scenes on table tops and walls, and crocheting wall hangings for special days. On one of them was written her version of a Biblical passage: “There is a time to be born and a time to die and a season for every activity under the heavens.”
Cindy loved “fun times” as she called them and managed to work them in between a full time job with Sacramento County and reading half the night. Books became her real world as she unraveled the mysteries of her life. All the rest was fantasy.

We are planning a memorial service in April to say the formal kinds of goodbye to a child-woman who lived and died as time determined, but she will exist until the end of my days at a place in memory where there are no tears and where one never has to say goodbye.

It was one of those nights when someone passing through the canyon says to himself, “I want to live here.” That usually comes about when the Valley’s too hot and the ocean too foggy and Topanga exists in weather of its own, remembering the cool of winter but anticipating summer.

But it wasn’t just the meteorological biome that made the night special. I don’t even recall what the temperature was, actually, only that we wore light jackets and weren’t too cold or too warm. What intrigued me was all of it put together, Topanga, a non-intrusive crescent moon and jazz.

It was one of those moments you remember in some detail even though you might forget your cat’s name and your wife’s birthday. You walk into a place, the Canyon Bistro in this case, and there’s a guy in the corner riffing on an electric guitar making magic to an almost empty outdoor seating area.

That’s what we walked into the other night at the Bistro, and I have to tell you that I got into a mellow mood real fast listening to him. Jazz is the kind of music that talks to you and I was hearing it say let go, relax, soar with the sound to a place you’ve never been on a night that never was.

The man doing all this to me on this perfect night was a jazz guitarist who calls himself Edwing. He was sitting on the floor against a wall impassively plucking at the instrument, its echo lingering over a small Wednesday night crowd as friends at a nearby table listened with the kind of attentiveness just naturally paid to a master. One of the friends was Yvonne Butler, a woman in a bright yellow, wide brimmed summer hat and yellow summer smock, a vocalist who has sung with the Edwing Trio, and who sang on this night.

We came in a group—my wife, Cinelli, and two daughters, Cindy and Linda—to have dinner and weren’t anticipating music with the food and good wine. Larry Cohn’s dinners stand alone as far as I’m concerned and we go there often. But I’ve never been there on a jazz night. It was an added incentive to mellow out and be transported to one of those mystical places of memory that jazz can evoke.

I was listening to Edwing riff idly but intensively which is where all bravura performances are born, with both ease and concentration that transcends the moment, making it special. He suddenly seemed to pull away from wandering through the chords and began playing “As Time Goes By.” If there’s one piece of music in the world that will carry me through a thousand memories, it’s that one. I can get positively dreamy listening to it and remembering a rainy night in San Francisco when Cinelli and I were young and the future was unrolling like a scroll of time.

Edwing played other pieces that evening, like “Misty” and “The More I See You,” as the last of the heavy traffic faded on the boulevard, leaving the night to music, but it was “As Time Goes By” that got to me. That stormy night in San Francisco found us in a club called Blackhawk awaiting the arrival of Billie Holiday. She didn’t show up when she was supposed to and the place was almost empty when she finally did. Only Cinelli and I and a couple of friends were hanging in there listening to Cal Tjader on vibes filling in.

Finally, like two hours late, Holiday wandered in through a side door half stoned, her hair and clothing damp. One could only guess what she’d been doing. She didn’t say a word, but just stood at the mike and began singing like a little girl in pain, which maybe she was. She sang steadily for what seemed like half of the remaining night, but it was the tune from “Casablanca” that remains all these years later, evoking perfect visions of the City long ago.

So I want to thank Larry Cohn for having Edwing and Butler at the Bistro, he graying and pony tailed, she in dazzling yellow. They provided the stimulus to lose myself for a moment under the stars, with music as sweet as honey in hot tea and that silly little crescent moon shining bravely in a windless Topanga sky.

Almtz13@aol.com

There’s a darkness over the world, one of those periodic cycles of woe that has everyone edgy and nations unpredictable. I’m beginning to feel like a guy I used to know in Oakland who walked around under a dark cloud like the cartoon character Joe Btfsplk, living a life of grim expectations. Ask him what the trouble was and he’d say “Everything,” which caused the rest of us to fall into his gloomy state, anticipating the worst, hunched over and sad.

Well everything does seems to be the matter today. That oil spill tops it all off for the moment, spreading a gummy mess through the Gulf of Mexico, polluting the sandy shores and threatening the wildlife. But then there’s that Iceland volcano too sending up clouds of smoke so thick you can’t fly through the damned stuff. The essentials in peril.

Periodic earthquakes up and down the west coast and elsewhere in the world, tornadoes in the Midwest, a recession throughout the land, hatred in Arizona, a bunch of banjo-plucking protestors who call themselves the Tea Party following an emptiness like Sarah Palin to, by God, set things right, and layoffs in L.A. that are going to send hundreds more shell-shocked jobless people to the bread lines.

What’s going on here?

Even fun places like Greece and Italy and maybe Spain that no one takes seriously in the economic strata are causing money problems and what about that nut who pushed the wrong button on Wall Street and sent our own stock market into what they’re calling a flash crash? A chef is charged with trying to hire homeless guys to kill his wife and the mother of a dead girl visits the guy in jail who killed her daughter and says she forgives him.

What? Huh?

Everything Is out of synch. The music’s wrong, the words don’t scan, the beat is erratic. One expects that at any minute Godzilla will rise out of the sea and we’ll all run screaming like the Japanese in Tokyo, dashing blindly through the Ginza, but in L.A. it’ll be down Sunset Boulevard or Broadway in New York, depending on whether the monster rises in the Atlantic or the Pacific. He’ll eat us all.

The feeling of doom is one I can’t shake. Forget the war, that’s penny ante horror compared to everything else that’s going wrong and could go wrong. Our troubles are in the core of the Earth and in the very atmosphere we breathe and no one seems to know what to do about them. We blame each other, we blame God or government, we blame nature, fate, kismet and the radiation we’ve loosed in the air, and the acid rain falling on our heads.

Yesterday the cat bit me. It was a big bite for no good reason and it drew blood. Great, I’ve got a bad heart, bad lungs and a convulsive stomach but I’m going to die of cat fever like some kind of small prey that wiggles into stillness in the last painful moments of life, screaming beyond our ability to hear, a wee cry into eternity.

“You’re just lumping all of the bad things together, which makes the world look terrible and life as bleak as the face of the moon,” my wife says. “It is bleak,” I say, “even my fish are dying. I had six in the tank and now I’ve just got that one scrawny thing staring out at me. He knows, the fish knows, but the fish aren’t saying.”

She used to say that bad things happened in threes. The refrigerator would stop working, the dryer would break down and the car wouldn’t start. Now it’s in far greater multiples, affecting everything around us, damaging our auras and dimming our electrolytes.

Then I look out the window. The rain has stopped. Drops of water glisten on the new green of the oak trees. The world glistens. OK, I say to myself, the oil still leaks, the volcano still rumbles and the wind blows evil circles through the cities and the farmlands, but there’s sunlight too.

Cling to the brighter things, I say with a will. Let a little light shine in.

Almtz13@aol.com

You’re dancing along to life’s two-step when a guy looking a little like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining,” with his diabolical grin, taps you on the shoulder and whispers in your ear. He’s not looking to cut in and he’s not there to bring good news. It’s fate, man, and he’s there to remind you that you’re mortal.

I felt the tap and heard the whisper at home recently as I danced along with the stars on TV and began feeling a tightening in the chest. At first I thought it was just my usual hypochondria telling me to whine a little and be comforted like a child with his mama, but that wasn’t it. I’ve had what doctors like to call discomfort before, but this time it wouldn’t go away. My wife was asleep and I was sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for God knows what when it occurred to me that I might have a real problem here.

I shook Cinelli awake and said I had chest pains, but she’s heard about my pains so many times before that she patted my hand and said I should try to relax and think of puppies and the bad old aches will go away. Puppies won’t do it this time, I said; it was time for me to hustle my old ass down to emergency in the Little Hospital on the Corner. That would be the Providence Tarzana Medical Center.

They know me there. I drop by every once in awhile to check out a new ailment and they welcome me like their idiot brother come home for Christmas. I always feel a little like Norm in the old TV series “Cheers” where everyone greets him as he saunters in and the owner slides a beer down the bar. But instead of sliding a beer at me in the E.R., they rush around hooking me up to an IV, taking tests and declaring that I am there for the night.

I am whisked to a regular hospital room by a guy who pushes the gurney through the hallways like he’s at the Indianapolis 500. When I get to the room I am asked where the chest pain rates on a scale of one to 10. I am lousy at these kinds of estimates but I’ve got to say something other than it hurts like hell, so I say it’s like an 8. I’m thinking maybe I should have said a 9 but it’s too late.

They decide on an angiogram to see what’s going on with my heart. That’s where they run a small tube up an artery, pump some dye in and take x-ray pictures. Just about everyone I know has had one but it’s still no walk in the park. Don’t try it at home.

The cardiologist, a big guy with a puckish sense of humor knows I’m a journalist and says maybe I can get his name in the paper; he’s always wanted that. Then switching moods he says the procedure could cause a stroke or a heart attack or perhaps even, hell, death. Then he says they have to say that but I’m going to be OK, and reminds me that his name is Uri Ben-zur and it would be nice to get it into the paper.

Before I know it I am wheeled into a room as cold as an igloo where a tube is shoved up an artery, a dye released and pictures taken that reveal a 95% blockage. Old Uri isn’t overwhelmed by that at all. He just blows away the blockage, inserts a stent to keep the artery open and back to my room I go, surviving that and three days of hospital food.

They sent me home with a list of things to do and not to do, and what to eat and what not to eat. But the best advice I received came from my Cinelli who said I had to learn to relax and think of puppies more often. She was right so I’m going to quit writing for the day. And the next time someone taps me on the shoulder I’m not going to turn around. I’ll just keep on dancing.

Almtz13@aol.com

We sing today of Murray the rat, smarter than human, wiser than cat.

He entered our lives some weeks ago in our utility room, which is a room attached to the house, but closed off from it; where we keep the washer/dryer, the freezer and those items we intend to fix or throw away someday.

Murray actually is a rat, not a Mafia hit man who testified against the mob or a back alley gambler from a Damon Runyon story. I named him Murray, I don’t know why, but at least we know now that he has a specific identity.

Evidence of his initial presence was the usual rat pooh-pooh we have become accustomed to after many years of living in Ratville, U.S.A., and also materials that he laid in a line on the utility room floor: a small paint brush, straws from a broom, a plastic candy wrapper, some twigs and a nail.

They were placed in a precise pattern, more like elements of a Druid ritual than scattered debris. After a few days of this, we hired Jose One to search through the utility room and close up any entryway that might be utilized by an outdoor rat. He’s called Jose One, by the way, because he has a brother who is also named Jose who is Jose Two.

This accomplished, we declared our house to be Murray free and celebrated with a martini. Well, I celebrated with a martini while my wife, the non-drinking Cinelli, had the pleasure of lecturing me on the dangers of alcohol and wondering why I couldn’t be like other no doubt wiser husbands who only sipped a little white wine on celebratory occasions instead of those awful martinis.

Reference to such a pleasurable drink in such a hostile manner would have generated a barroom brawl on other occasions but for now I simply accepted the criticism in my usual genial manner and finished off the martini.

It wasn’t the end of Murray. The next night he laid out his usual pattern, which indicated he was either still finding a way into the house or was trapped in the utility room. We put our cat Ernie the Assassin in the room one night and all he did was yowl to get out. Either he was terrified of Murray or had searched for him without success.

Back in the days when our yard was heavy with ground covering vines we had rattlesnakes, but very few rats, because the snakes ate them. We got rid of the rattlers by chopping off their heads and now the rats were back, led by Murray, whom a rodent expert at UCLA determined was a wood rat, better known as a pack rat, a label often attached to women who buy shoes they never wear, hoarding them in a closet the way Imelda Marcos once did.

Since importing dangerous snakes was out of the question, our next effort was to trap the rats but not kill them. We borrowed a metal cage built to trap them alive and move them to a new location, such as near your house. We tantalized Murray with walnuts and peanut butter, put the food near the trap’s trigger and, voila!, the next morning there was a trapped and forlorn Murray, looking every bit like Bernie Madoff in the first days of his prison sentence.

We carted Murray down to another location and figure that was the end of our pack rat problem. Not so. Two nights later, there were the same ritual signs of a pack rat on the utility room floor. Either it was another rat or Murray was back. At a session of my Writers Workshop, members suggested that pack rats always returned to their original territory. They were homing rats, battling larger predators and chaparral to go home again. Asking writers to solve a domestic problem is like relying on Sarah Palin to lecture on international law, but I nodded politely and thanked them for their theory, however absurd it seemed.

We just put the trap out again…and again…and again. Murray is still there. He has figured out how to get into the trap and eat the bait without stepping on the trigger that would have slammed the door shut and thus imprisoned him. We have hired Jose Two this time to search for ways Murray might be sneaking in to the utility room and laying out the holy artifacts of his Druid ritual.

If we ever catch him again, I will ship him cross country to the Pentagon where the military has ways of dealing with undesirable mammals. By the time they’re done with him he’ll think twice about returning to Ratville.

Almtz13@aol.com

It is the year 2030 and the issue of same sex marriage has finally been put to rest with the Supreme Court ruling in its favor by more or less washing its hands of the issue by saying it didn’t care who married whom as long as they shut up about it. Just no kissing in public.

We also were able to get past the triangular marriage issue between straights, gays and bisexuals and dismiss as preposterous the idea of trans-species marriage which was proposed by a bloc of reasonably isolated cattle farmers, one of whom fell in love with a cow.

The high court ruled that there was no guarantee in the constitution that upheld the right of a human being to marry an animal, although it understood that deep affection existed between some humans and their pets, such as a man and his dog.

However, the court ruled in Fido vs Bubba that there was no need to sanctify such an arrangement in marriage, either civil or religious, and urged those supporting the issue to practice whatever phase of it in strict privacy.

And now comes word from the Christian Fundamentalist Marriage League that animals should not be allowed to consummate their intimate relationships in public. It is setting a bad example for young, single farm hands who are not only privy to the carnal act but who are forced to assist in the birthings of children that result from the union.

The CFML is calling for a ceremony that unites the two mating animals in a union similar to human marriage which scoffing liberals are calling the cowbell rites.

“It is enough,” thundered the Rev. Bleeden Goodheart, “to expose our young to human fornication without the sanctity of marriage in movies, on stage and in television, there is no need to further pollute their morals by allowing them to continually witness farm and domestic animals doing it in fields and neighborhoods, thereby giving legitimacy to the very random act of sex on the run.”

The whole thing was considered a joke at first because sex is no longer a big issue in 2030. Everyone is doing pretty much what they want to do and we enjoy watching them do it, although there is a good deal of protest when a contest between who was doing it best and with what degree of imagination became a video game.

The protest was so loud that sex as competitive entertainment has been removed from the lineup of videos offered by various manufacturers who have since ramped up the violence in war and murder games in order to take the public mind off the ill-considered sex issue. When blood replaces physical intimacy everyone breathes a sigh of relief.

But the CFML is continuing its drive for marriage among farm animals, with domesticate animals on the horizon. The issue has expanded to include a new ministry dedicated to conducting marital rites among the beasts and threatens to involve animal activitist who consider forced marriages prior to breeding as cruel and unusual punishment for species that have heretofore been using the rutting seasons pretty much as they wish.

It’s beginning to feel that this may be the major issue of the day this summer of 2030 since most of the other matters have been dealt with. I shudder to think what may come next. Already there’s talk of how to prevent cross-breeding on a cosmic scale. I’m not sure how Martians do it but I’m reasonably certain that we’re about to find out.

Almtz13@aol.com

When I think about it, which I do this holiday time of year, the images return in a dream like quality, shimmering in a muted sunlight, almost but not quite in focus. If I concentrate, the scene begins to emerge slowly from that corner of the mind where memory is stored, and eventually I see it in a wide screen panorama: my first snow.

I had seen snow before only in pictures, and the reality was dazzling. This was more than the simple beauty of the revelation’s purity, the gleaming dusting of white on white, outlining the whole day with its iridescence. This was a remaking of the world from war’s ugliness to the natural beauty of things.

I realize that seeing snow for the first time is a child’s delight, but this was something beyond a toddler’s wonder. I was seeing how the simple existence of a snowfall in the night could transform a reality, shifting it into a new perception. I was seeing napalm-burned trees, bomb craters, shrapnel-sliced vegetation, military squad tents and artillery pieces disappear in new outlines beneath the brush of winter’s creation.

It was as close as I have ever come to believing in God.

The year was 1951. I was a young Marine reservist, called to active duty and shipped off to Korea after a year of combat training in the States. The 7th Regiment had been pulled off the front lines after 90 days of brutal fighting in the northeast section of Korea and placed in reserve just a few days before Christmas.

It was to be a melancholy Christmas. I had seen friends die on hills distinguished only by numbers and I had been the hand maiden of death for those I knew only by the generic term “enemy,” round Asian faces that bob like toys in my dreams more than half a century later.

There was a kind of numb joy being in reserve, knowing that the likelihood was we wouldn’t be under attack that far back from the main line of resistance—although an occasional mortar shell, flung from beyond our perimeters, and the shadowy presence of an infiltrator caused moments of alarm.

I along with others who were witnessing carnage for the first time remained numb to the relief of being out of combat, still discussing among ourselves in reverential tones the friends we had lost in blurred instances of a shattering explosion, or the silence of a sniper’s bullet. We mourned them with disbelief as though the surreal nature of death among the young had never occurred.

I awoke early on Christmas morning, the day the world change. There had been no sound to alert me to the alteration outside of the squad tent six of us occupied. Rain had pounded on the canvass of our roof before, and wind had howled through the open flap, but there was only a whisper to the night that had just passed, nature’s restorations offered in silence.

I poked my head from the tent and stared. Everything was white. What had existed the day before, the charred reality of war’s existence, was gone. I have tried many times in the past to describe the beauty and the magic of what I saw that morning in Korea, the absolute transformation of worlds in the space of a few hours.

The sky was an iron gray and the air was still; no snow was falling. But the whiteness was blinding in its reality, transfixing me in an isolation of oneness that in itself was peculiar, feeling alone in a company of men whose involvements were stark by comparison.

I have seen snow many times since then, blanketing the mountains and pine trees from a cabin window; I have played in the snow with children and grandchildren, and have witnessed its churning on mountainsides criss-crossed with sleds and skiers. They slip from memory like a river’s current, rushing away the bits and pieces of nostalgia to be retrieved later, at a place downstream.

But always in the forefront of my thoughts, tucked just a whisper behind the travails of today lie the images of the first snow on a Christmas in Korea where for a breathless moment we had a space in horror where peace and dignity combined to remind us of what was possible, and to give us hope in the midst of a war that beauty was a more enduring reality, if only in a snowfall on Christmas.

Almtz13@aol.com

When you reach  50, everyone begins looking familiar, so it is not unusual to accept a hug from a male whom you may or may not know. Liberals who are brimming over with love and peace and other passionate instincts have to hug someone or something, even if it’s a stray dog or the family cat, such is their overwhelming need for compassion. Ergo when I am hugged by a male I’m not sure I know I just figure he’s a liberal friend, since most of my acquaintanes are of that persuasion, or a stranger suddenly stricken by the urge to embrace.

But I’m here today to tell you that I would rather shake hands than hug men. Women, OK, God created them to be hugged, but men are made to be warriors or at least NFL line backers, more content to bump bellies or behinds in displays of affection or triumph.

I don’t hug back when a friend grabs me in his arms. I stand there as cold and unresponsive as a euthanized anaconda and wait until the hug is done to greet the hugger in a more casual manner. I don’t push him away only because I understand the nature of a liberal to be close to his fellow man; it is an expression of his desire to transfer powerful inner rays of fellowship to the huggee as a way of bringing peace to the world one hug at a time.

Sometimes I wonder what became of the simple handshake among men, including warriors and football players, as a means of greeting or friendship. To huggers the extension of an arm to shake hands becomes a rope to pull you into the embrace, a little off balance and wondering fleetingly whether the man also intends to kiss or grope you.

It isn’t a question of homophobia. In fact, I feel it is more natural for gay men to hug men than for a straight guy to hold you close. Since most of my gay friends are not only liberal but also, well, motherly, the need to hug another man is probably twice as great.

I had a gay proctologist once who after he examined me asked me out for a glass of wine. I declined the invitation and then quit going to him, but couldn’t help wondering whether he came on to all the guys or was it just my behind that attracted him? Either way, I figured that with his job and his sexual orientation he must be in seventh heaven even without me.

I began noticing the liberal hug late in life and wondered what started it. I have a hunch that it emerged from Hollywood, since everything nutty has its roots in the activities of young actors and actresses seeking new ways to express their sexuality. It seems to somehow soothe their libidos for movie heroes to declaim their masculine traits for a hug and occasionally even a kiss on the cheek or on certain festive occasions, God help their perverted souls, on the lips.

Male liberals adopted it as a way of proclaiming the brotherhood of man, ascending over their own masculinity to declare their oneness with humanity. I understand that certain conservatives, mainly Log Cabin Republicans, secretly hug but they otherwise scorn it as a trait of the perverted left.

A friend, Billy Cobalt, a defrocked jesuit, suggests that male hugging has nothing to do with peace or love or even with bonding but is an assertion of one man’s dominance over another. If he has you in an iron grip, patting your back as though you are a small dog, he is trapping you and you are helpless to wiggle free until he decides to let you go. The male hug is a hostile act, Cobalt believes, intended to crack your ribs and crush the breath out of you.

For those who feel my disinclination to hug manifests a misanthropic nature, I say not so. I will hug a woman, as I said, because their hormones are so constituted to require hugs and domination. And I will also hug my son and my grandson because I have true feelings for them. While I may like and respect my male friends, my feelings toward them are more casual. I would rather just shake hands or, hell, bump behinds if, at my age, I can jump high enough to make the bump memorable.

The others can get their intense desires out of their system by hugging trees or high-backed Louis IX chairs or their potbellied pigs. Just don’t try hugging a grizzly bear. Like me, they’d rather you kept your love of brotherhood confined to the world peace movement and leave their furry bodies alone. Makes sense to me.

Almtz13@aol.com

They were the golden years at the Los Angeles Times under Otis Chandler. Staff members flew first class to cities across the country and sometimes around the world to gather news and features first hand. Editorial budgets were fat and reporters were eager to go where the stories were, vying for the front page’s favored Column One, set aside for original and innovative work, running down the left hand side of the page.

Ambitious and eager for self-aggrandizement, we were equally proud of what we did and what the Times had accomplished in shedding its old reputation of right wing, union-hating, race baiting rag to emerge as one of three great dailies in the country, alongside the New York Times and the Washington Post. It was a time of pride as well as profit, and we all knew that we were a part of something real and meaningful.

Like Camelot, magical kingdoms eventually turn to dusty memory, as the Times, now a shadow of what it was in the Otis Chandler era, struggles just to stay afloat, its advertising and circulation down, its staff pared to an almost skeletal size, observing the future of print journalism with concern and trepidation.

I was a part of that Golden Era as reporter, feature writer and eventually a columnist until last January when I too was downsized. And so I have a special interest in “Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times” from Angel City Press, which artfully parallels the growth of Los Angeles and the newspaper under three generations of the Chandlers. Based on the PBS documentary by Peter Jones, complete with more than 200 photos dating back to the 1800s, this is not only an important book but an exceptional book, laced together by ex-Timesman Bill Boyarsky’s faultless prose, the merger of a reporter’s terse observations and a columnist’s insights, jobs he held during 30 years at the Times, leaving as city editor in 2001.

The book isn’t just about Otis Chandler. It begins with Civil War veteran Gen. Harrison Gray Otis who joined the newspaper that was to become the Times in 1882, followed shortly thereafter by the first Chandler, Harry, who later became the General’s son in law. They were not only the founders of the Times but pitchmen for the city itself, seeing it grow almost overnight from a sleepy town of 12,000 to a metropolis of 320,000 in the 30 years from 1880 to 1910, and the growth never ended.

Virulently anti-union, the Times was bombed into debris and 21 employees killed in 1925 by what the General called “anarchic scum,” one of the many epithets employed in the free-wheeling Times by the man Boyarksy regards as “the old master of vitriol.” Two union men, brothers Jim and John McNamara, went to prison for the bombing, saved from execution by the wit and skill of celebrated defense attorney Clarence Darrow, whose fame would increase five years later in the Scopes “Monkey Trial.”

Norman Chandler followed Harry and while less bombastic than his predecessor still lobbied for those elements that would transform a village into a world class city. The Chandlers had gone all out for a deep water harbor, water for the San Fernando Valley and a general development of the urban areas, but their hucksterism included a less appealing side of them, and that was a campaign to sell L.A. to the world as “the White Spot.” Boyarsky points out that the phrase could be translated as a land of sunshine, but more likely was an appeal to those who preferred a city devoid of non-whites, a slogan that might have helped stoke the fires of brutal attacks on Chinese-Americans and Latinos, and later contributed to the hysteria that landed American citizens of Japanese descent into internment camps during World War II.

Otis Chandler followed Norman, and the newspaper that encouraged a neo-conservative agenda, racism and union-busting was a thing of the past. The Golden Age at the Times became the measured voice of a city which by now had achieved world class status, a power on the Pacific Rim that would not be denied. Those of us who were a part of the Golden Age cannot hope to see its likes again in today’s faltering fortunes of print journalism. Perhaps a sequel to this book would be not so much inventing L.A., but reinventing the Los Angeles Times.

Almtz13@aol.com

It rained in Manhattan on our 60th wedding anniversary. Lightning, thunder, a relentless downpour, the whole flashing, roaring, drenching package of a storm that pounded over West 44th Street like the drums of eternity.  I took it as God’s recognition of Cinelli’s endurance.

In the vast stretch of cosmic time, six decades is not very long. When one thinks in terms of Earth’s wrinkled age and all the growth and creatures that have inhabited it, 60 years is about a quarter click on an atomic clock.

But when you’re two fiercely independent, highly emotional people every day is a journey through a dense jungle, a shot into space, a dive to the deepest parts of the ocean, a race without a finish. Nothing is easy in a collusion of spirits.

That’s why the storm on that particular Thursday seemed quite appropriate. I will remember for a long time ducking through the calamity heading toward our hotel, umbrellas offering little shelter from the rain that lashed at us in horizontal gusts. We got to our room drenched, and we laughed.

It is the power of laughter that has helped prolong the drama of our marriage, the willingness to perceive life as an amusing trek, and the two of us as funny little travelers on an unforgiving orb. A shared sense of humor, with its whimsical blend of irony and inanity, has helped carry us past the point where others have failed, the laughter dead in their throats.

So I sing today of the woman Cinelli as the perfect companion, whether it’s getting drenched in the Big Apple or breathing in the perfume of night blooming jasmine on a perfect evening in the Santa Monica Mountains. She loves both locals. Our home in Topanga Canyon with its cool, forestry places to hide is the Eden of her soul, New York  City with its clatter and murmur of human wildlife is the home of her spirit.

We see shows in Manhattan, visit a myriad of art and history museums and dine on fussy little foods at multi-starred restaurants tucked away here and there in the quiet shadows of the city’s imposing towers. My tastes are more gourmand than gourmet and I am rattled by the subtle ambience of a restaurant like Daniel, its décor once described as “the lining of a prim octogenarian’s underwear drawer.”

In such a rareified atmosphere, Cinelli reminds me of my manners by whispering, “Pretend you’re not from Oakland.”

No Oakland guy would pay $513 for a pair of tickets to watch a little boy tip-tapping across the stage in “Billy Elliot.” I wouldn’t pay that much to see Dick Cheney in a tu-tu pirouetting drunk through Grand Central Station. But it was an anniversary so I shelled out the $513 and more to see a revival of “Hair” whose primary contribution to American culture was a celebration of drugs and nudity.

What intrigues both Cinelli and I about New York is the endlessness of it. While movement in the city may slow in the hour when old men are asleep, taxis still roam the main streets and lurk up and down the intersecting crossroads like lightning bugs in a neon forest. Garbage trucks muscle down narrow avenues vying for space with delivery vans. Limos slide through darkness toward hotels and mansions in a weary coda to party and pleasure.

When we talked about a 60th wedding anniversary trip she said New York and I said Paris, both of which we have visited many times. This time, I gave up the City of Light for another season, but I feel no loss of testicular standing in allowing Cinelli to make our decisions. She chose where we’d live when we moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to L.A. and it turned out to be a paradise in the mountains, a place of art and beauty and wildlife rare on the fringes of most large metropolitan areas.

She makes our decisions with honesty, wisdom and a sense of caring that involves more of others than herself. I rely on her to lead the way while I follow with a bag of words and stories that complete my life. She is my muse, my plot, my outline, my syntax. She is my beginning and my ending.

It is unavoidable to link as symbols the storms in our marriage and the storm that day in New York City. We have endured them all, Cinelli often waiting patiently, trusting that I will eventually have sense enough to come in out of the rain. My career in journalism has been a slippery race through a lot of bad weather, but that too has abated and I am free to reinvent myself, with Cinelli, as always by my side.

I asked her as we dried off in our hotel room on the 60th year of our companionship, rain tapping at our window like a nervous stranger, that if she had to do it over, would she still marry me. She thought about it for the briefest of moments and then, turning away, said, “Probably not.” I sensed the teasing quality in her voice and knew that secretly she would. I sensed it in the thunder.

Almtz13@aol.com