BOXES 129-131: Back Out West.

Not bad for a backyard swimming pool. This is San Simeon, aka Hearst Castle, the estate built in the California hills above the Pacific for newspaper tycoon William R. Hearst and movie star Marion Davies. A much gloomier fantasy version of it can be seen in the Xanadu of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, but the real place is open to the public--including my friends and me in 1979.

I must have put more miles on my car that summer than any other year, considering that in late May I had driven from Sheboygan to Louisiana and then to Georgia, New York and Cleveland--and now, later in the summer, I drove from Cleveland out to Santa Monica to visit Gloria Garvin and her family once again, as I had the year before. Gloria's boyfriend (later husband), Jeffrey, whom she'd met in Sheboygan, was visiting as well, and we planned to drive back together (i.e., me in my car, they in theirs) in time for fall semester, by way of a leisurely drive up the California coast--hence the stop at San Simeon--and eventually to Utah to check out Dinosaur National Monument.

I'll report on the first half of the trip in this post. I took only a small fraction of the number of photos that documented the 1978 drive, which took seven posts to cover; this one should take only two.

But to keep things chronological, let me return to mid-summer, when my Cleveland family and I drove to Pennsylvania for a wedding. The photos I took didn't turn out as well as those for a previous PA wedding (cf. BOXES 111-113)--once again I blame my temperamental Nikon, though it could have been totally my fault--but in scanning them I've been able to correct some overexposures to some degree. Once again a lot of Milicia relatives came for the wedding, as you can see below. First, here's a photo of my Aunt Ann and Aunt Mary (who were sisters) and Aunt Ann's daughter Connie:

Inside the church you see my Uncle Pete on the right, and two of his children, Angelo and his wife Lorraine on the left, Josephine and her husband Joe in the middle.

My brother, Jim, was there as well--here he is looking into the church, with our mother on the right and other folks, including Josephine and Joe, in the background; and, in a better photo, standing with Cousin Angelo:

Here are a few more lineups of aunts and uncles. In the shot below, Uncle Pete is in the back left; his wife, Aunt Fanny, in the foreground with Lorraine behind her; Aunt Ann with her granddaughter Melissa next to her; Aunt Rose in the right foreground and Cousin Debbie in the back toward the right.

And here are Aunt Fanny, Aunt Frances, Aunt Rose, Aunt Mary, Mom, and Aunt Ann. I've left the background in the shot to show the Pennsylvania setting:

Back at our relatives' house, I discovered an album of much older family photographs and tried capturing some of them. For example, here is what must be the 1928 wedding of Uncle Pete and Aunt Fanny, standing to the left; I hesitate to identify any of the other couples.

A couple of other attempts to photograph these pictures were even more inadequate, but fortunately my brother has better copies that I will substitute here. Below on the left are my grandparents holding up what must be Uncle Pete, their firstborn, so the photo must be from about 1904. On the right is my grandmother standing with her parents, in Sicily, some years earlier.

Here are a couple of other photos I copied from the album, showing my grandfather and his sons playing cards, maybe in the back yard of his farmhouse, probably in the late '40s.

Back in the present (i.e., 1979) here are Aunt Frances, Uncle Angie, Uncle Tony, Aunt Rose and Uncle Pete (whom you've now seen as an infant and a bridegroom too):

And in less formal poses, here are Aunt Frances and Uncle Tony, along with his son Ronny and daughter-in-law Anne in the back, plus Dottie and Jamie:

Sometime after this family reunion I was back in Cleveland and ready to take off for California--the longest drive I had ever undertaken by myself with no friends or relatives for stopovers along the way. The first leg of the trip was about 550 miles, from Cleveland to East St Louis, where I found a motel at an Interstate exit. The next morning I went to see Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch and have breakfast. Somehow I had learned about a rehabilitated warehouse district near the Arch and downtown (something happening in American cities all over during those years):

I had a memorably good breakfast at a trendy café on this street, and then visited the tower in drizzly weather. I didn't go up to the top (it was probably closed at this early hour) but took several pictures from the base, including one with a helicopter passing by:

The rest of my route, from St Louis to Santa Monica, essentially followed the old Route 66, though in 1979 most (but not all) of it had been replaced by Interstates. My second day's drive took me through scenic southwestern Missouri to Oklahoma City, another 500 miles. I see that I took only one photo that day, evidently to show the typical Oklahoma landscape--though it could be from the next day, when I drove across the Texas Panhandle (and had lunch at a barbeque place in Amarillo):

Later that day there was no mistaking the beautiful mountains of New Mexico:

That night I got as far as Grants (600 miles from Oklahoma City), where a station on the motel TV was unexpectedly showing La Dolce Vita, and where I had dinner at a Mexican restaurant next to the motel where there was no menu, just three choices that the waiter, who spoke no English, told me. One item was menudo--he had to go ask the chef what it was called in English, and when I learned it was tripe, I chose the barbacoa, which turned out to be a plate of shredded pork with a bowl on the side containing a thick bright-red sauce of pureed chilis with chopped cilantro and green onion stirred into it. So I mixed the two and it was really delicious.

Early the next morning, after a more prosaic Egg McMuffin at the Grants McDonalds, I took a scenic detour instead of continuing directly west on I-40: I went south toward a Malpais National Monument and west through the Zuni Reservation before reconnecting with the Interstate. Here are the photos I took that morning. I think there were petroglyphs on the cliffs near the pool in third photo, but I can't see them in this shot.

The drive took me across northern Arizona, which is probably where the next photo was taken:

I was hoping to get all the way to Santa Monica that night, and I did, but with an unexpected delay. Driving without air conditioning (as with all the trips I've been reporting on), I was doing ok though the August Arizona heat until I had to sit through some construction delays near the AZ/CA border, where a stretch of I-40 was just beginning to be built. Then, the two-lane highway took me down steeply into the Colorado River valley to the famously hot Needles CA. At that point I started feeling really terrible and fortunately was able to pull over to a diner, where I remember sitting for 45 minutes nursing an iced tea and staring at the glass. Finally I felt up to ordering the only food on the menu I thought I could handle--half a cantaloupe. Then I waited until sunset before I got back on the road, knowing I had to drive across the Mohave Desert to get to LA. I did stop to take one photo while crossing the Mohave: of a train crossing the desert. You can see the string of lights in the photo below:

I got to Santa Monica around midnight--a close to 750-mile trip from Grants, the longest I've ever driven in one day.

My second visit to LA was tremendously enjoyable, like the first. We spent a lot of time at the beach and going to movies, but on one occasion we drove down to San Diego and went snorkeling in the coves of La Jolla (where the water was pretty chilly):

A bit farther up the coast, near the Salk Institute, we looked over the cliffs and saw gliders riding the air currents:

We also visited the San Diego Zoo. Some bird photos I took turned out too blurry to include here, but the parrots posed politely:

As did the ringtailed lemurs:

The zoo had more rare red lemurs as well. I can't identify the species of monkey in this photo:

. . . but this is clearly an orangutan:

And I'm pretty sure this is a jaguar, not a leopard:

Back in LA we went to a special showing of a silent movie--Victor Sjostrom's 1928 The Wind--with its star, Lillian Gish, in person for an interview after the showing. This was a sensational evening, not only because the film, shown in a beautiful restored print, was an excellent drama and its star was in attendance, but because the event was at the Wiltern (built 1931, at the corner of Wiltshire and Western), one of the greatest art deco movie palaces still in existence. Before the show started I took a couple of pictures of the proscenium firescreen (here's the better shot):

It was harder to get photos of the spectacular ceiling in the dim light without a tripod, but here is what I was able to get:

And here is Miss Gish being interviewed:

(The theatre is now a performing arts venue; you can take a virtual tour, though the gaudy colors give it a very different vibe from the soft golden glow in 1979.)

Armed with an architectural guide I drove through various parts of the city, sometimes with Gloria and Jeffrey, occasionally by myself. Here are a couple of extravagant older mansions on a hill near Downtown (on Bonny Brae St. if I recall correctly):

And here is Frank Lloyd Wright's 1921 Hollyhock House, in Barnsdall Park in East Hollywood:

On the street below the park I took this shot of the Hollywood Hills with the Griffith Observatory on the left:

When we left Santa Monica for our return to Sheboygan, our route was up the coast as far as Bodega Bay before turning eastward. We planned to visit San Simeon (a bit north of Morro Bay), but by the time we got there the tickets for the afternoon tours were sold out. So we bought tickets for the next morning and set up at a nearby campground close to the ocean. I was extremely glad we decided to stick around, not only because we got to tour Hearst Castle but because our walk along the rocky coast that evening took us to a cove where we had an awesome view of sea lions swimming and resting on the offshore rocks.

Here is a view of the Castle the next morning as we started our drive up the hill:

And here is the staircase leading to the main entrance:

A terrace provided grand views of the coast:

And here's another perspective on the outdoor swimming pool:

The indoor pool was pretty astounding in its own way:

I didn't take photos of the other interiors (maybe they weren't allowed), but the whole place was quite a spectacle. In my next post I'll report on the rest of our trip, plus some happenings around Wisconsin that fall.