BOXES 138-141: Summer in California, Fall in Wisconsin, Winter in Ohio.

Where else but Los Angeles would you find a soft-drink bottling plant designed to look like an Art Deco ocean liner? This was one of the places I sought out during my fourth visit to the city, in the summer of 1981. This post will describe that visit, followed by a drive from Sheboygan to Richland Center WI for the early October colors, then some snowy scenes with the family that winter.

Having spent time with Gloria and Jeffrey and Foster on our trip along the Jersey Shore (see previous post), I now was seeing them again on the other coast, where Gloria and Jeffrey were now living in Santa Monica, and Foster, a native Angelino, was visiting. In addition, my Northwestern friend Harriet was beginning a semester as a guest professor at UC-Riverside, just east of LA, and I wanted to see her and Riverside as well. Plus, my New York friend Estie had met Gloria and Jeffrey during their Eastern visit, and was also planning to come out to LA.

The Garvin family had installed a deck with a wooden hot tub in their side yard, and I took a couple of near-identical photos of folks gathered around it--here is the better one:

That's Gloria (I think) with the hat and her friend and neighbor Cathy with the guitar. One of the boys is Gloria's nephew, "Little Charles," and another is Cathy's son. In another part of the yard I took a photo of Gloria's Aunt Barbara (left), her husband, Saadoun (right), and his older sister and her daughter, visiting from Iraq.

Out at Riverside Harriet was renting an apartment for the semester in the city's most famous landmark, the Mission Inn, a gigantic hotel taking up a full city block, built over the course of 30 years in various extravagant movie-palace styles: Spanish Gothic, Moorish Revival, Mexican Baroque, and assorted Medieval and Renaissance borrowings. It's a fascinating place to wander around/get lost in; my photos can only show fragments of the whole.

From the top level of the Mission Inn here's a view of the mountains beyond the city of Riverside:

One of Harriet's motivations in taking the UC-Riverside opportunity was to see LA Philharmonic concerts with her favorite conductor (and mine), Carlo Maria Giulini, who had left his chief-guest-conductor position with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the fulltime music directorship in LA. He was leading the LA Phil in a couple of summer concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, and we got to see a rehearsal from up close:

If I recall correctly, he had programmed a Vivaldi Concerto for 4 Violins--the piece you see being rehearsed in the second picture. My next photos in the slide box show some rugged territory, likely the Hollywood Hills not far from the Bowl, maybe up on Mulholland Drive. In the second shot you can see the city beyond the last of the mountain crests.

Foster and I spent a day driving around the city, including a tour of movie palaces Downtown, mostly along Broadway. Here is the magnificent 1927 Mayan Theatre, with Foster standing in front. It had become a porn house by the 1980s (but is now restored as a performing arts center).

The 1939 Coca-Cola Building is just a little south of the Mayan, just beyond Downtown. In addition to the photo at the top of this post, I took several others:

I'm not sure where we were when I took the next photo--indoors to judge from the reflection, maybe in a restaurant:

But we were definitely Downtown for an after-dark photo of the 1918 California Theatre with its excellent façade, sadly demolished a few years after we were there.

At some point on this trip I took another sunset photo, this one at oceanside:

As I mentioned at the top, Estie came out to visit during these weeks. With Gloria and Jeffrey we went on a trip to San Diego (possibly where the above photo was taken). I remember going to a outdoor Mexican restaurant in a festive square after dark, and then the next day over the border to Tijuana and farther south to Ensenada, where we stayed overnight as well. Here are my friends standing above what must be a rooftop patio of our hotel:

My final pictures of the '81 LA visit take us back to the Garvin hot tub, now being enjoyed by Estie:

Back in Wisconsin my next set of photos--following an extremely rare (for me) image of a

sunrise, looking eastward on my block--is of a trip I took with a group of people to southwestern Wisconsin. My friends David and Debbie Spear knew a French family (maybe their hosts when they stayed in France some years earlier), and this family was now visiting them in Sheboygan. David and Debbie decided to take them on an excursion to see David's parents, who lived in the country near the town of Richland Center, and I went along. (We may have taken two cars.) We naturally needed to stop to show the French folks a local dairy farm:

And besides the cows there were local flora to show off, like some orange berries and a milkweed pod and a stand of sumac--the last is one of my favorite photos from these years, though my scan doesn't quite convey the glow the leaves had when the slide was projected on a screen:

These photos were taken out in "the Kettles," i.e., in the Kettle Moraine State Forest west of Sheboygan, where I had taken pictures back in '76 (BOXES 103-105). Below you see Debbie and David (left and right foreground) and the French visitors coming down from the Parnell Esker (glacial gravel ridge) and then a couple of photos of a kame (gravel mound):

And here is David by himself. Our route took us through the small town of Columbus, distinguished by having a bank designed by Louis Sullivan. I'll include a photo even though the flaring makes the façade hard to see:

The fall colors along our drive were close to their best:

The town of Richland Center, like Columbus, has a landmark building of its own: a warehouse designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, built in 1921 and showing the sort of Mayan patterning seen on some of his California houses of that era (you may have seen examples in BOX 126; BOXES 129-131).

We had an excellent time visiting David's parents--here are a couple of photos, one a little more formal than the other:

And here are more views of the autumn scene from the Spears' homestead:

On the way back we stopped to look at Wright's Taliesin, outside the town of Spring Green:

To match the sunrise in the photo preceding our trip, here's the rise of a full moon, also down my street but clearly later in the season. Later yet--close to Christmas--my sister came out to visit, and on a cold but sunny day before we drove back to Cleveland together, we visited the dunes and beach at Terry Andrae, where I had taken photos my first year in WI (again see BOXES 103-105). The weather was certainly chillier than the previous time I took pictures there.

I hadn't taken Christmas photos since '77, but but here are a few from 1981, including two of Mom and Ellen at my mother's place in Warrensville:

And here is Mom, probably preparing mashed potatoes, with Dottie's mother, whose face is unfortunately partly blocked. Then, a photo of Dottie and Ellen in Dottie and Jim's new house in North Royalton (another Cleveland suburb):

The house in North Royalton had a very deep back yard that ended in a gully with a little creek at the bottom and then a slope upwards that served as a good sledding hill. Here you see Ellen testing out how frozen the creek is, then she and I doing some sledding. That's Jim and Dottie's lab, Bogart, in most of these shots.

These shots conclude my 1981 photos. Going through the slide boxes recently, I was very surprised to find that I took no pictures at all in 1982. I did continue to travel, but to familiar places--NY and LA--and must have decided not to bring along my (slightly) cumbersome camera equipment. So my next post will skip ahead to 1983, when I photographed friends in and around Sheboygan and then went on my first trip to Europe since 1974.