Mormon History In California

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Last week, I had a final interview with the Los Angeles office of a law firm I've been considering joining. While I was up in LA, I hopped over the hill to my extended family's old stomping grounds of Burbank/North Hollywood.

It's not widely known, but North Hollywood was virtually the first area outside of Utah to which Mormons migrated after the end of the pioneer period. That is, it was one of the first Mormon communities outside of Utah that wasn't intentionally planted by the Church leadership. During the twenties and thirties, young Mormon families were drawn to the aircraft industry at Lockheed and the Disney animation studios (a surprisingly large number of animators of the Disney classics were LDS). Hugh Nibley spent his formative years there; so did a large number of present Church leaders and teachers.

The Forest Lawn cemetery at Hollywood Hills has one section, set against a mountainside, where many of the North Hollywood LDS community is buried. You see bronze grave markers from the 1960s with images of the Salt Lake or Los Angeles Temples, or scriptures like "The glory of God is intelligence," and "When you are in the service of your fellow beings, you are only in the service of your God."

My three deceased grandparents are buried there, under a pine tree. (Not that it matters or anything, but Ozzie, Harriet, and Rick Nelson's feet are a couple of feet from my maternal grandparents' heads.) After picking up a box of teacakes at Martino's bakery (another family tradition), on a whim, I drove over to the cemetery and visited the graves. They needed a little cleaning; nothing major, but the grounds crew must be pretty casual in where its weed trimmers blow grass.

My mother used to take me to her parents' house in the Burbank hills to keep me out of my father's hair while he worked on his Ph.D thesis. (Writing up observations of the Virgo Cluster, whatever that is, and dealing with a three-to-five-year old son are not compatible.) At the time, Burbank seemed stuck in the 1950s; coming from 1970s-vintage Costa Mesa suburbia, the place seemed older and more substantial, with serious metal block letters on all the public buildings, graceful prewar houses, tree-lined streets, and a kind of anachronistic, manly atmosphere in the old barbershop and golf course my grandpa would take me to. Lumbering around with him in an ancient 1960s battlewagon of a Buick enhanced the sense of place. I'd go to sleep in my mother's old bedroom, listening to the crickets and to the hum of the neighbor's air conditioner through the open window on hot nights, and watchiing the red light blink on top of a radio tower atop the Verdugo hills.

My mother grew up in the affluent hill neighborhood; my father lived in the flat valley below. I never knew my paternal grandfather. He met my grandmother at BYU, back when most of the classes were held at the old lower campus that's just been restored. He was an artist, as was his father; in fact, one of the lecture rooms at the BYU Harris Fine Arts Building is named for him. (Unfortunately, it also preserves his homely-sounding first name "Elbert" for all time.) They moved to California in the 1930s, where he went to work as a commercial artist for Lockheed Aircraft. He seems also to have done some drafting of engineering diagrams; during World War II he was on the design team for the P-80 Shooting Star, the first operational American jet fighter plane. He continued his personal art as well; although most of his work was in watercolor, he created stained-glass artwork for some of the LDS chapels being built in the area. (It was removed in remodeling; frankly, the modern style wasn't my taste.)

Unfortunately, in the early 1950s, my grandfather was one of the last people to contract polio before the Salk vaccine was developed. He was hospitalized, in an iron lung respirator, for a long time. Of the married people in the iron-lung ward with him, his marriage was the only one that survived the experience; my grandmother never complained about the ordeal of caring for him. Eventually, he recovered enough to leave the hospital, although he remained in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. The Church's sports program was a lot more involved back then, in a time when the Church was small enough that an all-Church youth basketball tournament was possible. My grandfather spent hours and hours coaching Church youth teams from his wheelchair. He died in 1967, about a year after my father returned from his mission.

My parents went out of their way to give me a sense of this history. We'd visit my grandfather's grave every few times we came up to visit. Forest Lawn is definitely a California-style cemetery. It's easy to make fun of; the Eurosophisticate criticism is that it tries to hide death under a well-manicured lawn with flat markers instead of morbid gravestones sinking slowly into the ground. And of course, a couple of the cemeteries are "themed" -- Glendale's has reproductions of Renaissance art, while Hollywood Hills has a replica of Old North Church in Boston (Paul Revere's "one if by land, two if by sea" tower), monuments to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and a giant mosaic, reproducing artwork of the American Revolution (Washington crossing the Delaware, Cornwallis surrendering, etc.), captioned "God gave us liberty. Those who forsake God, lose their liberty." All in all, it's definitely a product of pre-Vietnam 1950s America, and would be easy to sneer at if one were so inclined.

Since these things were part of my upbringing, I didn't become so inclined. As a student of history, it's impossible not to recognize the ugliness that's part of our country's history; on the other hand, the same study of history convinces me that we could have done a lot worse, given man's imperfection. Lincoln spoke in his First Inaugural of "[t]he mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land." Disneyfied as the Forest Lawn patriotic displays might have been, I associated them with the solemnity of my father's father's grave, and the history of my family in the land that stretched out in the hot shimmering San Fernando Valley air beneath the hillside cemetery. I've never quite been able to shake those mystic chords of memory, notwithstanding youthful cynicism, collisions with unpleasant historical facts, and the best efforts of some -- certainly not all -- university professors.

I'm not quite sure what my point is as to all this, or what connection to a particular gospel principle this has. Maybe I'll just say that the hearts of the children are turned to the fathers in many wonderful ways.

[Guest curvette]

Thanks PD. I love it when you give us peeks into your personal life. When you are tired of being a lawyer, you should become a writer! Good luck on your job--I'd hire you in a heartbeat!

[Kevin]

How did the interview go? Those L.A. firms make big bucks - make sure you demand your fair share.

[Snow]

Well-spoken and nicely done.

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Curv and Snow -- Thanks, guys.

Kevin -- It's actually the Orange County branch office of an old-line LA firm. It doesn't pay quite as much as the bluest of the blue chips, but it won't kill me off, either -- a happy balance. It's still quite a nice raise from where I was, not to mention that I don't have to work for Satan incarnate, which was unpleasant.

I accepted their offer today. I start July 12. Woo. Hoo.

[sgallan]

Pd -

On the one hand I am really happy to see you accomplish what you set out to do. Seriously. You are obviously very talented and will do very very well. While I am not a good judge of people, I am a good judge of talent. On the other hand I am going to miss the PD I once knew. This saddens me. But much as I am an eclectic mix of..... do everything once, maybe twice, wear my heart on my sleeve, very much an independent minded anti-authoritarian type person - as is much of my family - you are a (or will soon be) conservative, 'make the big bucks', over achieving upper middle class Orange county LDS. Just a bit of a late starter. This isn't necessarily good or bad. It just is. We all tend to choose our paths, and our upbringing has much to do with this, whether we want to admit it or not. But as I have stated on other threads..... soon we will have little to nothing in common and I will be your societal enemy.... though if we were to ever meet in person we would no doubt be very kind and polite to one another, and get along just fine. Something which always intrigues me as I have your 'soon to be LDS peers' as some of my customers. They are generally among my best customers. Always nice, polite, and understanding.

Anyhow, good luck. There is nothing better than getting out of a screwed up job to go to something better.

[Snow]

Originally posted by TheProudDuck@Jun 29 2004, 06:51 PM

It's still quite a nice raise from where I was, not to mention that I don't have to work for Satan incarnate, which was unpleasant.

Try reason this out Duck...

Even if Satan were an actual existent being - and if he were, he would undoubtedly be a lawyer - but even so, what are the chances that he would be practicing in Orange County?

Logic my friend, logic.

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Scott --

When we square off on opposing battle lines, which one of us gets to wear the blue? Gray tends to wash me out.

Seriously, you really don't have to worry about me becoming an overachieving big-bucks Mormon lawyer any time soon. Thanks to being in debt up to my eyeballs to my beloved alma mater, and to various usurious credit card companies thanks to a major health-insurance screwup on my part a few years ago (which just happened to coincide with the complicated birth of my daughter), and to my having missed the boat on a runaway housing market, my lifestyle will be roughly commensurate with that of an Arizona convenience-store clerk for the foreseeable future.

Snow -- Yeah, I know. I would have thought New York. Maybe the pressure there got too great even for him. In any case, it's going to take several dry-cleanings to get the smell of sulfur out of my suits. (Which I won't need -- the new firm has all-week business casual. Woo hoo again!)

[Guest Starsky]

It all comes together....history...I mean...

[Guest Jets]

Originally posted by Snow@Jun 29 2004, 11:25 PM

... but even so, what are the chances that he would be practicing in Orange County?

Logic my friend, logic.

Especially since odds are he's practicing somewhere in the basement of the COB.