GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

The first time I rode a bicycle was at Yosemite Playground in Eagle Rock.  It was 1955, I was eleven years old, and an older kid who lived down the street showed me how.  His name was Paul Moncur and I used to take piano lessons from his mother.  Years later, I saw where he became a Police Chief for a city in the San Gabriel Valley.  Paul was two years older than me; enough to convince me that he knew everything. We both went to the same schools in Eagle Rock.  We were in the same class at one point and I happened to look at his journal.  Mr. Wilson taught agriculture and required all students to maintain a hand-written journal.  Instead of writing in cursive, or longhand, like everyone else, he printed.  He used upper and lower case and it was as neat and uniform as the pages from a published book.  It was easier to write than cursive, easier to read, and different than anybody else.  Since that day, the only thing I'...

In 1954, when I was ten and my cousin Donnie was eight, our mothers let us stay home from school and play number games.  The first game was our own creation and came about because we were baseball fans but too young to play the actual game.  Instead, we developed a game using dice and a mathematical model that transported us to a make believe world that became an all-consuming passion for years.  We never let up until I left to start college in 1962. The first game model we built was for baseball as there were lots of data available to us on the backs of baseball cards and in the newspaper.  Once we had constructed the baseball game model we would play a complete game, keep a detailed box score, and then update the statistics we kept for individual players and teams.  Our game schedule followed the real schedule in the major leagues at that time.  There were two leagues, the American and The National, eight teams in each league, and each...

In 1967, Gerben and I were living in a house on Mt. Washington, with the rent and utilities paid by the owner.  It was very remote, set above and back from the street by 200 feet.  The owner wanted somebody staying there until they found a buyer for the property.  Other than the mattresses we slept on, the place had no other furniture.  It was a great deal but I still needed to earn some money for food and gas. I landed a job working the night shift at Van de Kamp's Bakery in Glassell Park.  The building is still there where Fletcher Drive crosses San Fernando Road.  The company that last operated the bakery declared chapter eleven in 1990 and 500 employees lost their jobs.  The place remained abandoned for ten years until it was renovated with $72 million of tax payer money, and was designated for use by the Los Angeles Community College District.  Years ago, at this same corner, was a Van de Kamp's store and coffee shop...

Babe Brandelli's Brig sat on the corner of Palms and Abbot Kinney Blvds in Venice, California, serving the locals for 50 years until it changed owners in 1997.  The place today has little in common with the original décor or clientele.  The new owner kept Babe's picture on the sign in front and the large mural visible from the street featuring Babe and his Wife Betty. Five blocks west of Brandelli's Brig is the Venice Post Office where I worked the graveyard shift in 1971.  I worked alone in the basement of the building tossing parcel post packages into gurneys.  When I would start work at midnight, there would be a huge pile of parcels in the middle of the basement floor.  Surrounding the pile, were 54 gurneys (one for each carrier route) that filled the entire remaining space.  The gurneys were big enough to hold a small Fiat and each had a sign attached with the route number.  I would pick out a package from the pile, read the add...

During the mid 1960s we were students at Occidental and used to eat at Roma Pizza.  It was across the street from Bob's Big Boy drive-in at 900 east Colorado Street in Glendale.  The one-man, owner-operator of Roma Pizza was Emilio, a Russian immigrant, who had built the place himself.  He bought the lot, put up a small one-story box-like building made of cinder blocks that looked like it had been transported from Leningrad, along with Emilio. The restaurant was open seven days a week from 4:30 pm to 2:30 am.  Len Fisk found the place and dragged me along with him one night to meet Emilio.  Fisk was a dead ringer for Ernie Kovacs in both looks and mental state, drove a 1949 Chevy convertible which had no reverse, later married a Lebanese belly dancer and settled in San Mateo, California.  I was immediately taken with Emilio and ate there when ever I could afford to.  It wasn't expensive; I just didn't have any money.  Ou...

Last week over breakfast, I was telling Friedman that my wife and I were ready to pull the plug.  We are both retired now that I've been canned, the family trust has been updated, and our cremation services are pre-paid.  We're out of here!  A day or so later, it dawned on me that if Derek Jeter can do it, there's no reason why I shouldn't be able to arrange my very own farewell tour. I set about making a list of the stops that would make up the tour.  The first would have to be the Highland Park Police Station on York Boulevard.  This was where I spent a night in the hoosegow in 1966.  The building remains as the oldest surviving police station, now serving as the Los Angeles Police Museum, sitting directly across the street from a Coco's.  It opened in 1926, survived a bomb planted by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1973; and directed the case of the Hillside Strangler in the 1980s.  The night I spent in a cell there, Captai...