Back Then

Eagle Rock 1905 

In the wee hours at the age of five, I would lay in my bed and listen to the distant shrill sound of steel scraping against steel coming from the railroad yard on San Fernando Road.  The house we lived in was three miles from the yard but with the Los Angles population at less than a third of today, there was little to dampen the eerie music.  The railroad was the southern boundary of what I was aware of at the time as the physical world.  Our house was on a hill and from the second story I could see the hills that formed the other three sides of the shallow valley where sat our suburb of Eagle Rock.  It wasn’t until years later that I realized how comforting it had been as a child to have my known world so nicely framed.  The first time I drove through the San Fernando Valley I remember thinking what a nightmare it would have been to grow up in such an infinite flat and featureless wasteland.

My grand kids now live in a house on a hill that looks out across a somewhat smaller valley but that is also hemmed in by other hills.  I hope that this setting brings to their childhood the same self-assurance and peace of mind that it afforded me.  My grandson’s bedroom is in the front of the house overlooking the valley and the hills to the west.  Late at night, lying together in his bed, we can hear the blare of air horns from trains heading to the same yard that was part of my youth, and though we can’t hear the sounds of the steel, I tell him what it was like.

Driving my grand kids home from preschool I’d always make sure they checked out the big boulder that gave Eagle Rock its name and I’d try to get them to picture the shadow cast across the face of it as the shape of an eagle.  It was more prominent as a landmark when I was a kid before being partially obscured by freeway overpasses.  We used to hike over to it back then after charting our route while viewing it from atop the hill that served as my back yard.  It marked the eastern edge of the valley before it came to the suicide bridge that crossed into Pasadena.

From that same vantage point we could also look down on Yosemite playground where I spent my weekends and summers.  Baseball was really the only sport we knew about in those days and we played pick-up games like over-the-line for as long as the daylight held out.  I never gave a thought to spending the entire day at the park, a couple of minutes’ walk from my house. 

My house is on the far left with the red-tile roof

In the early 1950s, my grammar school friends and I were around the age of ten and walked all over town unchaperoned, to and from school, to the park, the Eagle Rock, visiting each other’s homes or climbing to the radio station perched on a hilltop a good mile beyond where the 134 freeway is now.  The street cars hadn’t yet been ripped out, families had one car, the 6-year high school (grades 7 through 12) had 800 kids instead of today’s 2,400 and were 95% Caucasian as opposed to 10% now.    

The only time we couldn't play over-the-line was on Sunday afternoons when the amateur baseball teams would take over the main diamond.  The Eagle Rock Merchants were a holdover from the early 1900s when every podunk town in the USA had its own baseball team.  The Merchants played their Sunday games against teams from surrounding areas such as Glendale, Echo Park, Boyle Heights, etc.  The teams were a hodgepodge of characters, ages and nationalities who were talented enough to deserve the crowds that came every Sunday to take in the games. 

There was only one umpire who was positioned behind the plate and was a lesson to us kids how a commanding presence could maintain order when things sometimes became tense.  In deep right center field next to the clubhouse used by the cub scouts and brownies was a dilapidated scoreboard where runs were posted with chalk onto a dark green plywood surface.

God knows how many years these games preceded my youth.  I’d imagine several decades based on the variety of uniforms the teams wore.  There was at least a half dozen versions worn by players on the Eagle Rock club.  Most of uniforms had "MERCHANTS" printed on the front but there was a range of font styles.  The classiest thing about the uniforms was the consistent use of pin stripes be it on flannel that was white, off-white or gray.  On the back of the uniforms were the names of the merchants who had chipped in for the uniforms, Tritch Hardware and Foster’s Freeze among them.  As far as pants and the old fashion stirrup socks that made for the rest of the outfit, there was no discernible pattern.

The games were friendly enough but even though I was too young to understand it all, it was obvious to me that the outcome of the game definitely mattered.  After all, there was no ESPN, the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and the Lakers were still in Minneapolis.  The Rams had recently moved to Los Angeles from Cleveland but pro football hadn’t begun to catch on.  The phenomenon of local amateur baseball certainly flourished in the first half of the 20^th century in part due to what would seem today as an entertainment vacuum.  I had the feeling watching those games that it was more to the players and spectators than a diversion.  Even at that age I could sense there was an attachment to the team as our team, made up of our guys, playing for our town.

Those that came out to watch the games sat in the bleachers that ran along both foul lines.  Mostly old men, many of whom still wore hats (not caps) and gnawed on short cigar stubs.  The most senior of these were frail and shrunken, walked with a cane and carried themselves with that unnerving question-mark posture that a little kid can’t take his eyes off.  I remember being completely stunned the first time one of them spat to end a twenty-second-long session of violent thoracic purging of which only the old and infirmed are capable. 

It never entered my head that any of them in their youth had played the game as surely some had, perhaps even on that same field.  I could only see them as old, even older than my grandfather.  They watched quietly for the most part.  An exceptional play might bring about some polite applause, an error could make for some shaking of heads and a loss meant lots of disappointed muttering.  The majority of those that came to the games lived in the neighborhood and old as they were, walked to the park.  Yosemite Park, or “playground” as we referred to it was put in in 1927 at the same time as the high school directly across the street.  Thinking back, I now wonder how many years these old men had been attending these games and supporting the Merchants.  It could easily have gone back prior to 1927, and if so, where did they play their games.

The players fascinated me.  Working stiffs, many of whom I was certain were older than my father, suited up and playing serious baseball.  Most of them arrived in the dugout before the start of a game still yanking on parts of their uniform, smoking, spitting, laughing and pushing each other around playfully.  Some carried with them a canvas duffle bag with equipment while others came barefooted holding a pair of spikes to avoid slipping on the sidewalk on the way in from the street.  The players on the visiting teams were equally interesting.  The one I remember best was a reliever that held us scoreless for the last three innings.  He had to be close to fifty years old, thoroughly gray, tall, gangly and thin as a rail.  His delivery was so painfully slow I thought he was still taking warm up tosses.  Not one of our players could make decent contact on any of his pitches.  He sported this huge grin the entire time he was on the mound and never stopped talking to the batters, his catcher and the ump.  It was mesmerizing.

We got to where we knew the names of the Merchant players after a while.  Joe was the most intriguing to me.  He played second base, may have been five feet tall and I’d guess was 190 lbs.  Beyond that I only know he wasn’t white as I was a novice at the time with regard to nationalities.  He was a mechanic and when he got to the park he would change from one uniform into another.  He had to have been 45 years old but he was really quick on the base path and very crisp in turning double plays.  His five-o’clock shadow appeared at noon and was heavier than Nixon’s.  He had the thickest forearms I had ever seen and when he laid his short compact swing on the ball the sound made you wince.  The highlight of my summer in 1952 was watching Joe hit a ball all the way to the swimming pool in left center and seeing it bang off the end of the board a few feet in front of a guy getting ready to dive.