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| Musings on a life lived to its fullest |
In the 1930s, whenever they got the chance, my dad and the kids from his neighborhood would walk the mile from their homes in Sawtelle (West Los Angeles today) to UCLA’s Spaulding Field on the Westwood campus to see the Bruins practice. He remembered sitting in a corner of the field and watching the gargantuan-sized players run through drills and scrimmage, inspiring the young kids to form their own teams.
Any vacant lot would do. They’d chose teams and start playing “sandlot
football.” In no time, all the kids were playing football. The Japanese kids,
led by the Kenagai and Watanabe boys, had their team. The upper-class Anglos had
their team. The Mexican kids joined forces with the working-class Anglos and
the only two black kids in town, the Wilson and Chase boys. The competition was
fierce. My dad said, "We'd play hard, and the winning team would win a
couple of watermelons." It was during the depression, and a watermelon was
a big deal.
No touch football for them, tackle all the way. In no time, they had
their stars, dead-eye Jesse Santana at quarterback, scrappy Mario Vasquez at
halfback, and Nino Villa, who played wherever he was needed, and better than
anybody else.
My father’s memory kicked in, "Mario was good his last year at
Santa Monica J.C.,” this at a time when few Mexican kids even graduated high
school. “Mario was the first-string quarterback and did a lot of running, and a
lot of passing. He wasn't big, but in those days, nobody was really big, not
like today. We’d all go watch. They played at the old Memorial Stadium in Santa
Monica, on Olympic Boulevard next to where the high school was back then. Where
the Little League is now. They’d put up portable bleachers. It wasn’t a real
stadium, but they had lights, and that's where they used to play."
Different universities offered Mario scholarships, but he had to reject
them and find a job to help support his family. Eventually, he went to barber college and
worked in barber shops along Santa Monica boulevard until he retired, a legend
in his own time. UCLA offered Jesse Santana a football scholarship, but he
rejected it for the same reason as Mario, the need to work to support his
family.
My dad said that in those days, people didn't associate college with a
career. College was something only wealthy Caucasian kids could
afford--four years of reading books, drinking beer, and chasing girls.
My father and his Sawtelle friends began competing against the guys from
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| They left behind a grand legacy |
Each town had its sports stars.
The competition grew, and the reputation of their neighborhoods was at stake.
They played tough and fought hard to win. But more than anything, they met guys
who would become livelong friends.
He said, "At first, Santa Monica didn't have a lot of guys who
played sports. In my generation, Sawtelle had the better athletes, but later, after
they started playing, Santa Monica had good teams, like when the Guajardos and the
Garcias came along. They were younger than us, but they were good. Santa Monica
started having very good athletes, especially in baseball. Like your uncle,
Rufino. He was one of the better baseball players around. He played semi-pro
ball and could've probably gone pro, but he got married."
My uncle Rufino married my father's sister, Carmen. She didn’t like him playing
baseball. I’m sure she knew there were also pretty girls in the stands watching
the players. To make her point, before one game, she took the baseball
equipment from his bag and replaced it with a bowling ball. Rufino sensed his
bag was heavier than usual but thought nothing of it. When he got to the field,
he was confused about the bowling ball in his bag. All the guys began laughing.
They knew what was up. Without his shoes, glove, and uniform, he had to sit out
that game.
Turi Guajardo, raised next door to my mother in Santa Monica, once told
me that when he first started playing football, as a kid, the guys from
Sawtelle always beat Santa Monica. “The Sawtelle guys didn't mess around.
Shoot, they’d show up wearing football helmets, pads, and shoes with cleats.
Nobody had the money to buy those things, not in those days, so you know, they
probably 'borrowed' them from some place," he laughed, emphasizing the
word borrowed.
He said, “The guys from Santa Monica showed up in street clothes and
usually barefoot. But we learned and later we started beating them, too."
Why did the kids from West L.A. take to this typically Anglo sport more
enthusiastically than the kids from Santa Monica? I think one answer gives us a
little insight into the Mexican-American culture of the times.
The Chicanos from West L.A. lived in integrated neighborhoods, among
Caucasian and Japanese families. Their neighborhoods bordered the Veterans
Administration, Westwood, Brentwood, and Beverly Hills. They spent time among
Anglos and were widely exposed to “American” culture, language, food, music, and
sports, especially football.
The kids from Santa Monica, my mom and her family among them, lived in a
true barrio, among other Mexican families, and many were related by blood or
marriage. Most arrived from the same towns and ranchos in Los Altos de Jalisco,
between San Juan de Los Lagos and El Valle de Guadalupe. They settled the area around
Pico and Olympic boulevard and 20th Street, where many of their
fathers worked in the brickyards. Home ownership was important to them. Though
there were Anglo and African American families in their neighborhoods, these Mexican families insulated themselves more than the families in Sawtelle.
"Don't forget," my dad said, "Santa Monica goes back a
long time, way before the 1920s.”
I knew the Reyes, Machado, Marquez, and other Californio families,
settled portions of Santa Monica going back to the first expeditions in San
Gabriel, in the late 1700s. That’s a lot of history.
“West L.A.,” my dad said, “started in the 1920s, with the families, and bachelors
from Sherman (West Hollywood, today).” They were railroad workers who came from
Chihuahua, Jalisco, Michoacan, and Sonora. In Sawtelle, they lived in a
neighborhood next door to Okies, escaping the Dust Bowl. “Sawtelle wasn’t
really a barrio.”
He thought, then said, “Besides, sometimes, well, there was nothing else to do. We didn't have toys or anything, so we played sports.” He also suggested the kids from Sawtelle, enrolled in L.A. public schools, saw more of L.A. than kids enrolled in Santa Monica schools, many at St. Anne's, a private Catholic school.
"I remember we had like an exchange program with
Jordan High School in downtown L.A. They'd come over and put on a play or some
musical stuff, and we'd go over there and put something on. Back then, there
were mostly Anglos and Chicanos at Jordan, but the Anglos started moving out in
the 1930s. The blacks lived in Willow Brook. A lot of them came out here (to
Los Angeles) from Louisiana and Texas. They came into
"Was
"At first? No. White and Mexican…."
I thought how strange it is the cycle of life. Today Mexicans have moved
back into South Los Angeles, Watts, and Compton and the African American
families have moved out to Moraga Valley, Lancaster, and Riverside.
My dad reminisced about how he and his friends, as soon as one had a car,
like his cousin “Peanuts”, would drive along Jefferson Boulevard to the
Coliseum to watch UCLA football games on Friday nights. UCLA was a fairly new
school, and the rivalry between UCLA and USC was the biggest event in town.
There were no real professional sports in L.A. back then, and USC already had a
long tradition in Los Angeles. My dad said that UCLA in those early years was
always the underdog. "The first game between them was something like UCLA
0, USC 71."
A high point for Westside Chicanos was in the 1950s, when Primo
Villanueva, a Chicano from Calexico High School, became the starting tailback
for UCLA. "We never missed a game. Those were the years! Primo took the
Bruins to the Championship."
I did a little research on Villanueva, dubbed, the “Calexico Kid,” by
the media, and learned Primo played both offense and defense, gained more yards
that many running backs, intercepted more passes, and was a catalyst for their
national championship team. Why then would he not be inducted into the UCLA
Hall of Fame, not even today, when his record bested those of other players
inducted into the Hall of Fame?
Sawtelle Chicanos love of UCLA sports never waned. My dad and his
friends bought UCLA season tickets for the next fifty years. They drove to
Stanford and Berkeley to watch games. But, behind sports, came a pretty full
social life. “Oh, that was in the late 1930s early ‘40s,” my dad said, “we’d go
to dances in West L.A., Ocean Park and Santa Monica. Sometimes we’d go to
downtown
In those days, just before the war, local promoters organized the
dances. It was the time of the big bands, Glen Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Louis
Armstrong, Dizzy Gilespie, and Benny Goodman. Lesser-named bands would come to Sawtelle
and Santa Monica and perform, like at the Aragon Ballroom in Ocean Park. For fifty-cents,
my dad said that he and his friends would spend the night dancing. He
remembered how some guys and girls really took the dancing seriously,
practicing for hours, hoping to win contests, money, and attract girls.
"Some guys were really good dancers," he said.
Then there were the guys who didn't care much for dancing, but they
loved music and would spend all night in front of the bandstand watching the
musicians play their instruments. "In those days, musicians couldn't fake it, not like
today's music. Then, you had to know music, to read music," he said. Of
course, he was referring to rock ‘n roll music, which he knew I loved, and he’d
razz me that most rock musicians can’t even read music, as if that’s the
measurement of “good music.”
Love this. Men were Men!!!
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