March 3-4, 1968: The trip home

As Mom stated in the last letter she wrote to my grandmother during our stay in Los Angeles, she and I flew from L. A. to Dallas the evening of Sunday, March 3. Here is what I have been able to piece together regarding our final days in L. A. and our trip home based on a few of my memories, some pictures, and hearing Mom talk about it years later.

The picture of me standing in front of The Brown Derby restaurant (well, standing in the landscaping), which was previously posted with the July 25, 1967 diary entry, was taken the last day we were in L. A. There are several other photos in that same part of the photo album that were likely taken our last weekend in L. A., although their captions don't state that explicitly. Here are a few:

This is the Ambassador Hotel, which was located at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard, less than one mile from our apartment. This hotel opened in 1921 and hosted the Academy Awards six times through 1943. It was the location of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, which was frequented by many celebrities from the 1920s into the 1970s. (If you zoom in on this picture you can barely see the large signs for the hotel and the nightclub.) The Ambassador Hotel is also where presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June of 1968. It closed to guests in 1989 and was then purchased by a real estate developer who proposed a 125-story building for the site. The developer lost a long legal battle with the Los Angeles unified school district after the school board tried to take the property via eminent domain, and a school was built on the site after the hotel was demolished in 2005.

[Fun Fact: That real estate developer went on to become President of the United States.] There were a couple of pictures in this part of the photo album of the building where Dad worked on Wilshire Boulevard, a few blocks west of the Ambassador Hotel. Nothing special about those pictures so I won't post any here.

Here is a picture of a bar called Thirsty 30s, which was somewhere on Temple Street based on the street sign I zoomed in on.

Mom's caption is: "This was just an old bar that we passed many times. Loved that sign." I was unable to find anything online about the bar or the Fred M. Atkins Tire Company next door, which had been doing dependable retreading for over 40 years at the time this picture was taken. (Atkins Tires and Wheels was established in 1997.) The last L. A. photo in the album was the Bull 'n Bush restaurant, which Mom mentioned in the next to last letter.

Mom's caption on this one is: "An eating place where we ate with Hansens. Loved the prime rib there." According to the description of a Flickr photo of the Bull 'n Bush taken in the early 1980s, it was open from 1956 through 1985, and Jack Webb (Sgt. Joe Friday from Dragnet) used to hang out there. It appears to have been on the southwest corner of 6th Street and Kenmore Avenue, based on the tall white building behind it in the photo from the photo album.

As you know, since Mom was so far along in her pregnancy there was a slight possibility she could go into labor during our flight home. I must have been at Mom's last doctor appointment in L. A. because according to Mom, the doctor told me that if she started to have the baby my job was to collect shoelaces from the other passengers. I honestly don't know if that was just to keep me occupied so I wouldn't be in the way, or if the shoelaces might have served a purpose such as tying off the umbilical cord. (I don't know nothin' about birthin' babies!) In any case, I allegedly took the instructions from the doctor very seriously and I was prepared to do my duty.

Although the flight to Texas was my first flight, I really don't remember anything from the flight itself. No, Mom didn't go into labor. She always liked to tell the story that I was so excited about flying I went to the bathroom three times before the flight took off. I do have one flashback memory of being picked up at the airport in Dallas, though. (At least I think this is from when we were picked up.) Uncle Wayne and Aunt Linda picked us up, and Mom and I sat in the back seat of their car. I remember Aunt Linda holding my cousin Steven, who was almost four months old, over her left shoulder in the front passenger seat, and him looking at us in the back seat. I guess since I had been hearing about Steven for a few months, and he was the first newborn in the family I was aware of, I thought it was really neat to finally see him. We'll pause here and cover the days after our arrival in tomorrow's post.