September 15, 1967: Watts happening

Diary entry for September 15, 1967:

Wrote letter in AM and straightened house. David Wayne and I drove to La Brea Tar Pits. Went to Observation building and bought pictures and saw bones of sloth. The Art Museum was not interesting. Then we drove to another museum - Natural History. We enjoyed it. Drove through Watts on way to museum. I didn't like that. Came home by way of freeway. Very tired that night.

This was a legendary day Mom loved to talk about. I am so glad she mentioned it in a diary entry. First, let's look at a map to get our bearings.

Our apartment is at the top of the map, and the La Brea Tar Pits are less than four miles due west of there. The Art Museum is next door to the tar pits. The Natural History Museum is about a seven mile drive south and east of the La Brea Tar Pits, on the south side of I-10. Watts is a neighborhood about ten miles south of the Natural History Museum, near the intersection of I-110 and I-105. As you can see, Watts is definitely not on the way to the museum, which means Mom took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up driving through Watts, but found her way to the museum.

So what's the big deal with Watts and why didn't Mom like driving through it? For you youngsters out there, Watts was the scene of about a week of riots and civil unrest (looting and arson) in August of 1965, triggered by allegations of police brutality. Almost 1000 buildings were damaged, burned, looted, or destroyed. The National Guard was called in for support, and 34 people were killed during the riots. It was the worst unrest in Los Angeles history until the Rodney King riots of 1992. (For you youngsters out there, the Rodney King riots happened when . . . )

For disturbing reasons I won't get into here (they're easily googled), Watts was one of the racially segregated areas of Los Angeles with a very poor population at the time. I don't know if "ghetto" would be an accurate word to describe Watts in the late 1960s, but I'm sure many non-residents described it that way. Not just a ghetto, a dangerous ghetto given the 1965 riots. Gang violence significantly increased there in the 1970s, so chances are it wasn't a great place in 1967.

So my mother, sitting behind the wheel of our big white Pontiac Bonneville in her bouffant hairdo, drove little five-year-old me through possibly the most dangerous neighborhood in Los Angeles fifty years ago today. (Yes, this should remind you of the scene from National Lampoon's Vacation where Clark Griswold takes the family through a bad area of St. Louis in the Wagon Queen Family Truckster.)

Mom said when Dad got home and she told him about our day and how she inadvertently drove through Watts, he just about exploded and read her the riot act. (See what I did there?)

I doubt we'll be visiting Watts again during our stay in Los Angeles. And I didn't even get a bank. :-(