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Park La Brea Towers

Chapter 12 (1) (2) (3)  (4) (5) (6)

1952
Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet!

Getting Lost in the Park La Brea Towers

(Previous Page)

Applied for a Job as a Milkman

Carnation Dairies was advertising for milkmen trainees, so I went and applied. Hey, didn't milkmen work in the early morning hours—and wouldn't I have the afternoons off to pursue my freelance sign painting business?

Well, the first thing I discovered was that you didn't get to be a milkman without first being a door-to-door salesman, where you would try to sign up customers for a milk route.

Door-to-door selling—just what I liked least to do. But, they assured me, it was just temporary and I'd be getting a salary while in training.

Our main selling feature was Carnation's new "multi-vitamin" milk that came in brown bottles to "filter out harmful sun's rays." We were taught how much of each vitamin a quart of milk contained, and what the average adult's minimum daily requirement was for each one. Since we were representing a major company and offering a service that would make the buyer's life a lot easier, making these sales calls would be fun and easy, we were told. Yeah, right.

Our instructor at thi cold-call selling was a shifty-eyed guy named Cliff with a gravely voice, who'd obviously been doing selling of some kind all his life. And he would say anything to make a sale.

He struck me as somebody I wouldn't trust to give me the time of day, but the Carnation milkman's cap he wore lent him a certain air of credibility. When one of the crew said he'd just had a doctor answer the door (and not sign up for milk delivery) Cliff said, "Oh, I forgot to tell you—if a doctor ever answers the door you look him right in the eye and say, 'Good morning, doctor—I'm with Carnation's health department.'" Yeah, right.

In any case, after about three weeks of sales training they sent me out on a delivery route. I would spend the next three weeks working as helper to a seasoned route driver. I was excited.

But I was also disappointed to learn that the most successful route drivers became so largely because of their ability to continually sign up new customers. Hmm, in order to make money at this job you had to be a salesman. Not too encouraging for a shy guy like myself.

The fellow I would be training under for the next three weeks was a likeable guy named Bob Prettyman. However, he was a little defensive about his name, and advised me right up front that it was pronounced, "Purtyman."

Anyway, he liked everything about being a milkman, and was genuinely convinced that one day he would become Carnation's CEO. "My first day on the job," he was fond of saying, "I took to delivering milk like a duck takes to water." Well, I soon discovered that I took to delivering milk like a brick takes to water.

Park La Brea Blues

Have you ever heard of the Park La Brea Towers? In those days buildings over three or four stories high were rare in Los Angeles (earthquake country, you know). Well, in the vicinity of La Brea and Wilshire Blvds., there was (and probably still is) a large development that interspersed 11-story apartment buildings with 2-story four-plexes. Park La Brea and its Towers quickly became the nightmare of my life.

But shouldn't this have been a dream route for a milkman? It was beautifully landscaped with lots of green areas around the structures. You didn't have to compete for space with buses, trucks or streetcars—and at 4:00 in the morning there was relatively little automobile traffic to contend with.

The tenants were relatively affluent and rarely stiffed you on a bill—and some were even known to give generous tips on occasion. Furthermore, Park La Brea was only a ten-minute drive from the Carnation depot. How could this be anything but the ideal milk route? Easy.

For starters I felt lousy even before I got there. I had to be at work at 3:00 AM to get my truck loaded. I was never a morning person to begin with, and having to go to bed in the middle of the afternoon didn't suit me at all. I was lucky to have gotten four or five hours sleep by the time I arrived at the terminal.

Then there was my truck. Refrigerated milk trucks had only recently been invented, and Carnation had just a few. Only the drivers with the most seniority got one. The rest of us had old open-air Dodges and Divcos, whose dairy products were kept cool by covering them with gunny sacks filled with ice cubes.

The first thing I had to do every morning was to put these icebags in place. Well, being a Southern California boy, I was not good at working with cold fingers. And at 3:00 AM (especially in winter) handling these icebags would numb my fingers for the rest of the day. This made it hard to drive, to write notes, and to function in general.

As for those towers, there were about two dozen of them and they all looked alike. The only thing that identified one from another was the address over the entrance. And the four-plexes spread around between them only had three or four different floor plans—so they all looked pretty much alike, too.

Now this sameness may not sound like such a big deal—but early in the morning, when it was still dark, and I was cold and sleepy, it was easy to confuse one building with another. The streets curved around with no right angles to their intersections—and, with no sun, you really couldn't tell east from west. I'd basically be lost as soon as I drove into the complex.

There would be several deliveries in each tower, so the idea was to try to carry all the milk, cream, butter, eggs and cottage cheese that the customers normally ordered in one trip. And getting to the eleventh floor of Building No. 1214, only to discover you were carrying the goods for Building No. 1204, did not get your delivery day off to a very good start.

But even when you took the right goods into the right tower, you'd frequently find a note from Mrs. Shapiro on the tenth floor, whose standing order was two quarts of milk and a pint of cottage cheese, saying today she wanted three quarts plus a dozen eggs.

Well, you weren't going all the way back to the truck for the eggs and extra milk until you'd checked out all the other stops to see if anyone else had changed his or her usual order. This meant writing hasty notes with cold, stiff fingers, or hoping you could remember all the changes when you got back to the truck.

Neither system was very reliable, and it was not uncommon to get back to the terminal and be told that Mrs. Shapiro had called to complain that you left skim milk instead of regular.

Also, people would move or go on vacation without telling you, causing you to leave a delivery at the door of an empty apartment. And deliveries that didn't get paid for came right out of your paycheck.

My friend Carl would say he could hardly wait for me to give up this job, because he had to listen to all my complaints after each day's work. He finally got to where he'd say, "I don't want to hear anything about wrong addresses, or unreasonable customers, or ice that melted too soon—and I especially don't want to hear the words 'Park La Brea Towers.'"

To this day Carl cringes if I say, "Remember when I used to be a milkman?"

Early Morning Eye-Opener

I survived this job for about four months. I couldn't wait to start going to bed at midnight again. But the four months weren't totally unfulfilling. There was this stop at a four-plex, where a startling surprise awaited me one morning.

As I was placing the milk on the doorstep, a light came on in a large window of another apartment. A shade was raised and revealed the shapely body of a totally nude young woman. I couldn't see her face, because the shade stopped just at the neck. (I probably wouldn't have been looking at her face anyway.) After a few moments, the woman turned and walked into another room.

Well, I didn't know what to do. Would she come back? And if she did, would she turn the off light or pull down the shade? I waited—but nothing happened. Well, I couldn't spend the rest of the day standing there; so I finally went back to work.

In any event, this had certainly brightened my morning, and made suffering through Park La Brea a little more bearable that day. Not surprisingly, I could hardly wait for my next delivery at this address. But the window remained dark and Miss Godiva never appeared again.

Being a Milkman Is Not Entirely Without Its Rewards

However, there was another apartment where a young woman in a see-through top invited me to come in. She said she hadn't decided on her order, and if I'd come in and wait she'd get it sorted out. Over her shoulder I could see three other delectable young things clad in a variety of bras, panties, and slips. One was in the process of hooking up a strapless bra when she dropped one end. She discreetly turned her back to me as she finished fastening it.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?" I asked the woman in the doorway, trying not to notice the curvaceous breasts whose nipples were pushing through the clinging top.

"Come on in, and I'll see what we need," she repeated.

"Uh, well, we're really not supposed to go into people's houses," I said with a catch in my throat.

"Oh, come on," she said as she grabbed my arm. "It's cold outside. She disappeared into the kitchen, and the others all smiled at me as they continued getting dressed. One asked me to zip up the back of her dress.

(Continued in Next Column)

"Darn," I was thinking. "Wouldn't it be nice to be invited in when they were all getting undressed?

Oh, well. Just be grateful for small favors," I told myself. A few moments later the brassiereless one returned and told me what she wanted. I wished I'd had the nerve to tell her what I wanted. Anyway, I thanked her for her order, and spent another delivery day that was a little more bearable than the others.

Our Own Apartment At Last—Well...

Carl and I had been best friends since junior high school, and had been through a lot together. But the closest we'd ever come to "having our own place" was living in two different rooms in Mrs. Glasser's boarding house.

When my gay roommate Bruce suddenly moved away, Carl and I discussed having Carl move into his spot—but abandoned this idea almost immediately because the room was way too small to accomodate all Carl's stereo equipment and other electronic gear he'd been accumulating since starting school at the California Television Institute. So we got out the classifieds and started apartment hunting.

We found a very nice place on Franklin Ave. not far from Hollywood and Vine. It was on the second floor and had a large bedroom with twin beds. The kitchen and living room were fairly good sized as well, and we were excited about finally having our own place. The rent was a little more than we could afford, but when we happened to catch sight of the tenants in the adjoining apartment (two very pretty girls just about our age) we decided that we'd manage it somehow.

There was only one problem with our new apartment.

My mother.

As soon as she heard Carl and I had gotten our own apartment, she got on the phone and asked if she could come and stay for a "couple of days." She had to move out of her place (so she claimed) and hadn't found another one yet. It would just be "temporary."

"No way," I said. "You've got friends. Find somewhere else."

If this sounds cruel, it's only because you never knew my mother. She'd been after me to move in with her ever since I got out of the army, and, for a multitude of reasons I won't go into here, I had decided there was no way this would ever happen again. If there weren't already enough other reasons for my refusing to let her move in with us, there would still be this one: she hated Carl.

But the phone never stopped ringing. We finally had to take it off the hook.

The second day we were there I got home from my milk route at about 2:00 PM and found the door to the apartment ajar. This was strange, because Carl didn't usually get home from school till after 3:00. I cautiously pushed the door open an looked in. There was my mother, sitting on the sofa reading a book (whose title, incidentally, was "The Natural Superiority of Women"). She looked up and smiled.

"Now don't get excited," she said. "It'll just be for a few days. But I really did have to find a place to stay."

"How did you get in?" was the only thing I wanted to know.

"Well," she said, "I just came and rang the bell. Carl didn't know what to say, so I just walked in. I've already unpacked my things—and I told Carl he could sleep on the sofa." Then she patted the sofa, as she looked at it approvingly. "He ought to be quite comfortable here."

"Hey, this isn't going to work. You have to get out of here—right now."

"What—you're going to put your mother out on the street? You wouldn't do that. Now just relax. Everything's going to be fine."

I didn't know what to do. What would you do? I couldn't pick her up and throw her out—yet I couldn't let her stay. I turned around and left the apartment.

I decided to wait in my car till Carl showed up. Maybe between the two of us we could think of something. I finally saw him walking from the bus stop toward the building. He was walking slowly and looking very apprehensive. I hurried to meet him. "Hey Carl," I called.

"Oh there you are," he said. "I guess you know..."

"Yeah, I know. What I don't know is what to do."

"Can't we call the police and have her evicted or something?" he asked hopefully.

"I have no idea, but I think the first thing we'd better do is go in and see if we can talk her into leaving," I said—although I really had no illusion that this would do any good. It didn't.

We were both at a loss for what to say or do as we opened the door and walked in. And we were both surprised by the smell of meat cooking that came from the kitchen.

My mother came out of the kitchen and said, "I've put a roast on. I'm cutting up some vegetables to go with it." Then she disappeared back into the kitchen. Carl and I just looked at each other. Where had the food come from? Neither of us yet had bought anything except a few snack items. She had come prepared.

Suddenly she was back in the living room, setting the table. "I hope you like roast beef, Carl—I know Don does," she said with a warm smile. "It'll all be ready in less than half an hour. I hope that's not too soon for you. I know Don has to go to bed early because of his milk route." I noticed that she made it a point not to call me Donald or Donny—she knew how I felt about those names—and she was obviously trying to perpetuate the myth that we were just one big happy family.

But it was like Alice in Wonderland—totally unreal. Carl and I couldn't do anything but look at each other in disbelief and despair. What could we do?

Well, we cleaned up and sat down to dinner, but it was all very weird. My mom did all the talking, because she was the only one who could think of anything to say.

"I met your nextdoor neighbors this morning," she said with a twinkle in her eye. "I can see why you chose this apartment, you rascals. I introduced myself and said that I was sure we would all become good friends. The blonde is Claire and the brunette is Ginny."

"I told them, 'My son Don and his friend Carl are dying to meet you.' See—I've already broken the ice. Wasn't that nice of me?"

Carl and I just groaned.

Then after dinner the proverbial fecal material hit the proverbial rotating blades.

"So Carl," my mother began with a smile that was quickly beginning to lose its warmth, "what do you expect to get out of this 'television course' you're taking. You're going to be an actor or something?"

I could see what was coming and wasn't about to let Carl get dragged into it.

"He's studying to become a technician," I said.

"A technician? I see. But don't you have to be pretty smart for that? I mean—I heard you never got particularly good grades in school, Carl."

Carl was now itching to say something, but I kicked him under the table and he gave me the right of way.

"Look," I said, "whatever Carl is doing is none of your business, and you know it."

"Well, it's my business if he's holding you back."

This statement was so far out in left field there was no way to respond to it. Carl and I were both speechless. But not my mother.

"You know," she said, her voice now becoming strident as she looked at me and pointed at Carl, "it's his fault that you and I have problems getting along. If it wasn't for him, you and I would do just fine!"

"You're starting to talk like a crazy person," I said, trying to maintain my composure. Then I turned to Carl and said, "Maybe you'd better leave till I get this settled."

"Yes!" agreed my mother, emphatically. "Why don't you just leave—and not come back!"

She leaned across the table and stared menacingly at Carl.

"Why are you just sitting there?" she demanded, as she started to move slowly around the table in his direction. "Didn't you hear both of us say it was time for you to leave?"

Carl looked helplessly at me, as he started to back away from my mother, who by now had fire in her eyes. Before I could say anything she was literally chasing him around the table. "Get out of here!" she screamed.

Carl was now running frantically around the furniture, with my mom in hot pursuit. It was like something out of a Tom and Jerry Cartoon. Only it wasn't funny.

Finally Carl made it to the front door and let himself out just as my mother appeared to be about to grab him by the throat. She slammed the door triumphantly and spun around to look at me.

"Good!" she said with a sinister smile. "Now let's throw his clothes out with him!"

"The only thing going out there with him," I said, "is me. And we'll be back with the men in the white coats."

Her look suddenly went from rage—to shock—to fear, as I went through the door and slammed it behind me.

(Next Page)

Prologue   Ch.1 Alameda - Los Angeles 1939-40   Ch.2 Echo Park 1943   Ch.3 Virgil Jr Hi 1944   Ch.4 Le Conte Jr Hi 1945-46
Ch.5 Gower Gulch 1946   Ch.6 Hollywood Hi 1946-47   Ch.7 Drop Out 1948   Ch 8 Norma Jean Salina 1948   Ch 9 Fort Ord 1949
Ch.10 Fort Belvoir 1950   Ch.11 Korea 1951   Ch.12 Back to Civilian Life 1952   Ch.13 Cornet Stores 1953   Ch.14 Puerto Rico 1955
Ch 15 Signs by George 1956   Ch 16 Mexico 1958   Ch.17 Fullerton 1960   Ch.18 Fallbrook 1973   Ch.19 Costa Mesa 2000