Customer Reviews

2500 Strand

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There is something about Scott Littleton's new book that fairly quickly got under my skin. I turned first to its 12 pages of b/w snapshots--pictures of houses, family members (and dogs), a town fountain with its bare-breasted females, church, school, and The Green Store where you got snacks after school. Plain stuff indeed, but very much the kind of things and places that anchored my childhood (albeit fifteen years later) in another part of southern California.

It's hard to imagine how "wild" southern California really was in the 40s and 50s when kids played in fields, built forts in the woods and weeds, and hung out on the "fringes of civilization." Reading the book, I longed for that freedom, for streets without curbs, burros, and "teenagers" whose worst crime was making love in the backseats of convertibles.

Scott writes with a somewhat flat, methodical attention to detail, yet this "detached" stance seems to release the smells and sounds of the landscapes and buildings he knew. His understatement engages the reader's emotion, and the narrative never slips into sentimentalism. We come to know the specific ways in which a little boy, an only child, often makes sense listening to his grandmother's stories as they shell peas in the kitchen... there really being nothing better to do. It is that child-like voice that not only captured my attention but many times made me cry.

It is so rare that a man goes back and reflects upon these things without making them LARGE. Too many memoirs strike me as decoupage. Not this one. Scott shows us a boy working day by day to grow himself into the person he imagines himself to be. It is impossible not to ache with recognition at the determination and wit of a little beach rat who will not let circumstances trap him.

How does one grow up to become an anthropologist or any other profession? Scott's narrative reveals how specific, cumulative childhood experiences shaped his brain, heart, and soul. I never before grasped how a "calling" originates. Any parent should read this book.

This book is an excellent snapshot in time. My mother, who lived in Pasadena and frequented Hermosa Beach just a few years before the time period covered in this memoir, assures me that she remembers many of the places just as Littleton describes them. I grew up in the Pasadena area, and I spent the early years of my married life not too far from Hermosa Beach, so I am also familiar with many of the locations discussed, albeit from a later point in time.

Littleton has an engaging writing style that is well suited to this sort of tale. His anthropologist's eye lends a unique perspective to places and events that have been covered somewhat less engagingly by many a journalist and historian. While I will always be a bit skeptical when it comes to his UFO stories, that does not detract from the fact that he is an excellent storyteller who expertly captures the mood and feeling of this important point in our history from a child's eye view. The fact that Littleton's father was a screenwriter in Hollywood during this critical period lends another intriguing dimension to this account.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who was there, for the children of anyone who lived in the Los Angeles area at the time, and for anyone who is curious about what it was like for a child to grow up in the beach communities of California when the people who lived on the western coast of the United States really thought that hostile Japanese troops could be landing there any day.

This book appears to have rather narrow and specific target audiences. The narrow audience would seem to be those who were raised on the Southern California coast during World War II. The more specific audience would be those who either know the author personally or knew members of his family. Having been born in Redondo Beach and raised in and on Hermosa Beach from the late 1930s until joining the navy in 1951, I fall in the former category. I bought this book, then, to see what another boy on a parallel path thought about his childhood in that time and place. I hoped it might stir some memories.

In that respect, the book was a bit disappointing, but I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps it's because we lived farther South, nearer the center of town, and I seldom ventured North of the Biltmore Hotel unless the surf carried me in that direction. So, though in many ways our experiences were similar, they were also quite different. For example: No one I knew seemed to realize that there was a social strata system in Hermosa and neither my parents nor anyone I knew ever looked up or down on anyone else, and I'm glad they didn't. My sister must have ventured farther North than I did, though, since she married one of the older brothers of the two Edgar boys mentioned in the book.

The book did bring to mind a few things from my childhood, however, but not necessarily in the same way the author described them. I too stood on the porch and watched the searchlights scan the sky during the so called "Battle of Los Angeles" but, being only nine years old, I don't recall it the specific detail which he does. And, although I don't remember seeing or hearing the lumber barge being torpedoed, I clearly remember standing on the beach just South of the Hermosa pier and looking at part of the hull which had washed ashore there. And I certainly remember what the author terms "the Valley," although no one I knew ever called it that. But, once again, I seem to remember it differently. As I recall it: if you entered the area from Pier Avenue, which we always did, you would walk into a wooded area on the left and farther on into an abandoned orchard with a number of fig trees still growing there. I think that's about the only time in my life I ever ate a fig. I also remember participating in war games there, as the author did, at least once with bee-bee guns, but I have no recollection of dirt clods. In such fights, however, clumps of ice plant certainly made great substitutes for bullets and hand grenades. It was also in the "valley" that I shot my first and only sparrow. It was a one in a million shot which caused me to run home crying and ashamed.

Another thing about which this book reminded me was the churches on Manhattan Avenue. I was in one of them while still a heathen, i.e. before leaving Pier Avenue School for St. James Elementary in Redondo Beach, but after the nuns worked me over I was firmly convinced that if I ever set foot in one again the roof would fall in on me.

Anyway, looking back through my mind's eye, I can still picture Hermosa Beach as it once was: a quaint little town where a boy could cut across a vacant lot whether headed to a friend's house, to school or to the beach. I can still walk past the Union filling station, glance across Hermosa Avenue at my dad's shop, then head on down the street past Mode `O Day, the Hermosa Fox Theater, with Kappy's Delicatessen next door, on past the Men's Shop and over to the imposing Bank of America Building with its sign in the window reading "All Accounts Insured up to $1,000." Boy, that seemed like a lot of money. It was a great time and place to be a boy. But, sadly, times have changed and, despite the Japanese threat, boys and girls living in Hermosa Beach today aren't near as safe as we once were, and many may have heard of vacant lots but few have probably ever seen one.

What did I like best about the book? It brought back some memories. What did I like the least? It seemed to be written much like an intellectuals' view of what it was like to be a boy growing up on the beach, whereas I was hoping for Tortilla Flat or Tom Sawyer. I also thought there was a bit too much gratuitous and irrelevant political commentary.

Bottom line: I never quite got to see, hear, smell, touch and taste Hermosa Beach as I once knew it. But, although the book wasn't exactly what I had hoped it would be, one thing is certain: Scott Littleton clearly cherishes his memories of growing up in Hermosa Beach and must surely have delighted in reliving those times while writing his memoirs. He and I never crossed paths, but still we have much in common. And, interestingly enough, though I never met the author, who obviously has a photographic memory and was much more precocious than I, I now know more about him and his immediate and extended families than I know about anyone else I did know in those wondrous days, to some extent including my own family.

"2500 Strand" is a 220-pages memoir of C. Scott Littleton, who grew up in Hermosa Beach, California, in a house that stood at the corner of 25th street and the Strand. This intriguing book mostly revealed the events that occurred during the period of 1941-1946 to which the author has lived at 2500 Strand.

The author starts off with his family background from the beginning of 20th century to 1939, then briefly about his previous beach house before moving into 2500 Strand. Then, his story at 2500 Strand begins, including his experience during the "Battle of Los Angles" and the reactions to the events of Second World War. Finally, a brief account after his and his family's departure from 2500 Strand is included.

I personally found this book to be quite enchanting and awe-inspiring. It is also interesting to see the difference between his experiences during the era of World War II and the present accounts to which the recent events has occurred, such as 9/11 and Iraq War. I have never experienced what Littleton has experienced because we are generations apart, and this memoir of his gave me an eye-opening perspective of people's reactions to the war over sixty years ago. I also found it very interesting about the unexplained "Battle of Los Angeles" that occurred in February 25, 1942 to which I had never heard of before now.

With fourteen chapters, including an epilogue, and roughly 220 pages long, Littleton's book is well written and very touching. And, I really enjoyed reading such a memoir.