Dad's Final Summer- A Ten-Year-Old's Memories

I will never forget the day Darwin S Warriner, our Dad, passed away.  Summer was winding down and school was getting ready to start back up in a week. I was going into 6th grade and was 10 years old.  Dad was 58 years old.  He worked the swing shift at Teledyne Ryan.  He went to work in the afternoon while we were at school and came home after we had gone to bed, around 11 PM or closer to midnight.

When he worked this swing shift, he would come home in time for Johnny Carson.  Mom would already be in bed, but she sometimes made him a batch of popcorn (popped on the stove because there were no microwave ovens yet) And she had some soft butter on the stove in a little yellow ceramic melting pot for him to heat up and drizzle over the popcorn.  Sometimes instead of popcorn he would open a can of pitted black olives and munch on them while having a late night goblet of Old Crow.  I know this because sometimes I would sneak out of my room and quietly visit with him. If he was in a good mood he would let me stay up and share his snacks.  If he was feeling grumpy, he shooed me back to bed.

 It seemed like Dad's work schedule changed every few months.  Sometimes he had a regular day shift, then it would change to nights, and we kids had to make sure we were really quiet during the morning because he would be asleep.

He had been really busy that summer with home projects in addition to working.  He had spent the month of July redoing Jeff's bedroom, which had originally been known as the sun room. This was the room that everyone walked through to access the swimming pool, and it was always getting wet from us kids dripping pool water all over the place.  The walls had been covered with Chiquita Banana, German cross, and Nazi stickers, compliments of big brother Darwin Don, who was the previous occupant of that room in the sixties before he ran away from home, got into all sorts of trouble and never lived in that room again.

The day after his final birthday

Dad put up light tan colored wood paneling on the walls, pulled up the carpet and  laid down small white ceramic tiles with blue grout on the floor.  Every day he would try to get a little bit more done on the room before getting ready for work.

New piano, new tile on the floor, new wall paneling

When the den was finished in August, he bought me a new piano to replace the ancient stiff-keyed player piano that was getting harder for me to play. The piano was delivered on August 30,  and they put the new piano back in the newly remodeled den.

 There was also the excitement of a new granddaughter, Lynda's daughter Sara, who had just been born in early July.

Normally, Dad smelled like pipe tobacco.  But that summer he smelled like Heet. Heet was a topical painkiller that came in a bottle.  It was like a giant nail polish bottle, but instead of a brush being attached to the lid, there was a sponge.  His left arm had been killing him for several weeks, and instead of going to the doctor to see what was wrong, he painted that stuff onto his upper arm and shoulder every day.

 He was also having stomach problems.  I remember he and Mom often sending me to the bathroom to get them the "chalk." It was a thick white chalky medicine and came in a dark blue glass bottle. Its real name was Milk of Magnesia. Dad said he had an ulcer, and was treating it with "chalk," at night,  and by drinking glasses of Half and Half in the morning with his Folgers coffee.

September came, and the mailman delivered a package from Aunt Amy.  She had made pajamas for all of us kids in addition to some new play clothes.

Here I am, posing with my new piano and my new nightie that Aunt Amy made for me. Mom took this picture to send to Aunt Amy with my thank you note.  That thank you note was never written. The date on the wall calendar was September 7.  Little did I know that Dad had only one more day to live.

Wednesday, September 8th was just another day.  Dad worked in the afternoon.  I don't remember saying goodbye to him when he went to work.  Like I said, it was just another day.  We kids didn't interact too much with Dad, because he was either asleep, tackling a home project, or working at Ryan.

Thursday was trash day on Eagle Street. This was before plastic bins on wheels, automated trash trucks, or even Hefty plastic trash bags existed.  Everyone put their kitchen trash in paper grocery bags and put them out in the big metal trash cans that sat near the garage. My bedroom window overlooked the driveway where our trash cans lived.

On September 8, after our usual TV dinners and my hour of piano practice,  Mom sent Jeff, Tabatha, and me to bed.  I spent the next couple of hours on the top bunk, under the covers with a flashlight reading, because that's what I always did when I was sent to bed way too early.  I had been asleep maybe an hour when I heard a familiar sound that woke me up.  Dad, just home from work, was in the process of getting the cans out to the curb.  Since the cans were metal, they made noise.  It was the sound of metal scaping on cement that woke me, and it seemed noisier than usual.  But, knowing it was just Dad taking out the trash, I turned over and fell back to sleep.

Suddenly I was shaken awake by Mom.  She was nervous and upset.  She told me I needed to go find someone who would stay with us kids, because Daddy was sick and had to go to the hospital.  I jumped off the top bunk and ran down the hall.  When I got to the living room, the lights were on.  Dad was lying in his La-Z-Boy,  unconscious. He had a sheet covering him with only his face showing. His face was white, and he was completely still.  I looked at him briefly while Mom urged me to go outside and find a neighbor who would come over.

 I ran out into the dark stillness of night, wearing my brand new nightie from Aunt Amy.  I couldn't go to our next door neighbors, because there had been a long-standing feud between our family and theirs.  I crossed the street to Bob and Margaret Raymond's house, and pounded on their door.  No one answered, because they were elderly and hard of hearing.  I ran to the next house and knocked urgently, but no one answered.  My bare feet and nightie were getting wet from running across damp lawns.  I glanced across the street at our house.   Mom was looking out from the porch, awaiting the ambulance.

 The next house I tried  had brand new neighbors who had arrived in August.  The lady was an oil painter and had thrown out some of her paintings the week before.  I was pulling them out of the trash when she came out and introduced herself as Katherine DeSanti.  She was a nice lady who thought it was funny that I liked her painting failures.  When I knocked on Katherine's door, she answered.  I told her we needed help and she rushed right over, just in time to see the ambulance pull up.  Mom tried to shield me from what was happening.  I could see the men working over Dad briefly, then they put him on a gurney, hurried him out of the house, bounced the gurney down the steps. They slid him up into the ambulance and slammed the door. I don't remember red lights or a siren. I just remember that suddenly Mom and Dad were gone.  Katherine took me inside and just sat with me.  I remember telling her that he would be fine, because one of my favorite TV shows was Marcus Welby MD, and no one ever died on that show.  I was going on and on telling her that he would be in the hospital a few days and then he would come home. It didn't even cross my mind that we wouldn't have a happy ending.

Dawn broke. The dark sky slowly began to change to light, the birds started to sing, and the little kids woke up.   They had no idea what had happened just a couple hours earlier. Mrs. DeSanti was still with us, just quietly watching and waiting.  I think she knew what we would soon be told.

Then Mom was home, crying hysterically.  She thanked Mrs DeSanti, who left for home.  Then she told me that Dad was dead.  I really couldn't believe it.  I felt betrayed by my favorite TV show.  As Mom cried, Jeff and Tabatha started crying too, although they really didn't know why they were crying. I left the house with our two dogs, Tiny and Collette, and walked them down to the end of the street, where a rickety white fence separated the dirt road from the canyon.  I stared out at the dead wildflowers that grew along the canyon's edge and wondered what this meant. Everyone had a dad. This was new territory.  How would we go on without our Dad?

Dad was Dead on Arrival at Mercy Hospital.  I believe he was already gone when I stopped to look at him on my way outside to get help.  Since he was DOA, he had to go to the medical examiner for an investigation.  The findings are not surprising.  If Dad had gone to the doctor earlier in the summer for his arm pain and his constant indigestion, could he have been saved?  In 1971, perhaps not.  All I know is that from September 9, 1971 onward, without Dad, our lives were never the same.

House Hunting-A Seven-year-old's Memories

Lynda vividly recalls the first time she saw what would become her home at 4071 Eagle St.

"After living in Linda Vista for a short while, I was able to go with Mom and Dad to look for a new house for our family.  I felt very special to be included.  I remember the first time we went to 4071 Eagle St.  It was so beautiful!  It had modern Venetian blinds on the windows.

Living Room

 Glass doors separated the living room from the dining room, which had china and crystal glasses in the built-in cabinets.  Everything was so clean and in a proper place.

Dining Room "I use it for my office"

The kitchen was so big!  There was a dining area with seating like you would see at a 50's style diner.  (After they moved in, this eating area was removed and a washer and dryer were installed there.)  It had a very long counter that ran the length of the room; underneath the counter there were bins for flour and sugar.  There were cabinets and cupboards everywhere.

There was a little laundry room that had two big deep laundry tubs (which were used later on to wash toddlers, and as a darkroom for Dad)  There was room for the wringer washer that we had for awhile.

Walking down the hallway, I remember seeing pictures on the wall of young children with bows and arrows.

There were three bedrooms and one bathroom, and that bathroom seemed so big to me as a young child.

The third bedroom had windows on two walls and the home owners had rattan furniture in it.  They called it the sun room, and it looked like it should be in the movies.  That bedroom had a door that took you to the patio, which was very large and overlooked the canyon.

Sun Room

The basement was small and creepy and is the source of many stories all on its own.

Mom and Dad also loved the house on Eagle Street, and they bought it.  Now for the real story about Warriner's crack:

It was moving day!  We were leaving our rented house in Linda Vista.  Mom and Dad rented a U-Haul type of open trailer.  Susan and I got to come along to take the first load to the new house.  We were going up Juan Street hill and the trailer came off the hitch and rolled into a house.  The people in the house were quite upset and we were all scared, because this was the second time we had a calamity with a trailer!  Since we were little kids, we don't really know anything about the settlement process, but one thing is for sure--the wall was never repaired."


So, there really is a Warriner's Crack.  But it was not caused by the house trailer.  It was caused by the U-Haul!  This makes much more sense, because it seemed like really bad judgment for them to attempt to climb that steep hill with a huge house trailer, and that tight curve at the top of the hill would have probably been impossible to navigate. This is a much more believable explanation!
Thanks for an eye-witness report on this Family Legend, Lynda!

And don't these old photos completely illustrate Lynda's childhood memory of their new house?  Amazing recall!

Homeless in San Diego

Having just been through the disaster of the trailer accident, the theft of almost all of their possessions, and the runaround from the Allstate Insurance Company, the family still moved onward to California. But now they were headed  to a strange city with no trailer to live in, and having spent all their savings already, there was great uncertainty of what lay ahead.

Lynda provides our view into the past to those days when the traumatized and exhausted Warriners finally arrived in San Diego as a homeless family:

" When we got to San Diego, we had no place to stay.  Our parents went to the Salvation Army and they provided us with shelter for several days.  The males of the family (Dad, Tim and Skip) had to stay in one area,  and the females (Mom, Patty, Sue, Lynda, and baby Darwin, who was only a few months old and still nursing) stayed in another area.

I later learned that it was The Salvation Army that found us housing in Linda Vista.  We all went in the car with Dad while he applied at Ryan.  He came out very happy, and we knew that if Dad was happy, that meant everything was going to be okay.  I don't believe the story that he cried in the hiring office.  He was a talented, gifted engineer who had previously worked as an engineer at Square D in Detroit and who had designed the box in most elevators.  He had a plan for himself, and he talked about it. That plan was to come to California to work at Ryan in their space program.  He achieved his goal. And I don't think he achieved it by crying; he achieved it with his confidence and his resume.

The Salvation Army helped us find housing in Linda Vista.  While we lived there, Mom and Dad started to look for a home of their own, and sometimes I would get to go with them while they were house hunting."

Thanks to Lynda for filling in this important gap in the story of the move to California!

The Warriner family's brief stay in Linda Vista lasted from December 1952 until sometime in 1954. It was during this time that they acquired their little Sheltie puppy Dachoo.  Their home address, according to the dog tag, was 7254 Wellington. I remember seeing a home video of the children playing on a large grassy area, and Carol told me that was shot at their first home in San Diego.

 Linda Vista did not even exist 10 years before. It was conceived during World War II, for the purpose of providing much needed housing for defense workers.  During the 40s, housing was in such short supply that Mission Valley was packed with trailers, and many other workers were sleeping in their cars and in abandoned streetcars. The wartime project in Linda Vista was the largest housing development in the world at the time, similar to Levittown.  Thousands of houses were hastily built in the area now known as Linda Vista in just a matter of months, and about 13,000 people quickly moved in.  Once the war was over,  these homes became available for others to live in, and thanks to the Salvation Army, the Warriner family did not stay homeless for very long.

The Harrowing Trip to California

The move from Detroit to San Diego was an exciting and crazy trip.  Carol never spoke of the trip itself.  Carol had a VHS tape of an old movie called, "The Long Long Trailer" which stared Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.  Whenever Carol watched it, she would say that the movie reminded her of their trip to California, but she never got into any of the details.

Back in the early 50s, the idea of living in a trailer was forward-thinking, similar to today's trend of rejecting the McMansion house and adopting a more independent life in a "Tiny House." An article in the Detroit Free Press, dated January 20, 1952, by Clarke Beach, describes the type of people who were adopting the Trailer lifestyle:

From Detroit Free Press, January 20, 1952

There is one person left on the planet who was there and who was old enough at the time to remember this big move--Lynda.  She was five years old at the time and remembers it quite clearly. Here is her story:

"When we headed for California, I recall many stops at RV camps and the "Trailer life."  I can only imagine what a nightmare it must have been to go across country with six little kids!  Buying the trailer took all the money Dad (Darwin S) had saved up.  He told us this, and told us quite often that we needed to take care of the car and trailer because they had to last us for a long time, and that it would be the house we would live in when we got to California.

It made such a big impression on me that I made sure I never did anything to cause damage.  I can even remember the license plate on our car--LPR930.

The trailer was the largest one you could get at the time.  The trip took place during late fall.  It was very cold, and there was snow all along the journey until we got closer to our final destination.

From Clovis News-Journal, NM, Dec 1, 1952

In New Mexico, we drove into a terrible storm.  Dad had a difficult time keeping the car and trailer on the road.  He kept saying, "How much longer are we going to be in this damned New Mexico!"  This is why I know that we were in New Mexico when the accident occurred.

The weather conditions got so bad that all of a sudden the car and trailer skidded off the road and rolled over.  It seemed like it was a slow and long roll over process, and everyone was screaming until the vehicles finally came to rest.

No one was injured in the accident.  Everyone crawled out of the car and went to the side of the road, which was deserted.  It was getting colder as time went on, and we were all starting to freeze.  Our parents knew they needed to get warm coats for everyone, and everything was inside the tipped over trailer.  They had Tim crawl to the top of the trailer and get in through a window to find our warm things.  He was the hero!  He came out with all our coats and some blankets.

So there we all were, all bundled up on the side of the road in freezing New Mexico, waiting for a car to drive by.  A few cars approached, but went on by without stopping.  Then a bakery truck and another passenger car came upon the scene and they both stopped to offer help and gave us a lift to the next town.  There were too many of us to get into one vehicle, so Mom, Dad, Tim and Baby Darwin went in the car.  Patty, Sue, Skip and I (Lynda) got to ride in the bakery truck.  In the bakery truck Skip and I sat on the floor, at eye level with cupcakes, donuts, and all sorts of tasty and tempting things.  We were really hungry, and everything smelled so good, but we knew not to ask for anything, and we were still really frightened.

The bakery truck got us to a small town and stopped at a cafe, where we were reunited with the rest of our family.   The next thing I knew, we were in a small motel room with two beds for all of us to share. We were there for several days, and it was a bewildering and scary time for us kids.    After a few days, our car showed up at the motel, repaired and ready to resume the journey.  We all piled inside and drove to the Allstate Insurance office.  Our parents went into the office to settle the claim and came out very upset.  Mom was crying and Dad was comforting her for what seemed like hours.  We learned later that the insurance company was not very helpful, gave them very little and made them wait a long time for the money that they did give them.  This is why I will never use Allstate Insurance to this day.

As far as the trailer goes, that was a disaster.  By the time Dad returned to the accident site with the tow truck, the trailer had been stripped and most of our possessions had been stolen, including all of Dad's photo equipment.  The only reason we didn't lose everything was because a farmer happened by and saw the vehicles, and he knew from his experiences living there that bands of thieves and Mexicans would take everything they could get out of the vehicles.  So he used his tractor to pull the car upright and towed it to his yard, then called the police to tell them where he took the car and why he did it.  So our belongings that were in the car came to California with us, and everything else, including the trailer, never made it out of New Mexico."


I don't know why Carol never shared this story with me.  I can only speculate that it was so traumatizing for her that she chose not to remember the details and after many years reinvented the memory in a more palatable form.

Herman Gardens

Detroit was humming back in the 30s and 40s.  There was the automobile industry, of course, but during the war there was also alot of defense work going on in the factories.  This required thousands of workers, and there was not enough housing for all these working families. A 1937 law requiring the government to provide affordable housing for low income workers was enacted, and suddenly there was a big push to create projects.

A wealthy physician/mechanical engineer named S. James Herman came up with this great idea to create a master planned community to create a slum-free city.  His plan became a low income neighborhood called Herman Gardens.

During the war years, Herman Gardens apartments housed the defense workers.  Once the war was over, they were all kicked out and the low income families were allowed to move in.

It was during this post-war period that Bill, Carol and the children moved into an apartment there.  There is no one to ask about this period of time, because Patti, Susan, and Tim are all deceased.  Lynda was just a toddler during this time and has no clear memory of that time.  According to Carol and Darwin's marriage certificate, dated May 17, 1950,  Carol listed her home address as 17111 Van Buren, a Herman Gardens street.  This photo from the 40s shows the brand new Herman Gardens housing project.

Carol told me stories about a very nice apartment complex that she lived in with her kids.  Bill was evidently working with the railroad and he came and went. She stated that she had to keep the floors scrubbed nice and clean, and that is why her knees were shot, from years of scrubbing.  She also talked about washing their clothes by hand using a scrub board and hanging everything out on a line.  This was how it was in the project.  There were large beautiful grassy areas where the kids could all play. In 1947, there were about 4000 children living there.  Carol often told the story of giving birth to Lynda on the floor of her apartment alone, with no one to help her.  I am not sure if this event happened at Herman Gardens.  More research needs to be done on that.

 According to a newspaper article about the project from the Detroit Free Press, entitled, "It Wasn't Paradise, It's Trying Not to be Hell-Herman Gardens is Still a Home of Last Resort to Poor," written by Susan Ager, dated November 13, 1983, it was not easy to get approved to become a tenant back in the late 40's.  Every aspect of your life had to be documented, from work and school records to birth certificates. You had to be a low income worker. You could not be a single mom with a bunch of illegitimate kids. You needed to be married. You could not have a police record. And once you were allowed to rent a place, you absolutely needed to keep your apartment clean, because the housing officers would stop in weekly at random times to inspect your apartment.  They wanted to make sure the floors were clean, the children were in clean clothes, and that there was no garbage piling up. That would validate Carol's stories about having to keep the place clean as a whistle. Not long after Carol's marriage to Darwin, the family left Herman Gardens and moved into a trailer for a short while, before driving out to California.

In the 60s, the beautiful place turned into a ghetto slum, according to Ager.  Legal advocates for criminals, unwed mothers, and parasites of society made the argument that there can be no expectations of behavior, whether moral or sanitary.  Once the self policing was forced to cease and desist, the project quickly went downhill. After becoming a filthy, violent, drug-filled, crime-ridden neighborhood where 80 year old grandmothers were forced to start packing heat just to go to church on Sundays, the once beautiful family-orientated neighborhood collapsed.  It became, as the newspaper article stated, a home of last resort.  Dr. Herman's dream to create a slum-free Detroit failed.

It is interesting to note here that Carol married Darwin twice.  And after doing the research on Herman Gardens, I think Herman Gardens may be the one of the reasons.

Newspaper article About Tompsett Death

Doing online research today, I located the Newspaper article which validates Carol's story of the Tompsett suicide.   This came from the Detroit Free Press, dated Monday, April 4, 1949. I made a copy of the whole page, and in a tiny paragraph just to the left of the Neds logo I found the article.

The address 14555 Burt still exists in Detroit, which is amazing since half the houses there have been torn down, burned down, or are crumbling ruins.  But it is vacant and owned by the bank, so I think it won't be around much longer.

It is very sad to actually see this article. It makes the death more real to me.