Easter on Eagle Street

Easter was fun for us kids. Mom and Dad went all out to make sure we had a great time.  Unlike every other family I knew, we did not go on Easter egg hunts.  Because at our house, the Easter Bunny did not just hide the eggs--he hid the entire Easter basket.  Peter Cottontail, better known as the Easter Bunny, would come to our house while we were sleeping and hide our baskets somewhere in the house.  Then when we woke up on Easter morning, we would go searching everywhere to find them.  The rules were simple: You knew what your basket looked like because you had the same one every year and it had your name on it. Mine was the pink basket for many years.  If you happened upon someone else's basket, you were required to leave it alone and not say anything.

On the day before Easter, someone was tasked with going down to the scary basement to retrieve the Easter box.  This box contained all of our baskets, colorful plastic grass, and plastic eggs that would hold candies. After the little kids were in bed, Mom would get out her electric egg cooker.  It would hard boil seven eggs at a time.  She would cook two or three dozen eggs, then she would color them using the Paas egg color kit and some vinegar.

This was the exact model of Mom's egg cooker

Mom spent the 40 days of Lent stowing away Easter candy. She hid everything underneath piles of clothing in her closet.  We kids loved Easter candy, because it was special and only available during this time of year. It wasn't just everyday stuff like M & M's  or Reece's rewrapped in pastel colors like they do now. Here is a partial list of our seasonal treats:

60's Easter candy that was in our baskets every year

Peeps (which were usually just yellow, I liked them, but most of the kids did not)
Brach's jelly bird eggs (we all hated the licorice flavor)
Malted milk robin's eggs (pastel colors with flecks.  Also called Fiesta eggs at one time)
Brach's Marshmallow eggs (hard candy coating, softer chewy white inside, also known as Easter egg hunt eggs, and are now hard to find because most stores don't carry them anymore.  If I could still find them, I would eat them until they were all gone)
Big hollow Chocolate Bunnies (fun to bite off their ears)
Chocolate covered Marshmallow Bunnies
Chocolate covered Marshmallow eggs (packaged in a egg carton.  Mom loved these)
Brach's chocolate covered eggs with soft fillings like Maple, Fruit and Nut, and Vanilla  (the gateway candy to See's Chocolates. These wouldn't last 2 minutes in my basket)

On the night before Easter, after the kids were in bed, Mom would bring out all of these candies and divvy them up between all the baskets, then she would nestle a few hard boiled colored eggs in the plastic grass. Back in the day, you didn't get sick from eating an egg that had been sitting out all night long. Sometimes she would add a special gift like a tiny wind-up duck,  a fuzzy little toy chick or bunny, (I still have my bunny, he is in the first photo) or a new coloring book and crayons.  Then Mom, and Dad if he wasn't at work, would figure out good hiding places for each kid's basket. The level of difficulty in finding it would be based on the kid's age.

Lucky Tammy, age 2, found a real Manx kitten in her basket under Mom's crafts desk. 

Easter morning was fun, fun, fun!  We kids would be running around the house looking in closets, pawing through the clothes in laundry baskets, opening the kitchen cupboards, searching everywhere until we found our basket.  For a little kid, the basket would be in an easy place,  behind Dad's chair, for example.  Or:

At age three, finding my basket underneath Mom's Hammond organ

As we got older, it took longer to find it. If we searched for more than 30 minutes with no success, Mom would start throwing out hints to get us on the right track.  Once we all found our baskets, we would immediately isolate our favorite things to eat right off the bat or to hide so that no one else would grab them when we weren't looking.  Mom would encourage us to peel and eat at least one of our real eggs before we would start in on the candyfest.  The last time my basket was hidden was Easter 1971, Dad's last Easter.  I had a really hard time finding the basket, and needed a hint from Mom.  I finally found it in the poolroom, wrapped in a plastic bag, sitting up on the top of the pool slide.  Little Jeffrey's basket was found inside the clothes dryer in the kitchen.

A 70's Easter morning.  Candy and coloring for breakfast!

For me, Easter meant going to church services  at the Mission Hills Congregational Church.  As I got dressed for church, Mom would sing an old song about wearing an Easter Bonnet at the Easter Parade.  A couple times, she actually made me wear a crazy hat and some gloves because in her day, that's what the ladies did on Easter.   I did see fancy hats on the older women in the pews on Easter, but I think I was the only little girl who carried on the tradition, and nobody was wearing gloves anymore. I hated it, but I wore them, because it didn't occur to me that I could have stowed them somewhere on my five block walk to church, and then retrieve them later on my way home. Mom wouldn't have ever known, because I was the only one in the family who went to church on Easter back in the sixties.

Yes, I had to show up at church looking like this

Here is Lynda's favorite Easter story from when she was a kid in the fifties:

"One year there was a great hunt that I will never forget. Even though we all knew the simple rule, Tim disregarded etiquette.  He always found everyone else's basket and ruined the search for the rest of us.  He truly took the fun out of the search.  Only little Darwin's basket could never be revealed--it was always hidden where he would find it right away.

One year, Dad decided that Tim was too old to get a basket and he was tired of him taking the fun away from the rest of us kids.  That year, Tim was not allowed to look for his basket until the rest of us found ours, and whoever found Tim's was not allowed to tell, or else they would forfeit their own basket.

After we had all found our baskets and were going through them, Tim, who had to wait and watch all this time, was pretty upset. As he started searching, Dad was smiling a sly smile, certain that Tim would never find it. After looking for hours without any luck, Tim was convinced that he didn't really have one.  And the rest of us were enjoying every minute of his pain. None of us had come across his basket when we were looking for our own baskets, so we had no idea where it was hidden.  Dad finally asked Tim if he gave up, and he said he had.  Then Dad made him agree that if he were to get clues of hot, warm, and cold, to help him find it, Tim would have to play by the rules in the future and leave our baskets alone.  He agreed.

Tim started out looking in the kitchen, where he heard "COLD!" than went on to each room only to hear, "COLD" and "VERY COLD."  He made it to the living room and he heard, "WARM!"  Tim perked up, with new life in his face, and started walking around, he heard, "WARMER!"  Now all of us kids were interested in this search and for the time being forgot about our candy in order to watch Tim as he made progress.

When he got near the fireplace, he heard, "OH, VERY, VERY, WARM!" We were all in suspense, Where was it? Tim looked in the fireplace, and Dad called out, "WATCH IT, YOU WILL GET BURNED!" Tim knew it had to be really close, but where?  He then stuck his head in the fireplace and looked up, and there it was!  The night before, Dad had gone up on the roof and dropped a rope down the chimney.  Then Mom tied a knot around the basket handle, and Dad had pulled the rope up the chimney so that just the bottom of the Easter basket could be seen if you carefully looked inside the fireplace.  Tim found it, but he wasn't cheerful about it.  He was pretty mad and said how unfair it was to hide it there.  He felt it was a dirty trick.

The rest of us were quite pleased that Tim finally got what was due to him.  For some reason, Tim never got in trouble or was blamed for anything.  He could do no wrong and always got his way. So it was satisfying to see him humbled a bit that morning.  The Easter Bunny sure got him good that year.  And for the record, that WAS Tim's last Easter Basket on Eagle Street."

Great story, Lynda!

After Dad passed away in 1971, our Easter fun was toned down a bit.   Mom gave me the opportunity to prepare the eggs, and fill and hide the baskets for the two youngest kids.  As we all grew up,  our tradition gradually faded away.  But Lynda and I will never forget our great Eagle Street Easters.

Fear the Blue Dot

After the manic photo purge in 1972, Mom started getting paranoid.   Following our nightly drives to eat dinner at various places, she deviated from her normal route home to take us past the Hillcrest Receiving Home. It was located on Third Avenue, in the part of Hillcrest that is now a major medical complex. It was stationed between Mercy and County hospitals and was within walking distance from Eagle Street. A sprawling county building behind very high chain link fencing, it housed children who had been taken into protective custody because they were abused at home or without  someone to care for them.  Usually they would stay there on a short term basis until the courts figured out what to do with them.  Most ended up in foster homes, others ended up back with their families. Mom would drive slowly past this children's shelter and tell me about all the terrible things that happened to kids who were put there.

She told me that big sister Susan was taken away and put there because she told her school counselor lies about her life on Eagle Street. While inside those walls, she caught head lice and got pregnant. And she never got to live at home again.  The picture she painted for me was terrifying.  The last thing I wanted was to get locked up, get lice and have a baby.  So when Mom started to warn me that there was a possibility that my two younger siblings and I would end up there, I wanted to know why.  Mom finally told me that Tim had gone to court to declare her an unfit mother, and wanted us kids taken away from her, but he didn't want to take us.  He just wanted us locked up.  That, she explained, is the reason she chopped up all the photos of Tim and burned them a few months earlier.

One day, a county vehicle drove past our house as we were sitting on the front porch.  All county trucks and cars had a distinctive round blue dot on the front doors. 

A present day blue dot.  They still make me nervous for a nanosecond

Mom pointed this symbol out and hustled me inside the house.  She warned me that a car with that same blue dot would stop at the house and take us kids away.  She instructed me to grab my siblings and run to hide whenever we saw one of those cars. So for the next several months, I went outside with my stomach in knots.  I stopped to watch every car or truck that ventured into our neighborhood to see if it had the blue dot, and a few times it did.  It never stopped at our house, but I ran inside anyhow. And I made sure I never complained about Mom or anything else to my teachers at school, because I didn't want a blue dot car showing up there to snatch me out of my classroom.

During our frequent evening drives past the Receiving Home, Mom would tell me that I needed to know how to escape the place and how to find my way home, so she would always drive the same route from the Hillcrest Receiving Home to Eagle Street so that I would know how to navigate my way back home on foot.

Fear is a effective tool of control, and Mom knew how to use it to her advantage.  Thanks to her stories about Susan's Receiving Home experience, and the constant threat of the blue dot cars,  I wanted nothing to do with Tim, had no trust for authority figures, and really felt like it was our little family of four against the world. I learned not to trust teachers, cops, counselors, or anyone else.

A St. Patrick's Day on Eagle Street

Saint Patrick's day is a big drinking event these days.  There is a parade, green beer, and the stereotype of the drunk Irishman is celebrated.  But it didn't seem like that big a deal back in the 60's and 70's in our neck of the woods.  If the day fell on a school day, you needed to be sure you had green on, or else it gave the boys an excuse to pinch you.  We didn't eat corned beef and cabbage, or watch a parade.  It was really just another ordinary day.  But there was one  St. Patrick's Day that I remember.  It was Sunday, March 17, 1974.

About a dozen Eagle Street kids, ranging in age from five to 14, were out in the street playing kickball together that afternoon.  Our kickball game was sort of like playing a fusion of baseball and dodgeball. You kicked a big rubber ball, trying to get it past the other kids who were clamoring to catch it,  and you then ran to base trying to avoid being hit with the ball before you got there. Our playing field was the street, and the bases were the four sidewalk corners at the intersection of Eagle and West Lewis Streets. It was a safe place to play because there was no traffic whatsoever.  The only cars coming through belonged to the people who lived there.

An elderly Irish widower named Mr. Martin lived two doors south of us.  His yard was full of rose bushes and he employed a full time gardener to keep them beautiful.  Usually this gardener was always busy pruning and fertilizing the roses, and mowing the expansive yard.  But today, he was different.  He was wearing dirty clothes, his hair was uncombed, and he was laying on the grass, drinking one beer after another.  I ran over to catch the ball near where he lay,  and that's when I first noticed him amid all the empty beer cans. I could tell he was drunk because he was yelling at an imaginary person.

Around 3 o'clock, one mom after another came outside and started calling their kids in to eat dinner.   My little brother and sister and I started towards home, and just as we reached the steps leading to our porch, we head a car door slam, then a gunning of an engine, then screeching tires. We turned around to look.  In a second, the drunk gardener had taken off down Eagle Street, driving past our house, slamming into parked cars on one side of the street, then the other.  He blew through the intersection of Eagle and West Lewis, where a dozen kids had been playing just a couple minutes before.  I quickly ran down the street to see what would happen next.  There was only one more short block before Eagle Street ended at a dirt road. There was a white wooden fence separating the street from the canyon leading to Mission Valley, and I wondered if he was going to stop.  After sideswiping another car,  the gardener sped up.  His car smashed through the fence, become airborne, and then disappeared from view as it descended down into the canyon.  By this time all the grown-ups had heard the noise and they came out to survey the damage that was done to their vehicles.

The end of Eagle St today.  The white fence is gone, replaced by a driveway leading down the canyon to a new house. 

Soon, the other kids joined me at the canyon's edge.  Dinner for all of us would have to wait, because somewhere down among those thick bushes and trees there was a big smashed up car and a drunk guy, and we wanted to see if the guy was dead or alive.  The police came, then the fire truck, and soon, Cathy Clark from the TV news was doing a live report as the first responders headed down a hundred feet to rescue the drunk gardener.  They carried him up out of the brush on a canvas stretcher.  He was barefoot, bloody, confused and still yelling.  It took a tow truck about an hour to drag the smashed car up and out of the canyon.

That was the most excitement Eagle Street had ever seen. Mom's car was one of a few that was not hit during the incident.  I don't know what happened to the gardener, but we never saw him working in the yard again. Mr. Martin's beautiful house and rose gardens have since been transformed into an out-of-place 11 unit condo complex. The site of the crash is now home to a couple of million dollar canyon-side houses. A big tree now grows at the end of the street to stand guard against any future car calamity. The large families that once lived on our street have been replaced by childless and very well-off professionals.  It is all different there now.  But every year when St. Patrick's day comes around, my mind revisits that day.  Thanks to the grace of God and all the mothers calling their kids home to dinner at the same time, none of us were killed by the gardener who celebrated the day by driving drunk on Eagle Street.

The Schwinn Bicycles

Most kids who grew up in the 50's and 60's went to neighborhood schools and played with neighborhood kids.  Unless you were a rich kid who went to a special private school across town, your life was centered around your neighborhood.  And a big part of the neighborhood lifestyle was the bicycle.  Every kid had one.  They rode them to school, rode them with friends after school, used them to deliver newspapers on their paper routes. If you didn't have a bike, or if your bike was incapacitated for some reason, you felt hobbled.  It was the same feeling a grown up has when their car is in the shop for repairs.

It was also a pretty big deal to have the right kind of bike.  The Cadillac of bikes for us was the Schwinn.  Schwinn bikes were made in America.  They had authorized dealers who sold and serviced their products.  They put compelling commercials on TV that convinced us that "Schwinn bikes are best." Nobody wanted a Huffy or a no name knockoff.  We wanted a "real" bike.

A Christmas 1960 Ad in the paper.  Deluxe equipment included tandems, baskets, lights, & fenders, all chromed 

Schwinn published a catalog every year that I couldn't wait to get my hands on.  I studied that catalog, reading every word over and over, marking the pages of the models I liked. In the 60's I really coveted the Sting-Ray model with the cool stick shift.  In the early 70's, my choice was the limited edition Krate Grey Ghost.  I wanted slick, sporty, fast, and fun.  Mom had other ideas.

Mom loved big, heavy, bulky Schwinn models.  She also loved to trick them out with tandems, baskets, fenders, and lights. And she loved chrome.  Mom would buy a used Schwinn bike at a garage sale, and she would take it in to the shop to get it chromed.  By the time she was done with it, the bike was so heavy that it was a chore to ride.  Even the slightest incline became a pedaling challenge.  But these heavy metal bikes were the only choice we were given, and any bike was better than no bike.

Big heavy tank with chromed fenders, metal basket big enough for two dogs, and a metal tandem in back

When I was a kid, Mom used to tell me that Tim and Lynda's bikes were stolen and that they were hidden under the Merry-Go-Round in Balboa Park.  But she never gave any other details to this mysterious event, which happened sometime around 1961 or 1962.

Here is Lynda's eye witness account to the story:

" Tim and I had Schwinn bikes that were heavily chromed.  No one else had bikes like ours. They were one of a kind, and it didn't take long before all the Mission Hills kids were talking about our "chrome bikes."

Tim got his bike before I got mine.  I was upset when Tim revealed to me that I was going to get one too.  I didn't want it, because that meant I was going to have to ride it to school.  I was going into 9th grade at Roosevelt Junior High School, which is next door to the San Diego Zoo.  I really did not look forward to pedaling that bike over two miles to school every morning and parking it there.  I found a house near the school where I could park it.

I didn't understand why I had to ride that bike to school. After all, Mom had me excused from PE class. She got a Doctor's note saying I had overcome Rheumatic fever and should not exert myself.  The Doctor's note allowed me to ditch PE, which was the last class of the day.  This got me home from school sooner, because Mom always needed help with something at home and wanted me there.  I was hoping that the doctor's note would also pertain to riding the bike to school, but Mom didn't see it that way. I still had to ride that heavy bike.

One Saturday, Tim and I rode our bikes to the San Diego Zoo and locked them up outside.  When we came back out, our bikes were gone.  Back then, you were required to license your bike, and the police would give you a little metal license plate.  We reported the theft to the police so they would be on the lookout for these special chromed bikes.  But we never heard anything from the police, and many weeks went by.  We didn't think they would ever turn up again.  And then one day....

Mom and I went shopping at Fedco, a membership-only department store.  It was out on Euclid Avenue and 54th Street in the Oak Park area of San Diego.  Not the greatest neighborhood, but it was Mom's favorite store.  After the Fedco shopping was done, Mom had one more thing to get from the drug store in the same shopping center.  I waited outside while she went in real quick.  As fate would have it, I looked up and saw this beautiful and very familiar chromed bike with an African American boy pedaling it straight toward me.  I knew instantly that it was my bike. So I went over to him and told him that he had a beautiful bike.  I straddled the front wheel, lowered my arms around the big basket so he couldn't ride off, and began petting the bike.  I told the boy that my Mom would buy me anything I wanted and she would pay him a lot of money if he would sell it to me. 

Well, he got pretty excited over the thought of making a lot of money from the sale and then Mom came out of the store and immediately sized up the situation.  I told her I really wanted the bike and she played along and said, "Of course, if you really want it." I don't remember how much the kid wanted for it, but we made the deal.  Mom said she just needed to go use the phone in the store to call Dad and have him bring some money, and that he was only about 5 minutes away.  Then Mom went in the store and called the police.   The police showed up and we explained the situation, that it was my bike that was registered and had been stolen many weeks ago.

The poor kid was scared silly and spilled his guts to the cops.  He told us that he and his friends saw the bikes at the zoo, took them and rode them into some tunnels.  These tunnels were by the merry-go-round and the train ride.  It was a very old tunnel that supposedly went all the way to Mission Valley.  He said that they stripped Tim's bike out and took the chrome parts.  When we went to the tunnels with the police to look for Tim's bike, all we found were parts and pieces of it.  Tim got a replacement bike, but this time, Mom did not chrome it out!"

Mystery solved! Thanks for finally clearing up the story, Lynda!