Before the candelabra and the Vegas residency and the rhinestone capes and the jewel-bedecked Rolls Royce and the coke habit and the poppers and the rent boys, few remember Liberace was once a Catholic icon. Lest you doubt, I found him among the detritus of a decidedly Catholic household in Van Nuys, which once belonged to a piano teacher. In rooms filled with religious bric-a-brac and paintings of the pope, his is the largest image.
With Pope Pius XII
His home in Palm Springs, The Cloisters, had its own chapel to St. Anthony, the special intercessor to ‘lost souls’, to whom he attributed the miracle of a death bed restoration from kidney failure after inhaling toxic chemicals used to clean his costumes.
John McLaughlin had the loudest whistle in Van Nuys. At sundown, when the streetlights came on, he would put two fingers in his mouth and let it rip. From Kittridge to Archwood, the kids would report in on their skateboards and roller blades and bikes. Katie, her brother Mike, Samantha and Annie, all the friends.
“We were a pack of wolves.”
In the morning her mother would drop Katie and Mike off at St. Elisabeth’s Elementary. In the afternoon, she would walk home on Kittridge, a key around her neck, across six lanes of Van Nuys Blvd., past the Dearden’s department store and the 7-11. When Mike, who was three years older, transferred to Notre Dame High, she made the trek alone. Creepy men would sometimes pull over and expose themselves to her.
When her father played in his softball beer league in Encino, the kids would run into the cornfield and down into the concrete wash. There were no fences to stop them.
There was no phrase “free-range parenting”. That was just the way it was done in the Valley in the 1980’s.
Leadwell St., 1986Ice Skating, Laurel Plaza
Maybe it worked because there was strength in numbers. Or maybe it worked because there was little to command their attention indoors, but no so long ago a large cohort of children wandered, unleashed, without GPS devices or sunscreen, across Van Nuys.
Costello St, 1956
Katie’s mother Jan also was a free-range kid. She grew up two doors down from the house she raised Katie and Mike. Her father, Frank, was a set painter at MGM studios. He painted ships for the Navy during WWII.
Frank and Madeline settled in Van Nuys and had three daughters. Jan was born in 1946.
Alemany High School, 1964. Cheech Marin second from right.
Jan attended San Fernando Valley State, married John in 1968, and began teaching English at Providence High School in Burbank. John also became a teacher, and later in his career, a principal. In 1976, when Michael was born, they bought 6712 Costello, where Jan once played with her childhood friend Dolores.
They would both teach for over 40 years
The kids lives revolved around the ball fields at St. Elisabeth’s. John would chalk the field, seed the grass, man the snack shop, and coach. Katie’s greatest fear growing up was that her parents would get divorced.
That, and being abducted by aliens. There was a neighbor who lived across the street who claimed to have been abducted and probed. In an era noted for the Night Stalker and the Freeway Killer, Katie sobbed hysterically when she saw E.T.
In the summers, the families in the neighborhood would share a rental in Newport. John would surf. Katie smoked her first cigarette here at 15 with Samantha and Annie.
She would attend Notre Dame High School, with her brother Mike. On the weekends she would go with her friends to Hollywood to see girl bands like Hole and Seven Year Bitch. She became a Derby Doll. She met a boy from the East Coast with tattoos who worked with motorcycles and fell in love with him. She moved directly from her childhood home into his apartment in North Hollywood, which was both a rebellious and very traditional thing to do.
In 2000, John would leave Jan after 32 years of marriage. He would spend time at the beach. Things went a little haywire in the McLaughlin household for awhile. Jan withdrew. Mike struggled. Katie decamped for Virginia with her boyfriend.
Grace and Katie, Costello Street, 2016
Grace saved the family when she came to the world in 2005.
After a brief marriage in Virginia, Katie returned to Van Nuys and moved back in with Jan to raise her daughter as a single mother. As so often happens with the arrival of a grandchild, a rapprochement of sorts was effected between Katie’s parents.
Grace can put her foot behind her head. She played Danny Zuko in her school production of Grease. She claims a photographic memory and has excited opinions on many topics. She talks with her hands, and can recite the plot of Carrie, though she’s not allowed to see it yet and is terrified of scary movies. She sleeps in the bedroom her mother grew up in and loves her vinyl record collection.
What she doesn’t do is wander down the street. There are no other children her age on the block. She doesn’t walk to school, either. Unlike St. E’s, her magnet school is well out of the neighborhood. She’s the last 11-year-old in LA without a phone. Almost.
Like so many Valley children today, Grace is not a free-range kid. She lives indoors. She loves her Marvel and her DC comics and YouTube channels and her Kindle. For Katie, this is the heartbreaking part of raising her, the inability to re-create for her daughter the freedoms of her own childhood.
By any statistical measure, it’s much safer for children alone on the street today than 30 years ago. But the heart doesn’t work that way. One can’t un-know things once one has experienced them. Creeps will lurk in cars. A cool priest will be deposited in your parish, mix jokes with his sermons and be very popular, until he wasn’t. Men you love will fail to live up to the hope you invest in them. There may have been no alien abductions, but Southern California played host to a cornucopia of serial killers.
And Grace is the only child. The last in the line of four generations living on Costello. The house hasn’t changed, but the world around it has. You cleave to her most tightly and you care for your aging mother and you hold down your job at the salon and occasionally you slip away to Macleod for a beer to nurse your heartaches. You’re going to make it work.
Step one, find a lot with a shack on it. Step two, knock it down. Leave the framing of two walls standing. You’re not building anything new, remember. You’re merely renovating.
Step three, install steel girders, go vertical. Three floors if you can afford it.
Step four, add floor to ceiling windows, so people from the Valley can peer directly into your bamboo floor Designista great room and fully contemplate the sin of envy. Discreetly draw the curtains at dinnertime so no one on the walk sees you eating takeout while surrounded by Miele kitchenware.
Step five, spend $1000 installing a garden box in the parkway that produces $30 of vegetables a season which you donate to the local food bank.
Step six, be sure to remind everyone of the virtue of being virtuous.
Suppose you found a lot on a good block in a nice, family neighborhood in the Valley. You consult an architect. He hits ALT F3 on his keyboard, and out pops a house in the modern Los Angeles bento box style. Nothing too vulgar, mind you. In square footage, it would fit right in Palmdale. But in single-storey mid-century Van Nuys…
…you look out the window in the morning, and this is what greets you.
All over the neighborhood, the welcome wagon rolls out for you, the first homeowner to go vertical. To go big. To rub everyone’s nose in it. Sensible of your shame, you plant a second wall of ficus and wait out the scorn. The Stop McMansions signs stay put. You’re the Hester Prynne of Van Nuys.
Our private self is most amused and our public self is most circumspect. We pass each other in the store and reveal nothing. The carnival of snark beckons from every screen and we don’t tip our hand. We are more ears than feet.
Across the city and to the Eastern shore, half of us are not speaking truth aloud. We listen to the prognostications on cable TV, and enjoy others guessing at our motivation. We study the faces of strangers like runes. Is she one? Will he be joining her?
The loudest voices doth protest too much. They have bad poker faces. The quiet ones are putting the affairs of state into order, or carelessly toppling them into disorder, depending on your view. The Never People can no longer take refuge in never. Certitude is a masquerade. They lie to themselves as much as to their friends.
The elites would rather burn down their institutions than allow Godzilla to breach the perimeter. All lies are permissible in her service. Ring the klaxon bell. All hands on deck. Unless secretly, some of them really wouldn’t mind watching her lose. But they’re not telling.
The peasants are inclined to view “Godzilla” as something altogether different. He speaks their banished language. He carries their pitchfork over his head like Poseidon’s staff. Perhaps secretly, they are more admiring of the idea of the man than the man himself. Oh, the satisfaction of watching him pull it off! Then you’re stuck with the guy, and no one is quite sure what that’s going to mean. There are private bluffs within public bluffs.
Spouses extract declarations of agreement from one another then part company into separate voting booths, clutching secret ballots and hugging doubts.
Friends and neighbors avoid talking about this Thing That Shall Not Be Named. The firecracker sits in the middle of the dinner table, the fuse slowly burning down, while we seek reassurance in our sense of how things should be. Surely there are more of us than there are of them. Right? Right? I know my country. I’ve lived here my whole life.
Nobody really knows, and most of us aren’t telling. We have dice underneath our leather cup and you can’t see.
She’s taking her Punter’s Club mug, ring tone laugh and Indiana niceness with her. Also, the red hair, the maxi dresses and her peripatetic, public book-reading way. The full Amy.
Sigh.
That’s not fair. She’s going for the right reason. Love, the only permissible rationale for abandoning our beloved working class brigadoon of Van Nuys. In five years we will be Highland Park, and everyone in this photo will be regaling the newcomers with anecdotes, but for now the Nuys is still so un-cool, it’s actually cool to be here.
And Amy? Enjoying the full measure of happiness she extended to everyone else.
