-Mark Hoppus, Blink-182
Seventeen and mostly clear out there, with a dusting of snow.
Thinking this morning about Southern California, and fire. Those neighborhoods in Pacific Palisades and at the base of the San Gabriels in Altadena were lovely, magical haunts of my college years. Now all gone.
At this point I could descend into a political rant about the Republicans' demand that the California congressional delegation go along with a list of unrelated demands from DJT, most notably eliminating the debt ceiling, in exchange for disaster relief. A complete failure of the federal government, which Paul Krugman accurately called "an insurance company with an army".
No, this one is more personal, because my family have served in the Los Angeles Fire Department for nearly 100 years now.
When my great-grandmother Peggy was raising my grandfather as a single mother, having left his alcoholic father in the early 1920s, she met and eventually married Bill Bowman, a young fireman with the LAFD. Together they raised Grandpa and had another son, my great-uncle Bill. Great-grandpa Bill died before I was born, hitting a patch of ice in his car and plunging over a cliff while driving home from a work assignment in Big Bear. Peggy never remarried. We used to think of her as the original "little old lady from Pasadena", cruising the valley in a custard yellow 1968 Mustang GT long after someone should have inquired whether she could still safely drive. When she died in the late 1980s, that car had maybe 12,000 miles on it. We all wanted it, but somehow it passed out of the family.
I digress. Don't get me started on cars.
When Grandpa returned from the war, in a story that sounds straight out of The Best Years of Our Lives, he found himself within a couple years back on a hillside above Los Angeles on a team fighting a brushfire after Grandpa Bill got him hired on with the LAFD. Grandpa recalled to me the day he was sweaty and covered in soot and digging a firebreak, when he looked up and watched a transport plane fly over. That was it. Shortly thereafter the Soviets blockaded Berlin (Grandpa used to call Josef Stalin "the reserve officer's best friend"), and Captain Bowman was recalled to fly the Airlift. He stayed for another 24 years, before retiring at March AFB after serving as an O-6 in the USAFE inspector general's office upon his return from Vietnam.
Uncle Bill joined the department as soon as he could, and stayed for three decades. His two sons both became LA firemen: Mike rose to the rank of captain (or was it chief? I knew he was sort of a bigwig) and still works with television production crews as a technical advisor on those 911 shows. He's the stereotypical fireman jock, a fireplug who at sixty-something doesn't have an ounce of fat on him, as near as I can tell.
Cousin Scott was always a little more easygoing, and eventually worked his way out of the firehouse to pilot a chopper for the LAFD, following in the footsteps of his uncle (Bill's brother-in-law), Mike. These days he plays a lot of golf in their retirement community outside of Phoenix. My cousin Debbie married a fireman, and their boy was with the Burbank Fire Department the last I heard, working for a shot to join the LAFD. Hell, he must be around 40 now. Time flies.
When I was a kid in the '70s, Uncle Bill and Aunt Pat's home in San Fernando was the social center for the firemen (they were all men back then) and sheriff's deputies in the neighborhood, many of whom grew up with my cousins. Our branch of the family were sort of isolated nomads, moving from city to city as Dad kept getting promoted or just restless. Those sunny Southern California afternoons in Bill and Pat's backyard on our rare visits, folks clustered with a beer around the grill while kids frolicked in the pool, were some of the happiest times of my childhood.
Later, when I was a junior in high school, I returned to California and the Hemet Valley in 1980 to live with my grandparents. I remember my first night in town sitting on their patio on Sprague Heights, with Uncle Guy and Aunt Peggy (lots of Peggys in my life, obviously) watching the crest of the hills hugging the south side of town ablaze from a brushfire that had come uncomfortably close to the upscale homes built up there among the boulders and tumbleweeds that looked straight out of a Hollywood western.
That night was in September, the beginning of the two fall months when the Santa Ana winds come howling out of the deserts to the east. I'm at a loss how this could be happening now, in January.
While I was in Hemet I was offered a part-time job working for the California Department of Forestry, riding in the cargo bay of a C-199 Flying Boxcar used to dump chemicals on brushfires.
Yes, that very one in fact. The photo was taken at Hemet Ryan Field (footnote: My grandfather actually went to pilot training at Ryan Field in 1941 before heading to the Pacific to kill Japanese). And yes, that's a little jet engine they stuck to the top of the fuselage to give the underpowered old girl a little extra push on heavy takeoffs.
This was the one-and-only time my mother vetoed a job offer, her suasion aided by the fact that she was dating at the time the CDF captain who offered me the job. This is a woman who didn't intervene when, a year or two later, I found myself crawling around in school attics repairing asbestos pipe insulation while wearing a drugstore surgical mask.
The old C-119 crashed a few years later if memory serves, just folded up at the wing roots as it pulled away from a hillside after dropping a load of fire retardant. Women's instincts, eh?
I kicked around beating on Cousin Mike's door and looking into the LAFD while I was drinking my way through undergraduate mediocrity at USC. They made great money, and I never met an unhappy fireman. Instead I plowed through college, picked up a commission in the Air Force, and the rest is history. If I'd taken the other path, perhaps my boys would be out there right now on the fire line, as we Bowmans have done for generations.
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