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Book ReviewHOLY LAND: A Suburban Memoir Poet-historian D. J. Waldie has written a lyrical account of growing up
in our neighbor city, suburban Lakewood. Living as we do in a community so
close to the history and development of Lakewood, I think that you will relish
each moment as your read Waldie’s memoirs. Filled with history, poignancy,
loss, and emotion, the book is an easy-read, illustrated with wonderful period
photographs. Published in 1996, it won the California Book Award. Waldie,
who works in Lakewood as a city official, still lives in the home that his
parents purchased there in 1946. Some samples of Waldie’s poetic, spare
writing style and fascinating “This suburb was thrown up on plowed-under bean fields beginning in early 1950. No theorist or urban planner had the experience then to gauge how thirty thousand former GIs and their wives would take to frame and stucco houses on small, rectangular lots next to hog farms and dairies . . .When the sales office opened on a cloudless Palm Sunday in April 1950, twenty-five thousand people were waiting.” “The average age of the wives in the new suburb was twenty-six. The average age of the husbands was thirty-two. Most families made between $4,000 and $7,000 a year.” “There wasn’t much crime in these neighborhoods. If you had asked residents what their new community needed, many would have said it needed to control dogs.” “There were no trees here when the land was farmed, except a stand of eucalyptus planted near the field office of the Montana Land Company. . . By ordinance, every house must have a city tree planted in front of it. The tree is planted in the rectangle of land, seven feet wide and thirty feet long, which is the city’s right of way in front of each house. None of the city’s street trees is native to California.” “The May Co. sold everything needed to make a home when the store opened in
February 1952. It sold china, violins, permanent waves, and washing
machines. . . The building cost $11 million. It was as nearly perfect as
an almost featureless building can be. Above the building—the highest
point of the city for many years—were the emblems of the May Co. They
were four letter Ms, each facing a cardinal point of the compass. When the
store opened, the four letters could be seen from every street in the “Water company employees laid redwood pipes to bring water from the Bouton
Well to Long Beach. The milled and hollow redwood logs, bound with iron
straps, had a bore of twenty-four inches. That was big enough for a man to
crawl through. The redwood pipes lasted two generations, serving even the
first years of my city’s (Lakewood’s) development, until the wood soaked
through completely and the tree-trunk pipes sagged shut. In the early 1950’s,
when the wooden lines were taken out of service, the Waldie touches on so many topics: racial discrimination; the
naming of streets; the men behind the financing and building; religion; his
suburban childhood, families, and neighbors—and much, much more.
You’ll enjoy his reminiscence of a different time in Southern California. Dejon Deleon Dejon Deleon is a new neighbor. He lives on Studebaker
Road with Jackie and George Merrill. George brought Dejon home with him
while on a walk in El Dorado Park. Dejon is a little mouse. His
story is told in the delightful children’s book The Most Unforgettable Day in
my Life.
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