My piece of writing not the actual valley. I envisioned this piece as one in a series about my relationship to California.
So I started with my birthplace, Pasadena.
For international readers, a fairly large city east of Los Angeles in Southern California, part of the giant urban sprawl.
Why Pasadena? Location of St. Luke's hospital where my mother gave birth to me, her first child at age 27 on April 19, 1952. The hospital, a leading medical facility when it opened in the 1940s has long been closed but production companies use it for a location for movies and TV shows.
Where did my mother and father live when they first became parents? Duarte, a town in the San Gabriel Valley not far from Pasadena
Did they grow up there or did they move there? They moved there in 1950 from New England. My father, 25 was a recent graduate from Harvard and Cornell and came to Southern California to take a job at a new company Aerojet which started with rocketry and moved into defense contracts in the post-war boom.
What was the San Gabriel Valley like when my parents moved there and when I was born? The valley was trnasitioning from a citrus culture economy to an urban/industrial area. Before, the entire landscape was planted with orange groves. I was born two years after they arrived in Southern California.
How did they feel about their new home? I don't know if they thought they would stay. They did buy a small house in Glendora just east of Azusa (where Aerojet was located) which had 17 orange trees in the back yard. My mother thought it was quaint and amusing. She was busy with me plus my brother 2 1/2 years later. My father always worked long hours. In between the babies, we went to Oak Ridge Tennessee for 9 months so my father could attend reactor school. I know my mother didn't really want to live in South California but they made some friends with the neighbors.
So what happened to all those miles of citrus groves? They were cut down to make way for towns and industry. Some ended up in prople's back yards. Like ours.
Did you and your parents stay in the San Gabriel Valley? Not for long, by 1955, my family moved to Sacramento (in the central valley of the state) to work in a new plant near Nimbus in the foothils of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Did they ever go back? No.
So what part of you belongs in the San Gabriel Valley? Not very much, it's my official birthplace but I just passed through like thousands of others with no regard for the natural landscape or the citrus economy. Isn't that the tragedy of southern California? That so many people take advantage of its climate and industry but callously toss it aside.
Do you remember the orange groves? I have some vague early childhood memories of the backyard full of trees and one tree that I got to climb. In the 1960s I remember some trips to southern California and seeing some of the surviving orange groves. I'm pretty sure they're all gone now.
Why is it important? I was born there and we all only have one birthplace. Where my own life began. I feel like I threw over the place like thousands of others and the orange groves disappeared. Somehow culpable though I certainly had no personal control.
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Very interesting interviewing myself. I've written a piece containing most all this information. Had some workshopping and several wondered what I was really writing about. I repackaged it with other sketches illustrating 'passing through' and that didn't work at all. So now I'm back to working on my original piece. I think this exercise helped!
Picture of the San Gabriel Valley used without permission from http://valleys.co/valleys/san-gabriel-valley/ "Valleys of the World"
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