A Business Owner Recalls Some Old Village Friends
By JOHN F. HARRINGTON Special to the Palisadian-Post Ever since I can remember I’ve been in awe of fiction writers, those people who can create a book out of thin air. It certainly is not that easy. I know several such people, and their work is forged with copious blood, sweat, and tears. Such a person was Frank Gruber, who, with his wife, owned a book store on Antioch near my business on Sunset. She ran the bookstore, and Frank had an office in the back where he turned out many Western novels and screenplays. At that time, a particularly nasty, undisciplined kid lived here, and he took to stopping at the door of the bookstore and teasing Frank’s wife. Frank watched where the boy went after he tired of harassing Mrs. Gruber-he turned left on Swarthmore. When Frank had had enough, he enlisted the aid of his adult son. When next the punk bothered Mrs. Gruber, Frank and his son went out the back door and down the alley. They caught the kid and took him into Frank’s office and explained certain harsh facts of life to him. They may have kept him out of reform school. I never again saw him near the bookstore. One night I was listening to a late-night talk show when Frank and an American Indian were guests. The Indian reviled Frank fiercely, as though Frank alone was responsible for the bad treatment Indians suffered. Next morning I saw Frank as I was going to work, and said to him that I thought the Indian was going to shoot him when they left the studio. Frank laughed boisterously. “That was an act,” he said. “We’re very old friends, and he has been in every movie made from one of my books.” Another old friend was Ah Wing Young, who owned the House of Lee for many years. On his 60th birthday he gave a big party at the restaurant and invited everyone. As we left the party, I asked him if he would do the same thing next year. “No,” he said. “We Chinese celebrate a birthday only every ten years.” I had the pleasure (not to say experience) of playing golf with him the first and only time he played. It was the Optimist Club’s annual tournament at Riviera Country Club. Ah Wing used only a 5-iron for every shot, and scored 164, which must remain the all-time high at Riviera. It made for a long day, but he had a glorious time. The business community has changed drastically over the years I have been here. There was a time when rents were so cheap that someone wanting just to keep busy would open a little store, lose money for several years, quit, and give way to the next person. But that time is long gone. Merchants now are almost always pretty competent. They have to be. The rents are high and the price of commercial buildings, which rarely come on the market, are staggering. But business is good, and factoring that in, rents are not unbearable. A fact helping local business people is that the traffic is so congested everywhere that more people shop here to avoid having to go to Santa Monica or Westwood. We oldtimers who were lucky enough to buy homes here in the early 1950s, as I did for $17,000, have a huge paper profit, but nobody wants to leave. My first sight of California was when my amphibious ship came back after two years of action in the Pacific. I met my future wife, Celeste, when the Navy sent me to learn to be a 90-day wonder at Northwestern University’s Midshipman School in the heart of Chicago, at Chicago and Michigan Avenues, where the old Water Tower still stands. Celeste and I first saw Pacific Palisades in 1948 when we drove here from Chicago on our honeymoon. We knew immediately that it was the best place to live that we had ever seen, and made a pact to come back and settle here one day. The clincher was when our first daughter, Cathy, was born the day after Christmas with 11 inches of snow on the ground. Due to the weather I could not get to the hospital of our choice, and stopped at the first one I saw. Cathy was born on a gurney in the hallway. When things settled down I asked Celeste what I could get for her. “A ginger ale laced with two shots of bourbon,” she said immediately. We hoarded our money, and in 1954, with two children and one on the way, we loaded up our old DeSoto sedan and hit Route 66, and came here to stay. Celeste missed Chicago at first, so I urged her to go home for Christmas when Chicago was snowed in-a dirty trick but it worked. Soon her mom and dad would come out to visit during the winters, and eventually one of her brothers moved to Santa Barbara after visiting us several times. If I sound a bit smug about all this, it was at that time a daring move-and perhaps the smartest thing I’ve ever done. (John Harrington founded his camera store on Sunset in 1958. His daughter Cathy now owns and operates the store, where he still works most Saturdays.)