San Pedro Ward - Part 1

The San Pedro Ward chapel.  This has to be one of the coolest, most original chapels in all the church.  Originally, the wall with the windows was an outside wall but a new wing was added on that side and the windows became light boxes.  The large window at the back of the chapel went to the cry-room.  It was a great place to hang out when you didn't want to sit in the chapel itself.  Of course, you had to listen to all the babies up there that were crying.  I remember my first meeting in this chapel.  Well, sort of.  We were sitting near the back, in the center, and I went to sleep.  About two-thirds of the way back, in the center, was the row that we kids always called "death-row."  It was where all the old widows would sit together.  One of them was Sister Lambertson.  She was the one that my mom and dad would get to come and babysit us when they went out.  She eventually left death-row in the usual manner.

Our Home in Miraleste

2777 Calle Aventure, Miraleste, CA

This is the street in front of the house where I grew up.  My house is on the left with the pickup truck in the driveway.  One of the things I remember about this street was skate-boarding down it all the time.  The street was fairly steep and you could really get a good ride if you didn't fall down and get banged up instead. I had a lot of good times growing up in this neighborhood.  We moved into this house in 1963 and it looks pretty much the same except with a few landscaping changes.  One of the more unpleasurable memories, however, was doing the landscaping when we moved in.  The terra-forming was not easy because the dirt was just full of rocks and not just any old rocks but huge rocks; boulders.  I know that there was one in the corner of the yard over next to the house below us, that we never did find the edges of and weren't able to get out.  We used to have a tall palm tree in the front yard but it is now long gone.

At the bottom of the street there was this big field that we used to play in.  It is now a park but back then it was just a field with tall grass that you could hide in.  The view from the bottom of the street was pretty good but back then I don't think we much thought about the view.  Once I remember playing hide and seek in the grass.  I dove down into the grass and after a while I looked around and found half of a freshly killed jack-rabbit right next to me.  Today, before you enter the park, there is a sign that says "Watch out for rattle snakes."  Today it is grass.  I can't even imagine how close I must have been to any snakes when we were running through those fields.

From the front door of the house, you could look out over the house on the other side of the street and see Catalina Island but only on days where it was clear enough to see.  This area is known as one of the foggiest areas in the United States.  It is on a peninsula that juts out into the ocean and the conditions are just right for fog.  So, there were a lot of times that the view was obscured by fog or just haze that would sit on the ocean.  Once, when I was driving, the fog was so thick that I got disoriented and lost in an intersection (PV Drive East and Crest Road).  The intersection curves and I could only see as far as the front of the car so I was trying to judge how much it curved as I drove through it.  I made it but it was pretty scary.