This brought me back to my own life and how I had lived several places before I was 6 years old myself. My daughter is having another son this week in San Diego County so we are visiting the area to be of help if we can.
My own life began before 1950 in Seattle Washington in Lake Forest Park, Washington where my father and mother and my mother's mother lived together on my other grandfather's land which was 1/2 apple and black cherry trees and 1/2 on a hill where my grandfather's house was and his garage and a unit he built for one of his daughter's and her husband and grandkids too. My father bought a trailer which was a 28 foot Spartan all aluminum sort of like and Airstream only it was made around 1946 I believe but it's surface looked just like an airstream but it was a different shape.
This is what something like this looks like today:
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1946 Spartan Manor Model 25 Travel ...
So, this is what I lived in the first 7 or 8 months of my life while my father built a unit for us to live in under the garage on a hill. So, my first memories around 2 to 4 years old were in this apartment unit Dad built under my Grandfather's garage on a hill. And we played around my father's Spartan Trailer because it was still there after we moved into the apartment he built on Grandfather's land.
One of my first memories would be at 2 or 3 where I was shown how to pick ripe raspberries off a vine outside the clothes washing room out back of our ground level apartment. I was shown how to not get prickled (stuck with the little barbs) as I picked these wonderful juicy Raspberries. This was an amazing moment one of those you never forget your whole life.
By the time I was 4 years old we had moved to San Diego to a place in Vista, California where I missed my two older cousins, a boy and a girl who stayed living on my Grandfather's land in Seattle (Lake Forest Park).
In Vista, California (just north of San Diego a ways) and south of Oceanside, California where the Marine base is I started Kindergarten for the first time where I didn't like taking naps on the floor on a towel I brought from home because I didn't take naps anymore since I was about 3 years old.
However, I loved the Mockingbirds in Vista, California because we didn't have them in Seattle, but we did have Robin Redbreasts birds and we had hazel nuts that grew there too along with the black cherries and apples off grandad's apple trees and Black Cherry trees. We also roasted chestnuts in Seattle too. It also snowed a little and rained a lot in Seattle too.
However, people were completely different in Vista, California than Seattle completely. They were much less polite because they didn't have the Canadian influence which is a lot like England in Politeness. Seattle isn't far from Vancouver and Victoria Canada so people intermarried a lot between Canada and Washington state too.
However, Vista, California was my first taste of just how different California was from Seattle. Though I missed my relatives there I also liked mockingbirds and wearing bermuda shorts much of the year and I liked the fact that it was sunny and warm most of the year in California because it wasn't like this in Seattle At all.
Then when I was 5 Dad and Mom Rented a big house in El Cajon where we had an apricot tree in the back yard that I could climb and pick apricots from which was really nice then too. Our neighbor one day killed his rooster to eat him I guess and I was watching through the fence at age 5 when this happened and I saw the head come off and then the rooster ran around the yard spurting blood up the headless neck until it fell over. I was a pretty horrified 5 year old too because my parents were vegetarians and so I had never seen anything killed in front of my eyes to eat before too. So, this was very traumatic for me but likely I was supposed to be a little man because it was 1953 and by 4 you sort of had to be a man already because that was traditional then at least until the Viet nam War ended in the mid 1970s when things changed a lot starting about when Kennedy was assassinated around 1963.
When I was 6 years old my parents moved again to Tujunga which is up against the Angeles National Forest and the mountains there which go up to 8000 or 9000 feet where there is snow in the winter time there right next to Los Angeles.
They had been put in charge of a church in downtown Los Angeles which was about 45 minutes away by car. However, when we first moved my mother couldn't drive a car yet. Most women weren't driving cars yet by the early 1950s. However, by 1960 almost all women could drive a car in California. So, things changed a lot between 1950 and 1960 in California.
We didn't wear seat belts until around 1987 I think in California or at least were not legally required to until then. So, when my mother was trying to learn to drive Dad's old 1941 Century Buick that had been his brothers during world war II it was a 3 speed column shift and so she hit a mailbox and knocked it over learning to drive and threw me into the front window and I got a little hurt with my face hitting the front window and dashboard. But, this was kind of normal for kids to be injured in cars a lot then. But, I didn't need to go to the hospital because it wasn't that bad.
Then we moved to Glendale California where my father's sister and her son who was 5 years older than I lived and there we stayed living in 3 different rental places from 1956 to 1969. I was sent away to a private school in Santa Fe, for my senior year in high school in Fall of 1965 to May of 1966 when I graduated high school there.
So, between birth and college I lived quite a few different places in Seattle and California before I entered college in Fall of 1966 for the first time.
Then in 1969 my parents moved back to San Diego where my father was a union Electrician and he could make more money going back there to San Diego with the IBEW local then. I was 21 then and mostly a college student but I also worked for an Electrical Contracting business then because my father had given up being an Electrical Contractor by 1969. So, I worked with him there at this contracting business for about a year in 1969. I had been a computer programmer but realized after a few years of working with computers that it would be about 50 years (or about now) before I could do what I was really interested in doing with computers which was Artificial intelligence in Robots and stuff like this. But, I had to understand how far away we were from what I wanted to do before I gave up going in that direction by understanding better the technology. For example, microchips were only used by NASA mostly for astronauts in the 1960s. It wasn't really until the mid 1970s and early 1980s that microchips found their way forward and then they made their way into home computers like Apple Computers and IBM Clones and the like. So, computers became a hobby for me after the mid 1970s except for one job working for Glendale Hospital in 1977 when I was going to Summit University and working in their computer department there too then.
When my parents moved to San Diego in 1969 I was kind of lost because my home was always Los Angeles since Tujunga and Glendale since 1954. So, I was kind of feeling sort of lost when my parents moved to San Diego so I moved in with my aunt who was an actress in Hollywood then and her youngest son in the Hollywood Hills. She had a great Swimming pool and I thought it would be cool living where there was a swmming pool. However, I realized this wasn't going to work very long for a variety of reasons and so I got a job working as an electrician in Venice, California wiring up an apartment building and part of the pay was a free apartment right on the beach. This was sort of a rude awakening because like most 21 year old males I thought I knew everything but had no idea what I was really in for moving to Venice. So, I didn't stay there very long because Venice in 1969 was a lot like Haight Ashbury in San Francisco then too so it wasn't a really good influence in my life in this sense.
So, I moved back in with my parents in San Diego and went back to college at Palomar College and San Diego State University and started the next phase of my life which ended in me getting married and having my first child, a son in 1974 when I was 26 and my wife was 21 years old.
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