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Cali-41-Vacation
Jan. 3rd, 2021 12:13 pmI have a shmoopier post to get to before the day is done, but I've cracked open the old photo album again and you get to look!
I'd mentioned this trip before in recalling a reconnection with one of the few old friends I kept through both high school and college years. That was before I found the ancient album I've been occasionally going back to, which had a few unremarkable photos of a not-quite-week spent on a not much on the road trip to the West Coast, 41 years ago this week, for the first and only time in my life.
What the motivation was, I don't remember. The more traditional Thing was to go to Florida for spring break, but I was never much for conforming, and this was over the Christmas holiday in the middle of our junior Cornell year. We had no college friends in Southern California to visit there, and no relatives that I knew of then (and I just discovered that the only possible resident rel, my maternal grandfather, would have been paws-up in San Diego by then), so I, and after the first night we, were entirely on our own.
I had just turned 20, Dave may have been 21, but at that time, that meant absolutely nothing! Voting and draft age were 18 (and I'd just missed having to register for Jimmy Carter's new possible Selective Service by about a month), and drinking was still 19 after going up just after I turned that age. Most importantly, neither of us was 25 or had a major credit card, which was the key to being able to rent a car in the most car-centric city in the world.
We made separate travel arrangements to get there. It was my first-ever flight, and one of perhaps three roundtrips in my life on a 747, redeye-ing into LAX. In those pre-internet days, I think I used AAA to reserve a hotel in downtown LA that had shuttle service from the airport- an older vintage place called the Roosevelt, which didn't look as upscale back then as in this more current view-
- but between its cost and downtown being away from most of the touristy glamour of LaLaLand, I had to meet Dave and get out of there to cheaper digs. I must've been in a hurry, because on my first morning as a California tourist, I acquired a ticket for jaywalking. On a downtown thoroughfare called Hill Street.
Hey! Let's be careful out there! Especially since that show didn't even exist yet;)
Not only was this a major embarrassment and an unexpected cost at the time- I ran, within the sidewalk speed limit, to the Police Officer Station to settle my debt to society, burning one of my precious American Express Travelers Checks to pay the fine- it was an even bigger annoyance five years later when I had to track down the details of it for my bar admission, since it was, strictly speaking, not a motor vehicle conviction. I did learn from that, in the remaining days with much pedestrian activity, that drivers took the few people out on the streets very seriously, unlike New Yorkers who consider them only for the number of points they can accumulate for running them down.
We met up, I forget when and where- Dave may have been visiting family out there before this- but we spent the next several days as semi-stranded tourists. We settled on a cheap but livestock-free motel right on Hollywood Boulevard- it might have even been the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel immortalized in the later Zevon song- which served as our base. Being carless, we were dependent on tour packages, on the unremarkable but semi-reliable city bus system (Red Cars long having gone and the LA subway being far in the future), and on our feet.
Probably why I was a lot thinner then.
That's from the Pacific, taken on a very long-routed city bus trip out to the Santa Monica beach and pier. This was my first sight of that ocean, and the only sights of it in my life were that week. Venturing from our Boulevard HQ, we caught a re-showing of Star Trek The Motion Picture at the just-unnamed Grauman's Chinese, marveled at the utter dullness of the corner of Hollywood and Vine, and took in a fancy dinner in the revolving atop the glass-elevatored Hotel Bonaventure, filming site of dozens of blockbusters.
The rest of the vacay consisted of day trips, few immortalized on film. Hey, Kodak was EXPENSIVE back then! To feed my English major geekdom, we took one to the Huntington Library out in the OC, home of a bunch of Shakespeare memorabilia. Another day took us to Beautiful Downtown Burbank for the NBC studio tour; not a single star was in residence, but we did get to visit the empty Tonight Show set, then in the midst of Johnny's campaign of "WE WANT BERT!" to bring the legendary Miss America host back to the pageant. The most striking thing about it was how small the studio was.
One night, we went in search of The Funny-
(Sorry, yourself- we musta looked 21.)
No Dave or Jay or Robin that night- just an unremarkable guy whose schtick was using a megaphone. Want better service in a restaurant? ::holds up to mouth:: Some water would be nice! Want to end your date better? :::holds up to mouth:: Some sex would be nice!
We pigged out at the Farmers Market near the tar pits and went dinosaur hunting around them. But the biggest set of photo memories trip came at the Universal Studios tour.
We did. Still had to pay.
Compared to today's theme parks, it was pretty hokey and understated. Most of the "live" interactions came on just-for-tourist sets likely never used in anything, like this one which I had a connection to at the time:
Who knew my college paper had a California bureau? The rest of the "lights, camera" action was from afar- Bruce the shark's pool from Jaws, the Bates Motel on the hill from Psycho, and on one driven-by set, something we had never seen and wouldn't for months:
Bob's Country Bunker, where they play both kinds of music- country and western! They told us this would be featured in the upcoming bigscreen production of The Blues Brothers, which Dan and John had already introduced to the world on SNL and on their Briefcase album. When I saw the film that summer back in Ithaca, I remembered this moment as one of the fondest of that entire trip.
----
No Disney. No game shows. Plenty of palm trees and a totally forgotten plane ride back to JFK and bus trip back home to the basement apartment with Jim and the missing Link. I never had a reason or desire to go back for a visit, nor ever considered a career move that would take me there; California remains one of the few places to require all poachers to take their bar exam no matter how long they've been practicing elsewhere.
It's less cool than it was then; even the Tonight Show has come home to New York. And LA is no place for a....
Suburban Cowboy;)
Still, I have the fading memories and crummy pictures of....
Those Hollywood nights, in those Hollywood hills....
(It's Bob Seger. I'll try not to be depressed....)
I'd mentioned this trip before in recalling a reconnection with one of the few old friends I kept through both high school and college years. That was before I found the ancient album I've been occasionally going back to, which had a few unremarkable photos of a not-quite-week spent on a not much on the road trip to the West Coast, 41 years ago this week, for the first and only time in my life.
What the motivation was, I don't remember. The more traditional Thing was to go to Florida for spring break, but I was never much for conforming, and this was over the Christmas holiday in the middle of our junior Cornell year. We had no college friends in Southern California to visit there, and no relatives that I knew of then (and I just discovered that the only possible resident rel, my maternal grandfather, would have been paws-up in San Diego by then), so I, and after the first night we, were entirely on our own.
I had just turned 20, Dave may have been 21, but at that time, that meant absolutely nothing! Voting and draft age were 18 (and I'd just missed having to register for Jimmy Carter's new possible Selective Service by about a month), and drinking was still 19 after going up just after I turned that age. Most importantly, neither of us was 25 or had a major credit card, which was the key to being able to rent a car in the most car-centric city in the world.
We made separate travel arrangements to get there. It was my first-ever flight, and one of perhaps three roundtrips in my life on a 747, redeye-ing into LAX. In those pre-internet days, I think I used AAA to reserve a hotel in downtown LA that had shuttle service from the airport- an older vintage place called the Roosevelt, which didn't look as upscale back then as in this more current view-
- but between its cost and downtown being away from most of the touristy glamour of LaLaLand, I had to meet Dave and get out of there to cheaper digs. I must've been in a hurry, because on my first morning as a California tourist, I acquired a ticket for jaywalking. On a downtown thoroughfare called Hill Street.
Hey! Let's be careful out there! Especially since that show didn't even exist yet;)
Not only was this a major embarrassment and an unexpected cost at the time- I ran, within the sidewalk speed limit, to the Police Officer Station to settle my debt to society, burning one of my precious American Express Travelers Checks to pay the fine- it was an even bigger annoyance five years later when I had to track down the details of it for my bar admission, since it was, strictly speaking, not a motor vehicle conviction. I did learn from that, in the remaining days with much pedestrian activity, that drivers took the few people out on the streets very seriously, unlike New Yorkers who consider them only for the number of points they can accumulate for running them down.
We met up, I forget when and where- Dave may have been visiting family out there before this- but we spent the next several days as semi-stranded tourists. We settled on a cheap but livestock-free motel right on Hollywood Boulevard- it might have even been the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel immortalized in the later Zevon song- which served as our base. Being carless, we were dependent on tour packages, on the unremarkable but semi-reliable city bus system (Red Cars long having gone and the LA subway being far in the future), and on our feet.
Probably why I was a lot thinner then.
That's from the Pacific, taken on a very long-routed city bus trip out to the Santa Monica beach and pier. This was my first sight of that ocean, and the only sights of it in my life were that week. Venturing from our Boulevard HQ, we caught a re-showing of Star Trek The Motion Picture at the just-unnamed Grauman's Chinese, marveled at the utter dullness of the corner of Hollywood and Vine, and took in a fancy dinner in the revolving atop the glass-elevatored Hotel Bonaventure, filming site of dozens of blockbusters.
The rest of the vacay consisted of day trips, few immortalized on film. Hey, Kodak was EXPENSIVE back then! To feed my English major geekdom, we took one to the Huntington Library out in the OC, home of a bunch of Shakespeare memorabilia. Another day took us to Beautiful Downtown Burbank for the NBC studio tour; not a single star was in residence, but we did get to visit the empty Tonight Show set, then in the midst of Johnny's campaign of "WE WANT BERT!" to bring the legendary Miss America host back to the pageant. The most striking thing about it was how small the studio was.
One night, we went in search of The Funny-
(Sorry, yourself- we musta looked 21.)
No Dave or Jay or Robin that night- just an unremarkable guy whose schtick was using a megaphone. Want better service in a restaurant? ::holds up to mouth:: Some water would be nice! Want to end your date better? :::holds up to mouth:: Some sex would be nice!
We pigged out at the Farmers Market near the tar pits and went dinosaur hunting around them. But the biggest set of photo memories trip came at the Universal Studios tour.
We did. Still had to pay.
Compared to today's theme parks, it was pretty hokey and understated. Most of the "live" interactions came on just-for-tourist sets likely never used in anything, like this one which I had a connection to at the time:
Who knew my college paper had a California bureau? The rest of the "lights, camera" action was from afar- Bruce the shark's pool from Jaws, the Bates Motel on the hill from Psycho, and on one driven-by set, something we had never seen and wouldn't for months:
Bob's Country Bunker, where they play both kinds of music- country and western! They told us this would be featured in the upcoming bigscreen production of The Blues Brothers, which Dan and John had already introduced to the world on SNL and on their Briefcase album. When I saw the film that summer back in Ithaca, I remembered this moment as one of the fondest of that entire trip.
----
No Disney. No game shows. Plenty of palm trees and a totally forgotten plane ride back to JFK and bus trip back home to the basement apartment with Jim and the missing Link. I never had a reason or desire to go back for a visit, nor ever considered a career move that would take me there; California remains one of the few places to require all poachers to take their bar exam no matter how long they've been practicing elsewhere.
It's less cool than it was then; even the Tonight Show has come home to New York. And LA is no place for a....
Suburban Cowboy;)
Still, I have the fading memories and crummy pictures of....
Those Hollywood nights, in those Hollywood hills....
(It's Bob Seger. I'll try not to be depressed....)
