Escape From War Torn Los Angeles

1970

As April dawned in 1970 everything was closing in on me. I was seriously between girlfriends. I had stopped going to class. so school ever again was off the table. My long time part time job was evaporating. And my foreign student visa was kaput since I had opted for the ‘get out when school is over’ option.

What did LA have to offer me anyway? OK the weather was nice. All year round. I had a crew of great friends. My mother lived there. So one meal a week was covered. I knew how to dial a phone so I could get a date for Saturday night. I wanted to stay.

Then suddenly after the killings at Kent State and the renewed eruption of violence on college campuses a new lane opened.

The PHDs who ran San Fernando Valley State College, where I was a grad student, in their wisdom declared that if students were ‘psyched out’ by the eruptions on campus they could drop out with incompletes. For me this was preferable to a raft of fails so I dropped out. Officially.

My new lane was to escape my war torn utopia in southern California and refugee back to Toronto. My older brother Avron would hire me. And my five incompletes meant I had a renewed shot at graduate school once I saved up some money.

I also had a network in Toronto. I was only seven years distant from my junior high school friends. I doubted they had matured either. I had many relatives, including my eldest sister, Dolores. She would be good for one meal a week.

So since I had to go anyway I decided to get going. I'm still a good decision maker when my back is against the wall. And I’m the son of two economic migrants so crossing borders turned me on.

In mid June I set out on my cross continent drive with my fraternity brother Fred. He was also footloose with a few months off between his electrical  engineering degree and a top secret job in Columbus, Ohio. Fred was the quintessential engineer. He was born a handyman. He could fix anything whether it was broken or not.

That was good since we were driving in my white Volvo P1800. Like me it was fragile and high maintenance. There was always something going wrong. So having Fred as my wingman was ideal. You may remember the P1800.  Roger Moore drove around England in one as The Saint in the 60s TV series.

Our first stop on the trip was in San Jose, California about 7 hours north of LA. We were going to visit a girl Fred knew. And her family.

Nice family from Holland originally.  Mother, father, Fred’s friend and her slightly older sister.  We were invited for dinner, which was nice, since our first meals on the road had been at McDonald's.  

Dinner turned out to be a rijsttafel which is a many course meal of typical dishes from the former Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia.  Ours turned out to be 26 dishes. My favourite was nasi goreng, a splendid version of fried rice created with unique spices found in Sumatra, chicken and prawns folded in and a fried egg on top. All in all a delicious meal which left me with a taste for fried rice to this day.

Sadly, I learned a few years later, that the two sisters died as drug addicted prostitutes in Haight Ashbury. The summer of love had peaked after Woodstock. Things were decidedly less loving in San Francisco by the mid 70s.

The next milestone was the crazy shaped poured concrete buildings at  the University of Oregon.  We went to see them as we wended our way north on the pacific coast. I had recently seen those same buildings in the movie Getting Straight starring Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen. It was a movie about the heavy duty campus politics of the day. It was filmed right there at the University of Oregon.

What's ironic about this is just four years later, after getting my MBA at UofT, I was working as a management consultant. I had a project to analyze high rise concrete construction in Toronto and why ours was by far the most efficient city for building tall concrete buildings in the world. For a brief moment I had some expertise on the subject and I can bend your ear even today if you'd like.

After Oregon our drive took us through Seattle, Vancouver, Jasper, Edmonton, Saskatchewan and back into the USA in North Dakota.

We were headed due east towards Minneapolis driving fast across the flat barren northern prairies. Then this happens.

I'm driving. Probably ninety to one hundred miles an hour. It was a fast highway. Nothing to see in any direction except down. I come up on a car in front of us. It's probably going eighty miles an hour. We're on a four lane road and we're both in the passing lane on our side. No problem to pass. I don't have to accelerate. I just have to steer into the right lane and I'll be by the car in seconds. So I make my move. As I'm passing the one going 80 a blue blur going like 160 passes me on my right as if I'm standing still. It passes me while it's on the shoulder. It came out of nowhere.  Scared the bejesus out of me then and still does now. I've always thought this very fast car, it looked military to me, was passing me when I pulled out. I guess it had to swerve around us and that's why it was on the shoulder. Good driving there saved my life.

In Minneapolis we stayed at the local chapter of our fraternity. For what it's worth Bob Dylan then Bobby Zimmerman had been a member before his career took off. This was probably the highlight of our trip as far as being tourists go.

Then thru Madison, Wisconsin, Ann Arbour, Michigan and into Toronto. I remember thinking the stretch of the 401 between Windsor and London  should be re-named the Trans Canada Speedway. People drove fast thru the ‘banana belt’ as I've since learned the area is called.  

When Fred and I got back to Toronto things moved pretty fast. I connected with friends and relatives. I found my own apartment near the Republic of Rathnelly neighbourhood pretty quick and started working for my brother selling fake wigs. Graduate school again, was in the future. One year to be exact.

Fred stayed for a month or so. He moved onto my cousins’ hobby farm in King City. Lots for him to do there before he headed back to LA.

So that's my transition from LA to Toronto and also from childhood to adult life. During  the next four years I earned an MBA, I married, I invested in the Toronto housing market, I moved to Ottawa and back, I travelled across Europe and Asia and embarked on my very interesting career in advertising. Holy moley.