SEPTEMBER 27 - ROOTS

(A lot has transpired since Sept. 25, so I'll try to get you up to date in severals belated blogs!)

One of the main reasons I picked LA as my base during my job hunt (I could have gone almost anywhere) is family history. Since Dad died and the last remaining relatives are aging themselves, I wanted to take some time to reconnect with the Sundberg roots and learn as much about their decades in this city as I can. I realized a couple of months ago that I now live within 5 miles of the graves of my father, grandfather Ernst, and great-grandfather Johan Emanuel Sundberg! The Sundberg's go back pretty far in this town by California standards - over 100 years. (At least to the 1890's, when JE uprooted the family from Omaha to come west yet again. I'm hoping to narrow down the year with some more research.)

September 27, I visited the new "Collapse" exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History (an exhibit based on UCLA prof. Jared Diamond's recent best-seller, also titled "Collapse"). The Museum is one of the oldest in the LA area right next to the LA Coliseum, where the '32 and '84 Olympic Games were held. (I have a photo of my dad and aunt as kids in front of the Olympic stadium.) It's all in the USC complex SW of downtown, in an otherwise "not a good neighborhood".

Since I was near the old stomping grounds of my father and grandparents, I decided to combine the museum trip with a visit to some of the family's former houses. The first was a short distance west of USC, the house my grandparents lived in from the 1910's through about 1940. (They were living there when the Long Beach earthquake struck in 1933.) I didn't hit me till I visited the museum that they had lived so close to USC, the Museum and the '32 Olympics. To take the photos I have, they had only to take a short neighborhood car trip (or even walk). Dad had taken Ann and me by the house back in the '80s, when it was in an all-black neighborhood. In 2005, the neighborhood is in transition yet again, with Spanish-language shops on the nearby shopping streets and many Latinos walking the neighborhood sidewalks. I was pleased to find that the current owners were taking excellent care of the property: there was a healthy rose garden in front, and the yard and house were immaculate. I think Selma and Ernst would approve! They moved out of my Dad's childhood home when Art and Helen began to attend UCLA in the early '40s so they wouldn't have so far to commute. (USC, closer by, was the expensive private school out of reach of a math teacher's budget - UCLA was the state-subsidized public university.) I'm currently trying to pin down where their UCLA-era second house was. Lois mentioned the area in passing, and I have photographs, but this is a big city!

My second house stop was to find one of the first apartment buildings my great-grandfather JE and Elsa lived in after moving out to LA in the 1890's. (They originally lived near Olivera Street, the oldest Mexican settlement, and attended Lutheran services in the first church in town, a Catholic parish.) I had only recently gotten the address from Dad's cousin Lois, so it was the first time I'd ever seen the neighborhood. It turned out to be in the "Fashion District" (the industrial and garment district SW of the big downtown skyscrapers) on a grungy street full of textile, clothing and other low-end stores. The original building at 721 E. 9th Street had obviously been razed, and some bland new concrete structure had taken its place. I snapped a photo anyway. A couple of buildings away was a 5-story apartment building that looked like it was from the right era, so it gave me an idea of what JE's family likely experienced back in the early boom era of LA before cars, before motion pictures, etc. The neighborhood was pretty urban even then, like Brooklyn. You could picture the teeming streets with horse carriages, livery wagons, and factory workers. (JE worked for a downtown factory making kitchen and bath fixtures.) The quiet streets with stand-alone, single-family homes were several neighborhoods away even then. That would come later.

The last family outpost wasn't far away, just west of downtown, almost under the Santa Monica and the Harbor freeways today. JE and Elsa eventually saved up enough to get out of the downtown and buy their own home, 1701 Burlington, now a Latino neighborhood with mixed Mexican and Salvadoran residents (to judge from local shops). Their blue, two-story Victorian home (quite respectable looking) was still in good condition, obviously well taken care of by the current owners - Mexican-American Catholics, to judge from the large cloth image of the Virgin of Guadalupe hanging in the parlor window. I snapped a few pictures and drove around the neighborhood, a quiet historical preserve of Victorian Los Angeles architecture with a few modern apartments inserted every so often. (The city is full of these quiet backwater historic districts, many gone Latino now over the years.)

I realized weeks later that the Sundberg's old family church, Angelica Lutheran, was just a couple of blocks from JE and Elsa's old house. It made sense. In that era, people were pretty much creatures of their neighborhoods, and the 30-mile auto commute was unknown. Today, the neighborhood is solidly Latino, lower middle class but busy and seemingly prosperous. Definitely not a slum. Hard-working families with their jobs, homes and churches, much like life for the hard-working Swedes and other new immigrant families in 1890's LA. (The abundance of Spanish-language churches of all denominations is one of the underground, little noticed facts of the new LA. This is a very RELIGIOUS city, Hollywood stars excepted, and the Latinos are some of the most devout.) Today, the pastor of the Iglesia Luterana Angelica is a Hispanic, the Rev. Carlos Paiva. I hope to visit some Sunday and compare notes.