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New Torres at guitar salon
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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 RE: New Torres at guitar salon (in reply to estebanana)
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Last time I was in San Bernardino was some time in the 1980s. I used to go to Norton Air Force Base regularly on business.
One time I got to the hotel, unpacked and noticed I had failed to bring anything to read. Hopped in the rent-a-car, went in search. After checking a half dozen places, the best I could come up with was a Spanish language edition of Mad Magazine. (Broad, lowbrow satire in comic book format.)
Another time I had spent a day at Norton on a "black" project. The documents I brought qualified for an armed guard. We drove in my car from Santa Barbara, with another car trailing us.
On the way back, having dropped off the papers in the vault at Norton after the meeting, we stopped at the San Bernardino Harley Davidson dealer to buy a battery for my bike. To my surprise, the guy behind the parts counter was wearing his San Bernardino Hell's Angels colors.
For those who may not know, Hell's Angels are a notoriously violent criminal motorcycle gang. In those days the San Bernardino chapter was second only to the founding chapter in Oakland for its evil reputation.
We were dressed in suits and ties. Seeing our apparel, the gangster began to give us some lip. I said, "Just bring us the battery. We didn't come in here to listen to your f***ing bullsh1t."
Briefly startled, the parts guy was still alert enough to take in my companion's buzz haircut, cheap blue suit, shiny black shoes, level stare and the pistol bulge under his coat. Without a further word he fetched the battery and said, "Anything else I can do for you, sir?"
When we got back to the car my companion said, "It's probably not a good idea to push it with those guys."
"Yeah, sorry. It was a frustrating day at work. If you want I'll buy you a bistec ranchero at the Familia Diaz Restaurant in Santa Paula on the way back."
"I like the chile verde."
"Done."
A good friend--flamenco guitar playing buddy--accompanied me on a business trip to San Bernardino. He usually ran 8 or 10 miles a day. He went out in the morning, came down with a sore throat and bronchitis from the air pollution.
At one point I was living half the time in Austin, half the time in Palo Alto, California. I decided to bring my car from Austin to California. My 16-year old son accompanied me for a visit to California. He had a buddy in school who had lived in Redondo Beach. From his buddy he had heard about the beach, surfing, California girls.
I played a trick on my son, entering the sprawling Los Angeles urban area from the high desert, driving through San Bernardino, Ontario, etc. on Interstate 10.
My son looked right and left, surveying the utterly ravaged landscape, abandoned steel mills, slums and choking smog. "So this is L.A.?" he asked.
"Suburbs," I replied.
He brightened up a bit when we checked into the Portofino Inn on the Pacific Ocean shore in Redondo Beach. The next day he was positively chuffed when we walked up the beach as far as Manhattan Beach, surveying acres and acres of beautiful teenagers in tiny bikinis.
I would kind of like to play that Torres myself. The trebles sound more like a mezzo soprano than a coloratura, or even a high contralto. Reminded me a little of Brune's Barbero. I bet it would bark if you pushed it.
RNJ
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Jan. 24 2015 16:08:14
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estebanana
Posts: 9352
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: New Torres at guitar salon (in reply to Leñador)
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Lenny and Richard I highly recommend City of Quartz, it will give you a picture od California you may not know. And since you Richard had many visits to Norton AFB it will have meaning for you, I think. And you Jungle Boat Lenny, you may find it interesting too, it explains how your Wild West parking lot was settled by Mexican ranchers, Spaniards and Mormans and how the orange and Kaiser steel industries came to thrive in combination with SB being the home base for the Santa Fe railway main maintenance yard, Norton AFB which was the main SAC air command base and how there was a light rail system that connected SB to Downtown LA to all the beach cities down the coast.
The oranges became to expensive to grow, the steel industry went off shore, the Air Force pulled out, then all the people who could not make it in LA moved inland because it was easier to get on welfare in SB county, and then SB county became the meth capital of the whole US, per capita.
Compound that with increased gang activity and underscore it with what happened after WWII- A consortium of tire and oil companies bought up all the independent light rail companies that linked So California and scuttled them in order to sell the land to the State of CA to create the LA freeway system.
Now contrast that with Japan, for example, a country that was trashed to it's core after WII, a country that has an end to end bullet train system, functioning nationalized health care and intact farm to market roads. The rubber and oil companies took So. CA and dumped it into the sewer. It was still a garden when I was a young child and the smog was only beginning to encroach on the bowl shaped basin formed by the San Bernardino Mts. I remember the first smog alerts and how my lungs would ache if I went to the pool, some days I had to be kept home. (However nothing like what I see on the news in Beijing today.)
San Bernardino was still a garden when I was a little boy in 1970, one could walk or ride a bike to the remnants of the orange groves in East Highland. The gaming casinos on the Serrano Indian reservation had not been built yet, and the abandoned orange packing factories were open to be explored. Cases of collectable packing labels could be found now and then. The last high cube boxcars with the big orange or yellow & blue Santa Fe crosses were left waiting in long spurs off the main tracks, the last vestiges of the orange boom. We played on the boxcars and once when a train derailed and the box cars and hoppers full of some kind of ore spilled all over the road bed we watched from our perches on our banana seat bikes. A real prison chain gang arrived on the scene in two old school busses outfitted with heavy wire mesh over the windows. The pit boss spit, opened the back of the bus and yelled at the men inside. We had never heard such language and I think our eyes popped out. Prison boss screamed at the scared and lethargic men on the bus: "Ok you lousy bastards, cut loose the cocks and pull up your socks it's time to work!"
I think I was about 9 years old. My best buddy Kevin, still my friend today, and I watched them shovel gravel back onto the road bed and move broken boxes of crushed oranges. We looked for a while and decided to move on further into the groves to a hidden pond where we caught bluegill and forgot about prisoners as we got excited about our shiny little catches.
Down off Foothill Blvd. in the south part of town there was a famous tittie bar called the Boobie Trap and further down the road there a was a Country Western bar called The Silver Spur. Further our toward Fontana you would find Hells Angles bars where the cops would not go. and in that area you knew it was where Frank Zappa and Eddie Van Halen lived! And as 9 year olds we never went into the Spur or the Boobie Trap, but we overheard the women in our families talk about how a husband or boyfriend got drunk and beat up at the Spur or was being a sleaze over at the Booby Trap.
And on the South East side of town there was a piece of Spanish history called an "asistencia" - An overnight stop on the old Spanish Mission road that the good history minded San Bernadinians that did not frequent tittie bars formed a society to preserve. I visited the asistencia as a school boy to learn out my towns Spanish settlement heritage. While at the North end of town forced up against the foot hills was the last band of Serrano Indians, refugees from the Spanish mission days.
It was a strange and wonderful place to grow up. History was pock marked on the the face of the town. And you could read it everywhere, if the town really was a face I've only described the corner of the mouth so far. And much of the history and nostalgia was gone for me last time I was there. It truly broke my heart to see it and it make sense to me because I loved the romance of the town as a kid. A friend of mine told me the definition of a cynic: A cynic is just a romantic with a broken heart.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Jan. 26 2015 12:23:28
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: New Torres at guitar salon (in reply to estebanana)
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Stephen, your description of San Bernardino when you were growing up is the finest piece of writing I have seen on the Foro, bar none. It is a nostalgic, bittersweet memoir, sort of like a 16th century Persian miniature painting in prose. It reads as only one who knew its history, experienced it, and got under the skin of that part of California at the time could have written it. It had echos of John Steinbeck's writing about the life and characters around Salinas and Monterrey.
I love Steinbeck's writing, including his most well-known book "Cannery Row." But my favorite is "Log from the Sea of Cortez," his chronicle of the six-week voyage circumnavigating the Sea of Cortez, made in 1940 with his marine biologist friend Ed Ricketts (who appears as "Doc" in "Cannery Row"). Ricketts was collecting marine specimens to sell to aquariums and laboratories, and Steinbeck wrote a log-cum-chronicle of the voyage, interspersed with philosophical musings. It meant more than just a good read to me, as much of my youth was spent traveling to and within Mexico, particularly along the the Sea of Cortez, from the upper end (Puerto Penasco) to Mazatlan and points in between. Especially interesting was Tiburon Island, last home and refuge of the Seri Indians.
But I digress. I sense a Steinbeckian work on San Bernardino within you just waiting to bloom with a flourish. So when the time is ripe, put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and let the muse take over.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Jan. 26 2015 13:50:30
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