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| Excerpt from STORMY WEATHER |
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After grabbing a burger at Teddy's, I headed west on
Third Street, all the while pushing buttons on the radio
of my department-issued Chevy, hoping for a sign. Everyone
has one—the day the tree goes up in Rockefeller Center,
receiving the Needless Markup catalog in the mail, or hearing
a favorite song that unequivocally signals, "'Tis the season."
In my family it was Nat King Cole's recording of "The Christmas
Song." As I cruised through Hancock Park, which boasted
one of L.A.'s more extensive collections of mansions, I
remembered the stories my parents told me about how Nat
and Maria Cole and their kids had moved there in the late
forties—aided and abetted, I would imagine, by the U.S.
Supreme Court's ruling that struck down California's restrictive
housing covenants—only to have a cross burned into their
lawn, allegedly by the local "protective association," in
a perverted version of the neighborhood Welcome Wagon. And
although the incident was before my time, the legacy of
the outrage bubbled to the surface every Christmas when
Nat's version of the classic Mel Torme song was played at
the Nut House, sort of a Justice Family Yuletide-cum-civil
rights anthem.
I stopped at a corner to watch an immaculately attired Korean
man emerge from his gated property to walk his Labrador
retrievers across the intersection. I wondered how Nat's
white-collared, rednecked "neighbors" felt when more undesirables—like
this man or even the city's black mayor—followed in the
Cole family's footsteps. By then they'd probably pulled
up stakes and moved somewhere else, San Marino or behind
Orange County's invisible curtain, circling their wagons
against the encroaching yellow, black, and brown hordes.
If you would like to read more of STORMY WEATHER check it
out in the Books
page. Read the words to "The
Christmas Song." See the house
where Nat and Maria Cole lived in Hancock Park. |
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