by Andrew Saito
Some twenty years ago and half a continent away, my father recounted memories from his childhood in Southern California. He told me about setting plastic toy soldiers on fire in dirt pits in his backyard. He told me about the Red Car, a light rail and streetcar system that crisscrossed Los Angeles from Long Beach to Downtown to Pasadena to Santa Ana. Profusions of Western toads would make regular nocturnal visits to his
house, a block from the Los Angeles River, in a neighborhood nicknamed Frogtown. When he would go to the beach, the water was so clear he could see not only his feet, but fish. Yes, fish!
Today, all of those memories are nothing more than that. The Red Car’s last operational line discontinued service on April 8, 1961. This was part of what is now referred to as the Great American Streetcar Scandal, when General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, among other corporations, engineered the replacement of light rail and streetcars with buses, to pave the way for broad public ownership and use of automobiles and freeways. In all honesty, I did not shed many tears when GM recently teetered on the brink. We reap what we sow.
Indeed, that seems precisely the position we currently occupy. We are reaping what we sowed, what our parents and grandparents sowed, and what we continue to sow. How many of us drove here? I am flying to Kentucky for spring break. I spent winter recess in Peru. It was long flight. I do not exculpate myself from responsibility, or hypocrisy.
The toads no longer visit Frogtown, and haven’t in years. I had the fortune of seeing one or two here and there when I was a kid, but that pales in comparison with the dozens and, as rumored, hundreds of toads that overran Frogtown in the 1950s. Perhaps they were looking for quarters more comfortable than the concrete channel that replaced a once free-flowing river.
Tags: green and natural, green energy, ocean preserve, organic, southern california