Aunt Alice and author, 1930. Every downtown corner and sidewalk clotted with sailors, and bars sprung up around the plaza, patrolled by MPs. Aunt Alice insisted I carry a hatpin with me to ward off advances from roustabout males.

My grandmother accomplished a lot in her 97 years. But to my mind, her prime achievement was blazing a trail to San Diego. Early in the last century, this young widow packed up her two sons and a few belongings and hopped the transcontinental train from New Jersey. She didn’t need to. She was well supported— pampered, even — by her eastern-shore family. But if there was one thing Grandmother hated, it was sitting still. And there were those cousins in San Diego who raved about this mini-Eden’s glories.

Grace Wallraven Lawrence (author's grandmother), 1895. Grandmother instituted her Sunday salons, glorified afternoon-tea parties, to which she invited the Marstons, the Klaubers, and Colonel Fletcher and kin.

The first thing she did upon her arrival was to purchase a little apartment building near Balboa Park, which she christened “The Wallraven,” after a favored family name. The second thing she did was to embellish its rooms, and the third, to carve out a garden around the building’s feet.

Once the Wallraven was occupied by her tenants of choice, Grandmother instituted her Sunday salons, glorified afternoon-tea parties, to which she invited her newly adopted and favorite neighbors, among them the Marstons, the Klaubers, and Colonel Fletcher and kin. Some of these founders-to-be took part in the salon’s entertainments — recitations, musicals, plays — often offered in the garden.

Author at 16. I was 17, he was 20. The wedding was held at my old school’s parish church, Sacred Heart. I wore something white, bought quickly at Lerner’s on Broadway. He was in uniform.

Grandmother bloomed among her good company and creations. But a few years on, an old beau from back East appeared at her door. This was the grandfather I knew, a stately fellow with a white mustache. In no time, the two sons were dispatched back to the family, while Grandfather took his bride on a worldwide voyage, a voyage that lasted through the years they were to share.

My dad never recovered from having been thieved of San Diego, so as soon as he made a bride of my Brooklyn-born mother, he whisked her back. Their first home was a wood-beamed stucco bungalow whose veranda looked out on his cherished childhood locus, Balboa Park.

After Grandfather died, Grandmother trekked back to San Diego every year. She would arrive at the train station and, before disembarking, stand at the top step, surveying the scene before her the way a queen glances over her minions. We’d then transport her to the penthouse at the Park Manor or, if she this time hankered for sea and sand, a suite of rooms at La Jolla’s La Valencia. By then I was old enough for memory to take fragile roost, and the image that towers is of umbrellas. The umbrellas of La Valencia’s cool-tiled patio; the umbrellas beyond the Del’s Crown Room, planted like jumbo daisies in the silvery sand; the umbrellas tiered down the luncheon gardens at Balboa Park’s Del Prado; the orange-and-black beach umbrellas set in the sands of Old Mission, where we sometimes picnicked, the womenfolk perched on canvas chairs,. clutching their hats against the sea gusts, and, if emboldened, removing their shoes and silk hose to tiptoe into the tide’s fringe, their skirts hitched daintily about their knees.

During these extended visits, Grandmother renewed her friendships with her did neighbors and, to my dad’s chagrin, insisted we share their social milieu. (Dad wasn’t

big on formality. A lowly salesman at Thearle’s Music Store, he was happy with our barefoot, sand-on-the-floor Sunday drives in the flivver.)

In memory, I, a toddler, am seated on old George Marston’s lap, shielded from the tinkle of glasses, the grownups’ gossipy lingo. The white-bearded old man is so kind and doting I decide he is God. On another evening, Laurence Klauber tells me all about snakes, while in a corner, Colonel Fletcher booms on about the virtues of real estate. Sometimes, on sunny afternoons, Grandmother dragoons me to the Rowing Club, where I am given canoeing lessons.

The Homefront

Girlfriend Patsy and I were planted where we were usually planted on Saturday afternoons, the State Theater’s matinee, at 48th and El Cajon, sharing popcorn. Suddenly the picture shimmied, clicked, and went dark. The house lights blinked on, and while we craned our necks, the manager marched to the front of the rows. “We’ve just gotten the news,” he announced, “that Pearl Harbor has been bombed by the Japanese.” He mopped his brow with a napkin. “We’re sure you all want to go home and be with your families and stay by your radios.” No one moved. The manager held out his arms, looking helpless. “We’re shutting down,” he said. “Please go home.” And then, almost inaudibly, “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”

In the living room, I found Aunt Alice huddled beside the big Philco. I shook her shoulder. What did it mean? I demanded. Why did it happen? Were people hurt, killed? How far away was Pearl Harbor? Were we in danger? But Aunt Alice only shushed me away.

I knew nothing of war, except for those photos in the family album of my mother’s brother, so cocky in his camp uniform, killed months later in France, and how Mother, whenever she caught the notes of “Taps,” would dissolve into tears. And now Mother was dead too.

Here, memory scrambles, as events scrambled then. Was it that first night, after Roosevelt’s dire address — the “Day of Infamy” proclamation — that we were commanded to douse every light because enemy bombers might be headed our way, and in the darkness that fell over the neighborhood, searchlights crisscrossed the sky, and the neighbors, huddled on their porches, kept pointing up to what they were sure was an enemy plane? And was it that night that my dad declaimed that we’d beat back that puny nation in less than a week? And was it the next day, or the next week, that we found our skies filled with huge balloons, their aim to foil enemy bombers, and that suddenly the harbor was bristling with ships?

But no bombers found their way here, and we relit our lamps, and the radio news became the focus. I was still 14, and my classmates still gossiped and crooned over boys, and there was still homework to do and football teams to cheer on, and the return of Saturday matinees. No one we knew was of an age to enter battle, and the boys at Hoover High School — though they’d taken to a swagger, bragging about how they wished they could, right this minute, go join the heroes—were sure the war would be past by the time high school was over.

A few months on, Aunt Alice gussied up her house-dresses and offered herself as a hostess at the USO, located at the downtown Elk’s Club. Three or four nights a week her black shoes marched her to the bus line that led to a downtown dance hall/canteen, where she manned the coffee-and-doughnut tables and lent an ear to sailors and Marines. I used her absence to sneak out on smooching dates or to invite my girlfriends over to taste-test Dad’s liquor cabinet. It was the apricot brandy that did me in. Aunt Alice came home one night to find me curled around the toilet. “Young lady,” she announced, “you are not to be trusted out of my sight.”

The minute I was tugged into the USO dance hall, it came to me that this enforcement might not be painful. A 12-piece band, in imitation of Glenn Miller-Tommy Dorsey-Artie Shaw-Harry James, blared over swaying and jitterbugging couples. Young men lined up at the coffee tables, and in no time at all, I was the center of such male attention as no dreams could have held.

The increasing shortages of meat, butter, foodstuffs were now limited to what our ration cards would allow. Neighbors dug up their flowerbeds and planted “victory gardens.” For some reason lost to me, Aunt Alice saved every sliver and scrap of tinfoil, molding them into silvery balls that lined up like planets on the pantry shelves. Along the waterfront and Pacific Highway, defense plants burgeoned— Consolidated Aircraft, Ryan Aeronautics. Every downtown corner and sidewalk clotted with sailors, and bars sprung up around the plaza, patrolled by MPs. Aunt Alice insisted I carry a hatpin with me to ward off advances from roustabout males.

We still marched to school every day, bobby-soxed and saddle-shoed and toting tin lunchboxes. We still tried out for cheerleading and gaggled around our football heroes. We still pored over movie magazines and with dime-store cosmetics tried to look like Carole Lombard, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow. And we came home to the newspaper and radio reports of battles and bombings, of defeats and courage and death. My dad stopped pro-claiming we’d beat back Japan “any day now”; he’d become an expert on battle tactics instead.

No Room at the Inn

I was 17, he was 20. The wedding was held at my old school’s parish church, Sacred Heart. I wore something white, bought quickly at Lerner’s on Broadway. He was in uniform. The rest of the assemblage consisted of Father O’Byrne, my dad, and his paramour of the moment. Three months later, my husband shipped out to the South Pacific.

It was 1944, and the city was teeming with service wives and families and defense-plant workers crammed into rented rooms, trailers, garages... After a three-day honeymoon at the Del Mar Inn (my dad’s wedding gift), along the beach on 101, where we lived on graham crackers and peanuts, we tracked down a motel room in the Logan Heights barrio. The place held a tiny kitchen, a lumpy bed, a broken chair, a bureau, and a toilet Inside, roaches scampered across the counters, and the water taps produced oozes of rust Beyond the walls, young men of color, trying to act tough, roved and battled, sirens wailed, and an occasional ambulance rescued a battered body. Paul, stationed at Camp Pendleton, was given leave three or four nights a week to join me. We ate our poor rations flopped onto the bed, listened to songs on the radio, and tried not to think about our diminishing days together. A week before he left, I knew I was pregnant.

On the day of departure, the transport carrier docked in the harbor at the foot of Broadway. Somehow, Paul had managed to sneak away from the troops massed at the harbor, for a last good-bye. When he pulled away, I stumbled after him until his form dissolved into the crowds.

That night, I wedged the chair up against the motel-room door and buried my head in the beds pillow. Around midnight, a siren wailed nearby, then stopped beyond my window. I watched a woman being carried from the room next to mine, bloodied. The next morning, I tucked the paper’s “Rooms for Rent” section under my arm and set out in search of a less threatened home.

I got a room in Hillcrest, near Fifth and Robinson, the bedroom of a small apartment I was to share with Ginnie, the wife of an overseas sailor. She was older, reeked of perfume, and chewed gum. When I tried to open my bedroom door that first night, I found it locked, while beyond it rose giggles and the clink of glasses and drunken male voices. The next morning, she unlocked me and, waving her hand over empty glasses, garments, and ashtrays, remarked that since I was underage and pregnant, it was best that I stay locked away when she felt like a party. I assured her that I wouldn’t budge from my quarters but that neither would I be kept imprisoned.

A few nights later, I was propped in my bed, reading, when there came a fumbling and banging at my room’s door and with it a voice shouting, “Come on out, girlie, come to the party” I grabbed a chair and shoved it against the door. After a few more thuds, I heard Ginnie admonishing, “Come on, leave her alone. She’s just a kid, and preggies besides.” The next day I demanded the bedroom key, so I could lock myself in from my own side.

During the day, I had the apartment to myself, after Ginnie limped off to her job at a downtown cafe. At first, I busied myself cleaning up the messes she and her celebrants left, then padded around the neighborhood and into the nearby park. Nights, in my room, I wrote great sheaves of letters to Paul, his own, smudged and black-lined by the censors, shrined beside me. One day, at a dime store, I bought a tiny turtle for company. Setting him into a pebbled bowl, I watched his antics for hours.

Over a Coke in a drugstore one afternoon, I struck up a conversation with the young woman beside me. Her husband was overseas too, she told me, and to keep from going crazy, she’d taken a job at Consolidated Vultee, the defense plant above the harbor. “You should apply ’ she said. “It makes you feel pretty good, you know, helping the war effort.”

Two weeks later, I was on the line, a steel rivet-bucker, outweighing me by a stone, clutched in my fists. Opposite me, hidden by a sheet of thin steel, my partner shoved metal pins through the seams of this bomber-to-be, which, with my bucker, I was supposed to flatten into a nice, round seal. I did my best, deaf to the roar and clatter from every direction. And every hour or so, the foreman would march through our aisle, stopping to examine my craft. He’d pull his pliers from his work apron, yank my rivets from where they were planted, and fling them onto the floor. My rivets were failures. Instead of the round shapes they were supposed to form into, mine ended up in the shape of baby booties, which I considered cute, given my secret condition. I scooped up the rejects at my feet and poured them into my lunchbox. Back in my rented room, I lined them up on the bureau. Two weeks on I was fired, my Judas riveter having ratted my pregnancy to the foreman.

Whenever I got news of a war plane’s failure, ditched into the sea or nose-dived into some foreign field, I stopped up my ears, wondering if a batch of my rivets had somehow gone undetected.

Six months later, on my way to the Naval Hospital to give birth to my son, I carried in my pocket a bootie-shaped rivet, for luck.