ROBERT GARDNER -- The verdict
The first line of the song “Summertime” goes as follows: “Summertime, and
the living is easy.”
Well, if working seven 10-hour days a week is easy, I’m glad I didn’t
live where the living was hard during summertime.
When I was a youngster, I lived in Balboa when that part of our city was
a summer resort. During the summer, everyone worked like dogs to make
enough money to carry them through the rest of the year. It was seven
10-hour days a week for three months, then hibernation.
The rest of the town didn’t differentiate between summer and the rest of
the year.
In Newport Beach, the fishermen fished all year, selling their catch to
John Horman, who put the fish in ice-filled tubs and sent them to Los
Angeles on the Pacific Electric for sale at the Grand Central Market.
Balboa Island was a mud flat that disappeared entirely at high tide,
summer or winter.
Corona del Mar, or “The Palisades” as we then called it, was a few square
miles of unsold lots over which Irvine Ranch cattle grazed, and those
cattle didn’t care much about the seasons. But in Balboa, it was summer,
and the place shut down.
The weather was usually good during the summer, which was what brought so
many people down here, but we natives knew a secret.
It was the month after “summer” that was really the best. September meant
warm days, warm water, guaranteed -- and no crowds.
When I became a judge and took the first vacation in my life, of course I
took the month of September, and what happened? It rained every day. If
you live on some glamorous South Pacific island, there are two seasons --
the wet season and the dry season.
The latter is something of a misnomer. During the dry season, it just
doesn’t rain as much as it does during the wet season -- 50 inches during
the wet season, 20 inches during the dry. That’s what it felt like. I was
living on the island at the time and spent the whole month in Buster
Creely’s bookstore. So much for September.
After that experience, I took my vacation during the summer like everyone
else.
Going back to the song “Summertime,” the verse concludes, “and your Ma is
good-looking.” What is she the rest of the year -- ugly? It must be tough
to have an ugly mother, even if she’s only ugly nine months out of the
year.
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