The Great Fire: Who-Dunnit

The list of suspects was long: for the GREAT FIRE "WHO-DUNNIT"

1) My tribe...the Wolf Pack
2) Mr. Blaser
3) Mr. D (that's my dad)
4)Chet Young
5) Frank Nargie
6) Charles Manson
7) Sea-Shell
8) Leeland the want-to-be hot rodder
9) Weenie Tripp
10) Johnny Gillemot
11 Tommy Blaser
12) Four boys dressed as girls
13 The Nuns at Saint Marks who lived just behind the house
14) Crazy, Anti-War, Peace-loving members from an opposing Fraternity

 and NUMBER 14 was "The Consipiracy Theory" - not a man on the grassy knoll, but...
 15) The Owner of the property.

This unsolved mystery turned out to be the greatest disaster on Harding Avenue and third biggest crime in the History of Venice CA.

On our short block on Harding avenue, we had 5 large turn-of-the-century houses with the Lennon Sisters occupying one of these grand masterpieces on the opposite end of the street and us right-smack-dab in the middle.  If this was just a story and not true life, it would have been written this way to symbolically suggest that we were in the geographical center of the universe - and for all intents and purposes WE WERE!

In the picture shown here - practically every car seen was one of ours...except for the Lincoln Continental parked in the driveway next door.  This picture was taken a couple of years ago and you can see my best friend, Tommy, and my little sister, Kjersten playing out front. At this time, however, Tommy was about 9 and loved to play with matches...he loved to burn things up -  that's why he made the list.

You can see the wonderful round turret that graced the craftsman architecture of the old house. This large magnificent home on the corner was owned by a man who lived in Santa Monica that consented to rent it to an ambitious party animal against the wishes of my my dad and the other concerned Real Estate Broker, Mr. Blaser, who lived next door to us (owner of the Lincoln Continental). Making matters worse, the tenant was a friend of my brothers named, Cameroon who decided to turn the old place into a "College Fraternity House."



No one in the neighborhood liked the idea. That's why Mr. D and Mr. Blaser made it on the list of suspects. 




Since most of us are Catholics on our block and had only learned Latin for Mass, we butchered the proper pronunciation of the three Greek Letters...        
            Φ Β Χ 
 ...which Camaroon hung on the front facade that you can see playing "peek-a-boo" behind the palm tree.

Also of note in this picture is the 56' Ford Business Coop parked out in front of the "Frat-House" that is in the beginning stages of  being transformed into the legendary Rat Killer (Shhhhhh - please don't tell Ford Motor Company where their high-performance 427, V8 motor disappeared to - Blog Post 7-4-2013 click here The legendary Rat Killer of Venice ).






 
Anyway, I wasn't about to tell my mom and I certainly wasn't going share this with the priest at confession, but one things that was pretty cool about being the house in the middle of the block was the college girls who walked by our house on their way to the so-called "Frat-House."  I was 12 - not a Zombie.  Ummmmmmm...I know this is the Sixties, but I'm pretty sure that the clothes they were wearing (or should I say lack of clothing) wasn't appropriate at any college in America, unless it was Magical Mystery Tour University.

       Weird...Right? I have no idea what the Beatles were thinking!

Speaking of the ill-clad "frat-girls" I guess some of the members of my tribe - the Wolf Pack, had lost some kind of bizarre bet in the hippie-cave in our backyard while smoking those funny-looking, hand-rolled Zig Zag cigarettes. The outcome of losing the bet was that a couple of  my brothers and several of their glassy-eyed friends had to dress up like girls and try to get into the Fraternity house. A couple of the boys with long hair looked pretty cute - my dad especially loved this - because he got to add this as evidence for his "ahhh...the little girly-men" speech he would often sing-song, invoking his Swedish inflection making fun of older boys who had long hair. I'm not going to lie, however, Chewbacca, looked like the ugliest women you every saw with his pink, poka-dotted dress and beard. The boys looked ridiculous staggering down to the end of the block in their fish net tights, mini-skirts and high heals. What was really gross was that Primo wore a bikini with oranges stuff inside the top.

Two of the hippies pretending to be girls got "hit on" Ewwwww...GROSS! ...and the rest were thrown out. 

That's why four boys ended up on the suspect list - the two that made it in and two who were jealous for getting kicked out. 

Weenie made it on the list just because she lived right next door, but really - anybody in the Tripp Family had motive.With all the wild parties and cars speeding in and out of the dirt driveway, no one on our street would blame them.

No one really knows for sure what happened to "Sea-Shell."  It was one of those, "which came first things"...the chicken or the egg?  Was she always slightly crazy or did that happened to her when her big brother, Camaroom, dropped her on her head from the second story balcony of the Fraternity house after her 15th attempt to sneak in.  Because of the head accident, she definitely makes it on the list.

Four Eyes says that someday they should make a movie based on the Fraternity called Party House or Animal House or something like that - but he was always speaking nonsense - like that is ever going to happen. 

I guess I have to tell you why some of the other people on our street made in on the list and also tell you about the night the Molotov cocktail - the poor man's grenade, smashed through the large plate glass window that sent the house up in an blazing inferno.

“Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself”

                                                          Mark Twain         

                                                       Until next time...   Happy New Year!