Jesus. Venice. And Night of the Living Dead!

Venice was not just a place, but an identity - something that is inescapable part of you. Good or bad, being from Venice gave you both pride and cringe.  Though only 12, by 1969 I had been across the country and back 3 times and seen my fair share of the "Purple Mountain Majesty and Fruited Plains."  Everywhere we went, "tourist" (we called them, derogatorily), were the people living in their own towns who look at the long hair of my brothers and invariable asked if we were from Venice. I learned early on of the stigma of being from Venice that gave my brothers such pride.  It was like that part in the Bible where it talked about Jesus being from Nazareth that said, "Can anything good come for Nazareth?"

Every time someone looked at my family and asked if we were from Venice, it was as if  they were saying, "Can anything other than hippies, free love, drugs Flower Power and Jim Morrison come from Venice?" We thought that was good, but it appeared they didn't share that sentiment. They might well have said to our face, "Can anything good come from Venice?"  So I guess I understood how Jesus felt when he heard those words.

The once glamorous Canals that hadn't been filled-in, began to rot and stink and the formerly cute bungalows of Abbot Kinney's dream were now run down shacks full of pot smoking hippies, unemployed artist, and raucous parties of the flower children of the sixties.

Several weeks after I broke my arm playing football in the street, I had been outside in my cast. Although it had Andrea's treasured signature, as well as some other seventh graders, it smelled and was pretty disgusting already. I was didn't give much thought to that fact that I had only been wearing one shoe when an older couple slowed down to a stop in front of our house and gawked. The old geezer cracked his window a couple inches, as if the air on Harding avenue was unsafe to breathe, and called me over.







His wife was holding some kind of Hollywood, or Beverly Hills, or Celebrity map or something and stared at our house - eyes wide in disbelief and mouth hanging open in shock.




















With cars and boats and more broken down cars and broken down boats and creaky stairs and hippie brothers hanging out on the porch, the couple from Nebraska carefully whispered through the cracked window asking if my house was a hippie commune?



I said, "No, I live here!"

"With your Parents?" they asked, incredulously.

"Yeah!" I said.

"Poor parents" the man muttered.

"Where's your other shoe" the lady asked.

"What other shoe? I asked

"The one your missing" she snarled, thinking I was being a disrespectful smart-aleck.

I informed her, "I'm not missing one."

"Then why are you only wearing one shoe?" her husband barked at me as he took over.

"Oh, this old thing isn't my shoe. I came outside barefooted and found this decroded thing in the flowerbed."

I looked inside the window to see if our house was on the tourist map as a place of interest for being a hippie commune as they rolled up the window and sped away - only to screech to a halt in front of the Lennon Sister's home two houses up the street. I ran down the street towards them in my older brother's size 11 shoe and frightened the poor couple like I was one of the dead bodies in "Night of the Living Dead."

I can't really say with certainty whether our house was on  that map or not, but certainly this couple went back to where they came from telling their neighbors about what they saw on Harding Avenue and wondering if anything good could come from Venice?"






Pshaw... "fer sure" We have the Famous Lennon Sisters across the street and right behind us was Cheryl Arnold who was Miss Venice, and Miss Santa Monica, and Miss LA...SO TAKE THAT... tourist!

Ha! Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

With all that said, I guess the thing I want to share next with the world is that fact that my Boy Scout Troop from Venice - Troop 32, had been in steep decline by the time I had been recruited by my Eagle Scout brother and was not the best thing Venice exported: something me and my fellow hoodlum scouts took great pride in.

We raided camporees at night, causing havoc on Troop 34, cutting the ropes on tents and making life as miserable as we could at Camp Slauson in Malibu in the Santa Monica mountains.

Here is a picture of our (converted moving truck) i.e. Troop 32 Boy Scout Truck - that was a not a whole lot more than "cage wresting" on wheels.

You can take the Boy Scouts out of Venice, but you cant' take the Venice out of Troop 32!

Next time: National Jamboree and "Diarrhea 'till Easters"