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Pomona First Federal Savings and Loan Assn..N. Garey Avenue and Center Street, 1957
Pomona First Federal Board of Directors, Feb. 24, 1956..L-R: Fred B. Palmer, Gerald V. Curran, W. R. Coon, George Streit, Paul D. Walker, J. Fred Boileau, Carl H. Lorbeer, in front of new office location on N. Garey Avenue, Pomona Calif..My mother was an insurance clerk working here at that time and she retired in 1976 at age 65

Palomares Hotel, Pomona, California, burning down, June 14, 1911

Palomares Hotel, Pomona, California, burning down, June 14, 1911..Famous Pomona landmark..Corner of Monterrey Street and N. Garey Avenue, which was replaced by present day YMCA building which was built in 1922...

"Strange Cargo" (1940)...

Joan Crawford and Clark Gable in "Strange Cargo" (1940) Classic film from MGM...

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"Dancing Lady" (1933)...

A scene from "Dancing Lady" (1933) with Joan Crawford and Fred Astaire..An early musical from MGM...

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"The Gay Divorcee" (1933)...

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in "The Gay Divorcee" (1933)...Excellent musical for RKO with the excellent dance number "The Continental"...

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Joan Crawford...(click this link for my first weblog)

Joan Crawford who started out as a song and dance lady for MGM then went into serious drama acting and then went over to Warner Brothers where she did her best work and won an Academy Award for "Mildred Pierce" in (1945)...

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The Bradbury Building...

The Bradbury Building, erected in 1893, in downtown Los Angeles, California...

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"The Gay Divorcee" ..(click this link for blog #2)

"The Gay Divorcee" (1933)...Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers....Especially excellent, extended version of "The Continental" dance routine...I never get tired of seeing it...It`s really a trip!...And it`s good even though the 1933 sound quality isn`t as good as today`s sound....

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My mother (early photo)..click this link for blog #4

I took this photo of my mother in 1953, in the Fall season, and not knowing, at the time, that you had to click on the camera button slowly, and not jerk it, in order to get a clear photo...My first experience in using a camera, at age eleven...It was my birthday present in October of that year, 1953...My mother, Mercedes, was at the age of 42, here...And the location is 418 Kenoak Drive, in Pomona, CA, our first residence in Pomona, after relocating from Iowa in 1950...In the distance, you can see the house, which was located to the left of us, the front of the house, anyway, is visible...And this house was the residence of our "neighborhood instigator" and one of my "pet peeves", Marshal Turpin, who moved in that same year, 1953, and disrupted everything, including my friendship with my very first neighborhood friend on Kenoak Drive, Terry Densley...Terry happened to be Catholic and had to attend a Catholic school in Pomona...Marshal Turpin was two years older than Terry and I, at the time...Terry and I both were age eleven...

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Tommy Rettig...

Actor Tommy Rettig of TV`s "Lassie" fame...He also had a long list of 1950`s movie credits where he performed with major film stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum...He was discovered by a talent scout while living in a New York apartment with his family...He is amongst all the other child actors who had difficulty adjusting to a normal lifestyle after being dumped and thrown aside by the movie industry after he became too old for child parts...Tommy`s was also, a rather tragic story...He also got into trouble with the law on account of drugs, etc, after leaving the spotlight of the movie industry...He was addicted to junk food, as well, which led to his untimely death in 1996...However, he did manage to become an award winning computer software programer, later in his life...

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"It`s A Gift" (1933)...click on this link for blog #5

"It`s A Gift" (1934) W. C. Fields...One of his funniest movies...Fields was born in 1880... He went into Vaudeville and then into the movies...He got a late start in the movies, the talkies, anyway...Fields died in 1946...He was known to "hit the bottle", so to speak...

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My brother-in-law and sister (early photo)...click this link for blog #6

I took this photo in 1953 of my brother-in-law and sister (Dorothy Lee and Kenneth Hadley) not too long after they both were first married...I was age eleven, at the time, and we were living at 418 Kenoak Drive in Pomona, Calif...As you can see in this early photo, across the street from our house, there sits a vacant lot after they had removed all the houses that used to be there in order to make way for the construction of the Interstate 10, San Bernardino Freeway...And, of course, after that, the noise level picked up quite considerably around there...

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My grandmother and friend (early photo)...

The year 1954, standing in front of our second residence, on the corner of Wisconsin and Alvarado Streets, is my grandmother, Mama Berenice, on the right, and next to her is a friend who came to visit with her husband...You are looking at a corner view of our house...A large palm tree, not in view, sits in the foreground...I was, most likely, taking this photo with my Kodak Brownie Camera...I was at age eleven, at the time...I never could figure out why they got rid of this wonderful old house for a track house, on the other side of Pomona, and when the track house was also located right next to the Interstate 10 Freeway...Whereas, this was a quite location and a friendlier location...In fact, at the track house, where the family moved to in April of 1957. when I was in the nineth grade at achool, in back of our house at that location was just an alley, then there was a fence, and beyond the fence was the freeway, and the noise was continuous...The track house was at 671 Elaine Street in Pomona, California...And also, there was less room for everybody in the newer house....But this was my mother and grandmother`s systematic method of squeezing all the unwanted members of our family (meaning, all my mother`s offspring,which was myself, my brother and probably, even my sister) out of the family so that there would only be my mother and my grandmother remaining...And this is exactly what had occurred to our family...And it was on my mother`s side of the family that all this happened, not my father`s side, as I never lived with my father, nor did I ever have a father, nor even a mother, for that matter...

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Haunted Camarillo State Hospital...

One of the many eery courtyards within the former Camarillo State Hospital, now a state university since 1997...What you see in the foreground is actual spirits from the departed, captured on film when this photo was taken...And Camarillo State Hospital was and still is truely haunted and possessed with demons from all the terrible things that had occurred there when it was a state hospital...

The Grandstand at the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona...

An early shot of the grandstand at the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona, California...We had a family friend, who owned horses which he would race at the track here...His name was "Jim Hackler"...He also had two daughters, Rosalind and Sandra, the later, who my niece was named after (Sandra)...Jim`s wife, Ramona, died prematurely, in the early 50`s, and left only Jim and the grandmother to care for the three children...There was also a boy, "Ladd", who was the youngest of the children...When we first moved out here from Iowa,in 1950, our house on Kenoak Drive was not ready to move into yet, so the Hacklers let us stay with them for awhile..Their house was located on North San Antonio Avenue, in Pomona...Just before my grandfather, Papa Joe, Died in 1951, he had been working, helping out at a snack booth, or eating booth, called "The Shady Nook" which was owned by his friend, at the time, Jim Hackler, who is now, also deceased...Other family members say that Papa Joe was working too hard at the L.A. County Fair at his friend`s booth and it contributed to his death at age 73.....

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Laughlin, Nevada...

Laughlin, Nevada, across the Colorado River from Bullhead City, Arizona...You can take a boat ride, free, to go back and forth across the river...Would, especially enjoy going to this place with someone I had met on the internet as a travel partner...A very scenic place to visit....

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My fourth grade class photo in Pomona...

My fourth grade class photo, Lincoln Elementary School, Pomona, California, the year 1952, and I was nine years of age here...I am pictured on the front row, second student from the right...The kid on the far left, on the front row, was a bitter enemy of mine...his name was "Casimer Wilson"...Some of the kids would gang up on me and call me names...In the third grade, the teacher, actually made up a name for me for all the other students to begin calling me it, the name she said should sound like the cross between a boy and a girl, so she made it "Ganesia", and so, just as she wanted it to be, all the other kids began calling me this name that she made up for me...What a terrible thing to do to a kid, and , especially, for it to be a teacher who instigated the whole thing...If I had parents that were supportive of me, at this time in my life, all I would have needed to do is tell my parents and they wouldhave gotten tis teacher fired for this action to humiliate a student...But, I knew it would do no good to tell my guardians, at the time, because they could not care less about me and my problems..So, I was forced to keep my torment inside me and it manifested itself in other ways..But I began thinking i must be some kind of a freak, or some mistake in life, or otherwise, all these kids would accept me, rather than treat me as someone to pick on and exclude from being their friend...I became withdrawn and developed an inferiority complex , and thought of myself as less than adequate...In my fifth grade class year at elementary school, I really began to lose it and my mental processes were becoming very complex and tangled and I became very frightened as to what was happeneing to me...I did not know what was happening to me...Up until this time, my thought processes seemed okay, but know i was confused and seemed to be preoccupied with trivial matter...i tried to make things right in mind, but the more I tried, the more scared I became, and more confused...I was very frightened and no one I could turn to..No one in my family understood my problem, or even cared for that matter...I am pretty certain now, however, that what was taking me over was "OCD", Obsessive, Compulsive, Disorder, which still affects me, somewhat, to this day..However, I have learned how to keep it somewhat under control, but with no help from anyone else but myself.....The kid in the second row in this photo, fifth person from the right, including the teacher, was also one of my tormenters....His name was "Bill Goodale"...Another kid who used to tease me a lot, but was a good friend of mine, anyway, a jewish kid, "Henry Lowy", who is pictured on the top row on the far right....

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Tommy Rettig...(click this link for blog #1)

Actor Tommy Rettig of the old TV "Lassie series" in the 1950`s which I used to watch all the time...When Tommy got too old for the part, they just sort of brushed him aside and got another younger kid, Jon Provost, who also lived on East Lincoln Avenue in Pomona, at the time...and at a time when it was fit for actors to live in Pomona, I might add...However, when Tommy Rettig was in his 20`s he often considered suicide...Then finally he found work as a software developer, but he liked to eat junk food too much and is the reason for his untimely death in 1996...Tommy was just a year older than myself...I began watching the "Lassie TV Show" in 1954 and until 1957 when Rettig was replaced by Jon Provost...

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Historical Museum Yuma Territorial Prison, Yuma, Arizona

The main gate of the Yuma Territorial Prison, Yuma, Arizona, which was an active prison in the late 1800`s and now is a museum...A lot of the original prison is gone, but there is still enough left to see...Hopefully, I will find a travel partner on the internet and we can visit this place, as well as other interesting places...

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Hotel Clark..Downtown Los Angeles...

Historical Hotel Clark, located in downtown Los Angeles, California, built in 1913...