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THE PLACE CALLED HOME: WHAT'S THE VALUE OF HOME?
What follows is really two stories in one. The first is about how my mother and father, children of the Depression, found each other and material prosperity after World War II, thanks to hard work, self-discipline and more than a little good luck. The story pretty much tells itself: the right people (middle-class whites) at the right place (Los Angeles and Las Vegas) at the right time (the Golden Age of US capitalism).
But interwoven in this familiar success story is a second one about the inherent contradictions of capitalism, specifically the contradiction of "use value" and "exchange value" embedded in the commodity form. Mom and Dad were deeply invested in the value of three commodities central to postwar capitalism—home, housing and place. They had an identity attachment to the use value of the four homes in which they raised their children, spent their empty-nester years and crafted their life-long identity as self-made Americans. They had a financial attachment to the exchange value of the three apartment complexes which they bought and sold in the period 1970-2001, and where thousands of tenants made their own homes. And they had an emotional attachment to the aesthetic value of the Southwest and its breathtaking landscape, the place of Dad's birth and Mom's rebirth. When I think about the life they made together, I am struck by how much of it revolved around a single question, what is the value of home?
Mom and Dad came from white middle-class families battered by the stresses and strains of the Great Depression. Dad grew up in a 1,484 square-feet, 3 bedroom, 1 bath house, eight miles west of downtown Los Angeles, into which were squeezed his mother and father, three brothers and sister. The house was built in 1924 and must have been brand-new, or nearly so, when they moved in. In the polaroid above, you can see his father seated on the living-room couch in our first childhood home, arms around me and two of my brothers (brother # 3 is tucked away in the bassinet).
"Gramps," as we boys called him, was originally from Chicago. He first set eyes on Southern California through the window of a private Pullman rail car in which he made regular cross-country trips, working first as an errand boy and then as the personal secretary for a vice-president of the Union Pacific Railroad. Gramps liked what he saw and relocated to LA. He found his calling in the retail trade, opening up a pair of specialty stores, the first of which was a millinery shop that went belly up when the ladies' hat industry collapsed, a casualty of the Depression. Next, he tried a florist shop on Wilshire Boulevard, a few blocks away from where the family lived, which blossomed into a successful enterprise.
Dad was born in 1926. He spent his teenage years dreaming of the day he would escape the overcrowded space of his youth. In dribs and drabs over the years, he let me know that my joking-smoking-drinking-singing grandfather, whom I adored, was often in trouble with the bank over delinquent mortgage payments and the like, which created an undercurrent of marital discord in his childhood home. It was clear to me whose side Dad was on in these disputes. Gramps, he told me, had once renegotiated the terms of the mortgage behind his wife's back, a piece of skullduggery that only came to light when what she thought was Jubilee Day came and went but the bank continued to demand its money. According to Dad, his mother, who was born an Earley, always thought she had come down a notch or two in marrying into the Steffen clan. If she passed along to her children her lace-curtain Irish disdain for Gramp's shanty background, Dad may have been reliving his parent's troubled marriage rather than offering a dispassionate assessment of his father.
Dad rarely spoke about his mother to any of us boys. She was a devout Catholic who died of cancer in 1948, before any of us were born. Whether Dad's silence was his way of grieving, I don't know. What I do know is that the mortgage caper was consistent with Dad's recollections of coming from meager, unhappy circumstances, despite his parents being able to send all five children's to parochial school from Grade 1 through high school. Dad was not the boastful sort, far from it, but he definitely thought of himself as a self-made man or, to use his own words, an "adequate man." This had a lot to do, I suspect, with his memories of Gramps as a good-time Charlie who allowed bills to pile up while the wife stretched the budget and kept the household on track. Dad determined early on that he would be a different kind of man. This fixation on adequacy was central to Dad's sense of manhood during all the years he was in my life. It was the gyroscope that kept him upright and moving forward; the fuel powering his will to succeed; the standard against which he measured every man's worth, especially his own; and the burden he carried to his grave.
World War II was Dad's gateway to adequate manhood. Before finishing his senior year at nearby Loyola High School, a Jesuit institution for Catholic boys, he enlisted in the Navy and served out the war as an ensign stationed stateside and never saw combat. But if Japan had not surrendered to the Allied Powers in September 1945, Dad would have taken part in Operation Downfall, the planned US invasion of the mainland. As luck would have it, military service did not bring his life to an end on some ill-fated naval vessel off the coast of Japan, but rather opened up opportunities after the war, enabling him to go to college and medical school. In 1950 the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, another Jesuit institution that was the last stop on his journey through the Catholic school system, gave the 25 year-old vet its stamp of approval. Ensign Steffen was now Doctor Steffen.
Mom's childhood home was 2,000 miles away in New Orleans. Built at the beginning of the century, it was a 1,906 square-feet, 3 bedroom, 2 bath house, around the corner from Tulane University and five miles from the French Quarter. Her father, whom my brothers and I called "Pops" but never really knew, was a salesman for DuPont, frequently on the road and away from home.
My maternal grandmother was a classic New Orleans type, straight out of central casting. She swore by the medicinal properties of bourbon and always kept a bottle near to hand, "fo' ma' angi-i-i-ina," as she explained to my brother Dan. When I visited Grandma at the Catholic nursing home where she spent her final years, she regaled me with misty stories about her family, the LeLandes, descendants of French aristocrats who, she claimed, owned magnificent sugar plantations until the Civil War turned their world upside down. I later learned that Grandma was convinced she had married a man beneath her station. She never let Pops forget it. This edgy marriage was made even more difficult by the co-dependent relationship that developed between Grandma and her youngest son, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and went off the rails after his return from the Korean War, requiring close supervision in group homes until his death.
As the eldest daughter of four children, born in 1930, Mom was called upon to serve as the family's round-the-clock conciliator and fixer, a thankless job but one she was good at, having the sweetest disposition of any human being I have ever met. She was somehow able to maintain a balance between her strong sense of filial duty and her growing desire to escape the emotional pressure cooker of home. Mom entered a nursing program right out of high school, was certified as a Registered Nurse and landed her first job at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.
There, in 1951, she met my father, a war vet and newly minted doctor who was doing his internship at Charity. Dad was her ticket out. The love birds wasted no time tying the knot and lighting out for sunny Southern California, the great unknown for Mom. While she would go back to New Orleans on brief visits to check on her mother and sick brother, and maintained close relations with her older brother in Baton Rouge and younger sister in Houston, never once did the idea of returning permanently to the city of her birth cross Mom's mind.
She had hardly unpacked her bags in LA before she was pregnant with yours truly, who came tumbling into the world in 1952, "blue as a berry," as she described me. She attributed this to her prenatal regimen of steady drinking and chain smoking. Mom was always a happy drinker—a rare breed, in my experience—but the addiction to tobacco was one she battled most of her life until late-stage Alzheimer's succeeded where the nicotine patches and all the other treatments failed, erasing her memory of the last cigarette and her yearning for the next one.
The childhood experience of cramped quarters, financial worries and domestic discontent, all of which was mediated by my parents' strict Catholic upbringing, weighed heavily on their dream of the life they would create together. They wanted a big family—four children in the space of six years is proof of that. They wanted a home as big as their budget would allow. They wanted enough money to be safe from the soul-killing economic insecurity their parents had known. And they wanted a chance to prove and improve themselves, to reinvent themselves, in a postwar America that seemed wide open to such hopeful fantasies.
Shortly after Dad returned to LA with his New Orleans wife, he began a residency in dermatology at UCLA. My 1952 birth certificate from St. Vincent Hospital in central LA indicates that they were renting an apartment not far from the university campus. But it wasn't long before they started looking for a home to buy. Mom and Dad set their sights on the suburban enclave of West Covina, which was a thirty-mile drive from UCLA, due east on Interstate 10, the transportation corridor that in years to come would take them further and further away from Dad's LA-based extended family.
Why did they choose West Covina over West LA, where Dad grew up? Why West Covina rather than one one of the other suburban enclaves that were mushrooming throughout the San Gabriel Valley? The answer, I believe, is to be found in the city's official website: "As a result of remarkable expansion during the post World War II building boom, West Covina became America's fastest growing city between 1950 and 1960, with the population increasing 1,000 per cent from less than 5,000 to more than 50,000 citizens." What better place for Dad to hang out his shingle, for Mom to undertake her crash course in motherhood and for the two of them to ride the gravy train of Southern California suburbanization?
From the beginning my parents found the real estate market irresistible. Their first purchases of property were in West Covina: the new or practically new, 3-bedroom, 2-bath house that you see in the polaroid, and an older home nearby that was converted into an office for Dad's dermatology practice. Attached to this second property was a garage rental apartment that brought the medical practice, residential property and commercial property under the umbrella of a single family enterprise. This three-legged stool would be their business model for the next seventy years. Then, in 1960, with the medical practice firmly on its feet and producing a six-figure annual income, my parents made the first of several moves up the residential escalator, selling the West Covina starter home so that they could buy "an amazing city-light view mansion," as Zillow described it in a recent listing.
This was a break-through moment for Mom and Dad, when their dreams of success took material form in a big, fancy house. Located on a 3-acre parcel in the hills of adjacent Covina, the 3,441-square-feet house had 5 bedrooms, 5 baths, an outdoor pool and a stable for horses (which remained horseless during our tenure). As befitted their transitional social status as nouveau riche, my parents drew on sweat equity and deep pockets to make this place a showcase. Dad spent whatever spare time he had doing his best imitation of a hybridized farmer-landscaper. He tilled, sculpted, planted and babied those three acres, at one point renting a tractor which almost killed him when the brakes went out on our steep driveway. His greatest folly was trying to conjure up a dichondra lawn in the backyard, which four destructive boys and a Great Dane called King beat to death.
In this expansive space, my parents exhibited much more than their newly acquired material wealth and penchant for hard physical labor. They wanted to create a domestic space of elegance, refinement and taste. Neither Mom nor Dad had any formal instruction in history, philosophy, literature, languages and the visual arts beyond what they received in high school. Now that their finances were secure, they aimed to make up for lost time by rounding out their education If their marriage were plotted as an art history textbook, the Sixties would be titled the Age of Louis XVIII, for Mom and Dad were convinced that France was the apogee of culture and the arts. They started haunting the auction houses of downtown LA in search of antique French furniture, paintings and accessories for the formal living room with its snow-white carpet (no kids allowed), which was like an oasis of Bourbon court life amid the mashup of American styles to be found elsewhere in the house.
The big house was not the only property added to their portfolio in that banner year of 1960. Mom and Dad also made their first serious forays into commercial real estate with the purchase of apartment complexes in El Monte and Monterey Park, two cities located east of downtown LA which were on the threshold of explosive demographic growth. This buying spree was spurred by their increasingly complicated financial situation, if complicated can be stretched to include a problem lots of people would die for, namely making too much money. As the income generated by the medical practice grew, Mom and Dad found themselves on another escalator going up to higher and higher tax brackets. This incentivized their search for tax write-offs. They found a gold mine of them in the IRS's accelerated depreciation schedules for rental property enacted in the 1950s and 1960s. Thanks to the investment-friendly tax code of the pre-Reagan years, my parents were able to scale up the synergies of the income-generating medical practice and the tax-saving commercial investments.
Life was good on top of the hill with the million-dollar view, or so it seemed to me between the ages of eight and eighteen, when I was living there. But one day, something went wrong. In 1970 my forty-four year old father had a full-blown, mid-life crisis. I had just started college at the University of California San Diego, far enough away from home to remain largely and happily oblivious to what was happening on the domestic front.
I'm still trying to piece the story together a half century later. The short version is that the adequate man had finally hit the wall: he announced his retirement, shut down his practice, sold the faux chateau for a big loss, packed up the family and moved the whole shebang—Mom, my brothers and assorted pets—to a desert resort at the base of Mount San Jacinto, a 90-mile drive down Interstate 10. For the next 25 years Palm Springs, home of movie stars and golf enthusiasts, would be the family's new base of operations.
Years later, my brother Mike joined Dad on a deep-sea fishing trip off the coast of Mexico. An avid angler who would loosen up as he watched the sun set and the stars come out over the Pacific Ocean, Dad reflected on his crisis and the collateral damage it caused, the latter of which included Mike, who was yanked out of high school just before his senior year and marooned in a new school where he didn't know a soul. As Mike recalls the conversation, Dad sounds like a private dick in a Mickey Spillane novel: "Well, Mike, I guess I was depressed. But you know what I did? I got myself undepressed."
Owning up to his depression could not have been easy for Dad, a proud man who had a low threshold for male weakness. But he was not yet prepared to explain why he was depressed, much less apologize for whatever hardship his depression may had caused Mike or anyone else. Ironically, after an extended period of time mulling over what his mid-life crisis meant, Dad had come to understand it as a vindication of sorts: the adequate man encountered an obstacle—depression—and overcome it. How? Through an act of sheer will. I am inclined to give Dad's breakdown a less heroic and more human spin: the inner drive that enabled him to achieve so much, leaving home, joining the Navy, becoming a physician, finding his soulmate, completing his residency, starting a private practice, providing for his family, making a ton of money, joining the investor class and capping it off with the purchase of the swankiest house on the block—this drive deserted him at just the moment when he seemed to have reached the top. I believe that Dad's fixation on adequacy sucked him dry.
My parents weathered the storm, which took a lot of what I would call stamina. The dictionary defines this as "the ability to sustain prolonged physical or mental effort." Dad had a plenty of stamina but not as much as Mom, whose prolonged physical and mental effort to keep her husband on track and the family intact while he got himself "undepressed" was something I did not pay much attention to at the time. I was too busy studying and dreaming my own dreams. Mom never said a word to me about what she had to go through. That wasn't her style. She probably figured that the family had enough drama queens with four teenaged sons and a depressed husband to contend with. As much as Dad liked to think of himself as the strong, silent type who could fix himself, the real fixer was Mom who had been quietly putting out domestic fires since she was a girl.
The Steffen Boys and Gramps, Hartley Street, West Covina, 1957. From left to right: me (the pistolero) brother Dan and brother Mike. Baby brother Mark is hidden in the bassinet. When my father went through old family albums and found this photo many years later, he drew the arrow to mark Mark's spot.