Catalina Island – 1944 and 2022

Last Saturday, Daveen and I enjoyed a lovely day on Catalina Island, which is located off the coast of California, 26 miles West of San Pedro.  I’ll bet I was one of the few people visiting that day who had lived there in 1944, more than 75 years ago.

My dad earned his living playing the French horn.  To avoid the draft during WW II, he volunteered for the Merchant Marine Band which was headquartered on Catalina.  In 1944, when I was four years old, my mother, father, brother, and I lived there for almost a year.

I still remember our rental house – which was only a half a block from the ocean.  Mom and Dad would let me walk to the beach by myself.

I remember the day I went fishing on the pier.  Dad used yarn to tie my fishing pole to a buttonhole in my sweater.  Being four years old, and therefore almost entirely grown up, I untied the knot as soon as I left the house.

On the pier, of course, I immediately dropped the pole into the Pacific Ocean, never to be seen again.  I don’t remember how I explained that to Dad.  Nor do I remember what punishment he doled out as a result.  But he didn’t trust me with a fishing pole for many years.

While on Catalina, my mom seriously injured her back and we had to return to Los Angeles. She slept in the upstairs den for nearly a year as she recovered.

After she recovered, I remember Mom crying one morning in the bathroom.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

She said that the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had died.

I don’t have many memories from before I was ten, but the memories of our time spent on Catalina Island are some of my fondest.  And the day FDR died was one of the saddest.

Alan