‘You Can Go Home Again’
By Ann Salisbury/Special to The Malibu Times
Part II of Malibu Memories
I left Malibu the year I got my first bicycle — a brilliant blue Schwinn with training wheels that arrived on Christmas morning and tottered unsteadily as I gathered all the speed a 6-year-old could muster along the Colony road.
This time, I was on a mountain bike joined by my son, Derek, as I rode back into the Colony looking for No. 98, the first home I remember, and any evidence that might indicate whether the promise that Malibu planted within my soul almost 50 years ago still remains.
But at No. 98, our worn and friendly house is gone! In its place is an architectural confection of marigold yellow and reflected light. Dinner guests are entering a small entryway through an open door.
“I used to live here years ago,” I blurt out to a fashionably dressed woman.
“Isn’t that nice!” she responds.
She doesn’t see what I do: A white clapboard home whose narrow, green hallway passed four bedrooms before reaching a grand living room and dining salon facing the sea. Streetside, day lilies encircled a brick courtyard. An unsteady wooden staircase leads to a musty garret over the garage. And, like other residences, it had a stuffy, glass teahouse where my parents and their friends sipped beverages that, of course, were not tea.
But it was there that people of Malibu could see the horizon.
Individualistic and independent, they spoke, through example, to the character and the promise of this place where the spirit could soar.
Billie and Rick Ulrick, who lived at Gull’s Way, were frequent visitors at No. 98. Billie, with her fiery red hair and flamboyant, wide-brimmed, fur-trimmed hats. Billie was there giving me a push on Christmas Day as I lurched forward on my bike.
In our vast living room, white-haired ladies of the Malibu First Presbyterian Church sewing circle also met, embroidery in hand as they nibbled butter cookies and sipped real tea.
A “witch’s house” across a lot of cold dunes and prickly stickers dominated the distance between our houses. We didn’t know who lived there. But, attached to its pointed roof were two 10-foot metal towers — like smokestacks — casting angry shadows.
Jean Minthorne lived in the next house. Jean, “juke box king,” who either owned Seeburg Jukeboxes or had the West Coast distributorship. Every morning he and his wife, Dolores, would lie in the burning sand, low under the wind, sipping orange juice and vodka and absorbing the sun’s slanting rays.
Dolores, with her blue eyes, curly, jet black hair and bright orange nails, was a glamorous fairy princess to me, with dresses and shoes filling a closet larger than my bedroom. And a great round bed. Jean was a dashing Ashley Wilkes, Scarlett O’Hara’s true love from “Gone With the Wind.”
The Minthornes could not have children. So Jean doted on me. For Christmas he gave me a golden Hamilton watch, inscribed with my name. And for my 1952 birthday, delivered to our living room, a magnificent round jukebox. Colored lights revolved behind curved bubble glass set between two red panels, topped with a luminous yellow dome. When you pressed one button, Nat King Cole sang “Pretend.”
Another choice gave you Marlene Dietrich singing “Lily Marlene,” and yet another, “Mood Indigo.”
On hot days, we walked to Malibu Beach where white and purple hermit crab shells spilled into tidepools like beads from a broken necklace. Low tide uncovered gleaming abalones, and tide pools brimmed with slimy slugs that squirted purple ink. We were careful to avoid stepping on the scores of spiny, purple urchins.
These were the days when only a few brave surfers rode the waves, before the ’60s, before the Beach Boys … and hills were green with brush, and a lone, white Serra Retreat stood out there, in solitude.
Today, there is a castle at the crestline. The hermit crabs shells, urchins and abalone have disappeared, but there are some nice surprises, too. Herons, egrets, and pelicans still sit on uprooted trees in the moss-green lagoon.
And dolphins arc in the sea. I never saw dolphins as a child.
Eventually, my father’s work took him to downtown’s Cedars of Lebanon Hospital.
We moved, and I learned that the Minthornes also had left the strand. Dolores, I learned, had become very sad. She had fallen in love with an ice skater and left Jean, only to be abandoned herself several months later. Jean moved to Arizona. The last thing I remember of Delores is that I could not see her. Mama went alone. Dolores was “resting in a hospital.”
Their house also is gone.
As are many of the people who — despite constrained political leanings of the day — helped establish a progressive mood: George and Eleanor Howard, who shared their world travel adventures with friends who ventured to their hillside villa; Vicky and Rick Osborne, a test pilot who died on the job; and Rodney McQuarry, the beloved first pastor of the Malibu Presbyterian Church.
One seaside cottage remains virtually untouched. A tiny, two-bedroom bungalow that once belonged to Halley Riley, a patient of my father. This year, the mink coat she left my mother went, in tatters, to Goodwill. But it is to that little house that I now return with Derek.
We plunge into the ocean on our yellow kayak. The effervescent spray and rolling waves refresh and comfort, like a cradle.
An excitement bubbles within. But is this valid evidence that Malibu’s original spirit continues on? Or born merely from my memories?
Amid a school of dolphins, we paddle into kelp beds. Two naughty sea lions regard us curiously, impudence in their eyes. Derek jumps from our little boat and body surfs to shore. He digs sand crabs and puts them down my back. He builds sand castles taller than any I could imagine.
As I watch my son, away from the heated haze and traffic near our city home, I realize he is creating his own special memories of Malibu and experiencing the same free feelings I knew a generation ago.
I walk through the Ralphs shopping center and people I have never met say “Hello!” and smile.
I smell the air, inhaling the sagebrush, and I know that the spirit and promise of Malibu has grown new roots.
And with apologies to Thomas Wolfe, I now believe “You Can Go Home Again.”
Ann Salisbury is a freelance writer who can be reached at loislane@headlines.org.