The Cactus Pete story, and other memories....

I promised to tell you about what I remembered about a place called Cactus Pete's when your Grandmother and Grandfather and I first came back to California after my Dad was released from the Veteran's Hospital on the East Coast during World War II. He had almost lost a leg in an air raid in France.

When my father was badly injured and sent back home from the war in Europe in 1944 we came back to California, my mother, my father and myself and started up life here once more. I was nearly 3 years old by the time we came back. We first settled in a little store front along Garvey Blvd that once housed an ice cream parlor. That's where the first Christmas I can even remember was celebrated. I can remember standing up in my crib and seeing a very small and sparkling tree filled with tinsel and little colored paper things. And my mother had made some sort of garland for it also, and had taken soap flakes or something and made snow in the windows.

Later on that year, by some sort of miracle, despite a housing shortage that was severe, the house the ice cream parlor adjoined came up for sale, and my parents bought it. I still have the iron gargoyle door knocker from the round topped Spanish style door as a memento.

It was an amazing and beautiful little house. Before our home had to be divided into two parts ( to house another family because of the housing shortage) my mother made it beautiful with her midwestern thrift and farm girl expertise, hand sewing curtains and draperies that she acquired from who knows where to fit into her little home. This is the house that the 14 foot Christmas tree came home to when the man selling it told my father that if he could get it home on that bicycle he was riding Dad could have the tree for two dollars. The ceilings in the house where vaulted ceilings. The tree was really huge and it was made glorious with lights, tinsel and some ornaments that my grandparents had sent out to us from the East for our second Christmas in California. This is the tree that Sol, my friend for my whole childhood, made a little steel shaving ball that we hung every year on our own family tree. Do you remember me telling you about where it came from and what it meant to me?

Another amazing thing about this house was that it was right across the street from a place called Cactus Pete's. There were lath houses there than seemed to stretch farther than my little legs could carry me. In the heat of the southern California summer it was cool and shady inside, and the buildings were filled with the most amazing collections of plants. I was forbidden to ever cross the street without my mother or father, so I would wait patiently for them to take me over to see the endless rows of green and strange little plants.

My father worked weekends repairing and building more lath houses, and just generally helping the owner, Pete, move plants and soils around. Everything was done by hand with wheel barrows and shovels and hand tools at that time. I vividly remember my father cutting his hand on a saw blade one day and my becoming frightened that ALL his blood would come out. I was afraid because I knew that he had barely survived the war that sent him home walking with a cane.

Cactus Pete would give my mother and I little bits of his plants and tell us how to grow them in sand or let them root in an overturned flowerpot till they sprouted little red or white roots. These little bits of plants were almost as miraculous to my mother as any seed, as they grew into plants from a fragment of a leaf. She learned a lot of growing arts for cuttings and layerings from Pete and some of the other crew who worked there. She was raised on a farm and her mother had taught her how to root hard wood cuttings from all the various favorite plants like roses, hydrangeas, and other flowering bushes around the farms. Grandmother grew elderberry and many berries from starts such as that, and so did my mother. She filled every yard she ever spent time in with over flowing beauty.

I want to tell you more about your amazing Grandmother and will share more of her stories as I remember them. We all get this love of the rooted ones from her and I will try to find pictures of some of her gardens. They are rare and black and white but they might be a delight to you.