Health & Fitness
Patch Blog: Remembering a Fallen Friend on Memorial Day 2012
Old friends and great times with jazz and trains!
My childhood home at 1416 Wilson in San Marino, was built in the 1890’s. The Wilfred Le Sage house next door, 1418 Wilson, was built in 1907. Lawrence LeSage was my age and we grew up together. Lawrence went to St. Therese, the Catholic school down on Alhambra Road near Granada.
Behind the Le Sage home was a horse barn. The ground floor was just dirt. There, right in the middle, was a fine two-wheel horse buggy with big, brass headlights. Hanging on the walls were harnesses, reins, blinders, horse collars, and all sorts of stuff for horses. All of it was covered with 20 years of dust.
Interestingly, we kids never paid any attention to all this old stuff. What interested us was the second story of this enormous barn, a room with an equally enormous flat floor.
Find out what's happening in San Marinowith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Just right for—electric trains! Hurrah!!
And did we ever have the trains. Between the two of us, we accumulated hundreds of feet of “O” size track, locomotives, cars, bridges, curved track, transformers, rail switches, and everything! They ran across the room and around it several times.
Find out what's happening in San Marinowith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Lawrence had a complete collection of “HO” gauge track, locomotives, switches, and all that we needed. The “HO” gauge is a larger format than “O” gauge, though the style is still the same three-rail style track. The center rail is for the electricity.
We spent hours and days running trains, rerouting tracks, having collisions, train wrecks, and races.
But that isn’t all we did. We also had a collection of crank, wind-up Victrolas, all with spring motors. The RCA Victrolas played 78 rpm records using replaceable steel needles. These were all acoustic players with large built in horns for the sound, just like the old advertising picture of the little dog sniffing at the horn of an RCA recording.
We also found an Edison phonograph along with the Vitrolas up in that barn. The Edison was quite a different machine. The records were discs but they were 3 times thicker than the RCA records. The needle in the RCA player vibrated sideways and the tip of the needle ran along the bottom of the groove. The Edison used a diamond in the needle and vibrated up and down in a shallow groove. The diamond and the sound assembly required a transfer mechanism to move the acoustic head across the record as it turned.
And records? We found hundreds of old acoustic records. Soon, we were playing all the newest jazz records from the 1920’s: Enrico Caruso and hotel orchestras such as Abe Lyman and the Coconut Grove Orchestra and Earl Burtnette and the LA Biltmore Hotel Orchestra, and more. These orchestras played a style of jazz and made lots of records. I really got lucky when my mother got so sick of this old stuff (which was old when she was young) and bought us some Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey records. Jazz became my favorite genre of music. I still play it today.
The years went by and we all went off to high school and military service. Then we heard that Lawrence was a war casualty. He was killed when the US Marines invaded Iwo Jima. On this Memorial Day weekend, I’d like to remember my old friend and all the old friends who died in service.
Do you know a fallen veteran? Tell us about him or her in the comments section.