In the early 1950s, a young Roger McGrath tagged along with his older brother and sister to Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles. ‘Where are you kids from?’ he recalls a man asking. ‘Pacific Palisades, sir,’ they replied. ‘Now where is that?’ the man probed. ‘All the way out at the end of Sunset Boulevard’ they answered, to which the man shot back, ‘Why would anyone want to live out there?’ The story underscores the modest roots–and blissful obscurity–the town once enjoyed in the late 1940s and ’50s, an era McGrath will vividly recount during a presentation for the Pacific Palisades Historical Society on Monday evening, February 25. McGrath, now 60, is a noted author and historian who grew up in a house on Embury in the Alphabet streets. He describes the task of selecting photographs from the Palisadian-Post archives, seldom-seen images he’ll use to illustrate his talk, as a ‘half-fun romp and half-melancholy journey.’ A natural storyteller, McGrath delights in recalling the ‘boys will be boys’ days of his youth, when slingshots and skinny-dipping, motorcycles and mayhem ruled the day against a backdrop of empty fields, dirt roads and pristine beaches. Using his raspy voice to dramatic effect, he tells of hitching rides on the bumper of a Rambler station wagon, enduring muck up to his waist while playing with the neighborhood gang in the surrounding wilderness, and, at 17, using his pluck and motorcycle prowess to forge a friendship with a then 30-something Steve McQueen. His narrative skills are legendary. As a professor at UCLA during the 1980s, he taught a class called ‘The American West’ that consistently drew a capacity crowd of 500 students. Gun battle reenactments and other theatrics, many involving the professor himself, transformed the conventional lecture format. The author of ‘Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes’ (1984), McGrath makes frequent appearances on TV and in documentaries as an authority on the Old West and World War II and regularly contributes to a variety of publications, including ‘Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.’ Many of his recent articles focus on life in the Palisades and will eventually be used as chapters in a book tentatively titled ‘The Fabulous Fifties: Not a Decade But an Era.’ One piece gleefully recalls the bygone culture of fistfights among boys; another entitled ‘Church of the Open Sky’ exalts surfing as ‘an almost holy communion with nature.’ ‘When people say the 1950s, that’s not what they mean,’ says McGrath of the artificial distinction made by strict ‘decadists.’ ‘For instance, 1961 was really the ’50s with hot rods, motorcycles, surfboards, rock ‘n’ roll and fights all part of the scene. It wasn’t ‘Oh, peace brother, I’m going to chant this mantra.’ That nonsense came in the late ’60s,’ McGrath says. Selling blackberries for 10 cents a box at a stand along Sunset is one of McGrath’s earliest memories. ‘ This was the country for people taking Sunday drives in the late 1940s and early ’50s,’ he says. ‘It was like a big journey traveling from Los Angeles.’ The area behind his house, what is now a commercial block along Sunset from Monument to Carey, was a field filled with berry thickets, oak and acacia trees. ‘If you look at pictures of the Palisades in the late 1940s, there was more open space than houses. What we called ‘the center’ was just a couple of commercial blocks,’ says McGrath, emphasizing the rural nature of the setting by adding that his sister kept a horse in the backyard. Another early impression was Fiesta Days, a community tradition McGrath remembers as rivaling the Fourth of July parade in terms of popularity. Every June, all the men in town grew beards and anyone caught not wearing a Western costume would be thrown in a ‘monkey jail’ with bail set as a donation to charity. ‘It was a ‘back home in Indiana’ small town mixed with a certain Hollywood hipness,’ says McGrath, who concedes that this dynamic, however much altered, still exists today. McGrath’s baseball little league team, the Bay Pharmacy Orioles, was filled with Hollywood kids, including David Niven’s son. He remembers how the actor would bring his attach’ case to the games, turn it into a mini-bar, and after imbibing two or three shots, yell out to the field in his English accent ‘Good show, good show, lads.’ When McGrath was in high school, a visit to Vince’s Barbershop on Saturday morning would inevitably elicit reviews about the previous night’s football game at Palisades High. ‘Good game, kid,’ McGrath remembers hearing from men in the shop. ‘Everyone went to the game whether they had a son on the team or not,’ he recalls. The homespun character of the early Palisades is only one of many themes McGrath will touch upon during his presentation, the kick-off to a yearlong celebration of the Palisadian-Post’s 80th anniversary, taking place on Monday, February 25 at 7 p.m. at Pierson Playhouse, 941 Temescal Canyon Rd. Admission is free.
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