Being homesick at Christmastime in the 1940s in Beverly Hills, LA


Christmas is a tough time to be away from home, no matter what the circumstances. When the song "White Christmas" became popular, it spoke volumes to men who were away from home fighting in World War II. I'm sure you've heard the song, but if you haven't, this is how it goes:

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know.
Where the treetops glisten,
And children listen,
To hear sleigh bells in the snow.

And it was just another Christmas song to me until I found myself spending Christmases alone, in Phoenix, and in Los Angeles. And it was especially in LA that it hit me, when I heard the entire lyrics for the first time, and then I would wait to hear them again on the radio. I suppose that I could have bought a recording of it, but it never occurred to me, and besides it was only at Christmastime that I wanted to hear it. And it was a revelation to me, and it changed how I saw things, because I could feel the hurt in the original lyrics that went:

The sun is shining, the grass is green
The orange and palm trees sway
There's never been such a day
In Beverly Hills, L.A
But it's December the twenty-fourth
And I am longing to be up north

If you've never heard those lyrics, it's not surprising. When Bing Crosby made the song into a hit, he didn't include any reference to Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, or palm trees. It would have been difficult, if not impossible for most people to understand, but I did.

No, I never lived in Beverly Hills, and I was glad to be away from the snow and cold of Minnesota, where I grew up, but it still hit me. I'll see if I can explain.

The writer of those lyrics, Irving Berlin, was doing fine financially. He was sitting at a piano at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I know that it can be difficult for most people to generate much sympathy for someone who could call room service and get as much champagne and caviar as he wants. And speaking for myself, I was able to pay the rent on my apartment in Hollywood, and the repairs on my sports car, so my outward appearance was just fine. But it seems to me that just about every Christmas special emphasized how wonderful it was to be home, with family, and that money couldn't buy you happiness. It's true.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more