California Here We Come...

Upon their arrival in Southern California in 1924, Tony established his young family in a small, one bedroom house on San Carlos Avenue in what would become South Gate, a dusty little burg which an adult David described as “a poverty-stricken gulch,” years later to be swallowed up by Los Angeles’ urban sprawl. There the Wolter boys set about the business of growing up.


Young David’s preschool days were spent playing with various pets in and around the family’s goat barn. Long since vacated by the goats, this ramshackle structure lent temporary shelter to any number of stray animals, which David would nurse back to health, foreshadowing his future as a physician. A lucky Airedale, found starving and neglected, made such an impressive recovery that Mac, the milkman, offered it a home on his dairy farm down the street. It was only fitting that he should get first dibs on the dog, for it was his leftover milk products that had fattened up the patient. Later a less fortunate hound, found abandoned in rubble from the 1933 earthquake, made a more modest recovery. It would drag its paralyzed hindquarter out to the street, waiting in vain for its family to retrieve it, and was finally given away.

As David waited for his older brother, Claire, twenty-two months his senior, to return from first grade and guide him in more structured pursuits, he allowed his lively imagination to run free and carry him where it would lead. The front porch easily transformed into an ocean pier much like the one down the way at Long Beach. From it, little David would fish for the family’s pet terrier, aptly if not a bit unimaginatively named Terry. A bamboo rod with string and an alluring rag attached proved tempting bait, which Terry took each and every time it was cast his way. Fighting like the sword fish he became in David’s imagination, he’d alternately shake and pull the pole, putting up a valiant struggle that ended only when the rig would unravel or something more interesting would catch his canine fancy.

The ocean loomed large in David’s fantasies. One day as he played with his tin boat and bits of wood in an impressive puddle left by spring rains, he became completely engrossed in the idea of boats on the ocean, so much so that when brother Claire came home from school, David convinced him that he had been to said ocean and had seen said boats. What’s more, he was confident that he could easily show Claire the way, and so off they went, with a neighbor’s toddler in tow. The blocks of Long Beach Boulevard added up as David regaled Claire with tales of playful sailboats dodging in and out among more business-like steamers. Finally when they found themselves at the Four Square Gospel Church, easily three quarters of a mile from home, Claire grew both suspicious and weary. By now David was waking up from his reverie as well, and while he never quite admitted that he was dreaming, he did admit that they might be lost! Their toddler friend could not manage another independent step and so, to add insult to injury, big brother Claire had to give him a piggyback ride as they retraced their wayward tracks.

That tin boat got little David in even more trouble – trouble of an almost fatal variety. On a Saturday afternoon in summer the family took one of its fairly frequent trips to the ocean…for real this time. They stopped at a favorite beach, some six miles south of Long Beach, where the surf was modified by man-made breakwaters composed of large rocks. David was thoroughly engrossed with his painted tin boat, marveling at its ability to stay upright as it bravely rode the small waves created by the surf’s action against the rocks. As tin boats are wont to do, the sturdy craft floated beyond its owner’s reach, so David waded in a bit to retrieve it when suddenly all around him glistened a bright blue. He’d happened into the surf just as a wave pulled him down and through a tunnel under the breakwater, a passageway probably created by one of the many large seals that called that part of the California coast home. In David’s memory, some eighty years later, the mesmerizing azure water was, soon enough, replaced by a circle of bare legs spinning around him. Picnickers on the other side of the breakwater had spotted him floating feet first and fished him out. Resuscitation measures mercifully revived the child, and he was left with nothing more than a vivid memory and a wicked thirst that even the sulfur water from the fountains at Bigsby Park – usually deemed too foul to drink – couldn’t quench.

Picnics often proved perilous for preschool David. On another occasion the family had gone on a Sunday afternoon adventure to the Santa Ana Canyon, a sandy terrain with little streams winding through forests and Eucalyptus trees. Gene and Claire had established themselves down by a riverbank and were busily doing whatever it is that boys do on the banks of a river. Three year old David was making his way from the parked car to his brothers, skipping along in his unbuckled sandals, practicing his newly acquired recitation skills: Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water… (Hmmm…What does ‘fetch’ mean I wonder?) And…Little Jack Horner sat in the corner…when suddenly he realized that he was not with the others. Rather he was in what could only be called the forest! In fact, he was lost! Soon enough he began to cry as he climbed over fallen logs and followed nondescript paths that led him deeper into his escalating despair. His unbuckled sandals soon came off and had to be carried along as little David roamed rudderless through the woods. After several hours – an eternity when you’re shoeless and lost – David could hear the voices of the posse that had formed to find him. Of course he didn’t have the sense to simply sit down and stay put, so they had to happen upon him as he wandered. His worried father Tony, among the group that finally found the boy, happily scooped his youngest son up in his arms, awash with relief. Eighty-two years later, David recalled feeling quite the hero! After all, he must be of “some importance” to have caused such an organized stir!

Yet another family picnic ended rather poorly for the four-year-old boy. The Wolter family was often joined by their friends, the Frolings, for picnic dinners at a nearby park. As the adults set up a rather elaborate spread, the older kids began a game of baseball. David, too young to play, was also too young to pay good attention. At a most inopportune moment he chose to dash across the playing field…home plate to be exact. As the older Froling boy swung, David placed himself in harm’s way – so much so that the bat hit him on one side of his head, while the ball hit him on the other! The picnic was over for the Wolter family who rushed an injured David a few blocks down to the local doctor’s house where he and his white-clad nurse administered an ether drip and sewed up David’s lacerated mouth. He bears the telltale scar to this day and still cannot tolerate drinking through straws, the result of weeks of sucking all nourishment through glass straws with fruit decorations on the end – a weak attempt to make them seem something more than tedious.

That emergency trip to the doctors marked little David however. Not only was he enthralled by the kind and pretty nurse in her crisp white uniform, but he also was taken with the procedures he’d experienced: the ether mask, the counting backwards, the tender stitches in his mouth and on his lip that his tentative tongue discovered and explored upon waking. Once home he led his brothers in a game of doctor in the hut they’d constructed out of firewood by the goat barn. Perhaps there is something to be said for the preliminary life skills practiced in children’s play. While a four-year-old David played at being a doctor, thirty years later I would pretend to be a librarian, marking the bindings of all my books and placing them in alphabetical order. Come to think of it, I still play librarian with the thousands of titles I’ve collected and scattered over several continents. David, for his part, retired after over forty years of playing physician and is still consulted on medical matters by family and friends to this day.