Chicken Little

The early summer of 1929 found David playing in the pit gravel road in front of his house, inventing a game he called “Chicken Little” involving those ever-popular dirt clods that little boys can’t seem to resist, vertical tosses and a sky that was perpetually falling. There he was joined one day by a smaller boy with dark hair and a tanned complexion, a boy destined to become the little brother and best friend David had yet to realize he wanted or needed. Freddy Hunziker, the beloved only son of Fred Sr. and Thelma Hunziker, had moved into the newly completed rental house that old man Martin had recently built in the lot directly across from the Wolter family on San Carlos Avenue. Fred Sr., a jack of all things mechanical, moved his small family from the Boulder, Colorado area in order to open his garage on LA’s Hope Street – an aptly named location for what would become a going concern, specializing in the then popular Reo car line. In addition, he was an accomplished pilot and had an interest in a fixed base operation –a flying school at Mines Field, now Los Angeles International Airport.

And so it was that David met his childhood compatriot Freddy. Just as Tom Sawyer enticed onlookers to help him whitewash his Aunt Polly’s fence, David attracted Freddy, almost exactly one year his junior, with his “Chicken Little” reenactment. The boys hurled clods of dirt high into the air and then ran away yelling, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” Neither at that early point in time had any premonition of how, less than a decade and a half later, the sky would really fall – or more accurately – how they would both fall from it. Eventually tiring of this sport - but not before they were thoroughly covered in clod fragments and dirt dust, they sat down on the curb to become acquainted. Soon-to-be-six year old David told soon-to-be-five year old Freddy all about his older brothers, Gene and Claire and described his menagerie of pets headed up by Terry the wonder dog. This prompted Freddy to introduce his beloved Bozo, a bull terrier who soon, along with Terry, became indispensable in the boys’ shared world of make-believe.

That first summer cemented David and Freddy’s friendship as they pooled their imaginations to create any number of hair-raising, high stakes adventures. Terry and Bozo played pivotal roles in several of the scenarios. Harnessed to the handle of the wagon, they became the beasts of burden that pulled the supplies through treacherous terrain, right up until the moment they tired of such servitude and ran off to greener pastures or at least more neutral turf. Then they became the sharp-eyed, sharp-eared hunting dogs in the darkest jungles of Africa, as David and Freddy pursued the ever-elusive ape man of Saturday matinee fame – the humanoid the boys dubbed the “Ah-ooh Man” after his distinctive vocalizations that they mimicked in hopes of luring him with their guile and then immobilizing him with their spears made from sturdy weed stalks.

The sandy loam earth of South Gate made the digging of countless tunnels and caves almost effortless, while the maintaining of tunnel roofs and cave walls proved predictably problematic. The engineering skills of older brother Claire came in very handy as he showed the younger boys how to shore up walls with firewood and lay scrap planks across the top of their hand dug ditches for ceilings. Soon enough the boys became willing lackeys for Claire, playing brawn to the older boy’s brains. As Claire envisioned and then constructed any number of amazing contraptions, David and Freddy would pull the nails from old apple crates and then carefully pound them straight for Claire’s reuse. In this manner, Claire constructed a rather intricate airplane for the boys in the Wolter’s front yard, with wings made from Marguerite’s ironing board and a fuselage formed from the rescued fruit crates. David and Freddy, alternating between pilot and co-pilot, spent many an afternoon recreating the exciting aeronautical feats of their hero, Charles Lindbergh, as well as masterminding a few of their own that surely rivaled “Lucky Lindy’s” solo transatlantic flight of 1927. Sixty-three years later on a visit to Salesches, France – the country that had welcomed Lindbergh fifty-nine years earlier, David would introduce his grandson and Freddy’s namesake to the thrill of make-believe flight using lawn chair cushions as impromptu wings and inviting Madame Berthe Lefebvre on board to form an international crew.