Farewell, Innocent Flamboyance

My father's exotic car still shone in our driveway after 21 years like a new blue sun--brilliant and effortlessly powerful.

Its breathtaking curves still reflected a limitless sky and limitless future; even better, they reflected a happy past.

But the car was seldom driven anymore. Who dared? And memories of Dad behind its leather wheel--his cowboy boots pressed to the floor as he gunned it into the driveway with a throaty growl--had begun ever so gently to fade.

So the family gathered and admitted it was time. We rang up a museum curator, and he came with a contract. Then followed an appraiser, and finally a car carrier.

And so it was last week that a piece of our family history became a part of Los Angeles history. And we begin the new year without an old friend.

*

My father grew up in dusty, windy Great Falls, Mont., on the wrong side of the tracks. His dad, an immigrant from Bialystok, Russia, was a cigar-chomping fur trader who owned a scrap yard alongside the rail station. Opportunities were scant for Jews in the West at the turn of the century. His business card read: Sam Markman. Hides. Tallow. Junk.

My father learned to drive his dad's black truck before he turned 10. Occasionally, he and his sisters would drive to the nearby Blackfoot reservation together to pick up pelts. My aunt Chessa likes to recount that the chief and her father would exchange greetings of "Shalom!" She remembers feeling proud that her father could speak Blackfoot.

Soon after that, on a July 4 weekend, my grandfather died. And after selling almost everything they owned, my father packed up the family and drove to Los Angeles. My dad turned 13 the day they drove through the Cajon Pass.

*

Ah, Los Angeles. Los Angeles! The rich scent of orange groves and the rich golden sun and the rich blue sea made my father and his three sisters drunk with disbelief at their good fortune. Though they barely had enough money for two months' rent, they put down roots in the Crenshaw District, attended Dorsey High and conspired to make a new life.

My father worked two or three jobs during high school to help put food on the table, then headed to Alaska after graduation to find his fortune. He ended up driving U.S. Army trucks in the Aleutian Islands before being drafted for the war effort in Korea.

Cars and motorcycles were his passion, but paychecks always went home to his mom. And so dreams of new wheels would have to wait.