Peter Leibert's Page

THOSE TEEN YEARS

Another major redirection of my life occurred during that same time frame. I suddenly discovered sports. First, that was it for the “girl” fantasy. Now, it was a new life for me. Early on, I was always assigned to be the leftfielder for some softball team or another. In those days, few players had the money to buy a glove so you had to catch those fly balls barehanded.

For any one team, we were lucky to have one bat, two balls, a catcher’s glove, and one fielder’s glove. I do seem to remember a time or two when the bat broke and that was it for the day.

Somewhere during my early baseball career, I was marked with a false accusation. Here I was out in left field, without a glove, playing ball in the play yard between the Saint Thomas Church and their school. A batter hit a line drive right toward me, but it sailed about ten feet over my head and smashed into one of the church’s stained glass windows. Ouch.

I didn’t think of it as being my fault, but almost instantly, I was surrounded by a priest and a half a dozen others all of whom were informing me that I would have to pay to get it repaired. I don’t know. I don’t remember ever paying for the repair of the window, but I am sure I never played leftfield in that yard again.

While I am thinking about baseball, let me relate to you what happened during the final game of my senior year. I don’t remember whom we were playing, but I do know that I was playing shortstop. The batter hit a hard ground ball directly toward the shortstop. I immediately dashed forward to make one of my usual spectacular “6 to 3” plays to end the ending, and to end the game.

The next thing I remember was hearing a females voice calling “Pete, Pete”, and opened my eyes to observe some girl playing Kilroy by peering over the school nurse’s wall at me. It seems that I had collided with the pitcher as he also was heading for that same ground ball, but he beat me there by a microsecond. My nose hit his shoulder and it (my nose) went off to the side. That was probably the only time that I was every knocked unconscious – which I can remember.

Soon here comes my Mom and off to a nose doctor we go. It didn’t take long for him to realign the nose and to place a piece of tape across its bridge. The next week was my high school graduation ceremony, and if you ever see a photograph of me that had been taken on that day, you might notice a dark ring around my left eye and a bandage across the bridge of my nose.

I have been reminded that there might be more to this tale. Okay, all right, I will relate to you that part, but you must consider this to be a “second hand story”. From what I am told, a week later I accompanied a female friend to one of the local movie houses – the De Anza Theater. This female friend shall remain nameless – right, Joan?

I am told that sometime during that evening, (remember, my memory about this is not in agreement with other peoples memory) my nose ended up being relocated off to the side - again. The next morning, my Mom and I might have returned to that same nose doctor for a new band-aid.

We had a lot of relatives, some were aunts or uncles, and some were cousins. Most of them came to visit Grandma and Grandpa. I remember seeing the Hulbert’s quite often even though they had a long distance to drive to get there. They lived in Lewistown, Idaho, and I think they came in order to get out of their cold weather at Christmas time.

They always would teach us a new game when they were here. I still remember one of their stupid games – AH WAT TIN A. It was a geography game. You would have to name a country after saying the name of the game. AH WAT TIN A GERMANY, AH WAT TIN A ARGENTINA. The game would go on until someone came up with the country AH WAT TIN A THAILAND, or was it the old name - SIAM.

Uncle Mandy would be over next door fairly often. Whenever he came, he brought some exotic fruits with him. There would be pineapples, coconuts, papaya, mangoes, and even cherimoyas. He even brought bananas once in a while – but I couldn’t eat them because I was allergic and would get a rash all over me.

Once when the Morgan’s were visiting, my cousin Mary insisted that I eat a piece of dried banana to prove to her that I was allergic. I did. It was about a half inch of flat dried banana, and within ten minutes I was all swollen up and really had a bad case of that rash. Then Mary believed me. It was over 30 years later that I finally tried a small piece of banana again, and voila! No rash! Now I eat them all the time with no problems. Even ate one this morning.

The Haney’s were also frequent visitors or vice versa. I am sure Theresa will tell about my getting lost near the Haney’s place in Whittier, and Agnes will tell all about the Billy goat chasing Bill up a tree, so I will tell about a very exciting ride in Bill’s car. I don’t know where we had been, but most of Leibert kids were in the car. We were on Eight Street coming from Box Springs grade into Riverside. We had already figured out that the seven-up bottle Uncle Bill was sipping from contained more than just seven-up.

I was sitting in the center of the front seat next to Bill and as we approached Main Street, he tried to put on the brake and the pedal went all the way to the floor. He swerved the car to the right and up over the sidewalk, and through the intersection we went. We were still going and the signal light at fast approaching Market Street was RED.

As we got close to this crossroad, the signal finally turned green and we continued on through. No one was parked along that part of Eighth Street and soon Bill had his right tires rubbing the curb. When we stopped, everyone jumped out of the car.

We probably never rode with Uncle Bill again.

A kid growing up on a small farm, can get find a lot of opportunities to earn money by doing some type of work for neighboring farmers during their spare time. And if you perceived that you needed some loose change, a youngster can always reprioritize his spare time. Just up Hughes Alley lived Oscar McNichol. Oscar was the melon man for the area and offered the nearby young boys numerous opportunities to do a little outside work every summer.

Watermelons, Cantaloupes, and Jap melons were Oscar’s specialties. During WWII, Jap melons were called Victory melons. These melons were the best of the lot. Our duties with Oscar were mostly to help him gather in his melons. This was done about two or three times a week during most of the summer. On those days, Oscar would have been out to the fields picking melons late the evening before and he would use the younger set of helpers to load them onto the truck.

From the fields, we would haul them to a “stand” where he sold his crop – wholesale and retail. The prices for watermelon during those days were 2 to 3 cents a pound depending on size. The other melons were about 5 cents per pound, if I remember correctly.

Oscar reserved the actual selecting and picking of the watermelons for himself. There was truly a science to it. He would look at it, roll it slightly, feel it, thump it, maybe thump it again, and finally make a decision whether to disconnect it from the vine. The “watermelon crew” would form a line and throw the melons from one person to the next and then up to a guy who would be on the stake truck catching and stacking the melons.

A new crewmember would often carry the melons most of the distance to the next person in the line. By the end of the season, however, that same crewmember would have developed his muscles to be able to pitch and catch a 10 to 12 foot watermelon throw – except for the really big ones. Whenever a melon was missed and dropped, work would be delayed for a minute or two while the heart of that melon was extracted and consumed by some thirsty and hungry worker.

The gathering of other melons was done differently. On the days we did cantaloupe or Jap melons, the crew started the morning by taking a melon crate into the field and searching out the melons that had ripened since the last picking of that field. The ripe melons would be determined by size and color. When ripe, the stem would easily slide off using your thumb and forefinger. When your crate was full, or too heavy to carry, you would tote it over to a row where the truck could later pick it up.

When the crop of the field was completely picked, the melon crew would gather at the flatbed truck and assist in loading the crates of melons. A younger member of the crew would get the privilege of slowly driving the truck down the row during this loading process. This is where I learned to drive.

When the truck was loaded, you would tied down the crates, and then head off to the fruit stand that Oscar operated. There, the process was reversed. We would unload the melons, sort them

by size, and pile them in the appropriate place. One of the side benefits of working for Oscar was that you would go home after a days work with a couple of Jap melons or a watermelon under your arms.

During mid winter, the temperature would sometimes drop down below freezing. During those days, we could get a job lighting smudge pots at nearby groves. We didn’t smudge our own grove, but most other growers did. We would get picked up about 2 or 3 a.m. in the morning. It was always very cold. The worst part was riding in the back of the truck getting to the orchard. You would be frozen by the time you got there.

At the designated time, everyone would grab a torch and head down the rows and light the pots of oil. Then you would wait around and when the sun started coming up, you would then start refilling the pots with oil. You would always be late getting to school on those days.

The soot from the smudge pots would be all over you, so the first thing would be to try and clean up when you got to school. Even the kids that did not do smudging would have black nostrils from breathing that sooty smoke.

My first regular part time job for pay was working for a carpet cleaner. After school, I would go to work at Vogt Carpet Cleaner’s in Magnolia Center. My job was to roll out the carpets that had come in and vacuum them real good.

Then I would drag them over to the washing area where some other guys did the actual washing and the hanging of the carpets to dry. I would go back and start vacuuming another incoming carpet. That was the routine for Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Then on the other days, I would lower one of the dried carpets, brush it real good, then vacuum it, and brush the nap again in one direction. When done, I then rolled up the carpet and stacked it off to the side. Then I had to sweep up the area and get another dried carpet. If I ran out of carpets to work on, I would help the washers. After two or three months of that routine, I was ready to go back to being a farm boy.

The first family car I remember was a black 4-door sedan that we had. I have no idea what kind it was, but I am pretty sure that it was much like the type of car Bonnie and Clyde used – at least for their movie. Dad also had a pickup truck that he used to go to and from work at the Riverside Cement plant at Crestmore, northwest of Riverside. I think the truck might have been green in color, but of that I am not sure.

About 1940 or so, Mom and Dad purchased my uncle Bill Haney’s big maroon Reo limousine. Bill was a realtor and he used fancy cars to haul potential customers to see property. The Reo had a much bigger engine than our old car, and had twice as much room inside. The gearshift was mounted on the front dashboard. I don’t really recall exactly how it worked, but you turned the handle to the left and pulled it out, turned it to the right and pushed it in. It was something like that.

There were two jump seats just behind the front seat and a big wide back seat area – a lot of room for us kids. I am sure we felt that we were riding in style when the Leibert family headed for church in this car. After we had owned the Reo for a couple of years, someone decided that it needed to be painted. I don’t know who picked out the paint, but it certainly was not the maroon color that we had been used to. It turned out to be fire engine RED.

A route of the Pacific Electric Red car used to run from their depot at Market and Seventh Streets in downtown Riverside straight down Magnolia Avenue to Harrison Street, where the Riverside County hospital is located. Their turnaround point was about a half-mile from our house. We didn’t get to ride the streetcar much until I was transferred to Saint Francis School in Riverside.

I then only had to walk to Harrison Street and then catch a streetcar to ride to school - well, not to school, but within a mile of school. I am not sure that it saved any walking compared to the other school, but riding the streetcar was somewhat exciting, especially during the first few months.

I later learned that this expense had been considered by Mom to be quite costly as the fare to ride the PE streetcar was 3 cents – each way. It might have been 4 cents each way, as I don’t have records on that, but I do remember that each month Mom would give me a dollar to buy a coupon book of 30 tickets at the downtown depot at 7^th and Market, and I would always get some change back.

The first ride on any bus was when I was in the 7^th or 8^th grade. This was during the early part of the World War II and there weren’t enough people to pick various field crops. Our entire school class was loaded onto a couple of buses and taken to some field west of town where we picked tomatoes. If I remember correctly, they were Italian tomatoes (Romas). We each got paid for the number of boxes we filled. This may have occurred more than once, but it wasn’t too often.

During the middle of the war period, our family got a brand new car. New cars were hard to obtain and you had to apply and justify why you should be able to purchase one. Mom had a lot of reasons. The Reo had broken down and no one could get parts from the Reo factory in England. She was a home teacher for bed-bound children and needed a car to travel around the school district to work with her students. She was Secretary-Treasurer of the local USO serving troops from Camp Hahn, Camp Anza, and March Field, and she needed a car to do her duties.

She also was a member of the Arlington Welfare Council and needed the car to carry food to poor and sick people all around the area. She was a columnist for the Arlington Times and she needed to go where the news was. Her justification list must have convinced the rationing board because in April of 1943 Mom received approval to buy a brand-new (built during 1941) Oldsmobile sedan.

Immediately after the war, there was a phasing out of the PE Red cars as they were being replaced with buses. The transportation service down Magnolia was also expanded to go beyond our house down to Tyler Street where the buses turned around.  Buses had become my basic transportation by the time I was a junior in high school. This mode was supplemented on a few special occasions when I was allowed to borrow Mom’s car to take a girl to some school function.

Grandma and Grandpa also owned a 15 acre orange grove up at Meyers and Indiana Streets. These were Washington Navel oranges. On the property there was a house that was rented out to a Japanese family. As part of the rental agreement, they took care of irrigating and tending that orange grove.

Very soon after the war started in late 1941, all Japanese families were notified they would be relocated to camps far away from the population centers. When it came time to depart, they learned that only personal baggage would be allowed – no furniture or cars. Grandma came up with a solution. Soon, John and I were moving the wagons and tools out of my grandparents tool shed, and the furniture and cars belonging to this displaced Japanese family were stored there for the duration of the war.

By the time this occurred, both Dad (12/29/1941) and Grandpa (1/9/1942) had died, so this was leaving Mom and Grandma with about 40 acres to take care of by themselves and the Leibert kids. This must have been a worrisome time for them, but somehow we all survived and got the job done.

Starting during my junior high years, I got involved with the theater! Actually I belonged to the stagecraft club during my 8^th and 9^th grade. This was one of the activities that resulted in my getting involved in a variety of show business items.

One of my non-school activities during this period was through the Riverside Recreation Department. My Mom worked as a summer school teacher for the recreation program at Indepentiente School on Jackson Street in Arlington. One teacher in that program taught piano, and if piano didn’t work for you, she also taught singing.

My mother wished to keep me interested in this summer program, so she had me attend the music session during part of each day. The music teacher, who quickly realized that my thumbs were getting in the way of my piano lessons, started me on a program of singing - solo. Surprisingly, to me and to my Mom, I seemed to be interested in that form of “making” music.

During the latter part of the first summer, the music students of the Indepentiente program were invited to perform at the YWCA in Riverside – next to their swimming pool. Sing next to their swimming pool? That concern became even bigger when we got there. The room that housed the swimming pool was very, very noisy. The audience was seated up in the balcony above us. You couldn’t even see half of them. But after a lot of fidgeting and worry, the piano started playing my song and I was on. “I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree.” Oh, you remember the song “Trees”.I thought it sound fairly good and I am sure that I got a standing ovation, although, I still could not see anyone up there. The audience was very loud in their praise that echoed throughout the room, and that room did echo. Afterwards, the number of people that came down from the balcony to congratulate me on my great performance was overwhelming. Thanks, Mom!

After that fantastic outing, I received numerous requests (from my grandmother) to repeat my inventory of songs that had quickly grown to two – “Trees” written by Joyce Kilmer, and “Loch Lomond” a song about some kind of scenic lake that was located in western Scotland. They reportedly have a monster in that lake but I try not to think about that.