We look at the world once, in childhood.

The rest is memory.

— Louise Glück, “Nostos”

As the digital archivist of the History Room at the Whittier Public Library, the demographic I help most often is baby boomers nostalgic about their childhoods. They want to know if we have any material on the pastime of cruising Whittier Boulevard. Or they want to know if we have any photos of the Union Pacific train depot that used to be on Philadelphia Street. Built in 1918, it was demolished in the middle of the night in November 1983, depriving Whittier of an Old Spaghetti Factory. 

Union Pacific Ticket Office, Whittier Public Library Historical Photograph Collection

Other popular research questions relate to famous Whittierites of the past. The most famous of these is arguably Richard Nixon, who attended high school and college here, and who met his wife Pat at a 1938 Whittier community theater production of The Dark Tower. History buffs are also aware of Pío Pico’s connection to the town. He was the last governor of California under Mexican rule, and his home in what later became Whittier is now preserved as a historic site. It is less widely known that musician and gravelly-voiced singer Tom Waits is also from here. When I first became entranced with the Tom Waits' song “Kentucky Avenue,” from Blue Valentine (1978), I did not know I was listening to a baby boomer who, like one of my researchers, waxes poetic about the Whittier of his childhood. At first listen, I heard a song about 1950s boyhood hijinks (smoking, jumping from a roof, killing rattlesnakes, breaking windows, stealing boysenberries, slashing school bus tires). On second listen, the child Waits addresses in the song emerged, a boy in a wheelchair with braces on his legs. On third listen, I heard a song about the magical realism of childhood memories.

The day I spotted Tom Waits on a Wikipedia list of notable Whittierites, I followed Internet rabbit holes to the revelation that the “you” in "Kentucky Avenue" was a friend of Waits who survived polio. I wondered if the rest of the people in the song - Eddie Grace, with his bullet-riddled Buick, Mrs. Storm, with her steak knife, and all the rest - were the real names of his neighbors. This sent me to the History Room's collection of city directories, to see if I could find any of them.

Charlie DeLisle lived at 10162 Grovedale Drive.

Mrs. Storms lived at 15989 Graceldo Lane, and Ronnie Arnold lived at 15975 Graceldo Lane. 

Eddie Grace lived at 10109 Kentucky Avenue, and the Waits family lived at 10103 Kentucky Avenue.

While I was paging through city directories with the song “Kentucky Avenue” playing on repeat, I felt vaguely jealous of Tom Waits. In 1983, serial killer Ottis Toole kidnapped and murdered Adam Walsh, who was six years old. Media response to the tragedy ushered in the era of Stranger Danger, putting an end to the freedom Waits and his generation enjoyed as children. By 1990, when I was six years old in Whittier, the town had grown to 77,867 people, from the sleepy 1950 suburb

of 23,433. 

Growing up in a town of 50,000 more strangers, with 50,000 more cars, and candy to potentially lure children into them, meant that my friends and I did not ramble around stealing boysenberries. Too, the houses built on former orchard fields to accommodate the post-war population boom meant there were no fields, no berries to steal.

The jealousy was replaced by excitement as I looked up the houses on Google Maps. I could go to Kentucky Avenue, to the world of the song. On my lunch break, I did.

Google Maps

I thought about listening to “Kentucky Avenue” on earbuds as I walked, but decided not to. The (vague) idea I had was to pretend I had traveled back in time, trying to see the neighborhood as it looked in the 1950s, as if I were Waits. He didn't listen to the song while he roamed these streets, so I didn't either. I started on Grovedale Drive. The street is not a real street; it is almost a private lane, too narrow for two cars to pass side by side. A sign warns to go no faster than 10 mph. I looked up at the tall tree in Charlie DeLisle’s yard and imagined him sitting at the top of it, eating an avocado. Shaded from the heat, unseen from the street. 

I walked down to the end of the street, where I found a small strip of concrete between two properties that leads to Graceldo Lane. This is the most natural pedestrian route between the DeLisle house and the Waits house.

Passthrough

Erin Fletcher is the digital archivist of the Whittier Public Library History Room. Her newsletter on writing from archives can be found at erinrachelfletcher.substack.com.