In high school Millard was assigned to write an autobiography and my grandma gave me a copy of it almost twenty years ago. I have tried to make sure whomever is interested in it got copies of it. I figure the best way to start Millard's life is to post it in his own words. I am leaving it completely in his words. I just typed it up to make it easier to read. I will do another post later with pictures. He was 15 years old when he wrote this.
Millard
Tanner
A10 English, Per. 6
April 19,1936
Fifteen Years of Life
Chapter 1-Life at the Beach
It was in
the year of 1920 that I, Millard E. Tanner first glimpsed the light of
day. To be exact, it was a Tuesday on
October 26 that I arrived at the Methodist
Hospital in Los Angeles, California.
According
to my mother’s remembrance, I didn’t cry very much when I was a baby. When I was one year old, I was taken sick and
had to be put in the hospital. I stayed
there for two months and nearly died. When
I got out of the hospital, I wouldn’t let anybody come near me because I was
scared of everybody which was due to my terrible experience with doctors.
As soon as
I left the hospital, I went with our family down to the beach where we had a
house in Santa Monica
Canyon. This house was about a half a mile from the
beach and on the side of a hill in the canyon.
It was a two story house with a narrow staircase connecting the two
floors. It had four bedrooms upstairs, a
bathroom, and a shower. Downstairs was
the living room, the library, kitchen, another bathroom, and below this was a
cellar in which we kept tools and lumber.
Early in
the morning when the tide was low, my dad, my brother Bill, and I would go down
to the rocks along the shore and gather muscles from the rocks. It was quite dangerous for us because we were
so small then. During a calm spell
between the big waves, we would scurry down the slippery rocks and try to
scrape off a few mussels with a stone before the next big wave came. When we collected enough of them for a
meal, we took them home and steamed them
for breakfast. Coming home from these
trips was always a lot of fun because we would stop along the way to pick up
brightly colored stones and shells that had been washed up on the sand by the
waves. When we reached home we washed
the sand off the mussels and put them in a large kettle to steam. Off comes the lid and a stimulating odor of
the sea fills the room. Down we sit and
fill ourselves with this appetizing food. After breakfast, Bill and I went down
to the creek that was near our house and threw stones at the frogs and
pollywogs that infested the water. This
was an exciting sport which took up all the forenoon and gave us a good big appetite
for lunch. In back of our house, were
some hills which rose into mountains. In
the afternoons, when we weren’t working, we climbed the hills on exploring
trips through the underbrush and trees.
The jack-rabbits and squirrels were quite plentiful among the bushes but
to us it seemed funny that when we came near them, they would scurry away and
we wouldn’t be able to find them. We ate
supper at about six o’clock and then before we went to bed we watched the road
below our house to see how many automobiles we could see with red or green
lights on the running boards. This was
our favorite pastime in the evening and we got great enjoyment out of it. In the winter time, we spent our evenings in
front of the big open fireplace in the front room either telling stories or
playing games of some kind.
I first
learned how to swim when I was about five years old but the waves were pretty
big where we were so that it was almost impossible to swim; so we used to go
down to the Venice plunge every once in a while. I remember one Saturday morning before we
started to the plunge, my brother was at the top of the slopping front yard of
the house and I was at the bottom in an old hammock with a canvas top. Bill was rolling small stones down on top of
the hammock when a big stone was loosened and started rolling toward me. I didn’t know it was coming, and I had my
head close to the roof. As the stone hit
the hammock, it hit me on the head at the same time, so that called off my trip
to the plunge.
As we lived
pretty near the amusement pier, we decided to go down and go on a few
things. The first thing that caught our
eye was the roller-coaster, but it didn’t appeal to me very much. My dad said, “Come on, we’re going on the
roller-coaster.” Just before we got in
the car, I balked and said that I didn’t want to go, but my dad had a different
idea than mine so in we got. We started
up the first high hill with my heart coming farther up into my mouth all the
time. As we reached the top and started
down the other side, I closed my eyes and held my breath. The car seemed to be falling, falling, for
ages until with a lurch we shot up the next hill. Then down again and up again until I thought
I’d never get out of that car alive. As
we neared the end and the hills became lower, I began to feel relieved and
thought that it wasn’t such a bad ride after all. We walked around for some time, going on a
few other things, and then went home but the most memorable of all was that
roller-coaster ride.
When I was
four years old, another brother came to our family in July. He was named Lewis after a relative of
ours. All I can remember about his birth
is that he was born in the Methodist Hospital in Los
Angeles, California.
As Bill was
a year and a half older than I and he was approaching the age for kindergarten,
our family had to move up to our house on Fourth avenue in Los Angeles.
At Santa Monica,
we weren’t near enough to a grammar school so we moved to where there was one
near. Here on Fourth avenue is where I spent most of my
grammar school days and of which I will tell in my next chapter.
Millard Tanner
A10 English, Per. 6
April 30, 1936
Chapter II-Life on Fourth Avenue
I went to
Sunday School in Santa Monica but I don’t
remember much about it, but I do remember my trips up to the Universalist Church
on Alvarado Street
in Los Angeles. We had a 1921 Buick sedan which transported
us from our house to the church. On
Sunday morning, we would get up quite early and put on our best clothes for
Sunday School. Then we would all squeeze
in and start out. When we reached our
destination we clambered out and went in the Sunday School room. Here the
Superintendent took charge of the service which lasted about a half hour. When this was over we went up to the room for
the small children and sang hymns, children’s songs and played games until the
time was up. Then we usually went home
and had our Sunday dinner.
When we
first came to Fourth Avenue,
there were only a few houses around us and farther out towards the Baldwin
Hills there were only Jap(enese) gardens and fields. Along Mesa Drive, which is now Crenshaw, ran
the carline which joined Inglewood and Los Angeles. This carline seemed to be miles away at that
time but it was only three quarters of a mile from our house. There was one house on one side of us and a
vacant lot on the other in which we planted different kinds of berries,
flowers, and vegetables. In back of our garage were two small sheds where we
kept some chickens but a little later we took out the chickens and used the sheds
for club houses. Across the street was a
small monkey tree which is now about thirty feet tall. I remember this tree because we lost so many
things in it.
There were
quite a number of kids on our street and we had a regular gang. We used to be rivals of the kids that lived
on Fifth Avenue
and we despised them like a person would a thief. Norman Weber, we called stuck; Bob Bauer was
the fat one; Howard Fletcher was the one
that could pin doorbells best; George Vieira was the actor. There were the How boys, Miles, Ralph and
Virgil; Art Green, whom we didn’t know very well; and Ben Burch, who never had
his hair combed. We liked the How boys
the best because they could go almost any place at any time. Of course we got into some trouble because of
them but it never did do anybody much harm.
In the back yard of the How’s house, we built caves, dug wells, played
marbles, played bottle tops; in fact we did just about everything a person
could do down there. About seven years
later after they had moved to Santa
Barbara, the renters complained to them after a heavy
rain that the backyard was sinking, which was due to the caves which we
dug. When going back and forth from
their house to ours, we usually walked along the fence in back of the house s
until somebody would yell at us and there would be scrambling to get off their
fence and on to the next one. Across the
street and near the corner was a large acacia tree. We built a tree house in it and rigged up an
elevator with some chains and rope. Only one person could go up at a time but
while one was going up one could be coming down. We never realized the danger until years
later when we thought about it. The tree
was about thirty feet high and, if any of us had fallen, it would have been the
end. One day our bunch decided to go up
to the Sunset golf course and make some money by caddying. We got up there and I went over to a man that
was playing and asked for a job and he told me to watch the ball and carry his
bag. The first ball he hit soared into
the air but it just seemed to disappear.
Then I heard two mean shouting at us and driving us toward a car.
He said that he was going to take us to jail and keep us there but
Norman Weber piped up and said, “We won’t come around here anymore if you’ll
let us go.” Then the man said, “Well,
I’ll let you go this time but if you come around here anymore, I’ll take you
in.” This experience gave us quite a
scare and we never did try to caddy again. Quite a lot of children at school
bought milk and they sometimes left their milk bottles around the school
ground. This got us into some trouble.
One afternoon Bill, the How boys, myself, and a couple of others went
down to the playground after school was out and started to collect the milk
bottles in order to sell them but one of the teachers saw us and took us in to
the principal. She gave us a good
talking to and we never did try that again but we did collect some from the tin
can boxes.
My school
life started when I was five years old.
I went to kindergarten in the Angeles
Mesa Grammar
school for a term in the afternoon and a term in
the morning under the supervision of Mrs. Ralston and Miss Levens. I remember that we sang songs and made little
things out of paper and cardboard boxes.
In the fourth grade, I joined the orchestra by learning to play the
flute. Also I was put into the
opportunity room which was for children that were more advanced than the other
pupils in the same grade. In here, we
did more drawing and handicraft work than in any other class. I took wood shop
and I made a breadboard magazine rack, wood and glass tray, two lamps, and
quite a few other wooden figures. I also
took agriculture and learned many things about plants. In the sixth grade I was put on the safety
committee which was to keep order among the other kids. There were two teams in physical education
and I was captain of one and Arah Doolittle of the other. He had a better team and usually beat. They had a track meet but I only took one
first place and that was in the relay.
During my
grammar school days, I had many experiences in the mountains where my father
worked. I will tell of these and of my
summer down at Long Beach
in my next chapter.
Millard Tanner
A10 English, Per. 6
May 6, 1936
Chapter III-Vacations
During My School Life
My father
had a job as a supervisor in the Board of Education and he worked in the Sierra Madre
Mountains taking pupils
from different schools up into the mountains and teaching them forestry and
fire prevention. They had one school
truck in which they transported the school children up into the mountains. It was on a Saturday that my dad decided to
take Bill and me up to camp. We started
out in the old white truck toward Montrose, which is just the other side of Glendale at the foot of
the mountains. From here we started out
on the Edison Road,
which is a dirt road only nine feet wide, and started winding up into the
mountains on this private road. As we
traveled on, we kept getting higher and higher until the canyon below us seemed
miles away. The first time I went up
there and looked over the side of the truck it gave me a sickly feeling. Then we crossed the divide and started down
the North side toward the camp. As we
rounded the last bend and beheld the camp, I didn’t think it was so very
wonderful because it was then only a small house, a bunk house, and a nursery
with small trees and shrubs in it. There was no electricity so we had to use
candles for light and wood stoves to cook on.
We didn’t have a telephone then but one was put in later on. We always had to take up our own food because
the camp was quite hard to get to and nobody else was there to supply it. Sometimes we would get up there and find that
we had forgotten something, then we would have to go without it until we got
back in the city. At night we slept in
bunks out under the stars and listened to the frogs and other animals making
different noises and moving around near by.
When the sun was about to set in the evening we would go down the road a
ways to a place where we could see the whole Big Tujunga with the mountains
fading out in the distance and watch the sun sink slowly into the distance
making everything look red. When the sun
had settled out of sight it gave me the impression that the day was over and I
might as well go to bed. We would walk
slowly back to the house and eat our supper and turn in. In the morning when we
woke up and finished our breakfast we had to get busy and do at least two hours
work during the forenoon. Our job was to
take small pine trees out in the brush and plant them so that in time the
mountains would be covered with them.
Many times we had to get out with the pick and shovel and build trails
form one place to another. During the
rest of the day we climbed the mountains or went down in the valleys where
there was running water. Sometimes we
would see a rattlesnake. It was quite
dangerous to go out in the summer time on a hot day because you were liable to
run across a rattler anytime. I remember
one experience I had with a rattlesnake in these mountains. It was a hot day and I was going down toward
the dam, which was our water storage place, when I saw a snake lying across the
trail I wasn’t very old at the time and I didn’t realize the danger of going
near it. My dad and brother were at the
dam and I wanted to get to them quickly, so I ran right past the snake and told
my father what I had seen. When he
reached the place and saw the snake, he said it was a rattlesnake. He then picked up some rocks and threw them
at the snake but it went back into the hold in the rocks and we never saw it
again. I never really realized my close
shave with death until I thought about it later. One day while a friend of ours was in camp we
decided to climb Strawberry
Peak. It is about eight
thousand feet high and very steep near the top.
My smaller brother Lewis, and my dad stopped at the foot of the hardest
and steepest climb while Forest (which was our
friend’s name) and I started up the last part.
It was a tough climb, sometimes we were almost hanging over the canyon,
which was about seven hundred feet below us.
During this climb, I wasn’t a bit dizzy.
At last we reached the top, from which we had a wonderful view. Coming down was easier as we knew all the
good footholds and handholds. Going home
from the mountains was the worst part of the trip because I hated to go back to
the city among the crowds of people. We
usually hiked back over the Switzers trail and from there down to Oakwild where
the truck came to meet us and take us home.
We had
neighbor by the name of Miss Nevil and she was the crabiest woman on the whole
block. If we stepped on her lawn she
would call the police but the worst thing happened when Bill got a brand new
airplane for his birthday. He was sailing
it out in front of our house when it accidentally went on the Nevil’s
porch. She opened the door; came out;
picked up the airplane and broke it right in two. It made my mother so mad that she almost had
a fit. All this and our restlessness for
the beach led us to rent a small house down at Long Beach
as our Santa Monica
house was already rented. That summer we
had more fun than we had ever had at the beach before. We could walk out to the landing where the
sailors came in and sometimes go out to the battleships. We could walk down to the pier and watch
different people spend their money on foolhardy things. One time we thought of the idea of walking
out to the end of the breakwater. This
breakwater at Long Beach
hasn’t any walk on it and has big holes between the rocks. We got out there all right but on the way
back while Bill and I were walking ahead, we heard a cry behind us and were
astonished, on looking back, to find that Lewis was nowhere in sight. We ran back to where he should have been but
all we could see was a large black hole with crys coming out of it. Then on looking closer, we saw him about
seven feet below us standing in the water.
Bill and I reached down and helped him out and he was none the worse for
his experience.
During my
life I have made a few trips around California
that were connected with my music.
Although I haven’t been out of my native state, I saw many interesting
things and had a few adventures. Of
these, I will tell in my next chapter.
Millard Tanner
A10 English, Per. 6
May 11, 1936
My Trips
I started
taking flute lessons when I was about eight years old from a woman teacher by
the name of Mrs. Lewis. I worked up in
this line until I was good enough to play in a good band. I got in with an American Legion Band after
about fours years of playing. This band
was sponsored by the Hollywood Legion Post 43 and we got to go many places on
account of this. We played at the
Chinese Theater, ball games, New Years Parade, and other important
affairs. In the summer of 1933, the post
decided to send us up to San Francisco
where the big American Legion Convention was going to be held. As I had never been as far as San Francisco, I was very
happy at the thought of going up there.
We started out on a clear morning in June, in two busses, up the coast
route toward San Francisco. Near Salinas
our bus got a flat tire and this took up quite a bit of time. We started out again and when it began to get
dark, we stopped at a small town and ate our dinner. After dinner, one of the boys got his toe
broken by slaming[sic] one of the seats on it.
This laid him up for his stay up there.
We didn’t reach San Francisco
until one o’clock that night. We slept in the Y.M.C.A Hotel that night and got
our breakfast in its dining room. In the
forenoon of the next day, we decided to take a tour of the city and see all the
interesting sights. We saw the Golden Gate Bridge Towers
and it seemed to me that it would be impossible to build a bridge across this
great expanse of water. We next drove along the beach and up through the Golden Gate Park.
The park is made beautiful by the many ponds, streams, and green trees
that cover it. The museum and
aquariam[sic] are in this park and they have many interesting exhibits on
display. These buildings are really
worth seeing if you are near there. We
went back to the hotel and played in many concerts during our three day visit.
On the day before we were to go home, one of the bus drivers was robbed and had
to telegraph for more money. This took
up about fours hours of the next morning so we were late getting started
home. On the way back to Los Angeles, we stopped in at Sunnyvale to see the Acron. It was in it’s
huge hangar and they wouldn’t allow anybody to bring in cameras or anything
that might be used to get information because of the danger of spies from other
countries. They wouldn’t let us go
inside the dirigible but we walked around inside the hangar and saw the outside
of it. There are two massive doors on
rails at each end of the hangar which can be swung open to let the Acron
out. At last we got home at five o’clock
the next morning and went to bed.
In 1935, I
was invited to go down to San Diego
and see the fair. I jumped at the chance
and so a few days later we started off.
We left at seven o’clock and reached there at ten thirty. We bought our tickets and went in the
Southern entrance. As we wanted to see
the different buildings, we went there first.
In one of them, we saw the television exhibit. This television seems almost incredible to me
because it just doesn’t go according to logic.
I still don’t see how a single point of light can produce a persons[sic]
image. Undoubtedly the Ford building was
the most interesting in, that it has so many interesting mechanical devices and
displays. At night the buildings made a
wonderful sight, all lighted up. We went
down the midway and saw the many queer things of which it consisted. This trip will always be a memorable one to
me because it is the only one of its kind I’ve ever been on and because of the
many unbelievable things I saw.
