What Might Have Been Doesn’t Matter
by Reviewer Rob
This is a chunk of limestone I picked up from the side of the road in a development in Palos Verdes above Rocky Point and Lunada Bay areas sometime around eight or ten years ago. In 1963 my dad was a bartender in his mid thirties working at the Plush Horse on a corner of Pacific Coast highway when he met my mom. He was living in a house on property owned by his aunt Lucilla with her lawyer husband by the beach cliffs near Rocky Point. My mom was working as a real estate agent for a female real estate broker who had a company selling houses in Rolling Hills. In the early 1960s such uppity female employment was fairly uncommon. One night after having a good week my mom took a girl’s night out with her friends to celebrate the recent sale of one of her listings. Her best friend Tilly noticed my dad was flirting with my mom and told her she should respond. Dad got mom’s number then they got married, bought a house close by, Kennedy was asassinated and then I was born in 1964.
This rock is what they call “Palos Verdes Stone” and from what I’ve been told it was prized building material for new construction and remodeling in the 20th century. No one’s probably allowed to quarry it for building material any more though because it’s Palos Verdes, of course, and the peacocks would screech.
Like several other rocks in my collection, I need to return this too. My parents sold their house near the border of Redondo and Torrance before I was one-years-old and moved to San Diego so dad could take a job offer from Horatio Vella to manage his newly built Green Onion night spot in Kearny Mesa. So although I never develop a feeling of “home” for South Bay L.A. I do recognize that like this rock I’m a product of it.
I really need to take a trip up there again and put this stone back.