How my father became an environmentalist without really trying

PHOTO by OLENA KUCHERENKO

A few things my father pioneered:

• Driving a Saab. This was the ’60s, mind you, when cars were still made of steel and driving a foreign car—your Toyota, your Datsun, your VW—meant jokes about war atrocities and Japanese beer cans. The idea of driving something made by Swedes—whose side were they on, anyway?—just seemed nuts, especially since the car had a sunroof—a hole in a perfectly good steel roof! But my father didn’t run away from the derision—he welcomed it, craning his head and neck to stick out of the sunroof so he looked like he was motoring in a cartoon strip.

• Wearing wallaby shoes/desert boots. Again, this was the ’60s, and these things were worn by beatniks (we still spoke of beatniks) and college students, not Ford execs in their 30s—30 back then meant what 50 means today. My father didn’t like the hard brown and black dress shoes. They hurt his feet. Wallabys and desert boots were comfortable.

• Wearing shorts to venues and events not normally associated with shorts. No matter what Pepsi and Time/Life Records tell you, the ’60s remained a time of great repression, especially in fashion. People felt compelled to get dressed up to go to dinner or the movies. (Look at any rerun of The Ed Sullivan Show; when they scan the audience, all the men are dressed in suits.) But my father didn’t like pants, so he wore shorts to places normally not associated with short-wearing: restaurants, theaters, funerals.

As you can plainly see, my father is a great man, a man of vision and courage, not easily swayed by the hemlines or mores of the times. He is a man who never shrank from what he believed in, whether it was wearing comfortable shoes or lifting his shirt, taking two handfuls of his Rubenesque belly in hand to frame his navel, and shouting to me in the middle of Dooley’s Hardware, “Hey Steve! Say cheese!” and then pinching his navel shut as he made the clicking camera sound. (I miss Dooley’s.)

Yes, my father has always gone his own way, which is why, more than 30 years ago, he ripped out his backyard lawn. (I say “his” because my mother and father divorced. We lived with Mom in Downey, Dad moved to Fullerton.) He did this before it was the responsible/hip thing to do. He did this before anybody had ever heard of global warming or Al Gore. He did this because, in his words, “I’m a lazy bastard.”

Not true. My father is not lazy. But he is from Brooklyn. He grew up there in the ’30s in an apartment just like everyone else. In fact, growing up, he only met one person who lived in that bit of alternative habitation known as a “house.” So when he moved to California after the war—Korean—married my mom and bought the house in Downey, it probably seemed idyllic to him. The house I was brought up in was like so many in the area, a small structure placed on a huge lot designed to let young families grow into them. Our back yard was so large it was divided into two.

“We had chickens on the back half with a coop for them,” he says. “I thought I was going to be a farmer.”

It didn’t last. My dad discovered he didn’t like yard work, which is why he suggested to my mom a forward-thinking system in which an enormous hole would be dug in the back and a platform would be placed there with dirt and grass seed. As the grass grew the platform would be lowered electronically so the grass would always be at an appropriate height. As for the chickens . . .

“One day it was really hot and the chickens were panting. I didn’t know chickens could pant. Anyway, your mom says to me, ‘Andy what are we going to do?’ And I said, ‘I know, let’s go to the movies.’ So we did and when we got back some of the chickens were dead.”

So, my father is a man of action and common sense, and when he recognized how much he hated doing lawn work immediately acted on his inaction: he went to a local nursery and contracted them to rip out his Fullerton lawn and lay down some rocks and drought-resistant plants.

“I didn’t want to spend my weekends doing yard work, so I got rid of it. At the time it probably seemed inappropriate and kinda off the wall; I’m sure there were people who said some negative things about it. But I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I was from Brooklyn—you didn’t grow up doing lawn work in Brooklyn.”

Good for Brooklyn. Because, it turns out, the dense urban center where people live on top of each other and over businesses—my dad’s family lived above a drug and candy store and barber shop and within walking distance of all kinds of butcher shops, grocery and hardware stores—is better for the planet. If you need something you walk to it. You don’t waste resources on a car and certainly not on a lawn. In fact, Reader’s Digest (yes, it still exists) recently published a list of the world’s “greenest cities.” The greenest was Stockholm. The greenest American city? New York, which placed 15th in the world. Los Angeles came in at 57th.

So apparently my father knew something, even if he didn’t know he knew.

“Yeah, maybe,” he says, when I suggest his Brooklyn ways served as a beacon for the environmental movement to come. “To be honest, I just didn’t want to cut that crap any more.”

Tags: al gore, desert boots, downey, lawns, rocks, saab