They had their Summer of Love, and by '72-'73 it was all over. I always felt it was like coming on the field of a great battle, twelve hours after the battle was over, so the casualties were all lying on the field, but the battle was gone.
— Joe Strummer
Overview of location and circumstances…
We moved around quite a lot when I was young, here and there, for different reasons, to different neighborhoods and different school districts in and around L.A. This is 3112 Linda Lane, the last home out of which the Tuttles moved intact.
It was a four-bedroom, three-and-a-half–bath house with an attached three car garage, maid’s room, laundry room, central heat and air and pool with spa in a new development crafted upon the Trousdale Estates model in the hills west of the 405 Freeway, above where the Getty is today. We were the first people to have lived here. I have no idea how much it cost.
Occupancy in context (social historical)…
We moved in to this hilly western suburb near the end of the 1967-68 school year in the lull between the King and Kennedy assassinations. I was 8 years old and in the second grade; my brother Mack was 6, and in his second year of kindergarten. We moved on when I was 11 and Mack was 9, July 3, 1971, the day Jim Morrison died.
Isolated as we may have been, it was still a formative time in a tumultuous era. We lived here through the Kent State killings and the Beatles’ breakup, Woodstock, Easy Rider, the My Lai massacre, the moon landing, the Amazin’ Mets, the Sylmar earthquake (6.4) and the Tate-LaBianca murders that happened just a canyon or two away, even if the ugliest spectacles Mack and I ever witnessed firsthand in our Linda Lane years were the traffic jams in the Dodger Stadium parking lot after sold-out games.
Occupancy in praxis (draft)…
Mack and I stuck together exploring our new neighborhood and meeting new kids to play with, and over time, and resilient as we were, our new routines privileged us with a sense of safety and permanence, just as they had in the last couple of places we lived. When we weren’t at Cub Scouts or off playing Little League together, we were hiking trails or biking around on dirt roads in the underdeveloped hills where we lived. We played pick-up football in the street. We went swimming in other kids’ pools. There were pomegranate trees to pick.
Caption for image #4 thumbnail….
Flavors:
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This entry was posted by Tuttle on Friday, December 4th, 1987 at 11:37 AM
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No text with the last image. Is this another one of your unfinished pieces?
Fair question. I’m glad you asked!
The thumbnail version of the story (extended version to follow in this space) is that I drained the captions from the last two images above at my brother Mack’s request. In his opinion (IHHO), my text encroached not only upon his privacy, but upon his hard-won good health, so out of respect, and because he’s family, I cut out the offending passages (and foreclosed on the possibility that they could be re-published at postdelete.com). Look for new text in the next day or two that displaces the piece’s emphasis on Mack’s famous first novel’s portrayal of me upon my return from my lost years in the Himalaya…
It seems to have worked. I mean not offending the gods and asking you to take out the passages re: your lost years. My health continues to improve. However, I remain tempted to tempt fate by asking you to re-insert them. Maybe the gods won’t notice?
Love what’s here tho.
Your brother, Mack
You never call, you never write…
I don’t think the gods give too much of a shit about this kind of thing.