Wednesday, August 7, 2019 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
21
Commentary...
L.A. death trip
By Jim Cornelius
Editor in Chief
During summer college
breaks back in the mid-1980s,
I did some work for my
grandparents 4 the typical
light home maintenance stuff
on their place in La Cañada,
California. My grandfather
was on his last legs, his breath
stolen by emphysema, which
he earned with a heavy smok-
ing habit in his younger days
and by working with asbes-
tos and God knows what-all
building liberty ships in Long
Beach harbor during World
War II.
At lunch we9d sit at the
kitchen table and I9d ask him
questions about his ranching
days and the move to L.A.
during the Depression. These
were just conversations, not
interviews 4 and I neither
recorded nor wrote anything
down. Though I was a history
major and a lifelong history
nerd, I didn9t really think then
of my grandpa9s life as part
of history. I know. Youth is
wasted on the young.
Sometimes the conversa-
tion wound down odd paths. I
don9t know how we got on the
subject of the Manson mur-
ders of August 8-10, 1969,
but I recall the conversation
vividly. Because the killings
freaked my grandpa out 4
and he did not scare easy.
Quentin Tarantino9s cur-
rent movie, <Once Upon A
Time In Hollywood,= uses
the murders as a fulcrum on
which to move a twisted love
letter to vintage L.A. That it
works so effectively is evi-
dence that there is something
endlessly fascinating about
the killings set against the
cultural context of the times.
It was context that made
the killings so chilling to the
likes of my grandfather. Part
of it was that he either knew
or knew someone who knew
Leno LaBianca through the
grocery business (I can9t
remember which it was, but
I think probably the latter).
The slayings of Leno and
Rosemary LaBianca were
the second set of gruesome
<Helter Skelter= murders, and
are usually treated almost as
a footnote to the slaughter of
actress Sharon Tate and four
others in Benedict Canyon
the night before. A shocking
murder that hits within a cou-
ple of degrees of separation is
bound to shake anyone.
But what my grandpa
told me was that the killings
made him and my grandma
and their friends feel vulner-
able in a way they had never
felt before. Things still felt
<innocent= and <secure= for
them back in 1969, despite
all the social turmoil of the
era. Really, for a whole lot
of middle class people just
working to make a living and
provide a decent life for their
family, <the Sixties= weren9t
really a thing. My brother
was in high school, too young
for Vietnam; my older sister
was married to an Air Force
man, but he was stationed in
England. There was just no
real personal point of con-
nection to all the sturm und
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drang. My grandparents lived
in a nice suburb that had not
yet become an enclave of the
rich. It was an actual neigh-
borhood. They left windows
open on hot August nights (a
child of the Depression, my
grandpa refused to pay for
air conditioning. The week
after he died, my grandma
installed a unit).
It would be several
months before the Manson
Family was fingered for the
crimes of August 8-10. The
sensational killings and all
their bizarre and gruesome
iconography made my folks
and countless thousands just
like them feel personally vul-
nerable. <They= 4 whoever
they were 4 might just come
into your home and carve
you up. We like to think of
the media <back then= as
sober and responsible, but
it was rife with speculation
and stoked fear and hyste-
ria. People 4 and not just
freaked-out movie stars 4
started sleeping with guns on
the nightstand.
All of a sudden, the turmoil
of the 960s, which my people
viewed through the TV screen
but seldom encountered in
the real world, felt very pres-
ent and profoundly menac-
ing. Is that kid with long hair
hitch-hiking at the freeway
on-ramp a killer? Who is
that driving that beat-up car
down the street? What hor-
ror is going to happen next?
1969 was Maximum
California Weirdness playing
out in blood. Charles Manson
was an avatar of a variety of
pretty commonplace cultural
influences and obsessions 4
drugs, sex, pseudo-religious
self-actualization cons, <rev-
olution,= all rolled up, lit on
fire and inhaled in combina-
tion with the ultimate L.A.
drug 4 the deepest belief
that somehow, someway, if
you can just get in front of
the right person at the right
time, you can be a STAR.
The gruesome events of
August 8-10, 1969, are often
tolled out as <the end of the
Sixties.= You can take your
pick of end points. Altamont
in December 1969? The land-
slide reelection of Richard
Nixon in 1972? Watergate in
1974? The final evacuation
and fall of Saigon in 1975?
Such punctuation is inevita-
bly somewhat arbitrary and
inadequate.
This much seems clear, at
least from the standpoint of
my people: What happened
on August 8-10, 1969, shook
the sense of security that
middle-class Angelenos (and
maybe Americans writ large)
had retained through the
weird and wild times of the
1960s. Whether <the Sixties=
ended then or not, a certain
sense of the world did. Open
windows and unlocked doors
seemed mighty risky. Long
hair and rock music wasn9t
just distasteful 4 it was
downright sinister. It may
be putting too much weight
on a single episode, but the
way the killings went down
4 and the way they continue
to be obsessively recounted
4 pushed a wedge into
cultural faultlines that had
already cracked open around
Vietnam, the sexual revo-
lution, and a broad culture
clash. It raised the stakes.
They weren9t just rebelling
4 they were murdering us.
Those faultlines still
remain 50 years down the
line, and no number of secu-
rity cameras can quite relieve
the fear.