 |
|||||
|
Navy's 1932 visit
Remembrance of warships past
by Robb Fulcher
|
Betty Steidinger reminisces upon the 68-year-old visit of the USS Texas. Photo by Robb Fulcher |
The weekend visit by the Navy destroyer USS Elliot brought back special memories for 77-year-old Hermosan Betty Steidinger, who as a little girl clambered aboard another warship, the USS Texas, when it visited Manhattan Beach on Armistice Day 1932.
"I thought it was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me," she said. "All those big sailors, that big ship, you know."
Hermosa was different in those days.
"We had vacant lots. We had nothing. We had sand dunes where there are houses," Steidinger said. "In the summer the Strand houses would open up, when the summer people came. We had a lot of movie people back then."
In those days visits by Navy ships did not come many years apart. The year before the Texas visit, the battleship Colorado anchored off the Redondo harbor on Armistice Day, said John Hales, a board member of the Hermosa Beach Historical Society, citing reports in the Hermosa Beach Review newspaper.
"It was more informal back then," Steidinger said. "The ships would come in and we would just line up and get on board. It was just something we did. They never charged money back then."
Steidinger, then Betty McHenry, lived on 16th Street with her grandparents and an aunt, Virginia Fisk, a Redondo High graduate who is now 93.
"My mother and father split up when I was tiny, and I was dumped on my grandmother," Steidinger said.
"My mother had other things to do. She was busy. She was a flapper, back in the 20s. She did whatever came along that didn't involve raising children," Steidinger said with a laugh. "...I guess now they call that an abandoned child, but I didn't feel abandoned. I always felt like I had a family."
Steidinger's mother lived in LA and hopped onto a streetcar to come down and see her daughter.
"I saw her off and on. She was like a visiting princess. She would curl my hair with a curling iron, and we would play, and then she would go back to her apartment in the city," Steidinger said.
It was a blistering summer day when 9-year-old Betty visited the Texas.
"My aunt used to take me everywhere, we were always having adventures," she said.
As the years went on the Navy ships stopped coming around. The little girl grew up, and one day when she was 14, visiting her father in Long Beach, she met a schoolmate named Laurence Steidinger.
"We got married when I was 16," she said. "Well, we got married in August and I turned 17 in September, so I like to say I got married when I was 17. That sounds a little older."
The couple raised three children, and stayed married until Laurence's death in 1989.
"I still live in Hermosa. I've never had the sense to leave," Steidinger said with a laugh.
In her home lies a child's momento of her visit to a naval vessel.
"Somewhere around here I have one of those wooden spoons you get with your ice cream," Steidinger said. "I've kept it ever since that day." ER