About the time we came back from Saudi Arabia for (thank gawd!) our last long leave, my father celebrated by purchasing the Car of His Dreams: a Chrysler sedan. He bought it in New York. He and my mother drove it across the country to San Francisco, where he took up a first-mate’s job on an oil tanker and we lived for a couple of years in a tony apartment complex called Parkmerced. Then he got another, better-paying job, shipping out of Long Beach, California. So my mother and I packed up all our worldly goods, sent everything south, and moved into a (crummy!) apartment in Southern California.
Of course, we took the new Chrysler with us.
My father was so proud of that car. It was a Rolls Royce for the working classes. At least, so it was in his mind.
Meanwhile, my father being quite the cheapskate, my mother took it into her head to create her own little career: selling real estate. She had become friendly with a real estate saleswoman who was quite the scam artist. This woman persuaded my mother to get a real estate license and throw in with her, selling houses at the Salton Sea.
Salton Sea, then imagined to be a developer’s bonanza, was one of the Great Scams of the Western World. And my mother got swept right up in it. Fortunately, she didn’t buy any property down there, so my father didn’t lose his hard-earned shirt through her real-estate exploit. But….
Among other things, one aspect of my mother’s project involved driving from L.A. through Palm Springs and down to the half-baked development at Salton Sea. And that involved driving through a broad, sandy desert, where the wind blew fiercely.
Fiercely enough to sandblast the finish off that swell new car, right down to the metal.
My father must have just been horrified when he came home from the ship and saw the paint scoured off his beautiful new car.
And for what?
For naught. Salton Sea, as it developed, was one of the Great Scams of the Western World.
***
She had no clue. Neither, unfortunately, did he. But one senses that if he’d had a shore job, if he hadn’t been off at sea for week after week and month after month, he would have sussed out the rip-off before she got caught up in it..
I was just a kid in high school. I therefore had an excuse (of sorts) to have no clue. Instinct suggested that all was not perfect there, but there was no way in Hell (where we were dwelling…) that I could have figured out that it was a huge, ridiculous scam. Even if I could have, my parents paid no attention to me. I MIGHT have alerted my father…but probably not. As far as he was concerned, I was just a weird little kid — and worse, a weird female kid.
So they got sucked into the Salton Sea boondoggle. How much they lost — above and beyond the damage to a brand-new Chrysler — I do not know. They didn’t share their financial matters with a weird little kid.
Mercifully, she didn’t buy any property down there. I’m pretty sure that was only because my father wouldn’t have allowed it. He clung to every penny more fiercely than Scrooge McDuck hung onto his dollars.
Luckily for me..