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50
summer
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fal l
his isn’t that long ago, but long enough... I was alive
and lost in the suburbs of Santa Barbara. Other than
soda fountains in black and white movies from the
‘30s and ‘40s, the only one I’d seen was in Montecito
Village – a small group of shops just up from the
intersection of San Ysidro and East Valley, the two main roads into
our woodsy enclave. The southwest corner was taken up with the old
YMCA, a two-story wooden building the color of driftwood with
basketball standards and courts in the back. Across from the Y were San
Ysidro Pharmacy, the fire station, a Standard Oil filling station (as my
father still called them), and a horseshoe drive that looped toward the
foothills and back, with the Isaiah Brothers Market at the top. Isaiah’s
was a grocery where everything seemed 15% better than anything at the
markets in Santa Barbara – the service, the tomatoes, the ground round
at the meat counter – and a place where it all cost 30% more. Around
this loop there was a bookshop on the right hand side, a branch library,
an art-frame shop, and on the other side coming down, a small post
office, a Realtor’s and other offices. This was the blueprint, the world day
to day. I remember it because it was our lives; their repetition the daily
confirmation of our place on earth.
Mid-century, as the antique dealers and pitch-men spin it now... late
1950s and not everything sweet and worthwhile from the first half of the
1900s had gone to hell in a hand basket, as my father and most everyone
else was fond of saying. The Village was just half a mile down East Valley
Road from Our Lady of Mt. Carmel School, just an afternoon saunter
when we got out of class at 3 o’clock. We were living, we now know, in
one of the most rarified places on earth, intoxicated by the sunlight and
salt air, by the shade of oak and acacia, the fair weather clouds floating
like Ivory Soap Flakes over the foothills. The average yearly temperature
was 70 degrees, the air scented with eucalyptus, citrus, and honeyed
pittosporum... not that we were paying much attention. We were kids
with homework to avoid, racing out of school to tag up for positions in
a work-up baseball game, then walking down East Valley Road to the
Village before heading home; the world was slow and simple then.
On the south side of East Valley Road, across the street from all of
the more utilitarian places of business, there were two stores adjacent to
the Y. The first one on the right was The Hobby Shop; it sold models of
battleships and WWII bombers and jets, kits whose parts you broke off
from a plastic grid and glued in place. The shop also had a continuing
stock of balsawood gliders at 10¢, and all you had to do was open the
cellophane and slot the thin main and tail wings into the fuselage, move
them forward or back for long glides or quick loops, check the weight
inserted in the nose, then step out to a field and toss them into the sky,
hoping they would not splinter and would last longer than the one you’d
bought before.
I
saiah’s was a
grocery where
everything seemed 15%
better than anything at the
markets in Santa Barbara –
the service, the tomatoes,
the ground round at the
meat counter – and a place
where it all cost 30% more.
M M
ontecito
emories
by Christopher Buckley
Soda Fountain
The Last