[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 106 (Thursday, July 18, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1327-E1328]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     A CELEBRATION OF SUBURBAN LIFE

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. STEPHEN HORN

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, July 18, 1996

  Mr. HORN. Mr. Speaker, when the men and women came home from the 
Second World War, they moved into the sprawling suburbs that were 
springing up across America. There, they quickly settled into lives in 
which they worked hard, raised their children, and played by the rules. 
Not the kind of lives that make headlines--but precisely the kind that 
make nations strong. Until now, no one had chronicled the world of 
these quiet heros.
  Author Donald Waldie, who grew up in one of these postwar 
communities--Lakewood in California's 38th district--has filled that 
void. Mr. Waldie has made a significant contribution to American 
literature with the publication of his book ``Holy Land,'' in which he 
recounts the unique joys and frustrations of American suburban life. 
Not surprisingly, he reveals that the backbone of America lies in the 
families who live quietly and unremarkably in these communities.
  Lakewood is a proud part of the 38th congressional district. The 
beautiful tree-lined streets, an attractive civic center in which 
citizens find a responsive government, a vibrant business and 
professional community, and marvelous senior and recreational programs 
which welcome those of all ages--that is Lakewood. People sense the 
quality of Lakewood when they enter its boundaries and know their 
judgment was right when they go elsewhere.
  I submit the following article from the Los Angeles Times which 
details Mr. Waldie's achievement.

               [From the Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1996]

                  A Little Piece of Heaven in Lakewood

                           (By Thomas Curwen)

       On most Saturday mornings, Donald Waldie is out weeding his 
     frontyard, which he will say desperately needs it, but don't 
     be deceived. The azaleas are a little burned out, but the 
     lawn is green and well-manicured.
       Waldie lives in Lakewood, and his home is one of the 
     hundreds of homes that make up the nearly anonymous patchwork 
     of suburbs in southeast Los Angeles County. Little 
     distinguishes Lakewood--unless you recall the brief notoriety 
     of the Spur Posse, the group of teenagers who a few years 
     back made it a cruel sport to have sex with as many girls as 
     possible.
       Today Lakewood's tree-lined streets and well-maintained 
     homes are quiet and almost defy attention, unless of course 
     you're interested in the almost mystically simple qualities 
     of everyday life in a classic American suburb. Waldie is, and 
     has lovingly rendered his perceptions in ``Holy Land'' 
     (Norton), a memoir of growing up--and still living--in one of 
     the largest postwar housing developments in the country.
       Beginning in 1950 and continuing for almost three years, 
     Lakewood was a flurry of building. As many as 100 homes were 
     started each day, more than 500 a week, and by the end--33 
     months later--17,500 had been raised.
       When considering this astonishing boom, Waldie breaks ranks 
     with critics who disparage sprawl. He paints instead a 
     picture of a community of simple and practical values that 
     worked 50 years ago and still works today. A recent survey of 
     homeowners in Los Angeles County backs him up. The average 
     Lakewood resident lives here 15.6 years--the longest length 
     of stay of any municipality in the county.
       As the public information officer for Lakewood, Waldie, 47, 
     makes his living explaining the city to its residents and the 
     press. That he defends the place might not be surprising, but 
     unlike the boosters who sold homes here in the 1950s on the 
     benefits of a regional shopping center (the Lakewood Center 
     Mall was one of the first and largest in the country) and a 
     garbage disposal in every kitchen, he focuses on the 
     spiritual benefits of life here.
       ``These are not perfect places, and the people who live in 
     them are not perfect,'' admits Waldie, a soft-spoken man who 
     picks his words carefully. ``But my book is about the 
     possibility of leading a redeemed life in this kind of 
     suburban place--a life that has some value to others and a 
     life in which one gets saved.''
       Welcome to the first church of the suburb. Let ``Holy 
     Land'' be your bible.
       Comprising more than 300 minichapters, ranging from a 
     single sentence to a page and written much like an extended 
     prose poem, ``Holy Land'' is the story of Waldie's faith and 
     his notion that a kind of salvation takes place within the 
     context of a suburb like Lakewood. Responsibility and 
     obligation, he will tell you, are the linchpins of this 
     faith, holding neighbors and communities together to make 
     this a real holy land.
       If you look carefully behind a scrim of materialism--these 
     homes and these yards--you will see that the simple upkeep of 
     a frontyard is symbolic of a complicated social contract 
     between neighbors.
       Waldie--whom Buzz magazine described in its list of 100 
     notables as having ``a passion and eloquence worthy of Joan 
     Didion''--composed the chapters of ``Holy Land'' during the 
     half-hour it takes him to walk to or from work. Poor eyesight 
     keeps him from driving. He lives alone, almost like a monk, 
     in the house his parents bought in 1946. He attends Catholic 
     church.
       The homes in his neighborhood would probably sell in the 
     high $150,000s; most have three bedrooms, one bath and a 
     detached two-car garage. Windows look into neighbors' 
     windows. Cars, trucks and campers are parked in driveways and 
     in the street. Some lawns are scruffy; some are immaculate. 
     It is, in Waldie's words a place for the ``not-quite middle 
     class.''
       These straight-arrow streets and single-family homes are as 
     much a part of the American landscape as shopping malls and 
     7-Elevens and from here to Levittown, Long Island, have been 
     easy targets. Writer Ron Rosenbaum described his 1956 
     screenplay for ``The Invasion of the Body Snatchers'' as 
     ``about the horror of being in the 'burbs.'' In his 
     influential 1964 book ``God's Own Junkyard'' (Holt, Rinehart 
     & Winston), architect Peter Blake wrote: ``The kind of 
     stratified, anesthetized and standardized society being bred 
     in America's present-day Suburbia is not one to look forward 
     to with pleasure.''
       Nowadays critics are less unkind. Robert Bellah, principal 
     author of ``Habits of the Heart: Individualism & Commitment 
     in American Life'' (University of California Press), a 1985 
     diagnosis of what ails American communities, today sees 
     suburbs as ``a catastrophe for this country.'' First, their 
     population density is low, leading to a wasteful use of land; 
     second, they cater to the automobile, which is expensive and 
     polluting; and third, they represent a closed door to what's 
     happening in urban centers.
       ``People [in Lakewood] may be able to look out for 
     themselves,'' Bellah says. ``But what about the rest of 
     society?''
       Waldie is not surprised by the anger and the harsh language 
     the suburban experience can evoke.
       ``These are furious, vituperative attacks on the kind of 
     suburban space that Lakewood best exemplified,'' he says. 
     ``Willful ignorance about these places is one of the reasons 
     I wrote `Holy Land.' ''
       Take a Saturday walk through Jose del Valle Park in 
     Lakewood and you will see what the critics probably didn't 
     take into account. People really seem to enjoy living here.
       Children scramble for the playground equipment. Baseball 
     diamonds are packed with players; parents cheer children from 
     the bleachers. Waldie pauses to watch a foul ball fly into a 
     quiet street. He wrote ``Holy Land'' with the presumption 
     that the ordinary lives of ordinary people have a unique 
     value.
       In 1949, Louis Boyar, Mark Taper and Ben Weingart purchased 
     3,500 acres of farmland to create this landscape. Boyar who 
     had built homes on Long Beach in the 1930s, was responsible 
     for the plan. He used a simple formula--straight streets at 
     right angles and 5,000-square-foot lots--parameters that were 
     surprisingly prescient. Urban planners today, in an attempt 
     to built more friendly communities, are returning to 
     straight-line grids, which seem to be more conducive to 
     neighborliness than curved streets and cul-de-sacs.
       But Boyar did more than plot 17,500 homes and a scattering 
     of social amenities, Waldie says. He built a community out of 
     his heart, creating a network for possible social 
     interactions that reinforce common values. Values that make 
     Jose del Valle Park so popular. Values that seem at times 
     forgotten--or at least under-reported--in the country.
       Of course, the motives of the developers were not entirely 
     altruistic. By the time they dissolved their corporation, 
     they had made almost $12 million--money that ironically was 
     made from a community that kept Jews, like themselves, as 
     well as blacks and Mexicans from living here.
       Filled with sad truths and terrible ironies, ``Holy Land'' 
     chronicles the distance between 1950 and now. Here was a 
     suburb, after

[[Page E1328]]

     all whose major selling point was a shopping center that 
     could double as a fallout shelter; but rather than ridicule 
     these faces, Waldie writes with a poignant mix of knowing and 
     compassion.
       ``The critics of suburbs say that you and I live narrow 
     lives,'' one mini-chapter reads. ``I agree. My life is 
     narrow. From one perspective or another, all our lives are 
     narrow. Only when lives are placed side by side do they seem 
     larger.''
       Waldie will admit, however, that not all lives fit into 
     this side-by-side pattern. ``Holy Land'' does look at a few 
     disconnected people who live outside the tacit social 
     contracts that connect neighbors. There's the man who filled 
     his yard with dead machinery and used building supplies. 
     There's the woman who believed that the dead from the nearby 
     aircraft plant were secretly buried beneath her house.
       Conspicuously absent from the book, however, is mention of 
     the Spur Posse, the 1993 story that yanked Lakewood out of 
     its peaceful anonymity. To a nation worried about its 
     apparent loss of morals, the case of these high school 
     athletes who gave each other ``points'' for sexual conquests 
     was deplorable, especially coming from such an all-American 
     community like Lakewood.
       As Waldie sees it. ``The Spur Posse was less about the 
     decline of the suburbs and more a lesson in how charismatic 
     individuals can create evil.
       ``If you looked at Lakewood in 1993 and projected a 
     straight-line evolution from that point, I can see how you 
     might have imagined a collapse of the social infrastructure, 
     but that has not happened. There is some resiliency here.''
       Not only does he leave out references to the Spur Posse, 
     but he also glosses over the time he was nearly robbed at 
     gunpoint walking home from work. Snakes may live in the grass 
     here, but you won't find them in Waldie's yard.
       Perhaps denial keeps the residents here safe--as it did in 
     the 1950s with regard to the bomb and racism, so too for the 
     1990s with gangs and neighborhood violence.
       When writing about the ever-present Southern California 
     danger of earthquakes--apparently the homes here are built so 
     lightly, they pose relatively little danger to the owners and 
     ``might even shelter us''--Waldie concludes that ``the burden 
     of our habits do the same.''
       ``I believe that accepting obligations because you're 
     obliged to is probably the saving strength against all that 
     would further erode our social institutions,'' he explains. 
     And as he turns to weed a yard that barely needs it, Waldie 
     joins the dance that connects residents to the community--
     past and present.

                          ____________________