Road Trip, vol.12

January 19, 1933 Friday morning when we woke up the sun seemed all ready to shine but after an hour or so it disappeared behind the clouds. We went sightseeing that morning around Hollywood a little and then went back to the apartment for dinner. That afternoon we went down to Redondo Beach and went to look at the indoor swimming pool. It is a heated pool, of course, containing ocean water. There was no one in it at the time so we did not care to go in either. Then we went down to the beach a little further along and picked up sea shells. There were many little ones but we could find only a few large ones. The waves were very high that day, to us at least, being between six and eight feet high at times. When they hit the beach some of them would run up on it for quite a long ways and if they were not watched carefully they would wet your feet. I found that out by experience when one came up exceedingly fast and caught me before I could get away. We even found some bottles and caught some of the sea water. Then we had to hurry to get to Lehnerts in time for supper.

I forgot to mention that on the way out to the beach we were looking at our map for the best street out to Redondo Beach and saw one marked Speedway so we drove over to it in the expectation of finding a wide boulevard. You can imagine our surprise when we found it to be a very narrow street winding between a great many oil derricks. The street itself was not very good but it at least gave us a very good look at oil derricks in operation. There were probably only fifty per cent of the pumps in operation.

That evening we had our supper at Lehnerts and afterwards we went to a League Missionary Meeting at one of the ME churches in the city. It was in reality a sort of union meeting between some of the leagues but for that kind of meeting it was rather poorly attended. A Chinese woman of the city spoke and told about the very difficult time her race was having in becoming Americanized in Los Angeles and pleaded that the young people endeavor to develop a better understanding between the races. She also described the religious activities of the Chinese population there. The speaker herself was a well-educated woman who held an important position in some Chinese organization. She had spent all of her life here in the U.S. and was an American-born citizen. After the devotional meeting a social hour was enjoyed and then refreshments.