Wars, a Dangerous Toy, and a Place of Memory

Lakewood -- the city where I used to work and where I volunteer as historian -- is preparing to refurbish one of its memories. It's a jet plane. A Douglas Aircraft F3D-2 Skyknight carrier-based fighter.

I wrote about it last year, here.

Everyday places like my town are generally thought to have short memories. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why, still today, places like mine -- a postwar, tract house suburb -- are usually cast in academic literature as insubstantial and inauthentic.

Anyway, my place does remember, in ways that require patience, a little slowing down from the regime of speed that afflicts us all.

The memory Lakewood is refashioning is its veterans' memorial at José del Valle Park.

(The park itself is an official memory, named in 1957 in honor of a 19th century Central American statesman. Some people call it "Del Val" park. Other people say "Del Vi-yay." I guess it depends on how much you want to remember.)

The veterans' memorial at the park is layered with more than 50 years of remembrances, some of them contradictory. (Some people might call some of them ironic.)

What is today a site for somber Memorial Day observances began as an enormous toy.

Recreation Superintendent Kenneth Pitsenberger, according to a story in a 1958 city newsletter, had to plead with Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics for more than a year to acquire a decommissioned Korean War-vintage jet for Del Valle Park.

I haven't found why Pitsenberger or Recreation Commission Chairman Norman Kreitzer thought a Douglas F3D-2 Skyknight with a wingspan of 50 feet would make a good addition to a neighborhood park. But they were so pleased with the idea of putting planes in parks that they hoped they could get more of them for Lakewood.

I also don't know how Pitsenberger persuaded the Navy to give up its Skyknight and the Navajo Freight Lines company to haul it in parts from the Litchfield Park Naval Air Facility in Arizona to Lakewood for free. They did, in any case.

The jet arrived in April 1959. By May it had been reassembled by volunteers from Douglas Aircraft and Marines from the El Toro Air Station, repainted midnight blue -- the jet was a night fighter in Korea -- and laid belly down on the park's new grass as if the plane's Marine Corps pilot had made an oddly successful wheels-up landing near the park's playground and its jungle gym and swing set.

Miss Lakewood Patti Caraco, Mayor Angelo Iacoboni, and representatives of Douglas and Navajo Freight Lines dedicated the jet on Armed Forces Day in 1959 and turned it over to the kids of Del Valle Park. In a swarm, they fell upon the plane.

And almost at once, they began falling from it. In December, after a dozen kids had been injured, the plane was fenced off, and the city newsletter was asking residents for their ideas what to do with a jet that turned out not to be a toy.

In barely six months, according to the city's insurance provider, Lakewood's Skyknight had been reduced to a total loss -- new paint scuffed, metal and plastic parts torn out, the wing and tail surfaces dented, and the fuselage punctured.

Rather than cut the jet up for scrap -- and perhaps to salvage something good from a bad idea -- the city raised a 12-foot high concrete pylon at the edge of the park, bolted on the jet, repainted it in 1960s combat colors, and dedicated it anew in 1964 as the city's memorial to U.S. service members killed in the Korean War.

On its pylon, noise up as if taking off over Woodruff Avenue, the toy that became a Korean War memorial eventually served to anchor another set of memories.

In 1967, as the boys of Lakewood who had played on the jet in 1959 enlisted or were drafted into the Vietnam War, the city attached another plaque to the pylon, this one naming those who had died in Southeast Asia. There were only a few names in the beginning.

In the years after, more names were added to the plaque at the request of parents and spouses. The gathering in of those names must have been the saddest assignment at city hall. The tally finally ended in the early 1970s.

Eventually a third plaque was added through a gift from the Bonner family to remember all the losses in every Lakewood family in all the wars that had touched their lives since 1941.

Every Memorial Day, that's who we remember beneath the wings of our Skyknight. We've done so for so long that the plane seems more like an old acquaintance than a thing of war.

This is Lakewood's 60th anniversary year, and its passing will be marked by changes to the memorial at Del Valle Park. The jet is being taken down from its pylon and shipped back to Arizona to be restored.

When the jet returns in 2015, it will be fitted out as a historic warplane. It will be lifted up again on its pylon not far from the playground. And around the city's Skyknight will be a new plaza that will include the city's memorials for Korea and Vietnam and all the wars that came before and followed after.

The memorial will be different, but fundamentally, it will be the same place of memory.

Circumstance and need -- perhaps circumstance and grace -- turned an unwanted airplane into a dangerous toy and then into something where memories have accreted until that place has become familiar yet solemn.

I often think about who and what gets remembered by communities and by whose authority those memories persist in the stuff of our lives. I've come to believe that some places themselves remember better than we do, at least in Los Angeles.

Some memories perish, tossed into the furnace of history. Some memories do not perish. Some are raised on a pylon in the corner of a neighborhood park and persist a while longer.