Great Grandpa and The Berdoo’ Pussy Wagon
By: Patrick Killpatrick Strong
Tags: San Bernardino, History, Grandparents, Los Angeles, Prostitution

One of the cool things about moving in with the folks later in life is hearing stories I haven’t heard before. On our run up to Kaiser Riverside where they would X-ray and squash my mom’s elderly boobs to check for cancer, she told me a story about my Great Grandfather that was unknown to me. I’ll preface this to tell you that Grandpa Green was born in 1887 and died in 1989. He had an Army Pension starting in 1924, a railroad pension starting in 1945, and Social Security Benefits from 1952 on. With three sources of income, he did not suffer for want in his long golden years. He had a nice cabin in the Shasta/Trinity area on the shore of Whiskeytown Lake with his own little dock for his boat and a doublewide trailer in Yuma, Arizona, both areas with plenty of fish and game to keep him busy. I can still smell and taste the Rainbow Trout pan seared in cast iron with butter and lemon if I think about it. But that was decades to come; in 1924, he was a 37 year old man adrift with a monthly pension check and nothing but time. Not content to rest, like many others during these years, he made his way to California to look for opportunities, and in that down time hooked up with an old Army buddy who had a second hand bus and needed another driver.

Grandpa Green had been driving tractors on the farm when he was a little boy before the turn of the century, work trucks when vehicles were a toy of the rich or machines of industry, and he worked the Motor Pool in the Army starting at the age of 17. One of the reasons they took him at such a young age was his extensive knowledge of automobiles, mechanics and repair. Following his twenty years in the Army, my Great Grandpappy would join up with the railroad a year later, and his friend would go on to be one of the big wigs in the fledgling Greyhound company, but their gig for that long hot summer of ‘24 was taking johns from LA down to the red light district in San Bernardino.

For those of you who don’t know, San Bernardino has always been a shithole. You think the Hell’s Angels would get their start in Pasadena? Even the pre-Colombian natives avoided the swampy wetlands that make up the present day downtown area. They lived up in the foothills and mountains where there was plenty of game and clean water coming from springs and even hot springs when the water table was much higher. The pestilent bog of continual mountain runoff in the valley was a good place to lose your life to murky quicksand and insect borne disease. Funny enough, this area was Walt Disney’s first choice to build Disneyland, but the city fathers didn’t want “no bunch of carneys and circus freaks living in town full time.” Talk about a debilitating lack of vision. And, even though McDonald’s, Taco Bell and even via proxy Wienerschnitzel would get their start in the 50s and 60s in Berdoo’, that was almost three decades away. Back in the Roaring 20s, Berdoo’ was where you went to get a hooker, find a card or dice game, cheap booze and even reefer or the harder drugs, no questions asked, bought and paid for law enforcement, and no judgement, as long as you were white. For those white men, what happened in Berdoo’ stayed in Berdoo’…except the STDs.

Starting in late spring, my G-Grandpa joined his army buddy as his second driver, and they would pick up the party goers at a specific parking area in downtown LA, load up and one guy would drive out, and the other would drive back; the other driving back had to stay sober while the other partied with the passengers as a sort of ambassador and gonzo level guide. As the new guy, my G-Grandpa probably avoided several nasty STDs, all incurable at that time. Syphilis was actually deadly and the AIDS of its day. But, let’s not dwell on the negative. For about six months, Grandpa Green took thirsty, horny LA men out to the red light district on D Street in Berdoo’, near the site of the County Court House today. In 1941, the War Department would close down the saloons and whorehouses operating openly on D Street and drive the trade outside of downtown San Bernardino, ironically closer to the area that would become Norton Air Force Base in 1942, which kept a lower key red light district rolling in more discrete row houses just off base, all the way through the war. With the cessation of hostilities, when the new nuclear families sprouting up in the wake of the war wouldn’t have such lewdness in their city, the trade was sent four miles down the road to Rialto on Foothill Blvd, where it still flourishes today as “massage parlors.”

However, back in 1925 the houses of ill repute operated openly, women sitting in window fronts under red lights flashing their wares to crowds of wandering, drunk men. It was a classless occurrence, racist for sure but classless, a rare time where factory workers and Hollywood executives would drink in the same bars side by side and shoot their seed into the same women for hire. Conversely, Grandpa Green would sit at an all night diner at the end of the drag, where the bus was parked with several others. He would drink thick black chicory coffee, read the papers and dime store novels, and listen to the radio, when they could get a signal. Near sun up, about a dozen drunken and deflated inebriates would crawl back being Pied Piper’d by the other driver to load up and pass out for the hour plus ride back into LA. If you didn’t make the pick up, you got left behind, which wasn’t so bad. Rooms were cheap in the area, a Chinese laundry was nearby, and the bus was coming back the next night. I can only imagine the crazy shit he saw during that six month run of employment.