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Welcome to Wes Clark's Avocado Memories!

“Avocado Memories” is my collection of family photographs documenting the changes we inflicted on our little stucco-covered Burbank, CA home during the years 1966–1980. Some people have asked why I took photographs of the interior of our house while growing up — and the answer is simple: I knew someday I would want to look back on the place where I grew up. Now you can, too.

Added to this are essays about various aspects of growing up in Southern California in the Sixties and Seventies.

Essays

  • People Section People – Dad, Mom, Hollywood Spies, Captain Russian, and more.
  • Places Section Places – The Corner Drug Store, Lockheed Wash, Disneyland, Sav-On, etc.
  • Things Section Things – Monster Models, Kraft Cheese, Muzak, Rolaids, Porsches, Tiki Huts, and more.

The Home Tour

1631 N. Lincoln Street in Burbank, California — the place where I was raised. We lived there from 1965; I moved out in 1980.



Why This Web Page?

I was eleven when my dad and I were watching a 1967 episode of the Sixties TV sitcom Family Affair entitled “Fat, Fat the Water Rat.” The story was that the normally pampered and sheltered Buffy and Jodie were playing with kids from a poorer New York City neighborhood. One kid called up for his ma to throw down a piece of buttered bread sprinkled with sugar, chanting “Fat, fat the water rat / Sixteen bullets in his hat!”

Dad told me that he used to chant this as a boy — and also ate buttered bread sprinkled with sugar. We had just watched the 1937 film Dead End, and Dad made similar comparisons with his own Brooklyn childhood in the 1920s. As he told me these things, I knew something precious was in danger of being lost.

This website is my attempt to document my childhood so my children will understand. If strangers find it interesting, so much the better.

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