Whitewashed Adobe by William Deverell

Author:William Deverell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520932531
Publisher: University of California Press

Figure 34. Growing up in Yard No. 3: The young Walter Malone Jr. Author’s collection.

The macabre statement suggests another enduring irony of Simons. Because in a sense the reporter was right: a better world, a changed world, awaited the workers of Simons if they lived. But the trial they had to pass through was not so much living through a life of company town hard, segregated work; that alone would not and could not change the world. No, their world would change if they could live through the trial of the Second World War, something the magazine reporter could not possibly have anticipated. For it was that conflagration which forever changed the world of people who grew up at Simons and left it for military service and, in many cases, combat in the Pacific and the theaters of Europe. If they lived through this, and many, like Walter Leon Prado and Ismael Vargas’s brother, did not, they would return to a world less willing to accept the obvious divisions of race and class enforced by a place such a Simons. But they had to risk their lives to see that world change.

Today, more than a half-century later, Simons people still gather, though today it is as often at rosaries or funerals as anything else. “We lived in extreme poverty, yes,” remembers Ismael Vargas. “But to us it was Camelot. Simons was home.”94

Simons brick is now a local curiosity in Southern California, somewhat hard to find and prized by people who know anything about it for their gardens and walkways. One fairly sizable collection of Simons brick can be found in Pasadena, just south of the major intersection of Lake and California Avenues, in the courtyard of a coffee place and bagel bakery. It is a popular place on Sunday mornings. People gather with their Sunday papers, their dogs, and their babies, sitting in the sun, chatting, passing the time, and sipping coffee. At their feet, Simons bricks, with that distinctive S I M O N S embossing on the odd one here and there, merit hardly any notice.

Simons, the brick, is barely remembered. Simons, the place and its workers, is wholly forgotten.

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