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CHAPTER 3 "I Don't Feel at Home Anymore": Social and Cultural Change From the 1940s through the 1960s, Monterey Park was a community whose activities revolved around active service clubs, friendly churches, and a collegial chamber of commerce. Two hotly competing weekly newspapers (the Progress and the Californian) together thoroughly informed residents about what was going on in town. Since the early 1970s, however, the city's social and cultural landscape has been reshaped. This chapter describes the changing environment in Monterey Park from the 1940s through the conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s, when ambivalence toward the new immigrant Chinese, antagonism toward bilingual education, and hostility toward the proliferation of ethnic-oriented businesses escalated into a clearly anti-Chinese backlash. A Homogeneous Community For more than thirty years Nell Bruggemeyer was a columnist for the Monterey Park Progress, writing exclusively on the social scene during "the good old days" of the city. Until her illness in 1963, Bruggemeyer's regular feature "Bird on Nellie's Hat," attracted a loyal readership that particularly enjoyed her detailed depictions of an ideal small town where everyone knew everyone else. She often wrote about how people would get together for parties to celebrate not only every holiday but even the construction of a new room in a house. Communal activities from square dances at Ynez Elementary School, large picnics in the park, and block parties to building floats for the Pasadena Rose Parade on New Year's Day figured prominently in her columns and in the residents' image of their city. Social Institutions The people who settled in Monterey Park between 1916 and the end of World War II were primarily white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who 55 56 C HAP T E R 3 had a strong faith in themselves and a strong pioneering spirit. They also had a strong faith in God, whom they considered their partner in building a city reflective of American virtues, values, and ideals. Although Catholic Saint Stephens is the oldest church in town, the Methodist Church was easily the most influential. Methodists played an active role in Monterey Park's major secular institution, the Lions Club. Chartered in 1937, the Lions Club was the center of civic and social activities for many years. Notably, it participated in war-related services, constructed several public facilities in Barnes Park, and was instrumental in starting the city's first large senior housing project-the six-story, 126-unit Lions Manor. The Lions Club was also the motivating force behind "Play Days," a yearly festival that started with the city's golden anniversary in 1966 and is still celebrated every May with a parade down Garvey Avenue and a carnival at Barnes Park. The Monterey Park Lions Club initiated projects to help blind and vision-impaired people, such as testing the eyesight of young children in local schools every year, paying for eyeglasses for needy students, and selling small "white cane" pins to raise money for these activities . "White Cane Days," now a national Lions Club operation, actually began in Monterey Park in 1952, when member Walter Koetz came up with the idea of making pins from white pipe cleaners to resemble canes carried by the blind.' Several years later members Johnny Johns and Kenny Gribble built a machine capable of turning out millions of white cane pins; since that time the Monterey Park Lions have been responsible for manufacturing and distributing the pins to Lions Clubs all over the country. From the 1940s to the late 1970s the organization was also a major political force, having had several members elected to the city council . "The Lions Club itself was not political," explains Joseph Graves, a Monterey Park native born in 1916 and the 1956 president of the Lions Club, "but it provided personnel who were well known and had friends who would provide a good political team. That's how it worked."2 Moreover, Lions Club and Methodist Church members formed the core of the group of merchants and long-time residents who gathered every morning at Paris' Restaurant for coffee and conversation . The long-running Kaffee Klatch, as it was known, had a consistent turnout of fifteen to twenty, plus perhaps a dozen others who came intermittently, among them several top city staff members. Regulars included Harold Fiebelkorn, Howard Fry, Johnny Johns, Ed Kretz, Kenny Gribble, and Monterey Park Progress publisher Eli Isenberg (though he was neither a Lions Club nor Methodist Church member). [18.224.44.108...

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