Musing of one thinking about the extraordinarily beautiful Iowa girl who, on a visit to Southern California, started across the street at Hollywood

and Vine, created a monstrous traffic jam and got a ticket for obstructing traffic...

The following is just a story. It has no particular moral or point. It is simply a bit of history provided for the edification of young people who may not be knowledgeable about the 1930s and the Great Depression.

One night in the mid-1930s, when our family lived in Alta Dena, California, my brother and I decided to drive over to Hollywood. So we borrowed the family car (at that time, very few families owned 2 cars and many families didn't own a car at all) and set out for TinselTown. A little while later, we were driving through the Los Feliz district when we came to a four-way stop.

At this point I should describe the milieu in which drivers operated in those days. There were no left turn lanes, and automobiles did not have any directional signals. A driver signified his intention by sticking his left arm out the window and pointing it in a certain direction. Straight up meant right turn, straight out (horizontal) meant left turn, straight down meant stop. If the arm pointed at 45 degrees, everybody had to guess. Left turns were made from the regular lanes. In this case all 4 streets comprising the intersection were all 4 lanes, so left turns were to be made from the inside lane.

Traffic was fairly heavy and when we arrived at the stop sign, a number of other cars arrived at the same time from the other streets. For some reason, nobody noticed the forest of arms sticking straight out the windows. By coincidence, all the cars in the left hand lanes started at once to make their left turns, and all arrived smack in the middle of the intersection and got stuck there.

At this point, I should note that Los Angeles drivers always had a propensity for following as close as possible on the bumper of the car in front and not yielding to anything unless it had a red light and siren (there were no flashing red lights, the emergency lights were simply bigger).

Anyhow, of course all lanes in the intersection became blocked and there we sat. Some people got out of their cars and looked around and I imagine the atmosphere was permeated with various expletives. I also imagine people walking on the sidewalk were doubled over with laughter. Eventually the police came and untangled us and we all proceeded on our merry (?) ways.

In view of the vastly greater number of vehicles on the road today, it is a good thing that traffic control has kept up fairly well. We have left-turn lanes, directional signals on cars, computerized traffic signals, GPS, etc. So that's a good thing.

However, in spite of all this, we haven't solved the problem of traffic jams.

And so one of the frustrations of driving is still with us.