Long Road to Lincoln Place
By Ingrid
Mueller
We are children of the Universe.
This was engrained in my mind as of age 10. Who knows where it came from? My
search for that meaning continues almost feverishly.
After a Hamburg(er) Scientific High School for
Girls adventure, ‘twas obvious: this ain’t my earthly path. A
curiosity for the human condition was deepened by the passing of my father after
7 years of MS paralysis. I was 16, had to become my own
daddy.
England’s north and
international student community opened many minds to comparative religions,
cultures, foods.
Paris’ population
very probably included relatives of my mother’s grandmother who married
into the East Prussian State in Kaiser Wilhelm’s
times.
My language studies were
personal and intense in that City of
Lights.
Barcelona was my very first paid
job site as a trilingual secretary to the owner of a small Blanes/Costa Brava
hotel.
San Francisco completely sucked me
in in 1964 (go ahead, smile). Straight off the plane, a job on Market Street and
a turn-of-the-century-apartment downtown allowed amazing revelations in my new,
consciously selected country of an admired idea of human
equality.
But a quickie Las Vegas wedding
swept me onto the African continent where my engineer husband helped build corn
and flour mills across the South African veldt, as this child of the universe
innocently stubbed toes and knowingly insulted Johannesburg apartheid laws right
and left in the late Sixties. It was the very best social and human injustice
education for four years.
Back in WA
State with two daughters and eventually ‘on our own’, the
professional and financial opportunity to be transferred to L.A. was happily
grabbed in 1976 - after all, downtown’s Bonaventure Hotel couldn’t
open without moi, child of the
universe!
Alas, our car accident in late
1977 at the corner of Wilshire & 17th in Santa Monica stopped a whole lot
more than my corporate job and my daughters’ innocence. A decade later,
this ‘empty nester’ discovered a new home off the beaten track,
speak: busy Lincoln Boulevard, at the now historic 38 acre Lincoln Place Garden
Apartment complex.
And here
I’ve lived and loved and anxiously tippy-toed and complied and organized
and protested since 1988. I hope I’ve helped advance all Los
Angelenos’ Renters’ Rights in the face of rampant overdevelopment,
and rampant overpayment for a CEO (for example, $4.7M for Terry Considine/AIMCO
in 2007). All of which undermines every person’s right to
housing.
Let’s stay Los Angelenos.
After all, Children of the Universe know a little...
Posted: Sat - March 1, 2008 at 03:53 PM
