INTERVIEWER: Just tell it as it, as you recall it.
INTERVIEWER: It's the only record at all that we have.
BELLE: I've been bullied by my dear, wonderful niece, Rowena, to try and tell you something
about my memories as a little child and about Los Angeles when it was a charming, beautiful, little city
Quiet, green hills, beautiful orchards of walnuts, oranges, and olives.
And, um, my mother, I can remember, I couldn't have been more than five or six years old,
when... Main Street had a sidewalk which was wooden.
It was just wooden planks laid down.
And it was all unpaved and then dusty in the summer and frightfully muddy in the winter.
And the people that came in from outside places, heaven knows where, 'cause there were no roads,
came in buckboards.
And they tied their horses along the hitching posts all along the front of Main Street.
And I can remember walking to the market, the only little grocery shop in Los Angeles,
with my mother. And I couldn't have been more than five years old.
It was owned by a little old Dutchman with little side mutton-chop whiskers
and his name was Henry Van der Lick.
I can remember as if it was yesterday.
On the outside of the shop was a kind of a thing where the brooms stood upside down,
so you could select your own broom if you needed a broom, which I expect we did.
And inside he sold the things that we had to buy.
And everything in those days came out of barrels!
My mother would buy cucumber pickles.
They were fished out of a barrel with what they called a dipper.
She'd buy so much sugar and so much flour,
and that came out of the barrel and was shoved in a paper bag.
And the cheese.
He always gave me a little tiny piece of cheese to taste.
Everybody could taste the cheese.
Well, the first fire station in Los Angeles was in Main Street between First and Second Street.
And it was a tremendous excitement when there was a fire.
There were very few of them because there were very few houses and very few shops to burn down.
Well, when the fire alarm sounded,
the great big engine would dash out,
always with magnificent white horses,
and the, um, hook and ladder.
And all the inhabitants would run off to see where the fire was.
They'd jangle bells and whistled whistles, but no sirens, thank goodness, in those days.
And then, the next well-known thing was
the brewery that was in Third Street, between Main and Spring.
And it was owned by a man, great big German called Schwartz.
And my great excitement was to walk up Third Street with my father.
Mr. Schwartz with leather, or I suppose rubber, boots up to his hips,
would be sloshing down the suds and the water from the inside of the place
across the sidewalk and into the gutter to go down the main drain.
When I was a little girl about eight, I guess, eight or nine years old,
the whole of, practically the whole, at least two-thirds of Beverly Hills, was owned by two men.
One was called Hamil and one was called Denker.
And it was an enormous dairy farm right down to where the little park is down here,
now opposite the Beverly Hills Hotel.
There was nothing but dirt roads.
Absolutely nothing.
And my father was the lawyer for them.
So the great treat was that sometimes when he had to come out and see them,
he would come out in the buckboard.
And I don't suppose any of you know what a buckboard is.
It's a very uncomfortable little wagon with a high seat, two people on it,
no rubber tires, and a horse.
And you bumped along these awful roads...
Well, I thought it was, well, lovely then. With great ruts.
And we used to come out and it would take us practically an hour, or maybe an hour and a half,
to drive out here from Third Street, you know, on really, really awful roads.
INTERVIEWER: (laughs)
BELLE: And I live in the Beverly Hills Hotel, which I really love.
And, but it's a very expensive way to live.
But very comfortable.
But when I sometimes look out,
and think how I knew it when it was a dairy farm,
and the pigsties with horses, and how I used to lick the cream
it rather makes me laugh!