Today is the tenth anniversary of Tommy’s death. I know many people are thinking of him today. As always, thoughts of Tommy bring up many images. Below is a photo of the Venice pier, as it looked when Tommy was a small boy. In my mind’s eye I still see Tommy riding his skateboard along […]
Tag Archives: Tommy Marton
My niece Maureen scanned some old family photos and sent them to me recently. I would like to share some of those pictures on this site, and for now I will post two pictures that were taken at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, which took place in 1939 and 1940. The first […]
In a previous post I wrote about my aunt Gertrude, Tommy’s great aunt, who was my dad’s older sister. I recently came across the photo posted above, which was taken on a visit that Tommy and I made to her house in 1975. My aunt Gertrude lived most of her adult life in Riverside, […]
In an earlier post, I described a bike ride Tommy took as part of his PE class during the spring of his senior year in high school. At the time, he drew me a map of his planned route, which took him from the gym at Santa Monica High School north to Will Rogers […]
I found some pictures of my son Tommy in an old cigar box recently, and I’m posting a few of them here. The cigar box actually belonged to my Aunt Vivian years ago and dates back to her childhood in Los Angeles in the 1930s. Vivian’s father (my step-grandfather), Ernie Voigt, was a California […]
At the time of Tommy’s birth, his mom and I were living in a miniscule apartment over a dilapidated garage on Grand View Blvd. on the west side of Los Angeles near Mar Vista. In the picture below, Tommy and I are watching TV in that tiny apartment. The photo was taken in June of […]
Twenty-five years ago today — on a spring morning in 1991 — I sat in the audience in front of the Oviatt Library at California State University in Northridge and watched Tommy receive his Bachelor’s degree. I think of that day often, with gratitude that I could be there to see that ceremony. Tom’s mom was also there, along […]
Author Michael Connelly, who has great affection for Los Angeles, speaks for me when he writes in his novel The Black Ice: He loved the city most at night. The night hid many of the sorrows. It silenced the city yet brought deep undercurrents to the surface. It was in this dark slipstream that he […]
Consider a mental image: I am riding in the passenger seat of Tommy’s pickup truck, driven by my teen-age son, on a Los Angeles night — a night like the boy himself, bright, full of expectation and promise. Los Angeles feels to me at that moment like a place where anything is possible, a city […]
My brother Fred recently sent me a video clip containing some great photos and his own audio comments about the Venice canals. There are some photos from the 1970s (and earlier) including pictures of Fred, my mom, my brother Billy, Tommy, and others. The clip includes photos of the canals and also the old Venice […]
memories of tommy 