Visiting the Arcade from the Original Karate Kid Movie

My family and I spent a day this summer at Golf 'n' Stuff, an arcade and fun center in Norwalk, CA which is one of the locations the original Karate Kid was filmed. The Gen X nostalgia here floats above the tables, where arched windows look out upon the mini golf course. A walk through the arcade and around the buildings proved that while some things have changed from when they filmed the movie here in the fall of 1983, some things are amazingly the same....

Many of the 80's games that were shown in the movie have disappeared, like the analog mini hockey game Daniel and Ali played in the movie, and the water slide is now gone. High voltage poles still stand behind it, as if they are there just to power the rides and arcade games.

Main Golf 'n' Stuff sign on the far right

While I was taking some pictures, a man in flip flops and a hoodie who looked very Gen X was giving me this huge smile - he knew exactly what I was doing since nostalgic Xers often stop through here as tourists. It's the kind of place you might visit when you're in the LA area and you've already been to Universal and Paramount, and still want to experience some little piece of film history. Later in the day I saw another fellow Gen X tourist, even as younger people passed him by and had no idea why he was taking photos of the Golf 'n' Stuff sign. 

The mini golf course! On left: mini clock tower, mini Russian Orthodox style church, on right: mini pagoda

There is the feeling here that this is the symbol of any arcade or mini golf course you hung out at as a kid or teenager in Anytown, USA, just as there is this feeling we got from the movie that any of us could be the main character. Most of us know what it feels like to be the underdog. The script was based on a true story of a real Gen Xer from the San Fernando Valley.

I am always looking for the little retro things, little remnants that may go unnoticed, like this blue and white checkered ceiling....




A mix of analog and digital games still fill the arcade, even if most of them are different now.

The bumper boats look the same as they do in the movie.

The little race track looks about the same as it did in the film, though it's no surprise that all the go karts have been replaced.

Part of the mini golf course and its little buildings can be seen behind the snack bar area.

We had the place mostly to ourselves during the breezy, cool California morning, and as the afternoon came, the clouds parted and it gradually began filling up with families and people on dates.

I love retro outdoor tables and the way that they all look similar to each other across America - the bright pops of color of the seats and tables.

Where the main entrance used to be is now a party room that can be rented by the hour.

Inside the party room: it's hard to describe the energy in this space -- it was kind of strange. It was like there were a million memories from the decades, good and bad, that had unfolded in this space during parties and get-togethers. It was all kind of just hanging heavy in the air, like the smell of the pizza they were baking in the ovens nearby. It seemed as if all those memories, those intangible mementos of time, had no other place to go and just got stuck there in liminal space.

The day we were here, a boy was about to have his birthday party - he was a sweet kid who looked like he was about 12. He held the door for us as we came in, while his Gen X mom was busy setting up decorations on the table they had reserved. I wondered if maybe she once had a Gen X birthday party here as a kid. She probably did.

Movie poster on the wall by some 70's-looking decor

No one expected the original Karate Kid movie to be as successful as it was. All these years later, we are still talking about it, spin offs are still happening. Maybe part the reason the original film became so well-loved was because its cultural value. There weren't many good roles for Asian Americans in films those days and Pat Morita as Mr. Miagi played this wise, lovable father-figure. His role was a breakthrough, he was nominated for an Academy award, and he won the hearts of many Gen Xers.

Along with the cultural piece, there were also spiritual and philosophical components in the film. "Wax on, wax off" has become one of the most well-known movie quotes of all time. It's a philosophy that if you do some seemingly mundane thing many times over, even without realizing it, it can make you more ascetic, or even cause something extraordinary to happen. Occasionally I hear someone talk about how the Miagi philosophy applies to our spiritual life, and I have found it to be true. For those of us Gen Xers who did not have someone like this to look up to, we quietly wished Mr. Miagi was our own mentor, and inadvertently got a profound set of spiritual lessons from the movie -  impulse control, self-discipline, to only fight as a last resort.

No doubt this film was very important during the formative years of Gen X, which was why it was so interesting to visit this place. A view from the middle of the golf course above - possibly the one in the movie where you see Daniel and Ali playing mini-golf on their date. This place seemed so magical when I was a kid. 

Near the end of the visit, I made a stop at the token machine so we could all play a little skee ball. It was the first time I've ever made the 100-point target and the first time my daughter ever did, too!

I had my eye on these little Pac-Man ghosts, but alas, we only had enough tickets for two pieces of candy - that's how it goes when you are out of time for more skee ball and have other places to be!

Our very last stop was the hand-crank machine to make a pressed souvenir penny for my daughter to keep. Of all the amusement parks, museums, and landmarks I went to as a kid, making a penny was always one last moment to savor the experience.


Here's to all the Gen X journeys we go on, the places that we go back to, from movie scenes we watched as kids to the places we once went with our friends that hold memories of our childhood.  

Whether we experienced an important place with one close friend, or if we experienced it collectively with our entire generation, all of it is significant. And sometimes we feel the weight of that significance even more when we revisit a space completely by ourselves. These are the places that made us who we are.

___________________________

Source:

LA Weekly: How a Movie Shot in the San Fernando Valley Made us all the Karate Kid

(c) 2018 writing and photos by Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved

Finding the Lost Generation: Of Intelligence and Infinite Hope

One of the most influential thoughts that F. Scott Fitzgerald ever shared is this:

"The test of a first rate-intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time..."

Of all the wisdom Fitzgerald is known for, this quote from The Great Gatsby both strikes me and resonates with me the most:

"Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope."

At first glance, the two quotes above are unrelated. Look back again. I believe that among the wisdom that can be found in Fitzgerald's writing, the second quote is the most true incarnation of the original quote.

As we get to know people, their rough edges emerge, and if those edges are extremely rough, we find ourselves constantly scraped up and wounded by being in their life, and walking away is necessary. In other situations, we decide to stay, or to stay in touch, and to show forgiveness when a person's shortcomings surface (as we hope they will do in return). To hold the knowledge that every person we know is flawed yet to remember that those flaws probably come from the fact that we live in a very flawed world, is to be a loving person.

To know that when people hurt us, that it might not even be personal, it might be that they are lashing out at how someone else hurt them, is to show grace. When we can avoid judging others in those initial moments of forming an opinion of them when we first meet them, or even when we've known them for a lifetime, we participate in something truly infinite.

When it comes to quotes by Fitzgerald and the expatriate friends he drank wine with in Parisian cafes, I am only somewhat interested in the thoughts they had about human intellect, maybe because of all the spiritual and philosophical issues that exist among a generation, and of all the wisdom that can be passed on from one lost generation to another, I am much more interested in the limitless of the human soul. And if we look back to the wisdom of generations that came from saints or philosophers or artists from all the centuries that led us to this moment, they all left a certain reverberating message for us. It's in the leaning stones in the British Isles, and in the chipped, antiquated marble of the statues of the Mediterranean, and in the hieroglyphics of the caves of Northern Africa, and maybe even in the gilded edges of California buildings of the 1920's. And the message is this:

 The human soul is infinite.  

___________________________________________

(c) 2017 writing by Chloe Koffas all right reserved 
photography by Chloe - The Saint Claire Hotel,  built 1926, San Jose, CA

Huffington Post's article: why you should re-read The Great Gatsby as an adult

Finding the Lost Generation: Of Hunger and Hoovervilles

When her picture was published in newspapers, it caused an emotional stir across the country. The U.S. federal government sent thousands of pounds of food to the camp where her photo was taken, but by the time it arrived she and her family had already left to look for work elsewhere. The pea fields at that farm had frozen, which meant no work and no pay for migrant workers. Near the end of her life, almost fifty years later, her son put an appeal in the San Jose Mercury newspaper for people to send money to help with her overwhelming medical expenses as she was struggling with multiple health issues. Letters with money came in the mail from all over, much of it in the form of crumpled one-dollar bills. People responded because they had not forgotten her.  There was a connection they had always felt to her because of her picture.

There are certain images that have been ingrained onto the consciousness of the past few generations - one of these would be "Migrant Mother." It is not only the most iconic picture from the Great Depression, it is one of the most significant images of the 20th century. I thought until recently that the legendary woman in this photo was still anonymous, but near the end of her life she was identified as Florence Owens Thompson. Until now, I never saw the baby in her arms.

Dorthea Lange/Library of Congress/Public Domain

Why we cannot get over this photo is not just because of the mental exhaustion on her face or the creases on her brow that should not yet be present on the skin of a woman only 32 years old. It is more so because we see the inestimable greatness that is in her. In this woman's eyes is a strength that goes beyond Greek myth, in her face is the wisdom rooted in her Native blood, in her composition is fear wrestling with profound courage. Florence Leona Christie Owens Thompson could pick 500 pounds of cotton in one day, which was more than most of the men who worked the fields with her. This is a mother who raised ten children, and who worked any kind of job she could in fields, waiting tables, bar-tending, or doing factory work. Her father abandoned her even before she was born. She was already a widow at the time this picture was taken in 1936. Her family history was connected to the Trail of Tears. If anyone has ever known the depths of heartache, this soul did. And you can see it all in her immortally beautiful face. 

Lange/Public Domain

"Hoover-villes" were groups of shacks located on the edges of cities during the Great Depression. These shacks were often made from cardboard or scrap wood. The same name was applied to roadside temporary shelters that destitute families looking for work erected as they tried to escape the Dust Bowl and migrate to California. These shelters could be made of bed sheets or canvas and could be held up with tree branches.

In this same area, even now, Hoovervilles still exist, even if they go by a different name. As my husband was driving us onto a freeway recently, I looked over the edge to a reservoir, to where people go for water, and community, and to pitch tents on the grass. What I saw that day was a man sitting in a red folding lawn chair in a florescent yellow shirt, the morning sunlight falling onto his tired blue eyes staring off into the distance, much like the tired gray eyes of the migrant mother. The man was clearly Generation X. He is probably someone's father. If not, he is someone's son. A man in a neon yellow shirt in front of the backdrop of brightly colored, modern-day camping tents can seem so far away from the black-and-white images of the Depression Era. We see the agonizing images of poverty in America almost a century ago and want to believe this kind of suffering is safely in the distant past. Kerosene lamps have been replaced by solar powered flashlights, and tin pie pans have been replaced by plastic containers. Everything was different between the man in the red folding chair and the image of the migrant mother sitting on a wooden box, yet everything was hauntingly the same.  

Florence Thompson, was asked once, "Did you ever lose hope?'

She responded, "Nope, If I'd'a lost hope, this country never would have made it."

Her words tell us to never give up hope, because your hope sustains not only you and your own family,  your own individual hope is what sustains us all collectively.

May we never give up hope that tomorrow can be better, or next year, or that the next decade can be better. May we never stop hoping that our children will have a better life than we did.

Let's not forget the suffering of the migrant mother and her family. Let's not forget the man who sleeps tonight on the cold ground in Silicon Valley, in the shadow of affluence, by the reservoir on the side of the freeway.  

______________________________

Black and white photography by Dorthea Lange, 1936, Nipomo Valley, California
Color photography by Chloe Koffas, 2016, Napa Valley, California
Writing (c) 2017 by Chloe, all rights reserved

                                                      _____________________________


Cancer affected the Migrant Mother, and mesothelioma affects a disproportionate number of Native Americans. The outreach of Mesothelioma.net found this blog post after it was published and asked to have their info added here. This link explains why Native Americans have been at higher risk and the web site offers resources such as access to trust money for those affected:

hope, faith, help




Articles/Sources:

American Story: 'Mona Lisa' of Dust Bowl 'Never Lost Hope'

The Hidden Life Story of the Iconic 'Migrant Mother" - Mashable


And a book I hope to read sometime soon:
Migrant Mother: The Untold Story

Generational note: A large number of the parents during the Great Depression were from the Lost Generation. A large number of the children were from the G.I. Generation. Being from a generation is partly about the year you were born, though I feel it is much more about your life experiences. Florence Thompson was born in 1903, and while I consider her part of the Lost Generation, by some definitions this would make her part of the G.I. (Greatest) Generation. Either way, she is legendary and I send her my love across space and time.