Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star-dust in Hollywood However, the continual cheapening of the umpteenth-hand car brought prices so low that even tramps no longer deign to use boot-leather, and Los Angeles, which boasts of being the most car-saturated city in the States, owns one car to every two and a half inhabitants, including infants in arms. When we ourselves decided to leave the town we looked for a purchaser of our old Franklin. The grizzled keeper of the parking-ground before the Paramount studios had long taken a kindly interest in us as foreigners, and he promised to find somebody. At last he brought to us a stripling of waxy complexion whom conversation revealed to be the second cook in one of the wood and chicken-wire shacks that sold hot-dogs and lemonade in front of the extras* exit. The young cook was rather diffident, for, as he told us : " You see, it's this way . . . there's my wife and there's me, see ? Now we gotta purty nice car, but nachurally when one of us is using it that other can't be at the same time, see? Well, the fact is, as you'll see in the Sat <Ty Morning Post, every family nachurally has to have two cars, see? I only got about twenty-five dollars in the world, and I was thinking of getting me an old Ford, so's I could come to work on it and leave it about, while the wife drives round shopping on the other one we got, see? This yer car's a bit better than I was counting on, see? But if you're willing to take twenty-five bucks for it, why, then, they're yours. If it looks right to you I'm all right too. 'Cause, as I explained, you simply can't live in this city if you don't have two cars ; that's all there is to it. . . ." We may judge that, when the assistant cooks of wayside shacks have to keep their families up to a two-car standard, car-saturation in Los Angeles must almost have reached its limit. Up to now one might almost say that the swallowing of cars by the States has been the results of natural appetite, [270]