![\"deep](\"https:\/\/ayearofsongs.org\/ayearofsongs\/images\/blogimages\/circuitbreaker-3.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
M<\/span>y first apartment was a 3rd floor split-level walkup in a haunted old Hollywood-Tudor frame house. It had been built in 1908, by the developer of a then exlusive neighborhood called Carrol Park.<\/p>\n It was a time when houses, if they were big enough, had names. The name of my house was Brown Gables<\/span> and it reached about four stories above the two story neighborhood.<\/p>\n Our living room and kitchen were on the third floor but my bedroom was on a split level in between floors, with my roomie sleeping on an elevated loft above that — a full floor above the living room. The peaked roof rose another 15 feet or so above the loft. My bedroom was on the split level. It was part of a large gable, with three three light windows across the street side.<\/p>\n I used to eat breakfast on the rickety, swaying two flight wooden stair that led dizzyingly down from our kitchen’s back door, a story and a half straight on each flight. Our landlord was a neighboring church that was renting out the scheduled-to-be-torn-down old house, divided into five apartments during the tough times of the depression, to students from the local university.<\/p>\n Growing up in the postwar suburbs of Orange County, California, I found the old house the most exotic place I could imagine for a first apartment. I never saw the ghost but my roommate said he thought he did. A Sikh engineering student the next floor down had felt its presence and heard things. Another tennant, a young woman, had seen the ghost, a middle aged man, several times.<\/p>\n House legend had it that the ghost was the former aide and companion of a retired WWI general, supposedly killed in a lover’s quarrel by his longtime boss, who was subsequently sent away to an institution for the criminally insane, as those facilities were quaintly known back then.<\/p>\n As one might imagine, the wiring in the old house — apparently mostly unimproved since its building six decades before, a time when electricity was pretty much used for lights and maybe those new-fangled toasters that had just started being manufactured — was primitive.<\/p>\n There were no circuit-breaker panels at Brown Gables.<\/p>\n There was just a dingey — and singed –row of old-fashioned fuses with grease pencil labels over them, protected by a little slanted awning, tucked under the bottom leg of the back stairs.<\/p>\n I should hope it will horrify modern readers to think that college students — about half of them grad students — would do something as absurdly dangerous as substituting a slug for a fuse but that’s exactly what happened when no one had a fuse and papers needed to be written or Coltrane listened to.<\/p>\n The smudged and blackened area around some of the fuse sockets attested to that danger, yet standard practice when confronting an overheating slug was to simply turn off some appliances<\/span> and try to go on about normal life. And, of course, try to remember to pick up a box of fuses on the way back from class in the morning.<\/p>\n Brown Gables never burned down, happily for those of us more than three stories above the ground and safety, but they eventually herded us out under court order (at least I got something like a month’s rent free, that was nice). We tried a lot of last ditch efforts, invoking the building’s historic status (that was most of town in those days, though… much of it sadly gone, now), even holding a tiny protest before a bewildered reporter from the local daily, whose seemed considerably more sympathetic to soulless institution tearing our home out from under us.<\/p>\n Actually, the church caretaker who served as our property manager, was a real nice old fellow, so it wasn’t as though we were directly mistreated. Of course, the church tore his<\/span> house down to build an old folks home.<\/p>\n They put a parking lot where Brown Gables had been.<\/p>\n What, you were asking yourself back when you still cared, does any<\/span> of this to do with today’s song, which, for crying out loud, isn’t even about fuses<\/span> but rather about a circuit breaker, which is really just a slightly goofy metaphor, anyhow…<\/p>\n Nothin’ much.<\/p>\n\n