When Santa Monica was a little beach town and there was a hardware store on Montana

Long long ago Montana Avenue in Santa Monica was a quiet street where you could park anywhere and run errands. There was a hardware store somewhere around 10^th street, on the north side. One day I was in there looking for clipboards. I ended up buying 2 of them, 15” wide and 20” high. Leo Lemay came in while I was there so we talked about Leon Howard’s next visit from Albuquerque.  Whenever Leon came back to LA he would send Leo a guest list and send me a guest list for people he wanted to see. There would be some overlapping, always. I got more of the Valley people (the Northridge crowd) than Leo did, while Leo got more of the UCLA friends. I took the clipboards home and removed the metal at once, for what I wanted was smooth lapboards for holding masses of paper, not outsized clipboards. Even in their reduced state as lapboards, they reminded me of Leo. Now I need to take one of them and  glue a brace across it, 5 inches or so from the bottom of the 20 inch side, something thick enough to stop dozens of pages of paper so I can sit and sort through them and keep the pages from sliding down to my middle where I can’t work with them. This “reading board” is still going to remind me of the Montana Avenue hardware store and Leo and Santa Monica when it was a little beach town.