Episode 3, Red Hot.

When spring replaces our mild winter and then gives way to the summer, it gets pretty hot in a lot of neighborhoods here in Southern California.

But lately, it's hotter than ever. During August of 2019 before COVID, I forgot about that, went to the beach

in my bare feet and I felt like the comedy star Dudley Moore in that old movie 10, dashing

across the blistering sand to get into the water. Then came 2020, the hottest year on record,

and there's nothing funny about it.

I'm on an Aldi, and this is In Our Backyard, a six-part series about the local impacts of climate

change in Southern California.

We'll start warming up by getting to the point indirectly, starting with one of humanity's

enduring questions.

How do you fall in love? Do you know that? You get a lot of different answers to that one.

For Tim Watkins, it's all tied up with his father and his mother, who showed up after his dad's

first wife died back in the late 1940s. She fell in love with my dad. My dad fell in love with her.

It was around friendship. My father had been married, had two kids, and his 22-year-old wife

died from tuberculosis. And he was just a mess. He had to work and try to raise these two little boys that were two and a half three years old.

And my mom saw him outside of a bank that she was going into with her sisters and saw these two little black boys all rusty and dusty.

And a conversation started and they became friends.

They fell in love. Now, Tim is a second generation resident of Watts in Central LA. He inherited

leadership of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee from his father, Ted Watkins.

Here's more of Tim's story about how love found

away for his parents, and it wasn't easy. And they got married. They had their first rude

awakening that because she was white, they had to go to Mexico to get married. It was 1949.

...