He did what he wanted to do — or had to do.

What people said didn’t matter to him.

Rodia wasn’t a showman. Nor was he particularly a social being. He was
polite, but he didn’t make friends easily. He was an introvert.

A couple of weeks ago, I described my one personal encounter with Rodia,
one which ended as soon as it began. He had agreed to appear on television with me, but no sooner had we been introduced at the studio gate than he took off running — literally — down Sunset Blvd.

In the column I pointed out that Rodia had told my assistant that he constructed his fantastic towers as a tribute to the United States of America, his adopted homeland.

It was a nice, patriotic explanation of a mystery — the one I guess he was going to give on the television show. But it wasn’t necessarily a believable one.

Today I think I have a reason that’s a lot closer to the truth. It was given
to me by Mrs. Raymond Ball, who knew Simon (Sam) Rodia throughout the
’30s.

“My husband and I used to take him bits of material for his towers,” she told me. “Mostly broken dishes. I like to believe that we got to know him about as well as anyone.

“He told us that he’d started his project in 1924. He did it, he said, more by accident than by plan.”

Mrs. Ball then gave me the story which Rodia had given her:

It was a warm Sunday afternoon in ’24, and Sam had been drinking, as usual, heavily. His wife had died about a year before.

He was putting up a concrete wall in front of his property, taking a belt
of whisky from the bottle now and then, and thinking about how his wife
used to plead with him to cut down on his drinking.

He was in a morose, regretful mood because the bottle had deprived his wife of so many of the things he could have given her.

So, with one deliberate stroke, he smashed the half-full bottle. And,
picking up the pieces one by one, he pushed them gently into the soft
concrete.

That marked the beginning of the towers and the end of a very bad habit.

“When he finished his story,” Mrs. Ball told me, “he led us over to the wall
and showed us the pieces of the whisky bottle that were the cause of it
all.”

That’s Mrs. Ball’s story of Sam’s towers — now so heatedly championed as a work of art and condemned as trash.

But who’s to say that the towers of Watts are any less a work of art if the artist was inspired by a broken bottle of whisky?