Family matters...

It's amazing the things you can find on the 'net, even when you're not really looking for them. Case in point: this 1940 aerial view of Covina – my home town – 14 years before I was born there:



The full-res version of the photo is viewable here.

What's particularly amazing to me is that I can see the actual house I was born in in 1954. (Yes, I'm so old, my mother delivered me in a house, not a hospital!) In the photo above, look at the lower left, second street up, you'll see a line of palm trees going from left to right. My birthplace is directly across the street from the sixth palm tree from the corner. Here is a closeup of the little house at 250 W. College St., Covina, California:




And even more incredible, I just found out that the doctor who delivered me is still alive! His name is Arthur F. Gore, M.D., he is now 96 years old, and he lives in Big Bear! Unbelievable! What a wonderful evening of discovery this has been. ^^

 

A painting of the hills I grew up in is currently up for bids on eBay. I confess, I got a little misty-eyed when I first saw it. I recognized the scene immediately...




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It's only about a mile from our old Covina home. The painting was actually done about 25 years before we lived there, but the vista remained relatively unchanged until the 1970s, when this little dale began to be developed. Back when me and my buddies had those hills all to ourselves, they were alive with coyotes, jackrabbits, pheasants, tarantulas, even the occasional rattlesnake. Today, the hills are completely covered with houses. I'm certain the eucalyptus trees alongside Covina Hills Road in the foreground were still there when I left the area in the early 1980s, but I just checked Google Street View and they are all gone now, too.

I already know I can't afford the painting, but it sure was nice to see our hills in their natural state again. I can even recollect what the place would have smelled like on a beautiful summer's day like this one, and call to mind the sound of a gentle breeze blowing through those tall grasses and trees. It really was a wonderful place to grow up.

 

Today, fifty years ago, our family moved into our new home at 3255 Rancho El Encino Drive in Covina, California. I was 5 years old then, and I remember that moving day vividly. Dad wanted us to be in the new house by Christmas, and construction was completed just in time. December 19, 1959 (also a Saturday), started with me saying good-bye to my first best friends - David and Di Gruener - and meeting my new best friend - Richard Rudolph. So, today is Rich and my golden anniversary, too!

Architect: Edward Shannon; Builder: Fred Allen and Associates.

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The vacant lot, August 15, 1959.

Slowly but surely...

There's a ghost in the living room! Actually, I did then and still do think the house was just a little bit haunted, but that's another story.

During my visit to L.A. this past July, I tried to find my first pair of glasses, which I lost while playing in the ivy in 1964. I didn't find them, but about 5 feet in back of where I'm standing in this picture, I found this shard of an old Pepsi bottle which probably came from one of the workers who built the house 50 years before.

It's difficult for me to grasp the fact that the house is now a half-century old. I still dream often about our Covina home. In it, my parents and grandmother are all still very much alive. These dreams are so vivid sometimes, it's like I'm actually there. Sometimes I think part of me never really left...

 

Wally Moon's Summer Baseball Camp (or was it Wally Moon's Baseball Summer Camp?), in the hills east of Covina, California, 1962. Look at the size of that mitt! It's bigger than my whole chest!




Little League, 1966. Our team was "Badillo S&M Pharmacy." I wore the number 8. What a joke! The only reason I was in the Little League "majors" that year was because my dad was the team's coach. I struck out looking about 100 times that season. And I almost hit a home run once! Other than that, it was a season to forget. I never played organized ball again after this.




I was pretty darned good with a bat when I wasn't afraid the pitcher would hit me, though. If someone would pitch underhand to me, I could hit a ball anywhere on the field I wanted to. I never imagined that when I put down my bat after my last time up in PE in my senior year in high school that I'd never hit a baseball again. I'm too old to even think about doing that now...

 

One day when I was a senior in high school, I found a little bonsai pine tree in the nursery section of a hardware superstore called Builders Emporium. I think I paid like $1.99 for it.

I thought it was cute, but as bonsai requires patience, I quickly lost interest. So I planted the little tree in a depression in a large ornamental stone in the Japanese rock garden in front of our kitchen window, and essentially forgot about it.

When I sold the house 18 years ago, the tree was about head-high. Here's what it looked like when I visited last month! (I hadn't seen our old place in 10 years.)





The tree is about 37 years old now, and the base of the trunk has almost completely enveloped and entombed the ornamental rock I planted it in. What a trip eh! 8D

 

Here are some more pictures of our family home at 3255 Rancho El Encino Drive, in Covina, California – the house I grew up in.

This first one was taken by the gas company photographer on the same day in 1960 as the kitchen photoshoot. Look at the thick ozone smog! Those hills are only 1/4-1/3 mile away, but you can barely see them through the photochemical haze. Isn't that appalling? People in L.A. today complain about the smog. Most don't have any conception of how bad it was before the air quality laws...




( +5 b/w glossies of the interior, also taken in 1960. )

And here is the "mature" property, in 1973. This shows the place as I most like to remember it. After I left home for college, my parents decided to sell the house, and this was the photo for the real estate listing. The asking price was $65,000. I'd imagine it's a million-dollar house today...

 

One evening last week while Bucky was snoozing, I decided to put away a bunch of old family photos that I'd scanned recently. In the process, I came across this old ad and realized I didn't have a digital copy of it yet. So, right then and there, to the scanner it went...



The ad copy says, "Close Your Eyes and Pretend It's Yours!" Well, I didn't have to pretend. This was the house I grew up in! I was just about to begin first grade when this ad appeared in the Home magazine section of the Sunday, September 11, 1960 edition of the Los Angeles Times.



click image to enlarge

It's funny – I still cook chili in that orange pot that's in the oven. Several of the other items in the ad weren't ours at all, though, like that copper pot on the range. That's totally unfamiliar to me. The red pitcher wasn't ours, either. What's most amusing to me, though, is that that refrigerator there didn't exist at all – it's a complete airbrush job. At this time, we actually had an ancient Servel gas refrigerator from the early 1950s that style-wise was rather dated. So the ad-makers painted an entirely fake set of "modern" chrome handles and a fictional freezer section on our old fridge.

Here are a couple more pics of our kitchen from the Gas Company photoshoot. This one has my mom in it, and this one has a much more open view of the kitchen space.

( The Home Magazine cover. Look! Floor tiles that glow! A house with a 'fall-out' shelter! )

It's a bit difficult for me to cope with the fact that this was essentially a half-century ago. But yeah – it does actually feel like 50 years have passed since that time. My, how quickly life flies by... *sighs*

EDIT: I also posted these images in the LJ community vintage_ads. Click here to read all the comments!

 

Wow. Google Maps has really increased the coverage of their Street View feature since I last used it. I was surprised to discover they've even done the little out-of-the-way street I grew up on. Here's the house I lived in from age 5-28. (The window on the right was my room.) It doesn't look like much here, but it's a really grand place. Hard for me to believe it will be 50 years old at the end of next year...


View Larger Map

 
( And here was my home-away-from-home! ;–) )

My boyhood neighborhood looked entirely familiar, of course, but the vegetation, especially, had changed a lot. (Note, for example, the stump of the beautiful willow that used to grace our frontage. *snif*) The properties in general look a lot swankier now, too. It was a straight middle-class neighborhood when I grew up there. Now, well, no middle-class family could afford any of those houses, I'm sure.

It was great walking down memory lane, so to speak. I'd resigned myself long ago to the possibility that I might never lay eyes on these places again, so this was a genuine treat. :-)

 

The classic "googie"-style coffee shop used to reside in the parking lot of Eastland Center in West Covina, California, close by the neighborhood where I grew up. Built in 1958, Eastland was then only the sixth shopping mall built in the Southland. The Huddle was down from the mall by the side of the westbound San Bernardino freeway (US 99, I-10), right at the Citrus Ave St offramp...



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(More on The Huddle restaurant chain.)

Our family actually almost never went to The Huddle. Mom didn't like the service or the food, and the place was always absolutely packed after church on Sunday, which also met with Mother's extreme disapproval. (We always ate out for breakfast on Sundays.)

Mom may not have liked The Huddle, but the place was really interesting to me. In the front, it was like a normal everyday family coffee shop, a la Denny's, but the back half was this very dark, smoky bar with a lighted fountain, central fireplace and extremely "mod" furniture and stylistic appointments. Not that I ever went in there – I used to sneak peeks at this forbidden area when I'd go in the back to the bathroom. ^^ I always wondered why grownups liked to go into dark, smoky places...

Anyway, by the time I was leaving high school, The Huddle was in obvious decline. During my freshman year at college, the restaurant disappeared, and in its place was a sporting goods superstore. That's gone now, too, though there's still a building on the site, and it's probably the same building that was the core of The Huddle.

Wow, I just looked at the area on Google Earth, and yeah, the Huddle building's still there, but a whole shopping center that used to be west of Eastland is like gone! (Where Akron was.) I wonder what they're going to build there. Who knows, who cares? *sighs* No matter what, if it's in LA, it'll be gone 50 years from now. That's just how it goes there...

 

Last week, quite unexpectedly, a lifetime's dream of mine came true. I've finally been able to see what the Covina hills I lived in as a child originally looked like before they became part of Los Angeles's spreading metastasis...

See that outcrop of white limestone on the hill in the background? That's what we kids called the "Chalk Mine." Down and to the right from the chalk mine can be seen a much smaller patch of white. In 1959, my family's house would be built just to the left of that. So these were my hills, circa 1935, about 20 years before I was born...



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I'm just totally blown away by this image. The whole little valley I lived in – and everything around it – was entirely undeveloped, open rangeland. Nothing but wild grasses, chaparral, valley oaks and orange groves.

It is a vision of Heaven to me... a true Paradise Lost.

And here is the same scene today, courtesy of Google Earth. The then-newly-constructed Arroyo Avenue (U.S. Hwy. 99) in the old photo is now Interstate 10, and virtually all the formerly open spaces are now occupied by homes and businesses. It's become just another faceless L.A. suburb...



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I'm grateful that I lived long enough to be able to see my hills the way they originally were. The chalk mine is long gone, but there's still a small refugium of undeveloped hills just past where my house was. Bulldozers may not have claimed it yet, but no coyotes howl, no jackrabbits scurry, no pheasants fly, no tarantulas crawl there anymore, like they did when I was little. It's all dead land now, fit only for humans...