My Own Memories of La Crescenta

In the next few weeks I’m going to feature some memories of old-timers that I’ve personally collected over the years. But I thought I would start with myself. I guess I now fall into the category of an old-timer!

My mom and her family moved here in 1962. She had just escaped a short disastrous marriage in Sacramento and headed to LA for a fresh start, along with her brother, her parents and 5-year-old me. She told me that coming south she got on Foothill Boulevard in Sylmar heading toward Pasadena. When she got to La Crescenta, she had a feeling this was a good community and stopped at a realtor’s office. She bought a rambling old house on Raymond Avenue, just below Altura Avenue. It had a huge yard, a big falling down garage filled with lots of old items left by previous owners, and even a small root cellar. I loved all of the old junk left there. Once a year I calendared a “Treasure Day” when I would spend the day searching the house, yard and garage for old stuff. My favorite activity was digging holes in the yard, looking for buried junk that had been discarded over the years. So you can see, the history bug has always been with me.

Our street then had several vacant lots, filled with rocks and lizards. The neighborhood kids and I explored them, built forts, tossed rocks around and hunted the lizards – the prize lizard being the horny toads. Spike Jones Market was just up on Foothill and often friends and I collected beer and soda bottles to cash in there for candy and soft drinks. My favorite was Orange Crush soda and those little wax bottles filled with colored sugary liquid.

The street was then lined with carob trees, which were perfectly branched for climbing. We played baseball in the street, having to move out of the way as cars went by. “Car, Car, C-A-R. Stick your head in a jelly jar!” was the warning call that a car was coming. Thick smog was ever-present in the summer. I can remember many times not being able to see the end of the street. I can still recall that heavy ache in my lungs after a day outside.

By the mid-1960s the 210 Freeway route had been decided and it was to take our side of the street. A family in one house had been (the story was) killed in a car accident. The house was left empty for several years and became our local imagined haunted house. One brave older kid crawled in a window and said all the furniture was still in there. In the evening I would sprint past it sure that I saw shadows in the dark windows. 

The freeway took our house in 1968. My mom told me later that they paid her way more than it was worth. This sale gave 11-year-old me the chance to do some suburban archeology. For years I had been eyeing the back of our fireplace. I was convinced that there was a large space between the inside of the fireplace and the outside. I was sure there was something hidden in that gap. As we moved out I was allowed to take a hammer to the bricks. There was indeed a gap, but alas it was filled with sand.

My mom was a Midwest farm girl and terribly naïve. She moved us to Highland Park, which at that time was a very rough neighborhood with gangs and drugs. We only stayed for a year and a half of that trouble, until she moved us back to La Crescenta. After settling, I walked down to the cleared area where our house had been and found a couple of my old toys in the loose dirt.

Today, I live on Altura Avenue, just across the street from the freeway, and just a few hundred feet from where our original house sat. When I look out at the freeway, my mind still sees the old neighborhood. 

In the next column I’ll write up more of my childhood memories.