My Own Memories of La Crescenta – Part 2

Continuing from the article I wrote last week, I’m writing my own memories of growing up in La Crescenta in the 1960s.

One of my earliest memories is going on an adventure with my next door neighbor Michael. Michael knew of an old mine in the Verdugos and so we went on an expedition. I must have been all of 6 years old. 

From our house on Altura Avenue, we walked all the way down to Shirleyjean Street. We entered the neighborhood, went through someone’s backyard and up the hill. We found the mine, with an opening just big enough for us to squeeze through. It went back about five feet and ended at a big rock. At the base of the rock was some white powder of some sort. That was surely the bone dust from an unfortunate miner who had been crushed under the rock in a cave-in! 

The walls of the mine were lined with some sort of a shiny rock, which we knew to be gold. We took off our socks and filled them with the rocks to bring home. We were rich! (From what I know today, there was a graphite mine in that area so this was probably an exploratory prospect.)

On the way out, we went across the street to the La Crescenta Nursery (still there today!). There was a little pond filled with goldfish. More gold! We tried to catch a few but we were soon chased off by the proprietors. 

At this point I somehow got separated from Michael and had no clue as to how to get home. I wandered up through Sparr Heights and finally knocked on a random door for help. The man who answered the door was wearing underwear. I gave him my street name and he actually came outside to point out where to go! In his underwear!! I was so embarrassed. 

A few words about my time at La Crescenta Elementary School … It was not the good old days. The way to school involved crossing La Crescenta Avenue at Prospect Avenue. As we waited for the crossing guard to help us across the street we would look up at the house of the northeast corner. There in the front window was “the lady in the iron lung.” For those too young to remember, in the 1950s and ’60s, polio killed and crippled tens of thousands of people. Often it took away the ability to breathe. If people wanted to stay alive, they had to live inside a horizontal metal tube that was pressurized to breathe for them. A young mother had contracted polio, and was doomed to live for 37 years in this iron lung. She could look out on the world via a mirror mounted above her small window. We could see her face in that mirror, see her eyes looking right at us … and it was terrifying.

The playing field at La Crescenta Elementary School was entirely asphalt. Coming back in from recess, our hands were black from the asphalt and our lungs hurt from the ever-present smog. Add to that were stinging blisters on our hands caused by the dreaded “rings.” The rings were metal handholds suspended by chain from a circular frame on a high central post. The idea was that you would swing by hand (like Tarzan) from ring to ring completing a circle. In reality, you would swing from ring to ring until the skin came off of your hands.

Then back to the classrooms, which many times were in ancient wooden bungalows. The classes were big back then, often holding 35 kids. The rooms were hot and stuffy, sometimes hotter than the outside air. We had the ancient desks, hooked together in a line, that still had a hole in the desktop for an inkwell. 

And of course there were the air-raid drills when we crawled under desks or huddled in the hallway in the duck and cover position. It added an aura of existential dread to our young lives.

Unlike many of my contemporaries, I don’t look back fondly on this period. The past was not better than the present.