My Own Memories of La Crescenta – Part 5

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

The Montrose Theater was a kid magnet in the 1960s. I would call the Montrose Theater and listen to the pre-recorded message that told the features showing and the times. (If I didn’t know the phone number, I could dial “4-1-1” and a live operator would look it up and read me the number. I had to write it down quickly.) I can remember many times when that 600-seat theater was packed full of kids. One time we came a little late for a showing of Disney’s “That Darn Cat.” We had to sit in the front row on the far-left side. Couldn’t even see the screen!

The ticket window was an opening in the outside wall on the left side of the theater. After entering the doors in the middle the tiny snack bar was on the left side, and the even tinier bathrooms were on the right side. My choice of snacks was always a big box of Milk Duds. The seats were miniscule compared to theater seats today. I was a tall kid and my knees hit the seats in front of me.

Another haunt for us kids was a miniature golf course. It was located on Foothill Boulevard about where the Office Depot is today. It was a very old mini golf course, poorly maintained, with the putting green felt peeling away in many spots. The windmill didn’t even turn.

This mini golf place was my first introduction to pinball as it had a line of old machines under an awning. Amazingly they all worked. There was a crusty old guy behind the counter who gave out change and issued the golf clubs. One time he told me the story of having lost one of his testicles in an accident. He said he had been “cut proud,” which is a very old horseman term for a stallion that hasn’t been properly castrated. He went on to tell me that made him very popular with the ladies, as they thought he couldn’t get them pregnant. As a kid, I had no idea what he was talking about but I knew enough to be very, very uncomfortable with the conversation. Ah, the good old days when it was still okay to be incredibly inappropriate.

My pets of choice while I was a kid were guinea pigs, bought from the Tropicana Pet Store in Montrose. I could collect scrap hay for free for their bedding from Bonetto’s Feed at the corner of La Crescenta and Montrose avenues. I got lettuce for them at Spike Jones Market for free as well, the outer layers of lettuce and cabbage that they were going to throw away. When one of the pigs died, romantic me wanted to bury him at sea. My mom took me down to Pacific Ocean Park, an old amusement pier in Santa Monica. I intended to toss him off the end of the pier but it was crowded and I got too self-conscious, so I slipped him into a trash can instead.

Many of my columns focus on the darker side of history, murders and such. I was the same way as a child. When a family at the end of the street suddenly moved I was quite sure that there was a murder involved. Us neighborhood kids poured through the trashcan of the house, trying not to be seen by anyone still living there. We soon came upon a kitchen knife with suspicious red stains on it (probably tomato). We had found the murder weapon! We all knew that blood can permanently stain. We had all seen Don Knotts at the Montrose Theater in “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” with the permanent stains on the haunted house organ that couldn’t be cleaned off (“And they used Bon Ami!”). But now that we had the murder weapon, what would we do? Try to find more evidence? Go to the police? No – our solution was to never go down to that end of the street ever again. 

Problem solved.