Kimball Sanitarium Part 6 – Kimball’s Becomes Ralphs Supermarket By the late ’50s it appeared Merritt Kimball, owner/operator of Kimball Sanitarium, was ready to get out of the sanitarium business. A full size community hospital was being planned for the growing Crescenta Valley, and Merritt Kimball had put his property at Rosemont Avenue and Foothill […]
Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls. I’ll Get It. As my kids will attest, I have three immitigable personal quirks (okay, at least three). One: I can’t walk past a light switch without turning it off if no one’s in the room. Two: An outside door left open during the winter while our […]
Voicing Protest Over CVWD Hike Before the local water district draws the mistaken conclusion that residents support the soon to be enacted 16.6% sewer rate hike because only 15 letters of protest were submitted, let’s look at some of the reasons for the seemingly scant opposition. About a month ago the agency sent its customers […]
Kimball Sanitarium Part 5 – Hollywood Stars As I’ve said before in these columns, patient confidentiality hinders our knowledge of who was a patient at Kimball’s. We have some pretty murky local lore referring to Kimball’s as being the “Screen Actor’s Hospital” even though the actual Motion Picture and Television Hospital has existed in Woodland […]
Call Me Fed Up In the classic Buffalo Springfield song, “For What It’s Worth” the band sang, “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” Now, I don’t know if whatever’s happening is only happening at my house or throughout the entire Crescenta Valley. It could be happening all across L.A. County and […]
Adds Input to Reader’s Observation This is in response to a letter published in the Aug. 30 issue of the CV Weekly by Mr. Tony Bowling. His letter was pointing out that the lawsuit being filed against the Glendale Unified School District by the parents of Drew Ferraro was not the correct target and that […]
Kimball Sanitarium Part 4 – Anti-Sanitarium Movement As I’ve documented in previous columns, the sanitarium business was booming in the Crescenta Valley in the late ’20s. One old-timer stated that at that period there were some 20 different sanitariums locally for the aged, for lung diseases and for mental illness. During that same period […]
Missing Meatball Already Way back when I was a kid, we used to sing a parody version of “On Top Of Old Smokey” that went something like: “On top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese; I lost my poor meatball, when somebody sneezed!” I know it’s an odd connection, but last week I couldn’t help […]
The Con is On My father-in-law called while I was working at my desk the other day. He asked if I knew that one of my sons (the one attending college in Missoula, Mont.) had been in a car accident in British Columbia and was now in jail. Wait. What? I was vaguely aware of […]
Sanitariums in CV – Kimball Sanitarium Part 2 Last week I wrote about the background of Merritt Kimball, owner of Kimball Sanitarium. He had been raised in the fledgling mental health industry in Southern California, his father having been head of the first state run insane asylum in San Bernardino, and later a large private […]