Giving Thanks It’s that time of year when we give thanks, when we look back and reflect. But this year, like most recent years in this decade, feels precarious. Israel and Palestine, Russia and Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Artsakh and Armenia: all of these conflicts are far away. They’re also affecting us right here at home. I […]
Holidays Don’t Offer Break for CVTC As the holiday season is upon us, the Crescenta Valley Town Council is continuing to work hard on issues that matter most to the community. We would first like to thank the community for attending our annual pancake breakfast last month. We had a record turnout! This is the […]
March of Dimes Celebrity Parade 1954 Last week I wrote about the origin of the March of Dimes. It was a grassroots fundraising effort to find the vaccine for the disease of polio. Polio was a scourge in the early and middle part of the last century. It was a disease that paralyzed the muscles […]
No Room for Hate As a GUSD parent and Glendale resident I’ve been upset to witness a small group of apparent anti-public school extremists causing chaos at GUSD school board meetings and directing persistent harassment campaigns against individual teachers, administrators and members of our LGBTQ+ community. On Thursday (Oct. 26) some of these same individuals, […]
March of Dimes and the Crescenta Valley’s ‘Porchlight Parade’ Polio was a scourge in the early and middle part of the last century. It was a disease that paralyzed the muscles of the body and, most heart breaking, it mostly struck kids and young people. There were waves of infection, often in summer. Just like […]
Confessions of a ‘Collector’ In my opinion, the difference between a collector and a hoarder comes down to the perspective of the person who is in it versus the person who is observing it. For some people who live a minimalist lifestyle, they just can’t understand why other people surround themselves with a lot of […]
Junk Fees Imagine my shock when I showed up at Walt Disney Concert Hall to buy a ticket for the Halloween night screening of the 1925 classic “The Phantom of the Opera” billed as “Horror in the Hall.” The real horror was not the price of a seat in the last row of the balcony ($64) or the […]
A New Market Opens in Montrose 1939 Store openings may be grand events today but nothing compares to supermarket openings in the past. Supermarket openings back then were over the top, goofy extravaganzas. Take for example the 1939 opening of the new Fitzsimmons Market in a large building on the northeast corner of Verdugo Boulevard […]
Dear Community, There has been an increasing amount of armed conflict abroad. Although our service toward public interest is focused on this community, we are concerned with public interest overall and our hearts extend to all those affected by the recent and ongoing tragedies. On the home front, we’ve welcomed respite from the spate of […]
Glendale’s Oak of Peace and The Power of Women The Oak of Peace was a giant oak tree that once grew in front of the Catalina Verdugo Adobe in the Verdugo Woodlands. It was under this oak in 1847 that representatives of the American Army and the forces of the Californios negotiated terms of surrender. […]