Memories of Jack Laughrey

The Laughrey family were early residents of the valley, opening a hardware store on La Crescenta Avenue in the 1920s. They moved the store to Foothill Boulevard and lived beneath the store. Later they were early residents of Mountain Oaks. A news article was written about Jack Laughrey back in 1979 and it provides some gems about life in old La Crescenta.

Jack had a variety of interesting jobs over the years, starting with a lemonade stand on La Crescenta Avenue. He was a soda jerk in the Montrose Pharmacy (that’s the building that today houses Gus and Andy’s Restaurant). He was a wildlands firefighter with the county forestry department. He was a caddy at the Oakmont Country Club and dug ditches for one of the many water companies that supplied water to the valley. He laid pipelines for the gas company, worked for the telephone company and, during retirement, worked at Rogers Pharmacy. Needless to say Jack liked to keep busy.

When Jack was a soda jerk at the Montrose Pharmacy part of his duties included emptying the slot machines there. Yes, it’s true – the Montrose Pharmacy had slot machines!

Jack laughed, “Now it can be told. They were crooked! There was no way to get the three little bells to pay off. There was a stopper inside.”

In fact, there were several slot machines in various businesses around Montrose and Jack made an extra few cents a week servicing them – and probably all were rigged.

“If some old timers are still around, this is going to make them mad,” Jack observed.

Jack remembered the time a young teenager raced his own Motel T against the owner of the local Ford dealer and won. He remembered the many families that made basement wine during Prohibition.

“I knew all the Italian families up here – the Zittos, Famularos and the Begues. They had the best wine cellars,” Jack winked. “Great people. That’s what made the town nice and friendly.” In fact, Jack also had a job delivering locally bootleg liquor– booze made in the back room of a local business.

Jack enjoyed dancing in the ’20s.

“But I wasn’t good … at least not at the Charleston. But I could waltz.”

He vividly remembered the great New Year’s Flood that struck the valley at midnight in 1934.

“Me and Archie Potter were walking along a street when we heard the sound of falling rocks. We had just enough time to scramble up an oak tree. Those people who drowned; their bodies were just washed away. I think they all died. The place was destroyed.”

Jack remembered an undeveloped Montrose.

“There was nothing but sagebrush from the corner of what’s now La Crescenta Avenue over to Ocean View. If you drove along Honolulu Avenue, a narrow one-lane road then, there was brush all the way to Tujunga.”

One of Jack’s vivid memories is the story of the “Rattlesnake Murder” in 1935.

“Some guy put his wife’s foot in a box of rattlesnakes and when he thought the snakes had not been effective, he tossed her into the pool where she drowned.”

Wild memories from Jack Laughrey!

While we’re on the subject of wild stories, let’s remember the 100^th anniversary of a disastrous train wreck on the Glendale & Montrose Railway line. It was a beautiful morning on Nov. 30, 1923 when a freight car sitting on tracks at Verdugo Park accidently lost its brakes and began quickly rolling down Canada Boulevard toward downtown Glendale. Workers jumped into a freight engine parked nearby and “Mac” Bainbridge positioned himself on the front of the engine, intending to jump onto the loose freight car and apply the brakes. They chased the loose car down Glendale Avenue at high speed. At Glendale and Lexington, they met a northbound steam engine head-on. The loose car was sandwiched and destroyed between the two engines and Bainbridge was hurled into the wreckage. He died later that day. It was a heroic act that ended in disaster.

BTW – That Glendale & Montrose engine Bainbridge rode the front of still operates at the Orange Empire Railway Museum in Perris, California.