This Old Wooden House – Sunday School

Prologue

In those days, in the days of the late 1950s, the San Fernando Valley was a land of citrus, walnut, and olive groves, and corn fields, acres and acres, providing fruit and vegetables of all sorts to the people, overflowing the storage houses and bins along the railroad tracks, and capable of filling car after railroad car and making trains of cars with mounded piles of oranges and lemons.  Near the end of winter, the blossoms of the trees filled the warming nights with an intoxicating aroma one could almost taste – a taste promising a lovely pleasure mixed with honey and spice just beyond the fingers’ reach – or so it seemed – the blessing of a gentle wonderful perfume that seemed fitting, that seemed right, for a land, a valley once a sage covered desert, coaxed and enticed into life by the sweetness of stolen water.

The San Gabriel Mountains rose to the east of the Valley, unchanged since the Chumash, the Spaniards, the Mexicans, and the Americans all in turn first looked upon them.  The sun rose in the morning behind them.  And the sky was already lit, and the roosters, birds and crows were alive with crowing, song, and loud cawing, long before the sun, long heralded by a golden glow, first peeked across the mountain tops and shot its molten gold and burning red across the Valley floor.  A moment, a reminder, to the understanding eye, that once in time, God said, let there be light.

      Hills, much lower that the San Gabriels, surrounded the rest of the Valley to the north, and west, and south, creating an irregular oval valley and shutting off the land from the cooling breezes of the ocean not more than a wish, a Sunday drive, or a determined long bike ride away over hills to the south or east.  In the winter, the Valley was sheltered and warm.  In the summer and into the fall, those same mountains and hills made the Valley an oven.  The land was baked hot and the air was still to where, in the past, the padres of the Mission retreated at midday behind two or three or more feet of adobe mud bricks into the created coolness of a cloister of workrooms and a large high church of simple yet elegant design and decoration.  Many of those now inhabiting the land retreated to rooms with fans and swamp coolers, and window air conditioners or into pools, all designed to escape or celebrate the sun and heat. 

With the heat of spring, of summer, and into the fall – in the continuous season of warmth, growth, heat, and drying wild grass – smog, the thick smelly gray-brown blanket of car exhaust and smoke – at times laid ahold of the Valley, choking, poisoning, the very life from the air.  Heat, trapped within the length and breadth of the Valley by an unmoving and uncaring layer of cooler air higher above, baked the air into a deathly, breathless stillness, choking all and everything without mercy, for there was no breeze, there was no cleansing breath of wind from the north to lift the pukey yellowish-brown blanket of polluted air.  The heat and the smog induced stupor and many inhabitants became lethargic and listless, and breathing was painful at times.  The smoke-like smog hid the blue sky and obscured the sun, changing the sunlight into a shadowy haze of brownish-yellow.  Sometimes the smog sieged and suffocated the Valley for just a day, sometimes two, many times longer, obscuring all, the mountains, the hills, the houses and figures down the road.

      From the Mojave Desert to the northeast, the Santana winds in any season could flow into the Valley, always warm and dry.  These winds were not the kiss of the cooler breezes from the true north, gentle and kind like the longed-for greetings of fond lovers, but rather, with their heat, they were constant and insistent, and at times they could become oven-hot, vicious, and as irrational and unpredictable as the anger and wrath of lovers scorned by those careless and stupid.  The winds, born in the hotter heat of the high desert, when violent, assaulted the Valley, a land that now had forgotten its sagebrush desert origins, a vast fertile ground blessed and wooed into life by water sweet stolen from the north afar.  Once a compliant companion of the higher desert, the Valley, now emboldened and arrayed with a face painted of corn, of citrus, olive, and walnut trees, and many other hues of living green, and polka-dotted with tracts of modest houses sprouting here and there, was punished with a hot, savage, windy violence for forgetting whence it came and by whom it was once possessed.  And in the path of the violence, subject to the scorching heat blowing over all the landscape of the Valley, large trees would thrash about and be bowed almost to the ground, and large tumbleweeds from the many empty lots would take flight, jumping and tumbling over the land and spreading their seeds among the groves, within the gardens, along the side of roads, dirt and paved, eventually rooting and arising as reminders of the anger of the howling heated wind.   

Dairies with cows upon cows dotted the east Valley.  The manure smell, an additional perfume to some – from a distance – an unwelcome distraction to others, wafted up in the sky with the heat, smelling somehow cleaner in the cooler more brittle winter air.  The dairies themselves were marked at places with piles of the manure, usually near the roads.  At times, cows stood calmly upon the heaps, perhaps actually ruminating upon the greener weeds and grass on the other side of the road, a seasonal contemplation, as the empty fields were green only in response to the rains of November and February, turning golden brown later in the heat of summer, but while green, a source and cause of quiet longing and meditation for the cud-chewing, milk producing cows.  Milk, conveniently purchased at easy drive-through dairy stores by the growing inhabitants of the Valley, or home-delivered on set prearranged mornings, the milk, in half gallon glass bottles, was carried to the door in rectangular, handled wire baskets, capable of holding four bottles, easily furnishing the needs of large and growing larger families.  The milk bottles when opened, were clogged at the top of the neck with half an inch or so of cream, a delicacy for some.  

Also, in the east Valley, huge pits were being dug, wider and wider, deeper and deeper, and enormous metal mechanical crushers and separators rose into the sky as the appetite and need for more and more gravel and sand – upon which the entire Valley sat upon – grew with the building of the freeways – the Interstate 5 planned and advancing from the north mountains and hills into the Valley, and the 405, destined to cut the Valley in half, heading to Santa Monica over the hills to the south and beyond.

In the Valley, once almost covered in trees and fields, in places among the groves and cornfields, tracks of similar homes and clusters of houses appeared.  Acres and acres of two-bedroom, one-bath houses sprang up around the GM plant in Van Nuys and Panorama City in the middle of the Valley.  Other houses, some similar, some larger, along with streets of shops appeared almost overnight in places with names like Tarzana, North Hollywood, Canoga Park, Granada Hills, and Sepulveda, all part of a city called Los Angeles, which was not a city to those living in the Valley, but just a remote cluster of some tallish buildings over the hills to the south.  Two separate cities also had claim to parts of the Valley, Burbank in the southeast, well established with Lockheed and the aircraft industry from the war, and San Fernando in the northeast, an original city, a tiny town of two-square miles or so separated into a Mexican, Spanish speaking section, and a white and relatively more affluent part.  It was a town with deep roots, roots with many roots, situated next to the old 18th century Spanish built Mission San Fernando Rey de España, and Brand Park in front of the mission, with the preserved still splashing mission fountain, sights and sounds of a time now far distant and touching only few of the those now flooding into the Valley.  Tensions grew and intelligent balances disintegrated in the Valley as its form in the late 1950s, soon to be a memory, changed and changed again as cars, houses, pools, and streets began to appear and spread in all directions.

Yet, the pace and form of change and growth was different from one named locality to the next.  Some sprang completely new out of the groves and cornfields with no connections to any past other than the occasional horse or chicken ranch or isolated hamburger stand.  Others had a past, like San Fernando, and the change more involved people and language, not buildings and streets.  Other places were already loosely established with no order, with no distinct identity or apparent purpose or rational for existence other than that wheat or groves had been planted in the past and a few houses – mostly cheap – had been put down on mostly cheap land – and the growth continued practically everywhere along the same lines – without plan or purpose or any real thought, just cheap houses rising on relatively cheap land.  Once such place was Sylmar.

Sylmar lay north of San Fernando.  As much as San Fernando was organized, identifiable and distinct, Sylmar was not.  Its existence, its place on a map, seemed merely a parenthesis, its boundaries drawn to surround – and limit – whatever was left over from everyplace else.  It had no center, it was not a town, and it was just sort of there.  A nothing place, a dumpy afterthought in a barely acknowledged corner of Los Angeles – a city itself, after the war, barely distinct and still emerging from a warm weather and filmmaking induced sleepy nothingness.

Sylmar, bordered on the west by low hills and a reservoir of water captured and held by the Van Norman Dam, a Mulholland project, was also unevenly divided by Highway 99, named the San Fernando Road when it entered the Valley from the north.  This old highway, the main north-south road of California before the building of the 5, came over the mountains from Bakersfield, down into the Valley through Sylmar and San Fernando and then headed down towards Los Angeles.  In Sylmar, the west side of the road was evenly spaced with very tall thin palm trees with heads of upright green thorn-spiked fronds above a shroud of brown dry rustling-in-the-wind fronds hanging down.  A few larger paved roads ran off San Fernando Road, but many of the roads touching the 99, and also the streets and roads radiating out from the paved ones, were dirt roads and the mostly old cars bouncing and rumbling upon them provided a gentle covering of dust for many of the houses and people, drab upon drab, and dust upon all.

Finally, Sylmar was a land of two types of cheap houses, those well built by frugal owners reading blueprints at night at a kitchen table somewhere else, houses unique and different from one another, and those not so well-built tract houses thrown up by small-time opportunistic builders.  It was a land without sidewalks.  It was a land of streets studded with metal bread-loaf shaped mailboxes nailed to wooden posts, each mailbox possessing a little red metal flag that placed upright, would stop the mailman – even if there was no mail for the folks of the house that day – to fetch and whisk away letters to places and towns and homes left behind somewhere else – always somewhere else.  It was also a land of cesspools and septic tanks – promised sewers not provided, or houses not connected to them – the expense of the sewer hook-up always a major issue for those bidding their time in Sylmar.  It was also home to weasels, horned toads and other lizards and garter snakes.  Dotting the landscape were front yards with old cars that did not work, back lots with goats and chickens, paddocks for horses, shoddy wooden outbuildings no longer in use, and weedy fields with a few cows still content to graze.  Olive groves were in profusion, and fields of berries, corn, and vegetables appeared here and over there.  In the spring, vacant fields, saturated and muddy with the rains of February, soon sprouted lush growths of wild oats and sunflowers, mustard plants, puncture weeds and tumbleweeds.  The fields were home to hordes of ladybugs, grasshoppers and other bugs, all making the fields alive with their movement and noise.  The green of the fields lasted until the heat of summer dried the life out of the ground and the wild oats turned golden and everything else withered to a dusty brown.  This, all of this, was Sylmar in the late 1950s.

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