Angeles Crest Highway – Our Backyard Paradise One of my favorite drives is to climb up Angeles Crest Highway from La Cañada and explore some of the most spectacular scenery in Southern California. Any visitor from out of town, any dynamics in the weather – heck, any couple of free hours – provides an excuse […]
Famous Women of Rockhaven Sanitarium – Peggy Fears Rockhaven Sanitarium today stands as a monument to powerful and dynamic women. As a successful business run by powerful women, it attracted powerful women as patients. Besides the businesswomen and academics who spent their last years at Rockhaven, a number of show business ladies were patients as […]
Crescenta Valley Water and The Road to Glendale Annexation In last week’s column I described how the earliest settlers in CV in the late 1800s had enough water to survive on just by trapping and carefully distributing surface water. The winter runoff in the canyons was held in cisterns built of stone and mortar, then […]
Early Development of Crescenta Valley’s Water When we choose a home site in CV today, we think of schools, traffic, proximity to stores or views. But in the late 1800s, the earliest settlers had only one consideration to keep in mind when choosing their home site – availability of water. Thus when the first American […]
The Story of Glendale High’s Legendary Track Coach Recently my good friend Art Cobery expressed to me the admiration he had for one of the greatest athletes and running coaches that he knew of: Glendale High’s Ranier de Mandel. Remember that Glendale and Hoover were our high schools until CV High was built in 1960, […]
CV is the Front Line of the Squirrel Wars The Crescenta Valley is currently the front line in yet another battle between a native species and invasive species. In this case it’s the native western gray squirrel versus the invasive eastern fox squirrel. While the invasive fox squirrels occupy the valley, the native gray squirrels […]
Finally, A Historic Preservation Ordinance For La Crescenta! I’m asked regularly what can be done to preserve older homes from demolition, and my response has always been, “It depends on where you live.” Communities around us such as Sunland/Tujunga and Glendale have for many years enjoyed the ability to preserve their history by working through […]
Hot Rod Nostalgia – La Crescenta’s H&H Automotive I recently went on a tour of H&H Automotive with the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley. (Just an aside here: If you enjoy these articles on our local history, you really should join the Historical Society. They offer amazing tours and events. For instance, last weekend […]
Our Old Hometown Newspaper – The Ledger From 1922 to 1978, the Ledger was our own newspaper, a twice-weekly, multi-page record of happenings in the Crescenta Valley. It recorded every birth, every death, every burglary, and every car crash. More importantly, it reflected the trends of growth, the changing governments (local, state and national), and […]
The Lanterman Scandals Those who read my column regularly know that I love history’s so-called “dirty laundry.” It somehow makes history come alive for me to know that great historical figures were, after all, human with flaws and weaknesses just like us. The founding Lanterman family of La Cañada has always been presented as squeaky […]