Tuna Camp and Charlie Chaplin’s Chauffeur Tuna Camp, now the site of the Verdugo Hills Golf Course, was a detention center during WWII for Japanese, Germans and Italians. It held enemy aliens for interrogation before they were released or sent to larger prisons inland. One Japanese man who spent time there on a charge of […]
Few today know the name of Stephen Seymour Thomas, but in the first half of the 1900s he was a well known American artist. His specialty was portraits, and he painted the rich and famous of that era – captains of industry, statesmen, prominent scientists, governors – all the way up to the presidential portrait […]
Montrose History Book on the Horizon There have been two books and one DVD released in the last few years on the history of the Crescenta Valley (“Images of America: La Crescenta,” “Crescenta Valley – Then and Now” and the DVD “Rancho La Cañada: Then and Now”), but that pace of book releases is now […]
The Verdugo City Tribune I’ve written before about the mythical town called Verdugo City, a place most valley residents are blissfully unaware of. Today, Verdugo City officially is just the Verdugo City Post Office at La Crescenta and Honolulu avenues, with its own zip code (91046) that applies only to the PO boxes in the […]
CV’s Own Movie Star Being so close to Hollywood, the Crescenta-Cañada area has always been home to stars. From silent great Francis X. Bushman to Victor MacLaglen, Kevin Costner, all the way up to Miley Cyrus – those and others have all lived in the area. But none of them embraced the community and became […]
Black Work Crews Rejected by CV In the pre-WWII years, racially exclusive Crescenta Valley soundly rejected the establishment of an all-black CCC camp locally not once but twice, in 1935 and again in 1941. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was part of President Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” designed to lift America out of the Great […]
Racial Discord Boils Over in 1941 The Crescenta Valley today is not as ethnically diverse as many other communities. We have a big immigrant population of Korean and Armenian Americans, but people of color – black and Latino – not so much. Some of that has to do with our history of regulating ourselves as […]
The Who, Baba O’Riley, and La Crescenta In May I wrote “The Utopia at the Top of La Crescenta Avenue” about a spiritual center that was established on the old Bissell High-Up Ranch, the neighborhood above Markridge Avenue we now know as Pinecrest. I wrote that followers of the Indian spiritual leader Meher Baba had […]
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 […]
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 […]