Juvenile Delinquents of CV – A Gang Fight in Tujunga!

We don’t know what led up to the fight, what offenses real or imagined caused two large groups of teenage boys to meet at Sunland Park with deadly weapons for a gang fight. We only know that police rolled up on the fight before it even started and prevented it from happening.

On a hot August day in 1950, the LAPD received a call from a concerned resident in Sunland about a disturbance at Sunland Park. Two officers in a patrol car were dispatched. They approached the park and saw a large group of teenage boys milling around a tree, near the children’s play area. As they approached the boys, the teens hurriedly tossed some objects into the bushes. The two officers held the 12 teens in place while they called for backup. The boys ranged in age from 14 to 18, and were all from La Crescenta.

As the boys were being questioned, another carload of teenage boys rolled up, seemingly oblivious to the police presence. The police quickly collared them as well. The five boys in the car were from Sunland-Tujunga. When the car and the bushes were searched, they yielded an arsenal of weapons: a knife, an ice pick, a saw blade sharpened into a long knife, a lead sap, a crescent wrench and lengths of chains and rubber hose. Questioning revealed the teenagers were from two rival gangs representing La Crescenta and Tujunga, and they were meeting at the park for a fight. The police had broken up a major brawl before it even began, a fight that would have led to bloodshed.

The 17 youths were booked at Van Nuys police station and today there is a wonderful archived newspaper photo of them being questioned. Most are in T-shirts sporting slicked back hair. At the flash of the camera, the majority covered their faces. One of the teens stared straight at the camera, a surly look on his face, looking for all the world like a young James Dean.

Incidents like this in the early 1950s began a media frenzy about “juvenile delinquency” that lasted for decades. Parents who grew up poor in the Great Depression, and then fought WWII, now had kids who had too much time and too much money. The kids of the 1950s had a cultural influence on America that caused no small amount of anxiety for adults. Parents of these kids reacted with restrictive policies and, of course, the kids pushed back. The crime rate among youth soared.

While our local paper railed against juvenile delinquency, Hollywood and the entertainment industry glamorized it. The 1950s spawned movies like “Rebel Without A Cause” and “Blackboard Jungle,” stoking the fears of parents. The popularity of rock ‘n’ roll and “bad boys” such as Elvis were on the rise.

Even Broadway got into the act with “West Side Story.” Who can forget the line from the song, “Gee Officer Krupke”: “Juvenile delinquency is purely a social disease – Hey, I got a social disease!”

For indeed, in the 1950s, juvenile delinquency was considered a social disease of epic proportions. A poll revealed that Americans ranked juvenile delinquency as the third largest problem in the world, just behind national defense and world peace. To adults, incidents like the gang fight above made it seem that the social fabric of America was being ripped apart not only by their rebellious children, but by the media that seemingly glamourized it.

In 1954, a senate committee was formed to investigate juvenile delinquency. While the influence of movies, radio and music was examined, action was taken on the easiest target: comic books. Popular crime and horror comic books such as “The Vault of Horror” and “Crime Suspense Stories” were held up as the source of America’s ills. Comics producers agreed to self-censorship and every comic book had a stamp on the cover “Approved by the Comics Code Authority.”

Interesting that today the sitcom “Happy Days” and the Fonz is our view of teenagers in the 1950s. For parents of that era, those were anything but happy days.

  mike lawler