A poker game, thrown tomato, a rotting corpse and a lazy-asterisks honorary mayor were ultimately responsible for the creation of our city. Long before Santa Clarita was founded in a special 1987 election, local jungle drums were beating. We’ve been wanting local representation since the 19th century. Fiery movements came and went.
But, a series of events, beginning in the mid 20th century, finally ignited the powder keg of our long-ignored cries for freedom.
Being the oft-beaten red-headed stepchild of Los Angeles County for decades, we were abused, ignored and a backyard dumping ground for everything from toxic waste dumps to prisons. But in the 1950s, we were struck with yet another Final Last Straw. On a pleasant weekend evening, just about every mucky-muck in town was at a friendly poker game in Downtown
Newhall. The vice squad from the L.A. Police Department — not even L.A. County — armed and shouting, raided the game, handcuffed and arrested several community leaders. With all the whores, drug dealers and miscreants belly-crawling in Downtown L.A., a Mighty Signal editorial asked, didn’t the cops, who didn’t even have the jurisdiction, have anything better to do on a Saturday night than raid a nickel-&-dime card game in a sleepy little cowtown with a force large enough to take Omaha Beach?
This followed a two-year episode of L.A. County first showing up and changing the addresses of EVERYBODY in town. Back in the 1950s, we had soothing, no-pressure and village-like addresses, sporting two or three digits. In a matter of months, all addresses were changed to five digits. This especially played havoc on the business community, who had to change everything from Yellow Page ads to business purchase orders. Worse? After going through all the changes on stationery, L.A. County then changed several long-standing street names. Like the peasants below Dr. Frankenstein’s castle, torches were lit and farm implements poked holes in the valley’s peaceful skies.
Why didn’t the county alert us they were going to implement these changes, people angrily asked. Years later, it turned out, L.A. County did. They had sent a series of notices to our honorary mayor and Chamber of Commerce head about scheduling information meetings with the community. The lazy so-&-so promptly filed every notice in the trash. Shrugging and guessing we didn’t care, a flotilla of county maintenance trucks showed up one morn and started threatening thousands of locals to take down their old addresses and put up the new.
A few years later, a corpse from a traffic accident was going through the mulching process along the side of a Castaic road and no one from the county seemed interested in getting out the snow shovel and scooping it up. I was too young then for my entrepreneurial mind to kick in. I could have rushed to The Old Road with a cardboard sign:
“HAVE YOUR PICTURE TAKEN WITH THE DEAD GUY FOR 75 CENTS!!”
There were many other slaps in the Santa Clarita face, too numerous to mention. In a 1960 move to create the city of Newhall-Saugus, we held a community info meeting at the Hart Auditorium. A bevy of SoCal bureaucrats and polits showed up to scold us about being L’il Abner rural booger-eating morons incapable of tying our shoes, let alone self-government. One young exec, Ruth Bennell, vice mayor of Pico Rivera, was particularly harsh and impatient. During her tongue-lashing from the stage, a local farmer stood up and threw a tomato at her. Drat, it missed. Still. That woman held a grudge. Years later, Ruthie was head of LAFCO (the Local Agency Formation Commission) the powerful body that approves the creation of new governments or agencies, from dog catcher zones to new cities. A few days before our 1987 election, Bennell cut the proposed boundaries by half and flipped us the bird while doing it. Revenge, indeed, is a dish best served cold.
We finally formed our own city to avoid mooncalf bureaucrats like Bennell from reaching down the back of our cowboy jeans, grabbing us by our clean white 100% cotton underwear and giving us a shame-bringing 9th-grade melvin.
I thought, with the 2024 election, we were finally waking from an insane, Orwellian dream.
Except driving down Orchard Village Road I learned the city of Santa Clarita had turned this calming and beautiful corridor into an explosion in a clown factory.
We’re talking about the mile-length of albino massage therapy vibrators posing as lane dividers along Valencia’s scenic boulevard. The question, raised by many harsh and hurt voices of local citizens, is why would anyone do something so profoundly stupid, soul-sucking and butt ugly?
A call to City Hall offered an answer.
According to the official at the Valencia Avenue HQ, “We had a grant.”
Which conveys that, somehow, in magical, junior high thinking, it was free. A grant? Gosh. That must mean no one has to pay for it.
There’s an old cowboy saying, “Just because someone gives you a free, angry, biting monkey dripping with rabies, doesn’t mean you have to take it.” May I be honest? That’s not actually an old cowboy saying. But, next time I’m out riding with friends? It’s going to be.
We formed a city in 1987 to protect us from madcap government edicts and whimsical Tuesday pickups of highway corpses. With this whackazoid Halloween prank/knucklehead arts homage to post-modern phallic symbolism, the city of Santa Clarita has attained the highest plateau of some eastern heathen spiritual discipline of Ultimate Lunacy — to annoy us.
I’ve another old cowboy saying. Actually, it’s Buddhist, but, I’m stealing it for My People. You know. The Citizens of Santa Clarita? That koan is this: “An idiot can throw a rock into a pond that 12 wise men cannot retrieve.”
City of Santa Clarita?
Dive into that pool. Grab that pornographic dirt clod of a bike lane you chucked in before it hits bottom.
And don’t ever — ever — create such a monstrosity like this again.
Vive le guerre …
Visit John Boston’s store, book shop and commentary/humor website at johnlovesamerica.com.
