Today, this glorious, once in a forever eon, each in our own way, it’s our day to howl. Happy Independence Day, dear saddlepals. Happy 250th Birthday and Happy Time Ranger adventure. Isn’t it just beyond grand to live in this amazing ongoing song of a country?
This fine Saturday morning, let’s go for a trail ride. Let’s ride back through the quieter times of yesteryear. There we will find heroes, villains, humor and tragedy.
WAY, WAY BACK WHEN
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, RUTH! — My dear, dear friend and hero, Ruth Waldo Newhall, was born on July 3, 1910. She was this paper’s best gossip columnist and best editor, period, not to mention a genuine force of nature. I shall like and miss her always.
AND DON’T FORGET TO WATER THE POPPIES — Imagine owning most of the Santa Clarita Valley. Think of the yard work. On July 1, 1808, Ignacio del Valle was born in Jalisco, Mexico. He would later be mayor of Los Angeles and one of Southern California’s most prominent political figures.
HAPPY SLIGHTLY BELATED BIRTHDAY, CASTAIC — On July 1, 1915, the township of Castaic was founded, which makes it 115 years young today. Interestingly, a 40-year-long range war in which as many as 27 men lost their lives was just winding down there. W.W. Jenkins, a sort-of self-made Judge Roy Bean who dispensed vigilante law up there, was one of the combatants. From the small-town department, Jenkins was employed by Ignacio del Valle as one of the captains of the California Rangers, the shoot-first, ask-questions-later group that helped clean up a lawless Los Angeles in a record time of about 18 months.
HEY JOE & JOHN — This isn’t local, but it sure is close. This marks the 180th anniversary of Rancho Palos Verdes, a segment of the original Rancho San Pedro, a sprawling land grant originally given by the king of Spain to Juan and Jose Sepulveda. Most of you have driven along the boulevard named after the boys.
JULY 3, 1926
SHAKE, RATTLE & ROLL — A decent-sized earthquake rattled the Santa Clarita Valley around 3:15 in the morning. It was on the anniversary of the great Santa Barbara quake. No damage was reported.
MOVIE MEMORABILIA BLAZE — Built in 1923, it was first used as a movie prop in a William S. Hart movie. On this date, the cabin burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances. Hart lost a lot of movie memorabilia in the blaze, valued at $6,000. That was a ton of money back in 1923 when you consider a house cost $600.
VISITING THE WATER GOD, TOTSONI — The Navajo tribe that lived and worked the ranch of another famous local movie star, Harry Carey, made their annual pilgrimage to the Pacific. Led by Carey and his wife, Olive, they made the trek before dawn where they boarded the Carey yacht and sailed to Catalina. Carey had met the tribe in the early 20th century while on a movie shoot and invited them — all of them — to move to his 1,000-acre spread in San Francisquito Canyon. The Navajos would camp on the beach, swim in the ocean and do a variety of ceremonies, honoring their water god, Totsoni. The tribe believed all living things, organic and animal, came from the oceans. The recognition was a nine-day ceremony. The last four days the Navajos competed in foot and horse races, wrestling and archery contests back at the ranch.
HOTTER’N THREE HECKS — Summer came in with a devilish vengeance. We went through some weird weather where the mercury topped the 110 mark. Darn muggy, too.
AND WE’RE NOT TALKING THE HOTSY-TOTSY MIDDLE-AGED DIVORCEE, EITHER — Not too many SoCal Edison workers have this as part of their job description today, but, 100 years back, SCE’s F.A. O’Brien bagged a 6-foot-long cougar prowling near his pack mule by the Tumble Inn on the old Ridge Route. O’Brien made a rug of the predator.
WONDER IF ‘FBO’ STOOD FOR ‘FRED’S BOX OFFICE?’ — They’re not exactly household names like MGM or Warner Brothers, but the FBO and Myers Production Co. were in town, making silent movies on this date, both trying not to bump into one another in Whitney Canyon.
JULY 3, 1936
A DEAD FOOL BEHIND THE WHEEL — Maxine Rideaux, badly burned, was pulled from a fiery wreckage. Hysterically, she screamed: “I should have known better than ride with that fool, because he was a demon of a driver.” The demon in question was Jim Epperson. He tried to pass a cement truck on the Ridge Route, lost control of his Porgrimson car and crashed. Epperson and his wife were burned alive in the wreck.
COPS SHOOT WELL — Local sharpshooters competed in the annual Hart Cup competition at the Fourth of July festivities. Named after our silent Western hero, the four finalists were all local sheriff’s deputies. One of them competed with a historic gun that had been once adorned with large diamonds and gold. The jewels had been pried off decades earlier and ended up in pawn shops. One competitor kidded the deputy who now owned it, saying the handle, filled with putty, looked like “a smallpox victim.”
JULY 3, 1946
A SURREAL FOURTH — The mood was both surreal and joyous around Newhall. The Fourth of July parade — the biggest to date — was right around the corner. Yet, right near the starting ground, David Clark, foreman of the William S. Hart ranch, was quietly securing the property, putting on new locks. The valley’s most prominent figure and one of the world’s most famous people, Bill Hart had died a week earlier. Few realized that for the next 10 years, his estate, willed to the county, would be the subject of a bitter and ongoing fight between Hart’s son and Los Angeles.
THE COWBOY: AN ENDANGERED SPECIES — A lot of locals were well represented at the big Pan Pacific summer rodeo. First of all, the thing was named for rancher and cowboy star, Gene Autry. The Jauregui boys, Ed and Bob, both placed high in calf-roping and Andy supplied most of the rodeo livestock. A pair of Foxes (not related, obviously) Fox O’Callahan and Dewey Fox also placed, as did Chick Hannon, Harry Logue and Claude Uterback. We had a lot of working cowpokes living here 80 years back. Today, there’s less than a handful.
JULY 3, 1956
ALMOST A DUMP? — Today, they’ve made an industrial park out of it. More than a half-century back, salvage tycoon Louie Visco bought the old Needham Ranch on Sierra Highway, south of Eternal Valley. Needham was considering turning the 900 acres into either a roofing paper factory or a dump. He did neither.
OIL TRUCK FIRE — A leaking oil truck with a dragging muffler was blamed for starting eight small brush fires in 100-degree weather along Placerita Canyon Road. County firefighters quickly doused the blazes. Sparks from the old oil tanker, caused by the dragging muffler, were blamed.
CHEAP GAS — Regular gasoline was 28.9 cents in Newhall. That’d be not for an ounce, but a gallon.
JULY 3, 1966
GIVING THE SECOND AMENDMENT A BAD NAME — Gun-toting morons (good band name!) were responsible for a power outage affecting 1,400 homes and dozens of businesses. The yahoos shot out a big insulator.
PRETTY PEGGY — My good pal, “Pretty” Peggy Sinclair, was hands down the most gorgeous gal in the SCV. Others agreed, crowning her Miss Newhall-Saugus.
ONE STEP CLOSER TO CIVILIZATION — The first traffic crosswalk signals in the valley were installed 40 years back, culminating an effort that began in 1955. The Chamber of Commerce started lobbying the county in ’55 to get some form of traffic lights here. It only took 11 years and hundreds of letters. The chamber even collected thousands of signatures and counted vehicles.
CAKE FOR THE GIRLS! — Happy anniversary to our local Soroptimists. On this date, 60 years back, they received their official charter from the national office. Mrs. Anne Lynch was elected first president. I’m guessing there was no one born yet in 1966 who is currently in Soroptimists.
FANCY PHONES — North Castaic residents in a 117-squre-mile area joined the rest of the world when dial telephones replaced the old-fashioned wind-up and radio phone service. At the time, there were — get this — only 20 telephone subscribers in the area. At the time, Newhall alone had 14,500 phones.
JULY 3, 1976
SWIMMING UPSTREAM — Cripes. People. How they break our hearts. My dear pal, ol’ Doc Patrick Shaughnessy, isn’t with us anymore. The controversial dentist and William S. Hart Union High School District trustee died young, many years ago. But, bless his heart, he was a rare hero, trying to change the patterns of our youth. Alarmed at the amount of junk food the district had piled into their campus vending machines, Pat tried a pilot program at Sierra Vista Junior High. Taking out all the candy bars, Twinkies, chips and addendum junk food from the vending machines, he replaced them with roasted nuts, granola, fruit juices and milk. The result? Vending sales slumped in one month from around $8,000 to about $5,000. That translated to a loss for the district of about $250 a day.
THE UPS & DOWNS OF FAME — Some folks were rather amazed to hear that country/western singing star Merle Travis was their neighbor. The recording star lived in a trailer in the Lily of the Valley Mobile Home Park with his wife, Betty, and two poodles. That’s two poodles too many …
FREAK ACCIDENT & THEN SOME — A 25-year-old San Diego woman died in one of the most bizarre freak accidents in this valley’s history. Motoring home in her Volkswagen, the last thing she saw were the two huge wheels, tires and axle assembly from a big rig truck bouncing toward her. Right after leaving the Castaic scales, all teamster Herbert Wann reported feeling was a slight vibration. Somehow, the last axle on his rig broke off, went bouncing down Interstate 5 and crushed the little VW with the young woman inside.
NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED — Two California Highway Patrol officers in an $80,000 helicopter landed in a field near Highway 138 and I-5 to help an elderly couple stalled in the heat. With one officer still at the helm, he felt his chopper lurch to the right. The big blades plowed up the field and the bubble was smashed. The officers escaped with minor injuries.
ONE BIZAREE THEFT — Someone broke into Rich Sheyda’s truck and, of all things, swiped just a 4-ounce bottle of white cyanide powder, clearly marked with a skull-&-crossbones. The poison was used to strip gold from circuit boards.
JULY 3, 1986
TOO DARN BUGGY — The beetles were in the SCV. Not the English rock group. Placerita Park director Frank Hovore returned from Costa Rica with a collection of male elephant beetles. The giant bugs were about the size of a man’s fist.
LOCAL HUBBA-HUBBAS — Tracy Blalock, Naomi Weinstein and D’Nell Haerle would make the national airwaves just about every Sunday. The three SCV girls were picked for the Los Angeles Raiders pom pon squad.
FILLED WITH, AHEM, ‘ZEAL?’ — On this date, New Zealand prime minister David Lange rode the Colossus roller coaster at Magic Mountain. Reportedly, he did not, ahem, “ralph,” afterwards.
• • •
Isn’t this something? This is the only time — ever — on our trail rides where we get to wish each other and this wonderful nation of ours a rousing, “Happy 250th Birthday!” See you back here at The Mighty Signal hitching post next weekend with another exciting Time Ranger adventure. Until then? ¡Vayan con Dios, amigos y Feliz cumpleaños, América!
Visit John Boston’s bookstore and eclectic online store with unique gifts for readers and writers at JohnBoston-Books.com. A lifelong SCV resident with 119 major writing awards and nearly 12,000 columns, Boston is the most prolific humorist and satirist in world history.
