We all grow up somewhere, and that place shapes us.
I grew up in Altadena, a magical place, and now it is gone.
The first two homes I lived in — a little dingbat stucco on Sunny Oaks Circle across the street from the Angeles National Forest, my parents’ first house, and then the one they built down the block, designed by second-generation Altadena architect Harold Bissner, a midcentury modern, back when a rocket scientist and a librarian could afford to build such a home, in a gorgeous oak grove — are gone. So is the midcentury mod up the way, the best tiny jewel box ever built, by architect Cal Straub for himself just out of ‘SC, bought by the parents of my oldest friends in the ‘50s. Gone.
Around the corner on Loma Alta, the home of my best friend from then and now, built by hand by his late father and lived in still by his brother and his family, is ashes.
The first house I bought as a bachelor just out of graduate school, thanks to my first full-time journalism job — business manager of a start-up Altadena newspaper — across a gully from the forest at the top of Lake Avenue, a little cabin in the woods — it’s gone. Very few people get to live, and work, both in Altadena.
My elegantly simple elementary school, Arthur Amos Noyes, named after the Caltech chemist, designed by Altadena architect Boyd Georgi, who lived in his own midcentury on the bluff above Noyes, whose kids went to school with us, spilling down the hill on many levels toward Eaton Canyon, where this awful blaze began, is gone.
So is my junior high school, Charles Eliot, named after the Harvard scholar who literally invented the concept of junior highs. It’s so far down Lake Avenue from the mountains — more than a mile — that I have a hard time believing it’s gone. Though it is.
The charming Sinaloa Avenue house my ninth-grade girlfriend, still a dear friend, grew up in and has lived in these 70 years, gone.
Altadena, suddenly famous in fire, is that kind of place. When you grow up there, in its faraway bucolic quiet still minutes from the metropolis, you either stay, or you come back there. It’s an unincorporated town, without the bureaucracy of a city. The access to the mountains made our young lives wild ones. We used to sneak up Eaton Canyon to surreptitiously camp overnight there at startlingly young ages. I suppose our parents thought we were all spending the night at someone else’s house. The beloved waterfall just a half-hour walk from town so many people get to know wasn’t the half of it. Well above that, the same stream makes a water slide at Idlehour Campground that was a delight to swoosh down. The canyon is in the steep face of Mt. Wilson. John Muir himself, a frequent visitor to Pasadena, wrote in one of his books — I found it in the Eliot library –—about hiking the face of Wilson to the summit. Steepest walk he ever made, he said. The front range of the San Gabriels rise more quickly than any mountains in the world. Having trod some of that territory, I can’t imagine how he did it.
In deep shock this week from the loss of so much of my hometown, I can’t imagine a lot of things. How it will ever recover. Thousands of people, dozens of them my friends, are suddenly homeless. Our son-in-law’s childhood home off Chaney Trail, gone. Why did this happen in the midst of winter, when it should have rained to dampen and even stop the fire? But it hasn’t rained. Why did the Santa Anas have to whip up in January of all months?
The Altadena I grew up in was like a secret. The last couple of years, that changed. All of Silver Lake – actors, musicians, other creatives – discovered it and bought their own sylvan half-acre, put their kids in school here, created the demand for wonderfully hip places like Good Neighbor Bar and West Altadena Wine after April and Randy moved to town themselves. Worldly restaurants of renown like the new Bernee — “We cook simple food, using only a wood fire” –— would have been, well, unimaginable in my youth. We only had The Fox’s, opened the year of my birth. Tuna melts were genius. Now just the iconic sign, picture of an impish fox, is there.
“If the universe is with us, it is our intention to rebuild,” owner Monique King told SFGate. “We absolutely intend to. I mean, the sign is still standing tall.”
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.