Time Travel

Somehow an absolute miracle occured this morning. I was driving Josephine (The 1938 Buick named for Josephine Baker) west to East across Foothill Boulevard. Somehow, at a steady 37 or so MPH I hit every green light and as I rolled along on the cloud of Josephines tires and suspension, time seemed to enter another dimension, I could see things as they were long ago.

Of course, maybe this only worked for me, as my father has described this area in his childhood, and it has changed radically even from my own. In my father's time this part of Fooothill was WAY WAY out of town, as a child it seemed to him to be a long drive as a passenger in his Father's 1933 Dodge. In those days foothill was a two lane road and the area east of what is now Altadena drive was walnut groves, fruit packing houses and chicken and turkey farms. According to Dad, his mother had some relatives, exactly how they were related he no longer remembers, aunt & uncle, second cousin, something like that,an older couple who owned a house, a couple of barns and a large area of land where they grew chickens, turkeys and some produce near the South West corner of Foothill and Rosemead. They sold live birds, butchered birds and eggs, along with some produce. During WW2 they sold and moved to teh San Fernando Valley. Dad visited them there once, he recalls.

When I was a young child there was a famous seafood restaurant near there, then a gas station, now a harbor frieght.
But this morning at that steady thirty seven miles an hour in the light traffic, I could see the past and present together. I could smell the sage on the breeze, I could see clapboard farm houses and board and batt barns as ghosts back of all the newer stuff. I could see golden grasses dry in the early summer and even smell the Chicken farm,chickens and chicken fertilizer...

That was a time when most of the food grown in the San Gabriel Valley was grown near home. I can remember as a child, when about a third of our food was still local. My Grandparents would drive out to Azusa and buy fresh eggs, there was our famous local sage/orange blossom honey, chickens were local, and while not in this valley, hogs were from Fontana in my youth. In Altadena when I was a child we grew our own vegetables, squash and fruit. We traded with friends and neighbors, who did the same, and there was an amazing abundance.

I can remember that there was a area on the South side of Foothill just beyond sears were there were no homes well past Anokia, just a couple of small farms, one abandoned, one still working when I was young. That all got developed about 1970, and now it seems as if it has always been there, but it hasn't.

So, the San Gabriel Valley settled by second sons of the midwest who would not inherit the wheat and corn farms, became a center of fruit ,vegitables, dairy farms, and the production of Chicken and Turkeys. My own house built in 1906, was a part of the Carl Curtis Chicken ranch, and the home across the street was the main house to a ranch belonging to his sister and her husband. The farms gave way to industry, and then aerospace and now commercial sales. A whole population making its living selling Mc Donnal's burgers and Starbucks coffee to each other, but not growing or producing any products. Well, Starbucks is a lot easier work than chickens.

But what of that economy where chicken dung fertilized avacado and citrus groves? Where SGV honey was considered the best in the world? Where the Pasadena Motorcycle Club held the first motorcycle drag races in the world in an orange grove?

I came home after running my errands and picked a lovely valencia, an orange with too thin a skin to ship too far, but a flavor unequaled. I ate the fantastic flavor my Great Grandparents generation planted and that was my grandparents birthright. It was sweet, yet full of acid, rich complex and delightful like the cool early summer Southern California sky. I've got a place in the yard where I don't want to tend grass. I think I'll plant boyesenberries, they too are disappearing.