Lofthill Drive 1958 1959
When I was eight years old and as the city of Los Angeles expanded outward, my family left the city for the suburbs, settling in La Mirada, California. My dad would drive the old Santa Ana Freeway through traffic to downtown drop off my mother and then off to UCLA where he worked, and then back again at the end of the day.
Prior to moving, they looked at many of the new homes in the area ranging in price from $10 to $18,000, settling on the Cape Cod model half way up a hill at the price of $15,000. Having just moved from and apartment into this brand new home, I thought it was so large yet by today’s standards it was not.
My elementary school (Eastwood) was under construction just up the hill and as young men we would walk up the hill to the school site and slide down the un-landscaped hill on sheets of cardboard or plywood. The year was 1958 and we said that we were inventing a new sport we called skurfing. Many years later as my children grew, I learned of a new winter sport called snow boarding, which encompassed the same ideas and techniques as skurfing.
My first visit to the principal’s office occurred at Eastwood when I instilled fear in the hearts of my fellow students by spreading rumors of the dreaded Mr. Takamoto being a left over Japanese spy from war time days. In actuality, Mr. Takamoto was a handicapped gentleman who suffered greatly as an internee during the war. I can recall the signs advertising the new developments, “Vets, $1 moves you in.” Our mailman was another victim of the recent war in that he only had one arm. I was amazed that he was able to sort the mail in his bag with just a stump for an arm. Being so close the end of WW II we were in the midst of a huge baby boom with children in every home on the block. All of us children had a fathers who had served. They shared their stories away from our ears late in the evenings as they passed time drinking beer and playing cards.
Just down the hill was the Orange County line and the city ended with open fields and hills from there to Buena Park 5 miles away. The view was spectacular and every evening we would sit on our porch and watch the fireworks from Disneyland a few more miles down the Santa Ana freeway to the south.
The long block was often filled with the kids on the block having fun. The most fun being, wagon training. We would pull our wagons (everyone had one) to the top of the hill, tie them all together and start a run down the hill much to the horror of our parents. As a car would back out a drive way, we would turn into the hill and tumble from our wagons making horrible yells accompanied by laughter.
Times turned hard and my dad lost his job in 1959 and forced our move from the two story house back to a small apartment in Culver City. It seemed that it was so hard on my family that we snuck away in the middle of the night and just let the bank take our house back. Recently as I attended the memorial service for my nephew Chris. After 50 years, I had the opportunity to go back to the old neighborhood. The house is still there. The hill is just a small rise, our skurfing run is now heavily landscaped and the open fields are all gone. The neighborhood has grown up and a new generation of children now inhabits the hood. I wager however that they don’t have the fun that we had, way back then.
