Joy Ride part one
It slowly dawned on the three of us that we had made every traffic light since we left Brand Blvd. We were driving home from Glendale back in the days when there were people actually living there that weren't Armenian. Michael and Marc were with me, ages 12 and 8 at the time. We were in my 1976 Mazda Mizer that despite being fairly new had a baseball-sized hole in the floorboard where a passenger in the front seat could observe between their feet the pavement passing beneath the car. I had purchased the Mizer having discovered it was the cheapest thing available with four wheels. I had done the same thing five years earlier when I bought a bright green Hornet made by American Motors. In the 1970s auto makers required seven years to bring a new model to market yet both of these makes had been discontinued after only a few years.
We were travelling east away from Glendale on Colorado Blvd. Growing up in Eagle Rock I had spent surprisingly little time in Glendale because my Dad refused to go near it, claiming you took your life in your hands anytime you drove through it. His fears were validated in 2014 when a survey based on insurance data ranked Glendale as having the worst drivers of any city in California and the 5th worst in the USA. Drivers who live in Glendale experience 76% more accidents than residents from other cities.
Any kid who grew up in Eagle Rock was keenly aware that there were only two roads in our town that were designated as a "Blvd." One was Eagle Rock Blvd that ran north and South and intersected with the second, which was Colorado Blvd that ran east and west. Other than Figueroa Street which formed the town's eastern border, the two boulevards were the main drags of Eagle Rock and the only roads in the entire town that had more than two lanes, all others being residential streets.
The three of us drove past the point on Colorado where Bob's Big Boy drive-in restaurant used to be along with an old Orange Julius stand where Carey worked when I was in high school. Carey used to scare the bejesus out of customers while they stood on the sidewalk deciding what to order. He would suddenly thrust his head and upper body clear out of the narrow past-through window and shout, "Welcome to Orange Julius!" He would finish off the "S" on the end of Julius with his patented lisping whistle that produced an ear-splitting shriek.
We were approaching where Verdugo Road crosses Colorado which was an intersection where you often didn't catch a green light. Verdugo was a half block past where Glen Bowl used to be and where I went bowling when I was in Junior high. Before automated pin setters were invented the pins were replaced by a few desperate souls who scrambled around mostly out of view clinging to a narrow catwalk above the pins. Occasionally they'd drop down to pick up pins and you'd see a pair of legs from the knees down. One of the pinsetters came out from behind the far wall one Saturday and walked down a lane to the front desk for a coke. He was the first transient I remember seeing that wasn't in a Frank Capra film. He was a short and gnarled little man covered in grime and walked in a manner that made it obvious he had serious physical problems. I never liked going bowling after that.
We made the light at Verdugo Road and I pounded on the dashboard and shouted. "We're hot! We're hot!" We were all three getting worked up over the incredible consecutive string of green lights we had passed through. The next intersection where it was sometimes tough to get a green light would be the intersection in front of the Eagle Rock Plaza.
The plaza had been built on a plateau that separated Eagle Rock and Glendale. The property was at the base of a hill that sported a radio tower and a house where John Steinbeck had once lived. It opened in 1973 as a shopping mall but paled in comparison to the monstrous Glendale Galleria that came three years later to further exacerbate Glendale's horrendous traffic problems. Where you once sailed through easily on Colorado, putting in the Plaza had added multiple traffic signals to a short stretch of road. To our amazement we make it through the trio of lights in front of the plaza as well as the one at the bottom of the hill at Ellenwood where Colorado drops down into the valley where Eagle Rock sits. The next challenge would be the busiest intersection in Eagle Rock where Colorado crosses Eagle Rock Blvd.
The intersection of Eagle Rock and Colorado Blvds was where the northern end of street car line number five had been from the beginning of the twentieth century until the entire system was torn out in the 1950s. In 1922 the Sierra theater went in a half block south on Eagle Rock, two doors down from where Swork Coffee is located today. The Street was called Central at the time but was renamed Eagle Rock Blvd the following year when the town was incorporated into the City of Los Angeles. John Sugar owned the Sierra along with the Eagle Theater further south on Eagle Rock Blvd that opened seven years later and another on York in Highland Park.
The Sierra had a bright pink façade but was called the "dirty dime" which was the price of admission through the 1940s and the early 1950s. It sat 505 with a single center aisle and was either intimate or cramped depending on your point of view.
When I was in grammar school the place was on its last legs but kids filled the place on Saturday mornings for nine cents per head to see 10 cartoons and usually something silly with Abbott and Costello or Francis the talking mule. For five cents I could get a box of Good & Plenty that because of my dislike of licorice would last me through the entire show. Popcorn came in rectangular cartons that once emptied of the popcorn could be folded flat and sailed like a Frisbee. When the last of ten cartoons ended, the curtains were drawn back at the start of the main feature, and a few hundred flattened cartons would be launched into Lou Costello's twenty-foot high smiling face. This never failed to generate an explosion of screaming delight for everyone. The uproar continued until a bald eighty-year old man with question-mark posture would appear at the back of the room, pull on a chain attached to an annoyingly bright single bare bulb that would remain on until we settled down. When quiet was restored the man would pull on the chain, the light would go out, and everyone would turn back around to face the screen. I never saw the first few minutes of any main feature.
In my last year of grammar school a coming attractions poster outside the Sierra Theater announced an upcoming science fiction thriller entitled KRONOS. Every kid in school was looking forward to seeing it and the movie poster was all anybody talked about that week during recess and lunch. Somehow the PTA got wind of it and managed to prevent the Sierra from showing the film for fear it would permanently damage our little psyches. The film, which I've since refused to ever see on principle, has gained somewhat of a cult status being perhaps the first sci-fi film to call attention to over consumption of the earth's natural and man-made resources.
I was maintaining a consistent speed as slowing down to time the lights would have ruined the whole thing. There were a few semi-radical adjustments to avoid ramming the rear end of cars poised to make right or left turns. Damned if we didn't get through the big intersection at Eagle Rock Blvd. We were all shouting now, "We're hot! We're hot!" Could we possibly make it all the way across Eagle Rock?