Back Then
Eagle Rock 1905 In the wee hours at the age of five, I would lay in my bed and listen to the distant shrill sound of steel scraping against steel coming from the railroad yard on San Fernando Road. The house we lived in was three miles from the yard but with the Los Angles population at less than a third of today, there was little to dampen the eerie music. The railroad was the southern boundary of what I was aware of at the time as the physical world. Our house was on a hill and from the second story I could see the hills that formed the other three sides of the shallow valley where sat our suburb of Eagle Rock. It wasn’t until years later that I realized how comforting it had been as a child to have my known world so nicely framed. The first time I drove through the San Fernando Valley I remember thinking what a nightmare it would have been to grow up in such an infinite flat and featureless wasteland. My grand kids now live in a house on a hill that looks out ac