Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: September 11, 2018 01:15PM
Tahoe Girl Wrote:
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> We actually lived up in Topanga Canyon and drove
> to Woodland Hills for church. This was the 1960s.
When my parents were in the early process of building our house on the nearest hill which is on the same side of Ventura Blvd. as the site of the future church, we lived with my step-aunt and uncle in Topanga Canyon. (My parents built our house themselves.) During that time, we lived on a mountain-top in what I always knew of as "Wit's End" in Topanga Canyon, but I don't know if this is a local name, or was just a name within my family. (If you're driving from Woodland Hills to the community of Topanga Canyon, it was on the "right" side of the street, and you turned off Topanga Canyon Blvd., to the right, just after you crested into Topanga Canyon proper, and then you drove up-mountain on this winding, and virtually hidden, road until you arrived at the top of that mountain, where my relatives lived. Looking back, I think the house we lived in there, for maybe a year or so until our house in Woodland Hills was capable of being lived in, was probably built around the 1920s or so, judging from the architecture.)
> Family names I remember are Nixon, Frame (the
> bishop), Shepherd, etc.
I've never been Mormon, and I don't recognize any of these names as "Woodland Hills" names, but the time frame you indicate would have been after I graduated from Canoga.
When I was growing up (starting when I was in fifth grade at WH Elementary) I wrote free-lance articles for the WOODLAND HILLS REPORTER (it was where I went to for my early writing credits, after I sold my first article, to Archie Comic Books, when I was in fifth grade). Much of what I wrote for the REPORTER was local history because it was relatively easy for me to do, and relatively speaking, many of the people in Woodland Hills at that time had been there since the earliest days after it became Girard. The REPORTER would print any of the local history/local "pioneer" ;) stuff I brought in, and I took maximum advantage of this to learn how to write for publication, and also to build my credits list.
Which is a lot of words to say: I don't recognize any of the Mormon family names, and looking back, I think it is probable that there were virtually no Mormons among the Woodland Hills "pioneers"--I only knew of one local Mormon family, and that only because their daughter was in my class at WH Elementary. (Though I have NO idea where they went to church. They seemed to be nice people, but they very carefully kept to themselves as much as possible.)
One of my very best memories of "early" (post-WWII) Woodland Hills were the Saturday nights, about once a month during good weather, when the entire (everyone was invited) community of Woodland Hills would gather on the vacant lot behind the Flying-A gas station on the northwest corner of Ventura and Topanga Canyon Blvd., a screen would be set up, and we would watch silent movies in what amounted to tailgate parties.
Those evenings were some of the best memories of my growing up--especially since most of what we were seeing on the screen had been filmed in the western San Fernando Valley, and every time the hero [for example] would gallop on his horse to save the damsel in distress, the roads, the mountains, the literal rocks (Stoney Point!), the HOUSES were all part of our daily lives. Since the films were silents, everyone could whoop and holler at the goings-on happening on the screen, I remember all the (often beer-fueled) comments being shouted out, the laughter, the camaraderie, the incredible feeling of COMMUNITY--those Saturday nights were WONDERFUL!
My personal definition of the "pioneers" in Woodland Hills was early 1800s (although I never personally knew anyone who came from the earlier Spanish and Mexican families, before California became a state), through the 1920s when the residents were living in "Girard" (which was intended to be a kind of "real estate scam"), and then through the immediate post-WWII period (up to 1950 or so). ("Girard" was officially renamed "Woodland Hills" in 1941.)
The people who came to the west Valley in the years immediately following WWII were way heavily financed by the GI Bill, or were relatives of GI Bill property buyers. In the early 1950s, those not using GI Bill resources began arriving in greater numbers. I personally, and frequently!, used to think it was absolutely insane that every time our post office designation was boosted to a "higher" rating (I think we went from a D rating when I moved to Woodland Hills, to a AAA rating by the time I graduated from high school), all based on our population growth. It was obvious to me (even when I was in elementary school) that we were going to become overpopulated and LITERALLY "out of land" in the western Valley if the growing population boom kept going on.
Because of Woodland Hills, and all of the richness of what was constantly around me (the hills, the animals in the hills [we had a roadrunner in our immediate area who became virtually a pet when I was growing up, and there were rabbits all over], the native plants [the California poppies and the lupines and the "watermelon grass" in the spring], the local geology (I created a small "crystal mine" out of a hillside, on the dirt road I walked when I went to elementary school), the safety of the entire area, the ability to roam the hills for hours at a time, or take a walk anytime I wanted to around the clock (my sister and I could get up in the middle of the night and go out walking--my sister used to walk down to the movie sets near the future Deseret Drive LDS church site, and back, all the time), and it was perfectly okay with my parents), the residents around me who frequently had rich and complex backgrounds as their personal histories, and being able to sit on a hillside and think long thoughts as I watched the far-off traffic on the road to Ventura (the town of Ventura), while the sun gradually slipped down behind the hills of Agoura.
I am very grateful. I don't think I would have ever become the person I actually did become had I not been raised with the incredible (and often, by today's standards, literally unbelievable) advantages I had as an ordinary kid growing up in Woodland Hills--an extremely real world which, by today's standards, seems something like fiction.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 09/11/2018 01:22PM by Tevai.