When I was growing up there, almost unimaginably long ago, in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, it was almost impossible to both live and work in Altadena.And now that the equivalent of an atom bomb a year ago leveled the darling place, which lives mostly in memory, and in forlorn hope? It’s rather harder.
Because everything is gone.
Nineteen dead in the Eaton fire. Every neighborhood from Pinecrest Drive west to the edge of the Meadows burned to the ground.
I know, I know. The courageous Altadenans of today are fighting the good fight. There is already a restaurant of genius, Betsy – formerly Bernee, a name that just wouldn’t work now – all the entrees charmingly cooked by the hardwood flames, and there is the best bar in California, the Good Neighbor.
Bless you all who are rebuilding and who are not as clinically depressed as I am about what has been lost. Because it is a lot. It was all I once had, and I loved it. And it’s gone.
Tiny town, Altadinky was. Houses to beat the band, you bet, almost none of them cookie-cutter tracts, and some of them at the highest levels of Craftsman and Mid-Century Mod. Schools, sure, and excellent ones. Mountain trails full of bobcat luck. But little commerce. Our dads all had to commute to distant offices. Still, I did manage some gainful employment there, and later, when I moved back to my hometown in the mid-‘80s, even helped start a newspaper there with a wildly easy commute: Roll down Lake Avenue half a mile from my mountain cabin across the gully from the Angeles National Forest, and I was at my desk.
Which happened to be in the very same office as my first newspaper job, unless you count serving as editor of the Eliot Junior High School Husky Hi-Lights another few blocks down Lake.
Was it a job? I think Kenny Rausch, two years older and possessed of a driver’s license and a Chevy Impala with a massive trunk you could fill up with newspapers, mostly paid us in Marlboros every Thursday morning when we’d gather at his house pre-dawn and rubber-band a thousand copies of The Altadenan, the free weekly edited and published by the enormously cranky, skinny, crewcut Harry Smith, who literally created the paper in hot lead type there at 2396 Lake Avenue in the Webster’s block – which somehow survived the fire – where we decades later began Altadena: The Weekly, sister paper to the still extant Pasadena Weekly.
Kenny would drive and we would toss them onto every driveway in East Altadena until the sun came up and it was time for school.
I couldn’t believe my luck when they asked me in 1984 to become business manager, later assistant editor, of the Weekly, in sweet little Altadena. I moved back across the country from Manhattan to take that job. I bought that house at 1049 Alpine Villa Drive — now burnt down; I always knew it would burn someday; it had a shake roof — on the strength of that job.
So many of those big little things couldn’t happen today. Nobody in their right mind would start a newspaper, much less a newspaper in Altadena. No bank would give a mortgage to a 27-year-old who worked for one. I wanted to be there not only to be close to the office but also because if you followed that gully in my backyard a few hundred yards downstream, you’d be on my beloved childhood street, Sunny Oaks Circle, where my parents moved into a dingbat stucco at 1216 in 1953, had me and my sister in ‘55 and ‘56, and in ‘60 built their dream house down the block at 1294 in an oak grove, my mother insisting that not one be chopped, so Altadena architect Harold Bissner designed it around a central courtyard that saved the tree.
It burned down to the ground that awful night of the howling winter Santa Anas, after that December with no rain: Jan. 7, 2025. That west side of Sunny Oaks backing on to the Rubio Canyon flood channel had been like an architectural nursery for guys just out of ‘SC — Ziegler, Tipton, Munson and the very first house built by the minimalist zealot Cal Straub, a jewel box of a post-and-beam, giant panes of glass bringing the mountain light in from the old olive grove.
They’re all gone now. I went back there once, on Jan. 9, out of journalistic duty, my press pass serving as entree past the National Guard. I’m not sure when I will go back again. Good on my new friend Hans Allhoff, who had only recently moved to Sunny Oaks before losing his home, and his Altadena Heritage gang, for working toward a new future for the town. Good on the Altadena Town Council, so many of the members of which lost their own homes, for fighting for their neighbors’ rights to rebuild, fighting for a full cleanup, fighting Edison, lobbying the county to speed the permitting process. Good on Supe Kathryn Berger, who has 2 million constituents, and who has spent the last year mostly on the travails of a mere 40,000 of them.
Me, I’m still in the wilderness about it all. The formerly semi-secret place where I had a placidly pleasant free-range childhood, and then young adulthood, had been in the last decade discovered as a relative real-estate bargain by thousands of L.A. creatives, and who doesn’t like to see their memories validated? And it was still the happy home to so many of my friends and loved ones. And then it all went up in smoke.
The Eaton fire, and the criminally inept response to it by authorities who failed to communicate to elderly and disabled residents the deadly holocaust that was soon to overwhelm them, is a nightmare from which I will not soon awake.
Larry Wilson, for 12 years the editor of the Pasadena Star-News, is on the Southern California News Group editorial board.