Llew Keller, Original Descanso Tract Resident

My parents and I moved into our new house at 6824 Apperson Street on February 15, 1954, my second birthday. It was the house I grew up in, and I lived there until I went to college in the fall of 1969. I lived there only briefly after that, usually for a few weeks during summer vacations. I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1973. Lew Keller was my father – an artist (painter) and illustrator who made his living as an animated cartoonist. http://cartoonmodern.blogsome.com/2006/09/11/lew-keller-1912-1996/
and
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0445701/

There was not a lot of job security in that business, so over the years he worked for many animation studios, including UPA, Disney, and Jay Ward (Bullwinkle). He often did freelance work at home on the weekends for extra income. Gail – my mother – met my father in the early 1940s at Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), and was a housewife, as were most of the women in the neighborhood at that time. They lived in the house for 37 years, until my mother’s death in 1991.
My parents found out about the Victor Sease designed house from their friends Tony and Mary Rivera, who had moved into 6716 a year or two previously. Tony was also in the animation business,
http://animationguildblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/remembering-tony-rivera.html
and
http://filboidsudge.blogspot.com/2005/03/march-1-1944.html His wife Mary was a concert pianist who also taught music at Immaculate Heart College (in the 1960s) and taught piano to many children in the Sunland-Tujunga area, including myself.

It was a good place to be a young kid, with a lot of open space for me and my friends to play. West of our house, the land was open to Glory Avenue, and south below our house, it was open space down to Day Street. The Day St. lot below 6822 was not built on until 1963 or so, and two houses below 6824 were moved in already built - by trailer (freeway construction clearance) in 1967. There was also a big open lot across the street from 6818 and 6812 – just below 6807, as well as a lot of empty acreage just north of 6807 and 6801 up to the bottom of the hill, until it was developed in the mid 60s. And of course, when I was older, there was the Angeles National Forest in Haines Canyon to hike in. A few of my friends lived in other neighborhoods, but came to my house often because there was so much space to play. Westerns were very big on TV in the late 50s and early 60s, so we built “forts” in the greasewood and scrub in the big empty lots, and named the trails, which we “mapped.”

I had two friends my age that lived in the Descanso tract - Bill Nakasone at 6801, and Bruce Friedman at 10223 Haines Canyon, at the corner of Day Street. Bruce’s parents (Dan and Virginia) must have been the second owners (after Victor Sease himself), because I’m quite sure the Friedmans lived there starting in the mid 1950s. Bruce had three younger siblings. I remember that Dan built a long north-south addition onto the house parallel to the street, which is primarily what was visible from the street, since the main house, like all of the others on Haines Canyon, ran perpendicular to the street. When Virginia died about 1967, Dan moved the family to the Bay Area. The house was put on the market, but did not sell, and sat vacant for probably over a year. One hot summer night, the house caught fire and burned to the ground. We were told that the house had spontaneously combusted due to the extreme heat that had been allowed to build up inside.

Another friend was Vince Zauskey, who lived at 6801 before the Nakasones. His father Fred was a tough man who usually dressed in a khaki uniform or jump-suit, and drove a Jeep (they were just army-type vehicles in those days). Fred felt claustrophobic on “crowded” Apperson St, which seems laughable to me as I write this from my semi-detached house in San Francisco, but I guess its all relative. So Fred sold 6801 to the Nakasones, and moved his family into an austere little cinderblock house he built on the hill above the neighborhood at the north end of Haines Canyon Avenue – accessible only by a narrow – barely paved fire road. By the mid 60s, Fred could no longer cope with the population explosion in LA, and moved his wife, Vince, and his little sister to Grants Pass, Oregon.

The Nakasones – at 6801 after 1956 or so - had 3 sons; Steven, Robert Jr. (Bob), and my friend Bill. They built a pool in their backyard and had a big Japanese garden. Bob Sr. was a very intense and motivated engineer who opened his own company (I think it was called Solid State Instruments) in the mid 1960s. They struggled financially for a couple of years, but the company became successful, and I heard that some of their instruments were used on the Apollo spacecrafts on the missions to the moon. Bob Jr. http://www.lausd.k12.ca.us/Verdugo_HS/j4fun/stars/nakasone.html was about 3 years older than Bill and me, was one of the town’s popular kids, and was the quarterback at Verdugo Hills High in the mid 60s when “The Dons” were a winning football team. He later became a successful businessman, and was CEO at Toys-R-Us for awhile. Steven became a lawyer. http://www.mcguirewoods.com/lawyers/index/Steven_M_Nakasone.asp
I regret to say, I lost track of Bill after I moved to the Bay Area, but I heard from my mother that he had become a social worker.

Above our house at 6830 lived Yoshiro and Kay Befu and their two boys Jonathan and David. http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft9n39p2w0/?layout=metadata&brand=oac
“Bef” was a prominent landscape architect, and an all around nice guy; more fun than many of the other fathers in the neighborhood, who tended to maintain a stern demeanor toward their kids. Jon and David were 2 and 4 years younger than me respectively. We played together a lot in the early years. Given their father’s occupation, it’s not surprising that their yard was beautifully landscaped, and I remember their house had – by far – the best boulder pile of any Sease house. It was huge, and over the years, it was many things, including airplanes and spaceships.

Tujunga was still famous for its dry healthy mountain air, and people with respiratory problems moved there for their health. Like most neighborhoods in town, a number of people with chronic health problems lived nearby. As I remember, Erwin Brown in 6818 was one of these, and was a virtual invalid until he passed away in the early 1960s. His wife Marian was the proprietor of Hummingbird Heaven, and made hummingbird feeders sold primarily through mail-order. Needless to say, most everyone in the neighborhood had those feeders, and Apperson Street had more than its share of hummingbirds. A year or two after Erwin’s death, Marian married Ed Miller, who was the opposite of Erwin – a big strapping friendly guy who I remember as always cheerful and fun to talk to.

As I remember, Jim Irving (6822) suffered from asthma, and was sometimes not well. Their kids (a son and a daughter, I think) were older than me. I vaguely remember the Shibuyas at 6729. My memory is that they had an older daughter or two, but I could be wrong. I do remember Pat was a nice lady, who would occasionally give us rides in her big 1956 Oldsmobile. I was very impressed by cars as a kid, and that Oldsmobile stood out in a neighborhood where most people drove economy cars (Chevys and Fords), sports cars, or Volkswagen Beetles. I don’t remember the Coburns - Andy must have been about six years older than me. He noted in his oral history that he was in fifth grade at Pinewood Elementary in 1956. I started Kindergarten at Pinewood in 1957. After the Coburns left, their house at 6728 was owned by a quiet bachelor we knew only as Mr. Gibbard. My mother always spoke fondly of Andy’s mother Bonnie, who remained friends with the Riveras.

The Riveras had a large pool and back patio. As I said, Tony and Mary were close friends of my parents, and their house at 6716 was a social center for some of us in the neighborhood – especially on hot summer days and warm summer nights when the parents and kids would have barbeques and parties around the pool. Since there were so many kids in and out of the house taking piano lessons, the Riveras had become friends with some of the mothers and fathers of her students. Their son Juan was a pre-baby-boomer, born during World War 2, and was an electronics genius and ham radio operator. There was a huge antenna tower on the Rivera’s property for a number of years. Juan once helped me build a crystal set radio for a school science project. Actually, he did practically all of the work, and I mostly just watched. By the mid 1960s, he was grown, and had moved to the Bay Area where he became a student activist and later worked in the technical end of the broadcasting business, as well as being a helicopter pilot. http://www.bowkera.com/larry_landes.htm
and http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/lfs/people/bios/rivera-bio.html
Around the time Mary’s nest emptied, she began teaching music at Immaculate Heart College, so she was not home in the daytime, but I was always welcome to bring my friends over to swim and hang out, as long as I swept the patio and skimmed the pool.

Judge Leila Bulgrin lived at 10279 Haines Canyon, at the corner of Apperson St. She had been a prosecuting attorney, and notably appeared on the “What’s My Line” TV show – presumably because a female prosecutor was an oddity in those days. By the 1960s, she was a municipal court judge. She was a real upwardly mobile career woman, which was unusual in our neighborhood, just as it was unusual everywhere in the 50s and 60s. I was always impressed at how different she looked from the neighborhood women I was used to – very attractive, but also very professional looking. Her mother Gladys frequently baby-sat for kids in the neighborhood – me included.

Los Angeles has always been referred to as a car culture – and our neighborhood was no exception. Let’s face it – Tujunga was kind of a backward suburb, not much went on there. In those days before the 210 Freeway, it took twenty minutes to half an hour to get anywhere of any significance - all on surface streets. Forget public transit; there was one bus that only ran up and down Foothill Blvd at irregular intervals. My mother was a bit of a shopping snob, and usually drove to the “better” stores in Montrose, downtown Glendale, or Pasadena. Most fathers worked miles away – many dads in Tujunga had Cold War era aerospace jobs at Lockheed in Burbank – where Burbank Airport sits today. My father had to commute to Hollywood or Burbank, depending on what animation studio he was working for at the time; and many dads even commuted to downtown LA for government jobs. So practically every family had two cars, and British sports cars were very popular for the fathers. Both Tony Rivera and my father had MGs similar to the one Andy Coburn’s father had. Tony later owned Triumphs, while my father’s later preference was for Austin-Healys. Anybody who’s ever owned one of these cars knows how temperamental and unreliable they were. Sy Nevius at 6807 was another sports car nut, but unlike the other men in the neighborhood, he was handy, and knew how to fix them. So it wasn’t unusual for my father to spend Saturday mornings at Sy’s house getting the latest mechanical problem diagnosed and repaired. There would often be a dismantled engine spread out in pieces on tarps in Sy’s carport. While my father was at Sy’s, I’d hang out with my friend Bill Nakasone next door. Actually, the best car in the neighborhood was Mr. Nakasone’s – a red Porsche Super 90. Like I said – I was impressed by cars.

I remember our block of Apperson Street before it was paved. The pavement ended at Glory, which was also unpaved. Our block wasn’t even much of a dirt road, since it was full of sink-holes and rocks that were practically boulders. When I was 4 or 5, the muffler on my mother’s 1950 Studebaker was ripped off by one of those rocks as we were driving up Apperson toward Haines Canyon Avenue. The car was so loud after the muffler came off that I got scared – I thought it was about to explode - and jumped out of the car and ran home. My mother was not happy with me. I believe the city paved the street about 1958 or 59, and I remember that everyone was thrilled about it. The two blocks of Glory Avenue from Day Street north remained unpaved for a few more years.

There’s one other person of note, who actually didn’t live in a Sease house. Gino Garibaldi had been a professional wrestler in the 1930s and 40s. He lived on the southwest corner of Apperson and Glory – next to the Befus, and was the neighborhood’s minor celebrity. I believe he had moved to Tujunga because his wife suffered from emphysema. Gino was semi-retired by the mid 1950s, but he’d supplement his retirement by appearing on “Wrestling from the Olympic” (Auditorium) on Channel 5, from time to time. The big wrestling star in those days was Gorgeous George, and that local show was the forerunner to all of the WWF “Smackdown” shows that are popular to this day. http://www.wrestlingclassics.com/garibaldi/bio.html . I don’t remember Gino’s wrestler son Leo, who must have been grown and gone by the time I was born. Not surprisingly, Gino was immensely strong, and built an impressive four foot high rock wall along the entire southern border of his yard – probably around 40 feet in length. When we got our dog Victor in 1960, Gino generously gave us the old wooden doghouse he had built for his dog, which had died. It was a sturdy peaked roof structure made of 2” by 4”s and 3⁄4 inch plywood – kind of like Snoopy’s doghouse. I remember that he picked it up like it was made of paper, and handed it over the rock-wall to my father, who almost crumbled under the weight, but somehow managed to hold onto the doghouse, and his dignity.

The small bungalows on the west side of Glory between Apperson and Day St were rented in those days to Spanish speaking families, and one of my friends in the early years – Mario – lived on the corner. It was hard to forge friendships with the kids on Glory, because their families never stayed for long.

Most of the other names on the list of original owners are familiar to me – I know that my parents talked with and about these people, but I don’t think any of them had children my age to interact with, so most my memories of these other people are hazy. My mother had a good friend in the 60s named Rosalie Roth, I think - at 10231 Haines Canyon. Rosalie had a daughter a few years younger than me. They were apparently not original owners. My parents socialized a little with the Larrabees (10275 Haines) in the early years. My memory is that Temple and Verna separated, and Verna stayed in the house with the kids as a single mother, but I could be wrong about that.

I don’t recall that the Sease houses were considered “architecturally significant” in any official way in those days. We lived in one of many post-war housing tracts built all over Sunland Tujunga in the 1950s and 60s, and many of them were larger tracts of sometimes a hundred homes or more, usually very conventional type ranch style homes on smaller 1⁄4 acre lots. A lot of these developments had names; I remember Seven Hills Ranch and Crystal View Terrace, which was the 60s development that surrounded the Sease homes on the Manzanita slope. But I can tell you that many homeowners in our neighborhood – my parents included – felt that their houses were special. As families grew in size, and people added rooms, some like my parents tried to stay faithful to Victor Sease’s original designs. When we turned the storage room and original carport into a large new living room, I remember that our contractor – a man named John Gosline – couldn’t understand why we didn’t want to just frame in the walls, install conventional drywall and carpet, and throw in a few small aluminum windows. I’m sure he said “Well, it’s your money…” more than once.

A Couple of Memories about People in the Manzanita Slope Tract
My parents knew the Battaglias who lived in the Victor Sease house on the hill south of Foothill Blvd at 9530 Haines Canyon Avenue. Aurie Battaglia also worked in the animation business; http://imdb.com/name/nm0061284/. In the late 50s, they sold their house to Gerard Baldwin, an animator who later worked with my father at Jay Ward Productions. http://www.americanroyalarts.com/catalog_search.php?p=1&cat=1&id_sub=0&id_nivel_padre=19&id_nivel3=222
Gerard and Pat threw frequent dinner parties that kids weren’t invited to, but I remember being at their party for the television premiere of the Flintstones in 1960. Gerard was the animator on that show. The Baldwins had a color TV, and I was in awe.
May Higa was the sister of Frances Nakasone (6801 Apperson). The Higas lived at 9541 Haines Canyon. Walter and May had one girl and two boys – Lani, Noel, and Craig. I probably shouldn’t repeat this story, but what the hell – I visited the Higas with Bill Nakasone in 1968, and saw my first marijuana joint. It was being rolled by Lani’s “hippie” boyfriend. I doubt Walter and May would have approved, but my memory is that this happened in a room the Higas had build below the main part of the house, so it was private. The boyfriend did not offer us any.
Valmont?

Nobody has mentioned the three Victor Sease homes built on Valmont St. (I think that was the street). They were identical to 6824 and 6830 Apperson, and were built in a row on a deep lot. The two in back were accessible down a long driveway. The house in front was owned by Bill Scott, also in the animation business. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Scott
Bill was the co-producer of the Jay Ward shows, and a script writer and voice actor who did the voices of Bullwinkle, Dudley Do-right, and Mr. Peabody, among others. Bill did well in the business financially – voice acting paid rerun residuals – and was able to build two enormous additions on either side of his house. He also ran a local theatre company out of Tujunga’s Episcopal church off Apperson St (on Mountview, maybe?) It was around the corner from Our Lady of Lourdes). Many of his friends, including my father, were coerced into playing parts in Bill Scott directed plays.

Briefly About Me:
Aside from a month or two back on Apperson Street during the summer of 1970, I was basically out of Tujunga for good, except for occasional visits. In 1973, I moved to the Bay Area – technically so I could attend UC Berkeley, but really, I just wanted to live in Marin County, which I had visited and fallen in love with. After 5 years there, I moved to San Francisco. I met my wife Kathy in 1979, and we bought the house in the Bernal Heights district that I had been renting. It turned out to be one of the best investment decisions of my life. We never left, and raised 3 kids there, who are now 24, 20, and 11. The youngest is a dancer, and wants to attend the School of the Arts here when she reaches 9th grade. I went back to college for a Master’s degree in my 40s, and then started my latest career as a Human Resources Administrator at a public transit agency.