Before the fire: remembering my home in Altadena, California

I moved away from California about 35 years ago, but I still think about the years I spent there. When I used to look up my old neighborhood in Altadena, CA on Google Maps, it was always green. Last week, when I looked it up on the Eaton Fire map, it was all yellow. When I looked it up tonight on a different map, it was mostly red.

The map tells me that the fire came within five blocks of my office in Pasadena. And that my apartment complex across the street from the Altadena fire station, 2521 El Molino Ave, was completely destroyed. But not everything was devastated. Amazingly, part of my old neighborhood, including the public library, was skipped by the fire. No houses were damaged at all in the block north of my apartment.

Altadena, north of Pasadena, was settled by Civil War veterans. It was the farthest northern community in greater Los Angeles, the place where the megalopolis ended. It felt to me like a small town. I could walk to the hardware store, the grocery store, the library, the post office, the bank, and the Theosophical Society. If I were energetic enough, I could have walked up Lake Avenue from my apartment into the Angeles National Forest, but I never did that.

A magical bus stop stood a block from my apartment, the end of four lines. From that corner, I could take the bus either to Hollywood, downtown LA, or the Pacific Ocean. One day a young friend of mine, who slept on our couch while trying to find his way, carried his $1,200 bass guitar on the bus to Hollywood and traded it for an electric guitar. The next day he carried the electric guitar to Hollywood again and traded it for a smaller guitar. Over the next few days he repeated the process until he was the owner of a $25 speaker.

My Altadena bank and post office was also lost in the fire. The brass post office boxes at the Rockton post office always remind me of the post office box I had in Altadena. Sorting through the junk mail from my mail order business and dropping it into the trash, I sometimes recognized the addressees on other discarded letters. I had seen some of them on jazz album covers.

A century ago, Millionaire's Row ran along the western edge of my block. But middle-class African-Americans later created a community for themselves nearby. Freeway development had displaced them and white flight had followed, especially after 1960.

In 1922, the Balian family bought a home in Altadena, having made their money by making ice cream, and turned it into the "house of the 10,000 lights" each Christmas. Their fellow Armenians dominated the Pasadena neighborhood to the south where I worked. There, I enjoyed cheap and plentiful pita bread and bulghur in coffee-scented corner stores.

I'm told that several celebrities in the Altadena area lost homes in the Eaton fire, including Cameron Mathison, Mandy Moore, Richard Cabral, and Candis Cayne. Despite California's reputation, I didn't meet any celebrities in Altadena. As a child growing up in the San Fernando Valley, I met a few. The youngest member of the Partridge Family went to my elementary school and the White Knight from the Ajax Laundry Detergent commercials pastured his white horse a few streets over from mine. Oh, and I once stood across a bonfire from Sally Field. But we didn't talk. But I'll never forget what Walter Matthau said to me when he came to pick up his son from school. It's something he said to me more than once. A good word. It's something I've repeated many times to others. He said, "Hi." But he's gone now too.