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Growing Up In Sylmar

Growing Up in SylmarNeighborhood: SylmarSylmar, CA91342United States of AmericaI grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles named Sylmar. Somewhere along the line someone told me it meant "sea of olives" and came from the days when Sylmar were still the olive groves for the nearby San Fernando Mission.

I sit her and try to think, what is my first memory of Sylmar. I remember the earthquake of '71, I lived at 13101 Glenoaks Blvd, the house just NW of the library. Maybe that's my first real memory, the library. I remember having a library card and being allowed to go there, it seemed like every afternoon. Thee was no concept of time, just a golden light and the books I loved so much. Curious George just jumped into my mind. I'd read and read, then check out books to take home, day after day, back when Sylmar still felt like a small town, at least to a 4 or 5 year old boy. Heck I remember before there was the electrical substation next to the library, back when it was an empty lot!

I remember getting a dollar from my moms purse and going to the liquor store at the corner of Glenoaks and Polk and buying a bag of candy. I remember my mothers stories abut how a dime accomplished the same thing when she was a girl. I don't remember it, but my mom tells a story about the time I took an old $2 bill and went shopping, she was upset and never got the bill back.

I have a memory of riding my tricycle around the corner and down Polk to De Garmo at the end of the block, then around and back up the cull-de-sac behind our house. I remember an older boy, 6th grade I believe, coming over and helping me build a tree house, them my Mom being upset because I had let some strange older kid in our yard to play. My stepfather Bill took the tree house down, apparently the lumber had been for something else.

The Bills, my stepfather, the elderly man that lived behind us, the man next door, my best friend John Johns uncle Bill the next house down and the man across the street, all named Bill. The joke was that you could open the door, shout "Bill" and get 5 answers back.

I have memories of John Johns house, his older sisters, 19 and 16. I remember his mom always being angry with the older sister, she was a hippie and in hindsight, probably high most of the time, it was the summer of '69. Ah, but the younger sister, I thought she was an angel, blond and beautiful, I was totally and completely in love with her. She is why the song Sugar Sugar still has a special place in my heart.

I remember him getting his first bike with handbrakes and the time he let me try it. I ran him over, I didn't know from handbrakes! So funny that that memory would still be so crystal clear. I remember going fishing with his Grandpa, who might have also been named Bill, and his Uncle Bill. Maybe we were headed to Castaic or Piru, but I remember the story I told. I asked how high it was and before they answered I said I couldn't go up past 1000 feet because I got sick. I was...probably in kindergarten then so thought 1000 was an impossibly huge number, practically the edge of space!

I remember coming home from school, I went to Pinecrest in North Hollywood then, and wanting to go to John Johns house, my Mom said I couldn't, something had happened. She sat me down and said his Uncle had died, was cleaning his rifle and it had accidentally gone off. I remember the sadness that lasted in their home. He'd lived in a single wide trailer in their driveway. It wasn't until many years later when I was talking to my Mom that she told me it hadn't been an accident, but you don't tell children that small about suicide.

I remember the Mobil station across from our house, remember them taking the flying red horse down for a more updated version, and the burger joint next door. You could buy gas for twenty-one cents a gallon, or a really big soft serve cone for twenty-five.

I remember the day in November 1967 when my mom brought my brother Steven home from the hospital, I'd been an only child up to this point and was so excited to finally have someone else. I still remember getting our pictures taken with the matching stripped shirts and how much I loved this person I was holding.

Then there's the day mu mother will never forget. She worked for Abbot Labs and dropped Steven and I off at a baby sitter near Van Nuys Blvd and San Fernando Blvd. One day I got bored and decided to walk home. Sure it's only 4.3 miles, not so far in a car, but for a 1st grader. I walked up to SFR and headed toward San Fernando walking along the train tracks, this was the only route I knew. Hang a right on Polk, left on Glenoaks and I was home. I knew how to open the back door, came in grabbed a snack, then heard something. When my mom walked in and saw me hiding behind the chair in the living room, she freaked! She asked how I'd got home and when I said I walked, she pictures Steven, who followed me everywhere, left behind somewhere along the way, too tired to keep going. If I've ever come close to giving my mother a heart attack or stroke, this was the moment. I used to wander off at the babysitters all the time, go to the neighbors, go around the corner to the bar and dance on the stage for tomato juice. The walking home was the final straw for both parties and we got a new babysitter.

Who wouldn't remember February 9th, 1971, the day of the Sylmar Earthquake. I lived in that little house on Glenoaks and had recently started attending El Dorado Elementary. I recall waking up and looking out the window at the cull-de-sac behind us and seeing the street light go out, someone once said children detect the same waves animals do. I laid my head back down and suddenly it felt like someone was shaking our bunk beds really hard. There was a sound, a sound that I've only ever heard again during earthquakes. I tried to climb down the shelves of our toy box at the foot of the bed and stepped right through the shelves. We gathered, or rather tried to gather in the small hallway in the middle of the house. My mother was frantic because Steven was missing (this time it definitely wasn't my fault). She stood there in the dark hallway calling for Bill, but he couldn't get to us for some reason. She told me that when she couldn't find Steven she'd quickly rationalized that two of her children had lived, Stacy having joined out family in Sept 1969. My grandparents were living in their travel trailer in our driveway while they built a cabin up in Running Springs near Big Bear Lake. Apparently the trailer had come off its stands and had hit the house hard enough to jam the front door. Grandpa Terry was a pretty big guy, but it took all his strength to kick open the front door. As it got brighter, there was Steven, asleep next to the heater. The amazing part was that this was back in the days of glass bottles. Broken bottles of everything out of the hall cabinet were strewn around him on the floor. Grandpa Terry soon discovered Bill trapped under a heavy dresser in the bedroom. It had hit him, knocking him down just before the ceiling buckled in top the dresser.

Outside the world was a shambles. The cinder block wall had toppled. The water mains in front of the house had caused the street to explode raining asphalt and dirt onto everything and leaving a crater in the street. I still remember Grandpa Terrys brand new Mustang Cobra and how he let us push out all the broken safety glass. We drove past the school, the walkway roofs had all bent and were half as tall as before. The driveway into McDonalds that had previously been pretty level, well it was now about a 10' high incline. Several lanes of the bowling alley right across the street had disappeared into a sinkhole created by an underground stream changing course after the earthquake. A friend later told me about how his father had worked on filling in that hole with all the debris from everything that was damaged.

Sylmar Square which was previously two floors high suffer so much damage that it was changed to a single level. Many of the old brick building in San Fernando Mall lost walls and you could see into people lives. I also remember seeing the Interstate 5 and Highway 14 bridges collapsed. We had a friend whose son was in the brand new Olive View Medical Center. Eddie told about how when the earthquake started, the beds started rolling around the room, once the beds hit so hard the boy sharing the room was thrown out of his bed and into Eddies. Almost immediately that bed raced across the room and disappeared out through the window. It was later found under the collapsed stairwell and for a while, they thought the boy had perished in the quake. I had an appointment there later that morning.

For years afterward, long after the new hospital was razed, we'd go up there and walk around. Amazingly the old Veterans Hospital, built to treat TB patients, and constructed from brick and stucco had survived pretty well. We'd look through the broken windows at the lab equipment, slides still on the counter tops and wonder if those slides held samples, imagining we started death in the face. The power station for the hospital stood, destroyed but still there for many years.

After the earthquake we moved into a house on Tyler Street below the train tracks, within walking distance of El Dorado Elementary I remember the day we moved in. We'd always had chain link fence, but this house had a wooden fence. I climbed up to look over and met the neighbor, Mrs. Westman, a woman who screamed at me to get off her fence and never seemed to stop being angry after that. For some reason my parents hadn't noticed the Southern Pacific tracks at the end of our street and the first evening we were in the house, a train came by and my mother nearly had a stroke thinking it was another earthquake. She made Bill take down the dividers between the living room and kitchen that rattled incessantly every time a train passed by.

I do not recall the first day of school after the earthquake, but I remember the second, the day I met Danny, a boy 3 or 4 years older than I was. I was grabbed and pulled into some bushed and asked, "Are you a surfer or a low rider?" I didn't have a clue what either was and must have said low rider because he promptly started hitting me. By about the third time I'd figured out I was a surfer, Dannys attitude towards me improved significantly.

Maybe I'd led a sheltered life up to this point having gone to Pinecrest in North Hollywood for kindergarten and first grade, but El Dorado was where I would learn about prejudice. I'd know kids from Pinecrest that were not white, seems to me my best friend John Thomas was probably from India, so kids with different colored skin was nothing new. The hatred that came along with it was a new experience. I remember being called 'white patty' and in pretty short order learning to dislike and eventually hate anyone with brown skin, all because I was mistreated constantly by the kids with the brown skin. By 4th grade I'd started hearing about gangs and one of the local Mexican gangs in perticular. Fernando, Armando and the others, all they could or would talk about was how they wanted to join this gang.

In an ironic twist, many years later I worked with two guys who had an older brother who ranked very highly in this gang. I was introduced to many of he head people over time as they came by the Carls Junior on Laurel Canyon to see them. When their guard is down and they trust you, they turn out to be people that can be pretty nice when they want to, they seemed to respect me for not being judgmental of the lifestyle they chose. Once one of the higher ups asked if I'd be willing to do them a favor. There was a particular member of their gang who they were getting tired of, they asked if I would do them a favor and kill him for them, they'd pay me. I pointed out that if I did do this, they'd never be able to trust me again, who else might I be asked to go after? They agreed.

One night I was working with the two guys and a car came through the drive through, Javier recognized the guy and said he'd take care of him. We made his food, he paid and drove off. "I thought I recognized him" and said what gang he was from way down in LA. "What's he doing up here?" I asked. Turns out her was there to rob us and would have stuck a gun in my face. When Javier walked up, the driver asked if he was so and sos' brother? Yes. How much money did we have? Not enough. So he drove down the street and robbed McDonalds instead!

I asked once if they knew either of the guys from El Dorado, they laughed, yes, they knew them, they were members but were not respected, lowlifes. I was sort of happy that Fernando and Armando got their wish, made me smile. One day after I was married I was walking through Vons on Foothill, I was working at the Kinneys Shoes across the street, when one of these gangsters saw me with my wife and mother. "Hey Shawn, hows it going, long time no see." once he'd walked away they asked, "So how do you know people like that?" They'd never believe me. This was about the time I decided that maybe we should move out of Sylmar.

I remember Olive Vista Junior High. I remember the lunch area, my friends and I would run around looking for empty milk cartons to stomp on and pop. One day I saw one, ran up and...brown sprayed everywhere, especially all over some Mexican kid with white pants. He was just a little upset I'd stomped on his full carton of chocolate milk and after multiple death threats I was released and never ran through the lunch area stomping on milk cartons again. When I think of OV I always picture standing out on the PE field and facing the San Gabriel mountains. We knew they were there, but despite Sylmar being located right at the base of them, many days you couldn't see them because of the smog. The sky was always a shade of whitish gray. This never stopped them from having us run around the field, maybe running in heavy smog cooled the throat like cigarettes did in the old days.

I remember very little about OV, a few girls I was wildly infatuated with, oh yes, and the paint incident. For some reason my mother had purchased me white pants. On this specific day I was working with this blood red paint and as you may have guessed, managed to spill it, all over my crotch so looked like some teenage girl that had just got her period. I was devastated but the ladies in the office were very accommodating in calling my mother and letting me go home immediately.

Same class, different story, another pair of white pants, not mine. There was a person that my friends in art class and I despised, yea, that's the correct term. Well he had art right after us so one day we got the brilliant idea to mix paint up the same color as the chairs. He didn't sit in any of our seats so we had to act fast, painted one of our chairs just before the bell, then quickly swapped chairs as the bell rang and everyone stood up. Never saw it myself, but I heard his mom came to get him too, must have looked like he'd sat in mustard.

When I arrived at OV we did not have a library any more. There was a rumor that my neighbor Danny had broke in and torched the place. When I arrived at Sylmar High, we didn't have a library and the same rumor existed. Years later one of Dannys sisters confirmed that he had indeed burned down both libraries and also started most of the fires in the fields around El Dorado Elementary!

About the only other thing I remember about OV was the King Tut trip. King Tut was coming to Los Angeles and out school was receiving 300 tickets for students to attend. We had to write an essay explaining why we should, out of all the student, be chosen. I had never voluntarily written an essay before but sat down and wrote a well reasoned essay on why I should be granted this rare privilege. Announcement day came, I checked the list of the lucky few, I was in! I was so impressed with myself, look at all these kids that I believed were smarter, I had beat them and was going to see King Tut. Several weeks later my bubble was burst when I learned that out of the entire 8th grade class, only three of us had asked for tickets. I could have wrote my name on a sheet of paper, with my feet, and gone. Still a cool experience and I am glad I went.

One last OV memory them we'll move on. One of the first days of the eighth grade fall semester, I had a creative writing class. As the teacher was still trying to get things organized, she told us to write a short fictional story about anything we wanted. I set off describing a horrific accident at the corner of Polk Street and Glenoaks. I wanted to portray a very graphic moment with empathy, allowing the reader to experience the pain of the moment. "Suddenly there was a spine twisting sound." was the line I used, sounds painful, someones getting paralyzed. My paper came back, line through the word twisting with a note, "should say tingling." I was pissed, it was my damned story and she was wrong. If I couldn't write my story my way, I wouldn't write at all!

This moment quashed a desire to write for the next...twenty years at least! It wasn't until I was in my early thirties that I discovered I really enjoyed writing, it was therapeutic for me. A note to all you English and Creative Writing teachers out there, be careful of criticism, you may not realized the long term damage you can do to a young, aspiring writer.

One of the reasons I don't remember a lot about OV was because of my accident. I don't remember why, but one day that was normally a school day we were off school. My mother dropped us off at a friends house, Gloria, she lived on Oro Grande down near Telfair where it starts to climb the hills near I-5. I'd brought my skateboard and was riding it down the sidewalk, going a little further up the hill each time. One time I was coming down, got to their driveway and Glorias daughter jumped out in front of me. I swerved left, stuck the skateboard in the grass and went head first into the elm tree, knocked out cold. I don't recall how long I was out, but I felt terrible. The next day I still felt bad so my mom let me stay at another friends house. Peg had been a nurse but was now a homemaker. I was laying on their couch, apparently closed my eyes and went into a seizure. Peg knew what to do and not to do. I went to the ER, then to the hospital for two weeks where they put me on phenobarbital. Walking dead probably describes me pretty good. I'd go to school, fall asleep in class, wake up, go to the next class, repeat. After a few weeks the teachers wanted to know what was up, the school told them. How was I ever going to get any more education if I couldn't stay awake?

I remember going to UCLA Medical Center and riding the elevator down to nuclear medicine in the basement. We walked in this room and there was the biggest machine I had ever seen, It was either a PET scan or a CAT scan, don't recall. What I do remember id the operator said that they and Johns Hopkins were the only places that had one. "What does it cost for this test I was having?" "We don't charge because it would be really expensive and nobody could afford it."

The guy walks back in with a stainless steel cup and asks me to drink what's in it. "But please, don't spill any of it on the floor, it's radioactive." This got my attention. Too dangerous to spill on the floor, but I'm going to drink it, okay. I drank, they tested, I went home and opened the encyclopedias in the living room and read everything in there on radiation, nuclear power, nuclear weapons. Fascinating stuff for a kid who was 11 or 12.

I believe Dilantin was still in clinical trials at the time at UCLA, I got in the trial and boy what a difference, I was awake, functional, and had to go to UCLA every single Wednesday so they could take blood and find out if I was having kidney failure, After several weeks I began to protest, I stayed in the trial and went to our family doctor for blood. Geez, I was already getting poked and prodded enough as it was. Oh the joys of having electroencephalography (EEG) done, it felt like every other week! Back them they still stuck the pins in your scalp, it was like being a human pin cushion!

August 16th, 1977 became a turning point in my life. My parents were Jehovah Witnesses so we had no Christmas, birthdays, nothing, but on this day my day asked if I could come to my Aunt Kathys house for a birthday party, and my mom said yes. I arrived and my dad was there, I was shocked, I'd only seen him maybe a half dozen times that I could recall. He was more of a legend like Sasquatch, than a reality in my life. He said that because I was 14, the law said I could decided if I wanted to live with him in Manhattan Beach, or with my mom. I'd been to my dads earlier that years and loved it, no decision. I was elated, then someone called the house, the news came on, Elvis was dead. I resented Elvis for a lot of years after that, maybe until...2002 when my family went to Graceland on out way back from Pittsburgh. Every year my birthday came and all people did was whine about Elvis. By the way, living with dad lasted something like 6 months. What do you expect when you take a kid from no, no, no and drop him into, "The only two rules are #1 you're never allowed to come home and say your girlfriends pregnant and #2 drinking is fine and you will only be in trouble if you let someone drunk drive you home." I was like a sailboat without a rudder and soon returned to Sylmar.

It must have been either the last half of 9th grade at OV or in 10th grade at Sylmar High School that I really started developing allergies, allergies to olive pollen to be specific. It must have been from breathing all the clean ocean air. Sylmar is supposed to mean, Sea of Olives, so you can probably tell how well it went. I think it was 11th grade, I showed up the first day, sneezing, dripping, wheezing, met my teachers, then got a note from my doctor saying I would not be back until the trees stopped pollinating. It might be my imagination but I believe I missed the entire first 6 weeks! This was back when Luke and Laura were getting married on General Hospital, so mom and I sat and watched the saga unfold.

I'm sure SHS is worse now, what ever gets better when it comes to school violence? I remember that the first day of the semester we'd have an assembly in the gym, the principal and his entourage would introduce themselves, then came school security. I clearly recall the officer introducing himself then telling us that if any of us pulled a weapon in him (remove automatic from holster) he would shoot us. Almost 32 years later and I still recall the assembly from my first day of 10th grade.

There were clicks, the smart kids, the jocks, the stoners, I played basketball, every day at nutrition (morning break) and lunch. I learned of a remarkable correlation between getting all sweaty playing basketball at lunch and having hideous school pictures, I never had a comb. Another year we switched to racquetball and again, another bad picture. Every day through junior high and sometime in 11th grade I hung out with chuck either playing basketball or racquetball. Then it happened.

One day I looked at the guy, Chuck, who had been my best friend for at least 4 of the last 7 years and it clicked. Chuck was never going to leave Sylmar. Chuck would never want to leave Sylmar. I had wanted to leave Sylmar since the the day after my dad shipped me back to my moms house. I was almost physically ill looking at Chuck and in that instant, I could no longer be friends with him. I never told him what happened and if he ever thinks about me, I'm sure he still wonders what happened. I'd seen some other friends in Dr. Bleus' class playing some game with dice and sheets of paper. I started playing D&D the next day and stuck with it until our last day of high school. This was also about the time I was reintroduced to John, we were related by marriage, two different ways through my step father I believe. After a while we hung out so much we just introduced each other as cousins. If I wasn't home, I was at Johns. I may have actually spent more time at Johns during 11th and 12th grade than I spent at home. By the way, last I heard, Chuck was still living at home with his parents, no wife, no kids, no life.

Now I don't recall if it was John or I that found it, but one of us discovered a copy of The Anarchists Cookbook at the public library. Obviously someone didn't have a clue what it was. If you don't know, look it up. I was never one to take pills so drug recipes were of no interest, especially taking Dilantin.

John and I would mix up this or that and BOOM, wow this was fun. Neither of us had taken chemistry so neither of us knew what a nonreactive pot was the day we were distilling things out of read flares and ammonia I believe. What I recall was pouring out our concoction and John saying something like, "Oh crap, this stuff at holes in my moms brand new aluminum pot." We were probably using sulfuric acid or something on the stove that day. We'd mix up this or that, learned to make acceptable fuse and go out making holes in concrete.

SHS has, or had a Senior Rock in the quad in the middle of the school. Rumor had it that this was not the original rock, it had been destroyed. Any time Sylmar played another school, the other school tried to sneak in and paint the rock their colors. A friend, Joel, told us that his older brothers had snuck in and blown the original rock up with dynamite several years earlier, their dad did have a heavy construction company so getting dynamite was conceivable.

Figuring that dynamite had already been done, we wanted to use something out of our favorite book. Not having seen a copy in over 20 years, I can't tell you how but, we'd figured out how to tell the really good recopies from the now boring ones. We found one that was all chemistry, looked interesting so decided we'd use it to take out the rock. We envisioned everyone arriving Monday so see small pieces of rock all over the quad.

We gathered the chemicals needed and borrowed a 1 gallon Pyrex bottle. As I recall the recipe called for a certain percentage of this and a certain percentage of that. Well lets see, 5 ounces on the bottle would equal 5 percent more or less. We added, not knowing about lab stirrers we'd sort of swirl the bottle a bit to blend the contents...wow is this thing getting warm? We moved out onto a more open area because the fumes it was making were horrid. As we added the final ingredient and gently swirled our now 100 ounce concoction, we realized it was off gassing, off gassing flammable vapors. The fuse we'd brought wasn't going to work, nobody wanted to be that close. Wow the stuff in the bottle was starting to bubble and off gas even worse. We moved over to the side of the quad, watching and talking as the bottle that sat on the paint covered rock seemed to get worse and worse. In the end we decided not to follow through and ended up saving out own lives.

Monday arrived and something was happening in the quad. There sat the rock, completely devoid of any paint, like it has just been delivered. All around it the concrete was blistered and discolored, the grass nearby was dead and some of the branches that hung over the rock didn't look so hot either. Nothing was said by the school, the concrete and dirt were replaced.

Several years later I was in school for commercial diving. One member of my dive team was a former FBI agent Ed. I was studying at Eds one afternoon and glanced at his bookshelf and recognized something, The Anarchist Cookbook. I pulled it out and started telling Ed about that night, searching the book for the recipe "I think this is it, " I said and handed him the book. I'm pretty sure the color went out of his face, "How much of this stuff did you say you made?" "One hundred ounces." He went on to explain that what we'd made was fuel air explosive. In a military version a bomb is dropped and as it reaches the target, it mixes and sprays a cloud, finally igniting the gas cloud. This was what you made when you couldn't build nuclear weapons but wanted a really powerful surface explosion. Ed said if we'd lit the thing that night, the only reason the Russians would have know it wasn't a small nuke would be because it wouldn't have the signature of a double flash. There would have been no more rock, school, houses for several blocks. Windows would have shattered for a pretty good distance in all directions and I would not be here typing this. Ed went ton to tell me about how for a while in the 60's, the CIA had taken over publishing the book, only with bogus recopies designed to blow the builders up. Great way to take care of people like the Black Panthers they figured.

Let me repeat, we checked this out from the public library.

There are other memories, some good some bad. The Freedom Train that passed through Sylmar in 1976 to celebrate the nations bicentennial, I remember it had a really odd sounding horn. The trucks that drove San Fernando Road thumping the ground so they could see the faults. I remember when they lifted the old train tracks up replacing it with seamless track so the click click went away as the wheels passed over the seams. I remember when they filmed Rockford Files at the old Evergreen Motel at Tyler and SFR and getting to meet Jim Garner because we knew Mrs. Kline the owner.

I remember when Polk Street was still only two lanes and how when it rained it turned back into a river bed with four or five feet of water running down it. I remember when Bradley Street between Cobalt and Roxford used to be dirt, sever streets over there were. I remember when they built the Foothill Freeway and filmed CHIPs there.

I also remember the night the two boys died on San Fernando Road after racing out of Winchells and hitting the back of a tractor trailer they clipped. I remember the day that Steven looked in the back window of a car parked across the street from out house and discovered a man who'd been murdered.

I remember the New Years Eve I was standing in front of 7/11 at Foothill and Polk and kept hearing this weird buzz-snap. After a few more times we realized it was the sound of the bullets passing us and hitting the palm trees. I remember my senior year when they announced our quarterback, his girlfriend and another of his friends drove off the road to the Nike base and died. I remember sitting in the front yard with binoculars want watching them lift the missile out of the silo. I remember one Saturday night when my best friend Ron, Cindy who would eventually lose her mind and marry me, and I saw a little car flipped on it's roof on Old San Fernando Road, CHP, ambulances and firetrucks with their lights ablaze, then the next morning when they announced at church that my friend, a guy who was only a few years older than me and was trying to help mentor me, Walter Gurman, had died in that accident when something in the front end suspension broke. His old Corolla didn't have seat belts and when it flipped, he was thrown out and crushed. His passengers, Eddie and Joyce, were only saved because she was sitting on his lap. When they were married a few months later there was no Best Man, you can't replace a Best Man so easily.

When I go back to visit my mom who still lives in that same house, I have mixed emotions about Sylmar. I see that it has evolved in my absence, some for the better, some for the worse. Tyler street lost that rural feel when they built in the field North West of it and built up the fields around El Dorado Elementary, that was when the crows went away, Sylmar used to be infested with crows. I still miss Honda Hills when I visit, we spent so much time up there on our bikes. Tyler Street changed, the old residents moved, died, new people came in. The Westmans finally got a divorce, he passed away and their youngest now lives there with her husband and kids. Danny, the arsonist, died young in a construction accident. My cousin Mike, Johns older brother, also died young, killed by a drunk driver leaving a wife and children. It's funny but some of the best things that happened to Tyler Street were because of the families that moved in from South of the border. Multiple families working hard to buy homes they could be proud of, slowly they improved the street.

Sylmar is also where Cindy said she'd marry me that night as we sat at the stop light at Polk and Foothill. I was so suave, having just picked her up from work at Vons. "So...you want to get married?' "I'll have to think about it." I deserved that answer, she'd wanted to say yes, but also wanted to say it on her terms and not in the front seat of my old Ford Torino. Ah, the Torino, anyone remember a 72 Torino parked on Polk Street or out in front of Kinneys that was painted in a black, gray and white urban camouflage pattern, that was it!

I guess I can't judge Sylmar anymore, it my hometown, but it's not my town anymore, it belongs to others to love, abuse, shape or destroy. My Sylmar is the Sylmar of the past. My Sylmar is only a ghost locked away in the recesses of my mind.

(By the way, if there's anything that might be construed as criminal in any of the actions mentioned, and not covered by some statute of limitations, I'm positive I imagined said criminal actions and they are in fact a work of fiction)