Memories: All that’s left, all that matters

It was October of 1993 and our neighborhood was on fire.

We had bought our first home in the throwback small town of Altadena, Calif. less than a year earlier. My daughter was about six weeks shy of turning 3. We had been married about five and a half years.

Owning a home had never really been on our radar. We didn’t make that kind of money and real estate prices in southern California already felt out of control. But my mom gave us $8,000 for a down payment and when it looked like we were not gonna qualify for the mortgage because we did not have enough money in the bank for a sufficient period of time, I found a loophole that sale of pre-existing assets counted the same as money in the bank for a year. A good friend who had played bass in the band and who had recently buried both of his parents lent us the reserves we needed (about double the down payment) from his inheritance and I gave him an invoice for all my music gear, none of which ever changed hands. The day after we closed, I gave him back the money and he gave me back the invoice. We got more help. My wife’s employer lent us $3,000 to pay off a credit card to get our debt-to-income ratio down and, when it looked like it was all gonna blow up days before close because we could not come up with $1,200 for mortgage insurance, our real estate agent cut us a check and we paid her back over a two-year period. In our case, it really did “take a village.”

We looked for a house with our agent — who was also the restaurant critic at the Pasadena Weekly newspaper where I was the editor — for months. We entered negotiations on two houses that we were not able to close. We were only a few thousand dollars apart on both of them but we were also fully and totally tapped out. We finally found a little 1,099-square-foot bungalow built in 1953 on a big lot on Raymond Avenue. Two bedrooms and one small bathroom.

As that fire — which also started in Eaton Canyon — raged and came within a half a mile of our home, we already knew that our friends Mark and Megan had gotten out of their house with just the clothes on their backs and their dog. Megan wrote a column for singles for the paper and a dozen years later, she and Mark would be the inspiration for us pulling up stakes and moving to Las Vegas.

I had spent the night on lookout duty with anything of real or emotional value already packed in my truck so we could be ready to leave on a moment’s notice. But we were lucky that night. The high winds shifted and then died down and we were spared.

But now all three of those houses are gone, along with more than 1,000 others.

It has been hard to watch. Although we have been in Nevada now for just a few months shy of 20 years, my family (and especially my wife and daughter) has kept an emotional connection to Altadena. Watching all of the places we went to and drove past every day disappear is surreal. And knowing they will never come back is almost indescribably sad.

Back in ‘93, it was a similar situation to this fire in that there was the blaze in Altadena that destroyed about 135 homes but at the same time, there was a fire in Laguna Beach which threatened some celebrity abodes and all of the media attention was at the beach. If you have been watching coverage of this fire, it is easy to think that it is all in Pacific Palisades because, outside of residents, almost no one knows about Altadena.

An atypical small town

It was, in a lot of ways, like Boulder City, which is why I laugh every time someone who is upset with something I have written claims that I just don’t understand a small town, which is just BS. Altadena is older than BC by about 50 years but, even up until last weekend, it maintained its quirky, small-town charm.

We, too, had our little historic downtown and just one grocery store without driving down the hill (versus over the hill) into Pasadena. We, too, had our Christmas and Fourth of July parades. The difference is that my historic downtown is now cinders and ash. It will never be rebuilt. Wealthy developers will come in and put up faceless, charmless strip malls and the working-class, multi-racial neighborhoods of tiny houses built in the early 20th century will be replaced by mansions that few of the current residents will be able to afford.

And, to be honest, that will bring the area kind of full circle.

The foothills of Altadena first got on the map due to a guy who made, well, maps. Andrew McNally was an Irish immigrant who came to the U.S. and got a $9-a-week job in a print shop owned by a guy with the last name of Rand in the 1850s in Chicago. For those of you old enough to remember paper maps, yep, the two of them became Rand-McNally, which was probably the biggest and most successful map publisher in the world. In the 1880s, McNally bought a large plot of land north of Pasadena and built a stupendously grand summer home in an area that became known as Millionaire’s Row. It had a nearly half-mile-long driveway lined on either side with deodar cedar trees.

From then up until the Great Depression, large numbers of very wealthy businessmen and merchants made the same move, building grand homes where they could escape summer in the East and Midwest. But, over time, as the original owners died off, their children sold off bits of the land to developers building homes for the post-World War II boom in Southern California. And that led to part of Altadena’s charm. All over town you could find pockets of very modest homes built in the early 1950s surrounding one huge, old, grand estate.

The McNally house was far from the only famous home. The Zane Grey estate, where the popular author lived for the last almost 20 years of his life and who once said that, “In Altadena, I have found the qualities that make life worth living,” is gone, though when it was built in 1907 it was claimed to be fireproof, having been made of reinforced concrete.

The McNally house is now torched as well, as are all of those cedar trees, which up until a day or two ago lined both sides of Santa Rosa Avenue, which led up to our neighborhood. For more than a century, those trees, which had grown to be 100-feet tall, became, for a couple of months each year, Christmas Tree Lane. The trees were filled with lights and we would go up and down that street every time we left the house or returned at night, even though it added 10 minutes to the drive as everyone turned their headlights off and we all crept down the street at about 10 mph. It was magical.

It was also one of my wife and daughter’s favorite places in the world. It is gone and never coming back.

Only memories remain

Though we were hundreds of miles away when our old home was destroyed, it has still been rough. Altadena represented some of the best years of our lives. It was my daughter’s whole childhood.

The Thrifty where we stopped for ice cream at least once a week on the way home from school.

The Girl Scout camp across the street from the McNally house where she and my wife did Brownie activities when Linda ran the Brownie troop.

Fox’s restaurant where I would meet my friend Jay who lived a few miles down the hill from us for breakfast.

The overgrown white climbing roses that became Erin’s “secret garden.”

The flock of wild parrots (ironically, the product of a fire decades earlier that burned down a pet store) that would land daily in our backyard and scream at the wild peacocks that lived up the street.

Even the garage where I built my first really good band and the back bedroom where Erin would sit and listen — when she was supposed to be sleeping — to old songs that ended up forming the foundation of her musical tastes far into adulthood.

And now it’s all gone.

My heart aches (yes, I actually do have one) for the friends and neighbors who lost everything. Even those who were spared will likely end up selling to the inevitable developers of mansions rather than live for years in a place that looks like a bombed-out war zone.

All that will be left are the memories. Erin playing in the sprinklers in the front yard. Linda and I ending the evening sitting on our tiny front porch watching our neighbor’s cat torment the owl that lived in the tree across the street. Erin sitting among those roses reading “Alice in Wonderland” and telling us she wanted to paint the roses red. The band drinking a toast to our trumpet player who was killed in the days right after 9/11.

And that night in ‘93 watching the flames and wondering if they were coming for us.