By Neil Reisner
I didn’t really understand what happened to my hometown until I saw it for myself.
The fire that exploded out of the brushy hills at its edge January 7 turned my childhood into rubble and ashes.
I grew up in Pacific Palisades.
I lived there until I was fourteen in the three-bedroom, 1,200-square-foot ranch at 850 Hartzell Street my parents bought for $7,000 in 1951, nine months before I was born. It had a grassy front yard and a backyard shaded by Chinese elms. Four fruit trees: peach, plum, nectarine, and apple stood by the back fence.
I left Los Angeles in 1980 for graduate school in New York, and since then have lived in New York City, New Jersey, and Florida. But LA was still home and I kind of commuted back and forth, visiting my parents frequently, my father especially as he was dying of cancer in 2006, and my mother as she slipped into dementia.
But my sister and I moved Mom to Florida in April, and my recent trip was the last time I could realistically call LA home.
I ventured to the devastated Palisades to say goodbye.
It was a perfect suburb, the street lined with towering eucalyptus trees and the neighborhood riddled with kids: Peggy lived next door, Martin next door to her, and Linda next to him. Cory and Peter lived across the street, with Dougie, Billy, and Elaine a few doors away. We played hide-and-seek, tag, hopscotch, and other childhood games, with all the screaming, laughing, and joy kids mustered at a time before playdates and parental fear of strangers.
It was nothing like the italicized, neon-lit town—what Us Magazine called a “celebrity haven”—we hear about today, full of stars living in multi-gazillion dollar homes. No Billy Crystal, Tom Hanks, Jeniffer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Adam Sandler, and scads of others.
Oh, okay, there were a few.
Peter Graves, later “Mr. Phelps” of Mission Impossible fame, lived across the street and Jocelyn Brando, sister of Marlon, lived two doors down.
I went to school with Rolf Arness, son of Gunsmoke’s James. Author Henry Miller lived on the other side of town, near Leon Feuchtwanger, the German-Jewish refugee author and playwright.
Actor Walter Matthau was a Palisadian. So was Bob Denver, who played the beatnik Maynard G. Krebs in The Dobie Gillis Show, as well as Mel Blanc, voice of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and countless other cartoon characters.
But they were neighbors, not stars.
We’d see them in the “Village,” the diminutive business district full of mom-and-pop shoe, hardware, clothing, pet, and bookstores, and small cafes and restaurants. They were simply part of the background noise.
The Palisades was still closed to all but residents when I visited but media was allowed.
I started at my house on Hartzell, one of the “alphabet streets”—Albright, Bashford, Carey, Drummond. Embury, Fiske, Galloway, Hartzell, Iliff (they skipped “J”), and Kagawa—all named after the Methodist ministers who founded the community.
The streets were filled with houses like mine, homes mostly to solid, middle-class families. My father owned a small factory where he made keys, the man on one side of us was an auto mechanic and on the other side an engineer.
Some months back, I stood where my house once stood. Only the chimney remained; I knew I was at the right spot because of the “850” painted on the curb.
No house stood for blocks in any direction.
Living near the Santa Monica Mountains that sit astride the city of Los Angeles, I was used to fire. The Bel Air Fire scorched those hills in November 1961, destroying 484 structures and scorching 6,090 acres.
My dad loaded up the family station wagon in the event we had to evacuate, but the blaze was a couple of miles away and we really didn’t think that would happen. Fire had never reached the neighborhood where we lived.
The Palisades fire was different, a perfect storm of drought that dried the native chaparral to a crisp, and Santa Anas, the dry winds that blow from the desert during fall and early spring. This time they blew with unprecedented force to one hundred miles an hour, spreading cinders that ignited homes like mine far beyond the flames. It turned 6,837 structures into ashes and blackened 23,707 acres.
I stared at the rubble that remained of where I lived before turning to drive the route I would take when I walked to school with friends, even as a five-year-old kindergartner.
Up Hartzell to Carey, a left past Galloway, where my grandmother lived, and then past Fiske before reaching Sunset Boulevard. Yes, that Sunset Boulevard, the main drag through the Village.
Wil Wright’s ice cream parlor, the fancy one my parents would take us to only on special occasions, was on the corner. Corpus Christi Catholic School was across the street, a mystery to my young Jewish self. Next to Corpus Christi was Hughes Market.
(It was late one afternoon in the Hughes parking lot where Mom told me that no woman would ever marry me if I didn’t eat eggs—I never liked them and still don’t —because that’s what wives make their husbands for breakfast. She was wrong. Someone did marry me.)
I wouldn’t cross Sunset, though, I’d turn right and walk past the office of our family doctor, Jack Flasher, and past Moss Bootery, where I got my Stride Rite shoes from Harry Moss, a man my mother told me fought in the Spanish Civil War against the dictator Francisco Franco.
The Hot Dog Show was at the next corner, a small restaurant with a counter and small tables inside and out that served, well, hot dogs. I’d cross Sunset there, by the Bay Theater.
Saturday was hot dogs and movie day.
My mom and dad would give my sister and me a couple of dollars for hot dogs—I ordered the “hound,” with onions and barbecue sauce, and the “Chihuahua,” with chili, onions, and cheese, sixty cents the pair—and fifty cents each for the Saturday matinee of two movies and a cartoon at the theater across the street.
(It was only when I grew up that I realized why my parents would want to escape their kids for a few hours of intimacy on a weekend afternoon.)
I’d walk past Woodbury’s Five & Dime, where I’d buy school supplies, turn on Antioch and pass Colvey’s, the men’s clothing store that was too expensive to even set foot in.
I’d turn left on Via de la Paz and pass the Hobby Shop, purveyor of models, train sets, slot cars, and more. (More included a glass funnel, a two-hole rubber stopper, and plastic tubing I bought when I was fourteen.)
I’d pass Wong’s laundry, owned by my classmate Becky’s parents, and the Palisades branch of the Los Angeles City Library, where my classmate Mike Miller’s mom Roxie was librarian.
Across the street was the pet shop, where I bought a chipmunk as a pet and where I was scratched in the face by a monkey.
(It was at the pet shop I bought a hamster water bottle. Combined with my Hobby Shop purchase, I had the makings of a DIY water pipe. It was 1967. What would I possibly do with a DIY water pipe in 1967?)
I’d finally arrive at the 1930s-vintage Palisades Elementary School (now Palisades Charter Elementary), the Spanish Colonial Revival, two-story structure with a three- or four-story tower at one end. It was there on November 22, 1963, when I saw my fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Satrang come out of the cloak room in tears after lunch to tell us that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
Pretty much everything I saw on this vehicular walk through my past was gutted by fire save Palisades Village, a small upscale mall whose billionaire owner and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso hired private firefighters to save.
Outside the business district, I saw my partially burned high school. The church where my Boy Scout troop met burned to the ground. My childhood synagogue, just down the street, survived, but 300 of 900 families who prayed there lost their homes.
Other neighborhoods were also gutted, but parts of the Palisades were nearly untouched, especially a wealthy neighborhood west of Sunset Boulevard, as if wealth made homes fireproof. Other neighborhoods showed fire’s fickleness, one house burned to the ground, the one next door unscathed with cars in the driveway.
But my childhood haunts on the other side of town?
Ashes.
Rubble and ashes.
P.S.: On October 7, Jonathan Rinderknecht of Melbourne, Florida, formerly of Pacific Palisades, was arrested for setting a small fire on New Year’s Day that reignited on January 7 and became the Palisades Fire. He’s charged in a federal complaint with destruction of property by means of fire. The complaint says fire fascinates him. There is a special place in hell, as far as I’m concerned, where he can enjoy fire and brimstone for eternity.