standing in a doorway watching people stepping through or back out carrying things furniture…? perhaps boxes…? maybe in this doorway aware of a house aware of people aware of the world aware of myself for the first time
This is my very first memory, that is, the earliest moment of my life that I can recall. It could very well not be, but I’m pretty certain that it’s of the day my family moved into 4406 Haskell Avenue in Encino, California sometime in 1954. I was not yet two-years-old.
It’s fitting that this first memory would be of the house I would grow up in and call home for the next twenty years.
Like almost every neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, Encino is part of the city of Los Angeles. Roughly bordered by the I-405 on the east, the U.S. 101 on the south, Lindley Avenue on the west and Mulholland Drive on the south, Encino is nestled in the northern slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains. While half its homes are in the flats, the other half are on the twisty, serpentine streets that wind through the hills. Its name is derived from “Los Encinos,” the Spanish word for oaks. When the Spanish Portola Expedition first explored the inland of California in 1769, it crossed the Santa Monicas via the Sepulveda Pass (where the I-405 runs) and stayed two nights at the Tongva village of Siutcanga (“the place of the oaks”). Father Juan Crespi, the Franciscan missionary traveling with the expedition, named the valley “El Valle de Santa Catalina de Bolonia de Los Encinos (The Valley of St. Catherine of Bologna of the Oaks). In 1845, the Rancho Los Encinos was carved out of San Fernando Mission lands by governor Pio Pico. Los Encinos would eventually become “Encino.” According to Wikipedia, Encino’s current population is about 45,000.
Forming a huge grid, most of the streets in the San Fernando Valley run for miles along the entire length or width of the large basin. Running north-south, Haskell is no exception. The 4400 block, however, is Haskell’s final one on the south, where the hills of the Santa Monicas begin to rise. Our street number — 4406 — was the second to last one before the street ended at its intersection with Valley Vista Blvd., which began there and wound its way east along the base of the hills. This was a block from the border with Sherman Oaks, the “town” to the east; and two blocks from the I-405.
The lots on our side of Haskell were large — 100×400 foot rectangles almost an acre in size. Ours had been subdivided into two, the back half accessed from the street by a long, narrow dirt driveway. When my parents bought this back lot in 1954, the only thing standing on it was a small, one bedroom/one bath home that perhaps had been built as a guest house. With a living room, a fireplace, a good size kitchen and a brick patio with a wisteria arbor, it was a cute little place, but hardly large enough for a family of five. Yet we all lived in it for two years before two more bedrooms, another bathroom and a second, bigger living room were added. My father and I slept in the living room while my mother and two sisters took the bedroom. During the summers, my mother put her bed on the patio and slept out there.
To a two-year-old child, our lot — 20,000 square feet – seemed like a 40-acre farm. And it didn’t take long for my father, who claimed he had always wanted to be a farmer, to begin turning it into a little agricultural oasis. There were rows of corn and strawberries. New fruit trees were planted to join the venerable ones already there.
Because of its unique position inside the end of the block, our lot was bordered by seven other properties: the front half the lot (4400 Haskell), two homes on Valley Vista, three on Firmament Avenue behind us (which were technically in Sherman Oaks) and the Haskell lot next door (4408). While this put us in kind of a fishbowl, it never felt so. This si becaue what we saw were big, deep and mostly neglected backyards. Not only were the houses unseen, so were the residents, who rarely ventured far from their homes. The lot with which we shared the most footage (next door at 4408) was owned by an older Italian named August Bucchieri, who, like my father, was an avid gardener and had filled his yard with fruit trees and vegetables. Many a conversation with Bucchieri was held through the chain-link fence.
I have little memory of those first years on Haskell. I remember my mother’s bed on the porch. I remember my Uncle Tex, my father’s elder brother, visiting us while in LA on business, sitting in a chair in our crowded living room/bedroom, gifting my sisters and me with half-dollars. I remember when, my mother off on a trip to her native England, my grandmother Julia and aunt Eleanor (my father’s mother and sister) came up from Texas to take care of us. I remember the house addition going up. These memories, however, are all vague and elusive, as ephemeral as dreams.
My eldest sister was Victoria, though I knew her mostly as “Vicki.” She was named “Victoria” because she was born on June 5, 1944, the day before the D-Day invasion. News of the successful invasion of Nazi-occupied France coming through, our parents did what many others and named their first daughter for the triumph. (Some children were unfortunately named “D-Day” – or “Deeday” Vicki was lucky our parents didn’t go that far.) In between Vicki and me was Mary, five years Vicki’s junior and three years my elder.
Moving from a relatively new tract house on Allott Avenue in Van Nuys, our parents bought the Haskell property because they wanted to get Vicki into the school at St. Cyril’s of Jerusalem, the Catholic church located a block down Haskell at Ventura Boulevard. Vicki, Mary and I all attending St. Cyril’s through 8th grade, the church was a key element of growing up on Haskell. In so many ways, our lives and those of our parents revolved around it, its elementary school, and the large asphalt parking lot that doubled as playground. It was at St. Cyril’s that my Anglican mother converted to Catholicism. It was at St. Cyril’s that my father conceived and set up the church library. It was where I was an altar boy, and where my Boy Scout troop was based. It was where friends and I would hang out on afternoons and weekends, playing basketball or kick ball.
For many years after we moved in, our Haskell block didn’t have sidewalks. There were just dirt paths that ran atop berms on either side of the street. Organized by my father, Haskell residents petitioned the city, claiming the street wasn’t safe for schoolchildren. The city responded by installing sidewalks, but only on Haskell, the concrete pathways ending a few dozen feet past our driveway. So while schoolchildren walking home were safely removed from traffic on that block, if they lived beyond it they had to step back out onto the street.
The lack of sidewalks – and the inconsistency as to where they were built — was typical of the San Fernando Valley in the 1950s and 1960s as it transitioned from farmland to suburbia, from rural to city. Large sections of Ventura Boulevard — the main commercial thoroughfare — had no sidewalks. Pedestrians had to navigate dirt paths, especially along the fronts of empty lots awaiting development. Street construction was a haphazard affair and often problematic. After big rains, intersections on Ventura would flood badly. One could say there was general messiness to the area as it experienced growing pains.
Once grassland with occasional stands of oak, the San Fernando valley is now full of trees – trees planted by new residents as they moved in from the 1940s to the 1970s. In the mid-1950s, recently planted trees hadn’t yet grown much and yards were still sparse. Indeed, there was so little plant growth between us and St. Cyril’s that we could easily see the schoolyard’s flagpole from the house. Within five years, trees had grown high enough that that view disappeared.
I will relate many memories of Haskell, but I’ll end this post with a very early one of a small event that my mother found especially amusing and would recount over the years. (This is, perhaps, why I have such a vivid recollection of it.) I was quite young – maybe three or four – and I had some playmate over, a boy my age whose identity I don’t recall at all. (I suspect he was the son of a neighbor or friend imported by my mother to keep me company. As the baby of the family, I was home while my sisters were off at school.) It was winter and it had recently rained. Armed with rubber rain boots, this boy and I had gone off exploring in the yard, oblivious to the fact that downpours had turned sections of the yard into tracts of goopy mud. When we wandered into one of these areas, I sunk down into one mucky patch to the point that my booted feet were held firm. I couldn’t move at all. I don’t know how long I flailed there, futilely trying to extract myself before my companion, who had somehow avoided being similarly mired, went and found my mother. “Chrissie stuck in the mud” he told her. She came out to find me, feet cemented, arms flapping and, by now, certainly in tears. Bravely wading across the mud to my rescue, she lifted me up and out of the wet soil that entrapped me. Only the sludge held the boots so firm that my feet came right out of them. My mother carrying me back to the house without extracting them, I don’t know how long those two little rubber boots remained, peaking up from the goop…