Living in a small town in the 1980s, Los Angeles California

I watched an excellent TikTok video yesterday that showed just how huge the city of Los Angeles is, and it got me to thinking about how I coped with LA in the '80s. Trust me, LA is huge, and has been for a very long time. I even remember the joke about Bugs Bunny burrowing to New Mexico and seeing a "Los Angeles City Limits" sign - and those cartoons were old when I was a kid!

What I did was to limit how much of the city I would live in, and take in. That is, I knew my neighborhood very well, but beyond a certain limit, and for me it was the 405 freeway, I it might as well be in a completely different city.

Don't get me wrong, I would still venture beyond the 405, but I would take a map, and I wouldn't feel right until I got back to my 'hood. If you've lived in Los Angeles, you understand, and if you haven't, it's difficult to explain, but today I'm gonna try. I've lived in Phoenix for a long time, and if people ever ask me where I lived before that I will simply say LA, but that's the short answer.

If you live in Los Angeles, just saying that you live in LA is essentially meaningless. Technically, since I lived in Canoga Park, it was City of LA, but I either said Canoga Park, or in the Valley. Of course there are separate municipalities (I think that's the word) in the Valley, such as Burbank, which isn't City of LA, and that means that they have their own cops, their own mayor, that sort of thing. And while places like Canoga Park are under the jurisdiction of the City of Los Angeles (the LAPD would come for you if you broke the law!), for practical day-to-day purposes, Canoga Park is considered its own city. And that's where I lived, in a small town.

I lived on the western edge of Canoga Park, and worked in Warner Center in Woodland Hills, which was about two miles away. My girlfriend used to say that I lived in a triangle that wasn't much bigger than that, my apartment, work, and the gym. Sometimes my world would stretch to a square, but even then she didn't live all that far away.

When I moved back to Phoenix after being away for ten years, it took awhile for me to realize how small it was, and still is. In Los Angeles I would use a Thomas Guide, which was a book with binder pages, but in Phoenix all I needed was a regular folding map. And because of that I figured that it would be even easier to make Phoenix into a small town, but it really wasn't - in Phoenix you were expected to know all of it, from Peoria to Mesa. No one I know ever said that they never been beyond a certain area. People in Phoenix go all over the place - they may complain a bit about traffic, but the traffic has never gotten bad enough to make people stay in one place, like in LA.

But I settled into a small town attitude in Glendale, Arizona, where I bought the house that I'm still in. My world remains wonderfully small - I go to the same places all of the time, for my coffee, that sort of thing. I've never gone to watch a football game, but if I wanted to, it's just a few miles away. I like it here.

Well, I was born in a small town
And I can breathe in a small town!

John Mellencamp

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more