Firefighters learn about radiation exposure during the Cold War

Ten Years Ago

Calling the Jet Propulsion Laboratory a “national treasure,” Ed Weiler, then associate administrator for NASA, announced the La Cañada Flintridge facility had received an $8-billion contract extension through 2008.

Twenty Years Ago

Sheriff’s deputies on patrol shot and wounded a man who they said tried to run them over on Foothill Boulevard near Crown Avenue. At the time of the incident the suspect was behind the wheel of a car belonging to a La Cañada Good Samaritan who, shortly before the deputies arrived, had given the suspect a ride to get gas for the truck he’d been driving that ran out of fuel.

The truck, it turned out, had been reported stolen in another community.

Thirty Years Ago

The La Cañada Youth House-Community Center (its name in 1982) on Chevy Chase Drive was offering a three-hour course to those unfamiliar with the new appliances on how to use food processors and microwave ovens to speed food preparation.

Forty Years Ago

The first 36 pledges toward a campaign to completely remodel the Church of the Lighted Window exceeded the amount that had been pledged by 234 members for the ongoing operation of the church for the full 1972 year.

The remodel involved reversing the position of the main entrance from underneath the famed lighted window visible at the intersection of Foothill and Verdugo boulevards to the opposite side of the building. Today the church goes by its historic, first name: La Cañada Congregational Church.

Fifty Years Ago

With the international situation heating up during the Cold War and with the Cuban missile crisis having occurred just weeks before, La Cañada firefighters were required to take seven days of instruction on radiation exposure and how to read measures of radioactive fallout.

The course was held in the Arroyo Seco near JPL.

Sixty Years Ago

Armed bandits struck in the heart of the La Cañada business district on a Sunday night in November 1952 when they held up the operators of the Bit O’ Italy restaurant. Ray and Elsie Calabrese were walking from the restaurant to their nearby home on La Porte Drive, carrying the weekend’s receipts, when they were held up. The suspects got away with $889.92 in cash.