Hooray for . . . Chino, Other Centennial Cities

Lately it’s been one hurrah after another for Hollywood, which just turned 100.

After all, the Super Bowl didn’t salute the city of Colton at half time. People magazine didn’t devote a recent issue to “100 Years of Chino.” And Bob Hope isn’t reigning over any ceremonies in Whittier.

But fanfare or no, Colton, Chino and Whittier are among a dozen local cities also celebrating centennials. Barstow (est. 1886) is already partied out, but a handful of 99-year-olds, like Long Beach and South Pasadena, are getting ready to blow out the candles next year.

Hollywood is a tough act to follow, but its less glitzy neighbors hope to grab a bit of the spotlight with such attractions as the Azusa Torch Relay April 10-11, Burbank on Parade April 25 and Hands Across Glendora May 3.

And they’re offering memorabilia on the order of the Centennial Rose of Redlands, the Monrovia Trivia Game and Goddess Pomona pins (Pomona was the Roman goddess of fruits). The various casts include 160 runners for Azusa’s relay--featuring Tiki, rather than Olympic, torches--about 2,000 hands for the line across downtown Glendora and a mystery grand marshal for Burbank.

There’s so much municipal merriment--Whittier’s festival lasts five months--that some burgs feel a bit left out.

“We heard all the others boasting about their centennials and we thought maybe ours was this year,” said a spokesman for the El Monte Chamber of Commerce, somewhat glumly. “But we checked and we’ve only been incorporated 75 years.”

Upstart Baldwin Park, on the other hand, jumped into the fun even though it didn’t attain cityhood until 1956.

“Our City Council decided upon 1887 because that’s when the first tract map was filed, the first school and water districts were created and we really became a community,” explained Human Services Director Lee Lucas.

Wishy-washy San Bernardino isn’t exactly sure what year to hang its banners inasmuch as it has disincorporated and incorporated five times.

No such identity problem for South Pasadena, which remembers well the year it citified (1888) after defecting from Pasadena in order to prevent the establishment of saloons and brothels in its area.

Hollywood, by the way, isn’t even a city, having been annexed by Los Angeles in 1910 to avail itself of the city’s water supply. But the other 100-year-olds smile indulgently at all the publicity Tinsel Town has received.

Jane Spaw, La Verne’s centennial chairman, said: “A lot of outsiders ask, ‘Where is La Verne?’ and we have people here who like it that way, like their privacy.”

And where is La Verne?

“We’re where the 210 freeway dumps everything onto Foothill Boulevard,” Spaw said, laughing.

Burbank is more famous, even if its renown came late in life as the victim of a hometown comic’s one-liners (“Burbank Airport handles 912 flights a week--all leaving”).

“Is Johnny the grand marshal?” Burbank centennial Chairman Mary Jane Strickland was asked.

“Johnny who?” she replied.

Who cares about stars anyway?

The histories of Hollywood’s neighbors are filled with the names of real-life characters: mining and land speculator E.J. (Lucky) Baldwin, who is said to have survived murder attempts by two jilted lovers; Mexican revolutionary Francisco (Pancho) Villa, who operated for a time out of the hills above Chino; Wyatt Earp, who grew up in Colton; such athletes as Hall of Fame pitcher Walter Johnson (Fullerton High), football great Glenn Davis (La Verne’s Bonita High), and football not-so-great Richard Nixon (Whittier College).

Not to mention the mule that regularly pulled a trolley up a hill in Monrovia, and hopped aboard for the trip down.

More than 100 towns popped up in Southern California during the municipal baby boom of 1886-1888 when railroad service was extended into the region. The Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads were trying to lure people West to buy the vast tracts of land that the companies had received as subsidies from the government.

A rate war saw the price of Missouri-to-California tickets fall from $125 to $1 at one point. There was no such discount for the trip back, however, leading some Easterners to charge that people were being stranded in Southern California.

Los Angeles’ population swelled from 11,000 to 50,000 in one year. Among the arrivals, historian Carey McWilliams wrote, were “veterans of land booms (who) knew how to attract crowds to auction sales . . . With white stakes marking off the lots, and tracts and subdivision flags flying in the breeze, the suckers would then be assembled . . . by the bait of free excursions, brass bands, brilliant music, California fruits . . .”

Riverbed tracts were praised for their fine soils, desert tracts were touted as health resorts, swampland tracts were laid out as “harbor cities.” A hillside town named Border City “was most easily accessible by means of a balloon,” one historian said, and as “secure from hostile invasion as the homes of the cliff-dwellers.”

Posters for Chicago Park showed steamboats heading up the mighty San Gabriel River, a Monrovia promoter trumpeted “ocean view” lots (just 28 miles from the shore) and a Burbank advertisement bragged that six trains passed through daily (omitting the fact that none stopped there).

“Anything seems possible,” went one jingle, “the future is yours, and the past--there isn’t any.” Then, in 1888, the present intruded. The banks stopped accepting real estate as security, and everything crashed. More than 60 towns vanished.

So, while this may be a joyous centennial year for some, there will be no brass bands extolling the virtues of Ivanhoe, Dundee or Gladysta. No parades in honor of Wahoo, Raymer or Englewood (“no frosts, no alkali, no adobe”). No schoolchildren releasing balloons in Walteria, Alessandro or Terracina.

No Hands Across Morocco Junction.