Vale Without Tears : THE SAN FERNANDO VALLEY THEN AND NOW An Illustrated History <i> by Charles A. Bearchell and Larry D. Fried (Windsor Publications: $27.95; 144 pp.; 0-89781-285-9) </i>

The authors of “The San Fernando Valley: Then and Now” call their work “an important literary and civic project.” And a quick glance through the book’s pages, handsomely laid out and amply illustrated, gives the impression that there is a local history of some significance.

A closer reading, however, reveals otherwise. Except for a few bright spots, “The San Fernando Valley” comes through as a drab and listless chronicle. Too bad, because the Valley--despite its detractors and its current problems with unrestrained growth--is a region with a rich and lively past. Indian, padre, soldier, gold-seeker, land-grabber, Anglo rancher, Chinese laborer, Japanese truck gardener, suburban home buyer are among the hordes who have thronged here, and left their distinctive imprint.

The book is divided into three parts--a general historical overview, followed by a series of brief community sketches, and concluding with a section titled “Partners in Progress,” profiles of the several corporate sponsors who, presumably, helped subsidize the book. The result is a resurrection of the old turn-of-the-century “mug books,” those regional histories to which were wisely added flattering portraits of local nabobs.

Part of the problem with this book is the authors’ unsuccessful attempt to compress too much history into too little space. The result is a superficial and often misleading picture of life in the early Valley written in boosterish, chamber-of-commerce style. We are told, for instance, that the Indians who came to the Mission San Fernando after its founding in 1797 were “willing workers,” weaving their baskets and tending to crops and livestock and that “life at the mission seems to have agreed” with them. No mention is made of the often brutal means used to keep them at the missions and on the Mexican ranches, nor of the aboriginals’ tragic odyssey toward extinction once the mission system broke down in the 1830s.

The complexities and conflicts of the post-mission period are likewise crammed into a few pages--a dull and confusing litany of land grants, and a long procession of grantors and grantees, buyers and sellers and developers. Few faces emerge from the crowd--no rogues, no rascals, yet in truth they were abundant.

We glean from this book nothing of the early litigation over water rights, are given only a hint of the sometimes violent squatter battles of the 1880s and ‘90s, and learn nothing of the chicanery that stripped the fertile Owens Valley of its water, so that the fields and orchards and land brokers of the San Fernando Valley might thrive.

Some of the anecdotes in the book are wonderfully tantalizing: the story of the Panorama City bank teller who came to work on a horse; the utopian dreams and schemes of Charles Weeks, whose Weeks Poultry Acres became the basis for the town of Winnetka; the tale of the villainous Miguel Leonis and how his ghost may yet haunt the Calabasas adobe that bears his name; the reason why Sun Valley was once called Roscoe.

How I wish the authors had expanded these brief blurbs into something more substantial. It would be helpful to know the details of the “Great Valley Fire of 1878” which burned more than 18,000 acres, or to discover a quote or two from the aptly named Lankershim Laconic, whose feisty editor was often knee-deep in controversy. And why exclude Glendale--geographically as much a Valley town as Northridge or Chatsworth? Yet why include a half-page photo of Fern Dell, on the Hollywood side of Griffith Park?

Too much space is wasted on “celebrity mayors”--notables like Monte Montana, Yvonne De Carlo, George Gobel, and the ubiquitous Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows--who, we are reverentially told, “graciously donate their time and names to civic affairs.” While it’s amusing to learn that Encino resident Edward Everett Horton loved to play “Governor” of the Valley and has a short lane named in his honor, there is no mention of Horton’s more celebrated tenant, author F. Scott Fitzgerald, nor how Horton’s penchant for searching Fitzgerald’s trash found its way into the “The Pat Hobby Stories.”

The authors credit the assistance of corporations and their para-corporate allies, the Valley chambers of commerce in producing this history. The influence shows. Too often we are treated to such Babbitry as “Sherman Oaks, in keeping with the forward-looking attitudes of its citizens, may well see even greater development of major commercial and service complexes in the years ahead.” A cause for rejoicing? Or, when describing the Valleyite’s view of the world: “And this optimism is not without some justification, for the Valley today is growing steadily, continuing to attract people to its climate, its beautiful views, and its gracious living.”

Crime? Blight? Smog? Slipshod zoning and atrocious planning? Freeway tie-ups and water contamination? Such things don’t exist in this rose-colored version of the San Fernando Valley.