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One Tour <i> Way </i> Off the Beaten Path

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Times Staff Writer

It’s bad enough admitting you live in the Valley, but what on earth could you show visiting know-it-alls from some place like New York or London or Gettysburg, Pa., for that matter?

Sure it’s all a bad rap, all those stereotypical jokes about the Valley and Valspeak and time warps. Nobody says “wellll, grody, fer surrrre” any more except obnoxious cousins from New York eager to wax up the old image that you have guacamole for brains and they are the Carborundum on which the cutting edge of hip is sharpened.

But still and all, there was nothing here before about 1955, right? C’mon, wasn’t that when they bulldozed the grapefruit trees and Annette Funicello or Ozzie Nelson or somebody moved in and perfected the ‘50s?

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There’s nothing like, historic, is there? How could there be? Everyone who’s ever lived here is still alive, aren’t they?

Wrong, Bunky. Go to the back of the class, and while you’re there, study up on this handy guide to places of unusual, historical or funky interest in the Valley.

Before we get to the Cold War and that stuff, we’ll start out with the heavy history.

So there you are, leaving Universal City. They’re here for another two days and they’re whining, “Now what, now where?”

Go right across the street.

Here on Lankershim Boulevard, right across from The-Studio-That-Ate-The-World, is the place where the United States took a major step on the road to superpowerdom. The Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department has a small adobe-style house and a feeble museum commemorating what happened on this spot on Jan. 13, 1847: The acquisition of much of the western United States and the Pacific Coast, turning what had been a collection of Atlantic Seaboard colonies less than 75 years earlier into a continental power with a springboard to the Pacific.

Surrender Site

The small Campo de Cahuenga Park marks where the military forces of Mexico surrendered to Lt. Col. John C. Fremont, commander of the California Volunteers, ending the Mexican-American War in California. The Mexicans had won the early battles, but the tide had turned. Fremont, marching across the Valley en route from northern California, had cleverly put out word that his surrender terms would not be harsh--just give us your cannons and go home.

This may have been the last time the San Fernando Valley played a strategic military role until the 1950s, when it suddenly blossomed with bastions of the Cold War, many of which were not well known in their time, and for that matter, haven’t drawn many bus tours since.

A Cold War tour of the Valley should start someplace out around northern De Soto or Winnetka avenues, in Chatsworth.

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Someplace around here, in an area now covered with instant-entrepeneur electronics firms, there was a CIA station, back about the time of the Korean War. Groups of Russian- and Chinese-speaking employees monitored Soviet and Chinese radio traffic in Siberia, Manchuria and other places where there is never likely to be a Club Med, even now.

Look up at the Santa Susanas, that long ridge where you tell the folks back in Duluth you see snow every winter. Visible on the high peak at the western end, at least on clear days, is a cluster of buildings. Today, it’s a California Conservation Corps training center.

But it was built as a NIKE anti-aircraft missile launching base in the days when it was presumed that the Los Angeles aerospace industry was a key target and that the Soviets would come after it with airplanes carrying nuclear bombs, Hiroshima-style.

The aerospace-rich Valley was both an important target and a natural shield for the city to the south, and a ring of missile-launching sites was built and manned into the late 1960s. Drive down Victory Boulevard between White Oak Avenue and the San Diego Freeway. The Air National Guard base on the south side of the street was once the headquarters for these bases. The missile bunkers (the ground-level steel doors are impossible to see from the street) were converted to storerooms long ago.

For another chapter of the story, go up to Mulholland Drive and proceed westward until the pavement ends, up above the Lake Encino reservoir. Keep going on the gravel road. (Or, if you like your car, maybe you should just take this part on faith; the unpaved part of Mulholland is suited more to horses than horsepower.) A short distance to the west on the south side of the road is a small, cement building.

It is surrounded by a cyclone fence, meant to keep out the teen-age madcaps who get inside anyway and have littered the ground with bottles and defaced the building with graffiti. This was a radar tracking station, apparently a secret at the time--it doesn’t appear in contemporary public descriptions of the NIKE batteries. From here, Our Side would have shot down Dr. Strangelovski, had the Soviet bombers ever appeared.

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The development of the ICBM made all these places moot. It’s technically a city park now, but the bunker may be around for a long time. Park workers have found that buildings constructed for nuclear war are difficult to get rid of when they have outlived their day.

Tall Building

For the windup of the Cold War tour, return to Ventura Boulevard. In Sherman Oaks, on the south side of the boulevard at Kester Avenue, stands a tall building, a Darth Vader of a structure. If World War III had brought thunderclaps of doom, this place was supposed to be standing when the fireballs cooled.

The telephone company--remember back when there was only one, as in “The Phone Company?”--built it as a nuclear war headquarters, from where vital communications would be continued and civilization rescued.

It has walls of 15-inch-thick, steel-reinforced concrete. Once upon a time it could be hermetically sealed, with lead baffles to keep out radiation. Two stories underground is a “war room,” reachable by a narrow passageway that includes a crude shower for washing off fallout. Pacific Bell maintains the emergency center because it would be handy in the much-discussed “Big One” earthquake. There is still a supply of “fallout suits”--paper coveralls that can be discarded--for workers to wear on forays into the radioactive wasteland, but now they are curiosities as dated as a covered wagon.

Returning westward on Ventura Boulevard, on the southeast corner at Balboa Boulevard is a red brick savings and loan building. Under it, construction workers several years ago discovered remains of the “lost village of Encino,” an Indian village. The village was described by the first Spanish explorers to pass through the Valley and got “lost” in later years. Archeologists, using the Spaniards’ descriptions of the terrain, had been digging around for it for some time when the construction workers stumbled into it.

Literary Types

Now, as a treat for the literary types in your contingent, nip up to the Ventura Freeway on Balboa and head west. About the point where the car has merged into the traffic stream, you are ever so briefly rocketing through what was once F. Scott Fitzgerald’s house. Do not stop for a drink.

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But while you’ve got the literati enthralled, slip off the freeway at Reseda Boulevard and back up to Ventura Boulevard.

Here you are in Tarzana. For some reason, visitors are often surprised to learn that it actually is named after Tarzan the Ape Man. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author, bought a ranch there in 1919 with the profits from the book and named it after the fictional character who made it all possible.

Turn left and keep an eye out for an unmarked Old Spanish-style building on the south side of the boulevard, once Burroughs’ office and still the headquarters of the family’s Tarzan enterprises. You can win Valley trivia contests by being able to point out that the cremated remains of Burroughs have been deep under the spreading branches of the black walnut tree in the front yard since 1950.

And for the eternal romantics, this should do the trick: Drive past Van Nuys Airport and casually remark that the classic final scene of “Casablanca,” in which Humphrey Bogart kisses off Ingrid Bergman, both swallowing their tears, because fighting the Nazis came first, was filmed there. This is about 2% true, which may be enough for legends.

Actually, virtually all of the scene was shot on a sound stage, but in the few seconds of the scene when a real airport is visible, it is indeed little old Van Nuys.

Indians and Manifest Destiny, nuclear war and here’s lookin’ at you, kid.

That should hold the ingrates for a day or two.

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