Bare Feet and Buttercups in Monterey Park

Thelma Medendorp recalled the trauma of the 1933 earthquake.

Kenny Gribble and Harry Herron spoke about how they went barefoot without the worry of burning their feet on sidewalks or asphalt streets--because there weren’t any in the early 1920s.

Going Sliding

Emily Dixon Lambert told of using sheets of tin to slide down a hill of buttercups.

These were the days when the automobile was just beginning to make its appearance in the San Gabriel Valley. This was a time before there was a Hong Kong Supermarket and before you could get dim sum or shark fin soup on Atlantic Boulevard.

It was a time, Lambert said, “when you knew all your neighbors.” Social life revolved around watching Tom Mix or Clara Bow movies at the Monterey Park Theater. A PTA meeting, a potluck at the Methodist Church, or rubber-necking while Hollywood film crews made a movie with the likes of Rudolph Valentino were big events.

As part of an oral history project begun in 1984, the Monterey Park Historical Society has so far recorded the recollections of 13 longtime residents of the western San Gabriel Valley.

The project focuses on Monterey Park, but the portrait is a universal one of Southern California in the early decades of the 20th Century, when suburbs emerged from the orange groves, walnut groves and chicken ranches.

Russ Paine, the principal interviewer and coordinator of the project, has elicited memories of World War I, World War II, the Great Depression and the subdivision booms of the 1920s and 1940s.

People told him stories of emigrations from the plains of the Midwest and from the countries of Europe.

There were few Latinos or Asians in this resettling. The Anglos’ tales of those days, however, are somewhat similar to those of recent Latin American and Asian newcomers, who have transformed the look and feel of Monterey Park.

More Interviews

Paine hopes to expand the project and perhaps obtain a grant to interview the new Asian immigrants. But first, he said, he has about 30 more longtime residents to interview.

Paine, 76, retired in 1973 as a journalism and public relations professor at East Los Angeles College. He became interested in Monterey Park history during the 1970s, when Eli Isenberg, then the publisher of the local weekly newspaper the Monterey Park Progress, asked him to write about the origins of street names.

After that, the Monterey Park Historical Society gave Paine an honorary membership, and he was hooked.

The most shocking stories that Paine heard, he said, were of City Hall corruption. “Every once in a while, something crops up that indicates some council members or city officials weren’t quite living by the rules,” he said.

The late Cliff Ostler, who worked at City Hall for 35 years in the Public Works and Building departments, told Paine about an official, now dead, who bragged about taking bribes of 10% to 15% of a project’s value. “I don’t think he’d take more than that,” Ostler said, “but what he’d take would be at least 15%. When there was an argument or discussion, he’d take (from either) side--the one that would pay the most.”

Paine also got longtime Monterey Park Lions Club member Kenny Gribble to talk about the 1951 origins of White Cane Days, when lapel pins shaped like canes are sold to raise money for the Lions’ charitable work with the blind. The event expanded from Monterey Park into a nationwide campaign.

And another Lions Club story emerged from the recollections: young Richard Nixon, as a Lion in Whittier, sometimes would stop by for a visit with the Monterey Park group.

HARRY HERRON, 74

Grew up in Wilmar, known today as South San Gabriel. Now lives in

Rosemead. Family came to the San Gabriel Valley from Texas in 1923.

When we left El Paso, it was still wintertime in March. All the trees were bare and brown. It was constantly raining. We had hard winds and some snow.

We came across the desert in California and we could see the Salton Sea, way to the west. It was very warm. And when we got to Pomona, it was just getting dark. There was a cool breeze, and we could smell the orange blossoms. We knew we were in California. There was greenery everywhere. Mustard weeds were five feet tall. Every place you looked you could see orange trees or walnut trees, heavily loaded.

In El Paso, we had sidewalks, electricity, running water. But when we arrived here, the first thing I noticed when we walked into that little house in Wilmar, you could smell kerosene. Our cooking stove burned kerosene. The lamps were kerosene. We had to go outside to a water faucet, to bring water in. And we had nothing but outside plumbing. We had an outhouse about 60 feet from the house, down behind the garage. There was a big garden around it. It was two or three years before we had inside plumbing.

When we first came here, we wore high-top shoes and long white stockings. All the boys wore short pants where we came from. We soon found that the boys here wore coveralls and went barefooted. My mother wouldn’t hear of that. We weren’t supposed to go barefooted until June. We found a place to hide our shoes, after we left the house to go to school in the morning.

THELMA MEDENDORP, 67

Born in Monterey Park in 1922. Her family had come in 1909, when her grandfather bought an acre in Ramona Acres.

I remember clearly the Long Beach earthquake in March of 1933. It happened around 5 o’clock in the evening. It really did shake. Our table went clear across the room. I started to run out the back door, but the door wasn’t there, the wall was. I hit my head and was knocked out.

It really was a good shaker. Finally my father got me outside, and then I ran back inside to get my doll. I was scared my dolls were going to get hurt. The house next door caught afire, I remember, because they had a penny behind a fuse in the fuse box. I was shipped off to my aunt’s house because my mother had a miscarriage when she ran outside, scared. We ran out of my aunt’s house every five minutes it seemed, all night long during the aftershocks.

We used to build Rose Bowl parade floats where Barnes Park is now. We’d have a tent there. Then we went to Pasadena early New Year’s morning with the floats. One year some drunk guy ran into the back of our float while we were en route to Pasadena.

We had to make sure all the flowers were in place after we got to Pasadena, because if you had one little bare place showing, you lost all your chances of winning. It was 2 o’clock in the morning when we were putting flowers on. By the time the parade would start, I was so sleepy, I’d just fall asleep and not even see the parade.

PHIL BROWNING, 77

In 1914, two years after he was born in Los Angeles, his family (originally from Illinois) came to Ramona Acres, the name for the area that became the city of Monterey Park in 1916. He has operated a real estate business that his father started in 1922 in Monterey Park.

As a boy, I’d take the Pacific Electric train to Pomona and visit my grandmother. From El Monte east, clear to Pomona, it was almost solid orange groves. There was very little habitation until you’d come to a little town like Covina or Glendora. Once you left the city limits, you were back in orange groves.

We all had horses and bicycles. Most of the streets were dirt. Monterey Park’s main street, Garvey, was so uninhabited by automobiles you could actually play in the street.

When I was 20 and my brother was 22, we had this little hamburger stand from 1932 to 1934. It was called Browning Brothers Hamburgers. We’d sell a huge hamburger for a dime, a cheeseburger for 15 cents, and a bowl of chili beans for 15 cents. We used to buy potato chips from Laura Scudder in a five-pound can, and they were the most beautiful potato chips one could imagine. (Laura Scudder started her potato chip company in Monterey Park in 1926.)

One of the first sales I ever made in real estate, about 50 years ago, was a house for $1,500 on South Orange. The same house without any additions last week--it is now April, 1989--sold for $150,000. An average size residential lot, that you could build a house on, would sell for $100,000 or more today. Back in ‘36, ’38 and ‘40, I sold many lots for $250. You could buy a nice two-bedroom home with fireplace, hardwood floors, dining room, a single bath, double garage, on a lot 50 by 135, for $3,900.

EMILY DIXON LAMBERT, 78

Civic and community leader; former president, Monterey Park Historical Society. Resident since 1915.

My dad came from England. My mother was born in Los Angeles. My dad was a cabinetmaker, and then he went to work for the Southern Pacific Railroad.

They lived in Los Angeles, but the streetcar line was coming through where their house was, so they had to move.

In the newspaper was a big article: “Go to the country.” My dad got on the Red Car line. He got off where Mark Keppel High now stands. There was an old shed there, a real estate office. They took him in a Model T, drove over the hills and came to South Orange Avenue. There was an acre of ground. This acre had a beautiful stream running through it, and my dad said: “What an ideal place.” He bought that acre for $600.

While our house was being built, we took a trip to England and stayed there until the war began and we had to get home. So on January the 1st, 1915, we moved into this home.

KENNY GRIBBLE, 79

Family came to Monterey Park from Nebraska in 1913, after stopping briefly in Oregon and Alhambra. Father ran a general store in Monterey Park. Gribble was a service station owner; has been mayor and City Council member.

I can remember bands of sheep going down Garvey Avenue. But I don’t remember any sheep after 1918. The land had been subdivided, and there wasn’t pasture for them any more.

When I was a little kid, I don’t suppose there were 20 automobiles in Monterey Park. The only way to go to Montebello was on a dirt road. There were no north-south roads in Monterey Park in the early days.

In those days, in what now is south Monterey Park, people planted grain and harvested it to feed horses. There was a lot of hay raised and baled. We spent a lot of time in the hills. We hunted some. There were rabbits, birds, lots of doves.

Garvey Dam (where the baseball field is in Garvey Ranch Park) was where I learned to swim. It’s been filled in now. At one time it was 65 to 70 feet deep. The water was used to irrigate orchards and alfalfa fields. The water in that lake, Mr. Richard Garvey Sr. brought from way up north in Pasadena through a pipeline. He spent a fortune bringing in water.