Memories and Friends Found Amid the Ashes : Blaze: Neighbors pull together when catastrophe strikes their charming Westwood street.

Fred Lagerson was out driving in his car Saturday morning finishing up his Christmas shopping when he heard that fire had come to Holmby Avenue. He grew up on Holmby, and he wondered how his mother’s house had fared.

Several hours earlier, Joseph Duerr had learned of the crisis another way. He was up checking on his sleeping 3-year-old son when there was a banging at his door. Two young women were there shouting, “Your house is on fire! Your house is on fire!”

Catastrophe is not the sort of thing people expect on Holmby Avenue, a street that, by the looks of it, seems to embody the Westside Dream. Here, in a residential district east of Westwood Village, joggers ease up gently sloping sidewalks shaded by jacaranda trees. Home prices run in the neighborhood of $600,000 to $900,000--a nice neighborhood, as they say.

It was about 3:30 a.m. when flaming embers started to come down from the sky, cast off from the huge blaze a few blocks north on Wilshire Boulevard. Neighbors banged on each others’ doors and ran for garden hoses.

“Everyone came out and pulled together,” Shirley Frierman said. “I didn’t know whether to water the roofs or the sky above.”

A few hours later, joggers were out Saturday morning, and so were neighbors walking the dogs. Lynn Montgomery, a comedy writer, couldn’t help but notice a Fuller brush man a few blocks away selling mops and brooms--something to help clean up ashes that had fallen everywhere. The lucky ones had only a small cleaning job.

Fred Lagerson, it turned out, was one of the unlucky ones. After learning that his mother’s house had burned down, he and his brother, Doug, came to see what they could salvage.

“My mom saved everything. Everything,” Fred Lagerson said. What he found was nothing.

He took a break from shoveling piles of charred rubble to give a tour of the old family home where he, his brother and two sisters were raised.

The house had been filled with paintings, antiques, silver, china and crystal--all of it now gone. “You can’t put a value on it,” he said.

He is 48, but at his feet he recognized the blackened shapes of old metal toys that his mother had stored in the attic--a small cash register, a spinning top.

“That top was from the ‘40s. It used to whistle. It was mine.

“My mom saved everything,” he repeated.

The four-bedroom house, Lagerson said, had been built in 1929 by silent film idol Lewis Stone, who later became better known playing Mickey Rooney’s father in the Andy Hardy movies. In 1940, the Lagersons moved in, and Fred’s 71-year-old mother, Luana, still lived there. She was away for Christmas, however, visiting her daughters.

Fred Lagerson, who lives in Playa del Rey, said he was glad his mother wasn’t here.

“She’ll be all right,” he said. “She’s a survivor.”

Joseph and Ann Duerr and their family, it turned out, were perhaps the luckiest of all. After the two neighbors--strangers, really--had alerted Joseph Duerr, they used garden hoses to put out fires that had flared up at two places on his wood shingle roof.

So while the Lagersons shoveled rubble, Duerr was able to watch over a tree-trimming crew that had come to prune his jacarandas.

Duerr was also making plans. One was to replace his wood shingle roof. Another was to add to the guest list for a social gathering on Christmas Eve.

Those neighbors who banged on his door, Cathy Hayes and Tricia Burlingham, are no longer strangers, Duerr said. He hopes they can make it over.