O, HAPPY DAYS!

What wonderful memories came rushing back as I read Charles Perry’s “When We Were Very Young,” on growing up in Van Nuys in the ‘50s. I don’t know if he would recall the senior class at Van Nuys High in 1956. We were over 800 strong, and the school did indeed make a great fuss over all of us.

I think the theater we called the “flea bag” was the Rivoli, not the Bijou. The big difference between the Fox and the Rivoli was that the Fox cost a quarter and the Rivoli was only 14 cents. The movies at the Fox were always better.

The phone company called “California Drip and Tinkle” was a small private phone company named California Water and Telephone Co., and it wasn’t bought by GTE until the ‘60s. We were let out of school to see the parade on the day that General Motors opened its plant in what grew into Panorama City. There was a bookstore in Van Nuys in the ‘50s, a wonderful secondhand bookstore on Friar Street east of Van Nuys Boulevard.

The great high school rivalry I remember the best was the one between Van Nuys and North Hollywood high schools. It is especially memorable for me since I dated a girl from North Hollywood who eventually became my wife of 30 years, and the rivalry made our early dates together very interesting. We wound up raising our kids in an area called Granada Hills, where orange groves stood in the ‘50s. They can’t believe the Valley was ever the way that Charles Perry described it.

But it was, it really was, just like he told it in that beautiful article.

WILLIAM GREEN

Granada Hills