COLUMN ONE : Azusa--After the Bulldozers : The city fathers foresaw prosperity when change began coming to the sleepy little farm town after World War II. But something went wrong.

Environmental change--from polluted streams to congested highways and overdeveloped land--is affecting the quality of life across the nation. Such change is gradual and often goes unnoticed while it happens.

To measure how various areas have been affected over the decades, The Times dispatched reporters to the places where they grew up. This occasional series of articles examines how our hometown environments have been altered--for better or for worse.

Things were pretty quiet in Azusa during World War II.

It was a typical Southern California farm town in those days--mostly oranges, with a scattering of lemons, avocados and row crops. The biggest thrill at my grammar school was watching the city fathers climb the wooden tower in a corner of the schoolyard to look for Japanese warplanes. Of course, they never spotted any.

For the most part, Azusa was attractive then. Lush orchards. Clear skies. The unspoiled San Gabriel Mountains just to the north. Streets lined with palm, eucalyptus and pepper trees. Sprawling farmhouses in the groves. Tidy homes set comfortably on spacious, shaded lots in much of the town. And most of the faces were familiar.

The real excitement began about 10 years later, when, as teen-agers, we watched in awe as bulldozers rooted out the orchards, where we’d worked as farmhands, and tore away the surrounding brushlands, where we’d hunted jack rabbits.

The rural countryside we’d roamed so freely was soon replaced with asphalt parking lots, tacky shopping centers and mean little tract houses so small that some of them were hauled in on the backs of flatbed trucks.

Sure, it was ugly. Yes, there was dust, trash and something new blurring the sky, called smog. And when we walked up Azusa Avenue--past the Safeway market, Richter’s Drugstore, the First National Bank and Leo Nasser’s Men’s Store--we saw a lot of faces we’d never seen before.

But the city fathers pointed out that the downtown business section was thriving.

They spoke of the new brewery and manufacturing plants on the west side of town, near the old gravel pits. They counted the traffic jamming Highway 66, right through the center of town. And they bragged that the way things were going, Azusa would soon be the giant of the San Gabriel Valley--bustling, prosperous and handsome in a new, different sort of way.

But something went wrong.

Surrounding communities like Glendora, West Covina and Duarte grew and went on to become pleasant and successful suburban bedroom communities, with busy downtown business districts. Azusa grew and went on to industrialize, but the heart of the town went nowhere.

Highway 66 was replaced by a freeway that skirted local businesses. The downtown section, once a fertile hubbub of small offices and retailers, withered into a wasteland of pawnshops, shuttered stores, abandoned shopping centers and vacant lots.

And as the economy sagged, so did the environment. Smog stayed. Buildings aged without dignity, as porches sagged, siding cracked and paint faded. Trash piled up--on purpose this time, in one of the old gravel pits. The pristine front of the San Gabriel Mountains was scarred by quarrying.

Eugene Moses, Azusa’s mayor, says the town is starting a comeback. He says investors are ready, and revitalization of the downtown area is just around the corner.

But city officials have said such things before.

According to local historians, the first known residents of the area were Shoshone Indians who threw up a few brush huts and dubbed their village Asuksa-gna. Early records indicate the name translates to something like “skunk place.” Whatever it meant, the early Spanish settlers adopted a variant, referring to the place as El Susa.

The lands, which eventually became known as the Rancho Azusa, fell under the general purview of the mission at San Gabriel in 1771. Probably used for livestock grazing, the rancho, then about 10,000 acres, was eventually sold in 1844 to an ambitious young Englishman named Henry Dalton.

Dalton converted the ranch into a successful farming operation, digging irrigation ditches to carry the clean, plentiful water in from the nearby San Gabriel River. He planted grains, laid out orchards, put in vineyards and built a flour mill.

In the 1850s, Dalton drew up a town site to be called Benton, but no lots were ever sold. About 20 years later, an attempt was made to create another town, to be called Mound City. It, too, came to naught.

Finally, in 1884, land speculator Jonathan Sayre Slauson acquired the 4,431 acres that remained of Rancho Azusa. His timing was excellent.

The Santa Fe railroad was building a line to Los Angeles, 30 miles to the west, that would pass right through the middle of the rancho. Southern California’s first major land boom was on, and Slauson was ready to cash in on it. In the spring of 1887, he drew up a third set of plans for a town, this one to be called Azusa.

“Through the long hours of the night previous and until 9 o’clock on the day of the sale, a line of hungry and weary lot-buyers stood in front of the office where the lots for Azusa were to be sold,” J. M. Guinn wrote in his “History of Los Angeles and Environs.”

“Number Two claimed to have been offered $1,000 for his place in line; Number Fifty-Four loudly proclaimed that he would not take less than a cool hundred for his chance,” Guinn said, writing of an era when a dollar a day was considered adequate wages.

“Two hundred and eighty thousand dollars’ worth of lots were sold that first day,” he added. “Not one in ten of the purchasers had seen the townsite.”

Somehow, despite the same sort of promotional hyperbole that saw so many other Southern California boom towns of the 1880s vanish without a trace, Azusa survived.

It could have been the fortuitous combination of water, soil and climate that made the orange groves, planted there over the next 70 years, flourish and prosper. It could have been the presence of the railroad, and later, Highway 66--two of the nation’s principal transportation arteries.

The population grew from about 800 at the time of incorporation in 1888 to about 5,200 in 1942, the year I started attending Center School, a three-room elementary school in the orange-ranching district southeast of town.

There were two of us in the first grade when classes began that fall--myself and Hank LeMay. Charlene Mitchell and Roderick Abbott showed up by Christmastime. That made four of us in an area of about three square miles that today has a first-grade enrollment of about 360.

We were a simple ethnic mix in 1942--we Anglo kids, whose fathers mostly owned the orange groves, and the Latino kids, whose fathers mostly labored in them.

We got along fine, doing the same sort of things--collecting newspapers for the war drive, doing chores in the groves, exploring the unspoiled Angeles National Forest just north of Azusa, heading into the center of town on weekends for movies or a swim in the municipal plunge.

But there was a difference.

We did most of these things apart, we children of different nationalities. And while not much privilege was available in Azusa in those days, what there was went to us Anglo kids.

We Anglos wandered into town confident of welcome wherever we went, whether it was Richter’s Drugstore, where a woman named Sibyl dished out ice cream on a marble countertop, or the Azusa Theater, where we screamed ourselves hoarse over Roy Rogers.

Tony Contreras, a contemporary of mine, remembers “feeling separate.”

Unlike the comfortably spacious, Spanish-style farmhouse that I grew up in, Contreras, now 50, grew up in a cramped, clapboard bungalow in the “barrio” on the south end of town. Most of the streets down there weren’t paved in those days, and the little house he was born in--his grandfather’s, just around the corner--lacked electricity and plumbing.

“When we went downtown, we felt people were looking at us; like, what were we doing there,” Contreras recalled.

“We went to the movies at the parish hall, where they were in Spanish,” he said. “We only went to the plunge on Saturdays, and the next day they drained the water out and refilled it. They didn’t tell us we had to do it that way, it was just understood.

“My parents taught me to accept things like that. . . .”

Tony and I, along with George Hutton-Potts and most of the other boys we knew, worked on the ranches during the summers when we were teen-agers. The hours were long and the pay wasn’t much, but it was outdoor work, and we liked it.

Tony irrigated and picked oranges, I sprayed weed-oil and hauled fruit and George sold corn at a stand alongside Highway 66 at the Foothill Ranch, where Tony’s father and grandfather, and my father and grandfather, had worked before us.

Once a year, I’d take a Model A Ford pickup out along the ranch’s mile of frontage on Highway 66 to pick up trash. That year’s worth of trash would only half-fill the little pickup.

The Foothill Ranch was still about 750 acres in those days--more than 350 of it in oranges--and as late as 1949, the first year I worked there, we were still planting new orchards. It seemed as though the agricultural life, centered south and east of town, would go on forever.

And Azusa had a burgeoning industrial base, too, in what had been the largely empty brushlands west of the downtown area.

In addition to the rock-crusher pits, which had been there for years, there were the Aerojet and American Cyanamid plants, which had sprung to life during the war and were continuing to prosper. Lucky Lager built a brewery out there to take advantage of the excellent and plentiful well water pumped from the wash lands beside the river.

A brochure printed by the city in 1950 referred to Azusa as “the industrial giant of the San Gabriel Valley.”

It was about then that George Hutton-Potts’ family sold its 25-acre grove for part of the Azusa area’s first postwar residential subdivision, called Valleydale. The builders weren’t thinking about charm or space or craftsmanship, they were thinking about quick sales to World War II veterans short on cash.

“Forget quality,” said Leo Nasser, a 77-year-old haberdasher who has been selling Azusans their “dress-up” clothes for 59 years. “They put one nail in where they should have put in three. But the houses were cheap. And they sold. . . .

“Then people got the idea that every residential area had to have a shopping center,” Nasser said. “And pretty soon those were all over the place, too.”

For a while, as more orange groves were plowed under and more houses were tacked up, the shopping centers did pretty well--well enough to drain the old downtown area of the retail business that had kept it alive for decades.

Some say the death of the downtown area in the 1960s and ‘70s was hastened by a decision to make Azusa Avenue--the town’s principal north-south artery, leading to the recreation areas in San Gabriel Canyon--a one-way street. Some say it was an unwillingness to invest the sort of money needed to keep up. Some say it was political bickering and a lack of planning.

Whatever the reason, Richter’s Drugstore, the Safeway and a lot of the other downtown stores became vacant, and eventually were razed. Many were replaced by vacant lots. A few were replaced by new structures, now housing pawnshops, gun stores and the like. Some of the replacement buildings are now empty, too.

Leo Nasser hung on, in the menswear shop that still sports the decor he installed in the 1940s.

Most of his clientele are in their 60s now, and the few who drop by do so as much to socialize as to buy anything.

“I know them all personally,” Nasser said. “If I get four or five of those people in here a day, that’s what makes me happy.”

He gazed across the street, where a jewelry store, electric appliance shop and two drugstores have been replaced by an empty lot.

“Business used to be terrific around here,” he said quietly. “It’s a ghost town, now.” By the mid-1970s, some of Azusa’s shopping centers began to die, too, as residents were attracted by newer, larger, more attractive malls in neighboring towns.

Azusa Square, created in the 1950s out of an orange grove across the street from George Hutton-Potts’ house on Alosta, had boasted in 1960 of “sixteen shops, including a major supermarket.” Not to mention the first McDonald’s hamburger joint anywhere around.

Today, even the McDonald’s has fled, to a couple of outlets farther out of town. Azusa Square now claims one seedy old bowling alley and three or four marginal shops, surrounded by about 10 acres of crumbling pavement.

If the Azusa of today is plagued with one lasting curse, it is smog.

Azusa doesn’t create it all, of course. Most of the smog is generated 30 miles to the west, in the Los Angeles area. The stuff drifts east each afternoon on the prevailing breezes from the ocean, to be trapped above Azusa--and a number of neighboring communities--by the broad barrier of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Mayor Moses argues, with some justification, that Azusa became unfairly known as smog city because for years the Southern California Air Quality Management District had a measuring station there and the Azusa readings were among the highest.

Moses says the smog in Glendora and other nearby communities is just as bad. He’s probably right, but that doesn’t make the smog in Azusa any better. It still discolors lettuce in residents’ vegetable gardens and causes the bloom to drop from back-yard fruit trees. And if George and Tony and I remember correctly, the skies had been pretty blue when we were kids.

The Foothill Shopping Center fronts about an eighth of a mile of the old highway. Nowadays, they vacuum up more trash at that shopping center in a week than I used to shovel up from a mile of that highway in a year.

They use one of the old rock-crusher pits west of town these days as a landfill for trash.

Last October, despite protests from local water officials and environmentalists that the dump threatened the safety of water already polluted by industrial waste from other sources, the state Water Resources Control Board authorized expansion of the landfill to accept another 36 million tons of trash.

Browning Ferris Industries, which operates the dump, says the installation of high-density plastic liners in the pits and the construction of a complex drainage system will prevent further pollution. The local officials aren’t convinced.

For decades, the Azusa Rock Co. confined its quarrying operations to pits that, despite their size, are all but invisible, except from the air. A couple of years ago, acting under permits granted by the city back in the 1950s, the company started gnawing away at the face of the mountains above Azusa, creating an 800-foot scar that is visible for miles.

Last summer, a judge ruled against environmentalists who sought to block further mining.

Azusa isn’t even vaguely rural any more. What once was an identifiable town, surrounded by farms and open land, is now just another part of the great, urban, Los Angeles metropolitan sprawl that stretches unbroken almost 60 miles east from Santa Monica Bay.

The last of the orange groves in Azusa have disappeared, although a few of the original trees still survive in back yards.

The only agricultural operation of any consequence is the approximately 500-acre stump end of the Foothill Ranch, now home to the Monrovia Nursery, one of the largest commercial nurseries in the world. In recent years, the nursery has been planning to move. The land would be developed for housing and business.

While successors to Aerojet and American Cyanamid are still in Azusa, the brewery is gone, sold to Miller Brewing Co. and relocated in nearby Irwindale. Other, smaller businesses, many of them quite prosperous, have filled in the rest of the wash lands west of town, but for some reason, none of that has rubbed off downtown.

Azusa today has about eight times as many residents as it did the year I entered grammar school.

The streets are paved in the old barrio section now, with electricity and plumbing everywhere in town. But while there’s no identifiable slum in Azusa, there’s no identifiably posh area, either.

Local realtors say that while the most expensive houses in Azusa peak at about $350,000, top homes in Glendora, the town immediately to the east, command prices as high as $1.45 million.

Azusa’s mayor, Moses, says 55% of his city’s residents are renters--”and that’s probably the highest rate in the county.” He says the high rental rate makes for a highly transient population, “and that’s part of the problem.”

And even a lot of us whose families had never been renters--people like George Hutton-Potts and Tommy Graning and Eddie Tyck and me--chose to move elsewhere when we grew to adulthood.

Tyck and I ended up in Glendora, where there was more of the grace and space we had remembered from our childhoods. Graning ended up in the high desert, where there was even more room.

Hutton-Potts fled Azusa for the coast.

“I didn’t want to live in all that smog,” he said. “I wanted air. . . .

“And besides that, I didn’t like what had become of Azusa,” he said. “It was crowded with unpleasant little houses. It wasn’t the vibrant little town it had been. It was a shabby little town.”

On the other hand, people like Leo Nasser and Tony Contreras chose to stay.

“I love this place, and my roots are here,” Contreras said. “But when I was a kid, we had a town, and now it’s just a place to live. . . .

“It’s a hell of a lot quieter, now. When you don’t have a town, it’s quiet.”