Summertime: A Guide to Entertainment, Activities And Excursions : Childhood’s Long Summers : * A member of a noted San Fernando Valley family recalls life in the 1920s and 1930s on a 700-acre ranch.

I would like to write a poem As long as California And as slow as a summer. -Jack Spicer

Long and slow. That was what a Valley summer promised to be, when on the last day of school in June it lay ahead like a loose scroll of endless lazy days that I would have all the time in the world to unroll.

In the beginning, simply to lounge at home was a treat, but soon I missed the companionship of my schoolmates as I came to grips with the hard realization that summer on our ranch meant solitude.

I grew up in the 1920s and ‘30s amid 700 acres of citrus and walnut orchards in Chatsworth and Northridge, where our closest neighbors were almost a mile away. My father was boss of the orchards and ranch yard. Workers lived in the bunkhouse, a cook in the cookhouse, livestock in the barn and corral. My mother was the presiding spirit of our home, which was hidden from view in an orange grove about a quarter of a mile north of the ranch yard. This kingdom of my childhood was centered along Corbin Avenue and Nordhoff Street, dirt roads rarely traveled by outsiders.

Dependent on our mother for transportation until we were old enough to drive, my brother, Richard, and I did not have casual social encounters with other children. Mother and other ranch wives arranged daytime recreations for us children, such as trips to the State Beach at the south end of Topanga Canyon, picnics in Browns Canyon at the north end of De Soto, outings to Pop’s Willow Lake over near Sunland or boating at Glover’s Twin Lakes in Chatsworth at the north end of Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

Sometimes on Saturday afternoons Mother would take us to the Madrid Theater on Sherman Way in Canoga Park. I remember seeing matinees of “Buck Jones” and “The Red Rider” serials. A really special treat was going to Graumann’s Chinese or to the Egyptian to see films such as “The Champ,” “Little Women,” “King Kong” and Shirley Temple movies with my Auntie Rose Mulholland. We’d get to stay with Auntie Rose, who lived in the city with my grandfather Mulholland on St. Andrew’s Place at Western Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard. She loved movies and I think having us stay was a good excuse for her for go to the movies. Those days were really special treats.

Mother would also take us for swimming lessons at the brand new Reseda Municipal Plunge, the first public swimming pool in the West Valley, opened in 1931.

From its beginning, Reseda Park was a lively social center for the West Valley. Every Saturday night, there were square dances. My father’s head tractor driver, Roy McDonald, would call the dances, and people who worked and lived on the ranches all came.

Closer to home, my brother and I hiked and played in the dry bed of Lime Kiln Wash, which ran from the Porter Ranch down through our property. We would travel by bicycle or horse or on foot to places nearby. There was so much open space in the Valley that tracts of empty land were our parks in a sense. If we wanted to play baseball, we’d just ride our bikes to a nearby empty lot and start playing.

Summers made a literate person out of me. I would spend a lot of time reading books such as “The Good Earth,” “Gone With the Wind” and the complete works of Dickens. I read everything in the house.

The Valley before World War II was predominantly agricultural. The succession of ripening crops gave a seasonal rhythm to the year, and summer was a crescendo of fruitfulness. Roadside produce stands sprouted as well. With the appearance of strawberries and apricots, housewives got out their canning equipment.

The Valley hummed with summer’s labor. I had just graduated from the largest eighth-grade class that Winnetka Avenue Grammar School had ever had--17 pupils. A few weeks later I earned my first money pitting apricots in a shed at a neighbor’s ranch, near where Northridge Fashion Center stands today. We were paid 50 cents for each drying tray that we filled, and after making $8 the first week, I felt in the chips. I was let off the following week because the crop played out.

Not everyone worked in agriculture. The Valley had long been popular for film locations, and Valley residents were accustomed to curious encounters with film folk. Earlier in the year, up on the Porter estate north of Devonshire, about where the gated community of Monteria stands today, MGM had built an entire Chinese village for the filming of Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth.” I would ride my bicycle up there to watch the shooting or simply to imagine that I was in China, where the heroine, O-Lan (played by Luise Rainer), had lived her long-suffering life. The illusion in those tawny foothills was complete, even to ducks, chickens and little pigs wandering in the yards of the thatched huts. The property men paid schoolboys for grasshoppers to be filmed as part of the great locust invasion. Between catching grasshoppers and trapping gophers, for which farmers paid bounties, an enterprising West Valley lad could put nickels in his jeans.

Our house was a one-story, mission-style home with an attic and a basement. It had a tile roof and walls that were insulated with large, hollow square tiles--called hollow tile construction. This helped keep the house cool during a good part of the long, hot summer.

By midsummer, though, the heat sent many folk packing off to the mountains and beaches for vacations--and my family was no different. Usually in the month of August, we would rent a beach house in Avalon on Catalina or in Santa Monica. I just adored the ocean.

Jack Spicer, the Los Angeles-born poet and my college friend who wrote the words at the top of this article, was right. Summers do seem long in California.

By the end of August those lucky enough to have taken vacations returned. The public playgrounds, like the one at Reseda Park and at schoolgrounds, began to close. Children thought of school.

The peril of fire was always at its greatest at the end of the long, rainless summer. In late August, 1936, all hands turned out to battle a blaze in Malibu and the Old Topanga area. Twenty thousand acres of brush and scores of homes were burnt.

A more pleasant memory that marked the end of summer--and another treat--was to go into town to buy school clothes. We’d shop at Bullock’s or the Broadway or Robinson’s downtown and it would be an all-day excursion. We’d even get haircuts at Robinson’s.

On the hottest summer nights we ate dinner outside at a long picnic table under a spreading sycamore tree. In September, just before school started, we had the last of our family Sunday dinners with aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents. After the platters of fried chicken, corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes and watermelon had been emptied, the adults settled into comfortable wicker chairs on the lawn. Under the darkening sky they spoke of many things.

I liked to stretch out on the grass and listen to the sounds tuning up for night in the orchard: crickets, frogs, mourning doves calling and little bats flitting in the growing dark as the crows grew blessedly silent after their raucous day. There, in a state of contented torpor, I half-listened to my family discuss the distant world where the Spanish were fighting each other in a civil war, and Mussolini and Hitler cast their foreboding shadows. My father had been vexed by a recent encounter with an acquaintance who had been to Germany for the Summer Olympics. He claimed that Hitler was saving the German people. My father foresaw catastrophe and said so.

But, during the summer of 1936, matters nearer at hand weighed heavy on me. I was anxious about entering Canoga Park High School, the only high school in the West Valley. More than 600 students were expected to enroll. The thought of encountering so many strange faces was daunting. Besides, walnut harvest always coincided with the opening of school, and every year I regretted missing its bustle and excitement.

Before the evening was over, my grandmother and her brother, my great-uncle Ike, would begin to reminisce about their early days in Calabasas. Before long they would be bickering about some long-forgotten and inconsequential matter such as when the justice of the peace, Charley Bell, lost his arm. Was it in a winery in Cucamonga or a boxcar at the Canoga Station? Finally my mother would appear bearing homemade fudge and divinity. The ancient mystery of Charley Bell’s lost arm vanished amid good-natured protestations. Soon, tranquilized by food and the lateness of the hour, everyone said his goodbys.

My world seemed as fixed in its place as the sun. I knew the old ones would someday go. My Grandfather Mulholland had died the summer before, and I had seen him put to rest amid pomp and grief, venerated as the man who brought water to Los Angeles. But my world remained. After all, how could a ranch disappear?

When the disillusioned Doctor Astrov in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” wondered if anyone in his stagnant Russian backwater would ever remember anything of the lives they had led, “those for whom we are blazing a trail,” he decided that they would not. His old nurse agreed, but added, “God will remember.” To which the doctor answered, “That’s a good saying,” and went on drinking vodka. Now I understand that what my grandmother and great-uncle were trying to assert in their sometimes tiresome quibbling was the reality of their vanished world just as I now try to salvage a bit of mine. If I were in the habit of addressing the Almighty, I would like to say: Please remember that girl on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley who once wished that summer could go on forever.