PIRU : Hilltop Cross Memorializes JFK

Most visitors to Piru have seen the town’s John F. Kennedy Memorial--perhaps without realizing what they saw. Visible nearly everywhere in the community, the simple white cross has topped a treeless hill behind Piru since Kennedy’s assassination stunned the nation 28 years ago.

Residents credit Luis C. Torres, then in his 40s, for erecting the cross. Torres now lives in a nursing home, but his wife, Andrea, vividly recalled the moment when she and her husband heard of Kennedy’s death. “We were in Santa Paula, in a doctor’s office,” she said. “We felt so bad about it--we thought a lot of our President.”

Luis Torres often gathered groups of young people for impromptu fishing or hunting expeditions, his wife said. So it seemed only natural for him to round up a crew of teen-agers to build a memorial to the nation’s youngest elected President.

The idea of a cross on the hill was not new to Piru. “Dad said there used to be a cross up there a long time ago,” said son Danny Torres, who was part of the group that set the cross in place. “A lot of little towns in Mexico do that.”

Lacking keys to the five gates along the dirt road behind the hill, the group hiked up with lumber, paint, tools and cement. Some months after the cross was completed, Danny Torres said, it received an official blessing from the parish priest, a man from Spain.

“We went up there to christen the cross, and he brought a bota of wine. We told him that here, young people aren’t allowed to drink like they are over there,” Torres said. “But we all had a little sip of wine.”

Today, most members of the cross construction crew have teen-age sons and daughters themselves, and some have moved away from Piru. Original pictures of the expedition have been lost, and both Torres and friend Tommy Rodriquez had trouble recalling more than half a dozen names of the participants. “I seem to remember there were more than that,” Rodriquez said.

The cross itself has had its ups and downs. It acquired added significance for some residents after the death of Piru native Manuel Torres, Danny’s cousin, in Vietnam. In the 1980s, it was burned in a brush fire and replaced--”I think by the Ortega family,” said Torres. Recently, during the Persian Gulf War, a few energetic supporters of U.S. troops hiked up the hill to affix a yellow banner to the top of the cross.

The cross has become such a fixture in Piru that Torres said it would be rebuilt in the future if need be. “I’d see it got replaced somehow, if anything happened,” Torres said. “It’s a symbol.”