80th Birthday Stirs Memories of Canoga Park

Canoga Park celebrated its 80th birthday Sunday and, as parties go, it was rather sedate: a couple of cakes, some butterscotch mints and a few fond memories of the days when the Los Angeles River was a limpid little creek and the San Fernando Valley was a dusty, windy plain.

Forgive the party-goers for not raising a little more Cain. A few of the 150 who attended the celebration at the Canoga Park Women’s Club were older than the community itself. Edith Haas Hull, for instance, graduated from Owensmouth High School in 1916, four years after moving to Owensmouth, as the community was called until residents changed the name in 1931.

“It was a primitive town, but it was in nice shape,” said Hull, 96.

She and others recalled how the community was born in the minds of downtown developers and made possible by water imported from the Owens River--a real estate sales effort, plain and simple. After a few years of planning, the lots in the town site of Owensmouth were opened to public inspection 80 years ago today--Saturday, March 30, 1912--at a huge barbecue that was supposed to feature a race down Sherman Way between an automobile and a biplane.

What prospective buyers encountered instead was a windstorm so severe that they could barely find the barbecues set up to cook lunch. With no buildings or trees to break the wind, dust, tumbleweeds and other junk blew across the Valley with unforgiving force.

It’s become a Canoga Park legend--repeated at Sunday’s three-hour celebration--that the gusts were so strong that a fly ball at a pick-up baseball game was blown into the crowd, breaking a woman’s jaw. “She bought in Monrovia,” noted Catherine Mulholland, the honorary mayor of Canoga Park.

No such mishaps plagued Sunday’s party, which is the type of event that Canoga Park residents seem to enjoy throwing for themselves. Last year, they held a celebration to commemorate the 60th anniversary of changing the community’s name from Owensmouth.

There is now little to distinguish Canoga Park from the rest of the Valley except for the memories of a few people like those at Sunday’s event. So the old-timers reminisced about the community they knew as young men and women. Perhaps inspired by this winter’s floods, some recalled how it used to be a thrill for teen-age boys to carry teen-age girls across flooded areas to the local high school.

“This is about the community that was,” Mulholland said, looking around the room at the gray-haired men and women.