Foster Park, R.I.P. : The little town, abandoned in 1965 to make way for California 33, may be gone but it’s not forgotten.

“Excuse me, sir. Could you tell me how to get to Foster Bowl amphitheater?”

“Go north on Ventura Avenue. All the way to the end. When you get to the intersection you’ll see a repair shop and a little filling station on the right. Next to it is the Golden Chick Cafe.

“Straight ahead, you’ll see the Foster Park Market. It’s got a green sign. You can’t miss it. It’s also the town post office, you know. And you’ll see an S&H; Green Stamp sign up on top of the market.

“They’ve probably got some special on beef jerky today. It’s good stuff. You can’t get it like that just anywhere. They call themselves The Home of Real Western Jerky. They say they ship it around the world.

“On your left, you’ll see Okies beer hall. That place can get pretty rowdy sometimes--they call it the Bucket of Blood--but they’ve got some fair country music. It’s next to the Shanty Tavern. Wouldn’t stop in there if I was you. Talk about wild.

“Keep going straight across the bridge, over the creek. It’s full and there’s darn good fishing there most of the year. You’ll go past two stone towers with lions on top. That’s the entrance to Foster Park. Make a right and you’re just about there. Just follow the road. The Bowl will be on your left.”

“Thanks, sir. Oh, could you tell me one more thing please? What’s the date today?”

“September 10, 1962.”

*

Sound like pure fiction? The conversation maybe. But the town, known as Foster Park, with its market and cafe and bar, situated inconspicuously between Ventura and Casitas Springs, was hardly a figment of the imagination.

Newcomers to the county may know the Casitas Vista Road-Ventura Avenue intersection as nothing more than a vacant, dusty spot beneath California 33, where the freeway comes to a sudden end. But until about 27 years ago, some 200 people lived in this full-fledged, fully operable town with its own small business district.

That was before the bulldozers arrived.

The town of Foster Park sprang up adjacent to Foster Memorial Park in the 1920s, during the city of Ventura’s oil boom. The town was named after the park, which was presented to Ventura County in 1907 by Eugene P. and Orphia Foster, in memory of their son Eugene C. Foster.

Foster Park was alive and well until California 33 was extended through the hub of it in the mid-1960s. Ventura Avenue was the town’s busiest street.

“The avenue was very crowded. It has been since the oil fields went in,” said developer Robert Nye, who worked on the freeway. “Oh God, would it be a mess now without (the highway).”

Originally the plan was to run the freeway along the hillside east of town, which likely would have saved the main thoroughfare.

But according to a January, 1965, report by the Ventura County Department of Public Works, the proposed realignment of the freeway extension through town was expected to save about $376,000 over the cost of going through a hillside. The assessor’s office valued the property in Foster Park, at the time, at $85,000. And the loss of county tax revenue from the loss of the property would amount to about $6,000 annually. A final plan to route the freeway through town was approved a month later.

Homes still exist on the west side of Foster Park as well as the outdoor amphitheather, but only traces--bits of the gas station and a back wall of the cafe--remain of what was the business area. And only a 37-year-old palm tree that once adorned a back yard remains from the 50 or so residences that once made up the east side of town.

That palm tree was behind the home of Mary Ann Aguilar (nee Pluim). She was one of three generations of Pluims to grow up in Foster Park.

Aguilar remembers seeing the old family home getting knocked down. “I was coming home from Ventura one day. It was the day they started tearing the houses down. My mother’s house was one of the first,” she said. “I drove by and saw the bulldozer and I cried.”

Bud Miles, who spent his teen-age years in Foster Park, remembers it as a friendly community. “I drive up and down there on a daily basis. I don’t call it the end of the freeway, I still call it Foster Park. I’m still mad they took it out.”

Miles isn’t the only one who holds a grudge. But by now the former residents of Foster Park are resigned to the fact that the town exists only in their minds and in the rare photo.

It takes awhile to stir their memories, but once these folks get talking about their old stomping ground, common themes surface.

*

Much of the reminiscing revolves around Foster Park Market, the community’s central gathering place through 1965. The market changed hands over the years, but was always integral to the town. The Corner Market, now standing on Burnham Road in Oak View, is the market’s successor.

Jean Davis, whose parents Ray and Inez Roberson owned the market from 1941 until 1945, spent many hours helping out at the store.

“The pickles, I’ll never forget them. A nickel for a big one. Every kid in Foster Park loved those great big dill pickles,” said Davis, who left Foster Park at about age 13. “My father’s nickname was ‘the Mayor of Foster Park.’ I don’t think we ever sold much bubble gum, he was always giving it to the kids.”

There were some advantages to being a shopkeeper’s daughter.

“Since my dad had a grocery store, I could steal packs of cigarettes,” said Davis. “All the smoke coming out from under the bridge looked like the damn bridge was on fire. Of course nobody could inhale.”

And working at the store provided Davis the opportunity to meet lots of people, including her future husband, Larry, to whom she has been married for 44 years.

“He came in and was twiddling around,” she said. “He used the old line, ‘What are you doing in a town like this?’ ”

And she met servicemen bivouacked at the park during World War II.

“Of course, all of us young girls were absolutely thrilled,” Davis said.

Though she had long since left Foster Park by the time the freeway moved in, Davis protested the development ardently. “The worst thing they ever did in the state of California,” she said, “was get rid of that town.”

*

Jeanne Getman lived behind the market when she was a child. It was from there that she made regular pilgrimages to the stone lions at the park entrance. “I would sit on the lions to make a connection to reality,” she said, “because Foster Park was an unreal place.”

Getman’s parents, Virginia and Gene Boles, bought the market in 1951 and ran it until they were bought out by the state in 1965. “They knew nothing about business, absolutely zilch,” Getman said. “They built it from a dozen loaves of bread the first day.” They ended up, she said, “owning a lot of Foster Park.”

She remembers her years in the town with some, but not a whole lot of, fondness. Apparently, living behind the store wasn’t exactly the lap of luxury. “I remember going to friends’ houses in Ventura and pretending to have to go to the bathroom so I could see what a real bathroom was like . . . tile floors,” she said. “Foster Park was a strange little town.”

Strange, perhaps, but close-knit. Getman described it as one big extended family, with her mother and father acting as everyone’s parents and the store was their second home.

“There were people there who couldn’t read or write, people who couldn’t do their income tax. My parents were the landowners,” she said. “There was always a pot of soup going. If people were hungry, they came in and ate.”

They also came in and watched TV.

“The first television was in the store, high over the dog food,” Getman said. “I remember sitting on bags of flour watching it for eight hours. People would just come in and hang out all day watching this box.”

Mention the name Gene Boles to anyone who lived in Foster Park during the ‘50s and ‘60s, and you will see eyes widen and a grin--or maybe a smirk--creep across a face.

Then you are likely to hear about the tin barn incident, when Boles and his friends dismantled and hauled away a building that the state had bought as part of its land acquisition for the freeway.

Boles was arrested for this removal of state property, but when the case went to trial, the barn was nowhere to be found. With no proof of the barn, the prosecution had no proof of theft, so the judge dismissed the case.

“My father and his crew of reprobates went roaring out of there,” Getman said.

The reassembled barn appeared afterward.

By many accounts, Boles was a “character”--but a friendly character. “Gene Boles was a wonderful guy,” said Nye, the freeway developer. “He extended credit.”

“He was a leader of men,” Getman said.

“His crew had names like Tex, Rudy and Joe Bob. They wore white T-shirts with Lucky Strikes rolled up in the sleeves. They had only half their teeth and the half they had were brown. They had pot bellies and could drink anyone under the table.”

*

If Boles was a “character,” then he shared the title with a guy by the name of Charlie Hoffman.

Hoffman was known for his daily handwritten billboards. He would set up shop along Ventura Avenue and display his opinions on current affairs for the benefit of people driving toward Ventura.

“There were so many issues--national issues, supervisor issues, city issues. He was very critical,” said A.P. (Buzz) Stokes, former county road commissioner, who saw the signs on many a commute. “They weren’t insignificant. They were humorous, very terse. One-liners for sure.”

Getman remembers Hoffman for his use of quotations. “Charlie Hoffman, with his little parables,” she said. “Here was this little guy in Foster Park with a little junk shop, quoting Nietzsche. Unfortunately, the people in Foster Park didn’t get it.”

*

Foster Park may not have been on many chamber of commerce lists of places to go for entertainment, but during the ‘40s and ‘50s people would come from miles around to attend country-music dances at Moose Hall. The Loyal Order of Moose got their original charter in Foster Park in 1929.

Every Friday and Saturday night, big-name acts would draw people in large numbers. Cars would be parked up and down Ventura Avenue.

Buck Owens and Johnny Cash performed at the hall. Another big name was Lefty Frizzell, who at one time lived in Foster Park. Bud Miles remembers him well.

“He would come home from being out singing and gallivanting around,” said Miles, “and he’d do rope tricks for us.”

Miles was too young to go inside Moose Hall, but not too young to enjoy the action there. “I remember as a young boy sneaking in behind the lodge,” he said. “We’d peak through the crack doors and watch them dance.” He may very well have run into the Pluim sisters who did likewise.

Getman, on the other hand, was more into opera than country-Western. But she remembers a thing or two about those hoedowns. “There would be people parked all the way to Casitas Springs,” she said. “I got my sex education looking into the back seats of those cars . . . through the steamed windows.”

As one might imagine, some drinking went on inside and outside the hall. And where there was drinking and dancing, there was apt to be fighting.

Marguerite Simonson, whose family built one of the first houses in Foster Park in about 1926, remembers a particularly unfortunate incident. “My father walked in the door one night and saw a fight going on. He was Irish, so he loved to fight,” she said. “He took a swing and hit his sister.”

Leon Helton has vivid memories of those dances too--or at least the mornings after. As a teen-ager, he worked evenings and weekends at Bill Diamond’s Foster Park Gas Station across from the hall. One of his jobs was to tidy up the station when he came to work.

“Sunday mornings, I woke up and had to clean the damn bathrooms from the people at the Moose Hall,” he said. “Everyone went out in their cars to take shots of whiskey or beer and then they’d go in and dance. They used our facilities across the street.”

In 1953, Moose Hall was bought by Fred (Okie) Leaf and turned into Okies bar, which relocated to Santa Paula when the freeway came in. And it’s still there.

*

Helton, Miles, Getman, the Pluim children and other youths of Foster Park might not have been allowed to participate officially in the town’s night life, but there was no shortage of activities to keep them entertained.

“We just hung around here,” said Nelson Sorem, whose favorite spot was the gas station, where he would hang out with Helton in the early ‘50s. “The park and the river were our playground.”

Stories of the Ventura River, which flowed freely through the area, are filled with childhood adventure.

“We didn’t have to worry about anything. Just hop across the (Southern Pacific) railroad tracks to the river,” Aguilar said. “We’d stand up on the bridge and watch them haul in the salmon. They were huge, about half as big as the men who caught them. We never got bored or tired. We just got worn out.”

Sorem remembers the steelhead trout.

“When trout season would start, this was the boundary. All of a sudden we would see trout fishermen below the bridge,” he said. “We could just pick the trout up with our hands--30-inchers. People don’t believe it. We used to make rafts and go up and down the creek. We used to carefully put our hands in the water and touch the fish.”

The Miles family--six boys and, later on, two girls--was the largest in the area. Parents Harold and Mona managed the approximately 24-unit Foster Park Courts housing tract in the 1950s, with the family itself taking up three of the units.

“I remember going down to the river and fishing and sleeping down there for a couple of nights, and shooting mud hens with a single .22, and catching crawdads,” Bud Miles said.

Miles also recalls a small rivalry between the kids on the east side of Foster Park and those on the west.

“I know we used to have coaster races. As you cross the bridge and round the corner, all the kids called that Park One. We used to coaster race down Park One where the steep hill is,” he said, referring to the homemade vehicles, which were basically boards with wheels.

When they weren’t fishing or racing, they might be sharing in dreams of riches. “Us kids always believed there was buried treasure up on Red Mountain,” Miles said. “We crawled all over there and got poison oak and went home.”

They never did find the treasure.

Small Town, Big Memories

People who lived in Foster Park for any significant period of time seem to have an indelible memory of life there and an opinion about its demise. Here are a few of their recollections:

“When I got home from school I’d go over to the store. People would call for food and Mrs. (India) Pluim and I would sack this stuff up, and I’d deliver all over as an errand boy. And after work, she’d give me a quarter or 50 cents, depending on how hard I worked. . . . Mrs. Pluim was an absolute sweetheart, and she still is.”

Bud Miles, former employee at Foster Park Market

*

“We had everyone in the county visit on Christmas because the whole town had forgotten whipped cream.”

Jeanne Getman, lived behind Foster Park Market when her parents owned it

*

“After Lake Casitas was built my mother grew worms (for bait) in the bathtub. She’d feed them the moldy tortillas that the store hadn’t sold the day before.”

Jeanne Getman,

*

“People were going to fight (the freeway) like crazy, but then the state started coming around and explaining it and making offers. They made fair market offers.”

Mary Ann Aguilar, longtime Foster Park resident

*

“A lot of us were sad to see Foster Park go. But there was always the argument--on the other hand . . . it was easier to get to Ventura.”

Marguerite Simonson, a freeway protester