The Town That Time Forgot : Communities: Tiny Piru will grow after 148 new housing units are constructed. For some, change is a hard sell.

This ancient gas station would be considered an eyesore in most towns.

It squats unsteadily beside a road long abandoned by the highway, its bowed doors giving in to gravity by degrees. The cracked paint is the color of the barren lots that surround it.

But instead of a blight, the station and its dilapidated downtown companions are civic attractions, after a fashion. They are used as locations for the film industry, featured in movies, commercials and music videos.

To outsiders, the blend of movie fantasy and hard-scrabble reality is sometimes startling: The front of the gas station boasts a large hand-painted sign that announces, “Crystal City, Texas.”

Actually, this is Piru, Calif. But the dusty, one-horse-town image that lures filmmakers is rooted in reality. Until recently, Piru has escaped the relentless growth that is transforming its neighbors, former agriculture towns such as Fillmore, into commuter havens.

But as Piru remains stuck in time, it also remains mired in poverty.

Its per-capita income of $8,386 is less than half the Ventura County average. Nearly two-thirds of its adults never finished high school, and half of that group never started ninth grade. Most of its jobs are low-paying and tied in some way to agriculture and the acres of lush green citrus orchards that cover the Santa Clara River valley.

“All my life I’ve heard Piru is going to grow. But it hasn’t happened yet,” said Norma Henderson, who moved there 47 years ago.

It is now. Piru is on the verge of a growth spurt--and not everyone believes growth is such a good idea.

In a close-knit, predominantly Latino town where homes are rarely sold on the market but are kept in the family, workers will break ground this month on 35 subsidized apartments for low-income residents. Next spring, construction will begin on the first of 113 affordable homes. The development could swell Piru’s population of 1,148 by 450 to 600 people.

The six-mile road from the main highway, California 126, to Lake Piru cuts through a pastoral creek bed dotted with homesteads, mostly invisible oil wells and a roadside stand that advertises the “world’s finest honey.”

Texaco, the major landowner, pumped oil in Piru beginning in the 1930s, but it capped its Piru Field wells two years ago and is preparing to sell its 5,500-acre holding, spokeswoman Faye Cox said.

Residents say developers are eyeing that land for resort homes and a golf course.

And one mile from downtown, construction crews are turning the notoriously perilous California 126 into a divided highway, which will make Piru an easy 10-minute trip from the Golden State Freeway.

“Piru’s going to change,” said Al Gaitan, president of the Piru Neighborhood Council. “It’s got to.”

Gaitan sees the need for change in downtown Piru’s boarded-up storefronts and in the exodus of its young people, who leave in search of jobs and housing. But others worry that growth will disrupt years of traditions that have made Piru, if not wealthy, a friendly and peaceful place to raise a family.

Farm workers still straggle through town, empty field sacks slung over their shoulders, after their shifts in the citrus groves. Giggling schoolchildren still study on the tranquil grounds of Piru School, where the ancestors of some of today’s students went to class as far back as 1882. A white cross erected in memory of John F. Kennedy still watches over the town from atop the steep foothills that so dramatically mark the town’s northern boundary.

And Esther Nunez still walks from her house on Main Street to her job at the Fillmore-Piru Citrus Assn. packing plant, as she has for 57 years.

Now, Nunez, 75, has concerns about the future of her town.

“I can’t get used to closing my door but I’ve started,” she said. “Because it’s not the same. It’s not the same people anymore. Very few families are still here.”

On weekends, Jess Zavala watches a clattering procession of vehicles speed by his house on their way to Lake Piru--RVs, motorcycles, cars towing boats. Zavala, who painstakingly carves wooden carousel horses in his carport, now thinks about leaving the house he bought in 1965, four doors down from the one he grew up in.

“I’d like my grandchildren to grow up like my children did, when you could have the kids walk three blocks to the store and my wife could call someone on every block and they’d look out for them,” Zavala said. “I don’t see it in the next 15, 20 years.”

Not that Piru is in the midst of a crime wave, he added.

“If I had to chase you out of here, I could call my cousin up the street or my godfather over there,” he said. “They’d block off the highway and you’d never be able to get out of here.”

While most of Ventura County staggered from two decades of explosive growth, Piru shrunk. Few today would call Piru an “important trade center,” as the Ventura Free Press did in 1899. The paper’s description seems astonishing today:

“Piru City has a large Methodist Church, a beautiful new public school house, two general merchandise stores, post office with four daily mails, Wells Fargo’s express, Western Union Telegraph office, Sunset Telephone Company’s office, meat market, livery, stable, barber shop, two blacksmith shops, carpenter shop, paint shop, a fine two-story hotel, restaurant, dressmaker, notary public, warehouse and packing house, poultry yards and dairy, fruit drying yards, and oil shipping station with tank and pipelines.”

The Methodist church still stands, in a snug picture-perfect clapboard building. Not far away is a fairly new Catholic church. But the post office has cut its “daily mails” to two, and the only utility company left is the Warring Water Co. (office hours 10 a.m. to noon every Tuesday).

The remaining merchants consist of four small grocery stores. The hotel, where D.W. Griffith and Mary Pickford once stayed while filming a movie, has been overhauled and is for sale. There has been no restaurant since the Blue Bird Cafe closed, although it opens on weekends as a bar. And while the Piru Beauty Salon offers the latest styles, the Casa de Wash ‘N’ Dry next door is vacant and for rent.

The struggling businesses and shuttered buildings that make up the downtown end at Piru Square, a vacant lot marked by an orderly row of mature pepper trees.

“I tell my daughters, ‘When you grow up, get out of Piru. Don’t get in a rut,’ ” said Jimmy Sanchez, owner of Sanchez Liquor on Center Street. “The packinghouse, it’s a living. But if you want to better yourself, you have to go outside.”

But while they bemoan the lack of opportunities in Piru, many residents say they can’t imagine a better place to live.

“It’s the peace and quiet you have out here in the evenings,” said Gaitan, a burly 51-year-old man who lives with his mother in the house he grew up in. “In the San Fernando Valley, I worked out there after high school and I couldn’t sleep.”

Harry Lechler, 82, the town’s unofficial historian, said he was afraid of the city and never thought of leaving Piru.

“I could come home and there’s no sirens and everybody screeching at you,” said Lechler, who owned a general store for 38 years.

Born in the hotel, which his parents owned, Lechler now lives in a house he built in 1937 for $3,200.

“It was $30 a month and I wondered if I was going to make it,” he said.

The old house now holds Lechler’s renowned private museum, which he has filled with curios, antiques, what-have-yous and what-are-theys. The collection began in Lechler’s attic, but grew so much he put up three buildings to hold it all.

The museum helps remind people of a way of life in old Piru, Lechler said.

“Everybody helps everybody. You may be mad at your chums across the street--may not even talk to them--but let his house burn and you’ll be across the street to help them as quick as anybody, even quicker.”

Happy with what they had, he said, residents have never been keen on growth.

Lechler said visitors would stop by his general store on their way to the lake and ask about living there. “They’d ask, ‘You have any houses for sale?’ I’d say ‘No, and I hope you don’t find one,’ ” Lechler said.

Today, finding a house for sale is still nearly impossible.

Piru’s houses, made of wood frame, stucco, and, occasionally, corrugated metal, sit cheek-by-jowl on postage-stamp lots. Not one is currently on the market.

“They’re a sleepy little town, and they seem to like it that way,” said La Ruth Forte, a real estate agent in Fillmore.

There is one exception, but it is a big one.

For $2.5 million, buyers can acquire the town’s most famous residence, the 11,500-square-foot Piru Mansion, which is considered one of the finest Queen Anne style Victorian homes in Southern California.

When fire reduced the original mansion to ashes in 1981, owners Scott and Ruth Newhall rebuilt it. The home has been featured in numerous films. But when Scott Newhall died a year ago, his widow decided to put the house on the market. The price has been reduced substantially since it first was listed.

What will it take to revive Piru?

James Jimenez, who owns land near the lake and La Buena Vida ranch outside of Piru, has one idea: Tear it down.

“Piru’s sort of a pathetic situation right now. There’s nothing there. In order to make something of the town you’d almost have to bulldoze the whole place and start over,” Jimenez said. He discounts talk of resort development near the town. “I can’t see why somebody would want to put up half-million-dollar homes nearby.”

But Lynn Jacobs, president of Affordable Communities Inc., which is building the 113-home development, said the new houses may be just the boost Piru needs.

“I think this will revitalize Piru. This will get some of those businesses that are closed and boarded up now to open. In many ways it will change downtown to what it was in the ‘30s and the ‘40s, when it was a functioning commercial area,” Jacobs said.

With enough population, she said, the town could attract a chain grocery store.

The three- and four-bedroom townhomes will sell for about $150,000, she said, and buyers will be eligible for low-interest mortgages.

The county’s Area Housing Authority, which is building the 35 low-income apartments, expects to rent most units to Piru natives who are forced to live in Fillmore or in crowded homes elsewhere in Piru.

“The 35 units will go a long way towards the rental needs of the low-income families in the area,” said Carolyn Briggs, executive director of the housing authority.

Douglas West, the park and recreation manager at the Lake Piru Recreation Area, welcomes the housing project for another reason: the increased work force it will bring.

“We don’t have a labor base. It’s hard to find employees out here because there’s not that many kids,” West said.

The need is greater than ever, because attendance at the rain-swollen lake is setting records.

For the fiscal year ending June 30, the lake had a record 800,000 visitor-days, West said. Attendance during the first three months of the new year is up by another 10%.

“We’ve been full every weekend,” West said. “You can’t fit many more people in here now than we’re doing.”

He credited the increase to the $2.8 million in improvements at the lake during the past six years, and a recession that encourages Southern Californians to take their vacations closer to home.

Every visitor to the lake has to pass through Piru, and many stop for night crawlers, beer or other supplies, and a report on fishing conditions. But while the lake may have kept Piru’s economy from sliding further, it never provided the boost that many expected.

Holding out for the status quo are the Haunted House gang, a group of men who hang out at a former bar, now boarded up, that stands in the otherwise-vacant lot across from the old gas station.

The men, most of them unemployed, kick back beneath a shade tree in chairs and an old sofa. Someone’s car radio provides entertainment, while a charcoal grill provides lunch. Some are there by morning, sipping beer, grilling tri-tip for burritos, and watching Piru pass by.

“I wish I was at a job instead,” said George Perez, the only member of the group who agreed to be identified by name. “We have to travel 15 miles to get a job every way. It’s kind of hard if you don’t have a car.”

At the Haunted House, the planned housing development doesn’t go over well.

“It’s going to ruin Piru--gangs, graffiti,” said a man who asked to be referred to only as a resident. “It’s good the way it is.”

Nothing typifies traditional Piru better than the Fillmore-Piru Citrus Assn., which is by far Piru’s biggest employer with 104 workers.

Nunez’s tenure of nearly six decades there is not unusual. Not far behind her in longevity are Connie Ruiz and Lucy Alverdi, both 71, who have worked at the packing plant for 54 years.

The three women are graders. They stand before two long conveyor belts, on which an endless supply of oranges from Santa Clara River farms tumble past.

As many as 250,000 oranges go by every hour. They rumble like bowling balls along the conveyor belts.

The graders quickly pluck out the premium oranges, the juice oranges, and the rotten fruit and toss them into separate chutes, where they are sent through the cavernous plant along an elaborate transit system of belts.

Nunez has been doing much the same job since she finished eighth grade.

“I came to work. I didn’t want to go to high school so I started packing. I enjoyed it so much that I didn’t want to quit. I come every morning to work.”

Their foreman, Sam Orozco, 30, shakes his head when asked if he can imagine spending his life grading oranges. Although Piru has been a good place to grow up, Orozco said, opportunities are few.

Piru “has to change because the town is getting bigger and there’s not enough places for people to live in,” Orozco said. “People buy trailers and put them in the backs of their homes.”

Orozco lives on his parents’ property in a second home they built behind theirs.

For others of Orozco’s generation, the packing plant is an unattractive option.

“My kid says there’s no work,” Zavala complains. “I say, ‘Don’t tell me that. Go down to the packinghouse and pick oranges.’ That’s good money. They say, ‘We don’t want to do that.’ These kids want bankers’ jobs without going to school.”

Meanwhile, another tradition from the town’s beginnings, the Piru School, continues to thrive.

Now part of the Fillmore-Piru Unified School District, the Piru School is so popular that about one-third of its 420 students commute from Fillmore, Principal Jane Kampbell said.

The original buildings are long gone, but the school retains a strong rustic atmosphere. The campus runs up to the edge of the soaring foothills. On the school’s large field are enormous trees, planted decades ago, that can shade an entire class eating lunch. On the school’s farm and garden, students can cultivate tomatoes and ride donkeys.

“Last year we had jobs going up and collecting all the chickens’ eggs,” fourth-grader Christina Landeros said.

But the new housing project brings some uncertainty to the school’s future. To accommodate the expected increase of students, the school district is building a middle school in Fillmore that all sixth-grade students will attend, Supt. David Haney said.

Eliminating the sixth grade from Piru School will free up classrooms for more students, but Kampbell said she is nervous about potential growth.

“We would very much like Piru School not to grow very much anymore,” Kampbell said. “One of the pluses of this school is that it is relatively small and more personable.”

Those, after all, have always been Piru qualities.