Journey to the Center of the City

Los Angeles, it is alleged, lacks a center. This is a lie. In point of fact, the city’s center can be found at longitude 118 23’ 56” west, latitude 34 07’ 31” north.

It is a beautiful and tranquil place, tucked within 300 acres of parkland so obscure most Angelenos are not aware of its existence.

I was hoping Allan Edwards would take me there someday. As it turned out, 82-year-old Lotte Melhorn proved an excellent guide.

We drove to the corner of Mulholland Drive and Coldwater Canyon Boulevard, then down a road into Franklin Canyon, home of natural springs and ponds and mule deer and coyote. A park ranger joined us for the hike up a trail on the canyon’s eastern slope. We came to an overhanging branch of a walnut tree adorned with a little sign pointing left.

Not far from the tree’s trunk is a little homemade marker affixed to what appears to be a large boulder buried in the earth. “Point of Balance of the Plane of the City of Los Angeles,” it declares, along with its navigational coordinates and the elevation, 920 feet. Also stamped into the metal is the date the marker was placed, “12-30-90,” and the name of the man who placed it.

“He was just a kid,” Melhorn said.

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Allan Edmund Edwards was 70 years old and he was younger than most people half his age. He was still just a kid and something of a kidder, too.

He was 6 feet, 3 inches tall, and had the lean, flinty look of man who was most at home in the outdoors. Allan Edwards was by all appearances in robust health until, on the evening of Feb. 18, he complained to his wife, Beth, of an intense pain behind his left eye. Beth was alarmed. She’d seen her husband break a bone and not say ouch. “You can’t hurt steel,” he’d tell her.

Beth had Allan lie down and brought him an ice pack. When Allan’s speech became slurred, she called the hospital, and then 911. The paramedics were there within five minutes. Allan was still conscious, but the stroke was massive. Before midnight, he was in a coma.

When she held her husband’s hand and felt it grasp hers, the neurosurgeon told her it was reflex. Beth, a psychologist, knew enough about CAT scans to see that her husband’s brain was severely damaged--an aneurysm, probably. Yet when she and friends spoke, they could see subtle changes in the monitors of his heart and lungs. His brain was dying, but his heart was so strong. Nine days after the stroke, he died.

Allan Edwards had not been much of a newsmaker. The local papers might carry an obituary, but it would be a short one. He wasn’t one of those so-called “movers and shakers.” He never attained great power or monetary wealth. He was never accused of a notorious crime. He never had a supporting role on a soap opera or a sitcom.

What he did, it seems, was pretty much live life the way he wanted to live it--with curiosity, enthusiasm, generosity and a taste for gentle mischief. Along the way, he made the city he so obviously loved a richer place.

“Everything interested him,” Beth Edwards says. “Some people walk down the street and see nothing. He saw everything.”

Scrolls laden with “Whereases” and signed by Mayor Bradley and Mayor Riordan and other officials tell some of the story. The shock and the sense of loss is felt profoundly among his friends and fellow volunteers at Franklin Canyon, at the Japanese Garden and at the Valley Historical Society. For two terms he had served as president of the Historical Society, and for two terms he’d chaired the docents committee of the Japanese Garden.

Because of Allan Edwards, you can read a series of “micro-histories” of Valley communities; you can listen to Japanese music a few feet from a sewage treatment facility; you can visit the center of Los Angeles. And just about any story was better if Allan was telling it.

Allan often called me with story ideas. I took him up on a few. Yes, he could spin a yarn. He could tell the tale of the little-known Battle of Cahuenga (total casualties: one horse), and have you halfway believing it altered the course of world history. He once took me to the Valley’s old missile silos and explained exactly how these defensive fortifications prevented the Cold War from becoming World War III.

But Allan wasn’t joking about how he found the center of Los Angeles. His technique was simple and theoretically valid.

First, he got a large map of Los Angeles and pasted it to a piece of lightweight foam core board roughly the size of a double bed. Then he cut around the city’s oddly shaped perimeter, from San Pedro to Sylmar. Then he carved out holes to eliminate the “island” cities of Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and San Fernando, as well as unincorporated areas such as Universal City.

Then, very carefully, Allan Edwards balanced the City of Angels on the head of a pin.

*

A handsome wooden deck reaches out from the Edwards’ home in the hills of Sherman Oaks. When the Northridge earthquake damaged the small deck that had been there, Allan seized the opportunity to build a new, better deck--all by himself, at the age of 66.

“Oh, he can do anything,” Beth Edwards says, before catching herself. “He could do anything. . . It’s hard talking about him in past tense.”

They had been husband and wife--and, in a way, co-conspirators--for 31 years. It was the second marriage for both of them, and by the time they met in graduate school at UCLA, Allan was a worldly fellow. He often referred to himself as “an Okie,” but in fact his family had come west from Denver. At the tail end of World War II, he joined the merchant marine as a teenager and later worked for Standard Oil in China. He came back to L.A., enrolled at City College, got drafted by the Army and saw combat in Korea. His war experience, Beth says, was one subject that Allan preferred to keep in the past. Allan had designed and built a home in Topanga Canyon, and while his first marriage would end, he maintained a close relationship with his stepson.

Allan and Beth earned doctorates in psychology and pursued their calling at VA Wadsworth Medical Center. He was a research psychologist and she did clinical therapy. They always found time for travel, and once took a six-month leave to work in Malaysia, evaluating the training of Peace Corps volunteers.

Beth said they had their ups and downs: “We fought because we cared about each other.” But as they grew older, they grew closer. They retired from the VA in 1982 and embarked on explorations of their own city, and the occasional conspiracy.

The fact that L.A.’s center turned out to be in Franklin Canyon, Beth says, was a happy surprise. They had discovered the canyon and Allan was already tending to Lotte Melhorn’s landscaping around the nature center.

Nobody gave Allan and Beth Edwards permission to install Allan’s plaque. It was a guerrilla operation. Allan fashioned his marker from scrap metal, then he and Beth carried it in with shovel and cement. They found a nice spot, dug a hole and mixed enough cement to make sure it would be tough to remove.

Beth Edwards, a widow for one week, laughs remembering the time they discovered flowers and other offerings left by visitors. Wouldn’t it be a hoot, Allan would say, if a cult would deem this a holy place and drive the park rangers crazy.

She laughs and tries to hold back tears.

“[They] say it gets better,” she says. “It can’t get any worse.”

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Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, CA 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.