Valley Life : jaunts : Canoga’s 1st Baby : Museum head who earned title in ’31 will preside over school’s 50th reunion.

Snow in Canoga Park? Hard to believe but true, as seen in a 1940 photograph on display inside a converted 1930s firehouse that serves as home to the Canoga-Owensmouth Historical Museum.

Situated in the western end of the San Fernando Valley, the museum also features a picture of the first baby born in Canoga Park, a boy named Bill Bird, now a 68-year-old retired Pierce College instructor and also the museum’s director.

Fourteen days before Bird was born, leaders of Owensmouth, founded in 1912, changed the community’s name to Canoga Park. The midwife who delivered Bird made a gift to the new baby of a ceramic bowl inscribed “Given to Billy Bird in 1931.” The artifact is on display at the museum.

Bird shares the task of guiding visitors through the collection of historic photos and memorabilia with a team of docents, all members of the Canoga-Owensmouth Historical Society.

This weekend Bird will preside over the 50th reunion of Canoga Park High School’s Class of 1949. About 150 graduates will gather at the museum Sunday starting at 10 a.m.

“The kids from all the way to the ocean on Topanga Canyon Boulevard attended,” Bird said of his former high school. “In those days, they could get here from the beach in 20 minutes--no traffic, no cops.”

Another museum docent, Jean Jaucks, said that when longtime Canoga Park residents visit the museum, they invariably cluster around the huge aerial photo of Canoga Park dating from the late 1950s.

“They have all kinds of fun with it,” she said.

The photograph shows the entire West Valley from a vantage point high above Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Sherman Way. Jaucks pointed out the historic Madrid Theatre, which was recently renovated and opened as a cultural center. Situated on Sherman Way, just around the corner from the museum, the theater will be the focus of a television documentary on Canoga Park airing Thursday on cable Channel 35 at 10 a.m. and 7:30 p.m.

Other photos include some astonishing shots taken after a big snowfall in 1949, and a picture of the local high school girls’ basketball team in 1927. The expressions on some of the faces of these demurely clad girls (middy sports blouses and up-to-the-knee silk stockings) show that the thing we call “attitude” these days is not new.

Owensmouth was laid out as a farming community in 1912 by Los Angeles Times founder Harrison Gray Otis, son-in-law Harry Chandler and business partner Moses Sherman (for whom the thoroughfare is named).

The district initially took its name from the fact that it lay at the mouth of the aqueduct that brought water to the Valley from the Owens River.

But the month before Bird was born, a civic effort succeeded in reclaiming a Native American name that railroad surveyors had given the place, Canoga. “Park” was added because the word was considered “classy” at the time, Bird said.

BE THERE

Canoga-Owensmouth Historical Museum, 7248 Owensmouth Ave. at Sherman Way, Canoga Park. Open the second Sunday of each month from 2 to 4 p.m. Extended hours this Sunday starting at 10 a.m. to host the 50th reunion of the Canoga Park High School Class of 1949. Admission free. (818) 340-5639.