What’s in a (Street) Name? Plenty

“Hello, honey? I’m stuck here on the bleeping 405.”

“Elroy, they can take this bleeping 101 and bleep it.”

“Bleep Ventura Boulevard! Isn’t there some way we can get our bleeping bleeps outta this bleeping mess?”

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Ah, the wails of San Fernando Valley gridlocked motorists! And based on the predicted population growth in the area, the crescendo of profanity rising from our choked and teeming thoroughfares may soon become deafening.

There’s a touch of irony here too. A traffic-jammed driver who curses a street such as Van Nuys Boulevard, Lankershim Boulevard or Sherman Way is merely following historic precedent. As prominent Valley real estate developers of yore, Isaac Van Nuys, Isaac Lankershim and Moses H. Sherman undoubtedly were used to having their names taken in vain. Real estate developers are always being cussed out by somebody.

Yet could that threesome have foreseen that 85 to 140 years after their various heydays, in masses of immobilized vehicles on today’s Valley boulevards, their names would still be heard, punctuated with masses of expletives?

Charles Nordhoff, whose name graces Nordhoff Street, which spans the Valley from Osborne Street westward to Topanga Canyon Boulevard, is a more obscure case. Never a developer, he doesn’t figure in Valley history at all. He was commemorated with a street because he lured a lot of people to the rest of Southern California through a book. Irrelevant to this but noteworthy is that Nordhoff also begat a literary dynasty embodied by himself and descendants, who, over the course of three generations, turned out popular travel, true-life adventure and fiction works, some of which became source material for Hollywood.

A Ventura County town once bore the Nordhoff name too. It was re-christened Ojai in 1916. In that same year, city engineers laid out the first stretch of Nordhoff Street: the half-mile between Woodman Avenue and Terra Bella Street in the future Panorama City.

Nordhoff arrived in America from Prussia at age 5. He ran away from home and lied his way into the U.S. Navy at 14. Later he sailed as a whaler and fisherman. Then somehow he veered abruptly into journalism.

During the Civil War he was managing editor of the New York Evening Post. He spent 16 more years with the New York Herald as an editor and political reporter.

Nordhoff wrote 13 popular books covering his nautical experiences and travels. During his wanderings he fell in love with California and turned to ballyhooing its wonders. His 1872 book “California for Health, Pleasure and Residence” is credited by some historians as the strongest force attracting Americans of that time to California. It was one of the influences that in 1877 brought engineer-to-be William Mulholland to Los Angeles, resulting in his creation of the celebrated aqueduct that brought the first Owens River water to the city via the Valley.

A handful of Nordhoff’s readers may have dribbled into the San Fernando Valley, although Nordhoff extolled Santa Barbara above everyplace else. He spent his declining years in Coronado.

Charles Nordhoff’s son, Walter--a chip off the old journalistic block--was the New York Herald’s London correspondent when his own son, Charles Bernard Nordhoff, was born in 1887. Returning to America after a spell as the Herald’s Berlin correspondent, Walter settled his family in Los Angeles near USC while Charles B. got his rough edges knocked off at Mrs. Clark’s Classical School for Boys in Pasadena.

Charles B. Nordhoff graduated from Harvard, and 1916 found him on the Western Front in World War I, an American volunteer driving French Army ambulances. Later he transferred to the French air service. After zooming through and over the canyons and peaks of the Pyrenees during flight training, he wrote home about their striking resemblance to Southern California’s familiar San Gabriels, the range bordering the San Fernando Valley on the north.

Lt. Nordhoff emerged from combat a much-decorated fighter jockey, but before his demobilization he was assigned to write a history of the Escadrille Lafayette. This legendary squadron was composed of Americans who had volunteered to fly for France well before the United States’ entry into World War I.

Nordhoff’s partner on the project was a Capt. James Norman Hall, an American volunteer who had fought for 15 bloody months as a British infantryman and then flew with the Escadrille Lafayette. He had survived a prisoner-of-war camp after being shot from the sky by German guns. The two strangers were destined to become one of the most distinguished writing teams in literary annals.

Civilians again, they decided to visit the South Seas. In January, 1920, after mustering at Nordhoff’s parents’ Pasadena home, Nordhoff and Hall sailed for Tahiti, their idyllic home for most of the remainder of their lives.

During roughly three decades Charles B. Nordhoff and James Norman Hall won wide literary fame, writing singly and in collaboration a total of 34 successful books, mostly novels and histories.

Meanwhile Walter Nordhoff, treading again in Grandpa Nordhoff’s footsteps, turned author with a popular historical novel, “The Journey of the Flame,” published in 1933. The best known Nordhoff and Hall work is the classic, based-on-fact novel “Mutiny on the Bounty,” published in 1932. In 1935 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released its filmed adaptation, which starred Clark Gable, Charles Laughton and Franchot Tone and was shot principally around Catalina Island. It became the year’s box office champ and won the 1935 Best Picture Oscar.

Less-acclaimed remakes appeared in 1962, starring Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard, and in 1984, with Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson. In all, five Nordhoff-Hall books have been given the Hollywood treatment, including “The Hurricane,” released by United Artists in 1937 as simply “Hurricane.” Little-known Charles Nordhoff, the man who started it all and who is memorialized in the Valley’s Nordhoff Street, died in San Francisco in 1901. Once-renowned Charles B. Nordhoff died in California in 1947.

James Norman Hall died in 1951, not long after seeing his son, Conrad, graduate in the USC class of 1950. In subsequent decades Conrad Hall has become a preeminent Hollywood cinematographer, his most recent credit being “American Beauty,” winner of the Best Motion Picture Drama trophy at last Sunday’s Golden Globes presentations in Beverly Hills. He is the holder of a Motion Picture Academy Oscar for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” an American Society of Cinematographers Award for “Searching for Bobby Fischer” and an ASC Lifetime Achievement Award. Hall has been nominated for the Oscar seven additional times.