Street of Fire

Many Los Angeles streets possess a character all their own. Mulholland Drive is known for its views of the city, Sunset Boulevard for its colossal billboards. Brentwood’s Barrington Avenue is defined by its gnarled ficus trees.

Then there is the lesser-known South Sierra Bonita, graced by lacy jacarandas and well-cared-for lawns and tidy Spanish and Tudor-style houses. But the Wilshire District street has distinction beyond that of its lavender-flowered trees and architecture.

Within a short stretch of closely situated houses, live 10 people, parents and children, with red hair. Considering that only 2% to 5% of the U.S. population has red locks, this is either some sort of harmonic convergence of redheads, or at the very least, a statistical fluke.

“We talk about it quite a bit because it is so weird,” said non-redhead Sonja Hults, mother of Hunter, 4, a strawberry blond with blue eyes. “All of us joke that it’s in the water from rust off the pipes. I mean, what else do we share? We warn people when they are shopping for houses here that you have to be prepared to have a redhead and that you have to buy stock in a company that makes 50-plus [sun protection factor] sunscreen.”

For residents, the realization that an inordinate number of redheads were living within yelling distance was gradual. As parents congregated in front of their houses with their restless children, they began to notice that more and more of their neighbors had a shade of red up top.

Indeed, about the same time that Hults gave birth to Hunter, neighbor Judy Boasberg had the sienna-haired Noah Landry. Chestnut-haired Karen Golden and her husband, Steve Rachwal, who has a mass of light reddish-brown hair, had two titian-haired daughters, Hyla, 5, and Soli, 2. Then, Bill, with hair of a radiant red, and Susan Pruitt moved to the neighborhood a year ago with their sons, 3-year-old Wyler, a blond, and 2-year-old Jack, a strawberry blond.

The littlest redhead, the clincher, as it were, of the phenomenon, is cherubic Ethan Murray, born one year ago to Juliette Yager and Rip Murray.

Hults was the first to notice the crimson convergence three years ago when she spotted neighbor Karen Golden walking by with redheaded daughter Hyla. “I said, ‘God, you look like us!’ ” recounts Hults, who made fast friends with Golden while the children, whom people assumed were twins, forged a bond.

Boasberg, whose own lustrous mane of red readily connects her to her child, adds: “It would be really hard to tell whose kids belong to whom.” And you might say that the question of where all the red hair came from is as much a source of humor for the residents of Sierra Bonita as it is for strangers.

“I say it’s in the water, or it’s Steve [Rachwal],” jokes Mark Landry, Noah’s dad. “Steve works out of his garage as a graphic artist, and he’s always coming out of his garage all sweaty saying he just got through playing basketball. We know it’s not the mailmen, because they don’t have red hair.”

All the stereotypes and reactions to people with red hair are heartily explored in dozens of Web sites dedicated to redheads (such as https://www.realmofredheads.com) and in an upcoming redhead documentary. The film, with the tongue-in-cheek title “Better Dead Than Red,”will be a humorous “look at this little understood minority,” said independent filmmaker Kelly Loosli, himself a redhead, though not a resident on Sierra Bonita.

“It started out as a joke and a funny play on how white people are angling to be some kind of picked-on minority,” says Loosli, a visiting professor of animation at Brigham Young University in Provo, who has been at work on the film for three years. “I picked redheads. But what I found was the subject was a lot deeper than we imagined.”

In the documentary, Loosli interviews a list of famous redheads, among them television news anchor Harold Greene, U.S. soccer player Alexi Lalas, former U.S. Olympic volleyball player Steve Timmons, and Samantha Madsen, a champion bodybuilder. Loosli is also recruiting redheads everywhere to interview redheads and non-reds alike for the film.

But back on Sierra Bonita there isn’t too deep a reflection on the redhead phenomenon. The two men on the street with red hair, Rachwal and Pruitt, acknowledge that the hue comes with costs.

“I have always contended that it is easier to be a redheaded girl than a redheaded boy,” says Rachwal, who grew up answering the question, “Where did you get your red hair?” with, “The milkman!” “With a girl, it’s, ‘Oh, isn’t she cute.’ I would say the majority of women were less interested in red-haired men . . . unless they wanted a red-haired baby.”

As for Pruitt, he quickly tired of being defined by his hair color. “All the characters Ron Howard has played have haunted me all my life,” says the producer of biographies for E-Style who has been called “Richie” and “Opie” too many times to count. “When I got to college, it got better, and I did get glowing satisfaction knowing that I got kissed by the sun.”

As every redhead parent who has been emotionally bruised by their tinted locks has discovered, there is a kind of exuberance that comes with having a child born with a head of coppery hair.

“When Wyler was born and the nurse said, ‘Oh, look! He’s a redhead!’ there was a flood of tears,” says Pruitt, who adds that now his first son is “as blond as all get-out.” “You couldn’t have had a more immediate connection. It was as if someone said, ‘He’s beautiful like you.’ ”