Veterans housed at Griffith Park

April 27, 1946: Jack Benny and Bette Davis were among the celebrities on hand to help dedicate Rodger Young Village, emergency housing temporarily erected in Griffith Park for 1,500 World War II veterans and their families. Built at a time when homes were in short supply, the collection of Quonset huts was “the largest veterans’ emergency housing project in the nation and first of its kind to be opened,” The Times reported.

Pfc. Rodger Young, for whom the village was named, was awarded the Medal of Honor after he died protecting his squad from Japanese gunfire in the Solomon Islands in 1943. His mother was at the Griffith Park dedication, as was Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron, who described Young as “one of our truly great American heroes who died that his comrades and their families might have American homes in which to live.”