VERDUGO VIEWS:Daughter recalls father’s theaters

Louise Baffa Peebles grew up in Atwater, but she and her sister, Linda, were in and out of Glendale constantly since their father, Harry, operated a series of movie theaters here.

In the late 1950s, they ran Temple Theatre in the Masonic Temple on Brand Boulevard. The box office was located in what is now the entry to A Noise Within. Tickets were 50 cents for three movies, with two changes of movies per week.

“George Crittenden, who runs the films for the Alex Film Society, was a projectionist trainee under my father,” said Peebles. “He still thinks of that theater and my parents as an early home away from home.”

For a short time, also in the 1950s, the Baffas leased California Theatre, now Jax Bar & Grill.

“It was a very small, narrow gem of a theater with lots of red carpet and plush red seats.” She said.

Because of the narrow entry, the candy was displayed on lighted shelving on the right-hand wall.

Baffa’s biggest venture was building the Sands Theatre on Brand, just south of Harvard Street.

It opened in March 1963. A banquet hall is there now.

“By the first summer, the theater was off to a good start and he booked the second Sean Connery James Bond film, ‘From Russia With Love,’ ” she said.

“The turnout was fantastic.”

“These theaters were really family affairs,” said Peebles. “We had ‘candy girls,’ a janitor and a projectionist, but my mother, Madeline, my sister, Linda and I, and our uncles and aunts, did all the running of our theaters. There were always friends dropping in and food for everyone, with baseball games on the office radio and our cute little poodle running between the office and the lobby.”

Peebles graduated from Marshall High School, Winter Class of 1962, and helped manage the Sands while attending Los Angeles City College. She and her sister (Marshall, Summer 1958), visited their family every Friday night. She recalls that her father was showing one of the many revivals of “Gone With The Wind” when he passed away in 1976. Later, they sold the Sands to the owners of Montrose Theater on Honolulu Avenue.

Peebles listed other theaters on Brand: the Alex and the Glendale, with the same ownership; the Roxy, a few doors north of the old Glendale Federal building; and the Capital (just above Harvard).

The Baffa home was on Edenhurst Avenue, off Los Feliz Boulevard, near the Allen Wertz candy store.

“The ladies would have the back door open and we’d peek in and inhale the smell of the chocolates, she said. “They wouldn’t let us in.”

On weekend mornings, her father would take them to the train station.

“He’d buy a bag of oranges and we’d sit there peeling the oranges and watch the trains come in,” she said.

“Before the overpass came in, we had to cross the tracks on Los Feliz to get to Glendale. Sometimes a big train would come up out of Taylor Yard. You could sit for a long time as a hundred cars went by. Autos would be backed up to the Mulholland Fountain. Dad would race down side streets to Chevy Chase Drive and try to get over before the train got there. They were long trains, but they weren’t fast.”

READERS WRITE

According to Jim Brown, a longtime Glendale resident, Dick Lane, who served as master of ceremonies for the 1950 Glendale Police Officers benefit, was one of L.A.’s first major television stars.

“He found a niche in those embryonic TV days at KTLA. Under electronic genius Klaus Landsberg, the station, owned by Paramount Pictures, had been operating experimentally for some four years as W6XYZ. On Feb. 20, 1947, less than a month after it became KTLA, the first commercial TV station west of the Mississippi, Lane was sent to do a live on-the-spot broadcast of an electroplating-plant explosion on Pico Boulevard that destroyed a four-block area, leaving 17 people dead. The significance of the extensive live broadcast is almost forgotten,” Brown wrote, “as there were only about 350 TV sets in L.A. at the time.”

By 1951, a reported 30,000 people watched their black-and-white screens as Lane reported on an atomic explosion in Nevada from his camera location atop Mt. Wilson.