La Cañada History: Buena Vista Pictures acquires Frank Lanterman’s Wurlitzer organ

Ten Years Ago

Clergy and laity from La Cañada houses of worship publicly invited local residents to participate in an interfaith program of prayer and petition to be held on Sept. 21, 2005, in recognition of the United Nations’ International Day of Peace. Organizers said the local event, to be held in Memorial Park, would take the form of a candlelight vigil for peace.

Twenty Years Ago

Local historians were celebrating the news that the giant Wurlitzer organ that had belonged for several years to former state Assemblyman Frank Lanterman, was to be restored and placed in the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood. The 34-ton, 1929 organ purchased by Lanterman in the early 1960s and installed in a special room he added on to the Encinas Drive home he shared with his brother Lloyd, had become a white elephant when the home and its contents were bequeathed to the city of La Cañada Flintridge on Lloyd’s death.

This city, which kept the house as a museum, sold the instrument to the city of Glendale in 1991. In late summer of 1995 the Glendale Redevelopment Agency/City Council accepted a $120,000 bid from Buena Vista Pictures, which said the organ would be installed at the El Capitan, which itself was then undergoing restoration efforts. It remains there today.

Thirty Years Ago

An $11.3-million budget was approved by the La Cañada Unified School District Governing Board. The budget was balanced with what board members observed was a meager reserve of $263,542.

Forty Years Ago

After hearing from a Descanso Gardens Guild leader who said such a move would greatly restrict the number of visitors, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to rescind a plan to charge a 25-cent admission fee to the gardens. Barbara Crowley, representing the 800-member guild, pointed out that a fee had been instituted in the 1950s and rescinded in 1957 because it put a damper on attendance. Although the supervisors sided with Crowley’s argument, they cautioned that they would revisit the matter annually.

Fifty Years Ago

Golfers at La Cañada Country Club were expressing their concerns over the dangers of hunters taking shots at deer that frequented the course’s eighth fairway. The golf pro’s assistant reported to sheriff’s deputies that on a Sunday in mid-September 1965 firearms had been used by three different hunting groups, alarming but not harming golfers.

Sixty Years Ago

Irate citizens representing 50 households in the vicinity of Crown Avenue and Mero Lane circulated a petition asking that a commercial apiary then thriving on the Gould Mesa above them be declared a public nuisance. A spokesman for the residents said two or three bee stings a week were being reported in the neighborhood and that a hot spell in the late summer sent “flight after flight of bees” swarming down from the mesa, “most often picking small children as targets for their missiles.”

Compiled from the Valley Sun archives by Carol Cormaci.