La Cañada History: Woman drives car into the local five-and-dime variety store
Ten Years Ago
A series of three winter storms that began on a Friday in January 2008 and continued for four straight days brought 6.39 inches of rainfall to the city. The only damages reported by the public works director involved boulders that washed off a hillside onto Corona Drive in the Flintridge area and some new leaks in the roof of the Community Center on Chevy Chase Drive.
Twenty Years Ago
La Cañada Presbyterian Church culminated a yearlong celebration of its 50th anniversary with two morning services in its sanctuary that honored charter members.
Thirty Years Ago
A power outage that left 2,000 La Cañada homes without electricity for several hours was reportedly caused by a peacock that had become entangled in power lines off Harter Lane.
Forty Years Ago
Faced with declining enrollment and a depleted reserve fund, La Cañada Unified School District officials were seriously considering the closure of Oak Grove Elementary School, adjacent to La Cañada High School. Oak Grove had first opened its doors in the fall of 1952.
Fifty Years Ago
When new postage rates went into effect on Jan. 7, 1968, raising the cost of first class stamps from 5 cents to 6 cents, La Cañada residents made an unprecedented run on 1-cent stamps at the local post office, depleting the entire supply of 40,000 in a single day. In the words of then-Postmaster Dick Mason, the run that took place Jan. 8, 1968 “was worse than Christmas.”
Sixty Years Ago
The front window of the Cornet variety store in the 400 block of Foothill Boulevard (near where McDonald’s restaurant is today) was boarded up awaiting repairs after a car driven by a Georgian Road resident crashed through it on a Thursday at about 10:30 a.m. The vehicle left behind more than $2,000 in damages. The three employees and two customers in the store at the time of the accident were not injured, nor was the driver, who said her car accelerated when she thought she was hitting the brakes.
Compiled from the Valley Sun archives by Carol Cormaci.
