4. Local Activism
The Kanes in Levittown
Julien: We both got active in the schools, and LPOA was a very important force for schools .
Muriel: They were mostly interested in taxes.
Julien: They were putting gas stations in Levittown. We were also concerned about business in homes. We decided to form zoning committee and I was asked to be chair. From that day I became zoning chair. I won every case except one, and the one I lost was against one of our friends who was granted a variance for a used car lot in this centrally located bluegrass park area. Well I had lot of friends in newspapers, because I refused to stop until I was finished. They realized he couldn=t kick Julian out because fighting fort the public good. I was able to put his opposition in very colorful tones, Aa zoning atrocity.@ Well, writers kept referring to it; I got a lot of grief in the newspapers, people would write letters. Finally we put so much pressure on the board, that he had to withdraw from that enterprise.
[Next year he became LPOA presiden] maybe for two years; [but he] didn=t want to deal with other stuff [the] president had to deal with; I just wanted to deal with environmental and zoning issues...
The Burnetts in Ronek Park
Sellers: What aboutYdo you have any memories of migrant workers? Or those farm workers?
EUGENE: Yes, well umYbut ahYI have to get into my police experience with them. We had, ahYnot too much contact with them here, even though I have some pictures somewhere of a family of migrant workers here in Melville that we went to visit them one Christmas. And they were living in a barn and we just couldn=t understand how you could live like that.
... we took ahYa turkey and loads of stuff to them...as part of the NAACP. >Cause we were attackingY.SeeYright away when we got out here we got organized. For one thing we had a higher level of constituency that we could, ah, we could mobilize on issues, all right. And we needed street lights and sidewalks and all of that stuff >cause we didn=t have that.Yand so we had to organize to get street lights and sidewalks and ya know, the roads, was nothing but mud ya knowYto get >em paved.
Sellers: The roads were not paved?
EUGENE: I don=t think so, >cause I remember an enormous amount of mud.
The Murphy's in Old Field
Paraphrased from the book:T
The nation’s third chapter of the Nature Conservancy was formed on Long Island in 1954, with Robert Cushman Murphy as it first leader. And in 1957 he helped inaugurate a lawsuit against a DDT spray campaign against the gypsy moth, the first widely publicized civil suit against pesticide use in the nation. He, along with thirteen other plaintiffs, sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture for damages to the property and persons.
In August of 1956, she inaugurated the “Women United for Long Island,” soon re-named “Conservationists United for Long Island.” The first meeting of forty women, convened by the conservation committee of her Three Village Garden Club, drew charter members came from four other garden clubs, two chapters of the League of Women Voters, along with the Nature Conservancy.
The Rynersons in Lakewood
Janet Rynerson: I think, from my own personal point of view, having lived in Los Angeles for so many years and feeling always--there was always an interest in politics, especially my mother. When you lived in L.A., you know, downtown seemed so remote and what happened seemed so hard to grasp, you didn't feel like you knew exactly what was going on. So here was a chance to have a home town, you know, to get in on the ground floor, to know what was happening.
You went through all this questioning about where we all came from. Well, you can see there was no allegiance, necessarily, to Long Beach. So the idea of adopting Lakewood as your home town had a lot of appeal.
Bud Rynerson: We didn't know there was going to become a city or how it was going to become a city. We just didn't want to be part of Long Beach.
Janet Rynerson: That's how it started. And then what we realized was they had these what they called shoestring strips around to try and make it possible to annex, and we knew that if we didn't incorporate, eventually we'd be fighting this annexation over and over again. So then that gave rise to the drive for incorporation.
Sellers: About how many other people got together for that, the signing?
Bud Rynerson: Oh, golly. There were hundreds of people who were involved in this little process in the community. The town is, what, 70,000 right now, something like that. We must have had several thousand at least involved in circulating petitions
The Alvas in San Gabriel
Alva: Mostly the people from here, but then we started getting them from the outskirts, people that had moved away from here and settled on the outskirts. So we had quite a group going. The outskirts could have been as far out as Pasadena, Topanga Canyon, in that area, you know, and Santa Monica. We had people from Santa Monica that were Indian, the coastal Indian. Then we had them out of the Baldwin Park Puente [phonetic] area, because they had moved away from here. I don't mean to say that we were just here, but this is where it started. The Gabrielano Indians were here. That's why we call them from the San Gabriel Mission. We were not [unclear].
Sellers: What did you call yourselves?
Alva: We called ourselves the Gabrielanos. We were not a tribe.
Sellers: Why?
Alva: They would not let us be a tribe. We were a band. So we were the Gabrielano band. We were the Gabrielano Mission band of Indians, and the Gabrielano came out of the San Gabriel, the name of San Gabriel and the mission. So that's what they called the people that belonged to it, Gabrielanos. The people out of San Diego were Dieganos. The people out of San [unclear] were [unclear]. San Juan, they were Juananios. See? Yet, the ones out in Caliente, the desert, they were Sapranos [phonetic] and the Caweias [phonetic], they were all the people on the desert and the mountain-type Indian.
The Lillards in Beverley Glen
From the book:
In the middle of January, 1952, the hills’ natural instability returned with a vengeance. A storm blowing down from the northern Sierra pummeled Los Angeles with over seven inches of rain, the worst flood since 1938. Torrents rushing down the canyons sloshed free any and all loosely packed soil. A half million cubic yards of mud and debris slid into Los Angeles City streets, closing the Pasadena and Ventura Freeways. Almost two hundred tons of it slumped down the steep side of Beverley Glen gulch into the Lillard’s yard...
The collective response brought pause to a refrain of cultural and neighborhood criticism in Lillard’s diary: suddenly, neighboring turned vital and authentic. An all-day work party “brought out scores...with shovels and pickaxes to help dig out five or six houses caught in mud slides.” It was hard to miss the weather’s contribution to the disaster, but scanning the hills, Richard early on surmised that only those streets and houses overhung by new construction, like his own, had suffered landslides. Joining with nearby neighbors, Lillard sued Quito Lane’s recent developer. His and other lawsuits also provided the nuclei for a revival of the area’s neighborhood association, dormant since the 1930's. ... The first president of a resurrected Residents of Beverley Glen, [Lillard] saw himself as revivifying that frontier democracy once celebrated by Frederick Jackson Turner.
Over subsequent weeks, Lillard’s neighborhood association joined together with 13 others to form the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Associations, from its beginnings a powerful force in Los Angeles politics.