Hi Gary,
I did indeed follow the link to your La Puente Days site. It started to turn into a time sink, especially the maps section, but others as well. The graphic development of the area in just a few years after WWII is striking. I know when we moved to E. Doublegrove Street, we thought we were way out in the country, and it sort of stayed that way for a while.
The hills were still pretty wild and covered with oak trees and manzanita. There were trails, but no roads. I do remember the soapbox derby cars we built and raced down the hill by our house (not "P" Hill, that was south.)
The story of the Hoovers moving to Maplegrove Street caught my eye. We had a subscription to LIFE, and yet I have no memory of that story. Of course, Maplegrove was on the other side of the hill beyond our place, and usually kids on our side didn't go over there, though I do remember watching those houses being built from the top of the hill. The pictures at the school in the Hoover story were taken in the kindergarten classroom at San Jose Elementary on Francisquito. I remember that distinctly. I was in fourth grade and had to run errands sometimes between the office and the kindergarten, and I remember quite well what the room looked like, and even what it smelled like!
The pictures of Old Puente are very evocative. I didn't know the history beforehand, and I feel like I have to study up, but in the meantime, the names Rowland, Workman, Temple, and so on are very familiar. A place on one of the maps that caught my eye was "Otterbein," because for some reason, I remember that name.
I recall that archaeologists were sent out to the school when a friend and I dug up those Indian artifacts and they did a brief dig of their own, reporting later that the site had been a Gabrieleno Indian village inhabited until about the 1820's.
I'm not sure, but I may still have the newspaper story about it. I seem to recall seeing it 20 years ago or so, but it will take some digging to find it if I still have it. We live in central New Mexico now, and some of the things we didn't bring from Northern California is still in storage in CA. If I find it, I'll send it (scanned) along.
One of the pictures -- here -- on your site, taken by Mary Herbert, has me a bit puzzled. When I first saw it, before I read the caption, I immediately recognized the jungle gyms as those on the San Jose Elementary School grounds. It was startling. But I thought I recognized some of the kids in the picture, too. And one of them, I'm pretty sure, is me (second from the left on top of the bars.) But if the picture was taken in 1962, it couldn't be. I wasn't there! We moved to Northern California in 1959. So I'm wondering if the picture might have been taken in 1958 or 59. On the other hand, I've been accused of having doppelgangers almost all my life!
I enjoy your sites partly because I have so few pictures from that era of my life. I found your site because I was looking specifically for pictures of Eastland for a project I was working on. Little did I know I would find so much!
Thanks for keeping at it. Though I don't have any pictures of my own to share at the moment, if you have any questions about what it was like in the area where I lived, between Lark Ellen and Azusa Ave and along Francisquito to the San Jose Hills, I'm happy to share memories.
Cheers,
BR brfelix@hotmail.com
