![]() SPEAKING OF RURAL… - You just don’t see things like this anymore in the valley. ![]() The driver wisecracked, “What do you want - blood?” then sped out of the pasture, dragging 400 feet of Vartanian’s barbed wire, which doesn’t grow on trees. Rancher Harry Vartanian rode up to see if the guy was OK, then asked if the guy was going to either pay for the fence or help him put it back together. On this date, an unidentified driver with a Los Angeles bumper sticker lost control of his car on Sand Canyon Road and took out 400 feet of barbed wire and fence posts. Barksdale was out about $2,500 in goodies.ĬITY PEOPLE. Adding insult to injury, while he was in the joint, thieves broke into his market and looted the place. It must have been one heck of a traffic ticket. POOR JIMMY BARKSDALE - He ran the B&B Market in Val Verde and had to shut it down while serving 60 days in Wayside for a traffic violation. The truck was valued at $14,000 and all that wine was worth only about $16,000. On the bright side, it wasn’t a very good vintage. He was trying to steer while standing on the running board, then jumped for his life when he felt the right wheels go over a cliff on old 99. Truck driver Lane Grinstead was forced to bail out of his double rig when an electrical short caught his cab on fire. He died of a heart attack in John Boston’s Hardware Store in Agua Dulce.ĭOES WINE BURN? ONLY THE BAD STUFF! - In 1952, we lost grapes. It surely wasn’t great for Harry Staples. NO RELATION TO YOURS TRULY - It wasn’t great for business. Add to that, we were still getting earthquake aftershocks from the big trembler a week earlier. Besides the mercury hitting triple digits, we had soup-thick humidity and cloudy weather. ![]() NEW ORLEANS IN NEWHALL - It was so foreign that some folks complained that the SCV felt like another planet. Hawley’s took over the next storefront and doubled its square footage. NEWHALL’S VERSION OF A SUPER STORE - On this date, the Hawley Drug Store had its “re-grand” opening. Word got out pretty fast around the valley and dozens of locals were helping themselves to bushels of Thompson seedless. Another truck, carrying $3,000 worth of grapes, lost all its cargo. One big rig lost its medley of nutritious food items and a bulldozer had to be called in to shovel the road free of cantaloupes, tomatoes and other summer fruits. In three separate accidents - all involving fruits and vegetables - huge double rig trucks flipped over on Highway 99. GRAPES FOR FREE - This certainly was the week for spectacular wrecks. The Mallett engine, pulling the freight, was so heavy and powerful that it only suffered minor scratches. Luckily, no one was seriously hurt but many cars buckled and flew off the tracks. A passenger train and a freight train unintentionally rammed into each other, engine to engine. A huge, head-on train accident a few miles from downtown Saugus pretty much shut down the railroad. ONE TOUGH CHOO-CHOO - All major northbound and southbound train traffic was stopped for a day. That highway tunnel was built in 1910 and on this very date, that tunnel was replaced by a highway cut through the Newhall Pass that is the modern Sierra Highway. (We’re talking highway/automobile tunnel, not train.) Old Sierra Highway used to have this regular highway tunnel that went right through the mountain. TUNNEL VISION - It’s hard to believe that you had to drive through a really big long tunnel to get to Newhall from the San Fernando Valley side. These who’s who of Western folk had grandiose plans to build the Newhall Polo Club and take on other groups from Santa Barbara to Hollywood. Bussey, Leo Logan and Bob Anderson (who was such a cowboy that his nickname was “Cowboy”) joined forces on this date to build a polo field on the west end of town at the Miller ranch. LET’S BRING BACK THE NEWHALL POLO CLUB! - Cowboys Bill Hart, Andy Jauregui, Hoot Gibson, C.V. SCV Signal News Podcast with Aron Bender.
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