the short intro for the TV show that made Norm Grabowski's T a star... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weAIhNDn034
"OK George I'm leaving, but you'll see! In fifty years SOMEONE will think this is cool, and they'll also believe that ALL cars looked like this during the Fifties!"
You had to smoke two packs a day to get a voice as raspy as Jack Webb's! You just don't hear many voices like that anymore.
"They're gonna' be called 'traditional hot rods' and they're gonna' be all the rage! YOU'LL SEE!!!" (Sound of one screeching tire followed by the crunch of the 1-2 shift. Cloud of smoke optional.)
Remember the SoCal fad in the mid-late '80s where kids would cut-up In-N-Out Burger bumperstickers so they said "In-N-Out urge"?
Yeah, that was about as lame as the "Baby Onboard" window cling sign always spotted on a car driven by an jerk
You listed this as Cahuenga Blvd and Vine St..They run parallel to each other...Looks to be Vine St just south of Selma...The small building with the pointed roof on the left side of the street is Lucy's Burgers at the corner of Selma and Vine...Still in business and has been since 1926...One block south of Hollywood Blvd... Diggin' this thread...Great pics, lots of memories...There is a pic back at the beginning with the cheerleaders in the Merc convertible...Taken at my alma mater, Monroe High School in Sepulveda (now North Hills..)
[/]Old L.A. had great Street Furniture from the 20's to the 50's, there is an Acme Semaphore Signal on one corner a Keystone Fire Alarm and Police Call box on the other and a Porcelain Bear Top Ca. Highway sign in back of it. All gone now. Check the messenger? guy on the scooter
While not HAMBy, that film of the Ferraris rat-racing on Mulholland is an important part of the history of L.A.'s car scene. Rich boys thrashing what were then basically throw-away "old" sports cars. Even Steve McQueen saw that GTO and stopped traffic (in his XJ/SS) to watch it drive through the intersection. Epic.
I remember stuff like that. House fires, car accidents, whatever, and the neighbors would all come out and gather. My dad even put us kids into the car and drove to watch a local house fire back in 1966. One day at the corner market (in our residential neighborhood) one of the boys (about seven of us, all 4 to 8 years old) knocked a full Coke bottle out of one of the other boy's hands and it broke on the sidewalk. Boy 1 runs about 50 feet away laughing and Boy 2 picks up and throws a piece of the broken bottle at Boy 1. I can still see the glass twinkling through the air and it hit Boy 1 in his neck. Suddenly Boy 1 starts screaming and blood is squirting up in the air from his neck. I was five years old (1967) and I just stood there in terror watching this awful scene unfold. Boy 1 screamed, "HELP MOMMY I'M BLEEDING" several times as he ran in circles, bent-over at the waist, blood shooting 10 feet in the air over him. Within a second or two we were all running for our nearby houses and my buddy Rob and I ducked under his back deck where his "fort" was. Our mothers were all home in those days and his mom comes out and looks over the deck and calls to us "What is going on?" She had heard Boy 1 screaming up at the store and then heard us run full-speed down the driveway and under the deck. We came out, told her what happened, and then we all headed back up to the store. My mother was out front, having heard the commotion, as we went past my house and when we walked up to the store there was Boy 1, unconscious, sitting on the sidewalk with an adult man holding him and sitting behind him. Boy 1's back was against the man's chest and the man was holding Boy 1's neck and they were both covered in blood. My mother made sure the ambulance was on the way and then started talking to the man holding Boy 1. The man was a truck driver and he was making a delivery to the store when this all happened. He had heard the screams and ran outside, grabbed Boy 1 and...found his severed artery and held it together until the ambulance arrived. The trucker had been a WWII medical corpsman and when he saw the boy shooting blood everywhere (us other boys had already run off) he knew just what to do--or try to do. So there the two of them sat, on the sidewalk, the trucker calmly talking to my mother. A crowd gathered, just like the one above, and we all waited. 45 minutes later the ambulance arrived--they had gone through a shift-change and the oncoming crew had not gotten the message! When the ambulance crew hopped out and saw all the blood they practically went into shock themselves. The trucker told them what he was doing and how to transfer David (Boy 1) into the ambulance. They did so and the ambulance raced off with David. The firemen had arrived right away but were not able, or not trained, to deal with such a situation. Once the ambulance was gone the firemen got out the hose and washed down the sidewalk and I can still see all that red water running down the gutter for 80 yards to the next corner. David survived and I remember that he looked very fragile and gray as he stood in his driveway across the street from our house after he came home from the hospital. He had a bandage wrapped around his neck and he just stood there stiffly and didn't talk. The boy who threw the glass had to be dragged out from underneath his house by the police and I can still hear him crying uncontrollably as they did so. He thought he had killed David and he was inconsolable. Off to Juvi he went. So yes, I remember neighborhood crowds after some kind of event. Everyone but the dads were home during the week in those days. Neighbors knew one another too. People didn't move quite so much and there were residents in our neighborhood who had been there for decades. As a matter of fact, my buddy with the fort under his back deck? His mom and dad moved into that house in 1962 (paid 13,000 for the house) and they still live there today. Same phone number too. East Richmond Heights in the SF Bay Area. Sorry for the hijack. Back to EL-LAY!
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