220908 1729 E. Grand

This picture is Joyce and her mother heading out the door on E. Grand for our first trip to Las Vegas.

We lived on E. Grand for 5 very good years.
We had some interesting neighbors on either side of us. On one side was George and Mary, a delightful older couple we spoke with on a daily basis. They had some grape vines in their yard and a plum tree. They shared them with us in the summer and we shared our oranges with them in the winter.
Our orange tree, mid-summer before the oranges were ready in December.

On the other side was old and crazy Mary. She constantly complained about everything. In the late fall she complained that our tree in front dropped its leaves and they blew over on her front yard. I had to have Annie rake the leaves every day after school to make Mary happy. One time a big rain and wind storm snapped an upright pole that held up our shared privacy fence and caused it to sag over her yard. She went out in the storm in her wheelchair with a 2X4 board to try and prop the fence up straight. She called her son-in-law to come over and ask me to fix the fence. He did and I told him I would as soon as the ground dried and I could put in a new post. He was a nice old man. I felt sorry for him. His wife was Mary’s daughter and the two women both had dementia.

During those years we had a 1967 VW bug we drove everywhere, the best and most fun to drive car I ever had. Annie was a teenager then and we would take her places on the weekends, but it was never just Annie, it was her and her friends. The back seat of the VW sometimes had 6-8 girls back there, packed in like sardines. We would first round them up, then deliver them wherever they were going and afterward we took all of them home. We were the only VW taxi in town.

E. Grand was a four lane street and on a few late Saturday nights it was the perfect place for the teens to drag race. The police would drive over and send the racers off in short order. The next street over was the main street through town where the teens all gathered to watch the other teens cruising down the street. They had a good time doing that.

During those years we traveled all over southern California to the big attractions available there. We went to Disneyland, Knots Berry farm (Huge Disney-like park). We went to the horse races at Del Mar. The Hollywood wax museum. Torry Pines on the coast and camping up on mount Palomar and went to the observatory there. We also went to Sea World there in San Diego.
This picture is Joyce and her mother on the overhead tram there. Joyce was afraid of heights and that tram was high above everything. Annie and I were rocking the tram and having fun, sadly to Joyce’s dismay.

We were young and having fun. We also made our trips to Las Vegas and that was great fun back then.