OK, saddlepals. I know Valentine’s Day is Monday, but let’s not get overly mushy. It spooks the horses. And, no double snuggling. One person per saddle. If you’re horseman or horsewoman enough to hold hands without tearing an arm off or pulling the other out of their rig, well. That’s fine.

We’ve got a most interesting time ride ahead, saddlepals. There’s big earthquakes, nuclear power plants and a whole passel of murderers. We’ve got another self-inflicted gunshot wound but the odd thing is how the husband took his wife to the hospital. And it was sooooo close to Valentine’s Day. 

(Photo Caption: Nope. Famed actress Clara Bow was not a Nazi sympathizer. Around the turn of the century into the 1930s, this ancient symbol, dating back thousands of years, was a popular design motif. It was also a popular Navajo design. If you go up to William S. Hart’s castle and visit the flagpole, you’ll notice the old grout in the concrete that depicts what appears to be swastikas. They ain’t. Navajo signs again. Hart took them out during World War II because Naval officers flying over his house thought they were the Axis symbols. Even actor Harry Carey sported the controversial designs at his San Francisquito Canyon ranch and trading post in the 1920s and 1930s. As for Clara, in her day, she was one of the most famous actresses in the world. On this date in 1931, Ms. Bow rented one of those 8th Street rock houses from former vaudevillian, Charlie Mack. Clara actually lived in Newhall for a while. She was friends with William S. Hart.) 

FEBRUARY 10, 1921 —

— Stop the presses and hold your horses. On this date, the Ladies Auxiliary threw a bake sale to help finance the purchase of a piano for the Presbyterians. History is truly an exciting, vibrant discipline.

FEBRUARY 10, 1931 —

— The Santa Clarita Valley is famous for its little weather systems. The sun can be shining on one end and at the other, we can get snow or monsoons. A big cloudburst dumped about 3 inches of rain in a coupe of hours. It hit from Honby (where Home Depot is today) to Plum Canyon. The Santa Clara overflowed its banks onto Soledad Canyon Road. Folks were stranded for a bit.

— The old Ridge Route was one of the most dangerous roads in America. On this date, Erwin Connelly and Cheng Wong collided with an oncoming vehicle and were forced off the road. They plunged 600 feet to their death.

— Charlie Whitcomb was luckier than Connelly and Wong. He lived. Whitcomb’s car lost control on a soft shoulder and fell over a 75-foot cliff. Whitcomb was pinned upside down in the wreckage all night. His son went looking for him and found his dad the next day. Whitcomb had a severed artery in his wrist and nearly bled to death. Had his son found him a couple of hours later, Whitcomb would have been a goner.

— It was a busy day for the local sheriff’s office. Officers were involved in two separate shoot-outs the same day, one with rum runners and the other with some plain old robbers. Both gangs escaped after heated high-speed chases and gun play.

— The new Fords hit the Doty dealership in town. Brand new vehicles sold from between $430 to $630. That’s total cost, not the monthly payment. 

FEBRUARY 14, 1939 —

— It wasn’t a very pleasant Valentine’s Day at Newhall Elementary. The little school burned down for the third time.  

FEBRUARY 11, 1941 — 

— The Forestry Service was wondering what happened to their phone line from Newhall to Oat Mountain (the tallest peak in the SCV). Some rangers road up to check the line and found it broken. A little investigation and it seemed a huge transport plane clipped the line, missing the top of the peak by just 18 feet.

— Yet another epic rainstorm hit the SCV, the fourth in a row. Atwood was under water as was Pico Canyon. The ground was saturated and all the creeks in the valley were over their banks. Ralph Stevens, 76, who lived on Vermont, quipped: “I’m beginning to feel like Robinson Crusoe.” It was really funny. The low-lying Atwood Addition was frequently stranded from the outside world.

— On the bright side, with all the rain, locals were gobbling up the wild mushrooms. One wag noted he and his family had plenty of mushrooms but no steak to put under it. Beef prices even in Newhall were rather high.

FEBRUARY 11, 1951 —

— Scoutmaster Spike Ashford was given the coveted Silver Beaver Award. We’re just going to leave it at that.

— Back in the 1950s, our telephone needs were simple. There was no direct dialing and most folks shared a “party line” with as many as eight other households. Fred Trueblood, former Signal editor, shared this anecdote about one frustrated Newhall woman who had to make a semi-emergency phone call. The other woman wouldn’t get off the line and, after several tries, the first woman got back on and said, “Say, listen. I think I smell your beans burning.” The woman reportedly shrieked and hung up.

— Two small brothers and their tear-drenched mother were getting the third degree by the local police. Seems the boys, 7 and 8, put some large rocks on the train tracks by Sand Canyon and nearly derailed a freight train. They were caught and taken to the 6th Street poky. The lads had a serious run-in with reality.

— Here’s an odd one for you. Mrs. Elizabeth McGee was evidently cleaning a .22 caliber rifle and had the barrel pressed against her chest when the supposedly empty weapon discharged and sent a bullet through her. It missed her heart by two inches. It gets stranger. Her husband, Don, instead of taking her to the local Newhall Hospital, drives her all the way into Los Angeles to search for their family physician. He wasn’t home. Don then motors down to Huntington Beach with his leaking wife to find a hospital down there. Must have been a nice night for a drive. Cripes.

FEBRUARY 11, 1961 — 

— Mr. and Mrs. Jack Avant used to run the Peter McBean stud farm on the Newhall Ranch. They were mighty proud of their 21-year-old son, Bob. The former Hart grad cleared the high jump bar at the L.A. Times Invitational with a leap of 6-feet, 11-inches. Only two other people in the world had jumped higher.

— The Army rolled through downtown Newhall with a Nike Zeus missile en tow. Locals were awed by the 40-foot-tall missile. It was en route to upper Sand Canyon to the Nike base up there. A nuclear warhead would later be added to its cone, although that was rather hush-hush then.

— The DWP and Pasadena’s water and power company withdrew their bid with the Atomic Energy Commission. The big utilities requested permission to build a nuclear power plant in Haskell Canyon. The utilities figured it was just too expensive to build. Thank goodness. It was the third time Southern California utilities started the ball rolling for construction of a nuclear facility in the SCV. The other two locations were in San Francisquito and near Oat Mountain. 

FEBRUARY 9, 1971 —

— We had another one of those early morning big earthquakes. This one, centered in Sylmar, rattled the Santa Clarita, causing $5.3 million in local damage to 1,540 of the valley’s 15,000 permanent buildings. Mobile homes suffered the worse. About 70 percent of the SCV’s 2,200 mobile homes.  One car, parked near Hart Park, was partially swallowed up by the earth. Signal editor Scott Newhall came up with chilling prose in his editorial: “The Earth for a moment played us false. We are suddenly a baby who has been dropped by its mother, and we resent it.” On the bright side, while the quake caused $1 billion in Southern California damage, it was just 1/100th the strength of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Care to guess who was hurt the most by the 1971 earthquake? Thatcher Glass. About $3 million clean-up bill. Still. The quake was considered more mess than destruction. 

FEBRUARY 11, 1971 — 

— Locals were grinning at the chance for autographs. The legendary comedy team of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon took over the old Thriftimart grocery store on Lyons (where once I was a boxboy). There were filming the tragi-comedy, “Kotch.”

— The “Compton Four” were given a retrial. The gang members had been arrested and charged for the first-degree murder of two hunters in Acton. The trial ended in a hung jury. Six white and two Oriental jurors had voted guilty. The four black jurors voted not guilty. The evidence had been overwhelming that the Compton Four had traveled to Santa Clarita specifically to kill a white person, but district attorney Lewis Watnick felt the black jurors resisted the motive.

— Chester Furgeson was arrested, trying to flee the country at LAX. Chester had put out a murder contract for the superintendent of the Torrance School District. He was also the consultant for the Wm. S. Hart School District where he also tried to bump off our superintendent, Dave Baker.  

FEBRUARY 11, 1981 — 

— A wise person once noted that we either marry or give birth to our needles. Tracy Lincoln was charged for attempted murder — on his mother. The 14-year-old Valencian had first attempted to gas his parents by placing a pan of drain cleaner and bleach under their bed. When that failed, he shot his mother in the face with a .22 caliber rifle the next day. She recovered from the attack. Also on trial was Lincoln’s friend, 16-year-old Christopher Bernd, who supplied Lincoln with the rifle.

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Well that’s about it for this particular soiree into yesteryear. You folks show a little Valentine’s Day affection for your ponies and give them an apple, carrot or fine cigar after the rubdown. See you next Thursday under the warming glow of the West Ranch Beacon with a brand new Time Ranger adventure, and, until then — vayan con Dios, amigos! 

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