Another Anniversary This week we celebrate the 82nd anniversary of this newspaper. It got me thinking. What the heck was there to write about in Crestline in 1922? I imagine myself as the editor of the paper, sitting here on my same little plot of land, trying to find something to fill the paper. It’s hard enough today—imagine what it must have been like back then. There would have been lots of logging, a traumatic finger or toe amputation here and there, maybe a building going up or being finished, or possibly a film star passing by on his or her way to a movie shoot. And they had to fill eight pages! Big pages. There wasn’t a lake to swim or fish in, there wasn’t much opposition to anything that was going on, and you weren’t even supposed to drink, although I’m sure a few enterprising people way up here in the mountains took care of that little legal nuisance. Busting those little enterprises up probably made the news every once in a while. In my neighborhood, you would have constantly heard the sound of trees falling, the roads that were here would have been constantly blocked, and there would have been no electricity. Sounds a lot like 2004 is going so far in my neighborhood. It was the Roaring Twenties, but the only roaring that was going on in March 1922 was likely from the wind and the occasional bear. I’m sure this wasn’t Party Central then like Top Town would become about 40 years later. So what was there to write about and who paid to read it? There wasn’t a dance hall yet, and although you might have found them in Los Angeles, I’m also sure there weren’t many flapper girls dancing anywhere near my piece of property at the time. F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the two writers that my son, Austen Scott Reeder, is named after, described flapper girls as, “lovely, expensive, and about nineteen.” I’m sure if any of those were sighted on the road to Crestline back then, they’d have been snapped up well before they passed Panorama Point. No, my piece of property probably would have had one old oak tree (which is now an old stump) and one big pine, a bunch of pine stumps, and a lot of small trees coming up. In a few weeks when Edison and I are done with our work, it’s going to look much the same again. If you’re excited enough about a place, you find things to write about. This year, my family will celebrate six years of living here. And we know the day to celebrate it on—Sept. 19. I never marked the day I moved to Temecula or Escondido or Cardiff or Carlsbad or any other town I’ve lived in (well, except for when I moved to Germany the first time). You know why? Because the fact of moving to all of those places wasn’t a big event. They were where I moved to be close to where I was working, or to be close enough to afford to live where I was working. I couldn’t afford to live in any of those places now anyway. We moved to Crestline because it was going to be very cool. I’m not referring to how the weather is outside right now, but as the phrase that was coined in the Roaring Twenties goes—it was going to be the cat’s pajamas. When we started into escrow, every day we had this feeling that we just couldn’t believe that when this slowpoke escrow company up here finally got its act together that, “We’re actually going to be living up here!” That didn’t happen anywhere else. We came up here and trespassed on our property-to-be many times before we finally moved in. One day we were exploring the backyard and found that old stump of what must have once been a mighty oak, hundreds of years old. My name is Lee and my wife is named Shelby. Many years before, someone had carved on the stump in our backyard-to-be a heart and the initials “L + S.” It was fate, I guess. It still hits me. Just 14.2 miles from my house, there are people living in 1,300-square-foot houses that sit 50 feet away from a freeway onramp, and they cost more than my place, which is twice as big. Sh-h-h! If they’re too lazy to come up here and figure this out for themselves, let them stay down there. I guess that’s why we had to have our own newspaper, so we could keep everything that was happening up here to ourselves. All of this tree clearing as a result of the bark beetle infestation is going to make this place even more beautiful when this newspaper is another 82 years old. It will look more like this forest was meant to look, except with houses on it. That is, if our memories serve us well. That’s perhaps one of the best things a good community newspaper does—it never lets us forget our mistakes. Years down the road, perhaps halfway to that 164-year anniversary, this old codger is going to be sitting in a public meeting where a bunch of young Crestline residents will be irate and complaining about being forced to thin the trees on their property. I’ll balance on my cane and wave the front page of the Oct. 30, 2003, issue of the Crestline Courier-News in their faces—the one that has the eerie picture of the burned-out properties on Saturn Way. And I’ll yell, “Just sit down and shut up, you young whippersnappers! You want your neighborhood to look like this? No? Then just thin your dang trees and quit your bellyaching!” Yep, I’ll be talking like that in 41 years, you betcha. I can feel it starting already.
|
. © 2004 Winning Words and Crestline Courier-News For our search engine optimization and search engine placement services, go to:
|
