When I hit California in 1913, the red soil almost looked like gold. And the orange trees: I thought it was the most glorious sight I had ever seen, and I fell in love right then.

This was quite a garden spot here. Gosh, people used to grow asparagus and there were so many fruit trees! The Valley was just loaded with apricots, peaches, and walnuts. There were a tremendous amount of chicken ranches. In fact, one of the first jobs that I had was in a chicken hatchery. Boy, was that a dirty job!

I went barefooted the first 15 years of my life. Around here, hell, we never wore shoes—just a pair of overalls to go back and forth to grammar school and Van Nuys High School.c

My father was an adventurer who was in the Cherokee Run; I think the west was intriguing to him. He came out here and started in the lumber business in Van Nuys in 1911. Then, about 1913 or 1914, he got into the automobile business and was a dealer for Dodge, Buick and Ford. In 1925, he started a wholesale auto parts business near the corner of Lankershim and Chandler Boulevards in the city of Lankershim.

We had a good relationship with our customers. All the years that we have been in business, none of us has ever gone to court to try to collect a penny for a debt. What we lost in the grocery business didn’t amount to much. We had personal notes for a lot of it, but after about a year we just tore them up. The fact that those people and their families still deal with us, I guess, is what you’d call a good relationship.

We were one of the first Jewish families in the area. It’s very unusual for a Jew to be a blacksmith, but my father, Louis, was from the old school. He had such big muscles he couldn’t even bring his arms together.

The Depression hit us pretty close to home because my wife's father was really struggling to find construction work, and it was practically at a standstill. There were an awful lot of people that I've known for a long time who were on the WPA projects and all of those things.

We’d dam up the L.A. River down at Coldwater. We had a swimming hole called the John T. Die swimming hole. There were a bunch of trees, and we had a diving spot off the branches that went out over the water. We worked like hell because every year it would wash out from the heavy rains. We’d go out there and swim all day and smoke cornsilk.

We loved the Los Angeles River which meandered through the Valley, and we could often be found riding our horses through the washes, hiking along the bank, catching crawdads or playing swords with cattails. It was cemented up, and its course controlled to help flooding, but cars still swim on many Valley streets.

I used to go down to the L.A. River with a gang. We smoked cornsilk and caught crawdads and got ourselves all stuck up with nettles. Boy, that L.A. River! Before they paved it. It was a kind of jungle down there. We used to have an awful lot of fun.

I think it’s too bad that the Valley grew the way that it did. I would rather go back 25 or 30 years and have it as it was then without all the freeways and all of the people. I really miss the open places.

In 1953 there were only four public high schools in the Valley: North Hollywood, Van Nuys, San Fernando and Canoga Park. But by then the growth was on. I remember thinking that if everyone were ordered to return to the place of their birth, as in the Bible, I would be left alone in the Valley with many small children.

When confronted by the culture encompassed and portrayed by the entertainment industry, it is hard not to feel cheated of some of the American Dream's promised wealth. Still, the good life here is not just a projected dream, it is a reality—as long as you keep striving and earning and paying for it.

My father died in 1976, at the age of 80. He was buried at Valley Forest Lawn Cemetery on a hillside where, 45 years earlier, he had courted my mother. He is the only member of my family who remains in the Valley.

Why I ever stayed in the Valley after getting out here, I’ll never know. It was the most desolate place you would ever want to live. When the wind would blow, you couldn’t see across the street for the dust. It was terrible. Then the tumble weeds would be, I bet, four or five feet high. Right down the middle of the street. The winter time was just as bad with the floods when we’d have them."

We used to have terrible floods through here. The dams and storm drains weren’t up here, and we had no water control. The water used to push through here once a year turning all the roads into one flat mud cake.

There was no control of the water and in the winter season it was just hell around here.