On the Skids in Carbon Canyon #16141

Just sitting here on the computer a few minutes ago, when the familiar roar of a speeding car, the skidding as it tried to negotiate a curve here Sleepy Hollow and then the sounds of crashing were heard in short order.

Walking down to Carbon Canyon Road and then a little east of Rosemary Lane, there are two late-model cars sitting on the south side of the highway, one of them with a blown-out tire and probably other damage and three young men, in their late teens or early twenties, milling around with flashlights.

On the side of the road, where there is a dirt embankment about six or eight feet high, the tire marks are visible climbing the slope to where the remnant of a rock wall projected out and was hit by the vehicle.  The car then drove down the road a couple hundred feet or so before it came to a halt along the narrow shoulder.

The driver and his friends, who a neighbor said were racing through the canyon, were walking down the road with their flashlights looking for something--probably whatever common sense they once had.

This has become something of a consistence occurrence in a decade of living in Carbon Canyon and being right on the road gives a little extra experience to the regular displays of dangerous driving that happen along Carbon Canyon Road.  In most cases, the speeding and skidding don't lead to an accident, but sometimes they do.

Damage from a recent accident on Carbon Canyon Road east of Olinda Village, in which a car heading westbound skidded across the road and hit the guardrail.  

Not long ago, someone heading westbound on the highway, just east of Olinda Village took a curve too fast, skidded across the opposing lane and put a good-size dent in the guardrail there. Other recent instances of skid marks, mostly on the Brea side, show people miscalculating and over-correcting, but not actually hitting anything.

The sheriff's department was called, basically because of the close proximity of the disable vehicle to the roadway as a fairly regular stream of cars are making their way east into Chino Hills and there could be a hazard.  Wonder if the responding officer will ask what happened and what kind of answer there'll be.  The call in did mention that there was racing going on--the roar of the engine, the skidding and the crash were pretty clear indicators.

In all likelihood, the car will get towed and repaired and the youngster will be at it again very soon.

Chino Hills Historical Society Presentation Last Night

Last evening's talk at the Chino Hills Community Center for the Chino Hills Historical Society by Champion owner and publisher emeritus Allen McCombs was filled with great photos of the Chino Valley from the 19th century to the very recent past and punctuated with interesting anecdotes and stories about the people and places of the area.

McCombs came to Chino in 1956 fresh from a three-year stint in the Navy and with a journalism pedigree and training, purchased the Champion, which continues now in its 127th consecutive year under the original name and still very much a viable paper (even in this technological period), thanks largely to his leadership.

His talk covered everything from Antonio María Lugo, grantee of the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino in 1841, to the creation of Chino in 1887 by Richard Gird, to early landmarks and significant residents in that town, to the development of Chino Hills in the last quarter century, and much else.

The one-hour presentation covered a lot of ground and some of the best parts were when McCombs shared his personal connection to people, buildings and locales, with some of the more humorous and telling recollections coming during the question-and-answer period after the formal part was concluded.

There is no one in the area with more knowledge of the community's development and, while McCombs has shared much of this through his paper and, specifically, his "Rolltop Roundup" column, there is clearly a great deal more information that has not been made public yet.   Hopefully he'll do so because he is one of the last living links to the small-town Chino Valley which predominated until probably the 1960s or 1970s.

It was fun to hear the stories and see the images--preserving as much of the remarkable store of historical material McCombs possesses becomes that much more important because we'll not see the like of him again in the Chino Valley.

The next presentation for the Chino Hills Historical Society is slated for Monday, 9 February 2015 when the focus will be on the archaeological work done in the area over the years.  That should be an interesting presentation on the unearthing of the previously-buried history via artifacts found at building sites in the valley.

A Little History of Laband Village in Chino Hills

The last post concerned some of the history of the people behind the name of the Gordon Ranch subdivision in Chino Hills and now is a similar excursion into Laband Village.  This community abuts Gordon Ranch to the north, starting off of Chino Hills Parkway between Eucalyptus Avenue and Grand Avenue and extending past Grand and into the hills to the northwest.  As with the Gordons, there is some interesting history about the Laband family.

The Labands, an Ashkenazi Jewish family, hailed from what was then the city of Breslau in Prussia, which was an independent nation before being incorporated into a unified Germany in 1871.  After the German empire collapsed in World War I, the region became Poland and the city's name changed to Wroclaw.  This blogger has maternal ancestors, the Levys, who were also from Breslau.

One of the more famed of the Labands, Paul Laband, was a professor of international law, was a major supporter of the unified Germany, and wrote many important and influential works before his death at Strassbourg in 1918.

Born in Breslau in 1900 was Walter Hermann Laband, who came up in the banking trade in his native city but developed contacts throughout Europe and especially in Amsterdam in Holland.  Starting in the 1920s he began to make trips to New York as part of his business and, by the end of the decade, he was hired by a prominent Wall Street firm, Maurice Wertheim and Company, to work for them by facilitating stock transactions in Europe, principally London and Amsterdam, through companies acquired from Colbin and Company

In September 1929, Laband was a party in the first trans-Atlantic telephone stock transaction between his firm and a Milan bank.  Several weeks later, however, the stock market crashed in New York ushering in the Great Depression.  Fortunately for Laband, his firm had disposed of all of its bad stock prior to the collapse.

Walter Hermann Laband and his second wife, Katharina Steinweg, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1932.  From the Amsterdam City Archives and the Red Een Portret Web site.

Laband was married first to Ruth Hilde Steinlitz, from whom he was divorced in 1931.  In August of the following year in Amsterdam, he was wed to Katharina Steinweg.  Notably, while Laband was born Jewish, he was obviously not observant, as Katharina was a Roman Catholic.  The union bore a daughter, Kathleen, and a son, Stephen, and, in 1939, as the Second World War erupted, the Labands left for England, settling in the town of Sevenoaks.  Just several months later, Katharina Laband died a few weeks shy of her 33rd birthday.

Laband continued working for Wertheim & Co. until 1946 when he retired, taking with him about a quarter of the company's stock and providing the gift of a week's pay for each employee of the business.  Interestingly, according to an obituary for this last wife, Francine Lombard, he was working as an intelligence officer for the British Army at Versailles in France after the conclusion of World War II.

Francine, who was born in 1920 and grew up in Versailles, studied at the famed Sorbonne university in Paris and was a MASH unit nurse during the final assault of Allied forces into Nazi Germany as the war came to a conclusion.  The obit mentioned that, after their honeymoon, the couple relocated to the United States, settling in, of all places, Covina.

Walter Laband then formed General Air Conditioning, a firm that may well have been financed with the stock he took with him from Wertheim & Co.  The use of air conditioning was starting to expand exponentially in the post-World War II era and General Air became one of America's largest and most successful firms, operating offices all over the United States.

General Air's plant was located near the intersection of Interstate 5 and Interstate 710, but it was incorporated in Florida in 1953, for obvious reasons of tax advantages, with its offices in Jacksonville.  Clearly, the company made a significant fortune for Laband, whose wife, Francine, was a director.

The couple, who had three children of their own (Stephen, from the first marriage, died after an accident in 1951 while still a teen), purchased 400 acres in the southeastern corner of what is now West Covina near Grand Avenue and Cameron and lived on a large home there.  Within a few years of settling in the area, the Labands bought a large estate and property on a promontory overlooking Lake Arrowhead.

The Labands quickly became prominent in their new home, with the couple being active with Intercommunity Hospital, now part of Citrus Valley Health Partners, which offers a Laband Award honoring major supporters; Casa Colina, a rehabilitation center that was started next to Boys Republic here in the Chino Hills area before it moved to Pomona in 1960 and at which there is a Laband Building; Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, for which the couple endowed the Laband Art Gallery in 1984 and also supported the Kelly Art Gallery; and very active involvement in the Roman Catholic Church.  The couple each were knighted by the Church and served as regents and associates at Catholic universities, he at Immaculate Heart and she at Loyola Marymount.  The Walter and Francine Laband Foundation was formed in 1961 to support their charitable endeavors and dissolved in 2012.

Walter and Francine Laband at the opening of their Laband Art Gallery at Loyola Marymount University in the Westchester neighborhood of Los Angeles, 1984.  The photo is from the university archives' Web site.

It may have been because of their involvement at Casa Colina, when it was still in Chino/Chino Hills, that the Labands purchased a ranch on what was the former Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, just north of the Gordon Ranch discussed in the last post.  It hasn't yet been learned when the property was acquired, how large it was, and what was done with it (presumably, cattle raising), but it remained in the family until the late 1980s.

As the Chino Hills area became part of a major planning effort by San Bernardino County in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then the real estate market became red hot by the end of Eighties, the Labands benefited mightily.  Newspaper reports from October 1988 revealed that 89 acres of the ranch were purchased for a staggering $18 million by Fieldstone, a Newport Beach-based builder and that Riverdale Management was overseeing a planned community of 1,700 units, now known as LaBand Village (curiously, the spelling of the family name is everywhere else "Laband.")  Notably, just a short time after the Laband Ranch sale, the real estate market, grossly overheated and overvalued, tanked, leading to a depressed market which lasted through most of the 1990s.

Less than a year after the fabulous windfall in the sale of Laband Ranch, on 1 July 1989, Walter Laband died at the age of 89.  His widow lived until 2010 when she died at the same age.  Their large West Covina home, on a 2.44 acre parcel, as the rest of the 400 acres were sold off over their years for residential development, was sold in 2012.

There is an interesting little footnote to the story of the Labands.  Before he married Francine and while still in the banking industry in Europe, Walter bought bonds from the Republic of China that were backed by gold reserves and, allegedly, the full faith and credit of the government.

It is said Walter Laband began buying Chinese-issued bonds in 1913, but that would have been when he was only thirteen years old, unless a relative made those transactions for him, and continued for twenty-five years until the late 1930s.

Then came World War II and the Japanese invasion of China, followed by the campaign of Mao Tse-Tung and the Communists which led to the 1949 revolution that ushered Mao to power.  Nothing was done by the Chinese on these bonds until the People's Republic formally disowned any responsibility for the bonds as being from a previous government.  By 2008, when CBS News covered the issue, 15,000 persons were due an estimated $260 billion, so some of them took their complaint to Congress.

Part of the effort was to show members of the House of Representatives that the bonds included, in four languages, wording that bound the Chinese government "and its successors" to pay bondholders what they were due for their 5% interest payments over time.  Among those who went to Washington was Pierre Laband, son of Walter and Francine, who said in the CBS piece that his father needed the payments to "make ends meet," which, given the Labands very successful lifestyle, seemed a tad overstated!  In any event, the issue remained unresolved.

Like its neighbor, Gordon Ranch, Laband Village is generally viewed as a collection of tract houses and other residences, along with the Laband Shopping Center, as part of a new city with little history, but there is actually some interesting history behind the names of these communities within Chino Hills.  As the city approaches its 25th anniversary in 2016, that history can be an interesting part of the celebration.

A Little History of Gordon Ranch in Chino Hills

Just to the north and east of Carbon Canyon is a section of Chino Hills called Gordon Ranch.  Recently, a short news article from 1964 was located about a birthday party held at the ranch for its owner, Huntley Lennox Gordon.  This started a search for more information about him and the ranch property.

Gordon was born in September 1882 in Minneapolis to Hanford Lennox Gordon and Mary Louise Carpenter.  Hanford, a native of New York, was the organizer of the First Minnesota Volunteer regiment during the Civil War, which fought auspiciously at the Battle of Round Top, and later fought in campaigns against the Sioux Indians in Minnesota, being appointed a Brigadier General by President Ulysses S. Grant.

A biography of Hanford Gordon claimed he was made an honorary member of the Sioux, however, and he went on to be a poet and author, writing what were referred to as "Indian poems" in the volume, "Indian Legends and other Poems," a collection called "Laconics," and the novels "The Feast of the Virgins" and "Pauline."  Hanford's first wife, by whom he had a daughter, died in 1877 and he married Mary Carpenter late the following year (in a double wedding including his daughter, no less!)

Hanford Gordon became a lawyer in Ithaca, New York and then practiced in Minneapolis and made his fortune representing James J. Hill, one of the most powerful men in America during much of the late 1800s as president of the Great Northern Railway and who was known as "The Empire Builder."

He also did very well in the lumber business and was a mover and shaker in the Minnesota Republican Party (which was then generally more liberal than the Democrats) and served in Congress.  With his financial situation more than lucrative, Hanford moved his family to California, starting in San Jose, although he divorced Mary and relocated to Los Angeles, and married a much younger woman, Nellie Kennedy, whom he also divorced in 1906.

The elder Gordon also bought some prime property in the years after the Los Angeles region went through its first major land boom and then bust and built a commercial structure, The Gordon Building, at Second and Broadway.  He also owned a lot at Fourth and Hill that became the Hotel Clark, the structure built in 1914 is just now reopening as a renovated hotel, as well as several ranches in the southwest sections of the growing city.  He was also president of the Manhattan Mining and Oil Company.

On his death in 1920, Hanford Gordon had unusually detailed instructions about his burial, specifying that he be buried in his cheapest suit in a simple redwood coffin of exact dimensions.  He wanted no more than $100 spent on his funeral, noting that "I desire the cheapest funeral possible without the service of any priest or clergyman."

Moreover, he instructed a son, William, and another estate executor to place his body facing north at the west end of the Gordon family plot at Rosedale Cemetery.  He also ordered that only his descendants and those of his children be interred in the plot and pointedly excluded a son-in-law and his two ex-wives from burial there.  His $50,000 estate was to be divided into amounts from $100-1500 to family members, as well as to pay inheritance taxes.

Just prior to the elder Gordon's death, his son Huntley, who lived with his mother and brother in San Jose and then was a manager of a bathing resort in Los Angeles, acquired property in what was then the Artesia Township as a dairy.  This was in 1917 as the southeastern portions of Los Angeles County was increasingly being devoted to the dairy industry, including places like Cerritos, Paramount, Lakewood, Bellflower and nearby locales--areas that, when suburban housing took root by the 1950s, saw its dairy farmers move out to Chino and Ontario.  Now, the dairies are relocating elsewhere in the American West.

Huntley Gordon's dairy was on Del Amo Boulevard, just east of the San Gabriel River, and west of what is now Interstate 605 in a corner of Lakewood.  In addition to the business, he raised beef cattle in the Mojave Desert and on a 3,500 acre spread on what was once the west end of the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino and which simply became known as "Gordon Ranch."  In 1944, as the dairies of southeastern Los Angeles County were starting to be phased out, he sold the business, though one of his sons continued to reside at the site.  Today, the Gordon Dairy area includes a strip mall, gas station and a housing tract, with two of its streets named Gordon Drive and Gordon Place.

This "village monument sign" denoting Gordon Ranch is on the northeast corner of Chino Hills Parkway and Eucalyptus Avenue.  The former "village" is between Carbon Canyon Road and a bit south of Founders Drive on either side of Chino Hills Parkway.

From that point onward, Gordon made his ranch his home and soon dabbled in raising horses, including quarter horses.  One of his partners was Frank Vessels, a construction company owner and member of the American Quarter Horse Association Hall of Fame, who is best known for establishing a horse-breeding operation on his 435-acre ranch and then opened, in 1951, the Los Alamitos Race Course, owned by the Vessels family until 1990.

Huntley Gordon was first married to Olive Roelling and had a son and twin daughters with her.  After a divorce in 1915, he married Margaret Gleason and they had a son, Robert.  She died in 1945 and Gordon married his last wife, Edna Myers, who had been a well-known designer in New York.  Gordon remained a resident of his Chino ranch for over twenty years, passing away there on the last day of 1967 at the age of 85.

Huntley also had a serious hobby:  car racing.  In 1914 and 1915, he participated in six races, driving a Mercer, with the American Championship Car Racing circuit in the Los Angeles area, including one of the early popular tracks out at Santa Monica.  His best finish was a fifth place showing at a race in Corona. It is also said he raced at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The tradition continued with his son's son Robert, Jr., also known as "Baja Bob," a well-known off-road racer in the Baja California and local circuits.  His wife, Marlene, has also done some racing and the sport was continued by several of their children, including daughters Beccy (who also played softball for the American national team at the inaugural of female softball in the Olympics in Barcelona in 1992) and Robyn, the only woman to win the Baja 1000 race.

The most famous of the Gordon racing clan is Robby, brother to Beccy and Robyn, and who has been unusual in that he has competed in NASCAR, IndyCar, various off-road events and the Paris to Dakar race, in which he ended third in 2000.  A 1999 fourth-place finished at the Indy 500, Robby Gordon is a 3-time winner of the Baja 1000 and has taken the Baja 500 crown four times (most recently in 2013) and recently captured a bronze medal at the Summer X games at Austin, Texas.  He has been involved in a number of controversies in a sport that has more than a few of these.

After portions of the ranch were sold off over the years after Huntley Gordon's death at the end of 1967, the Gordon Ranch became part of an 1100-acre master planned community under the Chino Hills General Plan laid out by San Bernardino County in the late 1970s and early 1980s,

Thousands of people live in the Gordon Ranch neighborhood (Chino Hills' original "village" concept has now been abandoned), shop at the Gordon Ranch shopping center at Chino Hills Parkway and Eucalyptus Avenue, play at what is now Veterans (formerly Crossroads) Park, and drive along Chino Hills Parkway past some of the "Gordon Ranch" monument signs.

The history of the ranch and its namesake family deserves to be remembered as part of the city's history, especially because there seems to be an assumption that, because Chino Hills only goes back to 1991 (its 25th anniversary isn't far off), there is no history in it.  This is far from the case and the next post deals with another interesting family, the Labands.

Chino Hills Historical Society Presentation This Monday

Following on the heels of a very successful June talk in front of over 200 persons, the Chino Hills Historical Society is hosting its next lecture this Monday, 13 October at 7:00 p.m. at the Chino Hills Community Center, 14250 Peyton Drive.

The speaker is Allen McCombs and his topic is Chino Valley's Role in How the West Was Won (And the People Who Played an Important Part in It.  McCombs is the publisher emeritus of Champion Newspapers, the oldest newspaper published under its original name, having been founded in 1887.  He bought the paper in 1956, just after arriving in Chino after three years in the Navy, and his family retains ownership after nearly sixty years.

A native of Berkeley, McCombs earned his bachelor's degree in journalism at Stanford University, followed by a Master's in Business Administration from Harvard University.  In addition to his career running the Champion, McCombs served on the school board and the Chino Planning Commission and is a lifetime member of the historical societies of Chino and Chino Hills.

The Historical Society has recently sprung back to action, spurred on by the recent completion of the Chino Hills Community Center and a core leadership that is actively working to promote local history through presentations like the one McCombs will give, as well as to conduct oral histories.  The Society is entirely funded by membership fees and donations.

For more information on the upcoming presentation, call (909) 597-2051 or e-mail chhistory@aol.com.

Tumbling Tumbleweeds' Troubling Transformations in Carbon Canyon

This view off Carbon Canyon Road just west of the S-curve in Chino Hills shows a growing carpet of Russian thistle, better known as tumbleweed, filling the hillside.  A little late Spring rain amidst an ongoing serious drought has brought a proliferation of the highly flammable invasives to our area.

In recent weeks, there has been a significant transformation in the landscape of Carbon Canyon.  From a distance, deceptive green carpets covering bare, brown hills looks like a good thing, but a closer inspection finds something entirely different.

What's been popping up on the Canyon's hillsides and along Carbon Canyon Road are tumbleweeds.  A 24 September article in the Los Angeles Times noted that tumbleweeds, spurred on by a prolonged drought and some late spring rains, have taken over areas usually inhabited by invasives like the wild mustard we typically see covering our local hills.

For this blogger, it's been many years since there has been a proliferation of tumbleweeds as is occurring now.  At the time, the connection to drought was not there, but in the later 1970s, probably 1977 or so, drought drove the tumbleweed population sky-high and it is a vivid memory seeing the uprooted plants rolling down the streets of a Huntington Beach neighborhood.  Several years later, maybe in 1983, a similar phenomenon was observed in the Placentia/Yorba Linda area.

Soon enough, a repeat of those distant recollections will be here.  As the article related, tumbleweeds break off during the autumn and get into drains, ravines, fences, the yards of houses and in other areas.  More concerning:  the itinerant plants become highly flammable and pose a major fire hazard.  In our region, dry as a bone and with vegetation already crispy and containing high fuel content, this added threat makes for a troublesome possibility.

There is a little history in the article, as well.  Known as Russian thistle, the tumbleweed first made its appearance in the United States in the 1870s courtesy of the importation of flax seeds and spread widely and wildly.  Naturally, they flourish during dry spells and are kept in check when rainfall is significant.

Interestingly, there are efforts underway to eradicate the plant by introducing fungi from, of course, Russia. Experiments conducted by the federal Department of Agriculture have been successful enough that the agency is seeking approval from the agency's Animal and Plant Inspection Service to begin treatment.

Meantime, public and private property owners are left with trying to remove existing plants and keep the additional fire hazard down.

To see the Los Angeles Times article in full, click here.

Carbon Canyon Fire Safe Council Brush Drop-Off This Saturday

The Carbon Canyon Fire Safe Council is holding the Fall edition of its brush drop-off program this Saturday, 4 October from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. next to Fire Station 64 on Canon Lane and Carbon Canyon Road.

Council volunteers will be there to assist residents of the Chino Hills portion of Carbon Canyon only who want to bring brush and other vegetation removed from their properties and leave them in a roll-off bin provided by the City of Chino Hills in collaboration with Chino Hills Disposal.

With hot, dry Santa Ana conditions coming in this weekend, this is an important time to get that removed brush off property and disposed of and this program gives residents a boost in that direction.

Again, this program only applies to Chino Hills residents within Carbon Canyon, so if this fits the bill for you, bring down that cut vegetation this Saturday!