CSUN University News Clippings

Nearby, an experimental nuclear reactor spews radiation during a partial meltdown.

A few miles down the road, Charles Manson and his followers roll out of rustic Spahn Ranch on a killing spree that will haunt the world.

The earth-shaking events in the summers of 1949, 1959 and 1969, respectively, rocked the San Fernando Valley and beyond. But throughout history, the penultimate years of other decades could be equally cataclysmic.

As Summer 2009 kicks off, Los Angeles teeters on the cusp of change.

“Any time we’re standing on the edge of something - whether we’re in a new decade or a new century - we’re sometimes anxious,” said Elizabeth Adams, associate dean of humanities at California State University, Northridge. “It’s what anthropologists call the liminal time - the time in between.

“But it can (also) be a time of great creativity … a moment when people sometimes break out of old patterns.”

In August 1769, Spanish explorers led by Gaspar de Portola trudged into “a very pleasant and spacious valley” before bivouacking among natives in what is now Encino. For local Tongva Indians, the visit would signal the beginning of their demise.

In July 1869, Pio Pico, the former Mexican governor of California, sold his half-interest in the San Fernando Valley to a farm association headed by Isaac Lankershim.

That year, a post office opened in San Fernando, putting the Valley officially on the U.S. map. For the Valley’s few residents, it would signal a century of development.

‘The San Fernando Valley: America’s Suburb’

By June 1969, the Valley symbolized the lifestyles of those fleeing major cities around the U.S., according to “The San Fernando Valley: America’s Suburb,” a history by written by longtime resident Kevin Roderick. And as the year progressed, it would prove among the most dramatic.

“Valley history is rich in every year, in every decade, in every digit,” said Roderick, who is now a professional blogger. “But the ‘9s’ look like awful fertile ground in the history of the Valley.”

The highlights include the crash of a Standard Airlines flight some 430 feet below the Santa Susana Pass on July 12, 1949.

The pilot of the New York-to-Burbank flight reported a violent fistfight about the twin-engine C-46 aircraft just moments before it crashed among the rocks.

Thirty-five passengers and crew were killed. Among 14 survivors was the actress who had been Judy Garland’s stand-in in “The Wizard of Oz” a decade earlier.

And among the rescuers were bedrobed followers of the WKFL Fountain of the World - a long-haired cult espousing wisdom, knowledge, faith and love - who were living in nearby Box Canyon. Their leader, Khrishna Venta, claimed to have led rocket ships to Earth and had recently declared, “I may as well say it: I am Christ. I am the new messiah.”

“I remember seeing the Fountain of the World people, in their blue uniforms,” recalled Virginia Watson, 88, of Chatsworth, curator of the Virginia Watson Chatsworth Historical Museum. “They were really nice people. Friendly. They wore Jesus clothes, all of them.”

Nearly a decade later, Venta, born Francis Pencovic, was killed in a suicide bombing by two ex-followers who accused him of dallying with their wives.

By summer 1959, the Cold War was hot. Pacoima rock ‘n’ roll heartthrob Ritchie Valens, born Richard Valenzuela and best-known for his hit “La Bamba,” and two other hot singing stars died when their plane crashed during an Iowa snowstorm.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, livid over not seeing Disneyland during a visit to L.A., refused to leave his car on a tour of tract homes in Granada Hills.

The Dodgers sizzled toward their first World Series in Los Angeles.

And a hilltop nuclear reactor above Chatsworth busted a radioactive vein.

In July 1959, Watson’s husband was working for Rocketdyne at its hilltop Santa Susana Field Laboratory when an accident occurred at an experimental nuclear reactor.

Over a two-week period, 13 of 43 uranium fuel rods either ruptured or partially melted, releasing an untold amount of radiation.

Company officials that summer said no radiation had escaped, that no one had been exposed to harm. But in 1989, news of extensive radioactive and toxic contamination at the lab launched calls for a massive environmental cleanup and a flurry of health-related lawsuits.

“We knew a little bit about it,” Watson said, “but it was all hushed up.”

Counterculture helps summer of ‘69 spin out of control

It would be 10 years after Valens’ death that the Valley would again rock the world. For there were few times as out of control as Summer 1969, as the counterculture caromed ’round a U.S. landing on the moon.

And two months before the phenomenon of Woodstock, more than 120,000 fans converged on the Devonshire Downs fairgrounds for America’s largest rock concert to date.

Beginning June 20, and for three blurry days, such psychedelic icons as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Burdon, Steppenwolf and The Byrds rocked the the one-time horse track. Only there were few bathrooms. Little food. No rules. And a torrent of gate crashers during a party that spread to nearby neighborhoods as the Downs closed down at night.

“For the kids, it was fun,” said Roderick, who was then 16 when he crashed the gates a few miles from his Northridge home. “But for the neighbors, it was a weekend of hell.

“It was the biggest thing to hit the suburbs. It was the first and the last big invasion of the San Fernando Valley by hippies and music fans.”

But while Newport 69 put Northridge in rock nirvana, it was Charles Manson and his family who put the San Fernando Valley to shame.

The stringy ex-con, living in a run-down house in Canoga Park and at the remote Spahn Ranch movie set above Chatsworth, had terrified residents with his attentive mostly female “family.”

“We used to see the Manson Family in the market, at Hughes,” rummaging in trash bins, said Watson. “When they came in, everybody left. They were scary.”

“Poor Mr. Spahn couldn’t see. They took advantage of him.”

On the night of Aug. 9, 1969, black-clad intruders entered Benedict Canyon and into the home of beautiful actress Sharon Tate.

Tate, 26 and eight months pregnant, was slaughtered along with three friends and a caretaker’s friend.

Tate was hanged. Then stabbed. On a door was scrawled “pig” in her own blood.

The following night, the killers struck again. Market owners Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were slain in their Los Feliz home. A carving fork was left in LaBianca’s stomach. Bloody words again marked the scene.

Homecoming princess Leslie Van Houten and former high school athlete Charles “Tex” Watson were murderers for Manson. So was Susan Atkins, a troubled girl, and Patricia Krenwinkel, a homely secretary who said Manson had made her feel beautiful, according to news reports.

Their 10-month trial was among the most chaotic in Los Angeles history.

“With the Manson Family, you saw the death of the peace-love hippie movement,” said Sandi Gibbons, a former reporter who covered the trial for City News Service and is now a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.

“I could never accept the notion that Charles Manson could be the guru over anything, because he was a little redneck Southerner who hated women, and that’s all he’s ever been,” she said. “He was a con man, and he still is.”

It would be another 30 years before another hate-filled man terrorized Los Angeles on a summer eve of the new millennium.

After traveling from Washington state with an arsenal of weapons, white supremacist Buford O. Furrow Jr. on Aug. 10, 1999 went on a shooting spree at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills.

Spraying more than 70 rounds with a 9 mm rifle, Furrow wounded three children, a teenage girl and a receptionist. He then drove to Chatsworth, where he gunned down Filipino-born postman Joseph Ileto in a rampage that would shock the nation.

Valley secession movement gains momentum in 1999

In decades ending in 9, many events were notoriously dark. And others were on the brink. In 1999, the Sherman Oaks Galleria, home of the Valley Girl, closed as a full-service shopping mall as a Valley secession movement gathered steam.

“Once you enter the liminal place, it encourages anxiety, and some like Manson and his family, they take things too far,” said Adams, of Cal State Northridge. “They may have taken the good ideas of the counterculture. Instead of using them for (good), they used them for evil.

“By the end of the millennium, the Valley is torn about its identity - half wanted to leave Los Angeles, half wanted to stay,” she said. “So the Galleria can’t exist anymore - because the Valley would be a caricature of itself.”