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Showing posts from May, 2021

You Can Never Go Back.....

  It is also true that the only constant in life is change! I say these things because I had an unplanned trip to some of my old home areas in Southern California from the first of May to the thirteenth. And man, have things changed! I have a friend that lives in the town I spent many years living in, Yucaipa, California. Yucaipa used to be a small, mostly retirement community, about 70 or so miles east of Los Angeles if you're on your way to Palm Springs or directions east out off Interstate 10. When my family moved there in 1973 from Redlands, another no longer small town about 10 miles west, it was full of orange groves, egg farms, a turkey ranch, and many mobile home parks for the decidedly retirement-aged residents of the era. The freeway through the area was 3-lanes, not the current 5-lanes, and the population then was, as I recall, around ten-thousandish. Back then, there were many vacant lands, and due to its rural area, many homes had septic tanks and not city sewer connec

44 years ago, this date!

 It was a Thursday, this date way back in 1977. I was 19-years old, my family operated the Redlands Fox Theater, and I worked there too, most often as a Projectionist.  About this time of the day, around 4:00pm (pacific time), I was on my way driving west on the I-10 freeway in my 1973 Dodge Challenger (I still wish I had that car!), making the almost two-hour drive on my way to Grauman's Chinese Movie Theater in Hollywood to see, in 70mm widescreen (the high definition of that era), this new movie that had just premiered the day before, (movies premiered on Wednesdays back then) this new movie was called, "Star Wars."  Years before it became Episode IV, it was just, 'Star Wars'. I was drawn to the special effects and commercials I had seen about the movie on TV and in magazines for several months. There weren't the hour's long waiting lines........yet, those really started that first weekend and news stories were all over it about the lines after the week