Once upon a time,
Dirt roads lined the simple composition of a town in its youth, snug against the region called
Asuksagna, Tongva communities where home is located. A mourning dove’s view captures
acres and acres of citrus treetops. A young Glendoran rides their horse on a dirt road; the ripe
winter of 1915 is new.
The Glendoran grows into adulthood with her town, and becomes a witness to its maturation.
They are 95 years old, Glendora is in its 113th summer. Her little folk-Victorian house on
Glendora Avenue sits on the namesake of the town itself, conceived by George Whitcomb as a
union of his wife’s name, Leadora, and the geographical “glen.”
From the porch, she watches. Kids make their pilgrimage east down Carroll Avenue toward
Finkbiner (Carroll Sylvanus Whitcomb was the son of George). Virginia Avenue was after his
daughter, Ada his daughter-in-law, Meda his sister-in-law.
The old Glendoran’s daughter drives along Foothill Boulevard–originally Old Clay Road, where
clay had been brought in and laid over dirt to create the only graded road, the only way to
Pasadena.
She travels north on Barranca, called Ben Lomond Avenue until the 60’s. The old name was
decided by Lawson La Fetra, a man obsessed with Scottish literature and thereby with the
well-written-about Ben Lomond Mountain of the Scottish Highlands. On Wabash, pulling up to
her childhood friend’s home, the daughter is standing upon a reference to Illinois’ Wabash River,
a very affectionate place to Whitcomb in his pre-Glendora days. On street signs the natural
world is meekly praised.
On dinky Pflueger Avenue a birdsong wafts across suburbia. Gustave Pflueger is immortalized,
the father of Donald who penned Glendora: The Annals of a Southern California Community
(1951). The ladies at the Historical Society familiarly call it “the Pflueger,” a classic.
The old woman remembers, fleetingly, seeing all of the stretched-out land from a perch on
Bluebird Road, named for the hill that bluebirds dwelt in abundance circa 1800s. She
remembers what it had meant to live in this place, on the namesakes of these people where
they experienced formation and degradation and the many things in between. So too had she, a
Glendoran like any other.
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