Antelope Valley Blogs

With all this recent talk about aquifers, which I admittedly don't know what that is exactly, call me stupid but I had to look it up. It's been a while since geology classes. 

I started thinking about how long its been since we here in so cal have had a good shaker. I would say we are due one soon wouldn't you? I saw on the news the other day that there is supposed to be something like a 55 second long magnitude 7.0 or greater quake that will kill thousands and the antelope valley was listed as one of the places where shaking would be the worst. I guess that's what we get for living on a fault line.

Does anyone believe the news? Seems like they have been saying the same thing for years.

Yes back in time there was a time when the Antelope Valley Press was free and I delivered it. Every one in town received the paper even if they didn’t want it they got it. The main newspaper in town back then was called the Ledger Gazette it was very small and did cost you money to receive it. But then came the Antelope Valley Press with a new idea in marketing, give the newspaper away and let the readers start liking the paper and then let them pay for it only if they wanted to.

I was paid a penny a newspaper to deliver it and delivered 150 newspapers on my route. Then at the end of the month I would go out and ask the people I delivered it to if they wanted to pay for the paper it was 25 cents.

Out of the 25 cents I received 12 cents of that a long with the penny a paper every time I threw it. That wasn’t bad money in those days, but I did hate to go collect the money for the free paper, some people would get very unset at being asked for the quarter, they would say I didn’t order the paper and I’m not paying for the paper. We would then say the payment is voluntary.

I then started my own new marketing plan, I hired smaller kids to make the collection for me and paid them. No one could refuse to pay a nice looking little kid looking up at them with those big eyes.

I lived in Lancaster California then and cruising the blvd. was what every kid that had a car did. The age of 15 and ½ gave you the right to drive as long as you had a licensed driver sitting beside you. But when that age of 16 came around it meant that the blvd. was the place to be. It was the days of the 4-track stereo and 32 cents a gallon gasoline, then of course when the gasoline wars came along the gas prices didn’t go up they came down. The wars I’m talking about didn’t happen over seas in the desert they happened right here between the different gas stations. I remember then gas at 28 cents. Five dollars and you have a full tank of gas to cruise with.

Those were the days of the hot cars with big engines and dual four-barrel carburetors or three duce’s and cheater slicks for rear tires. The 409 engines were the thing to have and the chrome four speed gear shift on the floor. Those were the cars to cruise in, and car clubs were in, and they were cruising the blvd like the rest of us.

The words 10th and K meant more than just the name of two streets. It meant a race was going to take place. 10th street east had two painted stripes on it that just happened to measure a quarter mile. After the race, it was back to cruising or a stop at the Foster Freeze on avenue I and the words Duke Of Earl could be heard playing in the night air.

I met my wife cruising the Blvd. she was driving a new 65 Mustang red in color and I drove a 64 Pontiac Tempest blue green in color. She would have a car load of girls in her car and I would have a car load of boys in mind and together we would pass in the night.

The 4 track would be playing in both cars and the waving at each other would begin. Then it would be following each other to the Foster Freeze or to Paxtons drive in the in place to get that coke and meet the chicks or the chicks to meet the guys.

The cruising is how I met my wife and now we been together for 40 years, I guess you might say cruising wasn’t all that bad of a thing to do.

Amid rumors of dead men and whispers of untold depths lies Palmdale's "Bottomless Lake". Local's know it's there and yet many of us haven't the slightest idea how this strange body of water came to be on the east side of Sierra Highway, just south of Avenue S.

 Local stories about this lake include those of people who were last seen swimming in the lake, strange lake monsters that emerge only to swallow large water foul, scuba teams that have "tried" to find the bottom, a place where shady characters go to dump their victims and according to the website Shdowlands Haunted Places - an online index of haunted places "{quotes}A Ghost of a fisherman has been reported to lash out, slurring viciously, ordering (people) to leave, also tales of black figures climbing into the trees and vanishing{/quotes}" have been spotted. Stories of this nature go back as far as the 1880's.

The truth about how this lake came to be is not as unusual as the rumors surrounding it, considering it's location. And for that we can thank the San Andreas fault.

Remember how things were in the Antelope Valley? Lets go back to 1957 the days of the 57 Chevy, just one of the hot cars in those days. The Antelope Valley High School even had a swimming pool then and the neat buildings that use to be there.

Ivy covered hallways and steps that took you up to the second floor and into the main building in the middle of the Antelope Valley High School Campus. Alfalfa fields growing all around and the local farmers busy in their fields while Edwards Air Force base, and at that time NACA the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was busy pushing the limits with speed and hot planes.

Space and space travel was still being done by Buck Rogers and in the minds of our leading scientist and comic book fans. In 1957 the United States of America lunched its first try of placing a Satellite into space but only ended up with a big time failure. While we were busy trying to place a satellite into space the USSR did it, the small little light in the sky could be seen from the Antelope Valley as it past over head.