I found your blog by searching for a horseback riding ranch that I went to as a kid in the 1950-1960s - I think it was in Chatsworth and I believe it was called The B Bo Dee Ranch. But not sure how it was spelled.

I would love to find out where it was. I recently moved from Van Nuys to Shadow Hills. A lovely horsey community that still has unpaved streets yet it's only 15 min to downtown LA! It's quite an amazing place. By the way, I was born and raised in North Hollywood (now Valley Village) and have lived in the valley all of my 53 years!

So does anyone remember the B Bo D?

Vickie Sampson

Well let's find out. Thanks Vickie.

Has anyone heard of this place? From what I've read, this was a "western swing" music venue in the 40's and perhaps the 50's. Spade Cooley performed there. It's decline seems to coincide with the opening of the Palomino in North Hollywood in the late 50's. Any idea of where it was located?

I recently researched the Riverside Rancho — the old country music club, not the Burbank-Glendale horse neighborhood — but didn't post about it because, as it turns out, the Rancho wasn't located in the Valley. So I'm glad Martin asked. He's right that it was a major western music spot. Spade Cooley was the headliner for several years. (So was Tex Williams.) The club was at 3115 Riverside Drive, on the far side of Griffith Park just south of Los Feliz Boulevard. The site had been the home of the Los Angeles Breakfast Club in the 1930s and 40s, then opened as the city's hottest country music nightspot. After it closed, the Los Angeles Fire Department torched the building on Sept. 3, 1959 as a training exercise. Two years later, Cooley murdered his wife and went to prison.

Riverside Rancho's closure led indirectly to the popularity of the Palomino, the Lankershim Boulevard club that became the preeminent West Coast venue for country music. When the Rancho shut down, acts moved over to North Hollywood and the Palomino's legend grew.

I have the unhappy chore of driving between Beverly Hills and Calabasas (Faux Town) at least once a week during evening rush hour. This means the 101 and the 405 on the way to Beverly Hills. When these freeways aren't parking lots, they're not unlike bumper cars on speed or some kind of crazy video game. Most nights it is a little of both: grinding slow traffic interspersed with bursts of manic jockeying. It takes about an hour.

I've been coming home a different way. I take Beverly Glen to Mulholland and then execute some complicated twists and turns until I get myself down to Ventura Boulevard somewhere on the western edge of Encino. Until I get to Ventura, most of the route is one lane. There are often slow-downs and stops. But there are not five lanes of cars humming on either side of me and there is no manic jockeying. It's not exactly peaceful and it's too dark to enjoy the scenery (except for a spectacular view of the sparkling lights of the valley below right after I turn onto Mulholland). But I like it better. It's quieter. It takes about an hour.

Gardiner now cracks the op-ed page of the Daily News with a piece defending her hometown:

Eventually, I left San Francisco and planned to live as close to the beach as possible. Which is how, on a blistering August day in 1985, I moved into an apartment in Reseda. It was as close to the beach as I could afford.

With Frank and Moon Zappa's Valley Girl lyrics stuck in my head, whenever anyone asked where I lived, I'd barely mumble — not wanting to be pegged as a Val.

The Valley wasn't the beach. It was hot. But my apartment did have a pool. A plus. And I spent every free hour at the ocean anyway.

Soon, I came to expect the blast of heat which welcomed me as I neared the top of Topanga Canyon toward home after a day at the beach. I'd drive down palm tree-lined Ventura Boulevard — passing neon-lit liquor stores, coffee shops and carwashes — all swooping angles and optimism, radiating the California vibe.

Once married, my husband and I made our Valley status official. We bought a ranch-style home. Our brains hadn't shrunk from the heat. The housing prices were relatively affordable. And — all right, I'll admit it — we liked the Valley and planned to raise our child here ... on purpose.

We re not alone. Even as mortgages rise, the middle and working classes, as in the past, still come to the Valley to raise families. But today the area is more ethnically blended than ever. According to a report from Pepperdine University's Davenport Institute, The Valley is not only as diverse as the rest of Los Angeles, but in some ways more so.

See! You'd never know that by the way Hollywood portrays us.

While the Valley has changed over the decades, the stereotypes haven't. And, unfortunately, there are critiques much worse than Vacuous Vals being slung around. For instance, when the Valley tried to secede from Los Angeles, opponents claimed our drive for independence was class- and race-based. Since I live here, and know otherwise, I'd sooner believe Encino Man won an Oscar than we re racists. But it's easier to perpetuate tired rants than it is to look further, isn't it?

I expect people will continue to blather that we have no culture or diversity. But we know what we ve got. Green pockets of rural life. Horse communities with trails and stables. Pierce College's cow- and sheep-dotted rolling hills and vegetable farms. Local parks — Malibu Creek Park, Stoney Point and Balboa — for hiking, rock climbing, biking or exploring. Many farmers markets, theaters and festivals. An arts district and an antique row.

Her praise continues in the piece.

Famously, Burton wears clunky black specs with dark-blue lenses. They seem to be literally, and figuratively, the opposite of rose-colored glasses.

"The Valley," he says. "I get freaked out just coming here: It's all flat. There're even less seasons here in the San Fernando Valley, aren't there?"

Born in Burbank in 1958, when the city already seemed lost in time, Burton grew up in a middle-class neighborhood just under the airport's flight pattern. "You could watch the exhaust come down," he says.

"The thing about Burbank was, life sorta ended at the Smoke House," he says of the landmark 1946 restaurant near the Universal, Warner Bros. and Disney studios. "You didn't venture outside. You didn't get a lot of residents making that trip over the hill to Hollywood."

All artists are shaped by their upbringings, but Burton's childhood as a misunderstood loner who lived in his head ended up feeding directly into his work as a filmmaker.

As he drives past Magnolia and Victory, the main drags near his old house, he's not charmed by what he calls "that weird '50s quality" of his old neighborhood, and he's amazed by how many old liquor stores have survived. "A lot of wig shops — is there a lot of hair loss in Burbank, or what?"

But the old movie palaces — among the few oases of his childhood — are just memories now.

"There were five or six great movie theaters, including a couple of drive-ins on Burbank, all gone," he says, pointing out where each used to stand. "There was this one called the Cornell, my favorite, which showed triple features for 50 cents.... You could see 'Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde,' a Godzilla movie and 'Scream Blacula Scream.' Or three Japanese science-fiction movies."

This is where he discovered horror films from England's Hammer studios and the Italian monster movies of Mario Bava.

After passing by the church he attended as a child, we turn onto his old street, Evergreen Street, past a series of squat bungalows that becomes increasingly claustrophobic, and pull up to his boyhood house. "There's something frighteningly ordered about it, and also unknown," he says of the area. "When you look at these houses, they're so small and close together. You kinda knew your neighbors, but you didn't really know them, so there's a secretive nature to it."

For Burton, recalling "the private hell" of childhood produces various disappointed groans and sighs, as we continue on to the schools he attended. A short distance away, his high school, Burbank High — which he remembers as an imposing building alone on a hill, like the hotel in Hitchcock's "Psycho" — has changed too much for it to be very evocative. "It looks more like an airport terminal now." He's still a bit haunted by the return. "Everybody said, 'These are the best years of your life.... ' Are you kidding me?"

The years before were even worse; he describes himself as "quiet and kind of anonymous." His junior high — now Luther Burbank Middle School — looks even less inviting than he remembered it. Between chain-link fences, a sign announcing 24-hour surveillance and yellow "Caution" tape, it doesn't exactly welcome him back.

"Is this a school or is it some sort of strange prison camp?" Burton asks. "All you need is a little barbed wire on the fence and you could shoot a new 'Dirty Dozen' film here."

As he starts to reflect on his memories, planes take off loudly behind him. Burton's sure he couldn't go in, even if the place were open. "It's like a vampire entering a church," he says. "You can't do it."

The director seems much cheerier as our car passes the Smoke House and heads onto Barham Boulevard past Forest Lawn, one of several cemeteries where he used to play as a kid, and toward Hollywood.

"This was amazing," Burton says of the route. "Here you start to get a sense of Universal Studios, that there was a bigger world out there.... I would take the bus; I used to love making that trip to Hollywood Boulevard. It was a bit more seedy."

The tourists then headed off to Hollywood for a look around over the hill.

"This is the beginning of flood protection for residents of the Sun Valley community," said county Department of Public Works spokesman Kerjon Lee.

Geez, if this is the beginning what took them so long? The photo is of the L.A. River during rains in 2003 near Griffith Park. From You-are-here.com.