She commissioned an English Manor-style home by Paul R. Williams, one of Hollywood's favored architects. After marrying actor Robert Taylor, who also had a Northridge home, Stanwyck in 1940 or '41 moved back to the city. She sold her share of the business to Marx and the home on Devonshire to Jack Oakie.

Oakie was a comic actor whose big role came as Benzini Napaloni, a broad spoof of Benito Mussolini, in Charlie Chaplin's talkie The Great Dictator. Oakie raised Afghan hounds on the estate, claiming at one point to have a hundred dogs running around. He planted a citrus orchard on the hill below the house, where the ranch bumped into the pasture of Northridge Farms, a prominent thoroughbred breeder that lined Reseda Boulevard as far south as Lassen Street. Oakie wrote later that his chores were interrupted one day by a call from Sid Grauman telling him to come in to Hollywood right away to put his hand and footprints in the wet cement at Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

The Oakies socialized with nearby neighbors Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, William Holden and Gordon McRae. They also hosted backyard swimming pool parties that became Valleywood rituals. "'Ah, those bacchanalian Sunday binges at your baronial manner — Northridge's last stand against civilization — the most palatial rabbit hutch west of the Pecos,'' writer Seaman Jacobs wrote in ''Dear Jack: Hollywood Birthday Reminiscences, one of three books by Oakie or his wife, Victoria Horne Oakie. (The others are Jack Oakie's Double Takes and Jack Oakie's Northridge)

Jack grumbled about his beloved Northridge turning from country into suburb, complaining once to neighbor Lionel Barrymore about all the new stop signs slowing down their trips into Hollywood for work and parties. ''The next morning [Barrymore] pulled into my gate...'This way, young man!' he called to me and led me down Balboa Boulevard. He had found the last street that was left wide open."

Oakie died in 1978 and is buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale, the same final resting place as his Valleywood contemporaries Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Spencer Tracy, W.C. Fields and Walt Disney. Oakie's widow lived in the home until her death and donated the property to USC, which has a scholarship named for Oakie. The university sold the estate to a developer, but McCarthy writes that the Paul William-designed home will remain, perhaps as a community center.

A dense thicket of trees guards the house, as you can see in the photo — click on it for a large scene of the property. In both photos, Devonshire is to the right and the top of the photo is west. You can sneak a nice glimpse of Oakie's old orchard by peering over the brick wall in the vacant field on Lemarsh Street, between Yolanda and Gladbeck Avenues.

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.

Friends of Granada Hills -

A quick note to update you on the progress of the Granada Hills History Project.

Over the past few months we have located a number of wonderful images of life and events in Granada Hills through the decades. Many of these have never been shared publicly before.

But we are still looking for additional photographs and other images to fill "holes" in the Granada Hills story or to help round out what we already have. I have posted a checklist of the places and events we are still actively looking for images of on the Granada Hills History Project web site.

And with only two months remaining before we need to stop taking submissions in order to get everything to the publisher (The deadline to submit material is February 10, 2007), I wanted to remind those of you still interested in participating that time is beginning to run short.

I realize with the approaching Holidays, people probably have better things to do than rummage through closets or dusty storage boxes looking for some old photographs, but then again what better time of the year to share memories of Granada Hills with family and friends! …Just a thought, even if it is a tad self-serving.

Feel free to contact me (GranadaHillsHistory@gmail.com ) if you have any questions or thoughts about material you may have or are thinking about - and thanks in advance for any help you can provide in providing material for the Granada Hills History Project....

Jim Hier
www.GranadaHillsHistory.com

Granada Hills also comes up in a recent post at LA Observed.

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.