If you stood halfway up the hill east of our house and looked west up Philadelphia Street this is what you would see. It was a really steep hill, and all of us had to walk up it every day to go to school. (No, not in the snow.)

That little street that leads off to the right was a dead end; it stopped after one house.

Coming home from school, after hiking all the way up Philadelphia St from Uptown Whittier to the top of the hill, this was the view down to our house. It’s the last one on the left, with the camper van in the driveway.

The hills were almost always brown like that. There’d be a couple of weeks each year in the spring when they’d had enough rain to turn green. We were not supposed to go climbing up there; it was private property, owned by the oil company, and there were oil wells up there. And on the next hill after the one you can see here was the city dump.

But we climbed up there anyway, and lived to tell about it.

The fire had burned a lot of the shrubs and bushes off of the hills, so when we had a good rain storm the following winter it washed a great deal of dirt down to the flood channel. We had a lot of mud down there, and it completely overwhelmed the drainage system. It took several years for that to be cleaned out.

Philadelphia Street is one of the main streets in Uptown Whittier. (The locals call the central part of the city “Uptown.”) Uptown Whittier is mostly level ground, but the hills are very close on the north and east sides and the roads get steep very quickly. If you follow Philadelphia Street east out of the center of town, you start going up right away as you cross Painter Ave. The main part of Whittier College campus is at the corner of Painter and Philadelphia.

Philadelphia continues up the hill to the east and then angles north. Houses on this part of the street are old and expensive. Dick’s Aunt Cile lived on this part of Philadelphia St. while we were growing up, and we went to her house for Votaw Christmas parties in those days.

After turning back to the east, Philadelphia St. used to come to an end near the top of the first hill, but in the mid-sixties a real estate developer came in and extended it up to the top and over the other side, down a steep slope to a valley on the other side. In the spring of 1967 Mom and Dad bought the house at the bottom of that hill, the last one on the left side of the street. It had served as the model for the rest of the development, which was completely sold out when we moved in.

The house was difficult for the builders to sell, because it did not face the street. (And it was very difficult for us to sell in 1990.) The front door faced east, to a flood channel immediately in front of the house and the next row of hills beyond it. The flood channel, which was just a concrete pipe laid in the dirt, was dry most of the time – it was pretty ugly. So they’d built a wooden fence right next to it, which edged the walkway up to our “front” door. From the street, you could see only the garage, not the house.

When we bought the house, we were told that there were plans to put in a street over that flood channel, a street that would go north up to a new intersection with Hadley St. (which would also have had to be extended). So on that future day when that happened, the fence would come down, and we’d have a corner lot. But the new street was never built, and our house was stuck behind that fence as long as we were there.

Here is the view down Philadelphia St. after the fire. As you can see from the blackened hills, the fire came down quite close to the houses.

In the fall of 1966 we purchased a large home at 13895 Philadelphia St. as we were feeling the pinch of space on Davista. Our family was all growing so fast that many times we all needed more ‘space.’ We found this lovely home at the end of a cul-de-sac that was being shown as a model for the other houses on the street. It was a two story house with 2,700 sq. ft. of space and we had the third garage made into a bedroom for Dave. This way all four kids had their own rooms as we had three bedrooms upstairs and our bedroom was on the ground floor.

We had a large family room with a pool table, a dining room, and a living room with a nice fireplace. This house stayed in the family as Dave & Karen purchased it from us later on and it was not sold until they moved to Oregon in 1990. The fall after we moved in, thanks to a Santa Ana wind,  a huge fire swept down the canyon next to our house and we nearly lost it. We were saved at the last minute by chemicals being dropped by airplanes on the fire to retard it and by Whittier College students working to clear brush providing a fire break.

We had been evacuated from the area and didn’t know for some time about the fate of our home. We had very little time to take things out with us and of course we grabbed the wrong items. Instead of taking items that could not replaced, such as pictures, valuable papers, and such, we took our TV. and other mundane possessions. We were finally allowed to return home and saw just how close the fire came to wiping us out. The large eucalyptus tree just behind our back fence smoldered for two or three weeks and the fire department kept coming back each day to check out the area.