HOLLYWOOD — The notebooks came in a banker’s box, the albums in two shopping bags, and Lucia Renteria Ames carried them into the Bureau of Street Lighting’s district office on the morning of September 3 with the specific instruction her father had given her, more than once, in the last year of his life.
“He said, ‘Don’t let them throw them out, and don’t let them keep them in a drawer,’” she said. “He knew the bureau. He knew both were possible.”
Aurelio Renteria, who died August 12 at 84 after thirty-eight years as a city streetlight electrician on the Hollywood routes, kept what his family described in his obituary as a private census of the district’s ornamental poles: which casting stood on which corner, which pole had been struck and re-set two degrees off plumb, which 1920s lantern took the gasket that had not been stocked since the Carter administration, and where he had squirreled away the spares. Seven notebooks. Fourteen albums of dusk photographs, each print labeled on the back in pencil.
The bureau has accepted the donation. Ignacio Gaffney, the district supervisor who received it, said the notebooks will be scanned page by page and attached to the corresponding pole records in the city’s asset system, so that a crew pulling up a pole on a tablet will see, alongside its number and its maintenance log, whatever Mr. Renteria wrote about it between 1974 and 2007. The originals go back to the family when the scanning is done.
“I have worked here twenty-two years and I had heard about the notebooks the whole time, the way you hear about a thing,” Mr. Gaffney said. “I had not seen one. I opened the first one on my desk and did not get anything else done that morning.”
He had also, it turned out, used one within the week.
A double-lantern pole on a corner near Yucca Street — one of the oldest castings in the district — has, for as long as anyone in the office can remember, dimmed and flickered each winter with the first cold rain, and been patched each winter with a modern gasket that does not quite fit the original head. The notebook for that route describes the problem in Mr. Renteria’s hand, dates it to 1983, names the gasket, and records that he had put four spares “in the tall cabinet, bottom left, behind the bulb boxes” in a bureau yard that has since been reorganized twice.
Emmett Dunphy, the retired supervisor who worked with Mr. Renteria for two decades and had told this newspaper he signed off on the man’s overtime “maybe twice,” went to the yard with Mr. Gaffney on Friday afternoon. The tall cabinet had been moved. It had not been emptied.
“Bottom left, behind the bulb boxes,” Mr. Dunphy said. “Forty-three years. Four gaskets in a paper bag with his handwriting on it. I stood there for a minute. Then we took one.”
The gasket went into the lantern near Yucca on Tuesday. The bureau will find out whether it holds when the first cold rain comes, which in Hollywood is usually November. Mr. Gaffney has written the date on the pole’s record, next to the scan.
Ms. Renteria Ames said her family has kept two things back from the donation: the last notebook, which is mostly blank, and the album of prints from the summer before he died, when he could no longer walk the whole route and photographed the lamps he could reach from the car. Those, she said, are still being sorted.
“He’d have wanted the gaskets found more than the pictures kept,” she said. “But we’re keeping the pictures.”