HOLLYWOOD — Aurelio Renteria, a city streetlight electrician who spent thirty-eight years keeping Hollywood’s ornamental lamps lit and the better part of his retirement photographing them, died August 12 at his home in East Hollywood. He was 84.
His daughter, Lucia Renteria Ames, said the cause was complications of a stroke.
Mr. Renteria joined the Bureau of Street Lighting in 1969 as an apprentice and worked the Hollywood routes from 1974 until his retirement in 2007. His territory, for most of those years, included the district’s oldest inventory: the ornamental double-lantern poles from the 1920s, cast in patterns that long ago stopped being manufactured, holding fixtures that long ago stopped being standard.
The city issued route sheets. Mr. Renteria kept, in addition, a notebook — several notebooks, eventually, filled over decades with what his family describes as a private census of the district’s poles: which casting was on which corner, which pole had been struck by a truck and re-set two degrees off plumb, which lantern took the gasket that had not been stocked since the Carter administration, and where he had squirreled away the spares.
“The city knew the poles by number,” his daughter said. “He knew them by number too, but that was not how he talked about them. He talked about them the way a teacher talks about students. This one is no trouble at all. This one acts up every winter. This one, you have to know its history.”
Colleagues learned to call him before condemning a fixture. “The easy thing was always to swap the whole head for a modern one, and then the street loses another lantern and never gets it back,” said Emmett Dunphy, a retired supervisor who worked with him for two decades. “Aurelio treated that as a personal failure. He would rebuild a socket at his kitchen table on a Sunday to keep an original head on an original pole. I signed off on the overtime maybe twice. He did it maybe two hundred times.”
His argument, made mildly but often, was that streetlight work was neighborhood work. A dark block, he told a trainee once, in a line that traveled through the bureau, “is not a maintenance backlog. It is a promise you are not keeping.”
Aurelio Renteria was born in 1941 in El Paso, moved to Los Angeles with his family at nine, and finished at Belmont High School. He married Carmen Solano in 1966; she survives him, along with their daughter, Lucia, of Glendale; a son, Aurelio Jr., of Ventura; five grandchildren; and the notebooks.
In retirement he walked the old routes with a camera, photographing lamps at dusk in the few minutes when the sky and the lanterns hold the same weight of light. He printed the good ones at a drugstore and kept them in albums his family is now sorting, each print labeled on the back in pencil: corner, casting, date. This summer, when the city’s lighting crews began retrofit work in the district, his daughter said, he followed the news of it closely and remarked more than once that he hoped the crews were keeping notes.
The family has offered the notebooks to the bureau.