Remembering the lives of our community.
She kept an index card on every student — about 1,400 of them — and a rule she repeated for six decades: play the wrong notes loud. A session pianist, a dentist and three generations of one family were among those who learned it.
He painted gold-leaf shop names, sale banners and truck doors from 1957 until his hands told him to stop. A dozen of his windows are still on the street, and one owner has refused for twenty years to replace hers.
She sold popcorn to three generations of the same families, memorized a thousand standing orders, and maintained a private accounting of children who could not pay, which balanced to zero every night by her own method.
He serviced the ornamental double-lantern poles by route and by name, kept a notebook the city never asked for, and held that a street you can see is a street you can love.
For fifty-one years he parked the neighborhood's cars in a lot that was always somehow one space bigger than it looked, and held its keys, its packages and a fair number of its arrangements.
He ran a rental warehouse off Cahuenga for fifty-three years and kept, in his head, a catalog no one has ever been able to write down. Its contents went under the hammer last month.
She never worked a station but that one, never wrote an order down, and taught three generations of the diner's cooks a system that exists nowhere on paper.
She shot on set for thirty-eight years, produced perhaps two hundred thousand negatives, and spent her retirement in a fight with three studios over who owned them.
He won the crosstown trophy nine times, lost it eleven, and spent forty years insisting the schools had the story of where it came from exactly backwards.
For fifty-one years he shaped neon tubing by hand in a shop off Santa Monica Boulevard, and he taught the man who relit the HAROLD'S sign in June.
