The Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

We're hitching a ride with Sherman and Mr. Peabody in the Wayback Machine today to revisit a time when homebuilders couldn't keep up with demand in Southern California as buyers flocked to get their piece of the American Dream.

Long Beach Press-Telegram columnist Tim Grobaty recalls in today's edition the ads for developments in the Los Altos and Lakewood Plaza neighborhoods during the early 1950s. The sales pitches were breathless — and so were the prices.

"THEY'RE ALL RUNNING TO LOS ALTOS VILLAGE!," hollered an Independent, Press-Telegram ad in 1952. "Join the crowd," the ad exhorted." Pay less money down and have easier monthly terms in the beautifully planned L.S. Whaley community....TIME IS FLEETING...THEY'RE SELLING FAST...COME OUT EARLY TODAY, AHEAD OF THE CROWD."

And you bet there were crowds. It was as though families were beamed down from space, fully formed. Ones such as ours when our family moved in, with a husband and wife, a daughter and a son — the dog would come soon — looking for what some have called with varying degrees of irony, the promised land.

Grobaty also writes about another ad that detailed the quality of the homes of Lakewood Plaza, a  series of tracts to the north of Los Altos. A down payment of $450, with monthly payments of $60.98, bought a home with such details as:

• Two baths with stall shower.
• A wall of windows opening onto a paved terrace.
• A living room wall of ash or Philippine mahogany.
• Built-in breakfast nook (equipped with "conver-tables" that folded every which way).
• Two car detached or attached garage.
• Dual wall furnaces.
• Zolatone, the new grease- and dirt-repellent paint.
• And electric Thermador bathroom heaters.

The homes ranged from under $10,000 up to $12,000 for more "luxurized" mode.

Finally, the piece pays homage to the developer.

The mastermind of all of Los Altos — virtually the entire New East as well as the earlier northward expansions of Long Beach — was a young Nebraska transplant Lloyd S. Whaley, who, through his Home Investment Co., began erecting entire neighborhoods in the late 1930s.

His projects included Ridgewood Heights, Country Club Manor, Wrigley Terrace, Wrigley Heights, and, as he moved into the '50 s and eastward, Los Altos Terrace, University Manor, the tremendously upscale Park Estates (where he built his own home on Bryant Road) and, most sprawling of all, Los Altos Village.

It would be interesting to be able to set the controls for the Wayback Machine into the future to read what nostalgic writers 50 years from now will be writing about the homes of today.