CHILDHOOD IN IDYLLIC HILLS HELD DARK SECRET.

Byline: TONY CASTRO Staff Writer

CHATSWORTH -- For Holly Huff, growing up in the sun-reddened hills above Chatsworth in the late 1950s was like living in a Norman Rockwell painting on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

Her home on Rowell Avenue just off Lake Manor Drive sat in the shadows of a hillside rock formation locals called ``The 12 Apostles'' and overlooked Chatsworth Reservoir, where she and her friends sometimes crawled under a cyclone fence to go skinny-dipping.

Huff's family -- her mother, Lynn, stepfather, Ed Kissinger, two brothers and a sister -- were virtual pioneers to an area that in the 1950s looked like Marlboro Country. Huff recalls only one other family, the Crawfords with nine children, who lived nearby, and a small store on Lake Manor that drew passers-by.

``All we did was play outside,'' Huff said. ``We called the reservoir Chatsworth Lake. It was scenic, and the lake scenes in (TV's) `Lassie' were filmed at the reservoir. `Combat' with Vic Morrow was also filmed there.

``We were kids. We loved it.''

It was such an idyllic life, Huff remembers, that even the inconveniences were bearable.

``There was always rocket testing, and the windows would rattle,'' she recalls. ``The windows were (installed) loose so they wouldn't break.''

Every weekday morning, as Huff and her friends waited on Lake Manor Drive for the school bus to take them to Justice Street Elementary, they'd also see diesel rigs roaring up the hillside road to Rocketdyne and the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.

Mystery of plant

If there was any sign of anything foreboding, it was the mystery of the plant up in the hills.

``It was kind of scary,'' said Huff. ``We knew it was all top secret, and on the (school) bus we would see guards on the road.''

It would be 30 years before it would all start to make sense for Huff. For years, she thought all those ``drop drills'' held in school at 10 a.m. on the last Friday of every month had been a waste of time, as had all the other precautions she remembers her family taking in the event of a nuclear attack on the West Coast.

Huff had not known that the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, located on 2,900 acres in the hills above her home, had been developed as a remote site to test rocket engines. She had not been aware that the lab was conducting nuclear research and was a key supplier of America's expanding arsenal of nuclear weapons.

But in 1989, Huff learned of a meltdown of a nuclear reactor at the laboratory 30 years earlier and of extensive radioactive and toxic contamination. A study released last week estimates the meltdown released 300 times more radiation than the Three-Mile Island disaster and may have been responsible for upward of 260 cancer cases.

Huff, 55, is not among those cases. But she still lives directly downhill from the lab, and she is actively involved in one of the Santa Susana Knolls watchdog groups trying to track and remediate what happened there.

`We never knew'

A part of Huff finds the upheaval thrown into her childhood memories especially disturbing. Her mother and stepfather and their family moved into their new Rowell Avenue house just a month before the reactor meltown in July 1959.

``We never knew anything about it,'' said Lynn Kissinger, 78, Huff's mother, who still lives in the one-story house where she and her husband, Ed, raised their family.

Today, the Kissingers' neighborhood is dramatically changed from what it was in 1959, beginning with Chatsworth Reservoir, which is now a vast crater of shrubs and concrete.

``It used to be like looking out onto a big lakefront,'' said Kissinger. ``They had to dry it up after the Northridge Earthquake.''

Similarly, the hillside flanking Lake Manor Drive no longer looks like a backdrop from an old Western movie, having been settled by two generations of new residents.

``We've even got lots of coyotes who come down from the hills because of all the buildings,'' Kissinger said. ``I guess we used to have them before, but they never came down from the hills. They only started doing that when more people moved in.''

And as for any worries over the impact of the nuclear reactor meltdown?

Kissinger seems to have held on to the indominatable spirit of a pioneer.

``I figure if it was going to have any bad effect, I'd have been dead by now,'' she said. ``From 1959 to now is a long time.''

Her daughter, though involved in holding the parties behind the nuclear power plant meltdown responsible, is equally unwilling to believe that the life she lived on Rowell Avenue or in the area was in any way personally imperiled.

``When I first learned of the meltdown, I didn't feel good about it at all,'' said Huff, a retired nursery worker. ``Maybe I've just been living in denial. I've believed that the wind didn't blow this way, but blew the other way.

``But like I said, I might be living in denial, and I don't want to think about that. I raised two children (son Garret, 27, and daughter Callen, 23) growing flowers at the Sage Ranch (Park, where she worked).''

Sad realization

But as she talks, a sad realization shatters the picture-postcard memories of life on her hillside. Huff recalls that Mary ``Mickey'' Crawford, her childhood friend from across the street, with whom she reunited years later, died in 1993 at the age of 39 of ovarian cancer.

``I don't know if it had anything to do with'' radiation from the nuclear reactor meltdown, Huff said. ``I hadn't connected one with the other. How do you put the two together? How do you know? Maybe it was in her genes ... She lived in Moorpark and Simi before she moved to my neighborhood. I don't know. Like I said, I'm in denial.''

tony.castro(at)dailynews.com

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CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Holly Huff looks out over the Santa Susana Field Laboratory on Tuesday as she makes her way along a rocky ridge above Simi Valley.

(2 -- color) Structures are shown at the former Rocketdyne facility. ``It was kind of scary,'' said Holly Huff. ``We knew it was all top secret, and on the (school) bus we would see guards on the road.''

Andy Holzman/Staff Photographer