VALLEY OF DREAMS WORLD WAR II TURNED A VAST LAND OF ORANGE GROVES AND OLIVE TREES INTO ASSEMBLY LINES, HOUSING TRACTS AND AN IDEALIZED VERSION OF SUBURBIA.

Byline: Brent Hopkins Staff Writer

In 1946, construction boomed across the once rural San Fernando Valley, jobs were handed out by the thousands and the theft of four pounds of butter from a Van Nuys restaurant made the front page of the paper.

This was, and continues to be, the story of the Valley. In the year that gave birth to the modern suburb and the American Dream, tremendous change loomed on the horizon - restless, endless progress. The pastoral landscape of orange groves and olive trees yielded to assembly lines and housing tracts, bringing with it all the things that made the country great - and troubling.

In those postwar years, when GI's traded their carbines for textbooks and rivet guns, a community sprung up right on the edge of orchards and ranches. Developments became neighborhoods, which enveloped one another, only to split off into whole communities. It grew so big and so fast that it seemed everyone could find a home, find a job, find a life, with only thoughts of a good future ahead.

But that runaway growth had its price, one paid today the form of cracked sidewalks, antiquated utilities, not enough cops and freeways so choked that it can take an hour to drive from one end of the Valley to the other. The few hospitals left to care for a booming population can barely make money, they're so overloaded with patients who can't pay their bills. Angry residents who feel neglected by the rest of the city fight against development, politicians and each other. Affordable housing, once the siren call that led young families to the Valley, is nearly impossible to find on once-middle class wages.

The image today looks vastly different from the bucolic picture in national magazines inviting people to enjoy the healthy air and speedy freeways.

But sixty years ago, the Valley held immense promise. The nation, battered by years of war and economic depression, was ripe for change and the Valley felt it like no other community. For the thousands of people who'd come through its factories, airports and veterans' facilities, the region called them back, representing a fresh start with perpertual sunshine to spur it on.

``No other time in human history have the forces combined to create the wealth, the power and the culture that came about after the war in Los Angeles - that's what this Valley is symbolic of,'' said Fernando Guerra, director of the Institute for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. ``To me, this is the story of LA. The postwar history of this city isn't what happened at City Hall, it's what happened in the Valley.''

It was a place where anyone could come, where movie stars walked the same streets as mechanics, bricklayers, junior executives and salesmen. Things weren't always equitable, but everyone had a shot to get a job, buy a house, drive down brand new streets and send their kids to freshly constructed schools.

What was once the stomping ground for ranchers and actors looking to get away from the hustle of Beverly Hills became a magnet for dreamers. Some houses came so cheaply that a would-be homeowner could use their car's pink slip as the security for a loan or even borrow money from their real estate agent to make the deposit. The region as it is today was born.

``The Valley has always been the ultimate middle class place,'' said Joel Kotkin, author of ``The City: A Global History,'' and resident of Valley Village. ``It's been a homeowner, whether he's a Jewish guy from Brooklyn or a Latino from East L.A., backyard kind of community. It's not just a suburb, but the ideal of a suburb.''

``Jobs Enough to Go Around,'' trumpeted a headline in the old Van Nuys News, showcasing jobs from laboratory technician to ``butcherette.'' The war machine that whipped the Axis shifted gears to become the defense industry, giving birth to aircraft makers, rocket testers and nuclear physicists. General Motors opened a massive plant in Van Nuys that would employ thousands and churn out the cars that would ferry these new residents around the huge region they called home. With little more than a high school education and ambition, discharged soldiers could find themselves a good manufacturing job that would support an entire family comfortably.

And for professionals with college degrees, many earned through the G.I. Bill, the nascent aerospace and electronics industries offered opportunities unheard of for years. Men who'd been stuck taking whatever jobs they could find during the Depression or who'd taken up arms during the war could now find careers to harness their creativity and brain power.

To house these workers, who came so quickly that the population more than doubled to more than 400,000 between 1945 and 1950, developers threw up row after row of single-family homes. Rather than expanding vertically, as New York and Chicago had, the region ballooned outward. A furnished three-bedroom in Pacoima went for $8,250, with 50 goldfish included. A Van Nuys ranch home with two bedrooms cost $14,000 and included chicken equipment.

Thus was born the community that would define the American Dream, where anyone could own a house, a car and a swimming pool.

A few days into the new year, the paper reported the Valley outpaced the entire rest of the city for construction permits, 18,503 out of a total 33,000. New residents required 2,965 water service installations, 3,080 electrical service permits and 2,215 for gas. More than 1,000 people got new phones and the telephone company was 5,000 households behind in installation, with the slowdown attributed to a shortage of central office equipment, wire and cable.

From the start, this rapid growth caused problems. Streets flooded after heavy rain, sewer construction couldn't keep up with the household proliferation and few neighborhoods were built with a plan for the future. As a result, this community of wrench-men and rocket scientists just sprawled outward instead of evolving.

``The Valley was built by people looking at going into space, not their own space,'' said Robert Marshall, head archivist at the California State University, Northridge, library. ``We were a very brainy place for building cars, planes and rockets, but we weren't very good at building this as a city.''

That lack of planning would inevitably lead to problems. Neighborhood associations rose up to protest the next community's developments and residents protested everything from new construction to fast driving to freeways and airports. This would eventually pit one block against the next, with Arletans considering themselves apart from Pacoimans, chunks of Sherman Oaks splitting off from Van Nuys, West Hills looking down on Canoga Park.

It would also fuel a general anger at the city, rekindling secession rumblings that dated back to the 1920s. Residents, geographically isolated from downtown, felt they'd be better off as their own city. These feelings of abandonment would surface again and again, coming to a head nearly 60 years later, with a formal movement to split from the city that would fail to pass the full electorate in 2002.

People don't think about that as they fondly trip down memory lane, but they feel it today in the form of cracked streets, congested freeways and poorly lit neighborhoods. They don't remember back to the nuclear experiments in the Santa Susana mountains, the labor strife or the flatly racist laws that pushed minorities to the furthest corners of the area, but the effects of each linger to this day.

In some ways, the Valley's past 60 years are now catching up to it, but at the same time, it's in the exact same place.

Its major employers have shut down, moved away, been bought and sold. GM's mighty Van Nuys plant that built the Camaro and the Impala is now a shopping center. Sculptures of its famous planes and history displays are the few reminders that Lockheed once built this town. The Adohr dairy's a memory, the Carnation milk factory where scientists cooked up Coffeemate disappeared long ago.

And yet the Valley endures. As its huge companies vanished, small ones popped up to take their place. Its braintrust evolved from aerospace to biotech. Just like in 1946, its jobs and economic growth outpace the rest of the region and it remains an exciting, diverse, malleable, fractious community.

People keep pouring in, as well, and now that the region has six decades of modern history to draw upon, it's finally starting to learn to accomodate the folks who make it run and call it home.

``We've grown up,'' said David Honda, who grew up the son of a Pacoima gardener, went on to run a succesful Northridge-based construction firm and became a civic leader who now sits on the city's planning commission. ``Those of us who experienced the Valley in the '50s and '60s realize those growth patterns and can reflect on it. Now, we can make some changes and better the Valley.''

brent.hopkins(at)dailynews.com

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CAPTION(S):

31 photos

Photo:

(1) A panoramic view shows the rapid development of residential housing in the Sunland-Tujunga area of the San Fernando Valley in the mid-1950s.

(2) Construction workers build a home in the San Fernando Valley in 1950. Raymond Bennett is applying the first scratch coat of plaster onto the lath framework of the walls. The man in the foreground is the hod carrier preparing the plaster.

(3) The Lockheed Air Terminal is shown in 1945-46, the aircraft in the background is a DC-3 used by American Airlines. The airport pictured is now the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank.

(4) This photo shows Ventura Boulevard in Studio City during the 1950s. ``This famous boulevard joins the San Fernando Valley with the blue Pacific.''

(5) The Topanga Shopping Center in Topanga Canyon is shown in 1962, picturing the Best Food Center. The notes on the back of the picture show the date as 1966, but the cars are from the mid-1950's.

Photo courtesy CSUN, University Library

(6) In 1946 the San Fernando Valley was not much more than orchards and farmland.

Courtesy of Security Pacific Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

(7) Cesar de la Cruz, 57, North Hollywood

(8) Terrance Thatch, 34, music producer, Studio City

(9) Mohammad Buzorgmand, 36, cartoonist, Reseda

(10) Donna Capka, 62, counselor, Sherman Oaks

(11) Katie Phillips, 28, graphic designer, North Hollywood

(12) Katie Hill, 26, art therapist, North Hollywood

(13) Fred Thiphaine, 37, poet, North Hollywood

(14) Walter Burk, 57, retired maintenance worker, Panorama City

(15) Suzanne Shin, 26, cosmetology student, Woodland Hills

(16) Len Taylor, 59, small-business owner, Winnetka

(17) Frank Mejia, 32, contractor, Chatsworth

(18) Duc Ha, 48, small-business owner, Canoga Park

(19) Jayceson Jones, 19, food service worker, Canoga Park

(20) Bridget Gatling, 45, nurse, Canoga Park

(21) Vicente Hernandez, 58, laborer, Canoga Park

(22) Shawn Yang, 27, retail clerk, Van Nuys

(23) Kathy Douglas, 46, chemical dependency counselor, Reseda

(24) Michael Thabet, 55, small-business owner, West Hills

(25) Splatt, 43, Carnival game operator, Van Nuys

(26) Robert Campas, 48, Maintenance worker, Van Nuys

(27) Orlando Lopez, 23, construction worker, North Hills

(28) Linda Rosales, 19, retail clerk, Canoga Park

(29) Hank Fisher, 57, musician, Reseda

(30) Richard Vasquez, 46, hairstylist, Sherman Oaks

(31) Maria Gurule, 47, nurse assistant, Valley Glen