WELCOME TO SHANGRI-LA IN THE POSTWAR YEARS, THE SAN FERNANDO VALLEY ATTRACTED NEW RESIDENTS LIKE A BEACON. WHEN THEY ARRIVED, THEY FOUND HOMES, A WEALTH OF JOBS AND A NEW SUBURBAN LIFE.

Byline: Brent Hopkins Staff Writer

Among the orange groves and gravel roads that sketched out the San Fernando Valley in the postwar years lay opportunity, ambition and the relentless push of the future.

Opportunity for a family of Arkansas shipwrights fleeing racism. For little Mexican sisters whose parents dressed them in red, white and blue to come to their new home in Los Angeles. For a would-be actor and occasional clown from New York, trying to break into the entertainment business. They'd heard there were jobs and houses and weather that would break your heart.

They came west, north, south, from nearby and a continent away. This mysterious place called the Valley, seen once passing through or mentioned by a cousin who'd been there, it called to them like a beacon. They packed their families, found jobs and bought themselves homes in a pastoral paradise just above downtown L.A.

Heeding the instructions of the tune made popular by Bing Cosby, they settled down and made the San Fernando Valley their home.

``It was a magical time, when you think about it,'' said Dave Levy, who grew up in Panorama City and now runs the Big Kid Collectible Toy Mall, a retro store in Sherman Oaks devoted to the merchandise of the era. ``People got more out of life back then. When I look back at that time period, it still intrigues me. It was that black-and-white, more innocent time.''

Levy's father Jack, an aspiring actor, moved out to Los Angeles not long after World War II, with hopes of getting into showbiz. He ended up with Capitol Records and when he needed a house, he bought one at the corner of Katherine Avenue and Osborne Street for under $5,000. A New Yorker with no idea of what to do with a lawn, he had the backyard ripped out and paved over.

But in an artificial touch that wonderfully befit the era, he painted the ground green to retain a grassy veneer.

The word was out that the Valley was the place to be for young families who wanted a house. Advertised as ``a wealth of health'' and ``a scenic rest for tired eyes and lungs,'' in the promotional literature of the era, developers lured new homeowners by the thousands. The Crosby tune, penned by Sherman Oaks writer Gordon Jenkins, echoed in ears across the country, giving the homey, pastoral land an identity for folks who'd never set foot anywhere near it.

Like many who grew up in the postwar boom - when houses came cheap and good-paying jobs popped up by the thousands - Levy recalls the Valley as nothing short of Shangri-La. Traffic was unheard of, kids wandered through neighbors' yards, movie stars waved hello to their common-man neighbors as they shopped for groceries and watered their own yards.

Though they might get into a scrape or two with neighborhood kids from other blocks, Dave and his older brother Mike could lead a life pulled from the scenes of ``Leave it to Beaver'' or ``The Wonder Years.'' Children played ball outside from dawn till dusk in the summertime and every family knew everyone else on the block. There were no fences, no fears and a gang was nothing more than the kids on the block who built forts and roughhoused in the vacant lot together. Neighbors socialized, with dads barbecuing on weekends and mothers passing the time drinking coffee at each others' houses.

They didn't question the chemicals seeping into the ground from the Lockheed plant in Burbank or the nuclear waste coming from Rocketdyne's Santa Susana Field Lab. They didn't consider the ownership covenants that kept the Valley racially divided. They didn't worry about sprawling development without a unified plan.

They just kept coming.

For Alicia and Jesus Hurtado, the San Fernando Valley brought the promise of a better world. He had only a third grade education, his wife's went just through the eighth, but they had ambition and skill. Schooled in the dry-cleaning trade, they moved, first from Mexico to Echo Park, then on to 11558 LeHigh Avenue, right on the border of Pacoima and San Fernando.

The Hurtados paid $16,000 for a four-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath place in the Joe Louis tract homes in 1956, where they raised five beautiful daughters. The goal, in the words of their daughter Angelica, was ``to acquire a better life.''

``We just came here for a six-month trial to see if my mother liked it,'' said Angelica, now Mrs. Hurtado-Gracia and the senior librarian of the Pacoima Branch Library. ``She never did, but we stayed because here was where the good quality of life for their kids was. This is where the opportunities were.''

Her adopted home stuck, as she attended San Fernando High School, then Valley State College, then on to graduate school at the University of Southern California. And her parents, after years of laboring, saved enough money to open their own store, San Fernando Cleaners, which afforded the family the middle class life they'd dreamed of.

``A lot of people came here from the Midwest and brought with them those Midwestern values,'' said Hal Lifson, whose dad came out from Minnesota with the wholesale beverage trade, bringing with him an Iowa-born wife to their new Encino home. ``Lemonade stands, let's take a walk in the summer and say hello to the neighbors, that kind of thing. After the war, there was that sense of optimism and promise.''

Lifson's family came later, in 1963, but he schooled himself well in the postwar era that shaped his childhood. He grew up eating strawberry shortcake, hanging around the Encino Bowl and waiting for the Helms Bread Truck's toot-toot whistle. Life for him could have been lifted from a Norman Rockwell print.

The opportunities didn't always play out right away, however. Before the war, Harold Muraoka's father ran a produce hauling business near Carson. Executive Order 9066 sent the then-11-year-old Muraoka to the Manzanar War Relocation Center until 1945, then another government directive sent the family to a Federal Housing Authority trailer park in Burbank.

Several hundred Japanese American families ended up across from Lockheed, then in another trailer park in what is today Sun Valley. Even college-educated men couldn't find work, a result of lingering prewar prejudice, sending scores of breadwinners into the gardening and produce businesses.

As the eldest of eight kids, Muraoka was expected to pitch in, as well. He spent his final two years at Burbank and San Fernando High Schools with half the day in class and the second half harvesting onions and turnips. Friends outside of the trailer park were hard to come by and peers outside the park weren't always kind to the boys who road the bus to campus.

But while the Valley was less than idyllic to Muraoka in those postwar years, he was able to realize its promise after a stint in the Air Force during the Korean War. As a 25-year-old veteran in 1956, he used his training as a radio technician to get a job with 20th Century Airlines in Burbank. Soon after, he married his girlfriend, Maye, whom he had met in the trailer park.

``If I hadn't gone in the service, I'd have been a produce clerk for the rest of my life,'' said Muraoka, now retired after 30 years as an electronics tech with the city of Los Angeles. ``I consider myself one of the lucky ones.''

With his new bride, Muraoka bought a lot in Sun Valley - one of the few areas where Japanese Americans, pushed aside by both restrictive legal covenants denying ownership to the ``yellow'' race, were permitted to buy - and built a two-bedroom, one-and-three-quarter-bath house for $13,400, with a $73 monthly mortgage. They'd live there another 20 years and raise a son and daughter before moving to a comfortable Northridge home.

Things worked out pretty smoothly for Muraoka, who became a respected leader of the local Japanese American community, but not all had it so easy. Around the time he moved to Sun Valley, his sister tried to buy a home in Canoga Park, only to be turned down because those of Japanese descent weren't welcomed by the local real estate agent. When she returned a week later, found a different salesman and listed her heritage as Hawaiian, she was welcomed with open arms.

But even with his jarring relocation and postwar discrimination, Muraoka's story isn't so different from thousands of others who headed to the Valley in its dawning days as a real suburb.

First it was the lure of Barone's pizza, which pulled young Jerry Hurwitz over the hill from his Westside home as a teenager in the early '50s, going on double dates in his hotrod Chevy. Then it was his service in the Air National Guard in the 146th Fighter Interceptor Squadron in Van Nuys. Finally, it was the promise of an inexpensive three-bedroom house in North Hollywood that made him stay.

``I have the most marvelous memories of the '50s,'' said Hurwitz, who still lives in the same Bucknell Avenue home and runs a successful gift shop, Adele's II, in Encino. ``You didn't lock your door, you didn't look over your shoulder, families were home for dinner and not everyone had to work.''

With his wife, Doris, he sent his daughter and son to public schools, went to school barbecues and parties. Even as the neighborhood grew and the 170 Freeway cleaved its way through, he got to know his local police officers and couldn't help but run into the people he'd grown up with at Fairfax High, who'd traded the apartment life of old Los Angeles for single family homes.

In this burgeoning metropolis, where new developments were constantly underway, the now 69-year-old Hurwitz could feel like he was living in a small town.

That was no accident, either. When developers carved the old ranches and farmland into the Valley floor, each new development took on an identity unto its own. Critics would later charge that the area lacked a unifying plan, but it was certainly good at maintaining the Main Street, USA feeling in small stretches.

But the Valley wasnt always so welcoming of minorities, with a history of racial division that lingers to this day. Though he had no scrapes with the law and was the son of the respected minister Rev. Hillery T. Broadous, Zedar Broadous felt that brush of racism growing up and deep into the 1960s.

Born in 1948, he grew up in the Basilone Veterans Housing Projects in what was then called the Roscoe neighborhood. His family had left the Deep South to work in the shipyards during the war, part of a landmark anti-discrimination law that enabled thousands of minorities to find work in the integrated defense industry. While they found the policies to be less overt in their new home, they still faced plenty of hardships.

Broadous recalls as a college student at Valley State in the 1960s being stopped by police in nearby Burbank, then driven to the city limits and told not to return, though he'd done nothing wrong.

But at the same time, he also remembers the good days, the church parades, playing football in the street, running track at Pierce College. When he got older, he joined the Navy and saw the world, yet he still ended up back Van Nuys Boulevard, the owner of a print shop. Fifty-eight years after he was born, he reports for work each morning only feet away from the place he went to elementary school.

``This is my community - it always has been, no matter where I was in the world,'' said Broadous, who also serves as pastor of social concerns at his family's Calvary Baptist Church. ``I've been other places. I loved Atlanta, enjoyed Chicago, lived in Dallas for a hot minute, but there's no place like home. The whole San Fernando Valley, that's my neighborhood.''

Brent Hopkins, [phone]

brent.hopkins(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

34 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- 2) Below, a 15-year-old Jerry Hurwitz stands beside his father's '53 Chevy he used to drive on double dates out to Barone's. At right, Japanese-American children set up a government-run trailer camp in Burbank, similar to the one an 11-year-old Harold Muraoka occupied in what is now Sun Valley.

Courtesy of the Hurwitz family

Courtesy of UCLA Library

(3 -- 4) The Rev. Zedar Broadous, above, as a junior high school student at Charles Maclay Junior High in Pacoima. Angelica Hurtado, at right, graduating from San Fernando Valley State College in 1973.

Courtesy of the Broadous family

Courtesy of the Hurtado family

(5 -- 6) Dave Levy's 5-year-old brother Mike, left, dressed as Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier, hunts critters on the wild streets of Panorama City. Below, Mrs. Satterfield's kindergarten class at Chase Street School in Van Nuys, which Dave Levy attended in 1961.

Courtesy of The Levy family

(7 -- 9) Jerry Hurwitz, top, used to come out to the Valley for dates, then ended up a homeowner in North Hollywood. He now lives in Valley Village. Doris Hurwitz and her daughter Sheryl, left, in front of their North Hollywood home. Above, a photograph of Harold Muraoka's first home in Sun Valley. Muraoka was interned along with his family at Manzanar War Relocation Center.

David Sprague/Daily News

Courtesy of the Hurwitz family

Courtesy of the Muraoka family

(10 -- 11) Dave Levy, right, and brother Mike Levy stand in front of the Katherine Avenue home in Panorama City, where they grew up in the 1950s. The Hurtado family, at left, is pictured on a Sunday outing in 1958.

Courtesy of the Hurwitz family

Courtesy of the Hurtado family

(12) Hal Lifson grew up on Morrison Street in Encino, selling lemonade and riding Sting-Ray bikes.

(13 -- 16) Clockwise from top left, the Rev. Zedar E. Broadous in the backyard he grew up in. The Broadous family all together in their Pacoima home in the mid-'50s. Harold Muraoka stands in front of his Northridge home. Hal Lifson shows off his first tricycle.

David Sprague/Daily News

Courtesy of the Broadous family

Courtesy of Hal Lifson

(17) Van Nuys land office

(18 -- color) Floods hit Van Nuys

(19 -- color) Universal Studios

(20) Edgar Rice Burroughs on his favorite horse, Colonel, at Tarzana Ranch.

(21 -- color) Howard Hughes

(22) ``San Fernando Valley''

(23) Bing Crosby

(24 -- color) Red Car museum

(25 -- color) Ritchie Valens 

(26) Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard M. Nixon

(27 -- color) President Ronald Reagan

(28 -- color) Sylmar Earthquake damage

(29 -- color) ``Fast Times''

(30) Rodney King 

(31 -- color) Los Angeles riots

(32 -- color) Northridge Earthquake damage

(33 -- color) North Hollywood shootout 

(34 -- color) O.J. Simpson acquittal

Photos: Daily News archives; Associated Press; Getty Images

Box:

Milestones

Source: Daily News research

Research: Carol Bidwell/Staff Writer

Graphics: Jon Gerung/Staff Artist