WOMEN PLAY BIG ROLE IN VALLEY; HARD-WORKING PIONEERS HAD FEW CONVENIENCES BY TODAY'S STANDARDS.

Byline: Steve Carney Daily News Staff Writer

The names that dot any map of the Valley invariably belong to men - Burbank, Lankershim, Leonis, Maclay, Mulholland, Pico, Porter, Sepulveda, Sherman, Van Nuys.

Even San Fernando refers to the canonized Spanish king who defeated the Moors in the 13th Century.

But the Valley isn't just a man's world. Throughout this century women have struggled, worked, played and made names for themselves here.

In 1934 aviator Amelia Earhart moved to Toluca Lake and lived there with her husband until 1937, when her plane vanished crossing the Pacific during an attempted around-the-world flight.

Actress Debbie Reynolds got her break when she was named queen of her hometown, Burbank, in 1948. First prize was a Warner Brothers screen test.

Barbara Stanwyck and Marion Marx, wife of Zeppo Marx, owned a 140-acre spread within the Porter Ranch that they called Marwyck.

And for most of the 1950s and '60s, Dale Evans and Roy Rogers lived on their ranch in Chatsworth.

Angie Dickinson, Sally Field, Sharon Gless, Dorothy Lamour, Carole Lombard and Shirley MacLaine have also been Valley residents.

But their cushy hillside homes probably wouldn't have existed without the efforts of the Valley's pioneer women.

``In Calabasas there was no electricity, no running water. There were no conveniences,'' said Catherine Mulholland, 75, of Chatsworth, a fourth-generation Valley dweller. ``My mother and my grandmother lived essentially rural lives.''

If they wanted hot water for washing clothes or bathing, it had to be heated on the massive, squat, wood burning stove in the kitchen. There they also cooked the huge meals they prepared for their husbands, brothers, sons and hired hands who worked in the fields. They got up at dawn, prepared all the midday food, hitched the wagon and brought the lunch to the workers, then came home and started on dinner.

``There was a lot of meat, potatoes and macaroni,'' Mulholland said, and very few fruits or vegetables. Before the Valley was widely irrigated in 1913, such thirsty crops were hard to come by, while wheat production could usually get by with only rainfall.

``Mother said it was a terrible diet by modern nutritional standards. But there was no obesity. These women worked,'' Mulholland said.

``The women sewed, they gossiped, they made all their own clothes.''

``But they had fun,'' added Virginia Watson, curator of the Chatsworth Historical Society museum.

Farm life preserved

Next to the museum, visitors to the Hill-Palmer cottage in Chatsworth Park South can still see what life was like in 1911, when it was built. In that modest home made of redwood beams, Minnie Hill Palmer lived with her husband, her older brother and her ailing mother. And she remained there almost until she died at age 95.

Born in 1886, she grew up on the family farm in the Chatsworth foothills as the seventh of eight children.

``They really enjoyed themselves. They had taffy pulls. You could go to church. You had hayrides. You could go to Calabasas for dances,'' Watson said. ``When you had a party, you invited everyone in the area.''

For entertainment, most families sang, or had a piano in the home. They also played cards, or crocheted, and even played baseball.

But women rarely glimpsed life beyond their farms.

``The women's lives were typically narrow and limited,'' Mulholland said. ``It took real effort to receive an education.''

She said her grandmother, who loved Dickens, ``was very determined her girls would be educated.'' In 1912, when Mulholland's mother was in high school, the closest one was in Hollywood. She rode the Pacific Electric Red Car trolleys to and from school.

Minnie Palmer also tried to push the boundaries that often fenced in Valley women at the beginning of this century.

``She thought women should have equal pay and equal rights,'' and was excited when women were allowed to vote starting in 1920, Watson said. She even offered her home as a polling place for many years.

And Watson once asked Palmer what she considered the greatest invention of her time - The airplane? Motion pictures? Space travel? Television?

The washing machine, she replied. And she wasn't talking about a Maytag - the marvelous innovation she extolled was a hand-cranked wringer, which women ran clothes through after scrubbing them on a metal washboard. One is still on display in her cottage's kitchen.

To make extra money, Watson said Palmer and her family washed the clothes of the men building the Santa Susana railroad tunnel a few miles away, completed in 1904. Theirs was the house closest to the tunnel.

``Father went to get the clothes, because women didn't go around a camp like that. Nice women,'' at least, Watson said.

Taking the wagon to L.A.

Mulholland said when her mother or grandmother wanted nice shoes or a good dress, they had to travel to Los Angeles to buy them. That involved hitching up a horse and wagon, and staying overnight during the journey at a relative's home near the current site of Universal City.

``It's a marvel to me how mobile they were anyway,'' she said.

Even more impressive is the life Lorena Lauesen carved out in Van Nuys. She found herself a single mother in 1923 when her husband abandoned her and their son. Malcolm Sears was 7.

``It was hard for her,'' Sears said. ``She was a farm girl. She only had an eighth-grade education.''

But she took $1,000 she inherited from her father's South Dakota farm and bought a one-acre plot in Van Nuys.

She got a job at the Robert Morton organ factory in town, and when talking pictures closed that down by reducing the need for theater organs, she went to San Fernando and picked lemons.

And she scraped together enough to buy other plots of land in Van Nuys, and even invested in property in Los Angeles. She also saved and bought a Ford Model T in 1923, said Sears, now 82 and past president of the Valley Museum Historical Association.

He proudly recalls his mother, who died eight days shy of her 100th birthday, as a shrewd businesswoman. She had to be.

``We had hardly any money at all,'' he said. ``We planted peach trees on the acre to make some extra income. She was kind of a farmer-ette.''

And in spite of the tough hand dealt her, Lauesen's careful savings and investments kept her self-reliant, and enabled her to pay the debts her husband left.

``She said she could walk down the streets of Van Nuys and look everybody in the eye, because she didn't owe anybody anything,'' Sears said.

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

PHOTO (1 -- 2) Chatsworth Historical Society Museum Curator Virginia Watson tends the Hill-Palmer cottage. Dressed in period costume, docent Betty Summers demonstrates an early 20th century washing machine at the Hill-Palmer cottage.

Evan Yee/Daily News

(3) Chatsworth residents Minnie Palmer and Alfred Palmer on their wedding day in 1909

Photo courtesy of Chatsworth Historical Society