Once Upon a Time in... Encino

aka How Weird Was My Valley

As a man of a certain age, ethnicity, and body-mass index, it’s become hard not to overly-romanticize my childhood through the gauzy haze of nostalgia, a Super 8 montage of suburban Slip-and-Slides and magic hour cul-de-sac baseball.

And as a product of the Valley in the 70’s, who wouldn’t want to romanticize a time and place, where you could ride a bike down Ventura Boulevard, shirtless, eating an ice cream sandwich without a trace of self-consciousness or fear of ending up on TikTok as “Sephardic Guy devours Choco Taco?” (I believe we could get that trending).

Especially for those of us who’ve lost parents, this Valley remains alive in memory, like a mythical, dry heat Brigadoon. A place where our parents are always young and vibrant, clad in head-to-toe Fila, meeting us for lunch at Dupar’s, their whole lives still ahead of them. 

The reality was a little more complicated. I wish I could say this without cussing like a Bad News Bears’ shortstop, but growing up in the Valley was kinda fuckin’ weird.

But unless you cruised Van Nuys on a Wednesday, owned a KMET Whoo-Ya sticker, rode Schwinns to the La Reina in two thousand degree heat, made a pig of yourself at Farrell’s, went to elementary school with Chaka from Land of the Lost, bought a bar mitzvah suit at Rudnick’s or still have clothes that smell like red cabbage from the Wiener Factory, it’s hard to grasp just how weird it was. 

Behind the cheery facades of ranch houses, needlepoint shops, and Gabe Kaplan doppelgängers coaching little league was a place, somehow both sterile AND untamed. 

The quintessential suburb meets the Wild West. A paradox in pooka shells. 

For those who didn’t grow up here, the Valley of the 70’s was defiantly not Los Angeles. It wasn’t even the Valley of today.

One that’s demographically-diverse and politically-progressive with its bistros, pilates studios and parents who “know where their kids are.”

The Valley when we were growing up was Sam Yorty country: White, conservative, wide-open, and reactionary.

Kids in the Valley were like feral, feather-haired cats, hopped up on Fun Dip, Shasta soda, and affordable home prices. Everyone had feathered hair: girls, boys, Chachis.

Dads went to jobs none of us could describe. Something about…“space?”

Moms sought fulfillment by plunging themselves into mahjong or squeezing Gelson’s produce.

Valley parents, by and large, had no idea what kids did with their days.

They’d put their children on a bus in the morning and didn’t care where that bus took them. As long as it wasn't a school in an ethnically-diverse neighborhood.

Helicopter parents? These weren’t even moped parents.

The Valley was a place where the only “social justice” movements were Prop 13, anti-Busing, wearing baseball sleeves as casual wear, and naming boys “Leslie.”.

“Civil rights” meant ensuring every adult got a free beer with the price of admission at Busch Gardens.

How strange was my Valley? Let’s just say, the Manson Family didn’t make their home base in Mar Vista or the Century City Mall.

The Valley was hurriedly built for returning GI’s. Planned communities, paved over orange groves, overlaid on Indian burial grounds.

Nothing good was destined to happen here.

This wasn’t West LA with its progressive preschools, advanced degrees, and a concern for a child’s “self-esteem.”

The City had museums and universities and LA’s old money families.

The Valley had pinball, pornography, and Larry from Three’s Company.

Yet, in the spring of 1972, my family decided to make aliyah and move to the Jewish Holy Land.

Encino.

Not just anywhere – the hills. South of the Boulevard.

The Jewish Alps. The Kosher Canyon. 

Emigrating from the far away land of Van Nuys, we had crossed the Rubicon of nouveau-respectability.

South of Ventura? We’d never lived South of Victory.

In the words of seminal 70’s philosopher, George Jefferson: we were “moving on up.”

To a certain ethnic group– the one with swarthy skin and iffy sinuses–

Encino was the new Promised Land. 

A place so Jewish, census takers would count your household’s adults, children, and Purim Carnival goldfish.

The permed-and-mustachioed men on my block all looked like recent graduates of the Alan Dershowitz school of modeling.

The women ranged in height all the way from 5’3 to 5’3.

There were so many Fila sweat suits you’d think you were at a Bjorn Borg cosplay convention.

The closest Encino came to “violent crime” was my family of origin robbing me of my self-esteem at brisket-point in the Fromin’s parking lot. 

Everything about Encino was new and clean.

Within weeks of our arrival, I attended the Grand Opening of Encino’s first McDonald’s– the ultimate signifier of the American suburb big time. 

It was greeted with the fanfare of Vienna getting its first opera house. Though it's safe to say, at the Wiener Hofoper, you couldn’t get Grimace hand puppets or a hug from Mayor McCheese.

Encino was safe And conservative. In my new class at Hesby Street School, I was THE ONLY ONE, in a class of twenty, who chose George McGovern over Richard Nixon in our kindergarten straw poll.

I was like the Karate Kid getting bullied by the rich Encino kids. Except they were using Silent Majority conservatism instead of Cobra Kai karate. (That one was for the history majors.)

The flipside of that story: Later that day, without telling my parents, I, a 6 year-old, went door-to-door canvassing for McGovern.

And I didn’t end up on a milk carton OR chained to a neighbor’s radiator.

Encino was so squeaky-clean, we literally had one homeless person. 

Because kids assumed there’d never be another, they referred to him as THE Encino Bum. More honorific than actual name.

The Duchess of Sussex meet The Encino Bum.

He even looked the part-  a trench coat and pork pie hat. Like a depression-era “Forgotten Man.” Or the leader of a 3rd wave ska band.

I can’t say I always dealt with my parents' upward mobility with aplomb. 

One day, the family Dodge Dart, perfectly sufficient for Van Nuys, was replaced by a late model Mercedes.

I handled this minor change as any boy my age would: I cried for 3 straight days. Not sniffles. Like hard, should-we-take-him-to-a-doctor bellowing.

According to family lore, I even yelled at my parents: “you’re selling out!”

A Gen X tantrum if ever there was one.

I was a gentle boy in an un-gentle era. With a male Dorothy Hamill bob–the kind of hair you only now see on closeted congressional pages.

Which brings us to my lunchbox story: The perfect storm of casual child-rearing and free-range children. 

Gen Zers may be shocked, but in 70’s Encino, there were no safe spaces, sensitivity training, or intersectional feminism.

Boys had to act like surfers or Oakland Raiders or you were called “fag.” Unless you acted too much like a surfer or a Raider. Then you were also called “fag.”

Those were prodigiously narrow windows.

To paraphrase comic Gary Gulman, back then, you were either Evel Knievel or you were Charles Nelson Reilly.

There was no gray area. No special carve-outs for sensitive Jewish boys who liked girls, but also cried while watching Eight is Enough.

Smoking Thai stick, behind the Pony League fields, listening to Physical Grafitti – good. Solving all the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries – not so much.

So, it was the first day of first grade at Hesby. And my parents got me a new metal lunch box. 

It wasn’t Superman or Batman or the Six Million Dollar Man or any of the myriad options with “man” in the title.

No. I was sent with a Julia lunchbox.

That’s right. Diahann Carroll in nursing shoes.

In the 70’s, lunch boxes had nothing to do with lunch and everything to do with performative masculinity. And THIS is how my parents decided to present mine.

Look. The closest the manufacturers could come up with for an “action” shot was Julia supervising her son's math homework.

The good news, despite the era’s narrow views on gender, the kids themselves reacted with tolerance and kindness.

I’m just fucking with you. They were brutal.

The first kid at the bus stop called me “the F-word.” That was as good as the day got. You can still see the dents from whence I was beaten upside my head.

This was a rare case where I not only provided a reason to be bullied, I even provided the weapon to do it with.

Most of the day was a blur, though I vaguely recall kids in Strawberry Shortcake backpacks yelling, “get ‘em, he’s different” and kicking me with their jazz shoes.

No idea why Jewish first graders sounded like segregation-era sheriffs. Just how I remember it.

By the heteronormative standards of the 70’s schoolyard, I could’ve ridden to school that day, on a unicorn, buttered from the waist down, through a field of penises, and I would’ve received a less homophobic reception.

It’s not like my parents were warriors for social justice. This wasn’t Bella Abzug striking a blow against gender normativity..

The lunch box was probably on sale at Fedco.

Back then, parents didn’t obsess over every parenting decision in hopes of keeping their kids out of Cognitive Therapy.

I was always the only boy inside the girdle gallery known as the Loehmann's changing room. I rest my case, your honor.

Odds are, my dad didn’t know about the lunchbox, my mom didn’t think about it, and it was on sale. Or it wasn’t.

Not long ago, I read Philip Roth's American Pastoral and Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run back-to-back. Both use childhoods in postwar Jersey to tell the story of mid-century America.

This may be a first, but both books left me jealous I wasn’t from New Jersey. 

I envied the writers’ richly-rendered sense of place. The kosher butcher shops of Jewish Newark. The mixed Italian-Irish Freehold homes. The girls in their summer clothes walking the boardwalk in mid 60's Asbury. All felt like stories that needed to be told. From places interesting enough to have stories. 

For decades, I grappled with the notion that “growing up in the Valley” was the equivalent of “growing up nowhere.” To borrow the parlance of the pharmaceutical world, the Valley stood as the generic for “bland suburb.”

But time and distance (and a lot of therapy) allowed me to realize growing up here was unique as growing up anywhere,  maybe more so.

Encino Bowl, Mike's Pizza, Harry Harris shoes. Space Invaders at GolfLand, go- karts at Pepe's. Hesby kids smoking in the Boys Market parking lot like a hesher Algonquin Roundtable or a production still from Foxes.

We even had a hot dog stand slash batting cage, Flooky's, right there on the main boulevard. Never heard anyone say that about the Champs d’Elysee.

It's funny, I vowed to never move back to the Valley, a stance that lasted as many minutes as it took me to read the Westside real estate section once. 

I even raised my kids in the Valley. Their experiences were just as unique as mine, albeit with less hair product.

And finally, I’ve come to terms with Encino, not as the mythical suburban Brigadoon, but as a real place with real stories to tell.

Not in spite of the perms and the pooka shells, the lox and the little league, the tennis lessons and the Torah portions, the Fun Dip and the Farrah posters, the Vans, Valiums, Val Surfs, Van Halens and Van Nuys Drive-Ins.  But very much because of all of them.