| PART TWO |
| The jewel piece was the Loyola Theater. I saw many fine late-70's features there like 'The Blues Brothers', 'Used Cars' & '1941'. Mind you, they weren't REALLY checking them I. D.'s in those days. The theatre was glamorous as hell. When there was a boring scene on the screen, I'd look up at the ceiling where the dark blue sky was littered with stars and do a bit of star gazing until something interesting happened with the movie, mainly an explosion. Did a lot of THAT with 1941. Sure, the sky and its stars were fake, but so was the movie. It's called special effects. You get what you pay for. |
| There were other places in this area that I should remember (outside the Fox Hills Mall, but that's in Culver City), but those memories don't have enough muscle over the major ones I just mentioned here. Yup, nostalgia can be so selective, ego and brain cells permitting. Or maybe I was too busy concentrating on the music coming out of my Sears "boom box". Guess that's the part of nostalgia that gets left out, how obnoxious you were and looked...especially if you were like me, a geek/slacker with thick glasses and a cheap boom box with stuff like 'Rapper's Delight' or 'Pop Muzik' blasting out of it. (hey, no walkman in them days) But then, I was also preoccupied with LAX. See THAT page for details, too. To my personal joy, I ended up working in Westchester in the mid-90's and it was at the antique mall for a couple of years. When the Loyola Theatre turned into a gray medical building, my stomach turned 360 digress and I began to turn into Art Bell on speed, I was loudly complaining to friends that they, for example, painted that poor thing gray just so to punish us all for enjoying THAT old theater and not in some shoe box...blah...blah blah, etc. |
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| That dropped kicked me into taking pictures of the area. Somebody had to, as even more local landmarks began to give way to the era of the chain stores. Westchester Music shrank and went out of business in 1981 after 35 odd years of business. The old Ralph's was changing locations. JC Penny and the Broadway Westchester had their glamorous department store days suddenly come up dry. Compari's would change into the dreaded IHOP. Marina Hotel had changed hands and started to desperately remove or painted over the unique characteristics from its past. Even the Faire itself would close up due to a thing called Ebay in 2000. |
| Luckily, Soundsations and the Temple Of Good Things only changed addresses to a couple of blocks down. Despite the traditional change of time, the skeleton fragments are still here and my 'history' collection slowly grew. It's gone to the point that this goes beyond just plain old selfish nostalgia. It's trying to record a history, a more humane time before shtick like Fox News, cell phones, strip malls, deregulation, sandblasting and etc. that made the world more hostile and noisy. However, you gotta keep your wits and perspective together. Think back to your days of "innocent youth" and see how many people thought that the junk you love so much was just as trite. Especially if its something like disco coming out of a cheap boom box carried by some mindless punk....like me. Don-O |
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| An opinionated version of the Loyola. |
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| Two old sign at the Broadway W just before closing |
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| Thank you and good night |