Two toddlers, dressed in costumes, enter the liquor store. "Say 'Trick or Treat', says their mother.
They walk up to the cashier, behind his bullet-proof glass, and say...
"Hi, Sam!"
During this surreal moment, a song plays on the radio. "Long ago, and oh so far away..."
It's a whisper-y male voice, but he's singing a song that Karen Carpenter recorded. 40 years ago she grew up here, in Downey. Two decades after her death, they're playing the song she made famous.
Happy Halloween!
Next door, a trick-or-treater visited J.J.'s Burgers #10.
And up the street at Stox, customers were waited on by a lady pirate and Zorro
The Aerospace Legacy Foundation traces the history of the famous Downey site - from its beginnings as a 1929 Emsco plant, through new owners like National Security Aircraft Corporation, Vultee Aircraft Corporation, and North American Aviation. It grew from 11,000 workers in the 1950s to 25,000 in 1964.
Switching from Air Force contracts to NASA contracts, they laid the keel of the Apollo space vehicle, and constructed its command and service modules. "The Apollo program is recognized as one of man's highest engineering and industrial accomplishments," the site's newsletter notes. "As such, it is nationally significant and much of the recognition belongs to the Downey Industrial Plant..."
The site also received frequent visits from Wernher Von Braun, and by 1969, when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Mike Collins visited the plant, they could honestly say that "the trip to the moon started right here." Five of the space shuttles were later constructed there in the decades to come - the Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavor - and the plant was also involved in building Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz mission.
And here's a bit of trivia I learned from the site. 70,000 cars a day drove past the intersection at Lakewood and Firestone in 1954. That's an average of 48 cars per minute, every minute, 24 hours a day!
11:18 PM
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Long-distance phone service was out - as well as some 911 calls - for Downey, as well as Long Beach, Huntington Beach, Laguna Beach, Westminster, Artesia, and Bellflower.
Verizon blamed "an equipment problem" for the outage, which began at 2:20 Tuesday and continued intermittently throughout the day.
This is the first time I've seen Downey mentioned in a national wire service story by the Associated Press...
UPDATE: The L.A. Times blames a hard-drive crash in Long Beach, and a backup system that didn't come on. They tell interesting stories about people coping with the outage...
A team of volunteer ham radio operators fanned out to 17 nursing homes to restore communication with medical personnel.
Police departments in several cities placed more patrol cars on the streets.
"The outage was so complete that Long Beach officials had to drive to KJZZ-FM, the city's designated emergency broadcast station, to let the radio station know what to tell listeners."
