It had been a few months since I’d attended a Chino City Council meeting, and two years (!) since I’d been to a full-fledged Rancho Cucamonga City Council meeting. (Last year I did attend an afternoon workshop, though — as part of my effort to attend a council meeting in all nine of our cities.)
So I hit Chino on Tuesday and Rancho on Wednesday, finding enough material, and commentary, for Sunday’s column.
Diane Williams and Bill Alexander will leave the Rancho Cucamonga City Council after the November election. They’ve been in office a combined 54 years. I talk to them both for Wednesday’s column. (In a hometown touch, I ran into Williams at the drugstore and she gave me the story.)
The long-shuttered Pacific Electric train depot in Rancho Cucamonga is due to be repaired and reopened next summer, with the hope of having one or more tenants leasing space in the city-owned building. I offer an update and some history in Wednesday’s column.
My column late last month on the Base Line Road/15 Freeway interchange got a heavier than usual and polarized response, from which I excerpt the best. Kind of like that column item, this one is just for fun. Then there’s some Culture Corner items and a Vignette. That’s all in Wednesday’s column.
Alta Loma High School opened in 1963, with its initial three grade levels graduating in ’65, ’66 and ’67. When the organizer of the joint 50th reunion contacted us about coverage, the topic seemed like it might make for a good nostalgia column. What was Alta Loma like before the growth boom? I talk to some alums, one of them the mayor, and write about it in Sunday’s column.
Reader Mary Jo Kunkel submits the above photo, looking north from the corner of Archibald and Highland avenues in Rancho Cucamonga, and wonders what the detour sign is all about.
She doesn’t know what the detour was or why the face-down sign said the sidewalk is closed, although she wonders if the So Cal Gas leak in the area earlier this year was involved. “These have been on this corner for months and months,” Kunkel writes. “I’m hoping you will post this picture … so someone will come by and pick them up. Obviously no one is paying any attention to them but me.”
I happened to drive past Monday on my way to an appointment and the signs were still in the same position.
Joseph Filippi Winery is now in the hands of Joey Filippi, the fourth generation of the family business. But it wasn’t easy getting to that point. He grants a rare interview for my Sunday column.
A view looking north on East Avenue in the left turn lane that seems to be on the wrong side of the freeway pylons.
I marvel at the improved but still confounding Base Line Road interchange in Rancho Cucamonga and Fontana in Wednesday’s column, while also tossing in a list of notable upcoming local concerts and a Valley Vignette. If you’ve had any experience with that interchange, past or present, I’d like to hear about it, in hopes that it isn’t just me.
Secrets Behind the Columns Dept.: I wrote the interchange item as long ago as May and revised it a few weeks later but, unsure if it was column-worthy, saved it for a rainy day. I’m on call for jury duty this week and don’t know from day to day if I’ll be working the next day or serving. Learning Monday night that I’d be working Tuesday, and thus would need to file a column by 1 p.m., I hauled the interchange item up from the depths.
Will I have a Friday column or a Sunday column? Only court administrators know for sure.
An email query arrived from Carolyn Inhoffer Montes, who asks:
I hope you can help answer a question for me. My dad, a Marine, was chatting with a fellow Marine, who asked him if he knew about the ‘Anchor Lounge’ in Rancho Cucamonga, owned by a Navy guy (thus the name) that was ‘in the middle of a vineyard. My dad and I are assuming it was a ‘seedy’ place…
Nonetheless, he keeps asking if I have learned where it was located. I’ve googled to see if anything would pop up, but nothing does. I saw your blog and thought you might be able to help me, given your historic knowledge of Rancho.
Any thoughts? Or insight?
I’ve never heard of this, but that doesn’t mean much. Have you any of you?
Update: via the Alta Cucawanda Friends Facebook page, Chris H. Boesen says the Anchor Lounge was on Foothill Boulevard, just west of Hermosa Avenue, on the north side, in what is now a patio furniture store. “I know it was there in the mid-’70s. Don’t remember when it closed,” Boesen writes. “It was a dive bar for sure.” And Jane Vath O’Connell says: “I remember it as a place called Capt. Shinks!”
One of the most visible vineyards in the area is the one in Rancho Cucamonga at the corner of Haven and Fourth. The harvest this week is likely the last, though, as hotels have been proposed for the site. I watch as grapes are picked and write about it in Friday’s column (with great photos by Will Lester). Above, a field worker totes a tray of grapes to the truck. (I shot that one.)
