Piece of Mind: It's moved and shaken La Cañada

If you live just west of the Alta Canyada area and are enjoying the benefits of owning property in La Cañada, you might want to tip your hat to the La Cañada Chamber of Commerce and Community Association, which in April of 1949 formed a Boundaries Committee.

The committee came about because, according to a vintage Valley Sun, residents in the upper reaches of town found themselves “floating in space — neither La Cañada, La Crescenta, Montrose — not even ‘Catalina-on-a-clear-day.’” And so they appealed to the local chamber of commerce to help resolve their problem. The Boundaries Committee was tasked with securing public acceptance of standardized boundaries for La Cañada “by mapping the various political districts and public services.”

That’s just one historical tidbit related to the local chamber that we learned this week. Researching some of the organization’s history for us was Olga Alvarado, the cheerful woman you’ll find at the Valley Sun’s front desk any time you wander into our office. She answers our phones, helps the walk-ins, keeps an eye on our building operations and, in her spare time, lends her support to the editorial department.

In advance of tonight’s launch of the chamber’s year-long 100th anniversary celebration, the centennial committee was hunting for historical items to place on a table during its installation dinner. We could offer only photo-copied news stories from back in the day and looked to Olga to dig them out.

This is a time-consuming task, because the vast majority of the news stories that have appeared in the newspaper, now in its 67th year, were not archived except in bound volumes. (Only items published in the past decade are also electronically archived.) So Olga has been up to her elbows in old issues, hunting for stories that illuminate how the chamber has operated in the area—at least since our publication began in 1946 and up to the era of the cityhood movement in the 1970s.