#004 - Karate Kid Tourism, Rare Guitars, and Fourth of July 1947
Plus soft serve flavors and star-spangled banners!
Hello and welcome back to IN THE VALLEY WITH JOSH HELLER!
We’re at it again for another week of valley treats. We’re excited to see SFV-interested subscribers continue to roll in. So I again want to ask: what kind of 818 things should we be covering? Do you have any Valley gossip to report? Any events to promote? Restaurants that we’ve got to try? Dedications to your sweetheart? Missed connections? Whatever it is I want to hear from you.
Send me an e-mail (my instagram handle [at] gmail.com)… and don’t forget to share and subscribe this newsletter!
Yesterday I witnessed some real-live KARATE KID TOURISM as I drove down Saticoy in Reseda. A fan was taking pictures of the South Seas apartment complex where Daniel LaRusso lived with his mom when they first arrived here from New Jersey.
I suppose this guy could have also been apartment hunting, but at the time of publication there does not appear to be any vacancies. If you also happen to be on a COBRA KAI CRAWL don’t forget to visit that mural on Ventura in Encino across the street from Uncle Bernie’s.
I want to give a shoutout to the ITVWJH community. A bunch of people sent me this great Eater LA piece: A Beer-Riddled Dive Bar Food Crawl Through Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley
Noah Galuten takes us on an extended trip through valley dives eating the weirdest menu items he can find at Pogo’s, Norwood, Springbok, Ireland’s 32 and more. Come for the Peri Peri Chicken Livers and Shrimp Louie on an Avocado Half, stay for the multi-day hangover. I emailed the writer to congratulate him on the piece. He told me: "I get out a lot less these days, so when I do I try to write about it." I feel you bro. Galuten’s drunken adventures continue this week imbibing agave-based moonshines with Bill Esparza in Sonora.
Pogo’s made it to the top of Galuten’s list. Two weeks back we reported that a high-speed pursuit ended at Pogo’s, and we also learned that it was where DJ Quik had his first drink at a bar after (or during) the lockdowns of 2020.
Popular pizza parlor Prime Pizza replaces puzzling Puzzle Pizza in that perplexing plaza on Victory & Canoga in Woodland Hills. Plenty of people have told me that the Burbank outpost makes the best pizza in The Valley. Even though I’m a seasoned pizza reporter, I still haven’t tasted it yet. I look forward to bringing home a Prime pie next week. Will keep you posted.
In dairy/non-dairy-related news I continue to get reports on the best flavors of soft serve at Magpies in Tarzana from my colleague Donna. She is currently obsessed with their Yuzu. I was there with my family on Friday and ordered a vegan swirl of Corn Almond and Fudgesicle with honeycomb toppings. Magpies’ almond and oat milk-based frozen desserts are wonderful, especially as someone who struggles with lactose intolerance, and more specifically as someone who struggles to remember to bring their Lactaid with them. Magpies also has dairy-based flavors like Sweet Cream and Malted Milk Chocolate, which my mom got. Maureen really loves slices of their soft serve pies, especially the original fried pie.
Magpies has tables set up in front of the neighboring smoke shop and what is perhaps the most iconic guitar store in North America, Norman’s Rare Guitars. As we were finishing our desserts employees from the extraordinary axe exchange were locking up for the evening. My dad is a real guitar guy and loves that store. The last person to walk out was Norman himself. I could tell my dad was a bit starstruck. So I asked Norm if I could take a picture of them. He said “sure—wait how’d you know it was me? did you see the documentary?”
Norman Harris is a world-renowned expert on vintage guitars. His shop has been opened since 1975 and they’ve sold instruments to everybody from your average guitar player to rock-n-roll royalty. His gear has been seen in movies like The Last Waltz, This Is Spinal Tap and Back To The Future.
The 2024 Netflix doc features Norm’s legions of devotees like local valley dudes Tom Petty and Dave Grohl, as well as Kiefer Sutherland, Melissa Etheridge, Post Malone, Lenny Kravitz and a whole lot more.
The store is open Tuesdays, Fridays & Saturdays from 11:30am-5:30pm. They also have a popular YouTube channel with 639k subscribers. Check it out.
It’s not all rare guitars, yuzu-flavored frozen desserts, and dive bars here in The Valley. ICE continues its crackdown in the SFV and throughout Los Angeles. This week they’ve been targeting day laborers at Home Depots across the Southland.
This continues to be a devastating breach of the social contract. You can show your support for workers by volunteering and donating to IDEPSCA (Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California.) They operate the worker centers adjacent to Home Depots. This is the page for the centro de jornaleros in Van Nuys. They’re staying vigilant at the moment, but when things calm down you can drop off food to their refrigerator and pantry, which I first learned about from Los Angeles Community Fridges.
Over the weekend 150+ people convened for a community meeting at The Midnight Hour in San Fernando. The coalition of individuals and groups came together to organize in the face of ICE.
"It's clear that the Valley is yearning to organize now more than ever as ICE continues to terrorize our neighborhoods. ICE may be out there, but WE ARE TOO!"
A few weeks back I found these game day programs from the late 1940s at a Leonis family estate sale in Woodland Hills. Last week I showed off some cool vintage burger ads. This week because I’m committed to an editorial calendar for timely content, I wanted to share this souvenir program from the 21st Annual Circus & Fireworks spectacular at the Rose Bowl on July 4th 1947.
The event included many spectacles like a “sensational hot-air balloon ascension and parachute jump,” “eight beautiful male African lions performing at one time in a setting of dazzling splendor,” “fun on the trampoline,” and “a short camel race. (we hope!)”
This was the grand finale:
For the first time in the West, “Queen of the Air”, MARILYN RICH offers her sensational new attraction, working suspended beneath a helicopter at approximately one-hundred feed midair, and performing an intricate roman ring routine and finishing with her sensational one-arm phlanges.
Here’s 1951 footage of her performing above New York City and the Statue of Libert
"She's a cool cutie this Marilyn calmly defying death at a daring salute to Miss Liberty"
And if you’re into high-resolution scans of artifacts like this one, consider becoming a paid subscriber. I’ve already posted the full program here.
I’m not feeling particularly patriotic at the moment but I’ve always loved the radical Chicano doo-wop singer Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara’s bicentennial rendition of The Star Spangled Banner (1976)
It ends with this short poem which has always resonated with me.
Say, America, I wanna thank you for giving me Chevy cars Rhythm & Blues Thank you for giving me Ritchie Valens Little Julian Herrera And I wanna thank you for giving me The Penguins The Flamingos The Jaguars Thank you for giving me Drive-in movies James Dean Marlon Brando Thank you for giving me King Kong But most of all America, I wanna thank you for giving me my voice. Yeah, you’re my home sweet home,
I’ll be playing this tune on the Fourth of July edition of my weekly oldies radio show La Hora Dorada / The Golden Hour on Bilingual Sounds. You can catch it live every Friday at 5pm. Older shows are archived here. I also host a more eclectic show every Thursday night at 8pm called The New Josh Heller Show.
Thanks for reading IN THE VALLEY WITH JOSH HELLER #004
GOOD EVENING FOLKS!
Guevara's rendition is a bop.