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Community Corner

Looking Back: The Gully Behind Carpenter Avenue

The gully was filled with mystery, adventure and a ton of trouble!

We lived on a cul-de-sac that was the perfect backdrop for all sorts of childhood fun. Pacoima Court in Studio City was home to many games of football, baseball, tag and hide-and-seek, but our favorite place to play was in the gully at the end of the street, which was filled with mystery, adventure and a ton of trouble.

My twin sister, Teresa, and I discovered the gully when we were about 3 years old. No doubt my brother Jack probably took us down there to scare the overalls off us, and it worked. The gully was a big forest of emerald green with a creek running down the middle. The crawling ivy was home to all sorts of things with four, six and eight legs.

I remember being down there with our pal Dennis Vitarelli one weekend morning. We were heaving boulders into the water to create tsunami splashes, when we heard some rustling from above.  Two large dogs were making a beeline toward us, probably because we were trespassing on someone’s gully property.

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We took off, leaping onto the flat rocks that punctuated the banks of the gully, and scrambled up the ivy to get away from the dogs. I’m sure they would have made mincemeat of my jeans had they gotten hold of us.

Another time, we headed down into the gully after a huge downpour. My mom was too busy to notice we were missing, but she sure paid attention to us after we came home soaked and covered with mud. Get out the hose!

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One afternoon, when Teresa and I were about 5, my brother’s friend Tom Logan took us down into the gully to pull a prank. Tom pointed up to some yuck-green contraption on the bank, and said it was a spanking machine. Teresa and I were petrified!

We found out later it was simply the water filter for the neighbor’s swimming pool. But back then, it was an ominous robot creature with large green arms that could easily grab us and torment us into submission.

Remember that huge pipe that laced under Carpenter Avenue? Rumor had it that it emptied into the Los Angeles River near Ventura Boulevard, but I could never explore that far to find out if that was true.  The pipe was much too dark and scary for me to think of slogging through the muck and slimy critters, let alone dealing with the unknown.

We used to throw stones into the pipe, skipping them along the water and watching them disappear into the oval darkness. One time, just as I was getting ready to hurl a huge stone, Teresa stood up, right as I let the rock fly, hitting her squarely on the side of the head. She started bleeding profusely, and I wondered what I would tell my mom once we got home.

I told her that Teresa accidently scraped her head on the branch of the tree. I’m not sure she believed me, but I don’t recall getting a spanking that day for my behavior.

Whew!

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