They have a lot of great stuff in there. I teach photography at a local school and we went through there on a field trip. It was awesome! The school kids thought it was great too.

Great stuff. Just discovered your site. My earliest memories are from California in the early 60′s (first, Cupertino, then, Canoga Park). I love the 50′s-60′s era and especially SoCal in that era. It calls me even to this day. All the best.

Recently viewed some of our home movies (8mm) from So Cal, circa 1961. Everything from the “Indians” doing their “War Dance” at Disneyland to me ay age 7 riding the “Flying Bumble Bees” in Lake Arrowhead’s “Santa’s Village”, which is no longer there, given way to ‘vacation cabins,’ many of them several acres in size … and the land surrounding those estate homes are several acres, too!

But how, oh HOW, could you feature Downey, CA, and NOT mention the Carpenters?!?! Karen and Richard continued to live there even AFTER they made many, many millions, so they MUST have had a very strong connection to that city and their family.

As The Car Nut, I should point-out that Richard Carpenter was one of the world’s pre-eminent collectors of Chrysler’s 300 ‘letter cars’, high-performance Hemi V8-equipped models. I wrote a few magazine feature stories on Richard and his cars — at that time, his father was the ‘curator’ of the collection. The first 300 appeared in 1955, a two-door coupe using body panels and other parts from their New Yorker, Imperial and Windsor models. Its heart was the 5.4 Liter V8 Hemi which made 300 horsepower (hence the ’30′ nomenclature).

And I say Richard “was” a pre-eminent collector because I think most of the collection has been sold-off, but I hope I am wrong about that.

These cars really “made their bones” (as Tony Soprano might say) in the early years of NASCAR, where the founder of Mercury Marine engines, Carl Kiekhaefer, owned and ran a team consisting of top drivers in racing versions of the 300s, and he had tremendous success doing so. And the ’300′ name lives on to this day, as Chrysler’s best-selling sedan model.

To many thousands of people, probably many more, long after Hawaiian shirts are gone (which I hope is never), the name “Downey, CA” will forever mean: The Carpenters.

Please forgive my taking the discussion a bit off, but I can never let a mention of ‘Downey’ slip by without telling folks about Karen, Richard, and that fabulous car collection.

Steve Parker
CAR NUT TV
http://www.SteveParker.com / http://www.CarNutTV.com