There are many hats I wear in this community. Auctioneer. Pest. Basketball sharpshooter extraordinaire. Annoying rural satirist. Valley historian. Besides staying awake nights thinking of ways I can sneak the phrase, “Monkey Bucket” into an op/ed piece on the Middle East, I used to teach the history of the Santa Clarita Valley. I would get queries from people asking if I know where large, forgotten caches of treasure are buried.
Seriously.
Some guy called me a few years back and wanted to know if I could help him find a lotto’s-worth of gold. Well. Sure. I know where all the buried treasure is in the valley and I’d be happy to tell the first room-temperature IQ Yuppie where it’s buried because, frankly, I’m too fat and lazy to drive to the back of the property and dig up the untold millions myself.
We’ve had Bigfoot sightings in the valley, about 30 years ago. Someone, who had a very controlled, disturbed kind of voice, telephoned to inform me that the North American Abominable Snowman is so hard to find because he can enter and exit through these portals and travel through time.
“I knew that,” I said. “It makes it easier to walk through a time portal to get to the liquor store as opposed to walking across six mountain ranges to pick up Metrolink.”
He wasn’t amused. In fact, I could have sworn I heard the tell-tale click of an AK-47 before he hung up.
I suppose the teacher’s query about 3rd grade history songs was a legitimate question. Maybe she thought I had an entire library shelf of history songs on CD, arranged by maturity and rhyme.
“Did you want 3rd grade songs on local SCV history in mambo, gangsta rap or 1940’s swing?” I should have asked.
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that maybe what this valley needed was such a song book, skewed toward 8-year-olds. Let it begin with me.
What about a song about our local history, sung to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s, “It Was A Very Good Year.” Here. Let me sling a raincoat over my shoulder and adopt my best bass Yo-Frankie-Boy Good Fella voice:
“In 1303, it was a very good year. I met a naked Tataviam girl. She was quite nude. I said, ‘What’s happenin’, Dude.’ She was sitting under an oak. I thought maybe she’d let me get lucky and give her a …”
Hmm. What rhymes with “oak?”
I could see a classroom filled with 8- and 9-year-olds, rocking back and forth in serious concentration, singing that.
Maybe I need to consider my target audience a bit more carefully.
Remember the old Peter, Paul and Mary folk song, “Puff, The Magic Dragon”? With a few lyric changes and saluting our local political heritage, it’d go a little something like this…
“Our… local planning commissioner… lived by a cut-down tree. And frolicked in the campaign cash in a land call Santa Cla-reeeeeeeeee…”
How about something from Streisand?
“People. People who afford condo rent… are the luckiest, people in, SClarita…”
OK. OK. I’m getting away from the age group and history theme. Let’s spin this one and see if the kids will skateboard on it.
“Itsy-bitsy SClarita spider, went up to Newhall Ranch. Out comes Lynne Plambeck and declares the spider an endangered species. Out comes Marlee Lauffer, and stomps on all the bugs. Then out comes the lawyers, and wipes the Skip Newhall quarterly dividends out…”
That one needs a little work. It doesn’t meter out, then there’s the lack of discernible rhyming, so important to that age bracket.
I made this one up all by myself. It’s about our local legendary bandit:
“Tiburcio Vasquez was shot in the butt, climbing out of a lady’s bedroom win-dow. He had no pants. And got bit by the ants. And then all of a sudden, they hanged him.”
Try singing the above to the theme of “Bonanza.” It’s a trip.
The world-famous cowboy crooner, TV and movie star, Gene Autry, had his ranch here where Melody Ranch is today in Placerita Canyon. One of his legendary songs was “Happy Trails.” Of course, there aren’t too many trails left in the SCV. Maybe Gene’s song in 2008 would sound something like this:
“Happy paseos, to you, until, we cement, again. Happy paseos, to you, keep smiling until the gardeners come in. Don’t ever be afraid of stormy weather. We’ll rubberize the community together…”
I can just hear the merry little voices of the next generation harmonizing to that one.
John Boston is the preeminent local writer and humorist who has won 119 national writing awards. He is a wonderful human being and it is a privilege to call him a friend. John will continue to live in the Santa Clarita Valley and write about anything and everything. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.