It was the year the Rev. Sam Dixon would die after wounds suffered from a car accident. We had a spectacular rain storm — in July. There was the big snow of January that crippled and delighted the valley. Gov. Ronald Reagan dedicated the Bonelli Center at COC. We were in the clutches of the Arab Oil Embargo when gasoline skyrocketed to 65 cents a gallon. A young CalArts male played a curvaceous mermaid in a student film. He’d later take the stage name of Pee Wee Herman. Patty Hearst, the heiress turned member of the Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist gang, was spotted by numerous people trying to hide in Placerita Canyon.
Then there was the Bigfoot.
Back in August of 1974, Saugus resident Bob Curasi made a plaster of Paris model of a Bigfoot spotted locally. Curasi had been curious after a series of reported Sasquatch sightings in the SCV, including one by a pair of boys staying at a remote hog farm up Lost Creek Canyon. Of course, the teens were ridiculed after perfectly describing a 9-foot-tall Bigfoot, adding that he had been wearing a blue bell. But then, the boys’ story (save for the bell) was corroborated by a pair of young lovers who were parked up Plum Canyon and making out by the full moon. The young woman screamed when she opened her eyes in the front seat and saw a hairy face the shape of a bullet staring in through the windshield. The creature, she estimated, was between 9 and 10 feet tall. It ran away when she screamed. Curasi went out to where the couple had been parked and that’s where he found the bare footprint. However, it was only 10 inches long and six inches wide — unusually small for other reported Bigfoot tracks of creatures being reported as the same size.
The other legendary being who was scheduled to appear in the hot Santa Clarita August was Vice President Gerald Ford.
Just two days ago, our 38th president died at the age of 93. Former senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole used just three words to best describe his friend. Ford was “a good man.”
Back in 1973, Valencia was brand new and ranching, oil and agriculture were still our economic mainstays.
A telephone executive and local chamber president, firebrand Republican Dick Millar, tried to put the Santa Clarita Valley on the map by inviting notable politicians to visit us.
For more than a year, he worked with the vice president’s office and the Secret Service to bring Ford here.
The vice president finally agreed to speak at the new CalArts campus before a crowd of 10,000 people.
Special bandstands and bleachers were constructed. As the day grew nearer, Secret Servicemen worked with local security. Bomb-sniffing dogs and their handlers patrolled the campus. Horse-mounted lawmen scoured the neighboring hilltops, looking for snipers. Millar even had an agent sleeping over at his house for a week before Ford was to speak here in Santa Clarita on Aug. 9, 1974.
The day before was when Millar, and the agent, got the call.
The next day — that day he was supposed to speak at CalArts before thousands — Gerald Ford took the oath of office as our 38th president.
The impact locally was rather large.
First, in a divided community, there was a clamor to remove all pictures of Nixon immediately from government offices.
Then, there was the bothersome detail of what to do when you’re throwing a party for 10,000 when no one will show up.
The custom bleachers were dismantled. Bands, color guards, fireworks, armies of security and support staff were canceled.
Local merchants, who had banked on the crowds, had thousands of dollars in merchandise, T-shirts, hot dogs and beverages.
Back then, we had something called the Women’s Chamber of Commerce. Flo Chesebrough had to figure out what to do with all the porta-potties her organization had leased.
The Chamber of Commerce incurred around $2,000 in debt for the visit and 2,000 bucks wasn’t small change back then.
The Signal’s then-Publisher Scott Newhall penned one of his trademark, above-the-masthead, swashbuckling editorials — a stinging rebuke of Nixon. In a front-page opinion piece, The Signal wrote:
“Richard Nixon deserves no pity — only justice. He is and always has been a tortured human being, whose craving for the cheers of the mob and whose hunger for the stroking of his White House courtiers was so unbearably intense that they destroyed him in the end, and poisoned everyone around him.”
This paper also not-so-delicately suggested that if Mr. Nixon had been head of a South American nation, he would have been long ago “…propped up against an adobe wall and shot.”
While Nixon and Ford were gobbling up all the headlines, most people that day of Aug. 9 failed to notice that ANOTHER famous person was a no-show to the SCV that day.
At the recent Boys & Girls Club auction, someone had the winning bid to play tennis with the controversial showman, Bobby Riggs.
Bobby never made it to the courts.
All the way up into Christmas of 1974, they were talking about now-President Ford being a no-show. At a December Chamber of Commerce meeting, it was pointed out that Mr. Ford already had been given a lifetime membership to the chamber.
One chamber member yelled out during the meeting: “So who’s going to cough up his dues?”
In that odd, odd year of 1974, Gerald Ford would not visit the SCV.
But, right after that, his predecessor — and the man he pardoned — Richard M. Nixon was sighted locally.
After he resigned, the 37th president was spotted driving around the back canyons of the SCV with his Secret Service agent in a large, black Cadillac.
According to reports in this paper, the president had been witnessed walking along some back roads, taking in the scenery.
John Boston has earned 119 major awards for writing stuff. Besides The Mighty West Ranch Beacon, his work appears in the prestigious thebostonreport.net just about every darn day. 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. Read Boston’s daily blog, his Daily English Muffins, the Adventures of Job Hunter and more of John Boston’s award-winning commentary on thebostonreport.net
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