When Beverly Cleary died, on March 25 at age 104 in Carmel, her obituaries gave a welcome nod to the two years, 1934-36, that the future author of the Ramona and Beezus books lived in Ontario. A sentence or two cited her education at Chaffey College, which was then located in Ontario.
Let me go into more detail, since I once researched her Ontario years.
Cleary, then Beverly Bunn, left her native Oregon to attend Chaffey during the Great Depression. Tuition was free and she could board with a relative who was the college’s librarian.
Picked up at the bus station by a member of the family, the 18-year-old marveled at what she saw.
“We drove up Euclid Avenue, Ontario’s main street, which appeared to end in mountains. This was the California I had imagined,” she wrote in her 1995 memoir, “My Own Two Feet.” And on Euclid, just as she’d seen in postcards and geography textbooks, were “tall palms with feather-duster tops.”
Not everything has to be about Hollywood. Even Ontario can seem glamorous to a newcomer.
Cleary lived in a boardinghouse at 328 E. Princeton St. and walked the three blocks to Chaffey College, which then shared a campus with Chaffey High.
Alert to her surroundings, the Oregonian was delighted by things new to her: fruit trees, mealtime place mats, backyard incinerators, early dusks, suntans and patios — a feature she had always mentally pronounced “paysho.” She picked avocados off the tree, got sodas downtown at Gemmel’s drugstore and saw movies in Pomona with her friends.
Her sophomore year, she shared an apartment downtown with a classmate to cut expenses and worked as a substitute librarian at the Ontario Library for 40 cents an hour. The job also gave her a chance to observe people.
“Patrons furnished subjects for English compositions,” Cleary wrote in her memoir. “An old man who spent most of his days in the library confided that he called it his private club.”
After graduating in 1936, she finished her education at UC Berkeley and pursued a career as a librarian. In a famous anecdote, a grubby boy one day asked her, “Where are the books for kids like us?”
Well, there weren’t any, so the budding writer filled the void with “Henry Huggins,” the first of her many novels that took a more realistic view of youngsters.
Ontario has changed a lot since the 1930s. The apartment she lived in her sophomore year is long gone and the Carnegie library was demolished decades ago. But the house on Princeton Street, dating to 1884, is still looking good.
Nothing in Ontario is named for Cleary, despite the efforts of the Library Board and myself back in 2006. City leaders sniffed that she wasn’t really local.
At least the Ontario library has a good selection of her books. Check one out in her memory and read it on your patio while eating an avocado.
brIEfly
In a rare interspecies mayoral summit, the human mayor of L.A. County’s West Hollywood met March 20 with the canine mayor of Riverside County’s unincorporated community of Idyllwild. Mayor Lindsey Horvath presented Mayor Max, a golden retriever, with a certificate of recognition from the West Hollywood City Council, praising him for bringing his constituents joy, for making the world a better place “and for being a very good boy.”
David Allen writes Friday, Sunday and Wednesday, three dogs. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, visit insidesocal.com/davidallen, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.
