Sharing My Story

By far South Pasadena was the nicest area that I had ever
had the privilege of living. South Pasadena is just west of
San Marino which is a high rent district similar to Beverly Hills.
The house we lived in was an older mansion type of dwelling
that supposedly was the servant's house to an even larger house
that was no longer there (or that was the story). The street the
house was on was tree covered with many large mansion-type
dwellings. It even was the site of the filming of several movies
including the cult favorite, Christine, a demon possessed car.

During the 1970s a group of art school students rented the
house (they attended the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena).
Vance Sanders was one of those former students and was part
of the singles group at Sierra Madre Congregational Church
(Koinoia). We referred to the house as the Cal Trans House.
It was owned by California Department of Transportation
(Cal Trans) and was on a proposed freeway extension route.
Cal Trans also owned other properties in the area. However,
local resistence, over the course of a couple of decades,
prompted the state to abandon their plans for the freeway
extension.

I moved in to the South Pasadena house in July 1989 and
was there until the end of November 1996. At this time
Cal Trans had abandoned their efforts and were in the
process of selling their properties back to private owners.
The married couple who lived in the upstairs was able to
put together the financing to purchase the house.
However residential regulations now called for this to be
a single family dwelling so the rest of the house mates
were forced to move out and find to other living quarters.
This was the longest resident (almost 7 1/2 years) I'd had
since leaving Washington in 1971.