James Laird - Lark Ellen Boys Graduate from Emerson Jr. High School - Page 2

They had a great auto shop if you owned a car or a friend who had one you could work on. One friend did have a neat hopped up Roadster that he had been working on for years before he could even get a driver's license. At this time they were rebuilding Ninth Street and changing its name to Olympic Blvd. They did this in strips doing every other lane for miles before doing the others. This made an ideal drag strip as the most of the side streets were closed with only a few streets with crossings. Late at night the dragsters would enter the new lanes at a crossing and line up on the finished lanes. Other cars would be at the next crossings and when they signaled it was all clear by flashing their lights the ones racing would take off for the finish lane. They did not want to lose control during a race because it was a 8 inch drop off the sides of the finished lanes.

For us boys at the home this was great entertainment as they had taken half of our front lawn to widen the street and you had a good view from the upstairs windows, or standing at the new curb line. Not having a car to work on the instructor had little time for us non owners. They did have a big assortment of engines on hand that you could look at and take some of the parts off to see how they worked. The most interesting were from old aircraft going back to WWI.

The Lark Ellen Home for Boys was getting ready to move to a new location which had been donated to them out near Pomona at the end of 1941. The existing property had become to valuable with so much open space on the block. It became a UCLA frat house. The new home was a country estate with large grounds and buildings. I never saw the place but a few years later at the LA County Fair I met some boys from the home who had Soap Box Derby cars on display and they gave a good description of what it was like and it sounded like it was a good move.