Hoagy's Petting Zoo

It was a pet shop with a zoo in the back of it. Located near the Rohr Aircraft plant (now Goodrich Aviation) in Riverside, California, you could buy exotic animals there (until the Humane Society deemed that animal to be unfit to live with humans).

The truth is I really don't know what happened to this place. I was last there when I was in junior high school. It was a lot of fun. I discovered I don't like unsalted peanuts (that's what was given to the elephants there).

I would love to hear from anyone who remembers Hoagy's Petting Zoo. The picture I selected for this page really doesn't do anyone any justice.

Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour

I remember the Farrell's in Riverside, behind the Tyler Mall (corner of Magnolia Avenue and Hughes Alley). It just wasn't a good place to eat ice cream... the Reuben sandwiches... the unique soda pop from years gone by...

In time that Farrell's became England's Ice Cream Parlour. It became independent. Then I went off to join the Army and spent a few years in Germany. I came back AND IT WAS GONE...

The Farrell's chain survived many years after this. However, today there are only three left... One is in Santa Clarita (north of Los Angeles) and the other two are on the island of Oahu in Hawaii.

If you are using the information I put in my old website about one being in San Diego... that one went out of business 3-4 years ago!

Typewriters

A little girl got excited when she saw the office device pictured at the left:

"Look what I found, Mommy. It's a computer. But it doesn't have a CPU. The keyboard is built into it. It has its own printer. And there is no monitor.

"Wow! it sure looks a lot nicer than Daddy's Macintosh Pro!"

ZZZZ Best Carpet Cleaning

Barry Minkow was a whiz kid. He got a few household supplies and started cleaning the carpets in his Los Angeles neighborhood when he was 16. He got to be so good he started advertising on TV and became wealthy at a very young age.

He was shown to be a model kid. Everyone was so proud of him. But he got involved with the wrong kind of people and money laundering. Eventually, he wound up in prison.

Today he works to help people understand that you cannot survive without being honest to anyone, especially yourself.

San Bernardino Valley College Indians

I was a student at Valley College in 1975 through 1976 and again in 1982. I played with the pep band, as the marching band had been disbanded two years before. We were the Indians. SBVC had been the Indians since 1927. The original nickname was the Wrens. It seemed strange to me then that the original nickname had been the wrens... I never saw any wrens. But it isn't that silly a thing... there are many wrens in the nearby desert...

Founded in 1926 as San Bernardino Valley (Joint) Junior College, Riverside Junior College (later known as Riverside College, Riverside City College, and now Riverside Community College) was twelve years older. Valley was always a bigger school with impressive athletic teams and bands. (The Valley College marching band was in the Tournament of Roses Parade long before RCC (Riverside Community College) even thought about being in it.

My band director at Valley was C. Paul Oxley. He was there from the 1950s through the 1980s. A studio trombone player in Chicago, an Army musician during World War II, and a high school band director in Tennessee, I owe a lot of my musical knowledge to that man.

In 2000 the students at Valley College voted to change the nickname of the school to Wolverines. Now wolverines don't even live in Southern California, except in zoos. The reason given for the change was that the term Indian was a pejorative term in describing the people who lived here before white people. Christopher Columbus called the people he saw Indians because he thought he was in Asia (and that's what they called Asians then).

No matter, in 2004, the entire musical program was wiped out so I wouldn't go back to that school today.

One thing many people against the Indians nickname protest is that the nickname demeans Native Americans. Arcadia High School in Arcadia, California, is the Apaches. For many years they abused that name. But in recent years, everything they do is approved by the tribal council of the White Mountain Apache Tribe of Arizona.

There are those who say there are no Caucasian school nicknames. Here are five. I'm sure you can come up with more. I linked the schools. Enjoy...

• University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana - - "Fighting Irish"
• Rim of the World High School, Lake Arrowhead, California - - "Scots"
• Erasmus Hall High School, Brooklyn, New York - - "Flying Dutchmen" (a mostly Black school)
• Loara High School, Anaheim, California - - "Saxons" (mostly Latino)
• Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College, Miami, Oklahoma - - "Norse" (mostly Indian/Native American)