In Montebello, Neighbors Are Valued : Middle-class, heavily Latino suburb works, despite north-south divisions.

As usual, the municipal golf course in Montebello was already crowded at 6:30 a.m. one Saturday last month, as foursomes waited their turn at the starting tee.

More than a dozen middle-aged men were waggling their clubs over the wet grass, chatting in Spanish. They were all correctly dressed for a municipal course, in mismatched slacks and sweaters. A young man bounded up to join them in a maroon-and-silver jogging suit, with a cocksure smile and a set of gleaming clubs.

It grew quiet as he was introduced to his partners. Golfers, especially golfers about to tee off, are apt to inspect one another for signs of overconfidence, the better to gloat over later as the course drags one and all down to their true level. This young man was being inspected for all he was worth, but he didn’t seem to notice.

But then, as he was being introduced by a man whom he slightly resembled, an uncle or perhaps his father, something about him quickly changed. The young man stood in the perfect pose of humility, stooped, eyes lowered, his hands at his sides. He was showing respect.

Conversation resumed.

That’s as good an anecdote as any to illustrate the spirit of Montebello. A bedrock middle-class community near East Los Angeles, between Monterey Park to the north and Downey to the south, Montebello has a firm grip on respectability.

Flame at Memorial

The city’s varied institutions are in working order. At City Park, the flame at the Veterans Memorial is lit and the ballpark smooth and green. Another of the city’s five parks was named after a cop.

Besides the public schools of the local district, the city is served by the Catholic diocese, which maintains two high schools and a trade college. The Armenian Orthodox Church has raised a new cathedral. Rod’s, the venerable coffee shop on Garfield Avenue, serves homey cinnamon toast. Tianguis, the Latino supermarket, sells 10-pound bags of chickens’ feet and fresh tortillas.

Montebello, heavily but not predominantly Latino, figures in California history as the site of Mission Vieja, founded in 1771, forerunner of the prosperous Mission San Gabriel.

The Taylor Ranch, active early in this century, became the city’s locus. The sprawling yellow ranch house is now part of a park, and one of its outbuildings is an “art barn” where children learn painting and crafts.

In its own right, the city is rare for a suburb in having a long- established industrial base. It is an important trucking center, virtually surrounded by freeways.

Named After Slope

What is not so rare for a small town is its set of longstanding feuds and divisions. Residents sometimes speak of South Montebello and North Montebello in tones that bring to mind the Union and Dixie.

South of Whittier Boulevard are trucking yards and flat, gridded neighborhoods of postwar housing. North is the sunny slope from which the city took its name in 1880s (“Beautiful Mountain” in Italian). On this slope are custom houses and the new Montebello Plaza shopping mall.

Recently, the city’s redevelopment agency proposed to buy out 23 householders in South Montebello and replace 444 trucking lots with a new, revenue-producing industrial park and perhaps another mall.

Indignant, South Montebello arose and defeated the proposal in a citywide vote, and now residents clamor to replace the City Council members who put forth the offending plan.

Like Their Town

Campaign rhetoric was sharp, but for the most part, it seems, the people of South Montebello still like their town well enough.

“I don’t think I ever had any ill-feeling toward North Montebello,” said Alejandro Morales, a professor of Spanish at UC Irvine, who grew up on Espanol Street, in deepest South Montebello, on a bluff overlooking Simon’s Brick Factory.

“North Montebello was part of the outside world,” he recalled. “It was there to be conquered.”

The brick factory, which closed in 1952, was Morales’ world. His father and uncle were among the thousands of Mexicans imported from the state of Guanajuato to work and live in the factory compound, which had its own store, pool hall, school, church and baseball team.

When the factory closed, Morales and hundreds of children like him were integrated into the English-speaking schools of Montebello. Morales says he had his run-ins with a few teachers, but fondly remembers many others. They helped train him well enough to later write a novel, “The Brick People,” about the factory and its inhabitants.

Remembered Flowers

Another product of the Montebello Unified School District is 36-year-old David Velasquez, a municipal court judge in South Laguna Beach. His parents, Gil and Della Velasquez, moved to South Montebello in 1949, buying an $11,000 house on South Taylor Street with a GI loan.

Della Velasquez, who grew up near downtown Los Angeles, had visited Montebello many times as a girl, and remembered its hills being covered with flowers, for the city’s most visible business then was agriculture. It was a place of fig orchards and plantations of roses and birds of paradise. (Oil derricks, during the 1920s, had already sprouted on the higher slopes of the North Montebello hills.)

“I remembered all the fun times I had when I used to visit here, and that’s why I wanted to return,” she said the other day.

Gil was a steelworker who came to own a construction business. As he prospered, he saw his neighbors on South Taylor move to more expensive houses in North Montebello, and eventually he followed them. Not without misgivings. Della did not want to move.

“I loved my neighbors,” she said with great feeling. “It was the house where we lived when the children were born. That kind of place is always special.”

‘It Was Now or Never’

But Gil watched one neighbor, the police chief, move to a new tract on the hill where a fig orchard had been, and then another, the city fire chief, moved up there as well.

“It seemed like a lot of money,” he said of the $61,000 house he wanted, “but I knew I could afford it, and in a way, I figured, it was now or never.”

He wrote a good-faith check and gave it to his realtor. Then he talked to his wife and had to ask the realtor to return the check. Then he decided he couldn’t pass the chance to move up in the world, and tendered the check again.

“After a while of going back and forth, that check started to look like an old dollar bill,” he said, retelling the story. “Finally, my realtor said, ‘I’m keeping this check, and you are buying this house.’ ”

In 1973, the Velasquezes moved to their present house on North 19th Street, about halfway up the hill. They have noticed that people in the new neighborhood, though friendly, keep to themselves more and have fewer children.

‘Right Decision’

The neighborhood seems also more mixed, with Japanese, Armenian and Hungarian families around them. Without a doubt it is more prosperous: houses today sell for about $400,000.

“It was the right decision,” Della said of the move. She has realized that they never completely left South Montebello. They still see their old friends at St. Benedict’s Church. “Our kids were baptized, confirmed and married there,” Gil said. “We know every person in the place.”

Further, Montebello is still a small town. One runs into neighbors at the supermarket, the mall or at Rod’s. When a visitor was telling Gil Velasquez about the author Alejandro Morales, Velasquez said, “I remember that kid. Used to be in the neighborhood.”

AT A GLANCE Population 1988 estimate: 51,994 1980-88 change: + 4% Median age: 31 years Racial/ethnic mix Latino: 73.8% White: 13.4% Other: 12.4% Black: 0.3% Annual income Per capita: $10,386 Median household: $26,859 Household distribution Less than $15,000: 26.9% $15,000 - $30,000: 29.2% $30,000 - $50,000: 24% $50,000 - $75,000: 13.6% $75,000: + 6.3%