CLIPBOARD

When Jim Crowder was a kid, he used to go on after-school adventures with his friends in the foothills above northwest Brea. The dirt paths leading up the hillsides behind his house were a great place to ride bikes and stage make-believe battles.

His boyhood playground bordered one of Southern California’s largest wholesale nurseries. And when he was in high school Crowder worked there after school, tending plants and making deliveries.

Today, at age 27, Crowder owns his own nursery on the same corner where he used to catch the school bus. His is the perfect “local boy makes good” tale of early success and the entrepreneurial spirit. He started his own business at age 18 with just a truck and a knowledge of plants. Today he has four trucks, 2 acres of land, a greenhouse and seven full-time employees. He tends the interior plants at nearby Brea Mall and provides landscaping for restaurants, supermarkets, shopping malls and hotels all over Southern California. The legendary pink bougainvillea surrounding the Beverly Hills Hotel is replenished with stock grown at his nursery, and he plans to add palms to his inventory.

Developers would love to get their hands on the land he purchased five years ago, just a few yards from the house where he grew up. Then, it was nothing but a debris-filled lot and an old wooden shed badly in need of paint. But Crowder put a lot of time into cleaning the place up and, for now, he’s not selling.

“We filled up 21 dumpsters clearing the lot,” Crowder recalled. The old shed, built in 1947, got a fresh coat of paint. “We found out that it used to be the United Avocado Growers Assn. packinghouse,” he said.

Today, there isn’t an avocado grove in sight, but small pockets of nearby land are used to supply Southern California with locally grown landscaping material. In addition to Crowder’s California Living Nurseries, the neighborhood is also home to Village Nurseries, a larger operation that grows its plants on power-line easements and several larger sites throughout the area. Bonsai are also grown here in a greenhouse operated by Specialty Plants Inc.

But it won’t be long before the acres of azaleas suffer the same fate as the avocado groves. According to Russ Wojcik, production manager of Village Nurseries, a large portion of his operation sits on land slated for development in the next two years. “We’ll move farther inland but try to stay close to the marketplace,” he said.

When Village Nurseries moves on, the neighborhood will consist almost entirely of housing tracts and large electronics and aerospace firms such as Hughes Aircraft, located south of Central Avenue. The bulldozers, for their part, are already at work on Crowder’s former playground.

Population Total: (1990 est.) 5,918 1980-90 change: +49.3% Median Age: 39.5

Racial/ethnic mix: White (non-Latino): 84% Latino: 8 % Black: Less than 1% Other: 8%

By sex and age: MALES Median age: 37.8 years FEMALES Median age: 40.5 years

Income Per capita: $21,508 Median household: $69.123 Average household: $75,110

Income Distribution: Less than $25,000: 19% $25,000-49,999: 28% $50,000-74,999: 27% $75,000-$99,999: 15% $100,000 and more: 11%