Foothill Community Likes Small-Town Feeling : * La Verne: When college town’s citrus industry failed, the packing houses and groves were replaced with residences.

Newlyweds Vic and Chandre Nichols were snuggling up to their first Christmas in “Old Town” La Verne, exchanging gifts inside their Craftsman-style home when they heard the approaching wail of sirens.

“We were thinking what a horrible time for an accident,” Chandre recalls. “Then it started getting closer and closer, and we finally walked out on our porch in our robes, expecting to see this house in flames and people fleeing, and instead it’s the fire department with Santa Claus handing out candy and apples to the kids.

“That’s when we went, ‘We love this town.’ ”

Since 1931, volunteer Santas have parked their sleighs and hitched rides with the La Verne Fire Department to deliver bags of candy, peanuts and fruit to the town’s children. Last year, they distributed more than 9,000 paper sacks of Christmas goodies.

“I would doubt that there’s anything like that in the whole country where the local fire department goes to every single home,” says La Verne Mayor Jon Blickenstaff.

But while the fire department’s unique Christmas tradition may keep the Nicholses in La Verne, it’s not what brought them to this foothill town of 30,000 people and 8.3 square miles in East Los Angeles County.

“I was just struck by the small-town atmosphere,” says Vic, 37, a purchasing agent for a Torrance-based aerospace firm who lived in Redondo Beach for nine years before his marriage.

Chandre, 29, first discovered La Verne while driving out from her hometown of Pasadena to Pitzer College in Claremont to go to school.

“Like everybody else, I thought civilization ended at Pasadena’s eastern boundary,” Chandre says. “Then I came out to school here and fell in love with the area.”

After six months of searching from Altadena to Claremont for something other than a “cracker box-style house,” the Nicholses purchased their home on Third Street for $209,000. Shaded by 100-foot deodar cedars, the 1,600-square-foot 1917 bungalow on almost a third of an acre has three bedrooms, two baths and laundry room in the basement. Amenities include a cozy front porch and avocado trees in back.

Homes in Old Town La Verne with about 1,600-square feet range between $200,000 and $250,000, depending on the extent and quality of the period-style restoration work. Don Kendrick, president of the La Verne Historical Society and the Nicholses’ realtor, believes his clients made a solid investment. “Dollar per square foot, the old homes in La Verne (pre-1940) are as desirable, if not more so, than any other house in La Verne,” says Kendrick, whose great-grandmother Margaret Bixby named La Verne and donated the land to build the town’s first grammar school.

Despite the value the Nicholses place on their first home, they seem to place even greater stock in the neighborhood.

Chandre recalls how neighbors reacted when a car struck their dog Keeter, when she and Vic were still new to the area.

“Instantly, everyone came out of their houses,” Chandre says. “The guy across the street brings out a table to act like a stretcher. Another person ran ahead to the hospital to warn the vet that we were going to bring in this dog. Another person brought a blanket. It was amazing.”

East of the Nicholses on Third Street live the Hertzes, Howard, a retired principal and his wife, Barbara, a kindergarten teacher at Grace Miller Elementary in La Verne.

They make up part of a large congregation of porch sitters who roost on various neighbors’ porches, bantering away the evening about grandchildren and local politics.

“We’ll have as many as 17 neighbors gather on one porch in the evening, and it’ll go on like that all summer,” Barbara says.

Many in their group--with either parents or grandparents among La Verne’s early settlers--also share the common bond of history. Their heritage, as well as that of the town, has been shaped by the confluent forces of capitalism, church, college and citrus.

La Verne was actually started because of a one-man feud with the Southern Pacific Railway, whose historic line linking the East with San Francisco and Los Angeles was completed in 1876. Upset with the Southern Pacific’s monopoly on shipping rates, businessman and land speculator I. W. Lord helped persuade the Santa Fe Railway to build a rival line to serve the West.

Excitement was so contagious that just the promise of the completed route gave birth to 13 towns along the Eastern San Gabriel foothills in 1887, including Lordsburg. On May 25, 2,500 people accepted Lord’s invitation of a free train ride to visit the new town and attend a land auction. By the end of the day, the sales tally reached more than $200,000, marking the single largest land sale in Southern California.

Lord capped his triumph with the construction of a $70,000 three-story hotel on the present-day site of La Verne University.

The trouble was the land boom fizzled almost as quickly as it started, making La Verne’s land almost worthless. The constant ringing of hammer on nail was silenced, and it is said that Lord’s hotel never welcomed a paying guest.

Salvation was on the way, however. Members of the Church of the Brethren, introduced to La Verne on one of the Santa Fe’s promotional $1 excursions from Kansas in 1889, purchased the Lordsburg Hotel and some adjoining lots for $15,000 with the intention of converting it to a college.

By the fall of 1891, the college opened with eight faculty members and 135 students, and served as a real magnet for Brethren people in the Midwest, who came here to retire and enjoy the unique advantages of living in a college town. The college quickly gained a reputation for producing “teachers and preachers.”

The union of church and college was a powerful force in town, according to Evelyn Hollinger, City of La Verne Historian and author of “La Verne, The Story of the People Who Made a Difference.”

“The city council usually consisted of four Brethren and one Methodist,” says Hollinger, a member of the Church of the Brethren, adding that the “values-oriented” council successfully kept liquor stores and pool halls from the city’s limits until the 1970s.

Town residents didn’t even enjoy the luxury of a movie house. “We had to stretch a bedsheet between two deodars and watch outdoor movies on the grass,” recalls Barbara Hertz, a La Verne College graduate.

Also central to La Verne’s history is the citrus industry, which engaged most townspeople until recent times in growing, picking, packing and shipping of oranges, grapefruit and lemons. The whole community feared winter freezes, wind storms and low prices, for all prospered or went broke together, says Hollinger.

In the 1940s, citrus production began to fall, hastened by a mysterious malady called “quick decline” disease. Although the town’s last packing house closed in 1959, dry-land farming continued in some pockets of La Verne through the ‘80s. But one by one, the uprooted groves were replaced by the newest industry: housing--especially north of Foothill Boulevard.

Today, neat tracts of homes built by Hughes, Lewis and Pulte march right up into the canyons and foothills of north La Verne, ranging in price from $250,000 to $500,000.

“This is God’s country,” says Marty Rodriguez, Century 21’s top U.S. realtor for the first six months of 1991 who has made a lucrative living serving La Verne’s upwardly mobile families.

“I feel good about moving people here because I would live here,” she says. “You still have neighborhoods where kids can play outside and do all sorts of things they can’t do on the west side of town. It’s just clean and refreshing.”

Jeff and Candy Wellbrock and their two daughters, Danielle and Kasey, moved from Covina to north La Verne six years ago, and then moved farther north into their current home at Emerald Ridge two years ago. Purchased for $356,000, their 2,700-square-foot Warmington home has four bedrooms and three baths.

“We never looked south of Foothill Boulevard,” says Jeff, 33, who owns a contracting business. “We like the newer homes where we can be a little higher in the foothills.” He also cited La Verne’s low crime rate, good schools, late-afternoon breezes and increasing real estate prices as reasons for moving here.

“Since I’ve been in La Verne,” Jeff says, “I’ve seen the prices continue to rise, and that’s a sign of a good, growing community.”

Using his contracting experience, Jeff accented his home with oak baseboards and moldings inside, and a deck, patio and swimming pool outside. The lot backs up to an oak preserve that they use for hiking or family picnics.

“It’s just kind of like I’m in my own little world up here,” Jeff says. “I just walk in my back yard and sit by the pool, and it’s just total tranquillity.”

Jeff admits that building a business and raising a family left little time for social activities. Now that’s beginning to change.

“We have a big handful of friends up here,” Jeff says, “and we’re getting more involved in the town as the girls get older.”

The Wellbrocks say they shop along La Verne’s busy Foothill Boulevard corridor but rarely patronize the Old Town section unless they have to post a letter, take the girls to dance or eat at Jeff’s favorite pizza place.

Mayor Blickenstaff, who lives downtown, discounts what many view as a growing rift between north and south La Verne.

“The split is geographic as well as historic,” Blickenstaff says. “It’s kind of old and new, but it’s not as if one area is a better or worse place to live.”

For seniors, La Verne is an excellent place to live, Blickenstaff says, listing the city’s eight mobile home parks, two senior citizens apartment projects and the Church of the Brethren-sponsored Hillcrest Homes as examples.

Younger denizens of the community may find fewer options, however, Blickenstaff says, adding:

“I think the young people feel as if there’s not enough to do in town, and that’s one of the reasons the theater (the recently approved Edwards Cinema complex to be built at the corner of B and Foothill) would be an important part of our growth.”

All the politicking over the size of the project and its impact on traffic have scarcely filtered down to sections of old La Verne. “We moved here precisely because there wasn’t much to do,” says Vic Nichols.

On the subject of increasing La Verne’s cachet with the addition of the new theater or some other upscale project, Blickenstaff confesses: “A lot of people say, ‘Where’s La Verne? I haven’t heard about it,’ and I’m thinking ‘That’s fine, because if you get too crowded, there’s really no advantage to that.’ ”

At a Glance Population

1991 estimate: 29,412

1980-91 change: +25.1%

Median age: 32.5 years

Annual income

Per capita: 15,870

Median household: 42,776

Household distribution

Less than $20,000: 18.7%

$20,000 - $35,000: 20.3%

$35,000 - $50,000: 20.7%

$50,000 - $75,000: 24.7%

$75,000 +: 15.6%