Verdugo Views: Column about Jackson Bowl was up their alley

Two men who grew up in Glendale read a recent Verdugo Views about Jackson Bowl, and both wrote to say they had youthful connections to the bowling alley.

Robert Tarallo, who sold newspapers at the corner of Glendale Avenue and Broadway as a young boy, sent a note saying that one of his regular customers worked at the bowling alley. The other reader, Warren Westerholm, had a job there setting pins.

Setting pins was hard work, Westerholm said in a letter in response to the April 24 column.

“You had to watch out for the flying pins. I remember a couple of men getting broken arms. I had big hands and could pick up three pins in each hand. That sped up the setting and customers liked that,” he wrote.

This was in 1947 and 1948, he added, when they earned 10 cents a line. “Our tips were put in the thumb holes of the ball and then rolled down to us,” he wrote.

The two men have another connection: They were both in the newspaper business as young kids — Tarallo sold and Westerholm delivered.

In a follow-up email, Tarallo said his family moved here in 1950 and lived on Louise Street. He sold the Mirror for 7 cents a copy, earning about $4 on weekdays and $10 on weekends. His station was in front of a Glendale icon, the Victorian, Gingerbread-style, 75-room Glendale Hotel, built in 1887.

“It was old then, in 1955,” he wrote.

Westerholm, who grew up in Glenoaks Canyon, delivered the Glendale Star, originally published on Thursdays and later, also on Sundays.

“I was on my route Sunday morning, Dec. 7,1941,” he wrote. “I had to rush home and wake my parents to tell them Pearl Harbor had been bombed.”

His route was from Glenoaks Elementary all the way up East Glenoaks Canyon. At first, he delivered 150 papers, but within a year and half, his deliveries doubled.

“That’s how fast the canyon grew with new homes,” he wrote.

This was quite a heavy load for a 10-year-old, he wrote. “We had a split sack that went over our shoulder. Half the papers in front and half in back. When loaded and you threw it over your head, it was enough to knock you off balance,’’ he added.

Neither young man stayed in the newspaper business for long. Tarallo graduated from Glendale High in 1957 and went to work for Glendale’s Sears Roebuck in 1960.

“I worked there for 32 years. I started in the automotive department and then worked in major appliances,” he wrote.

That’s where he met a young woman named Pat. “We married in 1969 and will celebrate 45 years this year,” he added.

Westerholm went to work for Woolworth when it first opened on Brand Boulevard. He worked in the kitchen and had friends who were stock boys in the same store.

“On Friday nights, we would work feverishly to get our chores done so we could go to the studio previews at the Alex across the street,” he wrote.

In 1950, Westerholm worked for Bob’s Big Boy on Colorado Boulevard and then later helped open the Montrose Bob’s at La Crescenta Avenue and Verdugo Road, working the breakfast shift.

And, here’s one more similarity. Both men now live in La Crescenta.

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Readers Write:

Paula Devine was elected to Glendale’s City Council during a special election on June 3. After the election, a reader contacted me, asking whether there had ever been two women on the council at the same time.

I got in touch with former Councilwoman and Mayor Eileen Givens to sort it out. Here’s what we came up with:

Ginger Bremberg was elected to the council in 1981, so “she was already on council when I was elected in 1991,” Givens said. They served together until 1993.

“In 1993, Bremberg went off the council and Mary Ann Plumley was elected,’’ she said.

Plumley and Givens served together until 1997.

‘’Then, Plumley went off council and Bremberg came back on,’’ Givens said, so from 1997 to 1999, when Givens retired, she and Bremberg were — again — on the council at the same time.

Now, Laura Friedman and Paula Devine will be serving together, making this the fourth time there have been two women serving on the council at the same time.

Bremberg wasn’t the first or even the second female to serve on Glendale’s ruling body. The first was Ann P. Bartlett, elected to the Board of Trustees (later the City Council) in 1920. The second, Zelma Bogue, was elected to the council in the 1950s.

For more on both Bartlett and Bogue, see Verdugo Views, Jan. 30, 2010.

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