Crabgrass Crucible by Christopher C. Sellers

Author:Christopher C. Sellers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2012-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Nearby Nature as Privilege and Peril

The place where the Lillards lived for several decades after the war, a canyon known as Beverly Glen, lay in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains but also within Los Angeles’s city boundary. Entirely private property until 1968, the Santa Monicas, with their steepness and rough topography, had long stymied agriculturalists and developers alike. Yet those same features made them, like the West Los Angeles over which they loomed, a new postwar frontier for the Los Angeles suburban elite. Their slopes and hilltops, as at the new extensions of Bel Air, offered spectacular views and wild chaparral right at one’s doorstep. The Beverly Glen house where Richard Lillard moved in 1947, however, was tucked in a canyon, with far more chaparral than vista. For this reason, it also was within his financial means as an entry-level college instructor. The location was well suited to Lillard’s passionate eye for wild nature—the result of earlier experiences.

Though born in Los Angeles, he had spent most of his boyhood on a farm outside Sacramento. He then earned a doctorate in the East and commenced a career of teaching college English, while writing books with nature-related themes such as The Great Forest (1947), a history of western woods from Indian times to the present. Immediately after its publication, he returned with his wife and child to California to take a teaching job at the University of California, Los Angeles, and bought the Beverly Glen house. It lay, he later reflected, in “a modern middle environment, an old semi-tame, semi-wild hilly tract lying between primeval brush (and groves of oaks and black walnuts) and farm-sized parking lots devoid of green leaves (the towers of Wilshire Boulevard).”41

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