Growing up in Garden Grove – Our Neighborhood

When we came to California in 1963 my folks bought a 3 bedroom 2.5 bath house in Garden Grove. It was way better than any of the apartments that we lived in in Michigan or Washington, although it wasn’t nearly as cool as Grandpa and Grandma Logsdon’s home in Flint, MI.

When we moved in, it was a brand new house in a new neighborhood at the corner of Harbor Blvd and Garden Grove Blvd. The house backed up onto a big empty strip of land, we could see houses and business across the way but had no idea that within the next few years there would be a Freeway in our backyard. It turned out that it was the future home of the 22 Freeway.  Now we thought it was pretty cool when they were putting the freeway in. I will admit the coolness factor dropped drastically when the cars took over. But fortunately they eventually came through and planted trees in our backyard to act as a sound barrier.

The house was located on Pearce Ave. which had empty fields at each end,  This turned out to be the best thing ever as it was really awkward for cars to turn around so we ended up with very little traffic. This meant we could spend all our time in the street playing football, over the line, war, bicycle and skateboard riding and dang near anything else 3 young boys could think of. And with streetlights it was easy to figure out when the play day was over. With a little effort we built an underground fort, I think it lasted all of 2 weeks before the city came in and bulldozed it full.

This house was also within walking distance of our elementary school (Eisenhower Elementary about 3/4 mile walk), our middle school (Leroy H. Doig, about 1.2 miles), and our high school (Santiago High, about 1 mile) . This was nice because our mom almost never had to drive us, except when it was really rainy.

This neighborhood turned out to be perfect, at least to me. We had a Jack-in-the-Box(late night Jumbo Jacks with mom and dad) and Del Taco (Taco Tuesday 10 Tacos for a $1) just around the corner, an Alpha Beta Grocery store (by then I had grown out of my shoplifting ways) just a short walk down the street and when I got older it had my kind of candy store – Sav-On Electronics, I could build anything I wanted perfect.

I lived there for 15 years and kept going back until 1989 and every one of them was filled with many wonderful memories.