I was born in East Los Angeles. My parents were Russian Immigrants. We moved East to Montebello Gardens when I was 1. While we lived on Oak Street in Montebello Gardens (Pico Rivera) my 3 older siblings and I would walk to the Montebello library to check out books. We’d head to Whittier Blvd. and have to cross this bridge over the Rio Hondo River to get to the library. It was approximately 2 miles each way.
The library was located at Montebello Park. This is the building the library was housed in where I spent many happy hours looking at all those books and trying to choose just 4. Reading is one of my favorite childhood memories. I loved to look at and hold a book in my hands and read it. When the bookmobile came to my elementary school I would shake with anticipation for my turn to go into the mobile library and decide on what books to borrow.
We moved from Montebello Gardens across the river to Montebello when I was in 5th grade. This is our house on Los Angeles Ave. When we lived here there wasn’t a second story and there wasn’t a chain link fence. Although a chain link fence would have come in handy after the twins (escape artists) were born…
This was my high school. Montebello High home of the Montebello Oilers. There are lots of fences around the school now so they can lock down the school. How sad is that?! That’s a reality of our times. No fences in the 60’s!
The football field that I spent most Friday nights at during football season in high school. It was under renovation when I took this photo.
In my junior and senior year I was a Song-leader and part of the cheer squad. I’m in the bottom row on the right. You can see those same stands behind us. This photo was taken in fall of 1967. We’re seniors here and we all graduated in June of 1968.
To see more Childhood Memories visit the Round Robin Photo Challenge Blog and click away!
Photobucket is holding all my photos that I stored on their site from 2007-2015 hostage replacing them with ugly grey and black boxes and asking for a large ransom to retrieve them. It is a slow process to go through all my posts deleting the ugly boxes.
The Happy Wonderer ~ ellen b. 
That is sad that they have the fences around the schools now. I went to take my daughter to my high school one year and it was a week before school actually started and we were stopped at the door. I wasn’t allowed to take her in and show her around. =(
I enjoyed your entry.
Monica
I enjoyed your blast from the past and all the new and old photos. I follow along your blog but do not always have time to comment. God Bless your sweet parents and the fact that your Dad’s story was published in the BG book is amazing. Nice the family was together and that baby was too cute. Now I can identify with the two homes as I am sitting in one of them right now and wondering where the lemon zester is but oh that is in the other house. Makes me a bit crazy but it makes life interesting:) Happy Valentine’s day!
Joyce
Nice memories, and I love that photo of you! Wow, b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l!!!!
Enjoyed your memories and what a pretty picture of you as cheerleader!
What a sweet post, Ellen! I too don’t have any much of anything from my childhood. I think that’s why I am a little overboard on the keepsakes for Baby. I too have LOVED LOVED books ever since I was young. My aunt was a librarian. There were many days when no one could watch me (both my parents worked), I would spend the entire day at the library just perusing books! 🙂
What a great photo of you my friend. I love it and this entire post. Thanks for sharing. The photos were wonderful 🙂
I love hearing about your special family history. I just saw a bookmobile the other day and was trying to remember details about mine. You and Jeanie were both Song leaders too! Another thing you have in common.
Love this post, Ellen. I spent several years living in Pico Rivera but only ventured from the house (off Dufee and Beverly) across to the Home Depot.
They built a second story? Wow that was a small house for all 10 of us!
I don’t have anything left from my childhood either, which Is why I’m glad I have a few photos of that time. You being a song leader somehow doesn’t surprise me….I bet you were great!
ellen, I forgot about Round Robin Photo Challenge this time. I love your childhood story! 🙂
Great memory lane!!! Funny that you mention the twins were excape artist…..go Lana!!
It’s great that you have so many memories and photos of aspects of them from when you were young. I don’t have too many, just photos of family from long ago taken by my dad. Still, they bring back a lot of memories for me, too.
How nice to see some pictures of where you lived in your childhood !
I too had the same hairdo in the 60th lol ! It’s funny that it was so international.
Wow! Maybe no trinkets, but a heck of a lot of photos for memory lane.
Great entry! : )
Nancy
http://nancyluvspix.blogspot.com/2010/02/childhood-memoirs-and-memories.html
I don’t keep any of my childhood toys, neither can I find any old photos, so I decided to ‘cheat’ and borrow my son’s toys, something that still survive from my forefather times to his. Unfortunately I think those type of toys will be long forgotten as kids nowadays prefer the electronic toys and those associate with cartoon character in tv programme.
Sweet memories!
Thanks for the great tour of childhood places. I especially love your old home in Montebello.