Commentary: Dark against an Oven of Yellow Fire—My Home of 41 Years

By John Gallup

TNews Contributor

 I was just another college grad at loose ends.

I didn't have any idea what I wanted to do, and my supervising professor at college said, "If I were you, I'd go to Alaska."

It seemed like a good idea at the time, so here I am, 52 years later.

This story is about where I was born and spent the first 23 years of my life: Altadena, California.

Set up against the San Gabriel Mountains on sloping ground, Altadena was laid out on a basic grid pattern when old haciendas were broken up and Pasadena became built-out and expanded north.

It is divided almost exactly in half by north/south Lake Avenue. East of Lake was more upper-middle class, larger homes and lots, and it was here that Dr. Gallup moved into 1560 Homewood Drive on my sixth birthday in April 1955. I was enrolled in Noyes Elementary school.

The house at 1560 was huge by our standards, it was called a "New Orleans Colonial" and had wide balconies on three sides. In the backyard was a formal garden with a rectangular fish pond which was quickly emptied of its fish and became our summer swimming hole. To the west, down a steep slope, was well over an acre of raw scrubland which we called "The Jungle" and where four young boys could dig for buried treasure and build forts.

Fifteen-sixty was at the end of a cul-de-sac, so the street also was our playground and our football and baseball field. The Baby Boom provided us with lots of other kids to play and make mischief with.

We all had bikes, and our mother would greet us as we came home from school, saying, "I don't want to see you or hear you until dinner." Which was just fine with us. We pedaled off into the afternoon smog in search of adventure.

Elementary school, junior high, high school, then off to college. College was only about a 20 minute drive away, so I was back home a lot, usually with my hand out for spending money.

Then off to Alaska.

My dad passed in 1989, and my mother in 1996, and,by 1997, another family owned 1560 Homewood Drive.

On January 8th 2025, Santa Ana winds approaching 100 mph took a small brush fire and did what nobody had ever envisioned.

It destroyed Altadena.

Spreading from east to west it ignited drought-stricken landscaping and soon the first homes. It traveled west at high speed, the embers landing blocks ahead of the main fire. The houses, built with wood which had been drying for decades, exploded in flames as each ignited the next door neighbor's home.

Fire crews and police  along with social media and blog posts got the people out. The miracle of the Eaton Fire is that the loss of life wasn't in the hundreds or even thousands.

Sometime in the early hours of January 9th, 1560 and all of the other houses in the area went up in flames.

An NBC news crew started down our block after the worst of the fire had passed, stopping to look at each, now, mostly-consumed home. As they got down to the cul-de-sac they panned around to the south and there it was—four brick pillars with steel railing still attached, dark against an oven of yellow fire that had been our home for 41 years.

East of Lake Avenue there had been a couple of lucky islands of homes that got missed, but west of Lake, the destruction was nearly total. This had been the more working class side, and was home to many upwardly mobile minority home owners.

Since then, I've thought about the old place a lot. I remember odd things: the feel of the doorknob in my room, the sound of the crickets at night, sitting together in my parents bedroom on summer nights with two fans on us to stay cool. My dad listening to the Dodger game on his old Zenith radio.

I guess this might be grieving.

 What lies ahead for Altadena is a very long road to recovery. All of those old homes had asbestos in the heating system and in the plaster, and lead from solder. A witches brew of every construction and furnishing product is still there. It is today a huge (maybe the largest) Superfund site in history. What isn't there is any vestige of wood. At those temperatures it is completely combusted.

The idea, voiced today by a well-known idiot—that the Eaton fire could have been stopped in those conditions—is ludicrous. As the homes started to burn each water service opened up and quickly robbed pressure from the system. No aircraft could fly in those conditions, taking the best firefighting tool off the table. Getting the people out was the goal, and that was done successfully.

The Eaton Fire is a textbook example of conditions outside anyone's experience.

I call out anyone who says that it could have been handled better or differently, including the Idiot-in-Chief, who heaped more pain on the victims today.

It will be interesting to see how far he rides these falsehoods. He enjoys inflicting pain on those who don't support him. Those who have suffered can only hope that he doesn't withhold aid as he did before, in his first term.