A note on July 13, 2003 – Photographs (click on this link)

From the original page - 

One thinks of Los Angeles as urban, particularly the triangle of Hollywood with its tacky glitz, Beverly Hills with its thirty-million-dollar mansions, and the endless wide streets lined with strip malls.  But at the north edge of it all are the Hollywood Hills and the Santa Monica Mountains.  In the hills are deep, odd, secluded valleys.  So.  Turn right off Sunset at Rexford, and go uphill only a few blocks.  Turn left at Coldwater Canyon Park.  Within a few hundred feet you'll be in Franklin Canyon, a thousand or more acres of wild scrub and live oak trees.  It's totally silent.  Within a mile or two there are four major film studios, and the most expensive homes in the country piled on top of each other choking the hills, and Hollywood with all the tourists and souvenir shops just one mile east.  And here is Franklin Park Lake, built as a WPA project in 1940 and just sitting there quietly.

New information that came my way…

The Andy Griffith Show was shot on the Culver City Forty Acres back lot – and that’s long gone.  But the opening sequence, with that whistled theme song – Andy and Opie (Ron Howard) strolling with their fishing poles toward a pond – was filmed here, at the edge of Franklin Park Lake, sometimes called Heavenly Pond.  The site, shown in these photographs, was also used in various Star Trek and Combat! episodes.  Scenes from How the West Was Won were also shot here.

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Early morning on July 4^th at Norm’s 76 on my corner.  Very patriotic.