Wildfire took the district of the Altadena man and her Corvette dream

It was elegant as a night wind, painted in red, with an interior of peanut butter, a carrier engine granted with a four -speed factory.

Oh, guy, said Danny Robinson, the things that 1986 Corvette could have done. He had been working on her for a while, ordered a ignition switch And awaited the registration. She was a key sheltered from the road lends to the road, and Robinson, a well-known handyman on Harriet street in Altadena, could imagine himself behind the steering wheel, running under the evening crows flying west over the San Gabriels.

“It was my dream car,” he said. “Let's go.”

The forest fire that swept Eaton Canyon This month was terrifying, fast and fierce. It took Robinson's house. Took his own 1966 Pontiac GTO. Took the impala of 1962. Ravaed the old pick-up of his father's Ford, led by the Mississippi and preserved to remind the family the Patriarch who, more than half a century ago, brought his wife, southern sons and daughter of Jim Crow to California Foothills. But nothing hurt like losing the corvette, its melted tires, the broken windshield, and its fine lines twisted in a charred metal and ash puzzle.

Robinson looked at the wreck as if it were a beast taken from a war. But, he said, a man needs to know his blessings and move on. Enough preachers have said it over the years. It is a test of the mind that you must do yourself: “Do not dwell on anything. If you linger on things, you can't go ahead. It will clothe your mind, ”said Robinson, 63, a tall man with a talkative air wrapped in a musical. “You eat your dinner, and in space after, you think you are going ahead.”

Many houses on the Robinson block have disappeared, including the house of his former neighbor's drummer Kenny Elliott, who died of cancer last year and had played with Lou Rawls, Ray Charles And She Fitzgerald. Robinson’s friend Danny Shigemori, who lives in the street for 55 years and headed a landscaping company, has also lost its place. The young man and the face appeared behind a burned wall.

“Hey, neighbor!” He shouted ruins in Robinson.

“How are you going there?” Robinson shouted back.

“In search of some my mother's stuff,” said the young man, waving and disappearing behind the wall.

Robinson smiles.

“I have known this boy since he was so tall,” he said, cradling his arms on his chest as if he had a baby. “There were many more children here. I watched the children grow up in the street. They went from the thrust of the lawn mowers to drive large trucks. But then, it happened to the point where it was almost like a retirement community. Everyone grew up and walked away. No one had children. It has become very calm at night.

Danny Robinson lost his house and his collection of cars in the late Eaton: “Do not dwell anything,” he said. “If you dwell on things, you can't go ahead. It will hide your mind.

(All J. Schaben / Los Angeles)

Robinson crossed the rooms without more than his missing house. The bedroom was there, the kitchen there, the living room, then on the aisle and its destroyed cars, including the Corvette, worth $ 45,000, and Pontiac, worth $ 20,000. Toolboxes, sockets, free weights and a bellied developed were dispersed nearby in the sun, not far from the place where he had written the names of his concrete family: Charlie (dad), Minnie (“mom, like the mouse”), sister Valerie and brothers Henry and Ronny.

A son of segregation, Charlie Robinson came to California first, sending members of his family, who traveled across the country in the train in the early 1960s after being hired as a truck driver. They started in Pasadena and moved to Altadena in 1979. “My last year of high school,” said Robinson, who after graduating would become a mechanic and framed, working on cars on West Harriet Street on weekends and evenings. His father returned to Jackson, Miss., But Minnie stayed with her children until they leave the house – with the exception of Danny, who lived with his mother, escape With her around 3 a.m. on January 8.

“My mother took people,” said Robinson, who is divorced and to two adult children. “If someone needed a place to stay, my mother would give them a room to be able to recover. My cousin came here from the Mississippi and my mother gave her a room. She became a nurse, obtained her own job, found her own place. Then her boyfriend came and went to school for truck drivers. They made enough money and returned to Mississippi. And now they have a house.

“My mother,” he said, “did that for many people.”

Robinson said he had not come to sift the ashes, not today. It would be done later, when the debris and Toxins have been eliminated And he could hire entrepreneurs with insurance money to rebuild. He spoke instead of lost things: his collection of 400 miniatures Hot wheels cars and photos of him with his uncle Cleveland Green, Who played an offensive platform for Miami dolphins in the 1980s and once invited Robinson to the team's locker room.

“He used to block And Marino, “ Said Robinson. He stopped, looked in indecipherable gray at his feet. “These photos have disappeared, but I like to talk about things that were once in this house.”

He also remembers other things, things that you couldn't hold out but you know and that you were part of the history of the neighborhood.

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1 and 1 Danny Robinson had conventional cars parked at home in Altadena, including a 1986 Corvette.
2 The corvette was estimated at $ 45,000.
(Danny Robinson)

“Each evening just before nightfall,” said Robinson, “the crows would begin to migrate into packages of 20 and 30 and go. I used to count them. Every day at the same time. Once, a herd of hawks has passed. I had never seen that before in my life. They migrated to the west. Another time, I had a group of buzzing. The wing was 6 feet.

He underlined his father's charred pick-up. He did not want the man who raised him – he died years ago – forgotten: “Many memories in this truck,” he said. “My father brought us here for a better life, and he gave it to us.”

He looked in front of Shigemori, who pushed around the remains of his house fallen.

“Coucoo, hello,” joked Robinson.

Among the many things Danny Robinson lost in fire, there was a collection of Mattel's Hot Wheels Wheels.

(Danny Robinson)

It was the call that the men had made through the backgrounds for years. It meant it was time for a beer, to speak while the last songs of the day turned to night. There was no beer that day.

Shigemori approached. He said he lived in this street for so long that he could not where to go elsewhere; He would be like a pigeon at home, would throw him into the sky and he would turn around. When the flames hit the neighborhood and jumped towards the houses, Shigemori, a light man with a gray mustache, known as “rebel of the block”, caught a garden pipe and tried to hold them back.

“The flames have shown the fence,” he said. “The winds were too strong. I tried to return inside to get my wallet, but the fire was in the house. Windows appearing. I was the last to leave the neighborhood. »»

He looked in the distance, passing through bare chimneys, a bright red chimn – miraculously thus – a cart of child and a table where men played dominoes. Why has one house burned and another did not do it? What are the Wind whims, And what are the possibilities that this could happen again?

“I do not intend to move,” said Shigemori. “This neighborhood is a family. We were devastated. We had a meeting the other evening. We told ourselves that we would always be family. We said to ourselves: “Don't sell”. “”

Robinson headed for a blackened tree where he had nailed a cymbal that Elliott had given him. He had been burned and cracked by flames. Robinson cracked him.

“Dude, I liked to watch Kenny play,” he said. “I put this here to remember him. It hurt to see him when he entered hospitals. »»

Calm has settled. The sky was clear, the kind of blue that made it difficult to believe so much ruin below.

THE National guard was in the corners, the health workers distributed masks, the churches heard prayers and vans transported burned things that could be recovered. Robinson said his 83 -year -old mother was going to visit his family at Mississippi for a few weeks while he and his sister sorted the papers and other details that would start to lift a new house on this beaten terrain.

Danny Robinson inspects the remains of his dream car, a Corvette from 1986.

(All J. Schaben / Los Angeles)

Robinson had a brain aneurysm that almost killed him a few years ago. “I cried in front of the doctor when he told me that swelling had dropped.” It looks a bit like that now, he said, while waiting for healing to come, saying that when he returned alone to the neighborhood for the first time a few days earlier, he felt like the last man in the world.

“If I hadn't lived here for so long,” he said, “I would have thought:” Where am I? “”

He descended the alley to the backyard. Everyone in the neighborhood knew what was there, just as sure as they knew that the heat of summer relaxed against the evening breeze. The Pontiac was a classic. People stopped and asked for this. The impala for years has been recovered for parts for other cars. He looked at the corvette. It was unrecognizable, but not in his eye. He would never do it on the road, but he said, he approached his dream. Few men understand this.