Cars used to motor up the paved trails to the top of Mount Rubidoux, as mentioned here casually a few weeks back, with reader Joanne Dallas citing her white-knuckle drive in the 1970s.
That may have been my most-read column of February, to my surprise. A few of you responded with your own anecdotes.
“I used to drive a VW van to take my grandmother to the top for viewings, secretly to scare the hell out of her,” confides Laura Densmore.
The good-natured Robert Crabby says he “probably made the trip at least 20 times in huge American sedans from the ’70s,” including in a ’71 Mercury Marquis.
“In my early days in California some friends and I drove from Pasadena on Easter morning in 1947,” Charles Green relates. “We drove up the narrow pathway, bumper to bumper, until the parade of cars stopped. We got out and watched the sun come up and could hear some part of the service that was going on.”
Green says that all these years later, he can’t remember if there was another pathway down or how he and his friends made the return trip. “I can’t see how,” he admits, “all these cars got turned around.”
With this much feedback and that many eyeballs on the column, I thought I’d better treat the subject more seriously this time. So I phoned Glenn Wenzel.
Wenzel serves on the Friends of Mount Rubidoux board and wrote a book, “Anecdotes on Mount Rubidoux and Frank A. Miller, Her Promoter.” Fellow board member Nancy Cox says of Wenzel: “He is the ultimate source to go to for the history of the mountain.”
Miller and two others bought the mountain (which isn’t really a mountain) in 1906. He got the road built in 1907 expressly for cars. Miller, the developer of the Mission Inn, had touring cars that took hotel patrons up the mountain for a look-see, Wenzel explains.
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