Marching Along Together

At any given time in L.A., Monday through Sunday, in storm and high holiday, someone is in a royal snit about something.

I’m not talking about a wife angry at her husband for not taking out the garbage or a man enraged because the beer is all gone.

I’m discussing larger themes and greater numbers here, streets filled with those who protest, who support, who defy, who object and who resist.

They have a good time out there raising hell for a point of view and simultaneously ridding themselves of evil spirits by chanting out their displeasures for all to hear. Honk if you hate hatred.

Most demonstrations last for about the time it takes to reach a park, hear a speech and throw a burger on the barbie. Then everyone takes off and, like noisy dogs, forgets what they were barking about in the first place.

Except in South Pasadena, home of the free and the brave.

They have been marching and hollering against the extension of the Long Beach Freeway through their city since the subject was broached 35 years ago.

Wars have been fought, governments toppled, new diseases discovered, and skirt hems raised and lowered and raised again during the life of the longest-running protest in L.A. County and maybe the longest anywhere.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance, wasn’t even born when the battle began.

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As recently as last Saturday, aging activists and their descendants marched against the 6.2-mile slash of concrete that will rip out 1,000 homes, destroy 7,000 trees and dislocate 4,000 people.

The engineers at Caltrans are salivating to begin the project. A final federal decision is expected in a matter of days.

What amazes is that the passion of the marchers was no less on Saturday than it was back in the era of bell-bottoms, crash pads and doing-your-own-thing. This, I am telling you, is a serious rage.

They weren’t only from South Pas, but from Pasadena, El Sereno and Alhambra, although the Alhambra City Council, possibly due to the negative effect of smog on the brain, has come out in favor of the freeway extension.

I am not one for marching around town for any cause but, like a eunuch in a harem, I do enjoy watching and later talking about what I’ve seen. In this case, impressed by a fervor that has never lessened, I sat around one day talking with those who have kept a fire alive for almost four decades.

One of them was Tom Bryce, who will lose the home he built with his own hands in 1948 if the extension is approved. He was at the ‘60s meeting where the link was first mentioned and is still madder than hell. “It isn’t the house that matters,” he said in a tone not intended to invite debate, “it’s the destruction of our community!”

Lorna Moore has devoted her life to fighting the freeway. Twice she has paid her own way to Washington, D.C., and three times to Sacramento to protest. She’s never missed a meeting of any group willing to join the battle and will likely throw herself in front of a bulldozer if it ever comes to that.

Not since Joan of Arc went to heaven on a bonfire has anyone been as dedicated to a cause as Lorna Moore.

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Louise Woo probably summed up their position best when she talked about the death of neighborhoods. A second-generation Southern Californian, her father grew up on a San Fernando farm wiped out by housing tracts. She was raised in a Highland Park of open spaces that similarly no longer exists.

Jesse Granados was chased out of one house by construction of the Harbor Freeway and will lose his present home to the Long Beach extension.

“People in the East can go back to their hometowns,” Woo said. “Out here, our generations have lost their hometowns. If the freeway comes, our children will lose their hometowns too.”

Eileen Garcia added to the thought: “Most people who build a good future know their past. Ours would be lost to a freeway.”

True. L.A. is in a rush to change its look, embarrassed by the nutty image it once wore like a clown face. Old buildings with history fall to make way for the new. Orchards die. Country roads vanish. Our only constant is a worship of The Car, before which we bow like supplicants at a sacred icon.

Much of the future ought to lie in the past, and it became clear to me while driving the proposed route of the freeway link that those pieces of the past Garcia was talking about will cease to exist.

It isn’t just the slicing up of a well-fed community that matters in the long run, but the preservation of a sense of neighborhood that will benefit us all. The protesters are fighting for that. It’s a good fight. Rage on.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com