Chatsworth, CA

Posted on February 17, 2007 by jovi

I grew up in Chatsworth, CA. Nice place. Home to the porn video industry, a splash of aerospace, the late great Dennis Weaver, several of James T. Kirk’s alien-wrasslin’ scenes, an obscure nuclear plant meltdown, and the best bean dip and margies in town at Los Toros. The rockclimbers love it for Stoner’s (sorry, Stoney) Point, and the history buffs for the Pony Express trail (now mostly covered with pools and parking lots). Mayo got the chance to experience Chatsworth Park (pictured), where my buddies and I used to monkey around when I was a kid.

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2 Responses to Chatsworth, CA

  1. Anonymous says:
    March 2, 2007 at 9:05 PM

    The sad thing about the meltdown at ETEC (aka SSFL’s atomics area) is that there’s more to the story than the Wikipedia entry covers.

    I was lucky enough to be allowed into an off-campus chemistry program while I was in high school. It was sponsored by Rockwell International / Rocketdyne.

    As part of the program, we kids were allowed to tour of parts of SSFL, and this greatly upset one of the Rockwell scientists. He said that children should never be taken anywhere near that place, and mentioned the meltdown as justification. He went on to say that it was typical ETEC slopiness and stupidity, and added that most of the radioactive waste from the failed reactor was hauled across across the Valley in open trucks and dumped somewhere in the desert in the middle of the night. Needless to say, his words had no real effect on us worldly highschoolers except to make the tour sound even more appealing. When we returned to the Rockwell plant for the next session, he had been replaced by a different, far less talkative guy.

    With the rapid eastward growth of the LA sprawl, I can’t help but think that there’s probably a housing development or mall on top of that waste nowadays.

  2. Anonymous says:
    March 2, 2007 at 9:31 PM

    Here’s a link to SSFL on Google Maps. Surprising that they haven’t blanked it out. Zoom in a bit and see if you can find the test stands for the Space Shuttle’s main engines.

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