The little city of Lawndale long since has been subsumed in the seamless carpet of redundant municipalities that rolls south and west from Los Angeles, but in the mind of Jim Osborne the place practically shimmers with historical uniqueness.
Osborne is an amateur historian whose family came to Lawndale in 1909 and who lives in the city's oldest house, which was bequeathed to him by his grandmother. Drawing on a trove of old photographs and documents accumulated by his family over the generations, he has steadfastly maintained that Lawndale rightly dates to 1906, not 1959 when it incorporated as a city.
His efforts reached a culmination of sorts Saturday at the Lawndale Civic Center, where he and other like-minded Lawndalians marked the 100th birthday of their community with cake, punch and a display of civic memorabilia -- a December 1913 issue of the defunct Lawndale Review newspaper, a 1918 letter of appointment to the town's first postmaster and a program from the Nov. 15, 1946, Lawndale Leuzinger High School-Inglewood football game.
Over three hours, organizers estimated, about 200 people attended the exhibition. The Leuzinger High School band stood outside the civic center and played "Happy Birthday," the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors sent formal birthday greetings and visitors shared a large cake decorated with "Happy 100th Birthday, Lawndale."
The affair was a magnet for residents whose tenure in the town long predates the visual amalgamation that overtook the separate cities in the area. Celebrating the history of Lawndale, no matter how anonymous the place might appear to an outsider, "matters a lot when you've lived here your whole life," said 70-year-old Angie Badalamente Borne, whose family came to the town in 1931.
Janice Givens, 66, a Lawndale resident since 1949, said "every town, big or little, should know what its history is, because we're all losing so much of it. When I see Lawndale, I see it as it was, not just as what it is."
Osborne fixed Lawndale's birth date as Feb. 25, 1906, because that's the day the Los Angeles real estate firm of E.L. Hopper and Son ran an ad in The Times that announced, "Opening Today ... LAWNDALE ... The New Town. A Home Community for Home-makers ... " in the newly subdivided barley and wild oat fields southwest of Los Angeles.
