Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Since the last Sunday of this month is Christmas, I decided that we should move the monthly ‘longer ride’ back a week. So this week, we rode to the San Fernando Mission cemetery to visit the graves of Lee de Forest and Chuck Connors. Lee de Forest was the inventor of the Audion Tube, which was a precursor to vacuum tubes, which made modern electronics possible.

The route was pretty simple. We rode across Eagle Rock to Glendale. Then we got on Glenoaks Blvd and just rode north for many, many miles. That’s where we saw the giant Mario walking down the street, which was suitably weird.

When we got to the cemetery, we found Lee de Forest and Chuck Connors. Most of us knew Chuck Connors for his role in “The Rifleman” on TV, but we didn’t know that he had also been a professional athlete, playing both baseball and basketball. That’s a pretty good range of skills.

The ride back was nice, aside from my getting a flat in Sun Valley. We rode up La Tuna Canyon coming home, and that’s always fun. Our snack stop was at Goldstein’s Bagels in La Cañada. They were playing Christmas music there, which I thought was a bit odd.

All told, it was a nice ride.

56 miles.

I went out to the back yard to pick some more tangerines off my two trees, and I found about half of the remaining tangerines had been eaten by something. It was kind of surreal, seeing all the hollowed-out tangerine peels still hanging from the tree. I’m guessing it’s still more of the fallout from the big windstorm we had.