I know. At first I thought I’d write about some Earth-shaking event, but we hear enough of that in the news all day long. Today I just want to write about the people, places and things here in the SCV.

Many of us complain about our little valley and how crowded it is and how the traffic sucks and just about everything else. I’m not sure I like all of the changes, but it was inevitable that people would come if “they” built it.

I miss the ability to ride a horse at full gallop between Placerita Junior High and Wiley Canyon Road. But I don’t.

I don’t miss the dust and the onion smell and the stockyard smell and – I do miss it.

It is always good to look back at what was, and think of how good it was, and if it were the same now, it would be perfect. But do I miss the lack of air conditioning? Trees? Better streets and roads?

I really have to laugh to myself when I hear someone complain about the lack of stores they like at the mall. They might have to go to “The Valley” to shop.

Got news for them. We used to have to go to San Fernando to get school clothes. In the mid-1960s we went to the Topanga Plaza mall and shopped at the Broadway or May Co. We didn’t have a mall. We had some carrot fields near where the mall is today.

Not exactly a mall.

Castaic had two little “mom and pop” grocery stores: the Rainbow Grocery and Troncalli’s. The Rainbow had just about everything, but the competition had a deli.

Want to stop for coffee someplace? At one time we had three Tip’s cafes and the Saugus Café, Bamboo Inn, Halfway House and Solemint Store. There wasn’t a Starbucks anywhere. Anyplace. It wasn’t even a dream yet. We did have an A&W Root Beer place … well, we had two of them, and the Hi-Chic, too.

We didn’t know how good we had it. It wasn’t in having something we learned. It was in what we had that was nearly perfect, and it was gone before we could appreciate it.

But I’ve written of all of this. What of the people? Folks now and folks then. Are the folks of the SCV any different, better or worse than back in the day? What caused some of the changes in them, if there are some?

When we’ve gone from hard-wired phones with party lines to the current array of social media tools like smart phones and tablets and laptops and … we can communicate with each other a lot more now. And we think it is somehow better.

Sometimes I think folks spend so much time on social media, I wonder how they even see what is going on around them. Sometimes I think if we all just shut off our phones and other devices for a few hours when we’re awake, we might really smell the flowers and see the sights of the SCV.

We might just communicate so much that we don’t have time to form our own thoughts and just take the simple path of using the thoughts and feelings that someone else has described in the perfect little story we read in some spot on Facebook.

Do we get too much information too quickly? Do we jump into a conversation when we should just sit and listen? Do we?

I don’t know the answers for you. For me, I’ve noticed I jump in, only to discover I know nothing about the subject. I still jump in and state my ill-informed opinion. Hey, why do I do that? I get to write a rather lengthy commentary every day of the week. Why am I getting into a discussion when, like today, it was about what I had written already?

Now that I’m almost totally confused, I’d like to remember that then, we had nothing, and now we’ve got most of that left.

I think I’m OK with that concept. Are you?

Darryl Manzer grew up in the Pico Canyon oil town of Mentryville in the 1960s and attended Hart High School. After a career in the U.S. Navy he returned to live in the Santa Clarita Valley. He can be reached at dmanzer@scvhistory.com and his commentaries are archived at DManzer.com. Watch his walking tour of Mentryville [here].