Sense Memory: The Classroom and the Jungle

AS PART OF my parents conscientious attempts to encourage my education during the summer they once enrolled me in the Summer Science Workshop at the Museum of Science and Industry. Once. It seemed to my pre-teen self that summer was not meant for school, and certainly not a summer school program built around a science curriculum. But the greatest indignity of it all was taking classes “at the museum” that were really in old, cramped, run-down classrooms that were buildings away from the actual air, fun, interesting museums themselves.

The classroom I remember was long and narrow, old plank wood floors that creaked if you even thought about shifting in your university style chair desks. The spaces between the floor planks was black from years of accumulated grime that had been waxed over rather than cleaned away. It was sticky, and you could peel up small strands of the grime and ball it up between your fingers. The floor grime was far more interesting than learning the differences between concave and convex, or discussing the properties of heat.

There was a large multi-sectioned glass window opposite the entrance, a chalkboard as long as the wall, and desks facing the chalkboard in two rows that were twenty seats wide. Space was so packed that once the class started no one could move – not even the instructor – until the class was cover and the last person in could open the door. In retrospect, the room was a fire hazard and probably in violation of code, but all in the name of science education, so who could fault them?


And it was dim. The heat of an LA summer and a building no doubt built before “refrigerated washed air” had been invented meant that the only way to keep fifty school aged kids comfortable meant cracking the windows open an inch and keeping the overheard lights off. At least I'm pretty sure they were off. The ceilings were so high in the room, the hanging light shades affixed to six foot steel poles stopped at least ten feet above our heads, made it difficult to know whether the large, clear glass orb lights were even on.

There was one redeeming quality to my daily summer trips to the Museum of Science and Industry, and that was the drive along Jefferson Boulevard that passed by a place I called The Jungle.

The Jungle was a small hunk of land on the other side of the only creek I'd ever known growing up, the concrete gully known as Balona Creek. On the far side of the creek a large berm rose from the chain link fence, and beyond the bern exotic trees and shrubs. Exotic to me at least. In truth they were probably nothing more than sycamores, polars, and old oaks that had been planted and grown over time. Surrounded by large planes of asphalt and concrete, with the occasional tree along the road and a lot of casual shrubbery that smelled of the dusky smog dust that settled on their leaves, this oasis I knew as The Jungle seemed an anomaly of time and place.
And indeed, it had once been a jungle. It was decades before I understood that this plot of land had a formal name: The 40 Acres Studio Backlot. Like many of the illusions of Hollywood, the 40 Acres property was less than 30 acres of land, and it had been used for jungle sequences by its original owners RKO when they filmed King Kong. When I was older my father mentioned in passing that The Jungle was a studio backlot and that I've probably seen the inside of it more than I realized. A little research proved this was an understatement.


Any child of the late 60s and 70s has seen their fair share of The Jungle on television. Exteriors for television shows like The Andy Griffith Show, Bonanza, and Hogan's Heroes were filmed there, as were the occasional desolate 20th century Chicago sets for a few Star Trek episodes. In its prime The Jungle was home for the Tara plantation in Gone With the Wind, exteriors for The Magnificent Ambersons, and various Tarzan adventures among the dozens of other films shot there.

In a way I'm glad I never knew what went on behind the eight foot earthen berm that ringed the property. In my mind the place was a Shangri La of exotic flowers and crystalline springs and trees dripping with vines. The dirt roads and trails that wound their way through The Jungle were of an earth that was unlike the rest of the Southland which smelled of oil and dried hopes.

As with everything else in Los Angeles, the land was too valuable and possessed too much history to be left alone or preserved. In the late 1970s it was razed and turned into a far more valuable industrial park.

-- David Elzey