Carleton Cronin watched and chronicled the evolution of West Hollywood

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is another of a series of casual stories titled The Grownups about West Hollywood residents 75 years of age or older who have been active in civic life.

Carleton Cronin has observed life in West Hollywood for 46 years. While raising a family, he watched the region go from a forgotten Los Angeles County Mayberry to a bustling city that made the headlines. Along the way, he noticed that politics and development were playing an increasingly important role in the city, while reflecting on how things were, how they should be and how they really are.

For 14 years, he has shared these observations via his column and his editorials, published for the first time on the WeHo News website, which has since disappeared, and now on WEHOville. Cronin also shares his observations and opinions on cogito, a blog he launched in April 2012.

His writings on local life earned him fame and fans, local residents being enthusiastic about his hunches and nostalgic memories.

Considering his propensity to write and his spiritual way with words, one would assume that Cronin, who just turned 87, worked in the publishing industry, either as a Writer or editor, or perhaps both. And this assumption would be completely false.

Despite his talent with the pen (or perhaps more precisely, the keyboard), Cronin has spent his adult life working as a salesperson. He has never been a professional writer in any capacity, except for a brief stint in 1956 as a copier working for the Boston Post, the city's oldest newspaper.

The newspaper had a columnist who was quite popular, but he was also drunk and missed many of his deadlines, said Cronin, who grew up in Boston. The city editor was a friend of mine and had a dozen of his chronicles written to me by ghost. Without signature, of course. They paid me $ 20 or $ 30 more.

While he loved writing these columns and hoped it could turn into something more, this dream should not be. The Boston Post was on its last feet when it was hired and folded up in October 1956.

There was a picture of me running down Washington Street. In my hand was my last paycheck. I ran to the bank to cash it, followed by a whole bunch of other guys with their checks, he laughed. The Boston Globe published it.

Sociable and involved

Bon vivant is the way neighbor Manny Rodriguez describes Carleton Cronin.

He's outgoing, friendly, sociable, active in the neighborhood, very accessible, said Rodriguez. He has an institution on Dorrington Avenue.

Rodriguez first met Cronin at a meeting of the West Hollywood West Residents Association in 2004, shortly after arriving in the region. Rodriguez was immediately impressed and dragged into the Cronins orbit.

It quickly became apparent that he cared deeply about what was going on not only in our neighborhood, but in all of West Hollywood, said Rodriguez. He knows what's going on and where the city is going. . . He is a visionary and a bit romantic too. Definitely a person half full of glass.

Neighbor Mike Zannella agrees, noting that Cronin and his wife Toby were among the first to greet them when he and his partner, Richard Blons, moved from Manhattan to Dorrington Avenue in the early 1980s.

They told us where the best places to shop are, where to find this and that, Zannella recalls. They introduced us to others on the street, made us feel part of the neighborhood. We have become very good friends.

And like good friends do, they take care of each other. After Blons' death four years ago, the Cronins made it a point to check Zannella regularly, sometimes having him eat dinner.

That's what the neighbors do, says Cronin. I don't believe in living in a place without investing in it. You get to know everyone on the street, so no one is more of a stranger.

Wife Toby explains that the two are just naturally outgoing people, but that there is also a need to raise a family.

When you have children, you have someone to watch for you, said Toby Cronin. It becomes important on each side of you. In this neighborhood, there were wonderful people who took care of our children.

Arrival in West Hollywood

Carleton and Toby Cronin moved to West Hollywood in 1974, buying their house on Dorrington Avenue for $ 59,000. Although there are only two rooms, they raised four boys there (Prescott, Brendan, Justin and Daniel). Fortunately, the property had a small guest house which became additional rooms for boys as they grew older.

At that time, many people from the entertainment world lived in the West Hollywood West area; it was a good place to buy a first home. The neighbors were affordable and open to the friendly nature of the Cronins.

Also at this time, sheriffs were often slow to respond to service calls. Meanwhile, with the gay clubs in Boystown a few blocks away, men often wandered the neighborhood and made love in the bushes.

Therefore, Cronin helped organize the neighborhood into an informal neighborhood watch group to limit crime.

It is not possible to have a cop at every corner, so it is up to residents to keep an eye on what's going on in their neighborhood, he explained.

Cronin recalled that in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Los Angeles County government, which had jurisdiction over the region, treated West Hollywood as a backwater to the county. Therefore, when the movement to create a city started in 1984, it was all for him, doing his part by going door-to-door to promote the idea of ​​creating a city from the collection. of neighborhoods.

Even before the city, county supervisor Ed Edelman appointed him to a citizens' advisory council covering the West Hollywood area because of his commitment to public safety. However, Cronin quickly abandoned this board because the members seemed to be arguing more about Roberts' procedure and rules of procedure than anything else.

Because of this experience, he never volunteered to serve on one of the city's many boards or commissions. I'm just having a problem with the process, he confessed. I want things to happen and I look forward to spending a lot of them.

However, in the late 1990s, when the city launched a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) program to deal with earthquake preparedness for residents, it was an active participant.

In fact, the city even sent Cronin to the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in Maryland for training on how to teach CERT courses to other residents.

As a result of this training, he also joined a public safety expert to write a brochure entitled West Hollywood Is Prepared on disaster preparedness. This booklet is still used today.

He thinks disaster preparedness is one of the things that should bring the many diverse populations of West Hollywood together.

We created this city to get away from the county's carelessness, he observed. West Hollywood has the gay community, the Russian community, the tenants, the landlords. I just feel like the people who live in a place must be part of it. If we were to be a city, we must learn to do things to help form an even stronger community.

Youth

Born February 14, 1933, at the height of the depression, Carleton Cronin was the oldest of four siblings (one brother, two sisters). The family was poor, living near the poverty line with their grandmother and aunt.

His father was a romantic, as he described it, and left for several years in the late 1930s to fight in the Spanish Civil War. While her mother eventually became a physiotherapist for children with cerebral palsy, she does not know exactly what she did for a living during her formative years, but in one way or another. Another, there was food on the table.

At age 7, he contracted rheumatic fever, an inflammatory disease affecting the heart that was the main killer of children under the age of 20 in the 1920s and 1930s. He spent three years recovering, two of them hospitalized and another at rest at home. During this time, he took care of books, developing a love of reading.

Reading, it takes you and allows your mind to develop in areas that were not part of everyday life, thought Cronin, who particularly appreciated the western tales of Zane Gray and the historical adventures of Kenneth Roberts (better known for the Northwest Passage).

After recovering, he was admitted to the Working Boys Home, a Catholic boarding school outside of Boston, which passed 8th grade. There, an assistant chaplain loaned him many books and his love of reading continued. It was there too that he published a weekly school newspaper using a ditto machine after writing articles on an old typewriter in a small office above the gymnasium.

When he started high school, he ended up being expelled from several high schools in Boston for causing trouble because he was bored, having already learned at school most of the things that public high schools taught. He eventually graduated from the now-extinct Boston High School of Commerce, which he said was at the time considered a prison because it all turned out to be accountants. and accountants and people who didn't want to have any problems.

He joined the recently formed Air Force in 1951 at the age of 18, but has never seen a fight despite the fact that America fought the Korean War at the time. time.

I joined the Air Force to escape the air current. I didn't mean to be a grunt, said Cronin who achieved the rank of Airman 1st Class (the equivalent of a sergeant). I ended up going to two army bases to train. I was in the Air Force and I never saw an air base before I was sent to England.

Later, he was posted to Oslo, Norway, when opening a NATO headquarters there, a mission he loved. Eventually, he went to Provost Marshal General School to become a military police officer.

I just kept volunteering so things didn't get sent to Korea, said Cronin who, ironically, has never received flight training in his five years in the air. ; Air Force, despite civilian flight training in adolescence.

After the army, he attended Boston University, majoring in American studies. This is where he also audited the poetry lessons of famous poet Robert Lowell. However, he never graduated.

I spent several years in therapy trying to understand why I hadn't finished my studies, he said. I still don't know exactly why, but it was a dark time in my life.

Find love

In 1968, Cronin lived in Manhattan and worked as a salesperson with Sandvik Steel, a Swedish company that manufactured specialty steel products such as saws, razors and drilling equipment. He was 34 years old and was already married and divorced. He was not looking for love, but fate intervened.

In January of this year, he attended a cocktail party in Greenwich Village at 119 Waverly Place where he met Toby Ann Grossman, who had recently moved to Manhattan from Denver, where she had been raised.

He was funny, but funny, not funny. He and his partner (salesperson) were telling stories and making jokes and they were really smart, remembers Toby Cronin. The more I looked at it, the more beautiful it was.

Cronin was also impressed.

It was different in many ways. Tall. Rather royal. Well read. Well-educated. It was a lot of fun, he recalls. She was the first real whole woman identified in a long time. She opened up to me. When we met, I was done with women. I have had it up to here with all the nonsense of romance. It was just garbage. She felt the same for men.

Nevertheless, they threw caution into the wind, quickly fell in love and got engaged after only a month of dating, Cronin proposing February 14, 1968. They married a year later, February 22, 1969, a date chosen because that it was George Washingtons' birthday and therefore a date that Cronin could remember.

The newlyweds moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 1969 to take up the position of sales manager with Prima Die Company, a cutting company. Meanwhile, Toby finally got a job at UCLA in the department of psychiatry, working for the director of the Resnick neuropsychiatric hospital.

Sales suited Cronin because he was such an outgoing person, loving human interaction and the chance to tell jokes and stories as part of the sales pitch. In the late 1970s, he joined E.D. Bullard Co. as Regional Sales Manager. Bullard, the company that created the helmet for the industry, sold occupational health and safety products.

He loved this field and eventually opened his own consultancy firm specializing in occupational health and safety and environmental law issues, as well as popular university courses on these subjects.

Cronin says he is constantly amazed at how common the field of occupational health and safety has become. Now everyone can go to Koontz (Hardware) and pick up half of the stuff I sold to Bullard.

Fiction writing

Throughout his life, Cronin managed to find time for his writings. In addition to his column, he reported that he had written over 600 essays. But he also writes fiction, detailing that he wrote 25 or 30 short stories, several plays, a folk opera and two novels.

Although he has shared some of his fiction with friends from time to time, none has ever been published. These friends encouraged him to submit them for publication, but he never did.

When asked why he had never tried it, he replied: A lack of confidence in the fiction I wrote.

However, his wife Toby sees things differently, expressing his fear of success.

Anyway, Cronin admits that he recently met a literary agent with whom he succeeded and is now refining a novel he wrote in 2009 to submit it for review. .

Toby Cronin, who says that her husband's best qualities are his kindness and sincerity, reported that it was the compliments he received from fans of his chronicles about life in West Hollywood that gave him more confidence. in his fiction.

When someone stops them, they'll say, "You're famous, I read you at WEHOville," said Toby Cronin. I want to tell you, it boosts his ego. He feels so good after that. It is amazing what a kind word will do.