As our editorial team started creating the book and the website that were to become
Hometown Pasadena, we spent weeks debating possible titles. Some of the writers argued passionately in favor of “Hometown Pasadena”; others weren’t so sure. One of our husbands hated it, because it made him think of crocheted doilies and stifling provinciality; I worried that it wasn’t clear enough.
But in the end, “Hometown Pasadena” it was, and after working on the book and site for a year, we knew we made the right choice. None of us was actually born in the San Gabriel Valley; we hail from L.A., New York, Orange County and the Valley. But most of our children were born here, and we’re all as rooted as Americans are capable of being. We no longer refer to our birthplaces as “home”; that honor now goes to each of our houses, in Pasadena, Altadena and South Pasadena.
You have one sort of relationship with a place in which you live, and an entirely different relationship with a hometown. With the former, you take what you need and ignore the rest. With the latter, you’re too vested to ignore anything. You go to the neighborhood association meeting even though you don’t want to. You volunteer at your kid’s school, and if you don’t have kids, you volunteer somewhere else. You read the local paper. You run into someone you know every time you go to Trader Joe’s. You pick up that piece of trash you notice on your dog walk. You know the names of all your neighbors’ dogs.
It is this personal relationship with our hometowns that inspires and informs this new online magazine. We’ll share our discoveries with you: the people, places and fun stuff of the valley’s hometowns, from Highland Park to La Crescenta, San Gabriel to Sierra Madre, Altadena to San Marino. Every few days we’ll post something new, from an interview with a fascinating local (an artist, a teacher, a tycoon, an activist, a scientist, a writer) to a report on a new restaurant. Gardener Sandy Gillis will keep us connected with the valley’s green roots. The Concierge section will help you find everything from an internist to a housepainter to a bookbinder. What’s Happening will showcase our short list of don’t-miss events and provide movie times and links to great events calendars. We’ll give away a free lunch every month. And in this section, we’ll talk about anything and everything: a conversation overheard on a Rose Bowl walk, a chat with a scholar visiting the Huntington, a stroll through a neighborhood home tour, a debate over a development, a funny story we might tell a friend over coffee at Kaldi.
Welcome to hometown-pasadena.com. Drop by for a visit as often as you like.
-- Colleen Dunn Bates
Smarty Stamps
Two of the “Six Caltech Smarty-pants” that we featured in Hometown Pasadena: The Insider’s Guide made national (and international) news recently. First, astronomer Mike Brown, who had 
discovered the tenth planet, learned that both his discovery and the beloved Pluto had been demoted to mere “dwarf planet” status, which means they’re not considered planets at all. During that week of interplanetary hubbub, Brown seemed to be the most-interviewed man in America. (Tragically, however, we’re now back to listening to politicians.) More recently, the U.S. Postal Service released a new series of first-class stamps featuring physicist and ice-crystal expert Kenneth Libbrecht's remarkable photographs of snowflakes.
By the time you read this, Sheldon Epps’s staging of August Wilson’s Fences will have left the Pasadena Playhouse, and if you didn’t get to see it, well . . . you only missed out on a world-class production, as good as anything we’ve ever seen on Broadway or anywhere else. Not only was the sold-out run a smash hit for Pasadena, but it was also a sign that the Playhouse has finally achieved the rebirth it has been working toward for some years now. The moral of the story: Get season tickets, and if there are any tickets left for Sister Act, the new musical comedy that premiered in late October, snap ‘em up now.
