The Bradbury Building

bradburyplaque01

I have written in a number of essays, most of which are not on this site, about a comic book club to which I belonged in the sixties. Actually, I not only belonged, I was president for the entire lifespan of the Los Angeles Comic Book Club. It met every Saturday afternoon at what was then called Palms Recreation Center, located on Overland Avenue in West L.A. The facility consisted of a couple of ramshackle buildings that were mostly meeting rooms, a lot of park and picnic tables, a not-big-enough parking lot, and a pretty good public library. I spent a lot of my late teen years at Palms Recreation Center in those buildings and in that library.

The park and library are still there, though the park now seems to be called Palms Park and all the buildings have been rebuilt. Just the other day, the library held a special dedication center in honor of perhaps its most famous patron, Ray Bradbury. It was the library closest to the Bradbury home in Cheviot Hills and I saw him there a few times.

He had two other connections to the place. We made Ray an honorary member of the L.A. Comic Book Club, back when we met in the building on the other side of the parking lot. He never attended a meeting but he did accept a membership card signed by me, treating it as seriously as any honor he'd ever received. Based on that, we felt it was okay to shamelessly exploit his name and brag to all that Ray Bradbury was a member of our club. Also, the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society met for a time at Palms Park before finally acquiring its own clubhouse building out in the valley. Bradbury joined L.A.S.F.S. at the age of 17 back when it met at the Clifton's Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles. I don't believe he ever attended a meeting of L.A.S.F.S. at Palms Park either but I could be wrong.

Anyway, I wasn't there for the dedication ceremony on Monday but I hear it was quite nice with three of Ray's four daughters in attendance, along with other folks who knew him such as Harlan Ellison and George Clayton Johnson. Next time I'm in the neighborhood, I'm going to visit the old place and see that plaque in person. Just the photo of it someone sent me makes me smile.