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pressed forward, pulling up stakes, chasing down the promise of a brighter future, Esther and Harry were starting over—together.

CHAPTER 2
    The new couple set their sights on a rural town called Baldwin Park, seventeen miles east of downtown Los Angeles, in the heart of the picturesque San Gabriel Valley. When the Snyders arrived, Baldwin Park looked much as it had when it was pasture land belonging to the San Gabriel Mission. Some seven thousand people lived within the town’s pastoral 6.8-square-mile stretch, nestled among acres of orange groves and citrus orchards that were still protected from the frost by black smudge pots. Largely undeveloped, Baldwin Park was primarily made up of small farms, vineyards, chicken and cattle ranches, and dairy farms. Rows of eucalyptus, black walnut, and pepper trees shaded its dusty roads like army regiments that gave way to open fields crowned by blue skies, ringed by the improbably snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains, and bathed in the rays of the sun.
    Despite Baldwin Park’s rural American setting, its residents proudly claimed two symbols of modernity. Leafy Morgan Park with its lighted baseball field was built before the Depression, costing some $28,000. Perhaps more significantly, Baldwin Park could boast that it was on the new Pacific Electric Railway line. Built in 1902, the Pacific Electric was the largest electric interurban system in the world at the time. Running sixty trains daily between San Bernardino and Los Angeles, the Red Line ferried passengers from the Baldwin Park depot to downtown Los Angeles in thirty-five minutes flat. Before In-N-Out Burger, the biggest name in Baldwin Park was the traveling Al G. Barnes Circus. With no fewer than twelve hundred performing animals, Barnes billed itself as the largest wild animal circus in the world. In 1927, the flamboyant Al Barnes snapped up a quarter-mile tract of land facing Valley Boulevard for roughly $200,000 for use as the circus’s winter camp after he was forced to leave his previous encampment in Culver City (where locals had grown wary of boisterous circus employees, who reportedly bought liquor from bootleggers—homeowners also complained that during feeding time, they could hear the roar of lions a mile away).
    The residents of Baldwin Park happily adopted the circus and its numerous creatures. During a building binge, circus elephants were used to pull down trees and haul away timber later used to build homes. Indeed, the circus gave the town a measure of fame, attracting some of Hollywood’s tinsel when the Paramount movie studio used the Barnes lot to film King of the Jungle with Buster Crabbe. Delighted residents were used as extras. The town’s thrilling circus days came to an end in 1938 when the show was finally shut down not long after Ringling Brothers purchased it.
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    When Harry and his new bride arrived, the couple found an unexceptional town of wide-open spaces filled with restless teens. A bucolic stretch on the citrus belt, Baldwin Park had only received dial-up telephone lines three years earlier. In 1948, Baldwin Park was on the verge of transmuting into yet another car-obsessed suburb of Los Angeles. Like the rest of Southern California, Baldwin Park was undergoing a rapid transformation fueled almost exclusively by postwar development.
    World War II was already receding into the past. New borders were being drawn and a new geopolitical landscape was being defined. The British Empire was in its twilight years; India and Pakistan were independent from both the United Kingdom and from each other. And the United States had quickly stepped out from behind England, establishing itself as the strongest, most influential, andmost productive nation in the world. In something of a surprise, Harry S. Truman was reelected president of the United States, soundly defeating Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey. And Truman was Baldwin Park’s kind of fellow. Its voters, reported