Sorry to hear about your illness. Perhaps what I write below will generate more memories.
I grew up in West Whittier and College Hills, attended Walter F. Dexter Junior High School and Whittier High.
We were regular customers at the Wardman Theater as well as the Roxy Theater downtown, the Sundown Drive-in Theater on Washington, and the palatial Whittier Theater on Whittier Blvd. where Sam Cohen, the father of the neutron bomb, used to like to go when he was growing up in Boyle Heights.
For Mexican food, we went to Carillo's in Whittier and the Mt. Baldy in Pico Rivera, which resembled Mt. Baldy. Sometimes we would get over to El Poche in San Gabriel, which was renowned throughout the region. All of these eateries are long gone, but Chris & Pitt's barbecue restaurant in West Whittier, which opened about 60 years ago, is still in business as is Rubi's, a joint that serves excellent burgers, Mexican food and ice cream cones dipped in chocolate sauce, which has been there since the early 1960's.
We shopped at the Box Market on Whittier Blvd., whose owner's name was Box, and at the Buy Fair market, which changed its name every few years, a few blocks to the west. The best place to get meat was the Model Market on Beverly Blvd. For a while, Don Nixon ran Nixon's Market on Whittier Blvd. about a block from his where better-known brother Richard once lived. All of these stores are long gone, but I often shop at the Trader Joe's, located in the old Alpha Beta market in East Whittier.
When we needed a haircut, we went to a barber named Luigi, who was an immigrant from Tuscany and had a shop in a long-gone strip mall on Whittier Blvd.
I also remember some disasters--the fires that destroyed the Whittier News in 1958, Mifflin's Market in 1970, the Roxy Theater in 1971, and the William Penn Hotel in 1979. In 1967, a brush fire scorched 2,000 acres in the Whittier Hills. but the worst disaster to hit the community was the Whittier earthquake of 1987.
The Whittier area may have changed considerably,but it's still a nice place to live.
Ya know I live in the BBQ capitol of the world, Chris and Pitts will always be my favorite. As long as my parents were alive, they would send us C&P BBQ sauce.
Maria