The Rolando Street Fair of 1947!

By Aimee Lee Cheek

Below is a fun piece of history from 1947 … the VERY FIRST ROLANDO VILLAGE STREET FAIR. Take a look!

The trees and the rides look familiar. It must be the Rolando Street Fair, now in its fifteenth year. But wait a minute. The poster, plain as day, advertises a Rolando Village Carnival in September, not March 27, when this year’s Street Fair will be held. And who are those girls in the formal gowns?

Thanks to Mrs. William E. Flohr, who still lives in Rolando with her husband of nearly fifty-six years, who excavated this photograph from her closets, we now know some of the answers. Moreover, we are able to establish that the Rolando Street Fair had a precursor sixty years ago.

Claribel Houston (far right, above)—or “Tootsie” as she had been nicknamed as a baby and has been known ever since—was seventeen years old in 1947. When she was six years old, in 1936, her family had moved to a house with a half-acre lot on 67th Street. They kept cows, chickens and pigs, she recalls. “Our side of the street was all dirt and there were no sidewalks.” She and the other little girls took their roller skates and wagons over into the slightly more developed section just to the west and “the boys played cops and robbers up and down the sewers.”

Her father, Verl R. Houston, was a builder eager to attract customers for new houses. Rolando, its development slowed by World War II, seemed the perfect opportunity. He drove around in a pick-up truck filled with signs emblazoned Rolando Village. Then, in late summer 1947, he and others planned a carnival to draw in potential buyers. By chance or design, La Mesa staged a street parade. Mr. Houston seized the moment.

Mrs. Houston had decided that for her senior prom Tootsie had to have a gown. It was pink, full length, with an enormous skirt and a diaphanous overlay. Perhaps it was the sight of his daughter in her beautiful dress that inspired Mr. Houston and his collaborators to dream up an elaborate float to enter in the La Mesa parade to advertise the upcoming Rolando Village carnival.

Tootsie remembers that her neighbor, Yvonne Massa (far left, above), also rode on the float. It was mounted on a flat-bed truck with a decorative skirting to conceal the unglamorous underpinnings of the machinery. By the time they made it back to Rolando Boulevard where the photographer set up his camera, a huge rent had appeared in the skirting. The young women spread their own skirts to hide the damage and smiled their best smiles into the afternoon sun.

Tootsie’s father went on to construct and later build and sell a number of houses on Rolando Boulevard and in the neighborhood as it expanded, most if not all still standing. He built the house that she and her husband Bill moved into shortly after their marriage. Here they raised their four children. Here they still live.

Tootsie hopes this photograph might jog someone else’s memory about that long ago day of the parade, perhaps of the other three girls in the photograph whose names she cannot recall. She’s sure they weren’t called princesses. “We were just girls,” she says with a smile. But looking at them, and listening to Tootsie now, it’s easy to see that Rolando indeed had royalty.

Do you have historic photos of Rolando?

If you, or anyone you know, have photos of Rolando Village they would be willing to share please email photos@rolandovillage.com and we can help arrange to digitize the photos with loving care so we can shared them here.

Tagged as: 1947, good old days, photographs, rolando history, rolando street fair