A wildfire claimed the Altadena man's neighborhood and his dream Corvette

It was sleek as the night wind, painted red, with a peanut butter interior and a factory four-speed engine.

Oh, man, said Danny Robinson, the things the 1986 Corvette could have done. Had been working on it for a while, ordered a power switch and was waiting for registration. It was one step away from being ready for the road, and Robinson, a well-known boilermaker on Harriet Street in Altadena, could imagine himself behind the wheel, racing beneath the evening crows flying west over the San Gabriels.

“That was my dream car,” he said. “It's gone.”

The wildfire that raged through Eaton Canyon this month was terrifying, fast and fierce. He took Robinson's house. He took his 1966 Pontiac GTO. I took the 1962 Impala. Wrecked his father's old Ford pickup truck, driven from Mississippi and preserved to remember the family of the patriarch who, more than half a century ago, took out his wife, children and daughter of the Jim Crow South to the foothills of California. But nothing hurts more than losing the Corvette, with its tires melted, its windshield shattered, its fine lines twisted into a charred puzzle of metal and ash.

Robinson looked at the remains as if it were a beast taken from a war. But, he said, a man needs to know his blessings and move on. Enough preachers have told him that over the years. It is a test of spirit that you have to do yourself: “Don't stop at anything. If you focus on things, you will not be able to move forward. It will fill your mind,” said Robinson, 63, a large man with a talkative air wrapped in a musical tone. “You have dinner and in the space after you think about moving forward.”

Many of the houses on Robinson's block are gone, including the home of his former neighbor, drummer Kenny Elliott, who died of cancer last year and had played with Lou Rawls, Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald. Robinson's friend Danny Shigemori, who lived on the street for 55 years and ran a landscaping business, also lost his spot. So did the young man whose face appeared behind a burned wall.

“Hey, neighbor!” he shouted at Robinson from the ruins.

“How are you there?” Robinson shouted in response.

“Looking for some of my mom's things,” the young man said, waving and disappearing behind the wall.

Robinson smiled.

“I've known that kid since he was this big,” she said, cradling her arms on her chest as if she were holding a baby. “Before there were many more children here. I watched the kids grow up across the street. They went from pushing toy lawnmowers to driving big trucks. But then it got to the point where it was almost like a retirement community. They all grew up and moved away. Nobody had children anymore. At night everything was very quiet.”

Danny Robinson lost his home and car collection in the Eaton fire: “Don't worry about a thing,” he said. “If you focus on things, you can't move forward. It will saturate your mind.”

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Robinson walked through the rooms that no longer existed in his missing house. There was the bedroom, there was the kitchen, the living room, and then to the driveway and his destroyed cars, including the Corvette, valued at $45,000, and the Pontiac, valued at about $20,000. Tool boxes, jacks, weights, and a bench press were scattered nearby in the sunlight, not far from where he had written his family's names specifically: Charlie (Dad), Minnie (“Mom, like the mouse.” ), sister. Valerie and brothers Henry and Ronny.

A child of segregation, Charlie Robinson arrived first in California and sent for his relatives, who traveled across the country by train in the early 1960s after he was hired as a truck driver. They started in Pasadena and moved to Altadena in 1979. “My last year of high school,” said Robinson, who after graduating would become a mechanic and builder, working on cars on West Harriet Street on weekends and evenings. Her father returned to Jackson, Mississippi, but Minnie stayed with her children until they left home, except for Danny, who lived with his mother and escaped the flames with her around 3 a.m. on January 8.

“My mom took people in,” said Robinson, who is divorced and has two grown children. “If someone needed a place to stay, my mom would give them a room so they could get up. My cousin came here from Mississippi and my mom gave her a room. She became a nurse, got her own job and found her own place. Then her boyfriend showed up and she went to trucker school. They earned enough money and returned to Mississippi. And now they have a home.”

“My mom,” he said, “did that for a lot of people.”

Robinson said he didn't come to remove the ashes, not today. That would be done later, when the debris and toxins had been cleaned up and he could hire contractors with insurance money to rebuild. He spoke instead of lost things: his collection of 400 miniature Hot Wheels cars and photographs of him with his uncle Cleveland Green, who played offensive tackle for the Miami Dolphins in the 1980s and once invited Robinson to the team's locker room. .

“I used to block Dan Marino,” Robinson said. He paused and looked at the indecipherable gray at his feet. “Those photographs are gone, but I enjoy talking about the things that were once in this house.”

He remembered other things too, things that you couldn't retain but that you knew and were part of the history of the neighborhood.

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1. Danny Robinson had classic cars parked at his home in Altadena, including a 1986 Corvette.
2. The Corvette was valued at $45,000.
(Danny Robinson)

“Every night just before dusk,” Robinson said, “the crows would begin migrating in flocks of 20 and 30 and fly by. I used to count them. Every day at the same time. Once a flock of hawks passed by. I had never seen that before in my life. They emigrated to the west. Another time I had a group of vultures in my tree. Six of them. The wing span was 6 feet. Just sitting there in this tree right here. “I’ve seen a lot of things up here.”

He pointed to his father's charred truck. He didn't want the man who raised him (he died years ago) to be forgotten: “There are a lot of memories in that truck,” he said. “My dad brought us here to have a better life and he gave it to us.”

He looked towards Shigemori, who was snooping through the remains of his fallen house.

“Cuckoo, cuckoo,” Robinson joked.

Among the many things Danny Robinson lost in the fire was a collection of Mattel Hot Wheels.

(Danny Robinson)

That was the call men had been calling to each other for years from their backyards. It meant it was time to have a beer, to talk as the last moments of the day turned into night. There was no beer that day.

Shigemori approached. He said he's lived on this street so long he wouldn't know where to go; It would be like a carrier pigeon, I would throw it into the sky and come back. As flames broke through the neighborhood and headed toward homes, Shigemori, a thin man with a gray mustache known as the “rebel on the block,” grabbed a garden hose and tried to contain them.

“The flames went up the fence,” he said. “The winds were too strong. I tried to go back inside to get my purse, but the fire was in the house. Windows bursting. “I was the last one to leave the neighborhood.”

He looked in the distance, past the bare chimneys, at a bright red children's car (miraculously) and a table where men were playing dominoes. Why did one house burn and another not? What are the vagaries of the wind and what are the chances of this happening again?

“I don't plan to move,” Shigemori said. “This neighborhood is a family. We have been devastated. We had a meeting the other night. We told each other that we would always be family. We told each other: 'Don't sell.' “

Robinson walked to a blackened tree where he had nailed a saucer that Elliott had given him. It had been burned and cracked by the flames. Robinson pinged.

“Man, I loved watching Kenny play,” he said. “I put this here to remember him. “It hurt me to see him go into hospice.”

There was silence. The sky was clear, the kind of blue that made it hard to believe there was so much ruin below.

The National Guard was on corners, health care workers handed out masks, churches heard prayers, and pickup trucks transported burned things that could be saved. Robinson said his 83-year-old mother was visiting family in Mississippi for a few weeks while he and his sister sorted out the paperwork and other details that would begin the ordeal of building a new house on this battered lot.

Danny Robinson inspects the remains of his dream car, a 1986 Corvette.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Robinson suffered a brain aneurysm that nearly killed him a few years ago. “I cried in front of the doctor when he told me the swelling had gone down.” He feels a little like that now, he said, waiting for healing to come, mentioning that when he returned to the neighborhood alone for the first time a couple of days earlier, he felt like the last man on Earth.

“If I hadn't lived here so long,” he said, “I would have thought, 'Where am I?'”

He walked down the driveway toward the backyard. Everyone in the neighborhood knew what was there, as sure as they knew that the summer heat eased with the afternoon breeze. The Pontiac was a classic. People used to stop and ask him about it. For years, the Impala was sought after for parts for other cars. He looked at the Corvette. It was unrecognizable, but not to his eyes. He would never make it on the road, but, he said, he came close to fulfilling his dream. Not many men understand that.