Chick's Sporting Goods Timeline

Recently I posted about Chick's Sporting Goods on my new Facebook page and the "I Grew Up in Covina" FB group. Both were pretty well received, so I thought I'd put together a more detailed version of those posts in my blog here: specifically a timeline of Chick's various locations in and around Covina.

I knew from past experience that there's plenty of disagreement about where the "original" Chick's was located. To illustrate that, I conducted a poll on the Covina group.

Just on the basis of personal memory, I would have said without hesitation that the original Chick's was on Citrus up by San Bernardino Road. But, from the Covina FB group, I learned of an even earlier location: at College and Second, where the Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlor has been for the last 70 years.¹

However, even that was wrong! Just the other day, doing a newspaper search, I discovered that the actual birthplace of Chick's was in a little hole-in-the-wall retail spot at 112 Italia Street in Covina. And moreover, that James Chick was not the original owner. That was a gentleman named Edwin Girdham Henman.

Chick's started out here at 112 Italia Street, Covina, in 1947. Source: Google Maps.

So, without further ado, here is my timeline of Chick's Sporting Goods in Covina:

October, 1945—E. G. Henman opens Henman's Bicycle Shop at 112 Italia Street in Covina.²

Covina Argus-Citizen, September 21, 1945. Clippings from Newspapers.com.

August 18, 1947—James Elmo Chick buys Henman's store;³ new dba is James Chick Sporting Goods.⁴

Covina Argus-Citizen, September 5, 1947. Clippings from Newspapers.com.

April, 1950—James Chick Sporting Goods moves to 177 East College Street, Covina. That July,⁵ Chick sponsors a youth basketball team called "Chick's Sporting Goods," then adopts that name for his business in December.⁶

Ad for James Chick Sporting Goods on College Street in the Covina Union High School Cardinal yearbook, June, 1950. Source: Covina Valley Historical Society.

This was a great location because it was right across from the post office. However, it didn't take long before Chick's outgrew that little corner shop, as well.

1953-1954—Chick's expands and briefly operates a second location in West Covina Center at 1212 East Garvey Boulevard.⁷

September, 1954—Chick's Sporting Goods opens at 309 North Citrus Avenue,⁸ consolidating both stores under one roof.

Covina Argus-Citizen, September 30, 1954. Clipping from Newspapers.com.

October 9, 1965—Death of founder James E. Chick.⁹

1968—Son James Merrill Chick assumes ownership of Chick's.¹⁰

September, 1978—Chick's moves to 626 South Citrus Avenue just south of Rowland Avenue: the former Alpha Beta market adjacent to Shoppers Lane.¹¹ After this Chick's goes bigtime, opening new locations all over the Southland.

Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1978. Clipping from Newspapers.com.

February, 1997—Appearance of the last newspaper ad showing Chick's at the Citrus location;¹² presumably this was the year Chick's moved to Eastland Center.

2007—Chick's is bought out by Dick's Sporting Goods for $72 million.¹⁰

February, 2009—Chick's 15 stores close,¹³ reopen as Dick's in May.

March 7, 2023—Death of James Merrill Chick.¹⁰

Another retail giant was also born in little old Covina: the Cornet dime store chain in 1922. Hopefully someday I can write something about that, too, though info about Cornet is strangely hard to come by. Odd that a regional department store chain recording tens of millions of dollars in sales annually in the middle of the 20th century then all but disappears from history by early in the next. Yet another mystery I need to solve!

References:

¹ Los Angeles Times, August 11, 1957, p.202.
² Covina Argus-Citizen, September 21, 1945, p.1.
³ Covina Argus-Citizen, August 15, 1947, p.13.
⁴ Covina Argus-Citizen, October 17, 1947, p.15.
⁵ Covina Argus-Citizen, July 28, 1950, p.8.
⁶ Covina Argus-Citizen, December 1, 1950, p.17.
⁷ Covina Argus-Citizen, November 5, 1953, p.23.
⁸ Covina Argus-Citizen, September 30, 1954, p.10.
⁹ Certificate of Death, James E. Chick, State of Oregon, Board of Health, received Oct. 15, 1965.
¹⁰ "James M. Chick, owner of Chick's Sporting Goods, dies at 76," San Gabriel Valley Tribune, March 24, 2023.
¹¹ Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1978, p.50.
¹² Los Angeles Times, February 6, 1997, p.195.
¹³ Los Angeles Times, February 15, 2009, p.45.

 

Citizen Casad

If you've followed my blog for any significant length of time, you know I enjoy collecting old Covina postcards and learning about the people who wrote/received them. Well, this may not be a postcard, but in terms of discovering someone, I really hit the jackpot here!

To see the Hollywood received postmark on the verso, click here.

The first thing I noticed about this old envelope was its fine-grade Irwindale postmark. (Irwindale in this case being the original Irwindale, i.e. turn-of-the-last-century West Covina, not the modern-day incorporated city to our northwest.) Then I pondered the fancy cursive that closely resembled my grandmother's, and deciphered the addressee's last name as "Casad." Ahh, that's a street in Covina/WC! Could this maybe be the person it's named after? Then, only minutes later, a quick newspaper search introduced me to Mr R. C. Casad, who has turned out to be one of the more remarkable historical Covina personages I've ever had the pleasure to meet.

In our Civics class at South Hills, I remember Mr. Douglas telling us that the framers of the Constitution intended that Congress be comprised of regular citizens elected by the community who would then come to the nation's capital for a two-year term and represent their constituents. Sounded great on paper, but of course, the system we ended up with was career politicians representing their party and themselves over and above anything else. Not so great...

Covina's Roland C. Casad, however, was a throwback to the Founders' ideal, and much more—a common man who sought not only to stand for his district, but who sincerely desired to improve the lives of all the people and bring prosperity to the entire country. To that end, he tirelessly ran for national elected office 11 times from 1932-1948, including 4 times for president.

The Badilla Foreclosure

The story of the Badilla coffee venture in the 1870s is the genesis chapter of Covina history. The families of Julian and Antonio Badilla were the first to settle the north region of Rancho La Puente, and had they not lost their land to foreclosure in 1879, Covina as we know it today would not have been born. J. E. Hollenbeck's lawsuit changed the course of our history, but the passage of time has obscured the events and people involved. Long assumed lost, I recently found the official court records for Hollenbeck vs. Badilla et al., and what they reveal will significantly broaden our understanding of Covina's past.

The court case that set the stage for Covina's birth.
Source: Los Angeles area court records, 1850-1911, Call number: mssLAACR, Item number: 05091, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Because this article is rather lengthy, I'm going to begin with some tl;dr bullets of my principal findings:

• Contrary to legend, the Badillas did grow coffee here, and wheat in abundance. Their only failure was financial.

• The old story also said Antonio Badillo was a debtor landowner whose mortgage was foreclosed, and that entire characterization was false.

• The Badillas did not use any of their own money to buy the land in Rancho La Puente. Instead, the Badillas and Rowlands arranged a seller-financed mortgage for the $45,000 purchase price.

     —The down payment of $15,000 was borrowed from the Commercial Bank of Los Angeles.

     —The $30,000 balance was financed with two one-year-term $15,000 promissory notes.

• Plaintiff Hollenbeck was not the original mortgage holder. Rather, he purchased the Badillas' delinquent mortgage from the Rowlands, then foreclosed.

• Hollenbeck did not buy the former Badilla land at the Sheriff's auction, he was granted title to it as payment-in-full for the court's decree.

• Two future California politicians were involved with this case. The judge was a member of the influential Sepúlveda family, and the Badillas' defense attorney went on to become a United States Senator.

The Badillo Legend

In my 2021 article about Hollenbeck and the Badillas, I presented proof that several elements of the familiar Badillo story were untrue. Now, after years of further research and studying these newly-discovered court records in particular, I'm more certain than ever that the narrative once considered historical fact long ago crossed over into the realm of fiction.

The most complete telling of the Badillo legend is found in Donald Pflueger's Covina (1964), and can be summarized as follows:

Julian and Antonio Badillo were wealthy Costa Rican plantation owners who met Hollenbeck when he lived in Central America. Hollenbeck convinced the Badillos to leave Costa Rica and grow coffee in southern California. About 1875, the brothers bought 5,500 acres of Rowland land in Rancho La Puente for $4 an acre. However, being unfamiliar with the area's semi-arid climate, the Badillos failed twice to grow coffee. Julian got discouraged and left, but Antonio stayed and borrowed large sums of money from the Los Angeles bank of which Hollenbeck was principal stockholder. Antonio tried growing other crops, but he failed at that as well and defaulted on his loan. The bank foreclosed on Antonio in 1879 and Hollenbeck purchased all the former Badillo land for $16,692. Then in 1880, Hollenbeck deeded 100 acres back to Antonio as a gift.¹

For more than a half-century before and after Pflueger's book, this was considered settled history.

Real Facts Emerge

In 2011, however, descendants of Julian Badilla discovered their genealogical connection to his 1870s coffee experiment in Rancho La Puente, and new historical facts came to light.

The First Settler in West Covina, 1904

It may be difficult to believe, but a section of the East San Gabriel Valley that is now home to about a hundred thousand people was basically uninhabited until 1904. Before then, the land south of today's Interstate 10 between the San Gabriel River and Glendora Avenue in West Covina was not yet irrigable, so the area lagged behind Covina in terms of development by almost two decades. At the time, the land was still part of "Lucky" Baldwin's division of Rancho La Puente, and nothing much went on there except for a few cattle grazing on the wild wheat.

In 1904, though, Baldwin started subdividing this portion of his ranch, and the first tract was surveyed in March of that year.¹ H. T. Cotton bought the 810-acre subdivision six months later for $121,500² and named it "El Monte Walnut Place."³ Not because it was in El Monte (it wasn't—that was just the closest town then), and not because there were walnuts being grown there, either—there weren't any yet—but the soil and lay of the land seemed perfect for them, if only someone could find a way to water the trees.

Then, just three weeks after Coffin bought Walnut Place, he made his first sale to a gentleman from actual El Monte named Robert E. Dancer. The property was described in the newspaper as "thirty-three acres...about one-half mile north of Bassett Station."⁴ Mr. Dancer then drilled for water and found a gusher of it at a relatively shallow depth. Word got around, and before you knew it, a small land rush ensued, and the district known as "Walnut Center" was born.⁵ And since Walnut Center was the immediate forerunner of today's West Covina, local historians have long pointed to Robert Dancer as its first settler.

What nobody in later years really knew, though, was the precise location of Dancer's pioneering farmstead. (A "half mile north of Bassett Station" is a clue, but far from an exact one.) Over time, many plausible educated guesses have been put forth, but the actual location of Dancer's ranch has remained a mystery for decades.

Now because I've had really good luck lately finding old deeds with the legal descriptions of many pioneer lands in Covina, I thought I might try to find Robert Dancer's, too. Fortunately, copies of those deeds are relatively easy to obtain from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder's Office in Norwalk. (Also fortunately, even someone who lives 700 miles away like me can place an order online and get them, too.)

Well, just today, I got the deed, and now we can tell exactly where Robert Dancer's ranch was! The legal description is as follows...^1,6

Covina Wikipedia Article

Spent the last 5 days working on improving the Wikipedia article on Covina. For years, the History section of that page has been the single worst source of misinformation about Covina's past on the whole internet. It was the exact opposite of what it should be, and an absolute disgrace to anyone who really knows or cares about the details of Covina history. The references cited were very weak, too; in almost every case they weren't authoritative sources at all, just websites that repeated the same distortions of events we've been told all our lives.

So I finally got fed up and decided to basically start from scratch and make the History section the absolute best quick source of information about Covina's bygone days that inquiring minds can find anywhere.

I didn't edit the whole History section, though. There's still stuff at the bottom that needs tidying up or moved to other sections. But paragraphs 2, 3, and 4 are all "New and Improved!" by Yours Truly. Have a look!

Click on the image go to the History section on Wikipedia.

And here are the new references I cited. You'll notice almost all of them consist of primary source material, like original deeds and newspaper reports written at the time the historical events actually occurred. So many definitive references here!

Click on the image go to the References section on Wikipedia.

I know I should have done this a long time ago, but editing Wikipedia is no simple task. It can be pretty intimidating, and exhausting, too. So 5 days of it is quite enough for me, at least for now. *whew!*

 

Compromise Line Road

I hope my dozen or so regular readers will pardon me if I write about someplace other than Covina just once. ;-)

Although I was born and raised in Covina, I lived my first five years on East Foothill Boulevard in Glendora, so consequently, the history of our neighbor to the north is a natural area of interest to me.

The subject is not far out of bounds geographically, either, as both Covina and Glendora share partial origins in a historical Mexican land grant called Rancho San José Adición (aka Rancho Addition to San Jose) which just happens to be the broader topic of this article. Most of Covina's Charter Oak neighborhood lies within Adición's borders, so I'm not really straying too far afield here.

Anyway, even as a child, I had a keen interest in roads and maps which really took off after I discovered my dad's Renie Atlas around age 12 (same time as my interest in Covina history, hmm!). Probably not long after that, the name of one street in particular from my Glendora years aroused my curiosity: "Compromise Line Road." Always wondered what that meant. Somewhere in my early readings of local history, I did learn that it involved a dispute over a northern boundary of Rancho Addition to San Jose, but I never could find out much more than that.

Compromise Line Road in Glendora. Source: Renie Atlas of Los Angeles City and County, 1965 edition.

Recently I was contacted by an old classmate who asked about Compromise Line, and desiring to know more than the basics I'd heard long ago, I decided to do a deep-dive into the subject. Obvious first stop reference-wise was Donald Pflueger's Glendora (1951), but unfortunately his mention of Compromise Line Road was so nonspecific as to be no help at all. Then I searched the newspaper archive, and that was a similar dead-end.