No Camping

Writing of Dutch Haven, as I was, brings back lots of memories. At that time, the 60’s, we were living in the San Fernando Valley, one of the original suburbs, but one that had already grown too expensive for us to dream of owning a home there. We rented. And we dreamed of owning our own home. Hey! it was America!

One Sunday we decided to drive all of the way out to Ventura County to see the houses we had heard about in Thousand Oaks. OK, they were nice but still expensive. And since we had nothing else to do, we drove a little bit further north on 101 and got off the freeway in Newbury Park, following the signs to the model homes for Dutch Haven homes. There were half a dozen cars in the parking lot and we wandered through the models without being disturbed by salesmen. They were nice houses. Raised foundations with hardwood floors. All electric. Shake roofs. And all quite reasonable, if we could only come up with a down payment.

We went in to the sales office to see what we could do. And that’s when we learned that the day before, Saturday, had been a madhouse at the sales office. Hundreds of people had driven up on Friday and had camped out on the lawns just make certain that they could be in line to buy a house when the tract officially opened for business Saturday morning. We were a day late!

As it turned out, we weren’t late at all; in fact we found the perfect house and didn’t have to wait in line for it. We used my VA loan to buy the house and then we would drive out every weekend to watch it being built. All American.