Known as Throop Memorial, "the First Universalist Parish of Pasadena is the oldest liberal religious congregation in Pasadena. It first met in 1885 and organized a year later under the leadership of the reverend Florence Kollock of Chicago. She was the dynamic minister to Amos Throop, a wealthy businessman, who had come to Pasadena from Chicago, to retire. Instead he became one of the first mayors of this new city, helped finance the new Universalist Church building at Walnut and Raymond Sts., and founded Throop Polytechnic Institute, a trade college that later changed its name to California Institute for Technology
(Cal Tech) "
(by Paul Sawyer of the Throop Memorial Church website
Goodness, it is pleasant to see the interior of Throop Memorial again after some years, having left LA at the end of 1996. You will find a great deal with which you will resonate in the LA area. I hated it at first, and came to be fascinated by it during the 12 years I lived there, although it is not all good. I still have two more or less grown up children, an aunt and uncle, and the ghost of my maternal grandfather, all still living out there.
The museums of Pasadena and the Huntington further east, and the Getty in LA are really something etc. Walking around East LA is something else, and the Russians of Fairfax are a vision of the past. I wrote a sermon once about a homeless man I knew for a while in downtown LA, who looked unnervingly like the great black singer Roland Hayes whom I knew in college, but was insane, so that I could not take him in although I wanted to.
The community of UU groups there, extending from Santa Barbara to San Diego, is something also. As a denominational affairs trustee for a while, based at the little
Emerson Church in Canoga Park (West San Fernando Valley) I learned a lot.
And don't miss the Archives Bookstore in Pasadena. They are not big, but deep.
I hope that things go well with your wife's health, and your move to LA. Buy a bunch of Thomas Guide books for the freeways and highways.
LinguistFriend