CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Only slightly larger than two square miles in size, San Fernando is an incorporated island city surrounded by the massive metropolis, Los Angeles. Until about a hundred years earlier, there had been a lot of independent small towns and cities in the San Fernando Valley. Los Angeles had annexed all of them one by one for the same reason. Their agricultural fields had needed the plentiful water supplies that the Los Angeles Aqueduct offered that William Mulholland had built. All except the valley’s namesake, San Fernando. With adequate groundwater supplies, the small 2.3 square miles city hadn’t needed the aqueduct and had remained independent. One hundred years later, it remained a quaint throwback to California small-town values. In modern times, San Fernando wasn’t im
