Dan Carlin, A Hardcore Tolucan

Dan Carlin is a name that will be familiar to many of you as the creator of one of the most widely listened to podcasts in America, Hardcore History. A smaller fraction of you, if you have lived in Toluca Lake since the 1970s, may have actually known Dan or the Carlin family personally. It recently came to my attention that Carlin, a man whose work I greatly admire and whose voice I have listened to for over 100 hours, had lived in Toluca Lake and in fact grew up with some of my closest family friends.

Upon learning this, I knew I had to reach out to Carlin, and thankfully, Dan could not have been more receptive. I was thrilled to receive a response, and even more excited that Carlin was eager to talk and fondly remembered our mutual friends. Carlin graciously offered his time for a lengthy and wide-ranging interview over the phone with The Tolucan Times. Carlin was phenomenally kind, open, and a model interviewee, which should come as no surprise considering he has made a living as an eloquent communicator.

Carlin started his career in journalism originally working at KJH-TV, which would later become KCAL. “I got a coffee-getter, intern-runner, gofer type job at channel 9,” Right on cue, Dan had a history tidbit to share about channel 9’s history. “This is how old [KJH-TV’s] manager was. It was an RKO General station. I think RKO General was a tire company in the Depression, and they bought a bunch of media outlets, and by the time I worked there, they were still hobbling along with something they didn’t even know why they still owned anymore. I’m not even sure they still sold tires at that point. And while I was there, it got bought by Disney.” Dan’s story checks out, a tire company called General Tire owned channel 9 in Los Angeles from 1951 until 1989. He continued to work there under Disney for a while. “From there I got a job – I didn’t want one – but the guys at KABC were pushing me saying: ‘You know, you’ll die at this job if you don’t keep moving up the ladder.’ They were encouraging me to be a reporter. And I think to just shut them up, I sent out some tapes because nobody was getting hired who were sending out tapes, so I didn’t think it was much of a risk. I got hired in Eugene, Oregon. So I moved up here, became a TV reporter, and moved over to talk radio.”

Carlin’s career in broadcast journalism clearly served as a foundation for his future career in podcasting, but I wondered too if his upbringing in Toluca Lake, a neighborhood known for its many entertainers, influenced his gravitation towards entertaining others. “It’s funny because I often think back to Toluca Lake, and I’ll tell my wife, who’s from Oregon, stories about [Toluca Lake] and it’s different now than it was then. When I think of what the parents of all of the kids that I knew did, it was two general areas of employment: Either the entertainment industry – in front of behind the camera – or aerospace.” Unsurprisingly, again, Carlin was ready to teach me a bit of history that I didn’t know, but this time about our neighborhood. “There were a ton of people that worked Lockheed, McDonnell, Douglas, you know, all of those kinds of firms. My next-door neighbor’s dad was an Air Force colonel who worked for Lockheed, and there were a lot of those guys. That seemed to be like that because Lockheed was huge and it probably was not so huge by your time, but this was the Cold War, you know? I moved to Toluca Lake late 1960s, and it was a huge industry in the Valley.”

Today, I doubt many of us think of Toluca Lake as a neighborhood that caters specifically to military contractors, but I’m sure there are still a few in our midst. Carlin’s family belonged to the other of the two major industries at the time in the area: entertainment. His mother, Lynn Carlin, was an actress in the 70s and 80s when Dan was growing up. She has over 60 on-screen credits, including a starring role alongside Toluca Lake’s late, great honorary sheriff (and Dan Carlin’s first little league coach) Joe Campanella in the 1974 film Terror on the 40th Floor. Carlin has been an undeniable trailblazer in the world of podcasting having first entered the sphere in 2005, long before the podcasting boom with his show Hardcore History that now receives millions of downloads per episode. “When we started in 2005, we started the very month that Apple started supporting podcasts. So we really didn’t think anybody knew what [podcasting] was going to be. Most of the people doing this were like nerds in their dorm rooms in college just reading stuff into a microphone or whatever. I mean, it was just so eclectic and weird and strange that I don’t think any of us really grasp what any of this was.”

Carlin told me that he has always been fond of his time in Toluca Lake, where he lived for the first twelve years of his life in houses on both Navajo and Rose. “That’s my foundational place,” he said of our neighborhood and went on to share some charming stories from that time in Toluca Lake’s history. “Did anybody ever mention the candy ladies to you?” Carlin asked me. “There were two – and I always think of them as old women but I thought about it the other day and they probably were my age – but these women were the candy ladies,” Carlin explained joyfully. “If you would knock on their door and you were a child, they didn’t even ask anything they just came to the door with a whole tureen of candy. They would come any hour, day or night and do this. And every kid, of course, in the neighborhood knew about this. It was it was a landmark.”

Carlin remarked too how the times have changed and the thought of sending one’s kids to the mysterious candy ladies’ house would be almost unthinkable to many parents today. On the topic of the Toluca Lake that he grew up in, Carlin told me a couple of his favorite old spots. “One place that I used to go to that my dad would roll his eyes when I made him go there was called Saint George Smorgasbord. It had like a knightly theme, Knights of the Round Table kind of thing. But it was a smorgasbord, so it had every kind of food you can imagine. It would have been like an upscale version of Golden Corral or something.” Another old favorite Carlin mentioned that I’m sure many readers will recall: The Hot Dog Show, which was a Toluca Lake staple for 62 years before it closed its doors in 2011. It was an incredible honor and pleasure to speak with Dan, and I want to leave you all with some of his words about Toluca Lake and what it has meant to him throughout his life. “It’s so funny that just in my little town here where I live in Eugene, Oregon, it just reminds me of how I felt in Toluca Lake when I was a kid. Just because the big, wide world of Los Angeles really wasn’t a part of my life, you know? What was a part of my life was from Riverside Drive to Lakeside Golf Course.

That little square area that was my whole world, and it was nice. It was green; it was safe, and that’s kind of how this community where I live right now is. It reminds me a little of how my mom always said I was looking to get back to Toluca Lake ever since we left.”