1960-1961 Where was Diana/Paige living, and what was she was doing these years? She would have been 16 and 17 years old.

Her grandmother Virginia LaRocca was a recent widow. Virginia has voter’s registrations listed at 13204 Riverside Drive. It was a 4 or 6-plex at the time, on the corner with Atoll Ave.   Diana could have lived here with her grandmother as she was still high school age.

Josephine Young Harker, Virginia’s sister and Diana’s great aunt, is also listed with the Riverside Dr. address in a 1960 LA phone directory. Josephine was also listed at least once living at the LaRocca family home at 3834 Evans St. in the 1940s.

13204 Riverside Drive is also the address on Ned LaRocca’s death cert. 1959. It is unknown if he ever lived there. He might have been at the sanitarium for the last year or so of his eventually fatal lung cancer. (see related chapter)

This all means the family had to leave the duplex on Moorpark and Ethel Ave., at some point.

Donna LaRocca Cotterell married Jack Holroyd in 1958. The couple moved to their own place on Oxford Ave. and/or Ventura Canyon Blvd in Panorama City. Did Diana live with them even temporarily?

Sister Constance (Connie) was already married by 1960 when she was 18 years old.

There were profound changes in Diana’s life circumstances these years.

Her de facto father,grandfather Ned LaRocca, died in 1959.

Her mother Donna remarried in 1958.

A move out of a single family dwelling/duplex with family, to multiplex living.

UPDATE 7/25/2022: I had a phone conversation with a close relative of the family named Chris.

Chris informed me that Donna and Jack Holroyd had a son Wesley, born in 1960.

Add this to the list of major life changes for Diana who again, was only 16 in 1960.

Chris/Christain Young also confirmed visiting Diana and Virginia, at the Riverside Drive unit in Sherman Oaks.

Donna and Jack Holroyd, are listed at 12835 1/2 Oxford Ave., a few blocks from Grant High School in 1960, 61 and 62, voter’s registrations.

Donna and Jack Holroyd were married in Las Vegas in 1958, their son Wesley Scott Holroyd was born on August 20, 1960.

That date is almost 9 months to the day after Ned LaRocca died.

If Diana and/ or Virginia both lived here on Oxford, they would have run out of space and privacy pretty quickly. Especially with an infant.

Virginia LaRocca is listed here on Oxford at least once or twice in directories and voter registrations in the early 1960s.

Move to another SFV city: Panorama City

1962 What looks here like a Panorama City Chamber of Commerce ritual, takes place at the popular venue Sportsmen’s Lodge, only 0.6 miles from Diana Cotterell’s childhood home on Moorpark St. in Studio City.

To liven up this dull looking affair there was a special appearance at the lodge….

With 3,000 homes built between 1947 and 1952, Panorama City was the first large postwar community in the San Fernando Valley. In making up the blueprint for the community, Kaiser engineers also designated space for a Kaiser Permanente clinic and hospital, which was completed in 1962.

A General Motors plant completed in 1947 was situated one quarter mile south of Roscoe Boulevard, the southern boundary of Panorama City. A Schlitz Brewery sat immediately to the east, and Lockheed and Vega Aircraft, and Precision Tool, were all within seven miles of the Kaiser development.

Kaiser Permanente website.

This was Robinson’s first store in the SFV opening June 27, 1961. Other major department stores expanded into Panorama City: The Broadway, Orbach’ s, Montgomery Ward. The department stores in Panorama City continued the tradition of hiring the best architects for department stores. Beautiful Department stores thrived in the consumerist post-war years of the 1950s and 60s.

This is the earliest date I have found of Paige’s usage of the name Paige Young: Feb. 1962 when she was 18 and could be the first time she she was publicly documented with the name Paige Young .

The latest date I have seen Paige associated with her birth name, Diana Cotterell: her 9th grade photo listing in the Van Nuys Jr. High yearbook, 1957, age 15 or 16.

Note that in this write-up of Paige, no high school is mentioned. This is out of the ordinary.

I’ve seen and read dozens of newspaper photos with brief write-ups of models, starlets, beauty pageant winners, even “Muscle Beach” beauty contest entrants and winners and runners-up from the 1950s and 1960s.

The article nearly 100% of the time includes where the young woman attended high school and frequently, they were still in high school.

It is probably the only article of several I’ve read interviewing Paige that doesn’t mention her devotion to oil painting.

In 1969 interviews, Paige told reporters she graduated from Van Nuys High School. I have found no school photos of Paige at VNHS. (see 1969: Most Public Year)

My opinion is Paige dropped out of high school after the 9th or 10th grade. And changed her name between ages 16–18.

1963 and 1964 Both Virginia LaRocca and Jack Holroyd are in the phone directory with an address of 8533 Ventura Canyon, Van Nuys.  This address is also listed as Panorama City. Paige was married in 1963 and 64, living with her husband”south of the Boulevard” in Sherman Oaks on a steep winding Road known as Crisp Canyon.

Donna Holroyd is not listed in the phone book these years, only her husband Jack Holroyd.

She may have started her studies at UCLA around this time, majoring in Early Childhood Education.

Paige’s cousin Chris told me he remembers visiting Donna and Jack Holroyd and their baby Wesley in the early 1960s, in an apartment building. He couldn’t remember the address. He did remember an unheated pool. Chris said the apartment certainly could have been one near Grant High School or Panorama City. He didn’t see Paige during those particular visits.

Chris said he did see Paige at the Riverside Dr. location.

Paige would be married in Las Vegas 1 1/2 years (Oct. 1, 1963) after this “Miss Panorama City” article appeared.

The marriage lasted for 11 months (Aug 27, 1964).

In 1964, Paige filled out a divorce questionnaire ( below) stating that she had moved out of the marital home and was “living with family”.

Family would have been living at 8533 Ventura Canyon Ave. according to phone listings.

Her answer to employment record says clerical-secretary.

-is this at Robinson’s of the Valley as a clerk-secretary in their business offices, or was she a salesgirl in the department store. Unclear.

See chapter on Marriage and Divorce to Mark F. Segal 1963-1964.

Some of Paige’s quotes from Playboy magazine are about disliking and avoiding the “9-5 doldrums” and “working for impersonal corporations.” Ironically enough.

By 1963, Diana’s childhood home on Moorpark near the Sportsman Lodge had been razed.  Records show a city permit (below) requesting a 6-unit apartment to be built.

Notice it says NONE (highlighted) for “existing buildings on lot.” I’m not sure when the house was actually torn down.

Did a developer make the LaRoccas an offer for the Moorpark house back in the late 50s when Ned was sick with lung cancer? Many older houses were now being razed for multi-unit housing to meet demand for higher density populations flooding into the San Fernando Valley.( If you can call a 6–plex multi-housing.)

I’ve been by this complex and it is obvious that more buildings were added over the years.

Nearby Ventura Blvd. continued to thrive with many businesses of all kinds.

 SFV continued to experience massive population growth and housing development throughout the 1960s and beyond.

The famous Sportsmen’s Lodge has been demolished as of 2024.

I do not know if any of the structure was saved. I had read that was a possibility.