Monday, April 13, 2026

Burned Into the Record: Altadena’s Fire Stories Reach a UCLA Classroom

James Farr is host of weekly KBLA Talk 1580 show “Conversation Live: Altadena Rising,” 10 p.m. Saturdays.

A KBLA journalist who has spent a year reporting from the burn scar will deliver a guest lecture in a UCLA course co-anchored by the Altadena Historical Society and west Altadena’s Bob Lucas Memorial Library

The conversations James Farr has spent more than a year recording on the edges of Altadena’s burn scar — raw, unfiltered accounts from fire survivors and displaced families — are headed to a UCLA graduate classroom.

Farr, host of KBLA Talk 1580’s “Conversation Live: Altadena Rising,” will deliver a guest lecture Tuesday evening at UCLA as part of the university’s Urban Humanities Initiative, in collaboration with cityLAB-UCLA, according to a press release from KBLA. The graduate-level course draws on partnerships with the Altadena Historical Society and the Bob Lucas Memorial Library in west Altadena — two institutions that have been active in the effort to preserve what the Eaton Fire took and document what comes next. Historical Society president Veronica Jones said the invitation carries meaning for the community.

The lecture is titled “What We Witness. What We Honor. What We Record. What We Pass Forward.” It will draw from Farr’s firsthand observations within the fire zone and his months of conversations with residents still navigating rebuilding and displacement, according to the press release.

“For so long, community knowledge has been treated as anecdotal or secondary,” Jones said in a statement provided through the press release. “When institutions engage with our stories, it signals that lived experience is expertise.”

Jones is a 60-year west Altadena resident and the Altadena Historical Society’s first Black president. The society, founded in 1935, is an all-volunteer organization — and more than half of its 17 volunteers lost their own homes in the January 2025 fire. The urgency is not abstract. It is personal.

Jones said Farr’s radio program has been doing archival work from the start, whether or not it was called that.

“KBLA and Altadena Rising are creating a living archive,” she said in the statement. “These conversations aren’t polished or filtered — they’re raw, emotional, complicated, and honest. That’s exactly what makes them historically valuable. They are documenting the community in real time: the frustrations, the resilience, the organizing, the grief, the wins. Years from now, people will be able to look back and hear directly from the folks who were actually on the ground, not just the official statements.”

Farr launched “Conversation Live: Altadena Rising” on March 8, 2025, roughly two months after the Eaton Fire swept through Altadena’s historically Black west side. He lives on Altadena’s border. In the fire’s immediate aftermath, he co-produced KBLA’s three-hour live remote broadcast from the impact zone, according to KBLA press materials. The weekly program airs Saturdays at 10 a.m. PT on KBLA Talk 1580 AM and rebroadcasts Sundays at noon PT.

KBLA describes itself in press materials as broadcasting at 50,000 watts, day and night, on the same 1580 AM frequency that carried the KDAY call sign from 1956 to 1991 — the period when, according to Wikipedia, the station became the first in Los Angeles to play hip-hop music.

The UCLA course is part of the Urban Humanities Initiative’s 2025-2026 graduate certificate program, which centers this year on the theme “Care as Critical Spatial Practice.” cityLAB-UCLA has been engaged in Altadena’s recovery since January 2025, including presenting an exhibition on the living legacy of Black Altadena and Pasadena at the second Eaton Fire Rebuild Senior Summit in August 2025, and co-presenting a follow-up exhibition at the Bob Lucas Memorial Library that October.

The Bob Lucas Memorial Library, at 2659 Lincoln Ave. in west Altadena, reopened in August 2025 after a 16-month renovation that added roughly 1,000 square feet of space. Its namesake, Robert “Bob” Lucas, spent decades advocating for west-side library access after Proposition 13 forced the Lincoln Avenue branch to close; the building was named in his honor in 1991. According to the press release, students in the course are developing a reimagined, place-based guided experience inspired by Altadena’s historic home tours.

“These stories will live on for students, scholars, and anyone seeking truth,” Farr said in a statement provided through the press release. “Because history isn’t just made — it’s honored, recorded, and passed forward.”