STREET WISE: / New Directions : Two Streets Where the Names Don’t Quite Fit

I’d love to live on Easy Street.

Nobody works on Easy Street.

Just sit around all day...

Life is sweet on Easy Street. --from the song “Easy Street” Alan Rankin Jones, 1941 She had been to Augusta once with Jeeter and Ada, and she had seen with her own eyes girls who were laughing and carefree. She did not know whether they worked in the cotton mills, but it made little difference to her. Down there on the tobacco road, no one ever laughed. --from “Tobacco Road” Erskine Caldwell, 1932 Perhaps only in Southern California could Tobacco Road be transformed into a quiet cul-de-sac resembling the Brady Bunch’s quiet calle rather than Caldwell’s shack-lined dirt road. There it sits overlooking I-15 just on the edge of Escondido, lined with suburban ranch homes.

Somebody employs a gardener. One house even overlooks a swimming pool.

And Easy Street? Well, it is a dirt road, maybe a quarter of a mile long in the rapidly disappearing boondocks of San Marcos. It’s marked by a hand-painted, rusted sign you can’t see if you come from the wrong direction.

Actually, there are two Easy Streets in North County--the other is in the Solamar Mobile Estates off Palomar Airport Road in Carlsbad. The driveway-like road in the mobile home park agreeably intersects with Friendly Way.

At least one thing is true of the Easy Street in San Marcos: it’s an exclusive address. There are just two residences there, one owned by Charles Sherman, a retired chicken rancher and the man largely responsible for naming the street. There are a couple of cows, a couple of horses and the aroma of cows and horses in the air.

According to Betty Rule, a 31-year resident of the neighborhood, she and Sherman and another neighbor at the time were approached by the local fire department in 1960.

“They said we had to name these easements,” she recalled. “So the three of us who live pretty close to each other were sitting around trying to think of names. I said I always wanted to live on Easy Street.”

And Sherman, who had lived in the area since the 1950s, knew he would retire on his land and had always wanted to retire on Easy Street.

And so it was.

Rule is sure the street is aptly named.

“It’s perfect,” she exclaimed. “Look at that road. When you drive on it, if you take it easy, you don’t break an axle!”

But the wheel of fortune turns and those who live on Easy Street one day can wake up and find themselves in another place the next. Just ask Rule.

“The fire department said I was really one block off Easy Street,” she said. “The name of my street became Ascend Road. I lived on Easy Street for a week.”

Sherman, who has lived there for 32 years, claims living on Easy Street is not all that easy.

“No matter where you live there is a lot of work,” he said.

But do not feel sorry for Sherman. His retirement is everything he hoped it would be.

“I have a small grove, and a pond with fish and ducks and I live in a nice area. It’s OK.”

Tobacco Road is just a hop skip and a jump from Easy Street--perhaps a moral in that for all of us--but Tobacco Road looks just a bit upscale.

The residents here are fairly well-to-do. Some have their own businesses. Some are retired from their own businesses. The neighbors all know each other in this lovely little slice of Leave It to Beaverdom. There isn’t a cotton field or a donkey cart within a hundred miles and nobody has goiter.

Not that everybody is thrilled about the name.

“When I first moved here, I thought it was horrible,” Jean McCone said. She has now lived on Tobacco Road for 25 years. She tried to get the name changed once and got only as far as her neighbor. The neighbor liked the name as a conversation piece. McCone gave up. But she still has not forgiven the two developers who named the street as a joke.

Zoran Matejic moved from Chicago to Tobacco Road six years ago. He said his teen-age daughters love the name despite the fact some other teen-agers at school make fun of it. Matejic likes living on Tobacco Road better than he liked living in Chicago.

“It is nice and quiet here,” he said. “I really enjoy it. I tell everybody I am not going to move from Tobacco Road.”