When you lose everything, it’s the little things that make the difference. And right now, one of those things, for Jonathan Sims and Kyle Shire, is that the Altadena grocery store is still standing.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” Shire says, laughing as we pass the discount store with a postcard-perfect mural declaring “Greetings from Altadena” on the side, a little corner of normalcy on a street which is now dotted with the burned remains of businesses. The couple will soon exclaim over the loss of several favorite places devoured by the Eaton Fire — a breakfast restaurant here, a pizza place there — but here is a favorite destination for low-cost groceries, suddenly glorious in its ordinariness. “I’m really sorry, but I’m really happy to see this grocery store,” Shire said.
Shire and Sims are just two of thousands of entertainment workers whose lives have been upended by the Los Angeles wildfires that ravaged sections of the Los Angeles area starting Jan. 7. The rental home where the longtime couple resided for four years — the first home they lived together — was destroyed in the fire, along with nearly all of their belongings.
Shire, producer of the popular web series Critical rolewas able to run home from work on the night of January 7 and gather a few things, as well as their four cats. But when Sims, a former VFX artist on The hunger games And X-Men: Apocalypse who now runs projects for drag queens, returning from a concert abroad, he realizes that he had forgotten to ask Shire to collect a precious family heirloom. That’s why the couple returned here a week later: to dig through the rubble and try to find a katana sword that was allegedly given to Sims’ grandfather, William J. Sims II, then a major in the Corps. United States Marines, near the end of World War II.
It took about two hours to reach this area, a once-bustling stretch of Lake Avenue just 2 miles from their former home. National Guard and sheriff’s deputies cordoned off areas under an evacuation order in Altadena, including the hilly neighborhood where the couple lived. To break through the barriers, you needed a member of the media covering a natural disaster (that’s where The Hollywood Reporter arrived), interviews with deputies from the Sheriff’s Department, a conversation with a member of the National Guard, and a few calls to the Sheriff’s Information Office before a deputy arrived to escort our group past the barricades .
Jonathan Sims’ workspace in his Altadena home; the katana sword is visible against the left wall, circled in red.
Courtesy of Jonathan Sims
Once heading northwest, closer to the San Gabriel Mountains, the view begins to become dystopian. What was once a patchwork of burned-out building shells, here and there, transforms into an eerie sight of razed, soot-dusted neighborhoods, punctuated by brick chimneys that still stand tall. Hollowed out cars with melted tires occasionally appear on the sides of the roads. The streets are deserted, except for the occasional vehicles of civil servants. After climbing higher and turning a corner, Shire said, “That was us,” signaling that we had arrived. On a hill with stunning views of downtown Los Angeles stand the remains of their home. Their old mailbox – now nothing more than a wooden stump – is marked with a telltale pink polka dot ribbon. The sheriff’s deputy tells us that this seemingly innocent decoration indicates total destruction of the structure; every house on this part of the street seems to have one on it.
The terrain consists largely of rubble, framed by collapsed and flattened walls. What remains are strange objects, damaged but recognizable: rake teeth. A stationary bike. The skeletons of a washer and dryer. Shire and I carefully walk down the driveway, littered with a section of nails, but Sims boldly jumps into the rubble. He knows where to look: the sword was next to his office when his house burned. Armed with two layers of gloves, Sims begins digging with his hands and a hammer.
Almost immediately, Sims finds something. “It comes from there,” he announces, brandishing a decorative element in its sheath. He sets it aside and continues digging, bending pieces of wall as if they were wet cardboard. Soon he discovers another piece, a separate part of the scabbard. Then suddenly, improbably, not far below the surface, Sims pulls out a piece of metal that almost looks, at first glance, like a long branch. It’s blackened with soot, grainy and curved, handleless, but it’s still unmistakably a blade.
“Not the Arthurian ending I was hoping for,” he said, showing us the weapon. “It must have been a very hot fire. Can it be reforged? Is it Narsil? he jokes, referring to a blade in THE Lord of the Rings. At first, the condition of the weapon saddens the Sims. “I hoped everything would work out,” he said. “It’s stupid, isn’t it?” But the more he thinks about it, the brighter he gets, realizing that the sword is mostly intact, just distorted. “It’s a project,” he decides. He holds the tip of the blade under his gloved finger: it is still sharp.
Although his grandfather was his namesake, Sims – whose real full name is William J. Sims IV, although he goes by J. for Jonathan – did not know the details of his childhood past. He remembers the man he calls “Colonel Bill” as a “big, jolly old man” who didn’t brag about his history; he died when Sims was in his twenties. But the older Sims got, the more he heard stories “that he was like a war hero, this pillar of his community,” he says. As he wields the sword, Sims reflects, “I guess it just symbolizes that people go through phases in their lives and they change and there’s more to people than meets the eye. really think.”
Portrait of William J. Sims II in the Altadena home of Jonathan Sims.
Courtesy of Jonathan Sims
Sims and Shire don’t know what they will do in the future. Currently, they’re staying with family in the San Diego area, but “we’re not thinking beyond the next 12 hours,” Sims says. He worked while coping with the loss of his home, tackling several projects after experiencing a dearth of opportunities over the past year. It’s not uncommon: Many independent entertainment workers have faced a shortage of work in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes, and the overall contraction of the sector, with forest fires being only the latest obstacle.
Unlike the more affluent Pacific Palisades – known for being home to industry executives and celebrities – before the fires, Altadena was generally a middle-class enclave for entertainment workers, home to crew members, writers and d Other people have achieved some success, enough to buy a house in the Los Angeles area. It was also historically a black community, with blacks at one point making up nearly 43 percent of the population, according to census data cited by The New York Times (now it’s closer to 18 percent). Now that both areas are weakened, Sims hopes the industry will find a new path forward. “I think there’s just this attitude with streaming and strikes and all that and natural disasters where it’s like, ‘Oh, we just have to get through this,'” he says. “No, it feels like this is a new normal coming from the top down, in almost every facet of our lives… We have to stick together because this isn’t going away. You can’t pretend it’s going to go away.
Sims has heard the refrain in recent days that what he lost was simply thing; that ultimately, goods are replaceable. He, Shire and their animals are safe, and that’s what matters. But Sims believes that, like many creatives, he constructed his space with many intentional objects that had meaning to him and which he drew inspiration from in his work. He still struggles with the loss of these things.
The sword provides at least some measure of closure; the effort to salvage some agency in an unfathomable situation. “This was the last thing I wanted to do,” he says as we prepare to leave Altadena. “I wanted to take something from this house, something from my past, so that it wasn’t… Do you know what it was? So that it doesn’t have the last word.
A few days after the trip to the remains of their home, a twist occurred: a family member sent Sims an old letter from his grandfather to his grandmother, describing the sword. It turns out that the blade found was not the one given to the major; his grandfather obtained it in a trade with a friend who cared more about the beauty of the sword the major originally had in his possession. The sword Sims dug up was “the boring one (his grandfather) traded for the really nice one because swords didn’t interest him much,” he wrote in an email. It was the one that Colonel Bill brought home because he thought his future children would like it.
“The truth was much smaller and less simple,” Sims continues. “But it’s okay. Myths are important. That’s the myth that led me to track it down, although Colonel Bill would probably say the old thing wasn’t worth it.
Jonathan Sims holds up a portrait of his family, showing him as a child and his grandfather.
Katie Kilkenny
