Home Care In Woodland Hills, CA

He was standing in line at the airport in New Delhi, India, a few weeks ago when the big announcement came.

“Are you Mr. Edward Reynolds from Woodland Hills, California?” asked the airport manager. Reynolds nodded, yes, he was.

“Would you please step out of line? We’ve been waiting for you.”

Uh, oh, he thought. What’d they find in my luggage now?

“Congratulations,” the airport manager said. “You just went over two million miles flying with United Airlines! Can I get a picture with you?”

Meet Ed Reynolds, a retired United States Air Force Lt. Col., who has visited all 193 member states in the United Nations. This last visit to Sikkim and Darjeeling raised the total of land based and small island countries he’s stepped foot in to 322.

There are a few islands off Norway he’s eyeing next, but they’re hard to get to so it’s going to be a challenge.

He’s a young 88. He has time.

This travel lust began when he was 10 and his stepfather took out the back seats of the family Kaiser automobile so Ed, his younger brother and the family dog had a place to bounce around while his stepfather and mom sat up front as they drove from Connecticut across Canada all the way down to Mexico on vacation.

“Every other night we stayed in a motel; the other nights we pitched a tent, but if we thought there were snakes around we’d tie jungle hammocks to the trees and sleep in them.”

Not exactly 5-star accommodations, but to a kid venturing out to see the world for the first time, it was fascinating.

When his stepfather’s job required the family to move to Irving, Texas, he piled them into an Airstream and drove to a little farm he and his wife had bought.

“My mom turned the farm into a trailer park,” Ed said. “Instead of selling the Airstream, she rented it out. We kept adding more trailers and she converted the stalls in the barn into little guest rooms for friends visiting the people with trailers. I was driving at 13, picking up all the trash in the trailer park.”

At 16, he was sharing driving duties on family vacations in an old 1937 Woodie station wagon, and he still has the 1953 MG sports car he won as a freshman at SMU.

“In 25 words or less, you had to say why you liked your Paper Mate pen,” Ed said. “You had the choice of the car or a year’s scholarship. I took the car and hit the road.”

It wasn’t until he became a navigator in the Air Force after World War II that Ed hit his travel stride. He would hitch rides on cargo planes going all over the world — Spain, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Singapore, Bangkok and Vietnam.

He served 22 years in the service, and then went to work as a computer manager at United Airlines. None of the flying he did for business counted toward the two million miles, nor did the miles he earned on his United Visa card.

“The two million miles were accumulated by purchasing a ticket for myself and my wife when we went on vacation,” Ed said.

They also took vacations to Greece, Wales and many to Hawaii when there was space available on United flights.

Then there were the trips he took with travel groups to Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea, countries on the U.S. “do not travel to” list. Ed couldn’t resist seeing them.

“Our tour bus broke down in North Korea, and while they were fixing it, we just wandered around by ourselves checking out the little village and people living there. Imagine an American walking around North Korea by himself today.”

After his wife couldn’t travel anymore they made a deal. None of the household money would be spent on Ed’s traveling. It all came from the sale of the house his mother left him in Lompoc in the early 2000s.

Three years later, he had traveled his way through another $100,000.

Now his challenge is how to keep traveling and still being around to lead the weekly Monday morning meetings of the veterans group Wings Over Wendy’s?

“I think I can leave on a Tuesday, fly to Finland and take a ferry over to the Aland Islands located in a Finnish archipelago, spend a day or two, and fly back Sunday,” Ed says.

He knows it’s a challenge, but he’s only 88. He has time.

Dennis McCarthy’s column runs on Sunday. He can be reached at [email protected].

November 14, 2023 — The Los Angeles Rams today announced that they will be moving their practice facility to Woodland Hills, CA in advance of the 2024 NFL Season. The facility will be located at the corner of West Oxnard Street and Canoga Avenue, part of the nearly 100-acres in Woodland Hills acquired last year by Los Angeles Rams Owner/Chairman E. Stanley Kroenke.

The announcement took place during a celebration at the adjacent Topanga Village, an indoor-outdoor shopping and dining destination that also is part of the 100-acres. Los Angeles Rams Chief Operating Officer Kevin Demoff was joined by Council member Bob Blumenfield to announce the move and share that construction work will begin later this week.

"This is a monumental day for the Los Angeles Rams as we can now call Woodland Hills and the City of Los Angeles our home," said Demoff. "We are grateful to Councilman Blumenfield for his support and to this wonderful community for welcoming us to their neighborhood. Since bringing the Rams home to Los Angeles, Stan Kroenke's commitment to this region is unmatched and we are excited to expand our footprint and deepen our impact across the city."

This celebratory moment culminated the Rams Community Blitz Day of Service in Woodland Hills, which included stops at the West Valley Food Pantry as well as Holiday For Heroes military appreciation events at two local schools – Calabash Charter Academy and Woodlake Elementary Community Charter. Rams players Rob Havenstein, Ernest Jones, Larrell Murchison, Christian Rozeboom, Coleman Shelton, Jonah Williams, Kyren Williams, and Russ Yeast joined Rams Cheerleaders and Rampage at these events to give back to the Rams new home and honor the military as part of the team's annual Salute To Service week. In addition, the newest Certified #RamsHouse Blinkie's Donuts gave away Rams donuts to welcome their hometown team to the neighborhood.

"I am thrilled that Stan Kroenke and the Los Angeles Rams are investing in our community and calling Woodland Hills their home," said Council member Blumenfield. "I look forward to partnering with the Rams and the Kroenke Group as they develop plans for their footprint and investments in Warner Center and deepen their local relationships."

Over the next few months, the Rams will set up a facility on this land consisting of modular trailers that will include office space and meeting rooms for coaches, players, scouts and staff, a weight room and training room, locker room, media room, and meal room. Adjacent to the trailers will be two football fields where the team will train and practice.

This is the first step of Kroenke's long-term vision for the land, which is part of the tremendous development envisioned for Woodland Hills under the Warner Center 2035 plan. Once the practice facility is set up, the organization will begin exploring a larger development that will include the permanent headquarters and practice facility for the team, as well as a plan to include residential, commercial, and retail uses along with green spaces and other community-serving amenities.

Topanga Village is one of the premier shopping and dining destinations in the West Valley, with over 70 shops and restaurants, ranging from popular national brands to unique local businesses. The outdoor shopping center features a playground for children, pet-friendly areas, and water features that are perfect for hot summer days. Topanga Village serves as a community gathering place and hosts a wide range of events throughout the year including summer live music, a pumpkin patch, outdoor workout classes, and Holiday events. Future improvements to the center will prioritize creating a space where people can come together to shop, dine, and socialize in a beautiful environment.

Much of Kroenke's professional life has been dedicated to real estate and community development. In 1983, he founded the Kroenke Group, a leading national firm that builds and manages shopping centers and apartment buildings across the United States. The Kroenke Group owns and operates shopping centers in 39 states that amount to 40 million square feet. Throughout his career, he has launched and transformed dozens of business ventures, including television and radio stations, warehouses, and renowned vineyards and ranches in North America and Europe. In a confluence of his areas of expertise – sports, retail, commercial and residential development – Kroenke constructed SoFi Stadium and continues to develop Hollywood Park in Inglewood, CA.

The Los Angeles Rams will move their practice facility to Woodland Hills next season as part of a large-scale real estate development planned by owner Stan Kroenke that could help give the car-centric Warner Center district a more urban feel.

The Rams officially announced the long-expected move Tuesday at an outdoor shopping center that Kroenke bought earlier this year as he assembled a 100-acre parcel for future development that will include a new headquarters for the Rams.

The move will center the Rams, now based in the city of Agoura Hills, in Los Angeles’ Woodland Hills neighborhood. The team plays at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood on game days, but spends most of the year at its headquarters and practice facilities.

“It’s important for us to have a foothold in L.A.,” said Kevin Demoff, chief operating officer of the Rams.

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A temporary practice facility similar to the one the team now uses at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks will be built on what is now a parking lot next to an unoccupied office tower the Kroenke Group bought in Warner Center in 2022.

Kroenke plans to build a more permanent and expansive training facility and team headquarters on the site in the future, part of what is expected to be a sprawling mixed-use complex that may include stores, restaurants, hotels and residences.

Work will start shortly on the temporary football compound at Erwin Street and Canoga Avenue, Demoff said. Asphalt and two one-story buildings will be removed to make way for two practice fields and a network of temporary modular trailers that will be similar to the setup the team uses at Cal Lutheran.

The trailers will include office space and meeting rooms for coaches, players, scouts and staff, along with a weight room, a training room, a locker room, a media room and a meal room.

City Councilman Bob Blumenfield called the facility “a great use that brings a lot of value” to the neighborhood and “not much traffic.”

The 13-story tower on the site that was formerly home to health insurer Anthem Inc. may be part of the future mixed-use campus or could be eventually razed to make way for other uses.

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Kroenke Group is working on a new land-use design for the site that also includes the former Woodland Hills Promenade, a largely inactive shopping center built in 1973, and the thriving outdoor mall Topanga Village built next to the Promenade in 2015. The move was announced at the Village, which will remain a cornerstone of the Kroenke complex that could take many years to complete.

Los Angeles city officials are encouraging dense mixed-use development in the Warner Center neighborhood that could include new housing, offices, shops, restaurants, hotel rooms and entertainment venues.

The planned building boom may help Warner Center finally achieve its original purpose. In the early 1970s, planners decided that the west San Fernando Valley land, once the site of movie mogul Harry Warner’s horse ranch, should be turned into a “downtown” for the Valley.

As it developed, however, Warner Center bore only passing resemblance to the densely built urban districts people associate with that word.

Today, the neighborhood is mostly a mix of office towers that jut up from a sea of cookie-cutter, low-slung office buildings served by acres of surface parking lots. Apartments and stores are mostly isolated in discrete blocks, and the whole expanse is cleaved by wide, fast-moving streets that flow to freeways.

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Kroenke’s $325-million purchase of the Village in January further signaled the billionaire businessman’s intention to build a sports-centric development like the one around SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.

In Inglewood, Kroenke controls nearly 300 acres surrounding SoFi Stadium, in what was formerly the Hollywood Park horse racing venue. When the Inglewood complex is completed, it will be 3½ times the size of Disneyland and contain a performance venue, hotel, stores, restaurants, offices, homes and a lake with waterfalls.

With the additional 100 acres in Woodland Hills, Kroenke is now one of the largest real estate developers in the Los Angeles region, Demoff said. His company could build and operate as much as 7 million square feet of property in Woodland Hills as envisioned under the city’s Warner Center 2035 Specific Plan.

“Stan and everybody else is a believer in the potential of Warner Center,” Demoff said. “Everything keeps growing here.”

The Kroenke Group owns and operates shopping centers in 39 states with a combined total of 40 million square feet, the company said.

WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. – When the Rams begin preparing for their 2024 regular season opponents, they will be doing so with their practice facility in a new location.

The franchise on Tuesday announced it would be moving its practice headquarters to Woodland Hills ahead of the 2024 season, with construction work beginning later this week.

"It is nice (to be able to officially make the announcement," Rams Chief Operating Officer Kevin Demoff said after a celebratory ceremony held at the Topanga Village indoor-outdoor mall, which will be adjacent to the team's Woodland Hills site. "You heard all these whispers, people in Woodland Hills saying, 'Oh, I hear the Rams might be coming, who's buying the Promenade?' And then it's, oh, the Anthem building is for sale and maybe you're buying that, and then we were able to buy the Village. So it is nice to be able to stand up here and say we're officially coming in 2024, that we do own these 100 acres."

Demoff said the organization would love to have the temporary practice facility at the Woodland Hills site built by the time the offseason program starts, with the drop-dead date for that move being when the team returns from training camp.

In terms of that temporary setup, Demoff said they're not going to move anything "except the people," meaning that rather than move the temporary buildings from Thousand Oaks down the road to Woodland Hills, the Rams will be taking new temporary buildings and assembling something similar to what they currently have at California Lutheran University. According to the press release, that the temporary setup will include "modular trailers that will include office space and meeting rooms for coaches, players, scouts and staff, a weight room and training room, locker room, media room, and meal room," with two practice fields adjacent to those trailers.

Grass for the practice fields is in the process of being grown.

"We're gonna go build that new on one side of the practice fields," Demoff said. "The grass fields we put in will be permanent, so those will be where the permanent fields will go. We're going to put the temporary facility on the west side of the fields, and ultimately the plan is to build a permanent facility on the north side of the fields, so that way we'll be able to be at the practice facility while we go build a new permanent facility. Otherwise, it just seemed like there was no reason to announce you were coming to Woodland Hills and actually moving to Woodland Hills."

Demoff added that the goal is to move the organization's Agoura Hills business office somewhere in Warner Center in the "near future," and then combine the football and business offices when the new permanent facility opens for training camp.

When the business and football sides become located closer to one another, Demoff said it will able to give the business side more opportunity to interact with leaders on the football side.

"I think it will be a great experience for them," Demoff said. "When you sign up to join a sports team, you want to feel and be part of the team, and we haven't had that point of connection except on gamedays, except at training camp. It will be amazing for our staff, and I think certainly for all of us to be in one place, to have that truly be the heartbeat (of the organization)."

When it comes to training camp plans, Demoff said as of right now camp will not be headquartered in Woodland Hills.

"Our vision has always been, and not just because it would be a little hot to hold training camp here in Woodland Hills, but we've always liked the idea of going away a little bit for training camp," Demoff said. "UC Irvine's been a great partner. We've looked in and around other places within Southern California. When we started at UC Irvine, it was always with the idea of being in Orange County, with the idea to move it, so we're going to explore that moving forward, but it is not our current plan to hold training camp here. That could change at some point, but we would probably need an indoor facility, or certainly some shade, to make that happen."

An indoor facility is "certainly one of the things we're looking at on the map," according to Demoff.

"The truth is, in California, you don't need an indoor facility, but it would always be great to build one," Demoff said. "If we built an indoor facility, you'd be looking at, how could you use it for community uses as well? Do you do something like The Star (the Cowboys' facility in Frisco, Texas) where you're playing high school games or other events in it? Are you using it just for a practice facility? Those are all things that we're really working to look at now. No promises, but (head coach) Sean (McVay) has always wanted an indoor practice facility. But getting out of the wind I know is the first step for him. I know he's excited about that."

WOODLAND HILLS — The Los Angeles Rams officially announced the team will be relocating its practice facility from its temporary location in Thousand Oaks to Woodland Hills in advance of the 2024 NFL season.

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The highly-anticipated announcement was made by Rams Chief Operating Officer Kevin Demoff Tuesday afternoon at Topanga Village, in front of a crowd of community members, media and Rams fans.

“When we moved the team back with the design, now making Hollywood Park and SoFi Stadium the world’s greatest sports and entertainment district and seeing that come to life, there was always a second mission, which was to build the world’s greatest practice facility and sports and entertainment development around a practice facility,” Demoff said to the crowd. “… It was always about creating a second heartbeat and from the moment we landed back our goal was to deliver that second heartbeat to the San Fernando Valley. Here we sit today, I can’t believe eight years later, and we have found that home here in Woodland Hills and at Warner Center.”

Word had been making the rounds about the prospect of the team moving its practice facility ever since Rams owner Stan Kroenke purchased a 34-acre shopping mall called The Promenade in the heart of Woodland Hills in March of 2022.

A month after the sale of The Promenade, Kroenke acquired an adjacent 13-story office building and its vast acres of landscaping and parking lots that used to be home to Anthem, Inc.

In March 2023, Kroenke finalized the purchase of Topanga Village, a 600,000 sq. ft. outdoor mall where Tuesday’s announcement took place.

“You heard all these whispers, people in Woodland Hills saying, ‘I hear the Rams might be coming, who’s buying The Promenade and then the Anthem building is for sale.’ And then we were able to buy The Village so it’s nice to be able to stand up here and say we’re officially coming in 2024,” Demoff said. “It has been a journey. This is an amazing piece of property. This is a great location, it’s growing, it could be the epicenter in a heartbeat for us but it also really can provide that sports and entertainment district.”

Rams coaches, players and staff have been operating out of modular trailers at Cal Lutheran University since moving back to Los Angeles in 2016. To hasten the move to Woodland Hills, the team will be purchasing similar modular trailers to use as office space and meeting rooms at the new site.

Two football fields where the team will practice will be built adjacent to the trailers.

The trailers will eventually be replaced by permanent buildings in line with Kroenke’s long-term plan, to make Woodland Hills the forever location for the organization’s headquarters and training facilities.

Demoff made his prediction that it will take three to five years to build permanent structures at the new site, but said the team will be able to practice and train there before the start of the 2024 season.

“We will take a new temporary facility, new buildings and basically assemble something similar to what we have at Cal Lutheran, who’s been an amazing partner for us,” Demoff said. “The grass fields will be permanent, we’re going to put the temporary facility on the west side of the fields and ultimately the plan is to build the permanent facility on the north side of the field.”

With the bustling community of Woodland Hills continuing to grow, moving the Rams to the area felt like an ideal fit.

Demoff, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, acknowledged that the area always felt underserved to sports fans. He hopes that will change with the Rams coming to town.

“I’ve always looked at it growing up here, no sports team has ever invested in the Valley. The San Fernando Valley would be one of the 10 largest NFL markets if you chopped off the rest of Los Angeles,” he said “So if you can come bring a sports team to this community which has never had anybody put in roots. …This is about our organization and bringing that epicenter to the Valley and we couldn’t be more excited.”

The celebratory announcement, which the organization labeled “Touchdown Woodland Hills,” marked the culmination of the Rams’ Community Blitz Day of Service in the Woodland Hills area.

Rams linebacker Ernest Jones and defensive back Russ Yeast, along with Rams Cheerleaders, front office staff and team mascot Rampage started the day of at West Valley Food Pantry. They helped bag groceries and distribute food to hundreds of community members in need for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.

Rams offensive Linemen Rob Havenstein and Coleman Shelton visited two elementary schools, Woodlake Elementary Community Charter and Calabash Charter Academy, where they met with students to help customize cards to send to activate duty military members and veterans.