Girla Way

This cul-de-sac’s name is a double play on words. Girla Way refers to the thoroughbred racehorse Girlaway (1946-?), whose owner Roy Boyd Warring (1900-1969) set up this 10-house tract in 1954. Girlaway’s own name was a pun on the legendary thoroughbred Whirlaway (1938-1953), who won the coveted Triple Crown in 1941. As for Roy Warring, he was a Sacramento boy with an especially somber childhood: orphaned at five, he was raised by his grandparents – who orphaned him again at thirteen. A neighbor evidently adopted him, but Warring would soon serve as a cadet observer during WWI and had moved to Chicago by 1920, where he embarked upon a career as a machinist. In 1926, he married Florence Allen Davis (1899-1979) and helped raise her son Elgan. The Warrings were in Los Angeles by 1947. Roy was running his own machine shop at this point, which clearly made him enough money to own more than a dozen horses, stabled at his own ranch in La Puente.