Time Warner Cable ‘Experience Store’ Employee Re-Experiences Eagle Rock

Time Warner Cable’s new interactive “Experience Store,” which launched Friday on Eagle Rock Boulevard, a stone’s throw from the Panda Express franchise, is meant to create a special hands-on, touch-and-feel environment for customers.

As many of them walked into the store today for its ribbon-cutting or to conduct business, a smartly dressed Time Warner Cable employee with short hair welcomed them while doing her best not to choke up from her experience of Eagle Rock after being separated from the neighborhood for decades.

Donna Kepner was two years old when her parents moved from a house on Glen Iris Avenue to San Diego decades ago. Her childhood was marked by frequent trips back to Eagle Rock—to visit her grandparents’ who lived on Rock Glen Avenue behind what is now the Eagle Rock Plaza compound.

“My whole childhood was coming to visit my grandparents when they were here,” Kepner recalled, adding that they moved to the Leisure World retirement community in Orange County after the City of Los Angeles bought them out to build Eagle Rock Plaza.

“That’s when it all came to an end,” she told Eagle Rock Patch wistfully on the grand opening of Time Warner Cable’s fifth Experience Store in Southern California—located roughly equidistant from Panda Express and Super A.

Her grandfather was a local ophthalmologist who loved to take her around Eagle Rock—on foot because he had bad eyesight and couldn’t drive, said Kepner, who now lives in Orange County, where she works at one of the five Time Warner Cable Experience Stores.

“I have a lot of childhood memories—of going to St. Barnabas Church and hiking in the neighborhood back when it was a much safer place,” she said, adding that it was thrilling but also an intensely emotional experience to be back.