Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree or in jail, would be welcomed home on their return. In October 1971, newspaper columnist Pete Hamill wrote a piece for the "New York Post" called "Going Home". In it, he told a variant of the story, in which college students on a bus trip to the beaches of Fort Lauderdale make friends with an ex-convict who is watching for a yellow handkerchief on a roadside oak in Brunswick, Georgia. Hamill claimed to have heard this story in oral tradition. In June 1972, nine months later, "Reader's Digest" reprinted "Going Home". Also in June 1972, ABC-TV aired a dramatized version
Encino Oak Tree in the pre-urban Encino that the community was named after the Spanish word for "oak." The Encino oak was the most magnificent of the community's oaks, so large that Louise Avenue was split to accommodate its enormous canopy, diameter, and circumference. It has been said that the Encino oak "creates a woodsy atmosphere more resembling a whole forest than just a single tree." In 1958, the oak was threatened when a developer planned to bulldoze the tree to build a road. Local residents formed a group called Encino Save the Oaks and the developer eventually donated the tree to the