Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp., 1935, 1902
Chapter IV Our First Families
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"[p. 43] The property [which included those lands that became Griffith Park] went to an American-General Baldwn. Everything went wrong. The cattle died. Fire destroyed the grain in the fields. Grasshoppers ate the green crops. The vineyards were stricked with a blight. Within a few years, a mortgage was foreclosed, and General Baldwin left in financial ruin.
"The lawyer to whom the estate was conveyed was killed in a drunken celebration. The heirs of the friend who had witnessed the will fought miserably and scandalously over his money. His widow married an adventurer and was unhappy.
"The gringo into whose hands the Feliz ranch finally came was a singular character and met a singular fate. There came to our pueblo in the eighties a young Welshman naned Griffuth Jennings Griffith. He was a handsome, swaggering, but poor. According to local tradition, his first job was driving a dirt wagon.
[p. 44] "There was at the time a German family who raised garden truck at the edge of town [Los Angeles]. The old man became rich when the city reached out and surrounded his farm. There was a daughter upon whom the young Welsh peasant's eye fell greedily but he did not know just how to go about meeting her . . . A hack writer composed a love poem for him . . . A pioneer editor of the town has told me how this was . . . accomplished . . . [it was refused newspaper publication as a literary gem . . . [instead he was offered] the amusement rate which was 33 1/3 per cent in excess of the normal advertising rate. After several weeks of negotiations, he took it to another paper which published it at the ordinary commercial rate. It had the desired effect; he met and married the girl and gained riches thereby.
"Griffith-wealthy-was the most pompous man I have ever seen. He had a strut, a gold-headed cane, a flower in his buttonhold and a patronizing little snicker. He was, however, a very affable and, having an avid thirst for publicity, was easy to interview.
"He became addicted to strong drink and with each drink became more pompous. One day [in 1902] he drove his wife into a corner of their room at the Hotel Arcadia at Santa Monica and told her to get down on her knees and say her last prayers. He informed her that his agents had discovered she was conspiring with the Pope to overthrow America and he proposed to rescue the country-meanwhile flourishing a big revolver. He finally shot her through one eye; to escape a second shot, she jumped out of a window and was [p. 45] saved from death by a porch roof. His trial was one of the most sensational in the history of the pueblo. I covered it as a reporter. It was a battle between Earl Rogers, a criminal lawyer whose success had been phenomenal, and Henry T. Gage, equally famous and former governor of the state. Rogers defended Griffith and Governor Gage was engaged as a special prosecutor. Gage fairly blew the younger lawyer out of water when he drawled to the jury in his slow, deliberate way: "Gentlemen, there has never been a rich man in the state's prisons of California." I could see the jury bristle and fairly itch to make Griffith the first one. He went to San Quentin for two years. Came out nearly as pompous with an air of benign forgiveness."
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