Betty Lou Young Our First Century: The Los Angeles Athletic Club 1880-1980, LAAC Press: Los Angeles, California 1979, 176 pp., 1880, 1880s
" . . . By 1880 . . . in the fall, the circus came to town as it had each year since the 1840s . . . "Frank Gardner's famous double somersault over 3 elephants and 9 camels."
Page 15: Poster for W.W. Cole's Circus The Only Electric-Lighted Sun-Eclipsing Big Show That Ever Crossed the Great Divide "Cheer after cheer rent the air at each surprising feature." Nashville American. The Grandest and Best Circus Ever in California at Los Angeles Wedn'sday Sept. 15. Reproducing and Reflecting All Earth's Grandest Marvels! Under the resplendent glare of the Brush Dynamo Electric Light, used exclusively with W.W. Cole's Great Concorpation of Circus, Menagerie, Aquarium, and Congress of Living Wonders. "The best trained horse in the world"-Quincy Daily Herald The Only Show that Faithfully Keeps its Word. "A better show never existed."-Lincoln Daily Journal.
2. "The Best Young Men": The Arcadia Block
(Sept., 1880) Fifty-three original members formed "a purely American," as opposed to a Germanic, Los Angeles Athletic Club, renting Stearns Hall, on the second floor of the old Arcadia Block at the corner of Los Angeles and Arcadia Streets, built in 1858 by Don Abel Stearns and named in honor of his wife, Doña Arcadia Bandini. . . . "In recent years the rooms had been used for dancing classes and as a skating rink, while the ground floor was occupied by the firm of "Harris Newmark and Co., Wholesale Grocers and Liquor Merchants." Across Los Angeles St. from the Calle de los Negros. The three-story Baker Block, immediately to the rear, contained shops, offices and the . . . apartments of Arcadia Bandini de Baker herself. . . . By November the club had installed a trapeze, long horse, flying rings, parallel bars, dumbbells and Indian clubs, and turnverein trained teachers were teaching the beginners. Boxing was introduced.
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"[Ed] A. Preuss [a charter member of the Turnverein, and an accomplished athlete, served as the LAAC gymnastics instructor] was co-owner of the Preuss and Peroni Drug Store . . . which advertised . . . nostrums, "the Lion Malaria and Liver Pad, with body and foot plasters and three remedies in one, and only one dollar for all." The shop included a soda fountain . . ."