Ocean Park

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

     " . . .

     "[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 stricken 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 Griffith 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."

     ". . . "

[South View of the Domes of the Solar Telescope, Planetarium Theatre and Twin Refracting Telescope of the Griffith Observatiory, Los Angeles, California Post Card, L.81 Western Publ. and Nov. Co., 259 S. Los Angeles St., L.A., Calif. Frank J. Thomas, Color Photography; Curteichcolor 3-D Natural Color Reproductions, JT, 1960.]

Chapter VI Ranches That Are Now Los Angeles

     P. 59 "All the early land grants in California were made to Spanish soldiers, who had served their time and had been discharged with honor. In most cases they had been Corporals and Sergeants in command of the tiny garrisons guarding the missions.

     " . . .

     "[p. 62] Rancho Santa Anita, upon which is the race-track, was granted to Hugo Reid, an early gringo, a charming, highly educated Scotchman with a love tragedy in his life. He married an Indian girl; it is part of our pueblo's tradition that she was the daughter of the chief of Yang-na. He was perfectly charming to her; built her a two story house . . . He sold the ranch for about twenty cents an acre and it finally passed into the hands of that Rabelaisian old pioneer, Lucky Baldwin.

     "The ranch that has the most romantic interest for tourists is Camulos at Santa Paula-this being the supposed home of Ramona. Helen Hunt Jackson only saw it once but described it in exact detail. It was then owned by the del Valle family which has held a prominent part in California-through every era.

     "The first del Valle was born in the old Mexican town of Compostella, from which Francisco Vasquez Coronado set out in 1540 to find the fabled Seven Golden Cities of Cibola. Having become a Mexican army officer in a garrison at San Blas, he was sent to California to defend our coast against the pirates. The next del Valle, his son, was an officer on the staff of several Meixican governors.

     "His son is still living. Senator Reginaldo del Valle. He has been a member of the State Legislature and was (p. 63) president of the Water Board that brought the Owens river into our water pipes.

     "Senator del Valle's daughter is the beautiful Lucretia del Valle Grady, wife of Dr. Henry Grady who, as assistant secretary of State, negotiated the bilateral trade treaties with various countries in Europe and the Orient.

     "South of Los Angeles, where the Olympic Villlage housed the athletes of the world in 1932, and where the suburb of Angelus Mesa now stands was Rancho La Cienega O Paso de la Tijera (the Ranch of the Swamp and the Pass of the Pair of Scissors). It was granted to the Vicente Sanchez, a soldier of the King. At his death it went to his son Tomas and his daughters, with other property . . . Unlike most of the rancheros, Sanchez had some realization of the value of his property. He sold a fourth interest to Lucky Baldwin for sixty thousand dollars. As Baldwin Hills, the rancho witnessed a phenomenal growth.

     ". . .

Chapter VI Ranches That Are Now Los Angeles

     "[p. 64] The movie summer colony at Malibu lives on the beach front of Rancho Malibu Sequet. With its 13,315 acres it was traded by José Bartolome to Leon Victor Prudhomme for four hundred dollars, of which two hundred dollars were [p. 65] to be taken out in groceries,

     ". . . Its values now run into hundreds of millions. From the summer colony, running back through the hills and canyons-along the north slopes of Antelope Valley-to Nevada and so on all the way to the Dakotas, is a prehistoric trail along which moccasioned feet padded for centuries; they came to  the Indians of Santa Catalina for cosmetics. The movie girls at Malibu were not the first girls there who used lip-sticks and manufactured the complexions you love to touch.

     " . . .  

Chapter XI Trails of Destiny

     "p. 118 . . .

     "We have an accurate picture written by a woman of [p. 119] gentle birth who tells what the pueblo was like in these formative days. Mrs. Benjamin Hayes was the wife of a young lawyer, son of a Missouri slave-holder who came in 1852 . . . [p. 120] Mrs. Hayes did not live to see the pueblo grow up; she died of consumption. Judge Hayes . . . his diary is one of the standard books of California history.

     " . . .

     "1853: Comes Abel Stearns, the Yankee, to marry the beautiful Arcadia Bandini and put new impulse into the old Spanish life, yet accepting its customs and proud to become "Don Abel." Dr. W. B. Osborne built a post office by making pigeonholes in a cracker box. Before, the letters had been thrown into a tub. Catholic Sisters started the first hospital in the adobe house of Don Cristobal Aguilar on upper Main Street. H.P. Dorsay installed the first Masonic master.

     "1854: The Rev. James Woods started a Presbyterian church in a carpenter shop on Main Street. Rabbi A.W. Edelman started the first synagogue. Joseph Newmark brought the first Chinese servant in, to whom he paid one hundred dollars per month. Bill, the waterman, was peddling domestic water, a bucket a day, for fifty cents a week. Andrew Briswalter, an Alsatian, planted the first truck garden. O.W. Childs paid one hundred fifty dollars for the first hive of bees.

     "1855: The first public school was started at Second and Spring, far out of town to keep the children away from the pueblo's distractions. St. Vincent's College was started in [p. 121] the old Lugo house on the Plaza. The first flour-mill ended the long anthem of the metate.

     "1856: Boom year. Cattle sold for five hundred thousand dollars. William Wolfskill shipped the first oranges East-four hundred boxes, one hundred dollars a tree.

     "1857: Lieutenant Ord made the first survey establishing the present streets. A public appeal was made to citizens to buy public lands at one dollar an acre, now the heart of the down-town district.

     "1859: Mrs, Arcadia de Bandini de Stearns de Baker [sic] built the Baker Block, the first grand building. A gold rush in San Gabriel canyon thrilled the pueblo. On account of the pro-slavery attitude of Los Angeles, California voted by a two-thirds majority to divide the state. Congress refused to ratify.

" . . .

     "1861: Year of the Civil War. Southern feeling ran so high that Charles Jenkins who wanted to enlist in the Union Army had to sneak out of town and ride to San Francisco to enlist. General Albert Sidney Johnston, with a hundred followers, rode East on horseback to join the Confederacy. He was killed at Shiloh. Captain Hancock, afterwards a famous Union general, put the town under martial law, closing the United States Hotel, notorious for sedition. The dragoons marched from Tejon to the war. A military post was built at Santa Catalina Island-another in the Arroyo near Pasadena. The foreigners-French, German and Mexican were loyal. A union regiment of native California cavalry was raised.

     "1861: First Baptist church started. Chung Chick opened the first Chinese store. Telegraph line opened to San Pedro. Pobladores began shingling roofs. Heavy floods. Smallpox and measles raged. Times were so hard that two lots 120 x 165 on Spring and Fourth Street and Broadway and Fourth were offererd for $1.26 taxes. No takers.

     "[p. 122] 1864: The great drought. Cattle died by thousands. Rancheros ruined.,

     "1865: Dragoons arrived from Fort Tejon to squelch a demonstration of joy on the part of Southerners when Lincoln was assassinated. Joseph Mesmer took over the disloyal United States Hotel, His heirs still own the old hotel which stands across the street from the present City Hall on Main Street. Gringos began buying and cutting up the ruined ranchos. One of the first was Santa Gertrudis subdivided by John G. Downey, afterward governor. Downey Avenue is named for him.

     "1865: Oil discovered. St. Vincent's College moved to a new building on the present site of Bullock's Deparment Store. Two banks started, one by John G. Downey and J.A. Howard with a capital of one hundred thousand dollars, the other by I.W. Hellman and William Workman. F.P.F. Temple and Joseph Toberman also started one which was ruined by their soft-hearted policy. Temple killed himself. J.J. Reynolds, a stage-driver, imported the first hack. Pico House was opened, the famous hostelry of the South. The first steam fire engine came in. Pasadena started as "The Indiana Colony." R.M. Widney built the first street-car line, running from Temple Block to First, down Fort (Broadway) to Fifth, to Olive to Sixth to Figueroa.

 "[p. 122]

     "1876: The Southern Pacific built the first railroad into Los Angeles. The golden spike was driven through the heart of the little old pueblo. The flood of Mid-west immigration started." p. 122

Chapter XIII Boom Days

     " . . .

     "[p. 153] The days of reckoning for these promoters in court often shows lurid dramas. One oil promotor who now has a number instead of a name saw so much money coming in that he spread out into imperial luxuries that embarrassed him on the witness-stand. As president of the company, he gve a party that, by comparison, made the orgies of a Roman emperor seem like a tame church "social." He had a "company" yacht upon which he invited a party of motion-picture stars-a bevy of beauties, any one of whose names would have stopped traffic in that city. Dinner was served in deck with all the costly viands that he could remember the names of. At the dramatic moment, a squardron of airplanes flew low over the city and a shower of orchids fell in profusion over the dinner guests. The stockholders whose money went into these displays were not as enthusiastic as the orchid dripped on stars-and the prison door clicked open and clicked shut again. A great many of the Hollywood wild parties that are told about are, in fact, given by butter-and-egg men with the hangers-on of the film colony as guests-more often than not paid to go.

     "One of the most notorious of these boom boys was a former street-car conductor named C.C. Julian, who milked the town for a hundred million or more on oil stocks. After [p. 153] he went on his way, a "bright boy" came in from New York to straighten out the wreck. He said, "Tut, tut," and what he did to the town with the materials at hand was worse.

     "Very few of the old-timers have made money out of real estate in Los Angeles. It is the new-comers who always gather in the ore. When Hollywood was first opened, Paul de Longpre, the French flower-painter, put up a beautiful house in the middle of a hay-field. We all laughed . . . some thought it was a shame to bilk an innocent foreigner. The general opinion was that if one didn't get his money another would, so why interfere with the foreordinations of Providence. He started the Hollywood vogue and saw his investment multiply many times in value.

[Home of Paul De Longpre, The Artist in Hollywood, Cal. Post Card, 50098 Newman Post Card Co., Los Angeles, Cal. Made in Germany. KR, 1907]

[Paul de Longpre and daughter at their Hollywood Home Post Card No. 3364. M. Rieder, Publ., Los Angeles, Cal. and Leipzig. 1908] 

[10-Residence of Paul De Longpre, Famous Flower Painter, Hollywood, California Post Card, Edward H. Mitchell, Publisher, San Francisco, Printed in United States, Undated, JT, Postcards Adrift]

     " . . .

     "[p. 156] One of the most interesting of these colonies was the Socialistic Utopia of Job Harriman-Llano in Antelope Valley. It was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward turned into wood and stone. Out there in the desert, buffeted by sand-storms, are the ruined walls of Llano. Jack-rabbits build burrows under the administration building. Owls hoot from the fallen rafters of the social hall and the rattlesnakes raises little rattlesnakes and digests chipmunks in the sheltered foundations of the cottages where men were to work for the joy of work alone-sheltered from the world of envy, strife and filthy lucre. " p. 156

     " . . .

Chapter XIV What We Reporters Knew

     [p. 158] "No one knows a town better than a reporter. And I was a reporter during the years when the pueblo was growing up.

     " . . .

     "[p, 159] One of my first assignments was the first fiesta-Fiesta de las Flores. It was a flavor of the old days coming back. Max Meyberg, a member of one of the pioneer Jewish families, was grand marshal, a trim and striking figure on a superb charger. All the elite turned out in carriages almost hidden in flowers. Those were still the days of fine carriage horses . . .

[Marco R. Newmark La Fiesta de Los Angeles of 1894 The Quarterly, XXIX, 2, 1947, pp. 101-111, [Max Meyberg, Parade and Masked Ball], 1894]

     "For La Fiesta the fire department was shining and groomed until the horses gleamed. The national guard wass slick and marital in all its trappings, the officers staring staight ahead with the steadfast gaze of Napolean at Austerlitz. The public schools turned out in four-horse-talley-hos with lovely and excited flappers who are now grandmothers. Best of all, there came a prancing cavalcade of the sons of the early rancheros on splendid horses- a glitter of silver-mounted saddles and bridles, tapaderos almost sweeping the ground, sombreros, bearskin chaparajos, spurs and glamour. [p. 159]

     " . . .

     "William Rowland was one of the last of the pioneer sheriffs. His father had come across the desert from Taos, New Mexico, with a Spanish wife and built a home on the Puente Ranch. As sheriff, Rowland earned immortality by capturing the California Robin Hood-Tiburcio Vasquez. With Harry Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times and Tom Scott, the pioneer oil man, he had a great ranch near Pomona; it was called Tres Hermanos (Three Brothers) . . .

     " . . .

 [p. 170] " . . .

     "[p. 170] It was a "homey" little city then; we all knew everybody. We were still naive and perhaps unsophisticated; but Los Angeles in its greater days has never been so charming.

     "As nearly as by anything else, this general period was punctuated by the Spanish American War. It began when we were still a little hick town. When it ended, we began to grow into a city-and to become conscious of the fact that the next era of the world's history would be in the Pacific and we would be the front door.

     ""I was perhaps the only war correspondent in the history of newspaperdom who ever started out for the war trail at fourteen dollars a week. I can remember the days when I plodded around town in burning excitement from the colonel's office to the adjutant's office to find out if orders had come from our militia regiment to avenge the sinking of the battleship Maine . . .

     "[p. 171] But our Seventh Regiment did not sail. It wa a political [p. 172] war and the Secretary of War-General Alger gnashed his teeth at the thought of Los Angeles. Congress had reversed his ruling by giving the breakwater to San Pedro instead of Santa Monica-and the Southern Pacific Railroad. So he took out his spleen on the militia from our pueblo . . .

     " . . .

Chapter XV Underneath the Surface

     "[p. 173] When I got a job as a reporter on a newpaper it was like moving into a new city . . . a Los Angeles I had never dreamed of; like going from a drawing-room through a trapdoor into an exciting and mysterious sub-basement . . . a world of crooks, policemen, actors, politicians.

     "I was still little more than a schoolboy when I began to write for an evening paper. Before I was old enough to dry behind the ears I was appointed dramatic critic.

     "The movies had not yet happened. There were two stock companies, a vaudeville house, and an occasional road show at the De Lux Theater.

     "Lillian Goldsmith was then a vaudeville headliner with her exquisite little playlets: George Fuller Golden was the star monologist; McIntyre and Heath . . . Papinta, a raw-boned Mexican girl who danced with rainbow flaring (p. 174) skirts over plate-glass flushed from below with colored lights.

[Thomas Edison's Carmencita, 1894:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_oSVcHaPrEc]

     "The Burbank Theater on Main Street [Los Angeles] was under the management of Oliver Morosco, who had been a professional acrobat. His piece de resistance was Tim Frawley's traveling stock company. To our unsophisticated little pueblo it was rather a tony affair and the elect bought tickets for the season.

     "At another house down Main Street was a ten-twenty-thirty house that was considered to be somewhat beneath our notice. It thrilled the galleries with heroines who were tied by villains to railroad tracks, to be rescued by the magnificient young hero just as a teetery prop train came roaring out of the wings. The death-defying hero was William Desmond, afterward of movie fame, and the innocent heroine was Laurette Taylor. Afterward Miss Taylor married a charming young Irishman named Hartley Manners. He wore the first monocle ever to over-awe our pueblo. Under his influence, Laurette stopped dodging buzz-saws and railroad trains and moved over to the more aristocratic Burbank.

     "Mail service was slow in those days. One time a manuscript failed to arrive for the next week's show and I well remember the panic at the stock company. I happened to be standing in the lobby of the theater wtih Hartley Manners when Morosco came out and told of the disaster. He asked Manners if he could scratch together some kind of play to tide them over for just one night. Manners consented and the little make-shift play that he scrambled together was Peg o' My Heart -one of the greatest box-office gold mines in the history of American theatricals. It has been produced three times in the movies and hundreds of stock companies have played it all over the world. To his dying day, Hartley Manners was bitterly ashamed of it.

     "Morosco finally moved to a new theater over on Broad (p. 175) way where he never quite repeated his triumphs. Still . . .

     "One day they got into another panic for lack of a play, and an actress named Ann Nichols filled the gap with a piece she had written. It did not make much impression upon our pueblo. It lasted a week. It was Abie's Irish Rose, which holds all world's records for continuous runs.

     "Another company that came periodically to the Burbank in those days was the Frank Bacon Stock Company. Frank was from somewhere up the state. He was periodically on the edge of going broke and I recall how we used to consult as to what kind o story I could write for the paper that would get enough money into the house to pay off the actors on Saturday night. He was never more than one jump ahead of the sheriff. His favorite play was General Grant's Picture . . . which he had written himself. In the Bacon family was an old farm which he sold for a song to help out the weekly pay-roll. He told me that anyhow the farm wasn't any good-couldn't be worked -one corner was all gummed with sticky stuff. When the purchaser made a huge fortune by drilling for oil in the sticky, worthless soil, Frank only rubbed his nose and laughed.

     "Years after, I spent an afternoon with him in New York. He was then playing in Lightnin,' which was finishing its third year at standing room only. We went around behind the scenes and he told me in a hoarse whisper the secret. "Just the same character I've been playing all my life," he said . . . "Just Old Bill who was in those plays I used to write in California. They wouldn't have him then; now he is packing them in. Sell-out for three years every night." He looked around cautiously to be sure we were alone; then he said slyly, "Carr, let me tell you. This play Lightnin' isn't any good. Shucks, it ain't worth a damn. Never expected it to get over at all. Now General Grant's Picture there was a play."

     "[p. 176] Two blocks down the street from the Burbank was another stock house called the Belasco. It was under the management of a cynical, charming young fellow named John Blackwood. He had brains and sophistication. Leading ladies came and went but the pueblo would never consent to the changing of the leading man;. he was Lewis Stone, who as a movie star has held a continuous place in the affections of the public for a longer period of time than any other actor. One of his leading ladies was Bessie Barriscale. Came a young playwright from the University of California. His name was Richard Walton Tully and he had a play that concerned a goddess of a volcano in Hawaii; Bird of Paradise also became one of the great money-winners of theatrical history.

     "On east First Street was a little burlesque house-admission ten cents and you could bring your own garlic on your breath. The squalid girl show produced Blossom Seeley and other stars.

     "One of the girls in this show was crossed in love and, embittered, forsook the stage world. She went out to Antelope Valley; took up a government claim and, at the plow, yelling at her mules, wore out her theatrical costumes-ballet skirts and all.

     "There was another girl show in town. This was run by Pop Fisher on Spring Street. The leading lady was a blonde of some heft and a compelling charm, although she talked so loudly you could hear her on a clear day for a mile. She came nearly every night after the show to sit with the dramatic staff in the Times office. She was continually anxious for our opinions as to whether she was too fat to wear tights. At no other period of my life have I discussed legs so earnestly or with such critical analysis. The lady was Texas Guinan. Behind the scenes was an assistant stage director who was something of a genius at make-up. His job was to see that (p. 177)the scenery was ready, that the girls were ready and that they had their tights on straight. This was Lon Chaney, afterward the movie star. To his last day he never changed. His best friends as a movie star were the ham actors who had been with him in Pop Fisher's stock house. When any of them came to his parties in evening dress, he tore off their shirts and gave them bath-robes in which to dine.

     "Even in the days of his glory, Chaney had qualities that few suspected. He had studied the human face so long and so carefully that he could see souls behind. One day we were sitting at the table in a studio cafe. "That girl over there," he said, indicating a very beautiful girl at the next table,. "Well, I only know her to speak to; but I can tell you something about her. Do you notice how she has the air of cocking her head as though she were listening to some one behind her-like a nervous horse trying to watch the driver's whip . Well, she goes home at night and somebody tells her that the director is all wrong. It is probably her mother. She will see her greatest days when she marries." And that was exactly the truth and his prophecy was fulfilled. She is now one of the greatest stars in pictures." . . . p. 177

". . .

     "[p. 178] Sarah Bernhardt came here several times-usually to play in vaudeville. Life was never monotonous during the period of her visits. The first time [1906] she went to live in a hotel at Venice by the sea and insisted that she should catch the fish for her own dinner every night. The press agent of the Orpheum had to hire old sea-dogs to catch fish; put them in a tub under the wharf and see that Madam's fish-hook arrived in the tub. On her last visit they hired a floor of a Hollywoood hotel for her; but she was adamant; she would go back to Venice-by that time a wreck of the gay resort she had visited. Coming back to the theater for an evening performance, her car bumped into a truck loaded with iron pipe. She catapulted into the front seat of her car and hurt her knee. She finished the evening journey riding on the lap of the truck-driver. I was so unfeeling as to write a newspaper story about it and she hired bill-boards all over town to denounce me and my iniquities . . . the press agent following with a second detachment of bill-board stickers to plaster over the [p. 179] denunciation. Madame Bernhardt never recovered from the injury to her knee. When she got to Paris, her leg was amputated-and this was the beginning of the end. She made one more visit, being carried onto the stage in a wheeled chair and supporting herself by a table as she went through the motions of acting. Her greatest rival, Duse, also made one of the last appearances of her life in Los Angeles. In those days my newspaper work was concerned largely with the world of sports as well as the theater.

     " . . .

     "[p. 182] On account of the climate Los Angeles has always been a sports center. The place where the Olympic Games were held in 1932 was the site of the first race track. The pride of our community in the early days was a rangy oldd farm horse named Silkwood who, I believe, was never beaten. He was a pacer and was rewarded after each victory by a dinner of Santa Ana pumpkins. Lucky Baldwin was there in the heyday of his glory. His ranch at Santa Anita-site [p. 183] of a new and magnificent track-pastured his stable of horses. He had two great nags-Emperor Norfolk and Rey El Santa Anita. The latter made one of the most sensational "killings" of all time, winning the Chicago Derby at 40 to 1-an unknown Western horse. To his dying day, the old millionaire believed that his stable was always about to produce another derby winner; but it never did. One of the horseman's peculiarities was that he constantly quarreled with his stable boys. When I was a boy reporter, covering the courts, his racing steeds wore a path between his ranch and the sheriff's office-under attachment for lawsuits.

     " . . .

     "With the coming of the new century, automobiles came in . . .      

     "In no other part of the world did motor cars make a more sweeping change in the customs, the thought or the manner of life of the people. For one thing, they scattered the pueblo all over the map. People went to the outlying sections where they could have room and the bucolic atmosphere. They brought the desert, the mountains and the sea into the daily life of the pueblo. A great many people of moderate means have a city home, a beach cottage and a mountain or desert cabin. Most of all, the automobile brought to the pueblo the consciousness of its traditions. It was not until we were able to motor to the old missions that the architecture of Los Angeles "went Spanish"-or that we remembered the flavor and speech of the conquistadores.

     " . . .

 [p. 184] ". . .

      "Before the days of automobiles, we had bicycle races. On [p. 185] July Fourth every year there was a road race on high, old fashioned wheels from Santa Monica to Los Angeles; one of the champions was Tracy Hall, now a well-known banker. Regular bicycles of the present type brought in track racing. At first they were called "safety" bicycles and were considered to be somewhat sissified-for girls and such. I think that they started the Modern Youth movement in the pueblo-shameless flappers wearing bloomers that showed the leg mighty near to the knee. They made such a scandal that few girls had the courage to go on wearing them.

     " . . .

(a)The Richmonds and Safety Bicycles, 1890s

(a)Troop Richmond and His Racing Medals. 1890s

(a) Zoe Richmand, Flapper, Safety Bicycle 1890s

     "Tennis was brought to California by English people at Santa Monica. A Britisher named Bob Carter was perennial champion and his sister May Carter mowed down all the women. When they retired Lewis R. Freeman, now a well-known author, took the cups-with Alfonso Bell, who owned a dairy ranch near Santa Fe Springs. The discovery of oil near his cow barns made him rich beyond the dreams of avarice. I well remember the day when a little girl named Violet Sutton stepped onto the tournament courts for the first time and swept off all the honors. The next year her younger sister, May Sutton, started and became the champion of the world.

"The two high spots of Los Angeles sports were the first aviation meet ever held in the world-and the Olympic Games.

     "The aviation show was in 1910 on a high mesa of the old Dominguez ranch, near the scene of the Battle of the San Pedro where Mervine's American sailors retreated before [p. 186] the ancient pueblo cannon . . . [p. 186] There were only two aviators who figured to any extent-a Frenchman named Paulhan . . . The other flyer was Glenn Curtiss a pioneer manufacturer who came to sell planes . . .

     [p. 186] "The bringing of the Olympic Games to Los Angeles was the result of more than five years' ceaseless propaganda-including several trips to Europe by leading citizens of the pueblo. The technical arrangements-once the games were assured-represented two years work by experts. They turned out to be by all odds the most successful games ever held. At other games the athletes had had difficulty finding lodging; there were no practice tracks; the newspaper men were driven to the verge of insanity trying to find out what had happened.

     "The Olympic committee in Los Angeles erected a village for the athletes on Angelus Mesa-the old Baldwin ranch. Water of the exact chemical properties of their drinking water at home was provided for each team-also native cooks for each country. In front of each working sportswriter in the press stand was a stock ticker, continuously printing out the results and figures-not only at the track in front of his eyes, but at other places where boat races, horsemanship events, fencing matches were going on. The tracks were lightning fast; they were of peat-impossible in any country where rains are uncertain.

     "Not only were nearly all world's records broken; but the games had a profound and beneficial effect upon the inter-[p. 187]national relations of the United States-especially as regards Japan.

     "The Japanese cavalry officers were the first team on the ground. The bombardment of Shanghai had just occurred with unfortunate repercussions. The Japanese came with the defensive manner of a cat walking into a strange garret. They were received with open arms. They became the undoubted heroes of the games . . .

   " . . .

     "[p. 188] . . . Although our cheers for the Japanese were innocent enthusiams without guile, we learned a lot about internationalisms during the Games.

     " . . .

[p. 197] ". . .

     "One of the greatest industries of Southern California is fresh vegetables, garden truck, spinach, melon.

     "This was started by the Chinese after the big ranches were cut up. They understood farming in semi-arid coun- (p. 198] tries; they were all from Canton where they had fought floods and droughts for thousands of years. They understood irrigation and the rotation of crops. They brought to California casabas and musk melon." [p. 198]

     " . . .

Chapter XVIII The East A-Calling

     "[p. 218] . . .

     " . . .

     "[p. 220] Los Angeles has always been a city of trails . . . trails for Spanish soldiers . . . trails for covered wagons . . . swift automobiles . . . the urging instinct of the Aryan people to press on toward the setting sun . . .

     "And now a new trail has opened-and we are plowing on toward the Orient. We are going home to the high Mongol mesas whence our race started its long trek West . . . the door opens through Los Angeles Harbor to Cathay.

     " . . .

[p. 221] ". . . I can remember San Pedro when it was little more than a mud slough with a few lateen fishing boats, manned by Portuguese fishermen . . .

     "The first ship which ever came to anchor here was one of the ships of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo in 1542. He came over on a long track from Santa Catalina Island and probably came to anchor off San Pedro, to wait for the night breeze from the mountains to take him northeast on his way to the coast. It is not absolutely certain whether he stopped at San Pedro or Santa Monica. Whichever it was, he called the place Los Humos y Fuegos (Smokes and Fires) . . .

" . . .

[p. 223] "Captain Phineas Banning from Wilmington, Delaware, was the father of the [San Pedro] harbor. He started the first stage-line to the pueblo; took a long chance and towed the first schooner into the inner harbor; promoted the first railroad between Los Angeles and the bay.

     "In his day, it was the only connection between the pueblo and San Francisco . . . then the big city of the coast. Los Angeles was a contemptible, one-horse, sleepy adobe town so inconsequential that the first railroad had to be coaxed hard to build the rails into Los Angeles instead of driving straight down to San Bernardino.

     "There was a weekly mail steamer which anchored off shore and took on passengers from the pueblo by lighter."

[p. 223]"Its real career as a harbor started only after a knock-down and drag-out fight between the Southern Pacific Railroad, whch political combat is still remembered in the halls of Congress for its ferocious quality. It was the beginning of the end of corporation control in California.

     "I am not going to dig up the details of this old battle now. Only this: Senator Jones of Nevada really lived in Santa Monica but held office by virtue of a technical voting residence in Nevada. He had an ambitious plan to make Santa Monica a seaport and built a wharf. Collis P. Huntington, the ruthless old boss of the Southern Pacific, who held the politics of California in a strangling fist, rushed at him like a watch-dog over a tramp. He had the Jones wharf condemned as unsafe. Shipping would stay at San Pedro, what there was of it.

     " . . .

"After the Sante Fe railroad built into Los Angeles, the pobladores discovered that we had a sea at our doors and that it would float boats-a stunning surprise to the Iowans [p. 224] who thought it was to take baths in. They began rounding in our Congress to appropriate money to build a breakwater and dredge out the mud flats.

     "Huntington answered this demand with an ogre roar. It was lése majeste. He had whipped the pobladores to their knees before. Once they kept Crocker of the Southern Pacific waiting in the lobby of the council chamber while they debated the Southern Pacific's demand to turn over all the municipal bonds by which the San Pedro to Los Angeles railroad had been built. "I'll make the grass grow in the streets of your town," yelled Crocker; and the frightened little pueblo handed over its railroad.

     "This time, Huntington's growls blanched no faces. Instead old General Otis, with his then little paper the Times, opened up a broadside that turned the old tycoon's face purple with rage . . . And in the Senate a brilliant young California-born senator, Stephen M. White, whose statue now stands in bronze in front of the court-house, lashed the great corporation boss with devastating fury.

     "Collis P. Huntington knew he had, for the first time in his life, a fight on his hands. He wanted the breakwater built at Santa Monica for the very obvious reason that the Southern Pacific had a monopoly there. So confident was he that he could whip Congress into line that he went ahead and built a wharf nearly a mile and a half long going out from the narrow point of land where the road turns into the Malibu. For years it stood there empty and forlorn, growing gray and salt-crusted in the surf spray, a playground for children-a convenient fishing place for the Sunday excursionists. Finally, in the winter storms, its worm-eaten piles broke and drifted ashore to make sputtering green- and orange-colored fire logs for the movie colony at Malibu. Nothing burns like driftwood and broken ambitions.

     "[p. 225] It was a furious struggle that lasted for years. Army engineers surveyed both places and recommended San Pedro. Their reports were pigeonholed by the Secretary of War-General Alger-with what motive no one has ever discovered. Powerful forces in the Senate rose to block Stephen M. White; but he was a gallant fighter.

     "Desperately, as he felt the battle going against him, Collis P. Huntington offered to build a breakwater at Santa Monica and give it to the government.

     "Congressman Henry A. Cooper of Wisconsin said in the House of Representatives at that time:

     ""No question ever presented to me since I have been a member of this house has struck me with as much astonishment as this. I have never known anything like so determined a fight to thwart the will of the people to prevent the carrying out of just laws in the interests of a private corporation. And now these people who have been defeated year in and year out in their efforts to establish a harbor at Santa Monica come in and say: "We will build a harbor and give it to the United States if you will put it where the engineers of the United States army think it ought not to go.""

     "[In 1896, Congress finally voted an appropriation . . . for San Pedro; but still nothing happened. General Alger, the Secretary of War, managed to block the work until 1899 when President McKinley press a button in the White House to dump the first car-load of rock. . . . The electrical connection failed to work. . .

" . . . By 1930 . . .

     "The essential reason for the growth of deep sea shipping at San Pedro was, of course, the growth of the oil industry in Southern California.

     " . . .

     "[p. 228] Oil is the chief product going out of the harbor. In 1929 (from which year all these figures have been taken), tankers carrying 5,650,751 barrels of oil sailed for various countries with a value of $58,870,837. As has been shown this was not a peak year.

" . . .

[p. 233] Chapter XIX So This is Los Angeles

     " . . .

     "No other city that I have ever visited has anything like the beauty of its natural setting-unless it be San Francisco.

     "If we could make it over again from the scratch, with modern street planning and modern architects, it would be beyond comparisons or rivalry. Owing to the ignorance and stupidity of the early gringo city councilmen and the greed and lack of enlightenment of the real estaters, we have done about the worst we could with the materials at hand.

     " . . .

     "[p. 237] On the east side of the Plaza is a row of Chinese stores; one is a two-story building with a balcony. Were you to tear off the outside boards, you would find the adobe walls of the Lugo mansion-a house that once rang with laughter and dance music. After Antonio Maria Lugo retired to his ranch, the house became a Catholic college.

     "In the days of Chinatown's bustling prosperity, when it was a little corner of Cathay, one of my warm friends lived in a room of the Lugo mansion. Like Don Antonio, my friend Wong Fong was a howling swell. He was also a high binder, hatchetman and gambler. He dressed in cerise-colored pantaloons tied around the ankles-a purple silk jacket and a little, round embroidered cap. He once did me the unusual honor of introducing me to his two peachblow wives who giggled in furious embarrassmenht while Wong and I drank tea. One day I met Wong Fong on the street and he said good-by. He said he was going to San Francisco to try to settle a tong war and would be killed. A reception committee met him at Dupont Street and filled him with bullets. I don't know what became of the peachblow wives.

     "When I was a boy reporter I loved the dark, whispering alleys of Chinatown. Sometimes they whispered of death-never more darkly than when Helen of Chinatown was the reigning belle. She was a slave girl purchased as a child from one of the Flower Boats of Canton. When I knew her, she was one of the prettiest girls in Chinatown-a wan, lovely, graceful little flower. The tong which owned her intimated that she was for sale at a price and another tong eagerly grabbed her up-only to find that she was dying of tuberculosis. This bad bargain found its echoes in nearly every Chinatown in the United States. Hatchetmen lurked in dark corners in San Francisco. Revolvers began spitting out scar- [p. 238] let death into the night shadows of the Marchesseault and Apablaasa Streets. Daggers flashed in Chicago lanes. Death in the Chinatown of New York. And finally swept sweet little Helen went to her grave with a brass band at the head of the procession, coolies flinging out Devil Papers while the tiny corpse was hustled out through Los Angeles to the cemetary before the bad spirits could wriggle their way through the perforated holes in the red papers and snatch her scarlet little soul.

     "There isn't much left of Chinatown. You can still see the scarlet news bulletins on the side of the brick building where Sun Yat Sen, the George Washington of China, sat with Homer Lea-that strange military genius confined in a crippled body-and planned the revolution that was to end the Imperial sway of the Manchus in the Forbidden City of Pekin. The alert guards who used to sit in front of the fan-tan joints with their double-thick oak doors have gone away. The alleys which resounded to the thump of these slammed doors are now peopled with knots of Chinese college boys and girls with patent-leather hair and permanent waves. They speak English and discuss football scores and bridge. There is still a Chinese temple with punks burning before ugly, be-whiskered household gods. Also a school where in the evenings Chinese children learn their own language and the chicken-track writing of their fathers.

     "As a usual thing, Chinese boys and girls remain more or less Oriental in spirit and under the influence of their families until they are about twenty; after that, with bitterness and sorrow, the old peope watch the Oriental look fade out of their eyes. The family ties remain, however, to the end, with good-natured skepticism on the part of the young people. Nearly all the Chinese who live-or ever have lived-in Chinatown are from Canton, where business sagacity seems to run wild. During the depression they had a ghastly [p. 239] time, proudly starving rather than ask alms of the white man.

     "There are several Chinese cafés, where you can get excellent dinners-if you know how to order. If you ask for chop suey, they know you for a tenderfoot and treat you accordingly. Real Chinese food is delicate and rare; supposed to be tasted rather than eaten, for the number of courses is stupendous. If really to the manner born, you reach into one general dish with your chop-sticks; it is a clean and delicate way to dine. Unless you go in for too much bird's nest soup and century-old eggs, the prices are reasonable. Bird's nest soup is delicious but any one can have my share of the heirloom hen fruit.

     "And so we circle the streets, past shop windows where are displayed tiger's tooth powder and snake extract, Chinese adding machines, padded shoes and the camel's hair brushes with which they write.

     "The Japanese quarter lies about four blocks south of Chinatown. It clusters arount East First Street. It was at one time the ghetto; but the Jews could not compete with the Japanese. As their leases expired , the Japanese out-bid them and the Jews moved out. It is now a little Japan . . . silk shops, kimono stores, Japanese hotels, drug stores . . . worshipping their own gods . . . eating their own food . . . speaking their own language. Neon lights throw scrawling Japanese ideograph words out against the mystery of the night. Into the clatter and scurry of the Japanese street comes strident, harsh music of Japanese phonographs. They have a Japanese theater, frequent flower shows and festival days in honor of royal birthdays. It is a city of mystery and charm.

     "There are approximately twenty-five thousand Japanese living in Los Angeles; they have driven all competition out of the cut-flower business and vegetable business. When I first came [p. 240] to Los Angeles all the vegetables were raised by Chinese. They came to the doors every morning with wagons driven by aged and sway-backed horses. Ah Sam came to the back door, bland and smiling, "Any vegebales today?" On Christmas and Chinese New Year's he would bring us candy and lichee nuts, saying deprecatingly : "Jus a foo things for the boy." My mother, moved by his courtesy, made him presents in return. Moved to gratitude, Ah Sam increased the elegance of his gifts and my mother increased hers. These sweet old Chinamen gave credit to anyone. They seldom asked for payment. In those days it was a point of honor to see that they were paid. Later gringos were not so meticulous. During the days of the depression one old Chinaman went back to China a financial wreck, all the savings gone to the support of white families who did not pay up. When he left on the train to begin the long journey back to Canton some of the Big Names of Pasadena society wept bitterly on the station platform; they had little girls in pinafores when he sold vegetables.

     "We loved those old Chinese but that did not prevent our throwing rocks at them as the long procession of vegetable wagons went down Main St. at nightfall to their farms. The Exclusion Act cut down their numbers. The trade passed to the Japanese.

     " . . .

     "[p. 241] There is very little anti-Japanese feeling in Los Angeles . . .

     " . . .

Sections on Japanese Cuisine, Geisha, Filipino taxi dancing, Russian molekanes,

     "[p.245] It is a belief common among Jewish people that California is the Promised Land which they were promised. Since the rise of Hitler they have poured into Southern California, settling in two different ghettos in Los Angeles. One is on Temple Street just west of Figueroa; the other out on Brooklyn Avenue . . . In 1908 there were just two Jewish families in this district; they now number 60,000 . . . ten synagogues, nine attractive hotels, two theaters, lodge rooms, apartment houses built in Spanish style, bungalow courts . . . kosher restaurants, an Old People's Home as fine as an expensive hotel . . . a kosher slaughter-house where chicken and cattle are butchered by rabbis according to the laws of Abraham. They came in about equal proportion from Rumania, Poland, Russia and the New York East Side. The clean, wide [p. 246 ]streets, the lawns and flowers-most of all the splendor of the mountain panorama, makes considerable contrast to the push-carts, tenements and dirty streets from which they came . . .

     "[p. 246] Next to Harlem in New York, Los Angeles is probably the Largest Negro city in America. The Black Belt is on Central Avenue Avenue below Fifth. There are over 50,000 black people, mostly from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

     "As the reader has seen, the original settlers of the pueblo who came with de Neve included several Negroes-prob- [p. 247] bably descended from Spanish slaves of the Conquest. The real story of the Negro in Los Angeles starts with Biddy Mason.

     "In October, 1850, Robert Smith of Hancock, Georgia started for California in search of gold fields, taking the best and strongest of his slaves, including Biddy Mason [August 15, 1818 in Hancock County, Georgia-January 15, 1891 in Los Angeles, California)] , a woman of masculine strength, and her children Ellen, Anna, and Harriet. Her special work was herding the sheep on the trail. They came to a stop in San Bernardino, April 24, 1851. Word came to Smith of the Emancipation Proclamation [ January 1, 1863] and he hustled his slaves down to Santa Monica Canyon to be away from the rumors. He intended to sell them before the knowledge became general, but Charles H. Owens, a free Negro boy, visited them and became suspicious of Smith's intention.As the town was filled with pro-slavery, they were locked in jail for their own protection but Judge Benjamine Hayes, himself a Southerner, declared them free. Biddy became a nurse and mid-wife in the pueblo and with her savings, bought a large lot out on a country lane in the middle of a cow pasture. It became the center of Spring Street's business section and a large business block now covers it . . . still owned by her heirs. Biddy spent the greater part of her life in charity. She practically supported the Negro Church. During the floods of the eighties, she gave an open order to a little grocery store on Fourth and Spring Street to feed all refugees-black or white, and send her the bills. Her estate is now valued at something over five hundred thousand dollars.

    " . . .

     "[p. 249] Unitl the depression sent several thousand back home, Los Angeles was, next to Mexico City, the largest Mexican city in the world, with more than 200,000 inhabitants. The Mexican town is out on BrooklynAvenue, beyond the Jews . . . "

     " . . .

Chapter XXIII Los Angeles Is Somewhere Else

     "[p. 297] . . .

     " . . .

p. 306]æ Manhattan Beach, Shakespeare Beach, Hermosa, El Segundo, Playa del Rey (where the movie stars in great excitement spoiled their summer homes by drilling oil-wells in the backyards), Venice.

"Venice is a millionaire's dream that went sour. Abbott Kinney was a millionaire who grew rich from manufacturing Sweet Caporal Cigarettes. He came out here with Helen Hunt Jackson on a government commission to investigate the conditions of the California Indians. And stayed on. He planned Venice as a world cultural center-a Bayreuth- where great scientists would meet to exchange their discoveries; where grand opera stars would sing under master batons . . . where to win fame would signify world recognition. He dug a series of canals to make it a Venice and started the idea of going with a venetian palace. For the town café he had ship architects construct an ancient galleon upoon which at sunset every night a trumpeter in medieval armor would climb to the poop deck to bugle the sun down behind the sea horizon and fire a sunset salute from a brass cannon. Alas for dreams! The canals have been filled up. The wharf where the opera stars were to walk at evening gaining inspiration, is a country fair ballyhoo walk . . . throw a ring over the cane and take home a clock . . . shooting galleries, roller coasters, mirror mazes, "crazy horses," knock-down-the-doll with a baseball . . . hot dog stands . . . There is a movie house which is the acid test for previewing doubtful pictures; if any comedy can keep this audience quiet, [p. 307] with the sound of jazz orchestras pounding in the dance hall next door in their ears, it is a sure winner.

[p. 307] "When I was a young man, Santa Monica was an English colony . . . with a club-house and tennis that stopped for afternoon tea. We learned to cry "Played, sir" in Oxford voices when some one swatted the ball and to dismiss a recreant to the lower level of perdition by calling him a blooming bounder. The ultimate horror to be imagined was that some one might be asked by the house committee at the club casino to explain their conduct.

     "Now it is a city of hotels and beach clubs fronting the Palisades and reaching back to a lively modern city-through whose streets the wildest, death-defying automobile races were run in early days. Many movie stars have mansions on the beach, and in the long wooded canyon that runs to the sea, the Uplifters Club and the Polo Club have ranches . . . along with the country estates of many movie folk. It was on the grounds of this polo club that the cavalry officers of six nations competed in the horsemanship events of the Olympic Games.

     [p. 307] "On up the beach in the Malibu, the summer cottages of the movie stars . . . although in latter years they have been moving out to other places, discouraged by disastrous fires. The Malibu movie colony lies near the mouth of Topanga Canyon through which ran a prehistoric trail, cut deep into the rocks by the scuff of bare feet and moccasins through the ages. From the pipe-stone relics it is judged that it finally ran all the way to the Dakotas; it has been traced to Newhall-along the north hills of Antelope Valley-out through the Nevada desert to the "lost city" -evidently at that time a salt trading-post. They came to the Malibu to trade with the Santa Catalina Indians for cosmetics, fruits of two solid mountains of iron oxide form which they made rouge. [p. 3081

[p. 308] "Off Los Angeles are San Nicolas, San Clemente and Santa Catalina. In times past all have supported large populations of Indians. Only Santa Catalina is a summer resort.

     "When Cabrillo discovered the island in 1542 it swarmed with natives; they had fine canoes and were expert watermen . . . intelligent and friendly. Cabrillo named it Victoria after his flag-ship but Vizcaino changed the name to Santa Catalina on account of the holy day upon which he dropped anchor.

     "Relics dug up indicate that there must have been a people earlier than the natives Cabrillo found. Some of these relics are so strange that archaeologists made no attempt at interpretation. . . .

     "[p. 309] . . .

     "It is doubtful if so many prehistoric relics were ever dug up from an area of similar size. Car-loads, train-loads of ancient mortars, shell necklaces, skulls, weapons, harpoons have been shipped to the ends of the earth. They are still being dug. At one place on the isthmus it is still possible to unearth relics with one's foot.

"During the forties and fifties the Russian otter hunters came into these waters and brutally slaughtered the Catalina natives, coming ashore to massacre the men and steal the women. Most of those who escaped were brought to the mainland by the mission fathers to have their souls saved.

     " . . .

     "[p. 310] . . . Avalon, on the edge of a little bay whose waters have a peculiar translucent quality, making it possible to see bottom at a depth of thirty or forty feet. . . .

     "Santa Catalina has from the earliest days been a famous resort for fishermen . . .

     "[p. 311] In later years Southern California has become boat-conscious. . . .

     "The other playgrounds . . . are the mountains . . . the Inyo County Sierras, the highest mountains in the United States with the exception of Mr. McKinley in Alaska.

     "Every year, a few . . . get lost.

     "For one month in summer the pueblo . . . goes deer hunting.

     [p. 312] "The trout streams are overfished . . .

Chapter XXV Characters Make a Town

     "[p. 319] . . .

     "[p. 323] . . .

     "Perhaps the most famour character our pueblo ever produced was General Harrison Gray Otis, whose fight against union labor attracted world-wide attention. I approach with hestitation the task of writing about him. I have read so much written about him by profound young authors who seemed to know him so intimately, without every having seen him. I will say frankly at the start that all I know about General Otis is that I worked with him and under him for twenty years and for about five years of that time was his personal assistant. He had a fondness for the military; I was his aide-de-camp.

     "The general was born in Ohio of New England ancestry. As a young man he was a printer (yes, and belonged to the union.) When the Civil War broke out, he enlisted in the same regiment in which McKinley was a soldier.

     "At the time of the World War, when we were teaching young boys to hate Germans, inviting them to thrust bayonets into hay figures by telling them, "Now he has raped your sister," I asked the general if he hated the Confederates. He was furious."Certainly I did not hate them. What do you think I was, a hired murderer? I was a soldier. Had I hated them, I should have refused to fight." [p. 323]

     "[p. 324] In the seventies he came out west as a government official in charge of the sealing industry in the Alaska Islands. From there he drifted to California and became editor of a small paper in San Francisco.

     "In Los Angeles, two printers had started a little weekly paper called the Mirror, out of the wreck of a disastrous venture that two young men had tried in the way of a daily paper. General Otis came to Los Angeles and bought it. The Times was started in 1884, the office being in an old brick building at the corner of Temple and Main. They had a ramshackle printing press that ran by water power from the city zanja. From time to time the pipes got clogged with fish and the press had to stop.