Los Angeles was about ninety years old and I about one when we first
met, neither of us, I am afraid, taking much notice of the other. For
over twenty years San Francisco had been a city, a most interesting
and alive city, making so much stir in the world that people forgot
that Los Angeles was the older; that her birth had been ordained by
the governor and attended with formal rites of the church and salutes
from the military way back in 1781, when the famous revolution on the
east coast was just drawing to a successful close. Until the stirring
days of ’49, San Francisco was insignificance on sand hills. Then her
rise was sudden and glorious and the Queen of the Angels was humble.
But she was angelic only in name. She was a typical frontier town with
primitive, flat-roofed dwellings of sun-dried bricks, much like those
built in ancient Assyria or Palestine. Saloons and gambling houses were
out of proportion in number, and there were murders every day. The
present crime wave is nothing in comparison.
My father first saw Los Angeles in January, 1854, when he was camped
with his sheep on the Rancho San Pasqual; his arrival was a few months
later than that of Mr. Harris Newmark, who, in his book _Sixty Years
in Southern California_, so vividly describes the village as he found
it.
By the time I knew it there had been a great change. There were some
sidewalks, water was piped to the houses, gas had been introduced;
several public school buildings had been built; there were three
newspapers, _The Star_, _The Express_, and _The Herald_. The public
library had been founded,--it occupied rooms in the Downey Block where
the Federal Building now stands, and Mary Foy, one of Los Angeles’s
distinguished women, had begun her public service as a young girl in
attendance. Compared with what it had been twenty years before, Los
Angeles was a modern, civilized city; compared with what it is now, it
was a little frontier town. At school I once learned its population to
be 11,311.
We lived first on Temple Street, near Charity. Once Los Angeles boasted
Faith and Hope Streets as well, but only Hope remains, for Faith has
turned to Flower, and Charity masquerades as Grand.
Next door to us lived a Jewish family whose girls sat on the front
porch and amazed me by crocheting on Sunday. I had not known that any
Jews existed outside the Bible. Perhaps this family was the nucleus for
the present large colony of Hebrews that now fills the neighborhood.
Temple Street was new and open for only a few blocks. Bunker Hill
Avenue was the end of the settlement, a row of scattered houses
along the ridge fringing the sky. Beyond that we looked over empty,
grassy hills to the mountains. Going down the first hillside and over
towards Beaudry’s reservoir for a picnic, I once found maidenhair
ferns under some brush, and was frightened by what sounded like a
rattlesnake--probably only a cicada. Court Street disappeared in a
hollow at Hope, where a pond was made interesting by a large flock of
white ducks.
Across the street from us on top of a hill that is now gone, at
the head of a long flight of wide steps, stood “The Horticultural
Pavilion,” destroyed a few years later by fire. It was replaced by
Hazard’s Pavilion, an equally barn-like, wooden building on the site
of the present Philharmonic Auditorium. The first Pavilion held county
fairs, conventions, and operas. It was in this place that I once had a
great disappointment, for when I was hearing _Pinafore_ a child ahead
of me suddenly coughed and whooped, and I was removed with haste just
at the most entrancing moment. The opera had been put on in London
first in the spring of ’78. It had reached Los Angeles by ’79, and we
revelled in its wit and melody with the rest of the world.
It must have been somewhat later than this that the city took such
pride in the singing of one of its own girls, Mamie Perry (Mrs.
Modini-Wood) who was educated abroad and made her debut in Italy.
Another name that will recall many a concert and social event to old
timers is that of Madame Mara.
In this building I once saw a strange instrument, a box into which one
could speak and be heard half a mile away at a similar contraption--a
very meek and lowly promise of our present telephone system.
At this fair, where there were exhibited fruits, jellies and cakes,
quilts and long strings of buttons, when the mania for collecting them
was at its height, I remember that some ladies, interested in the new
Orphans’ Home, served New England dinners, in a room decked as an old
fashioned kitchen with spinning wheels and strings of corn and drying
apples. Among them were my mother and Mrs. Dan Stevens, two slender,
dark-haired young women, wearing colonial costume and high combs--my
mother, who so soon after left this world, and Mrs. Stevens, still
among us, loved and honored for her many good works.
Mrs. Stevens tells me that this was at the time of the visit of
President and Mrs. Hayes and a party of government officials, the first
president of the United States to come to California. All Los Angeles
turned out to welcome them, although there was enough bitter partisan
feeling left to cause some neighbors of ours to walk past him in line
while refusing to shake the hand of the man who they believed usurped
Tilden’s rightful place.
The celebration began with speaking from a grandstand built in front of
the Baker Block, followed by a reception given to Mrs. Hayes and the
ladies of the party in the parlors of the fashionable St. Elmo Hotel,
still standing but now fallen to low estate.
After this the presidential party went to the county fair at the
pavilion where there was more speaking, a public reception and a formal
dinner. Dr. David Barrows contributes as his memory of this great
occasion--the memory of a small boy who had been brought down from the
Ojai Valley--his amazement to observe that Secretary Sherman kept his
cigar in his mouth while making his address. It was during this speech
that a little boy came forward bringing a great bouquet, the gift of
the local florist, but suffered so from stage fright that he refused to
mount the platform and my small sister, standing near, was substituted.
She marched serenely across the stage, delivered the flowers to Mrs.
Hayes, was kissed by her, then by the speaker, and final glory, by the
President himself. I am sure it was the most lime-lighty moment of
Nan’s modest life.
This bouquet was not the only gift we afforded our distinguished
visitor. The other was a cup and saucer, fearfully and wonderfully made
of sectors of red, white and blue cambric, stitched round and round
until it was stiff by a little hole-in-the-wall sewing-machine agent.
After inspecting our fruits, vegetables, cookery, button strings and
other fancy work the party was entertained at dinner by the leading
women of Los Angeles in the improvised New England kitchen at the fair.
The city council granted them the privilege and appropriated toward
expense the generous sum of twenty-five dollars, all the council could
afford toward banqueting the most distinguished party that had yet
visited the City of the Queen of the Angels, so said Mayor Toberman.
But every grower of fine turkeys or prize fruit or vegetables and every
notable maker of preserves brought in offerings in kind so that in
spite of the council’s thrift a most generous feast was spread before
our guests.
Speaking of politics recalls the wonderful torchlight processions of
a later period when I, with my cousins, shouting little Republicans,
perched on the fence at their residence on the corner of Second and
Broadway and delightedly recognized our fathers under the swinging,
smoky lights.
I happened to be in Maine during the Blaine-Cleveland campaign and once
rode upon a train to which Mr. Blaine’s special car was attached. It
interested me to see that when he got out at one station for a hasty
cup of coffee at a lunch counter, he poured the hot liquid into his
saucer to drink. Was that doing politics, being one of the people,
or was it simply that the mouth of a presidential candidate is as
susceptible to heat as that of an ordinary mortal? I was much edified,
as I was not accustomed to saucer-drinking. When the train reached
Boston towards midnight, it was met by a most gorgeous torchlight
parade and a blare of music.
When Garfield died, Los Angeles had a memorial service and a long
daylight procession headed by a “Catafalque,” (a large float,
gruesomely black), on which one of my schoolmates, Laura Chauvin, rode
to represent, I suppose, a mourning angel. Later its black broadcloth
draperies were used to make souvenirs and sold for some deserving
cause. We purchased a pin-ball the size of a dollar, decorated with a
green and white embroidered thistle,--a curious memento of a murdered
president.
But I have been lured by memories of processions as is a small boy by
martial music, away from my ordered account of where I have lived in
Los Angeles. The second year we moved to the Shepherd house, (so-called
because of its owner), where presently my brother, Llewellyn Bixby,
junior, in direct answer to my prayers, came through the ceiling of the
front bedroom straight into the apron of Mrs. Maitland,--a two-day-late
birthday present for me. So I was told. My sceptical faculty was
dormant.
This house still stands at the top of the precipice made by the cutting
of First Street between Hill and Olive Streets.
The lot in front was very steep, with zig-zag paths and terraces, in
one of which was a grove of banana trees, where fruit formed, but,
owing to insufficient heat, never ripened well. Do you know the cool
freshness of the furled, new, pale green leaves? Or how delightful it
is to help the wind shred the old ones into fringe? One by one the red
and gray covers for the circled blossoms drop, and make fetching little
leather caps for playing children.
In those days the hill had not been hacked away to make streets, and
where now is a great gash to let First Street through there was then a
breezy, open hill-top, whereon grew brush and wild-flowers. The poppies
in those days were eschscholtzias (the learning to spell the name was
a feat of my eighth year), and were not subjected to the ignominy
of being painted with poinsettias on fringed leather souvenirs for
tourists. The yellow violets were gallitas, little roosters, perhaps
because in the hands of children they fought to the death, their
necks hooked together until one or the other was decapitated. The
brodiæas, or wild hyacinths, sometimes now called “rubbernecks,” were
called cacomites, (four syllables), a word of Aztec origin brought to
California by people from Mexico where it was applied to a different
flower but one having like this one a sweet edible root.
Between the weeds and bushes there were bare spots of ground where,
by careful searching, one might find faint circles about the size of
a “two-bit” piece. Wise ones knew that these marked the trap doors
of tarantula nests. It was sport to try to pry one open, with mother
spider holding it closed. We young vandals would dig out the nests,
interested for a moment in the silky lining and the tiny babies and
then would throw away the wrecked home of the gorgeous black velvet
creatures that did no harm on the open hill side.
At this house Harry and I conducted an extensive “essence factory,”
collecting old bottles far and near, and filling them with vari-colored
liquids, obtained by soaking or steeping different flowers and leaves.
We used to drink the brew made from eucalyptus leaves. The pepper
infusion was pale, like tea; that made from old geraniums was of a
horrible odor,--hence we liked to inveigle innocent grown folks into
smelling it. The cactus solution was thick, like castor oil, and we
considered it our most valuable product, having arrived thus early
at the notion that difficulty of preparation adds to the cost of a
manufactured article.
North of us were several houses containing children--and here I found
my first girl play-mates--Grace and Susie, Bertha and Eileen. The level
street at Court and Hill, protected on three sides by grades too steep
for horses, was our safe neighborhood playground. I never go through
the tunnel that now has pierced the hill without hearing, above the
roar of the Hollywood car, the patter of flying feet, the rhythms of
the witch dances, the thud-thud of hop-scotch, the shouting boys and
girls defending goals in Prisoner’s Base, the old, old song of London
Bridge, or the “Intry mintry cutry corn” that determined who was “it”
for the twilight game of Hide-and-Seek--and then the varied toned bells
in the hands of mothers who called the children home.
We played school, jacks, marbles, tag, and an adaption of Peck’s Bad
Boy, and, between whiles, dolls. Even Harry played with them when we
were still youngsters--say eight or nine. He didn’t seem young to me
then--he was just himself. I called him “Hab.” My aunt tells of finding
us once about our housekeeping, he doing the doll family washing, and
I papering the house. In our menage there was no sex distinction as to
the work to be done.
We girls, as we grew a little older, had a collection of small dolls,
none over four inches long, and the various marriages, deaths, and
parties kept us busy. I tailored for the whole group, having apparently
a talent for trousers, which early experience undoubtedly encouraged
me in later life to gather in all the stray pantaloons to cut over into
knickerbockers for my numerous boys.
Raids on the Chinese vegetable wagon provided supplies for our cooking
over a row of small, outdoor fire-places we had built in a low bank
in our yard. Once my mother was much disturbed to find a little pot
of squirrel meat cooking on the stove. She needn’t have worried, for
I knew as well as she that strychnine, slipped into a small piece of
watermelon rind, transferred its evil potency to the body of the little
beast that ate it. But it was sport to hang him up as I had seen the
men do at the ranch when butchering a sheep, to skin him and dress the
meat, and pretend it was a stew for Isabel, the doll. I had a large
collection of squirrel skins tacked up on the barn at the Shepherd
house.
After a couple of years we built our own house in the same neighborhood
on the south-east corner of Court and Hill Streets. It began as a seven
room cottage, white with green blinds to suit father. Later the roof
was raised and a second story inserted and the house painted a more
fashionable all-over gray, to suit the ladies.
My mother was a happy woman when, after eleven years of married life,
she moved into her very own home. A few months later she suddenly died,
leaving my father widowed a second time, a lonely man for the remaining
fourteen years of his life.
Mother had never been a strong woman and was unable to withstand an
attack of typhus fever, contracted when on an errand of kindliness to
a sick and forlorn seamstress. I often wish I might have an adult’s
knowledge of mother,--my child memories are beautiful. She was tall and
slender, with quantities of heavy brown hair, dark eyes, and unusual
richness of color in her cheeks which is repeated in some of her
grandchildren. It amuses me to recall that I had such absolute faith
in her word that on one occasion when she had visited my school and a
girl remarked upon what a beautiful mother I had, I stoutly denied the
allegation, for had she not herself assured me that she was not pretty?
I suppose that her New England conscience and native modesty could not
allow even her little daughter to tell her how lovely she really was.
I am told that she “had a knack of clothes” and I remember some of
them well enough to confirm the opinion. Her taste allowed beautiful
materials and much real lace, but of jewels there were none except some
brooches that performed useful service and the wedding and engagement
rings that held sentiment.
It was a sad thing that just when her dearest wish, that for her own
home, was fulfilled, she must leave it and her three babies for some
one else to care for. Fortunately her dearly loved, next-older sister
was able to take her place.
At the time we built there seemed to be but two styles of architecture
in vogue, one square on a four room base and the other oblong on a six
room plan, the narrow end being to the street, with one tier of rooms
shoved back a little in order to provide a small porch,--we chose the
latter. Every such house had a bay window in the projecting end, that
being the front parlor, and all windows visible from the street must
have yellow, varnished inside blinds.
One evening while the building was going on we went over as usual for
our daily inspection and noted that the newly set studding marked the
coming rooms. The connecting parlors seemed small to our eyes and
tastes not yet trained to apartment and bungalow court proportions, so
on the following morning father ordered out the wall between proposed
front and back parlor, and our large sitting room,--living room it
would be called today, was ordained. It, was unusual in Los Angeles
where the prevailing mode demanded the two parlors. This room was large
enough, 18’ x 33’, to stand the height of the ceiling, fourteen feet.
Wide, high double-doors opened into the hall, opposite similar ones
into the reception room, giving a feeling of spaciousness to the house.
The furnishing was of necessity more or less that which it is now
customary to damn as mid-Victorian,--walnut furniture and a wealth of
varying design in carpet, curtains, upholstery, wall-paper; but the
whole in this case was kept in harmony by a key color, a medium olive,
relieved by soft shades of rose and tan. Even the woodwork was painted
to match the ground color of the walls, instead of glistening in the
usual glory of varnished redwood or yellow pine. Everything was in good
taste except a fearful and wonderful ceiling that was wished on us by
the local wall-papering nabob. How fortunate that the walls were so
high it was almost out of sight!
Over our heads were the two plaster of Paris centerpieces from which
lighting fixtures sprang, first hanging lamps with prismatic fringes,
later gas chandeliers. These fruits and flowers were tinted and gilded.
Around them was a cream colored sky, set with golden stars, small ones,
not planets,--limited in extent by an oval band of brocaded red velvet,
this being the pet aversion of Aunt Martha. Outside this pale there was
a field of metallic colored paper with an all-over design like chicken
wire; next came a border of flowers and something modest to connect the
whole artistic creation with the side wall.
We had a ceiling, but there were many things characteristic of the
period that we did not have. We never had a “throw,” nor a gilded
milking stool with a ribbon bow on one leg; we never had a landscape
painted on the stem of a palm leaf, nor oranges on a section of orange
wood; we did not hang in any door a portière made of beads, shells,
chenille ropes or eucalyptus seeds, all of which things were abroad in
the land.
The room contained four bookcases, a rosewood square piano, a large
table, a sofa and several easy chairs. From the walls looked down upon
us Pharoah’s Horses, The Stag in the Glen, and the Drove at the Ford,
(suitable subjects the vogue provided for a family dependent upon
livestock), but these were not all, for there were a few reproductions
of old masters, a fine portrait of grandfather in his youth, and
a picture of the sweet-faced mother who had gone to Heaven, as we
children said.
At one end of the room was a white marble mantel with a large grate,
always annoying us by its white patchiness in the low toned room, but
contributing cheer with the coal fire that, through more than half the
year, burned all day long. Los Angeles had no furnaces in those days,
but the family was suited by the single fireplace, for one could choose
the climate he wished from torrid zone near the grate to arctic in the
bay window, where the goldfish circled their watery globe.
The room was the center of a happy family life, where, of an evening,
all read by the light of the student lamp, or indulged in games,
dominoes, authors, crambo, or logomachy, sugar-coated ways of getting
training respectively in addition, names of books and writers,
verse-making and spelling. Father rarely went out, and after the
reading of his evening paper might join a lively domino tournament or
amuse himself with solitaire.
Until the very last years of his life he busied himself at odd jobs
about the house. Sometimes it would be a session with the grandfather
clock, sometimes it would be chopping wood. He had the willow brought
up from the ranch in long pieces, which he cut and stacked under the
house. He raised chickens and at first cared for a horse and cow. Later
we kept two horses, dispensed with the cow, and had a man for the
livestock and garden and to drive us about town. We did not have a dog
regularly but always cats, classical cats. Æneas was very long-legged
and Dido lived with us a long time. I think it was she who went every
evening with father for his after dinner walk and cigar.
One Thanksgiving time the wagon from the ranch came, bringing us a
couple of barrels of apples, a load of wood and a fine turkey for the
feast day. Imagine our dismay, one afternoon, to see it mount up on its
wings and soar majestically from our hill top back-yard down to the
corner of First and Broadway below. He escaped us but, I presume, to
some one else he came as a direct answer to prayer.
Father was always interested in flowers and was very successful in
making them grow. Usually there was a box of slips out in the back
yard. Often he would bring in a rich red Ragged Robin bud, dew-wet, to
lay by mother’s napkin for breakfast. For himself he put a sprig of
lemon-verbena in his button-hole. For some reason, he excepted orange
colored flowers from his favor. He made mock of the gay little runners
by twisting their name into “nasty-urchins.”
The windows of my room, directly over the parlor, were covered with a
large, climbing “Baltimore Belle,” an old-fashioned small cluster rose
that I never see now-a-days. From my side window I looked out on a long
row of blue-blossomed agapanthus, interspersed with pink belladonnas,
flowers that in summer repeated the blue of the mountains touched at
sunset with pink lights.
Every night when ready for bed, I opened the inside blinds and looked
at the mountains and up to the stars and enlarged my heart, for what
can give one the sense of awe and beauty that the night sky does?
The location of our home on the brow of a hill was chosen because
of the view and the sense of air and space. Below us was the little
city, the few business blocks, the homes set in gardens on tree shaded
streets, the whole surrounded by orchards and vineyards. On clear days
we could see the mountains far in the east and the ocean at San Pedro,
with Santa Catalina beyond.
One very rainy winter, possibly ’86, we watched the flood waters from
the river creep up Aliso Street and into Alameda: we saw bridges go out
and small houses float down stream. Then it was that Martin Aguierre, a
young policeman, won the admiration of everyone when he rode his black
horse into the torrent and rescued flood victims from floating houses
and debris in mid-stream. One of the girls in my room at school lost
all her clothing except what she wore, and we had a “drive” for our
local flood-sufferer.
This was a very different river in summer. I once saw a woman whose
nerves had been wracked by dangerous winter fordings when the water
swirled about the body of the buggy, get out of her carriage, letting
it ford the Los Angeles river while she stepped easily across the
entire stream. She had a complex, but she didn’t know that name for her
fear!
Beyond the river and up the hill on the other side stood, stark
and lonely, the “Poor House,” the first unit of the present County
Hospital. Many a time when the skies forbore to rain I had it pointed
out to me as my probable ultimate destination; for, after the bad
middle years of the seventies when to a general financial depression
was added a pestilence that killed off all the lambs, and to that was
added a disastrous investment in mines, the firm of Flint, Bixby & Co.
was sadly shaken, and it was of great moment whether or not sufficient
moisture should come to provide grass and grain for the stock. So, if
the sun shone too constantly and the year wore on to Christmas without
a storm the ominous words, “a dry year,” were heard and the bare
building across the river loomed menacingly. But it always rained in
time to save us!
Rain and overflowing rivers connote mud. Walkers on the cement
sidewalks beside our paved streets little realize what wonderful mud
was lost when Progress covered our adobe. With its first wetting it
became very slippery on top of a hard base, but as more water fell and
it was kneaded by feet and wheels, it became first like well-chewed
gum and then a black porridge. I have seen signs that warned against
drowning in the bog in the business center of town. An inverted pair
of boots sticking out of a pile of mud in front of the old Court House
once suggested that a citizen had gone in head first and disappeared.
Small boys turned an honest nickel or two by providing plank
foot-bridges or selling individual “crickets” which the wayfarer might
take with him from corner to corner. As the sun came out and the mud
thickened the streets became like monstrous strips of sticky fly
paper. We walked the cobblestone gutters until our rubbers were in
shreds, or, when necessity drove us into the gum, lost them.
A friend assures me that one Sunday morning she set out for a church
near the center of the city, that she made slow progress for a block
and a half, and then, realizing that so much time had passed that she
could not arrive in time for service, turned around and went home. It
had taken her an hour and a half to make the round trip amounting to
three blocks.
There is no mud so powerful when it is in its prime as adobe, and when
it dries in all its trampled ridges and hollows, it is as hard as a
rock. It takes all summer to wear it down level, ready to begin over
again with the new rains. There are a few places yet, where, some rainy
day if you are feeling extra fit, you may try a stroll across a Los
Angeles street and learn to sympathize with a captured fly.
Certain other interesting kinds of soil are also covered up in Los
Angeles. On the southwest corner of Temple and Broadway there is mica
cropping out between the strata, and up by Court Street Angel’s Flight
there is a nice white formation very like chalk. I liked to cut it into
odd shapes.