My Hero, Ed Asner
By LIONEL ROLFE
Twenty five years ago, my mentor and hero was a city editor of television fame. The actor’s name was Ed Asner and he played a city editor named Lou Grant, which was also the name of the television series. Asner played the role so well I came to believe he made manifest the two real editors I had worked for who taught me every thing I knew about the journalism racket.
One was a wild Irishman, Dana McGaugh, at the Livermore Independent, a small town paper in Northern California. The other was Scott Newhall, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, then the major newspaper in Northern California. Read more
Edendale: Chapter 6
Sixth Chapter of “Edendale,” Frog Town by Phyl M. Noir
Architectural rendering of proposed Hyperion Bridge. Courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library. The Electric railway runs alongside it.
By Phyl M. Noir
Bruno Shultz followed Celia at a distance and when she turned to look at him he looked at the ground. She walked by the Frog Town houses, which were surrounded by dirt yards planted with corn and tomatoes except for the house with the carved wood Virgin bulto, and that house had a lawn.
Celia’s father Juan Lowry had returned from the war in Europe with money he won playing poker and bought Won’s on the corner of Riverside Drive and Knox before CalTrans built the Golden State in 1956, which eradicated, obliterated, razed, moved, ripped asunder, and demolished the mostly Latino Eastside near the River. The stretch of little commercial buildings except for Won’s sunk into desuetude. In 1964, CalTrans brought California Route 2 over Riverside Drive, which almost completely isolated Frogtown and surrounded it with incessant noise. Read more
Honey Drives Up Baxter in Echo Park
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
When I was very small, my grandfather drove the Stalwart Studebaker downtown. My grandparents did not call each other by their names. Each called the other My Better Half.
My grandmother pulled up my dress and had me stand on the car’s running board – which was covered in rubber matting — and held my hands and I peed in the street whenever the need arose. Read more
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
