Re-Reading L.A.: 'Señor Plummer' from 1942 - KCET
To the reader of its popular literature, Los Angeles can seem like a city of compulsive memoirists who want you to know why they came here, what they found when they did, and if they stayed or left. Some of these narratives are hilariously unreliable as history, like Horace Bell's "Reminiscences of a Ranger: Early Times in Southern California" (1881). A very few, like Harris Newmark's "Sixty Years in Southern California 1853-1913" and Sarah... Most of these narratives are like Jackson Graves' "My seventy years in California, 1857-1927" -- a recasting of the American myth of the self-made man as a myth of self-made Los Angeles. But among them are a few books like Leo Carrillo's "The California I Love" (1961), where Los Angeles, even after American occupation in 1847, is remembered for its sweetness of life and the melancholy of that life's passing. It's an "as told to" book assembled by John Preston Buschlen (writing under the coy pseudonym of "Don Juan") and published by the Times-Mirror Company in 1942 when Eugene Plummer was 90. The Los Angeles Times was then (and would be for another two... Source: www.kcet.org
