The Thanks Along the Way

It’s been a long, sometimes tedious, journey — the researching, writing, reworking and publishing of this book has taken more than seven years. That’s mostly because, as a newly retired journalist, I never wanted to make this a full-time job. I wanted to enjoy retirement as well as the search for clues, the visiting and revisiting of libraries, and waking up some days at 5 a.m. to dedicate a few hours to writing. Once I had a first draft I created a Substack platform, Digging History, to get feedback from readers, then tweaked the copy and migrated it to Pressbooks.pub so as to prep it for publication as an ebook. That wasn’t the last step, however, as I then had to fix formatting issues in order to publish on Amazon Kindle.

Along the way I’m pretty sure I tested my wife’s patience — “Didn’t he retire? So why is he up writing at 5 a.m.?” she probably often muttered. As such, the acknowledgements have to start with thanking Gaby for letting me indulge in this “hobby”.

From there, a big shout out to all the researchers, writers and information engineers maintaining incredible history troves across the Internet — from Wikipedia to newspapers.com to nonprofits like the California Digital Newspaper Collection, HathiTrust.org, Archive.org and the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America collection . In the physical world, i.e., bricks and mortar, UCLA’s Special Collections Library became my “happy place” — I knew each visit would produce some new nugget of information or insight. The staff were always welcoming and the process for accessing archives was always easy. Thanks also to staff at The Huntington Library, USC’s Special Collections, the Los Angeles Public Library, Loyola Marymount University, Woodbury University and the Autry Museum of the American West.

On a personal level, I’m grateful for the early encouragement from Griffith Park: A Centennial History author Mike Eberts and playwright Robert Fieldsteel, whose own fascination with Grif led him to write “Crazy Drunk“. For the cover design, shout outs go to Kiera Long and Alexis Martenka. And during my feedback phase — i.e., getting reader comments on whether the story made sense — thanks to family, friends and especially: Julia Henri of Juicy History;  Santa Monica historian Nina Fresco;  C.C. de Vere, whose blog Frenchtown Confidential explores a unique angle of Los Angeles history; and Russ Shaw, my former boss at msnbc.com. All provided great advice, especially C.C. and Russ’ encouragement to dump the idea of a “narrator” as he proved confusing to the reader. The idea was to have Harry Chandler, an acquaintance of Grif’s and the man who ran Los Angeles, explore Grif’s personality ala Che Guevara in “Evita”, but while the device certainly works in a play or movie it proved kludgy on the written page!