Oasis for Readers : A South-Central Store Has Provided Eclectic Choices for Almost 30 Years

If you live in South-Central Los Angeles and aren’t willing to take a lengthy drive, your choice of bookstores is woeful.

You could brave the parking hell of USC, or veer off west to the Crenshaw Mall. However, if you’re not too picky about the book--perhaps you could get into a steamy Danielle Steele novel, or an autobiography of the prophet Muhammad, or maybe something romantic like “The Bridges of Madison County”--there’s a closer option: the Vernon & Figueroa Bookstore, where proprietor D. C. Wyrick has reigned for almost 30 years.

“People read around here too,” said Wyrick, a soft-spoken, engaging man of 73 who lives alone in a two-story home near his store.

Located half a block south of the busy intersection of Vernon Avenue and Figueroa Street, the bookstore is not a bookstore in the classic sense. The total number of books in the white, 15-by-15-foot building is under 200, and finding the latest bestseller is often as difficult as finding a good rib joint in the West San Fernando Valley.

Still, in this part of Los Angeles, where Bookstar and Super Crown fear to tread, it is at least a place to browse, however briefly.

“Maybe other book dealers don’t want to come here because they are afraid of the area’s notoriety,” said Wyrick, who opened his store in 1967 after a decade of selling newspapers in the same location. “But, hey, all the time I’ve been here, I have never been held up.”

The Vernon & Figueroa Bookstore is actually more of a small magazine stand and candy store, with an oddball selection of books. Tomes about Martin Luther King Jr. and by L. Ron Hubbard share shelf space with autobiographies of Martha Reeves and Daryl F. Gates.

It was ridicule from a friend that delivered Wyrick, a former laborer, to the newsstand business.

“He looked at my paycheck and started laughing,” said Wyrick, a native of Arkansas. “He said I was working like a dog when all I had to do was sell newspapers.”

So in the mid-1950s, Wyrick set up a few tables and began doing just that. Among the papers that Wyrick sold were black-oriented newspapers from various cities, such as the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Louisiana Weekly. The move coincided with the postwar migration of blacks to Los Angeles. “People would want to get the papers they had read in their hometowns,” he said.

And he sold Racing Forms. Lots of them. Still does.

“If only some of these young people would study their books like they do these Racing Forms,” he said.

“I remember in the ‘50s, when Swaps was the big horse out here. He had my business up. Now Cigar is the best horse going, and he’s coming to town soon [June 30, though that is now in doubt], and I know I’ll make a good profit off Cigar.”

Like many older African Americans, Wyrick fondly recalls the ‘50s and early ‘60s for the commercial vitality that surrounded him. “You could get anything you wanted on Broadway and Main Street [between Slauson Avenue and Adams Boulevard]. You didn’t have to go downtown for anything. It was all right here. Now it’s mostly junk. And you could walk at night without anyone bothering you.”

He speaks longingly of a time when neighborhoods were neater and safer. “Each person wanted to outdo you by making their house and yard pretty.” Then the enthusiasm in his voice trails off. “I think black and white folks got along better than they do now,” he said.

He looks around his store and shakes his head. On one wall is a rack of magazines, nearly half with nude women on the covers.

“I used to have so many more educational books and history books, but now they don’t sell that well. It’s kind of discouraging that some people aren’t seeking knowledge. But, in business, you have to give the people what they want.”

What Wyrick’s customers want, in addition to the men’s magazines and horse racing newspapers, are books on astrology, romance magazines and novels.

The combination has been enough for him to earn a decent living, working six days a week, but he doubts he’ll be at it much longer. He was crushed by the death of his mother in Arkansas last year, and his own health has been slowing him. Soon, the Vernon & Figueroa Bookstore will probably close, and some people will have to drive a little farther for a book.

“It doesn’t actually seem like it’s Los Angeles to me anymore,” Wyrick said. “I still like Los Angeles, but it’s much dirtier and you can’t enjoy yourself going out at night because somebody might be acting stupid.”

“It’s been a good living, but I’ve been getting tired lately. I really just want to go home now, back to Arkansas. I think about it every day.”