He Helped Write, and Rewrite, Local History

Did you know, the museum director was saying, that the first major gold discovery in California wasn’t at Sutter’s Mill, but a few years earlier “right here in the San Fernando Valley”?

Wait a second, this visitor replied, I thought that happened up in the Santa Clarita Valley, not far from old Newhall.

Well, yes, Austin Conover conceded, it was up over the ridge in Placerita Canyon. But it was close.

The principle that applies to horseshoes and hand grenades, it seems, sometimes applies to history. Purists may not approve, but promoting San Fernando Valley’s place in the world comes with Austin Conover’s duties as volunteer director of the Los Angeles Valley College Historical Museum.

Was the first feature-length film, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” really filmed in the Valley? “You bet,” Conover tells the visitor. And did you know that, in the film “Lost Horizon,” the Santa Susana Mountains played the Himalayas?

Austin Conover is, at 83, a kind of living museum himself. From 1938 until 1970, Conover covered Los Angeles and traveled the globe as the “Roaming Around” columnist for the Hollywood Citizen-News. In the foreword of an autobiography he is writing, Conover notes his experience covering the Cold War from the vantage point of Hollywood, where studios blacklisted suspected Communists. “The nightmare years,” he calls the era.

“Hollywood was a launching pad,” he says, that enabled him to search for stories in Guatemala, Israel, South Vietnam and the

USSR.

After the demise of the Citizen-News, Conover became a writer and part-owner of The Tolucan, a weekly newspaper in Toluca Lake, and later worked in public relations for the community college system. Now, as museum director, he edits a monthly newsletter and drops by the nondescript building near Parking Lot H every afternoon, Monday through Friday, providing the public with tours of the past.

With the 200th anniversary of the founding of the San Fernando Mission coming up, Harold B. Maxwell, president of the museum association, suggested I visit Conover, “an extremely interesting man and gentle soul.”

I had a second agenda. Some readers may have noticed a daily feature dubbed “Valley 200,” a collection of mini-profiles of people who, for better or worse, have helped make the community what it is. The editor in charge has assembled a master list of more than 200 possibilities; I figured Conover could add a few.

Soon Conover was showing me around the James L. Dodson Museum, named after the first teacher hired for Valley College and a leader of the Valley historic association. The building itself, he explained, was the first office and residence of Valley College’s founding president in 1949. Conover pointed out the mail slots for the president and Dodson.

Conover had prepared a short list of names and told some stories, like the one about visiting the Great Wall of China, where “somebody asked me about the Great Wall of Los Angeles.”

Conover had an answer, even though most Angelenos may not be familiar with Judith Baca’s mural along the west wall of the Tujunga Wash flood channel depicting local history. Was Baca, he wondered, on our list? She wasn’t.

“She was a little bit radical,” Conover said. He laughed. Being radical can be fine, Conover suggested, smiling, “If you play it well.”

He mentioned other names, told other stories. Amelia Earhart was already famous when she and her husband moved to Toluca Lake. Decades after her disappearance in the South Pacific, Conover says, her personal secretary told him she had indeed been on a spy mission for the U.S. government.

We talked as Conover provided a tour of the museum’s 10 rooms. Here were whale fossils that show that, some 2 million years ago, the Valley was an ocean floor. Here were stone artifacts of the Valley’s first human inhabitants and remnants of the Spanish and Mexican periods. Here were paintings, lithographs and photographs that show the Valley’s evolution from farmland to city.

One photo is of an early Van Nuys shopkeeper fishing in the annual flooding outside his store; another exhibits a carpet of snow that leaves Conover speculating that modern life--especially autos and asphalt--may have altered the climate a bit. In another room were tools from the Lankershim ranch as well as turn-of-the-century fashions.

Another room held a desk, typewriter and other items that once could be found in the home of William Paul Whitsett, one of the founders of Van Nuys.

Was Whitsett on our list? Conover wondered about that, aware that Whitsett, whose heirs have helped support the museum, is overshadowed in memory by Isaac Newton Van Nuys. One has a whole community named for him, the other just an avenue.

I looked up the Ws under “Historic Figures” and couldn’t find Whitsett. That, Conover said, would have to change. (He’ll be pleased to know I was in error; Whitsett was teamed with Van Nuys in the Vs. So even on the list, he was overshadowed.)

*

When the Valley College museum was established in 1974, Conover recalled, “we just had a little alcove in the library.”

A woman entered the front door and began to inspect the photographs. Four o’clock had already arrived. Closing time.

Austin Conover apologized and said if she’d just come back another weekday afternoon, between 1 and 4, he’d be delighted to show her around.

The invitation, it was clear, was open to anyone.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to Harris at the Times Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, CA 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com. Please include a phone number.