From Angeleno to Zoot Suit

The late Jack Smith once wrote that Easterners seem to believe that the city of Los Angeles didn’t exist until a megaphone-wielding Cecil B. DeMille ordered its creation on a movie set one day in the 1920s.

“Los Angeles” and “history,” in other words, sort of go together like “Boston” and “surfing.”

But L.A. does have a past, as Dale and Leonard Pitt make clear in their new, deftly written 603-page reference work, “Los Angeles A to Z--an Encyclopedia of the City and County” (University of California Press).

And it’s a past that often sounds remarkably similar to the present:

* Explorer Juan Cabrillo noting smoky skies in the Southland more than 450 years ago. . . .

* The controversy over immigration 150 years ago (immigration by white settlers). . . .

* The first two media-christened “Trials of the Century”--the murder cases of the McNamara Brothers 85 years ago and of Fatty Arbuckle 75 years ago. . . .

But, in other ways, few cities have changed as much as Los Angeles since its days as a dusty little pueblo in the 19th century.

“There’s history here--rapid history,” said Dale Pitt, a playwright, who is married to Leonard, a visiting history professor at UCLA.

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While comics joked that Azusa means everything from A to Z in the USA, it is more likely an Indian word translated variously as “grandmother” or “skunk-place.” (Page 33)

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The authors have tried to fit as much of that history as possible into the volume, with entries ranging from “Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem,” “Black Dahlia” and “Crips and Bloods,” to “Little Landers” (an early-century Utopian movement of farmers in Tujunga), “Mann, Thomas,” “Parrots, Amazonian,” “Spielberg, Steven” and “Zoot Suit Riots.”

Sports fans will be intrigued to discover that L.A. once had two pro football teams (“Los Angeles Raiders,” “Los Angeles Rams”). There are profiles of L.A. County’s cities and communities (“Seventy suburbs in search of a city” is an outdated description of L.A.--the number would now be well more than 100).

There are even biographies (blessedly brief) of all the current L.A. City Council members.

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Los Angeles Mayor Charles Sebastian was forced to resign in 1916 when the Los Angeles Record published letters written to his mistress in which he referred to his wife as “the Old Haybag.” (Page 460)

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How did the authors come up with the idea of containing L.A.’s urban sprawl--geographic, historic, ethnic and cultural--in one book?

Well, for one thing, in this city that so often talks of sequels and remakes and reruns, the Pitts found that no one else had published an L.A. encyclopedia.

“We would talk to librarians and they would be annoyed that there was no one reference work,” Leonard Pitt said. “They would say, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were a handy guide when people came in asking questions about, say, Highland Park.’ ”

Then, too, he found in his classes that few students knew much about the City of Angels. He first conceived of the book as an almanac, “but Dale persuaded me that that would be too dry and dull.”

“We decided to do an encyclopedia that would have narrative, discuss interesting parts of L.A. and its people,” Dale Pitt said. “We have an educational achievement section because we think that area deserves as much recognition as sports teams do.”

The section lists the coach (Phil Chase) and members of the 1995 Marshall High team who won the national academic decathlon.

The encyclopedia took six years to write and the authors have striven to make it timely. Yes, “Los Angeles A to Z” mentions O.J.’s criminal and civil trials.

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The 1884 Stevenson map of Los Angeles situated “West Los Angeles” near the site of the future University of Southern California and Exposition Park. (Page 541)

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The encyclopedia also gave the authors an opportunity to focus on the contributions of minority groups, so often ignored in early histories of the region. Of the 44 settlers who founded L.A. in 1781, 26 were of black or mixed ancestry.

L.A.’s Indian heritage is discussed. And there are profiles of such varied personages as ex-slave-turned-businesswoman Biddy Mason, Mexican-born journalist Ruben Salazar and Frederick Hsieh, the Realtor whose ads in Hong Kong newspapers in the mid-1970s persuaded residents to move to the “Chinese Beverly Hills”--Monterey Park.

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Joseph Chapman, who became the first American resident in L.A. in 1818, was a pirate. (Page 86)

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“Los Angeles A to Z” has a scholarly tone--”A to Z” doesn’t mean Angelyne to Zsa Zsa--with rare historic photos, charts and maps. But it is not your standard encyclopedia either.

Boxed quotations sprinkled at random throughout the volume act as a sort of Greek chorus, reminding the reader that not everybody takes L.A. so seriously, whatever its impact on world events.

There are some familiar jabs--”City of Dreadful Joy” (Aldous Huxley), “stank of orange blossoms” (H.L. Mencken), “the ultimate segregation of the unfit” (Bertrand Russell).

And there are some colorful, not-so-familiar characterizations of L.A., such as this one from performance artist Ann Magnuson: “Cheap pedicures, perpetual sun, guilt-free careerism, seeing Vincent Price at the 7-Eleven, having a backyard, no cockroaches, true love and Disneyland. Every day is like Saturday.”

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L.A.’s noisy bands of parrots are believed to date back at least to 1913 when Lucky Baldwin set some birds loose on his Arcadia estate. Other birds were said to have been set free from aviaries in 1961 as the Bel-Air fire approached. (Page 384)

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The Pitts acknowledge that derision from outsiders is a thread that runs through much of L.A.’s history.

“Historian Carey McWilliams traced this to the early 1900s when Easterners came here and couldn’t get a glass of wine with their dinner in restaurants,” Leonard Pitt said. “L.A., with its Midwestern roots, was a pretty conservative place.”

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Legend has it that the 104-year-old Bradbury Building downtown was designed by “a $5-a-week untrained draftsman [who] was inspired to take the job after receiving a message on a Ouija board.” (Page 57)

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Later, the motion picture industry would become a metaphor, in the minds of some, for L.A.’s lack of substance (“Strip away the phony tinsel in Hollywood and you’ll find the real tinsel underneath”--Oscar Levant).

“To this day,” Dale Pitt said, “some people still think L.A. is shallow, not cultural, and hedonistic, when actually it is the No. 1 buyer of books in the country. Not New York--L.A.”

Apart from the quotes sprinkled throughout, the book offers some distinctively L.A. categories that can’t be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

There’s a section on “Chinatown” (the neighborhood) and “Chinatown” (the movie). “Freeways” and “Freeway Sound Walls.” And, of course, “Murder Cases.”

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Marilyn Monroe was born in the charity ward of L.A. General Hospital in 1926. In a meeting of two generations of L.A. celebrities, she was baptized by evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in the Foursquare Gospel Church in Echo Park. (Page 330)

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The “Murder Cases” section covers such characters as Otto Sanhuber, who lived in his married lover’s attic for more than a decade before emerging to kill her husband; Clara Phillips, whose ferocious claw-hammer attack on her husband’s lover earned her the sobriquet Tiger Woman; the McNamara Brothers, who bombed the Times Building in 1910, killing 20 employees; and Clarence “Fatty” Arbuckle, who was found not guilty of killing a young actress at a party, though the publicity ruined his career.

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Henry Huntington, who developed Southern California’s Red Car and Yellow Car rapid transit system early this century, inherited his fortune from his uncle, Collis. He also married Uncle Collis’ widow, Arabella. (Page 215)

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It might surprise some that writing an encyclopedia about L.A. has not soured the authors on this city.

“When you think about the diversity of the people here--people from more than 140 countries--the 80 different languages spoken in the schools, the talk you hear about how bad race relations are, I’m actually amazed at how well people get along here,” Dale Pitt said.

Maybe some were listening when Rodney King said, “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?” (Page 415).

Others, perhaps, view L.A. the way Raymond Chandler did Tinseltown: “Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn’t like it is either crazy or sober.” (Page 316).