Archivist Follows Her Star and Finds a Rich History

A smile -- one that is both proud and mischievous -- crosses her lips as she proudly proclaims herself a “Mormon Jew.”

Behind Hynda Rudd’s desk in her Glendale home hangs a picture of a frontier rabbi she calls her “patron saint.” Although he died more than two decades before she was born, this man’s passion for politics and religion not only piqued her interest but also led her on a treasure hunt for documents to learn more about him.

His paper trail led her from Salt Lake City, where she was born and raised, to Los Angeles and propelled her into a career as the first official custodian of Los Angeles’ historical records.

Rudd, 69, retired nearly four years ago as the city’s first archivist and records management officer after more than 20 years on the job. The city has always been populated by fascinating characters, as she learned, but she never stopped researching the man who captured her scholar’s interest: Herman Silver, for whom the Silver Lake community and reservoir are named.

“Educated men turn me on,” Rudd said. “But Silver was more than educated: He was handsome, charismatic -- a man for all seasons.”

She was 21 -- married and the mother of two, attending the University of Utah in Salt Lake City -- when she decided to rediscover her Jewish roots in her Mormon-dominated native state. It happened when she “flunked royally” a test on which she confused Old Testament figures Moses and Abraham. “I always got those two mixed up,” she said.

Classes on historical furniture and design led her down the history path and allowed her to focus on Jewish culture, exploring Judaism as more than a religion. It was within that cultural context, she said, that she began to discover her spiritual self and find her lifelong hero.

She first ran across his name in the 1970s while completing her master’s thesis on “Jews of the Intermountain West.”

“Most people who migrated west were peddlers, miners or pioneers looking to find a new life,” she said. “Herman was different. He appeared to be politically, intellectually and economically savvy, besides well-connected.”

He was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1831, one of six children. A sickly boy, he often had to miss school, so he passed the time reading books from the family library and becoming proficient in Hebrew.

In 1844, on the advice of the family doctor, Silver was sent alone to the United States. He was just 13 but, at 6 feet tall, he stood out among the passengers. He caught the eye of a Spanish-born Catholic priest, Father Gerard, from Montreal, Canada.

Silver taught the priest Hebrew and the priest taught him English. When the ship docked, Silver accompanied Gerard to Canada and studied under him for several years. They became lifelong friends.

In the 1850s, after working and traveling throughout the East Coast, Silver settled in Ottawa, Ill., where he met his future wife, Eliza Post, when he retrieved a letter that had blown out of her gloved hand.

Silver joined John C. Fremont’s grass-roots party, the Free Soilers, whose slogan called for “free soil, free speech, free labor and free men.” The party was absorbed into the newly formed Republican Party around 1854.

Silver campaigned for Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and won appointment as a government land assessor during the Civil War. He also recruited volunteer regiments for the Union, receiving a commendation for valor and services “off the field.” After the war, he studied law and opened a law practice in Illinois.

Rudd lost Silver’s trail in the early 1870s but picked it up again in 1874, when he was appointed director of the U.S. Mint in Denver. For a time, he was also managing editor of the Denver Tribune and a lay rabbi.

By the 1970s, Rudd was divorced; her two children were grown and she had no reason to stay in Utah. A daughter was attending art school in Los Angeles, and the last newspaper story Rudd had seen on Silver mentioned his going to L.A. She headed west too.

Silver had moved to Los Angeles in the 1880s, both for his health and for a job with the Santa Fe Railroad. Soon, he and a partner had built a double-track railway from downtown to Boyle Heights. That got his name in the papers -- and made him easier for Rudd to track.

She enrolled at USC’s School of Library Science and continued her search for Silver at City Hall.

“July 5, 1979, was the most fateful day in my life, when I marched into the city clerk’s office, expecting to find the city records so pristine,” she said. “I was bowled over by the mess.”

The mess extended to 150-year-old original minutes of City Council meetings, piled on the floor of a dank and dusty room. She complained about the conditions and was offered the job of cleaning it up -- and becoming the city’s first archivist.

In the minutes of meetings, she found Herman Silver’s name as president of the Los Angeles City Council. He became more than a historical figure to her; he became a real presence.

“I felt that by reading the minute-book accounts of his terms in office and seeing his signature as president, I could sense and feel his presence as a living human being,” she said. “It meant more to me than I can put in words -- even to this day.”

After four years and two terms as president of the City Council, Silver ran for mayor in 1900 against Meredith Pinxton “Pinkie” Snyder. Silver, who campaigned against vice, liquor and municipal ownership of the waterworks, lost by more than 3,000 votes out of more than 17,000 cast.

In 1902, Silver was appointed to the city’s first Board of Water Commissioners and elected its president. Two years later, Gov. George Pardee appointed him to the state banking commission.

In 1906, a reservoir was named in Silver’s honor -- Silver Lake Reservoir. (The lake’s name has nothing to do with its argentine reflection.)

The next year, Silver made the news again -- with a mystery. On March 31, 1907, someone abandoned a baby boy on his doorstep. The infant was wrapped in an expensive blanket and wore new clothes. A bottle of milk and a jar of baby food were nearby. Silver and his wife, both in their 70s, apparently didn’t hear the crying baby, who was discovered by a neighbor.

Investigators searched for a woman and young girl seen with a bundle on Magnolia Avenue in Westlake, where Silver lived, according to a newspaper account. But no follow-up stories reported whether they were found or what happened to the doorstep baby.

The Silvers had two grown children (whom Rudd has been unable to track).

Silver Lake Boulevard bore Silver’s name too. But by 1931, according to city records, its name had become Silverlake Boulevard. Today, it’s again Silver Lake Boulevard.

Before Silver died in 1913, at 82, he watched his namesake community become a movie center and birthplace of the Keystone Kops. Producer William Selig opened a studio at the eastern side of the lake in 1910. Half a dozen or so other studios, including those of Mack Sennett, D.W. Griffith and Tom Mix, also clustered around the reservoir.

From the early 1930s to the 1950s, Silver Lake was an architectural center. Rudolf Schindler, John Lautner and Richard Neutra, among others, used the hilly lakeside setting as a showcase for new designs.

But it’s Herman Silver and the government he served that enchants Rudd to this day. She came up with the idea for a book that would tell the story of the city’s government. In a more than six-year effort, she recruited more than two dozen scholars and authors to write chapters of “The Development of Los Angeles City Government: An Institutional Memory 1850-2000,” which will be published next year.

“The government deserves to have its true story told,” she said. “And the truth is all here in the archives.”

Rudd’s research on Silver has even shaped her spirituality. She attends temple occasionally and explores her Jewish heritage.

Finding Silver, she says, “was bashert,” a Yiddish word meaning fate or soul mate.