One Man’s Passion: All the News That Is Fit to Collect

PRESIDENT LINCOLN ASSASSINATED.

Sure, we learned about it in grade school, but Richard M. Robinson can read about it in the April 15, 1865, Daily Reveille, a military newspaper from Washington, D.C.

The paper, which he bought for about $25 in 1965, is a one-page “broadside” that was tacked on a post outside an Army hospital after Lincoln was shot. Only one other copy is known to exist; it’s in the Library of Congress.

Robinson’s collection of several hundred thousand papers extends from the 17th century to 1974, when President Nixon resigned. Leafing through it is like touching history: the Hindenburg. Babe Ruth’s 60th home run. The Wright brothers. Jack the Ripper. The San Francisco earthquake. Pearl Harbor. The Titanic sinks -- or, in early reports, floats, saving all passengers.

“There’s 25 times more enjoyment in collecting newspapers than stamps or coins,” Robinson, 69, said in an interview.

Others may be content to read the virtual paper on a computer screen, but Robinson likes to feel the texture of history. He roams through pages made from rags, linen or bulky wood pulp. “You can actually feel the imprint of each letter, like Braille,” he said.

Controversy spices up his hobby too. Take the Sept. 2, 1909, headline in The Times: explorer Frederick “Cook’s Own Story of Finding [North] Pole” on April 21, 1908. Five days later, Sept. 7, explorer Robert Peary proclaimed that he found the North Pole on April 6, 1909; he denounced Cook’s claim as bogus. The controversy followed Cook and Peary to their graves.

Robinson’s collection includes the 1665 Oxford Gazette, the oldest recognized continuously printed newspaper in the world. The newspaper was created at King Charles’ request when he left London for Oxford castle to avoid the Black Plague. When he returned, he changed its name to the London Gazette. Today, the paper and its counterparts in Edinburgh and Belfast are the official newspapers of record in the United Kingdom.

His hobby is as rare as some of the newspapers he has stashed in warehouses around downtown Los Angeles. There are only a few hundred serious collectors in the nation, and only two or three in Southern California, Robinson said. “People don’t like the bulk.”

Neither do libraries, which have been “de-accessioning” newspapers for decades, computerizing and recording the pages on microfiche.

Among Robinson’s most valuable acquisitions is the Pasadena Daily News of April 15, 1912 -- the day the Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg. The headline proclaims: “Titanic Floats, All Saved.” The story says the ship was being towed to port and continues: “The Titanic’s prow was shattered ... but the watertight compartments automatically closed, and with the pumps working well, the crew managed to keep the vessel afloat.”

In fact, the Titanic sank within three hours, taking more than 1,500 people with it. Robinson bought the edition in 1970 for $3; he says it’s worth about $800 today.

He owns an April 18, 1906, edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, the day of the great earthquake and fire. But there’s no mention of the catastrophe: The paper was printed and put on a train an hour before the temblor. The banner headline is about Italian tenor Enrico Caruso singing at the opera house. The Chronicle’s building was destroyed, and the issue became known as the “ghost edition.”

Robinson started collecting newspapers at age 12. Born in Los Angeles in 1937, he grew up on Walden Drive in Beverly Hills. From his home in 1946, he watched Howard Hughes’ struggling plane fly overhead before crashing two blocks away. Three years later, when he ran across a copy of a newspaper about that event at a bookstore, he bought it for 20 cents.

That same year, 1949, he went looking for news stories of the 1947 chemical blast at the O’Connor Electro-Plating Co., which he’d felt and heard about 15 miles away. He wanted to know the details of how it destroyed a four-block area near downtown, killing 17 and injuring 150.

His appetite for news also had something to do with his environment. Although his father was a dermatologist, his uncle -- whom Robinson prefers not to identify -- was a mobster.

At age 9, Robinson rubbed elbows with the notorious but impeccably polite gangsters Mickey Cohen and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Siegel’s younger brother, Maurice, was the Robinson family physician.

Robinson’s uncle ran the slot and pinball machine section of the syndicate, he said. “He had a secret phone in a closet, secret compartments in his den and muscular Doberman pinschers guarding his house on Beverly Glen Drive.”

When Siegel was gunned down at his girlfriend’s mansion in 1947, Robinson’s relatives refused to discuss it. In his zeal to know more, he bought newspapers that carried the story.

Robinson graduated from Cal State L.A. with a degree in history and an interest in mechanics and hot-rod racing. He eventually became an auto parts executive.

But in 1950 he wrote a college thesis about the moment when newspapers lost their primacy in delivering the news: 1931, he says, when readers could plug in a reliably powered radio.

Robinson became a scavenger of history. Beginning in 1959, he would come to The Times and look through old issues dating to 1913. “They let me have whatever I wanted before they turned them over for scrap,” he said.

For months, “I spent every Saturday and Sunday going through old papers looking for key dates, such as March 5, 1933, the inauguration of FDR.”

He eventually took more than 10,000 papers from The Times and saved them in his personal archives. The Times now calls him when it needs an old issue.

It isn’t just the news stories that attract him. Robinson gets a kick out of reading the ads too.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, he said, The Times published advertising supplements selling whole life and accident insurance. “The ad shows a house with a black ribbon around the door and a man with an armband, to simulate he was in mourning, and saying something to the effect that he was sure glad he took advantage of Times insurance.”

Other nuggets from his collection include:

* Beginning in 1917, a drawing of a black cat appeared on top of the front page of The Times’ midnight edition. In 1921, it was changed to a white cat.

* An 1882 headline in the New York Tribune reads: “Jumbo Safe on Shore.” On the back page is an announcement for the P.T. Barnum Circus. “It was the first pachyderm to come to the Western Hemisphere,” Robinson said.

* In the 19th century, Robinson said, William Randolph Hearst’s papers included ads for prostitutes, listed under the heading “Massage Treatments.”

* During the Spanish American War in 1898, a Times story notes how a drunk Valentine Short lurched down the street waving an American flag on a pole. When he pushed it through the shuttered window of Stella Clark, a prostitute occupying a “crib” on Alameda Street, she grabbed it. He pulled out his pistol and fired five shots from close range -- missing her each time.

“It happened at 2 a.m.,” Robinson said. “And not only was a reporter there or nearby to witness the incident, but the story made the morning edition of the paper.”

Robinson’s collection has a past, but what of its future? So far, he’s been unable to find a reputable person or institution willing to take it off his hands and keep it safe.

“I’ve spent 50 years putting this collection together and I don’t want to see it sold off piecemeal after I’m gone,” he said. “I hope someone in their 20s or 30s, with financial support and the space, will take it over and preserve it for posterity.”

cecilia.rasmussen@latimes.com