1890s Los Angeles. LAPL Digital Archives.

Ever eager to view our region’s current events through the prism of its off-the-wall history, Friday’s garbage post (below) got me thinking: How did Angelenos handle their refuse problems, say, a century or so ago?

As you might expect, the answer isn’t very pretty.

Ralph Shaffer, history professor emeritus at Cal Poly, Pomona, has written an interesting online book entitled Letters From the People, which paints a vivid picture of late-19th-Century Los Angeles through the citizenry’s letters to the L.A. Times. Encompassing everything from politics to the city’s growing dog-catching dilemmas, lo and behold, Letters From the People also includes an amusing chapter on public health, streets and sanitation.

After reading it, you may conclude our modern infrastructure of landfills, storm drains, and blue, black and green bins isn’t so bad after all.

An intriguing primer on American Spiritualism. (Photo: Amazon.com)

From time to time your humble blogger likes to share some of his library finds with Dateline>City of Angels visitors. This week I finished The Haunting of America, a fascinating look at our nation’s ongoing obsession with the paranormal, from the Salem Witch Trials to Harry Houdini’s attempts to unmask modern Spiritualism.

It’s a strangely perfect Independence Day recommendation: According to authors William J. Birnes and Joel Martin, alleged encounters with the Great Beyond have shaped American history more than any political science professor would ever care to admit.

For instance, while every schoolchild (excluding maybe those in the LAUSD) can recite the tragic legacy of the Salem Witch Trials, how many of us know the story of a late-night psychic vision that supposedly inspired a beleaguered George Washington to persevere at Valley Forge?

Or that prior to his presidency, Andrew Jackson personally witnessed phenomena surrounding Tennessee’s famous Bell Witch, one of the most bizarre demonic hauntings in U.S. history?

Or that President Lincoln and Mary Todd frequently welcomed a favorite clairvoyant into the White House for sittings and seances to not only contact their deceased son but to help advise Civil War strategy?

Indeed, by the late 19th Century, Spiritualism had so permeated American culture that leading scientists rushed to develop research methodologies to alternately prove or disprove the claims of an ever-increasing army of mediums, mesmerizers and psychic charlatans. These efforts continued into the early 20th Century. At his death in 1931, none other than Thomas Edison was rumored to be at work on a “spirit phone” designed to investigate communication with the dead.

For their part, the book’s authors are clear believers in the occult. Birnes is star of The History Channel’s UFO Hunters, while Martin is a well-known paranormal expert famous for exposing the Amityville Horror. Still, they’ve managed to turn out a moderately objective and even humorous tome presenting a mix of intriguing facts, little-known references and thoughtful speculation.

Whether you’re a supernatural devotee yourself, or an avowed skeptic scratching your head over how an otherwise enlightened society can fall for the “cold-reading” chicanery of Crossing Over’s John Edwards, The Haunting of America is a must-read primer on American Spiritualism.

Mark Twain. Wikipedia.

Well, do you? (Not that it’s a bad thing, especially if you are a woman.)

More importantly, which great writer do you emulate? Jane Austen? Homer? H.G. Wells?

Thanks to computer nerds with way too much time on their hands, the answers to these questions are just a few mouse clicks away.

Enter your blog URL (or any other) into the data cruncher at GenderAnalyzer.com, and it will quickly guess the author’s sex. Dateline>City of Angels garnered a 64% masculinity quotient, which your humble blogger is perfectly comfortable with since he’s not afraid to show his feminine side every now and then.

Even more interesting is oFaust.com, which compares your prose to 71 classic masterpieces by 21 famous authors to determine whose it most resembles. Here Dateline>City of Angels got a 17% match with Mark Twain (pictured.)

Incredible. As a junior in high school, my favorite class was “Laughter in Literature,” an elective dealing with American satire. Clemens was by far my best-loved humorist, probably due to his cynical streak. Course assignments included crafting our own parodies, and our teacher Ms. Rosencranz often remarked on how much my style echoed Twain’s.

I guess we writers really do retain all that stuff we learn in high school English.

Ms. Rosencranz would be so proud.

With the 1970s making their retro-glorious comeback, Dateline>City of Angels readers might want to check into the popular Foxfire book series that debuted during that decade.

I was reminded of these books while making my recent post about Grannie’s breadbox. As those who lived the 1970s will recall, “returning to nature” and “the basics” were prevalent themes back then, spurred by a tough economy and a burgeoning ecology movement. (You know the saying: “The more things ‘change’…”) Then, like now, there was a yearning for the “simple life” of earlier times, and the Foxfire books helped many Americans explore that fantasy.

The story behind these books is remarkable in itself. Starting about 1966, high school teacher Eliot Wigginton armed his students with notepads and tape recorders and sent them out to interview the denizens of the Southern Appalachians about traditional folk ways. The result was Foxfire Magazine, a student publication that Wigginton and his classes eventually compiled into an eight-book set from 1972 to 1984. (By 2004, the series had grown to 12 volumes with more than 9 million circulating copies.)

My dad was an avid fan of the initial series and, growing up, I also became absorbed by each new addition to his collection. Foxfire 1 dealt with hog dressing, log cabin building, mountain crafts and foods, “planting by the signs,” snake lore, hunting tales, faith healing, moonshining “and other affairs of plain living.” Later volumes would serve as equally eclectic guides to ghost tales, animal care, gardening, weaving, midwifing, home remedies, wagon and banjo making, blacksmithing and more.

Being a heritage-minded bunch, I think this blog’s readership would appreciate these books, which are captivating on so many levels. Wigginton’s students may have started out as amateur journalist-sociologists, but they quickly got caught up in the lives of their “hillbilly” interviewees. The books display a deep affection not just for the lost bits of Americana the kids discover, but for the old-timers whose oral histories they record. You sense that, somewhere along the line, the students came to understand themselves as custodians of dying but meaningful traditions, which they in turn felt compelled to pass along in honor of their mentors.

To me the books are timeless. Having recently borrowed them again from my Dad’s shelf, I’m once more struck by the stark contrasts they paint between urban and rural living one generation to the next. The people and customs we encounter in the Foxfire series are as removed from modern L.A. as you can get. Yet, incredibly, it wasn’t that long ago in our history that Angelenos lived a similar frontier life.

• Link: Foxfire on Amazon.

If you’re into the latest best sellers, head on over to the New York Times book reviews. If, on the other hand, you’re willing to check out reading material that’s a little more “dated,” you’ve come to the right place.

Once again, I’ve let this blog languish the past several weeks while indulging other pursuits — namely, frequent, intensive research trips to the library for the book I’m writing.

Soooo, here’s a brainstorm: Why not kill two birds with one stone and launch a new  blog feature sharing some of my more interesting book finds?

In this first installment, we take a look at Los Angeles: A Profile, by William Wilcox Robinson (1968, University of Oklahoma Press). The author should be a familiar name among Angeleno pop-culturists. A former vice president of the Title Insurance and Trust Co., Robinson (1891-1972) became a prolific Southland historian, churning out an incredible assortment of pamphlets, articles, essays, poems and books from the 1930s onward.

A Revealing Portrait…

Los Angeles: A Profile is not so much a history of the city as a series of revealing essays exploring the most salient features of the Angeleno dreamscape. Compact, breezy, and weighing in at a mere 138 pages, it can easily be tackled in a few sittings.

But don’t let the easy reading fool you. Every page is loaded with entertaining historical insight into a wide range of topics, from L.A.’s early development, to its Latin heritage, to the rise of its car and star cultures, to its flitting enthusiasm for the arts.

My favorite chapter (No. 10) scrutinizes Angeleno “myth-making,” surveying some of L.A.’s most enduring urban legends and the sense-of-place yearnings that fuel them. From the very outset, Robinson ties these yearnings to the city’s transient roots:

“The Los Angeles area, beset always by waves of newcomers, has produced its full share of myths. Its people prefer to accept and retell stories which seem good enough to be true, even if they are not.”

Uncanny… You’d almost think he was describing the modern L.A. blogosphere…

Anyway, without giving away the particulars, Robinson’s myth-busting includes popular fables surrounding the city’s founding, life during the Days of the Dons, a famous ghost tale, and the development and naming of places like San Pascual, Beverly Hills and Azusa. (Forget everything you thought you knew about this stuff…)

The Bottom Line…

Like so many of Robinson’s works, Los Angeles: A Profile exudes a playful affection for the City of Angels even while exploding cherished misconceptions. Amazingly, the author’s observations are as fresh today as they were four decades ago. All in all, visitors, transplants and natives alike will find this book a fun and essential backgrounder for “living the L.A. dream.”

Los Angeles: A Profile can be checked out from the LAPL or purchased from select Amazon.com sellers.

Amid all the usual tips for weekend getaways, this season’s hottest succulents and making your cramped living spaces look bigger, the latest issue of Sunset Magazine includes a curiously uncharacteristic fluff piece on “How to Live to 100.”

Announcing that “One hundred is the new 70,” the article purports to “uncover the secret to why people are living longer in the West, particularly in California, which has more centenarians that any other state.” Then, employing a rather unscientific methodology to answer this weighty question, the “Magazine of Western Living” interviews three Extreme Senior women, ages 99-102, about their lifestyles and interests. (Apparently no coherent men in that age bracket could be found.)

The conclusion? Westerners live longer, healthier lives because we enjoy the sun and relaxation, eat fresh-picked fruits and vegetables, do a lot of hiking and visiting day spas, and quaff plenty of Pinot Noir.

Oh yeah… and we garden, too.

Really.

Catching up on my web browsing, I see that the Big Orange Landmarks blog recently got to the Shakespeare Bridge in the Franklin Hills neighborhood, managing to attract the attention of a Los Angeles Times literary blog in the process.

Kudos to Big Orange’s blogger, who writes under the pseudonym Floyd B. Bariscale! Whoever he is, I really enjoy his one-by-one visits to L.A.’s long series of designated historical-cultural landmarks. (Even more, I admire his ability to simply get out, explore and photograph them on a regular basis.)

In regards to the bridge (which I happen to enjoy crossing each morning during my daily “coffee runs” to Los Feliz), Bariscale notes that the origins of its Shakespearian moniker remain a mystery…

Oh. And the reason it’s called Shakespeare Bridge? You got me. But, then again, what’s in a name? That which we call a road by any other name would still be a street.

Like everyone else in this part of town, I have my own personal theory on the name, which I can’t really prove, but which probably makes as much sense as any other.

When I was growing up in the San Gabriel Valley, people often called old 1920s “Storybook” homes “Shakespearian Architecture.” It wasn’t an “official” architectural term, but rather more of a popular colloquialism here in Southern California. The Franklin Bridge, of course, exhibits strong Storybook cues, and after it was built locals probably applied the colloquialism to it as a sort of shorthand reference. Eventually it stuck as a permanent name.

If this proposed nexus seems a little far-fetched, a quick Google on the topic reveals this article, which makes a similar connection between the terms for a home in the Vancouver region.

Incidentally, I can’t help but also smell a Disney connection to the “Shakespeare Bridge” and Storybook architecture in general. Seems that Uncle Walt actually lived in a modest Storybook house just a few blocks from the bridge. Meanwhile, just a stone throw away in Atwater, you’ll find the Tam O’Shanter, a Storybook-style restaurant that reportedly was a favorite hangout for Disney employees, who worked in Walt’s original studio along Hyperion Avenue in Silver Lake.

The Storybook style was fairly ubiquitous in early Silver Lake (which back then included the Franklin Hills district). The architecture, of course, was also a prominent feature in the settings and backgrounds of many early Disney cartoons. How much Silver Lake’s fanciful homes inspired Disney animators (or vice versa) is anyone’s guess, but I’d venture a no-brainer that the influence was significant.

I must be the only writer in L.A. without a script in the oven. I say this, because whenever I tell people what I do at a party or cocktail gathering, they instantly light up with questions about my TV and movie credits.

Upon explaining that I’m not a script writer — that my work is mainly PR and magazine features — I start to lose them. When I add that my most recent work has been for an off-road trade journal, their eyes really glaze over. After all, how relevant can that be to most people’s lives?

Judge for yourself: Marketable Trends is my latest piece for Off-Road Business Magazine, appearing in this month’s issue. Even if you aren’t a Jeeper, Baja racer or dune buggy enthusiast, you may find it interesting. As automakers step up their manufacturing of products and parts for this segment, more and more mainstream American companies are injecting “off-road lifestyle” imagery into their advertising and marketing campaigns. Plus, an increasing number of tourist destinations are courting off-highway vehicle users to give their local economies a boost. Once reserved for hardcore outdoor adventurers, this unique form of motorsports (along with the money fueling it) is definitely on the rise.

L.A.’s love affair with the automobile has left a special mark on the Southland: a massive tangle of streets bearing iconic names. Some are wistfully romantic-sounding, others obviously named for historic figures or events. But more often than not for us modern-day commuters, the monikers are merely puzzling signposts to a forgotten past.

If you’ve ever wondered about the history behind your neighborhood route, click on over to KPCC’s Street Stories Blog. I ran across the site entirely by accident the other day and found myself quickly engulfed. KPCC Radio (89.3 FM) reporter Kitty Felde has amassed quite a collection of quirky tidbits about SoCal’s many roadways — a collection that continues to grow.

History buffs will especially appreciate reading/listening to the “When the Streets Had No Names” and “Long and Winding Roads” features at the top of the page. Plus, you can even suggest your own avenues for investigation via the blog’s comment section. Consider it a pleasant drive down Memory Lane.