57A. NEWMARK, Harris. Sixty Years in Southern California 1853-1913.... Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company; Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1930. xxxv [1] 744 pp., frontispiece portrait, numerous plates. 8vo, original red cloth, gilt-lettered spine, t.e.g. Spine a bit light, else very fine, mostly unopened.
          Third and best edition, greatly enlarged. Howes N123. Norris 2845. Rocq 3223. Zamorano 80 #57 (J. Gregg Layne): “All three editions have a wealth of illustrations and many scarce portraits of early pioneers.” Charles F. Lummis wrote the foreword.           ($40-80)

Newmark’s book has won praise as one of the most important sources of information concerning the development of Los Angeles and its environs in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Charles Lummis, that colorful and flamboyant interpreter of California and the Southwest, called Newmark’s encyclopedic memoir “the Pepys Diary of Los Angeles.” Densely packed with facts and anecdotes, the charm of this massive volume is its frankness, simplicity, and humor. In the introduction to the fourth edition, community historian W. W. Robinson wrote, “It is a very personal and unique account of a dusty, muddy, adobe village emerging from pueblo days and of young city rising in strength.”
          While the title features sixty years, this recollection is primarily devoted to the first three decades of Newmark’s residence in the City of Angels. The opening chapters can be likened to a Wild West novel. When his stage roared into town in 1853, his Prussian jaw must have dropped upon seeing a gang of drunken field hands wandering about on the Sabbath. He then proceeded to note the abundance of saloons and gambling houses and their fascinating customers. He remarked, “Human life at this period was about the cheapest thing in Los Angeles, and killings were frequent.” Conditions, as Newmark chronicled, eventually calmed down as solid institutions and citizens took hold. His memoir proceeded to cover seemingly every major event and personality including horse races, amusements of all kinds, duels, sheriffs, entrepreneurs, railroads, marriages, Civil War, the infamous Chinese massacre, capture of Tiburcio Vásquez, boom of the 1880s, and the state division controversy. Newmark himself emerges as a prosperous businessman, real estate mogul, and civic leader.
          Newmark, after some prodding from local historian and promoter Charles Dwight Willard, began putting together this recollection in 1913. His two sons, Maurice and Marco, hammered their father’s notes into a manageable form but then obtained professional help by securing the services of Pasadena scholar and historian Dr. Perry Worden. Three years later, after painstaking fact checking and plowing though old newspapers, Dr. Worden had molded the pioneer’s thoughts into a coherent and highly readable book. Upon publication, Sixty Years in Southern California generated such intense interest that the first edition of 1,000 copies quickly sold out. In response, a second edition with additional material came out in 1926, and four years later a third edition of 2,000 copies rolled off the presses. In 1970, the doyen of Los Angeles booksellers, Jake Zeitlin, produced a revised edition of 1,250 copies under the imprint of Zeitlin & Ver Brugge. As all these editions attest, any city would be most fortunate to have such a personalized, straightforward memoir of its past.

——Gary F. Kurutz

Additional sources consulted: Biographical Files, California State Library; Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913 (Los Angeles: Zeitlin & Ver Brugge, 1970); Franklin Walker, A Literary History of Southern California (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1950), pp. 61-63.