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It's the day lots of adults look forward to, and lots of kids dread. After a summer of fun, it's time to start setting that alarm again, shop for supplies, and go back to school!
Long before Divine, Charles Pierce, Craig Russell, Jim Bailey, or any contestant on ‘Drag Race’ brought the art of drag performance to mainstream audiences, there was Julian Eltinge.
And now, a bit of real life noir compliments of the photo collection of the Los Angeles Public Library and the real lives of two L.A. femme fatales – the Black Widow and the Vice Queen.
At some point in 1889 the president and (later) chairman of the board of the Farmers and Merchants National Bank of Los Angeles, Jackson A. Graves, decided that his Alhambra residence simply wasn’t as relaxing for his family as he would like.
Born in Louisiana in 1922, Rolland J. Curtis came to Los Angeles with his wife in 1946 after serving in the Marines during WWII.
Former City Librarian Charles F. Lummis approached the Library Board of Directors in October of 1905 and recommended that a system of collecting autographs be put in place:
Cinco de Mayo is a holiday commemorating just one event: The Battle of Puebla, which was a day of victory for the Mexican army against the French in 1862. Over 150 years later, people still mistake the holiday for Mexican Independence Day which is September 16.
In the spring of 1942, the City of Los Angeles experienced a population exodus triggered by a presidential executive order. Images in the Los Angeles Public Library's Herald Examiner Collection and Shades of L.A.
"It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper.
“Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.”
—Trees by Joyce Kilmer