 Hi, everybody. I'm Ginny Steele, the Norman and Armina Powell University librarian at UCLA here to welcome you to this year's 2021 celebration of the Powell Society. As I begin, I'd like to acknowledge the UCLA library's presence on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Gabrielino Tongva peoples. Today, as we gather for our remote Powell Society celebration, the library has a lot to be thankful for. Over the course of this year, one that has been truly unprecedented in my 40 year career as a librarian, small acts of care and larger innovations across the library were equally significant. Your generous gifts and partnership are a large part of what kept us going. Looking back, the date March 10 holds particular significance. On that day, UCLA officially announced it would cancel most in person classes and campus gatherings. That triggered the library's inevitable eventual decision to cancel our 2020 Powell Society event, which had been scheduled for March 25. We had been looking forward to welcoming all of you to campus. Our librarians and staff had been adding the finishing touches to programming that they were so eager to share with you at stations around the library. The presentation topics included 3D printing for research and teaching, preservation and curation of endangered archival materials, oral history, machine learning, and a sneak peek of our newly renovated main gallery and its inaugural exhibition. Having to cancel this annual celebration marked a reality shift for me and for many others at the library, and it signaled that everything was about to change. So over the course of the past 379 days, not that we're counting, the UCLA library has navigated the pandemic, guided by the core principles of our mission to take a lead in making knowledge accessible, preserving cultural heritage and building a library of the future, whether on campus or online. Access to library services and materials drives the world class research groundbreaking discoveries and innovation for which UCLA is renowned as the campus transition to remote learning and shuttered our physical library locations. We have worked hard over the past year to continue to make knowledge accessible to our communities. Donor support has enabled the library to be responsive to the needs of thousands of students and faculty, no matter their location. And now some numbers for you as of mid March, we have made available digitize millions of digitized volumes from our collections. We've acquired more than 100,000 new digital items. We've answered more than 12,000 reference questions, fulfilled nearly 1500 digitization requests and hosted more than 700 virtual workshops, online tutorials and integrated instruction sessions for close to 20,000 attendees. But perhaps the most jaw dropping statistic is this one. Since March 10, 2020 UCLA library website visits are up by 482% and connections to off campus online library services have increased by 432%. We've also seen an increase in visits to our unique digital collections from the library archives by 42%. In the earliest days of the pandemic, keeping our students connected to their virtual classrooms was among our top priorities. Faculty were sharing stories of inequity. We learned for instance of a student who had to drive and sit in the parking lot of a Burger King to take class, because there was no internet connection at home. In response, the library has provided long term loans of more than 2000 wifi hotspots, laptops and other technology through our campus instructional computing commons, also known as click. With donor support, the library has steadily worked over more than the past decade to digitize millions of volumes of our physical print collections, add unique digital collections and form strategic partnerships. We're now truly seeing the benefits of this strategy as the library has been able to help ensure the continuity of UCLA's teaching and research missions. In April, how do you trust a consortium of academic libraries of which we are a founding member began providing emergency access to digitized versions of volumes held by the University of California libraries. What that means is that our students and researchers have had access to almost half the library's print collections, more than 5.2 million volumes for the duration of the pandemic. In early July, the library kicked off a digitization on request service which scanned and delivered published book chapters and journal articles via an email link. In August, we added a shipping service for books and monographs, and then in October we launched a new pickup service for circulating materials from our general stacks. All told, we've processed nearly 5000 requests across these three new services. The UCLA film and television archive now part of the library launched a virtual screening room offering programs of rare content for free online programs have included fruitful partnerships with academic units and faculty across campus, including the Asian American study center, the black feminist initiative in the school of theater film and television, and the Chicano studies research center screenings have seen robust attendance attracting a significant number of first time patrons and people from around the world. There is planning seeds of hope for the future by transforming spaces in our physical libraries. When UCLA fully reopens, the library will activate a new distinctive collections teaching space in the Charles E young research library. The purpose built space will quadruple the number of students from 15 to 60, who will be able to work directly with librarians during instruction sessions, featuring our rarest and most unique holdings. Mobile seating design for the space will encourage active hands on and collaborative work in a flipped classroom setting and flexible leading edge technologies will enable asynchronous and hybrid learning experiences. We anticipate robust use of this new space. Students have shared with us that visiting the library to handle rare materials has changed the way they conduct research and faculty have told us that working with primary source materials drawn from our own distinctive collections provides invaluable opportunities for students to explore and arrive at their own conclusions. In the science and engineering library of refreshed interior and new furniture will elevate a space dedicated to a learner led design program created for STEM undergraduates who need help bridging gaps in their education. This empathetic teaching and learning model centers peer to peer education where teaching sessions and materials are created for students by students. We're excited to share these new spaces with our students faculty and other researchers and are deeply grateful for your support in bringing them to life. Guided by our mission, the UCLA library has provided stability to the campus community by responding to the needs of our students faculty and researchers under difficult circumstances. At the same time, the past year drew our focus even more to several key needs. One is digitization and preservation of materials to expand access, including library special collections and the film and television archive. Our student workers while students aren't on campus that meant they also weren't available to staff our new digitization shipping and pickup services. We may need to expand our student workforce to staff these new services once more people return to campus. The pivotal role librarians and staff play in teaching research and cultural heritage preservation is essential, even though funding continues to diminish. Further we have an urgent need to lead with equity diversity and inclusion in all we do. The library has formed an anti racism initiative to expand representation in our collections as well as collection description and access and to root out and dismantle structural racism across our entire operation. We have also had a national and international impact on correcting how materials are described to accurately reflect historical facts. A UCLA initiated initiated proposal prompted the Library of Congress to amend a subject heading from Armenian massacre to Armenian genocide. This resulted in international attention for the library when it was successfully implemented last fall. The library is now working to suppress and replace other terms. For example, amending the term illegal aliens to undocumented undocumented immigrants. As the campus begins to responsibly reopen in accordance with Los Angeles County Department of Public Health guidelines, study spaces on the main floor and a level of the Charles E young research library are now available for up to 162 Bruins per day by reservation. Meanwhile, the library leadership is looking at innovations from the COVID period that makes sense for us to keep our digitization mail and pick up services may effectively stretch our resources. As we go about our work in the coming weeks, months and years, it's our partnership with dedicated donors like you, who value the pursuit of knowledge and what it can add to everyone's lives that makes all the difference. On behalf of the UCLA library, I thank you for your support during this unprecedented year. Now I have the distinct pleasure of introducing our special guests this evening who I am sure will knock it out of the park. Eric Nussbaum is the author of stealing home Los Angeles, the Dodgers and the lives caught in between. Eric is a writer and former editor advice. His work has appeared in sports illustrated ESPN, the magazine, the Daily Beast, dead spin, and the best American sports writing anthology, born and raised in Los Angeles. Eric is a lifelong Dodger fan stealing home shares the complicated history of Dodger Stadium, and is a story about baseball family, the American dream, and the fight to turn Los Angeles into a big league city. Please join me in welcoming Eric. Thank you. This is this wonderful to be here. I'm going to, I'm Eric, I'm going to talk a little bit about about the book about my research practices and about how the UCLA libraries really helped make stealing home a reality. I'm going to try to control the screen remotely here. Let's see. My name is Frank Wilkinson and when I was a junior in high school in Culver City. He came to speak to my US history class about the being blacklisted in the Red Scare in the 1950s. He had this kind of intimidating imposing way about him, and he said Dodger Stadium should not exist. I was a 16 year old obsessed with baseball I was on the baseball team and went to every Dodger game I could, and his words blew my mind. How could it not exist what did he mean. And that's the, that's the beginning of the story of this book for me personally. So this book is really about why, why Dodger Stadium does exist. You know what are the historical forces that led LA to this point and it really follows three histories in particular. One is this family, the Arachiga family who will get to in a second. Another is Frank Wilkinson who we just saw he was a public housing advocate in LA. And the third is sort of the interwoven history of boosterism with both baseball and the city of LA itself. As for me, I really was not a historical researcher before I started this book, you know my background was as a reporter. I'm actually looking at this clip art, you know, Google image stock photo that I used for the slide and the recorder in the middle is the one I really use as a reporter. You know I've written for magazines as an editor and had all these different jobs but I didn't have a lot of experience with archives and with research and that was itself a big learning experience for me as. I don't know it was, it was great to have the UCLA libraries and I'll get into why to make to make this book happen. In particular that building right there which I'm sure you're familiar with. I spent a lot of time asking questions of librarians of talking to UCLA faculty who would respond to my emails even though they didn't know who I was and learning kind of how to be a historian. I think the advantage of the online resources through UCLA, including oral histories that allowed me to kind of make an era come alive that otherwise it wouldn't have been able to. So, double click here. So those three neighborhoods Palo verde la Loma and Bishop. This is made today. So this is a brand that she got. She's the central protagonist of the book, and she's a woman who was born in Zacatecas in Mexico and immigrated to United States in 1916. The document you're seeing there is a record of her border crossing in 1944 on a trip she made back home to visit family. She gives you a little bit about her background, and it's the kind of document that becomes really important when you're trying to tell the story of a person who didn't leave an extensive written record, but Anna didn't speak English and she didn't really read or write in either language English or Spanish. So, finding these little treasures is really helpful. She moved from Mexico to Marencia, Arizona, which is a copper mining town and ultimately ended up in LA in 1922 about with her second husband, a man named Manuela. And they settled in a neighborhood called Palo Verde. And Palo Verde is what we now think of as Chavez ravine. It was a little community in the hills of LA. Manuel and I went on a bottle plot of land, they sell intense and they built houses for themselves in their, their family by hand. The neighborhoods kind of grew into these really proud communities mostly Mexican and Mexican American families, a little bit isolated from the rest of LA geographically, and they tended to struggle to get city services that just got like bus services or good lighting or, you know, paved streets in certain places, but other parts of the neighborhoods were really, really nice you'd had churches and schools and big beautiful houses to was a bit of a mix. So this is a drawing from inside the book of Manuel and over on his house on Melvina Avenue, right next to where the LA police Academy is now. So, you know, a little passage from the book they had a bunch of children. They had a daughter Lola, who was born in. Sorry, I'm having technical difficulties here. All right. I have a son Juan, a daughter cell, another son Manuel junior who died young. They had another daughter Tolina, and they have not had a daughter from her first marriage back in Arizona and Delphina. So it was a big family and lots of cousins and uncles and stuff around as well, which kind of gets us to the other side of our story Frank Wilkinson. Frank Wilkinson also moved from Arizona to LA as a young man but in very different circumstances, he was brought from Beverly Hills by a conservative Methodist father was a doctor who was a big activist in LA and kind of like anti vice circles he was really a big and shrinking and gambling and all these things and Franklin to UCLA he was involved in student politics as a sort of conservative sort of candidate for office and he intended to become a Methodist minister until he went to college and after college. He took this trip to Europe into the Holy Land to see the world and sort of gain experience. And while he was in Europe and in the Middle East. He saw poverty for the first time he had been very sheltered, and it blew his mind and he came back basically an atheist, and he had been sort of radicalized and he didn't really like change his personality he was always sort of a hard charging crusader and true believer but he went from applying that to his Methodist beliefs to applying that to his sort of radical politics. And one of his big projects in LA that he wanted to get done was called the Legion Park Heights. Legion Park Heights was part of a 10,000 unit plan for public housing in Los Angeles that came about after World War two. And this project was going to be at the site of the Arachigas family's home and other neighbors in Palo Verde la Loma and Bishop. It was going to be an ambitious kind of utopian public housing project designed by the famous architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander. It was designed by the Federal Housing Act which was signed by Harry Truman. It was very popular in City Hall. It was not popular amongst certain real estate developers who thought it was unfair competition, and it was not popular amongst the people who lived in those communities who were going to lose their homes to make way for this public housing project. So I'm going to go back into research a little bit. I had been pretty new at archives when I started this book, and the best book I could find on public housing and maybe one of the best histories of LA was this book called making a better world by Don person. And there you see Don right there. And he just from reading his book so much about housing and how archives are organized, and I found myself sort of chasing documentation about public housing in LA. You know from UCLA to the Getty to CSUN to Cal State LA to Southern California library in in South LA. I came through really love the process of sitting down in an archive and this kind of quiet special place where you're treated like you're important even if you're not affiliated with the university. You know you get a pencil to write with because you have to be precious with the materials, and it also becomes a way to have this conversation with other researchers and writers who came before you. For example passed away while I was writing stealing home and I had hoped to talk to him but tragically I wasn't able to, but I still felt like I could read his end notes of his book and get to know him a little bit. For example, and, and making a better world he tells the story of this city council member named Ed Davenport in the 1950s. Ed Davenport was a hard charging anti communist, kind of a loquacious guy who was also almost certainly extremely corrupt. And he mentions that there was this affidavit he found at the young at the UCLA Special Collections in the papers of his campaign managers who were a couple named Ed and Ruth Leibach and the affidavit describes all the ways in which Davenport was corrupt the bribes he was taking all the drinking he was doing everything awful about the guy. But it was anonymous. And I thought wow I want to read that you know that seems relevant to the story I'm telling. So, you know I went to UCLA and I requested the collection and I found it and it was tremendous. So going through the live back papers. I also came across like this amazing sort of sidebar I'm just kind of going through these folders full of letters of correspondence. And I see a letter signed Lyndon Baines Johnson, I thought whoa, LBJ, he was going to be president, you know, not that long after this 20 years later. So the letter is from LBJ to LA Congresswoman named Helen Cahagan Douglas and it's requesting her help, getting one of his constituents in a public housing unit in LA. So then I read the next page and the next page is a letter from one of Douglas's aides, a guy named Walter pick who was also her cousin back to Ed Leibach who is her campaign manager. And it's got this incredibly like cruel. This is an explanation of his thoughts about LBJ. He says Johnson not only votes wrong on housing rent control and civil rights but he put Helen in a most embarrassing spot when he campaigned for the Senate, she had gotten him some labor endorsements only for him to go ahead and attack labor for my money he's no good. This is PS. These Dan Texans will pull strings for their relatives and friends in a most unorthodox manner. I'm not against Southerners the people are all right, but most of the congressman who come in here, elected by a handful of elite privilege class and legislate for this class alone or rotten. Okay, that's pretty harsh. Then he has a pps. I don't think this will make a good document to preserve for posterity and would appreciate its destruction. It's just the kind of like amazing little finds you have in the libraries at UCLA. This wasn't even in the book but it just like amazed me so much I saved it and I thought about it all the time this weird little drama involving LBJ and Helen Douglas, who I found out later also had had an affair around this time. So there's all this history just kind of hidden in these pages will go back to the story a little bit. So Elysian Park Heights is getting developed and communities in Palo Verde La Loma Bishop are being served eviction notices. There's a lot of community resistance here you see City Hall you see folks in the neighborhoods really beginning to organize the neighborhoods have been organized politically already they had been fighting for bus services and things like that. So it was very easy for them to begin this process of demanding fair treatment or demanding fair prices for their homes at the very least. There's also a lot of institutional resistance. Norman Chandler you see there on cover of Time magazine was extremely anti public housing. He, you know wielded all of his influence and power to not let public housing happen. He combined with real estate developers like Fritz Burns, who's, you can see his Westchester tracks down there. Fritz Burns started an organization called cash citizens against socialist housing, and they really brought like all the 1950s red scare politics into this question of public housing in LA. So in August 1952 Frank Wilkinson was testifying about this housing projects and Elysian Park Heights, and he was asked about his political affiliations. He refused to answer. He was pretty much immediately ruined. He was actually a communist it turned out and didn't want to say it and didn't think he should be asked to say it. He was fired from his job fairly quickly his wife was fired from her job as a school teacher his kids were kicked out of camp. I mean it was a traumatic time for him and for many people who were caught up in the red scare whether or not they're members of the Communist Party. So what was that public housing, which had already been sort of taking hits in the media became almost untenable in 1953 a new mayor was elected named Norris Paulson and Paulson, but the gavash on the project. Frank was done in LA politics he would have a afterlife in his career as an activist. So for many years after this, the city didn't know what to do with the land that would become Dodger Stadium. Ultimately, we know it did happen. There you see Walter O'Malley pictured with Kenneth Han and Rosalyn Wyman Rosalyn was elected the same years Norris Paulson 53 as the youngest and youngest person ever elected to the LA City Council and the second woman only and she had campaigned on bringing baseball to LA and she was a big part of the process of kind of enticing the Dodgers to come out. So there was also the space this sort of land that had been mostly empty after the public housing development, except for a few families who resisted including that etiquette family and didn't want to leave. They use that land to kind of draw the Dodgers West basically so this is a great spot for a stadium Walter O'Malley saw it he famously took this helicopter ride, you know over the city and saw the meeting of the freeways there and said okay I can build a stadium but there was a catch. So the land had been confiscated, for the most part using eminent domain and for the sake of building a public housing project. That meant that the land still had to be used for a public purpose. It was an open question whether a privately owned baseball stadium counted as a public purpose. And that question was put to a test on the ballot in 1958 soon after the Dodgers arrived from Brooklyn when they were playing in the Coliseum. The fans voted it was a 52 to 48 vote in favor of the Dodgers so it won Dodger Stadium construction could proceed as soon as they dealt with the fact that there were still families living in the land. In 1959 County sheriffs came and violently evicted the Arachica family. I'll just show you some images here. There's a sheriff's deputy and a but on and her husband Manuel. There's Lola at Lola Vargas their daughter being dragged down the stairs that that image and that film has been probably played the most of anything related to the construction of Dodger Stadium. They were trying to cry and you know their grandchildren and then some of the bulldozers coming in to direct the home so this was on television this was a traumatic event in the history of L.A. you see you know family getting forcibly kicked out of their home. Watching their home get bulldozed and all to make way for a baseball stadium. That was, it was a heavy deal. And a lot of the coverage around it was very charged to say the least. So I really like wanted to do my best to kind of learn what was happening beyond just like the big bold headlines and all the papers had agendas. So you know where can you find information about this kind of stuff. So the Arachigas refused to leave their land they stayed there on a tent, you know, Abraana said to the papers that she had arrived and lived on a tent and now she could, you know, end her time in L.A. in a tent. It was, it was pretty dramatic. And so you know one paper I looked at was La Opinion, here you see Saka and the Chavez Raveon La Ultima Familia. It's, there's a lot of great Spanish language newspaper archives at UCLA to the other archive that really helped me here was the Ed Roybal archive. The first Latino Congress, excuse me, council member elected official in L.A. and he was the Arachigas representative. He had been supportive of Dodger Stadium's construction but also opposed to the violent way that the family was kicked out and he was kind of walking this fine line, but he ended up being a big advocate for them towards the end. And his archives and UCLA are full of correspondence related to these events. And these archives had been picked over by other people who have written about this, and, you know, a lot of them refer to different letters that are in the archives, but you still kind of have to go through it and see what you find. And when I was going through them, I, you know, I found a treasure towards the end of my time writing the book. And it's a letter, you can't really see it that well here but it's a letter written from Juan Arechica who's a banana son to all the elected officials in L.A. who opposed, you know, their family basically and it's kind of this long manifesto explaining the family's values, and kind of showing you really what's in their heart what's going on with them, while this is all happening, and this is all playing out and it was like, it's kind of, for me, it made the book, and it allowed me to feel close to people who, you know, I could talk to their descendants, their friends but ultimately were people who were alive before I started the research project and didn't leave extensive, you know, notes for me to follow up on the way that like Frank Wilkinson would have. So, I'll end with just a little passage and there's Juan testifying at City Hall from from that. You know, he says my father had a Model T Ford on that truck we went to Fresno and pick fruit, we did this for about eight or nine years used to take us about a week to get there. So the people themselves and see them my parents made quite a sacrifice to what to have what they had two houses and a lot and Travis ravine. The first step in taking possession of their land was for a housing project that was abandoned. So now does the housing authority have the right to sell our land to the city and they in return sell it to Mr. Malley for a private ballpark. That's, you know, that's his voice. That's him talking. So, obviously, they did have the right or had the power to do it and then 1962 Dodger Stadium opened. And that's where I'll leave it. Thank you for for hearing me out. And I'm looking forward to the Q amp a. Thanks so much Eric that was really fascinating to hear and I certainly learned a lot. I learned and learned about resources we have in UCLA library that I wasn't aware of some things. I, I now is the time for everyone who's attending to ask any questions you may have using the Q amp a function on in zoom so please feel free to do that. While people are starting to think about their questions Eric maybe I'll ask. Did it did writing this book change the way you feel about going to Dodger Stadium and watching the Dodgers play, or do you still have the same same feelings that you did before. Yes and no, it definitely like changed the way I feel about it. I, you know, I knew about these events before I wrote the book right that's why I wrote the book when I was it when I was in high school and I first heard about this. That was the biggest change I think because I was, I became aware of a layer of history that I just wasn't aware of. And then when I started writing the book. It was, it was the interviews that made me start to think differently about it it's not necessarily the events themselves because I was aware of those but it was when you sit with somebody and they tell you about their home. That's, you know, it was wrecked and is buried underneath the parking lot and center field. And you get to see, you know, their pictures of it and you can go to a game and sit in the top deck and look out and picture where it is that that started to resonate with me a little bit more. So, so yeah, it changed the way I think about it but I mean, I still love Dodger Stadium and I still look when the games there. That's great. So, there's a question from Gail asking whether you prepared the drawings in the book. Is that something. Yeah, I did not draw them myself I wish I could draw like that. My friend Adam villison is an artist and he did the drawings in the book it's actually kind of funny when you write a book. It's really the author, if you want to have photos in it the author is responsible for finding the rights to those photos and purchasing them if they want to have photos. So, as I was thinking about having photos in the book. It occurred to me why not do something a little bit different if I'm going to be spending out of my pocket for it and I thought they would provide more of a kind of dramatic feel and maybe capture the emotion of the book a little bit better, and I think they came out amazing. Definitely. So, do you know what happened to the family that out at Chiga family after the stadium was built. Did they stay in LA. Yeah, I mean there's a big family right and there's different members of the family and they spread out, you know the kids were all grown by that time so they had, for the most part already, you know started to leave. They had different parts of the city of non non Manuel moved to city terrace. And that's where they lived out the rest of their lives. And were you able to talk with any of their descendants any of the, the, say the grandchildren was. Yeah, some not all. And it was like a privilege to get to talk to them there, you know, those events were traumatic and have definitely, you know, the families trust in people who are writing about them for example. So it was, it was really, I was really thankful for the people who are kind enough to let me in and, you know, trust me with their stories. In particular, you know, one great granddaughter Melissa, it was fantastic about opening doors to other members of the family. So that was, it was great. Do you have any documents or photographs or anything themselves or was it all. Yeah, yeah, they do. I mean, they do. They have, you know, family papers and artifacts and things like that and those are all spread out through the different, you know, grandchildren and cousins and stuff like that but everybody has their little family heirlooms. Absolutely. So, did, did the O'Malley family say anything about this when the, the arachigas were, were evicted, and their house was bulldozed? The O'Malley family was very much not saying anything about it. I think they, they felt partly that they had been sort of misled by the city of LA that they were buying property that they thought would be empty and that they ended up there being people on it. And I think they made a very conscientious decision to not get involved. They didn't publicly comment on it. They really like completely stayed out of it and let it be a city matter and made that their political stance but you know not commenting on it as sort of a way of commenting on it too in my opinion. Yeah. So, have any of the former residents brought suit against the city or the Dodgers or any sort of legal action or claim? The lawsuits at the time that were pretty intense. I, you know, I didn't get into the full detail in the presentation because it's too much. But there were, you know, the arachiga family was in on a lawsuit that went to the California State Supreme Court. Other landowners, other families sued. I've heard rumors that there were some families that privately settled with the Dodgers but I have no confirmation of that. As far as the lawsuits though, you know, for the most part, they eventually kind of just all fizzled. Do the Dodgers have an archive? And if so, were you able to go? The Dodgers have a team historian but I was not able to access any of that stuff, unfortunately. The Mali family also has an extensive archive and they were really kind and they let me and then let me see, you know, some of Walter Romali's papers from that era so I could go look at, you know, his notes on construction of the stadium and stuff like that, which was tremendous. Yeah. So what about the other neighborhoods that were affected by the construction? Did anything happen with those similar? I mean, the three neighborhoods of Palo Verde and La Loma and Bishop, they're gone, right? The neighborhoods, they just, they were removed, you know, one house at a time for the most part. A lot of the houses were rolled down the hills to other parts of LA, other houses were knocked down, you know, the elementary school in Palo Verde was actually, they took the roof off of it and it was buried in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium. So the neighborhoods, I mean, they're gone. That's sort of it. Right. So a question from my predecessor, who's happy to see he's here tonight. What's your next book project and will you use the UCLA collections to do research for that? I don't know yet. I don't know what my next book project is, but I almost certainly will. Great. So could you speak a little about how the people who lived on the land, the renters and owners were not really given a voice or a seat at the table as to whether they wanted to have a public housing project built where their homes were? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. So the process of kind of choosing a place to, you know, build a public housing project is a politically charged one right you know that nobody wants to give up their home to build a public housing project, or anything else freeway would be a really an example in LA because a lot of people have been displaced to make way for freeways. Generally speaking, the communities did not have a say, I mean, they could speak up, you know, the communities of Palo Verde and Alma and Bishop were at City Hall they're writing letters they were saying please you know we like our community we don't want to move we don't want to be kicked out. You know we're homeowners we're taxpayers we sent our children off to war, but the folks who were making those decisions you know the public housing folks. You know, at the time the supposedly most progressive people. It was a very paternalistic idea of what the right thing is and you know you can be a, you know, wealthy white person who thinks they know better and they can tell everybody else what to do kind of situation and that was that was the dynamic. Yeah, it's unfortunately a story that has repeated itself over and over again so. Do you know whether this, this particular project changed eminent domain laws. I don't think it did, but I'm not sure. Yeah. Yeah, a question about do you do you think that what happened at Elysian Park is similar to what's happening now with the state owned Caltrans homes in El Serino Alhambra and South Pasadena. I think there are definitely some similarities. I can't say, like, with a lot of expertise because I just haven't followed the culture and story that much. There are definitely some similarities when it comes to questions about, you know, what about power and, you know, governments and wealthy people exerting power and communities where there's housing shortages or where there's homeowners who feel like they're being not listened to and they're being ignored. Right. So, a question about whether the property owners were compensated at all was. Sure. So people were compensated the big dispute with the Etchica family, for example, was they owned three lots and two homes. I think I read that in one's letter in that excerpt and fella better day. And they, their house was assessed in the beginning of this process in the early 50s at $17,500. So that was the price that they, you know, the independent assessor gave to their home, but then a judge because this could happen at that time overrule that assessment and said that that property is actually really only worth $10,050. And the Etchica's thought that was unfair. Very reasonably Mike and thought that was unfair. We're talking about, you know, three lots and two houses in the middle of LA. And they, their big kind of sticking point. And one of the reasons that they said they didn't want to leave their home and that they resisted and they sued and they took all these activist steps was because they thought they were being treated unfairly. And that they wanted the full $17,500. They never got it. They were ultimately stuck with a $10,050 minus $11 and back taxes that they owed. Well, one of our attendees tonight is wondering what your actual process was to access the archives and sort of to extend that question. Did you know the archives you were going to go to or did you go to one and then sort of end up at another. And, and sort of just follow the trail of breadcrumbs so to speak. Yeah, so I mean part of it is following the trail of breadcrumbs absolutely I had never really spent time in archives before this so I was sort of feeling my way around in the dark. It's very easy though if you ask nicely you can call or it depends on the library or you just fill out a form online, and they'll bring you the folder and you just make an appointment I couldn't believe it as an independent researcher. So you're anything like that that I could get my hands on this stuff, you know you just kind of tell them what you're doing and you're polite and people are people are great. Often librarians and archivists will have ideas to for other stuff that you could look at. So you'll you'll pull one file and they'll say this might be interesting to you as well and that that's a gift to people like me. Right. Yeah. Yeah, and I have to say just interject my own comment here I think one of the things we're really proud of in the UCLA library is that we are a public university and public institutions so we welcome anybody to come in and use our collections it's it's an important part of our mission and part of us serving the community so anybody who's here tonight, you two are welcome to come in. I have a comment from someone who says this. This isn't really a question just a note from another author. I enjoyed your book. I'm a UCLA alum BA geography and 76 and wrote a book about candlestick park. It has its own sorted political history but not to the extent of Dodger Stadium. I learned a bit about candlestick park because because the giants and Dodgers came less together and when they were having these arguments over Dodger Stadium some of the council members in LA who were critical of the deal. Looked at San Francisco as a better model, the city owned stadium where the city could charge the team rent. They thought that made more financial sense than kind of the sweetheart deal that the city gave to the omalis. Interesting. Yeah. So here's another really fascinating comment from someone who writes I am Sharon Leibach Hartman, the daughter of Ruth and Ed Leibach. I'm still alive and living in LA more than 60 years ago I gave the Leibach papers to UCLA. Did you look at them as well as working for the housing authority at Leibach lived in Chavez ravine at this time. Wow, I definitely looked at them. That's where I found that crazy lbj letter I, they were great, the Leibach papers. And I had no idea that Ed lived in Chavez ravine that that I totally missed. Thank you for for being here and for donating those papers. So what was the most surprising factor incident you came across while you were doing the research. I don't know. I think I was surprised by how corrupt LA was. That's a kind of strange thing to say but you know, I, like, as I was reading about the LA city council, especially in the 1950s, and just how transparently controlled, you know so many politicians sort of the vision powerful in the city, the Chandler family, people like that you know you had stories about the Norman Chandler sending his city hall reporter to the floor of the council to tell council members how to vote, you know to whisper in their ears how to vote on something and that that blew my mind. Yeah, pretty amazing. Someone else writes I saw a play years ago called Chavez ravine at the mark taper. Did you find that in your research or know about that. I saw they restaged it at the Kirk Douglas in Culver city and I saw it then so it was great. And one of our great librarians says we talk a lot about silences in the archive in the library and archival field, meaning that the historical lack of documentation of marginalized communities. And I'm wondering if you feel like you ran into that and maybe we're left with some unanswered questions because of it. And what would some of those questions be if so. Yes, this was actually the biggest challenge probably writing the book for me was that you, you deal with these really big imbalances and how history is recorded, you know the books, central figures were a family that practically didn't exist in the official record. They, you know, there was an article about Tolena at Echiga, the first mentioned yet at your family I could find in anywhere in the city. During the World War two, she was kicked by a goat and the LA Times, like, did a joking story about a girl being kicked by a goat kind of making fun of her she was injured pretty badly. And that was the only record of them until they became the faces of this resistance to housing and then Dodger Stadium. They were, they didn't, you know, leave stuff and, you know, as a society, you know we didn't value their voices the way that we would evaluate Frank's and Frank left like a 10,000 page oral history at UCLA. Writing a story where you have so much information about one person so little about another is actually really, really hard and you can really see those inequities when you try to write kind of a social history like this. Right, right. So a question about whether you use the archives in Cooper town, or the archive of Rosalyn Wyman or speak to her. I think at the baseball archives in Cooper's town on a trip to Cooper's town for unrelated, you know, personal fun reasons. A few years before I wrote the book, and I scanned a bunch of stuff which was awesome. I was not able to speak to Rosalyn Wyman. I asked her a few times but she kind of told me that she had spoken about this enough and she was pretty busy. So I didn't get to speak with her. A question that many of the houses were self built the houses that were originally there was their justification used by the housing authority that the homes were substandard and thus not up to code. Yes, that was a big thing so the technical designation was slum they actually said this is a slum and that became like a legal term. And so they would find reasons that houses were not up to standard. It was very subjective. Also, a lot of the houses were up to standard, which is why they were rolled away and put in different parts of the city hundreds of them. The idea that they were not up to standard is also sort of sort of like a self fulfilling prophecy because the city never did code enforcement and never provided any resources for people to know that their homes were not up to code. But you know most people had running water and electricity and phones and plumbing and you know all the things that would be expected in LA in the late 40s. Right. So, another set of questions on back to baseball, you referenced how charged this situation was in the community where the Dodgers initially welcomed when they moved the and this person is thinking that the Dodgers may have wanted relations with Angelinos and therefore sought out Fernando Valenzuela specifically with this in mind. And did your research confirm this and was that a turning point for the Dodgers in LA. That's a complicated question. So, the atmosphere was definitely charged in those communities because people lost their homes you know imagine having a home seeing it taken away and then sold to a private businessman to build the baseball stadium. You would feel pretty charged. I would at least if that happened to me. But you know it wasn't universal, you know when that ballot measure passed to allow the Dodger stadium construction process to be continue the people who supported it were mainly from, you know, black and Latino communities in LA the people who opposed it were white wealthy homeowners who were offended by this, you know seizure of private property. You have to sort of strange political dynamic. As for Fernando Valenzuela, I don't think it's fair to say that Fernando Valenzuela is responsible for changing, you know, the dynamic of the Dodgers in LA. I would say the Dodgers really made a specific effort from the beginning to have a fan base, you know they hired the first Spanish speaking every day radio broadcasters. They made the stadium a very welcoming place for women fans which had not always been the case in major league parks at the time. Walter Ramelli did have a goal of like getting lots of Spanish speaking fans in the park he would always tell people he wanted a Mexican cofax. You know, looking for that kind of player obviously Fernando is probably as close as you can get to that. But the idea that like he solved the problem or healed wounds, I don't really necessarily buy. So, question by another librarian friend that we have many of them with us tonight it's great to see all their names so this may be a bit of a stretch but do you see the events of Chavez ravine is being part of a historical arc in LA. That included other events like the zoo suit riots, the sleepy lagoon trial, etc. Yes, 100% I actually talk about this in the book a little bit. Well the zoo suit riots really came out of the naval armory which was down the street from Palo Verde La Lama Bishop and those soldiers and sailors spilled out of that armory onto the streets in terms of racism against Mexicans and Mexican Americans in LA in that era. I mean it's all part of the same story, in my opinion. Given that Dodger Stadium is close to Chinatown. Did you find stories of Chinese people being displaced for the stadium. I didn't find any specifically, but there was you know the neighborhoods were somewhat diverse so they're, you know they were Chinese people they were Italian Americans they were African Americans they were, you know, white people it was it was the neighborhoods were not totally homogenous. So, yeah. And it may also be one of the another instance of sort of the absence of materials about marginalized communities in archives that. Chinatown has its own story of displacement and its own kind of lurking tragedy underneath too. Right, right. So I think we have time for one more question, or comment. From Joe Wilkinson who writes your amazing research revealed the paths of the Arachiega family and the Wilkinson family actually crossing in Douglas, Arizona. Before they met in such a tragic way in Los Angeles. I learned more about my own family thanks to you, your book is beautifully written. Thank you. And that is Frank's daughter. Oh, thank you Joe. Great. Well Eric, it's been wonderful having you with us tonight we're so glad you could join us and wish that we could have done this in person that would have been more fun but this was great and again, really excellent work that you've done and so fascinating to hear about it and of course, all of us who are librarians and library staff on who are here tonight really thank you for using the resources we have them for people like you who want to pursue these challenging areas of research and keep our history alive and remind us of what happened in the past so we can try to change things in the future. So thank you for that. Thank you. I couldn't have written the book. Otherwise. Well, and there I see a number of thank yous in the q&a to so you're getting lots of lots of thanks, not just for me. So, and I do want to say to everybody who's here that since we normally do celebrate Powell society in person, and we have lots of staff present who say, thank you to our donors in person. Since we aren't able to do that tonight we have a special message from the library staff. Thank you for your support of the UCLA library. Your generosity helps enrich student and faculty's research by connecting them to rare unique and distinctive collections, your dedication makes a difference. This year would not be complete without me taking a moment to thank you for your generosity to UCLA library. It's great of possible to realize projects that we had not even anticipated at the start of 2020. Your gifts to UCLA library have made a difference in the online services we provide and the spaces we will return to in 2021. Thank you for your support. Thank you so much for your support of the UCLA library and the film and television archive. Your generosity has made it possible for us to preserve our unparalleled collections, making them accessible to students, researchers and film and television lovers alike. We'll see you in our virtual screening room, or when it's possible at the movies. Thank you. Thank you for your support of the UCLA library. Your contributions have made it possible for library special collections to connect students with primary resources in a meaningful and engaging way. Thank you for your dedication. We really appreciate it. Thank you for your support of the UCLA library. With your contributions, the music library has been able to support music research and performance during remote learning, including providing access to digital music scores and recordings, as well as completing an open access project that includes over 5,000 contemporary music scores. These scores are available worldwide and have been used over 40,000 times. Additionally, endowed funds have enabled us to continue expanding our collections by purchasing works by underrepresented composers and scholars, including women and people of color. Your gifts to the music library make a difference at UCLA and the world. Thank you. Thank you so much for supporting UCLA libraries. So much of what we do in library special collections is made possible because of the generosity of donors, such as connecting undergraduates with library special collections materials. These materials are unique and they share the stories of individuals, organizations and communities. And because these materials are one of a kind, they allow the students to engage in original research and that's really important, especially during undergraduate education. Thank you again. We really appreciate you. My profound gratitude to every East Asian library donors for enabling us to build unique resources to support teaching research of East Asian studies on campus. Thanks for your dedication and your trust in us. Your gifts make a huge impact and difference. Hope to see you soon in person. Thank you. Thank you for supporting UCLA library. Your contributions have made it possible for the data science center to provide the UCLA community with advanced data as well as geospatial services. Thank you for your dedication and your gift makes a difference. Thank you. Your contribution has helped us to connect students with primary sources. Your gifts really do make a difference. It's a fifth generation in a line of history of medicine and science curators. I deeply appreciate your continuing support with enthusiasm and trust in us to build, describe, promote and use world class research and teaching collections like our 1918 influenza pandemic letters and diaries here at the UCLA library. Hi, thank you for your support of UCLA library. Your contributions have made it possible for the digital library program to provide access to unique digitized content from around the world. Thank you so much. We really appreciate you. So thank you again for coming tonight. I wish we could have seen you in person, but we hope we will next year. I also wanted to let you know that library development will be following up with you to send each of you a special virtual care package that we hope you all will enjoy. And if you have any questions or comments, they'll be able to help you with those. So again, have a wonderful evening and see you next year. Bye bye.