We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Los Angeles — %eal Estate
guished dwellings, when every corner shall have bred its gasoline-station, though each may strive for the prize offered by the city to the most beautiful, and when every block shall have its * drive-in ' grocer's shop and every few hundred yards its armoured-cement place of worship.
At the moment the real estate business was not in a very flourishing condition. The boom had expanded and had * bust.' Los Angeles was in the curious position of being a town without any real reason for existence. It was a town that advertised loudly its charms and virtues yet had almost nothing to offer the expectant immigrant. It was in reality a town of refuge for the retired farmers of Iowa and the Middle West, who, fleeing from the horror of the monotony of their great, echoless wheat plains, found by contrast an infinite variety in the crazy, domestic, gregarious monotony of Los Angeles.
Already there were some eighty thousand workmen unemployed in the place, and their opinion of Los Angeles was best expressed by a poem which our bootmaker, an Englishman, told us of. He could not find a copy. But later the garage man's daughter typed us this from one in the possession of a friend.
(This letter was submitted by Tom Marshall, of Hollywood, to the Los Angeles Times in a prize competition to boost Los Angeles. He did not get an award.)
CALIFORNIA
Oh, come to the land of the Western Sun,
Where every business is overdone,
Where the stores charge freight on the goods made here ;
If you ask them the reason they think you're queer.
Where the cows eat barley instead of hay,
And the cream gets lost in the Milky Way.
The grape-fruit here is something fine,
A cross between a melon and a pumpkin rind. . . .
[55]