Offering yet another soft, “Warm Western Howdies” this fine Signal Saturday morning. They don’t cost much and meant not to startle. Oh.
Sorry about the spurs on the condo carpeting. This morning, we’re going to ride back into the annals (The lady way in the back from the NorthLake snickering? Stop.) of time and check out the peculiar variations of life we call history.
Some of you saddle sleepers might want to pay attention this morning. We’ve got one of the darkest and more amazing stories in local law enforcement ahead with the killing of Constable Ed Brown. WAY, WAY BACK WHEN LEE SMELSER WAS IN THE FIRST GRADUATING CLASS — The third-oldest school district in Los Angeles County was formed on Sept.
16, 1872. Through the muscle and brains of local community leaders, especially John Lang and Tom Mitchell, kids in Canyon Country were able to attend school. The first few years, classes were held in the kitchens of Lang and Mitchell, taught by their wives.
RE: THE ABOVE? BEAR NECESSITIES — For more than a century, history books and witnesses attested that John Lang shot the world’s largest grizzly bear, a few miles away on July 7, 1873. A recent and yellowed newspaper article from The Los Angeles Herald in 1875, a letter penned by Lang himself, corrected the texts and rumors. Lang wrote he did shoot the bear, but it weighed not 2,350 pounds, but 1,600.
The same old history texts and others noted around the same time, at the other side of the valley, was another gi.