Charles Harris Garrigues
Encyclopedia
Charles Harris Garrigues (1903–1974) was a California writer and journalist who wrote as C.H. Garrigues. He was a general-assignment reporter in Los Angeles, California, in the 1920s, a grand jury
investigator and political activist in the 1930s, a newspaper copy editor in the 1940s and a jazz critic in the 1950s. His nickname was Brick, for his red hair.
. The family later moved to Imperial, California
, near the Mexican border.
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While attending Imperial High School, the 15-year-old Garrigues wrote a letter to the local newspaper, the Imperial Enterprise, calling a previous letter-writer "ignorant" because of the views the latter had expressed in attacking a resigned Imperial High principal. As a result, the lad was expelled by the school board in May 1918. The expulsion resulted in what the Enterprise called a "Walkout of High School Students," who "paraded the streets to demonstrate their dissatisfaction at the refusal of the faculty to reinstate C. H. Garrigues of the senior class." Garrigues was befriended by the editor of the newspaper, who taught him the craft of journalism, and in 1919 he was allowed to graduate.
for a year but dropped out to become a reporter with the Hemet News in Riverside County, California
. He then worked for the Venice Vanguard in Venice, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, and by mid-decade was with the Arizona Daily Star
in Tucson, Arizona
. In 1926, he returned to Los Angeles, where he joined the Los Angeles Express
as a copy editor. The next year he had become a reporter with the Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News
, published by Manchester Boddy, where he specialized in reporting on civic affairs, particularly the county government.
In the early 1930s
, Garrigues was not only covering civic news, but he had also volunteered to become the Daily News opera and classical-music critic. He had a regular political column called "The Spotlight." He also did investigative work into graft and corruption in county government, as a consequence of which by January 1931 he was granted a leave by Boddy to take a temporary job as an investigator for District Attorney Buron Fitts
. His work led to the indictment and conviction of, and a prison term for, county supervisor Sidney T. Graves
for accepting a bribe from builders of a flood-control dam on the San Gabriel River (California)
.
In 1934, he was working for a county grand jury
impaneled by Superior Judge (and later Mayor) Fletcher Bowron
; his investigation led to Fitts himself, whom the jury indicted that year on charges of bribery and perjury. In this work Garrigues became an enemy of Fitts, and the reporter was assaulted in a Hall of Justice stairway and beaten in a vacant courtroom by what he described as "a gang of the district attorney's plug-uglies."
By 1936, Garrigues was free-lancing as a political consultant, and the next year worked briefly for the San Diego Sun but soon left to become the editor of the Labor Leader, a newspaper published by the San Diego Federated Trades and Labor Council. In 1937 he was an organizer in Los Angeles for the American Newspaper Guild. He joined the Communist Party in 1937 but left it the next year.
officials, Earl King, Ernest Ramsay, and Frank Conner
, who faced trial for murdering an officer aboard a freighter
anchored in the east San Francisco Bay
, and three years later, in 1939, he moved to the Bay Area
.
He found work as a copy editor on the San Francisco Examiner, where he stayed until his retirement in 1967. In 1943, his name was listed in a report of the anti-Communist Tenney Committee of the California state legislature in connection with testimony by writer Rena Vale
about her experience as a Communist Party member from 1936 to 1938. In March 1953 Garrigues testified under subpoena in Los Angeles before Congressman Harold H. Velde of the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his interest in the labor movement and his membership in the Communist Party.
Between 1956 and 1961, Garrigues was the Examiner's staff jazz reviewer, "with a weekly column and a recognized name." He retired in 1967 and moved to Brentwood, Los Angeles, California
, in 1968. He died on March 8, 1974, in Pacific Palisades, California.
, Garrigues wrote:
Grand jury
A grand jury is a type of jury that determines whether a criminal indictment will issue. Currently, only the United States retains grand juries, although some other common law jurisdictions formerly employed them, and most other jurisdictions employ some other type of preliminary hearing...
investigator and political activist in the 1930s, a newspaper copy editor in the 1940s and a jazz critic in the 1950s. His nickname was Brick, for his red hair.
Kansas and the Imperial Valley
The fourth child of Charles Louis and Emily Young Garrigues, Charles Harris was born on July 8, 1903, in Wakeeney, KansasWaKeeney, Kansas
WaKeeney is a city in and the county seat of Trego County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 1,862.-History:...
. The family later moved to Imperial, California
Imperial, California
Imperial is a city in Imperial County, California. Imperial is located north of El Centro. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 14,758. It is part of the El Centro metropolitan area. The City of Imperial is a bustling center in the Imperial Valley due to its central location in The...
, near the Mexican border.
While attending Imperial High School, the 15-year-old Garrigues wrote a letter to the local newspaper, the Imperial Enterprise, calling a previous letter-writer "ignorant" because of the views the latter had expressed in attacking a resigned Imperial High principal. As a result, the lad was expelled by the school board in May 1918. The expulsion resulted in what the Enterprise called a "Walkout of High School Students," who "paraded the streets to demonstrate their dissatisfaction at the refusal of the faculty to reinstate C. H. Garrigues of the senior class." Garrigues was befriended by the editor of the newspaper, who taught him the craft of journalism, and in 1919 he was allowed to graduate.
Southern California
Garrigues attended the University of Southern CaliforniaUniversity of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
for a year but dropped out to become a reporter with the Hemet News in Riverside County, California
Riverside County, California
Riverside County is a county in the U.S. state of California. One of 58 California counties, it covers in the southern part of the state, and stretches from Orange County to the Colorado River, which forms the state border with Arizona. The county derives its name from the city of Riverside,...
. He then worked for the Venice Vanguard in Venice, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, and by mid-decade was with the Arizona Daily Star
Arizona Daily Star
The Arizona Daily Star is the major morning daily newspaper that serves Tucson and surrounding districts of southern Arizona in the United States. The paper was purchased by Pulitzer in 1971; Lee Enterprises bought Pulitzer in 2005....
in Tucson, Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
Tucson is a city in and the county seat of Pima County, Arizona, United States. The city is located 118 miles southeast of Phoenix and 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The 2010 United States Census puts the city's population at 520,116 with a metropolitan area population at 1,020,200...
. In 1926, he returned to Los Angeles, where he joined the Los Angeles Express
Los Angeles Express (newspaper)
The Los Angeles Express was a newspaper published in Los Angeles in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Founded in 1871, the newspaper was acquired by William Randolph Hearst in 1931. It merged with the Los Angeles Herald and became an evening newspaper known as the Los Angeles Herald-Express...
as a copy editor. The next year he had become a reporter with the Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News
Los Angeles Daily News (historic)
The Los Angeles Daily News , often referred to simply as the Daily News, was a newspaper published from 1923 to 1954. It was operated through most of its existence by Manchester Boddy...
, published by Manchester Boddy, where he specialized in reporting on civic affairs, particularly the county government.
In the early 1930s
1930s
File:1930s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: Dorothea Lange's photo of the homeless Florence Thompson show the effects of the Great Depression; Due to the economic collapse, the farms become dry and the Dust Bowl spreads through America; The Battle of Wuhan during the Second Sino-Japanese...
, Garrigues was not only covering civic news, but he had also volunteered to become the Daily News opera and classical-music critic. He had a regular political column called "The Spotlight." He also did investigative work into graft and corruption in county government, as a consequence of which by January 1931 he was granted a leave by Boddy to take a temporary job as an investigator for District Attorney Buron Fitts
Buron Fitts
Buron Rogers Fitts was a California politician, who was the 29th Lieutenant Governor of the state from 1927 to 1928 and Los Angeles County district attorney thereafter until 1940....
. His work led to the indictment and conviction of, and a prison term for, county supervisor Sidney T. Graves
Sidney T. Graves
Sidney T. Graves was a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors between 1926 and 1930. He was the only member of the county's governing body to be convicted of a crime and sent to prison. In 1933, the former supervisor was convicted of accepting a bribe concerning the building of a dam...
for accepting a bribe from builders of a flood-control dam on the San Gabriel River (California)
San Gabriel River (California)
The San Gabriel River flows through southern Los Angeles County, California in the United States. Its main stem is about long, while its farthest tributaries extend almost altogether...
.
In 1934, he was working for a county grand jury
Grand jury
A grand jury is a type of jury that determines whether a criminal indictment will issue. Currently, only the United States retains grand juries, although some other common law jurisdictions formerly employed them, and most other jurisdictions employ some other type of preliminary hearing...
impaneled by Superior Judge (and later Mayor) Fletcher Bowron
Fletcher Bowron
Fletcher Bowron was the 35th Mayor of Los Angeles, California from September 26, 1938 until June 30, 1953. Until Thomas Bradley passed his length of service during the 1980s, Bowron held the distinction of having the longest tenure in that position in city history.Bowron was born in Poway,...
; his investigation led to Fitts himself, whom the jury indicted that year on charges of bribery and perjury. In this work Garrigues became an enemy of Fitts, and the reporter was assaulted in a Hall of Justice stairway and beaten in a vacant courtroom by what he described as "a gang of the district attorney's plug-uglies."
By 1936, Garrigues was free-lancing as a political consultant, and the next year worked briefly for the San Diego Sun but soon left to become the editor of the Labor Leader, a newspaper published by the San Diego Federated Trades and Labor Council. In 1937 he was an organizer in Los Angeles for the American Newspaper Guild. He joined the Communist Party in 1937 but left it the next year.
San Francisco Bay Area
At the age of 34, Garrigues was named in 1936 as an investigator for a defense committee in the case of three labor unionTrade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
officials, Earl King, Ernest Ramsay, and Frank Conner
Earl King, Ernest Ramsay, and Frank Conner
Earl King, Ernest Ramsay, and Frank Conner were three merchant seamen convicted of murdering a ship's officer, George Alberts, aboard a freighter anchored in Alameda, California, on March 22, 1936. Their trial, appeals, and terms in San Quentin Prison were a celebrated cause among trade unionists,...
, who faced trial for murdering an officer aboard a freighter
Cargo ship
A cargo ship or freighter is any sort of ship or vessel that carries cargo, goods, and materials from one port to another. Thousands of cargo carriers ply the world's seas and oceans each year; they handle the bulk of international trade...
anchored in the east San Francisco Bay
San Francisco Bay
San Francisco Bay is a shallow, productive estuary through which water draining from approximately forty percent of California, flowing in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers from the Sierra Nevada mountains, enters the Pacific Ocean...
, and three years later, in 1939, he moved to the Bay Area
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...
.
He found work as a copy editor on the San Francisco Examiner, where he stayed until his retirement in 1967. In 1943, his name was listed in a report of the anti-Communist Tenney Committee of the California state legislature in connection with testimony by writer Rena Vale
Rena Vale
Rena Vale, or Rena M. Vale, was a writer who from 1926 to 1930 was a scriptwriter for Universal Studios in Hollywood and in the 1930s was an investigator for a U.S...
about her experience as a Communist Party member from 1936 to 1938. In March 1953 Garrigues testified under subpoena in Los Angeles before Congressman Harold H. Velde of the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his interest in the labor movement and his membership in the Communist Party.
Between 1956 and 1961, Garrigues was the Examiner's staff jazz reviewer, "with a weekly column and a recognized name." He retired in 1967 and moved to Brentwood, Los Angeles, California
Brentwood, Los Angeles, California
Brentwood is a district in western Los Angeles, California, United States. The district is located at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains, bounded by the San Diego Freeway on the east, Wilshire Boulevard on the south, the Santa Monica city limits on the southwest, the border of Topanga State...
, in 1968. He died on March 8, 1974, in Pacific Palisades, California.
Marriages
Garrigues was married on April 30, 1926, to Beulah May Dickey. They had two sons and were divorced in 1937. He was married in 1938 to Naomi Silver, and they had one daughter. Naomi died in 1968. His third wife, whom he married in 1968, was Marguerite (Peggy) Walker.Published works
Besides numerous newspaper articles, music reviews, and phonograph album liner notesLiner notes
Liner notes are the writings found in booklets which come inserted into the compact disc jewel case or the equivalent packaging for vinyl records and cassettes.-Origin:...
, Garrigues wrote:
- You're Paying for It!: A guide to graft, Funk and Wagnalls, August 1936
- So They Indicted Fitts (self-published pamphlet)
- Why Didn't Somebody Tell Somebody (self-published pamphlet), May 1938 and January 1939
- "Most Polite Man," Nation's Business magazine, February 1953 (article on San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge toll collectors)
- "Target Therapy: New hope for lost minds," Brief magazine, August 1953
- "How to Live Within Your Income," This Week magazine, February 18, 1959
See also
- John Bell Clayton and Martha Clayton, friends
- Michael Foster (writer)Michael Foster (writer)Michael Foster was an American novelist, journalist, screenwriter and cartoonist. Born August 29, 1904, in Hardy, Arkansas, he died March 25, 1956, in California....
, friend - Lisa RomaLisa RomaLisa Roma was an American soprano who toured in the United States with composer Maurice Ravel in 1928. She was chair of grand opera in the College of Music at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles beginning in 1930...
, friend - Toni StrassmanToni StrassmanToni Strassman was an authors' representative based in New York City. Her clients included Charles Harris Garrigues, John and Martha Clayton, William Goyen, Harry Mark Petrakis and Friderike Zweig, the first wife of Stefan Zweig....
, friend and literary agent - List of newspaper columnists