Contents
1. Transcript
1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE
MAY 18, 1978
-
GARDNER
- As I mentioned, I think we'll start off by discussing somewhat your
family background, and what your father's life was like before he got to
San Francisco, and what you know of your grandparents, and so on.
-
COWAN
- We'll start with my grandfather [Robert Hawke Cowan], my father's
father. He was born in Galway, Ireland, of an Irish mother [Elizabeth
Hawke] and a Scottish father [Richard Cowan]. The father came from
Edinburgh, landed in Dublin as an Episcopalian minister. Heaven knows
how he got along, but he did. [laughter] Anyhow, he came from Galway
after he was born and lived in Dublin until he was of age; he had two
older brothers, half-brothers actually. Then he joined the army. And
eventually he landed in the Kaffir War in South Africa, and he got
wounded a couple of times down there. He was at the tail end of the
Indian mutiny. He didn't see any service over there, but after the thing
was settled when he got there--it took him nine months to get there from
England on slow-sailing vessels, as usual--he came home by way of the
Arabian desert. It was four days and four nights on camelback across the
Arabian desert before he got to Alexandria, and then he sailed from
there to England.
-
GARDNER
- Is any of this written down anywhere? Did he record any of his
adventures at all?
-
COWAN
- My father did, yes. I was too young to record them myself when he died,
but father recorded a lot of things, not such as this, but by written
notes that I've gathered together. And my grandmother [Lydia Rebecca
Peer] was born in Canada, in Markham or near Markham, which is near
Hamilton and not too far from Niagara, and her folks came from
Pennsylvania. Her grandfather [Stephen Peer] came with Wolfe at the
siege of Quebec and landed eventually in Pennsylvania; and it's presumed
that he was in the Revolution. I have some doubts about that, inasmuch
as I think he was a Tory, and he got out of the Revolution and went to
Canada and established a family there, where [my grandmother] was born.
And her father [Stephen Peer] owned Lundy Lane, where, in the War of
1812, a battle was fought (the battle of Lundy Lane) on his property,
and he was killed there at that time. He was defending his property. He
was in the English army and defending his property, I guess, and he was
killed there. Anyhow, grandfather came to America eventually, after
having an upset with his family. His mother died and left a considerable
estate--she was in the linen mills and there was a bit of money
there--but the older brothers, half-brothers and no relation of hers,
got the estate on account of her marriage. So he cut off the family from
then on; when they cut him off, [laughter], he came to America, and
there's been no contact of our family with that family since.
-
GARDNER
- Is that so?
-
COWAN
- Yes. It's been cut off entirely, so I don't know anything about them. I
don't know if any of them ever came to America or not.
-
GARDNER
- It was just completely closed off?
-
COWAN
- Just slammed the door. And he came over here and thrashed around for a
while and wanted to get into the Union army during the Civil War. And he
went to the recruiting office, and he saw them throwing men up in
blankets; well, that wasn't for him, so he decided he wasn't going to
join the American army. [laughter] And then he came to California to dig
gold--before the Civil War period; he came in the late fifties to dig
for gold. He didn't make any attempt to establish himself here at that
time; then after he married, almost immediately after he was married, he
came to California. He left his wife in Markham, and father and his
older sister [Annie] were born there.
-
GARDNER
- In Canada?
-
COWAN
- Yes. And then grandfather called for his wife to come out to California
and establish themselves. She left the children there with a grandaunt
and uncle. And the children were sent out after the measles in a wintery
snowstorm, and they both almost lost the sight of their eyes. My father
could only see out of one eye, actually, and the other was so
nearsighted it was microscopic; he'd always take his glasses off and
hold an object about two inches away from his eyes so he could see it,
as if he wanted to use it as a microscope.
-
GARDNER
- And that was the result of measles.
-
COWAN
- That was a result of being out in the snow after the measles. His mother
came out to California sometime in the middle sixties, and by 1870 she
went back and gathered up the children and came out here. So father came
out on the first transcontinental railroad about a year after it was
opened up in 1870, and [my family] established themselves in San
Francisco in the Mission District, because that has the nicest climate.
And grandfather, although he might have been a medical graduate from
Dublin College (he set up a business as a doctor), we would call him a
quack doctor today because he dealt in herbs and corns and one thing or
another. But anyhow, he's known as Doctor Cowan, always. And he
evidently had some background and made pretty good money for the time,
and so forth; so he bought property around Twentieth and Treat Avenue,
which is in the Mission District. And instead of going up to Mission
Street or any of the commercial streets (he didn't like that), he just
bought residential property in around the Twentieth and Treat Avenue
vicinity. Then father went to medical college for two years and couldn't
take that--it wasn't his bit at all. But in the meantime, after reading
his first book on bees when he was five years of age, he established
himself in the book field. He had gathered a library, and his father
never denied the fact that books were fine for the education, but that's
all they were good for; they weren't good for business. So when father
got out of the medical college he went to work for Waldteufel, who was a
music dealer, first in San Jose and then San Francisco, who also carried
Catholic art goods. Father was in the music department there. Of course,
there are a few stories about irate priests that came in on the wrong
bill, and so forth, and told Waldteufel he was being a Jew; but he
married a Catholic, so that established him in that business quite well.
The priest had said they were very short of holy water when he was
baptized. [laughter] And then after that, father started the book
business.
-
GARDNER
- I wrote down Lowell-Toland Medical College--what was that?
-
COWAN
- It was a medical college. It's now the affiliated colleges in San
Francisco. It was all medicine at that time, just one building. I don't
know whether the area's the same now. I think that Toland was more in
town than the affiliated college; of course, that's in the middle of San
Francisco now, but I don't think it was in that area. I'm not sure.
-
GARDNER
- But he did two years there.
-
COWAN
- Yes, uh-huh.
-
GARDNER
- Had he already started involving himself in the gathering of books
before then? You mentioned that it started when he was small and he read
the book on bees. Had he done any dealing, or was he just buying?
-
COWAN
- No dealing, no. He established a library--it was more or less of a
reading library up till probably the late 1880s--and then his interest
became more aimed at Californiana, and he started collecting then.
-
GARDNER
- Do you know how that interest first came about?
-
COWAN
- Just automatically, I suppose, with father. I don't think he had many
contacts at all that would take him in that area. Then he got into the
book business on his own after collecting a lot of Californiana. His
major collection of manuscripts came from Halleck, Peachey, and
Billings, the most famous law firm in California. Colonel [George W.]
Granniss folded up the office for Halleck, Peachey, and Billings because
[Henry W.] Halleck went into the Civil War and Billings went up to
Billings, Montana, which was named after him; he was more interested in
that than he was in the law business in San Francisco. And I think
[Archibald] Peachey died. That left the firm high and dry. And Granniss
was around all through the office period, the later office period, and
he was in charge of the Montgomery block at that time and saw to it that
all the papers and stuff were thrown out or disposed of one way or
another. Father made his acquaintance somewhere along the line, and he
was given a tremendous amount of manuscripts that eventually went to
Berkeley before the Bancroft Library was there. They were purchased by
Collis P. Huntington as a gift for the library in Berkeley.
-
GARDNER
- Do you know how they originally got together? Was it just the chance of
a book buyer and bookseller that your father met Colonel Granniss?
-
COWAN
- No, father had little or no business acumen, but he knew the papers were
there, so he made his acquaintance in a sociable way.
-
GARDNER
- I see.
-
COWAN
- So sociable that I got the name from Granniss; that's my middle name.
And Granniss bought me my first suit of clothes. And also, in reference
to the papers that father got from him, and also Granniss's liking for
the family, well, I got the name.
-
GARDNER
- What was Colonel Granniss like? Do you recall him? It's a long way back,
I know, but...
-
COWAN
- I don't remember him at all.
-
GARDNER
- Even with that first suit of clothes? [laughter]
-
COWAN
- That's right; there are other things I can remember. I think I wore that
first suit of clothes to have my tonsils taken out--by electricity at
that time, believe it or not! That was 1902 or -3, somewhere in there,
or maybe before. Oh, it must have been before.
-
GARDNER
- So your father would have gone into the book business then in the late
1880s, I would guess. Did he just sort of hang a shingle out and say,
"I'm going in the book business"?
-
COWAN
- No, he started gathering, but he didn't hang a shingle out until he had
sold the collection to Huntington. He bought Healy's store on Powell
Street--Patrick J. Healy. He's a little squat Irishman about so high
[indicates height] but hefty and strong as all get out. And he had his
way around, and he got into the anti-Chinese movement and made speeches,
and so forth, until one day he switched sides and was thrown out of the
anti-Chinese movement. [laughter] And he got involved in the Mercantile
library, I believe, and so forth. And, of course, father by that time
was in and out of shops around San Francisco and Healy couldn't stay put
very long. He had several shops; this first one that father bought out
was on Powell Street; and then I don't know where Healy went, and father
moved to Fourth Street near Mission; and then he bought out Healy again
on Mission Street. [laughter]
-
GARDNER
- I know I have this long list of addresses for shops. Was that usual in
those days, that bookdealers move?
-
COWAN
- No, no.
-
GARDNER
- It was just your father's expansion of business, I suppose.
-
COWAN
- Probably a matter of rent more than anything.
-
GARDNER
- At the time that he got into that business. Well, in Los Angeles at that
time there would have been a handful of booksellers--maybe two or three.
Were there a lot of booksellers in San Francisco, or was it a fairly
open market for them?
-
COWAN
- Oh, yes, there were many established by that time.
-
GARDNER
- Is that so?
-
COWAN
- Yes, small and large. The Holmes Co. I think is 1890, And there's
[William M.] McDevitt, whose name I tried to mention the other night and
forgot; [laughter] he was a socialist. And then the King brothers and a
couple of women--Miss Libby and others mentioned in The Booksellers of
Early San Francisco. Father at that time would generally spend all
afternoon rummaging around in bookshops to find out what he could find.
And they learned afterwards that father knew more than they did about
Californiana; so whatever he bought, he'd have to take two or three odd
things that didn't mean a thing to him and stack them in between the
thing that he wanted, so they wouldn't know what thing it was that he
wanted, so they wouldn't deny him the sale! [laughter] Which they did
before.
-
GARDNER
- I noticed by going through the files that there were many ways in which
he purchased books, but would you say that he got most of his books in
those days, in the early days, by going around to the different shops
and buying there? Or did he have contacts all around and about?
-
COWAN
- He bought them anywhere and everywhere. He had a lot of contacts in
Europe, bookdealers in Europe--he bought from catalogs. There was Thorpe
in England and Lange in Italy. Thorpe, incidentally, sent catalogs to
father and myself for about seventy years before it was cut off. And, of
course, I bought very little from Thorpe because he didn't have anything
of my interest. They kept on sending them until just a few years ago.
-
GARDNER
- Let's take a sideward move here: I have down that he married your mother
[Marie Fleissner Cowan] in 1894, and then I guess you were born not long
afterwards. Can you tell us something about your own early childhood?
Tell when you were born and something about your mother as well.
-
COWAN
- My mother came from a very musical family. Her older sister [Minna
Fleissner-Lewis] was a singer quite renowned around the Sacramento area;
in fact, there's broadsides still existent [of her] as a top opera
singer in some of the opera companies up there. Her oldest brother [Otto
Fleissner] taught music to the blind in Berkeley for fifty years before
he retired. And the other two brothers--one [Hugo] played the flute and
the other [Gustave] the violin. The other sister [Hermine Fleissner
Winks] could go to an opera or a musical and could come home and play
the whole thing on the piano without hesitation. They were musically
involved that much, and my mother herself played the piano and sang.
Well, this older sister of mother's went to Waldteufel’s bookshop to buy
some music, and she met this nice young man behind the counter; and she
decided that her sister should meet this man. So he was invited to [the
Fleissner] house (her name was Fleissner) for dinner, and this thing
jelled; and after two years, why, they married. They married in 1894,
and I was born a year and one month afterwards.
-
GARDNER
- What was the date of your birth? That's one of those things we like to
include in the record.
-
COWAN
- On December 14, 1895. During this period, while he was courting mother,
they saw an awful lot of the midwinter fair in San Francisco. Then they
were married, and they established themselves in one of grandfather's
dwellings at Twentieth and Treat Avenue, which, from all points of view,
even at that time was quite hideous. [laughter] But I guess they got
rent free for a while.
-
GARDNER
- In what way was it hideous?
-
COWAN
- It was old at that time.
-
GARDNER
- Oh, even then.
-
COWAN
- It was one of the houses that was a racetrack house at one time. It had
a very peculiar second floor; it seemed that the second floor was a
gallery at the time it opened up. And by the time I came along, the
gallery was floored over, and there was nothing left but seemingly rooms
surrounding the gallery. It wasn't in that building I was born--I was
born in the one next door. And then from there he moved to 819 Treat
Avenue near Twenty-second and paid rent to a man who had--we called them
flats, but they weren't really flats. They were just two stories with a
basement as the first floor. And we lived there for about two years, and
then there was the possibility of getting a house two doors away that
was owned by grandfather again. By this time grandfather died, but
grandmother owned the property, so he inveigled grandmother into
disposing of the tenants over there, and father moved in. And every once
in a while he paid the rent, if and when he could. [laughter] And while
we were at this first residence at 819 Treat Avenue (owned by somebody
else, a stranger), he closed the shop downtown and moved his entire
stock into the basement of that place. And then it was moved a couple of
years later into 867 Treat Avenue.
-
GARDNER
- The first one was 819 Treat?
-
COWAN
- It was 819, then later to 867. From then on the stock was never touched
except in and outs in the basement until 1926. And I packed the thing up
and sent it down to Los Angeles, twenty tons of it, and about twenty
tons were disposed of.
-
GARDNER
- We'll do that in more detail when we get up to 1926.
-
COWAN
- I'd like to go back again and give some of the background during the
period that he was in business.
-
GARDNER
- Yes, that's what I mean. We'll do 1926 later on when we get to it. I'd
like to hear some more, before we go on, about your father; something
about your own memories of childhood; what it was like growing up around
Treat; what the family life was like. Obviously the family at that point
was close to Dr. Cowan, your grandfather--what were things like around
the Cowan household?
-
COWAN
- Well, it was at the center of an Irish community, and the Cowans were
all regarded as aristocrats, and we had to fight our way. [laughter] It
was hideous. The Cowan family lived at 711 Treat Avenue, which is around
the corner from Twentieth Street, in a three-story house. And on each
side they had Irish neighbors, and they fought with all of them all the
time, even to knocking broomsticks at each other, and so forth.
[laughter] And they didn't have any social life in San Francisco in that
area, and it kind of divorced the Cowans to themselves. But father was a
lot more sociable, going around to the booksellers and meeting people
and eventually joining certain institutions like the Philatelic Club and
the 6:30 Club and the [San Francisco] Library Association; why, he got
to meet many people and went to dinners and so forth. He was secretary
of the Philatelic Society for a dozen years, and he met people like
Henry Crocker and a lot of outstanding citizens that belonged there. And
the 6:30 Club was a marvelous institution from my point of view. It was
comprised of many literary people--I can only remember two or three.
Frederick J. Teggart of the University of California was one of the
outstanding members; and Koenig--I think he was involved in business on
Montgomery--and several others of very high mental quality. And this
club was established for the mere purpose of going there, having dinner,
reading a paper, and then everybody tearing the paper to pieces after
dinner! [laughter] No paper came out of there unscathed. If the author
of the paper couldn't stand it, he resigned. And the papers were all in
the abstract. Father wrote a paper, and it was presented there--it was
on philanthropy or some such title, entirely abstract--and, of course,
that was torn to pieces like the rest of them after dinner. But it was
marvelous. And then finally the club folded; it lasted about ten, twelve
years, something of that sort. For a while father was secretary of that.
-
GARDNER
- So he stayed active in lots of things.
-
COWAN
- The things he was interested in. But he wasn't a joiner; he never joined
any lodges or things of that kind. The things that were in his category
of thinking he would join for the purpose which helped his business in a
lot of ways--like meeting George Haviland Barron, who was the curator of
the De Young Museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. He met him
probably shortly after the fire in San Francisco. Father had social
talents; he could talk well. He was invited over and over again to the
Canadian House of the midwinter fair and which was behind the museum,
and it was still used for residential purposes for the curator at the
time. I was an only child, and it was very seldom I was left behind.
Barron about once a month, at least for a dozen years, had dinner
parties, and about a dozen people would go there, and you'd meet anybody
and everybody there. He'd have politicians there, and he had the plumber
at one time. [laughter] And he'd have European travelers and he'd have
scholars and people that visited the museum, and if he liked them, he'd
invite them for dinner; so you got all kinds of people there. But Barron
was one of our greatest impromptu after-dinner speakers that
California's ever had, I think, because he was a spellbinder. He could
tell stories, sometimes historical, and sometimes the history got very
twisted, according to how he wanted to promote the story. It didn't make
any difference, because listening for two minutes you forgot all about
history and everything else. You were so involved in his method of
telling, his dynamic appearance--he was a very tall man with flowing
white hair, not long, and a white moustache which imitated the last
kaiser's moustache (points up on the ends, and so forth) and he had a
very military bearing and was very precise in his language. He'd been
born into the Spanish language, I think, because he could handle the
Spanish language like a native, as well as English. And he was well
educated--I don't know where, but he was well educated. But he was a
thriller. And he had these dinner engagements, and after dinner
everybody--even myself, the ten- or twelve-year-older--had to get up and
give an after-dinner talk. And I was the only youngster in the crowd,
over and over again. Father met many people that way, to promote his
name more than anything else, because he never talked books unless
somebody was interested. It was anything else and everything else he
would speak of. Some of our tops down here found out the same thing.
Like Larry Powell used to come and visit the house very often, and on
account of father's scholarly attainments, they didn't talk books much.
[laughter] Then this Barron--they traveled around together. Father had two close
friends; one of them was [Frederick I.] Monsen, who came along before I
did, and they traveled around together.
-
GARDNER
- Who was he? What did he do?
-
COWAN
- He was a photographer and a lecturer. And he traveled: he went to the
Moqui Snake Dance, and he did that on slides and lectured on slides; and
he went with father up to Portland and Seattle on a picture-taking
expedition, and they had various episodes up there. And Monsen and
Barron were the real friends, and that was it. He had hundreds of
acquaintances, of course. And almost every day, after business hours,
they'd meet downtown and run the cocktail route for an hour or so and
then come home. [laughter] They met a lot of top characters down there.
They weren't all saloon hangers-on or anything of that sort, because the
cocktail was a way for politicians to go to establish themselves, and
they met the tops of the aristocracy of San Francisco--male, of course.
So his contact with Barron did a great deal of good for him because he
met many people. And then Barron would get him to talk, and that brought
him before the people also. For instance, Barron had him talk at the
laying of the foundation, I think it was, of the De Young Museum, and
there was quite a gathering there--a couple of thousand people, I think,
from the looks of the pictures that I've seen. I was there, but I don't
remember much about it, except that I listened to father and I didn't
know what he said. [laughter] And those kinds of occasions that Barron
steered him into broadened father, and it broadened his name also.
-
GARDNER
- You were obviously placed right in the middle of this circle then, from
a very early age.
-
COWAN
- Yes.
-
GARDNER
- You were taken along to all the functions, and so on and so forth.
-
COWAN
- Quite true. I think I got most of my education there--if I have any!
[laughter]
-
GARDNER
- Did you then have any interest in the book business at that early age?
As a youngster going around from function to function and seeing what
your father was doing, was there an interest for you in that? What was
it like for you?
-
COWAN
- No, because it was seldom that books were ever mentioned.
-
GARDNER
- I see.
-
COWAN
- Judge Treadwell in San Francisco, one of the people that went to
Barron's parties, had parties, and I also remember going there; I was
the only youngster there. I can remember it was 1912, and we burned an
effigy of 1912 in alcohol on the table, [laughter] which I thought was
great. And the effigy consisted of a block of wood about eight inches
long, dressed as an officer in the Austrian army, very much decorated.
Well, he was burned at twelve o'clock New Year's Eve. And those kinds of
things stuck in my memory. But the talk was of a general nature; there
wasn't anything bookish about it at all, because at Barron's house and
at Judge Treadwell's house and at other houses, there were few book
people, actually. And, of course, I never went to the library
association meetings or anything of that sort. I was packed off to my
grandmother's to stay for the night, and I never got in at those where
they did talk books. My only exposure to books was in the basement of
our house, and I used the rooms to play hide-and-go-seek in with my
friends. And I always got in trouble because invariably stacks of
magazines and books would be knocked over, and then father would know it
the next morning, and then I was in trouble. [laughter] That's my
exposure to books to begin with.
-
GARDNER
- What were your interests early on, then? What sort of things when you
were a kid growing up?
-
COWAN
- Oh, I got interested, not in collecting books--although I always had
books and read a lot all of my life.
-
GARDNER
- You would have had to. [laughter]
-
COWAN
- Yes, I was taken by the nose. And I didn't begin by reading particularly
trash. My first book that I read was Chalou's In
Equatorial Africa, which gave you a very good picture of
Africa at that time; it's considerably changed. And then my next book
was Froissart's England, France and Spain,
which was a considerable history. Those were the first two books that I
read. And then I got to reading history; history is more interesting to
me, if it's nicely presented, than fiction. Although I've read a lot of
fiction too, beginning with Dickens up and Dickens down, as far as
fiction is concerned. So I always had a library of sorts, you know, a
general reading library. When father actually moved and came down here,
then I began getting very much interested in California, because I'd
handled his library down here and then got into the bibliography bit,
which was first cataloging his library, and then at my suggestion it was
converted to a bibliography. There wasn't any conversion because he set
me up and told me how to proceed with the cataloging of the library in
bibliographical style, which was done. So about the middle of the thing,
it was decided that we should offer it somewhere for publication, and
eventually Nash took it on; it didn't do us any good financially--there
were only 600 copies issued.
-
GARDNER
- This was what, 1919, '20?
-
COWAN
- In 1933 it came along.
-
GARDNER
- Oh that's the '33 one! Oh, right, the Clark one was the first one.
-
COWAN
- No, the first one was the [Bibliography of
the] Spanish Press [in California], and it's been through various
publications; and the next one was the [Bibliography of the] Chinese
Question [in the United States];
and the Bibliography [of the History of California and] the
Pacific [West], which isn't a
bibliography in the sense that the California was, because the
bibliography of the Pacific Coast only is a thousand titles of top
quality of the whole Pacific Coast, not exclusively California. But the
latest bibliography [Bibliography of California,
1510-1930] is exclusively California in its entirety.
-
GARDNER
- Well, when you were growing up then, here you are surrounded by people
involved in books and also surrounded by this other community. Did you
have any kind of vocational goals as a teenager? I mean, did you think
to yourself, "I'm going to be a railroad engineer"? What were your
thoughts?
-
COWAN
- No, I was floundering around the same as my father, I guess. [laughter]
Oh, of course there were first goals; I wanted to be a dentist or
something of that sort, and then that moved out of the picture
eventually. That was after I got to go to the dentist a few times. I
didn't like his operations at all, because they had a foot pedal for a
drill, and it got stuck in my teeth and all those kind of things which
weren't very comfortable, so I didn't like that. And then about the time
I graduated from high school, my uncle [Gustave Fleissner] induced me to
be errand boy for his jewelry business. [portion inadvertently erased] It was a small, nicely appointed office on the second floor across Post
Street from Shreve and Co. Most of the business came from wealthy women
desiring something special, mostly in rings or brooches. He would make a
crude sketch of what was wanted, in size and shape of the mounting and
the stone or stones. I would be called upon to pick up a selection of at
least four or more sapphires and/or diamonds. (The mode of the day
called for diamonds and sapphires mounted on platinum.) All things
decided, the sketch would be turned over to an artist, who would come up
with a perfect, colored drawing of the unique filigree work with all the
details. After the customer's acceptance it would be taken to a
manufacturing jeweler. I do not believe that cost was ever discussed.
Once I made a delivery to Mrs. Phoebe Hearst, a very gracious lady, who
was living at the Fairmont Hotel. This uncle was a slave driver. From nine to six o'clock with no breaks
save the lunch hour. If I wasn't on an errand, I had to clean rings,
wrap packages (with absolute precision), and, during the interims,
polish the silverware. He had an Apperson Jack-rabbit automobile, about
a 1914 model, which I serviced for him. I drove this car after learning
which foot pedal was the brake or the clutch and which were the correct
positions of the gearshift. There was no one to show me. Driver's
licenses were not heard of until later. The first ones issued were
supposed to be permanent, but they canceled out a few years after. The other uncle, my father's brother [Elbert Cowan], was a musician. He
was the leader of the Hotel Oakland orchestra for twenty-five years, and
he could pick up any stringed instrument and play it like a
professional--well, he was a professional. My operation was mainly the
jewelry business. And then World War I took twenty-two months out of my
life, and I came back and was in the jewelry business for a very short
time. And then I met my wife, and through her connivance I got a job
with Dill-Crosett, an importer and exporter; they did more importing
than exporting. That was through the W.P. Fuller Co., where my wife
worked. The company imported all kinds of dry paints and chemicals,
Japanese articles, food, almost everything around the world. So I got
involved in that, until they folded two years later. I was at that time
in the Japanese importing department, so I went out on the road and
sold, I think it was, ninety bales of grass rugs, which were very
popular at that time. I loaded Sloan's with all I could sell them, and
then I went on the road to sell, and that was the finish of the
business. [laughter] I sold their stock out.
-
GARDNER
- Your father never encouraged you before the later period to get into the
book business?
-
COWAN
- No, he never tried to induce me or encourage me or discourage me--he
never had anything to say about it.
-
GARDNER
- Well, you made this comment in your history of booksellers, I think,
your chapter on him. I wrote down: "... funds were never too plentiful."
And then Henry Wagner had the great comment about how they got started
in their relationship as bookseller and bookbuyer: "He needed money more
than books, and I needed books more than money." Which I think is an
interesting way of putting it. Did you ever feel the pinch as you were
growing up?
-
COWAN
- Oh, yes!
-
GARDNER
- Really!
-
COWAN
- Oh, yes. It was a comfortable day when two dollars came in. Mother got
one dollar, and father took care of all the expenses--the bills, the
rent, and everything else--from the other dollar. The dollar that mother
got was for food and household operations, and so forth; that included
clothing, too, so there wasn't much left, you know.
-
GARDNER
- And yet he seems to have led a life of some elegance, with the clubs and
the society, and so forth and so on.
-
COWAN
- That's what everybody thought, [laughter] but it wasn't true! They
learned how to live, and they lived very well--no case of starving or
anything of that sort--on the small amount that did come in.
-
GARDNER
- Did your grandfather have an inheritance or anything like that?
-
COWAN
- Yes, he left it all to his wife and his two unmarried daughters, so the
married children didn't get anything. And there wasn't much to leave; it
was just the property, which they had to hold for their income. As a
matter of fact, that was the only income they had. But outside of that,
there was no other estate, just this property.
-
GARDNER
- This is kind of an obligatory question, I suppose: What about the
earthquake? The earthquake-fire took place in what? 1905, '06?
-
COWAN
- In 1906.
-
GARDNER
- How did they affect you, and how did they affect the business, if at
all?
-
COWAN
- Well, it affected me by shaking me out of bed, [laughter] number one.
And we had to get out of our house on account of the fire came within
four or five blocks of the house. We lived in a friend's basement up on
the side of Twin Peaks for the three days following, and so forth. It
didn't affect father's business; it promoted it rather than defect it,
although he lost a box of valuable books down in Holmes's basement. He
was careless about leaving things around that way, and they were burned
up, of course. But after the fire, all the libraries in the area--both
the public libraries and the private libraries--needed building up, so
father was right there with the stock, because all his life he bought a
good deal more than he could afford to, and he had quite a backlog more
than he could sell. One of the rooms in the cottage at 867 Treat Avenue
was devoted to books entirely; it was called "the back bedroom," the
back parlor. That was shut off from the rest of the house, and it was a
book room, lined with books. That was his library; and when all the
collectors would come to the house, that was the room they were in. You
wouldn't go down to the basement at all because his stock was
downstairs, but his library was upstairs. All the book
collectors--[Augustine] MacDonald of Richmond, Wagner, [Allen] Knight,
[Fred] Zimmerman, Bonestell, and Graupner--they all would come upstairs
into this room, and he'd let them go through it and pick out what they
want, and he'd put a price on it. It was always a satisfactory price
because father was never high, and that was the reason all his
collectors stuck to him until he got into the Clark Library, actually,
or until they had their fill of books. Like MacDonald--he sold his to
the Huntington Library, the sale of which was engineered by father.
Father got three lots on Central Avenue as commission from Huntington,
and that was the only commission he got, which he had to liquidate right
away. [laughter]
-
GARDNER
- What was a typical day like for him in those days when you were growing
up?
-
COWAN
- He spent his mornings answering correspondence or in the basement
sorting out magazines for articles, Bret Harte articles, out of The Overland, or putting them in order. Or if
he got an order for something, he'd go down and dig them up and set it
up, and so forth, ship it out, and then go and get an expressman--he
always had a favorite expressman, who generally charged him anywhere
from fifty cents to a dollar and a half for the job of transporting the
books here and there and bringing them into the basement. And then in
the afternoon he'd take off for the bookshops and then come home by the
cocktail route, always at six o'clock, precisely at six o'clock. And
mother and I always sat in the window for him; he'd turn the corner at
six o'clock, and that was it. [laughter]
-
GARDNER
- Your mother must have had a great deal of patience...
-
COWAN
- She did.
-
GARDNER
- ...given the circumstances.
-
COWAN
- Yes, well, mother was from the old school, and father was the king of
the house, and that was it. She had to have patience, although when she
blew--[laughter] father didn't blow it; he gentlemanly absorbed it. He
let her have her way, but she didn't demand her way very often--very,
very seldom, unless it was something very vital. The rest of the time
father always had his way. We always went out on Sundays, that was
family day. Nothing interfered with that. Our outing generally consisted
of going to a certain part of San Francisco by streetcar--we didn't have
any other means of transportation--for a nickel apiece, and walk. It
might have been downtown, or it might have been the dumps, or it might
have been the pesthouse, or anywhere else, or just a certain section of
San Francisco, residential and business. And we'd generally end up in
the Latin Quarter for dinner at about two to three o'clock in the
afternoon. There weren't any crowds there at that time, and dinner was
very comfortable and very inexpensive--fifty cents on Sundays and
thirty-five cents during the week, which is a seven-course dinner. It
started with a bowl of soup; then the salad; then a bit of chicken, a
leg or a small portion of breast of chicken; and then fish (no, the fish
came before the chicken); and then the entree, roast beef or something
of that sort. And then for dessert it was always banana fritters or
fried cream and then a bowl of fruit and a split of wine and a demitasse
coffee, fifty cents, and five cents for the waiter. [laughter] So the
dollar for that day--well, it was a little more, a dollar and a
half--went for that outing. Should we stay home on Sunday, dinner was
invariably a twenty-five-cent cut of cross-rib. The butcher would cut a
piece that he considered the proper size, but he would never weigh it.
There were no pennies in circulation, so there was no object in weighing
it. You had asked for twenty-five cents' worth, and that's what you got.
This roast would last the three of us at least two days. And then in the
evening at home during the week we would go for a walk around the
neighborhood. The neighborhoods were a lot different then; it was very,
very safe to go around the neighborhoods. There was one man that stood
under a particular lamppost every evening for six years to my knowledge
and was never molested at any time--not on account of his size, but
because nobody would ever think of bothering another person on the
streets. Light or dark, it didn't make any difference. He was a
character; he stood under the same lamppost for years...
-
GARDNER
- What was he doing under the lamppost?
-
COWAN
- Nothing, just standing there. [laughter] He greeted everybody that came
along. His name was John Pryor.
1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO
MAY 18, 1978
-
GARDNER
- As I just mentioned, the first bibliography that I have any record of is
1914, and you were about to describe to me what that was.
-
COWAN
- It was a Bibliography of the History of California
and the Pacific [West]. It was
comprised of 1,000 titles of that area and there were just the most
historically valuable things that could be gathered up and put into
this. It wasn't an overall picture of the scene at all; it was simply a
catalog of outstanding books--rare, expensive, and also historically
valuable.
-
GARDNER
- Was there any story behind putting the bibliography together?
-
COWAN
- No, father had always made notes along the line. He visited and viewed
Vallejo's library up there and then he was always involved with
Bancroft. And, in fact, long before Bancroft Library was moved to
Berkeley, when it was still in Bancroft's hands, I went with father on a
couple of Sundays; he had access to the library any Sunday that he went
over there, and he took me a few times. I met [Hubert H.] Bancroft a
couple of times. I can remember he looked like [Venustiano] Carranza,
with his back to a sunlit window. I could not distinguish his face but
he could see me, and that's why I say Carranza, because Carranza did
that. He admonished me to be a good boy and all that. But father had the
access there, and he always went there to take notes; he made notes
right from the time he became interested in Californiana; anything that
passed through his hands, he made a note of. So he worked those notes
out into bibliographical forms, and that was the background of his
bibliographies. For this he chose 1,000 most important books and some of them were put
into that because that's as far as the Book Club [of California] wanted
him to go, I believe, as far as space was concerned. But father didn't
have any idea of creating these things himself; he had to be pushed into
everything. Before that time was the Bibliography of the
Spanish Press [in California],
and I think that John Howell induced him to do that. And then before
that, the Chinese question--Boutwell Dunlap wanted to make a name for
himself, I think, and pushed father into doing all the work on the
bibliography for the Chinese question. From what I gather, Dunlap didn't
know anything about bibliography or the Chinese question either,
although he was the Argentinean counsel at San Francisco at that time
(and he saved me stamps, which I was quite involved with at that time).
But he was a great big, heavy man; he must have weighed close to 300
pounds. He was on crutches, too, all the time that I knew him. He was a
great eater, because the one afternoon it was late and father invited
him to dinner, we only had a half a slice of round steak for dinner;
which did our family--it cost ten cents for a half-slice. And he came to
dinner, and mother didn't know it, so she hadn't prepared for him. He
had to go out and buy a dinner after he ate what he could at our place.
[laughter] He was quite voracious, I think, in his appetite.
-
GARDNER
- That takes us up to the world war. You mentioned that you spent
twenty-two months in the service. Can you tell me something about where
they sent you?
-
COWAN
- Yes, well, thirty-three days after United States declared war on
Germany, I joined the coast guard. I had no formal training; I just
marched around close to twelve-inch mortars at the armory at Fourteenth
and Valencia in San Francisco. I was there until they drafted us as a
unit into the regular army. I never saw boot camp; we were trained by
that time and had enough sense to accommodate ourselves because it was a
social organization. I knew some of the fellows in there, and I didn't
know where to go, and I wanted to join something to keep out of the
army, to keep from going to Europe (which I didn't). [laughter] But,
anyhow, that was the idea. Well, I didn't mind going there, but my
girlfriend and my mother and father, of course, they didn't want me to
go to Europe, naturally. So I joined this and so forth. But we got all
our training down at Fourteenth and Valencia, and then we were drafted
into the army, and we spent months at Fort Scott training on the big
guns. And then they found out that I could run a typewriter, and I guess
I was the only one in the company (well, there was another fellow that
ran the typewriter, too), so I got into the office, and I was in the
office all the way through the war. I didn't have to worry about mess
lines; I didn't have to stand in a mess line in all that time. It was
very nice. [laughter] Then we were sent to Utah on guard duty, and that
was a joy for all of us because all we had to do was stand guard.
-
GARDNER
- What were you guarding in Utah?
-
COWAN
- Well, our outfit was split up into three parts--four parts, I guess;
some of them were sent up to Boise, Idaho (I don't know what they were
doing up there); our major portion was sent to Garfield, Utah, and we
guarded Tooele, where there were mines, with some of the outfit. And at
Garfield they had the smelters, and in Bingham was where the big mines
are; and we did guard duty for all of those places. I was stationed at
Garfield all the time, and I, being musically inclined right from the
start on account of family background, I suppose--my nose was stuck into
the piano keys and then in the violin and so forth, and it didn't take
(I joined the glee club in high school and sang bel basso profundo)--I
organized a quartet in the army up in Utah, and we began singing up
there. And we had a very good quartet. In fact, the captain, who had
gotten involved with one of the girls at a Catholic church and was
trying to show himself off, had our quartet sing at a Christmas mass up
there. And this quartet was comprised of a Jew and an atheist and a
Catholic and myself, who was Protestant. And we sang, so that didn't
make any difference. [laughter] Anyhow, we weren't asked again because
we weren't up there for the next Christmas, but they wouldn't have
invited us anyhow. But, anyhow, that was the quartet, and that was how
the quartet got started, and we stuck all through the war with this
quartet. Then after the guard duty, well, there was one episode where somebody
rolled a barrel of hard cider down the middle of our lane, which was
comprised of kinds of shacks, up at Garfield. So everybody caught wind
of it and we packed our canteens on post--we were spending four hours on
post and eight hours off of post at that time--and we got onto this hard
cider business. Instead of putting water in our canteens, we put hard
cider into our canteens, and the guard duty was wonderful! [laughter] I
was sent some Christmas cookies from home--this was New Year's Eve--so I
passed them around and, oh, we had a lovely time on guard duty. Of
course, we were stuck in sentry boxes that weren't warm but they did
shield us against the climate up there. They had snow on the ground all
the time; in Tooele we had three feet of snow all the time, which was
rather tough. We couldn't drive jeeps, even. That was awkward also. And
up at Bingham they didn't have as much snow, and most of the outfit was
up there on account of the extent of the mines. Bingham at that time was
just a one-street town with houses on either side, and it was rather
uproarious. And one celebration we went up there for a dance, and the
cook in our outfit loaded our coffee, or some portion of the food, with
saltpeter, or something of that sort, which gave us the Montezuma trots
all evening. And we went up there by train, which is very slow going
because it's all uphill; it ran about four or five miles an hour, I
think. We'd have to get off the train and then run and catch up with it
afterwards. And up there, every once in a while we'd be dancing with
some girl and a fellow'd have a funny look on his face and drop her in
the middle of his dance and rush off to the restroom. [laughter] Well,
then we were sent back to Fort Scott again. Eventually (we didn't do
much except march around) we moved from Fort Scott into barracks at the
Presidio, and we were drafted at that time by the regular army as an
unusual unit. It was a regiment comprised of 1,000 men; we were called
the Army Artillery Park, which consisted of three park batteries,
supposedly about 250 men each, and six truck companies. The Army
Artillery Park established ammunition dumps for the artillery--sometimes
in front of the artillery, sometimes behind it, but always in the
vicinity. And the truck company operation is obvious; they carried the
shells to and from the dumps. That was our operation in France.
-
GARDNER
- Oh, so you got to Europe; that's what I was going to ask.
-
COWAN
- Yes, well, on our way to Europe--we left to go to New York on the Santa
Fe. We had a boat pick us up at the Presidio, and the quartet was on the
rail singing to all the parents down below. We sang "There's a Long,
Long Trail a-Winding." Well, that was a tearjerker; everybody on the
docks cried, and even some of the fellows on deck cried, [laughter]
especially the sailors. And we got to New York and we used the quartet
there. One place we got to, a YMCA place in New York, they were supposed
to entertain us; but by the time it was over, we were entertaining them
by the quartet. And I met Painless Parker's sisters and daughters in New
York. They were all married, and they took us under their wing. There
were three or four of us that were taken in by three or four of them.
And they took us all over Brooklyn, particularly, and Coney Island, New
York, and elsewhere to entertain us for the week, or couple of weeks,
that we were in New York. Painless Parker was an established advertising
dentist here in Los Angeles and probably, in California, the most-known
dentist of the time.
-
GARDNER
- That's a wonderful name. Painless Parker. [laughter]
-
COWAN
- Yes, nice alliteration. And anyhow, we left on the Kroonland from New York, which is the sister of the Finland. And I kept a diary, which was
forbidden because I was in the office, and I went with the office
records, and my diary went with the office records. Well, if the Germans
captured our office records, they'd know more about our outfit than the
diary could ever give them because it was all personal in the diary. And
I had this diary aboard ship, which started from the time I left San
Francisco and had the various episodes. We were shot at, at sea, a
couple of times by torpedoes--one going forward in front of us, one
going aft. And another time, we were almost stalled, and we didn't catch
the torpedo, though it was awfully close--about thirty feet away from
us. Then we were stalled a couple of times, and we got about halfway
over and welcomed the British army and ran our flanks on either side,
destroyers all around us. And every once in a while, one of the ships
would break down, and they'd leave a destroyer behind with us or the
other ship that had broken down till we got to France. We did break down
just before we got to France, and we left the convoy. We never saw the
convoy again; we got to France before they did. We took a more direct
route through the submarine zone, I presume. But we did land at St.
Nazaire, which I don't think was used very much at that time for troop
landing. We were not the first to land at St. Nazaire. From St. Nazaire
we were shipped out to Chalus, which is close to Limoges, where all the
great pottery comes from, including Haviland china. About thirty miles
from Limoges, Chalus is, They'd never had American soldiers before, and
we were treated royally.
-
GARDNER
- About what were the dates at this time, do you remember? This would have
been early 1918?
-
COWAN
- Yes, in June, because we celebrated Fourth of July right after landing
at St. Nazaire in 1918, and then we were taken by trains. We spent about
three months in Chalus, more or less. And then we had our own trucks, of
course, because our own truck company engineered us to the front. And we
had episodes because we were along, and very often we were entirely
alone because the office force was separate. We had all of the special
duty sergeants along with the two battery clerks on this truck. It was
loaded with clothing and everything, which made nice beds; so we slept
inside most of the time, although the truck was open. We didn't have any
cover over the truck, so in inclement weather we had to find somewhere
else, or else sleep in the rain. And we'd get stalled and get away from
the outfit. We knew where we were going but that's all we did know. We'd
stop off at a likely-looking farmhouse at night in a little village. The
French farmers live in little villages, and the farms are on the
outskirts of the villages and are one or two acres apiece. And we got to
learn the French people and their way of life by living with these
farmers; we'd take their family fare, whatever it was at that time. When
we got near the front, we had to turn the lights off in the vehicle (it
was a Pierce-Arrow truck, one of the big heavy ones with nine men in it
besides the load), and we couldn't find our way in the dark along the
roads except by looking up through the trees at the moon on top of us.
We couldn't see the road, but we could navigate through the opening of
the trees. Well, of course, before this time no matter where we went
we'd end up at the cafe at the little village (whatever it was), and we
had all the Frenchmen around there. And the quartet sang; we had the
quartet in there with us, and we'd sing and we'd gather a backlog of
cognac and anisette for the evening. We were always happy with that, and
with a truck driver that had a half a dozen and more cognac and
anisettes looking up at the road traveling forty-five miles an hour down
hills, it was rather precarious, but nobody paid any attention.
[laughter] And we got to the front. We weren't shot at directly by infantry or
artillery or anything of that sort, but we were close to the front at
times. We were not in a position ever very long; we moved back and forth
for the month or so that we were up there. And we were always in fear of
being bombed by airplanes. One week we had an airplane or two coming
over for the whole week, every night for that week, just once a night,
but that was enough; we got pale during that period, I'll tell you. And
they did come fairly close, but it was all through visual navigation and
they couldn't see anything at night, and so they didn't get us. Because
if the dump was blown up, we'd have all blown up with it, of course. But
they didn't get us. And the war came to the end, and we were right
beyond the German outer lines when that happened. It was over an area
where there hadn't been any pickups, and the dead were still there and
so forth; two days before they'd removed, and they didn't take the dead
with them. They didn't find them. We found them! We took part in four
offensives: St. Mihiel, Verdun, Champagne, and Meuse-Argonne. And then
after that we came through France and then back to Bordeaux. The quartet
began to get busy, and we got into the YMCA circuit for about six months
afterwards. I think they held the whole outfit there for about six
months after the war to use us, because we entertained all the YMCA
outfits, right up to Pershing. Pershing was going to come one night, and
he couldn't come, but his general staff came. And by that time we had a
whole vaudeville show around the quartet; the quartet was the background
of this vaudeville show. But it was a fun show because it pleased
everybody; we were invited everywhere all the time, and we always ate at
officers' mess and everything (which was unusual for just plain old
privates to do at that time, you know). Although I got to be a corporal
afterwards, I was a private at that time. And all around Bordeaux, for
three weeks or more, we had done that. In the meantime I had kept a map
along with my diary, and I found out that I had gone through or stopped
at sixty-five little towns and villages all through France. That's quite
an excursion. The tourist of today doesn't do that, or he can't get to
do it, because the railroads in France are not built like the railroads
in the United States; they're built to gather in all the little small
towns from big place to big place. So you can get by truck in thirty
minutes where it takes three hours to get by train to the same place.
That was accomplished between Limoges and Chalus, because the trains
gathered in all these little towns along the way and stopped at all of
them. And they would converse Frenchwise for a few minutes, each
engineer and station operator, and so forth. And during that period we
had a messenger that we sent out to contact this, that, and the other
thing. He was French and could understand the language so he didn't have
any difficulty getting around from place to place. But he, being French,
was like the rest of the Frenchmen; no matter where we sent him on a
five-minute excursion that would take at least a half an hour because at
every street corner he'd stop and have a discussion about this, that,
and the other thing with every Frenchman that he could find. So I began
calling him Mercury. [laughter] And then we came across to New York from Bordeaux on the Canonicus. The Canonicus, under the name of Sonora, was renamed and taken over from Spain by Americans. It
only held 1,000 men, which is very, very small, because going over the
Kroonland, I think there were 6,000
aboard that. We had control of the whole boat ourselves--we could go
anywhere on the boat. It was very nice; the sailors were all great. And
of course from time to time the quartet would entertain the soldiers,
and we had a banjo trio, too, that did very well. One of them was the
orchestra leader of the Odeon in San Francisco. The quartet sang above
decks; I have a picture aboard the Canonicus coming home, and we had the sailors in tears, believe
it or not. [laughter] Of course, by that time all the soldiers were used
to us, because they'd heard us dozens of times. We got to New York and
were given the usual warm welcome, again in San Francisco; wherever we
stopped off we got the World War I welcome, which was a bit different
from later wars.
-
GARDNER
- Right. So there you are; you're getting back in 1919.
-
COWAN
- Yes, I got engaged before I went to Europe and then married after I came
back from Europe.
-
GARDNER
- Your wife was...?
-
COWAN
- She was Georgia Harvey--a San Francisco family. However, she was born in
Shingle Springs just a dozen miles from Coloma and a dozen miles from
Placerville. Part of her family's still up there in that region.
-
GARDNER
- By the time you got back, your father's life had added on William
Andrews Clark, because it's by the following year that he was put on
salary by...
-
COWAN
- I was home only two or three days before father came to Los Angeles for
the first time to interview. And he was going to be there for $300 a
month, which was wonderful, for a month trial. Well, that month expanded
into sixteen years, and of course the salary went up all the time during
that period. So father left me, let's say, a comfortable estate. It wasn't grand or
great or anything of that sort, and certainly small in this day's
reckoning, but it was quite comfortable then and enabled me to buy
property, low-class property for rental purposes. I was fortunate enough
to elect courts, which worked out very well. The upkeep was nil, and I
did the upkeep myself. So I did double it in less than ten years by just
having the courts, and keeping the normal rent down, which was twenty to
twenty-five dollars at that time. The highest it ever got was sixty
dollars, I think, and that was about 1965, when I began liquidating.
-
GARDNER
- How did your father first get to know Clark?
-
COWAN
- Clark had broken his arm--of course, Clark was a bookman, no question
about it. And he and Miss [Cora] Sanders undertook the bibliography, but
he wanted some- body that knew bibliography. So he asked John Nash, and
Nash had introduced him to Charles Clark; and father did a job for
Charles Clark, W.A.'s brother in San Mateo.
-
GARDNER
- What sort of job?
-
COWAN
- Bibliography: he cataloged his library. And for that job father got
about fifteen first editions of Dickens, all beautifully bound in full
Morocco by a top-notch binder in England.
-
GARDNER
- In lieu of cash.
-
COWAN
- Yes, definitely. Oh, it's a beautiful set. And W.A. went to Nash, who
was his printer, and asked him. Nash sent father down with a
recommendation from his brother also, and that's how father came down to
Clark.
-
GARDNER
- I see, and he immediately went to Los Angeles. Did he take up residence
here?
-
COWAN
- Half the time he spent in Los Angeles, and half of the time in San
Francisco to engineer John Henry Nash through the printing of [the
bibliography]. And by that time Clark had proceeded in the
bibliographical field so he could get along without father. But he still
wanted father with him as a houseguest. And until 1926, from 1919 to
1926, father was Clark's houseguest when he was in Los Angeles.
-
GARDNER
- I see. But your mother remained in San Francisco and took care of the
basement full of books.
-
COWAN
- That's right, yes. And father, as far as I know, never missed a dinner
with Clark, no matter who came to the house. And father was always a top
entertainer, we'll say, and Clark loved it very much.
-
GARDNER
- What do you recollect of it?
-
COWAN
- There was a time that he had Rise Stevens, the famous singer, for
dinner. The name was bantered around the table--Rise, how should it be
pronounced and so forth. And it came to father, and he said, "I should
pronounce it charmingly." Well, that almost broke the dinner party up!
[laughter] And Clark went over and kissed him on the top of the head.
"My bibliographer," he said.
-
GARDNER
- What are your recollections of Clark, his relationship with your father
and so on, the sort of person he was?
-
COWAN
- Well, it was a wonderful relationship, and my relationship was
wonderful, too. Father was still half-time down here, and I came down in
the summer because I was working for the Southern Pacific Company at the
time; and with passes to the ends of the road, that is why I came in
with the wife--no children at that time--and we were going to visit
father and explore Los Angeles. I'd never been to Los Angeles before, so
we stayed at the Clark Hotel down in Los Angeles. It was a very good
hotel and one of the top hotels--not the top, not the most entertaining
or expensive. So we stopped at the Clark, not only on account of the
name, but it was recommended. We went out to visit father in the
afternoon, and we met Mr. Clark. He asked us all kinds of questions and
so forth, and he says, "Well, where are you staying?" And we told him.
"Well," he says, "that won't do. You will stay here." And he gave us a
room--his room, as a matter of fact. He stayed in one of the empty
bedrooms. And he gave me a butler half-time, his own butler half-time, and his housemaid full-time to the
wife. So we lived sumptuously; we were millionaires for two weeks.
[laughter] During that time, his sister-in-law came in with a niece of
Clark's, and he turned over his room, and he slept on the front porch;
instead of throwing us out of the house, he slept on the front porch. It
was during the summer and very warm, and he said it got too hot in the
house, anyhow. And he was that kind of a man; he always said, "Well, it
got too hot in the house," so he would take the rough edge of it. He
always did that. And, you know, he always took care of us; he gave us a
night chauffeur and this night chauffeur was at UCLA--no, USC, studying
dentistry. He became our dentist afterwards, and he took care of four
generations of the Cowans.
-
GARDNER
- Is that so? That's amazing.
-
COWAN
- Yes. And that two weeks was a wonderful two weeks. He tried to get us
into the Tuna Club in Catalina--women were verboten, so that was out of
the picture. And then one night he had some Russians in there, and he
didn't think we'd fit in very well with the Russians, so he had his
secretary. Miss Sanders, take us out--no, no, we went with father, to
see My Wild Irish Rose (I guess that was
it) at the Burbank Theatre, which was a pretty good theater at that
time, and dinner before. That was the only time we didn't have dinner
with him while we were in town.
-
GARDNER
- That's wonderful. So he was very generous.
-
COWAN
- Oh, very! And that night I understood that he gave up one of his
Stradivarius violins to one of the Russian boys that came in with the
adults because he showed signs of being a good violinist, and Clark was
an excellent violinist.
-
GARDNER
- Is that so?
-
COWAN
- I imagine that's how he got in with the orchestra.
-
GARDNER
- The Los Angeles [Philharmonic] Orchestra. What were your father's
duties? Was he simply bibliographer? Or librarian, I suppose?
-
COWAN
- Yes, and general entertainer of any celebrity that came in here, and
general entertainer in the house and in the library. Of course, the
library was in the house when father was there, before the new library
was built, and a couple of pieces of furniture around here that I have
came out of the library. Father got them eventually, and then they came
to me. Father was his, you might say, entertainer along with doing his
bibliography, for the most part in conjunction with Clark; it was a
fifty-fifty deal, I imagine. And he always had to go to San Francisco.
Well, father loved that, anyhow. And any time he'd go to San Francisco,
he'd generally get [Henry] Wagner, who had a car and a chauffeur at that
time, to go with him. And they rode up together, and as Wagner said in
one of his books, he always dropped Cowan up there and Cowan never
showed up again until it was time to go home. [laughter] He'd never see
Cowan all the time that he was in San Francisco. Father'd go to all the
old places he remembered before the fire, and then to the bookshops. He
liked to go to the bookshops and get a hold of all the new youngsters,
you might say, in the bookshops, like Anna Marie Hager, and all the
people that had just gone into the business as clerks, particularly
women--Ellen Shaffer, now at the Stevenson Library, St. Helena, and all
the rest of them--and talk to them. And that's the reason they all
adored him: because he talked and told them stories--not about books.
Well, they'd pull his leg once in a while for books, I imagine, naturally. But, anyhow, he was an entertainer
no matter where he went.
-
GARDNER
- Marvelous. Did he buy books for Clark?
-
COWAN
- Yes.
-
GARDNER
- Did Clark buy on his own as well?
-
COWAN
- Oh, Clark bought on his own, but he'd often confer with father before
buying.
-
GARDNER
- I see.
-
COWAN
- And Clark offered him a commission, always, which father wouldn't have;
he'd reject it always. And Clark thought that was wonderful because
everybody that surrounded him wanted their commission no matter what.
And that's the reason Clark never had many friends. His millionaire
acquaintances that might have been friends had no idea as to books and
no consideration of music, so that left him alone. And father was the
only go-between that he could trust, because he learned after a while
that father was above money grabbing.
-
GARDNER
- And a bit above money for much of his life, as well. Well, let's make
the move now before we finish up today. In 1926, then, you started
packing up books.
-
COWAN
- Yes.
-
GARDNER
- Can you tell us something about that--what the circumstances were, what
the move was like for everyone--I assume your mother then moved down?
-
COWAN
- Yes, at that time. Well, she maintained the house up in San Francisco
until that time. Up to that time I was working as cashier for the
Southern Pacific Company on the auto ferry, which was a nerve-wracking
job. On certain boats, the eight o'clock boat in the morning, you'd have
at least six or eight trucks that lined up waiting to be weighed, and
maybe anywhere from fifty or more automobiles waiting to get a ticket,
and about forty or fifty pedestrians waiting to get tickets on the Creek
Route when they had pedestrians at five cents to go cross the bay. And
you'd have to weigh these trucks, establish the rate of the truck--was
it a big truck or a small truck--and the driver's and passenger's fare.
This all had to be on one ticket and written out from scratch. And then
you had to weigh the truck on the scale, the beam of which was just
inside of cashier's window. And then you'd have to get the fare from the
driver, and then subtract the fare from the gross to get the net, and
then extend that at the going rate per ton, and then add the state toll,
which was a weight, a percentage that had to be extended. And then the
whole thing added up, one ticket for each truck, and then they had to
slowly move off the scale after that. You had to do at least eight of
those to get one boat loaded, and if the boat were late, it was your
fault; there was the devil to pay, always. The cashier was responsible
for all financial mistakes. I remember one episode on that thing where
the boats were late, and it was no fault of ours. It was Christmas Eve,
and there were oil cars spotted where the boats take oil. The boats drew
oil, started on the Christmas run, and they began to slow up; they'd
have to take the burners off every few minutes and clean them, because
somebody had spotted a earful of molasses, instead of oil, over the
sump. Well, of course, that went to the bottom of the sump, and the
first boats that got there got the molasses. So by the end of the day,
they were an hour and a half late, the three of them. Oh, and the
traffic had piled up; that was a hideous mess that day. Well, that was a
day that was easier on the cashiers; there was no pressure on them. But when I first went to Southern Pacific Company, I was on a swing
shift--one week on the Oakland side of the bay and the other side, the
San Francisco side the other week. And they'd tie up a boat on the San
Francisco side, at night; and whereas I lived in Oakland, and in order
to have me at six o'clock before any boats were running, I had to stay
aboard the boat. I slept on all the boats that were tied up at the city,
and I had to make sure I was on the right boat or else I'd be tied up in
Oakland. So I'd leave early in the evening and get aboard the boat and
sleep in San Francisco aboard the boat. I got to know all the captains
and mates so any trip that I went over on, I'd go out on the promenade
deck under the pilot house, and they'd see me and beckon, "Come on up."
I never, you know, went up there and rapped, or otherwise they might
throw me off; so they always had me up in the pilot house. I made many,
many trips across San Francisco Bay. And many of them were old sea
captains, and they were full of old sea stories that were great. It was
wonderful! So sometimes I'd deliberately make a trip aboard to go to San
Francisco and back again on another boat to listen to some of their
stories. [laughter]
-
GARDNER
- So then you become involved with trucking the library down. How did that
work? How many tons?
-
COWAN
- Twenty tons.
-
GARDNER
- What did you do with them? How did you get them down here?
-
COWAN
- After packing them in solid wooden boxes--no cartons, because father was
afraid that the shifting of the cartons and the handling of the
cartons... he didn't know how it was handled at that time. I didn't know
either, as a matter of fact; although I conducted a lot of freight to go
across on the ferryboats, I didn't know how it was packed. Anyhow, it
ended up having a Bekins large truck van hoisted aboard a flat car with
part of the library and a little part of the library in another van
along with the household furniture that had accumulated. It took two
large Bekins truck van bodies that were hoisted on a flat car and
brought down here; and I don't know how it was handled down here because
I wasn't here. I was still getting rid of stuff and getting the house in
shape, because it was sold to a friend up in San Francisco, and he was a
bit choosy in certain respects. He wanted it cleaned out; he didn't want
to have any books, magazines, newspapers, or anything of that sort, so I
had to get rid of those things. We dumped a lot on [John] Howell, as
many as Howell would take for free, and other booksellers up in San
Francisco and then called in the paper company for the rest of them. All
that had to be done after father left. And then there was the shelving
to be disposed of; well, that didn't give much trouble with that,
because the new owner wanted the shelving. The shelving was redwood and
it was either six or eight inches wide, and some of it was twenty-four
feet long. Well you could start a split at one end of that
twenty-four-foot strip and it'd come out the same split at the other end
it was so perfect, the grain was so straight. It was wonderful wood;
it'd be worth a fortune today. Well, he didn't mind keeping that, even
though in that day it wasn't worth very much and it wasn't worth packing
up and taking down here and storing for who knows what. And so all that
had to be taken care of. I did bring a few pieces down here when I
packed my own stuff; I took a few pieces home and I made boxes out of
it. I got the residue of the redwood shelving down here myself. I built
a few things out of it myself. And the operation after that was simply
all in Bekins’s hands.
-
GARDNER
- Did you move down here at that time, too?
-
COWAN
- I sold my property. I'd taken a vacation from my job and then went and
quit my job and then came down here after I sold the property up there.
-
GARDNER
- Where did everybody live?
-
COWAN
- I lived in the Melrose area in Oakland.
-
GARDNER
- No, I mean when you came down here in 1926.
-
COWAN
- Oh, on Twenty-fifth Street. That's where father landed--in one of
Clark's houses.
-
GARDNER
- I see. What was the address there, do you recall? It doesn't matter if
you can't.
-
COWAN
- Yes, it was 2164 West Twenty-fifth Street, the Clark property west of
Gramercy by one house. Clark owned only a couple of pieces on
Twenty-fifth Street; in fact, he was buying the property at that time.
He didn't have the house next door on either side of father, but he had
that one house and he was buying it piecemeal until he got the whole
block.
-
GARDNER
- So the whole family moved in there then?
-
COWAN
- No, I rented a cheap little court over on Thirty-seventh Drive. It was
all white over there then, but I lived next door to a Scotsman. The
Scotsman was a contractor, and he built my house on Redondo Boulevard.
And after six months or so of living in this court, we moved into our
place over on Redondo Boulevard near Pico. And I had by that time a
set-up for books, as I was architect of the house, you might say; I made
a steep English roof and had a library room upstairs which extended all
over the whole house. It was about 30 x 40 feet in size, and it became
the library room.
-
GARDNER
- So at this point, then, you are becoming a book person, too.
-
COWAN
- Yes, by that time I was working on the bibliography. [laughter]
-
GARDNER
- Well, I see the tape's about to run out, so why don't we stop here for
now, and we'll pick up again next week and talk some more about Clark
and bibliographies and so on.
1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II [video session]
JUNE 2, 1978
-
GARDNER
- Since we're here, I think the main topic of conversation might as well
be the Clark Library. We started talking about it a little bit a few
weeks ago and explored something about the trip down here and getting
the books together. But as long as we're physically in the building,
maybe you can describe to me what the setting was for your father--where
it was in the building that he worked, and so forth and so on.
-
COWAN
- Yes, he had his office, a little office on the north side of the
building, and from there he worked ever since the library was
established.
-
GARDNER
- Who else was where, of the other people who worked in the library at
that time?
-
COWAN
- Miss Sanders and Clark worked together on the south side of the building
in a little office there. Actually, there were two offices there; it's
been changed around since, I think, but there were two offices. But they
worked together pretty closely, because she was not only assistant
librarian but she was secretary to him and everything else, everything
but the social secretary.
-
GARDNER
- To your father?
-
COWAN
- No, to Clark.
-
GARDNER
- What was Miss Sanders's relationship to your father? Did they occupy
complementary roles, or did they do some of the same things?
-
COWAN
- No, Miss Sanders was assistant to Clark, really. The association was on
a friendly basis, because they were passing limericks and all kinds of
fun between them all the time. There was a bit of competition on Miss
Sanders's part, because I think she wanted the librarianship, but father
was in ahead of her a long time before she began working on the
bibliography of the library. That was while it was in Clark's home and
not in the library here. After the library was built, why, she wanted a
substantial job then, I think. But there was no friction because father
wouldn't allow anything of that sort. And, of course, father's contact
with Clark was very, very friendly. For the first years that father was
down here, he lived in the house entirely.
-
GARDNER
- Here?
-
COWAN
- No, before the library was built--in the house that's been torn down.
-
GARDNER
- Oh, I see.
-
COWAN
- He was a houseguest for six months out of the year, because he went up
to San Francisco for six months to see the printing under John Henry
Nash, and the rest of the time he was down here doing bibliography. That
was before Miss Sanders got into the library picture very strongly.
because she was just Clark's secretary up until that time.
-
GARDNER
- Was the house torn down?
-
COWAN
- Yes, just a couple of years ago.
-
GARDNER
- Oh, just a few years ago? So there was a house and a library.
-
COWAN
- Yes. That was a beautiful building; it's a shame that it's gone. But
they found foundational flaws in it, and I think they wanted to improve
the scenery around here, so they tore it down.
-
GARDNER
- I notice this building was built in 1926.
-
COWAN
- Yes.
-
GARDNER
- Do you recall any of the circumstances of that? Did your father
participate in it? I guess you would have moved down here by then,
wouldn't you.
-
COWAN
- We moved down after the library was established and opened, and that's
when father moved down here. Clark had given him a home, over on
Twenty-fifth Street, which is now part of the grounds here. I didn't
have any contact with the library at all, except in and out once in a
while. But I didn't want to intrude--well, I had other things to do
also; I had to make a living. [laughter] And then I began cataloging
father's library at that time in his library, so it kept me across the
back lot here. We used to go out and in the back way if necessary.
-
GARDNER
- Where was the back way?
-
COWAN
- The home on Twenty-fifth Street that father was in backed up against the
library property here at that time. You just walked right across, and
there was an opening in the back here. I don't believe it was fenced,
even at that time. So that was very convenient; father just walked out
of the back door of his place and into the side door here, right to his
office.
-
GARDNER
- Did he have anything to do with the actual construction of the library?
-
COWAN
- Not at all.
-
GARDNER
- None at all. I thought perhaps he might have advised as to the quality
of the places to keep the books and perhaps the atmosphere for the
books.
-
COWAN
- No, that was impossible because those weren't any of father's
attributes. He had no conception of what a thing looked like on paper
before it was built, and he'd have to see it after it was built before
he had any ideas. And then he'd never change anything anyhow. [laughter]
He didn't see too well and everything in our home in San Francisco had
to be left in the same place all the time. He wanted no changes of any
kind. So even if he saw the plans, he wouldn't make any changes.
-
GARDNER
- Why don't you describe what a typical day would have been for him when
he was working at the Clark Library, while he was Mr. Clark's librarian.
-
COWAN
- That'd be hard to say because I never spent a day over here myself. But
from what I gathered, he'd simply come in, and he and Clark would be in
the same room and work together and discuss things. Either one would
steer one or the other according to his conception of things, but they
conceived things very much together, and there wasn't any friction or
any difficulty in that direction at all. Everything was very smooth. And
Clark respected father very much because father was well established as
a bibliographer at that time. But then Clark had his own ideas, because
he started the bibliography before father got into the picture,
actually. Father came down here on account of Clark breaking his arm and
couldn't do anything with the books, and so he wanted help. Part of
father's working day was, after lunch, one hour at billiards. Clark had
purchased a table for him and had it set up in father's library. Clark
had learned that father enjoyed the game.
-
GARDNER
- I don't think you told that. Why don't you just go back over that for
us?
-
COWAN
- Yes, well, Clark had played golf, and he broke his arm or something and
he couldn't do any writing. Miss Sanders was here, but then she wasn't
qualified at that time to go ahead with the bibliography; so Clark
thrashed around and asked John Henry Nash and also his brother Charles
up in San Mateo. Well, father had done some work for Charles before,
bibliography work--he cataloged his library up there--and Nash promoted
him, because Nash knew father quite well and had done several things in
connection with father. And then Clark said, "Well, come down here, and
we'll try out for a month." And the month extended to sixteen years.
[laughter] They liked each other that well; Clark was very, very fond of
father in a social way as well as a bibliographical way.
-
GARDNER
- Right. There must have been quite a few social events here.
-
COWAN
- Not particularly, because Clark was a loner. The people that weren't of
his wealth would always have an ax to grind, so he was very aloof and
very afraid, and he very seldom ever had anybody in that wasn't of his
own financial caliber. The people that were of his financial caliber had
no interest in books or music; so they were out of the picture. So he
had very, very few friends. The parties that he did have were for
visiting celebrities of one kind or another, particularly in music with
regards to the philharmonic, which he set up and organized. He'd have
them for dinner, and father would always be one of the guests; he was
there all nights, whether there was anybody there or not. It made no
difference to Clark until father moved to L.A. Father made himself
acceptable on account of his humor and wit and so forth to most people
that came in there. Rise Stevens was invited here one night, and there
was some discussion about how her name should be pronounced; she was
right there listening, and she didn't say a word, from what I
understand. And the discussion got around to father, and he said, "Well,
I don't know how to pronounce Rise, except one way, and this is
charming." Well, that drew the house down, and he got a kiss on the top
of his head from Clark! [laughter] And that was his relationship with
Clark; that was their relationship all the time.
-
GARDNER
- That's very nice. What about Harrison Post? Does he come in later?
-
COWAN
- Yes, a little bit later. No, he was here in '26. But he didn't do
anything as far as the bibliography was concerned; he was just a
figurehead and a character to have around the house, that was all.
You've got his name in the books as assistant librarian, I think, and he
was considered assistant librarian; but he was kind of a social adjunct
of the house that didn't do anything particularly, except that he knew
and had all the famous Russians into the place when they did come to
town.
-
GARDNER
- Famous Russians?
-
COWAN
- Yes, because he was Russian. Post wasn't his name, it was an assumed
name.
-
GARDNER
- What sorts of Russians?
-
COWAN
- Hmm?
-
GARDNER
- What sorts of Russians? Visiting royalty and that sort of thing?
-
COWAN
- Well, no royalty at that time because it was after the revolution. And
no book people, but mostly musicians he had here, on account of the
philharmonic as much as anything. Of course, they'd come with a whole
group out to the place here. One night when we stayed at the house here,
why, Clark had a lot of Russians in, and we were taken out by Miss
Sanders to dinner and we saw Abie’s Irish
Rose down at the Burbank Theatre for the evening, because he
didn't think that the Cowans would get along too well with the Russians.
[laughter] So he sent us out. And that night there was a very young
boy--I don't suppose he was more than eleven or twelve years old--that
seemed to be very apt with the violin, and Clark gave him one of his
Stradivarius violins that night.
-
GARDNER
- Ooh!
-
COWAN
- I don't know what's happened to the boy since.
-
GARDNER
- Oh, I thought you were going to say he turned out to be Yehudi Menuhin
or something like that.
-
COWAN
- No. No, I don't know what happened to him. I didn't know his name at the
time and, of course, I couldn't follow up.
-
GARDNER
- As far as gathering the collections, Clark's collections--I suppose your
father played a very important role in that. Was he responsible for
choosing what books would be bought, and so on and so forth?
-
COWAN
- No.
-
GARDNER
- None at all?
-
COWAN
- No.
-
GARDNER
- How did Clark buy?
-
COWAN
- He bought through agents and at auctions and one thing or another; but
it was all his own choosing. Once in a while he'd have father buy
something, and what promoted father in Clark's estimation was the fact
that father would never take any commission on anything. Never! He'd
never had anybody in his employ that was ever that way before.
[laughter] That endeared father to Clark. Father didn't have very much
to do with the designing of the library and the categories into which
the library developed at all. That was all Clark, and that was all
really quite developed before father got into the picture at all.
-
GARDNER
- Right, but it continued afterwards.
-
COWAN
- It continued afterwards, and it was made a great library and more
extensive in various directions, like Pope and Wilde, and so forth. He
aimed particularly at that category, so that whenever anything came up
that they didn't have in the library he'd go after it and get it one way
or another.
-
GARDNER
- Did you know any of the local booksellers at that time? Were you
acquainted with them? I'm told, for example, that Alice Millard was one
of the booksellers from whom Mr. Clark did a lot of buying; I came
across some correspondence of hers in the collection. Did you know her?
-
COWAN
- Personally, I didn't know her, no. Father did--yes, definitely. They
never had any business as far as personal business was concerned,
because Mrs. Millard was high and fine. She wanted millionaire
customers, etcetera, etcetera, and she put the price on accordingly.
Well, that didn't appeal to father as far as his own personal library
was concerned. She handled a great many fine things in all fields, but
not too much Californiana. It was mostly things that appealed to Clark
in his library here.
-
GARDNER
- What about some of the other local booksellers? Since your father was
really a San Franciscan to begin with, did he quickly fall in with the
local people--Ernest Dawson...?
-
COWAN
- No, because he knew them and was well known to them long before he ever
came down here, on account of his book activities.
-
GARDNER
- I see.
-
COWAN
- Dawson knew him, oh, twenty years or more before he came down here; in
fact, the moment Dawson opened his store. I suppose, father probably
came down here or sent to him and put his name on the list for
Californiana, I'm quite sure. So he knew most of the bookstores. And it
was his hobby, even after he was librarian at the Clark Library here, to
go downtown, oh, three or four times a week and just spend a half a day
or so circulating in all the bookshops and picking up all kinds of
oddities, as well as Californiana--but mainly Californiana--to improve
his own collection.
-
GARDNER
- Were there any of the booksellers that he was more friendly with than
one of the others of that group, that Sixth Street group?
-
COWAN
- Well, he was friendly with all of them. [Jake] Zeitlin was downtown at
that time; he was on Sixth Street first and then afterwards. Bennett and
Marshall--no, I don't believe so; I think they opened up a little bit
later, And of course he was in and out of Dawson's all the time, and he
used to spend many an afternoon down at Dawson's talking to the young
clerks, particularly the female young clerks, [laughter] because they
would listen with mouths open, awed by his stories and recitations and
what he knew about books. They really pulled his leg in that direction.
He'd done that to a great many people, so when father died, why,
everybody who had contacted father thought they were his proteges. They
all came to me and said, "I'm a protege of your father's," and so on.
Tried to pull my leg; I knew better. [laughter]
-
GARDNER
- I noticed from the random reflections that you gave me to read last week
that he was also very involved in the organization of the Zamorano Club.
-
COWAN
- Yes.
-
GARDNER
- Could you describe that; that would be an interesting story to tell.
-
COWAN
- From what I know, [Arthur] Ellis was the instigator of that club,
because he was very much involved in printing and he wanted to set up an
organization like the Roxburghe in San Francisco down here. He gathered
many of these people around him, and so forth. But he was very, very
close to father. They used to visit about twice a week at either house
and, of course, Ellis was always promoting the Zamorano Club and talking
about it. Actually, father gave it the name, because Zamorano, being
California's first printer, was a proper name, or at least they thought
so. And so did Ellis; so he assumed that name, although he had other
names in tow that he offered. But that was the one that stuck. And, of
course, father was one of the charter members of the Zamorano Club in
that connection and was with it until he died.
-
GARDNER
- Were you ever a part of the Zamorano Club?
-
COWAN
- No, no. About a week after father died, they asked me if I wanted to
take up the Zamorano membership that father had, and I wasn't ready for
it at that time; things were in an uproar in my house on account of
father's death and so forth, so I turned it down temporarily and never
got the opportunity again. [laughter]
-
GARDNER
- Well, I suspect it's their loss.
-
COWAN
- Well, I'd been a guest down there once in a while, but...
-
GARDNER
- John Henry Nash, of course, is the catalyst for many of the things that
went on. He seems to have played a middle role, in a way, between your
father and William Andrews Clark, of course, as the San Francisco
printer for this and, I guess, a lot of other things for Clark.
-
COWAN
- Yes.
-
GARDNER
- I imagine you knew Nash personally.
-
COWAN
- Yes.
-
GARDNER
- Could you tell me about, first, your father's relationship with him, and
then something about Nash personally?
-
COWAN
- Well, father's relationship with him was entirely on a business basis.
Father had no business acumen, and all the things that he ever brought
out he was pushed into by somebody or other--the book club, and so
forth. And then Howell and Nash--they all pushed him into the various
bibliographies that he'd gotten out. Nash seemed to think a great deal
of him as far as a bibliographer is concerned, and his activities and
position and so forth, but nothing ever social, because Nash was a high
reacher. He'd socialize with Clark and go up to Deer Lodge with him in
the summertime. And he'd socialize with Hearst and be at the castle on
weekends and days at a time. He was a high liver, and I guess that's the
reason he went broke in his business establishment as a printer; he had
to go broke. He amassed quite a library of incunables and very early
printed books, and I think Nash sold them to an Oregon institution
somewhere to get out of difficulties here. That didn't pull him through
either, because he lived pretty high,
-
GARDNER
- How long did his relationship last with Clark? More or less throughout
Clark's life?
-
COWAN
- Oh, yes, right up to the end. It was quite a close relationship. When
this library was first established there were some doors on here that
Clark didn't particularly like--I think they were big ancient thick
doors or something--and he gave them to Nash and put them on his house
in Berkeley. Of course the house burned down two years later, I think,
and the doors went with it.
-
GARDNER
- What about the Montana collection? Clark had quite a bit of material on
that. Was your father involved in that, since that was sort of western
Americana; or was that also something that he did more or less on his
own?
-
COWAN
- Clark was involved indirectly, on account of father, in the Montana
collection. That collection was built by a man by the name of Kessler (I
think Kessler Brewery up there had some relationship to him), and he
collected probably the best Montana collection in private hands. Of
course, Clark, being born in Montana, had a little bit of interest in
it, but practically none. But father was interested in western
Americana--it didn't make any difference where--so he actually bought
that for father to play with. [laughter] He put it in the basement of
this library, and it was there until father left the library.
-
GARDNER
- And then your father took it with him?
-
COWAN
- No, no. That was Clark's.
-
GARDNER
- I see.
-
COWAN
- Father had no strings on it at all. It was simply there for father to
play with. [laughter]
-
GARDNER
- I think that unless you have anything to add about Clark or any of that,
I think we've covered that fairly thoroughly; so I think what I'll do is
turn to my list of personalities and have you comment on some of
them--again, from both points of view: both the relationship with your
father and then also your own personal relationship with them. Of the
early people that I have--well, these predate you, I think--are people
like [Chester] Rowell and Bancroft. I guess those go back into the
nineteenth century. Did your father ever tell you much about his
dealings with them, his relationships with them?
-
COWAN
- Oh, yes. Father always talked at the evening meals, no matter what. It
was a remote relationship that he had with Rowell, and he couldn't take
much of Benjamin I. Wheeler. But there were some people that he was very
close to in the university. Teggart was one he was very close to
personally; they used to visit back and forth. Teggart had a boy about
my age, and that was part of the deal, too. Father wanted very much to
be the librarian of the Bancroft Library when it went to Berkeley; but
Teggart got it, and that upset the friendship a bit.
-
GARDNER
- Did it really?
-
COWAN
- Yes, although it went on after that. They were not closely related when
they died, but they were still sociable when he died (Teggart died
first, I think).
-
GARDNER
- Had he been friendly with H.H. Bancroft?
-
COWAN
- Yes, very friendly. After the bibliography came out in 1914, why, I have
a letter from Bancroft himself congratulating him on the bibliography.
He knew father before that. He gave him entree to his own library when
it was on Valencia Street in the old brick building over there. And
father had entry every Sunday or any other time that he wanted to go
there, whether Bancroft was there or not. He didn't have the keys, but
he'd go there at any time and was allowed in. I was taken there and
introduced to him, and so forth; and he patted me on the top of my head
and admonished me to be a good boy and all that sort of stuff.
[laughter] And I remember when I was in there he always had his office
in the west side with the window behind his desk, and we were in there
in the afternoon with the sun behind him. I couldn't see much of
Bancroft, but he could see everything about us. He was like Carranza;
Carranza, the president of Mexico, used to do the same thing so he could
see people and they couldn't see him too well.
-
GARDNER
- That's very interesting. Among the early booksellers in San Francisco
are people like Paul Elder, John Newbegin. Did your father know them as
booksellers, as friends? How did that work?
-
COWAN
- With Elder, father was in and out of the shop when it was Elder and
Shepard a long time before it was separated. Shepard went up to Salt
Lake, and Elder continued the business here and established himself;
it's still in existence. And they were very close. Father got along very
well with Shepard but not too well with Elder. And Newbegin--that was a
good relationship there, bookwise. Newbegin, I think, was quite socially
minded. Father would pull stunts like putting out prizes for poetry in
regards to Newbegin in the shop, and limericks and so forth. I remember
father wrote a limerick about Newbegin's shop, something about the
pelican who held more in his bill than his belly "kin" and ended up with
Newbegin. [laughter] It was a fairly clever thing; I don't know whether
he got a prize for it or not. Father was involved and they were quite
close--in a business way, not social.
-
GARDNER
- What about the Howells? John Howell would have been his contemporary,
and I guess Warren Howell is yours.
-
COWAN
- Yeah, well, I'm close to Warren Howell, as close as you can get to him;
he's rather aloof, you know. [laughter] And the same way with his
father: you always feel in his presence as if the both of them were
looking down on you. And they put up an austere front. Nevertheless,
they appreciated the Cowans, both of them, and still do. Although John
is gone, Warren still appreciates me; he's very courteous to me and sits
down and has a five- or ten-minute talk when I go into the place. Of
course, John Howell induced father to get out the bibliography on the
Spanish press for one thing, which Howell had printed. He was the
publisher.
-
GARDNER
- That was one of the early bibliographies.
-
COWAN
- Yes, I think it was 1919.
-
GARDNER
- Then I have a number of people down here. I'll ask you general questions
first. Since your father was so close to John Henry Nash, for
example--or at least on a business level in the north--was he acquainted
with some of the printers down here, some of the Southern California
people of that era?
-
COWAN
- Ward Ritchie, of course. I don't think he was particularly acquainted
with any of them. Of course, he knew of them, and they knew his name and
so forth.
-
GARDNER
- But he did no work with them?
-
COWAN
- No, not as far as I know, excepting Ritchie.
-
GARDNER
- Bruce McCallister?
-
COWAN
- Well, he knew the name; that's been brought up in the house many times.
But the man was never at the house as far as I know, or never any
personal acquaintance.
-
GARDNER
- I see. When he was down here--and he was down here for how many years?
Fifteen or twenty years--did he develop any close personal friendships
or relationships?
-
COWAN
- All the booksellers along Sixth Street. There was [Fred] Lofland
and--well, I don't remember all of them now. Of course, Norman Holmes
was down here. But Norman Holmes never had anything to offer; it was
more Goodwill stuff than any kind of books. [laughter] But up in San
Francisco he was very close to Harold Holmes. I was also, because in
later life Holmes liked to sit down and talk; and when I'd go up, there
was always a big long talk in his library for anywhere from a half-hour
to two hours and a half. He enjoyed it, seemingly.
-
GARDNER
- Anybody outside the book business with whom he became friendly? I'm
talking about the years in Los Angeles now, trying to get some idea.
-
COWAN
- Well, he was rather close to [Ed] Grabhorn. When Nash blew up, for
royalties we got about 400 copies of the bibliography. Nash only sold
200 of the 400 copies; 300 were in unbound sheets which father induced
Grabhorn to store in his basement, until eventually I got father to move
them down here. Had he left them up there, we would never have probably
seen them again; but when the bibliography began to get scarce, why,
then we got these sheets down, and I folded the sheets and sold them
that way. And that was our royalty. We got $200 or $250 in cash, and
that's all we ever did get for six years' work. [laughter]
-
GARDNER
- That's not a very good per-hour rate.
-
COWAN
- And every time I'd go to San Francisco, I'd sit and hobnob with Ed
Grabhorn, smoking his pipe in front of the fireplace on Sutter Street,
for a half-hour or an hour, according to how busy he was. But he was
acceptable to having company, at least my company, as far as I know, and
we had some nice talks. He was quite a collector; he had a fine
collection of Californiana. During the Los Angeles period, many notables
came to father's home: J. Gregg Layne, Phil Hanna, Larry Powell, Paul
Jordan and Sarah Bixby Smith were a few that came often. The Henry
Wagners and the R.E. Cowans visited quite often back and forth for
dinner. During the last years of Wagner's life I visited him about once
a month. He always made me welcome. There were times when others were
turned away. Mrs. Wagner always joined when she learned that I was
there.
-
GARDNER
- The other thing I think might be appropriate to talk about, since we're
on UCLA territory, is the disposition of your father's collection
finally to UCLA: how that came about; something about his relationship
with UCLA.
-
COWAN
- Well, he was very close to [J.] Gregg Layne, for one thing, although I
don't know what the contact was with UCLA as far as Layne is concerned.
When UCLA first established itself out in Westwood, why, Layne bought a
house right in the immediate area.
-
GARDNER
- That was clever.
-
COWAN
- Yes. [laughter] When the bibliography came out and Clark died, father
had to move out of the house, and he moved the library twice, and that
was enough. He thought he had better dispose of the library, so he
contacted people--Moore was the librarian at that time, wasn't he?
-
GARDNER
- Ernest Carroll [Moore] was the provost. What year was it then?
-
COWAN
- About 1930, '34, '35.
-
GARDNER
- Ernest Carroll Moore was the provost of the university. [John E.]
Goodwin, I suppose.
-
COWAN
- Anyhow, he had contact with the people out there, and I think Moore had
something to do with it. Then he sold the library, at least father sold
the library, and I lost track of the library ever since, because I never
went out there to see it. Because he left me a tremendous number of
duplicates--it was almost a duplicate library that I inherited--and I
had no reason to go out there. I made use of what I had and explored
elsewhere because of the parking problems out there; and it was a long
ways out, and so forth.
-
GARDNER
- Even in those days.
-
COWAN
- Yes, quite true; they expanded the parking facilities always too late.
[laughter] So I never followed the library in that direction.
-
GARDNER
- What about the Clark Library, its acquisition by UCLA. Did that come
about around the same time?
-
COWAN
- Yes, it came about the same time. Although it was willed to UCLA in
1926, Clark retained a life's estate in it. Father was, you might say,
discharged, because Clark's financial status came from 60 million down
to about 4 million, and he thought he was a pauper. [laughter] So he cut
corners, and one of them was to allow father to go. And he let father
live in the house that Clark moved over on Twenty-second and Cimarron
until he died, when, of course, the house went to someone else. But
Clark, being much younger than father, anticipated outliving him, and so
he let father live there for free until he died. Well, of course, father
had to move then, and father's library had to be moved.
-
GARDNER
- Okay, why don't we now turn back to your life at this time, and have you
recount. I think the last we have of you, we have you going through the
service; we have you working, I guess, on that ferry, and then helping
bring the books down here. And is that '26?
-
COWAN
- Yes.
-
GARDNER
- Okay, what then with Robert G. Cowan? [laughter]
-
COWAN
- Well, he built himself a home, eventually, at Pico and Redondo
Boulevard. At that time I was working at father's library on the
bibliography, and in that consideration I was not only the bibliographer
for the Cowan family, but I was also the chauffeur and the man of all
sorts and did a lot of things including an hour at billiards each day
with father. After we got through with the library and it was sold, I
went into the stamp business--with a little bit of help from father--and
established myself, first in a partnership on Fourth Street near Main,
and then I moved into the Philharmonic building at Fifth and Olive (on
the ground floor right next to the stage entrance) and had that shop for
a half-dozen years.
-
GARDNER
- What was it called?
-
COWAN
- The LaCal Stamp Company. I assumed the name when I took over the
partnership myself. And I thought it was going to do well there right
across the street from the Biltmore. But I never got a customer, I don't
think, from the Biltmore. Then the war came along, and the rents went
up, and I couldn't see any advantage in keeping on; so I got out and let
it go. And then I thrashed around a bit and didn't know just what to do.
Father died shortly after that in 1942, so he left me a few thousand
dollars, and I invested in property. I had very cheap court dwellings,
and they paid very, very well--gave me a living, kept me busy most of
the time. And before I sold the stamp shop, I got involved in yachting,
and a friend of mine, a Dr. A. A. Steele, whose boat the Stella Maris was in the last Honolulu race
before the war as scratch boat.... It was a new boat, and he had
difficulty getting there; otherwise, he might have won the race. But
anyhow, that race left San Francisco on the Fourth of July, so we went
up there with a big "Good Luck" sign on the Golden Gate Bridge for when
the boat went under it, but it was so foggy he didn't see us and we
couldn't see him, so that was a lost thing. [laughter] Well, anyhow,
he'd taken me out on the boat, and I got involved right away in sailing.
I'd been on the water a lot in San Francisco Bay, but always on a boat,
a tug or something of that sort, and on the ferryboats, too. I liked
sailing right from the day I went out on it, so I bought a boat for
$1,000. It was the old Venus, which had
quite a name for itself around the San Francisco area, built in 1902 by
Fellows and Stewart. And it got to be horribly soggy and slow, and they
cut down the sail area; so it was very slow when I got it. And I kept it
about two years and then sold it and started to build my own boat by
putting 8,000 pounds of lead into the keel. I poured it myself by
setting up a bathtub and putting coal underneath it and pulled the plug
and let the lead run down to the forms. I built the boat according to
the design this Dr. Steele had made for the boat after his own boat. And
the design was written up in Sea magazine,
which is a nautical magazine of the era. I had that until I sold it in
about 1943--no, about 1950 I sold that and entertained the whole family
at that time. Well, I had at least one person for a crew, and it was
always a son; and his family became the wrong age, and so he wasn't
going out too often. So I sold the boat at that time and just kept my
nose into books and kept property, up until a few years ago when it got
out of hand--too many government regulations and everything of that
sort. The property was good property, although the area changed in
disposition and it was hard collecting rents. And so I finally gave it
up.
-
GARDNER
- Well, now that you've mentioned your family, I think we can go back and
do some chronology and some description of your family. First of all,
tell when you were married and to whom, and then your children--when
they were born.
-
COWAN
- I was engaged before the war, and after the trip to France, about six
months later, I became married. I was married in 1919 in October. Just
before we were married, we found a little place in Fruitvale and put
down $500 and chase me for the rest on a $3,000 house, which is a very
nice house. It was reasonable for that time but not cheap. It was an
older house, the first bungalow built in Oakland. It must have been
about 1915, along in that era, when it was built. It was called
Honeymoon Row because it was in a row of bungalows on Bartlett Street
there. We got one of those. It was secondhand at the time--it wasn't
new--and we lived in there for six years. Then we moved to the Melrose
area and lived there for another year, and then moved down here. And all
during that time I commuted to San Francisco or down to Oakland wharf. I
got involved in the Southern Pacific Company at that time, and it was a
matter of commuting, very agreeable commuting, to San Francisco on the
ferryboats. They had clubs in every corner of the ferryboat, and some of
them would get out and bet as to whether a seagull was going to fly off
the piling when the whistle blew, and all kinds of things of that sort.
They had card games going over there about twenty minutes on board the
boat, and then they'd get on the train and we had to show our tickets
when we got near the end of the run. At times I snoozed then and was
tapped on the shoulder and awakened just before my station to show my
ticket or pay my dime, so I always got off at the right place.
[laughter] Never overslept! When I lived in Fruitvale, it was about a
mile-and-a-half walk to the station, and for a time I didn't have a car;
and even when I did have a car I still walked down to the back lots. And
there wasn't any danger of being mugged then, so even though it was
sometimes late at night we had no trouble with it. It was a good
exercise and a good walk.
-
GARDNER
- When were your children born?
-
COWAN
- The first one was born in 1923 and the other one in 1924.
-
GARDNER
- And their names?
-
COWAN
- Robert III (although there's no middle names that were the same, he's
still the third Robert), and then William Alfred. We chose Alfred on
account of a friend of mine, and also it gave him the same initials as
W. A. Clark. [laughter] And Clark sent congratulations and a bit of a
present down at that time, a letter which I consider was much better
than a present. It was a very nice letter wishing us happiness and all
of that.
-
GARDNER
- They were both born up north.
-
COWAN
- Yes, one in San Francisco and one in Alameda; I say Alameda because he
went to the General Hospital in Alameda, but we lived in Oakland at that
time. They had all their education down here in the lower schools.
-
GARDNER
- Well, we'll jump back for a second here before we come to some more of
you. Return briefly to your father and tell some of the organizations he
was in. I was fascinated when I was going through his papers to find
that he was--I hesitate to say "a compulsive joiner" because that says
something psychological, but he was a member of so many different clubs
and associations it was really striking to me. I'll mention some of them
to you, and you can tell me something about what they were and what his
participation was. Some of them are obvious, but some others aren't. The
first one's the Monticello Club. Do you know what that was?
-
COWAN
- It was a high-grade club of individuals of high mental caliber--not a
Playboy club or anything of that sort, but they went there to listen to
talks, historical talks and book talks and whatnot. That didn't last
very long, as far as I know.
-
GARDNER
- Yes, a number of these seem to have lasted a very short time.
-
COWAN
- Yes.
-
GARDNER
- How about the California Historical Genealogical Society?
-
COWAN
- He was in that about the time I came along. They published father's
paper on the Spanish press, which he read before the Library Association
in 1902.
-
GARDNER
- Their interest was the genealogy of old California, rather than personal
individual genealogy.
-
COWAN
- Yes.
-
GARDNER
- The next one I have is the California Library Association. Was he an
early member of that?
-
COWAN
- Yes, I suppose he got into that about the time I was born, about 1895.
And he'd go to their meetings for purely political reasons; he was after
a librarianship somewhere.
-
GARDNER
- Right.
-
COWAN
- He knew books, but they didn't know it unless he exposed himself. So he
joined that society and was, you might say, an active member. He didn't
take any office, as far as I know, but he was very active in it in one
way or another just to promote himself.
-
GARDNER
- The American Historical Association is another organization of which he
was a member, and one of the most impressive things to me, going through
the collection, the papers, was a letter from Frederick Jackson Turner.
I assume your father was active in the American Historical Association.
-
COWAN
- No, never active. But they published the article "Bibliographical Notes
on Early California" in the 1904 report.
-
GARDNER
- Oh, I see, that all ties in.
-
COWAN
- That was a remote membership that he went into and one of the few that
he did set up; he wasn't a joiner, although the list may show it,
because...
-
GARDNER
- The list implies it.
-
COWAN
- From there on, practically everything in the list there (if you want to
read them off, go ahead) he was pushed into, like the Fire Department
and other organizations, on account of his talks that he'd given around
here and there. They made him an honorary member or a member and that's
how those things came about.
-
GARDNER
- Well, the next couple are a little funnier; these really titillated me,
and I'd like to know something about them. The next one is something
called the Tongue-Waggers. Have any idea what the Tongue-Waggers are?
-
COWAN
- I never heard of it, no.
-
GARDNER
- How about the Last Thursday Club, which was also sometimes the First
Thursday Club? That seems to be a place where they got together and also
gave speeches to one another.
-
COWAN
- I don't know about that.
-
GARDNER
- The 6:30 Club?
-
COWAN
- I know about that. That was a club of university professors and people
of the same mental quality with a broad sense of humor, that met and had
dinner once a month. They wrote papers on abstract subjects, and after
dinner and after the paper was read, why, they proceeded to tear the
paper apart. Everyone around the table--there were about a dozen of them
that would show at the meetings--they all had about five minutes' talk
to just actually tear the paper apart. And if the member couldn't take
it psychologically, they were asked to resign. [laughter] They even
brought Jack London in one day, but they couldn't take him and he
couldn't take them, so he was never asked again.
-
GARDNER
- An interesting group. Now I have down here Grolier Club, so I assume he
was an early member of that. Do you know anything about his relationship
with them?
-
COWAN
- It's very remote, but then his reputation was established by that time.
And Miss Granniss, who was the secretary, had my middle name, spelled
the same, so father decided that she must be of our family, or at least
Colonel Granniss's family somewhere down the line, so he invited her.
And, of course, she knew all about him; she'd been to the house several
times. So he simply kept on with that, very remote. He didn't do
anything for them, and I don't believe they did anything for him, except
just to promote the institution. Because it was a book thing and that's
the reason he was a member--because it was promoting books. I believe
Clark sponsored him.
-
GARDNER
- I have him down for a membership with the Pacific Philatelic Society.
-
COWAN
- Yes.
-
GARDNER
- He was obviously very close to stamp collecting all his life.
-
COWAN
- Yes, he was.
-
GARDNER
- It seems to have spilled over to you.
-
COWAN
- In his early youth he and his sister lived in the house for two weeks
alone while their parents went off on a vacation. They were teenagers,
and they were both stamp collectors, and they took most of the twenty
dollars that was left to them for food for the two weeks and spent it on
stamps; they almost starved for about a week. [laughter] He was involved
in stamps in that way, and he joined the Pacific Philatelic Society. At
that time he wasn't active in stamp collecting, but he did have a
backlog of stamps because he'd been collecting many, many pieces of
correspondence, and along with it came the covers--very interesting and
valuable covers of the '49 and '50s period, with the old hand stamps on
them that are very, very scarce and very collectible. He had a lot of
those, as well as early United States stamps that had come off these
early letters. He always kept them on the envelopes, which is much
better. And he was interested to a certain extent in philately in that
way, not as a collector; actually, he stored them for future use. During
the last dozen years of his life, he collected western express covers.
He had one unique cover. It was sent from Martinez, California, to
Chicago, then readdressed with another stamp to Lansing, Michigan, by
someone unfamiliar with adhesive stamps who probably licked off most of
the gum but, to insure delivery, inscribed, "Prepaid if the damn thing
sticks" on the envelope. For about eighteen years, I think it was, or
twelve years, he was secretary of the Pacific Philatelic Society, until
the opening of the Panama Canal or until about the time of the threat to
open the Panama Canal. He saw too much work involved in philately, so he
resigned from that, and therefore he lost his interest in the philatelic
society. During most of this period, Henry Crocker, of the renowned
Crocker family, was president.
-
GARDNER
- I see. Did you pick it up early? Were you a stamp collector when you
were young?
-
COWAN
- Yes, yes. Right from the time I was eight or ten years old.
-
GARDNER
- I see. So then when you went into the business, it was something you
were well familiar with.
-
COWAN
- Yes.
-
GARDNER
- Do you still have a collection?
-
COWAN
- No, I don't. I got in the business, and I found out it wouldn't pay to
collect and be in business at the same time. You'd be either robbing the
stock at the store or you'd be robbing the collection at home. So I
dumped the whole collection into the shop. Incidentally, that collection
eventually landed in a pair of albums that W.A. Clark had given me along
the line sometime or other, and it had some very fine early Nova Scotia
and Canadian stamps in there, a beautiful collection of these two and
then a miscellany of other stamps also.
-
GARDNER
- And you sold them all?
-
COWAN
- Yes, I sold them all eventually.
-
GARDNER
- It's an interesting contrast, given your father being a bookseller and
book collector who ended up robbing his bookselling so that he could
collect; and on the other hand stamps, which you ended up throwing into
the business. That's an interesting contrast. Well, I had a couple more
societies; we have a little more time, so I'll keep running them down
until the tape runs out.
-
COWAN
- All right.
-
GARDNER
- Your father was a member of the California Historical Society, and
that's something that I think would be very important, with your own
interest in historical societies and so on. Do you know much of his
connection with them, his early days?
-
COWAN
- Well, he was one of the refounding members, you might say, because he
came in with Henry R. Wagner and Templeton Crocker, and they organized
it. There were three or four of them, and I think there were several
others who were involved in the actual organization of it. But that
wasn't father's field of activity. He was no organizer in any sense of
the word, but he went along with all of them.
-
GARDNER
- When was that?
-
COWAN
- In 1922. That's when they reorganized it. It had nothing to do with the
original one because the original one was disbanded about
1880-something-or-other, and it never picked up again. So there were no
members that were hangovers; they'd all died off by that time, and there
were no original members that were tied over into this new one. This new
one was organized in 1922, and eventually father was involved, and he
was very close to Miss Dorothy Huggins, who was the first secretary. She
is now the widow of George Harding; she married George Harding later.
And then father was president for one year in the thirties.
-
GARDNER
- Were you a member of it at that time?
-
COWAN
- No, later.
-
GARDNER
- Tell me something about his presidency then; that's an interesting area.
What sort of responsibilities did he have, do you recall?
-
COWAN
- Well, he was on the board of directors, and I think on account of his
living down here, they wanted him off the board of directors. So the
easiest way was to put him in the presidency for one year, and then he
was out. [laughter] But he was no parliamentarian. Oh, he handled the
meetings all right, but nothing exciting went on at that time; it was
just routine stuff, as far as I know.
-
GARDNER
- It was a matter of setting up meetings and transacting whatever business
there was, and there were no major issues?
-
COWAN
- No. Well, he was smart enough to appoint committees for all that, I'm
quite sure. [laughter]
-
GARDNER
- Okay, I'll keep on down my list. We'll come back to your participation
in the historical societies next time. Do you know anything about the
Wine and Food Society?
-
COWAN
- No.
-
GARDNER
- The Society of California Pioneers?
-
COWAN
- Yes, he was made an honorary member of that. He and Theodore Roosevelt
had been the only honorary members up to that time.
-
GARDNER
- What is it? Is it literally what it says? It's an organization composed
of people who...
-
COWAN
- It's composed of men whose fathers came here before 1850, before the
close of 1849. Otherwise there's no possibility of getting into the
society. It's a rather strong society in that nature today, competing
with the California Historical Society, because, although they were
burned out, they still have a lot of artifacts. It's a museum, and they
have a fine book collection, mostly donated. Father was connected
through them in his honorary membership, which was promoted by Phil
Bekeart. Philip B. Bekeart was the son of the first gunsmith in Coloma,
in 1849, and Phil Bekeart continued the business until he left it to his
son, Philip K. It has just recently folded. So there's three Bekearts
that ran this original gun business. And of course Bekeart was a wheeler
and dealer for the Pioneer Society, and so he got father in there as an
honorary member, because that was the only way he could get him in. But
father had been moved down here by that time. I don't think he went to
too many meetings, but anyhow he was indeed proud to be in that society.
-
GARDNER
- You know anything about the Atheneum?
-
COWAN
- No.
-
GARDNER
- I don't even know what that is. The last one that I have is Friends of
the Huntington Library.
-
COWAN
- On account of the library--that’s the only reason that he joined that.
Of course, like I mentioned before, he sold Macdonald's collection to
Huntington. He was involved in the library in that direction and he knew
what was in there because all this stuff that Macdonald collected
eventually went into the Huntington Library.
-
GARDNER
- Was he involved with the founding of the group, do you know? I would
assume that their friends group probably would have set up around the
thirties sometime.
-
COWAN
- I don't believe so, no. Of course, he knew all the heads at the
Huntington Library at that time--[Robert] Schad and all the rest of
them.
-
GARDNER
- Okay, well, I've come to the end of my list for today. When we get
together next time, we can go more closely through the rest of your life
and your participation in the historical society, your writing and so
on, and finish up on your father. Thank you very much.
-
COWAN
- Well, thank you.
1.4. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE
JUNE 8, 1978
-
GARDNER
- As I just mentioned--I'll say it again for the benefit of history--I
thought we'd start off now and talk a little bit more about your own
life in Southern California and what we were talking about last time,
your publications and your work with the historical societies. First of
all, why don't you talk about your family, whatever you'd like to say
about them--your children, grandchildren and so on. That's an
interesting place to start off.
-
COWAN
- Well, the field is too big. As far as my own activities are concerned in
Los Angeles, I got myself involved in many things; and principally, at
the bottom of the Depression, I learned to play the bass fiddle and got
in with an orchestra, a rather peculiar situation. Clark's night
chauffeur was going to USC for a dental course, and he became a dentist.
Well, he became the dentist for the entire family, and we were very
close to him. And he came to the house one night, and I showed him my
banjo and tinkered around with that a bit. He got involved with the
banjo, and he created an orchestra, and he said, "Well, we can't have
two banjos in the orchestra. You've got to play something else." And I
said, "Well, I'll play the bass fiddle." I'd never had my hands on a
bass fiddle before, but I went over to Los Angeles High School evening
class and sat in. I could read notes because of my musical background,
so I could find a note along the line that I could play. And from that
point on, why, I wanted to, so I became--well, not good, but fair as a
bass player. Anyhow, it was good enough for the orchestra that he
organized. And the orchestra grew--it was a ten-piece orchestra--and we
did very well at the end, playing for some mighty big dances like
Polytechnic High School. They packed in 600 in there. And then we had a
radio spot for six months; we played ahead of the Hillbillies there,
which was quite a break for us. And then we played some exclusive
dances, like the Canadian Club, and we also played at the Moose Hall in
Inglewood for three dollars a night. [laughter] We had a really good
orchestra, and eventually [Frank B.] Fisher, who was the dentist, got
himself involved in making violins and making bows, and he let the
orchestra go by the board. In the meantime, the best that I got out of
the orchestra was a Los Angeles Athletic Club membership; I took the
boys down there, and they learned how to swim, and they learned to fence
and all the rest of it.
-
GARDNER
- How did that come about? How does the Athletic Club tie in to the
orchestra?
-
COWAN
- We played for the Athletic Club for about two years as their orchestra,
just intermittently, once a month or once in two months or something.
Whenever they had an affair down there, why, we were their orchestra for
this period.
-
GARDNER
- Terrific. Was that your last musical venture, or did you keep up with
music after that?
-
COWAN
- No, I haven't kept up with music.
-
GARDNER
- Oh, that's too bad.
-
COWAN
- I have the old piano here that all the Cowan tribe learned to play on,
but then I don't use it myself. The only musical attainment I have at
the present time is to tune that piano, to a certain extent. [laughter]
-
GARDNER
- Now, you ran your stamp company, from the information I have, from 1933
to 1942. What happened after that?
-
COWAN
- In 1942, father died and left me a bit of money, and I put that into
property.
-
GARDNER
- So that's when you became involved in the...
-
COWAN
- The stamp business was entering a new phase as far as a lease was
concerned, and I couldn't see any future for it with the war on, so I
got out of there. It wasn't a big-paying thing, anyhow, although it gave
me a living for a while. And then a bit before this time, I got into
yachting, and I bought a boat that was built in 1902 by Fellows and
Stewart.
-
GARDNER
- Right. We talked about that, I think, last time on the video. That's a
terrific story about building your own boat. What was it called, the
Stella Maris?
-
COWAN
- The Venus. The Venus was the first one, and then I built the Regina Maris.
-
GARDNER
-
Regina Maris, right. I also have down here
something called Washington Holding Company that's in your biography in
the Who' s Who. What does that mean?
-
COWAN
- Well, this holding company had a building down at Washington and Towne
Avenue in Los Angeles, and it was actually set up as a hospital
building; if and when they could lease it in that area, why, they ran
it, and the holding company simply held that for various stockholders. A
friend of mine got me involved in that, because he didn't know where to
go for another director. It meant nothing, actually; it wasn't big and
it wasn't small. It was just a place to go down and get twenty to thirty
dollars per meeting.
-
GARDNER
- Oh, I see. So mostly, then, from the point of your father's death, you
subsisted on the properties?
-
COWAN
- Yes.
-
GARDNER
- Well, I don't know what you'd like to say about your family history,
your children and so on. Would you like to talk a little bit about
them--what they've become, where they are now, your grandchildren and so
on?
-
COWAN
- Well, I had two sons, William and Robert, and of course they were both
in World War II. William was on a Y boat which carried gasoline all
around the Pacific, and it was a great worry to his family, naturally.
Robert joined the coast guard, and he was one of the first seamen on
horseback patrolling the beach at Monterey. Then he was sent to
Washington, D.C., and was the first enlisted man from the coast guard
and the first that passed through the Naval Research Academy there, on
account of his mathematics. When he was in high school his advisor told
him he wasn't fit for mathematics, but he stuck to it and got up through
calculus before he got out of high school. And then from there he went
to this institute in Washington, D.C., and carried on further. He used
that all through his various activities in life; he's had three jobs, I
think, something of that sort, but all relied on the mathematics he'd
had. And just now, and for the last ten years or more, he's been with
the Hughes Company in their function of sending these things in the
atmosphere that relay all kinds of messages to earth and around the
earth. He's involved with the six as his unit, as a working unit; he's
been working with them now for quite some time. The other son, William,
after floundering around a bit, went with the General Electric Company.
For twenty years he has been a salesman in the parts department. For
three years, I think, he's been the top salesman this side of the
Mississippi, and he's gotten bonuses and whatnot for that. That's more
on account of the position, I think than it is the effort. Although he's
not in charge of the department at San Jose, he still is in the position
to take in the orders as they come in by phone and not go after them.
-
GARDNER
- Oh, that's nice. That's a nice position.
-
COWAN
- It gives him a nice operation. I guess he can accommodate himself to
that job very well. He's been there for twenty years or more now.
-
GARDNER
- Well, let's move on, then, and talk about the historical societies.
You've been very closely involved with the Historical Society of
Southern California for some time. When did you begin your affiliation
with them, do you recall?
-
COWAN
- It was in 1958. I walked into one of their meetings one night, and there
were quite a few people--some of Dawson's clerks and Anna Marie
Hager--and they cabbaged onto me and got me to join at that time. I was
only in a short time before Anna Marie was president, and then I was
elected director; and it was three years on and one off, and it's been
that way with me ever since. I moved their library, actually, three
times when I joined the society. I took over the obligation of moving
the library, and together with Doyce Nunis and Ray Billington we
disposed of much outside material that was in the library and stuff that
we didn't want, mostly valueless stuff, and moved the library from
Eighth and Hill down to 240 Broadway, which is on the site of the old
city hall. It was moved onto the fifth floor upstairs in this empty
building (except the ground floor had some tenants in there); then it
was moved into the basement of that building, and then from there to the
Lummis home. I supervised all the three movings, which was quite a job.
-
GARDNER
- I can imagine.
-
COWAN
- Yes. The last move was shuttling between 240 Broadway and the Lummis
home, and we had three small trucks that shuttled for a whole day in
moving this stuff out; so it was quite an operation.
-
GARDNER
- That seems to be one of your areas of expertise, moving libraries.
-
COWAN
- [laughter] Yes--father’s, my own. When I moved here, I had books; and,
of course, with books you have to take them off the shelves, package
them. And then I had to store them in a garage. I filled the garage with
cartons up to about five feet high. There wasn't room for another carton
in the place. And then I set the shelves and cases up here and then got
the books out; that's really two movings in one, and it kept me busy for
a while. I built the house myself, as contractor. I'd come from my house
with a load of books, dropped them in the garage in the neighborhood of
the place that I was building, and as I assumed the contractorship of
the building, I had to come over there every two days or so to watch.
And so there wasn't any difficulty about moving the books.
-
GARDNER
- Back to the historical society. You mentioned that you were a director.
Could you explain something about how the historical society runs and
what different people do as far as making it run.
-
COWAN
- Well, it's comprised of a group of people to promote history, a friendly
group of people, not necessarily historians, but they're social minded,
and they enjoy getting together. Because we've found over the years that
the dinner programs we have induce more people to come than just the
straight historical programs. Of course, we always have some kind of a
historical talk for the nine months of the year, but not during the
summer. Then we have other meetings, our Christmas party, and then
another meeting to meet new directors, generally in the afternoon at the
Lummis home. Then we have a trek once a year, anywhere within a
reasonable distance of Los Angeles, which is a day's trek. It generally
averages anywhere from seven to nine hours, the trek.
-
GARDNER
- That's a lot of trek.
-
COWAN
- Yes, and everybody enjoys it. This last trek, why, ninety-five people
turned up--two busloads. Everybody enjoyed it very much; no complaints.
There generally is a complaint from some of the people that shouldn't
travel. [laughter] They can't see things as they are at home, so they
don't like it.
-
GARDNER
- What were some of your functions during the years you've been a
director, the three years on and one year off?
-
COWAN
- Well, I've been stuck on various committees--the nominating committee a
few times, and actually I'm supposed to be the librarian at the present
time. It's the library committee, but the committee doesn't function;
I'm the only one that does much, although I get somebody outside the
committee to help.
-
GARDNER
- How big is the library?
-
COWAN
- Very, very small. It's been a gift library, and we've not been able to
buy anything. We're in a better position in that regard now because
we're disposing of the material that has no historical connection with
Southern California and then putting that back into things that do,
particularly aimed at Los Angeles and its history. We dispose of all the
other stuff anywhere that we can. We put out a list, and that goes to
all the members, and members have first choice of everything. And then
the rest is packaged up and dumped here and there to booksellers or
wherever we can.
-
GARDNER
- It sounds as though you're among the most active member of the
organization.
-
COWAN
- So they say. [laughter]
-
GARDNER
- You're also a member of the California Historical Society.
-
COWAN
- No longer.
-
GARDNER
- No longer?
-
COWAN
- No.
-
GARDNER
- How did that work? How long were you involved with them, and were you
ever active with them the way you are with the other?
-
COWAN
- No, never. I devoted my attention to Southern California because I lived
here. Of course, I knew a great many of the people of the California
Historical Society also, because there's duplication of membership
between the two societies. I used to go to their meetings when I was
near San Francisco, if they happened to have a meeting, and I'd meet
some of them. At one of the meetings we had Thomas Streeter and someone
of the other bibliographers (I can't bring up his name at the present
time), and we three were honored by introduction. It was [Carl] Wheat,
the other bibliographer. And the three of us there at once were
introduced to the membership as the three bibliographers of California.
Outside of that I didn't have very much contact with the members,
although some of the members, when they'd come into Los Angeles, would
come into the house and we'd have a little visit. George Harding and
several of them came down here. Somebody put out a resume, about ten
years ago, of all the people who built the society up there and had
something to do with it and promoted it and so forth. Father was a
member of the directors practically all of its life, and he was
president at one time, and he'd written many, many reviews and articles
that were in the quarterly; but whoever wrote this resume of the
activities of the society left out the name of Cowan entirely. So I
thought as long as the name Cowan was not involved in the society, I
should back out; so I did. Kind of sour grapes, [laughter] but then I
felt it at that time, so I never joined again.
-
GARDNER
- You've been active also in the Friends of the UCLA Library, of course.
-
COWAN
- Just as far as the meeting is concerned. I haven't missed many of those
ever since I joined ten or fifteen years ago.
-
GARDNER
- You've never been involved in the...
-
COWAN
- No, none of their activities.
-
GARDNER
- You're just a dinner visitor.
-
COWAN
- Yes.
-
GARDNER
- Same with the Huntington?
-
COWAN
- Same with the Huntington. I went to very few of their meetings because
their meetings were generally at noon in the middle of the day, and I
didn't appreciate luncheons and meetings of that kind--and I still
don't. [laughter]
-
GARDNER
- Driving to Pasadena in the middle of the day.
-
COWAN
- Yes. But I dropped the membership just a few years ago at the Huntington
because I wasn't getting anything out of it particularly.
-
GARDNER
- Now, you're the author of a number of works, more than you had listed
yourself in the biography, I found when I went through the card catalog
at UCLA. I'll name a few, and then you can name others that you've done
in addition to that. The first one, of course, was the bibliography with
your father. Had you done any writing of any kind before that, any work
along those lines?
-
COWAN
- No. Oh, for the high school annual, I wrote a story, plagiarized mostly.
[laughter]
-
GARDNER
- If the truth be known. So the bibliography was really the first?
-
COWAN
- That was really the first attempt, yes.
-
GARDNER
- What was your role on it? How did the two of you divide up
responsibilities and so on, putting that bibliography out?
-
COWAN
- There was no division of responsibility. Well, there was in
responsibilities, but there wasn't any division of labor or work because
father was involved with the Clark Library and I was involved in his
library. It started off by writing a catalog of his library in
bibliographical form, and it continued. Of course, he'd look over my
shoulder once in a while, but the whole thing was dropped in my lap. Out
of the 5,000 titles, he supplied, probably from his notes, about 200
titles, and the rest was all out of his library; and it was my activity
in that direction that made the bibliography.
-
GARDNER
- So you really had to go through book by book and notate each one.
-
COWAN
- Yes, I did.
-
GARDNER
- Had you had any experience doing this before?
-
COWAN
- No, that was my first attempt.
-
GARDNER
- Baptism by fire.
-
COWAN
- Yes. Of course, I had his earlier bibliographies for form and everything
of that sort, although he watched the form until I really assumed the
writing of it entirely by myself. Of course, he checked everything out
before it ever went to Nash, the printer, but the whole bibliography was
actually my work (although I wasn't qualified in the beginning to do
it).
-
GARDNER
- You were, in the end.
-
COWAN
- So they say. [laughter]
-
GARDNER
- Well then, the next thing you have down among your writings is The Booksellers of Early San Francisco, which
is 1953. Can you talk about how you came to do that, and what the reason
for it was?
-
COWAN
- Well, father left the manuscript--that was the last thing he wrote, and
it hadn't been seen by anybody and there had been no attempt to publish
it. So I edited it and shortened it, because by that time father had put
in a lot of repetition that should have been taken out, for one thing.
The main portion of The Booksellers of Early San
Francisco is all father's writing; outside of shortening it,
I changed no language or anything of that sort. And then I added his
biography to it and a bibliography of his writings.
-
GARDNER
- Right. Now, who published that?
-
COWAN
- Ward Ritchie published it, and it got in the Rounce and Coffin and went
around to the rest of the nation on the exhibit of the Rounce and Coffin
books of that year.
-
GARDNER
- Oh, outstanding books.
-
COWAN
- Which made me very proud, naturally.
-
GARDNER
- Of course. Did it have an overwhelming sale?
-
COWAN
- No, it was a very slow seller. The field is very small.
-
GARDNER
- It continues to sell today, though, I imagine.
-
COWAN
- Oh, it sold out nearly ten years ago, and there's been a trickle of a
demand ever since which cannot be filled; but it's still there.
-
GARDNER
- There's no thought of a reprint?
-
COWAN
- No. There wouldn't be enough of a field for it to be reprinted, I'm
quite sure, because the old-timers that knew father or anything about
him have gone. The newer institutions might be induced to purchase it,
but the older institutions have it and that'd be it.
-
GARDNER
- Right. Then there's Ranches of California,
from 1956. Now, this is probably a work completely on your own at this
point.
-
COWAN
- Yes. Father left me a tin box of Henry W. Halleck of Halleck, Peachy,
and Billings, and in that box there was this notation of what I suppose
were court cases, or just simply notations of ranches that they were
handling in court--no date or anything of that sort, but just a listing
of the ranchos. And that induced me to make a search of the ranchos
through everything that I could find that was available and come up with
a list of the ranchos, gotten as far as possible from the state
surveyor; pinpoint them, not by surveyor's chains or anything of that
sort, but just pinpoint the nearest town or the nearest locale. Then I
went back to the various grantees that were known and also through the
later claimants that got the eventual disposition of the ranchos, and
jotted them all down. The book is quite complete in itself. It has a
glossary and a listing of governors and a listing of the claimants and
the grantees and dates and so forth. So it's self-contained. And I was
floundering around and came up with Monsignor Culleton up at Fresno. He
was very much interested, and it was published up there by the Academy
Library Guild. And that's how it came about: he published it; I didn't
publish it myself.
-
GARDNER
- I see. How did that one do?
-
COWAN
- At first, nothing, and then it became scarce. It was published, I think,
at first at six and a half [dollars], and it became quite scarce. The
price got up to fifteen or twenty dollars in the booksellers so I
thought it was time to do it again, which I did a year and a half ago.
And it's been going slowly. I almost got my money out the first year, so
I'm satisfied. But there was a place for it; there is a place for it,
still.
-
GARDNER
- Right. One that fascinates me is the Bibliography
of Congressional Speeches upon the Admission of California
that you did in 1962.
-
COWAN
- I had probably the most outstanding collection of separates in the
United States. I had a great percentage of those; they're all marked in
the bibliography as to whether a separate was seen, and I had all those
separates myself. And from that point, why, nothing has ever been done
in that direction, so I got copies of the Congressional Globe, as the publication was called at that
time (later called the Congressional
Record), and traced down all the speeches, and I think that is
the most complete bibliography that's ever been issued. Because
everything that was mentioned in Congress is in the Congressional Globe, so I don't think there was any speech
that was missed. [laughter] I took them all out of there. Of course,
there's earlier speeches before that era that might have some connection
with California, but not as far as the statehood is concerned. It began
in 1848, the moment we took over California from Mexico. They began to
talk about it in Congress, and then, of course, after gold was
discovered, California asked for admission on her own. Of course, there
was a year of talk. It took them a full year of congressional talk, to
the exclusion of everything else, practically, as far as government
business was concerned.
-
GARDNER
- It's a fascinating area to have covered. Who published that?
-
COWAN
- I published that.
-
GARDNER
- You did that yourself. Who was the printer?
-
COWAN
- It was printed at the Torrez Press of Los Angeles. The pressman was a
Greek graduate from an Egyptian university. The linotyper was Mexican
and spoke or read no English. He operated a Greek machine, but the book
came out without any international complications.
-
GARDNER
- I just thought there might be some stories, some connection having to do
with the printing. How did that one sell?
-
COWAN
- Very slowly; it's still selling slowly.
-
GARDNER
- Yes, well, the nature of these books is such that that's how they would
sell.
-
COWAN
- Well, there's very few places for it, actually.
-
GARDNER
- Right, but nonetheless it's the sort of thing for which demand would be
constant. A couple of people every year would find out about it and want
to add it to their collection.
-
COWAN
- I felt it was a record that should be preserved regardless of the
consequences, because there's nowhere you can find a list of that kind,
and not a complete list, either.
-
GARDNER
- Another one of your publications was A Backward
Glance: Los Angeles 1901-1915, and that was put out as a
200th anniversary publication, wasn't it?
-
COWAN
- The Southern California historical society got a collection of pictures
that had never been used before that came from a private source, along
with many pictures outside of California. But these are all from Los
Angeles, and outside of a few pictures in the book, which is a
pictorial, all of them came from that source. In order to preserve the
pictures and broadcast them, I thought it would be a good idea to
publish the thing for the society. And it has done very well and is
doing very well; there's a great deal of interest. A great many visitors
come to the Lummis home, and every once in a while they buy one. And the
county museum has had them in stock all the time, and they've done quite
well, also. Then, through the booksellers all over the United States,
every once in a while an order comes in from a bookseller; somebody's
caught onto it and wants to see the pictures. So it's doing quite well,
-
GARDNER
- I have down that it's the 200th anniversary of something. It was put out
by Torrez Press?
-
COWAN
- They were the printers, yes.
-
GARDNER
- And my notes say (my notes are incomprehensible, I understand),
"Historical Society, 200th anniversary." What was it the 200th
anniversary of?
-
COWAN
- The founding of San Diego mission and beginning of California.
-
GARDNER
- Is there any other book?
-
COWAN
- Yes, there's another--On the Rails of Los
Angeles. It shows many of the streetcars, not the Red Cars, but
the streetcars of Los Angeles; I got most of the pictures from the same
source, the Historical Society of Southern California.
-
GARDNER
- When did you do that?
-
COWAN
- After the Backward Glance. That's the
second book. and that's done very well also. The society sells a lot of
them, and, of course, the Orange Empire Railway Museum sells a lot of
them. There's a lot of railroad buffs, and they're all involved in
streetcars as much as trains, and it's done quite well.
-
GARDNER
- That's it then for the publications of Robert G. Cowan. Let's go back
now and talk about the Cowan collection and then also the Cowan papers,
which I assume were given separately, or sold separately, to UCLA.
You'll have to clarify this for me because I'm not exactly clear about
how it works. When your father died, the major collection of his books
went to UCLA, is that true?
-
COWAN
- No, the collection went to UCLA in 1936.
-
GARDNER
- What was the circumstance of that? How did that work? Was it a gift, or
was it a negotiated sale?
-
COWAN
- It was a negotiated sale for $50,000--$25,000 the first year and annual
payments to 1939.
-
GARDNER
- I see. Who negotiated with whom? Was it something he had done before his
death to set it up?
-
COWAN
- The indenture was signed by the Regents of the University of California,
William H. Crocker, chairman, and Robert M. Underbill, secretary. After
he moved out of the last Clark house that he was living in, the library
was too cumbersome to move around, and he had no further use for it.
There wasn't another bibliography possible to come out of it, so he
decided that he was going to sell it; so he did.
-
GARDNER
- That was before his death, then, that that happened. It would have been
in the thirties.
-
COWAN
- Oh, yes. It was six years before his death. And, of course, it was more
than Californiana that's in the collection, because the whole Pacific
Coast--British Columbia, Washington, Oregon--was represented in the
library that went to UCLA. And he took a list, or made a rough list, and
turned it over for the edification and for the sales promotion to the
library. And they debated for a very short time the $50,000, which was
probably a very modest sum today. [laughter] And he sold it. He did not
list any of his manuscripts, so there was a backlog of something like
about $12,000 worth of manuscripts--not his own papers but manuscripts
of one kind or another. Eventually Larry Powell found out about it and
came to the house and surveyed them and wanted them. So he set up a
price. Of course, the price that I asked didn't work, so he chiseled,
and I gave half of them to the UCLA Library [Department of] Special
Collections, and then they paid me the other half in cash for the
manuscripts.
-
GARDNER
- This is the correspondence and so on?
-
COWAN
- No correspondence of father's, simply early papers of William H. Davis,
Parrot Folsom, Leidesdorff, D.B. Wilson, etc.
-
GARDNER
- Oh, I see.
-
COWAN
- The kinds of correspondence that are relative to this history of
California, for instance. There's much from Halleck, Peachy, and
Billings and from other sources, the Parrots, the Parrot Building and
their outfit, from that nature, the business nature in San Francisco,
not early manuscripts in Spanish or anything of that sort--a few. There
were some very good documents as far as the conquest was concerned;
there's about four or five letters of Fremont-Gillespie etc. etc. that
are very good. When father died he'd written to Thomas Norris about
those letters, and Thomas wanted them, but he didn't get them; UCLA got
them.
-
GARDNER
- When would that have been?
-
COWAN
- That would have been in 1945.
-
GARDNER
- Okay, so then all that's left then is the collection that I went through
before I came to talk to you, the collection of his own personal
correspondence and papers.
-
COWAN
- Yes. I gave those at a much later date to the university. I didn't give
them everything; I kept out a few notes which the university will get
eventually. But the bulk of it went to them. Of course, father wrote
everything in longhand, and he didn't keep copies of anything, so what
they got was simply correspondence from other people and nothing of his.
-
GARDNER
- Well, not nothing; as I recall, there were one or two things written in
scratch letter or something like a list or something like, today he
wrote to Mr. Such and such and a list of what he wrote or sort of a
summary of what he wrote.
-
COWAN
- Yes, he did that, but he generally kept the letters and answered on
them, and that was done that way. But what he wrote was not copied. Once
in a while, for unusual letters, he'd take the back of an old envelope
or any piece of scratch paper that he'd find around the place and write
that. Well, there's some of those that I have still extant, but not
many, because he didn't do that very often.
-
GARDNER
- Was that collection, then, a gift to the library?
-
COWAN
- Yes.
-
GARDNER
- That was! That's very generous. I was fascinated by some of the letters
in there, naturally. I mean, it would be hard not to be fascinated by
them, and we talked about many of the ones that had to do with San
Francisco. But I found at one point a letter from Ambrose Bierce and was
sort of stunned. I guess Bierce was about to go into Mexico again or
something like that, and he wrote to your father pertaining to some
books, and so forth; but it was a friendly note, too. Were you aware of
any kind of correspondence between them?
-
COWAN
- I did have at one time what was supposed to be the last letter that
Ambrose Bierce wrote from Mexico, and the only thing I remember about
it--I don't remember what the subject was and I don't think it was to
father--but to identify it, it ended up, "With charity for none and
malice for all." Is that the letter?
-
GARDNER
- I think so.
-
COWAN
- Well, I never knew where that went until just now.
-
GARDNER
- Yes, it's there.
-
COWAN
- I had that letter; I don't think it was addressed to father.
-
GARDNER
- I think it was.
-
COWAN
- It was?
-
GARDNER
- I think it was, which fascinated me, because I was unaware that they
would have had any kind of contact. But it may be that Bierce 's
interest in the West and the history of Mexico perhaps had gotten them
in touch. You recall that; I know that's a wonderful slogan. Well, I
think I'm about out of questions. Is there anything that we've
overlooked that you can think of?
-
COWAN
- Well, there's one contact that father wasn't particularly proud of (and
neither was the other person), and that was Charles C. Russell. Father
had no respect for him particularly, except for the choice of the
material that he reprinted. Because, as I understand it (I never checked
it out), Russell edited all the material that he did publish--and mighty
fine source material it was--and he changed things to suit himself. And
in that particular angle, he came head-on to what father thought ought
to be done with the publications. Maybe it was over the years, and maybe
it was just one contact, but he had no respect for father, and father
had no respect for him either, personally. Russell probably had a
colossal ego, because there's a letter that's been reprinted which he'd
addressed to the state librarian--Ferguson at that time, I believe--
telling about his operations and condemning Nash and the Divine Press
(in fact, he calls Nash the biggest faker in the printing world) and
also deriding father in his angle towards Russell's publications. The
editor of this just recently, in 1970 it was, did not know the
background, and he said that father left out all the things in the 1933
bibliography that Russell had done. That's quite true, because at that
time we didn't have space to put in every edition that was ever
published about the history of California; so those reprints were left
out definitely for that reason. The source books are in there, except
for one or two things like Shirley papers that hadn't been done up to
the Russell time. And then this editor mentioned that in the addenda to
the bibliography Cowan broke down and put them in. Well, Cowan was dead
at that time, and I put them in my Volume IV that I added to the
bibliography, because they weren't in the original. So that was one of
the angles that father had with one of the printers in San Francisco. I
don't suppose that Grabhorn was involved in that because Grabhorn came
along a little bit later, and probably Russell would have discounted him
also like he did everybody else. He wasn't popular around San Francisco
at all. And his books are not left out of the bibliography for any
prejudice that father had against Russell but simply the prejudice of
what the bibliography should contain.
-
GARDNER
- Well, that's very interesting. Shall we use that as our closing note,
then?
-
COWAN
- All right.
-
GARDNER
- Well, thank you very much, Mr. Cowan. I've enjoyed it.
-
COWAN
- Well, I have too.