According to my aunt Lillian, her father, Royal Rosamond, taught Earle Stanley Gardener the rudiments of writing. In a taped interview Lillian told me she would fall asleep in the Rosamond home in Ventura to the sound of Roy and Earl pecking away on the Royal typewriter. Gardener is the creator of Perry Mason, an old television series about an attorney who never fails to win a case.

According to my mother, Rosemary, Royal used to sail out to the Channel Islands with his friend, Dashiell Hammett, and camp overnight. I found old photographs of my grandmother and Roy camping on one of these islands, and will post them later.

Above is a photograph of Henry Meade Bland, the Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County, with Joaquin Miller ‘The Poet of the Sierras’. Miller would come down from his poet and artist’s retreat called ‘The Heights’ and carry my father…