Vol. I, No. 10
Mulholland then proceeded to delight listeners by supplying those stories and anecdotes of life in the early days of the Valley, while unfolding the history of her family and her own experiences growing up on an isolated ranch in the northwest Valley.
About 150 community members, faculty and staff gathered in December to hear Mulholland's talk. Her presentation, "Valley Lives: A Memory of Grandfathers," was sponsored by the Friends of the Oviatt Library and held in the University Student Union's Grand Salon.
Mulholland spoke first of her maternal grandfather, John Haas, who came to Calabasas in 1888 when the population of the Valley "numbered only a few thousand." Beginning as a cowboy and a ranch hand, he often served as deputy sheriff "in the rowdy and sometimes violent little settlement of Calabasas," Mulholland said.
Eventually, he was appointed "county roadmaster-in charge of the construction of the north side of Topanga Canyon Drive, as well as the Old Topanga Road and Decker Canyon Road," she said. Haas met an untimely death at age 50 when he was killed in an accident with a horse.
Mulholland then spoke of her more famous grandfather, William Mulholland. Born in Ireland in 1855, William Mulholland "created a water system which enabled the city to grow. As builder of the Owens River Aqueduct, he also achieved great renown as an engineer, but also provoked controversies which persist to this day."
She also spoke of the anguish her grandfather felt in the aftermath of the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, which he built as part of the aqueduct northeast of Castaic. The March 1928 tragedy, which caused an avalanche of water to sweep 54 miles through the Santa Clarita Valley to the Pacific Ocean, killed about 450 people and demolished 12,000 houses.
Fondly remembered by Mulholland was her greatgrandfather, Isaac Clay Ijams. Mulholland said "on June 6, 1902, the Los Angeles Times announced that the millennium had occurred in its favorite Wild West settlement of Calabasas. Judge Ijams was retiring as justice of the peace, because, so he declared, it had become so peaceful that there was 'nothing to do.'"
Mulholland said that when Ijams died in l938 at age 97, the local papers described him as the Valley's oldest resident. "He had lived in the Valley for 54 years, and when he'd first ridden through during the terrible drought of the 1860s, he said you could ride across the entire Valley on the bones of dead sheep and cattle," Mulholland said.
Ijams was a true pioneer, Mulholland said. She read from one of his journals about his arrival in Los Angeles in 1867. "I spread my blankets under the open canopy of heaven, and laid down for the first time feeling safe without my gun and saddle for a pillow," he wrote.
Mulholland also spoke of her own childhood, recalling growing up on the ranch, and her house at the intersection of Plummer Street and Corbin Avenue, where a Kmart now stands.
She later left the Valley for Berkeley, where she attended college, married and raised a family. Mulholland said she returned to a much different Valley years later and likened herself to Rip Van Winkle, finding herself in a place where little remained of the world she had known.
"I determined to write something about a place I had taken for granted and which had vanished in the face of overwhelming growth and change," Mulholland said. Two books, "Calabasas Girls" and "The Owensmouth Baby" were the result.
She also contributed a chapter to a book about the St. Francis Dam disaster. And Mulholland has just completed her third book, about William Mulholland, which is pending publication.
The friends group will sponsor another lecture Feb. 18 when Dr. Joseph McCormick, former head of the Center for Disease Control's "Hot Zone," is slated to speak on "Virus Hunters of the CDC." The talk will be at 7 p.m. in the Performing Arts Center and is co-sponsored by the Office of Graduate Studies' Distinguished Visiting Speakers Program. For more information, call (818) 677-2638.
-Cindy Ventuleth
