It’s been a long, sometimes tedious, journey — the researching, writing, reworking and publishing of this book has taken more than six years. That’s mostly because, as a newly retired journalist, I never wanted to make this a full-time job. I wanted to enjoy retirement as well as the search for clues, the visiting and revisiting of libraries, waking up at 5 a.m. to dedicate a few hours to writing, eventually creating a Substack platform, Digging History, to get feedback from readers, and then finally migrating and formatting the content to publish on Pressbooks.pub.

Along the way I’m pretty sure I tested my wife’s patience — “Didn’t he retire? So why is he up typing at 5 a.m.?” she probably often muttered. As such, the acknowledgements have to start with thanking Gaby for letting me indulge in this “hobby”.

From there, a big shout out to all the researchers, writers and information engineers maintaining incredible history troves across the Internet — from Wikipedia to newspapers.com to HathiTrust.org and many other archives. In the physical world, i.e., bricks and mortar, UCLA’s Special Collections Library became my “happy place” — I knew each visit would produce some new nugget of information or insight. The staff were always welcoming and the process for accessing archives was always easy. Thanks also to staff at The Huntington Library, USC’s Special Collections and the Los Angeles Public Library.

On a personal level, I’m grateful for the early encouragement from Griffith Park: A Centennial History author Mike Eberts and playwright Robert Fieldsteel, whose own fascination with Grif led him to write “Crazy Drunk“. For the cover design, shout outs go to Kiera Long and Alexis Martenka. And during my feedback phase — i.e., getting reader comments on whether the story made sense — thanks to family, friends and especially: Julia Henri of Juicy History;  Santa Monica historian Nina Fresco;  C.C. de Vere, whose blog Frenchtown Confidential explores a unique angle of Los Angeles history; and Russ Shaw, my former boss at msnbc.com. All provided great advice, especially C.C. and Russ’ encouragement to dump my “narrator” as he proved confusing to the reader. The idea was to have Harry Chandler, an acquaintance of Grif’s and the man who ran Los Angeles, explore Grif’s personality ala Che Guevara in “Evita” but while the device certainly works in a play or movie it proved kludgy on the written page!