In 1853, there was but one newspaper in the city--a weekly known as _La Estrella de los Angeles_ or _The Los Angeles Star_, printed half in Spanish, half in English. It was founded on May 17th, 1851, by John A. Lewis and John McElroy, who had their printing office in the lower room of a small wooden house on Los Angeles Street, near the corral of the Bella Union hotel. This firm later became Lewis, McElroy & Rand. There was then no telegraphic communication with the outside world, and the news ordinarily conveyed by the sheet was anything but important. Indeed, all such information was known, each week, by the handful of citizens in the little town long before the paper was published, and delays in getting mail from a distance--in one case the post from San Francisco to Los Angeles being under way no less than fifty-two days!--led to Lewis giving up the editorship in disgust. When a steamer arrived, some little news found its way into the paper; but even then matters of national and international moment became known in Los Angeles only after the lapse of a month or so. The admission of California to the Union in 1850, for example, was first reported on the Coast six weeks after Congress had voted in California's favor; while in 1852, the deaths of Clay and Webster were not known in the West until more than a month after they had occurred. This was a slight improvement, however, over the conditions in 1841 when (it used to be said) no one west of the Rockies knew of President Harrison's demise until over three months and a half after he was buried! Our first Los Angeles newspaper was really more of an advertising medium than anything else, and the printing outfit was decidedly primitive, though the printers may not have been as badly off as were the typos of the _Californian_. The latter, using type picked up in a Mexican cloister, found no _W_'s among the Spanish letters and had to set double _V_'s until more type was brought from the Cannibal or Sandwich Islands! Which reminds me of José de la Rosa, born in Los Angeles about 1790, and the first journeyman to set type in California, who died over one hundred years old. But if the _Estrella_ made a poor showing as a newspaper, I have no doubt that, to add to the editor's misfortunes, the advertising rates were so low that his entire income was but small. In 1854, the _Star_ and its _imprenta_, as it was then styled, were sold to a company organized by James S. Waite, who, a year later, was appointed Postmaster of the city. Speaking of the _Star_, I should add that one of its first printers was Charles Meyrs Jenkins, later City _Zanjero_, who had come to California, a mere stripling, with his stepfather, George Dalton, Sr.