When the big fleet came around here some years ago I was director-generaling a very snappy flower festival at Santa Barbara, and as the “Times” played up all the bar-room brawls the sailors got into and belittled my pretty show, I got hold of the local correspondent and says: “Mac, why are you crabbing the show and featuring the rough stuff?” “Well the truth is, Bob, my pay depends upon the kind of stuff I send. A rotten story is good for columns, against a few paragraphs of the birds and the flowers. You know the General has towns as well as individuals on his index, and Santa Barbara is one of them. The General once owned the Santa Barbara ‘Press,’ and with his usual cave-man methods got in bad with the villagers, and they bumped him socially so hard that he finally left in great heat and swore vengeance, which he practices to this day. This has been going on for years.” Now the old “General” is gone, but his “index” still stands. The song should read: “Old Otis’ body lies a-moulderin’ in the grave, but his soul goes cursing on!” It goes on cursing, not merely movements of social reform and those who advocate them; it goes on cursing Santa Barbara! Soon after we came to Pasadena there was an earthquake shock, sufficiently severe to cause us to run out of our house. You understand, of course, that earthquakes are damaging to real-estate values; therefore there was no report of an earthquake in any Los Angeles paper next day—save that the “Times” reported an earthquake in Santa Barbara! A year or two later this happened again—and again it was an earthquake in Santa Barbara. Also, Rob Wagner tells me of his own amusing experience with the “Times.” I quote: During the Harriman campaign I deserted my class, kicked in and had Socialist meetings at my studio, and even enjoyed the degradation of offering hospice to Ben Reitman and Emma Goldman the night after they were run out of San Diego. So the General paid me the amazing compliment of putting me on his index, and gave orders that my name should not appear thereafter in his art columns. Anthony Anderson proved it to me by slipping in a harmless little notice of a portrait exhibit I was holding, which got the blue pencil. So you see that even an artist who might help the town in its very ingrowing aestheticism got the General’s axe if the General didn’t like his politics!