Who is this man?

Chávez Ravine, 1949
A Los Angeles Story by Don Normark

The mystery man on the cover

Anyone who has ever viewed Don Normark's now-classic 1999 volume of photographs and text, Chávez Ravine, 1949, A Los Angeles Story, has marveled at the iconic photograph on the dust jacket of a solitary man — a workman, perhaps — wearing a hat and carrying a lunch box and walking along a winding path toward a cluster of houses and, presumably, toward home.  Portions of the image are repeated on the front cover of the book and again on page 55.  It is a captivating image; but the man's identity is not revealed in the book.

Recently, a Seattle resident, Victor Rini, Googled 'Chavez Ravine' and was surprised at the amount of information he found there, including about the PBS 2003 Independent Lens documentary CHAVEZ RAVINE by Jordan Mechner.  One of Normark's images from the book appeared briefly in the film

Victor continued searching the Web for Normark's images, and he found these two:

Studying the two images, Victor thought, That looks like my grandfather, Lupe García.

On Mother's Day, 2015, he was able to show the images to his mother, Helen.  Her reaction was immediate:

"That's my father!" she said emphatically.

The following weekend, the images were shown to Victor's aunt and Helen's sister, Mary Ann.

"That's Dad!" she said.

And so it was confirmed by two of his daughters:  the image in the Normark book, and the second image, also taken by Normark, which shows the man from the front, is of la Loma resident Guadalupe García.

Mystery solved!

Where was Lupe García walking?

But the questions asked by many of us remained:  where was the path on which he was walking located, and to where was he going?

To try to solve that puzzle, I turned to a 1948 aerial photograph of the area:

Portion of Los Angeles, 1948

Knowing where to look, I zoomed in to this area:

Portion of the 1948 aerial photograph

This portion of the 1948 aerial photograph, while still quite busy, clearly shows all of Solano Canyon and la Loma as it appeared in 1948.  But where is the path?

The García family lived on Spruce Street in la Loma.  Victor's mother, Helen, described in detail the location of the family's home in relation to the topography of the area.  She also described how she walked, once every week, down the same path that her father walked every day to his job as a stevedore for the Southern Pacific Railroad.  She said that the path led down to Bishop's Road, and from there, she continued on to Savoy Street, where she took piano lessons in the Ocampo home from Professor Cantu.

Armed with this information, I located Bishop's Road on the photograph (it is the curving street at the bottom-left of the image).  The path had to connect Spruce Street, in la Loma near the reservoir, with Bishop's Road.

And there it was:  the path.

The path from la Loma to Bishop's Road, 1948

The mystery is solved

So, through a series of coincidences, the least of which is not the fact that Victor knew of my blogs and went to the trouble to contact me, the mystery of the identity of the man on the cover of Don Normark's book has been solved.  In future blogs, I will discuss more about the García family history and genealogy.  It is an interesting story.

My many thanks to Victor; to his mother, Helen; and to his aunt, Mary Ann, for permission to present this information.

One final puzzle

There was one final puzzle that bothered me about  Normark's photogarphs of Lupe García:  why, in the photograph of Lupe's walking away from the camera, was he wearing suspenders, while in the photograph of his walking toward the camera, he was not?

I posed that question to Victor, who quickly answered it for me:  Lupe was a stevedore, and the "X" mark on his back was not suspenders; rather, it was sweat marks on his shirt from the straps on the apron that he wore while at work.