The newspaper dated April 26, 1930, was found by workers for a construction company who were working on the foundations of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in 1991.
Sports, crime, politics, immigration and ship departures all stud the pages of the Evening Express, which claimed to be the oldest daily newspaper in Los Angeles with a founding date of March 27, 1871.
Take that, you mighty Los Angeles Times!
A history buff could spend hours digesting the headlines of the old newspaper. The names leap out to anyone with a taste for the past.
"Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York confined to home with what his doctors describe as complete physical and mental breakdown," reads one story.
"Capone’s kin face prison," screams a headline, adding that Big Al’s brother has been convicted of tax fraud.
Then there is the picture of the Hostetter Industrial District in Los Angeles, and a story about how home building in Los Angeles is the second fastest in the nation.
The editorial page carried an in-depth study of the problem of admitting seasonal Mexican labor into the U.S.
Sound familiar?
The sports pages glittered with a story on how former USC grid star Fay Thomas was slated to pitch baseball that day for the Sacramento Solons who were playing Los Angeles.
Remember the old Pacific Coast League?
My own memories of the great Pacific circuit date only to Steve Bilko and Frankie Baumholtz, but I’m sure there are those who still recall Thomas as well.
The Evening Express was big on sea arrivals and departures. The Point Sur tug "Peacock" arrived, as did the San Francisco vessel "Wapama" and the "Charles L. Wheeler, Jr.," from Portland and San Francisco.
San Pedro was a beehive of activity.
The departures included the North German Lloyd liner "S.S. Columbus" with 348 on board, 137 of whom were going to Europe. There wasn’t a hint in the Los Angeles of 1930 that another World War was in the offing. Pearl Harbor was just a point from which ships arrived.
Perhaps most poignant of all, and most meaningful today, was a story on how one loses identity in the U.S. Census. It noted that residents of Los Angeles became mere numbers through the census count then under way.
Sound something like the complaints of contemporary census counts linked to federal funding and reapportionment?
Things weren’t so different in 1930, now were they?