Citizen Casad

If you've followed my blog for any significant length of time, you know I enjoy collecting old Covina postcards and learning about the people who wrote/received them. Well, this may not be a postcard, but in terms of discovering someone, I really hit the jackpot here!

What first attracted my eye to this envelope was the fine-grade Irwindale postmark and cancel. (Irwindale in this case being the original Irwindale, i.e. turn-of-the-last-century West Covina, not the modern-day incorporated city to our northwest.) Then I pondered the fancy cursive that slightly resembled my grandmother's and deciphered it as "Casad." Ahh, that's a street name in Covina/WC! Could this maybe be the person it's named after? Then, only minutes later, a quick newspaper search introduced me to Mr R. C. Casad, who it turns out is one of the more remarkable historical Covina personages I've ever had the pleasure to meet.

In our Civics class at South Hills, I remember Mr. Douglas telling us that the framers of the Constitution intended that Congress be comprised of regular citizens elected by the community who would then come to the nation's capital for a two-year term and represent their constituents. Sounded great on paper, but of course, the system we ended up with was career politicians representing their party and themselves over and above anything else. Not so great...

Covina's Roland C. Casad, however, was a throwback to the Founders' ideal, and much more—a common man who sought not only to stand for his district, but who sincerely desired to improve the lives of all the people and bring prosperity to the entire country. To that end, he tirelessly ran for national elected office 11 times from 1932-1948, including 4 times for president.

But you've never heard of the man, have you? I hadn't. Mr. Casad never received even the briefest mention in any local history book or other account I ever read. And yet, Roland Casad's one-man citizen crusade all started in a melon and squash patch right here in Covina.

Born in Ocheltree, Kansas in 1876, Roland Cortez Casad (pron. ka-SAD)¹ made his way west in 1899² to settle in a then-unheard-of agricultural section of Los Angeles county called Hollywood.³ In May, 1905, he purchased 16 acres in the W. R. Rowland Tract in what was then the Irwindale section of Rancho La Puente,⁴ and soon after made a home there with his wife and mother.

Aerial view of north West Covina, 1936. R. C. Casad's ranch was located on two 8-acre lots at the historical western terminus of Rowland Avenue.
Source: Geospatial Collection, U. C. Santa Barbara.

(And that, I suspect, is where my envelope entered into the story. Casad bought his land from Alson and Sadie Vincent of Irwindale,⁴ and I surmise Mr. Vincent used the envelope to mail him material pertaining to his upcoming purchase. The Vincents lived at the southeast corner of today's Vincent Avenue and San Bernardino Road,⁵ and the Irwindale post office at the section's Southern Pacific rail depot⁶ would have been only a 3/4-mile walk from the Vincents' front door.)

For the next 20 or so years, Casad led a quiet life divided between farming and real estate.⁷ During this period, he began writing letters to the editor, most of which contained novel takes on a wide range of topics. Some of his ideas were genuinely ahead of their time, e.g. as early as 1930, Casad proposed the creation of special interurban highways where cars could travel "at a high rate of speed...without the necessity of one single stop,"⁸ more than a decade before the Arroyo Seco Parkway became Los Angeles's first freeway. He was also an early advocate of the formation of local historical societies,⁹ an idea I obviously support.

This increasing fondness for short-form messaging led to his discovery of a truly unique broadcasting medium: banana squashes! Casad found that if he scratched the flesh of a growing squash, it developed raised scar tissue which it retained as it ripened. So with his pen knife, he inscribed little epigrammatic messages—many of a political nature—on his Covina-grown squashes,¹⁰ and this novel gimmick attracted the attention of several area newspapers.

It was around this time that Casad tossed his hat into the political ring. While most men might test the waters by running for city council or the like, Roland C. Casad decided to start at the very top. The Covina Citizen carried the first announcement that local produce-grower Roland Casad was seeking the office of President of the United States.¹¹ Other papers quickly picked up the story.

Hollywood Citizen-News, April 14, 1932.¹²

In June, however, Casad scaled back his aspirations and campaigned instead for California's 12th District congressional seat.¹³ He came in dead last in the August, 1932 Republican primary,¹⁴ but Roland Casad had only just begun to fight!

Casad ran again for Congress in 1934, lost,¹⁵ and in 1935 once more declared for the presidency.¹⁶ This time around, though, he was thinking big. He sought the nomination of eight different parties,¹⁷ and in the spring of 1936, Casad embarked on a 7,000-mile, 25-state campaign tour¹⁸ to present his platform directly to the people. His planks, summarized, were:

• Special government pensions for seniors
• Elimination of most federal government agencies
• Remove 3/4 of existing taxes
• Reduce/eliminate the public debt
• Promote creation of parks and recreational facilities
• Conserve natural resources¹⁹

After his speaking tour appeared to have fallen on deaf ears, Casad returned home and opted once again for the 12th District congressional seat, this time as an independent.²⁰ Casad made his first bid for U. S. Senate in 1938, running as a Republican, Democrat and Prohibition party candidate.²¹

Then, from August, 1939 to May, 1940, Casad made what would turn out to be his biggest campaign push of all, when the now-63-year-old farmer hitchhiked across the length and breadth of the entire nation to spread his message of recovery and prosperity for all. Visiting every state in the union and calling on every governor and metropolitan newspaper office along the way,²² Roland Casad became the political "Forrest Gump" of his time.

This one-man boots-on-the-ground odyssey of course made Casad headline news all over the country. And remarkably—despite tacitly implying his was a lost cause—most of the press coverage that Casad received was neutral to positive. Editors evidently knew "good copy" when they saw it, and the congenial, soft-spoken man who never failed to boast Covina, California as his home town was all of that and more.

In 1942, perennial candidate Casad made yet another try for Congress,²³ followed by the U. S. Senate for a third time in 1944,²⁴ and one last write-in go for the White House in 1948.²⁵ But that was still not the end of the line for Roland Casad. In 1950,²⁶ now 74, he made his third and final cross-country trip to stump for his economic plan which he never stopped insisting would eliminate the national debt and usher in a period of perpetual prosperity for every person and for the country as a whole.

Roland Casad's idealist crusade finally reached its end when he passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage on January 14, 1951.²⁷ A man of no vices other than unrestrained benevolence for all, he had proven himself utterly unflappable and indomitable. Have you ever heard of anyone more doggedly persistent in the face of certain defeat? I sure haven't!

After all I've read about Casad (and believe me, I've barely scratched the surface here), I'm still hard-pressed to pin the man down politically. Some of his platform—such as eliminating taxes and reducing federal agencies—was distinctly conservative, yet his stances on parks, the environment, abolishing poverty and particularly his $200 monthly pension for every senior (what today we would call "universal basic income")—those would all qualify as liberal. And although he ran under the Republican banner more times than any other, Casad himself once stated flatly that he "has never known anyone who was liberal or progressive enough either in economics or politics" to suit him.²⁸ The man simply defied the usual labels.

The people who voted for Casad rendered the final verdict, however. In his last race for Senate, he garnered 2,600 votes,²⁹ more than ever before, and of those, 50.8% of his voters were Democrats, and 49.2% were Republican.³⁰ Statistically speaking, that's the textbook definition of "bipartisan."

Casad was decades ahead of his time in terms of messaging, too. Who knows how much more influence he might have been able to muster in today's world of social media? Considering his skill with the written word, and his persistence, I think he would have been a sensation on platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. I mean, what else were those squash aphorisms but an early form of "tweet?"

Some postscripts:

Not long after Casad's death, half of the land on W. Rowland in West Covina was sold and subdivided, and its short east/west street named "Casad Avenue."³¹ In 1953, Roland's sister, Irene C. Hartley, sold the other half, and the new street one block east of her brother's was named for her.³² In the years to come, several other short east/west residential streets in the Covinas would also be named or renamed "Casad."

In terms of legacy, I can't think of anyone else in Covina history who has more to offer in terms of raw inspiration than Roland Cortez Casad. That he never won a single race for office matters not one bit to me, nor I daresay to him, either. The man himself said, "I don't care whether people agree with me or not. If I can only get people to thinking, I'll have done a great work."³³ That you did, Citizen Casad. That you most certainly did.

References:

¹ Pasadena Star-News, August 15, 1942, p.12.
² Monrovia Daily News-Post, January 19, 1951, p.9.
³ Hollywood Citizen-News, January 18, 1951, p.22.
⁴ Los Angeles Evening Express, May 19, 1905, p.13
⁵ United States Census, 1940.
⁶ Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1899, p.7.
⁷ Los Angeles Record, October 12, 1929, p.3.
⁸ Hollywood Daily Citizen, April 4, 1930, p.20.
⁹ Daily Times-Advocate, April 1, 1935, p.3.
¹⁰ Long Beach Press-Telegram, February 23, 1932, p.14.
¹¹ Covina Citizen, March 31, 1932, p.1.
¹² Hollywood Citizen-News, April 14, 1932, p.8.
¹³ Covina Citizen, June 30, 1932, p.3.
¹⁴ Covina Citizen, September 1, 1932, p.1.
¹⁵ Covina Argus, August 31, 1934, p.1.
¹⁶ Pomona Progress-Bulletin, May 3, 1935, p.6.
¹⁷ Covina Argus, November 22, 1935, p.4.
¹⁸ Long Beach Sun, April 18, 1936, p.7.
¹⁹ The Emporia Gazette, November 14, 1935, p.12.
²⁰ Pasadena Star-News, October 8, 1936, p.6.
²¹ Los Angeles Times, June 26, 1938, p.8.
²² Pasadena Star-News, May 17, 1940, p.21.
²³ Pasadena Star-News, August 22, 1942, p.9.
²⁴ Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1944, p.18.
²⁵ Long Beach Press-Telegram, September 23, 1948, p.13.
²⁶ Escondido Times-Advocate, December 15, 1950, p.1.
²⁷ Certificate of Death, Roland Cortez Casad, California Dept. of Public Health, filed January 18, 1951, Los Angeles County Recorder.
²⁸ Monrovia Post-News, October 31, 1940, p.3.
²⁹ The Whittier News, May 17, 1944, p.1.
³⁰ Hollywood Citizen-News, May 17, 1944, p.1
³¹ Map of Tract No. 18633 in the city of West Covina, County of Los Angeles, surveyed Oct., 1952. L. A. County Dept. of Public Works.
³² Map of Tract No. 18922 in the city of West Covina, County of Los Angeles, surveyed Jun., 1953. L. A. County Dept. of Public Works.
³³ Pomona Progress-Bulletin, January 10, 1934, p.3.