Impermanence

*sighs* It looks like I'm going to have to write a book, after all...

All these years, I've been operating under the assumption that, even if I died, my blog would remain hosted on Blogger indefinitely, but it turns out that's not true. I recently discovered that, if my account is not logged into on a regular basis, after a certain period of time, my blog will be automatically deleted.

This on top of the fact I always knew that, after I passed, at least the images here would soon disappear, because all of those are on my private hosting, which would terminate after my credit cards were canceled. Gone right there would be half my blog's informational content, but I assumed that at least the text of it would remain. Nope. Even that would eventually vanish forever, too.

So, it appears the only option left to preserve my years of historical research is to turn my blog into a book. (Or, considering the amount of material, maybe even two or three.)

I know right off the bat that I'd have to self-publish, but I have no idea (yet) how to go about that. Anybody have any suggestions?

What I do feel fairly certain about already, though, is what's going to be in that book (subject to change without notice, of course):

• Preface: A Dedication (expanded to include others, as well)
• The San Bernardino Road (rewritten to cover early ESGV history in general)
• Hollenbeck and the Badillas
• The Badilla Foreclosure
• Untold Stories of Hollenbeck and Phillips
• The Tract, Trials and Tribulation of Joseph Phillips
• When Was Covina Founded?
• Who Really Named Covina?
• The Founder's House
• Badillo Mystery Solved?
• The Oldest House/Building in Covina
• Covina Hills Road
• Italia
• The Baseball Champs of '09
• The First Lady of Covina History

• Appendices: Covina History Timeline, Covina Schools Timeline

Plus three in-depth histories I've been working on for a while now:

• The Hollenbeck Ranch
• Mountain View and the Ruddock Family in Covina
• California Preparatory School (including the Theosophical Society and the Baptist Seminary)

That said, you know how I feel about books! Once you set something down in print, it might as well be set in stone, because you can't go back and edit errors or add new information. But, like I said, I really don't have any choice. Gotta bite the bullet now and get 'er done!

 

New Pages

Visitors to this blog are invited to read Covina Past's Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy. Links to these new pages are provided below, as well as in the footer of the main page and in the footer of every post.

• Terms and Conditions

• Privacy Policy

Both documents are subject to change without notice.

I should say, I only recently learned that legalities of this nature are mandated to conform with regulatory laws in this and other countries. I trust these documents will suffice to satisfy said requirements. If anyone notes any deficiencies, discrepancies or has any questions regarding these policies, please inform me via the Contact Form in the sidebar below. Thank you.

 

Covina Wikipedia Article

Spent the last 5 days working on improving the Wikipedia article on Covina. For years, the History section of that page has been the single worst source of misinformation about Covina's past on the whole internet. It was the exact opposite of what it should be, and an absolute disgrace to anyone who really knows or cares about the details of Covina history. The references cited were very weak, too; in almost every case they weren't authoritative sources at all, just websites that repeated the same distortions of events we've been told all our lives.

So I finally got fed up and decided to basically start from scratch and make the History section the absolute best quick source of information about Covina's bygone days that inquiring minds can find anywhere.

I didn't edit the whole History section, though. There's still stuff at the bottom that needs tidying up or moved to other sections. But paragraphs 2, 3, and 4 are all "New and Improved!" by Yours Truly. Have a look!

Click on the image go to the History section on Wikipedia.

And here are the new references I cited. You'll notice almost all of them consist of primary source material, like original deeds and newspaper reports written at the time the historical events actually occurred. So many definitive references here!

Click on the image go to the References section on Wikipedia.

I know I should have done this a long time ago, but editing Wikipedia is no simple task. It can be pretty intimidating, and exhausting, too. So 5 days of it is quite enough for me, at least for now. *whew!*

 

Changes

Although the sometime long gaps between posts might make it appear I'm only doing this part-time, the truth is that even if I'm not actively working on a new article, I'm involved with some aspect of this blog every day. I'm always trying to improve it and make it the best it can be. Whether it's browsing the newspaper archive looking for new material, fact-checking, correcting errors, or making an older post more informative or readable, this is basically my full-time job.

Consequently, an article you read 2 or 3 years ago (or even 2 or 3 weeks ago) might have been altered significantly since. The following is a list of those changes—from major ones to minor—and in reverse chronological order.

Important revisions: (i.e. re-reading highly recommended)
• Remembering Bob Ihsen, Mark Thiel and Dave Rogers—Added two more recent deaths and changed the title.
• Badillo Mystery Solved?—Lots of wording changes, style improvements, and a re-stated conclusion.
• When Was Covina Founded?—Some important date changes and clarified wording.
• Covina Hills Road—New intro, facts, conclusion, and map.
• The Ruddock Mansion—Many new historical details!
• Oak Canyon Road—Rewritten basically from scratch. (I'm really pleased with this one. Definite improvement!)

New post images:
• The Hollenbeck Palms—Added another 1906 postcard view, this one looking south from San Bernardino Road.
• Italia—Added a photo of E. R. Richmond, Italia Cook's father.
• Original Covina Landowners—Corrected a couple of errors in the parcel map.
• Citrus Avenue, 1938—Added a view of the 200 block of North Citrus.
• Covina's Old Neighbors—New map with adjusted labels for Walnut Center and the Hollenbeck Ranch.
• Hollenbeck and the Badillas—Corrected the southern boundary of the Badilla Tract on the 1877 map.

Minor updates:
• The Tract, Trials and Tribulations of Joseph Phillips—Some wording and style adjustments.
• Untold Stories of Hollenbeck and Phillips—Same as above.
• Mayors of Covina—One missing name added to the list.
• Old Covina High, 1961—Corrected the date that the campus was razed.
• Covina Valley Panorama, 1930—Changed the year the photo was taken, the year Lark Ellen bought her Cameron Avenue estate, and some photo label IDs.
• Driving Around the Groves—Made the description more readable.

Always being updated:
• Covina History Timeline—Now over 200 entries!

Due for a complete rewrite:
• The Baptist Seminary—I really must do better than this.

Might actually be a good idea if I made a list of changes every few months, just so everyone can stay right up to date with the greatest Covina history blog there ever was!

 

Facebook Page

I decided to give social media a try and create a Facebook page to hopefully boost this blog's readership. Check it out!

Covina Past on Facebook

Presently, I plan to populate the page with short teasers to my blog's "greatest hits," some of the more interesting vintage photos of Covina I've collected, and links to new articles as they appear here. I'll still update the Twitter/X account with those same new article notifications, but that's about all that site was ever good for. I doubt my blog got a single new reader going that route.

In other news, I've been working on multiple different topics for new posts lately, which unfortunately is actually proving to be more of an impediment to my productivity than anything else. I really should try to stick to just one subject at a time. That's the way I've always been used to working, anyway.

More to come soon! And do please Like and share the new Facebook page! This blog needs all the help it can get. :-)

Covina Past at 100

For this blog's 100th post, I thought a little retrospective might be in order. There've been quite a few changes here at Covina Past since I created this account in 2012. Suffice it to say, it's a very different site now versus what it used to be.

On AI

Given the pace of change in our electronic world, I'd like to state for the record that I have never used "artificial intelligence" in the production of this blog, and I never will. Every article you read here is the output of my native human intelligence applied to researching a particular topic, or an account drawn from personal experience.

To me, this is not merely a matter of principle or credibility. This blog is all about discovering new facts about Covina history, and AI in its present state is not able to generate novel ideas. It may be able to tell you things that you never knew before, but it cannot create entirely new knowledge on its own. Not yet, anyway. So for my purposes here, AI doesn't have any practical usefulness.

Granted, my reliance on human intelligence also means mistakes will be made, but at least any errors of fact you might find here are not the result of "hallucinations" of the sort that is currently endemic to AI. (Which is to say, I never just "make shit up" like the LLMs sometimes do.) ;-)

All that said, I've been amused the couple of times that someone has quoted a chatbot to me on some aspect of Covina history, and I note that it's lifted virtually verbatim from my blog. So although I have few followers in the realm of organic life, it's at least nice to know the machines are scraping my blog and learning things from it. :-)

 

Tags

Some readers may have noticed that I recently added subject tags to my postings. This is to help people directly access articles related to specific topics. Might be worth bookmarking this page for future reference. (I have!)

Particular attention is called to the New History tag. There you will find facts about Covina history that have appeared nowhere else before. Covina Past exclusives, you might say!

Below are all the tagged subjects, with clickable links for your convenience.

Commenting

Blogger for some reason made a recent change in the way the site handles cookies, the result being that readers can now only post comments here using the Google Chrome web browser.

It also appears that replies to comments are no longer supported. So, from this point on, if you have a question about something in one of my posts, please use the Contact Form in the sidebar, then I can reply to you by email.

This thing at the bottom of each page.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but so many things we encounter online are simply beyond our control. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

A Dedication

Occasionally someone asks how my interest in Covina history originated. I had an abiding fascination with "old things" in general as far back as I can remember, but the specific seeds of curiosity about my home town's past were actually planted by teachers at Barranca School: in particular, Mr. Miller in 3rd grade (1962-1963), and Mrs. Shipley in 6th (1965-1966).

Subscribing

I see I haven't posted anything here yet this year. Sorry to say, I am so far behind with everything in my life, I don't know how I'm ever going to catch up.

But for now, I might as well start with the question I've been asked the most recently, and that is, "How can I subscribe to this blog?"

The short answer is: you can't, at least not in the most logical way, which would be to get a notification email when I post a new article here. Unfortunately, Google/Blogger ended that functionality a couple of years ago. (Thanks a bunch, Google!)

So currently, the only way to subscribe is by "following," and that can only be done if you have a Blogger account. If you do, you can go to your Blogger Dashboard, select "Reading List" in the sidebar, click "Manage," then click "Add," then copy/paste the URL for this blog where it says, "Add Blogs to Follow."

Trouble is, you have to visit the Blogger Dashboard every time you want to check for new posts, so unless you follow several blogs, it's easier just to come check the Covina Past page directly, say, on the 1st of each month. (I've rarely posted here more than once monthly, anyway.)

I've also created an account on X/Twitter that you can follow for announcements of new posts. Here is the URL:

https://x.com/covinapast

Regarding Covina history, I've actually been working on several articles simultaneously for a while now, but in each case, I've run into a roadblock where I'm unable to find some critical piece of information that would allow me to tell the complete story properly, which is very frustrating as you might imagine. One article in particular is a "magnum opus" of sorts on an important subject that's never been chronicled in its entirety, but it now looks like I'm going to have to go to Covina in person to find the material I need to finish it, and I hope to do that next month.

In the meantime, I'll see what I can do about wrapping up some of the other drafts I've put on the back burner. Some will probably do with just a bit of touching up, and not require the usual perfectionism I impose on myself for considering a project to be ready for prime time as it were. Anyway, my apologies for my long silence, and thanks for everyone's patience. I will try my best to get back on my feet here as soon as I can.

 

Birth Plate

This commemorative plate was gifted to me when I was born. It is one of my most treasured possessions, and also my most personal Covina collectible. Except for my years away at college, it has been on display in a place of honor everywhere I've dwelt my whole life, and as such, it's an everyday reminder of my ultimate roots in the town of my birth.

2024 was a year of difficult losses for me, but in the end, I decided I should not add to those losses by killing off the one thing I love that I have the power to keep alive. So I will resume posting here, even though doing so carries with it neither reward nor recognition. It's a thankless job, but someone has to do it!

 

Is It Worth It?

I'm losing hope this blog is ever going to attract a decent-sized audience. My latest post has only 16 page views in a month. Other articles show a similarly abysmal level of traffic in the last 30-day period.

Lowering my spirits even further is the fact that I've been writing this blog for over 18 years now, and Covina Past still has only 1 follower. On the whole internet, just one person is interested enough in my content here to subscribe to it?

I feel ignored by the Historical Society, as well. When Glenn Reed was their historian he actively supported my work and was always happy to converse and provide feedback, but that came to an end with his death. I'm the only person left now who is doing scholarly research and writing on Covina history, but those who profess to care most about the subject give me little tangible help with access to source material or gaining readership here.

All this is disheartening to say the least.

And then there's the matter of time. I just turned 70 a couple of months ago, so this could very well be my last decade of life, and I really have to ask myself: is this blog a productive use of my remaining days on this earth? Would someone of any age think it's worthwhile to write for such a tiny and apparently indifferent audience? I think the objectively obvious answer is no, it is not.

Consequently, as much as I love Covina and its history, I've decided it's probably for the best that I wrap things up here. I'll continue to do research on my own, and there are a couple more topics in my queue that I've been working on that I feel I owe it to myself to publish on this blog, but after that, I think the time has come for me to move on.