David Comstock, a Nevada County historian, shares his life story and passion for local history in this interview. He discusses his early life in Oakland and Walnut Creek, his time in the Air Force, and his career in commercial art and publishing. Comstock recounts how he met his wife, Artis, and their shared dream of building a self-sufficient life in the Nevada County woods. He details their efforts to construct their own home and the challenges they faced. Comstock's fascination with the area's rich history led him to extensive research, resulting in the publication of several books and historical indexes. He emphasizes the importance of preserving historical accuracy and shares his ongoing work organizing and publishing historical records. Comstock's dedication to local history is evident in his meticulous approach to research and his commitment to making historical information accessible to others.

Full Transcript of the Video:

We will say clever things like, today is October the 10th, 2004.

This interview is with Mr. David Comstock at 1819 William Quirk Memorial Drive in Nevada County.

Mr. Comstock, you're on.

Yeah, I see that red light.

What? I see the red light.

Well, it should be there.

That's right, yeah.

Okay.

What would you like me to say? Well, first of all, how did William Quirk Memorial Drive get its name? Ah, okay, I like that kind of question.

Okay, back in the 1970s, I think it was, the county suddenly announced that everybody had to have street addresses.

And they were going to give out numbers, they had street names, the driveways had to have names, and what have you.

And, so here we were with this dirt road connected to another dirt road connected to another dirt road.

And so, I said, let's name it for William Quirk, who used to have a saloon here in the 1860s.

He had a saloon at the town, it was called Chalk Bluff.

And it was only out here for a short time, but it's just up the road a piece.

And then later on, he had a mine over at Red Dog.

He's buried in the Red Dog Cemetery, because he was about to go off to Nevada City one day.

And, stopped by to check his mine in the month of March, and it had been kind of rainy and what have you.

And, apparently he got caught in a cave, and nobody found his body for a couple days.

I kept waiting for him to come back from Red Dog, and then they went looking and found him.

So, I thought, somebody ought to remember this guy.

And, so I said this was going to be William Quirk Memorial Drive.

Not long after that, a guy drove up to my house, and he says, how come you memorialized me? I'm not dead.

And, it turned out to be a guy named William Quirk, who's a contractor here in Nevada County.

And he didn't know anything about this other William Quirk.

And, so anyway, and then subsequently I read some other books in which I picked up William Quirk's name, working in other parts of California, the same William Quirk.

So, he turned out to be more famous than I thought he was.

Great.

Is the name of this drive on county maps now? Yes, it is.

Okay.

And, if you have one of these computer maps or any things that you can buy and what have you, make computers in there, it'll show you that, because it's picked it up off at county maps.

Okay.

Would you just briefly start off where you were born, some of your early history, and then we'll get around to your history up here in Nevada County.

Okay.

I was born in Oakland, a son of parents who were also born in California.

My father was born in Chico.

My mother was born in San Francisco a few months before the quake.

She survived it, obviously.

So, I was born in Oakland in a hospital that later became the very first Kaiser Hospital in Oakland.

And, my dad was an architect.

And, the first thing he did when he graduated from college was bought a house.

I mean, not many guys do this at that age.

He wasn't married or anything else.

But, his family had always moved around, moved around in awful lot of, always renting places.

And, he just felt the need to have a stable place.

So, he bought the house.

Actually, his brother-in-law had built the house as part of the new subdivision.

And, he moved in there, put his parents in there.

He wanted them to have a place where they could stay.

And, then a couple of years later, he got married and he moved them out.

So, I can go back to Reddy again.

And, that's where I was born.

And, I went to school in Oakland up until, I was born in '27.

I went to school in Oakland up until 1942.

When my parents surprised the whole family by saying, "We're going to move to Walnut Creek.

" Now, two years earlier, they had bought a piece of land out of Halimo, which is about three miles below Walnut Creek.

It was just agricultural land and had a nice view of Mount Babel.

But, the war had come along in '41 and you couldn't build any more.

They couldn't build on their lives.

So, they had decided without consulting those kids at all, that they were going to do a buy a house in Walnut Creek and move out there.

I learned later it was because they were impressed with this new high school that had just been built out there.

At McElhoneys High School.

And, that's where I went to school.

I lived basically in that area, Walnut Creek area, Contra Costa area, until the 1960s when I bought a piece of land up here in Grass Valley.

And, I eventually moved here in 1971.

Now, you were between high school and moving up here.

Give me a little specifics about that.

Okay.

I graduated early from high school so I could enlist in the Air Force in '44, the fall of '44.

The only way that you could get into the Air Force and fly at that point, the war seemed to be nearing its end at that point, although nobody was sure, was to get out of high school at the age of 17 and a half and they would send you off to college.

Until your 18th birthday you took kind of a pre-engineering program.

But between, I went off to college in Idaho and while I was there, the Germans surrendered.

And, they sent me home for my 18th birthday and the Japanese surrendered.

And so, you were in an Army program at the time? Yes, I was in an Army program but when this sudden development happened, the Air Force gave us our option of opting out to getting out of the Air Force at that point.

And we could enter some other service or we could just wait and take our chances with the draft.

And, I decided to stay in the Air Force.

And, I was glad later that I did because most of my classmates who hadn't jumped ahead to get into service, ended up in Korea, which I thought was a deadly proposition than being an occupation troop in Japan.

The most interesting thing that I did in the Army was I went to cryptography school.

It turned out, at the time I was finishing basic training, it turned out to be one of only two schools that was still operating.

And, it was something that kind of had always fascinated me, codes and things.

And, from there, the cryptography school, I became an instructor and then I went to Signal Corps.

OCS became a cryptographic officer.

And, in later years, that has kind of been very helpful in what I've ended up doing, which is researching and writing history because it's all about solving puzzles.

But, between the service and moving up here, I actually became an artist, a commercial artist.

I studied art at San Jose State College, which is now a university.

And, I went to look for a job in San Francisco after I graduated.

Well, I actually didn't graduate.

I'm not very good about graduating from things.

I get impatient.

And, I think, well, that's enough of that.

Let's go do something.

And, so I went out to get a job in.

And, I went to San Francisco and I looked for a job for a week.

And, most people tell you, especially you're going to get in, go looking for a job in that age.

But, most jobs, you don't get a job in one week.

But, that week told me that I really didn't want to work in San Francisco.

And, I was really thankful nobody had hired me.

So, I went back to Waller Creek and opened an office and had some cards and letterheads printed up saying that I was running an ad agency.

And, so that's what I did for that sort of thing up until about the time that I met artists.

And, I had shared a couple of wives at the same time.

By the time I went to work at the University of California Press, I discovered this was what I really liked to do.

Which was along the lines of what I'd been doing, which was designing and printing and what have you.

But, it was designing books.

And, the books were, I just loved that.

And, so that, from then on, books and history have been my whole life.

Let me ask you a question.

You say you opened up an office and you designed some letterheads.

And, one thing or another, just out of the clear blue you did this and it was successful? It was reasonably successful.

It was enough that it got me going until I got polio.

And, then I went to work for Kaiser.

But, for several years, yeah.

Actually, you see, you can start a business doing anything.

If you believe you can and you're convincing enough that you persuade other people that you can.

It's pretty surprising.

People are pretty gullible.

Okay, so you ran that agency until you got polio and then you went to work for Kaiser? For Kaiser Graphic Arts in Oakland.

It's a company that no longer exists.

But, at that time, Kaiser companies, there were a whole slew of them.

You know, they had gone from Kaiser Construction and Kaiser Permanente to having a steel company, aluminum company, and an automobile company.

They were building cars, Kaiser and the Fraser cars.

And, so each one of these companies had a publication, an internal publication.

And, that's what they were doing for the people they did business with.

So, they put together this little company, a printing and designing and editing company.

It was essentially like a publishing company, but that was on a printing plant.

And, we produced all of their magazines for them.

And, basically, what I was doing there at first was just pasting up stuff.

Nowadays, people that work on computers, young people, say, "What's it mean, you know, what's it mean cut and paste?" Because they use these terms on a computer.

You know, "Where'd that come from?" And I said, "Well, we used to do it with scissors and paste.

" I mean, literally.

And, the problem was getting things straight.

I mean, lined up so they didn't look crooked.

And, newspapers were done that way for a while.

The Union was pasted up back in the 1960s and 70s.

And, at Luxon, they weren't really good at it.

But, so, I learned a lot of skills there, working for that place.

The one time that I like working with a group of other people is when they're all doing different things than I am doing.

So, that I can watch and see what they're doing, and I can learn other skills and trades from them.

So, I learned a lot about printing and editing and what have you while I was doing there, cutting and pasting.

And, I was also starting to pick up some more advertising work on the side.

I'm getting some of my old customers for advertising business.

And, at one point, then, Kaiser, the Kaiser company, at least their staff, got unhappy with this.

And, they didn't want people doing stuff on the side.

So, I said, "Okay, I'll bring, is it okay if I bring my customers in here?" And, I handled my view like the account executive here.

And, I said, "Okay.

" We did that for a few months, and they began to complain about that.

I was printing them a lot of business.

And, meantime, one of the people I was doing business with, a fellow that was designing, or producing the annual reports for Contra Costa County, had an affiliation with a printing company in Richmond.

And, they made me an offer.

And, it was a lot better than when I was being paid.

So, I went to work for them.

And so, my career, my working career for other people has been one of, I stay there from three to four years.

And, by three years, and certainly by four years, what happens is I'm telling them how to run their business.

And, they always point out to me that they didn't hire me to teach them anything.

They weren't hiring a consultant.

And, if I wanted to do that, I could do it somewhere else.

And so, I would move on somewhere else.

So, the longest term I've worked for anybody individually has been myself since 1971.

That's worked out really well.

Okay.

Whenever you want to take a break, let me know.

Okay.

I'll turn this off.

Your problem is to turn me off.

Oh, no.

You're doing great.

So, anyway, when I met, I told you I had bought this property up in Grass Valley in the mid-60s.

Up here? Yes.

Right.

No, not out here.

Actually, down off of Rattlesnake Road.

It was about three and a half acres.

And, down on a dirt road is now a paved road.

There was no water or anything like that.

But, there was a little cabin on this thing.

And, I bought that because I decided I just needed to get away from the city on weekends or something.

I used to go camping.

But, I got so that, you know, I had to get reservations at state parks and all this sort of thing.

I thought, well, if I buy a little piece of land, okay.

I came to Grass Valley because, after looking at other places that were within like a three-hour drive of Walnut Creek, I began to look inland and spotted this place called Grass Valley.

And, it triggered a response.

I remembered when I was about nine or ten years old, my grandfather had taken me to Grass Valley.

And, he was going to preach at the Methodist Church in Grass Valley.

My grandfather was a banker.

But, he was a lay preacher.

And, he would go out to little country towns in the summertime, so that the little country preacher could take a couple of weeks off.

I mean, usually they were working on a really small salary.

And, they couldn't afford to do much of anything.

And so, he would do this.

And, he took me along.

And, somehow I remembered Grass Valley.

I mean, I remembered what it looked like, what it felt like and everything.

And, I thought, this was the neatest place on earth.

And, I thought, but all these years passed, when I went up there, it would be totally different.

It came up, it was just like I remembered it.

But, of course, to see that was before they built the freeway, before everybody started moving up here, in 1964, this was.

And, at that time, hardly anything had changed.

It was pretty much the same.

And so, I fell in love with the place.

So, anyway, when I met artists, and we decided to get married, I was trying to figure out how I could make a living up here.

So, she agreed to come down to Waller Creek and live with me there.

While I went to work for the press, while we figured out how to get back up here.

Well, working at the press was the key.

I found that the publishing business, that you can do it anywhere.

You deal with people by mail and phone and this sort of thing.

Sometimes you never see the people that you work with.

And so, I began, even before I left the press, I began freelancing for other university presses, including Nevada and Colorado and Hawaii.

And so, I had some customers already by the time I left here.

And UC Press had agreed, let me continue to do work for them on a freelance basis.

And so, just moved up, and for a while, we hadn't built this place out here in the woods.

We were living at Artis' old family home on Colfax Highway, the Stone Arch in front.

And we were just living there temporarily while we got our money together.

We still owned a house down in Waller Creek.

And we were renting it out and waiting to get to the point of building this.

And in 1973 and '74, we started building this house.

The two of us working together.

We built it in two summers.

You and Artis built this house? We built the entire thing.

The other thing done by other people was Artis' son George ran a Jeep Trencher that we bought at an auction.

And he dug the holes to put the telephone poles in.

These telephone poles, incidentally, to hold the house up, came from the streets of Nevada City, on the underground of the utilities.

So, they're historic.

So, they dug the poles for us.

One son started to help us one day, came out here, the youngest one, and Artis and I were working as, you know, we don't look much like construction workers when we're acting.

She's at one end of the board and I'm at the other end.

And so, this end, we grabbed one of these two by twelves that was twenty feet long.

And he'd just, he'd grab it under one arm and start going.

But he'd swing this thing around.

And it was like one of these old Keystone Cops movies.

And after we had, you know, dodged these boards for a couple hours, we suggested he go home.

So, otherwise, we'd build it all.

How many acres do you have here? Twenty.

We started with ten and before much time had gone by, we began to realize that people could move onto the acres next to us.

And so, we bought two more fives.

And they were all contiguous.

Now, just to back up a little bit, how did you meet Artis? That's a strange story.

But like all stories, I mean, they're all strange.

This guy I was working with, before I bought the property up here, I went to work, back up a little bit, in between two marriages, my first wife had divorced me.

I decided that I would go back to college and get a degree and teach.

I had always said to my family and everybody else that I'd left college before I had a degree.

I actually had four years of college.

I just had switched courses around so that I never got enough of the right ones to get a degree.

I said I'd always go back if I thought I needed one.

So, I went back to the University of California.

I was about 36 or 37, something like that.

And I went one semester, but in the middle of the time, one of my sideline moonlighting ventures was with some guys who had been working with Aerojet General and had been designing and building nuclear reactors down in the San Ramon Valley.

I can imagine, I was in the business of promoting nuclear reactors to be sold to foreign countries.

A lot of them ended up in India and other places.

I suspect that I'm somehow involved with some of the weapons of mass destruction that proliferate around the Earth.

But anyway, these guys were selling these things and I was drawing pictures of them.

And then they did something a little wrong, I guess, and Aerojet kicked them out.

And they started their own company, which was even crazier.

They started making little miniature rockets.

And they were selling all kinds of things or ideas to all of the military things.

This was during the Vietnamese War.

And they had things like teeny rockets that were 1/8 of an inch in diameter, made out of aluminum, had fins on them.

And you put a bunch of them in something, they could fly.

They could go on a tach them to plants, like thorns, and they would poison you.

They had a lot of great ideas like this.

All of them were not only ridiculous but really didn't work.

But what they did was they were busy going around.

They had discovered, after having worked for Aerojet, that you could sell all kinds of things to the government.

You could go after contracts that were too small for General Motors and all these other big companies and General Electric and other people to go after.

These would be $25,000 to $50,000 contracts.

And they would skillfully carry out this contract to which they would come in with a report, show all their testing and all, and say, "We're almost there.

" They would give us another contract.

And so they would get these things, a whole series of these contracts, and eventually, like they'd be selling it to the Navy.

And finally the Navy would be in to realize that they'd been had.

And so they'd end it.

So then they'd sell it to the Marines.

And then when that failed, they sold it to the Air Force and to the Army.

I don't know if they ever sold anything to the ghost guard, but they'd sell these things over and over again.

And it was a crazy thing.

So while I was there, this is a long way to tell you how I met artists.

While I was there, there was this fellow who was in charge of building these little rockets.

His name was Bert.

And it turned out that Bert was getting to know some people up in Grass Valley, because Bert had us kind of on a sideline in which he was interested in old movies.

Old, old movies.

And he would give showings of them.

And so just about the time that I either quit or was fired from this rocket outfit, and we quarreled about that for some time.

We had arguments with the state, and finally the state agreed with me that I'd been fired.

This was because they wanted me to design some literature.

They finally had a rocket gun, a pistol that fired rockets.

And the services wouldn't buy it anymore, so they decided to sell it to the public.

And so they asked me to design it.

I had been hired to do, actually, the draft drawings.

But they asked me because they also, because these people had worked with me in the past, where I had done advertising and what have you, they asked me to design a brochure.

And so I designed and write the copy for it.

And so in the course of writing the copy, I described it and I put some warnings in there.

I said, "Be careful.

Keep your thumb away from these little openings along the side, because you'll burn your thumb off otherwise.

Or don't fire it into the woods.

You'll start a forest fire.

" Well, they objected to that.

They said, "We don't need that kind of stuff.

" They said, "Well, that's not going to help sell it.

" I said, "Yeah, but it happens all the time right here.

We have the fire department out there about once a week, but he got fires that we are people who start on testing the guns.

" So they said, "Look, just leave that out.

Put it the way it's right.

" I said, "Well, I'm not going to do that.

" And they said, "You're going to do that or you're going to clear out your desk and get out of here today.

" Well, I took that.

I understood that to mean I'd been fired because I wasn't about to do it.

So anyway, about this time, because I'm now out of a job, I go up to my place in Grass Valley, this piece of land with an old shack on it.

And Bert, who is still working for this company, gets ahold of me and says, "I'm going up to Grass Valley too, and I want you to help me design a brochure for this movie I'm doing about ferryboats on the bay.

And so I'm going to meet you at her house.

We'll meet at Mrs.

Bell's house.

" And actually, so I went up with my then-wife to this cabin.

And the night before we were to meet at Mrs.

Bell's house, my friend Bert arrives with Mrs.

Bell at the cabin.

They just decide to come by and see what our cabin looked like.

It was a pretty crummy cabin.

And so that's how I met Artis.

Were you Mrs.

Bell? I guess I was.

She was Mrs.

Bell.

She was a divorced woman.

Okay.

She was unencumbered.

I was encumbered at that point.

And so we actually did go over to Mrs.

Bell's house.

With swimming? Well, my wife kept wanting me to go over to Mrs.

Bell's house all the time because Mrs.

Bell had running water, and she had a swimming pool.

Anyway, the rest of this story you don't really want to hear because there are probably young people watching this at some time or other.

But they would not like to think the older generation acted like the younger generation.

But anyway, we ended up getting married.

Okay.

When did you get married? Put it here.

1967.

Okay.

This will be our 37th anniversary.

My boy.

My word.

Yeah.

We've been married to each other longer than we've been married to all the other people combined.

No.

I found a really fine woman.

Yes, you have.

Now, to get back to your career.

Once you got married, you're living in a cabin as far as I can tell.

Oh, you're living in, once you got married, you're living in Mrs.

Bell's house.

No.

Well, we moved down to Walnut Creek because we got to figure out a way to make a living of it.

Oh, okay.

See, I'm working for the University of Press in Berkeley.

So we bought a house in Walnut Creek.

I didn't have any money then.

I was broke, so I had a young teenage son then, very early teens, and he had an account that we had set up for him to go to college.

And I said, "Is it okay if I borrow some money out of your college account for a short time while I put a down payment on a house?" So we did buy it, and I did put the money back in his account, and he did go to college.

What's his name? Greg Comstock.

Greg Comstock.

He's now up at Sun Valley, actually he's at Ketchum, Idaho, which is right next to Sun Valley.

Ketchum is where Hemingway lived and where Hemingway killed himself, too.

Anyway, so he's a planner, city planner up there, and skier and whatnot.

And so Artis and I lived in Walnut Creek for four years, during which we concocted the scheme for how to get up here.

Artis went around to garage sales buying building materials so we could build a house, and saving money, putting money in the bank.

The first time I ever met a woman that added to my income, and she was just a marvelous.

She never spends money, and she always buys banks money and what have you.

And so I became rich overnight, relatively, compared to anything that happened before to me.

I mean, I had reserves.

And I was getting paid a decent salary at the press, and so working at the press made me realize that publishing is the way to do it.

I could freelance that.

So at the end of four years, we were ready to go up here, and everything we had planned worked.

It's, I say, getting involved with Artis just made things really just sort of click along.

And it has ever since then, too.

Good team.

Our thoughts for moving out here were multiple ones.

First of all, having lived down in Walnut Creek and seen that place during my up-to-then lifetime, you know, the first 40 years.

Actually, it was the second 20 years of my life that I saw what could happen in Walnut Creek.

Went all the way from being just a sleepy little village smaller than Grass Valley and Nevada City ever were, to a metropolis with bart and raised highways and all kinds of things where people commuted to that place.

And I figured, well, if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.

Anywhere that you would like to live.

I mean, anywhere nice people are going to come to sooner or later.

Especially as things had changed so much with Social Security.

The fact that people at a certain age started to receive retirement pay, even if they worked for somebody that didn't pay.

Had didn't have pensions and all.

And suddenly people could go anywhere and receive their check anywhere.

And so I anticipated what was going to happen up here.

And I decided, well, all right, let's find a place that's going to be really expensive to develop.

That's going to be nice, but it's going to be costly.

So it'll be the last place the developers come to.

I have no doubt the developers will be out here one day and this place is going to be full of really expensive houses.

But it's costly and they can do it cheaper elsewhere.

And so that dictated that had to have some kind of things working against it.

Like not only dirt roads, but in this case, this wonderful digging sound here.

You've got diggings that are a mile and a half across and create a really big geographical barrier.

And it's worked out that way because the phone lines and the teleno, which did not exist, and the power lines that did not exist on the side of the green horn, have advanced all the way across and stopped the diggings.

And the other thing was having observed what it was like at Artis' house over on the highway, where they were in the Nevada Irrigation District, that this was the most terrible, most unscrupulous district that you can imagine.

It's a state of affairs you just don't want to believe in which nobody can dictate to them.

You have no recourses.

They do what they want.

And I thought, I'm just not going to be able to tolerate that.

And so I wanted to get out of the district.

And it turns out the district ends at the Green Horn Creek.

And so once you get out there, you're out of there clutches.

We happen to supply a lot of the water for NID.

We are a watershed for NID.

But they can't charge us anything without changing their district lines.

So that was an impetus.

I wanted to live in the woods.

I wanted to really have a lot of elbow room.

By that time, I had learned that three and a half acres wasn't nearly big enough.

That's not nearly big enough.

And so I did want that.

And the other thing was, I figured from all my previous experiences, that if you're going to work for yourself, and if you're going to pick out projects, and if you're going to have a little freedom to pick out things that don't necessarily pay for themselves at first, you've got to find a way that you can live in a relatively small amount of money.

So that if times get a little tough, that you don't have to quit to go back to work and move, or what have you.

So I thought, "Oh, how do you do this? What's the trick?" I thought, "Well, what's the biggest single expense that people have?" Ongoing expense.

It's their housing.

They're either paying rent or they're paying on a mortgage.

If you didn't have to pay that money, that saves you a lot of money.

And that either puts some money at your disposal for other things, or it's money you don't have to earn.

And so the idea then was to build a house that would be paid for.

A pay-as-you-go house would be all paid for when you got through.

The only thing you ever had to pay was taxes.

And so we were able to achieve it with a combination of things.

One of them, the equity that built up in our house in Walnut Creek, and amazingly we built up a big equity in four years, because suddenly prices started to escalate at that time.

And we started climbing.

We didn't realize how far they were going to go.

But even in that time, it escalated enough so that it gave us a bunch more money than we expected we had.

And then the money that we had saved, and the fact we were going to do our own labor.

Now, to put this thing into perspective and context, when we went to the architect, we wanted to build it, and we wanted to build it for $12,500.

And he said, "Well, I think you can do that.

" And the interesting thing is, even though prices continued to escalate while we were building, it cost us eventually $15,000.

So that I don't know how you'd do it now.

I don't know how you would accomplish that now.

It would make it incredibly hard to do it.

It was certainly the right thing to do.

The two most intelligent things I did in my life was marry artists and build this house.

Because it really paid off.

It really worked.

In the '80s, there was a recession, and the recession affected our clients, our universities.

All of a sudden, we didn't have money to spend on books and things and designing.

And I was losing clients.

But a thing came along to balance it.

All of a sudden, there were people coming to me who had retired and wanted to write books about themselves and what they had done.

And they had the money to do it.

And they were ready to pay me to produce these books for them.

And so, this was an unexpected thing.

I did not expect to have self-publishers, individuals coming to me.

And they came to me.

They heard about me through my regular clients in the Bay Area.

People had said, "Where can I get this done?" And they said, "Well, this guy that lives way up in the woods, he doesn't have a telephone, or what have you.

You'll have to write him a letter or get ahold of somebody that will get ahold of him on a CD.

" In those days, everybody out here for miles around got on the CD radio at 7 o'clock every night.

And we talked to each other and passed information along, shared ideas.

And one or two people had telephones.

And they would take messages for the other people, or just to take a message to call, to go to a telephone and call somebody else.

And that's how I dealt with my clients and with the printers and binders and all kind of people for 15 years.

I suspect it was just exotic enough so that it attracted people.

It absolutely did.

They came driving out here in their Cadillacs and Lincoln's and stuff, you know.

And all dressed up.

And they thought it was wonderful.

And they'd go back to town and you'd go to lunch with people and tell them all about this guy that they deal with.

And it gave a wonderful story for them.

They just loved it.

And so we played the part.

It was easy for us to play the part.

We are pretty strange people.

But also, because we know, we can also talk like they do too.

We have manners and all that sort of thing.

And so it doesn't feel gross to them.

It's just entertaining.

That's right.

And a good predator.

That was it.

Michigan.

Yeah.

And the thing was that I could beat everybody's prices.

I had this low overhead.

And the other thing was that I had ferreted out quality suppliers who didn't charge obscene prices.

And so that I could, if they wanted, some of them would get prices, shop around for people in the Bay Area.

And always I could do the job for half.

Whatever it was, I could do it for half.

So it was worth the drive.

And it was a nice country.

People loved going to Grass Valley and Nevada City.

Especially in the earlier days.

There were just lots more attractions even than now.

There's just a lot more houses now than poor cars get in the way of.

Want to take a break? Okay.

Yeah.

Think about what you want to do.

You're on.

Okay.

I got involved with history in this county in a way that I've never got involved with history before.

In fact, in college I hated history.

And afterwards I only learned to like it by reading biographies.

But I still didn't really like history books.

But I came up here and like almost everyone else who arrives here gets touched with it a little bit.

You can't escape it.

I mean, it's just all around you.

You see it all the time.

Unlike cities, there's history.

But it's all covered up and hidden.

And you only see it, little glimpses, and it doesn't give you any idea of what it was really like.

There's not enough context.

Up here, I mean, you see whole city streets.

And you see whole big areas.

You see mining areas.

You see forests.

And you see old timber mills or lumber mills and this sort of thing.

And so I read a little bit the kind of stuff that's easily available from chambers of commerce and what have you in newspapers.

And I got fascinated.

The more I read, the more I began to realize there was a whole lot more to this than anybody was talking about.

People weren't putting it all together.

And so I started reading more.

And I got more and more fascinated.

And I thought, you know, somebody ought to put all of this together.

It's just a fascinating tale.

And a couple of years went by and one day I said to her, "You know, if I want to read this story before I die, I'm going to have to write it.

" And I just felt like nobody else was doing it.

Nobody else seemed to have this.

Everybody had this fascination with it.

But people were writing little bits and pieces.

But I wanted to put the pieces together and make some bigger sense out of it.

I'm just sure there was more, lots more to it.

And so I read the "Thompson West" index.

I'm in "Thompson West" history.

The index is a separate thing later.

But the history had been reprinted just about the time I came up here.

It was newly, they made a new printing of the 1880 edition.

And so we purchased a copy and I read it through.

And at the back of it are all these biographies.

People paid for biographies or families paid for biographies to be printed at the back.

And I got interested in two particular biographies.

One was the Searles family and one was the Rolfe family.

Because of what was included, they wrote long enough biographies.

Most of the people had little small ones.

I guess they paid by the inch or something.

The ones that paid for more, they told more about the background of these people.

And you could see that if you wanted to tell the story of Nevada County in real people, that's what I wanted to do.

I didn't want to talk about the way history books usually do and the people who are the governors.

So here were people, the Rolfe family, for instance, had been among part of the Mormon movement.

I mean, both the Mormon movement as actually moving because they followed it from state to state.

But also of the major activities of the Mormons.

Ben, this young fellow, Talvin Rolfe, had left the Mormons and gone on the Oregon Trail in 1845, the same time Francis Parkland, went on the Oregon Trail and wrote the famous book about it.

Worked on a newspaper in Oregon in 1845 or '46, the first newspaper on the coast.

That came down to California, worked on the first newspaper.

San Francisco was there working for Sam Brannon when gold was discovered.

And then ends up working on a Sacramento newspaper and ends up in Nevada County.

I thought, well, here's a wonderful way to tell the thread of history there.

Then I look at Searles, and here's Niall Searles, who makes his way across the plains in '49, coming by Missouri and coming with the wagon trains and all of '49, four years after a Rolfe.

And so here's another group of people coming because of gold.

Talvin didn't come because of gold.

He was among the people that came before gold.

But here's the guy that's part of the gold milieu.

And he gets here and he becomes a district attorney.

He becomes a judge.

He ends up in the Supreme Court.

And both these guys work on newspapers.

Newspapers is always a wonderful way to tell the stories if you've got people that are working for the newspapers.

If you were inventing, if you were making up characters, if you were making up a story, these are the people you would invent to tell your story.

Here they are already made.

Furthermore, artists had already made me a connection about the Searles family.

Before I knew her, artists had known some guys that ended up moving out of Nevada City, I guess owing some bills, including on a rental of either an apartment or a storage facility.

Among the things that were going to be carried off to the dump were a lot of letters that had been written by Mary Searle, Mrs.

Niles Searles, to her son in college at the University of California in the 1870s.

And so she gathered these things and showed them to me.

And I had read them.

And they were these neat letters that could have been written by any mother to her son at any time in history.

She was going to college.

And again, part of the thing that was drawing to me at all this was the realization that people stayed pretty much the same throughout history.

And it's the strangeness of their environment that sort of puts us off at times.

We think of people living around castles or living in a mining camp or something as being different.

And they're not really.

And so you get closer to them.

So I really like those letters.

And so the fact that now I'm reading in the Thompson West about the rest of this guy's career, I'm thinking, wow, this is a family.

So I started doing a little bit of research and went over to the Searles Library, which was brand new at that time.

It just started in '72.

And found there a little pamphlet that had been written by a woman named Frances G.

Long, published by the New York Historical Society, I think it was.

The New York State Historical Society.

And they were a handful of letters written by Miles Searles, back to his wife, Mary, while he's traveling west on the 1st Transcontinental Railroad, 20 years after he came across the plains.

And these were interesting letters, but what most interesting thing at all was a paragraph from the beginning of these things, identifying the author and saying that she was working on other family papers.

So, huh.

So I got in touch with her, started corresponding with her and with her daughter.

This wound up in the fancy with her daughter coming to California with her husband to a convention.

And we met in San Jose.

And she had brought with her boxes of letters.

Boxes of letters.

I had never seen so many letters before.

In time, I would discover this was a pittance.

I mean, they would turn out to be 20 or 30 or 40 times as many letters as she had with her.

But these were, and she had the originals, and she had made copies of some of them.

And we sat in a motel room with her for a couple of hours.

While she would hold these letters, she didn't have them to me.

She would hold them in her hands, and she'd read little bits from them, and fold them up and put them away.

And read others.

I'm sitting there in an egg, and yeah, is she going to let me have these or what? Well, pretty soon she's finally made a decision after a while that she's going to share them with me, but she's not going to let me have the originals.

And she's copied a bunch, but she hasn't copied them all.

And I'm wanting to nail this thing down, and I said, "I happen to know there's a copy place a block down here.

Why don't we go down there and copy the rest of it?" So we did.

We went down there and copied the rest.

And we got out of there.

I don't know what time of day it was we left, but we got home after midnight in here.

And I sat up the rest of the night reading these letters.

Didn't go to sleep, didn't go to bed.

It was fascinating, finally.

And it took over the next few years.

I got more and more and more and more letters from these.

And then we found another batch of other members of the family.

And these grew into three volumes of history I wrote.

And the writing of that history and the other thing that prior to doing this writing, prior to finding these letters, about the time I decided I wanted to read as much as possible and to learn as much about it.

And we started reading these tops in the west.

I began to realize it was going to be hopeless to try to find stuff a second time in there, because there was no index at 238 pages or three columns of tiny little type.

And so artists and I set up to put together an index.

This is before computers.

And so we were writing things on little pieces of paper that are like fortune.

They're like the things in fortune cookies.

And when you finally go to compile them, you don't dare open the door.

The breeze would come and they'd fly.

And we spent a year doing this.

I really did other things in that year, but that was our major project for one year, putting that index together so that I could find stuff.

And by the end of that time, we thought, well, we'll share this with other people, which we did.

So those two things were creating that index in which there are thousands of names.

Somehow, most of those names are stuck in my head.

I can't recite the names to you, but generally it's been, I found that if you name a name, I can make a pretty good guess about whether it's in that book, because I can usually, since I hand-lettered everything in there, I can remember writing each of these names.

So that's been useful.

Your indexes is an extremely useful publication.

It's just a crime for anybody to publish anything of that complexity and not put an index in.

It just really is awful.

And the reason it happens is that most people hate to make indexes.

They just hate it.

And it's time-consuming and mostly they don't want to pay people to do it.

There are people who will do this for pay.

There's a guy in Nevada City who makes a living doing this.

But most people don't like to do it.

But I insist on all the books that I work on that there be an index.

Anyway, and doing all these letters and writing this stuff again, so much information ran through my head while I'm doing it.

As a result, I think that I and Ed Tyson are the people who have seen the most documents and things.

The largest number of things have gone by us.

We're either able to point to things or describe things or remember things or make good guesses about where you might find something in this and that.

And so as a result, this has led me to get involved with most historical projects in this county, which I do happily and willingly.

In most cases, I don't require any pay or anything like that because I find that whatever I give, I sort of get something back in exchange from the sharing of information.

It's the most exciting thing that I've ever done in my life, and I know that it's never ending.

It will last for the rest of my life.

I do not have to worry about what I will be doing at any time.

Whatever happens, whether I go blind or can't move my arms or whatever, one way or another, I will make some kind of progress in doing things with history.

There's a never ending supply of raw materials to work with.

Your formatting of the Historical Society's bulletins is extremely valuable.

Yeah, well, because I'm able to.

.

.

You know, a university press, before they publish a book, and many other publishing companies too, will call in.

.

.

They will pay, actually, a panel of people to read a manuscript of something.

These are people who are considered to be expert in one way or another along this sort of thing.

They have them look it over for things that the publisher feels unequal to on spotting defects or problems or what have you.

And these people are very useful in picking up on stuff and saying, "Well, this is really good," or "This is good, except this stuff is based on the wrong information," that sort of thing.

And so it keeps.

.

.

What I try to do is keep the society from making errors that could be avoided.

And I think that it's really important for the society to do this because one of the biggest problems we have is we have a lot of old publications that people use for research purposes.

They go to the Searls Library, they go to the Public Library, they go to the Foley Library, and they look at our old publications and copy stuff for Bader.

And repeat errors that were made innocently in the past.

And when called on it, they said, "But we got it from the Historical Society.

" So the Historical Society is the ultimate authority in most people's minds about what happens.

And so I'm probably.

.

.

I'm a fuss budget about it.

But I think somebody has to be.

I think you're correct.

Ed Tyson is wonderful.

I admire.

.

.

For the first time I've met him, I wanted to just really admire his abilities and his understanding and complexity of all this.

And he stays cool and calm through it all.

He can be answering a dozen questions in the library and on the phone and everything else.

I would go crazy if I had.

.

.

if people have that much access to me.

I have to have a little more limited access.

But he can handle that.

And I guess that comes from having a career as a librarian.

I think so.

Yeah.

If he couldn't handle that, he'd have got out of the business.

He's been in it a long time.

Yes, he has.

You ready to take another break? Well, let's see.

What I'm trying to do with the rest of my life is to tidy up.

What happens.

.

.

this happens to everybody.

You know, you not only get a garage full of stuff that you have a yard sale or something like that.

Or do something about it.

You just collect stuff.

When you're doing the sort of thing I do, you end up with.

.

.

you have lots of partially started projects.

Or imagined projects.

Or unfinished projects.

Waiting.

.

.

always waiting for a little time or something here and there.

And so I have started on a course, a sort of a planned course, a somewhat planned course, scheduled events of this project to finish, that project to finish, and this and that.

And, for instance, I have, in the first part of this year, I put out three publications.

They're not books.

I mean, they're only because they're bound to spiral bindings.

They're 8.

5 by 11.

Each one of these contains about 200 pages of stuff out of old newspapers.

And they're in chronological order.

And they're based on all the research that I did while I was writing my books.

And my thought.

.

.

the way I went about this, particularly when I started out, in the early days I was going to other libraries, I was going to the Bancroft, I was going to the California State Library and reading microfilm and copying stuff by hand or taking a little typewriter along.

And I didn't always know where things were going or leaving, who was important.

I had a sort of a broad idea and I had a little bit of a focus.

But I sort of made the decision to not be too narrow, not to limit my stuff too much, because I really didn't want to go and do this again.

I didn't want to go and crank through the same microfilm and the same library over and over again.

And so anything, after a while, anything that caught my eye that I thought was interesting or might connect and in time names of people that pretty soon were repeating what have you, I was copying all of this stuff.

And so, after I got through with the books, a lot of it existed either just in handwritten stuff or typed stuff, or it was in kind of a raw form in the computer.

And it was accessible to me, but to no one else.

And I thought, you know, this would be a real shame to have this stuff just wither and die.

And nobody in my family is going to do something with it.

Nobody is going to resurrect it.

Nobody is going to do what I'm doing with it, which is formatting it into a nice readable form of annotating it with stuff that only I know as a result of what I do in that print, as I'm saying.

It says such and such here.

Not true.

Go to February 26th, you know, two weeks from now or next month, and you'll find where they corrected the story.

Or I'll give other information going along with it.

Just little notes like that, along there to keep people out of trouble.

Because it's so easy with a microfilm or just a sheer, or just an old newspaper, to pick an item out of the newspaper and say, "Wow, this happened.

" And Paul, he'd have somebody later on tell you, "No, it didn't happen.

" Or it wasn't like that.

And if you had read all the newspapers for the next six months, or 20 years, he would have found out, "Well, I happen to know the answer, so it's in there.

" So the first one of these volumes that I put out, I call it "News and Advertising" from, well, that time, from gold camps or something like that.

I don't even remember the names of these publications because they're not available in bookstores.

They're available from me.

I sell them directly to people.

I print 12 copies of each one as a starter.

If I run out of them, then I'll print another 12 of each.

I only have one copy left of the first one, right at the moment, except for my own personal copy.

The first one goes from 1850 to 1852.

And since there were no newspapers up here until 1851, a lot of these things had to come out of Sacramento newspapers or Marysville newspapers.

But they were talking about Nevada County.

They were talking about Grass Valley and Nevada City.

They were the only published items.

And they included some of the--there's advertising in there.

There's lots of names, we'll have you.

And it's in chronological order.

And you can tell by looking at the top of each page what the year is, what the month is, and what newspaper is being quoted in their little bunches.

And so of these 12 copies, I give one as a gift to the fully-vibed.

I keep one for myself, the other 10 I sell individually.

Okay, the second one I did was for 1853.

By 1853, there were a couple of newspapers, actually about three newspapers, although we had incomplete files of them.

But anyway, it was enough to fill up one of these volumes with just one year.

And then I did the third volume was 1854.

I then stopped doing those because I had other projects waiting for the rest of this year.

And I said, "All right, next year I will publish some more of these.

" Several people are buying these as fast as I make them up for their own research.

But they're available fully for somebody else to use.

It's a heck of a lot easier than searching through the microfilm initially.

And you can consider it as an index.

You can consider it as a way of locating these stuff first.

And then I indicate if there's more to this story in the newspaper.

And now you know where to find it.

There are a lot of other things of this sort, of unfinished kinds of things, that will be very useful to people, that is going to take a long time to do.

And at the same time, then come along with the unexpected projects like right now.

I'm working on Jack Clark's book.

Jack Clark's been working on this for a long time.

And like every three or four years, he tells me where he is.

And then he sort of drops out a picture for a while, and he goes, "I'm working well.

" Recently I found that he was ready to sort of let go of this thing.

And so I'm typing that now.

All right, I didn't know when that book was going to come along.

But as soon as I knew that I wanted to do that, I expect I'm 77 now.

I probably got 25 more years to go unless I get hit by something.

Because my mother is going to be 99 next month, and she doesn't look like she's going anywhere in a hurry.

And my father lived to be over 100.

Other people met over 100.

So there's a likelihood there's another 25 years to do things.

And so I expect a lot to keep my path.

So it's a lot happier place out here than it is in the rest of the world.

So it seems to be not being in the rest of the world.

However, I suspect that, and this thing I've thought about before, that if I were living under the czars, or if I was living under Saddam Hussein, or any other horrible kind of a situation, that like the people that lived under them, that I find something to do, and I'd probably be productive.

It's just very fortuitous that I happen to be in this situation where everybody treats me kindly.

Even my government, if I stay, keep a low profile.

And it's hard to find a nicer environment to be in.

You said something rather interesting when we took that trip over Hennes Pass.

You said, "I'm having as much fun as if I stayed home.

" Which I thought was.

.

.

Weird? No, not weird at all.

It's significant.

I understood immediately what you meant.

Yeah, it's true.

There are a lot of times that I have a really good time somewhere else, and I always measure it by how good a time I can have here.

There are just a lot of people, I've talked to several people recently, that just came back from cruises.

And you couldn't drag me on a cruise.

I'd rather go over there and be in the county jail.

I think I could find more interesting things to do in the county jail than on a cruise.

But every time artists and I leave, we go out on the road here, and we're thinking about coming back.

I remember the day we left for Spain.

And we were thinking, "In three more weeks, we'll get to come home.

" Yeah, never again.

How long were you in Spain? About three weeks.

Yeah, we went over there, and a lot of people said, "That's terrible what happened when you were in Spain.

" People go to Spain at the end of November and beginning of December, especially the Brits and people from Northern Europe, because this is sort of an artificial summer there.

It's down on the beach, and then at sun and everything else.

Well, this was one of the rainiest, stormiest times in history.

It flooded three times in the nearest city.

The airport was flooded.

The first President Bush went there to meet with a garbage shop or somebody else out there on the Mediterranean, and they got seasick.

The sun was so stormy.

We actually had a better time because of the storms, because life was more interesting.

You couldn't travel along the main roads.

They were blocked and washed away, and you had to take these dewers up in the mountains.

We had a rented car.

We were there with another couple, and they had rented this car.

He started driving, and Lending found out we were going to have to go to these deep tours.

He said, "You better drive.

You're used to driving these back mountain roads.

" There were washouts.

There were all kinds of interesting adventures that we had there because of it.

It really kept it from being too bad.

[Laughter] [BLANK_AUDIO]