Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 351
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[Page 351]
173
Any previous idea I had had of settling permanently in the United States was soon dispelled. I very soon realised what a kindly country Australia was by comparison. However, I felt that I should make my trip worth-while, and spend a few months looking around at least a part of this populous bustling land and gaining some of the useful experience it had to offer.
I had hoped to get employment, almost immediately, in any capacity, clerical or labouring, as much for company as for some money, because I was feeling very lonely in this big, and not too friendly city, where nearly everyone seemed far too busy rushing around on business bent to say a few words to a stranger. Finally I made the acquaintance of a middle-aged visitor from Los Angeles who was staying at my hotel for a few days, and he invited me to call on him if I was in that city and he would show me around. In our conversations he told me many interesting things about earlier days in California.
While in San Francisco, I went one night to see the opera "Tosca" performed by the Chicago (Mary Garden) Grand Opera Coy, in the huge Hippodrome hall at Civic Square. I paid five dollars for a seat on the aisle steps, but the performance was well worth the money and the discomfort of sitting on cold hard concrete. It was a magnificent production, with a fine orchestra of a hundred and twenty musicians and a choir of about two hundred vocalists. The scenery and the period furniture and costumes were really perfect, and the gifted star singers, mail and female, sang and acted faultlessly.
After a few weeks in San Francisco, I took the train to Los Angeles. One had the choice of travelling by the coastal or the inland route. I chose the former and on arrival booked into a large new hotel, the Trinity. Los Angeles, founded originally by the Spaniards, was a bizarre mixture of the very big and new, and the small and old. Even in the main city-block modern multi-storey office, bank and store buildings rose up, here and there, amongst the shabby green wooden ones built years before by the Spaniards and Mexicans.
I lost little in calling on my friend at his office. He