Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 353
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[Page 353]
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had an elderly sister who had some connection with the film industry, and in my honour she arranged a night's entertainment in the palatial Graumans Chinese theatre, which had only recently been opened with great eclat by prominent personalities of the film industry.
Speculation in oil shares was raging in the city, and one narrow street that ran parallel to the main one was full of little offices, all pushing shares in some new company that was supposed to be about to strike oil in commercial quantities. Men standing in the entrances and shouting the fortune-making potentialities of their particular shares, endeavoured to steer pedestrians inside. Los Angeles was on the top of a tremendous boom engendered by the new film enterprises and the recent big oil discoveries.
My friend had an interest in one oil lease, the Kaltawa, with three or four wells down and yielding moderate flows. But further exploitation was held up for lack of funds. He got the mistaken idea, despite my protests to the contrary, that I had a lot of money available for investment. One Sunday morning he insisted on taking me for a forty-mile drive in a ramshackle car away up a long winding valley in the big hills behind Los Angeles, on a very rough track that was often the bed of a dry creek, to see his show. The black crude oil already won was stored in a few large, wooden, circular vats, and his problem was to get the money to build a suitable pipeline down to a refinery on the lower ground about seven miles away. However, I convinced him finally that I had no worthwhile funds to invest, and we returned to the city still good friends.
A few days later I took the inland train back to San Francisco via Fresno, passing across the desolate Mojave desert, covered with fantastic cactuses, then through the forests of oil derricks working with shallow oil beds around San Jose and Bakersfield.
On my return to San Francisco, I felt more lonely than ever and resolved that I must get into some job, somehow. I began to