George Garrigues

George Garrigues (1932-2022) launched his career as a journalist when he and his brother, Charles Samuel Garrigues, put together a hand-printed "newspaper," to send to their absent father in a distant city. Later, the said absent father wangled a job for George as a copyboy on the San Francisco Examiner, at the age of 15, and they worked together in the same newsroom, the father on the copy desk, and the son on the copy bench, which is where all the copyboys sat.

Garrigues wrote a book about his father, "He Usually Lived With a Female," which tells the story of C.H. (Brick) Garrigues's life as a 1920s reporter and opera critic, 1930s gumshoe, 1940s would-be novelist, and 1950s music reviewer.

As an undergraduate at UCLA, George Garrigues was one of the many victims of McCarthyism, when somebody discovered his old man had been investigated as a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s and the son was apparently tainted as a bomb-throwing, wild-haired traitor. He was blackballed by student politicians and developed an unhealthy disrespect for Greek-letter cabals, even though he did begin combing his hair more often.

Undaunted, the young man became a reporter on the Inglewood (California) Daily News, Ontario (California) Daily Report, and Los Angeles Times. He worked in public relations for the State of California (San Francisco and Sacramento) and the International Labor Office (Geneva, Switzerland). With a master's degree in journalism, he later was head of communications or journalism programs at University of the Pacific, Wayne State University, University of Bridgeport and Lincoln University of Missouri.

After his retirement in the early 2000s, Garrigues devoted himself to researching and publishing stories of untold history, especially of Los Angeles, some of which can be found on his website ulwaf.com His book Los Angeles: The Palms Neighborhood was published in 2009.

Garrigues founded City Desk Publishing in 2016, to tell the true stories of criminals, victims, journalists and other heroes and villains of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, based on the fascinating newspaper articles from that era. All the books are heavily illustrated.