Small Town in the Big Town

The big news that rates the big headlines may roll in from half the world away, but the best newspapers never forget that they are local. Most of their readers get most of their kicks from reading about the neighbors.

In Los Angeles, a city of transplanted small-towners, the Times caters to that persistent curiosity with a staff of 50 local reporters and acres of community news. It goes even further and offers something special in the way of chatty, back-fence journalism. In a column called "On the Move," it covers all of Southern California as if it were Main Street, reporting the doings of beekeepers at the foot of Mount Palomar and lettuce growers in the Imperial Valley in a nostalgic reminder of a life that flows at an easier pace. "Across the street," wrote Columnist Ed Ainsworth after a Sunday service in little Escondido, "church was letting out, and friends lingered on the sidewalk in the bright sunshine to chat, an art which seems forgotten in the metropolis."

As a chronicler of the half-forgotten art of small-town life in Southern California's hill towns and desert byways, Ainsworth is one of a vanishing breed of peripatetic reporters. By his own estimate, he has logged 1,500,000 miles in not quite 40 years, celebrating things that few of his colleagues would bother to write about. "This is the only city in America where a dried grape ranks on a par with President Kennedy, the atom bomb, Nikita and the Cuban Reds," he wrote from Fresno a fortnight ago.

Wistful Appeal. Appearing six times a week, Ainsworth's column is as old-fashioned as handset type, but Angelenos who spend their days in the clatter and clutter of megalopolis find wistful appeal in a report that the town of Arcadia "has sounded taps for the last chicken farm within its limits," or that in La Puenta a "gargantuan battle raged over the bougainvillaea, the rose and the iris," candidates for the town's official flower (the hibiscus, a dark horse, won).

A crewcut, greying man of 60, Ainsworth has a withered right arm and leg, and can use his left arm only from the wrist down as a result of childhood polio. He finished high school in Waco, Texas, in a wheelchair, but set out soon afterward for San Francisco to cover the 1920 Democratic National Convention, at space rates, for the local News Tribune. As it happened, the Democrats merited precious little space for nominating James M. Cox. "I got about $3," recalls Ainsworth. But he went on working for papers from San Pedro to Atlanta before landing a job with the Los Angeles Times in 1924.

Ainsworth rose to chief editorial writer, but after a 1959 heart attack he began "On the Move." The column is more than just folksy, for Ainsworth is a local-history buff who garnishes his prose with obscure tidbits of information and relishes exotic place names. Driving through Malibu, he can look past the cantilevered homes of the movie stars to a time when "Cabrillo in his voyage of exploration in 1542 saw the Chumash Indians in their settlement of 'Maliwu.' "

Outside the Limits. Writing "On the Move" is not exactly a pensioner's job. Ainsworth often packs his wife into his well-worn white Chevrolet for weekend camping expeditions, spends so much time on the road that when a Times editor is asked where he can be reached, the usual answer is a shrugged "Who knows?"

An incorrigible booster who plugs for the preservation of "our outdoor heritage intact and unspoiled," Ainsworth has only one continuing gripe. His official beat excludes Los Angeles, and the city is growing so fast (current pop. 2,600,000) that his own territory keeps shrinking. "I'm losing ground all the time," he says, "and one of these days I may be crowded up against the Colorado River."

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