DocentDoings

Researcher gave the Chumash a gift: their heritage John Peabody Harrington relentlessly studied Indian families for decades. Today, a 71-year-old woman who considered him a pest is grateful for his intense scholarship. You can open his video at the end of the newspaper article below (click on the arrow key): Everyone thought the tall, strange white man was some kind of genius. But to teenage Ernestine De Soto he was a giant pain in the neck, a nosy, "Ichabod Crane-like" character who drew her mother's attention from its rightful place -- on her. John Peabody Harrington studied De Soto's Chumash family for nearly 50 years, pumping her great-grandmother, her grandmother and her mother for the tiniest details of their lives. Everything fascinated him: the Chumash names of places mostly forgotten, of fish no longer caught -- even, to the family's puzzlement, of private parts never discussed in polite company. A brilliant linguist and

The following articles appeared in the science section, main part, LA Times on Feb 13 and Jan 20, 2010. Double click on picture to enlarge to read:

In spite of the rain and a restriction on taking interior or even exterior pictures or videos (most but not all docents followed instruction to not to take pictures. The pictures you will see below, with the exception of the docent group pics, were extracted and posted from the internet), today's tour of Mount St. Mary's College and the Doheny Mansion, turned out to be warm and fuzzy. Estelle Doheny permitted Mount St. Mary's College to use Chest Place #2 for classrooms in the late 1950's. After her death in 1958, the Chester Place properties became the downtown campus of Mount St. Mary's. Doheny House at on the Chester Place subdivision in the 1890's, named for the son of developer Charles Silent. Built by Oliver Posey in 1899 and purchased in 1901 for $120,000 by oilman Edward L. Doheny. Over the next 50 years, the Doheny's acquired all of the property in the original Chest Place development plus many other nearby homes. The Doheny's frequently enh