Articles by Cecilia Rasmussen

Nearly half a century ago, a 20-year-old Southern Californian named Michael Rubel decided for reasons all his own to build a stone castle with a clock tower. Read more

Most know Steve Cooley as Los Angeles County’s district attorney. Read more

Los Angeles’ first widely known car huckster, Earl “Madman” Muntz, was the area’s premier big-personality media pitchman, and he made himself a household name from the 1940s well into the 1960s without ever appearing in his own billboard, radio or television advertising. Read more

President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it a “date which will live in infamy,” words that still resonate strongly for the dwindling few survivors of the attack that propelled the United States into World War II. For those servicemen, the six decades since the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the thousands of miles between the mainland and Hawaii, fall away. Read more

The San Fernando Valley’s Lankershim family is immortalized by the seven-mile boulevard that bears its name, along with a school and a historic downtown Los Angeles building, among other namesakes. Read more

Justice Gavin W. Craig, who sat on the state appellate court about 70 years ago in Los Angeles, made his mark on history not through his judicial opinions but through his own legal woes and a penchant for persistence. Read more

In 1947, Frank Louis Drye, a highly decorated veteran of two world wars, brought his family from Alabama and bought a house in a well-to-do Los Angeles neighborhood. Read more

Not everyone can find it, hidden away and closed off as it is. Read more

When fire chewed its way through the San Bernardino Mountains town of Running Springs last week, it was not the first time the little forest community had been ravaged by flames. Read more