Chapter VII
Los Alamitos and Los Cerritos
For many reasons our choice of Los Angeles as a residence was a very happy one. In the first place it gave my father an opportunity to keep in touch with his business interests in the southern part of the state, and in the second it fulfilled two dear wishes of my mother.
It had been her desire, for years, to get away from the large ranch house at San Justo, with its crowds of people, and into a small home of her own where she could surround her children with influences and conditions that accorded with her ideals.
Again, it was joy to her to be near her two sisters, who lived on the neighboring ranches, Los Cerritos and Los Alamitos, and to her father who had recently come to Southern California.
The three families were doubly related,—Hathaway mothers and Bixby fathers, Mary and Llewellyn, Margaret and Jotham, Susan and John. I have told of my father’s marriage to Sarah Hathaway. She was always a delicate girl and lived only six years after she came west as a bride. There were no children, much to the disappointment of them both. After an interval of six years father returned to Maine and married my mother, Mary, the little sister of his
