The 3rd annual Lummis Day: The Festival of Northeast Los Angeles event, a free, public celebration of the diverse culture and history of the L.A.’s Arroyo neighborhoods, will take place on Sunday, June 1, featuring musical, visual, culinary and literary artists representing an array of the region’s cultural traditions.
Charles Fletcher Lummis, at age 25, was offered a top position at a new young Los Angeles newspaper, to start as soon as he showed up. He decided to walk to his new job, from Chillicothe, Ohio, to Los Angeles—a trek of 3,507 miles. It was September 12, 1884. He arrived at work on January 31, 1885, quite changed, because he’d lately gotten, as he would proclaim for years to come, a better education than Harvard ever gave him.
Lummis book A Tramp Across the Continent records his journey.
Following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Tramp Across the Continent
But why tramp? Are there not railroads and Pullmans enough, that you must walk? That is what a great many of my friends said when they learned of my determination totravel from Ohio to California on foot; and it is very likely it is the question that will first come to your mind in reading of the longest walk for pure pleasure that is on records. But railroads and Pullmans were invented to help us hurry through life and miss most of the pleasure of it -- and most of the profit, too, except of that jingling, only half-satisfying sort of which can be footed up in the ledger. I was after neither time nor money, but life -- not life in the pathetic meaning of the poor health-seeker, for I was perfectly well and a trained athlete; but life in the truer, broader, sweeter sense, the exhilarant joy of living outside the sorry fences of society, living with a perfect body and a wakened mind, a life where brain and brawn and leg and lung all rejoice and grow alert together. I am an American and felt ashamed to know so little of my own country as I did, and as most Americans do.
Lummis Day takes place at SYCAMORE GROVE PARK, 4702 North Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, CA 90042
More info: http://www.lummisday.org/