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Although in a few months Walter Measday, 2540 Prospect, will be 90 years old, not many in the community who are his junior by two decades, are half as active as this transplanted, London-born man, who has called California his home for 36 years.
His career includes years as a newspaper man, mostly in New York City and as a liaison representative for the press with Woodrow Wilson when he was a candidate for President. He was associated with theatrical ventures in the East and in California, was for 15 years with the U.S. Department of Commerce, besides having taken an active part in the development of residential and business areas in California.
This Montrose resident received his early education in London, England, and still remembers the "pea-soup" fogs which for blanking out daylight or lamplight are far more dense than any California smog. "When I mention to one of the native sons that in a real London fog, a person cannot even see his own feet when walking along the foot-pavement (we never used the word sidewalks), I am regarded as a fabricator", says Measday.
One of the highlights of his reporting days was coverage of the trial of Harry K. Thaw who shot the famed architect, Stanford White, in the old Madison Square Roof Garden, New York over the affections of Evelyn Nesbit.
Measday was also dining in the Garden that night, so had a keen interest in reporting the lengthy trial for the New York World. The trial resulted in Thaw's being confined to an asylum for the criminally insane, from which he was released some years later.
The World assigned Measday to cover the presidential campaign of Wilson. He accompanied Wilson on both his campaigns, and became a close confident of the president.
After leaving newspaper work, Measday entered the field of public relations for a large eastern industrial organization and later was associated in several theatrical ventures. That led to his first visit to California where for a time he was connected with a motion picture firm. The Carthay Circle realty development in Los Angeles, owes much of its success to the pioneer work done by Measday. The city of San Clemente, is another noteworthy and distinctive community of the Southland for which he is partly responsible.
When the late William Gibbs McAdoo aspired to be Senator from California, he acquired the services of Measday to handle public relations. McAdoo was elected; so the public relations man went to Washington as press representative and executive secretary.
Later on, Daniel Roper, then Secretary of Commerce, invited the versatile Measday to become Regional Director for the Department in Southern California and Arizona. The invitation was accepted and for 15 years he operated the Department's district office in this area.
Perhaps it was during that period that he sensed the future development of desert lands of California. Following his retirement from government service, at what Measday feels was a ridiculously young age of 81, he went to Twenty-Nine Palms to aid in development of that community.
But the Crescenta-Canada Valley called, and Measday was alert enough to ralize that it offered more agreeable living conditions and opportunities for a young fellow who still had much to accomplish in the world.
His efforts now are more leisurely -- among them the handling of public relations for a church organization. With his wife, he makes his home in Montrose, there being Walter Measdays 1, 2 and 3 now -- one a professor at Maryland University. There are several grandchildren and 6 great-grandchildren.
Measday plans to live on in the Valley for another decade. Or more.