1972: He Fought for Palms. This book is dedicated to David I. Worsfold (1907–1975), Palms’s premier historian. At age seven he came with his family to Palms, where he coasted down unpaved Lowe’s Hill (Overland Avenue) in a home-made wagon. A lima-bean ranch, with “horses, pigs, mules, and a cow” stood where Sony Pictures is today. He learned to swim in Ballona Creek. Thirty-four years later he turned the first shovel of earth in the construction of Palms Junior High School.
Worsfold fought the good fight to preserve Palms’s identity, telling reporter Doug Smith of the Los Angeles Times in 1972 that the neighborhood’s boundaries were “the most abused, slighted, and trampled on in the West Side. . . . Its land has been stolen, and now people don’t even want to recognize what’s left.” He spent four decades as a mapmaker for the Los Angeles City Department of Water and Power.
Of him, reporter Smith wrote: “Perhaps without a man like David Worsfold to protect it, the oldest community on the West Side might already have been printed over and forgotten.”
