Jim A. Beardsley is an independent archivist and historical research specialist in Los Angeles who began researching Newport '69 while pursuing his master's degree in history at Cal State Northridge.

If you lived in Los Angeles in the 1960s and were inclined toward rock and roll, you might have seen Ray Manzarek and The Doors play at Sunset Strip clubs, at Ports O'Call in San Pedro — or at your ...

Los Angeles car culture never saw anyone like Big Willie Robinson — or needed anyone quite so much. In the mid 1960s, when baby boomers were racing hot rods and fighting each other and the cops all ...

"Back then, covering Scientology was not for the faint of heart," Sappell said. "The stakes were huge in the late 1980s—bigger, I think, than today. At the time, the IRS was investigating Hubbard (who ...

An LA Observed reader who works at Cal State Long Beach stopped by Wilshire Books in Santa Monica and found the store cleared out.

Filthy McNasty owned two well-remembered music clubs in the Los Angeles area. His Filthy McNasty's on Sunset Strip occupied the spot where the Viper Room is now. After leaving the Strip, McNasty ran ...

Sunday's New York Times revives a classic Los Angeles sports media incident — the time that KLAC radio reporter Paul Olden asked Dodgers manager Tom Lasorda what he thought of Cubs' left fielder Dave ...

Leo Greene chronicled his fight with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis for more than a year in the pages of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, where he was a reporter, columnist and videographer. On Friday ...

Susan Atkins was the Charles Manson follower who used the knife on actress Sharon Tate on Cielo Drive in 1969. After she died this past September, Orange Coast Magazine writer Shawn Hubler began ...

Last week's bust in a downtown penthouse of a counterfeit-money operation has the makings of a great yarn, if only detectives can figure it out.

Rodger Jacobs has a profile in Xbiz of Eric Edwards, said to have acted in adult films from the 1960s to the 1990s and recently both homeless with a thirteen-year-old son and suffering from ...

Gary Dretzka of Movie City News knew Brenda You, the L.A. writer who apparently committed suicide over the weekend, and adds some needed texture to her story in an unpublished ...